[00:03:05] William Green: And I think you’ll like it cause its sort of Nick Sleeps’ alley. And so he wrote back to me this morning and he said, yeah, Thanks. Thanks for the podcast. I really enjoyed it. It’s a bit strange hearing about myself in it, but he said the Snow Leopard is ordered, but I’ve got to get through this Robert Caro book first, The Power Broker. Which is a 1300 page book by Robert Caro. Who’s one of the great biographers and that reminds me, oh, I forgot to read Robert Caro’s book, Working. Which is about his writing career and Caro is a hero of mine, wrote this extraordinary biography of Lyndon Johnson. So then I go on Amazon and I order Caro’s book on working just cause I’ve remembered it cause of Nick mentioning that.

[00:03:45] William Green: And then I’m like, oh, I gave away my copy of John McPhee’s book on writing before I even read it. I gave it to my son’s ex-girlfriend. I better get that as well. So I’m realizing suddenly that it’s like seven in the morning and I’ve already ordered two books just today. So that happens a lot where just something triggers me to remember that there’s a particular book that might have something in it that’s special and I just don’t even hesitate order it.

[00:04:09] William Green: And so I have several books a week arriving from Amazon. I mean, often there’ll be several a day because there’s such a low hurdle, because I just have this attitude that there could be something in each of these books that could potentially change or enrich my life or help other people because I’m going to think about it or talk about it in some way that could be helpful.

[00:04:28] William Green: And so for me, it’s just this sort of endless kind of scavenger hunt and then I’m constantly getting recommendations from people. So say, I interviewed Bill Miller a couple of months ago at a private event and at the end we’re sort of walking out and he says, oh, there’s this book I’ve been reading, this novel that I’ve read twice that’s all about mathematicians and scientists.

[00:04:50] William Green: And he’s like, it’s just great. It’s called When We Cease to Understand the World by someone called Benjamin Labatut and I also look at that and I’m like, what a beautiful title when we cease to understand the world. And so I get that and so I’m reading that and then this week I probably, I think I’ve been sent two books in the last few days by Guy Spier, one of which is that book on how we can, What I learned from Darwin about how to invest or something like that, which Mohnish Pabrai had recommended as well.

[00:05:19] William Green: So there are books coming into me that people are giving me. Then there are these random things that people are recommending. Then I’m stumbling upon things and then I have a book group as well that’s made up basically of writers. So we just read classic fiction. We only read great novels and so that forces me to read things like Dostoevsky and Proust and Flaubert, and Nabakov, and Jane Austin, and so that’s an amazing thing as well. And then there’s another sort of thread of books. And then the other thing I guess is I’m constantly preparing for podcast episodes. So say I have an episode with Pico Iyer coming up who’s a great writer, who’s extraordinary in multiple ways. And so on my side table in my study, I have eight books of his and I think I’ve probably read about four of them so far.

[00:06:07] William Green: And so say, I don’t know before I interviewed someone like Dan Goleman, I probably ordered five of his books and I probably, I grazed through about three of them and I probably finished a couple of them. Likewise, when Jim Grant came on the podcast, I probably got about eight of his books and I read a bunch of those, some of them from cover to cover, like his one on Bernard Baruch, which is fascinating cause Bernard Baruch was a great financier and investor who made a fortune after the Great Depression.

[00:06:37] William Green: So I’m just getting books sort of left, right and center, but then I’m not reading them in a super linear way where I’m like, I have to finish every book from start to finish. You know that book that I mentioned, the one that Bill Miller suggested? I found it on a pile by my desk this morning and realized, oh, I forgot to finish the last 50 pages.

[00:06:56] William Green: And that happens to me constantly cause I’m just juggling so many books at any one time. So I’m not reading in the way that maybe some of our listeners are reading where it’s much more systematic and they’re reading one book at a time or, and they’re taking really neat notes. For me it’s like this sort of, like the vampire squid kind of attacking the world of words and books from every direction simultaneously.

[00:07:23] Stig Brodersen: That is so wonderful. William and I would wish I could read like you cause I am one of those people who read cover to cover. I have a really hard time not doing it. And I think that’s just the way that I’m wired. So, if I were doing something today that wasn’t on my list, I would put it into my list and then cross off as done with that.

[00:07:43] Stig Brodersen: So it’s absolutely painful and I practice not finishing books and I practice not reading from the first page, but I have a really hard time doing it, so it’s so wonderful hearing how you do it and it’s inspiring to do it like that.

[00:08:00] William Green: That’s funny that you say you practice not finishing. I mean, there’s an element of guilt and homework at play here, right?

[00:08:09] William Green: Where you’re sort of thinking, well I’m going to complete the task and I don’t have that at all. I have this sense that I’m kind of plunging into books almost randomly. To look for something that’s going to leap out at me. So right before we started, I opened a book randomly and picked a paragraph that kind of leaps out at me.

[00:08:29] William Green: And likewise, this again is a pretty good example of how to, I just grabbed a bunch of books from my side table this morning. So this is a pretty good example of how I buy a book, right? So someone messaged me on LinkedIn the other day and he said, did I know some way of helping this guy, Derek Sivers, who’s looking for some help with distribution or something like that?

[00:08:47] William Green: And I remember vaguely that I knew who Derek Sivers was, but I couldn’t remember why and then I realized, I think I heard him on a podcast with like Tim Ferriss or something like that in the last few weeks. And so I go on Derek Sivers’ website and there’s this book called How to Live 27 Conflicting Answers and in One Weird Conclusion, which already is an interesting thing to me, right? Yeah so, it’s like an interesting subtitle.

[00:09:08] William Green: So I opened that yesterday, randomly in the middle on page 35 and then I opened it again randomly this morning on the same page. And it says here, nobody cares what you’re bad at and neither should you. Amplify your strengths. Nobody will see the rest. And I look at that and I’m like, that’s really interesting.

[00:09:27] William Green: Like that’s something I think about a lot that I shouldn’t be focused on. All of the things that I’m not good at. The thing I need to focus on is the thing that actually plays for my strengths. And then I look a couple of paragraphs down and it says, mastery is not about doing many things. It’s doing one thing insanely well. The more you take on, the less you’ll achieve. Say no to everything but your mission. This is your one contribution to the world. Now this is both true and not true. Like most great truths, like you want to be narrow and you want to be broad. But I think about this question a lot.

[00:09:58] William Green: I mean, we had this discussion months and months ago when I was thinking of setting up a YouTube channel and you said, no, don’t do it. Like the best productivity tool is to say no. And I wrestled with this, and finally my wife convinced me the other day, just don’t do it and so this idea of focus.

[00:10:15] William Green: And mastery is hugely important to me and so by buying randomly this book the other day, because somebody messaged me on LinkedIn and then opening it randomly, maybe it’s speaking to me in some way, or maybe it’s just, As Guy Spier once put it to me. You know, that he has this lovely phrase he probably stole from somewhere.

[00:10:34] William Green: That invitations to serendipity where, you know, if you go to a party, it’s an invitation to serendipity, for example. And so if I buy lots of books and I’m opening them and I’m open to the possibility that they’re there to talk to me in some way, there are thousands of invitations to serendipity all year because I’m just opening, I’m buying books constantly and I’m looking in there for strange and beautiful things that talk to me.

[00:10:58] William Green: And so I don’t need to finish this book by Derek Sivers and I probably never will, but I’ll probably dip into it many times. So I don’t need to be linear now. I wish I were, I mean, I think you have great strengths. In the fact that you’re more systematic and you’re more linear. But that’s just not the way I’m built.

[00:11:19] William Green: I mean, I can be reading a book that I really love and then I literally lose the book. I don’t know, I like to forget that I was reading it. That’s a real flaw in my wiring. But on the other hand, the strength in my wiring is because I’m that vampire squid coming at things from so many different directions.

[00:11:37] William Green: I’m able to make these weird connections between this book by Derek Sivers and another book by Peter Matthiessen and another book by Robert Pirsig and so that’s sort of how I’m reading. So I think some of it depends on just how you are built in terms of your, it’s not that you are wrong to be doing it in a systematic way, that’s a beautiful thing and you are probably much more efficient.

[00:12:01] William Green: Figuring out how to take notes, things like that. If I found, I had one book I went to Vancouver a few weeks ago. I went to the TED Conference and I had lunch with Monish there, and I took notes from our lunch, like he was talking to me about this idea of his That’s very interesting. And so I took really fast notes and then of course, I couldn’t find the notes.

[00:12:23] William Green: And then I looked in a book the other day and I’d written them, I think it was in the back of that Benjamin Labatut book, When We Cease to Understand the World, sort of ripped out the notes. That’s a great disadvantage to be not systematic that way, but it’s also a great advantage in certain ways because it enables me to make weird connections between lots of different things.

[00:12:42] William Green: So tell us Stig, like how do you do it? What are you doing when you identify books you want to read and don’t do it in a sheepish way. You should be proud of the fact that you’re more systematic than I am.

[00:12:52] Stig Brodersen: Yes. So first of all, I want to use Mohnish’s cloning framework as I’m picking books and I’m doing it the same way that I’m picking stocks.

[00:13:00] Stig Brodersen: And so if I can use that analogy about picking stocks I would go on [inaudible] and I would see Charlie Munger’s portfolio as one of my favorite portfolios check out because there’s so little activity. And he works with so much more conviction with absolutely love, in all walks of life. And so he has like, I don’t know, four or five stocks in there right now.

[00:13:20] Stig Brodersen: So I know it’s very hard to make Munger’s portfolio. And so in a similar fashion, I’m also thinking about how does that work whenever it comes to books, if there’s someone you really respect and that person reads, I don’t know, a book a week, even more, I think Mohnish said in one of your episodes, it was Richer, Wiser, Happier Episode eight, he talks about how Munger reads 500 books a year, not from A to C though, but 500 books that he would either read carefully or browse through.

[00:13:48] Stig Brodersen: And then he has all the annual reports and all that good stuff on the side. And so I heard Munger mention Guns, Germs, and Steel, that book quite a few times and I looked it up quite a few times and it’s a book I typically wouldn’t read, which is probably why it took me so long to read.

[00:14:07] Stig Brodersen: And I picked it up and it was amazing. I actually love that book, but I used that stock investor, that aroma type of filter because I knew it came from a very trustworthy source. And I did the same thing with say with Guy Spier whenever he came on the show and recommended Sapiens by Harari.

[00:14:25] Stig Brodersen: And again, I looked it up on Amazon a few times, like, yeah, I don’t think that’s for me, but you know, Guy reads a lot and really loved it. So I picked it up and lo and behold, all Harari’s books are at least that serious. I haven’t read the others absolutely wonderful. And so I typically gravitate towards that approach.

[00:14:40] Stig Brodersen: I kind of feel it’s the most powerful for me. If I can continue with this analogy between stock investing and picking books. I would say that sometimes I do fight myself going on Amazon and just browsing just because I don’t know, there was something in my brain, like whenever I see book covers, even if it’s not like real books just digital.

[00:14:59] Stig Brodersen: It’s just something about it makes me happy. And so I do that, but I also kind of feel that it’s not always the best way to find books. For me, it’s a bit like whenever you are using a stock screener, you’re sort of like forcing the action. You’re forcing yourself to invest in that stock or start researching that stock, whereas I kind of feel the same thing are happening on Amazon, like.

[00:15:22] Stig Brodersen: This sort of look interesting. Amazon’s algorithm is really telling me I need to pick it up. It has all of these five star views. I should do it because I kind of feel I become susceptible to this social proof where I get drawn to these books that a lot of people really like, or at least I can see their views.

[00:15:41] Stig Brodersen: They really like them and there’s definitely an element of wisdom of the crowds whenever you see very popular books. But I also feel that you lose out on some of the good stuff, like some of the really hidden gems because you realize it only has eight reviews and, but it’s actually a wonderful book.

[00:15:58] Stig Brodersen: And so if you sort of like to stay in that Amazon ecosystem, I sometimes feel you do yourself a disservice. And I don’t know if this is a good analogy, but it’s almost like reading a 10 Q or 10 K without knowing what the stock price is. And you figure out is this a good company instead of getting all the kind of emotions riled up before you start looking at the stock price.

[00:16:18] Stig Brodersen: So, I guess that’s how I find my books, William.

[00:16:22] William Green: Yeah. It’s much more systematic. I was thinking I don’t think I ever pick a book based on the number of reviews or five star reviews or something like that. Like I mean, I read these obscure books out of nowhere, right? So I was talking to Arnold Van Den Berg the other day, right, who’s been a guest on the podcast and it’s going to be a guest on the podcast again soon, who’s extraordinary.

[00:16:43] William Green: And we were chatting on the phone and he mentioned a book called The Tower of Physics, and I think it’s like 35 years old. And it’s a book about the intersection between modern physics and eastern mysticism. And I’m like, that’s cool. And so before the call’s even over, like, I’m literally, I’m ordering it as we speak and then we’re mentioning we’re talking about something else, and for some reason reincarnation comes up and so I’m ordering him a book. As we speak about reincarnation, I can’t even remember if I’ve sent the same book to him before. I know that I’ve sent books by the same author before, and I think we once had this discussion about reincarnation. He sent me sign like 15 books by different authors. So for me, often the joy is in going for really weird obscure stuff.

[00:17:30] William Green: I mean, I opened that book randomly on Eastern mysticism and physics, and that’s really interesting to me because I mean, Josh Waitzkin, who I talk about quite a bit, who wrote this great book, the Art of Learning, talks about this phrase thematic interconnectedness, where you are looking for these themes that come up in different disciplines.

[00:17:48] William Green: And so one of the things that’s really interesting about his book, The Art of Learning, is that he finds parallels between chess where he was a master I guess grandmaster, I’m not no expert on the world of chess, but he was the kid, the prodigy in the movie, searching for Bobby Fischer that was about him.

[00:18:07] William Green: And then he became a Tai Chi Wan push hands world champion and a Jiujitsu black belt. And then he is become a sort of hedge fund whisperer, right? An expert on high performance in the world of investing. And now he’s off in Central America doing surfing and foil surfing with Chris Begg, who I did this podcast with a couple weeks ago.

[00:18:28] William Green: So it’s all about the quest for excellence, but he’s looking for excellence in all of these different fields. And so for me, I’m less interested in does everyone love this book? They all say this book’s great. I’m looking for thematic inter connectedness where I’m going off and I’m reading some weird book and I’m like, oh, that’s interesting.

[00:18:48] William Green: There’s this in physics and there’s this in Eastern mysticism and they figured out the same thing. And so for example, when I was reading The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin, one of the things that really struck me was that he talked about the power of simplicity. And he talks about. The fact that when he was doing martial lots, he would kind of make the move incredibly slow, for example.

[00:19:10] William Green: Or when he was doing chess, he would think, well, let’s look at the end game where there are only three pieces left or something. And so he would reduce a very complex thing to something very simple. And then I would start to see simplicity like that, the ability to simplify in all of these different areas of life.

[00:19:26] William Green: And I would start to think, oh, this is kind of master principle. So I would go off and I’d interview someone like Joel Greenblatt and Joel Greenblatt, who’s one of the greatest investors of our time, would say, look, the entire essence of investing comes down to one thing, which is you value a business, you value an asset, and then you buy it for much less than it’s worth.

[00:19:47] William Green: And he’s like, that’s it. That’s the whole game. And then I would go off to Fidelity and I interview Will Danoff, who’s one of the great mutual fund managers of our time, who’s managing 200 billion or so dollars. And Will Danoff would say, look, it all comes down to this. Stocks follow earnings and so if I buy a company.

[00:20:03] William Green: That is going to double its earnings per share over the next five years, then all things being equal, it’s pretty much likely that it’s going to, its stock price will double too. And so he would keep buying best of breed businesses like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Tesla, often very early in there trajectory. I mean, he is an amazing fund manager.

[00:20:22] William Green: But so that in a way is how I’m reading, where I’m looking for themes that run through all sorts of different areas. So it’s not necessarily that I’m like, I’ve got to figure out everything that Daniel Kahneman said, or I’ve got to figure out everything in Guns, Germs, and Steel. It’s like I’m going in and I’m looking for something where I’m like, there’s some sort of pattern recognition.

[00:20:45] William Green: So to give you an example, there was some book I was reading recently, I can’t remember, I think it was by a guy, an English writer, I think who is Dead now, who had written a book about poker that I read many years ago and he’s just a really good writer. I’m forgetting his name, sorry but he’d written a book about mountain climbing and I start reading this short book about mountain climbing.

[00:21:06] William Green: It’s called something like Feeding the Rat or something like that. Which is a great title. It has rat in the title anyway, and there’s a lot of stuff in there about avoiding disaster. So it’s really connected to the idea of the margin of safety and investing and so I’m reading a book about mountaineering.

[00:21:25] William Green: Yeah, I think it’s called Feeding the Rap, reading a book about mountaineering because it gives me some insight into how to survive as an investor. And then I’m watching that Alex Honnold documentary that we’ve talked about in the past, Free Solo about climbing a mountain El Capitan with no equipment on his own and how he’s mitigating risk.

[00:21:51] William Green: And so in a way it’s just a different kind of reading where it’s much less linear and it’s much more looking for ideas that enrich our understanding of certain principles for how to operate in the world. Does any of that make any sense at all, Stig?

[00:22:05] Stig Brodersen: Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense. And it probably also what, partly probably stems from the way you’re wired it but it’s, I think it also comes from which journey are you on?

[00:22:17] Stig Brodersen: Like what do you want to achieve? One quick example. So I get all these books sent to me and my wife has said to me more than once, because there’s only so much space we have in our condo. Couldn’t you just read them on Audible? But there is an emotional thing about books, there is an emotional thing about being surrounded by wisdom that’s just, it’s not the same as having 2000 titles on your audible. I love Audible, don’t get me wrong and I also read audio books whenever I can’t get the real thing but it’s in that order. And it’s wonderful that you don’t feel that sense of guilt for lot of better words whenever you are, you only read like three chapters in a book.

[00:22:59] Stig Brodersen: And I can constantly find myself whenever I’m reading books saying I’m here at chapter three and I really look forward to chapter six, whereas I feel you’ll probably just go to chapter six. And my, I don’t know if the audience can resonate with that, but I’ve already done the, I’m 14.28% into the book.

[00:23:17] Stig Brodersen: Because it’s one seventh. And so I do that as I’m reading, which probably seems like a lot of work to people tuning in unless they’re wired that way and they just listen or they just read the same way.

[00:23:31] William Green: So what is the goal, Stig? Like when you think of the game that you are playing, when you are reading, what are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to become wise? Are you trying to become a better investor? Are you trying to assuage your guilty conscience and do your schoolwork properly? Like none of these things are wrong. I’m just curious, like what’s the game? I mean, I think it’s helpful for our listeners to be thinking like, why am I doing all this reading or should I do it?

[00:23:55] Stig Brodersen: Yeah, I absolutely love that you asked that question cause it is a good segue into talking about books that had made us richer, wiser and happier. But I’d say that’s my goal and perhaps today less richer and more wiser and happier. Whereas if you asked me perhaps 10 years ago, I would never pick up something that wasn’t about investing.

[00:24:15] Stig Brodersen: And being a smarter business person, I was very single-minded, and I guess to a lot of people I probably still would be. But I am practicing the art of indulging in that book that is not supposed to make me smarter, but just make me happy. I think I’m actually reading for the most part, to learn how to live.

[00:24:37] Stig Brodersen: I mean, part of that is to become financially secure enough that I can live in a way that’s totally true to who I am or as true as it can be, and not to be subservient to somebody who I don’t like. And so making money is important, and I love the game of investing, so there’s something intellectually fascinating about it to me, but I’m not really trying to build a business like, like I can’t be bothered to read books on like how to market myself or how to build a brand.

[00:25:06] Stig Brodersen: Like I’m just not interested. I know that I should be, but I’m just not interested. I mean, even that, that phrase, like I said to you like that I’m interested in figuring out how to live, like there’s a beautiful book. It’s by an author called Sarah Bakewell, who writes really beautifully called Montania, the French philosopher from the 16th century, I think and it’s How to live a Life in one question and 20 attempts at an answer. And that to me is a really beautiful thing, right? So when I first got that, years and years ago, it was recommended to me about a friend of mine, Nina Munk, who’s a very good writer, who’s written multiple books, and it had helped her.

[00:25:42] Stig Brodersen: And so I read that and it’s kind of profound and it’s beautiful. It’s a meditation on Montania’s life and what he figured out about everything from mortality to other people’s cultures and how people view things differently. And our values are kind of often somewhat arbitrary and prejudiced. So all these different insights.

[00:26:00] Stig Brodersen: And then I remember I’d interviewed Joel Tillinghast, this great Fidelity fund manager for my book, for Richer, Wiser, Happier. And I could see that there’s a kind of soulfulness and a little bit of sadness in Joel sometimes. And so I remember just sending him the book afterwards. And then I was interviewing Matt McLennan, who’s become a close friend of mine from First Eagle.

[00:26:24] Stig Brodersen: I also wrote about in the book, I interviewed him in New York and he just has this really beautiful mind, like a very elegant mind and is just a voracious reader and thinker. And I remember just going into the city a couple of days going into New York City and just dropping off that book for him.

[00:26:39] Stig Brodersen: And so for me, there’s just like this constant conversation with books where you’re figuring out how to live and then you’re sharing books that are beautiful with friends or people they could, that you think it could help. And then I’m constantly being sent books back by other people and it is just this beautiful thing.

[00:26:57] Stig Brodersen: And so there’s something kind of impractical about it. And at the same time, it turns out to be deeply practical because you read one of these great books and it totally changes the way you view the world. So you read a book by Montania and you remember something about the arbitrary of our views, right?

[00:27:17] Stig Brodersen: He’ll talk about the values of one culture versus the values of another culture. And then you start to think, oh, this sort of connects to everything that we’re learning about our behavioral biases. And so it just broadens your mind or you start reading great literature and you realize everybody is viewing things from a totally different perspective.

[00:27:36] Stig Brodersen: And so if I don’t broaden my mind and view things from multiple perspectives, how can I possibly hope to get it in inverted commas the truth? And so there’s stuff that in some ways it’s madly impractical reading so many books from so many different areas and trying to figure out how to live.

[00:27:55] Stig Brodersen: But in some ways it’s deeply practical and it gets back to something that Bill Miller had said to me once, where, I think he may have said this on one of the two podcast episodes that I’ve done with him, he talked about how when he was a young investor, this guy from Merrill Lynch, I think it was Bob Farrell, who’s a strategist at Merrill Lynch, talked to all of these young money managers and analysts and said, you are reading exactly the same thing.

[00:28:18] Stig Brodersen: You’re all reading the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and the Financial Times, and how can you possibly think differently from each other when you’re all just getting the same inputs. And so I think it’s really interesting when you look at the really smart re really gifted. Really interesting idiosyncratic money managers at the absolute top of their game.

[00:28:42] Stig Brodersen: They’re all kind of problematic readers, pretty much with a few exceptions. I mean I think it’s interesting that Nick Sleep is reading this enormous book, the Power Broker by Caro. I think it’s interesting that Bill Miller is recommending when we cease to understand the world and is studying chaos theory and complex systems and stuff at the Santa Fe Institute.

[00:29:01] Stig Brodersen: The one of the few really renowned investors that I’ve met and interviewed who wasn’t like that was probably Mario Gabelli, who I remember saying to me very proudly that he never read novels. And I remember Peter Lynch once telling me many years ago that it was much more helpful to play games like, like bridge.

[00:29:22] Stig Brodersen: And poker, which taught you about probabilities than it was to read all of the books on investing. But in some weird way, I mean, it’s not a coincidence that I never got really that interested in either Peter Lynch or Mario Gabelli because they were really great money makers. But it was like I don’t know.

[00:29:39] Stig Brodersen: I’m much more interested in the people who are problematic readers who are figuring out these connections between investing business and life. cause as Munger says, Munger often quotes this line, it’s all one damn relatedness after another. And so that’s the beauty of it, is that you find these damn relatedness is between the novel that you read, the nonfiction book that you read, and then the annual report that you read, and then you’re like, oh, that’s what quality is.

[00:30:07] Stig Brodersen: Or, oh that’s what compounding is or that’s how to reduce risk. I like that you say

[00:30:14] Stig Brodersen: that volume and also that you let serenity happen. One thing that I do in my very intricate note system that I don’t know if it if I should even tell about later, but you know.

[00:30:25] William Green: Oh no, you definitely have to because you’ll actually have figured out a good way to do this but mine will be haphazard.

[00:30:30] Stig Brodersen: Yeah. So, well thank you for saying that William. So one of the things that I do is I typically order a new books whenever I am reading the last new book that I’m currently going through. And it forces me to have some time to reread books. And I don’t really know where I got that inspiration from, but it’s to, because I’m not a very spiritual person, I tend to be way too logical in the way I approach everything in life.

[00:30:54] Stig Brodersen: And so I will go to, I have different bookshelves in my condo and I would see which book would call to me. For whatever reason and well, in that case, I would then start from, go to go through my notes, but at least I would see which book that sort of like speaks to me.

[00:31:13] Stig Brodersen: So anyways, I also want to say on that note serendipities or serendipity there’s this old Chinese proverb that says when the student is ready, the Master appears and I find that to be so true whenever it comes to reading books. 10 years-ish ago, I was in a bad place in my life and I remember reading Brian Tracy’s book, Change Your Thinking Change Your Life, and it changed so many things in my life.

[00:31:38] Stig Brodersen: And so, because I just felt that book was a wonderful, a few years later, I went back and reread it and I was like, this is not a great book. There are different things I now strongly disagree with. And it came, not to go on too much into detail with that book, but my point of telling that story was just that.

[00:31:56] Stig Brodersen: I needed to change my thinking at the time to change my life. And then some of his advice may or may not be good, but I just, I needed to get into that mindset, whereas before I kind of fell a pain of self into a corner in different situations in my life. And so I could say the same thing about reading Michael Gregore’s book, How Not to Die, which is that you read [inaudible] [00:32:17] William Green: [Crosstalk] not the whole, of course, I would, it’s like how to avoid diabetes how not to die of diabetes, right? Or how not to die of a heart attack. And I read those bits but I by no means read the whole thing, I grazed.

[00:32:30] Stig Brodersen: Right. Exactly and of course you, you know me, William. I’ve read it cover to cover quite a few times, even for all the diseases I wouldn’t even like genetically be able to get.

[00:32:40] Stig Brodersen: I’m pretty sure I probably still read it just to be sure I got all of it and there was something about it. And so the book is about diet and actually changed my diet after reading that and has been very helpful in many different ways, both for my wife and for myself. But. And then recently, cause I can’t remember which episode that was in, but it might have been the one you did with Jason Karp, I’m not completely sure, but you talked at the end about books, about diet and one of them was How not to Die. Another one was, I want to say it was Forever Young or at least I sent you an email saying, oh this was wonderful.

[00:33:10] William Green: Yeah and Undo it. That had a big impact on me. I did read Undo It from cover to cover, which is this Dean Ornish book and I actually, at one point I tried bribing my children. I said to them, I’ll pay $150 each if you read this book.

[00:33:24] William Green: And neither of them took me off on the offer. They all sort of more or less say the same thing, The Longevity Diet as well by Valter Longo. But I think they’re really helpful in giving you at least a sense, they’re sort of all directionally correct. I think.

[00:33:39] Stig Brodersen: Yeah, and I think you bring up a good point and to hit that point before home would be to say, I didn’t feel that Forever Young changed my life the same way as How Not to Die. But I think it was because of the time it came into my life. Like what you’re saying before, it was more or less the same thing. And so I already lived that way. Whereas whenever I read how not to die my doctor was not happy and now my doctor is happy.

[00:34:03] Stig Brodersen: And so it’s just one of those things where you need to let Serenity happen. It’s not always, I don’t know if you experienced the same thing, William, but you have this one person who’s telling you, oh my God, you have to read this book. It changed my life. And you read it and you’re like, how? Yeah. And that was one of the things, and I also just should mention that I don’t know how it comes across whenever we talk about how not to die for ever young, it’s probably, cause it’s a more catchy book title.

[00:34:28] Stig Brodersen: The proper book title should probably be How to Live a Longer Life With a Good Health Span and Not Get Sick As Much. It just doesn’t sell as well. So the other title just sounds a lot better. It’s not because William and I are into any kind of futuristic, we never die kind of thing, or I don’t know. I won’t speak for you here, William, but that was not the intention on what I was just saying.

[00:34:50] William Green: Yeah. But I do think it’s a great title, How Not to Die. Because I’m a look, I edited the Asian, European, middle East and African editions of Time Magazine, and I spent many years working for magazines.

[00:35:02] William Green: And so I’m also a great admirer just of the craft of words, of how titles are written, how things are packaged. When I see something like that, I’m like, oh, that’s good. They figured something out. So I’m also not just reading these things for practical guidance on how to be more successful or anything like that.

[00:35:24] William Green: There’s also sheer joy, the beauty of the language, the way it’s packaged, the cleverness of it the, I mean I bought both my kids this book by Rick Rubin recently the famous music producer. And it’s just a really exquisitely designed book. And it’s designed by Pentagram, which is the same firm that designed the great minds of investing the book that I did with Michael O’Brien years ago.

[00:35:48] William Green: And I just really appreciate these things. When a title is good or a design is good, like if you look at that Rick Rubin cover, it’s just really beautifully done. And he apparently made all of the creative choices. Like they, they gave him choices, but then he made the decisions. And so there is something just beautiful about the craft of books, the feel of a good book.

[00:36:09] William Green: I mean it’s just there’s a wonderful line from the poet Keats where he said a thing of beauty is a joy forever. And so when things are beautifully written or beautifully packaged or the cover is beautiful, it’s just a delight. So I mean, there is a tendency for a lot of people in our audience, they’re going to be so practical that they’re just like, yeah, how do I get better?

[00:36:29] William Green: How do I get smarter? How do you know? And I totally appreciate that. But there is also just this sheer joy. Of these beautiful writers, beautiful books, beautiful stories, and I don’t know I hope people don’t forget that part of it, that there’s going to be joy in this journey of learning as well.

[00:36:47] William Green: It’s not all practical. And so even though there is a sort of practical benefit to reading a lot of these things, there’s also just, it’s a delight. I mean this book group that I have, we met last night and we go, we only read great fiction. And last night for once we went to a restaurant, usually it’s in someone’s house.

[00:37:05] William Green: And so you’re eating great Thai food with a bunch of really smart people who are good friends, talking about great literature. That is an incredible joy. That is just, that’s a really central aspect of a life well lived for me. And part of what you’re doing is you are forcing yourself to focus on some of the greatest things that have been created by mankind.

[00:37:26] William Green: That’s an inherently beautiful thing and so as we are kind of trying to construct a richer, wiser, happier life, we shouldn’t forget the actual joy of the journey. And I think people like you and me think we’ve been so hellbent on trying to become more successful, better. There’s sometimes too much guilt and we forget the actual joy of the journey.

[00:37:48] Stig Brodersen: Yeah. The best part is the journey, that is so true. And the best books are those who put you in the state of flow. And I would like to talk a bit about flow because it’s something that I would, I experience whenever I read books. And I don’t think necessarily everyone, even though there is a selection probably in our audience who also feel a state of flow whenever they read books, it could be whenever they’re.

[00:38:10] Stig Brodersen: Exercising or whatever the fancy. And so the state of flow, and I’m just going to quote this cause it was way better written than I ever could experience of being so absorbed by an engaging, enjoyable task that your attention is completely held by it, end quote, and I hope you’ll forgive me, William, whenever I’m giving a plot for your book, Richer, Wiser, Happier, which I’m sure a lot of people in the audience, if not all of them, are familiar with, because that book put me in a state of flow.

[00:38:36] Stig Brodersen: I would even say from time to time, I wasn’t only with one decimal point, knew how far I was into the book because whenever they talk about page turners, it was one of those, one of those books, because you don’t. You don’t think too much about where you are and just really get absorbed.

[00:38:50] Stig Brodersen: And if you don’t know the book without going too much into detail, it’s about richer, wise and happier. Which it’s just the intersection of what really fascinates me. And for you it might be football or any kind of other activity, but that’s sort of like regardless of your walk of life, if it going into that state of flow and searching for that state of flow is a part of my quest now.

[00:39:12] Stig Brodersen: And I do a lot of that through reading. I should also say that if you’re interested in learning more about the state of flow, Steve Kotler has this book, The Art of Impossible, which ironically did not put me in the state of flow, but I had to finish it because I started on the book. But he talks a lot about how to get into that state of flow and once you try it, I would imagine close to everyone had tried at least once, if not multiple times in their life. You want to go there again. So if you want to have a more intellectual approach to how to fight that state of flow, if you don’t know it already, I’ll recommend The Art of the Impossible.

[00:39:47] William Green: Yeah, he’s a very smart guy. I’ve spoken to him a couple of times. He is a really smart guy. He’s done some books with Peter Diamandis as well, who I’m friendly with and yeah, he is a very good writer and very good thinker.

[00:39:58] Stig Brodersen: Yeah. What’s the one he did with the, was it Bold? He did with Amendus.

[00:40:01] William Green: I think he did Bold. I think he may have done abundance as well.

[00:40:04] Stig Brodersen: Abundance, yeah. Great books.

[00:40:05] William Green: Yeah. I do, I, or over the years I’ve done quite a lot of ghost writing with famous people and sometimes it’s kind of concealed and sometimes it’s evident what you’ve done cause they’re open about it.

[00:40:17] William Green: And there was one project where I was trying to get Steven to work on the project with me, and I think he was interesting. He was like he’ll only do it if his name is on the cover. And so Peter Diamandis is a very smart guy and is happy to share billing with Steven Kotler, who’s also a very smart guy.

[00:40:36] William Green: Whereas, I was willing to sort of conceal my role in various books that I did with other people.

[00:40:44] Stig Brodersen: Wonderful. Thank you for sharing William. He’s a great writer. And I, yeah, I think that is I might be mixing those three books, but I want to say that the Art of the impossible is where he talks about he wants to be the best writer in the world, and I might be misquoting this, and then he also talks about AI.

[00:40:59] Stig Brodersen: And so I’m curious, I know I’m going completely off tangent, but that’s why you have these conversations. William. [Crosstalk] [00:41:05] William Green: He’s a good writer though

[00:41:06] Stig Brodersen: He is. He’s a wonderful writer. And you have all of these, I don’t know how much you’ve been plugged into that, but you have all these publishing houses that say they don’t accept in your scripts because everything is written by AI.

[00:41:18] Stig Brodersen: And of course all of that is in the early stages. And I read your book, say, Richer Wiser, Happier, and I think, how can AI write something like that? Then I think about what if AI wrote, what if they was trained at all the best books in the world? Probably cross references with different type of reviews and whatever kind of thing people really liked.

[00:41:38] Stig Brodersen: Or it could probably track out. People got into a state of flow, whatever. I don’t really understand everything with AI how do you, as an author, look into this whole thing about AI writing books?

[00:41:49] William Green: I’m intrigued by it. I’ve been listening to a lot of these discussions of AI. I was listening to one with David Remnick yesterday, the editor of The New Yorker, and he was talking with the founder of ChatGPT or the co-founder and he was saying, look, I got ChatGPT.

[00:42:06] William Green: To write in the style of David Remnick than you know himself. And he is like, it doesn’t look very good. It’s not very elegantly done. It’s just like sort of weird summaries in my language. And I don’t know. There’s some, there’s definitely potential for it’s extraordinary what’s going on.

[00:42:23] William Green: It’s going to get better and better. I have this perhaps naive view and I’m way out of my depth, anything to do with technology, but I have this naive view that you feel whether something has soul in it, whether there’s, as I would put it, blood on the page. And I think one reason why people connected to Richer, Wiser, Happier and thank you for your very kind words about it, is cause I suffered to write it.

[00:42:52] William Green: It took me five years. Where I was really trying to figure out how to live and how to invest and how how to learn from my mistakes and my failures and what I needed to learn from the smartest people I’d ever met. Whether it was a Bill Miller or Charlie Munger, or Howard Marks, or Joe Greenblatt or Ed Thorp.

[00:43:12] William Green: And I think you can feel whether there’s blood on the page, whether there’s heart and soul in it. And I’m not convinced that, and again, I’m way out of my depth in saying this, but I’m not convinced that this is what we are going to get out of AI, at least for a long time. And so my bet in my own life is to go for quality and go for to try to do things that are of deep value.

[00:43:46] William Green: I think in a world where more and more is just pumped out. Where there’s a lot of content, a lot of things where people are just producing content and filling time slots and space and pages that are allotted. I think that stuff is very vulnerable because it’s like factory output and, but the stuff that really has soul, how do you replace that?

[00:44:12] William Green: I mean I read this novel over the weekend, this Japanese novel called [Inaudible], which was published in like 1906 and I think the guy wrote it in about 12 days, apparently. I mean, it’s crazy. It’s 140 pages and it’s kind of a beautiful novel and it’s strange and it’s funny and it’s brilliant and it doesn’t entirely cohere.

[00:44:32] William Green: It’s a little bit all over the place, but it’s just like this Twitter force, just a brilliant piece of writing and it’s got a great voice, at least in the translation that I read, and that’s inimitable. And part of why it’s inimitable is that here’s from this. Samurai family that’s kind of fallen on hard times.

[00:44:50] William Green: And his parents had him by accident and he was the sixth child when his mom was 40 and his dad was like 53 this back in 1906. And they gave him away. And so he was sort of raised by this childless couple because his parents didn’t want him. And the book is infused with that sense of melancholy and longing because it’s written by a guy who was given away.

[00:45:17] William Green: And then he was candid back to his parents, cause I guess that couple didn’t want him anymore. And then a couple of his siblings died of tuberculosis. And there’s this sort of, there’s so there’s this human tragedy there that shaped the way he’s writing about relationships. And I don’t see that a machine can get the beauty and the melancholy and do you see what I mean?

[00:45:40] William Green: Like that’s, there’s soul in that.

[00:45:43] Stig Brodersen: Yeah, I see exactly what you mean and I hope you’re right. Thinking about this, and I can’t help but be a bit of practical, which is probably just how we are wired.

[00:45:53] William Green: Thank God one of us, is Stig.

[00:45:55] Stig Brodersen: And thinking what would that mean for the landscape of business? And it’s interesting. I remember having discussion with Preston a long time ago about social media and like, Preston is like a wizard on social media and I’m not even there. Or at least I don’t really post a lot a bunch of stuff. I kind of feel a bit toxic from time to time. But anyways, I remember speaking with Preston and going into this discussion of the whole thing about being sustainable and we need to like build the brain of TIP and we need to call the account something with a company name.

[00:46:32] Stig Brodersen: And Preston was just saying people do not connect with brands, people connect with other people. And the think that there is something. To that and that I’m sure like a great publisher probably also know that and would know if they published something, they probably spend a story around it and not say it’s produced by AI.

[00:46:52] Stig Brodersen: But there’s something about reading your book, William, and say, now I’m going to watch a video or listen to a podcast by William and he’s going to talk about how much he bled. And I also think that there will be from a demand side, there’ll probably be aside from a few who is, who would be curious and say, oh, it’s amazing.

[00:47:09] Stig Brodersen: It’s written by AI. Quite a few would, would probably feel this fear of being replaced one way or the other. And feel I can resonate with the idea of reading, Richer, Wiser, Happier connecting with William, whether it’s on social media on a deeper level or whatever it is. And that’s, I don’t know how you can replace that.

[00:47:32] Stig Brodersen: And then at the same time, I’m looking at something like META. I know how that company has been manipulating people’s emotions because they can track people’s emotions and I read this article about how whenever you scroll down in, in your feet, it’s the same thing as slots machines we do in the casino, cause it gives you another kind of dopamine release.

[00:47:55] Stig Brodersen: And so it’s not exactly what we’re talking about but it’s not the opposite either. Cause they can track your emotions, figure out how you react to it. And so perhaps no. Right now, AI can’t have this, cannot give you the same sense of grief, sorrow that this Japanese author you’re referring to can do.

[00:48:16] Stig Brodersen: But perhaps it can tell you what makes you turn the next page, especially if it’s not a physical book. If it’s something you’re reading on your Kindle and it can track what is it that gets you going and it can pump out these emotions and it can stoke your desire for stuff. I think one thing that social media has been brilliant at is getting you to say, wouldn’t you like this pair of trousers too?

[00:48:39] William Green: I mean, I think technology is brilliant at manipulating us. Look, there was a great panel at the TED Conference in Vancouver. This is where I went, where I was sitting next to Mohnish for part of the conference, and one of the opening panels was with all of these people, like the co-founder of ChatGPT and they’re all talking about how AI is going to change the world.

[00:49:00] William Green: And there’s just a part of me that thinks when we look at what the tech companies, the, these tech giants have done to manipulate us, whether it’s Meta or Twitter or whatever it might be, I just think you have to know that the profit incentive is so powerful that they’re not going to look out for our best interests.

[00:49:23] William Green: There’s no way that companies on, I don’t feel that capitalism is inherently evil or bad, or inherently good. I mean, I think it’s an amazing thing, but I think it, it has both polarities, right? And Munger always says, really focus attention on the incentives and all things being equal.

[00:49:44] William Green: Always focus on the incentives that’s, that will tell you how people behave. And so my fear with the AI stuff is like, well, we’ve seen that the companies that dominate social media are not looking out for our best interests. Why would we assume that they’ll look out for our best interests with ai? And so I’m not trusting of where this is going to go, but at the same time, there’s this personal bet that I’m making, which may be just born out of denial, which is that I think people are yearning for human connection.

[00:50:16] William Green: They’re yearning for honesty, they’re yearning for. Integrity they’re yearning for quality in general. And I think you hear it when you listen to a podcast, right? You can hear whether the person bothered to prepare and is truly interested and is truly curious in the person they’re interviewing or if they’re just mailing it in cause they’re trying to build their brand.

[00:50:41] William Green: And there, there are I think it’s the same when you read magazine articles. You can tell when there’s deep work being done when books are written. I mean, you can see there are extraordinary people who can just pump out a book a year or every two years or whatever. And good luck to them.

[00:50:58] William Green: I wish I were one of them, but look I mean, one, one of the people in my book group is Jon Gertner, who’s one of the best writers I’ve ever met who wrote books like The Idea Factory about creativity at Bell Labs and the ice at the end of the world about exploration. And he’s working on a book and he is like, yeah, it’ll probably take me five years, seven years, and another member of the book group is this guy, Ramin Bahrani, who’s an incredible filmmaker and got nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay of the White Tiger, which is a great book written by another friend and former colleague Aravind Adiga. And Ramin is just like such a serious artist. I just don’t think people like that can be replaced.

[00:51:43] William Green: They’re so passionate about their work and the quality of the work, and when you see real quality, you can smell it. And when you, yes, we are manipulable by technology. We really are. We can be very easily exploited, but I think there’s always a taste for quality. There’s always room in the marketplace for that, for quality and depth.

[00:52:08] William Green: And I just, I sort of feel like for our listeners, like you kind of have to decide like, what kind of life do you want to lead? Like is it shallow and kind of panicky and just moving fast and full of dopamine hits? Or is it like a little slower, a little more thoughtful, a little deeper?

[00:52:30] William Green: I don’t know. That’s my bet is that a lot of us are yearning for that.

[00:52:34] Stig Brodersen: I think you mentioned this quote to me a few times from someone you interviewed that quality has its own vibration.

[00:52:43] William Green: Yeah. Yen Liao, who’s a brilliant mind, who’s been a very successful investor, but he also just is hugely articulate.

[00:52:51] William Green: Yeah. And it stopped me on my tracks. I remember going out for a lunch with him in New York once, and I was talking about something and he said, well William , quality has its own vibration and it was like one of one of those moments where you’re like, oh, that’s a deep insight. Yeah. Well, no, he said quality has its own frequency.

[00:53:08] William Green: That was the exact phrase. Quality has its own frequency.

[00:53:12] Stig Brodersen: You might not be able to tell how but you can just sense it and you can just sense it in the way that you express yourself there. There’s just something there. Like if you read the transcript, perhaps you couldn’t but if you’re listening to it, you can.

[00:53:26] Stig Brodersen: And if you read a book that the brilliant writer took five years to write, it’s very hard to copy at least yet.

[00:53:35] William Green: Well I talked about this whole issue of quality in Omaha when I went to Guy Spier’s value X meeting, which was I guess it was probably the day before the Berkshire Hathaway Annual General Meeting, and there were 250, 300 people went to this conference that Guy was hosting.

[00:53:53] William Green: And I was talking precisely about this question of quality because if you think of people like Nick Sleep, who we talked about before, Nick and his partner Zack, who I wrote about in my book, their whole approach to investing was built around this concept of quality. So it sounds kind of esoteric and beside the point.

[00:54:11] William Green: But they actually, that became their guiding principle for everything that they did with Nomad, which beat the market by 800 and something percentage points over, I think 14 years. And they got the idea from Robert Pirsig, right? Who was this very eccentric, brilliant philosopher slash novelist who wrote the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

[00:54:32] William Green: And one of the things that Pirsig talked about was that whether you are mending a motorcycle or you are mending a dress or you are sharpening a knife or anything else, there’s a beautiful way to do it and there’s an ugly way to do it. And as I was saying at that conference, guy’s conference, one of the quotes that I love from Pirsig is where he says, the question to ask yourself is whether you are growing towards quality or falling away from quality.

[00:55:01] William Green: And that, that became a defining question for people like Nick Sleep and Qais Zakaria, when they were running nomad because it simplifies these questions of how am I going to deal with my partners, for example, like, am I going to try to overcharge so I can gouge them? Am I going to try to raise as many assets as possible because then I can get immensely rich?

[00:55:26] William Green: Or am I going to behave in a, where I favor my partners over myself? And once they started to apply this filter of quality, it became incredibly clarifying. And so they would do things like, they would say they got to a hundred million in assets. And they said, all right let’s close to new investors for a while because we can’t find any good opportunities.

[00:55:47] William Green: And then they eventually signed like three and a half billion dollars in assets. And then they were like, let’s just return the money and we’ll send back all the money and we’ll focus the second half of our lives on giving back money to society in a way that creates the maximum enduring good for society.

[00:56:04] William Green: So this whole question of quality. Becomes really a defining issue in life and it’s interesting. I mean I got given a book on quality. It’s literally called On Quality. It’s on my desk [inaudible]. It’s by Robert Pirsig. It’s after he died, his wife put it together and it’s called On Quality, an Inquiry into Excellence.

[00:56:25] William Green: And it’s got excerpts from Zen and art of motorcycle Maintenance and Lila, his final novel and also from various letters of his all about this question of what he called the metaphysics of quality, how to lead a quality life. Which infuses everything. And I organized a zoom call several months ago with a bunch of really renowned investors where we just talked about that book.

[00:56:50] William Green: And so these were people you’d have heard of. And so it’s really interesting that this thing that sounds kind of esoteric actually is of real interest to people managing tens of billions of dollars. So this is a beautiful example of thematic interconnectedness, right? You take an idea from this sort of weird memoir, come novel, come Philosophy Tracked by Robert Pirsig about the metaphysics of quality.

[00:57:14] William Green: And it actually changes the way you manage your money. It changes the way you write books, it changes the way you deal with your partner, changes the way you deal with your clients, because you’re suddenly thinking, well, so what’s the quality decision here? What’s the quality move? I think it affects the way we do the podcast, doesn’t it?

[00:57:32] Stig Brodersen: It does. And in so many ways. Let me give you one example, and one of the things I’m struggling with right now, one thing that’s very tempting right now is to have programmatic ads on the podcast. It’s tempting, but it’s also the opposite. And if you’re like thinking what’s programmatic ads, it’s more similar to like Google Ads Sense, if people are familiar with that.

[00:57:51] Stig Brodersen: So if you were a certain demographic, you’ll get in a certain geographic area too, you’ll be giving different ads. So William and I would be served different ads. And so that is the direction where the industry is going. There seems to be a secular shift away from doing conventional host rate ads about, let’s say we endorse audible and then they sign up for X amount of dollars.

[00:58:13] Stig Brodersen: And then that’s been the traditional business model. I’ve been asked, I don’t know how many times from members on the team, but also from others, like, should we do programmatic ads? And we are leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table? And probably more, even more like depending on how long you go out, it could be significantly more than that.

[00:58:33] Stig Brodersen: And so I just really. I can’t stand the thought of advertising for McDonald’s on my podcast. I just can’t, and I don’t know if you have any kind of affinity for McDonald’s. So I’m like, it could be any other bread.

[00:58:47] William Green: I’m vegetarian. I’m not big on eating Big Mac anymore. I’m, although I know they have some ultra healthy vegetarian food as well.

[00:58:55] Stig Brodersen: Right and it’s not just the brands. Cause we can always discuss whether or not a brand is good or bad, but it’s also just the way that the ads are being served. It’s going to sound a bit more like you are a local radio station. And so I just have a really hard time rev myself around it. What I eventually succumb to that in a way I would like to say, I have quote unquote, so much integrity that I don’t want to have that type of ads on the feet.

[00:59:20] Stig Brodersen: But you know what, if not to fear Munger for anyone listening, tuning into this from the team. But what if the decision is we run a huge deficit and if we don’t have terrible ads on, everyone will lose their jobs. What do we think about it then? And it’s difficult. And I should also say it’s not the situation right now, but I can’t help but let my mind wonder.

[00:59:40] William Green: So that’s a beautiful application, Stig of this whole principle of quality that seems kind of nebulous and vague. And then you think of manga saying, take a good idea and take it seriously. So when you come across one of these ideas, a simple principle like deciding, saying to yourself, am I growing towards quality or falling away from quality?

[01:00:05] William Green: If you apply Munger’s idea of taking a good idea and taking it seriously, that infuses every area of your life. And so this is one of those things where I think this is a defense of why it’s worth reading broadly. Because you never know where you are going to come up with an idea like that. And so because Nick’s sleep happened to be.

[01:00:27] William Green: A failed landscape architect. When he first left Edinburgh University didn’t really intend to be a legendary hedge fund manager. He was just reading really broadly. He was a geographer at college and geography happens to be an incredibly broad discipline. And so he was able to read stuff like Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.

[01:00:48] William Green: And as I mentioned at the start of the conversation, here he is reading a 1300 page book by Robert Caro, one of the greatest biographers of all time about Robert Moses, who was the power broker who sort of built New York. And that’s really interesting. The, one of the great hedge fund managers of our time is just roving through the world reading books like this and thinking about business models, thinking about what works in business, thinking about what lasts.

[01:01:19] William Green: And I, I don’t know, the fact that we are discussing seriously a practical question, like what type of ads. The podcast should have, or how to defend our careers against the encroachment of ai, and that we are drawing on ideas that Robert Pirsig, who’s no longer even Alive, was discussing. That’s a very beautiful defense of why it’s worth reading broadly.

[01:01:41] William Green: But then as Munger often says look, you don’t need your proctologist to be reading Proust, and maybe it’s better if he isn’t reading Proust. And so I think there’s a tension here and you have to kind of decide when you are deciding on what books to read, what game am I playing here?

[01:01:58] Stig Brodersen: I love that you say that. Which journey are you on, William and I want to take this opportunity to play this clip from an episode you did. It was back on episode 26 with Jason Karp and this wonderful clip. Let’s just let’s play now and we can talk about it a bit later.

[01:02:17] William Green:  So, on the surface, this is a story of enviable success, but underneath this, there’s a sort of more dramatic story of you kind of crashing and burning personally.

[01:02:27] William Green: And I wondered if you could take us through that story in some detail, telling us what actually happened to you and what the price in a way of this hyper neurotic, overachiever mindset was in terms of your body and mind.

[01:02:42] Jason Karp: Yeah, and I didn’t fully know why it was happening at the time. I think with the benefit of time and hindsight, it looks a lot clearer in terms of what happened to me and how I did to myself, what I did.

[01:02:54] Jason Karp: But I was, you know, I was hell-bent on this continued path of overachievement. I got this very coveted job right out of college. I wanted to be great at it, you know, and I obviously wanted to make a lot of money, but I also wanted, I wanted the accolades. I wanted to feel impressive. I wanted to quiet all those insecure imposter demons and I was very good at my job.

[01:03:17] Jason Karp: And in the second, third year of working, I think it first started about a year into it, I had continued to evolve my own different forms of efficiency hacking. And this is before like podcasts and before, you know, four-hour work week was out and all these things. I was really obsessed with how do I improve my efficiencies. 

[01:03:43] Jason Karp: And this is before like podcasts and before, you know, four-hour work week was out and all these things. I was really obsessed with how do I improve my efficiencies. And it wasn’t just for business. I was so curious and so interested in knowledge acquisition and I had sort of delusions of my own grandeur at the time because I had been so everything, I put my mind to in college I did, I sort of thought, oh, sky’s the limit.

[01:04:03] Jason Karp: Let’s keep going. And I taught myself how to speed read. I taught myself how to go on less sleep and I started taking a very myopic approach to productivity and efficiency. And if it didn’t fit into my rubric of is this going to make me more productive or better, it didn’t fit into my life. And over, you know, in college.

[01:04:20] Jason Karp: Primarily because like I had an athletic schedule, I was working out, you know, an hour and a half to three hours a day and I didn’t realize how beneficial that was for me. Both mental health and physical health. And then I get into this kind of work hard play hard environment, New York City, 1998, 1999, 21, 22 years old.

[00:21:25] Jason Karp: And everyone’s like, you know, caffeine in the morning, crappy lunch, you know, work till nine o’clock at night, go out for cocktails, get five hours of sleep back again. And I started doing that and then I realized well wait. Like a lot of this is not helping my productivity. So, I’m going to teach myself how to sleep less.

[01:04:52] Jason Karp: I’m going to basically stop hanging out with people because hanging out with people didn’t have a tangible benefit for me. I’m going to teach myself how to speed-read. And so, I started reading. I got so fast at one point I was reading a book a day and that was outside of work. And I gave up exercise cause I didn’t see how that fit into my goals.

And for a couple months it was working. If your objective function was like, get more productive. And I kind of felt like it was just around the time that Good Will Hunting had come out and I was like obsessed with that movie and I kind of felt like maybe, maybe I could be like him, and which obviously is a fictional character.

[01:05:37] Jason Karp: And I always had these, you may or may not remember, I have a mathematician uncle who was a child prodigy and was kind of like Good Will Hunting, you know, and graduated high school and college three or four years early and you know, just went on to do crazy things in the mathematics world. And I always kind of looked up to him and wondered like, you know, was I anything like him?

[01:05:58] Jason Karp: Could I be like him? And so, I had that kind of fueling me. And then I noticed that I started getting sick and it started with some weird symptoms, and I started developing these rashes on my body. I noticed my hair started falling out in like clumps. And then what was really acute was my vision started to go.

[01:06:18] Jason Karp: And I remember one day walking out of my apartment and at this point by the way, I was sleeping three, four hours a night tops. And not cause I was having fun because I was like, I was neurotically reading things and doing things and I was teaching myself how to do these like 10-minute military-style power naps and all for like acquisition of knowledge and productivity.

[01:06:40] Jason Karp: And I noticed walking out in my hallway at like six in the morning that the lights had like kind of double and I noticed I was having a hard time reading and I ended up going to see a few doctors and I was diagnosed with degenerative eye disease that has no cure. And has just sort of like a rate of acceleration that you can maybe control.

[01:07:04] Jason Karp: But they basically said I would be fully blind by the age of 30 and I was going blind, and I had to put my name on a corneal transplant list. And while this was happening, I had all my other health symptoms, the hair, the rashes. I had a few other things that are probably not worth going into, but I felt awful.

[01:07:19] Jason Karp: And yet in what I thought mattered, I just kept bringing up more points at work.

[01:07:26] Stig Brodersen: Okay. So William, I have to say, this was one of the most impactful episodes you did. And I could play the entire episode out. It would probably be a bit too much, but…

[01:07:38] William Green: I should get more coffee.

[01:07:39] Stig Brodersen: Right, exactly. But that call it five, six minutes or whatever it was, I really resonate with that and I think a lot of our listeners would resonate with that too. There are so many of our listeners that are top performers in the field, and it’s very clear whenever you meet the audience that they’re also very competitive.

[01:08:00] Stig Brodersen: And if anyone is competitive, is Jason Karp especially the period of his time that he’s talking about here. And so I can speak for myself here and say that even though I probably haven’t had the same symptoms, I have had some of them because I’ve been very competitive. I try not to be, but it’s just wired into who I am.

[01:08:20] Stig Brodersen: If anyone else is wired the same way than I am and perhaps most people are somewhere in between where we are, see if you can perhaps strike a more healthy balance. I also could play another clip, which I won’t, where I talk about, where I talk with guys spear about giving yourself permission to not become smarter about investing or whatever it is that you really want to be an expert in.

[01:08:44] Stig Brodersen: And it might seem like a ridiculous conversation to have unless you are very competitive and understand what it takes to be very good at what you do.

[01:08:56] William Green: Well Guy, a few years ago, I remember when, I think Antarctica with his wife, Laurie and their three kids, and he read War and Peace while he was there by Tulsa, which is a big behemoth of a book.

[01:09:11] William Green: On the one hand, as someone who’s been invested in guys’ fund for like 22 years, there’s a part of me that’s like, what the hell? He’s off in Antarctica reading Tolstoy when he should be managing my money. And then on the other hand I’m well, that probably makes him more resilient because.

[01:09:29] William Green: He needs to invest time and energy in his family. He really needs a good marriage. He needs to have good relationship with his kids, really loves his family. And he needs some time off. And maybe that’s a really valuable thing for him to do in terms of having a sustainable life. And I’m not sure, I suspect there’s a price to pay in terms of returns by not being really narrowly focused and really intensely driven just about money.

[01:09:59] William Green: And you think of someone like Peter Lynch, who I think didn’t take a holiday basically in like 13 or 14 years that he was at the top, his game as a fund manager at Fidelity. And I think the one time he went away, the market kind of fell apart and it was like he couldn’t stop work for a second, but he quit after 13 or 14 years and his career as a money manager was done.

[01:10:21] William Green: And so, On the one hand he had this kind of lightning pace and this intensity, and on the other hand, it wasn’t resilient he couldn’t keep doing it. And you think also of Jason Karp, right? Who I remember when I first interviewed Jason Karp for Richer, Wiser, Happier, I just liked him tremendously, immediately.

[01:10:42] William Green: I mean, he is such a smart, honest, thoughtful human being, super articulate, super self-aware. But I said to him, it seems like you’ve set yourself up to be an extreme athlete. And he is like, yeah, that’s exactly how we see ourselves. We see ourselves as extreme athletes. And so he was he had a meditation room in his office.

[01:11:00] William Green: He had with blackout curtains, he wouldn’t allow certain food in the office. They had like healthy snacks. He was exercising like crazy, had a gym there. They had everyone had their own locker and stuff. And so he was approaching it in this really smart way as an extreme athlete, digesting all of this information faster and quicker, and trading quickly.

[01:11:21] William Green: But it wasn’t really sustainable. And I think part of what’s happened with Jason’s career is he shifted to being much more like Buffett, where he’s got a platform company now, a holding company where he’s building businesses in the space of health and nutrition and nurturing them over many years.

[01:11:45] William Green: It’s a much healthier approach to life. Whereas before he was just trading pieces of paper and he said he started to feel like his soul was just decaying. And that he was kind of adding no value in life. And so I think again, you have to kind of figure out like what game am I playing? What game am I built for?

[01:12:03] William Green: Part of the problem for Jason was that he was like an extreme athlete. He could win that game, but it came at a tremendous personal cost and it, at a certain point, he started to feel like he was wrecking his health, his physical health, his mental health, his equanimity, and that there was no real meaning to it, no real soul to it.

[01:12:22] William Green: And he switched to something that’s much more aligned with who he is, which is building these businesses that are going to improve the way people eat. So think with all of this stuff, whether you’re picking how to invest, whether you’re picking how to do business, whether you’re picking how to read, you want to do it in a way that somehow aligned with your personality and your strengths.

[01:12:43] Stig Brodersen: I was going for a walk with my wife, which we luckily often do, and at the time I remember we were eighth in the world in business podcasts. And my wife, who is way more, not just smarter than I am, but also lives a more balanced life than I am. She was really proud of the hospital, like, oh my god, like eight in the world.

[01:13:02] Stig Brodersen: And I looked at her and said, but there were seven who are better than me. And then, so I not in any way to put myself along the likes of Jason Karp, that’s not the point of me saying this. But my point is saying that if you want to play that game, you cannot win. Because if you read a book like Jason did, you are just competing with other people who also read a book a day.

[01:13:24] Stig Brodersen: It doesn’t really matter if they’re 99.99% who are not. cause that’s not who you’re competing with. If you’re the second best in the world in tennis, you focus on the one that’s better than you. That’s the nature of things. And just be very, I guess this is my way of saying that. It really just hidden between the eyes.

[01:13:43] Stig Brodersen: Whenever I read that, sorry, whenever I listened to that episode you did with Jason because. I feel that there’s so many audience who can resonate with that and being so obsessed, for lack of better words about what they do, and really want to excel at it, not give themselves permission to enjoy some of the final things in life.

[01:14:02] William Green: I think you have to ask yourself what constitutes a really successful life for you, a truly successful, truly abundant life for you? And I think some of us are so competitive by nature and we are so desperate to get ahead and this sort of survival mode that’s deeply wired into us, maybe even more so as men.

[01:14:21] William Green: I don’t know. I mean, there’s this sort of, this hunger to prove ourselves and to prove that \ we’re somehow desirable and powerful and macho and stuff. I think it’s very easy for that to get out of control. And so to be able to pause and step back and say, what am I optimizing for here? Like, why am I reading, why am I working so hard?

[01:14:42] William Green: And I don’t know, I think about this a lot, right? Because you can imagine how much time I’ve spent even just reading the novels with my book group. I mean, we read Life and Fate, which was one of Jason’s favorite novels, which by this great Russian novelist, Vasily Grossman, I think it’s like an 800 page book.

[01:15:00] William Green: We read Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, oh sorry, 800 hundred page book, Read Crime Punishment by Dostoevsky, that’s a big time suck, reading that stuff. And we’re all busy and we all have like, books being published and things like that. And I sometimes think like, why am I doing this? Like, why isn’t it just a distraction?

[01:15:19] William Green: And I’m terrible at organizing things and I’m the person who kind of ends up organizing a lot of this stuff, which so doesn’t play to my strengths. And so it’s even more of a time suck for me. And then I prepare like crazy for some of the meetings cause I’m sort of moderating stuff sometimes. And so I spend the weekend partly studying this Japanese novel so that I could then kind of moderate a decent conversation about it.

[01:15:42] William Green: And then I’m thinking, well, no, part of what I’m optimizing for in terms of a successful, happy and abundant life is to be chatting with people I like tremendously who are really thoughtful about great books and we are learning stuff. And that, for me is part of an abundant life. And so that’s not a digression, but there have been so many times where I feel that tension.

[01:16:04] William Green: I’m like, should we just pack this in? Is it just too much? And then every time we’re like last night we’re like, so what’s our next book? And we’re like, why don’t we just read the first two books of In Search of Lost Time by Proust? Which I’ve sort of, I’ve come close to finishing the whole book and never quite managed to, cause there’s like 4,000 pages.

[01:16:22] William Green: And so maybe this will be the last attempt, but it’s like, that is part of a rich life for me. And I think this is something that Jason Cooper’s done as well, is he’s decided no, part of a rich life for me is to be in Austin, Texas, not in the heart of Manhattan, in a skyscraper. So I have a little bit of a quieter life and I spend a little bit more time with my kids, and I just think this is a hugely important question for our listeners to ask themselves is, what am I optimizing for here?

[01:16:51] Stig Brodersen: William, on that note, let’s go to the third segment here. I’m desperately trying to give some sort of structure on our conversation, and luckily it’s not too easy and that’s the way that it should be.

[01:17:02] William Green: I’m testing your ability to keep people track.

[01:17:06] Stig Brodersen: No. I love how much we deviate from the from the outline. I have all these bullet points and notes and like, then we have to go this direction and then we always end another place which I really enjoy. This feels like it’s time off whenever I speak with you.

[01:17:20] William Green: And I had the outline and I lost it. Yeah. So between home and my office, I was like, oh no, it’s on the other computer.

[01:17:28] William Green: So this is a pretty good reflection of our different personalities.

[01:17:30] William Green: Yeah.

[01:17:32] Stig Brodersen: So the third segment here for today is how to encourage reading. It didn’t come across that way because William and I are so intense about reading. We absolutely love reading if we would like to give that back one way or the other.

[01:17:45] Stig Brodersen: And it’s something I thought a lot about. And then I listened to one of the podcasts you did, it was not here in, in a video, was in another podcast, and you talked about how you had given your children unlimited book, but yet whenever they grew up and inspired by you, I’ve given the same privilege to my nieces.

[01:18:02] Stig Brodersen: So they’re eight and 10, so we haven’t really gotten around to security analysis, second volume, whatnot. We are doing Harry Potter now [Crosstalk] Yeah. We’ve just waited a day or two, but we are reading Harry Potter now, but I wanted to turn the tables here and ask you, William, how have you encouraged your children to read whenever they were kids?

[01:18:26] William Green: Well, my son Henry is now 25 and he got a creative writing in English literature degree from Columbia and now is teaching English and is a very good writer. And my daughter Madeline, is 22 and is a college in Boston and kind of flips between Emerson College, where she’s a visual and media arts person, and Berkeley College of Music and the New England and Conservatory of Music.

[01:18:50] William Green: So they’re both very creative people. So maybe it was partly wiring, but part and both extraordinarily good writers, like very talented writers I think from very early on. So I think part of it is that just from day one we were telling stories. It was all, there was so much storytelling in our family and everything was about words, books, stories when the kids were growing up they grew up in New York and then Hong Kong and then London and they just were always surrounded by books everywhere and.

[01:19:26] William Green: In the car there would be books everywhere and you’d be I remember once taking Henry, our son when we were in Hong Kong to whatever the Disney thing is, the Disney world of Disneyland there in Hong Kong. And teaching him some poem while we were in the car. And then realizing that Madeline, who was much younger, must have been about five or something, had heard the poem and memorized it while Henry was memorizing it.

[01:19:49] William Green: And I think Henry was going to get some sort of prize for memorizing the perm. And then Madeline memorized it when she was like ridiculously young. And so there was always like, words were just there around you there and stories and so I think part of it is just creating an ecosystem in which books, words, and stories are valued.

[01:20:10] William Green: I remember this as a boy where I would I would be with my father. My father was a judge, but he would read the Oxford English dictionary. And he would say oh son do you know the etymology of this word? And it wasn’t fake. It was like there was a deep passion for language. I remember once hosting him, I may have told you this story before Stig.

[01:20:32] William Green: I remember once he came to visit in New York, he was from London and but by this time he was probably about 70 short before he passed away. And he was sitting on this balcony that we had overlooking the Hudson River. And I went to do some work or shower or something. And I left him with an article by Michael Lewis from Worth Magazine in those days, it was a great article that he’d written about Alan Greenspan the then Fed Chief.

[01:20:54] William Green: And I thought, oh, my dad, who loves the stock market, will enjoy this article by this great writer. And when I came back, my father was reading Sophocles in ancient Greek on the balcony on his own. So nobody in the world is watching him. And that’s what he’s choosing. To read. And there’s something I admire so much about that.

[01:21:13] William Green: Like my mother was equally incredibly literate, like and a very good writer. And so that creation of an ecosystem where something is valued is hugely powerful. And so if you think about the kind of ecosystem that you create for your kids, if it’s if it’s full of an emphasis on. Flash and money and possessions and showing people how rich you are, and that’s what they’re going to pick up on.

[01:21:41] William Green: And so they’re going to pick up on our behavior. And I’m not saying this to be critical, it’s like of anyone some of these things are sort of unconscious and we just pick them up from our parents. But I think there’s nothing more powerful than a how you structure your ecosystem, like to fill it with books.

[01:21:57] William Green: There are books just sort of spilling off every counter. I mean my bookshelves can’t take the books anymore, so they’re stacked up on the floor, they’re stacked up everywhere. And I just it’s like a compulsion. And so on one level it’s kind of irksome for my wife, no doubt. Although, I mean she has like a literature degree from Barnard as well.

[01:22:18] William Green: I mean, she’s highly literate and was a writer, but it’s still irksome to have books everywhere. But it’s a great ecosystem. So, that’s really important. And b, just the behavior that you’re modeling and so as with any aspect of parenting, they see what you do not listen to what you say. And so if they see you reading, I mean my daughter Madeline, who’s back home from college at the moment saw me come home from the city on Saturday from New York City.

[01:22:48] William Green: And I’m just sitting there in my study reading this Japanese novel and my wife’s like, can we go listen to this music cause there’s a concert around the corner? And my daughter sees how painful it is for me to drag myself away from reading the book in my study to go to this concert. And as soon as, and I love music, but as soon as I could duck out, I went back home and read the book.

[01:23:12] William Green: And the modeling of behavior is just huge because your kids can hear when you’re being hypocritical and when you’re not when you say to them, oh, you should read, but then you’re just watching tv. They see that.

[01:23:25] Stig Brodersen: One of the ways that I encourage reading, and I don’t even know if I should be encouraging reading, but I love giving away books.

[01:23:32] Stig Brodersen: It’s just nothing better than just giving away books. I used to give away my own books, but I kind of felt ultimately it was quite self serving. I was just, you are just so proud when you have your first book, you’re like, oh my God, the whole world should know about it. Then you realize whenever you’ve written it in the accounting book, no one really wants to read it.

[01:23:50] Stig Brodersen: But now I started to give away, Richer, Wiser, Happier not just because it’s better, but it, I also find that it breaks the ice. I’m quite shy whenever I meet new people and I really don’t do small talk. Well, I’ve actually have a practice before I jump into every call I have. What should I talk about whenever we small talk?

[01:24:09] Stig Brodersen: Because it just doesn’t come natural to me. And so one trick I would like to hand off is that if you are quite familiar with a book, could be Richer, Wiser or Happier or whatnot, it’s just great to have that as a security blanket for you if you’re not too comfortable about too many people around you.

[01:24:24] Stig Brodersen: And it will always give you something you can small talk about if you kind of feel like the weather and what do you do is sort of like too used. So you can go that route whenever you give books away to friends and family. I would also say make sure not to be too passive aggressive. Don’t give a book about how to lose weight to your obese friend if that person has not expressed any kind of wish about going in that direction.

[01:24:48] Stig Brodersen: But I always want to pick up on if I have a friend who talks about Buffett, not just like, I know you’re interested in Buffett, so let’s talk about it, but if you really sense a genuine interest, give that person the snowball or the Ss of Warren Buffett if they are interested in macroeconomics.

[01:25:04] Stig Brodersen: I also love giving away Dalio’s book, The Changing World Order. I think it’s a magnificent book and it’s also like great at sparking conversation. So what I would do I was thinking about what you said the other day, William, about keep the candy away. And I kind of feel like, let’s do the opposite whenever it comes to book let’s have the candy right in front of you.

[01:25:24] Stig Brodersen: So what I would do is that I would order a stack of books that I know I want to give away just because if I’m going out the door I might just think about it that part point in time. So make sure you always have books you can give away if people come in your home or if you’re going to meet up with a business contact or friend or whatnot.

[01:25:42] Stig Brodersen: Just to make it easy for yourself to give away those books. And also, if you have 10 copies of the same, you’re probably going to force yourself to give at least some of them away. At least that’s one approach I use to. Yeah. I’ll also say whenever you do that, make sure not to expect anything. Don’t expect anyone to send you a book report or anything like that.

[01:26:02] Stig Brodersen: Give it away. Give it into the universe and see if anything comes back. And if it does, it’s wonderful if someone wants to discuss whatever kind of book or if they find a one page to help them. And if that doesn’t happen, that’s okay too. If nothing happens and they just smile, they receive it, they never read it, that’s okay. It’s should be giving in the right spirit.

[01:26:24] William Green: I think that’s huge. The giving and sharing of books is a really beautiful thing when done in the right spirit. And I had a lovely example of it the other day where a friend of mine, Samuel Goldberg, who’s someone I met through the book who wrote to me at some point, we started talking and he is a really a high quality individual.

[01:26:43] William Green: We got on a Zoom call a couple of weeks ago and we were talking about something and I think he was asking me something about meditation and he was sort of saying how he’d never really managed to kind of add down a meditation practice. And so I was, not that I’m any great meditation master by any means, but I was giving him some advice on some things that had helped me.

[01:27:02] William Green: And I was mentioning the Ten Percent Happier app, which I think is a very good app and that there are some very good teachers on there. I haven’t used it in a while cause they do other stuff. But one of the really good teachers is this guy George Mumford, who’s a former heroin addict who ended up totally turning his life around and coaching people like.

[01:27:20] William Green: Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan with meditation. And I said to this guy, Samuel his first book, the Mindful Athlete I think it’s called, and it’s an interesting book. And there are a couple of really great interviews that he’s done on the Ten Percent Happier podcast. And I said he’s got a new book, but I haven’t got it yet.

[01:27:39] William Green: I haven’t read it yet, so, but I’m sure that’ll be interesting too. And about 24 hours later, I get a copy of that book from Samuel with a really lovely note thanking me for spending the time chatting with him. And it was just really thoughtful. It was a really nice thing that he’d heard that this was a guy I’m interested in that a guy who’s impressed me.

[01:27:59] William Green: And I hadn’t got around to buying his new book yet, which I would surely have done at some point, but I obviously got distracted and forgotten to buy it. And it only came out a few weeks ago, I think. And he bought it. And there was nothing cynical about it. There was nothing kind of manipulative. It was just a really kind gesture I had done something to help him by just talking to him for there, there’s nothing I I’m trying to get out of giving him advice.

[01:28:22] William Green: He’s just the right, talented young person. Happy to help him. And he did something kind of really selfless and gracious. And I’ve seen that with him a couple of times before where he’s, he is given me a couple of books and he’s much younger. I mean, he’s, I think he’s 24 and here he is giving books a gift to a 54 year old who is trying to help him and share some insight about things that I’ve learned over the years.

[01:28:47] William Green: And so I think that spirit of giving people books without an agenda just because you think they’ll like them and it’ll help them in some way, that’s a very beautiful thing. And it’s something I remember Arnold Van Den Berg saying to me at one point that his hobby is giving people books. And I’m pretty sure that over the last few years I’ve got well over 20 books from Arnold and I’ve definitely sent him a lot of books over the years.

[01:29:15] William Green: And there’s something kind of really beautiful about that, that you’re just, you’re not counting, you’re not trying to think of Cialdini and the reciprocation bias and how is this person going to help me? You’re like, let me send a book to this person that I think might spark something in them. And sometimes you never hear back from that person.

[01:29:35] William Green: Often you never hear back from that person. I remember. Yeah. I mean, I’ve had this multiple times where I sent someone the 23 volume book and I never heard back and I have no idea if you got it and maybe not, I don’t know. But that’s okay.

[01:29:48] Stig Brodersen: And that’s so important that you say that should be the spirit. I wanted to bring up another thing that we do here at TIP about encouraging reading. But it’s very important to say that it should not come from a place of give business books. And then you can model something in Excel that shows you have a positive ROI because now your team are more aligned.

[01:30:08] Stig Brodersen: That’s not the spirit you should do. I just wanted to provide a few examples of something that I found working for our organizations, perhaps others out there, whether regardless which organization they’re a part of might find useful. But I, we had this principle, and this was instituted like years back, that if anyone wanted a book, they can just invoice it to TIP and then TIP could just…

[01:30:30] William Green: You never told me, that would’ve been dangerous.

[01:30:32] Stig Brodersen: No. And this was announced on Slack and William, you’re not on that group, but I actually thought about that, oh my God, like and this was probably back in 2016, 2017, the original. And then we resurfaced it a few times and I was thinking what would William do? Would he like order this rare book collection from?

[01:30:53] William Green: No. I wouldn’t want to take advantage

[01:30:54] Stig Brodersen: Right! No. You of course, William you’re free to do that. But this was something we actually relaunched here a few weeks ago and I wanted to tell about experience because we have a system where everyone can order any kind of book that they want and then TIP will give them that reimbursement.

[01:31:11] Stig Brodersen: And it didn’t work that well. We had a few who did that, but nothing really happened. And then whenever it happened, it was very often because I communicated something to the team, like, now I’m reading this book, perhaps you want to check it out. And then, I don’t know, half the team or whatever would then pick it up.

[01:31:27] Stig Brodersen: And I spoke with quite a few members on the team and I heard different explanations why, so what I decided to do was to curate a book list of books I’ve read and I could, I would always be open to discuss that book, but that was not the intention of doing it. It was to say, I read those books and if that resonates with you, make sure to order them any point in time.

[01:31:49] Stig Brodersen: And not only that, you can of course also reading it through the workday so you should not feel like it’s an extra task. There was actually, I don’t know if I made it sound like it, it feels like a task because they could read it throughout the workday. It’s just like, make sure to read if you want to and if you don’t want to, then that’s fine too.

[01:32:04] Stig Brodersen: And what happened, because we only had 12 books on that list. Was that so many ordered from that list? I wonder why that was the case. The conclusion I came up with was that whenever you go on Netflix, there’s so many movies in there that are often, I happen not to watch any of them cause they’re just too many and I have too many choices.

[01:32:23] Stig Brodersen: Whereas if you have 12 or whatever kind of number you come up with, it’s a lot easier to say, well, at least six of them. No. And then there are only six left, and I might have read two of them, but not the other four. That’s all the four books.

[01:32:36] William Green: This is one of the lessons of that Barry Schwartz book, right? The paradox of choice is that when you’re in the supermarket and there are like 35 types of luxury jam, like what do I do? And I think that this goes back to what we were talking about with simplicity before. When it comes to investing, that simplicity is kind of this master principle that sometimes.

[01:32:55] William Green: You don’t actually want to choose between a hundred different cars or a hundred different stocks or a hundred different funds. I don’t know. I thought, I think at some point I’m going to have to buy a new car. And I was thinking I’ve had this sort of okay, Honda CR-V for many years and I was thinking about the fact that Tom Gayner now drives what is it, the Toyota Rav4 hybrid thing.

[01:33:19] William Green: And I was like, I know that Tom will have done a lot of work to research this, or at least that he’ll have good standards. Like he’ll have applied a good filter. So I’m okay. So I know now that it’s between the Honda CRV and the rav4 because I know that Tom has done the work and I know that he’s not really into flash and what he’s not trying to sort of show people how rich or successful he is.

[01:33:43] William Green: He wants a really good car that’s going to last a long time, that’s going to be reasonably good for the environment and stuff like that. And so there’s something about simplifying the choice. So I think you were tapping into that when you offered people 12 books, not an entire library.

[01:33:57] Stig Brodersen: Yeah, exactly. And I think that there are many dimensions to that. Part of it’s that you can say, start with 12 books and then next quarter you might introduce another six books. I think that’s way to go about it. Also, not to overwhelm people. One of my favorite books, that’s Poor Charlie’s Almanac, and I don’t know, it’s probably like 60 bucks or 80 bucks. I don’t know exactly the cost.

[01:34:16] Stig Brodersen: And there might also be an element that people want to be nice like William said, that he would never take advantage of an offer like that. And to some people who might not buy books, they might be saying, oh my god, like 60 bucks. And we are like 20 people ordering the same book, like $1,200, like just in books.

[01:34:32] Stig Brodersen: And no one’s going to ask us about it. No one’s go going to figure out if we read it, and we might just give it off to someone else. So I think that a lot of people want to give books to others and then also other people perhaps want those books, but there’s just something lost in translation where they might not feel comfortable about.

[01:34:49] Stig Brodersen: Doing that. And sometimes you have to make it happen. If you want to do that. And this was just like, based on my own experience professionally with friends William, I think you had a wonderful example about what you did with your kids. I don’t know if this serves as inspiration for anyone, but those were at least some of my reflections on how to encourage screening and how to give that gift to others.

[01:35:12] Stig Brodersen: And just for the last time, I probably just want to say that, give it in the spirit of it’s okay if nothing happens. Like what you were getting at before there, William. Like the whole reciprocity. Such a powerful rule. Yes, but don’t use that as your North star.

[01:35:27] William Green: People smell, if they’re being manipulated and so the more you can avoid doing that and kind of trust that in some way, there are rewards of trying to behave decently and honorably and kindly and generously, but they may not be direct rewards. It’s not like I’m going to give this to this person and they’re going to love me or they’re going to hire me, or it’s like no, you, you put out stuff in the world and then you trust the fact that if you are a decent, generous soul, at least for the most part good stuff is going to happen. You’re going to draw good people into your life, and you are going to have good experiences with them. I don’t know I’m more and more convinced that’s the case.

[01:36:11] William Green: I think when you see people behave generously and kindly and selflessly, you just want that person in your life. And so I think there are tremendous benefits to behaving that way. And I love the fact that I’m surrounded by people who give books to each other and without, I don’t know. My son came back home recently and he’d got me a couple of books and I don’t know. I love that my 25 year old son is already like gifting books. What a beautiful thing.

[01:36:43] Stig Brodersen: Yeah. He must have good parents. Good upbringing, William.

[01:36:48] William Green: He knows the way of my heart.

[01:36:50] Stig Brodersen: He does. William, this has been a wonderful conversation. Do you have anything you want to add here before we, we round off the episode?

[01:36:58] William Green: I wanted to mention two very specific books that I’ve read recently that I think would be worth people taking note of. And one, this book which is by Scott Patterson, who’s a Wall Street Journal writer who wrote things like quants and dark pools, I think, and he’s written a book called Chaos Kings, How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis.

[01:37:19] William Green: I got a copy very early because it’s edited by Rick Hogan, who is my editor of my book at Scribner and who’s had like a hundred bestsellers and it’s just a, he’s a famously good editor, and it’s a very interesting book. It focuses a lot on people like Nassim Taleb, a [inaudible], so these chaos kings who are basically betting on disruption, they’re betting on things going wrong in society, and it’s a thought provoking and interesting book and it’s timely, and one it’s well told.

[01:37:51] William Green: He’s a good writer. I’m biased. I mean I wrote a blog for it. And I want it to do well, but it deserves to do well. But the thing that’s really important, I think, is the observation that the world is, in some ways becoming more fragile and vulnerable to these extreme events, partly because of technological interconnectedness.

[01:38:13] William Green: The amount of travel, global travel, for example, increases the likelihood of pandemics. The fact that we’re all technologically interconnected raises the risks in terms of cyber warfare or power outages or the, like you’ve got climate change as this kind of systemic global risk that’s increasing.

[01:38:39] William Green: And so there are all of these kind of areas of fragility to use a Nassim Taleb term that I think force us to think about how to build more anti-fragile lives and anti-fragile portfolios. And I think every investor has to think about that topic. If you are someone like [Inaudible] or Taleb, you are able to use elaborate esoteric schemes using options that mean that most of the time you’ll lose money.

[01:39:09] William Green: Day to day you’re going to lose little amounts of money. And then there’ll be some extreme event like a market meltdown or a pandemic or something, and you’ll make hundreds of percent very quickly, and that’s their game. That doesn’t really suit me and my temperament and my skillset, which is a, not a great term for my skills, which are limited in the area of options and like, but value investing in a way is of, because of the emphasis on margin of safety is a very good response to an increasingly fragile world that’s vulnerable to these extreme events. And so keeping money on the side so that you can take advantage of these moments of dislocation living within your means so that you are not over leveraged and not suddenly going to have to sell stuff in a vulnerable moment. These are really important.

[01:40:00] William Green: So think of when Covid took flight. I think around sort of January, February, March, 2020. So early on I was able to buy Berkshire a couple of times, two or three times because I hadn’t overreached and in register. I wish I bought more, but the fact that I’d been indoctrinated with all of these value principles and I knew that in a time of dislocation to buy something like Berkshire that was hated at the time.

[01:40:28] William Green: That was very helpful to me. And so I think this is an interesting and timely book, and I would recommend that.

[01:40:33] Stig Brodersen: Sorry. Just really quick William, I just want to say that Clay our co-host, he’s going to interview Scott about Chaos Kings. The episode is 558 and will be released June 8th, so it would already be in our feed whenever you’re listening to this.

[01:40:47] William Green: So, yeah I think I introduced them maybe. Scott is a very good writer and a very interesting guy. And I think this theme is one, to take seriously this idea that in a fragile world that’s vulnerable to extreme events, how are you going to operate in a way that makes you more resilient?

[01:41:06] William Green: That’s something we should all think about. The other book that is the one I recommended to Nick Sleep and that I bought a copy, I listened to it on Audible and then I immediately bought the paper back cause I needed to write notes in it. And then I also got it for a well-known fund manager because I was like you need to read this as well, just cause it’s so beautiful, is this book, The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen. And it’s an old book that’s just one of the best books I’ve read in recent years. And it’s non-fiction. And it’s this journey that this guy goes on to, I guess it’s the Himalayas to 16,000 feet in Nepal. And he’s with a great biologist, field biologist.

[01:41:50] William Green: And in some way they’re searching for a snow leopard and also for these blue sheep. But it’s also kind of a spiritual voyage, a spiritual journey, and it’s just really beautiful. And I don’t know I think I have a copy of it here. Yeah. And this will give you a sense of why it’s worth reading any, anything like this.

[01:42:11] William Green: I’ll give you one paragraph here. So he says, in this very breath that we take now, lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us what one Llama refers to as the precision and openness and intelligence of the present. The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment, is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times to be of the present, nothing but the present to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.

[01:42:38] William Green: In some ways, this journey where he’s trying to find something, he’s trying to find this incredibly elusive, enigmatic animal, and he is trying to find great spiritual wisdom. And then he is like no, I just need to be here now in this moment. And in a way, this goes back to what we were talking about with Jason Karp, where you know, you can be so desperate to get ahead because you fall under the spell of thinking, my performance has going to be better and better, and I’m going to accumulate more accolades and better returns and more reputation and again, when you read these great thinkers, You come back to the realization that I’ve going to be present now.

[01:43:16] William Green: And so, yeah, we want to be becoming something more and improving ourselves and growing and be continuous learning machines. But we also, there’s this paradox that we have to constantly be bringing ourselves back to this present moment and be fully awaken this moment and appreciating where we are right now.

[01:43:34] William Green: And it’s such a simple lesson, but such a beautiful and profound lesson that we have to be here right now in this moment, fully awake, aware of what’s going on around us and sort of a appreciating where we are and what we have right now, while also trying to become better.

[01:43:53] Stig Brodersen: I cannot think of a better way to end this conversation. William, thank you for joining and talking about books. I mean, starting or ending where we started off, how lucky we are, William, that we can sit here a regular weekday and talk about books and the love of books.

[01:44:11] William Green: It’s an amazing gift. And this is actually part of what I’m working on in my own life is to appreciate the gift that I have now. And so, yes, I want to be trying to improve and become better and get more. And, but why, like I want to actually appreciate what I have now and the fact that I get to be here with you, my friend and colleague, and chat about books and stuff that’s had an influence on us and try to share some ideas. Ah, that’s a really beautiful gift.

[01:44:39] William Green: And I don’t want to be so busy chasing after stuff that I fail to appreciate the gift that we have right now, that we get to do this, which is, it’s pretty splendid. So thank you.

[01:44:50] Stig Brodersen: It’s been a privilege, William. And yeah, thank you for everyone who made it this far into the episode. Thank you for everyone.

[01:44:57] William Green: All three of you.

[01:44:58] Stig Brodersen: All three of you. Our tens and tens of listeners. Alright. Thank you so much for your time and let’s end it there.

[01:45:05] William Green: Thank you.

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