[00:04:59] Intro: You’re listening to the Richer, Wiser, Happier Podcast, where your host, William Green, interviews the world’s greatest investors and explores how to win in markets and life.

[00:05:19] William Green: Our first clip is from an interview that I did with Ray Dalio back in 2023. As I’m sure you know, Ray is one of the most successful investors of all time. He famously founded Bridgewater Associates and built it into, I think at the time of our interview, a company with 150 billion in assets, which made it the world’s largest hedge fund company.

[00:05:40] William Green: Ray also wrote books like Principles, which was a number one New York Times bestseller, and sold more than 4 million copies. In this conversation, we spoke in depth about a new book of his titled My Principles, Your Guided Journal. As you’ll hear, this first clip is about the importance of self-awareness and the absolute necessity to understand our own strengths and weaknesses so that we can create workarounds to help us deal with them.

[00:06:08] William Green: This has been absolutely fundamental to Ray’s success both in investing and business. It’s a pretty long clip, it’s about 12 minutes long, and it starts with a slightly absurd piece of confusion because I pronounced the word PATH, which is spelled P.A.T.H, as PATH and not as PATH. In any case, I’ll play the clip for you and then I’ll add a few comments and observations of my own at the end. Thanks a lot.

[00:06:35] William Green: It all really starts with the adage that you need to know yourself, that to know your nature, and Is critical so you can match it up with suitable parts and you write I think in the very last paragraph of the book something that I think is it sort of took me aback and I started to think I actually got internalize this you wrote life is largely a journey to discover one’s nature.

[00:06:55] William Green: and to find paths that suit one’s nature, which strikes me as a really deep truth. Can you talk about this importance of the first step, really, of self-discovery, of figuring out your own nature and then finding paths that actually suit your nature?

[00:07:11] Ray Dalio: Yes. Your English accent. I just want to make it clear that word is paths in in, but that’s right. Find your nature, matching your nature with the paths that suit your nature. That’s a discovery process.

[00:07:27] William Green: Sounds better in an English accent, right? If you want me to narrate your next book, just…

[00:07:31] Ray Dalio: No, no, no, I’m sure they wouldn’t understand me and make fun of me if I was in the UK, but I, right. We are born with nature. A certain nature, and then our environments give us a certain preferences, a certain personality, things that we want. And I’ve seen that through running my company. And that’s also why I created this principles you test that is available to everybody free. So it’s like a half hour test. You answer questions, And everybody virtually said, ah, that describes me.

[00:08:07] Ray Dalio: And it also shows if you put another person in it, it describes what your relationship with that person is likely to be like based on what you’re like, what your preferences are. So we have these preferences. I can, you know, enumerate them. Somebody’s a, Big picture adventurer kind of thinking some person is more detailed and not adventurous and all of these things.

[00:08:30] Ray Dalio: So to know your nature, and then you want to match it up with the path so that you say, ah, that’s going to be, you know, a great path for me. And that’s the exercise. So the first exercise, Is that exercise you not only take the test that gives you and it will describe you almost everybody who’s taken the test says, wow, that’s described me in detail and then it takes you through some other questions to help to make that discovery and then you move on with the path.

[00:09:03] William Green: You did many different personality assessment tests yourself, and obviously with people like Adam Grant, or, oh, Adam Grant, I should say, you helped to develop this test the Principles U Assessment, which I’ll include in the show notes for this episode. What did you figure out over the years about your own strengths and weaknesses and the way that you’re wired? And then more importantly, perhaps, what workarounds did you come up with to really compensate for or hedge against those, the weaknesses that you found?

[00:09:38] Ray Dalio: So I’m in personality test. I’m what’s called a shaper, which is, and then there’s other parts on an adventure and so on, but I’m a shaper is somebody who likes to visualize something and build it out.

[00:09:50] Ray Dalio: And I’m very excited about new ideas and adventure and all of that kind of thing. So what I find is that I need people who are strong where I’m weak, and I’m weak in paying attention to a lot of details. I mean, I will, Go to the detail, but I need tremendous amount of leverage of different kinds of people.

[00:10:13] Ray Dalio: Some people are meticulous and reliable and they’ll help keep me out of trouble or, you know, that kind of thing. So I guess that’s kind of it in a nutshell. I wanted to find out when I started to transition, think about the transition of the control of Bridgewater. I wanted to find out what were the elements.

[00:10:36] Ray Dalio: That were in common among shapers such as. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Reed Hastings, who did Netflix, Muhammad Yunus, who it was, he received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel Prize for inventing so many different things, so many different leaders. And I gave them the personality test and 0. 8 percent of them, they were all the same, and they accounted for 0.

[00:11:03] Ray Dalio: 8 percent of the population. So it’s that element, you know, you can see that preference. And so for me, it was that I have this personality and I need people who are strong and that means like meticulous. Patient, reliable. Of course, in people, there are in the people’s nature, there are values, abilities, and skills, and they’re different things. So you have to know what they are about, match them up.

[00:11:37] William Green: You mentioned this whole issue of values and motivations in some depth the values that drive us, I guess, and you listed a dozen or so of them in the book and they include to be liked slash loved, to be ethically good, to create something new, to help others, to learn and evolve, to impact the world, to live a peaceful life, savoring the simple pleasures it has to offer, but To attain financial success, to understand the world, to have a life filled with fun and adventure, to have good friends, and to have a thriving family. And I was wondering, when you look at that list, A, what drives you most? And B, how has that changed with age now that you are 73?

[00:12:16] Ray Dalio: Yeah, so that exercise lists all the those and some more, I think. And then what you’re supposed to do is you pick the three most important and then you pick the three least important.

[00:12:27] Ray Dalio: And that helps you to make that focus for me, like I, I say. For me, it’s more meaningful work and meaningful relationships. And I’m, I am a shaper, meaning I like to visualize things and build them out. And so those are, I like adventure. I like ambiguity. I like differences. I like going too far away on that unusual places with far away unusual places.

[00:12:56] Ray Dalio: I’ve always had those preferences and that’s always been in me and then I, by my nature, I just happen to find a way to do that.

[00:13:07] William Green: So let’s go to the second exercise, which is really about how you go from the case at hand, the situation you’re dealing with, to actually figuring out your best principles for dealing with this type of situation in case it recurs.

[00:13:19] William Green: So you write at one point that your goal in creating the journal. Is to help you convert your experiences into reflections about how reality works and principles for dealing with your realities well to get you what you want. So let’s go back say to that example from 1982 where I think there was a debt crisis where Mexico defaults on its debt, we have the worst debt crisis since the Great Depression and you bet, I think that the stock market and the economy would be battered by this and instead it actually strengthened.

[00:13:52] William Green: And it was sufficiently disastrous that you had to fire almost everyone at Bridgewater and ended up borrowing four grand from your father. When you think of that process in that case, how you went through this process of reflection on what went wrong, what happened, what flaws of yours this exposed, or what misperceptions of yours and how you develop principles based on that. How would that be a good microcosm of what we should do when we screw up?

[00:14:19] Ray Dalio: Oh, that’s, it was so good. It was such a painful experience. I think, and then I really learned pain plus reflection equals progress. That’s one of the principles I learned that every time I have an encounter that it’s like a puzzle that if I can solve the puzzle, you know, what should I do differently or how should I deal with it?

[00:14:47] Ray Dalio: I would get a gem and the gem would be a new principle and a learning that would improve my life. And so in that particular case, I learned to fear and deal well with the possibility of being wrong. I, it gave me a humility I needed to balance with my audacity. In other words, it made me think, how do I know I’m right?

[00:15:14] Ray Dalio: And then through that process, To try to find out of curiosity the smartest people I could who disagreed with me and to study their reasoning and it made me learn really how to diversify my bets so that I could, by diversifying my bets, I could radically reduce my risk without reducing my returns. And it let me also reflect on life.

[00:15:39] Ray Dalio: Like I was at a juncture, I was broke and I’m, you know, it was, do I go get a job? Do I put on a. Jacket and tie and take the, you know, the railroad into the city and work at Wall Street or something, or do I not? And it was like I was sitting on one side of a jungle and I could have the safe life by sitting on the one side of the jungle and not going into the jungle.

[00:16:06] Ray Dalio: But I knew that if I wanted to have a great life, I had to cross this jungle. Of all these threats in the jungle and survive. And then I sort of said, okay, what am I going to do? Am I going to live this safe life or, and then it won’t be as terrific, or am I going to go into the jungle and how would I go into the jungle?

[00:16:26] Ray Dalio: And then I realized I learned, okay, let me go into the jungle with people who would be on the mission with me and could see things I couldn’t see. And we would protect each other as we went into this jungle. And I found out from that experience that I didn’t want to get to the other side of the jungle to the success and sit on the success, because I found being in the jungle with these people or being on the mission with those people, even though the ups and downs and the threats was rewarding.

[00:16:56] Ray Dalio: That all came from reflections of that terrible mistake. We learn a lot from pain. You know, life, I think is, it’s almost a trick that what happens is the second order consequences are so often the opposite of the first order consequences. In other words, the things that are really good for us don’t feel good.

[00:17:20] Ray Dalio: And the things that are bad for us feel good. You know, okay, you eat, you know, the tasty stuff. is the stuff that is not probably good for you. The exercise that might be painful is the thing that you don’t want to do and you want to do the painful. So quite often pain or that is the opposite. It’s a trick.

[00:17:43] Ray Dalio: Can you do the things that are really good for you? And so, those kinds of reflections, I think, were very powerful, and that experience really brought a lot of those. And from those lessons that I learned, that was the bottom. In other words, from that point, while there have been some ups and downs, it was almost totally up.

[00:18:03] Ray Dalio: Almost all the way. There have been, of course, twists and turns and bumps. Personal things, of course. Terrible personal things that have happened. I lost his son. I, you know, all of those things, but to reflect on reality. Okay. What does it teach you about reality and whatever? And how do you approach that? All of those reflections? I’ve learned a lot from those reflections.

[00:18:29] William Green: There are so many powerful lessons in this clip from Ray Dalio. The first, I think, is this very fundamental idea of knowing yourself well and then finding a suitable direction in life based on your talents, your skills, your personality, your values.

[00:18:47] William Green: And this I think is a reminder of a really important theme that came up again and again in my reporting for the Richer Wiser Happier book. I remember, for example, when I went to the Daily Journal meeting in Los Angeles where I ended up interviewing Charlie Munger, someone asked him for career advice.

[00:19:05] William Green: And he said, look, you have to play in a game where you’ve got some unusual talents. He said, if you’re five foot one, you don’t want to play basketball against some guy who’s eight foot three. He said, it’s just too hard. So you’ve got to figure out a game where you have an advantage. And so this idea of staying away from your weaknesses and playing to your strengths is really important.

[00:19:27] William Green: And also, I think when I when I write about happiness. In the epilogue of the book and I think about what makes certain investors happy and what makes them unhappy I think this idea of living in alignment with your personality and your priorities and your values is really important. You have to decide what the game is that I’m playing that actually suits me that I actually care about.

[00:19:50] William Green: And so for Dalio, he was very clear that he likes adventure, he likes ambiguity, he likes debating differences and searching for the truth about an investment. He’s not worried about conflict. I remember once having a conversation with him and asking him something kind of provocative that I sort of knew was a little bit impertinent, just to kind of see how he would respond.

[00:20:13] William Green: And there just wasn’t any kind of reaction on his face. There was no flicker. There was no flinch, no, no flicker of emotion in responding to it. And it was one of those moments where I realized. Oh, he actually doesn’t mind being challenged. He likes being challenged. I think what it was, if I remember rightly, was I said to him, it seems to me there’s something kind of unkind about your approach of radical transparency and radical truthfulness, and that it’s a little bit brutal.

[00:20:38] William Green: And he said, you know, why, if you’re wrong about something and you misunderstand something, wouldn’t you want someone to tell you about that? Wouldn’t you want them to point it out? And so there was just a willingness to engage in debate. That I think is really extraordinary and so he, he structured his firm in a way that played to that desire to argue and to debate.

[00:21:00] William Green: So, one of the questions then I guess, a practical question for you and me is to say, well, okay, so how do I actually figure out the right game for myself? And one of the things that I found very helpful in preparing for this interview with Ray, Was I did the principles you personality assessment test that he mentioned which you can find I think it’s a principles you calm and it’s free test And one of the things that was extraordinary to me was that I saw very starkly The difference between my own strengths and my own weaknesses and the chasm between them was just extraordinary as I recall I think I was in Sorry, I’m not trying to say this to be self-aggrandizing or self-congratulatory.

[00:21:43] William Green: I was in the top 1 percent in terms of creativity and conceptual thinking, but then when I looked at things like systems and processes, I was literally in the bottom 1%, which is kind of stunning, right? So one of the things that came out of studying these lessons from Ray is that I was much clearer in my understanding of where I’m incredibly weak, And like Ray, I thought, okay, so I have to be honest about my flaws and my weaknesses, and I have to actually find people around me who are strong where I’m weak and partner with them.

[00:22:18] William Green: And so one of the things that I’ve really done in the last year or two, since I first spoke to Ray, was partner with people like Stig Brodersen at the investors podcast network is very systems oriented very process oriented and has this amazing team in the Philippines that’s very systems oriented and very process oriented.

[00:22:35] William Green: I also recently had someone who’s amazing with systems and processes and is doing things like revamping my website and I’ve been intending to revamp my website for something like three years now and it just sort of sits there on my to do list never quite happening because I just have so many other things to deal with and so I think one of the things that’s been very helpful for me from studying Ray Dalio has also been the kind of brutal honesty that he has.

[00:23:04] William Green: In looking at his own flaws and his own mistakes and not being ashamed of them and not burying them, but actually bringing them to the fore. And there’s a really extraordinary moment in this clip that I hope you were struck by as much as I was struck by it. Where he said, he looks back at this catastrophic investment mistake that he made back in 1982 that nearly destroyed Bridgewater in its infancy.

[00:23:29] William Green: And he says, it was so good, it was such a painful experience. That’s an extraordinary thing to say, right? This ability to lean into pain, and to learn from it, not to bury our mistakes. And this is something, again, that we learn from Charlie Munger that I write about in the book, right? Where Munger, I remember when I went to One of the Berkshire Hathaway annual meetings, Munger really very consciously rubbing his nose in his mistakes by talking about how we failed you as investors when we failed to buy Walmart and when we failed to buy Google and how they were in our sweet spot and we should have bought them.

[00:24:04] William Green: So again, this ability not to bury your mistakes, but actually to bring them to the forum, be open about them is very powerful. And I think one of the things that’s very distinctive about Ray is this ability to take experiences and then reflect on them and turn them into principles that he’ll remember and so one of these very central principles for him obviously is pain plus reflection equals progress.

[00:24:30] William Green: And so it’s not about just taking the hit and then going into fetal position or being self-flagellating about it, it’s taking the hit and using it very consciously. as a spur to reflection, to think about what it is you need to get better at. And I think what’s striking about this self-honesty, this sort of brutal self-honesty, is that it enabled Ray To make a number of very practical improvements based on self-awareness.

[00:24:58] William Green: So you think about the fact that he said, Well, look I started to realize I had to surround myself with smart people who disagreed with me. And who see things differently from me. And I need to study their reasoning. That’s a very powerful practical work around and so he realized also as he pointed out that he had this natural audacity that was part of his makeup you need actually to gain humility to balance your natural audacity because otherwise.

[00:25:26] William Green: You can blow yourself up as an investor as he almost did back in 1982. And so this is one of the reasons why he came up with this strategy of diversifying in non-correlated assets. So it’s making a very practical step based on the knowledge of your own weakness that I think is so powerful. And so he also talks about finding people who are meticulous and reliable because that’s not really his strength.

[00:25:52] William Green: So I think as you and I dwell on what Ray said here and think about takeaways for us, practical takeaways for us, I think one of them is simply to ask yourself, okay, where am I weak and where am I strong? And then another is just to say, okay, how can I protect myself from my own flaws and my own weaknesses?

[00:26:14] William Green: Are there practical workarounds? Are there people I can surround myself with who compensate for my weaknesses? But I think above all, It’s really a reminder that we need to play games that we can win. And I keep thinking about something that Ed Thorpe, who I often describe as the greatest game player in the history of investing, said to me that I quote in the introduction to Rich or Wise or Happier, where he said, look, when it comes to gambling, if I don’t have an edge, I don’t play.

[00:26:44] William Green: And so this has had a huge impact on me. I’ve really thought a lot about when I decide to take on a project, am I playing to my strengths? Is this a game that I can win? Am I surrounding myself with people who can take care of the parts that I’m not good at? And I also keep thinking of another quote that I think is in the chapter on high performance habits in the book, which comes from an email that Jason Zweig, an old friend of mine, once sent me, where we were talking about Bill Miller and Buffett and Munger.

[00:27:16] William Green: And Jason wrote to me, Think of Munger and Miller and Buffett. Guys who just won’t spend a minute of time or an iota of mental energy doing or thinking about anything that doesn’t make them better. Their skill is self-honesty. They don’t lie to themselves about what they are and aren’t good at. Being honest with yourself like that has to be part of the secret.

[00:27:37] William Green: It’s so hard and so painful to do, but so important. So I think here again, you’re just seeing what You’re seeing this reminder of the power of self-honesty, of looking at yourself, of knowing who you are, finding suitable paths, or paths, based on who you are, what you’re good at, what you value, sticking at games that play to your strengths, and also very much avoiding games that are likely to expose your weaknesses, but then not denying your weaknesses, being very honest about them, and not being ashamed of them.

[00:28:09] William Green: It’s just part of who we are. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. And we shouldn’t bury them, and when I talked to Ray about this huge issue that I faced about my weakness with systems and processes, he was like, that’s great, now you know, now you can deal with it. And I think instead of being ashamed of this stuff, We need to lean into the pain, we need to lean into the weakness, acknowledge it, and then we can do something about it.

[00:28:36] William Green: The next clip comes from a wonderful conversation that I had last year with Chris Davis, a renowned investor whose father and grandfather were also legendary investors. Chris also serves on the board of Berkshire Hathaway, alongside Warren Buffett. In this conversation, Chris and I talked in some depth about what he learned from his friendship with Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, who were both very important mentors to him. Let’s listen to the clip, and then I’ll share a few thoughts of my own.

[00:29:04] William Green: Alright, hi folks, I’m absolutely delighted to welcome today’s guest, who’s Chris Davis. And Chris is chairman of an old and renowned investment firm named Davis Advisors, which I think was founded back in 1969. I’m And he’s also a member of the board of directors of a small obscure company that some of you may have heard of, namely Berkshire Hathaway. It’s lovely to see you, Chris. Thanks so much for joining us.

[00:29:29] Chris Davis: Oh, I’m so glad to be here. I’ve been looking forward to this, which I don’t say about a lot of interviews, but I feel like the way you approach life and the universe and everything has made me look forward to this conversation.

[00:29:41] William Green: Thank you so much and before I forget, since we were talking about it right before we, we got on, Talk to me about this idea of our 30, 000 days because it’s such a beautiful idea and two hours from now I’m likely to have forgotten that we talked about it. So, so discuss the significance of this before we get started on anything else.

[00:29:59] Chris Davis: Well, I’m going to start, I’m going to go back to my days as an accountant because this is actually when it, when I first sort of started thinking about it. I’m not much of a birthday celebrator and, but one of the things I’m particularly struck by is. The ones that are hallmarks tend to be tied to 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, so on.

[00:30:18] Chris Davis: Not a lot of life changes around those sort of random decades. And when I was working back at State Street as an accountant, I had the worst job, which is I had to, at one part of my job was to calculate the NAV of money market and bond funds. And that meant accruing the interest by the day. And so, Lotus one, two, three had just come out.

[00:30:43] Chris Davis: And so I was using that to write a little program to make it easier to calculate bond interest and count all the days and so on. And when I was testing it, I put in my own birthday and ended up, I was at the time, something like 9,500 days old. And that was sort of the Genesis of this idea where I started thinking we live about 30,000 days or generally have 30,000.

[00:31:05] Chris Davis: really productive days. And our life divides much more naturally on the 10,000 day increments. So after 10,000 days, you’re about 27 or so 28, somewhere in there. And you often think that first 10,000 days is about going wide, experimenting, trying new things, new places, new professions, new people, new towns.

[00:31:31] Chris Davis: It’s a time of exploration and 21 years old doesn’t capture it or 20. And by the time 30 comes around, usually you’re already into what I would call that second phase of life. So right around 10,000 days by then, usually on average, people have decided. what they want to do, where they want to do it, who they want to do it with.

[00:31:54] Chris Davis: And instead of going wide as they have for the first 10,000 days, it’s about going deep. The, just the depth of relationships that comes through marriage, through family, through your vocation, your profession, your colleagues, you sort of have 10,000 days to execute, 10,000 days to accomplish And build what in many ways will be the sort of monuments of your life, your family, your kids, your profession.

[00:32:21] Chris Davis: And then right around 55, 56, 57, somewhere in this 50s range. But what happens when your kids are grown and beginning to, to leave? What you’ve achieved professionally is fairly settled and in a funny way, it lifts an enormous weight off many people. I think it’s one of the reasons people actually end up growing happier as they get to their 50s, 60s, 70s.

[00:32:44] Chris Davis: Because you’re in a time when you can, in a sense, go wide again. You have more perspective, you have less of that urgent depth of the day to day. So, anyway, I know when we started talking, we were talking about this idea of both sort of completing the, maybe our second 10, 000 days, and now looking at how we think about this next 10, 000, this chapter that sort of gets us from here to around in our 80s.

[00:33:12] William Green: And how does this affect the way that you’re actually living? Like, what is this awareness of these three phases due to your view of how to behave and what to focus on and what you’re actually optimizing for at this point?

[00:33:27] Chris Davis: Well, this sort of ties in with how I think about investing is so much about it is about anticipation and preparation.

[00:33:34] Chris Davis: So I think a lot of people go through unhappiness in their thirties. In part, because they’re sort of thinking, where did my youth go? I used to be able to do all these different things and now I’m tied down. And if instead you have this mindset, you really look forward to that. The privilege of being able to go so deep to concentrate.

[00:33:54] Chris Davis: And I think how it’s affected me thinking about this next 10,000 days. Is a little bit about this idea of inverting it and thinking about what would stand in the way of this 10, 000 days being a very enriching time of life. And of course, health is one of them. So it becomes, as you think about going into this next third, it becomes a time where you think a lot about taking care of yourself.

[00:34:20] Chris Davis: You think about investing in relationships. When you’re raising a family, when you’re in the office every day, when, you know, a lot of your life and your social life are structured for you. As you get to the next 10,000 days, people can lose touch. So I think it’s also been a time when I’ve really invested in maintaining, invigorating, revisiting relationships, deeply getting to know my children’s partners and spouses, making sure that their aspects of friendships as people, I, We may get to this, but I, the idea of retiring has no appeal to me.

[00:34:59] Chris Davis: I mean, I love what I do. It always seems startling to me that we get paid so well for studying something so interesting. And it should be a profession where we get better over time, provided we’re not creating behavioral and psychological roadblocks. And if that is the case, I would like to continue as long as I could.

[00:35:19] Chris Davis: But of course, I also recognize that’s not. The same for many of my closest and oldest friends. And so as they contemplate retirement and moving and going to different places, old patterns can dissipate. So I think it’s a time to really invest in being prepared for this sort of exciting chapter that’s in front of us. It may not end very well, but 10, 000 days is, that’s a long time. And so I think it certainly has impacted how I think about preparing for that transition.

[00:35:52] William Green: I thought it was very interesting the Berkshire annual general meeting, which I guess that’s where you and I last chatted. Actually, we spoke for a couple of hours on the Sunday, I guess, after it all ended and everyone had left and you and I had the pleasure of sitting down with another friend of mine and chatting.

[00:36:11] William Green: I was very struck at the AGM, the. Buffett said a couple of times he talked about the idea of writing your obituary and then trying to figure out how to live up to it. And he said, look, if you want to know how to live your life, write the obituary, then reverse engineer it, go backwards, which is really not dissimilar to what Nick Sleep does with this whole idea of destination analysis of figuring out a happy ending. And then all they didn’t use that phrase. And then working backwards, thinking of the inputs.

[00:36:39] Chris Davis: I’m starting to feel unsafe.

[00:36:40] William Green: I’m sorry about that. Trigger warning here. And then starting to work backwards to figure out what the inputs are to get there. And obviously, you’ve been close to Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett.

[00:36:52] William Green: And we’ll talk about this more. I’m wondering how seeing Warren at 92 and Charlie at 99, seeing how they’ve lived the sort of the final chapters, the closing chapters in this kind of remarkable way, how that’s had an impact on your sense of how you want to live that third stage out of the three, however long it may be.

[00:37:14] Chris Davis: Well, and I could expand that list. I mean, Warren and Charlie are great examples, but I had an incredibly influential grandmother. In fact, her pictures on the wall here. Next to me who died at 106 and I had her in a kayak at 104 and I had her on a motorbike at 100 and she had a PhD in international relations.

[00:37:36] Chris Davis: I mean, she was an incredible intellect and model. So that was Catherine Davis.

[00:37:44] William Green: So what did you learn from her? What did you observe that?

[00:37:47] Chris Davis: Well, she was magnificent in every way, but this is going to be a tie in to Warren, to Charlie, to all of the people that I would put on that list is one was this idea of they kept interested.

[00:38:00] Chris Davis: They kept so engaged with life. My mother has a very close friend who we always admired as kids, because she was that powerful sort of irreverent woman. But one of the things I’ve watched as she’s gotten older is she resents the impact of technology. She doesn’t want to learn to use a cell phone.

[00:38:19] Chris Davis: She doesn’t want to do email. She doesn’t certainly not going to do Instagram or something. And the result is she is increasingly getting cut off. So this idea of keeping interested, how you stay interested in the world around you. I think the second thing is they all kept optimistic. There’s a very common sort of old man disease, which is the world is going to hell.

[00:38:43] Chris Davis: And of course, We feel like that because we’re no longer at the center of it. America in particular, but a lot of the world is oriented. Every marketing message is oriented towards people in their peak spending years, in their peak family years, you’re at the center of everybody depending on you. And I think what happens is gradually, of course, the world moves on and you become less relevant.

[00:39:08] Chris Davis: And rather than have your ego absorb that reality, People rail that the world is wrong, that if only people listen to them. So I think you get a pessimism that begins to take over a rancor. And so I think resisting that is the next. So keeping interested, resisting that pessimistic tendency, which is really simply the extrapolation of the approach of your own demise and projecting it onto the world, a related one to keeping interested. And I’ve seen this so much with Warren, with Charlie, with my grandmother, other people who are octogenarians and whatever the next two decades that come after that means. Certainly with my father, who’s 86 and still skiing, is this, they keep making new friends.

[00:39:53] Chris Davis: They just, it is a very sobering part of life is how dramatically differently people age. I had the enormous misfortune when I was a kid and a teenager of not hitting puberty. In fact, I didn’t break five feet tall until I was a senior in high school. I will just say the loss of other key Defining milestones happen somewhat later, and that, that made that time of life very trying, and, but of course, the other side of that, as Charlie Munger likes to point out, is one of the other than genetics, one of the strongest predictors of age is how late you hit puberty.

[00:40:30] Chris Davis: And so, of course, you see it with friends aging at different rates. And so that idea of my grandmother, very late in her life, said to me that it was very difficult for her that she not only outlived all of her friends, she outlived many of her friends children. And so for her, it was keeping making new friends became a very important part of it.

[00:40:52] Chris Davis: So what I would say, when I look at all of these older people that I admire is they’re interested, they’re optimistic, and they’re constantly meeting new people and pursuing relationships, and there’s not a lot of time for self-pity. One friend said only one organ recital a day. They don’t need to spend a lot of time talking about what’s failing.

[00:41:12] Chris Davis: So. Look, isn’t it ultimately that idea of living life backwards from your obituary or from your funeral? It is a very useful way to think. And it, it is keeping that perspective in the back of your mind, I think is a very useful exercise.

[00:41:30] William Green: When I started interviewing great investors about 30 years ago, I mostly just wanted to figure out how to get rich without getting my hands dirty and working too hard.

[00:41:40] William Green: But what I gradually realized after interviewing a lot of these people is that they offer incredibly valuable lessons about how to think better and how to live. And in many ways, this clip that I just played from my conversation with Chris Davis is a beautiful example of that, of this kind of worldly wisdom that we can learn from the great investors.

[00:42:00] William Green: I particularly like the moment when he talks in that clip about how to approach the last 10, 000 productive days of his life, and he says you really want to invert, and you want to say how could I screw up the last 10, 000 days of my life, and this is really a great example of what Charlie Munger would often do where he took this idea from a famous German mathematician called Gustav Jacobi, Who said invert, always invert.

[00:42:28] William Green: And so Munger takes this principle and he says, Okay, whenever I’m trying to solve a difficult problem, one of the best ways to do it is to solve it backwards, to invert it. So if you want to figure out how to have a successful life, you start by figuring out how to have an unsuccessful life. So, what Chris Davis is doing here when he’s thinking about how to approach the last 10, 000 days, Is he saying, okay, well, if I wreck my health or I wreck my relationships, that’s a pretty good start.

[00:42:56] William Green: That’s going to ruin it. So you first figure out what not to do. So I just love this as a very practical application of a particular way of thinking that Munger would apply not only to markets, but other areas of life. So I think one of the best things that we can do really, when we’re studying the great investors is to look at.

[00:43:18] William Green: what aspects of their life we think are successful and what aspects are awful and decide what we’re going to clone. And so I like studying people like Buffett and Munger, not because they’re absolutely perfect, but because they got so much right. And so Chris is a great conduit for understanding them. I mean, this understanding that they continue to learn, that they continue to invest in their relationships, that they never fell into pessimism.

[00:43:46] William Green: Or for that matter, self-pity, which is something that Charlie talked about a great deal. So I think for me, I’m just constantly coming back to trying to figure out what these people Already learned so that I don’t have to reinvent the wheel and Chris becomes kind of a great bridge between these greats like Munger and Buffett and us.

[00:44:10] William Green: Our next clip is from an amazing conversation that I had with Bill Miller in early 2022. Bill, as you know, is one of the great investors of our time. He most famously beat the market for 15 years running, which is more or less impossible. Then he had a famous blow up during the financial crisis. And since then has had an unbelievable rebound driven partly by the fact that he had an immense personal stake in Amazon.

[00:44:38] William Green: At one point he told me. That he was the biggest individual shareholder of Amazon, whose name wasn’t Bezos, but then he also made an enormous and very contrarian bet on Bitcoin, which most members of the value investing community regarded as kind of insane and People like Buffett and Munger who Bill admires greatly regarded as rat poison and when I was speaking to him in early 2022, Bitcoin had just halved and was very much out of favor.

[00:45:09] William Green: And Bill had been buying it very aggressively since the early days. He had told me at one point that he had started buying it 200 per coin and then his average price was around 500 a coin. And so in this clip, he’s talking really in some depth about Bitcoin, what he saw in it, and how he kind of reduced it to its essence, and it’s kind of extraordinarily prescient, and I’m recording this on November 15th on a day when Bitcoin is at 91, 235 astonishingly, so this was an amazing contrarian bet and we’re talking to Bill about it at a time where it could hardly have been more out of favor. Let’s listen and then I’ll share a few comments about it.

[00:45:55] William Green: I wonder if we could turn to Bitcoin and crypto, and I have a lot of questions on this front, and I think the obvious context to look at it in is this whole idea of misperception, because as we were talking about with Amazon, you had a very different perception than the Rest of the market.

[00:46:11] William Green: And here again with Bitcoin, they’re just these very heated ideological differences about Bitcoin. It’s almost like a sort of religious or political difference about Bitcoin. And it seems to me traditionally part of your advantage has been to step back somewhat dispassionately and to say, What actually is this thing?

[00:46:29] William Green: Can you talk first about where this way of thinking about the world comes from? Because it, it clearly stemmed in part from your study of Wittgenstein and William James, and this whole idea of seeing things more clearly, not being so biased and trying to say, What actually is this thing? And so before we get to the detail of Bitcoin, I wonder if you could actually talk about that kind of philosophical problem of how you actually describe things and see things clearly so that you’re not just caught up in your own prejudice and bias.

[00:46:56] Bill Miller: Yeah, I would say this came out of a lot of, you know, initially William James. Wittgenstein, and then John Dewey, and then Richard Rorty in the 20th century. In the sense of, you know, you go back to Kant, for example, or Schopenhauer. And so Schopenhauer is interesting because he spent countless years just studying Kant and concluding that Kant had things mostly right.

[00:47:17] Bill Miller: And, but he missed a few big things. And the thing that he really missed was when he talked about the ding on seek, you know, the thing in itself. And so what you have is, you don’t have no ability to see things as they are themselves. What you see is effectively your representation of them, which may or may not fit the way that things actually are.

[00:47:35] Bill Miller: And Schopenhauer’s insight was that you don’t have any need of the hypothesis of things as they are, and it doesn’t do any work for you because it’s inaccessible. And therefore, all you have is your representation. Of things as they, you know, as you perceive them, and therefore, if you then go forward to William James, you know, one of the points that he made is it’s a person, I guess, initially was, yes, that’s exactly right.

[00:47:59] Bill Miller: And therefore, what you really care about is just how useful are these. views that you have to navigate the world that you’re in. And, you know, this is, I think there’s a, this comes to mind if I get it right. There’s a story of the three baseball umpires and they’re asking how they call balls and strikes.

[00:48:14] Bill Miller: And so the first baseball umpire who could be called you know, a Kantian or a near Kantian. And he says, well, I call them as they are. If they’re strikes, I call them strikes. And if they’re balls, I call them balls. And then, so, you know, that’s when, Philosophy, you call that realism, right? So I call it the way that they are.

[00:48:29] Bill Miller: And then there’s basically the coherence theorists who believe that truth is basically things that cohere consistently together and the coherence theorist umpire says, well, I call them as I see them. If I see them as strikes, I call them strikes. If I see them as balls, I call them balls. So obviously leaving open that he could be calling them the wrong way, but that’s the way he sees them.

[00:48:48] Bill Miller: And then you get the pragmatic umpire. He says they aren’t anything until I call ’em. So I think that’s the key. And from my standpoint, when I don’t have a particular view one way or the other about Bitcoin as it is. Charlie Munger thinks to threat to currencies. It’s evil. A lot of, you know, mavens were very negative on and Bitcoin in 2017.

[00:49:07] Bill Miller: Now, some have come around, Paul Tudor Jones, Larry Fink now, Howard Marks at Oaktree, who were denouncing it then, and now they’re, well, you know, I mean, yeah, well, we, this can be okay. You know, we probably were wrong about that, you know, Jamie Dimon says it was wrong to call it a fraud and stuff like that.

[00:49:22] Bill Miller: So, but Buffett and Munger are still out there, and my view is, how useful is this thing? Whatever it is, how useful is it? Does it do a job in my portfolio that I can’t have done with something else? Under what circumstances will it do well? Under what circumstances will it not do well? And so that’s the, you know, my key to Bitcoin is that it’s the only economic entity in the world, certainly monetary, but it’s just called an economic entity in the world that the supply is unaffected by the demand.

[00:49:47] Bill Miller: So if gold, which is, what’s gold, 1, 800 today, something like that. If gold was 18, 000 instead of 1, 800, there’d be a lot more gold mined. So gold that was uneconomic to mine today would become economic. And I mean, Charlie wonders said, I think at the Berkshire meeting that he expects that any fiat currency in a hundred years will be worth zero compared to what it’s worth today.

[00:50:06] Bill Miller: That’s because they keep creating more of it. And with Bitcoin, you know, the supply this year will grow about 1.7 percent maybe. And so the only question you have to ask about Bitcoin is over the long term, will the demand exceed in essence, 1. 7, then 1. 5%, then all the way down to You know, zero, and I think it’s going to grow. Demand’s going to grow faster than that. So I, that’s, and again…

[00:50:28] William Green: Sorry Bill, just to explain that for people like me who are not experts on this. This is basically because the supply is fixed at about 21 million coins and about 19 million have been mined so far. So we know, can you just explain that for, you know, the idiot’s guide to Bitcoin?

[00:50:44] Bill Miller: The supply of Bitcoin, it’s a little bit like, you’ve ever seen that, who’s the inventor who just died recently, who invented that black box? You know, when you flip the switch and the lid came up and a hand came out and it turned the switch back off again and went down to the box. So basically that’s what Bitcoin is.

[00:50:57] Bill Miller: It’s a protocol. And effectively the number of Bitcoins is, has a certain feature that it basically goes in half. The new supply goes in half every four years. Okay. And so I think it’s, I think it’s, what is it? 12, 12 bitcoins every 10 minutes are created. And that’s what all the computers and the miners are solving equations to, so they can get those bitcoins, which are given to them.

[00:51:20] Bill Miller: If they verify that the protocol is functioning properly and there’s no, you know, no double counting and stuff like that. So, but that’s fixed and it’s 21 million and 2140. That’s when the supply will run out. And then for Bitcoin. So who’s going to maintain the, what are the miners going to do that? Well, they’re still going to maintain the ledger and they’re going to do that though.

[00:51:38] Bill Miller: They get fees for that instead of getting Bitcoin. So the same process will be underway unless they go from what’s called proof of work to proof of stake, which I think is a potential risk to Bitcoin right now, but not a big one.

[00:51:49] William Green: So when you explain the essence of the bull case for Bitcoin and you have this kind of gift for simplifying things and reducing the complexity to something kind of more graspable, Is the essence of the case basically the supply demand argument that there’s very limited supply, the supply is growing, you know, in this kind of paltry way that you just described, and yet there’s enormous potential and growing demand? Is that the simple essence of it?

[00:52:13] Bill Miller: It is but let me make it maybe more concrete. I’ll give two examples. One that everybody will understand. The second one they will understand theoretically, but maybe not. The details. So the one that everybody will understand is when, you know, what Buffett says nonproductive asset.

[00:52:30] Bill Miller: He said, you know, I wouldn’t give you 25 for all the Bitcoins in the world, but if I, you know, if I buy farmland that I can grow stuff with it, you know, if I buy a company, it can generate dividends and earnings and cash for me. Bitcoin doesn’t do any of that stuff. So he says, it’s like gold. You can sit there and look at it.

[00:52:44] Bill Miller: It sits in a place in your portfolio, but it’s not productive. And therefore he can’t value it. And I think, fair enough. I mean, that’s, if the only thing that you think you can value are productive assets, then no one’s making you buy it. Right. So ignore it. Now, the other, maybe the more mundane thing for most people would be that I’ve used this.

[00:52:59] Bill Miller: I think I might’ve told you, I use this with Chris, my good friend, Chris Davis. And I said to Chris, who’s been in every meeting, major meeting that I’ve been in on Bitcoin going back to when it was 200 and he’s never bought it. And his argument is. Well, you know, yes, I understand that it could be digital gold.

[00:53:14] Bill Miller: In fact, it probably might be better than gold, but I don’t own gold either. It’s a nonproductive asset. He’s got a Buffett view on that. So why would I own Bitcoin? And my first answer to him is, well, the objective of investing is not to own productive assets. The objective is to make money. So the question is, can you make money with this thing?

[00:53:29] Bill Miller: Not because it gives you dividends. But if you can make money with it, you know, so what I said to him, I said, but look, here’s a better way to think of it, Chris, like you’re an expert in insurance, right? And he’s like, yes, I purport to be. My grandfather was the insurance commissioner of New York and my father, you know, was a long time insurance analyst.

[00:53:44] Bill Miller: And I published a newsletter when I was young called the insurance, you know, Analyst observer or something like that. And I said, so how do you value an insurance policy? And he said, well, you can evaluate insurance company really easily. You can look at the exposures. You can look at the capital. You can look at the experience they’ve had.

[00:53:58] Bill Miller: You can look at the quality of their investment portfolio on and on. I said, I didn’t just say an insurance company. I said, an insurance policy. And he paused a second and I said, well, here, let me tell you the way I think about that. And you tell me where I’m wrong. I said, you own insurance, right? You have health insurance, car insurance, homeowners insurance, life insurance, stuff like that, right?

[00:54:16] Bill Miller: Property insurance. He’s like, yeah. I said, what’s the intrinsic value of those policies? You write a check every year for those policies. And I said, and what’s the value of those? And I said, the way I look at that is you are paying somebody else. Basically, and you, for a policy that you hope is worthless, you don’t want to die prematurely.

[00:54:34] Bill Miller: You don’t want to, you know, get serious illness. You don’t want to have your house broken into. And it’s valuable to you to have something that will pay you. If something really bad happens, except the company goes bad, it’s yours. You own it. And it’s going to solve your problem with that. If that happens.

[00:54:49] Bill Miller: Well, right now we have something called gold, which could do that. But again, it’s supply isn’t fixed. But everything else out there is something that if you live in Venezuela or you live in Nigeria, live in Lebanon, you lived in Ukraine when the war broke out, all of that stuff, Afghanistan, when the U.S.

[00:55:06] Bill Miller: pulled out, when the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan, Western Union stopped sending remittances there or taking them from Afghanistan. But if you had Bitcoin, you were fine. Your Bitcoin is there. You can send it to anybody in the world. You have a phone. And so I consider Bitcoin basically, you know, an insurance policy against you.

[00:55:22] Bill Miller: Financial catastrophe of one sort or another, and it doesn’t have to be all or nothing that have to be like there’s some war in the United States or some kind of thing where the banks are all shut and stuff like that. It’s just the case that if there’s a, you know, look what happened to the money supply with the pandemic hit when the fed stepped in and that pandemic.

[00:55:37] Bill Miller: And started gunning the money supply and bailing out, in essence, the mortgage REITs and the other people that are doing commercial paper and stuff like that. Bitcoin functioned fine. There was no run on Bitcoin. It went down a lot initially, but the system functioned without Fed and without any interference.

[00:55:52] Bill Miller: And everybody got their Bitcoin and the price adjusted. And then when the Bitcoiners and newer Bitcoiners realized, wait, we’re going to have inflation down the road, Bitcoin went through the roof. So that I think is a, it’s an insurance policy the way I look at it.

[00:56:05] William Green: You also said something that had a profound impact on me. I think the last time or the previous time we talked about Bitcoin, where you explained to me that back in about 2014, 2015, when you first started to get fascinated by it. It was. Because you heard Wenceslas Casares talking about it and that he was explaining exactly what you were just saying that if you came from the US where you had a kind of functioning legal system and pretty good financial governance and property rights and the rule of law and all of that stuff, it was actually very hard.

[00:56:33] William Green: To understand why this would be so valuable and that he came from Argentina where he had a totally different perspective, which kind of fits into what I’m trying to talk about in terms of perception. Can you talk about what he said? Because that seems to me profoundly important, this idea that he just viewed things differently because he wasn’t living in Omaha, for example.

[00:56:53] Bill Miller: Yeah, I mean, what he said was his family had been in Argentina for 150 years and have been wiped out multiple times by the government, you know, nationalizing the banks and taking the bank accounts away, inflating them away through that. And in fact, there were three different things, nationalizing the banks.

[00:57:08] Bill Miller: Inflation, I forget what the third one was, but in any case, the fact is, he said, we’ve been wiped out several times and he said, but with Bitcoin, we can’t be wiped out by the government.

[00:57:16] William Green: Yeah, they seized, the government just seized your assets at certain points, right?

[00:57:19] Bill Miller: Yeah. And he said with Bitcoin, you know, we can’t be wiped out, you know, the government cannot take it away from us.

[00:57:24] Bill Miller: And that’s what, I think I might have told you the story of Bob Schilder, he went to Where was it? Estonia, I guess it was. And he met with the businesspeople there, and he was on his way to Davos where he was going to be on a panel about Bitcoin. And so he was curious about if anybody of the businesspeople that he had met, he was in a room with, you know, 100 of them and given a talk on whatever.

[00:57:43] Bill Miller: And he asked if any of them owned Bitcoin and everybody raised their hand. And he said he was shocked and asked him why. And he said, well, because when Russia took us over after World War II, what they did is they nationalized the banks and they stole all of our money, but not our money, but our grandfather and grandfather’s money.

[00:58:00] Bill Miller: And if you actually, that’s if you’re a regular citizen, but if you actually owned a business, you were sent to Siberia. And he said, and we sit right up here against Russia. They can do that again. And he said, but they can’t take our money this time because we got Bitcoin and we can send it anywhere we want.

[00:58:13] Bill Miller: I mean, that was what, I think that’s what happened with also with Wittgenstein’s father, who was one of the wealthiest people in the world. And he had money invested outside of Austria, the United States and England and everywhere, because he said he couldn’t trust the Austrian government not to steal it.

[00:58:27] Bill Miller: And then when Hitler took over Austria, he did, he basically took all the money from everybody. It was. You know, Jewish, and then a set of the concentration camps and the Wittgenstein family actually got some decree where they weren’t, you know, sent to the concentration camps because they had all this money outside the country and they agreed to give it to Hitler.

[00:58:46] Bill Miller: So, and then he said, okay, well, I’ll count you as only partially Jewish and you’ll be spared. So that’s the one of the things about Bitcoin. That’s not the case with gold. We can’t carry gold around, you know, in sacks trying to get across the border. So that’s another advantage that Bitcoin has. Fidelity had one of the best pieces they wrote recently on Bitcoin, Fidelity Digital Assets, and one of the points they made was that it was one of the arguments against Bitcoin.

[00:59:08] Bill Miller: One of the perceptions is that Stan Druckenmiller used to say, I don’t know if he still says it, but well, you know, somebody is going to invent something better. There’s thousands of these tokens and coins out there and technology is always changing in crypto. And so somebody’s going to invent one that’s better.

[00:59:22] Bill Miller: Just like Ethereum was better than Bitcoin, according to many people. And Solana is better than Ethereum. And the Fidelity people said, well, That’s actually wrong in our opinion, because basically Bitcoin is like the wheel. Nobody needed to reinvent the wheel after it was invented. Now, Ethereum is actually a specialized type of entity.

[00:59:39] Bill Miller: You know, it’s maybe like a wheel for giant tractors, you know, or it’s maybe a wheel that’s a run flat wheel or it’s got these things that Bitcoin doesn’t have, but it’s basically a wheel. And so that Bitcoin is the wheel. It’s the perfect wheel.

[00:59:53] William Green: I love this clip from my conversation with Bill Miller because I think it, it gives you a sense of just what makes him so extraordinary as an investor, the fact that he was prepared to invest so heavily in Bitcoin.

[01:00:05] William Green: At a time when almost everyone in his community, the world of value investing, disagreed with him and thought it was rat poison, didn’t bother him at all. What Bill always had was this ability to think for himself and to question everything that everybody believed. There’s something extraordinarily open minded about him and agnostic.

[01:00:26] William Green: And I saw this many years ago when I first wrote about him Long Profile for Fortune magazine back in about 2001 or 2000, I think, when he had made this enormous investment in Amazon, which most people in his community thought was going to go bankrupt. And, again, it just didn’t bother him. He at that point had bought 15 percent of the company, and the stock had gone down from 90 to 6.

[01:00:49] William Green: And the fact that everyone else thought it was going to go under Just was not a problem for him. Bill was always interested in these very asymmetric bets where there was tremendous upside and I remember Bruce Greenwald at one point, a legendary professor from Columbia, said to me a year or two ago that Bill was a specialist in explosive upside.

[01:01:12] William Green: And so I think as with Amazon, part of what Bill saw With Bitcoin was this potential for explosive upside this tremendous asymmetry and it didn’t really bother him that it could go nowhere and he could lose all of his money on Bitcoin because he was able to see that there was this extraordinary upside if it did work out and so his willingness to bet on asymmetric situations where the rewards were enormous, even if the risks were huge, it turned out to be a huge advantage.

[01:01:43] William Green: And so I think you get a sense of the way great investors think probabilistically, the incredible guts and conviction it takes to go against the crowd to make this sort of bet. And there’s just something kind of remarkable about it. And the fact that Bill was drawing on all of these philosophers, like Wittgenstein and William James, when he was investing, always made him very fascinating to me.

[01:02:04] William Green: He wasn’t just interested in the money. He was looking at these intellectual questions like, How are people misperceiving an asset a company like Amazon? How are they misperceiving Bitcoin? What really is it? And these are really philosophical questions. But I think there’s also an extraordinary ability that Bill has to reduce things to its essence.

[01:02:26] William Green: And one of the parts that I love about this exchange that we had was when really, he was able to reduce Bitcoin to its essence and see that there was this supply demand imbalance. And it was just a really remarkable perception. Obviously, you know, the case of Bitcoin was much more complex and we’ll see what happens with Bitcoin down the road.

[01:02:48] William Green: But I think you have to give Bill a tremendous amount of credit for seeing this more clearly. Then almost all of his peers and seeing it earlier than almost all of his peers and also backing up the truck so that he just made a vast fortune off this bet that he got right. The other thing that I think is really interesting that came up later in this conversation was when I asked Bill what people like Charlie Munger.

[01:03:16] William Green: And Warren Buffet, brilliant as they were, missed about Bitcoin. And one of the things he said is, and this is an exact quote, he said, I think everybody’s got blind spots in one way or another and they’re error prone. And he said, but certainly one of, one of the blind spots, one of the issues, he said, is that they’re old, and they’re not used to new things.

[01:03:40] William Green: And they’re not the type of people who embrace new technologies and different ways of doing things. They look at the tried and true and tested, and they also don’t want to take a lot of risk. So I think it’s a really interesting observation, just that we all have our blind spots in one way or another, even if you’re as great as Warren and Charlie.

[01:04:00] William Green: And I remember once asking Charlie about Bitcoin and asking what would make him think he was wrong. And he just didn’t engage in the question at all. I mean, I think he just regarded it as a social ill. He regarded it as something That was bad for society because, you know, you needed strong currencies and this could undermine the dollar, it could undermine the existing financial system, and so he didn’t care whether it was a good investment or not, he didn’t care about making money, he thought it was a social ill.

[01:04:31] William Green: So I’m not saying that he’s right, he was right or wrong, I just think he was looking at it through a particular lens, and he saw other ways of making money that appealed to him more. That’s all. And so, one of the great strengths, I think, of Bill Miller always is that ability to look at situations without prejudice, to look at it without bias.

[01:04:51] William Green: And I think Bitcoin, as with Amazon, is an extraordinary example of it, and I think goes a long way to explain what a remarkable investor and remarkable thinker he is. The final clip I’m going to play you today is something completely different. It’s from a conversation that I had with Michael Berg.

[01:05:10] William Green: Michael is a great scholar and author who draws on the ancient spiritual wisdom of Kabbalah to talk about how we can build lives that are truly richer, wiser, and happier. I’ve studied Michael’s teachings pretty deeply for the last 16 years or so and have learned an enormous amount from him. So I was very excited and slightly nervous also to get him on the podcast because he’s one of the people I admire most in the world. In this clip, he talks about how to extract more pleasure from the wealth we happen to have. Let’s listen and then I’ll add a couple of final comments.

[01:05:45] William Green: I wanted to talk in more detail about how to increase our enjoyment of the money we have, because you did a very interesting podcast a couple of years ago with your wife Monica, the Spiritually Hungry podcast, where you talked about how to enjoy our money in a more balanced way.

[01:06:03] William Green: And you talked about growing up without money yourself and having to buy clothes and thrift shops and the like, but never having any sense of lack. And so you were saying that the most important thing is not how much money we have but being able to enjoy what money we do have and get pleasure and fulfillment from it.

[01:06:20] William Green: So I wanted to talk in a bit more depth about how actually to do this. And the first thing you said, if I remember rightly, there are a whole slew of points that are worth discussing here. But one of the things you talked about that’s kind of a provocative idea, is the importance of recognizing that the money is not yours in the first place, which is something that Templeton talked about there, right? Where he talked about being a steward of God’s wealth. Can you talk about that idea and why it’s helpful to think this way?

[01:06:47] Michael Berg: Yes, it’s very important. So, first of all, you say it’s a little controversial, but the reality, of course, is that if you think about it for more than five seconds, you realize it’s true, right?

[01:06:57] Michael Berg: No wealthy man ever takes his money into the grave. I mean, he might be able to physically take it, does him or her no good. So objectively, philosophically, it’s true. The money is not ours, right? That’s just a factual reality. But more importantly, if we understand that everything is energy and more importantly, that none of what we have is actually ours.

[01:07:20] Michael Berg: And this is true again, not just of money. It’s true of wisdom. How many wise people have a stroke and in a second, all that wisdom, but seems to no longer exist. How many times people have a car that they love and something happens, right? So The times that people think that they own something and then it goes away is 99 percent of the time.

[01:07:40] Michael Berg: It might take a year, 5 years, 50 years. This body within which we live to think that it is mine is ridiculous. Because we all know that unfortunately at a certain point it no longer continues to serve us. That is all to say that the false view of that which we have acquired. which the ego wants us to take ownership of, which this is my wisdom.

[01:08:03] Michael Berg: This is my money. This is my car. This is my child. That thought which comes from the ego and is false. It is not, is it is objectively not physically true, but more importantly, certainly not spiritually true. All we are given are gifts for purpose, either to enjoy to partake, to share them. When we really and truly view everything that we have as not ours, but as given to us again for to take care of.

[01:08:33] Michael Berg: If it’s a tremendous amount of wealth, a big part of that, of course, will have to be its purpose is to share, but it’s true about wealth and even our children. Some of the most, the greatest pain that we ever feel stems from the ego convincing us that this thing is mine. And then when anybody tries to either take it away from me or succeeds in taking it away from me, that causes great pain because this thing that was mine has now been taken away from me.

[01:08:58] Michael Berg: If you view it as no, this is not, this was never mine. This was never mine. It was given to me. Maybe it was given to me for a day. Maybe it was given to me for a week. First, you have greater enjoyment of it because your appreciation for it never wanes. And again, I, there’s a lot, I don’t want to go to this point of appreciation, which I think is foundational to, to this idea.

[01:09:19] Michael Berg: There’s a teaching that says that when we take anything, money, gifts, wisdom as our own, what we’re actually doing, and this might be a deep spiritual concept, we’re separating it from its source. What we call the light of the creator, that energy that is sustaining, that is flowing all the time. If we, our ego convinces us, no, this is my money, this is my wisdom, that thought separates it from its source.

[01:09:49] Michael Berg: What happens to a flower when you cut it off from the ground, it begins to die. Now it might take a day or a week or a month, but it begins to die. So if we understand that the thought of ownership actually cuts away our blessing, be it our money, be it anything that we have away from its source, it will of course, lose its life force, and therefore the pleasure that we are able to extract from it.

[01:10:14] Michael Berg: So The reason, many reasons, but one of the reasons it’s so important to live with a thought, with a consciousness of not ownership, but again, having it for a certain amount of time, an undetermined amount of time. It first of all, spiritually allows our blessings to be connected to their source, which allows them to be able to be receiving life force.

[01:10:34] Michael Berg: And therefore we continue to receive pleasure from them. Because again, why we know this again, relationships is probably the most obvious case. And I always use this example because it’s sadly true. Almost everybody on the first date is very excited. Almost everybody on their wedding day is very excited.

[01:10:50] Michael Berg: The majority of the world by year five is not as excited, certainly. And by year 10, most people aren’t happy. So let’s look at that continuum right in. I’m sure Daniel Kahneman. And so he writes the fact that marriage is the most, is the silliest thing that people do. Because the facts and the figures tell us it’s a terrible choice, right?

[01:11:09] Michael Berg: People still continue to make it. But I think more importantly, let’s go to the root of that. Why is that the reality? Where people have this hope for love, for relationships that almost always dies. It almost always dies. And one of the reasons is, Because when you marry somebody, you believe that they are yours, not remembering nobody, certainly, but nothing really is ever mine.

[01:11:33] Michael Berg: And therefore I have to be earning it every single day. That appreciation can only truly stem if you would truly believe that you do not own it. And if you understand that you do not own this great marriage, not on day one, and not in year 10, and I’m near 25. Then you have the possibility, or I would say the ability, to have the love in your relationship grow.

[01:11:53] Michael Berg: Taking that back to what we were talking about before, it pertains to wealth. The second, and unfortunately, I would say most people, and it’s an important question for people to ask themselves, how do I view my relationship with that which I acquire? Be it money, be it a car, be it a house. Has my ego convinced me that it is mine?

[01:12:10] Michael Berg: Well, I don’t know. That is the first step to its dying. Now, death can come in many ways. It could be that you hold on to that money, but it doesn’t give you pleasure. It could mean, of course, you don’t hold on to that money. But the only way to truly maintain and to continuously be able to receive great pleasure from the money that you have.

[01:12:32] Michael Berg: And acquisitions do we take in this life is by remembering it is not mine, that as we said, keeps it connected to its source, which allows the life force that energy to continue to flow through it, because money is energy, which is an important topic, maybe we’ll talk about a little bit later, but it allows it to continue to be in that flow of energy.

[01:12:52] Michael Berg: And therefore, I’m able to extract from it more pleasure. And secondly, Which is very important. It allows me to maintain appreciation and the understanding that this thing that I have because it’s not mine. I have while I woke up this morning and this million dollar is still in my bank account or this beautiful car that I enjoy.

[01:13:09] Michael Berg: It’s still in my driveway. I’m sure most of us remember and I have many clear memories of this. As a child, when you get a new toy, and usually you play with it all day and you get sort of bored with it. But as a child, often you wake up the next day, it’s almost like it’s brand new to you and you enjoy it.

[01:13:23] Michael Berg: That’s the way our life is meant to be. Whether it’s our relationship to money, whether it’s relationship to the physical things that we enjoy, never ownership, only use for an undetermined amount of time, and therefore great appreciation. If you’re able to maintain those two things. Which is the thought that this blessings, this gift, this money is not mine, but it’s connected to a higher source.

[01:13:46] Michael Berg: And second, therefore, I have great appreciation and a growing appreciation for it. Every day that I wake up, then that is able to maintain the energy within the money and for the pleasure that we receive. And one more point to this, there’s a verse from King Solomon. He says that you will find often wealth kept with the individual for their detriment.

[01:14:05] Michael Berg: I’m sure you have, who have a lot of money, but are not able to extract great pleasure from it, or at least not the pleasure you would expect them to be able to extract from it. And that is because of these two things. They have taken ownership on it and therefore necessarily will lose appreciation for it.

[01:14:28] William Green: That was a clip from my conversation with Michael Berg, who is one of my absolute favorite guests on the podcast. As you know, I mostly interview hugely successful investors, but if I’m honest, the episodes that have given me the greatest joy and satisfaction have often been the most unexpected ones. For example, I particularly loved interviewing my friend Pico Iyer, a great author, and I very much encourage you to go dig up that episode if you’re interested.

[01:14:56] William Green: I also really loved interviewing Tsoknyi Rinpoche, a great Tibetan meditation master, who came on the podcast wearing saffron robes, accompanied by the author Daniel Goleman, who has also become a great role model and friend. And so, I think part of the joy of the podcast for me Is looking at this whole subject of how to build a richer, wiser, happier life in a broad way, learning as much as we can from great investors about how to get rich, but also learning from them about how to think and how to live.

[01:15:29] William Green: And then also bringing on these more unexpected guests who can shed light on, on this whole subject in a slightly different and more unlikely and more unusual, but always very thought provoking way. So thank you for indulging me in letting me bring on unexpected people wearing saffron robes.

[01:15:47] William Green: It’s really just been an incredible pleasure doing this podcast over the last two and a half years. And I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have and that you’ve found a lot that’s led you to think differently. And I hope you’ll go back and dip into the archive and see what you may have missed or see what might be worth listening to again.

[01:16:05] William Green: For me, in many ways, I’ve come to think of the podcast almost as a second volume of my book, Richer, Wiser, Happier. It’s a continuation of those conversations. I’m absolutely delighted that I embarked on this venture, and I’m really grateful to Stig Brodersen and Preston Pysh, and their wonderful team in the Philippines, who’ve helped me on this journey and have tolerated me whenever I’m late with my episodes, which is pretty much always. In any case I’ll be back very soon with some more great guests and until then thank you truly.

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