YouSaid · the spoken record

Morgan Housel

lines on the record: 159
first: 2022-03-02
most recent: 2022-03-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I would say the website to go. It's morganhauslin.com is just like, it just has my email address. I would say the website is just the collaborative fund. That's where everything I write is.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What works for me might be terrible for you and vice versa, even if we're just as smart as one another, same education, same information. We're always going to come to different conclusions. We just need to accept that.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing that doesn't irk me, but I just think it's interesting when I talked about that we don't have a mortgage, and I know that was a dumb decision, but here's why we did it, because it makes us feel good. A lot of people, I get emails that are like, yeah, but look at the spreadsheet that I made. The numbers don't add up. And I'm like, I know I'm trying to explain. Like the idea that I should, I need to be rational instead of just reasonable and using money to give me a better life. I feel like that still didn't land with some people. Maybe that's my fault as a writer of not explaining it well. That's one point. To me, I think the most important part of the book that I think a lot of people got, but is I feel like it's the single most important thing. It's just this idea that everyone is different. They have different goals, different personalities, different risk tolerances, and therefore we should not expect any of us to come to the same conclusion about what's the right thing to do with our money. And I think that can be hard for people because you still have these financial debates of like this person's investing their money this way. That's wrong. They should be doing it a different way. It's like, well, we're all so different that like.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A site called Blast.com B-L-A-S.com. It's run by this guy named Blasmoros, who's a really cool guy. And he reads more than anyone I've ever seen. I think he must read two books per week, something like that. And then he makes a fairly detailed summary of every book that he's ever read. And they're not quick summaries. Some of them are like five-page PDFs, but you can just go in there and he summarized hundreds and hundreds of books into a five-page PDF with the key points, the big takeaways, and he does a better job at it of any other book summary service that I've seen. And it's all free. It's just his private blog that's out there. I can get lost in his website for hours, just finding these little nuggets in these obscure books that I've never heard of. And he has all the highlights right there.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Never slowed down either. I don't think he's ever missed a day that I've seen and he's been doing it for, I don't know, 15, 20 years. It's incredible”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so abnormal returns is run by a guy named Tadas Viscontas, and he is a financial professional himself. And he runs what I think is the best financial news aggregator. He is just an absolute machine. He reads every financial article that's been published in the previous day, and he aggregates the top 20 of them or so every single day. He's been doing it since 2006, I think. And he's the best sets out there. That's a site that I visit every single day because I know that whatever the best financial article that was written the previous day, he's going to have it right there. I don't need to spend hours sifting. It's just he's got it right there and I can go to his site. It's like a one-stop shop.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My son in Oculus for Christmas, and there's a thing where you can do a tour of the White House with Barack and Mochell. It was filmed back then. And just sitting at a table in VR, having a conversation with Barack Obama, it was so shockingly realistic. And you know where that's going that the VR headsets that we have 10 years from now are going to make this look like a complete joke. If you mix that with the ability to deep fix, we're heading into a world that's going to be so wild.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that just torpedoes trust even more than it's ever been. Like you hear a quote from Tim Ferris and you're like, I don't even like that's probably not even Tim. So I don't even take it serious anymore. There's no trust anywhere.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's scary to me about that too is that when the nuclear bomb came about, there was obviously fear that this is the future of war. And knock on one fingers crossed, it has not since 1945 because the consequences of a nuclear war are so catastrophic that everyone who has them up until this point has said it's not worth using them because the consequences are so severe. I almost think drone war is the opposite, where it's like there's no skin of the game. You're not sacrificing any soldiers' lives. You're sacrificing civilian lives, of course, on the other side, but there's so little skin in the game and it's so easy to just flip these things up in the air and go for it that it makes starting a war, progressing a war so much easier than it's ever been. It's the opposite of what happened with nuclear war over the last 80 years.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jason's book Your Money in your Brain, which came out in probably 2005, 2006, and it was one of the first behavioral finance books out there. Behavioral finance is pretty popular and ubiquitous today. But back then, not that long ago, it wasn't. And his book was kind of a bold look at like, hey, money is not spreadsheets. It's dopamine and cortisol. I would say today that's not a very profound statement. But back then it was. So I think he was brave to write that book and it really changed my view of what matters in investing. That was one of the first, oh, okay, this makes sense to me. It's not about Excel. It's about just how you think and how you behave.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it'll be obvious that the 2022 election is going to be a disaster in one way or another. I won't even again, I won't try to guess which way that's going to go or what the details are going to be, but I have a feeling that there will never be a clean, uncontested election for the rest of Europe and my lives. I think that's probably once you set the precedent of chaos, it's hard to put that genie back in the bottle.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's probably something about COVID, and it's either going to be that we're way too scared or not nearly enough scared. I don't know what that is, but I think that's what comes to mind when I think about that, that we'll look back a year from now. As we look back one year ago, today and a year before that, as like, oh, it was obvious that this is where we're going to, like, it's always obvious in hindsight what's going to happen. So I have a feeling it'll be something around COVID, but I won't venture to guess which direction.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of it. Most people who work in finance are good, honest, noble people. Not all of them, but most of them are. But to the extent that there is bad advice that gets perpetuated, I really just think it comes down to the incentives that are in the industry. I mean, the perfect example of this is that the only firm that's really been able to make a good business out of selling passive funds is Vanguard. And they've done it by becoming a nonprofit. That's the only way that you can do it. You can't make a good business out of selling the lowest fee funds that are out there. You just can't do it. So I know that if I had a different compensation structure, I would think differently as an investor.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Personally, if I was paid per page view on the blog, I would write the blog differently. I don't know how, but I know it would be because right now it just never comes to mind. It's just not part of the equation. I just want to write what I think is good. But if I was, if it was like, oh, I'm only going to get paid if this goes viral, if it's shareable on Twitter, I would write headlines totally different. The articles would probably be much shorter, much punchier than they are now. So I think that's a big part of it. If I was paid selling products by commission, if I was a financial advisor selling by commission, I would probably be much more into active investing in active investment strategies than I am right now. I think because I'm not a financial advisor, I'm not giving people advice. I can just kind of view it as an outsider and be like, well, this is what makes sense to me. So that's what I'm going to do. Whereas I know that if I was in the trenches, so to speak, and had to make a living doing this, I know I would have very different views about what strategies you should pursue. And I know that the strategies that I would lead towards would be higher fee, higher commission. I think just think that's the reality.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a lot within value investing that falls in this camp. Value investing will always work in terms of if you buy an asset for less than its worth, you'll probably do pretty well over time. But the actual formulas that you use to determine value, those have always evolved and always changed. And the formulas that people use, whether it's like priced to book value, the PE ratio, whatever formula it is that may have worked at one period of time, those always evolve. That's always been the case. And I think it always will be the case that there will be people that will be stubbornly attached to the metrics and the formulas and the valuation techniques that worked perfectly in the previous era that are now outdated and outmoded.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One other example is from Thomas Malthus, who of course wrote this essay many years ago, many, many, I don't know when that was, 200 years ago or something, that humans are all going to starve to death eventually. Like famine is the future because population growth is growing faster than we can generate new food and therefore famine is the future. And his calculations were accurate, but what he didn't take into consideration is that we would become better at growing food and more effective, more efficient at growing food. So there's a long history of that, of like the calculations can make sense, but you underestimate people's ability to adapt and to come up with new ways, new technologies to create more”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's accepted by many now, but a lot in crypto probably falls in that camp. The thing about crypto that's so interesting is that every new technology going back for hundreds of years has started with a dynamic that is completely unsustainable. And very often times it then collapses and like disintegrates, but it still stays around. Was the internet in the late 1990s a bubble? Yes. And in the sense that the market fell 90% and 99% of the companies went out of business, but the internet was, of course, a real thing. That was the wave of the future. And every new industry is exactly like that. Like in the early 1900s, there were 2,000 car companies in the United States, and that whittled its way down to three, two of which went bankrupt eventually. There's a big difference between is something growing at an unsustainable rate in terms of like the market cap or whatnot, and is this technology a way for the future? I think there's probably a lot in crypto that falls in that bucket.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Try to keep them to myself and I don't write or tweet about this, but I have my political views and I'm sure a lot of that is just catchphrases and talking points that I have over the years been like, oh, that I'd like that. That makes sense to me that I've run with. That has been persuasive to me. And it's just someone came up with something that's not really true, but like sounds really good. There's also probably some investing beliefs that I have that sound good that are very simple. Maybe it's around passive investing. Maybe it's around my admiration for Warren Buffett. I don't know what it is, but it sounds really good and it's easy to explain, but it's actually not how the world works. So I think by definition, I don't know the answer to that question, but I know that there are things that I believe in my heart that are just not true.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The next day he's sleeping on my couch. He and I became good friends, and that's how I got into writing. That's a he introduced me to the Molly Fool. So it was like, if he didn't have that typo in his blog post that I was a jerk enough to write at to email him and say this is wrong, I wouldn't have had this career that I've had. It's like there's so many little serendipitous accidents in life that are like that”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You want to hear about chance encounters about where this all led to. I mentioned my friend who was a writer at the Motley Fool who got me into this. His name is Sham Gadd. He's still a great investor, great writer out there. And I came across Sham and I became friends because he wrote a blog. And in his blog post, he had a personal blog. And in a blog post, he had a typo, an error that drove me crazy. And I emailed him. He was a complete stranger. And I said, hey, you got this error. You need to fix it. And he wrote back and he said, hey, thanks. I'll correct it. By the way, I see from your email address that you go to USC. I'm going to be at LA next week. Do you want to meet up for dinner? Complete stranger, who I just wrote a nasty email to. And I said, great, yeah, let's meet up. And Sham and I met. And during that dinner, he said, hey, I don't have a place to stay tonight. Do you know of any hotels around here? And I said, do you want to sleep on my couch? And he said, that would be great. Thanks. So this complete and utter stranger who I was writing to tell him that he was wrong.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really self conscious about what I was writing and it needed heavy editing on behalf of these like angel editors at the Molly Fool that were walking me through it. But the answer to that question was I didn't think I could do it. I had no self-confidence. It's incredible that they let me do it. I would say if there was one like point to this, the first article that I wrote from the Molly Fool, I wrote a draft and I sent it to a coworker. I was at the private equity firm at the time. I sent it to the co-worker and he said, hey, this is really good. This is actually really well written. And I was like, really? Is that true? And when I go back and look at it now, like it's not that good. But I think early on, I did have some aptitude of like putting a little story together, even if it was really pretty bad back then. But I had some little seed of like maybe I do have some skill at trying to do this, even if it was really hard grinding through it.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Give you one little story about the level at which I was at. And I was probably 21 at the time when this happened. I wrote a paragraph, I forget what, but a friend of mine looked at it. It was just like, it was just like a note that we wrote at work. And he said he was a good friend of mine and he was a smart guy himself. And he said, hey, Morgan, do you know the difference between then and then, T-H-E-N and THAN? And he said, because you used it wrong in this paragraph three times, you said then, but you met then. And he said, do you know the difference? And I said, no. Now that I think about it, I don't. I could not explain to you when to use each one. And that was when I was 21 years old. I just say that to like the level I was at was so basic. I really had an eighth grade education, 90% of which I had forgotten at that point. And then so to go from that and then try to become a professional writer. When I was an econ major that didn't have any writing, it was terrifying. It really was. And the first year, like I said earlier, was bad. It was, I was.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, I'm going to Wall Street. That's what you did. That's what I'll do now, too. To answer your question, I did it because I wanted to become rich. That's not how I think now. It's funny to say that, but I think in my 19-year-old mind, that's why I went to college.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there was a period when I didn't think I was going to when I was 18 or 19 and I wanted to be a ski racer. Now every ski racer at that level knows the odds of you making the US ski team and going on the Olympics. It's 0.0001 that you actually go there. So like I knew that I was not going to become the next Lindsay Vaughan, but I really enjoyed it. I thought, oh, I'll probably go on to be a coach. That'll probably be what I'll do for the rest of my life. And I think working as a valet at a nice hotel in Tahoe, that was my first experience to very wealthy people. First time I had seen very wealthy people coming in in their Ferraris and their Lamborghinis and their Rolls Royces. And it was the first time in my life that I was like, oh, like I want to be that, which is funny thinking now because that like the guy in the Rolls-Royce is like, definitely don't want to be that guy now. But at the time, I was like, whatever you're doing, I want to do it. Whatever I got to do to get there, this guy is so cool. I want to do it. And most of them were working in finance, I've learned. So I was like, cool.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I had to start at because I basically had an eighth grade education up till that point. So I started when I was 19 or 20. So I was a little bit older than others to begin with. And I started at the local junior college in Truckee, California, where I lived. And I had to start at like the most remedial math that exists. It was basically eighth grade math that I had to start and I was 20 at the time. And it was really like, okay, like how to simplify fractions. It was really like starting at that level. So I was in junior college for a year or two and then I transferred to the University of Nevada Reno. I was living in Lake Tahoe at the time. I went to UNR for a year. And then I went to another junior college in Southern California. And then I transferred to USC. And I was there for three years and then got my degree there. So my whole college experience was I don't know, like seven years or something because I had to start at the very bottom.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got my degree from USC, but I kind of slipped my way in there since I had no high school education. Well, I was going to ask.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can you spell your name and tie your shoes is basically like how I remember it. It was just like the most basic bare bone stuff. And then I got a diploma for that. So I really had no high school education. I spent my entire teenage years just skiing. That was the sole focus. And everyone else in my cohort, all of my friends around me did the exact same thing. So it felt normal to me. It wasn't until I was a little bit older that I realized that like, hey, everyone else went to four years of high school and they actually learned something that I didn't.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I grew up as a competitive ski racer, as you mentioned, in Lake Tahoe, and ski racing is one of the only sports that it was pretty common for people in my group in this competitive ski racing group to view high school as a nuisance that got in the way of our skiing. And the way that we got around that, because we were skiing six days a week, we just didn't have, we just viewed it as we didn't have time to go to school. And so the way that we got around that was there was an independent study program that was designed for juvenile delinquents who had been like expelled from every other school that was kind of like a homeschooling. It was like a guided homeschooling system where we didn't have to go to a high school. We had like they gave us some work packets to fill out that we did. And then when I was 16 years old, they sent a diploma in the mail. It's not a GED. It's a real high school diploma. But I did nothing for it. I don't have any memory of actually doing academic work during these years doing it. They had some work packets where it's like,”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty sure Ryan Holliday is like that as well. He talks a lot about routine is so important to his writing. And for me, it hasn't. And my takeaway is not that I'm right or he's right. It is different for everyone. And maybe I would be a better writer if I had more routine. But for better or worse, I've just kind of slapped it together haphazardly over the years.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I actually remember I was going for a run listening to your podcast with Stephen Pressfield. I heard him talk about the story of the people in the mental institution could not put up with it. I stopped and I sent myself an email, which is how I take notes. And I said like optimal amount of hassle. Steven Pressfield. And then I put like the timestamp in your podcast. And then I kept running. And then I came home. And then like I just had that nugget the next day just so I had no idea where it was going to go. But let's start with that and see where it takes me. That was the genesis of that article.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he said, When you're in a wheelchair and you want milk, but they bring you orange juice instead, you learn to say, that's all right and just drink it. Just the ability to put up with that kind of stuff is, I think, really important and often lost in this age where we want perfection. We want everything to be perfect. And it never is.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Continue, but that's that was that so that was I listened to that and it was like, oh, see, these people could not function in the real world because they had no tolerance for bullshit. The second step from that is there is an optimal amount of bullshit to put up with in life. And that was where this article, the optimal amount of hassle came from. And I was on a flight many years ago and there was this guy in pinstripe suits who let everyone know that he was a CEO of some company. And the flight was like two hours delayed and he completely lost his mind. He was dropping F bombs to the gate agents and just like completely making an ass of himself because the flight was delayed. And I remember thinking like, how could you make it this far in life and have no tolerance for petty annoyance, like a delayed flight? And I just think there's a big skill in life in terms of just being able to deal with some level of bullshit. And a lot of people don't have that. There's another great quote that I love from FDR who of course was paralyzed in a wheelchair.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got from your show not too recently. You had Stephen Pressfield on your show and he was talking about a time when he lived in a mental institution. He was not a patient himself, but he lived there and he starts talking to all these people. And he made this comment that a lot of the common denominators of these people who lived in a menstrual institution was they were not crazy. They just could not handle or put up with the bullshit of life. They just couldn't deal with it. And that was kind of why they ended up in the mental institution. And he said, all these people were the smartest, most creative people he had ever met. but they couldn't put up. They had no tolerance for the bullshit of the real world. And that to me just brought up this idea that there's actually an optimal amount of bullshit to deal with in life. There's an optimal. If your tolerance for bullshit is zero, you're not going to make it at all in life.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say that the majority of the time that I start writing an article, I have no idea where it's going to go and no idea how it's going to end. And the actual act of writing is kind of what gets the brain moving. And you write one sentence and then you're like, oh, that reminds me of this other thing. And then you write a paragraph and you go, oh, that reminds me of this thing I read five years ago to pull it in. And so it's really, I think that's the art of writing is you don't have any idea where it's going to go. It's true for articles. It's true for entire books. When I started writing my book, I didn't really know what the format was going to be. I didn't know what the chapters were going to be. It was just, let's start putting this together and see where it goes. I think a lot of writers do themselves a disservice by writing as you're taught in school, which is like have your outline, have it all outlined before you start writing. It's like, no, that takes away the creativity and the art of like exploring as you go that's been really interesting for me. So it often starts with just one little tiny nugget of like, oh, that's really interesting. Tim, I'll give you one example that I.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In each block, each chapter is like 300 words, which is a length in which you can go into a little bit of detail, but it's quick. You can breeze through it. So just putting that together in that format was like a challenge, but I was pretty happy with how it turned out.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One article that I wrote fairly recently is called How This All Happened, which is a very short history of how the US economy evolved from the end of World War II through today. And I don't want to write a complete history. That's too ambitious. But just what are the connecting dots from how we got from here or from the end of World War II to today? Like what's the narrative of how this all happened? I just wanted to connect the dots between all those. And it started actually years ago when I said like, how can I write the history of the US economy basically in tweets? Like what is the shortest that I can do this and just write a couple sentences of like, okay, after World War II, this happened and then that happened and the whole article is like 10 sentences. I wanted to like challenge myself to summarize it that quickly. So that was, I don't know, eight years ago that I wrote that piece. Then I realized, hey, that was actually like a cool format, but there's obviously a lot to expand on there. So rather than writing the history of the US economy in single sentences, like what if I just put it together?”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have a Google Doc called Scrapped Bits, and that's where it is. It's like 50,000 words. It's over 10 years of just the paragraphs that I cut from articles. And I get a lot of material in future articles from that scrap bits that didn't work in the past.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And maybe you told a great story in this article that didn't work out. And so you just leave that in your drafts. But then a year from now, you're like, oh, I got this story.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One's going to hold it against you. No one's going to care what they want is good content. If it takes you an extra week to come up with an extra good idea, just do that. So I publish on random days. Sometimes I publish once a week. Sometimes it's twice a month. It's just whenever I come up with something that I think is worth writing about that I do. So freeing yourself from that timeline, if you can, is the only way to do that for me. I think if there's one thing I've gotten a little bit better at over the last 15 years of doing this, it's having a little bit better sense before I sit down and write whether it's going to work or not. I think in the past, like a lot of times I would work on something for five hours before I realize like, no, this isn't working. Now I feel like within 10 minutes of writing, I'd be like, nope, nope, this is not going anywhere good. Let's just quit this and move on to the next idea. And that's fine. There's also a lot of times where you write half an article that doesn't work out. But there's some story in that scrap of an article that's going to work a year from now or six months from now. So saving all those scraps is really helpful.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's definitely the case if you are writing for a big publication and you have a deadline. Like your deadline is like 3 p.m. on Friday. You need to turn your article in, then you have to do it. If you are away from those handcuffs and you can just kind of”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To words because the idea that you're trying to get across is wrong, and that's why it's hard. So I've tried to do that with myself of just quitting pretty easily. Even if I'm halfway through an article and I'm like, oh, I can't figure out how to phrase this. It's like, well, maybe that's because my idea is wrong and I should just move on to something else.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And 90% of the quote unquote writing takes place there. I don't think that well when I'm sitting at my computer in front of a Google Doc typing, but when I get up and move around and go for a walk, then I'm like, oh, here's how I can write that paragraph. Here's how I can do it. Like, oh, actually that sentence, here's a better way to phrase it. All that takes place when I'm walking, never when I'm sitting. And so for me, whenever I feel like an article is not going well, where I'm stuck a little bit, it's like, okay, let's go for a walk. And then most of the time I'll figure it out there. The other thing that I've come to realize about myself is that the majority of the time that you have writer's block, it's not that you have writer's block. It's that your idea sucks. And that's why you can't figure out a way to write it. Good ideas are very easy to write. And bad ideas are hard. That's pretty easy. So a lot of writers, when they get writer's block, they're like, oh, how can I muscle through this and figure it out? And I think nine times out of ten, you're like, no, let's take a step back. And maybe it's hard to put this in.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know if I really have a writing process other than I really don't try to schedule it or say, okay, like Monday is writing day and I'm going to sit down and do it. I know a lot of great writers who would come on this show and say that that's the way to do it, that your routine is so important. For better or worse, it's never been like that for me. I just kind of take as a leap of faith that maybe twice or three times a month, I'll come up with an insight where I'm like, oh, that would be pretty cool. And here's a story that I could tell. But I don't try to force it at all. Every good idea that I've come up with has come when I'm not trying to force it at all. It's like in the shower or going for a walk or going for a run that you just all of a sudden you're like, oh, I got it. Here's the idea. And so the process for me is no process. It's just like wander aimlessly around life and then it'll eventually come to you. The actual writing for me, I would say too, I go for a lot of walks. I walk several times a day just around my neighborhood.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a big part of me of just like taking this off the table for me that relieves a lot of pressure is like I have no desire to become the world's greatest investor and I respect people who do, but I'm not one of that. So if I can just compound my money passively for 50 years, I'm going to achieve every goal that I have and then some. So for me, the idea of, well, how can I take the greatest advantage over the next market crash? How can I maximize more portfolio? I'm just not playing that game. And once I'd like become more introspective about my own personality, about what I want and how I react, how I think, how I interpret stress, how prone I am to stress, that kind of thing, it's like, once you become more introspective about yourself, I just took that pressure off my shoulders in a way that was very relieving.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What that book really showed me and put into words in a way that really stuck with me is the difference between your slow, thoughtful process of thinking about future risks and the oh shit like heat of the moment how am I actually going to react in the book it's framed as head versus gut years later Daniel Kahneman, the great psychologist, framed it as system one, system two. I think that's really important and particularly in investing where we've talked about in this podcast it's so easy to sit back in your armchair and be like, oh, if the market fell 20%, I would do X, Y, and Z. And then when it actually happens, you don't. You think something totally different. It's a very different experience. The difference between what you think and what you actually do can be 10 miles apart. And that book really explains that quite well.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One that's not that well known, but I wish was, and it's not a behavioral finance book per se, but it's a behavioral book, is a book by a guy named Dan Gardner who wrote a book called The Science of Fear. The title's basically self-explanatory. And it's not a deep science book. I would say it's more of a pop science book, but I don't mean that in a derogatory way. It's very digestible. You can understand it. But that book really changed how I think about fear and just observing fear in a pretty profound way. I've read that several times. What else? I mean, obviously the word from Jason Wag.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their skill is very universal and their observations could be applied to other fields. Like if Ryan Holliday wanted to become a writer of astronomy or like soccer games or like a medical writer, he would be one of the best medical writers. If James Clear wanted to write about like early childhood education, he would be the best childhood education writer. They're just great observers of how the world works and great communicators of putting those observations onto paper.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he writes every day. He puts out a letter five days a week. And they're long posts. And every one of them is great. There's almost never a dud. He gave an interview last week where he talks about his process. And he said his process is like he wakes up at 6 a.m. and panics until there's something written, which I think that's a great thing to admit that like writing is hard. Even for the people that make it look easy, it's almost always like a daily panic attack of like, oh shit, what am I going to do now? What am I going to write about now? The other observation I make about all these people, Matt Levine, James Clear, Ryan Holliday, all those people is that”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A way that can be off-putting to some people, but I think they are just so smart. And a funny story about this. In 2018, some friends of mine rented a house in Omaha for the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting, and a guy came over who I had never met before and I said, hey, who are you? And he said, oh, hi, I'm James Clear. And I said, what do you do? And he said, I'm an author. I'm writing a book right now. I said, what's it called? And he said, it's called Atomic Habits. And I didn't say this, but at the time, I was like, that sounds like a dumb name. I don't know. That's not. Of course, I didn't say that to him, but in my head, I'm like atomic habits. That sounds cheesy. And but he explained it. He was a really nice guy. I liked talking to him. But for those who don't know, I think atomic habits has now sold five or six million copies. It's probably the best-selling book of the last five years.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mentioned earlier James Clear, Ryan Holliday, Mark Manson, you, Tim. I don't want to blow too much smoke, but I'll just drop that there and then move on. I think those people like that that have a lot of success and a lot of followers have earned it. Like content is a meritocracy. And for people who have sold a zillion books and have a million followers and get this, by and large, they've earned it. And so a lot of those people who are big names and almost cliched a mention, I think, are very insightful people. James Clear and Ryan Holliday are two that really stick out as just like really thoughtful, almost philosophers.”
2022-03-02 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #576: Morgan Housel — The Psychology of Money, Picking the Right Game, and the $6 Million Janitor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT