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

“Well, here's one counter to that. You're generally right, but here's the counter to this February of 2020 rolls around. There's a new virus that's going to rile the world economy. What did Buffett do? Do you know the answer to that? What he did?”
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
“Said, I want to be Warren Buffett. I want to be the next Warren Buffett. But then you read about what it took to get there. And I'm like, no, I want to stay 10 miles away from that. That's a really important insight to learn is that a lot of these people who you admire, the reason that you admire them is because they're so successful. And that success that they had had enormous costs associated with it that are easy to ignore. And when I look at that, it's like, I can look at pieces of Buffett's life that I admire and pieces of Jim Simon's life that I admire, but I don't want to be them. Because that mega success had so many costs attached to it that I want to avoid in my life. That's been a really important observation too for me.”
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 more that I admire just how they've lived their lives and their general life philosophy. Actually, there's an interesting thing about Buffett, which is that it was so easy to admire him and still is. But when the book, The Snowball Came Out, which is a biography written about Buffett by an author named Alice Schroeder, and it came out, I want to say 2009, something like that. It really makes clear the case that Buffett has not lived a perfect life by any means. And in a lot of instances, his family life has been a disaster. I think that's the right word to use. It's kind of rude to say that, but I think it's really true. In some ways, that's good to hear that, that like everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time in the morning. Everyone is human. Everyone deals with the ups and the downs of living a life. And that he's a human. And also that a lot of the reason that his family life was troubled at times is because he was had a singular devotion in life, which was picking the best stocks. And everything else came second to that. Everything from his family on down came second to that in a way that a lot of people, including myself at one point,”
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
“Write something A value investor name Moniche Pabrai, who is not very well known. He's a fairly small investor. He's capped the size of his fund at a fairly low level. So he's not a household name. Even within investing circles, not many people know who he is. His returns are incredibly good. And he's just the nicest, wisest, fun to be around guy that I've met in a long time. Like I really look up to him not just as an investor, but just as a person, just how he's situated his life, what he aspires to be, how he lives his life as someone who I've really looked up to for a long time, someone who lots of listeners will be familiar with, Brent B. Short, who's very active on Twitter as well, is an incredibly successful investor. He won't say that. He will deny that, but he really is. And he, too, is just one of the nicest, kindest, funniest people who I've met. And most of the time, when he and I talk, it's nothing to do about investing. We just talk about life and our kids and our spouses and whatnot. So I think most of the people who I really admire as investors.”
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 I think in finance for the last 20 or 30 years, that person has been James Simons, like the only person in the field who can say, if you ask them the question, what is your competitive advantage? They can say, I'm just smarter than everyone else. Only one person can say that, and it's James Simons. If you look at what Renaissance technology has done and just the results that they've accumulated and the consistency of what they've done, it's like LeBron James, times, Michael Jordan, times Tiger Woods to the power of Michaela Schiffrin. It's just like such a different universe compared to what anyone else has done that it's just astounding to watch.”
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
“Vanguard, I think, is probably the most admirable because it was so selfless what he did. Vanguard, a lot of people don't even know this. Vanguard is owned by the people who own Vanguard Mutual. There's no Vanguard shareholders. There's no profits. There's no dividends that are played to the owners. Vanguard was made for the benefit of the people who own the ETFs, the people who own the mutual funds. And John Bogold did not make that much money for himself because of that. And you could almost think that like Vanguard's low fees is like the amount that you saved in fees is money that could have gone to John Bogle and John Pogel's estate that didn't. It's like he's like this undercover philanthropist of finance that I really admire just because there's so few other people like that. And I think someone like James Simons, who we mentioned earlier, I think in every field, there's only one person who's claimed to fame, whose competitive advantage is I'm smarter than everyone else. In tech for 20 or 30 years, that person was Bill Gates.”
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 mean, definitely buffet and munger for one, just this them in general. Here's kind of the twist on this. I'm not sure there's any investor who I admire that I would try to emulate. And I think the reason that is because I admire them because they have a really unique skill. And by definition, most people, including myself, don't have that skill. Another thing is that a lot of people who are really successful at investing were successful in one era, but maybe not necessarily this era. So you can really admire what they did and how they thought and the risks that they took in that time, but it would never work today. Benjamin Graham, the great investor who wrote the book, The Intelligent Investor, he's like the godfather of investing. If you tried to put Benjamin Graham's techniques to work today, you would fail so incredibly hard, so miserably. If you were putting together like the actual formulas that he laid out in his book, you would fail miserably. So there's really not anyone that I would really try to emulate. I'm a fairly passive investor. And John Bogo, who started...”
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, oh, I got to look at this. This is interesting. So, James, Mark and Naval, I think, have, in my view, played the game really well. Josh Brown, he quit Twitter about a year ago, but I thought he was the king. And he was someone. He is the CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management. He's on CNBC almost every day. And he was someone who would tweet probably 20, 30 times a day, but he's so funny and he's so insightful and so smart that it was worth reading every time. So it was a loss for Twitter to see him go. I think Derek Thompson from the Atlantic, I've mentioned him a couple times as someone who I really admire as just being a really multidisciplinary thinker. And whenever he puts something out, it's from completely different fields. He had a podcast recently on autocracy in Belarus. And then the next day, he could be writing about Omicron. He could be writing about the stock market. He's so well-rounded in his thinking that it's always interesting. It's always fresh. You never know what's going to come from him. Those are just a few people who I really admire here.”
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 will expand that slightly out of FinTwit, but two that really stick out. And these are very well known names. One is James Clear, who wrote a book called Atomic Habits, and the other is Mark Manson, who wrote the book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. Both of them do something that I think is really rare, which is that they don't tweet very much. They maybe tweet once a day, but it's very good. It's very thoughtful. It's thought-provoking. And they tweet one away, and then they back off until the next day. That's also something that I've tried to emulate. And I think the people that just kind of flood the feed with every little brain fart that might come into their head and just dump it into Twitter and hit publish, some of them are interesting and entertaining, but it can get old after a while. I think the people who have done really well that I've admired have a level of restraint on Twitter of only putting out things that they think are really worth reading. I think Naval is also pretty good at that in terms of just putting out something maybe once a day. Maybe he's like twice a week at this point, but it's good. When he tweets,”
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
“Here's how I think about content in general whether this is Twitter or writing writing an article, writing a book. I call this selfish writing. I'm writing for an ancience of one, and that is me. The only thing that I write, the only thing that I tweet, the only thing the articles that I write, the books that I write, I just write through the lens of do I personally think this is interesting?”
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
“Be different from yours, which is different from anyone else who's listening. And it's not because we disagree with each other. It's just because we're different people with different goals and different ages and different family situations, et cetera, et cetera. So risk is a very personalized calculation for everyone, whether that's an investing or other areas of your 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
“Catastrophic risk. I personally would say that's not a risk at all. And the reason is because my goals lie 50 years in the future. So what's going to happen in the next three years? I could honestly care less. That's really how I think. But that would not be my answer if I was a 90-year-old retired widow on a fixed income. Then I'd have a very different answer for you. So I think summing all that up, risk is just the odds that something will prevent you from achieving your goals. But the nuance is that everyone has very different goals and aspirations and time horizons. So everyone thinks about risk differently. The takeaway from that is most investing debates where people are arguing with each other. Is this a risk? Is that a risk? Should I buy this stock? Is the market going to go up next week? By and large, those debates are not actually debates. It's people with different risk tolerances and different time horizons talking over each other, talking over one another. And that's why, so I think to me the most important part about risk is that the definition is different for everyone. My definition 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
“Let me start with a short story that I was talking with a friend of mine last week, Derek Thompson, of the Atlantic. He and I did a podcast together, and he asked me if I thought inflation would be transitory, which is a very common question that a lot of people are talking about right now. And I said, well, what does transitory mean? By transitory, do you mean it's going to be gone in a week? Do you mean it's going to stick around for 10 years? All these little weasel words that don't have any agreed-upon definition, you can really get into a lot of trouble there. Because I think inflation is transitory, but by that I mean it's probably not going to stick around for five years. If your definition of transitory means it's going to be gone next week, then no, I don't think it's transitory. And I bring that up because I think that's the same with risk. And there are a lot of people that will define risk differently by and large based off of the time horizon. So if you were to ask me if the stock market fell 20% and stayed there for three years, is that a risk? A lot of people would say, yeah, that's a huge risk. That's an enormous 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
“Thanks. I do think, like I said, I was appointed six weeks ago. I've been to one meeting. But even in that one meeting, I would say, Tim, it's obvious from the get-go, the burden and responsibility that you have. And there is a little bit, I think this would be true for anyone in this position, a little bit like of an oh shit moment of like, I realize the decisions that need to be made. There's a good friend of mine named Brent Bishore who says every successful business is a loosely functioning disaster. Every single successful business in the world that's as good as you can get. That's the highest peak is a loosely functioning disaster. Every business is just a mix of personalities and emotions and imperfect information and you're just trying to hold the thing together and do the best that you can. And you really see that when you're on the inside of any company that exists in the world. So that's always apparent for me just as an outside investor looking at any company or on the inside as well. All businesses are tough and challenging and you need to make tough decisions.”
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 for making the right decisions, and if things go wrong, realizing that the spotlight's going to be on you and you deserve 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
“Something like that. It intends to be an older group that came of age during a similar time. And I think sees the world through a similar lens. That is not exactly the clearest lens of where the world is going next. So I think having a generational diversity has been important. That was explained to me. And I think just having a view about risk and about what matters in investing as well. That's really it. It's been an interesting experience for me. It was not a job that I thought was going to coming my way, but it's a cool job to have that I know has a very heavy burden. It's cool to put it on your resume and talk to your friends about it. But I think like a lot of things, there's a great quote from Jeff Melt, who's a former CEO of General Electric who says, every job looks easy when you're not the one doing it. I think that's a great quote that applies to a lot of things. And I think that's true for sitting on a board as well. It seems like a great position and a fun kind of Cushy position. In many ways it is. But you realize even from day one, my first meeting, the burden that is on.”
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
“Huge responsibilities. There's a great quote from a guy named Lawrence Cunningham who says that being on the board of a large company is corporate America's highest honor and heaviest burden. It's easier to focus on the first part and ignore the latter part. But yeah, it's right. Those are huge burdens. But I think, and again, I'm speaking with six weeks of experience here. I'm not going to pretend like I have lots of war stories to share with you about this because I don't. But I think seeing eye to eye on the big picture of where the company is going and what it needs to do it right and just having experience for myself as an investor, as someone who thinks about risk and have done that for my entire career is important. What I do not have is experience running an insurance company, experience running a company with $19,000. Those are things that I do not have. But I think I do bring to the table both a generational diversity of, like if you look at the boards of all public companies, I mean, you're looking at an average of something like in the mid 70s.”
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 thing that's interesting, I do think there is some misconception about what a board member does. And the important thing is explaining what a board member does not.”
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 really wish the story was more interesting, but that's really it. They called me up. I had never spoken with them before at all, no communication. And they said, would you like to join the board? Once that phone call ended, began a year of meeting everyone, discussing everything, flying out to meet them, them flying to Seattle to meet me, a long process as you would expect any big corporation would have. I think very similar to Craig, Tom Gaynor, who's the co-CEO, and I see the world through a very similar lens of just like, what does an investing company or an investor need for long-term success? Having just those big macro values aligned, I think was really important. So it was an obvious answer for me and then getting to know the rest of the board over the last 12 months has been really interesting. It's a very diverse board, diverse in terms of gender, race, and also just background. So it's a really diverse set of views and set of opinions within the boardroom. And then I joined the boardroom just about six weeks ago.”
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
“Be a good insurer and a great investor with those insurance proceeds at the same time. You can be an incredible company. So now if we fast forward today, Mark Elli is a $17 billion company with 20,000 employees. They own about a dozen industrial businesses of various sizes. And it's a really cool company. It's a company that I've admired for a very long period of time. I'll tell you a little quirky story here. When you joined the Motley Fool as an employee, they give you a small sum of money to invest in any stock that you want. They just want every employee to be an investor. When I became an employee in 2007, I got my little allocation and I invested every penny in Markel at the time. True story. I really admired what they were doing. The guy who is co-CEO runs a place Tom Gaynor. I really think is one of the great investors of our time. And so I've admired it for a long time. And then about a year ago, I got a call from the company and this asked if I would be interested in joining the board of directors. And I said, yeah, yes. I admire them so much, of course.”
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'm sure there's listeners who don't know what Markel is. The easiest way to describe Markel is a mini Berkshire Hathaway in the sense that it is an insurance company that uses the profits from the insurance company to buy whole businesses, industrial businesses that it plans on holding forever, which is exactly what the Berkshire Hathaway model was. And that's really what Markell was as well. Markel started in the 1930s as an insurance company, and it was that for many years. Now, every insurance company in the world does investments because you use the proceeds from your insurance premiums to invest. Most insurance companies will just do that in bonds, maybe some index funds pretty boring. And it's not until you have a company like Berkshire that's like, hey, we got all this money laying around. Let's go buy some amazing businesses. That's how Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett became what they are. And Markel started doing that really around the 1990s when they realized that you could become a great business and a great incredible company if you are not just a good insurer. That's really important. But if you could.”
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
“Do very well. They don't get any engagement, they don't do very well, but personal Twitter accounts from people like yourself can do very well because people don't want to interact with a company. They want to interact with a person. And I think so leaving the masthead, so to speak, that actually didn't bother me that much because I didn't want to be a Wall Street Journal writer or even a Motley Full writer. I wanted to be Morgan Hausle. I just wanted to be, I wanted to build the name. That's very selfish, but I think it's true. And I think it's true for a lot of people. The URL of your blog is tim.blog. Like it's your name right there. I think branding it after yourself and being kind of explicit about that is the right way to go in content these days because people want to interact with a person. So that didn't bother me.”
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 worried me at the time because I had been at the Molly Fool for 10 years and I felt like I built up an audience there. And I had no idea if any of them would travel with me. And if I went somewhere else would do, like, did I have to start at square one and build myself up from zero? That was terrifying. Or was that audience going to be somewhat portable? And I think the answer is like somewhere in the middle. I think it felt okay to me because I think this is obvious now, but it wasn't obvious five or ten years ago that people don't necessarily read the New York Times. They read by and large certain writers at the New York Times. I don't read The Atlantic. I read Derek Thompson. I don't read the Wall Street Journal. I read Jason's Wagg. It's all about those people. Now, there's some nuanced to that. Like there's some places like the economists that have no bylines. It's just like you're reading one voice. But I think by and large, people want to read certain writers. They want to make it personal. One example of this is most corporate Twitter accounts do not.”
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
“Sound like marketing, even if it is, no one wakes up every morning and says, I want to read a marketing article. They just want to read something that's interesting and thought stimulating that they can share with their friends. So that's what I do. And that's what I've done for the last six years is just writing about all the different things that I think are interesting and trying to do a bunch of reading and thinking and talking to friends, trying to learn something and then sharing it with the world. That's all I got started at Cloudfoot.”
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
“Is look, if you are a venture capitalist, money is fungible. So if your only asset as a firm is we can write a check, you do not stand apart at all. A lot of people can write a check. You stand apart in the private investing world by having values and a view of the world that is differentiated in some way. And those values that view do not matter at all unless people know about them. So you need to kind of going out there showing the world how you think, what you think, who you are, waving your.”
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'm really happy at the Molly Fool. I'm going to stay here forever. Not interested in it. And he just kind of kept chipping away. And it took me a long time to figure out that like I really see the vision of what he's trying to build and I like it. I like the brand. I like him personally. He's a great guy. And I also knew that he was going to give me complete autonomy to write about whatever I wanted whenever I wanted and just make the blog my own little canvas that I could paint on. That was really important to me. And it was clear that he was going to let me do that. So then I joined collaborative fun, which is a venture capital firm, private equity firm, kind of invest in lots of different asset classes now. And my whole job is to write and speak. And not even write about venture capital or not even to write about our portfolio. Just write about things that I see where the world's going, things that I think are important for investing, investing history and investing behavior. The idea for it, the idea for having a writer like that at a venture capital firm, by and large,”
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 normally, if someone sent me that email, I would just delete. I wouldn't even respond to it. I would literally just delete it. That's a personality flaw of mine, but that's how I respond to those kind of things. But I was in New York that day where Craig was from, and someone had just canceled a meeting. So I had some free time. So I get this email from a guy in New York who says, hey, let's meet. And I said, great, I'm two blocks away. Let's meet right now. So I met Craig Shapiro and he just turned out to be, he's one of those people. And I'm really being sincere when I say this. I'm not just blowing smoke because he's my boss. He was one of those people who right away I was like, ah, this guy, like he and I see eye to eye on how the world works. We disagree here and there, but in the broad strokes of how to live a good life and how investing works and where the economy is going, Craig and I really see eye to eye on the big picture stuff. And that was clear right away. It was probably about a year after that that he said, hey, you should join collaborative fund and just keep writing about the things that you do. And I said, Craig, thanks, but no.”
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
“Okay, let's start with Collaborative Fun. At the time, I was at the Molly Fool, at the time being, let's go back to 2015. I was at the Molly Fool, and my plan was I was going to stay at the Molly Fool for life, including my wife and I bought a house half a mile from Motley Fool headquarters in Virginia. The play was we're going to stay there forever. One day, a guy named Craig Shapiro emailed me and said, hey, I'm Craig. I run this tiny venture capital firm called Collaborative Fun. I read your stuff. Let's grab lunch.”
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 this financial media world that is so competitive, and there's so many other people who are writing about the same stocks that I do, that if I can tell a story, it's more fun and it catches people's attention. And even after that, so now we're in like 2009, 2010, I would say it wasn't until probably 2014 or 15 that I felt like I really started hitting a stride of like, oh, I can kind of figure out what I'm doing here. And I kind of feel like I've cracked the formula of what works in a finance article. And so it was really, you know. five to seven years of just kind of hacking my way through trying to put the pieces together to figure it out. Before I really started A, enjoying it and felt like I had some aptitude of doing a good job at 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
“Your name at the top of the test, that's all that's required of you. And so I had no writing background. And then so the first year was really hard because I had no idea what I was doing, both on the investing front, like I had no idea what I was talking about and on the writing front. I just didn't know how to write a good paragraph. And it was tough, particularly as anyone in online writing or even social media knows. If you say something wrong online, people will tell you about it in no uncertain terms. So I was just, you know, as part of my job, I was just getting torn to shreds day after day. It just wasn't any fun. But after I would say a year or maybe two years, I felt like I started to get the hang of it. And I started to be like, I understand investing better. And I feel like, oh, I can start telling a little bit of a story that people might enjoy. And rather than just being a capital J journalist and just like throwing numbers on the page and hitting publish, maybe I can tell a story that will resonate with people. And if I twist the phrases this way, and if I try to be funny in this way and tell a tale in this way, then I can stick 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
“I wouldn't say I was comfortable. I wouldn't even say it was a decision. It really was in the summer of 2007. So I graduated in 2008. So as everything fell apart, I thought I wanted to be an investment banker and then I realized I don't. It's the culture of it was not for me. And then I thought, great, so I'll go into private equity. And then all those positions just disintegrated before my eyes. I just needed something to do. I just needed a job. And like you said, I had a friend who was a writer at the Molly Fool who said, Morgan, you should apply. Like, you're interested in investing, just apply. And I thought, A, they're not going to hire me. And even if they do, maybe I'll do it for six months before I find another private equity job. So it was really just out of desperation that I became a writer. That's the right word for it. It was not a plan. I didn't even enjoy it. I wasn't excited about it. It was just like, how I need a paycheck. And then I would say the first year of that too was not very much fun because I really had no writing background at all. I was an econ major in college where it's heavily math-based. So it's not, you know, there's not much writing. As long as you can write.”
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
“Most private equity firms in the summer of 2007 knew they were in deep shit. It was a really tough time for people when you're borrowing a ton of money to lever these low quality businesses up. Like that was a tough time. They saw the writing on the wall and I think they were just trying to scale back as quickly as they could. The idea was, so I was a summer intern at the time. And the idea was I was going to stick around full time after college and become a full-time employee, which would have been that fall. So that was the plan. It was kind of all sketched out. Like, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to stick around. And then just before I was going to start full-time is when they said, hey, there's not going to be a spot here for you. So I'm sure their wording was not intentional, but that wording of you're not fired, but you can't work here anymore was a funny. I remember walking out and being like, so wait, so do I come back tomorrow? How does this work?”
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
“That's a verbatim statement. I remember sitting there thinking, I'm pretty sure you just fired me, but thank you for being polite about 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
“Including during the doctor's years, my dad looked like a professional, and now he's back to full hippie long gray ponytail. It all goes full circle. It all comes back.”
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
“First, I'd say they're the happiest that I've ever seen them now in the last couple years. They bought a piece of land on the coast of Northern California and they are just like small-time farmers. They're vegetarians. They've been vegetarians for 45 years and they grow like two-thirds of the food that they eat. So they spend all of their day in their little personal farm doing it and they love it. They don't need to do that, but they absolutely love it. They have a tractor and they got all these cool tools and they absolutely love doing it. And it's all in their own terms. And they take naps every day. They go for bike rides along the coast. Like they have a lot of fun doing 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
“It's called the farm. It's still in existence. It's a tiny, tiny fraction of what it used to be. But back in the 1970s, it's a hippie commune called the farm, and it was huge. It was like thousands of people. And it truly was a commune. You are not allowed to have your own financial assets. You couldn't have your own bank. When you joined the farm, when you got there, you had to forfeit all your possessions, all of your money, all of your assets had to be donated to the farm. And everyone worked together. They were farmers. My dad, like my dad flew a crop dusting plane. He was a pilot before he moved to the farm. And everyone worked together. Now, of course, the punchline here is it failed. It fell apart eventually, as you would imagine. But my parents, I was talking to you about it just last week. They have nothing but incredible memories from it. They were in their early and mid 20s when they were doing it. And their best friends still to this day are from there. They have nothing but great experiences from it, even if the whole thing fell apart. The 70s, of course, was like peak baby boomer.”
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
“Do what he wants. I literally think it's a hundred times happier than he would have been if he lived a better material life when he was young. So that was a really profound takeaway for me watching 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
“And he could do it on his own terms when he wanted to, and he had all these colleagues who for years had been living a much better life than him, bigger houses, nicer cars, sending their kids to better schools, all that. And they wanted to quit and they couldn't. They were just as burned out, but they needed to put it in another 10 years of doing it. And I think watching that, watching my dad just getting to a point where he said, I don't want to do this anymore. So I'm going to leave tomorrow. It was like, ah, that clicked with me. Like, that's why you were so cheap growing up, which I looked down upon you for when I was young saying, why don't we spend more money? But now I get it. You have, he has pure independence and autonomy. And the happiness that he and my mom got from that, I think exceeds the happiness that he would have gotten from driving a Porsche or living in a bigger house a hundredfold, literally a hundredfold. He's been so happy over the last decade just doing what he wants to do, particularly retiring as he slows down, as his body and mind slow down as he aged to just be able to.”
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
“Great life. We had a nice house, drove fine cars, we went on some cool vacations. It was not living poor at all, but my parents had a very high savings rate. They lived well below their means because that's how it was forced upon them for decades of living like that. And then when this is like now, if we fast forward to the last 10 years, my dad, after working in the ER for 20 or 25 years, which is probably one of the most stressful fields of medicine you can go into because people are literally dying in your arms every day. It's a very stressful profession. So after 20 years, he just kind of had enough. And since he had a high savings rate, he could as soon as he got to the day where he decided he had enough, he just left.”
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'm the youngest of three, and I think he started undergraduate the month after I was born. That's when he started undergrad. And then he became a doctor when I was 12 or something like that. And my brother would have been 18 at that point. So he got a very late start, which is a very, like when he started everyone, I think from his parents to the professors, like, what are you trying to do? You're going to become a doctor. Like, what you're out of your mind. But he did, he ground through it and did it. And what's interesting about that financial story is that we grew up my whole family. When I was a young kid, very, very poor. My parents were students. We were living off of grants and like low income houses. Like we were poor. We had a great childhood, but we were very poor. And then my dad became a doctor when we were in our early teenage years and then had a comfortable upper middle class life from there. But the frugality that was forced upon my parents when they were poor stuck around. So my parents had a very high savings rate. We lived a”
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
“Answer the question my dad was an ER doctor. My mom was an ER nurse. They're both retired now, but they got to it in a really interesting way. My parents met on a hippie commune in the 1970s in Tennessee. And my dad started his undergraduate college when he was 30 and had three kids. And he became a doctor when he was like 43 or something like that and had three teenagers.”
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 I think for the huge majority of people, not everyone, but for the majority of people, there could be a lot more. And the reason that they don't want to have more savings is because to them the knee-jerk reaction is why would I just keep my money in the bank or even invest it? Like the purpose of money is to go out and buy more stuff to enjoy my life. I get that. I understand it. But it's usually once every five or ten years that people realize how important independence and autonomy is. And having that wealth that you have not spent, having the money that you haven't spent. That was just laying around doing nothing becomes the most valuable thing in the world when it lets you gain control of your time and just wake up every morning and say, I can do whatever the hell I want today. I think that's as close as it gets to him to like a universal financial law.”
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
“Benefit that it can bring us is systematically overlooked, like using it for independence and autonomy is so overlooked. That to me has always been kind of a sad thing that we are so accustomed and attuned to just wanting to use our money, whatever money that we have, whatever savings that we have to go out and buy more stuff when we could be using it for freedom and autonomy. And then when you come to a period like in March and April of 2020 or October 2008, when millions of people lose their jobs and you see during those periods like the early day of COVID, how many people are just on the razor's edge of insolvency? And it does not take them much one or two weeks of unemployment to be in a really bad financial spot, whether that's for an individual or a small business. It does not take them much to be thrown over the edge. And you realize how dependent so many people are on their jobs, their salaries, their customers, and in a short period of time. And there's just not a lot of room for error throughout most of the world.”
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
“If there is a universal trait of money that's true for not 100% of people, but let's say 90% of people is that what people really want in life is independence and autonomy. I think no matter where you're from, what you do, what your aspirations are, that's a common denominator. That people just want to wake up every morning and do what they want to do on their own terms and whether they're able to do that, whether they can actually do that today or that's a goal. I think that's a universal trait among people. It's just independence and autonomy. And so to the extent that we can use money to gain that, to gain independence and autonomy, that is, I think, as close as it comes to a universal want and thing that we can use money for. The interesting thing to me is that a huge numbers of people, educated people, financial professionals, the purpose of money is to buy stuff. It's to accumulate more stuff, bigger house, nicer car, whatever it might be, which is great. I love all that stuff too. But to me, the most powerful thing that money can do and the most universal.”
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
“Picture or imagine who your kids might be someday. It's like you have no clue what they're going to grow up to be. It's intuitive to think that my kids will grow up similar to my wife and I because I'm going to instill in them the values that my wife and I value. But they're so starkly different from one another. And I'm so different from my brother and sister. We went so completely different ways in life that it's so hard to give your kids advice when they're young, when you have no clue where they're going to end up. So people have asked me this question going off of that article. What would I teach them now or how am I teaching my son about money now that he's old enough to start to get the basics of it? And the truth is, I'm really not because I don't know maybe when he's a young adult, he wants to be a partner at Goldman Sachs. Maybe he wants to work for Greenpeace. Like who knows what he's going to be? And therefore, I can't give him or anyone universal financial advice and say, this is what you should do. And this is what you should value. This is where you should.”
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
“First, let me give some insight into that man in the car paradox, as I call it. When I was in college, I was a valet at a high-end hotel in Los Angeles. So I was in my early 20s and there were people coming in and Ferraris and Lamborghinis and Rolls-Royces, like the whole thing. And it dawned on me one day that when those cars pulled in that I had really admired. I'm a car guy. I've loved that. Never once did I look at the driver and say that guy's 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
“Reuben Robert Ruben, who was a former Treasury Secretary and a partner at Goldman Sachs, like one of the most astute, sophisticated, experienced financial minds in the world was on the Citigroup Board of Directors at the time. And he afterwards said that he had never even heard the name of this product. He had never even heard of it. This product that could nearly bankrupt the entire company had the ability to almost bank up the company. The guy who sat on the board had never even heard of it before. So that to me, like you can criticize Robert Rubin for that, but that to me just showed that Citigroup was just too big to manage. There's too much going on for any sane person to understand what was going on. I actually empathize with a lot of those too big to fail bankers. And look, should they have lost all their wealth, of course. But there's no way that anyone at Citigroup or JP Morgan or Wells Fargo or any of those banks can honestly say that they know what's going on inside of them. They're just too damn big to understand 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
“Are enormous. Like when you're a big bank, you have a lower cost of capital. You can raise money. You have regulatory capture. You own the politicians, et cetera. You want to be a big bank. That's the sweet spot. But then there's this really interesting thing. Like, we all know what happened to the banks in the mid-2000s. But one of the most fascinating stories that I remember is Citigroup in the mid-2000s had this product on its balance sheet. I forget what it was called. It was like a CDO putback, basically what it meant in layman's terms was CDO had all of these collateralized debt obligations, these junk bonds, and there was like a little footnote in them that, hey, if the value of these bonds declines, if these investments go sour to these clients that we're selling them to, we Citigroup will buy them back at par at full price. And when the mortgage market imploded, Citigroup was obligated to repurchase like tens of billions of dollars in these junk bonds. And that was a big part of what sent them over the edge and nearly bankrupt the company. The interesting thing about this is that Robin.”
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 you see that actually in a lot of fields. There's this thing in evolutionary biology called Cope's rule. It's not a law because it's not very universal, but Copes rule basically says that organisms get bigger over time. So if you look at the evolution of humans, we used to be half of our height that we were as we evolved over the years, you get bigger and you went from like little worms that turned into boa constrictors. Most species get bigger over time. So then the question is, why aren't all species just enormous? If getting big is better because you are a better hunter, you can hunt more prey. Why aren't we all huge? And the answer is because like there's huge downsides to being big. You can't hide from other prey. You need an enormous amount of food to keep yourself going. There's always a sweet spot in evolution of big helps, but only to a certain point. One of the areas that this really became clear that size is size helps you, but it also has huge downsides where banks in the early and mid-2000s where the economies to scale to banking”
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
“2000s, and a lot of people started buying Berkshire stock and becoming part of that cult. And the stock since then has not done very well. And I think that's almost inevitable at the size that it is, that it's just not going to outperform anymore.”
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