William Green - The Man Behind The Books
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+ Transcript
Bill: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Business Brew. I'm your host, Bill Brewster. This episode features William Green. If you don't know who William Green is, I encourage you to-- Well, I encourage you to listen to this episode no matter what. But William is someone who I met at unique time in life. I'm pretty sure it was the same weekend that I spoke to Mario Gabelli. Saw William at the Markel, Sunday brunch get together at Berkshire, asked him if he would grab lunch with me and we spoke so long, I almost missed my plane. In that conversation, I saw a really unique person and I hope that this conversation gets the world to see who he is in a similar light that I got to see that time, I think. Everybody now knows William as a fantastic author and great podcast host, but I think this episode may highlight who he is as a man, and it's one that I am fortunate to be able to feature, and I just really appreciate him as a person. He's one of those people that I'm really fortunate to have in my life and I hope that you all enjoy this episode very much. And also, buy his book, Richer, Wiser Happier. We're coming after Morgan Housel numbers and we need your help.
I hope you enjoy this conversation. I hope you check out Bastiat Partners. Nader has been a great friend and has supported the pod, because he enjoys what we're doing here, and he is a member of The Business Brew community for lack of a better term, and he's been a great guy to get to know, and if any of the words that I just read resonate with you at least check out his website. He's a great guy and he's worth a call.
As always, none of this is financial advice. All of the information contained in this program is for entertainment purposes only. Please consult your financial advisor before making investment decisions and do your own due diligence. PS, if you've heard kids screaming in the background during this read, I assure you they are happy and no kids were harmed recording this.
Excited to be joined by William Green. We're jumping into the conversation. So, we'll see how it goes. William, we were just talking about how we're both tired.
William: Yeah, I think everyone we know is tired. Yeah, I don't know that we don't give ourselves permission ever to stop working these days or if there's no separation between work and home life or if we're just tired from this pandemic period. I don't know, but everyone I know seems to be a little bit weary.
Bill: It's funny for me. 2020 happened and then I was like, “All right, 2021, we'll get back to normal.” Well, that didn't happen and now, 2022 isn't exactly starting out anywhere near normal. They track these misery indexes, misery is through the roof and it's just like, “Ah, the 2020 is going to deliver any nice years.
William: I feel a little bit guilty, because I actually have been pretty cheerful [chuckles] but cheerful. I think part of it is that in a sense for writers, we're used to economic uncertainty and we're used to isolation. And so, in a sense, the period of COVID where suddenly everyone felt sense of uncertainty and a sense of isolation, that was like my home court, where it's like, “Welcome to the game.” This is where I've lived for the last 25, 30 years. I think also in a very strange way, it became less isolated for me, because my wife stopped going into the office and started working at home, which was lovely. I had company.
Bill: That is nice.
William: While my kids were home as well, not now, my son has graduated from college and he is teaching and my daughter is back at college, but is coming home tomorrow for a few days. Actually, weirdly, while most people were isolated, I thankfully was less isolated than I usually am as a writer. There was a time when I was working on my book a few years ago, where I felt I was going nuts. I think my son was at college, my daughter was at high school, was away for the day, and my wife was in New York City at work. I remember coming into the house and saying out loud, “Do I exist or do I not exist?”
Bill: [laughs]
William: I'm just thinking, “Oh, Jesus.” I'm really in trouble now and I'm speaking out loud. But there was this weird sense of just being so isolated inside my head as a writer. Yeah, this is a very self-referential and digressive way of saying. Actually, I do feel guilty about the fact that I've not been more miserable during this period. I've been pretty happy. So, sorry about that. I apologize.
Bill: I think it's good. I think we need to spread more cheer.
William: Yeah.
Bill: I encouraged people on the Twitter machine to turn on some Earth, Wind, and Fire, and dance a little like, just let it out.
William: The other thing about this period is, it gives you permission to say no to a lot of things that you didn't want to do. That's been great to be able to say, “I'm sorry, I just don't want to expose those people to the risk of me giving them COVID, because I've been socializing or something.”
Bill: Yeah.
William: And duck out at some of them that you just really didn't want to go to.
Bill: [laughs]
William: It really means that I can sit around reading, and thinking, and blathering on all day.
Bill: Well, that's nice.
William: Yeah, so, I don't know. But you've been relatively cheerful since we last spoke or you've been going nuts?
Bill: No, man. Look, on a day-to-day basis, I have nothing but gratitude. I live a very fortunate life. I think that I have felt burnt out, if that makes any sense and I've gotten to this weird point in my life where-- You know what's really weird that I'm going through actually? For the longest time, my identity that I thought I cared about was being a good investor and this podcast is actually way more fulfilling to me than returns. Some of that has to do with—
I'm watching my grandma age and she's declining slower and now, it's faster. I don't know. Just put a lot of stuff in perspective and my kids are at this age where, once the four-year-old turns five, I think we're all going to have really good times together at four. Four is not my favorite age.
William: Yeah.
Bill: But I don't know. I'm much less interested in work than I used to be. I don't know, I almost feel guilty saying that, but it's the truth.
William: Yeah. maybe this period has forced us to reappraise a little bit and say, “What is it that actually makes for a happy, and successful, and fulfilling life?” I think I just had my midlife crisis a few years earlier than you did. I'm sick. I'm older than you.
Bill: I'll tell you what I think. I think what a commonality may be is, I have now had access to investors that I respected for so long, and I see how hard they work, and I see how smart they are. I don't know, if I really like to look in the mirror and say, “Do I want it as bad as they do?” My answer is, no.
William: That's very interesting. That's a very helpful piece of self-awareness. It may be that you could structure your investment portfolio, so that it would require less intensity.
Bill: Yeah.
William: If intensity is not what you are wired for maybe that would be smart to structure it in a way that suits your temperament, and your drive, and frosty. I sometimes think about this because over the years I interviewed people like Peter Lynch, who ran crazy for 13 years, I think, and then quit, and basically, never took a vacation, never took a day off practically, and had this belief that he's just turned over as many rocks as possible. If he looked for 10 ideas, he may be find one good one. If he looked for hundred, he'd maybe find five good ones or whatever it was.
Then his successor, one of his successors is Jeff Vinik also worked like crazy, but then quit to spend more time with his kids. Then, [unintelligible [00:10:25], who I wrote about in the epilogue of my book, also regarded himself as an extreme athlete almost the way that he was investing and he was a great squash player, and obsessed with fitness, and health, and nutrition. And so, he was trying to outrun everything and then just decided he couldn't bear it anymore and quit.
I sometimes wonder if you can win massively by just working way harder than anyone else, which is what Peter Lynch figured out. He's like, “Look, I'm competing with so many smart people. If I don't work incredibly hard, I'm not going to win.” That was the early advice that he gave to Bill Miller, when Bill Miller went to see him in the 80s and Bill said, “Can you ever slow down?” Peter Lynch was like, “No, not really. There are two gears. Either you are full speed ahead or you might as well stop. You can't really compete at the very pinnacle unless you're working really full pelt.” And so, I think that has interesting implications if you don't want to do that.
Then you look at these older investors, the Buffet’s and the Munger’s and the like. They’re clearly working. Buffett in particular, I think, clearly works incredibly hard. I remember Tom Gaynor saying to me that Buffett has incredible stamina. They used to sit together on [crosstalk] board and he said, “Buffett just was the Energizer Bunny” and he said, “That's a physical feat what Buffett has. So, he never stops working.” Even there, someone slow and patient seems to have this intensity, this ferocity to the way he works. But I think you want to structure things somehow, so that it suits your temperament, so that you're a long-term investor. That in a sense, you're actually taking advantage of your laziness, or your lack of desire to be trading constantly, or running around constantly, or studying a thousand ideas. So, it may actually be that's a competitive advantage.
Bill: Yeah, look, I don't know if it is or it isn't. What I do know is that I am responsible for my pool of capital and I'm not responsible for other people's pool of capital. Part of the reason for that is, I don't really want the pressure that I feel accepting outside money would create. Part of it is, I frankly, don't know if I deserve to ask people to give me their money. But I guess, I always thought that the goal was to get to the point where I felt I was ready to ask people for their capital and now I'm finding out that maybe the goal is to have really fascinating conversations with people that I'm really fascinated with and share that knowledge.
When we first met, I don't know, man, I felt really lost. I guess, for the first time, I actually feel I have a purpose and then I'm giving back to the community that has given me so much. If I wasn't an investor, I don't think I'd be interested in the world and we never would have met. There are all these fantastic things that I owe to investing and this is the way that I can actually get back and it's fulfilling.
William: Yeah. That sense of being lost, I think, is actually pretty powerful, because I think if you were really satisfied the way, so then you felt you'd figured it out, you were smug and complacent, and you're like, “Yeah, I've nailed this game how to live, and how to invest, and all of that, and how to parent and everything else.” You wouldn't have this intense desire to learn, and to chat with people, and to try to figure things out. For me, I think part of what's helped me over the years in the same way as you, I've gone through these periods where I felt really lost and where--
When I'm interviewing people that I write about or that I interview on my podcast, I have skin in the game, when I'm asking them how to think, and how to live, and how to invest. That's because I want to know. I want to figure it out. I think it's interesting when you think of people like Tim Ferriss with his podcast, Tim, who I've never met personally, but he's talked very candidly about having had issues with depression, and abuse, and the like. He's obviously working through a lot of pain.
Tony Robbins, who I know pretty well personally, but not incredibly well, also had an incredibly difficult childhood and went through a tremendous amount of pain that he's been very candid about with, being physically hurt by his mother, and having lots of different stepfathers, and poverty, and no food, and the like. I think it helps to have some degree of pain, angst, and difficulty that you're trying to work through it. It tries you to figure these things out. And so, you have to harness that. I'm fortunate because I had loving parents and in some ways it’s very, very fortunate, but I've managed to have lots of self-induced-
Bill: [laughs]
William: -crises of confidence, and angst, and all of that. I have a lot to figure out. Yeah, I think you're harnessing your deep desire to learn stuff yourself and then share it with other people.
Bill: Yeah. The benefits are incredible. People always say, give to get. I don't know how else to give other than what I'm doing, but it seems to be resonating with people and it's just rather than like, “What can I take from the world? It's what can I give to the world.” I don't know, man. I don't know how to describe it, except for I'm just a lot more calm and a lot more at peace with where I am and my investment returns, especially this past 12 months maybe would argue that I should be paying a little more attention. But I don't think that's actually reality. I think where I'm at is actually pretty okay.
William: With investing, it's a very long game. 12 months doesn't really matter. If you are positioning yourself to succeed over 30, 40, 50 years, why do you care what happened in the last 12 months? Especially, if you didn't screw up so much that you're knocked out of the game, then you're absolutely fine. Paper losses and all of that, who cares? I think there's a really big difference between the way that investing is often covered in the media, which I've been guilty of, too because I've written for Forbes, and Fortune, and Time, and Money, and Baron's, all those places are great investors over the years.
There's a sense of this horse race that you've got to beat the market and the stars are the ones who want to beat the market. That's all very well. If you're a professional money manager, you have to demonstrate that you've added value in some way. But I think the reality for most of us as much as we would like to beat the market and it's possible to beat the market, although incredibly difficult. The reality for most of us is really, you just want to build wealth in a resilient and sustainable way over the long term. And so, the focus then is completely different. Things actually protecting your energy, and investing in a way that suits your temperament, and investing in a way that's going to enable you to survive these difficult periods, so that you'll just stay in the game, that's much more important.
Bill: Yeah, I think that's totally true. I can imagine why somebody that's dedicating their life to constant outperformance would hear something like this and say, “That's nonsense" and I could understand why they feel that way. But I don't know, man. I guess I just got to a point where not to go back to it, but it's a big part of my life right now. Taking care of my grandma and making sure that my kids at this stage of their life know that they're loved, I'm probably remedying some stuff that I perceive that happened in my childhood. But one of the things that happened in my childhood was my grandma was the driving reason that I feel I am okay. To be able to be with her as she ages and to be the reason that the infrastructure around her exists and the people are taking care of her, it's just way more rewarding to me than did I outperform.
William: Yeah.
Bill: I think some of it's just like, I've just had some things go on in my life that reprioritized how I look at the world.
William: What made your grandmother so special? Because I remember hearing you talk about it before in another episode where you talked about you had difficulties with your stepmother and the like, and grandmother stepped in. What made-- [crosstalk]
Bill: She was just awesome, man. Every day for a while, my stepmom and I got to a point where she was like, “I'm not going to do anything for you anymore.” That's my version of reality. Her version of reality is probably well, I put a food over your head and structure around your life that you didn't have before. So, I did a lot. And as I've gotten older, we've mended some things. My mom's life for a while was quite chaotic and I think that when my dad moved me to Florida, my grandma became my mother figure. She lived 25 minutes from me, but she drove to pick me up from school every day, and then we go play golf every day, and she is my homie. I'd go see her every summer, I'd spend with her, and it was just all the great memories from my childhood are with her.
William: If there's something that you've learned from your grandmother that you'd like to replicate with your own kids, what would it be?
Bill: Being there, like, physically being there. I have some beef with how much she was able to emotionally be there. She had barriers around her and she's dealt with a lot of loss in her life, which probably had something to do with it. But the time together created these quality moments and I'd like to replicate that.
William: Yeah, that's an amazing thing. I don't know, maybe part of becoming a little older is, it reorients you. You start thinking that a lot of the stuff that was going to give you a sense of purpose early on like, “I'm going to become so successful that they can't ignore me, or so rich, or so smart, or so educated, that everyone's going to be impressed with me.” You start to realize how hollow that is at a certain point. I think most of us, anyway. Either you got some of that stuff and you realize that it still didn't make you happy, or you didn't get it and you're like, “Oh, shit, well, that didn't work.”
Bill: [laughs]
William: And so, either way, there's some crisis, I think. Unless you happen to be someone who just that stuff really does work for. I don't know, I don't want to be judgmental of other people. Maybe it's a shallowness, or maybe it's superficiality, or maybe it's just you're better adjusted, and you can take pleasure in things like that. I don't know. But for me, when I hit about 14, I think we've talked about this, part of what happened to me as I got laid off from this incredible job. Then you start to think, “Wait a second, I've worked unbelievably hard for all these years. It's something I was really good at.” I felt like a big shot, who would go off and into, presidents, and prime ministers, and billionaires, and traveling all over the world. And here, I was thinking that was my identity.
Maybe it was just a way of hiding from other stuff. It may be that that stuff gets stripped away and then you're like, “Oh, so, what am I actually left with?” And then you start looking around, you're like, “Well, I have these two young kids,” because my kids who are now 24 and 21, then were very young. Not much older than yours. And so, you're like, “Oh, okay, so, I actually get to stay home and take my daughter to school every day, or take my son and pick him up from school, or whatever it would be.” Yeah, just reorient you and you start to think, “Oh, maybe that's actually way more important.” Most great truths, these things are pretty trite to accept they do happen to be true, you get much more satisfaction out of that. But at the same time, you do want to achieve something and you want to feel your career is meaningful.
Bill: Yeah, no doubt. Do you mind telling people a little bit about what your job was? Because I don't know that too many people know that about you. Many may, but I didn't know until we talked.
William: Oh, sure. I came to New York in my early 20s. I'd grown up in England, and I went to Oxford and studied English Literature, and then I came to New York. I thought I'd be a great writer, and would write fiction, and write for the New Yorker, and stuff like that. I got off to a fast start writing for a lot of great magazines, and I would write book reviews, and I'd write long narrative features, and I'd go off to Mississippi, and write a seven, eight-page story about Byron De La Beckwith, who was a white supremacist who killed Medgar Evers, the great civil rights leader and was being retried now having been acquitted by an all-white jury, I guess the 60s. I would write these long narrative literary things, and then I ended up becoming a financial journalist, and I fell in love with the stock market. I went to work for things like Forbes, and I wrote for Fortune, and all sorts of financial publications.
Then I went to Asia and lived in Hong Kong to work for Time Magazine. I became initially the deputy editor of the Asian edition of Time, and then later the editor, which meant that I would be sending reporters around India, and China, and North Korea, and Myanmar, or Burma as it then was, and Pakistan, and Afghanistan. It was an amazing job. It is incredibly interesting job and covering things like the tsunami, and SARS, and avian flu. It was really fun, really interesting, incredibly demanding. Then, I went to London to edit the European, Middle Eastern, and African editions of Time. I felt like this big shot. I returned to my home city of London on an expat package for Time, which was an amazing ruse. It meant that I was living in a beautiful white stucco house in Belgravia in this beautiful area of London and my kids were paid for to go to private school. And so, it's all this great ruse.
There's still the tail end of the golden age of magazines, where Time magazine was still very powerful and getting on the cover of Time was a great thing. Time was owned by Time Inc, which was the most powerful magazine company in the world and sports illustrated, and People, and Money, and Fortune, it was an amazing powerhouse. But they had done this terrible deal with AOL. I think goes down as one of the worst deals in the history of business, where AOL and Time Warner had merged at the pinnacle of the dotcom bubble in 1999, 2000 around then. And so, they've never really recovered, so, the company became very weak. Then during the financial crisis in 2008, 2009, things really went to hell. Here I was one of the most expensive people on staff with my fancy expat package, running around interviewing people like David Cameron, the British prime minister, and Donald Tusk, who was the Polish leader who then became head of the EU, and feeling very self-important, and being flown business class everywhere to interview prime ministers, and presidents, and the like. Then suddenly, ignominiously, when Lehman Brothers went under and the financial crisis struck, I got laid off.
This is probably around October 2008, something like that. I remember calling home and telling my wife and my son, who must have been about nine or 10, if I remember rightly, maybe a little older, probably 11, or 12, projectile vomited across the living room. It was really intense. I went from feeling like this golden boy to feeling -- It's hard to explain, because you know it's not personal when these things happen that everyone tells you, “It's not personal,” but it's intensely personal. You've just been working-- [crosstalk]
Bill: I've given my entire life to this organization. Now, you're canning me when I need you, right?
William: Exactly. I've worked 70, 80, 90 hours a week for probably seven years at something that I was weirdly good at, at least in my own estimation. And then suddenly you’re canned, I was probably 40 at that time, so that really forced me to go back and think, “So, is it all just random, did I just lose this political baffle because I didn't smarm up to the right people? Is my profession dead, because I’ve spent all those years in journalism as it declined.” You're like, “Is this just going the way of horse carriages, and buggy whips, and all of that? I just need to change or is it a blessing in disguise? Am I going to be able to support my kids and my wife?” It created all sorts of issues in some ways. It's funny, I've forgotten all of this, I thank you for reminding me of my trauma, Bill.
Bill: [laughs] We can get into mine. [laughs]
William: Yeah, thanks. Live to regret asking you about your grandmother. Because I had been in New York for all those years, I grew up in London and I'd been in New York, then Time Magazine had sent me on an expat package to Hong Kong, and then I'd gone to London on an expat package. When I got laid off and I was living in London, it's like, “Where do I even live, what's my [crosstalk]? Then, do I keep my kids in these fancy private schools in England?” My son was at a 700-year-old private school in England at some point then. Initially I went to work. It was like a rebound relationship. I took a job at one of the few media companies that was really thriving. I was very lucky to get picked up. I got a severance package, and then immediately went to work for this other company, and I just hated it, and I felt like a trap rat in this cage being tortured. And then I quit that job and I started writing books.
Yeah, for me, I feel slightly guilty when I talk about this period as if it was a really big deal, because so many people go through so much worse stuff. Then, I would intimately remind myself about a great line from the singer, Neil Young, said, “My problems are so meaningless, but that don't make them go away.” In the grand scheme of things, big work, but it felt bad at the time and it felt a little bit like a public shaming.
Bill: Yeah.
William: But the benefit of it partly is that it forces you, when you're in sufficient pain and what you're doing isn't working. It forces you to go back to the drawing board. That for me was a very, very powerful and beneficial process that really has changed my life over the last, what is it, 13, 14 years. My life now, thank God, it's much better than it was then, but I had to go through this storm, a very long storm to get that. Maybe like I was saying to you before, when I was saying that the fact that things have not always been easy for you is partly what drives you to ask questions and learn stuff that it turns out to be actually a real gift. I think the fact that I went through this very painful period helped me in many ways. One of them as a writer, an interviewer. When I'm interviewing people, I'm much more empathetic and I think people trust me and tell me stuff that maybe they wouldn't tell me otherwise. Probably, because I'm pretty open about the fact that I went through the wringer myself.
Bill: Yeah. That's such a public position, and then you've got everybody on speed dial pretty much, and then you're fired and it's like, “Well, now what?” It had to be a very lonely feeling for a little while.
William: Yeah, you do feel. It's funny. I was talking to a friend of mine, who's very successful investor and he ran a hedge fund that was successful, and he was an eminent professor. And then his hedge fund got ripped apart during the financial crisis. We talked a lot about his situation or mine, and he talked about his sense of shame, and it's a very strange thing. I don't think many of us said that. Maybe it's men, we're not that comfortable talking about a sense of shame.
Bill: Shame is powerful stuff, man.
William: Yeah. We've mentioned guilt a few times. Guilt and shame, it's interesting. I read a lot of David Hawkins’ books. A lot of people have read Power vs. Force. I just finished another of his books this morning and I read his book pretty obsessively over and over again. One of the things that he says that was an important lesson for me is that these emotions like shame and guilt in in his terms calibrate very low. They're not very helpful. They're destructive emotions. And so, I think in practical terms, one of the implications of that is that you want to flood the zone with better emotions like love, kindness, compassion, empathy, truthfulness, things like that, serving others, sharing, because those things calibrate incredibly high.
If your listeners want to go read up on some of this stuff, I would start with something like Power vs. Force, which is the very seminal book of his and you will get a sense of what we're talking about with this scale of consciousness and I have no idea what to make of that scale of consciousness in literal terms. But figuratively. I think this stuff is very, very powerful to know that things like shame and guilt are not very helpful. In some ways, I think part of what we do is we take issues we live with as kids, parents or teachers, or schools, or whatever making us feel guilty, or making us feel that we were somehow lacking, or that we hadn't come up to scratch and we project them on to God, or the universe, or other people. We end up beating ourselves up with guilt and shame as a way to-- I guess we learned as kids that there were very helpful emotions, because they pushed you to be better.
In some ways, we learned this short-term trick that if I feel guilty enough about not having finished my homework, or about not having taken advantage of my privileges and having a good education, or not having cleaned up my room, or not having treated people kindly, if I just feel guilty enough or ashamed enough, then I'll improve my game. I think these emotions work, but they're very fragile. They give you a very fragile foundation. I don't know how I got off on this weird tangent, but I guess, talking about my own shame of being laid off. But part of what's helped me in terms of improving my life over the last 13 years has been to try fairly consciously to shift away from emotions like shame and to think more about how to be kinder, more helpful, beloving, stuff like that all of which I fail at the whole time, but at least-- [crosstalk]
Bill: I don’t think you fail at the whole time.
William: But 70% of the time. When you were saying before Bill about how with your podcasts, you feel you're sharing and you're helping people. I think you're tapping into one of these deep truths that again, all truths is platitudinous, but really important that the more you become sharing, and helpful, and think about serving other people, the better things become. Great irony, this is what behavioral psychologists like Kahneman talk about. We get on this hedonic treadmill, where it's all about hedonism, it's all about me, how am I going to make myself feel better. And so, you keep filling this gaping hole with more toast, and more donuts, and more sex, and more money, and more power, and more validation from people approving of you. All of this stuff, I think just doesn't really work. It works temporarily because it all has energy. But I think your happiness becomes much more sustainable when you're doing things like helping other people.
When you look at all of the great investors that I've interviewed, who were very sharing, and charitable, and giving, and have worked on themselves a lot, I feel they will validate that. I see that when I look at Buffett’s and the Munger’s. I interviewed Mohnish Pabrai, the other day for my podcast, which will come out I think next week. I was asking him about how he's changed over the years. It became pretty clear that he has a much deeper sense of service. I think he would have said that a decade ago. He might have thought it, but I don't think he would have said it. I think shifting towards that sense of service and that sense of trying to help other people just works better.
Bill: Yeah, I think that's right. It's funny how shame-- Whatever sense I had, I think it's not an unrealistic accounting of my history to say that I didn't have many problems from a monetary standpoint, but I was dealt plenty of cards. My wife sometimes really reminds me of that when I didn't have any adversity or whatever. She'll go through it a little. But it's amazing how much I have not felt worthy of anything that I have because I've just attributed it to somebody else. Then for a long time, I discounted anything that I did well as like, “Well, of course, that's what should have happened.” But then any failure, I beat myself up over crazy.
William: Yeah.
Bill: It took a while to get past that to be like, “No, I did earn some of that stuff and I do have things to be proud of.” Man, it probably took 32 years and I think I started to do it. I think it happened after this men's weekend that I went to where, I don't know, this guy got me all riled up, and I screamed at some people, and they’d like, I was talking to my parents but I wasn't, it's a person that represents. I think it was a conversation that I had to have.
William: Yeah.
Bill: It wasn't even necessarily a bad one. It was just one that I had to have and that unlocked some things for me. I think it may sound silly, but I don't think it was.
William: I think this sense of unworthiness is a really powerful thing that-- Maybe men in particular, I don't know. What do I know? Maybe men don't explore very often. We don't talk about very often, because we're so busy trying to be macho, and superior, and tough, and impregnable, and impressive. The admitting to a sense of unworthiness, [chuckles] it's embarrassing and weak. But I think it's a very powerful thing. How do you deal with it unless you're candid about it?
Yeah, I think about this a lot. It's funny that I don't know if you ever heard it. Again, it sounds like a weird tangent. There's a beautiful song called If I'm Unworthy by this guy. I think it's Blake Mills. He has extraordinary guitar in it. Really beautiful song. I often think of that line, because, yeah, it just begins, its beautiful line, If I'm Unworthy. It resonates in your brain because I do think we have a sense of unworthiness. It's like this feeling in some way that-- [crosstalk]
Bill: I'm writing this down, so, I don't forget it.
William: I hope you like it. There's a sense of being unlovable for some reason. I think that's in a romantic setting in that song, I remember rightly, but-- [crosstalk]
Bill: I don't know, man. Before I dealt with some of this stuff, I don't know that I loved myself.
William: Yeah. I think that's a very hard one. I keep resorting to generalities for men or for English people. Suddenly, I'm thinking it's a very hard one for English people. The idea of loving myself, when I came to America, and I would hear Americans on talk shows, and they were talking about, “I've learned to love myself.” I go, “What the hell are you talking about?”
Bill: [laughs] Rub some dirt on it.
William: Yeah, I've always hated myself. But I do think we internalized this sense that if you just beat yourself up a little more and you just drove yourself harder, somehow, you'd be more lovable. Again, like shame and guilt, it works in the short term. You actually can drive yourself really hard, if you're constantly seeking external validation and prove that somehow, you're lovable. But I think it's a really fragile foundation, leads to all problems like just unhappiness. I think you're having to rewire yourself as an adult, once you become conscious of that stuff and it may be that many of us find it so painful to face this stuff that it becomes very difficult to rewire. And so, part of what's been helpful to me, I can't remember if we talked about this last time I was on your show, so, forgive me if I'm being repetitive, but you can do-- [crosstalk]
Bill: Sometimes, it's good to revisit the important stuff, man.
William: And you can do what my kids do and just tune me out at some point.
Bill: No, no, I'm very listening. Listening very carefully.
William: Part of what I've been working on over the last year or two I'd say had been the two tracks of studying these Tibetan Buddhists and also studying David Hawkins, where they both have a similar way of dealing with this stuff. Hawkins, I would encourage people to read Letting Go, which I think is one of his more practical and grounded books. There's a bit in chapter two where he talks about this mechanism of letting go, which I'll gobble, but I think is incredibly important where what he's basically saying is, “When you feel stuff arising these emotions that are difficult, or these patterns, or thoughts that are difficult that you don't particularly like and they're very uncomfortable, instead of judging them, or suppressing them, or trying to change them, or projecting them on to somebody else, because you can't bear it. So, you start to think, “I can't stand this guy. I can't believe he's behaving that way,”’ when actually, it's just triggered something in you that you need to deal with yourself.
Instead of trying to change, or judge, or suppress any of these thoughts or feelings, you let them arise, and you look at them, and you're like, “Oh, okay, yeah, okay. I see that.” Because you're not resisting, Hawkins’ view is the energy behind them gradually dissipates. He also has this approach of surrender that I think is very interesting, where I think the subtitle of letting go, it's The Pathway of Surrender or something like that. There is a deeply spiritual aspect of what Hawkins is doing. He calls his path, the path of, I think devotional non-dualism. It's very connected to Buddhism and Hinduism, I would say. And so, he's surrendering a lot of these emotions, difficult thoughts, and feelings to God, I would say that it's just this--
If you don't believe in God, fine. Whatever it is, you believe in. You surrender them to your ancestors, to your grandmother, to nature, to the better part of yourself, to whatever it is. But that sense of you let stuff arise and then you let it go in some way without resisting it, I think is a very, very powerful mechanism that really goes deep. There's a very strong connection to what these Tibetan Buddhists are doing as I understand it. I started studying this great lineage of Tibetan Buddhists that includes this guy called Tsoknyi Rinpoche, which is T-S-O-K-N-Y-I Rinpoche. Rinpoche means precious one, I think and he has a brother called Mingyur Rinpoche, who's also amazing and their father was called Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche. He was also amazing. It's this great lineage that goes back, whatever, a thousand years or whatever.
Obviously, the Buddhists were studying the mind. They were sitting there studying the mind and just watching the way that the mind operates. They are the masters dealing with this stuff. One of the things that Tsoknyi Rinpoche says, I think it is a very helpful way of thinking about this is, he describes these difficult thought patterns, and emotions, and recurring patterns of reaction, and behavior, all the things that trouble us that come up again and again in our minds. He calls them ‘your beautiful monsters.” He says, again, instead of judging your beautiful monsters, and hating them, and suppressing them, denying them, he says, “You need to befriend them and treat them in this kind, and compassionate, and loving way, because they're part of your phenomenon.”
There's a course that I've been doing on and off for the last year or so, he has online. It's called Fully Being, I think it's very good. I think he's remarkable in many ways and has a lovely presence. He says, “I think in that one day, we will be friends with all of our beautiful monsters.” I love that idea that instead of looking at that sense say of something triggers a sense of shame, or a sense of embarrassment, or a sense of humiliation, or a sense of being unlovable and it comes up, and you look at it. What Tsoknyi Rinpoche says is, he has this whole practice called handshake practice. And so, you greet it and you say, “Hi, yeah, all right, I see you. There you are. Welcome.” But you're not indulging it and you're not getting super entangled in it, you're not getting obsessed with it, but you're also not suppressing it and denying it.
I think it accords with what David Hawkins is saying that, “When you don't resist things, the energy dissipates-- The energy behind them dissipates.” This gives you a practical way of dismantling or disarming these very painful emotions and patterns that maybe we never dealt with. Maybe you could do it by going to a really good psychiatrist or something. I'm sure there are many parts up the mountain, but I think this is part of your repertoire or one's repertoire. It is a very, very helpful mindset. It's a more friendly mindset. If one of your kids got really scared, or was really irrational, or wet the bed, or was ashamed. you wouldn’t go there and be like, “You idiot, I can't believe you did that. What sort of a schmuck are you?” You'd be like-- [crosstalk] ‘ Bill: Hopefully, I wouldn't. Sometimes, I say the wrong thing at the wrong time, but yes.
William: Yeah, we’ll do, especially, when we're stressed.
Bill: Yeah.
William: But if your kid runs into you and you realize that they've just wet the bed or something and they're totally ashamed, or whatever, or they went to a friend's house, and wet the bed or whatever, it is some form of shame, or failure, or disappointment. You’re at your best or you're reasonably decent. You treat them really compassionately and then there's this question, “Why would you treat yourself with so much less compassion than your kid or your friend?” I did this once, I suggested this to my son at one point because we were both doing some meditation and I said, “Picture yourself as a little kid and cradle yourself while you're meditating.” I've only done this once or twice myself, I think. But it's very powerful, where you're like, “Why shouldn't I be the little kid that I'm comforting and be kind to? Why should I treat myself so much more brutally than I would treat a friend who's in trouble or a kid who's in trouble?”
I think we just internalized this idea that it works to be brutal to ourselves. And because it worked enough that it got us through exams, it got us through periods where we’re disappointed, relatives, or teachers, or authority figures of some sort, you saw, you were like, “Okay, I'm really in trouble. I'm going to pull my finger out, and I'm going to work really hard, and I'm going to try to be better. I'm not going to swear at my mother anymore or whatever it is.” Then you behave well and they said, “You've been really fantastic this afternoon. I'm just so impressed and I'm so proud of you.” You'd be like, “Oh, so, it works when I beat myself up and I harness my shame, and my guilt, and my self-loathing and everyone approves it.”
There are probably all of these deep patterns that we internalized very early on that worked. I'm totally whether I'm utterly unsophisticated about this, any psychiatrist or whatever, anyone who's training will be shaking their head and be like, “I can't believe this route.”
Bill: [laughs]
William: But I think for me, I'm a slow remedial learner. It's taken a while for me to say, “Oh, so, I internalized all of this stuff that worked, but probably wasn't very helpful. I need to find a better way.” Part of the joy of getting older is that you discover that all of these things are changeable to some degree that we are plastic, just as there's neuroplasticity in-- There’s a great catalyst, Rabbi Ashlag, who said, “It's a spiritual law that any negative characteristic that you have you can change.” He wasn't saying this is an observation and this is what I believe. He's like, “This is spiritual law.” And so, I look at these things, I'm like, “Yeah, so, if I have anger, or hatred, or jealousy, or whatever and it comes up, and I go, “Yeah, there we go.”’
Bill: Yeah, I like that concept of acknowledging it, because I think that to try to run from it almost empowers it, because you're almost saying, “If you can't acknowledge it that it's so powerful that you don't want to touch it” in a way, at least that's what my mind tells me. I wonder if you hear all these stories about like Michael Jordan and what drove him, I think Tiger Woods probably didn't exactly have the healthiest mindset from a happiness standpoint, young in his career. I see those super outliers that use that as drive and I think maybe in the past, I've been like, “I need more of that.” But I definitely didn't need more of that. I think that what is not told-- it's a form of survivorship bias is all the people that use that that never had really bad outcomes because of that.
William: People had used it and it worked in one area, but it wasted their lives and all of these other areas. I think it's not an accident that many of the great investors that I've interviewed ended up with broken relationships. Mohnish Pabrai was visiting Charlie Munger probably a year ago, visits him a lot, but he took this wonderful video in which he asked him about my book and Munger was very kind and flattering about the book. Then Mohnish, as I remember this video that he sent me, said, “Were there any insights that were particularly striking to you, Charlie?” Charlie said, “Yeah, how many of us ended up divorced or in broken relationships?” One of the reasons for that, I think is probably because they're a little less emotional than a lot of people to be a great investor. It helps if you're maybe a little bit emotionally stunted, which doesn't necessarily help you in your relationships.
But I think it's also because they were ferociously driven and captivated by this. This is the point Charlie was making that it was such an all-consuming game that was very easy to neglect their partners. There's often a price. One of the things that's been helpful to me is a question in the last few months is to say, “What are you optimizing for, what is that you really want? Are you optimizing for maximum returns, maximum profit, maximum wealth, maximum approval from the outside world or what's your measure of a successful, and happy, and abundant life?”
I remember a discussion with Tony Robbins about this a few years ago, where he was giving examples of what constituted a beautiful life for different people and he was saying, “For one person, it's going to be to write a book, and for another person who is going to pay to have three kids, and another person is going to be able to [audio cut].” I thought it's really interesting, but at the end of the conversation, he added, “Would it be closer to that God?” That's really interesting, because also your motives and what drives you changes over the course of your life. I've done a grand tour of all of these beliefs. So, I was conventionally observant as a Jewish kid, who went through a bar Mitzvah and stuff like that. But I've mainly just wanted to get my presence, which included about £1000 and enabled me to buy an incredible stereo.
Bill: Nice and a fun party.
William: [crosstalk] Exactly. So, that was my religious upbringing. It was largely the culminating in the gifts that enabled me to buy a stereo. But then I-- [crosstalk]
Bill: I grew up in Boca Raton. I saw a lot of that.
William: Oh, okay. Yeah, so you're familiar. Then I became agnostic, and then I became atheistic, and then coincidental with my getting laid off from time, actually, very shortly before that I started to become increasingly spiritual, and that's been huge, unexpected shift in my life over the last 13, 14 years. It's made my life infinitely richer. I would have poo-pooed the idea that rolled my eyes and just thought, “Yeah, right. If you're a moron, that's a good goal. Good luck with that one, duke.”
Bill: [laughs]
William: And now, I'm like, “Yeah, well, there's a teaching of Rabbi Ashlag, the catalyst. I mentioned before where he said, “Basically, your purpose, the purpose of creation is to cleave to your Creator to become more closer and closer to your Creator.” He says, “The way that you do it is through what he calls an affinity of forms.” If there's this force of creation that's loving, and sharing, and kind, and compassionate, and creative, and all of that, you want to become more loving, kinder, more compassionate, more sharing, and overcome what he calls the desire to receive for the self alone, which is like, “Me, me, me, me. Everything for me.” He's setting out the path as being actually a matter of, how do you become closer to your Creator by becoming a better person. That to me increasingly makes hell a lot of sense.
When you said to me before that you've shifted away from wanting to have maximum returns, and manage other people's money, and get that external validation as a money manager, and you're like, “I'd actually really like to be there for my kids and I'd really like to do this podcast, and talk to people, and learn in public, and share what I'm learning.” That's much more attuned to what Rabbi Ashlag is talking about, which is cleaving to your Creator. It's not a creator in a sense of a guy with a white beard up on a cloud. There's a sense there's this force of infinite giving, and love, and sharing, and kindness, and all that.
Look, as I said, I've had all of the different belief positions. The one thing you know is that I've been wrong. This is all very personal and I'm not trying to proselytize in any way. But I think when you swim with the tide, and you try to shift in the direction of being less selfish, and kinder, and more compassionate stuff, things improve and then you look back and you're like, “Oh, why do I feel happier?” I felt much more depleted. In the days before I got laid off, by time when I felt conventionally successful in certain ways, but very dependent on external validation, on well, here's my Big Shot title. and here are the Big Shot people that I'm interviewing. I would go to India and I'd interview the Indian Prime Minister, a guy who's overseeing a billion people, or more, or whatever and you'd be sitting four feet from him looking into his eyes.
It was a very interesting head spinning intense life. It's really fun in some ways. But I didn't really stop to think, “Is this true to who I am, why am I doing it, am I doing anything of any enduring value?” In some strange way, I feel I had to get all of that yanked away from me, because it was so intoxicating that I don't think I would have left it of my own volition. Once it was yanked away, I left a space for me to start to say, “So, what actually do I want to do with my life? What's true to me? How do I harness the gifts that I've been given and the opportunities I've been given?” I think even asking that question is a very helpful place to start.
I remember one great teacher saying, “You should be asking every day. You should be saying, “Okay, please reveal to me the purpose of my soul. What am I here for?”’ Again, I'm not proselytizing in anyway, what do I know? But I think that openness, that sense of, instead of madly rushing to get a promotion, a pay hike, a better title, more respect, unquestioningly rushing to get more of that validation to fill the hole, I think it's really helpful to stop and say, “Okay, please just show me what I'm supposed to do. What's the purpose of my soul? In your position, why were you given these talents, these particular talents, these particular opportunities, these particular challenges that you faced?” Once you start to be open and ask that question, maybe also, it softens you up a little and it makes you a little more humble. And so, instead of saying, “I know, this is what's right for me.” A little more accessible to hearing.
I don't know. When you have a conversation with someone and you think you can say something that can help them, but they're so busy talking and telling you what they figured out about life and universe that you're like, “Yeah, I just can't talk to this person that I'm going to go,” which probably suits me pretty perfectly.
Bill: [laughs] No, not at all. I love talking to you, man. I'm really glad that this episode is going this way, because honestly, man, the first day that we met when we had lunch, that was one of my favorite days that I've had. That was a really memorable day. It was like, going back to what investing has given me, if I'm not an investor, then I'm not in that room at Markel, and I don't ask you to have lunch, and you don't say yes, and these are meaningful conversations, and I think this is what life is actually about.
William: I think we're on some kind of parallel journey together, Bill. If I am a mystic about these things and so, I think it will come into your life for a reason. Whether that's true or not, or whether it's just a helpful delusion or illusion who knows. I feel pretty strongly that it's true and it may be that believing that it's true makes it true. But I think we met for some reason and I think we're fellow travelers on this journey of trying to figure things out. If you can come in at an opportune moment and help the other person or talk about a particular issue that's on their mind, or help to share something that you've learned, and then they like to share something they've learned or whatever it was, somebody else shared something, it doesn't need to be a quid pro quo because I think also, there's a sense that one sets your mindset where you're looking to help other people, you're constantly getting help in all sorts of different ways, not necessarily by that person, but by other people. It becomes this really beautiful feeling that the world is looking out for you.
I was interviewing Mohnish the other day and I wonder if people will even hear this bit, because so much is said that it's really easy for your eyes to glaze over, but right at the end, I said something to him and he said-- I mentioned this guy, the colonel, who came in to run the Dakshana Foundation for many years. He was one of the most extraordinary people I've ever met. He’s incredible human being, who ran the Dakshana Foundation for one rupee a year.
Bill: Wow.
William: He said, he had lost his daughter. His daughter had died, I think in a car crash when she was pregnant. He said, “The Lord took away my child and gave me thousand children to take care of.” He was looking after all these kids at the Dakshana Foundation. He’s just an amazing guy. I mentioned him very briefly in that interview with Mohnish on my podcast and I said, “Yeah, you were incredibly lucky to get the colonel.” Mohnish said, “When you do the right thing, the universe conspires to help you.” That's really interesting to hear someone who is profoundly rational and cerebral as Mohnish expressing such a profoundly mystical and spiritual idea that I really deeply believe is true. And so, I think that's interesting that the world is conspiring to help us in all sorts of ways as we try to become better people.
Bill: Yeah, I subscribe to that. What I've noticed is, there's a group of people and they seem to operate in similar ways. Whether or not, it's becoming one of them, puts you in the peer group or whatever, but one of the guys that I'm thinking of is Saurabh. He's just a guy that if I can ever do anything to help him, I will do it.
William: Yeah.
Bill: And the reason is, I know he would say the same. I don't know how I can help him, but there was a way once upon a time and I'm glad that I was there for him.
William: I was in Omaha recently for the Berkshire Annual Meeting and Guy Spier had a Friday night dinner, and I was in this room with a guy and a bunch of other good friends, and Saurabh came in, Saurabh Madaan, for people who don't know, if you look at the Google Talks on investing, Saurabh hosted most of them including mine, which I looked at the other day and has a lot of hits and at the top someone someone's written great content, terrible speaker really made me laugh.
[laughter]
Bill: Aren’t the comments just great?
William: Oh, Jesus.
Bill: [laughs]
William: At least, I could laugh at that. It's pretty funny, great content, terrible speaker. Then I put a dislike on it, which I never do. I’d say, “You fucking idiot. Really? You are serious, you're going to dislike that.” I thought maybe I should actually put like on his comment instead, it'd be better for my ego. But when Saurabh came into this room in Omaha, people including me lit up. I felt myself like, “Saurabh, it’s lovely to see you.” What an amazing thing to have that be the way that the world greets you? Because he's just a really lovely bloke. He's a very warm, kind, generous, sharing guy.
In practical terms, if you want to be cynical about this, you could say, well, as Robert Cialdini says, “There's reciprocation bias.” When you're decent, and you're helpful, and you are kind, and you do good stuff to other people, they also want to help you. This is something that Guy Spier figured out very early in his career. He was like, “Well, so if I become nicer, and kinder, and I'm looking to help people, and people will do good stuff to me.” It's relatively cynical at first, and then what Guy found and he wrote about this in the Educational Value Investor, which for your readers haven't listened, I would really encourage you to read and I'm totally biased, because, A is he’s an old friend, B. I helped him write the book. He talks about this very candidly about how initially it was selfish, but then you become addicted to helping people, because you start to feel so good when you help people. And so, it's a positive addiction.
Bill: Yeah.
William: I think what's interesting is, when you see people like Guy, Mohnish Pabrai, Saurabh Madaan, Tom Gaynor, Buffett, Munger, and you see them all working on themselves trying to become better people, there's something very inspiring about it. There's something really deep going on here that if you tap into is really life changing. Because I can see, for example over the last few years, the changes in Mohnish. I asked him about this in our interview, where I said, “You've just become gentler, and softer, and kinder over the years. Was that a conscious effort or did it just kind of happen?” But I definitely see it. I think it was very striking.
At the Berkshire Hathaway meeting also, when Buffett was talking about-- It's really worth looking at the replay for people who weren't there or who don't remember this, because it was very easy to miss, where he showed the pictures of these optical illusions. I think they were vases or something that could be women's faces or something like that. He started talking about how-- When he read Ben Graham, there was a certain chapter, I think of The Intelligent Investor, where he suddenly saw something that he'd never seen before, and the scales fell from his eyes, and he understood that the way he had been investing was really dumb, and that he should invest in a different way based on what he'd learned from Graham. Then he said, “This can happen in other areas of your life, too.” He said, “Suddenly, your mind just sees things totally different.” He said, “Maybe you just suddenly realize that you need to be kinder or that to be loved, you need to be more lovable,” something like that. If you look at the transcript, it's really worth looking at, because he said it in such a way that it's really easy to miss what he said.
Later, in that same conversation, he was talking about the realization that if you've had a really successful life, you really want to look back and be like, “How can I be a better person in the second half of my life than in the first half?” I think at some level, what Buffett was doing was saying, “I screwed up the first half of my life. Maybe my marriage didn't work out as well as it should.” His wife separated from him and his kids, I think, probably didn't get as much attention from him as they might have done. I'm not saying any of this to be critical I think to operate at that level, it takes a ferocious focus. But I think what he was saying is that he's learned to be a better person and he wasn't trying to say it in a self-congratulatory way. But he's giving you this really important clue that you want to become more lovable and how do you become more lovable? You give more.
I just keep picking up these clues where I see certain things that Buffett and Munger do or that Mohnish and Guy do for example and I'm like, “Oh, that's how it works.” Well, Tom Gaynor, I give you a beautiful example with Tom Gaynor since you and I met at the Markel brunch. A few months ago, I emailed Tom and I say, “I've become this advisor to this investment firm and they're having an offsite event, and they're going to be 30 people or so. Some really interesting people will be there. I want to interview a great investor there. Would you come? Can I interview you for an hour or something like that?” Tom immediately replies, comes to this event. There's nothing in it for him. He comes the night before. He has this lovely dinner with a bunch of us and then I interview him the next morning. He doesn't have time to stay to listen to a couple of events that are really great. They're really, really interesting speakers. It turns out he's taken a train for six hours from Virginia to come to this event, to have dinner, and then be interviewed by me the next morning, and then he gets a train home. He's who's co-CEO of a Fortune 400 company. He's overseeing what, 17,000 people and about 20 private companies, and probably $20 billion or so in assets and he makes the effort to do that.
Bill: Yeah, he drove his Prius to train.
William: Exactly.
Bill: Yeah.
William: That's just a really kind and decent bloke. When you see something like that, you never forget it. All of the things that I've seen in my interactions with Tom, interviewing him and the like, nothing speaks louder than the fact that he took a train for six hours from Virginia for that event. He wasn't taking a private plane, he wasn't saying, “No, I'm too busy. There's nothing.” He didn't take the offer of doing it over Zoom, which would have been much easier because he said, “I think the energy is much better when you're in person.”
Bill: Yeah, he was one of the first to have an in-person meeting.
William: Yeah.
Bill: I gave him a hug. When I saw him. I was like, “Thank God, you're doing this. The ice needed to be broken.” [laughs]
William: Amazing. Amazing. Tom is someone who has deep wisdom. Tom understands the importance of human relationships, understands the importance of doing the right thing, being kind, taking care of other people, helping people. In my book, when I interviewed and wrote about Tom, I think in the chapter on high performance habits, one of the things he said is, the part of his competitive advantage is that he's a nice guy. He wasn't saying in a conceited way. He was saying, “There are just so many people who want to help me” and he said, “It just helps.” That's what you were saying about Saurabh as well. There are deep truths here that I think for your listeners, some of it, they'll just be listening to us, they'd be like, “God, what are these guys droning on about? Some of it--”
Bill: [laughs]
William: If there’s something [crosstalk].
Bill: if they're still listening, that's probably not their answer. They probably understand by now.
William: Maybe, but I think if there's a takeaway here, it's to start looking at the way people like Gaynor, Buffett, Munger, Mohnish Pabrai, Guy Spier, the way that they're behaving, in David Hawkins terminology makes you go strong. And look at the way that people behave that makes you go weak. When you see somebody, when you see politicians lying, or you see-- Even when I say that there's a part of me that sinks. When you see the behavior of the people on billions or succession and you start to think, “God, the whole world is just this dog world where it's a zero-sum game,” it makes you go weak. When you see someone lying or just looking out for themselves, it makes you go weak. When you see people behaving like Tom did when he came to New York for that meeting, it makes you go strong and it makes you--
There's actually a really, really important underlying set of principles here. When I look at Mohnish, if people have the time and energy, I hope they'll listen to the interview that I did with Mohnish, which hasn't been released yet on my podcast just because I think if you listen carefully, you start to be like, “Oh, that's what works in life.” Mohnish, for example, reading David Hawkins and saying, “I'm only going to be truthful, I'm just going to be honest, I'm going to have integrity.” That decision has led to all sorts of remarkable things happening in his life including Munger becoming a very close friend and mentor of his, Buffett becoming a friend, Li Lu, one of the greatest investors of our time becoming a close friend, Guy becoming a very close friend.” It is like the world is conspiring to help him. As a result, he's able to live thousands and thousands of really deserving, really bright, really underprivileged kids out of poverty through his foundation, he's able to make lots of money as an investor, although he doesn't intend to have it when he dies, because he's going to give it away, and he has these two really lovely daughters, where he has a great relationship from what I can see.
It's all by understanding certain principles about how to behave. That's in a sense what I'm getting at is. Maybe this gets back to what we were talking about before where I was saying, instead of becoming obsessed with things like shame and guilt, which calibrate really low, flood the zone with these more powerful principles that people like Gaynor, and Mohnish, Guy, Warren, and Charlie illustrating at their best. This isn't to say they're all perfect, because they like us, no doubt, behave crappily at times, I'm sure. If they don't anymore, they certainly did in the past. And so, we all have both sides within us, but if you gradually start to tilt the balance in one direction, in a better direction, being as Tom Gaynor would say directionally correct, the impact is overwhelming.
Bill: Yeah, I agree with that. Well, it's certainly what I've seen. I don't know. My N=1, but it's the only view that I have. I think it aligns you in this win-win mentality. I think Rishi at Google, I think he's the one that introduced me to the idea of playing win-win games rather than zero-sum games. I believe he attributes it to Naval. But when he said it, it was one of those truths that just struck me [crosstalk] guess.
William: Charlie is obsessed with the idea of win-win games. Peter Kaufman, who's very close friend of Charlie's is obsessed with the idea of win-win games. Yeah, it's funny. I remember Guy saying to me once that whenever he had some major revelation and was congratulating himself on something you'd figured out. He discovered the Buffett figured out 40 years earlier.
Bill: [laughs]
William: Yeah, it's like Naval can congratulate himself if he wants on figuring this out, but you look at Munger, who's 98 and he figured this out a long time ago. You look at something like Costco, which Charlie was on the board or was Chairman of the board, I think he may have stopped being chairman now. He’s been very closely involved with Costco. Costco embodies their sense of wanting to be a win for everybody in its ecosystem. The customer is doing great, I think they treat their employees pretty well in the grand scheme of things, their shareholders are doing great because they treat the customers great. And so, the more you can tap into these ideas of not treating life as a zero-sum game, where you're going to crush everyone, and impress everyone with your brilliance, and the better it gets.
I think part of what was difficult for me was that I came out of this system in England that was very ritual. I went to Eaton and then to Oxford. It's a very out of school called world where you really wanted people to know how bright you were and I don't know you wanted impressive credentials and that drove me a lot that desire to impress. But when it doesn't really work to make you happy, you're lost. You have to figure out, “Am I just going to run twice as fast and push twice as hard to get the world to notice me and validate me or do I have to find a different system?” For me, what's been very powerful has been to see this whole other system and see it’ll work. I said to Mohnish the other day when I was interviewing him, I said in some ways, “It seems you've been engaged in this grand experiment with the principles that you learned from David Hawkins.” He’s like, “It's not an experiment anymore. It worked.” That's what's cool.
You want to look to people who are a little further along on the path and be like, “What worked?” When you see it, go big on that. It's not an accident when you see these patterns. I guess that's what I do as a writer and as an interviewer is I'm trying to figure out these patterns of what works. But it goes back to what Munger says. I observe what works, and doesn't work, and why.
Bill: Yeah. It's been fun to listen to you interview. Have you enjoyed doing it?
William: Yeah.
Bill: I know you've always done it, but now it’s broadcasts and audio.
William: I find it stressful. I'm surprised at how stressful I find it. Probably, it was more stressful at start. But no, it's still stressful. I interviewed Guy Spier, a week or so ago. I was stressed before. I've spent hundreds of hours talking with Guy over the years and I was still stressed. I was partly stressed because I went to an event recently, where a great novelist was interviewed by a close friend of ours and it was just terrible. It was all so self-referential, and it was all about their friendship, and what-- I don’t know. It wasn't really there for the audience. When I see other people screw up, I'm aware that I can screw up really badly myself.
Bill: [laughs]
William: There's always this question of-- Yeah, there's still quite a lot of performance anxiety. Part of what I do is, I prepare obsessively. I spend several days preparing for an interview.
Bill: Yeah.
William: I'm interviewing someone in a few weeks and I realized, I've ordered seven of his books in preparation and it's not that I'll read all of them, but I'll graze. I'll go through them and I end up with probably 15 pages of questions for many of my interviews and so. Yeah, it's stressful and I'm as obsessive as ever. But when it's good, it's really a deep pleasure. When someone tells you something that's true, and it's really honest, and it's really candid, “Ah, okay, that's it. That's beautiful.”
Bill: Yeah.
William: I've been trying to interview people who are very honest. I don't know. I was listening to an interview of yours that you did with that guy from Kenya-
Bill: Yeah, Erick Mokaya.
William: Yeah, talking about his childhood. I thought it was very moving when he was talking about his struggles to stay in school, and how he needed all of these different people to step up and give him scholarships, and how he needed-- [crosstalk]
Bill: Amazing story, right?
William: Yeah. I just think, when you hear people tell their stories, and they're moving and true, there's something just intensely beautiful about it. And also, there's something very intimate about hearing people's voices.
Bill: Yeah.
William: It's inside your head. So, I'm torn. There's a part of me that thinks, “Oh, it's a really a ephemeral form and what's the point and I should just be writing, because that's the real game.” Then there's a part of me that’ like, “No, I really love listening to conversations.” I've listened to so many hundreds of hours of shows like Fresh Air, where Terry Gross interviews people, and she's just been an amazing interviewer, and I always loved conversations. I don't know. Do you have any tips to me? What have you figured out over the last--? [crosstalk]
Bill: I don't know, man. You're quite good at what you do. I was listening to an episode today that I had recorded and I guess that my biggest thought at the moment is, I think I messed up the interview as a questioner, because, one, I really wanted to help the person that I was interviewing, and two, I think I had some questions for the person that were not authentic to the conversation that I was having, if that makes sense. I think it made the interview a little bit choppier than it should have been. And actually, in focusing on the questions that I thought would be right, I think I missed the questions that could have made the conversation great, that could have made the person-- it could have highlighted who I wanted to highlight. But there was a tension between the execution and I'm-- I don't know, I'm upset at myself for it. That would be the only thing that-- But I think you're very good to listen to, man. I listened to them all.
William: Ha, thanks. But it's funny, Bill as an interviewer, I'm trying to try to notice stuff. And so, as I asked you that question about what you've learned and you started to admit this very vulnerable thing about where you thought you'd messed up. Your right arm crossed over your body, and clenched your left arm in this protective position. My daughter will say, it’s like you're protecting yourself against a predator or something-- [crosstalk]
Bill: Yeah.
William: I suddenly felt something on my forehead and realized that I had a bead of sweat on my forehead. As we start to discuss what we're trying to learn about interviewing, both of us actually have this weird physiological reaction.
Bill: Yeah, that was totally-- I could not have controlled that. I was thinking elsewhere and I just did it.
William: Right. I'm like, “What is that? Is there like a fly on my forehead?” Then I reached out and I'm like, “No, I'm hot as well.” It's literally a bead of sweat. That's really interesting to me that we care so deeply and we're so worried also about being judged as somehow having screwed it up. So, that's somewhere where our fear of being unlovable and showing our failure, showing our stupidity, showing our incompetence very publicly comes in. The way I deal with it is by forcing myself prepare obsessively, so, at least I have as much control over the material as possible. And then again, we were talking about letting go and surrendering before.
There is some weird aspect that I'm trying where again, I'm not trying anyway to be pious, or sanctimonious, or proselytizing. But if I say to myself before an interview, or before writing anything, or before giving a speech, if I'm trying to say to myself, “Let me be a force for good. Let this somehow reveal light in some way. Let me shift the world in some small way towards something good.” Again, I'm talking about something I know nothing about. But how Buddhists talk about dedicating their practice when they're meditating and catalysts, who I study a lot. They talk about the [unintelligible [01:29:14] the direction like the intention behind a prayer. And so, I think there's something about setting an intention that's really powerful.
Just deciding, this is not just about the ego of William Green, or selling books, or making my reputation bigger, or getting more Twitter followers, or whatever. There's a big part of that ego that's part of our ancient survival instinct, I think that wants us to survive in the jungle as an animal or whatever. We do have these very strong primeval, or primal, or whatever they are, instincts for survival. But I think the more you shift that towards wanting to help other people, the more it helps, whether it helps in any empirical way or whether it just softens you, because it allows you not to clench so much and just think, “Oh, my God, are they going to think I'm smart.”
Bill: Yeah.
William: That's something I do consistently. Literally on my way, as I was driving from home towards my office where I'm doing this interview, I'm thinking about that, I'm like, “Let this in some way be a force for good.”
Bill: Well, I think it has been. I think we've definitely touched on the wiser and happier part and I think it will probably generate richness for people, too.
William: I mean [crosstalk] rich.
Bill: Well, how's the book going? What are book sales like? I would assume that you have a big first push and then, I don't know what the cadence looks like, but what's the tale like?
William: The book has done really solidly and pretty consistently well. Thank God. Well, one way I measure it is, I think it's been translated into more than 20 languages. That's really cool.
Bill: That's cool.
William: Some of them are really wonderfully unlikely languages. I love the fact that it's not only going to be in whatever, German, and French, and Spanish, and the like, and Mandarin, and whatever. But three different Indian dialects. When you look at them, you realize, there are more people who speak those dialects than who speak other languages in the world. It's amazing. So, Gujarati and Maharashtra, and Hindi, I think it's been translated into. Then things like Estonia and Thai. There's something really wonderful about that. That gives me a great sense of joy and I continue to get letters from people, or emails from people, or messages on my website, or Twitter, or LinkedIn from people saying that it's had a powerful effect on them. That's really lovely. That's a very joyful experience.
Then there's a part of me that I look and I'm like, “Why is Morgan Housel’s book been so much more successful?” I look at that and I'm like, “Ah, jealousy, my old friend, or resentment, or self-pity, or sense of inadequacy.”
Bill: [laughs]
William: I look and I'm like, “Oh, yeah, that too, still got it, still got those beautiful monsters.” There is a part of me that wishes that I were number one international bestseller. Again, it's a reminder of my own mediocrity and uselessness.
Bill: [laughs]
William: Then I have to pick myself up again and remind myself, “That's all good. Stop feeling so sorry for yourself and just be grateful for the fact that you get these opportunities.” Writing book brings up a lot of stuff. It brings up a sense of your exposure to possible criticism, your vulnerability, your inadequacy. I missed my deadline by about two years because I was so obsessively perfectionist about it. When I look back, there was a lot of pressure along the way that came with that decision, where I just decided, I'm just going to make this book as good as I possibly can and to hell with everything else. If it's not lucrative because I spend so much time on it, fine. I'm just committed to quality. If it dries my editor nuts, I'm really sorry. I hope he doesn't cancel my contract, but I'm just going to make it as high quality as I can.
When I look back now, I'm so glad that I made that commitment to make the book as good as I could possibly make it. I don't really have any regrets where I look at something and I say, “God, I wish I'd just taken more time over that.” It's like, ”Why did I take a lot of time?” If they're failing, it's not for one of the efforts.
Bill: Yeah.
William: I spent about five or six months just on the chapter on Nick Sleep & Qais Zakaria. At one point, when I was feeling incredibly vulnerable about how ridiculously long I was spending on it, and how obsessive I was about trying to get everything perfect, I sent him an email, and let him know what was going on, and I said, “I'm not really doing anything else. I'm just quietly in this tunnel just working away at this thing, and just ignoring the rest of the world.” He wrote me back a lovely email that said something about how that obsessive pursuit of quality. He said, “That's where all of the peace and satisfaction lives.” I took that really seriously. There’s a write in that chapter like Nick and Zak were obsessed with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and with particularly this idea of quality that the author per se talks about.
I do think focusing obsessively on quality to the best of our ability, I have more and more faith in that as a path. And so, again, with my podcasts, I'm like, “There are so many people pumping out so much crap. Let me try to do something that's as good as I can possibly make it.” That's the one thing I look back on where I don't really have control over the sales, I don't have control over the fact that most of the reviews on Amazon stuff are good. But someone posted something last week that he gave a one-star review, which I think I've only had a handful of one-star reviews. I have 2,000 or 3,000-- [crosstalk]
Bill: I've gotten some of those.
William: Literally, one-star review and he said, “Terrible. It could be whittled down to hundred pages.” I say to my wife, “Yeah, that's probably true. Maybe a page.”
Bill: [laughs]
William: You are exposed, and you're vulnerable, and it gives you a way to face a lot of your beautiful monsters. But the basic idea if I'm trying not just to be self-referential, I think going big on a commitment to quality in a world that's committed to pumping out a lot of stuff that then people look at later and they say, “Yeah, it wasn't my best work” and I'm not sure the world needs a whole lot more of that.
Bill: Yeah.
William: I would just encourage people to go big on quality in whatever way that resonates for you. It's not possible at certain times in your life. When I was editing a weekly magazine, there were times where I would say to quote English soccer commentators, “We won ugly.” It was like, “You won ugly with a goal in the last minute that probably should have been disallowed, but you won to ugly.” There are times to win ugly, but I think when you have an opportunity to create something that's true, beautiful, and good, there’s a friend of mine would say, “You really want to go big on it.”
Bill: I could not agree more. I actually think that that's a great place to close the conversation, but I want to say, I do think that we are on parallel journeys and I look forward to many more years being on the journey with you, because I think you're a super special guy, I love talking to you and I hope that everyone that heard this that hasn't bought your book yet, goes out and buys the book. We're coming from Morgan Housel. Morgan, if you're listening, know that we're coming for you. Thank you for your time.
William: Thank you. In confessing my sense of inferiority to Morgan, I'm trying just to make peace with my beautiful monster, so that finally, I can just look at and say, “It's okay, Morgan's better than you.”
Bill: I don't know about better, but here's to saying hi to the beautiful monsters and thanks again. I appreciate it.
William: Thank you. It's been a real delight.