Morgan Housel on Writing - [Making Media, EP.20]

Let's do this. Welcome to Making Media. Humans are in an eternal quest for convenience, save me time, make my life easier. My gosh, that's such a good start to an interview. Today, we are going behind the scenes with a master of his craft, Morgan Housel. He media is one big, never-ending lesson in how to build a media business. Four months and twenty conversations in, we've talked to leaders of media businesses of all shapes and sizes, and every conversation never comes back to the same thing. Make great content. What does that actually mean and how do you do it? The investing world that Matt and I are from, there are a few, if any, who make better content than Morgan. His blog has been a personal favorite of years in his first book, The Psychology of Money, just crossed three million sales. So he reached out to see if he had taken us behind the scenes. Where does he write? When does he write? How much is art? How much is science? To get into those details, we took a blog, Morgan wrote in late 2017 called The Freakishly Strong Base, and used that as a case study to explore his craft. It's one of my favorite pieces he's written and focuses on compounding in nature, business and investing. At this point, you might like to hit pause and read or reread The Freakishly Strong Base on the Collab Fund website, then come back here to learn how Morgan writes magic like this. I hope you love this episode as much as I did. Alright, Morgan, despite your push into the podcast medium recently, we are going to spend today focusing on your writing, which you are very well known for. We wanted to get into real detail, like dive deep into your process, how you think about writing, basically take something that is undoubtedly an art and make it as much science as possible. You can tell us if we are over-engineering anything, but we want to give it a shot. The way we thought about doing this was rather than talk about your general process, actually take a specific piece that Dom and I both agreed on. We both really enjoyed, and it goes back in time a little bit, so you'll have to refresh your memory. I'll just start out there. When I bring up the piece, The Freakishly Strong Base from October of 2017, what is your immediate reaction? Well guys, thanks for having me, I'm jazzed to have this discussion because the truth is, my little disclaimer here is that I've been a professional writer for 16 years, and if I'm being truthfully honest, I hope this doesn't spoil the episode too early, but I don't know that I have much of a process, and maybe that is the process in itself. We can dive deep into that. But I've always viewed writing as an art much more than a science, and art has no rules. You just go for it. I'm super jazzed to jump into this and pick some things apart. One thing that I would say early on that I think is really probably the most important thing about how I write and really gets to this piece too, even though this piece was six years ago. I remember writing it, which is not true for every piece, but I definitely remember writing this piece. What's always true is that when I start writing an article or a book, A, I have no idea where it's going to go, and B, I don't even know all of the insights or takeaways I'll be in the article. The process of writing is how I learn. I think that's true for almost every writer, and it's easy for readers to overlook it, that most authors, whether it's a blog or a book or whatever it might be, it's not that they're walking around with all of this information in their head, and then when they write, they're just giving it to you. The process of writing is how they learn. I write a sentence and it's like, "Oh, that actually reminds me of this. Let me go do some more research on that." Oh, now that I write this paragraph, that actually reminds me of this thing I read a couple of years ago. Let me go back and review that. That's the process of learning. That's what sticks out the most to me, but I'm happy to chat about this piece in particular, because it's definitely one that I remember. Let's start with the kernel of the idea that kind of rolled down the mountain. If you take every sentence as it comes, what began this piece specifically? Do you remember what the catalyst was? I definitely remember the catalyst. Yeah, there's a Bill Bryson book called "A Short History of Neural Everything," or maybe it's a brief history of nearly everything. He has one sentence in the book where he says 150 years ago, whatever, there was this climatologist, meteorologist who discovered that the causes of ice ages was not cold winners. It was cool summers. In the footnotes, he says who this climatologist was, and you go back and research it. This is really fascinating story that for centuries, literally for centuries, we have known that ice ages exist. It's in the evidence everywhere. We've known how many there have been and how severe they were, and it was always assumed that the causes of ice ages were abnormally cold winters. That the winters got so brutal that it just buried the world in ice. This climatologist whose name is so hard to pronounce, I'm just going to call him that climatologist. I'm not even going to try his name. He discovered that it was actually the opposite. Ice ages began when there was a moderately cool summer, and then the snow from the previous winter never melted, so that you began the next winter with a base of snow that made it easier for the snow to pile up. When you dig into his research, there's several academic papers read him about him. You're like, oh, this is compounding. This is compounding in nature. When you start with a small base of snow in the winter, like you begin with a small base, more of it piles high, and when more of it piles high, then the next winter, even more of it, and it just literally snowballs, no pun intended. So I'm never reading that and being like, oh, that's compounding in nature. I took a note of that. I have all kinds of scrap notes around of just being like, here's compounding in nature. I remember, actually, Patrick O'Shaughnessy tweeted, I think it was probably around this time about the increase in megapixels among digital cramers, and he laid it out. I'm making these numbers up, but he was like, ten years ago, one megapixel was great. And then it was five, and then 20, and then 60. I'm making those numbers up, but he laid out and he was like, this is compounding in photography. And I was like, yeah, that's compounding in photography. I have this example about compounding from nature and ice ages. What if it just wrote an article about compounding, which is like such a boring idea. Everybody knows what compound interest is. They think that you're going to have an insight about, hey, compound interest is cool. But if you can tell an interesting story around it and show these quirky examples, that might be kind of interesting. So I just started writing the idea about ice ages. And then from there, it was like, okay, because this was my stick, how do I turn that into a finance lesson? I don't remember where this idea came from, but it was the idea of like, how much of warm Buffett's success is tied to his age. How much of Buffett's success is investing skill, like earning annual returns versus just the magic of compounding. And the math behind it, I laid in the article, it's super simple math. It's like back of the napkin math, but you do the math and it's literally 99% of his success is due to just the amount of time he's been investing for. And the way that I sum it up is 99% of his net worth was accumulated after his 60th birthday. To be the amazing thing is that if Warren Buffett started investing in his 30s, like a normal person, and if he retired in his 60s, like a normal person, you'd have never heard of. So you can tie 100%, 99% of his success to this small base that he built up when he was a teenager and in his 20s, and also the fact that he's still going strong in his 90s. So just like the ice ages were so counter-intuitive that a moderately cool summer could lead to the earth being covered in snow, it's the same with Buffett. The idea that someone who just started a little bit early and kept going a little bit later could achieve his success, that's not intuitive either. But that's the common denominator of compounding is that it's never intuitive. So I think from there on the article, I was just like, okay, what are some other quirky examples of compounding in action? I think there's like an example of smoking cigarettes, how like it was so important in World War I, I think it was that the soldiers were comfortable, so they started putting cigarettes and all the care packages and all like their meal packages. And when they got home, everyone was addicted to cigarettes and that just like exploded from there, exploded into society. There's all these things, we're just a tiny little nudge, a freakishly small base, the article is called, just blossoms into something different. I think when I was over analyzing the piece, something that really stuck out to me was, I got this opening story, which if I just got that in and of itself, I could have been telling it at the water cooler, at the evening party, it's a really interesting ice age story that most people probably don't know. And then I wouldn't have thought to connect it to something like Buffett. Are the stories themselves, the seemingly unrelated to finance stories that are so key to your work, are those usually the first thing that kick off your writing? Are those the catalysts that lead to the rest of the piece? Well, I think what's important about my writing, this is not true for I think most finance writers. And there's really no false humility and sadness, but I have no original ideas. I'm the passive dollar cost average into index fund investor. I can't write about the next great industry. I can't write about where AI is going. I don't have any insights into other things. I write about like, hey, compound interest is cool. Hey, sometimes you get lucky, sometimes there's risk. This is all boring stuff that's been known forever. I've always known that about myself. And therefore, if I can stick out as a writer, I have to do it through the writing and through the examples and through the stories. And there are other people who are not good storytellers, but they can come up with great investing ideas. That's their skill. It's never in my skill. So I've always been like first and foremost, I need a good story. That's it, because I don't have good ideas, so I need a good story. And so I'm always looking around for these examples of, oh, I might be able to twist that into a finance story. And once you have that kernel in your head and everywhere you look, 24/7, you always have this bug in your head of, how does this thing that I'm reading, looking at, thinking about? How does that apply to investing? And when you view investing in finance as a behavioral field, then the ideas are endless, because everything in the world is behavior. Everything is behavior. If you find something that is true in one field, it's probably true in other fields. So it's actually pretty easy to twist almost anything into a finance story. I'm always just kind of looking around for these. And sometimes just like the Glacier story, I find it and I'm like, oh, that's a good compounding story. But I probably didn't write the article for another year. I just kind of left it there and then came back to it when the time was ready for whatever reason. I'm always just looking for those stories, because I feel like that's, if there is any kind of edge that I have in writing, it's that. Is there a process behind that piece of it in terms of like, I block out X amount of time in my day, just to read whatever, either whether a book or stuff online or watching things. Obviously, you know, you need to build this repository of interesting stuff or just wade through all these stories until you come to something that really grabs your attention. Maybe it just fuels you to go and write something. There is, but it's not formalized at all. And I think the more that if I tried to formalize it, the worse it would get. I've never started reading a book with the idea of, oh, I bet I can find some great finance stories in a year. I'm always just like, oh, this book seems interesting to me. I might enjoy this. I'm never even actively looking for these stories. It's just, oh, let's do some pleasure reading. I might be interested in reading this book. And then you kind of let them come to you naturally. I think the more you try to formalize and put a structure behind art, the worse it's going to get. The more you just kind of let your mind run free and go wherever it wants to go, the better it's going to get. If you're a technical writer, that's probably not true. Then you need to like a formal research process. But I think if you're a storyteller or an artist, you just got to run free and go wherever it goes. I spend a lot of time reading, thinking, writing, talking to people, but it's not formalized at all. My calendar, as it pertains to writing, is totally free and open and has been forever. We're not writing in one specific place or one location or one specific time of day, anything like that. That I actually do. I write everything in this chair that I'm sitting in right now in my home office. I've never worked in an office. I work from home my entire career. And I cannot do the coffee shop thing. And even when I travel, I travel quite a bit for work. I can't work in hotels. I can't do it. I don't know what it is, but I need to be sitting in my home office with my noise cancelling headphones on with the door shut to do it. The other thing is, for whatever reason, I feel like I get really not impatient, but a little antsy when I write. So most of the time, I write one sentence and then I get up and I play with my dog. And then I come back and I write two sentences and then I go do the dishes. Everything is truly written one sentence at a time. Once in a while, I'll get into flow if you want to call it that and I'll write for 30 minutes. And that feels like a marathon for me. I think what actually the anxiety or the antsiness is is I write a sentence. And then I'm like, oh, that reminds me of something else. So rather than writing another sentence, I'm like, I got to go think about this for a while. So let's get up and go play with my dog. And then I'll come back and write another sentence. I think that's probably what it is. This is a important question, but I think interesting. Do you write in word or do you have an application that you write in? For years, it was word. And then for the last, I don't know, six or seven years, it's been Google Docs. And is there a reason for that change? It's not all in Google Docs. You can go, I can search everything very easily. And you can just search, oh, four years ago, I wrote an article. What was it called? Oh, I remember I used this phrase in there and said, oh, we searched. Oh, yeah, that was it. That's it. So I think it's just easier to discover. And this article specifically, do you remember how long it took, he's right? I think it's 1500 words. I would say, and this has changed a little bit over the years, but I would say almost every blog that I write now, I think about it for a day, two days. I write the whole thing in one day, and then I think about it for another day, and then I publish it. That's not like a strict formula, but I think in general, that's kind of how it ends up. People like very good writing books often talk about shitty first drafts, like just get stuff onto a piece of paper, and then you can work back with, you can delete most of it, but they'll be kernels in there that, oh, you already like or you can adapt and make them better. Are you really talked about how you write one sentence at a time? Do you like to think about that at all in terms of, this doesn't need to be a perfect sentence, but let me just write what I've got in my mind, and I go play with my dog and come back to it. Do the next one. Okay, back over the sentence. I've just written. For better or worse, this should not be advice, because this is probably a terrible way to do it. But if I were to rename my blog, I might call it shitty first drafts, because I feel like that's what it is. I think the fact that I write one sentence at a time, and I really think about this sentence, and I craft that sentence, and I reread it, and then I move on to the next, might make it a little bit easier for me versus other writers that what I publish is the first draft. I really don't do that much editing, but that's not because it's like first pass, and it's perfect. It's because I think most writers sit down and just smash out the whole piece, and then they go back and revise it, where I'm like, okay, one sentence. All right. Now, let me think about that sentence for 10 minutes. I want to change this word, actually, what if I use this word? Actually, I think I can cut this one word out of it, and so there's like a heavy editing line by line as I'm writing it. And because of that, I think when I get to the bottom, I like do a quick review, and I'm like, yep, that's it. Good enough. I think that phrase good enough is also important, because at some point you just have to let it go, and just say, this is good enough. I could keep editing this for weeks or months, but you just got to let it go. I was listening to a podcast yesterday, it was with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck on the Bill Simmons podcast. And Matt Damon said, you know, when a movie comes out, they call it released. We're going to release some move. And there's a couple of meanings to that phrase. One is like the public gets to see it now. The other release is the producer, the actresses have to say, it's good enough. I just have to release it from my soul and just let go of this. And I think that's true for writing as well. It's really difficult with books where the stakes are much higher. And at some point, you just have to say, send it to the printer. I'm done. I can't. If you gave me another four years to edit this, I would edit it for another four years, but at some point, you just have to say, I'm going to release this. Those are your first drafts. I'm quite impressed, and I'm glad that you don't do second drafts. I don't know how much better they would get. The other side of this is almost every blog post without exception. There are two or three typos in there. And after I publish it, I frantically check my DMs for people to say, hey, there's a missing word here. And I think because there's not that much editing, so there's always errors in there. You could always count on those DMs. We heard Mark Manson, I think was on Tim Ferriss, say that he actually starts some of his blog posts or his ideas actually start with the title. I think subtle art of not getting a fuck started as the title before anything else. Where does the title come in for you? I think 90% of the time, that's true. In fact, a little story, Patrick O'Shaughnessy has been a friend of mine for many years, and I so remember, I like vividly remember this. I remember where we were sitting when I said this to him. It was early 2018, and he said, what are you up to? And I said, I want to write a blog post called the Psychology of Money. I don't know what's going to be about, but I really want to write a post called the Psychology of Money. And he was like, oh, cool. So I eventually wrote that blog post, which is what turned into the book. I had no idea what that post was going to be about. I had no idea that it was going to turn into a book, but I was like, that's a cool title. I like that title. I would want to read whatever's in that post. So I would say a lot of times, that's the case. First, I start with a broad idea, oh, I want to write an article about X, and then it's the headline, then it's the title, and then you're like, all right, now let's figure out what this thing is going to be about. And once in a while, and this drives me crazy, this is the worst thing. I would say this happens 5% of the time. And then every 20 blog posts, I write a post and I'm like, oh, this is good. I like this. I'm proud of this post. What am I going to call it? I have no idea what I'm going to call this. And then it's like the four word title takes up 90% of the time in a 1000 word blog post. The four word title takes up all the time. And that's really frustrating. And I feel like most of the time that happens, the title that I end up using is shitty. If it doesn't hit you instantly, what the title should be, if you have to grind your gears to think of it, it's probably not going to be that good. Man, you're speaking my language. How many podcasts, conversations I've listened to, it needs to come up the title for. And the ones you sit on, as you say, like you never get this moment of inspiration that strikes you and think that is fantastic. It comes as you're listening to the episode or as you're writing the piece and it's like a hit. That's the title. You kind of have to get to the point of just release because it's not going to come to you. So just get something out there that will be satisfactory. I think it's true that the ones that strike you like lightning are always the good ones. I think in my whole career, the title that I'm proud of stuff. And this is all subjective. Other people might not think so. But years ago, I wrote an article about how tales drive everything, the tale distribution, the outlier events drive everything. And the title of the blog post was Tales You Win. There's two different meanings of that. But that too was just struck me out of the blue. And as soon as I thought about it, I was like, home run. I would also say that there's not a lot of, oh, I came up with 10 headlines and I got to pick the best one. This is not because I think I'm good at headlines, but I feel like it's usually the first one that I think of as what it ends up being most of the time. So structure of the rest of the piece, you tend to, as we've already talked about, start with a story that has nothing to do with investing. Then you bring it back to investing and then you can kind of dive in and out between investing, non-investing and then end up with something very simple, closing thoughts. You've been writing for, like you said, 15, 16 years. Have you just honed that structure? Do you think about it ahead of time? As you're coming through, like thinking, okay, what might the next sentence be? Are you conscious that, at some point, I want to shift gears and I want to go from the story into the investing piece and obviously you don't want to lose people along the way. Generally, your stuff isn't that long and it's kind of, like, perfectly bite-sized, maybe 10, 11 minutes or worth of reading. Are you conscious of that as you're going through and thinking out, it's probably time to move here? I'd say there's no formula. It's not like, oh, the intro should be x words and then I got to move into this. There's no formula. Here's a really important point. I've talked about this before. I consider myself a selfish writer and the fact that I write for an audience of one, which is myself, I only write an article that I myself, as a reader, would be interested in. I never think about the audience when I'm writing. It's almost like I write this in this sense of, like, this is a private diary and I'm just writing for myself. I do think in that structure, it's always in my head of, like, okay, are people getting bored yet? Are they getting bored of me rambling on here? Like, let's wrap this up. So I feel like there's always this impatient bug in my head that's like, what's the point you're trying to make? Let's get that point and move on to something else. And I think that comes into focus most often in the introductory story, where it's a story that has nothing to do with finance. That, if it's too long, people are like, where's this going? You're talking about ice ages? What are we doing here? I think that story is the most important part of the article because the finance idea I have is not unique. I'm like, hey, compound interest is cool. So that's important. That's also the spot where it's easiest to lose people. And I've seen other writers do this and they name names, of course. People who use a similar format of, oh, let me explain investing, but I'm going to talk about this other story. Nine times out of 10, I see authors, writers doing that. I'm like, oh, you're interested too long, way too long. You've lost me. You've lost everybody else because after I've been reading for four minutes and you're talking about cell division or something, I'm like, where's this going? So you really got to get to the point quickly. I think if there is any like formula in the process, it's not formulaic, but if there's anything that's in my head, it's this impatient bug of like, get to the point, get to the point. Get to the point. You featured many famous people with a last name that starts with a B, you have Buffett, Bezos, Batnik, probably the three biggest B's, I guess, Bryson, even the author. There might be a hidden subconscious theme going on here. That transition going from Ice Age to a Buffett story is actually pretty interesting. And if you would have led with Buffett, I would have just kind of thrown it into like, there's quite a few things written about Buffett. It's another Buffett B's. Exactly. It's so important not to hijack your question here, but what you just said is so important because if I started the article and said, let me tell you something unique about Warren Buffett. 90% of readers are like, by gone, I've read enough. This is one of 75,000 blog posts about Buffett published in the last hour. If you know it's a finance blog, and I start by talking about Ice Ages, or there's other chapters in my book that start with syphilist medications and World War Two battles. And like all these things, you're like, what? Where's this going? I got to read more here. I think that's a way to hook something in. Was this the first time that you had written about most of Buffett, or all of Buffett's wealth had come past his or sixth birthday? Probably not. I have no shame in repeating myself and using old material. I think it's probably true that I use that statistic as a passing quote in a different article. But I was like, oh, that's a cool statistic. I should elaborate on that. And that's where it came in this article. And I'm shameless. I do that so often. And when people point it out, they're like, hey, you've used this example before. I'm always like, yeah, and I'll use it again, because I think it's good. I have no problem repeating myself. So that happens a lot. A lot of times, the basis of a blog post came from a passing comment in a different blog post. In this piece, specifically, so you talk about the Ice Age, then you get into Buffett, the duration of which he's been investing. That's the key that no one ever talks about. You could very feasibly, and it'll be an epic blog, end it there. And then even your conclusion, you just rush it up into around 600 words or so, but you carry on with different examples, talk us through why you would have done that. Is it, I want to have a home that point with different examples or is it, I'm just having a lot of fun here. I'm just going to carry on letting these sentences blow out of me. I think there is a fine balance between getting to the point and giving somebody enough so that the point will stick with them. I have a book right in front of me that is so good. This is by Kevin Kelly. It's called Excellent Advice for Living. It's a book of aphorism. It's just a bunch of sentences, one sentence pieces of advice. That works. It works incredibly well. Just give somebody a one sentence piece of advice, just an aphorism. That's one end of the spectrum. On the other end, there is the 600 page book that just goes deep, deep, deep, ramble, ramble. I do think like there is a balance in there where you can add a lot of value by, I just want to make one quick point, but I'm going to give you just enough stories so that it really sticks with you. If I give you one example, it might stick with you. If I give you two examples, I'm going to grind it a little bit deeper at you. If I give you three examples, you're never going to forget this. I think maybe that's the point of this. If I ended with Buffett, it would have been like, "Oh, that's cool." The truth, too, is that anyone who writes a blog or a book knows that the majority of readers do not read all of it. Even in a great blog post that you're proud of, if you saw the data, most people read half of it and then they're done. Most people probably did make it to Buffett and they're like, "Oh, great. Done. Next, moving on." That's fine, but it's a fine balance. I've always written my whole career, roughly 1,000 word blog posts, between 800 and 2,000 words. It's all that I write. If I wrote something that was 500 words, I think instinctively, I would be like, "Oh, I got to add a little more." If I went to 3,000, then instinctively, I'd be like, "Oh, too much got to cut this. This has always kind of been my zone." I think there's something in there about the page. If you're writing 12 font, I think 500, you're still within one page. I wonder where the psychologically there's like, "I don't want to just be one page yet." Maybe two is like the sweet spot. If I'm like inching onto the third page, then we're still good. Any point in past that, then we're starting to be too long. I've told the story before that when I wrote psychology and money, the average book chapter is 4 to 6,000 words. And I was like, "Great, I'm writing a book. I'm going to write 10,000, 5,000 word chapters." And I started doing that. And after three chapters, I was like, "This is garbage. This is no good." Because I had trained myself over the years to write 1,000 word blog posts. And now that I was like, "Oh, let's write a 5,000 word chapter." It was just ramble, ramble, ramble, fluff, fluff, fluff. I threw all that out and I just owned it. I was like, "I know how to write 1,000 word blogs or chapters." So the average chapter in psychology and money is like 1,500 words. It's a blog post. So I just kind of owned that length that I felt like I had some skill at writing. When you bring up the different examples, I do agree by adding the Bezos point, which is about brand consistency, which is a different form of compounding. You show different forms of compounding in nature. And you could start to see how it's all connected, even though they're unrelated examples. Where do you store all of these? Is it all up in the head to have some type of good system for tracking, you know, compounding examples or anything else, a good notes app and ever note, anything that helps you keep this all organized? I literally just like a month ago, I started using read wise. I have no affiliation. I have no dog in that fight. And I think it's great. I think it's such a good note taking app that I use pretty consistently now. David Senra, another podcaster, he mentioned it. And he said, his read wise is he called it his smart Twitter feed. Because when you use read wise, you have all these quotes that you've highlighted. They has on the read wise app, it looks like a Twitter feed and you can go through all of the things that you've highlighted. David said he had 28,000 or something highlights, he has, I have about 7,000 between Kindle and stuff that I've loaded into it and he's so right, it's a smart Twitter feed. You go through and see all these things that you've highlighted over the years from all these different books. So that's great, but that's literally the last month that I started using that, but I love it. I have a Google Doc called Meet Stuff. That's what I call it. I've had for a decade. And whenever I come across a link or a passage or something, I just kind of dump it in there. There's no organization. It's a bloody mess of just random scatter shot thoughts. I would say a lot of it just is in the head, though, that's not good or efficient. That's just been a product of not being organized. I think now that I have this read wise structure, I think I'll get a lot better at organizing these thoughts and being able to recall them. Do you expect that to be true? Do you think in five years time, if we talk to you again about this stuff, you'll still be using read wise because so much of this is organic. It's so much like, I feel like this might be too much process for you. I would say in five years, I'm not going to have better idea, recall probably not. I think I've been doing this long enough. The habits are ingrained, hard to switch it. But I do. I was on a plane yesterday and I spent an hour scrolling read wise of some of these highlights that I highlighted in a book 12 years ago that I've now loaded into read wise. And I'm like, oh, that's actually great. Now, is that going to lead to better writing, probably not, or just marginally so? But I feel more organized today than I have at any point in the last 15 years. David Colossus family member here is a true testament to the read wise because when I have conversations with him on the phone, his recall for amazing quotes by David Oglevy or PT Barnum is just like, snap. It's never like fumbling over the quote where it's perfectly applicable to whatever story you're giving. And he talks about his process. He's been using it forever. He reviews them at night. And then in the middle of a conversation, it's like, boom, they're waiting for him. And he has done great things, not having any type of sponsorship deal related. And I always say, man, you would read why I should really have some type of partnership because I think the amount of people who've been awakened by that and studying his process, it's very clear. That was me. I don't think I had ever heard of read wise before David. Maybe I had, but as soon as he said, it's my smart Twitter feed. I was like, sold. Signed me up. That's been really helpful. You mentioned this a little bit. You have no editors, nobody that's actually editing the pieces. That's true. One manband from start to finish and that's by design. I'm not proud of this. This is not a braggie comment and I think it's a character flaw, but I've never worked well with editors. I worked at the Motley Fool for 10 years. I worked at the Wall Street Journal for about two years and particularly at the Wall Street Journal. Good people, good professional, well-being people, but it was so hard for me because I've you writing, always have you writing as an art. And in art, there's no right answer. And so an editor would say, oh, you wrote the sentence like this, but we think it should be written like this. And I was like, well, then get your own blog. This is how I want to write it. An editor would be like, oh, you wrote this, but I think you meant to say this. And I was like, no, I meant to say the first thing. That's why I wrote it. I wrote it because that's what I meant. If you do writing as an art, well, painters don't have editors, sculptors don't have editors. Now a lot of people will really disagree with me with that and say, a good editor is so invaluable. I think that's generally true. I think it depends how you're writing. I think if you're a capital J journalist and you're writing for like really clear, crystal clear, like you're just reviewing the day's news, then like, great, 100%. I think if you can take a little more artistic view of your writing, then I think it's with no disrespect to editors who I think are all lovely, well-meaning people that I've come across. I think it can just kind of get in the way of the art sometimes, in a way that I always found frustrating. So I've designed it so for better or worse, I'm a one-band band. The downside of that, like I said, is every blog I publish has typos in it. There is actually one in this one as well. There's a missing space. I'll tell you all of the. Well, you know what I kind of like about it is that when I'm a one-band band, if an article does well, I can take 100% credit for it. And if an article does bad, I get 100% blame. Whereas when an editor is chopped up your work, if it does well, can you take credit for that? Because the editor fixed it for you and if it does poorly, then it's easy to say, well, that's because the editor took out all the good parts. So I think just having 100% ownership over the good and the bad is really helpful. I have nobody else to blame when an article flaps other than myself because it's all just me. Are you loading the articles into the CMS or, you know, on the Cloud Fund, are you literally putting them online as well or is there someone that's touching them? That's all me. And no one else, everything from start to finish, even picking the images, formatting the images, 100% me from start to finish. That was my next question. Obviously, the stories and the writing is the important thing. But to some extent, what it looks like is important to the font size, the line spacing, all that stuff makes a difference to how people read these blogs, particularly whether you're on mobile, desktop, et cetera. Do you have a say, like, is that all you as well in terms of, like, I want this to look this way, I want the font to be this size and all the ways that it will interact with your writing? Yeah. Well, that's interesting. So when I joined Cloud Fund in 2016, Craig Shapiro, who runs a fund, was redesigning the website. And he hired me to be the full-time writer. So he was like, Morgan, you're a blog, tell me what you want. I was like, I don't know. So the web designer who's designed the website was like, oh, here's some font I like. And this is the spacing that I like. And I was like, great. Perfect. Looks good to be. Let's do it. And then about a year ago, we redesigned the site. And during the redesign, the designers picked a different font and a different spacing. And when they showed it to me, I was like, cool, looks great to me. And no issue. Like, yeah, let's do it. And the day that we made the change, I think I literally got 15 emails from readers being like, whatever you did, change it back immediately. I can't read this. And I was like, honestly, I can't even tell the difference. The fonts were like so similar, but that was eye-opening to me because I would never in a million years would have thought about it, but as soon as it made this a little tweak, like there was a protest, we switched it back to what it was. I guess I do technically have say over that stuff, but I really don't have any opinions other than just trying to keep the people happy. You referenced an article can be a flop or can be a massive success. Do you have a competitive edge to you? Do you measure success in any particular way with your pieces? Well, what's true when you're writing publicly is that if an article is good, people will let you know, and if an article is bad, people will let you know. And this used to really bother me early on. I had very little confidence in myself as a writer, and frankly speaking early on in my early days of the Motley Fool, I felt like I was one bad article away from being fired. And that was probably true. It probably was true. I was like, if I write a flop, the editors of Motley Fool might be like, yeah, let's cut this guy. And I think that was really true. When an article flopped, it really bothered me. And my wife, as I said, she remembers those early years of like she would come home from work, and I would be like moping on the couch, and she'd be like, oh, there's a bad comment wasn't there? This is back when they had the comment sections on the blog. And people are so ruthless that the articles bad, they'll write in the comments to be like, hey, this is shitty. I don't even know why you publish this, find something else to do you moron. And early on, it would ruin my day. Now there's no more comment section, but even on Twitter, people are ruthless. And it doesn't bother me as much anymore. The benefit of that is that you learn very quickly. It's like a very fast feedback loop. And I think I have gone out of my way to pay attention to that. I'm like, hey, people like this article, like why? What did I do? Okay. Let's try to replicate that in the future. Hey, people really didn't like this. Why? Well, I was using this tone. And maybe that was off-putting. All right. Let's not use that tone anymore. Not as formal as I just described it there, but I think if you just do this every day for 16 years, you start to pick up on what works and what doesn't. In any profession, a fast and honest feedback loop is critical. And I think in writing online is the fastest and most critical feedback loop that exists. Do you measure anything in terms of viewership or distribution? Any numbers involved? Or is it mostly the commentary that's coming back to you? I do track the numbers. I pay attention to it. I don't think we disclose it publicly, but I view it. It's never like, oh, my goal is x. And Craig, superior to a club at fun, has never from day one. There's never been a KPI. Yeah. Hey, your blog needs to hit these numbers. It's always just been like, let's go have some fun and see what happens. So I check our numbers once a week, maybe, but it's just out of curiosity to see what it's been and see what does well and what doesn't. But I don't dig any further. It's not like, oh, this article got 10% more views. So let's try to dig into that. It's always like, there's so much randomness that goes on. And I always say, this is true for books as well, 90% of virality is luck. It's just like the right person retweeted us at the right time and it just took off. So it's really dangerous, I think, to read into and say, oh, this article got two times as many pages as average. It's like 90% of that was probably luck. It's easy to mislead yourself if you dig too deep in the data. The article is called the Freakishly Small Base. If we relate that to you and your career, what would that small base look like if you were kind of writing it about yourself, or people who look about your success now that you've got an extraordinary blog and amazing book that sold millions and millions of copies? The thing that sticks out to me the most is that I feel like there's never been a major breakthrough in my career. I feel like it was always just like 10% growth every year or whatever that figure was. It's always been a pretty slow progression. I feel like if I look back, if I compare myself today to 2007 when I started writing, it's like, oh my God, there's been a lot of progress. But if I look at myself today compared to last year, there was no progress between the year before, hard to measure, a year before hard to measure, that in itself is compounding. That's what it is. Over 15 years, there's been a lot of growth. In any given year, it feels like no growth at all. And this is true, too, when I go, if I stumble across a blog post that I wrote 10 years ago, invariably, I read it and I'm like, God, I would never write this today. I can't believe I use that sentence. I can't believe I thought that was a good way to describe it. I can't believe how much I'm rambling here. There's been a lot of progress, but you never notice it in any short period of time. So I think that's the compounding of my career, but that's true for anyone's career. All good things come from compounding and compounding always takes time. And that's hard to recognize because bad news happens overnight. Bad news is instantaneous. Bad news is COVID, boom, overnight, we got a pandemic. September 11th, boom, overnight, here's a terrorist attack, where good news is just like a slow, grind higher over the years. That is so powerful, but it happens so slow that you never really notice that progression. Your first book is being a huge success, and I know you've got a second book coming out later this year. People often talk about second albums and first albums, and the first album or the first book is kind of like your whole life's work poured into this 10 tracks or 200 words or whatever. And the second album, some people say it is much harder. How have you found the process of writing the second book and how up for it where you in the first place? I think it's definitely true. I think you could say psychology and money was my greatest hits over at that point was 10 or 11 years, something like that. And the second book is that too, but over a shorter time period. Now, over that shorter time period, I think I got better as a writer, because in every one of these chapters for psychology and money and other stuff, it is derived from a blog post that I wrote. It's not copy paste, but it's like, oh, I wrote this blog post about this idea. Let me tweak that, change it, update it, add to it, fix what I didn't like, boom. That's the chapter. So there are chapters in psychology and money, the chapter about enough. That was derived from a blog post that I wrote in 2008. And then I changed a bunch of it and cleaned it up and went on and came into what it is. So I think it's just the length of the hits that you're pulling from, so to speak, truncates over time. But I don't think that's a problem. I would say, look, if I don't look at any of the sales, leave sales aside. If I just look myself at the manuscript of psychology and money and then compare that to the manuscript of same as ever, the book coming out later this year, I think I'm equally satisfied with them personally. In my head, I think they are of equal quality. But that's not to say at all that other people will agree with that or that because 90% of virality is luck that that feeling will translate into equal sales that I don't expect. Sounds like we got a godfather, godfather to situation going on based on the vibes that we're getting. So I believe that over the course of your career, whether it's other writers or other creators, have you been inspired particularly by people that you've modeled style after or anything else? Other people that you take inspiration from? Yeah, there's been so, so many. I mean, a couple that stick out one early on, I just feel like he got the early internet finance writing was Felix Salmon, who I think is now at Axios back in the day. He was at Reuters. When I said back in the day, this is 2009, 2010. He was like the first godfather of financial blogging that he was just in a league of his own at the time. I really looked up to what he was doing and I think at the time in 2010, I tried to emulate his style. I don't know if I do anymore, but back then, he was like super influential, but so cliche, but Michael Lewis has been, I think the best at turning business into storytelling. That's what he does. Actually, if you look at the core of Michael Lewis's work, it's about boring mundane topics. He just tells a better story than anybody else. Like who can write a story about high frequency trading and turn it into a thriller? That's pretty unique, or his last book is about COVID-19, very well-documented, but he tells stories about unique people from the COVID-19 battle. I've always looked up at his ability to take something boring and spend it into just an incredible story. There's two other writers that I think are the best contemporary storytellers that are much less well known. One is Eric Larson, who has written books like The Splendid in the Vile and Devil in the White City. He is just a absolutely stupendous storyteller, and his ability to craft a sentence is just mesmerizing. He's so good at it. I said he's less well known. I think he sold 10 million books. It's not like he's some unknown author. Every time I read his work, I'm just like, "Yeah, this is so incredible." The other is Robert Kerson, who wrote books like Shadow Divers and Rocket Men and Breaking Through a Hips ability to tell a story. It's just every time I read it, I'm like, "God, this guy gets it." I think if there's a common denominator between those two guys, it's that they know when to stop telling the story. They know how to not ramble. They know how to say just enough and then quit. Most good storytellers just keep going on and on and on and on, and you're like, "God, stop." To bring up David Senra again, who has read like every biography about every human ever existed, he was talking about how a lot of biographies have quite a bit of fluff. He was like, "I don't need to read three chapters on the origin of this person's last name," like the family history going back 100 generations. Leave that part out. I think the great storytellers, it's a reductive process. They know what to leave out. They know to just give you the key points and then move on. That's really great. The other writer who I think might actually be the best at this is Doris Kurnes Goodwin. He's a very well-known historian of presidents, which he's written about Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedies and whatnot. Most of her books are literally 600 pages. They're tombs. They're six inch thick books. And in those 600 pages, there is not one wasted sentence. Every sentence needs to be there. That is the skill. So when people say "revity," "revity" doesn't mean short. Revity just means that every word that's in there needs to be there. Doris Kurnes Goodwin is the only person who can write a 600-page book where every sentence needs to be there. I think from just a pure writing, jealousy, standpoint, admiration, she probably gets the crown. I don't know whether you have had this chance, but if you had the chance to talk to these people you just mentioned, what would you be interested to find out about their process or what they do or would you just chalk it up to skill an innate thing that they have in their body that they can produce this stuff? I would kill to have dinner with any of those three people. It would be so much fun. But because I know that writing is an art, I don't know if there's much that anyone could learn from that or me or anybody. I think that's true. Like if you sat down with Picasso back in the day and said, "Teach me how to paint like you can't. You can't do it." If you sat down with Mozart and said, "Teach me how to write a composition. You can't do it." Art is in your soul. It's so corny to say, but I think it's so true. I would love to sit down and talk to those three about writing, but I don't know if I could pick up much from them or anyone else because art is hard to teach. It's not impossible to teach, but it's not like you can just say, "Oh, here's the formula I go and copy it." It just doesn't work like that. Where do you stand then on writing techniques if you google it? You'll get tons of advice on use this sentence construction, "Don't do this. Read it back to yourself to see how it sounds." Like, do you take any of that stuff on board? I guess when you're starting your career, I have to imagine that you kind of fed this stuff and either thrown it away as you've gone on or you can embrace some of it. I just use the simple heuristic of, "Do I like this sentence?" Not if somebody else is going to enjoy this. I write a sentence and I just, like, does that sentence tickle me? If it doesn't, either cut it or rewrite it. If it does, great. Believe it in. It's the only heuristic that I use. I think the more formulaic you try to make it, the worse you're going to get. Because the more formulaic you make it, the less artistic it's going to be. Your sole north star that I have is, like, do I like it? And I just have to take a leap of faith that if I like it, somebody else will. Not everybody. There's a lot of people who don't like my writing because it's an art. Every art has different flavors. But it's just a leap of faith that if I personally like it, somebody else will. Do you think so much of this? Paul Graham writes about this. It's just down to taste. Maybe your taste is just better than other people's, so you kind of get it. You can read something and say, "That is interesting," whereas other people might read the same thing and either not get so jazzed up about it or they might skip over something that actually isn't very interesting. I think it has to be, and I think the proof of that to me is there are a lot of writers or even genres that other people love that I can't stand. In this too, I'm not proud of. I feel like this has just been a lack of effort in my part. I don't read fiction. And every time I do, or every time I try, I'm like, "Now, not doing it for me." And there are so many people when I tell them that, they are disgusted. And they're like, "Morgan, you are missing so much." And I'm like, "Yeah, I think you're right. I know I am missing a lot." But maybe it's taste. It just doesn't hit me. It's same with music and same with food. If somebody said, "I love country music, country music is in my soul." I'm like, "Well, it's not in mine, but good for you." I don't think you're wrong. I'm not gonna argue with you. So for music, people understand it. This person likes country. This person likes rap. This person likes rock. Neither of them are right or wrong. It's just taste. I think that does exist in writing. But because people try to turn writing into a formula in a way that they would never do with music, there's a great quote that I heard recently from Louis Armstrong. And somebody asked him, they said, "What is good music?" And he said, "Good music is anything you can tap your toe to." And he said, "You don't ask what it is. If you can tap your toe to it, it's good music." I think that's writing too. How do you define good writing? Whether you like it or not, it's so simple, it's so mundane. That's it. And people are gonna like different things. So the three authors that I just named, who I really like, other people might not like me. And by the way, if you go on to Amazon, there are a lot of reviews on my book that says too simple, too boring. Everyone's already said this. I don't disagree with any of that. It's just a different taste. So I think that's the answer to it. Like it has to be a taste thing because everybody's different. Do you enjoy writing? And if you kind of go through the arc of writing this post or other blogs you've written or even the book, like I have to imagine, and I had other artists talk about this, you go from you for it to despair, at which points do those feature in your process? And overall, do you look forward to tomorrow to write more? I forget who said this quote, but it's a great quote. They said, "Writing is not hard work. Whole mining is hard work. Writing is a nightmare." It's what I said. Writing is not hard. Like I sit at my desk in an air conditioned house and type away in my sweatpants. It's not hard, but it can often be a nightmare because you have these gut feelings in your head. You can't convey this point. I just can't find the words to convey it. That can hurt. That can be a nightmare. So sometimes it's torturous. It's also, you think you have a great idea, but then you put it on paper and you're like, "Oh, actually, this is shit. This is not a good idea at all." So it can be very revealing in that sense. I would say most of the time, though, more than half of the time, I either literally or figuratively have a smile on my face when I'm writing because I feel like in my own head, I'm learning and I'm uncovering something. I'm like, "Oh, this is cool. I bet if you turned my camera on when I was writing, I bet I would look pretty happy most of the time." I think that's true. But that is definitely interspliked with periods of just like, "Oh gosh, I can't. I'm just, why can't I figure this out? It's driving me crazy. It's a mix of those." I would say most of the time. It's fun. This is passing the test for us, or at least for me, I can't speak for Dom in terms of, do I enjoy this conversation? We're a little nervous about how that format would actually work out, but there's been so many interesting tidbits and things that I wouldn't have expected, which is ultimately how I define great conversations as getting answers that either outside of your expectation norm or going to really deep detail that you didn't expect. The last thing I would just wanted to ask about is how all of this translates into the business world with some of the other things that you do. So you're on the board at Markel and you have other things that fall into your sphere and you spend this time thinking through ideas that are really timeless. How does that translate once you take it out into the world, and what has that experience been like being on the board of a big, successful company? It was great. Markel is such an amazing company, and this is a true story. When you join the Motley Fool as an employee, every employee gets $1,000 to invest in stocks, and it could be any stock you want, but they want every employee to be a shareholder. When I joined the Motley Fool in 2007, I used all that money to buy a Markel stock. I've always admired the company. It's an amazing company. And a lot of people have tried to emulate what Buffett has done. And I truly think I'm not saying this because I'm on the board. I've thought this for well before I joined the board that Markel is the only company that's come close to emulating what Berkshire and Buffett have done. It's such a cool company. So when I was asked to join the board, it was like, I was so tickled, excited, admired them for so long. And I think it's interesting, too, because as a writer, I'm not in the trenches, so to speak. I'm not a portfolio manager. I'm not a financial advisor. I'm an outside observer. So Markel gives me the first time I career to be in the trenches, I guess, to actually see up close how a business is working. And Markel has 22,000 employees and is in dozens of countries. It's a small city. And in a small city, there's lots going on, good, bad, everything in between. So I think that in the trenches view has been so fascinating for me. And I think philosophically, we are so aligned. Which is how I ended up joining the board, philosophically, everything aligns. Which is why I think there's a lot of cohesion there. It's been such a fun process and for a company that I really admire. Awesome. Well, this has been a great conversation we're going to. And I'm fully convinced that others will find this very, very helpful to appreciate you joining us. Also, appreciate as Colossus, we are big believers in audio to see you in the podcast world. That has been a great delight for us. And we're excited for that second book to come out. Cool. This has been fun. Thanks for having me. All right. Was that everything you hoped and dreamed, fanboy? I love that. Well, as you know, I need Morgan for his big. And to talk to him now that he is big, total thrill. That was excellent. As I mentioned on the podcast, we were a little unsure on the format. We have been trying to find other podcasts that we admire. We like the press box, Brian Curtis, one perfect story where he's been doing this with people that have written deep dive articles for magazines or different things. So this is where we pulled the idea from. And I just got a lot of tidbits that I didn't expect. I think hearing that he was so unconstrained in terms of how he approached it didn't have editors. I was very surprised by that. Then once it gets into the body of the text, I thought that was really interesting because it does feel like it's a little bit more formula like there. It's funny because he kind of butchered the process on our side. Like in the first three, four minutes, he basically ran through our 10 questions that were neatly lined up for him. Because we were going to kind of go a bit more by paragraph and he just gave us a whole story and one hit. But to your point, it was awesome. And I think it almost felt like 50 minutes of him telling us like, no, you idiots, it's just art, which I loved because I think we need a bit of dose of that. You know, there are too many Twitter threads out there saying this is how you produce magic. The reality is magic is in the fingertips of certain people that just have it. And he certainly does not come to writing. Then when you get some of the details that kind of hit you, even things like, I used to write and work. Now I do it in Google Docs. Like for me, that's just really interesting behind the scenes. No one touches it. And he puts it on his thing about typos was say fascinating to me because I've been one of these people in his DMs before being like, hey, there's a mistake there. Obviously. You were. Oh, man. Oh, you should have told me that. You should have broadcasted that. Just trying to help him out, which clearly, that's what he wants. Here's the thing. Someone else is going to help him out. You don't have to be that person. You cannot live like that because that's like saying if you're walking down the street and someone's in trouble, you just walk past because someone else will help him out. You've got to take ownership. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, two completely different circumstances. If someone is in need of health, that's one thing. If it's a typo, no, no, oh, man, that's going to sting me. That guy, your new name, that guy. Keep going. There, if you made that horrible comment, then why trying to feel it now is being completely disrupted by thinking about, you know, helping the stranger on the street because someone else is going to do it fully. Well, I do think there was a little bit more science than you're giving a credit for. Titles. I was surprised by that. I thought he was going to be a, I come up the tie to at the end of the piece. Completely agree. Caught me way off guard and obviously, we think about how we would apply it because titles are the death of us in many circumstances and even if you go into a conversation with the title, that can help scare things quite a bit. 100%. The whole title thing is the being of my existence and 80% of them come out easily, but then the 20% that just take forever and they really really frustrate me. Here's my overarching thing from that discussion. It's made me want to go and write more. Hearing that he writes sentence by sentence goes in place with a dog, scrolls, Twitter, like all of that stuff is how I feel when I'm writing and he said it's a nightmare. That's how I feel, but I really enjoy when you have an idea and when you do start writing and then you're like, "Oh, that actually kind of linked to this other thing that I thought. Let me put that down a piece of paper." Then it's all these other extraneous thoughts from the outside that then kill my love of writing because I'm like, "Oh, if I published this and someone's going to think I'm an idiot or whatever." Actually, just to for the innate love of the craft, so it really has given me fuel to start journaling more writing even just for myself because if that's his process, then I'm not too far off. Obviously, my output is completely different, but the way in which he's putting this together seems familiar. Yeah, he made it sound easy. Not even easy, he made it sound relatable. No, you don't need to block off the four hours in the morning, which I think is kind of interesting. I'm going to pull it back to a little bit of the science again, though. The structure is interesting. He's not coming in with Buffet, which I assumed was going to be like, "No, you're crazy. I don't think about that." It's like, "No." That was what he was thinking about. It's like completely outside story, then finance story, and multiple examples and then finish it up, and that I like because it doesn't limit your creative abilities. If you have a structure because you know that structure works, you can still be very creative within that structure. To me, there's some science in terms of how he's doing that. I think we do that with some of our shows, like breakdowns. We try to do that, but we're doing now. We struggle with the co-hosting thing because you try to keep it in some chronological order. But yeah, I thought that was an interesting scientific approach to it. I think, as we were starting to uncover a little bit, what in his mind is just years and years of reading stuff and thinking, "I like that. I don't like that." Just putting these pieces together, and in his mind, he does have a template for how these things are constructed, how sentences fit together. When you read it, the first two, three sentences of this piece, read like a poem. There's a short one. There's a long one. There's a bit of a literation, and kind of just rolls off your tongue, and then before you know it, you're ready into the second paragraph. Basically, he's not thinking about it at the time, but because he's got so many reps under his belt and he's read so much stuff and he just has such a good sense of what makes for interesting writing, it comes out through, not his pen, but his fingertips on the keyboard. Sometimes, this is like when you talk to an amazing athlete about how they do what they do. Honestly, I don't really know. I get the ball, and I just look up, and I just end up over there. But then from outside, as perspective, you start deconstructing the types of patterns that they play and the things that they do. You can start to kind of make more sense of it than actually the person in the arena. If you like, and I'm giving myself too much credit for this kind of analysis, but I do think there's some validity to it. Honestly, I think you put in all that time and that work, and you build a freakishly strong base. It goes into what Josh Wateskin writes about in terms of really mastering the small things, and then all of a sudden subconsciously, you're connecting those small things together for like one bigger thing that's the output. So I think you're right about that. The Buffett question again, it's just interesting to me that I wasn't going to ask that. I almost crossed that one off, and then I did. I don't know what the lesson is there, but maybe it's asked stupid questions and project ideas onto someone and see if they agree or disagree. That was interesting. I love that he enjoys what he does. I know that sounds really stupid. He's obviously incredible at it, and him saying that if you were to video me, you'd probably see me smiling as I'm writing this stuff. I could listen to anyone talk about anything who enjoys their craft, and obviously, I enjoy the output of his craft. That stuff just really, really gets me going. I love that you ask like 45 minutes in the conversation. It was such a mic drop question. I was like, well, what if he says no, and then just spills it out? That really got me. I think it was at the top of our sheet, and you put it at the bottom of our sheet. So then I had to crowbar it in. I thought it was a joke, so I didn't want to get distracted by it. It's a really important question. You read any book from great writers about the process, and they say it's torturous writing, and he agreed with me, but he does love it. He loves the torture. That's fair. Writers that inspire you. Juan, I just have to make a comment on Michael Lewis. I hate Michael Lewis, because he is so damn talented. And when I heard that man on his podcast with his southern draw, telling his stories again, I thought to myself, really, now you're coming into this medium too. He's got too much talent that Michael Lewis. You got any others on your list that actually inspire you? You really put me on the spot, man. Yeah, I know. I wrote mine down. In my notes, I knew this would happen. I'll go first. My first one is cliche, I think, Anthony Bourdain. I just think is one of the fucking most amazing writers, no matter where he's on writing. It's just poetic and abrasive in such an awesome way, then the other one is David Benioff. More popular for his Lord of the Rings involvement, but wrote some freakishly good novels and just has a way with words. Also wrote the 25 hour, which was eventually converted into a great movie. So those are two that stand out to me. Yeah. I would second those. I hate myself for this answer, but I see any person that's going to mind right now. Are you going to say, "Call her daddy," or go, "She's not a writer." I'm going to say Matt Levine or Levine. He obviously writes in a different way about finance than Morgan does, but he's equally joyful to read. He would be another really interesting person to go through this exercise with, because I think you get a completely different set of answers, but maybe the core is the same in terms of how they think about stuff, the way he can deconstruct complicated things and writes it in an enjoyable manner. Again, he's taking something that's innately boring and turning into something that's very interesting. Yeah. Levine's a good one. I never would have thought of him as like an inspirational writer, because it's so unique, but I like that. Yeah. Like him and Morgan in our industry, no one else writes like that. Lots of people try to, like you see lots of particularly younger people like right in the same style and then know the time, like Morgan said, that he copied someone's style earlier in his career. You always have to start with the greats, like any artist you start by copying and then you start morphing into your own language. Yeah. He mentioned Felix, which wasn't a name that I thought about for a while. Best Levine from Dealbreaker, she was an OG finance writer. Yeah. I think there's some great writers out there for shorters, too many to list. I really enjoyed that format and I want to think about doing that with others. Even like the Google doc and just like planting things there, honestly all of that made me feel better, which is probably the wrong takeaway to have, like, oh, that doesn't seem too complicated in terms of the style, which tells you there's a lot more behind it. But I don't know, I find those answers really interesting and then, you know, if you take away one or two tidbits, the title thing is something that's sex with me. There's some Google docs out there, Neil had a hit list basically in his Google docs when we talked to him or he was like, if I have a really shitty email, I write it in there first and then come back the next day, whereas from Morgan's putting out interesting quotes, I think Google obviously has a lot of proprietary data, but some of these Google docs will be fascinating to skim through. The last thing I'll say and this is maybe corny to say, but that was genuinely like a thrill for me to talk to him. I went to the conference in 2017, I think it was until it's in Morgan and London when I was really enjoying his stuff, still do, but it's interesting that the world works like this and I'm very grateful for it. No, that's good. I'm glad that I got to hear the story. Honestly, I agree because when there's somebody who inspires you to do those things and then you get to have that conversation, I think that's awesome. And to hear that you were at that conference again, he just evolved, kept a straight face through that sentence. Maybe we could just put that in an audio recording and set up a separate feed so I can listen to it every day in the morning. No, that's good. These are the things that you got to take advantage of in the workplace when you get these opportunities and I would try to enjoy those a little bit more and more and we got you one of those and I think it would be useful for everyone and I'm going to list out different ideas. I think we've talked about Jimmy Chin and our initial contact fell through. So we're going to try other angles, but that would be another awesome example of this. Give out in the mountains as well. Well, you enjoy it. I could see there's some tears coming down your eyes. So clean those up and we will be back next week on Aking Media. Yeah, see you.