Speaker 1Most bad financial decisions happen when you follow the strategy that is right for somebody else, but not for you. You have to view it as an art, not a science. That's why the book is not called The Science of Spending Money.
Speaker 2I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators. My guest on today's show is Morgan Housel, bestselling author, partner at Collaborative Fund, and board member of Markel. Morgan's work focuses on the intersection of human behavior and financial decision-making. His first book, The Psychology of Money, has sold 10 million copies since releasing five years ago and is already one of the bestselling investment books of all time. His second, Same As Ever, explores human behaviors that never change and is rapidly approaching a million copies sold. Our conversation discusses Morgan's latest work, The Art of Spending Money, Simple Choices for a Richer Life. I wanted to get him back on the show to share his thoughts on the subject that affects us all, but I wasn't expecting to have my mind turning on how Morgan's insights about envy, aspiration, and contentment also apply to the assessment of money managers and corporate executives. His recently released book is another tour de force, and I suspect once again will soon
Speaker 3hit the bestseller list. Before we get to the interview, a quick announcement. We've set new dates for our Capital Allocators University for investor relations and business development professionals. Those dates are December 3rd and 4th in New York City. Later in the year is just a better time of year for this gathering. It's post-AGM season, travel starts to wind down, it's right before the holiday crunch time, and it's a great time for capital raisers to reflect on their previous year and plan for the year ahead. December 3rd and 4th in New York City. CAU for IRBD is a closed-door gathering for capital raisers to connect with peers, learn from allocators and other experts, and really share in best practices with each other. You can learn more at capitalallocators.com slash university. Thanks so much for spreading the word about Capital Allocators University for investor relations and business development professionals. Capital Allocators is brought to you by AlphaSense.
Speaker 2Here's something for you. Most AI tools today are very good at sounding right. But can you actually trace it back to a filing transcript or specific passage that drove the answer? Or are you just trusting the confidence of the output? For allocators, that's not a minor concern. A missed filing, incorrect source, or context that gets lost somewhere in the retrieval chain aren't edge cases. They're how decisions go wrong. AlphaSense is the AI platform built specifically for this. AlphaSense is the AI platform built specifically for this, They own the content. Over 500 million curated documents, from broker research and expert transcripts to filings and earnings calls. And they own the retrieval layer on top of it. That means every answer can link back to an exact, verifiable source. Because the answer is only as good as what's underneath it. And with AlphaSense, you know exactly what that is. See it for yourself. Try a free trial at alpha-sense.com. slash capital. That's alpha-sense.com with a hyphen in the middle. slash capital. Capital Allocators is also brought to you by Morningstar. In a sea of data, you need to know what you can trust. Morningstar's data, analytics, and research helps bring clarity across public and private markets, connecting independent research and data into the tools and AI platforms you use every day. So insights are easier to spot and act on. Morningstar. Nothing in your way. Visit morningstar.com slash game on to learn more. Capital Allocators is also brought to you by Juniper Square, the operations partner trusted by the leading private market GPs. One theme that keeps coming up on the show is GPs that build the strongest and most durable relationships with LPs are the ones that have both strong returns and strong operations. AI raises the standard. Stakes on operations. And having Juniper Square as your operations partner helps ensure your data is organized, accurate, and accessible so you can unlock operational alpha. That's why thousands of GPs trust Juniper Square. Learn more at junipersquare.com slash capital allocators. Please enjoy my conversation with Morgan Housel. Morgan, great to see you, bud. Thanks for having me. Good to be back. Why don't we just start with, how you got from your last book, Same As Ever, to writing The Art of Spending Money?
Speaker 1I've always been a believer that you cannot force creativity. You cannot sit down at your desk and schedule and be like, I'm going to come up with the next great idea. It always hits you in the shower when you're going for a walk, when you're walking your dog, and you're like, oh, I got this idea. And I so remember the moment. This was probably 2021. And I was on the treadmill at 8 p.m. And it just hit me out of the blue, The Art of Spending Money. Very similar with The Psychology of Money. One day, I remember just walking down the street in New York. And I was like, The Psychology of Money. Oh, that'd be a good. So, it always starts with just the title. The reason that I really liked The Art of Spending Money is because I realized, I think everything I write starts with introspection about my own life. I'm trying to figure out my own problems, my own flaws. Five years ago, I realized that I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours about my investing philosophy and why I do it. But then one day I asked myself, I was like, what is my spending philosophy? Which is something that you and I have talked about in my life. And I was like, what is my spending philosophy? And I was like, my personal life for years. Why do we do the things we do? And I couldn't tell you. I couldn't tell myself. I never really thought about it that much. And then it also struck me as I started thinking about this, that there are tens of thousands of books written about how to get wealthy. Some of them better than others, but tens of thousands of them, virtually none written about what to do with it. And I think part of the reason why is because a lot of people's intuition, including probably my own until a couple of years ago, was nothing needs to be said about the topic. It's simple. You just spend on what you like, and then it's over. That's it. There's nothing to be about it. But I think if you drill into a lot of people's lives, rich people, poor people, middle-class people, it's never that simple. There's always a psychological element of the psychology of envy, the psychology of social aspiration, the psychology of fear and contentment. And so there's nothing in the book that tells you how to spend because you and I are different, as you and I have debated in our personal lives many times about how we spend money. But I think the psychology of those topics, envy, greed, aspiration, contentment tends to be universal for everybody.
Speaker 2So as you started doing research, you go through the process of originally thinking, wow, there's nothing to say, to an insight, oh, there's psychology around this, to then formulating what became, say, the core thesis of the book.
Speaker 1There's a well-known thing in psychology. I forget the name of it, but once you get a nugget in your head, you see it everywhere. And so once I started thinking about the psychology of spending money, I saw it everywhere, including in my own life. And so I would ask, when have I been envious of people? Why? Why did I envy what they had? They had you start drilling down into it, and then you start seeing it everywhere else. Every book that I would read, you would start connecting the dots. Oftentimes, it's not even about spending money, but the psychology of contentment. Why some people just didn't care what other people thought of them. What was going through their head? What did they want? What was in their life background that brought them to that point? So it was a classic thing of once I'd started looking for it, I couldn't stop seeing it. For a lot of writing too, this is true for everything that any writer has ever written, including yourself, you have to tell a good story behind it. When you're writing a book about finance, if you only use finance examples, you put people to sleep in one chapter. You can't do it. So I had to find examples outside of the world of finance and spending, stories of people who are envious, who were very content, and then using those to craft a narrative about what I thought were the most important elements of the psychology of spending.
Speaker 2As you take a step back, what's the core lesson or thesis that you think someone should take out of what you learned from writing the book?
Speaker 1More time looking in the mirror, so to speak, and figuring out who you are individually, rather than what does society tell me I should want and how am I trying to impress other people who aren't even looking? What I want is different from what you want. There is no right answer to do this. There are people who live paycheck to paycheck and that's right for them. That's the right lifestyle for them to live. There's no one way to do this. I think this is true in investing too. And it's an easy trap to get into because it is the right advice for other people. And you're like, this worked for him, worked for her. Of course, I should go mimic that. And it's not right for you. I dollar cost average and index funds. If you did that, you'd probably be bored out of your mind. And if I invested like you, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. We're just different people. There's not right or wrong. Art is individualistic and it's subjective. And you have to keep your desires and your expectations confined to your own roof without being too influenced by other people.
Speaker 2Very first chapter of the book is this great line I love, all behavior makes sense with enough information. So much of what I see in the investment world, people trying to tease out why people do what they do. Would love you to dive into that thought.
Speaker 1I got that line from my brother-in-law who's a social worker. He works with very disadvantaged children, many of whom have been abused physically and psychologically. They're homeless. Their parents abandoned them. The saddest case studies you can think of, he works with. And a lot of those kids, actually, The majority of those kids do not do well in school. They get in fights on the playground. They don't do their homework. They skip school. It's very often that the teacher or the principal will be like, why are you doing this? How can you possibly think it's okay to behave like you do at school? And my brother-in-law said, they have a phrase in the social system, which is all behavior makes sense with enough information. This kid who's skipping school and getting into fights, if you saw what he was going through at home and the abuse and the lack of love, you don't condone his behavior, but you're like, I get it. I understand why you would want to lash out like that. It's not that you say, it's fine for you to do that, but you're like, I get why you're doing it. That phrase, all behavior makes sense with enough information. You can apply that to so many avenues of life, including money. What happened in my past? There was a period of my adult life, five years ago when my wife and I were very frugal. We've loosened up quite a bit. And you are a big part of trying to prod me in a different direction. But I've often asked, because now we have loosened up a little bit. And now I've asked, what caused me to be in that mindset? And I bet if you got me on the therapist's couch and dug a couple layers deep, the answer would be something happened earlier in my life that left me in some aspects with low self-esteem, low self-confidence. And I had this mentality of, I need to save everything because this is all going to come crashing down. I bet that's what it was. It's hard for me to zero in that specifically, but it's something like that. And so it was very common. This is not a criticism because you and I had fun conversations about this. They were always respectful. But I think it is common to be like, Morgan, why are you so frugal? Live a little. And the truth was, even for me at that time, behavior made sense with enough information. That was a product of who I was.
Speaker 2One of the things I find really fascinating when you're talking about that is this lack of specific knowledge of why for you, in your past, you feel like, I think I saved it because something happened where I just felt like I had to keep all that money for my safety. I know you've explored that. I'm curious, why do you think that exists if you can't even put your finger on what it is?
Speaker 1I heard this from Peter Kaufman. He said, there's evidence in neurology that only 10% of your brain function is conscious. The other 90% is processing emotions and feelings that you can't actually think about. They're there, but you don't know them. A lot of people, if you think, am I scarred from my past? No. I had some bad experiences as a kid, but I'm not scarred from my past. But the truth is, oh, you absolutely are. Things have happened and shaped you in ways that you can't even imagine. Everybody. And that's 90% of what's going on in your brain are feelings and emotions that you can't put your finger on. I always found that to be really fascinating, as well. So, if you asked, why do I live this way and why do you live that way? Neither of us actually know. If you spent time with a good therapist who can start pulling threads out of your brain, you're like, oh, I didn't even know this was there. I didn't even understand this until we started talking about it. But of course, it's been there influencing who I've been. So, everyone can have that experience. The idea that 90% of it is not even conscious means that we can think about this all day, but not really understand it. So, a big part of this is there are puzzle pieces you can put together. But at the end of the day, you kind of have to say, this is who I am. For whatever reason, this is who I am. Part of that too, actually a huge part of it is my growing belief that a lot of our personalities, maybe the majority of our personalities are forged at conception and there's nothing we can do about it. It's just on the nature-nurture spectrum, there's a lot of nature going on here. People are wired differently. I'm one of three kids. I have two older siblings. We're all so incredibly different. My two kids are so incredibly different. Same parents, same values, same house. Couldn't end up more different. Of course, that's just a part of our experiences, but we've just wired, differently. Buffett talked about this quite a bit with finance. He was like, some people have the money mind. The first time they learn about compound interest when they're eight years old, they just get it instantly. The first time they hear the principles of value investing, they're like, yeah, done. Got it. DCF, understood. Munger put it more starkly. He was like, when you teach financial matters to young people, they either understand it instantly or never. You either get it or you don't. You're wired for it or you're not. And I think there's a lot of areas in life that are like that. Music is one of those. If you're a musician, you either understood it instantly, when you're 60 years old or never, you're never going to be a musician. We want to think that because we're intelligent and educated, we can just go learn a new topic. And to some extent, it's true. To a big extent, it's not.
Speaker 2One of the concepts you talk a lot about in the book is the pursuit of freedom, money as a path to freedom. Would love to get your thoughts on what you mean by that. It's different for everybody.
Speaker 1Some people like houses, some people like cars, some people like travel, but everyone's different. Virtually everybody. I would actually say everybody likes freedom, likes independence, doing whatever you want to do on your own terms, whatever that might be. And what you want to do might be different from what I do, but we're doing it on our own terms, being our own individual. That is universal. My definition of freedom is different for everybody. And also, independence exists on a spectrum. When I say independent, I don't necessarily mean you don't need to work anymore, like pure financial independence. Independence is always a spectrum. And every dollar of wealth that you have is one more claim check of your own future that you own versus somebody else's. So it's always on a spectrum of that. Very few people will get to a point outside of retirement where they don't need to work anymore. They're completely free to do what they want, when they want, with whom they want. But the idea for average ordinary people, if you can have the independence to choose where you live and have a shorter commute, that's enormous independence. If you can be laid off without frantically having to look for a new job the next morning, that's independence. If you or your family can get sick without it massively devouring your net worth, that's a level of independence. It's just the ability to withstand all the normal, natural, inevitable ups and downs in life. Some people will get to a point where they can withstand virtually any economic disaster. They can live off interest and dividends and they're all set. There's that level. This is how I view debt too. I view it as the more debt you have, the narrower the range of outcomes you can endure in life. Very simple, very elementary in that sense. That's how I think about wealth. The more wealth you have, the wider the channel becomes of the range of outcomes that you can endure. Good, bad, ups and downs, all of it. I never viewed it as saving money or building wealth. I viewed it as purchasing independence. From when I was a teenager, every dollar that I saved felt like a little bit more independence that I had. A lot of that too was low self-esteem. This is all going to come crashing down. I don't know if anyone's going to hire me ever again. I need to save for the apocalypse. That was probably my mentality. Maybe it still is my mentality. Viewing it as not saving money, as idle money, as not delayed gratification, but viewing it as purchasing independence that I gain pleasure from today. It's not delayed gratification. If I save money, I benefit from that right now because I was before. That's always how I viewed it.
Speaker 2You touched earlier on the concept of contentment as it relates to spending. I'd love to come back to the research around happiness, how you spend your time, who you spend it with, the depth of relationships driving happiness more than financial means. How did you think about writing about how people spend their money as it relates to contentment and happiness?
Speaker 1One of the biggest things is that a lot of the people get into trouble with, if only I had more money, then I'd be happy, is they're chasing the wrong emotion. Happiness is always a five-minute emotion. Happiness never hits you for more than a couple of minutes at a time. I think it's very similar to humor. If I told you the funniest joke in the world, you laugh for five minutes, maybe. You don't laugh for 10 years. If I told you that joke every day, you're like, stop, stop. It's not funny anymore. Happiness is very similar. People have brief moments of, oh, this is so great, but not for 10 years. It's fleeting. When people daydream about having the nice house, the plane, the car, whatever it might be, and realizing how great that would be, by and large, what you're doing is you're imagining yourself in that house being content with it, not being happy with it. You imagine yourself in that house being like, I'm good. I don't need anything else. I don't care that my neighbor's house is bigger. This is great. I'm totally content with this. Contentment can be a lasting, enduring emotion. Happiness never is. I think that's where people get into trouble. What you want to chase in life is contentment. You want to get to a level where it's like, I want to live a good life. I want to be able to enjoy the material abundance of this world, but I also want to get to a point where I'm like, I'm good. That's all I need. I talked about my late grandmother-in-law in the book. She lived for 30 years on nothing but $1,800 a month in social security. No assets, no pension, nothing. $1,800 a month, nothing else. Happiest woman you'll ever meet. Happier than any of the billionaires I've ever met. One of the few people who probably did wake up smiling every morning, found all of her joy working in her garden, going for walks, birdwatching with her friends, totally content. She had no financial, no wealth, and she had unlimited psychological wealth. She had nothing and she wanted nothing more. You and I know some very wealthy people, billionaires, who want the world and wake up every morning saying, this ain't enough. I want to live in a world where most people wake up and say, this isn't enough because that's where progress comes from. That's the seed of all innovation is people waking up and saying, not enough. We need bigger, better. That's great. But the individual level, it puts you on a hamster wheel forever. If you do want to chase that, unless you are so type A that you know, you want to work a hundred hours a week till the day you die, what you want to seek is contentment. When I say contentment, I want to be content with my house. I don't want to be content with how good I am as a writer or a father or a husband. I never want to drop my standards for that. I always want to do better. I'm never going to be satisfied with how well I'm doing there, but I absolutely want to be content with the physical life that I live. Because if you're not, you're always going to drive yourself crazy.
Speaker 2Most people, certainly most people maybe listening not having enough money for their basics. And, oh, there's so much money on the side that you can just clip a coupon from the US treasury and have everything you want. For that group of people in the middle, how do you think about the trade-off of achieving contentment or autonomy or freedom with incremental income that might get you that in the future?
Speaker 1So much of this is be careful who you socialize with because they will absolutely in dispute, - It's a beautiful story. set your expectations. I grew up in the woods outside of Lake Tahoe, and this was before San Francisco tech money invaded. So when I grew up in Tahoe, it was a poor little mountain town. By my childhood expectations, normal people drove old pickup trucks and rich people drove new pickup trucks. That was the stratification of wealth. If you had a new F-150, you're like, that guy's rich. And then I went to college in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles is the opposite. The definition of wealth is sky's the limit. There are people in LA who are like, oh, my Bentley's two years old, so I'm poor. That felt like the mentality in LA. And I think, honestly, if I think about it, people were way more content in Tahoe because they were socializing with people where the stratification of wealth was so much narrower that if you were a middle manager in Tahoe, you're like, great, you're doing awesome, and you're raising your kids. Everything's great. Whereas in LA, it was like, oh, you're not a billionaire? Why? What happened to you? So I always say, be careful who you socialize with. Be careful where you live because that is absolutely going to set your expectations. One example of this, the minimum wage, in professional baseball, by any definition, on the national stage and definitely the world stage, that's rich. $750 a year, you're in the tippity top, particularly on global standards. Nobody in the MLB earning the minimum wage feels rich. They all feel like they're scraping by because there are people on their team in the locker right next to them making $15 million a year, $25 million a year. And so $750 is absolutely a joke. There's a great Buffett quote too. He says, success in life is when the people who you want to love you do love you. And everyone's different. In my own life, I want my wife, kids, parents, and two or three of my friends to love me. I desperately want them to love me and pretty much nobody else. I want to use my wealth and my time and my energy to help my life within the context of those six or seven people. So being careful who you socialize with and being careful whose attention and admiration you desire is really important.
Speaker 2So if someone's in a certain situation, it's not easy overnight to move to a neighborhood, make new friends. How have you thought about the incremental changes that move someone towards what would be contentment as they're sacrificing, let's say, incremental wealth?
Speaker 1If I go back to when I was in my early 20s, my material desires were off the charts. I wanted to be the guy in the yellow Ferrari with the Gucci. Material aspirations were so high. And they're really not that much anymore. I think the reason why is because when I was 21, I had nothing to offer the world. I had no intelligence. I had no job skills. I didn't know how to love. I didn't know how to be a good friend. I had nothing to offer. I think intuitively, a lot of people, including me in that situation, are like, no one's going to admire me for any of those skills. Maybe they'll admire me for my car. And then I think a lot of people go through this as I'm like, oh, now I want to gain my admiration from my family and my ability as an author. So my desire to show off my car drops because I want people to admire me for other things than that. I think that can be really true. So part of the equation as you're thinking about incremental wealth is again, whose love, respect and admiration do you want? Who do you want it from? If you want it from strangers, then you can try to get it through your material wealth. And that's not even a criticism. I think it's a natural thing in the world. Status is not always a bad thing. You're trying to fit into other groups and cooperate with other groups. Status is not always a terrible thing. But if you want to use that money in what I think is a more durable manner, then you have to answer the question, who are the five or so people whose love and attention I really admire? And how can I use this money to leverage that? I use the example in the book of will a big house make you happy? It might if having that big house makes it easier to host your friends. But the realization is the friends are making you happy. The house doesn't make any difference. But if it's a conduit to having more meaningful relationships, awesome. Fantastic. Enormous house, super expensive house. I mean that everyone wants to come over and hang out with you. Awesome. Your social life is great now. But it's not the house. It's the lubricant into better relationships. It's answering that very simple question. Whose attention and admiration and company do I want? And how can I use my money to get me there?
Speaker 2What are some of the things you found that people misunderstand about the right way to go about spending money and how they actually do it?
Speaker 1Let me give you an example of a guy who I profiled a little bit in the book, Chuck Feeney, who was a multi-billionaire, started duty-free stores where you can buy a gallon of vodka in every international airport, made a fortune, made $10 billion from the business. The very well-known part of Chuck Feeney's story is that was literally he took out $2 million with an M from his $10 billion fortune to live on. He lived in a tiny little apartment, flew coach. That's the well-known part of his story. He gave everything away. The less well-known part of his story is that when he became wealthy in the 1980s, when he first became a billionaire, he lived like a billionaire. He had multiple mansions. He had a private jet. He had a yacht. He lived like quintessential billionaire. And he didn't like it. It just wasn't for him. Here's a quote that I love. He said, I realized one day that I was happy when I was giving money away and I was not happy when I wasn't giving money away. And so he chose to live like a completely normal, ordinary middle-class person and gave everything away. What I love about that is not that he lived so frugally. That was his choice. Great. What I love about it is that he chose it. He did not say, because I'm a billionaire, I have to live this lifestyle. He was like, I don't care what anyone tells me what I should. That's not what I want to do. I want to live like this. It's my choice. So I love that he just made the decision for himself. He was not influenced by anyone else's expectations, any societal influences. A lot of people thought he was completely crazy, that this guy's worth $10 billion. A lot of billion dollars flying coach in a one bedroom apartment. But it was his decision. It's very rare in life that you see true independence. Someone whose aspirations do not leave the roof of their house. And they're not influenced by anyone else's desires. It's very rare that you come across it. He was one of them. And it's a beautiful thing. Those folks who do that, are they just wired differently? Of course, they're wired differently. And the wiring that is different from most people is completely and utterly, they are an internal benchmark. Thinker. And the external benchmark of comparing themselves to others doesn't measure whatsoever. I think it's more often that you see the opposite of somebody who is entirely external benchmark focused and probably doesn't have a lot of very stable internal scorecard of how they're doing. Their measure of success is net worth, social media followers, attention, and going to bed at night, asking the question, am I doing the right thing? Am I doing the moral thing? Am I doing something that makes me happy? Would never cross their mind. I think that's actually way more
Speaker 2common. How does somebody calibrate that external piece? Because it's true in almost everybody. There's some external validation of why are you doing what you're doing and calibrating it? Is it because that's what your friends are doing? Is it because you think you're supposed to keep up?
Speaker 1One of the things that got me going on this topic of the psychology of spending was I used to live in Washington, DC, and I used to go down to the Library of Congress where they have this really cool section where they have every newspaper going back to sometimes the late 1700s. You can go read the Washington Post from 1871. I used to love just going through and reading these things. One day, I was reading the Washington Post from 1929, obviously the peak of the roaring 20s before the Great Depression. I stumbled across this headline that I thought was so profound. The headline was, the more you're snubbed while poor, the more you will enjoy displaying being rich. Yes, so many people, if they have a very high propensity to show off their wealth, a lot of times it's because they are trying to fill an emotional wound that they had from earlier in their life, of some time in their life when they were snubbed in some way. Either for other people or even internally for themselves, they want to show people or show themselves that they overcame that scar. I think everyone has some version of that, that my view of the world, my spending desires, and yours and everyone are a product of the experiences that we've had in life, some of which were good, some of which were bad, some of which left some emotional scars on all of us. I have a family member who grew up extremely poor. He was homeless for much of his childhood. He was in and out of the foster system, then became a very successful businessman later in his life. When his daughter was going to college, he told her, please pick the most expensive school that you get into. It was almost like the higher the tuition, the better. The reason was the idea that he was sending his daughter to an expensive school meant so much to him within the context of what he overcame. That's an extreme example, but I think so many of us have some kind of emotional wound like that. Wound might be the wrong word because it's one of the positive experiences. You grew up a super popular kid, loved by your family. You might not have very much desire to go out and prove yourself. You have an amount of self-confidence from that experience. To answer your question, the idea that we are products of our own experiences, most of which are out of our control, is a good realization because it means my desires, your desires, our own view of the entire world, how we view the economy and politics are completely different from person to person. What you've experienced, Ted, is different from what I've experienced. People in different generations, different countries, everyone's a little bit different. Part of that for me was A, giving myself a little bit of grace of saying, look, if I do have quirky money habits, and of course I do, it's not because I'm not thinking this through necessarily, even though sometimes that might be the case. Something happened in my past that makes me believe this. That's true for not just money. That can be true for political beliefs, all kinds of social beliefs. Rather than looking at other people and saying, why do you believe that? Why are you doing that? A way better question is, what have you experienced in life that makes you believe that? An even better question is, if I experience that same thing, would I believe what you're doing? And a lot of times the answer is yes. And so, to the calibration question, I think it's less about, oh, do I have flawed thinking and I need to push myself in this direction versus embracing who you are and embracing that there is no right answer to this question. There's no right way to spend money. There's no right way to save and invest money. I dollar cost average into index funds. I know a lot of people watching this show don't do that or might even look down upon it. That's okay. The point is, there is no right way to do it. I think it bothers people in finance because finance, for instance, has been proposed as a math-based field, like it's a cousin of physics. It's a cousin of physics. 2 plus 2 equals 4 for everybody. For you and I, there is one right answer. And we want to assume it's like that for money. That for how we save, invest, and spend, there should be a right way to do it. The reason that finance can be such a tense topic and subject of so much debate in a way that meteorology is not, in finance, there's an infinite number of right answers for different people. And I think that bothers a lot of people. The idea of embracing who you are and also being less judgmental of others. Because I don't think it's ever appropriate to say, I value spending my money on this and therefore other people should as well. Or I don't value this and therefore nobody else should as well. It's just not how the world works.
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Speaker 1The author, James Clear, he's the most successful nonfiction writer of the generation, or maybe several generations. The book has sold over 25 million copies. Unbelievable. Dramatically more successful than I am as a nonfiction writer, and we're about the same age, somewhat similar topics. I do not have one single molecule of Envy in my body for James, because he is so likeable. He is the nicest guy you'll ever come across. You will never meet someone as successful and humble as he is. You will never meet someone who wants to help other people more than he. He's just an awesome guy. So it's impossible for me to envy him. He inspires me. I want to do more like he does, but I don't envy him. And I think it hit me that if occasionally, this is a character flaw of mine, if there are other authors who I envy, it's because I don't like them personally. They have a quirk of their personality that rubs me the wrong way. There's a difference between being inspired and not being inspired. And I think it's important to know that there's a difference between being inspired by someone's success and being envied of what they have. And usually, if you are struck with a bout of Envy, as all of us will be from time to time, it's usually because you say, that person has something that I don't, and they didn't deserve it. That's usually where it comes from. And I bring that up because it's so common now in the age of social media. If you see someone with a nicer house, nicer car, nicer plane, clothes, whatever it might be, you can either be inspired by their success if you admire them, or if you think they didn't deserve it, it's very common to fall into the trap of Envy. I think we're always making judgments about not only what people have, but whether they deserve that success to begin with. So back to the James Clear example, I am inspired by what he wants to do, by what he has accomplished. I want to be a better writer because of him, and it makes me feel good about it. When you are caught in Envy, then it's trying to chase what they have just because you feel like you're falling behind them and they didn't deserve it. You might be chasing something material that is not necessarily going to make you happy. Your neighbor who you don't like very much has a bigger house. So you have to have a just because you feel like they are in an unjustified manner above you on the social pecking order, and that doesn't make you feel good.
Speaker 2When does that translate from an emotion to spending? It's all over the place.
Speaker 1Some people are obviously much better at this than others. This is not a black and white thing. But how much of the modern consumption economy is based off of some form on the spectrum of Envy? Tremendous, huge, particularly for young people, particularly for young men, I would say, who are desperately trying to put themselves on the social pecking order. If they're early in their career, trying to figure out where they sit in the order, trying to fork it to show people and to broadcast their talents, tremendously common in that aspect. So some people are much more influenced by it than others. There's two ways to use money. One is as a tool to give yourself a better life. The other is as a yardstick of status to insert yourself on the social pecking order. I think it's extremely common. That's always been the case. That was true 100 years ago. It has gone supernova in the last 15 years with social pecking order. It's always been the case. Because no matter how well you're doing, no matter how much you make, no matter where you live or how successful you feel, there is somebody on Instagram who looks prettier, happier, smarter, more successful than you are. No matter what you're doing, the comparison group that everyone compares themselves to has grown from what used to be probably 10 or 15 people in your personal life to 7 billion people on social media. And I think it's impacted everyone, particularly younger people for whom that's all they've ever known is a social comparison group is social media. And everyone knows what the mental health, Gen Z is. It's atrocious relative to previous generations.
Speaker 2How have you thought about how people approach and think about spending money?
Speaker 1The way that I wanted to think about it in my own life, but I think it's a pretty good exercise for others, was asking the question, if nobody could see how I lived, if nobody except my immediate family could see my house, my cars, my vacation pictures, nobody else was watching, how would I choose to live? And you immediately understand the difference between utility and status. If you completely remove status from this mental exercise and because nobody's watching, how would you want to live? And you immediately be like, well, I would want things that actually make me happier. I would want a house with a nice view. That makes me happy. I wouldn't necessarily want a house in the most exclusive zip code. That does nothing for me. I probably wouldn't want a Ferrari. I'd probably want a pickup truck that has utility. I would want comfortable clothes that have utility. I wouldn't care at all about what brand they were. And so you immediately flow to this area. And why it's an important exercise is because the truth is very few people are watching. There's a great quote from the comic Jimmy Carr. He said, in their 20s, most people are worried about what other people think of them. In your 30s, you say, I don't care what anybody thinks of me. And in your 40s, you finally realize the truth, which was nobody was thinking about you to begin with. That is so true. And it is so common with spending that nobody is thinking about you as much as you are. Nobody cares about your house or your car or your clothes as much as you do. They're busy thinking about themselves. Once you come to grips with that, then your desire for impressing strangers plunges. And then your desire for using money to help you and your immediate family, the people whose love and attention and admiration you actually want can increase.
Speaker 2Alongside of understanding the why, what did you see in terms of calibrating expectations, how spending flows through to what you think you want in your life?
Speaker 1One thing is that it is extremely common and very easy that if you wake up every morning feeling a little bit unfulfilled in life, there's a hole in your soul and you're just a extremely easy to assume that the solution to that problem is more money. It's almost like a knee-jerk reaction for everyone that, well, I have these problems. I don't feel fulfilled. If only I earned more money and could live a little bit different, then I'd feel great. Sometimes that can be true. Everyone can spend money in a way that's going to give them a better life. This is not an anti-spending creed at all, but I think it is too easy to make that assumption. Part of the reason that it is so easy is because money is one of the only things in life that is so immediately tangible and quantifiable. I'll use the example. If I woke up in the morning and said, I want to be a 10% better father. Great goal. I would love to do that. What does that mean? How do you measure that? There's just no way I can measure that. I don't know if I'm a better dad than you are. There's no way to quantify it. But if I wake up and say, I want to increase my net worth by 10%, measurable down to the penny, I can compare mine to yours and everybody else's. So, because it is such an easy yardstick of measurement, it becomes for many people, the ultimate target of not only how well they're doing, but the quality of their own life. It's too easy of a target. And so, it becomes the knee-jerk reaction of the solution to all your problems.
Speaker 2There's a lot of people, particularly in the finance world, where that measurement is some verdict of success in their eyes. And you see people who it's unclear if it's just the game or more is the goal and there's no end to more. What did you see of folks that achieved any ostensible measure of success and yet that wasn't enough?
Speaker 1The biggest that I've come across because there's such a famous example is the Vanderbilt family. Of all the Robert Barons, the Rockefellers and the Carnegie's did pretty well at managing expectations, keeping wealth across multiple generations. They did a pretty good job. The Vanderbilts did by far the worst. It's a tragic story. Not a lot of sympathy for someone who was worth almost half a trillion dollars adjusted for inflation when he died. But effectively, when Cornelius Vanderbilt died in the late 1800s, adjusted for inflation, roughly half a trillion dollars. Within three or four generations, there was virtually nothing left. And in between there were three or four generations of Vanderbilts whose lives, if you dig into their lives and their biographies, almost every one of them to a T was miserable. And part of the reason why, how could you be miserable if you had more money? You could do anything in life. In theory, that's true. But the truth was they had virtually no independence at all. And the money told them who they could be, who they could socialize with, where they could live, who they can marry, what values they could have. The money controlled every aspect of their personality. It was like they were imprisoned by it. How can that be true? Most people's dream is to have that money. It's like they were imprisoned by it. much money. I came up with this concept in the book called social debt, which is you have financial assets. And sometimes you have financial liabilities, but there's a social debt as well. And social debt is a hidden liability. You don't actually see it, but it's very real. It's when society and your own expectations tell you how to live and who to be and control your personality, control your desires in ways that might be opposite of your actual personality. And the Vanderbilts are a very interesting example because the first Vanderbilt heir who did not get a trust fund when virtually all the money was exhausted is Anderson Cooper of CNN. Not only is he the most successful Vanderbilt heir in probably 150 years, he's probably the happiest. Part of the reason was he was basically the first person in his family in a century and a half for whom money did not control his personality. He was like, I need to go make a name for myself and do what I want to do. I'm not going to be a socialite and just go to parties and host whiskey tastings with my friends. I'm going to go do this thing that I love, which is journalism and TV. It was almost like he was a first person who was mercilessly let go of money controlling their personality. Now, that's an extreme example. There are plenty of other very wealthy families who do a great job. The Rockefellers did a very good job of it. So it's not cut and dry, but the Vanderbilts had half a trillion dollars of wealth and probably a trillion dollars of social debt hanging over them that they didn't even know. They couldn't count it, but it was a very real thing.
Speaker 2How about people currently making that money? It could be first generation wealth. Obviously, a lot of people in the money management industry that just generate a lot of wealth and then seem to have the motivation to keep going and others generate the wealth and then they're done.
Speaker 1The formula that I tried to put in the book is a simple formula for a pretty nice life, which is independence plus purpose. It's a very basic formula, but it's hard to imagine anybody having a really nice life without those two things, independence and purpose. There's financial independence, of course, but there's also independence of thought, independence of philosophy, and purpose is another enormous thing. My guess, and this is probably not black and white, the vast majority of people who made some money and then quit and then walked away, what they were doing was not their purpose. They made a ton of money in a company, was running that company, owning that company actually what fed their soul? Probably not. And the people who do run the business until the day they die, they love it. That is their purpose. That is their soul. That's what they love to do. By and large, it's not about the money. Anything over, I would say, in the tens of millions of dollars, it's not going to change your lifestyle that much. It's really not going to change that much. Maybe, let's say, a hundred million, anything over a hundred million. By and large, you're living in the same houses, driving the same cars. So, if you have financial ambitions more than that, I think it's either an addiction to money, which is a very common thing, or it's because what you're doing is actually your purpose and filling your soul. It's what you love to do. Take Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, those guys. If you told them they had to quit their business tomorrow, they would rather not live. They have to do it. It's just an extension of who they are. It's their purpose.
Speaker 2What are some of your favorite stories and lessons from the book?
Speaker 1This is one that has nothing to do with money, but when I heard it, I'm like, that's one of the best stories I've ever heard. Kevin Costner, great actor. This is back in the late 1980s, probably. He had a friend who was homeless at the time. And because he was homeless, Kevin Costner, who was still kind of a budding actor at the time, he and his wife invited them into his house. You're homeless. You can sleep in the basement. Come on in. And his friend is a writer. So, when he was living with Kevin Costner, he was constantly writing manuscripts all day long. And he would tell Kevin, please read this. Please read. This is the best thing I've ever written. Kevin's, no, I don't want to read your manuscript. Go away. You're just a smelly guy in my basement. Finally, he lived there so long that his wife said, he's got to go. He's got to get out. And the guy left and continued to be homeless. He was back on the streets. As he's out on the streets, he's calling Kevin, please read my manuscript. It's so good. You're going to love it. Out of desperation, Kevin was like, fine, I'll read the damn thing. Send it. He sends it over and the manuscript is titled, Dances with Wolves. And completely changed Kevin Costner's life. Of course, one of the greatest novels that turned into the movie. And so, Kevin Costner used it as his example of, you never know where talent's going to come from. You never know where it's going to be. One of the takeaways that I had from that is, the luckier you are, the nicer you should be in life. If you are in a position to help other people and give them a chance, and you never know where talent's going to come from, like that, particularly for an artistic talent like writing, you should give people chances when they have it. The general philosophy of the luckier you are, the nicer you should be. As a base of the pyramid philosophy in life, I think it was really important.
Speaker 2I'd love to dive into your path and your thoughts about spending where you just started. Because post-psychology of money, there's just a shift. Again, we see this a lot in the investment world. When someone has success, all of a sudden, they're in a different economic stratosphere than they thought they would be, or maybe they aspired to be there. Walk me through your thinking with you and Gretchen and your family, going from that scarcity mindset to what's changed over the last five or six years.
Speaker 1I think people who have made an amount of money that they never anticipated can probably relate to this to some degree. There is a list of things in which my life got better. Because we have more money. I could name a dozen things where like, oh, life's better now than it was five years ago. There's also a list of things that did not change whatsoever. And there's a list of things that probably got a little bit worse because of it. That would be something that I would not have foreseen. There's no use being negative about it. We could talk about the list of things that got better. But a list of things that got a little bit worse in terms of my expectations, my family, kids' expectations, family expectations, the publisher's expectations, all shifted in a way that created a social debt, a social liability. And I think my wife and I have done a very good job at keeping those expectations in check. Even though we've loosened up, the only thing that's going to make us happy is our relationships with each other and our health. So, if you asked a very fundamental question, my kids are young. They're six and nine. And if I said, does my six-year-old daughter love me more today versus a couple of years ago? Of course not. Does my son like playing football in the driveway with me more now than I make more money than he did three years ago? Of course not. So, the things that actually move the needle don't change whatsoever. I would also say that relative to where I was five years ago, I don't have more better days, but I think I have fewer bad days, which is a lifestyle improvement. That is a better life. That is an upgrade. But let's not pretend that when people make some amount of money, they're just going to wake up grinning year to year. It's not like that. That's not how it works. I probably wake up frowning less often. So, great. That's cool. But it's not necessarily the happiness that a lot of people envisioned. I intuitively knew that five years ago before this, but it's not like that. I'm not one of those things you have to experience to actually believe it.
Speaker 2What are some of the things that you would say were smart spending for you and your family, things that you do spend on now that you didn't before?
Speaker 1One is our house, which is a big purchase. I work from home. My wife is home. This is where we're at 99% of the time. Might as well go big on a house that is great for us and gives our kids a good life in a neighborhood that we enjoy. That was huge. That, I would say, is all internal benchmark. We don't have a lot of people in our house. We don't have a lot of people over. We're not showing this to anybody. This is all just for us. We drive normal cars. We wear modest clothes. The stuff that is more external benchmark, we really couldn't care less about. The internal stuff is good. The other, and I think a lot of people with money can relate to this, the joy and legitimate pleasure that you can get from helping others is hard to describe. It's very hard to describe. It sounds self-congratulatory if you haven't been there yet, but it is so true that if you help somebody who's in deep need, you're actually going to make a big difference. It's enormous. Spending five grand on yourself will probably do nothing. Spending five grand for someone who's in need can utterly change their life. You get an enormous boost from that. We've had several experiences with that too.
Speaker 2As you've internalized all these lessons through writing the book, how have you thought about imparting lessons about spending to your
Speaker 1kids? One of the biggest things is I don't. I don't think about doing that because I don't think you need to. The analogy I always use is there's so much evidence in politics that what you believe is extremely correlated to what your father believed, your father in particular. Not just different for everybody, but very high correlation between those two beliefs. What's also true is that most fathers do not sit their children down and say, this is why I vote the way I do. The kids hear every little comment. They watch what you're watching on TV. They understand what you're reading in the paper, and they form a mental model over time. Even without any explicit instruction, they have an extremely strong mental model by the time they're young adults of what politics should be from their parents. I think money is the same. You don't need to sit down your kids and tell them about money, but every time you say, we can't afford this, every time you make a snide comment about your neighbor's yard, every time you choose the hotel to go on, they're always paying attention. By the time you're young adults, they have a very crystal clear mental model of how money works. Usually, people will go in one or two directions, either mimicking what their parents did or realizing that the parents made catastrophic errors and running away as fast as they can in the opposite direction. You're very influenced one way or another. You don't need to impart lessons on your children. You just need to lead by example. You just need to be very cognizant of the lifestyle that you live, how you talk about yourself, how you talk about other people at the dinner table. I talked to this guy a couple of years ago. He's about my age, and his father is a very well-known billionaire investor. This friend of mine grew up as a child of a billionaire, living like a billionaire. He is the most rational, down-to-earth, humble, empathetic person you can meet. I asked him one day, how did you grow up like this but become so down-to-earth? He was like, I always knew we had a lot more money than other people and we lived a bigger life than other people, but my parents made so clear that that's not what you judge other people by. At the dinner table, we did not sit around and talk about how filthy rich we were. We talked about values and helping other people and being good corporate citizens, and that's what rubbed off on the kids. I think there is a truth that whenever you have spoiled children, it's usually not because the children had a big material life. It's because the parents maybe without even knowing it taught their kids that you should judge other people by how much money they have. not how much wisdom they have or how helpful they can be or their morals or whatever. We have more money and therefore we're up here and they're down there. That's where the spoiled kids come from. So you got to be very careful about the lifestyle that you choose to live as well.
Speaker 2One of the things I love about getting the chance to do this with you right before the book comes out is there's a level of expectation you may have that books have, especially yours, a very, very wide degree of potential outcome. How are you thinking right now about this book compared to your other books, compared to your own expectations of what happened? Now we've made bets in the past. I've always won taking you over on your books.
Speaker 1I owe you dinner. It's true. Yeah. So we're recording this before the book comes out. So I have no idea what it's going to do. I also have a theory that all books are basically a seed stage startup in the sense of even if you do everything right and it's run by talented people and well-funded, it's probably going to fail. That's most of the case. Books are a tail-driven business. The first print run of psychology money was 5,000 copies because all the evidence showed us that would be a great success. That would be a great success. And we're at nearly 10 million now. Nobody could have foreseen that. There's also plenty of books that are very well-backed by big name authors at Flop. That happens all the time. I've always had this idea of what I call selfish writing. I write for an audience of one, which is me. I write things that I think are interesting. I tell stories that I think are fun. I write it in a voice that I think is fun to read and easy to read. If other people like that, great. If they don't, there's nothing I can do about it. So particularly if you're in a position to sell lots of books, if you sell a million copies of your book, you're going to have a lot of 1% of people hate it. That's 10,000 people who hate it. 9,000 of whom will email you and tell you about it. You always have to be with a mentality of, I did the best and I'm proud of it, but I can't please everybody. And that's just how it works. It's a tail-driven business. 90% of virality of anything in life is luck. It hits the right people at the right time, particularly with social media. It just takes off and has its own life after that. Before I wrote psychology money, Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal told me something that always stuck with me. He said, Morgan, if the book is good, you don't need to write it. You don't need to write it. You don't need to market it. And if the book is bad, no amount of marketing will help. You do the best you can, and then it's out in the world and there's nothing you can do about it.
Speaker 2I'm going to ask you a couple of closing questions relating to spending. Before that though, what's your over-under on the number of sales this book's going to generate?
Speaker 1I've been a very poor judge of that, as you know. I don't try to think about it that much. Back to it's a seed stage startup. If you were a founder of a seed stage company that incorporated yesterday, and you said, how much is your company going to be worth in 10 years? You're a fool to answer that question because the answer is probably zero. But if it hits, it could easily be a hundred billion. And so, somewhere between one and 10 million copies. I think this is an important topic. People don't like the word luck because it makes it feel like you're bitter of their success. So, rather than luck, the phrase you should use is what is repeatable? And the truth is, if you sell 10 million copies of a book, it's probably not repeatable unless you're like JK Rowling. It's just not repeatable.
Speaker 2What's next after this one?
Speaker 1I don't know. I remember Michael Lewis saying this in an interview many years ago. He's like, so often for an author that when they finish one book, they're like, great, what's next? I got to start the next one tomorrow. And some people would do a very good job at that. But he was like, that's the worst mentality. You have to wait for the idea to hit you. And like I said, at the start of this, it's going to hit you in the shower. It's going to hit you when you're walking your dog. You can't just sit down and be like, what's the next idea? Psychology money hit me on a walk. This hit me on the treadmill. I don't know. I just have to wait. And that might happen tomorrow. It might happen 10 years from now.
Speaker 2All right, Morgan, a couple of questions to ask you. What is the best money you've ever spent?
Speaker 1Oh, I don't think I've ever told this story. My wife and I met when we were young and she was 19. I was 21, met in college. We started dating in May, which was important because we started dating and she was like, hey, I'm moving to England this summer. We've been dating for two weeks. I get back in September. Let's just see how it goes then. I was so in love with her already that I didn't like that answer. And I was like, I'll see you in London in two weeks. I didn't have a lot of money, but I was like, I'm getting on a plane. And London is where we actually started dating. I almost guarantee if I didn't do that, if I said, I'll see you in September, we would have gone our separate ways. And that was more than 20 years ago. We're still going strong.
Speaker 2That's awesome. What have you splurged on that you love and don't regret?
Speaker 1The cheap cheating answer would be independence, but I know that's not what you're actually getting on. I grew up as a ski racer in Lake Tahoe and I always felt that my friends on the team had better gear than me. They're skiers. Their jackets were nicer and it drove me crazy. It was like a hole in my soul when I was 12 years old. I hated it. So now that my son, he's nine, he's a big skier with me now. To make up for that wound that I had when I was a kid, I'm like, I'm going to buy him the best. New skis, new jacket, the best that exists. It's all his. The irony is he could care less. He does not care at all. He could be skiing on a cardboard box, wearing a burlap sack, wouldn't bother him in the slightest. It's been interesting for me of like, hey, I got you a new jacket. And he's like, I don't care. And to me, that's the ultimate psychology. I had this hole that he doesn't. And therefore we view it very differently.
Speaker 2All right. One more. What's the worst financial advice that you see people keep repeating?
Speaker 1One that seems very harmless and innocent is that spend money on experiences. I think it's bad for two reasons. One, a lot of times the experience that you want is what will make a good Instagram picture. That's especially true for young people. And you're not doing it for the experience. You're doing it for the material good of social status. That is just as much of a trap as buying expensive things to get people's attention. That's one. My wife and I also came to this conclusion a month ago. This is a recent thing. We were like, can we acknowledge to ourselves that the last five vacations we've taken, the best part of the trip was coming home. The most enjoyable part of the trip was coming home and being like, oh, back to the comfort of home. And we're like, maybe we should do this less. Society tells us travel, travel, travel, travel. But at this phase of our life with young kids who aren't the best travelers, maybe we shouldn't. Maybe two months ago, we canceled a vacation and we were like, oh, I'm so glad we could just stay home and sit on the couch. And so that advice of spend money on experiences, maybe part of it is the experience that I want right now is playing Legos with my kids on the living room floor. That's an experience. I don't need to fly across the world to do it.
Speaker 2Morgan, I wish you best of luck with the book. Thanks again for doing this with me. Thanks, Ted. Thanks for listening to the show. To learn more, hop on our website at capitalallocators.com, where you can join our mailing list, access past shows, learn about our gatherings, and sign up for premium content, including podcast transcripts, my investment portfolio, and a lot more. Have a good one and see you next time.
Speaker 4All opinions expressed by Ted and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of capital allocators or their firms. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of capital allocators or podcast guests may maintain positions and securities discussed on this podcast.
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