Mastering the Art of Spending Money - Morgan Housel

Chris Williamson 0:00 You are my favorite writer.

Morgan Housel 0:02 Thank you.

Chris Williamson 0:02 You have the most insights per word of anybody that's writing stuff at the moment.

Morgan Housel 0:08 Well, thanks. That, that means a lot to me. Thank you.

Chris Williamson 0:10 You could have chosen to write about anything. Why choose to write about spending money?

Morgan Housel 0:16 Well, I'll, I'll, I'll take it back to the start of my career, which was like a lot of young men, particularly in the, in the mid-2000s, uh, the ultimate goal... Before tech really existed, the ultimate goal was be an investment banker on Wall Street. And it's hard to remember that era, 'cause now, if you're a young person at Stanford or whatever, your goal is, like, go work at Google. Go work at, uh, at, at OpenAI. Back then, it was all, "Go work at Goldman Sachs." And so what I- my, my sole kinda life aspiration when I was 20 was to be an investment banker or a hedge fund manager.

Chris Williamson 0:47 Mm.

Morgan Housel 0:47 And I knew I, I loved investing. Even at that age, I used to go to Barnes & Noble and read investing books, and I, I loved it to begin with. I just l- I was fascinated with money. And then I haphazardly got a job as a writer, because I graduated in 2008. The economy was, uh, it was a wreck, and nobody was hiring. No banks were hiring. And so the only finance job that I could find was as a writer for The Motley Fool. Didn't wanna be a writer, hated writing, was embarrassed that I had dreams to be a powerful investment banker, and now I was a journalist? I was like, I, I hated that, but I actually, like, pretty quickly fell in love with it. And what I loved about it was I loved being an outsider who was not being influenced by the incentives of that career. And so if you are a hedge fund manager, you have a lot of incentives and biases based around that. If you are a financial advisor, there's a lot of just... You have to think a certain way to fit into that profession. And I felt like as a writer-- and I'm not a journalist.

Chris Williamson 1:42 Right.

Morgan Housel 1:43 Uh, as a writer, I could just be on the outside looking in. I felt like I was just up in the bleachers looking down and be like, "Let me try to figure out what's going on down there."

Chris Williamson 1:50 Felling abuse of the players on the pitch.

Morgan Housel 1:51 Yes, and then tell a story behind it. And to me, uh, money, I, I think I, I, I got lucky, because money, I, I, I think, has more fascinating social stories in it than almost any other field, where how you spend money and how you save money and your ambitions are such a window into who you are. And of course, there's a lot of other things in life that are more important than money, family and, and purpose and whatnot, but money is a very clear window into who you are. And so that, I, I, I feel like there's just an endless well of interesting stories to tell about it.

Chris Williamson 2:21 What can you tell about someone from the way that they spend money?

Morgan Housel 2:24 So much of it is about your ambitions and who you think about yourself. I, I really, I, I'm not anti-materialistic at all, and I, I really don't judge other people. But when I see somebody driving a, a yellow Lamborghini, I'm like, there's a story there. There's a story there, and it's not a judging story, but there's-- that's a story of who you wanna be and what you wanna show off. Now, some people have expensive cars, 'cause they love the craftsmanship and the engineering and whatnot. They're truly doing it for, uh-

Chris Williamson 2:49 Which is still a story

Morgan Housel 2:50 ... for, for- it's still a story. But whenever I see someone clearly peacocking, and there's a lot of it, you see it, there's a story in there. I found this headline from 1929, which was the peak, uh, just before the Great Depression, and it was such a good headline. It was in The Washington Post. It was, "The More You Are Snubbed While Poor, The More You Enjoy Displaying Being Rich." And I was like, there's-- it's almost like you don't even need to read the article. Like, that's, that's it. That's- it's so astute, and I think so true, that for a lot of people, not everybody, but for a lot of people, the more you are showing off or you just desire to show off, a lot of it is a wound that was inflicted upon you, and you're like, "I'm gonna get back." And so- and sometimes, too, you're not even showing off for other people. You're doing it for yours- you're doing it to prove to yourself.

Chris Williamson 3:36 Mm-hmm. I am-

Morgan Housel 3:36 To signal to yourself that, "I did it." I remember talking to Anthony Scaramucci about this, and he said that, uh, he, he, he grew up, you know, in, in one social class, where the ultimate signal that you made it to yourself, that you overcame where you became, was the Lamborghini. That, that was it. And so he... So he, he said, he was like, I, I... He was like: I, I don't want it for other people. I wanna do it to show myself that that kid who grew up down there made it up here. So it's a signaling and a story either way, and that's why it's not judging. It's just... But it's an interesting window into who you are.

Chris Williamson 4:09 Like, retributive materialism is what it's making me think of, that I am going to get back at whatever that thing was from my past.

Morgan Housel 4:16 Yeah, and we-

Chris Williamson 4:17 You see-

Morgan Housel 4:18 Go ahead.

Chris Williamson 4:18 You see this across everything. You see this across people who spend a lot of time beautifying themselves, well, it's because they probably, at one point in their life, felt quite ugly.

Morgan Housel 4:27 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 4:27 Somebody who spends a lot of time accumulating power, well, at one point, they probably felt pretty powerless.

Morgan Housel 4:33 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 4:34 Somebody who tries to accumulate a lot of wealth, well, they felt like they maybe didn't have very much freedom, or they didn't have very much independence-

Morgan Housel 4:41 Mm-hmm

Chris Williamson 4:41 ... or they were very poor. Uh, somebody who makes themselves very powerful and very strong and very big, well, at one point, they probably felt very weak. Like, it, [chuckles] it's not a wonderful lesson, because in the calling out of it, it sort of derogates the thing that most people are chasing, and everyone fucking hates that-

Morgan Housel 5:01 Yeah

Chris Williamson 5:02 ... because it, it devalues the goal that they haven't yet reached or the one that they have reached, and they say, "Look how fucking hard I worked to get to this place, and you're telling me-

Morgan Housel 5:08 Yeah

Chris Williamson 5:08 ... this is part of just some childhood ancestral wound thing?" It's like I, I, I get that. But if you look around closely, the reliability of being able to pattern match what somebody becomes or is trying to become and what it is that they fear or what it- they used to be-

Morgan Housel 5:24 Yeah

Chris Williamson 5:25 ... is [chuckles] a really high hit rate.

Morgan Housel 5:27 And the, the saying that a lot of people know, hurt people hurt people.

Chris Williamson 5:30 Mm-hmm.

Morgan Housel 5:31 There's a lot of cousins of that, of just, like, the way that we behave and act is a reflection of insecurities, things that were done to us that we had in life or, or even positive experiences that we've had in life. I think a lot of people who grew up very wealthy, they have a very interesting financial psychology as well. They can... They understand, I think, very acutely, what money cannot do for you. So a lot of them, if you talk to them, will be like, "Yeah, we grew up very rich, and we had all these homes and all these cars, but, you know, pick, pick whatever story you want. My, my parents didn't get along. My parents got divorced. My dad didn't have any relationship with me. I was bullied at school." Like, they, they're very acute, uh, they're, they're acutely aware-... that money can solve a lot of problems and build an amazing life for you, of course.

Chris Williamson 6:12 Mm.

Morgan Housel 6:12 But I think when you're poor, it's easy to tell yourself, "That's the solution to all my problems, that if only I had that much money, then this hole I have in my soul would go away, and it would- it would be- it'd fill up, and everything would be done."

Chris Williamson 6:24 Mm.

Morgan Housel 6:25 And I mean, people who grew up rich know that that's not true.

Chris Williamson 6:28 Will a big house make you happier?

Morgan Housel 6:30 If you use it as a way to, uh, have better relationships with people. If you have a big house, so you can have 20 of your best buddies over every Friday night and have a great time, yes. If you have a big house because that's what you need for you and your spouse to have five kids, and that's your meaning and purpose in life, yes, absolutely. But I think i- i- if, if you're using it as, as a way of just, like, a, you know, because that's what you should want-

Chris Williamson 6:55 Mm-hmm

Morgan Housel 6:55 ... kind of thing-

Chris Williamson 6:56 Mm-hmm

Morgan Housel 6:56 ... then it can be pretty miserable. Very interesting, Harvey Firestone, who created Firestone tires, uh, he, he, he was, he was alive, uh, 120 years ago or some odd. He wrote a biography in the 1920s, and he pointed this out. He said every wealthy person that he knows, without exception, buys a gigantic house, and every single one of them, without exception, finds it to just be a tremendous burden. [laughing] And, and he was, and he was like... He was like: "Why? Why do we do it?" And he even said Henry Ford, who at the time was like a, a cheap miser kind of-

Chris Williamson 7:27 Mm.

Morgan Housel 7:27 He was like, e- he was like, "Even Henry Ford has a gigantic house that he hates." But he's like, there... So he's like, "There has to be something in the human soul that just associates large property with success."

Chris Williamson 7:38 Big abode.

Morgan Housel 7:39 Because... And I think a lot of people who have a big house know this. Like, a big house is a tremendous amount of upkeep.

Chris Williamson 7:44 Mm-hmm.

Morgan Housel 7:45 And a lot of people who live in those giant homes will eventually basically seclude themselves to a small little corner of that house-

Chris Williamson 7:52 Yeah

Morgan Housel 7:52 ... that feels homely.

Chris Williamson 7:53 I would love to see people who have homes over 10,000 square feet or whatever. I'd love to do one of those GPS tracking maps-

Morgan Housel 8:01 Yes

Chris Williamson 8:01 ... you know, how they do with wolves?

Morgan Housel 8:01 Where do you stay with wolves? [chuckles] Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 8:03 And I'd want to see, "Oh, my God, you know, of the 10,000 square feet that your house is, you use the same 1,500 square feet."

Morgan Housel 8:12 Right.

Chris Williamson 8:12 "And you would be able to purchase that in this location or however many of these, or you-- this is what you lived in. You use the size of house that you lived in when you were 22-"

Morgan Housel 8:22 Yes.

Chris Williamson 8:23 "-and you're still living in that same house that's just slightly bigger surrounding."

Morgan Housel 8:26 But even if you showed that person that, that information, or for myself, and you said, "Hey, you, you could actually only live in a house that's 1,500 square feet." "No. No, thanks, not interested." So that, that's what Harvey Firestone got right. He was like, "It's a burden, but you still do it, and you're still going to do it."

Chris Williamson 8:40 [chuckles]

Morgan Housel 8:41 I, I have a friend whose parents ha- live in a 20,000-square-foot house, and he gave us a tour, and the tour was basically, "Yeah, down that hall, there's four bedrooms that nobody ever uses. Down this hall, there's a room. It was gonna be a gym, but we ne- but we actually put the gym downstairs. Nobody ever uses it." It was... He was giving us a tour of places that are never used, and just like I said, they basically secluded themselves to the kitchen, living room, bedroom, and that was it.

Chris Williamson 9:03 Behold, my obsolescence.

Morgan Housel 9:05 [chuckles] Right, yes.

Chris Williamson 9:05 Look at how much-

Morgan Housel 9:06 Yes

Chris Williamson 9:07 ... surplus I have.

Morgan Housel 9:07 But I think this is why it's such a fascinating topic, because people have always done that, and they will always do it.

Chris Williamson 9:12 An interesting point is even, uh, rich people, uh, not all rich people buy fancy cars.

Morgan Housel 9:20 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 9:20 Not everyone's into cars.

Morgan Housel 9:21 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 9:22 Uh, not all rich people-- most rich people fly at a slightly nicer class.

Morgan Housel 9:27 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 9:27 I think that's one of the places that very few people regret choosing to fly business over flying economy-

Morgan Housel 9:34 Yeah

Chris Williamson 9:35 ... if you're in the market for that kind of travel quality.

Morgan Housel 9:38 Yeah, this is what Sam Zell, who is a, a billionaire real estate guy, he told David Senra this. Sam Zell said, Sam Zell said, "The only true material luxury is flying private." So Sam's, Sam's advice, it's ambitious advice. He was like: "Get the private jet money. That's the only thing that makes a difference in your life."

Chris Williamson 9:53 Scott Galloway said the same.

Morgan Housel 9:54 Yes.

Chris Williamson 9:54 Scott Galloway said, "Once you were able to own your own home, the only next thing worth buying is being able to have a jet."

Morgan Housel 10:01 And obviously, that's .0001%.

Chris Williamson 10:03 It's fucking... Yeah, I'm like, Scott, the difference between, I mean, for a lot of people, being able to buy a house is-

Morgan Housel 10:08 That's, that's-

Chris Williamson 10:09 ... out of fucking reach at the moment. And then the jet thing, but at, at least to me, the f- the sort of funny note on that was like: "What about a yacht?" And he's like: "Yachts are stupid."

Morgan Housel 10:18 No. Pain in the ass.

Chris Williamson 10:19 Yeah. [chuckles]

Morgan Housel 10:20 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 10:21 I thought he was so

Chris Williamson 10:22 funny. Uh, how do you define financial success then? After all of this time thinking about it, what does financial success come to mean?

Morgan Housel 10:31 To me, it's independence to be who you wanna be, and who I wanna be is not who you wanna be. Is- e- everyone has their own very individualistic definition of that. It's waking up and saying, "I can do whatever I want today," and having the independence and the freedom to do that. And the distinction is: there are billionaires who have no control over their time-

Chris Williamson 10:49 Mm

Morgan Housel 10:49 ... no control over their schedule, spend their entire day doing things that they don't wanna do, and there are people who make $50,000 a year, who are living their absolute best life and totally control their life, control where they live, where they work, who they spend their time with, doing the hobbies that they wanna do.

Chris Williamson 11:04 Mm-hmm.

Morgan Housel 11:05 And so to me, that's really what wealth is, and I think, I think a lot of people can get this wrong in their ambitions, that if your sole financial ambition is, "I want the highest net worth," and, and the re- and the way in which you're gonna get that is to basically put on a performance of somebody that you're not and wake up every morning and do things that you don't enjoy doing.

Chris Williamson 11:25 Mm.

Morgan Housel 11:25 And that's, that's, that's not to say hard work. I think, I think the vast majority of people get a big thrill and a lot of pleasure out of hard work. They like being productive, doing the thing that they wanna do. It's working hard on things that you genuinely don't enjoy solely because you're attracted to a bigger bank account.

Chris Williamson 11:41 Mm-hmm.

Morgan Housel 11:42 And but then that's a very common thing. So I think, I think the definition of wealth is the ability, the pleasure of being who you wanna be, being independent, waking up every morning and saying, "What I'm gonna do today is the thing that I want to do."

Chris Williamson 11:55 Wealth without independence is a unique form of poverty.

Morgan Housel 11:59 That's, that's what it is for a lot of wealthy people. This to, this to me, is one of the most fascinating things of meeting a lot of wealthy people. If you associate wealth with material, and you go, "Do they have a big house? Have a big car? Maybe have a plane?" And you associate, "Oh, this person is very wealthy." And for a lot of them, not all of them, but for a lot of them, if... when you-- if you get to know them-... they spend the vast majority of their day doing things that they don't wanna do. And that to me, that, that still might be appeal- be appealing to some people. Or if you're not at that, you might say, "Look, I understand you say that, but let me experience it for myself. Let, let me try to do that." That's always the appeal, so I get that. But it's-- of the very wealthy people I've met, some of them have truly amazing lives, and I wouldn't say jealous, but I look at them and be like, "I, I, I want to be you."

Chris Williamson 12:41 Yep.

Morgan Housel 12:42 There's-- I think there's a greater number, though, that when you... if you get to know them, you're like, "Wow, that's, that's not what I thought it would be."

Chris Williamson 12:48 Well, a lot of people have to do things that they don't want to do, and many people who work super hard, two jobs, got the kids, all the rest of the stuff, would say, "Well, you know, good. They, they should do-- I have to work hard, and so should they." You go, "Yeah, but why do you think they made themselves wealthy?"

Morgan Housel 13:06 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 13:06 "What would you do if you were... Well, if I was wealthy, I wouldn't have to work the second job." It's like, if you are the sort of person who is driven to make yourself into the kind of wealth that they have-

Morgan Housel 13:15 Yes

Chris Williamson 13:16 ... you can't turn off the switch.

Morgan Housel 13:18 You can't, you can't turn-- You're never gonna meet a, a billionaire, except on the very few people who, like, accidentally got rich. You're never gonna meet a self-made billionaire who has a kind of personality who can say, "That's enough. Let me put it all in muni bonds and go home."

Chris Williamson 13:30 Mm.

Morgan Housel 13:30 It's, it's not, it's not there. The reason that they are successful is because they have the kind of personality where they cannot... Twenty-four hours a day, all they can think about is their business.

Chris Williamson 13:38 Mm.

Morgan Housel 13:39 And the w- and that's, that's a m- and even if I would say, "I don't want that for myself," of course, I wanna be financially successful, and I enjoy the work that I do. I'm so grateful that those people exist. Like, the vast majority of the great technology and great medicine that we all enjoy in the world came from people who were maniacally obsessed about their job, even if it came at the expense of their health, their marriage, their relationship with their kids. They created something amazing, and that's why they got successful.

Chris Williamson 14:05 Human perpetual motion machines-

Morgan Housel 14:07 Yes

Chris Williamson 14:07 ... they're just churning, uh, sucking in problems and spitting out solutions.

Morgan Housel 14:12 Yeah, I think we should be almost the most grateful for people in society who created amazing technology and amazing things at the expense of their own happiness, that we all get to benefit from now.

Chris Williamson 14:22 Yeah, I mean, it should be a cautionary tale, but from the outside, everybody looks at it and thinks some version of, "That might be true for them, but it won't be true for me."

Morgan Housel 14:31 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 14:31 "Watch me dance through the minefield that has been laid by art and literature and movies and songs and stories from my grandparents and the most famous investors from history. Watch me dance through that minefield and not kick any-

Morgan Housel 14:48 And they do it

Chris Williamson 14:48 ... of the tripwires."

Morgan Housel 14:50 David Senra has profiled four hundred of the most successful entrepreneurs. Uh, he's done such a good job doing it, and he says, of the four hundred entrepreneurs he's profiled, there's two whose lives that he thinks that he would, he, he, that he would actually wanna live.

Chris Williamson 15:04 Who are they?

Morgan Housel 15:05 Uh, one is Ed Thorp, who was a, a card counter in Vegas and then a hedge fund manager-

Chris Williamson 15:10 Okay

Morgan Housel 15:11 ... and had just an amazing personal life on the side. Just amazing family, incredible health.

Chris Williamson 15:16 Mm.

Morgan Housel 15:16 I think he's still around. I think Ed Thorp is ninety years old and genuinely looks s- fifty-five.

Chris Williamson 15:21 Wow!

Morgan Housel 15:21 He's a, an incredible life. But of the other, you know, three hundred and ninety-nine people that he's profiled, it's that person created something amazing.

Chris Williamson 15:29 Mm-hmm.

Morgan Housel 15:29 Built an incredible thing, an amazing amount of wealth, technology that we all benefit from, and we should worship that person or at least admire that person, and I would never wanna be them.

Chris Williamson 15:37 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and evade them as much as you can, at least in a role model. You got this great line: "Money serves you best when it stops being the thing you think about."

Morgan Housel 15:46 Yeah, I think, I think a lot-- the vast majority of successful entrepreneurs, with the exception of maybe hedge fund managers, were not chasing the money. They were absolutely fascinated with the problem that they were trying to solve, but they weren't doing it just to get rich. The, the, the money, the money came. It eventually came. If you solve enough problems in a way that's helpful for people, it'll eventually come to you. But I think people who-- uh, entrepreneurs who set out the goal is to become rich very seldomly do.

Chris Williamson 16:11 The, uh... Oh, I actually took that line to mean something else. "Money serves you best when it stops being the thing you think about," I took that to mean that your ultimate form of wealth is when you no longer have to think about the cost of a thing. You turn up at dinner, and you don't mind putting your card down.

Morgan Housel 16:26 That's true, too.

Chris Williamson 16:27 You need to fly somewhere.

Morgan Housel 16:27 Sure.

Chris Williamson 16:27 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 16:28 You can stop thinking about it.

Chris Williamson 16:29 So I was in Nashville a couple of months ago on tour, and I was there with, uh, Luke, who's my tour manager, and he was telling me this story about how his missus gets mad at him because it's 1:00 AM and he's still WhatsAppping away. He has the highest phone use of anybody, Gen Z girls, TikTok addicts, like, degen. He has the highest, and it's all work. It's just work, and he just loves it. He used to be a club promoter, same industry as me, and the guy is an animal. He's, he's so good at what he does, and he is unrelenting, and he has a lot of fun doing it, too. So it's this kind of weird intersection of all the Venn diagrams. And he, he made this really fucking wonderful point. He said, "I have a brain that likes to solve problems. I'm just trying to give it good problems to solve."

Morgan Housel 17:13 Yeah, great.

Chris Williamson 17:14 And-

Morgan Housel 17:14 Yeah

Chris Williamson 17:15 ... I was like, still chills on my arms thinking about it because lots of people have the kind of brains that are just looking to obsess over something, to try and fix, uh, make this piece fit to that piece. He is fortunate that he has managed to find business and kids and jujitsu and wife and health stuff, and he's, uh, a bunch of interesting problems allow me to apply to that. But if you don't have a sufficiently interesting problem, that's when people get obsessed with politics or porn or their ex-

Morgan Housel 17:47 Yeah

Chris Williamson 17:47 ... or whatever it might be. And I think a really great solution to this, maybe should you do enough mindfulness to be able to relinquish your permanent obsession with problems? Perhaps. But a good interim strategy is just give yourself better problems to solve.

Morgan Housel 18:03 Good problems. I mean, a, a, a cousin of what you just said is, you know, the, the FIRE movement, financial independence, retire early. You had all these people who would try to live incredibly frugal lives with a high savings rate, and then they would retire when they were twenty-eight and had half a million bucks in the bank, whatever it would be. So many of the people who actually did that, who retired when they were twenty-eight, were clinically depressed six months later. 'Cause they realized, like, what their actual purpose was in life that gave them meaning and whatnot was work, and so many of those people who did retire went back to work. And so the idea that we all need meaningful problems-... to solve and to go is, is really important. And a lot of, a lot of people get this wrong with retirement. They spend all of their retirement planning on, "How do I save enough money?" And none of it on, "What am I gonna do in retirement?" I mean, that's, that, that's, that's, that, that, that's a big problem for people.

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Morgan Housel 20:22 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 20:22 And if you stop working earlier, you tend to die sooner. And, uh, I mean, continuing to serve your corporate overlord as a longevity strategy might be a little bit of a high-risk move for me to put forward, but I think-

Morgan Housel 20:35 But doing something

Chris Williamson 20:36 ... the lesson is, yes, meaning, purpose, reason to get up, structure, collegial, sharing with other people, problems to solve, keeping the mind active. It, it's a big suite of things that come from work that is more than just the paycheck.

Morgan Housel 20:51 The only formula that I put in the book, it's like, the simplest that I could do is a formula for a pretty good life is independence plus purpose. And I, I, I, I think it's hard to have a good, meaningful life without both of those things. The independence to be who you are and do what you want-

Chris Williamson 21:07 Mm-hmm

Morgan Housel 21:07 ... and the purpose, the wisdom to solve har- solve interesting problems, har- hard problems, as you said. I think that's, that, that's important. I think you need both of those to have a good life.

Chris Williamson 21:15 Mm, and I guess you need the independence so that you can choose the problems you want to solve.

Morgan Housel 21:21 The problems you can solve. And purpose will be different for everybody.

Chris Williamson 21:23 Mm-hmm.

Morgan Housel 21:23 For me, it's my, my kids right now. That'll change when they're on their own. For some people, it's work, some people, it's religion. Whatever it might be, the independence to be who you are and to chase something that is bigger than yourself, work on a problem that is

Morgan Housel 21:35 bigger than yourself.

Chris Williamson 21:36 Talk to me about the relativity of wealth, the, the comparison and anchors.

Morgan Housel 21:42 I think it's, uh, it's... You have to choose your words carefully when you say this, 'cause you can really offend a lot of people. But the average, ordinary, median, middle-class American today, earning $60,000, whatever, whatever the median income is, uh, lives a life that would be indistinguishable from magic to somebody 100 years ago. I mean, that's, that's true. Just the, the access to the simplest things that you and I never think about, Advil, sunscreen, let alone phones and the Internet and whatnot, would have seemed like magic to people. It is also true, and this is the important part, it's also true that nobody wakes up thinking about how magical Advil is-

Chris Williamson 22:18 Mm

Morgan Housel 22:18 ... and how grateful we should be to live in a world that has Advil and penicillin and all this. Nobody-- the speed at which a luxury becomes a necessity is two seconds, and you can easily imagine a world in which our grandkids live in a world that if we could get a glimpse of it, had a time machine and could see how they're living in the world 2150, be like: "I can't... You, you guys must be wake up so happy."

Chris Williamson 22:42 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 22:42 "We've cured cancer. W- w- what, what..." "You know, we've done all these things. We're, we're a multi-planetary species," whatever it might be, and they won't appreciate any of it because it'll just become a normal thing. And so that's always the case, that luxury becomes necessity-

Chris Williamson 22:54 Mm

Morgan Housel 22:54 ... uh, very, very quickly. It's always been the case that there's no definition of wealth. There's no objective definition of wealth. The only definition that makes sense to people is relative to other people.

Chris Williamson 23:06 Mm.

Morgan Housel 23:06 And so it doesn't matter how much money that I have; all that matters is that I have more than you.

Chris Williamson 23:11 Mm.

Morgan Housel 23:11 That's always been the case. It is 100 times more potent now because of social media. So what I just said was true 100 years ago, it's true 1,000 years ago. You judge yourself relative to other people, but your comparison group now that you're comparing yourself to is a curated, algorithmic, highlighted reel of the top 1% of moments of the top 1% of people's lives.

Chris Williamson 23:30 Globally.

Morgan Housel 23:31 Yes, globally. And so it's created this idea... Look, as an iron rule of math, half the population has to be below the median.

Chris Williamson 23:38 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 23:39 That's just how it works. Half the population has to be below average. And when everybody, though, is being almost force-fed the top 1% of moments of the top 1% of people's lives, you create this situation where a lot of people are living good lives by any historical standard.

Chris Williamson 23:56 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 23:56 But we've created a world where I think most people expect what is effectively a top 1% outcome.

Chris Williamson 24:01 Mm.

Morgan Housel 24:01 And you see this a lot with, with, uh, college students, where a lot of people think that the... Look, the baseline norm of what they want in life is a bachelor's degree from a flagship university, a, a corporate job that pays low six figures to begin with, great health insurance, great retirement, uh, a 3,000-square-foot house with two SUVs. That's, that's become their baseline norm of, like, "That's the- that's just what I expect."

Chris Williamson 24:25 Anything short of that-

Morgan Housel 24:26 Anything short of that is a failure.

Chris Williamson 24:28 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 24:29 ... on one hand, I wanna live in a world that has rising expectations. That's what progress is. I wanna live in a world where my grandkids live in a world where, where cancer is cured, and they don't even think about it. That's the dream. Rising expectations are, is progress. That's what it is. But you also, also have to e- expect and understand that in that world, that growth individually and as a whole society is never gonna feel like you think it would be, because it just becomes the norm that you're expect.

Chris Williamson 24:55 Hmm. Yeah, uh, the median income is 83,000.

Morgan Housel 24:59 For a household. Individually, it's, it's, it's, it's lower 'cause there's, there's more than one worker per household.

Chris Williamson 25:04 Whoa! That's per household?

Morgan Housel 25:05 You know, there's, there's one and a half or whatever workers per household on average.

Chris Williamson 25:08 Oh, that's interesting. You're right, the median US household income.

Morgan Housel 25:11 Household income, yeah.

Chris Williamson 25:12 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 25:12 So, so individually, it's probably 60 or something like whatever, maybe 50, whatever it is.

Chris Williamson 25:15 Oh, interesting.

Morgan Housel 25:16 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 25:16 Uh, it- I think the, the sort of relativity thing is, is completely true. There is no such thing as objective wealth. There is only subjective wealth compared to the people around you. But there's another comparison, and it's you yesterday.

Morgan Housel 25:31 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 25:32 So not only do you need to be more than the people around you, but let's say you even manage to do that, right? Which is by design, you're the outlier in that group. So however big the group is, which is now eight billion people, but local friend group, neighborhood, whatever it might be, I've done it. I'm in the top 10% or 1% of people that I compare myself to. Okay, and how's your trajectory doing up against you?

Morgan Housel 25:57 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 25:57 Because you now have to run on a treadmill that's not only faster than all of the other people running on treadmills next to you, but the treadmill can only get faster on yours, irrespective of what they do-

Morgan Housel 26:08 Right

Chris Williamson 26:08 ... at the same time. And that, um, that trajectory piece, I know you're a massive fan of Jimmy Carr. He's a great friend and, and he... The guy fucking-

Morgan Housel 26:16 The best

Chris Williamson 26:16 ... rules, dude.

Morgan Housel 26:17 The best.

Chris Williamson 26:17 He absolutely fucking-

Morgan Housel 26:18 So smart.

Chris Williamson 26:19 He's great. And, um, he has this idea: trajectory is more important than position.

Morgan Housel 26:25 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 26:25 If you are the 100th best downhill skier in the world, but last year you were 150, you are in a subjectively better position than the second-best downhill skier in the world, who last year was number one.

Morgan Housel 26:37 Yeah. Oh, uh, that's, that's absolutely true. Uh, I think for a lot of people, what they really like with money is not even being rich, it's the process of becoming rich. The change in, in the trajectory is way more exciting.

Chris Williamson 26:49 The philosopher Andrew Tate once said, "Having things isn't fun. Getting things is fun."

Morgan Housel 26:55 Sure.

Chris Williamson 26:55 It's an accurate insight.

Morgan Housel 26:56 And I think it was Nas maybe who said, "People don't like you when you have something. They like you when you're pursuing something."

Chris Williamson 27:02 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 27:03 Uh, have you read the book The Evolution of Desire by David Buss?

Chris Williamson 27:05 Of course.

Morgan Housel 27:06 Fantastic book. One of the things he pointed out, the example that he gave I thought was so fascinating, is what tends to be attractive, uh, are not people who have a lot of resources, it's people who have the potential to acquire future resources. So the example that he gave is a med school student-

Chris Williamson 27:21 Mm

Morgan Housel 27:21 ... might be more attractive to a mate-

Chris Williamson 27:23 Than a doctor

Morgan Housel 27:23 ... than a doctor.

Chris Williamson 27:24 Yeah. Well-

Morgan Housel 27:24 It's the trajectory that they're on.

Chris Williamson 27:26 Why is it that the starving guitarist living on his friend's couch can kinda get all of the girls? Why? Why- like, you know, I'm sure the rock star could too, as long as he's on the right trajectory. But if the rock star's facing down, oh, he, he's kind of like Bitcoin at $1. You were talking about some of the early episodes that we'd done, and it, uh, when you get to be at the start of somebody's journey... You know, we spoke for the first time before-

Morgan Housel 27:52 2019?

Chris Williamson 27:52 Maybe-

Morgan Housel 27:52 Does that sound right?

Chris Williamson 27:53 Yeah, 2019, maybe, maybe even 2018.

Morgan Housel 27:55 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 27:56 Before you'd written Psychology of Money, before... I don't even know if you were blogging on Collaborative Fund.

Morgan Housel 28:00 I was, I, I was a blogger, yeah.

Chris Williamson 28:01 But were you-

Morgan Housel 28:01 Yeah

Chris Williamson 28:01 ... still at Motley Fool?

Morgan Housel 28:03 No, I was at Collaborative Fund-

Chris Williamson 28:04 Right

Morgan Housel 28:04 ... but I hadn't written a book yet.

Chris Williamson 28:05 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 28:05 You were a very nascent podcaster yourself, right?

Chris Williamson 28:08 [chuckles] Correct, yeah. It was a, a blobby, baby toddler

Chris Williamson 28:11 thing. Uh, but yeah, uh, talk to me about that, that trajectory piece. What are your... Have you got any examples, any stories that speak to that, "I must be better not only than the people around me, but also than me yesterday?"

Morgan Housel 28:25 I think it's, uh, you know, it, it, it was weird for me. I, I, I had been a full-time professional writer for 15 years before I wrote a book, and I was very comfortable in my position of where I was as, as a blogger, as an online writer. I felt like I had a great life, loved what I did, made enough money for my family to be totally happy and have some sense of independence. And then I wrote a book 15 years into it that I never expected to do anything, and the publisher didn't expect to do anything, but massively increased the trajectory of my career. And it felt great. It felt, it felt amazing for, I wanna say, a year, and then it became, "This is just where I'm at now." I think what... The reason happiness is a fleeting emotion, which it is, most people are never happy for more than a short period of time. It's a great emotion, but it's always fleeting, is because what makes you happy is surprise. It's experiencing something that you genuinely did not expect. And so when I had this bump in my career, there was a period of surprise. I never expected this to happen.

Chris Williamson 29:25 Mm.

Morgan Housel 29:26 And then after a period of time, it was like, "Okay, I'm, now I'm used to this trajectory, and this is where we're at." So I think even when you're on a higher trajectory, you can get used to it very quickly.

Chris Williamson 29:34 The gradient continues to get steeper-

Morgan Housel 29:36 Yeah

Chris Williamson 29:36 ... but the problem is, as the gradient gets steeper, there are fewer and fewer degrees that you can make it go more vertically.

Morgan Housel 29:41 But even if you're on this, y- like, even if you're still... So there's a hedge fund called Renaissance Technologies. It's the most successful hedge fund that's ever existed.

Chris Williamson 29:47 No way! I've never even heard of it.

Morgan Housel 29:49 The average... So it's, it's a, it's a, it's not open to outside investors. It's pretty much only employees get to invest in it, and it is in a universe of its own. [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 29:56 [chuckles]

Morgan Housel 29:56 Uh, its average annual returns, going back, like, 30 years, are 66%.

Chris Williamson 30:02 Sure.

Morgan Housel 30:02 Just at a complete... Which, if you don't know anything about finance, that is like Michael Jordan times 50. It's a com- different universe. And, uh, but look, when you've earned 66% every year-

Chris Williamson 30:13 For 30 [chuckles]

Morgan Housel 30:13 ... for 30 years, and if you earn it next year, like you got richer, but you're like, "Yeah, that's just what this does."

Chris Williamson 30:18 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 30:19 "That's just where I'm at."

Chris Williamson 30:19 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Morgan Housel 30:20 "That's, that's what I expect." And I imagine, like, when Taylor Swift makes a billion dollars on tour, she's like, "Yeah, that's, that's just, that's what I do."

Chris Williamson 30:26 And anything short of that is a failure.

Morgan Housel 30:28 Anything short of that is a failure, right, right. I think that's always the case with anything that you do.

Chris Williamson 30:32 ... Great line in a, a Jon Bellion song. He says, "If the higher I climb is the further I fall, then why love anything at all?" He's talking about emotional connection and opening up your heart and then potentially it being broken. But [clears throat] the same thing is absolutely true when it comes to status and striving and money and success and accolade. Your, your last album got a Grammy nomination. Well, this year, it better get a nomination or win, or you better get two-

Morgan Housel 30:56 Yeah

Chris Williamson 30:57 ... or else you're going backward. That's not very good.

Morgan Housel 30:59 The one career profession I think is really interesting in here is President of the United States because you are the most powerful man in the world with anything at your fingertips. Uh, and by the beauty of democracy, it's a short-term job.

Chris Williamson 31:12 Yep.

Morgan Housel 31:12 And after being the most powerful man in the world, one day you wake up, and you're just some guy named George Bush.

Chris Williamson 31:18 [laughing]

Morgan Housel 31:18 And there's, there's very few careers that are like that, where you are absolutely tippity-top for a moment, but it's going to end. And yes, you, you can even have book deals and speaking deals and have good fortune, but you know there's gonna come a specific day where nobody cares about you anymore.

Chris Williamson 31:34 Well, I mean, imagine the first book that you write being a global international bestseller at a rate that's heretofore unknown of in the entire industry, and then having to write a second one and a third-

Morgan Housel 31:44 And a third one and a fourth one.

Chris Williamson 31:45 [chuckles]

Morgan Housel 31:45 Yeah. No, it's a, it's an interesting thing for me.

Chris Williamson 31:47 [chuckles]

Morgan Housel 31:47 And, uh, yeah, it's been-

Chris Williamson 31:49 But you're in oddly, oddly good company with regards to that. James Clear did the same thing.

Morgan Housel 31:54 Yep.

Chris Williamson 31:55 If you discount models, Mark Manson did the same thing.

Morgan Housel 31:58 Yep.

Chris Williamson 31:59 Uh, the- there is a-- you're in a c- sort of contemporary club of people who kind of did the same of peaking at, in high school-

Morgan Housel 32:08 Yeah

Chris Williamson 32:08 ... with regards to their writing career, and that's not to say that it can't be beaten, but the ability to be able to beat it is so-

Morgan Housel 32:16 It's so difficult because your own, and i- importantly, everybody else's expectations shift.

Chris Williamson 32:20 Correct.

Morgan Housel 32:21 Not just higher, they, they-

Chris Williamson 32:22 Right

Morgan Housel 32:22 ... they go stratospheric-

Chris Williamson 32:23 Yeah, yeah, yeah

Morgan Housel 32:23 from there.

Chris Williamson 32:24 Which says a lot about the importance of expectations.

Morgan Housel 32:27 Yeah, yeah. It's, it's everything. And I think a lot of the reason that maybe my first book did well is nobody expected anything from it. Nobody expected-- readers didn't expect anything. The publisher, I didn't expect... It was all, it was all upside right there.

Chris Williamson 32:39 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 32:39 And everything ca- that came after that was like, if this is anything short-

Chris Williamson 32:44 Yeah

Morgan Housel 32:44 ... of a, of absolute life-changing in every sentence, I'm gonna consider it a failure.

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Chris Williamson 34:01 at checkout. How much of modern dissatisfaction do you think comes from comparing ourselves to people that we don't actually want to be like? I think that that marries what we were talking about before, which is a lot of the richest, most powerful people on the planet are secretly or even kind of publicly miserable.

Morgan Housel 34:19 Don't want to be.

Chris Williamson 34:20 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 34:20 I think what's more important... Do you remember the show, the show MTV Cribs?

Chris Williamson 34:24 Of course.

Morgan Housel 34:24 You're of that generation? I know you're young.

Chris Williamson 34:25 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Morgan Housel 34:26 That was, that was most people's view into how the other half lives.

Chris Williamson 34:30 Right.

Morgan Housel 34:30 This is before social media and whatnot, and that was it. But it didn't really inflate your aspirations because you know that's not a peer. It's Jay-Z. It's Shaq.

Chris Williamson 34:38 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 34:39 Of course, he has a bigger house than I do. What's- what social media did is it showed you people who ostensibly should be peers, or at least that's the, that's the idea.

Chris Williamson 34:46 They've got an Instagram login as well.

Morgan Housel 34:48 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 34:48 They use the same platform that you do.

Morgan Housel 34:49 That's just a normal-- that's not a celebrity. It's not Shaq. It's just a guy who looks like me, but he's obviously living a much better life than I do. So it created this idea that, like, I, that's, that's where I should be, and I think that's, that's the poison of what it is. It, it gives the impression that people who, A, are, are showing you a tiny little fraction of their life-

Chris Williamson 35:07 Mm.

Morgan Housel 35:08 ... it gives you the impression that that's what you should be doing right now at this moment, too.

Chris Williamson 35:12 What is-- what, what have you come to learn about the relationship between money and status?

Morgan Housel 35:19 You bring up our friend Jimmy Carr, who I, I admire, so I- I think he's so brilliant. I have a, such a fondness for comedians in general.

Chris Williamson 35:25 Have you got to speak to him?

Morgan Housel 35:26 Uh, no, we've DM'd a couple times.

Chris Williamson 35:28 Oh.

Morgan Housel 35:28 But that, but I, I love the guy. He's so great.

Chris Williamson 35:30 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 35:31 Um, and I think what's great about comedians and, uh... is that i- if you have a favorite comedian, you don't know, and you don't care how much money they make. I saw Louis CK live a couple weeks ago, and this is part of who he is. He stumbles out on stage, and he's wearing, like, a, a shirt that's way too big for him and his dirty jeans, kind of, and people love him. They love every second of it. Because what you love them for is their comedy, uh, obviously. You just, you don't, you don't... It's a rare situation where I'm like, "What I value you for has nothing to do whatsoever with your financial success." And so-

Chris Williamson 36:04 Mm-hmm

Morgan Housel 36:04 ... you ask, like, the relationship-

Chris Williamson 36:05 Mm

Morgan Housel 36:05 ... between, uh, money and, and power. If you're talking about, like, a businessman or an entrepreneur, you might measure their success based off of their net worth. If you're talking about if, if your favorite athlete, uh, had, had a, had a gambling addiction and lost all their money, but they're still just so much fun to watch on the court-

Chris Williamson 36:21 Mm

Morgan Housel 36:21 ... you wouldn't care that much. And there's a lot of athletes who did fit that, that bill and, and comedians who might fit that bill. If, and this is not the case, but if my favorite comedian, uh, i- if I found out, like, he hasn't figured out how to monetize it yet, and, and the guy's actually broke and lives in a tiny apartment, I don't care!... I'm gonna watch every special-

Chris Williamson 36:36 Yeah

Morgan Housel 36:37 - 'cause I value them for something more than money, and that's true for your be- your best friends. I wrote about this in the book. One of my best friends, I've known him for 20 years, the best guy I know. I have so much fun hanging out with this guy, and I've- I've- I've known him forever, and of our peer group, he makes by far the least amount of money, by far the least amount of money, and it really bothers him. And he talks about how inferior he feels and whatnot, and I told him one day, I was like, "If you are a funny joke teller and a good friend, you're fun to hang out with, I love our conversations, you're working hard to support your family, you're a good dad, you're a good husband, you're a good citizen, if you do those things, you've earned 90% of the points that I am willing to give anybody."

Chris Williamson 37:16 Mm.

Morgan Housel 37:17 "If you also happen to be rich and successful, I might bump you up to, like, a 9.2."

Chris Williamson 37:21 Mm.

Morgan Housel 37:22 "But let's not pretend that, like, what I enjoy about you and like about you is that you're-"

Chris Williamson 37:25 His issue, though, is not your warmth and respect to him. His issue is his perspective of himself.

Morgan Housel 37:33 Right.

Chris Williamson 37:33 It's how he feels about him, not how he feels you feel about him.

Morgan Housel 37:37 I think, and in some ways, this is unavoidable, so I'm not saying this is even a bad thing. It's just a real thing.

Chris Williamson 37:42 Mm.

Morgan Housel 37:42 But we wanna think that what people admire us for is our, is, is, is our wealth, and 90% of the time, if you run through the people who are most meaningful to you in your life, they don't value you for your wealth, and the thing that they might value you for has nothing to do with money. My kids don't care in the slightest, uh, whether my income went up last year or what our net worth is. They care that I listen to them, and that I play football with them in the driveway, and that I read books to them, and that I, and, and that I'm a good father. I, I, I've, I, I've, I've another friend, the same friend who gave me the tour of his very large house [chuckles] that was, uh, mostly not used, who said, "Sometimes I have days where I, I wish my dad was just a normal guy who drove a Subaru," that the money was actually getting in the way. It was getting in the way.

Chris Williamson 38:26 Oh, he inherited, he inherited the money?

Morgan Housel 38:27 Yes.

Chris Williamson 38:27 Right.

Morgan Housel 38:28 Uh, that the money was getting in the way of his ability to just be a normal, good dad, and when you have that much money, it was the co- it was the center of everything that they did in life, was like, "How do we use our money for philanthropy and the lifestyle that we live?" And he's like, "Sometimes I just want my dad to just go out and play baseball with me, to be a normal guy."

Chris Williamson 38:45 Isn't that strange, that people who are struggling for money are obsessed with money, and people who have lots of money are obsessed with money? Both groups at both ends of the barbell, uh, much of what they're spending their time thinking about is their wealth.

Morgan Housel 39:03 I think that's true for a lot of things in life. If you've known someone who's dealt with infertility, they will do anything to have a kid. They would chop off their arms, uh, do anything to have a baby.

Chris Williamson 39:12 Mm-hmm.

Morgan Housel 39:13 If you know people who have newborns, they would do anything to sleep tonight. [chuckles] They would chop off their arms-

Chris Williamson 39:18 Yeah

Morgan Housel 39:19 ... for this kid to shut up and let me sleep.

Chris Williamson 39:20 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 39:20 It's always the case that, like, the extent to which you value something, if, if you want something, and you can't have it, you value it more than anything. When you have it, the value diminishes-

Chris Williamson 39:30 Mm

Morgan Housel 39:30 ... and if it's taken away from you, then the perceived value goes up tremendously again.

Chris Williamson 39:34 Such playground mentality, this sort of scarcity equals value-

Morgan Housel 39:40 Yeah

Chris Williamson 39:40 ... f- for everything.

Morgan Housel 39:41 How could it be any other way, though? Of course, that's, that's always what it is, that scarcity equals value.

Chris Williamson 39:46 Because dopamine is a hell of a drug.

Morgan Housel 39:48 That's it. Uh, yeah, that- that's a lot of it, and in a competitive world, where we're all competing for attention, we're competing for jobs, we're competing for spouses, we're always competing, again, it doesn't matter how much I have. It just matters that I

Morgan Housel 39:59 have more than you.

Chris Williamson 40:00 The happiest people I know are the most content, not necessarily the richest, healthiest, or most successful. Is it possible to train contentment?

Morgan Housel 40:09 Pretty difficult, I think. I think there are a lot of things in behavioral finance that it's just who you are and that who you are was forged at conception, and there's not a lot you can do about it. Daniel Kahneman was a, a psychologist, won the Nobel Prize in Economics. He was basically the godfather of behavioral finance, uh, came up with the vast majority of the theories that we all talk about that dictate how we think about money and, and, and success, and we, we a- we asked him one time, like, "Has all of this research that he had done over the previous 70 years, has it made him better at making decisions?" And like, "No," without hesitation, "No."

Chris Williamson 40:44 [laughing]

Morgan Housel 40:45 "No, no." And so you're like, if somebody like him, it hasn't necessarily helped him. So I think for a lot of this, the flaw that people make is seem like I, I, I can learn about the psychology of wealth, and money, and investing and then change myself and change my behavior, and I think a lot of it, a lot of the evidence is no, you can't. I think the best you can do is become more aware of who you are and accept it, and build a financial plan, and build goals that are around that. I remember... I'll, I'll, I'll give you an example of this. Jeff Bezos was talking about when he started Amazon in 1994, I think it was, and he used the, this is now famous, the regret minimization framework, and he said, "If I started Amazon, and it failed, I would not regret that, but if I didn't start it, I would regret that for the rest of my life."

Chris Williamson 41:24 Mm.

Morgan Housel 41:24 And I remember hearing that and being like, "That's awesome. I love that, and that is so not me." If I put everything I had into a startup and raised money from my parents and worked 150 hours a week for five years, and it failed, I would be beside myself.

Chris Williamson 41:38 [laughing]

Morgan Housel 41:38 And that's, and that's... But I'm so glad that he and other people exist.

Chris Williamson 41:42 Which is exactly why he's a billionaire, and you're not.

Morgan Housel 41:44 It's not... Exactly, and, and never will be, and it's not... A- a- and so the, the idea that, like, you have to figure it out, what kind of person you are, and so back to like, I w- I should not train myself to be like, "How can I train myself to have the entrepreneur's mentality?" I don't. It's okay. It's not that big a deal. I should just create a life that maximizes who I am than try to be someone who I'm not.

Chris Williamson 42:03 What are the important things to learn about who you are in this context?

Morgan Housel 42:07 I think so much of it is having goals that don't leave the roof of your own house, kind of just being very selfish in a positive way. I think a l- a lot of bad financial decisions happen when you are chasing a goal or doing something that is very right for another person but wrong for you, and it's the easiest trap to fall into because you're like, "Chris did that, and it worked for him, and he's really happy with it-

Chris Williamson 42:30 Mm.

Morgan Housel 42:31 - so I should do it, too." And it's, a- and it's, it's one thing if you're chasing ideas that didn't work out for other people. Then, like, the writing was already on the wall, but if I try to do something that not only was successful but that you love-... then it's like, well, I, I, I, I should love this too. Without the, the acknowledgement that everybody is very d- is so incredibly different. There are a lot of things that I do with my money that other people, maybe you, would look at and be like, "I don't... It doesn't make any sense to me. I don't understand why you're doing that." And I'm- and 90% of the time, my answer would be like: Yeah, I, I understand it wouldn't work for you. You probably do things that would drive me crazy, too.

Chris Williamson 43:05 Mm.

Morgan Housel 43:05 And then, that's, and it's fine, and people understand that very vividly if we're talking about our taste in food or music, that, like, everyone's different. Like, you like Italian food, I like Mexican. It doesn't matter. There's- nobody's right. It's all subjective. But when it comes to how you should manage your money and the lifestyle that you should live, it really bothers people. I think part of it is because there's obviously no right answers on how to do this. This is all very uncertain.

Chris Williamson 43:28 Mm.

Morgan Housel 43:28 How to build wealth is uncertain-

Chris Williamson 43:29 Mm.

Morgan Housel 43:29 -how to manage it, how to spend it, it's all uncertain, and so when you see somebody doing it differently than you are, uh, you, you take it as not like, "Oh, maybe that's a different way to do it." You take it as a threat to the, the, the decisions that you made.

Chris Williamson 43:41 So true. It's... This is everything.

Morgan Housel 43:43 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:43 This isn't just wealth.

Morgan Housel 43:44 This is why I think the rent versus buy argument gets so heated. Because if you've, like... Because i- honestly, it's, it's not, it's not obviously clear which is better, rent and buy. You, like, anybody can make the argument either way. But if you've... If you have a giant mortgage and you put your life savings into your house, and somebody tells you renting was better, you're like, "That's a threat."

Chris Williamson 44:03 Yep.

Morgan Housel 44:03 "That's a threat to my identity, and I'm gonna respond viciously now."

Chris Williamson 44:07 What's that line of yours where you say, uh, "Most debating on the internet are just people with differing perspectives being unable to understand the others?"

Morgan Housel 44:15 Talking over each other.

Chris Williamson 44:16 Yeah, people just speaking-

Morgan Housel 44:17 Most people, whether, whether it's how you invest your money, when people are like, "No, Bitcoin. No, index funds," they're just, they're different people talking over each other.

Chris Williamson 44:23 I'm a Bitcoin guy trying to tell you, an index fund guy-

Morgan Housel 44:26 Right

Chris Williamson 44:26 ... how to be a Bitcoin guy.

Morgan Housel 44:28 And, and, and, and the truth might be, is like Bitcoin is the absolute right way that you should invest, and index funds are the exact way that I should invest. And that's where a lot of people get... Like, most debates about this, there's people with different time horizons, different risk tolerances, different cultures, different family goals, and not understanding that it's okay for people to have different views.

Chris Williamson 44:47 "Spending money to show people how much money you have is a fast way to go broke and an expensive way to gain respect."

Morgan Housel 44:52 It's the fastest way to have less money.

Chris Williamson 44:54 [laughing]

Morgan Housel 44:55 Spending money to show people how much money you have is the fastest way to have less money. And so this is why I think one of the most valuable financial assets is not needing to impress strangers.

Chris Williamson 45:04 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 45:05 It's the most valuable financial asset that you can have on your balance sheet is to say, "I want to use money as a tool to give myself and my family a better life. I do not want to use it as a yardstick of social status"-

Chris Williamson 45:14 Mm

Morgan Housel 45:15 ... by and large, because we massively overestimate, almost always, how much other people are paying attention to us. I've seen some fascinating studies, I thought they were so well designed, of a study where some researchers took a woman, and they put her in an objectively hideous, ugly sweater, like, like, like, like a comically ugly sweater, and sent her into a party.

Chris Williamson 45:36 Mm.

Morgan Housel 45:36 And she mingled about, like, with a sense of humiliation, and she came back out, and they said, "How many people in the party noticed your sweater?" And she's like: Everybody. Like, "Everybody's staring at me and laughing." And they go into the party, and they start asking people, "Did you notice the woman in the, in the ugly sweater?" "No, no, no, no, no, no, no." Nobody's thinking about you as much as you are.

Chris Williamson 45:54 Mm.

Morgan Housel 45:55 And I think, so the idea, it's so easy to tell yourself, "If I had this house, car, clothes," or whatever it might be, "that other people will notice and elevate my status and pay attention to me and look at me and say, 'Wow, look at, look at Chris. He's such a cool guy.'"

Chris Williamson 46:10 Mm.

Morgan Housel 46:10 And, and the reality is, most people are- aren't thinking about you because they're too busy thinking about themselves.

Chris Williamson 46:15 Have you-

Morgan Housel 46:15 They're inside their own head.

Chris Williamson 46:16 Have you seen the Dartmouth scar experiment?

Morgan Housel 46:19 No.

Chris Williamson 46:19 It's similar to that. So study participants were brought in, and they were going to sit down and have an interview. As they were putting makeup on them, prosthetic makeup on, they, uh, make up this scar across the, the face, like a huge, big smile, as if you'd been in sort of gang violence. This massive scar across their face. And then, as they're about to head in, they said, "Well, just one moment. Be- be- before you go in, we're gonna, we're gonna touch it up and, and just refine the scar a little bit more." And the participants weren't allowed to see themselves before they went in. They removed the scar.

Morgan Housel 46:51 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 46:52 They put them in. They said, "Have the interview. Come back, tell us, do you think the person noticed the scar? Do you think that the interview went well or badly because of their impressions of this?" "Uh, they couldn't stop staring at it. I'm absolutely certain that they were judging me because of it. This is horrible. This is so bad." "Please look in the mirror." The scar wasn't even there.

Morgan Housel 47:08 Wasn't even there, right. I think a lot of times, it's really interesting if you meet someone the first time, and the, the conversation goes great, and sometimes a couple hours later, they'll email you and say, "God, I'm so sorry that I said X, Y, and Z. After I thought about it, I ne- I, I'd really... That, that probably offended you, and I'm really s-" And 99% of the time, you're like, "I don't... I wasn't... No, it's an- I didn't think about it whatso- [chuckles] whatsoever." So the idea that most people, they don't have the bandwidth to think about you because they're busy worrying about themselves.

Chris Williamson 47:36 Mm-hmm.

Morgan Housel 47:36 And so in that situation, there are probably people in that room who did have scars, did have birthmarks-

Chris Williamson 47:41 Mm-hmm

Morgan Housel 47:41 ... did have ugly sweaters, that are worrying about [chuckles] themselves and not thinking about other people.

Chris Williamson 47:45 What's that word for staircase regret? Uh, l'esprit d'escalier.

Morgan Housel 47:50 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 47:50 familiar with that?

Morgan Housel 47:51 No.

Chris Williamson 47:51 Okay, so l'esprit d'escalier, staircase wit, is a French term used in English for the predicament of thinking of the perfect reply too late.

Morgan Housel 47:59 Oh, all the time!

Chris Williamson 48:00 As you're going down... L'esprit d'escalier, and someone said, "We'll know when AI has fully reached human intelligence when it regrets not saying the thing it meant to say on its way out of the chat."

Morgan Housel 48:12 See, this is why I like blogs more than books-

Chris Williamson 48:15 Me too

Morgan Housel 48:15 ... is because I would always do that. I would write a blog post, and a week later I'd be like, "God, in that second paragraph, you know what sentence I should've? I should use this sentence." Maybe, maybe-

Chris Williamson 48:23 Well, that's for the next blog.

Morgan Housel 48:24 Let... No, I would just go update it. I would just go update the blog.

Chris Williamson 48:26 Oh, okay.

Morgan Housel 48:26 Whereas a book, when it's printed, it's done. That's it.

Chris Williamson 48:28 Well, that's the issue with email, right?

Morgan Housel 48:29 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 48:29 If you're pumping this stuff out, you don't get back to go back into someone's-

Morgan Housel 48:32 Can't go back in to think it, yeah.

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Chris Williamson 49:46 [whooshing] When, when you look at the happiest people that you've met, what, what did they have in common that money alone doesn't explain?

Morgan Housel 49:55 I think they, they were very internally benchmark focused. Their benchmark for how well their life was doing was like health, marriage, kids, job. It was a very... It, it didn't, it didn't leave the confines of their roof. And you can, you can flip that around and say some of the, the least happy people you met are a purely external benchmark. How beautiful am I? How many followers do I have? How many other people do I think are looking at me? Is a very external benchmark focused. That's almost always the case.

Chris Williamson 50:21 Mm.

Morgan Housel 50:21 The internal versus the external benchmark is everything with, in terms of contentment and money. And contentment is important because the, the emotion that people want to chase with money is happiness. I, I, I want to be happy. But as I said earlier, happiness is always fleeting. You experience happiness, and it's awesome, but no one's happy for more than usually a couple minutes at a time.

Chris Williamson 50:42 Mm.

Morgan Housel 50:42 I use the example of happiness as like humor. Like if I tell you the best joke in the world, or if we listen to Jimmy Carr, let's say, and it's the funniest joke, you laugh for thirty seconds. You don't laugh for thirty years. This is, that is not how humor works.

Chris Williamson 50:55 Mm.

Morgan Housel 50:55 And if I tell you the joke every day over and over again, you're like: "Stop! It's, it's lost all value at this point." And I think so happiness is that way. It's a great emotion. It's fleeting.

Chris Williamson 51:03 Mm.

Morgan Housel 51:03 Contentment, though, is permanent.

Chris Williamson 51:04 Isn't it interesting that music is, is different? You can listen to your favorite song a thousand times-

Morgan Housel 51:09 Yeah

Chris Williamson 51:09 ... and still love it on a thousand and one, but the same is not true with-

Morgan Housel 51:12 Movies

Chris Williamson 51:13 ... with jokes. Movies.

Morgan Housel 51:14 Derek Thompson of The Atlantic, used to be at, at The Atlantic, wrote about this, that, uh, if, if, if, if you watch a movie a hundred times, you want to blow your brains out. It's just, you hate it. But you listen to a song a thousand times, it can get better over time.

Chris Williamson 51:27 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 51:27 It's a, it's a different part of your brain that's processing it.

Chris Williamson 51:29 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 51:30 But I think that it, it tends to be the case. But being content, just waking up and being like, "I, I got everything I want, and I can live in the moment and just appreciate what I have. And yeah, there's a lot of people who have a lot more than me, but I don't focus on that. I, I got everything that I need right here." It's a unique mindset.

Chris Williamson 51:45 There's two elements that I thought about a lot last year to do with happiness. One is that happiness can only arise when uncertainty isn't present. Like, if you're highly uncertain, uh, and y- maybe you're uncertain about how the football game's going to go, and that's kind of exciting, but when we're talking about life, how- ambiguity, uh, is my job going to be around in three weeks' time?

Morgan Housel 52:09 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 52:09 Or is my partner going to stay with me, or is my dog going to die, or is my kid gonna come home? Uncertainty is just cancerous to happiness. And the second one is from Naval, which is, uh, happiness can only arise when you don't want things to be different.

Morgan Housel 52:25 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 52:25 Like, if things are uncertain or ambiguous or ambivalent, and you want the world to be different, that is... Those two things, and they cross over a lot, they're often intersected, uh, it, it becomes very difficult to be happy. So in as much as money is able to reduce uncertainty and allow you to want things to be different less-

Morgan Housel 52:52 Yeah

Chris Williamson 52:53 ... I think that creates a nice foundation, 'cause that's kind of like a price that everybody has to pay. If you've got high uncertainty and you want lots of things to be different, w- to whatever extent money is able to reduce those things, I think that's a good, a, a good reason to gain more of it.

Morgan Housel 53:08 And just using it as a tool for, for optionality. To say: Look, if we were to experience the second Great Depression, I'm, I'm gonna be okay, and, and my, and my kids are gonna be okay. If I want to change careers, I can do that. If I want to move, I can do that. If I want to work less, I can do that. Having the mere option to do it, even if you're not exercising that option, is tremendous for people. Of just waking up this morning and being like, "My life's in my control."

Chris Williamson 53:31 Thirty-five to forty percent of adults in the US say they couldn't cover a four hundred dollar emergency without borrowing or selling something.

Morgan Housel 53:39 Shocking, right? And, and look, here's the thing. If you, if you had said that statistic to someone a hundred years ago, and it wasn't four hundred dollars, it was forty dollars, whatever, it'd be adjusted for inflation, people would be like: "Yeah, that's how, that's how life works. Life is fragile and brutal."

Chris Williamson 53:53 Mm.

Morgan Housel 53:54 And the idea that you have unemployment, and you need to... and, and, and drastically reduce your lifestyle, you know, that would be the, that would be the norm for people. I think we're fortunate to live in an era where there's an expectation that ordinary people are gonna have some sense of, some semblance of protection and safety-

Chris Williamson 54:10 Because other people do

Morgan Housel 54:11 ... in their life, right? Yeah.

Chris Williamson 54:13 What, what's your favorite historical example of the difference between being rich and having wealth? Because there is a difference between these two things.

Morgan Housel 54:25 To me, the most interesting family of all the mega-rich families that existed, of all the, the robber baron families, the mega-rich, the, the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, and the J.P. Morgans did, did v- pretty good job managing their money. They lived good lives themselves. They left it to beneficial causes. Not perfect, but they did a pretty good job of it. The Vanderbilts, I think, by far did the worst, and it's such a fascinating example to dig into, the Vanderbilt family, of, uh... You know, when, when Cornelius Vanderbilt died, adjusted for inflation-... depending on metrics you use, he had something like three to $500 billion, adjust, billion dollars adjusted for inflation. And within several generations, three generations, not that long of a period, there was virtually nothing left. And not a tremendous amount went to charity either. Vanderbilt University was the kind of their, their big project, which didn't even cost that much money to fund it. Uh, but most of it was spent on three generations of Vanderbilt heirs who were just in a generational pissing contest to see who could spend it the fastest. And if you dig into their biographies, there have been several biographies written about them, it is, uh, it's telling, and it's kind of sad, 'cause true to the, the, the David Senna idea of like super successful people who you would never want to be, that's, that's the sense that you get reading the biography of the Vanderbilt heirs. They... The money told them who they could be. It told them where they could live, who they could marry, who they could socialize with, how they had to dress. They had no independence over their life at all. And a lot of them, it was like, it was almost like they were characters in a movie, like the movie was called the Vanderbilt Family.

Chris Williamson 55:59 Mm.

Morgan Housel 55:59 And they were just reading from a script on who they could be. They had no independence on who they could be, and a lot of them were just miserable for it. And this is now a well-known thing, but one of the first Vanderbilt heirs f- who didn't get a trust fund when there was, like, no money left over, was Anderson Cooper.

Chris Williamson 56:14 Mm-hmm.

Morgan Housel 56:15 And he's talked about this, about how, uh, it was... He was kind of the first Vanderbilt heir in 150 years who was allowed to be himself. Had to figure out who he was, create his own identity, make his own money, be his own person, and it was almost like he was the first person who was, like, relieved of the burden of the money controlling who they were.

Chris Williamson 56:34 Well, he, he inherited the genetics of somebody that was able to make $350 billion, but didn't have to deal with the gravity of managing it.

Morgan Housel 56:45 Or, or, or, or just dictating who he was. He, he also had another element, which is that his last name is not Vanderbilt. His mother was Gloria Vanderbilt, and his father was a guy named Wyatt Cooper. And, uh, so, so he didn't have the name recognition of it that would follow him around for the rest of his life and change people's opinion of him.

Chris Williamson 56:59 Where did they spend the money on?

Morgan Housel 57:01 The, the Vanderbilts?

Chris Williamson 57:02 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 57:02 Most of it... Well, a lot of it was mansions, and parties, and yachts, and just a, a, a, the most ostentatious lifestyle that you could imagine. A lot of it was, you know, the, the, uh, some of the mansions that they made-- this goes back to the point of what people actually want is, like, a smaller house. And so some of the mansions that, that they made were so unbelievably huge that they didn't wanna spend any time in them. They were, they were, they were so big and so, uh, unhomely, that where they wanted to spend was the, the smaller apartment that they had in New York that felt much more like home to them-

Chris Williamson 57:32 Mm

Morgan Housel 57:32 ... versus the other house, the gigantic mansion that they had, was a trophy. It was to show other people that you had, but nobody needs a house with 70 master bedrooms kind of thing.

Chris Williamson 57:41 Mm.

Morgan Housel 57:41 It was just to show people what you had. And I think it... There's another element here when, which is when you don't make the money yourself, when it was inherited from somebody else, then the symbolism of what you've overcome doesn't exist. It's not there. If you made it yourself, then the giga- the gigantic mansion is a symbol to yourself of what you've done and what you've built and what you overcame in life, and you take tremendous pride and, and, and gratitude in that.

Chris Williamson 58:06 Do you know Eddie-

Morgan Housel 58:06 You inherited it from someone else, you had none of that.

Chris Williamson 58:08 Do you know Eddie Hearn, boxing promoter?

Morgan Housel 58:10 Sounds familiar.

Chris Williamson 58:11 British boxing promoter, big, big name in that world. And, uh, his dad created the organization that he now runs, and he was asked, "What, what do you regret about childhood? Or what, what do you wish had changed?" And he says, "No, it was... I, I really loved my life, loved my life, loved my dad, but I never got to do it first."

Morgan Housel 58:36 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 58:38 "I never got to do it first."

Morgan Housel 58:39 And if your parents are unbelievably successful, you know there, there's no chance statistically that you'll ever exceed them.

Chris Williamson 58:45 Well, I mean, if you're someone who wants to become a writer, what's the likelihood that you can outstrip The Psy- The Psychology of Money? You, the guy who wrote it, can't outstrip The Psychology of Money.

Morgan Housel 58:55 Right. And, and imagine if one of Elon Musk's children, uh, is an entrepreneur and creates a business that's worth a billion dollars.

Chris Williamson 59:02 That's cute.

Morgan Housel 59:04 Right?

Chris Williamson 59:04 Isn't that cute?

Morgan Housel 59:05 Imagine if they become self-made billionaires, one billionaires-

Chris Williamson 59:09 Yeah

Morgan Housel 59:09 ... and your dad is worth $700 million.

Chris Williamson 59:10 Oh, that's so cool.

Morgan Housel 59:12 You know?

Chris Williamson 59:12 Yeah, I mean, even if... Uh, what a, what a, what a-- I haven't, I've never even thought of that, but what a horrible bind that you'd be in. I know that he's got a slightly estranged relationship with some of the kids. Um, even if you were to say, "I don't want any of the inheritance, I don't want to even take the name. I'm gonna change all of the things," and then you go, and independently, you become a millionaire or a billionaire-

Morgan Housel 59:33 Yeah

Chris Williamson 59:34 ... how many people are going to go, "Yeah, but I mean, you were Elon Musk's kid?" You go, "I don't even talk to him. We haven't even... Look, like I don't even... He w- I'm not even on the w-" "Yeah, but you were Elon Musk's kid."

Morgan Housel 59:42 Well, look at that something where you can't necessarily use your parents', uh, you know, status. Someone like Bronny James.

Chris Williamson 59:49 Who's that?

Morgan Housel 59:50 LeBron James' son-

Chris Williamson 59:51 Oh

Morgan Housel 59:51 ... who now plays for the Lakers. He's a, made, made the NBA. Unbelievably good himself, but [chuckles] he's, he's, he's always gonna be LeBron's son.

Chris Williamson 1:00:00 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 1:00:00 Right?

Chris Williamson 1:00:01 You know what's interesting, though? Steph Curry's got a higher percentage shoot than his dad.

Morgan Housel 1:00:05 Is that right?

Chris Williamson 1:00:06 Yeah. So, uh, what you see is typically a regression to the mean in the world of basketball. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz did a wonderful book on basketball, the, the, the mathematics of basketball, basically. For every inch that you are over six foot, your likelihood of getting into the NBA doubles, so it's twice as much, twice as much, twice... And it doesn't stop to six seven, to six eight-

Morgan Housel 1:00:26 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:00:26 ... to six nine. It just keeps going. Um, but the regression to the mean usually happens. Like, if you have this outlier freak of a, an athlete, typically the son goes a bit closer to whatever the median is, except for with, uh, more skill-based players, and that is typically free throw shooters.

Morgan Housel 1:00:46 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:00:47 Because not only have you got some of that genetic material that's percolating through you, but you've also got all of the expertise, all of the tactic-

Morgan Housel 1:00:56 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:00:56 ... all of the training. And Steph Curry is the canonical example of this, that his dad was really, really great at what he did.... and Steph Curry's better.

Morgan Housel 1:01:04 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:01:05 Um, so there's some cool, you know, it's okay. Well, what are the, what are the kind of inheritances that I can take from my parents? Um, my dad left school with z- no qualifications at 16. None. Zero qualifications at 16, and I'm the first person in my family to have gone to university. But I was able to learn stuff from him that I didn't need to use in an academic setting.

Morgan Housel 1:01:27 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:01:27 Like, get a fucking master's in international marketing, I can't remember.

Morgan Housel 1:01:30 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:01:30 Like, none of that, none of that really mattered.

Morgan Housel 1:01:33 Yeah. No, that's interesting. I think there's a lot of people who are very talented in their own right but will always be in the shadow of their parents. Colin Hanks is a very talented actor, unbelievably talented.

Chris Williamson 1:01:42 Tom Hanks?

Morgan Housel 1:01:43 He- he... Exactly. You knew it with- I, I, I can tell you don't even know who Colin Hanks is, but you know he's, he's Tom Hanks' son.

Chris Williamson 1:01:49 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 1:01:49 And he's unbelievably talented.

Chris Williamson 1:01:50 Mm.

Morgan Housel 1:01:50 If you just put him in his own right, he'd be an A-list actor, but I think he'll always be known as Tom Hanks' son.

Chris Williamson 1:01:55 There's a, an interesting explanation about why the children of wealthy families perform so well in school, and it's not the additional tutoring or the after-school clubs or the going to a higher-rated local comprehensive. It's not to do with any of that, even if you control for all of those things. It seems to be the fact that those are the kinds of kids who are driven to do unreasonable things in a desperate attempt to escape the gravity of their parents' accomplishments.

Morgan Housel 1:02:28 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:02:28 And that's why you see more drug use among the kids of wealthy parents. Again, not because, maybe because they can afford it, they've got... They're having these sort of swanky parties at 16-

Morgan Housel 1:02:39 Mm

Chris Williamson 1:02:39 ... and they're bringing their friends around, and one of them's got ecstasy or whatever it is. But how much of it is just trying to escape the fucking expectations-

Morgan Housel 1:02:46 The shadow of their parents

Chris Williamson 1:02:46 ... of their parents?

Morgan Housel 1:02:47 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:02:47 Yes, and how unpopular of an opinion is this to talk about? "Oh, sorry, these poor upper-class kids that are out in, you know, fucking Long Island, off on the tails of the fish, just partying it up in the Hamptons."

Morgan Housel 1:03:01 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:03:01 Like, hey, I mean, these kids are driven to do unreasonable things. To get into a varsity league university, to do the things that are needed, unless you're unbelievably naturally talented, to do the things that are required in order to become a billionaire... Like, if you've read Walter Isaacson's book about Musk-

Morgan Housel 1:03:18 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:03:18 ... it's evident that he is just on a generate- an intergenerational, generational run-

Morgan Housel 1:03:24 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:03:24 ... to disprove all of the shit that happened to him as a kid.

Morgan Housel 1:03:26 Yeah. Yeah, and I think, I, I, I'll, I'll, I'll... There's, there's a different flavor to this. I met, uh, I did some work for a family many years ago, that they were, they're multi, multi-billionaires, and, uh, it was, it was the grandfather who made all the money. And I was working with the grandchildren, who were mostly, like, probably 18 to 25 years old, let's say. And I was there to teach them about some money stuff, and one of the things they said, uh, because the other, the other element here was all of these kids were very good-looking. The guys and the girls are, are extremely good-looking, and they're all- they all have access to unlimited money-

Chris Williamson 1:03:57 Okay

Morgan Housel 1:03:57 ... and live unbelievable lives.

Chris Williamson 1:03:58 Yep.

Morgan Housel 1:03:59 One of them had a helipad in his backyard kind of thing, just unbelievable, quintessential billionaire children. And one of the things they brought up was how hard it is to date.

Chris Williamson 1:04:09 Mm.

Morgan Housel 1:04:09 And one of the things... They, they said two things. One is, is that it's almost impossible to find someone who can just look past the money and actually like me for being me. The other thing is that if the relationship progresses long enough, basically, the family's lawyer pulls the boyfriend or girlfriend aside and says, "If this relationship gets to a proposal, you will be met with the most ironclad prenup that has ever existed in the world." [laughing] And after that meeting, so many of the boyfriend and girlfriends are like, "I don't know. I don't know if this is what I want to do."

Chris Williamson 1:04:38 Going for it.

Morgan Housel 1:04:38 And so you have these very good-looking 19-year-olds with unlimited money, and they're almost undateable.

Chris Williamson 1:04:45 Wow.

Morgan Housel 1:04:45 It's like... And so this, this, that's, like, a, a tiny violin thing.

Chris Williamson 1:04:48 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 1:04:48 But the social pressure, I call it social debt. There's a social debt that can hang over having a lot of money that's very difficult to contextualize when you don't have a lot of money.

Chris Williamson 1:04:59 Mm. What are the worst ways to spend money, then? Like, if, if someone wanted to guarantee dissatisfaction with their wealth, what would you tell them to adopt?

Morgan Housel 1:05:07 I, I, I think you would anchor all of your expectations and all of your goals to the pa- the, uh, chasing the admiration of people who are not important in your life. I desperately want my wife and kids to admire me and love me and pay attention to me. After that, it drops off precipitously. And I think if you're the kind of person... And social media has really put a spotlight on a lot of these people, who are just desperate for the attention and the engagement of total strangers, and their life's purpose, like, their- the only thing that matters to them in their life, uh, is, is the engagement of strangers. And it's a, it's a very unhealthy way to go about things, and I think it's always gonna leave you empty.

Chris Williamson 1:05:46 Mm-hmm.

Morgan Housel 1:05:46 So I think, I think, I think that's the biggest. I wanna be very ambitious, financially and career-wise, to benefit a very small number of people in my life, fewer than 10 people.

Chris Williamson 1:05:56 Mm.

Morgan Housel 1:05:57 A family, a couple friends kind of thing.

Chris Williamson 1:05:59 Mm.

Morgan Housel 1:05:59 And after that, I couldn't give two shits about what happens from there. I think that's, that's the goal of happiness, and everything around it, the opposite of that, of trying to impress people who aren't paying attention, is the source of the vast majority of financial misery.

Chris Williamson 1:06:11 Okay. Ultimately, you do end up needing to spend money, and if people get to the place that they want to, which is some kind of wealth escape velocity, where they can have more than they need, you're gonna end up spending it on some stuff that isn't the necessities. So what's the opposite? What are the best places for people to spend money?

Morgan Housel 1:06:31 I think, uh, where a lot of people go astray with this, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll definitely get to what works, but where they go astray is don't spend money on things, spend money on experiences. I think, I think a lot of things are awesome [chuckles] and a lot of experiences can leave you pretty empty. Particularly in the social media world, I think of a lot of people, I would venture to say most people, pick their next vacation based off of what's gonna make the best picture on social media.

Chris Williamson 1:06:54 Oh, that's interesting.

Morgan Housel 1:06:55 And I've talked about this before. You know what my personal example of this is? This is very subjective. People can disagree with this. Bali.

Chris Williamson 1:07:00 Okay.

Morgan Housel 1:07:01 You ever been to Bali?

Chris Williamson 1:07:02 I have twice. I came off a moped once.

Morgan Housel 1:07:03 Do you like it?

Chris Williamson 1:07:05 Uh, yeah, I do, actually.

Morgan Housel 1:07:06 Okay, so we might differ in this. I think Bali is-

Chris Williamson 1:07:09 ... super overrated? Not go back.

Morgan Housel 1:07:10 Completely overrated!

Chris Williamson 1:07:11 Okay.

Morgan Housel 1:07:11 We went there, and it's not bad, but I've been to so many other tropical places that were 10 times better.

Chris Williamson 1:07:16 Mm.

Morgan Housel 1:07:17 But if you go to Bali, and you put- post a picture on Instagram or TikTok of you going to Bali, you think all these people are gonna be like, "Wow, you went to Bali. That's so cool. It's so exotic."

Chris Williamson 1:07:25 Super exotic.

Morgan Housel 1:07:26 And so I, I, I think there's quite a bit of that, of like, the, the experience thing is, is a different, is-

Chris Williamson 1:07:30 What are the other... Other than ho- holidays, and what are some other experiences that you think people get the spend money on experiences, not things, thing inverted due to?

Morgan Housel 1:07:42 The reason I think travel can be beneficial for a lot of people is sometimes it's not even the destination of where you're going or how beautiful the destination is, it's that you need to travel to kinda give yourself permission to detach from the rest of your life. And so if flying to Maui is the only chance that you can have totally uninterrupted time-

Chris Williamson 1:08:01 Mm

Morgan Housel 1:08:01 ... with your spouse or your kids, you just can't do it at home. You're too distracted at home. Your kids are too distracted at home. You have to fly to Maui in order to sit there and spend hours with each other in each other's presence and company. Like, that's, that's the value of it.

Chris Williamson 1:08:16 Mm.

Morgan Housel 1:08:16 I think, I think that, that tends to be true, and that's, that's definitely been the case for me. That I have to go somewhere else to totally detach, and if you have some sort of staycation at home or even just a weekend at home, we're all... Everyone in my family is all kind of just lost in their own world, their own priorities, their own email, or friends or whatnot. W- they're all lost in it, and you have to detach from that in order to spend quality time. To me, that's the biggest value of spending money on travel-

Chris Williamson 1:08:42 Mm

Morgan Housel 1:08:42 ... and vacations.

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Morgan Housel 1:09:52 Yeah, yeah

Chris Williamson 1:09:52 ... that is all of the benefit of not at home, not in work mode, not even in f- typical family mode. It's got all of our stuff there, and I, I, I don't know. I guess this is why people like caravanning in the UK. I don't think it quite exists in the same way here in America.

Morgan Housel 1:10:09 No, no.

Chris Williamson 1:10:09 Um, but a caravan park, where what you're doing is you're extricating yourself from the usual day-to-day monotony, and you're putting yourself into this new thing, this different thing.

Morgan Housel 1:10:19 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:10:20 I guess the problem is that if you go there enough, that just becomes-

Morgan Housel 1:10:24 It's not new anymore.

Chris Williamson 1:10:25 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 1:10:25 This is why-

Chris Williamson 1:10:26 Ah, fuck it. Fuck the f- fuck the caravan. I'm not getting one.

Morgan Housel 1:10:27 No, I think the idea that you just hit on, which is what really gives... What has the potential to make you happy. We said before, a lot of what happiness is surprise-

Chris Williamson 1:10:35 Yeah

Morgan Housel 1:10:36 ... is, is trying new things. And a lot of it is everyone has their thing that they might spend money on, cars, food, clothes. Everyone's got a different thing. Everybody has a thing, but it's always different, and it's not always obvious what your thing might be. And so y- I think you have to experiment with a lot of different kinds of spending to actually figure out what's gonna be right for you. So little experiments of like, try eating at a fancier restaurant than you normally would. It might not do it for you. Wine is not my thing. I have so many friends who are like... 'Cause I, I'm, I'm not a wine guy, and they're like: "All right, well, you haven't tried the right wines."

Chris Williamson 1:11:06 Mm.

Morgan Housel 1:11:06 And they're like, "Here, this is gonna change your life, Morgan." They hand me a glass, and I'm like, it's- it all tastes the same to me. I'm so- I just don't have it.

Chris Williamson 1:11:13 I'm a philistine as well, it turns out.

Morgan Housel 1:11:14 Right. But, but there's other people that's like wine is the, is... Gives them so much happiness and purpose, and they love the collection, the tasting of-

Chris Williamson 1:11:20 Yeah, yeah.

Morgan Housel 1:11:20 Everyone's got to find their thing.

Chris Williamson 1:11:22 Watchers.

Morgan Housel 1:11:22 One of the things for me with reading is that I think a lot of the reason that if people don't like reading, they obviously, they obviously just haven't figured out the kind of book that's gonna work for them, and it's not always obvious what you will enjoy. And so for the longest time, I was like, "Fiction just doesn't work for me," but I know- I've heard from so many people that are like, "Fiction changed my life. These stories changed my life." And I always tried, and I couldn't figure it out, and I finally found, like, a genre of fiction that would work for me, but I had to experiment-

Chris Williamson 1:11:48 What is it?

Morgan Housel 1:11:48 ... so many different times. It's like historical fiction, is like... It, it has the potential. But science fiction just makes- I, I, I don't understand why anyone would enjoy it. [chuckles] That's- but historical fiction, this could be true. I'm like, "I can, I can sit there and read this all day long." I love that

Morgan Housel 1:12:03 kind of stuff.

Chris Williamson 1:12:03 What are some of your favorite fiction books?

Morgan Housel 1:12:05 Uh, you know, some of those... There, there's, there's one that was a historical fiction of the history of New York City, starting back before it had been populated, when it was truly just, just a, a, a forest inhabited by beavers and whatnot. And then it tracked a series of families, a Dutch family that originally colonized that, and then through the generations, ending up with 9/11.

Chris Williamson 1:12:28 No way!

Morgan Housel 1:12:29 And, and, and tracked it. It's like 1,000-page book.

Chris Williamson 1:12:31 What's it called?

Morgan Housel 1:12:31 Can I... Can you get this out?

Chris Williamson 1:12:32 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Morgan Housel 1:12:33 Look at it.

Chris Williamson 1:12:33 Yeah, get it. Dude, that sounds fucking awesome.

Morgan Housel 1:12:35 Amazing.

Chris Williamson 1:12:36 'Cause when I think historical fiction, what I think is the fall of the Roman Empire or G- Game of Thrones, but without the dragons, and, uh, something that brings... Um, what's that? Man in the High Tower.

Morgan Housel 1:12:52 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:12:52 That was kind of similar, right?

Morgan Housel 1:12:53 Of if, if, if the Germans won.

Chris Williamson 1:12:54 Alternative history, but it's moderately modern history.

Morgan Housel 1:12:58 Um, 'cause it has a unique name. No, it doesn't have a [chuckles] unique name. The book's name is New York. [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 1:13:04 Oh, and who's it by?

Morgan Housel 1:13:05 Uh, guy's name is Edward Rutherford.

Chris Williamson 1:13:07 Okay.

Morgan Housel 1:13:07 He's written-

Chris Williamson 1:13:08 I imagine he's lots of books.

Morgan Housel 1:13:08 He's written s- he also wrote one on the history of London, and that has a unique name.

Chris Williamson 1:13:12 Same thing?

Morgan Housel 1:13:13 Yes. Uh-... all made up of like-

Chris Williamson 1:13:15 This is such a cool-

Morgan Housel 1:13:17 And, and the history of China.

Chris Williamson 1:13:18 This is such a cool way to do it. All that you do is take some interesting place and then make a-

Morgan Housel 1:13:24 Make a story

Chris Williamson 1:13:24 ... fake story about-

Morgan Housel 1:13:25 And, and here's kinda how he does it, is let's start with a family, and then track generations of that family over 500 years.

Chris Williamson 1:13:31 He's done the Vanderbilts.

Morgan Housel 1:13:32 And, right. And it's so, it's, it's fascinating. And he gets very deep into the culture of what New York was at different periods of time.

Chris Williamson 1:13:39 That rules.

Morgan Housel 1:13:39 Uh, very different 200 years ago than it would've been today. So that I could wrap my head around. The, the best fiction for me is when I'm reading it, and I forget that it's fiction.

Chris Williamson 1:13:47 Oh, yeah.

Morgan Housel 1:13:48 That's the best.

Chris Williamson 1:13:48 It's just a slightly more exciting biography-

Morgan Housel 1:13:50 Yes

Chris Williamson 1:13:50 ... or retelling of something that could've-

Morgan Housel 1:13:51 The other trash fiction that I love is, like, John Grisham, because it, it, it easily could be true, and that's another where I'm reading it, and I have to remind myself that he's made all this up. [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 1:14:00 I got into, I got into a, a spiral last year because I wasn't... I was pretty tired, and I was trying to look after my health and do a bunch of other stuff. So I, [chuckles] I got pinged on whatever the Amazon Kindle algorithm is with, uh, Freida McFadden.

Morgan Housel 1:14:17 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:14:17 She did The Housemaid, and then The Housemaid's Revenge, and then The Teacher, and the, the, The Trap Door, and the, the, the something of everything. And then I did The Silent Patient by, uh, Andrew Michaelides, Alex Michaelides, and I just got sucked into this vortex of chick fiction, and-

Morgan Housel 1:14:33 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:14:34 ... I fucking loved it, and I thought it was [laughing] so-

Morgan Housel 1:14:36 There's a reason it's so popular.

Chris Williamson 1:14:37 [laughing] Yeah. It's so good.

Morgan Housel 1:14:39 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:14:39 They're so easy to read.

Morgan Housel 1:14:41 Well, wasn't there a thing that, I think many years ago, they made a version of the Harry Potter books that had adult covers on them?

Chris Williamson 1:14:48 Correct.

Morgan Housel 1:14:48 'Cause adult doesn't wanna hold a book that has a cartoon cover on it.

Chris Williamson 1:14:51 Something like that.

Morgan Housel 1:14:51 So they made it just a... And I, I, I think you could do that with some of those rom-com books or, like, those, those, like, those, tho- those kind of books.

Chris Williamson 1:14:57 I was proudly reading The Housemaid by Freida McFadden.

Morgan Housel 1:15:00 [chuckles] I like it.

Chris Williamson 1:15:00 I was brandishing it to pe- "I'm reading the... Have you read it? It's really lovely. I wonder what the twist is gonna be."

Morgan Housel 1:15:05 I mean, so, so many of those are just, they're just amazing storytellers, and they just, they keep you up.

Chris Williamson 1:15:09 It's-

Morgan Housel 1:15:09 So I'm sure if, if Freida McFadden wrote, uh, a John Grisham novel about, you know, or like, like a, like a, a crime novel or a legal thriller, like, it'd be amazing.

Chris Williamson 1:15:18 Wouldn't that be cool? Wouldn't it be cool to go to, you know, some of the biggest authors in different genres of fiction and get them to try and maybe work together? You do one of mine, so you do a kind of domestic thriller thing-

Morgan Housel 1:15:32 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:15:33 ... about a powerful woman, and I'll do one of yours, which is about an unsolved murder, and then we'll get Jack Carr in, and someone can do one of his about a N- Navy Seal that's-

Morgan Housel 1:15:43 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:15:43 ... been trapped behind enemy lines.

Morgan Housel 1:15:45 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:15:45 And it would be so cool to see what other people's interpretation would be. But the thing that you learn with, uh, going back to dopamine, that you learn when you read something like a, a Freida McFadden book, is so much of it is, uh, pacing and just keeping the uncertainty and the suspense going-

Morgan Housel 1:16:03 Yeah, totally

Chris Williamson 1:16:03 ... and the surprise, and this, what's it gonna be? What's it gonna be? And then after I'd read enough of these, it's almost a little bit like learning to... Learning to read them is like learning to dance. It doesn't take much learning to read, but you become more excited when you know what, what's going to happen, but you don't know how it's gonna happen.

Morgan Housel 1:16:18 How it's gonna happen.

Chris Williamson 1:16:18 I know that there's gonna be something, and it's gonna get me, and I'm gonna go, "Ah!" Uh-

Morgan Housel 1:16:22 I think, I think if you did that, I don't know if it would go both ways. I think if you had J.K. Rowling, if you told her to write a non-fiction-

Chris Williamson 1:16:31 Mm

Morgan Housel 1:16:31 ... like, "Hey, J.K. Rowling, write, uh, write a 1,000-word article about what's going on in Gaza," w- w- whatever it might be-

Chris Williamson 1:16:38 Mm

Morgan Housel 1:16:38 ... uh, it'd be amazing. But I think if you asked Michael Lewis or Malcolm Gladwell to write a fiction, it'd, it'd be much harder to make that work.

Chris Williamson 1:16:45 The street goes in one direction.

Morgan Housel 1:16:46 Yes.

Chris Williamson 1:16:46 Well, because the storytelling is more compelling than the other way around. All of you guys, you, George Mack, who's, you know, knee-deep in his current book about high agency, all of you, especially yours, is kind of the canonical example of this. You're desperately trying to sneak non-fiction ideas under the guise of fiction.

Morgan Housel 1:17:04 Yeah, you're just trying to tell stories.

Chris Williamson 1:17:05 Desperately.

Morgan Housel 1:17:06 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:17:06 Stories, stories, stories. Stories, stories.

Morgan Housel 1:17:07 Stories are that in, in finance is important 'cause 99% of financial media is, is, A, a lecture, and, B, incredibly boring if it's formulaic, and that's the vast majority of personal finance books. It's a lecture. "You're doing it wrong, you idiot, and here's a really boring formula that looks like an algebra equation of how you can fix it," and nobody wants to read that. It's not interesting at all.

Chris Williamson 1:17:29 Your line of, uh, personal finance is more personal than it is finance, and, okay, how am I going to interject into this very psychological, bias-driven, predisposed, patterned response with these statistics? That you did, Shapiro's famous line, which you kind of reworked in the book, of, "Facts don't care about your feelings."

Morgan Housel 1:17:54 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:17:54 That could not be more wrong. Like, feelings really don't care about your facts.

Morgan Housel 1:17:59 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:18:00 They don't, they don't give a single shit-

Morgan Housel 1:18:02 Right

Chris Williamson 1:18:02 ... and that means that if you can w- uh, they should do, uh, what Ben is sort of putting forward is, in the perfectly rational worlds that we should want to live in, it shouldn't be the case that the way that you feel about something would impact your opinion of it, et cetera. But the bottom line is, it does-

Morgan Housel 1:18:20 It does

Chris Williamson 1:18:20 ... and it always will do.

Morgan Housel 1:18:21 Yes.

Chris Williamson 1:18:22 So, uh, yeah, I think, I think so much about what my bias is when I'm trying to tell, uh, tell somebody something. I think about this with the live show that I do. Back on tour, Australia, New Zealand, and Bali coming up soon, then building out the new live show, and I've got my first work-in-progress show here in Austin on Monday. I'm like, "Fuck!" Like, I've got to... I, I, I've got all of these ideas. I've got three years since I wrote that first show, Self-Discovery, and I've now got the new one, Mostly Wise. Okay, what am I gonna talk about? What am I interested in? And I've just got a quarter of a million words that I've written on the newsletter.

Morgan Housel 1:18:55 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:18:56 All of it, all of it is just kind of thinly veiled autobiographical journaling, but it's personal, so it... And then made into the third person.

Morgan Housel 1:19:07 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:19:08 So I'm like, I can't, I can't do this. So I'm scouring the internet, going, "Ooh, Salvador Dali, I think he brings m- my idea to life." But when it comes to trying to compel somebody to think a thing-... peppering them with statistics and, and, and rhetoric just straight up doesn't work, as opposed to you going, "Well, look, the Vanderbilts managed to go from basically the richest people on the planet to zero in the space of three generations, and they did this-

Morgan Housel 1:19:35 It's a story.

Chris Williamson 1:19:36 They did this-- Yeah, exactly.

Morgan Housel 1:19:37 It's true for almost anything in life, that the best story wins. Not the best idea, not the right idea.

Chris Williamson 1:19:42 Mm.

Morgan Housel 1:19:42 It's just the person who can tell a good story that gets people nodding along, that's who wins. That's been-- That's true in politics, it's true in business, it's true in everything. I remember I had this friend, it was probably 10 or 15 years ago, who was like, he hated Apple, and the reason is, he was like, "Samsung and Microsoft make better- they're technically better, and they have every feature that Apple does," and it drove him crazy. He was like: I don't understand why anyone would own an Apple phone. The Samsung is just objectively better. And I, I, it was-- That was interesting. I'm like, "Yeah, but Apple's just telling it better. It's just a cooler phone. It just, it just tells a better story of who it is and what it wants to be."

Chris Williamson 1:20:16 That's, that's the Ben Shapiro philosophy up against-

Morgan Housel 1:20:19 Yes

Chris Williamson 1:20:19 ... what actually happened.

Morgan Housel 1:20:19 Feelings, feelings don't care about your facts.

Chris Williamson 1:20:21 Yeah, feelings don't care about your processor speed.

Morgan Housel 1:20:23 Yeah, pe- people... It, it was just a better story. But you see that, that everywhere, of just the per- the person who can tell the best story. And this is why a lot-- The, the example I like to use is, is Bill Bryson. Fantastic author, one of the greatest authors of our time. He's written some amazing books. And my understanding is that if you are an academic historian-

Chris Williamson 1:20:39 Mm.

Morgan Housel 1:20:40 -you know, you know, if you're a, if you're a Harvard historian, by and large, you don't like Bill Bryson because you consider him a pop historian, is what they would call him.

Chris Williamson 1:20:47 Mm-hmm.

Morgan Housel 1:20:48 And to me, pop historian just means you're a good writer. It just means that you can communicate things better than the academics who are writing in the most dense, verbose language that nobody wants to read.

Chris Williamson 1:20:56 Mm-hmm.

Morgan Housel 1:20:57 And so if you can-- I think there's a lot of room in the world for people to take really good ideas from academics who have no communication ability, and just explain them a little bit better.

Chris Williamson 1:21:08 I-

Morgan Housel 1:21:08 You can move mountains doing that. Both of us?

Chris Williamson 1:21:10 What, what do you think my ca-

Morgan Housel 1:21:12 Both of us!

Chris Williamson 1:21:12 My, my career is me poorly reinterpreting the ideas of smarter people who are smaller in platform and need somewhere to come and speak it.

Morgan Housel 1:21:25 Sure, I mean-

Chris Williamson 1:21:25 Like, that's exactly what it is. It's like, hey, I, I had, I had a conversation with a guy who is an evolutionary pediatrician.

Morgan Housel 1:21:33 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:21:34 So he looks at child rearing through an evolutionary lens, and this is both from a developmental standpoint and a, a medical standpoint. His work's fascinating. He's done lots of work that's been, um, tangential to reducing anaphylaxis from peanut allergies by realizing the amount, the, the sort of dose that these kids would be exposed to, and then you do this, um, titrated exposure over time, and you can get rid of it. And you can do the same thing with dairy. Then he's talking about how one in six American adults have occipital flattening, the occipital lobe at the back of the head, because kids are laid on a mat-

Morgan Housel 1:22:04 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:22:05 ... for so long while their skulls are still forming, like an ice cube in a tray freezing in the freezer.

Morgan Housel 1:22:10 [chuckles] Yeah, right.

Chris Williamson 1:22:10 You've ice-cubed your kid's head.

Morgan Housel 1:22:13 [chuckles] Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:22:13 Um, but that a kid on the ground is a meal, and that you look at what happens with hunter-gatherer tribes, and they're whole-- Anyway, like, uh, uh-

Morgan Housel 1:22:21 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:22:21 ... fifty things like that, that I had to explain. It was so cute. He had to get maybe his daughter-in-law, he's, like, in his seventies, had to get his daughter-in-law to come and explain to him how the webcam works, and I'm, like, getting him to sort of rejig, and then I got him to sit down, and this guy is a fucking legend. He's so good. He's a great communicator. He's full of vim and vigor. He's great. I was like, "You rule, and you're significantly more talented than me, but nobody knows who you are."

Morgan Housel 1:22:46 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:22:47 "Immersively, from a thousand and a bit repetitions of doing this thing, sitting down with people like you, my-- I now have this weird kind of slingshot that I can strap you into and go, boom-

Morgan Housel 1:22:58 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:22:58 ... and just send your..." Yeah, shamelessly repurposing the ideas of people who are way smarter but just need a platform.

Morgan Housel 1:23:05 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:23:06 And then allowing them to come on and shine and go, "Do it."

Morgan Housel 1:23:09 It's a great thing to do. I mean, this is what the internet and social media has done so well, is it's just turned a lot of things into a pure meritocracy.

Chris Williamson 1:23:17 It's so egalitarian.

Morgan Housel 1:23:18 And I, I don't, I don't care-

Chris Williamson 1:23:18 So fucking egalitarian.

Morgan Housel 1:23:19 No- nobody gives a shit where you went to school. When I was just like, if, if you can tell a good story, you go straight to the top.

Chris Williamson 1:23:23 And it's getting more like that now as well.

Morgan Housel 1:23:25 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:23:26 Right? The, uh-

Morgan Housel 1:23:27 Now, that, that, that can be gamified, of course, on social media, in a way that can be kinda nasty.

Chris Williamson 1:23:31 You can-

Morgan Housel 1:23:31 When people learn that the right way to get attention on, on X is to do this and say that and rage bait and whatnot, you can gamify that.

Chris Williamson 1:23:38 Right.

Morgan Housel 1:23:38 But still, it is a hundred thousand times more meritocratic than it was twenty years ago.

Chris Williamson 1:23:42 Yeah, and the internet, I think social media is more egalitarian and meritocratic now than it was even three or five years ago.

Morgan Housel 1:23:49 How so?

Chris Williamson 1:23:49 The biggest YouTube channels don't have the most plays. The biggest TikTok accounts don't have the, uh, highest shares. The biggest Instagram accounts don't get the most reach. It's-- If you do... I, uh, my friend Zach, who I lived with and I toured with around North America this year, last year, uh, he realized that ChatGPT shits itself if you try and get it to spell the word strawberry out loud in terms of counting the number of R's.

Morgan Housel 1:24:14 Yes. Yeah, people... Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:24:15 And he, he did half a million likes. I think it had fifteen million plays in a, like, a week, from him just having a conversation with ChatGPT.

Morgan Housel 1:24:24 Trying to get it to spell strawberry.

Chris Williamson 1:24:25 Trying, desperately trying, and he's arguing with it and getting infuriated with it. Um, my point is, he's got a couple of hundred thousand, uh, followers on Instagram, which is lots, but it's not an absurd amount. The video was just good.

Morgan Housel 1:24:37 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:24:38 The, the platforms are getting more and more egalitarian, which means that you don't... You, you can compete with anybody that you want. If you put the right sort of thing out with a base rate of launch velocity, you, you can, you can absolutely

Chris Williamson 1:24:51 crush it. On the, the point of we kind of don't necessarily know what it is that we want-

Morgan Housel 1:24:56 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:24:56 ... Have you heard the story about Jennie Jerome, Winston Churchill's mother?

Morgan Housel 1:24:59 Yeah, Churchill's mom, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:25:00 Yeah, so she dined with Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and his rival, William Gladstone, on consecutive nights. She was a bit of a sort of Hollywood, uh, socialite, and when asked about her impressions of the two men, she said, "When I left the dining room after sitting next to Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But when I sat next to Disraeli, I left feeling like I was the cleverest woman."

Morgan Housel 1:25:24 Mm, that's good. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:25:26 And I think a lot of the time people believe that they want to be charismatic.

Morgan Housel 1:25:30 ... you wanna make the other person feel good about themselves.

Chris Williamson 1:25:33 Bingo.

Morgan Housel 1:25:33 Yes.

Chris Williamson 1:25:34 Some people are interesting, and some people make us feel interesting.

Morgan Housel 1:25:37 I w- I w- I was telling someone earlier today about someone who we, we both know, a mutual friend, who when I met this person, I, I came away and I was like, "I think he really likes me. Like, he really seems interested in me." And then I had this moment, I'm like, I, I, I think actually he does that to everybody. I think he has that effect on every single person that he meets.

Chris Williamson 1:25:53 That's a great point from, uh, Matthew Hussey around dating, that people go on a first date with someone and feel this incredible spark and think that it's something special between them and the person, without realizing that that person is just sparky.

Morgan Housel 1:26:06 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:26:06 They just have this effect-

Morgan Housel 1:26:07 They do it to anybody

Chris Williamson 1:26:08 ... on everybody, yeah. But y- the reason that I love that story about Jenny Jerome is a lot of people believe that they want to be more charismatic because they want to walk into a room and for that aura to be electric and everyone to sort of turn and gasp and be so impressed. But when I reflected on the sort of friends that I liked spending the most time around, they weren't the ones that had this m- magnetic aura that was super impressive and dominant or formidable or whatever.

Morgan Housel 1:26:33 Made you feel good about yourself.

Chris Williamson 1:26:35 They were just people that I wanted to hang around with because they made me feel good about myself.

Morgan Housel 1:26:37 They make you feel good about-

Chris Williamson 1:26:38 They make me-

Morgan Housel 1:26:38 I think this-

Chris Williamson 1:26:39 feel interesting

Morgan Housel 1:26:40 ... and it's a great thing, what we were talking about earlier, of like, no one's thinking about you as much as you are.

Chris Williamson 1:26:45 Mm-hmm.

Morgan Housel 1:26:45 And so no one's paying that much attention to your aura or your charisma, or if anything, they might find it gross and egotistical. But if that person makes you feel good about yourself and makes you feel good about the person who you are inside of your own head, people love that.

Chris Williamson 1:27:01 Mm.

Morgan Housel 1:27:01 Politicians figured that out a long time ago-

Chris Williamson 1:27:03 How so?

Morgan Housel 1:27:03 ... of making other people feel good about themselves. When you meet someone, it's less about look how powerful I am and more about, like, uh, liking themselves and m- making you feel good about yourself.

Chris Williamson 1:27:13 Wasn't-

Morgan Housel 1:27:13 That's always been the trick.

Chris Williamson 1:27:14 Wasn't that a descriptor of the people that had met Clinton? He made me feel like I was the only person in the room.

Morgan Housel 1:27:20 That's, that's exactly it, yeah. Yeah, I was trying to think of who, who the other one was. I think it was Howard Dean, someone said.

Chris Williamson 1:27:24 Who the fuck's that?

Morgan Housel 1:27:25 Or John Edwards, who-

Chris Williamson 1:27:26 Who the fuck's that?

Morgan Housel 1:27:27 Uh, they, they both ran for the, for presidency, uh, in the early 2000s. John Edwards had a huge flame-out, but they were very talented. Of everyone they met, they'd be like, "He really likes me!"

Chris Williamson 1:27:36 Magnetic.

Morgan Housel 1:27:37 "He remembered me," kind of thing.

Chris Williamson 1:27:38 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 1:27:38 That's, uh, that's always been a skill.

Chris Williamson 1:27:40 That's also a really good way, if you want to hurt someone, if you really, really want to hurt someone, when you shake their hand, just look right through them.

Morgan Housel 1:27:48 Mm, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:27:49 Be as, you're as forgetful as possible.

Morgan Housel 1:27:50 I'll tell you, I, I, I won't tell you who they are, 'cause they're still writing. But, um, I had, I had a writing role model 10 or 15 years ago-

Chris Williamson 1:27:58 Okay

Morgan Housel 1:27:59 ... a person I looked up to more than anybody, and I emu- I wanted to emulate this person. And not only their writing, but career-wise, I was like, "I wanna be this person." And I saw them at a conference, and never met them, never exchanged a word with them. And I came up and I said, "Oh, I'm, I'm, I'm Morgan Housel. It's nice to meet you." And he went, "Who?" I said, "Uh, I'm Morgan. I- I'm a writer for The Motley Fool," and he basically swatted me away and kept walking.

Chris Williamson 1:28:20 Looked through you.

Morgan Housel 1:28:20 And I will never forget that. It, it made me, it made me feel so small, and, and the fact that I looked up to him so much at that time. And, and on the... Like, honestly, it was a, it was a no-nothing event. Like, I'm not gonna pretend it was that big a deal, but I'll never forget it.

Chris Williamson 1:28:35 Mm.

Morgan Housel 1:28:35 People will never forget how they made you feel-

Chris Williamson 1:28:38 Yeah

Morgan Housel 1:28:39 ... good or bad, in that moment.

Chris Williamson 1:28:41 Well, you're right to say that the expectation as well, talking about expectations, talking about wealth, your expectation of meeting this person who you've idolized-

Morgan Housel 1:28:50 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:28:50 ... for a very long time-

Morgan Housel 1:28:51 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:28:51 ... i- you had- 'cause if you'd just been some bloke who didn't know who that other bloke was, and you said, "Oh, I'm Morgan," he's like, "Oh," he seemed a little bit rude.

Morgan Housel 1:29:00 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:29:01 Whereas you had the-

Morgan Housel 1:29:03 Huge expectation

Chris Williamson 1:29:04 ... the clouds are going to part and the ah-

Morgan Housel 1:29:06 Exactly

Chris Williamson 1:29:07 ... the angelic music's gonna come down.

Morgan Housel 1:29:08 In, in his mind, I was just a little rat getting in his way-

Chris Williamson 1:29:11 Yeah

Morgan Housel 1:29:11 ... that he needed to brush aside. In my mind, he's, he's a hero.

Chris Williamson 1:29:14 He's a goat.

Morgan Housel 1:29:14 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:29:15 The key to understanding most online debates is that a lot of people take joy in being angry. It's their preferred mindset, because it makes them feel morally superior to the other side.

Morgan Housel 1:29:24 It's intoxicating.

Chris Williamson 1:29:25 That is such money!

Morgan Housel 1:29:27 It's, it's, it-

Chris Williamson 1:29:27 That is so good.

Morgan Housel 1:29:28 And I think it's the idea that, like, every judgment is a confession. When you judge other people, when you judge other people, you're actually confessing something about yourself.

Chris Williamson 1:29:35 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 1:29:36 And a lot of people enjoy being angry, because it gives them an intoxicating sense of moral superiority. Because what you're saying is, if I say, "Chris, you are immoral. You're doing things wrong. You're a terrible person," what I'm actually saying is, "I'm doing it better."

Chris Williamson 1:29:51 Implicitly.

Morgan Housel 1:29:52 "I'm doing it better, and I feel good about myself. I've elevated myself by pushing you down." And that's why a lot of this, uh, happens. It's, it's not that people... Like, people enjoy being angry. They wanna be angry, because it makes them feel good about themselves.

Chris Williamson 1:30:05 Mm.

Morgan Housel 1:30:05 And if you see it through that lens, why is everyone so pissed off? Why is social media so negative?

Chris Williamson 1:30:10 Mm.

Morgan Housel 1:30:10 'Cause it feels great. It can feel great to hate other people, especially on social media, where you don't need to do it to their face. You don't need to physically attack the person. You just write this, and I feel great about myself.

Chris Williamson 1:30:19 You're implicit in that my morality stands on the shoulders of your morality-

Morgan Housel 1:30:24 Yes

Chris Williamson 1:30:24 ... that I've just pushed down a peg.

Morgan Housel 1:30:26 The only way that I can really measure how, what, what my morality is, is if I identify people who are below me.

Chris Williamson 1:30:33 Correct.

Morgan Housel 1:30:33 And that's why it feels great to identify people below me and constantly be looking for them and reminding them that they're below me.

Chris Williamson 1:30:40 There's an idea from, uh, evolutionary psychology about female intrasexual competition. It's called the bless her heart effect, and what it explains is a type of gossip that is more prevalent among women than it is among men, and it's venting. Venting is couching the critique of a potential rival under the guise of concern.

Morgan Housel 1:31:05 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:31:05 So Morgan, I, I just, I need to tell you about Elizabeth. I'm just so worried about her, 'cause she's sleeping with all of these guys.

Morgan Housel 1:31:11 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:31:12 And I'm just so worried that she's gonna get hurt.

Morgan Housel 1:31:14 I'm just here to look out for you.

Chris Williamson 1:31:15 What have you taught? You've said that Elizabeth's sleeping with all of these guys, that you would never... Me, I would never. So implicit in the derogation of her, you've disrupted her trajectory and implicitly raised up your own. You've managed to get- if Elizabeth comes and says, "Christina, why did you, why did you tell Morgan this thing?" And I go, "See how Morgan's good?" 'Cause it's a girl's name as well. [laughing]

Morgan Housel 1:31:39 [laughing] Right, right.

Chris Williamson 1:31:40 Uh, "Christina, why did you..." It's like, "I, I, I'm-... Elizabeth, I'm so sorry. I'm just, I'm really worried about you. Ask- I- w- was I, was I, was I gossiping, or was I worried about her?

Morgan Housel 1:31:49 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:31:49 And, yeah, the bless her heart effect. Um-

Morgan Housel 1:31:51 I mean, there's, there, there's another version of this joke that goes around, that girls like telling other girls that they should cut their hair short.

Chris Williamson 1:31:57 The, I had the research-

Morgan Housel 1:31:58 Because they know guys, by and large, don't like that.

Chris Williamson 1:32:01 I have-

Morgan Housel 1:32:01 But they- if you tell your f- girlfriend to do it, you've just demoted her and promoted yourself. [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 1:32:05 Dr. Danielle Sulikowski-

Morgan Housel 1:32:06 I don't know if that's a real or a joke.

Chris Williamson 1:32:08 Dr. Danielle Sulikowski is the woman who did the study on this.

Morgan Housel 1:32:11 Okay.

Chris Williamson 1:32:11 And women who are higher in what's called intrasexual competition, which was the dynamic I was literally just talking about-

Morgan Housel 1:32:16 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:32:17 ... women who rate higher on that advised women that they saw as potential sexual rivals to cut off more hair.

Morgan Housel 1:32:23 Yeah. That's so fascinating. [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 1:32:24 Bro, there is an entire world-

Morgan Housel 1:32:26 Everything's a competition.

Chris Williamson 1:32:27 But there is an entire world... This is why

Chris Williamson 1:32:29 when it comes to finance, it must be really fascinating, and I know that there is a huge world of this, like, a, a financial advice for women.

Morgan Housel 1:32:36 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:32:36 And I, I don't know what the split is of, of people who read your books, but it's the same fuel source and a similar outcome that both men and women are looking for when it comes to finance, but their motivations for getting there have to be very different. And the way that they think about money, I would imagine that there is a big sexed difference. Steve Stewart-Williams, who wrote the fantastic The Ape Who Understood the Universe, his new book is A Billion Years of Sex Differences. I can't wait.

Morgan Housel 1:33:02 Yes, I, I've seen this. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:33:03 He's gonna be, he's gonna be so canceled, and it's gonna be so fucking brilliant. [chuckles]

Morgan Housel 1:33:06 Yeah. Yeah. [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 1:33:07 And, um, I... There have to be some really interesting sex differences. Like, what is it that i- uh, driving women to accumulate wealth, and what are their fears? And what about men? Because we certainly know that women spend more money on beautification, and men spend more on cars and watches. Uh, men spend more on formidability. Women spend more on, uh, making themselves look younger. Okay, so what does that say about the, uh, the motivations and the dynamics if you start to lose... c- being number 100 in the world and then dropping down to 150-

Morgan Housel 1:33:41 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:33:41 ... how does that feel to a man, and how does that feel to a woman?

Morgan Housel 1:33:42 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:33:43 So, you know, when you're talking about there is no one size fits all, even from the same culture, same family, same background, same industry, well, those two individual people-

Morgan Housel 1:33:51 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:33:51 ... if you just pick man versus woman-

Morgan Housel 1:33:53 Yes, you get a totally different outcome.

Chris Williamson 1:33:54 Universes apart.

Morgan Housel 1:33:55 I'm, I'm willing to bet, too, I don't have this data, I'm willing to bet if you were to sort through the most reckless Robinhood accounts of people who just blew themselves up-

Chris Williamson 1:34:03 Mm-hmm

Morgan Housel 1:34:03 ... you know, they had a six-figure account balance and bet it all on this thing and lost everything, I'm willing to bet good money 98% of them would be men.

Chris Williamson 1:34:10 Of course.

Morgan Housel 1:34:10 That's, that's just the, the mindset of it. Uh, but I also think, to that point, on the, on the getting rich versus staying rich spectrum-

Chris Williamson 1:34:17 Mm

Morgan Housel 1:34:18 ... I think it tends to be the case that men are better at getting rich because they are willing to take unbelievable risks.

Chris Williamson 1:34:23 Yep.

Morgan Housel 1:34:24 And women are better at staying rich because they have a more developed prefrontal cortex-

Chris Williamson 1:34:27 I wonder-

Morgan Housel 1:34:28 ... who can, who can better size up the risk and issue. Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:34:30 Hey, I wo- I wonder if this is a really wonderful pro-marriage argument.

Morgan Housel 1:34:35 You need both.

Chris Williamson 1:34:35 Yes.

Morgan Housel 1:34:36 Yes.

Chris Williamson 1:34:36 Yes, yes. You need the man to have got you off the launchpad-

Morgan Housel 1:34:39 [chuckles] And the woman to-

Chris Williamson 1:34:39 ... and then you need the woman to keep you out in orbit.

Morgan Housel 1:34:41 There's... Yeah, I, I think that's-

Chris Williamson 1:34:43 What a [chuckles] wonderful-

Morgan Housel 1:34:43 I think that's the case. There's a lot of things in life... I forget where I read this recently or heard this recently, that young men in particular like really need guard... Scott Galloway is who wrote this. Men- young men really need guard- guardrails, by and large, from, from women [chuckles] -

Chris Williamson 1:34:54 Yeah

Morgan Housel 1:34:54 ... who can put the guardrails around them. Left to their own devices, they're gonna make terrible decisions.

Chris Williamson 1:34:58 Very bad. Yeah.

Morgan Housel 1:34:59 I wouldn't be surprised... I, I'm sure I've been- my wife and I have been together for 20 years, and I'm sure a lot of my financial philosophies in my own house are based on the idea that, like, this is just me. I, I got a- I have a family to take care of, so I'm not gonna take risks that I otherwise might if I was on my own-

Chris Williamson 1:35:15 Mm

Morgan Housel 1:35:15 ... and otherwise would make perfect sense to me if I was on my own. But now I have the family guardrails around me to temper that down and be like, "No, this ain't for me."

Chris Williamson 1:35:21 Don't use leverage.

Morgan Housel 1:35:22 It's for them.

Chris Williamson 1:35:22 Don't use leverage. Not today.

Morgan Housel 1:35:24 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:35:24 [chuckles]

Morgan Housel 1:35:24 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:35:25 Let's not, let's not use margin.

Morgan Housel 1:35:26 And I, and certainly, I did a lot of crazier things when I was much younger and, and not married, not, not partnered, um, because they seemed like good i- I think, I think the vast majority of young men, in particular, when they are first exposed to investing, have a pure gambling mindset. And the idea of, like-

Chris Williamson 1:35:42 [laughing]

Morgan Housel 1:35:42 ... buy a diversified portfolio and hold it for 50 years, you're like, that's, that's nobody's knee-jerk reaction of what you should do.

Chris Williamson 1:35:49 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 1:35:49 Everybody's knee-jerk reaction is like, "What's the fastest way that I can get rich?"

Chris Williamson 1:35:53 I wonder if that is going to become more prevalent with Polymarket and Kalshi.

Morgan Housel 1:35:57 Oh, it's the worst. There is so much financial history across cultures, across countries, across generations, that if you give people the tools to light themselves on fire financially-

Chris Williamson 1:36:09 [laughing]

Morgan Housel 1:36:09 ... they will douse themselves in kerosene and light the match. They will take it full and ruin their lives doing it.

Chris Williamson 1:36:15 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 1:36:15 And they'll do it. And so look, I'm a free markets guy. I'm a, I'm a free... I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, uh, I'm a individual responsibility guy, but giving 17-year-old boys the power to bet their meager life savings that they need for tuition or whatever it might be, to bet on the spread of tonight's game, that's... I, I, I don't think we're gonna look at that fondly. And every statistic- it hasn't been around for that long.

Chris Williamson 1:36:40 Mm-hmm.

Morgan Housel 1:36:40 And every statistic, if you talk to, like, therapists, of just, like, the explosion of young men coming to them and being like, "I'm broke. I lost everything. I spent all of my time-

Chris Williamson 1:36:49 What on? Sports betting.

Morgan Housel 1:36:50 S- sports betting-

Chris Williamson 1:36:51 Wow

Morgan Housel 1:36:51 ... or stock market.

Chris Williamson 1:36:53 Wow.

Morgan Housel 1:36:53 Robinhood kind of things. And so it used to be, whether it was legally or the, the barriers to entry to stock trading 20 years ago were, were pretty high. You know, you were paying per trade. There was a per-trade fee that was like a speed bump that I think, I actually think was, was a good thing. Like, there's not a lot of times in life where, um, lower costs l- gives worse consumer outcomes.

Chris Williamson 1:37:13 Mm.

Morgan Housel 1:37:13 I think stock trading was one of them. It was just enough speed bump for you to be like, "Do I wanna be doing this? Is this the right trade to make?" Now you can sit there on Robinhood all day and just buy, sell, buy, sell, buy, sell, buy, sell. And everything we know about investing is, like, that's, that's the behavior that's gonna lead to regret.

Chris Williamson 1:37:29 What are some of the biggest well-meaning mistakes that parents make when money enters the picture and it's related to their kids?

Morgan Housel 1:37:39 I think a lot of wealthier parents, not super wealthy, but just parents of some low level of means-... have an idea, a very understandable idea of like, "I want to use my money to give my kids a better life, but I don't want them to be spoiled."

Chris Williamson 1:37:54 Mm-hmm.

Morgan Housel 1:37:54 And the way that they go about that with very well-meaning intentions is being like, "Look, we have money to help this child, but they need to go do it themselves. They need to go earn themselves, and, and, you know, and, and suffer on their own and whatnot." And inadvertently, what often happens is the parent thinks that they are teaching the kid, uh, hard work and dedication and integrity, and the message that the kid actually hears is humiliation, that the parents could be helping them, but they're not, because I'm not worthy of their help.

Chris Williamson 1:38:24 Oh, oh, that's-

Morgan Housel 1:38:24 And it's very-- And in the mind of the adult-

Chris Williamson 1:38:26 Yeah

Morgan Housel 1:38:26 ... in the mind of the parent, that doesn't make a lot of sense. In the mind of a 14-year-old, that's all he can hear, is, "I'm not worthy of their help." And a lot-- And it, it goes astray. I've told this story before about a, a good friend of mine whose grandfather was very wealthy and didn't want his kids and grandkids to be spoiled, and so when they went skiing, his grandfather would say, "If you want me to buy you a lift ticket, you first have to hike up the hill. And if you do that and ski down, then I'll buy you a lift ticket. Show me that you are capable of hard work." And so my, my friend tells the story. He says, "The lesson that the grandfather wanted to teach us was hard work, and but the lessons that we actually learned was Grandpa's an asshole." That was the lesson that they actually heard from it, was humiliation from it, and I think there's a lot of, of, of, of versions of that. Another version of it is it's extremely difficult for anyone to demote their lifestyle, to be at one level and then have to tick down even a small amount. People can absolutely lose their minds-

Chris Williamson 1:39:22 Downsize the car, downsize the house

Morgan Housel 1:39:24 ... if they're downsizing. And so if you are a parent of any kind of means or wealth, you have to be very diffic-- uh, careful picking your lifestyle, knowing that that will become the baseline barest of expectations for your child when they are adults.

Chris Williamson 1:39:37 If you're in a twenty-thousand-square-foot house, you've got-

Morgan Housel 1:39:40 That's the baseline.

Chris Williamson 1:39:41 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 1:39:42 That's not a mansion. To, to you, the parent, it's a mansion because you grew up in something smaller. To your kid, that is normal now. And you think about this. What if that child wants to be a kindergarten teacher, but they can't? They know that they can't live that lifestyle 'cause they got accustomed to something else, so now they have to try to become a lawyer or a doctor or an entrepreneur, even if they don't want to do it.

Chris Williamson 1:40:00 I wonder if this explains another element on top of the psychological and relational and all the rest of it, why divorce is so painful. Because if you're splitting the finances or even not-

Morgan Housel 1:40:14 Everything's half, right!

Chris Williamson 1:40:15 With a prenup. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's, there's half as much to go around-

Morgan Housel 1:40:17 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:40:17 ... which means you don't get the same house and put it in half. You get two houses that are less than half as shit.

Morgan Housel 1:40:26 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:40:26 Like, you-

Morgan Housel 1:40:27 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:40:27 ... because y- you've got all of these additional costs that you need to pay now, and you've got to go between the two, and maybe you shared a car, but now you've got to have t- two cars, and that means that both cars are less than half as good.

Morgan Housel 1:40:37 For sure. Right, right. I think a very core human feeling that feels incredible when you have it and is devastating when you don't is generational improvement. Is to say that I, I'm living a, a better life than my parents.

Chris Williamson 1:40:48 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 1:40:48 And as parents, it feels so good when you look at your children and say, "They lived a better life than, than we did." That is a core thing, and if you don't have it, it's difficult to have a good life. If you say, "My parents raised me up here, and now a- as an adult, I'm down here," even if down here is still a great life-

Chris Williamson 1:41:05 Yeah

Morgan Housel 1:41:05 ... it's very difficult to wrap your head around.

Chris Williamson 1:41:07 Have you looked at intergenerational competition theory, IGCT?

Morgan Housel 1:41:10 No.

Chris Williamson 1:41:11 The entire body of work around exactly what you're talking about. Really, really interesting. You'd love it.

Morgan Housel 1:41:15 It makes a lot of sense, and this is-- that's the curse of being a very successful, wealthy parent. You feel so good as a parent. "I worked my ass off, made a lot of money. Now I can give my kids a great life." Every cell in your body tells you to do that, and it's a wonderful thing. And if, in the process of doing that, you inflated your kids' expectations to a level that they will never be able to exceed themselves through their own hard work and dedication, it's actually a curse.

Chris Williamson 1:41:37 Wow. Yeah, I, uh, I think the other interesting thing is this comes into conflict with, like, two or three other dynamics in the modern world. So you have intergenerational competition theory, and it's not, "Where were my parents at the age that I'm at?"

Morgan Housel 1:41:55 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:41:55 "Where do I think my parents were at the age that I'm at?"

Morgan Housel 1:41:59 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:41:59 So if you're unable to see the difficulty of them taking the bus to work or whatever it might be, there's just this assumption that a lot of the costs and a lot of the prices kind of they-

Morgan Housel 1:42:08 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:42:09 ... didn't really pay it all that much, but they were able to buy a house for what, like, two years' wages or something like that?

Morgan Housel 1:42:13 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:42:13 So it's not only that, not where were my parents, but where do I think my parents were when they were at my age? And also, where do I think that all of my peers are now-

Morgan Housel 1:42:24 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:42:24 ... given that everybody is putting the best of themselves online and that your entire competition network is globalized and available twenty-four/seven and has the, uh, highest status, wealthiest people on the planet rising to the top by design-

Morgan Housel 1:42:38 Mm-hmm

Chris Williamson 1:42:38 ... because they're the ones that have got the outlier effect. It is no fucking surprise to me that people feel like they can't afford to have a family, that they can't afford to buy a house.

Morgan Housel 1:42:48 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:42:49 Uh, what's your... Give me-- You must have looked at this, sort of the, the financial state of Gen Z and of sort of modernity. What are some lesser-known or unpopular insights into the wealth of Gen Z and previous generations?

Morgan Housel 1:43:04 Well, the-- look, by and large, there has been wage growth, real wage growth, uh, growth adjusted for inflation over the last several generations. On average, that's true. On a whole, that's true. The areas in which it is absolutely not true, that is just dramatically more expensive today than it was in any previous generation, is housing, and that's the most important thing to people. In terms of, like, box checking into adulthood, buying a house is near the top, to where if you can feel that you can do it, you feel like you're really making progress. "I'm an adult. I own my own house. I'm doing it." And if you can't do it, you feel like you're just kind of stuck down in some lower level that you'll, you'll never get out of. And so when people talk about the price of housing, they, they talk about it like, like it's a spreadsheet problem, like it's just, "Oh, we got to get down mortgage rates." It's a social problem, and I think almost every social problem today that we have in any country, in America or any other country that has expensive housing, is downstream of housing affordability. If you can't afford your house, you're less likely to get married, you're less likely to have kids, you're more likely to abu- use drugs, you're more likely to have poor mental health. It all stems down from lack of housing, and even something like, like, like drug addiction that you wouldn't think would be that attached to housing.

Chris Williamson 1:44:14 Mm-hmm.

Morgan Housel 1:44:15 ... when housing is very expensive, almost by definition, uh, the bottom sliver of society becomes homeless. 'Cause there's, there's not- housing is expensive, 'cause there's not enough of it.

Chris Williamson 1:44:23 Mm-hmm.

Morgan Housel 1:44:24 Almost definitionally, people become homeless.

Chris Williamson 1:44:26 Supply and demand.

Morgan Housel 1:44:26 What do a lot of the, the, so many people do when they become homeless to gain a little bit of hope in their life?

Chris Williamson 1:44:31 Drugs.

Morgan Housel 1:44:31 Heroin. And so I think it seems crazy, but you can- there's so many of those where you think housing affordability is a housing problem, and it is just a social problem all the way down.

Chris Williamson 1:44:40 Wow!

Morgan Housel 1:44:41 We had a, a family friend, and she was in her, uh, late 20s, happily married, both of them have good jobs, uh, want to be parents, but can't afford a house where we live and are delaying, delaying, delaying trying to have kids until they can afford a house, which in many cities, including the city I live in, seems like a, like, good luck waiting kind of thing.

Chris Williamson 1:45:00 Yep.

Morgan Housel 1:45:01 And so it's a, it's a huge... It's, it's, it's the biggest social problem I think that we have in America.

Chris Williamson 1:45:06 W- what is the relative-- Do you know the data on how actual wages, median wages, median house price at what... Is it because house prices have gone up an awful lot and wages haven't gone up in line with it? Is it because of interest rates? Is it... What, what, what is it?

Morgan Housel 1:45:22 The thing that's so, I think should be agon- should make you angry about the housing issue, is that it's the easiest issue to identify why it's a problem, and it's the easiest thing to fix. We don't build enough houses. That's it. It's the easiest supply and demand thing, where we're probably five million houses short in America that we, that we should have built, then we didn't. Why didn't we build them? We have plenty of construction workers. We have plenty of capital. There's plenty of demand. Almost all the way down, it's a zoning issue. Whereas in most cities in America, where people want homes to be, it's illegal to build them. You can't get it properly zoned, or it takes too long for most developers to put up with it.

Chris Williamson 1:46:03 Okay.

Morgan Housel 1:46:04 And so it's purely a... It's a choice. It's a choice to be in this situation that could end tomorrow-

Chris Williamson 1:46:10 Hang on

Morgan Housel 1:46:10 ... if people, if people understood the problem enough.

Chris Williamson 1:46:12 Hang on. So, we have the money to build the houses?

Morgan Housel 1:46:19 Of course.

Chris Williamson 1:46:20 And the people to be able to-

Morgan Housel 1:46:22 The, the, the demand to do it.

Chris Williamson 1:46:23 The people to be able to build them-

Morgan Housel 1:46:24 Right

Chris Williamson 1:46:25 ... and the materials to be able to make them-

Morgan Housel 1:46:26 Of course

Chris Williamson 1:46:26 ... and the people to live in them-

Morgan Housel 1:46:28 Yes

Chris Williamson 1:46:28 ... and the demand for them.

Morgan Housel 1:46:30 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:46:31 But because of-

Morgan Housel 1:46:32 Talk to a real estate developer in Los Angeles who owns a plot of land that wants to build a hundred homes on it, and he'll tell you, it'll take you, if you're lucky and good and spend a fortune, it'll take you three to five years to get it permitted, and by that time, you'll probably just give up and move somewhere else.

Chris Williamson 1:46:47 This is fucking insane.

Morgan Housel 1:46:48 Is it?

Chris Williamson 1:46:48 I didn't know, I didn't know any of this about it.

Morgan Housel 1:46:49 It should, it should be the biggest problem. There's several books have been written about it recently. Abundance by Ezra Klein and, and Derek Thompson is a good one. Uh, there's, there's another book called Stuck, that is about the history of zoning rules, uh, and the-

Chris Williamson 1:47:00 Why, why is zoning getting in the way? What is it that they want?

Morgan Housel 1:47:05 Well, this is by-

Chris Williamson 1:47:05 Do the people not want houses built?

Morgan Housel 1:47:07 The people who already have houses don't want other homes built around them. The other thing, I think the most dangerous thing that we've done in America in the last fifty years, is convince people that rising home prices are a good thing. And now, if you own your house, you think, "Oh, I bought this house for two hundred grand, and now it's worth six hundred. I just made four hundred thousand dollars. I've never seen so much money in my life." A, no, you didn't, because if you sold that house for six hundred grand, you have to buy another house that is also inflated in value.

Chris Williamson 1:47:33 [laughing]

Morgan Housel 1:47:33 So you didn't make anything. You didn't make any money what- whatsoever.

Chris Williamson 1:47:36 Yeah, yeah.

Morgan Housel 1:47:36 Who you did push out is the first-time homebuyer, who didn't ride that wave of rising home prices, that is now priced out of a house.

Chris Williamson 1:47:43 That's such a fucking good point, and I've ne- how have I never thought about this? That if you buy a house low and sell it high, you still need a house.

Morgan Housel 1:47:51 You need another house that is inflated by the same amount. The only exception to this is if you downsize-

Chris Williamson 1:47:56 Or if you migrate

Morgan Housel 1:47:56 ... but that's a very rare thing to do. If you di- if you migrate or downsize.

Chris Williamson 1:47:59 Well, I did the, I did the, I-

Morgan Housel 1:48:00 But most people do neither nor.

Chris Williamson 1:48:02 I don't own, uh, my house in America, but I, I did very fortunately manage to buy a house in the UK. Uh, and I did it the other way. So I went from the northeast of the UK, very working class town, where, you know, uh, gosh, at a not particularly fancy wage, I think less than one year of, uh, a annual salary for me was my deposit. So i- in the space of not too long, by being frugal, I was able to save up enough money to be able to put a deposit down on the house.

Morgan Housel 1:48:32 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:48:33 Then I moved to America, and the world [laughing] is very different over here.

Morgan Housel 1:48:36 It's a different thing.

Chris Williamson 1:48:37 It is-

Morgan Housel 1:48:37 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:48:37 ... a different-

Morgan Housel 1:48:38 And it's a-

Chris Williamson 1:48:39 ... fucking beast.

Morgan Housel 1:48:39 You know, Trump was, had a very honest comment about this two weeks ago, and this is one of the great things about Trump, he'll tell you exactly what's on his mind, won't sugarcoat anything. And he said... Look, I'm, I'm paraphrasing him, but he said, "If we build more houses, that's gonna come at the expense of people who already own houses. If you build more houses, the price goes down. That's phenomenal for the people who don't own a house yet-

Chris Williamson 1:49:00 Yeah

Morgan Housel 1:49:00 ... and it's devastating for the people who do." And so that, that's where we're at, this, at this, this huge-

Chris Williamson 1:49:05 Stalemate-

Morgan Housel 1:49:05 Yes

Chris Williamson 1:49:05 ... between the two, right. And I'm gonna guess that local house owners lobby the zoning people-

Morgan Housel 1:49:12 Huge

Chris Williamson 1:49:12 ... so that we don't want more because we don't want to lose our... Right, I get it.

Morgan Housel 1:49:17 I, I read this book recently on the history of Levittown. Do you know what Levittown is?

Chris Williamson 1:49:20 It's... I know a funny joke about it. It's near Long Island.

Morgan Housel 1:49:23 Oh, there, there, there's several of them.

Chris Williamson 1:49:24 Okay.

Morgan Housel 1:49:24 And it was at the end of World War II. You know, we, we stopped building houses in World War II, 'cause we needed the material for other things. We didn't build a single house, basically. And then you had 16 million GIs come home, all of whom, what they wanted more than anything else, wa- was a house.

Chris Williamson 1:49:38 Mm.

Morgan Housel 1:49:38 And so they came home in the late 1940s, and there was a massive housing shortage, and prices surged, and it was a huge problem. And but back then, in most area of the country, there was very little zoning, and so the Levitt brothers started buying up old, abandoned farms, and they built tens of thousands of houses, just threw them up, and this became, like, the quintessential white picket fence-

Chris Williamson 1:49:58 Right

Morgan Housel 1:49:58 ... small, that, that housed all the GIs. And one of the parts of the bill- of, of, of the book that's really interesting is, like I said, there's virtually no zoning back then. If you, if you bought a farm, do whatever the hell you want with it. Now we're sitting here in Austin, Texas. Texas is one of the few states that still more or less has that, and what is true about Texas housing?... it's cheap relative to-

Chris Williamson 1:50:18 Yep

Morgan Housel 1:50:18 - other areas of the country.

Chris Williamson 1:50:19 Yep.

Morgan Housel 1:50:19 And if you go to, well, then San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, extremely difficult zoning, and an entry-level shithouse costs two and a half million dollars. And it's d- it's absolutely devastating to the young generation, who rightly feels that the opportunities that were afforded to their parents and their grandparents nobody gets anymore.

Chris Williamson 1:50:38 I should, um, I should, I should do more about this on the pod. If you were to bring somebody on the podcast, who would I speak to? Who do you think is good on this topic?

Morgan Housel 1:50:46 Probably Derek Thompson.

Chris Williamson 1:50:47 Okay, yeah.

Morgan Housel 1:50:48 Probably understands it more than anyone and can articulate it very well.

Chris Williamson 1:50:51 Okay.

Morgan Housel 1:50:51 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:50:51 Cool. I'm gonna-

Morgan Housel 1:50:52 It's phenomenal

Chris Williamson 1:50:52 ... I'm gonna, I should, I should do more about this.

Morgan Housel 1:50:54 The book Stuck is very good, and the history of zoning. And zoning started really with, uh, a- as a way to keep Chinese immigrants out of white people neighborhood, out of, out of, out of neighbor- neighborhood. And it started with that, and it just expanded, expanded, expanded, uh, and, and blew up. So it has, like, very, uh, you know, strict, racious, uh, racial beginnings-

Chris Williamson 1:51:17 Mm

Morgan Housel 1:51:18 ... that came into as something that almost every city in America now practices.

Chris Williamson 1:51:21 And it's now been inherited by domestic, uh, uh, domestic people, that Americans-

Morgan Housel 1:51:27 Everywhere.

Chris Williamson 1:51:28 Yeah, yeah.

Morgan Housel 1:51:28 And when you frame it again as the first part of the equation, like if the value of your house doubles, you didn't gain anything because the house that you have to buy... So frame it as this-

Chris Williamson 1:51:35 Bro.

Morgan Housel 1:51:36 We are stifling young people's ability to buy a house-

Chris Williamson 1:51:40 Mm-hmm

Morgan Housel 1:51:40 ... so that old people can raise the value of their house when they're not actually gaining anything at all to begin with. They don't actually gain any wealth.

Chris Williamson 1:51:48 Because it's the entire waterline-

Morgan Housel 1:51:49 It's the, it's the entire

Chris Williamson 1:51:50 ... up and down.

Morgan Housel 1:51:50 It's, it's all of it.

Chris Williamson 1:51:51 Yeah, yeah.

Morgan Housel 1:51:51 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:51:51 Everybody's going up and down together. I suppose-

Morgan Housel 1:51:53 And so here's, here's the other thing that's so crazy about this. To Trump's comment, if we build more houses, the value of homes would fall, and that would hurt people. It wouldn't actually hurt them. If your house is currently worth a million dollars and then we build tons of house- houses, and now it's worth five hundred, you didn't lose anything-

Chris Williamson 1:52:08 Because you can buy another-

Morgan Housel 1:52:08 Because you sell that and buy another house that's five hundred.

Chris Williamson 1:52:10 I suppose the problem here is you need a God's-eye view to coordinate all of the houses to go up and down together.

Morgan Housel 1:52:16 And so much of this is the vast majority of it is local-

Chris Williamson 1:52:19 Yep

Morgan Housel 1:52:19 ... rules and laws. And if you think national politics is dysfunctional, local is, is, is much more so.

Chris Williamson 1:52:24 Let...

Chris Williamson 1:52:25 Okay. Art of Spending Money talked about a million different ways that you can get spending money wrong. What about not spending money? Because there are the misers.

Morgan Housel 1:52:35 Huge, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:52:35 There's Ebenezer Scrooge on the other side. Bill Perkins' book, Die With Zero, is fucking fantastic.

Morgan Housel 1:52:40 Fantastic, yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:52:41 Wonderful. Um, what is your perspective, or what is there to know about people who can't put their hand in their pocket as opposed to keep putting it in too frequently?

Morgan Housel 1:52:52 I've two, two views on this. One is, uh, it's just as broken and detrimental to have a, a mentality of "I can't spend this money" to the person who can't spend it fast enough and runs himself over a cliff. It's, it's just as much of a mental illness in that situation, and if you talk to a lot of financial advisors, they will tell you the number one psychological ailment of their clients are baby boomers who have saved several million dollars, can af- easily afford to safely have a wonderful retirement and can't bring themselves to spend a penny of it because their financial identity is number goes up every year.

Chris Williamson 1:53:26 I'm a saver.

Morgan Housel 1:53:27 I'm a saver-

Chris Williamson 1:53:28 Yeah

Morgan Housel 1:53:28 ... and my net worth goes up every year, and the idea of, of starting to entrench that down is, is so painful to them. The other side of this, of why I think it's actually half rational, is we're fortunate to live in a world where if you retire at 60, there's a meaningful chance you're gonna live into your 90s. And so you're talking about it was not that long ago, I mean, 60 or 70 years ago, the idea of retirement by and large didn't exist for most people.

Chris Williamson 1:53:52 People just worked up until they-

Morgan Housel 1:53:53 They, they worked until they died

Chris Williamson 1:53:54 ... couldn't work anymore?

Morgan Housel 1:53:54 Your retirement party was also your funeral. That was, that was how it worked. And retirement was something that rich people could afford to do, but ordinary people, it didn't work at all. And then even if you go back to the 1980s, you retired at 60, you're probably gonna die at 68. So you're talking, you might need to fund a retirement for three, five, maybe 10 years. Now you're legitimately looking at people who might need to fund a retirement for 40 years. And the amount of money that you- so the idea that they are worried about spending too quickly, I mean, like, yeah, good worry. You should think about that. [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 1:54:21 Yeah, between, uh, some people getting to wealth escape velocity and longevity increasing lifespan, y- you could end up with... Well, I mean, even for your adult life, you're talking about only maybe about 50% of your time being spent working.

Morgan Housel 1:54:36 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:54:36 If you live until you're 90, you-

Morgan Housel 1:54:38 And you, and you retire at 65, you got... I mean, that's, that's, uh, that's a big-

Chris Williamson 1:54:42 Not far off

Morgan Housel 1:54:42 ... and it's a period of time that you need to fund that would've been uh, just such a magical thing to my grandparents' generation, to our grandparents' generation. So the idea that people think about that longevity and don't want to overspend makes a lot of sense, and you can match that with people who still have a mental affliction of, "I can't bear seeing the numbers go down." I don't know if I'll do a good job with this, honestly.

Chris Williamson 1:55:04 Right.

Morgan Housel 1:55:04 Now, I'm in wealth accumulation growth mode right now.

Chris Williamson 1:55:07 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 1:55:08 When I'm 80, I don't know if I'll do a good job of it because I do feel like, in a way, that's probably not good.

Chris Williamson 1:55:12 You know what I think-

Morgan Housel 1:55:13 Number go up is important to my identity.

Chris Williamson 1:55:15 Yeah, I think a good line from Bill Perkins' book about give your kids their inheritance when they're 30-

Morgan Housel 1:55:22 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:55:23 I think-

Morgan Housel 1:55:23 That's my favorite takeaway from his book and changed profoundly how I think about inheritance for my children.

Chris Williamson 1:55:28 Yeah.

Morgan Housel 1:55:29 Profoundly.

Chris Williamson 1:55:29 Yeah. Uh, the, the simple fact that if you wait until you die, your kids don't need your money.

Morgan Housel 1:55:36 Right, but they desperately need it when they're 30-

Chris Williamson 1:55:38 Yes

Morgan Housel 1:55:38 ... and trying to buy a house.

Chris Williamson 1:55:39 Get the first house.

Morgan Housel 1:55:40 And get it-

Chris Williamson 1:55:40 Do it

Morgan Housel 1:55:40 ... and getting, having kids, you know, daycare.

Chris Williamson 1:55:42 You know what else you could do? What... This, this might actually be a wonderful intervention to get people, uh, parents to feel the pain or to, to dampen the pain or maybe even completely negate the pain of the downsizing and of the number go down thing of, well, yeah, sure, we had a big house, but we had a big house 'cause there was three kids in it.

Morgan Housel 1:56:05 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:56:06 And now it's just... I know you've talked about this as well, that you and your wife have discussed, "Okay, what, you know, what are we gonna do when kind of the golden era is over-

Morgan Housel 1:56:12 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:56:12 ... of the kids, and now we've got the next thing?"

Morgan Housel 1:56:14 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:56:14 "And we're gonna... Maybe it'll be a lake, or maybe it'll be whatever." And, um, okay, well, if you, at, uh, 60, 65, are-... we're gonna downsize. We don't need the big house. All of the kids are grown, and it looks like none of them are coming back, which hooray, we did a good job. Let's sell the house. How much money are we gonna get out of the house? Well, that's a, a few hundred grand or maybe more. Wouldn't that be wonderful? And I'd listen to that Morgan guy, and I listen to that Bill guy, and I think, I think we should give the, give it to the kids in their late 20s, early 30s-

Morgan Housel 1:56:45 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:56:45 ... and then they can do it. You go, "Well, the number's gonna go down, and the house is gonna go down, and we'll have to downsize a few things, but look at what we got out of it."

Morgan Housel 1:56:52 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:56:52 Like, you know, what a wonderful way to trade money-

Morgan Housel 1:56:57 For a better life for my family

Chris Williamson 1:56:58 ... for the people that you were doing it for all along.

Morgan Housel 1:57:00 Now, I think in a very broken way, it's well-intentioned, but it's a, it's, it's, I think, a very wrong way, is that what's holding a lot of parents back from doing that is, "Well, I had to work when I was 30. I worked my ass off and bought my own house."

Chris Williamson 1:57:13 This, this odd reverse-

Morgan Housel 1:57:14 "This kid has to do it, too."

Chris Williamson 1:57:15 It's reverse intergenerational connotation theory.

Morgan Housel 1:57:16 And here's why I think that, here's why I think that's wrong: You baby boomer parent who thinks that you built all this, you live a life that l- makes you look like a spoiled little bitch in the eyes of your grandparents.

Chris Williamson 1:57:27 Mm-hmm.

Morgan Housel 1:57:27 You have antibiotics. You have air conditioning.

Chris Williamson 1:57:29 Mm-hmm.

Morgan Housel 1:57:29 You have jet travel. If your grandparents could see how you lived, you said, "You spoiled... You don't have to-- You, you think you know hard work? I used to work in a coal mine."

Chris Williamson 1:57:38 Mm.

Morgan Housel 1:57:38 "You think you worked hard?" The, I think the goal of every generation should be to create kids and grandkids-

Chris Williamson 1:57:44 Mm

Morgan Housel 1:57:44 ... who appear, by the standards of a previous generation, to be spoiled.

Chris Williamson 1:57:48 Mm-hmm.

Morgan Housel 1:57:48 That's the goal.

Chris Williamson 1:57:49 Mm.

Morgan Housel 1:57:49 And so the idea of using your money to give your kids a benefit so that they appear spoiled by your generation's terms, I'm, I'm kind of like, "That's, that's the goal, right?"

Chris Williamson 1:57:59 That's pretty cool.

Morgan Housel 1:57:59 "Isn't that the way to do it?" I remember having this conversation recently of a guy who, um, his parents were immigrants, worked their absolute asses off to support him and his siblings, and now he himself is pretty successful, and he's like: "I feel guilty that, like, I didn't, I didn't have to work as hard as my parents."

Chris Williamson 1:58:14 Yep.

Morgan Housel 1:58:15 And I, and I said, "Look, I bet if we could talk to your parents right now, they would say that was the goal."

Chris Williamson 1:58:20 Only-

Morgan Housel 1:58:20 "The reason they worked their asses off is so that you would not have to. That's the goal, and so don't feel guilty. Like, this is, this is what it was supposed to happen."

Chris Williamson 1:58:27 Dude, I feel the exact same about living in the US. I'm an only child. My mom and dad only have me. I'm their sole progeny.

Morgan Housel 1:58:34 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:58:34 And I decided to fuck off to the other side of the Atlantic, and any time that I think about it, I think, "Well, why do you think that they encouraged you to work hard and get a university degree?"

Morgan Housel 1:58:44 Because they wanted you to be who you are today.

Chris Williamson 1:58:46 Because it means that I get to go and do the thing that I want.

Morgan Housel 1:58:48 I think it was Steve Harvey, I think it was, he said this. I don't know if it was his quote or if I just heard him say this from someone else. He said that, uh, I think it was at his father's funeral, someone told him, "Your dad was the only pers- the only man in the world who wants you to exceed him."

Chris Williamson 1:59:05 What a wonderful-

Morgan Housel 1:59:05 "The only man in the world-

Chris Williamson 1:59:07 Mm

Morgan Housel 1:59:07 ... who wants you to do better than him."

Chris Williamson 1:59:09 Mm-hmm.

Morgan Housel 1:59:10 And I think that's, that's by and large true. When most particularly men look at each other, ch- I, I want-

Chris Williamson 1:59:14 Even your brother.

Morgan Housel 1:59:14 Yeah, yes. I want you to be successful.

Chris Williamson 1:59:16 Especially your brother.

Morgan Housel 1:59:17 I- especially your brother. I want you to be successful.

Chris Williamson 1:59:19 But not more successful.

Morgan Housel 1:59:19 Not more than I am. The only person who doesn't believe that is your dad. I want you to be more successful than I am. And so tying this all together, if you can use your money and supercharge that at age 30, do it. That's, that was the, the shift that I had from Bill's book.

Chris Williamson 1:59:34 Morgan, you're the GOAT, dude. Episode eight or nine or whatever this is, you're so fantastic.

Morgan Housel 1:59:38 Let's do it again. Can't wait.

Chris Williamson 1:59:39 I can't wait. Uh, what have you got out? Where should people go to get all of the things that you do?

Morgan Housel 1:59:44 You know, the three books I've written, Psychology of Money, Same as Ever, The Art of Spending Money, every, every half-decent thought that's ever entered my head about money is in those three books.

Chris Williamson 1:59:52 Unreal. I appreciate you, man.

Morgan Housel 1:59:53 Thanks, Chris.

Chris Williamson 1:59:53 Next time.

Morgan Housel 1:59:54 Thank you. [upbeat music]

Chris Williamson 1:59:55 Thank you very much for tuning in. Congratulations for making it to the end of an entire episode. Uh, another one that I think you'll enjoy is right here.