Why Some People Become Ridiculously Rich | William Leith | Modern Wisdom Podcast 183

1. 0:00 – 0:25

   Intro

   1. WLWilliam Leith0:00

      I think that this, um, this pushing the envelope is part of us. And I think the people who make the most money ha- are, are kind of ... Sometimes they are unbridled examples of this. They're, they're, they're runaway examples of pushing and pushing and pushing.

2. 0:25 – 1:53

   How are you

   1. CWChris Williamson0:25

      (wind blows) William, how are you?

   2. WLWilliam Leith0:27

      I'm okay. I know the world's in a ... I, I, this is what I say to everybody: I'm fine. Uh, I dread to think what's gonna happen next. The world is in a, you know, very peculiar state. It's, for me, it's the same. I'm doing the same thing as I always do, which is (laughs) try and think of things to write, sit at home, go for walks, you know, meet the same few people.

   3. CWChris Williamson0:51

      (laughs)

   4. WLWilliam Leith0:51

      Socially distanced now, although, obviously not things like my son and that sort of thing. But, um, my life's more or less the same. But I know that loads of people are either ... I just had this conversation. I suppose I must have it every, every day 'cause it is the conversation to have. Um, you're either... Some people are locked in a situation they hate. Some people have to go to work and put themselves in terrible danger. (laughs) Um, anyway, so I keep thinking of that. But, you know, like you said, it's lovely weather. You can go for walks, and my life's the same, so.

   5. CWChris Williamson1:30

      I, I agree. I keep on saying it to people that, um, I appreciate for some, it might be challenging. But for me, it's n- not a massive difference from what I'm used to. You know, I've got slightly fewer people to see, slightly more time to read, and a little bit worse internet connection because everybody's on- online. But-

   6. WLWilliam Leith1:51

      Yeah, yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson1:52

      ... other than, other than that,

3. 1:53 – 5:26

   Money

   1. CWChris Williamson1:53

      it's all good. Um, so today we're talking about money, very sort of passionate topic, a very, uh, viscerally emotion-inducing topic. We're talking about why some people can make it and others can't.

   2. WLWilliam Leith2:07

      It's we- it's, it's a very weird thing, money, because you think you know what it is. You spend your whole life with this concept of money. You know, you've got it, you haven't got it. What is it? Oh, it's what's in my pocket. And then when you try and sort of drill down into it, try and understand what it is, how it arose, what it does to your head, then it becomes this very weird thing, and I realized that quite quickly. That's why I wanted to write about it 'cause I didn't understand it. There was a big ... you know, the global financial crash. And I think that wasn't the very first time I'd thought about money 'cause I'd once tried to write about it and found after writing, I wrote a 1,200-word article on the origins of money from first principles, and I thought, "God, I'm not going there again." (laughs)

   3. CWChris Williamson3:01

      (laughs)

   4. WLWilliam Leith3:01

      That is so weird. Um, and then we had this big crash, and I realized that there was something wrong with ... You know, money was something that really helped us and really enabled all sorts of things to happen. But there was something deeply wrong with it, and I wondered what that was, and was there a way I could simply understand it? Wha- was there a simple way to understand what was wrong? So, after that, I began to think about it a bit. And I was thinking, "Yeah, money. God, ugh, wha- I, I could write about that. No, I couldn't. No, no, no." And then one day ... And I realized, all this time, I kept interviewing these people who made tons of money, and I would say, "You know, how did you make this money?" And (sighs) th- it's almost like you're asking somebody, "Hey, your garden's tidy. How did you do that?" And they say-

   5. CWChris Williamson3:57

      Mm-hmm.

   6. WLWilliam Leith3:57

      ... "Well, you see that grass? Uh, I, I, I got this mower. I mowed it. And then I, um, I painted the shed," like all this. And you ask people how they make money, and they go, "Well, first of all, I thought, yeah, uh, I, you know, what's, what's going on in the hi-fi market? And then I thought, yeah-

   7. CWChris Williamson4:15

      (laughs)

   8. WLWilliam Leith4:15

      ... I could make it a bit cheaper." You think, "Yeah, that's a good point, yeah." "And then I made it a bit cheaper." "And how much do you make?" "Oh, you know, like 10 million." So you think w- the people who make a load of money, they, they sort of understand it, and it seems like this logical thing. But for 99.9% of us, it's, um, it's not logical, and, you know, obviously, if you could do it, (laughs) if you could do it, you would. And I couldn't do it. And I actually had some pathological problem with money, which is that even when I made a load of it, it would somehow get into me and change me, so I'd become this person who had some money, and then it would all be gone because identifying as yourself with your money is terrible. You've got to be the person who doesn't have money and then have the money. Um, so I thought my problem with money was a bit like, you know, I'm an- I'm a, what do you call it, reformed alcoholic. I'm a, I've been teetotal for seven and a half years.

   9. CWChris Williamson5:20

      Amazing. Congratulations.

   10. WLWilliam Leith5:21

       I, well, I wouldn't ... You know, and I know that I can't touch alcohol. You're drinking, what is it, an

4. 5:26 – 7:50

   Energy Drink

   1. WLWilliam Leith5:26

      energy drink?

   2. CWChris Williamson5:26

      Oh, this is-

   3. WLWilliam Leith5:27

      Uh-

   4. CWChris Williamson5:27

      There's no, there's no caffeine in this, although shout out to Nocco. Thank you for supporting the podcast. But this is just some BCAAs flavored, flavored elderflower, nothing, uh, nothing too exciting.

   5. WLWilliam Leith5:36

      Right, right. So, so, um, I'd had this, y- you know, an- anything that sort of, um, that sped life up, whether it was, you know, cocaine, was a, I had a terrible thing with that, um, alcohol, somehow, um, I would, um, be unable to ... The person...... who had had the substance was, seemed to be not me, but some raging, crazy person. (laughs) So like, uh, two drinks, and the chance I have a third drink is very high. Three drinks, and the chance I have a fourth drink is so high that all bets are off. And then, where do I wake up? I don't know.

   6. CWChris Williamson6:25

      (laughs)

   7. WLWilliam Leith6:26

      So, so, so, uh, and I had that relationship with money, which is like, "Oh, I've got some money. Oh, you know, I could have this, I could have that. Well, why not? Oh, it's all gone. Well, I'll borrow some." Anyway, so obviously, it w- there was some sort of drug-like quality to it, um, and it became part of you. It becomes part of you because it's like, um ... The way I explain it is it's like part of you is a bully, and he's saying, "Go on, have this, have this." And, and another part of you is like, "Well, I guess I could. I guess I could have that." And you buy yourself out of every, you know, "Oh, I'll go to both parties, and then I'll get a taxi back," rather than ... You have to make a choice, you know. Which party are you gonna go to? So, um, I, I knew I had a problem with it, which was even more reason to, to write about it, to try and, uh, sort of study it. And I kept on interviewing these people, and I thought, "Yeah, they do tell me how they make money, but I'd like to think about this a bit more." And the turning point came when I interviewed Jordan Belfort, who was the, who is the person who was, um, portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film The Wolf of Wall

5. 7:50 – 13:30

   The Wolf of Wall Street

   1. WLWilliam Leith7:50

      Street.

   2. CWChris Williamson7:50

      Did you, did you interview him before you knew you were going to write The Trick?

   3. WLWilliam Leith7:56

      Um, basically, w- um, the, the, the story was that I had got a contract to write a book about money, and I, and I didn't know how to do it. So, I would-

   4. CWChris Williamson8:08

      Jordan, mate.

   5. WLWilliam Leith8:10

      (laughs)

   6. CWChris Williamson8:11

      Are, are you there? I've heard-

   7. WLWilliam Leith8:12

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson8:12

      ... that you did okay with money.

   9. WLWilliam Leith8:14

      It was, well, the thing is, you did okay with money but also had a terrible problem with it. And I realized that he was, he was everything that ... He was the confusion in one person, which is, how do you make 100 million, but then, why, when you've made 100 million, do you commit a fraud that might well land you in jail for money that you could never spend? So, I thought, here, here's, here's something that's interesting, because he's got a real gift for making money. But it's almost like, why would you then commit a fraud? Why would you then, ye- ye- you know, put yourself at that risk of going to jail if somebody catches you? Which they did. So, I thought that was really interesting. So I, I, I spent a few days with him, and he was rehabilitating himself a- actually in, in a way that was quite admirable. You know, he, he's, he's, he's really down and out. He's, he owes 100 million at this point, and he's wanting to teach people how to make money, and he's got this great confidence and this great, um, salesmanship. And he's te- he's telling me that the greatest part of his life was when he had this company, and he had this room full of brokers, and he was every day giving them these talks to inspire them, to motivate them, and whatever he said worked. And he wanted to get back to being that person because that was where it really ... That was one of the things that it was for him, was the ability to be on stage and talk to people about how to pull off some, some trick. And, and, and this was, um ... Or a series of tricks, which was how to, um, buy stocks and then get other people to buy them so they were worth more, and that worked to a certain extent. And then he, he met somebody who said, "Do you know what you can do if you wanna do even better?" (laughs) "You can actually pay people to buy the stocks and then tell them when to sell them, and you, you can then manipulate the market in a way which is completely illegal." So, he did the completely illegal thing, and, um, and was caught and went to jail. And so here he was, after this had happened, in his new life, doing a similar thing of getting up in front of people and saying, um, "This is what you have to do if you wanna make money." And one of the things was, "Don't let your stupid emotions get in the way." Another of the things, the overriding thing, I think, and this comes, um ... You mentioned Nassim Taleb w- who we'll get to. But what he said to me, the first thing I remember he said was, "When you get rich, you get rich quick. But that's not at the start. You have to do an awful lot of things before it kicks in. But when it kicks in, it happens very fast." In other words, you're gonna spend a long time putting all these pieces together, working out what it is you have to do, and if you do it a bit wrong, it, it, nothing happens. And if you don't do all of it, nothing happens. You have to get this complicated series of things to work. But then when you do, everything happens. So, it's a bit like this is not a linear thing.... you go along and, and I thought to myself, it's a bit like learning a language, right? You're translating the language into your own language, and it seems all very stilted. And every day, you learn a new word, and every week you learn a new bit of grammar. But basically, nothing much happens, and you think, "Will I ever get anywhere?" And then one day, somehow, it clicks and you realize you, you've gotta think in the new language. And then you start, "Oh, God. That's what it is." I ha-

   10. CWChris Williamson12:44

       (laughs)

   11. WLWilliam Leith12:44

       This isn't this painstaking bit of translation. It's not, it's not, y- y- you know, it's not all these labels. It's, it, it's not the same world that, with, with all these labels on it. It's, it's a different world, and the labels are different, and the way they think's a bit different. But once you've accepted that and you see that, you're in that new world. So I thought, "That's probably how people get rich." It's, it's, it's a complex set of things. And if you read genuinely good, um, self-help books, ones that don't say, "H- here's a magic, here's a bit of magic. You just need to, like, concentrate on money

6. 13:30 – 16:15

   The Slight Edge

   1. WLWilliam Leith13:30

      and it'll all come through your door-"

   2. CWChris Williamson13:31

      What would you put into that category? Can you-

   3. WLWilliam Leith13:33

      Well, I-

   4. CWChris Williamson13:33

      ... put your hand where your mouth is with that?

   5. WLWilliam Leith13:35

      Yeah. I'm, I'm saying s- something like The Slight Edge by Je- Geoff Olsen basically says you're gonna ... if you wanna succeed at something, you're gonna have to learn all about it. So, let's say you wanted to learn a language, or let's say you wanted to learn the, uh, s- y- you know, how to run a garden center or whatever it is you want to do.

   6. CWChris Williamson14:01

      The art of selling.

   7. WLWilliam Leith14:02

      Yeah. Well, anything you wanna do, you have to learn about it. And you're gonna start learning about it, and there's gonna be a period in the middle where you don't seem to be getting anywhere, because you, y- you're not, you don't seem to be making any progress. But actually, all the work you're putting in now, and will be putting in for the next couple of years, is gonna pay dividends eventually when everything f- comes together. You're gonna be glad you did all that learning. So, you've gotta think with the idea of, there's gonna be a future me who knows how to, you know, make a film, write a book, whatever it is. But at the m- but there's gonna be many, many days when you feel, "Oh, this isn't working, and, uh, h- how can I move forward?" So basically, that's how almost everything seems to work, and that, that's the, that's the kind of big lesson, that if you wanna do something, you've gotta do it over and over. It's the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours. It's not entirely that because y- you ... Well, he does say, Malcolm Gladwell does say, "You've gotta have, um, feedback. You've gotta learn." And I realized also that this is very much like science, right? It's all about looking for patterns. You have a th- you have a hypothesis. It's not necessarily your belief. It's something that you're saying might be the case, and then you try and disprove it. And you set up all these experiments to s- to, to say, "Why doesn't this work?" And eventually, the thing that your hypothesis might survive, and, and then you, you know that you might be getting closer to the truth. So, it's kind of like, um, all of these people, and all of these people that I interviewed had a method that was a bit like that.

   8. CWChris Williamson16:04

      Mm-hmm.

   9. WLWilliam Leith16:04

      They, they, they, they, um ... I mean, I didn't put this in because there was just so much of it, but I'd spent about a year studying Warren Buffett,

7. 16:15 – 17:16

   Warren Buffett

   1. WLWilliam Leith16:15

      Warren Buffett.

   2. CWChris Williamson16:15

      Great guy. Him and Charlie Munger are both fan favorites from this show.

   3. WLWilliam Leith16:19

      Right. Okay. So the thing that, um, w- impressed me ... I mean, lots of things. I mean, he's obviously a very, um, strange and very unusual guy.

   4. CWChris Williamson16:33

      Mm-hmm.

   5. WLWilliam Leith16:34

      Um, and you realize that when he went to, when he went to Columbia, when he went to university-

   6. CWChris Williamson16:40

      Is it the w- the Wharton College? Is that what it is?

   7. WLWilliam Leith16:43

      Well, he, he went to the Wharton and then he went to Columbia, and he met Benjamin Graham, who was the guy who wrote The Intelligent Investor.

   8. CWChris Williamson16:50

      Mm-hmm.

   9. WLWilliam Leith16:50

      And, um, I think Graham would ... He, he had a class of people, and he would s- uh, y- you know, say, "Well, let's talk about the insurance industry," or something. And th- the, the sort of student age Buffett would know all about it and would say, "Yeah. Well, I would say that this company's doing this, and next month we'll see that." And Benjamin Graham was like, "I beg your pardon?

8. 17:16 – 25:12

   Benjamin Graham

   1. WLWilliam Leith17:16

      You know all this stuff."

   2. CWChris Williamson17:17

      (laughs)

   3. WLWilliam Leith17:18

      Um, but what impressed me, what was incredible is that ... I remember I did this thing where I, I got all the sources I could find, and I, I imagined a day in his life when he was 16. And I think he ran 11 businesses when he was 16, and they weren't major businesses. One was a, a car wash business where he hired kids to wash cars. And actually, there came a point when he dumped that 'cause it wasn't making enough money. Um, he had a golf ball business where he realized that you could f- you could go to a golf course in Nebraska, and you could go into the lake where they, th- that there were these sunk go- you know, sunk costs. The go- golf balls are all gone. You could get somebody to get the golf balls from the bottom of the lake, and then you could post them to some golf ball, secondhand golf ball guy in Illinois where people paid more for golf balls. So you could, um-... y- you know, you could just hire people to, (laughs) to get golf balls and then you could stand them up-

   4. CWChris Williamson18:22

      Some arbitrage opportunity in a lake somewhere, in wherever it was he was, yeah.

   5. WLWilliam Leith18:27

      And, yeah, and, uh, there were, there were stamp collections. You know, he, he realized that, um, a full collection of stamps was worth, uh, you know, $200, but a collection with 10 stamps missing was worth $5. So, he would then, um, look at the, the sorts of stamps that needed to be, that, that, that most collections were missing and he'd-

   6. CWChris Williamson18:48

      Okay.

   7. WLWilliam Leith18:48

      ... make up the collection. You know, and he, he did, he did 10 or 11 of these things, um, all the time when he was 16. So, he was constantly running these businesses, made more money than his teachers, his parents.

   8. CWChris Williamson19:03

      Mm-hmm.

   9. WLWilliam Leith19:03

      Extraordinary, um, and what he was learning was how businesses worked from the ground up. So you got an incredible, um, view of, um, what a business was trying to do and how the people who ran it were contributing to it, and how, how they were frittering things away or not. So he, he, he would home in on what really worked about a business. So when he started buying businesses, he had an incredible sort of gut sense.

   10. CWChris Williamson19:35

       Mm-hmm.

   11. WLWilliam Leith19:35

       You know, he'd spend a day with people, you know, "Tell me about your day, tell me what you're buying," and he would really get a sense of how they worked. Um, and so that's learning, isn't it? That's making it a science, it's kind of imbibing it.

   12. CWChris Williamson19:49

       So I think one, one of the interesting things about that, that I've been thinking about recently is because of the imbalance, because of how disproportionately we see people's successes and not their grinds and failures before they are successful, we don't get to see the handle of the hockey stick.

   13. WLWilliam Leith20:14

       Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson20:15

       We, we just get to see the head.

   15. WLWilliam Leith20:17

       Yeah, yeah. (laughs)

   16. CWChris Williamson20:18

       So, to the people that are listening, if you can imagine a graph and it's the shape of a hockey stick laid on its side and it's going along and it's flat, and it's flat, and it's flat, and then it just kicks up and it hits a, hits a, a, a, a inflection point, right? Tipping point as it might be.

   17. WLWilliam Leith20:32

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   18. CWChris Williamson20:33

       And, um, the, the best... (laughs) Because it's rare that you have in normal day-to-day life, like my mum doesn't have a, a, a, a graph of the stuff happening in her life, you know, like how, how, maybe how much she's meditating, if she uses the Headspace app sufficiently. Mum, keep using the Headspace app. Um, but it, it, very often you don't have an objective measure. However, I have done and it's been this podcast, and I prom- (laughs) I promise you, it's the shape of a hockey stick. It's the shape of a hockey stick. You do tons and tons and tons and tons of work, and not really that much happens, and then something happens, and it just goes whoop. And there's a, a quote that James Clear uses, I can't remember the American football team, someone who's listening will know the one that I mean. There's an American football team who has on their wall a quote about a stonemason, and they say, um, "We know that it isn't the hundredth hit which snaps the stone. We know it is the 99 which came before."

   19. WLWilliam Leith21:37

       Yeah, yeah. (coughs)

   20. CWChris Williamson21:38

       And the, the point with that is that it takes a lot of time to become an overnight success.

   21. WLWilliam Leith21:45

       Yeah, yeah.

   22. CWChris Williamson21:46

       And all of the things that we've come up with there, so Jordan Belfort, someone who started off with penny stocks, he learned from the ground floor up, anybody that's seen the movie knows this. Then he starts to hone his craft, uh, on stage in front of a big group of people. Then moving forward, he even repurposes that now, (laughs) now that he's barred from operating in the financial sector, you know, repurposes that. Then you've got somebody like Warren Buffett who runs so many businesses. I found out the other day, Warren bus- uh, Warren Buffett, Warren Business, uh, Warren Buffett has 90% of his net worth attributed to 10 trades.

   23. WLWilliam Leith22:24

       Yeah, yeah, I can imagine that.

   24. CWChris Williamson22:26

       90% of his net worth attributed to 10 investments. Unbelievable. So we've got these people who are all showing the same thing, and yet all of us, yourself, me, everyone is seduced by the idea of get rich f- fast, uh, the 10-minute booty abs blaster workout-

   25. WLWilliam Leith22:46

       Yeah, yeah.

   26. CWChris Williamson22:47

       ... to, you know, lean your, your bum out in this time, despite the fact that we are shown time and time and time again that the way to become an overnight success is actually to just grind away at something effectively with a feedback mechanism, making sure you're doing deliberate practice for a long time.

   27. WLWilliam Leith23:06

       I, I once, I mean, I once saw, um, I don't know if you follow, uh, football, that thing that used to happen, um, but, um, the former England player, Rio Ferdinand was once asked, "Who is the best player that you ever played with, that you ever, you know, trained with or played with?" And he said, and I've forgotten the name of this guy, (clears throat) he said, "It's such and such and it's not a familiar name."

   28. CWChris Williamson23:33

       Mm-hmm.

   29. WLWilliam Leith23:35

       And so the interviewer said, "Yeah, I kind of remember him. Didn't he play a few games for West Ham or whatever?" And he, he goes, "Yeah, yeah, he's got so much natural talent, this, this guy." And, you know, he'd had his career, he was now about 30 odd. Um, but he said, "This guy was, he, he had more talent than anybody I've ever played." "Y- what, you mean even so-and-so?" "Yeah, yeah, this guy was really extraordinary." And so the interviewer said, "Well, what happened to him? Why, why..." You know, he obviously could play in the Premier League, but, um, (clears throat) why didn't he, why don't we all know his name? And he said, "Well, he, he didn't, um, have the same work ethic as all these other people." It's like-... you know, w- you, you have to train every day. You have to stay behind after training. If you've got a bit of a, a, you know, if your fitness isn't quite there, you have to try again and again and again. And maybe you're gonna have to work on this move or that move. And everybody who succeeds does that. And, um, uh, p- pure ability isn't quite enough-

   30. CWChris Williamson24:45

       Hard-
9. 25:12 – 29:57

   Russian Billionaire

   1. WLWilliam Leith25:12

   2. CWChris Williamson25:12

      That's where the growth occurs as well, right? And also, as you start to see, as with anything, if there's a bell distribution of normal, right?

   3. WLWilliam Leith25:19

      Yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson25:19

      Out on to the tails, the further that you can push yourself out towards them-

   5. WLWilliam Leith25:24

      Yeah.

   6. CWChris Williamson25:24

      ... the fewer people you are going to have to compete with by definition, right?

   7. WLWilliam Leith25:28

      Absolutely, yeah. (laughs)

   8. CWChris Williamson25:29

      So, um, right. I want you to tell us about the Russian half-billionaire and his butler, please. So, we've learned about Jordan Belfort. Who's this, who's this Russian guy?

   9. WLWilliam Leith25:38

      Well, this, this, this guy ... The interesting, uh, thing about this guy, somebody was saying to me, "This guy lives in the nicest house in, you know, the country, maybe the world." It's, it's this house, a very special house that was built in 1698 or s- it, it took a few years, 1700. Um, and it was built by Nicholas Hawksmoor, the famous architect. But it was originally designed by Christopher Wren, the fame- most famous architect i- i- in history. And, um, and Wren passed the project on, and between them, they managed to concoct this beautiful house. And it has beautiful grounds and it has, you know, the avenue of trees and the amazing reflecting pool so that you can stand behind the house and you can see it doubled in this reflecting pool, and it's ... everything is thought of.

   10. CWChris Williamson26:36

       Where is it?

   11. WLWilliam Leith26:37

       It's, it's in, um, Northamptonshire.

   12. CWChris Williamson26:39

       Okay. And why is it-

   13. WLWilliam Leith26:40

       So-

   14. CWChris Williamson26:40

       What, what makes it so special? Like, it's just pretty and it's got a pool?

   15. WLWilliam Leith26:42

       It's, yeah, it's, it's, it's beautiful. It's, it's, um, it's ... if you imagine something like Buckingham Palace but smaller and prettier. Um, it, it-

   16. CWChris Williamson26:54

       Pretty big, pretty high bar to set then.

   17. WLWilliam Leith26:56

       Yeah, yeah. It's ki- it's kind of ... it's, it's a lot smaller than Buckingham Palace, but it's, it's got perfect d- dimensions. And all these architecture critics would say, "Ah, this, this house is ... it's, it's one of the best houses ever made." So, I was interested in the fact that some Russian guy had bought it, and I thought, "Who is he?" And so th- they gave me the story to go and spend a day at this house with this Russian guy. And it was odd. Th- the whole thing was odd because, um, he, um, he'd made his ... an awful lot of money in the, in the rag trade. Clothes. And he had these, um, these concessions in s- in, um, department stores all over the world. A- a- and a lot of stores in China, a lot of stores to the Far East, a lot in America. And he had somehow, um, he, he, he dialed ... he, he, he'd found the point at which the ... h- how expensive it was to make something compared to how many you sell, compared to the price point you sell it at. And he's got this computer-like brain, um, and so ... And I said to him, um, (laughs) "This ... you sound a bit like, um, Ingvar Kamprad." You know, 'cause I once did this thing on IKEA. I couldn't ... uh, Kamprad wouldn't see me, but he actually let ... uh, you know, I stayed in some nice house on a lake somewhere in Sweden, and I did meet his designers. And the story about Kamprad is that, you know, the designer could show him a table, "Here's a table," and say it's made out of, um, you know, teak or it ... well, it's made out of oak or whatever it is. You know, pine. It's made out of pine. And this is how big it is. And Kamprad would look at it and his brain would go, "I'd get the pine from the Ukraine, and then that would be such and such a ton, and if we made, you know, 10,000 tables, that would cost this much per table, and the trucking costs, but then we'd have to buy in, in, um, Swedish crowns and then we'd have to sell in, uh, you know, whatever it is. And then we'd, we'd blah, blah, blah, and then there's the petrol cost."

   18. CWChris Williamson29:14

       (laughs)

   19. WLWilliam Leith29:14

       And he would ... his mind would be buzzing with all these things, and then he would just say to the guy, "Okay, do it." Or-

   20. CWChris Williamson29:20

       (laughs)

   21. WLWilliam Leith29:21

       (laughs) or, or like, "No, this one's not gonna fly."

   22. CWChris Williamson29:24

       Okay.

   23. WLWilliam Leith29:24

       Um, because he, he would look at everything and he, he would just be working out the whole supply chain, and that's what he was g- ... and this ... I said this to the Russian guy and he said, "Yeah, that's exactly me." You know, he thinks about where you can get the cotton and who you can ... which factory, what it ... he has loads of factories in China, you know, which one would it go to and ... and then where would I sell it? This would be good for Los Angeles stores and it would be good for the blah.

   24. CWChris Williamson29:54

       Mm-hmm.

   25. WLWilliam Leith29:54

       And then you'd sell it for $600 a

10. 29:57 – 33:17

    Depth of Understanding

    1. WLWilliam Leith29:57

       ... yeah, we'll do it. So, so he-

    2. CWChris Williamson29:58

       So, we've still got here an unbelievable dexterity, uh, and kinda depth of understanding of their own operation, you know? You look at these people who make a lot of cash, and sometimes you can discount them as just lucky, fortunate idiots. It doesn't sound like you really ... it doesn't sound like this Russian guy or Jordan Belfort is, is one of them.

    3. WLWilliam Leith30:19

       No, all of these people, I mean, including Alan Sugar and including Howard Schultz and incl- these are people that I interviewed.... um, they all looked at their business with a, a real depth of understanding. You know, Howard Schultz and his coffee shops, how much, how much per square foot would you get back if you rented this? How many, how much would you have to ma- You know, he knew all that. Um, you put comfortable chairs and you change it a little bit, and he managed to ... He had a, an idea that if you, if you made coffee shops a, a little tiny bit more like bars, you'd get all the business for coffee. We- And he was right. Um-

    4. CWChris Williamson31:06

       Who does Alan Schultz own, by the way?

    5. WLWilliam Leith31:09

       Howard Schultz. He ru- Starbucks. He was the guy who started Starbucks.

    6. CWChris Williamson31:12

       Okay.

    7. WLWilliam Leith31:13

       Um, and, and, and again, he's one of these guys, um, he's, he, he, he's obviously brilliant. Uh, so many of these guys, they've got a sort of, um ... They remember everything and th- they, it's almost like ... And it's like with Taleb and his, and his, um, his graphs, and y- you know, you can see him thinking about, like, mathematical equations, and he can sort of almost draw them. They're in his head. He lives them. Um, it's, it's not like ... Uh, uh, I mean, he, he, he understands, um, the, the value a- how options are priced, and h- how, how likely or unlikely something's about, some, something is to happen, and therefore how much you should spend on predicting-

    8. CWChris Williamson32:06

       Mm-hmm.

    9. WLWilliam Leith32:06

       ... that it would happen.

    10. CWChris Williamson32:06

        So what, tell me, just tell me what it was like being in this building then. This Russian guy-

    11. WLWilliam Leith32:11

        Well-

    12. CWChris Williamson32:11

        ... who's he, who's he there with?

    13. WLWilliam Leith32:13

        Well, as I, a- as I say, he, he was living in this vast estate, um, at the time with his butler. It was him and his butler, and the thing I found-

    14. CWChris Williamson32:23

        No one else? No, no-

    15. WLWilliam Leith32:24

        No one else. Well, he was, he, he, he, he would sometimes get models to try on his clothes, uh, and he would have these ... He ended up marrying one of them, not the one that was there the day I was there (laughs) , incidentally. Um, but it struck me that he, he was plowing a lonely furrow in a way, but, but in this extraordinary luxury. And he said to me ... He was gonna have dinner, and I said to the butler, "You gonna cook him dinner?" And he said, "Yeah, yeah, I always cook him dinner." I said, "What? Do the two of you just sit around eating?" And he goes, "Oh, no, I eat in the servants' quarters." (laughs)

    16. CWChris Williamson32:59

        Wow.

    17. WLWilliam Leith33:00

        And-

    18. CWChris Williamson33:00

        That's so f- so interesting, isn't it?

    19. WLWilliam Leith33:03

        I know.

    20. CWChris Williamson33:03

        So this-

    21. WLWilliam Leith33:04

        The guy had, the guy had a church as well on his, on his land, in his grounds. Lovely old church. And it's like, you've got a church, you haven't got a congregation. (laughs)

    22. CWChris Williamson33:14

        Yeah. It's just you, it's just you in there.

11. 33:17 – 40:16

    The Price of Success

    1. CWChris Williamson33:17

       So, something I've been thinking about a lot recently as well actually is the price that you need to pay for someone's success. So people might look at Nassim Taleb or this Russian billionaire, half billionaire, or Conor McGregor, or some Instagram model or whatever, and say, "I want that." But they don't understand the price that you need to pay, not as in the long hours and stuff like that, but the pathologies that come along with having a mindset which permits you to do the thing which you think is good. Right?

    2. WLWilliam Leith33:45

       Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    3. CWChris Williamson33:46

       What, what is the price that you need to pay psychologically, biologically, uh, routine-wise, in terms of your sleep, in terms of your mental health, in terms of the thoughts that go through your head when your head hits the pillow at night? All of those things, right? Like, what, what is the price that this Russian half billionaire has to pay in order to be such a complete, uh, uh, sort of crazy advanced thinker with regards to his supply chain?

    4. WLWilliam Leith34:13

       Yeah, yeah. Well, exactly. The, the, the best case I had of that was Felix Dennis.

    5. CWChris Williamson34:20

       Who's that?

    6. WLWilliam Leith34:20

       Um, who was, he wa- he'd made about the same amount of money, about, in, in, in pounds, about th- probably 4 or 500 million pounds, that sort of thing. And he, um, he had this big estate in Warwickshire, and he also had an ... Uh, that was the only place of his I went to, and I went to hi- uh, to it twice. And it, but he also had s- places. He had a, an estate in, um, the Caribbean, and he had one in Connecticut, and he had various houses. But when I went to his estate in Warwickshire, which was his kind of main place, there was the ... He, he, he'd, he'd got these, um, he'd got an avenue of statues which led up to this kind of barn that he'd converted into this kind of luxurious crazy, a place where he sat and contemplated and wrote poetry and that kinda stuff. And the line of statues, uh, uh, uh, and, you know, who commissions full-size statues these days? Well, it, he's dead now, but it was him and the odd kind of dictator. But not, not many people. And at the very end of this avenue was this, um, a pond, and a statue of Icarus plunging to his death, the person who in legend had flown too close to the sun. Which I thought was a bit odd because, you know, he himself had done all this unfettered, capitalistic, um, making these, these great moves and tons of money, and yet the thing that was outside his ve- his very ... The place he went to think, was a warning. The warning, "Don't do this too much." So I went in there and I, I, I asked him about this, and, and he said he thought that making money was ... He kind of said, you know, it had driven him insane in a way, it had driven him crazy. He'd become a crack addict. He, he'd had an existential crisis which lasted for years. He'd nearly killed himself.... and arguably did kill himself with all the crack smoking, 'cause he ended up dying of lung cancer. So, eh, th- surely that had something to do with years of smoking crack. Um, and, um, and he said, yeah, he'd be- he'd made himself into a different person, a person he didn't like. You know, this person who, um, who was hard-driving and obsessive and permanently focused on how to make money, w- how he could get an advantage in the market of whatever it was he was doing. And in a way, he, he- you sort of think, well, he'd made, like, 450 million quid or whatever, but he, he should have stopped at 50. That last 400, what was that worth to him? Um, it had, it had done him in, in working on-

    7. CWChris Williamson37:27

       So, why do you think he kept going?

    8. WLWilliam Leith37:28

       Well, this is th- this is the big question, and it's a qui- it's a bit like a question for the human race. You know, we want more and more luxury, and we're prepared to go to the very edge of, um, our own sanity and also our own, um ... y- y- you know, we're prepared to take big risks to get just a little bit more. We're prepared to ... W- we will say, "Well, I've heard that these forests are, are, are crucial to the earth's, um, upkeep. But hell, we want a bit more luxury, so let's chop 'em down and see if we can get away with it. We might, we might find a way of tweaking it so that we're all right." So, I think th- I think that this, um, this pushing the envelope is part of us, and I think the people who make the most money ha- a- are kind of ... Sometimes they are unbridled examples of this. They're, they're, they're run-away examples of pushing and pushing and pushing. And also, I mean, I'm gonna use an analogy of, of drinking, which isn't necessarily the same, but, um, the writer and drinker Kingsley Amis once said, um, "It's not about being drunk, it's about getting drunk." So, the process of getting drunk, the, the, the constant change-

    9. CWChris Williamson38:55

       Mm.

    10. WLWilliam Leith38:56

        ... from, from being less sober and less ... I mean, being drunk, you can keep that. It's getting drunk that's the thing. And so these people, if you think about it, the best time they ever had in their life was when they were on that curve. The hockey stick was going right up.

    11. CWChris Williamson39:13

        Mm-hmm.

    12. WLWilliam Leith39:13

        Now, they can't ... T- how do they keep going? They don't, they don't wanna stop and say, "Do you know what? Let's have another infinity pool." (laughs)

    13. CWChris Williamson39:23

        (laughs)

    14. WLWilliam Leith39:23

        "Let's, let's commission a few more statues." That's part of the, in a way, the pathology. Uh, i- the thing that they crave, it seems to me, is the actual making of the money. You know, you, you can only-

    15. CWChris Williamson39:37

        Not the- not the money itself.

    16. WLWilliam Leith39:39

        Yeah, you can only spend it on certain things. Y- wha- once, once you've spent it on (laughs) , you know, you can have a private island, you can have a nice house on a private island, you can have a-

    17. CWChris Williamson39:53

        A jet and a helicopter-

    18. WLWilliam Leith39:54

        Yeah, yeah.

    19. CWChris Williamson39:55

        ... and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

    20. WLWilliam Leith39:55

        Exactly. And, and, and once you've ... You can have a, a Ferrari, and then you can have a slightly better Ferrari, and also a Range Rover, and then one with tinted windows. And th- th- you run out of things to buy pretty quickly, um, and so th- i- it was that process of making money that was so exciting,

12. 40:16 – 41:56

    Focusing on the Journey

    1. WLWilliam Leith40:16

       uh-

    2. CWChris Williamson40:16

       Isn't, isn't the ... That's something quite profound, I think, there, that the richest people in the world, or some of the richest people in the world, who have more money than they can ever spend are not ... What they're not doing is focusing on the money. They're not focusing on the outcome, they're focusing on the journey. And yet we look at these people and we think, "I want the end of that journey. I don't want the hockey stick." It's almost like they're, um, keeping that grinding mentality going, because that's where the pleasure is actually brought from, right? Another thing as well is the, the, the virtuous mean. I've been throwing this around recently, that we're absolutist beings, right? If you tell me to have one biscuit out of a packet, it's really hard. If you tell me to have none or all of them, that's actually quite easy. Find it quite easy-

    3. WLWilliam Leith41:13

       Yeah. (laughs)

    4. CWChris Williamson41:13

       ... to have no biscuits or all the biscuits, um, because it's a very, uh, sharp line in the sand, right? Um, whereas just to have one, to have enough but not too much is really challenging. I had a neuroscientist on talking about the seven deadly sins, you know, like the fundamental problem with humanity, and every single one of them is fixed by sloth, need a little bit but not too much; wrath, you need a little bit but not too much; lust-

    5. WLWilliam Leith41:38

       Yeah, yeah.

    6. CWChris Williamson41:38

       ... you need a little bit but not too much; and it's the same. It's the same, greed, spoke a lot about greed on that as well. You need a little bit. You need to get yourself over the inertia of having nothing. But when you push yourself forward and you chase it too much, it becomes, as anything, you turn a tonic into a toxin, you pathologize the thing

13. 41:56 – 47:46

    Greed is Good

    1. CWChris Williamson41:56

       which liberated you into something which is now actually a prison.

    2. WLWilliam Leith42:00

       Yeah, absolutely. And th- I, I, I looked into ... I, I, I wondered what greed was. And, and, and you've got this, uh, Michael Douglas, "Greed is good." You know? In, in, in- and, and that's in that film Wall Street, where he, he says, "Greed is what's gonna save us. Greed's what's gonna make America great," et cetera. And, um ... and, and w- that's going back to Adam Smith, which is, you know, if everybody does what th- l- you know, seeks what they want, then, in a way, you all come together and find the, the value of everything, and everybody knows what they need to provide to make themselves some money. And it's a self-generated, it's an emergent system.

    3. CWChris Williamson42:43

       Mm.

    4. WLWilliam Leith42:44

       ... and of course, that's true up to a point. I, I actually wo- began to wonder what that point was and where things started-

    5. CWChris Williamson42:52

       Well, that's a good question.

    6. WLWilliam Leith42:52

       ... to go wrong, yeah.

    7. CWChris Williamson42:54

       Like wh- where do we, how do we draw that line?

    8. WLWilliam Leith42:56

       Well, I looked, I looked into the history of, um, of money. Uh, uh, the, the whole idea of prosperity is that once we start to exchange things, i.e. trade, we naturally start to specialize, and people who are good at things end up doing what they're good at. Um, and so, at the top end, you've got everybody who's good at something is doing that thing. And they're also, because they only have to do that thing and they can, they can outsource all of the other things, um, they, they tend to become inventive. So if you, if you raise, if you're good at raising chickens, just say, um, pretty soon, you're gonna find out that, you know, if you feed them this, they get a bit bigger quicker, and if you feed the, the males a different one, diet from the females, then th- you'll get more eggs or whatever it is. And you wouldn't have known that if you hadn't specialized. So when everybody's specializing, you get all of this innovation, and then you get more and more trade, and that leads to more innovation, et cetera. So, swapping things is great. When you have money, swapping things is easy because they find a price, uh, and we can all agree on what the money's worth. Um, and I think the, the, the thing that starts confusing people is when you start applying that to money itself. So, when you start applying, um, y- you know, trading and specialization to the exchange of money and financial products. It seems to me that people can't get their heads around it in the same way that they can get their heads around trading money for goods. Trading money for money, you get, you get bubbles and crashes, basically.

    9. CWChris Williamson44:45

       Well, it's orders of magnitude there, right? You-

    10. WLWilliam Leith44:47

        Right.

    11. CWChris Williamson44:48

        ... you're multiplying the thing by the manipulation of the thing.

    12. WLWilliam Leith44:51

        Yes, exactly, so, so, so it's acceleration rather than speed or whatever.

    13. CWChris Williamson44:56

        Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

    14. WLWilliam Leith44:57

        It's, it's things taking off. Y-

    15. CWChris Williamson44:58

        Where's Taleb?

    16. WLWilliam Leith45:00

        W- what, what about him?

    17. CWChris Williamson45:01

        Nassim. Nassim, we need to work out which, when with me and you were fumbling our way through probably to him, grade one mathematics, trying to work out the term-

    18. WLWilliam Leith45:10

        Yeah, yeah, exactly.

    19. CWChris Williamson45:10

        ... and I need to, we need to ring him and say, "Nassim, what's the, what's the word for this, mate?"

    20. WLWilliam Leith45:15

        The thing is that some people like him do under- it, it doesn't do their head in. But he, but most people, (laughs) it does. And, and, and, you know, the people who work in, um, in money, in banks, um, they'll often... I mean, a- as a pure example, if you look at, um, rogue traders like Nick Leeson and many others, Peter Young, all sorts of other people who started making bets and then they went a bit crazy. They did, th- th- they kept on making bets that were losing and they become like, um, gamblers chasing the- their losses. A lot of bankers have that problem. They don't, th- they, they're not unemotional, mathematical machines who can, who can say, "Oh, look, I, I need to, um, invest in this, lose a bit of money, so I understand how it works, and then see where I can make the big money." They just end up being all, getting emotional and chucking a lot of money away. And when lots of people are betting like that, you get this kind of mayhem, and sometimes all this value is wiped off the system and nobody really understands where it's gone. And now, when it's machines that are doing that, I mean, half the time it's machines that are doing that, and, and, um, I remember reading this account of the so-called flash crash, where (laughs) algorithms kind of became confused and they lost billions in about half a second, and then th-

    21. CWChris Williamson46:52

        When was this?

    22. WLWilliam Leith46:53

        2009. Um, there, there, there was some problem with al- algorithms, um, you know, that, that they're programmed, they're instructed to do, you know, this in th- this circumstance, and if, if this, then do that, and if that, then do the other. And normally these, these reflect quite sensible ideas. But when it all happens so fast and they're sort of interlocking robots (laughs) and they don't understand each other, it, you know, there is a problem. And l- in this case, it magically reasserted itself because the algorithm somehow managed to see what was happening and claw it back before it ...

    23. CWChris Williamson47:36

        Completely annihilated the market, dear me.

    24. WLWilliam Leith47:39

        Yeah. Yeah. And, and-

    25. CWChris Williamson47:40

        Okay, so we- we've just touched on him there. We've sort of danced around him a couple of bits. Nassim Taleb, uh,

14. 47:46 – 53:36

    Nassim Taleb

    1. CWChris Williamson47:46

       very, very... what do you call him? The hottest thinker on the planet? Is that what you've-

    2. WLWilliam Leith47:49

       Well, that, that I, I was saying that, that, that, that's what he, he, he, this, he ca- when I interviewed him, I s- I, I, I saw him a few times and s- I think the Sunday Times had called him the hottest thinker on the planet. Um, and it was at a time when he was, um, when people like David Cameron were asking his advice. And if you see The Big Short, that movie.

    3. CWChris Williamson48:17

       Mm-hmm.

    4. WLWilliam Leith48:18

       Um, he's not in it, but he represents those people who, um, who could see that, um, there was something wrong with the housing market, what was happening wasn't sustainable, um, and, and it had to end. And when it ended, or even when it started to change a bit, even when it flattened out, every, all, all the houses would come onto the market, they would lose value, and all the people, all the different funds that had invested in those, um-... mortgages would find that they were underwater, and all the banks that were relying on those funds for short-term money so they could keep their ... And it was this big, kind of circular-

    5. CWChris Williamson49:07

       Mm.

    6. WLWilliam Leith49:07

       ... um, y- you know, and, and a h- a few people (coughs) who, who were sort of outsiders spotted that this was bound to happen, and ... I mean, Michael Burry was one of them, who, who was featured in The Big Short. Now, these were people who, who, who weren't, uh, part of the crowd, you know? They, and, and the thing about Taleb, um, is that he was brought up in Lebanon, and he's now about 60. So, when he was about 20, um, there was this, uh, terrible war in Lebanon, and everybody said to him, "Oh, yeah, this is ... y- we, we occasionally have these wars. Uh, don't worry, it'll be over by Christmas." You know? And then it wasn't, and it just kept on dragging on, and, and nobody predicted that, that this would be such a long-term, immensely destructive conflict. Nobody could sort of bear to imagine that the whole world of Lebanon would, would change. And even when they saw it happening, they were still wanting to hold onto the belief that, "Oh, you know, it's gonna be all right soon." And so he began to think, um, weird things happen, things that people don't want to believe will happen. But it's not just that. It's that these weird things are the triggers of history. So, nobody thought the First World War was gonna be a full-year kind of, um, bloodbath. They thought it was gonna be a few months. In fact, it- ... (sighs) It's almost like an accidental war. It's like this treaty meant that this country had to say, "I'm gonna back that country if you do this," and all these treaties, this complex system, sort of clicked into place, and suddenly you're having a war in France and Belgium that s-

    7. CWChris Williamson51:10

       Has brought half of Europe into it.

    8. WLWilliam Leith51:12

       Yeah, and, and it has ... sees no s- sign of stopping, and w- what the hell is that all about? And so it's this, this thing that changed history, that nobody was expecting, and he began to think, "God," you know, um, "these weird things that nobody predicts, um, (sighs) are ..." Now, I would say we're in one of them now. He has said, "Oh," you know, "this isn't a black swan." He calls them black swans-

    9. CWChris Williamson51:41

       Mm.

    10. WLWilliam Leith51:42

        ... th- these unexpected but very important events. And he says, "Th- this isn't a black swan," because people predicted it. And actually, I think, well, yeah, technically, but it's really not, did a few people predict it? It's what does the world at large think? And I think we weren't prepared for this. I mean, I, I actually wrote an article about f- about flu epidemics, uh, uh, just a general, thinking it was a normal ... you know, I was reviewing a book, and the headline was something like, "What about (laughs) ... are we prepared for the next one?" And I didn't even think about it.

    11. CWChris Williamson52:22

        Mm.

    12. WLWilliam Leith52:22

        Somebody had put that headline in. Now I can send this article to people (laughs) and say, "Look." (laughs)

    13. CWChris Williamson52:26

        Look at me, I'm a clairvoyant from the future.

    14. WLWilliam Leith52:30

        But, but, but, but, but the point is, I, I, I didn't. I would ... you know, no way did I think of this as a real thing. I just thought, "Yeah, we've had these flu epidemics. Uh, some of them take off, and some of them don't. The last one that really took off was in 1918. Let's look at the reasons for this." But nobody had planned for it, and, and Taleb's argument was all sorts of ... h- history's basically dominated by these unexpected moments, and so if you know how to position yourself to deal with them, you can make a ton of money if you're in the markets. So, that, that was his basic thing, but i- i- in the end, you know, he, he made a ton of money, but wanted to get out of just trading and get into sort of thinking about history. And that's what he's done since 2009, I guess.

    15. CWChris Williamson53:27

        What was it that you ... the, the summary that you gave to do with how people don't like to be wrong,

15. 53:36 – 55:51

    Two ways of investing

    1. CWChris Williamson53:36

       or they don't like to be proved wrong, so they always presume that the same thing's going to repeat? I can't remember.

    2. WLWilliam Leith53:41

       Well, yeah, uh, uh, it's kind of like you've got two ways of investing, and you would imagine they balanced each other out. So, you can invest in things that you think are going to get better, and so you can put money into things that are gonna get better, and if you're right, then you'll mostly get small returns back all the time. Um, but then when the thing crashes, you, you might blow up. You might lose the lot. On the other hand, you can bet on things getting worse, and most of the time, they don't. So, you're losing money all the time. But when they do get worse, you make your big killing. And the point is that: these things aren't mirror images of each other, because, because people ... it's cheaper to invest in things going up than it is to invest in things going down, because not many p- ... it's very lonely. It's a lonely place to be losing money every day, in, in, in the hope (laughs) that, that everything crashes. So, not many people do it. So, it turns out the, the odds are better, and the, the reward- the returns are bigger. Um-... it's a bit like with job safety, you know, safety's overpriced so people can, people can... A lot of people want a job for life.

    3. CWChris Williamson55:08

       Mm.

    4. WLWilliam Leith55:09

       Um, that-

    5. CWChris Williamson55:09

       So they're prepared to be underpaid for it a little bit-

    6. WLWilliam Leith55:11

       They're prepared-

    7. CWChris Williamson55:12

       ... every single day.

    8. WLWilliam Leith55:12

       Yeah, yeah, exactly.

    9. CWChris Williamson55:13

       Yeah.

    10. WLWilliam Leith55:13

        And it turns out that, um, y- y- e- it's actually probably safer to do something else, like, uh...

    11. CWChris Williamson55:19

        But also, th- those, those jobs, as proven by the fact that we're in the middle of a chaotic global pandemic, actually aren't all that safe. They're not hugely-

    12. WLWilliam Leith55:28

        Yeah.

    13. CWChris Williamson55:28

        ... safe industries to be in. So what did you learn, if you could sort of synopsize what your time with Taleb... And, you know, a little bit of one-on-one time with that man would be very, uh, envied by, uh, a lot of people on this planet. You know, as you mentioned, David Cameron, uh, government, and, uh, uh, politicians asking his advice. What

16. 55:51 – 56:41

    Being prepared to be in the outgroup

    1. CWChris Williamson55:51

       did you... I mean, is it learning about being prepared to be in the out group, to remove your emotions from the situation? What was it?

    2. WLWilliam Leith55:57

       Um, yeah, that's, that's interesting. I, I, I think it's... I, I think what he says is, in a way, it sums up what all the other people do. It's kind of, um, ha- ha- ha- have a deep understanding of something. Uh, you have to put, you have to sink a lot of money and a lot of time into understanding things, and then when they move, they move fast. So it's, it's kind of like nothing happens and then everything happens. Um, who was it that said, um, you know, nothing hap- most decades nothing ha- happened, but there are some weeks in which decades happen? I, was that Churchill who said that?

    3. CWChris Williamson56:36

       It was, it was someone Russian. Uh, there's another one which I absolutely adore,

17. 56:41 – 58:16

    History doesnt crawl it leaps

    1. CWChris Williamson56:41

       which I, I'm gonna misquote. I'm not even gonna bother trying to quote who it's from, but the quote is, "History doesn't crawl, it leaps."

    2. WLWilliam Leith56:48

       Yeah. Well, that's exactly right. This is a, like the evolutionary pattern. Um, you know, things change. Animals change into new species. But it, it's not like a gradual progression. It's much more like, um, nothing much happens and then there's a leap, and then they become something new, and maybe they'll survive and maybe they won't as that new thing. So that's another thing. Things happen in, in leaps and bounds. The things that are, um, important are often unexpected, and history's all about these weird unexpected things. So if you ex- if you try to expect the unexpected, you'll do a lot better 'cause nobody else is looking.

    3. CWChris Williamson57:39

       Ah. And I suppose, as you identified before, we have this comfort predisposition even for bankers who must have an idea that there's a potential boom-bust cycle, you know. They're not gonna be completely ignorant to it. They're certainly gonna be at least a little bit better informed than the normal proletariat on the street. Um, but because we have this predisposition, because we don't like to think about bad things happening, we, we tend to not fully account for the effects of them occurring, and that's, that leads to...

18. 58:16 – 1:11:34

    We are at the very beginning

    1. CWChris Williamson58:16

       It's just like a sweep-it-under-the-rug type thing. Like, put it behind the wardrobe, no one's ever gonna see.

    2. WLWilliam Leith58:21

       Yes, yes. And it's, it's, it's like we're, we're in this, uh, crisis now, and most people talk about it as if, um, "Well, we've, it's, we're done now. It's nearly done."

    3. CWChris Williamson58:36

       (laughs) Yeah.

    4. WLWilliam Leith58:37

       And, and, and you get the occasional person saying, "Do you realize we're at the very beginning? We don't even understand what it is that we're up against." And sure, it might vanish into thin air, but it might be 10 years of, um, uh, readjusting-

    5. CWChris Williamson58:56

       Yeah.

    6. WLWilliam Leith58:56

       ... and reinventing and all.

    7. CWChris Williamson58:57

       Changing the way that society works. Do you think that there is a, a limit to where we should put positive thought? N- naturally, I have quite a catastrophic mentality, uh, which I think I inherited. Uh, it's half genetic, half socialized. Um, so I tend toward negative thought. But I've, I've worked quite hard to, to overcome that, right? Like, I've worked quite hard with doing gratitude to actually have a more positive mindset and, and, and turn things around. But when you start to scale that, either across societies, across countries, across policymaking, or just maybe scale it across people, um, is there kind of an upper bound on how much we should be pushing that level of sort of it's all bright and rosy, just look for the silver lining?

    8. WLWilliam Leith59:57

       I guess you, you have to go ima- imagine, because we haven't evolved much since we had, you know, very, very rudimentary tools and lived in groups of 150. And I guess you, you, you needed people, didn't you, to say, "We could get across that river. We j- we would just need, I don't know, uh..."

    9. CWChris Williamson1:00:19

       (laughs)

    10. WLWilliam Leith1:00:19

        "And once we're over there, the, the bison are much bigger and..." And you need people to say, "Yes, you're right. We'll, we'll bloody well do it. We can get across-"

    11. CWChris Williamson1:00:29

        (laughs)

    12. WLWilliam Leith1:00:29

        "... this ravine." Um, but you needed some pessimistic, depressed people to say-

    13. CWChris Williamson1:00:35

        (laughs)

    14. WLWilliam Leith1:00:35

        ... "Oh God, are you kidding me? Not this again. Do you remember when we last did it and all those people fell in and it was terrible?" So you need a, a mixture of people, don't you, and a, a mixture of emotions.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:00:48

        Yeah.

    16. WLWilliam Leith1:00:48

        And, um, I mean, there's an awful lot of, um... Have you ever read Iain McGilchrist?

    17. CWChris Williamson1:00:56

        No. What should I read?

    18. WLWilliam Leith1:00:57

        Um, well, he, he wrote this book called The Master and His Emissary, and it's all about the two sides of the brain. But it's... The, the takeaway thing is that, you know-... part of our brains are, are looking out at nature. That's what they do, that's what they did for 200,000 years. They looked out at nature, at the sky, and the rain, and the clouds, and the, you know, the trees and all this. All the time, they're looking out at nature and the, the other side of the brain is thinking, "How can I make a tool out of that?" You know, "I could chop that branch off and then it would be this big, and if I chopped it in half, I could then join them together and..." And that's what the other side of the brain's thinking. And of course the, uh, that side of the brain, the left side, the, the tool-making side, begins to make more and more tools, until what the right side is looking at is not so much nature, but tools. You go into a city and you're looking at tools. You're looking at cars and computers and, and, you know, telegraph poles. And then you're making tools out of those tools. The left side's saying, "Yeah, how can I make tools out of those tools? Oh, I know, I could sell them in advance and then charge interest and then come..." you know.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:02:08

        Mm.

    20. WLWilliam Leith1:02:09

        And, um, and so, of course, we have, we have sort of created a new environment that we're not quite, we're not quite up with yet.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:02:19

        Mm. And I sup-

    22. WLWilliam Leith1:02:20

        And, uh-

    23. CWChris Williamson1:02:20

        ... I suppose because it's so safe as well. Because we don't-

    24. WLWilliam Leith1:02:24

        We're s- ... Yeah.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:02:24

        ... we don't have that ... E- e- ... Fewer people are falling into the ravine.

    26. WLWilliam Leith1:02:30

        Exactly.

    27. CWChris Williamson1:02:30

        And more people are making it across on the log and then the tool, the tools to the power of tools, uh, is a cool concept. I like that. It makes me think about the financial products that we were talking about and they're like-

    28. WLWilliam Leith1:02:41

        Exactly.

    29. CWChris Williamson1:02:42

        ... uh, houses to the package of mortgages, to the package of bonds, to the package of da-da-da-da-da-da-

    30. WLWilliam Leith1:02:48

        Yeah, yeah.

Episode duration: 1:11:34