It seems like everybody wants to get rich, but is the pursuit of wealth really about the money? Are we actually chasing something much deeper? These are just a couple of the fun ideas that I toss around in this episode with Morgan Hausel, the New York Times bestselling author of the Smash hit The Psychology of Money, which has sold more than four million copies worldwide. Morgan is a partner at the venture capital firm, The Collaborative Fund, and he sits on the board of the Markle Group. He's been a columnist for The Mothley Fool, The Wall Street Journal, and in 2022, Marketwatch named him one of the most influential people in the world of finance, which is way more impressive than anything I've done. But what I love most about Morgan's approach to money is that he digs deep to uncover the emotional and the irrational relationship that we all have between our wealth, our self-worth, and our happiness. So put away your spreadsheets, step away from the credit card, and for God's sake, stop trading crypto and settle in for this one. Who knows? We might just make you filthy fucking rich. Wait, are you allowed to say fuck in your.

Podcast intro?

Oh, fuck. I just did. This is the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Hanson. Morgan, dude, it's so good to have you here.

So good to finally see you. Thanks for having me. I'm really looking forward to this.

We've been pin pales for many years. We're fans of each other's books, but we've never actually spoken face to face. So it's great to have you here. Great to have you as one of the inaugural guests on the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck podcast. Excited to see your fucks not given.

It's so mutual, Mark. I'm thrilled to be here. There's a few people I'd rather talk about this topic than you.

All right, so I figured I'd start with the easy questions. My first question is, Why do humans attach so much moral value, both positive and negative, to wealth?

This is starting with the easy question. This is the deepest as it goes. I think it's very true that humans are wired for status and not for happiness. And wealth is just the most tangible form of status that exists. There's lots of forms of status. Another example here is, why do we put so much emphasis on a college degree? Particularly in an era where the vast majority of undergraduate degrees, you can learn everything you can, even at a top school on YouTube. I don't think there is virtually anything taught about economics or philosophy or psychology, even at Harvard, that you can't learn on YouTube. But we put so much value in the degree because it's a very tangible, easy to identify form of status. That's really what it is. So since we're all geared towards status, money is just the scorecard for so many people. And the problem here, the right word is definitely a problem because it's the cause of so much anxiety in society, is that people measure their status and their net worth relative to people around them. There is no such thing as an objective measure of wealth, where it's like once you hit X dollars, you're wealthy.

Everything is just relative to those around you. If you pull up to a traffic light in a Lamborghini, nobody cares because there's six other Lambo's right there, and they cost more than yours. So it's all just a relative gain. And so in a world where by and large, in most capitalistic societies, things get better over time. People get richer, get wealthier. It's this never ending treadmill of things are actually getting better and no one feels any better for it, because they're all chasing the status of money, and the only scorecard is relative to other people who are also doing well around you.

Right. Things can objectively be getting better for you, but if they're not getting better at the same rate that they're getting better for the people around you, you still feel like you're losing.

It's always been an issue of comparing yourself to others. Social media in just the last 10 years has increased it by, I think, literally in order of magnitude.

Yeah. When I was coming up with this question, I was thinking of counter examples, because there are a lot of other things that denote status within society. Having a lot of friends, having a great marriage or family, or your kids are super successful at school, that denotes status. There are a lot of very intangible ways that we judge status of each other. But you don't see people making these vast moral judgments of like, Oh, he thinks he's so good because he has so many friends. What a dick, right? But if somebody has a billion dollars, we feel completely justified in making statements like that.

I mean, two of the traits that I most value out of my friends and family and coworkers are humor and wisdom. That's what I really like in people. But how do you measure that? You can't quantify it. And even when you said number of friends, what counts as a friend? A casual acquaintance or your spouse? Whereas net worth is just so easy, you can measure it literally down to the scent and compare yourself against others. I think that's the only reason. Most people, I think, are closer to me where what they really value are things like humor and wisdom and love and compassion, but they don't actually chase those things because there's no hard number.

Around it. It's funny. I was just about to make a joke when you said, how do you measure a friend? That I measure friends by Instagram followers. But then it made me think that actually you're starting to see that. You're starting to see people on people with millions of Instagram followers for being shallow, for being vapid, for being a sellout. All the same criticisms that people have leveled at millionaires and billionaires for decades now.

And it's so true on social media. I see this on Twitter all the time where someone will figure out how the Twitter algorithm works and they'll be like, Oh, if I tweet a thread or if I tweet like this, I'm going to get a zillion likes and a zillion retweets. And they use that quantification to be like, See, it's good. They like me. It's working. And for a lot of those people, it's like, No, you're just tweeting bullshit. That's so cringeworthy, but it tickled the algorithm correctly, so you got a bunch of distribution. You got a bunch of likes on it. I think there's analogy there with money, too, where it's like, If I have more money, I'm going to be happier. My life is going to be better. So people end up chasing that, even if it's not what they actually want, what they want is a great spouse and great friends and control over their time. But it's so hard to get feedback on those things and measure the progress of those things that they just chase what's so easy to measure.

I like this analogy a lot, and I think we can even extend it a little bit further, right? Because fundamentally, that example you just gave, somebody figures out the Twitter algorithm, they start posting a certain type of content, they get, say, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of followers. On one level, you could say, That's great. This person has figured out how to give hundreds of thousands of people value that they value enough to give him a follow and continue to follow him and read future stuff. That's the system working as it's supposed to. I think where the moral judgment starts to creep in is when you get this idea of what some people call audience capture, which is as the creator, you start putting your own interests and values aside and you're like, Let me just reflect back to the public whatever they want to hear, and then I'll socially and monetarily benefit from that practice. I think the same applies to money as well. Where we get really judgmental about money is when people do the business equivalent of audience capture of like, Well, I'm just going to put a bunch of random garbage and pills and market it on an infomercial because that's what people want to hear, and then that'll make.

Me wealthy. Or I would say another example of that is people who got rich trading meme stocks. Okay, you made money, but there's nothing impressive about it. There's nothing noble about it. And to me, what a lot of this comes down to is I'm not interested in anything that's not sustainable. Not friendships, not investing strategies, not careers. If I can't do it indefinitely, I'm not interested in it. Interesting. And I think that's a very simple rule of thumb to guide your life. And a lot of people in audience capture on social media, Cool, you got a lot of followers and you got a lot of likes, but can you now be holding to the algorithm that might change tomorrow? It's not a sustainable thing to do. Whereas I think if your audience really loves you and they like you and they're willing to buy your work and maybe you have half as many followers as the other guy, I'd much rather be in that situation than just pandering to something that's out of my control. The most successful stock of all time in the history of the US economy, and there's nothing even close, not Berkshire Hathaway, not Microsoft, not Tesla, it's Philip Morris.

And what's so interesting about that, of course, it's addictive, so we could just end the story there. But the other thing about that is they make the same product today that they did 100 years ago. It's just a product that people like. Now, of course, they might like it for reasons that we're not thrilled about. But I think that's good products win in the long term. Products that people like, and you don't need to change them. It's not a constant iterate on this cycle to figure out how are we going to advertise this? It's just like build a product that people want buy and just keep it going. In other examples, the most successful stock market industry and sector are consumer staples like toilet paper, soap, toothpaste. That's what works forever because people want toothpaste today as much as they did 50 years ago, which you can't say that about iPhones or AWS or anything like that. That might be gone tomorrow.

It makes sense too, because it doesn't matter how bad the economy gets. I still got to wipe my ass and brush my teeth.

It all just gets back to what's sustainable is what you should be chasing. That's such a broad-based rule of life.

So does earning or losing great amounts of money, do you think this fundamentally changes a person? Or does it simply expose parts of them that was always there but maybe wasn't seen before?

It's different on either end. Earning a ton of money just always exposes what's there. Just recently, Elon Musk's biography by Walter Isaacson came out. And Walter Isaacson was interviewing Elon Musk's first wife, I think her name is Justine Musk. And she was saying she met and started dating when he was a nobody. They were still in college. He hadn't started any company. He was just a broke nobody from South Africa. And she went into detail about how much money and fame completely changed him and utterly changed who he was. And I think you've even seen that if you look at who Musk was 10 years ago when he was a mere single billionaire compared to the centibillionaire he is now, very different person. Another thing that I think is really interesting is, look at some of the interviews of Donald Trump from the early '80s. Very calm, very measured, very balanced, very polite, very respectful. And you see, because he really wasn't that famous back then, if it's in the early '80s, and you see what fame and more money did to him. And there are a lot of people like that. Back to memes.

There's a meme of Jeff Bezos in 1999, and he's like a skinny dork with a Horseshoe. And then after he became the richest man in the world, he's jacked and he's got a half billion dollar yacht and whatnot. So I don't think any of us, not me, not you, anyone, if we stumbled across a billion dollars tomorrow, we would be different people. I think there are so few exceptions to that. There might be some, but there are so few to that. I think it's because in a very good, healthy way, the fact that I rely on other people in society to help me and to maybe employ me to buy my books, means that I'm going to be measured in what I say. Of course, this is true. When I'm alone at a bar with my friends, I say things that I would not say on this camera. When I know a lot of people are going, Of course, that's the case. But once you have fuck you money, and not just fuck you money, but fuck you status, then I think it all just comes out. Now, losing money in the other direction is a completely different thing.

Here's a great example that you are going to know because you may have actually written these words. In Will Smith's biography, he writes that becoming famous is amazing. Being famous is a mixed bag, and losing fame is the most painful thing you can ever experience in life. You may have written those words, so I need to give you credit there too. And I think that's very true for money. Becoming wealthy, gaining wealth is amazing. Having wealth is okay. And losing wealth is absolutely chaotic to your soul and your personality. It's just going to rip you to shreds, because it's just the dopamine that we're chasing. It's not even the money that we want. We just want the dopamine of like, Oh, I used to have $100, now I have $200. It's just the increase that you want. And going in the other direction is just an absolute catastrophe for most people. This is why in investing, I think most people take too much risk because it's so easy to underestimate what a 50 % decline in the stock market is going to do to you. And it's not just to your portfolio, but for a lot of people, it's going to really shatter their identity and their personality and their confidence.

You really see a form of national depression when you have a big stock market decline. It was called the Great Depression for a reason. I think that was a very apt word to use. It was just like it's shattering for people to go in the wrong direction.

Do you think that's because the hedonic treadmill in our mind, no matter how much money we make, our default expectation rises to meet that amount. And at a certain point, even if you have $500 million, it feels as normal as when you had 50,000 or 5,000. And so losing all of that, in a way, it feels even more catastrophic because not only are you losing all of your money, but you're also losing that status, that prestige, the reputation that you've built up over. Nobody who has $5,000, their social identity isn't built around their$5 billion. But if you have $5 billion, a huge percentage of your social identity is built around your $5 billion. So losing that is almost like a traumatic ego experience that happens.

For sure. There's the joke from Chris Rock. He says if Bill Gates woke up with Oprah's money, he'd jump out the window. I think that's so true, because Oprah was worth like three billion or something, and then Gates was worth 100 billion. When Bear Stearns, the bank, went out of business in 2008, the chairman was a guy named Jimmy Cain. And Jimmy Cain, before the Bear Stearns went under, was worth a billion dollars. And afterwards, he was worth 100 million. He lost 90% of his net worth. And he had a quote in the newspaper where he said, When you go from a billion to 100 million, it's only your heirs who suffer. It made no difference to his life. He kept his apartment, he kept his private jet, et cetera. It was just his heirs. And I remember reading that and thinking that is a very rare response. Maybe he didn't actually feel like that because there's almost no one that would actually believe that. To go from a billion to 100 million and be like, whatever, it doesn't matter. It's only my ears. I think it had to be and have been so tied up in his identity, not only the net worth, but using the net worth as a scorecard for his career success, for his ability as a CEO and a manager that was now completely shattered.

And sometimes I think the wealthiest I ever actually felt in my life is when I had $5,000 in the bank. And I remember hitting that milestone and just being like, This is unfathomable. Like $5,000. And happy to report, I have quite a bit more than that now, but I felt the wealthiest back then because it's just the gap between what you had and what you have now that brings happiness. And for me, going from $100 to 5,000 felt so much bigger than going from 1 million to 2 million or whatever it would be, because just in percentage terms, it was so much different. So I think people are always just chasing the gap between what they used to have and what they have today. And when what you used to have is more than you have right now, I think it just shatters people. And there's also a thing in the stock market where all of your success as an investor in the stock market is just not panic selling. Your whole lifetime success is just don't freak out and you'll be fine. And so everything that I do for my own money is geared around that, because everybody, including myself, if my networth went down 50 %, it might change how I think about my long term optimism and my long term faith in the US economy and whatnot.

So it's just like trying to avoid what a catastrophic loss does to your psyche in those situations.

I remember. So I started having enough money to invest in 2012, 2013. There was a pretty sizable dip in 2016. I remember I shat my pants. I was like, Oh, my God, the bear market's coming. Panic cell, freaking out. Obviously, that was stupid. There was another big dip in 2018. There was 2020. I've lived through a couple of crypto markets. I remember in 2020, I hit this point where I remember just watching those red candles, and I was like, I'm young. I'll be fine. But I feel like I needed to go through those early panics earlier in my investment career to understand that. They're like, Yeah, don't be an idiot here. You're young, stick with it. How much of it is just simply getting used to the pain?

I think it's a lot of it, and not only just living through it, but understanding the long term history of the stock market. Where if you look over the last 100 years, on average, the stock market falls 10 % or more every 10 or 11 months for the last 100 years. So when the stock market falls 10 %, the headlines on CNBC and the Wall Street Journal will be like, Dark clouds are here, catastrophe on the horizon. That is something that happens every 10 or 11 months for the last century. And even a 30 % decline is something that historically happens every three or four years. And so even something where it feels really, really bad. If you look historically, it's perfectly normal. And to understand that and contextualize that is probably the most important investing skill to deal with it. And you're definitely right that the more you deal with it, the easier it becomes. Although I would say every big decline is for a different reason. So in 2008, it's easy in hindsight for us to say, Now you should have just kept the course and it was a great buying opportunity. And that is the right takeaway.

But there are so many alternative histories in which 2008 could have turned into something way worse in the Great Depression. So there's a lot of hindsight bias and looking back and seeing what you should have done. But it's definitely true that the more you've been through it, the more rodeos you've been through, the easier it becomes to hold on. But it's also true that people overestimate their ability to hold on. And when times are good, as they pretty much are now, it's very easy for people to say, Oh, if the market fell 30%, I would be a buyer. That'd be a buy-up, buy-up. You're not. It turns out you're not Warren Buffett, and you're shitting your pants too, just like everybody.

Else during that moment. Yeah. As Mike Tyson famously said, Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. That's the one. This ties into your upcoming book a little bit, but I'm curious what you think. Do you think social media has affected our understanding of investing or money given the rise of meme stocks, crypto, show the intense pessimism, constant pessimism that seems to always be present in the financial news media. I'm curious if this feels different at all, or as your book title says, is it same as ever?

I think what's really true is that for most information, not just in investing, but political news, whatever it is, people don't want information. They want their views validated by somebody else, their pre-existing views validated. And what social media does is no matter what you believe, you can believe anything about the economy or the stock market, there are a thousand other people who believe the same thing, gladly welcome you into their tribe. And it's such a difference from 20 or 30 years ago, and now you look at it today and it's infinite. And so virtually 30 years ago, not that long ago, when my parents were our age, virtually everyone was getting the same investing information and listening to the same opinions. And now it's just choose your own adventure for whatever you want to hear. And I do this as well. I curate my Twitter followers, and I bet you, I don't do this intentionally, but I bet you if you went through, I follow people who say what I want to hear. And I think virtually everyone does that because you don't want new information, you want to reduce uncertainty because reducing uncertainty feels great.

It just turns confirmation bias into something that is orders of magnitude greater than it was even 10 years ago. The meme stock bubble, which really began and thrived on Reddit, that's something where historical information about shorting stocks in the 1940s, it does not matter at all anymore. We're in a completely different world where it is now. And I think a lot of hedge funds really got fucked because of that, because they had based their entire career on studying historical evidence that just in a matter of 10 years became completely invalidated because of social media.

It just seems like the velocity is amped up, right? You used to get bubbles, you used to get groupthink, you used to get people would all hop on a bandwagon together and then get screwed down the road. It just seems to happen so fast now given all the access that we have to each other.

I think that's really true. The Great Depression started in 1929 and didn't really bottom until 1933. It was a four-year process. And even in 1999, now the stock market peaked in March of 2000, and it bottomed in I think, the summer of 2002. That took quite a while. That took two years to wash everything out. Whereas I definitely think we saw this during COVID. We went from everything's great to the world is coming to an end in three days. It did happen pretty quickly. And because of that, in COVID, from the time that people first heard the word COVID to the time when it was actually like the economy was starting to perk up and the stock market was perking up was less than 90 days. Compare that four years in the Great Depression to 90 days during COVID. And a lot of that is so much, not just some, but the majority of trading on the stock market are bots and algorithms that are scraping the news feeds in milliseconds. And before you and I can read the first letter of a press release, there are 10,000 computers that have already traded on that news.

There are stories of Warren Buffett back in the 1950s and 1960s, where he was buying stocks at two times earnings, which, if you're not familiar, is just as cheap as it possibly gets. And he was digging through the library archives to dig out these old dusty papers to find it. And that's how he could find those opportunities. Now, when everything literally happens and it's measured in millionth of a second. There's even some traders that trade in picoseconds, which is a billionth of a second. And compared that to what happened in the 1950s when you're digging out dusty papers from the library, it's a totally different world.

Do you think there's any point in trading at all?

For individuals, absolutely not. Zero. It gets back to like, is it possible that you could trade successfully for six months or 12 months or even three years? Unlikely, but possible, yes. Is it possible that you as an individual can day trade successfully for 30 years? It's not 100 %, but it's so close to 100 % that you might as well give universal and just make it universal and say, no, you can't. And here's the thing, I think there are individual traders that would say, no, I've outperformed the S&P 500 by one percentage point, whatever it would be. And my response to that is like, A, awesome, congratulations. But you also need to subtract all the effort that you put into it. So if you are working 80 hours a week to formulate your trading strategy, that's the cost that you need to subtract in it, versus in an index fund, if you can literally just do nothing and go to the beach and sleep in and hang out with your family and have no input in it and still earn a really great return, then I think even the after tax, after effort profits that you're going to earn trading are round to zero, even for the successful traders.

Yeah, that makes sense. It sounds like it's akin to deciding you're going to start a career as a blackjack player. You might do well for a month or a year, but in the long run, the house always wins, right?

And what's so hard about trading too, is that the barriers to entry are so low that everyone thinks they can do it. Like if I said, I want to be a heart surgeon, you're like, All right, that's going to take me 20 years of education to get there. But if I say, I want to be a day trader, great. Open a Robinhood account in 60 seconds and have at it. There's no barrier to entry. And because of that, every young man thinks they can be the next George Sauros and just open up an account and just start going at it. It's also one of the few skills where you actually have a pretty good chance of succeeding based on luck. So if I were to perform open heart surgery on someone tomorrow, there is a zero % chance it would be successful. There's a 100 % chance that person would die. But if you are 19 years old and you open up a brokerage account, you might, by luck, do very well early on. So because the possibility of luck exists, it just entices so many people. I think the worst thing that can happen to you as a young investor is to do well early on by luck because it increases your confidence more than your ability, and you're just going to keep on taking bigger risk until it blows up in your face.

I think the best thing that happened to me as an investor, I started investing when I was 19, and I started like everyone does, as a day trader. That seemed like the cool thing to do. And the best thing that happened to me is I lost a lot of money. And then I was like, Okay, I'm going to pick stocks and hold them for a month, which seemed like a long time for me. And I lost a lot of money doing that. And that was so great for me because by the time I was probably 25, it had pushed me towards what I now think is a very sustainable and proper long-term investing strategy of just buying and hold a diversified portfolio. But if I had done well day trading based off of luck, I may have kept trying to do it for another 10 years and been in a way worse position than I am right now.

So you wrote psychology and money. It came out 2020. I imagine you probably wrote it 2018, 2019. I imagine you had a stable, well-to-do career. You were doing fine before the book. Obviously, since the book, you've sold millions of copies. You're probably doing the speaking circuit. You've probably gotten very good book deals for future books. I imagine you have gone from respectable middle class to scummy rich bastard. I'm curious, now that you've made the leap yourself... By the way, welcome to the 0.1 %. We've got caviar, champagne, some jet skis if you want them. But I'm curious, now that you've made that leap, has there been anything that surprised you? First of all. And second of all, is there any of your own advice that you have struggled to take?

Both really good questions. I don't know. Here's what I would say. Because the book's success was a complete and utter surprise to my wife and I, never planned for it. And we were very happy and satisfied with our income and our net worth before the book. So all of this in the last three years has been total out of the blue. I think we're still to this day trying to process it and what to do with it. First thing I would say is without giving any numbers, we haven't spent really any of the book money. We live in the same house, we drive the same car, and that's very intentional because the biggest challenge is how do we raise kids? Our kids are four and seven. How do we raise kids who are not spoiled and who will grow up to have their own ambition and realize that they need to work hard and build their own path? That's been the hardest thing to deal with, and that's the reason we live in the same house and drive the same car. If we didn't have kids, it would probably not be the case. But you realize how quickly kids can become spoiled and how ruinous that can be to their long term success.

And I think the goal of every parent, certainly us, is not to raise good kids, it's to raise good adults. I want my kids tobe good, functioning adults. And the only way to do that is if they really value a dollar. And they're not going to do that if we just spoil the hell out of them. So that's been the hardest thing to deal with. And the biggest barrier to our spending is not wanting to raise little pricks. That's really been the hardest thing. The other thing, I probably saw this coming, but the extent of its truth has probably been surprising, is that we are no happier whatsoever. We're plenty happy. We were happy back then, but it's really done nothing to our day-to-day happiness. And I could have seen that coming because what makes people happy, at least for us, is relationship with my wife. Are our kids thriving at school? Or do our kids have good friends? Do we have good friends in the area? Am I sleeping eight hours? Am I healthy? And for the most part, money is not going to change that at all. Now I'm probably more content, I'm more independent, and those are great feelings, but it's not happiness.

Happiness is not part of that. And what I just said, I wrote in the book. But the irony is after making money from the book, it's really just been slammed in my face how true that was.

I'm there with you, man. After SubtleArt blew up, money in a lot of ways actually made me less happy for a short period of time. I think it complicated my life quite a bit in ways that I didn't expect I wasn't prepared for. And then it was funny because as I worked through and navigated all those complications, I realized that most of the advice that I needed to overcome those issues had been written in my fucking book, and I just had never thought and applied them to this new life experience. When I wrote everything in that book, I was looking back and applying it to all the challenges that I had already overcome, and it had never occurred to me to look at the potential future challenges that I might overcome. But I think this topic is really interesting. And it's funny because it's something that when I go on podcast, I get asked about a lot. And I've started to deduce it's just because maybe I'm the only person who really talks about it. But I feel like you're probably the perfect candidate to also talk about this. And I guess this is the, I don't want to call it downsides, but maybe the hidden cost of wealth.

When you don't have money, there is this very idealized, rosy picture of like, Man, if I could just have this car or this house, everything would be great if I could send my kid to this school. And yeah, there's definitely truth to that. But I think there's a lot of unexpected social and psychological challenges that come with wealth that most people don't know that they're signing up for. And then when they happen, they don't really know how to navigate that.

I do think for everybody that with every dollar of wealth that you gain comes probably a few pennies of what I would call social debt. It's not actual debt. It's not credit card debt. But it's like with every dollar of wealth is this little bit of whether social debt could be an increase in your own expectations in life that's going to whittle away at your wealth over time. It could be friends and family members asking you for loans and expecting you to pay at dinner. There's all the social debt that comes with every dollar. And people who make a lot of money have a lot of social debt. I've told the story before, but two or three years ago, I did a consulting session with a group of NBA rookies. And the purpose of it was everybody knows that most professional athletes, including the NBA, these guys go broke. They go bankrupt. They have a three-year career where they make $20 million and then they all go bankrupt. And one of the players, he was 19 years old, he said something that I thought was so astute and so smart. He said, When you grew up in inner city poverty and then you sign a $10 million contract when you're 19, he said, That's not your money.

That is mom's money, dad's money, cousin's money, grandma's money, neighbor's money, your friend down the street's money. And he said the reason that so many athletes go bankrupt is not because they bought themselves a mansion, it's because they bought a modest house for their fifth cousin who they felt obligated to help. So these NBA athletes, they make $10 million. And with that comes, let's say, $30 million of social debt piled on top of it. And it's very easy to count your net worth. Everyone knows your net worth. But social debt is very obscure, and most people don't even know it exists until they realize how complicated their life has become. There's a very good book written, I think 1905, a very old book, and it's called The Quest for the Simple Life. And basically what it is, it's not that money can't make you happy, that's not the case, because money can bring some form of happiness. But it's that money can also make your life very complicated. And without a doubt, people whose lives are complicated are less happy than people who have a simple life. And I think that is timeless advice.

Yeah. That said, so this question of money and happiness, you say that since becoming very wealthy, you have not seen your happiness tick up at all. I would actually say my happiness dipped for a few years. Just in the last year or two, I would say I'm happier than I was pre-subtle art. I've had this bust-boom cycle that's happened with me. What's interesting, so the research around happiness and money, for a long time, the conventional wisdom was money makes you happier up to 75, 80k, and then it levels off. What they've recently found in the last few years with some better studies is that actually it does continue to increase. It just increases at a much more marginal rate past six figures. And as far as they've measured, it doesn't ever completely level off. It just slows down over time. And what's super fascinating about the research is that they find that people who are unhappy without money, money improves their happiness up to about 80-100K, and then it stops. But people who are happy without money, money continues to make them happier forever and ever. It's super interesting because you would assume that it's the people who are unhappy without money, probably think money is going to fix their happiness problems, but then it doesn't.

Whereas the people who are happy without money probably don't feel like they need any money to be happy, but those are the ones who actually become happy. It's a classic backwards law situation.

To me, what's definitely been true for me, and I think a lot of the studies will bear this out, and this might seem very nuanced, but it's important, is that it's not that money can't make your life better, it's that happiness is probably the wrong word. And the right word that money can do for you is contentment. That's really true for me. Before the book, I think I had a lot of career anxiety of just, Am I going to make it? Is this the right thing to do? Is this the right career? Can I hack it in this career? Do I need to find something else to do? It gave me a lot of anxiety and sleepless nights. In postbook, I really don't have that anymore. But that's not happiness, it's just contentment.

One thing my dad used to always say that I think is very wise is he said that money doesn't buy happiness, it buys away on happiness. It's not that your problems go away when you become wealthy, it's that your problems become much more controllable. When I was broke, I had plenty of problems in my life, and a large percentage of those problems were completely outside of my control. A storm hits, the train is out of service. I can't go to work that day. I'm so fucked. I need to pay rent. I need to buy food. Whereas when you're wealthy, you don't have that problem anymore. You're like, Oh, well, I'll get a car. I'll hire an Uber or whatever. I'll work from home today. But the problems that happen when you're wealthy, they tend to be more inside your control. It's like, Oh, I hired a shitty housekeeper who charged me five times more than they probably should have, or I bought a house that's too big. That's a class. That's the big mistake I made. I bought a house that's too big, and I feel obligated to fill it with shit that I don't want.

And it's like, This is actually just causing me more problems. But it's like, ultimately at the end of the day, that's my fuck-up. And it's completely within my control to remedy that situation. I think one way to look at it is that wealth simply moves your problems from being more external to being more internal.

I do think it's true that for everyone there is such thing as an ideal net worth, a net worth at which beyond that, you get no material benefit, but your life does become more complicated. And I think that number is lower than most people think. That's the peak improvement that you're going to get from money. One way to think about this, among the 10 richest men in the world, there are 15 divorces between all of them.

That's a great stat.

I think one of the reasons this occurs is if you are that successful in your career, if you're Bill Gates or Elon Musk, your life is very, very complicated. There's a really good book called The Snowball, which is the biography of Warren Buffett. It's the most in-depth biography of him. And anyone reading that book will realize how complicated is the most charitable word you can use. His personal life is. I mean, it's not an exaggeration to say that since he's been 10 years old, he's devoted every waking moment to picking stocks. And a lot of that came at the expense of his family, his children, his wife, his personal relationships. And I think someone like that didn't really have a choice. Their mind is just so wired towards their career that they had to do it. But I think for me, and for a lot of people would read that and say, I don't want that life. I don't want a life that is so fundamentally imbalanced that it's going to come at the cost of my children knowing me and my wife wanting to leave me. That sucks. I think that's why there are so many divorces among those people.

Bill Gates went like 30 years without taking a single day off. He worked seven days a week for 30 years. There are some people who might aspire to that. I'm definitely not one of them. There's no amount of money that would ever make that worth it to me. And he probably doesn't regret it, I assume that's true. But there's a cost to all of that and just making your life very, very complicated that I think of most people if they got that money or had a career that was going to pay off that money, would realize the downsides that are so easy to overlook.

Has becoming wealthy changed your politics?

Oh, that's good. I want to say no, but I will tell you, I always consider myself fairly moderate. I think in my entire life, I've probably voted, if you look at senators, Democrat presidents, I probably voted Democrat 70% of the time and Republican 30% of the time, which I feel like is actually pretty rare. That's as moderate as it gets. But I'll tell you, I read this morning that the 2017 tax cuts actually expire in 2025. And depending on who's in Congress, they might get rolled back. And it was the first time in my life where I was like, Oh, shit, no. No, you can't do that. No, don't waste tax. That's terrible.

But let's pivot off politics before we get canceled. In your opinion, and obviously your kids are still young, so you haven't gone through the failures and iterations yet to give really strong advice on this, but what's the 80-20 advice for teaching your kids about money?

You're right that my kids, so they're four and seven, so talking about money. But especially my seven-year-old son, he is in a stage where because he spends so much time on YouTube that markets to him so effectively, his list of wants is enormous. Every day he wants something else. When kids watch someone like Mr. Beast, all of a sudden, my seven-year-old definition of success is driving a Lambo and giving millions of dollars away to your friends. That's the definition of success. Whereas I grew up watchingNature Turtle. None of those can... So much of social media and YouTube is so geared towards materialistic wealth that it really inflates the aspirations of kids. And my son lives, he doesn't know it, but he lives such a ridiculously good life, but he doesn't know it because his expectations are so high. And he has so many more toys and gadgets than 99.9% of other kids, and it's never enough because this other kid he saw online has something different. And when I see that, I realize how easy it is to spoil your kids. How easy it would be for my wife and I to give in to his every little desire that he sees on YouTube and just ruin him socially.

When my children are in their 20s and 30s, they can function on their own with proper expectations. That's all I want to do. And I can see it, especially in my seven-year-old son, little tinges of him already becoming spoiled. And my wife and I have tried so hard to not do it, but if you're just given a little bit, they become spoiled so quickly and so easily. And so I don't know if I have any great advice. I've done quite a bit of work with very wealthy families, and this is their biggest concern, is if you're a billionaire, how do you raise kids who are still ambitious and whatnot? And I've come to believe, I think, that the very hard but honest answer is give them less money. That's the only thing you can do. You cannot give your child a billion dollars or a million dollars or $10,000 and have it not affect their sense of entitlement. I think it's impossible. I think there are no counter examples to that. And that's a really tough thing for a lot of those people to hear, but that's the truth. What's that the only thing you can do to not spoil your kids is give them less money, give them fewer toys, make them work for it.

And the crazy thing is that virtually every one of those billionaire families, if it's first generation, the reason they are successful is because they grew up poor with a chip on their shoulder and worked their ass off from the day they were 18. And that's the one thing that they can't give their children. They can give their children a house and a car and a private jet. The one thing they can't give them is the ambition of.

Needing to work. My dad was a hard ass, and I actually wrote a newsletter about what he did with us when we were kids. And I got so many replies from parents saying, Tell me more. Give me the playbook. My dad, he started each of us, my brother and I started each of us on an allowance when we were five. If we wanted anything that cost money, it went into a ledger. I remember being six years old and being at a restaurant and wanting to play an arcade game like Pac-Man or something. I asked my dad for a quarter and he was like, Well, I can give you a loan on your next allowance, but you're going to pay interest. I was six. I remember I ended up playing four games, so I spent a dollar playing the arcade game. I remember the next Sunday came around and he gave me, instead of my three dollar allowance, and he gave me a buck 80. I was like, Where the fuck is the other dollar, 20? Where's my money, Dad? And he was like, Well, remember I loaned you that dollar at the restaurant on Tuesday and you paid 20 cents interest.

I was sick. I hated him for this for so many years. All my friends, they got new bikes, they got Nintendos. I had to fucking rake the yard, do the dishes, clean my room, and get paid week in, week out for it. I had to take loans from him. I remember taking a loan to buy a Lego set when I was about eight, and I spent about a month paying it off. He called it the bank of dad, and he would calculate interest. And we had ledgers and we had a notebook in the kitchen and everything. I thought he was a fucking psychopath. And then I got to college and all my friends were broke and I had like a thousand dollars in the bank. I was like, Wow. And then I think it was around 25 that I finally went back to him and I was like, Thank you for doing that. I mean, not only did it teach me the importance of saving, managing money, teaching me the understanding concepts like interest and loans and things like that. I was absolutely one of those kids. My family had a lot of money and I didn't know it until I was a teenager.

We were very well off and I had no idea and I certainly was not experiencing it. So that's another benefit that came out of that.

I would say two things here, and thank you for sharing that because it's such a good story. I do think on the nature, nurture spectrum, how well you do with money actually leans towards nature. Because for every one of those stories that you just told, you could tell a story about someone whose parents were just as smart as teaching their kids about money, and they went on to just be profagate spenders. And to the counter of that, some people whose parents were terrible with money that ended up doing very well. Warren Buffett always talks about some people have the money mind and some people don't. And if you have the money mind from age five, no one needs to tell you to save and invest. You just get it. It's just in your DNA. You just understand it. I think there's also the other end of that, of people who are just no matter what you tell them, they're going to be compulsive gamblers. No matter what you tell them, they're just going to be just absolute degenerates with money. My parents were and are very, very good with money, but they never sat down and taught us.

They never sat down and said, Here's what you should do. Here's how much you should save. I think it was just natural. No one needed to tell me to save. From the time I got my first job at 16, I was saving half my paycheck. I don't think I even knew why or why I should do it or what I was saving for. It just seemed like the natural thing to do. I'll tell you another example. For my son, I don't want to throw him under the bus because he's only seven, but I've tried to get him to save. I have offered him, because we give him a small allowance too. I've offered him 50 % interest per week. 50 % per week to save that I will pay him an interest, he won't do it. As soon as he gets money, it burns a hole of his pocket, it's gone. Wow. And so maybe on the nature of nurture spectrum, I hope he watches this podcast in 20 years and he's.

Pulled it together. There you go. Also, just at that age, from a developmental point of view, seven-year-olds have no impulse control. I don't think I started to appreciate my dad's arrangement until probably around 10. I remember it was by the time I got to middle school, I had figured the game out. I was like, All right, if I save up allowances for three months, I'm going to end up with 50 % more money than if I go spend every day. So it.

Took a while. The other thing that's been really hard for us with allowance is that my son got really into Legos as I was when I was a kid. And my wife and I were like, Well, Legos are educational. It's engineering, and he's building it himself, and it's creative. So Legos don't count towards allowance. If he wants new Legos, we'll get. And then it turned into he wants a new $200 Lego every day. It's actually really difficult for him, a parent to want to foster your children's creativity and have that not spill into spoiled little brat without even knowing it.

I love it. He's teaching you guys about loopholes. Totally. My parents' rule was only books. They would buy me as many books as I wanted, which is interesting because it actually incentivized me to want books. I remember actually asking for books a lot because I knew that would always be free.

Were you a big reader and writer when you were young?

You know what's funny? Yes, when I was really young, yes. I remember sitting in my room writing short stories. I remember I started writing a memoir of sixth grade, wish so badly that I still had it. Obviously, it got lost on some computer somewhere. I used to write a lot when I was young, but at a certain point, I think two things happened. One is I discovered music. That got me a lot more social approval than writing did. Then the second thing that happened was I actually got bad grades in school for writing. Looking back, it was because I didn't follow the assignment. I would just go on some crazy tangent and run with it. The teacher was like, No, that's not what I told you. But I thought I was a bad writer for that reason. I actually didn't realize I was a good writer until I had been publishing online for about.

Two years. I'm willing to bet, though, that even if you were getting Cs or Ds or whatever in writing in school, you were doing it because you were deviating from what they told you to do. But that's probably why you are a good writer, because you've never just tried to follow the script. You just carved your own path and literally said, Fuck you, I'm going to go do my own thing.

Absolutely. Which then raises the question of what is... I mean, obviously there's a practical side to writing instruction, which is teach grammar and teach kids how to put two sentences together and argue a case. That makes sense, right? But it's again, too, I grew up in a pretty conservative part of Texas, so there wasn't a lot of respect for creative deviations, right? I think I had one teacher my entire school career, I had one teacher that was encouraging. She was like, You're very creative. You should keep exploring this. But it just went in one ear and out the other.

I almost had the opposite experience. My education background was very unique. I effectively have no high school education. I was a competitive ski racer, and I just basically bypassed high school. Not because I was smart, just because I was doing something else. And so when I got to college, I had to start at a local community college when I started, and I effectively had an eighth grade education at that point. I had to start at the most basic remedial level. And I had such low self-esteem in terms of my intelligence, which was justified because I really didn't have a high school education. It was a psychology class, and we had to write a paper. And the teacher pulled me aside and said, You're actually a really good writer. I remember just being stunned. I think in that moment, my self-confidence increased more than at any other point in my life. It's really easy to underestimate what a little compliment can do for the right person and push them in that right direction to just keep going a little bit more. That always sticks out to me.

I had a high school teacher of mine who we were friends on Facebook. This was 10 years ago, and he posted on Facebook that he was leaving my high school after 20 years there, and he was so grateful. And he shared a story of it was the last day of school and a student of his came in and got a little bit emotional and thanked him and said that he had changed her life. And on his Facebook post, he said he was like, Yeah, I guess as teachers, we have no idea the impact that we have on our students sometimes. I actually replied and I said, This extends much further than you think, because I was a total shithead in high school. I was all my teacher's worst nightmare, slept through every class, never did homework. I remember he had been one of the teachers that was pretty hard on me. I told him, I said, There are a lot of things that you said to me when I was 16, 17 that I blew off and thought was a joke at the time. But three years later, I looked back and I was like, Oh, shit, Mr.

Wick had a point. I told him, I said, You probably have no idea how many people are walking around in the world right now where something you said, like a seed you planted in 10th grade took five years to finally sprout and actually made an impact on them. It's all the teachers out there. Don't underestimate yourselves.

I think there's a counter to that too, of it's easy to underestimate if you're a teacher. What telling a kid that you're not good enough or some negative connotation is just going to shatter their confidence at that point. I think every student from kindergarten through college is so fragile emotionally in terms of their confidence. And to me, the biggest value that I got out of school was not what I learned because I could have learned to everything on YouTube or in the library. What I got out of it was confidence. And particularly in college, if I can go through four years and get good grades and get a diploma, I can do anything out in the real world. It was just the confidence that it gave me that was all the value from it.

So your next book coming out is called Same as Ever. I believe the core premise behind it is that everybody is so obsessed with what's changing and what's different, whereas we overlook the things that never change. What are the things that we overlook that never change?

There's literally hundreds of them. If you look over human behavior, it tends to be the same story over and over and over again. The cast of characters changes and the script changes a little bit, but it's the same movie again and again. Every war is the same. Every recession is more or less the same. Even if what's causing them is different, the way that people react to greed and fear and emotion and their desires is the same today than it was 500 years ago, and it'll be the same 500 years from now. And that's really important because everyone knows how bad we are at forecasting, what the economy is going to do, who's going to win the election. Because we're always focused on, we're trying to guess what might change. And I think if you just focus all of your effort on what's never going to change, you have a much clearer sense of what the future is going to hold. I have no idea what the stock market is going to do over the next 10 years. Nobody does. But I know exactly how people are going to respond to greed and fear during that period.

So let's just focus on that. There's a great quote from Jeff Bezos where he said, Everyone is always asking what's going to change. And he said, A much more important question is what's never going to change. Because at Amazon, he said, You cannot imagine a future where consumers don't want low prices and fast shipping. It's impossible to imagine a future where those two things are not desired. So therefore, he could put all of his effort into investing in those things, knowing that they would be just as relevant 20 years from now as they are today. And there's so many things in life that are like that about our strong propensity to be persuaded by a good story. Not the best answer, not the right answer. The best story always wins. Just the person who tells the story that you want to hear is the person who's going to get the attention and who wins. That was true 500 years ago, and it'll be true 500 years from now. So I think understanding the persuasiveness of a good story is so fundamental to understanding how society works. Understanding how fragile the world is and how just the tiniest little nudge of nothing can have a massive impact on history and your personal life and throughout the economy, that's always been the case.

Understanding the power of incentives was influential 500 years ago, and it'll be influential 500 years from now. So the book is 23 little stories, very short chapters similar to psychology of money, of just things that have always been a powerful driver in human behavior that you can put all of your faith in will be just as relevant in the future. I think psychology of money was really the psychology of you, the individual, and same as ever is the psychology of us, the collective. It's just like, what do people do in groups that keeps happening over and over again? It was so much fun.

To write. I imagine you could even reach back to ancient times and probably find analogs all over the place.

Every chapter includes a story that is an example of these things happen. And most of them are from the last, I would say, 200 years or so. But, yeah, I mean, it's always true that if you looked back at ancient times, I mean, one of the opening quotes that I use in the book is from Schopenhauer, who says, The whys have always said the same things, and fools have always done the opposite. The reason that we enjoy stoicism, so much of which was written 2,000 years ago, is because it's just fundamentally true. It was true 2,000 years ago, and it's true today. I think it's actually like when researching this book or just when thinking about the idea from this book, how few people had really tried to tackle this concept. It's always like, What's going to change is way more appealing. It's sexier. It's way more enjoyable. But I think it's always the case that if you look back across, whether it's in business or in life or in marriage or in military, the things that never change are always what matter the most.

Because there is this bias, especially recently with all the technological change. There's this constant bias of like, Oh, what's changing? What's going to be the new paradigm? What's going to be this and that? I've developed a little bit of a, I wouldn't say fully contrary intake on AI. But I guess my counterargument to AI is just this really fundamental sense that people will always value connection to other people. People will always value authenticity. I talk to a lot of Internet tech business people and they're like, Oh, AI is going to replace this and that. Books are going to be written by AI, and TV show is going to be made by AI. I'm like, I don't think we read a book or watch a TV show only for the content, only for the information. A huge reason of why we watch it is because humans made it, and we want to feel connected to those humans, and we want to know that they feel the way that we feel, and they worry about the same things we worry about. I don't think there's any way that AI could ever fundamentally replace that. Totally agree.

So much of what I love about a book or about music, let's say, is not even the wisdom that I gained from it. It's the awe that a fellow human wrote this thing. That a fellow human had this much information that I never knew about. And same for music. If you listen to your favorite musician, so much of it is just awe that another human who wakes up in the morning just like you could make this. And there's no way you could, but they could. And you're just astounded by that.

Absolutely. I do think it will put a premium on human connection. I almost think of it in the same way. Ikea is a huge furniture business, but people will pay ten times as much for a handcrafted piece of furniture that in some ways is probably less perfect and less efficient. And that's actually what they're paying for. They're paying for the lack of efficiency. They're paying all the time and craftsmanship that went into it.

I always think of this, I'm sure you will respect this too. I have such a newfound respect for how hard it is to write a book. And now when I walk into a library or Barnes and Noble, every single book on the shelf is 1-10 years of somebody's life. Whenever I walk in, it's just you can see the amount of effort put into it. And if all of that was replaced by an algorithm that just spit it out in two seconds, all of the allure is gone from it.

Yeah, I think people underestimate the intangible value of creative work in general. Last two sections. The first one is, so one of my favorite personal pet theories I came up with, and I write about a lot, is this idea that the best thing about a person or a thing is usually also the worst thing about a person or a thing, right? It's like Warren Buffett, since he was 10 years old, spent all of his waking hours trying to pick the best stocks. That's what made him Warren Buffett. But it's also the worst thing about him because it completely wrecked his home life. And probably every significant problem he's ever had throughout his life was caused by the same thing that gave him all of his successes. My question to you is, what is that trait in you that you believe?

I don't even need to spend one second thinking about this because it's so obvious for me, which is that I'm a people pleaser. I think I hate confrontation, and I want people to like me. I don't think that's a good thing, but it's true. I go out of my way to please everyone around me. The good side of that is I think most people would say I'm easy to get along with. The bad side of that is I let a lot of problems just stew, and it's easy for me to just bury that. I don't like that this person is doing this to me, but ignore it because I just want to get along with them. And then the problem just boils and boils and boils and boils until it explodes. And it's causing me a lot of problems in my life. I think on Net, it's been a good trait, but it's barely on Net because I'm always letting problems do.

What are the things that you've done in your life to try to get better about it?

I think what's true for me is that since I'm so incapable of having a conflict with people that rather than like, Oh, I'm going to be friends with this person who I don't really like just because I want to be a people pleaser and I'll deal with the bad parts later. I think I've gotten much better at just being very picky and choosy of who I surround myself with. I've always been the person that has two really close friends rather than a dozen acquaintances. I've always just been like, There's going to be two to five people who I talk to in life and everyone else can go fuck themselves. I can say this on that podcast. If I had to constantly battle over conflict, I couldn't do it. I would just roll over like a puppy dog with my belly in the air and be like, Take me. I can't fight on this. I need to find someone who I don't have conflict with because I'm so incapable of.

Dealing with it. Well, maybe next time you come on, I'll just compulsively disagree with literally everything you say.

I'll burst into tears and hang up.

Stop talking to me, Mark. Cool. Well, thank you for sharing that. Actually, that's a very common one. I imagine there's thousands of people listening who struggle with that. It's definitely something I've struggled with in the past a little bit, and it's important to deal with. I think also too, part of that selectivity of who you let into your life is making sure that you're surrounding yourself with people who aren't going to take advantage of that about you.

Yes, totally. I think that's the biggest thing.

Okay, last segment. Are you familiar with the game Fuck, Mary Kill?

Yes.

Okay, so we're going to play Fuck, Mary Kill.

80 % chance this gets me canceled, but let's do it.

That's what we're here for. Hey, we're here to not give a fuck, Morgan. All right, Fuck Mary Kill, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, George Sauros.

This is so great. Okay, Mary Munger. I think he's the wisest person of modern times. I don't think that's an exaggeration. A lot of people disagree with that, but I think it's really true. It's not necessarily the wisdom, it's just his ability to explain it. So he's someone I want in my life. Kill probably Sauros. No offense. I'm sorry. I'm not even going to go into detail, but let's just leave it there. Fuck. I'm going to have to say Warren. I'm not going to go into detail there, but you're really forcing me into this question here.

Well, I mean, Warren's failures as a family man are well documented, so I can understand the fuck. But he is quite pithy and seems very charming, so I can understand that.

So he would be great to take out on a date because he's.

So pithy. Yeah, just spend the night with. I could see him being good for that. Charlie seems like a solid family man. Sauros, I don't want to say too much. The tinfoil hat crowd might show up and-Exactly. Start spamming me. Okay, Fuck Mary Kill. Stocks, gold, Bitcoin.

Oh, God, the last two are hard. Mary Stocks, it's the best long-term investment. Kill gold. It's a shitty long-term investment. Fuck bitcoin. I'm going to change the meeting. I'm not going to say sleep with Bitcoin. I'm going to say fuck Bitcoin. I'm just going to say fuck Bitcoin. I'm just going to say fuck Bitcoin. I actually don't have much wrong with Bitcoin. I just think it brings out the worst in not just some people, but the majority of people in Bitcoin, it brings out the worst in them.

I have watched myself get sucked into the crypto world for three straight bull runs. I feel like half of it is just I like risk. But it is so fascinating from a psychological point of view. Last year, there was a saying that was going around, which was that crypto was speed running financial history. I would add other things to that. I would add religious cults. I would add black markets. If you're interested in human nature, crypto is almost like a dangerous place to be because it is so endlessly fascinating.

I so agree with that.

Not only would I fuck with Bitcoin, but I absolutely have, and I have the herpes to prove it.

I think there have been a lot of people on this point, I'll make this quick, about with the decline in religion has come an increase in tribalism elsewhere. So whether that's sports or politics or Bitcoin, I think a lot of that is just in a previous lifetime these people all would have been going to church every Sunday. And now that they're not, they find their crowd, their tribe in something.

Like bitcoin. And by the way, I'll call it Apocalyptic Porn, has transferred as well, right? It used to be if you were a very apocalyptic person, you would probably end up in church most days of the week. Now, if you're a very apocalyptic person, you're probably on ZeroHedge every morning. You're probably putting all your money and Bitcoin in gold. You're probably reading some crazy far-right or far-left-wing website and thinking that George Souros and Bill Gates are going to take over the world. All right, last one. Fuck, Mary Kill. Diversification, dollar cost averaging, dividend investing.

Why do you got to do this to me? This is the hardest one. This is the hardest one. Can I be polygamous? I'm going to go polygamy on this one. I'm going to marry all of them. I would say all three of those. I dollar cost average into index funds that I plan to hold for 50 years. That's how I invest. So all three of those are just square in the merry category. Okay. I'm cheating on this one. You're cheating.

We've got a polygamous. All right. All right. Well, we'll let you be polygamy on that. Morgan, it's been a pleasure, dude. It's been a blast. Definitely want to have you back at some point. Book or no book, I don't give a shit. This has been fun.

I've admired you for years as a writer, as a person. I'm so glad we finally got to do this.

Thanks, man. I appreciate that. Everybody, same as ever. Morgan Hausel, it's coming out or it is out when you're listening to this. I don't know. But check it out. Psychology of Money, obviously, it's fucking hit. I actually think Psychology of Money, I think, is the last book I read in one sitting. I was thinking about that this morning.

That means a lot to me.

It doesn't happen often, and I think that was the last time I was just like, I sat down for 30 minutes, and next thing I know, it's like four hours later. I'm like, Oh, I have 20 pages left. Oh, shit.

It's not a very long book, but the metric that I wanted to maximize for was not even sales. It was how many people read to the end. And the only way that you could do that was a very short punchy chapter. Make your point, get the hell out of the way.

Yeah, it is extremely readable. You can tell that you put a lot of thought into that, into keeping people engaged, keeping people flip into the next page. It's a great read. I'm excited to read the new one. Everybody check out Morgan Howsell. You're at Collaborative Funds. You've got a blog there. You're on Twitter. You're on all the places. We'll put links to all the places. As always, everybody, thank you for listening. Be sure to leave a review. Give us five stars because my ego desperately needs it. And we're a new podcast and those things matter for us. So thanks, everybody. See you next time.