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I'm writing a book right now on financial independence, [music] and while doing the research from that, I come across some things that I think are so interesting that I'd never really seen before. One is I was watching a documentary on minimalism, people who take so much pride in having few possessions, and they can live off of basically nothing, and they live in tiny little places with like no furniture, and they own one shirt, that kind of thing. They could afford more, but they love the minimalism.
And on on one hand, it's always phrased as these people have escaped materialism. And I think to some extent that's true, but they are obsessed with what they don't own. They're obsessed with their lack of possessions.
And it it hit me that like being obsessed with a lack of of things that you own is another form of just being obsessed with those things. These people who have apparently escaped materialism think about materialism all day long. They are obsessed with the things that they don't own.
And that is just another form of thinking about things all day. And what's that long term There's a quote that's been around forever of like the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. And these people who are addicted to minimalism hated material items.
It was meant they were thinking about it all the time. But the real opposite of love is indifference. People who have I think figured it out and have the healthiest relationship with their things don't think about it.
They don't think about their things all day. They're too busy enjoying the rest of their life that with their hobbies that they want to do and their friends and their family. They're not obsessed with their items.
That was one thing I came across recently. The other is there's a chapter in this book that I'm writing about Mark Twain who was such a fascinating individual because he was the most famous and successful writer of his day, wealthiest writer of his day, and he married a very rich heiress. And so they had incredible sums of money.
They could have lived the easiest, most carefree life that could have existed and yet they went bankrupt and lost a house that they were living in and Mark Twain had to go on this world tour giving lectures that he didn't want to do. He was just trying to pay off all the debts that he accumulated. It's a fascinating scenario of someone who had so much and ended up with so little.
What's very interesting about Mark Twain in many aspects is that he was among the best in the world, potentially among the best of all time at identifying other people's flaws. And he could point out where other people with things like money were making mistakes and what where their flawed thinking was. And yet he seemed to blind to his own faults.
And a lot of the things that he would criticize others for he was making that same mistake for himself, but he didn't even know it and would not admit it to other people. I came across this Twain quote and like everything else that he writes, I think it's just brilliant. He says "Since $100 million in New York City and 22 fish hooks on the border of the Arctic Circle represent the same financial supremacy a man in strange circumstances is a fool to stay in New York when he can buy 10 cents of fish hooks and emigrate.
" So he's saying like, "Look, being filthy rich in New York City feels the same as as being a good fisherman in the Arctic. What matters for both is not how much you have, it's how much you have relative to other people. And since there are so many wealthy people in New York, you can have a ton of money and not feel wealthy.
But if you were just merely good at surviving in the middle of nowhere, you're the richest man in town. He said this like in the 1880s, so maybe 100 million is now 100 billion or something like that. But I think there's a lot of truth here, that there are two ways to feel poor in life.
One is to have too little, particularly for the basics that you need. The other is to be around people and socialize with people who have dramatically more. And the first of those is a finance problem, the second will persist at any level of income.
There's no amount of income that you can have that will objectively always make you feel wealthy relative to other people. I remember, this is two or three years ago, an interview with Lloyd Blankfein, who used to be the CEO of Goldman Sachs. Actually a very great guy, who wrote a biography last year that I thought was amazing.
But during his many years or decades at Goldman Sachs, he became a billionaire in his own right. And he gave this interview, and I want to read this, I want to quote it directly here, so I'm not putting words in his mouth. He told the Financial Times that he considers himself well-to-do, but not rich.
He says, "I can't even say rich. I don't feel that way. " Now, this is a guy who's a billionaire.
Now, obviously there is no statistic by which he is not rich. Of course he's rich. The only context that might justify that feeling, and maybe it's just a false sense of humility, he wants to say that cuz it sounds good in the newspaper, the only context though that that might have a little bit of validity is, I looked this up, he is not even in the top 10 richest people in his own apartment building.
And so by that context of other people, that's how he feels, even if by any other context in the world, he is obviously doing extraordinarily well. And so one of the takeaways there is like be careful who you socialize with. I think that's a really important in life.
Some of those most valuable friends that you can have are those who you get the most joy and pleasure out of by doing things that don't cost a lot of money. Sitting around and laughing over a cheap meal and a cheap drink can be the one of the most wonderful things. The other thing that came to mind is Mark Twain's solution of be the richest man in the poorest town, so to speak, still relies on comparing yourself to other people.
And his example of having 22 fish hooks makes you the richest man in the Arctic Circle. Well, eventually somebody with 24 is going to show up. And so if your definition of success and a good life is always relative to other people, and that's the most natural thing in the world, that's almost a a race that you cannot win.
And so seeking your pleasure in those kind of things from attributes and metrics that don't have to do with social comparison is always so much at the core of this. All right, let me get into some of your questions. And this first question is very related to that point I just made about Mark Twain.
It's a question from Regina, who writes about she and her husband doing very well and not wanting to raise spoiled children. And she says, "I don't want my daughter assuming that everyone has someone to clean their room, that she's entitled to flying first class all the time, and I'd like her to learn how to make a regular pot of coffee that isn't a one-button push bean-to-cup espresso. " That being said, "My husband and I don't want to skip out on enjoying our lives.
Both of us come from very poor backgrounds and we have worked hard and exercised discipline to create the lifestyle that we enjoy. " Two things come to mind here, Regina, and it's always that very similar to the Mark Twain quote. Your sense of spoiled, and maybe that's not the word that you use, but let's use that, is always relative to some level of baseline.
And let me give you an example here. You are worried about your daughter always flying first class that that would leave her to be spoiled. Basically what you're saying is if she was flying coach, that would not be spoiled.
But needless to say, for the majority of the world, if not the majority of Americans, flying coach all the time to wherever you're going is spoiled. And certainly by the standards of another generation. If you want to talk about our grandparents generation, flying on an airplane all the time in any class level, even in the cargo hold, would be considered spoiled.
And so I've made this point before that I think the actual goal of most parents, even if they wouldn't phrase it this way, is to give their children a life that would appear spoiled by the standards of a previous generation. And you can call that spoiled, but you what you could also call that is just generational progress. When when you frame it that way, you're like, it's great.
Who would fight against generational progress? Of course I want that. The other thing to think about when parents are worried about raising spoiled kids is that they will often say something along the lines of, "I'm worried about giving them an easy life.
" And I always want to make the point of you don't need to worry about that. They will find something to worry about. They will find they will have no problem stressing over certain aspects of their life.
They will have no problem finding difficulty in their life. They will have no problem finding things to be anxious about. That's how people are wired.
And so I think the the goal of wealth and the goal of financial independence is not to eliminate problems from your life because that is never the case for anyone. The goal of financial independence, talked about this before, is to choose the problems that you have in your life. And so if those spoiled children are yes, they don't have to worry about finding food or proper shelter.
Yes, they're flying comfortably. They can still have an enormous amount of stress and challenge and anxiety from school, sports, socializing. Good problems to have.
And maybe that's the generational progress. One generation, maybe many generations ago, had to worry about securing food and shelter. And then another generation has to worry about proper education.
And then you keep moving up the line to where these generations are focusing on, you know, work-life balance and how to find purpose and meaning in life. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. And so I on one hand empathize with your fear.
I worry about it, think about it. On another hand, I think we tend to blow it out of proportion. That whatever life your kids are living can appear spoiled to one generation or can appear modest to another.
And those kids are always going to find challenges in their own life, even if they are different challenges that we as parents faced in our own childhood. All right, next question. This one's from Livio.
He says, "Hi Morgan, I heard you say on a podcast that you wish you hadn't worried so much in your 20s because everything turned out okay. What advice would you give to someone in their 20s who worries about everything? How can we learn to worry less and trust things will work out?
" Yes, I've mentioned on podcast before that if I could have a conversation with myself when I was 20 years old, I would tell my 20-year-old self not to worry so much because everything, most for the most part, worked out. Doesn't mean it wasn't necessarily always good or necessarily easy, but for the most part, the things I worried about the most the most worked themselves out. Even if they didn't turn out the way I thought, I at least got accustomed to whatever the situation was that I found myself in.
But I also make the point that is almost a contradiction to that, which is that a lot of the things that worked out that I worried about worked out because I worried about them. Because I was so worried about school in my 20s, I studied hard. Because I was so worried about my career as a writer, I put a lot of effort into it.
And so on one hand, you can look back and say, "I shouldn't have worried. It all worked out. " On the other hand, I'm like, "No, it worked out because I worried.
" And that's true for almost anyone. And so I think the key there is not necessarily, I I phrased it wrong. It's not don't worry so much.
It's identify that when you are worried about something, that's the only fuel for your willingness to solve it. And become more comfortable with it. And so, the idea of being comfortable being uncomfortable, I think has a lot of meaningfulness for your worry in life.
And the idea of eliminating all worry from your life. If you eliminate all worry from your life, that's when you're going to stop solving problems, and that's when you're going to have actually something to worry about. That's going to be a huge issue in your life.
And I think about that now. I think I'm more comfortable worrying about things now because I know the worry is not focused on, "Oh, this is all going to fall apart. " The worry is a signal that I need to go figure this out and put more effort into it.
All right, next question. This one's from Everton. He says, "You mentioned Nassim Taleb a few times.
What do you think about his barbell strategy versus periodically buying index funds? " Let me explain the barbell strategy, and I'm I'm paraphrasing Nassim Taleb, who's a wonderful author here. His barbell strategy was effectively you should take a ton of risk, and then be very risk-averse.
If I'm getting this wrong, cuz I don't have his book in front of me, it was like buy way out of the money call options, like very risky investments with part of your money, and then be in treasury bonds with the rest. Something along those lines. And I actually think as a index fund investor, that's effectively how I do invest, even though the mechanics are slightly different.
I don't buy super risky options, but I do have a lot of cash on one hand, and then I'm taking risks with the stocks that I own on the other. And I think you have to think about that barbell strategy of I'm a scaredy-cat and I'm very risk-seeking, and those two things really blend together because the only way that you can actually benefit from the risk that you're taking with the stocks that you own is to make sure that you have the psychological and financial cushion to absorb all of the volatility that we're all going to face in life. And so, I think too many people with their investments in particular want to be consistent.
They're either big risk-takers or they're not. And I think the only actual sane and rational way to think about it is right dead in the center. I want to be very risk-seeking and very paranoid about risk at the same time.
Which is how the economy works over time. Which is very fragile and very unpredictable in the short run, lots of surprise and setback, and enormous opportunity for those who can survive and endure it. And so, I think that's that's how I think about it in my own money.
This one from Bernardo. He says, "In 2025, Brazil uncovered one of the biggest financial scandals, the Banco Master case, in a case that was reminiscent of Bernie Madoff's fraud in the United States. What drives someone?
" he asked, "To risk everything, freedom, reputation, and their entire future for just a few years of extraordinary wealth and luxury? " A very difficult question because I think all these cases are very nuanced in how these people are thinking. And maybe the answer for a lot of these people is they're psychopaths.
Their brains are not thinking straight in the slightest. Like, that's probably the right answer. But, there's a very interesting, and I think good, book um by a guy named Roy Baumeister.
And the book is called Evil. And it's about the psychology of evil people, murderers and terrorists. Like, what is their psychology?
And of course, it's so common when you're analyzing someone like that to have a very visceral reaction of like, "Oh, because they're monsters and they're terrible. " But, it's true. Roy Baumeister is very good at calmly [snorts] taking a step back and being like, "What is going through the mind of a serial killer?
" Just what's going through the mind? And it's a very interesting book. One of the points that he makes early in the book is that evil is in the eye of the beholder.
And that most people, there are exceptions to this, but most people who commit an act that you and I would consider evil, in their minds when they committed that act, they did not think that they were doing something evil. They were able to justify the action or they weren't even thinking about the consequences of it and when they did it, they weren't thinking they were doing anything wrong. And there's a quote that I love from a a guy I used to work with at Marquel who says um what does it feel like when you're making a terrible decision?
And he said, it feels great. That's why you're doing it. And I think that's true for a lot of these financial criminals.
It's not that they think that they're taking enormous risk that's all going to blow up in their face a year from now and then they're going to spend the rest of their life in jail. I think a lot of them are extremely good at justifying their actions in a way that they genuinely do not think in their own head that they're doing anything wrong. I think that is true for a lot of them.
And of course they are extreme cases and lots of people are just sociopaths and terrible people. But I think all of us, me and you and every law-abiding person has a little bit like a tiny bit of that in us where we are very good at justifying our own actions even if someone else might look at that action and identify the bad things that might come from some of those actions. The people are very good at looking in the mirror and saying, I'm doing the right thing even if an outside observer can see all the flaws in what they're doing.
All right, next question. This one's from Philippe who says, What thing today are the richest people doing that the majority of people will be doing in the next 10 plus years? I love this question cuz there's this idea from the author Kevin Kelly that everything that rich people do will eventually kind of trickle down to the rest of society particularly in what they value.
There's always a trickle-down effect there. So the point of like European travel used to be the exclusive domain of the ultra-wealthy and then it kind of trickled down to lower classes. The same with like college education used to be the domain of very wealthy and now it's trickled down much further in society.
You can even say things like granite countertops and two-car garages and all these things that started as a rich person's pleasure trickle down to everything else. So, it's very interesting to look at what are wealthy people doing today, what behaviors and values do they have that might trickle down to other segments of society in the future. I think in many ways this is what's cool about AI is particularly for the assistants that are out there.
You can easily imagine, I'm not forget about 10 years ago like you like 10 years from now like you said, 10 months from now you could have everyday ordinary people cuz a lot of these products products are effectively free that have digital assistants that book their travel, that manage their schedules, that manage their medicines and like manage their doctor's appointments, that have all that. Managing their finances, managing their estate planning, managing their taxes. Things that a year ago were the exclusive domain of very wealthy people who could afford that now trickle down to other people.
Now, obviously there's a lot of risk and etc. with AI, but I think that's that's a huge democratization of information products that used to be very expensive now become very cheap if not effectively free. The other thing I thought about is how much a lot of wealthy people today want to shield their kids from kind of the horrors and the addictions of social media.
As people acknowledge like that's such a thing and how much of social media particularly for young kids has effectively been outsourced babysitting for the parents of the parents have to cook dinner and clean the house and like here's an iPad, go entertain yourself so I can take care of the rest of life. That a lot of wealthier parents today have much more stringent limits on screen time and whatnot. And you can easily imagine a society is in the process of waking up to the addictive aspects of social media that becomes a bigger and bigger thing.
That almost like a a status symbol of being a parent is raising kids who are not on screens all day. I could easily imagine that happening. All right, last question.
This one's from Sagar who says, "I have one question for you. Why do you do what you do and what can we learn from your journey? " Very broad question and I love these kind of things.
Thank you for the question. I think if there's one driving thing that drives kind of the work that I do, let's leave aside family and that kind of thing, it it's this idea of what percentage of thoughts that people have running through their heads are actually come out of their mouth or are written down. Like what percentage of what's going on in someone's head do we actually have a window into seeing?
And I think the answer is like a tiny fraction of 1%. And so if you could see inside of people's heads of what they were actually thinking, not what they were saying or writing down, but what they were actually thinking, you would see that the average person is 100 times smarter than they actually appear. They're 100 times more anxious than they actually appear.
They're 100 times funnier than they appear. They have all these thoughts that they never verbalize. And I think a big driver of what I do is I I just want to learn more about that that unsaid thought process that's going through my head, your head, everyone else's head.
I think we've just we we we have such a tiny little window into what people actually think. And the more that you can really dig into why they made this decision, why they feel this way, I think it's just a fascinating endeavor. And so I've never been interested in the technical aspects of money over where the where's the economy going to go next, where's the stock market going to go next.
I've always been very interested in how people think and how they justify their own actions and that's that's a lot of why I do what I do. All right, what's my recommendation? In my research for Mark Twain for this book chapter that I'm writing, two big sources.
One is Ken Burns, the great documentary filmmaker, wrote or uh published a very good documentary on Mark Twain many years ago. It is so so well done. Highly recommended that you go and watch it.
It's fantastic. And if you're a real enthusiast, this tome of a book by Ron Chernow on Mark Twain is incredible. And like so many of these very successful people, the books that he wrote and his life as an author, that is 1% of the interesting aspect of his life.
Most people who are that interesting in how they think and how they can communicate, gain that skill by having very tough, traumatic, [snorts] interesting lives. And so digging through the life of someone like that is always just fascinating. He was a character for the century.
It's It's very interesting. And that's all I got for you now. I'm going to be traveling [music] next week.
I don't think there's going to be an episode, but I'll see you the week after.
