[00:02:41] William Green: I’ll behave in some way that reminds me what a schmuck I am and how much work I still have to do. And so I sometimes think that. The ego just gets more cunning. So, there are really obvious ways in which we have ego when particularly, not just when we’re younger. I mean, I think about times where I had such a compulsion to say something that I knew was arrogant and ego filled, if you’re in a meeting with someone you want to impress and you tell them how well, your book is doing or your podcast is doing or, You know how much people love you or something someone said about you that was flattering, and you shouldn’t do it.

[00:03:18] William Green: And then you’re like, I just can’t help myself and so I think I’ve got a little bit better at not doing that. But then I think probably my ego just got kind of craftier and found other ways to express itself. So maybe then I can congratulate myself on being at a higher level. So I no longer boast about that stuff. And so then instead, I’m boasting about, being at a higher level and so my ego just tripped me up in a whole other way.

[00:03:41] Stig Brodersen: Wonderful. So, the same problem, just in a different form. Is that what you’re saying?

[00:03:46] William Green: Yeah, I mean, I often think that life is a bit like playing computer games, where you, not that I ever really played computer games, so the analogy, I may get wrong, but that sense that you keep getting to a slightly higher level, where, it’s like, okay, you aced that level, or you muddled through that level, or whatever, so the challenges just get bigger, so I don’t think there’s a sense that you ever really you overcome this stuff.

[00:04:11] William Green: I had a great teacher who taught me a really important lesson. I actually long after, several years after he died, I watched a video of him speaking for, called Rav Berg. He’s the father of Michael Berg, who is a guest on the podcast. And he said something about how you always have what they would call in certain translations from Hebrew, the evil inclination.

[00:04:29] William Green: There’s always this negative desire to do stuff just for your own ego, for your own self. The question is whether you bind it or not. And I found that incredibly helpful to hear because instead of then hoping, or sort of projecting onto other people and thinking, oh, they’re so superior, look how holy they are, and they’re not subject to these flaws, like, Lust, jealousy, greed, anger.

[00:04:53] William Green: It was a reminder that, no, we’re human, and so we’re all vulnerable to these things, and the question is really whether you bind them or not. That was very helpful to me. Rather than deluding myself into thinking that anyone really had nailed this stuff, all falling into the trap of self-loathing and despair, because I’m like, well, how come I still have all of these things?

[00:05:15] William Green: So, when someone who’s profoundly wise, like him, says something like that, that, no, we’re always going to have this evil inclination, you just bind it, I find that incredibly clarifying, so I’m always Tucking away these great insights from elders whether it’s him or Charlie Munger or Marcus Aurelius you know any of these people who seem to have figured something out and then at the same time aware that they’re flawed as well that they are subject to the same human floors that we have.

[00:05:43] Stig Brodersen: So thank you so much for sharing William I wanted to go into the first topic here today, which is about serving others. And I almost feel a bit bad about going this route after you’ve talked about Marcus Aurelius and Charlie Munger and getting enlightened. I’m going to start with McDonald’s as mission statement.it sounds so flat in comparison. So I’m going to take one step back and explain why we’re starting with this premise.

[00:06:10] Stig Brodersen: So it really starts from this idea of serving others and it’s probably no secret that TIP is a huge part of my life. And I very much started to think more about our podcasts, the other things we do here on TIP as a way of serving others, which might sound simple, but I found it’s very not simple.

[00:06:33] Stig Brodersen: And one of the first thing that came to mind was, I remember whenever I was a student, I was in business school. And then you learn that all companies should have a mission statement. And I remember thinking what a waste of time that was to talk about mission statements, because to me, it didn’t seem applicable at all.

[00:06:52] Stig Brodersen: Of course, whenever I was in that age and had no life experience and whatnot, and you look differently at the things, but let me read out here, McDonald’s has mission statement. Our mission is to make delicious feel good moments easy for everyone. Okay, that’s it. So, I don’t know if I’m going to offend anyone here working at McDonald’s, but you read that, and I don’t know if anyone is any wiser, and I don’t know If you work at McDonald’s, if you wake up in the morning and think about that mission statement, my best guess, it’s that it’s not something that gets you out, out of bed.

[00:07:26] Stig Brodersen: And really this whole idea about a mission statement really felt like it was just a bunch of corporate nonsense and something that the companies do because it sounds good, but not because they truly meant it. you can go back and look at some of Enron’s like their mission statement and you would, I don’t know, that didn’t age well.

[00:07:45] Stig Brodersen: Yeah. And so as irony, of course, would have it now that I’m offending everyone I can hear as I’m talking, I thought a lot about TIP’s misstatement over the past, I don’t know, 12 to 24 months and I want to take the opportunity to discuss this with you, William, about how to best serve others and what it means for the value investing community, because.

[00:08:06] Stig Brodersen: If I could take again, one step back, whenever we started TIP, Preston and I, so I could have come up with some kind of, I don’t know if this is beautiful, but I would probably come up with a mission statement. Like this is something I just typed up here. So educate and enrich the world about investing just like Warren Buffett or something like that.

[00:08:23] Stig Brodersen: But that was not how it happened at all. We didn’t start with that mission statement. Preston and I became friends and we thought it was fun to talk about Buffett on a podcast. That was it. We didn’t really go out and enrich the world. that was, at least I don’t, I can’t speak for Preston.

[00:08:38] Stig Brodersen: That was definitely not what I was thinking. And after a few years of making no money, we made just a little bit more than nothing, which is still, I should say very little. It wasn’t like it was enough by any means to sustain like a full time salary or anything like that. But Even at that time, I didn’t wake up and think to myself, how do I serve others?

[00:08:57] Stig Brodersen: I mean, I kind of feel like I’m going to come across as a, I don’t know if I’m going to come across like a bad person here, but you know, I had a teaching job whenever I started TIP. I love teaching. That was also one of the reasons why I wanted to do TIP, but I wouldn’t go to the local school and teach if they didn’t.

[00:09:12] Stig Brodersen: Pay me and I don’t think any of my co-workers would have done that. It was fun to teach, but I need to pay rent but you know, whenever I started making a bit more money, it was more like, hey, can I support my family with this money? Again, I would like to say. Man, if we just had this mission statement about serving others, like that would really drive me.

[00:09:31] Stig Brodersen: That was not what drove me. It was, oh, I can actually do this, which I really enjoyed doing it. And I can support my family. It was really only after reaching my financial goals that I started waking up thinking purpose. Like what is my, what’s the purpose of TIP? Why do we exist? Why should we exist? And I wanted to hear your journey with serving others.

[00:09:53] William Green: Well, I think much like you. I didn’t start out with a great sense of altruism and selflessness. I think that develops more as you get older. I mean, maybe it’s part of middle age that, you’re still in your thirties, right? I’m in my fifties.

[00:10:08] William Green: It may be that the ego kind of quietens down a bit. And you get increasingly interested in teaching and sharing ideas and stuff like that. Maybe it’s an evolutionary thing. There are people who know a hell of a lot more about evolution and biology and the like than I do. But maybe it’s just part of our purpose is we and our wiring.

[00:10:27] William Green: We start out in the early years being motivated by this kind of young, hungry, intense desire to get ahead and prove ourselves and compete. I was very much motivated by that for a very long time and there’s still an aspect of that’s still there, I mean if I can’t lie about that and deceive myself that I’ve risen above that, it’s not nearly as intense as it used to be, but I think a lot of my desire to succeed in my twenties and thirties was driven by pretty early.

[00:11:03] William Green: Low emotions and motivations, like wanting to prove to myself to people who had rejected me or, to teachers who had underestimated me, or professors who gave me bad grades, or editors who killed stories of mine, or even, I mean, I think there are things like Wanting to impress your parents, or wanting to prove that you’re lovable, or wanting to win the girl, or, prove that you’re, this macho provider who can succeed, and, I mean, do you remember there was that song from my youth, I don’t know if you’ve heard it, where the chorus is, Anger is an Energy, and there is energy, In these pretty selfish, self centered, fairly low motivations, and I harnessed it a lot.

[00:11:49] William Green: I mean, a terror of failure as well, a terror of mediocrity was a huge driver for me. And then, mixed in with that, was a desire to do work that was really good and a desire to make a difference in the world but it wasn’t very pronounced the desire to do good work was but I think that was more That was probably more ego filled.

[00:12:09] William Green: It was more wanting Approval admiration for everyone to look and say God, he’s talented God. He’s smart or whatever It wasn’t really it wasn’t really about service. And then I remember I was working at Time Magazine I’d edited the Asian edition of Time and I’d hired this amazing reporter, a guy called Aravind Adiga, who had come up to me when I was giving a talk at Columbia many years ago or was on a panel at Columbia.

[00:12:37] William Green: He said to me very awkwardly, I’m a writer and he gave me these clips from when he had been an intern at the Financial Times. And I end up looking at this stuff and I’m like, this guy’s unbelievably talented. And I got him to leave Columbia and go work at the magazine that I was working at the time.

[00:12:53] William Green: And then I got him to leave and move to Asia to work for Time Magazine there. And then eventually he quit Time Magazine and he wrote this book called The White Tiger. And he invited me as his plus one at the Booker Prize dinner, which is really the most important competition in, I guess, Commonwealth countries for a novelist.

[00:13:11] William Green: And so I was sitting there as his date on the evening of the Booker Prize party in London and Aravind won, and I remember this moment of just utter joy that this friend of mine who I’d sort of mentored and hired and helped over the years. Had won the book a prize and become kind of famous and you know meant I think is His book was like the most the fastest selling book in the first 40 years of the book a prize You know beating even people like Salman Rushdie and the like and I remember thinking.

[00:13:41] William Green: Oh, I actually have some altruism in me Like I actually am really happy for this friend of mine Instead of thinking, if someone else does really well, it somehow hurts me because it’s a zero sum game. And so I was probably 39, something like that then. And I remember being shocked and kind of happy and relieved at the idea that I was so happy for my friend.

[00:14:08] William Green: And so that gives you, that’s a sort of marker that something was starting to shift. And I guess earlier than that I had, I have kids who are 26 and 23, so in my late 20s, I remember when my son, Henry, was growing up, if he got bitten by a mosquito, his body would just sort of swell up and he’d look really uncomfortable.

[00:14:29] William Green: I remember we were living in Hong Kong, I remember, being in a room with a mosquito and thinking, I hope it bites me, not Henry. And so, so I guess earlier on I had this sense of like, oh, okay. So, I have great care for my kids and love for my kids. I’d rather suffer. such a small example, but again, it’s a mark of where you’re like, oh, this is one of the strange things about being a parent is You’d actually rather be the one who’s bitten than suffer.

[00:14:53] William Green: Such a small example, but kind of emblematic. Than have your kids suffer. So there’s some sort of awakening of something where you care more about other people than just yourself when you have kids. But then when I see Aravind succeed, I’m like, okay, so it’s gone like a little bit beyond just my immediate family.

[00:15:12] William Green: And then I think as you get older, maybe also if you’re fortunate enough to succeed a bit or get to a point where you’re a little more comfortable financially or professionally, so you’re not coming from such a fearful place of lack where you think, where you’re so worried that if someone else does well, it’s going to somehow hurt you, that there’s not enough cake to go around.

[00:15:33] William Green: So that helped, I think, when I started to become more successful, that helped. But then everything kind of fell apart when I was about 40, because I was editing the European, Middle East and African edition of Time and then got laid off during the financial crisis. So that kind of fed that sense of lack.

[00:15:48] William Green: And then I’d say sort of in my fifties, once things started to go well, and my book had done well, I felt more comfortable and more secure. It was much easier to focus on serving other people. And so I think. In some ways, it’s a really good illustration of the quote that Buffet and Munger would always cite from Ben Franklin, where he said, an empty sack can’t stand straight.

[00:16:11] William Green: And so I think it’s really hard to be of service when you feel kind of empty yourself, when you’re afraid that you’re not going to be okay, that there’s not going to be enough. I mean, that’s a slightly long winded way of explaining an aspect of my trajectory. And then I would say one of the things that was revelatory to me that really helped me put all of this in context was I read a book called The Wisdom of Truth by a great Kabbalistic sage called Rav Yehuda Ashlag, and I mean, I’ve dipped into this book, hundreds of times.

[00:16:44] William Green: It’s a really important book to me. And he was this, he was one of these people who sort of saw everything, and could explain things where he would just say, this is the purpose of your soul, this is the purpose of your life, this is what you’re put on this earth to do. And you would look at it and you’d be like, huh, well that’s pretty clarifying.

[00:16:59] William Green: Someone like David Hawkins does the same sort of thing where he just says, this is how the world works, and either you believe it or you don’t, but with Rav Ashlag, and also with Hawkins, I tend to believe their explanations. And so what I’ve actually explained is that there’s this kind of trajectory for each of us where we start off with what he would call the desire to receive for the self alone, which is this kind of this sort of small ego.

[00:17:24] William Green: That’s like me, looking out for yourself. He uses the phrase selfish love, so it’s like, it’s just wanting to be okay. it’s wanting to get ahead, wanting to beat others, wanting honor, wanting respect, wanting everything for me. And then he said, gradually, we’re in this process where we transform that desire to receive the self alone.

[00:17:45] William Green: Into the desire to receive for the sake of sharing and this for me was very revelatory it’s a great stage to explaining in very clear terms that this process you’re going through where you start off just looking out for yourself essentially. It’s going to have to change. You’re going to have to elevate yourself somehow so that you share with others more.

[00:18:08] Stig Brodersen: You know, I was really, I had this conversation with Mohnish, it must be at least a few months ago, because I remember us talking about whether or not we would meet up in Omaha.

[00:18:20] Stig Brodersen: So it would have to be before Omaha. Yes. Sherlock Holmes. That was probably it but really what stuck with me was Mohnish asked me and I said that I didn’t plan to go and also, I didn’t want to go. And he, like, I, I gave him like a song and a dance about, no, it’s overwhelming 24 hours to get there.

[00:18:40] Stig Brodersen: It’s not really my scene. I get a bit of excited around crowds, yada, yada, yada. And then, and Mohnish said to me, that was the wrong way to think about it. Like it was, I came from like, and I’m going to paraphrase here, but it was basically coming from like this mindset of scarcity. And instead turning the tables and say that I should be going to Omaha to elevate others in the value investing community, just like the value investing community have been elevating us.

[00:19:06] Stig Brodersen: And I kind of felt it was such a beautiful way of looking at something, turning something around. And I think the, well, the first thing I probably want to conclude is that Manish is a better person than me, but I also think he’s absolutely right, because what makes you happy doesn’t always make you happy while you do it.

[00:19:22] Stig Brodersen: And sometimes serving others just don’t fall into that bucket. And let’s say one example could be some aspects of parroting that could fall into that bucket. And if you have purpose, you can do many things that are not fun in the short term. And it’s something that I’ve increasingly been thinking of as I’m going through my own journey of wanting to serve others and understanding where other people are coming from.

[00:19:49] Stig Brodersen: We’re six hosts across the podcast network here by TIP. And I found that I’ve increasingly have been talking about how can we serve others? how can we point this podcast or newsletter or whatever it is we do, how can we point that towards more service? And that’s being received in different ways, I would say, and also think it’s important to understand where the recipient is coming from.

[00:20:15] Stig Brodersen: You know, if I speak with Clay and Kyle, for example, who also hosting this podcast about how we’ve been elevated by the value investing community and how we should make sure to elevate the community too, in return as a way of almost like a karma, like you’re supposed to pay back. It makes a lot of sense to them.

[00:20:34] Stig Brodersen: And it’s not like they’re going to say. That doesn’t align with my key performance indicator for my annual bonus. Like it makes sense to them because they like, they are like, they understand the ethos around Warren Buffett. He’s teaching the next generation and so on and so forth.

[00:20:49] Stig Brodersen: And it makes them excited. But then the other hand, a big part of our team is also in the Philippines and I also think it should, we need to be realistic, or I need to be realistic about whenever I talk about that purpose, I started off like from the very top about like McDonald’s purpose, like, is that something that’s going to make everyone excited?

[00:21:08] Stig Brodersen: So if I went to the Philippines to visit our team there, which I do from time to time, and then said, could you rally behind, like get up early in the morning and work hard to elevate people in the value investing community? I wouldn’t fault them for thinking, well, so, okay. So people who are into value investing commute, okay.

[00:21:25] Stig Brodersen: So it’s mainly relative the rich people in the West who want to accumulate skills to become even richer. Like that’s probably not like the rally cry, like you’re really looking for it. as a corporation, it probably isn’t, it doesn’t sound good. Like when you put it on a website, like McDonald’s is what’s like, but you also have to be a bit realistic about.

[00:21:45] Stig Brodersen: Like where are people coming from? And so perhaps then, you find a different purpose and you have to mean it. you talked about Hawkins before, like you can’t fake some, like you, you have to be very sincere about it. But you know, in that case, you might speak to them more about like how we’re taking some of our profits and funnel into different local charities and how we improve society a bit more to that side than perhaps saying.

[00:22:09] Stig Brodersen: It’s going to sound bad, but yeah, let’s make rich people richer. Not everyone can like rally behind that and so, and of course that’s still about service, and about serving others. And so I wanted to share that. I want to back over to you here, William.

[00:22:24] William Green: Well, there are a few thoughts I have about that. One is just an observation about Mohnish, which I think I may have shared with you before privately or possibly on, on the podcast. Where I remember going to, I remember going to Omaha years ago and I would sit next to, I would always sit next to Mohnish and Guy Spier, who are close friends, and I remember walking out of the annual meeting, I guess at lunchtime towards the Marriott Hotel across the way, and I remember watching Mohnish sort of swaggering out, and he’s like a big kind of imposing, impressive guy, and he’s got this luxury and mustache and, he’s charismatic and everyone, wanted to see him.

[00:23:04] William Green: And it was a little bit shocking for me the first time to see that there was almost like this rock star effect. And then over the years, I would see money change in his bearing. At the annual meeting and I think I talked to him about this when I had him on my podcast and I told him I had seen this that we had dinner a couple of years ago on the Saturday night after the Berkshire Hathaway AGM, and I could just see that swagger had gone and there was a kind of greater gentleness and quietness and kindness and focus on other people.

[00:23:43] William Green: And I was really struck by it. I was like, oh, this guy has changed and I asked him about it. And he said, well, there are all of these people who come to the Berkshire Hathaway meeting and they don’t have access to Warren and Charlie. And I have access to Warren and Charlie, right? He would go to the brunch on the Sunday that they would host and stuff like that.

[00:24:02] William Green: And so he was sort of part of this inner circle, and he would go to a private dinner that Charlie had, and he’d get to see people like, Bill Gates and the like and he said, there are all these other people who don’t have access, and the closer, and the closest they’re going to get is to me and if I can help them to have a really wonderful weekend.

[00:24:21] William Green: That’s a great thing and so I’m here to be in service to them. And I thought that was such a lovely thing. It showed a kind of maturing and a kindness that he was working on himself. I found that very inspiring and I think that was partly the influence of seeing Warren and Charlie and seeing how they served others as well.

[00:24:40] William Green: That they were there, these guys who just spent an enormous amount of time sharing their ideas in a generous, selfless way. And so that had a knock on effect. It influenced Mohnish to do the same. And Mohnish’s behavior makes you go strong. When you see someone behave like that, it makes you go strong in David Hawkins terms.

[00:24:59] William Green: And you’re like, oh, I want more of that. I want to be more like that as well. So, I don’t know, I think there’s something kind of lovely about seeing the trajectory of these very successful people and seeing them continue to work on themselves. And then in Mohnish’s case, again, I mean, maybe it does get back to that Franklin observation about how an empty sack can’t stand straight, but because Mohnish had kind of won the game, he’d become very wealthy, he’d become a sort of mentee of Charlie Munger’s and stuff, and he had this amazing charitable foundation, Dakshana, that lifts thousands of people out of poverty.

[00:25:36] William Green: He was coming from a place of abundance, and so he felt good about himself. And so he could share, but it’s also complicated. He’d also gone through a painful divorce and the like. So maybe his ego had been crushed a bit. And so there’s also, your ego does get crushed. And at the same time, you sort of elevate a bit and you learn from other people who are good role models about what, what works and you try to become less selfish, I think.

[00:26:01] William Green: And so he’s been a great example of watching his trajectory has been great. And this is. This is one of the reasons why it’s fun to sort of keep coming back to the same people, like I interviewed Manish years and years ago in California, and then I traveled with him for five days in India for the book, and then to keep coming back to see him in Omaha and see the way he’s changing.

[00:26:23] William Green: It’s been really inspiring and sort of, I don’t know, kind of, kind of impressive. I keep wanting to ask you, and I know you’ve talked about this before, but I don’t know if you’ve, I don’t think you’ve ever talked to me about it explicitly. I remember that you ended up investing with Mohnish and that, of all the people you’ve had on the podcast, he’s the one you ended up investing with. And I’m just wondering what it is about him, both as an investor, but also as a person that in a sense made you go strong, that made you want to be in his orbit.

[00:26:55] Stig Brodersen: That’s a big question, William, but I’ll be happy to share. So I think that track record is one, you have to show a good record over a period of time, preferably at least two decades.

[00:27:08] Stig Brodersen: He runs a pretty concentrated portfolio, typically 10 names. We all shaped by our experiences and I’ve heard people also here on the podcast say that they’re concentrated investors and they have 40 positions or 80 positions. So I think concentration is different for everyone. I own five stocks and sometimes feel I’m a bit too diversified.

[00:27:31] Stig Brodersen: So it very much depends on like how you’re looking at this. And so. I wanted to invest with someone who were quote unquote concentrated because I wanted the access to the best ideas, not to the 80th best idea. And I wanted to hedge against myself. We started talking about ego. It doesn’t come easy to me.

[00:27:49] Stig Brodersen: I think naturally to have a small ego, but I think life has made me humble so many times that it’s gotten a little easier with every passing year. And so I like to think that I’m right about my investments. I could be wrong about all five stocks in my portfolio, and I like to hedge against myself by investing with someone else.

[00:28:08] Stig Brodersen: And I think that there’s an element of if we ran this experiment a thousand times, I think that mine is a strike record would be better than mine. And I think that I think we would have to look through that lens as well. I should say for the record, I think mine is a wonderful human being, but I don’t think I put a huge emphasis on that whenever.

[00:28:29] Stig Brodersen: I chose an asset manager and I only chose one. Now it was very important to me that the asset manager couldn’t be a terrible person, but I think like if I could invest with an asset manager that was like a 10 out of 10 on a personality value scale, but a subpar investor compared to being eight out of 10 on wonderful values, I think I would probably have gone the better investor route, even though that probably doesn’t reflect well on me.

[00:28:53] Stig Brodersen: And then I think there was also just, staying in the whole value investing community thing. I like to think that I would be able to sniff out if quote unquote, money’s lost it. And I don’t know how to best other quantify that, I before being invested in stocks, that was clearly outside my circle of competence.

[00:29:12] Stig Brodersen: I couldn’t see it was outside of my circle of competence because I didn’t understand it well enough, but I think I, I understand what minus is doing well enough to see if he doesn’t have it anymore, which I think is a very important component of any investment thesis. So that was the short version, believe it or not, William.

[00:29:33] William Green: No, it’s very interesting. It’s and I think it’s helpful to people to hear your thought process about these things. I have a slightly. I don’t know if it’s irrational or if it’s intuitive or whatever. I have a different set of filters in addition, I think, to that. And so the people I’ve ended up investing with on the whole are very concentrated and very patient.

[00:29:55] William Green: And they’re very much in the Munger school of spear fishermen of waiting patiently for a mispriced bet, then grabbing that opportunity with what Munger called gumption, and then going back to sitting on their hands for a long time, just reading, studying other ideas and not doing anything. So, I have the same kind of philosophy as you, I think, in that sense of liking people who understand that they can’t know that much about that many things, so they’ve got to be concentrated.

[00:30:23] William Green: But the most part although there are different ways of winning the game obviously many different ways of winning the game but that one sort of suits me temperamentally and intellectually but then I also really think about do I want that person in my life does this manager? Seem like someone I actually want in my life And I give a really, I think probably an unusual amount of weight to that.

[00:30:51] William Green: And so, I don’t know, I mean, I’m always a bit reticent to talk about people I’ve invested with, because I don’t want it to seem like an endorsement or anything and lead people astray, but, like I invested with Chris Begg, for example, who I had as a guest on the podcast. He has a very concentrated portfolio and he’s very smart and he’s not asset gathering, but I also just really like him.

[00:31:12] William Green: I’m also aware of the fact that my judgment can be poor. So I diversify again. I’m hedging against myself. So if I’m wrong in one bet, it’s not going to sink me, God forbid. But also, I want to spend more time with Chris. I really like him. I went to see him in Costa Rica and spent time with him in Costa Rica, and I’ll go see him I met him in New York, and I’ll go see him in Massachusetts, where he has a home, so part of it is actually seeing people who I want in my life. Same with my friend Josh Tarasoff, who I ended up investing with years ago, who also runs a concentrated portfolio. But it’s just like a very calm, decent, honorable person. And so, I don’t know that, so the quality of the human being matters a great deal to me.

[00:32:00] William Green: And then at the same time, I’m also aware that one of my behavioral flaws or vulnerabilities is that I look for the best in people and that makes me extremely vulnerable to making poor judgments of people’s character. And so I have to be careful about the risk of projecting onto a fund manager qualities that I wish they had that maybe are my own self-delusion.

[00:32:28] William Green: But so, despite that caveat and that reticence, that distrust of my own judgment, I take really seriously that idea of, I, I’m almost collecting people, not funds, and I only have a small number, but they’re people that I trust, and you can see it with their fee structure, you can see it from their habits, you can see it from what they read, you can see it from who they hang out with, And if there’s someone who is like really good at making money, but kind of an ass, I actually just wouldn’t want them in my life.

[00:32:58] William Green: I wouldn’t want them in my portfolio.

[00:33:01] Stig Brodersen: I love that you say that, William, and I have a story to that. So this was something that happened to me here recently, and I, and this is the ego talking again now, so please bail with me, William. So, I sometimes get offers in terms of people wanting to invest with me.

[00:33:17] Stig Brodersen: And I always say no, and I could make significantly more money managing assets than running TIP. And I’m pretty sure I would have jumped at the chance 10 years ago if someone would, but as irony would have it, whenever no one knows you and you don’t have a track record, no one wants to mess with you.

[00:33:36] Stig Brodersen: So your opportunity set, of course also changes. And so, and I felt like I was a little. lost, especially earlier this year. and I found it to some extent to be a bit tempting to take some of that money. So what happened to me here recently was that I was doing business with someone. It’s not someone who is part of TAP and it was a business relationship where I felt that it perhaps wasn’t a win.

[00:34:01] Stig Brodersen: And I had a conversation with him about it. He didn’t really understand where I was coming from. And I was kind of like worried about telling him what basically what I’m telling you now, William, and the rest of the world. It was like, I could choose like the money and hate my life, or I can choose to work with TIP and not make as much money, but still decent money.

[00:34:19] Stig Brodersen: And since I’ve done that, I only want good relationships in my life. And he looked at me and he was like, I’m paraphrasing here, but he was like, life is a grind. You it’s gone. It’s tough. You have to make money and you have to pay rent and then you hustle. And perhaps you lie a bit and you try to, no.

[00:34:34] Stig Brodersen: Like what? Like what are you telling me? And so it will be easy for me to judge that person and say, you have flawed values. But I also think starting here at the very top of our conversation here, William, and talking about our own journey, About service. It’s easy to have principles whenever you can afford them.

[00:34:54] Stig Brodersen: It’s easy to say, no, I don’t need, let me just use generic number. I don’t need 3 million a year. I can get by with half a million dollars a year. Poor me. And there’s someone out there that’s like, yeah, but if you’re making half a million, like it’s the same as 3 million, but it’s not necessarily the same if you make half a million dollars and it’s going to, obviously these generic numbers, and it’s going to make me sound like a bit of a jerk, but I think it’s very.

[00:35:18] Stig Brodersen: I think there’s something to be said about like you’re changing your opportunity set all the time. And you meeting other people who have different experiences and never see things a different way. And don’t judge others. If they feel that if they don’t have the, I don’t know what the word I’m looking for here. Don’t judge others. If you feel that they have a floor principles, but perhaps to your point, William don’t have those people in your pulpit.

[00:35:43] William Green: Yeah, I think you’ve got to be very careful about who you have in your ecosystem because if we go back to that insight that we talked about before, which is that we all have ego.

[00:35:52] William Green: We all have the, I don’t really like the words, but it translates as the evil inclination. we all have this desire to do lousy stuff. The question is, how do you bind it? And so if you put yourself in an environment where you’re surrounded by really good people, you’re less likely to give strength to the part of yourself.

[00:36:14] William Green: That’s a little bit more base and a little bit self-interested and a little bit more morally flexible and likewise you think of Buffett talking about how he never wanted to get in debt because he didn’t want to see what he was capable of. And so I think to put yourself in a situation you’re not overreaching financially you live within your means you don’t take on a ridiculous amount of debt so you don’t have to.

[00:36:40] William Green: You don’t have to be tempted to do things that maybe are unethical, or that you would be ashamed of later, or that require a compromise in your values. I worked on one book project, you and I have talked about this before, where I had a feud with the guy who had hired me to do it, and I just really disliked him.

[00:36:59] William Green: And he sort of threatened me at one point financially, and Mohnish said to me, if you had more money, you would have told him in, using expletives in the way that Mohnish would, you would have told him where to go. And in fact, it turned out to be an amazing project for me in many ways, and I’m glad that I’m glad that I stuck with it and that I didn’t tell him where to go.

[00:37:20] William Green: But it’s true that if I had more money at the time and I, I had kids in private school and I had very expensive rent and stuff like that. And I was sort of still rebuilding from that period after the financial crisis when I’d lost my job as an editor and the like, I don’t know. I would at least have had the choice to get this guy out of my life.

[00:37:40] William Green: And I’ve not really talked to him since. I’ve thanked him for the fact that actually he was a good force in my life and he helped to put me in on a good path in certain ways. But, the people who’ve treated me really decently and really kindly, I keep going back to those people, it’s like Munger talking about the seamless web of deserved trust, when you find people who, Just behave really well and who look out for your best interests and who you trust and who are really high quality people like why would I want my ecosystem to have lower quality people and that sounds like really judgmental and it’s not really meant to be it’s an it’s bad term say low quality because again there’s a really beautiful insight from Rav Ashlag who I quoted before who said We’re all like unripened fruit.

[00:38:31] William Green: And so we’re just at different stages in our ripeness and we’re all ripening. I mean, just, I don’t think I was a terrible human being in my early years of my career for wanting to get ahead and prove myself and work hard and get financial stability and be able to support my young children and the like, I was looking out for myself and my family.

[00:38:53] William Green: I wasn’t a terrible human being, but I, there was a, there was an element of unripeness. And now in my fifties, there’s an element of unripeness. And I hope, 20 years from now I’ll look back and be like, wow, I’m a much kinder and more decent human being. And I’ve, I’ve found that much more of my own ego and negativity.

[00:39:14] Stig Brodersen: William, I’d like to continue talking a bit more about this idea of serving others. And as the list, I can probably tell by now it’s, I’m definitely a work in progress. So this is going to be my disclaimer and my excuse. So before your flight takes off, you’re told that in case of emergency, are you supposed to put on your oxygen mask on yourself before you put it on your child or whoever’s sitting next to you?

[00:39:35] Stig Brodersen: And I think that’s such a beautiful metaphor for so many things in life, whether it’s diet or Any of your relationship that, that comes to mind, then I feel so privileged and lucky to be hosting this show. And I would like to say it’s because, it’s because of me and I’m just super smart that we now crossed 170 million.

[00:39:55] Stig Brodersen: I think you would probably find that most of the growth you had was after I left the microphone and. We had, we teamed up with William and other hosts instead. I should also just make this game or we’re super lucky to be starting in 2014, setting up the same show today would give us close to zero listeners compared to what it used to, but you know, reaching so many people as we have, I found it to be ironically, I found it harder to build relationships.

[00:40:19] Stig Brodersen: But it was actually very easy in the beginning, because whenever you have like tens and tens of listeners, you get so excited about people emailing you and you’re like, oh, let’s jump on the call. That’s like, you’re a new best friend. But I get thousands of emails and this is probably me complaining.

[00:40:36] Stig Brodersen: It doesn’t sound nice, but I think it’s, I think it’s tricky. I remember whenever I was a kid and there was someone, That I’d looked up to and someone to get, I wanted to get in contact with and how much it hurt if they ignored me. And I really don’t want to ignore people. And so it might be like, how do you respond to a thousand emails?

[00:40:54] Stig Brodersen: Yes, there is, of course, and there’s an element of delegation and some people on the team are much better with emails than I am, but I also wanted to mention our mastermind community and what a gift it has been for us, but also that there’s a, I think that there is an element of guilt there I wanted to talk a bit about.

[00:41:11] Stig Brodersen: So one of the wonderful things in life is to build relationships. And it’s hard to build relationships with a thousand people at the same time. What I really like about a mastermind community is the ability to meet up in person away from the crowds for my benefit, but meet up in person and, but also, we mainly like meet virtually and, but you meet the same people week after week and month after month.

[00:41:35] Stig Brodersen: So you get to like, you get to know people. And it’s a small community that in our mastermind community. So by definition, you, you don’t get to serve as many as you would, if it’s on the podcast and it goes out to a 170 million or whatever it is, but you can also serve them better because you get to know them in different way.

[00:41:54] Stig Brodersen: That’s going to be my disclaimer to, to do that. And I. I don’t know how to solve that. I think for me to some extent, the mastermind community that we have here has been a bit of an oxygen mask for me. And I should say the biggest oxygen mask that I have on has been the relationship with the other members of the team.

[00:42:11] Stig Brodersen: Cause I feel I get energized by building. These deep relationships with people who share the same values, whereas I get flustered whenever I go to these places and they’re like thousands of people. And everyone’s like going around for two seconds and hi, who are you? Like, I just, I can’t do that. But then the other end of the spectrum, if I, it would sit at home, just speak into a microphone and I don’t get to engage with all the people that through email.

[00:42:39] Stig Brodersen: I also think, I was, I could feel like some time ago that. It drained me and it didn’t put me in a good state to be that removed from other people. And so, William, I actually, this was my very long handoff to you because I know you have something that you’re working on outside of the Richard Weiser Happier podcast that you call Richard Weiser Happier Masterclass.

[00:43:00] Stig Brodersen: And I think I wanted to, Approach that from the angle of how does that speak into this idea of serving others? And how do you struggle with this where you don’t serve as many people? It’s going to be a small group, just like what I mentioned before, but you also build deeper relationships, but then you’re also kind of excluding all the people who could be. Getting some of that content to learn from that content. How do you give me the equation, William? I guess that’s what I’m trying to ask you.

[00:43:30] William Green: Yeah, I think a lot about this conflict that on the one hand, you want to reach a very large number of people because there’s someone out there in the middle of nowhere, who’s going to hear something.

[00:43:41] William Green: And it’s going to affect them in some amazing way and on the other hand, you want to have good face to face rich relationships with people who, you can hear about their issues, what they’re working with, and you can really help them. And so, this isn’t an either or, it’s a yes and, you want both.

[00:44:02] William Green: You want to go wide and you want to go deep and the podcast is a beautiful way to go wide. I mean, I had a lovely lunch a couple of weeks ago with a doctor who’d written to me. Multiple times to ask to meet. He’s a fan of the podcast and the book and I’m always distracted and I’m juggling too much, but I was like, actually, as it happens tomorrow, I can meet for lunch in the city, Saturday afternoon and we went out for a really nice lunch.

[00:44:30] William Green: He told me that there was something, I guess it was in an episode where I was talking about Mohnish and I did this long riff about the most important lessons I’d learned from David Hawkins, and I mentioned a book that has a couple of pages, I think it’s called Transcending the Ladder of Consciousness or something like that, and this guy had got that book and it had really changed his life, like, that’s the most wonderful thing, right, to have this sense that there’s someone out there Who’s heard something, and he’s acted on it, and that’s actually had a really profound effect, and it had affected his marriage, which had been going through a difficult period, and it had really helped him get back on track, and he’s a very high quality, really kind of special guy, and so to feel like the podcast can reach something, someone like that, who I never even knew existed until we happened to have lunch, That’s a very beautiful thing.

[00:45:21] William Green: I love that but so the thing that you and I have been discussing is, how do you go in the opposite direction and not just have that broad reach, but how you actually in a way, create these concentric circles where you have that very broad circle, but then you have this sort of more intimate circle where there’s a handful of people That you meet and you talk to about these ideas and so the thing that I ended up deciding I wanted to do that I guess I started talking to you about and you initially were skeptical and then you were like, actually, that’s a really good idea.

[00:45:52] William Green: Maybe we should do this so that you and I think this is always the way I think you always start skeptical and then I wonder if I’m on to a stupid idea and then you’re like, no, actually, this is great. We should do this. So the thing we decided that we wanted to create it. is a richer, wiser, happier masterclass that is really intimate.

[00:46:09] William Green: And so the plan that I’ve hatched, and I’ll be, I’m very open to hearing what people would find helpful because it’s at a very early stage, but it’s going to happen. And it’s, I’m really excited about it. It’s basically to have a minimum of about 10 people and a maximum of 20, possibly 22. And it would be a year long journey where we would have discussions about the book, Richer, Wiser, Happier, and the topics that I explored in the book and how I’ve continued to think about them and build on them because of the podcast and other things that I’ve been reading and thinking about and studying.

[00:46:45] William Green: And so because the book, I think, is an introduction and then eight chapters and then an epilogue, so ten different sections, I figured what I would do to keep it simple is to have ten Zoom sessions over the course of a year that are probably, 90 minutes to 120 minutes each where we would, the 10 people or the 20 people would get on a zoom call.

[00:47:07] William Green: I would talk about some of these themes and then we’d discuss them and they would be open to questions. and in addition to that. There’s going to be a book launch for the paperback edition of the book on January 7th. So I was thinking, okay, so I’ll have a day in New York on January 7th, where people come have lunch with me, who are in that master class, and then I’ll invite them to the book launch party that evening, that probably is going to be in a, fancy private club like the rack and tennis club of New York where which is actually where I first became friends with guy spear and then also we would do what clay and I hosted this wonderful Jeffersonian dinner on the night of the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting in Omaha Jeffersonian dinner is something where you just have one conversation all of you are just having one conversation so there are no side conversation.

[00:47:55] William Green: So you’re all involved in the same conversation. So the other aspect of this masterclass is that we’ll have a dinner like that on the night of the Birch Hathaway annual meeting. So that’s what, so that’s 12 different contacts over the course of a year with a small group of really high quality, really interesting kind of passionate investors, learners, people who are interested in.

[00:48:19] William Green: In the book, in the podcast, in the ideas that we’re exploring, people who are interested in how to become, not just richer, but wiser and happier. And it’s a really interesting experiment to me. to give a sense of how I’ve been thinking about this, one of the things that I initially said to Stig is, should I also have a private call with each of those people?

[00:48:39] William Green: And Stig was like, well, that’ll get out of hand, because everyone will want to talk for like two hours, and it’ll become unbearable for you, and it’ll just be too much. And then as I’m driving in this morning to my office to record this, I’m thinking, well, actually, I’d to have a private call with each of those people, because this is a journey of, not for two hours, which would be unmanageable for me, but it is a journey over the course of a year.

[00:49:01] William Green: And the reason it appeals to me is you do have the capacity to change your life in there to actually help people in this very personal way. And I sort of feel, I don’t know, that’s, that to me is a kind of beautiful thing that process of learning together, discussing things together, being on an intellectual journey together.

[00:49:20] William Green: But that also in some ways is a spiritual journey, because you’re all kind of figuring out how to live, how do we live better? How do we make sense of our lives? How do we help each other? That’s a beautiful process to me. And so that’s why the idea appeals to me so much.

[00:49:34] William Green: And it’s an experiment. I’m, I mean, initially Stig and I were talking about, maybe we do it. Twice a year, we jam it in over two or three months. I’m like, no, I actually, I’m too scattered. I’m doing too many things, juggling too many things. And as, Stig said, plan one, not kill William.

[00:49:50] William Green: So, but also, I want it to stretch out over a year, so it’s more of a journey. So I’m sort of thinking, maybe I should do this once, and never again, and it’s just an experiment or maybe it turns out to be a really fun and interesting thing that really helps people. And we do it more than once. And so, I didn’t mean this to sound like, an ad for it, and I hope it doesn’t come across that way, but if it appeals to anyone out there, and I’ve only really talked about it with friends so far, so there, there are several friends who are like, Yeah, I want to do it.

[00:50:21] William Green: And they’re really interesting people. I mean, money managers and professional gamblers and the like, and, like serious, interesting people. But if you’re interested, I think my right stick that the best thing is probably to write to Kyle Grieve, our co-host, who’s in charge of the logistics, because if I plan it.

[00:50:38] William Green: It will happen in about 2083 where Kyle is. I think it’s kyle@theinvestorspodcast.com. The basic plan is to start probably at the start of November, given my schedule. And then it would be roughly, once a month, the call of a zoom. The meeting in New York on January 7th for lunch and dinner and, this launch party for the book, then in Omaha for the annual meeting and just continuing on this journey over the year.

[00:51:07] William Green: So, I don’t know, I hope people are interested in it. If it’s fewer than 10 people, I won’t do it, but we’re also going to cap it. 2022 or something so it is a sort of intimate special kind of one off thing.

[00:51:21] Stig Brodersen: Wonderful William thank you for sharing I wanted to continue this conversation about building relationships. I think it was Guy who introduced us. [Crosstalk]

[00:51:30] William Green: I was one of the guests on your podcast back when you had about 12 listeners.

[00:51:36] Stig Brodersen: Wonderful. Thank and thank you, William. Yeah.

[00:51:38] William Green: It’s a pleasure.

[00:51:39] Stig Brodersen: Yeah. But you know, I remember whenever we started working together, like more formally, like a few years ago, I want to say, and. I remember you said to me at the time, which I was originally a bit confused about, you said, oh, we should probably like chat once a month or, and I was a bit confused because my first thought is what should we talk about?

[00:51:59] Stig Brodersen: One of my strengths, but certainly also my weakness. It’s very often comes in pair. Like I’m very mechanical. I’m just wired that way. And so for example, we, William, we talked previously about how we read books and I just read cover to cover. It’s very difficult for me not to read cover to cover.

[00:52:14] Stig Brodersen: I know like you can, you’re much, much better than me. You can stop reading books and you can go back and forth and all of that. And I go the same way. And so I would go into. Every meeting I have with an agenda and not like, not in the Machiavellian way of like, hey, I have an agenda of like angle shooting you and like, no, that’s not my pipe.

[00:52:35] Stig Brodersen: But like, I would even this interview, but this conversation, but I would go and be like, okay, so we have so and so many bullet points. And then we have sub bullet points. And then we have takeaways. Like, I’m just. I’m wired that way. I can’t read a book without having like a note system with three different indexes.

[00:52:52] Stig Brodersen: And it’s absolutely terrible, but for whatever reason, it makes sense to me. And so whenever you mentioned this to me, William, I remember I was confused because I’ve noticed that others sometimes say, let’s just stay in touch. And then typically what happens is that you never hear that person again.

[00:53:09] Stig Brodersen: Perhaps they’re just trying to be nice, but you mentioned it so many times and then you’ve stopped with what’s my end of, I probably just not that interesting to speak to, but I wanted to open up the conversation with you about how you form. Relationships, how you go into a call with an agenda, not to have an agenda.

[00:53:29] Stig Brodersen: And then at the same time, you also want to live a life of traction, but then you also want to build beautiful relationships. And so how do you juggle all of that? Yes.

[00:53:41] William Green: I juggled it really badly. I mean, one of the things that happens is that I have this fantasy that I’m Of a simple, easy, calm life of subtraction, where I’ve reduced all of the complexity, and I write about this in Ritualize the Happier, I talk about it on the podcast, I talk about it in speeches, and then there’s like this cosmic joke that I keep adding.

[00:54:08] William Green: New layers of complexity. And so, for example, I mean, a few weeks ago after we had talked about setting up the masterclass, the, I was thinking, well, it’s insane. Why would I add yet another layer of complexity to my life? Because everything I do, I’m obsessive and I sort of fanatical and I want it to be great and to add a lot of value.

[00:54:30] William Green: And then we decide, okay, so we shouldn’t have those individual phone calls with the people in the masterclass because that will add yet another layer of complexity and make my life that much more crazy. And then I’m like, yeah, but I want to add more value to those people and really have an impact. So I should do it.

[00:54:48] William Green: And if that’s my instinct, give them more value and to help more. I should trust that and I should do it. So I’m constantly caught up in this conflict between this fantasy of wanting a simple, clean, calm life and the reality which is I keep adding more complexity to my life. And one of the challenges with this is that I’m not very linear.

[00:55:12] William Green: I’m not very structured. And so my approach, which has sort of worked for me over the years is In a kind of sequential way to deal with one, one project or one deadline at a time in a maniacal way, so I surround the topic, whether it’s that I’m going to interview someone or I’m preparing for a speech or for a master class or editing something or writing something, I’m maniacally focused.

[00:55:42] William Green: On it’s almost like this spotlight this floodlight focuses on that and then I bring that thing to fruition or at least as close as I can you know maybe I finish editing a chapter and then I start preparing for a podcast episode or a conversation with you and then I move on to something else. And that sort of works for me, but it’s quite a stressful way to live, because I’m also traditionally always harnessing my anxiety, and my fear of failure, and my fear of doing something mediocre.

[00:56:12] William Green: So it’s often not very joyful, because I’m so busy being maniacal in my preparation for everything. But it sort of worked, but I’m trying to evolve and update that strategy, so I’m still being a maniac in the intensity with which I prepare for everything, and work on everything, and try to make everything good.

[00:56:29] William Green: But I’m trying to be more joyful about it. And so to have the intensity of the commitment to quality, but without the worry and the self-recrimination and the self-flagellation about missing deadlines or being behind or not being able to juggle everything. So I’m really struggling with this stuff.

[00:56:47] William Green: So I don’t want to in any way give the impression that I’ve nailed this and I’m on top of it all. But one of the things that I’m very conscious of is really to think about what am I optimizing for? And so I think about Well, the masterclass sort of gets through the filter of what I should or shouldn’t be doing because I have an opportunity to have an impact on people’s lives.

[00:57:12] William Green: I have an opportunity to talk about books, to talk about ideas, to share ideas, to help other people. That’s very central to what I perceive as the purpose of my life. But then one of the things that I started, yeah, and so I’m fairly ruthless about turning down things. That don’t really work for me. So people are often writing to me and say, I mean, literally this morning, I had someone write to me and say, could you edit, this book for this person?

[00:57:40] William Green: I’m like, no, I keep passing things like that off to other people, even though it might be kind of lucrative because it’s just not what I want to do. But I am at the moment editing a different book that’s with a close friend of mine, you. Because I’m learning a great deal from the book and he’s someone I love and I get to spend time with him and learn from him and I’ll have him as a guest on the podcast down the road and so I don’t know I have this general sense of what it is I’m optimizing for what’s important and then I try to remove the other stuff, but I’m failing it at the whole time constantly adding complexity, but I guess one thing one thing that I did realize very vividly in the last year or so was that I’d been neglecting my friendships.

[00:58:21] William Green: I’ve been neglecting relationships and I needed to make sure that I was feeding that part of my life And so part of what’s added to the complexity of my life is that I’ve tried to spend more time with friends I spent a lot of time with family, but so things like going to Costa Rica to see Chris Begg It’s kind of a crazy thing to do, but I hadn’t taken a vacation in ages.

[00:58:43] William Green: I went with my wife and I spent some time with this really nice guy who I hadn’t spent much time with. I mean, he’d been on the podcast. I met him a couple of 2 or 3 times before. So to go spend 9 days at a hotel that he and his wife have in Costa Rica was a pretty big thing to do for me.

[00:58:58] William Green: Similarly, I recently started to have these calls every few months to discuss Proust, my favorite novelist, with Pico Iyer, who was a guest on the podcast, who’s brilliant, and who I like tremendously. And he lives in Japan, and so to have the opportunity to talk to someone like that, is really valuable to me, and so, I love Proust, I love talking about fiction, Proust is incredibly profound on multiple levels, but also it’s an opportunity to build my friendship with Pico, who I love, who’s just a really wise, decent, lovely, brilliant guy, he was an amazing guest on the podcast, it was one of my favorite episodes, And, Pico has, was close to Leonard Cohen, and has known the Dalai Lama really well since he was a teenager, and, for me to get to, and Pico came off of his class at Oxford in English Literature, and to get to talk about books and build that friendship is really important, so to try to structure that regularly is important, and likewise, Every Friday morning, I have a conversation over zoom with 3 friends.

[01:00:05] William Green: Sometimes only 2 of them show up. They’re 3 very successful money managers who are all students of a particular great Tibetan Buddhist teacher. And we talk about our lives and we talk about, meditation practice and we help each other and we support each other and that ends up being about an hour and a half every Friday morning and sometimes we meet at 7:30 in the morning and sometimes otherwise 8.

[01:00:30] William Green: It’s a really big commitment but they’re very extraordinary people and one of them is a lot of. Our investment audience will know it’s great. I mean, just an extraordinary mind, utterly brilliant guy. And, if you have the opportunity to speak to Yen Liao three or four times a month, that’s a really rich thing to do.

[01:00:53] William Green: One of them is a senior partner at a major private equity firm. One of them is a guy I share my office with, really special guy. Whose book I’m editing at the moment. And, so to, so I think one of the things that’s shown to me That would have terrified me, the idea of structuring that into my life.

[01:01:10] William Green: This huge commitment, really, an hour and a half That sometimes turns into two hours on a Friday morning, every Friday. That’s like, way too much. But actually it’s turned out to be a very precious thing and the others are incredibly busy as well and it’s turned out to be almost like this sort of sacred space.

[01:01:26] William Green: And so I think, one of the things Yan often talks about because Yan is even more linear than you. Yan has this incredible ability to design systems. And so he’ll talk about the importance of structuring things into your day, into your week, that these structures trump any intentions, you’ve got to actually structure it in.

[01:01:47] William Green: So I think if there’s any, if there’s anything kind of practical to take away from this, I think you want to figure out what you’re optimizing for, and then try to figure out a way actually to structure it into your life. And so. If you and I don’t really need to chat once a month, and maybe it would be a waste of time for you, but there’s also a sense that if you have regular conversations with something, the spotlight will be there, you’ll be deeply present, and things will come up, and I’ve often tried to do this with Guy Spier to schedule something once a month, and I just don’t think he, I don’t think he sees the value in it, and is too distracted, and so we’ve never really done it.

[01:02:27] William Green: Done it regularly and so like couple of weeks ago we talked briefly and we were like, let’s have a proper talk tomorrow and then of course we didn’t and so I think that’s the problem if you don’t structure it in Those conversations aren’t going to happen and then there are things where you could bring a great deal of value to that person by simply being present and talking about what’s on their mind and so this commitment to what I’m doing every Friday morning has actually reinforced my belief that if you, if something is valuable to you, if you want to spend time with people regularly.

[01:03:01] William Green: Structure it in and particularly this idea that I think I’ve talked about before to you this phrase that I learned from my friend Matt Ludman, who’s one of the three people I meet with on Friday mornings, he talks about this image of friends along the path and if you find friends along the path.

[01:03:19] William Green: Who can really support your own progress, your own development, your own process of continuous learning. That is such an unbelievably powerful thing. And so in some ways, what I’m doing by setting up the richer, wiser masterclass is creating another container of friends along the path. So it’s not me saying, oh, look, I’m the teacher.

[01:03:44] William Green: I’m better. I’m smarter than you guys. Not at all. It’s like, it’s friends along the path. Who are exploring ideas together and, if you can lift up other people in some way as part of that process, that’s an amazing thing, but also at the same time, you’re forced actually to internalize these ideas and to study them yourself and to figure out what you think so that you can explain it to other people.

[01:04:09] William Green: Which is one of the reasons why Munger said to talk to Mohnish about this, right, when Guy, I’ve told you this before, I think, where Guy was introduced to Munger by Mohnish, and Guy said, yeah, Mohnish was like, yeah, this is the guy who I discuss all of my investment ideas with, and Guy said something self-deprecating, like, you might as well talk to a monkey, I don’t know why he bothers to talk to me, because he’s so much smarter, And Munger said, no, a monkey wouldn’t work because Mohnish would know that it’s a monkey.

[01:04:37] William Green: And so Munger’s belief is that what he was trying to explain there is that to have a talking partner is an amazing mechanism for learning because you’re going to have to articulate your own views. And that’s going to, that’s going to teach you and is going to help you to progress as well. So that’s what I’m trying to structure into my life is this process where I’m surrounded by friends along the path who are decent, kind, continuous learners who come at life with a very generous mindset where they’re trying to help each other.

[01:05:09] William Green: And so, part of what’s difficult here is that it’s not a very linear process. It’s not a very directed process where you know that you’re going to get a particular return. What you’re doing is creating this container for a certain type of magic to happen. And that’s a little harder for you because It’s so nebulous.

[01:05:32] William Green: There’s no agenda, but it’s okay for me because I’m not very linear and I have this confidence that if I’m there with really cool people who are really smart, something is going to come up because the spotlight is going to be flashing in that area. And we might have the opportunity to learn something beautiful.

[01:05:54] Stig Brodersen: William, I can’t help, but ask whenever I’m listening to how you’re forming these deep relationships. You have a big voice in the value investing community and you reach a lot of people. How do you think about spending your time to serve the value investing community? So for example, whenever I had this conversation with Manis and talked about, we should probably sometimes do something we don’t always enjoy.

[01:06:17] Stig Brodersen: The practical man in me said, well, instead of going to something, that’s not really my scene. Why don’t I hire someone who feels like being paid to go to Omaha is the best thing in the world and who would actually enjoy it way more than me and then everybody wins and then I can do something else.

[01:06:37] Stig Brodersen: That’s a little more me, which is probably not the right way to, to think about it. How do you think about forming these very deep relationships? And some of the people are you refer to here are not all of them. very successful. It doesn’t have to be financial success. That’s not what I’m talking about, but they’re very successful in what they do.

[01:06:55] Stig Brodersen: And you perhaps enjoy those relationships more than using your platform to speak to a hundred thousand people at the same time. Which might not be as joyful, but you’ll pay more back to society. How do you square those two?

[01:07:13] William Green: I mean, there’s this great irony, right? That on the one hand, I’m writing about and interviewing the world’s most rational people.

[01:07:22] William Green: And on the other hand, I find myself becoming more and more intuitive about every decision I make, and I’m not recommending this to other people, but I put myself in certain situations because it feels right to me in some way, so I’m not really doing it in a very calculated way. I, when I think about something like the masterclass, I’m thinking maybe there’s someone in that group.

[01:07:50] William Green: Who’s life I could change. It was just one person. I don’t know. And I remember there’s a beautiful teaching from this guy that the Balsham Tov who said that you could be incarnated in a body for whatever it was 80 years or something like that just to do one material favor to one person and He said you could miss it You know, you could be here for a whole lifetime just to help one person.

[01:08:14] William Green: I love that phrase. it’s one material favor for one person. So I often put myself in positions. Because I’m like, what if this is the moment? What if this is the person who I’m here to help? and I obviously can’t do that with everyone. And I can’t, and life becomes kind of intolerable because there are times where I’m like, so in stretch that I’m making problems for everyone because I become unreliable because I’m doing too many things and I do this often with your lovely team in the Philippines, who are quietly waiting for me to edit an episode that was due the other day. And it’s like, it’s hard for me. I always feel like I’m letting people down because I’m juggling too much.

[01:08:54] William Green: But then, on the other hand, I do have this sense of like, yeah, what if this is the person? What if I need to meet this person or what if I need to be in this place for this reason at this moment? And I did have an extraordinary thing a few years ago that I’ll mention very briefly where I was in this town next to me in Westchester, New York and with my kids and someone pulled out of a parking space in front of us, like sort of tore out of this parking space really fast and my son daughter and I were in the car and we looked down and we see that there’s a phone on the street and we think well, like it’s probably from this woman who tore out of this space really fast and we pick up the phone and it hadn’t, it was still unlocked and so we called the last person who she texted and I talked to that person and that person said to me, yeah, this woman who dropped the phone, she lives just across the street from where you were and I went with my kids and we put the phone in her mailbox and then we went home and we had a dinner.

[01:09:54] William Green: I think it was Friday night dinner. So we had to kind of shut up dinner with the family, which is kind of really joyful and lovely. And then a few hours later, I get a call from this stranger, whose phone it was I had picked up, and she said, you don’t understand. If you hadn’t returned my phone, I would have jumped off the Tappan Zee Bridge that night.

[01:10:12] William Green: Because she’d had a series of terrible things happen to her. I think she’d lost her job, and she’d had health issues and the like, and All of her contacts were in the phone and it wasn’t backed up and she’s like, literally I would have committed suicide that night. And she and I have actually remained friends and she’s been very supportive to me at times.

[01:10:30] William Green: It’s kind of an amazing person. And I think of her pretty much every day. Even though I don’t talk to her that often and so just that and during COVID there was a moment where she said to me You know, she was helping all of these old people and she said to me No, you don’t understand how many people I as in she was helping, you know She’s just like I think I was very late on my deadline for my book and I was tormenting myself I felt terrible and she’s no you saved my life and here I am helping all of these people That’s much more important than your deadline And so I think that sort of thing makes me kind of mystical or sentimental about these things. I’m just like, I want to be not so linear and so logical and so rational that I miss the opportunity to be available to these strange things that come up out of nowhere.

[01:11:25] Stig Brodersen: I can’t find a better way to end this conversation, William, than what you just said. Any concluding remarks? That was absolutely beautiful.

[01:11:33] William Green: I’m just grateful that we get to talk about these things, and it’s, I mean, it’s a, it’s hard to talk about these things, because there’s a part of me that wants to censor myself, and not, not sound too crazy. And there’s a part of me that’s like, well, no, I have to try to be honest and have to try to be authentic and have to try to share, what it is I’ve figured out whether it’s right or wrong.

[01:11:53] William Green: And a lot of it is very idiosyncratic and it’s not for everyone, but this is my attempt to make sense of my life and to figure out how to live and I’m just. so if I can share some of these stories and insights that have helped me make sense of it, my, my hope is there’s someone out there that’s like, yeah, no, that works for me and it’ll change the way they behave and if it helps them, that’s a really beautiful thing.

[01:12:21] Stig Brodersen: Well said William, thank you as always for making time and it’s always a pleasure speaking with you. I always learn so much. So what can I say other than just say, thank you.

[01:12:32] William Green: Thank you Stig. Thanks for creating this particular container. It’s great that we have this regular opportunity to chat.

[01:12:39] Stig Brodersen: Yeah, that’s the irony of things William where we have this very structured way of being unstructured so perhaps, we meet each other midway there.

[01:12:48] William Green: Yeah, it’s a good insight. It’s not one or the other, it’s that you bring together these two things that are sort of contradictory structure and no agenda, linear and nonlinear. It’s like always bringing these things together that don’t naturally seem to go together. So you’re in charge of the linear stuff.

[01:13:07] Stig Brodersen: That’s a deal, William.

[01:13:08] William Green: Thank you.

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