[00:02:15] Guy Spier: So, you know, two, two things before I get into it. One is I love this Chinese expression. Apparently, it doesn’t matter how slow you go so long as you don’t stop, which I think is a beautiful idea. This friend who’s climbed Everest five times and he’s taken various people up.

[00:02:29] Guy Spier: I think less of that is happening these days, but he sort of feels like he can get anybody up Everest as long as they’re willing to put one foot in front of the other and never stop putting one foot in front of the other. That’s the most important thing. And so I think that the other thing that I want to share with you is that obviously, I’m aware of all the domain of things that I’ve figured out that I want to avoid, but obviously that’s what’s within my consciousness, and there’s probably a vast, infinite area of things I ought to be avoiding that I’m still not aware of.

[00:03:00] Guy Spier: And obviously we make rules for ourselves, and so just to rattle off a few. You know, I shorted three stocks and, you know, it’s, it’s funny because I had a conversation with a really wonderful investor who’s extremely quiet and private. And he said, you know, I, I said to him, I talked to him about shorting stocks.

[00:03:19] Guy Spier: I met him, Steve Waldman. I met him in Omaha, incredible investor. And he said, yeah, you know, I believe that Charlie Munger shorted three times before he decided it wasn’t a good idea. And I actually shorted three times before I decided it wasn’t a good idea. But simply looking at the mathematics of shorting, you realize that if you just cut that from, if you just, you know, if you just cut that from your behavior and your activity, you’re going to be already ahead of the game.

[00:03:45] Guy Spier: The next place is leverage period, and in any way, shape or form, certainly inside the portfolio, there was a period in 1998 where we were 10 percent levered. It was just not a smart idea to be levered at all. The only way that I could argue that an investment portfolio perhaps could be levered is if you really had access to not a margin loan, but long term capital that is not contingent on the movements of the market.

[00:04:10] Guy Spier: So one of the problems with margin loans is that they may require more capital exactly the time that it’s, you’re indisposed for it because you might get redemptions from your investors, for example, so you cannot see the leverage that is in a margin loan or some kind of loan against a portfolio, which may have very specific market related terms as to when more capital is required or when they can take the margin loan away and sell securities from underneath you.

[00:04:37] Guy Spier: You cannot compare that to a mortgage on a home, a 30 year mortgage on a home, where even if you, in the United States, even if you stop paying your mortgage interest, they can’t evict you from your home. Those are two very, very different kinds of leverage. And then you can go into the leverage inside of the corporations that you’re in.

[00:04:54] Guy Spier: And one of the huge mistakes and horsehead was, I did not pay attention to the buildup of leverage inside the company of debt inside the company, which should have been pretty obvious to me. And it’s kind of shocking that I didn’t do that. It was a kind of a boiling frog phenomenon. I then go into, in my case, the selection of investments.

[00:05:12] Guy Spier: So I’ve already, you know, we’re taking away vast areas where people operate. And then when we go into what I find is happening to me, I think with the selection of companies where I’m even willing to look and start thinking about investing is that that area is becoming narrower and narrower, and I kind of don’t want to think about assets that could evaporate for one reason or another. So if you’re a company that has a new drug that you’re at work to develop with the FDA, and you’ve made progress through the first two stages, but you might not make it through the third stage, that asset could evaporate. And so you kind of like rule out every possible asset where it could evaporate in one way or another.

[00:06:02] Guy Spier: And what you’re trying to do, what I’m trying to do is only look at assets that will exist through time, forever and ever, even after a nuclear winter or an asteroid hits the Earth. I can sort of like, predict that on the other side, that will still be there. And that cuts out. A very, very large number of businesses where you just can’t tell if they’ll be there on the other side of some sort of like huge event, because most businesses are just not like that.

[00:06:28] Guy Spier: Any kind of consulting business is really just the people. And what we’ve seen, for example, in the case of you can have an Arthur Anderson or a McKinsey where it’s extremely well known, highly respected. And then a series of events happens. where suddenly the brand has been utterly damaged. So getting to those assets that are really around forever and ever and only operating with those assets is also hard, but those are a few things where you’re kind of clearing things off the table and getting a way to kind of like, shut them out or, or reduce the brain cells spend thinking about them quickly.

[00:07:05] William Green: You mentioned something interesting to me the other day also when I said to you what could interrupt the compounding journey, the long term compounding journey, in terms of your own behavior, and the very first thing you talked about, before you even talked about meddling unnecessarily with the portfolio, trading too much, things like that, having too much leverage, you said messing up my relationships, can you talk about that, because I think it’s something that people don’t really think about, and actually I think it’s such an important insight that if you mishandle your marriage or your relationship with your kids or something, or your relationship with your friends, that actually can have a really powerful impact on your compounding journey.

[00:07:46] Guy Spier: And yeah, and I find it interesting that there are a few areas where I, with the deepest of respect, part company with these great sages that I worship in Omaha every year, It’s somebody made the point to me that, you know, these, these kind of like extremely famous value investors live a very long time, but they don’t necessarily have the best marriages.

[00:08:07] Guy Spier: And so, so, you know, pay attention and something really irks you. And that bothers me because that is just not an outcome in my life. I don’t want to have an unsuccessful marriage. I don’t want to be somebody who’s who got married twice if I don’t have to. I totally respect and understand somebody who loses a spouse, God forbid, to some, some tragedy, and then they end up getting remarried, but, so that bothers me, and I, because it seems to be a pattern with some of these famous value investors, but, I think that my experience of one CEO who was going through a divorce, and so it’s not that, you know, you get into the office and you’re having, I’m having difficulties with my wife.

[00:08:49] Guy Spier: We’ve had a bad argument over something. It’s when behavior, it’s sort of like, becomes, and I saw this from the outside with the CEO, where what one spouse has done to the other makes the person so red with rage that in this case, he was willing to make decisions about compensation structures inside this company that he had significant influence over to spite his wife, or the wife with whom he was going through a divorce. And I think that the problem is not you’re going through turbulence with your spouse, which we all have, or with significant relationships. It’s where the thing overwhelms us in such a way that we’re unable to take rational decisions anymore.

[00:09:33] William Green: I think this is one of the most important things I’ve learned from you over the years. It’s actually the importance of having a calm, quiet, steady base or foundation on which to build everything and I, I think one of the reasons why it resonates so much for me is that like you, I have an unquiet mind. I have a, you know, there’s a lot of noise in my head.

[00:09:57] William Green: Both of us, I guess, you know, we often talk about having different types of attentional issues where our minds are all over the place. And so to find a place to create an environment where we can be quiet, where we can think calmly is probably even more important for us than it is for other people, because it’s so easy for us to get flooded or overwhelmed or distracted.

[00:10:22] William Green: And so I think one of the things that I saw very vividly. with you is how you, by moving to Switzerland, you create a quieter environment. And something, something that you mentioned to me when we were working on the book, that’s always had big impact on me was you said, I, I, it was a beautiful image. You said, I need, I need to be, I need to have my mind be like a calm pond so I can see the ripples in the pond.

[00:10:47] William Green: And so I think you understood much earlier than I did the importance of structuring your environment, including your physical environment, your office, but including your relationships so that your mind can be a compound. And I think for some people, there are people who can sit in a cafe. I know Tim Ferriss has talked about how he can write in a cafe or something where there’s lots of noise and that’s helpful to him.

[00:11:13] William Green: My friend Jon Gertner, who’s a wonderful writer, who wrote these books like The Ice at the End of the World and The Idea Factory about Bell Labs. He used to sit down with Wilco playing on headphones and would start writing. For me, my kids would start playing piano or guitar at home and it would drive me insane.

[00:11:31] William Green: You know, my daughter Madeline complains that for years she couldn’t play piano because I was working on oh, my book at home. And so I think just understanding how your mind works and how to create an environment in which you can operate peacefully and how the relationships matter. I think there are some people who could be arguing with their wives and still have amazing returns.

[00:11:52] William Green: For me, so much of my life is built on the fact that my wife, Lauren, is a really lovely, kind, gentle soul who makes life possible for me. Likewise with you, I see how much, like I said to you earlier this week, and apologies for this long winded monologue, but one of the things I said to you this week is, you seem much better this year than last year, and I can see that’s because Lory is around.

[00:12:14] William Green: And it’s lovely, you’re so happy when Lory has been around. She drove up from, Zurich the other day and cooked us dinner and was hanging out with you. And you just, I can see the calmness. I think it’s such an important realization for us to think about how to create an environment in which we can operate peacefully and think, think calmly.

[00:12:34] William Green: Do you have any thoughts on that?

[00:12:35] Guy Spier: So many. And, you know, my brain wants to dart in five different directions but so, so one really important thing is that I think that I was, I was right to focus on constructing the right environment and the physical environment is important, but I, I think that today from the perspective of today, don’t, everything counts and the physical environment counts, but the right relationships.

[00:12:58] Guy Spier: And that’s not so. So first of all, get the right relationships and then work on them to make them better and to support your decision making. I think it’s something that I would focus on a lot more. And so I, you know, the idea that you can’t build a successful investing firm in the middle of New York City is, is wrong.

[00:13:16] Guy Spier: And especially given that some people, for example, work extremely well in noisy cafes, and some people don’t. Another thought that comes up to me is that people have approached me who are kind of young, they’re in their, sometimes, some of the people who attend Berkshire are like as young as 14 and have totally committed to compounding, or I’ll meet men in their early 20s who are maybe not even dating or haven’t figured out their life partner, and I will tell them, if you plan to compound, from my perspective, I think that one of the most important things I, I started really the journey of compounding around 30 and you know, that extra 10 years or Warren started at age 11 makes a huge difference. I mean, often the difference is just the amount of time you’ve been in it. I tell them, don’t worry so much about setting up your investment structure and your financial compounding structure, figure out the right spouse and invest yourself in figuring out the right spouse and get that done.

[00:14:07] Guy Spier: Get your marriage into the hopper and settled. Because that’s going to be, at least for me, I think that’s a really, really important building block. The third place I want to go is that is to thank you because I remember one of the times I think it was perhaps after the Horsehead bankruptcy and I was rattled and you came and visited and you did, so, so William did, you did psychotherapy and effectively or marital counseling.

[00:14:31] Guy Spier: In which, so, so you sat down with Lory and I don’t know if I was there, but you kind of said, do you see that he’s rattled? And I think that up to that point, and so, so it’s worth saying, I mean, you know, William, that you, you’re one of these people who sees through people, that’s your job in a certain way.

[00:14:46] Guy Spier: So, you know, one of the scary things about having William around is that you’ll see things that you want, you don’t want to reveal to him, but you’ll see anyway. So I don’t even know if I’d, it’s not like I’d sat down with you and said, I’m rattled, but you, took the opportunity and, and Lory has trust in William and said, do you see that he’s rattled?

[00:15:03] Guy Spier: And I think from that day forward. You kind of opened up a channel that had been closed in Lory and she opened up to the, to, to that, to seeing that. And once she saw that, she was able to act differently around me when she saw that I was rattled. And so…

[00:15:19] William Green: Yeah, I think, I mean, to be more specific about it.

[00:15:21] William Green: I saw that you were in, I think this was the start of 2016 and I was staying with you in Zurich and I saw that you were in unbelievable pain because Horsehead had just gone under and it was a huge mistake, it was probably the worst investing mistake of, of your career and it was deeply painful and the market was getting hit at the same time and you were doing even worse and Lory, who’s absolutely lovely, was acting as if things hadn’t changed.

[00:15:50] William Green: She, she was like, married to this young hotshot hedge fund star who had just published a book that everyone loved, and so she was flying around the world having a great time, and I was like, Lory, Guy is in so much pain, you don’t understand, and there was a moment there, where you said to me, I think we were sitting in your office in Zurich, and you said to me, I understand why sea captains sometimes say, you have to relieve me of your, you have to relieve me of my command.

[00:16:20] William Green: And I said to you, Guy, do you hear what you’re saying to me? And you said to me, Yeah, I’m saying to you, get me out of my pain. And so I think in a way, part of my role in your life and your role in my life has been, you know, to use this beautiful phrase from another friend of mine, Matt Ludmer is to be friends along the path where I can kind of come in and say, God, you’re under a lot of pressure and, and make sure that the people around you know what pressure you’re under or and try to steer them to help you. And I think this idea of finding friends along the path who can give you strength, when you’re really suffering, but who also were there to celebrate with you during the good times. And there was, there was also a time I remember when we were in New York, when you were at your annual meeting and you were talking kind of embarrassed that your returns weren’t better.

[00:17:14] William Green: And I was like, Guy, do you hear yourself? Your tone’s been really strong and I had to kind of remind you, no, no, no, you’re, you’re, you’re not getting carried away becoming too arrogant. You’re actually getting carried away beating yourself up too much. And so I think, I don’t know if there’s some takeaway for our listeners and viewers.

[00:17:33] William Green: I think this idea of finding people in your ecosystem who wish you well and are friends along the path and who see when you’re in trouble and when you’re thriving, when you’re getting ahead of your skis, if that’s even the time, is so, too far ahead of your skis, is so, is so valuable.

[00:17:51] Guy Spier: Yeah, I mean, so, just to go into some of the subtlety of my interactions with Lory, so, there’d be times that I’d be feeling down on myself, or stressed, or lacking in, sort of like having imposter syndrome.

[00:18:08] Guy Spier: But the way, so that’s what I was trying to express to Lory, but given other things going on, young children, you know, sort of like, disagreements over our roles in the home, what it came across was, along the lines of, dammit, I’m out there working all day and you’re doing nothing and no matter and so, you know, one of the things that your conversations with Lory helped us to transition to is here’s some pain that I’m feeling or here’s some something that’s kind of like not happy for me at work right now and to be able to talk about that without making it sound to her like I’m disparaging her role in the home and what’s important here is not what I actually think, it’s the way she receives it, and so that, that’s kind of a subtle difference.

[00:18:53] Guy Spier: I would tell you that what Lory and I have learned when we have, when things come up, and it’s very easy to tell when something’s come up because one or both of us is riled. And the, the perspective that I’ve developed is I don’t have to try and figure that out on my own. There’s, most of the time there is a template out there that we may not have within our toolbox.

[00:19:16] Guy Spier: And so we’ve, we’ve gone to this marital counselor in London who’s helped us in all sorts of ways. And, you know, there, there are subtle adjustments and differences or modeling of certain kinds of interaction that just once you’ve got it, you’ve got it. It’s a bit like learning to ride a bicycle. We had a transition.

[00:19:30] Guy Spier: One of our children was moving from one school to another. I was deeply uncomfortable with and we, we went to him. We had three or four sessions with him. His name is Philip Trenchard. He works in London. He’s amazing. And he helped us. And I know that my relationship with my daughter is and will be far better because he helped me navigate us, navigate that transition. So it’s subtle.

[00:19:52] William Green: I think this is one of the important things that I’ve learned from you is the extent to which investing is, is this in a game? There’s the, there’s the outer game of figuring out how to do financial analysis, how to, you know, how to look at the numbers, whether the numbers are trustworthy, what the leverage is, all of the, you know, whether, whether management is good.

[00:20:13] William Green: And then there is this in a game that, because I’ve had this up close and personal view of you over all these years, I can see you having to manage your own relationships, your attention, the structure of your office, the environment, and I’m not sure, I don’t know if most people are as conscious about it, maybe because you’ve done a lot of therapy and a lot of analysis and also a lot of writing, which I think has been hugely helpful for you in figuring out what it is you think and believe.

[00:20:43] William Green: You’re just much more aware of this than most people, this aspect of the inner game.

[00:20:48] Guy Spier: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. So the writing definitely helps. Writing is really worthwhile. Writing in order to figure out what you think, not writing for somebody else. But, interesting enough, as we’ve discussed, in the writing of the book, which in a way does something that therapy cannot do, But I’d gotten to a certain point and you incredibly pulled me further, further than I was comfortable going, despite the writing, which is interesting.

[00:21:15] Guy Spier: I think that, you know, so, in, in difficult circumstances, so if, if I think of my father for a second, it’s fascinating because he is, he, for, because of his experience as a, an officer in the Israeli military, other experiences he’s had when it’s difficult and adverse circumstances and decisions have to be made somehow, he’s an incredible person to have in the foxhole with you.

[00:21:40] Guy Spier: Why? Because he’s developed a mode of thinking under adversity and a mode of dealing with adversity and difficult circumstances that I, my brain kind of taps into. And if I just go for a second to the great investing partnerships, I think of, you know, I think that Nick Sleep and Zach, I, I actually, Zach is kind of, almost a recluse, I think.

[00:22:04] Guy Spier: I would love to spend time with Zach because I think that he’s a very, very important part of Nick’s thinking process. And I think that, and we know the role that Charlie has played in Warren’s life and I think that what we also have to do is some people are lucky enough to find that sparring partner that works early on for them and the relationship, but, but just because we have the template of say Nick and Zach and Warren and Charlie doesn’t mean that our template will be exactly the same.

[00:22:34] Guy Spier: Our template may be different and, and I guess what my, the point I’m making to you and anybody listening in is see that as an area of work, see that as an area of study. What is, what, what role does my father play? What role does my wife play? What role does William play? And we, that, we, so to come back to structuring the physical environment, I actually think that while it’s all important, you know, if, if I would give 1 percent of my thinking power to the physical environment and 99 percent saying, what is my relationship with Monish?

[00:23:03] Guy Spier: What is a good way to structure it? When is a good way to time to talk to him? When isn’t a good time to talk to him? What is my relationship to my father? When should I, shouldn’t I? How do I, all of those things is really where the juice is. And I would say that, I think that some successful investment funds, incredibly, not only do they develop, Those relationships, but they managed to transmit it through generations and we’ve talked a little bit about Ruane Conniff and perhaps others, and it’ll be interesting to see how that transition happens with Berkshire Hathaway, but developing that and understanding that and having a way of work with that.

[00:23:39] Guy Spier: I mean, I think that actually you told me that Ray has an on call psychologist at the office.

[00:23:44] William Green: Well, also Steve Cohen, right, was very big on this. I remember Jason Karp used to work at SAC and they would have these sports psychologists, right, like super sophisticated. And I remember one of the great things that Jason Karp said to me about that sports psychologist, Jason had unbelievable returns there.

[00:24:02] William Green: I think he was kind of the best performing person there for a long time internally at SAC. And then the sports psychologist basically said to him, now that you’re getting really rich, are you going to use the money to complicate your life or to simplify your life? And so one of the things that Jason figured out is, I don’t want to own multiple homes.

[00:24:23] William Green: I don’t want to have, like, extra complexity. I you know, he would love to go to St. Bart’s, I think, on vacation. He’s like, I’ll just rent a place. And he’s like, I’ll have, six gym outfits that are all the same. So he, so part of what, what that guy was helping him to do was actually figure out the softer side of, of investing.

[00:24:44] William Green: You know, don’t, don’t let the money complicate your life. So that all spirals out of control, keep it calm, keep it simple so that you can focus on. on what matters to you. So yeah, I think, I think Ray Dalio was, has always been really smart about this. Steve Cohen was smart about this. I don’t know. I look at people, friends of mine like Yen, Yen Liao, who I hope will come on the podcast at some point.

[00:25:07] William Green: He’s incredibly aware of these things about how you structure your environment, how you use your time and so I think a lot of the best money managers have these very systematic minds that I don’t really have where they think about how to structure your environment, how to, how to use your time. It’s much harder for you and me, I think, naturally.

[00:25:25] Guy Spier: So, yes, they have systematic minds, but I think what it comes, what, and, well, I don’t think this has come up, but I think it’s an important sort of principle to lay on the table, and it’s this paradox that once we acknowledge Once we shine a light on our weaknesses, shortcomings, the places where our hardware doesn’t quite fit and work right, that’s where we can actually solve the problem.

[00:25:48] Guy Spier: So, we’ve talked about, you know, I am not systematic, it’s why I did well in structured environments like universities and why I was drawn to Zurich, and In hiring Chantal, I I was very clear I have ADHD and I need help with all sorts of ridiculous things like where are my keys and leaving on time for the airport.

[00:26:09] Guy Spier: And so you can invite what is missing in your life in once you acknowledge what it is that you need and express it in the right way and kind of the universe has a way of potentially delivering that to you. I want to sort of like, it just comes up and it’s really, really important. We talked about the role of my father and the role of Lory, and I realized that there’s something that was missing there and I’m sorry, because I kind of circling back a little bit.

[00:26:34] Guy Spier: But so Lory showed, with your help, Lory started showing up in my life in a far better way, in a more supportive way. My father has become more and more supportive as he’s, he’s trusted me more and more and he’s understood that what, where my, you know, I’m, I don’t have high EQ, I don’t think, and in periods of adversity, that’s where he can really comes into his own.

[00:26:56] Guy Spier: But I realized that part of why I think that’s happened better in Lory’s case, certainly is that I didn’t, I didn’t wait for her to show up in the right way. I also asked myself, how can I serve her needs? What does she actually need in this relationship? And the channels opened up for her, perhaps at a parallel time that channels opened up for me, that Allowed me to see her more clearly, see who she was, see what seat she needed, see how I could modify in some cases, very minor modifications of what I do that make her feel super safe or far safer than she felt.

[00:27:37] Guy Spier: I think my point to you is in constructing, it’s kind of like a beautiful idea that in constructing one’s not physical, but relationship environment. It’s not just saying, how do I go to the supermarket of people and pick off the shelf what I want? It’s like, actually, if I find a way to serve the people in my life in the right way, they will now become the people that I need them to be.

[00:27:59] Guy Spier: It’s kind of like a weird energy thing, spiritual thing that, and it comes to this idea that, And, and I was doing it constantly and you kept pulling me away from it because it’s just so easy to point over there and say, you know, that person really needs to dot, dot, dot. And you a few times brought me back and basically saying, yeah, but forget about that guy because you can’t change them.

[00:28:22] Guy Spier: The only thing you can change is yourself. So all We really need to do, all I really need to do is, yeah, to see the dynamic, to see the way it’s not positive, but then own my part in it, and change that part in it, and somehow, the world has this way of, once I do that change, then the change is far more likely to happen on the other side.

[00:28:43] William Green: Yeah, I think it’s a, it’s a really profoundly important point. It’s like we’re constantly looking to change other people. And I remember a friend of mine once saying to me, he said, yeah, when I, when I look for the perfection in my wife, I find things go much better than, and, and it was, it really stopped me in my tracks.

[00:29:05] William Green: It was an extraordinary, extraordinary thing. So yeah, I think I also find sometimes when I’m looking at other people, I’m looking at the flaws in other people, that’s a really important cue for me to realize there’s something amiss in my life where I’m stressed or upset or overwhelmed in some way, and it’s leading me to criticize other people.

[00:29:29] William Green: And so it’s actually, it’s, it’s become a kind of sign for me, like a sort of symptom. Oh, like, Oh, I’m struggling in some way. If I’m, if I’m looking at someone else and I’m thinking, gosh, schmuck he is, I’m, I’m obviously looking away from myself because it would be too painful to look at myself. And so it’s a way of me, like you, you just start to get more familiar with the tricks of your own ego and to see, oh, okay.

[00:29:53] William Green: I need to focus on myself because I can actually control my own behavior.

[00:29:58] Guy Spier: And so, I saw very different behavior in you last time we were here, it was, which, and this is, I think I can trace out the ways, the, the, the sort of like, indirect paths by which things unfold, so, William and I, and, and when you get into locked horns over something, so I was riled, you were riled, and, you know, suddenly it’s like, it’s, it’s a struggle not over what we think we’re struggling about, but there are eight things below it.

[00:30:24] Guy Spier: And then I don’t know how well you remember, you did something that I’d never seen you do before. You said, and it’s certainly under the influence of Dan Goldman. Dan Goldman from your podcast, one of the things he says, you just want to increase the distance between the trigger and the reaction.

[00:30:40] Guy Spier: So, you did something that I’d never seen you do before is in the midst of this heated sort of like both at each other’s throats. You said, I’m getting heated. I don’t like this. I’ve got to take half an hour just to walk away and literally you disengaged. Almost. I felt like I was mid sentence. You just walked away to the bedroom and you disappeared.

[00:31:01] Guy Spier: And, and that was hard for me because I wanted to remain locked in verbal combat with you. And I was kind of a break. I was like, what now? You know, do I make another coffee? I wonder when he’s going to come out.

[00:31:12] William Green: You always make another coffee.

[00:31:15] Guy Spier: So, that, that was new, but, but what, so then, and I just want to trace this cause I’m learning in the process of talking about this.

[00:31:22] Guy Spier: So you did something that didn’t enable me to distract myself from whatever was going on inside by focusing on whatever the hell this I perceived to be the source of the irritation from you. And but then something else really important. So William’s been talking, you’ve been talking to me a lot about meditation and you gave me, and this is now Matt Ludmer, who gave me this.

[00:31:43] Guy Spier: And I just think it’s such a gem and is so important is I don’t know what you went and did in the room, but the key is not to say, oh, I’m calm, I’m calm. This, this annoying argument, I’m calm. No, it’s like, create the space to try and understand what is going on. So, the, the, the term that Matt Ludmer gave me is spiritual bypassing.

[00:32:04] Guy Spier: That’s not the point of the disengagement. That’s not the point of calming the mind as I understand it. The point is, now you have the space to try and understand what’s really going on, going on. And so that calmness is to do real work. It’s not just to deny it and put a lid on it, so.

[00:32:21] William Green: Yeah, you’re trying to look at what’s actually going on in your body and your mind in an honest way, not looking away from it, not avoiding it, not pretending, oh, I’m so Zen that everything’s just fine.

[00:32:33] William Green: It’s like you actually, you’re looking at it. I think this is one of the great gifts of meditation is you’re looking at it with a, a higher level of resolution so you can be like, Oh my, I’ve been feeling it during this conversation. It’s like, I don’t know if it’s, I drank too much coffee, which is usually.

[00:32:50] William Green: But I, I, I can never drink too much coffee. Usually it doesn’t have any impact on me, but I’m like, there’s like something weird, you know, like there’s this sort of anxiety kind of here that I, you know, in my chest that I’m like, It’s, it’s like, it’s uncommon for me and I don’t know if that’s so, so yeah, it’s slightly uncomfortable because you become more self aware, so you’re like, oh, what’s going on with me?

[00:33:12] William Green: Like, but that’s kind of helpful instead of avoiding what’s going on in your body and just being kind of, or your mind and just being quietly controlled by it, you’re like, huh? Okay. So, so one of the things Ken Schubenstein, our mutual friend taught me that was hugely valuable that, that I wrote about a little bit in, in Richer, Wiser, Happier was when he said that you don’t want to make important decisions when, for example, you’re hungry, angry, lonely, tired, in pain, or stressed. And so knowing, knowing what state you’re in is hugely valuable. So like when I was, so when we had that more locked horns last year, and I could see I was just getting angry and upset because I was saying something to you that you didn’t get and you were kind of rejecting and then I felt hurt and rejected so I just know if I continue to have this discussion while I’m angry, I’m going to cause damage and that’s not going to help me. Let me just take myself out of this situation and so I don’t think it was optimal because I wish I hadn’t got angry, but I think it was at least I had the self awareness to know I need to take myself out of this situation.

[00:34:22] William Green: It gave us a chance to cool down. So I think with a lot of these things, it’s not, it’s not like, oh, I’m going to become so Zen and so profound, such a great practitioner of meditation and so self aware through therapy or whatever it is, that none of this stuff will occur. It’s Dan Goldman talks about this a lot.

[00:34:38] William Green: He, he was on a recent episode of the podcast and just incredibly thoughtful about this. It’s not that those thoughts or emotions are going to go away, but because you’re more, you’re more aware of them. Yeah, I think he, he was, he was quoting Viktor Frankl, who said that you can, you can expand that space between stimulus and response.

[00:34:59] William Green: And in that space between stimulus and response, you have a choice. And that’s your free will. Whereas for most of us, it just, it’s like the match is lit. Like you just explode. There’s no space.

[00:35:11] Guy Spier: Yeah. You just gave me a little more on that. That’s so beautiful. I just want to pause and just reflect on it. So, there’s the stimulus and there’s a response.

[00:35:22] Guy Spier: And when you increase the space between the two, that is free will. And that is such a beautiful idea. I, oh, my brain was going in two different directions.

[00:35:31] William Green: Yeah, because you get to choose in that moment where if, if you’re just controlled by the stuff that’s swirling under the surface, you have no choice.

[00:35:37] William Green: You’re just controlled by the fact that you got triggered by something. You said to me something very interesting the other day where we, you said to me that there were certain points in our discussions over the last few days where you were being slightly triggered by something and so you would start to feel your feet as a way of grounding yourself and you would breathe more deeply.

[00:35:59] William Green: Can you talk about that because that’s strikes me as a sort of practical thing that you’ve learned to do to kind of lean into difficult situations instead of avoiding them.

[00:36:08] Guy Spier: Yeah, I’ll have a go as my brain comes back into focus. One thing that, so I, so it’s Dan Siegel who wrote a book called The Developing Mind, which I read 20 years ago.

[00:36:19] Guy Spier: What an incredible guy, and I’m sure he and Dan Goldman know each other. He’s a professor at UCLA, and he gave me this insight that, so in, in in the development of dyads in the, the, the different, the John Bowlby, there’s different kinds of attachment, and he continues with this attachment theory. And the key developing good attachments is not that you get into fights and disputes.

[00:36:46] Guy Spier: It’s that you both have the ability and the confidence to repair from those disputes. And so, and so if I, if I go, and so this is, a dyad is just two people in this sort of intense mirror norms interaction, and it happens in deep friendships, it happens in relationships, parent child, husband wife, and for various reasons, when Lory and I would get into a fight over something, the way we locked horns, that would feel extremely unsafe for Lory, because she’d grown up in a family where there were never any fights.

[00:37:19] Guy Spier: Whereas I grew up in a family where I was arguing constantly. I was like, that’s always a normal space for me to be, especially with my father. So we had to learn to ride that bicycle together. And what would happen with Lory is that Lory would run away and not physically, but she would shut herself off from me.

[00:37:36] Guy Spier: And that would actually trigger me in all sorts of ways. So learning to repair after you’ve had that break, that upset, one person yelled, one person started crying, whatever it is, is where the action is. What I started learning to do in part through having structured sessions with Lory and a counselor, is first of all, when that happens, if we can possibly do it, is to get excited and to get curious.

[00:38:03] Guy Spier: So, my God, something’s happening here. What is it? And in a sense, that’s sort of like trying to become meditative. And I’ve done this with Lory many times. I would say, Oh my God, look, we’re fighting. There’s something here. There’s something valuable for us to learn. Let’s find what it is very early on in those sessions.

[00:38:19] Guy Spier: One of the things that the therapist said was because, because what happens is you become reactive. You want to kind of interrupt the other person. You want to try and impose your point of view. You want to disagree with them, what they’re saying. You just like, don’t buy it. And so literally just putting one’s feet on the floor, it kind of like it grounds you.

[00:38:38] Guy Spier: And, and, and so I was remembering that and I’ve done that a few times actually. And because the point is. When William or Lory and it’s like you’re saying something and I profoundly disagree and and then I’m about to be more damaged and so just like feel my feet on the ground and breathe it in and breathe in what he’s saying and it’s this fascinating thing that when so I want to go back because I had a realization In our conversation.

[00:39:05] Guy Spier: So this is how learning happens. So I wanted to very much say how me serving my wife opened up the channels for her to serve me. What I realized, William, is that you wanted to start every session where we were working on the book with some study of the Zohar and how I’m proud of myself because every now and then I realize I did something good.

[00:39:27] Guy Spier: So if you would have asked me honestly in that moment, Guy is your most important thing to do right now is study Zohar? I would have said no. I get to work on the book. But what I would have been able to say at the time is, but I, I know that William is doing incredible work, and I know that this is important to him, and so I want to open myself up to that, not because I see it as intrinsically important to me, but it’s important to him, and now I think my relationship to doing that, before we do any real work, has changed, I kind of like, I did it, and then I learned it, and so, it seems to me that it’s just really important in all of these interactions to sort of go, okay, how do I open up to this person here in ways that may be difficult, uncomfortable, I don’t see, I’m going to have to go to a new territory, but open up to them and trust them, if that makes any sense.

[00:40:20] Guy Spier: And it’s got, it’s interesting because I really don’t know meditation very well. I don’t know all of the learning that you’ve been doing with people like Sopney Rinpoche, but it’s got to do with putting your feet on the floor, breathing in what is happening, giving space to the other person. And I’ll just end with this before I hand the mic over to you is what they taught me and the book to read is this guy Harville Hendricks, Imago Therapy was extremely helpful for us and the skill which is this riding a bicycle skill that they taught, he taught to me and Lory in the most basic way is, so, so just, you know, if, if in doubt and if feet on the floor and other things don’t work, just repeat back what the person is saying.

[00:41:02] Guy Spier: So rather than react, say, okay, so what I hear you telling me is, and just try and create the space for them to see that you’re, you’re seeing, or you’re, you’re making an effort to acknowledge their reality. I don’t know if that’s helpful.

[00:41:18] William Green: Yeah, I think part of it is, is getting quiet enough. You use that beautiful term talking about giving space that you’re trying to create enough space and enough quiet so you can hear where the other person is coming from.

[00:41:31] William Green: And you can, yeah, so I think a lot of this stuff is about adding space, like, you know, as we were saying before, like, expanding that space between stimulus and response. And so when, because you and I are pretty emotional and pretty intense people, and our minds are just very, very busy and distractible, it’s, we’re probably sort of a more extreme version of a lot of people, it’s more important for us to find ways to keep quiet, to give space, whether it’s through meditation, exercise, walking, in the, you know, in the mountains or whatever, anything that you can do to create a little more spaciousness so that you can respond more wisely on that subject.

[00:42:15] William Green: I wanted to ask you something that you and I have been talking about a lot over the last few days, I think is a really important issue that’s contentious for a lot of people, but really worth us exploring, which is you and I have been talking about the fact that we live in this very intense period where there’s a lot of division and high emotion over Trump and US politics over the environment and global warming and ESG over women’s right to choose what to do with their bodies versus the Supreme Court kind of deciding they don’t have certain rights and arguments about guns and issues with Ukraine and, and Gaza.

[00:43:02] William Green: And one of the things you and I have been talking about a lot this week is how to engage with people who are coming at us with very different views, very different experiences, and find ways to talk and find ways not to be just reinforcing our own views. prejudices and shutting ourselves off from other people’s views because I mean, I saw this yesterday at value access event that that you’re hosting here in in Costas that a friend of yours, Abdul Aziz from, from Saudi came onto the stage and you just immediately hugged him and there’s something really beautiful about seeing a, you know, a guy whose father is Israeli mother is South African in your case, and this guy who I think is a Saudi living in, London able to kind of look at each other and kind of express love in that way in a situation that could be incredibly intense.

[00:43:58] William Green: And I, it seemed to me that was a very conscious decision on your part. And I’m, I’m trying, I’d love to get a sense from you of what you’ve learned both through your mistakes and through the times when you’ve done it well in recent months, since October 7th, not least, the attack in Israel, how you communicate, how we can communicate better with people whose experiences views and prejudices and biases and understanding is just so different from, from ours on any of these contentious subjects.

[00:44:29] Guy Spier: Yeah, I mean, boy, I feel like I am. So first of all, I need to say Aziz is very huggable. But And he’s, you know, I joke with Aziz, he’s, I’ve said to Aziz, Aziz, I want to meet your mother because I just feel I see in Aziz somebody who’s deeply loved by his mother, perhaps by his father as well, but I feel like it’s his mother and it comes through in his smile and all sorts of things.

[00:44:53] Guy Spier: And I’m very grateful for Aziz in my life. But I feel kind of slightly daunted and honored that you asked me that question, because I don’t think that I’ve necessarily handled myself, if you like, the best in the wake of the October 7th attacks. And so, and I think that there are people who are real experts.

[00:45:13] Guy Spier: I’m thinking of a sort of a forum trainer, moderator, coach type in Israel called Amir Kfir, who I’ve seen moderate disputes. And so there are people who are real experts at it and, and I’m not one. And I think that I think that I, I know the principle. and the principles but acting on them, especially when you’re involved is extremely hard.

[00:45:35] Guy Spier: And I think there’s many nuances and subtleties, but I’ll just give you what I know, which is that when we have anger and hate, but let’s stick with anger a lot of the time, not always. So the way I understand anger, anger, when, as an appropriate emotion, is an emotion that says, my boundaries have been violated and I need to take action.

[00:45:58] Guy Spier: And there’s some sort of saying somewhere that, you know, to get angry is easy, but to get angry in the, with the right person in the right way at the right time. So that, that sometimes, maybe often that motion of anger is appropriate, although acting on it and finding an appropriate way to act on it.

[00:46:14] Guy Spier: I’m reminded of Warren Buffett, who says, you can always tell somebody to go to hell tomorrow. You know, that’s a, you know, we feel angry. Somebody’s wronged us, but you know, is the appropriate thing to tell them to go to hell? Maybe there are other things that we can do. We should wait. So that’s one version of anger, but there’s, there’s another thing that happens in anger which when we experience the emotion of anger, the way I understand it, which is that it’s actually covering up pain and for one reason or another, we don’t feel like we have the safety, the space the ability to experience our pain and therefore anger comes along with this protective shield and the anger allows us to push away whatever it is that is causing us pain.

[00:46:58] Guy Spier: If we can somehow, in ourselves, in others, see that actually what is, what this anger is doing is it’s shielding pain, and allow the anger to kind of, be, not obscure the pain, that is, so if we could just go to, you know, what is, highly contentious and a dangerous territory, but it’s the one that I’m most familiar with because I’ve been probably far too engaged with it is that what is going on in Gaza, and I can template it onto fights that I’ve had with Lory, is that there is enormous pain on both sides.

[00:47:32] Guy Spier: So whether, you know, one can, can talk about the rights and wrongs of all sorts of things, but I don’t think anybody, if I could, we could get them in a quiet conversation, could dispute that there is enormous pain. And I guess we can go into a little bit you know, on the on the Israeli side, well, I’ll start with the Gaza well, I’ll start on the Israeli side.

[00:47:52] Guy Spier: So, there is enormous pain at the atrocities that were permitted, which on the Israeli side, very clear, and I think to most humans, feels extremely unjustified, unprovoked. And things that one human being should never do to another. And then over and above that, that triggers, that’s triggered two further things, which is this has happened to the Jews throughout history.

[00:48:18] Guy Spier: And another trigger, which is that the state of Israel was supposed to protect us against these kinds of pogroms happening, but it didn’t protect us. And we thought that we would live in a world without antisemitism, but antisemitism is right there. And then on, you know, I, I want to take the perspective of an innocent Gazan family who are trying to make their lives.

[00:48:40] Guy Spier: And I would tell you, William, that for the longest time, and if, if I, I have somewhere in my Google account, this was well before we had Google, you know, in Ramot HaShavim, which is a village that was founded by my grandfather and other people in the 1930s, my aunt Miriam had a, somebody who was a farmhand who would travel from Gaza.

[00:49:05] Guy Spier: He’s from South Gaza, I believe from Khan Yunis. And it’s terrible because I forget his name, but he was like, he knew everybody. I, we knew him. He would stay overnight when he was allowed to. And then Israel changed the rules. And in theory, he had to get up very, very early in the morning and then go all the way back to Gaza.

[00:49:25] Guy Spier: And then for some time, my aunt Miriam allowed him to stay overnight against the rules, because he was supposed to go back every night for security reasons, not for any other reason. But when I talk about Gazans, I just want to be clear that I know Gazans. There was another Garzon that I knew at business school who, at the time, had started the Gaza Rowing Club, actually.

[00:49:47] Guy Spier: There’s a beautiful beach there. from the perspective, and, and I know that there’s the claim, and, and, and, you know, this will be controversial, but there are, there are also, you know, some people want to say the whole of God and society is complicit in the acts of Hamas in, in Nazi Germany. There are, you know, Hitler’s Willing Executioners was a book that was quite successful where the author of that book made the same claim.

[00:50:10] Guy Spier: But I’m certain in the same way that Abraham said to God, there’s at least one innocent person in Gaza. There are certainly more than one, many, who just want to live a quiet life. That’s what we all want to do. And from their perspective, there is enormous pain. We can’t get a state. We for one reason or another, you know, from the perspective of that person, I don’t have a freedom of movement.

[00:50:38] Guy Spier: It’s, you know, very, very hard for me to travel just within the Middle East, let alone outside of the Middle East. I have work every day just to get my children educated and just to put food on the table. Hassan is his name, is his name. We don’t know where he is now. No, Hassan wants to feed his family. He wants to have, to earn his daily wage and buy bread to feed his family.

[00:51:00] Guy Spier: It’s that simple. And so long story short, and I don’t know the half of it because I obviously I connect far easier to the Israeli side than to the Gazan side. But I would imagine in an ideal world sitting down with somebody from even somebody in power and say, you’re in enormous pain, aren’t you?

[00:51:21] Guy Spier: And sorry, that was a long way of asking that question.

[00:51:24] William Green: I think it’s important. I think it’s this is one of the things that you and I have been discussing over the last few days is how easy it is to forget the humanity to, of the. people on other sides of any of these arguments. It’s one of the things that happened in the U. S. with, with Trump, that Republicans started to, to hate Democrats and vice versa. And so I listened to someone, there’s a very good podcast that Andrew Sullivan has called Dishcast, and he was, he was talking to an old anchor man, who was saying that one of the things that went wrong in U. S. politics was that in the age of Newt Gingrich, they started Congress.

[00:52:01] William Green: And the politicians started to play to the cameras instead of looking each other in the eye across the benches. And once they no longer saw each other as humans, and no longer had to look each other in the eye, it was much easier to demonize each other. And so I think one of the great challenges for all of us on, on, on both sides, on every side of these debates, whether it’s, whether it’s Gaza, Ukraine, politics, you know, Trump, abortion, guns, any of these things is somehow to yank ourselves back to remind ourselves of the humanity of the people on the other side, whatever, whatever we think of them, however misguided we think they are.

[00:52:40] William Green: And they think we’re misguided too, not to forget their humanity. So that’s, That’s, that’s one thing that’s a real challenge for me because in my, in my anger and my pain or my distress or my anxiety about politics or geopolitics or any other thing, it’s very easy for me to kind of batten down the hatches and just sort of retreat into my own sense of dogma and prejudice.

[00:53:04] William Green: I think that’s key. The other thing you and I discussed that I thought was very interesting was an insight from David Brooks that actually also came from a discussion that David Brooks had had on the Dishcast podcast with Andrew Sullivan, which is David Brooks is this great New York Times columnist and writer said you, you want to ask people what experience led you to have these beliefs.

[00:53:27] William Green: And this is something you and I discussed yesterday that there’s something so powerful about that ability. To kind of gently open yourself up to the experience of the other person. Can, can you talk about that? Cause it seems to be a really valuable insight.

[00:53:42] Guy Spier: So, the first place I want to go briefly is this idea of seeing somebody else’s pain and the inability to see somebody else’s pain and, you know, I go back to early therapy session with Lory with my then Jungian psychotherapist called Søren Ekström, God bless his soul. He’s I haven’t had any contact with him since I stopped being his client slash subject, but really incredible guy and Lory came to him.

[00:54:08] Guy Spier: We were in the midst of a big fight and so, you know, I had to be quiet. While Lory. laid it out from her side and then she had to be quiet while I laid it out from my side and I was full of anger and and he turned to Lory. He said, do you see how much pain he’s in? I was full of anger. It was just a moment and, and I don’t think that Lori saw at that moment how much pain I was in.

[00:54:35] Guy Spier: And she may not have seen it for the rest of the therapy session, but just those words over time sank in. And so I, I find myself really wanting to get a, some kind of anchor who will, who will sit with some of the, some of the people who are representing the Palestinian case, I think awfully and say wow.

[00:54:54] Guy Spier: You guys are in a lot of pain. You’re in a lot of pain, but I’m sorry, William, because I wanted to say that, but I’ve not really addressed the question. So please bring me back to the question.

[00:55:03] William Green: Well, it’s important to, we were talking about this idea from David Brooks, this idea of asking what experience led the person to think what they think, because at the moment, part of what’s happening, this gets at Charlie Munger, right?

[00:55:16] William Green: Charlie Munger would talk about how people just want to go back into their echo chamber and get into what he would call heavy ideology. He talked about Buffett’s father having heavy ideology. And so in a way, what we’re talking about is how to have. How to operate in a way where you’re not just reinforcing your own heavy ideology and biases but opening yourself up to other people’s perspectives. And I mean, one of the things that the Munger would do in practical terms is as a Republican, he would read articles by people like Paul Krugman, who he disagreed with a great deal. But he’s like, this is one really smart Democrat. And he wanted to engage with his views.

[00:56:02] William Green: So he was very consciously engaging with the other side. And as a result, he was a free enough thinker that he could say, well, so he was a Republican who, who ended up voting for Hillary Clinton, and I’m, this is not a political debate. What we’re really talking about is the ability to open yourself up to the opposing view, whatever side you’re coming from.

[00:56:26] William Green: That’s what I’m really trying to get at is how we do that.

[00:56:30] Guy Spier: And yeah, so, where do I go first? Something that’s sort of like, in a way, it’s just a problem in with media and social media and the way communication works is that it really upsets me that Some of these people are reasonable people with whom one can compromise, you can see the other side and understand the other’s narrative, but they know that in order to get elected or in order to win their supporters over, they have to say things that they know are not true or leave half of the truth out because that’s how you win in the political game. And I think that that’s, that’s kind of like, just distressing to me. And I don’t know what the answer is when it comes to Switzerland, Swiss political culture. And I really, I think, I don’t know how you construct this, that, you know, how do you get to a place where what is truly respected in society is the person who can best represent the middle ground?

[00:57:27] Guy Spier: What is truly respected is the person who can best Demonstrate to an audience that they understand the opposing side’s position and to really go into it in depth, which is kind of like this healing process that we’re talking about. And I don’t think that I’ve spent enough time studying or experiencing politics.

[00:57:47] Guy Spier: I just like am a kibitzer from the side, but there are people on the Israeli side who seek to understand, say, the Palestinian narrative. And I say Palestinian narrative because there’s no point getting into facts. This is a narrative and what they try and do, and I’m thinking specifically of a woman called Einat Wilf, who was introduced to me by Hillel Neuer, and she has worked hard, as I believe did Amos Oz, and is to say to Israelis, look, this country was created in the wake of the Holocaust.

[00:58:19] Guy Spier: There was much violence that was done to Jews because they didn’t have a state and that feels really good and we have a history that we tell ourselves and that in order for us to make peace real true and lasting peace with this set of people who are also occupying the land. I know that we want to either ignore their narratives or we want to pick holes in their narrative and show that it doesn’t correspond to historical fact, but one way or another.

[00:58:49] Guy Spier: The only way we’re going to get to a true resolution of our differences with the population that inhabits more or less the same space is to engage with their narrative in a real way and to at least, even if you disagree with it, because we’ll always disagree with it, express empathy. Now, what happens to an Amos Oz in that kind of situation is that he could do that because he was an author because he would never have gotten elected by, by writing and saying things like that. And Amos Oz is a very famous, well known Israeli author. He’s no longer around, but his daughter is, Fania, Fania Oz is her name. And similarly, Einat Wilf, I mean, amazing woman who was a member of the Knesset might’ve been Israel’s nomination for its representative in the United Nations, who sat with me, She’s part French, so her mother’s French.

[00:59:41] Guy Spier: She sat with me in the south of France, and the one time that we were lucky, I was lucky twice I’ve met her, and she had to make the decision between telling, I mean, this is kind of like nothing profound, telling lies to get elected or being intellectually honest, and she decided that she wanted to be intellectually honest, and I think that what is deeply disappointing to me about the person, it seems, that Benjamin Netanyahu has evolved into is that he has become utterly fine with telling lies, it seems to me, in order to be politically expedient.

[01:00:11] Guy Spier: And he’s a different person now to the person he was, flawed as he was at the very beginning of his career, where I felt like what he was talking about was in some way rooted in realities. And he’s very, very capable of talking to a specific portion of Israeli society in ways that are just not helpful and productive, but…

[01:00:29] William Green: I mean, in a way I don’t, I don’t even really want to get into the specifics of politics like that.

[01:00:34] William Green: I think it’s more, more what I’m getting at is politicians are playing a particular game, as you point out, which makes it hard for them to be honest and makes it very tempting for them to exploit division and exacerbate division. I think, I think what we’re trying to, and we can move on from this subject in a second, but I think what you and I are groping towards is what a lot of our friends and peers are groping towards, which is to try to get to a place where we’re not boxing ourselves into narrow ideologies and anger and hatred, but we’re like It’s, it’s more that action of you hugging Aziz and looking at each other with love and openness to learn from people with different experiences rather than coming at it thinking, I’m right, you guys don’t understand me and I’m under threat.

[01:01:25] William Green: And I, I, so I think, I feel like you and I have both made our mistakes on this front, we don’t really know how to engage on this front, but that’s what we’re sort of working at, and the more all of us can work towards that, I think, I, I, I think that’s it’s an incredible challenge over the next few years, because these divisions are not going away in all of these different areas.

[01:01:45] Guy Spier: I mean, I, I just want to bring it back to the personal because that’s where I feel like I have the best experiences. I can trust my experiences and it’s, it’s empirical data that I feel I can share without kind of fluffing around and things that I don’t really know a lot about. So, I come back to my experiences and my most important relationship with Lory, my wife, and I don’t know if I’ve told you this story.

[01:02:07] Guy Spier: It was kind of utterly miraculous for me when it happened. And I think that my personal experience, what you’re asking for is how do we translate that into the political realm? And I don’t know how to translate it, but I feel like talking about my personal experience and expressing the hope that it can be translated.

[01:02:23] Guy Spier: I do believe it can be. So I’ll just take you through the, the sort of miracle, really, I felt it was miraculous. It’s early on in our relationship there. We have no children, but I believe that Lory’s pregnant. Lory’s, we’ve had this incredible marriage and it was a fantastic celebration. And now it’s probably sort of February and Lory’s now pregnant and it’s a dark winter in New York City.

[01:02:47] Guy Spier: And I’ve had a lousy day at the office. And Lory, who came to the U. S. with the largest French base in Mexico, kind of alone and lonely. And but I walk in through the door and do what I would often do, which is had a lousy day walk straight through to the TV room, flip on the TV and zone out the way I think many men do at the time.

[01:03:10] Guy Spier: That was the way, a way to zone out. And Lory comes into the room and she’s beside herself. She’s like, you don’t love me. And you didn’t even say hello to me. I probably sort of grumped, did a grunt as I walked through the door, acknowledged her in a very basic way. And, and what comes up for me is, is like, you screaming, yelling, ungrateful B words.

[01:03:32] Guy Spier: Here I am, battling the world all day. Had a lousy day. Yeah, you’ve had nothing to do. You’ve been hanging out, spending my money, you know, and like, all you’ve got to do is like, maybe make some frickin food for me at the end of the day. And all I want to do is watch television, and you are going to come and give me grief?

[01:03:55] Guy Spier: So this is what I want to say to her, is on the tip of my tongue, I’m like, get out of my face and leave me the hell alone. And instead, you know, by some miracle, I remember some of the marital counseling sessions, and literally, William, I really am, I say it through gritted teeth. I don’t. I don’t believe what I’m saying.

[01:04:15] Guy Spier: I don’t own what I’m saying when I say, so what you’re telling me is. When I walked through the door and I walked past, you felt like I had ignored you, you know, and even in saying that in that way, in that kind of tense, that way I want to say, and I did say hello to you and I, and I didn’t have to go long into it.

[01:04:32] Guy Spier: And she’s full of rage and anger. And she, she burst into tears and she says, yes. And I felt so unloved and it’s been so difficult for me. And I, you know, and in that moment I’m tearing up right now, everything changed inside me, that was a miracle. And I was like. You know, it was like, holy moly. And, and we’ve been through many of those things, but how, you know, through gritted teeth, William, I wasn’t even, I was trying in the most minimal way.

[01:05:02] Guy Spier: So that is the transformation that is capable of happening in a, in a relationship. And that is what needs to happen in the Middle East, for example, and how we get there. I don’t know.

[01:05:14] William Green: Yeah, but I think it has to start with a willingness to, a willingness to see the other person’s experience in their humanity and to get over our own, our own narrow, narrow prejudices.

[01:05:26] William Green: So I, I don’t know, I hope, I hope it’s, it’s helpful for me to think this through cause I, cause I mess it up the whole time. I wanted to, I wanted to switch.

[01:05:36] Guy Spier: Thank you for giving me the space to that. I think that this feels more, this is even more authentic to me because it’s been deeply distressing to watch this. It’s been deeply distressing in all sorts of different ways and I feel like at least we’re honoring the people who are in distress.

[01:05:52] Guy Spier: Right now, and I specifically, forgive me William, I, I, I walk around every day caring about these people who are underground, they’ve been held hostage now. Kfir Bibas is you know, more than one year old. He’s, he’s, he’s going to be, he’s spent about a third to, it’s going to come up for more than a third of his life as a hostage.

[01:06:11] Guy Spier: No child, no child should ever have to do that. And while I’m saying that, and I’ve posted this on Twitter, there are from time to time photographs of injured, Gazan children, and what I want to say is that no Gazan child, no child should have to deal with that, and that is also deeply wrong.

[01:06:29] William Green: Yeah, yeah.

[01:06:31] William Green: So thank you. Yeah, no, it’s a, it’s a very important, it’s a very important subject. We talked before about this idea of this long term compounding journey, and one of the things you and I have discussed is, you’re 26 years into this and we sometimes talk about, okay, so a couple of years ago we would say, so let’s say you’re halfway through this journey and now we’re starting to think, well, okay, so you’re about to turn 58, I think, in a couple of days.

[01:06:58] Guy Spier: That’s true. Thanks for reminding me. I was really holding on to that 57, you know, nice prime number in the second digit.

[01:07:05] William Green: So I was sort of saying to you the other day, well, wait a second. So let’s say you do the fund for another 10, 12, 15 years, you know, it’s probably not halfway through anymore. I mean, we, we figured out the other day that if you continue to compound at 9 percent a year, which doesn’t sound that fantastic, that original 14 million in the fund becomes over a billion. That’s how extraordinary it is. If you continue to compound over half a century, 9% would turn that, that original stake into a billion. So it’s an, it’s an enormous number, but you and I were sort of discussing, like, what’s the point in it all anyway?

[01:07:40] William Green: And you were talking about, well, so, so as I look to the future, what am I really aiming for? What does a meaningful and beautiful life actually look like? And what part in that is to do with money and continuing to compound? And, and what part is developing these other areas of life? And I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about, how your views have evolved on this question of what actually creating a meaningful life and increasingly meaningful and beautiful life actually looks like for you.

[01:08:11] Guy Spier: And it’s something that, thank you, and something that I’ve struggled with because it’s, it’s not clear to me. So I think that when you have an immigrant’s mindset, doesn’t mean necessarily you’re a first generation immigrant, might be just, but the, the immigrant mindset is, first of all, to acquire security.

[01:08:32] Guy Spier: And I don’t think that non immigrants can fully understand the sense of unease and, yeah, I guess it’s the sense of unease of being in a society where you don’t fully know your way. And I would say with the UK, you know, my family. Starting with my mother and father who immigrated to the UK when I was 11 years old, I would argue that we’re still on a journey of understanding what the United Kingdom is really about.

[01:08:59] Guy Spier: It’s a particularly complex, I think, society with a very, very complex social system. And I’m on a learning curve that I’m still going through and getting to. And I think that many immigrants understandably lunge for financial security. That is why in many countries, immigrant populations, there are many very successful entrepreneurs amongst immigrant populations, because that is the source of security, and I think that when I look back, that is a part of what’s motivated me to be doing what I’m doing, and we’ve talked, and I think I’ve written in my annual letters about that, you know, often the, the kind of that sense of security or not goes back generations.

[01:09:43] Guy Spier: So in my case, I think there’s a particular break in the 1930s when any family wealth that My family had in Germany was completely destroyed and those kind of starting again and what’s fascinating about this is that I think that we need to be aware of it because it influences us whether we like it or not.

[01:10:00] Guy Spier: And it’s not like my father or my grandparents or relatives ever sat down with me and told me that story, but we grew up living with it. And so it is worthwhile to make it explicit. The place where I struggle is that, and I’ve said this to you, it seems to me to be asinine is the word that I want to use.

[01:10:20] Guy Spier: But, you know, we’re in front of a guy who has read many more words of English and maybe we’ll get onto Proust at some point.

[01:10:25] William Green: That would be Charlie Munger’s words, asinine.

[01:10:27] Guy Spier: Yes, it is. And I’m kind of using it to reference here. But actually, before I go there, do you mind, William, what does asinine really mean?

[01:10:34] William Green: Well, it’s, it’s, it’s in the same genre of words like puerile, stupid, naive, so asinine. It’s kind of dumb. It’s a fancy word for saying. It would be dumb and puerile and idiotic.

[01:10:49] Guy Spier: And I think that, what’s my point, is that I’m using the word just because Charlie Munger’s used it, and actually I think the better word for me to use is shallow.

[01:10:57] William Green: Yeah, he would say asininities and inanities.

[01:11:00] Guy Spier: Right, but it’s shallow because, because what are you actually trying to optimize for and You know, William, I think you worked out that we have less than 10, 000 hours based on life expectancy.

[01:11:11] William Green: Yeah, let’s, probably, this is based on my conversation with Chris Davis.

[01:11:15] William Green: He said, once you hit about 54, you’re into the third set of 10, 000 days. Yeah. And so, Given that we’re into this, what may be, you know, you know, it takes into our early eighties. So let’s say another 10, 000 productive days that I have as a 55 year old and you as a soon to be 58 year old. Yeah. So Chris’s point was if you apply Munger’s, inversion technique, you want to say, what could mess up these last 10, 000 days?

[01:11:46] William Green: And let me not do that.

[01:11:48] Guy Spier: In any case, absolutely. And over and above that, you know, what is really the limited resource is what is every moment of our lives filled with? And what do we want it to be filled with? And it’s come up for me many times is The moment, so, if you’re Warren Buffett, to whom you could have asked the same question, his answer, I believe, would be, but I just really, really like looking at companies, and I really, really like continuing to work on this work of art that is Berkshire Hathaway Museum of Modern Business.

[01:12:27] Guy Spier: And I’ve tried reading, I don’t know, I could imagine Warren saying, I’ve tried reading Proust and it really left me stone cold. And I remember that moment when I realized that what really made Warren so remarkable for me was that he wasn’t trying to be that person who’s utterly fascinated with examining businesses all day long.

[01:12:47] Guy Spier: He is that person. And he’s tried being a different person and he isn’t. And then, I go to some point at one of the Wesco meetings where Charlie’s asked what novels he’s read and he said that he doesn’t read much in the fiction world anymore and that irked me and I realized that I did not want to go through the rest of my life having not read, you know, all sorts of works of fiction, including the world’s great classics, just because I think that, and I actually think that later, so it’s only in the last decade that I read David Copperfield and War and Peace and The Magic Mountain, and I think I’m a wiser, better person for it.

[01:13:22] Guy Spier: So, for me, those last 10, 000 hours, I believe it’s more meaningful for me to spend at least some part of that time exposing myself to some of those great minds of literature and you know, and it’s fascinating for me that, you know, what I’ve not been able to do is to pick a particular author. And I think it’s really beautiful and I’m fascinated that you seem to have picked Proust, all one and a half million words of In Search of Lost Time that you’ve chosen to spend time with.

[01:13:49] Guy Spier: So what I struggle with is that in a certain way, up to now, I’ve set up my life with the goal of creating this financial security for myself and my investors. In a certain way, I’ve achieved that for the people who’ve been with me, at least some of the people who’ve been with me from the beginning, including my father and my own family.

[01:14:08] Guy Spier: And I haven’t really figured out the right way to structure my life going forwards. And I know that the right answer for me is not to say, because I do love the investing side of things. I don’t want to clean that off the table, but it’s creating the space for the other things for a balanced, enriched life.

[01:14:24] Guy Spier: And for me, that involves reading and learning and developing. So, so, and then just forgive me going back to this financial security and I go back to a talk that was given and then I’ll hand the mic over to you to see where you go, where this, I think his name is Collier. I wish I remember, would remember his first name.

[01:14:43] Guy Spier: Five year bus reunion for business school where he see talks to us and says. As the years go on, many of you will not return to your reunions, and the reason you don’t return, he said, I’m talking, he was talking from experience, from analysis of business school reunions. He said, it’s not going to be your health, it’s not going to be your wealth, it’s going to be because you messed up some important relationships in your life, quite probably the relationship with your spouse.

[01:15:09] Guy Spier: He addressed us as a group, and he said, don’t worry about your finances. You’re graduates of Harvard Business School. You’re going to do great. You’re going to do far better than the vast majority of the American population. Worry about The non financial side of your balance sheet and I urge you to invest in that and so that I really took that to heart and so why would I continue to think about only getting wealthier in a financial sense, if I’m not investing in the non financial side of my balance sheet, my family relationships, my psychological health, all of those things, what I would tell you is that having thought about that for the last couple of decades, one of the things that’s been disappointing and hard for me to understand is that You know, we can do as much as we can with our own children, and even then, I mean, I’ve got teenage children, you are very soothing to me, I mean, the outcomes are often different to what we hoped for and expect, and part of wisdom is learning to adjust to that, and when it goes beyond immediate family, you can invest as much as you like, but the world has a way of taking over, so the answer is also not to just invest in the non financial side of one’s balance sheet or of one’s assets, but So I’m looking to kind of balance that out, and I don’t think I’ve done a particularly good job, and it’s also, there’s a kind of a sense of, sort of like, I feel conflicted, because, I mean, one of the first things I said to you when you came was like, you know, William, I feel bad, because I’m putting out not an Omaha number, and you’re an investor with me, and I have to be honest about what’s going on, I am interested in these other things, so that’s kind of hard for me and I have to find a way to navigate my way through that.

[01:16:48] Guy Spier: And what I was committed to doing, and I wrote it somewhere, so I delivered to William a whole bunch of things, is that I’m determined to be honest about this process and not try and cover up something, which it would be very expedient to do, but ultimately that will lead to a more diminished life.

[01:17:06] William Green: I think in the way that, when, when I said to Chris Davis, what does Warren talk about in private, and he talked about the extent to which Warren talks about making Berkshire resilient and bulletproof for many decades to come, I think people would be surprised at, not to equate ourselves with Warren and Chris Davis, but at how much of our conversations over the last week, and probably always, are about these, these questions of what’s an appropriate speed limit, how hard should we be pushing ourselves in life, how intensely should you be devoted to generating good returns, and what are you willing to sacrifice for that?

[01:17:48] William Green: And what actually is going to constitute a rich and abundant life? And what are we actually optimizing for? And are we optimizing for the wrong things? And so, these are questions that relate to investing, but they really, as Charlie would say, using that phrase you mentioned before, everything is one damn relatedness after another.

[01:18:10] William Green: It’s all related, like, I think this is something you and I worry about a lot, or ponder a lot, or, agonize about a lot. This question of like, just how intensely focused should we be on things like material and professional success? And are we, I know I had this extraordinary experience with a great Tibetan Buddhist teacher recently who said to me that the greatest wealth is a tamed mind.

[01:18:37] William Green: And once you hear that, like, wait a second. So if I’m, if I’m really intensely driving for success blindly in this kind of physical, material, reputational way, but my mind is a mess and I have no equanimity, I’ve kind of lost the battle. And so I think maybe this is part of our sort of middle aged existential crisis is.

[01:18:59] William Green: We spent an enormous amount of time actually trying to wrestle with these questions.

[01:19:03] Guy Spier: Yeah. I mean, yes. And it’s, it’s it’s interesting because, you know, I, I would have felt guilty about doing that, but somehow you’ve made me feel less guilty. You’ve actually made me feel like that’s perhaps, the most important work.

[01:19:16] Guy Spier: And once you get that right, many other things fall into place. I find it, I find myself reacting to just a, a calmed mind as being the ultimate goal. I feel like-

[01:19:27] William Green: A tamed mind.

[01:19:28] Guy Spier: Tamed mind. Yeah. Somehow for me, it’s, it’s so envy, I think, is such an interesting emotion. Again, we could spend a long time discussing, trying to understand envy.

[01:19:38] Guy Spier: There’s some things on my reading list that I haven’t yet read on envy. Mimetic theory, that is something that Peter Thiel is super into, is, you know, if you understand the envy in yourself, you can probably manage yourself a lot better, although it would not be good for the demand for luxury goods, so I’m quite happy that it’s a phenomenon.

[01:19:55] Guy Spier: In humans, but again, envy is an interesting call to action. So when we feel envy, it’s, I think, triggering something in us that says I could be that I could do that. And envy properly channeled says that person has got something or is doing something that I would really like to be doing. And actually, maybe I can’t do exactly that same thing.

[01:20:16] Guy Spier: There’s a path for me. What am I not doing that I can do? And so to the extent that I felt enormous envy for Warren Buffett when I was at D. H. Blair. And then I started taking steps and I got far closer to a life that is, that is suitable to me. And it was motivated. And, but what I find myself envying, I don’t, I know that academia is very, very messed up in all sorts of ways.

[01:20:41] Guy Spier: And, there are practical academics or public academics who are no longer part of universities, but no, one guy that I had, I was on a call with recently is an astronomer at Harvard University. His name is Ivy Loeb, and he’s a highly respected academic. And he writes something for his Substack email newsletter, short thoughts, not academic papers.

[01:21:05] Guy Spier: Every three or four days, he’s got an interesting thought that he’s kind of shared, sharing with his readership. Many, I’ve looked at his and other academic resumes and, you know, I feel envy for the fact that they have a they’ve left a body of work, a body of thinking behind them if they were to be taken off the planet.

[01:21:24] Guy Spier: And I’m super grateful. I mean, I would say that the most important thing that I’ve done in my life is get married, have three children and produce a book with you. So I’ve left something behind that perhaps will be of lasting value. We’ll have to find out, but maybe there’s more there. that I should be spending time thinking through.

[01:21:41] Guy Spier: And partly, I mean, we, we discussed this as well. I think that there’s a lot of meaning to working at trying to understand things, perhaps the way the Montaigne did in his essays and George Orwell did. And I think that what comes up for me, and I’ve asked you about this, is that doing that is extraordinarily painful.

[01:22:00] Guy Spier: Hard work, enormous, real writing. Sitting at the rock face and saying, now, what do I want to put on paper? What do I think about this? What is important for me to express is just the most painful thing without really actually being physically painful. I think that I’ve done far more difficult in therapy, far more difficult than fighting with my wife.

[01:22:20] Guy Spier: And so do I really want to do that?

[01:22:23] William Green: Real conversation is painful too. I realized I was thinking a few minutes ago, that tremendous discomfort in my chest disappeared a few minutes ago and I’m like, Oh, I think that was probably anxiety about talking about Gaza. And so literally, so I think like there was one point earlier in the conversation where I literally, I felt so physically uncomfortable that I could have, like there was a part of me that was thinking I need to get up and go lie down in fetal position in a room over there and now I realize oh that was like my body was like really anxious about the fact that I was going to raise this very painful, divisive, difficult issues. So I think, I think it gets at the fact that we are now, thank God that’s gone. Because we talked about it, we talked it through.

[01:23:09] William Green: And so I think that’s part of, part of what we’ve been doing for years. And it’s probably an appropriate place to wrap this up, especially since we’re going to have to go for lunch.

[01:23:17] Guy Spier: Not quite, because I’ve got something I want to say to this. And we haven’t talked Proust.

[01:23:21] William Green: Proust. Okay. But part of, we’ll talk briefly. But part of what this is about is some kind of inner journey where you’re looking at these difficult emotions, you’re looking at these, these conflicts that the painful conflicts between things like trying to be materially and physically successful in the eyes of the world and true to yourself. Like these are all, you know, how to have your own views and be true to your own view and your own experience.

[01:23:51] William Green: And yet at the same time, open to other people’s views. I think this is why it’s been such a rich area of exploration for us with the conversations we’ve had over all these years and with your book and with you helping me with my book that we’re just sort of, we’re, we’re, we’re grappling towards some sort of truth that requires us actually to look at quite difficult, quite painful, quite uncomfortable stuff.

[01:24:13] Guy Spier: And it seems to be that at some point though, we have to, and maybe this is the last 10, 000 days, we have, you have to actually make a conscious decision, which I don’t think that I’ve, I’m afraid of making really, is what do I want my life to be about? And there’s this beautiful idea that, so Ben Franklin comma printer, Ben Franklin was many, many more things than a printer, but it was kind of like, and there’s a friend of mine that I’m in a forum with and it’s like, landscaper, you know, and he’s a real estate developer, very successful real estate developer, but landscaper.

[01:24:47] Guy Spier: What is my life about? And, and, and what do I want that content to be? And, and two people came up to me as you were talking and you’re never going to expect who they are, but they kind of like live with me. Because, and so, two Russian dissidents, we can talk about three, we can talk about Garry Kasparov, we can talk about Alexei Navalny, and Vladimir Kara Murza.

[01:25:09] Guy Spier: I had the privilege of meeting Vladimir Kara Murza, who was at Oxford by the way, he’s an incredible man. Now, Garry Kasparov says, you know, there’s a book up on the shelf there. Winter is coming. I hate what’s going on in Russia. I’m going to do my very best to try and nudge it in a good direction, but I’m going to stay very, very safe in the West where they can’t get to me.

[01:25:30] Guy Spier: Both Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Karamoza take an extraordinary decision. And you know, there’s a documentary on Alexei Navalny. He decides that if he’s going to change Russia, he’s going to go back to Russia. and he knows that he might get arrested, which he did. He’s going to spend enormous amounts of time in prison.

[01:25:48] Guy Spier: They might torture him. They might poison him. He’s going to be separated from his wife and from his children. And I’ve met his wife and she’s a an incredible lady. But in a way, Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Karamozov decided that what their life should be about is changing Russia and taking whatever risks it takes.

[01:26:10] Guy Spier: And you know, he’s on the, on the subway into Moscow and he’s being videoed on somebody’s iPhone and, and the police coming to arrest him. He says, we have nothing to fear. And he’s a guy who made the decision. I would rather be in a prison cell somewhere in Siberia than live a comfortable life. You know, that is a meaningful life for me.

[01:26:33] Guy Spier: And I look at that and I just, and, and then, you know, just briefly, the, the guy who changed South Africa is Nelson Mandela. Yeah. So, you know, his biography of many, many hours and days that he was away from his family because he was working on changing South Africa and he got himself imprisoned in a way, this, the same way that those two Russian characters did.

[01:26:52] Guy Spier: And he had to spend all that time on, that was a conscious choice that he made. And I look at that and I go, I don’t think that even if I was inhabiting the same body, the same circumstances, the same thoughts, I would have opted for a more comfortable life and they would have looked at me. So there’s a choice that they made that I just mentioned because they’re extraordinary people and human rights activists who take enormous risks with their own personal security and sometimes pay an enormous price, often pay an enormous price.

[01:27:19] Guy Spier: Mahsa Amini, who was, who was, who was killed in cold blood in, in Iran, because she wanted to protest not having a veil on. That’s not me. And I feel slightly cowardly as a result, but there’s an incredible exercise, Warren’s talked about it, Monish and I have done this exercise, write your obituary. What do you want your life to be about?

[01:27:41] Guy Spier: And then try to live up to that obituary. And I will tell you, William, that Monish and I did that exercise recently, and I had a really hard time with it because I had a really hard time deciding. What, you know, I definitely don’t want to be an Alexei Navalny figure. It’s just not for me. I’m sorry. Sorry, all those people that I might have served, but that’s just really, really important.

[01:28:01] William Green: What was the most important revelation for you in writing that obituary about what you want your life to add up to?

[01:28:08] Guy Spier: And it was, I was just so, you know, it wouldn’t have had a hard time saying I don’t want to be Vladimir Karamurza, much as I respect him enormously. But I knew that you know, Guy Spier discovered Warren Buffett wrote a book and made a lot of money was not enough asinine to use the word or shallow.

[01:28:25] Guy Spier: It had to be Guy Spier discovered Warren Buffett had a family, wrote a book, made enough money, continued to make money, but devoted himself to and produced and thought or something. And that was very, very hard for me. And it was very hard for me to see exactly how that would fit together. And I think that the answer for me is just to struggle with it.

[01:28:46] Guy Spier: And, you know, and so here’s, here’s where I’ll go into dangerous territory with you, William, just is that so, you know.

[01:28:52] William Green: I want to interrupt you for a second before you go into that dangerous territory and just, and we’ll wrap it up in a, in a couple of minutes. But when you look at Munger, who’s nearly century long life, just ended a few months ago.

[01:29:07] William Green: Does that, does his life clarify for you anything about what, you know, when you look at his life, does that clarify at all this question of like, what constitutes a really meaningful and valuable life?

[01:29:20] Guy Spier: I think it does. Yeah. And I think that’s true. That’s absolutely right. And in a way that, that, you know, it’s, it’s hard to approach the multiplicity of things that he did, whether it was building dorms and being, being on, being on the boards of hospitals and being at the center of an incredibly rich family with the summer compound in Minnesota.

[01:29:40] Guy Spier: Yeah, I think that does. I think you know, we, we, we have to make our own path. The Arthurian knights in the legends would enter the forest in the darkest place. We all enter the forest in the darkest place. I have to figure it out for me and I’m nowhere close to figuring it out.

[01:29:56] William Green: He was a channel for rationality and worldly wisdom.

[01:30:01] William Green: I mean, I think, I think he figured out somewhere along the road that that was sharing, sharing wisdom, sharing rationality was a huge part of who he is. I, I think somehow, you know, in our own less grand ways, we have to kind of figure out like, where, where do I fit into this mosaic?

[01:30:20] Guy Spier: It’s something that’s really interesting.

[01:30:21] Guy Spier: I, but you know, the yin and the yang of Charlie and Warren, you know, Warren with his singular focus on Berkshire and, Charlie with his extraordinary intelligence and rationality that I, you know, looking at that person, I can’t say I, I’ve, I am friends or was friends with either of them known, known Warren just a very, very little bit and Charlie even less, just observed them from afar.

[01:30:45] Guy Spier: I think that I would have, even though Charlie is a far more interesting conversation partner, an interesting person with all of the range of his mind. On some level, I think I would have preferred to have Warren as a friend. The Blumkins are friends with Warren. Somehow, I don’t know why that is, but that’s just an interesting thought for me.

[01:31:02] Guy Spier: So yeah, those are, I don’t know exactly, I mean, I don’t even know actually how one figures that out, because I failed at the obituary exercise. Unless you push me, I want to ask you, William, because it’s come up multiple times. So the search is also fun and interesting, but I think it shouldn’t be more than just a search, but I want you to talk to me about how you.

[01:31:24] Guy Spier: It’s clear for you that Proust is your author and I think that I just feel like it’s just fun to hear it again because it sort of puts it into my mind for me. I think that you’re becoming a far wiser person reading Proust and I want to hear you on that.

[01:31:39] William Green: I’ll just try to wrap up in a small way with this.

[01:31:42] William Green: So I think both both Guy and I have been thinking for years. What’s going to constitute a truly rich and abundant life for us? And given our limited amount of time, and for both of us, our limited amount of attention, because our mind goes all over the place, so we can very easily fall into rabbit holes, we have to be really discriminating, really discerning about what are the really important things to focus on, so I think for both of us, family is absolutely the top of the list, then there’s professional stuff, friendship, helping people, sharing insights that we’ve learned.

[01:32:17] William Green: And then there are certain things that don’t really make that much sense that you’re like, no, this is ungodly important to me. And so for me, one of the things I figured out along the way is I, it’s really important to me to study great literature and then figure out what’s deeply valuable in it that applies in other areas of life that Josh Waitzkin, who wrote The Art of Learning, talks about thematic interconnectedness, this idea that when you find something in one area and it’s interconnected with something in other areas, it’s, it’s, there’s something really beautiful there about that kind of, if you find something in, say, for him, Taoism and also in martial arts and also in investing, that’s kind of a really beautiful thing.

[01:32:59] William Green: And so part of what’s wonderful for me about reading Proust, and this is the third time I’ve. I’ve made a big attempt at the ascent of the Proust mountain and it’s hard because it’s like 3000 pages or something and I got 400 pages from the end when I was 39 and then got distracted by Philip Roth and never finished.

[01:33:16] William Green: So now I’m trying again. I’m about 1000 pages through this time, a little less. Part of the fascination with Proust is that among his other great gifts, he had an astonishing understanding of the human mind of our inner life and an incredible ability to understand the ways in which we’re contradictory and that we lie to ourselves, we deceive ourselves and also the way in which we appear as different things to different people.

[01:33:44] William Green: And so there’s a beautiful example of this great character, Charles Swan, who’s at the heart of the book, who is this tremendous East, the, who, If you want to identify, if you want to tell whether it’s a real Vermeer painting or not, you can go to Swan. And yet, he’s basically kind of destroying himself through this obsession with a woman named Odette.

[01:34:09] William Green: And then at a certain point he realizes that she wasn’t even my type and yet I was totally obsessed with her and destroyed my peace of mind for this woman who wasn’t even my type and wasn’t interesting to me and wasn’t smart or anything. And then right after he’s had this revelation, she’s described as Madame Swan, and you realize that Charles Swan has married the woman after he realized this, and then they turn out to have a pretty happy marriage.

[01:34:34] William Green: And so I look at this stuff and I’m like, it, it fills me with a sense of how unknowable people are, how contradictory they are, how we’re not even knowable to ourselves. We confuse ourselves where we deceive ourselves. And this does have a connection to investing and everything else, because also, you know, we construct stories about things.

[01:34:57] William Green: We, we look at people and we construct a narrative about a person or a company. And we say, this is what it is. This is what I believe it is. And Proust reminds you, it’s so much more complicated. And, and it makes you, I think it makes you a little bit less hasty in judging people harshly, because, you know, Proust sees everyone’s flaws in a sometimes vicious and very funny way. But there’s also great compassion there. And so, so for me, it’s a reminder of the complexities of human nature and how difficult it is to see anything clearly.

[01:35:34] Guy Spier: I want to relate two things because, you know, the, the next best thing to reading yourself, cause you can’t read all of the stuff is to have a friend who’s either reading it or read it.

[01:35:41] Guy Spier: So you know, I was describing to you, William, somebody that was you know, I kind of made me feel slightly uncomfortable, wasn’t sure why or how, and I don’t know if you remember, and you said, well, the person you’re describing to me sounds to me like this personality in this book, in Charles Dickens book, David Copperfield, called Uriah Heep.

[01:36:01] Guy Spier: And I’m so grateful because I’d actually put that book on my reading list and I’d made, there are books that I read and I just read them and there are books that I make myself read. I’m making myself read The Red and The Black right now by Stendhal. And, and I was like, my gosh, that’s right. And it enabled me to see this person in greater clarity because all you had to say to me was Uriah Heep.

[01:36:22] Guy Spier: And then I will just tell you something else who was smarmy.

[01:36:25] William Green: Uriah Heap was someone who was incredibly smart and would tell you what you wanted to hear and would make you feel good, but would be quietly plotting your downfall.

[01:36:32] Guy Spier: Yeah, so go read David Copperfield, focus on Uriah Heap, but that, I think, first of all, I got wiser reading the book, and then by your referring to the personality and making that connection to me, Uriah Heep’s personality to somebody in real life, I became wiser.

[01:36:46] Guy Spier: So I, I really do think that reading the right literature that’s for you at the right time, written by the right person will make you wiser. And I’ll just give you one more example of that, that I think is rooted in your reading of Proust, which is, I brought something else up to you and you said, yeah, it just shows you how you never know people.

[01:37:05] Guy Spier: That’s all you said. And I was like, what the hell is he talking about? But now that you talk about Proust, I kind of think I understand where you’re coming from. And so I think a beautiful thing, just to bring Nicholas Christakis into this. So, you know, there are networks of wisdom that created. And so in many ways you can, I’m benefiting from your, the wisdom that you’ve received through Proust, even though I’ve not read Proust.

[01:37:25] Guy Spier: And so that’s kind of interesting in and of itself, and I’m looking forward to learning more, and I don’t know if it’s going to happen, but I’ve been told by William that if I start reading it myself, he might include me in a book group, but I know that I have to do some real reading for it, but I would have spent, I know you want to close it down, you’ve given me multiple hints, But I would have loved to explore that, but I’ll let you take the mic and take control.

[01:37:47] William Green: Well, the real moral, I think, is that in our own different ways, we’re thinking about how to construct a meaningful life for ourselves in, in all of our own weirdness. And so for Charlie, constructing a life where he didn’t read fiction was just fine because he was busy designing dormitories. I have no interest in designing dormitories, but it’s pretty fun for me to read Proust.

[01:38:11] Guy Spier: Windowless dormitories.

[01:38:12] William Green: Windowless dormitories. So on that note, Guy, thank you so much. And I just really enjoyed these conversations and it’s, I’ve covered about, you know, 30 percent of the topics that I meant to cover with you, but it’s been It’s been more fun. We went in other directions. So thank you so much.

[01:38:29] Guy Spier: Thank you. It’s the, at, at, at some point our wonderful soundman and video man told us that the fire went out and I decided I had to let it go. So sorry about the loss of the fire.

[01:38:39] William Green: That’s symbolic in some kind of way.

[01:38:41] Guy Spier: It’s been fun. Thank you.

[01:38:42] William Green: All right.

[01:38:42] Guy Spier: One last thought. Sorry. This is late. What’s fascinating as well is that I have this feeling, so we have some awareness of what we think we’ve been talking about, and then there’s everything that’s sort of like below the conscious level that has also been going on that neither of us are aware of, and that’s in a way also been fun.

[01:38:59] William Green: So we’re going to need your therapist to give us the real explanation of what’s been going on. All right. Thank you so much.

[01:39:05] Guy Spier: Thank you, William. It’s privileged to be able to talk to you and to be able to work with you.

[01:39:09] William Green: Alright folks, that’s it for this conversation with my old and dear friend Guy Spier. I hope you enjoyed it and that you managed to listen to both parts of this extra long, special, double episode.

[01:39:21] William Green: If you haven’t read it already, I would strongly encourage you to read Guy’s memoir, The Education of a Value Investor. I’m distinctly biased since I helped him to write it, but I think it’s an amazingly honest and candid book. I’ve also included various other resources in the show notes for this episode, including links to the podcast conversations that Guy and I had back in 2022 and 2023.

[01:39:45] William Green: I’ll be back very soon with some more great guests, including a fascinating conversation that I had with Bryan Lawrence, a very successful and extremely thoughtful hedge fund manager who almost never gives interviews. Meanwhile, if the spirit moves you, please feel free to follow me on X @WilliamGreen72 and do let me know how you’re liking the podcast.

[01:40:06] William Green: It’s always great to hear from you. Until next time, thanks so much for listening, and thanks for being part of this ongoing journey to figure out how we can become richer, wiser, and happier. Take care, and stay well.

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