Today on the podcast I’m sharing 2 wisdom rich conversations I had with William Green!

William is a the author of Richer, Wiser, Happier: How the World’s Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life.

Over the last quarter of a century, he has interviewed many of the world’s best investors, exploring in depth the question of what qualities and insights enable them to achieve enduring success and he shares those principles in these conversations.  William is one of those people in life that every time I sit down with a leave with pages of notes on ideas that seem invaluable to crafting a life well lived.

Please enjoy these two wide ranging conversation that took place in April 2021 and July of 2023.

I am Sean DeLaney, the executive performance coach with over a decade of experience working with CEOs, executives, and leadership teams, guiding them beyond traditional definitions of success.

Interested in working together? https://seandelaneycoaching.com

William Green Episode Transcript

Sean: William, welcome to what got you there. How are you doing today?

William: I’m terrific. Thank you so much for having me here.

Sean: I’m excited for this one, but I would love to start at an interesting place and I think a great place to start is around horse racing and I’m wondering how horse racing influenced your, your frameworks for thinking decisions than even your later career path.

William: I think there is a degree of having to withdraw from the world and think in a very quiet way over a long period of time. That’s quite painful because you’re placing yourself almost in this void. There are times when you’re writing a book, if you’re like me, where it takes a long time, where you almost start to wonder if you exist because you’re not really seeing many people other than your family and a few very close friends. You’re very detached from the normal life, the hubbub of day-to-day life. But I think that quietness, that withdrawal from the noise, enables you to think quite deeply about some of these issues that are just kind of knocking around in your head for months.

For example, there’s a chapter where I write about the importance of simplicity. I have a strange mind where I’m reading in lots of different areas. So I might be studying Buddhist philosophy, Kabbalistic spirituality, exercise, meditation, investing, and I’m perennially trying to lose weight, so I’m always trying to study nutrition and stuff like that. Then I start to see these connections between them.

For example, at one point, I started to think, “Well, that’s really interesting that Occam’s Razor is this idea in science where the simplest solution is usually best.” Then I’m thinking, “Well, when I’m studying the Old Testament, for example, there are 613 commandments in the Old Testament, and then it gets reduced to the top 10 list, the 10 commandments, which I can never remember.” Then it basically gets reduced to one, where there was this great sage a couple of thousand years ago, who was asked to sum up the entire Old Testament in the time that he could stand on one leg. He said, basically, “Do not do to others what you wouldn’t want them to do to you. All the rest is commentary; now go learn.”

So I’m thinking, “Oh, that’s really interesting.” You have this reduction from 613 to 10 to one rule. Then I’m thinking, “Oh, well, Google has this home screen where it’s just like this little capsule that you type your search into.” There’s this tremendous simplicity there. Then you think, “Oh, well, Apple is a company that’s entirely built on simplicity because Steve Jobs was inspired by Zen.”

So I start to get really excited about that, where I start to think, “Oh, so there’s actually a kind of master principle at work here, which is this ability to simplify extremely complex things and reduce them to their essence.”

There’s a wonderful investor that I interview in the book, who I profile in one chapter, a guy called Joel Greenblatt, who’s this kind of legend who averaged 40 percent a year for 20 years at his hedge fund, which basically means you turn a million dollars into, I think, 837 million, which is pretty mind-boggling. It’s an amazing thing. When I talked to Joel Greenblatt at great length, trying to figure out what’s the essence of what you do, he said, “Well, it all comes down to this: Value an asset and buy it for less.” He said, “That’s the entire game.” He said, “Once you realize that that’s the essence of investing, everything else seems kind of silly and trite.”

For me, that part of the joy of writing and of interviewing these people is that I get to worry away at these particular themes and keep coming back at them from the books that I’m reading and from the interviews that I’m having. So I was able to talk to him about this question of simplicity, or I would talk to Howard Marks about it, or any of the investors that I was interviewing. I kept coming back to the same principles.

Principles like deferred gratification, the importance of deferred gratification in a world where most people are caught up in this sort of instant gratification culture where you can get all sorts of information instantly, you can trade your stocks instantly with no expenses, you can get every flavor of pornography you might desire instantly, you can get limitless food delivered.

So this ability to control your impetuosity, your desire for gratification right now, becomes a kind of superpower. So there were ideas like this that I think I had developed over the years that I thought were really, really important principles, like the ability to simplify and the ability to defer gratification. I got these ideas from things that I’d read, from my own thoughts, from my own observations, and from interviewing these extraordinary people. Then I just kept going deeper and deeper into them.

Then you get this enormous amount of information, this enormous amount of material, and the real challenge is, how on earth do I synthesize this? That’s part of what makes writing in some ways quite agonizing but also totally overwhelming. I mean, there was one moment where my poor daughter, who now is about 19 but when I started the book was probably about 14, found me just sort of sitting on the floor of our kitchen thinking, “I’m just never going to be able to finish this bloody book,” just totally overwhelmed. And here I am being comforted by my 14-year-old child, who’s telling me, “No, no, Daddy, it’s gonna be great. It’s going to be fine.” I think I write in the acknowledgments that it really wasn’t clear at certain points who was doing the parenting.

But I think that’s part of the thrill of writing: that you’re able to go deep on these ideas that are, I think, quite profound and quite helpful. But it’s also part of the agony of it. If you have a mind like mine that goes all over the place, trying to synthesize all of this stuff is extraordinarily difficult. If you’re trying to get at something that’s deeply true, that is kind of overwhelming.

But when you get to this essence that someone like that guy, Matt McLennan, was mentioning to me where it’s like catching a wave, or Joel Greenblatt, where he kept reducing and reducing and reducing the essence of investing to its purest form, there’s something deeply joyful about it because you do feel like, “Oh, I figured out something that, if not true, is probably approximately true,” which is pretty good.

Sean: No, no. I love the intellectual stimulation. Referring to Occam’s razor and the simplicity makes me think of Lao Tzu, who said, “To obtain knowledge every day, add something; to obtain wisdom, remove something every day.” I’m wondering for you though, in order to have a deep enough understanding of the broad concepts that you can really simplify things, there has to be an amount of initial work that goes into that, correct? You can’t just automatically start simplifying without having just years of knowledge, or am I off on this?

William: No, you’re totally right. I had a very interesting conversation with Dean Ornish, who’s one of the great experts on nutrition and health. This wasn’t for this particular book, but Dean Ornish created the Ornish Program for reversing heart disease. He said to me, I talked to him about simplicity, and he said, “Well, I’ve done 40 years of groundbreaking research on this, and I’ve basically reduced it to eight words.” If I remember rightly, it was: “Move more, eat better, stress less, love more.”

That sounds kind of trite and simplistic, but actually, those eight words are the essence of what he’d figured out about nutrition, movement, the impact of stress on our bodies, and the importance of relationships and community, which I think is something we’ve seen during this COVID period in terms of our mental and physical health.

He said to me, “When you deeply understand something over many, many years, you gain this ability to reduce things to their essence.” He was very close friends with Steve Jobs, and he said to me that Jobs used to say, “I’m prouder of the things that I left out of Apple’s products than the things that I put in.”

I think Jobs, partly because of his fascination with the beauty and simplicity of Zen, understood the importance of stripping away things. So I think it requires a great deal of work to get to this essential simplicity. Matt McClennan, the guy I mentioned before, said to me that he keeps these ideas in his phone, and he said, “I keep going over the same ideas again and again, raking them like a Zen garden.” I thought that was a lovely idea.

I have various scattered notes about future books that I’d like to write, and there are a few ideas that I just keep going over and adding to, and I have this sense that there’s something valuable there, but I don’t really know what it is. It may be that those books never come over. It may be that it’s years, but there’s something about that ability to keep going over the same fundamental questions and adding as you contemplate more. I think it’s a very important habit.

There’s one remarkable investor that I write about in this book, called Paul Lountzis, who said to me—he’s entirely self-educated, really remarkable guy—he said that there are two books, one by Ben Graham, who’s kind of the patron saint of value investing and financial analysis, and one by a guy called Phil Fisher that was written in the fifties, that he said he’s probably read 50 to 60 times. I think that’s a really remarkable idea that often, it’s not actually about breadth necessarily—although breadth is really important—but also about focus on a few really important ideas or a few really important books. So you’re kind of trying to get this combination of breadth in your searching for knowledge and information, and tremendous focus.

There’s a beautiful line from Charlie Munger, Buffett’s polymathic genius of a partner who’s now 97, where Munger says, “Take a simple idea and take it seriously.” It sounds so simple, like most great truths, our eyes glaze over and we don’t take it to heart, but actually, that’s something I think about almost every day. When you find a simple idea that works, that’s really robust, take it seriously and make it the core of what you do.

Sean: I’m wondering for you around this synthesizing process because I know for me, especially early on, I’ve just got to read incredibly broadly, and this takes months, years, and then all of a sudden, it starts to crystallize, becomes clear. And then for me, I mean, I have my specific notes, and then I distill those down even further. I’ve got my operating principles that I revisit, similar to what you were talking about with your ideas. For you though, with the number of interviews, the number of years, what does that actual synthesis process look like so you can tease these out and be able to revisit them?

William: The synthesis process is so appallingly inefficient in my case.

Sean: Well, I’m glad to hear that.

William: I have this constant yearning for order, and then the reality, which is that my brain is so disorderly. I was thinking this morning, I was looking at my phone and I’m like, “Oh yeah, there’s that Wunderlist app that has a list of all the things to do, and I don’t think I’ve opened it in six months.”

I still subscribe to Evernote because I heard Josh Waitzkin, who I love, who wrote the brilliant book The Art of Learning, on some podcast where he was talking about how he uses Evernote and everything’s tagged in Evernote. I’ve had Evernote for years, and I’ve never managed to do that. I even bought this scanner that went with Evernote so I could scan stuff in, and then the fucking thing stopped working, and it’s now sitting in my closet, and I don’t have the heart to throw it away.

For me, there’s this kind of fantasy of order, and then there’s the reality. But one thing that I find really helpful that I do for this is when I’m gathering ideas about future books. I like this app called Things, where I just have—it’s the most unromantic term for it—but I think in terms of buckets. So I think, “Well, here’s a bucket for ideas that I’m exploring for another book,” and then I just keep dumping stuff in that bucket.

For this book, I think it ended up being about nine chapters, including the epilogue, maybe 10 including the introduction. I regarded it as here are nine or 10 buckets. So I would have a Microsoft Word document, and I would just keep dumping stuff in it as I thought of ideas or as I read something. Because I take so long over everything, it took me years. Then when I come to write it, I see all of that stuff, and then I write this enormously long outline that I’m ashamed of just how long it is. It’s like if people saw just how long my outline is, I’d be embarrassed. Then I’m gradually synthesizing it and synthesizing it.

I’m not recommending any of this to anyone else, but I think because my mind is very unruly, the idea of having these kinds of buckets where I just dump everything in them, and then I keep synthesizing and synthesizing, and then I just go over and over it again and again with the writing. By the time I’m done with writing a chapter, there’s basically nothing that I want to change. I mean, there’s not a word that I want to change. So there’s a sort of obsessive relentlessness to the rewriting and the writing that I think whittles it down to the essence.

There are times where I reread something that I’ve written because I don’t have a very good memory and I’ve forgotten what I wrote, and I’m like, “Oh, that actually seems true to me, and that’s really helpful.” I was listening to this wonderful guy, a meditation teacher named George Mumford, who was the coach to people like Michael Jordan, LeBron James, if I remember rightly. He wrote a book called The Mindful Athlete that I like. George Mumford said something in an interview with Dan Harris on the 10 Percent Happier podcast, where I think he said he’d read his own book something like 40 times. I thought that was really fascinating that you could actually find your own book really helpful because you figured out certain things and got them down to their essence.

So, it might sound self-congratulatory, but actually, there are times, you know, there’s a part in my epilogue about stoicism and about the need for resilience where I’m talking about the way that certain great investors handled extremely intense periods. There was a time a few weeks ago, I was having a really tough day, and I went in and read that, and I can’t tell you how much better I felt afterward. I was like, “Oh, well, that’s how Bill Miller dealt with intensity when the financial crisis blew everything up in his life. This is how this guy Jason Karp handled intensity.” It kind of reoriented me.

So it’s kind of like I’m writing this book as much for myself as for anyone else because I’m trying to figure out how to navigate difficult times as we’re going through at the moment.

And so, he said he actually views himself as a node in a neural network surrounded by all these other extraordinary people. This thing that sounds kind of trivial turns out to be incredibly important—to be a nice, decent, sharing person surrounded by other remarkable people turns out to be an enormous, enormous benefit in life.

When my friend Guy Spier had lunch with Buffett a few years ago—he and another friend of mine, Monish Pabrai, who I write about at great length in the book—won this auction where they paid $650,000 to charity to have lunch with Warren Buffett. One of the things that Buffett said to them is, “Hang out with people who are better than you, and you can’t fail to improve.”

Guy once said to me, “Relationships really are the killer app.” So just my failure to develop these relationships with remarkable people early on, probably because I felt in some way unworthy, was something I needed to overcome. I think you have to overcome your sense of agenda, which you probably never totally overcome, at least if you’re me. You have to overcome that sense of, “Well, I’m doing this because this could lead to that,” and instead, just say, “I really like this person; it’s great to hang out with them.”

Gradually, you try to elevate your agenda a bit so it’s not quite so self-seeking. I think people can tell whether you’re just out for yourself or not. There are benefits as you work on yourself, become more comfortable with yourself, and become more comfortable dealing with other people.

Sean:
William, you hit on what I view as foundational principles. One is that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. You think about these positive-sum relationships and treating others the way you want to be treated—it’s amazing over time what that blossoms into. The other thing you hit on, which seemed crystal clear when you brought up all the different investors, is that they’re true and authentic to themselves. You can see this in sports with coaches or great athletes—they might have different styles, but that style is who they are. I think that’s a really interesting point. Is that something you felt you saw within a lot of the investors you sat down with over the years?

William:
I think it’s profoundly important, and it’s very perceptive on your part. The ability to become more and more authentic—again, like most great truths—sounds so superficial and so trite, but most people don’t take it seriously. If it’s not everything, it’s certainly a central core principle.

There was a wonderful moment during that lunch that Monish Pabrai and Guy Spier had with Buffett, where Buffett talked to them about the difference between people who live by an outer scorecard—like what we were doing at Eton, where your ranking in the year was read out loud—and people who live by an inner scorecard, where they’re really judging themselves by their own high standards. Buffett had this wonderful line where he said, “You can tell whether you live by an inner scorecard or an outer scorecard by asking yourself: Would I rather be the best lover in the world but known publicly as the worst, or the worst lover in the world but known publicly as the best?”

After one of the annual meetings for Berkshire Hathaway in Omaha, Guy Spier, Monish Pabrai, and I got this wonderful private plane back that Guy had rented to go back to New York. We spent the entire time on this flight talking about the importance of the inner scorecard. Monish was saying that all of the greats in investing live by an inner scorecard. He listed guys like Li Lu, Nick Sleep, and Buffett himself. Buffett said to Monish’s daughters, who came to that lunch with him, “I don’t need anything that I wouldn’t have touched when I was five years old.” He has this ridiculously childlike diet that, for most people, would have killed them at 50, but somehow he drinks rivers of Coca-Cola—Cherry Cola, I think—and eats red meat. He goes to McDonald’s every morning for his burger on his way to the office.

Again, it sounds kind of silly and trite, but what it really is, is him living in a way that’s profoundly aligned to who he is. Monish, who decided he was going to clone Warren—which is his term basically for modeling or replication—was not only going to figure out what worked for Warren as an investor but also how Warren lives. One of the things Monish decided is that he’s just going to live deeply in alignment with who he is.

Monish, for example, gets into the office pretty late. His secretary brings him some printouts of emails at around 11, and he just kind of writes a couple of words on the top, which is something he cloned from Charlie Munger. Then he basically just sits and reads in his office all day, except for when he goes out to play racquetball or to go biking. Then he takes a guiltless nap in the afternoon, and later in the evening, he reads until nighttime. He’s basically just decided he’s going to live in complete alignment with who he is.

He really doesn’t like the whole mumbo jumbo of having to market his funds, so he decided that he simply won’t have any marketing meetings at all. He’ll meet his shareholders once a year for his annual report, where he talks with total candor about his mistakes and everything he’s done, but the rest of the year, he just won’t talk to them. He won’t make any sales calls, and on an average day, he has zero meetings. He’s just left his time totally free to think, read, and do what he wants.

In some ways, there’s something profoundly antisocial about that, and in some ways, there’s something really beautiful about it—that he’s structured his life in a way that’s true to who he is. He literally said to me, “If I have a lunch or dinner with someone, I’ll ask myself, ‘Did I enjoy that?’ If I didn’t, I would never have lunch or dinner with that person again.” He also said, “When I meet someone, I’ll ask, ‘Is this person going to make me better or worse?’ If they’re not going to make me better, I just won’t meet with them again.” There’s something about that that’s kind of brutal and kind of deeply admirable—that he’s basically structured his life to be in alignment with who he is.

One of the great gifts of having money is that these great investors have the independence to live in a way that’s profoundly aligned with who they are in all of its splendid idiosyncrasy and peculiarity. I think that’s one of the reasons I started gambling in the first place on horses and why I became obsessed with the stock market. I think I always had this craving not to be answerable to anybody, and the idea that you could achieve that kind of life by simply thinking better—that’s a very beautiful route to success.

Bill Ackman said the same thing to me about money. He said that for him, money was about independence—the independence to do what he wanted, think what he wanted, and say what he wanted. Some people are upset by Ackman because he can be kind of brusque and seem arrogant, but I happen to like him and admire him a great deal. I think he was able to structure his life in a way that allowed him to do what he wanted, say what he wanted, and think what he wanted. That’s a tremendous gift that money gives these people.

Sean: How did that merger for you happen between love of investing and being able to think along with journalism and how those kind of intertwined together for you?

William: Yeah, it was a long process. I always felt slightly sheepish about the fact that I was so obsessed with investing, I think because I had studied English literature at Oxford, right? And I left Oxford thinking, “I’m going to write screenplays, I’m going to write novels, I’m going to be this amazing, amazing writer.”

When I was very young, I wrote for the Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker, and so I used to joke that I was anonymously famous because, in those days, you didn’t have bylines in the Talk of the Town. So I had these very high-minded aspirations of being a really great writer, and I regarded investing as slightly 1930s Tory.

I mean, literally, when the New York Times arrived when I was first living in New York, around the age of 21, I would take out the business section and just toss it away. It didn’t even occur to me to look at it. And I think part of what happened is that when I was about 25, my brother and I owned an apartment in London, and this was before property in London became hugely valuable. We sold it because he wanted to move into a much grander place, and I didn’t need it because I was living in New York. So I got this sort of small windfall where I suddenly had to figure out, “Well, what do I do with this money?”

I started to read obsessively about the stock market and funds just because I didn’t want to lose this money and I wanted to make it grow. My fascination was personal—I was actually trying to figure out this game. Then, when I started to interview all these extraordinary investors as a journalist in my mid-twenties, I just found them fascinating.

To be able to go off to the Bahamas and spend a day with Sir John Templeton, who was probably the greatest global stock picker of the 20th century, or to interview someone like Fayez Sarofim in Houston, who literally had an El Greco painting on one wall and a 5th-century Syrian mosaic in his office—that was really interesting. As a novelist, what could be better than spending time with this guy, who was known as “The Sphinx” because he was an Egyptian billionaire who never talked to the media, and here I was, sitting there interviewing him?

I saw that there was beauty in the stories. I thought, “Wow, these are really interesting, colorful characters.” I wanted to figure out how they viewed the world, how they made sense of the puzzle, how they cracked the code. What could I learn from how they cracked the code? What ideas could I share with other people about how they cracked the code? How could I become richer and more independent so I wouldn’t have to take crap from anyone, by applying what they taught?

There was this beautiful convergence where it was interesting as a storyteller, but there was also a practical payoff, both for me and for other people. If you can think better, you actually can achieve total financial independence, which is a wonderful gift for a writer because then you don’t have to take projects that you don’t want to take. You have the time to do your work properly.

Most other journalists weren’t really investing seriously themselves; they didn’t have skin in the game, so they didn’t care as much as I did. And because I had this strange interest in storytelling and literature, I really saw it as a narrative. When I see someone like Arnold Vandenberg, a Holocaust survivor who grew up in hiding on the same street as Anne Frank, I’m trying to tell the story of how he survived, who saved him, what he learned, how it changed his life, and what we can learn about this kind of inner mastery that he achieved in his own mind in order to gain control over our own minds and figure out what actually matters in life.

That’s a very much storytelling approach, a narrative-driven approach to writing about investing, that I don’t think many other people take. I’m fascinated by these people as characters and as code-breakers, in a sense, who are figuring out how to play this game in a particularly smart way that the rest of us can learn from.

Sean: Yeah, William, that language resonates deeply in terms of figuring out and cracking the code and learning how to play this game better. I loved the story of Vandenberg; that deeply resonated. I don’t care who you are—that’s going to move you emotionally to some degree, unless you’re one of these legendary investors who doesn’t seem to let emotion play too much of a part.

I am wondering, though, after 25-plus years of sitting down with some of the legends of all-time investing, was there an interview or a meeting that really shaped you early on?

William: I still wrestle a great deal with the time I spent with Sir John Templeton 20 years ago. One of the reasons I wrestle with it so much, and I write about this a lot in a chapter in the book, is that I didn’t really like him very much. He was this legendary, iconic figure with an extraordinary reputation—he averaged 40.5% a year over 38 years, which is an astonishing record. He continued to be extraordinary in his eighties and beyond, so he was this iconic figure, but I found him extremely austere, stark, slightly judgmental, sanctimonious, and holier-than-thou.

I think it highlighted for me just how chaotic my inner life was—how not in control of my thoughts and emotions I was—because he had such extraordinary control over his own mind, time, money, and thoughts. I was probably predisposed not to listen to him because it would have been painful to look at myself more honestly. At the time, I was probably somewhere between agnostic and atheistic, and he was very spiritual.

The joke is that I was super judgmental of him and dismissed his spirituality totally, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more and more spiritual. I am no longer atheistic. One thing you can be sure of is that I’ve been wrong about this because I’ve taken all of the positions—I’ve been agnostic, atheistic, and spiritual. You can be absolutely sure that I’m wrong at some point, but at which point it’s not really clear.

There’s a part of me that thinks, “What did Templeton figure out that I wasn’t ready to listen to?” There’s a point in the book where I mention reading some of the books he gave me back then, about the laws of the universe, where I literally blushed and groaned out loud, realizing, “Oh my God, this is stuff that he was trying to teach me 20 years ago that I was too bloody stupid and close-minded to listen to.”

For me, one of the great lessons of Templeton’s life is the enormous importance of keeping an open mind. He was extraordinarily inquisitive, doing what seemed like crazy stuff back then, like funding research at places like Harvard to prove scientifically whether prayer works. He was asking me, “Does it work better if you say, ‘Thy will be done’? Does it work better if the person you’re praying for is there, if you put your hands on them, or if they’re praying for themselves?” I was so close-minded that I kind of rolled my eyes at this.

I think one reason he was so successful was that he retained that open-mindedness. I still wrestle with my initial interviews with him and the fact that I was embarrassingly close-minded. I try to tread a little more lightly these days and acknowledge that I just don’t know. Someone like Howard Marks, who I focus on at great length in the book, said to me, “I belong to the ‘I don’t know’ school.” He really accepts that there are certain things he just doesn’t know.

That sounds, in some ways, disempowering, but in fact, it’s enormously empowering because once you recognize there are certain things you just don’t know, you can stop worrying about them. If you can’t predict the future, if you can’t tell whether the stock market’s going to go up or down, or what’s going to happen with inflation or interest rates, you can actually just say, “Oh, I’m not going to worry about that stuff that much. I’m just going to try to find a company and buy it for less than it’s worth, and that’s the game,” or buy an index fund, sit in it for 20, 30, 40 years, and keep adding to it.

The admission of your own intellectual limitations turns out to be an enormous strength rather than an admission of weakness. But I think I was probably too arrogant and too psychologically fragile to admit my own limitations in those days. Maybe I’ve just become more aware of my limitations as more evidence of them has accumulated over the years.

Sean:
Yeah. I wish I had started using the saying, “I don’t know,” a bit more frequently when I was younger and didn’t wait so long.

I love these stories about some of the investors. I’m wondering, though, has there been one where, as you’re peeling back multiple layers like an onion, it just keeps getting deeper and more interesting? Is there anyone like that who comes to mind for you?

William:
One of the most extraordinary investors in the book, who I write about a lot and think about a lot, is Ed Thorp. I describe him as probably the greatest game player in the history of investing. Ed is a model in so many ways for how you want to think and how you want to live. He’s remarkably colorful.

I met him when he was probably 84, and he looked about 20 years younger. He’s this handsome, unshaven guy who just looks full of joie de vivre, happiness, and joy. I think he had just gotten engaged to a 50-year-old woman, and he looked totally fit and healthy. He was wearing a black leather jacket and just looked comfortable with himself and comfortable in his own skin.

You can understand why he’d be comfortable in his own skin. He was the guy who figured out how to beat the casino at blackjack. He was the inventor of card counting, and then he figured out how to beat the casino at roulette. He and another famous guy from MIT, Claude Shannon, made the first wearable device—probably the first wearable computer. Ed would activate it with his big toe in his shoe, and it would calculate the velocity of the ball and the wheel in the roulette wheel, allowing him to predict with more certainty than anyone else where the ball might land.

So, he was turning a game that’s totally random into one where he had a slight edge. He approached life by stacking the odds a little bit in his favor, giving himself marginal improvements in his chances of winning, which then compounded massively over time. That example is very powerful. Once you see someone like that, you start to ask yourself, “Do I have an edge in investing?” I asked him this question: “How can you tell if you have an edge?” He said to me, “Well, if you don’t have any really rational reason to think you have an edge, then you almost certainly don’t.”

One of the things that Ed Thorp does is he only plays games that he can win. Why would he want to play the game of picking individual stocks or speculating on big macro trends if it’s not a game he can win? He said to me, for most people, they’re going to do way better by buying an index fund. He explained that the market tends to go up over the long term due to improvements in the economy and productivity. Gradually, over time, it’s just going to continue to go up. He said, if you can bet on an index fund for the long term and have very low expenses, you’re increasing your odds of winning. You’re going to beat about 80% of all professional investors just by admitting what you can’t do and riding the market over the long run with very low expenses.

I think about this constantly: “Am I playing a game that I can win? How do I stack the odds in my favor in everything that I’m doing?” This applies to everything. The great investors are constantly looking for these asymmetrical bets where there’s very limited downside and very high upside.

Take how Ed Thorp approached COVID. He didn’t trust the government’s information to tell him what he should do. He analyzed the numbers himself. Very early on, in January or February of 2020, he was studying data from Wuhan, looking at things like unexplained deaths, and making inferences from the 1918 flu pandemic that killed his grandfather. He extrapolated what he thought was the true fatality rate and what was actually going to happen. In February, before there was a single reported death in the U.S., he gathered his family and said, “I think there are going to be 200,000 to 500,000 deaths in the U.S. over the next 12 months. We need to get supplies now.” So, they stocked up on masks, detergent, and other supplies a month before anyone else figured out they should be clearing out the stores.

He put himself in isolation in Laguna Beach, where he has a beautiful home with his wife, and pretty much didn’t see anyone. He would see his kids outside with masks because he was 85 or 86 at the time. That’s an incredibly logical approach to life: thinking about how to survive a catastrophe, how to avoid being blown out of the game, how to act rationally, and how to analyze the data for yourself, not just believing what the experts tell you.

This is exactly what he did with gambling. Everyone said, “You can’t win at blackjack, you can’t win at roulette, you can’t beat the casino.” And he said, “Let me study the evidence for myself.” What you see with all these investors is this independence of mind. They’re constantly looking around for what works, where they can get the best information, and playing games they can win while avoiding games where they’re going to lose.

Buffett famously said, “How do you beat Bobby Fischer?” He said, “Play him at anything other than chess.” They have this very rational, pragmatic way of thinking about life. They study what works and what doesn’t work. For someone like me, who’s trying to figure out the code, trying to grope my way through the fog of life, these guys provide unbelievable clues about what works and what doesn’t.

What I was trying to figure out is how to reverse engineer these people and apply certain things to my life. A simple idea from Ed Thorp is that you want to avoid catastrophe. If you can stay in the game and survive the dip—survive a period like this pandemic—you’re much more likely to win. If you stick with games where you have an advantage and if you’re a continuous learner like Buffett, constantly deepening your knowledge in areas you’re good at and understand, the cumulative effect is actually overwhelming.

What I’m trying to do with the book is synthesize for myself what these super principles are and share them with other people—and with my own kids—because I want them to know that there are certain things that work and certain things that don’t work in life.

Sean:
Yeah. To take the simple ideas, combine them, and use Charlie Munger’s term, the “Lollapalooza effect,” where there’s an actual outcome there.

William:
Exactly. It’s funny that you use that word because I thought about that a lot. I thought of using that phrase to describe it and didn’t, so it shows that you’ve thought deeply about Munger that you actually used the phrase that I didn’t use, but probably should have.

Sean:
Yeah. Munger has been formative in shaping my thinking, along with Ed Thorp, who won’t be a guest on the show. He gave me the art of thinking, but to talk about his thinking process. You bring up a great point in the book about how he ran the calculations on the number of deaths by bicycle, went for a bike ride one day, and realized it was the last time he was going to do that. I found that humorous.

William:
Well, and you have to do that in every area. Tom Gayner said to me that if you apply Charlie Munger’s inversion principle—which is basically Munger’s idea taken from Carl Gustav Jacobi, the algebraist—you invert, always invert. Instead of saying, “How do I make this a wonderful outcome?” you say, “What causes a disaster, and how do I avoid that?” So, you’re constantly inverting, constantly looking for what can go terribly wrong rather than what can go terribly right.

For example, Tom Gayner, the co-CEO of Markel, said to me, “If I apply the Munger inversion principle, I say, ‘Well, I’m really happily married. I really love my wife.’ He’s been married to this woman he dated when he was 15, an amazing thing. They’ve been married forever, and she’s lovely. He said, ‘If I’m happily married and I don’t want to wreck my marriage, I’m not going to go to bars and get drunk on my own. If I go to a bar, maybe I have two drinks instead of 10 because I don’t want to put myself in difficult situations where there’s enormous downside and no upside.'”

It sounds like a trite example, but think of things like cheating on your taxes, cheating on your wife, cheating, lying to yourself, driving too fast in bad conditions. These are all things with limited upside and massive downside. So, that simple principle that’s essential to the greatest investors in markets turns out to be hugely applicable in every area of our lives.

I think about these things constantly. I would say to my son when he was first learning to drive, “Think about the margin of safety. Remember that there are blind spots, and before you turn, turn and look as well, rather than just checking your mirror.” Once you really understand how the greatest investors are navigating the world, it becomes profoundly helpful in every area of your life—whether it’s deciding what habits will benefit you, how to invest, how to structure your relationships, or how to structure your time.

They’re tremendous pragmatists. It’s not like a journalist who pays no price if they’re wrong unless they get sued, or an academic with tenure who can just bloviate about things in a totally wrongheaded way, or political pundits who pay no price for being wrong. The greatest investors have money on the line, and millions of people’s lives are affected by the quality of their decisions. There’s something about the stakes involved and the fact that there’s skin in the game that forces them to be better thinkers, forces them to think about what really works in an agnostic way, and just say, “Well, if it’s really helpful for me to meditate, and that’s going to help me make better decisions, let me start meditating. If it’s helpful for me to exercise because I’m going to have more equanimity, let me exercise. If it’s helpful for me to reverse engineer people who were great investors, let me do that. If it’s helpful for me to surround myself with people who are better than me, let me do that.”

There’s a pragmatism to the way they approach not just investing but the problem of life, and that’s something profoundly helpful for all of us.

Sean:
One of the stories you brought up, I’m pretty sure it was about teaching your son to drive. You said, “Every time you’re on the road, someone out there is trying to kill you. You just don’t know which person it is.” I thought that was a great model.

William:
I think you’ve got that from somewhere else. I don’t think I said that, but I wish that I had said it.

Sean:
I could have sworn this was from your book. I’ve been trying to use it all the time when I’m on the road now.

William:
I would love to take credit for it, but I don’t think that’s from me. However, there’s a similar idea from one of the great investors I interviewed, who said you always have to know that when you’re buying or selling an asset, there’s somebody on the other side of that transaction. I think it was Templeton who said, “You need to know more than that person.” So you’re constantly thinking, not just about your own position, but the position of everyone around you. It’s about how to stack the odds in your favor by getting an informational advantage, which is what he was doing. So, yeah, I don’t know if that’s related, but I wish I could claim your insight about driving.

Sean:
Well, I’m wondering, and this is going to be different for each person, but after studying all these legendary investors and distilling down the best mindsets and skill sets they have, which mindset do you think is the hardest to implement or adopt in your own life?

William:
One of the things that’s very striking to me is how rational, objective, unemotional, and analytical the best investors are. I’m not a particularly rational human being. I’m fairly mystical about things. If most people knew how I actually think and operate, they’d be kind of appalled.

So I kind of have to accept the fact that I’m not really cut out to be a super-rational, super-unemotional person. That self-knowledge is actually really valuable, both in investing and in life. For example, when the market’s going to hell, when it’s falling apart, I find it surprisingly easy to remain calm. That doesn’t bother me at all. Somehow, deep in my psyche, I’m able to buy when everything’s falling apart. That’s not a problem for me. But it’s very hard for me to be super optimistic about the future when everything is going well and everyone else is happy. I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop and for it all to fall apart.

I think that maybe it partly comes from being Jewish. You know, we were refugees from Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. We were always fleeing. And I think it’s very striking that Ben Graham, who came up with the idea of the margin of safety, came from a similar background. His family came from Poland, and his grandfather was the chief rabbi in Warsaw. They went to London, where my family was from, and then to New York. His family had a fortune, but they lost it, and his mom lost what was left in the Panic of 1907. She ended up with a boarding house that also went bankrupt. So, Graham’s obsession with the margin of safety and resilience was born from the same kind of chaos that my family went through as refugees.

I think there’s a kind of fearfulness to my mindset that certainly would never enable me to be a venture capitalist with the belief that everything’s going to be great. But it does position me to take advantage of uncertainty when everything’s going to hell. I have this basic sense that when there’s disruption and tremendous uncertainty, people do stupid stuff, and that’s when there are tremendous opportunities.

So just knowing how different my mindset is from the optimal mindset of great investors is very helpful. Without wanting to be too self-referential, if I can make this apply to your listeners, I think one of the most valuable things you can do as an investor is to be honest about your own psychological makeup, your strengths, and whether you’re equipped to win this particular game—whether it’s picking individual stocks, having a very concentrated portfolio, or remaining unemotional in the face of market swings.

Howard Marks, for example, told me that he’s inclined to be fearful, so he has to be careful and humble about his limitations. But he said people aren’t paying him to be a chicken. So, during the financial crisis, when the market was imploding and nobody would buy toxic bonds of companies in danger of bankruptcy, he and his partner invested 500 to 600 million a week for 15 weeks, and they ended up making about 9 billion in profits. It was partly because he knows he sees the world through a filter of pessimism and fearfulness, and he has to compensate for that.

I think this ability to be conscious of your own limitations and makeup, to create workarounds, and to stick with games you can win, is enormously helpful in business, markets, and life.

Sean:
Potentially the most important words in investing or life are “know thyself.” That definitely applies. We’re going to wrap up here in a minute. I’ve just got two more questions, and we’ll make sure to link up everything with the book. The book Richer, Wiser, Happier is a distillation of 25 years of insights from some of the most profound minds in investing. I’m wondering, though, are there any other books that you’ve come to over the years that you wanted to revisit, relive, rethink, or give to others? Are there a few that have been really impactful but maybe aren’t as well known?

William:
There are definitely books that I read again and again. One of the books that I recently gifted to both of my children is Letting Go by David Hawkins. I do this a lot—buy multiple copies of the same book. Hawkins wrote Power vs. Force, which had a huge impact on people like Mohnish Pabrai and Arnold Van Den Berg. Letting Go is a book he wrote very late in life, and Hawkins had been a very successful psychotherapist who became something of a mystic. I think he’s writing from the position of someone who’s actually, if you believe in this sort of thing, enlightened, and he’s telling you, “This is how it is. This is reality as it is.”

In Letting Go, there’s one chapter, chapter two, where he talks about how to relate to your own emotions, which wasn’t something we were taught growing up in England. Certainly not in English boarding school, where we wore tailcoats, waistcoats, and starched white collars—until World War II, we even wore top hats. So, we weren’t very in touch with our emotions. Hawkins talks about becoming aware of your emotions, abiding with them, and gradually, by being with them without judgment, letting the energy behind them dissipate. That’s an enormously important idea.

It also runs through the teachings of a great Tibetan Buddhist called Sogyal Rinpoche, who I find fascinating. I’ve been doing his online course called Fully Being, which I think is a very interesting course. The idea of how to deal with your own emotions is something I continue to explore. I’ve always thought that if I have wayward emotions—whether it’s anxiety, fear, self-loathing, despair, sadness, or anger—I should try to change them and replace them with something better. Tony Robbins, who I’m friends with and admire a great deal, focuses on this in the last chapter of his book Unshakeable, where he talks about transforming emotions by focusing on appreciation, love, or whatever can shift your emotional state.

That’s clearly powerful and important, but there’s something really fascinating to me about this idea of sitting with your emotions in a non-judgmental way and letting the energy dissipate. If this is true, which I’m inclined to believe because this wisdom has come down through thousands of years of Tibetan Buddhism, then it’s a very profound and important idea. It’s an idea I wanted my kids to benefit from as well because I do wish people had taught us how to deal with our emotions at school. In an English school, the attitude would have been, “Stiff upper lip, what’s wrong with you?”

Hawkins provides a technique for dealing with emotions that I think is probably very powerful and quite profound.

Sean:
That’s excellent. I love getting new book recommendations. Power vs. Force has been sitting on my bookshelf, and it came up multiple times in your book, so I knew I was going to have to dive into it. Another one I’m excited about. I know you’ve sat down with almost all of the legendary investors, and this doesn’t have to pertain to investors specifically, but is there anyone—dead or alive, not a family member or friend—that you’d love to spend a weekend interviewing?

William:
I’ve spent a lot of time studying Kabbalistic wisdom over the years, which for me is the most profound thing I’ve ever studied. There was a great Kabbalist called Rav Yehuda Ashlag, who wrote extraordinary books like The Wisdom of Truth and The Thought of Creation. You have this sense that he wasn’t making an intellectual argument or groping for the truth like I am. He wasn’t in the fog with a blindfold trying to figure out what’s true. You get the sense that some of these great sages, like Rav Ashlag, are actually revealing what’s true. He said things like, “I reveal one hair’s breadth and conceal two.” It’s as if they’ve been given permission to reveal certain secrets about how the universe operates.

He had an extraordinary student, Rav Brandwein, who was remarkable, and another student, Rav Berg, who I met and who died a few years ago. Rav Berg was one of the most powerful people I’ve ever met, even though I’ve interviewed presidents, prime ministers, billionaires, and legendary figures. You had the sense that he was operating at a different level of understanding, almost like he was seeing truth. If I could meet someone, Rav Ashlag would be high on the list.

A friend of mine who’s a deep student of Buddhism said there’s a kind of transmission when you’re with one of these great Buddhist sages. I think it’s similar to what Buffett was saying about hanging out with people who are better than yourself and you can’t help but improve. I think you want to do that in every area of your life—with your friends, with your teachers, and with the eminent dead.

Munger, because he couldn’t find many people on Earth as clever or wise as he is, hung out with people like Ben Franklin, Einstein, and Richard Feynman through their books. But probably Franklin more than anyone. What’s fantastic is that you can create your own sort of board of directors by assembling this group of dead people to be your guides through life.

So for me, it’s not so much about meeting these people; it’s about having books like Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations or The Book of Joy, which Nick Sleep, one of the great investors I write about, recommended. That book is a series of conversations between the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. These are the sorts of books you want to keep around and revisit because they offer direction through the fog. You don’t necessarily have to meet these people; befriending the eminent dead is a beautiful and profound idea.

Sean:
I love the thought about going through the fog. Howard Marks shared a great quote in one of his memos a few months back: something about us all walking into the future with our chests puffed out, thinking we know exactly where we’re going, but in reality, we’re walking around blindfolded with a cane out in front of us. I probably butchered that, but I love your idea of a board of directors. It’s a thought experiment I do frequently when trying to solve something—thinking about how a certain person in a specific scenario would think it through. It’s one of the things I love about your book because it helped me add a few more people to my board of directors, which helps me think through problems in life. I want to make sure the listeners can connect with you and your book, Richer, Wiser, Happier, which is out now. We’ve talked a lot about what’s uncovered and some of the great stories and distillations of knowledge. Is there anything else you want to leave the listeners with if they’re interested in picking it up?

William:
Well, I’d love to hear from your listeners what resonated with them in the book. It’s really curious to me. One famous investor who read it mentioned privately—I’m not going to name him, but he’s one of the most famous investors in the book—he talked about how what struck him most was the number of divorces among famous investors. He said it’s understandable because we all got so absorbed by what we did. It was so consuming that, of course, we neglected our spouses. Maybe they also lack great emotional intelligence, and I just thought that was really fascinating. That was what resonated with him.

Another well-known author and investor told me the other day that the chapter on high-performance habits had the biggest impact on him. And then Mohnish Pabrai said to me that the three most important words in the book are “scale economies shared,” which is from the chapter about Nick Sleep and his partner Zak. He said that chapter has changed the way he sees the world and invests, which is really fascinating to me. Something about Nick Sleep has completely changed this great investor, who is the character in the first chapter of the book. So, I’m really interested to hear what resonates with other people because I’m sharing what resonates most with me. There are so many things I could have written about, but if there’s something you think is a really important idea or something you think others should read about, please tell me. Or if there’s someone you think I should interview because they’re remarkable, let me know.

You can reach me on social media—whether it’s Twitter (I think my handle, if that’s what you call it, is @WilliamGreen72), befriend me on LinkedIn, or email me. I hope it’s an ongoing conversation because I’m not coming at the book with the sense of, “Well, I’ve figured this all out; I’m so wise.” I’m borrowing the wisdom of these other extraordinary people, trying to synthesize it, and passing it on. I feel like I’m on a journey with the reader, and I’m trying to provide them with resources that can help them on their journey to become richer, wiser, and happier. But it’s my journey as well. So, if there’s cool stuff you discover that I ought to be thinking about or writing about, please let me know.

Sean:
Looking back over your entire career, has there been a mindset of yours that you think has been incredibly impactful for your own life personally?

William:
I think having relentless curiosity is pretty helpful. Just not really knowing where anything is going to take you, but being open to learning stuff. Maybe because I don’t have a very orderly mind, I’m inclined to chase after whatever interests me, which can be a little frustrating at times.

I can never remember if this is actually true or if I’ve sort of invented this in my mind, but I have this image of watching The Simpsons Movie many years ago. There’s a moment where I think Homer is trying to rescue his son, and then he suddenly stops and is like, “Ooh, donuts,” and totally forgets he’s trying to rescue his son. I have a bit of that, where I’m going down one lane, and then suddenly I’m like, “Donuts!” That donut might literally be an extraordinary work of fiction that I start reading and then forget that I’m reading, but I’m very intensely involved with it while I’m reading it. Then I shift to something else, and I’m very intensely involved with that.

One of the most surprising things I’ve found is that these areas I chased down, which seemed to be weird digressions, turned out to be the main path in retrospect. Often, these things I was slightly sheepish and embarrassed about because I started as an English literature student at Oxford—had no interest in business, money, or finance. I thought that was all crass and vulgar. Then I discovered the stock market in my twenties, and that became a weird obsession. I became really interested in investing, but I was weirdly interested not in the numbers but in the psychology and philosophy of it—questions like, “If you’re trying to predict the future, and yet the future is unknowable and everything changes, how do you do that? Are you just lost, or are there ways to stack the odds in your favor?” That radiated out into all these different directions.

At the heart of Buddhist philosophy is the idea that everything changes, that nothing is permanent. Then I started studying that in other areas. I’ll be sitting on a Shabbat in a very eccentric place where I go for Shabbat service every Saturday, and I’ll be looking at one of the portions we’re reading, and it’ll say something like, “Everything withers, everything dies, everything passes, but His word is forever.” And I’m like, “Wait a second, so these guys are saying actually that the Creator is permanent, there’s something that isn’t impermanent?” Then I start studying more Buddhism and think, “Oh, within this space where everything is happening, there’s this open space like the sky where there’s just awareness of things happening in it.” So, there’s some sort of permanence even there—like your consciousness.

I was talking to someone the other day, an extraordinary guy who is a translator from Tibetan, and he was saying to me, “I believe that our mindstream continues from one life to the next.” In this weird, erratic, slightly irrational way, I’m just chasing after all these things. In a way, it’s a disadvantage because my mind isn’t linear, and I don’t have a great track where I can set up a schedule that works and keep at it. But in a way, it’s a great advantage because I’m going off in these weird directions and making odd connections.

If there’s any takeaway, it’s that you somehow have to embrace your own form of craziness and idiosyncrasy in order to perform well at anything. I can’t deny the fact that my brain is wired that way and that I’m intensely curious. I have to harness it in some way while also being aware that there are weaknesses to that approach and that it would be good if I could strengthen my ability to be more linear, for example.

Sean:
Yeah, it’s interesting how the disadvantage becomes the advantage for you. It’s fascinating to see people finally accept those idiosyncrasies. I think it was Graham Duncan who wrote a great article about embracing your funk and those idiosyncrasies because that’s what’s going to sustain you. That’s you getting in touch with that. I’m wondering for you, what opened up the floodgates to allow you to do that? Because so many people go through their lives trying to fit another mold that’s not them.

William:
I still haven’t fully embraced it. There’s always an element of shame and guilt about it. I start the day with a plan to do something, and then it’s gone in a totally different direction. I do feel some guilt and shame about that. But increasingly, I’m trying—because of my slightly half-assed meditation practice, which is as distractible as everything else—to watch that happening. I try to observe the guilt and shame and think, “Oh, look, there’s a little bit of shame arising, there’s a little bit of guilt arising. Where do I see that in my body and mind? Why has that served me?”

What was I doing to allow myself to beat the crap out of myself so that I could wrestle myself to the ground and try to perform in a way that would satisfy other people? It worked to some degree—this effort to beat myself up and feel a little guilt and shame—but it was kind of a primitive technique. As I get older, I’m trying to be more aware of these things that worked when I was younger but don’t really serve me anymore. They don’t really help me. I think it’s a form of fragility in some way to beat yourself up a lot. It makes you unhappy; it’s not a very resilient way to live.

If you think of raising kids, if you were constantly like, “I can’t believe you did that, you schmuck,” it has a totally different effect. Maybe they would smarten up their act for an hour or 15 minutes or whatever, but I don’t think it works in a lasting way. Whereas if you put your hand on the shoulder of your young child and say, “You’re an extraordinary person, and I have so much confidence in your talent, ability, kindness, decency, compassion, and your ability to do extraordinary things in your life,” it has a totally different impact. It’s curious to me that we often don’t do that to ourselves.

As part of my ongoing effort—because I’m constantly trying to work on things—I’m working on rewiring myself to be kinder to myself. I got a message on LinkedIn the other day from a guy I’ve never met in person, a really smart, talented, accomplished guy who’s a Ph.D. in computer engineering or something like that. He asked for advice on dealing with a flaw of his—jealousy, envy. I’ve written about this and talked about it a bit because I asked Charlie Munger about how to deal with negative emotions. I was trying to say to this guy what I’m trying to say to myself: you didn’t ask to be wired this way. Have a little self-compassion. To some extent, it’s like our survival instinct, trying to keep the organism safe. We’re trying to beat out other people and do better than them; it’s part of how we were wired to survive.

I think there’s a better way to do it. When you shift towards things like appreciation and a sense of abundance, a sense of your own good fortune, and this beautiful idea in Buddhism—empathetic joy, where you’re actually really happy for other people’s success—you start to see these moments where these negative emotions come up. You look at someone else and think, “I can’t believe they’ve done so much better than me. I’m smarter than them, more talented, and I work hard, but everyone else likes them so much.” As I get older, I try to see that stuff as it arises and not judge it.

Part of this comes from studying this great Tibetan Buddhist meditation master, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, who I had on the podcast with Daniel Goleman. Tsoknyi Rinpoche has this beautiful idea of what he calls “handshake practice,” where as these beautiful monsters—these negative thought patterns or negative emotions—arise, you don’t judge them, condemn them, or try to apply an antidote to them. You handshake them and say, “Hi. Oh, there you are. There’s jealousy arriving. There’s self-contempt, self-laceration, sadness, anger.” There’s something about the acknowledgment of them, the gentle, warm recognition without condemnation, that allows the energy to dissipate a little bit. It’s not that I’ve reached some incredibly elevated state where I don’t have these negative emotions anymore. I feel all of them, but I try to be a little more gentle about the fact that they exist. I try to recognize them so I don’t necessarily succumb to them.

Munger said to me when I asked him how to deal with these intense negative emotions, “I just don’t let them run because I know they’re stupid.” Maybe that works for him. To know that extreme anger is just stupid is helpful. I look back and think of the times when I’ve been angry in my life, told someone what they did wrong, or what I was annoyed about. I can’t really think of a single occasion in my entire life when that wasn’t a mistake—when I didn’t create more damage. So there is an intellectual understanding of, “I better not go there; that’s probably not so good.” But I still feel the anger, I still feel it arising.

I felt this the other night. My daughter was supposed to help me clean up the kitchen, and I had to work until 11-something at night. I thought, “Really? Now I’ve got to clean the kitchen because she’s gone off to her room saying she’s not feeling well?” I felt the irritation rising, but instead of letting it rise and becoming really irritated, I watched it. It became an object of curiosity, and I didn’t get as swept up in it. I think this is helpful for all of us—this practice of trying to abide with the emotions and feelings that come up, seeing where they are in your body and mind, and not denying them.

I remember becoming friends with Tony Robbins over the years, though I haven’t seen him in a couple of years. He has a totally different technique where he immediately replaces negative emotions with a different emotion. I’m probably misphrasing what he says, but he’ll have a negative emotion come up and replace it with something else. I remember once getting into a contentious situation with him, and I was upset. But I could see that he was looking at me with tremendous compassion as we were talking. He was very consciously, instead of being defensive and reactive, going into a place of compassion. We talked about it afterward, and he said, “I’m looking at this guy, and I’m like, this guy’s my friend. I don’t want him to be upset or sad. I really appreciate him; he’s done all these things for me that have been really helpful.” I could see as I looked at him that his eyes were tearing up. He’s got a totally different approach to dealing with negative emotions. In a contentious situation, it’s very hard to go straight to something like being more loving, but it’s easier to access appreciation.

I don’t think there’s one way to approach these things like guilt, shame, anger, and envy. It’s a multi-pronged attack. You can dismantle them in different ways, but I’m very drawn to Tsoknyi Rinpoche’s approach, which I would describe as radical non-resistance. You see these things arise, and you don’t fight or condemn them. There’s something very beautiful about that practice, and I’ve found it unbelievably helpful.

Sean:
Yeah, I love the handshake technique you mentioned. It’s interesting—we all have our own ways of handling emotions. For me, it’s a simple framework I call the “Four A’s”: Awareness, Accept, Aim, Action. First, being aware of the unsettling emotion and what you’re feeling. The next step, which I think is what you’re alluding to, is acceptance—just accepting the emotion for what it is, not trying to change it. Then, the last two are Aim—what do I want right now? Like you mentioned with your interaction with Tony Robbins, do you want to go down that negative spiral or get to a better place? Finally, Action—taking steps toward that better place. So, it’s Awareness, Acceptance, Aim, Action. I think it’s a bit of a merger between the two approaches.

William:
Yeah, I think that’s a beautiful approach, and it probably works well with your personality. I think you’ve got to find something that works for your personality, your stage of life, and your situation. Sometimes I would argue with myself, using rational analysis, telling myself why I shouldn’t be jealous or angry because I’ve got this and that. But then your mind goes in spirals, and one of the things I learned from studying David Hawkins and his book Letting Go is that often one emotion is surrounded by thousands of thoughts. So, in a way, I found it not that helpful to go through these intellectual arguments about why I’m wrong to feel a certain emotion. Instead, just being aware of the emotion and watching it change—because everything is impermanent—is really helpful. The emotion is going to shift anyway, and watching it subside can be very liberating.

You mentioned in an email about a meeting I had with an extraordinary Buddhist teacher called Khandro-la, who’s a very remarkable person. She only speaks Tibetan, so a friend of mine, Adam Kane, was translating. I had a few minutes with her, and it was an incredible privilege to spend that time. What was extraordinary was how much she talked to me about anger and dealing with it, even though I didn’t ask about that. She pointed out that these emotions, like anger, have no permanent, inherent essence—they don’t exist as stable entities. This is a central teaching of Buddhism: everything changes, nothing is permanent.

When you’re getting irritable or angry about something, it’s often due to frustration over things not working the way they “should.” For example, I might think, “I’m the one working till 11, and my daughter, who’s on vacation from college, can’t even tidy up?” You start having these arguments in your head. But Khandro-la’s point is that you’re clinging to something that doesn’t really exist—it has no inherent, stable essence. As you watch it and see it change, it just drifts away. After seeing her, I had this image in my mind that I’m clinging to air or water. I’m holding on to my fury about the unfairness of something, but it’s like clinging to something that doesn’t even exist. It’s going to be gone in a minute or a day, and I won’t even remember why it upset me so much.

It’s a bit esoteric, but also incredibly profound. Because everything is changing and nothing has inherent stability, we don’t have to fixate on or cling to these emotions as much. We can let them go. So, part of what I’m trying to do is lighten up a bit, watch the storm pass through my brain, and realize that these emotions, like anger and irritation, are temporary. Maybe they’re more dramatic thunderclouds, but they’re not common, at least not for me as a repressed Brit. What’s more common is anxiety, a general sense of, “Oh my God, am I doing the wrong thing? I can’t remember what I’m supposed to do,” and so on.

Being aware of this low buzz of anxiety is also helpful. If you’re a little quieter, you can watch these feelings and observe how they manifest in your body and mind. For instance, last week I was trying to decide whether to do a speech in Australia, and as I was thinking about it, my eye started twitching. That was my body’s way of telling me something was off. But now that I’ve worked through the issue and decided to go, my eye isn’t twitching anymore. So, there’s something about being more aware of what’s happening inside you that helps you make more skillful decisions.

Sean:
Can you dive further into that paradox—the tension between the desire and striving to become something versus just being here in this present moment? You mentioned that you’re constantly curious and always trying to learn. How do you wrestle with that?

William:
It’s funny—we were talking before we started about the conversation I had with Pico Iyer on my podcast. Pico has this kind of “doubleness” to him. He’s a travel writer who, by the age of 30, had already traveled a million miles on one airline, and yet he’s also obsessed with what he calls “the art of stillness.” He’s been on retreat about a hundred times, usually to a Catholic monastery in the mountains of California, even though he’s not Catholic. So, there’s this tension in his life between the monastic desire to be still and silent and the travel writer’s insatiable, relentless desire for movement. I think all of us have this kind of doubleness in certain ways—this contradiction.

I have a desperate yearning for peace and quiet and a comic inability to remain peaceful and quiet. A desperate yearning for order and a comic inability to attain order. I was laughing the other day because I finally went on a silent retreat with Tsoknyi Rinpoche last year, and it turned out to be the least silent retreat of all time. Anyone who wanted to talk would end up asking me if we could have a chat while I was walking, and I’d end up walking up a mountain with someone, chatting. I was the one who was always talking with people, even though it was supposed to be a silent retreat.

So, this question you ask about trying to become something and trying to just be present in the moment—there’s this constant contradiction and conflict. I’m always trying to change and improve. I greatly admire Arnold Vandenberg, who you mentioned earlier, when he said to me during an interview for my book, “I’m going to be working on myself till the day that I die.” I really admire that mindset. But there’s also a part of me that’s constantly trying to remind myself to drop into this moment and be present here.

This was actually the question I asked Khandro-la when I met her. I said, “I have so much stuff coming at me all the time, so many pressures and demands on my time. In many ways, it’s beautiful—I get to do all these amazing things, and it’s a joy. But I find it hard to enjoy it because I feel too much anxiety or stress, and it’s hard for me to receive the gift.” This is a big issue for me: how do you simultaneously try to work on yourself, try to become something, try to improve, and yet also be present in this moment?

It’s something I’m wrestling with constantly. I feel some degree of guilt when I meditate because I think, “Really? I should be doing this other thing.” Sometimes I skip meditation, but I try to do what I call a “morning connection,” which involves a few Kabbalistic prayers and things. I’m more fanatical about doing that every day than I am about meditation, but I still feel guilt about it, like I should be doing something else.

There’s a part of me that’s constantly trying to drag myself back into this moment. I have a lot of Post-Its or written notes around my study, which are important to me as reminders. One of the words I have written out is “Hineni,” which you might recognize from a Leonard Cohen song. It’s something Abraham says in the Bible; it means “Here I am.” It has many connotations, but for me, it’s a reminder to be present in this moment.

But there’s also a great teacher of mine, Michael Berg, who once explained to me that “Hineni” can also mean, “Here I am, use me.” There’s a sense of, “Here I am, present in this moment,” but also, “Here I am, use me—let me be a channel for something useful that can help other people.” I love how words can radiate out in different ways, with so many interpretations. By constantly coming back to that phrase, “Hineni,” it’s a reminder to be present and also to be useful—to help other people.

I remember once asking Tony Robbins, “When you go out on stage with 12,000 people, what do you say to yourself?” He said, “I say, ‘Lord, use me.’” That’s a very interesting mindset—trying to tap into being helpful to others, being a conduit for something beyond your own ego. I think setting your intention is incredibly important in terms of your consciousness and where you’re coming from. If you start by saying, “Use me, let me be a conduit for something helpful,” you put yourself in a different space than when you think, “How many downloads, likes, or money will I get?”

I’m still very attached to all those practical, material things—I’m not disconnected from the social media culture of likes and followers. These companies figured out something deep about the less admirable parts of our personalities, and I don’t want to deny that I’m subject to it. But I think if I keep trying to put myself back in this place of, “Let me try to be a force for good, let me try to be a channel for something more than my own ego,” it’s a better place to come from.

Sean:
We had a beautiful discussion offline where you walked me through your office with all your Post-It notes and amazing quotes and sayings. After that call, one of the things in my notes was, “How can I be a conduit for good?” It’s something you kept saying, and I love that phrasing. Just thinking about that intention every day has a tremendous impact. One of the things I’m interested in hearing about is your experience with Khandro-la. I know you’re a fan of George Mumford, the performance coach for Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. When I spoke to him recently, he mentioned that being in Michael Jordan’s presence had a different energy. I know a few people who were in your small group with Khandro-la, and they said her energy was different. What was your experience like with her?

William:
Yeah, I love George Mumford. He’s extraordinary. I listened to your interview with him this morning, and I think he’s very special. His concept of finding the “eye of the hurricane”—a place of peace within chaos—is profound. It was interesting hearing your interview because you’re intense and fast-moving, while he’s slow, calm, poised, and balanced. When you’re in the presence of people who embody certain characteristics, it’s very powerful—more powerful than what they say.

With Khandro-la, one of the most striking things was her joyful, peaceful energy. She floated into the room with a couple of monks and handlers, and there was a joyful lightness of spirit about her. I was supposed to welcome her, but I completely forgot what I was supposed to do, and a friend stepped in to introduce her. It was all a bit otherworldly—like you think you’re in control, but when she came in, my smooth hosting skills disintegrated, and I forgot to introduce her properly.

Nothing went to plan. Instead of going into a private room for individual interviews, she sat down with us and talked for 45 minutes in a beautiful, extemporaneous way. She was going with the flow in a light, joyful manner, which in itself was a powerful example—don’t cling too much to your plans; go with the flow. Then she went on to do a series of private meetings, each about 15 minutes long, and she remained totally fresh and energized throughout. When you’re helping others, it’s tremendously energizing.

During my interview with her, which was more like a private audience, one of the most powerful moments was when I noticed her eyes were welled up. She was teaching me how to live a happy, free life, how to tame the mind because it’s all an inside job. She was so full of compassion, kindness, and what I would call “love for no reason” that her eyes started to well up. When I saw that, my eyes started to well up too because it was so moving to see someone who just loves you for no reason.

Seeing someone embodying such kindness and compassion has a tremendous impact on you. It’s not just about the teachings—it’s about witnessing someone truly living those teachings. I think this experience reinforces the idea of surrounding yourself with people who elevate you, whether it’s through the company you keep, your environment, or the books you read. Constructing the right environment is powerful because it tilts you in a positive direction.

For me, spending time with Khandro-la, even for a short time, or spending time with someone like Tsoknyi Rinpoche or Dan Goleman, who wrote Emotional Intelligence, is incredibly impactful. You see these people who are very evolved, very present. I don’t know if you’ve ever interviewed Dan Goleman.

Sean: Yes a couple of months ago he was on.

William: Okay, great. So, I became friends with Dan Goleman through a great friend of mine, Matt Luma, who I share an office with. Matt is someone I hope you’ll get to interview one day because we’re working on a book of his that you’ll want to talk to him about in a year or so.

One of the things that strikes me about Dan is how tremendously present he is. When you’re with him, he’s just there. There’s not a lot of disturbance or distortion; he’s fully engaged. I’ve seen this even in casual encounters, like when I ran into him with my daughter a year or so ago—he was totally present with her as well. It’s a result of, I think, 40 or 50 years of meditation. He’s deeply present, but there’s also a calmness and a kind of joyfulness, and I don’t see any evidence of ego in how he behaves. He’s not trying to impress you with how important he is or that his book sold millions of copies; he just doesn’t care.

Partly, it’s that he’s older, but I think a lot of it comes from the work he’s done on himself. For me, that’s very valuable because I see Dan as someone who’s further along the path. He’s probably around 76, and I’m 54, so I see the benefits of his habits, like meditation and helping others, and I think, “Let me get more of that.”

Part of what we want to do is make this useful and not just self-referential. So, I keep wanting to say, “The takeaway from this is…” But I do think a valuable takeaway is to look at people who deeply embody qualities you want to have, and spend time with them. Observe them and think about how they came to embody those qualities.

Some of it is probably just nature; it’s in their wiring. Maybe it’s the time of life they’re in, but a lot of it is stuff they’ve worked on themselves. I saw something similar when I went to the TED conference recently, and I met Ray Dalio. He has this tremendous presence, which I think comes from decades of meditation.

When I first met Ray in person, I said, “Ray, I don’t know if you remember, I interviewed you on my podcast, William Green.” And he leaned forward and said, “Yeah, you did a fantastic job. That was a wonderful interview.” I’m not saying this to congratulate myself, but because of how he leans toward you with this tremendous presence and intensity. There’s no sense of distraction or distortion. When I see that characteristic, I think, “How am I going to get more presence in the moment? How am I going to be more concentrated on the person I’m talking to? What are these people doing?”

This ties back to something I write about in Richer, Wiser, Happier—this idea from Nick Sleep of destination analysis. You think of a desirable destination and then work backward. If part of my destination is to become a more compassionate, kinder person as I grow older, what am I going to do to get there? All of these practices we’ve been discussing, like the handshake practice with emotions, are ways to help me get there.

Khandro-la once told me that when you become irritable or angry, you need to say to yourself, “This is just my confused mind.” And when you look at the other person, realize that they’re trapped in their own confusion. You should have compassion for them because they’re suffering. It’s the same idea Tony Robbins used with me—he saw me upset and thought, “My friend is suffering; I don’t want him to suffer.” So, he put himself in a different state.

These habits call on you to be more compassionate and kinder to others and yourself. It’s incredibly helpful to look at people who embody those qualities and aspire to do the same. At the same time, there’s hope that you become a better embodiment of these things, especially as a parent.

During the pandemic, I started using a Peloton religiously, partly to control what I could—my health, weight, and fitness—but also because I wanted to be a good example to my kids. The desire to model good behavior is incredibly powerful, even though I’m not perfect at it.

Sean: Khandro-la, you mentioned how she floated into the room and constantly had this joyfulness about her. It reminded me of a line I heard about the Dalai Lama that I’ve never been able to forget: “Ebullience is his resting state.” There’s something incredible about that, like you said, trying to strive to get to that point at some point in the future. I just wanted to bring that up because it was so beautiful hearing about her.

William: I have a great teacher in Kabbalah called Eitan Deni, who’s a wonderful guy. When I first met him about 15 years ago, one of the things that struck me was that he seemed free. There was a softness and lightness of spirit to him, despite all the challenges he’s faced over the years. I remember meeting him in New York once and asking, “Where does that lightness come from? You don’t seem to carry any heaviness or anxiety.” He said, “At a certain point, you have no burdens of your own because all you’re doing is taking care of other people’s burdens.”

That’s a consistent theme when I look at people like Tsoknyi Rinpoche, Khandro-la, or another great Kabbalist I study with, Michael Berg, who will be a guest on my podcast in a few weeks. Because they’re constantly serving others and genuinely wanting to help, they become freer.

It’s helpful to remember this because most of us are stuck on the hedonic treadmill, trying to fill a hole in our lives by working harder, gaining more respect, or acquiring more possessions. But the great paradox is that when you start helping others more, you get out of your own trap, and weirdly, you find the happiness you were chasing.

I see that with people like Arnold Vandenberg, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, Michael Berg, and Eitan Deni. It’s very powerful to see that, and I think you don’t need to be self-righteous about it. It’s enlightened self-interest: if you want to be happy, you need to build some form of service into your life.

So, if your intention with your podcast or book is to be a force for good, to help others, and to create something useful, you’re in a whole different space. And that intention weirdly makes you happier. There’s a master move in shifting away from ego-driven goals, and the more you study, the more you find these principles in every spiritual path.

One thing we’ve talked about before that had a powerful impact on me was reading books by Rav Yehuda Ashlag, a great Kabbalist. He talks about how we’re born with the “desire to receive for the self alone,” like a baby desperately wanting milk. But he teaches that you gradually transform that desire into the “desire to receive for the sake of sharing.” It’s a beautiful idea because you’re not saying you don’t want blessings in your life, but you want them to share.

When you start to understand this, you begin to reflect on your life and see that you’re happiest when you’re not just looking out for yourself. I think of this meeting with Khandro-la, which was arranged by my friend Matt Luma, who I mentioned earlier. Despite not being physically present due to COVID, Matt took great joy in creating this extraordinary experience for his friends. That’s a very beautiful thing when you see it, and it’s a reminder that we’re happiest when we’re not just focused on ourselves.

Sean: How are you instilling this in your kids? Your son is 25, and your daughter is 22. How do you help them understand these principles when the world is pushing them toward intensity and achievement? How do you navigate that as a parent?

William: I probably give them a lot of mixed messages that aren’t always helpful. On one hand, I have the anxiety of a parent who wants their kids to do well and make a mark in the world. They’re both really talented—singers, writers, artists—and my son is teaching at the moment. There’s a part of me that’s sure they feel my sense of urgency, competitiveness, and base instincts that want them to succeed and be able to support themselves.

But then there’s also a part of me that really wants them to be kind, loving, and compassionate human beings. I want them to understand the importance of things like meditation, stillness, and kindness. So, I think I probably give them slightly distorted and contradictory messages, which might require years of therapy to untangle.

That said, I think we’ve done some things right. One thing we did early on was tell my son when he was very young, “We won’t judge you by how well you do in school or things like that. We’ll judge you by how kind you are to your sister.” I think they remember that the one rule in the family was to be kind to each other. They have their moments of conflict, like everyone, but that emphasis on kindness has been helpful.

Another thing that might have made up for some of the flaws, mixed messages, and mistakes is that we’ve been consistently loving. They have no doubt that they’re deeply loved, and I think that’s incredibly important. Knowing that your parents really care about you, really love you, and want the best for you makes up for a lot of things.

It’s like what I was saying before about setting intentions: if your basic intention is to be a force for good, it makes up for a lot of mistakes and stumbling because you keep coming back to that true north. Likewise, if you’re consistently loving to your kids and emphasize kindness, that’s very powerful.

But it also has to be modeled behavior. They see when you’re full of crap, and words don’t mean much if your actions don’t back them up. So, I think modeling the behavior you’d like to see in them is the most powerful thing. They see if I’m kind to my wife, and that’s more powerful than telling them to be kind. They see if I’m cleaning the kitchen or helping out, and that’s more impactful than just talking about it.

I’m no saint on any of these matters, but they see it. Likewise, they see if you exercise or meditate or if you hold your tongue instead of saying something unkind. I’ve worked on that a lot in recent years—choosing not to say the unkind thing. I probably censor about 80% of the unkind things that come to mind, especially when I’m stressed or irritated.

I think modeling behavior is probably the single most powerful thing.

Sean: You mentioned kindness, and something you shared with me had a tremendous impact on me. You brought up David Hawkins earlier. I had been exposed to his book Power vs. Force, but you introduced me to Letting Go, especially chapter three on emotions, which was incredible. The line you shared with me from Hawkins that has stuck with me is: “Simple kindness to oneself and all that lives is the most powerful transformational force of all. It produces no backlash, has no downside, and never leads to loss or despair. It increases one’s own true power without exacting any toll, but to reach maximum power, such kindness can permit no exceptions, nor can it be practiced with the expectation of some selfish gain or reward. And its effect is as far-reaching as it is subtle.”

You shared that with me, and I’ve thought about it as much as any other quote I’ve come across.

William: Yeah, it’s very powerful. I talked about this on a recent podcast, one called something like “Legends of Investing” with Mohnish Pabrai, Tom Gayner, and others. I was worried people would think I was nuts because I went off on a 20-minute tangent about why Hawkins had such an effect on me. But that single line, that distillation of kindness as a true north, is very powerful.

In another one of his books, Transcending the Levels of Consciousness, Hawkins talks about the importance of finding a few principles that have stood the test of time and really going big on them. He lists about 10 of them, and I think this process of simplification is incredibly powerful. I write about it in my book—this idea that in a very complex world with so much information coming at us, it’s important to have a few simple guiding principles to come back to again and again as a true north.

For me, because my brain tends to go off in all different directions, it’s very important to have a few simple guiding principles like “Just try to be kinder” or “Just try to be more compassionate.” The repetition of these ideas is very helpful, whether it’s through mantras, affirmations, or looking at a quote like the one you mentioned, which I used to have on a card stuck to my wall.

When you find these things that resonate with you, it’s important to have a way to keep coming back to them. One of the crazy things I have in my study is a list of words written out in Hebrew, arranged in a kind of pyramid. I’m not particularly organized or disciplined about coming back to the same schedule every day, but I use something like Habitica to remind myself of these habits. One of the categories I have is the “Ishma Mountain,” which is based on a word that means “to give pleasure to your creator.” It reminds me to think about how I can be more truthful, kinder, and more compassionate.

Another phrase I focus on is “Gam zu letovah,” which means “And this too is for the best.” I’ve tried to hardwire into my brain the sense that whatever happens is for the best, even if it doesn’t seem like it at the time. It’s like Tony Robbins says, “Life happens for you, not to you.”

When I was younger, I would have thought this was puerile and self-delusional. But now I believe that your consciousness creates your reality. You get to choose your thoughts and how you perceive the world. If you believe that everything is happening for your good, it becomes self-fulfilling. You start to see the blessings in what initially seemed like curses.

For example, I used to think getting laid off by Time Magazine during the financial crisis was a curse. But now I look back and see it as an incredible gift. It sent me in a different direction that has been so fruitful and made me much happier. It’s a data point that reinforces the idea that everything happens for a reason and often for the best, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time.

It’s about constructing narratives and choosing to see your life as a series of blessings rather than curses. Looking back, I feel like I was being lifted up and put in a different situation, given challenges that didn’t break me but helped me grow. These challenges allowed me to break a big part of my ego, which made me more receptive to teachings I wouldn’t have been open to before.

Sean: How are you instilling this in your kids? Your son is 25, and your daughter is 22. How do you help them understand these principles when the world is pushing them toward intensity and achievement? How do you navigate that as a parent?

William:
I probably give them a lot of mixed messages that aren’t always helpful. On one hand, I have the anxiety of a parent who wants their kids to do well and make a mark in the world. They’re both really talented—singers, writers, artists—and my son is teaching at the moment. There’s a part of me that’s sure they feel my sense of urgency, competitiveness, and base instincts that want them to succeed and be able to support themselves.

But then there’s also a part of me that really wants them to be kind, loving, and compassionate human beings. I want them to understand the importance of things like meditation, stillness, and kindness. So, I think I probably give them slightly distorted and contradictory messages, which might require years of therapy to untangle.

That said, I think we’ve done some things right. One thing we did early on was tell my son when he was very young, “We won’t judge you by how well you do in school or things like that. We’ll judge you by how kind you are to your sister.” I think they remember that the one rule in the family was to be kind to each other. They have their moments of conflict, like everyone, but that emphasis on kindness has been helpful.

Another thing that might have made up for some of the flaws, mixed messages, and mistakes is that we’ve been consistently loving. They have no doubt that they’re deeply loved, and I think that’s incredibly important. Knowing that your parents really care about you, really love you, and want the best for you makes up for a lot of things.

It’s like what I was saying before about setting intentions: if your basic intention is to be a force for good, it makes up for a lot of mistakes and stumbling because you keep coming back to that true north. Likewise, if you’re consistently loving to your kids and emphasize kindness, that’s very powerful.

But it also has to be modeled behavior. They see when you’re full of crap, and words don’t mean much if your actions don’t back them up. So, I think modeling the behavior you’d like to see in them is the most powerful thing. They see if I’m kind to my wife, and that’s more powerful than telling them to be kind. They see if I’m cleaning the kitchen or helping out, and that’s more impactful than just talking about it.

I’m no saint on any of these matters, but they see it. Likewise, they see if you exercise or meditate or if you hold your tongue instead of saying something unkind. I’ve worked on that a lot in recent years—choosing not to say the unkind thing. I probably censor about 80% of the unkind things that come to mind, especially when I’m stressed or irritated.

I think modeling behavior is probably the single most powerful thing.

Sean: You mentioned kindness, and something you shared with me had a tremendous impact on me. You brought up David Hawkins earlier. I had been exposed to his book Power vs. Force, but you introduced me to Letting Go, especially chapter three on emotions, which was incredible. The line you shared with me from Hawkins that has stuck with me is: “Simple kindness to oneself and all that lives is the most powerful transformational force of all. It produces no backlash, has no downside, and never leads to loss or despair. It increases one’s own true power without exacting any toll, but to reach maximum power, such kindness can permit no exceptions, nor can it be practiced with the expectation of some selfish gain or reward. And its effect is as far-reaching as it is subtle.”

You shared that with me, and I’ve thought about it as much as any other quote I’ve come across.

William: Yeah, it’s very powerful. I talked about this on a recent podcast, one called something like “Legends of Investing” with Mohnish Pabrai, Tom Gayner, and others. I was worried people would think I was nuts because I went off on a 20-minute tangent about why Hawkins had such an effect on me. But that single line, that distillation of kindness as a true north, is very powerful.

In another one of his books, Transcending the Levels of Consciousness, Hawkins talks about the importance of finding a few principles that have stood the test of time and really going big on them. He lists about 10 of them, and I think this process of simplification is incredibly powerful. I write about it in my book—this idea that in a very complex world with so much information coming at us, it’s important to have a few simple guiding principles to come back to again and again as a true north.

For me, because my brain tends to go off in all different directions, it’s very important to have a few simple guiding principles like “Just try to be kinder” or “Just try to be more compassionate.” The repetition of these ideas is very helpful, whether it’s through mantras, affirmations, or looking at a quote like the one you mentioned, which I used to have on a card stuck to my wall.

When you find these things that resonate with you, it’s important to have a way to keep coming back to them. One of the crazy things I have in my study is a list of words written out in Hebrew, arranged in a kind of pyramid. I’m not particularly organized or disciplined about coming back to the same schedule every day, but I use something like Habitica to remind myself of these habits. One of the categories I have is the “Ishma Mountain,” which is based on a word that means “to give pleasure to your creator.” It reminds me to think about how I can be more truthful, kinder, and more compassionate.

Another phrase I focus on is “Gam zu letovah,” which means “And this too is for the best.” I’ve tried to hardwire into my brain the sense that whatever happens is for the best, even if it doesn’t seem like it at the time. It’s like Tony Robbins says, “Life happens for you, not to you.”

When I was younger, I would have thought this was puerile and self-delusional. But now I believe that your consciousness creates your reality. You get to choose your thoughts and how you perceive the world. If you believe that everything is happening for your good, it becomes self-fulfilling. You start to see the blessings in what initially seemed like curses.

For example, I used to think getting laid off by Time Magazine during the financial crisis was a curse. But now I look back and see it as an incredible gift. It sent me in a different direction that has been so fruitful and made me much happier. It’s a data point that reinforces the idea that everything happens for a reason and often for the best, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time.

It’s about constructing narratives and choosing to see your life as a series of blessings rather than curses. Looking back, I feel like I was being lifted up and put in a different situation, given challenges that didn’t break me but helped me grow. These challenges allowed me to break a big part of my ego, which made me more receptive to teachings I wouldn’t have been open to before.

Kind of choose what the narrative is. And so when I look back at that narrative, I’m starting to think, and there’s a part of me that’s very English and very Jewish and doesn’t want to tempt fate. And that sort of superstitious, and I remember my grandmother would always say, the Cossacks were coming any minute.

And, I don’t wanna tempt fate, but there’s a part of me that looks back in the narrative, and I think now, “God, I was being blessed all along.”

Like, I thought I was being cursed. I thought there was some terrible thing happening to me, and my life was falling apart, and nobody appreciated how great I was, how talented I was, how hard I worked, and all that—poor me.

Then I look back and I’m like, “What an incredible gift.” I was being lifted up, put in a different situation, put in a different environment, given challenges to overcome that didn’t break me. They were really hard. They almost felt like they were gonna break me, but they didn’t quite. And they allowed me to break a big part of my ego in a very helpful way.

Because when you’re really smashed like that, you can’t really walk around thinking you’re the master of the universe. And so that also breaks you open and makes you receptive to things that you wouldn’t have been receptive to. So I never would’ve been receptive to teachings from Atan Deni, Michael Berg, Rinpoche, or Khandro-la.

I would’ve thought it was silly to be in a room with a great Tibetan lama. And not silly, I would’ve thought it was curious. I would’ve wanted to do it because it was interesting anthropologically.

Sean: Hmm.

William: But I wouldn’t have thought, “I’m gonna learn from this person.”

Sean: Yeah, everything you were just saying there, William, makes me think of this line from Tolstoy: “Wisdom is understanding how eternal truth can be applied to life.” And I just love that there are some of these big principles that are so foundational, so fundamental, and you need to apply them to your life.

So I just love some of the insights you provided there. I’m gonna let you get outta here in a minute, but I’d be so intrigued to hear—decades of interviewing some of the world’s most successful people, some incredible people that you’ve mentioned thus far—if you could sit down and do another interview with someone over all those years, who would you like to go back to?

William: Yeah, I don’t know. I really don’t know. There’s definitely been pressure to interview people because they were a big deal, because they were rich or famous or powerful or had amazing returns or whatever. And what I find increasingly is that the people I most love interviewing are the people who have something a little more soulful.

And I mean, that’s why, you know, to interview someone like a Pico or a Dan Goleman or a … is such a joy. And one of the things that’s kind of scary when you do that is that you are breaking away from the easy, low-hanging fruit of, “I’m gonna interview someone famous, who’s a great brand name, who’s got a huge following, and everyone’s gonna be impressed that it’s such a get.”

And I think there’s a sort of tension here, right? Because there’s a part of us that’s very connected to material success and how people think of us. And then there’s a part of me that’s like, well, I sort of don’t really care about that stuff. Increasingly, I kind of do. But at the same time, when you talk to someone who’s really elevated in a remarkable way, it’s such a beautiful thing.

And in Hawkins’ terminology, it makes you go strong. So if I think about the most impressive people I’ve met—someone like this guy Michael Burke, who I have coming on the podcast, who’s a great Kabbalist and who started translating the Zohar, this great spiritual text in 23 volumes—he started translating it at the age of 18. And he was part of this team that finished it over 10 years. His father was probably the most extraordinary person I ever met, and I wish I’d got to spend more time with him. I never met him except after he’d had a stroke. And even then, you would—you know, you would shake when you were in his presence.

I mean, there was something very extraordinary. You felt like you were in the presence of something very, very powerful. And it’s funny because he would often get maligned, and Kabbalists would always get persecuted and maligned, and were often physically attacked or excommunicated. It’s like the mystics in every path, whether it’s the Sufis or whatever—the secret teachings.

And so there’s a part of you that’s judging this from a very worldly perspective and thinking, “Am I right here? Am I confused? Am I missing something?” And then there’s a part of you where, when you are with someone like that, boy, do you feel it.

So in a way, when I look back, I kind of wish that I’d spent less time worrying about, “You know, this guy manages a hundred billion dollars,” or “This guy’s made $20 billion,” and had spent more time with the people who, in some way, made you go strong because there was something so powerful about their consciousness. There’s something deeply subversive about the fact that I have this supposedly investing podcast, “Richer, Wiser, Happier,” but that I get people like Tsoknyi Rinpoche on it. And I love the fact that here I have the only—probably the only—episode of any investing podcast with a guy wearing saffron robes, speaking in a Tibetan accent. And there’s something really kind of beautiful about that to me, because you’re trying to get at these deeper questions.

So what actually is wealth? What actually makes for a rich life? What actually makes for a successful life? And so I think all of us, because we’re pragmatic people from a country that’s full of hustlers trying to make money, trying to get ahead, trying to build the extension, trying to buy the latest iPad—we are very much consumed with that mindset.

But then when you actually connect with people who are going deeper, it kind of works out beautifully. And I’m sort of surprised when I look at the numbers. I don’t know if you’ve seen this with your podcast. I’m shocked at how well the interviews with people who are not as famous, but are really deep thinkers, do.

And so I think there’s some part of us that connects to this stuff where, when you know something is true or someone is deeply thoughtful, you feel it. And even if that’s not what they set out wanting, they listen and they’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s powerful. That’s beautiful.”

That makes for a better life. And so I want increasingly to do more of that stuff. But I also interview a lot of investors who I think are like a very tiny minority of the investment world, who are very thoughtful, soulful, intellectually interesting. I’m less interested in interviewing people these days who I don’t really admire.

I think in my youth, I spent a lot more time interviewing people because it was kind of sexy in some way. Like I would write about a murderer or a conman or something. I had an eye for a good scandal that I could write a good article about, and that was really fun. I would have these amazing experiences where I would—I remember once writing about some guy who—there’s this thing when, as a journalist, you would do what—this moment where you kind of lay out what you’ve got, what you’ve figured out in your investigation, and then give him a chance to respond.

And I remember once doing this in Spokane, Washington, and this guy takes out his gun, and he’s standing in his kitchen with this huge rifle and stuff. And it’s a little scary, but it’s really fun as well, so going after scandalous, edgy stuff was really fun.

But then, you know—and so then you’d be like, “Well, so I write about this scummy billionaire who’s made a fortune but is kind of rapacious.” And I don’t really want to do that anymore. And even, you know, in my book “Richer, Wiser, Happier,” I really like pretty much everyone I interviewed. There were probably one or two people who I—you know, and I’m not lionizing them in any way. Everyone has their flaws. But I’ve increasingly been focused on people who I think are a force for good.

And they are thoughtful. They’re not—and I think that’s a—maybe that’s a natural evolution. Maybe we’re just less impressed with just—really, that’s what you did with your life? You made billions of dollars and you left a trail of lawsuits and people who hated you?

Like, how impressive is that? Whereas I’d look at people—someone like Arnold. I was talking to Arnold Vandenberg recently, and he’s helping this young kid, a mutual friend of ours. There’s nothing in it for Arnold.

And I just see the joy that he’s getting out of helping this guy. And that’s just really cool.

And I just admire that so much more. In a way, I kind of wish I’d wised up to this earlier—the fact that those are the sort of people I should have been interviewing. But maybe we have to go wrong. Maybe we have to go the wrong way. And then when you screw up, you look back and you’re like, “God, that was wrongheaded.”

So let me do it a different way.

Sean: Yeah, sometimes you gotta go through it to get to it. William, this has been fascinating. You’re one of those people, I’ve told you this multiple times, that you make me go strong, you open up my mind, you help me explore other things and help me uncover more of those deep, eternal truths that I highlighted with Tolstoy.

Your book is incredible. The podcast we brought up multiple times—there are some incredible interviews, so I highly recommend everyone pick that up and go download the podcast “Richer, Wiser, Happier.” Anywhere else you want to direct the listeners?

William: I have a website that’s williamgreenwrites.com. I’m so incompetent about updating it, and I’ve never figured out how to track anyone who goes on it. I don’t collect any information about anything. I’ve never figured out how to do an email list or anything as sophisticated as that.

I’m a marketer’s nightmare, but I’m on Twitter and stuff at williamgreen72, and I do use Twitter to some degree. And I’m on LinkedIn, and I’m always happy to hear from people, and I’m not always brilliant at replying, but I do try to reply because I like the fact that we’re all on this journey together and we’re trying to figure out stuff. And I think you learn more if you are actually trying to help other people.

So, I mean, I think when you are—when you’re trying to—when someone asks you a question and they’re like, “What do I do about this?” or something, and you try to say, “Well, here’s what’s worked for me, and here’s what hasn’t worked, and here’s what I’ve read,” it forces you to think better about this yourself.

I’ve really enjoyed that dialogue with people who’ve followed me or connected to me or written to me. And so there is that part of me that wants to kind of build my brand and become more successful. And there’s a part of me that knows it’s all bullshit, and I just enjoy the fact that we’re like this community, this tribe of people who are trying to figure out how to live better, how to be happier, how to be better people, and what actually constitutes wealth.

Are we really gonna chase after just money, money, money, and possessions, and then look back and be like, “Really? That was it?” And so I think we’re all kind of wrestling with these questions of how to live. I like it when people connect with me because they’re on that journey, and that’s what the podcast is as well.

It’s like people just trying to figure out, “How do we live? What makes sense? What principles will help us?” And I enjoy the fact that you are very much on that journey as well. And you have this great characteristic of just being really, really curious and open, and you’ve had amazing guests, and you’re clearly trying to synthesize this material in a way that can help other people.

And so I feel like we’re fellow travelers on the same kind of path. And so I’m looking forward to learning more from you as well as I hear more of your podcast in the years to come.

Sean: Absolutely. Well, thanks again, William.

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