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Episode: Morgan Housel: Understand & Apply the Psychology of Money to Gain Greater Happiness
Author: Scicomm Media
Duration: 02:15:35
Episode Shownotes
In this episode, my guest is Morgan Housel, an expert in private wealth generation and management and author of the bestselling book The Psychology of Money. We discuss how desiring, pursuing, saving, and spending money impact our psychology and perception of wealth. We explore why people tend to either overspend
or oversave and examine the most common mistakes made in the pursuit of financial freedom. Additionally, we discuss how to best use money — and one’s relationship with it — as a tool to create psychological security, freedom, and a deeper sense of life purpose. We also delve into the impact of purchases, social media, and wealth signaling on our internal reward circuits, the dangers of using money as a gauge of career progress or self-worth, and the healthiest psychological stances to adopt while building wealth at any level. By the end of the episode, listeners will have gained numerous practical tools for making smarter financial decisions and should have a clearer understanding of the role money plays in their psychology, happiness, and life. Access the full show notes for this episode at hubermanlab.com. Pre-order Andrew's new book, Protocols: protocolsbook.com Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Wealthfront**: https://wealthfront.com/huberman BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/huberman ROKA: https://roka.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman **This experience may not be representative of the experience of other clients of Wealthfront, and there is no guarantee that all clients will have similar experiences. Cash Account is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, Member Finra/SIPC. Promo terms and FDIC coverage conditions apply. Same-day withdrawal or instant payment transfers may be limited by destination institutions, daily transaction caps, and by participating entities such as Wells Fargo, the RTP® Network, and FedNow® Service. New Cash Account deposits are subject to a 2-4 day holding period before becoming available for transfer. Timestamps 00:00:00 Morgan Housel 00:02:13 Sponsors: Wealthfront & BetterHelp 00:05:11 Spending Habits & Cynicism 00:08:44 Tool: Money & Future Regrets 00:16:07 Money Management Extremes; Credit & Hope 00:23:17 Money as a Tool, Happiness, Independence & Purpose 00:27:30 Sponsors: AG1 & ROKA 00:30:11 Unstructured Time; Independence, Identify & Money; Addiction 00:39:04 Longevity, Health & Money 00:47:42 Ambition, Social Media, Fame & Social Debt 00:53:37 Sponsor: Function 00:55:24 Resume Virtues vs. Eulogy Virtues 00:57:52 Compound Interest, Math vs. Behavior 01:01:42 Dopamine & Time, Marshmallow Test & Distraction 01:09:58 Motivation, Pleasure; Relationships 01:14:38 Freedom, Tool: Savings & Independence 01:19:06 Peak-End Rule, Autonomy & Independence; Elder vs. Elderly 01:24:07 Familial Wealth & Identity; Entrepreneurs 01:31:53 Life Purpose; Dogs; Social & Historical Comparison 01:39:58 Social Comparison & Geography, Angst 01:46:07 Carrot vs. Stick, Identity, Tool: Verb States & Energy 01:56:43 Envy & Spending Money; Wealth & Birth Rates 02:01:27 Tools: Parent Modeling; Resentment, Individual Goals 02:07:15 Purpose, Happiness & Money 02:13:05 Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow & Reviews, Sponsors, YouTube Feedback, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures
Summary
In this episode, Morgan Housel discusses the intricate relationships between money, psychology, and happiness. He emphasizes that the desire for wealth often stems from a quest for freedom and independence, warning against extremes in saving and spending. Housel highlights the personal nature of financial choices, influenced by individual experiences and backgrounds, and stresses the importance of aligning financial decisions with personal goals. He warns of the pitfalls associated with credit and social comparisons and advocates using money as a tool for enhancing life satisfaction through relationships and purpose.
Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Morgan Housel: Understand & Apply the Psychology of Money to Gain Greater Happiness) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.
Full Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker_00
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Morgan Housel.
00:00:17 Speaker_00
Morgan Housel is a partner at the Collaborative Fund and an expert in private wealth generation and management. He is also the author of the spectacularly best-selling book, The Psychology of Money. And today we talk about the psychology of money.
00:00:30 Speaker_00
We talk about how money can change your psychology. We talk about how most people tend to lie at the extremes of either saving too much money or spending too much money.
00:00:39 Speaker_00
And we talk about how most people get it completely wrong when it comes to framing in our minds what money is, what its real value is, and its ability to generate happiness within us.
00:00:50 Speaker_00
And no, I am not going to tell you and Morgan is not going to tell you that beyond a certain dollar amount, you don't increase your happiness. Because as we all know, money cannot buy happiness, but it can buffer stress.
00:01:02 Speaker_00
We acknowledge that from the outset. And then Morgan goes on to explain that really what we're seeking when we talk about seeking wealth or money, is freedom. Freedom is really about independence.
00:01:13 Speaker_00
And that if we are constantly in pursuit of wealth, well, then we are not truly free or independent.
00:01:18 Speaker_00
So today's discussion is as much about being happy, being free, feeling independent, feeling free of stress, as it is about this thing that we call money.
00:01:26 Speaker_00
So in other words, Morgan explains not just how to generate and manage monetary wealth, he explains that, but he also explains how to organize your life in and around this thing that we call career, the pursuit of wealth, and happiness.
00:01:40 Speaker_00
And I can think of few topics as important as today's topic. I read Morgan's book, The Psychology of Money, and I loved it.
00:01:47 Speaker_00
I also love today's discussion because I'm certain that after it's done, you will realize that you've probably been thinking about wealth and money incorrectly in a number of ways, and you've probably been pursuing it incorrectly in a number of ways.
00:02:00 Speaker_00
But by asking yourself certain probe questions that Morgan raises today and answering those questions, you can arrive in a place where your relationship to money and your pursuit of it really clearly matches your particular goals.
00:02:13 Speaker_00
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
00:02:19 Speaker_00
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.
00:02:30 Speaker_00
Our first sponsor is Wealthfront. I've been using Wealthfront for nearly a decade as my high-yield cash account, and I absolutely love it.
00:02:37 Speaker_00
Personally, I'm sometimes hesitant to invest money given the risks involved, so I often prefer to keep it in my Wealthfront cash account, where I'm able to earn 4.25% annual percentage yield on my deposits, and you can as well.
00:02:48 Speaker_00
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00:02:56 Speaker_00
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00:03:05 Speaker_00
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00:03:17 Speaker_00
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00:03:29 Speaker_00
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00:03:38 Speaker_00
If you'd like to try Wealthfront, go to Wealthfront.com slash Huberman to receive a free $50 bonus with a $500 deposit into your first cash account. That's Wealthfront.com slash Huberman to get started now.
00:03:51 Speaker_00
This has been a paid testimonial of Wealthfront. Wealthfront brokerage isn't a bank. The APY is subject to change. For more information, see the episode description. Today's episode is also brought to us by BetterHelp.
00:04:02 Speaker_00
BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. Now, I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years. Initially, I didn't have a choice. It was a condition of being allowed to stay in school.
00:04:15 Speaker_00
But pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to overall health. Now, there are essentially three things that great therapy provides.
00:04:23 Speaker_00
First of all, it provides good rapport with somebody that you can trust and talk to about any and all issues you want to. Second of all, it can provide support in the form of emotional support or directed guidance.
00:04:33 Speaker_00
And third, expert therapy can provide useful insights. With BetterHelp, they make it very easy for you to find an expert therapist who you resonate with and can provide you those benefits that come through expert therapy.
00:04:44 Speaker_00
Also, because BetterHelp allows for therapy to be done entirely online, it's very time efficient.
00:04:49 Speaker_00
It's very easy to fit into a busy schedule with no commuting to your therapist's office or sitting in a waiting room or looking for parking, none of that. It's all done online.
00:04:57 Speaker_00
If you'd like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com slash Huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com slash Huberman. And now for my discussion with Morgan Housel. Morgan Housel, welcome.
00:05:12 Speaker_00
Thanks so much for having me, happy to be here. I'm excited that you have a new book coming out next year about the art of spending money. Is that right? That's right. You got it. Today. I want to talk about how to think about money.
00:05:26 Speaker_00
what is it, how do we frame it within our historical context, meaning our personal historical context, because I think we all in each think about money a little bit differently, and then talk about what is the best use, or in some cases, not use of money.
00:05:47 Speaker_00
This is a topic that could go in any number of different directions, but my goal here is that people will get a better understanding of
00:05:55 Speaker_00
what money is, why they work for it, and really how to make it a true asset to their lives, as opposed to something that is forever out of reach in terms of amount or what they expected to bring them. Great, looking forward to it.
00:06:11 Speaker_00
Great, so your book starts off with this notion that people are not crazy. It's in fact the title of the chapter. Does that mean that people are rational about money?
00:06:23 Speaker_02
Oh, I think it's very different.
00:06:24 Speaker_02
What I meant by no one is crazy is that it is so easy for people to look around at society and how other people are spending their money and saving their money and investing their money and say, why the hell would anybody do that?
00:06:35 Speaker_02
Why would you waste your money on this? Why would you hoard your money like that?
00:06:38 Speaker_02
And I actually think if you peel back the onion layer of what's going on in those people's lives, no one is really that crazy with how they spend their money or save their money. It makes sense to them in that moment.
00:06:48 Speaker_02
My brother-in-law is a social worker. He works with very disadvantaged kids, kids who are abused at home, who don't have homes. And a lot of those kids, not surprisingly, do very poorly at school.
00:06:59 Speaker_02
They misbehave, they get in fights, they don't go to school. And it is so common for those kids that the teacher will look at those kids and say, why are you acting like this? Why don't you do the right thing? It's so obvious.
00:07:10 Speaker_02
And he says, there's a phrase in social work, all behavior makes sense with enough information. That if you look at what those kids are dealing with in life, it would all make sense to you why they are misbehaving at school.
00:07:21 Speaker_02
And I think that's a powerful idea for a lot of things in life, that all behavior makes sense with enough information. And you can really apply it to money, too.
00:07:28 Speaker_02
That you could easily tie how I spend my money today and save my money today based off of the experience that I've had in life, how I was raised, where I was raised, how old I am, the generation I was born into.
00:07:40 Speaker_02
all things that are outside of my control. And it is very common to look at people who are spending a ton of money. Well, there's a story behind that.
00:07:46 Speaker_02
They're spending a ton of money because they want some, you know, for a lot of them, they want some sort of attention. They're trying to get people's attention. Maybe sometimes they're trying to cover up a hole.
00:07:54 Speaker_02
Maybe they actually are really enjoying it. People who are hoarding a lot of money, there's a story there too. They experience something that's causing them to do that. And I think that this is really important for two reasons.
00:08:05 Speaker_02
One, it forces you to realize that there is not one right way to manage money, to save it, to spend it. You've got to figure out what works for you. And what works for me might not work for you. There's not one answer. And it's not like math.
00:08:18 Speaker_02
In math, 2 plus 2 equals 4 for everybody. And in money, you've got to figure it out for yourself. It's almost like your taste in food or your taste in music. Just find out what you like and do that.
00:08:28 Speaker_02
The other thing is I think you become less cynical about other people's decisions. And you don't spend all your day saying, look at that idiot spending their money in a stupid way. No, it's just, you got to figure it out for yourself.
00:08:38 Speaker_02
And I think you become happier when you're a little less cynical about how other people are doing it.
00:08:43 Speaker_00
For most people, including myself, the whole notion of money and safety are very closely linked. Do we have enough resources to take care of ourselves? Plus a bit extra, one hopes.
00:08:55 Speaker_00
I guess I would include in taking care of oneself, buffering one's anxiety about not having enough money. That's part of the psychological care. And also taking care of others that we might be responsible for or simply want to take care of.
00:09:08 Speaker_00
That's very closely linked to notions of how much and what type of education to get, right? I mean, I think everyone presumably at some point goes through the mental gymnastics of, is it worth it to get an advanced degree?
00:09:23 Speaker_00
What major should I focus on? Is that, are there any jobs there? When I went to school to be a neuroscientist, a cardiologist, a friend of our family said, why would you go into neuroscience? There are no jobs in that.
00:09:33 Speaker_00
There were plenty of jobs in neuroscience and still are. I wouldn't say that most of them are high paying jobs. So, you know, we know that higher education doesn't always scale with higher income. As we grow up and move into the world,
00:09:47 Speaker_00
we're thinking about how to integrate all these different things, what we want to do, because it's interesting versus what will make us money.
00:09:53 Speaker_00
In your experience and observation, and in writing your book, is there some sort of mental path to cut through these different considerations? I mean, when we talk about money and wealth, you know, what should we really take into consideration?
00:10:07 Speaker_00
Is there some sort of checklist? I mean, it becomes a pretty vast space. I believe that you get the best work out of yourself in terms of going after things that you're really interested in.
00:10:19 Speaker_00
But, you know, there may not be money in things that are highly interesting to somebody.
00:10:25 Speaker_02
I asked Daniel Kahneman a very similar question about 10 years ago. Kahneman is a world-renowned psychologist, won the Nobel Prize in economics, passed away a year or two ago.
00:10:34 Speaker_02
He said the trait that you need to do well with money over time, no matter who you are, is a well-calibrated sense of your future regret. What are you going to end up regretting in the past?
00:10:43 Speaker_02
I think at the highest level, that's how you should base all of your financial decisions. Will I regret spending this or not spending this? Will I regret making or not making this investment? Now, much easier said than done.
00:10:56 Speaker_02
I think most people do not fully understand their own sense of regret, what they're likely to look back and say, I wish I had not have done this. The other thing is that it changes over the course of your life. I'll give you a perfect example.
00:11:08 Speaker_02
I'm a big saver, have been for my entire adult life. If, heaven forbid, if I were on my deathbed tomorrow, would I regret the vacations I didn't take, the cars I didn't buy? The answer right now is absolutely not.
00:11:21 Speaker_02
I would feel so good knowing that my wife and kids are gonna be okay. So I would take so much pleasure in knowing that I did not spend that money. I saved it for their protection. Will I still feel that way if I'm 80 years old?
00:11:34 Speaker_02
Then maybe I will look back and say, I should have lived a little bit more. I should have given my money away while I could have seen it being given away. So it changes throughout the course of your life.
00:11:43 Speaker_02
But I think if you're always thinking through the lens of, what am I going to regret? It's never about YOLO or about like, oh, save today so you can have it for tomorrow. I think that's too simple to think about it.
00:11:57 Speaker_02
You have to know what you're going to regret in the future and look back. And back to everyone's different. What I will regret might be very different from what you will regret. Very interesting story from Jeff Bezos.
00:12:06 Speaker_02
He talked about when he started Amazon back in, I think, it was 1994. The reason he started it, and he knew that there was very little chance it was going to work when he first started it, but he said, if I do not try this, I will regret it.
00:12:20 Speaker_02
And if I try it and it fails, I won't regret that. That's an amazing story that talks about his entrepreneurial spirit. The other thing, when I first heard that story is, bless him for thinking that, I do not have that personality.
00:12:31 Speaker_02
If I devoted my entire life and my family's money and my parents' money to a startup and it failed, I might regret that.
00:12:38 Speaker_02
I admire and I'm grateful for the people who do not have that vision, as he does, made the world better, but everyone's sense of regret is gonna be a little bit different.
00:12:47 Speaker_00
And sometimes this sense of what one is likely to regret
00:12:52 Speaker_00
if we have access to it at all, because it sounds like we're not very good at anticipating this as Kahneman pointed out, most people lack a well-calibrated sense of future regret, that's going to change over time. So it's dynamic.
00:13:05 Speaker_00
And here we're talking about investing in two year or four year degrees. We're talking about investing in one's time that is in a particular profession. And I think we come up with all of these
00:13:17 Speaker_00
explanations post hoc about, well, you know, I went to that company, I went into that line of work, I spent 10 years there or the startup failed, but I learned a valuable lesson that then, you know, really supported me in a future endeavor.
00:13:32 Speaker_00
And so we rationalize our poor choices from the past in ways that allow us to, you know, connect the dots to sort of steal from the famous Steve Jobs speech. And yet,
00:13:44 Speaker_00
All of this really says that we are very poor at placing our current experience and our past experience into any kind of future projection of ourselves.
00:13:52 Speaker_00
You talk a little bit about this in your book and this really, you know, sunk in for me in a major way that we don't really know or anticipate how we are likely to change as we get older.
00:14:05 Speaker_02
Right, so there's a thing in psychology called the end of history illusion, which means that you are very aware of how much you've changed in the last 20 years. You are smarter, wiser, your beliefs about things in life have evolved.
00:14:18 Speaker_02
And that's true for most people. But most people, if you actually dig into it, they think if you say, Who will you be in 20 years from now? They think they'll roughly be the same person they are today.
00:14:27 Speaker_02
There's always this belief that I've grown so much in the past, but I'm done growing. Because it's hard to project how you're going to be different in the future.
00:14:34 Speaker_02
A lot of that is if I tell myself 20 years from now, I'll have very different beliefs about politics, whatever it might be. What I'm effectively admitting is what I believe today is wrong, and you don't want to believe that.
00:14:45 Speaker_02
Everyone wants to wake up and look in the mirror and say, what I believe today is the right thing. It's just like a self-justification of your own beliefs to make it easier to go about the day is what I believe right now is the right thing.
00:14:56 Speaker_02
And maybe you have a little bit of doubt around the edges, but most of it is what I believe is true. So you don't want to believe that you're going to adjust and adapt those beliefs over time.
00:15:04 Speaker_02
So it becomes difficult to take a truly long-term view and make a decision today that is going to be something that you're not going to regret in the future.
00:15:13 Speaker_02
As I've always framed this, I think the only antidote to this, of trying to get around this problem, is avoiding the extreme ends of financial planning. A lot of people are on the extreme ends.
00:15:23 Speaker_02
On one end, you have the fire movement, the people who save 90% of their income and they want to retire at 28, that kind of thing.
00:15:29 Speaker_02
On the other hand, you have the YOLO crypto traders who are like, doesn't matter, just throw it all down and let's see what happens. Those extreme ends are what you are most likely to regret at some point in the future.
00:15:40 Speaker_02
Look, I think a lot of those people are young and they have time to make up for their mistakes. I did a lot of really dumb things with my money in my teens and 20s. But I think a lot of them, that's where they are most likely to look back.
00:15:52 Speaker_02
It's one thing to lose a lot of money in your 20s and say, ah, it doesn't really matter. But then when you're 48 and trying to put your kids through college, that's when you're going to look back like, I wish I hadn't done something like that.
00:16:02 Speaker_02
So those extreme ends have the highest odds of future regret.
00:16:08 Speaker_00
as I described it before, carve a path through this for people. I'm wondering if people generally fall into either one or the other category of, as you described with Bezos, you know, not wanting to regret. not having done something.
00:16:24 Speaker_00
Okay, so I think of that in sort of pseudo neurobiological terms as being drawn toward the possible dopaminergic or other rewards of having succeeded.
00:16:34 Speaker_00
Really, that's what he's envisioning presumably is the pain of having not had been given himself the opportunity to succeed. Okay, that's one way to put it. And then the other path would be just avoiding the pain of loss.
00:16:48 Speaker_00
And there are a lot of studies, I think Kahneman did some of them, in fact, that people work a lot harder to avoid the pain of loss than to gain something.
00:16:57 Speaker_00
But in thinking about the people I know across various wealth scales and different ages, it seems that some people are just more motivated to try new things because they like doing new things.
00:17:09 Speaker_00
They like the sense of reward that can come from doing those things. And so it really is painful for them to stay in the same place financially or otherwise. Other people, they like the sure thing. They like reliability.
00:17:20 Speaker_00
And you can see this in a lot of domains of their life. I mean, I don't want to extrapolate this to all aspects of their life, but some people like,
00:17:27 Speaker_00
dogs that, you know, the entire breed would, you know, is known for rarely ever having bitten somebody. Other people like to raise cane corzos.
00:17:35 Speaker_00
And while I'm sure there's some really nice loving cane corzos out there, they occasionally bite it when they bite it serious. So, you know, are we really talking about a propensity for risk versus safety?
00:17:47 Speaker_00
And do you think that people fall into more or less two camps on that?
00:17:50 Speaker_02
I think it's true that some people would go nuts if they took the safe path. And even if they're doing it in the name of like, I don't want to regret this, but they need some sort of variability in their life. They need to go out and do things.
00:18:02 Speaker_02
The other element is we don't know the paths that we didn't take. And I'll give you a personal example of this. 20 years ago, I was enrolled in Pepperdine, but I didn't go. I was enrolled in just at the last second I transferred.
00:18:14 Speaker_02
So I never actually attended, but I was all enrolled. And of course, I think, what would my life have been if I had gone there? Because the school that I transferred to, I met my wife, started my career there.
00:18:24 Speaker_02
And it's easy for me to say, God, I'm so glad I did not go there, because my life would not be what it is today. But the truth is, maybe it would have been fine. It would have been better.
00:18:33 Speaker_02
You never know the paths that you didn't take, where they're going to end up. So I took on this point, a well-calibrated sense of your future regret. But nobody knows the paths that they didn't take and where those would go.
00:18:42 Speaker_02
So it just makes it very difficult to have any idea of which path you should be on. in that end. So I think just avoiding those two camps of the extreme ends of it.
00:18:54 Speaker_02
But again, as I said earlier, I think that is actually more than half of people are on some sort of extreme end of spending way more than they can or saving way more than they need to. There's a fat tail distribution in how people manage their money.
00:19:06 Speaker_02
And so that's quite a few people. And I think that's why I think it's one of the reasons why we live in a society that is richer than it's ever been by far. Not just at the top, but at the median level.
00:19:15 Speaker_02
The average family is richer than they've ever been. But because we manage it in such extreme ways, is it making people happier? Are we happier today than we were 40 years ago or 100 years ago? That there's not a ton of evidence for.
00:19:27 Speaker_02
Because managing it in a way that's actually gonna make you happier and reduce your regret and live a more meaningful life is much harder than earning it and accumulating it over time.
00:19:37 Speaker_00
When I was growing up, you would see a mixture of newer cars, including some very nice cars, as well as a lot of older kind of beaten up cars driving around. Nowadays, of course, this varies by area. It's actually rare to see really old beat up cars.
00:19:55 Speaker_00
You see some really nice old cars that have been restored, but that's a different thing altogether. And I assume this is because of credit. that people can now buy things on credit.
00:20:04 Speaker_00
How has the ability to purchase things on credit changed the way that we think about money generally? I know people who have tremendous credit card debt and I think are now at the point where they figure that they're never gonna pay it off.
00:20:17 Speaker_00
They're just gonna probably not live long enough to pay it off. And they're sort of comfortable with that, which is kind of scary to see. And some of them aren't even particularly big spenders.
00:20:26 Speaker_00
They just accrued this debt early enough and they can't seem to get out from the trap of that. I know other people who, you know, like myself pay off my credit card bill every month.
00:20:35 Speaker_00
I'm like, you know, I hate the, whatever it is, 18 plus percent interest. Even if I'm one day late, I'm like, you know, and, and at the same time, I'm not somebody who likes to purchase many things. I'm not a things guy. I, you know, I own, you know,
00:20:48 Speaker_00
one or two watches, one truck, like I'm just not a things guy. But I certainly have my own psychological relationship with money that after talking to you today, I'm sure I'm going to realize is not optimized either, right?
00:21:01 Speaker_00
So, it's easy to point fingers at people in these different groups. But going back to this issue of credit, how has the ability to own and use things that we don't really truly own
00:21:12 Speaker_00
basically to exceed our income level in terms of the number and type of luxuries that we can enjoy, change the way that people think about money and use money.
00:21:22 Speaker_00
Because today's discussion in your book, we're talking about money as if it's something that we have, but credit basically is living outside your means.
00:21:28 Speaker_02
I think the knee-jerk response would be, oh, it helps you pull your consumption forward so you can have more toys that you would not have had in a different era. And I actually think, for a lot of people, it's the opposite.
00:21:38 Speaker_02
That there are a lot of people that have holes in their life, challenges in their life. And a very easy answer, if you're not happy with your life and you have a hole you're trying to fill, is, well, if I had more money, this problem would go away.
00:21:51 Speaker_02
And in previous generations, previous decades, you could not just go out and have a ton of more money. You earned your money from your paycheck, that was what you had. Today, it makes it easier to try to fill that hole in your life with money.
00:22:04 Speaker_02
And so you can keep on getting more and more and more. And for a lot of people, they will wake up and say, oh, if only I had that car, my life would be better. And they go buy that car, and they still feel the same. So it's like, ah, you know what?
00:22:15 Speaker_02
If I had that car and that watch, then I'd feel better. They get the watch, they feel the same. Ah, you know what's missing? A house. I've got to go get that fancy house. It's this continuous spiral.
00:22:24 Speaker_02
And since you can finance all of that, it makes it easier and easier to go on that spiral. Will Smith made this incredible realization I love from his biography. He said when he was poor and depressed,
00:22:35 Speaker_02
he had hope, because he could tell himself, one day I'm going to have money, and all these problems will go away.
00:22:39 Speaker_02
And then when he was rich and depressed, he was still depressed, and he lost all his hope, because he had more money than he could ever spend. So he could not tell himself, if only I had more money, these problems would go away.
00:22:50 Speaker_02
And so for a lot of people, the availability of credit is giving them, I think, a false sense of hope that's keeping them on this hamster wheel of, if only I had this bigger house, this nicer car, all these problems that I wake up with every morning would go away.
00:23:03 Speaker_02
And it keeps you on that path, which I think if you actually don't have access to that much money, you're more likely to wake up and say, what is this hole? I need to fix it in a different way.
00:23:10 Speaker_02
It's health, it's relationships, it's purpose, whatever it might be, rather than trying to put a bandaid of credit over it.
00:23:16 Speaker_00
So interesting. I sometimes think about the phrase, money can't buy happiness. And my immediate impulse is to respond with, well, somebody with a lot of money probably said that. Not because I think money can buy happiness, but, money can buffer stress.
00:23:34 Speaker_00
I have friends who've had children recently who have night nurses. They're looking a lot more rested than the ones that don't because they can't afford them, and on and on.
00:23:46 Speaker_00
If you have a medical issue, there's this whole world within hospitals that we won't talk about in this episode, but there's this whole world about wealth and how one is actually even treated as a person in a hospital.
00:23:58 Speaker_00
There's a lot of knowledge behind the scenes about people's income level when they come into a hospital.
00:24:02 Speaker_00
people are going to go wide-eyed when they hear this, they'll get shuttled to different rooms, different conditions that allow them to sleep better, recover better, health outcomes depend on this, I mean, and on and on.
00:24:14 Speaker_00
So, money can't buy happiness, but it certainly can buffer stress and it can drive outcomes. So, how should we frame that, especially if we are on the or in the pursuit of acquiring more money, more wealth? Because a lot of people are.
00:24:29 Speaker_02
Money absolutely can buy happiness. It's often though an indirect path. And what I mean by that is, will a big fancy house make you happier? And the answer is probably yes.
00:24:39 Speaker_02
But the reason it might is because it'll make it easier to host friends and family. And that's what's actually making you happy. It's those extra connections with those people. Does going on a nice vacation make you happy? An expensive vacation, yes.
00:24:52 Speaker_02
because you're going to form memories with your kids, with your spouse, with your friends while you're there. That's what's making you happy. So you can't say that money doesn't make people happy. It does. It obviously does.
00:25:01 Speaker_02
The other thing that's important is what really makes people happy in their core is some sense of purpose. There's a great quote from the movie Boiler Room where he says, people who say money doesn't buy happiness don't have any.
00:25:13 Speaker_02
And I think there's a lot of truth to that, that people who become richer say, of course, I was happier now than I was when I was poor. Of course, I would never want to go back there.
00:25:19 Speaker_02
But often what's happening is the reason that you are happier when you are rich is because the reason you got rich is because you found some sort of purpose. You built a business. You were successful in your career.
00:25:29 Speaker_02
And that gave you a good sense of purpose and identity. And where you see the opposite of that are lottery winners.
00:25:34 Speaker_02
who become rich, but not because they made a good investment, not because they built a business, not because they're successful and their peers like them and whatnot, they just got lucky.
00:25:43 Speaker_02
And those are the people, so many studies that winning the lottery will not make you happy. It might for a very short period of time, but over time it doesn't because you didn't get any added purpose.
00:25:51 Speaker_02
You can't wake up in the morning and say, I built this business, I did it, I'm so successful, I got my PhD, I did, there's none of that, you just got lucky. And so that's not gonna bring you much happiness. So money does make you happier.
00:26:03 Speaker_02
I think it can for everybody if you learn how to spend it in your personality and whatnot. Spending a lot of it, spending a ton of money can make you happier.
00:26:11 Speaker_02
I think there's almost no limit to it, but it's different for everybody and it's often a roundabout way. I think a lot about this when... If I go on an expensive vacation with my kids, let's say that's a 10.
00:26:22 Speaker_02
That's a 10 out of 10 in terms of just happiness, memories and whatnot. But actually what was making me happy was spending uninterrupted time with my kids.
00:26:30 Speaker_02
So staying home and playing Legos on the living room floor with them, that might be like an eight and a half because that's what's making me happy. You just have to figure out like the actual purpose.
00:26:38 Speaker_02
I think a good formula for a pretty good life at the simplest level is independence plus purpose. You need to have a purpose that is bigger than yourself that you are chasing. Family, religion, work, whatever it might be, different for everybody.
00:26:53 Speaker_02
And you need to have the independence to make sure you can do it on your own terms rather than chasing somebody else's goal. That's the highest level of psychological well-being, independence and purpose.
00:27:03 Speaker_02
And money is not one of those things, but you can easily see how money can help those things. Money brings you independence. It can allow you to find your purpose in a bigger way. You're not chasing, you're not at your boss's whim.
00:27:15 Speaker_02
You can do whatever you want. You're independent. So, using money as a tool can make you happier. Spending money can make you happier. But it's not the thing that is making you happier.
00:27:23 Speaker_02
It's just a tool to do other things and acquire other things that are actually making you happy.
00:27:29 Speaker_00
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00:27:39 Speaker_00
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00:27:45 Speaker_00
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00:27:56 Speaker_00
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00:28:08 Speaker_00
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00:28:21 Speaker_00
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00:28:32 Speaker_00
Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim that special offer. Today's episode is also brought to us by Roka. Roka makes eyeglasses and sunglasses that are of the absolute highest quality.
00:28:44 Speaker_00
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00:28:53 Speaker_00
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00:29:03 Speaker_00
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00:29:12 Speaker_00
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00:29:25 Speaker_00
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00:29:32 Speaker_00
Now I put my Roka Red Lens glasses on as soon as it gets dark outside, and I've noticed a much easier transition to sleep, which makes sense based on everything we know about how filtering out short wavelengths of light can allow your brain to function correctly.
00:29:45 Speaker_00
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00:29:57 Speaker_00
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00:30:10 Speaker_00
I love the story about spending time with your kids on vacation as unstructured time, as well as spending unstructured time with them playing Legos at home. My graduate advisor sadly passed away very young of cancer. She was 50 and I knew her kids
00:30:23 Speaker_00
really when they were in the womb, because she was pregnant with the first one. And I attended the memorial service there. And it was an incredible thing because people gave their speeches and her kids got up.
00:30:35 Speaker_00
And by then they were, I think, you know, about eight and 11 or so. I'm sure they had a great many thoughts and feelings that they didn't share.
00:30:44 Speaker_00
But the one thing that really stood out is they appreciated how much unstructured time their mom had spent with them. It wasn't this like big event or something. It was all the unstructured time that she had spent with them.
00:30:56 Speaker_00
And that was very inherent to the kind of person she was.
00:30:59 Speaker_00
And so that really stuck with me and God willing, you live a very long time, but I think for anyone listening to this and because of the statement that Kahneman made where that we are not well calibrated to sense a future regret, you know, the unstructured time is perhaps one of
00:31:11 Speaker_00
the most valuable things that we can give our relationships, both the people we engage in them with and ourselves. And I don't think it's discussed enough.
00:31:20 Speaker_02
There's a gerontologist named Carl Pillemer, who wrote a great book called 30 Lessons for Living. And what he did is he interviewed about 100 centenarians, and he just said, tell me about your life. What advice do you have for the rest of us?
00:31:32 Speaker_02
And there's a section of his book about money. And he says, of the 1,000 people he interviewed, of the 1,000 centenarians he interviewed, not a single one of them, looking back at their life, said, I wish I earned more money.
00:31:44 Speaker_02
Not one, but virtually every one of them said, I wish I spent more time with my kids. I wish I was nicer to people. I wish I spent more time with my friends, my family, that was universal, but earn more money was not in there whatsoever.
00:31:56 Speaker_02
That stuck with me.
00:31:58 Speaker_00
And as you point out, however, Earning money allows for the opportunity to spend time with kids and loved ones of all kinds.
00:32:07 Speaker_02
It can, but I think there are a lot of people for whom it's the opposite. If you are a partner at a law firm, you're earning a ton of money. Congratulations. Great. You probably have a big house and a nice car.
00:32:14 Speaker_02
You're also probably working 100 hours a week. and the things that might fill your soul. It's different for everybody.
00:32:19 Speaker_02
This is not universal, but what might actually make you happy, spending time with your friends, your family, exercising, sleeping late, is not available to you. So that's why it's independence plus purpose.
00:32:30 Speaker_02
And I think there are a lot of people who make millions of dollars per year and have no independence whatsoever. They are completely tied to their boss's whims, to their work, to their employer. They might love it.
00:32:39 Speaker_02
I'm not saying you shouldn't do that, but they have no independence at all. I think there are billionaires who have no independence. because they are so tied to doing things whether they like it or not.
00:32:48 Speaker_02
And that's, I think a lot of people go crazy in that situation because they're like, I'm making $5 million a year, but it's not making me any happier. It's like, yeah, what would make you happier is independence.
00:32:57 Speaker_02
And you are pushing yourself away from that. You were probably more independent when you were 15 and had no money than you are at 40 making millions of dollars a year.
00:33:05 Speaker_00
So then in an ideal world, which of course doesn't exist, one would find a vocation or a pursuit that they found really meaningful, would work really, really hard.
00:33:17 Speaker_00
would make enough money to then, I guess, retire and spend unstructured time with the people you love and then simply stop working in this model that clearly is an artificial model that I'm creating here.
00:33:31 Speaker_00
Because it seems like after a certain point, provided you earned that money through an effort that you felt was meaningful, presumably with people you enjoy, or even if it wasn't, you found it meaningful, you make that money, then it seems that it's all about human interactions at that point.
00:33:45 Speaker_02
Yeah. And what's true is that that scenario, that dream scenario, might be true for 1% of the people, that they can earn enough money to retire young and then pursue whatever they want.
00:33:55 Speaker_02
There's an entrepreneur named Felix Dennis who wrote a book many years ago called How to Get Rich. And there's a quote in that book. He says, he was at the time maybe in his 70s and worth about a billion dollars, something like that.
00:34:05 Speaker_02
And he said, if I knew what I knew now and I could do life over again, I would make as much money as I could, retire at age 35, and plant trees and write poetry. And he was like, looking back, that's what I should have done.
00:34:18 Speaker_02
But let's leave aside that, of course, not everybody can do that.
00:34:20 Speaker_00
What did he do? He kept working.
00:34:21 Speaker_02
He kept working.
00:34:21 Speaker_00
Even though he didn't need more money. Absolutely. This is interesting because people who do achieve a high degree of wealth at a young age seem to keep going. And we could make all sorts of assumptions about why it is that they do that.
00:34:33 Speaker_00
Expectations from others that their ego, literally their sense of self in some way or perhaps entirely is tied to the sense that they're still in pursuit, that it's somehow a failure to opt out at that point.
00:34:49 Speaker_00
I mean, we can speculate all day, but what this guy Felix said really rings true. It seems like once people reach a number and for everyone, it's going to be different. It's not going to be a billion dollars for everybody.
00:35:02 Speaker_00
Once they have enough resources for themselves and the people they need to take care of, maybe a little bit more as a buffer, it makes no sense to continue on that path.
00:35:11 Speaker_02
Well, I think there are a lot of people. I think you're one of them and I'm one of them who enjoy what they do.
00:35:15 Speaker_02
And if you and I got to a point where we're completely financially independent, all the money we'll need for the rest of our life, I would still be a writer. You would still do your research because we enjoy it.
00:35:24 Speaker_00
Yeah, absolutely. I love learning. I love learning.
00:35:26 Speaker_02
Right. And I think if, actually, if you are the kind of person who says, once I hit my number, I'm done, you probably don't love your work at all. Almost by definition, you don't.
00:35:33 Speaker_02
I think what's dangerous though, is when the money itself is part of your identity. I like being a writer. I like the process of writing. But if I were to say, I have to keep writing books because I need to make more money.
00:35:43 Speaker_02
I just, I have to have a higher net worth, particularly if I'm past the point of taking care of my family. Then at that point, I think money is actually like a liability. It's a financial asset and a psychological liability.
00:35:54 Speaker_02
It's taking control over what you're doing in life. If you're saying, I have to have more of it. I mean, if there's anything in life where you're like, I have to have more. And even when I get more, my satiation point goes higher and higher.
00:36:05 Speaker_02
What is that? It's an addiction. And it's controlling you at that point. So there are a lot of people for whom money is a financial asset and a psychological liability. And I think that's actually true for some of the richest people in society.
00:36:17 Speaker_02
that the more like it grows exponentially over time, the richer you become, the more addicted to having more grows on you.
00:36:23 Speaker_00
in the backdrop of everything we've talked about thus far is the biology of dopamine reward. Dopamine, of course, being a molecule that people associate with reward, but it's really about the pursuit of reward.
00:36:33 Speaker_00
It's about more, it's about, and it's no coincidence that dopamine is involved in generating movement in the body. This is why people with Parkinson's who are depleted in dopamine can't generate movement.
00:36:43 Speaker_00
And it's also involved in generating cognitive movement and pursuit, paying attention to things.
00:36:49 Speaker_00
There is this idea that I've been pushing for a few years now that kind of throws its arms around a big literature on dopamine that says that addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure.
00:37:01 Speaker_00
But your definition is actually much better, I realize. Addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure and or safety or a sense of safety, right? Because here we're not talking about making more money to enjoy things more.
00:37:16 Speaker_00
We're talking about making more money to avoid the sense that pain is coming or that we are vulnerable.
00:37:23 Speaker_02
And for a lot of people, that pain is a social pain, that they're not going to climb high enough on the social ladder, that their peers are earning more than them, that their neighbors have a bigger house, whatever it might be.
00:37:33 Speaker_02
That's the pain that they're trying to avoid. And that is a game that cannot be won, because gratefully, thankfully, there are a lot of very wealthy people in this world.
00:37:40 Speaker_02
And no matter how much money you're making, there's always somebody out there who's earning more, living better, and has a bigger house and a nicer car. That's always the case.
00:37:48 Speaker_02
So if you are on that path of, I need to earn more to climb that ladder so I can have more than the next guy, that's a game that you cannot win. And I think that game of comparison, too, also grows the wealthier you are.
00:38:02 Speaker_02
The billionaires are more likely to compare themselves to other billionaires than the minimum wage worker is to compare themselves to somebody making $10 an hour or whatever. You are more likely to compare your lifestyle the richer you become.
00:38:13 Speaker_02
And since that comparison to other people is what gives you a feeling of inadequacy,
00:38:18 Speaker_02
There's this irony, it's hard to wrap your head around it and come to terms with it, but some of the most money insecure people you'll ever meet are the richest people you'll ever meet.
00:38:26 Speaker_02
People who live in a 15,000 square foot mansion, yeah, but he's got a 17,000 square foot mansion. Things that ordinary people would never consider that just consumes their life.
00:38:36 Speaker_02
And again, that's the point where money is like the psychological debt, it's psychological liability. It's controlling their, it becomes an integral part of their identity. They wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and they see,
00:38:48 Speaker_02
a person who makes money. That's their identity. Who are you? I'm a person who makes money. And that's when like your process of chasing it just becomes like a detriment to your happiness over time. You're not using it as a tool to live a better life.
00:38:59 Speaker_02
You're using it as a yardstick to measure yourself against others by.
00:39:04 Speaker_00
I fundamentally believe that all forms of addiction, all forms of addiction, are fundamentally a fear of death, their way of shrinking our aperture on time perception so that we're in pursuit of something.
00:39:20 Speaker_00
And for people that can place their addiction within work, it has this feedback of being quote unquote, functional, as opposed to dysfunctional. This is also true for people that are continually seeking awards within their profession.
00:39:34 Speaker_00
I mean, there are these professions, academia included, but other professions where people are constantly pinning awards on one another. And it gives this illusion of progress when in fact, there's a whole world of things happening.
00:39:43 Speaker_00
Now, these people often have quite healthy families and relationships, so they're not mutually exclusive. But, I think I know a few billionaires, not many, but I know some that are very happy.
00:39:54 Speaker_00
They tend to be the people that are still working and in pursuit of new things, avid learners. But perhaps by virtue of the work that I do, which is focused on science, but also health,
00:40:05 Speaker_00
The modern billionaires that I'm aware of seem to be very focused on not just making money, but also trying to secure their place on the planet for a very long time.
00:40:19 Speaker_00
Not through legacy, although I think many of them like to provide for the next generations in their family, surely.
00:40:26 Speaker_00
not so much by putting their names on the sides of buildings anymore, this used to be the way it was done, but rather trying to secure their health status.
00:40:34 Speaker_00
Because the one thing that money can buy sort of is better health care, but money can't buy you more years of your life, except by virtue of the things that you are willing to not do and do behaviorally. You still have to exercise.
00:40:48 Speaker_00
You still have to get your sleep. You have to avoid certain things. And so the modern billionaires often are talking about what they're doing for their health, as opposed to their yacht, their car, et cetera.
00:41:02 Speaker_00
This has now become the kind of metric for comparison. Blood profiles become a sort of point of bragging for people.
00:41:08 Speaker_00
It's pretty interesting, especially given that you just look back about 50 or even a hundred years and further back, and the more wealthy people were, the less physical labor they were doing.
00:41:18 Speaker_00
Now they're doing more physical labor to try and live longer. So what are your thoughts on the relationship between physical health and money. I mean, obviously, there's a sweet spot there. But there's no pill that people can purchase to live longer.
00:41:32 Speaker_02
Right. I view it in the negative sense of the people who work to get money so hard that it takes a physical toll on their body. And that is so incredibly common.
00:41:43 Speaker_02
And that's another form of debt that you can very easily measure your net worth and your income. You can put a number on it, very clean to measure. It's much harder to measure your health.
00:41:54 Speaker_02
And I think it's easier for people to say, yes, I'm only sleeping five hours a night, and I'm on my third divorce, and I'm overweight, but I'm making a lot of money this year. Because one is very easy to measure, and the others are much harder.
00:42:06 Speaker_02
Your happiness, your health, whatnot's harder to measure that. And I do think, too, that if you are very wealthy, particularly the very, very wealthy, you get so accustomed towards, I can snap my fingers and literally get anything.
00:42:17 Speaker_02
A Gulfstream jet, a mansion, whatever, I can get it right now. But health is like this last elusive thing. that by and large you cannot purchase. And I think that drives a lot of people crazy.
00:42:27 Speaker_02
And that's why if you can have anything in the world by snapping your fingers and getting it, then you eventually move towards what's the thing that you don't have, and that's immortality.
00:42:35 Speaker_02
And I think there's a long history of that going back to the robber barons. John D. Rockefeller was obsessed with it. Andrew Carnegie was obsessed with it. If you can have everything material in the world, You're still going to have desire.
00:42:46 Speaker_02
And ordinary people can sit around and dream and say, one day I'm going to have the mansion. Or not even a mansion. One day I'm going to have a house of my own. I'm going to have a car. I'm going to send my kids to college. Everybody wants to dream.
00:42:57 Speaker_02
So if all that is a given, you have all the money you could ever spend, you still want to dream. So what do you dream about? You dream about immortality. And so I think that's been the case for a very long period of time.
00:43:07 Speaker_02
What's interesting too is that there was a historian who looked back at the British peerage. He got a lot of data on how long people lived in various points of the UK economy.
00:43:18 Speaker_02
And what he found was until about, I think it was 1750, the richest members of the UK had among the shortest lives. The poorest people were some of them who were living the longest. And he dug into it, so how could this be?
00:43:29 Speaker_02
The richest people die the fastest. And what he found is the richest people were the only ones who could afford all the quack medicines and the sham doctors who were just poisoning them.
00:43:39 Speaker_02
They were poisoning us back in the day when we knew nothing about medicine. So I think the idea of, I want a better life and I should be able to buy that. There's a long history of that backfiring on people as well.
00:43:49 Speaker_00
Yeah, there's a lot of excitement right now about stem cells and treatments that currently are not available in the United States that are available out of country. And I get asked about these a lot. Most of them don't have FDA approval yet.
00:44:02 Speaker_00
Some of them probably never will have FDA approval. We'll probably talk about stem cells another time.
00:44:07 Speaker_02
Do you think you see this though, where the wealthiest people are spending money on treatments that you either know are not gonna work or are a very questionable? Yeah, all the time. And that might backfire on you. That might make you less healthy.
00:44:21 Speaker_00
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I'll just point out, I don't have anything against stem cell therapies. I think they hold great potential.
00:44:28 Speaker_00
But there is a true story about a stem cell clinic down in Florida prior to the FDA, you know, bringing the gavel down on them of injecting stem cells into the eyes of wealthy people who could afford the treatment.
00:44:42 Speaker_00
These people had certain markers for macular degeneration and other things that can cause blindness. And guess what happened to these people? They all went blind. So that brought the gavel down on stem cell therapy generally in this country.
00:44:57 Speaker_00
A lot of people are getting infusions of stem cells and related things out of country. They're coming back and they're walking and talking. So, and they're calling me and they're asking what my thoughts are. And I have a lot of thoughts.
00:45:10 Speaker_00
I mean, I think that the basics of longevity are clear, right? I mean, you want to avoid, you know, head trauma and environmental toxins. Those things are real and,
00:45:19 Speaker_00
if you have certain mutations like BRCA mutations, you need to be more careful about cancer and avoid smoking, all this stuff, right? Alcohol turns out to be pro-cancerous and things of that sort.
00:45:28 Speaker_00
But then it's physical activity, it's nutrition, it's social connection, it's sleep, it's sunlight, it's all the things that I've talked about on this podcast and that other people talk about as well.
00:45:38 Speaker_00
But yes, very wealthy people are looking for that edge. to live longer.
00:45:43 Speaker_00
And it is true that when you start to layer in all the basics of do's and don'ts, all the behaviors, and then you start to augment that with a few extra things, you get the sense of more vigor that sort of suggests they may live longer, but we still don't know.
00:45:58 Speaker_00
We still don't know. With the exception of exercise that we absolutely know can enrich mitochondrial density, give people more energy and vigor, et cetera, most of this is still a big question mark.
00:46:09 Speaker_02
See, I could see a very wealthy person using their money if you are very sick and you have a rare cancer to throw the kitchen sink at it.
00:46:17 Speaker_00
Oh, every excellent doctor.
00:46:18 Speaker_02
Those million dollar therapies, well, not absolutely. I think it's a different animal if you are already pretty healthy to say, I'm going to throw my money at trying to become immortal or close to it, whatever it might be. That's a different thing.
00:46:31 Speaker_00
I totally agree. And I think what we're talking about here is as you said it,
00:46:37 Speaker_00
fairly quickly, but I think I want to highlight it because I think it's really important that even people who have billions of dollars still have a sense of yearning for something that's missing or that they don't have.
00:46:51 Speaker_00
And in some cases, that's the sustaining factor to their wellbeing. You said it's also good to be in pursuit.
00:46:56 Speaker_02
Yeah, maybe that's with dopamine too, right? We always want more. It's the pursuit of more. And if you're wealthy enough to have everything, you still have a part of your brain that's like, yeah, but I want more, I want more, I want more.
00:47:07 Speaker_02
And if you've exhausted the physical part of the world, that material part of the world, and let's leave aside the billionaires, even the average ordinary American family that owns a modest house, owns a car that functions well, owns nice clothes, will send their kids to a state school, by a lot of historical definitions, they have everything.
00:47:24 Speaker_02
They have everything you would ever need, but you're always yearning for more. It's always this pursuit of, well, what else don't I have? And I think what you want more than anything in life is what you want and cannot have.
00:47:34 Speaker_02
That's what you're going to chase with all of your effort, is the thing that you want and cannot have. And I think that's where health comes in for a lot of these people.
00:47:41 Speaker_00
As long as you think that there's a possibility you could get it. The dopamine circuit loves, you want what you feel is just out of your reach, but might be possible to achieve. I mean, this is why people throw so much money away gambling.
00:47:54 Speaker_02
But maybe with social media, it makes it seem so that there are virtually anything is within your reach. because it used to be before social media that your view of the world was mostly your neighbors and your coworkers and your siblings.
00:48:05 Speaker_02
And now everybody's view of the world is a curated highlight reel of the most extreme events in the world.
00:48:13 Speaker_02
So if you are a 15 year old scrolling through Instagram, then what is within your reach, what looks within your reach is a Ferrari and a private jet and a mansion in a way that didn't exist when you and I were kids.
00:48:24 Speaker_02
I think it makes the aspiration level that much harder.
00:48:26 Speaker_00
and real examples of people who went from nothing to immensely popular or wealthy, etc. I mean, gosh, I would say about Once a month, somebody walks right up to me and says, just watch someday, I'm going to have the top podcast in the world on blank.
00:48:46 Speaker_00
And they're trying to seed this thing that they've seen on social media, which are examples of people, you know, kind of, it used to be called rags to riches, but you know, the parallels in different universes.
00:48:56 Speaker_00
But there's a famous musician, I think his name is Ed Sheeran, who there's still a video of him early on saying like he knew he was going to make it. If you watch the Conor McGregor documentary, it's amazing.
00:49:05 Speaker_00
I think it's called Notorious on Netflix, even if people aren't into, to MMA, they should at least watch the first part.
00:49:10 Speaker_00
He was videotaping himself very early on, and he made this prediction that he was going to be a world champion, and then he ends up being a world champion, right?
00:49:19 Speaker_02
This is a great anecdote that Kanye West used to practice his Grammy speech when he was walking to the train because he couldn't afford the car.
00:49:26 Speaker_02
Like when he was an absolute nobody, he was practicing his Grammy acceptance speech of just like absolute ambition of where you're going.
00:49:31 Speaker_00
Yeah, and I don't know if this anecdote is true, but there's the anecdote that I heard that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck practicing their Academy Awards acceptance speech in the schoolyard when they were kids.
00:49:44 Speaker_00
And then they gave their speech and they were laughing about that. I grew up skateboarding, so when I first got into it, the Tony Hawks and the Mike McGills and Steve Caballeros, these were the names at the time, were like these luminaries, right?
00:49:56 Speaker_00
The gap between us and them was so huge. By the time I was a junior in high school, my best friend at the time, Paul Zuanich, sent in a videotape of himself to a company called Planet Earth. He got sponsored.
00:50:07 Speaker_00
Next thing you know, we're in the shop watching him skateboard. And within a year or two, he had his own pro model. So I think
00:50:14 Speaker_00
social media gives us not just the sense of what's out there, but it gives us very salient examples of people that went from completely unknown to extremely known.
00:50:23 Speaker_00
Just this last year, there's the, you know, the so-called hock to a girl, you know, is interviewed outside a bar saying like, she now has a very popular podcast. She has sponsors, she's known.
00:50:33 Speaker_00
Literally became one of the most famous people in the country. Right, and has a financial stream now of income through her podcast.
00:50:39 Speaker_00
And so this raises the sort of idea in people's minds or the possibility, however remote, that if somebody puts a camera in front of you, by virtue of one thing that you say, you could suddenly be an internationally known person and potentially go from, quote unquote, rags to riches.
00:50:57 Speaker_02
And if you look at the studies, when you ask teenagers, what is your preferred career? What do you want to be when you grow up? It used to be astronaut, used to be doctor, used to be entrepreneur. Now it's influencer by far, is what people want to be.
00:51:09 Speaker_02
It seems like the quickest path to fame and wealth. And for a lot of people, it is. My sister-in-law is a kindergarten teacher. She has a girl in her class who has over a million followers on YouTube as a kindergartner.
00:51:20 Speaker_02
Like that didn't exist when you and I were kids or it was so rare.
00:51:23 Speaker_02
But now like enough people know stories like that, even if there are a few of them, enough people know stories to give you the sense of hope of like, well, if they could do it, I could do it too.
00:51:32 Speaker_00
Well, I'll tell everyone out there that if you think that fame is what you want, fame restricts your freedom. It does not increase your freedom.
00:51:41 Speaker_02
There's a great quote from Deval where he says, what you want to be is rich and anonymous. That's the sweet spot that you want to be. The opposite, you are poor and famous. And that's the hardest spot to be in.
00:51:51 Speaker_02
But if you can be rich and anonymous, because I think there's a really important concept with money that I call social debt, which is when the money that you have influences, it changes how other people think of you, and even maybe how you think about yourself.
00:52:03 Speaker_02
And you can measure your asset. It's not actually debt. It's not like debt you repay the bank, but it is very much a debt in terms of it is an anchor on your happiness that you have to repay. And fame is the ultimate social debt.
00:52:17 Speaker_02
And for a lot of people, their social debt of fame is more than the money that they made from whatever made them famous to begin with. And there's this anecdote from Tiger Woods where he said,
00:52:27 Speaker_02
He loves scuba diving because when he's 100 feet under the ocean is the only time in the world where people aren't taking pictures of him and asking things of him and gawking at him. That sucks.
00:52:38 Speaker_02
Not that you have a lot of sympathy for somebody like that, but it does suck. You can measure his net worth very quickly. What's your net worth? Just show me the number.
00:52:46 Speaker_02
How do you measure the liability of feeling like you have no privacy unless you are scuba diving? That's a hard thing. And at various levels, a lot of people have that.
00:52:55 Speaker_02
even if you earn a modest income and all of a sudden your friends, your family starts saying, hey, I heard you got a raise. I could use a little bit myself. That's a social debt. They want you to pay at dinner and whatnot.
00:53:06 Speaker_02
And maybe you're happy to do that. You're happy to share it. But let's not pretend that there's not a little bit of social debt and liability that comes with every added amount of income that you have.
00:53:15 Speaker_00
I mean, so much of social media is just by definition in terms of the number of followers being displayed, et cetera, number of likes and comments being displayed is designed to set up these metrics of comparison.
00:53:27 Speaker_02
Yeah, the smartest minds of the generation work at Facebook and Instagram and Twitter to figure out how to give you FOMO, how to generate a little bit more dopamine. And they're very good at it.
00:53:36 Speaker_00
I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Function. I recently became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing.
00:53:45 Speaker_00
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00:54:03 Speaker_00
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00:54:23 Speaker_00
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00:54:45 Speaker_00
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00:54:53 Speaker_00
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00:55:04 Speaker_00
And I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try Function, go to functionhealth.com slash Huberman. Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman Lab listeners.
00:55:18 Speaker_00
Again, that's functionhealth.com slash Huberman to get early access to Function. One thing that I wish somebody would do, maybe it's been done, is you mentioned earlier this, not typical, but,
00:55:33 Speaker_00
I guess semi-common thing of an article will come out and say, you know, the five things that people say on their deathbed or that they, and they look back and they mentioned that they wish they'd spent less time at work.
00:55:46 Speaker_00
They wish they had spent more time with their kids or more time in nature perhaps. Has anyone ever just asked people directly what were the things that they are most proud of or the things that they really feel brought them tremendous meaning then and
00:56:01 Speaker_00
as they're passing away, because it's related, but it's kind of the inverse of the same question.
00:56:07 Speaker_02
Yeah. Warren Buffett brought this up one time. He said a good way to think about life is, it's kind of grim, but he said, write what you want your obituary to say, and then work backwards to live up to it.
00:56:18 Speaker_02
And in that situation, if you were to write, like, what do you want your obituary to say? Most people would say, oh, I hope it says Morgan was a good father. He was a good husband. He helped his community. He was admired by his coworkers.
00:56:30 Speaker_02
That's what I wanted to say. And for a lot of people, it's different for everyone, but it'd be something like that.
00:56:34 Speaker_02
And why Buffett said it was important is because nobody who's writing their preferred obituary would say, would include the size of their house, how many horsepower their car had, how nice their clothes were. Because everybody knows it doesn't matter.
00:56:48 Speaker_02
And it's like, I forget who made this idea. There's a thing between resume virtues and eulogy virtues. Yeah, that was David Brooks. David Brooks said that. Thank you. Resume virtues are, you know, how much money you make, your degrees, everything.
00:57:01 Speaker_02
Eulogy virtues is he was a great father. He was a great friend. He helped his community. He was funny. And I think most people really aspire to have eulogy virtues, but they spend all their day chasing resume virtues. Resume virtues can be great.
00:57:12 Speaker_02
I want a good education. I want a good income. But what you're really trying to chase is to use those things to gain more resume virtues at the end of the day. So I think if you think about it through that lens, a lot of these things become clear.
00:57:23 Speaker_02
And that's why, like I said, going on a great vacation with my kids, if that's a 10, what's really fun about that is spending time with them when I'm detached from work. I'm not checking my phone every seven seconds.
00:57:35 Speaker_02
spending hours with my kids, giving them my full attention. That's what made me happy. The view was great on the beach, cool, but that's what made me happy, and I can do that at home, can't I?
00:57:43 Speaker_02
And so that's the difference between, like, going to Maui is a resume virtue. Spending time with your kids is a eulogy virtue.
00:57:52 Speaker_00
Why is it, do you think, that even though we've perhaps all heard by now that, you know, compounding interest is great, right?
00:58:00 Speaker_00
You put in, let's say, a small or a moderate amount of money into even just a savings account that's accruing a couple percent, you know, it varies year by year and with the economy, of course, or into the markets that over time, if you quote unquote set it and forget it, just kind of like put it there and walk away, that you're likely to make X percent
00:58:17 Speaker_00
over time, and you can look at the plot. You can look at that line upward into the right. It almost always is jagged line drifting upward to the right. And even just scroll over and see, okay, at age whatever, I'm going to have X number of dollars.
00:58:33 Speaker_00
And that value is often very high relative to where one's current wealth is. Even if they're a student or they have very little put away. We all hear this, we can see it. You can run the models. It's almost trivial.
00:58:45 Speaker_00
And yet people don't do that even if they have the income to save. Is it that hard for us to project our emotional state and the sorts of things that we integrate in terms of life meaning and value into the future that most people just don't do that?
00:59:02 Speaker_00
And why do you think that is? I mean, I'm not asking you to play neurobiologist here. I mean, I think we both agree that time perception is a complicated thing, but You would think that people would just sort of get it, but we're not rational.
00:59:14 Speaker_00
Most people aren't rational in that way. They don't save, they don't invest, and they don't compound interest. And so, they end up with a lot less money than they could have and a lot more regret.
00:59:22 Speaker_02
Yeah. I think there's two ways to think about this. One is my friend Michael Batnick phrased it this way. He said, if I ask you what is 8 plus 8 plus 8 plus 8, you figure that out in five seconds. That's an easy one.
00:59:33 Speaker_02
If I said, what is eight times eight times eight times eight times eight? Even if you're a math nerd, it's too hard. You can't figure it out. We're not wired for exponential thinking. You just can't do it.
00:59:42 Speaker_02
And therefore, even if you show you the numbers, hey, invest a small amount, retire with a million dollars. I think it's so counterintuitive that most people see that and they're like, eh, okay, that doesn't really seem right.
00:59:53 Speaker_02
It doesn't really pass the sniff test, how big the numbers can get, how quickly the numbers can get big. The other thing is if you tell a young person, hey, You have 50 years in front of you to invest. That's great. Time's on your side.
01:00:04 Speaker_02
When you're 70 years old, you're going to have $10 million. 50 years from now might as well be 10,000 years from now. You're talking about people who don't know what they're going to eat for dinner tonight.
01:00:13 Speaker_02
You're talking about, hey, let's talk about the year 2077. It's so far out of there, even if that's the right way to think about it. It's a tough way to think about it. And time perception, you mentioned, is so difficult for people.
01:00:25 Speaker_02
If I said, you're going to get punched in the face in 10 seconds, that's a fear. And you're like, oh, I don't. But if I said someone's going to punch you in the face 50 years from now, I'll deal with it when I get there.
01:00:33 Speaker_02
It's so easy to put out of sight, out of mind. And the other thing is, Warren Buffett talked about this a lot. He said, Actually, it was Charlie Munger who said this.
01:00:42 Speaker_02
He said, when teaching finance to young people, people either understand it instantly or never. It's like some people are just wired to get it and some people aren't. And that's always been the case.
01:00:51 Speaker_02
Munger often said all the time, he said, the iron rule of math is only 1% of people can end up in the top 1%. And that's why for a lot of people, yes, you should save and invest for 50 years.
01:01:01 Speaker_02
Let's not pretend that that is easy or that everybody is psychologically able to do it. Some people are wired differently. Of course, that's the case, as they are with health and intelligence and lots of other things.
01:01:10 Speaker_02
So, I do think there's a thing for financial education. We have getting people to understand what is possible. But I don't think we'll ever live in a world where everyone gets it and does it.
01:01:19 Speaker_02
I don't think that world has never existed and I think will never exist because it's not math. It's not a spreadsheet. It's behavior.
01:01:25 Speaker_02
And we now live in a world where we understand the dangers of smoking and highly processed foods and whatever it might be. But even if we know it, people still do it because it's behavioral. It's not intelligence.
01:01:37 Speaker_02
So showing people the numbers and getting them to do it is night and day.
01:01:42 Speaker_00
Do you know how they got people to stop smoking in particular young people? It wasn't by scaring them about their health.
01:01:48 Speaker_00
It turns out the most effective campaign to get especially young people to stop smoking was to hijack the inherent rebellion of youth. and to display ads of wealthy older people in rooms full of smoke.
01:02:03 Speaker_00
So it became us as the youth rebelling against them, the older generation that are trying to take our money, it had nothing to do with health. And it absolutely worked.
01:02:13 Speaker_00
And I have friends that work on this sort of thing in the context of public health, as it relates to all sorts of public health initiatives and the effective way to change human behavior as it relates to health.
01:02:25 Speaker_00
is to incentivize aesthetics, to incentivize fear or to hijack fear of dying. But even fear of dying is not sufficient as compared to hijacking these cross-generational, let's just call them frictions that exist. So I found that to be interesting.
01:02:47 Speaker_00
You used a math example of eight plus eight plus eight plus eight versus eight times eight times eight times eight. And you said that the,
01:02:54 Speaker_00
human brain is not capable of exponential thinking, or most people's brains are not capable of exponential thinking. I think you either intentionally or inadvertently hit on something really important.
01:03:05 Speaker_00
I don't know that the dopamine reward system, which is the fundamental currency of pursuit and reward across all timescales, it's kind of wild, right?
01:03:15 Speaker_00
One neuromodulator, and there are other things involved that modulate that modulator, but one neuromodulator is involved
01:03:21 Speaker_00
in reward pursuit across all timescales, whether or not we're playing, let's say we're both competitive enough to play a game of chess or checkers, dopamine is motivating.
01:03:32 Speaker_00
the pursuit for the win, or a four-year degree, or an eight-year degree, or why you would want maybe your kids to win a soccer game. Like now you're like a third person in dopamine, right?
01:03:42 Speaker_00
It's across all timescales, all scenarios, it's incredible, and across many species. So it makes me wonder, and I'll have to ask some of my colleagues that work on these dopamine reward schedules for a living,
01:03:56 Speaker_00
whether or not the dopamine reward system actually can do exponential math. It might not be able to do exponential math.
01:04:03 Speaker_00
It might be that the pursuit of water, the pursuit of mates, the pursuit of food, the pursuit of shelter, which is what these dopamine circuits evolved under the constraints of, whether or not they are even capable of doing exponential thinking.
01:04:16 Speaker_02
Or if it's like the marshmallow test, which got misconstrued in many ways, but it's like, yeah, would you rather have one right now or two in the future? I think for a lot of people, it's just like there.
01:04:25 Speaker_02
There are some people for whom like they're wired so differently for this. So you hear stories about like the old very wealthy people, the old billionaires, when they were 20 years old, they would not get a haircut.
01:04:36 Speaker_02
because they knew that $3 haircut would compound into $100 by the time they're older. They were just so wired from birth to understand this and to have a very long perception of time to do it. By definition, that's the rarity.
01:04:47 Speaker_02
Most people are not like that. And I don't know if they should be either. I don't know if you should be the kind of person your entire life who is always saving for a future and never enjoying what you have too.
01:04:56 Speaker_02
Like that could lead to a lot of regret as well.
01:04:58 Speaker_00
And there are those people. So let's parse the marshmallow test. The marshmallow test, I think, initially done at Stanford. I think it was at Bing Nursery School or something like that, or maybe somewhere at Stanford.
01:05:08 Speaker_00
If I'm wrong, someone will correct me in the comments.
01:05:11 Speaker_00
Of course, for those that don't know is they brought these really cute kids into rooms and they put the marshmallow in front of them and they told them they could eat it now or they could wait and they could get two marshmallows later.
01:05:21 Speaker_00
And then they videotaped them and the videos are absolutely delightful of the kids, you know, like distracting themselves or having the marshmallows talk or taking little piece of the marshmallows.
01:05:29 Speaker_00
I mean, it reveals as much variation on human self-constraint behavior as you could possibly imagine. And they're really interesting as you know. I would like to know whether, the children that were able to wait and therefore get two marshmallows.
01:05:46 Speaker_00
were trying to resist the temptation or whether or not they were being pulled forward by the anticipation of two marshmallows.
01:05:53 Speaker_02
My understanding, and maybe this is not complete, but my understanding, at least part of it, was neither of those two things. The kids who did the best and resisted it were the ones who distracted themselves.
01:06:02 Speaker_02
They weren't even thinking about the marshmallow. They would sing a song, they would start playing with their shoes, they'd play with another kid. And the ones who could not resist are the ones who just sat there staring at the one marshmallow.
01:06:11 Speaker_02
that was tempting them. That's too hard to resist. Almost everybody will resist that. It was like the environment that they put themselves in.
01:06:17 Speaker_00
But they weren't thinking into the future about how great it would be to have two marshmallows. I don't think so.
01:06:20 Speaker_02
I think they were so, because their kids are so distracted. They have the memory of a goldfish. They wanted to just go do something. They'd sing a song, they'd play with their shoes, they'd play with their friends.
01:06:29 Speaker_02
And then by dint of doing that, all of a sudden they had waited long enough to get the two marshmallows. I think that was at least part of it. And I think that's true for a lot of people too. Think about the stock market.
01:06:38 Speaker_02
where so much temptation to always watch it and see what it's doing, because we have CNBC and there's the ticker and the lights are green and red and whatnot. For a lot of people, it's impossible to watch that.
01:06:50 Speaker_02
Or even worse, in Robinhood, you get a push notification on your phone. That's too hard to resist.
01:06:54 Speaker_02
But you know where you see very good investing behavior, where people do a really good job, is when you invest automatically every paycheck into your 401k and you forgot your password. Because that environment is against temptation.
01:07:07 Speaker_02
There's nothing to do. You forgot your password. But if you're just bombarding yourself with stimulus of what to do, most people cannot resist that.
01:07:15 Speaker_00
My way of dealing with social media, I would say compulsion, not addiction, is I now, one could take an old phone. I actually got a phone specifically for social media. So I have Instagram and X on that phone.
01:07:28 Speaker_00
I don't even recall the number of that phone. I airdrop things onto it if I want to post and I do what Rogan calls post and ghost.
01:07:36 Speaker_00
So you post and then it goes into a box because otherwise I'm just absolutely blown away by how much time can be sucked away. you tell yourself, I'm going to just look at social media for a moment. And then you're pulled down some rabbit hole.
01:07:50 Speaker_00
It's just incredible the way they've designed these algorithms to get you. And of course I like social media. I teach on social media. This conversation will probably be, you know, fragments of it will be on social media, but.
01:08:02 Speaker_00
I think that people don't realize how compulsion inducing the dopamine circuitry is. And once you start getting pulled down it, you're a different organism altogether.
01:08:16 Speaker_00
And it's not a coincidence that the people who have the largest social media accounts spend very little time on social media. If you spend too much, it just gets overwhelming.
01:08:26 Speaker_00
Well, you're spending time doing things like commenting and liking and there's a liability to some of that, but there's a reward to it too, an immediate reward.
01:08:32 Speaker_00
What you're not doing is going and doing the thing that you bring to social media that brings you more followers and views.
01:08:40 Speaker_00
So I always think of social media as that last point in a funnel where I go do things in real life, like research papers, talk to people, learn, and then organize that learning into a format that I think people can benefit from, and then put it on social media.
01:08:56 Speaker_00
But that's the end point. And so if I stay too long there, then I'm not getting more material.
01:09:03 Speaker_00
It's almost like if I were a farmer, you know, this is like, you know, once the crops ship, you know, I'm not going to stand there just like looking at the road as the truck goes by. Yeah, you got to get back and plant more seeds and plow the field.
01:09:16 Speaker_00
I mean, so I like to think about these things in these very basic terms, because I feel that the dopamine circuitry has, it hasn't evolved, right? But we have new technologies that have hijacked it to some extent.
01:09:27 Speaker_02
Jerry Seinfeld said one of the reasons he quit his show in the 1990s was because what made it so good and so funny is that he and Larry David would go like sit in a deli and watch people order and make a joke.
01:09:37 Speaker_02
That's where they got their content from was observing the world. But they got so busy and so famous that they couldn't do that anymore.
01:09:43 Speaker_02
And he knew that it was going to come at the detriment of the show, that it wasn't like the ultimate reward of like, how big was the season? How many people watch the show? How much money do we make?
01:09:51 Speaker_02
What made them great was going out and living and doing their thing. And once it came at the expense of that, it didn't work anymore.
01:09:57 Speaker_00
Well, this raises a really key point for people, including myself, which is in an ideal world, one can make a living that is sufficient for their needs, doing something that you truly enjoy doing.
01:10:14 Speaker_00
Or I would say to be realistic, where 75% of the activities are pleasurable, maybe 15% are kind of neutral. And then the remainder, there's some punishing features. There are punishing features in every profession. Yes.
01:10:30 Speaker_00
Jeff Bezos said, if you can enjoy half, that's pretty good. Okay. All right. So I'm a little more stringent with my, with my, yeah, more of an optimist than Bezos. Hey, I don't, but then again, he's Bezos. Yeah.
01:10:40 Speaker_00
I mean, you want to be able to enjoy your work. Not all aspects of it are going to be pleasurable, but. Ideally that's the case, because what we're talking about here is effort that precedes dopamine.
01:10:51 Speaker_00
And I'm a big believer that dopamine that is not preceded by effort is very dangerous. It's not just things that are addictive, but by way of example, methamphetamine, cocaine, dramatically and quickly spike dopamine levels. With no effort put in.
01:11:06 Speaker_00
With no effort put in.
01:11:07 Speaker_00
And then of course we know from the beautiful work of my colleague Anna Lemke and others that then the dopamine profile is that then the higher the peak and the faster the rise to peak, then the more drop below baseline and the more time it takes to return to baseline.
01:11:21 Speaker_00
And typically what people do is when they're below baseline in terms of their dopamine, that's when they really start hitting the hammer with whatever behavior or substance. And all it does is drive that baseline further and further and further down.
01:11:31 Speaker_02
Maybe that's a good analogy for the lottery winner who gets a lot of money, a lot of dopamine in this example, but didn't put anything into it. You didn't build a business. You didn't work at your career. You just got lucky. So it doesn't feel as good.
01:11:41 Speaker_00
There's no effort put into to like base it against. Compare it against what you were talking about before, which is time that's unstructured with your kids playing Legos. It's almost, It sounds effortless.
01:11:53 Speaker_00
It's not like you're like, oh, I gotta go play with my boy's Legos. I'm sure that you're like, yes, like this is fun. This is the good stuff, as they say. And so there are forms of reward, it seems, that are not preceded by effort.
01:12:03 Speaker_00
Although you had to raise those kids and your wife had to give birth to those kids and it's work. But in terms of what's happening in that limited timeframe, it's just so seamless, right? It's just sheer pleasure.
01:12:15 Speaker_00
And yet that kind of pleasure is enriching. This has me very perplexed. As a biologist, I still don't know the underlying mechanisms, but clearly we have multiple paths to pleasure, but I think we have only one path for motivation and that's dopamine.
01:12:28 Speaker_00
But I think there are multiple forms of pleasure. And I'm certain that Dopamine that is high levels of dopamine that are not preceded by effort are not just bad, they are downright dangerous.
01:12:39 Speaker_02
I feel like so much of it too with parenting, this is a slightly different topic, but it's the things that you're not trying to have fun with that build the biggest memories.
01:12:46 Speaker_02
And for me, it's when I travel with my son, he's nine, so we go on a lot of trips now. What's fun is not the event we're going to. whether it's skiing or a football game, that's not the best part of the trip.
01:12:55 Speaker_02
The best part of the trip is flying with him, renting a car with him, going out to dinner with him. That's where you get all the memories.
01:13:01 Speaker_02
It's like it's a process of doing it that you're really enjoying that's going to build all the memories, not necessarily the final destination where you're going.
01:13:11 Speaker_00
I just want to hover on that for a second. Cause I can think of numerous examples in my life where the best parts of a relationship were like a drive home with someone where like, you know, I'm asleep for part of the time.
01:13:22 Speaker_00
They're asleep for part of the time. And you get back and like, like you really, you feel like you really did something. There's something bonding about, about traveling with people. it's even in the absence of external input.
01:13:31 Speaker_00
Like you're just, what is that? It must be something fundamental, some fundamental circuit about journeying with other members of our species.
01:13:39 Speaker_02
Going through a challenge with someone, going through a journey of like, we did this together. We went through it together. I think there's so much of that. If you go on a long hike with somebody at the top, like you want to hug each other.
01:13:49 Speaker_02
Like we just did that together. And it's not even about being at the top. It's like the journey you did with each other. So cliche, but I think it's true for a lot of things.
01:13:56 Speaker_00
And what's that movie with Emile Hirsch where he, it's a true story about the guy that goes out into the Alaskan wilderness and lives on that bus. And sadly he passes away there. I just spoiled it for you.
01:14:09 Speaker_00
But he has, I think it's called Into the Wild, where he's obsessed with this notion of bonding with nature. But then in his journal, a real journal of a guy that really died out there, he,
01:14:21 Speaker_00
gets to the realization that the fundamental pursuit in life is to experience things with other people.
01:14:28 Speaker_02
Absolutely, yeah. And this is why solitary confinement is such a torture, the extreme end of it.
01:14:34 Speaker_00
Brutal, brutal. On the other end of the spectrum, there's freedom. So let's talk about freedom. It means different things to different people, but certainly one does not want to be enslaved by anything, including, their own pursuit of work.
01:14:52 Speaker_00
So there, I think at least two forms of anti-freedom. One would be the type that exists within our head.
01:15:01 Speaker_00
We have to continue on this track because I'm afraid of failure or I'm in pursuit of something and we are actually enslaved in a way that we sort of create for ourselves in the act of pursuit.
01:15:12 Speaker_00
The other is the job where, you know, it's providing resources, we really don't need to be there. And yet people don't hop off the train. You know, they could, they could escape the dreaded boss or the dreaded circumstance.
01:15:28 Speaker_00
You know, I remember a time when all I wanted was a window at work that opened for fresh air. That's all I wanted. And like all these other things, I just wanted a window that opened.
01:15:37 Speaker_00
I even tried to find one of these like little saws, but then the maintenance people or the whatever, the facilities people told me I'd get in trouble. We yearn for freedom, we hate enslavement for all the obvious reasons.
01:15:52 Speaker_00
In your observation, what is the best way to frame this need for freedom? And I have to imagine that people listening are at various points along their careers.
01:16:06 Speaker_00
What have you observed here in yourself and with other people you talk to, wealthy, not wealthy? What is freedom? How do we get real freedom?
01:16:13 Speaker_02
I think there's this anecdote that I love, which was from Franklin Roosevelt when he was a kid. I think he was like five years old. He complained to his mother one day. He said, my entire life is rules and schedules and I hate it.
01:16:24 Speaker_02
So his mom said, okay, Frankie, tomorrow you can do whatever you want. The day is yours, anything you want. And his mom, Sarah Roosevelt, wrote in her diary that night. He said that day that he could do anything, he went back to his normal schedule.
01:16:37 Speaker_02
He did everything on schedule like he was supposed to do, but he was much happier because nobody was telling him to do it. And I think that's what's true for a lot of people. Freedom does not mean you do nothing. It doesn't necessarily mean you retire.
01:16:47 Speaker_02
It doesn't mean you quit working. I want to be free and independent, which means I want to wake up every morning and say, I can do whatever the hell I want today, even if most mornings what I want to do is work.
01:16:57 Speaker_02
and be productive and put myself to use. So I think a lot of people misconstrue freedom as I'm going to ride off into the sunset and do nothing now.
01:17:06 Speaker_02
It's like, no, I think people have an inherent drive to want to be productive and social and do things. But there's a big difference between your boss telling you to do it and doing it on your own terms. When I was a junior in college,
01:17:17 Speaker_02
Like a lot of young men, I wanted to be an investment banker. That's what it looked like, power and prestige. So I got this investment banking internship and I was absolutely miserable. They had this saying that is so funny in hindsight.
01:17:28 Speaker_02
They said, if you don't come to work on Saturday, don't bother coming back on Sunday. Like just the culture of it was work 100 hours a week, just go nuts with it. And I hated it. I hated every single second and I had to leave.
01:17:39 Speaker_02
But it wasn't because I was not into hard work. I think I was absolutely willing to work hard. I just didn't want anyone telling me to do it.
01:17:46 Speaker_02
And so when I became, you know, not necessarily financially independent, but I could have a job, it was more entrepreneurial, it was like, oh, I will work very hard. And sometimes I might work as hard as an investment banker.
01:17:56 Speaker_02
I might work 80 hours a week, but it's on my terms. And I think everyone is way more willing to do that than they are to be told what to do. I think that is an inherent human driver.
01:18:05 Speaker_02
And if you can use your money for independence to where you can wake up and say,
01:18:09 Speaker_02
I have the financial flexibility to work where I want, live where I want, retire when I want, take a different job, move to a different department, even if it's going to pay less.
01:18:18 Speaker_02
That giving yourself independence and autonomy, I think for most people is what's going to drive. That's the highest tool that you can use with money. And what's important about that is where do you get independence with money?
01:18:29 Speaker_02
It's the things you don't spend money on. It's the car you didn't buy. It's the house you didn't buy. And most people will view that as like idle money. You're saving up money. It's just sitting in the bank doing nothing. No, no, no.
01:18:38 Speaker_02
It's giving you independence. And once you view it as like every dollar that you don't spend is money that you are actually spending on independence. It's not idle. It's giving you marginal more independence than you had the day before.
01:18:50 Speaker_02
Then I think, to me, that's why I save money. I'm not saving money because I'm a pessimist. I think it's all going to come collapsing down. I'm saving money because I want to be independent.
01:18:59 Speaker_02
Because that's what I think is going to give me the most fulfillment, the most happiness. And that's where the savings comes from.
01:19:05 Speaker_00
Wow, I think this is a super important concept. How should the person who is, well, let's just say early mid career, who likes what they're doing, but thinks that this is probably not the thing for them. I hear about this all the time.
01:19:22 Speaker_00
Like, it's just like, yeah, like it's good, but it's a ton of work. It's unclear how it's going to turn out, but they feel like they're already on the conveyor belt.
01:19:30 Speaker_00
There's always this question of, do you stay in investment banking another year to make a bunch of money and then you get out so that you then have the freedom to pursue something where you have more freedom?
01:19:40 Speaker_00
You know, people are always playing this kind of mental math. And I don't think there's a clear answer, unless of course, you're lucky enough that like you fall in love with science.
01:19:48 Speaker_00
I mean, I did not become a neuroscientist to make money and Lord knows I didn't. I mean, I made some, I made a living, but I,
01:19:54 Speaker_00
If people heard what I was making as a tenured 45-year-old professor at one of the premier universities in the world, where the salaries are relatively high, they would be shocked. Just shocked that post-tax income is quite low by Bay Area standards.
01:20:08 Speaker_02
But did you feel like you had independence? You can teach what you want, say what you want. There was a level of independence.
01:20:13 Speaker_00
Absolutely. Oh, and I loved it. And I still teach there. it's one of these things where I wouldn't trade it for anything.
01:20:20 Speaker_00
I also, in terms of intellectual stimulation, in terms of being able to look to my left or look to my right and realize that most of the people at Stanford, students included, are just phenomenal.
01:20:31 Speaker_00
Like their level of intellect, their drive, their excitement for what they're doing. I mean, no one ends up there by accident. So that was and remains extremely exciting. But I think a lot of people, unless they find a profession that they really love,
01:20:47 Speaker_00
or there's some feature of that profession that keeps them, you know, looped in in a way that feels satisfying, the people, et cetera. Most people are kind of thinking like, all right, how do I work to make a living?
01:20:59 Speaker_00
And then, you know, like what's the exit ramp? People think a lot about exit ramps and sometimes it's a dollar amount, but also it's the idea that maybe, you know, go work on their real love, which might be like gardening.
01:21:10 Speaker_00
They want to, you hear about these sort of hobby interests, right? I'll go, I'll write poetry or I'll, go with ceramics or something like that, the things that they truly enjoy doing.
01:21:23 Speaker_00
How should people optimize along those musts versus want-tos versus sort of aspirational goals?
01:21:32 Speaker_02
Most people understand inherently the dangers of communism or something. If the government's telling you what to do, when to do it, what to say, that's a bad thing. It's gonna erode society.
01:21:40 Speaker_02
But a lot of those people work at a job where their boss tells them what time to come in, what to wear, what to say, how to act, whatnot. So they really understand it fundamentally at one level, but they're actually doing some version.
01:21:51 Speaker_02
Now, companies have to manage their employees, whatnot. It's not a knock against that. But I think what's really true for independents and people, if they eventually move on,
01:22:00 Speaker_02
to writing poetry and playing in their garden, whatever it might be, is that you leave on your own terms. That whatever your exit from your career was, was because you wanted to do it on your own terms.
01:22:09 Speaker_02
So the thing in psychology called the peak-end rule, where to simplify it, minimalize it, a lot of how you remember any endeavor that you did in life, a career, a vacation, whatever it is, is how you felt at the very end.
01:22:21 Speaker_02
And for a lot of people, if you have a great career, You enjoyed your career, you helped people, you made money, your colleagues appreciated you, but then you got fired, or your boss came to you and said, you're too old to keep doing this. That's bad.
01:22:32 Speaker_02
You'll never recover from that. And you compare that to the people who quit on their own terms. They said, look, I'm proud of my career, but that's enough. I'm going to take a step back and pass the baton to another generation.
01:22:42 Speaker_02
Those are the people who, even if they didn't really enjoy their career that much, will look back at it fondly, because it gets back to freedom and autonomy and control.
01:22:49 Speaker_02
Do you leave on your own terms, or are you forced out on somebody else's schedule?
01:22:53 Speaker_02
And so I think maximum, wherever you go in life, whatever you're doing, even if you're not an entrepreneur, maximizing for independence and autonomy and doing it on your own terms, on your own calendar, is absolutely vital in anything you're doing.
01:23:07 Speaker_02
Most people are not necessarily, particularly as they get older, are not necessarily scared of death. They're scared of a death not on their own terms. that's gonna sneak up on them where they're not gonna have a chance to say goodbye.
01:23:17 Speaker_02
So I think that's a good analogy for a lot of these things. We're not scared of the ultimate outcome. We're scared of not being able to do it on our own terms.
01:23:24 Speaker_00
I once heard Ray Dalio say something along the lines of, you know, the first third of your life is spent trying to learn how to function in the world.
01:23:33 Speaker_00
Then there's a kind of middle third where you are acquiring resources to be able to take care of yourself and people close to you. And then in the final third of your life, you want to,
01:23:43 Speaker_00
take your knowledge, take what you've gleaned in terms of financial and other types of wealth, because of course there are other types of wealth, and put back, you know, for subsequent generations. It's a beautiful model if you think about it.
01:23:54 Speaker_02
I heard it phrased as, when you get older, you either become an elder or elderly. You get to choose which one. Do you want to be an elder and help other people or elderly? You're just going to disintegrate over time. You got to choose which one.
01:24:06 Speaker_00
Nowadays, we have both the benefit and the problem of people living longer and maintaining vigor longer and therefore working longer. This is certainly true in academia. People don't like to retire. They really do not like to retire.
01:24:21 Speaker_00
And I don't think it's just so they can make more money. I think it's so they can stay intellectually active.
01:24:27 Speaker_00
People get into science typically because they like learning or academics generally, they have a campus office where they go to and it makes them feel socially connected. So you can understand all the reasons why these people in their late 60s,
01:24:40 Speaker_00
70s and even 80s, sometimes even 90s, continue to go to work. It's rare for these older generations of people that stay in various professions to continue to glean resources, but it happens. I mean, how old is Buffett? 93, maybe, yeah.
01:24:57 Speaker_00
He's still investing? Yeah, oh yeah, full-time. Okay. And presumably he's going to use that money for what, either philanthropy or generational wealth within his family. Is that the plan?
01:25:05 Speaker_02
He's already given away, I think about a hundred billion. And the plan is to give away the vast majority.
01:25:10 Speaker_02
I think he announced recently that he was going to leave each of his kids a billion dollars for philanthropy, not for their personal use, but for philanthropy and the rest is all given away.
01:25:18 Speaker_00
Oh yeah. The children of the ultra rich that inherit all their wealth. I don't know what the numbers are there. I know a great number of them squander it.
01:25:28 Speaker_00
But I also know a few examples of some that really make good on those incredible assets that they inherited and are very thoughtful, hardworking people. It does happen.
01:25:40 Speaker_02
There are a couple of families. I think of all the big robber baron families of 150 years ago, the Rockefellers probably did it the best. The Rockefellers still have a lot of wealth. The Vanderbilts by far did it the worst.
01:25:49 Speaker_02
They just squandered it in a couple generations. And this is fairly well known now, but it's pretty interesting.
01:25:54 Speaker_02
The first Vanderbilt heir who did not get a trust fund for whom all the money was dried up, the first person who didn't get any money was Anderson Cooper. of CNN. His mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, was the last Vanderbilt who got a big trust fund.
01:26:09 Speaker_02
And Cooper, I think not coincidentally, is the most successful and probably the happiest Vanderbilt heir in 150 years. And he's talked about this. He was like, I was the first person in my family who had to make a name for himself.
01:26:21 Speaker_02
The fact that his last name's not Vanderbilt, it's Cooper, and he didn't get any money. He was like, I had to go out and find my own way and find my own identity. Whereas all of his ancestors, their identity was you're rich from birth.
01:26:33 Speaker_02
That's your identity. You don't need to go out and make a name for yourself. You don't need to work hard. You don't need to create anything. All you need to do is sit here and spend your money. And it made them miserable.
01:26:42 Speaker_02
And Cooper was the first person, look, this is very anecdotal. I'm not saying this is how it's gonna work for everyone.
01:26:47 Speaker_02
But the first person who had to make a name for himself and work for himself was the one who was the most successful and probably the happiest.
01:26:55 Speaker_00
Super important concept. Again, incredibly important, I think, because people often will think that they, because they were born into families that didn't have a lot of money, that somehow they were given the short end of the stick.
01:27:09 Speaker_00
And in some sense they were, right? I mean, it's one thing to grow up in a world with assets and another world where you don't have assets. But we don't often hear about the downside.
01:27:19 Speaker_02
It's hard to have sympathy for a Vanderbilt heir who inherited $400 million on their 18th birthday. They're gonna have a lot of sympathy for that, right?
01:27:25 Speaker_00
Well, there's show succession, right? It's all about the horrible interpersonal dynamics of people that have a lot of wealth because it's never enough and they self-destruct essentially.
01:27:35 Speaker_02
I think the situation is you don't have sympathy for them, but you should also realize that if you were in their shoes, you would probably self-destruct as well. It's very difficult to do.
01:27:43 Speaker_02
Once in a while, you see someone who is completely motivated irrespective of money. You know, Mark Zuckerberg was offered a billion dollars cash for Facebook when I think he was 22. And he said, no, I don't want it. I'm going to keep going.
01:27:54 Speaker_02
That's a ridiculously rare personality. And I think, you know, most people, if I inherited a billion dollars on my 18th birthday, I probably would have no motivation. But if Elon Musk did, wouldn't slow them down whatsoever.
01:28:07 Speaker_02
Jeff Bezos did, Mark Zuckerberg did. Those are very rare people who have a motivation that is so detached from money.
01:28:13 Speaker_00
I wonder if it's the excesses of wealth that destroy people, or if it's the fact that the excesses take them away from the pursuit of what delivered the wealth in the first place.
01:28:26 Speaker_02
For a lot of those people, it's the pursuit of solving the problem that's doing it. And I have a good friend, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, who phrased it this way.
01:28:33 Speaker_02
I'm going to paraphrase him, but he said, if you had to describe the mindset of those very successful entrepreneurs, It's not driven, it's not motivated, it's tortured. That they wake up every morning tortured by the problems that they're not fixing.
01:28:47 Speaker_02
And the opportunities that they have not yet found. And there's a famous Elon Musk interview. I think it was on Lex Friedman, where he was like, you think you wanna be me, the richest man in the world, but you don't.
01:28:58 Speaker_02
And he was like, it's a storm up here. It's a mess up here. I think that's true for a lot of people. My friend, David Center has a great podcast.
01:29:05 Speaker_00
I love such a good guy.
01:29:06 Speaker_02
He's one of the best guys in the world I've ever met. But he says of all the 350 founders that he's profiled, only one of them has he actually said, I would want that guy's life. It was Ed Thorpe. But put that aside.
01:29:20 Speaker_02
Of the other 349, I think you read their biography and you can say, I'm so glad that they existed. By most of the time, they did a lot of good in the world. They created products that make us better off.
01:29:31 Speaker_02
And never in a million years would I want his life. It seems miserable.
01:29:35 Speaker_02
Because most of the time, the simple answer is their financial and career success came, the reason they're so successful is because they devoted every waking second of their entire life to this one problem, this one endeavor.
01:29:46 Speaker_02
And that came at the expense of their family life, of their health, of their mental health, their physical health. And if you get a full view of there, it's easy to look at Musk and say, oh, richest man in the world. Wouldn't that be fun?
01:29:57 Speaker_02
Yeah, but it came because he's had this life of a singular devotion to, well, in his case, two or three different companies. And I think if you take that full picture, it's less glamorous than it would seem. And it's too tempting in life to
01:30:12 Speaker_02
have envy of someone and say, oh, well, I want their money, and I want their career, and their relationship, or their humor. You're picking little bits and pieces from their life, but it's not how it works. You've got to take the full package.
01:30:25 Speaker_02
And when you look at the full package of those people who you might envy, if you actually take a complete view of their life, maybe some of them you would say, no, that is a great life, like Ed Thorp.
01:30:34 Speaker_02
But I think for a lot of them, if you got the full view, you would look at it and say, oh, that's actually a lot different than I thought.
01:30:39 Speaker_02
I frame this one way, if you look at, this is flagrantly anecdotal, but among the 10 richest men in the world, there are a cumulative 15 divorces among them.
01:30:48 Speaker_02
So it's very easy, particularly for young people to say, oh, that's like, I'm jealous of that person. I envy that person. I want to be that person.
01:30:54 Speaker_02
But I think for a lot of them, if you actually got a full view of their life, it's not nearly as good as you would think.
01:31:00 Speaker_00
I think people like Elon Musk, people like Mark Zuckerberg, they represent these incredibly extreme examples that obviously most people can't even, including me, can't fathom what a day in their life must be like. Matt Zuck, he was on this podcast.
01:31:22 Speaker_00
it seems that he really enjoys doing what he's doing. But I think for me, and for most people, it's just like, so far out of the stratosphere of understanding is similar to the amount of wealth that they've acquired.
01:31:34 Speaker_00
It just sort of like, what do you even do with all of that? And people go, well, I'd figure it out. Yeah, I'm sure you would. But you know, it's just, it's so astronomically outside the scale of one's normal
01:31:44 Speaker_00
kind of dopamine reward schedules that it's hard to imagine. And what are you going to do, buy a plane as big as a state? But there's a place in between struggling to quote, unquote, make it and being at that extreme. where people hit that sweet spot.
01:32:02 Speaker_00
And I think a lot of your work is really aimed at at least shining light on the possibility of a sweet spot, where you're doing something that you find meaningful, making sufficient income, that your anxiety is buffered.
01:32:17 Speaker_00
You have meaningful relationships in and out of work and you've essentially built a quote-unquote good life, right?
01:32:24 Speaker_00
I mean, I think, I heard Naval say something recently where he said, you know, you want resources along the dimensions I just mentioned, a healthy fit body. a calm mind and a home full of love. I think it's pretty awesome list right there.
01:32:41 Speaker_00
And it's a lot of work though, right? Just to check off even one of those four boxes, a lot of work, right?
01:32:48 Speaker_02
I think because money is so tangible, the counting it is so easy and so tangible that even if people know that, they're going to put an inordinate amount of effort towards making more money.
01:32:57 Speaker_02
at the expense of their relationships, their health, their children, their friends, their family. And it comes at the expense. Because if I were to say, you know, how do I increase my income by 10%? And it's like, I can wrap my head around that.
01:33:08 Speaker_02
I can give you a number of what that would be and how I might be able to do it. But if I said, how do I get my kids to love me 10% more? Like, ah, I have no idea how to measure that or how to even pursue it.
01:33:16 Speaker_02
So even if I want that, because it's hard, it's not tangible, it's much easier to ignore and just pursue the thing that you can count, which is money.
01:33:25 Speaker_00
Do you have a dog? I do, golden retriever. I was going to say, you want them to love you 10% more than get them a puppy, but it sounds like you already did that. I'm just, I'm only half kidding.
01:33:34 Speaker_00
I always say that, you know, dogs are not only unconditional love, but they have the ability to give on it. on a daily basis, multiple times per day in a way that, I mean, they give love as readily as they receive love.
01:33:49 Speaker_00
It's just like this perfect reciprocal loop.
01:33:51 Speaker_02
And they're constantly in the moment. They're just living right there. There's this great cartoon. A lot of people have probably seen it. It's a guy and a dog sitting on a lake.
01:34:00 Speaker_02
And the guy's thought bubble coming out of his head is he's thinking about money. He's thinking about work. He's thinking about stocks. The dog's thought bubble is a picture of them sitting on the lake.
01:34:08 Speaker_02
They're just, the dog's just right in the moment, just enjoying what he's doing right there. I think that's like, that's my jealousy of my dog when I look at her. 24 hours a day, everyone will, as a dog will recognize this. They're just in the moment.
01:34:19 Speaker_02
They just enjoy what they're doing, whatever they're doing. And everyone, including me, is either worrying, thinking about the past or dreaming about the future.
01:34:27 Speaker_00
I love that. What's your dog's name, if I may? Lucy. Golden Retrievers are an amazing breed because they also are universally loving. They love the person that,
01:34:37 Speaker_00
you know, their owner the most, but they also love people that stop and meet them on the street. Not all dogs are like that.
01:34:43 Speaker_02
Not every- The worst guard dogs in the world. You can break into your house, the golden retriever will just come up and wag its tail and lick you.
01:34:48 Speaker_00
I love it. Let's talk about this social comparison thing. I'm trying to make this practical for people that are both partnered and not partnered. Seems to me that a lot of,
01:35:04 Speaker_00
what I've observed in terms of people who are on the conveyor belt, work, work, work, work, work, have a picture in their mind of kind of where that's all going, when enough is enough, and when they plan to hop off or stay on or how late to stay, in large part based on, yeah, their upbringing, yeah, kind of who they are, but also the messages that they're getting from typically,
01:35:29 Speaker_00
the one other person that has the greatest degree of input, right? Like you could create a picture where the spouse in either direction is saying like, we need more, right? That changes the picture completely.
01:35:42 Speaker_00
Where the spouse just says like, I would just like to see you more. I don't need any more stuff. I just want to see you more. We want to see you more.
01:35:50 Speaker_00
These are the sorts of at-home dynamics that I think drive a lot of decisions about career, not just what careers to pursue, but how long to stay in, whether or not you try and make partner in a firm, whether or not your social media account needs X number more followers or not.
01:36:06 Speaker_00
I think to me, this is as important as the social comparison of your peers at work or online. The messages that we receive by the people closest to us about what to be afraid of, what the needs are.
01:36:20 Speaker_00
And I don't know that people have really parsed how to, you know, how to resolve all that. But I'm guessing you probably have some thoughts about this.
01:36:28 Speaker_02
Well, I think it's the balance between it is so difficult because for a lot of people who have families and are working very hard at the core, if you said, why are you working so hard? Well, to make more money. Why do you want more money?
01:36:38 Speaker_02
To take care of my family. Like it's for very good intentions, but it's coming at the expense of time with your family and whatnot. So a lot of things, it's not that you're making a terrible decision. You're doing what you think is right.
01:36:48 Speaker_02
And then if you said, well, how much is enough to take care of your family? By and large, it's a game of comparison. The way that people lived 100 years ago, what is a good life 100 years ago is a completely inadequate life today.
01:36:59 Speaker_02
Not even 100 years ago, you go back to our parents' generation and say in the 1950s. There is a nostalgia for the 1950s of, oh, life was so good then and so great, and the white picket fence, and the dog, and the stay-at-home mom.
01:37:10 Speaker_02
It was a good picture. But what was the definition of a good life back then? A good middle class life was an 800 square foot house with one bathroom for four people.
01:37:21 Speaker_02
and camping for your annual vacation, you would describe a life that most people would say that's inadequate today. That's not my definition of a good life today. So that is shifting all the time.
01:37:30 Speaker_02
And therefore you're saying like, well, how much money do you need to be happy? The truth is I need more money than the next family, than the next person. It's this continuous chain. And I think a lot of that is just evolution.
01:37:41 Speaker_02
It's a competition for resources and it doesn't matter how much money you have. What matters is that you have more money than the next person. That's the sad truth for a lot of this.
01:37:50 Speaker_02
And therefore, you can easily imagine a world in which my grandkids are earning, on average, way more money than we are today, and have way better resources, better health, better technologies, and they're no happier for it.
01:38:01 Speaker_02
And they don't feel any more relieved for it. They don't feel like they can scale back and work less for it, because they're going to be competing with other people that have all those things.
01:38:09 Speaker_02
John Maynard Keynes, a great economist, very famously predicted a world where people would be working 20 hours a week because technology was going to make it so we didn't need to work, and that's not how it works whatsoever.
01:38:19 Speaker_02
We are working less than we did back when everybody was a farmer, but not nearly as little as we could be if we still had the expectations of a 1950s family living in an 800-square-foot house.
01:38:31 Speaker_02
If we had those expectations, people could be working way less, but it's all a competition between other people.
01:38:37 Speaker_02
So even if 100 years from now, a middle class family is living in a 5,000 square foot house with a spaceship in their backyard, if that becomes the norm, you don't appreciate it, any of it.
01:38:46 Speaker_02
I mean, if you took someone 100 years ago, if you took John Rockefeller, the richest man in the world 100 years ago, and brought him to today and showed him a middle class family in America, he would say, what is this thing, Advil?
01:38:58 Speaker_02
You take a pill that makes your headache go away? You have sunscreen, you just rub this on your face, you don't get sunburn, his jaw would be on the floor. But nobody appreciates that today like he would because it's just commonplace.
01:39:10 Speaker_02
Your definition of a good life is, I expect to have that. So it's always going to be the case that The reason we're working hard is to take care of our family and what we feel like is an adequate amount is a growing level over time.
01:39:22 Speaker_02
I should also say that that is by and large a great thing. The reason society progresses is because most people wake up in the morning feeling a little bit inadequate. Whatever I have today is not enough and I need to go work harder to get more.
01:39:33 Speaker_02
That's why we have good technology and economic growth over time. So at the macro level, it's a great thing. That's what pushes society forward and better medical technologies, but all better technologies.
01:39:43 Speaker_02
But the individual level, it creates this hamster wheel of a constant feeling of inadequacy that we try to compensate for by working harder and working harder, even when it comes at the expense of things that should be more dear to us, like our friends and family and health.
01:39:57 Speaker_00
And with social media, we now have access to millions if not billions of comparison points. Whereas just 30 years ago, even 20 years ago, we only had access to local comparison points. Like the people in your neighborhood drove certain types of cars.
01:40:13 Speaker_00
And now online, you can see people that you went to high school with that have certain lives and their vacations that are spectacular relative to the ones that one typically has.
01:40:23 Speaker_00
I'd like to talk about this notion of social comparison as a function of place. We can touch on some major cities. We were doing this before we started recording.
01:40:31 Speaker_00
It's kind of fun to do, like in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley area where I grew up, it seems like there's a high value placed on the people who managed to do things that wick out to the entire world, the building of companies or technologies that go everywhere.
01:40:51 Speaker_00
And it's not just because of Facebook and Instagram, Also because of biotech, it's because of all sorts of things. Apple, right? I mean, there's a whole history of that. What would you say for like New York City?
01:41:04 Speaker_00
What is the dominant message that's being pumped into the psyche of New Yorkers?
01:41:10 Speaker_00
And by the way, I love New York City, but it'd be fun to play this game a little bit as an example, and then we'll then wick it out to people regardless of where they live in the world.
01:41:18 Speaker_02
This is one of those things where what is so good and beneficial for society is what makes individuals miserable.
01:41:24 Speaker_02
So I think what is the message here in Los Angeles or in New York or any other big city, San Francisco, the message is waking up in the morning and feeling inadequate.
01:41:33 Speaker_02
because you are surrounded by people who at least look like they're doing better than you. And you say, I have to chase that person. I have to get what they have. That is great for society.
01:41:40 Speaker_02
That's where we get new technologies, new innovations, and growth. At the individual level, it's very difficult. I grew up out in the woods in Lake Tahoe. And in that region, if you are a dentist, let's say, you are on top of the world.
01:41:52 Speaker_02
You are the richest guy in town. Everybody looked up to you. You had the nicest house, the nicest car. If you are a family dentist here in Los Angeles, You don't stick out whatsoever.
01:42:01 Speaker_02
You might feel like you are so far behind because you're surrounded by legitimate billionaires. And so I think it's interesting to ask, is a dentist happier in Lake Tahoe or here?
01:42:10 Speaker_02
I think it's probably in Lake Tahoe because your comparison group is so much less, especially back in the pre-social media days. The states that are statistically the happiest in the United States
01:42:20 Speaker_02
It's not, for cities, it's not Los Angeles, it's not New York. It tends to be in the Midwest, where wonderful places, whatnot, but less competitive than the grind of the big cities. But that's where, at the individual, where are you happiest?
01:42:33 Speaker_02
It's where you have less comparison. But for society, what is better? It's when you have huge competition for getting ahead. So I don't know where I come down on that of like where I would want to be.
01:42:44 Speaker_02
Of course, I want to be happy as an individual, but I want to live in a society that is moving ahead. And the reason it's moving ahead is because most people wake up feeling inadequate.
01:42:53 Speaker_00
You grew up in Tahoe? Yeah. I love Lake Tahoe, but can I ask you, did you grow up being competitive or thinking about how well people skied or snowboarded?
01:43:03 Speaker_02
Yes, absolutely. It was also, I lived in Tahoe pre-tech money. It's very different now because so much Bay Area tech money just flooded into it. It's its own little Hamptons now.
01:43:12 Speaker_02
But back in the day, I felt like when I grew up, normal people drove old pickup trucks and rich people drove new pickup trucks. That was the difference between rich and poor.
01:43:22 Speaker_02
And both in a city like Los Angeles and New York, and in a social media world especially, it's normal people drive Honda Civics and rich people have private jets. The stratification between them is just blown so far out of proportion.
01:43:35 Speaker_02
I see this with my nine-year-old son, who, like a lot of kids, watches Mr. Beast, who I think is great. I think he's an awesome, awesome guy. But it's completely warped my son's sense of money.
01:43:44 Speaker_02
Because Mr. Beast will be like, oh, keep your hand on the table, and the last person with their hand wins a million dollars. It's like, if that's your sense of money, it's completely warped and skewed. And so, look, it's a tough way to live.
01:43:58 Speaker_02
And I think the more of that angst that people have of, I'm inadequate, I need to get ahead, the better society is going to be, the more technology we're going to have. Great example of this is, what decades were the most technologically innovative?
01:44:12 Speaker_02
By far. It's not even close. It was the 1930s, the Great Depression, and the 1940s, World War II, when society was on fire.
01:44:20 Speaker_02
That's when every business, every scientist, every entrepreneur woke up every morning and said, I need to figure this out right now, today, immediately.
01:44:27 Speaker_02
During the Great Depression, if you were a business owner, it was, if I don't figure out a way to become more efficient, I'm bankrupt tomorrow. So that was the birth of a lot of the assembly lines.
01:44:35 Speaker_02
It was the birth of the grocery store, the birth of the laundromat. Every business got more better at what they do. And the ones that didn't went out of business immediately.
01:44:45 Speaker_02
World War II was, if we don't figure out new technologies, we're going to lose everything. Hitler's going to control the planet. So that was nuclear energy, radar, jets.
01:44:56 Speaker_02
Go on down the list of things that we benefit from today happened because of that social angst that we had back then.
01:45:02 Speaker_02
And so I think there's so much evidence that society progresses when things are a little bit on fire, not too much on fire, because then you just get overwhelmed with it. But if you have a little bit of angst of, I need to wake up, I need to do this.
01:45:14 Speaker_02
And when societies become fat and happy and decadent, or when companies do this, companies that just are minting money, and there's no pressure on it, they have more money than they know what to do with. That's the downfall of a lot of companies.
01:45:25 Speaker_02
Sears, IBM, Intel, Boeing, who are either not around or are shells of their former selves. I think you can tie a lot of that to the success that they had in the past when there was no pressure to innovate and get ahead.
01:45:37 Speaker_02
It was just a culture of, we have so much lying around here that we can do anything that we want. I had a guy tell me one time, he said, every business should have a little bit of debt.
01:45:46 Speaker_02
because it keeps you in check, keeps your ambitions in line of waking up and being like, no, I have to succeed this year because we have debt to pay off.
01:45:53 Speaker_02
And when you have too much freedom and a little bit too much autonomy, you have a higher chance of just letting it slip away. What made you great when you were young and poor and broke and hungry slips away when the wealthier you become.
01:46:07 Speaker_00
Tell me what you think of this mental exercise.
01:46:10 Speaker_00
As you're describing this to me, I'm thinking about how at different stages of my career, first academic science, and I still teach, but I shut down my animal lab, still involved in some human research, but mainly focused on the podcast these days.
01:46:25 Speaker_00
I can look to different things around me that were the forces pulling on me. I like to think in terms of carrot and stick.
01:46:34 Speaker_00
you know, for those that don't know what that is, because we have a lot of listeners from outside the US, carrot, you know, carrot is the thing you're working towards, the enticing thing, the reward, stick is the punishment, carrot and stick, because frankly, that's how the brain works, carrot and stick, right?
01:46:48 Speaker_00
And a lot of what we're talking about today is carrot and sticks of different sizes, different types, et cetera. For every stage of my career, graduate student, postdoc, professor before tenure, professor after getting tenure.
01:47:03 Speaker_00
It's kind of interesting concept. People think of it as job for life, but it's really academic freedom. And you're still on the fundraising treadmill.
01:47:09 Speaker_00
Or even as a podcaster, you know, like what the force was inside me and not trying to make this about me. I just can, I know that there are different people that I'm trying to satisfy.
01:47:21 Speaker_00
and of course satisfy my own curiosity and intellect, but there are forces. There's the, I'm part of a group. I'm part of a team here. I can't let them down. So it doesn't matter how well I slept last night.
01:47:31 Speaker_00
I happened to sleep pretty well last night, but it doesn't matter. I got to show up. I got to suit up and show up as they say. Do you think it's worthwhile for people to stop wherever they are in their life arc?
01:47:43 Speaker_00
And just think about like, where are these forces pulling us, the carrots and the sticks? Because I think therein lies a lot of information. Are you working for... an expectation that you need to fulfill because you did it before.
01:47:58 Speaker_00
I sometimes think about professional athletes. They sometimes have a shorter professional life than in other careers because just physical capabilities give way. But what drives them, I often want to know what pulls them. Where do they feel obligated?
01:48:14 Speaker_00
where, you know, not just, you know, what the drive is, but where do they feel obligated? Where do they feel like kind of pulled? Is it to the general public? Is it their parents? Is it their bank account?
01:48:23 Speaker_00
Is it the fear that they're going to have to retire at some point? Do you ever think about this kind of stuff?
01:48:27 Speaker_02
I think a lot of it is tied to your identity of just who do you see in the mirror when you wake up every morning? And if your identity is I'm a professional athlete, if your identity is I'm a podcaster,
01:48:36 Speaker_02
I am a rich person, whatever it might be, then that's what's pulling you. It's that source of your identity. So this gets back to the Paul Graham idea of keep your identity small. I think he meant it mainly in the context of politics.
01:48:48 Speaker_02
Politics can just poison your identity and it really affects your thinking. But keeping your identity small for a lot of things I think is a great point of view. The more you look in the mirror and say, I am a blank, doesn't matter what that is.
01:48:59 Speaker_02
I'm a professor, I'm an author, whatever it is. It's hard to give that up because it's part of your identity. I saw this with my own dad who was, he was a doctor and he retired and he went back to work a year later.
01:49:10 Speaker_02
Because I think at least part of it was when he looked in the mirror, he had to say, I am a doctor. That was his identity. And when he retired, he couldn't say that anymore and it drove him crazy. I think that's true for a lot of people.
01:49:20 Speaker_02
Now that can be great. For him, it was great. And I think for me, my identity, I think my core identity is I'm a father, I'm a husband, I hope to be a friend. But then maybe it's, I'm an author. And if I had to give that up, it might sting a little bit.
01:49:33 Speaker_02
It's not maybe the core of my identity, but it's right there. And I think for a lot of people, if you're successful, core to their identity is, I'm a person who makes a lot of money. I'm a person who makes X dollars per year.
01:49:43 Speaker_02
And they're unable to give that up. And that's, again, I think if we're talking about money, that's when money becomes a liability, is when it's ingrained in your identity. and it's controlling you. You're not using it as a tool.
01:49:53 Speaker_02
It's using you as its little marionette doll to control you every day. And I think that's when a lot of people go astray with their happiness with money is when it starts controlling them because it's so core to who they see in the mirror every day.
01:50:06 Speaker_00
Yeah, that's like that cartoon of the person standing with a little cage in front of their face. Like they're giving up freedom by virtue of some mental construct. I wonder if perhaps even
01:50:18 Speaker_00
better than Paul's idea of shrinking one's identity to make it operational and make it verb based.
01:50:25 Speaker_00
Because it's one thing to say, I'm going to not use my professional title of podcaster, professor, author, doctor, but if one gets to the verb function that drove the pursuit of things in the first place. I enjoy doing this. I'm a curious person.
01:50:41 Speaker_00
I seem to mention them all the time and I'm just going to do it because it's my podcast. Rick Rubin's a close friend and I feel so lucky for that friendship. Of course, I love the music he's produced, but that's not why I love the friendship.
01:50:55 Speaker_00
I happen to just really think Rick's a great guy, but because he's so verb and action-based, it's about almost everything Rick talks about in terms of creativity and productivity is about discarding with titles and concepts of who you were before and just being in the verb state of wherever you happen to be at that point in your life and creating offerings.
01:51:14 Speaker_00
And he actually likes to remove the concept of an audience
01:51:18 Speaker_00
he actually talks about this is your offering to God and the audience may or may not like it, but that in his words is the way to frame it because otherwise you end up trying to satisfy people.
01:51:30 Speaker_00
And then you're no longer in the process of exploring your curiosity or creativity. So yeah, I've decided at this moment and I'll put it on record that I'm not going to think of myself as a podcaster. I mean, I did a lot of things.
01:51:43 Speaker_00
and pursued skateboarding, pursued tropical fish tanks, pursued science and research sciences, teaching, which, and then this public education and podcasting.
01:51:54 Speaker_00
I fully expect that in five to 10 years, I'll be doing something completely different, but it'll still be attached to the verb state that drove every single one of those professions. or every single one of those pursuits.
01:52:05 Speaker_00
Because as Rick's taught me, it's the energy that you need to continue to tap into that is self-rewarding, the feelings of delight, of friction, and then release when you solve a problem.
01:52:16 Speaker_00
It's not really about the profession or the title or even the resources that come from that.
01:52:21 Speaker_00
but that in fact the greatest resources in particular financial resources coming from identifying the verb state of being in pursuit of something that's truly unique to you. And that changes over time.
01:52:33 Speaker_00
I'm always amazed at these examples like the Warren Buffett's and these people have been investing their whole life.
01:52:38 Speaker_00
You pointed this out in your book that one of the fundamental things about Buffett being so successful is that he's had a lot of time investing I've been doing it since he was 11 and he's 93. Right, it doesn't seem like he needs another venue.
01:52:51 Speaker_00
It seems like he's got it dialed. That's his venue. If he were a golfer, he'd be golfing at 93.
01:52:56 Speaker_02
Yeah, he's doing it because he loves to do it. I think it's true for me as a writer, what's always been the case. I wonder if this, I don't think this might, might really apply to your own career.
01:53:06 Speaker_02
I've always written for an audience of one, which is myself. I just want to write things that I think are interesting. I want to write stories that I find appealing. I want to write it in a style that I would enjoy reading.
01:53:16 Speaker_02
And I don't care that much about the audience who might read it. Of course, I want them to read it and maybe buy the books and enjoy it, but I'm writing for myself.
01:53:24 Speaker_02
And I think you always do your best work when you do that, if you're writing or producing a podcast for an audience of one, which is you. And so I think if you're doing it otherwise, it's performative.
01:53:34 Speaker_02
And people do much worse work, they're much less creative, they're much less enjoyable when it's performative. When you start off by asking, what does the audience want to hear or see? Yeah, that never works. But that's what most people do.
01:53:45 Speaker_02
And even what does every writing 101 teacher teach their students? Know your audience. I don't think it's good advice because know your audience very quickly becomes pander to your audience.
01:53:54 Speaker_02
not just as writers, but in any form of work that you do, pandering to your boss, pandering to your quarterly metrics, whatever that might be.
01:54:00 Speaker_02
You're always going to do your best work if you have the independence and the autonomy to have an audience of one, which is yourself. Brian Chesky of Airbnb talks about this.
01:54:08 Speaker_02
He's like, don't build a product that a thousand people like, build a product that a hundred people love or that one person you love and use it. That's when you're going to do always do your best work.
01:54:17 Speaker_02
You're not trying to manage a product or a book or a podcast towards some metric or goal. You're doing it because you love doing it.
01:54:24 Speaker_02
Much easier said than done for a lot of careers, because if you're working for a company, you do have metrics you have to follow. You do have formulas and policies you have to follow.
01:54:31 Speaker_02
So it's not that everyone can do this, but it's unavoidable that you're always going to do your best work when it's yours and you're doing it for yourself, not because you're trying to reach some metric.
01:54:40 Speaker_00
I guess the phrase, you know, be a lifer, I used to think that meant if you were a musician, stay a musician. If you're in finance, stay in finance. But I think now I'm going to revise that to one wants to be a lifer
01:54:53 Speaker_00
at tapping into the energy of pursuing things that are really meaningful to them in that moment, in that phase of life, because it's so different.
01:55:02 Speaker_00
I mean, when I was a kid, I was obsessed with fish tanks and tropical birds and then skateboarding, punk rock music, and it changed. I mean, the venue changed, but we don't really change in terms of identity very much, right?
01:55:13 Speaker_00
These professions and these bank accounts, and we don't actually, we're not fundamentally changed by them. It's really a bunch of verb states that drive all this.
01:55:24 Speaker_02
And I actually hope that in 20 years, I'm doing something different, that I'm not writing about the same topic. So maybe I hope I'm still writing and thinking and reading and learning.
01:55:32 Speaker_02
But if you're always doing the same thing, I think someone like Buffett is an incredibly oddball, rare bird who's been doing the same thing for 80 years and loves it. I want to grow and adapt and evolve in what I'm doing.
01:55:42 Speaker_02
But if something becomes core to your identity, then it's hard to release that and let go. You feel like you have to keep doing it, even when it's not that fun anymore. And you're not getting the dopamine rush of trying something new.
01:55:53 Speaker_02
You're attached to something. You keep being a lawyer, whatever it might be, because that's your identity, even when you don't like it anymore.
01:56:00 Speaker_00
Think about Michael Jordan playing baseball, which he did for a little while. He wanted to play professional baseball. So he gave himself the shot. I think it's awesome, even though it didn't turn out as well as basketball turned out for him.
01:56:12 Speaker_00
Because it just reflected his inherently competitive nature. you know, high-performance nature.
01:56:17 Speaker_02
I had to keep doing something, or Bezos, so I keep bringing up, but you build the biggest, most successful company in the world, Amazon, what do you do in your retirement? You start a rocket company kind of thing.
01:56:27 Speaker_02
It's like, maybe he did, I don't know this, I don't want to put words in his mouth, maybe he did get a little bit bored with Amazon.
01:56:33 Speaker_02
And it was, he needed to do something else, but he's not going to retire, he's not going to play golf, he's not going to sit on his boat, he's going to go build another company. You always have to be doing something, even if it's growing and adapting.
01:56:43 Speaker_00
You're working on a new book and I eagerly anticipate the release of that new book. When's it coming out? September, 2025. Okay, so we got a little while to wait. Yeah.
01:56:54 Speaker_00
Are you willing to share a few things that you're thinking about or that we might expect to see in that book?
01:57:01 Speaker_02
Yeah, I think there are pieces of the book that you and I have talked about today. The book is called The Art of Spending Money. And I make a point of the book is not called The Science of Spending Money because spending money is not a science.
01:57:11 Speaker_02
It's not something where you can say, here's the formula that works for everybody. It's an art. And what is an art? It is different for everybody. It's subjective. It's often contradictory.
01:57:20 Speaker_02
And I think that's what an appropriate way to spend money should be. So at no point in the book do I say, here's how you should spend your money, because I don't think anybody can accurately do that for a broad audience.
01:57:30 Speaker_02
It's a look at the psychology of envy, of keeping up with the Joneses, of social aspiration, of identity that we've been talking about, managing money and kids, being jealous of other people, of wanting to get attention for yourself.
01:57:44 Speaker_02
It's a look at the psychology of that without offering any firm, concrete advice, which I would say a lot of people don't like that. A lot of people are like, well, just tell me what to do.
01:57:52 Speaker_02
But I try to make a point in the beginning, same with my first book, Psychology of Money, of I can't tell you what to do because I don't know you. And what's right for you is going to be maybe not right for me.
01:58:01 Speaker_02
You have to figure it out for yourself, but I can tell you what's probably going through your head as you're going on that journey. I can tell you about the psychological pitfalls and challenges and advice that is psychological.
01:58:12 Speaker_02
It's not what you should do, but here's how most people and why most people fall for envy and why if you understand the mechanics of envy, how silly it can be. That's what the book dives into.
01:58:24 Speaker_00
in a lot of ways, what sounds like you're describing is kind of identifying the sources of self-seduction where we, by virtue of social media or just by virtue of being human, we compare what we have to see if it really is what it is.
01:58:43 Speaker_00
You would think that
01:58:45 Speaker_00
we would be pretty good as a species at just experiencing things kind of like the dog sitting next to the lake, given that we can understand that we have this propensity to, you know, compare and to regret things of past, but not be able to anticipate future regret.
01:58:59 Speaker_00
You'd think we would be better at that, but clearly we're not.
01:59:02 Speaker_02
Well, I guess this gets back to basic evolution. Evolution doesn't care if you're happy. It cares that you reproduce and you grow over time. That's what it's maximizing for. It doesn't really care whether you're having a good time during the process.
01:59:12 Speaker_00
Make more of yourself and take care of the young and then you're dispensable. Keep going.
01:59:15 Speaker_02
Louis C.K. says more of me. That's what we're trying to do. And whether you're happy or not doesn't really play into the situation and actually might reward the person who is
01:59:24 Speaker_02
gaining a ton of resources, even if they're miserable in the process, who's making a ton of money in the process, even if they wake up miserable every morning, they're getting a lot of resources that might increase their fitness over time.
01:59:34 Speaker_02
Happiness doesn't play much of a role.
01:59:36 Speaker_00
Do you think birth rates are going down because people feel that they have to use more of what they earn for themselves or that it's harder to establish a relationship to money and resources that makes them feel capable of taking care of others?
01:59:53 Speaker_02
I think it's so complex.
01:59:55 Speaker_02
It doesn't lead to simple answers but I think there is a lot of evidence that what happens, why societies all over the world, this has always been the case, have fewer kids when they become wealthier is because their expectations for those kids go up.
02:00:06 Speaker_02
So if you're living in a poor society, poor economy, or during a poor era, you could have 10 kids because you knew all 10 of those kids, or at least the ones who survived, were going to become farmers. That's what they were going to do.
02:00:17 Speaker_02
And that was their only hope. That was all they could do. And you didn't need to provide a lot of resources for them. If I give them basic food and shelter and clothes, that's all they need to become a farmer.
02:00:26 Speaker_02
And I think if you fast forward to today's economy, the expectations are so much higher. You want your kid to become a PhD, to become an astronaut, become a hedge fund, whatever it might be.
02:00:35 Speaker_02
And there, because of that, you need to provide so much more resources for that kid.
02:00:39 Speaker_02
I need to foster their growth and development from the time that they are infants and provide them tutors and after-school activities and maybe send them to private school and definitely send them to a college, which is going to cost a fortune.
02:00:51 Speaker_02
Because the expectations for what you need to provide are so much higher,
02:00:55 Speaker_02
you feel like you can only provide that to maybe one, maybe two kids, which would have been, a couple generations ago, three or four kids, and a couple generations before that, ten kids.
02:01:04 Speaker_02
There's also a very grim statistic about it used to be, why do people used to have ten kids? Because six of them died before they were five.
02:01:10 Speaker_02
And so if you needed those hands on the farm, you needed to have a lot of kids to make sure you had a lot of teenagers who could help you one day.
02:01:17 Speaker_02
And so I think we're blessed to now live in a world where thankfully the infant mortality rate has collapsed so much that we don't need to play that lottery game that we used to.
02:01:27 Speaker_00
What are you teaching your kids about money? And at what age should we start to do that? And for those listening who don't have kids, I suppose it's never too late to learn.
02:01:36 Speaker_02
I think one of the points I always make that I've learned the hard way, parenting, is I don't think you need to sit your kids down and teach them about money because they're paying attention whether you know it or not.
02:01:47 Speaker_02
Kids are so incredibly good at learning. They're better at learning than adults are, particularly for things like language and whatnot.
02:01:54 Speaker_02
But you don't need to sit your kids down and say, this is how much we spend, and this is what we value, and this is why I save. They're paying attention. They're figuring it out.
02:02:02 Speaker_02
Every time they hear you say, I can't afford this, every time we're at the store and they say, oh, look, this is on sale. Let's get two of these. They're making a mental note of everything.
02:02:10 Speaker_02
Every time they hear you bicker about work, every time they hear you talk about a raise, even if it's just in the next room, they're piecing it all together.
02:02:17 Speaker_02
And I don't think they even know it, but they're so good at learning that they're building a mental model. And so even if you never sit your kids down and teach them, by the time, certainly they're teenagers, they know a lot about money.
02:02:27 Speaker_02
And maybe some of those things are good, maybe some is bad, but they're paying attention. And so I think the only thing you can do as a kid, or as a parent, I should say, is to lead by example.
02:02:36 Speaker_02
Because we talked about this earlier, the propensity to rebel as a kid, as a teenager. You talked about the smoking ads, where they just wanted to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing.
02:02:45 Speaker_02
I think particularly for teenagers, which I don't have yet, but if you sit them down and say, this is what you should do. You should always do this. You should never do that. Their propensity to rebel is enormous.
02:02:55 Speaker_02
So I think I should think it can backfire if you try to teach them. I think the best you can do, the only thing you can do is lead by example with people.
02:03:01 Speaker_02
One thing that a lot of, not just very wealthy people, but moderately wealthy people will say is, or ask is, how do I teach my kids about money without spoiling them? How do I use my money to help my kids without spoiling them?
02:03:12 Speaker_02
That's a big topic for a lot of people. Even if you're like a middle class family, how do I leave a small inheritance or help my kids? Should I buy them a new car or should I help them through college?
02:03:22 Speaker_02
I think a big thing that is easy to overlook is two things. You might think as a parent that you are teaching your kid grit and independence by withholding resources from them. You're doing it very well-intentioned. You need to earn your own.
02:03:36 Speaker_02
I earned my money and this is mine. You've got to go figure out your own. I think it is very easy to overlook that you are not teaching your kid independence and grit. You're teaching them to resent you.
02:03:47 Speaker_02
I have a good friend, Chris Davis, who told this story. He's an extreme example. Chris Davis' grandfather is Shelby Davis, who was a billionaire investor, one of the greatest investors of all time.
02:03:55 Speaker_02
And Chris tells a story that when he was a kid and his grandfather took him skiing, his grandfather would say, if you want me to buy you a lift ticket, you need to hike up the hill first and ski down. Hike to the top.
02:04:07 Speaker_02
And if you do that, then I'll buy you a lift ticket. And Chris said the lesson that they learned from that was not grit and independence and hard work. The lesson they learned from it was grandpa's kind of a jerk sometimes.
02:04:19 Speaker_02
And I think that's an extreme example, but you see that a lot with kids. One like very practical takeaway from this is that I think as a parent, you have to live the same lifestyle as your kids.
02:04:28 Speaker_02
It's very difficult to say mom and dad fly first class, but you're back in coach. Does anyone actually do that? Oh, absolutely.
02:04:33 Speaker_02
And maybe that's still a very extreme example, but what you think as a parent that the kid is learning is, oh, if I work as hard as mom and dad, one day I'll be sitting up there.
02:04:44 Speaker_02
And they don't, the lesson they learn is mom and dad think they are superior to us, or mom and dad are superior to me, I'm inferior to them. I think this is why you see a lot of very wealthy kids who are just psychologically broken.
02:04:55 Speaker_02
Because I think you have well-meaning parents who are like, look, we're very wealthy, but you're not, you got to earn your way. And all the kid hears throughout their life is I'm inferior, I'm inferior, I'm inferior, I'm inferior.
02:05:06 Speaker_02
And by the time they become adults, it's so ingrained into who they are that they can't take a step forward, they can't advocate for themselves. And so look, that's what the very wealthy deal with. I think that's what I think a lot about with kids.
02:05:18 Speaker_02
The other thing that every parent with more than one kid will understand and recognize is my two kids could not be more different. Their personalities, their goals. Even with the same parents living under the same roof, they are a million miles apart.
02:05:33 Speaker_02
And so if you say, what are you teaching your kids? I don't know who they're going to be when they grow up. I don't know what their goals or their aspirations are going to be.
02:05:41 Speaker_02
So is it right for me to tell my daughter like, oh, here's how you can save and become super wealthy over time? What if she doesn't want to live that life?
02:05:48 Speaker_02
What if she does have more of a YOLO personality of like, oh, I just want to go travel the world. I have no aspirations to become super wealthy and retire early.
02:05:55 Speaker_02
So you have to let them figure it out for themselves and realize that what might be right for you and what may have been right for the era in which you and I grew up in might not be right for them and might not fit the era that they grew up in.
02:06:07 Speaker_00
I like this saying, none of us know what it's like to be, pick an age, 13 years old in 2024. We think we do because we were 13 years old at one point.
02:06:18 Speaker_00
Your earlier descriptions of depriving kids of the first class ticket, putting them in coach and the parents flying in first class, it makes me realize that we like to think that those sorts of things will drive integration of the lesson.
02:06:36 Speaker_00
Each one of your examples pointed to the fact that kids are integrating based on the emotion they experience at the time. They're not thinking about the larger lesson.
02:06:44 Speaker_02
They're thinking about- They're in their moment.
02:06:46 Speaker_00
They're thinking, I'm hiking up this hill and this sucks. And they're not piecing together things over time. Like, okay, I'm doing this and he's trying to teach me a lesson. It's really, they're very attached to their immediate feelings. Right.
02:06:58 Speaker_02
And maybe it would be different in Chris Davis's example if the grandpa hiked up the hill with them. Because then the lesson you're taking is like, oh, we're going to do this together. And that is teaching the value of hard work.
02:07:07 Speaker_02
I'm going to do it with you. I'm going to suffer with you. So leading by example rather than by humiliation, I think is the way to do it with kids.
02:07:14 Speaker_00
When I was a kid, my dad used to walk me to this point along our street where then he would split off to go to work. He was a scientist. He would go to his laboratory and I'd go off to kindergarten and first grade.
02:07:26 Speaker_00
And I remember one day asking him what he did for a living. And he's a physicist. And he said, well, I'm a physicist. And I said, what's that? And he explained a little bit about what it was. And I'll never forget.
02:07:38 Speaker_00
We still talk about this, he and I. I'll never forget. I said, do you like it? And he said, well, you know that feeling the night before your birthday? I said, yeah. And he said, I feel like that every day.
02:07:51 Speaker_00
And then I think he also said, and I'm still a little bit murky on this one. I need to touch base with him about this sometime again soon. But he said, yeah, you don't always get presence.
02:08:00 Speaker_00
It doesn't always work out, but the feeling that you might, or that you're likely going to, or there's a possibility, that just feels so good. And I think I must've internalized that lesson because what I like is work.
02:08:12 Speaker_00
I don't think I'm addicted to work, although some in my life have accused me of that, and I'm willing to be open to that possibility, but it wasn't even really about discovery, it was about the possibility of discovery.
02:08:22 Speaker_00
And so I think in terms of teaching to kids and teaching to peers and teaching among humans,
02:08:31 Speaker_00
getting people to think about the verb states that really motivate them from the best place seems to be the kind of general theme throughout today's discussion and in your book somewhat.
02:08:40 Speaker_00
I'm not trying to summarize to find a point here, but if I may, it seems like, and what Rick Rubin has said about, you know, he has this like just supernatural track record at bringing out the best creative
02:08:52 Speaker_00
elements in people from different genres of music. It seems to be about tapping into these verb states of like, what is the thing that brings out your best, as opposed to thinking about the rewards that come from that. But it's hard, right?
02:09:04 Speaker_00
We see those numbers, we see those, the followers, the dollars, et cetera. We see the metrics of comparison. It's tough. There's a work to this that is not obvious.
02:09:13 Speaker_02
And I think it will always be like that. We're never going to live in a world where people don't compare themselves to others. We're never going to live in a world where people don't feel inadequate to others who have more than them.
02:09:23 Speaker_02
But back to kids, I think this is a great place to tie this together. If you ask most parents, what do you want for your kids? Most parents will say, I just want them to be happy. I hope they're happy one day.
02:09:33 Speaker_02
And then if you said, well, do you hope that your children are rich and successful? Parents might say, yeah, but mainly just happy. I just want them to be happy, regardless of what they're doing.
02:09:42 Speaker_02
If they're a kindergarten teacher, I want them to be happy. And I think the parents themselves say that because they haven't done that themselves, because the parents themselves have chased money over happiness, and they see the downside of it.
02:09:53 Speaker_02
And that's very common. And that's why they say, I hope my kid does this because I haven't done a good job of that myself.
02:10:00 Speaker_02
Because the temptation is to do that, is to pursue something that's not going to make you, is going to make you richer, but not necessarily happier. Now, that's not an argument against money or working hard, which I want to do.
02:10:10 Speaker_02
I want to work hard and make money and have more money, of course. But I think there's such a stark difference between using money as a tool to make yourself happier versus as a yardstick to compare yourself against others by.
02:10:21 Speaker_02
And so much in the modern world is the latter. We're not using money to make ourselves happier, or freer, or more independent, or to sleep better, or to spend more time with the people we enjoy. We use money to measure ourselves against other people.
02:10:33 Speaker_02
It's just, do I have more than you? Is my car faster than yours? Is my house bigger than yours?
02:10:37 Speaker_02
And all of that is completely separated from what we actually want, like for our kids and ultimately for ourselves, which is, can I use this to become happier and live a better life?
02:10:46 Speaker_00
What a wild concept, but it seems just spot on. So we need to think about money a little differently or a lot differently if we are to get the most satisfaction from our work and from resources.
02:11:03 Speaker_02
It requires a lot of looking in the mirror and just saying like, who am I and what do I want? I think that's the biggest thing, particularly when we started this conversation by saying, everybody's different. What's right for me is not right for you.
02:11:13 Speaker_02
Inherent in that is that you have to understand yourself. And a lot of people, a lot of financial damage is done when people have a financial plan that is right for another person, but it's wrong for them.
02:11:23 Speaker_02
And that's dangerous because it's the right financial plan maybe for a lot of other people. So it makes sense, it's rational, it makes sense on paper, on the spreadsheet it looks good, but it doesn't fit your personality.
02:11:32 Speaker_02
That's when a lot of damage is done. So I think to do better with money, you need to spend a lot of time thinking about who you are and your family and your goals and your aspirations. Realizing that all those things will change and adapt over time.
02:11:44 Speaker_02
So what was right for you 10 years ago might not be right today and you know in a way that might seem selfish like tuning out the rest of the world and tuning out other people and co-workers and Neighbors and whatnot and being just saying how can I use this as a tool to become happier to live a little bit better life?
02:11:59 Speaker_02
Like what's the purpose of money if it's not that?
02:12:02 Speaker_00
Love it Well, Morgan, thank you so much for doing the work that you do. It's an incredibly unique perspective on this thing that we all have to deal with, grapple with, and hopefully can develop a symbiotic relationship with money.
02:12:19 Speaker_00
And it's clear from talking to you today and also from reading your book that there's a strong central cord of benevolence in all of this. I don't know if that was your intent. It seems to just come through in who you are.
02:12:33 Speaker_00
When I read your book and as we talked today, it's just so clear that you want the best for people.
02:12:39 Speaker_00
I think that's an important thing to highlight because there are a lot of people out there telling people how to make money, what to do or not to do with their money, but you're telling us how to live more meaningful lives, which is something just an order of magnitude more important.
02:12:53 Speaker_00
for that and the work that you've done and that you're doing. I'm eagerly anticipating your book next September and for coming here today to educate us. Thank you ever so much. This has been so much fun. Thank you, Andrew.
02:13:04 Speaker_00
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Morgan Housel. To learn more about Morgan's work and to find links to his two superb books, The Psychology of Money and Same as Ever, please see the links in the show note captions.
02:13:16 Speaker_00
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02:15:22 Speaker_00
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