Morgan Housel on market volatility, personal investing psychology, and the tariff shock

for for weeks like this. I I I actually have a picture from March of 2020 during the COVID meltdown where I was sitting I I took a picture of it. I'm watching Twitter and I have a blood pressure cuff on monitoring my blood pressure at the time.

So sometimes I have a veneer of calmness, but like I'm So here here's here's the disconnect. I think it's important. I watch markets every day. I have for 20 years. I think they're fascinating. I watch the ups. I watch the downs. I've been glued to Twitter for the last 72 hours, but it never impacts how I invest.

I think that's what's important. So, I worry about the economy. I watch what's going on in the last two days with a sense of shock and dread, but it's not but I'm not but it's not going to change how I invest.

And I think it's only dangerous if you are glued to markets and you're like frantically buying and selling at the same time. Yeah.

Do you think that there's any like I I feel like there's kind of a barbell strategy where you can either, you know, not let the whims of the market dayto-day swing you uh and you can take a much longer view or you can actually be that trader and know that yeah, you are going to be the one trading dayto day and maybe you go all the way into like the high frequency world.

Is there is there just like a messy middle or does it just is it just like an individual asset manager just needs to find like where are they uh best aligned and and and what kind of uh what kind of lifestyle do they want? guess.

I I think it's it's probably true that a lot of people have a gambling itch, like this gambling bug that that has to be itched. And for those people, if you tell them, "Hey, dollar cost average into index funds and leave it alone. " They're not going to.

They're just like, even if that's good advice, they're not going to do it. And for that person, if you can convince them to say, "Hey, can we put 80% of your money in index funds and then this 20% you can go nuts with. You can trade shitcoins. You can go crazy. You can do anything you want with it.

" that that is it seems like bad advice, but it's probably the right advice for that person. So, I I've always been a fan of like you have to pick an investing strategy that works around your unique personality.

And a lot of people like everybody, me, you, everybody has personality quirks that are not perfectly rational, but we have to just accept them as part of who we are.

So, I'm I'm I'm not one to judge people who are trading and going nuts and having fun in markets as long as it's within reason and it's just like a small portion of their net worth. Like, don't don't do that with your kids college money, you know? Yeah.

Have you thought about, you know, one of the benefits I've felt in my career of having uh consistently having, you know, the majority of my quote unquote net worth spread across, you know, maybe like 10 or so private companies, you know? Uh the benefit is like I just don't think about a lot of them that much, right?

It's just like I'm not worried if it goes up or down. You know, sometimes you get an upound and you're like, "Cool, it doesn't really change my life in the moment. " And then if the market's crashing uh you know you're you're not getting mark daily marks right so you're not thinking about it.

Uh in my view like every asset that you have that's being marked you know constantly is a potential source of distraction.

Do you worry about, you know, every new generation coming uh coming online, becoming an adult at a time when they might have a memecoin, an NFT, you know, Nvidia calls, and then they're sports betting at the same time.

And it's like how how do you actually like create value in the world and like focus on the right things? I'm sure when you you were 22, I'm sure you had a brokerage account or, you know, I I'm curious like even how you were investing uh at that time.

Uh but you certainly wasn't that like you know you're seeing every mark constantly and I and I do I I personally worry about what what that does to people's sort of attention and and um long-term thinking. I think it's it's easy to look at at today's markets and say it's just a casino.

Everyone is is betting on this and zero day options and day trading. Vanguard brings in more money every month than Robin Hood has in total.

And so like the idea that like oh it's all a big casino like no the huge vast majority of money is invested from people in their 401ks that's it's taken out every other Friday and every paycheck they're going to leave it they forgot their password it's going to sit in there for the next 40 years which is like a great way to invest.

So what we see on the surface is always the craziness but actually beneath it is literally hundreds of trillions of dollars just invested diversified for the long term. That's the vast majority of it. And so I I think that's the case. It's definitely gotten easier to be crazy in markets than it was.

You mentioned like when I was younger there was there was Erade and and Charles Schwab like people go in, but you even had trading fees like to place a trade costs 15 or 20 bucks. And when you're when you're 19, that's enough to slow you down. And so when I started investing, yeah, I I started out day trading.

Um but it was it was totally like, hey, it's going to be 20 bucks in and 20 bucks out if I'm placing a $100 trade. Like that's that's a lot of it to just getting sucked up by trading fees. So, it was a it was like a very effective speed bump. That that's a good thing.

And I think it's it's hard to push back against uh free trading. Like lower costs, that's great. But it removed a speed bump that incentivizes a lot of really bad behavior.

Uh it we've been hearing about this idea that like maybe we're moving into like a kangaroo market or I mean the story that I tell of like the last 20 years is like. com bubble big crash slow buildup housing bubble big crash slow buildup tech boom then we get COVID we get SVB and we're up and down and up and down.

Now we're having tariffs and and Trump pump and Trump dump. Um, does it feel like we're moving into a permanently new regime of higher volatility because of some of the some of the uh factors that you mentioned or is this temporary and maybe it's smooth sailing in the future?

Well, I think you what you mentioned there that's interesting is you feel like it's been like that for the last 20 years. I would say it's been like that for the last 200 years. Whenever we have market data, it's always been like that. So, yes, what you just described for the last 20 years is accurate.

Before that, there was the the SNL crisis in the 1980s. the inflation in the 1970s, there was a boom, like the 60s were a wild boom period, World War II, the Great Depression, like it's always been nuts. There's never been a period of smooth sailing.

And the periods that we associate with smooth sailing, like the 60s and the '9s, we know in hindsight were just the precursors to a giant bust that happened. So, every time in hindsight that we're like, man, why couldn't it have been like that? Like, actually, that time was a terrible time.

In hindsight, that was what you wanted to avoid. And so it's never going to be a case that it's more that it's it's it's smooth sailing. Like it's an inherent feature of capitalism that you have volatility and booms and busts. It's not fun. It's not enjoyable. But the absence of that is even worse.

I I wrote about this in in my first book. There's a great economist guy named Hyman Minsky who I I'll say it very quickly came up with this idea called the financial instability hypothesis which was the more stable the economy is, the more destabilization it's going to cause.

Because when the economy is stable, people get optimistic and when they get optimistic, they go into debt. And when they go into debt, you're going to have a crisis eventually. So, it's like the fewer recessions that you have, the bigger the next recession is going to be.

Is it possible though going back to John's original question that uh if if markets uh are are trading in part due to sentiment how people feel about the economy and the internet accelerates sentiment because if I feel some way I can go post about it on X or I can send something to my group chat or I can log on to Twitter and uh like that sort of acceleration of basically like sentiment just moving around the world constantly.

Can that cause the sort of like the phrase we've said it on the show a bunch in a joking way but like the bare market or bull market or the kangaroo market where things are just like you know it it the the line over time uh you know was like slower right of these cycles and then the internet comes along and gets you know basically like full adoption and then you just have this sort of uh this type of I'm not showing it on the on the camera properly but this sort of like massive up and down um And that's like the new normal.

I think it it it makes sense to assume that because the information age is what it is that these things happen much faster cuz as recently as the 1990s, everybody's access to financial data was Lewis Roheiser's Wall Street and the Wall Street Journal and CNBC like in its very early days and that was it.

So everybody more or less had the same sources of information. We were all listening to the same thing just like back in the 60s everyone's source of news was Walter Kronhite. And today I could obviously could not be more opposite than that. So when a news comes, it's just gonna happen much much faster.

One example of this is during COVID, which you know maybe prior to this week was the biggest economic shock of of our lives, the market bottomed two or three weeks after the first bad news hit like very very quickly.

Whereas if you look at the like like the economic crisis of the 70s and the 80s, some of them played out over a decade. argument that it's not bad news or even more volatility.

It's just happens like we process the information so much faster and get these things over with in 3 weeks than live through a decade of stagnation. So maybe that's that's the upside of it. Yeah, it does feel like everything's kind of accelerating.

Even just the last I guess the last eight years and going into 12 years like we've been in one term president, one term president and so there's been more oscillations there versus a two-term president gives you eight years of more stability. It's just interesting.

What immediately comes to mind when somebody says uh five simple words, short-term pain, uh sorry, six, short-term pain, long-term gain. How does that make you feel? Nothing's good. Nothing's good come is going to come from that. Wasn't it Xi Jinping just like a couple of months ago with all the youth unemployment?

I I think the phrase he used was eat bitterness. That's what that's what the youth should do is like you should just eat the bitterness that you have and enjoy it. Nothing's going to good from is is nothing good is going to come from that.

Of course, there is logic to the idea of like invest in the short term, sacrifice in the short term for long-term gain. I'm not sure that's what's going on today with what's happening today. I I I I don't think this is seven dimensional chess trying to get some sort of long-term plan.

I think this is this is that's that's a different topic. And I I I think there's a difference between, you know, investing for the long run and like foregoing consumption so that you can grow your money and like, you know, hitting your kids with a belt to instilled grit in them.

That's that's not short-term pain for long-term gain. So there's there's there there's a balance that needs to be struck here. Uh what do you think?

I I posted an image earlier that I saw you like hopefully you recalled it and it was Trump and she picking up pennies in front of a of a steamroller that was being driven by Sam Alman. And the joke was basically like you know we spend a lot of time talking about AI.

But we obviously like follow we we try not to talk about politics on the show but we talk about policy and and you know we've covered the trade war quite a bit and uh especially today in the context I don't know if you saw AI 2027 that sort of interactive um you know website and forecast uh but it but it feels like the sort of uh our sentiment generally is that you know we're arguing over these sort of political issues tariffs trade wars uh and you just have like AI looming in the background like, you know, potentially going to make none of this, you know, matter at all because if if if you know, bad tariff policy can, you know, hurt the market by, you know, or hurt the economy by 15% but AI accelerates everything at at sort of this like inconceivable rate, then it will just be like, you know, picking up pennies in front of a steamroller.

But I'm curious how you think given that you know you love the p public markets but then you're also a private markets investor and and I'm I'm I'm just curious how you think about um investing you know with this uh big unknown on the horizon.

I think it's not uncommon historically where an economic crisis and unbelievable world changing innovation is happening at the same time. So the 1930s and 40s it was great depression, World War II, and by the way, airplanes, nuclear energy, penicellin, all of this like world changing.

But a lot of that was drowned out by the obvious economic and and war calamities that were having in the early 2000s. It was. com bust September 11th. And by the way, this internet thing truly is changing the world every single day beneath our feet.

And so it's easy to ignore that technological change because it's drowned out by the rest of the news. But it it's not uncommon for it to happen at the same time. And a lot of times that new technology and the economic malaise, collapse, recession, whatever you call it, is related to each other.

And so it's I I think that probably adds to a sense of uncertainty right now that not only were we going through the tariffs in the last 3 days, but a lot of people very rightly have woken up in just the last couple months to what AI might do to their jobs.

And a lot of these people are people who for whom 18 months ago truly consider their jobs and their careers bulletproof coders, tech workers who, you know, were making half a million bucks at Meta and they're they're c and they they they could not fathom a a a world in which they could be deemed somewhat irrelevant.

And I think that's that's not uncommon during these periods as well. Like there's there's very rarely positive upheaval that doesn't come along with a lot of negative upheaval upheaval at the same time. Can you talk just a little bit about how you're personally using AI?

What what what what tools and models are working their way into your daily stack, if anything? Mostly it's just kind of fun and amusement. Um, and in terms of work, I I' I've tried to do a few things.

I've uploaded book chapters or articles into ChatGpt and and and several other models and just said, "Hey, give me some feedback on this. " Mhm. And I found that it's pretty good for what I would call micro feedback of just like, hey, you probably need a comma here.

It's not that good for macro feedback of like, hey, was this chapter good? Like, did it make any sense to you? It's like so far it's not that great for that. I'm sure that'll change and there's probably other models that are better at that. Um, and so it's it's it's it's pretty good.

I I for for for writing for for my profession, you know, it's going to differ for everybody.

Um, I I I use it quite a bit as like a as like a thesaurus of like I I'll be st I'll have writer's block on a sentence and I'll I'll put in my partial sentence and say finish this for me and that it's actually pretty good at that. So it's it's good at all these like little things for writing.

It's obviously going to be this is such a a a a dumb take like an obvious take that the people who are going to do the best are the ones who use their personal skill and then use AI as a as a tool to leverage it rather than the ones who are using it to replace it.

So use like if you're writing and you're writing your own sentences, you're doing it yourself and you're using AI to enhance it. That's that's a that's a huge boost. Yeah. Yeah.

The the the book feedback thing is so interesting because I feel like whenever you produce any content, you send it to your friends, it's always hard to get authentic feedback and almost you almost need to like let it simmer and then see if they come back to you unprompted and text you, hey, I just actually read the book all the way through and I love this part.

and you know that you didn't prompt them to hey you got to do this as homework and you're doing it as a favor. I I could not agree with you more. Yes. Yeah. It's tough. It's tough. Um are our uh somewhat related. I mean you've done a lot of uh a lot of thinking and work.

I recently Jordi and I have kind of come to this kind of obvious conclusion that like there are increasing returns to scale for picking something and just making it your life's work and instead of thinking in some short term think long term.

And this seems like kind of obvious but it's something that I think we both wish we knew earlier. Is there an interesting like axiom or mental model or framework that you wish you had discovered earlier in your career or life? I don't know if I if I wish I had discovered it.

Maybe this is a this is a very boring example, but I I like to learn with my eyes. I read. I'm not that much of a podcast guy, and I'm definitely not an audio book guy.

It it what what struck me about two years ago is I realized the audio book version of The Psychology of Money was selling twice as many copies as as the physical paper version. And that blew my mind because never in a million years have I even thought about listening to an audio book, but a lot of people do.

And that also opened up my my eyes to podcasts as as you guys have figured out. I'm not I'm I'm not much of a podcast guy. A little bit on planes, but not regularly because I like to read. But I'm unique. I'm rare in that. Most people are like, "Oh, forget about reading a blog. " Like, I am podcast all day long.

And so, I was a little bit late to that game just because it's not what I do personally. But it's it's so clear that books, blogs, all of that, etc. , is is being overtaken by people learning with their ears uh in in in podcasts and videos. That's so that was that's been like a change in my thinking.

And the people who did figure that out early on and started podcast 10 years ago, Patrick Oaughnessy, those kind of people are crushing it now. Yeah.

Do do you think that um uh in the future there will be just just more consumer choice in like act the actual instantiation of ideas and and context like it'd be fairly trivial with AI tools today to if I wanted to instead experience invest like the best as a book I could probably wire up you know a whisper API to transcribe every episode.

I think Patrick already puts out transcripts, but I could transcribe it, send it off to the printer, get it mailed to me, and I could and I could very easily read that and it's and vice versa, too. You know, even if an audiobook doesn't exist, you can have an AI read it to you.

Um I do you think that that choice will live on the consumer side because right now it's living on the creator side and you have to decide I want to do an audio book and I have to because of I'm gonna sell twice as many.

Um, but in the future I I could imagine that you have the choice to read anything no matter what the original author intended and and is something sacrificed by uh this isn't as the artist intended. Yeah, two things come to mind. One is Google's notebook LM like lets you do that.

You can upload a PDF and say make a podcast out of this and it's very very good. It's amazing. It's such a cool tool. The other example is my friend I think he was on your show recently David Senra.

I first came across David Senra when I read a transcript of a of a podcast that he did because I'm not that much of a podcast guy and reading the transcript I was like this guy's absolutely genius. This guy's brilliant. I have to go start listening to his podcast.

That's one of the few podcasts that I always listen to on planes. And so I I think that that still does exist. Most of the big podcasts out there have transcripts that they publish. And if you're like me and you do want old school and you want to read, that's that's most of what I do out there.

Are you a Kindle, iPad, printed it out? What what's your what's your playbook for reading? I I I've gone back and forth over the years. I keep I always toggle back and forth. Like I I always prefer a physical book. I like the smell. I like the feel.

Like that's And I think there's a lot of evidence that most people learn better. They remember better if it's a physical book. But I love the ability to highlight and search in Kindle. That is so effective and important to me.

And there there are some apps like Read Wise that let you highlight in a physical book, but it's so much easier in Kindle to have just highlight a line and then you can come back to it later. Particularly for me as as a writer, I want to highlight passages that I can use as prompts for my writing in the future.

So to have it all right there is so great. I also love the fact that when I travel, I have 400 books on my Kindle to pick from on the plane versus taking one or two and hoping that I like them. And so I it's it's always hard for me because I absolutely prefer physical but I always drift towards Kindle. Yeah.

Uh have you been tempted go going back to writing and and uh have you been tempted to write a book to help people understand uh how AI will be adopted you know broadly in our world and how it will sort of transform things.

I I I'm assuming there's like a bunch of lessons from same as ever that we can sort of apply um to understanding this technological trend, but when I think about the best content that's available on artificial intelligence today, it's not the kind of thing that, you know, uh somebody in the airport is going to be walking and and sort of like, you know, they're not going to pull a great blog post, uh out of the air, you know, and read it on the plane, right?

So, it's like how do you how do you get people to sort of like understand uh the the change that's happening now and and the coming change and does that and does like kind of helping people understand that excite you or do you not feel like you even have the clarity uh yourself?

I definitely feel like I do not have the clarity myself. And my my take on this too is I'm not sure anybody does because the history of every big innovation is looking back in hindsight, virtually nobody got it right. And even the most diehard optimists underappreciated how much change it was going to bring.

My favorite example of this is when the Wright brothers created their plane, they virtually they only marketed it to the US Army because they themselves, the Wright brothers did not see much commercial use for the airplane.

They knew you could strap a machine gun on it and drop bombs out of it and then the army would like it for that. But the idea that the Wright brothers themselves foresaw Delta airlines like traveling like absolutely not not in the slightest.

That was true for cars, that was true for computers, it was true for the early internet, that even the pioneers who were the crazy wild maniacs underappreciated how much change it was going to bring. Because every new invention, it's not what you create, it's what other people like manipulate like like what you do.

I remember one example it was um for Photoshop.

A lot of the the the the engineers at Adobe when they make new tools for Photoshop, they have no clue what artists are going to do with those tools, but they're like, "Let's just find every way to manipulate an image and someone else will figure out what to do with this because you can't foresee what other creative people are going to do with your invention.

" And that's why even, you know, Sam Alman has no idea what AI is going to be in 20 years. That's not a put down. That's always true for all new technology. Can you talk a little bit about uh entrepreneurial storytelling?

It seems like it's an incredibly valuable skill, but then some founders get maybe lost in the sauce and wind up just focusing purely on storytelling and then that needs to be handicapped.

Um what what advice do you have for founders uh when when they're when they are trying to tell kind of that definitive optimist vision of the future without seeming not credible?

I think I think we've actually gotten much better in the last couple years at separating storytelling from just charlatan [ __ ] And like there there was a period when we w like we were not very good at that. Probably you know late late 201s early 2020s we were we were not very good at that.

And there are a lot of people who got away with a lot of things that they should not have. But I think our our threshold for BS has dropped as as an industry in in in a very good way. And people can see through things very quickly.

And so it's always going to be the case that, you know, Steve Jobs was the best storyteller and he was the opposite of a charlatan, the the the polar opposite of a charlatan.

And I I I I definitely feel like there is a world where yes, you have to be a good storyteller, but there's a much stronger sense of put up or shut up. Like you have to show me the numbers of what you're doing. You can't just keep the story going forever. So that's that's a great thing.

I have this uh half joking riff that I I I call it Kugan's law and the idea is uh the value of coinages is increasing in a in a algorithmic feed environment and compressing these big ideas down into pathy two-word phrases has uh disproportional returns to the actual popularization of these ideas.

So you think about uh Lulu Murvy with going direct that encapsulates a very big idea boils it down very well. Uh Bology has the network state. Uh Andrew Norwood says American dynamism and and just creating these like pathy phrases seems to be increasingly valuable. Do you buy my argument that there is a trend here?

Has this always been the case? And what is your take on folks who not just write and produce thought leadership broadly, but also really focus on on coining phrases and boiling their ideas down to their, you know, essence. I think it's definitely been true, but I think it's always been true.

The the the golden ages of advertising was the 1930s and the 1960s. 1930s was kind of the or 1920s was kind of the birth of advertising, and the 60s was like the explo like the post-war explosion of it.

And that was like the the David Oglevie periods of just like they were they were better back then at creating little piffy phrases than most of us are today.

Like there's more people doing it today, but some of the the marketing like the the old like Mad Men style marketing from the 1960s was so ridiculously good in those in those magazine ads.

Um, I I think it's I think if you wanted to argue that people have shorter attention spans today, so the value of a piffy phrase is more because they're not going to give you the time a day to read through 10,000 words to get to your point is important.

But even in a in a 50,000word book, like most people don't remember books, they remember a couple sentences from their books. So even if you're like, "Oh, I love that book. I read that book 10 years ago. Changed my life. Loved it. " You probably remember like three or four sentences.

And it's those like those turns of phrase that are memorable that you can that that stick with you.

So I've I I've always thought that's the goal for any book or like any book chapter is even if it's a a 5,000word chapter, what you want are three or four sentences from that that people will remember and will stick with them because realistically that's the best you can do for actually like changing somebody's mind.

Yeah, that makes sense. Uh on on the other coinages, uh we we I have Kugan's law. We've been working on Hayes's paradox, Jord's paradox or Jord's law. That's where uh the the more funny you think something is, the less likely it will be funny sort of broadly, right?

So, you post something on X and you think, "Oh, this is this is like the funniest thing. " This is my best work ever and then it completely flops.

And I wanted to know uh is there an idea or maybe a chapter from your work or something you've put out that you think never found its footing but you still it's you know it's one of your babies. I I would I would have to think about that.

But one that really comes to mind, somebody else tweeted this the other day but I thought it was so perfect and everybody knows this. The more time you spend writing a tweet, the lower the odds that it's going to end up as a banger. And and and the reverse is true.

If you sit there and you're like, "Let me get creative and and like word smith this, it's gonna suck. " But if you're just in the shower and you're like, "All right, screw it. Let me fire this off. It's going to be amazing. " That's always the case. Everybody has experienced this.

I think it's true for writing as well, like writing longer things, that good writing uh is very easy because uh if if your idea is right, it's easy to articulate it. And if you get writer's block, the reason you have writer's block is because your idea sucks and it's wrong.

and that and that's why you're you're struggling to articulate it. So, I think the harder if if writing is hard for you, you should take a step back and say my my my whole thesis here was probably wrong. If it was good, it would spill out of me. Yeah. Is that true for investing, too?

You hear about these legendary deals? Uh they had drinks, they did some napkin math, and it was the best investment ever. The the deal that they were in the DD room for sending docsends back and forth, like it was just a mess.

Um, is there something more broadly applicable to this idea of like simplicity breeds genius or or like you know um inspiration? I think what's true especially for very smart educated people is that the harder you work at something the more opportunities you have to fool yourself.

So, if you're very smart and you have a a 140 IQ and you went to Harvard and you work at Goldman Sachs and you spend 6 months doing due diligence on this deal, you are going to convince yourself of whatever you want to convince yourself of because you have so much mental horsepower that you can create any model, come up with any theory that justifies what you want to see.

And so, it's like the harder you work, the more likely that your final result is going to be fooling yourself. I've I've seen that I've seen that too. you know, a challenge as as a if if you're a founder or an investor, you're probably pretty convincing.

And you can be so convincing that it can be your Achilles heel because you can convince otherwise smart people that doing something is good.

And you you deliver such a such a like a good uh you know, sort of like a series of statements to get other people on board with that that people are like, "Okay, like I think that's a good idea. " And then in hindsight, you look at it and you're like, "Well, that was a terrible idea. That made that made sense.

" I think what's what's even more true is not only do you fool other people, you fool yourself. Yeah. And I I think it's true in investing that you need just enough IQ to where you can understand the important stuff, but not so much IQ that the the the simple stuff bores you.

If the simple stuff bores you, you're going to you're going to try to over complicate it in a way that's going to fool yourself. And I I don't have the intelligence or the IQ to blow myself up in a derivative strategy. I'm not smart enough to do that.

So I just have like a very boring basic dollar cost average into index funds because I've been blessed with a low enough intelligence that that's as far as I go. But I think that's that's a huge inet big advantage. Yes. Exactly.

I was talking to this investor not too long ago and I was like uh and he he's a very successful professional investor and I where he asked how I invest. I'm like I I dollar cost average into into Vanguard funds and then I go to beach to the beach with my kids and that's that's it.

and and his response was, "I'm so jealous of that. " Because I think he was so smart and so educated and so credentialed that he cannot do that. It's impossible for him to do that even if he wanted to. Yeah. Uh can you talk about hard work specifically?

We were having a conversation with uh David Senra earlier this week and I think he brought up the example of how Michaelitz at the end of his career said he could have worked like 10 10 or 20% less hard and had the same result. And this is something that John and I talk about a lot. We work really hard right now.

We get to the office, you know, by 6 a. m. Uh we uh are working until we go to bed. We spend time with our family, but like very very fullon. Um, and it's top of mind because we both have, you know, young children between, you know, basically 6 months and and five, and we want to be able to spend time with them.

And so I feel like it's this topic that's constantly on our minds of, you know, wanting to live up to your potential, uh, yet wanting to maximize, you know, time with family in these sort of, uh, really important years. It's tough.

One thing that comes to mind here, there's always the criticism that we spend, I forget what the stat is, 30% of health care spending on the last month of people's lives, whatever that stat is. And whenever that comes up, you're like, "Yes, but you don't know when the last month of your life is going to be.

" Like, it would be great to stop spending money at the end, but you don't know when it's going to be. So, when people talk about, "Oh, I could have been just as as successful if I worked 20% less. " Yeah, but you don't know which 20% of your work was was was wasted or not.

It was always a case back in the day when I was writing a lot. I would write two or three blog posts per day. So let's say I was writing uh uh 600 to a,000 blog posts per year. This is like 10 years ago. I in in one year if I wrote 600 blog posts, I would look back and say I'm very proud of five of them.

Five of them were really good. And the truth is that when I was writing them, I did not know which which one of those five was going to be. I had no clue. So I feel like you had to put in a ton of work to get some smaller level of success out of it. And and so I think that's that's usually the case.

But to your point of like kids and balance and work and whatnot, I I experienced that too, I think the way to think about it is like this is a a a Daniel Conan quote. He's like, you need a very well-c calibrated sense of your future regret. What are you likely to look back at 50 years from now and regret?

And a lot of people including me and and and probably you guys whatnot might look back and say, "Man, I had a lot of career opportunity and I wasted it. " That would be a regret. And of course, I would also regret looking back and saying, "I didn't spend enough time with my kids. " That that sucks.

I There's this one point that I used in Psychology Money where it was a study from a gerontologist. His name was Carl Pillmer, and he studied 1,000 elderly Americans. Most of them were 90 to 100 years old.

And he he writes in his book that of the 10,000 elderly people that he he studied, not a single one of them, not one single person looked back and said,"I wish I made more money. " Not a single one of them. Every single one of them looked back and said, "I wish I spent more time with my family.

I wish I was nicer to my friends. I wish I was more helpful to my community. " That was universal. And so I think of a lot of that that too of people who have more life experience than you and I do. Like they have very different goals than you and I probably did.

They wish they had done things differently than you and I did. Now, one of my main life goals right now at this phase of my life is I want to take care of my family, my wife and kids. I I want to work hard and provide for them financially.

And so, when I'm out working and maybe not spending as much time with them, I don't feel guilty because I'm like, I'm fulfilling a purpose that is very important to me. But it's always a balance. I think a lot of people their kids turn 18 and go off to college and they're like, I don't I don't even know you.

I didn't spend any time with you. And so I I I I have I have no firm formula for that, but it's it's it's huge. It's important. Yeah, it's personal equation. Well, thanks so much for joining. This was a fantastic conversation. Uh we we could probably talk for another four hours if we if we had the time.

Uh so we'll have to have you back on soon. I wish that you had the the blood pressure monitor on all week. Anytime anytime anytime it like you know ticks up or whatever say get on the show, let's let's talk it out. in uh in Wall Street the first time you meet Gordon Gecko.

He's uh you know the market's up and he's taking his blood pressure. Taking his blood pressure. I love it. It's iconic. It's an iconic scene. Anyway, thanks so much for hanging by. This was fantastic. We'll talk soon. Appreciate it. Talk soon. You know, it's funny.

He was talking about if you're thinking about, you know, writing something too long or whatever. So that right before we got on the show, I I said I posted, "Hey, dude, you should come over later. We're going to be greedy while others are fearful. " And it's at 800 likes. Let's go. I knew that was good.

I I burst out laughing immediately and I thought it was going to be great. Uh we do need to get Jord's Haze Paradox popping on the timeline, but we will come back to that later because we have the co-founder of Honey in the building. Ryan, how you doing? Boom. Doing great. Uh yeah, thanks so much for hopping on.

Uh I uh I think we have a mutual friend in John Wallin. Yeah, we do. And uh and and obviously I