Financial Expert: Passive Income Is A Scam! Post-Traumatic Broke Syndrome Is Controlling Millions!

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/9771da9c983780a8

People talk a lot about passive income. Look, there's two ways to get wealthier.
And passive income is not part of that equation. But what's really important for people is how we should spend money. Because I've written about money and finance and investing for 20 years. And I can tell you the correlation between how much you spend and how happy you are. It can exist, but it is not as simple as you think. Morgan Hausel is the legendary financial guru, revealing that everything we've been told.
about saving and spending money could be our biggest downfall. And here's why. If you're unhappy with your life, it is a very easy assumption to make that if you had more money, a bigger house, a better car, whatever it might be, things would be better. And it's a lie we tell ourselves, of course.
Because here's the truth, so much of spending is a psychological itch that you're trying to scratch. And that manifests in so many different ways. For example, life is a competition. It doesn't matter how well I'm doing, it matters how well I'm doing relative to you. And the most tangible way to do that is the material stuff. I was reading some funny stuff. They say that if you win the lottery, the probability of your neighbor going bankrupt.
increases. It's an amazing statistic. So be careful who you socialize with because you're going to
anchor to them as a baseline level of success and happiness. So is it wrong to buy a roulette? Absolutely not, but when it's controlling your personality, it's no different than any other addiction where it's forcing you to do things that you otherwise don't want to do. What about people who don't seem to spend anything? It's just as dangerous. Like there's something called post-traumatic broke syndrome.
And I'll talk about that. But I guarantee you that everyone can spend money in a way that's gonna make them happier. So if I wanted to make a framework to know how to spend my money, where do I start? But also, based on everything you know about money, if I want to get complete financial freedom, what's the five things that I should be thinking about? The first thing that I think that's most important is
Mogan.
Everybody loves to talk about investing.
They love to talk about
Saving money.

But I've never heard anybody.
emphasize the importance of spending money. You've written this book, The Art of
spending. So it begs the question, why would someone like you, who sells tens of millions of copies of their books when they write about something, and really, really cares about
The art of writing.
commit themselves to writing a book about
the art of spending. When you couldn't when you could have written anything that you wanted to, it would have been a success.
So I've written about money and finance and investing for twenty years.
And almost never had I myself
Said, what is my spending philosophy? I can tell you how I invest, I can tell you how I save, I can tell you why I do those things.
If five years ago if you said, Morgan, tell me your philosophy about spending in your own life, I'd be like
I I don't really know.
And as I looked into it,
There are literally tens of thousands of books.
on how to invest, how to grow your money, how to get rich, how to help your career.
That top that topic is endless.
There is virtually no
book out there written about spending money.
And I think the reason why is because
We don't I think we intuitively think nothing needs to be said.
Because the answer should be obvious. More's better.
Fancier is better.
That's the end of the topic.
But if you know particularly wealthier people, I mean it affects everybody, but particularly wealthier people.
You know it's not that simple.
That the correlation between how much you spend and how happy you are
It it can exist. Everyone can spend money in a way that's gonna make them happier, but it is not as simple as you think.
And as I started digging into it in my own life.
Of
When have I been envious of other people?
Of their material possessions. Why was I envious? Why when have I been jealous? Why was I jealous? What kind of spending made me happy?
What left me completely flat
And y it's it's a much more complicated topic than it seems at the surface.
You know, an another title for the book could have been The Psychology of Spending Money, because that's what this is. So it's a look at the psychology.
of greed and envy and social aspiration and like climbing the social ladder who you're trying to impress.
Whether those people are paying any attention to you.
That's what this book is.
So for someone like me who wants to improve my relationship with spending
I guess the question uh yeah, I guess the qu first question is
Understanding
The art of spending money.
Simple choices for a rich one. W what is it gonna do for me?
How is it gonna make my life better to understand this? Why why does it matter to the person that's listening right now?
I think it is a very easy assumption to make if you're unhappy with your life.
That if you had more money.
Those problems would go away. Sometimes it can be true.
It's not automatically false. It's just easier to assume that that's true than it actually is. And so
I guarantee you that every single person listening to this right now has some degree of that. If I had a little bit more money, my problems would go away, even if they don't necessarily know it or not. So much of spending.
Is a psychological exercise. There's an itch that you're trying to scratch. And that manifests in so many different ways. And so I've often thought of money, look, is money
the root of society, the core of society. No. There's obviously a million things more important than money, but I do think
It's the clearest window.
that we can look through to try to figure out what's going on.
In our own lives and other people's lives in society. It shows very starkly
What people value.
what they're scared of, what they're aspiring to become. There are many more elements to the puzzle.
your health, your friends, your family. We can go on that forever.
But money is a very clear window that if you see how somebody engages with money, you're like, Oh, I understand your insecurities, I understand your aspirations, I understand your self confidence, I understand what you think of other people. You can learn a lot about that.
It's it kinda like a reflection of your your trauma.
Yes.
And it it it manifests in very different ways. There's a great financial writer named
Name Tiffany Ali Shea.
And she's uh she grew up very, very poor.
And now she's extremely successful.
And she calls it
Post traumatic broke syndrome. Where even though she has a lot of money right now.
She I I I don't want to put words in her mouth my understanding is like she's she's afraid to spend it because she's the the feeling in her head is I will never go back.
to that can't ever go back to that poor person, post-traumatic broke. And so it can manifest in very different, sometimes opposite ways.
And so the point is not like if you grew up poor, you're gonna want to display it.
But the point is that it's a psychological itch.
It it's not just I want the nice car because nice cars are better. There's a social signaling. You're signaling to others, you're signaling to yourself, the trophy for yourself of what you've overcome. The more I dug into it, the more it was so clear of like spending is not just
on material stuff.
It's not just I wanna buy this car or this house or these clothes or these jewelry because it's nice.
It's I'm trying to send a signal to others or to myself of what I've overcome. One of the ways I thought about this in my own life was
If I was on a deserted island
with maybe just just me and and my family.
Nobody could see how we were living.
Nobody can see your house, nobody can see your car, nobody can see your clothes, nobody can see your jewelry.
How would I live? For me, and I think most people in that exercise, you immediately gravitate
Away from status and towards utility.
Like I would not want a Lamborghini. I'd probably want like a pickup truck.
Something that has like more utility. If nobody could see it, I would just want utility. I would not want an enormous house. I would want a house with a nice view.
Because I'm not trying to show off to other people. I just want something that is calming and serene to myself. And so once you start seeing the stark difference between
Utility and status.
Wa what once you once you force yourself to see it, you're like, Oh, it's everywhere.
Is something inherently wrong with status?
Is it wrong to buy a role? Absolutely not, particularly at certain points of your life.
Okay. So when when is it good, when is it bad, when is it indifferent, like indifferent? I don't know. I don't know. It's hard to say what's good and bad in terms of a formula because everybody's different. But I would say this. My own personal desire.
to show off materially.
Happened when I was in my late teens, early twenties.
And looking back, I didn't know this then, but the reason why is because I had nothing else to offer the world. I had no intelligence, I had no wisdom, I didn't know how to love anyone, I had nothing else to offer.
friends, family, spouses, whatever it be. And so the last remaining lever, if you're trying to get attention and respect, is well, look, I have no intelligence to offer, I have no wisdom to offer. Maybe people will admire me for my car.
That was why I wanted it.
And now that I I hope
And uh in that I I hope to today, twenty years later, I have a little bit more to offer to my wife, to my friends, to my family, to you know em employers and customers, whatnot.
then my desire for those things has gone down. Not to zero, but it's gone down.
There's a great Warren Buffett quote where he says, Success in life is when the people who you want to love you do love you.
And key to that is like you have to ask the question like who do you want to love you?
And for a lot of people, the quick knee jerk reaction is everybody.
And so you want to have a nice car.
Nice clothes, nice jewelry, because you think everyone's gonna stop and stare.
When I drive this down the road, people are gonna be stop and say, Look at that guy.
Lo look at her.
That's a made like they're so successful. I'm I admire them, I respect them.
And by and large, that is almost never true.
Because
No one's thinking about you as much as you are.
They're not pay attention to your car or your clothes or your house. They're busy worrying about themselves. Jimmy Carr, I think you've had on the show before, is that right? Love Jimmy Carr. He said this a couple weeks ago, I heard it, and it was one of those I had to stop and write it down because it was so profound. He said, in your twenties,
People
worry about what other people think of them.
In your thirties, you say, I don't care what anybody thinks of me.
And in your forties you finally realized the truth, which was nobody was thinking about you the whole time.
They were busy worry about themselves.
And
Look, that's not black and white. Of course, people think about you and look at you and sometimes judge you, but not nearly to the extent that we think.
And that was why I get back to the exercise. If nobody was watching, how would I live?
The truth is because
Virtually nobody is watching.
Except the people who I really love and admire. And they're gonna admire me for things that have nothing to do with
The kind of car that I drive or the clothes that I wear. Aaron Powell What's the the evolutionary basis for all of this stuff? Life's a competition.
It doesn't matter how well I'm doing, it matters how well I'm doing relative to you. It doesn't matter how big my house is, if I'm trying to signal, all that matters is my house is bigger than yours.
That's true for all wealth. There's no such thing as
You are wealthy once you have X number of dollars. That that does does not exist. Everything is relative to other people.
And the truth is like we live in a world of such material abundance.
Where
The majority of people listening to this will have
some sort of shelter and a car and and can buy can buy clothes and whatnot. And because relative to a lot of history, we live in material abundance.
the competition, the arms race for bigger nicer nicer things is extraordinary.
And
It's
way more powerful and potent today than it's ever been.
For two reasons. One is social media.
So I am now aware of the homes that other people live in, the cars that they drive, the clothes that the vacations that they take. I'm now aware of it in a way that we were not 15 years ago.
The other thing is
Біз інтернет газ демократиз
Access.
to audience intention the ability to become extremely rich.
is much more powerful than it's ever been.
It's still rare, of course.
But it's
It's easier today than it's ever been.
to become very, very wealthy.
even if only a small number of people are doing it. Because your
Your potential customer base is now the entire world.
You know, a hundred years ago if I was a businessman.
my customer base was whoever lived in my town.
Now if you're a businessman, your customer base can be the entire world.
And so it's easier to make a huge fortune. And because of social media, once you make that fortune.
People are probably gonna know about it.
'Cause a lot of those people who become very rich are gonna say
Look at how I'm living.
And so you have this like trickle down aspiration.
of everyone else being like my definition of wealthy.
if you're a young person today.
A young person's definition of wealthy might be a multi billionaire with a private jet and a private island, where I think
eighty years ago, people's definition of wealthy was
A three bedroom house.
In one car.
And a and a and and happy family.
And so we live in a world where like aspirations have inflated by such a dramatic
degree that the arms race of spending just gets that much that much higher.
I think there's something in this idea that you almost have to
Develop the skill of disconnecting
Your admiration.
from your aspirations if you want to live a good life.'Cause so many kids will like look up to you and say, I want to be like Morgan when I'm older um because they admire what you've done but uh
The reality is they
They're just seeing the sort of shop window of your life. And so I pe uh people do this with Elon all the time. Right. And Elon has even said, he's like, You might think you want to be me, but you you don't
And he the the clip where he did that, he points to his head and he's like, It's a it's a tornado up here.
And I think it's true that for most people who are extremely successful,
Who are the ones that people tend to us to look up to, like the extreme outlier successes. A lot of the reason they're so successful financially.
and then their career is because they've devoted
Every
second of their life to that career.
Which
most of the time comes at the expense of everything else.
So they are very successful, made a lot of money, and that came at the expense of their health, their relationships, relationships with their
their spouses, their children. So I make the point in the book that of the top ten richest men in the world
There are cumulative thirteen divorces.
among the top ten richest people. And it's a small sample size, like you can't really
you know, say that that that much with that, but this is a group that is almost universally admired, particularly among young men.
you know, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, how how amazing would it be to have that much money.
But after if if you dig into their actual their the the their whole life.
Not just their net worth. Not just the house and the jet that they have. But if you look at
holistically their entire life. You're like I don't know.
It's it's it's it's not that great. It's it's one thing to admire someone if you can pick bits and pieces. I want
I want
His
House.
And her car.
And his career.
And his physique, but you can't pick bits and pieces. You have to take the whole thing. And once you take the whole thing, you realize that like a lot of the people who you may have been looking up to.
either did not have a better life than you did.
Or it was just marginally better in a way that was easy to overlook. I had this conversation with a girl in New York last week. I was a a sho a client like a brand shoot and she sat me down to interview me for TikTok and she said, um she goes, Oh w what age did you become a millionaire? And I said, about twenty four, twenty five And she went, Oh
I'm twenty four, twenty five now, and I'm not a millionaire. And
I remember saying to her, I was like, Yeah, but
Would you would you take my trade?
And I explained to her, I was like, so I was lonely between the age of eighteen and roughly twenty. I was working in call centres, my parents wouldn't speak to me, so I had no contact with my family really, um, for th through that period. And then I started shoplifting at
uh n about eighteen nineteen to feed myself. And my brother had given me this big um sort of industrial packet of oats. And what I had to do is it's like powder. I mix the powder with water and there's there's there's a
photo online I think from my previous TED talk, my first one, where I was just drinking this this powdered water. So I said to her, I said and I was a millionaire at twenty four. Lonely
Not speaking to my family, drinking powder. Drinking shop shoplifting, working night shifts at in multiple call centres. Would you take the trade? And she went, No.
Absolutely not. She wouldn't take the trade. So you can't you can't pick it apart because I
If you want to my outcome, you have to take the path that I took if you want my specific outcome. And people don't think about that. Like one of the things this podcast has actually taught me is to think through
The framework of trade offs. Yeah.
So think about everything as a trade off. Think of a Zempek as a trade off. There's a trade you're making somewhere. And even, you know, when you aspire or you admire people, if you admire what we've done here, for example, think about the trade-off.
But even with this team, the team have been working here.
Every single day, including the weekends, from morning till night,
For the last.
Fourteen days here in New York.
Every single day.
Do you want to do you wanna do you wanna podcast? Do you want the trade? And if you do, fine, but just be informed about, as you say, both sides of the trade. Another Jimmy Carr quote that I love. He's a profound individual. Not only is he hilarious, he's very smart.
The quote is
Everyone is jealous of what you've got.
Nobody's jealous of how you got it.
Yeah. And I think it's just so easy to overlook. One of the things I write in the book is what's called the reverse obituary, which is it's a very good helpful exercise to
Write down.
It's kinda morbid, but
What do you want your obituary to say?
Kind of a weird thing, but
For me, everyone's different, but for me I would wanted to say Morgan was
A good father?
A good husband?
A good friend?
Helped his community.
Was a good worker. That's what I wanted to say.
Never in a million years in that obituary would I wanted to say
What my income was.
How big my house was.
How many times I went on vacation?
How many horsepower my car had?
Like it's ridiculous to think that that's what it would be. I would want it you instantly drift towards
the things that you know you're actually you actually want in life.
And of course it's gonna be different for everyone, but
I I I found it a helpful thing because you realize that it would be completely absurd.
to put the things that I might be chasing in my life in my obituary.
And so if in any given day in any given year you're like, I gotta earn a higher income and I wanna buy a bigger house and I gotta need a new car and knowledge, you see they came out this watch.
But at the end of your life, you know that's not gonna matter. What's gonna matter is were you a good spouse, a good parent, a good worker, were you honest? Were you a good friend? Were you funny?
That's it. You know that's what's gonna matter'cause that's what you want in your obituary.
I think part of the reason people spend in the way that they do as well is linked to that, which is
sometimes that behaviour, which is also linked to the point about tremor at the start, might result in a savings addiction. I often wonder this,'cause you know, when I was younger I had this crazy spending problem.
Yeah.
And I've also seen people
Who
don't seem to spend anything and they're just like hoarding capital. You talk about this a bit in the book, like what
Is that equally bad behavior? Yeah, I think it's equally bad'cause both of them are the exact same thing, which is money's controlling you.
Money should be a tool that you use.
To become a better version of yourself.
To become that.
happier, more content version of yourself.
But when it's controlling your personality.
It's it's it's no different than like
Any any other addiction.
where you don't it's forcing you to do things that you otherwise don't want to do.
And that can manifest on either end of the side. Either people can't stop spending or they cannot spend enough.
A lot of financial advisors will tell you one of the biggest problems that they have.
are clients who have saved enough money for retirement.
Good job. You saved for forty years.
You maxed out your four one K. You did everything you're supposed to, and now you're seventy years old.
And you have enough money.
To travel and play golf.
And you won't.
You won't do it. And I think it's because they become so accustomed
Two.
The identity of I'm a saver.
Every month I save and every month my net worth goes up.
And they cannot bring themselves into switching gears and going in the other direction.
And for a lot of those people.
The money is in full control over their identity. It's telling them
How to live.
What to like.
What to aspire to, what to enjoy.
the money is totally in control of their personality.
And and it's it's just as dangerous and just as just as detrimental as you when you were a teenager of I can't stop spending. It's and both of those are in
are there. The money is like
playing the marionette doll of your life. It's telling you exactly what to do and when to do it. If I wanted to make a framework to know how to spend my money, where where do I start?
Do I have to get clear on something? Do I you know and I guess the other question which is somewhat linked to this is th this overarching debate around can money make you happy?
Right.
But I'm trying to figure out like where do I start'cause I I wanna
One of the things I wanna get out of today is I wanna have a a clearer framework for how to spend my money.
Well those two points that you just brought up, I think, are very related.
The first on the point of can money make you happier? The answer is yes, but there's a there's a there's a asterisk next to it that we need to get to. For years there was a big academic debate of
Does more money make you happy? A lot of s some of the studies showed yes, clearly it does. Others showed studies showed no, it really doesn't. And the academics, the economists were like battling for decades.
It's kind of been cleared up.
In the last just the last couple of years, this last couple of decades, with some nuance, which is this.
If you are already
An unhappy person.
If you're already anxious, if you're already depressed.
By and large, having more money will not.
help you at least that much. It might help you a little bit around the margins.
If you're if you start as an unhappy, depressed, anxious person, if you are already
A happy
Content.
Joyful.
Laughing person.
having more money will give you a better life.
So in either direction, it's just leveraging who you already were.
It's not gonna change you that much. It's just gonna leverage who you already were.
Very similar to like they say this about power. Like once you gain power in politics or something, it just leverages the personality that you already had.
Money is very much like that. And so
It's it's not
A a a panacea in the sense of like, oh, like if if you're miserable, like if you had more money, it's gonna clear up your problems. It can make some of your problems a little bit easier to deal with. But
Мікбати і не стар тармс, лиц це ю а.
Overweight.
And unhappy. You hate your job.
And you're recently divorced and your kids won't talk to you.
But you live in a mansion.
It has a Ferrari in the driveway.
And you got all kinds of fancy stuff.
If all if everything else in your life sucked.
And you woke up every morning going, Oh, I gotta go to work today. I hate my job. I can't stand my job.
I'm I'm lonely, I'm miserable, I'm overweight, I can't sleep, I'm addicted to alcohol, whatever it might be. Of course it's a terrible life.
The house and the car don't matter at all. But you can flip that around and say, Like, let's say you live in a very modest
Middle class house.
And you drive a a a ten year old Honda Civic.
But you love your job.
You love your co workers.
You have a great relationship with your spouse.
Your kids admire you.
You have your friends over for a barbecue every Friday night. Materially it's very modest. You have what you need.
You're not
Impover homeless.
You have the food that you want and the shelter that you want, but
You would be an absolute maniac to choose.
the miserable person in the mansion.
versus the content, happy person in the middle class house. If your goal is to live a good life,
It's psychotic to pick one over one over the other.
I felt this quite starkly recently'cause I flew to Cape Town on my own. Um
I've only ever been there with my girlfriend and with other friends and the first time I've I've only been there a few times to I've got a house there, and it's a very big house, and but the first time I came with was with my family, the second time it's with my girlfriend and my friends, this time I came on my own.
And
I felt this
Deep existential feeling.
Waking up, walking through that house.
Alone.
Thinking fuck me, I
It was so clear to me that the point of such a
such a thing is to fill it with people and you say I make this point in the book of like the very simple question.
Will a big house make you happier?
I think it will make you depressed if it's empty. Because that's how I felt.
I'd rather be in a studio apartment alone than a big house on my own. Right. I had a similar realization to you a couple years ago when I took my my my my family and I went to Maui for a vacation. And I love Maui. It's my favorite place in the world.
And now they have kids, so I'm building sand castles.
with my kids on the beach in Maui.
And that I remember thinking like this is this is a ten out of ten.
This is like this is peak life for me. Building sand castles with my kids, everyone's happy in the sun.
But then I had this realization of like if that's a ten
Playing with Legos at home on the living room floor with my kids is like a nine.
Like it's really close.
Because realization was what I enjoy is like quality time with my kids.
I think a lot of the reason that people like vacate like travel is not because they like getting on an airplane and flying around the world and being jet lagged and cramped into a small hotel. What they like
Is
uninterrupted time away from work, away from all the other stresses of everyday life. That's what they actually enjoy. That's what they like travel.
It's not necessarily the location. It's like what the location is doing for you. So the question of will a big house make you happier?
It will to the extent that it makes it easier to have your friends and family over.
Because your friends and family are the ones who are actually making you happy.
And so the answer can be can will a will a nice house make you happy. The answer can be yes, if you're using it for the right reasons. There was this article in the New York Times, this is probably ten or fifteen years ago.
And uh the article said two things happened to ju to Julia Roberts this week.
One, she won the Academy Award.
And two, she found out her husband was cheating on her.
And so the column said.
Pop quiz, did Julia Roberts have a good week?
And it's like you'd be a fool to say yes. It was probably the worst week of her life, I imagine. Yeah.
Um, but what we see from the outside was
dolled up in a beautiful dress, accepting the highest honor of her career.
And saying like, wow, that must be an amazing. But it gets back to once you see the full picture, you're like, nah, it's not as easy as it seems. You say on page twenty three of your book a a quote that I loved, show off the inside of your house, not the outside.
Right.
Because the inside of your house are what your friends and your family are seeing.
Is there like a
A hack here.
Like is there you know,'cause you have all these like internet communic communities that come up with these like hacks, these other ways to live. They they they step outside of the matrix and they form their own little
They're in little cult that are like doing it differently and not not abiding by the rules of the the quote unquote matrix. I very much feel like most of us are trapped in the matrix. Yeah. We're trapped in this like status game, competing against each other, not f not searching for happiness. Like what is the
The hack here. How do I get out of the matrix and what does that look like?
I think if there is a formula
that I I lay out in the book and I I make the point that like there's there's no formula for how to spend money. But if I did try to make a formula for a pretty good life,
And this extends way outside of money. The formula for a pretty good life is independence plus purpose.
If you want to say like how how can I be a happy person? You need to be independent.
You need to be able to do what you want to do, when you want to do it, with whom you want to do it with.
And you need some kind of purpose that is higher than yourself. And that could be a million different things. It could be friends, it could be family, it could be career, it could be religion, whatever it might be.
I think it is very difficult to imagine anyone having a good life without those two things. If your entire life and your schedule is dictated,
By somebody else.
Of you have to go to this job that you don't like.
You have to have a long commute that you don't like.
You have to do this when you don't want to do it.
It's it it's hard to be happy. And if you don't have any kind of purpose that you're doing it for.
It's difficult to be happy.
And so
The idea that
To me.
The best thing to spend money on is independence.
And I view it as purchasing I I don't view it as saving money.
I view it as purchasing independence.
That's how I I view I feel like I'm buying independence when I save.
And so
To me the biggest thing
that I spend my money on. And this sounds weird, but I is saving. And I view that as buying independents. I view that as every dollar that I save is a little bit more independent than I was before.
It's a little bit of my future that I now own and control.
And if if you're listening to this and you're like, look, I'm not financially independent, I've I've no
does I have no uh possibility of being financially independent.
Independence exists on a spectrum.
And literally every dollar that you save is a little bit more independent that you were before.
If you have$100 in the bank in savings, that can make it so that if you were to lose your job, you have a little bit more flexibility for rent or groceries or whatever it might be that you didn't before.
a thousand dollars, ten thousand dollars, any amount that you have.
is a little bit more independent than you were before. And so when you view
one of the cores of living a good life is independence.
And any amount of saving money will buy you independence.
I think that's a powerful observation for people.
And then the purpose part is gonna be different for everyone for me right now in my life.
It's being a good father.
That's what I want my end my identity to be. That's my overarching goal in life is to be a good dad.
I think I'm not going to be able to
the vast majority of parents will tell you that there was no greater
Joy.
Purpose.
Than watching their kids thrive.
Can also bring a lot of sorrow and a lot of sleepless nights and a lot of anxiety and a lot of worry that comes along with it.
But nothing that I've experienced or any of the other parents.
that I know would would say that anything in their life has come before that, that it's been a great thing.
So we got on this point because the formula is independent plus purpose. For me, the purpose is being apparent. That's not gonna be true for everyone. But you're training independence for that.
I'm trading
It's internal
independence that I'm giving up. I want to sacrifice
For my kids.
Like loyalty to people who deserve your loyalty.
is a wonderful thing.
Loyalty to people who don't deserve your loyalty.
Sucks.

And so if you are work if you're giving your loyalty to a company that doesn't respect you, that sucks. That's terrible. Loyalty to people who deserve it.
is a very fulfilling thing. So my kids deserve my loyalty. How did they end that loyalty? Just by being my kids. And there's some days where I feel like they they don't appreciate it. Of course. But I I think that tends to be true. People get into problems when they are loyal to people or organizations or political affiliations who don't deserve the loyalty.
Do you think that's the same thing?
The promise of independence and freedom.
has a secret hidden dark trade off that people don't talk about. Because there's this culture in it right now of like, you know, be your own boss and stand on your own two feet and
When you think about what makes humans happy, it seems to be collective things. It seems to be actually in your case, as you're saying
Dependents.
Your kids depend on you. And in some ways you depend on them. All the things that seem to like having my friends at my house made me happier than being in the house alone. But the nar the public narrative is all about like optimizing for freedom.
Whatever that means.
And really more so optimizing for independence, not depending on someone else. But when you look at the people that seem to be the the most unhappy, they seem to be
The most
Independent.
Because they're the if the if you picture someone like living in a cabin by themselves in the middle of Montana with no one around them or whatever. No family, no pets, freelance work on a laptop on their own.
In a in a glass box in Dubai.
Um, no ob no big obligations, not not in a church.
But back to the formula, independent was purpose. Those people have no purpose.
Oh yes, I'm gonna do it.
I think yes, everyone is gonna be I'm d I'm dependent.
On
My wife, my kids, but you know, there there is dependency there.
But I'm I'm choosing.
I chose her as a spouse. I chose to have kids. And so I d I still did it on my terms.
And so you're never gonna be, or y I think you don't wanna be.

100% independent in the sense that you don't rely on anyone and no one relies on you because then you have no purpose.
It's choosing who you want. I think it's I think you're not independent if
You have to be loyal to a job that you hate.
But you have to have it because it's the only job you got and you and you have to do it and you're you you have to pay this exorbitant rent.
an apartment that you don't even enjoy that much.
Like those are dependents on things that you don't want, but like I want to be dependent on my family.
Because that gives me purpose. It's like the independent to make the choice, I guess. To make the choice of who you're going to be dependent on.
Right.
Got you. And on this p earlier point you were talking about saving, um and
That you l your favorite form of spending is saving. Yeah.
Someone's listening now.
How much money do you think they should at a minimum have?
Saved.
If you try to get technical about it, I would say what are the odds that at some point in your life
you're gonna lose your job and not be able to find another job for six months.
The odds are not bad.
That that will happen to you at some point. Not very comfortable to think about. Maybe it's already happened to you already, but the odds that at some point that will happen are pretty good.
And therefore, if you were to say, like, look, a good measure of
some level of higher end independence. Not a low level of independence, but like a a medium level of independence.
Is six is is I could keep myself going for six months.
Now for a lot of people that's a daunting task and like it it it's okay. You're probably not gonna achieve that when you're eighteen. It might it's it's gonna take some savings to get there.
But that is a level at which you can exhale to a degree that most people have never been able to do before of like
There's gonna be some bad stuff happening in your life. It's gonna be uncomfortable, but it's gonna be okay.
And for for for most people, for most of history, it was there's bad things gonna happen to you and you're not gonna be okay. It's gonna be very traumatic. And and one of the important things there is when you lose that job.
The ability to go find a good job, even a better job, where you want, doing what you want with the people who you like working with is very important. If you don't have any savings, you're gonna have to.
by default, pick the very first job that you can come across, even if it's a terrible job in a location that you hate, doing something you hate, working with people you don't like. And so the flexibility to give yourself time to find a job that is a little bit easier and better for you.
That is the purpose of savings.
And that goes back to your point about
Independent.
Which is you want to

building up those savings is building up the independence or the freedom to make a choice about who you work with.
If the worst were to happen, you don't have to necessarily go get a a job at a you know some awful place. Some some terrible place.
And um I was reading some stats that are quite funny stats, but they they say that
Essentially that if you're if you win the lottery, the probability of your neighbor going bankrupt
Increases. It's an amazing statistic, right?
Yeah.
So what's g what's happening there? Well you're looking at your neighbor who won the lottery.
And your neighbor probably.
Bought a vacation house, bought a new car.
sending their kids to private school, whatever it might be.
And you watching that are like
I need that for myself.
I it's it's unfair that they have it and I don't. And I'm gonna go do any reckless financial decision to get that.
So much of what we think is is normal or definition of success.
is what other people around us have.
And so if you are watching your neighbor.
Live a better life that
than you, then all of a sudden your definition of a good life is what they're doing. And you will do some reckless things to get it.
I think that's that's what happens. And so one of the takeaways there is like
Be careful who you socialize with.
Because you're going to anchor.
to them as a baseline level of success and happiness.
Be very careful with what you do and who you look up to and who you aspire to. I grew up in Lake Tahoe, California, and this was before tech money, when it was not a wealthy area. It is now because all the tech money from San Francisco came up.
But Taho in the nineties and early two thousands was was just a out in the woods.
And
You know
you could buy a house for nothing and most people in town didn't have any money.
And then I went to college in Los Angeles.
Where there is a lot of wealth.
There are high expectations and there are Lamborghini's and Rolls Royce's and whatnot.
And one of my observations was
People were happier in Tahoe.
And I think the reason why is because the definition of success
In Tahoe back then was a two bedroom house and a pickup truck.
That was success.
In Los Angeles the definition of a success was a mansion.
And a and a Bentley.
And so
It was just it was easier for people in Taho to be like
I'm good. I I check the boxes, like look, I'm successful. Look at look at my tiny little house and my beat up pickup truck. That's success, right?
And so that was like be careful who you socialize with,'cause you're going to anchor to their level of success.
I have uh some graphs in front of you there.
Um, I think one of them is
The spectrum of financial independence. Yeah. Could you explain to me what that is and and how how that's useful to understand and why that's useful to understand.
Uh ten or ten or twenty years ago, and he said, I don't save any money because I don't see the purpose. All I'd be able to save is
A hundred bucks a month?
And what's that gonna do for me?
And since I don't think it's gonna do anything for me, I might as well just go spend it.
And I think no no, that's like a hundred dollars in savings, or if you do it for a year, twelve hundred dollars in savings.
is twelve hundred dollars more independents than you had before.
And again, w not if, but when you lose your job or your car breaks down, you're gonna realize how
unbelievably valuable.
that money is. And it's not savings, it's independence that it's giving you. So the idea that independence is on a spectrum, it is not you either don't have to work or you have to work. It's not that stark, but most people think of it in those terms.
Why would I try to become independent if I have no chance of
Not working. And the simple way to view it is every dollar that you save.
is a piece of your future that you own, that you control, that is yours.
The flip of that is like every dollar of debt that you have is a piece of your future that somebody else controls. It's a
It's a moment in time in the future that is not yours. It belongs to somebody else. And so I've always viewed it.
On a spectrum when I was younger and much poorer.
I was a big saver, even though like was I independent, like no, of course I had to work. I had to work to pay my rent and pay my groceries, of course.
But I viewed it as like every twenty dollars that I saved, every fifty dollars that I saved put me in a better position than I was before.
And looking back on it, I I don't think I could have articulated that twenty years ago, but it's what I felt.
A lot of that for me back then was
Coming from a place of fear.
I didn't have a lot of self confidence in myself in my career, so I was like I need to save to
prepare for when this all comes crashing down.
And even though it didn't come crashing down, I'm so glad that I did it.
Ca f I've had a sense of financial security and I've had a sense of independent.
Financially.
since I was in my ear twenties.
Not because I had saved a ton. I hadn't.
But
Any amount that I saved I I viewed as like the cushion.
that that gave me a a much higher sense of confidence that
If or when things go wrong.
I'm not gonna be flailing. I'm gonna have some cushion to fall back on. And what is this?
This spectrum.
Uh what are the stages of the spectrum?
So let's start at the very bottom. You're homeless, you're panhandling.
Reliant on the kindness of strangers. As you go up from there, you can be completely reliant on your boss.
In a job that you don't like.
No, that's that's that's a that's another low level. As you go up from there, you have
Look, I am I'm reliant on my job, I'm reliant on my pay on my paycheck, but I probably have some opportunities. I could go work at another job, I could I could choose to work here, I could choose to work there. And then you just go from there, it's like yo.
I I like my job and I have some savings. So if I've lost this job I can fall back onto it from there.
You can go up from there to have
You can live where you want, you can work where you want, you can change fields, you can you can go and you can do a completely different job. You can take two months off and travel if you wanted to. Like you're working your way up all the way to the highest level.
of financial independence, which is I don't need to work anymore. I've saved enough and I can I can I can wake up every morning and do whatever I would like to do. That's obviously an aspiration that for most people will never be.
Reached.
Until they're maybe in their, you know, seventies and they're retiring and they have
social security and some other savings from there.
But for most people, like a good level of independent as a good goal.
is enough savings so that if you lost your job
If your car broke down, if you needed to replace the roof on your house, you would be able to do it.
Without losing that much sleep.
That is a realistic level that I think almost anyone can achieve.
If I want to get to that highest level of complete financial freedom.
What what what's like the the five things that I should be thinking about at just a sort of a very simple level?
You know,'cause so many people listening right now think Scott, my goal in life isn't to become a billionaire or a tens of millionaire. My goal in life is just to get to that point of freedom as soon as I can. Yeah. Where I can start calling the shots. And there's there was someone who I was speaking to the other day and said that there's there's this internet movement of kids.
What do they call it?
It's like they're trying to get to the point where they can retire early. Fire fire something. Financial independents retire early.
Yeah, yep.
Yeah. Like how do I get how do I get that the first thing that I think that's most important.
This is the first and the last thing. This is the most important part.
Is that
All wealth, your feeling of wealth, is what you have minus what you want.
And it's so easy to ignore the latter. I talk about in the book my my late grandmother in law, my wife's grandmother's passed away a couple years ago.
For thirty years.
She lived off of nothing, but
Seventeen or eighteen hundred dollars a month in social security. Not a lot of money.
By most accounts, very little money.
But she didn't want anything more.
She did she like if she made seventeen hundred dollars a month, she did not want seventeen hundred dollars in one dollar in in one dollar.
She was perfectly happy.

Working in her garden.
Going for walks, watching the birds, watching the sunrise, watching the sunset, talking to our friends, hanging out with her family.
But if you asked her, you said, You only make seven hundred dollars a month.
You're broke.
Doesn't that make you unhappy? She'd be like, What?
Like, do you think having more money makes the sunset?
More beautiful?
You think having more money makes
Going for a walk more pleasant. And I'm not saying you should live like you should be content with that amount of money. But the point is like she was content.
She was totally content, and it was her choice. I think she was happier financially.
Then
Some
billionaires.
'Cause there's a lot of billionaires who have a billion dollars but they want to.
They have two billion, but they want four.
One of the things is that happiness might be the wrong word here. The word that
People want is content.
When you sit here and daydream about having the bigger mansion, what you're actually doing
Is you imagine yourself
in the mansion, being content with it.
You imagine yourself sitting in that house and saying
I don't want anything more than this. The feeling that we are aspiring to is just being content.
Happiness was always like a thirty second emotion.
It's like laughter. Like if I tell you a funny joke, you'll laugh for thirty seconds and then and that's over.
Like very few times in life are you happy for more than a couple of minutes at a time.
But what you want that is like an a durable emotion is being content. Just saying, like I'm good. I'm good with this. I don't want anything more. I interviewed Doctor Anna Lemke and she's like the
The uh the scientist who's most
uh renowned for talking about and writing about dopamine. Yeah. And I was wondering how much do the
molecule dopamine dovetails into this because I think one of the things she said to me was that dopamine is the chemical for wanting. And people have, I think, mistaken it for being the the pleasure happiness. Yeah, happiness. It's more, more, more, more. It's like you want more. And she told me this crazy study about this wrap where they remove the dopamine receptor from its brain so it couldn't produce dopamine.
And then they put food two inches from its mouth, and the rat starved to death.

Because it it w it it and in that I've always thought about that as like okay, so that's what dopamine is. It's the motivation to go get to go get, to want, to pursue. What role is dopamine playing here? It's huge.
A good realization to be like
A a lot of this is not something that you can solve on a spreadsheet. It's not something you can solve with a formula. It's chemicals in your brain. And obviously, some people are gonna be more susceptible to that than others. I think my grandmother in law.
just had for whatever it was was was wired differently than most people. Part of that was like she was a product of the Great Depression. She grew up during the Great Depression, which probably like lower her expectations. She never had social media and whatnot.
But of course, I think some people are wired.
differently than others for a level of contentment.
But I think just there's a a big thing in psychiatry where
diagnosing a mental illness.
is sometimes more important than the treatment.
If you just get a diagnosis of like, Oh, you're ADHD, whatever it is, just knowing just like
the the fact that you can stop questioning why am I having these thoughts, you can you can understand why you have those thoughts is more important than the treatment sometimes.
I think that's true here. If if you
It's easier said than done to complete control your desires.
But just knowing why you're doing it.
and realizing that it's probably not gonna give you the happiness that you want.
That's just like any addiction that the more you chase it.
the further away it's gonna get can go a big way. And so for me myself, there's
All the time there are moments where I'm like, Oh.
I I should I I should get that car.
Maybe we should get a bigger house. I have those feelings daily.
So the feelings don't go away, but I think I'm better now than I've been in the past.
I reminding myself of like
It's not gonna make you happier.
You know that.
You've tried this before.
You've tried it before and it didn't make you happy. What is gonna make you happy is spending time with your kids.
Have a good relationship with your wife.
And your own physical health.
And laughing with your friends.
And having good times with people who you enjoy.
You know that's gonna make you happy, and you know that's not. And I have to remind myself because it's not intuitive. And I have dopamine that tells me.
You should want more, more, more, more, more.
So you never get over it.
But I think once you've diagnosed the problem, it becomes easier at just like spotting that emotion and realizing that it's telling you a story that's probably not true. I wonder if you I could trade
The addiction.'Cause you you know you referred to it there as being an addiction. If it's for dopamine equation, could I
Not shift my addiction to something more productive.
And would that mean that my spending would get better? So actually when I think about me as eighteen years old and having that horrific spending problem, maybe I just shifted.
the the thing that gave me dopamine.
Like
Building businesses or to
Podcasting.
Or to writing books.
I think it's probably true that everybody's a little bit more than a little bit
Without exception, is addicted to something.
And it's just harnessing that that
process for whatever it might be. So some people are addicted to my wife's addicted to gardening, let's say. She she can care less about
About investing.
Or spending money on it. She could not care less about her car or my car or your car.
But if you have a good gardener.
If you you have a pretty guard, she's she's all over the So everybody's got their thing. And it's just like can you harness that for productivity? I think a lot of like extremely successful people.

Addiction.
and harnessed it for productivity into their business. And that's that's why they're so successful. They just became obsessed with one thing. And
It's it's a good question of whether we can actually guide that addiction, or if it's just kind of pre-wired in itself. I think it's true for myself, someone who's written books about money for twenty years, thought about money for twenty years.
My mom tells a story that when I was
Three.
I would sit there and count pennies.
I don't want to count seashells, I don't want to count cards, I don't want to count rocks, I wanna count money.
And so I think I've always had this
disposition towards being fascinated with money. Why? I don't know, because I did it when I was three.
I did it before I could even think through it.
But I think everyone has their little thing. It's always been fascinating to me. I don't think I'm obsessed with money. I don't think it controls my life, but if I had to go out of my way,
to have a a healthier relationship with it. But I think it's definitely been true that the reason that I've found myself in this career
is that it's always been my thing. And I think everybody has that thing in their life.
You know, people talk about addictive personalities and uh I was reflecting one of my best friends who was
Al an alcoholic, had a problem with gambling.
Then I had a problem with eating.
Then got obsessed with marathons.
And he he traded each one of those things for the next thing. So now he's like obsessed with health and fitness. And so I was when I was thinking about people that are struggling with money problems and even my own historical strugg struggle with money, I I think I probably just traded it for something. And actually I'm kinda happy about that.
Because I traded it for a a better addiction, which is one that was productive. My career and
Um
I guess doing this, I'm pretty addicted to doing this. Right.
And but and but I think it's healthy in a plasma screen. It's exactly. Yeah. I think what's true about a money addiction is that it tends to be the classic addiction of like you tell yourself, if only I get one more hit, so to speak.
Then I'll be satiated.
Then then then that'll be enough. And the answer is like no, it absolutely will not.
I'll tell you like a a pr a personal thing. I don't think this is true, but it made me laugh. My wife and I bought a new house about a year ago.
It's an awesome house. We love it. It's great.
And
My brother in law came over the other day.
And he goes, You know you're only gonna leave here for two years.
Before you want to buy a bigger house.
And I had to laugh because I'm like, God, like
I I I don't think that's true. I think we're gonna live here for a while.
But I know what you're saying is right.
That's the natural guide towards it. That
When we bought the house, it was like, Oh, this is gonna be so great. Can you imagine we're gonna g get to do this and get to do that, and we have these neighbors and whatnot.
And you become a
accustomed to that very quickly. And then your gaze shifts a little bit higher. And you're like, Yeah, but
Look at that house over there. That one's nicer, isn't it? That's always the natural thing and that's dopamine at work.
That is dopamine.
purely
At work.
Was great.
And our previous house used to be our dream.
And uh dopamine exists when there's a when there's a gap.
Between
Where you are
And where you want to be with something. And when that gap closes, they often refer to that as the arrival fallacy. Yeah.
Right. Which is a really kind of what you're describing. You tell yourself.
Once I get there, then I'll be f then I'll be good.
Then that's enough.
And it's a fallacy because you know that's not true. As soon as you get to that whatever that mountain top is, there's another mountain.
Above it, it pushes you in a way that is not easy. Like nobody should pretend that you can just go do this today, but it pushes you into appreciating what you have now and finding your joy.
Finding your happiness.
through other things that don't have the arrival fallacy. Never have as I as a parent
Have I said, Oh, if only I had one more kid.
then then it then that would be great. There's no there's really no arrival fallacy for kids. You just kind of be like this is like I I I just appreciate being around you. I just appreciate all the and if if anything, it's the opposite. It's you look back and you're like
Oh, I I I miss when you were younger.
It was like, Oh, I'm I'm it's it's sad how fast you're growing up. If if anything, rather than like looking ahead and being like, Oh, it's gonna be better then, you're looking back.
And you're like, Oh, I wish I had appreciated that phase a little bit more. When you talked about um
One of the ways to get to early retirement and to live uh live a better life is to one way you have
um and basically want less things. I go back and forward a lot with this idea because there's like the monks who say that like happiness is
not wanting something. And then there's like the reality of life where
striving for things seems to make me happy. And everybody describes the journey as being the most enjoyable part. That's your purpose.
Yeah, so like what what how do how do I make sense of this that like the monks are telling me
Got.
Not to want anything'cause that's going to make me frustrated and unsatisfied. And then
My lived experiences striving for things with a group of people makes me
Seems to make me happy.
I think there's a dig there's a difference. It's a subtle difference, but between pursuing something that you genuinely enjoy doing, which for you is this and your your business and whatnot, versus being addicted to something that
Been chasing something that you don't have yet.
And so I imagine, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I imagine when you're doing this, you don't tell yourself
I need to work harder so that one day the podcast can be up here.
I I imagine, tell me if I'm wrong, but I imagine you come to work every day and you're like I d I like doing this today.
I like today. I liked yesterday, I'm gonna like tomorrow. And so you're not chasing a false goal.
You just actually enjoy doing it.
It's uh
I'm gonna be honest,'cause it's a useful position to take. It's it's a weird combination of both. So I say like
It's important for us to have some like goal. Yeah. But also live in the
And

that the goal doesn't actually matter. Right. And it's this weird dichotomy I live in, where it's like, if we become the biggest podcast in the world,
Like s
as a goal because it gives us something to chase. I get that. KPI and then like
put time frames against and get excited by and focus on, but then also living in a total realization that it's not gonna matter
At all. Nothing is gonna change in my life.
Zilch. What am I gonna get? A better black shirt. It's like here's the truth. The reason that we live in a world with a ton of technology and a ton of great businesses and great medicine and whatnot is because virtually everybody
For all of human history.
has woken up every morning and said, It's not enough.
I need more.
That's the fuel of progress.
And I don't want to live in a world where everyone wakes up and says
I have all I need.
'Cause then progress would stop that day.
We probably start declining that day. And so there is a paradox here of like
As a whole society.
I'm grateful and you should be grateful that people wake up unfulfilled.
Because we live in a way better world today than existed a hundred or two hundred years ago because of that. And the richest people in the world who I think are by and large
Tortured.
Psychologically.
Have created amazing technology.
That you and I benefit from.
And the reason we're doing this podcast is because people before us who are way wealthier than you and I woke up in the morning and said, This is not enough.
Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, all all those people, Elon Musk.
Mark Zuckerberg, they woke up and said, I don't care if I have a hundred billion dollars, it's not enough.
I need I need to create better technology.
And that's great. We benefit from that. And so there is a paradox here that what is all and that will never change.
Will never change.
So there's a paradox that like
The more
The better society becomes.
I think.
Like it's always gonna be the case that as a whole society we're gonna have a level of angst and anxiety.
And not be satisfied and say it's not enough.
At the individual level, though, I think you can recognize that game.
And contextualize it with your own life.
And say like look
I want more money.
I I want to sell more books and have a better career. I want to save more money.
I also have to go so far out of my way to put it into contact and say none of it's gonna matter unless I have
A higher purpose beyond that money. So I think you can aspire for more and still go out of your way.
to realize what the expectations gain is.
Even if you can't perfectly control it.
It's similar to like
I want to eat a good diet.
Of course.
I wanna eat healthy food.
I'm not gonna pretend for a second that I don't want Oreos and ice cream.'Cause they're great and they're always gonna taste great.
And so I'm never gonna get to a point where I say
I don't want a nicer house.
I'm I'm a human.
I and and and so are you, and so's everyone else. You're always gonna have those feelings, but you can recognize the game. You can recognize the voice that's talking to you.
And realize when that voice lies to you.
And when it's telling a story that is either false or just a little bit incomplete.
I think if you had to like
Say who is the happiest person?
In the world.
on average, not like naming a person, but if you had to describe the life of like who's the happiest person out there.
My guess is it's probably something close to a a middle class family that lives in a three bedroom house.
And has a a five year old car.
But they have
Amazing marriage.
Tons of friends.
They're in good health.
But they are by any other statistic ordinary.
And at the end of their life.
more than the people who are very, very successful. That
ordinary family is gonna look back.
when they're on their deathbed, when they're ninety five years old and be like
That was good.
That was a good time.
Do you think um this is a very strange question to ask, but do you think I could make myself like that?
No.
H here's the truth. I think on the nature nurture spectrum.
uh most of what we believe and the feelings that we have is
Forged a conception.
And it's just we're just wired that way.
And there's not much we can do about it. Some people have different aspects. Elon Musk was born wired very differently than you and I.
And there's nothing we can do about that.
So we are who we are.
But I think we can
put those feelings into a better context. Even if we can't control having those feelings, we can choose
We can put
tell ourselves a more complete story about why we're having those feelings.
And what
those aspirations will actually do to our happiness. So on this point of how to retire early.
The first one was about managing what you want. Is there anything else there that if if I'm trying to increase the probability that I get to retire early?
Um I should know in terms of tactics and strategies. Well, one of the things this is a little bit different than the po than the question that you asked, but one of the things that's important is that a lot of the people
who do retire early.
Who they tell themselves, I'm gonna save so much money and I'm gonna retire when I'm thirty two.
And then life's gonna be great. What actually happens is they retire at thirty two.
And six months later they're bored out of their mind.
And then realize that like what actually makes you happy is purpose. And for a lot of people
Their purpose can be their career.
Or they realize they had this idea that when they retired
it was just gonna be a great life. But the truth is all of their friends are working and don't have time.
to go play golf with them on Tuesday afternoon.
And so a lot of people who retire early end up
Going back, they realized it was not what it was meant, what it was made out to be. Because they had if the the formula is independence plus purpose, they gained independence, but they kind of lost their purpose.
And then the four and so it was incomplete. They didn't get what they wanted.
Well, what about passive income? People talk a lot about passive income. I had a friend DM me the other day and say, Steve, I've got some debts, et cetera, but if I could just figure out a way to create some passive income, then that should solve the problem.
And this term passive income has become like
Completely overused. Because for example, a lot of people when they talk about passive income, they're like, Oh, I'm gonna own real estate. I'm gonna have some rentals, and that's passive income. If you think owning a rental property is passive income.
you've never owned a rental property because there's nothing passive about it. It is a constant chain of broken toilets and leaky roofs and
tenants who don't pay you on time on and there's nothing passive. That's a full time job doing that.
And so
I heard someone say this recently, that there's two ways to get wealthier.
You can sacrifice more, or you can want less.
And that's it.
And
Gain passive income is not part of that equation. Sacrifice more. What does that mean?
Work harder.
Work work in a job that is that has a lot of downsides that might stress you out and requires you to wake up early and go to work and do some things that you don't want to do.
And spend time away from your kids in a way that you don't want to do?
Sacrifice more or want less.
Those are your two choices.

And I think that's important in the passive income debate because I I I don't think there's but there by and large is not a thing.

You know, you you put your money in a in a savings account that pays three percent interest.
Well you had to sacrifice to earn that money.
And to save that money. And to delay the gratification of that money.
I I I really think it's an ironclad formula. Sacrifice more or want less.
Those are your two options.
It's not nice.
But it's true.
Tell me which crypto to invest in to get that.
The answer is eat a better diet and exercise.
Nobody wants that.
They just say g what's the what's what's the secret.
Potion. What's a secret formula? And maybe now we have Osempics. Maybe now we have it's closer to a to a secret formula. But the truth is
What's the secret to better health?
Sacrifice more?
Because working out
And lifting weights and running is a sacrifice. It's not fun. It hurts.
That's why it's good.
Or want less, be happier with your imperfect body.
And I I I think it's a great analogy between health and and wealth.
Often the difference between a company succeeding or failing isn't down to its product or strategy. It's down to the people on the inside. After all, the definition of the word company is group of people. And some of the best companies in the world have been largely built by A players because I'll let you in on a little secret.
When you hire an A player, they go on to hire more A players and it perpetuates. The challenge is finding those first few A players. I found the majority of mine on LinkedIn who are a sponsor of this show. LinkedIn provides talent I could not define
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How much do I need to
Understand what's going on in the wider world and the economy.
In order to understand.
uh my own spending behaviors, what I should spend on, how to get wealthy, how to save. Is it important to have any understanding around the macro?'Cause most people that listen to the show
We'll probably hear these terms being spouted out on by political commentators like the Federal Reserve interest rate.
tariffs, et cetera. And
Uh should I understand any of this?
Sh does any of it really impact me in a way that matters to me, my family. I don't think it's necessary.
And you can point to
People I've written about in my books who had no financial education, no training, did not read the Wall Street Journal, could not tell you how the Federal Reserve works.
But they had control of their
Psychology.
Control of the motions.
They s they worked hard, they saved their money.
They invested it and that that's all you need. They you you you so the answer is you don't need to know how this works.
Just in the same way that in order to be healthy, you don't need a PhD in biology. You don't need to understand how cell division works in order to be in good shape. And I think it's the same for the economy. And
It can actually backfire for a lot of people that once they start.
Reading the Wall Street Journal.
and learning a bit about finance, it increases their confidence more than their ability.
So they're like, Oh, like I read the Wall Street Journal, I should go day trade crypto now.
Because I read a thing.
That teaches me how the Federal Reserve works.
So now I'm like I'm gonna it increases your confidence more than your skill.
And so I I I think I
It's important to be an informed citizen and the Federal Reserve impacts your life.
And terrorists impact her life.
So it's important to have some baseline understanding, but I think that's more about being an informed citizen and an informed voter than it is having financial skill.
Of all of my best friends, there's like five or six of them, the one that's most catch cash rich is the one that knows
the least about I think he's the most rich period to be honest. He's the one that knows the least about finance.
And he knows the least about investing. He knows the least about crypto. Aaron Powell Well what's the meme of like the the the tail spectrum of like the poor person drives a Toyota?
The middle person has a Porsche, BMW Mercedes, and the rich person goes back to Toyota.
Of like it's uh like whether you are very uneducated or extremely wise, you tend to end up.
And so I I I think I think it it does tend to be the truth that the people who do the best financially
either have like no financial education or extreme financial education. And it's the person in the middle
that has their confidence is increased much faster than their ability. And they're like, oh no, no, I I read this thing on Reddit.
that taught me about day trading. So now I'm gonna go
bet my entire net worth on this company I've never heard of. So funny. But so what is it that the the person on the left and right side of the spectrum are both doing that is the same?
Yeah.
So for anyone that can't see, I'll put it up on the screen, but it just shows
The bottom axis says net worth. And it basically says that people with low net worth buy a Toyota, people with like in the middle, that sort of middle percentage buy Lamborghinis and Porsche's and Jaguars. And then people with extremely high net worth buy Toyota's. And obviously it's not it's it it's not it's not exactly.
Perfectly true, but I think people like a lot of comedy, you see it like it's funny because people are like, Yes, that's true, that's how it works.
I think a lot of it is like
The richer you become.
you realize that
the big house and the fancy car didn't do anything for you.
It d it it didn't give you what you thought it was gonna give you.
And then so you're like
Look, I'm just gonna go back to utility. Like status didn't do it for me, so I'm gonna go back to utility. It can also be the case that if you're successful and rich,
you can gain your
Admiration and your attention.
Through
What the business that you built.
Or the intelligence that you have.
Or the
the friendship that you can offer others.
And therefore your desire to be like look at my car.
Look how cool my car is just goes down from there. The way I also interpret it is that
When you're
When you don't have much money or when you don't ha have a huge financial understanding like my friend, you end up playing the really boring
Money games? Yeah.
And when you have a huge financial understanding, you probably also sp spend a lot of time playing the borrowing money games. And by borrowing money games I mean
Index funds. Yeah.
And the S P five hundred versus like crypto.
Yeah.
I think you'll see that in investing that like
The absolute lay person
We'll invest in index funds.
And the extremely ex
Experienced Wall Street veteran.
We'll invest in index funds as well.
And it's a person in the middle that just has like a little bit of intelligence, a little bit of experience, a little bit of information that's trying as hard as they can to outperform the market.
I kinda learned that from reading your f your book, The Psychology of Money.
Because I I think like many people thought there was some trick or hack that this book was gonna teach me.
to figure out how to trade coins at the right time or to like do 4X trading or whatever. But ultimately the book if if there was one overarching lesson it taught me was that
Like patience.
And
Uh
More than
Boring investing.
Is is the way to get
to build my wealth over the long term. And that like all other strategies have
Hidden trade offs which lead you to being broke. Yeah.
I think there's a truth too that like
There's a there's an optimal level of intelligence that you want for investing.
Where you want to be smart enough to understand the basics.
But not so smart that the basics bore you.
A lot of people get so smart that they're like
Look, index funds, compound interest, like I'm this putting like it's too boring. Like I I need something really complex.
to satisfy the intelligence that I have.
And I I there's a sweet spot where
Like for me I'm just like oh index funds and compound interest. Like that's that's kind of as high as my intelligence goes here. But the I think the truth is.
That that is the best position to be in. Smart enough to understand the basics, but not so smart that they become boring to you. Because once they're boring to you, you're just like, ah, sweep those away. Let's try to
Pull some more levers here.

What is going on in the world at the moment, Morgan?
There's um it feels like people are more
divided than ever before. And I th feel like a lot of these subjects we talk about are somewhat interconnected. It feels like there's a rise in inequality. You probably know the numbers better than I do. Um I mean there's a graph in front of you there.
Which shows
I think it's is it wage growth? Yes.
Month wage growth.

And it appears to be going down.
Well, but this is growth. So in any given year, even if the growth is two percent, that's two percent higher than the previous year. So this is not wages over time. Now it is true.
If you look over a twenty five year period and you took the average American family.
Not everybody, but the median.
that their wages adjusted for inflation have gone up.
Not not up as much as people would want over twenty five years.
But that that they are better off than they were twenty five years ago. What is also true.
Is that the average median family
would probably disagree with that statement.
Even if it is true statistically.
For several reasons. One of which is
Their expectations have gone up.
Over the last twenty five years.
The other is even if
You're looking at average wages.
Average in in the when we talk about these statistics does not refer to any specific family. This is just a statistical number. Everyone spends their money differently. So if I told you
Hey average family.
You're richer than you were in the year two thousand.
They're like, Yeah, but I'm trying to put my kids
Through college and have you seen the price of college?
And I yeah, that might be true because the price of TVs has gone down, but have you seen the price of rent?
And housing. Like at the individual level, these statistics don't really mean that much and never have. I think a lot of economists get
into a problem with that when they're like well statistically X, Y, and Z has happened.
But ignoring the psychology and the individuality of like what's happening actually on the ground.

There's a there's just endless amount of nuance.
In here.
And so
I think it's it's always been true that we live in a world where over long periods of time
There's good economic growth. We become wealthier.
would be that we have bigger, better things, we have more income, we have better medicine.
It's equally true too that like there is always something legitimate.
And it's legitimate to complain about. It's not just like oh you should be more grateful.
It's a real thing.
And so when I look at a graph like this, actually what like if I was thinking just n
Like with my math head.
I'd be like, Oh, there's been quite a bit of growth over the last twenty five years.
Like the growth has been gone up and down, but it's growth.
You know, never in this chart is growth below
Zero.
I guess the question there is, are rich people getting richer and are the poor getting poorer?
It depends.
mean it's it's at the end of are rich are the rich getting richer, yes.
Are the poor getting poorer?
Statistically no.
Even adjusted for inflation.
I I mean it it it depends what period we're talking about here. There was about a twenty or thirty year period where the answer was unequivocally yes.
There was an interesting trend over the last ten years where
And
Percentage terms.
The the group of
Of wage earners who had the highest percentage growth were actually the low wage. That was true for uh two or three years after COVID, where if you were a low if you were a minimum wage worker,
Those were in percentage terms great years for you for getting wages. It's tapered off. So I the the answer to your question is the rich are getting.
Richer.
The poor, I think, are treading water by and large.
There's there's always people who are doing differently than that. But when
One group of society is getting richer.
treading water feels like you're falling.
And the
the specifics of how people spend their money. So even if on average adjusted for inflation their wages are flat.
But if your rent
skyrocketed, or you're trying to send your kids through college.
Or you have a long commute and you gotta put gas in your tank.
the individual level things can feel very, very different from what the statistics show.
And what role do you think this sort of wealth inequality
That is widening between the very, very top
And everybody else.
is playing in everything that we're seeing play out at the moment. Because in the UK it's almost like there's
We're on like the verge of riots, it seems, and I think th last last month there was millions of people in London protesting against
immigrants coming over on boats and society becoming more cul multicultural. I'm so fascinated by the subject because you know earlier on we said that unless you have immigration
In the Western world, you have population decline and population decline sucks. Because you have uh which the biggest problem right now throughout a lot of the world, at least one of the biggest perceived problems, is is immigration. Trevor Burrus And the same's playing out in the United States. If I go on X, although I know I know what X is.
It's people.
Uh, maybe it's just my algorithm, but it's people attacking
Immigrants and immigration and people that are brown and black and whatever else it might be. I'm wondering how all of this is intertwined and
And if it i if it is connected at all.
And you'll be
I think
As a
Amateur student of history.
Across cultures, all over the place, all through history.
Well you want to avoid more than anything.
Yeah.
is when probably a third of the population wakes up every morning and says, This isn't working.
That's the point at which it's gonna collapse from there is when enough people wake up in the morning and just have this feeling of like
Whatever this is, it's not working out for me.
You want to avoid that part.
And so like look, I'm a
I tend to be a a free markets guy. I'm a capitalist. I think people should be able to come become very wealthy, et cetera, et cetera.
You also don't want to get to a point where people become so wealthy.
That
A big chunk of society just wakes up every morning and says, Fuck this. This is not this is not gonna work out for me.
I think we've got we've e we're either there or precariously close to there.
In a lot of areas in the world. Social media that's always been the case, and social media makes it a hundred times worse than it's ever been.
Mm-hmm.
For example, you and I are recording this.
A day after Charlie Kirk was
assassinated yesterday.
And
There were
Who knows what number or percentage it was, but
And I think it was not hard on social media to find people who were celebrating it yesterday.
Now when Martin Luther King was assassinated.
Did those people exist too who celebrated assassination? Of course.
But because of social media, by and large, you did not hear from them unless you were part of that group. Whereas today,
virtually everybody yesterday.
saw people celebrating Charlie Kirk's assassination.
And so even if those feelings existed in the past.
They're much more apparent today. You see them today in a way that you that you did not before. So because of that, it's easy to say we're more divided today.
We're more extreme today.
We're more pessimistic than they are today. I think the nuance is that's not actually true. You're just more aware of it.
But those feelings always existed. They existed in the nineteen nineties, they existed in the nineteen fifties. It was just much easier to contain those. And for the average citizen who got their information from one newspaper.
one evening news program.
to feel like things were much more stable and in control and that people were much more uniform in their opinions than they w actually were.
Before we start recording, we were talking about the the the Charlie Kirk shooting and how
Social media's ability to
dehumanize other people at a r probably a faster rate than history.
Would have done.
is pretty remarkable. And you see a lot of that. You see a l a lot of it taking place on both sides. I think both sides describe each other as being like animals and inhumane and one side's calling the other side Nazis and then the other side is calling the other side
referring to them in in animal terms because of maybe the color of their skin or their behavior. We saw a lot of that when the
uh a heinous individual killed the young lady on the on the the train in in America. And the way
Like this person's the fucking the worst thing on planet earth.
Um
But the language was very
It was putting that person in a group of other people. Yes. And then making the whole group
A pack of animals. Right. Because in that situation too, we talked about this earlier. I I don't know that individual's name doesn't matter, but no one refers to him by his name. It's them.
It's they.
And that once you dehumanize any group of people like that, and this has been the case for all of human history, that ninety nine point nine percent of people cannot kill another human.
But they're perfectly fine killing.
Them.
They that group.
Once you dehumanize, you can do anything. And at the at a much lower level, everyone realizes this with road rage. I've had road rage.
That person cut me off. That son of a bitch hung my horn, flip my I I I don't I don't get too extreme with it.
But in things I would never do.
Eye to eye.
But once I'm looking at a car
Then it's it's there's no human there.
And my ability to have a level of anger.
is so much higher than it would be if we were just looking at I
I had this experience a couple years ago where
I was pulling into a gas station and I inadvertently cut somebody off.
It was an accident, but I totally cut them off.
And he honked.
And

Threw up his middle finger at me.
And um we since we pulled into the same gas station.
We were not like eye to eye.
And I walked over to him.
And I think he thought I was like
coming to like confront him.
And I put up my hands I said I just want to apologize. I didn't I didn't mean to cut you off. I'm so sorry.
I did it was not on purpose.
And he
I think he was so surprised and he was like, Wow, thank you. Thanks for like and we had this moment of like almost hugging of just like ah I'm so like I hope hope you have a great day. It was one of those of like once w in the moment when it was
You strip the humanity off it when it was two cars.
Each other both of us were like
Fuck you. Once we looked eye to eye, it was like, Oh, brother, like it's okay. It's okay. And I think that was just like for me, that was an individual example of what happens at society. When you strip the humanity off of it, we're capable of so much anger and hate eye to eye, we're like, Oh, that's all good. And I think all of us know somebody.
who we disagree with politically, regardless of what it might be.
And it's easy to be like oh that person's an idiot, they're stupid, they're ill informed.
And actually if you sit down and talk to them, you're like ah look, we might have some disagreements here, but it's all good. Cheers, let's have a good night.
Like eye to eye on the
the vast majority of people get along and get together.
But social media has turned all of life into road rage. Of all political opinions, extreme left, ex you know, pretty extreme right. And
At this table.
We get along.
Right.
I think uh so many people have said this in the last twenty four hours about Charlie Kirk.
One of the most common phrases I've heard was I didn't agree with everything he said.
But at least he was brave enough to have a conversation with people who he disagreed with. That was what he did, by and large, was going into schools and being like, I know you disagree with me. Let's talk.
And
And he turned it from road rage into a conversation between people. Even if you disagreed with him.
Yeah, I think he did it very right in that sense. And I think that's what's been why people
From
All over the spectrum.
Are devastated in the last twenty four hours. It was like he was one of the people who was doing it right. Even when you disagreed with them, he was having a conversation face to face.
And bring people together. I think that absolutely hits the nail on the head, which is
I think we you know, there's things that I absolutely don't agree with him on. But I actually think that's just completely beside the point because I want to live in a world where there's people that I disagree with. Like I actually wouldn't choose the world where everyone I encountered agreed with my opinions. There would be no intellectual growth, there'd be no understanding, there'd be no real progress. Um
But also, as you've highlighted, the way that Charlie Kirk went about it was he w went to Oxford University.
And went on the formalized debate panel. He went face to face and said, I know you disagree with me.
Less of a talk. Yeah. And I'll listen to what you he wasn't interrupting people all the time. He's hearing out their points and he was making it. Yeah.
And what is missing from all political dis discourse today.
It's that. It's I know you disagree.
But let's talk.
Let's try to be respectful about it.
And I can't think of anyone
U on either side.
Who who did that as consistently as he did.
Even if I disagree with them.
The idea that we're only gonna talk to people who we agree with is what causes all the problems. I don't understand these fucking people. I don't understand. It's much more comfortable.
Two
Surround yourself with people who agree with you.
than to accept the nuance of life.
And this is the problem with a lot of political media, is that
It creates much better content when people say this is right, this is wrong.
He's right, he's wrong to make it very explicit binary, black and white.
than it is to accept the truth, which is like it's complicated. I think I was like traumatized yesterday when I watched that when I saw the video of him being shot. It was this weird, like deep sense of like s like uh
I've not been able to articulate what it is, but it was
I don't know Charlie Kirk. I've never met him.
There was a time when, you know, we were potentially gonna have him on the show and we were trying to figure out like, you know, who to who to have here with him'cause he's such an unbelievable debater that he would have ran fucking rings around me.
At the end of the show, you'd be like you'd be like fine, I'm conservative. But there was something really surprising in how I felt when I when I both heard the news and saw
um him being shot. This young guy, family person, who was out debating, who had ideas that many people disagreed with, but was in a forum where he was having them challenged.
Could be
Executed in public.
On live stream.
In a way that his children are gonna watch that video when they grow up, probably multiple times.
And I was like, Oh god, what yeah. What does this say about the society we live in and where we're heading? You know, I know guns play a huge role in this, and we have to acknowledge that, because it's very, very unlikely that could have happened in the UK'cause no we we don't have guns there. Yeah.
So you could have thrown a rock or something, but you couldn't have killed the guy.
But
It it's almost a cr it feels like a crescendo of the moment.
Yeah. Where division and algorithms and now that you know X has gone a certain way and other platforms are going certain ways. And if you look at the stats, there's more social networks now that have more than twenty million active users than at any time in human history. It's gone up by fifty percent in recent times, which means we're becoming more splintered. And then if you if you understand the commercial models of these algorithms
Their commercial model is dependent on you spending more time there. So how do I get you to spend more time there? Well, I give you more of the things that are gonna trigger your amygdala.
Which is you know, your fear senses and
And uh the things that are gonna drive you know drive you into rage and debate and engagement and these and sharing things. And so I I don't know, I I I wonder if there's a way back from here.
I have a
an optimistic view. And this is not a forecast because I don't have a hundred percent faith in this.
But
There are so many endless examples in history when people
Discount.
how powerful cycles cycles can be.
And so my optimistic my hope it's not even a forecast, it's a hope is that
Fifteen or twenty years from now.
We look back at this era.
As when
Things bottomed politically.
from which we grew out of, we improved. And we're gonna look back and be like, Man, the
The twenty twenties.
У соба, ми а со дивиди.
But that was also a bottom that we came out of.
Like a generational bottom. And that sounds crazy today, but that's always been the case. If you and I were talking about the economy in the 1930s.
It would have been preposterous, completely insane to say
The nineteen fifties are gonna be.
the greatest, most unbound prosperity.
Middle class prospects we're ever gonna have. That would have seemed insane. If this was the 1970s and we just had a raft of political assassinations in the 60s,
John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy.
And then Richard Nixon uh is impeached and resigned for Watergate. It would have been completely insane for you and I to say.
Hey, do you know what?
The eighties and nineties are gonna be a a an era of political stability and political faith and trust in government.
But in insane. Like it's always when things are the lowest.
that you feel like you're never gonna recover.
But if you understand how cyclical things can be.
It's usually the case that looking back, you're like, Man, it was bad.
But looking back, that was the bottom.
And I have no idea if the bottom was yesterday or if it's gonna come ten years from now.
But
I would bet that the most likely scenario, whenever that bottom comes, is that we will look fifteen or twenty years back and be like, that was terrible.
And at that moment, everyone assumed it would go on forever, but looking back, that was actually a bottom when enough people came together and said,
Stop.
Stop. This is this is too much.
the forces of the we've gone too far in the other direction, we need to we need to come around from them. It is always impossible in real time.
to wrap your head around that.
And to forecast it. It's only looking back that you're like, Yes.
That was the b that that there was the bottom. And you can see things getting so bad. Trust in government is so low. Polarization is so high. That would not surprise me in the slightest if we look twenty years from now and be like, Oh, things things got better.
I understand that from an economic standpoint. I I struggle with it because of the presence of how we like because of the the medium in which we communicate now with social media. Yeah. And I was looking at the some of the stats here and it says in nineteen ninety four, only twenty percent of Americans held a very unfavorable view of the other party.
By twenty twenty two, that number has jumped to seventy two percent among Republicans and sixty three percent among de Democrats, according to P Research.
uh and this is particularly pronounced in the United States, um and and the UK and other parts of Europe.
In this report it says that social media.
Um and also cable news's role has
Only amplified echo chambers, making the divide sharper and more emotional.
And I I can't especially with AO and the way I go well, AI is gonna make those algorithms even smarter. Yeah.
uh understanding exactly what to show me to increase my engagement, therefore increase their advertising dollars. So like what what would be the the mechanism in this context?
I have no statistic or even strong thing to back this up with. My gut tells me that
The younger generation in particular.
is gonna be the one that looks at social media.
And looks at AI.
and recognizes the bullshit that can come out of it.
It's the older generation, it's the boomers today on social media who believe everything that they see.
I think that tends to be where a lot of the polarization comes from, not to blame everything on the older generation, but I think if you were to look at statistically who is the most gullible on social media of believing every post in their feed, it's the older generation. And it would not surprise me if the younger generation is much more attuned to how quickly you can be led astray.
Into some bullshit rabbit hole that is not reflective of how the broader world works.
I don't know if that's true or not, but if you were to ask me to articulate why we're gonna get around.
the social media bubbles. It would be that
The generations who have been doing this the longest are going to be the best at recognizing how dangerous it can be. You're a very smart guy and you you're someone that studies h has studied history and understands you know you wrote the book same as ever, which shows
A a guide to what doesn't change through history and how things can often stay the same. So this is a bit bit of a percular question for you, but in the wake of what happened to Charlie Kirk yesterday
His his public murder.
And all that's rising from that.
What should someone like me and you
You have
Public platforms who reach people on a daily basis.
Do to help.
I think we have to remind ourselves
Two things about social media. One is that it's been designed by the smartest people of our generation.
to deliver you in your feed not the best information, not the right information, basically what's going to give you the most
FOMO the most anxiety. What's gonna g like pull out the starkest reaction in you.
And the smartest people
of our generation have gone to work at Facebook and Google and whatever and TikTok.
to make an algorithm that's gonna give you that. That's gonna give you the the thing in your feed that's gonna make you go, Wow, the what? That's so out.
And two is that
Even when it's
It's not that, even when it is just people's thoughts.
People go on social media to perform.
They go on like they are trying to give you and I'm trying to do this on social media as well. I don't want to give you any random thought in my head.
I'm gonna specifically give you what I think is gonna be interesting and whatnot. So if we view social media as a proxy world, and I think everyone it kind of intuitively does, even if they when you say it out loud, you're like, no, of course it's not the real world.
But it's easy to assume that when I open up Twitter or Facebook or Instagram
I'm like, I I'm just I'm just seeing a window into the world. You're like, no, this is your people performing for you and the smartest minds in the world.
ordering that performance for what's gonna give you the most anxiety.
Are you optimistic about the
The Western economy, the US economy.
I can be optimistic long term and realistic about what growth means.
The reason we tend to have growth
In the economy and in the stock market.
Is
Because it's specifically because there's short-term chaos. So am I optimistic about the next thirty years? Absolutely. I know that my kids will be living a better material life than you and I are. They'll have better medicine, they'll have better technology, they'll have flying cars, whatever it is.
It does that
But I'm equally confident.
If not more confident that the path between now and then is gonna be chaos.
And that's not
Exclusive. That's not mutually exclusive. Like the fact that I know I'm extremely confident that there's gonna be a lot of growth.
And that it's gonna be a constant chain.
Of setback and suffering and misery between now and then. Trevor Burrus Is there anything that you see creating a setback? I mean, there's these new protagonists in the story, there's AI, there's
And the declining birth rates which is gonna have an impact on the population. Is there anything that you think is your most focus there's tariffs as well?
Um, there's Trump economics which can cause some
Yeah.
Instability.
Хисторикли та бігас риск ба.
has always been the thing that nobody's talking about. So when we sort you and I survey the world today.
We talk about exactly what you just said, tariffs, birth rate. People know about those things. There's never been a period when the biggest risk was something that was knowable. It's always something like.
Covid?
Nobody saw coming September eleventh.
Which nobody saw coming, the Great Depression, like all these things, Pearl Harbor, all these things that were not on people's radar that did the most damage.
And so it's not that I don't worry about tariffs or that I don't worry about
uh birth rates. I I do.
But I would guarantee you that the
the worst economic story of the next ten years, the biggest risk is something that you and I are not talking about whatsoever.
It's a risk that's gonna come completely out of the blue.
That is not in any newspaper.
It's not in any podcast.
That's gonna be the biggest risk.
Is there a particular chapter in the psychology of money which was your the book that sold it, I I thought I hear
Yeah.
Almost ten million copies. And had a profound impact on my life and and my family's life. Is there a particular story or chapter in this book that is your favorite?
I think
the I the chapter on reasonable versus rational.
Which to very quickly summarize it is.
Don't pretend like you are purely rational and you're a spreadsheet and your financial decisions have to like make perfect sense.
Everyone is a little bit flawed.
A little bit emotional.
different family situations, different goals. As long as your financial decisions are merely reasonable.

That's good.
And I think a lot of people for me and for a lot of people, they're like, oh, thank you for giving me permission because I have this quirky thing that I do with my money, and it doesn't make any sense.
But it's reasonable and but it makes sense for my personality. And like as long as it's reasonable, like don't be unreasonable.
But don't think that every one of your financial decisions has to add up perfectly in a spreadsheet.
You want to use money as a tool for a better life.
And there's many different ways to do that, a lot of which might make sense to me, but not make sense to you, or vice versa.
And so that's fine.
And so, uh I I think that to me of just like hey, this is not
an exercise in a spreadsheet where I'm just trying to make sure all the numbers add up.
I'm just trying to use money to uh be a little bit happier.
And to sleep better.
And to give myself my family a little bit of a better life.
Even if it doesn't always make sense, it's as a tool to give me a better life. If money is a tool for happiness, I guess you have to get really clear.
Which you talk about in in your new book, The Art of Spending Money, you have to get really clear on what your goal is. And I think most of us
Have never actually done an exercise to get clear on that. Yes.
Which is quite shocking. Jeff Bezos talks about this in a way that I think was really profound.
Where he's like he thought about
building Amazon with what he called the regret minimization framework.
Which was he envisioned himself.
Being ninety years old.
Or whatever, on his deathbed.
And looking back, and he said the goal for life.
was to be on your deathbed and have as f as few regrets as possible.
And he said,
If he started Amazon and it failed, he would not have regretted that.
But if he never tried to start it, he would regret it.
And so it was an easy of course he has to do it because he wants to have as few regrets as possible.
But I just think that very simple framework.
Of
the overarching goal in life. If you have like what is the base of the pyramid for how to good live a good life, you want to have as few regrets as possible.
Not take as few risks as you can.
Just have as few regrets as possible. I think what's hard is that people by and large
don't have a good concept of what they will regret.
It's it's easy to do'cause a lot of things kinda compound slowly. So
Uh
If you eat a poor diet or if you're like not treating your friends as well as you should, that's like a slow thing. You might regret it eventually, but you're gonna look back, but in real time you don't really understand what you're doing.
So to have a good sense of what you're gonna regret.
is a difficult thing, but to me that's the ultimate.
goal in life.
There is a a uh you know, I I I heard the story one time of a uh of a guy who his his his last words on his deathbed were
So much wasted time.
Those are his last words.
I remember thinking like that's that's that's as worse that's that's as bad as it comes.
To be on your deathbed and look back and be like, and what a
What a regret. Just filled with regrets.
Of the things you didn't do.
of the way that you treated people.
Of the risk that you didn't take.
And so I think that if there is an overarching philosophy, it's that. And I ask myself a lot, like, do I have a good sense of what I'm gonna regret?
And for every decision that I make.
Do I ask myself?
Will I regret.
Doing or not doing this thing.
Easier said than done, but something I think about a lot.
I think it's generally just hard for us to
appreciate that there will be a future self. I I was reading a study where they put people in these MRI scanners and then ask them to think about themselves.
And then themselves in ten years' time.
And the
When they thought about themselves a certain part of the brain let up. When they thought about a celebrity
or themselves in ten years time, a different part of the brain lit lit up. Which kind of

Our future self is a stranger. Yeah.
And so we act uh and I think this about the people that I sit here with, I think probably most of the people that I sit here with learning from, if you can like distin it down to why they're here, it's because they were able to think about themselves in ten years' time.
They were able to so they became an athlete and trained, or they became a CEO, or they became an expert in something. They were able to like think
And they got through the PhD and all the things that we're going to do.
There's a great quote from Jerry Seinfeld. He says, Self control is empathy with your future self.
Mm it's you are
making a decision to either do or not do something today.
Because you have respect for your future self.
And you care about your future self. You know there's going to be a Steven 10 years from now, and you want to do something today with compassion for that person 10 years from now.
I'm guessing kids help in some regard because they give you
A future.
To think about. Yeah right. Something that's gonna outlive you.
And you want to teach them something and
and m you know, push them into becoming someone that's gonna outlive you.
So you're you're having like by default you're thinking about something that's gonna outlive yourself.

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You talk in the book about try new things.
And
And why that is uh there's a chapter called Try Something New
And I think a lot of us actually get stuck in ruts in life and that ends up we get stuck in routine. It's weird how as we age we like m routine more, but intuitively everyone would say that routine makes them
Boring. Boring. Less less life less spontaneous. Less interesting. Less awe, less wonder.
I mean, there's a thing, uh people realise this that
summer vacation when you're ten years old.
Seems like it lasts forever. Yeah. But when you're an adult, summer goes by in three seconds. And you're like, What like why does why is time going faster? At least one of the theories for why it seems like time goes faster as you age is because when you're a child
Every day is something new. You're experiencing something for the first time. It's a constant chain of novelty. When you're an adult,
It's probably the same commute, going to the same job, living in the same house.
And one day blends into the next, and before you know it, ten years has passed.
And so the idea of like trying something new, I think is is is is important. The point I made in in the book about trying something new is
You don't know what your thing that you really are going to enjoy in life is. It might not be intuitive. Some people value travel.
By and large, I don't
Some people enjoy like spending a ton of money on wine.
By and large, I don't, but I do spend my money on things that you might not appreciate. Everybody's different. You can't
There's no formula for how to do it. You have to try a million different kinds of spending before you're like, Oh, I like this. I don't like that. I want to focus more on this. And it's not intuitive what that thing's gonna be.
My wife and I also had this realization in the last month.
Yeah.
So many people when they talk and think about money and spending, they're like, I want to travel.
I wanna I wanna have more money so I can travel.
I think by and large that's great. Travel is an amazing thing.
My wife and I realize that like I think we've done so much of it and because we have kids right now that we're like
I don't think we enjoy it that much.
And it wasn't till we were looking at our summer schedule.
That we're like, Okay, we got two more trips coming up.
That we were like
Uh
Really? And we realized
the best part of the last several trips that we've taken.
It's coming home.
And we were like, can we just admit
That maybe we shouldn't be doing this as much as we do. Even if society tells us that we should do it.
And everyone else. I travel a lot for work, so like my idea of a vacation is not
Not going on an airplane.
And
But you have to realize like everyone's unique and different. Like if travel is your thing
Or someone listening to this awesome. Please go do it.
We had to just admit to ourselves that at least at this phase of our life we want to do a little bit less of it. The idea that everyone's different is important. I think I mean I think exactly that. I think what underpin underpins much of your message here is this ability to cultivate self awareness. Yeah.
And I think a lot of what throws people off.
With money.
Is chasing
A lifestyle that is right for somebody else but not right for them.
And that it can be very a hard thing to do because you're like, Man, this person over here
He's working this hard.
And and she has this house and they're living this lifestyle, and looks like they're pretty happy. And then you try to do it and you're like, but I'm not happy. And the truth may have been that
Working that hard.
And spending money on that was right for that person, but it's not right for you.
That's completely the standard.
Jeff Bezos's
Ambition, Elon Musk's ambition, I think we'd I I'd I'd I'd drive us we'd drive us absolutely crazy. It's right for them, it might not be right for us.
And so when we view it as it worked for them, so I should do it too. No, no, no, it doesn't work like that. You have to figure it out for yourself.
But also the inverse, right?
It didn't work for them, so it won't work for me.
Is also incorrect. Right. I think it's immature.
For people to say,
I like this thing and therefore you should too.
Or the reverse. This didn't work for me and therefore nobody should do it. This is the whole work.
And this is what you see raging on LinkedIn is one group of people saying
that amount of work and sacrifice is toxic. You should do it. Or or the or which reverse. You have to hustle. You're lazy if you don't live the life that I do. And both sides are wrong.
Yes, it comes from a sense of immaturity that everyone else should
Enjoy life in the exact same way that I do.
I think there's a few psych psychological forces at play here. One is
If
You're looking at a bunch of people working really hard and you're not. It's in a weird way holding a mirror up to you and implicitly sort of like indirectly saying
That you're not
Enough. Yeah.
And then maybe on the other side there's some other force going the other way. But I think both sides are kinda like misunderstanding.
That everybody is not them.
Yes. I can
Pick apart.
Elements of your life.
I say, wow, Steven, this podcast is is this and he's got homes here and he's doing this.
But there's a million different components of your life in my life and everybody's life that are invisible.
And most people
It be because of self preservation or because they're trying to get ahead in life.
Will not
Disclose what the bad parts of their life are.
Of course. Everybody does this. I d uh I do this, you probably do it. Everyone does that.
Because either they don't want to admit them to themselves.
Or
They don't want to talk about it because they think other people are going to judge them for the bad parts of their life. So it's very easy to look at other people's lives.
And have a sense of like oh well theirs is better than mine.
Because all you can see is what they are advertising.
And uh and and and because of that, it's very easy to be jealous or envious of people.
And say if only I had their life, things would be better.
And part of it is good. It's a part of it's good for me to look at and be like, man, Steven's been so successful doing this kind of content. Maybe I should do that's motivation. But once I say
their life looks better than mine. And if only I had what they had, I would be happier. Is y is a very
Treacherous path.
treacherous path to go down. Jack is the producer on the show. He's he's done the show with me since the the very beginning of us launching on YouTube.
And so he understands the in intricacies of my life very well. He understands my business, he understands you know the the
what it takes and the trade offs.

So Jack.
Would you want my life?
Absolutely not. No hesitation there. There's there's no world where like I could even imagine being in your world.
The amount of
People that are
Bidding for your attention on a daily basis.
Is mind blowing to me.
The podcast is like such a huge part of your life.
But the fact that I've
barely hear from you on like a weekly basis.
can probably put into a little bit of perspective how much
You have on your plate.
I just like couldn't imagine having the
Magnifying glass on me that much.
Mm.
Th the whole world is kind of looking at me and thinking
Like has an opinion on you?
Mm-hmm.
And
You run lots of businesses, so you almost have to perform.
A little bit.
And I think I see the worst of you and I actually take that a huge compliment.
Because you can be yourself around me.
I remember the time when you had to schedule your lunch.
Oh, I still schedule my lunch. It doesn't happen but I schedule it. You schedule it'cause you like don't get time for your lunch?
Like you went out of here, you went to the toilet and
People are asking you questions.
In between going from here to the toilet.
It's stuff that needs to be asked, but it's that is your life.
That's the kind of thing that you've um
Gone into the
And
I don't know if that kind of answers your question. I could probably go on for a long, long time, but I've got a last question then. So the next question is, do you think that I
Do you think I'm happy in my life?
Uh yes. I don't think you're content. Mm-hmm.
I think you're happy, but I don't think you're content. Yeah.
What you mean by content? Like what do you mean by content?
You're always trying to chase the next thing.
And I'm not sure why. Like you could
so easily just do this podcast. And it would
do so well for you, like it does do so well for you.
uh you could spend all your time doing this and I think you're super happy when you do do this.
But then there's also other stuff that clearly makes you happy that you want to
Do
But then you'll come to me and you're like, We should start this new YouTube channel.
And I'm kinda like, Yeah, cool great idea.
But I don't know why you want that extra effort.
To your core, you're a businessman.
So you're constantly trying to build and scale.
But on like a personal reflection of how much
extra toll that takes on you. And also for Mal. I know your relationship with Mal you don't see her that much.
So I think that's quite
An interesting one. But yes, I do think you're happy.
But I don't think you're content.
And last question, what would you like from my life?
What would I like from your life? Yeah, so you said you wouldn't want my you wouldn't want my life.
Because and you talked about the downside.
Yeah, which element of my life would you like?
It's actually quite interesting because I was I think I was talking to Jem and Cosby about this last night. Your life is so engineered to be super
Efficient.
Yeah.
So you have someone books your cars for you, someone books your flights for you, you you basically
As far as I'm aware, I don't think you do much kind of
normal admin that I would do. I don't even pick what I eat. I like I get the surprise I walk out here and it's there and I go, Okay, well I'm having coffee today. And I think so much of like the
joys of what comes from life is the little messiness of life. And I think Morgan kind of touched on this at the start.
That simple kind of
family that just
They're not like super ambitious, but they're super happy. That messiness of life is kind of
There's so much like beauty in that.
would want from your life. I think on the surface I probably would like that stuff, but I understand and appreciate
The beauty of doing those.
I asked the question around um
Um do you think I'm happy? Because
Even though you heard all of that stuff and you go, Fuck me, this guy, like he he doesn't have much time and he's he's always working and like we took a toilet break, which p the audience probably won't know, but yeah, as I walked out of there
Two different team members came up to two different issues. They said, someone wants to come on the podcast tonight, I've got this huge meeting in New York City tonight with this major investor for four hours. That then they asked me in the hallway, they said, Do you want this major guest to come on the show tonight or to cancel this huge meeting with a And you have to make the decision in four seconds? Four seconds. So you you saw me sit down and go tell the team yes.
Which was me making that executive decision and I was on my phone for two and a half seconds trying to make the decision. But it also means that date night
is if impacted with my girlfriend who's a So like that that was a little representation of my life. And I
I um I asked Jack if he thinks I'm happy because my opinion
And I could be living in a delusion.
I um
Happy.
And I the way that I would

Is I'm not unhappy.
I don't have a
Unhappiness.
My guess too is that you if you said I'm gonna quit the podcast
Quit all this.
Close a business down.
You would
Be beside yourself with anxiety and depression.
And so it's less about like
Is doing this does doing this make you happy?
I think
the better answer is not doing this would make you miserable.
Yeah.
But that's who you are. And that's how and I again I'm so grateful that people like you exist because I get to benefit from
The sacrifices that you made.
It's not.
Yes, I I I I I get that.
But what from my perspective would be a sacrifice I get to benefit from. Because you make great content that I listen to and whatnot. And so I like living in a world where most people wake up in the morning and say,
This isn't enough.
And I I I think I do that too.
I want to write more books, better books.
And but if you don't have some capacity to say
Look, I have ambitions, I have goals that I want to achieve. I want to work hard to achieve those. I want to sacrifice to achieve those.
But I'm never gonna have a good life unless I can take a step back and be like, Man, like
Look what I have right now. Even if it's not that much.
There's a very good book written by a gerontologist named Carl Pilimer.
He wrote a book called Thirty Lessons for Living, where he interviewed a bunch of elderly
Americans that were like ninety to a hundred years old. And he just said
Tell me the secret to a good life. You've experienced a lot of life, time on you now.
And he he has a section where he says, Of the thousand people who he interviewed, not a single
Person.
looking back at their life said, I wish I made more money.
Not a single person said, I wish I would pick a career that paid more money.
Not one, but almost every single one of them.
Looking back at their life, said
I wish I was nicer to people. I wish I was more helpful to my friends. I wish I spent more time with my family. That was universal. So if you want to talk about like regrets, what are we most likely what are you and I most likely to regret when we're ninety? It's not making more money.
It's spending time with the people around us that we
Love and appreciate.
And sometimes it's because of a thought, but I find myself switching between these states of being like in a moment and a in in a mode of gratitude. So last night I did the Jimmy Farlin show here in New York, my team were there. It was this really wonderful moment. I my fr you know, I woke up this morning feeling incredibly grateful. Last night I was like listening to some of my favorite music, I felt incredibly happy. And then I know
that I'm gonna switch into the lack of contentment that Jack's referring to Happiness is always a five minute emotion. Yeah, and and like
Today I'm g I'm back to business. And it's like build, build, build, build, build. And then I have this moment last night where I was I was making the Instagram posters to announce that I've been on Jimmy Fallon and I noticed my girlfriend next to me in bed had fallen asleep. And this thought through my head all the time now probably from doing this podcast, which is exactly what you said, which is
I am gonna regret
No
spooning her and cuddling her while I have the chance, especially I think because Charlie Cock had just been shot and I'd seen the his family. Yeah. And maybe that's why it was front of mind for me. And I remember putting the phone down and thinking
The thing I'm gonna regret is not cuddling her.
Yeah.
And so I put the phone down and cuttled her.
And I so yeah, I I I I'm I'm strange I think because I I s I
flock between these states. And sometimes on an hourly basis, sometimes on a daily basis, sometimes on like a minute by minute basis. The fact that you're just merely aware of those states.
And the the false story that those states can tell you puts you way ahead of most people.
I think that I think to some extent
Th there there's a there's an interesting book called Ten Percent Happier and it's about meditation.
And the point the title came from
Everyone's like, Oh, can meditation change your life?
Yeah, and his point was like it can make you ten percent happier.
Like that's pretty cool. And I I think that's true for money as well of like can it completely change your life?
and turn you into a a much better person and way happier like
I kinda feel like no, but like it it it can make you ten, maybe twenty percent happier in life. I think that's that's probably right. But just being aware of its limitations, like
is a huge relief, I think, I think to be like, no, if you want a happier life, you're gonna have to find it through.
your purpose and your friends and your family and your health.
and your other philosophies of life that have nothing to do with money. It can help.
It can make you 10, 20, maybe 30% happier.
But
Understanding its limitations and what it's not gonna do for you is pretty important.

That lack of contentment I think I sometimes feel guilty about.
Because they sit with so many people, especially like people that are monks and such, and they tell you that one thing will make you
But I find myself as
Being one of those people that you described that constantly wants to chase and pursue and pursue. And I think that I do have like Am I supposed to feel guilty about that? Is that something like wrong with me? No.
I mean I think that's how humans have evolved is to
Because at the core of it is competition.
Like where you have that, I think drive everyone has that drive.
is not necessarily because you want
to build another business or build a uh grow your podcast.
It's competition with others.
who might be doing that better than you or who might take your place if you were to step back. That gives you the anxiety. I think that's what everything has as its core.
And that's why I like asking the question, if nobody was watching, what would you want to do?
If nobody
was watching your podcast.
Would you still want to do these interviews?
If nobody could see your house.
Would you still would would you buy a house that was as big as the one you did?
Sometimes the answer is yes. The answer might be yes to both of those questions, but it's an important question to ask of are you doing this because it actually fulfills you? Or because you are competing with other people and you think you're gaining their attention.
By doing these things. I think everyone who is answering honestly would say for most of the decisions in their life.
Especially the big ones.
The answer is
Both.
Yes.
So like
Choosing Harvard versus the other university, which might have been better, but it's Harvard, or buying the house where you bought it, or that watch that you bought, or the Apple Watch instead of the whatever. And signaling is important. You can't just discount it because
If you want
You know.

The right friends, the right spouse, the right employers. There's a signaling aspect. A college degree is signaling. It's not the education you obtained. It's you're showing in point, you're giving a signal to an employer that for four years I showed up and did the material and got the right answers. It's a it's signaling, signaling can be very, very important. It's not to discount it.
But
There's a right and a wrong kind of signaling. There's a right kind of like I'm I'm doing this. I'm dressing in a way and displaying myself and cutting my hair in a way that's gonna attract the right friends and the right
mates the right boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever it might be. There's also signaling of like
I'm gonna aspire.
To buy this car that's a huge pain in the ass.
And I actually hate driving, but I think strangers are gonna look at me and pay more attention to me. That's the wrong kind of signaling. I think this is the thing that both sides misunderstand in the debate is that someone who is a workaholic

Yeah. Absolutely.
No work or works one day a week,
can be happy. And this is like a really difficult concept for either side to understand about the other side. And that's why as well I asked the question about Jack, like do you think I'm happy? Because Jack would know that if I'm like if I walk out of here and he sees me as this depressed person who never smiles, never laughs, and has no joy in my life, doesn't have mo you know, then
I would very much fit the stereotype of like the tortured workholic or whatever, but
It's uh
Yeah, it's surprising.
It's surprising.
I think we all just want contentment. So like we I think we get into a lot of trouble when we chase happiness when what we're actually going for is contentment. We actually just want to get to an area where we're like,
I'm good.
I'm all set.
What's the most important thing?
Or the most interesting thing in your book that you can remember.
That we didn't talk about that maybe we should have talked about.
I think the relationship between money and kids is is an is an interesting one where every parent wants to use their hard work.
what money they might have. It doesn't have to be a ton, you don't have to be rich, but they want to use their hard work in order to give their kids a better life.
When a lot of times what the kid needs to do is learn on their own.
And they're gonna learn vicariously the values that you have.
About money.
They're gonna learn just by watching.
You don't need to sit your kids down and say, Let me teach you how to budget.
Let me teach you how to save. Let me teach you how to invest. They're gonna figure they're gonna watch you and figure it out. And so you have to just lead by example.
With those kids. You cannot lecture values into them.
They're just gonna watch how you spend, what you value.
How you save, how you judge other people and talk about other people, and they're gonna form a philosophy of money based off of that.

I often think about money in terms of like attachment styles. You know, in like dating psychology and romance they talk about
anxious, avoidant, um
And then the
What's the middle person called? They're like a
Basically neutral. But I think I had an avoidant
Money.
Attachment style.
Money was
the th like the third parent in my household.
And
I learnt that money

Come around as much as we would like.
that it's really why we argue in the household.
That it's the reason why I am embarrassed when we pull up in that terrible car and I try and get my I hope the traffic lights change in a certain way so that I can be dropped off further away from the school so no one sees me. Like my relationship with money was established at such a young age and it was it's uh almost like a I had like a
unhealthy rel like they say relationship, yeah, like an attachment style to it. Um

Is that a useful frame to think through?
That you have this
Yeah, like this.
But
Romantic
esque relationship with this thing. And in order to change that you need to
Unlearn the lessons.
I think a lot of like the lessons that we learn about money when we're younger.
Or because, like I said earlier, it's because you when you're young, particularly you're a teenager, you're and you're you're
early twenties, most people in that situation have very little
other skills to offer the world. Humor, intelligence. Some some people more than others, but
in that situation, you're always going to gravitate towards.
If only I had a nicer car when I was being dropped off at school, then they would pay attention to me. But the truth is, if you are the funniest kid in class.
It doesn't matter if you're dropped off in a dull junky car. People still respect you because they're like, Man, he's a star of the football team. Like it's hilarious. It doesn't matter what kind of car he's driving. You gain your attention and your respect from something else. But if you not
the star football player. If you're not funny, if you have nothing else to offer, then you seek your admiration through
Oh, he's dropped off in an escalade. He's cool.
That's where you want your attention to come from.
Is there anything else we should have talked about that we haven't talked about, Morgan?
for people that are trying to get a grip of their life.
Be happy.
Make better money choices.
To me, like the common denominator between all three of those books that you're holding.
is the idea that we talked about quite a bit.
on all the shows we've done together, which is that there is no formula for it. And that's very disheartening for a lot of people to hear. There's no formula for here's what I want you to go out and do.
Which is a lot of what people want.
out of content.
Whether it's a book or a podcast, like just tell me what to do.
And the answer is like I I I can't because I don't know you and you don't know me. We're all different.
But I think that's actually the biggest like relief. That's actually the best news.
That
You don't have to follow somebody else's playbook.
You can do it your own way.
And it's easier to do it your own way when you come to terms with the fact that
nobody is paying as much attention to you as they think they are.
You can do it your own way, free of
Judgment.
And other people
you know, making fun of you or judging how you're living life because they're too busy worrying about themselves.
You have to figure out what works for you.
And do it. And that's as close as we can get as a formula for living a better life. It's funny, because the book is called The Art of Spending Money, but much of the three line throughout the book is really about happiness. And I guess that's really what money is for many people.
A tool. A tool to become happy.
I remember when I interviewed Mo Gordon, he wrote a book um about happiness. He said to me a line that's always stayed with me, he said, Happiness is when your expectations of how your life is supposed to be going are met. Yes. And so with through that lens I look at everything. I look at like
The food that you're given in a restaurant. And if you expected it to be this and it doesn't come like that, there's unhappiness, even if it's like a five star A5 wagyu steak or whatever.
Um and then your relationships, all of my arguments I've ever had with my girlfriend all stem back to unmet expectations. I was saying if you if you ride the Amtrak train from like New York to Washington, DC, on every train they have what's called the quiet car.
And in the quiet car, you're not supposed to talk at anything above a whisper. No phone calls, no talk with your friends. It's the quiet car.
And people go there for peace and quiet and serenity.
And the irony is that people are so
Uptight in there. Because if if they hear one peep out of everyone, they're like, Well, just shut up, we're in the quiet, quiet. They're so frustrated about it because your expectation
Is
I'm gonna get quiet. And if it's anything other than quiet, you lose your mind.
And it's like at that point, that's when your high expectations are actually working against you.
And people are actually calmer in the normal car where there's chaos all around them because that's what they expect.
So that's the unhappiness car. Right. Your like your expectations are a debt that has to be repaid.

That gives us a controllable element to our happiness, doesn't it?
What's your expectations.
than things like what the economy of the stock market's gonna do next.
Like I have no con nobody has any control of what the stock market's gonna do next.
But you have can you do have more control over your expectations of how much money do you expect to make next week? What do you expect out of the stock market? What do you expect out of your career? What do you expect out of your spouse? Like that is more in your control than influencing other people's behavior.
And this is probably why all these Eastern traditions talk about gratitude,'cause gratitude is the very realisation that expectations I once had are currently being met.
Yeah. And it just even when you start to think about dreams you once had that you are now living out
For me, it makes you feel yeah, that feeling of contentment. It makes me feel really, really good inside. So like even yesterday where I took a moment and I was on the Jimmy Fallon channel, it's like this crazy thing to me that I could never have imagined someone like me doing. And it took a minute to just like think about
How far beyond my expectations.
This stuff was.
It if you feel overwhelmingly good about it, you feel like the truth was relative
If you just thought about yesterday.
Yeah. You expected to go on the Jimmy Fallon show. You that that that that met your expectations for the day. If you looked at your calendar for the day, it was I need to go to Jimmy Fallon, I need to perform, I need to say the right things. But over the longer scope, that's off the charts of your expectations. And that's the zooming out is where we see.
the gratitude, you know, fills us up. Right.
And it's it's very difficult.
To say this without sounding ridiculous, but you can even zoom out and be like, God, I'm so grateful to live in a world with antibiotics. Like it sounds crazy because we expect them.
Whenever we take penicillin, we're like, Yeah, like it's just a thing that exists. But could you imagine living in a world without that?
as ninety-nine percent of humanity did before us. Like it's it's impossible to think of like the most basic things that we take advantage of. But that's where Gratu like you have to zoom out.
to become more grateful of these things. And you're not gonna be content. You can
exercise that level of gratitude. You said something uh earlier which dovetails into this, where you said that um
At different levels, people will aspire. The billionaire wants two billion. And I was reading a study many years ago that said roughly all the way up the income wealth spectrum people want like three times more than they have. Two to three times is what seems like the amount that's gonna keep you happy. So if you have ten thousand dollars, people are like
Once I have twenty.
Then I'll be good.
If you have twenty million dollars, people are like
Ah, forty seems like the right amount. It's always two or three times what you have. And that's just the intentional creation of an expectation gap.
It's like
creating misery for yourself. Yes. It's this idea that like if only I had a little bit more money, then these problems that I have, this anxiety, this unfilled hole that I have will finally be filled.
And it's a it's a lie we tell ourselves, of course.
And everyone listening right now has that. Everyone has a number in your head where you think if I got there
Then it'd be good. I I have that. You have that. We all do.
And if you and I have met that number.
Previous versions of that number?
It's the same thing. We're like
Okay, but double would be great.
That will that would be awesome. I met someone the other day.
Whose income, annual income, is almost exactly 2X mine. We were being very open with you, he's a good friend of mine.
And the instant feeling I had, I didn't say this, but the instant feeling I had is like
Okay, if I had that, everything would be right. And it's ups it's absurd. We do that all day. And I'm sure if my friend met someone whose income was two X of his, he would be like
That's the level. That's the one. Because your your overheads go up, but then you're
competition comparison group also increases. So you're now

Different class of comparison.
Like yeah, you're y like i when you bought that new house you just bought, that must have moved you to a new neighborhood.
And there's uh houses in the neighborhood nicer than ours. Yes. And my wife and I talk about that. It's it's absurd. Now I I think I'm I think because I write about this stuff.
I think I'm a little bit better at catching myself in those moments, but I won't pretend that I don't have those moments. They're almost unavoidable. What has worked for you? Is there anything that has actually worked for you?
In terms of
Detaching you from comparison and what people think. Is there is anything at all that's worked. I like this term humble bubble. I want to live in a humble bubble.
It has to be humble because I I don't want to live in a bubble where I I don't have empathy for other people.
I wanna take in the experience of others so I can try to understand the world that I live in. But I wanna live in a bubble.
In the sense of like
I want my expectations.
Not to leave my own house.
Easier said than done.
But when my expectations don't m leave my own house, I'm like, I want good health for myself. I want happy kids. I want a good marriage.
And those things don't leave my roof.
Once my expectations leave
My bubble. My once once once they expand outside of my house, I'm like, Oh, look at his house. I want it's like I just want to
I always think about
That humble bubble.

The only thing that's gonna make me happy exists underneath my roof.
And I know that.
And as soon as my aspirations are for are are leave that, I know it's just gonna spin out of control.
I I I try to think about that a lot. And as I mentioned before, the idea of if nobody was watching, what would I care about?
That's that's the most powerful exercise to me.
If nobody could see anything that I was doing.
What h how would I choose to live?
I've always wanted to counter
um this point with some thinking, which is
But
If I put myself in a higher status position, I'm gonna get more opportunities, which means more money, which is then gonna better allow me
to focus on utility. Not that it that's how it it ever plays out for anybody. Yeah. But the thinking is well actually status does equal revenue.
Yeah. In a lot of the world. And revenue can give you independents. Yeah. The the
I think that's right.
I think it to many extents that's been my goal.
How can I be successful in my career?
So that I can make enough money.
to not have to work in the career anymore. Like it's not that stark, but it's kind of like that. The flaw in it.
Is that
I like writing. You like podcasting.
And so if we get more successful, like I I'm not I'm not chasing success so that I can stop doing what I'm doing. I just want to do things that I enjoy.
We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next, as you know. Um
Do you have major regrets in life?
Then it says they prove no real purpose.
Do you still have regrets?
Nothing huge.
There are some regrets.
I was thinking about this the other day, my wife and I, we have two kids.
Or done having kids. Mm-hmm.

What would have life been like if we had four kids?
Three kids. If we've done that, like
Each both of my kids have
Given me so much
Meaning and purpose.
And I wonder what a life would have been like if it had said fed more.
And I I can't imagine having just one kid. I can't imagine just having zero kids.
But there's an alternative life in which I had four or five kids. And you know, life gets crazy at that point. And that's not a regret.
But you realize like once you've kinda closed that door.
on your life. You're like, man, what would have life been if I had done it?
If I had done it differently.
Because it's given me more purpose than anything that I ever could have imagined.
And I could have had more.
And maybe it would have been worse.
But I I I wonder what that would have been. I think it's not until you've we've
Chosen to close that door, that chapter of our life?
That were like, Man, what if we had what if I had done it a little bit differently? Trevor Burrus Do you wish you had frozen embryos?
No. Because that would have kept the door open theoretically.
Not really, because I think there is a point of like
You want you need youthful energy to be a parent.
I I I couldn't imagine having a newborn.
At fifty or sixty.
Yeah, I I I think you need the energy of a 30-year-old or 25 or a 30-year-old to do that. And it's not a regret because I'm very satisfied with the the family that I have now.
It's one of those things of like
You realize you're you're there's an infinite number of paths your life can go down.
And we could have had no kids, we could have had four kids.
We chose this path, but it's one of just one it's one of multiple paths that it could have gone down.
Morgan, thank you.
Uh thank you for doing what you do. You're my favorite author of all time.
And I think I've told you this before, but it's the way that you write. I find it so unbelievably engaging. You the message within your book is a profound one. All of your books are pr are profound ones, but it's actually the way that you tell the stories. And if anybody's listened to you speak today, they'll understand exactly what I mean. Your books are a a an im a mirror of that.
Um, The Psychology of Money, as I told you before, is the book that changed my financial life. The one book my brother, who's a very smart person, told me to re to read. And there's no wonder that it's one of the best selling books of all time. I think it might be the best selling book of all time in its category. Um and your new book, The Art of Spending, continues on the same
Trend incredibly accessible, incredibly engaging, incredibly human, but within there there's a profound lesson that stands the chance of ch changing our lives for the better. So I highly recommend everybody goes and gets this book, The Art of Spending Money, which comes out
Tomorrow.
October seventh.
October seventh. So I'm gonna link it below for anybody that wants to grab a copy of this book. And if you're someone that does want a happier life, it is a book about uh spending, but it's also more broadly a book about happiness and regret and
It tells stories that allow you to make better decisions in your life and it's through stories, not through frameworks alone or data.
that I think we're most influenced. And you can probably relate to this if you're listening to this. You probably have heard stats before. You probably know you should save. But it's sometimes hearing real stories from real people
That stick into amygdala and create that behavioral change. And that's exactly how Morgan writes. He writes through the context of great stories that stand the chance of changing your life. So it's a wonderful, wonderful book to read and I highly recommend you do.
Thanks a lot for having me. Thank you so much, Morgan. Hope to see you again sometime soon. Likewise.