what matters is not necessarily what are the best returns that you can earn this year that's what everyone chases but that's not what matters what matters is what are the best returns that you can sustain for the longest period of time i feel like i could rude to where i know i could be what i want to from at all then in like a days off on a road less travel never let's just get right into it morgan what's going on man i'm happy you're here i'm happy to be here thanks for having guys i read the book your your first big hit psychology of money a while ago was at four years ago about yep yeah and then this new one just came out was it called same as ever that's right yeah man and people are i the good reads reviews are higher on the most recent one i think in the first one so congratulations no thanks it's always it's always i think with all books and all articles this is probably true for podcast too you really never know what's gonna work and what's not and even i i've been a writer for seventeen years and i still really don't know when i published something a blog or a book how it's gonna be received and maybe you get a little bit better around the edges but it's always like you just have to birth it into the world and then and then just step back and watch it's gonna do whatever it's gonna do well you told me that the first version of psychology of money you said that you the first print run was i think five thousand copies is that right so you guys you thought you know five thousand copies is is the right amount you sold over four million now so i think that that proves your point of you don't really know till you know but that is cut that number is kind of amazing dude like over four million books sold your i don't know in the top point o one percent or something of of authors you know that i don't know how much to make per book but i think that means you've made like over ten million dollars as an author on a successful book that's so hard to do that's so rare and you know congrats steve for doing that thanks sean yeah i mean i was tell someone the other day i think the closest analogy to the book industry is probably professional sports where ninety nine point nine percent of high school basketball players will never make the nba i don't know ninety nine point nine nine whatever it is but but then you have a couple of of lebron james and michael jordan's who go on to make a billion dollars doing it and i i don't know this to be a hundred percent sure but adding up my head i'm pretty sure there are more billionaire authors and there are billionaire athletes even in a world in which ninety nine point nine percent of books will sell you know a couple thousand copies or or less if that but then you have jk k rowling and dave cli and james patterson who are more have made over a billion dollars writing so it's just like extremely tail driven in the success i wanna ask you about one of your philosophies because you're very interested to me you have a philosophy it's very easy to sell a philosophy of more right people do that all the time and in fact even our podcast i would say falls into the bucket of the philosophy of more many times when we say no small boy stuff right saying big big play big go for it don't sit around and wait don't don't be fearful right so more more action more ambition or whatever that's that's one philosophy a lot of people fall into and some people go even crazy right david go is like work harder or gary alex mo these guys are like just grind harder so people often have the philosophy of more and some people marie condo and others have the philosophy of way less you need less minimalism you know es just become a a a sort of a a a zen person go whatever get those vans and just like travel around the world so it's like there's the philosophy feel less and you're in the middle which usually is the the dead zone for content you're in the middle where you're like no just have enough right big moderation and i can't believe you've got moderation to sell i'm gonna read you a quote and then i want you to talk about this so you said more than i want big returns i wanna be financially un if i'm un break i think i'll actually get the biggest returns because i'll be able to stick around long enough for the compounding to work wonders i loved that quote and i in general i find this moderation thing interesting tell me about that this is where like moderation in finance is actually gonna lead to the biggest returns because what matters is not necessarily what are the best returns that you can earn this year that's what everyone chases but that's not what matters what matters is what are the best returns that you can sustain for the longest period of time and so this is why like on an annual basis i am i strive for average returns in my index funds by design why do i do it because that's gonna give me the endurance to hold them for fifty years and if you can earn average returns for fifty years you're gonna end up in the top one percent of all investors and you do it with zero effort what's average in the in the us stock market six percent real six and a half percent real after inflation is what's been if you can earn six and a half percent returns after inflation for fifty years it's it i mean you you can run the calculations of it it it it is it's gonna achieve every it's it's d wealth it'll make your great grandchildren wealthy and so that's this and you can do that with zero effort now look past past performance not a negative there's a nuclear war so you can come up with all these scenarios in which it's not gonna work out you can come up with scenarios in which the economic conditions in the last hundred years are not gonna replicate for the next hundred years okay all those aside earning average returns for an above average period of time is way more lucrative than trying to earn superior returns for a shorter period of time like as always i think it's so counterintuitive the intuition for everyone including educated professional investors is how do i earn the highest returns this year and like it's like of course it's like how could that be wrong it's like no if you just average for a long period of time you that's the winner pi code the big bond fund they had this phrase that i love they called it strategic mediocrity where in any given year they were never gonna be in the top half against their peers but in every decade they'd always be in the top d si because the peers that beat them in any given year get washed out and i think that i think it applies to a lot of things and it applies to a lot of businesses it applies to relationships and marriages of like you don't need to be a superhero if you're just good for a long period of time that's how compounding works its magic that that thing you just said was excellent i i love that so you said i want average returns for an above above average number of years rather than superior returns for a short period of time or you know i you know i in any given year i'm not trying to be in the top i i'm trying to you know sort of fifty percent but if i do that for thirty years i'll be in the top ten percent it's so true in the kind of like slow steady he wins the race i think you had a stat that like if warren buffett has i don't know what it is like let's say eighty five billion dollars net worth like eighty one billion of those eighty five came after his sixty fifth birthday right and i think he said something like if if warren had just retired when he was sixty nobody would even talk about him because the competition like like obviously he is a great investor of course but the whole secret what's literally ninety nine percent of his wealth is that he's been a great investor for eighty years that's what he started investing when he was eleven and he's ninety three today still going as as as as hard as ever and that's where all the money comes from and yes like so his average returns are are twenty percent per year which which is phenomenal of course but if you earn twenty percent per year for twenty years it's it's really good you're in twenty percent a year for forty years it's great you're in twenty percent a year for eighty years you're worth a hundred billion dollars like that that that's where all the returns come from did you hear this sam they're giving that shirt away at buffett give it away this year at the berkshire conference just hard as ever still going hard as ever is that real are you being serious oh be hilarious dude but we joke about or buffett where he talks about a you know like i forget the how he phrases it but he talks about like the the you know it's all about the future it's all about the future and we were like dude ninety three like there is no future like bail and enjoy life and you could argue like well he's he likes what he does so you know it's cool he's enjoying life but i've always like when i think about long term stuff i'll like map up my life and i'm like man like if i only live to be eighty i only have you know forty or something summer's left like i don't i don't know if i wanna be i'm not willing to pay the price of if that's what's considered great is doing thirty year twenty twenty percent returns for eighty years i'm not willing to pay that price because life's too short and when i think about like what it requires to be one of one to be one of the greats that's what freaks me out is i don't wanna be that old and not have enjoyed it you know that's why it's like the con converse to all this is bill perkins book die with zero of like spend it while you're here enjoy it while you're here because when you're gone it's it's pointless you what i mean yeah yeah now that i think i there's a couple i think i i agree with every word you said particularly for ordinary people like us i do think buffett dna is just he gets more pleasure from anything in life the the most pleasure he gets is from compounding there's nothing that makes him happier the other thing is even though he's worth a hundred billion dollars today he's given away a hundred billion already and and with with with the rest of his net worth fact you know go into the bill melinda gates foundation i i imagine i don't know this to be true but i imagine when he when he lays in bed pondering his life he's like i'm i i i did i i i put my skill to use and i'm gonna give away a quarter of a trillion dollars for the betterment of society was just in omaha couple months ago where he's lived his entire life and in downtown omaha one of the tallest buildings says the buffett center for cancer research or some something like that i imagine when he drives past that and this is the building that he drove past when he was five years old because i'm a ridiculous amount of pride and pleasure and so i actually think if if he were on his deathbed tomorrow charlie mu just died last month i think he would look back and say like i i i live the best life that i could have it wasn't perfect by any means but i i i think there is a difference between the bill perkins philosophy which is true for ninety nine percent of people and then there's one percent of people who actually get so much pleasure out of compounding and thinking about what that money's is gonna do to society after they die dude there's this crazy story about buffett where his daughter had just had a baby and she's living in a shit apartment and she in a mutual friend of warren and the daughter went it was actually the ceo of washington to post went to the house and was like warn her kitchen sucks man and so the daughter eventually goes to warn and goes hey can i get like a twenty thousand dollar loan in order to redo my kitchen and he was like i just go to the bank and so she eventually goes to the bank and then a few months later the the ceo of washington post goes back to her house and the daughter's sitting in bed but she has a really small tv where she would sit and nurse her child in front of and washington post like he goes to warrant goes warrant give her five hundred bucks for a new tv man she could barely see this tv and she's in bed like eight hours today or can you just give her a new tv and warm was like no compounding is more important for that five hundred dollar tv i can't i'm not gonna take the money out and so catherine a ceo of washington post ended up buying her a five hundred dollar tv but that's how like tight this guy was about following his code which i guess i appreciate that someone has a code but that ain't that ain't my code wait so warren buffett is just an asshole is that the store is this a real story because i hate walmart but well yeah so warren buffett gets he gets a pass for having this all shu attitude but he's definitely an asshole he's definitely an asshole depending on how you define asshole i would define him as a wonderful of a what do i say all great men are also bad men the way he handled this his family i think was was not wonderful the way he handled business associates was wonderful so you know like it's there's trade off so being great i think i think he as someone like i have so much respect and admiration and reverence for him but i would also put him in the camp to someone who was like i'm so glad he exists but i don't think i would want that for my own life which is not a criticism against his life it's just like to each their own and let's not pretend that everyone should want the life of the five standard deviation success it's like there's a cost to all of that i just trying to imagine like his daughter just like you know at the bus stop trying to get a bus ride to where she's going and looking up at the buffet cancer research center and just being like goddamn god damn and there's there's some other parts of the story buffett first wife susie you know had billions of dollars of her own and she was much more free willing with with money so i think that the beloved children and they did just fine but yeah there's there's plenty of stories about warren and he always described to as he was like capital is my tool i'm not gonna give like these are the tools of my business is how i make money i'm not gonna be willy nilly with it and even when buffett was in his twenties when he was a kid is back in the fifties he was already worth tens of millions of dollars in the when that was real money in the fifties and you could easily imagine a world in which he's worth the equivalent of a hundred million dollars when he's thirty years old or whatever it was and i wouldn't be like you you need to give all this away you're never gonna be able to spend this and his philosophy was like his philosophy has always been people in the future will be just as needy as people are today so if i have an above average ability to compound it it actually makes sense for me to hold on to this money for as long as i can before i give it away which i think is actually pretty rational you you set a few things that i thought were contradictory in in different interviews that i watch the and i think in the book i i forget i'm mixing up the book and interviews that i watch but you talk about financial goals and you're like i don't look at i don't look at my portfolio i i think you said i don't set goals or at least that's survived that i got in an interview but then i've also read a little bit where you do have some type of goals so for for financial goals do you like have a number in your oh sorry i remember what it was you said whenever you hit your goal you're always gonna double it therefore i don't have goals i think that's what you said it's such a the the the the reason it's hard me the answer is that is sure i've said things that are contradictory because i like everyone else it's like it depends depends on i'm trying to call you out no no no depends on but i'm probably the the mood that i'm in that day do i if i'm sitting here today i think do my wife and i have financial goals not really it's not like oh we're trying to hit x and once we hit x we're gonna go by why like not really but i like everyone else think about like oh if my income stays the same we'll have this much money what kind of life could we live with that much money and one thing to like we have two young kids and we are pretty hell bent on not spoiling them they live in amazing life and we live in a great house they'll have a great education they'll live the top point zero one percent of lives but we don't wanna raise spoiled little prick and because of that we often that we often when we have goals it's not like oh how can we buy a a bigger house another house nicer cars it's kinda like we wanna live a good but not extravagant at life because we don't wanna spoil our kids but like even that sometimes like i can talk to other people who are like no actually you can live the big high life without spoiling your kids here's how to do it so i i i feel like i say like i think a lot of the contradiction come from humility of just like i i i really figured it out yet for myself i tend to not have goals for years i had a goal of once my net worth is ex i'm not gonna work much anymore because i could easily live for the rest of my life off of that net worth and i've exceeded that number and i'm working i'm working harder than ever but i don't i don't regret that at all maybe that is some version of moving the goal post but i think more of it is after i hit some level of financial independence after i wrote books it was like okay i'm only gonna do the work that i enjoy now and it's not really work it's just like i really enjoy writing these books i only speak at conferences that in cities that i want to go to it doesn't feel like work and i i don't think i really understood that ten years ago ten years ago work was by and large and means to an ends i need to do this to feed my family and now that i've reached kind of the artistic level i'm like oh i wanna keep doing this forever and in that world goals kinda go out the window well we've like interviewed a bunch of i mean we've had we have a bunch of wealthy friends we've had a bunch of people on here i'm you're like a financial historian so you've like read about all these people you also know a lot of them and you're written about them and you probably run even a more elite circle than we do but a question that i've always wondered is is there a threshold where i'm not gonna worry anymore so far i've not found that threshold then we had scott gallo on here recently and he was like i'm worth like over a hundred million liquid and i still freak out have you found any type of thresholds to where the average person changes where they feel more relief i don't know i don't know if the average person i can tell you myself though that number that i was talking about before where for years i was like once i hit this number i'm not gonna work anymore once i hit that you still work need say that number i i don't know don't know if i wanna get two two digits maybe i'll tell you i'll i'll off camera it's not it's not it's not a ridiculous it because some people don't know how what how should i think about what that number is for me for example i was like oh if my life annual burn rate was x and i wanted a certain amount of money where you know four percent or five percent withdrawals of that would mean i'm sort of saying neutral let's i'm assume i'm getting six percent real returns in the market if i was to withdraw four percent out to pay for lifestyle you know that that number the bank accounts is never gonna go down it's only gonna go up that's how and you're sean how i calculated years ago sean you said yours was six million but if i had to guess that has changed as you've had a family yeah no and to be honest can i say the honest answer is kind of ridiculous sounding but like it's not that oh i had kids and oh man i really i underestimate these diapers are expensive that's not actually what happened i literally i remember one day i was like okay so done this i was like i kinda feel like a guy you should have a hundred million dollars and literally i'm with myself i was like i think i'm i think i've worked that i think i should be like you know i don't have to have it but like didn't have it something would feel a miss something would feel a little wrong and then i was like okay cool i think i should do that i would didn't become my like north star like i'm gonna do this but what i did do was i made sure that i would only i would only work on things that either i was doing purely for the joy of it it it didn't have to bring in any dollars or if i was doing it because it i thought it was gonna be financially rewarding the finance reward had to be big enough to make it to be like on that path not a path not a smaller path yeah but that's not like i i came up with my number exactly as you on it was like if i have a four percent withdrawal rate what is the annual income that i know is gonna be like easily comfortably all that we're ever gonna wanna spend and like i just backed into the number and sam to answer your question of like once i hit that level a i i kept working as i am now and i don't think i any happier but i had i have less financial stress less career stress because that's happening dude that's happening no i i yeah just hop out i hate we'll say money doesn't make you happier but it just gets rid of buddy problems and i'm like yeah when i worried about rent i was unhappy yeah i know and i'm more happy i'm not necessarily happy but i'm happier i i think like i i think we're we we probably agree this is like arguing over the definition of words but i would say there's a big difference between happiness and a reduction of anxiety i think those are very different things happiness is is like you wake up g ear to ear or it's like if you're watching the funniest comedy you've ever seen and you're just like laughing on the floor that's a happy moment but it's always fleeting but to me the reduction of anxiety or contentment that is something that money can buy and that is worth chasing it's great so like when people say money can't buy happiness what they're implicitly saying is it's not worth chasing i think it absolutely is worth chasing but it's not gonna give you happiness per s it's gonna give you contentment and a reduction of anxiety which is wonderful it's a massive increase in the quality of your life but in my definition it's not necessarily happiness but i i i i feel like i hit that i feel like i'm my my my wife and i talking about this last night i feel like i'm in a better mental state of like less anxiety than i've had relative to you know five or ten years which is great you know you wrote the psychology of money you've studied this a lot i wanna ask you what or what are the most what are the biggest or maybe the most common leak instead of most common i would say the most impactful psychological leak meaning a a a psychological trap or mistake people make around money and i want you to answer it for somebody who is kind of on the come up to somebody who isn't totally financially dependent yet and then for rich people who still have a bunch of weird psychology and real weird relationship with money i want you to tell me what you've seen or what you believe is kinda maybe the biggest a psychological mistake people have her own money in each of those buckets i think there's there's two i'll start with one that's probably the biggest which is social comparison which is always sean you just mentioned you know you wanna be a guy you should be a guy with a hundred million dollars i'm willing to bet if you told seventeen year old sean that figure you would faint but it doesn't seem that ridiculous to you now because i bet you know people who are worth a hundred million dollars and so who you compared yourself to in your seventeen or twenty five is different now and i think there's no end to that if and i hope you are worth a hundred million dollars someday day guarantee you you're gonna start comparing yourself to people who are with two hundred five hundred a billion and that never ends never ever ends the point i always make is like the the minimum wage in in the ml is like five hundred thousand year whatever it is four hundred what whatever it is a shit load of money by any definition if you're making half million dollars a year and i guarantee you there's not a single minimum wage professional baseball player who thinks they're doing well because they're comparing themselves to their teammates we're making ten million a year and so there's no end to that but you always think there is which is why i for myself had this idea once my net worth is ex i'm never gonna work ever again but once now that i'm here maybe it is because i'm comparing myself to other people other authors maybe that's at least part of it so i think even if i can write these philosophies and made a live in talking about these like i'm so susceptible to that as as anyone else i think everybody is so i think it's such a natural thing mean in all of evolution what matters is not how much success you have it matters that you have more success than the other person because in a competition for resources that's all that matters doesn't matter if you're worth a billion dollars if somebody else is worth a billion in one they have more resources in you and from an evolutionary perspective they're gonna win and you're gonna lose so that like always chasing no matter how much you have is is a big psychological underpinning to people's anxiety the second that i would mention that's that's probably equally as important is realizing that there is not one right answer for everybody and everyone in finance is always is seeking the right answer like quote unquote the red it doesn't exist i think it's much closer to like your taste and music of like there's no such thing as the best music you like this i like that to each their own and a lot of times when you have a financial debate of people are like i can't believe you manage your money like that why don't you do it like me you're not actually debating it's people with a different risk tolerance different social aspirations different family dynamics who are talking over each other and i think it's like it's hard for people to come to terms of like look that works for you this works for me our own people don't wanna settle on that because it's easier to think that there should be a right answer like there is a math you you had this quote i think it was from the book but it could could've have been from the a blog post that you wrote where you said the biggest risk an important news story of the next ten years will be something nobody is talking about today and but you're in this weird position where you work at a vc where you actually do have to predict the future a bit or at least you're around people who are trying to predict the future what do you think are there any trends or topics today that you think in ten years are gonna be a lot more common and popular well the good the good news for me is that since i'm not involved in the the deal side of the vc that it doesn't really rest on my shoulders to make those predictions of the risk that we know of which is like obviously very distinct from the surprises are gonna be more important but of the risk that we know of i've i've been saying for years that the biggest by far in the global economy is is demographics the terrible demographics that almost the entire industrialized world has outside of india and africa almost the entire world is shrinking population wise and the biggest economies china japan all of europe are are shrinking very very fast china's working age population age sixteen to sixty four will decline by two hundred billion people between now and twenty fifty it's just like there's no precedent outside of like the black death plague there's no precedent for that in all of human history it's always been the case that economic growth was driven by the fact that there was massive population growth and we just don't have it anymore and in the united states we have about the best demographics relative to our peers but it's still way less we've had for the last hundred years and all economic growth is either population growth or productivity growth all economic growth comes from those two things and so when you take half of the equation of economic growth and for the last hundred years it's been really good and now it's at best poor if not a headwind it's a very different world totally different world and maybe like the takeaway from that is it used to be that four percent economic growth was like oh good you're running at full capacity now maybe it's two percent just because we've taken away so much of that so of the of the things that we know are gonna be at risk that's probably the most prominent can you explain that one a little more i've heard elon talk about this too that like you the big risk is that we're not having enough babies and i first i thought he was just saying it to covers his ass because he was like you know knocking gonna everyone up but then i was no he's serious about this he actually leaves this to be true but i don't fully get it maybe just kinda dumb about this so maybe just explain like i'm a i'm i'm a five year old so if economic growth goes down but the population shrinks is it kind of like isn't there kind of like a per capita type of thing where it's like yes what's the big deal like why why is that disastrous if if economic productivity are still down if there's also less less people to share you the pie shrinks but there's less people eating pie does that matter or is that the wrong way to think about it is i it's it's it's not the wrong way to think about it because you could japan for the last thirty years which japan for the last thirty years has had a dismal demographics but i think it's safe to say that by and large it's been a fairly pleasant place to live it has not led to economic collapse but they're they're they're their version of an index has been shared yeah from a perspective yes that's a slightly different topic because the reason it's been shit is because it was so preposterous over valued in nineteen ninety got it so that's like the two two separate different stories but by and large is it has not led to economic collapse the one thing i would say though is like what it does lead to is when you don't have a growing economy you have much less investment you're not investing in new businesses new homes new factories because you don't need them you're fine with what you have whenever you have less investment you have less innovation and so in those situations like when was the last incredible tech company to come out of japan i i i i'm sure i'm sure one or two exist but i can't name it off the top of my head versus if you if you and i were talking in nineteen ninety and we said what was the last tech company we'd be like oh my gosh sony to toshiba about going like mitsubishi going down the list they're everywhere because when japan had a booming population it was investment up the yin yang of like new technologies and so when you once you remove that from the equation you could still have a pleasant society that's in some form of s but you're not gonna have growth not just economic growth but techno technology growth medical technology growth like all the things that we associate with like a better life kinda grows out the window so maybe is the case set for a lot of the developed world over the next fifty years it's still a pleasant place to live but the idea of like every generation is gonna live thirty percent better than their parents like that idea might kinda go out the window sam just asked you about like trends or predict like what what what is gonna come in the future but actually your your new book is actually about the opposite it's about what's not gonna change same as ever right so yep can you explain the premise of a book i like the buffett story that you kinda lead with maybe start with that one but give us the the teaser of like what are some of the the like i buy the premise that some things don't change what are some of the big sell whats that come out of that but start with the buffett story yeah so i had lunch last summer and he was two summers ago with a guy who was very close friends with warren buffett and this guy was driving around with buffett in two thousand nine in buffett car in omaha they're was driving ground together in two thousand nine the economy was a wreck and there's was like businesses boarded up and it was like the economic apocalypse and this guy says warren like how do we ever recover from this like how how's the world ever gonna be the same and warren said do you know what the best selling candy bar was in nineteen sixty two you guys said no warren buffett warren says snickers and buffett says do you what the best selling candy bar is today you says no says snickers and that's that's the end of the story the premise being like don't worry about like how are we gonna change like find something that does not change and bet on that and i've also thought i've been a financial writer for seventeen years and it's always bothered me how bad the whole industry is it predicting the next bear market the next recession the next pandemic the next technology nobody's any good at it that's like a little bit too harsh but that's that's directional true nobody's any good at it and so there's two things you could do with that one you could become more of a cy and just say nobody knows anything don't even try or kind of the buffett approach of like find something that is never gonna change and put your weight on that and so that was one observation the other was as a student of history realizing when you're reading about the economy from a hundred years ago or a five hundred years ago or a thousand years ago there's some things that you read about and you're like oh things were very different back but there were even more things that you can read that make you stop and think that's exactly how it is today the way that people responded to greed and fear and risk and uncertainty is the exact same today as it was a hundred years ago and so putting those two things together if you can find things of human behavior that are never gonna change then you know something that is gonna be part of your future so stop pretending that you know when the next recession is gonna happen but study how people respond to recessions when they do happen because that's never changed so it's gonna be part of our future and so that's kind of the premise of the book it's just a bunch of little stories of things that facets of human behavior that have always been with us and i think always will and you like regardless of what is gonna happen in our future you know that these little bits of behavior are going to be a part of it and so what's something where when you studied how people will say respond to greed or fear or change or whatever and you looked at these patterns of human behavior what's something that you like the best research or books or insights that i get i'm like oh i feel like i have a superpower like i you like almost like i could read people's minds now right so it sounds like by studying what doesn't change or how how human behavior works did you come out with anything that you're like did you change anything that you do or did you have a new strategy or a new plan or any new like could you action that because i you know i guess my my skeptical view would be i feel like i could understand how people behaved in the past but attaching that to what the hell am i supposed to do today is is not so easy of a leap what's one that you made do yourself doing this i know this is an answer that people will find inadequate but to me it's it's incredibly powerful and important and i think the main plea in the book is for humility it's not even about the the examples that of things that are never gonna change that's obviously the core of the book but the reason we're doing that is because we have humility and not fooling ourselves to thinking that we know what's gonna change what are the three biggest economic stories of our adult lives by far by an order of magnitude it's september eleventh le brothers collapsing in covid but by an order of magnitude nothing else matters more than those three things and the common denominator is nobody saw them coming they're not in any economic outlook no analyst forecast unless you were had inside information you were part of those things nobody saw them coming and it's always been like that because you can go back another generation and it was pearl harbor collapse in the soviet union all these things that even if in hindsight you're like y you you should have seen those coming great depression of course the fact is that very few people did if anybody and then something like pearl harbor you could not have seen it coming but think about how that changed the entire fabric of society not just the economy but everything and going forward it will be like that too you can state with so much certainty that the biggest economic story of our lifetimes in the future or or even the next twelve months is something that you and i are not talking about today mean what what what's the biggest global news story of twenty twenty three it's this this is subjective but i would say it's israel hamas which is something that even if you were an expert in middle east politics you did not see coming on october sixth to let alone people like us so that's and i think it's it's always been like that it'll be like that next year and the reason that we that view like we we tend to ignore that is because i think coming to terms of it is too painful come to terms of the idea and admitting to yourself that we don't know what's gonna happen next is a really uncomfortable level of uncertainty it's much easier and more comfortable to just say to pretend that we do which is why the market for pun is always gonna exist no matter how poor the results are and so that i think that's the biggest actual takeaway for me is i i don't forecast i i think i think it's much healthier to read more history and fewer forecast and when you read history you start focusing on the ind behaviors that never change and you become more humble in your ability to fool yourself and the thinking that we do know is what what what is gonna change morgan i know you gotta leave you have a hard stop in two minutes so let me i wanna ask a a very takeaway or an an actionable question which is what two or three or four however many you want history books can i go and read over the next month that do the best job of me not not a book like yours that aggregates a bunch of them but literally a specific era or a specific book that i can go and read that does a good job of of showing this where i'll read it and i'll be like oh this is exactly what i'm experiencing now or things won't change i think one of the best world war two books because it's not only a book about the military operations but also the human element on the ground is eric larson book the splendid in the vial which is a pretty recent book i think came out four years ago and it's about the london blitz bombing in world war two eric larson i think is the greatest living storyteller period and he's so good his book on el ten is wonderful it's absolutely epic so so that book is is is incredible doris k goodwin ones book no ordinary time which is about how fdr managed world war two it's not about the war itself it's about how he managed the politics and the emotions of it is absolutely stunning i also use that book as an example of i think the book is seven hundred pages and every single word needs to be there there's not a single wasted word in the seven hundred pages it's she's just like such an extraordinary writer those are two that really stick out is like some of the best and you're doing an excellent job of giving into the stereotype of thirty or forty something year old white guys ob accessing over world war two that what we're supposed to do yeah everyone talks about the roman empire fucked roman empire world war two that's where it's at man it's it's so true i i can't get enough it i will say the last thing i say because i do have to jump i i i think the reason world war two is so interesting is because it was the most documented major event and therefore like the emotion the emotions on either at end of the spectrum from despair to el ovation are there's more documented examples of that during that six year period than have ever existed in all of human history so it's not just understanding the military in the politics it's like if you wanna understand human emotions there's no better spotlight or magnifying glass and studying world war two well we appreciate you coming on man this is awesome we're big fans of your first i i know i'm in the middle of reading the second one same as ever and your badass ass we appreciate you doing this thanks guys this it's been fun thanks mori alright that's a pod i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road less travel and never looking back