Introduction To Psychology By Morgan And King Notes
Tabita Knezevic
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Morgan Housel (@morganhousel), a partner at the Collaborative Fund and a former columnist at The Motley Fool and The Wall Street Journal. Morgan serves on the board of directors at Markel Corporation. He is a two-time winner of the Best in Business Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, winner of the New York Times Sidney Award, and a two-time finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism.
He is a partner at the Collaborative Fund and a former columnist at The Motley Fool and The Wall Street Journal. He serves on the board of directors at Markel Corporation. He is a two time-winner of the Best in Business award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, winner of the New York Times Sidney Award, and a two-time finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. His book The Psychology of Money has sold more than one million copies and has been translated into more than 30 languages. Morgan, welcome to the show.
Tim Ferriss: So I have just an embarrassment of riches in front of me in the form of tabs open in this browser. And one of them is a Google document that contains my Kindle highlights from your book, and that is The Psychology of Money.
Tim Ferriss: And my question for you is ibanking, private equity, that is the meandering, not meandering, but the winding path of one who might aspire to be one of the masters of the universe. Right?
Tim Ferriss: And then you choose writing and you stick with writing, which has a very different financial payoff profile than the finance track. Why were you comfortable doing that? Or how did you make that decision?
The idea for it, the idea for having a writer like that at a venture capital firm by and large is, look, if you are a venture capitalist, money is fungible, so if your only asset as a firm is we can write a check, well, you do not stand apart at all. A lot of people can write a check. You stand apart in the private investing world by having values and a view of the world that is differentiated in some way. And those values, that view, do not matter at all, unless people know about them. You need to be going out there, showing the world how you think, what you think, who you are, waving your arms.
Tim Ferriss: Absolutely. Couple of footnotes on several of the names that have come up. So I believe you wrote about this in your book and it was something I did not know. So Benjamin Graham, right? If not a deity, certainly a minor deity, in many of the investing circles, certainly the self-described sort of value investing side of things. Is it true? Am I recalling correctly that a bulk of his career returns came from concentration in GEICO? Am I getting that right?
Morgan Housel: Like one example of this too that I love is from Walt Disney, who back in the 1920s and 1930s was making all of these cartoons that people loved and they were great, but they were all losing money. They were all commercial failures. And he was on the verge of bankruptcy and his whole career was going to be over, and shut down the studio. And then Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs came out, and it was such a huge mega blockbuster success. That all of a sudden he had enough money to keep the studio open and to make more films.
Mr. Read spent decades pumping gas and working as a janitor in Brattleboro, Vermont. After he died in 2014, at the age of 92, his estate was able to give more than $6,000,000 to local charities because he had scrimped and put every spare penny into stocks that he held for decades.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Let me read up one of my 17 million Kindle highlights, thank you to your publisher for not throttling the number of highlights that I could actually read after the fact, that is extremely annoying when that happens. So thank you, publisher. Who ended up publishing the book?
Tim Ferriss: And so we may or may not get a chance to dig into this, but one of the bullets I have here is every major publisher rejected the book, that seems just stupid, especially just based on the fact that my understanding is it began as a popular blog post.
Tim Ferriss: It seems like the most obvious indicator of interest imaginable, but what do I know about publishing? We may come back to that, but let me just read something here that I ended up highlighting. So for people who were wondering about my process, I highlight on the Kindle. In this particular book I actually read in a way I had not read any book before, and that was, I bought it on Kindle, that prompted me to buy the Audible version, and then I listened to the Audible inside the Kindle app so that I could, while going for, say, a hike with my dog, be listening, listening, listening, hit a point where I would want to make a highlight, stop and it would be tracking simultaneously in the Kindle. And I could then make my highlight and then continue hiking and listening. So I digested the book very, very quickly.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I am going to try to find this. There it is. It is a tweet from Jason. So a few years ago, Naval Ravikant and I were having a conversation on the podcast and he talked about the asymmetric costs of offense and defense in a world where drones are weaponized. Meaning if you have a drone or a bunch of tiny drones that are weaponized, and this is being developed all over the world, of course. You have sophisticated attacks where they can be coordinated with software to say all land on a given tank and explode at once. They can be used in more ad hoc, improvised ways.
And I think that that provides a universal cognitive and psychological toolkit that people can then apply to their individual circumstances. So I applaud that and I have to imagine that it was not easy to get the book to the place where it ended up in final form. I know that that was probably very challenging and I really enjoyed it and I expect to continue to enjoy it. So thanks for taking the time today.
The Tim Ferriss Show is one of the most popular podcasts in the world with more than one billion downloads. It has been selected for "Best of Apple Podcasts" three times, it is often the #1 interview podcast across all of Apple Podcasts, and it's been ranked #1 out of 400,000+ podcasts on many occasions. To listen to any of the past episodes for free, check out this page.
The notes and summaries are meant to be concise, reminding me of high-level concepts and not trying to recreate the whole book. You can use them to remind yourself of something you read or to decide on something new to read.
Phenomenal book on how our fear of death is the core of our psychological disturbances, and our motivation for life. It will make you think about why we do things and behave in certain ways in an entirely new fashion, and the language within it is delicious.
A phenomenal book on understanding your own "hidden motivations in everyday life" and why we do what we do. Widely applicable to all parts of life, and the kind of explanations you can't stop thinking about after reading.
Much better organized and fleshed out than the original PDF. It gets very slow in the work principles, definitely skim those based on your interest. The life principles are phenomenal, though. Would highly recommend.
A painful and gruesome story about life in Hiroshima right after the bombing. Hachiya kept a diary of his experience nearly dying, then working to save his friends and peers as a doctor working in Hiroshima before and after the bomb went off.
Fantastic, one of Robert Greene's best. The idea of fearlessness is essential for individual success outside of a traditional path, and even within it. If you can master fearlessness and take control of your own destiny, there is no limit on what you can accomplish.
It's a guide to not feeling lost in your 30s and 40s from a clinical psychologist who sees young people. It's a must read if you're in your 20s. Some of the research and examples are suspect, but the advice is excellent.
An excellent primer on pursuing more freedom in your life. Very impersonal egoist influenced, and it makes good arguments around honesty, priorities, and the traps that we put ourselves in. One of the few self-help books I'd recommend.
Hands down the best startup marketing book out there, and the first one I recommend to people who want to get into startup marketing. I still use some form of the Bullseye Method in it for thinking about digital marketing, and the list of channels to brainstorm new ideas.
Massively influential in my life, giving me the idea that I could pursue my own entrepreneurial projects to sustain myself immediately after college. Haven't gone back to it in a while, but it's still one of the first books I recommend for someone going down the entrepreneurial path.
This book sneaks up on you. You're reading these fun stories about Feynman's life, and then you look back and realize you learned about the scientific process along the way. Extremely readable, packed with wisdom, and fun!
A fantastic book told through 8 interviews done on the power of myth in our lives. It really made me think about how we lack cultural traditions and narratives, and how few people go through rites of initiation or make sacrifices for big commitments in their lives.
An excellent intro guide to the "Zettlekasten" method you can use to take useful notes from everything you read. Strong recommend for improving your note taking and the usefulness of everything you're reading.
Extremely useful book for the beginning photographer, full of heuristics for better photo taking. It was fun reading it then going through the National Geographic award-winning photos, since I could pick out some of the elements discussed in the book and how they helped make the photos work.
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