99 Years of Charlie Munger Wisdom in 44 Minutes

Today there's gonna be literally a thousand threads that are Charlie Munger was lived till ninety nine. Here's ninety nine lessons I learned and they're gonna regurgitate. The stupid quotes in Wikipedia. But this is my first meal. We do things differently around here. We're not just gonna give you the regurgitated quotes. I gotta give you that, you know, little special jus, that old jus that you can dip the sandwiches. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to

I put my law in it like my day song on the road Charlie Munger has died at age ninety-nine, and all around the world people are remembering Charlie, this guy who was Warren Buffett's business partner. You know, Bill Gates called Charlie, you know, maybe the broadest. thinker he knows he said that um He has the best 30-second brain of anybody he's ever met. And we wanted to dissect that brain. What's inside that? What made Charlie so prolific. Why did Warren Buffett say that Berkshire is shaped

in the mold of Charlie Munger and that he is one of the the smartest and wisest men he's ever met. And we pulled out seven of the big ideas. Charlie said a lot of things over the years, but we we identified What we think are the seven big Big bits of wisdom. uh that Charlie has shared. And what we wanted to do was instead of just making a listicle, which you're gonna see a lot today. You're gonna see people on Twitter, you know,

Every threadboy is gonna be like Charlie Mugger died at 99. Here's the 99. bits of wisdom and they're gonna copy paste Wikipedia. We didn't wanna do that. What we wanted to do was take the seven that we thought were really, really impactful and specifically tell a story of how we learned that lesson in our own business life or in our life. Um, it made for I think a pretty amazing episode. I told Sam, I said, dude, this notes document. that we have for this episode.

You got a handkerchief? This thing is dripping with wisdom. And you're that's how you're gonna feel at the end of this podcast. You're gonna need to take a shirt. You're gonna need to wipe the old podcast player because this episode is about to be dripping with wisdom. I hope you enjoy this episode on the seven. Bits of wisdom.

From Charlie Munker. All right. So let's jump into the wisdom. So What I think would be fun. is we just sort of trade our favorites'cause this guy's got little quips or or quotes about the way the world works, about the way minds work, about the way the markets work. All right. You go first. Okay.

I'll I'll start with a very easy one. So one of it uh you know one of his big ideas is To get what you want, you need to deserve what you want. And so he says, you know, the easiest way to get everything that you want is to deserve it. And it's so simple that it's almost like obnoxiously simple this advice. If you want the partner you want, you should

be deserving of that level of partner, right? Make yourself worthy of a partner like that. Uh same thing with investments. He he kind of calls out a few things that money can't buy. So he's like, um Trust. In other people. Uh success. And admiration.

Those are things you cannot buy. You can only earn. And so if you want somebody's admiration, deserve it. If you want somebody's trust, deserve it. If you want success, deserve it. And I'll share like a very simple, more practical anecdote about this. Cause again, like his big ideas are amazing, but they just sort of float. in the clouds unless you bring it to Earth with a real tactical example. So When we sold the milk road. I've said this before, but one of the reasons we we sold to the guys we did was I really, really respected these guys. It was not the highest offer.

But these were the highest quality people that we could sell to. And we just had a hunch that like selling to the highest quality people will result in the best long term outcome. You know, for every d dollar we're taking less today, we might create three more dollars in the future just by being around high quality people. And I'll tell you a story that came out of the due diligence that like was like a nugget of gold that stuck with me that was exactly this. So one of the guys that sold his businesses for about ninety to a hundred million

And the other guy had sold his business for over two hundred million. And both of them had built businesses that were SEO based. And I know a lot of things about marketing and growth, but I know zero about SEO. I am an absolute beginner novice. I never touch SEO. I don't do businesses that are SEO based. I literally know nothing. And so one of the ways I priced in the deal was, oh, I'm gonna learn SEO from these guys who are frankly masters at SEO. And so we get to the point where we do the deal, I've we're not negotiating anymore. And I'm like, oh good, I'm gonna start digging, I'm gonna start picking these guys' brains for SEO shit. So I sat them down. I was like, You're gonna teach me about SEO now. And they started to tell me something, but I was like, Okay, okay, that's the general stuff. I've heard that stuff before.

Like what's the like Real like master shit. What's the real like black belt shit that I don't know about that you can't just Google and read in you know some blog that like helped you guys create You know, one guy created um The number one search for if you say, I want to buy gold online.

And that's the business that was, you know, sold for a few hundred million dollars that he bootstrapped that, you know, never raised any money and he did it because He knew how to be the top result for buy gold online. I said, How'd you do it, bro? What'd you do? Was it the some some hack, some technique? And he's like, um You know, we did all the normal things and he's like and I tried some of these hacks' techniques, it didn't really work. And he's like, so then he's like, you know, what happened was one day

I Googled how to buy gold online. And we were the fifth result at the time. He's like so then I printed out all five of the results, us being number five, and I printed one through four also. And I sat down for an hour and I just looked at them and I read them. And I'm like, I had an honest conversation with myself of why I would I click on my page. What is better about my page than these other pages?

And I was like Wait, so you didn't like do some like black hat SEO shit that was like this like advanced trick. And he was like No, he's like we didn't deserve the click. We weren't better pages. He's so he's like so all I did for the next year.

was every week I printed out all the pages. And then I made my page like, you know, ten percent better. Well, I figured out one way that we could be better, as objectively better, even if we weren't moving up in the ranks yet. that I could look at it and say, this is a better page. We deserve To be higher ranked. And I had literally never heard this and I was like

On one hand, in the moment, honestly, I was kinda disappointed. I was like, dude, I You gotta work hard and and just actually make a better page. But it was also kind of like refreshing. It's like you go to the people who are masters of SEO and they're like, Yeah, you can do all the tricks, but at the end of the day, you have to have the best result. Like You have to have the best page and you have to have an honest conversation with yourself of is your page better than these other pages.

He's like, if you really want to sustainably like climb the ranks of be a number one, that's it. And that was such a like tangible business example of like to get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. And um I'll never forget that. That was like one of the biggest takeaways I had of the whole process. That's beautiful.

Uh uh I like that one. He also had another line Munger did where he's like I n never try to disagree with someone's opinion I unless I understand their side better than they do. And that and that's like a specific example of like let's say debate. Of how he was like I need to I need to deserve this. Right. So that's number two. I love that one. He says, I am not entitled to an opinion. Like I can't have conviction.

Until I can argue the other side better than someone who believes the other side. And he's like people think he's like people think this is some like crazy high bar. And those people haven't ever asked somebody who believes something why they believe it. Like it's actually quite a low bar to surpass their own like con you know their own understanding of something. Um And you know, I I think about this with like Bitcoin, for example. I'm a Bitcoin believer.

And my approach to this was always to say Here's all the reasons why I believe in Bitcoin. It just makes sense for you know reason A, B, C, and D. But actually the better way to do it is to say Smart people. who don't believe in Bitcoin would say A, B, and C.

And I understand that. And here's what I think about those and why I've landed on the side of conviction that I have. It's just a much better logical way to think than to just say Here's what I believe and I'm gonna come up with all the evidence. I'm even gonna make up some of it.

to justify my opinion, which is I would say how do we call Steel Manning? Yeah, so steel manning is like Argue the other side better than they would even argue it. This is cool, uh story from I think it's called Making of a an American capitalist.

And so they talk about how No here, I'll read it just the this part from the book. They go physically Munger was unimpressive. He had an elf like face, pacey skin, and glasses an inch thick. Though something of a snob and highly judgmental, he had a deep sense of ethics, and his smarts were matched by Churchillian self assurance. Once he was asked if he could play the piano.

And Munga replied. I don't know. I've never tried. And I thought like what a tell. Like what a telling line. So most people you say No, I can't play the piano. This was I probably could. It's uh it there's definitely a potential that I will be a great piano player. I just haven't tried. And when I read that line, I w I just thought

This man's beautiful. This man's born of a kind. And I love people like that. Because Myself, you, most everyone, we default to Can you do this? It's like of course not. I I I don't have the capabilities. I I I cannot do that. Where you that little mind shift of like

Well, not yet. Dude, noticing that props to you. I read that line in the research. I didn't even understand what was remarkable with the line. I just moved on. I didn't even notice it until you just said it like you did. Uh so good on you for even observing it. That's a good one. Well, that's what I'm saying. When I'm reading about these guys, it's like these little one off lines or these like like for example, if they'll say he founded this law firm. And then Next. He was bored there, next. Like whatever. And I'm like, well, hold on. Let me go look at this law firm. And then you start reading about this law firm and like, dude, this is quirky. This is a weird, we super strange law firm. And so anyway, yeah, this line, it's a beautiful line, uh about just showing like the day to day about how you can be different. All right. If you're loving this episode, I'm glad. I also want to tell you three things that we are doing as a podcast. Quick little news flash, news announcement about

M FM, I have three things to tell you. Here they are. Number one, there's like this meetup thing going on. So uh There's a woman she runs a company that basically helps like content creators like a spin up meetup. So basically what's happening is in In like a week or two around the world there's M FM meetups, which is kinda fun. We're not gonna be there'cause it's like, you know, they're they're all happening on the same day in different locations, but

Forget us. If you're one of these people that listen to the podcast, you're probably going to get along with other people who listen to the podcast. People who listen to this podcast. You're business nerds. With a sense of humor. And if you like business owners with a sense of humor, they're all getting together, but everybody's going to like a bar, you know, like there's one in Toronto, there's one in California, there's one in Austin.

And they're they're going to hang out. It's called a river. So if you go to Get River Dot Io. So get G E T and then river, like a stream, river dot I. Oh. You scroll all the way to the bottom and you'll see my first million meetup. They're happening in Austin and Houston. Denver.

Right. So yeah, uh they did this for all in, I think, and that's kind of one of one of the proof of concepts. Um I think this is gonna be fun. So so do it. We'll try to like, I don't know, call into a couple of these and say hi, but Um, this is cool. So that's happening next week. That's fun. Go meet some other people who um are part of Neckbeard Nation.

Number two, uh, we're doing the poker tournament. So a while back, we talked about this business that we thought found fascinating, which was a cloud poker tournament. It's like his digital poker tournament where everybody's webcam's on, it can be private for our community. And uh three hundred or four hundred people signed up. We just never scheduled it, but now we scheduled it. It's December thirteenth. It's happening. Uh, we will give away merch and some cool stuff as prizes. We'll come up with some dope prizes, thousand bucks or a call or free merch or whatever.

So yeah, it's at cloudpoker knight.com. So cloud poker knight.com slash MFM. So if you want to register for that, if you already registered, we'll send out an email. uh to be able to let him know that that's happening. Uh and last thing is I do a thing every year. Which is I uh this month, this month of December is the plan for, you know, other people are thinking about Christmas.

I'm thinking about End of your next year, hit my goals. And so I basically use this time for planning for twenty twenty four. So uh I'm gonna host a free session, which basically is I uh I'm currently doing it for all my businesses. I make like a one page plan. for what I'm trying to do next year. And it's basically like the big goal and then the breakdown of like how I'm going to do it. I have a method of how I get to that answer. And you walk away with kind of like a clear one pager for your business. Uh, Ben had the idea, he was like, dude, I love when we do this. He's like, We should just like

Do this together with other people that own businesses that want to do it. And so totally free. uh you'll walk away in an hour with like a bunch of clarity on what's what your next year looks like. Uh I have a bunch of good questions that help people get clarity. So if you want to attend that. Plan. for twenty twenty four.com. So go to plan for twenty four.com. Uh Ben's gonna spin up a website and we'll we'll invite people to that.

If you're the type of person that wants to kind of like set the vision and the intention for next year. Let me give you number four. So my number four um Charlie Ism I wanna bring up is Let me tell you a little story about where I where I felt this first and then I'm gonna tell you the Charlieism. So Uh, let's rewind the clock. Fifteen years, I was living in Indonesia. And in Indonesia, I lived in this building that had a uh ping pong table. And so I used to go down and just hang out by the ping pong table because I thought

Well, that's maybe like, you know, my equivalent of like going having a drink at the bar. Let's just go see if anybody's down here to to play and maybe I can meet some people. And uh so sure enough I would go down, me and my brother in law we would go down and we would play and my brother in law is better than me at Ping Pong. And He the way he plays is what you imagine somebody who's good at ping pong.

He's not just gonna hit it fast. He's gonna jump, even though you don't need to jump. He's gonna be like woo, but he's gonna just make you feel like he just smashed this shot and like I was so like I was trying to get better than him, he was trying to get better than me and I thought, okay He's brilliant at this. Like he could just hit these amazing shots, and I gotta be able to hit amazing shots. So I'm practicing hitting amazing shots. And it he and so whoever used to come down, he would beat them. He was the best guy in the building.

Until one day. This fifty five, sixty year old man came down named Poppy. And we're like, your name's Pope? He's like, I'm Poppy. I'm like, Okay. Uh I don't know if he's all bit flexing on us, if this is a real name. And he takes a a paddle out of his um Of his like case and we're like oh dude he's got his own

Oh shit. You know, it's like the guy who brings his own bowling ball to the bowling alley. You know this guy means business. So we're so we're already on uh like a game, basically. And so uh I play'em And Papy beats me, but he didn't do anything Like He wasn't smashing the ball. He wasn't doing it. And I just thought, Oh man, I was off today. All right. Like Aaron, you play him. And so I had my brother in law Aaron play him. I'm like, all right.

Aaron's never lost to anybody in this building. Let's see what happens. And he starts playing poppy and he's trying to do what he always does. He's trying to hit brilliant shots on the corner, down the line, cross court, you know, drop shot. And none of it's working. Poppy is destroying him. And the way that Poppy plays is like This is for anybody who's like a real ping pong fan. I I need like something to Demonstrate. So use this pen. Pretend this is the paddle.

Normally when you play ping pong. Your arm is back, you're doing like a full stroke like a tennis thing. Py used to just He used to just hold it like this, forward, like the paddle just facing you. And then he would just move left and right like a wall. And he would just whatever you hit, he would just hit back. And the thing about Poppy is Poppy was never hitting brilliant shots, but he would also never hit it out and never hit the net.

And so inevitably He would just keep hitting it back. And y one of your brilliant shots would go out of bounds. You would hit it too hard, too soft, you'd hit the net, like You would mess up and he would always score

Based on your error. And he crushed us. And he crushed us that day and he crushed us every day. And he would just chuckle and say, good game. And he would go upstairs and we'd be like, And poppy, man. I'm gonna get this guy. And we never got him. The whole summer I was there, we never one time beat this guy. And then one day he invited us up to his house afterward, his apartment in the building. He lived in the penthouse. beautiful. He was so successful in business. We're like, Pope, dude, you're balling out of control. He had like a secret poker room. He had a a wall of just like super fancy like liquor like people have a wine cellar. He had like a fancy liquor wall. It was crazy. He had a shower with like six shower heads. And we were like, dude, this guy poppy this and we're like, What do you do? And he's like

Uh I sell soap. And we're like, W you're like you make soap? He's like No no, I just import and export and we're like Is it better soap? He's like, No, it's just soap. Um he's like it's good, soap.

It's not the best. And we were like, Well who how do you sell it? He's like, Well, I just go to people that need soap. And we're like this fucking poppy. Like this is how he lives his life, too. He's just making no no brilliant shots, but no unforced errors. And so This is a Charlie Mungerism. Which is

Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance. And he says Other people spend their whole life trying to be so smart. All I'm trying to do is not be idiotic. It's harder than people think. But this is more important than trying to be brilliant.

And so Charlie was basically like, How do I just avoid the great errors in life? Let's say it's investing. How do I avoid the great errors of investing? If it's health, how do I avoid the great errors of health? And that's basically what he oriented around. He wasn't perfect at it. But I thought what a totally different you know, a different strategy than you'll ever hear, which is about being the best and becoming more advanced and becoming you know, being brilliant and talented. And his thing was just Just avoid stupidity and you'll you'll outperform everybody.

Is there a category in the Oscars for like Podcasters who can weave in a story into Charlie Munger. If If If yes, I think you might get I think you might get that nod. That was a wonderful we gotta give it up. That was a wonderful You you you had me enthralled and I didn't know where you were gonna go with this. I did a beautiful job. Sometimes you just open your mouth and start talking and see where it goes. And you won that, Mr. Wonder. You you you totally won that one. That was a beautiful the beautiful way to tie that in.

Copyrighting. That's what you that's what that was. Charlie Munger was lived till ninety nine. Here's ninety nine lessons I learned and they're gonna regurgitate. The stupid quotes in Wikipedia. But this is my first moment. We do things differently around here. We're not just gonna give you the regurgitated quotes. I gotta give you that, you know, little special jus, that old jus that you can dip the sandwich in. Y you came with he. Th that's gonna be hard to compete with. I um

Let me let me ask you something. So Right now it's uh it's November twenty ninth. So most people are doing their next year financial planning for their businesses. For years. At the hustle. I made a very similar mistake that I bet you made. And that is

Over optimism. Have you ever hit any of your projections in the first six years of your career? Never I've never met a goal I've ever set. Dude, if you ask people at the hustle, like one of my big weaknesses is it's Looking at the numbers of the Excel sheet. And you know, you see like a Seven million here.

Uh and you're like, what if we took that seven and deleted it? And put a nine. I'm like, look how much more profit they gave us. Let's just do that. Genius. People would be driven crazy because that's what I would do. I would just look at the sheets. I'm like, Yeah, that looks good. Hey, look, if you just delete that number and put it to that number, look how much better this looks. So let's just do that. And I've made that mistake so many times. I um I bought a property uh recently or uh a few years back.

And I remember like thinking like okay, this is only an okay price property. But Yeah, you know I'm gonna like take better pictures or I'm gonna like do something when I sell it and I'm gonna make that's how I'm gonna make all this money is I'm just gonna increase revenue and I'm just I'm gonna do this, this, this.

And guess what? Just like years of failing at projecting, I totally effed it up. So now I try to be way more modest, uh, with my financial projections, but I completely uh have always messed it up. And uh Munger's got a bunch of good quotes. He's like, it's dangerous to rely too much on models and formula. The the the reality is way more complex than that. We're very disciplined in our approach and we're not swayed by flimsy optimism. And then he goes on to say he's like

It's pretty ridiculous that people are are biased by both over skepticis skepticism and over optimism in in the business world. If the micro reality is good, good decisions and good systems are what I look for. Not predictions of macro environment changes. And so basically the point being. Is the his whole philosophy was to buy businesses where

If I bought a good business at a good price I'm golden. And then if I ever want to sell it. Or if something crazy improves, that's icing on the cake. Whereas what I do

And I bet most people do, and I try my hardest to avoid this nowadays, is I say I default to no the optimism is actually the truth. The truth It's just That's just what they did,'cause they don't know what the hell they're talking about. You know what I mean? Right. And that's been one of my biggest mistakes in business is over optimism. And what it does is it crushes

T morale. And it gets you in a losing state of mind and it just sucks. Um, what what Munger said was he goes, You make a lot of money when you buy a good company at a good price. But you make all of the money. By letting it ride for twenty years. So the patience is where the big money is. And I struggle like crazy to do that. I have

This this year we're we're I'm trying things a little bit differently, but I have never hit any of my projections because it's just too optimistic. And that is It's basically just mental masturbation is what it is. By by making these projections. And it's harmful. It's it's a liability. Well, there's like the thing you want to hit s you know, some people say you want to hit 70% of the goals um that you that you set. And that's like the right balance between ambition and you know practicality. Hitting zero percent of your goals is obviously means you're setting the wrong goals.

And hitting a hundred percent of your roles means you're, you know, obviously being uh playing it too safe and conservatively. And so there is some number between. You can pick seventy, fifty, sixty, whatever works for you. And uh Yeah, e I think most entrepreneurs And investors for that matter err on the side of optimism because boy doesn't it feel better in the moment. Do you know something I'm trying to do? No goals.

I'm trying to do no goals. And I it's it's not working out with any of the partners who I'm involved with who are trying to find it. You know what it's not doing? Working out. Yeah I'm trying no goals and I'm getting no no buy in. So I hate I've be I've grown to hate goals, man. Like It shouldn't change like Do you know what I mean it's like a it's like this is the one thing with money. Do you have like a you have like a weird relationship with money that you need like money therapy? You have probably like a weird relationship with goals that like uh you just need to work out. Like You know, these extremes, crazy goals that nobody can hit or no goals. I would just assume that the answer is actually somewhere in the middle, right? The mungerism is probably somewhere somewhere in the middle, not uh not in either extreme.

Let's go to one of his other ones I think is kind of related, which is one of Munger's big ideas, the one one that he is is well known for that I have taken into my life is this idea of Inversion. So he says invert Always invert. And so, you know, the what does this mean?

It's basically a way to think through problems backwards. So if you it let's say you wanted to solve a common thing that people ask, which is you know, how do I be successful? Um, or how do I be happy in life? And there might be like a thousand different answers to that question. But what Munger would do is is in order to get to the answer faster, he would invert, right? Why does Bill Gates say he goes from A to Z faster than anyone? He's he has the best thirty second brain of anyone. It's because Munger's default way of problem solving is to invert. And so he'll say

Instead of figuring out how to be happy, let me just figure out what is the surepire surefire path to misery. He literally wrote it out. Like I can read you the answer for what he said is the shirt for our path to misery. Or what what did he say? Uh, okay, so his his prescri he he actually did a talk and he calls this his prescription for misery. So he says, um What a be what a beautiful line, by the way. Is that beautiful language or what? It is. It's wonderful. Um

Inje number one, ingesting chemicals to alter your mood or perception. So if you rely on chemicals, To change your mood. Uh yeah, eventually this leads to misery. This is like, you know, alcoholism or like sort of like overstimulation, whatnot. Um number two is envy. Uh he has this great quote which is The world is not people think the world is driven by greed. It's actually driven by envy. Uh, he goes, um, you know, I am lucky that you know I'm an old man now and I've conquered my envy. I don't give a damn what anybody else has. I don't want one anybody else has, and I don't care what they have.

Uh, but most people are not like that. For most people, it drives them up the walls if they see that the neighbor has a nicer car or that their friend has a higher paying job, or that their co worker gets promoted. They didn't even want it in the first place. But as soon as somebody else has it, envy kicks in and it drives them that drives, you know, so much of their behavior. And so Number two of the prescription for for misery is envy. Third related is resentment. If uh if your joy goes down when other people's joy goes up, that is a surefire way to have a miserable life. So those are three that he stole from somebody else. And he says, I'd like to add my four on top of that. He says, um, number four. Be unreliable. Uh if you are unrebu unreliable, you will be distrusted by all those who matter. And that you might be a mighty fine turtle, but you will be outrun by hordes of mediocre turtles if you are unreliable. And even Some turtles that are on crutches. So it's like this idea that if you are unreliable, it sort of cancels out any talent that you have.

That one hit home for me because as you know, I am uh a bit of an unreliable person and I have paid the price for that in many, many times. Uh yeah. Hey, by the way, should we bring up that uh MFM podcast meeting that you missed yesterday? Yeah, just was on a different call and forgot about it. And so these things happen and it is a penalty I paid as part of my prescription for misery. Um Here's the next one. So He says another number five is learn only from your own experience and your own uh you know trials. Basically, um If you decide that your firsthand experience is your only way to figure out good versus bad and you're not gonna learn from other living and dead people, uh, that is a surefire way to misery because you will you will learn much slower than it than somebody who who learns the other way.

Next one, he goes. Uh when hit with adversity. Go down and stay down. That's another prescription for misery is to not bounce back from adversity, the inevitable the inevitable and unavoidable blows of life. And the last one, he goes, Don't be objective. Stay stuck in your ways. Hold on to your initial ideas, your most loved ideas, hold them with a death grip. And that is his final prescription for misery is to uh to never change your mind in light of new facts. My um

Of those that you mentioned, my biggest weaknesses are envy. So this podc is fun for you and I to do. Sometimes It creates a lot of envy because we have all these amazing people on here.

Or or if it's just you and I, like Sean just did great. S uh Sam didn't do as good. Or uh If we have all these amazing people on and you start talking to them and you're like, Huh. I'm just as smart as this guy, but this guy's how do you know because when you ask How old are you? That's the yeah that's the trigger of like, I'm feeling terrible. Can you really just do the finishing blow and tell me that you're two years younger than me? Yeah. And every once in a while there are people uh who I'm like, Yeah, you're just better. So I'm

Zillowing people's houses after you uh uh after you see them. That's not really nothing good happens on the end of a Zillow. So I have um I've got I I read Uh, I read a lot and I I like reading biographies. And whenever I read a biography, I do sort of what I did up here, where I write down like let's say it's a business biography. I'll write down the years and I'll make notes of interesting things that happened to that person in that year. And then it if it involves a dollar amount, I'll write the dollar amount and then when one sell over, I'll say what's that dollar amount in today's numb numbers. And then I'll say how old were they?

And so I'm like reverse engineering different people's lives. But you know what I'm really doing? I'm comparing myself to them. Yeah, of course. I'm comparing myself to them. And I justify it by saying, uh If I read someone and I am better off than they than they are, uh I say Great, I'm doing better than them and they ended up wonderfully. I'm gonna end up wonderfully. Or

If they're Kicking my ass at my age, I just think Motherfuck. This sucks. I gotta give you credit for your honesty and vulnerability. 'Cause you're being honest and vulnerable admitting this.

But I do not advise anybody follow this game plan. This is a recipe. I'm not saying that this is I'm not saying this is helpful. I'm just admitting uh and and the last thing that I sort of suck at is being bendable. What what was the last one? What is how did you describe it? He's like, you know, don't be objective. Uh don't change your don't change your mind. You know, stay stuck in your way. Stay stuck in hold on to those initial ideas you had before these new new facts and circ and circumstances came out. I try to think of myself as bendable, but I could work on that for sure. The the ones that I uh struggle with out of this are the unreliable one for sure. And then um

Maybe envy a second one. I think that's probably like number two. I think I'm pretty good on all these other ones. I wanna give you some more. I I I wouldn't have thought, by the way, of you as an envious person. I think that's a hard one to kick. Uh you know, I don't think I'm like let's say terrible at it, but it's definitely there. It's not something that I could be like, yeah. I have conquered that mountain. No, no, no. I'm still somewhere on that mountain. Hey, do you know what the uh what I think it's the sixth tenth commandment is?

Thou shalt not thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife. Right, right. Don't be jealous. Don't be jealous, my friend. So even the but I think if I said this joke, it's gonna get me in trouble with at least five people at minimum in my life. So I'm just gonna not make this joke. All right. So um I wanna give you some examples of the invert. principle because I think this is one of the most important ones. So

When he was a military meteorologist, it's World War Two. His job is to keep pilots safe. And he's like, Okay, uh what's everything I need to know about Pilot safety. And he's like, you know, there's like seven textbooks about everything a pilot needs to know. And then instead he's like, No, no, no, okay, let's work backwards. What are the most likely causes of of crashes or incidents for pilots?

And he went and studied that. Way simpler answer. He's like, Okay. I just need to be able to predict snow, ice, and fog really well as a military meteorologist. Those three, if I can avoid the if I can get my pilots out of the way of those three. Uh I can ignore everything else'cause those three are are the the real killers. And let me like he so he inverted it in order to like do his job.

Let me tell you another example of this. When I was in college Um I got picked as part of some like thing called Kairos that was like Uh top. college startups in the country. Honestly, it was like worse than Forbes thirty under thirty in terms of like credibility. Literally

If you signed up, you won. And um even better, if you signed up you won and then you you uh made friends with the person, they would take you on this all expenses paid trip to China for a week to go meet Uh Jack Ma the CEO of Alibaba. Oh, the founder of Alibaba And so we go I get picked on this trip, I go fly to China.

I don't even know what Alibaba is. We go to their hequarters. I'm like, holy shit, this is like eBay for China or something. This is crazy. And uh we get a sit-down meeting with the CEO. This guy's like one of the most powerful people in China. And Somebody a you know, we got to ask questions and one of the kids asked, you know, The sort of simpleton question, like you know

What's your advice, you know, I wanna be successful. What's your advice? Like what are the what are the keys to success from your experience? And um And he says, uh, you know, I was obsessed with this question also. What are the keys to success? Why what is the blueprint for success? And I talk to a hundred successful people and I got a hundred different blueprints and I thought, well, that doesn't really help. And

This was actually a guy named David Way, I think is his name. He was the current CEO at the time. He was the one answering this part. And he goes, um So every success is different. It's its own little unique snowflake.

But every failure is the same. And we were like, you know, we lean in. And you know, he had his answer and his answer I don't think is actually the the right answer but for this, but like he goes Um like tied into the Alibaba story and he goes, Every every f every big company that That eventually fails. So his his answer was like not how to be successful, but how do you not screw it up once you're a big company, which was the problem they were having. He goes,

Too much money. Too much technology and too many people. And so he tells a story about like how they were gonna compete with um with Google and uh with eBay when they were coming to China. And he's like, we needed to invent our version of Google AdWords.

And he goes, Jack Ma said, Cool. You get um I think it was like twelve, fifteen people. He's like twelve fifteen people. This is like gonna be a huge part of the business. Google has two thousand people working on this.

He goes. Did I stutter? You get twelve to fifteen people. Uh, you're gonna work, um he's like, We need some office space, uh, you know, w give us like a couple floors of the office or whatever. He's like, You're gonna work out of my old apartment. He's like, Your old apartment, we need a proper office. He goes, I started Alibaba in that apartment.

I think it'll work. And he goes, uh technology is like we'll you know, we're gonna need this many servers, we should get the best stuff. Uh, and you know, we need this much, but let's have double that for redundancy in case you don't want the servers go down. We don't want to lose anything. He goes, Oh, if I give you redundant servers, you're gonna design a system that goes down. I'm gonna give you only the servers you need and in fact, uh you go get go get used servers so it can run on even shitty servers. And uh you know, he sort of David Goggins them. That was like hit the story that he told about like And they they eventually did it. They pulled it off. But I wonder if that guy found that inspiring at first or like What the fuck, Jack. Yeah, definitely like a fuck you, man. Come on. But uh yeah, when it all works out, then you can tell this great story. Um Bezos has a simple inversion too. They were like, you know, Jeff

Tech, you're you're, you know, one of the like internet CEOs, internet's evolving so fast, technology's always changing. What technology innovations are you most excited for? What's gonna change about Amazon in ten years? And he goes, Oh, I don't think about that. Instead I think about what's not gonna change because customers are always gonna want the most selection, the lowest prices, and the fastest delivery. And so everything else can change. But that's not gonna change. And so we focus on what's not gonna change because We have to

change it with the times in order to like constantly beat consumer customers' expectations on delivery speeds, low prices, and and vast selection. And so you know this idea of inversion It's so powerful. Even in my own like life, I was telling you like I'm uh having a bunch of progress right now with my diet, which is great'cause like You know, the scoreboard is currently you know, thirty four years of no progress and you know, like

A month of gr of great product change now. Well, what changed and well I did a bunch of things, but but I also actually just inverted. So instead of trying to figure out what's the best diet program, what's the best workout program, exactly how many grams of this, how many milligrams of creatine, how many grams of protein, how much how much of this Instead of trying to like go is it the paleo diet, keto diet, Mediterranean diet, what should I be doing? It was just The inversion. Like

What's a surefire way to be fat? And that answer was quite simple. Yeah. It's like I need to eat way more cowlies than I'm gonna burn. Eating shitty foods that are fried and pr ultra processed. You know, right now I eat late at night. Pretty sure that's a recipe to get fat.

Sitting all day instead of walking for my meetings. probably a pretty good way to get fat is to sit all day. And I just inverted and I was like okay, cool. I'm just gonna walk more. I'm gonna eat you know, eat less calories than I consume and I'm gonna um

Not late night snack'cause I always eat crappy food when I do that. Is literally all I changed. And like Mm Boom, like started to get results finally after like, you know, instead of like being like, Let me go download nineteen hours of Andrew Huberman and try to like follow this protocol, it's like that wasn't the problem, right? Like that that was the complex solution rather than the the easy inversion. That's great.

Um Where where do we want to go from here? Um, let's do a couple more. Do you have any other ones that you like here? I I have a s story he told that I thought was pretty cool. Let's wrap up with that story. All right, so he's uh he's teaching a class at some college. He goes to like an economics class.

So he has this general idea of You need to learn all the big ideas in a space. So he's like, I don't know anything about psychology. But I figure there's probably twenty big ideas in the world of sh of psychology. And I should just like read the books and try to figure out what are your tw what are the twenty big ideas in your space. Exactly if I know those twenty big ideas, I'm gonna be better than like

I I'll know more than ninety eight percent of people who spend their whole life. You know, 90% of people, including some people who spend their whole life doing this because they're so lost in the weeds. And so one of the big ideas he had was like So he goes into economics, same thing. What are the big ideas in economics? Everybody knows Like economics one oh one is the supply demand curve. And uh, you know, basically the

The idea is that you know as the uh you know um you know supply of something goes down, the demand you'll go up or the price will go up. Similarly, if you drop the price of something, the demand should go up. So like people know this generally about economics. But Charlie has a thing. He's like, you learn the big idea, but then you also, how do you make this useful is you need to understand the exceptions to those rules. So what is the I before E, except after C? So he's like, How do you understand that okay, generally

When prices go down. Demand should go up for that. If the you know the demand for TVs is, let's say, you know, X at five thousand dollars, but if you drop the price of a TV down to five dollars, a lot of people that will buy it. And so He's like, but what are the exceptions? So he goes into this economics class. And he goes, Everybody understands, you know, when prices go down, demand goes.

Ever says uh. He says okay, fantastic. What are the cases where that's not true? An item that is supposed to uh signal prestige. Exactly. So

Hands go up, fifty hands go up, and they say luxury goods, uh, any item where price is a signal for quality or status. And he's like, you know, this is luxury handbags and whatnot, you know, if a Louis Vuitton bag was two dollars tomorrow, the demand would actually briefly go up, but then in the long term go down. And um he's like so everybody gets that one. He goes, What else? And now you get crickets, right? Like What else?

And He goes. Any industry where demand is based on bribing the purchaser. He goes, what he goes, Yeah, there's like uh many industries, the defense industry, uh many parts of the the medical industry where actually it's a screwed up kind of perverse incentives where Companies take profits.

And they use those to um you know, shower, you know, goods or or or money or um experiences on Buying agents, purchasers. And um whether that's through advertisement. So like I spend a ton of money advertising and that's how I create the demand. And if I didn't have any advertising budget, I wouldn't be able to create the demand.

Or it's things like the the the military industrial complex where there's like some cronyism where it's like Yeah, you give me this contract today because in five years you're gonna be on my board and your retirement package will be ten times what you're making in the government. And because we all know that that's true, because I have so much excess profit you want to reward me with big contracts and actually you want to pay more for these contracts to that. we can be this really successful company because it rewards you in the end.

And he's like, once you realize that that's an exception to this rule, you will understand how the world actually works. You will understand where the laws of gravity actually break. And I just love that story. I think it told like a it's an interesting little nugget. business wise, but also And the way that capitalism works, but it's also shows kind of the way this guy thinks, which is this I before e, except after C mentality, where he goes into any space, he tries to speed run and figure out, you know, what are the 10 to 20 big ideas of your space? And then he looks at the exceptions. And um, you know, I did this recently. I was

I went to Brian Johnson's house and afterwards I was like Thinking about longevity and I was like All right. Should I be one of these tech guys that like really fucking cares about longevity? Like is longevity gonna be my shit?

Or Am I gonna zag and be like longevity's overrated? And I was like, I need to have an opinion. And I decided What would Munger say? Hey, Munger lived to be ninety nine. He didn't look like a longevity freak. Well, uh somebody said this, well, the Val said this, he goes Buffett and Munger, these guys are like in their nineties and uh, you know, they famously like you know, eat McDonald's breakfast every day and you know, eat

you know, Ms and drink diet cokes maybe for show, but at le you know, they at least do it. They're not sitting there taking metformin and like cold plunging every morning. And uh He's like, you know, it just goes to show how um how important like not being stressed is actually to your health. Yeah. Uh, cause these guys actually were quite low stress in the the way that they they lived their life, you know, but they spent most of their days reading. Playing bridge, talking, thinking. Uh very few meetings.

They didn't sort of like, you know, stress out about investments. They were buying and hold long term investor type of thing. Like Low stress compared to a lot of uh successful people. Um But on the longevity thing, I was like, all right. Let me go learn what are the ten big ideas in the longevity space. And I literally carved out two days.

And me and Ben, all we did was just deep dive into longevity. Like I read like power skimmed through some books. I read I I I was like, Who are the five like thought leaders and then what are their most popular TED talks? And like, let me go watch those. Let me go see what these yeah, what does Peter Atia say? What does Brian Johnson say? What does what are they? What's your takeaway on of all of it? My takeaway was that the big ideas and this is like Somebody who's a big longevity person will will argue with me because I'm gonna do the short version of this. But the big idea is essentially Everybody in uh dec everybody's health declines.

We are probably past the age of like the live forever. So there's like one big idea, which is that If we ever figure out a way to reverse aging or like minimize cell damage. It's not just gonna be this gradual thing like We used to live till eighty, then ninety, then a hundred, and then a hundred ten, hundred twenty, hundred thirty. There's gonna be a stepful jump once we figure out how to stop cell damage.

But If you've already had too much damage, they're not gonna be able to like get you back into your twenties. You're gonna be like past the point of no return. And so like The big breakthrough is if you can figure out how to stop cell damage, we don't know how to do that yet. When that happens, there's gonna be an age sort of point, a tipping point, where people below that are gonna live to like 300, and people above that are still gonna live to like 110. And like there's gonna be this big like polarity between those two outcomes. That's interesting. The second interesting thing is like In terms of the Peter Atius school of thought of longevity,

Which is not live forever. but it's like live a longer health span. So health span versus lifespan is one big idea. And the health span idea is at the end of your life, everybody's gonna have a marginal decade, which is like your last 10 years of life, you're you're your health is gonna decline pretty dramatically from like being immobile in pain in in pain to like you know really you know not being able to wipe your butt by the end. Right. So it's like

That's typically the like Bad version of aging. What Peter T and these guys are trying to do is basically push that decade out. So if it was gonna happen to you from eighty to ninety, let's make it from ninety to a hundred. Or if it's gonna happen from ninety to hundreds, let's

Hundred to hundred and ten. And the cost of your today lifestyle in order to affect that final marginal decade, I personally was like. Uh. Not worth it. I'm gonna find the eighty twenty of like

healthy things to do that are not so costly. Like not so painful or hard to follow or like regimented or Whatever, like I'm not gonna forget to live today in order for my aid ninety to a hundred to be like better. I was like, you know, my takeaway was basically I don't care about the marginal decade. I'm not going to orient my life around that. There's an eighty twenty of like healthier stuff to do that's like I don't mind switching to that lifestyle.

I'll do those. And then that's good enough for me. And if like, you know, wonder drugs come out in some point in the future, hopefully I'm in time for that cutoff. That was my conclusion. Do you think that Buffett is gonna die like next week now? It's like when partly. Yeah, like is that Is that I like that m very well might happen. He uh I think he uh Buffett announced recently that like I I f he's like I I finally found my successor at the age of ninety two. I've I found my guy. Um

Yeah, I think that will that will probably happen. Um, all right. Well, if you made it this far, Sean, I wanna tell you The people in the YouTube comments have been making fun of you and I. They are saying that I dress like a serial killer, which I don't know what that means entirely.

Or that I now that I'm a father, I'm starting to dress like a father Or look like an accountant. And they're making fun of your hair. I don't exactly know what they're making a fun about your hair'cause I think you've got great hair. Maybe messy.

I'm also looking exclusively at my hair and that I had a bad I had a bad hair day in the sense that I wake up, roll out of bed, I do this podcast right away, and I don't even look in the mirror. And um Dude, I'm like the hairiest guy on earth. Like I got hair on my fucking palms. Like I'm like a you know, like a a gorilla. And somehow I think I'm losing kind of some hair here the front I'm getting a little light. And uh people were like, Yo, he's gotta start taking um uh whatever the drug is called. Uh I I forget what it is, but like Finestri.

Go after yourselves, right? We're just doing out there. And um so I did go ahead and and and wet the hair a little bit today and uh you know, try to try to spruce it up. Mm. It does hurt my feelings too sometimes, if I'm being honest. Hey, but you know what's what's working? Sean P. My little Gary V branding pivot is kinda working. In the comments every day, they're like, Sean P, Sean P for president. And uh right now we're a small but loyal army. I don't think anyone said Sean P for president. There's a small but loyal army

There's as they said in Arrested Development, there's tens of us out there. And uh but it but it but it is from that small base that we shall grow Sean P it is. And I feel like Sean P is such a good Such a good brand pivot. I'm actually a little upset. It came to be in my 30s instead of in my twenties. Alright, that's the pod. I feel like I could rule the world of nowhere. be what I want to I'm putting my all in it like my day's off On the roadless travel never looking back

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