#589: In Case You Missed It: March 2022 Recap of The Tim Ferriss Show

Matt Mullenweg (0:08)

Now is the appropriate time.

Tim Ferriss (0:24)

Hello, boys and girls, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types to tease out the routines, habits and so on that you can apply to your own life.

This is a special in-between episode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month. Features a short clip from each conversation in one place, so you can jump around, get a feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes. Based on your feedback, this format has been tweaked and improved since the last recap episode, for instance, at Hyper Sundays on Twitter suggested that the bios for each guest can kind of slow down the momentum in this format, so we moved all the bios to the end. So we are listening, keep giving us feedback. View this episode as a buffet to whet your appetite. It's a lot of fun, we had fun putting it together, and for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description probably right below where we press play in your podcast app, or as usual, you can head to tim.blogslashpodcast and find all the details there.

Please enjoy.

SPEAKER_4 (1:32)

First up, Morgan Housel, bestselling author of The Psychology of Money.

Tim Ferriss (1:42)

Since we're on a bit of a thread here, I will say I ended up with a tremendous cash reserve in part because I got my nuts kicked into my throat in 2007, 2008, just both self-inflicted wounds in the case of selling Amazon and then in the housing market.

And I was very conservative after that point, or I should say I took a barbell approach of sorts, right? So Nassim Taleb talks about this, but I was in the Bay Area. I felt like I had an informational advantage if I wanted to really commit time to trying to become well-versed and well-networked within technology. So I decided to begin angel investing. That was the highly, highly speculative, potentially high-return investing side of things. And then the rest was basically in cash. I mean, the equivalent of being in a mattress. I mean, I didn't even have the guts to put it into an index. And I missed some tremendous, tremendous growth as a result of that. It didn't bother me though, at the time at least. I was still sleeping pretty well. I was enjoying learning what I was learning in tech.

And then in January began tracking COVID. This is a 2020 And I was able to deploy a ton of my cash reserves, basically end of March, beginning of April. So it did well, but one could very, I think, convincingly argue that I would have made more money just by having it play in the market for a longer period of time. But I think that would have made it hard for me to sleep at night, having just had my face ripped off. I know I'm mixing a lot of metaphors, face balls, you get it, but it was unpleasant. It's the point I'm trying to make.

And I'm going to bring this back to how you think about success in investing. And I hate that word, so I'll parse it out a little bit, but I wanna read something from a blog post that you wrote or an article. I'm not sure which you prefer. This is on the Collaborative Fund website, internal versus external benchmarks.

And let me just read these two paragraphs.

The most important point may be this, internal benchmarks are only possible when you have some degree of independence. The only way to consistently do what you want when you want, with whom you want, for as long as you want, is to detach from other people's benchmarks and judge everything simply by whether you're happy and fulfilled. Okay, I wanna bold that in your mind. Judge everything simply by whether you're happy and fulfilled, which varies person to person. This next paragraph I circled because I just thought it was really worth reading over and over again. I recently had dinner with a financial advisor who had a client that gets angry when hearing about portfolio returns or benchmarks, and none of that matter to the client. All he cares about is whether he has enough money to keep traveling with his wife. That's his sole benchmark. Quote, everyone else can stress out about outperforming each other, he says. Quote, I just like Europe, end quote. Maybe he's got it all figured out. So I just love that because it's highly subjective, meaning it's personal, but it's also very objective. It's an absolute measure. And it's an example of, unless he gets a lot of lifestyle bloat and wants to have a yacht in the Mediterranean or something, it is a goalpost that won't move. All right, so you talk about the importance of the goalposts not moving.