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**Morgan Housel** (0:06)
Welcome back, and maybe you noticed, maybe you didn't, but this podcast now has a new name.
Same podcast as it's always been, same ideas that we've done for the last many episodes here. Still just gonna be me yapping up here in front of this microphone and camera. But it's now called The Psychology of Money with Morgan Housel.
Why did I do this? Well, the truth is, when I began this podcast three years ago, I could not think of any name. I really didn't know what I wanted to do with the podcast, so I gave it the most creative name that I could think of, which was The Morgan Housel Podcast. But I never really wanted it to be that. I just needed to think of something else.
I have an idea with book titles that fits in here. Every book title should be self-explanatory about what the book is about. If you're getting really creative with an abstract title that normally understands what it's about, it's hard to make the proposition to the reader or the listener in this case of what you're going to do for them. And so The Psychology of Money, if somebody asked, what is The Psychology of Money about?
It's about the psychology of money. You don't need any other explanation. That's what we're talking about. I do, of course, that was the title of my first book. And I do want to give you a little short story about where that idea came from, about where that title name came from. Back in 1996, Charlie Munger gave a speech, wrote a speech, gave a speech in Southern California. The title of the speech was The Psychology of Human Misjudgment. And it is phenomenal. No matter who you are, what field you're in, or what you're interested in, you can learn a tremendous amount from that speech. It doesn't have much to do with investing. It's about, hey, self-explanatory, the psychology of human misjudgment, all of the biases and errors that people use when justifying and making decisions. And it's phenomenal. Not only did I love this speech, I love the title and I love the format of the title, The Psychology of, where you're not giving advice, you're not telling people what to do, you're examining what is going through people's heads when they are making decisions about certain topics. And why I loved it is because I think it could be so, you could transfer that idea to so many different topics. For me, it was money. I've always been a financial writer, so The Psychology of Money made sense. But you could also, somebody else could write a book or start a podcast called The Psychology of Politics, The Psychology of Health, The Psychology of Sports, The Psychology of Education, any topic that we're thinking of, you could do it. You could use that format very effectively, where you're not telling people what to do because you don't know them to begin with. This is not one-on-one. You're examining how people justify the decisions that they make. Where we go wrong, how we're all different. I always love that idea. That's where the title of my book came from, and that's the title of this new podcast. But nothing else is going to change. Just new logo, new title. Before I get into your questions, I want to talk about a topic that's actually going to lead into the first question. So I'm cheating a little bit here. This is kind of a preamble to the first question. Many years ago, I was probably 25 years old at the time, I read a book by a guy named Felix Dennis, who was a very successful, a very rich, famous at the time publisher, published a lot of magazines back in the 1990s that were huge, very successful. He wrote a book called How to Get Rich. Now, I don't even know if I'd recommend the book, it's kind of a young person's book. But for me at the time, when I was a young person reading it, I loved it, it was great. And I keep a lot of notes when I read books, highlight passages and whatnot. And I was going back through my notes a couple of months ago, from when I read this book a long time ago. And I highlighted one passage from the book. And I want to read you that passage. This is from Felix Dennis, who again was very successful, very wealthy, worked very hard. He said, quote, if I had my time again, knowing what I know today, I would dedicate myself to making just enough money to live comfortably as quickly as I could. By the time I was 35, I would then cash out and retire to write poetry and plant trees.