Howard Marks; Nima Shayegh; William Green
Show: Richer, Wiser, Happier
Cleaned and reformatted from published transcript or auto-generated captions — punctuation added, filler removed, restructured for readability. Not verbatim. For exact quotes, refer to the original.
William Green
I'm very happy to be back with you on the Richer, Wiser, Happier podcast. Today I have something a little different planned. Usually I tend to do long, in-depth interviews with great investors, but occasionally I like to pause and look back at some of the most valuable lessons from interviews I've done over the last few months.
There's so much noise coming at us from every side that it's often very difficult to distinguish the signal from the noise. I think probably like you, I'm constantly listening to things, reading more and learning more — which is all great — but at a certain point you have to stop and ask yourself: what's the point of it all? What really matters? What essential lessons do you actually want to remember and internalise so you can live by them?
It's one reason why I read the same books over and over again. It's also why, when I was writing Richer, Wiser, Happier, I would ask myself: what's the eye of the bullseye? The thing I really want to convey about this investor. What's the absolute centre of the target here.
So that's what we're going to do today — focus on the essential truths from two extraordinary guests I've had on the podcast recently. One is Howard Marks, a legend in the world of investing. The other is Nima Shayegh, who has flown almost entirely under the radar. This was the first big interview he ever did. It's one of my favourite episodes of the podcast, and afterwards I received lovely messages from superb investors like Nick Sleep and Peter Keefe saying how impressed they were with Nima's remarkable depth of insight.
We're going to play about four clips — two from Howard and two from Nima — and I'll comment on what I think is important about each. Towards the end I'll also veer in a more personal direction and talk about something that has been particularly helpful to me recently.
William Green
We're going to start with Howard and specifically a clip in which he talks about artificial intelligence and the current euphoria surrounding it. It gives you a sense of how one of the world's great investors thinks about markets, about avoiding getting swept up in enthusiasm, and about the importance of humility and learning from the patterns of history.
In terms of Howard's status in the investing world, with the passing of Charlie Munger and the retirement of Warren Buffett, Howard really is the reigning wise man of the investment world in many ways. He co-founded Oaktree Capital Management in 1995 and oversees something like $223 billion in assets. He's been writing extraordinarily lucid, wise memos for the last 35 or 40 years, with more than 300,000 subscribers. In this interview, we talked about what AI rhymes with in market history.
When you look at this period compared to 1973–74, or 1999–2000, or 2007–2008 — what rhymes in terms of where we stand on the pendulum between greed and fear? What makes you not think we're at that kind of extreme yet?
Howard Marks
I don't have my finger on the pulse, so I don't know exactly where we are today. But when you look for comparisons, the strongest comparison — not in degree, but in kind — is to the TMT internet bubble of 1998–2000. The Nifty Fifty was different because it centred on established great companies, not novel technology. The 2005–2007 episode with subprime mortgage-backed securities is not comparable either, because that was a financial invention, not a technological one.
This is comparable to the internet bubble. People said the internet would change the world — and it did. Can you imagine today's world without it? It's completely transformed in a million ways. AI is comparable: a technological innovation that I think is going to change the world. But my recollection is we had a clearer view of how the internet would change things. Today I think we have less clarity about AI's specific path.
I'm not an expert — I'm the furthest thing from an expert. But I've never heard anybody tell me how AI is going to change the world in a way that translates into specific businesses and profits. We know it's a powerful force. It can think. It can process data. It has access to all data ever compiled. Exactly what it's going to do, how that's going to be a business, how people are going to make money — I think that's less clear than the internet was.
Most bubbles form around something new because the imagination is untethered and can go off on a flight of fancy. You'll never have a bubble in paper stocks or timber stocks — too prosaic. People can calculate how many houses will be built and how much wood is needed. But with something genuinely new, you can't yet say where things will grow. You can imagine trees growing to the sky. And this is one of those cases.
William Green
You had a very interesting conversation recently with Edward Chancellor, author of Devil Take the Hindmost. You made two bold statements. Number one: AI will change the world. Number two: most companies people are investing in today to profit from AI will end up worthless. And then you said, "When the naive or hopeful investor takes the leap that an irresistible trend will produce sure profits, that's when you get into trouble."
Howard Marks
That's right. And changing the world and investors making money are not the same thing. Warren Buffett pointed this out — I think it was at his 2000 annual meeting. He said there's no doubt the internet will produce a great increase in productivity, but it's not clear it will have a positive impact on profitability. The same is true of AI.
CNN was running an ad where an anchor said to a guest: "You say that AI has the ability to eliminate half of all entry-level jobs." That may be true. If you eliminate half the entry-level jobs, it could be more productive — but will it be more profitable? To whom will the savings accrue? If different companies are competing to provide AI services, maybe they'll compete on price to the point where it's not profitable for them. If employers of AI compete for market share, maybe all the savings go to consumers in the form of lower prices. Exactly how the labour-saving tool of AI turns into profits — I don't think anybody can say.
William Green
You often like to ask: what's the mistake here? When you ask yourself what would be the likely mistakes worth avoiding at a time like this — particularly for either naive investors or smart investors who get sucked into euphoria — what are the likely mistakes we ought to be trying to avoid?
Howard Marks
What I've seen in euphoria after euphoria: first, don't assume that today's leaders are certain to be the leaders of tomorrow. They may well be, but don't bet your life on it. Second, don't assume that because leaders are selling at high prices, it's a good idea to invest in the laggards because they're cheaper. People say, "They have a low probability of success but maybe a big payoff, so I should buy." That's what I call lottery-ticket mentality. If they have a low probability of success, you should accept that the chances of unsuccess are high.
On AI specifically, I'm led to believe you can either make binary bets on companies that have nothing else going on — sink or swim — or you can invest in pre-existing great tech companies, which will get moderate benefits from AI if it's successful, but still be in business if it's not. That's a choice: do you want a novel entrepreneurial start-up with no revenues and no profits today but a moonshot if it works, or a great tech company already making a lot of money where AI could be incremental but not life-changing? Know what you're doing. Know how risky it is.
William Green
There are lessons here that I think are both very timely and timeless. Not least that to be a successful investor — but also to function in the world — you have to have tremendous respect for uncertainty. We really don't know that much about the future. Howard often says that with COVID, we didn't even know what could happen, let alone what would happen. And here we are with AI, trying to figure out which companies will make money from it, what it'll do to careers and productivity.
This basic attitude — recognising that the future is inherently unpredictable and that you need to position yourself so you'll be okay more or less whatever happens — is profoundly important in life. Howard often says he belongs to the "I don't know" school of thought. You'll have noticed right at the start of that clip, he said, "I'm not an expert. I'm the furthest thing from an expert." He always comes from a position of being pretty humble about his own knowledge.
I remember once when I was talking to him about Bitcoin, he really wanted to emphasise the fact that judging cryptocurrencies just wasn't his domain expertise. Knowing our limitations is critical. The last time I interviewed Howard on the podcast, a few years ago, he quoted one of his favourite movie lines — from Dirty Harry, the Clint Eastwood character saying, "A man's got to know his limitations."
But this doesn't leave you powerless. You can study the patterns of history. Going back to study the Nifty Fifty, the tulip bulb bubble — it's instructive. One lesson from those periods: beware of the expectation that trees will grow to the sky. Beware the idea that some irresistible trend will lead to sure profits. Look at Bitcoin's astronomical rise and then its halving. I don't pretend to have any knowledge about where Bitcoin is going — but I think it's important not to make excessive one-way bets on things where being wrong would blow you up.
Howard's point that you can't assume today's leaders will remain tomorrow's leaders is a really important one. I remember back in the late 1990s, there were these stories in Fortune about Yahoo, about MySpace, about CMGI — companies that made people massively rich and then just disappeared. And yet it's not about being a pessimist or nihilist. I remember around 2017, Howard was deeply wary of the FANGs for exactly this reason — "trees don't grow to the sky" — and he was wrong. These were some of the most extraordinary companies ever. So this stuff is nuanced and not easy.
One of the key lessons from Howard is that you always want to be tethering yourself to intrinsic value. Always asking: how much optimism is already priced into this asset? There are assets where he simply can't calculate intrinsic value — so they're not for him. As he once said to me, there are a lot of ways to make money, and you can make a fortune making binary bets or making directional bets on the future. But know what you're doing. Know your risk tolerance. Ask yourself: what's my style? What's my game plan? What's my risk posture?
This is one of the most helpful things I've learned from Howard over the years. Think of it like a speed dial from 0 to 100 mph: usually you want to drive no more than 65 in current conditions. Should you be faster or slower than that? For some people, younger, with savings and cheap living habits, maybe they can drive at 80. For me, I don't feel like I can drive at 85 anymore. It's about knowing yourself — and then also accommodating yourself to reality as it is.
William Green
The next clip is related. It's about how to keep an even keel emotionally in a world where everything is so uncertain. You often quote Elroy Dimson, who said risk means more things can happen than will happen. It feels like the range of possible things that can happen today is wider than ever. How do you deal with it — not only as an investor but personally, as you talk to your kids and grandkids? How does one actually keep an even keel in a period where, as you often say, quoting Peter Bernstein, we walk every day into the great unknown?
Howard Marks
The toughest questions I get are the ones that start with "how." I can tell you what you have to do: keep an even keel. I can tell you that if you want to be safe it may be desirable to have a more defensive portfolio. But how to make that decision and how to keep an even keel is harder.
If you let your emotions run away with you — if you buy when things get exciting, which usually means prices are high, and sell when things get depressing, which usually means prices are low — it's obviously going to be very counterproductive. The even keel is essential, and most of the people you've met and written about have a pretty even keel.
And this goes back to not being hyperactive. Don't trade all the time. "Don't just do something, sit there." Investing is not a fluke. It's not a pachinko machine or a roulette wheel. It works over time because economies grow and companies improve their profitability over time. The most important thing for investors is to get on that gravy train and stay on it. Invest early, invest a lot, and don't tamper with it. Having your emotions under control is essential if you're going to be able to do that last thing — don't tamper with it.
Getting on the gravy train and staying on it and not tampering with it is much more important than getting on and off at the right times, picking the right stocks, avoiding the worst stocks. That's all embroidering around the edges. The most important thing is to be a long-term investor.
William Green
You quoted something in your "Risk Revisited Again" memo from 2015 where you said, "In my personal life I tend to incorporate another of Einstein's comments: 'I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.'" Is that genuinely helpful to you in dealing with uncertainty?
Howard Marks
I'm not a futurist. I don't think my vision of the future is bound to be more right than anybody else's. So no, I don't think about it that much. I just try to do something that might seem counterintuitive: labour in the here and now to buy things that are going to do okay.
You might say, "Yeah, but Howard, in order to know whether something is going to do okay, don't you have to have a view of the future?" Well, yes, kind of. But don't think you know everything. Don't think you have it right. The future is not a single set thing that if you're smart enough you can figure out. It's a probability distribution — a range of possibilities. Whether it's GDP growth next year or inflation or who's going to win the next election or the next World Series or whether we'll have geopolitical peace — only one thing will happen, but many things can. You should accept that. You should accept that it introduces uncertainty, and you shouldn't form certainty around one outcome and bet heavily on it unless you have special expertise, which very few people do.
Humility is a great way to stay out of trouble. I once wrote about my favourite fortune cookie, which said that the cautious seldom err or write great poetry. Every person has to decide: do I want to try to write great poetry and get rich if my bets are right, or do I want to avoid erring and be sure I'll do okay if my bets are wrong? You can't have both. You can try, but you have to put your emphasis on one or the other. Are you going to go for winners, or are you going to try to avoid losers?
William Green
The next clip is from an interview I did with a wonderfully thoughtful young hedge fund manager named Nima Shayegh. Nima runs a small investment firm in California called Roomie Partners, named after the thirteenth-century poet and Sufi mystic Rumi. Like Howard, Nima is trying to penetrate to the essence of investing, but he does it in a very different way. He finds a handful of extraordinary businesses, tries to understand their deep essence, and holds them for a long time.
You went to UCLA and studied mathematics and economics — very left-hemisphere oriented. My sense is you gradually came to realise that comfort in numbers and logical reasoning was not going to be enough. Can you talk about that evolution?
Nima Shayegh
The way it's come together for me is this idea of branches and roots. Rumi has this quote that I love: "Maybe you're searching among the branches for what only appears in the roots." That quote has a great deal of significance for investors.
When I reflect on the investment industry broadly, I see this in myself and in the industry at large: the idea that if you can just get more precise, if you can quantify reality, if you can measure things, you'll have an advantage. The industry today has swung so far in the direction of quantification — expert calls, credit card data, web scraping technology, extremely powerful tools to measure and predict. And yet it's still the case, as it has been for much of the last century, that almost no one compounds capital at very high returns for very long. Despite the fancy tools, despite the incentives, despite working really hard, it's still very difficult.
So I reflect on that and wonder: what are we missing? I started out very technical — everything about reason and science and quantification — and it felt like I was just lost in the branches and was missing the roots.
William Green
What are the branches and roots as they relate to investing?
Nima Shayegh
The branches are what everyone can see and measure. It's last quarter's margins, this week's unit growth, next month's inflation print. All of these quantifiable pieces of information that are often devoid of context. The roots of a business are the qualitative forces that are causal to the future economics of a business.
Lou Simpson used to say that all investing is figuring out the future economics of a business. That statement might sound easy enough to blow right past, but it actually creates an extraordinarily high bar. Most investors fixate on the current economics — the branches, the present reality. But every once in a while, you can get a really deep sense for what the future economics of a business might be, and in those cases it's usually because you have a sense for the roots. The roots could be something like the motivation of management, the culture of the company, the quality of the product, the alignment with customers. None of that shows up on any spreadsheet. You can't model it, you can't quantify it. But they are actually the most real parts of a business.
The question became: if the roots are what truly matter, why isn't everyone focused on them? The challenge — and the opportunity — is that the roots require some intuition. Suggesting that investing requires intuition makes many people uncomfortable because it feels subjective, squishy, hard to communicate. But it's precisely those qualitative, invisible factors that live upstream from the financials that represent the real competitive advantage.
William Green
You wrote this piece called "Roots and Branches" — originally a speech at Columbia — in which you quoted Robert Pirsig talking about pre-intellectual awareness. You talked about this ability to apprehend essence as supra-rational. Can you talk about that sense that there's something pre-intellectual in it?
Nima Shayegh
In most cases, the roots of a business are too hard to tell — it's not obvious. The first thing to note is that you only really want to swing when it's pretty obvious. In Buffett's parlance, there are no called strikes.
In Persian, we have a very old expression — probably more than a thousand years old. Cheshm del, which literally translates as "eye of the heart." The idea is that the heart is more than merely the organ that pumps our blood — it's actually a faculty of perception, capable of grasping non-material truths. Whether we like it or not, we live in a reality that is qualitative, and seeing with a qualitative perspective is important in investing.
Intuition is sometimes framed as a superpower you have to develop. I think it's less about developing a superpower and more about clearing away everything that muddies our perception. I truly believe all human beings have the capability to discern and perceive non-material qualitative truths — things like trustworthiness, sincerity, ambition, beauty. These are qualities you can't model or quantify. You can't measure them. But there's something pre-intellectual that can grasp and recognise those qualities when you're in the presence of them.
William Green
You had a lovely example of this when we spoke — about the experience of going to a Costco car park in a Tesla in full autonomous driving mode.
Nima Shayegh
This is timely because Tesla rolled out an update just this morning. It's hard to explain what makes this product special, but overwhelmingly when I take my in-laws or parents or friends who aren't familiar with it, there's this moment of awe. The example I was talking about was driving to Costco one evening. I clicked the button in the car and it navigated through construction zones, pulled over for emergency vehicles, got on the highway and off the highway. I hadn't touched the steering wheel or pedals the whole ride. Then it pulled into the Costco car park, skipped some open spaces, went a little further, found an even better spot, and pulled in perfectly. And I thought: this is almost a miracle that this exists.
Very few people understand the power of that technology without having had direct experience of it. It's one example of coming face to face with quality. Think of the first time you touched an iPhone. Or the first time you got same-day delivery from Amazon — you ordered a book and it appeared at your door in two hours. Some of these customer experiences, it's worth just listening to them, because they tell you something about the quality of what's producing that experience.
William Green
You had a lovely word for it — you and an investor friend had talked about the quality of "blown awayness."
Nima Shayegh
Yes — "blown awayness" is that experience I'm referring to. Unfortunately it's not an industry term you can quantify on a one-to-ten scale. But I think it tells you a lot about the quality of what you're encountering. It's as simple as your favourite restaurant: you have a perception that tells you when the quality of that restaurant has either improved or deteriorated. There's something within you that knows. Often it's emotional, even physiological. We all hold this dogma that you're supposed to turn off your emotions when you're an investor. I'm not sure that's always right.
William Green
I want to go back and talk in detail about Lou Simpson, who has clearly been the formative influence in your life as an investor. You moved to Naples, Florida, I think in 2016, and worked until 2019 with Lou at his firm SQ Advisers. Lou was head of investments for Geico for 31 years, from 1979 to 2010, and crushed the market over that period by a huge margin. Buffett, after first meeting him, said simply: "Stop the music, we found our guy." And later: "Lou is one of the investment greats." Tell us about what it was like when you first met Lou.
Nima Shayegh
Every time I think of Lou, the memory that always comes is the first time we met. I was in my mid-twenties at the time. The energy I carried with me from my first job at a more or less traditional investment firm — PIMCO — was this sort of over-analytical habit. There was a formality, an intensity to me. When I arrived in Chicago to meet Lou for the first time, I carried a lot of that energy. In my mind I imagined this very intimidating investment legend was going to rigorously cross-examine every little detail of my investment thesis. Mostly out of insecurity, I lugged along a very thick stack of research material — charts, valuations, everything. I was ready to go to battle intellectually.
I stepped into the elevator with my suit and tie on, heart beating a little faster than usual, and I remember thinking I'm going to be met by an assistant or ushered into a waiting area. Instead, the doors opened and it was just Lou himself standing in the hallway. Very unassuming. No formality, no pretension. He led me into an office that was the polar opposite of the office I'd been in the day before. There were no Bloomberg terminals. No financial TV on. It was like the library of a scholar — a comfortable chair, a couple of piles of reading material, and this very calm presence that immediately struck me. He looked at me as he led me inside and said, "Make yourself at home. Let me make you a coffee."
That line just stopped me in my tracks. Here was someone who had compounded capital at world-class rates for decades. Someone Warren Buffett had praised many times over the years. Someone I had been studying from afar since college — I used to pull up old Berkshire Hathaway 13Fs at the UCLA coffee shop and try to reverse engineer why Lou had bought Freddie Mac or Moody's, why he'd bought Nike in the early 1990s and held it for twenty years. And now here he was, stepping away to make coffee for a probably visibly nervous twenty-something who hadn't done anything yet.
When he returned, he didn't launch into some monologue. He didn't try to assert how smart he was. He asked questions with sincere curiosity. It was a remarkable receptiveness for someone with his experience and reputation. That first meeting left such a deep imprint on me because it opened a window onto a different way of being in this work. It didn't have to be this hard-charging, zero-sum way of operating. This hyperactive way. Lou carried himself with remarkably little ego. And that was so different from the archetype you typically encounter in the investment world.
The normal experience is to come across people who are very bright and hardworking but who insist on puffing up their accomplishments, telling you about their most recent investment win, their assets under management. Lou was so different. Some of his most extraordinary achievements would just slip out accidentally after having known him for years. He seemed deliberately uninterested in indulging the self-congratulatory aspect of himself. He was quick to say "I don't know." When someone would challenge one of his beliefs on a company, he wouldn't get defensive. He would simply say, "Maybe you're right. I should think about that more."
I truly believe his humility — his lack of egoism — was a big reason why he was a good investor. It gave him a clearer perception of reality. A friend of mine once offered me what I think is the best definition of humility: it's your awareness of your utter dependence on all that exists and your interdependence on everyone around you. The opposite — a self-centred perspective, thinking you did it all alone, that you're the one in control — clouds your perception and distorts your judgment.
When Lou talked about his portfolio, while everyone else would pitch their great ideas, Lou would say, "I think the portfolio is just okay. Maybe it's a little tired." This is one of the best investors of all time, and he's fairly ho-hum about his portfolio. Whereas at many large investment firms the Monday morning meeting features people pounding the table on probably mediocre ideas. His humility wasn't performative. It wasn't inauthentic humble-bragging. It came from a real awareness of how little we actually control. Buffett's "ovarian lottery" captures that spirit so well. We all like to believe we are the sole cause of our own success, but in truth so much of what goes right in life and investing is really just the beneficence of existence.
William Green
There's a lovely line from Lou in Alan Benello's book on concentrated investing: "We are sort of the polar opposites of a lot of investors. We do a lot of thinking and not a lot of acting. A lot of investors do a lot of acting and not a lot of thinking." What did you learn from him about detaching from the noise and distractions, the casino element of Wall Street?
Nima Shayegh
Lou lived a pretty balanced life in the years I knew him. He would read broadly. He had this amazing sense of humour. He made it a priority to exercise — in the mornings he would go for a long walk or a swim. I remember on one occasion, it was definitely the middle of the week, the market was open, and our portfolio was probably down quite a bit that day. He just called me up and said, "There's a new exhibition at the Art Institute in Chicago. Do you want to go with me?" And we just spent the afternoon wandering around looking at art. That is very different from the experience at most investment firms.
What I know is this: if you intend to have a long-term investment journey and you've surrendered to volatility, then if you're constantly sprinting, always wired, reactive to every little data point, staring at ticks on a screen — maybe that helps your results for the next month or two. But over the long term, it will completely destroy your physical and mental health. It will strain your relationships. And ironically, it will make the investment decisions worse. It's perverse that the harder you push, the shorter your runway. Compounding is all about the number of years. So creating space in your life is invaluable. So much of modern investing is preparing a memo or updating a model — there's so much reactivity. So little time is intentionally devoted to reflection. It's not intuitive for most people to think that going for a walk may be better for your portfolio than adding another scenario to your Excel model.
William Green
Before we wrap up, I want to share a few personal thoughts of my own. I've noticed lately that this has been a particularly challenging time for a lot of people I'm close to — people with health challenges, mental health challenges, financial setbacks. I'm feeling it myself: a very challenging year already. For various reasons I started to go back to some of the Stoic philosophy I had studied many years ago, because Bill Miller had talked to me about it back when I was first writing about him, and then again after the financial crisis, when he had been drawing on Stoic philosophers like Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. He had also read a book by Vice Admiral Stockdale called Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot.
So I recently did a deep dive — I reread that Stockdale book, went back to Epictetus. I found it incredibly helpful. Epictetus was born into slavery about two thousand years ago, had a cruel master who basically crippled him, and ended up in the court of Nero. He witnessed all sorts of depravity and difficulty and had a great deal of personal suffering. He came to his philosophy partly through experience, figuring out how to deal with suffering himself.
When I talked to Bill Miller about stoicism and what he'd learned from it, he summed up the essence of it beautifully. He said to me: "The chief lesson of stoicism is that you can't control what other people are going to say about you, think about you, whatever. You just control your reactions. So if you let other people determine whether you are going to be unhappy or happy — or your physical condition, which you sometimes can't control — you've given away your power. Focus on what you can control, as opposed to what happens to you." Bill has this ability to get at the essence of things.
There's a lovely line from Epictetus: "For it is within you that both your destruction and your deliverance lie." So it's up to us, to some degree. We can't control all external circumstances. But we can control how we respond. That had a huge impact on James Stockdale, who was shot down above Vietnam and had to eject from his plane. He said that as he ejected he told himself: "I'm leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus," because he knew he was about to spend years in prison. He spent about seven and a half years as a prisoner in desperate conditions — several years in leg chains, several years in isolation, tortured around fifteen times.
When Stockdale talked about what he'd learned from Epictetus, he said this: "Each individual brings about his own good and his own evil, his good fortune, his ill fortune, his happiness, and his wretchedness. You can only be a victim of yourself. It's all how you discipline your mind." He said: "The point is to do nothing shameful, nothing unworthy of yourself — because if you do, and you are in any way honourable, it will haunt you and corrode your will. Resolve to stand for what is worthy of us, to live so that our own best conscience is not offended."
My single favourite quote from Epictetus — one I had never noticed before this recent dive — is this: "Remember, you are an actor in a drama of such sort as the author chooses. If short, then in a short one. If long, then in a long one. If it be his pleasure that you should enact a poor man or a ruler, see that you act it well. For this is your business: to act well the given part."
I've been thinking about this a great deal in recent weeks. You picture yourself as an actor in a drama, and the author — whether you regard it as the creator or fate or randomness — is deciding to cast you in a particular way. Maybe your part is short. Maybe life is long. Maybe you're cast as a poor man, or a ruler. But as Epictetus says: see that you act it well, for this is your business.
I hurt my back a couple of weeks ago. My wife has been in a sling because of shoulder surgery. There's work piling up, travel ahead, and the ordinary chaos of a full life. These are first-world problems; it's not that difficult. But it's challenging. And so for me, these lessons from Epictetus and from Stockdale and from Bill Miller have been hugely helpful. The point is to do nothing shameful, nothing unworthy of yourself. You can control the way you behave. You can control how you view yourself.
At the same time, I'm deeply conscious that we're screwing up the whole time and not living up to these very high expectations of ourselves. And I think it's really important also to show ourselves a little self-compassion. There's a lovely line often attributed to Philo of Alexandria: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." These are some of the things that have been helpful to me during a challenging time. I'm not saying my time has been hard in the grand scheme of things. But I toss out these ideas in case they're helpful to anyone else.
Thank you so much for listening. I hope you've enjoyed this episode.