#604: Master Investor Ed Thorp on How to Think for Yourself, Mental Models for the Second Half of Life, How to Be Inner-Directed, How Basic Numeracy Is a Superpower, and The Dangers of Investing Fads - podcast episode cover

#604: Master Investor Ed Thorp on How to Think for Yourself, Mental Models for the Second Half of Life, How to Be Inner-Directed, How Basic Numeracy Is a Superpower, and The Dangers of Investing Fads

Jun 28, 20222 hr 34 minEp. 604
--:--
--:--
Listen in podcast apps:

Episode description

Brought to you by Wealthfront automated investing, Vuori comfortable and durable performance apparel, and Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating.

Edward O. Thorp (@edwardothorp) is the author of the bestseller Beat the Dealer, which transformed the game of blackjack. His subsequent book, Beat the Market, coauthored with Sheen T. Kassouf, influenced securities markets around the globe. He is also the author of A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market.

Edward was one of the world’s best blackjack players and investors, and his hedge funds were profitable every year for 29 years. He lives in Newport Beach, California.

You can find our first conversation here.

Please enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by WealthfrontWealthfront pioneered the automated investing movement, sometimes referred to as ‘robo-advising,’ and they currently oversee $28 billion of assets for their clients. It takes about three minutes to sign up, and then Wealthfront will build you a globally diversified portfolio of ETFs based on your risk appetite and manage it for you at an incredibly low cost. 

Smart investing should not feel like a rollercoaster ride. Let the professionals do the work for you. Go to Wealthfront.com/Tim and open a Wealthfront account today, and you’ll get your first $5,000 managed for free, for lifeWealthfront will automate your investments for the long term. Get started today at Wealthfront.com/Tim.

*

This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep! Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. Simply add the Pod Pro Cover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature.

And now, my dear listeners—that’s you—can get $250 off the Pod Pro Cover. Simply go to EightSleep.com/Tim or use code TIM at checkout. 

*

This episode is also brought to you by Vuori clothingVuori is a new and fresh perspective on performance apparel, perfect if you are sick and tired of traditional, old workout gear. Everything is designed for maximum comfort and versatility so that you look and feel as good in everyday life as you do working out.

Get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet at VuoriClothing.com/Tim. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but you’ll also enjoy free shipping on any US orders over $75 and free returns.

*

[06:39] The value of long-term thinking and the price of short-term thinking

[07:57] What is a common stock warrant?

[09:52] Why are people generally poor at taking longer term (or alternative) perspectives?

[11:08] Conversing about numeracy and common misunderstandings

[15:00] How to become more numeracy literate

[20:18] It’s Raining Man

[22:31] The Rule of 72

[26:14] Making the best financial decisions with unknown variables

[35:57] How to have fun learning about probability and statistics

[37:47] How to get an edge in hedge fund investing (with book recommendations)

[46:23] Ed’s methods for losing (or maintaining) weight and looking 60 in spite of being almost 90 years old

[53:38] Favorite beer

[55:03] Music as stress reduction

[56:02] Avoiding unnecessary risks

[1:04:12] The age-guessing experiment

[1:06:17] Other-directed vs. inner-directed and takeaways from The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman

[1:14:35] How an 89-year-old maintains hair growth

[1:17:20] Using scrap time

[1:19:45] A big change in Ed’s later life that increased its quality

[1:22:16] New reflections, future hopes, and parting thoughts

*

For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.

For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Showplease visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors

Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.

For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.

Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.

Follow Tim:

Twittertwitter.com/tferriss 

Instagraminstagram.com/timferriss

YouTubeyoutube.com/timferriss

Facebookfacebook.com/timferriss 

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss

Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry SeinfeldHugh JackmanDr. Jane GoodallLeBron JamesKevin HartDoris Kearns GoodwinJamie FoxxMatthew McConaugheyEsther PerelElizabeth GilbertTerry CrewsSiaYuval Noah HarariMalcolm GladwellMadeleine AlbrightCheryl StrayedJim CollinsMary Karr, Maria PopovaSam HarrisMichael PhelpsBob IgerEdward NortonArnold SchwarzeneggerNeil StraussKen BurnsMaria SharapovaMarc AndreessenNeil GaimanNeil de Grasse TysonJocko WillinkDaniel EkKelly SlaterDr. Peter AttiaSeth GodinHoward MarksDr. Brené BrownEric SchmidtMichael LewisJoe GebbiaMichael PollanDr. Jordan PetersonVince VaughnBrian KoppelmanRamit SethiDax ShepardTony RobbinsJim DethmerDan HarrisRay DalioNaval RavikantVitalik ButerinElizabeth LesserAmanda PalmerKatie HaunSir Richard BransonChuck PalahniukArianna HuffingtonReid HoffmanBill BurrWhitney CummingsRick RubinDr. Vivek MurthyDarren Aronofsky, and many more.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

This episode is brought to you by Viori Clothing Spell, V-U-O-R-I, Viori. I've been wearing Viori at least one item per day for last few months, and you can use it for everything. It's performance apparel, but it can be used for working out, it can be used for going out to dinner, at least in my case. I feel very comfortable with it. Super comfortable, super stylish, and I just want to read something that one of my employees said.

An athlete, she is quite technical, although she would never say that. Anastra, if she had ever used or heard of Viori, and this was her response. I do love their stuff, been using them for about a year. I think I found them at REI, first for my partner, T-shirts that are super soft, but somehow last as he's hard on stuff, and then I got into the super soft cotton yoga pants and jogger sweatpants. I live in them, and they too have lasted their stylish enough, I can wear them out, and about the material is just super soft and durable.

I just got their Clementine running shorts for summer and loved them. The brand seems pretty popular, constantly sold out, in closing, and I'm abbreviating here, but in closing, with the exception of when I need technical outdoor gear, they're the only brand I bought in the last year or so for yoga running loungewear that lasts, and that I think look good also. I like the discrete logo.

That gives you some idea that was not intended for the sponsor read, that was just her response via text. Viori, against called V-U-O-R-I, is designed for maximum comfort and versatility. You can wear it running, you can wear their stuff training, doing yoga, lounging, weekend errands, or in my case, again, going out to dinner. It really doesn't matter what you're doing.

Their clothing is so comfortable, and it looks so good, and it's not offensive, you don't have a huge brand logo in your face. You'll just want to be in them all this time, and my girlfriend and I have been wearing them for the last few months. They're Men's Core Short, K-O-R-E.

The most comfortable line athletic short is your one short for every sport. I've been using it for kettlebell swings for runs, you name it, the Banks Short. This is their Go-To-Land to-C Short, is the ultimate versatility. It's made from recycled plastic bottles.

I had to pick one to recommend to folks out there, or at least to men out there, is the Ponto Performance Pant. You'll find these at the link I'm going to give you guys. You can check out what I'm talking about, but I'm wearing them right now. They're Thin Performance sweatpants, but that doesn't do them justice.

You've got to check out P-O-N-T-O Ponto Performance Pant. For your ladies, the women's performance jogger is the softest jogger you'll ever own. Viori isn't just an investment in your clothing, it's an investment in your happiness. For you, my dear listeners, they're offering 20% off your first purchase, so get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet.

It's super popular, a lot of my friends have now noticed are wearing this. VioriClothing.com forward slash Tim, that's V-U-O-R-I clothing.com slash Tim. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but you'll also enjoy free shipping on any U.S. orders over $75 and free returns. So check it out. VioriClothing.com slash Tim, that's V-U-O-R-I clothing.com slash Tim and discover the versatility of Viori clothing.

This episode is brought to you by 8th Sleep, my god, and my in love with 8th Sleep. Good Sleep is the ultimate game changer, more than 30% of American struggle sleep. And I'm a member of that sad group. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat has always been my nemesis. I've suffered for decades, tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, putting them back on, and repeating ad nauseam. But now, I am falling asleep in record time faster than ever.

Why? Because I'm using a simple device called the Pod Pro Cover by 8th Sleep. It's the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced, but most user friendly solution on the market. I pulled all of you guys on social media about the best tools for sleep enhancing sleep, and 8th Sleep was by far and away the crowd favorite.

I mean, people were just raving fans of this. So I used it, and here we are. Add the Pod Pro Cover to your current mattress, and start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees Fahrenheit, or as hot as 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. My girlfriend runs hot all the time. She doesn't need cooling. She loves the heat. And we can have our own bespoke temperatures on either side, which is exactly what we're doing.

Now for me, and for many people, the result, 8th Sleep users fall asleep up to 32% faster, reduce sleep interruptions by up to 40% and get more restful sleep overall. I can personally attest to this because I track it in all sorts of ways. It's the total solution for enhanced recovery, so you can take on the next day feeling refreshed. And now my dear listeners, that's you guys. You can get $250 off of the Pod Pro Cover. That's a lot.

Simply go to 8sleep.com slash Tim or use code Tim. That's 8 all spelled out EIGHT sleep.com slash Tim or use coupon code Tim TIM. 8sleep.com slash Tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover. 8sleep.com slash Tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover. 8sleep.com slash Tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover. 8sleep.com slash Tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover. 8sleep.com slash Tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover. 8sleep.com slash Tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover.

8sleep.com slash Tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover. 8sleep.com slash Tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover. 8sleep.com slash Tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover. 8sleep.com slash Tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover. 8sleep.com slash Tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover. 8sleep.com slash Tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover. 8sleep.com slash Tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover. 8sleep.com slash Tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover. 8sleep.com slash Tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover.

8sleep.com slash Tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover. 8sleep.com slash Tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover. 8sleep.com slash Tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover. What do you think humans in general, but let's look at it within the sphere of investing. Why people are generally so poor at taking the longer term perspective, or at least considering alternatives to that type of short term focus? Well, you know, I talked to all kinds of people, often on, I have through my life.

What I found is that most people seem to be focused on what's immediately around them and what's happening then. For instance, I know a very talented woman who is a lawyer for a charitable organization. And she's been in the shop for over 20 years. And she is brilliant. She does hard work and she wants to do good. But the organization is terrible in the way they're managed. So she's a victim in a high mental management position. And she needs to take

her talent and go somewhere else. But getting somebody to actually make that uncomfortable transition is very difficult, even though for an outsider, it's totally obvious. So a lot of people, when it's involving them, they can't see clearly when it's involving one of their friends or acquaintances. They can generally see a lot better or think they can. Yeah. Let's segue because I think this may be complementary to what we've just been discussing

to numeracy. And perhaps we could begin with a definition of terms. But it strikes me that this is one of the most valuable topics that I could ask your help in unpacking and exploring. Where would you like to begin? We could talk about numeracy versus its opposite. We could talk about the fundamentals or basic numeracy. Where would you like to begin a chapter of conversing about numeracy? I can go back to 1960 when I was teaching at MIT. And I went to a wonderful lecture

in Cresculatory and Mopublic Lecture. And it was on the topic of two cultures and the scientific revolution by a well-known Englishman named C. P. Snow, Charles Percy Snow. But I'm not positive about that. And yeah, there were a lot of brilliant people on stage. And what the topic was, was how many people really accomplish people in the humanities don't understand much about science. But there are a lot of first class scientists that are very good in the humanities. And lacking

elementary numerical skills or comfort with it. And I'll put in that box statistics and probability and game theory and a whole lot of other things that have become much more important in the last many decades. So when you, for example, talk to an attorney, most often they're really good with words. But they make elementary numerical mistakes. So I get an decimal place in the wrong place and they won't realize it. That's one illustration of the sort of things that happen. I think there are

some fundamental things that you miss. If you read a news article that's full of numbers, the numbers will often be presented to ridiculous precision like 63.8% of people pull said such and such. But when you think about the poll, what does that really mean? It means somebody out there copied down some stuff and did a division and came up with 68.3%. But it doesn't mean that that poll represents what people really believe. It might have been badly worded. The sample might be too

small, sample might have been biased and so forth. So 60, you might read it if you're not an American person and think that 68.3% is pretty good precision. Well, the real answer ought to be something like somewhere between 30 and 80% of people believe such and such. We think, put that way, you can go on to the next poll. Another fundamental thing that people do, they don't understand

the difference between averages and the way things are distributed in a population. So an example of driving the point home, there are a hundred people in a bar and somebody knows who they are and says, see, the average net worth of the hundred people in the bar is 100,000 each. An hour goes by, one guy walks out of the bar, another guy walks in. The guy checks again, he says, the average net worth is going to a billion and a half. What happened? Well, one guy walked out and either Jeff

Bezos or Elon Musk walked in. So the average may tell you virtually nothing about the distribution and we deal with people often by thinking about averages instead of dealing with the individual person and all the unique qualities and where they might be in the distribution. So when I need somebody, I don't think about them as being in a particular category. I think that as far as I'm concerned, they're my equal and they know things I don't know. I probably know things they

don't know too, but I can learn from them. And I usually try to hear what they have to say instead of telling them what I have to say today's an exception. Well, you are on the hot seat. So I think you I think you're certainly allowed to answer more and say more than I do in this context. If we look at, let's just say the example you gave of how averages can be misleading and I think people listening, even if they are, let's just say they are smart, educated, but haven't had any

particular training in this domain. And they're unsure of how to train themselves or develop this type of awareness. I'll make a recommendation. There's a book called Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, who's a, I believe he's a UK physician. Excellent communicator as well. And there are a number of sections in this book that I think are valuable for separating, for instance, absolute versus relative risk. For instance, you might see a headline as you pointed out in the newspaper that says

something like bananas, double your risk of colorectal cancer, something like that. I'm making this off, of course. And people might panic and stop being a bananas. But if the risk is one in a billion and then it goes to two in a billion, the risk itself and how you should consider it in terms of your lifestyle choices. Pretty minimal. So there are certain resources like that book

that I'm aware of. But how would you suggest someone train themselves to become more numerate, or are there other basic concepts that you would suggest they become aware of? There are two things that I would encourage someone to just start with. One of them is to understand elementary statistics and how it works. Nothing complicated. There's a series called Showns Outline.

It's a sort of like a crib book for college courses. They have a whole set of topics. And one of them is on statistics, which I just gave to one of my daughters because she was interested in this exact conversation we're having. How do you spell Shown? I think it's S-C-H-A-U-M. Got it. You'll find other simple college outline books for statistics. And what they do is they get down to how to do it as opposed to a lot of theory and math formulas and that sort of thing. They

give you a few basic formulas and they share how they work. And that's really all you need to get started. And then if you're curious and like it, then you'll teach yourself more. If not, what you have will serve you well. That's the first thing. The second thing is elementary mental calculations. People have their little apple phones or calculators and they can find all kinds of things out on that. But if they hit the wrong key, they won't often know that what they've

gotten is garbage instead of the right answer. And you can figure out a lot of things in your head very easily if you get used to it. So I would learn how to multiply small numbers in my head if I were someone. And probably how to make other calculations like in finance, compound growth calculations in your head are very useful. My book has a little section about that called the rule 72. That's only the tip of the iceberg. But if you learn that and you like it, you can go

off further. And another pretty neat form that I've come across is if somebody asks you what day of the week was 4th of July 1776, for example, you can figure it out in under a minute in your head and it turns out your Thursday. So this is a well-known thing in the literature. I happened to stumble across it for myself, but that a thousand of people figured all this out long before I did.

But I find it's very handy. And I tend to remember the calendar that way. I don't actually look at calendars, but if somebody says, well, you know, what day of the Christmas I might say Sunday after thinking about it for a little while. But I don't have to go tap my calendar and find out. Do you know what that method is called of determining the day of the week for a specific date? I remember Michael Conway, who was a mathematics professor at Princeton, could do this also very,

very quickly. But if someone wanted to learn how to do that, how would you suggest they learn how to do that or where is their particular name of the method? There is. I try and think. Since we discovered it independent by many people, I'm not sure it has one name, but I'll just tell you briefly how it works for every date in a month. Like, well, let's see. Today is Tuesday, June 14th, 2022. So 14 is the day number that you assemble. Each month has a number of its own.

The number for June is four. Where this comes from requires a little investigation, but the people who write the books explain it all to you. You just have to memorize how it works. So you have 12 month numbers. And then every year of a particular century has a number that goes with it. And it's a way to figure that out pretty easily. And then every century has a number. And so the calendar repeats every 400 years. So you only need four century numbers. And then it rolls over and repeats

again. So you had up all these numbers. You throw away sevens and see what's left. Let's say if three is left, and it's a Wednesday, two is left, it's a Tuesday, and so forth. This was made pretty well known to people quite a long time ago in a movie called Rain Man. Did you ever hear that movie? Right. I have. I have absolutely. He had two super skills. One of them was to deliver the day of the week for any calendar date. So we know how to do that. And the other one was two

con cards of blackjack and win. And we know how to do that. And the biggest chance my wife and I were flying out on an airplane first class heading from I think I later New York one time. And we looked across the aisle and there was Dustin Hoffman and his retinue. I thought, why, I said, should I go over and tell that I know how to do all the rain man stuff? No, don't bother me having a good time over there. So let me mention a few things just for people who want to explore

this. So the first is we will find links to this particular method. And I'll put them in the show notes at Tim.log slash Thorpe. I'll just put them with the first and this now second episode. I want to come back to the rule of 72 and just a moment because I think that'll be fun to just explain briefly for folks. So the basis of Rain Man is someone named Kim Peek P E K who also

had some pretty astonishing capabilities. He could read a book by flipping the pages and the fixation points of his two respective eyes would be on the two respective pages in a given spread. So he had some remarkable capabilities. But a lot of these capabilities as you pointed out can be learned and learned very quickly. For instance, if you want to multiply a two-digit number by 11, it can get a little more complex than this. But if it's 34 times 11, it's 374. How do I know?

Because it's three plus four seven you stick it in the middle and it's really straight forward. So you can develop these heuristics, these shorthand methods. And another, I'll give a reference to another guest. Ed Cook has been on this podcast. He is a or was a competitive memory champion. So you can memorize a shuffle deck of cards in 60 seconds or less that type of thing. And we talk about various methods and mnemonics for memorizing long strings of digits,

things like that. So people can check that out and I'll link to it in the show notes. Ed, would you mind elaborating on the rule of 72? Well done in real estate circles. If you want to know how long it takes something to double, how many years or how many periods let's say, you take the interest rate per year, let's say, suppose the interest rate is 8%. If you divide 72 by 8, you get 9. And so the doubling time for 8% compound growth is 9 years.

Let's suppose that with 8% the rule is very accurate. If you use numbers below 8%, the doubling time turns out to be a little shorter than the rule tells you. And if you use numbers above 8%, it gets a little longer the further away you get above 8%. But it's pretty good for first pass. So for instance, there's a house on the beach that I looked at in 1974. So that was 48 years ago. Can it be that long? Yeah, your mental mathematics could be better than mine. I'll accept 48.

Okay. So you can use rules like the rule 72 and their offspring to use that time period to see what the compound rate of growth was for investing in that house. Now the house now sells for 300 times what it did then. So you end up with a pretty good way to return when you apply these rules. Anyhow, the rule can be used to calculate all kinds of stuff like that.

And the easiest way to use it is to calculate doubling things. For instance, let's say that I invest in the stock market and long term it goes up 10% a year long term. But it might be there might be bad very bad periods and super good periods it mixed together. But over a very long time, if it goes up 10% a year then I can figure out how long it takes to double. It'll be about 7.2 years. A little less goes the 10% higher than 8%.

So call it 7 plus a small amount. What happens if you let it run for 100 years? Well, 7 into 100 is about 14. That's 14 doubleings. And one of the handy metal things that you'll find is very useful is to know what the doubling powers are. Two, four, eight, 16, 30, two, 64, 128 and so on. And for 14 periods, we're looking at about, well, 10 doubleings is about 1000 and four more is about another 16 more multiplying.

So you get up to around 16,000 times. So that's what the number would growth at 10% over centuries. 16,000 multiple. So tell us you something about the power of compounding and why investing for the long term really pays off. It'll help you by wasting money really pays off in the negative way. A small example just at the low end. Suppose a guy buys two packs of cigarettes every day. I don't know what that costs. I don't pay attention to that. But let's say it's cost $15 for two packs.

So if he put that $15 a day in the bank and then every few months went and bought an index fund in the stock market with the money that he saved up in maybe 60 years or so, he might have half a million dollars just because he gave up the two pack a day habit. It also probably have seven more years of life and he probably also feel a whole lot better. So this is just a little thing that you can change with a huge long term impact. But short term thinking said, well, you know,

it makes me feel good. I'll just have another pack today and another pack tomorrow. I'll get over it sometime. Well, let's come back to your friend just to use a, I suppose not entirely hypothetical to real case, but your friend who could have sold his house for three million but wanted to hold out

for the 3.25 million or however much it was and ended up taking 10 years. So you're dealing with, where we are dealing with, he or she is dealing with knowns and unknowns in whichever path they take in the decision tree, whether it is hoping for the extra 250k in an unpredictable real estate market, but also dealing with unknowns in putting, let's just say, the 3 million into the stock market. Because as you said, there could be a bad stretch. There could be a really bad stretch of any

number of years. How would you, if you had been having a conversation with this friend and they listened to your advice and they said, well, I read a book on indexes and yes, I understand S&P 500 and retained earnings and over time X, Y and Z over the long term. But what if I put it in and I have 5, 6, 7 bad years or however many bad years, how would you walk them through the decision process,

understanding that we can't control outcomes necessarily only the decision process. But if they voiced that, they said, I'm open to it, but I'm afraid that I'm going to put it in and then the stock market's going to crash because there'll be some terrorist attack or who knows what. How would you walk them through making the best decision given the knows. I tell them that if you put it into something risky that has good long-term history and good long-term prospects, then you're going to

get shaken up a lot along the way. So you have to be prepared to hold for quite a long time to ride out the speed bumps that you're going to cross. If you're not prepared for that, then you're going to make all kinds of bad decisions along the way like getting out of the bottom. So let me know first whether you're prepared to do that or not. And if you're not, you're on your own. What would you

consider the minimally viable long-term? How many years in this particular case? If they said long-term, sure, what's long-term? For him, he was 50 or so and he was still working and he had other assets. So he didn't depend on what happened to this money alone. If a mark were down by 50% at some point, that wouldn't hurt him. He could wait. Some people can't wait. And so those are people that have to

do things differently. If they don't have enough capital, I was listening to Thomas Piketty talking about his new book, which is very interesting. One of the things he said was that the poor part of the country, maybe the lower half, have insignificant capital resources. So if they're out of a job, they've got to get another job right away because they're living paycheck to paycheck. And so they don't have the luxury of being able to make better choices. They're being forced to make immediate

choices that aren't good. So this long-term investing advice is for somebody who's not being forced to make immediate choices until they think they're going to be forced to do that. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. Wealthfront, you may have heard of it, pioneered the automated investing movement, sometimes referred to as robot advising and they currently oversee 27 billion dollars of assets

for their clients. Given all the stories out there, all of the flashy media pieces, you might think that day trading stocks is the secret to investing success. But Wealthfront's data show that time in the market almost always beats timing the market. Or I should say trying to time the market, not even the best investors I know can successfully time the market. So don't miss out on the best days

in the market. Stay invested in a long-term automated investment portfolio. Wealthfront's globally diversified portfolios automatically optimized to hit the goals you set at the risk level you choose and apply tax breaks, the combustor returns, even when the market dips. For the curious, that's called tax loss harvesting. You can also personalize your portfolio with a selection of funds hand-picked by Wealthfront's financial experts. Categories include social responsibility, clean energy,

cannabis, and cryptocurrency. Wealthfront is helping nearly half a million people build their wealth and invest a paedia just named them their best robot advisor for 2022. To start building your wealth and to get your first 5,000 managed for free for life, go to Wealthfront.com-tim. That's W-E-A-L-T-H-F-R-O-N-T.com-slashtim to start building your wealth. One more time, go to Wealthfront.com-slashtim to get started today.

In the case of your friend, 50 is still working. Would you say the long term that he should be prepared to buckle in for is 10 years, 15 years? Where would you put that number? If you had to peg a number just for the sake of conversation if you were actually having this conversation with him at the time. I'm talking to a person who is 45 years old, I believe. Right now, I'm close to 45. Almost 45. Almost 45.

I would say, look at the rest of your life. How do you project it? I can live to be 80, 90, 100? I hope I live to be. I know averages can be misleading. Let's just say the median death age of males in my family seems to be 85 to 88. You've already outrun that. I'm hoping to outrun that. I'm aiming higher, but let's just for the sake of argument, say 85.

Well, if you follow all kinds of healthy habits, which it seems to me that you do, and you're up on the latest things that you believe actually have merit, not just any fad. You haven't had any major issues. It means you probably got good genes. So far so good. You have economics behind your economics. The wealth is associated positively with longevity. It's obvious why. It's not fair, but if somebody has advantages, they can avoid problems that don't have those advantages forced to face.

So anyhow, I would say that the odds of you reaching 100 are substantial. I love this. Yes. I'm certainly aiming his eyes possible. Let's see. What was the question you just triggered? The question was if we're personalizing this to me, I mean, it may be a little strange to do so, but I'm just imagining a conversation between you and your friend who had the opportunity to

sell this home for three million. You're talking about the different options and one being putting the three million into, let's just say, a low-cost index fund for a long term. And your friend turns around and says, I'm open to it, but I know there are bad stretches. When you say long term, how many years should I be prepared to hold for? I'm using that as just a chance to clarify for people who may be listening what long term could mean in terms of absolute years.

When do you think you might need the money? Really need instead of creeping up. How much? In my case, I wouldn't need that money to pay the bills. You can run and run. I could. Now, I mean, this gets into some varied deranged, because I think in terms of not just lifespan, but also health span. So, am I hoping to build that capital and then, let's say, whether it's gift to family or gift to charity? Do I want to enjoy it in some fashion while I am still physically capable and able

to be out and about and fully capable, mentally and physically? I mean, these are certain questions that come to mind for me as well. But the truth is, I would not need to liquidate that to pay the bills. Yeah. If you can let it grow to some extent, not spend it down, then you have the luxury of being able to invest for a very long time. But if you need to spend down capital, take a person who's retired, has no sources of income with social security, and they've got a million dollar retirement

fund, and they're going to live another 20 to 30 years maybe. They've got to be pretty careful. As soon as they're not able to or willing to work anymore. And so, somebody like that needs a plan that will cause the money to last as long as possible while they're still alive and take care of them. But also, they need to be able to spend it a rate that gives them a decent life. So,

that's a tricky, tricky trade-off. Everybody's different. I would say that the more pressure there is in which you might have to spend down your capital at some future point, probably the less likely you are to try to become a long-term investor in something that's quite risky. There's no one thing that's going to satisfy everybody. It's a well-known problem in financial economics, the lifetime consumption problem. But my view is that you can get ahead enough. So, you have enough

capital, so you're comfortable. Then, this problem mostly goes away. You just stick it in for the long run at a high rate of return and let it go. And you spend some of it as time goes by. But you don't have to spend so much as to really eat into it, Emily. So, let me pause for just a moment to mention and ask a few things. So, the first is the Schaum's outline of statistics is spelled exactly as you said, SCH-AUM, POST-VS, and covers any number

of subjects. So, I'm excited to dig into that. Someone very close to me is actually going to be taking statistics in grad school soon and they're very intimidated. So, this will be ordered today. My question for you is to develop more numeracy and basic familiarity with

probabilities slash statistics. Something that comes to mind for me, and this is from recently interviewing a poker player, is that perhaps by encouraging people to play poker or blackjack, you could enable them to absorb some of these principles while having fun or doing something that has an objective outside of just becoming numerate. Are there any approaches like that or that come to mind that you might suggest to people who would like to absorb and cultivate some

of these principles and numeracy aside from reading a book on statistics. There are other games, other activities, anything that comes to mind. There's a mathematician out in the Claremont College, his name is Arthur Benjamin. I think he has a book called Math and Magic, and he also has a course on the great courses. I don't know. I haven't followed the great courses for a while, but I've seen that he has such a course. You can learn how to do a lot of math in your head

by looking at this stuff. Wonderful. Math and magic, Arthur Benjamin. All right, I will link to all of that. What I thought we might do next, we were talking about a fairly common and simple example of your friend with the real estate decision. We discussed in our last conversation a number of things related to hedge funds. There were questions around Citadel and listeners wanted to know how one might get an edge in hedge fund investing. What would you like to say to that or

any comments you'd like to add to satisfy some of this books? The hedge fund world has gotten very big. When I first started, there were only a couple of hundred hedge funds. I hedge fund in its original usage meant a private limited partnership that invests in typically financial products. It could be things like real estate, loans, equities, commodities, very wide ranging. It's kind of a catch-all for private limited investment partnership. The typical structure is

that there are a group of limited partners. There could be a hundred, two hundred of them and a managing general partner. The limited partners just collect whatever returns they get and the managing general partner charges a fee, typically so much per year plus a percent of the returns. That's the basic structure. Citadel that I talked about last time isn't such a thing. It is a collection of businesses and only one part of those businesses is the private limited

investment fund that I happened to be a limited partner in. There's just a clarification on that. Now, the asset class of hedge funds is very large. It's now about $3 trillion, which is like 2% of the entire net worth of the United States and it has perhaps 10,000 hedge funds in it. Some of them very large, like your guest Redalio or like Citadel, then they range on size all the way down from the multi-billion dollar ones down to a few

million dollars and they often start at a small level like that. It's pretty hard to roam one now and start it up because of all the costs. It's less than a few million dollars. So the hedge fund world used to be a much better place for individuals to invest. Now it's better for institutions. I'll give you an illustration. The hedge fund that I was in for 30 or so years in the hedge fund part of Citadel, they in the first, I don't know, 17 years or so,

we were making 20 plus percent annualized net toss after all the fees. It was incredible. Now, it wasn't so good for me because I was taxable. So I might be getting 14%, 35%, combined state federal tax rate. But then for an institution, it was a fabulous tax example institution like the University of Diamond Fund. And then maybe from 2008 to 2015, returns were some out less. I don't remember the exact numbers, but let's say they were 14%,

and now I'm in the 50% tax bracket. Taxes went up. So I'm only getting 7%. So the market long term is riskier, but it's going to give me 10%. And I don't have to do any work. All I do is invest once. I don't have to do any paperwork. That's sort of thing. And so at that point, for me, the market's probably a better choice, but for the tax exemption investor, they're still getting 14%. It's a wonderful choice. So that's sort of how the head fund world

changed for the really good hedge funds. For the not so good ones, they, as a group, have gotten less and less attractive for people. Now, you might say, who should invest in hedge funds today? I would say wealthy tax exempt investors, whether they be individuals or institutions, and might say, well, how many of my listeners have that pedigree? Maybe not for a minute, but when you think about all the people who are listening to this, a lot of them are probably

on the boards of tax exempt entities like the university endowment funds. And so they can advise them if they want to learn about this sort of thing and see whether some of these hedge funds are good choices. I might say the collection of all hedge funds together, taken as a pool, are not attractive. That is if there were an index, a cap weighted index of hedge funds, would not be an attractive asset class anymore, in my opinion. But there are exceptions,

like the Citadel operation. Well, I shouldn't say Citadel, the hedge fund part of Citadel. The whole business is beyond me. It's like I invested in the Amazon bookstore initially. And now I was an Amazon, I was always other things. So I don't have anything to do with all the other things as a passive investor. I'm so invested in the bookstore. I'll also mention just in passing that if you were to look at the venture capital industry, let's call it as a whole, it would make

a terrible index. If you were to average it all out, it would perform under the market more times than not. But there are, there are standouts. I wanted to recommend two books. And if you have

any opinions on these, actually, it's more of an author recommendation than anything else. But for people who want to gain some familiarity with the history of hedge funds, and what constitutes a hedge fund, in other words, a fund that has hedges versus those that are, say, unidirectional, but nonetheless, call themselves hedge funds, etc. There's a book called More Money than God by Sebastian Malibu that I found very entertaining. And he has written a new book, which I've not read,

believe it's called the Power Law, which really delves into venture capital. And there are some striking similarities. I'll just leave those to aside. Ed, I would love to ask you next about a few books that I have here in front of me, the titles of that is that were in some notes I had for our last conversation. And it relates to expert advice, predictions, and more. But there is a book here, which I've not read, but I've heard of before called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the

Madness of Crowds. Is this a book that you would recommend? Yes. It was originally written, I think, back in 1851. I forget who the author is. The name Charles McKay comes to mind, but I don't know if that's the publisher of the author. And you're finding out now. I am, you know, the Madness of Crowds. No, you got it. Charles McKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles McKay, M-A-C-K-A-Y. And I'll say this about it. It's not wholly accurate. I've seen

the critiques and corrections of it, but it's a great read. And it gives you the flavor of crowd madness. It might be good reading for people who are involved in cryptocurrency now, for instance. Or in my GameStop. And I will also just mention for folks that there is a, it looks like a decent Wikipedia page for this book, which covers some of the main tenets and anecdotes and stories within it. It was first published in 1841. What would you hope people to get out of this? Let's just say

that they are in the midst of buying and selling cryptocurrency. And they say, this adthrub seems like a very bright guy. I'm going to take his advice and read this book. What would you hope them to gain from reading this book? I think the first fundamental thing is if everybody's heard about it already, there's historically at least no reason to believe that you have any kind

of edge. You're basically rolling dice or buying lottery tickets. And just as in the gamelic casinos, where most people do not have an edge, you hear stories about lucky winners, the metros and more people who want to play. But if you look at all of them as a group, including the good players who actually have an edge, if you look at all of them as a group, they lose. And that's how the

casinos survive. That it loses a group. The casinos wouldn't be there. Right. Let's segue off to a to slightly, well, a completely different subject area, which is physical and mental fitness. We covered some of this in our last conversation, but there's certainly more specifics that we can explore here. So just to ensure I'm doing my fact checking, are you still 89 years of age? Or have you already turned a new birthday? Still 89, but getting close.

All right. So I will reiterate for people who didn't hear the first episode, you look like you're 60. It is remarkable. Certainly something to aspire to and removes any excuses I might have. And I have notes in front of me with a number of things that I would love to discuss. The first is developing awareness. And I have a note here about recording your weight. What is your suggestion for people? And is this something that you have done yourself? Yes. First of all,

I had a relative who was significantly overweight and he wished to lose weight. And so I said, the first thing you do, I'm not going to tell you what to eat or how to eat or anything else. The first thing you do is you get on a scale every morning and you write down the date and how much you wait. And just observe that number and do that day after day. Well, turn out he didn't really want to lose weight. And so after a while, he stopped doing this. And so I got after him and

got him to do it again for a while. And then he quit again. And his weight would go down and bounce back up and go down and bounce back up. But when he was writing it down, it seemed to alter his behavior and his weight was slowly drift downward. So I've made a habit myself of getting on the scale, maybe not every morning because I don't need to anymore. But for a long time, I'd get on every morning and just observe what I weighed. And I've been pretty well bracketed between 151 and

about 158 for as long as I can remember. And if I get near 158, I say, well, you know, I don't need that dessert tonight or that beer. We'll have it some other time. Or I've got a great big healthy salad today instead of a burger. And it's an off to shift me down. And then I have another little thing that I check. There's a simplistic notion of apples and pears in people. Have you heard about this one? I have. The apple is somebody that tends toward getting a big pot belly when

they gain weight. And I come from family of apples. And this is not healthy because you get all this fat around your internal organs. So one of the things I put on my list early was never get that pot belly. So all I have to do is I can look down if I see anything that isn't flat down there. I know I weigh too much. That's another awareness leads to change things. Those two feedbacks are more than enough to control my weight for a lifetime. And I really have to use them.

But anyhow, I would say that a person can develop their own feedbacks wherever those are and use them. And measurement is important because you want facts on which to base what you do instead of hopes, beliefs, wishes, so on. I remember a t-shirt that I was given a long time ago by the director James Cameron. It was actually an original staff shirt for the film Avatar. And the very top of it said hope is not a strategy. I liked quite a lot. And your weighing just to get

specific is before breakfast and without clothes or what you would recommend. Is that accurate? I do two things. When that's convenient, I do that. When it's not convenient, I just happen to go to the scale maybe before a shower in the middle of the day. And I weigh myself and put that down as a little side fact. And of course, I got to weigh more in the middle of the day than I did first thing in the morning. So I know that. So maybe I weigh one 52 in the morning. But when I put my

little side thing down, it might say at 3 pm, I say one 54 and a half. So I know that roughly speaking about each third of the day, corresponding to each possible meal, I gain about one pound. So I can mentally correct back to the beginning of the day. I don't have to weigh myself every morning if it's not convenient. But get other feedback. Absolutely. The whole thing about health and fitness as I see it is you want to do things that are preventative. And you want to make sure

you're not missing something important. Because it's the things you miss that are going to do more damage than the positive things are to save you. I mean, you can work out and be fit and have higher aerobics and so on. But if you're not going in for a routine colonoscopies and skincare checks and so on, you're leaving a big risk factor open for yourself. So you've got to try to get rid of the risks that you can cover. Do you have a checklist for yourself for how do you

ensure that you are not missing gaps or blind spots? I think about it and I talk to people. And I pick up information all over my list expands. You know, there's a lot of topics on the list. There's physical fitness to various kinds. There is mental health. There are supplements which I don't take much of because the evidence isn't strong enough in my mind for them. Other people will disagree. But I'm not heavy on supplements. Only if I think they've really been proven. One

thing that I found that really worked well was bone supplements. I was able to reverse osteopenia and turn them into excess bone after I've started years. And bone supplements, meaning, say calcium magnesium, K2, blinds, things of that type. Yeah. I have a few bullet points that I would love to hear you expand on. And actually, before I get to that, I should say that it is incredible how much behavioral change can subconsciously seep into someone's life also consciously. But

I find this subconscious side especially interesting. If they simply begin to measure whether it's body weight or body composition, which is partially why self-directed observational studies or at home clinical trials or experiments are so difficult to design well. Because you can say to someone, all right, you're going to follow the Mediterranean diet. Keep all of your other variables the same. Don't change anything else. But rarely is that going to be the case. So that's

just a side note. One more fact to it for folks. Mr. Rogers was also very diligent about weighing his body. I think it was every day when he swam and his magic number was 143. He tended to stay within a few pounds of 143. There are a few bullets here. I would love to hear you expand on. The first is limit alcohol to a total of a few drinks a week. So this makes sense to me. Do you drink alcohol yourself if so? What do you drink? I typically drink maybe a half a beer three or four

times a week. And maybe when I have company a glass of or two of wine, that's pretty much it. And I think it's too much. You think that's too much. Do you have favorite beer or favorite wine that you tend to consume if you're rationing in that way? I never drank beer until a few years ago. We went to over diolins and we visited the Guinness Brewery, which has a long and colorful history. Really interesting. And the stuff was re-degrade. So I did not see that coming. Wow.

All right. So he picked up beer a few years ago. So the 85, 86, something like that. I love that. I probably need to go the opposite direction with some of my alcohol consumption. There are no breweries. Yeah. I'm actually pretty good these days. My girlfriend doesn't drink very much at all. And she's like 20 pounds. So we tend not to drink too much. One is reduced stress. Now this is also something that at face value, I think will make sense to a lot of people.

But begs the question of specifics. How do you reduce stress? What have you done to reduce stress in your life that you've found to have a meaningful impact? One thing that really works for me is listening to music. And also another thing is just going for walks and thinking about whatever my mind just kind of runs free. And maybe after this conversation, I'll go for an hour walk. And I'll think about the things we said. And well, I wish I said, but forgot. So on. Or

is there a type of music? I happen to like classical, but I also like guitar. I like a lot of old songs and music from the movies. Reminds me of pleasant times I've had. I like, I like, I've talked yeah, it's true. I do too. I've developed a real predilection and this eagerness to consume more jazz and blues. I'm not sure maybe it's my maybe my proximity to a lot of that in Austin and recently spent time in New Orleans. But I'm on the same page with those. There's a bullet here.

Avoid unnecessary risks. Could you expand on that? What type of risks have you trained yourself to avoid? Well, the really everywhere. I have a laundry list of them that gets longer and longer as I think about them more. Here's a for instance, COVID, good current example. People are winding around now mostly without masks and they're actually like it's over. But I don't see any reason to catch it. And it's not going to be good if I do catch it, especially being 89, high risk group.

The death rate there is probably close to 20% in the 89 year old category. Now I'm healthier and I probably have better medical access than most people. So it might be only two or three percent for me. But that's too big. So I try to be careful avoid crowds. No commercial travel unless it's forced upon me. You just can't avoid it. The key thing is don't share air with people that might possibly be ill with COVID. Some of them don't know it. So any of that, that's an avoidable,

a largely avoidable risk if you're willing to limit your activities. But I'm hoping is that they'll have a broad spectrum antiviral that will allow us to get a shot and put an ant all this. But government seems very slow in getting its act together. And that's not telling how long it's going to be. That's one risk. Another one is travel. Let's say that I want to go from Orange County, California to New York City. I could fly out of Orange County Airport, nonstop to Newark

and take a somewhat less convenient for me flight. Or I could connect, land somewhere, take off again on the way. I so called direct flight, but it's not nonstop. Or I could go to LAX and get all kinds of flights with much greater time ranges. If I go to LAX, I'm going to spend 40 plus miles in a car. Two ways. The risk of driving in a car is roughly 100 times per mile, but it is flying an airplane, which is a gigantic difference. Now airplane risk, most of the risk is take off

and landing. So I won't take a direct flight if I can help it because there are more takeoffs and landings. So my optimum is to go to Orange County, take a somewhat less convenient flight, avoid takeoff and landings. So there's a small risk reduction. And I say, well, how much risk reduction is there? It's maybe a chance in a million, but we're a little thinking I can get rid of it. Here's another example. I don't know if we talked about this before or not. It was about

Australia heard by Benjamin Stein on his program. He is the son of Herbert Stein, famous economist and Benjamin Stein himself is economist, but also partly comedian on purpose. He and Milton Friedman, a well-known name, were walking in New York City and they came to one of these cross streets where the light was red, but didn't seem like anybody was going back and forth. So Benjamin Stein stepped up the curb and Milton Friedman said, Benji, wait a minute. And Benjamin

Stein said, no, it's safe to go. And Milton Friedman said, you know, Benji, probably it is, but maybe it isn't. Why should I risk the rest of my life to save 20 seconds? And that's a situation that a lot of people don't make. They'll run that red light because they can just barely get through once in a while. Why don't we get seabone? So the risk everywhere like this, if you think about them a little bit and make it a habit, you get rid of piles of them. There's a book called

Let's See, The Unthinkable, I think by Amanda Ripley. And she talks about horrible situations people of fung cells in. For example, the Twin Towers in 2001. And people made various decisions, some of which save their lives, others cause people to lose their lives. So she has three steps denial, where this can't be happening. Deliberation where you say, well, this is happening, what am I going to do? And then there's a decision, okay, I'm going to do something now. So I'm a little more

proactive. I say that for me, there's awareness. And then there's analysis. And then there's action. So what kind of things could happen? Well, besides the Twin Towers, you might find yourself in a burning theater. You might find your building shaking from an earthquake. You might see a, we hope none of these things happen. You might see a skylight up like a thousand suns. And you figure out that there's been a nuclear detonation. So the multiple things, or huge volcanic explosion somewhere,

or a tidal wave, there are many and one very remote things. But then there are things in everyday life. Somebody start shooting here in the crowd. You have very little time to decide what to do. I mean, well, I didn't drop to the ground first thing and then figure out what to do next, because you're a small target. And then see how you can help. But people have these things suddenly

thrust upon them. And if you have some thought about how you'd act in some of those things, like I know what I'd do in my high rise office building if there was a earthquake, if you have some idea of how you'd act ahead of time, it helps repair you so that you can probably have a better chance of coming out of it with less loss or damage. So that's another approach or big risk. The sort of things most people, most of us don't like to think about them, prefer to think about

happy things. You know, it's having been through a number of natural disasters and also crisis situations, for instance, in Austin, Texas, but also in San Francisco. It is always astonishing to me. And maybe I just have a healthy, sometimes unhealthy degree of paranoia about low probability events. But if you look at even recent history, like the Loma Prieta earthquakes in San Francisco, or you look at the freezes in Austin that paralyzed the city, prevented transport

trucks from delivering goods, ended up disrupting water supply. I am amazed how few people have a week or two worth of backup water. Just an example of something that you could remedy with a few hundred dollars, and less than they spend on a given weekend at restaurants, but just how few people have that type of contingency planned for even after they have had a really close call. I remember in Austin, deep freeze last a week. And I had some involvement during this entire

thing with disaster response. And it was pure luck that we had the thaw when we did. If it had lasted another day or two, it would have been catastrophic in terms of lives lost for a number of reasons. But even after that happened, I spoke with a number of acquaintances who had been in dire straits. And I asked them if they had bought backup water and a few other things. And they said, no, that was a one in a hundred years type of storm that'll never happen again.

This is puzzling puzzling. Are there any other risks from, say, an exercise perspective or a behavioral perspective, a day to day, kind of weak to weak perspective that you have removed by doing this type of analysis for yourself, things that you used to do that you no longer do. Yeah, I used to run on roads when I was training. And I soon changed that because I read about what these statistics were for runners being hit by cars on roads. Even if you run on the side in the

bike path, it's too much risk. So I went off road. And now when I walk, it's the same thing I don't walk on roads like I walk off road, except in a community where there's basically no action. I can see in here everything. What is the age-guessing experiment? Yeah, it's a funny thing. About, I think one is about 82 or so people go say, gee, you look like you're 60 and I said, well, that's very flattering. You know, it's nice to hear. I wonder how much truth there is in this.

So can I measure this? Has this got any fact behind it? So what I decided to do was approach strangers at convenient places like a waiter in a restaurant where I'd never eaten before. And I'd say, I have $5 here. I'd like you to answer a question about me, assuming you know nothing about me. And if you are close, I'll give you the $5. And the question was, how old am I within five years? I did this with a wide range of people, about 20 people altogether over several

months just to entertain myself. And I had a lot of fun with it in one restaurant when somebody guessed like 53, I said no. And they said, well, my friend wants to guess. And I said, friend, you want to go higher or lower? So friends a lot of while, I think they went higher. So they said something like 65 or so. And I said no. And they tried again, 75. No. But one woman came pretty close. She was an old lady in a senior citizen's library. She was

about 83. And I asked her the same question. And she looked at me and she said, I think you're about 72. I said no, you know, five years. And then I said to her, see that kid walking along there? How do you think he is? Kid was about 18 or 20. She said, I think about 40. The mean was in the 50s in, but that was several years ago. Well, I mean, that just sounds like a fun game to play also. It's very entertaining.

Now you can play with any other kind of question too. Ed, it strikes me that you have developed an ability. And perhaps this is somewhat innate as well. But to think for yourself and to attempt to start from first principles whenever possible, I'd love to pick up on a thread that I was hoping to explore last time, which is other directed versus inner directed. And there's another book title. I believe it's a book called the Lonely Crowd. Yeah, my David Reesman. That's right.

That's right. Could you speak to this and provide any elaboration that you think is helpful? And if there are any resources or approaches that you might suggest to people who want to become more inner directed? First, by the Lonely Crowd, it basically explores the idea of people who are quote, interactive. Do you call them maybe introverts? But it's not quite the same thing. And people who are other directed who tend to overlap with extroverts and other directed people tend to

get their direction and their values and their ratification from people around them. So they tend to conform and they tend to go with fads and they tend to go with the majority vote on things. And inner directed people tend to be more self-deciding about things. They tend to be more socially with introverts, but not exclusively. There are a lot of I'll call them

inter-directed extroverts. Say, by inter-direct, I think yourself as having your own independent moral and ethical compass and kind of set of rules for living and guiding yourself. And another directed person tends to pick those up from others. Others basically indicate to them what the right things to do are and what the wrong things to do are. So it's an interesting line of thought. There's a way to get into this a little bit. There's a book. It is a personality

typing scheme started by a mother and daughter. They have four major personality dimensions. One is introvert extrovert. The next is sensing versus this Myers-Briggs. Yes, it is. That's it. Thank you. Right. The Myers-Briggs type indicator. Yes. And so that is, I think, very useful even though it's simplistic. It kind of breaks people down into 16 major categories, depending on which choice they are on each of four dimensions, two times, two times, two times,

two. And then it gives you a general description of a pure type like INTJ as a pure type. And so the general description of the scientist slash mastermind or something like that. And ESTP is promoter. So all kinds of things come with promoter. But E is extrovert. S is sensing, which means more, I guess more sensitive to people around you. How they do things and how they act, you can read them. So if you look at these categories, you realize that they individual people aren't any one of

these 16 types. But if you wonder who's pushing you off and find that one of them is very much like one of those 16 types. And when you find that out, you can understand a lot of things about them very quickly. Sometimes will be a mixture of two of the 16 types. And again, it's not too hard to figure out a lot of things about them. And if you type yourself and you're anywhere near one of the 16 pure types, your hair will stand on the back of your head to leave stand either of us having

here. You have more hair. You have a lot more hair than I do. I've been growing it and growing it. So in any case, it's incredible. Sometimes the insights that you'll still have to get into somebody that you know, you say, oh, to this kind of person, they're artistic and artistic has these things that go with it all the time almost. So you learn quite a bit quickly about people, not everything. And you run the risk of stereotyping, of taking a prototype from a group and using

that to represent everybody in the group. And of course, it's a huge spread among people in the group. What we talked about before about average is the distributions, the same idea. But anyhow, it's a useful introduction to thinking about other people and realizing they're different from you. They're not better. They're not worse. If they're different type, they're just different. And you need to try to understand where they're coming from. And it helps one do that a bit.

So I recommend that as kind of off psychology introduction to understanding people better. What is your type? Do you know your type? It's I and TJ. I'm an I'm not. I am. I did the typing a long time ago for Myers-Briggs and I'm also an I and TJ. Which is not the imply. I have your personality or skill set. Well, I showed you how different people in Capigaw can be. And of course, we're not pure either. We're 90% I am. Or something like that or 80%. What do you have to be

instead of 100%? I think I'm introverted into it of thinking judging. I'm probably 99% judging, which I'm not sure always helps me. That's a joke. Good to joke. But the lonely crowd just to pick up on that. What is the takeaway or what would you hope people in an overarching way to glean from the lonely crowd? Is it the personality differentiation that you're describing along lines of a Myers-Briggs or is there more to that book that you would hope people would notice?

I think the biggest takeaway for me was simply the notion that people who are quote other directors and quote, which means that they pick up their cues about what to do and how to behave and what's good and what's bad from the crowd. Those people are kind of afloat without a compass. It's harder to be that kind of person. And those people are lonely because they don't really have anything inside that helps them feel a sense of worth and helps them make decisions that are

clear cut and that they feel like they can really count upon. So they're kind of addressed. Yeah, I'd love to tie two things together because I always wonder for myself, how does one develop this as a skill as opposed to an inborn attribute, let's say, or is it developable? If I want to learn to swim, I can improve my stroke, but I'm never going to have the same phenotype as Michael Phelps, right? I'm just not going to have these crazy anomalous flipper feet, for instance,

with hyper range emotions. She's not going to happen. So in the case of the lonely crowd and developing an inner compass, I want to tie that back to numeracy because I find that if someone learns how to say scrutinize studies or journalists who try to interpret studies, it is incredibly liberating and confidence building because they no longer feel entirely dependent on some high priesthood of interpreters to tell them how to think or to tell them how to digest or metabolize data. They

can actually go straight to the source. So I do feel like developing a basic, basic, basic understanding of probabilities and statistics, a very basic ability to do a handful of mental calculations, a very basic ability to read a study for oneself. And I think all three of those check boxes could be checked in a single month. I think with a few hours a week, for a few weeks, you could make an incredible man headway. For me, that seems to correspond to people who are

more internally directed. I don't know if that resonates at all for you, but I did want to, at least from my experience, tie those two things together. So it resonates fully with me. So I'll add some more resources in addition to those that you mentioned into the show notes for this episode so people can pick up on that. And people will harang me if I don't follow up on one comment that you made, which was I've been growing and growing

my hair. So how does an 89 year old grow and grow their hair? I stumbled into something accidently which may or may not work for everybody. And only applies to men, by the way. There is a drug called finasteride or proscar. Have you heard of this drug? I have. If you have an enlarged prostate which most older men tend to get, you want to keep that thing from getting larger and larger because it squashes other things down there. Like your bladder, for example. So you have to go to

the bathroom more often if you have a huge prostate. I've often from the opera going into the restaurant admission and these guys are standing there for five minutes. I know they have large prostates. So slowing the growth of your prostate is a good thing. So finasteride does that. However, it just so happens that it also promotes hair growth. And it's the best thing I've ever heard of for a hair growth. It doesn't promote mass hair growth, but it's noticeable. And it

also causes you to retain your hair. So I noticed more hair right away when I started taking it. How long have you been taking it? Probably 20 years. 20 years. Do you have much baldness in your family? My father was bald. Okay. All right. All right. See, my father is not bald, but and my mom is not bald. But I certainly, at this point, am bald. Maybe I'll pick up the finasteride. For people wondering, also, finasteride is also sold as propitia. So it's well known as propitia as

well. It's a five alpha reductase inhibitor. I think you get a higher dose if you get finasteride prescribed. I want to write it up. I'm pretty sure that's true because I knew about the over the counter versions. But they were maybe a fifth as strong at the time I checked. That makes sense. And of course, I'll just mention because it's a good idea. Speak to your doctor, neither of us are doctors. We don't play them on the internet. So please speak with you.

Are medical professionals? There are possible side effects with this and most drugs. But pro scar finasteride. Look it up. Good Wikipedia entry. Is there anything else that you would like to mention on the health side of things? And we can potentially, and we can discuss this another time, look at adding something on Timnablog that might outline some of this in greater detail. But is there anything else that you think we would be remiss not to mention or that we should include

in the conversation of health and longevity? I think it's pretty well confident from my standpoint. Yeah, I think we've covered quite a bit. There's really one more thing that I have highlighted here that I'd love to hear you expand on. And that is using scrap time. I've never seen this expression before, although I can sort of intuit what it might mean. How do you use scrap time? We recommend people use scrap time and what is that? I just made it up for this. Oh, you did.

Great. Because I was thinking about things. Perfect. This is an exclusive, a worldwide exclusive. Well, a lot of people complain that they're bored for the getting impatient when they're stuck somewhere. For example, let's say I met at a long traffic light. I happen to have to drive through about three or four two-minute traffic lights. Sometimes they catch me. Sometimes they don't. This is the couple of days a week. I go in for a few hours to my office. So,

after traffic lights sitting there, what do I do? I could say, I wish this light would change. Maybe I should have run that light. I don't do that. Instead, I said, you know, I've got a couple minutes here. I can do whatever I want. Well, my next little stiff today. Why don't I do a few neck exercises or a few shoulder shrugs or whatever. And by the time I'm going to that, the two minutes gone, I'm ready to go to the next traffic light. So, the scrap time turns out to be a payoff

rather than a negative. And I don't care about being caught at lights, not at all, or a doctor's office. Like, going to the doctor's office, they say, well, we were going to take you at 10.30, but there's been a delay the doctor had to do an operation and won't be here for a while. He'll be back at 11. If I don't have something else scheduled, I say, okay, fine. If I have anything on my phone, I do that. I use the scrap time. If I run out of stuff like that,

I try to get some exercise in some stretches, some limb bringing up, and so on. And it's amazing. When I start doing that, they take me in a lot quicker than they would otherwise. Because everybody knows this guy's been forced to wait and wait and wait. It's not why I do it. I try to do it as subtle as possible. Or I'm sitting there in the doctors room number seven waiting for them to show up. Same thing, more scrap time. I can get 10 or 15 minutes. I like raises,

push ups, all kinds of stuff in. You know, another advantage I can imagine is that they see you doing all this and they're like, this patient is scaring the other patients. We have to get him through the system as quickly as possible. They move you along. Ed, I'd love to know, and if there's no answer that comes readily to mine, that's fine as well. But I'm 45 and I'm wondering, or roughly 45, after some thinking, I am roughly at the midpoint to my next target, which is to

get to your age. And then from there, 220, or who knows where? You know, by then the world will have changed a lot. And your odds will be a lot better. One can hope. A boy can dream. So I hope that is the case and that we're not living in some dystopian future where no one has any reproductive health. So I am hoping for the the upside case. Let's assume that is true. What are some of the new beliefs or changes in beliefs that most positively impacted your second half? And of course,

some of this is self-serving. And it's possibly a hard question. But how did your thinking or priority or beliefs change after the midpoint that you think retrospectively looking at it have most benefited you or those around you? I started running probably when I was about 40 just a mile or so on a Saturday. And then as we talked about last time, I built it up and then I started actually

running Marathon's when I was 47. So I got into running very late. But Marathon and Tommy quite a bit about life in a way because I began to send myself in with life is a lot like running a marathon. And if you look at it that way, here I am at that age then back in roughly around 50. Here I am at the midpoint, perhaps of a marathon. So if you're running a marathon, you don't sprint because you'll burn yourself out really. You are careful not to step in particles. There are all kinds of

other things that you need to take care of in order to get to the finish line. And you will actually learn some of us learn how to get through the wall without there being a wall anymore. So I thought to myself, well, the same thing about life, if you plan ahead, you can avoid a lot of problems that sink other people, knee replacements, heart clogging up, catching diseases because you don't do proper vaccination, going to countries where there are horrible diseases to catch in the

first place, you can't protect yourself fully. Maybe that's sort of thing. So thinking long term is one thing that running a marathon teaches us. And so I tend to think long term anyhow, but that was a great reinforcement. In the last say five to 10 years, is there anything you've profoundly changed your mind about? Or it could be recently, I don't need to put a time frame on it. To me, the value of being around good people and not being around a few bad people is much higher

than it ever was before. And the people in my life, I consider the most important and my actions with good people, the most important thing. You know, I enjoy other things, but I think at this age, you've basically done most of the stuff that you're going to do of any general broad significance. And so it's a time to reflect and to think about life and enjoy it. And if one has any wisdom to assure us some extent. Well, you see him as sharp and as lively as ever as far as I can tell. I mean,

you certainly have more vitality. However, I know that's a bit of a maybe an italicized word, but life force than a lot of the 40-somethings I know. So whatever you're doing, well, thank you. Keep doing it. And is there anything else Ed that you'd like to add before we bring this conversation to a close? I think an important thing for everyone is to think about the world and society

as us instead of me and to try to act that way. And to think longer term, think about how the things one does affects the people around not only right away, but down through the years. And it might seem like it doesn't matter, but it does in a way. And a lot of these things will that you make better now for the future will actually benefit us a lot sooner than you might think otherwise. Pollution, for example, climate change is coming along, it's coming along pretty fast.

And people might say, well, what do I care about what happens 50 years from now? But it's happening in increments. It'll be a little worse next year and a little worse than you're after and so on. And you might not want to be around when it's really bad 50 or 100 years from now, but you might not care because you're only going to be alive in other 10 years, let's say, if you're a pretty old person. But still, these things come along

sometimes faster than you think in a ways that you don't expect. And so it's wise, I think, to just try to make the world a better place in any way you can, even though you might not repull the benefits. Yeah, here here, I recall a conversation. The friend had with an engineer, I won't name very famous founder. They were discussing artificial intelligence and the two questions were for anyone who this particular founder would speak to about AI. He said, number one, I ask them,

do you have kids? Number two, I ask them, do you know how to code? And the, do you know how to code is kind of self-explanatory? It's engineering bias, which is understandable. But the, do you have kids was to evaluate if they are thinking sufficiently long term? That was just one of the hurdles that he hoped people would pass. And if not for your own kids, if you don't have kids, then just think about your closest friends and their kids or their grandkids. I mean, there are many ways

to look at it. And I so enjoy our conversations. I know we've only had two long form conversations thus far. I hope this is, is just the second of more. And people can find you certainly online Edward O Thorpe.com, your books, beat the dealer, beat the market, and a man for all markets, subtitle from Las Vegas to Wall Street, how I beat the dealer and the market. Is there anything else you would like to point people to any other recommendations that you would like to make

requests of the audience other than what you just requested? No, I think we've covered everything. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you so much, Ed. As always, and for people listening, we will include resources. Everything we discussed links to all the books and concepts and so on at Tim. blog slash podcast or better yet, just go to Tim. blog slash Thorpe THORP and we will add as many helpful things as me and my team can think up and call from this interview. And until

next time, be a little kinder than it's necessary. Think long term, become a little more interactive, learn a little bit more about probability statistics and math and magic. I will link to that and thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribed

to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter, called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles and reading, books and reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on. They get sent to me by my friends, including

a lot of podcast. Guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog slash friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

This episode is brought to you by 8 Sleep. My god, am I in love with 8 Sleep. Good Sleep is the ultimate game changer. More than 30% of Americans struggle to sleep. And I'm a member of that sad group temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep and heat has always been my nemesis. I've suffered for decades, tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, putting them back on and repeating ad nausea. But now I am falling asleep in record time faster than ever. Why? Because I'm

using a simple device called the pod pro cover by 8 Sleep. It's the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced, but most user friendly solution on the market. I pulled all of you guys on social media about best tools for sleep and dancing sleep. And 8 Sleep was by far and away the crowd favorite

and people were just raving fans of this. So I used it and here we are. Add the pod pro cover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees Fahrenheit or as hot as 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It also splits your bed in half so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. My girlfriend runs hot all the time. She doesn't need cooling. She loves the heat. Then we can have our own bespoke temperatures on either side which is exactly what we're doing.

Now for me and for many people, the result 8 Sleep users fall asleep up to 32% faster, produce sleep interruptions by up to 40% and get more restful sleep overall. I can personally attest to this because I track it in all sorts of ways. It's the total solution for enhanced recovery so you can take on the next day feeling refreshed. And now my dear listeners, that's you guys. You can get $250 off of the pod pro cover. That's a lot. Simply go to 8 sleep.com slash Tim or use

code Tim. That's 8 all spelled out EIGHT sleep.com slash Tim or use coupon code Tim TIM 8 sleep.com slash Tim for $250 off your pod pro cover. This episode is brought to you by Viori clothing spelled V-O-R-I Viori. I've been wearing Viori at least one item per day for the last few months and you can use it for everything. It's performance apparel but it can be used for working out. It can be used for

going out to dinner at least in my case. I feel very comfortable with it. Super comfortable, super stylish and I just want to read something that one of my employees said she is an athlete. She is quite technical although she would never say that. The Astra if she had ever used or heard of Viori and this was her response. I do love their stuff but using them for about a year. I think I found them at REI. First for my partner T-shirts that are super soft but somehow last as he's hard

on stuff. And then I got into the super soft cotton yoga pants and jogger sweat pants. I live in them and they too have lasted their stylish enough. I can wear them out and about the material is just super soft and durable. I just got their Clementine running shorts for summer and love them.

The brand seems pretty popular. Constantly sold out. In closing, and I'm abbreviating here, but in closing with the exception of when I need technical outdoor gear they're the only brand I've bought in the last year or so for yoga running lounge wear that lasts and that I think look good also. I like the discrete logo. So that gives you some idea. That was not intended for the sponsor read. That was just her response via text. Viori against both VUORI is designed for maximum comfort

and versatility. You can wear it running. You can wear their stuff training. Doing yoga, lounging, weekend errands or in my case again going out to dinner. It really doesn't matter what you're doing. Their clothing is so comfortable and looks so good and it's not offensive. You don't have a huge brand logo on your face. You'll just want to be in them all this time and my girlfriend and

I have been wearing them for the last few months. Their men's core short K-O-R-E. The most comfortable line athletic short is your one short for every sport I've been using. Kettlebell Swings Ford runs. You name it. The Banks Short. This is their Go-To-Land to see short is the ultimate versatility. It's made from recycled plastic bottles and what I'm wearing right now which I had to pick one to recommend to folks out there or at least to men out there is the Ponto

Performance Pants. You'll find these at the link I'm going to give you guys. You can check out what I'm talking about. I'm wearing them right now. They're thin performance sweat pants but that doesn't do them justice. You got to check out P-O-N-T-O Ponto Performance Pants. For you ladies, the women's performance jogger is the softest jogger you'll ever own. Viori isn't just an investment in your clothing, it's an investment in your happiness and for you, my dear listeners,

they're offering 20% off your first purchase. Get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet. It's super popular. A lot of my friends have now noticed our wearing this and so am I. VioriClothing.com forward slash Tim. That's V-U-O-R-I clothing.com slash Tim. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase but you'll also enjoy free shipping on

any U.S. orders over $75 and free returns. So check it out. VioriClothing.com slash Tim. That's V-U-O-R-I clothing.com slash Tim and discover the versatility of VioriClothing.

This transcript was generated by Metacast using AI and may contain inaccuracies. Learn more about transcripts.