I don’t know any successful investors who are not curious, and I can’t think of a better person to learn from about curiosity than my today’s guest, an instant friend, Tom Morgan.
Tom describes himself as a curiosity sherpa to billionaires. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, 2 children, and a rabbit called Frank. Tom Morgan is a Director at Sapient Capital. He is responsible for the firm’s content. He has previously worked in Equity Sales on Wall Street at Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, and most recently as a Managing Director at Stifel.
Tom loves nothing more than meeting interesting people; drop him an email or phone call – if you are intrigued by what you hear today. Tom holds a BA from Oxford University. Tom’s bio doesn’t give justice to what a fascinating, multi-faceted, complex individual he is, and I hope this episode will reveal a bit more of the Tom I got to meet and spend time with.
I was introduced to Tom by Brendon Snow. It was one of a thousand serendipitous moments that have been happening since I launched the podcast. I was walking around Paris earlier this summer listening to Guy Spier’s interview with Julie LaRoche, I shared it on Twitter. Brendan reached out and mentioned that he not only also listened to Guy Spier on his visit to Paris not long ago but also went to the same Parisian Grande Ecole I went to. Brendan Snow is the CEO of Fluent Risk Partners.
Tom and I had a few long chats before the recording; we also shared a long lunch one summer day at a lovely vegan restaurant. Today, we talked about Tom’s life and the journey he’s been on, and it’s a very inspiring story that Tom shares in a very vulnerable way. We discuss the importance of curiosity and the idea of our future selves leading us on our path. We talk about the focus in the age of perpetual distraction. Tom shares his thoughts on complexity. We also touch on the meaning crisis in today’s world. I like Tom’s idea of continuously being exposed to new ideas that challenge our worldview.
Stay tuned until the end – Tom shares his childhood story; without giving too much away, I will tell you that we are the same age and were both at the same time and the same place, but experienced it from a very different perspective, only to compares our notes, and memories almost four decades later! If that’s not serendipity, I don’t know what is!
https://whatsimportant.substack.com/
https://sapientcapital.com/
---- Crisis Investing: 100 Essays - My new book. To get regular updates and bonus content, please sign-up for my substack: https://bogumilbaranowski.substack.com/ Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bogumil_nyc Learn more about Bogumil Baranowski Learn more about Sicart Associates, LLC. NEVER INVESTMENT ADVICE. IMPORTANT: As a reminder, the remarks in this interview represent the views, opinions, and experiences of the participants and are based upon information they believe to be reliable; however, Sicart Associates nor I have independently verified all such remarks. The content of this podcast is for general, informational purposes, and so are the opinions of members of Sicart Associates, a registered investment adviser, and guests of the show. This podcast does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any specific security or financial instruments or provide investment advice or service. Past performance is not indicative of future results. More information on Sicart Associates is available via its Form ADV disclosure documents available adviserinfo.sec.gov
AI-Generated Transcript (it may contain mistakes):
Tom Morgan on Talking Billions (8/2023)
[00:00:00] Bogumil: Well, hello Tom. How are you? Nice to see you again,
[00:00:02] Tom Morgan: Um, it's wonderful to see you. Um, I was just telling you before we jumped on that I'm, I'm rocking a slight summer cold, which, um, I, I'm hopefully on com on top form, but it's gonna give me a slightly huskier, sexier voice than normal.
[00:00:15] Bogumil: I know it's your signature radio voice, so I'm, I'm glad that we get to record today. You, you and I spoke a couple of times and we had a nice lunch and we talked about so many topics
it was fun to talk to you on, on a more personal level and get to know you, and I really enjoyed it. But I wanted to have you on the show because you write a lot, you touch on a lot of fascinating topics and you had a very interesting life and your life is getting more and more interesting with all the things you're pursuing.
So I know we have a lot to talk about and Tom, I know that each time we speak, I have no idea in which direction this conversation will go. So I feel the same way about today's conversation. I wanna jump right in, and you may know that I like to ask my guests about their childhood and upbringing and [00:01:00] how that time shaped their life and led them to a career path they're on.
So if you indulge me, share as much as you want, I.
[00:01:06] Tom Morgan: Sure. Um, my father was a diplomat. Uh, he was the British Ambassador to Korea, Poland, and Mexico. Uh, so I spent, uh, the first nine to 10 years of my life in those countries, which was phenomenal because not only was it very exciting, Um, it also meant that you have clearly demarcated memories, at least from the poet of Mexico, stage of those 'cause you are in a completely different world.
Um, you know, I think it would be a bit of a cliche to say it gives you a differentiated perspective when you're that old. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. But what it did instill in my whole family is, uh, a kind of an openness to travel and an openness to diff to different cultures. Um, I then returned to the uk, um, for my schooling.
Was very lucky to go to a lot of good schools. Um, went to college at Oxford, graduated, thought that I was, um, unbelievable and destined for immediate success. Had the [00:02:00] extremely helpful experience of not being destined for immediate success and really struggling and getting fired for my first job after 10 months 'cause I was terrible at it.
And then really thrashing around and a series of, of kind of fortunate coincidences ended up with me being in the city of London. Um, In equity sales. Um, and I spent 10 years on Wall Street, um, and then another five in kind of Wall Street adjacent areas. So I would say kind of 15 in total. And then I guess the, the most formative aspect of the discussion, uh, is that I, I, uh, was unfortunate enough or fortunate enough, depending on your perspective to have a two to three year nervous breakdown midlife crisis that, um, is, is a separate topic all of its own, but is the source for all of the insights that I now feel so adamantly about.
[00:02:48] Bogumil: We will come back to Poland and the fact that you were living in Poland in the 1980s. Uh, I'm curious to hear more. Tell me about that moment of, you call it a, you know, a personal [00:03:00] crisis, but I think it happens to a lot of us and we just ignore it and we have this moment where we thought we were on the right track career wise, and then we have a revelation.
We realize maybe this is not the right path. Can you share a little bit more about that time? I feel like too many of us just silently ignore that time and don't address it. And you did. And you found a newer calling. A new calling, and pursued your curiosity from that point on.
[00:03:24] Tom Morgan: Yeah. I, I, I don't think I can be too smug about this. Um, which is always a risk when you're talking about your own spiritual journey, right? Um, I, I now see everything through the lens of, um, Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey because that, Despite, despite sounding a bit grandiose, is actually a, a relatively specific construction manual for transitions.
And I think the start of that that's relevant to my story is this concept of stasis call to adventure, refusal of the call and then crisis. So for me, the stasis was, um, [00:04:00] being stuck in a, an incredibly nice corporate environment, uh, an investment bank full of very nice people. But had I'd simply lost interest in any of the topics that I was dealing with, uh, finance no longer worked for me.
I think over the 15 years that I'd been working around finance, um, the incremental value of information that you were sharing pe with people from an equity research report had, had dwindled quite dramatically, dramatically to the, to the extent that you were kind of just wasting people's time. And I've come to believe that people's time and attention is the most important asset that they have.
And so I was getting rich wasting people's time and that created an an integrity mismatch in me that. That caused a, a, a, an accelerating cognitive dissonance and that I was just wasting my own time. You know, I was in a room from seven until 5:00 PM every day effectively doing nothing. Um, you know, fooling myself and telling myself I was doing a lot, but I really wasn't.
Um, but I was being very well paid. I had a very big title. Um, and, you know, I had a very happy life except my health started deteriorating. [00:05:00] Um, I started getting brain fog, you know, panic attacks, unexplained pain across my whole body. I went through the whole US healthcare system. They could find nothing wrong with me, uh, obviously because it was, I think it was a sickness of my soul, which is not something that the tools can really get to.
Um, I, uh, quit. I was recommended to quit all stimulating substances, uh, through an elimination diet. Um, I then got more and more energy, and what I did was I wrote a 60 page P D F, which. Isn't really a book, but is sen was essentially a, a list of everything that had ever resonated with me. And that word is important resonance.
What was it resonating with?
[00:05:38] Bogumil: Mm-hmm.
[00:05:39] Tom Morgan: It's a really, like, it's a really interesting question. What was it resonating with? It was resonating, resonating with me. What was me? Me was the thing that I was ignoring, right? It was my unconscious. It was things that I was drawn to. And the moment I realized that on the day I finished a book, I completely popped out of consensus reality.
I had a spiritual awakening. Some people would call it a psychotic break. I see it as somewhere in the middle.[00:06:00] And it was this overwhelming experience that I now contextualize in neurological terms as becoming right hemisphere dominant. But that tore my world apart. Um, really for years. It made me insufferably spiritual for about four months, and then I went into a descent.
Um, and that rebellion within my own psyche, I think was caused by an acknowledgement that I was wasting my life and I was wasting my potential. But I was so attached to what I was going through. Um, I would not have quit on my own. Um, I would not have just made the leap, you know, and that is a staple of the hero's journey, which is that we, we don't leave comfort for uncertainty until we're really forced off the edge.
So there was nothing heroic about it. You know, I was, I was kind of left with no more options.
[00:06:41] Bogumil: Can you talk more about that right hemisphere focus? How has that changed and what it implies in your today's life?
[00:06:47] Tom Morgan: yeah, it's a really interesting idea. It's, um, I I, if you were to ask me what has influenced my life the most in terms of things I have learned, it has been the work of Dr. Ian McGilchrist. Um, there's kind of a [00:07:00] long running Twitter joke, um, 'cause I'm much too active on Twitter about how, like I'm, how obsessed I am with his work.
Um, he, you know, has just written a 1200 page book on, um, this, the hemispheric structure of the brain. Um, And I think it's a masterpiece. It's called the Matter with things. It's 1200 pages, so not everyone's gonna read it. And it's very hard to summarize because it's 1200 pages. Um, but all I would say is that his, his basic thesis is that we have two hemispheres of the brain and counter to pop psychology.
They both can do the same things but counter to scientific rebuttals. They do them in very different ways. Um, and he talks about how the left hemisphere is, is analytical, it's reductive, it specializes in language and syntax, but it also is focused on things like safety. Uh, and I believe it's kind of resulted in this sense of digital abstraction from the world where we have digital substitutions for all the things that should be deeply nourishing.
Um, and we live very much more in the map than the territory, whereas actually [00:08:00] the right hemisphere, um, is predominantly non-verbal. It's sematic, it's emotional. It has a sense of the whole, it has a sense of the flow of the world. Um, But without that filter, you can kind of get easily overwhelmed. So when I had that one day, my senses were completely open, which when you live in Manhattan, was utterly crippling.
But I could see, I could see energy, um, you know, tickling off the, the tree branches. Um, I could see the connections between things, you know, time no longer felt entirely linear to me. And the monologue in my head had completely stopped. Uh, which is a very strange experience if you have quite an active monologue in your head.
'cause it was just basically total silence. I was going through my day without any narration, without any thoughts, you know? I mean, it was utterly, utterly blissful. It was nirvana. Um, but now within a neurological context, you're like, oh, okay. This may be very, very woo woo and spiritual. And the thing that it connected me to very transparently that day, felt like love and felt like this ineffable love, which was why it was so pleasant.
I [00:09:00] now have some relatively straightforward scientific explanations for that. But the thing that I was connected to, it certainly was a mystery, and I think will probably for always remain a mystery. But what it was, and I think this is, this is maybe one of the most important things that I've come to believe and, and sort of the cornerstone of everything that I work on, is that you are right hemisphere essentially controls your exploratory attention.
And it does that in an energetic way. And I think if you are, if you are in this state of abstraction and control and analysis, um, you are, you are able to, to logically justify it to yourself with, uh, with rationality and with with language. But you'll have this creeping sensation that something is going wrong.
But in today's world, it's very hard to trust a sensation. And there's a line from CS Lewis, which is God shouts to us in our pains. Uh, and, and I always think about that, which is that if, if, if you keep ignoring that sensation, it's only gonna get louder until there's a crisis, which I think was my, my, you know, the source of [00:10:00] my chronic health issues.
[00:10:00] Bogumil: When, uh, when I listen to you, when we spoke and when I read your articles, I'm thinking of childlike, childlike wonder. You know, when you're, when you're five and six, everything is so fascinating because everything is so new. And I remember when I learned to read and I would pick up books and they were too big and too difficult for me to read, but I was so fascinated and I feel like rediscovering that. Later on in your, in your life. It's a very exciting moment and that's why I wanna talk to you about curiosity, which you call your big driving force behind everything you do. And you have a quote that I really like you say, exploring these unseen forces, that grip and direct your attention has become the cornerstone of my life ever since.
And you refer to yourself as the curiosity Sherpa to the billionaires, and I really like this idea. Tell me more about this. And I feel like it's, it's something that's really exciting, inspiring, and maybe something that we forget too often in our lives.
[00:10:58] Tom Morgan: Yeah. Um, you know, I wrote a [00:11:00] piece recently where I said, if, if I could have only one impact on the world, it would be to get people to trust their curiosity a little bit more. And the, the deeper I've dug into this, the more I realized that curiosity has a stronger basis in science than I ever thought it was.
But I remember in, I think 2017, I was listening to this absolutely stunning lecture, uh, by Jordan Peterson, which is. A difficult issue because he's had his own trajectory that I, I'm not totally a fan of, but back then he was doing some truly electric stuff. Um, and there was this line where he said that, um, Carl Jung had a theory that, um, yourself, your future self called to you in the present by directing your interests.
And it, it, you know, like when you listen to a podcast and you're on the move and, and something really hits you, you can always remember where you were. And I was in, again, it's in the Newark security line, and I was just like, bang, bang, bang, bang. That means something huge. And it, it, it's taken me kind of years to unpack it, but it, it's this idea that I, I think if [00:12:00] you stop and you say to yourself, do I control what I'm interested in?
And, and, and if you think you do try it and, you know, I, I, to, to, to relate it to my own experience.
[00:12:10] Bogumil: Mm-hmm.
[00:12:10] Tom Morgan: It would've been phenomenal had I managed to, to stay interested in the stock market and to stay interested in equity research because it would've made me much happier and wealthier for that transition time than, than I would've been otherwise.
But I lost interest. And once that toothpaste is out of the tube, you can't get it back in. And I've watched a lot of people, particularly in midlife and particularly in finance, lose the toothpaste and then just hold on because they're in their peak earnings years. And to them, I would ask What controls your interest?
And I know that you and I are kind of fascinated with the concept of language. I believe the curiosity is a relationship with, uh, a higher intelligence of some kind, because your intelligence is not entirely your own. And I believe that you can, you can somewhat reductively call it evolution. The, you know, your, your, your potential [00:13:00] course to you in the present by saying, if you pursue this path of what you are interested in, you will grow in an appropriate way.
You will grow towards your potential in an appropriate way. Um, and, and you know, I, I said there is basis in science for this, and I think one of the simplest ways of looking at it is this, which is that, um, the universe trends towards complexity. Um, which is, is kind of an obvious statement, right? Like, if you look at earth, you had rocks, you had, you know, tribes, and now you have the internet.
And, and that line of complexity has kind of gone parabolic and particularly over the last few years. Um, and what does it mean for something to be complex? It's almost a paradox, but basically it's for things to have very, very, very distinctly differentiated parts, but all completely integrated in a whole, what does that mean for you?
And for me, it means that the direction of the universe is for you and me. To become the most differentiated versions of ourselves possible through pursuing [00:14:00] our own highly unique niche, which is there are things that we are good at and skills we are cultivating, and as we follow that path, we will become more and more differentiated.
But that differentiation is only useful if it is in service of the whole organism, if it is in service of all of society, all of the world. And when you get those two things right, which is insanely difficult, and it's the work of a lifetime, when you get those two things right, unbelievably good things happen to you, but you have to get both sides right?
But that, I believe you are drawn into your niche through curiosity, because I don't see how else that process could happen, because there are an infinite number of things in the world you could pay attention to. So why are you being drawn to just a small handful?
[00:14:42] Bogumil: I love that. And I love the image of a future self. And it reminds me of a project I had at school. I think it was high school, when we were supposed to write a letter from the future self to you at the age of 15 or 14. I don't know. And what would you say? And I think I never lost that idea [00:15:00] of what should I do today that my future self would be grateful for?
And it comes from the investment world, right? It makes certain decisions, but I don't think it's just investments. I think it's your health, it's your wellbeing. What would you like to do today? What kind of habits would you like to have today that your future self would be grateful for? And there's this ongoing dialogue, and I like this visual that the future self gives you hints.
What is it that he wants you to do today so that you end up on the right track?
[00:15:28] Tom Morgan: There's a really important caveat. Again, probably one of the most important themes, um, that I've, I've come across, which is that your intellect is a scalpel, is very, very good at dissection and analysis. And so if you turn it on yourself, it will tell you the pieces. Sometimes if you get lost and stuck in life.
And you turn inwards into introspection. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But I think we overemphasize our, our introspective ability to access unconscious material. Uh, and the reason why I say that is that there's a, you know, Carl Young's red book is [00:16:00] mostly like a trip diary, like it's all over the place and crazy and weird.
But there is a section in it where he talks about, um, not wanting to be your own chariot here. And he basically says that what you know right now is what you know right now. And if you, if you play, if you formulate goals based on what you know right now, anytime any serendipity comes into your life that conflicts with those goals, you will bat it away and you will therefore close off your future and live in an eternal present.
So I think about that. There's a great Jungian called Robert Johnson that wrote a wrote, wrote a book called Balancing Heaven and Earth. And when I read that, I was like, you know, everyone, everyone goes crazy for atomic habits. And I think that, yes, eat well now. Do lots of sit ups. You know, go do Brazilian jiujitsu, keep your body in fine shape.
Use your willpower and your ego for the little things. But Johnson talks about the slender threads for the big things, which almost seems the wrong way to do things with life. Like why should you make your big decisions with less analysis? And I'm like, well, that's, you should actually make your decisions with less analysis.
You should, you should analyze [00:17:00] them. But the first step needs to be sematic and emotional, intuitive. Otherwise you risk just driving yourself into a tree, using your own intellect, which can't see anything it tells you. It can see anything, but it cannot see the future. It can only see the present.
[00:17:12] Bogumil: You know, it's, I wrote down a couple of things, but the big idea. That I've been thinking about is, uh, in general, in business, in life, is there a master plan or do you respond when the opportunity arises? And I think that's what you're slightly touching on. If I'm hearing you right. And I was at the Berkshire Hathaway meeting this year and one of the questions that people were there was the theme that I was seeing, and maybe I was seeing it because I was looking for the answer was, was there a master plan for Berkshire Hathaway or did it happen because they saw an opportunity one at a time and chased it.
And actually, I had a, a guest on the podcast and the episode will come out soon, who has been going to the Berkshire meeting for 30 or 40 years. And one of the guests, two of them, was actually working at Berkshire when Berkshire was a tiny company. And I asked them the same question, [00:18:00] and I think we think of life, can I sit down now and build a master plan for all of it?
Or should I be there available when the opportunity arises? What are your thoughts? I'm curious because you, you chased some opportunities that. Popped up from directions and places that I think you didn't expect to see
[00:18:17] Tom Morgan: Uh, there's a lovely, there's a lovely quote from Benoit Mandel brought, that is my life, like, seemed like a series of random events, but when I look back, I see a pattern. Um, and, and I love that idea. I, it's, it's, it's it incredibly unrealistic to tell people you shouldn't have goals, right? Like, I, I even, I don't live that way, but I think what you should do is never let your goals get in the way of, of what your attention or what your interests are clearly telling you.
Um, I thi, I think, I think what you need to have is a sense of integrity. That you need to have a very finely calibrated sense of your own integrity and, uh, a relationship [00:19:00] with your own conscience. Now, your own conscience is something we kind of associate with morality and woo woo. But actually, if you think about something that is a small voice and mostly inhibitory, the voice of conscience is actually quite easily related to the right hemisphere.
It is the sense of when you are going wrong. And if your right hemisphere is indeed more connected with your optimal path in life, you should be listening to it when it's telling you you are going wrong. And I think that kind of is this sort of master plan, which is if you have, if you have principles that you are unwilling to sacrifice, you are likely to stay on that path for longer.
And I think those principles can be relatively objective and I think that they can, they can persist for a really long time. And when I hear Buffet Munger speak, I think these are men who, to a certain degree have principles and they have certain, uh, They have certain maxims and they hold by those no matter what happens.
And that I think is powerful. But to say, I want to be this, by that date, you're then doing exactly what young says and you're closing off the [00:20:00] path unless you have the conviction that you are more intelligent than the un, than the unfolding of the universe. Which, you know, maybe I just, I just think that's pretty unlikely, right.
[00:20:09] Bogumil: I am smiling because I wrote down principles. And then you summarize it as principles. And I think that's the essence of it, that as long as you have principles and you refine them over time and you collect them and you borrow them from other people that were on a similar path, or people that you respect, like the people that you write about in your posts.
And the second point that you make, I think having a very precise timeline. Let's say I want to become a billionaire in 10 years, I think it's, uh, very seductive. It's, it's very inspiring. But if you don't get there, whether it's a million or a hundred million or 10 million or whatever other goal you have, weight loss, or I am not sure, you know, seeing a hundred countries in, in five years, what then, you know, the disappointment can derail your plan to continue and your motivation to continue.
And I like the word [00:21:00] eventually, and I actually wrote it down a few days ago, that if you have a goal and you'll get there eventually. For me, that's enough as no, as long as I know that it's possible for me to get there. If I don't get there in four years, I'll get there in seven years, eventually keeps me going.
Do you have some thoughts about that when you think about the goals that you have for your curiosity and your endeavors, not having a strict, you know, timeline by 2025, you have to do this or that?
[00:21:27] Tom Morgan: Yeah, I've been thinking about it a lot the last couple of weeks actually, and I've been thinking about wounds.
[00:21:31] Bogumil: Mm-hmm.
[00:21:31] Tom Morgan: Um, we exist in a very zero sum world, and I, I, I believe that the zero sum nature of both our psyches and our, and our markets and our economic structures and our social structures are creating an unfathomable amount of suffering, but beneath the surface.
Right? And the left hemisphere is essentially a zero sum, uh, part of our brains. It, it is, you know, social regard and, and competition and that those parts of ours are, are necessary. I just, I just think that we need to [00:22:00] optimize for process, um, and that what the womb does is it gives you a space, Within which something can grow.
So a lot of us think about, I'm gonna go have a vacation and, and, and mainline pina coladas, and I do do that, right? But all of the wombs within our lives need to be fertile places for all insights to be produced. And we need, we need those wombs. And then even more so once we get the messages from the womb, when life intervenes into that space and gives us a clear signal, we need to incorporate that into our lives.
And the way that I've been thinking about this on sort of a more practical level is don't optimize for destinations, optimize for processes. Right? Try and try and find a way of living that as far as you are aware right now is intrinsically desirable, right? So right now I spend all my week re meeting the most interesting people that I can, almost all based on serendipity and connections from other people and [00:23:00] writing about things that are intrinsically meaningful, uh, to me, I could do this.
For the rest of my life right now. And you don't wanna be the idiot that contradicts themselves. So like, if, if it no longer is interesting to me, I'm in trouble, right? I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to, to, to turn back to my curiosity and attention and work out where else I'm being driven. But if you sit there and you think about a destination, again, if you have the right destination, that's great.
And again, if you know where you're going after that destination, that's great. But if you've said, I've said a destination that I don't care if I reach or I want to reach by the end of my life, you are intrinsically telling me that the process is, is desirable, right? Because otherwise you wouldn't wanna set it up.
And very few people would be like, I want to struggle at something I hate for a destination I may never reach. That's a really dumb way of looking at things. But it also is how a surprisingly large number of people structure their lives. That their, that their destination is retirement and the process of getting them to their retirement is not what they like.
And then a lot of men just drop dead a couple of years after retirement. Because they're off of a treadmill. Like, and, and I know this is [00:24:00] a massive cliche, and I can hear it as it's coming outta my mouth, but just because it's a cliche doesn't make it true. It doesn't make it not true, right.
[00:24:06] Bogumil: So I can't keep up with taking notes because I already have three follow up questions. I, I had Luca Dena on the show who wrote a book, ergodic City, that I'll have to share with you. But, uh, one of the points he makes is that we optimize our life. In one example for the retirement, you know, we, we talk about investments and in comfort and financial independence, but he says, what, what if you don't make it?
And he has the idea. Well, he proposes an idea that people can embrace or, or reject to optimize. In the sense that if you were to live another day or a month or 50 years, you would be happy with the decision and the choice that you made today. And I think it's a very different way of looking at life, but also at businesses, you know, A C E O makes decisions that will maximize his or her payout in the next two, three years before they have to move on, right?
It's a very different decision than a family appointed c e O that will stay there for [00:25:00] 20 years. Managing the business would, uh, make, and when you think about business decisions in terms of what's good for the next year and what's good for the next 50 years, or life decisions, it makes you think differently, right?
Certain risks you wouldn't take or certain opportunities you're willing to chase because the outcomes will happen not in the next quarter or two, but in the next five or 10 years. I really paused on that idea. It made me think a lot and when you said how people optimize for retirement and they don't make it, I think that a lot of decisions made in investing business and life.
Where we don't have this dual way of seeing things. It might be a month, it might be 50 years. What would you do with that kind of movable timeframe?
[00:25:42] Tom Morgan: I, I think there's an iron law here. Um, one of my strongest, strongest held beliefs is that if a story is ubiquitous and keeps coming up in myth, you better pay attention to it. 'cause there's something in there. There's something in there you need to be, you need to be aware of. And probably the largest warning [00:26:00] I've come across in myth is the, the be careful what you wish for myth.
Right. You know, it's, it, it, it's, it's Aladdin, you know, it's, it's it, you've seen it a thousand times. It's the man that goes to the witch and says, give me something. And, and they get what they ask for, but at a terrible unanticipated cost. And I, you know, I, I think the clearest example is King Midas, right?
He wants the gold and life turns to gold. His daughter turns to gold. And, and there is a deep truth in here, which is that if you place something at the top of your hierarchy of values, that is not life itself, not your creative output, not that flow, you run the risk of going horribly, horribly off track because you are placing something dead at the top of your hierarchy of values, right?
You are placing money at the top of your hierarchy of values. And it's easy to crap all over money. But like, it's a good example, right? Which is that like, unless money is a means to an end and I think there is nothing wrong with money at all, then you, you'll end up with a [00:27:00] number. And what that number is, is your entire self worth, unless you're using that number to facilitate something else.
So you see it all the time with companies that optimize for earnings, right? Is that they'll optimize for this quarter's earnings at the cost of five years from now, and the com all the companies that, that, you know, optimize for quality. I always think of, of deeming, uh, I dunno, you, you're probably familiar with him, but you know this, this guy that came over to Japanese industry in the decades after World War ii, when Japan was essentially a smoking crater.
And he said, we are just going to optimize for quality. We're going to optimize for the highest quality output that we can. And then American consumers were preferring Japanese transmissions to American sight unseen. I imagine if they knew they were Japanese, they would probably feel biased against them.
But pursuit of quality in itself, when you look at that from a corporate perspective to the extent that it's allowed with within today's market structure, produces phenomenal results. But the same is true of people's lives, that if they are optimizing for [00:28:00] something intrinsically desirable, that they're never going to achieve things work out great.
But if you optimize for an abstract variable, not always, but pretty always, things go horribly, horribly wrong.
[00:28:09] Bogumil: A quote comes to my mind when you, I. Mentioned the, the earlier point, uh, about pursuing a certain goal and then realizing it's not what you wanted. I, I think the saying goes, um, I want what a wise man wanted before he got it. I dunno who said it. Do you know it?
[00:28:24] Tom Morgan: No, I've never heard that before. I never heard that before. I love that.
[00:28:27] Bogumil: And I thought the wise man wanted it, but once he got it, He didn't want it anymore.
And I think there are a lot of things in life like that. It makes me think of a concept of obliquity, which you and I might have talked about, which is the, you, you direct, you achieve goals in an indirect way. So happiness, it's something that you can't directly pursue. And they're philosophers that say it better than I do.
How the more you want it, the less likely you're going to get it. And there are other things you said quality instead of profit. And I think it's, it's a very powerful idea. We manage money for families over [00:29:00] generations and it's always interesting what's, what's your goal? And the goal is for this money to last multiple generations without the risk of losing it all.
But when you think about measuring monthly performance, that's not the right way to go about it. When you think about maximizing annual performance, it's not the right way to go about it. You have to have a bigger picture, which you touched on, which is the process, the process, principles, and philosophy. That will allow you to get where you're going. And I think we get lost sometimes, and there's so many ways to measure things. I mean, we measure with our smartwatch is how we spend our day, how many minutes we were sitting, walking, running, bicycling, and sleeping, and how we were sleeping, right? There are so many ways we can measure, and in, in the investment world, everything can be measured to a second.
There's a daily quote, right? So you think that because you can measure, maybe you're measuring the wrong thing,
[00:29:51] Tom Morgan: My, my wife actually, uh, wrote a very successful book on sleep, and in the research she found a condition called Ortho Somnia, which is basically people's sleep [00:30:00] trackers are giving them insomnia because they're so focused on getting the best quality sleep. Um, McGilchrist has this expression that I think he takes from the IRO choir or one of the Native American tribes, which is seeing with soft eyes.
Um, when you put people, when you have two lovers look at each other, you'll notice their pupils dilate. They don't see the imperfections in each other's faces. And it always puts me in mind of the magic eyes. You know, when we were kids, you would have those magic eye drawings where the picture would only be apparent once you unfocused your eyes and you realize after a while that the paradox is that all of the, all of life's most desirable things can only be pursued indirectly.
That's what Daoism basically says. And then you're like, well, why is that the case? Like, I need a why, why is that the case? And I think the why is really important. I, I, a few days ago, I heard of, I heard of interest as a signaling towards a benign anomaly that hasn't come into shape yet. And I think the fact that curiosity is relational, [00:31:00] and because it's relational, you don't know where it's going yet.
And because you don't know where it's going yet, it, it is not clearly in view. And I'm afraid the bad news is it's never going to be clearly in view because the moment it's clearly in view, it's dead. Right. The moment it's clearly definable, it's dead. So the cost of living life this way is, is, is a a, an absolutely perpetual lack of certainty, but also the faith that that anomaly is benign.
The thing that hasn't come into view yet is your is is your own potential and it's something that's gonna help you. And because you are not in control of it, there is just a level of uncertainty and you will only be able to take that opportunity if you are seeing with soft eyes.
[00:31:37] Bogumil: I have an image of, and I, I, somebody wrote about it, driving from West Coast to East coast or East Coast to West Coast, and you only see as much as the headlights will show. I. If you're driving at night, and I think that's how our life can work and how pursuit of curiosity works. We only see as much as the headlights allow us to see, and then we find something else.
And [00:32:00] something else. I mean, even the few hours that you and I spent in person talking, we realize how we're touching on new ideas. And actually, the more I talk to you and the more I read your articles, the more questions I have. So because it opens up things that I haven't thought about. And, and speaking of those, there's a quote I wanna share with you from one of the articles.
It's from Matthew Crawford. You write the redemptive nature of focused attention in an age of perpetual distraction. It's a mouthful, but I want to talk more about it. You know, there's so much information you focus on finding what's important. That's what you wanna write about. How do you manage when there's so much seemingly that we have to know that we have to care about.
And with the internet and everybody being a journalist and a reporter with, uh, a camera and a phone, and a, you know, keyboard at their finger, um, tips. Everybody has so much to say. How do you sift through all of it and decide what you're gonna focus on?
[00:32:53] Tom Morgan: I, I think the Matthew Crawford quote, um, he wrote a, a great book called The World Beyond Your Head.
[00:32:58] Bogumil: Mm-hmm.
[00:32:59] Tom Morgan: and [00:33:00] so to take it back to the McGilchrist Framing, So the left hemisphere, everything you see is all there is, right? If you and I are looking at a, um, some text on a computer screen, there is nothing else there other than that text, right?
You what you see is what there is. Reality does not work the same way. And, uh, my friend Frederick Kin, who's, um, I'd recommend his CK Minds and Markets is fantastic. He wrote recently about, um, a woman, uh, that lives in, uh, natural landscapes inhabited by birds. And over the period of her, her pursuit of mastery, she will now go through that landscape and have an entirely different embodied experience of that landscape and, and the richness of that and the things that she could hear and the things that she can experience that, that thing that seems flattened and uninteresting to us.
Is of limitless interest and complexity to her. And they are both the same things. The only difference is, is that she's interacting with reality. Reality is [00:34:00] infinitely complex. And once you, the redemptive nature of focused attention, I think is if you get used to having a relationship with reality. To an extent, our relationship with our screens is not with reality and it does not have that hidden complexity.
But if you, you know, he, he Crawford is, is is very much focused on things that for us would strike us as, as blue collar, you know, like organ builders or motorcycle shops. And I think it's no coincidence that zen and the art motorcycle maintenance is, is such a, such a, a, you know, a, a dominant theme for people in our industry.
But like you have this idea that your training focused attention in order to have more of a relationship to reality. And I think that word relationship is particularly important. It's kind of the cornerstone of, of, of curiosity as well, which is that this is a two-way relationship. That if you, if you are prepared to focus on something and really love it, look at it with love, it will love you back.
And this is anathema to a world where [00:35:00] we look at, we look at everything, we see it as kind of a, a three-dimensional box. I don't think that's the way things operate at all. And, um, I think he quotes Simone Weil when he says, every time we concentrate, we destroy the evil inside ourselves. And I always think about the flip side of that, which is that, you know, if, if our destiny as individuals is to concentrate on a relatively small number of things that pull us forward into our maximum potential, if that is the true good, what is the evil?
The evil is something that distracts us constantly and prevents us from really doing anything. It keeps us frozen in time, right? It keeps us scattered and it keeps, it keeps our, the hierarchy of the parts of our psyche all moving in different directions rather than focused on the one thing that's most important.
[00:35:40] Bogumil: I think investing is not the only profession these days where we're dealing with a lot of information and it's, it's a huge challenge. And in the investment world, we feel like we have to respond right away when there's new piece of information. And I spent a lot of time talking to very successful investors that have been doing it for decades.
And the one big theme that I see is [00:36:00] that they filter out where. The attention goes and they ignore a lot of what I would call short shelf life information. And you talk about it too. What would be relevant a long time from now? What should I be thinking about that's relevant? And I really like this idea of what are the things that five days from now, you and I will not even remember what the article was about, but what are the things that 50 years from now, we will look back and realize this was a turning point.
I should have paid attention. And I think it's the hardest thing to do in, in any profession that requires us to go through a lot of information. And the beautiful work that you do, you sift through thousands of pages. I mean, some of the books that you read, I think you would need two people to lift some of them.
And you find the big, big ideas that matter. And I think that's the beauty of what you do. You take the complexity and you make it understandable. And, and I don't wanna say simple, but understandable, easy to digest, and I, I find it really. There's a lot of value in that and I think [00:37:00] it's, it's, you know, it's a blessing that you decided to do it, and a lot of people can learn from it.
[00:37:04] Tom Morgan: Yeah, there's this idea of expert intuition. Um, there are a lot of people like, oh, intuition's useless. Oh, intuition's the best thing ever. And I'm like, intuition is neither. Intuition is, is the size of your database. If you show, uh, a grandma, uh, a a chessboard layout, they'll be able to memorize it in half a second, you know?
And if you show them a chessboard layout that has no relevance to a game of chess, it's just a random assortment of pieces, they have no advantage. And I think that's an interesting idea where it's like you, if you're an investor, some are better than others at basically training, pattern recognition through reps.
And then eventually that pattern recognition becomes sematic. 'cause it is held in our unconscious. If we were constantly running everything we'd ever seen against everything we were seeing right now, we would get nothing done. But the greatest cliche is, you know, George Soros back pain that, you know, his, he always, always used to give these very smart reasons why he had done something when his son was like, actually his back hurts when his portfolio is [00:38:00] positioned badly.
And that's not woo woo, that's just expert intuition. Um, so like that, that I think is very, very powerful that these guys can basically, the grandma can look at the board and immediately see what's relevant. But he does that because he has embodied experience and a huge amount of information in his database.
And I would say to people, focus on the things in life where you want intuition. It's why people's intuitions are so good with social interactions, because you've had untold millions numbers of social interactions in your life. And the complexity of a human face is such that, you know, many people with autism can't even look at it because there's so much data.
So you have insanely rich data, which is why a lot of investors I know get so much out of management meetings because unconsciously they can tell when people are just lying to them or vice versa when there's something brilliant coming down the pipe. Right? Uh, and I think that is, that is something I've noticed from very experienced investors in terms of the application of that to you and to me, I think of things in a very simple way, which is [00:39:00] that when you are, when you're triaging information in your life, um, excuse me, does the information make you feel better after you've consumed it not before.
Does an interaction with someone make you feel better? Afterwards in that like anything can be fun beforehand or during, like, you know, fast food, right? Bad food tastes fantastic, but you feel terrible afterwards. And I think the, the indication where the information is meaningful is the signature, uh, once you've consumed it.
And I do that a lot with books. There is something profoundly mysterious with the way I consume books now, which is I will go months without reading anything. And then someone, I, I get recommended, I mean, God knows 10 books a week and, and I'll buy two. So I have an enormous book budget, right? And then I'll open them and then I'll be like, does this, does this sink?
What's the sense of this information? What's the energetic signature of this information? And often I will read an entire book that is ostensibly quite [00:40:00] boring and then three years later it will click into something. And I feel, this goes back to the young idea that something in me knew that three years from now, that would be essential.
And that would be part of my journey. And I am being dragged through it like at fearsome pace. And it is ostensibly no, no more interesting than other things that I've read. And I think really respecting that impulse and I believe it can be cultivated, that intuition can be cultivated. 'cause I'm better at it than I used to be.
That the explore exploit, you just get better at exploiting the really profitable niches. And I think there's some really obvious ways to do that. Like knocking out all ephemeral news, right? I don't really consume any politics. Right? Like, um, and, and that's fine if you, if you want to, if you, if you want to clearly demarcate which information you are consuming for entertainment.
I read an enormous amount of, of soccer news, but I know what I'm doing, right. I'm not pretending to myself that there's anything relevant in there. It's more that like, I think that [00:41:00] most, most that, one of the great analogies I heard was, um, a bacteria is placed in a sugar solution. And it will learn to swim towards the sugar solution.
'cause if it does not swim towards the sugar solution, it will be selected against by evolution. Right? We are the same in the way that we treat information that way. And we exist in a four dimensional informational environment where something sings to us and it sings to, it sings to us from the future because it is about the manifestation of, of our potential in the present.
[00:41:26] Bogumil: Well, speaking about the future, I have to ask you about patterns because it's a word that came up a few times and I know that you recently wrote about patterns and, and the future. Looking back, it's always easy to see the pattern, oh, I did this because I did that, or the business did this, and then something else followed.
But looking forward into the future, it's the hardest thing and it's. I think we're seduced by people that forecast. They go on on TV and they give us a forecast. You know, COVID will last this long, or the economy will go into a recession, or this will, you know, housing prices will go up this [00:42:00] much. We love those and we love to listen to them.
Although we know that the value of that opinion, because it's, it's just an opinion. It's not much, especially in the investment world. Can you talk about the patterns and predicting the future? And let's throw in the word profits too, because you and I talked about it and it ended up in your recent article.
So tell me about the profits. How do they fit in to that picture?
[00:42:21] Tom Morgan: The way we try and assess expertise in our firm and also in our own pronouncements, we apply the same standards to ourselves is can you tell me what is happening right now?
[00:42:31] Bogumil: Mm-hmm.
[00:42:31] Tom Morgan: Then give me your opinion about it, then give me your forecast because you realize it's actually incredibly easy to give a forecast.
The US is gonna be a recession in 2024. There you go. I just gave you a forecast. Is there any information about you? Do I have any idea what I'm talking about? No, but I gave you a forecast, right? Can I tell you what is happening on the ground in America right now to a level of accuracy and relevance that is an unbelievably difficult job, and you know how difficult it's when you ask people to do it right?
Don't gimme your opinion. [00:43:00] Don't gimme your opinion. Tell me what's happening first. Then if you wanna offer an opinion, gimme your opinion. This is what's happening in artificial intelligence. Here is my opinion. Here is where we're gonna be in five years. And the further out you go, I think the more you can discount it, what profits do to the, the best definition of the word I've heard is they don't, they don't predict the future.
They tell you where you've gone wrong in the present. But how do they know? They know because they can see the archetypal patterns. I do believe that there are archetypal patterns. The biggest one is the hero's journey because it describes, it describes the nature of a phase change in any complex system.
It doesn't mean you can predict when, but it means you know what it looks like. So if you look around and you see all these patterns, so lemme give an example. The thing I wrote about this weekend, but Carl Young, right? Carl Young writing 50 years ago, maybe longer now, uh, no, considerably longer now was like the, the primary problem with humanity is its over reliance on analytical reason.
And the prescription is [00:44:00] surrender of that analytical reason to a higher intelligence. And I'm like, okay, blind me. That extremely simple explanation is the same as the explanation being offered by anyone I've ever rated. Right? And there's no timing on that necessarily, although he thought that we were doomed pretty quickly.
Um, it's just the same as a bunch of other people. And I think that maybe that's, that's some, an insight that's applicable to finance is that there are, there are a relatively small number of people that have this ability to see the present. And when they are all telling you the same thing at the same time, that is highly, highly relevant.
But they have to be relating it back to some sort of underlying arc archetypal pattern. And I think in today's world, we tend to be quite nihilistic about the existence of those patterns to which I call bss. I say that there are patterns, and if you want to know what those patterns are, read the stories that have been around for several hundred thousand years because.
They wouldn't have stuck around for several hundred thousand years if there wasn't patents to them. And don't get me wrong, any patent can, [00:45:00] any change at any one time can change at any one time. I'm just willing to bet that if something's been around for hundreds of thousands of years, it's going to persist.
It's gonna persist at different levels of complexity. It's gonna be fractal, but it's gonna persist. And I will take that bet. The timing is impossible. But I do believe that we are at at a critical tipping point right now because our society is in a poly crisis that is being caused by an over reliance on our analytical reason.
[00:45:24] Bogumil: I had John Maxfield on the show who is a banking analyst, but our conversation ended up being a lot about history and he told me, if you want, one big takeaway from our conversation is that there's nothing new. And it resonates with me that if you want to know the future, you have to understand the past.
And I'm not the first one saying it there, the beautiful quotes that phrase it better than I do. But the idea is that the history books give us hints of what's ahead of us. It's, it's human nature doesn't change. A lot of things are very, very similar. They, they rhyme, they're not exactly the same. But you know, the banking [00:46:00] crisis, whatever you wanna look at, we've had it before.
We'll do it again. And I think, uh, We all spend too little time reading history books, and this is the search for the patterns that you talk about. And we might not know exactly how the future will look like, but it will rhyme with what has happened before. that note, I have to ask you about ai and I really had a good time reading your article about ai because you said that basically you can't, you cannot not write about ai.
You have to say something about ai. What, what are your thoughts about it? Do you think it's gonna change the world in what way and how? And I, I think we've had AI in some shape or form for a while, but I think because we are interacting with a directly these days almost as a conversation, I think it's much more relatable.
And I think people, the imagination is expanding of how it can change, how we do business, how we live, how we look up information, how we pursue our curiosity at the end.
[00:46:56] Tom Morgan: Hmm. Well, let's apply the same standards to myself, [00:47:00] right? Let's not be, let's not be too much of a hypocrite. Um, a very, very interesting concept for passing information that I've run into from a guy called to Nora Trenders, who wrote a phenomenal book called The User Illusion. He talks about the concept of ex formation, which is, if you and I working out what information to consume, we need to work out, how long has that person spent thinking about it?
Have they, have they been thinking about this for 15 seconds or have they been thinking about it for their entire lives? And then how much information has been discarded to produce that information? As in, I have read 60 books and here is one tight paragraph where no signal has been discarded to create it.
Think about that. Every time, every time you read, read or consume anything. And it will be a very powerful watch word, which is why you should not listen to me about ai. ' cause I know almost, I know almost nothing about it. What I will say is this, and I should, I, I should not be trusted because I, I've spent almo, you know, AI came out and I was, I was from this, coming from the same starting point as everyone else, which, you know, all I will [00:48:00] say is that what is happening right now, I believe, again, placed no weight on my opinion, is that what we've produced right now as a universal intern, right.
And. That means that if you can outsource grunt work to it, that then has to be checked by someone wise. You've just increased the premium on wisdom, right? The person at the top of the pyramid has to be someone with lots of investment experience to work out when it's being fed nonsense, right? But it frees up those people to be less left hemisphere and more right hemisphere.
Now, am I terrified that this is a rational tool that's going to be abused to end the world? Yeah. I'm not gonna lie. I'm a little bit, yep. Like I'm like, it follows the archetypal pattern of humanity coming up against increasingly dangerous rationalist forces, whether it's fascism, communism, and Nazism in the 20th century, there's occasionally a threat that comes to us where we have to unify ourselves against something that's coldly, rationalist and against life.
So that's my 15 year forecast where we'll die or go into some sort of terminated to future, which I am concerned about, but you should probably place less than [00:49:00] 1% weight on that being.
[00:49:01] Bogumil: Well, speaking of wisdom, I have a quote from, from one of your articles that has three words that I like, which is wisdom, wealth, and freedom. And I, I think you know which one it is. And you say, wisdom is the ability to pursue what you love and ignore what you don't. Wealth provides that freedom. It's such a good sentence.
Two sentences. It's, it's an incredible quote. Tell me more about it.
[00:49:23] Tom Morgan: Uh, ex formation. Ex formation. So there's a guy called David Ra who runs a podcast for called Founders Podcast. And as far as I can tell, he just goes like, like elbow deep into every single biography of people. And he's done, it must be like 250 people by now. And, um, they're all brilliant. I recommend so many of them.
Um, but I'm like, yeah, right? So I'm like, you, you are ex formation for me. Look at what you've been through to get to what you, what you are, right? And he said, out of everyone that he'd studied, ed Thor. Was his personal blueprint. And I was like, that is huge signal. Think [00:50:00] about the information that he's discarded.
'cause one of my big bug bets about today's world is that we don't, um, we celebrate the people that have achieved something objective. Right? Because that's a very, very easy to point to. And often those people have terrible lives. You know, he talks about Enzo Ferrari being too anxious to ever even get on an elevator and never having got on a plane and having a terrible relationship with his family.
But Ferrari cool cars man, like, like we know about it, but he's like, so many of the people I studied do not have admirable existences or things that I would want. He's like, ed Thorpe is the only guy whose life I want. And I was like, why? And I believe the common factor in Thorpe is that he was very unusually willing to pivot quickly.
So he had the atomic habits where he was like, I'm going to, I'm gonna stay incredibly healthy. And maintain my personal relationships because those are cornerstones of a life. But you look at him and he goes from academia to breaking Vegas at roulette to founding one of the first quant hedge [00:51:00] funds.
When you listen to RA's telling of it, and it's a, you know, it's an N of one, it's one data point, but when you listen to his telling of it, it's that he was like, okay, I think I've done enough here. I'm gonna pivot. And yes, I think the, the relevance to that sentence you kindly quoted is that he had a foundation of wealth, but I don't think that foundation of wealth is the critical variable.
It's that that gave him the comfort to pivot. Yes. But it's the, it's the adherence to curiosity that I think is most important. I think that the, the warning is if you have the wealth and you are not respecting the curiosity, you are going to end up in a very bad place.
[00:51:37] Bogumil: I like that. Yeah, it's, it's a great quote. Wisdom, wealth, and freedom in one. I I have to ask you about the meaning crisis. And we talked about it over lunch and I kept thinking about it since we spoke about it. Can you set the stage of what it means to you? And I, I find it a, a fascinating idea and it touches and, and brings together a lot of the things we already talked about.
The meaning [00:52:00] crisis in today's society.
[00:52:02] Tom Morgan: I mean, you and I may not feel it, but look at the suicide rates for teenage girls.
[00:52:05] Bogumil: Mm-hmm.
[00:52:06] Tom Morgan: You know, look at what's happening to our kids. And I mean, you can blame a lot on social media, but I see social media as a course, uh, sorry, a symptom, not a course. Um, I see it all in this kind of McGill Christian framework where it's like we've, we've divorced ourselves from the real nourishment of the world, you know, that redemptive nature of focused attention.
Um, reality is relational and, and words are important here, that we are coming into relationship with something that brings us alive. And we are now three generations back from that. You know, we, we are post industrialization. And what on the Gilchrist point is that post industrialization, things like schizophrenia and autism, there's no historical accounts with them.
And we have intellectuals marrying intellectuals, and that's pushing their children even further into the left hemisphere, into our, into very societally admirable jobs. But we're all getting abstracted away from reality. And then we're pushing our children into abstracted forms of communication like social [00:53:00] media.
And in that world, everything is relative. There is no ultimate truth. So everything, everything is up for grabs. Even the nature of your own body, everything is up for grabs and nothing is real. And that sense of disconnection will kill you. It nearly killed me, right? Like it will, it will kill you. And what's funny for people is if you try and even convince them that there is something objective outside of ourselves that we can relate to, most people will look at you like you are completely insane.
Yeah. But the problem is, is if the longer you deny that, the more impoverished your life becomes.
[00:53:31] Bogumil: Related to that, you write about physicals and virtuals, and I think that can really help, uh, see the full picture, how I'll let you explain. But basically there are coastal elites that are focused on financial or digital abstractions that you talk about, and then there are people that are living closer to the real world. Can you talk about the two different worlds, how they coexist and when we can learn
[00:53:54] Tom Morgan: Yeah.
[00:53:55] Bogumil: The,
[00:53:55] Tom Morgan: the framing is via, um, a guy called NS Lyons that [00:54:00] if I, uh, he writes a ck that I, I think is the best I've read. Uh, he introduced me to the Crawford interview and he wrote a piece on Tolkien and CSS Lewis, uh, last year. That's one of the best things I've ever read, where basically they again, came to this diagnosis that the techno utopians, um, There's this, he, he, it almost makes me, it almost makes me shudder.
He talks about, um, c s Lewis talking about, uh, what he called the Tao, you know, t a o, which was this source of life, this objective good that we can connect to and that can help guide our curiosity, right? And he said that the heart is the bull walk between the cold brain and the hot gut that would guide us.
Uh, and it's something that I think may be physiologically true, but it's kind of a woo woo belief of mine. But the heart is predominantly connected to the right hemisphere, right? And there's this, he juxtaposes it with this line from Ray Kurzwell, the transhumanist saying The heart is subject to too many failure modes, right?
And so the best thing for us would be to [00:55:00] replace it with a machine. And you're like, Ooh. So you are replacing the one thing that connects us to the world with a machine, because you're not willing to risk that failure and. What's that? What's the relevance to physicals and virtues? And I think when you look at the people that we've held up in our society as the most successful, they are these relatively left-brained, often extremely left brained, Silicon Valley, uh, all Wall Street people that deal almost entirely in walls of abstractions.
You, you know, like try explaining most of what Wall Street does to a, to a normal person. I've worked on Wall Street for a long time, and even I barely understand any of it. Right? And Silicon Valley is the same. They're creating, they're creating virtual worlds metaverses that, that aren't connected to anything.
And again, within those world, nothing is, everything is up for grabs. And I think for people that live in the real world, the quote unquote essential workers, this just strikes us as absurd. These debates over the meanings of words that aren't meaningful to anyone. Trying to just simply earn a living and [00:56:00] the existence of things that are true and are good.
And what Lions talks about is how. You know, our politics has increasingly fractured along those lines where I think the virtuals look down on the physicals and actually often put words on them. Like, you know, racist, fascist, you know, like that, that aren't, the words aren't even really clearly defined.
You know, the deplorable, whatever it is, right? The words aren't even clearly defined, but it's a way of denying them some sort of humanity. And that creates this urge for rebellion amongst that group. And this is not a US thing, this is a global thing. Um, and I think it reflects this urge that we need to get back to, to reality and a, a, a relationship with reality.
[00:56:44] Bogumil: I like that. And in, in this world that we live in, the word uncertain and chaos and crisis comes up. And there's another quote that I like from one of your articles. It's called the The Hidden Force essay. And you write about self-actualizing [00:57:00] people who are relatively un frightened by the unknown and mysterious the puzzling, and often are positively attracted by it.
And it's from Maslow, if I remember right. And I thought it goes back to our initial. A conversation about curiosity, the unknown. It's an opportunity for discovery. Can you talk more about it? How we shouldn't be really afraid of it. Maybe that's something we could pursue.
[00:57:24] Tom Morgan: I think there's an applicability to investing here, which is that usually, and this is an awful thing to say, but you can tell when the other person you are facing has stopped thinking. Uh, and typically it comes at a certain time of life and usually it's when. Um, something knocks up against someone's professional or personal identity.
So if you are a perma bear and you are faced with irrefutable evidence that things are getting better, often you will simply not be able to threaten your identity with that new information. But it's, it's the true, it's true across almost any area of expertise. 'cause what you have to give up about yourself, you have to throw your own identity in the fire.
You know, I love the Upton Sinclair [00:58:00] quote that it's difficult to convince man of something when his salary depends on him not understanding it. Right. And and the same is true across, um, across the board. Something that happened to me that was highly confronting and I think quite relevant. Um, I gave an interview in March about, uh, the very worst parts of my midlife crisis and I gave it to a friend and I wasn't planning to, to relate it to my professional identity at all.
'cause there was a lot of tough stuff in there about mental illness and, and depression. Um, and then the day it was published, um, A neuroscientist by the name of Dr. Mona Banani contacted me and she said, um, it really resonated with me a lot of the stuff you did. And then I, um, I read her book and I was actually reading it on the way to Omaha to the, to the Buffett annual meeting.
And, um, on the plane, I felt physically sick. I felt physically sick because what happened to her is, is that she had a crisis of rationality. And so spent the entire pandemic digging through published research on Cy phenomena, which is things like remote viewing, [00:59:00] clairvoyance, telekinesis, precognition, all these things that I just imagined were, have been completely in comprehensively debunked.
And she, she, she read the research and not only did she find that it's actually relatively robustly proven, it, it's been proven by like incredibly credible, like organizations offering quadruple blind studies. And you either have to discredit Mona entirely, which I don't believe is fair. Or you have to discredit all the studies and meta studies.
And I was just, the reason why that backstory is important is that basically I made myself much more open to the world than I planned on doing. And as a result, the world made itself much more open to me immediately. And that and the Mona's work has opened up an entirely new world to me that I actually think is weirdly applicable to investing in certain strange ways.
But it opened up an entirely new world for me, and only because I decided to make myself open and vulnerable. Now, I wasn't being manipulative in the vulnerability. My intention was to help other [01:00:00] people who were going through a similar problem in a similar circumstance. And so my intentions I think were good.
And my reward was something that really messed up my worldview.
[01:00:09] Bogumil: I, I, I like that. You made me think, and I wrote it down earlier, the word change, and we talked about principles and philosophy, but. I think the biggest courage comes from being able to change your mind about something. And you talked about being tied up in a, with a certain identity, but I think in, in the world of investing, but in life in general, if you like a certain stock, you feel so invested, you can't change your mind about it.
And I think the biggest lesson for me, both in investing and in life is that it's okay to change your mind. What Tom thought in 2010 or what I thought in 2010 might not be true or relevant or correct given the information, knowledge, experience that we accumulated since. So we're free to change our mind.
And I think the way the society works, I mean, from the time when you go to school, changing your mind about the answer, when you're, uh, giving your [01:01:00] math test back to the teacher, it's not a good sign. Why are you changing your mind? But in real life, it actually pays to change your mind sometimes and be flexible.
And the other thing that I wrote down listening to you is being comfortable with other people disagreeing with you. Not ignoring it, acknowledging it, and sometimes taking it into account. And the reason I say it is whenever I give a talk, I always tell people, this is what I've learned so far. These are the ideas I have at this point in my life.
But at the end, please feel free to disagree with everything you heard. And I think it does a couple of things. First of all, they're paying more attention. And second, I hope to learn more from it because they'll poke holes in my way of thinking and I can learn from it. So not being afraid of people disagreeing with you and what you do, you put out to the world.
All those articles, all this content, even this conversation today, a lot of people will hear it. It might resonate with so many, and they'll reach out to you. And I think that's, [01:02:00] that's the part that's worth the, the risk and the vulnerable vulnerability that puts you in. Do you have some thoughts about it?
It's, you know, a creator, writer that shares so regularly,
[01:02:10] Tom Morgan: Yeah, I'd say, uh, a few people that I'd really hold up as creators online. They, they have the, the two characteristics of, of following their heart and opening their heart that they, they don't write stock write ups on Shopify because everyone's writing about Shopify. They'll write it about some weird micro cap that really has captured their attention, and then they'll be honest about what they don't know.
Um, and that's a powerful, powerful combination when it's backed up with work, right? You, you don't wanna just throw your hands up and say, I don't know what I'm talking about. And I, and I think that that vulnerability is important. 'cause I've been consistently surprised. You know, I'm constantly dropping my trousers in public and waiting to be kicked in the nuts, and instead I mostly get a hug, right?
I find that, I find that very surprising, that the more vulnerable I am, the more I'm rewarded. As long as I'm, I think I'm not trying to be manipulative with that vulnerability. So I, I think that's [01:03:00] incredibly important. I think that the hardest thing for me is understanding when criticism is, is valid. Um, so when I was on the sell side, you are facing off against a billionaire that has 20 years more experience than you.
They push back even a little bit, and their commission dollars are on your side. Your temptation to agree with them is massive, and as a result, you don't ever really know what you believe. Right. And I, I once heard the expression, you know, the, the truth burns off deadwood and most people don't like it because they're 95% deadwood.
And I think what happened through me, through the initiation process of a midlife crisis was that everything that I didn't believe got stripped away. Um, I still don't really know what I believe, and I think I capitulate too early when I get criticism, but I think you can have an emotional response to criticism when it's like, if some guy's like, I just hate you and everything about you, you know, like, okay, that's a troll.
But if someone's like, Tom, your articles are too long and disjointed, I think you need to work on that. I'm like, how does that feel? That feels right. That feels right. And I need to incorporate that feedback. And I think you have to have a somatic response to [01:04:00] feedback where it's like, if it hurts, you know, like dumb criticism doesn't hurt.
You're like, well, screw you fine. But, but really effective criticism hurts and that pain. Is feedback. That's how nature gets feedback through pain.
[01:04:12] Bogumil: What do you think about the idea that you are not your content, whether it's an article or a, you know, an interview. It's just a representation of the ideas, opinions, thoughts that you collected so far. And then you have the right to change it. You have the, the ability to accept that people disagree with you.
I think we get too invested sometimes in the ideas. Some investors choose not to share which stocks they're buying. I mean, there are compliance reasons for it too, but once it's even public, they choose not to get too far behind the name just so that they can change their mind. And it's, it's a very visible and powerful thing that's, uh, you know, if they change their mind, their filings, that you can see that they solved it.
So in many places in life, you don't even know that somebody changed their mind about it, but not being [01:05:00] so, Not identifying yourself with the idea that you just shared too far. Just saying, this is my opinion as of today, subject to change. 'cause I continue to learn.
[01:05:11] Tom Morgan: I think about it in terms of shame, actually. Um, one of the, one of the best things I ever heard from my own mental health was the, um, the degree of shame you feel about something in the past is an indication of your growth sense.
[01:05:24] Bogumil: Mm-hmm.
[01:05:25] Tom Morgan: you wouldn't, otherwise you wouldn't cringe, right? If you look back on something you said 20 years ago and you're like, I can't believe how dumb that was.
How offensive, how naive, right? The only reason you are able to recognize that is because you've grown. And when I read literally anything I've ever written, ever and hate it, Hopefully that represents the fact that my thinking has evolved since then and, and writing online that's really, really difficult.
Um, and so I, I think that that really helps you. And I think, you know, like I, I look back at what I was sending out to Wall Street in [01:06:00] from 2015 to 2017. I went through a big stage of being into, you know, Ray Kurzwell and Ulna Harari and techno utopianism and transhumanism, I think. 'cause I was struggling with my own mortality and I'm deeply ashamed of that period.
'cause I was like, Jesus. I was putting such bad ideas into the, into the ether that are ultimately incredibly nihilistic. And as a result of that nihilism, I think my voice was taken away from me. And on the other side of that, my voice isn't perfect, but I think I'm using my voice to amplify ideas that I find deeply meaningful.
[01:06:29] Bogumil: I have to ask you a question that. It's not on my list, but I, it popped in my head. How differently would you live your life if you knew that you're immortal?
[01:06:40] Tom Morgan: I think immortality would be a horrible curse. I don't know. No one's ever asked me that. I think,
I think you'd have to optimize, I think you'd have to pay even more attention to process, right? Because what you realize if you're a model is you try everything and every, every pleasure is fleeting, right?
You'd probably spend a few weeks, you know, jet [01:07:00] skiing across the aian and every, every, you know, even years, even a hundred years doing each of those things. Eventually it would, it would run dry. That's where I think the only thing that could sustain you for eternity is an infinite game. You know, by definition that the.
The energy of the universe is, as far as we know, inexhaustible, right? And so the only, that's what, it's a really interesting idea that's very hard to articulate, which is a zero sum game has a finite amount of energy in it. Because there has to be a loser, someone has to lose that game. An infinite game, a positive sum game, has an infinite amount of energy in it.
And this is something that we're starting to realize about thermodynamics, is that the inevitable heat death of the universe and everything is dependent on the view that universe is a closed system. And we do not know that. Whereas actually the movement towards complexity is capturing energy for the environment in a way that may go on forever.
The world may just get more conscious and complex forever. And as a result, if you can tap into that energy, that limitless energy source the [01:08:00] Dao forever, you will never get bored. Right. And again, what, like what do you do with this pretentious waffle? You try and find processes.
[01:08:08] Bogumil: I think that if you had this infinite time horizon, you would eventually boil it down to what's essential. You would've tried everything that you think would bring you happiness. We sp spoke about the idea that happiness is something that's very hard to achieve or impossible to achieve in a direct way, but I think eventually you would boil it down to a handful, few things that matter, and it might be different things for different individuals.
But once you remove that mortal time horizon, it, it really changes what you care about day to day. And I was thinking of the term waste, and I don't know if it's the right word to use, but. There's this idea that rich people don't waste money, poor people do. And mortals, I think waste. You have a different opinion.
I have simplifying, but mortals with a limited time tend to waste a lot of time. When you think about it, [01:09:00] we waste a lot of time on so many different things as if we were immortal. I dunno what would change in that sense? That would we waste time because we have unlimited time or would we choose not to waste it? I dunno how we would respond to it.
[01:09:14] Tom Morgan: I think.
[01:09:15] Bogumil: There's this, this, this idea that, uh, you know, rich people that stay rich live as if they were poor and, and poor people that stay poor, live as if they were rich. And I'm paraphrasing that, you know, you respect a certain blessing that you have, whether it's, you know, wealth or in this case time I.
[01:09:33] Tom Morgan: You made me think of, um, this book by Napoleon Hill, the guy that wrote Think and Grow Rich. He wrote, he wrote a book when he was alive that wasn't published, I think until 2011 because it was considered disturbing and wacky. Um, it's called Outwitting the Devil.
[01:09:47] Bogumil: Mm-hmm.
[01:09:48] Tom Morgan: And, um, there's no indication when you're reading it that he, he doesn't think the devil exists.
Uh, and his definition of what the devil does is he makes you drift. He fills your head with opinions that are not yours, which is [01:10:00] highly relevant to what we were just talking about, right? He distracts you highly relevant to the world of social media, right? Why does he do those things? To waste your time to run down the clock on your life.
Why does he wanna run down the clock on your life? Because the one thing that you can do through that redemptive power of focused attention that destroys the evil inside yourself is to focus on your niche. And once you focus on your niche, as you exactly just stated, you get increasingly, increasingly, increasingly, increasingly honed in on one thing that matters or a small group of thing that matters, which is what brings life to you.
What brings energy to you. You get better and better at it. You get more and more efficient. That is functionally the definition of wisdom, right? It is getting more and more done with less and less effort. It is the sage that clicks his fingers and suddenly a thunderstorm appears that is the apex of humanity.
It isn't someone that's constantly grinding against the world. It's someone who is completely at harmony with it. And so that I think is, [01:11:00] is like you have heaven and you have hell, and hell is constant distraction and heaven. Is complete alignment with yourself and the world at the same time.
[01:11:08] Bogumil: I like that. Wow. I'll be thinking about it for a while. Tom, I have to ask you a question that has, uh, It's a personal question and you and I talked about it. You are probably, I mean, I'm pretty sure the only New York unpolished friend that I have that was in Poland in the 1980s when the Cold War was still very much cold and frosty and we're the exact same age.
So we have some memories of those days. It was, to me, was the darkest time before the dawn because, uh, the era of the Cold War is coming to an end. We didn't know that at the time. What are your memories of those days? You were in Poland as a little kid, as, uh, I was.
[01:11:47] Tom Morgan: There's, there's two things, right? There's like the false memory syndrome, which is all the stuff that you remember at the time and this's the stuff you found out later. So, like, for me at the time, I remember a warm home full of like, [01:12:00] lovely Polish staff. 'cause we lived in an embassy. I remember going to an American school, uh, I remember wandering through the Wien and Warsaw and playing on the, the, the, the truck, the toy truck that they had there.
Um, I remember going to bison forests and being very, very cold. So like, it's, it's mostly incredibly positive. I do remember bread, lights. I do remember us being able to get things that other people couldn't get. But you're only, you're only superficially aware of that kind of stuff when you're that young.
Um, And then there's the false memory syndrome, which is the stuff I remember afterwards, which is, you know, our head Butler was a K G B agent. And my dad was meeting with, uh, lake Lenza in Backstreet to help move the solidarity movement along. And he directed Malcolm Rivkin's motorcade to the death of a political distant father, pop Lusko.
So, you know, I was living in a bugged house filled with spies, and at the time I was having the best possible time 'cause I was a kid. So, like, it, it's this very weird juxtaposition where I certainly do remember going from Poland to [01:13:00] Mexico and the day that I arrived in Mexico, like all these sugary cereals and bright sunshine and a swimming pool and all these things.
It was, it was a very, very, very stark change, even at that age. But, um, yeah, like, it, it, it, I try, I try not to let my actual memories be polluted by what I think I should remember.
[01:13:17] Bogumil: Well, I think we're both glad that that time ended. I, I have memories of going with my grandpa every month to pick up Russian cards and I was absolutely convinced that all the kids in the whole world go every month to some sort of a government office and pick up Russian cards that say, you know, that many grams of flour, sugar, all the basic, uh, goods that you can buy in government owned and controlled stores.
And when I went, Vienna was the first place that I went to when things were opening up and I realized the rest of the world works completely differently than what I saw as a kid. And as a kid, you don't have a point of reference. So it's all. You know, as a kid you see the, the walks and the [01:14:00] hikes and the castles and the tales and the stories and time with grandpa, you don't see it as, oh, I'm living under a, a communist regime.
And, uh, there are all kinds of restrictions and things I should be aware of, but,
[01:14:11] Tom Morgan: It always makes me think of the stories about the people that get out of North Korea, basically told that the rest of the world is like a hellish wasteland and they managed to get themselves into South Korea. Everyone's a foot toward them 'cause of nutrition and they're in the, probably the most technologically advanced country in the world.
Right. Just like, like, I don't, I don't know what that would do to your psyche. And I think, I think we forget as a result of the time that we live in how easy it was to, to convince people of things because they didn't have the same access to information.
[01:14:41] Bogumil: And I think it brings us back to the beginning, you know, with the world we're believed to be living in based on the information that you we have might be just incorrect. And that's an extreme example of living under a closed regime where you think this is the way the world works. And you leave and you see, no, that's not true.
And I [01:15:00] think we get caught up in bubbles much smaller, much, much less dramatic in our life where we think this is how the whole world works. And then we realize, no, this is just the bubble we were living in. Good bubble or bad bubble colder or warmer bubble, as you mentioned. But that's, that's the reality.
Tom, I have one last big, but uh, big, big question about success. And you and I touched on it a little bit, but I'm curious about your own definition of professional and personal success. How do you think about it?
[01:15:28] Tom Morgan: Yeah, it's tough. I talk about this, um, again with my friend Frederick all the time. You know, like we look at these people that. You know, if you, if you, if you, if you were to tweet out right now, who's the most successful, who are the most successful people in the world, it's gonna be the same cast of characters.
You know, it's gonna be, it's gonna be Elon Musk, it's gonna be Jeff Bezos. It's gonna be anyone that's, that's objectively at the, at the top 10, right. At the Forbes list or whatever. Right? And there's, again, there's nothing wrong with that. All of these guys are visionaries that have done fantastic things for the world.
But it's, it's quite a [01:16:00] straightforward, abstract and non holistic assessment. The problem is, is that to look at success, you have to make a value judgment, true success. And that's really hard. 'cause that's gonna, that's gonna annoy a lot of people, right? 'cause I have to make a moral judgment on your life in order to determine if you are successful.
To go back to the Ed Thorpe example, David Tamara's making a value judgment. He's just like this guy. Like I, I've got some, I look at all the ingredients of this guy's life taken as a whole. And I think that's the important thing. The left hemisphere looks at the balance sheet. The right hemisphere looks at every ingredients of someone's life and says, is this something that's desirable?
Can I explain why it's desirable? No, not really. You know, you meet someone and they glow, you meet someone, and they have just this irrepressible, childlike energy. You know, that person's successful and you can point to lots of different things, but they're, they're relatively specific to each person. And I guess, like, not to be repetitive, but it is my shtick, those people tend to be quite disciplined in terms of following their own curiosity.
It tends to [01:17:00] be quite keyed into the energy of the world in a relational way that that gives them this, this, this intrinsic flexibility. You know, like to quote grossly, they, they live like water and that allows them to move in and out of things that interest them with, with a surprising amount of flexibility and discipline.
[01:17:17] Bogumil: I have to ask you this. Have you ever been bored?
[01:17:20] Tom Morgan: I get bored all the time.
[01:17:21] Bogumil: Do you.
[01:17:22] Tom Morgan: Yeah.
[01:17:23] Bogumil: Even now when you can read whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want.
[01:17:26] Tom Morgan: I am probably more bored. I'm probably more bored than I'm not bored. I, I, I think about the nature of curiosity, like an apex, apex predator is that, you know, like if you look at lions, like particularly male lion, and they basically spend their entire time lounging under a tree completely unbothered, and they will explode into action and suddenly be devastating death machines.
Right? And I think the explore exploit is a bit like that, where you'll go through these long periods of inactivity where nothing's really interesting to you, or you are wrestling with an idea and it's a little bit boring and you've [01:18:00] really stagnated as a, as a person. And that happens to me all the time.
My thinking just gets stale and repetitive. Right? And then suddenly something comes into your world, the anomaly comes into your world, and you need to attack that with ferocity. You know, when I, I, I, when Mona's work led me to the Irv Laszlow as a field theory, I was like, Man, this, this could be a concept that, that resolves all of these crazy, random ideas.
And so I read like three books in a week and listened to like 15 lectures on YouTube and went nuts. And like I was, I was passionate, but then I went six weeks after that without finding anything and without really trying, just kinda sitting around and waiting for something to tickle me. And so I'm, I'm bored a lot, and Christ, it's not like my life is that desirable.
Right? You know, I'm, I'm sitting here talking to you in my bedroom. It's not like I'm, I'm, I'm the happiest person I know in the last three years of my life, have been the best three years of my life by a long way because I've respected curiosity. But, you know, like I'm, I'm, I'm far from a paragon of virtue in any regard.
[01:18:54] Bogumil: But the search never ends. There's no moment where you. The, the funny thing about this podcast, those [01:19:00] conversations, is that not just my guests recommend people and, uh, articles and cks by the way, I, I really like Frederick's writing and, and I'm hoping to have him on the show. I talked to him briefly. I think we would have a lot to talk about and a couple of people that you mentioned as well.
But I have a list of books I want to read and I organize them by category. And if anything, I notice that the, the list has grown, I don't know, five, 10 times in the last few months alone. And people have sent me books that I have yet to read. So I think the more questions you have, the more will come to you.
It's, it's all almost like shaking a tree with, uh, mango or an apple. You know? The more you shake it, the more will come down. But it's, it's fun. And to me, the, the search never ends. That's why. When I think of the word boredom, I, I don't know the, the feeling 'cause I'll always find something to look at. It might be not as exciting as I thought, but then I'll move on to the next thing.
But the, the pursuit never ends. And to me, if I think of successes, as long as I have a reason to keep on [01:20:00] moving and finding and discovering and having conversations, that's, to me, success. It's less about a destination. And I think a lot of people think of it as a destination. If only I had a million dollars, or if only I had a billion dollars, if only I had five houses. But if you realize once you have it, what then? And the pursuit is much more of an exciting, at least me, to me personally, a way of looking at it that I have a reason to get out of bed and, and. Get on the call, have a fun conversation, read a book, learn something new, get challenged, have somebody disagree with me.
I, I, I find this as a fun pursuit in itself. And go, going back to your quote that, you know, wealth and freedom, having the wealth and freedom to, to do it. And I was thinking before we got on the phone, and I, uh, I wrote it down that I think there were two moments when I was the most curious in my life, probably when I was five.
And today, because I finally have the time and the freedom to pursue all the interests that intrigued me. And I'm not [01:21:00] constrained by school and exams and diplomas. I'm just pursuing things that I'm curious about.
[01:21:06] Tom Morgan: Yeah, I don't want to understate the difficulty of being curious , but not only is it something you can probably only do at a certain level at Maslow's Hierarchy, but I. There's this weird idea of, of you being a whole, uh, and you've always, always, every time I've met you and, and even now, you strike me as just a, a person who has a lot of inner harmony.
And there was this idea that again, came out of this stunning Jordan Peterson lecture about Jacob's Ladder, which is that a differentiated psyche is the same as this definition of complexity that I was talking about where like you have lots of parts of your psyche that all want different things and they can pull you in lots of different directions.
But what the idea is, is to to clearly differentiate them to do different things, but have them all pulling together in pursuit of something that's bigger than everyone. That is the structure of a functional society. It's the structural of a structure of a functioning company. It's the structure of everything complex and successful where you have highly differentiated [01:22:00] parts, all unified in pursuit of something that's valuable.
And one of Peterson's big ideas is that there is something at the top of that hierarchy, probably. If there's nothing at the top of that hierarchy, you're just a mess, right? You're just going in a million different directions every passing second. And if the the wrong thing is at the top of that hierarchy, you're gonna get in real trouble real quickly.
And the only thing you can put at the top of that hierarchy is curiosity, life, whatever it is, right? And so there's the, the flip side of what I'm saying is it's very, very difficult to know what you're curious about. And I, I, I only really like, and, and it gets better. It gets better over time. You get better as you get wiser at knowing what you're curious and, and, and stripping everything out.
That doesn't matter. But if you've got a lot of trauma, if you've got a lot of things in your light, a lot of voices in your head, you know, telling you the person you should be, your parents, whatever it is, right? It's very difficult to have a clear view about what you really care about. And it's even harder to know what is at the top of your value system.
For me, that paralyzed me for, for several years, you know, what is a big enough thing for me? What is big enough? What is big [01:23:00] enough? And I made a, a catastrophic choice. Um, Um, when I left finance to reject finance entirely and to go and be a hospice worker and a social worker, and a recruiter and a psychologist to try and help people with something that was objectively meaningful.
And I basically, I went too clearly after something that I thought was meaningful in the same way as you can just as clearly go after something that you think is meaningless. And that paralyzed me just as surely because the thing you are going after, because you're seeing it with soft eyes, is never directly visible to you.
And if you try and go after it too directly, you will kill it and you'll possibly kill yourself.
[01:23:34] Bogumil: Tom, this is a beautiful place to wrap it up. Wow, what a conversation. And uh, I definitely hope to have you back on the show and talk more, but I think we covered a lot of the ideas that you and I talked about in person and the last few times we spoke. Thank you again for today and it was a real delight and I'll include all the links to your content on all the friends that you mentioned as well for them, for the audience to pursue [01:24:00] their curiosity and find out more and follow you and learn more from you.
Tom, thank you so much for today. What a pleasure.
[01:24:06] Tom Morgan: Thank you. Thank you.
