Write Like Wall Street’s Best | Michael Mauboussin | How I Write Podcast

What makes smart people bad writers is this  curse of knowledge. It's almost like I put my arm around the reader. Then we say,  let's talk about what we see. That to me is how I think about basically how to write. Bezos says, "Your margin is my opportunity." I always say your ignorance  is my opportunity as a writer. I'm trying to provide people with some sort of  angle, some sort of insight that can make them more effective in their investment process. Practice analytically, perform intuitively

. Oh man, wait, what? Hey, writers, you shouldn't just spend time with all these other writers in  this classroom. Go find the consilience between fields. Just live in the world of synthesis. Right? Because the world is constantly changing. What you believed yesterday  may not be true tomorrow. If you love to research, this episode is for you.  Michael Mauboussin is a master at researching, distilling, learning, and then taking  all those ideas, bringing them together, and then sharing them in p

ublic. I've always  wondered, how does this guy do it? How is it that he both has such an encyclopedic memory but  also doesn't suffer from that curse of knowledge that so many smart people suffer from? How does  he take that encyclopedic memory and right in ways that are clear, that are compelling? I've learned  so much from this guy. He also used to be the chairman of the board at the Santa Fe Institute,  talks about what he learned from Cormac McCarthy, who was really involved there, what he'

s  learned from other writers there, and then what he's learned being a professor at Columbia  Business School. So, hey, let's get to it. Enjoy this conversation with Mr. Michael Mauboussin. The place I want to begin is you just started your 32nd year teaching security analysis at  Columbia Business School. And what do you say to your students, your MBA candidates about  learning to write? What's really important in the business world that they need to know? Well, to me, the big issue is writing

is about understanding. So to be able to be an effective  writer, especially in things like in the investment world, it means you have to understand.  And so that is the foundation upon which all of this is built. And by the way, it's all  kinds of communications, verbal communication and written communication. Verbal communication tends  to be a little bit different because I can sit here and look at you and if you don't know what  I'm talking about or puzzled or disagree, I can read that cue

from you. Writing is very different.  Of course, because I'm just handing it over and don't know your reactions to that, but it's really  fundamentally to me about understanding. So to be an effective communicator in any form, certainly  a writer, the key to start is with understanding. And for you, is the understanding really  about research and working through it? Or what is that process of coming to  understand something look like for you? For sure, and by the way, the other thing I'll  say,

David, it's been consistent throughout my career is, I think I understand something and  then I'm going to write about it and I'm like, oh my God, I have no idea what I'm doing here.  So it forces you go back to first principles to me. So the way I kind of think about this is  really effective for me. It's about learning and then communicating. Learning and then writing  for instance, or learning and then teaching. So it's an input and an output, and both of  those things are really important. S

o yes, the answer is it's research and going back  and making sure I understand the foundations, poking the spots of weakness and trying to get  into some depth in terms of what's going on. And by the way, that depth I may not want convey  all that I know even, I want to convey that's useful for the reader to read. But yeah, it's  fundamentally about understanding and getting your arms around the issues you want to talk about. Yeah, and I think that there's multiple ways to think about understan

ding. I think that  there's really good one-liners, ways to think about understanding. You do a really good job  of this with the paradox of skill where you say, "Here is a one-liner that is a really simple  way that you can encapsulate this whole book." But then also there's understanding in  terms of how you communicate the idea, how the concepts are structured. And I think  that one of the things that's continually surprising to me is just how much work it takes  to get to something that is c

lear and simple, but also just how enlightening something that is  clear and simple is not just for me as a writer, but for the reader. It sticks in their brain,  it's easy for them to share, and because of that, there's a real utility to that information. I try to think a lot about that. You mentioned I started class and one of the quotes I put  up there, it's in Latin, but in English, it's translated as, "Not notations, but notions."  From Carl Gauss and famous mathematicians. So don't worry a

bout the formulas, the technical  things, understand the concepts. And to me, this is very much what animates as I try to write  is to say, what is the important underlying idea to your point, if you can distill it and make it  straightforward and make it accessible to people, that's really what we're after and  we're trying to communicate and write. The history of that class goes back to writing  because Ben Graham taught that class, right? It's an amazing story, yeah. He  started teaching that

class in 1927, so we're coming up on a century of some version of  that class [inaudible 00:04:57]. He wrote plays, he could translate classics, Greek, Latin. He was  an extraordinary guy, but writing was a big part of how he got his message out to the world. When you're working with students, how do you think about the relationship between the  spreadsheet and the written word, the synthesis between them? What do students need to know  about this? Or people work in investing at all? Well, I me

an at the end of the day, having some  foundation for you doing is really important. But when you're really communicating, a lot of it's  about storytelling. So in other words, what are these numbers? What is this analysis? What story  does this tell? What narrative flows from this that's important for us in terms of guiding our  actions or guiding our understanding? So I mean, to me that's a big part of it. And it's easy,  I'll just say in the investment world is an example. Lots of people use

things like multiples  of earnings or multiples of cash flow to value things, but they don't necessarily understand  the foundations of those multiples, because shorthand. So to me, this is what communication  is all about, is making sure that you understand the foundational principles upon which this is  built, and then that allows you to, I think, communicate or write much more effectively  because you have that foundation established. Yeah, I mean, I hate to pull out  such a proverbial analog

y here, but it really is good because it's the iceberg.  It is, you only see what's above the water, but there's actually this foundation that you need  in order to write well. And we were talking before we started about Steven Pinker and the sense of  style and how in chapter three he talks about the curse of knowledge. And I think that this is a lot  of the work that we need to do as writers is to have that deep understanding but then somehow  retain the clarity of thought and dare I say, empa

thy for a reader who doesn't have that same  depth and communicate to them so that as some novice or somebody who definitely doesn't know  as much about the topic as you do that they can still understand what it is that you're saying. I agree with that 100%. And it's a big challenge, and I think that you mentioned the Pinker  thing, and he says it quite bluntly, which is what makes smart people bad writers is this curse  of knowledge. You have a lot of stuff going on in your head, maybe that's t

he stuff underneath the  iceberg, and you're not communicating in a way that's effective or efficient for the reader.  So the key is to make sure, and by the way, making things accessible, acronyms. People like  to use jargon. Could a high schooler read what we're writing, maybe not understand every single  nuance, but basically get the ideas of what we're doing everywhere from that to a finance  professor who might be very sophisticated and have lots of experience and training, but  would also

get something from it of interest. How do you think about your writing style in  terms of the kinds of people that you're trying to appeal to? Because you are going for literally  some of the best investors in the entire world. You are trying to write for the elite of the  elites. So how do you think about retaining that sophistication, that rigor, while also trying  to simplify? And do you find that there is a necessary trade-off there, or do you find that  there's no trade-off at all and actua

lly the simplicity even for the people at the top say  you're writing for Jim Simons or somebody like that, that even they want that sort of simplicity? Oh yeah. I mean, that's the challenge. I mean, that's the goal is to try to avoid that trade off  and say, I make it interesting. Now it feels like rule number one is to have something to say.  So in other words, you've done something that you're excited about and you want to share it  with the world, and it sounds like trivial, but that is a re

ally important thing. So if  I'm working on something, oh, this is a nugget, this is something that's cool, this is something  I want to share. And then I'll go back to Pinker, Pinker wrote in that same book, the sense  of style. Chapter two is actually about this. It's all about classic style. And I think  classic style is what appeals to me the most. And the way I think about it, David, is it's  almost like I put my arm around the reader and we all gaze off into the world and we say,  let's ta

lk about what we see. Let's make this concrete and interesting, and we're going  to share this view. And that to me is how I think about basically how to write. And so  this idea of you and I as reader and writer, we're peers looking at the world, giving concrete  things that are cool and interesting. So that's I think the way that you transcend from the fairly  sophisticated person. If it's something new that's cool for them to something that's someone  that's not maybe completely sophisticated

because they're still part of the whole process. Concrete, what are you pointing out there? I mean, concrete is just to try to make the ideas.  I mean, we need to use abstractions from time to time, but to make things as concrete as possible.  By the way that's in our writing, if you read it now, we will do a lot of four examples. We'll  give a lot of little mathematical. I mean, they take up a little bit of space, but not a lot.  So if I give you a number, I'm going to show you how that number

was derived just so you can see  it. So it's something that concrete and you can relate to it and something that's solid. And I  do think people often remember things that are concrete a little bit more effectively. Yeah, I think so. Well, one of the other things that I've admired about your writing  is you love sports. And you've been able to basically pull sports into your work. It's funny,  I feel a lot of that with golf. So for example, I was with some students one day and they're  like, "D

avid, I can't write when you're trying to speak to us so analytically, I need to be in a  more intuitive state." And I took a step back and I was like, hold on, hold on, hold on. How is it  that I learned when I was playing golf? What is it that I tried to think about? Because I was  very analytical about my approach to the game, but I wasn't on the 16th hole in a tournament  saying, okay, I need to do this crazy thing. And I then said, you know what I used  to do? I used to practice analyticall

y, and then I would try to perform intuitively. So then I have a piece called exactly that where I bring in the example of Bryson de Shambo  who's on the range on Saturday night at the US Open, and he's out there till like 10:00 PM He's  hitting balls, hitting balls, hitting balls, and he's very analytical. And then there's this  quote that he has that he shares in a post round interview after he wins the US Open where he says,  "I finally found that feeling on Saturday night, so I could just go

play on Sunday." Yeah, I mean, I just love this idea and it's really about skill acquisition. Sports  is very convenient because it's something that's pretty discreet and we can really study it. And  look, there are levels of skill acquisition, but your point's exactly right. If you're teaching  someone to play tennis or golf, you break down the mechanics of it, have people practice, and this is  the whole work on deliberate practice to make sure you're at the edge of your skill set. You're  wo

rking hard on it, you're getting feedback that's accurate and timely, and you get better at  these different building blocks of the sport. And then when it comes time to play, you want it all  flow because you've already done all the practice behind it. So these ideas of muscle memory. I can take you off the hook. First, you mentioned Pinker's, classic sense  of style. What does that mean to you? So in chapter two of that book, Pinker talks about  various styles of writing, and he advocates for

classic style, which is one of many. By the way,  there's a lot of overlap in these definitions and so on and so forth. And so for example, Strunk and  White, which is another classic book I'm writing, is more of a practical style. So it's almost a  practical style would be teacher to student. So classic style would be, as I described, as sort  of peers looking into the world, finding and describing cool things, trying to make things as  concrete as possible so that we're all sort of on the same

page. And again, you can avoid a lot of  these little traps by avoiding acronyms and jargon and so forth. And just to make it clear, there's  a whole nother realm, for example, in academic, I have to read a lot of academic papers from my job. I'm so sorry. Yeah, no, exactly. And so now you  learn how to read these things, and obviously there's a wide range of skills,  by the way, finance people tend to be pretty straightforward. They're going to give you an  abstract which is going to summarize

it. And usually if they're doing a good job in  the introduction, they're going to say, here's sort of the history of what we're doing.  So we'll give you the setup. Here's why we think we're adding something to this, and then here's  what we found. And then the bulk of it is, the actual analysis, and then the conclusion  will reiterate essentially that. So there is a flow that makes some sense. But when you're  running some, especially in different subjects, finance is more straightforward and

cut and  dried. But other realms in the humanities, you're writing papers for other humanities  professors and it gets really abstract very fast. And regular people certainly can't  read that stuff with any sort of benefit, so. It's interesting to have traced your work  over the years because there's two sources that I see you referring to a lot. And  I had this with Marsh McLennan. I read Understanding Media when I was fresh out of  college, and there was something about the way that McLennan

explained the similarities  and the synthesis between art and culture and architecture and cities and technology, and how  all of these things that I thought were totally disparate and different were actually pulling  from the same thread. And I was like, what? Exactly. And it was this quake book for me where I feel like I just look at the  world through a McLennanesque prism. And for you, that seems to be the Stiglitz paper from 1980.  And then also the wisdom of crowds just shows up over and o

ver and over again. And I think  it's a good testament to how deeply you can mine a worthy idea for years, for decades. For sure. And I mean, let's take those two ideas because you're exactly right, let's take  those two ideas. Both of them actually relate to something called market efficiency. So let's not  get into too many details, but market efficiency basically says, by the way, efficiency is from  physics, it's energy and output. So in markets it would be information goes in, how accuratel

y do  asset prices reflect the information? So that is there slippage. That's the measure of efficiency.  So there are lots, obviously this is of great academic interest. So there are lots of theories  about how this happens. And one is the rational agent, we all know everything. We all share the  same views of the world. We might have different preferences, but that all gets manifested. No  one really believes that, but it's actually not a bad touchstone for thinking about how the  world might

work in the sort of abstract sense. Fast-forward, and this also ties into  the work at the Santa Fe Institute, but Jim Surowiecki writes The Wisdom of Crowds  and the ideas have been percolating for a while. He obviously quotes Francis Galton a paper that at  the time was already a century old. But The Wisdom of Crowds is this really wild idea that just a  bunch of people getting together trying to guess something. And by the way, they have incentives  and different amounts of money and so forth

, just the aggregation of that and often leads  to a better answer than the individual, we know that it's better than the individuals on  average. You're like, wait, wait, wait, what is this? So that alone was fascinating. And then the  other thing that he added on was it's unknowing under certain conditions, it's conditional. What are those three again? So it's diversity, so heterogeneity of the agents.  Second is aggregation, some way to bring the information together. And the third is incenti

ves,  which is rewards for being right and penalties for being wrong. So you might think about, I mean,  these things apply, the wisdom of crowds applies to the neurons in your brain, the cells in your  immune system, people walking around the city of New York, all these things. Heterogeneity,  aggregation, and incentives. Now in markets, it's pretty clear like heterogeneity means people,  different approaches to the world, different time horizons, different amounts of money. Aggregation  is exa

ctly what markets do. People say, I want to buy, I want to sell. And it brings it together.  And that price is a reflection of that aggregation of information. And then incentives are, if  you're good at it, you make money. And if you're bad at it, you lose money. So the people with  more money, the smarter people tend to survive and the not as smart people tend not to survive. So that wisdom of crowds to me is really powerful. It's a way of thinking about broader concept  of complex adaptive sy

stems. So again, this is a really useful, when you talk about going back  to writing, you say, okay, we want to understand this big thing called market efficiency. There are  different theories, but this is one that really, I explained it to you, it makes sense. Now,  last night you mentioned we started class, and what we do every year is this thing with  a jelly bean jar. So we have a jelly bean jar, a bunch of beans in it, and we just hand it around  to the student, say, guess how many beans i

n their jar? And last night's results is the average  student, if I just pick someone at random, was off by 50%, five zero. The crowd together  was off about, we did two versions of it, one off by 14% and the second off by 6%. So we can get a much tighter fit. And by the way, there's some mathematics as to why that works. So  now as a writer, as a communicator, you say, okay, here's a cool way to think about markets, and here  are the conditions. And by the way, the conditions tell us when the w

isdom of crowds flips to the  madness of crowds. And we know that both of those things exist and the real world. So now we have  a bit of a framework, and to me, that's something that's interesting to communicate to readers.  The Grossman, Stiglitz thing, this is, again, we're getting into the weeds a little bit but- I actually would love for you to very briefly explain the paper because as you were giving that  answer, I think I realized something about writing that we can get into, which will

be some very  tactical advice. So explain the paper briefly, and then I think we're going to end  up somewhere really interesting. And it's important to set the timeframe. So  this was published in 1980, which means it was written in the late 1970s. 1970s is probably peak  enthusiasm for the efficient market hypothesis with this idea that information coming in is  expressed efficiently in prices. And so there's no, don't try, don't even bother trying to do  this. So gross signals come along and

they say, this can't really be right, because there's a cost  of gathering information and reflected in prices. And you could think about this as a bunch of  investors all over the world scouring and research and running models and so forth trying to get  an edge. They say, well, there's a cost there has to be a requisite benefit. Now, you may  argue that cost and benefit offset one another, but there always has to be a benefit  to induce people to go off and assume. So they said the paper's cal

led, On The  Impossibility of Informationally Efficient Markets. Why? Because as long as there  is a cost, there has to be some sort of [inaudible 00:19:29], that's an inefficiency in  the market that someone's going to be able to be compensated for their efforts. Now, for the rest  of us as normal people, if these people go, they find something a little nugget of information,  they buy or sell, they make a little excess return, that's fine. But in the wake of that,  they leave an efficient pric

e. So you and I, we buy an index fund or whatever, we are going  to benefit from this work, this basic framework. Well, the way that this ties so deeply into  writing is I can't tell you how many people I speak with who say, "Either I have nothing to  share or everything that's worthy of saying has already been said." So David, there's nothing  to write about. I would argue that that very paper proves that wrong, that in the same way that  there's a cost to gathering, you can do the same thing.

You can go out and you can be the person  who gathers. And it's impossible for there to be a perfectly efficient market for information  that's out there. And now, if you layer on a personal story, oh my goodness, you can add so  much. And I think that if you take that idea and you actually apply it into writing, it's very  liberating. Because it effectively proves that if you do the work of gathering domain expertise  in a field, you're going to find things to say. And I'm sure you see it over

and over again  in your work that you've been doing this for decades now and you still find new things to say  that you hadn't seen before. And I would bet that Bezos says, "Your margin is my opportunity."  I always say, your ignorance is my opportunity as a writer. And as you learn more and more, you  realize that the markets for information aren't efficient at all. There's so much BS out there,  there's so many open holes of things that no one's ever written about. I'm amazed at how many  biog

raphies need to be written that haven't been written before. And the work to do then is to  find an area of the world where you're curious, where then you can go become a domain expert.  And as you do, I've still never seen somebody do that and not come back to me and say, oh  my goodness, there's so many things that I see that no one has shared before that  I am so passionate about writing about. I mean, I love that, number one. And the other  thing is, look, the world always changes. And as a

consequence, there are always nooks and  crannies to be explored as a consequence. One of the recent, our research reports we worked  on is on the concept of increasing returns. So in economics, you're taught like decreasing  returns, if you have high returns on capital, competition will come in and drive it down. And  this idea of increasing returns is marginal dollar generates more profits. Increasing returns, first  described by Adam Smith and Wealth of Nations in 1776. You remember the pin f

actory idea? Yeap. It's specialization of labor. So Adam Smith had  this in 1776. Fast-forward, Alfred Marshall, John Stewart Mill, David Ricardo, all these  classic economists or political economists talked about this over the centuries. There have  been, I think three or four Nobel Prizes given on work on increasing returns in terms of modern  applications of this. So we talk about these five different areas of increasing returns and how  they're relevant, but in each of these areas, there's s

omething new and how the world has  changed. One specific example, Paul Romer won the Nobel Prize for this in 2018, is the advent  of how information and ideas have become more important in driving economic activity. So very  much to your point when you think about writing, and part of what I'm doing here is just a  synthesis of something. But exactly makes your point, which is these ideas have been around for a  very long time, but they continue to be developed in an interesting way, and their

relevance  is greater, I think, or would argue because the world has changed. And that's super cool. Last thing I'll mention, Paul Krugman is he's a pretty famous now opinion writer for the New York  Times, but he's a Nobel Prize winner in economics, and his area of expertise was international  trade. And he's a graduate student in the late 1970s. He goes to a colleague and the guy's  like, "Ah, what you working on?" He's like, "Oh, international trade." And he's like, "Dude, that's  done. We fi

gured all that stuff out." He's like, "No, I don't really think so." He actually  took a couple ideas, he called them gadgets and reorganized it, observed how the world was  working and applied these frameworks and came up with some fascinating insights about international  trade and the concept of increasing returns. Super cool, that's a perfect example where  someone literally said, this topic is done exactly your point, everyone's done it. And this  guy not only revived, it, added huge amount

s of incremental intellectual capital and won the  Nobel Prize for it. So to your point, I mean, I completely agree with that, and it's not just,  there are obviously many ideas that are out there, but it's how those ideas are applied to the world  as it changes. And that's also very important. Let me ask just a super basic Joe man off the  street question. I'll even do an accent for it. Michael, what is it that you really  do for a living? Why do people hire you? It's a good question. I always

worry about that- I know that you have your papers, I know you've worked at all these big companies, but  why is it that people hire you and how do you think about your job and your career? Yeah, I mean, I think I'll just sort of try to describe a little bit of what I do and then  how I think about it. So in theory, it's really three parts to what I do. One is to work with  investors on the investment process. Obviously the firm where I am now, the idea is to make our own  folks as effective as

they can in their investment process. So it's a lot of internal communication.  It's sometimes formal conversations, but a lot of it's more informal type of stuff. The second thing  is research, and that's where the writing comes into play, obviously the most. So the research is,  can we write about things that are important and relevant to investors, not just our own team,  but also we share this with the world? Broadly speaking, we could talk maybe about the buckets.  And then the third would

be external stuff. Are there conferences that are useful to talk to  or clients or what have you? When I think about my own self, I always just think about, okay,  what makes me happiest? What makes me I think, most effective is this constant flow of input,  which is basically learning and then output, which is basically teaching our communication.  So output would include teaching a course, giving a talk, but very, very big part of  that is writing. So it's input, output. And by the way, if I'm

doing a lot of output,  not input, I feel out of balance. If I'm doing a lot of input and I'm not outputting, so I'm not  synthesizing for myself, I feel a lot of balance. So effectively it is essentially teaching.  It is the teachings from what it distills down to. So I think that would be the value. And the other thing I would just say is you think about your own life and you think  about the teachers who inspired you, the teachers who you thought were great, they're  almost all to an individ

ual, great learners. And so learning is, I think a prerequisite  to teaching. Learning is a prerequisite to writing. This is just so important. So when  people say, I need something to say, the answer is because you've learned something cool and  you think other people should know about that, you want to share it with the world. Tell me about this guy, Lawrence Gonzalez. You say he is got this old school  sensibility about him. So let's start there. Well, I first met Lawrence in probably 2005, 

2006. He wrote a book called Deep Survival, which I would highly recommend to people.  The subtitle, which kind of gives away the whole theme is who lives, who dies, and why? So  this is people that get themselves into extreme situations for good reasons or bad reasons and  then who survives this? So I wrote a book in 2009 called 2010, 2009 called Think Twice. And  it's about exactly what the title says, when you are faced with certain types of situations, your  mind's going to want to think abo

ut it one way, but sometimes you should pause and try to  think about a different way, think twice. So I write the book, it's relatively short, and I  think many authors do this. I send it to friends and say, give it a read and let me know what  you think. And most people send it back and go, "Oh yeah, it was great. It was awesome. Page 57,  I'm not sure that you got this wrong. You spelled this guy's name wrong on page 92, whatever."  But they're basically like Lawrence emails me back and he go

es, "What kind of treatment  would you like me to give this?" I'm like, "What do you mean by that?" He goes, "Well, I'd  like to line edit this for you." So I'm like, knock yourself out. So a few weeks later, it  shows up in my inbox and I have a deadline to submit it back to the publisher. And I'm  thinking, usually I go through edits, not that hard. I think I spent literally a week going  through his edits of a relatively short book. And the reason they were so powerful was not  only was he co

rrecting things that should have been corrected, but he was teaching me  about writing along the way. And he's like, "Here's a mistake you keep making. Here's  something you should be doing. Here's how I would recommend you treat this." And I was like,  revelation after revelation. You're like, oh, man, wait what? Why was I doing this way? So for me,  so those got reflected in the final version, but I think it was just the reverberations  were vastly greater than that because it spilled into eve

rything I did subsequent to that. So by the way, I had him formally, I had him hired as the editor for the Success Equation, the next  book after that, for the same types of reasons. And the other thing that's fun for me about a  guy like Lawrence is, he knows nothing about finance. I shouldn't say nothing, but he's not a  finance professional, which is perfect. Because going back to your point, I want someone to say  if it's clearly written and concrete and useful, it should be accessible to an

ybody, I don't have  to be a finance professional. And so it's also very beneficial. So he's like, why are you using  this technical term when a simpler term would do the same thing and get the job done? So I'm like,  those are the kinds of things. So Lawrence is great, and I talk to him quite frequently. The other thing I like about him, he mentioned this, he does have a little bit  of the old school. By the way, he teaches, he's taught historically writing at Northwestern,  which is one of the

great journalism schools. And he's edited and published, and he's written across  all different genres and so forth. But he's a little bit old school, and I kind of like that.  So I'll give you one example. So I write Think Twice, and I use the word error and mistake  interchangeably. And by the way, luck, fortune, chance. But go back to an error and mistake. And  he's like, "Do you know the difference between an error and a mistake?" I'm like, "I just wrote  a whole book about this and I have

no idea." And so he'll go into etymology here, where do these  words come from and what do they really mean? And do you mean error versus mistake? And by the  way, an error is typically when you do something wrong, when you should have known to do it the  right way. And a mistake is you just did something wrong, which you may not have had a reason to  do it the proper way. So anyway, it's kind of a fascinating thing. So he's like, "You're dealing  with errors or mistakes." So I'm like, okay, I s

hould just be more mindful. I should be more  mindful of the words that I'm using. I should be more mindful of where these things came from. And  I'll just say, by the way, the other thing I was say about in terms of writing for me personally  is, I'm just a huge of trying to understand the intellectual evolution of ideas. Because if you're  writing about something today, it's very nice to know where it came from, why we are where we are  today, and then where it might go into the future. It's l

ike people sometimes dismiss that. It's funny, Columbia Business School, you mentioned Ben Graham, he's obviously  very famous, but there are guys like this guy named John Burr Williams wrote a book about  investing in the 1930s, very, very profound book, very important contribution. Students don't  know his name, never heard of him. So I'm like to really understand where you are today  in a particular domain, it could be any kind of domain. I find it super helpful to understand the  history. So

that's a little bit, that sensibility is also a sensibility that Lawrence would share. You talk about the evolution of ideas. That's how I feel with the evolution of words. And first of  all, I don't know if this book exists, if it does, I would like somebody to email me what the best  book is on this topic. But I would love to see a book where every chapter is about the evolution  of a word. So I'll throw out two chapters, if I were to get started on this book, and the  first would be the word

innovation. So early on, we think of innovation now as an unequivocally  positive word. It actually used to mean exactly its opposite, that innovation was a bad thing. Why  would innovation be a bad thing? 12, 13th, 14th century. Because innovation meant going against  the nature of the world which was created by God. So to innovate would actually be an ungodly,  almost profane way of thinking. And obviously we've had a huge shift maybe in the 17th,  18th century is a bit more of a neutral term

. And so you can see, okay, why is it that we've  gone from such a negative connotation to such a positive connotation? Another word is the word  inspire, inspire. Okay, so what does inspire mean? In spirit, in spirit. Okay, well, the same spirit  in Hebrew, ruach, wind, then Yahweh, Yahweh, when you say Yahweh, which is the Hebrew word for God,  it's breathing. Yah in, weh. Right the, Yahweh is breath. And that the spirit is always aligned  with the breath. So it's your in spirit and you're alm

ost inhaling and exhaling. And you can find so  much by doing X-ray vision on a word or an idea. And this is just one of the places that I love  to look for. If I'm going on GPT and I just am trying to find an idea, I'll follow the etymology  of a word, and it always hits. It always hits. I am very much in that same, I love that same  vibe, which is going back and understanding where things come from. I'll just mention as a complete  side note, I was a government major in college, an economics m

inor, but two of my favorite courses  were Hebrew scriptures and power and politics in the biblical tradition. Believe it or not, which  were taught by a Jesuit. And so we learned about a lot of these ancient scriptures. And by the  way, what was fascinating is that you learn about what scriptures are the ones that are passed  down or read today. And you also learned about other writings that were contemporary,  that were passed over. So we actually, and they still exist, but they're not conside

red  to be part of a canon. So what were those people writing about? Why were they writing? Why did  they come up with these stories? What were they trying to address? Completely fascinating.  Anyway, so that's a side completely side story. I spend a lot of time looking now at ancient  Greek. Every day I'll look up something, and right now it's probably my biggest  source of paradigm shifting ideas in my life. Look, when I think about trying to be an effective  writer, so much of it is about rea

ding and knowing what you like to read, knowing what's effective as  a reader, reading other authors and what works and what doesn't work for you. And by the way, so I  love to do those, understand the history and read people who are going to do that. But so much of  what I do and how my sensibility is really framed in a large degree by what I like to read and what  kinds of things resonate and click with me. The other thing that's interesting I'll mention  is that observation is, there are peop

le who are deemed to be very great writers who I don't  connect with. The example that comes to mind is Stephen J. Gould, who's a very famous biologist  and very famous essayist and celebrated, I think in those ways. Every time I written and I'm like,  okay, I'm sure it's just I was with and last time- This time would be different. This time I get a cup of coffee, I'm ready to go get into it. And I'm like, it just  doesn't do it. And now that's idiosyncratic. I'm sure by definition, many, many o

ther people,  a lot of success and joy in reading that. So it's a funny thing. So what kind of writers are  the ones I click with? What kind of writers do I not click with? And of course, I'm going to  naturally try to, all of us are amalgamations of different styles. I'm going to try to  do more of that stuff that works for me. Sure. Tell me about your research process. And  I want to hear about one thing in particular. The number one thing I struggle with research  is that I begin to use it as

a justification for procrastination, where I'll say, oh, I'm just  researching. I'm just researching. And even now, I still haven't found a way to almost research in  a way that I have integrity with myself because I get down rabbit holes. The inefficiency of  research is both a feature and a bug. And when I'm on a deadline and life is busy and you  have five kids. So when life is busy, it's hard for me to justify it, but I know that there's  something there that you must have figured out. Yeah

, I wish when you say research, basically  if you follow the thread of what I tend to write about or our team tends to write about, it's  usually stuff that I feel like I need to know more about than I do. So you could use this rabbit  hole. It's usually some sort of rabbit hole. And I do try to confine it to that particular topic.  So if you go back and read what we've done, they're usually things that are very, they're sort  of projects that have almost like a beginning and an ending and a sto

ry that comes out of it. So  that for me tends to be not a big problem. Now, sometimes we'll do work and there'll be a  bunch of loose ends that haven't been tied up, which I just will take note of, and those end  up potentially becoming new projects. There's a funny story about Think Twice is that, there is  a chapter in Think Twice about luck and skill. And I thought I was really, really fond of this  chapter. So I made a chapter two and my editor reads the book from the publisher, and she is 

like, "Skill Luck chapter, it's fine. I don't think you should cut it, but I don't think you  want it to be Chapter two. Move it to the back of the book." So it ends up being the last chapter.  So the book goes out into the world, and I start getting calls from people and emails from people,  and they're like, "Oh, this book really liked the book, blah, blah." But man, that luck and skill  stuff, that was really cool. You should talk about that more. So I'm like, I knew it was important. So the

success equation ends up being a spinoff of that chapter, acknowledging that I didn't do  the topic justice, that there was a lot more that could be done. And that's sort of a funny, so  that's an example. So I did some research to do the original chapter, but there were just lots of  loose ends, and it turns out tying up those loose ends, and by the way, even the succession had  lots of, but tying up those loose ends itself becomes another book, which is interesting. Well, we see this a lot in

how people think about the notion of progress in society where  they'll say, oh, we've hit some sort of dead end. But the thing I find time and again, is  that answering a question in depth opens up new questions. And my favorite description of  this comes from Nassim Taleb. He says that, "All my books were born out of the ribs of my  previous book." So he's always following this same core idea of risk and how we think about risk  wrong. But he starts with Fooled by Randomness, which then leads

to the Black Swan, which then  leads to Antifragile, which then leads to, I think Skin in the Game is his fourth one. And everyone,  it's following that same thread, but you're eventually finding new things. And he writes  a book, say every five years. And he's like, "That's about how long it takes me to explore  the new question, write it out and publish it." And I'll say, by the way, Fooled by Randomness,  if you said, what is the genesis of the success, ultimately the success equation, it wa

s  two books. One was Fooled by Randomness, where that came out in 2001. And I read it and  I was like, absolutely makes sense. I mean, I was sort of aware of it, but brought the  point home that life has gotten much more random so we thought. But I was left a little  bit wanting in the sense that I didn't know how to figure it out, how much randomness is there?  And then in Moneyball in 2003, which influenced a lot of people, but Moneyball was almost like the  opposite story, which is we can us

e numbers and analysis to find skill and maybe find skill where  people are not looking for it. So I was like, okay, here's the thing on luck, here's the thing. Can we bring these two ideas together and create a framework to allow us to understand the relative  contributions of these two things, luck and skill, which is super cool. So that ended up being, and  of course people have written about, I mentioned Stephen J. Gould, who I didn't like reading, but  the Paradox of Skill, which is the nam

e I gave it, but that's Stephen J. Gould's idea. I got  that from reading his book, full House, in the book. I give him full attribution. So  I'm not pretending like I came up with it, but that was Stephen Jay Gould's idea, so I read  that from him. So there are examples of pulling things from different fields to try to come up  with something that can be useful for folks. So Michael, so I'm a writer. I come to you and I  say, "Hey, I'm really trying to build a career, and I want to be excellent

at what I do in my  writing." You've worked in investing for so many years with people who are always  on the search to find their edge. How do I think about finding my edge as a writer  based on what you've learned as an investor? To me, there are two key aspects. One is to  do work that is interesting to whether it's research or have an observation or an insight  that's interesting. And look, it is true that a lot of things have been said before, but it is  also true that there are a lot of i

nteresting ways to apply ideas. So having something interesting  to say is the prerequisite for all this stuff. And then the second is, trying to communicate it  in an effective fashion, so write it well. And there are plenty of people that have great ideas  that can't spit it out. There are people that have great ideas, that have the curse of knowledge,  that do a poor job, but try to write it well. And what I say, everyone comes to me and  says, "Oh, I'd like to write a book." The first thing

I say to him is, before you go too  far, you should get an editor. Because an editor, a good editor, is worth his or her weight in gold  from my point of view. And that is everything from doing the sort of nuts and bolts of the editing,  but also make sure the structure makes sense, maybe someone who's not fully initiated with  your industry so they can ask questions, making sure that you're addressing naive  questions. So to me, those would be two things, is have a good idea, and then make sure

that  you're structured to communicate it effectively. Tell me about your process for outlining.  You do it very deliberately. I am a little bit less of a planner. For me, the way that  I write is, I generally find some sort of one-liner or some story at the beginning  that encapsulates what I'm trying to say, and then I make sure that everything I'm saying  sort of pivots around that core idea and orbits around it. And then so long as things orbit  around it, then I can always use that core id

ea as a razor for when I'm in the editing  process. If it relates to that one sentence, one paragraph, then I keep it. And if it doesn't,  I cut it. But you write a little differently with outline. So what does that look like for you? Yeah, I do try to think about. And I love this idea of the key idea, the one-liner is the razor.  I do like that idea a lot, but usually it's like, here's something we're trying to convey.  Here's what our, and usually by the way, it's bubbling up from research. So

here's what  our research finding is, and then we're going to go through this and a lot of what we do is  fairly linear in terms of what we're doing, explaining things. So yeah, I try to outline and  by the way, that's the thing is, outlining also forces you to think about, and this is when you  say, what do I stay up at night thinking about in the middle of the night? It's almost always  the flow of how things work. So making sure that the flow makes sense, that we're building on  something, t

hat we're reinforcing the theme. Sometimes, often there are things I don't know  how to communicate them. So that's the kind of stuff that sort of bangs around in my head until  I sort of figure that out. But I do like to work out of outlines because usually I'm like, this is  encapsulated in this story, and as a consequence, I want to be able to touch on each of these things  effectively. But the thing is, in that process, usually in the outline is where I usually do  most of my killing, turns

out. That I'll say, this is an idea I think is really interesting.  I was actually thinking about this even today that I was coming in to New York. I was like,  here's this thing that's kind of interesting, and this thing we're working on now. I'm like,  but it just doesn't feel like it's not in the right spot here, so we're going to kill it.  So I'm just going to go back and exit out. So if there's a good answer to that, I think  everybody probably has their own little method. And walk me throu

gh, how is an outline different  for a paper that you would write versus a book? How are those the same and different? Well, I think that they're very similar in the sense that the chapters would be basically  sub that I would outline the chapters. Basically. I'm actually thinking about doing a book now. And  once again, the key is what do I have to say? And how to do all that kind of stuff. And so I'm  sort of thinking about that, literally that process now. And part of it is also, it is workin

g  on flow. So in other words, as one chapter goes to the next chapter, making sure that there's some  reason for the reader to go to the next chapter and almost like a lead into the next chapter. So  yeah, to me, those are just sub components. To build up to the bigger component of a book At the Santa Fe Institute, you literally got to spend time with Cormac McCarthy,  who has to be one of the best American novelists of the 20th century. What  did you learn from him about writing? That he's a l

ot better at it than me. I balk at  the idea that I am a writer and just hanging out with somebody like Cormack for 10 minutes  underscores why I can't be even put in the same sentence. But a couple observations about  him just in general is, first of all, well, he was brilliant. He was brilliant and was read and  knew about a staggering array of topics. And so he would go to a lot of the scientific meetings and  he would hang out with a lot of scientists talking about science. And yet when you

read the books, he  would write, of course, whether that permeated or not is another question. He was also an incredible  reader. And that's another thing that I took away from all this is, it's very difficult to  separate, to be a great writer, it seems to me you have to be a great reader and  you have to be probably a pretty prolific reader. And he certainly was all those things. But I think that, and he didn't like to talk about, at least to me, maybe talk about it with  others. He didn't lik

e to talk much about his writing process. But I think that my sense very  much was, it was almost like, to some degree, he worked very hard at it in the craft, but it was  almost like a gift for him. And it was almost like his reason to be his art of his writing. So that's  just my sense of it. And so it's interesting, you think about people who are really, really elite  at what they do, Tom Brady or Cormac McCarthy, it's almost what they do is the thing. And  it's very difficult to even deal wi

th other things around that when you have that much  ability and skill and passion and devotion. Well, you had mentioned that it was almost  like he was channeling the divine or something. That would be my sense is that we had a  conversation about this one time, and he sort of said, "The ideas are coming, and I'm just  basically typing." So obviously he actually wrote one nonfiction essay a few years ago, and it  was talking about this sort of subconscious, how our minds work. So much of what w

e do is  happening behind the scenes, sleep is a good area, an important area for all that kind of stuff. And  I think he wrote that essay in part reflecting his own process that he was, obviously these things  were constantly working in his mind. So when he sat down to the typewriter, the things flowed  again. There was a lot going on, but the things flowed, and it's almost like he was dictating  what was happening in his mind, which is, it's hard. Certainly it's nothing I can relate to  person

ally. And I also think that writing fiction is just a completely different, wholly different  game than writing nonfiction. So writing fiction for me is beyond what I could even think about. Well, he wrote the mission statement for Santa Fe Institute. That mission statement is awesome. It's so good. It's so good. It's so good. It's like, oh. It's so good. And there is a video of him reading it, which is even better. Oh, really? Oh yeah, it's worth it. I don't know if we have  show notes, but we

should put it on there. But he does go through it because he basically says,  "They gave me this mission statement and I crumpled it up and threw it in the car trash can  and started anew." And he typed it out and he say, he reads it, and he is got, there's one line  in there, I'm paraphrasing, but something like, "Every now and then someone shows up who's  crazy, and that makes us really happy." So this idea that we're going to be very  indulgent of sort of stuff that's out there a little bit,

which I love. It's great. Have you had moments in your career where you wrote something and you looked at it and you said,  how did I write that? Or has it always felt like this very rational, logical, aware process? It's funny you say that because sometimes I go back and reread stuff I wrote and I'm  like, "Oh, I didn't remember that." But no, not so much. But I will say there are a couple.  What I would say is there were some reports to me that were extraordinarily difficult and I  felt that t

hey were big. It was a lot to do. One was a piece we called, I called it Shift Happened  inspired by. But the idea is how do we understand markets and thinking about markets as complex  systems? And the reason that was difficult is because what I was attempting to do is to create  a bridge between what is classic theory and this notion of complex systems or wisdom of crowds. So in writing, when you're writing, you have to bring a reader along. And by the way, that's what  I try to do with my stu

dents is bring them along. So I want you to start on familiar territory, what  you've been taught in school, and then I'm going to move to thinking about this and introduce  why thinking about markets as complex systems gives you all the benefits of what you knew  on your firm foundation, but also adds things that are relevant to the world. So that was one. I want to just pause you there because I think that is a very good formula for thinking  about writing. Which is you're going to write a pie

ce that has two sections. The first  section is something that you're familiar with, and now you're on the rock climbing wall and you  have your grip, your feet are in a good place, you know this landscape well, and you can  write about it. Well, that's going to be your confidence and you're going to write that  out. You're going to explain it well, and then what you're going to do is you're going to take  one leap. And it's sort of like when you're rock climbing and you take your arm, you're li

ke, ah.  And you try to get that next area and that works well when you're writing. It's just, I know this  now from this, I'm going to go on to something else. It's a very good formula for people who  are struggling to write and trying to get going. So I love that. The second report, I'll say that's  related to that was called, it's called Measuring the Moat. And ended up being quite, it's out there  a fair bit, and I wrote that more than 20 years ago, but that was really a job, and a lot of wh

at  I do is synthesis, but that was one of the hardest pieces of synthesis that I ever did. So I've been  reading all this stuff on strategy, so reading Michael Porter and Clay Christensen and all these  other folks. But I was like, this is not really, and I've been writing microeconomics, but it  really hadn't been brought together in a framework that you could go through and have a checklist. And so I just sat down and just started going through this material. And again, how do  I organize thi

s in such a way that I can allow the reader to go through this from lay  of the land, big picture to industry issues, to firm specific issues, to guide them through  this with frameworks to allow them to come to a sensible conclusion. So now it's like seems, now I  go through this and I teach it, and it seems like, oh, this is obvious easy. But putting that  all synthesizing that was extraordinarily for me at least, very, very difficult. In the philosophical tradition. There's a long lineage of

people who study other philosophers for  decades at times. And they study this philosopher, maybe they'll do a second one and then a third  one. And only later in their career do they begin to make some sort of original contribution.  And in your world of business analysis, I think there are some great synopsis that I've  seen. For example, I've never read Michael Porter, but there's a great book called Understanding  Michael Porter. And I think that there's an opportunity for people who want to

do the kind of  work that you've done and also get their name out there to take somebody like a Clayton Christensen  or the guy who wrote Seven Powers at Stanford or Michael Porter for example. Here's a simple one.  How would you combine Brian Arthur's paper that he wrote out of the Santa Fe Institute in the  nineties around accumulating advantages? How would you combine that with Michael Porter? And you just synthesize those two ideas. Take one idea here, one idea there, and you say, where  do

they agree? Where do they disagree? Now what does that mean? And I say all this because in your  sphere, there is so much opportunity and financial upside for people who can do this well. And  rather than trying to make original contributions, what I'm hearing from you is just live in the  world of synthesis. And if you live in that world of synthesis and you read widely enough and  take notes well enough and put stuff out there, good things happen and good things happen  without you having thi

s divine revelation that comes from zero to one. Where did that come  from? It really can be a systematic process of getting your name out there as a writer. 100%. And the other thing about markets, there are two aspects of our markets. One is they  constantly change. So the nature of how companies invest, the businesses they're in, all that stuff  is very different today than say a century ago. The second is there tend to be cycles, the  same thing, the same movie plays, different casts of char

acters and so forth, but the same  movies play. So again, when you think about this idea of synthesis, I'll give you one example  that I think is a fascinating one. And again, you can go, I mean got the inspiration from this  was actually from neurobiology of all things, but this is fascinating. So it turns out the number  of neurons in your brain doesn't change that much throughout your life. It's about 85 billion. But  what happens is the number of synaptic connections changes wildly. So from

the time you're born  to the time you're about three years old, there's this huge upswing, and then there's this  huge pruning process. There's another little bump, and then as an adult, it levels off. Okay, so you're going on with this. If you meet a 3-year-old, they're kind of buzzing  with activity. They're very open to the world, but they're inefficient in a sense. And so  the pruning is we're going to get rid of those synaptic connections that are not used.  But it turns out that when you s

tudy this, this is one of the most efficient ways to  learn about an environment. Try stuff out, use the stuff that works, kill the stuff that  doesn't work. So I'm reading this, I'm like, oh, that's interesting. And then I'm like, industry  development. Turns out there's this famous work on this by Steven Klepper, and it's the exact same  pattern. Industry development follows the same pattern. Huge upswing number of competitors gets  to an apex, and then it comes back down again. In retrospect,

looks incredibly wasteful. Why were  we shipping 50 pound bags of dog food in the .com era or whatever? But it turns out what they're  doing is searching the space. So this pattern is played out over and over and over. So again, that  synthesis says, "Oh, if I have this framework, it allows me to understand how and why  this is happening, and we can see the repercussions from historical precedent and  how that might apply to what we're facing today." Super cool. And so those are the kinds  of t

hings that are recurring themes for sure. I think back to my own life, there were many years  where I was basically a speed reader. I would read this and that, I would read as many books as I  possibly could. I was just voracious my whole, basically for five years, every day was  basically about how much information can I consume? And I read so many things that I didn't  have interest in, but now I read very differently. Now I'm very careful. I find something that  I'm going to read and I go sup

er deep. I read around things. So if I find a book I like, I'll  read three books that inspired that author that I see them referencing a lot in the footnotes  and the hyperlinks or whatever. But early on, it was that voracious reading. And you know what,  it was the same thing with writing where now that I've been writing for seriously for almost  a decade, I want to just write great pieces. I want to write the best thing that I can write,  and I want to do the work, do the thinking. I want to

be dreaming about a piece for weeks, months, at  a time before I ship something. And then I want to ship it and I want to be really proud of it, and  I want that piece to be read for many years into the future. But I wrote 50 articles in 50 days  at a time where I would wake up and I'd just go, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And it's that  same pruning process that you're talking. So I wanted to, I should ask you this, because  I mentioned this piece, we're working on an increasing returns, and o

ne of the key ideas  is learning by doing. And it turns out you get better at something by learning, by doing,  and writing to me feels very much that way, which is, there's no substitute for hard work  and just basically getting after it. And it doesn't mean everything you're going to produce  is going to be good, but this idea of doing it. And yet the other thing that would be helpful  is to get good feedback. So having, again, someone who's trusted, whether it's an editor  to work with you. B

ut like you said, everyone's going to have their own way, their own path, and  so there's no substitute for getting after it. Yeah. My favorite little story is that the  Beatles started off as a cover band. So even The Beatles. Even The Beatles, they were covering  other artists before they made their own albums. No, over the last year, I'm embarrassed to say  this, I hadn't read it before, but I read Stephen King's book on writing. Have you read that book?  I mean, actually have it. Yeah. So I'

ve actually read, here's my embarrassing admission is I not  write any Stephen King novels, although I know he is a great writer. And I actually talk about  Richard Bachman, his pseudonym in one of my other books. But he wrote a book called On Writing,  and it's always, the guy's a very talented guy, but two things that came really hit me. One is,  he's an incredible reader. So he does read a lot and reads across lots of different things.  But second is that guy's a hardworking dude. He's a hard

working dude, and it's just like he's  banging it out. So even Stephen King people should realize it's hard work. Well, it's like anything,  there was a big poker phase, everyone thinking, "I want to be a professional poker." Being a  professional poker player is a grind, right? It's hard work. So being a great writer is hard work,  and there's no substitute for just banging it out. Are you a show up every day kind of guy  or write for a long time kind of guy? No, it is really, it is grinding it

out. But  I will say that writing for me to be effective at it, it does require blocks of time. So I  can't, even, when I was writing my first book, which I coauthored, I had this sort of illusion  that I could heck it out on a train or on a plane ride or like that, no, it just doesn't work so  I really need to be in the zone. I was actually talking about some folks earlier today. I used to  also from time to time, have music on. I now do none of that. So complete silence, by the way when  I wo

rk. So that's the other interesting aspect. And what is the nature of your editing  process? What do you feel like is the usual difference between draft two  to draft four or five? What are the big themes in terms of how your writing evolves? Yeah, I mean, by the way, this is something where we don't really have, and I work with a guy named  Dan Callahan. Dan's amazing. He's a great partner, and between the two of us, we essentially edit  what we do. And that's not an ideal solution, by the way.

It'd be great to have an external  editor. So I'll talk about books in a minute. But the answer is we just iterate over and  over. We don't usually cut tons of stuff out, but we are almost always spending a lot of  time on polishing. Now, you mentioned before, often when I'll read an older piece, I'm  like, oh, I wish I'd said this differently, or this word would've been better than that  word. I mean, there's always going to be that kind of stuff. So nothing's ever perfect for  sure. By the wa

y, it was interesting. So I said one at a time, I asked Cormack, when  do you know when you're done? And he says, "When I pull the manuscript out of the drawer,  and I don't want to change a single word." It's a high bar. High bar. I was like, I would never have written my first paragraph of my whole  life if that were true. But that's the right, he's working on a different level. So and a lot  of it is words, it's making sure that we're doing things like the structure of everything makes  sense

, the flow that makes sense. Obviously we're checking for all the analysis that makes sense. So  things will evolve a bit from beginning. Now when I'm writing books, it's so much different because  we have external editors, and so we have cut out big chunks of things before. Now I tend to try to  be very mindful of if we're going to work for a shoot for a certain word limit. I'm not a guy that  writes 150,000 words for a 50,000 word book and cuts two thirds of it. So I try to be a little  bit mo

re measured in that way. But editing is obviously really important. So it is always good.  We always try to let things sort of sit around for a while and come back to it after some time  to make sure that we're fresh eyes and energy. One of the things I've really been enjoying  working on, I've needed to work on this in my own writing, is injecting my own personality  into later drafts. I find that at first, my mental horsepower needs to be to the structure, getting  the ideas down, making sure

it's logical and that it flows well. But generally what I find is a  few things. When I work with my editor, he says, "I need more of you in the piece. I need more  of you." And I actually think this is becoming more and more important now with AI that the way  to counter AI is to bring more of your humanity, more of your personality, that people want  to be with the reader, they want to feel like they're with you. David Foster Wallace  always said that literature was almost this cure for loneli

ness. I love it when you're with  somebody else and you're crawling through their mind like a McDonald's playhouse or something. And what I try to do first is I try to say, what are the personal stories that I can tell  the personal anecdotes? And then just trying to play around. And Amor Tolls was sitting in the  same chair that you're sitting in now yesterday, and this is what he said, that once he can get  the left brain analytical writing done, that then opens up the opportunity for him to p

lay around  with the right brain stuff. But it's only once the structure and the foundation is there that he  can do that. And I feel very much the same way. Give me an example. What  would [inaudible 01:04:04]? Okay, so I just wrote a piece about, I became  a Christian last year, and I was talking about how I'd never read a book. I had learned to read  the Bible. My editor was like, "David, you have to give me an example that's going to allow me to  see where you were." He's like, "I hear you,

but I don't feel you." I said, "What is something?"  It was also a heavy piece, so I needed something light, I needed something that would reveal what  I was trying to say. And that expressed a sense of personality and a sense of place as well. Yeah, exactly. So I talked about how one time I even  spent two hours studying four verses, the book of John verses one through four  at a Schlotzky's in the hill country of Texas. And you can see it, and Schlotzky's is  a funny name. It's like Schlotzky'

s. There're Texas Hill country. So it evokes a sense  of place, and once I have that, all of a sudden something that seems dry begins to come  alive. But there were iterations and iterations and iterations. Just get to that sentence. And I mentioned before this idea of concrete, I think to me, that's a perfect illustration of  concrete. But I need to think more about this. I like that. Obviously, like many other people,  I try to tell stories. And so storytelling, often there's stories about som

e experience that  I had that could be helpful, but I need to think more about that because the kind of stuff we're  doing is, and by the way, some of the stuff we do is really like, here's how to do a certain  type of analysis. It's pretty boring stuff, so you're trying to bring some life to it, but  it's not hard to tell a story that's like a moving story about it. But yeah, even the success  equation, I opened a story about how I got a job, which is a completely random thing, and that  makes

it more relatable. But it's funny, because people will say to me, oh, they tell  me the stories about the trash can. You're the trashcan guy, or something like that.  So they do relate it. They remember that. It is a great story. You got the  Washington Redskins trashcan over there. It's probably because they only remember only read  the first three pages. Anyway, that might be it. Right? But that's a great example of what you're  saying. And I think a lot of people who I'd say you work with, ju

st people in the investment  finance industry. When I look at their writing, basically this is true for very, very smart  people. What I see is that they have great insights, which serves them well, but they're  almost afraid to talk about themselves. And I think that often in order for them to succeed,  they feel that they need to suppress part of who they are, which really hurts them in their  writing. So they don't talk about themselves, they write without personality, and their writing  beco

mes dry and stale. So there's just huge alpha in being able to counter that a little. That's interesting. I mean, in December we wrote a piece, and I did start with a story  about something like an experience I had gone through. So about the report was about pattern  recognition, and I tried to make it a little bit more relatable by explaining a situation where  I'd seen this happen and it didn't work out well. Matt Levine's a good example of  someone who just writes with vigor. That guy is a ce

rtifiable genius by, he's amazing.  I mean, amazing. And I was think of myself. I mean, I don't know how he does it literally. I  mean, I think I do know how he does it, but it's incredible to be that smart. And sometimes people  say, who are the people I drop what I'm doing to read what they've written? And Matt Levine is  one of the guys I really do. I stop what I'm doing the day and I'll read his newsletter. Well, Michael, thank you so much. Thanks for all your writing and The Success Equatio

n  in particular. I love that book. I love the idea of the paradox of skill. I love that  idea. Thank you so much for your writing, and thanks for coming on the show. Thank you, David. My pleasure.