 What is the most important lesson that the best-selling author William Green he himself learned from the legendary investor Charlie Munger? I recently had the honor of conducting a one and a half hour exclusive interview with William Green where he shared numerous investing insights and wisdom for living a richer, wiser, happier life. During the interview, William revealed that he had several fantastic opportunities to interview Charlie Munger in person. In fact, he was once invited to a very special Zoom breakfast mastermind together with Charlie Munger and due to the valuable interactions with Munger, William gained a lot of valuable lessons. In this interview, William Green shared with me the particular lesson that struck him the most and frankly, I was very surprised by his answer. Before I review this special interview to you, I just want to give a very special thanks once again to William Green for his generosity. During the interview, he shared many golden principles to help us not just become successful investors but also excel in various parts of our lives. To help you to better understand the depth of this interview, I have decided to break this one and a half interview into several episodes and delve into various topics each time. So if you do not want to miss out the future episodes that I'm going to roll out in this channel, make sure to hit the subscribe and like button and the notification bell right now. So to celebrate this interview, let's start off with what William learned the most from Charlie Munger, who is Warren Buffett's best friend, best partner as well as best mentor in life. After watching this interview, let me know if you are as surprised by William's biggest lesson from Munger as I am. Enjoy your learning! Now I'm also very curious to learn because recently, unfortunately, Munger passed away and I still remember the found moment that I get to fly over to Berkshire last year to witness these two great giants on the same stage together. That was like the greatest honour of my life as well. And that was also where I get to meet you for the first time and thank you so much once again for accepting my interview. I never thought of having this this honour to be able to invite you here to come and share with us. So I'm also very curious, you know, like because you've been spending so much time learning from Munger himself, what is the most memorable moment that you had with him that you learned a lot from him? Well, first of all, I want to make an important point of passing about meeting you in Omaha, which is I write in the book about the compounding of goodwill and I talk about what I call the dementia fact. Dementia is a, you know, kind of Yiddish, a Yiddish word for a good person, a likeable person. That's a very powerful advantage in life. The reason I gave you an interview today is because you're a nice person and that's such an obvious point, but it's such an incredibly powerful thing in life. If you go around the world being nice to people and working hard and being conscientious as you do, being very enthusiastic, very driven, but at the same time nice, that that is a profoundly powerful characteristic in life. And so I wanted A to give you credit for that, but B also to point out that again, this is about compounding, taking the principle of compounding and saying, what else can I compound? Why don't we just have to compound money? Why can't I compound goodwill? Why can't I be a person who's kind, who goes around the world being kind in ways that compound over many years? And it sounds ridiculous and sort of overly sentimental, but at a certain point I see that for example, my friend Guy Spear, who I helped write his book, The Educational Value Investor, everywhere you go, there's goodwill towards Guy. And, you know, he's spent so many years just being nice to people, just helping people. So I wanted to say that before I get to Charlie. So in terms of the most important, most memorable lesson with Charlie, I mean, you know, for me personally, it was him telling me that my book was one of the best investment books ever written, because that was such a powerful seal of approval from someone I admired so much that even though I talk a lot about wanting to live by an inner scorecard, as Buffett talks about, where you don't want to be defining yourself by validation from other people, I care about what other people think of me. And it matters to me. And it matters to me when people I admire think well of me. And so that had a huge impact on me. So that, I mean, I'll never forget the fact that he, you know, someone, someone I respect as much as that sort of gave me a pat on the head. And so that was important. In terms of watching him action, I was very struck when I went to see him I went to interview him before this event in California at the Daily Journal meeting, where he was not only vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, but was chairman of the board of the small publishing company Daily Journal. And so a lot of famous investors and regular people would go every year to the Daily Journal meeting to ask him questions and to listen to him or pine on his own for a couple of hours. And there was a joke that you would go in and you would sign this book that would say how many shares of the Daily Journal do you earn and everyone would write zero. Almost nobody under the Daily Journal, but they all wanted to see Munger in action. And so I got an interview with him before the Daily Journal meeting starts. Then he'd already spoken to the board of the company for more than an hour before that. Then he does my interview. Then he goes and answers questions in the audience for two hours during the annual general meeting. And then the crowd disperses and he stays on the dais and a few dozen, maybe 20, 20 or so people, these groupies from around the world kind of crowd around and start asking him more questions, including me. And so that lasted another two hours when he just keeps answering questions. And I'm just looking at this and I'm thinking he doesn't want to leave. Like here's a guy, he was 93 years old. I mean, he could barely walk. He's sort of hobbling along like this on this walking stick, like hunched over like this as he walks. And he starts eating seas candy. You know, this, and Berkshire had very famously bought seas, which, which was an amazing, yeah, that's great, which was an amazing deal for them. It was a definitive deal for them because it marked the shift towards high quality businesses instead of lousy businesses that were just incredibly cheap. And so he's eating seas candy. It's just flying everywhere, right? And there's something kind of exuberant and joyful about it. And then he starts passing it around to his disciples. So they're getting to eat it. So it's like sacrament. It's like, you know, passing out sacrament to his followers. And I just look at this and there was a moment where he said something like it was a silence and someone had an answer to ask a question for a few seconds. He said to me, like, you'll be okay. You'll be, you know, and, and you just realize he doesn't want to leave. He wants to keep dispensing wisdom to these people. And I knew that Charlie had this fearsome reputation for being gruff and brusque and sometimes rude. And there was something very moving to me about seeing this old man who'd mellowed who's a cervic edge had gone and who was just being kind and loving to his followers. And it made me think, one of the extraordinary things about Buffett and Munger is that as they got older, they continued to change. They continued to work on themselves. And that's inspiring because I look at aspects of my own behavior and I'm like, really you're still such a schmuck. I mean, you're still so irritable or so, you know, disorganized or whatever. And I look at, I look at someone like Munger continuing to change and it gives me, it gives me hope. And it, it felt to me like really an act of love towards his disciples. And I remember, you know, there's a, it sounds digressive, but I think it's an important point. So on a Vandenberg I mentioned before, you know, also made this astounding transformation of his character and his life coming from, from nothing to being very wealthy, having great relationships, having a very happy and good life. And Arnold talked to me about this. I think I'll write about it briefly in the epilogue of the book. He talked to me about this extraordinary thing that happened to him when he was about 16, where when he was 13, his father said to him, you have to support yourself now. I mean, you, you can live here, but you're, you're paying for your own food, your own clothing, everything. And so he would work, you know, he would have jobs at high school where he worked in a factory for four or five hours after school. I mean, you know, really hard work. And when he was about 16, he was saving money to buy a car so that he could go on dates with girls because he was living in Los Angeles where you need to drive. And, and, and so he gets this job selling flowers and he's such a good salesman. He's so charming that they end up giving him the best corner in like Beverly Hills, I think it was. Finally, where he's going to make some real money. And so on the day that he gets his opportunity to be in this great area, there's like this biblical rainstorm and he's just absolutely drenched. And he's like, I can't believe my bad luck. Like here I am, I'm on the street. This is finally my opportunity to make money. And like nobody's going to come by, you know, walk down the street or whatever in this torrential storm. And he's like, well, I'm here anyway. I'm soaked already. I'm just going to keep going. And this car pulls up and the window winds down and this woman says to him, how much are these flowers? And he's like, well, three for 50 cents or whatever. And, you know, five for a dollar or whatever it was. And she says, how much for all of them? And he's like, I don't understand, man. She says, no, I want to buy all of them. And so she buys all of the flowers and says, get into the car and she takes him to her home, gives him one of her husband's dry shirts, which he, the husband says, no, no, you keep it. She makes him soup, dries him off, you know, really takes care of him. And he said, that act of kindness changed my life. He said, when somebody touches your heart like that, it changes you forever. And so now in his 80s, when he does things, like give $100 to that young woman in the line in that store where he was getting his hearing aid fixed, he's literally thinking about the woman who helped him something like 67 years ago. And so that act of kindness has reverberated all of those years. And so when I look at the lives of people like Munger and Arnold Vandenberg, I'm like, what's going to endure? The thing that's going to endure is not really the fact that Munger was so rich. I mean, yeah, he was a multi-billionaire and he'll make a, you know, he'll give a lot of money to charity that's going to have a big impact. And that's wonderful. But it's really the lives that he touched. Same with Arnold. It's the lives they touched. That's what's really powerful. And so when you're trying to figure out how to have a rich and abundant life, you've got to put front and center the quality of your relationships. And so you have to start thinking, okay, am I investing in my retirement account? Yeah, am I investing in my relationships? Am I investing in my mental health? Am I investing in my peace of mind? And, you know, when you see these little moments of kindness or, I mean, I would say with Munger, the behavior with his disciples, I was like, that's love. And I didn't want to write it in the book because people would think, oh, you're so sentimental. It was love. And I, you know, I mean, when you see that, when you're touched by someone's behavior, it gets under your skin in a way that you can't explain. And this is so cloneable for us. I mean, this is, you know, it's within reach for all of us. And so when I'm looking at these truly abundant lives, the reason there was such an outpouring of affection for Munger when he died, yes, he was brilliant. He was intellectually brilliant and a voracious reader. Yes, he was rich, but it was the number of lives he touched by sharing his wisdom. That was a gift he gave us, his wisdom, like with incredible generosity of spirit. And so it's the gifts, it's the giving. There's this great paradox, right? That, you know, I mean, I had a wonderful teacher. I studied Kabbalah, which is this ancient mystical wisdom. If all of the books up here would be Kabbalistic books up on my bookshelf there, a lot of them in Aramaic and Hebrew. And I had a great teacher who used to say, the big man is the small man, and the small man is the big man. And what he meant is the small, the man who's small, who has a tiny ego, who's just giving, that is the big man. That's the person who has real power, like who can really have a huge effect on the world. And the guy who swans around with this huge ego with his big fancy car and his big fancy house, it's like, fine. But that actually is the small man. And so the thing that we connect to with Manga is that at a certain point, despite being totally beaten down physically and having been through a lot over the years, he was giving us his wisdom, he was sharing his wisdom so freely. And so that act of kindness, of overcoming his own ego, of overcoming his grumpiness and irritability and inability to suffer fools gladly, that overcoming of ego is what made him so precious. That's what touched us. And so there's a very important clue there, I think, that the more ego-filled we are and the more we take on the outer trappings of the big swaggering money manager, actually that's kind of poverty, right? To be that desperate for approval and respect and luxury and stuff. So it's the inequalities that actually make you rich. So I think of going to Arnold Vandenberg when I went into Arnold Vandenberg in Texas, he literally, he hypnotized me on the floor of his office about two days into my visit to interview him because he wanted to change the way I talk to myself internally. So he's like working on affirmations for me based on what I wanted to achieve in my life. And then he hypnotized me, playing me Vivaldi four seasons. There's nothing in it for him, except for the sheer delight of the fact that he can then see my life improving. That's a rich man, right? That's not rich just in the conventional sense. That's a truly rich person. I hope that's helpful. I hope that points us towards something that's almost more achievable. It's more within our grasp because none of us are going to be Ed Thorpe who could figure out how to trade derivatives in a way where he didn't have a losing quarter in 20 years. I mean, Ed Thorpe, there's a famous thing, the Black Scholes valuation method for derivatives that Black and Scholes won a Nobel Prize for figuring this out. Ed Thorpe figured it out before them and kept it to himself and traded on it. I mean, this guy's a genius. I'm not going to be as smart as Ed Thorpe, but there are ways in which maybe we can be wiser than Ed. I don't know. I said to Ed at one point, you know, do you believe in God? And he said, no data. And in some ways, it's a very smart answer. No data. In some ways, I'm like, no, there's nothing but data. Like you look around you and the world is a very extraordinary place. It's a very beautiful place and it's everything in some ways. If you look at it in, I'm not trying to be a proselytizer. I'm just trying to be honest. In some ways, it's like everything you see is sort of this unfolding of creation. And I think this is probably one of the things that you're getting to if you study meditation very deeply. You're not that I do or that I'm very expert in this, but you're just very deeply present watching everything unfold in the moment. And so you're awake. You're seeing it all. So you're tremendously alive. So it's as if to put it in sort of transcendent terms, it's as if you're watching God unfold. But it's like, when I see something like Manga behave that way towards his disciples, I'm like, that's transcendent behavior. That's beautiful behavior. So I'm not saying God as in a man with a beard and the clouds as my daughter would put it. It's more like this force of goodness and kindness and love and empathy and compassion. And I don't know. So in some ways, I hear Ed say that about no data. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, really clever and really rational. And in some ways, maybe that's totally blind. I don't know. Maybe that channel of being more spiritual isn't open. But at the same time, he's had amazing relationships. And he's brilliant. So I don't know. I'm rambling a bit. But I think this is very important to reorient ourselves actually to ask what a rich life is and to have a life full of those rich relationships, full of equanimity, but also where you're finding time to read, to sit, to look around, actually be awake. Not that you're running so fast trying to accumulate, that you're actually kind of almost like sleep walking through your life. I think whatever that you share with me just now, it's like reminding us to really pay forward the kindness that we have received. And you never know. The kindness that you give out actually has impacted me a lot. Thank you so much for being so kind to me and that really gave me the reason to pay forward this kindness to more people. And I think it's that love, that kindness, that go the extra mile that, like what you say, make Charlie Munger one of the most respected investors on earth. Not just about his intelligence, but his heart for everyone to become better, become wider. Frankly, I was very surprised by William Green's answer towards the biggest lesson that he learned from Charlie Munger. At first, I thought it would be along the line of self-discipline, keep learning, thinking inversion and all this. Although all these principles are important, what struck William the most is Charlie Munger's kindness and love towards his disciples, and his generosity in giving as all as compounding goodwill. And through this conversation, it reminds me to be a kinder person and in life is not just about accumulating riches, but also accumulating kindness. Of course, it's not just about my learning. I'm also very curious to know what did you learn from this episode. Comment down below and let me know your greatest key takeaway from William Green's sharing. And apart from Charlie Munger, William also interviewed countless brilliant investors. That's why one of the other questions that I asked him during the interview was, if he could just choose one principle to clone to become successful, what would that be? Again, I was very surprised by William's answer. And I don't want to reveal to you right now because next week, I will be playing that special segment so that you can also see the answer for yourself. If you want to learn from William Green and the lessons that he condensed from interviewing famous investors like Charlie Munger, Howard Marks, Sir John Templeton and more, make sure to get this book richer, wiser, happier via the link below. Even Charlie Munger said this is the best investment book that he has ever read. Lastly, you can also check out William Green's podcast over here for additional insights. Remember to join my Telegram channel too because I constantly give a lot of investment updates over there. See you in the next video. Arigato.