Vitaliks and Nelson talk about stoicism, life, wisdom, and investing with Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, and author of Soul in the Game, The Art of a Meaningful Life.
00:00:25.000He's a great writer, and I have mad respect for that.
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00:01:16.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:12.000I said, I want to have this guy on the show.
00:02:14.000And there's tons of lessons there, tons of things that I really want to talk about and explore, including stoicism, which we're going to get to later in the hour.
00:02:21.000But joining us now is the author of the book.
00:02:56.000I write these articles about investing about many fun topics, but a lot of topics are about life.
00:03:03.000And I wanted to make sure my kids read my content.
00:03:06.000So I figured the best way to do it is to package it into a book.
00:03:11.000Well, and it's just rich with wisdom and also your own personal narrative.
00:03:16.000And so again, the book is called Soul in the Game, The Art of a Meaningful Life.
00:03:19.000So let's just kind of go through some of the elements here.
00:03:21.000And then I want to dive into some particulars and specifics.
00:03:25.000Your father, so being born in Russia was obviously a big part of your life.
00:03:30.000Talk about that, being born in Russia, and then, as you put it, made in America.
00:03:34.000Yeah, so I was born in Russia and I grew up in a, not just in Russia, but in Soviet Russia.
00:03:40.000And I grew up in a town called Murmansk.
00:03:42.000And most Americans would know about Murmansk if you watched the hunt for the Red October, because that is the home for the Russian Navy base.
00:03:51.000And that's where the Red October, which is a fictional submarine, is from.
00:03:55.000So Murmansk was kind of actually an interesting place because This is so up north.
00:04:01.000If you look at Norway, you have to go to the very north, you know, to the highest tip of Norway to find Murmansk, right?
00:04:21.000The sun would come out for about 10 minutes and I would miss it because I would be in school.
00:04:26.000And when I walk back home, it's dark again.
00:04:30.000And today, so my family moved to the United States.
00:04:34.000I live in Denver, which is kind of the opposite of Murmansk because we have 300 days of sunshine.
00:04:41.000But so my family moved to the United States in 1991.
00:04:45.000Since then, now I have a wife, three kids.
00:04:49.000And I'm a kind of, I call myself a capitalistic pig because living in Russia made me appreciate, made me appreciate what we have here in the United States.
00:05:21.000Have you always been a curious person and just observing the little things and trying to connect them?
00:05:27.000I think I became a lot more curious about life and a lot more observant when I started writing.
00:05:32.000Because what happens when you start writing, you always look for stories and you look at life a little bit different because you are looking for stories.
00:05:40.000And I think writing made me a lot more observant.
00:05:44.000Number two, when you have a student of life as an attitude, when you have this attitude, you approach life differently because you never sure that your knowledge never becomes stale.
00:06:02.000You're less likely to become arrogant.
00:06:05.000And my day job as an investor, you know, like as an investor, you want to be kind of what I call thoughtfully arrogant.
00:06:13.000And let me explain what I mean by this.
00:06:16.000Whenever you buy a company or a stock, it's an act of arrogance because somebody is selling it to you, right?
00:06:24.000Or when you sell the stock, somebody's buying it from you.
00:06:26.000And so when you're doing this, you're basically saying, I know better than the person on the other side.
00:06:32.000So you need to have some arrogance as an investor.
00:06:36.000However, what I would argue, there's two types of arrogances.
00:06:40.000There's arrogance is I am, therefore, I'm no better.
00:06:45.000And then there is a second type of arrogance, which I call thoughtful arrogance.
00:06:49.000And that arrogance is basically, I've done this tremendous amount of research.
00:06:54.000I reached this conclusion, and my conclusion leads me to be, you know, to this decision.
00:07:00.000So that's what I call thoughtful arrogance.
00:07:03.000And but to write me also the kind of you combine thoughtful arrogance and being a student of life, this kind of attitude of constant curiosity or learning.
00:07:14.000And that's kind of, you know, that's who I am, hopefully.
00:07:20.000And so let's, another interesting part of the book that I have now applied like directly was the idea of how you identify with things that you're trying to resist.
00:07:32.000And so you have two portions: I don't eat desserts and I don't eat pork.
00:07:36.000Talk about that because it, you know, some people struggle with their vices.
00:07:40.000But if you change your relationship with the vice, such as not that I wish I wouldn't eat desserts, but use the, I think an example from a kosher rabbi, a rabbi who eats kosher.
00:07:56.000So You want, um, let's see, let's let me give you this example.
00:08:02.000So, the story was like this: I have a friend who is a rabbi, and he was in my house, and he uh, and he's telling Vitali, I have a hard time losing weight, and he says, My biggest issue is that I eat too much bread.
00:08:15.000And I said, And I said, Well, you just need to become a person who does not eat bread.
00:08:19.000It's not like it's not that you eat bread sometimes, you just never eat bread.
00:08:24.000Yes, and because what happens to us when you make little exceptions, every time you present it with a chin, every time you present it with a choice, it becomes a choice, right?
00:08:33.000Like, I'm gonna eat a little bit of bread, uh, or so I'm gonna eat dessert sometimes.
00:08:39.000If you become a person who doesn't eat dessert or who doesn't eat bread and it becomes part of your identity, that's not really a choice for you.
00:08:47.000So, when I was talking to my rabbi friend, he said, But Vitali, it's so difficult not to eat bread.
00:08:52.000I said, You do something like this all the time.
00:09:01.000I said, Well, just become a person who does not eat bread.
00:09:06.000And just the same way, like it's not a choice for you when you know when somebody offers you a piece of bacon, it's not like you're thinking, Well, I'm gonna eat bacon sometimes.
00:09:16.000You know, you just, you know, and so that had a huge impact on him because he called me a few months later and he lost 20, 30 pounds just from then, you know, just the that's becoming his identity.
00:09:31.000You know, so that he's a person who does not eat bread.
00:09:35.000So, the I call this a half-binary decisions, meaning it's a non-decision decision.
00:09:42.000So, I, at some point, I said, I'm a person who does not eat sugar or who does not dessert.
00:09:47.000And so, when people eat cake around me, it does not bother me.
00:09:52.000I could be sitting in my desk surrounded by donuts and I'm going to have zero temptation because it's part of my identity.
00:09:58.000I'm the person who does not eat dessert.
00:10:00.000Yeah, you've changed your relationship with the vice as to I'm not trying to resist it, but who I am is completely inconsistent with what that thing is.
00:10:09.000It's a totally different way to frame temptation and vices, which is a huge problem right now for a lot of people.
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00:12:27.000So if you're young and you want to learn investing, what I would do, I would take as much money as you can afford to lose and I would approach it as your tuition money.
00:12:38.000And figure out what are your strengths, what businesses do you know better?
00:12:44.000Like, for instance, if you are an aerospace engineer, you should probably focus on aerospace companies because you already know a lot about this business.
00:12:53.000If you have a restaurant background, focus on restaurants.
00:12:56.000And then I would analyze these companies and just buy like a very few of them.
00:13:03.000Your goal is not to build a diversified portfolio.
00:13:09.000And again, just approach it with the same attitude as if you're going to lose that.
00:13:15.000That's your tuition money that you're willing to lose.
00:13:18.000And then slowly start following your investments.
00:13:22.000And little by little, you become better at this.
00:13:26.000I mean, that's how I would start if I had a, I don't know, a few thousand dollars or $10,000 or whatever, and I wanted to learn about investing.
00:13:35.000So some people say that that's still too intimidating for me.
00:13:38.000I won't be able to track it or follow it.
00:13:40.000But I think what you're trying to do is democratize people's power to be able to engage in markets, right?
00:13:46.000And you can start small and you could scale from there.
00:13:50.000What do you think is the most misleading, not misleading, that's the wrong way, damaging philosophical approach people have towards investing?
00:13:59.000Is it they want to make money too quickly?
00:14:01.000They have too high expectations of their own genius.
00:14:12.000Number two, I think they get attracted by this daily liquidity of the stock market because you can buy and sell stocks 10 times a day if you want to, at no cost now.
00:14:24.000And they start and they become gamblers, not investors.
00:14:29.000Two people buying a stock, same stock.
00:14:32.000You can have two people buying Microsoft stock, for instance.
00:14:36.000One of them could be an investor, one of them could be a gambler.
00:14:39.000And the difference is it's how much work that person did who bought the stock.
00:14:45.000Because here's the tricky part about the stock market.
00:14:49.000When you go to Las Vegas Casino, nobody's going to mistake you for an investor, right?
00:14:54.000Because you are going to casino, you're going to gamble.
00:14:57.000The stock market, it's actually because of this daily liquidity, it sucks people in because they think I can buy the stock, it's going to go up tomorrow, I'm going to flip it.
00:15:41.000Yeah, I think the book that's probably the most appropriate for your listeners, The Little Book of Sideways Markets, which, you know, and I wrote the previous book is active value investing.
00:15:53.000The little book is a shorter version of my first book.
00:15:59.000So I would, the little book of Sideways Markets, that would be a good book for your listeners to start with.
00:16:05.000In 30 seconds, what is the lesson that you learned post last four or five years that you wish you would have known five years ago?
00:16:12.000I think when I started investing, I spent most of my time looking at very hard numbers, like at a lot of hard numbers, like price turnings, return equity, a whole bunch of terms like this.
00:16:27.000Over the last 10 years, what I learned is that how important people are that run the businesses.
00:16:34.000So today, when we analyze companies, we spend as much time looking at the people who run these businesses as the businesses themselves.
00:18:17.000So when I grew up in Soviet Russia, I'm Jewish.
00:18:24.000But until I was 18 years old, I did not know there was such a thing as a Jewish religion.
00:18:31.000Because Soviets looked at religion as it was competing with another religion they had, which was communism or socialism.
00:18:39.000So what socialism did for me, what religion did, what other people, religions were for that, is a kind of a framework through which to look at life.
00:18:54.000It's provided an operating system for life.
00:18:57.000How to go through life and still have a meaningful life, but at the same time, reduce the necessary volatility you get from life that comes from negative emotions.
00:19:11.000And the Stoic philosophy is 2,000 years old.
00:19:16.000And what's absolutely incredible about this is that if you read the ancient text from the 2000 years ago, I'll give you one example.
00:19:26.000Seneca, who is one of the four figures in Stoicism, writes about how people are wasting their life on this on the, and you think he's talking about Netflix or TikTok or whatever.
00:19:44.000And he's talking about how they're spending, how wasting their life on this Stupid activities, you know, and how the time is fragmented.
00:19:53.000And he wrote it 2,000 years ago, before iPhone, before TikTok, before Facebook.
00:19:58.000So, what was interesting about Stoicism is that even though it's so old, people have not really changed in 2000 years.
00:20:06.000We are still, you know, we are still broken in many ways like we were 2,000 years ago.
00:21:01.000And that's how Stoic Last Figure started actually by Zeno.
00:21:05.000So, Marcus Aurelius was an emperor of Rome.
00:21:08.000And he was an emperor of Rome when Rome was basically the world.
00:21:14.000And what's really incredible about him, how this is a person who had absolute power, completely absolute power, and he would not let that power corrupt him, which is absolutely incredible.
00:22:15.000I had that before I even read your book and only deepened my understanding and appreciation.
00:22:20.000His book is The Meditations, which is noteworthy because it was actually probably one of the most popular books ever that was not ever intended to be read by anybody except himself.
00:22:30.000He'd probably be horrified that we would all be reading his private diaries and journals.
00:22:36.000He was king of the world, and yet here he is writing about how you shouldn't get too comfortable in your bed, how you should embrace difficult environments, about how you should be out in nature, understand the stillness of the natural world.
00:22:50.000You connect this practically through your new relationship with cold water, which I love.
00:22:56.000I try to get myself in contact with cold water daily.
00:23:00.000How on earth is there really a philosophical reason why people should get into cold water every day?
00:23:06.000Well, Wim Hoff would tell you you should get cold water.
00:23:09.000Cold water has a lot of he's a crazy person, but yes, that is right.
00:23:22.000So I take cold showers almost every day.
00:23:26.000And the reason I take cold showers is because I turn on cold water.
00:23:31.000And this, if you think about it, it's a harmless activity, right?
00:23:35.000Like there is nothing bad that can happen to me once I get into the cold water, but it's the discomfort that you feel, right?
00:23:43.000And Then I over then, every single time I look at the cold water and force myself to do this, and I overcome this discomfort.
00:23:53.000And I think it helps you in life and in general, because a lot of times you have to do things that are difficult.
00:23:59.000And if you train yourself little by little to do those difficult things, then when you face, you know, when you face them, it becomes easier and easier little by little.
00:24:09.000So I have, I try, I try to do a cold water immersion daily, 42 degrees.
00:24:17.000It's usually more like three or four times a week now.
00:24:19.000I used to do it every single morning and I, now I just do cold showers.
00:24:23.000So what I love about cold water and how it connects to the philosophical part of it is it's one of the few things where it takes incredibly low, little period of time, right?
00:24:33.000So it's not like a huge time commitment.
00:24:35.000I think you write about this in the book.
00:24:36.000It's also one of the few things where I can find where the feeling and the reaction is completely disconnected with what actually is happening to you.
00:24:45.000So the reality and the feeling are so opposite, right?
00:24:49.000And this is kind of what you're getting at because you feel like you're dying.
00:24:53.000And that's not an exaggeration, right?
00:24:55.000Cortisol, noreperephrine, adrenaline is spiking, right?
00:24:59.000Your mind goes into fight or flight when in reality, it's just cold water.
00:25:03.000Now, if you stayed there for 10 or 15 minutes, you could have hypothermia and you could, but you're not.
00:25:07.000You're staying in the cold water for 30 to seconds to a minute.
00:25:12.000So just kind of add some depth to that or respond to that.
00:26:15.000If you train yourself little by little, then it's going to be easier just to go through life, period.
00:26:21.000No, this is, and I want to keep building this out.
00:26:23.000So it's one of the few things that in two minutes of commitment, you can feel as if you just did something that might take an hour of working out.
00:26:33.000So every single study shows your dopamine level baseline goes up for the next four to five hours, your sense of accomplishment.
00:26:40.000And again, you should check with your doctor if you have heart issues.
00:27:14.000It is a safe way to train yourself to get that muscle of grit and endurance.
00:27:21.000And so, but the Stoics talked about this in other ways, right?
00:27:25.000They talk about finding difficult, modern day, sucky things that can, that are good for you, not because they necessarily make you feel good, but because life is about becoming tougher, not becoming more comfortable.
00:27:40.000It's developing your character, right?
00:27:42.000I think I think some of them, I forget who, they would sleep in an uncomfortable bed.
00:27:54.000Yeah, no, they live in uncomfortable bed or expose themselves to cold.
00:28:00.000Like, I guess they would embrace intermittent fasting a lot.
00:28:06.000In fact, one thing I started doing after the book came out, once a week, I basically fast for 24 hours and I only do it just to appreciate food so much more.
00:28:18.000Because we live in this, let me tell this story because I think this, you know, it's a, I didn't talk about it in the book, but I think it's a very important concept.
00:28:27.000So when I grew up in Russia, I only had Pepsi or Coke once when I was like 16 years old.
00:28:36.000And I remember that was a magical experience because it was hot outside and it was almost like a Coke commercial.
00:28:42.000Like when it's hot outside and you get a, and I absolutely remember that moment and it was magical.
00:28:49.000And then when I came to the United States, I discovered that you can buy Coke by gallons and you know at the grocery store.
00:28:55.000And over the next three years, I probably consumed enough Coke to overcompensate of the previous 18 years of underconsumption.
00:29:06.000I was at the restaurant one day and I was getting my third refill of Coke and I realized I couldn't taste it because I drank so much of it.
00:29:18.000And so it's, you know, we have this incredible abundance here.
00:29:25.000But the problem is abundance is that we start appreciating what we have.
00:29:31.000And so in Russia, and so with Russia, we had a lot of scarcity.
00:29:34.000And obviously we look at scarcity from a negative perspective.
00:29:37.000But there are positive sides of it too, because when something is scarce, you appreciate it.
00:29:43.000We look at abundance as only positive.
00:29:45.000And I would argue that it also has negative side because we stop appreciating what we have.
00:29:51.000So what I started doing, so after that moment at the restaurant when I was 21, I basically told myself, I'm going to drink Coke now only a few times a year, like when I go to movie theater.
00:30:03.000And now every single time I have a Coke, I love it because it's a very special experience for me.
00:30:11.000So, and I would argue you can do the same thing with other things like that have a lot of sugar.
00:30:18.000By the way, we had a similar experience with ice cream in the United States, when I came to the United States as well.
00:30:24.000So kind of creating this artificially, this scarcity in your life can actually improve your appreciation for what you have.
00:30:34.000So me fasting once a week, it creates a kind of a new appreciation for food.
00:31:11.000There is a chapter in this book, which to me is kind of the most dearest chapter because I think it's the most original where I talk about art and craft.
00:31:21.000And I think that that's a very interesting framework because I think if you want to have a meaningful life in your activity, you want to have a certain amount of art and you don't want to have too much craft.
00:31:33.000So you have to have this right balance.
00:31:36.000And If you do something for a long period of time and you feel like you perfected it, it becomes complete, and there is no uncertainty, there is no risk.
00:31:47.000That's all you have is craft and no art.
00:31:50.000So whenever you, like when I write, you know, when I write, whenever I sit down to write, I always have this feeling of uneasiness.
00:32:00.000I feel like I don't know how it's going to look when I'm dumb as that.
00:32:04.000That's what's make, but that's what creates art in my life.
00:32:10.000If it's very easy, when I write about investing now, it's mostly craft now because I've done it for such a long period of time.
00:32:18.000When I write about new topics, I introduce more art in my life.
00:32:21.000So in your life, you want to kind of find this right balance where you still have plenty of craft, but an art at the same time.
00:32:28.000Talk about how classical music has impacted and blessed your life.
00:32:33.000I found that to be incredibly compelling.
00:32:36.000Well, I think classical music is one of my biggest loves outside of my family, obviously.
00:32:47.000It's basically adds flavor to my life.
00:32:51.000But what I also found fascinating, when you study the lives of composers, you get to appreciate how, like when you listen to Tchaikovsky, for instance, you listen to this incredible music, but what you don't realize, how much pain Tchaikovsky had to suffer to write this music.
00:33:12.000And as a creative person, you realize that when you go through creative pain, it's absolutely fine.
00:34:12.000So the reason classical music is usually inaccessible because when you listen to a symphony, usually it takes me 10, 15 times to listen to it to understand it.
00:34:23.000Well, pop music usually clicks with you right away.
00:34:50.000That's been life-changing because yes, I get up every day at five in the morning.
00:34:54.000I get a cup of coffee, do push-ups, and then I write for two hours.
00:34:59.000And I would argue that writing is probably the most important thing that has happened to me as an individual because that forces me to think two hours a day.