Kahran shares some of the lessons and thinking that guide his attitudes towards investing, saving and other types of finance in this wide reaching episode that looks at how to leverage your skills and assets to create more freedom.
Theme music is by Steve Combs, available here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Steve_Combs/Steve_Combs_Premium_Preview_EP_1325/06__Steve_Com
By specializing, you change the equation. Instead of billing for your time, you're billing for the transformation you create.
People who are very smart about financial investments can be oblivious about investing their time. They'll scrutinize every equity but not the hours they spend.
Hi, I'm Dhivya. Hi, I'm Kahran. Welcome to the 21st episode of Thinking on Thinking. Today we talked about a lot of different things, all around the idea of finance, money, risk, hedging, investment.
I've had this curiosity around Kahran's idea of what money is about and where it should go and where it comes from and how he thinks about it. And today I got the chance to pick his brain about it and I think it was a super interesting episode. We hope you enjoy.
It's also very interesting how we have very different attitudes. That reminded me of something else, but we have very different attitudes towards when kids are learning versus adults are learning. I've been trying to learn Korean and I was on the Learn Korean subreddit and there was somebody who was talking about how they feel so bad
that it's taking them so long and they wish that they were born in Korea so that they would have a better competence of knowing Korean. And this one person commented that, well, if you had three or four adults around you clapping for every single word you spoke in Korean, I am sure you will learn very fast today.
That's how we treat kids, right? I'm sure they speak one word and you look, oh my God, that's amazing. They speak one sort of verb in a non-declarative tense and you look, oh, wow, now this guy knows verbs also. And he's like, no, the guy does not know verbs.
He just learned another word. And also usually what will happen is someone will point out the object, repeat the word and then maybe tell you the correct sentence. And sometimes multiple people will point at the object and tell you the word. And that is, and that language acquisition still is like some six to eight year long process.
Like you start trying to learn in the first year of you being born and it just keeps going on. I would say that, okay, a 10 year old has a reasonable grasp on language, but generally when we are learning foreign languages, we expect that level of grasp in the first like two years or even shorter.
If six months and we're not at conversational level, we feel very frustrated with ourselves. And it's just like the way we categorize things because it's a kid versus because it's an adult. Okay, so speaking of one of the things that we do not learn about as kids and the topic of today's podcast was finance.
And because we've had like superficial conversations around finance or around topics like we did an episode around leverage last season. I think I wanted to just like maybe have a free form episode around what are your thoughts with finance and how you think about it because as far as I'm aware, you were investing quite early on and how do you even develop an intuitive sense of finance when you're that young?
So I think that a lot has to do with the environment when you were young, right? Because I was thinking about it and I think when I was very young, like maybe like six or so, I remember having a conversation with my parents about like certificates of deposit, which are very similar to fixed income in India. I'm trying to remember what they're called.
FD? Thank you. Yes, fixed deposits. Yeah. So CDs as they're called in the US are very much the same, right? But I'm not sure why savings already was kind of interesting to me. And when I understood this, I was like, oh, I should buy this because at the time, this would have been what, the early 90s.
So interest rates were still reasonably high in the US. I think they may have been five or six percent. I have this memory of it being like a 5% CD. And inflation, the target in the US has been about 2%, always like one and a half to 2%. So that means you're making a healthy like 3% above inflation, theoretically.
I think though that it's probably a mark of like the mindset my parents were in when I was really young, right? That's why I knew that savings was a thing that one should be doing. I think they were recent immigrants. They had just, my dad was working for at that point, like a startup, which was Microsoft. And it had just gone public the same year I was born.
So I think the environment that I was in, it was a point where they kind of had gambled on something that didn't, you couldn't have predicted what was going to happen. So I think my parents were very kind of concerned about, yes, you know, how are we going to kind of save? And then also, you know, they wanted to be able to send money for their family in India. So I think that, you know, that was the environment when I was very young, right? Like at some point in your mind, there would have been a distinction between savings and investing because they're not the same, right?
Like I don't think that I thought about investing until I was well into my adulthood. Like savings is still a concept that one knows about, but like how do you think about investing? Like how does that come naturally? So if you put money into a fixed deposit, that's savings, not investing. Correct.
What is investing? At least like in my mind, saving is closer to hoarding and investing is closer to sowing a seed. Like your attitude would be different in both cases. I don't think that the outcome or the numbers would be like sure in savings, you're slightly more conservative. But I think just the attitude for both of those things is very different.
So I'll answer that question in two parts. So I think the first part is my early exposures to investing in the way that you're kind of defining it was not so much from that attitude. It was more like, so the first company I kind of convinced my dad to invest in, because at that point I was too young. I think I was 12 or 13 and it was, well, I know when it was. So it was 1998.
Oh, so I was 11. And I convinced my father to invest into Amazon. And I, the way I kind of understood Amazon at that point or the way I just understood investing at that point was like, oh, there's sometimes companies are doing really cool things. And like, if you think the company is going to be successful, then you can invest in it and be part of that. How did you at 11 even know that?
Oh, because I had been using Amazon for like a year or two. And I was just like, this is the coolest thing ever because I could buy all my books on Amazon. And like, otherwise I used to really go to bookstores. So bookstores were like the place I used to hang out in libraries when I was little. But yeah.
So then I was like, oh my God, all the books I want are right here, whereas sometimes you go to the bookstore and the books were not there. Okay. So you convinced your dad that he should invest in Amazon. And it was great. I mean, I might be off.
It might have not been 1998. I remember it was $14 a share because my dad told this story for many years because eventually when I was in, I don't know, maybe in either of my late high school or early college years. No, it was late high school years. I traded the shares to my father and he bought me a camera.
Because I really wanted this. It was my first digital camera. But they really had been in his name the whole time because you can't buy shares yourself when you're that young. So that's kind of the first part to answer your question. I'd say the second part, I think there's a little bit of a funny thing people do in what you were saying.
There's this book I read a few years ago called The Psychology of Money, and he talks about how people will bucket money in their heads and then they will take actions according to that bucket, but not according to their relative money. They have trouble moving money between buckets in their heads. I think thinking about it in that way, it kind of ignores that what we're doing all the time is investing. A lot of times it's investment of money, which could be like you're loaning money or you're putting money into a degree or you're putting money into educating yourself in some way. But a lot of that investment is also investment of time.
And it's where we choose to spend our time. What are we getting better at? What are we learning? What are we strengthening? What are we sharpening? And I think when you break it into savings versus investment in that way, it kind of shields critical thinking about how we're going to get our money back. Because investment is being carved into the smaller bucket. That is, oh, that's what I do with equities. Interesting. Right? And I would content you that if you start to think about it more holistically and say, yeah, you know, I have so much capital resources.
I have so many hours of the day. How am I, my investments matching my risk profile? Right? And if you're someone who likes to have more risk in their life, you know, are you doing that with both your investments of time and your investments of money? Or maybe to say that differently, if you can tolerate more risk, are you capitalizing on that ability that you have? This is making me think about when you're playing any RTS, like whether it's Starcraft or Age of Empires, especially at a higher level. It's considered bad if one of your resources is accelerating way faster than the others, which means that you're not going to be able to do that.
And like it almost like when you were talking about this, it almost reminded me of that that often people look, oh my God, I have 9999 would or I have 9999 gold and it's like you fool. That's not a good thing. Like holding the resources is not a good thing because you want to be able to leverage it properly. Because ultimately it's quote unquote just a number. So it's just interesting when you said that. Yeah, I think that's a very good, fairly good corollary. And if you carry to a little further, right, one of the big things in RTS games is you have to weigh expansion versus, you know,
improving your society or maybe like building up your army is kind of the three consolidation. Yeah, consolidation versus expansion. Yeah. And I think similar to kind of how you're thinking about in like life, either you can be doubling down on the skills you already have and the sort of the capital you already have or sources of income, or you can be kind of thinking about like how am I creating more and how am I putting either capital or time into creating more sources of income or capital or you could be thinking about how do I make those ones that I have deliver more for me. Right. And to maybe use some examples there and maybe I'll just use your case because you're, you know, right in front of me, right, like you're you're a designer with a breath of experience today, you could double down on some of that experience and say, okay, you know, how can I make sure that I'm getting even higher bill rates than I'm getting higher bill rates than I'm getting higher bills.
Maybe it's that if I'm like more specialized in a certain area, like today, Gen AI is all over the place, right. So if you're like saying, you know, I'm going to teach people in your business how to use Gen AI, and I'm going to enable it so that you guys are going to be 10x more productive than you used to be. Now you might be able to say, well, whereas you might be able to pay a designer, you know, $150 an hour to help you because I'm going to be able to make all of your designers 10x more productive, right, you should pay me $500 an hour for this project that I'm going to do with you, right. So by kind of specializing your experience, you've been able to charge a higher rate. Now a different thing you might do is say, okay, you know, I what I'm realizing is that a lot of my clients are saying they need help into bear marketing. And what I really need is to be able to help do no more and to go to markets and be able to do more on their Facebook advertising or their Instagram or whatever. And so now you might be able to go and add more like invest in, in expanding your skill set and be able to generate more revenue or income that way.
It kind of depends on like where you feel like the imbalances in your life, right, like if you feel like, you know, the thing that's constraining your life is that you don't have enough finances to do, you know, you know, you can't do that. It kind of depends on like where you feel like the imbalances in your life, right, like if you feel like, you know, the thing that's constraining your life is that you don't have enough finances to do what you want to do, then that then you can kind of think about how do I enable that but then if you other side is like if you feel like you don't have enough time, then the kind of question can be, well, how do you take the capital that you have and use that to free more time in your life. I think something we were talking about right before the episode started was that one of your friends was saying something like, how do you like make your time more efficient? How do you unlock your life with your capital? And I think it's just a really clever way of thinking about it.
Because sometimes people will spend hours working on a startup, but they won't put money into it. And it's like, well, you know, if you can accelerate your progress a little bit, you're going to make all of those hours more productive. And it's so interesting because this breadth versus depth question of when do you invest in what of course as an individual you would have a leaning towards one or the other. Right, like there are people who are more prone to wanting to go deeper and there are people who are prone to wanting to go broader. It's always a very hard question to solve for. Which one do you go for at what point and just thinking about the way you articulated it right now that like, do you need more time or do you need more capital? Just like thinking, okay, this is going to give me X and this is going to give me Y and how do I balance both of these so that the product is the highest.
So and there's kind of more components to obviously right because this is a multivariant problem. But you could also think about what part is going to cost you more from your risk capacity. Right. So for some people, the idea of not being diversified is really scary to them. You know, whether we're talking about like their stock portfolio or they're talking about their skill set, right? Whereas there are other people who that's not as scary. And you can make money either way. You know, you can one of the things you can do if you want it to still have a diversified portfolio and still be able to make money on diversified portfolios, you can borrow money against that portfolio. Right. It's called taking a margin loan. It's like what hedge funds do. It's also called it's also right when we were talking about leverage. This is a way of getting leverage, right?
It's because you are investing more money than you actually have. You're borrowing some money against the value of your stock portfolio. Obviously, this increases the risk. It also increases the return, but you're still diversified. Right. Whereas if you're someone who you're like, oh, it's not that scary for me to go, you know, and work for 10 years for a startup in, you know, for a payday that might come. So, you know, I'm willing to also maybe take bigger bets on individual equities because I know some of these stocks are going to work. Well, then what you can do is you can say, okay, well, if I'm going to take a bet on a single equity, and this is one of the things that I do when I'm investing, is I'm going to try and get the upside without taking on a huge amount of risk. So if I invest in a derivative, I think we talked about derivatives a few weeks ago. If I invest in a derivative that can give me more access to the upside without giving me too much exposure because I have less capital that's actually tied up in that one equity derivative. So let's say people have X amount of risk appetite and they're able to take that risk across sectors of their life. Or is it that you have X amount and you can take like, you know, X by two in some places and X by 10 in other places.
That is a really interesting question. And that is something I have thought a lot about actually. I think that you have a capacity for uncertainty and that's very similar to your capacity for risk, but it's not exactly the same thing. Correct. So I think that I have known that like I have a very high uncertainty threshold, but I don't think I have a very high risk threshold. I think that your uncertainty is shared. Right. So I think that when you have a lot of uncertainty in like your personal life or in your work life, right, your capacity for uncertainty in other places diminishes. So you're not going to take on as much risk when you have less capacity for uncertainty. How interesting. So it's almost like there are two connected variables that both play into the equation.
And I wonder a little bit if this is why people took on so much risk during the pandemic, right, especially during that period where people were at home. Like, sure, there was a lot of uncertainty, like generally, but there was also like a lot of the small uncertainties in your life just disappeared. I don't know. I could be projecting from my experience, but I think like I was just like, oh yeah, of course, you know, it manifests in obvious ways, right? Of course, I have more time to look at my stocks, right? Of course, I'm going to then be able to like, you know, do more trading. But I think part of it is like, it's coming from this like, I'm going to be at home anyway, I'm going to be taking on this thing.
I'm not going to be taking on anything new. I might as well like do some risky behaviors here. People have described it in different ways. Some people have said like it was because there was nothing else, right? People were bored and they felt like it was kind of like gambling at home. I think part of it is just this capacity for uncertainty. Oh, and it's almost like a desire.
Yeah, like the way you're talking about it almost makes me feel like there is a reverse hedonic treadmilling happening. But because if the uncertainty goes below a certain point, people are like, no, no, but we must push it up again. Like I don't want a fully secure life and I don't want a fully insecure life. I want something which is, huh, that is so strange. It's almost like I want uncertain rewards from life.
Like, you know about attachment theory, right? And how like anxious attachment style is born out of uncertain reward pattern. Yeah, I know what you mean. This is similar, but on the other side where we're like, huh, I want to manage my uncertainty to a certain level appropriately across my life. That is so interesting because that would help me also understand why my friends feel like I have higher risk appetite and I feel like they have a higher risk appetite. Okay, so you know this, I have freelanced almost entirety of my career.
I've like done a job for a year in between and I wasn't particularly a big fan of that either. And my friends have always seen, seen it as, oh my God, but that's so risky. How do you get there? And I have been like, but you are just doing one job and anything that goes wrong is going to impact everything. Like I am actually diversifying my risk.
You are choosing the more risky option. And I wonder if it is also because I don't have to have uncertainty on the social construct side of things. I don't have to have uncertainty on a lot of other areas. If I'm just condensing the uncertainty into where is the next project going to come from? Yeah, I think that's fair.
And I mean, you also are someone right who like you live with your siblings, your mom comes to visit a lot. Like you have a very stable kind of personal life. And I think also interestingly, like the more narrow your theory of investment, the higher the rate of return you need to seek for, right? And I think sometimes people forget about that when they're like you were saying they go work for these startups. And sure, there's a possibility of a big monetary upside.
That's like, if you're not like growing or you're not getting other kinds of return on that investment, if you don't get your monetary upside, it's like shit, man. That could have been five, 10 or, you know, however many years of your life. So I don't know. I think that's kind of a thing where like, yeah, people do that when they're looking at stocks, right? They'll look at equities and say, oh, I'm only going to invest in this individual equity if I think I see a large upside. But then somehow in their time, they can be a little bit more oblivious.
I think it has a really interesting, corollary concept, right? Where I think if you don't give people a focus for competition also, it can that also can manifest in a similar way, right? When I worked at Microsoft really early in my career, I think it was my last year of college. I was part of the academic evangelism team, which was part of the Microsoft core corporate. But then in all of the Microsoft subsidiaries all around the world, they had different evangelism teams for different sections of academia.
So they would have like worldwide education and they would have like higher education and they would have like K-12. And what ended up happening is you had kind of some competition happening between the corporate and the subsidiaries. And I think because at that point, Microsoft, this is maybe the late 2000s, like Google had started to come out, but no one really could challenge Microsoft's presence as a tech leader, like especially in academia. It was just everywhere, right? It was all Windows PCs and every computer, Max had started to come, but they were basically only in specialized labs.
So it was just an interesting thing where I think, right, if people don't have a focus for that competition, they can easily become redirected in ways that you don't want it to. And I think similarly, when people don't, when they're not taking on enough uncertainty in their lives, they start to like create drama, you know, they start to create things to have something to. Anyway, but we can bring it back to finance.
So, so earlier you were talking about like, you know, when you are thinking about your investments and like, you know, whether it is time or it is money, you think about it in a certain way. How do you even come up with that? Like, where does the seed of this is how I should think about this problem? So I think there's a specific example, right, which is kind of what you're asking, like, how do I think about it? There's also kind of a more general way I think about it. So I'd say in a general way, I think about it. It's like, depending on what you're confident about, and what you want to hedge against, that can tell you kind of where you want to end up.
So if you're confident about the need for designers, and let's say you're like less confident about the need for like low level marketing people, right? So then you might start to think about like, okay, if I'm pretty sure that this is the world that we're going to, well, what would be the outcomes of that? So there's going to be sets of tools that these designers use. There's also going to be types of companies that employ them. And there's also going to be types of companies that their success is built on the side. Right. So you might want to start thinking about like, okay, you know, all of these kinds of companies might be good aspects for me to invest in.
If I am very confident that design is going to be something that will drive culture and drive like the zeitgeist in the future. Right. And similarly, if you're like, oh, you know, marketing tools and like all these low level marketers who use these tools are silly and there's going to be consolidation in the industry. And soon we won't even have these junior marketing people who get paid, you know, 10 to $20 an hour. We're just going to have senior marketing people and they use the like best tools. Right. So if you're confident something like that, then you might look and say, okay, you know, what are these tools that people like marketers are using a lot and where are they deriving the value that they are delivering.
So like some of them like Canva or something is like used by a lot of marketers and you know, it's kind of panned by like real design people. Right. So you might think about saying like, I don't really want to invest in tools like that and look and see like, okay, who's into those sort of spheres and now I could get a little bit into hedging, but I won't do that so much for right now. Because especially when I was early on in investing, I'm more just thought about who are the winners that I think and that kind of just fits with my personality as well. If you're someone who does like to think about losers as well, right, there's also ways for you to make money. And that's where you might start to think about buying things that make money when a company does worse. Right. So that's buying or selling things short. Right. Or buying puts, which are both ways that you make money when a company's stock goes down when the value of that company starts to become less.
And then the combination of those two is what I was just hinting at, which is how you can hedge. So in case the markets go in the direction that you don't think they will, you can use whichever strategy you're not putting your primary focus on in order to protect against the notion that your strategy is totally wrong. It's very interesting that like you started from a view of the world. So I have come across like, you know, a bunch of finance related stuff like this is how you should invest, this is how you should do this thing. And it almost always ends up being very functional slash operational in nature. And there is a lot of tactical thinking but not a lot of strategic thinking. And the way you just described it, it made me think about, huh, so you're starting from where do I think the world is going to go and I'm going to take a bet on that. Like that is the sort of almost hypothesis that you are trying to generate. And it's very. Absolutely. I mean, it's very interesting that I haven't thought of it like that. And we've like cursorily talked about it before and I've like found it interesting.
But like, I think that we haven't ever like distilled it down into this is how you build almost like a view of the world. It's also making me think about like how many different things would sort of get tied into this, like because of course your morality and your values and like your own specialization and the people you care about like all of those things would also start playing a role in this thing. Yeah. And if you start to take it to extremes, right. And by that, I mean, if you start to make very early stage bets on things that might have outcomes in five to 10 to kind of 20 years, then the potential for the outcome can be so much that it starts to take away from the value of hedging. So what I mean by that, and actually maybe I could just share an example. So my father invested in a company called I cert is very early on in its career. And he knew the founder well and basically what they do is they ingest agreements and like signed, you know, contracts, and then they automate staying in compliance, which
is just like an amazing thing for like large companies that might sign thousands of contractor agreements, right, and then they don't actually stay in compliance with them or having someone staying compliance or know what, know what even to be in compliance is a huge burden. Right. So this company is now, you know, it's it's a unicorn. It's I think it's worth more than a billion dollars and right and he would not have the way he thinks about it is he'll just he just invest in a lot of companies have very early stage that he believes in. He must very much like how a venture capital firm works right venture capital firm is going to put out 20 bets thinking that 19 of them are going to fail or really like 12 of them are going to fail, five of them will do okay. And you know you hope one of them is going to be a great and outspoken success. And you know, some variability on the other one or two.
Yeah, so that's that's the other way to think about it right which is even more extreme place than where I think I am. Interestingly, I think I feel more uncomfortable investing in things where you don't know anything. Right. I feel more comfortable and investing in saying like, Oh, you know, I know that VR and AR are going to be things. I'd rather invest in like a major tech player that I think is investing in the right ways in those than I wouldn't a really minor player where I don't necessarily understand as much. How else does this end up influencing like other areas of your life. If you're starting from a place of this is a hypothesis of the direction that I think the world is going to go in. I'm sure like you think about money and finance like in a completely different way.
Do you have like any ideas of like you know, apart from which companies to invest in where else that might play out. Yeah, I mean I think a lot of that is captured in that kind of scarcity versus growth mindset paradigm right. And it's something that one of my one of my good friends and I have been talking a lot about and he's been really helping me see how it can manifest in a lot of different ways like for example, I've been sleeping on a bed that if I'm really terrible, I just don't sleep that well. And it's funny because I have a lot of trouble wrapping my head around the notion that I should just buy a bed. Right, I could afford to buy a bed I need to just buy a bed, but I keep kind of like finding reasons why I don't want to commit to that just yet.
And I think it's interesting how you know you can have this this awareness in one part of your life but struggle with this awareness on other parts of your life. So, I have a lot of that that idea of like how I can enable things that I really enjoy in around like like travel and food right so I think the classic kind of the classic kind of adage is like experiences are what you matter not stuff. And I think like for me that is true in a lot of ways, though I do think there's certain stuff that can really just add value to your life. And I think I find a lot of delight in really well designed products. Like for example, I have this my monitor right now on a an articulating arm that is just so it moves so smoothly it's so beautiful to work with I really that brings me joy every time I get to move my monitor. And I think if you can find those kinds of things it's really worth spending a little bit more money on them, especially when those are areas that you do care about, you know, depending on who you are you can figure out how many areas you're willing to kind of indulge in but I think having some areas that you indulge in are very important just to like help have you.
What's the point of making money if you don't bring more delight to your life. It's also interesting that like just from that, if I go back, you are telling yourself a certain kind of message as well when you're investing in certain things that this is the world that I think is going to exist. And when you invest in yourself, it's almost like, I believe that like, you know, I am worth investing in. In some ways, like I don't think that I've done that as much with money. And I don't think it's just a problem of having or not having resources. I don't think like I just think that I haven't had that understanding or intuition around money but I've always had that around time and learning.
Like having active time carved out to improve myself has been like one of the things that I've always gifted myself is how I would think about it because it's like it matters and I know that it matters in the future. So it's very interesting to just like think about it from like money perspective also just the way you said buying small things that improve your life. Yeah, I think I think actually that's one of the things I've really learned from you because I think I didn't really look at it so much as I think I came from a place where I really thought of things being more fixed, right? Whereas like, oh, I have these interests and I have these possibilities and sure there's some amount of deviation from the path but you know, I'm on this path and working with you. I have kind of seen like you can if you keep investing in improving, you know, yourself, maybe you'll stop walking down the path and you can start cycling down the path, you know, and then your ability to kind of take turns and go in different directions is so much more when you have a cycle instead of your own two feet, right?
Yeah. I think that's a kind of an interesting notion that I started to think about a little bit more. I went to culinary school when I was 29. And that was an experience that was a large investment about time and money but it was a place where I felt like I got to acquire a set of skills that were really closely connected to things I cared about. And I think as much as money and you know, and your time when you can kind of create freedom of time can enable your life to be better.
And that's, that is the point. But you had said something earlier you had kind of been asking me about how do I invest my time given that like I invest my money thinking about that this is the future that I think is going to come. So I think there's a particular way that I like to engage with culture. I like to see theater, right? I like I really like interactive kind of like museums and exhibits.
This is very cool interactive play in New York called sleep no more. It's just it's nice if you can try and think about how does your capital enable those types of interaction for you. And so for me, I can try and stay abreast of where I think like the world is going from trying to stay with understand what's happening in these arts and in these arenas that I really enjoy. And then thinking about how I can put my money towards that if you're coming from a place of buckets where you're like, oh, this is my entertainment budget. And this is my like, you know, clothing budget and this is my shopping budget.
Like that is very important at a point where you really are, you know, operating from a budget and need to operate from a budget. I think what I'm trying to say is that I think thinking about how you add a scope to those different budgets, right? How do you add a lens to your entertainment budget or to your food budgets that is in line with the other things that you care about? And especially as you build more capital, it lets you start to think about how do I apply that capital in ways that make these other parts of my life better and not just making more money or where the point of the money just becomes more money. I also think just going back to what you were saying much earlier, it makes it more fun, whereas when it's very dry, it's not that fun.
Yeah, I think that has been my experience of like just talking to you in general, even before we started working together. So I think that I'm very good at creating a sense of possibility through knowledge and understanding. Like, I think that is where my idea of the world is infinite comes from. But I don't think that I had met people who felt that way about money. So even if I am around people who have money, even if they have like, you know, a lot of resources, they still have a certain bucketed thinking around it.
Or like, at least like in my interactions that never came up. But when we talk about it, I can feel that sense of possibility that you have. It's like, you will know a lot of curious people, but not all of them will give you a sense of, oh, the world is infinite. Similarly, like I've known people who have money, but I don't think that they have intuitively understood how this thing can make my life feel richer and more vibrant. And I feel like you had that understanding.
So like what you just said, like really brings together like one of the first feelings I had when like, you know, we became friends. It's like, oh, this person actually has taste and they're using their resources to evolve their taste. It's just very different from how most people think of money as like, you know, a safety net or something that will like, you know, fulfill my wishes. That's not how you're looking at it. And not that those are bad ways of looking at things, but it's just interesting that you look at it differently.
Well, those can end, those often can lead to the like never ending money game, right? Like I have some really good friends who have done really well, you know, some of them made upwards of like $10 million, which at our point, you know, we're all like in our mid 30s, right? So it's a huge amount of money, but not able to, you know, get off the hamster wheel. Like I think when you have that kind of attitude, right, you always can use a better safety net. It's hard to decide that like this is enough.
Even when we know, like, you know that you have earning capacity, you know that you have so many years of working ahead and you know how much you expend a year, right? So you should be able to kind of calculate out and say, okay, you know, if I keep 3 million here, right, then I can go and start to like, like invest other things into projects that I care more about, but it's very hard to do that. You're starting premise. It kind of has to be how is my money and how am I investing both my capital, both kinds of my capital, both my time and my money in ways that are making my life better. I also think that there is another additional thing here, though, which we probably don't have the time to get into.
But like one of the things that I found very useful while learning about science is that different forces operate at different levels and you have to change switch your thinking. Like the way galaxies behave is very different from the way Earth behaves is very different from the way atoms behave, even though they all exist in the universe, even though the quote unquote rules of physics haven't changed. But just the forces and the way they interact with each other has been altered because of the scale. So like where you're at in life, you need a different model for it. And you need to like sort of verify is the model that I'm using outdated or not.
And I think for a lot of people, it's like, so for example, and I think about my friends, most of them come from like middle class or lower middle class families in their childhood and like, you know, went to the most elite institute and now are making a lot of money. And it's very difficult to like, you know, shift from that space of, oh, we all lived in like, you know, a one BHK, we were three siblings and like, you know, mom and dad from there to like, we have enough. And now we can think about how can we, you know, enhance our lives. It's just very easy to stay stuck in maybe we'll never have enough kind of a space because you need to change your model because the scale has changed. I think it also, it makes you have to challenge more why you don't do something.
Yeah, right, because an easy excuse is to be like, oh, it's too expensive. Yeah. And the end, you know, a lot of things that when you start to go deeper into things, a lot of times, the value for the common person is not commiserate to the cost. But because you're further down in that journey, the value you're going to get from it, what could be more, but the cost is not necessarily justifiable, you know, to someone else because the money is worth different to them. Like you're saying they have a different calculus.
And so especially if you kind of grew up with one calculus and you feel like everyone around you has that certain calculus, it can be really hard to then say, well, no, you know, I want to do this thing, despite the cost, or really the reason I don't want to do it has nothing to do with the cost at all. And then you have to answer yourself why, you know, what is it? Okay, this is fun. Yeah, this is super fun. It flew by.
Yes. Okay, I'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of Thinking on Thinking.
Our theme music is by Steve Gomes. If you found any of the topics we talked about interesting this week, we'd invite you to get in touch with us. We'd love to invite you on the podcast or just have a conversation about how these topics apply in your business and in the decisions and problems that you're struggling with. You can get in touch with us on our website, joyus.studio, or by reaching out to Divya or me, Kain directly.