Psychology to Live By

A wonderful conversation with singer, guitarist, songwriter and producer Sean Martin. We explored Sean's post-Iraq war experience with the horrors of PTSD, his slow and continuous recovery, and the way in which this has led him to uncovering his more 'authentic self'. This led to a conversation in which we dug deep into the relationship between music, writing, creativity and wellbeing. He also talked about how his aggressively metal/punk/grunge style was suited to waking people up. All in all an inspiring conversation that I recommend to you!

'Don't Walk Away' is Marilyn Raichle's wonderfully personal and surprisingly happy book about the transformative benefits of caring for a family member living with dementia. Topics discussed included: the distinction between being a care give and a care partner; dementia understood as loss versus understanding it as change; the power of a life of gratefulness; and lessons learned from loved ones with dementia. Here’s a beautiful insight from the book: “It turns out that everything that works so well to enrich the lives of persons living with dementia does the same for everyone, everywhere.” This is an important book that I highly recommend to you.

In this roundtable discussion of indie-folk artist Garrett Kato, diverse insights included: Garrett's description of himself as a "professional daydreamer" as a driver of his creative insight; how creative work needs modulations between hard focus and looser imaginings; how boredom stimulates the imagination; how social media's toll is worse for artists because it's tied to their income; how artists now do marketing work that labels used to handle, and how relying on social media is akin to gambling; how marketing music, on the other hand, has always been a gamble, from radio to promo tours; and how high social media numbers often don't turn into streams, while authentic music travels on its own. Check out my bio for links to these wonderful discussions.

This roundtable explores my podcast interview with Will Young, a financial adviser who blends Stoic philosophy, behavioural psychology and surfing insights into his approach to wealth management (and to his life in general). Topics discussed include: Will's technique of loosening his clients’ epistemic rigidity and emotion-based investing beliefs by exploring their reasoning process rather than attacking their conclusions; cognitive biases like the availability heuristic, the illusory truth effect and reactance; Philip Tetlock's super forecasting techniques based on probabilistic thinking; How Will (who is on the autistic-spectrum) translates abstract concepts like Stoicism, epistemic humility and Bayesian updating into concrete financial advice; and Will's habit of listening to a book first and only reading it if it resonates enough to warrant deeper internalization. The discussion reiterated themes of intellectual humility, resisting tribal/emotional reasoning and the idea that probabilistic, unemotional thinking, whether applied to markets, surfing, or everyday life, produces resilience and better long-term outcomes. The conversation closes with Young's book (The Enough Equation: Wealth Wisdom, Virtue and the Pursuit of Less) as a Stoic parable about discovering one already has abundance.

My guest on the podcast is Will R. Young, a certified financial adviser, who, somewhat unusually, combines behavioral psychology, Stoicism, and financial analysis with insights from surfing. So, he’s a financial adviser with a difference. In addition, Will has achieved exceptional results in the Good Judgment Project from the University of Pennsylvania - outperforming leading economists and Wall Street firms, in forecasting financial markets. This free-ranging conversation explored how Stoic philosophy has formed the basis for his approach to financial management in which “The best investors don’t let emotions dominate; they follow a plan and wait for the right moments.” We also discussed behavioral psychology , judgment and decision-making and the science of forecasting. Key themes included reducing the impact of the ego, epistemic humility, apathy or equanimity, and the relevance of all this to the contemporary moment. There’s also laughter along the way!