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July 19, 2023 - The Charlie Kirk Show
36:22
Stoicism and the Soul with Vitaliy Katsenelson
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Being a Student of Life 00:10:20
Hey everybody, a special episode.
We talk about stoicism, life, wisdom, investing with Vitaly Costa Nelson, author of Soul in the Game.
I read the book.
I'm glad I did.
And I think this book will bless you.
It's deep.
It'll challenge you.
We talk about cold water, investing, waking up early, classical music.
A fun, insightful episode with a remarkably talented writer.
I am not a good writer.
I'm good at other things.
He's a great writer, and I have mad respect for that.
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Here we go.
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I got an email back, I think, in January, February that said, Charlie, do you want to read a book that Nassim Taleb recommends?
Like, of course, I love everything he's authored, including The Black Swan.
And so the book gets sent to me.
I get hundreds of books sent to me, hundreds.
And for whatever reason, I was drawn to this book by the recommendation.
And said, all right, I'll give this one a whirl.
It was a Friday night.
The book is called Soul in the Game, The Art of a Meaningful Life.
And I was like, I really like the way this is written.
Like, this author really knows how to capture your attention.
His syntax, his diction was excellent.
You just keep reading and reading and reading.
And it was incredibly deep.
Finished the whole thing.
I said, I want to have this guy on the show.
And 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.
But joining us now is the author of the book.
I might mispronounce the name.
I apologize if I do.
Vitaly Katz the Nelson.
Welcome to the program.
Vitaliks and Nelson.
You got it.
It's perfect.
No, it's perfect.
Okay.
Well, welcome to the program.
Congratulations on a very readable and fulfilling and deep book.
From your perspective, tell us why you wrote this book.
And I have several items I want to explore with you.
So please.
Yeah.
Well, you know, actually, I tell you this, the dedication of this book is to my kids because he don't read my emails.
And I think this probably sums it up.
I write these articles about investing about many fun topics, but a lot of topics are about life.
And I wanted to make sure my kids read my content.
So I figured the best way to do it is to package it into a book.
Well, and it's just rich with wisdom and also your own personal narrative.
And so again, the book is called Soul in the Game, The Art of a Meaningful Life.
So let's just kind of go through some of the elements here.
And then I want to dive into some particulars and specifics.
Your father, so being born in Russia was obviously a big part of your life.
Talk about that, being born in Russia, and then, as you put it, made in America.
Yeah, so I was born in Russia and I grew up in a, not just in Russia, but in Soviet Russia.
And I grew up in a town called Murmansk.
And 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.
And that's where the Red October, which is a fictional submarine, is from.
So Murmansk was kind of actually an interesting place because This is so up north.
If you look at Norway, you have to go to the very north, you know, to the highest tip of Norway to find Murmansk, right?
You know, it's 100 miles away.
So there's very little sunlight in the wintertime.
So little that I would wake up in the morning, it's dark.
I would walk to school.
It's still, you know, it's dark.
The sun would come out for about 10 minutes and I would miss it because I would be in school.
And when I walk back home, it's dark again.
And today, so my family moved to the United States.
I live in Denver, which is kind of the opposite of Murmansk because we have 300 days of sunshine.
But so my family moved to the United States in 1991.
Since then, now I have a wife, three kids.
And 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.
And it's very special.
Amen.
And I want to ask you about finance advice and all that, but let's get into some of the particulars of the book.
And you have the first part of the chapter is all around being a student of life.
And something I admired about reading the book is you're incredibly observing and curious.
And I think that's what makes people, that's one of the ingredients to live a happy life.
Just talk about that.
Have you always been a curious person and just observing the little things and trying to connect them?
I think I became a lot more curious about life and a lot more observant when I started writing.
Because 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.
And I think writing made me a lot more observant.
That's number one.
Number 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.
You're less likely to become arrogant.
And my day job as an investor, you know, like as an investor, you want to be kind of what I call thoughtfully arrogant.
And let me explain what I mean by this.
Whenever you buy a company or a stock, it's an act of arrogance because somebody is selling it to you, right?
Or when you sell the stock, somebody's buying it from you.
And so when you're doing this, you're basically saying, I know better than the person on the other side.
So you need to have some arrogance as an investor.
However, what I would argue, there's two types of arrogances.
There's arrogance is I am, therefore, I'm no better.
And then there is a second type of arrogance, which I call thoughtful arrogance.
And that arrogance is basically, I've done this tremendous amount of research.
I reached this conclusion, and my conclusion leads me to be, you know, to this decision.
So that's what I call thoughtful arrogance.
And 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.
And that's kind of, you know, that's who I am, hopefully.
I think that comes across.
And 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.
And so you have two portions: I don't eat desserts and I don't eat pork.
Talk about that because it, you know, some people struggle with their vices.
But 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.
Talk about that.
Yeah.
So You want, um, let's see, let's let me give you this example.
So, 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.
And I said, And I said, Well, you just need to become a person who does not eat bread.
It's not like it's not that you eat bread sometimes, you just never eat bread.
Yes, 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?
Like, I'm gonna eat a little bit of bread, uh, or so I'm gonna eat dessert sometimes.
If 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.
So, when I was talking to my rabbi friend, he said, But Vitali, it's so difficult not to eat bread.
I said, You do something like this all the time.
I said, Do you do you eat pork?
He said, Of course not.
You know, I'm a rabbi.
I said, Well, just become a person who does not eat bread.
And 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.
You 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.
You know, so that he's a person who does not eat bread.
So, the I call this a half-binary decisions, meaning it's a non-decision decision.
So, I, at some point, I said, I'm a person who does not eat sugar or who does not dessert.
And so, when people eat cake around me, it does not bother me.
I could be sitting in my desk surrounded by donuts and I'm going to have zero temptation because it's part of my identity.
I'm the person who does not eat dessert.
That's exactly right.
Yeah, 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.
It's a totally different way to frame temptation and vices, which is a huge problem right now for a lot of people.
Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
Identity Over Temptation 00:11:29
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So, Vitali, I want to spend a majority of the remainder of our hour on stoicism, but first, I want to just talk about personal finance.
You are really becoming a legend in the space of investments and investment philosophy.
We have a younger audience that listens that feels intimidated by the markets.
Just you talk a little bit about this in the book, and you've done other books that are focused primarily on this.
Let's just have a conversation: personal finance, best tips and tricks.
How do you get into it?
Let's explore this topic.
Sure.
Well, if you want to learn, if you want to learn investing, number one, you want to approach it not as gambling, but investing.
And what I mean by this is that when I buy a stock, you're basically buying a fractional ownership of a business.
It's how it happens to be publicly traded.
So if you approach investing that way, that's very different than probably 95% of people who buy stocks approach it.
That's number one.
So 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.
And figure out what are your strengths, what businesses do you know better?
Like, for instance, if you are an aerospace engineer, you should probably focus on aerospace companies because you already know a lot about this business.
If you have a restaurant background, focus on restaurants.
And then I would analyze these companies and just buy like a very few of them.
Your goal is not to build a diversified portfolio.
Your goal is to learn.
Okay.
And again, just approach it with the same attitude as if you're going to lose that.
That's your tuition money that you're willing to lose.
And then slowly start following your investments.
And little by little, you become better at this.
I 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.
So some people say that that's still too intimidating for me.
I won't be able to track it or follow it.
But I think what you're trying to do is democratize people's power to be able to engage in markets, right?
And you can start small and you could scale from there.
What do you think is the most misleading, not misleading, that's the wrong way, damaging philosophical approach people have towards investing?
Is it they want to make money too quickly?
They have too high expectations of their own genius.
I think a couple of things.
I think people, number one, people usually very impatient.
That's number one.
Number 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.
And they start and they become gamblers, not investors.
I'll give you an example.
Two people buying a stock, same stock.
You can have two people buying Microsoft stock, for instance.
One of them could be an investor, one of them could be a gambler.
And the difference is it's how much work that person did who bought the stock.
Because here's the tricky part about the stock market.
When you go to Las Vegas Casino, nobody's going to mistake you for an investor, right?
Because you are going to casino, you're going to gamble.
The 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.
But that's not investing.
That is trading.
And so I would approach it.
Yeah.
So the key here is this.
You want to have an attitude, this kind of attitude.
If the stock market was closed for next 10 years, would I still want to be making this decision?
And I think that's probably the most important kind of advice you can give in three minutes or less.
No, that's great.
Can you just mention you've written a couple of books on this?
What are they called?
Yeah, 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.
The little book is a shorter version of my first book.
So I would, the little book of Sideways Markets, that would be a good book for your listeners to start with.
In 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?
I 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.
Over the last 10 years, what I learned is that how important people are that run the businesses.
So today, when we analyze companies, we spend as much time looking at the people who run these businesses as the businesses themselves.
That's interesting.
That goes to show that a computer trading computer can't do everything.
You actually have to know the human beings behind it.
Fascinating.
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I want to get into stoicism.
The best part of the book, in my opinion, I find stoicism very helpful and interesting.
So talk about how you came across the Stoics.
And I have tons of questions, and I'd love to contribute my own thoughts, but how has Stoicism impacted your life?
It was life-changing.
So when I grew up in Soviet Russia, I'm Jewish.
But until I was 18 years old, I did not know there was such a thing as a Jewish religion.
Because Soviets looked at religion as it was competing with another religion they had, which was communism or socialism.
So 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.
It's basically what it did for me.
It's provided an operating system for life.
How 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.
And the Stoic philosophy is 2,000 years old.
It came from ancient Greece and Rome.
And 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.
Seneca, 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.
And he's talking about how they're spending, how wasting their life on this Stupid activities, you know, and how the time is fragmented.
And he wrote it 2,000 years ago, before iPhone, before TikTok, before Facebook.
So, what was interesting about Stoicism is that even though it's so old, people have not really changed in 2000 years.
We are still, you know, we are still broken in many ways like we were 2,000 years ago.
So, let's take a step back, actually.
And this is my fault.
Let's define what Stoicism is.
There's four Stoics: Seneca, Epietus, Marcus Aurelius.
The fourth escapes me.
Zeno?
That's right.
He's the founder of Stoicism.
Yeah, so those are the big four.
So, Epietus, I believe, was a former slave.
Zeno, I don't know his biography.
Aurelius obviously was the equivalent of king of the world.
So, if you had an operating framework, but walk us through the history of Stoicism.
Sure, yeah.
So, let's start with Zeno because he's actually the founder of Stoicism.
He was a wealthy merchant who lost all his wealth in the shipwreck.
And, you know, like what if you go through life, you realize pain could be an incredible impetus to self-improvement.
Yes.
And that's how Stoic Last Figure started actually by Zeno.
So, Marcus Aurelius was an emperor of Rome.
And he was an emperor of Rome when Rome was basically the world.
And 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.
Seneca was a Roman emperor.
I'm sorry, Seneca was kind of the Renaissance man, like 15 centuries before the Renaissance.
He was a playwright, he was a banker, he was an advisor to emperors.
And so, and so that's another one.
And the final one is Epictetus, who was a slave.
Cold Showers for Stress 00:06:01
And his writing is absolutely incredible.
And this is a person who had a very harsh life, but still was able to go through this life and find a lot of meaning and enjoying it.
And so they wrote, you know, separate, let's just say, writings and books.
Let's focus on Aurelius, who's my favorite.
I actually have a bust of Aurelius.
I had that before I even read your book and only deepened my understanding and appreciation.
His 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.
He'd probably be horrified that we would all be reading his private diaries and journals.
You say it perfectly.
He 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.
You connect this practically through your new relationship with cold water, which I love.
I try to get myself in contact with cold water daily.
How on earth is there really a philosophical reason why people should get into cold water every day?
Well, Wim Hoff would tell you you should get cold water.
Yes, of course.
Cold water has a lot of he's a crazy person, but yes, that is right.
But I think there's a lot of physical reasons to do this, yeah, because it's good for you.
I'm doing it for a different reason.
So I take cold showers almost every day.
And the reason I take cold showers is because I turn on cold water.
And this, if you think about it, it's a harmless activity, right?
Like 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?
And Then I over then, every single time I look at the cold water and force myself to do this, and I overcome this discomfort.
And I think it helps you in life and in general, because a lot of times you have to do things that are difficult.
And 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.
So I have, I try, I try to do a cold water immersion daily, 42 degrees.
It's usually more like three or four times a week now.
I used to do it every single morning and I, now I just do cold showers.
So 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?
So it's not like a huge time commitment.
I think you write about this in the book.
It'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.
So the reality and the feeling are so opposite, right?
And this is kind of what you're getting at because you feel like you're dying.
And that's not an exaggeration, right?
Cortisol, noreperephrine, adrenaline is spiking, right?
Your mind goes into fight or flight when in reality, it's just cold water.
Now, if you stayed there for 10 or 15 minutes, you could have hypothermia and you could, but you're not.
You're staying in the cold water for 30 to seconds to a minute.
So just kind of add some depth to that or respond to that.
No, absolutely.
No, I think you're absolutely right because the whole point is it's not just one or two minutes of this.
And so when you get under cold water, you start your heart starts racing.
And then through breathing, you try to calm yourself down.
By the way, that's a great exercise when you get stressed in general.
When you get stressed, when you get stressed, when you, you know, your breathing starts, you know, starts to accelerate.
And by breathing, you slow yourself down.
And that's a very good thing.
That's a very good trick to learn in general for life.
And so, and once you conquer it, it gives you kind of a sense of accomplishment as well, right?
Because you just did something, you overcame fear or discomfort.
And then in life, when you in life, you're going to face a lot of, you know, a lot of times, you know, this kind of discomfort.
And it's a muscle.
If you train yourself little by little, then it's going to be easier just to go through life, period.
No, this is, and I want to keep building this out.
So 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.
So every single study shows your dopamine level baseline goes up for the next four to five hours, your sense of accomplishment.
And again, you should check with your doctor if you have heart issues.
And, you know, no joke.
But for 99% of the audience listening, this is 100% safe and is perfectly fine.
I also love it.
And I'm sure, Vitaly, you understand this.
So there is a sense of psychological dread and wrestling that happens before you get into the cold, right?
That's right.
Where do I really need to do this?
The anxiety, the questioning, the tension, which is unbelievably applicable to other scenarios that you might have to go into.
And so you're right.
It is a safe way to train yourself to get that muscle of grit and endurance.
And so, but the Stoics talked about this in other ways, right?
They 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.
It's developing your character, right?
I think I think some of them, I forget who, they would sleep in an uncomfortable bed.
That's right.
Pain Behind the Music 00:07:07
They were said that.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, they live in uncomfortable bed or expose themselves to cold.
Like, I guess they would embrace intermittent fasting a lot.
In 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.
Because 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.
So when I grew up in Russia, I only had Pepsi or Coke once when I was like 16 years old.
And I remember that was a magical experience because it was hot outside and it was almost like a Coke commercial.
Like when it's hot outside and you get a, and I absolutely remember that moment and it was magical.
And then when I came to the United States, I discovered that you can buy Coke by gallons and you know at the grocery store.
And over the next three years, I probably consumed enough Coke to overcompensate of the previous 18 years of underconsumption.
And you know what happened?
I 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.
Now it's started to taste like water.
And so it's, you know, we have this incredible abundance here.
But the problem is abundance is that we start appreciating what we have.
And so in Russia, and so with Russia, we had a lot of scarcity.
And obviously we look at scarcity from a negative perspective.
But there are positive sides of it too, because when something is scarce, you appreciate it.
We look at abundance as only positive.
And I would argue that it also has negative side because we stop appreciating what we have.
So 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.
And now every single time I have a Coke, I love it because it's a very special experience for me.
So, and I would argue you can do the same thing with other things like that have a lot of sugar.
By the way, we had a similar experience with ice cream in the United States, when I came to the United States as well.
So kind of creating this artificially, this scarcity in your life can actually improve your appreciation for what you have.
So me fasting once a week, it creates a kind of a new appreciation for food.
So that's one example, I guess.
So Soul in the Game is the book.
Excellent commentary and deep wisdom.
So Tali, we only have a couple minutes remaining here.
I like to do this with authors because you put so much time into your work.
What topics in the book do you want our audience to be aware of or things that you wished we would have covered more deeply?
That's a great, I mean, this is such a great question.
Thank you.
There 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.
And 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.
So you have to have this right balance.
And 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.
That's all you have is craft and no art.
So whenever you, like when I write, you know, when I write, whenever I sit down to write, I always have this feeling of uneasiness.
I feel like I don't know how it's going to look when I'm dumb as that.
That's what's make, but that's what creates art in my life.
If 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.
It's very easy to do.
When I write about new topics, I introduce more art in my life.
So 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.
Talk about how classical music has impacted and blessed your life.
I found that to be incredibly compelling.
Well, I think classical music is one of my biggest loves outside of my family, obviously.
It's basically adds flavor to my life.
But 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.
And as a creative person, you realize that when you go through creative pain, it's absolutely fine.
That is part of life.
That's part of the creating process.
Because Tchaikovsky had to suffer to create this incredible music.
And so do we.
So classical music is similar to investing in this way.
People find it to be very difficult to understand and intimidating.
How should somebody start?
And I believe you have a website about classical music.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have a website, myfavoriteclassical.com.
And on this website, at the very top, there is a playlist.
And I created this playlist.
I call it the gateway drug to classical music.
And this clay, it took me a long time to create this playlist.
But if you know nothing about classical music and you start listening to it, you're going to fall in love with it right away.
I promise you.
I totally agree.
Yes.
Continue.
Yeah.
So 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.
Well, pop music usually clicks with you right away.
So I created this playlist.
So when you start listening to it, this music will click with you right away.
And it's get more and more difficult as you go down the list.
So yeah, that's my contribution to, yeah, I hope you, you know, your listeners check it out.
Myfavoriteclassical.com.
Finally, you wake up very early.
What has that meant for your life?
That's been life-changing because yes, I get up every day at five in the morning.
I get a cup of coffee, do push-ups, and then I write for two hours.
Two Hours of Writing 00:01:22
And 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.
It's a focused thinking.
It's a meditative like experience, actually.
And it improved my IQ tremendously.
And it made me a much more interesting person.
And, you know, and the reason you are talking because you read my book.
And I wouldn't be able to do this, obviously, if I didn't write it.
But after I wrote the book, I still write two hours a day every day.
And writing is like a muscle.
If you keep doing this, it gets easier and easier.
And so I write about, yeah, some 100 hours a year, roughly.
Yeah.
Amazing.
Vitali, you're welcome back.
Thank you for your book.
It certainly blessed and impacted my life.
And I encourage other people to read it.
It's deep and it's well written and it's fulfilling.
Vitali, thank you so much.
Charlie.
Charlie, thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
In fact, email me freedom at charliekirk.com.
Do you think Donald Trump should debate yes or no?
A couple of you that answer will be put in the running to an assigned book.
So email me freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thanks so much and God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.
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