Morgan Housel

I love nice things, but using your money for that

is I think the highest ROI by tenfold.

If you can use it for independence rather than as a material, you know, social peacock showing other people, look how successful I am, using it more inward to just be like, I just want to wake up every morning and say, I can do whatever I want today.

That to me was always the ultimate goal.

I mean, one of the Koch brothers is an unbelievable wine collector.

and has not like tens of thousands of bottles and the rarest, most amazing wine that's ever existed.

And two or three bottles that he purchased, I forget the exact price, it's in the book, but an unbelievable amount of money.

And they were Thomas Jefferson's wines from his estate that he bottled from his estate in Virginia and whatnot.

And he bought, you know, paid.

Well, this is where the story gets good.

They were fake.

They were forged.

Yeah.

He hired a private investigator to like audit his entire wine collection and be like, give me a rough estimate of how much of what I'd bought over the years is fake.

I mean, I forget the exact numbers of what they were, but it was a very uncomfortable percentage of what he had purchased for tens of millions of dollars was all forgery.

And once you dig into it, the wine forgery business is off the charts.

because you have very rich collectors and no way to authenticate what's there.

One of the tells of what they were doing when they were investigating this was like literally this Thomas Jefferson wine.

The label was on there, or for some of these wines, the label would be stuck on with Elmer's glue.

That was invented 50 years ago kind of thing.