The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025


10 Unchanging Ideas for Navigating an Ever-Changing World


Episode Stats

Misogynist Sentences

3

Hate Speech Sentences

2


Summary

To figure out what will happen in the future, we typically make guesswork predictions and look to particular periods in the past that seem like potential parallels. To figure out how to navigate the coming landscape, the best things to consider are those that have been true in every time and will be true until the end of it.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast
00:00:10.720 to figure out what will happen in the future we typically make guesswork predictions and look to
00:00:15.520 particular periods in the past that seem like potential parallels my guest says that to figure
00:00:20.300 out what will happen next and how best to navigate that coming landscape the best things to consider
00:00:24.860 are those that have been true in every time and will be true until the end of it morgan haussell
00:00:29.820 is a venture capitalist and the author of same as ever a guide to what never changes today on the
00:00:35.020 show we talk about the ideas and principles that never change that can help you be successful in
00:00:39.160 an ever-changing world including how the biggest risk are those you can't see how the idea of
00:00:44.040 compound interest applies beyond your finances how your expectations can sabotage your happiness
00:00:48.620 why you need to learn to accept that things are supposed to be hard and how success can lead to
00:00:53.120 failure morgan also shares his rubric for choosing your reading what genres of books he finds most
00:00:58.240 useful for improving long-term thinking and two books he especially recommends for broadening your
00:01:02.640 perspective after the show's over check out our show notes at awim.is slash same as ever
00:01:07.300 all right morgan haussell welcome back to the show thanks so much for having me back appreciate it
00:01:21.060 so you got a new book out called same as ever a guide to what never changes in the introduction of this
00:01:26.320 book you note that jeff bezos says that he's often asked what's going to change the next 10 years and
00:01:32.200 that he says quote i almost never get asked the question what's not going to change in the next 10
00:01:38.500 years and then he says and i submit to you that the second question is actually the more important of the
00:01:43.340 two why is the question or the answer to the question what doesn't change more important so much of
00:01:51.400 this just came from my experience that kind of led to cynicism in the financial industry of how bad we
00:01:56.260 are at forecasting as a whole industry forecasting the next recession forecasting the next bear market
00:02:01.340 or even like in politics who's going to win the next election we're terrible at it we're absolutely
00:02:04.800 abysmal at it and so there's two things you can do with that insight one is you can become even more
00:02:10.360 cynical and just say nobody has any idea what the future is going to hold or you can kind of take the
00:02:14.980 bezos approach and just say look let's just focus on what we know is not going to change what is just
00:02:21.100 an innate part of human behavior that has been happening for hundreds of years and will continue
00:02:26.300 to happen hundreds of years from now and so often i i love history i love all kinds of history and it's
00:02:32.020 so common that whatever you're reading no matter what the time period is no matter what the country is
00:02:36.220 that you see all these common denominators of how people behaved 100 years ago 200 years ago and you
00:02:42.240 will say to yourself you're like oh that's exactly what people do today particularly you know my
00:02:45.820 background is all in finance so if you look at how people responded to the great depression or even
00:02:51.520 some of the big stock market declines in the 1800s it's exactly the same way it is today it's over
00:02:57.120 confidence that leads to panic like none of those things change so let's take that and say like look
00:03:01.820 nobody knows where the stock market is going to go next nobody can predict that but we know exactly how
00:03:07.440 people respond to greed and fear we know exactly how people become overconfident
00:03:11.840 we know exactly how people panic at the wrong periods of time because it's always been like
00:03:15.620 that so let's focus on that if we're going to have some sort of vision of the future rather than
00:03:20.160 pretending that we know what is going to change right by focusing on the things that don't change
00:03:24.560 you increase your chances of success even in the face of setbacks you have a great quote from naval
00:03:29.520 ravikant where he talks about there's a thousand parallel universes and you want to be successful in
00:03:34.760 999 of them and the way you do that is you focus on the things that probably won't change in any of
00:03:40.540 those parallel universes that's it that's it and like by doing that you're almost you're going out
00:03:45.260 of your way to remove luck and chance and serendipity out of the equation and you just want to situate
00:03:51.540 your life and go about your life day to day so that you are doing things and focused on things and
00:03:57.200 paying attention to things that you know are going to be part of your future and then luck and serendipity
00:04:01.680 will play its role on its own but rather than assuming that oh because this person was very successful
00:04:07.820 this person got very rich and trying to figure out how they did it what was their secret by and large
00:04:12.360 those are things that cannot be replicated by you or anyone else or even themselves because they were
00:04:17.060 specific to one time period but if you're focusing on the things that never change you give yourself
00:04:21.840 the highest chance of being successful so let me just give you like one quick example of this if you
00:04:26.460 were looking at warren buffett as somebody to look up to there are a lot of different things that you
00:04:30.260 could take away from his success but how he picked stocks and and the exact stocks that he picked
00:04:36.540 you know back in the 1960s and 70s you can't replicate that today but can you replicate his
00:04:42.160 patience and his endurance like yeah probably so that's something that is worth paying attention to
00:04:47.780 rather than all the other things that you cannot replicate or and by the way like he can't even
00:04:51.800 replicate those things so big picture what are the types of things that don't change it sounds like
00:04:56.620 it's human behavior is what you've been focusing on that tends to be it you know there's a there's a
00:05:00.900 quote that i use at the start of the book from voltaire a very old quote where he says history never
00:05:05.320 repeats itself but man always does and that's really it it's like these like the details of
00:05:11.300 history always change so like compare the great depression to 2008 the details are totally different
00:05:16.320 because we had derivatives we had all these kind of like new financial instruments the details were
00:05:20.580 different but man never changes so how people respond to green fear that never changes so yeah it
00:05:25.980 tends to be these innate parts of human behavior that keep happening over and over again gotcha
00:05:31.100 so in the book you explore 23 different ideas that never change in the first one you explore
00:05:37.140 that big events the big events in life are often the result of tiny random and unforeseeable events
00:05:43.880 and you share a personal story that brings this idea home to readers can you share that story with us
00:05:48.900 yeah so i grew up as a competitive ski racer in lake tahoe california and ski racing is an interesting
00:05:55.340 sport it's obviously not baseball football basketball it's one of those weirdo sports that people don't pay
00:05:59.760 that much attention to and one of the things that's kind of quirky about it is that most
00:06:03.380 ski racers who get serious about it view high school as a nuisance that gets in the way so i
00:06:10.220 and all my other ski racing friends doing this we more or less bypassed high school we did this
00:06:15.560 independent study program that let us ski six days a week 10 months a year and it was great so i grew
00:06:21.360 up with about 12 other ski racers on the squaw valley ski team and we had known each other since we
00:06:25.300 were children we skied six days a week like it was it was a pretty awesome childhood and one day in
00:06:30.600 february of 2001 myself and two of my my best friends brendan allen and brian richmond were skiing
00:06:36.120 and we used to ski out of bounds quite a bit which if you're not familiar that's when you duck under
00:06:40.580 the ropes that say do not cross and because that's where you get some of the best skiing it's untracked
00:06:45.460 you get the place to yourself so we did this quite a bit and when we did it we would often get you know
00:06:50.140 there's no chairlift at the bottom when you ski out of bounds so we would often ski out to like a
00:06:54.680 backcountry road and then we would hitchhike back when we were doing this backcountry skiing during
00:07:00.660 this day we triggered a very small avalanche it was not that big it probably like came up to our knees
00:07:06.200 and it ended pretty quickly it wasn't that big a deal i remember when we got down the bottom we
00:07:10.500 kind of like laughed and high-fived about it it was like oh that was cool a little avalanche you see
00:07:14.000 that brenson so we hitchhiked back to the mountain and brendan and brian wanted to do that run
00:07:19.940 again they said hey that was great let's go do it again and for whatever reason i think it was
00:07:24.840 probably the hitchhiking is what always freaked me out i i didn't want to do it so i said hey
00:07:29.320 brendan and brian how about you guys go do that run again and rather than hitchhiking i'll drive my
00:07:34.520 truck around to the pickup spot on the backcountry road and i'll pick you two up so that's what we did
00:07:39.500 we went our separate ways brendan and brian went off went up the chairlift to go ski another run
00:07:43.880 and i went back to my truck to drive around the mountain to pick them up
00:07:47.420 20 minutes later i get to our pickup spot and they were not there
00:07:51.260 and i didn't think that much of it i think you know we didn't have cell phones back then so people
00:07:56.440 were very comfortable being out of communication it was normal to not know where somebody else was
00:08:00.940 and i didn't think that much of it i eventually left i realized that they were not coming i think
00:08:05.480 i waited 20 or 30 minutes and i was a little bit concerned but i did not think anything that bad
00:08:12.240 but the day went on the hours went on and later that day brian's mom called me at home and said
00:08:18.660 hey brian didn't show up for work today do you know where he is and i told her the truth i said we all
00:08:24.400 skied out of bounds backside of squaw and i was going to pick them up but they never showed up and i haven't
00:08:29.220 seen them since and brian's mom who was an expert skier herself is an expert skier herself i think kind
00:08:35.560 of pieced together in that moment what may have happened and i did as well more hours went on we
00:08:40.960 eventually got the police involved we did a missing persons report the police didn't take it very
00:08:44.680 seriously but we eventually got search and rescue involved and search and rescue went on the mountain
00:08:49.220 at about midnight and it was still a blizzard it was like gusting winds and snow in your face they
00:08:54.000 had these giant portable search lights and search dogs and these giant probe poles and they went
00:09:00.420 looking for brandon and brian at midnight and at about 9 a.m the next morning after they'd been
00:09:05.100 searching for you know nine hours at that point a team of search dogs kind of homed in on a spot
00:09:10.460 where we had been skiing and it had been a massive massive avalanche field the rescuers found the
00:09:17.020 search rescue team found this enormous avalanche debris field from what was clearly an enormous
00:09:22.200 avalanche that had taken place the previous day and the search dogs kind of honed in on the spot
00:09:27.040 and rescuers with probe poles these giant probe poles that searched down found brennan and brian
00:09:31.620 buried under six feet of snow in the avalanche field and they were dead of course and i always have
00:09:38.660 to preface this story by saying like i know that everyone listening to this and and and you brett
00:09:43.820 have lost somebody close to them i i know i'm not unique in this maybe the details were unique but
00:09:48.840 yeah of course a huge impact on me i was 17 at the time so were brennan and brian we're 17 years old
00:09:54.740 and one of the things that it took me a while to really piece this together but was the fact that if
00:10:01.380 i had gone on that second run with them 100 chance i would have died as well and these are two people
00:10:08.140 that i had been growing up with skiing and i skied with them that morning and then i declined a second
00:10:14.300 run and of course you know the initial trauma and still the the trauma and the pain today is losing
00:10:19.600 them but it was this always like maybe it was some form of survivor's guilt of being like gosh the most
00:10:24.820 important decision that i ever made in my entire life to this day was not taking that second run with
00:10:29.920 them and then you realize how fragile life is because i did not really contemplate that decision
00:10:35.760 to not do it with them i didn't i didn't weigh the pros and cons it was not a risk adjusted it was just
00:10:40.620 a random decision hey why don't you guys go i'm gonna i'm gonna stay back and that was the most
00:10:44.220 important decision i've ever made in my entire life so that's just an example of how fragile the world can
00:10:49.160 be we spend a lot of time forecasting risk thinking about risk thinking about what's in front of us
00:10:54.980 the truth is that most risk just comes from this just completely out of the blue
00:10:59.140 no nothing decision that you thought you made and that turns out to be enormously consequential
00:11:03.800 and there's a lot of examples like this in history of just a little tiny thing that somebody did that
00:11:10.120 seemed like the most benign decision ever that utterly transformed all of history and so once you
00:11:17.700 realize how fragile history can be even in your personal life or throughout the broader world
00:11:22.340 you become much more humble in your willingness and confidence to predict what's going to happen
00:11:28.700 next in the future well related to this idea is that the biggest risk in life are the ones we
00:11:33.260 don't see right like the avalanche risk you knew it was there but you didn't know that it was going
00:11:38.620 to happen that one time when you decided not to go yeah you use the example of the great depression
00:11:44.140 as a perfect encapsulation of this idea that the biggest risks are the ones we don't see
00:11:48.160 walks through that idea i did an interview with robert schiller from yale university a few years
00:11:53.480 ago and schiller won the nobel prize in economics for his work in in behavioral finance and part of
00:11:59.080 his his academic career many years ago was working with economic historians to find one person show me
00:12:06.320 one person who predicted the great depression and they can't find one person not a single person there
00:12:12.100 were people who said the economy is overextended there's going to be some sort of a pullback but a
00:12:16.340 depression where unemployment goes to 25 and it lasts for a decade nobody predicted that not a single
00:12:23.260 person saw that coming and people were pretty well informed in the late 1920s it wasn't that everyone
00:12:28.440 was oblivious it was just people knew what was going on they had all the data but the chain of events
00:12:34.620 that led from the stock market crash of 1929 to the depths of the great depression in 1932 33
00:12:40.400 was so unpredictable the number of things that had to happen and in hindsight it all makes sense you see
00:12:47.520 the craziness of the 1920s and in hindsight it's like of course that was the outcome but it was not it
00:12:52.780 was that it was not obvious to literally anybody in 1929 that this was in front of us so that's another
00:12:59.700 example of like the biggest risk is what we don't see coming because today in the year 2023 there are very smart
00:13:05.460 journalists and economists looking at all the risks in the world and saying here's the biggest risk you
00:13:10.960 know we have big budget deficits inflation war in the middle east etc etc and if history is any guide
00:13:16.700 and of course it is the biggest risk of the next year of the next five years of the next decade is
00:13:22.620 something that nobody not myself not you not anybody is even aware of today and think about the last 20
00:13:29.360 years i mean the the biggest risk of the last 20 years were september 11th and covid and that you
00:13:34.880 know the those are the events that move the needle the most and the common denominator of those events
00:13:39.620 is that nobody saw them coming until virtually the day that they happened and so i think it's it's always
00:13:44.460 been like that and it always will be like that so how do you prepare for risks that you can't see
00:13:50.340 i think there is some truth that by definition you can't and that's i i i think that's that's the
00:13:59.560 right answer that's the hard answer but if there is any kind of like okay well what what can you do
00:14:04.340 i've often thought for financial matters at least the amount of savings and liquidity and safety
00:14:10.540 cushion that you should have in your personal finances should feel like it's a little bit too much
00:14:15.400 it it it should make you wince a little bit because when it feels like it's too much
00:14:20.000 then at least you have a fighting chance to prepare for the risks that you cannot even imagine
00:14:24.100 that you can't even envision and if you are only saving for the risks that you can envision the
00:14:29.380 risks that are obvious to you then by definition you're going to miss the surprise 10 times out of
00:14:34.000 10 and so i think most people on average probably don't have enough safety and liquidity because they
00:14:40.280 are only thinking about the obvious risks they're not planning for the 9-11s the covid's the pearl
00:14:46.020 harbors that come out of the blue and do the most damage specifically because
00:14:49.920 nobody saw them coming so you should have uh some slack and slack is inefficient and people don't
00:14:55.280 like inefficiency but that's going to make you more efficient when bad things happen you know it's
00:15:01.380 it's generally true historically that on average roughly once per decade the world breaks once per
00:15:07.100 decade there's a massive event in the world where you wake up one day and you realize the world is not
00:15:12.720 the same place anymore covid was that 9-11 was that world war ii the great depression it's it's
00:15:18.420 usually been like that and during that one moment per decade the excess slack the capacity the cash
00:15:24.820 that you have in your savings is going to become the most valuable asset that you've ever had in your
00:15:29.180 life so another idea you explore is how our expectations can determine our happiness and you
00:15:35.980 start off by looking at how we romanticize the 1950s as this golden era in american history
00:15:41.600 but then when you actually look at the reality it wasn't as good as we remember it what's going on
00:15:47.460 there i think there's a lot of reasons people love to think about and romanticize and become
00:15:52.620 nostalgic for the 1950s one of the reasons is obviously just because the the 20 years that
00:15:58.080 preceded it in the great depression in world war ii were so awful for so many people that any sort of
00:16:03.300 peace and prosperity in the 50s just felt amazing by comparison that's a big reason but i think a lot of
00:16:08.360 like one of the other factors that went on here in the 1950s and why it felt so good and it felt
00:16:12.600 like the golden age of middle class prosperity is because for a brief period of time the distribution
00:16:19.440 between rich and poor the level of income inequality in america got very low there were not billionaire
00:16:24.960 hedge fund managers there were no ceos making 50 million dollars a year it just by and large did
00:16:29.580 not happen in the 1950s and that was really important it did something very important to people's
00:16:34.380 mindsets which is that there's no such thing as an objective level of wealth everything is just
00:16:39.660 relative to other people whenever you're trying to figure out how rich or poor you are you just
00:16:44.540 compare yourself to people around you and in the 1950s most americans could look at their neighbors
00:16:50.980 their co-workers their siblings their friends and say hey relative to them i'm doing pretty well
00:16:55.280 i'm probably doing about as well as they are and so that made people feel great even if statistically
00:17:00.800 they were not that well off even if statistically they were on average substantially poorer than the
00:17:06.780 average american is today even adjusted for inflation they felt better because relative to other people
00:17:12.100 they were closer in circumstances and i think what has happened over the last 80 years or so is that
00:17:18.040 on average we have become not only wealthier but way wealthier higher incomes higher net worth better
00:17:23.520 medical care higher life expectancy but we don't feel it because our expectations have risen by even more
00:17:29.820 so if your income doubles but your expectation triples you feel worse off even if statistically
00:17:35.800 you're doing twice as good as you were before so that's that's a big point i think it's true that
00:17:40.060 if your expectations rise faster than your income you will never be happy with your money
00:17:44.340 and that has been true forever like one common thread in history is that you know particularly for the
00:17:50.340 last 200 years or so things tend to get better for most people most of the time of course there are lots of
00:17:55.780 exceptions but for most people most of the time things get better you become more prosperous but
00:18:01.280 are people actually happier for it by and large the answer is no because with prosperity you just
00:18:06.340 ratchet up your expectations so think about what we have today that did not exist 100 years ago
00:18:11.320 penicillin advil sunscreen like all these like absolute basic necessities that we consider necessities
00:18:18.220 today that would look like magic to somebody 100 years ago but people just of course they just take
00:18:23.240 those for granted there's this quote that i love that says man has an infinite capacity to take
00:18:28.320 things for granted and that's it's kind of a sad realization but it's very true that with progress
00:18:34.160 tends to come a rise in expectations that kind of levels out the happiness that you gain from that
00:18:39.220 progress how do you counter that i think at the society level like at the broad level you can't it's
00:18:45.380 always been like that it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective that people don't just want to
00:18:50.100 become wealthy they want to become wealthier than their peers because that's how you compete for
00:18:54.480 a spouse a mate job opportunities whatever it is it doesn't matter how much you have it just matters
00:19:00.300 how much you have relative to other people who you're competing with is what really matters so i think at
00:19:05.040 the broad level there's there's nothing you can do about it at the individual level i do think it's
00:19:09.220 possible to at least like at the margins realize the game that is being played and realize that if you
00:19:15.960 don't go out of your way to manage your expectations with as much emphasis as you do improving your
00:19:21.040 circumstances you're never going to be happy and don't be surprised when you work your entire life
00:19:26.180 and get a bunch of raises and get a bunch of big bonuses and you're not any happier for it
00:19:29.820 and so i think going out of your way to manage your expectations with as much emphasis as you do
00:19:35.060 improving your circumstances is absolutely essential if you want to become not just wealthy but happy with
00:19:41.040 the wealth that you accrue yeah okay so focus on the absolute numbers instead of comparing yourself
00:19:46.160 to if you have if you got a million dollars in the bank like that's awesome but don't start worrying
00:19:50.780 like oh that guy's got three million i gotta start doing more another principle that stood out to me
00:19:55.080 was people don't want accuracy they want certainty how does that play out in the world it definitely
00:20:01.520 plays out with like commentary online and news and when people are like listening to their favorite
00:20:06.400 pundit by and large you don't want a pundit who is right you want a pundit who makes you feel better
00:20:12.240 and there's a quirk in punditry where if you tell people what they want to hear you as a pundit can be
00:20:18.480 wrong forever without penalty because when people watch a political forecast or a stock market forecast
00:20:24.600 really what they want is to reduce the uncertainty that they have in their head that is causing them
00:20:29.180 some amount of pain and anxiety because everyone i think intuitively knows how uncertain the world is
00:20:34.140 could go this way it could go that way and that uncertainty hurts it's not very fun but so when
00:20:39.300 you find somebody who says hey i actually know exactly where the stock market is going to go next
00:20:43.600 i know exactly who's going to win the presidency i know exactly you know how how the world's going to
00:20:48.500 play out we latch on to that because it instantly reduces the uncertainty that we have in our head
00:20:54.380 even if we intuitively know that what they're saying is bullshit and so there's a very long history of
00:20:59.320 that and i think it plays a role in an enormous degree in investing and politics of people just
00:21:06.960 latching on to the person who is pounding the table with the most certainty even if how the world
00:21:11.720 actually works is a lot of nuance and gradation and working in probabilities without certainties
00:21:19.220 yeah i've read and i think you talk about this in the book that when it comes to certainty
00:21:22.900 people who in the investment world who are like perma bears are always constantly saying oh man the
00:21:28.260 economy is going to crash there's a tendency for people to take that person more seriously because
00:21:32.140 that sounds smart compared to the person who's optimistic about the future because if you're wrong
00:21:37.860 that the economy is going to crash well no one really cares because everything's fine but if you're
00:21:43.460 wrong saying everything's awesome and then everything turns out to not be awesome you don't like that
00:21:48.740 guy it's definitely true that historically optimism makes you sound kind of aloof and detached and not
00:21:55.600 very smart and pessimism makes you sound smart like pessimism always sounds smarter than optimism
00:22:00.680 if if i were to say hey there's a great depression coming stock market is going to crash 90 you're
00:22:06.760 going to lose all your money most people will like sit up in their chairs and pay attention to that
00:22:10.080 but if i were to say hey i have a stock that's going to double in the next year a lot of people would
00:22:14.900 be like that sounds like a sales pitch you're pulling my leg i don't believe that and again like
00:22:19.780 from an evolutionary perspective it makes sense that people are more attuned to threats than
00:22:24.860 opportunities because you have to survive the threats in order to benefit from the opportunities
00:22:30.240 so we're always going to be more attuned to the pessimism than we are the optimism the irony though is
00:22:36.360 like if you are a student of history and you know people's ability to solve problems and become more
00:22:41.540 productive and for in a capitalistic society for that to accrue to you as an investor you should be an
00:22:47.480 optimist like your default assumption should be optimism even if the pessimism is so much more
00:22:53.300 seductive and will capture your attention in ways that optimism never will how have you learned to
00:22:58.360 get more comfortable with uncertainty i think for me it's just been a massive room for error
00:23:04.320 in my finances but i think i actually i think the the honest answer to that question is i don't know
00:23:09.080 if i have i think i'm prone to anxiety as much as anyone else and it was really interesting
00:23:14.580 for someone like me who writes about this stuff professionally to experience march of 2020 and
00:23:20.700 the start of covid that you know that was the intense lockdown month the stock market fell 40
00:23:25.000 during that period and i i didn't sleep very well during that period it was like even if even if you
00:23:30.900 know what the right response is to do once you're in the trenches so to speak everyone i think is kind
00:23:36.740 of naturally hardwired the the caveman part of their brain is to be anxious and uncertain about
00:23:44.160 parts of the world that you don't understand like that's that's a survival mechanism so in in some
00:23:48.560 ways we can't i can't but i think having some degree i think a core to a lot of this is just
00:23:55.320 basic humility the humility that we have no idea what's going to happen next and once you have that
00:24:01.860 then i think your willingness to try to predict goes down and you become more comfortable with saying
00:24:06.860 like look i need to situate my life so that if the world goes this way i'll be okay and if it goes
00:24:11.560 that way i'll be okay if my career goes this way it'll be okay but if it goes that way i'll figure
00:24:16.980 it out too it's less reliance on just a single path planning and more just like look i need to
00:24:23.460 have plan a b c for virtually anything that could happen in the world so i think people understand
00:24:27.860 the power of compound interest but you talk about how this power of compounding plays out in other
00:24:33.080 areas besides money where else do you see this besides finances well i think you you see it in lots
00:24:38.780 of places one of this one of the areas you see it is like in people's individual careers
00:24:42.400 where there's kind of two paths to take your career one that a lot of people will do is they'll
00:24:49.760 work at a company for one year and then move to the next company work there for a year and then the
00:24:54.000 next company work there for a year and that's that's not necessarily bad i'm not criticizing that
00:24:58.120 but another way is try to find a great employer and stay there for your entire career or stay there for
00:25:02.640 10 or 15 years before you move to another company and in the latter you get compounding of networks
00:25:09.000 of institutional knowledge of how that company works versus in the former when you are jumping
00:25:13.880 to a new company or new field every year every two years every time you do that you kind of have to
00:25:18.940 reset your social network your peer network the institutional trust that you have built up at that
00:25:25.100 employer and then so those benefits do not compound whereas the people who might stay at one company
00:25:31.120 or at least in one field for a long period of time those things do start to compound and i think
00:25:36.420 the huge majority of time that you see somebody in their profession and they're so good at it
00:25:40.940 and you watch them you just say how do you it looks effortless how do you do that the answer to that
00:25:45.740 question how do you do that is usually somebody saying i've been doing this thing in this chair
00:25:50.980 for 20 years or more that's usually the answer like because all those skills just started compounding
00:25:56.240 and the people who are jumping around never get that compound interest in their career
00:25:59.940 what have you learned to mitigate the desire to keep switching to different things so that you
00:26:05.980 can get that compounding effect what have you done in your own life well i've been i've been a writer
00:26:10.800 writing about the exact same thing for 17 years so in in some ways and i think that's really benefited
00:26:16.800 me is that not only have i been a writer for 17 years i've been writing about just behavioral finance
00:26:22.360 and virtually nothing else for 17 years and so when you do that just the amount of stories that you pick up
00:26:28.560 along the ways the anecdotes that you pick up along the way the learning what kind of writing style
00:26:33.840 works and what doesn't work there's the only way that you can learn stuff like that is just through
00:26:38.480 not only experience but years or decades of experience and so i think in my own life it's been
00:26:43.740 really beneficial now this is not to say that if you start a new career at age 22 and you hate it
00:26:47.980 that you shouldn't leave or if you have an employer that's that sucks you shouldn't find a new
00:26:52.060 employer it's not to say that whatsoever it's just a recognition that there is so much benefit
00:26:56.280 in terms of compounding to sticking with one thing and using years or decades of hard-fought
00:27:02.600 experience to gain that knowledge and that skill we're going to take a quick break for your word
00:27:07.740 from our sponsors and now back to the show another principle you talk about is that there's a
00:27:15.680 competitive advantage to imperfection and we kind of touched on this a bit earlier so what are the
00:27:21.820 downsides of chasing complete optimization it seems like intuition that people would say like oh you
00:27:27.740 you want to be as efficient as possible and there's definitely like this efficiency fetish among
00:27:32.360 businesses we want to become as lean as possible as efficient as possible one example of like how
00:27:37.320 starkly this backfired was in 2021 when supply chains were really broken you had at that time more
00:27:44.940 consumer demand for things like new cars and washing machines than virtually ever before it was
00:27:51.640 like a record amount of demand but those car companies and those washing machine companies
00:27:56.060 could not keep up with it because their supply chains were so quote-unquote efficient that they didn't have
00:28:01.840 any slack in them and like they all those companies would have been so much better off financially
00:28:07.060 if they had slack in their inventory if they had you know parking lots filled with unsold cars they
00:28:13.120 had the slack in their inventory so that when demand changed they could respond to it but because they
00:28:17.760 had spent so many years just saying you know just in time inventory if we're only going to stock the
00:28:23.280 exact number of cars that we are capable of selling over the next two days it was like such a tight
00:28:28.480 efficiency supply chain that when demand increased a little bit the whole system fell apart the whole
00:28:34.240 system virtually collapsed and so that's like one example of if you have a little bit of room for error
00:28:38.920 and slack and you go out of your way to not be efficient there's actually tremendous amount of
00:28:43.540 value in that tim ferris who of course wrote the four-hour work week in i think 2007 he had spoken
00:28:49.900 about this recently i don't want to put words in his mouth and i want to make sure i'm getting this
00:28:53.360 mostly right at least but he's gone out of his way to become in the last couple of years
00:28:58.180 to be less efficient in his life there's actually a lot of value in being less efficient and just kind of
00:29:03.700 like letting your day play out as it's going to play out and letting serendipity hit you in the
00:29:08.880 face when it wants to once in a while rather than having everything perfectly scheduled at nine o'clock
00:29:13.320 i'm going to do this at 11 o'clock i'm going to do that there's actually tremendous value to just like
00:29:17.540 free floating around and seeing what happens and you only do that when you recognize the value of
00:29:23.020 an inefficient life yeah so you can do this uh in your personal life with your cash savings so instead
00:29:28.800 of having you know all your money allocated in some investment it's good to have a good amount
00:29:34.660 of cash in a savings account somewhere and you might think oh my that's just a big waste like i could be
00:29:39.920 investing that and getting compound interest but you might need it like an emergency could pop up or
00:29:44.700 there could be like an opportunity where if you had cash you could jump on that opportunity and then
00:29:51.060 you can also do this with your time you know in your book you talk about being willing to set blocks of
00:29:56.540 your day where you're not doing anything you're not being productive because that can open you up
00:30:01.920 to new opportunities like that's when you get new ideas when you're not doing anything yeah i think how
00:30:07.060 you schedule your day is really important that a lot of particularly like the type a super ambitious
00:30:11.720 people will want to schedule their day to get the most out of it and i think that is by and large a mistake
00:30:18.200 if you have just several hours a day of unstructured think time on your schedule you will find that in
00:30:25.920 hindsight those will be the most productive hours of your day because good ideas rarely come when
00:30:31.580 you're sitting at your desk and you're like okay nine o'clock is my hour to come up with a good idea
00:30:35.580 that usually doesn't happen most good ideas come when you're going for a walk you're in the shower
00:30:41.000 you're at the gym it's these unstructured kind of free floating times when you let your mind wander
00:30:46.660 that creativity really starts to spark so particularly if you have if you're in a creative field
00:30:51.580 i think the more creative your field is the less structured you want your day the more open you
00:30:56.700 want your calendar even if that feels inefficient that's when the good ideas are actually going to
00:31:00.840 strike you well the other problem with scheduling your day to the hour you create sort of a just in
00:31:06.420 time inventory problem for your day because if one thing gets messed up it screws up your whole
00:31:11.240 schedule like those people who they want to get to the airport like at just the right minutes they
00:31:15.480 don't have to wait that long if traffic happens like they're going to miss their flight
00:31:19.400 that's it i'm i'm gonna i'm gonna knock on wood here because i'm a frequent traveler i've i've
00:31:23.640 never missed a flight in my entire life and i fly virtually every week because i i've i have a ton
00:31:28.580 of room for error and you could say look every time i fly i'm wasting an hour that i could have been
00:31:34.100 at home that i'm just kind of hanging out at at the airport doesn't bother me in the slightest
00:31:38.680 because at least for the work that i do missing a flight could be catastrophic and so those those
00:31:43.680 hours that i've wasted the other thing is i don't view them as wasted hours because when i show up to
00:31:47.360 the airport early i listen to a podcast i walk around airports are the best spots in the world
00:31:52.760 for people watching and so it doesn't bother me in the slightest if you can actually like figure
00:31:56.680 out how to utilize those quote-unquote wasted hours to actually gain some productivity and just have like
00:32:02.160 alone time to think in your head another idea that really hit home to me was it's supposed to be hard
00:32:08.000 what can jerry seinfeld teach us about this principle this is great story of like jerry seinfeld
00:32:13.900 talking with david letterman they've been friends for for decades and letterman was asking seinfeld
00:32:18.480 about the early days of seinfeld the show the sitcom seinfeld and during that period like jerry had all
00:32:24.880 these comedy writers that were supplied by nbc and david letterman says something like hey are those
00:32:31.160 writers a huge help are they like great at writing material and jerry says not really you know they're
00:32:36.260 okay but they're not that good and david letterman says like oh why that's interesting they're not that
00:32:40.480 good why and jerry said wouldn't it be strange if they were all great like wouldn't it be strange if
00:32:46.340 20 just like run-of-the-mill writers could come in and write the most brilliant hilarious company it's
00:32:51.580 supposed to be hard of course they can't come up with genius every single day it's supposed to be
00:32:56.540 hard i think this is really true in investing as well where there's all these statistics that everybody
00:33:01.860 knows about 90 of active fund managers can't beat the market they underperform the benchmark and that is
00:33:08.640 usually used as a statistic of a failed industry or like oh the industry is a scam my response is
00:33:14.780 always like of course it's that way what world would you want to live in or what world do you think you
00:33:19.560 live in in which everybody who tries to beat the market can do it of course 90 can't do it it's
00:33:24.820 supposed to be hard because the rewards are so great just like everybody can't get into the nba
00:33:29.600 it's supposed to be hard that's like the reason that it's hard is why it's enjoyable to watch these
00:33:33.920 are the best people in the world so i think just understanding the cost of admission and the price
00:33:39.100 of success for anything that you do is is really critical and you say that this idea that it's
00:33:44.340 supposed to be hard can help you put up with parts of your job you don't like how so this is cool from
00:33:50.720 jeff bezos that is like really stark but i think it's true he says if you can enjoy half of your job
00:33:55.900 if 50 of your job can be enjoyable that's about as good as it gets and no matter what you're doing
00:34:01.160 whether you're the ceo of a big company or an entry-level worker there is always going to be
00:34:05.460 at least 50 of your job that feels like capital w work it's it's just labor you don't want to do it
00:34:12.700 you don't want to go to this meeting you don't want to do this data entry you don't that's part
00:34:16.400 of it that's part of it there is no job in the world and that is a hundred percent fun and i think
00:34:20.780 people who say they enjoy a hundred percent of their job are are probably covering for something i think
00:34:26.340 there's there are so few exceptions to this that's hard and particularly if you are ambitious
00:34:30.680 and you want a big job you want a high-paying job then that ratio that bezos is talking about is like
00:34:36.900 if you could enjoy 20 of it 10 of it you're probably doing pretty good so i think just that
00:34:42.340 acceptance of the cost of admission the price of success is really important i think that quote
00:34:47.440 really hit home with me because i think there's this there's this idea out there that if you
00:34:51.800 if you love your job it won't ever feel like work um right like there's there's that quote that
00:34:56.520 says you know find a job you enjoy doing you'll never work a day in your life but every job is
00:35:01.580 still a job right even if you're i mean even if you're doing creative work there's going to be
00:35:06.240 parts of your job that just stink it's just it's work yeah it's like you know this is not just like
00:35:11.700 an artistic fulfillment like by and large you are working to support your family or support yourself
00:35:16.360 like it's it's work it's labor and we should recognize how lucky we are today that historically
00:35:22.160 95 of people the work that they did was manual labor and farming and today it's it's roughly
00:35:28.580 you know i forget the exact statistics 70 plus of jobs are considered service jobs something in that
00:35:34.440 range so we are very fortunate today that the kind of work that most people do is physically easier
00:35:40.820 than it used to be but i think it's still or if not even more mentally difficult and generates anxiety
00:35:47.220 and uncertainty and whatnot than it's ever before and you're never going to get rid of that there's
00:35:51.300 never going to be a time of like oh once i get this promotion then it's going to be smooth sailing
00:35:55.920 that's just it's not how it works these careers are supposed to be difficult that's why they can be
00:36:00.560 rewarding and so that's i think that's that's important for anything that you do in life and by
00:36:05.480 and large it's true for relationships like marriages take work and if people don't believe that they
00:36:11.900 should get their divorce papers ready of course it's hard of course it takes work and sacrifice and
00:36:17.360 what not of course it does and once you accept that price of admission then you realize that the
00:36:21.960 price is worth paying that the rewards are great but it's the people who don't realize that cost that
00:36:27.420 get themselves into trouble yeah my wife and i have an inside joke we worked at jamba juice together
00:36:31.700 when we first got married and we were in college so we just made smoothies all the time just you
00:36:36.140 know monotonous making smoothies making strawberry wild smoothies and we have a joke now with our job
00:36:41.600 there's certain tasks that are just like it's just monotonous boring even though we do a lot of
00:36:45.360 creative stuff right do podcast whatever there's parts of the job we just it's called smoothie
00:36:49.880 making it's like oh what are you doing i'm making smoothies today and it's just doing it's doing the
00:36:53.480 grunt work of the job you never get rid of that stuff no matter what you do yeah i mean it's really
00:36:58.840 true for parenting as well before you're a parent it's easy to imagine what it's going to be like and
00:37:03.820 it's going to be oh reading my kid bedtime stories doing arts and crafts playing baseball and yes there is
00:37:10.080 that but 90 of parenting is picking up mac and cheese from the floor changing diapers dealing
00:37:16.940 with screaming kids that's 90 of it like 90 of it is not that pleasant but by the way back to my last
00:37:22.360 point it's worth that cost of admission if you can deal with the food stains and the dirty diapers
00:37:28.300 and whatnot is well well worth the cost of admission you just have to recognize what you're getting
00:37:32.920 yourself into before you start but a trick with this is trying to figure out the balance of how much
00:37:38.220 crap you're going to put up with and figuring out the reward to it so how do you develop that ability
00:37:43.200 to identify the optimal amount of hassle and nonsense you have to put up with something to
00:37:47.980 get ahead in life because sometimes it's not worth it i don't know if there's a formula for it and it's
00:37:53.380 going to be different in every situation so rather than trying to say like what is the optimal amount
00:37:58.540 i think you can flip it over and just say it's just realizing that there's going to be some of it
00:38:03.260 there's going to be some like if you have no capacity to deal with inefficiency and nonsense
00:38:09.600 and rude people and delayed flights if your capacity to deal with that is zero you're going
00:38:14.620 to have a very difficult life and i i think you know again there's no formula but i often think in
00:38:19.600 my life i'm just making this number up i'm like you need to have a 20 capacity for your life of just
00:38:24.900 bullshit of 20 of what happens in your day and in your year is going to be things where you're like
00:38:30.580 ah really i got to deal with this i got a flat tire i got a meeting i got to go to i got to deal
00:38:35.940 with this silly nonsense that's life 20 capacity for dealing with bs on a day-to-day basis right the
00:38:42.000 silly nonsense that's something that never changes right never going to change you also talk about how
00:38:46.900 competitive advantages they usually end up dying at some point why do most competitive advantages die
00:38:52.980 there's lots of reasons the biggest and most important one is that success makes people
00:38:58.800 lazy and happy so to speak and then the fear and anxiety that created the success that drove them
00:39:06.340 into action dissipates as they become successful and then their success is cyclical they were scared
00:39:13.260 and anxious with which drove them to success once they were rich and successful that anxiety went away
00:39:18.620 and once the anxiety that made them successful goes away they begin their decline so that cyclicality
00:39:24.480 of success you see it everywhere at the individual level at the corporate level even like the
00:39:28.260 nation level you can see that you see it in the united states and so realizing that you know most
00:39:35.380 competitive advantages die makes you more aware of what it takes to succeed and just going out of
00:39:42.020 your way to ask the question what is my competitive advantage a lot of people will assume that their
00:39:47.100 competitive advantage was intelligence or some level of skill and sometimes that's the case that's
00:39:52.680 usually at least some part of it but for so much of this whether it's in sports or careers or
00:39:57.540 relationships what made you successful was fear you woke up scared every morning and that that fear
00:40:03.520 drove you into action and once your success eats away at that fear and you become fat and happy so to
00:40:09.600 speak that's the danger zone that's when you're really at a lot of risk is when you feel you're at
00:40:14.060 the mountaintop and you can kick your legs up and relax a little bit that's the danger zone yeah you give
00:40:18.880 the example of sears as a story of a brand or a company that had a competitive advantage but their
00:40:25.200 success actually led to their downfall it's like they like sears became so ridiculously successful in
00:40:31.180 the 70s and 80s that i think they got egotistical and they were like look we're really good at selling
00:40:36.380 socks and underwear we should now become a bank we should become a stock brokerage they started buying
00:40:42.340 they bought dean witter and they bought discover car they bought all these crazy things that they had no
00:40:45.940 idea what they were doing and i think that was just they became so successful that they thought
00:40:50.460 they could do anything and once they let that focus drift then walmart and target and eventually
00:40:56.980 amazon just came in and ate their lunch and this was a company that had been so successful at chasing
00:41:01.900 off competitors for a hundred years and then in the course of 10 or 15 years they lost everything
00:41:07.120 just went up in flames and so that's one example but there's that's that's almost that's the most
00:41:12.340 common story uh for successful businesses and without making any kind of predictions here you can
00:41:18.300 easily imagine a world in which 30 years from now at least one of amazon google microsoft tesla
00:41:25.620 those those big companies will be out of business i have no idea which one but just historically
00:41:31.680 speaking that should be your baseline scenario that's historically how it's worked i mean if you go
00:41:36.520 back even to the late 1990s not that long ago the big companies were kodak aig city group general motors
00:41:45.360 all those companies either don't exist or went bankrupt even if they still exist like and but those were
00:41:51.160 the behemoths back then sears of course was in there jc pennies and 20 years before that it was ibm and
00:41:58.300 us steel and all these companies that even though they they still exist they are shells of their former
00:42:03.220 selves so that's the most likely outcome in these situations is that former companies that had
00:42:08.460 massive competitive advantage similar to how what apple amazon have today they eventually lose it well
00:42:14.520 in your own life what can you do to counter this tendency for your competitive advantage to decline
00:42:20.100 because you just get you get lazy i think to some extent i i really admire the people who quit while
00:42:27.360 they're ahead and obviously most people just can't just quit their job whenever they want to i mean
00:42:32.700 hopefully they'll retire someday but i really admire the people who say look it was stress and anxiety
00:42:38.140 that got me here and i don't want to be stressed anymore so rather than becoming lazy on my job i'm gonna
00:42:43.780 quit the best example to me of that was jerry seinfeld whose show was on top of the world in 1998 it was
00:42:50.780 the biggest it had ever been and for various reasons he realized that what made the show so great at least
00:42:57.660 had the potential of dissipating and he said the only way to know where the top is is to experience
00:43:03.940 the decline and he said i had no desire to do that so when the show was absolutely at its peak
00:43:09.960 and had never been bigger he quit he pulled the plug and that is so hard to do but i really admire
00:43:15.120 those people who realize that it is way more beneficial for your reputation your legacy for your mental
00:43:22.080 health for your financial well-being it's way better to quit while you're ahead than it is to
00:43:27.000 experience the decline after you lose the skill that made you successful to begin with another idea
00:43:32.500 you talk about is the power of incentives to help help you understand why people do what they do even
00:43:37.600 like the crazy behavior so how can incentives understanding incentives help us understand people
00:43:42.080 i think a lot of times when you see somebody do something crazy or even evil it's easy to just say
00:43:50.300 that person is is a bad person that's an evil person and very often that's that's that is the
00:43:56.500 correct answer very often you can descend there i think what people overlook is that there are a lot
00:44:01.780 of things that they themselves you yourself me myself would do if we had the right incentives so
00:44:09.300 like one example here after the financial crisis of 2008 it was very easy to point the fingers at the
00:44:15.740 greedy wall street bankers who ruined the economy and like they like by and large that that actually
00:44:21.280 was the accurate criticism there's nothing wrong with that criticism what people missed was the idea
00:44:27.260 that look if you yourself the person criticizing if you were 27 and you worked at some wall street
00:44:33.900 investment bank and they said hey if you package these subprime bonds that were sold to widows and
00:44:38.800 orphans we'll give you a million dollar bonus we'll give you a 10 million dollar bonus you would
00:44:43.680 probably do it too it's so easy to criticize without realizing the incentives that will do it and
00:44:48.900 most people don't understand the boundaries of their morality and how those boundaries can be
00:44:55.380 influenced by the incentives of the system that they are operating in and that has a big impact i i think
00:45:01.240 it makes a lot of people more cynical than they could be and it also makes people ignorant to how
00:45:06.200 fragile the world can be because if you think like oh myself and everyone around me we're good people
00:45:11.640 we're moral people and we would not do x y and z you're going to miss the periods in which the
00:45:16.460 incentives are dangled in front of you that will cause you to do those things and therefore like
00:45:22.160 those people i think by and large underestimate wars financial crises whatever it might be and you
00:45:28.480 look at a war or financial crisis and you say how could somebody possibly do that and most of the time
00:45:34.580 the answer is because that person has incentives social incentives religious incentives nationalistic
00:45:41.660 incentives financial incentives that would actually make you possibly do that similar thing if you are
00:45:48.100 in their shoes yeah and uh you talk about you see this with when you go to a doctor or maybe a
00:45:54.620 financial advisor or maybe some sort of coach and you're looking for advice and they have an incentive
00:46:00.920 to make it look like they're offering you good advice so they're going to tell you to do something
00:46:05.780 even when maybe the more appropriate response would be like well actually you don't need to do anything
00:46:09.800 about this i actually went to the doctor this week with something that i went with 100 certainty in my
00:46:16.680 own intuition thought this is going to need surgery this is going to need a big intervention and the
00:46:21.520 doctor looked at it and said no you're fine you don't need to do anything get out of here go home you're
00:46:24.780 fine and it's like it's so refreshing to hear it once in a while because you're right that
00:46:28.160 i think it's very well intentioned that a doctor or a financial advisor or a consultant
00:46:33.000 wants like genuinely wants to give their patient or their client the right advice the best advice
00:46:39.040 but it's very hard to charge particularly a high fee a high hourly rate if you look your client in
00:46:45.420 the eye and say there's nothing you need to do just go home you like that's not adding any value
00:46:49.700 the desire to want to add value makes them want to pull some lever twist some dial do something for
00:46:55.620 the client to make it seem like they're adding value here and so that's the incentive that leads
00:47:00.620 to a lot of bad financial advice probably a lot of bad medical advice it's actually well-meaning it's
00:47:05.800 just the incentives of that system lean towards action in fields where sometimes do nothing is the best
00:47:12.660 answer and the right answer yeah i've had this issue with my roof so i got a metal seam roof and
00:47:17.420 there's been a leak somewhere and of course who do you call to you know look at your roof it's a roof
00:47:23.120 company every time i've brought out a roof company every single one of them has tried to sell me a
00:47:28.780 roof i finally found a company that said no we just need to make this one patch and you're good
00:47:32.860 but every other company is like no you need an entirely new roof and then you understand it's
00:47:36.480 like it's incentives what is that warren buffett quote like never ask a barber if you need a haircut
00:47:40.660 because he's always going to tell you you need a haircut that's it here's what's so interesting
00:47:43.860 about it when you say that i'm willing to bet that when you do need a new roof you're going to go
00:47:49.600 back to that guy yeah who told you that you don't need one because he just gained your trust so the
00:47:54.120 irony here is like if you can actually push back against those incentives you actually build a huge
00:47:59.520 amount of trust and that trust is going to be the most the biggest and most important financial asset
00:48:04.680 and financial driver that you have over time and or if your neighbor or your sibling or whatever
00:48:09.900 needed a new roof you would probably recommend them to that person who just declined an opportunity to
00:48:14.600 give you a new roof so what all these ideas have in common is that it requires you to look at life
00:48:20.520 in the world with a a long-term view right you can't just think about this situation because things
00:48:26.680 are constantly changing but all these things we talked about they happen on the long term
00:48:30.560 you mentioned in the book that you started reading more history books to get better at long-term
00:48:35.720 thinking were there any books in particular that had a big impact on your thinking like history books
00:48:40.920 there's one that really sticks out it's a book called the great depression a diary and self
00:48:46.960 explanatory title it was written by this ohio lawyer in 1930 or in the 1930s named benjamin roth and he
00:48:53.540 was a bankruptcy attorney in youngstown ohio and he just kept a very elaborate diary it was his personal
00:48:58.880 diary of what he witnessed during the great depression and how people in his town were dealing with
00:49:04.460 the decline and since he was a bankruptcy attorney he really had a front row seat into how the
00:49:09.140 depression was playing out and his son published it in 2010 and i think it's inadvertently the best
00:49:15.380 economic book that's ever been written because there's no hindsight bias in it most books about
00:49:20.440 the great depression or books about world war ii have hindsight bias you know how the story ends
00:49:24.900 and that colors the opinion of the person writing it but in 1932 benjamin roth did not know how it was
00:49:32.000 going to end he didn't know if it would ever end the great depression so when he's writing about it
00:49:36.820 it's so raw and you really feel the emotions and the uncertainty that they were dealing with
00:49:41.140 i mean the only other parallel there is anne frank's diary of the there's another world war ii book that
00:49:47.280 has no hindsight bias she did not know how it was going to end she didn't know how her story was going
00:49:51.700 to end and that is so rare and unique because anyone who is writing about history when they know
00:49:57.300 how the story ends is going to be influenced in some very subtle way that changes the arc of the story
00:50:02.420 but when you really see someone who is writing in real time it's a fascinating thing to witness so
00:50:07.740 that that that really stuck out to me and you also talk about when you pick your reading what you're
00:50:12.840 going to read for like just books or articles you always ask yourself will i care about this a year
00:50:17.240 from now 10 years from now 80 years from now and if the answer is no that's okay but i'm not going
00:50:22.680 to spend much time reading that type of stuff and the answer is no most of the time that's that's
00:50:27.400 usually the case i used to be a columnist at the wall street journal great place with people i
00:50:31.240 admire but there was such a strong push to make every article relevant to today's news so i would
00:50:37.540 write a column about investing behavior and sometimes the editors would say hey good piece
00:50:42.000 but how is this relevant to what's going on in the world today and i would want to push back and say
00:50:46.020 it's not but by and large it shouldn't if an article is not relevant a year from now it's not relevant
00:50:51.220 today that's how i viewed it but there was such a this idea that everything has to be tied to
00:50:57.180 what happened in your world over the last 24 hours and i think once you break away from that
00:51:02.760 or you recognize it you realize that the huge majority particularly of news that is published
00:51:06.660 today it's not that it's irrelevant but if you look at something like oh this company reported
00:51:11.760 quarterly earnings there's i'm not saying that's not relevant but will you care about that a year from
00:51:16.440 now of course you won't so once you put it through that filter it filters out the vast majority of
00:51:21.420 noise that's going on in the world besides reading history books or books with ideas that stand the
00:51:26.400 test of time what else have you done to improve your long-term thinking i mean this is somewhat
00:51:31.140 related but i love reading biographies particularly of very successful people you know entrepreneurs
00:51:36.160 politicians generals whoever it might be for the sole reason of 99 of the time if not you know
00:51:43.460 virtually 100 of the time at the end of the book you will say to yourself wow that person achieved a
00:51:48.260 lot in life and had a lot of success and their life looked like it sucks they were so stressed
00:51:54.120 the cost of their success was so enormous it came exclusively at the expense of the relationships with
00:52:00.420 their kids and their spouse and once you realize that then i think it's really important to start
00:52:04.920 admiring the right people like once you get the full view of their life and you're not just cherry
00:52:09.160 picking their success but you saw what it took to achieve that success there's a lot at the end where
00:52:14.280 i'm like oh it's so easy to look at just the the awards and the money and once you take a longer
00:52:20.240 view of like yes but here's what they had to sacrifice to get that this is true for elon musk
00:52:25.940 bill gates like all of these people today have made such enormous personal sacrifices to get where they
00:52:33.540 are that i think the vast majority of people definitely me once they get a full view of that you will say
00:52:39.240 look i admire those people i'm so glad that they exist because they make society better but never
00:52:44.680 in a million years would i actually want their life for myself is there a biography that you like
00:52:49.020 that really sticks out to you that you've read one that's so interesting i've read twice i think is a
00:52:53.980 biography of joseph kennedy john f kennedy's father and he's such an interesting person because when joe
00:52:59.600 kennedy was 20 he made this goal that he was going to make so much money that his kids would never have
00:53:06.280 to work and they could devote their entire life to politics to eventually become president
00:53:09.860 that was his life goal when he was 20 and he did it like he was just had the singular focus of
00:53:15.300 the only reason he wanted to become wealthy and he was extremely wealthy was so that his kids could
00:53:20.400 become president and it's just like that hey that's a perfect example if you see that and i think it's
00:53:25.680 fascinating but it's like god what a what a dumb life that is like what an egotistical life that is i
00:53:30.940 would never want to do that but he was such a he was such a an arrogant old bastard for lack of a
00:53:37.480 better phrase that it's just an absolutely fascinating life that he had this crazy ambition
00:53:43.020 and he did it and by the way john f kennedy was not his child that was supposed to become president
00:53:48.180 that the golden child was jfk's brother joe kennedy who died in world war ii so even after that dream
00:53:54.880 was shattered joe kennedy just immediately pivoted and said okay john you're going to be the one got to get
00:54:00.600 you into politics let's get going and even though jfk had a pretty mundane childhood he didn't really
00:54:06.500 have any skills that stuck out to anyone it was so important to the family that he became a successful
00:54:12.560 politician that it was just a 24 hour a day drive to turn him into a great public speaker uh informed
00:54:19.180 historian to understand how politics works and of course he became a president it's just a remarkable
00:54:24.700 story of like how driven to one goal one family can be yeah you talk about you this is that was
00:54:30.000 that's one of your other principles in the book that sometimes the characteristics that makes
00:54:33.480 someone successful also comes with like shadow characteristics that makes those good things
00:54:38.840 possible and you have to decide well do i want all because if you want to be successful like say
00:54:43.800 elon musk you have to be completely like elon musk and elon musk in his private life from what i've read
00:54:49.900 doesn't seem that great none does not seem great that's the the charitable definition of it seems awful
00:54:55.760 from my perspective you know what makes me happy in life and i'm sure i'm not rare in this is like
00:55:00.700 hanging out with my wife hanging out with my kids going for walks so they'll having dinner with my
00:55:04.760 family and what you see for the huge majority of these people who are mega successful is that the
00:55:09.880 mega success came at the direct expense of their family and personal life bill gates talks about when
00:55:15.060 he was really active in microsoft he went 30 years without taking a day off he worked seven days a
00:55:20.880 week for 30 years and it's like that's again i'm so i'm so grateful that he exists and people like
00:55:26.420 him exist because they create all this new technology that i benefit from but be careful when you are
00:55:32.180 idolizing these people it's one thing to say i'm glad they exist it's another to say i wish i had that
00:55:37.260 life that is for me at least by and large a step too far well morgan this has been a great conversation
00:55:42.520 where can people go to learn more about the book in your work so same as ever comes out november 7th
00:55:46.960 you can buy it on amazon barnes and noble wherever you buy books i spend most of my time on twitter
00:55:51.260 my handle is morgan housel just my first and last name fantastic well morgan housel thanks for your
00:55:55.180 time it's been a pleasure thanks so much my guest name is morgan housel he's the author of the book
00:56:00.140 same as ever it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can find more information
00:56:04.140 about his work at his website morgan housel.com also check out our show notes at aom.is
00:56:08.580 slash same as ever where you find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic
00:56:16.960 well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at
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