9 Timeless Lessons About Human Psychology - Morgan Housel

dude I got to say before we get started your new book is absolutely phenomenal it feels like it was written purposefully for me your ability to weave a story into a lesson is ungodly and everybody needs to go and buy same as ever right now it's one of the best things that I've read in a very long time that makes me so happy to hear and maybe it was written for the show maybe I wrote it just for this episode right now that we're doing who knows yes yes I knew it I knew it I knew that you dedicated years of your life to just me my only child my inner only child is coming out again oh also got to show uh the Rangers going to the World Series so I am uh repping appropriately the purpose of your book same as ever is to kind of as far as I can see explain to people the underlying uh principles and rules like the thermodynamics of life that doesn't change but a lot of the time people focus on things that they think won't change but will so what do most people get wrong when they're making predictions well it's it's pretty well known that particularly in finance and economics but also in politics things like that we're so bad at predicting predicting the next recession predicting when the stock market's going to fall predicting who's going to win the election it's not just bad it's abysmal it's absolutely disastrous and so I've been a financial writer for 17 years and a big part of what I've focused on is just trying to answer the question like why are we so bad at this and why does nobody care that we're so bad at this despite the track AR people keep doing it over and over again and one of the one of the ideas that I that I stumbled across was just the idea that and it's it's it's kind of ironic in tongue and cheek but it's not that we're bad at predicting it's that we're actually very good at predicting except for the surprises and the surprises are tend to be like virtually all that matter over time and so part of me was when I just accepted how terrible we are at predicting there's two with there's two things that you can do after that you can become a grump about it and just say just just become a cynic and say there's nothing we can do nobody knows anything by humbug or you can say okay actually are there things that never change that we put all of our weight into and I think if you look over history across any field in history business economics entertainment medicine Politics the themes that repeat themselves over and over again once you start looking for them they're everywhere and it's always like the characters change but it's the same movie over and over again and once you focus on that and then you marry that with this idea that we can't predict the change nobody can nobody's ever been able to do it nobody ever will be able to do it because they're all surprising and then you marry that with there's actually all these facets of human behavior that never change all right so let's put all of our emphasis and our new view of the Future Let's only focus on what we know is never going to change and there could be literally thousands of those bits of human behavior that never changed for the book I focused on 23 that I thought were powerful to me and that I thought I had stories to tell about of these things that like look regardless of what happens in the future we know that these things are going to be part of it regardless of which direction which path we go down it's so interesting to think about the Common Thread that ties all of this together being the idiot shaven Apes that kind of inhabit it the world can be different there can be a catastrophe or not it can be peace time or wartime there can be a depression or it can be the the greatest wealth creation period in history but ultimately humans are always going to respond with the same fear and greed and envy and lack of altruism and focus on their own self first I had I know quote Neil Ferguson at the start of the book and I had him on a couple of weeks ago and I asked him just how accurate is the quote history doesn't repeat itself but it often Rhymes and he called it doubly wrong he said not only is it not right it's also not what Mark Twain said so just in case anybody needed a final sort of nail in the coffin of that yeah you've got this great quote as well you say to know where we're going you have to know where we've been but the more realistic is admitting that if you know where we've been you realize we have no no idea where we're going events compound in unfathomable ways I mean there's so many there's so many little stories in history where you realize how fragile history is and whether it's the start of World War II or 911 or Co you realize that there would have been just a little tiny no nothing change in circumstances that nobody paid any attention to that would have utterly transformed everything one of the stories I tell in the book came from David McCulla who is a a historian died not too long ago but he was one of the foremost authorities on the Revolutionary War and I know I'm I'm an American talking to a Brit this is going to get really awkward here for a second I'm I'm an immigrant to this great nation I survived two Fourth of July without getting into an existential crisis I'm okay well let's say bygones be byon let's talk about the Revolutionary War uh there's there's a scene where David McCulla says there was a period in the Revolutionary War where the the British had George Washington cornered uh just outside of Long Island and all they had to do was sail up the East River in New York and George Washington would have been quartered it all would have been over and but they couldn't do it because the winds were blowing in the wrong direction last night they could not sail up the East River which gave George Washington just enough time to get away and David McCulla was asked he said if the winds were blowing in the other direction that night would there be a United States of America and he said no it never would have happened like the entire existence of this country relied on the winds blowing One Direction This One Night in the 1700s and if you take that out and you can tell similar stories about the start of World War I World War II the Civil War there's all these the more you dig into it you realize how fragile history is and then you have to accept if history is that fragile well the future is too there's going to be all these little no nothing the equivalent of the wind blowing in the wrong direction that's happening today that will completely spiral into this God knows unknown story 10 or 20 years into the future and it's just a plea for humility like when when you piece together how fragile the past is you realize that we have absolutely no clue some of the finer details of what's going to happen in the future yeah if you know where we've been you realize we have no idea where we're going each big story could have been turned out differently if it had a few little puffs of nothingness going in the other direction it's uh I think people want to have a sense of control and certainty about the future and it's disquieting to realize just how much random chance gets thrown into this and that's kind of what a lot of people didn't like the fact that Neil said the cycles of history aren't really Cycles the only things that are the same of the humans because it makes us feel uncertain and we go oh my God like maybe maybe I'm not going to be able to predict what happens next and he goes well yeah previously could you have predicted what happened then what was that thing about um uh about the depression like how many people were able to predict the depression zero exactly zero People Robert Schiller from yell University won the Nobel prize in economics he devoted a big chunk of his career to working with economic historians to find one person who predicted the Great Depression and they could find a couple people who would say we're look you know the economy is due to to decline or due for a recession but who predicted the Great Depression 0.0 people and of course that was that was the biggest economic event of the century and so and look people were pretty well informed back then it it's not that people were running around oblivious to what was happening everyone knew the stock market was crazy everyone knew things were stretched here but the chain of events that actually turned the decline into the Great Depression could not have been foreseen I mean the the B not to go not to go down too much of a rabbit hole here but what really made the Great Depression awful was the banking crisis it wasn't the stock market crash it wasn't necessarily the Dust Bowl it was once the bank started failing all hell broke loose and the banking crisis really began in Austria when there was a big bank called credit onsa that went out of business and you can literally track it on a map that the banking wave spread across the world it went from Austria to Paris to London and eventually made its way to New York and then spread throughout the rest of the United States and it's literally like you can you can draw a straight line from this Austrian bank in 1931 going out of business to a guy in the middle of Ohio losing his job it's not the kind of thing that somebody in 1925 could have predicted it was such a crazy chain of events that made it all happen yeah you've got this nice summation we are very good at predicting the future except for the surprises and and the next line of that was and the surprises tend to be all that matter over time it tends to be like if you look at the big events that have really moved the needle in history for the last 80 years in the United States at least it's Pearl Harbor September 11th Co those are the things that like we woke up one morning and we said oh [ __ ] the world is not the same the world is not the same place it was yesterday and the common denominator of those three events and you can add some more to it are that nobody saw them coming there were not there was no economic Outlook a year before that said get ready for 911 no nobody wrote that in the year 2000 I write in the book this crazy newscast that I came across and it's from the morning of September 11th and it's like haunting to listen to it it it it takes place about 20 minutes before the attack takes place and it's this newscaster I'm going to paraphrase but she says good morning it's Tuesday September September 11th beautiful day here in New York City and the the side like just she's completely oblivious to what's about to happen 20 minutes later which of course nobody could have seen it coming and you can say with so much certainty that the biggest news story of the next year and the next five years the next 10 years is something that nobody is talking about today that everyone's completely oblivious to because it's always been like that it's always been like that I mean just in recent times how many people month ago we talking about Hamas and and Israel outside of that region zero nobody but now it's the biggest new story in the world same with two years ago with Russia and Ukraine Co of course like there's a great quote from Carl Richards financial advisor he says risk is what is left over when you think you've thought of everything so you go out of your way to try to view the future in your own life and in the economy and it's like great that's a good thing to do and then after you have thought about all the risks in your life the thing that you're not thinking about the thing that's not on that list is the one that's actually going to do the most damage because if it was on the list you would have mitigated it in some way or another you would prepare for it I mean the perfect example of that is Y2K it's not that it wasn't a risk but everyone had been freaking out about it for five years so when it happened everyone had prepared for it the computers had been changed whatever it was so compare Y2K to 911 that nobody saw coming it's like it's night and day who was that NASA guy who's that the dude with a helmet yes yes re I want to hear I love that story dude it was one of the best ones in the book so it's a crazy story that I came across I was reading I I had this kick a couple years ago where I was really into studying the Apollo missions because I think walk going to the Moon is the coolest thing humans have ever done it's like the craziest the riskiest the most the most ballsy and I came across this little story and it was almost a foot note but it one of those things where you read it and you're like wait tell me more about that that sounds fascinating and what it was is before NASA went into space on Rockets which were expensive and dangerous they used to test a lot of their equipment on these ultra high altitude hot air balloons they had these hot air balloons that could go up to like 150,000 feet like basically the edge of space and they would do it to test a lot of their equipment so in July of 1960 there was a uh US Air Force test pilot his name was Victor Prather who took the hot air balloon up to about 112,000 feet to test NASA's new suit it was a suit that they eventually used in the Gemini missions and he goes up suit works great everything's perfect he's heading back down to earth he starts descending back down to earth and one of the quirks of the suit that he was wearing the space suit was that it was very hot and stuffy to breathe in particularly in in the Florida summer heat as he's descending back down to earth so when he was low enough to breathe on his own which is like 5,000 feet he opened up the face plate on his helmet just to catch some fresh air like not not that big a deal he knows he's low enough to breath on his own like who cares the plan A in that situation is that the hot air balloon would land on the of an aircraft carrier that was what they intended but a very wellknown and well rehearsed Plan B is that he would land in the ocean because it was it was just hard to stick the landing on this hot air balloon and so that's what happens he lands in the ocean nobody's panicking in that situation uh an Air Force helicopter is going to hover over him drop a rescue line that he attaches to himself and gets pulled to safety as he's doing that he slips and he falls into the ocean and that too like was not supposed to be that big a deal they had rehearsed this and whatnot but uh because the the the suit that he was wearing was supposed to be watertight and and buoyant he's supposed to Bob in the water but since he had opened up the face plate to his helmet all a sudden he was not watertight and as soon as he hits the water his suit fills up with water and he sinks to the bottom of the ocean and drowns and there could be so many takeaways from this story one of them that I think is just Bonkers is that there are four NASA astronauts who die in the mission getting to the Moon all of them died on Earth Earth which is just like crazy in itself but the other that I think about a lot is that um NASA is the most planning Centric organization that's ever existed like you don't go to the Moon by crossing your fingers and hoping for the best every imaginable risk that they could think of was planned out and they had plan A B and C contingencies for how to mitigate that risk and in their postmortem of what happened to Victor prth when he drowned they said something to the effect of we had thought of every single risk in this Mission except for the one thing that mattered most which is that this poor guy just wanted to get some fresh air and that that I think that's the definition of risk it's what's left over when you think you've thought of everything the other thing is like you can imagine the planners for this Mission planning about what ha I'm making this up because I don't I don't I'm not an engineer what happens if the balloon pops what happens if we run out of fuel whatever it might be you're not going to plan what happens if this poor guy wants to catch some fresh air right there's another story that I wrote about in the psychology of money that I thought was was so ridiculous when I read it it was during the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II and there was a division of German tanks uh out on the rear lines and they got called up to the front and it's like 20 or 30 tanks they get called up to the front battle lines all the tank commanders turn their tank on I don't know if it's a key or a button or whatever and none of them start the the entire division of Tanks their tanks don't start and they start to research what the hell's going on here and they realize that when the tanks were sitting in reserve the field mice outside of Stalingrad chewed through the wires and then so they can't so I use this an example too of like imagine you're like an army General and you're planning for what can go wrong and what can go wrong is you get shot at you get bombed you run out of food nobody is like hey make sure that we protect oursel from the mice in the fields right it's always a thing that you never see coming that's actually going to pose the biggest risk I wonder if those were specially trained sabater mice they were they were Soviet train mice during that period that would be correct so given the fact that risk is what is left over after we think that we've thought of everything like what can we do about risk how what should our relationship with risk be like given that as you say I mean do people become nihilistic and just stop caring about risk at all do people become uh overly risk averse and try to stay clear of stuff what's your relationship to risk like I I do think there's some balance between those two I I I think the honest answer to your question is this is why the world is risky and it's always going to be risky and there is not much we can do about it I think that's that's the honest answer if there is a more technical answer that I think particularly as it pertains to finance it's that if you are only planning for and saving for the risks that you can Envision by definition you're going to miss the surprise every single time and so I I tend to have quite a bit of cash as a percentage of my net worth and there have been a lot of people who would ask like like what are you saving for and my answer is always I don't know because of course if I was only planning for things that I could Envision oh I'm going to need a new car here and my kids are going to go to college then you're always going to miss the equivalent of Pearl Harbor 911 coid every single time so the amount of safety that you have it's it's not to say be completely risk averse that's not the point at all but the amount of cushion that you have should feel like it's too much because when it feels like it's too much you say it should make you wins it should make you a little bit Yeah and because it like like like if it feels like the right amount then you know you're unprepared by definition right so I guess the meta lesson here or it sounds like is bake in more contingency a greater buffer around your current risk profile to attempt as best you can to account for that which has been left over that you haven't been able to think of that's the only way to do it and the other thing to to to recognize is that the world usually breaks about once per decade not not not exactly on that timeline but pretty much once per decade there's a big event where like I said people wake up and they say the world's not the same as as it used to be so during that time when your savings makes you wise you might have to sit on a wincing amount of savings for a decade but once a decade you're going to realize it's the most valuable asset you've ever had in your life the first rule of happiness is low expectations why because every every bit of happiness every every bit of joy that you're going to get out of life is simply the gap between your expectations and your circumstances and you can show this very cleanly by just pointing out things like John de Rockefeller he was he was the richest man who ever lived his adjusted for inflation he was worth nearly half a trillion dollars in his time but during his entire life I think he died in 1933 or thereabouts he never had penicillin sunscreen Advil to say nothing of the internet or Communications of of any kind like he lived a life that the average ordinary American would look at today and view as positively primitive of course he had mansions and servants and won that but in terms of the technology he he took advantage of it was a joke but no average American should look at him today and say I live better than Rockefeller because they have Penicillin and sunscreen and Advil because everything all those new technologies just become the Baseline that we accept and therefore that that's just to say like you can go through a period of life or the economy in general where everything gets better technology gets better medicine gets better everyone becomes richer and nobody feels any better off for it because you just reset your expectations all along the way and you could so imagine a world in which my grandkids are earning three times as much as me adjusted for inflation and they're not any happier whatsoever and the medical that technology that they have let's just assume they've cured cancer they've Cur they've cured every they've cured every disease and they're not any happier for it because that just becomes the norm just like you and I today by and large don't think about malaria if if you told somebody three years ago that we in the developed world had more or less eradicated malaria they would have they would they could not fathom a world being that glorious are you familiar with are you familiar with the tville Paradox of course yeah yeah that's exactly what we're describing here yeah living standards rise people's expectations rise and then overtake the actual living standards that's it and at the micro level it happens too where you know if if you get if you get a raise at work but then with that raise you automatically adjust your expectations to the kind of house you need to live in to the kind of car that you drive to the kind of vacations that you take you instantly that's why you get used to these things so quickly it's not necessarily that you become accustomed to them it's that you raise your Baseline of what you expect in them and so look is it important to try to increase your circumstances become wealthier increase your net worth of course duh but with just as much emphasis you need to go out a way to manage your expectations to keep them low and recognize that it's the gap between those two that's actually going to bring you all the joy and happiness in life so as a society there's there's no way to do it it's always going to be the case that society's expectations increases that's the cheville Paradox at the individual level I think you can at least recognize the game that's being played though and how ridiculous the game is what's that is it a Monga quote where he says the world is actually driven by it's not driven by greed it's driven by Envy that's it and and really what Envy is is you're looking at your neighbor who has a bigger house and saying I want that that's all it is which is just it's just an adjustment of expectations in the 1950s which people tend to remember as this glorious period of prosperity the average new house built was 920 square feet and today in the United States it's like 2700 square feet but people don't feel better off and I and not only do not feel better off the people who are moving into a house that is two and a half times the size of what we of what my grandparents would have moved into probably feel like they're falling behind oh my house is 2700 squ feet but on Instagram that guy's house is 10,000 square feet kind of thing it's just a constant Readjustment of expectations part of that by the way this is an important thing here is great the fact that people are generally unsatisfied is where Innovation comes from the fact that people wake up in the morning and say I'm unsatisfied with my lot in life I need to do better and figure out a better way is why the world improves so it's not to say that this is bad but it's an explanation for why there can be so much progress in your individual life or throughout all society and nobody feels any better for it have I given you my bit on the mistranslation of the Buddha have I given you this one yet no no let's so uh this is from Robert wries why Buddhism is true and in it uh life is suffering is commonly quoted as coming from the Buddha but Scholars contest that the translation is actually wrong and the final word which is Dua du KK ha uh isn't translated as suffering but unsatisfactoriness life is unsatisfactoriness now I often think about um this imaginary couple that I have a vurus relationship with every time I think of this thing so they plan a holiday they know that they're going to go away and both of them are big into putting their itinerary together and they know exactly the hotel that they're going to go to and they look at the menu of the hotel of the hotel bar and of the restaurant that they're going to go to and they know the exact table they're going to sit at and they know that the sun sets and they've imagined it and they've thought about and they've organized the kennel to look after the dog and then they fly out and they get there and they sit down and then the wife sits down and she's facing the Sun but the sun's actually a little bit low and it's sort of glancing off the water and it's it's a little bit bright for her eyes and they got this cocktail but they wish that they'd got it on the Rocks instead of Blended and there was some sand between her toes from walking on the beach a little bit early run life is unsatisfactoriness it is baked Into Your Existence that things are just going to be on average a bit [ __ ] than you hope they would and even if they outdid your expectation very quickly you're going to be looking over the current moment's shoulder just trying to see what's coming next 100% I mean and and by the way I love the phrase just a bit [ __ ] than you expected that's a that's a wonderful price I think a lot of this too is that you get the most dopamine from anticipation it's not by actually achieving it you get the dopamine by dreaming about it so of course it's well known that the best part of a summer vacation is the anticipation of it but actually going on it is not didn't Ferris have a a hack where he would him and his family would book like the next half decade of holidays I'm pretty sure that he did that he would just be like well okay if enjoyment is in the anticipation if I get more anticipation that means more enjoyment from the same experience and I'm I'm pretty sure that there was a period where he had like five years of holidays and and and Resorts and trips and flights and everything else booked book booked out for precisely that reason that's so smart I I've had these ridiculous moments in the past I'm sure others have something similar of I'll be on vacation I'll be in Maui with my family and it's day one we just get there and I'm standing on the balcony watching the sunset and thinking to myself wouldn't it be so great if we could come back here next year like like even though I'm I'm literally right there what gives me the most pleasure is thinking about coming back and then I instantly have this recognition of just like this is so absurd but that's how your brain works because thinking about coming back is going to give you more dopamine than actually the fact that you're there in the moment Do's an interesting Insight from Gad sadd's new book on happiness that uh the amount of sex that makes somebody happiest is an adequate amount based on kind of an overall Baseline but what's most important is that you're having a little bit more sex than most of your friends are based on their self-reporting and you've got this phenomenal quote which I think kind of summarizes where we're at there is no such thing as objective wealth everything is relative and most relative to those around you there is no such thing as objective wealth is phenomenal and it it's so true given the fact that okay are people today with all of the advantages that we have a hundred years hence better off than John D Rockefeller well no one's going to say that no workingclass American that that's living paycheck to paycheck is going to feel like they're more blessed than what was once the richest man potentially who ever lived apart from masa Musa or whatever that dude was it's no one's going to feel like that and yet objectively there are arguments that you can have on both sides right you know there's as as most comedians do they really get to the point there's this great Chris Rock skit where he says if Bill Gates woke up with Oprah's money he jump out the window and slit his wrist on the way down and that's just to show that all wealth is so relative and so I yeah once once it's framed like that there's this other quote from monu who said this 300 years ago back to things that never change he said if if you wish to be happy that could very easily be achieved but most people want to be happier than other people and that is difficult because we overestimate how happy other people are so that's the thing too it's not about how much you have it's just where do you sit on the relative lot and from an evolutionary standpoint of course that's the case because we're competing against each other for resources and for mates so of course it doesn't matter how much I have it just matters that I have more than you not you in particular but you know so this must relate to fame and status as as well beyond just finances yeah there I I I I forget who said this quote but there's I read something recently that said it's so tragic that humans are not wired for happiness they're wired for status that's what we're going after it's not what can I do to make me happier it's what can I do that puts me ahead of the other people and I think for there's actually a lot of people early on in their career that really get this wrong in the sense of they might have a skill I'm really good at Microsoft Office yes but so is everybody else on relative terms that means absolutely nothing and people over uh they they overestimate that how rare their skills are and then they get to the job market and they their first salary sucks and they're not they're not that useful and they can't figure it out it's because the skills that they have everybody else has them too in relative terms they're zero and so that's that's that's really true it's true in investing too where it's like it it doesn't matter if you have a lot of information it all that matters is the information that you have that others don't and and that number for most investors is zero the information that you have that others don't doesn't exist there's no information that you have about the stock that others don't and that's why it's so hard to beat the market over time everything is just relative to what other people have and what other people are doing I've got this idea at the moment about trajectory being more important than position and it's literally the same lesson but from a status Fame uh perspective so if you are the number two in the world but but last year were number one there is way less sexiness and clamor around you than if you're number 150 but last year you were 300 and there's something about our prediction engine being able to kind of move out let's extrapolate into the future exactly where this person's going to end up and what they're going to do and there's this sort of Allure of what's trendy something else that's going on specifically with that which is someone who is a an appreciating stock as opposed to to a declining stock even if that absolute position is lower it tells you more about the current sentiment right now and because our availability bias and our window of what we're seeing is so dependent on the moment we over index for the person who is on the climb but lower as opposed to the person who's maybe at the top but not staying there there's this great quote from Will Smith in his biography where he says becoming famous is the most amazing feeling in the world being famous is a mixed bag and losing Fame is a pain like you've never felt before and like to I think it's true for wealth too that becoming wealthier like your net worth Rising is amazing being wealthy just having a high net worth is like is okay and losing wealth is is terrible it's always just the change in circumstances that you're after like you like most people get more joy and pleasure out of gaining wealth than they do having wealth dude they're going to be happier when it's going up than when they actually have it you weren't going to guess this but Andrew Tate said it best not one for quoting Andrew tape but I do love this quote from him and he says having things isn't fun getting things is fun there's a great quote from Drake too where he says people respect you more when you are chasing something not when you have it so good yeah I think it applies to virtually everything and it just it it it kind of boils down to isn't life just one big competition we're just trying to get ahead and it's kind of a sad thing to come to terms with and I think there are ways to combat that at the indiv individual level and not always be on the rat race but just enjoy what you have inside of your own head but at the at the at the society level it has always been like that and always will be i' mentioned before we started I was with Dan Bilzerian this weekend and I rolled this trajectory as more important than position thing to him and he seemed to agree too and I said I wonder if there's an argument to be made made that rapid changes in status and wealth and Accolade and Prestige are actually to be avoided almost at all costs because what you're doing is you're now resetting that Baseline as you mentioned that's so good yeah so I'm not like slow life strategy but slow success strategy trying as best you can to just pulled Pok this thing out a little bit let's just spread out you know I'm not going to I'm not going to go and get the car that I've always wanted immediately why don't I get a car that's halfway between it you know let's it's strange because we want success we don't want to leave anything on the table we want to feel like we're actualizing we want to maximize whatever we can bring to the world and yet the quicker that we do that all that we're really doing is condemning a future version of ourselves to have a higher bar to jump over right I mean the perfect example of that everyone knows the long history of lottery winners either going bankrupt or being miserable afterwards like I know recently cuz the lotteries now get ridiculous there was someone who was like a very modest Blue Collar working worker I imagine this person was making 40 $50,000 a year and they won a billion dollars in the lottery and that honestly to go from making 40 Grand to getting a check for a billion dollars has got to be the the biggest mind [ __ ] that you can imagine and I don't mean that in a good way I think I think I think that that is is something that on net it's it's ridiculous to say I know it sounds crazy but on net that's going to be that's that's a psychological burden could be could it could be one of the most difficult things that you've ever had to deal with in your life rips I had this idea as well about um guys like Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein and Eric Weinstein you know people who for a long time were academics working in the dusty annals of some place and then they get ripped out of obscurity by some bold MMA commentator and before they know it they're you know heavily scrutinized and people care about what they think and oh my God I need to comment on the Ukraine and let's get involved in the trans issue like they had we we we often talk about the Perils of Fame to young but we never talk about the Perils of Fame too old right like young Fame is you never got the chance to work out what it's like to be a normal person you turned into McCauley culin or whatever but like more old Fame is you thought you knew who you were and your sense of self has been completely ripped away from what you actually your your entire conception uh the way that people see you how much they care about what you've got to say you decades and decades and Decades of time accumulated aify this version of you you thought you were for something to come in and just smash it to pieces in the space of no time at all just toally Ah that's great I uh I I I spoke with this author recently whose first book was a mega Blockbuster success and his second book was by any objective standards a huge success but in order of magnitude or two less lower than his first book [ __ ] and totally [ __ ] and I asked him how that felt and he said uh even though he knew that was GNA be the case going into his second book he knew that would be the case and he was prepared for this it hurt it hurt because his first book set the bar so ridiculously high have you got this in your mind given that the psychology of money your first book was ju I mean you you're telling me that it's it's growing it's like the AR not number of your book is like Co on a bad day uh yeah have you got it that same as ever despite the fact that everyone needs to go and buy it right now and the link is in the description below is almost certainly going to be a disappointment to you yeah I I I think about it a lot and that was one of the points of talking to that author who I was speaking with because I I know this is going to be my situation of yeah how do you prepare mentally when I I hope to write many books in my career and I would bet very good money that the first book I wrote will by an order of magnitude be the biggest seller it's kind of it's kind of a hard thing to to wrap your head of course it's a good problem to have nobody feels bad for you but yeah it is kind of a hard thing like when I'm 66 how am I going to feel knowing that I peaked at age 36 when psychology money came out it's probably not going to feel that great to be honest but it's of all the problems to have it's it's not a bad one yeah uh have you seen the lwis Capaldi documentary no do you know who lisis Capaldi is Scottish singer Guy you would have heard his song 100% one of your kids will have had his song on it at some know you'll have heard it on the radio billions and billions and billions of streams and albums and all this stuff documentary about him and he has to write a second album first album's just ridiculous success right Globe trotting insanity and it's songs that he wrote when he was 17 still playing them in working men's pubs around Scotland right and it's better mastering and Studios and all the rest of it but it's the same songs and then he gets this catapulted to the top of the tree and then is told right do it again and Co happens so he's back in his parents' house in Scotland in this uh shed type thing that's got his recording equipment in there trying to write songs for this second album and he develops a twitch like a Tourette's twitch um and it's there's videos you can look at the videos it's pretty uncomfortable to watch of him at glastenbury Big festivals and he can't sing like he literally can't get the words out because of how nervous he is so he's yeah very much feeling the pressure a man who has the tent but not the Constitution to be famous which I think is a beautiful very interesting dichotomy um and he's got this one line in it that I paused the documentary and just turned it off after that and went into like a fever dream for about an hour thinking about it he's there and he's talking about all of this change and there's been all of this chaos around him and he's trying to write the second album and the pressure from the label and all of this sort of stuff and he turned to the camera and he goes Fame doesn't change you it just changes everybody around you yeah yeah oh my God every time I say it dude I get my the hairs on my arms stand up because I just thought it was so profound and so beautiful and uh yeah yeah you should watch it it's on Netflix it's kind of scary because what do so many people even if not explicitly but they implicitly hope for and want in life it it rounds to fame at least if not explicitly Fame is what they want and then you watch these people who've actually had it and there's a lot of baggage attached to it and I I really admire the people who went out of their way to push back or to quit the system one is the actress Cameron Diaz Mega A-list actress and then she said she's done she's she's done acting now she's still famous I'm sure the paparazzi still Hound her and whatnot she she can't get rid of that but for people who say I've had enough I achieved what I wanted to in this industry and I'm and and I'm out of here the other example I don't know how to pronounce this band's name it was spelled g y te and they had one Mega hit in 2012 I I I don't know how to pronounce It Go [ __ ] what whatever it is sounds like go yeah I think that's what it is and they have this mega mega Blockbuster hit in 2012 it's all over the world it's like the top song and then they just quit they said we're done like we're never going to top that we're out of here we're and I have so much respect for that if you can actually pull it off it's the people who feel like they start with a mega Blockbuster and then they have to top it the next time that you are you're guaranteeing yourself depression and misery if if that's your goal you had this other bit saying expectations are easy to ignore because their value isn't on a price tag what's that no we what we know what is the cost of a Ferrari you can look at the price thing you know what the cost is it's very easy to measure and put on a spreadsheet and get with Precision this is the cost of a Ferrari not only is this a cost but here's how much work you have to do to earn that much money so it's very it's very quantifiable but what is the cost of high expectations most people are completely oblivious to them and you can't really measure them with a lot of precision but they are enormous cost because they're Weighing on your happiness and so that's that's really what it is and that's why they're so easy to ignore it's because they're not on a price tag it's not quantifiable how do I say like how do I quantify the fact that I have higher expectations for medical care than johy Rockefeller did how do you quantify that you can but it's very real it's extremely real yeah I I've got another one for you dude so me and George Mack have been working on this for a while hidden and observable metrics and and it's our contention that people trade hidden metrics for observable metrics and it's mostly to do with the gamification the ability to track it's like how visceral and how front of mind it is but a good example of hidden metric would be the quality of the relationship with your significant other or uh time is an odd metric it's kind of hidden it's kind of not Peace of Mind sanity right quality of sleep uh your ability to spend your attention where you want it to be as opposed to it being distracted all of these things right happily traded for a raise happily traded to change to a different job which is twice the distance away one of the biggest determinants in someone's life happiness is the length of their commute right I learned that from Jonathan height like if you want to be happier half your commute don't worry about the wage and uh yeah people will happily well I'm going to spend an extra you know 45 minutes there 45 minutes back which means an hour and a half that I'm not going to spend with my wife and that's going to cause this amount of degradation of the amount of relationship satisfaction that we get but 20 grand extra a year or whatever right hidden metric traded for an observable metric and and the fact that you can measure your salary down to the penny and not only that but I can compare mine to yours so if if we're in a society where it doesn't matter what I have as long as I have more than you I can measure that so cleanly but what also matters to your life success in terms of the quality of your marriage your ability to be a good parent your own happiness to sleep eight hours at night with a clear conscience you those things are very hard to quantify if not impossible to quantify but they matter more so I think it's I I think all of that observable versus unobservable it's that that's what it is it's just we're searching for something that's so easy to quantify everything else even if it matters more it's out of sight out of mind George is trying to battle back against this by making the hidden observable so he's got some type form thing that populates a Google sheet it's Peak autism and he puts in at the end of the day how many stars he was did he wake up at this time did he do these things and tries to track correlations and basically tries to bring the hidden into the observable realm so he's forced to quantify uh that which is usually just kind of like an ephemeral wishy-washy notion it's like this ambient [ __ ] sense behind the back of his head um so to kind of round this out and I think it's a really really important point I'm so glad that you put it in the book presumably there are two things that you can change right either your expectations or your circumstances you can either reduce your expectations down or you can raise the quality of your life up on whatever metric it is that you're playing about with tactically have you found any way to reduce your expectations the only the only thing that's worked for me I wrote about this in the psychology money was this it was an observation that I had when I was a valet at a festar hotel in Los Angeles during college and there would be all these people driving in in rolls-royce's Bentley's Lamborghinis and I realized I was like 20 at the time but I realized that never once when somebody drove in in a Lambo did I look at the driver and say oh that guy is so cool what I did is I imagined myself as a driver and I thought if I was a driver people would be looking at me and thinking that I'm cool but it was like wait but I never do that for the D I just imagined myself so then it was nobody actually cares about the driver but they want to be the driver because they think people will then care about them and it was just like once you recognize that game and the big takeaway is like nobody is thinking about you as much as you are they're busy thinking about themselves and once you realize that no one's paying any attention to the size of your house or how nice your car is nobody's paying attention to your clothes nobody is paying attention to him as much as you are once you recognize that then I think your uh desire to put out your peacock feathers like that diminishes not not to zero it's not to say you should look like a slop it's not that in the slightest it's just when you realize that nobody nobody cares about your your circumstances as much as you do because they're busy worrying about themselves then I think it's much easier to keep your expectations in check and be like why do I want to spend money on this thing that's going to make me look better when nobody's even paying attention to it except maybe the people who who are like very close in my life my spouse my kids my parents who don't care about the clothes that I'm wearing they love me for being me so that's like that realization for me was like okay look I like nice homes and nice cars but when you recognize that game I think your ambition for those just peacock feathered aspects of life goes way down wild Minds people who think about the world in unique ways you like also think about the world in unique ways you won't like I started thinking about this years ago when people were like Elon Musk is kind of rude on Twitter and he's saying the wrong things and he's not very polite to people and like of course this is a guy who at age 30 took on GM Ford and NASA at the same time and succeeded like of course he's not a well-balanced individual of course he has these crazy quirks and of course he thinks that the rules of society don't apply to him because that's what you like him for the reason that people like and admire Elon Musk is because he doesn't think any of the rules apply to him and he's willing to take these Bonkers bets on new technologies and new engineering and with that an unavoidable part an undiv visible part of that are these are these parts of the world where he thinks about the world differently than you in negative ways and he can be a j he has different political views than people and you cannot separate those two you cannot have somebody who is a crazy out of boox thinker in a positive way and also dresses and speaks and looks and is polite like an average citizen it does not exist every person who has outside success is going to have some traits in them that are bad even if someone like Warren Buffett he like the the best investor of all time came at the expense of time with his family and his kids like there's always most people I heard this quote the other day everybody adds up to the same number but there's like different ways to get there and I think most people who are abnormally good at one thing are almost always abnormally bad at something else like it's like those numbers are going to even out in the end so if you take somebody like musk who is like off the charts talented at engineering and risk-taking Entrepreneurship of course he's going to have traits in which he is abnormally bad in equal parts to what he is good at and I think there are so few exceptions to that actually think the closest that we've come to an a crazy thinker who looked and acted like a normal CEO is Bill Gates there there there aren't many others who are like that where it's like he was this crazy hard driving Visionary but he wore a suit and said the right things on conference calls there aren't many people like that uh even if you looked at Mark Zuckerberg like he was one of the first who was just like I'm I'm G to wear t-shirts and jeans and even that little thing was just like like he he didn't look the part of what he was supposed to be doing because he's just like I'm gonna do it my own way on my own person so for all of these people there are traits and and to me it's just a like be careful who you look up to because you cannot pick and choose the parts of people that you look up to so you can't say this came from nval you can't say I want his body and his mind and his wealth you got it all comes with the same package so so if you look up to this person and say I want to be like that guy well you got to take the full package the good and the bad they always come one and the same that Naval sequence has inspired like probably 10 blog posts from me there's another one from Jason pain which is great except that all of your heroes are full of [ __ ] Your Heroes aren't Gods they're just regular people who probably got good at One Thing by neglecting literally everything else so you know Tiger Woods goat golfer not a fantastic husband Alan Watts life-changing spiritual teacher died of alcoholism early James Joyce guy that wrote finegan awaken ulyses masterful author but also posthumously a bunch of fart fetish love letters that he wrote to his wife got released like you know you might want to be the best golfer on the planet but do you want to be chased down the driveway by your wife wielding a club that presumably you got for free from your sponsor like you might want to have millions of people fall asleep to the things that you say in this beautiful British accent but do you want to die early because of how much you drink or like you might want to write Blockbuster novels like ulyses and fegan's wake do you want to have your innermost thoughts about the different types of farts that come out of your wife while you have anal sex with her be released to the world upon your death probably not no yeah I guess you I I I imagine that you would say no I I read a lot of biographies of entrepreneurs and Generals and presid never once not a single time have I finished a biography of someone who achieved these Heights in life and said or thought I wish I could have lived that life and and the opposite is almost always true it's usually at the end of the book it's like you achieved a lot but that was that was a insane life that I never within a 100 miles of it I just finished the Ken Burns documentary on uh Ernest Hemingway and here's another he was the author of the century I don't think that's an exaggeration and his personal life was the most despicable miserable immoral uh drunken life that you can imagine and of course he ended by taking his own life and but the the finer details of what his day-to-day life were like nobody would look at that and say that looks fun it was it was easy to glamorize the life of a writer this big macho guy who loved bull fights but like the actual of like his love life his family life his alcoholism his depression was terrible it was awful and I also don't think that you can detach how good he was of a writer from that alcoholic depression it's driven the it was driven by that and it was it was that messed up mind it was that pain in his head that created the good writing that we all enjoy what does it say that the people who we most ad admire are the ones who have the least admirable internal States I think that that was kind of the point of of this chapter it's like be careful who you look up to and after that I started trying to admire people in my life who I thought lived a good life but we're like I mean this in the most polite way like very average very like not not the celebrity not the billionaire entrepreneur but who do I know who is just like oh that that guy is a good husband and a good dad and he's in good shape he takes care of himself he takes care of his family he's smart he's educated he's funny and look he doesn't make that much money nobody knows who he is but let's leave that aside the rest of his life looks amazing and it's something that I want for myself I want to be a good husband I want to be a good dad I want to take could care of myself so like rather than looking up to the famous celebrity look up to the guy across the street who nobody knows like that's actually who's closer to be your Your Role Model yeah the same personality traits that push people to the top also increase the odds of pushing them over the edge and I found out that we're both Mutual fans of John Boyd who if you want to talk about extreme personalities that achieved stuff this is a guy who actually wrote the book on fighter pilots for the US Air Force during a kind of a glory period right sort of 40s through to 80s which is kind of like this era of of fighter pilots and he would smoke cigars I think once there was a story that he just put his cigar out on one of his commanders ties he just he he was he was an absolute monster there was some story I may be getting some of these details wrong but there was a story of he was in the barracks with his with his his fellow air forcen and the the heater wasn't good enough it was in the middle of the winter and they were all cold and the army refused to put in new heaters so he burned the barracks down he lit them on fire and burned them just at a protest and there's there's all these scenes of like these little things of he would be in a meeting with his superiors with generals and he would be he would like bite the callus off his hands and spit it across the table just like he was just a monster of a human but he was so talented at being a fighter pilot and he was so good at figuring out the math of the certain speeds and the trajectories of how you wanted your plane but with that ridiculous Talent came the personality that was like impossible for people to put up with wild numbers people don't want accuracy they want certainty there's there's this great quote where Jerry Seinfeld and and Jimmy Kimmel are driving in a car and it's this old car it's like this old relic of a car this like this this old custom car and Jimmy Kimmel gets in and he said he says there's no seat belts in here does that bother you and Jerry sefel says no but tell me the truth how often in your life have you actually needed a seat belt and like it's a joke it's supposed to be funny but in that is like the world is governed by odds it's not black and white it's like if it like of course if there is a one 1,000 of a percent chance that you're going to need the seat belt in your life you should wear it every day people understand that but what actually gets people like to pay attention in life is just whether you are right or wrong and you see this a lot in investing where it's like I think there's an 80% chance that this stock is going to go down but then if if it goes up was I was I wrong like no like I I I this is not a black or white thing this happened in a big way during the 2016 presidential election when Nate silver who is a very famous statistician who predicts elections he said that the odds were that Hillary Clinton was going to win and I think at the time he said there's a 70% chance or 80% chance that Hillary Clinton's gonna win obviously she did not win and so the next morning every headline was Nate silver was wrong Nate silver got this wrong Nate silver blew his forecast and he was like no I said there's an 80% chance he's going to win which implies there's a 20% chance that Trump is going to win just because that's what happened doesn't mean it was wrong but most people will not accept that form of thinking it's black or white were you right or were you wrong and so that's like it's a big flaw when people think about numbers in the world and data and statistics is that the world is governed by probabilities but everybody thinks in just binary yes or no right or wrong and it makes it so it's really difficult to know who to pay attention to like you want to be paying attention to the Nate overs who think about the world and probabilities and even when they are quote unquote wrong it's like it's actually really tough to tell whether that was like a bad call um like he easily could have been right like there was an 80% chance Hillary was going to win that was probably the right statistic even if it didn't turn out to be how it like what happened in the real world so the way that people think about numbers is is like screwed up in all kinds of ways and it just makes it that's part of the reason that we're so bad at predicting markets and politics is like the world is governed by probabilities but we always think binary right or wrong I think there's something seductive about a person who is able to speak in binaries and black and white as well because it seems like certainty which is a good proxy for expertise and you don't actually know like if if everyone's just throwing [ __ ] at the wall and my shit's sexier than your [ __ ] even if my shit's wrong it's going to Garner more attention right I I I see this online with you know other cultural commentators and and people that do YouTube and podcasts and stuff I'm very un I'm chronically uncertain of everything about and it's why I don't really make big proclamations about much that I don't have an area of expertise in didn't bother commenting on coid didn't bother commenting on Ukraine didn't bother commenting on Israel because I don't think that the world needs more noise it needs more signal and uneducated idiots like me who don't have specific knowledge within that domain giving Cod psychology opinions about it is precisely the problem that we're trying to battle back against that's exactly you you you had a post on Twitter recently that was just about this for what's going on in Israel where you said I I I don't I don't know enough to comment on the situation and I know there were a lot of people who took issue with that well how how can you not know more about this situation that you don't know more about I I don't know it it it is what it is but I think yeah the the world would be a much better place if uh people that didn't know what they were talking about tried to not talk about the things they don't know about and we all get out over Asis right you know that same thing I spoke about earlier on like if you if you're someone who has a young medium or old age garnered a little bit of attention like why shouldn't I why shouldn't I give my thoughts on epidemiology why shouldn't I give my thoughts on the lab leak hypothesis why why why don't they want to know about my my my opinions on immigration you know they're very very interesting when it comes to productivity or Focus or whatever the hell else it is that you talk about and you think again with that there's um seductiveness to uh fluency in particular uh but absolutely certainty too uh there's this guy called Peter Zion real interesting guy geopolitics dude um and I I don't know enough to be able to stress test his ideas uh but I know one thing he's one of the most certain humans when it comes to speaking that I have ever heard and he came on the show and I found him very compelling but I don't know much about what am we going to do go dig into the [ __ ] demography of of China and be like oh actually I I think it's not going to be 650 million it's going to be 750 like I'm not going to go do that right but right there I remember uh thinking at the time while speaking to him and I've kept in touch with him I think he's a very interesting dude uh wow like this guy speaks with so much certainty and he has vehement fans on the internet and I think it goes right back to what we said at the very beginning which is people abhor a vacuum and they abhor uncertainty and if you can give them something that seems like order wrangled out of Chaos oh you you're I allow me to become an evangelist like you know I will pray at the altar of the person who can tell me what's going to happen I me this is this is Cults how many [ __ ] Cults are like the world's going to end on the 21st of December 2012 or whatever it is and then it doesn't happen but the certainty was so much there that the seduction continues even when the certainty was proven to be wrong even when they're wrong because what people actually want they don't want the truth they don't even want an accurate forecast they want to reduce the uncertainty that exists in their head at this moment today and so even when the pundit is wrong people don't care because the pundit already did its job of reducing uncertainty when they went on TV last week and so that's a yeah that's a that that's a big part of this if you go on TV and you say there's a 20% chance of a recession next year that will be your last time on TV but if you say 100% chance and it's going to be bad and it's going to affect these people in these industries your phone will ring off the hook because you've just reduced uncertainty even if what you are professing is something that's pessimistic and is scary if you say it with certainty people are like that's who I want to pay attention to I think a lot of religions are probably like this too like like most religions don't say there's a 20% chance that heaven exists it's it's it's it's this is exactly what's gonna happen with 100% certainty and there's no wiggle room the Church of hous i' I'd attend that that's right and but but that it reduces uncertainty when you know for certain exactly how the world works and what's going to happen in in the future what's going to happen in the afterlife there's a very comforting aspect to that that removes uncertainty that is so unpleasant to deal with in your head what is it about the sufficiently big sample size playing out thing that you talk about one of the things that's always struck me is that since the end of World War II when we've had pretty good economic data of like we track the economy with a lot of precision there have been I think nine recessions which is not that many like the sample size that we're dealing with right now is is is ridiculous small and if you wanted to really be an expert on economic history you would if if if you had like a wish from the genie you would say give me a 100,000 years of Apple's to Apple's data that that I can study the economy like let me study the last 10,000 recessions but of course we don't have that we have good data on nine of them all that were each that was caused by like a very specific thing so it's we really don't for something as fundamental like an important for society as recessions and economic growth the truth is we really don't know that much we don't know what a really bad recession looks like we don't know the peak of our of our potential or like how fast the economy can grow our sample size is so limited but since it's all we have and because it's still 80 years worth of data it seems like a long period of time it's very tempting to say the average recession lasts for eight months or whatever it is it's very tempting to say the average recession unemployment goes to 8% but when you look at that average what that average is like there is so much else that could happen for good or bad like the economy being way stronger than we think it could be or way worse than we think it could be once we realize that the data that we're looking at of economic history is so limited you talk about unfortunate odds and recklessness and kind of distinguishing between the two I think uh retroactively even if we can see what occurred in the past it's so hard to try and work out the correlation okay was did these two things just happen together or did this thing actually cause this thing to happen was it unfortunate odds was it recklessness it it makes this entire situation really messy you know the the one I think about a lot is that uh in 2007 I think it was Mark Zuckerberg was offered a billion dollars for Facebook and he of course turned it down and we look at that we're like what a freaking genius he was because now the company's worth a trillion dollars or whatever like one of the smartest decisions that you could ever make uh but during that same time Yahoo was offered $50 billion for Microsoft that Microsoft wanted to buy yaho and Yahoo turned it down and we look at that and we're like you idiots like they of course you should have taken it because now I don't know what Yahoo is worth but it's not within 20 miles of $50 billion doar and so you look at that and it's like well how do we know Mark Zuckerberg made a great decision and Yahoo didn't like like there's such an easy world to imagine in which Facebook was a flash in the pan and Yahoo became the next Google you could easily imagine that world it didn't happen but it easily could have happened so when we look at these retroactive decisions and say uh these retrospective decisions and say look Mark Zuckerberg was so smart and yaho was so stupid it's not that clear even if that's what actually happened in there all these alternative histories that not only could have but should have happened that could could have made that narrative so much different than it is everyone's post talk rationalizing everything all the time the more that I've dug into personal growth and and development and being around successful people the vast majority of what people are doing is I have found a particular strategy that resulted in success for me given my idiosyncrasies and path of lease resistance and genetic predisposition and upbringing and culture and timing and gender and all of that stuff let me now create universal laws for everybody that is a retrospective justification of how what I did that gave me success is something anyone can do that can give anyone success when like the irony is like the reason that you are successful is because it only worked for you if that could work for everybody everybody would do it and that skill wouldn't matter at all anymore like the whole reason that this person got successful is because nobody else could do that thing that they're now trying to turn into a universal law so I think there are some things that we can learn from these these major successes like if you're looking at Warren Buffett the the traits that you want to learn from is like his p his endurance but I I don't think you should learn his stocks picking skills because so many of those skills were honed in 1950 when this Market was completely different than it is today so that's why you know one of the most famous investing books is the intelligent investor by Benjamin Graham and it was first written in the 1930s and there is of course a lot of Timeless wisdom in there but there's also a lot in those books that is like hypers specific to the economy in the 1930s in the 1940s that if you tried to implement those form foras today you'd lose everything it was it was just relevant to that period of time and it's not something that you can scale into a universal law best story wins stories are always more powerful than statistics why it drives you crazy if you think the world is going to be governed by the right answer and the best answer and if I can just come up with the right answer like that's what's going to change people's minds and it's almost never the case it's always the case that what actually like gets people to nod their heads it's just whoever's telling the best story the most compelling story and even if if the person is like that's not to say that they're fooling people but if if you have the right answer and you're not a good Storyteller you may or may not get ahead but if you have the right answer and you're a good Storyteller sky's the limit like those are the people that really run with it it's so easy to Discount the power of a good story because it's a soft skill like a lot of analytically minded people think if I can just find the right answer in the spreadsheet if I can just create the the product that works the best everything else will take care of itself and it's just not how it works we were talking earlier I write about this in the book Ken Burns who I think is just absolute genius documentary filmmaker and everything he's ever made is just 10 out of 10 it's so good and one of the things he does so well is incorporating music into his documentaries and he's talked about this before where he will literally change the sentence structure of a script so that a specific word that the narrator is saying matches with a specific beat in the background music the emotional word matches the emotional beat at the same time and no other filmmaker no other historian is doing that most historians are just say if I have the if I find the right information in the in the library like that's that's that's what I'm going to present and Ken Burns is like no this is going to be a performance and because of that I I I make this point that almost nothing Ken Burns has ever published is new information he writes about or he's made films on the Civil War and World War III and the Holocaust these are very heavily studied events everybody knows everyone knows how the story ends but his magic is that he's the best Storyteller that exists of any historian who's ever existed and because of that when the Civil War documentary came out in 1990 kenburn Civil War documentary more Americans watched it that year than watched the Super Bowl and this isn't about this is about an event the Civil War that everyone has been reading about since grade school there's no new information in the docu but the storytelling is so captivating that it it moves mountains I think this is true for Michael Lewis too of there there's there's been No Better Business Storyteller in modern times and look with some of what's come out recently like he doesn't necessarily always get the story right per se it's it could be easy to criticize him but e maybe this is just because I'm a writer I I just finished going infinite the book about FTX and even if yes there are Parts like many other people where I thought he was being unfair and supporting SPF in ways that I didn't agree with but his storytelling is so good his sentence structure is so good his writing is so poetic that I will read it all day long no matter what it comes out with like the best story is always going to win I feel like that when I read yours man I adore the Simplicity of your sentences whether it's on your blog collaborative fund and there's a newsletter that I subscribe to I I want to say sorry to whoever else writes for you because my first thing is I click if it's not got Morgan housel written at the top I just ignore it and the only ones I read I'm sure the rest of the Writ is really great but I just focus on you um yeah the Simplicity of your sentences even some I guess you would you break convention in in your books especially in the new one uh single lines three or four word lines that are paragraphs all on their own that was that was very intentional and the and the Publishers don't don't like it but that's how I like to read and I think it's I think what a lot of readers really want out of a book or what really makes them feel good is making progress they're like oh I finished this chapter I finished this level moving on to the next and when you have when you turn a page and it is solid uninterrupted block of texts it's very easy to be like oh God like what do I got in front of me not today Satan but when it's quick when it's a quick line it's just boom boom boom it's much easier to a feel like you're making progress but also it's just an easier format to read it you can just kind of Breeze your eyes over the page and soak it up rather than like really dense powerful reading so yeah I think that structure is it's part of it and I yeah you're right I don't think most readers think about the length of their structures or the the the the visibility of what a paragraph actually looks like like like like a block of text but it's critically important to the the reading experience yeah your books have a a particular uh robustness to put Dow inness like it's very difficult to put them down for precisely that reason there's a little bit more there's another little thing oh there's a story about [ __ ] World War II like let me get into that and yeah for my newsletter I stole a bunch of ideas um yourself James Clear uh Ryan holiday even some of the con conventions that he uses and um the newsletter this is kind of common commonly done now but it's one sentence per paragraph with smaller line breaks in between and it's just straight through super easy very nice to read tight margins so yeah like stuff like that and we were talking before we started about the um story that I try and tell with these big Productions that I do on the show you know I want to we choose the location of these particular uh venues based on the guest that we're speaking to so you know we have Patrick B David coming on and he's kind of like a like a a power guy like a power broker kind of guy he's like a Mafia Boss so I wanted a wall of bugs right or we we have uh an Andrew hubman coming on who's kind of this interesting blend of sort of science and precision with kind of like raw masculine kind of like grittiness like in terms of the way that he presents so he found this um beautiful Warehouse with exposed wooden beams uh so it's kind of got that rawness to it but it's organic as well and it feels it sort of humanizes it or we do Peterson and we did him in in the Alamo in San Antonio and it's got this sort of beautifully ornate um uh blinds behind him this sort of wooden blinds it's casting this very particular kind of light through so you know we're trying to do something to just create this little bit more uh of an event of an occasion but you're totally right that you know many of us me included how many times have we felt resentment for somebody who we think has achieved success that they don't deserve because of the way that they look or because of something which is outside of the substance of what they're doing you know all Style no substance is a meme for a reason and you know with Ken Burns you could spend forever designing the sentences to hit the beat of the the music and do all the rest of the stuff but ultimately the reason that it works is because of the story yeah that is then packaged in the way that's appropriate and going back to what we were saying before about certainty fluency is another thing you know if you've got some beautifully fluent person you got this great story uh about Martin Luther King right if you have someone who's unbelievably fluent not forgetting that he went off script in his famous I Have a Dream speech and he he gives himself a pattern break right he starts doing it follows the script goes ah no and then freestyles it like that's it the the fluency literally outdid the rational prescribed wellth thought out arithmetic stuff The Good the the script that he and his speech writer wrote that day is what he started to speak from and then there was a gospel singer in the crowd a couple lines in front of him who was a friend of of Martin Luther King and you could actually hear this in some of the videos at one point in in the speech she she turns around and she says tell him about the dream Martin tell him about the dream and you can literally see this in the video at that point he takes his script on the podium and he moves it to the side and then he looks up to the sky and he starts saying I have a dream and then the rest is history and he had actually practiced that I have a dream it was another speech that he had given before but in the moment I think he could dis sense that the speech that he was prepared to give was not the best one that day and that the gospel singer malalia Jackson was was was right that the I have a dream was the one he should have been doing and he just started freewheeling it and became literally the most famous speech of modern history how are stories like Leverage when you've got a complex topic it's it's like Leverage because you can squeeze more value out of them than you could just get by just putting raw data on the table so I mean you can you know if I think I think a lot of entrepreneurs will think if I have a successful company I need to come up with something brand new like the reinvent the wheel kind of thing and a lot of times you don't you can take a pre-existing product and just tell a better story with it like boom you're Off to the Races that's great and so there's once you realize how much leverage you can get out of a story or and how powerful a story can be like the the field of opportunities in front of you is endless because you don't need to come up with something brand new Ken Burns is is the 10,000th person to document World War II but he did the best job of ad because he he told a story if Ken Burns had to find new history find a new event that never heard of for his things like forget about it there you can't do that but if you can use a good story to leverage what's already out there you can become the most famous Storyteller of your era what's the complex bit how why is it when a topic is complex stories are like Leverage do they help to synthesize down confusion yeah I mean I mean most people's tolerance for complexity is so limited and everyone knows like the dull Professor who just talks in P values and is just like writes in charts and is so like monotonous and if you can switch that out with a good Storyteller like Off to the Races like there there's so much you can do out there so it's particularly in the complicated topics that are boring and dry and dull this is why Richard fean was such a genius he took physics which is so boring and so dull for most people but he could tell a story about it there's this video online you should people should search for it it's he's explaining the physics of fire of like like how does fire actually work and I I'm not going to do it anywhere near the justice but he's like imagine a trampoline with two bowling balls on it and they're both like competing for space and they're running into each other and when they run into each other like they move around and he's describing how molecules interact with each other that creates fire and I I didn't I I didn't do the the the accurate job there but when he does it you're like oh that's so entertaining and by the way I understand the physics of fire now in a way that if I had just pulled out a physics textbook I would have been like this is so I a I don't understand it and even if I understand it this is so boring to read yeah I like that again the best diet is the one you stick to the best fitness plan is the one that you follow the best habit is the one that you're compliant with ultimately in order to be able to get whatever the information is that you want across you need to play the game using the rules and the rules include all of the lack of attention and boredom and ease of distraction and everything else that humans have Eric Weinstein said this to me about um in a stickiness arms race most sticky message is the one that wins not necessarily the one which is most accurate and you know this is how cultural memes take hold like I have a friend Mary who says meme first explain later which is why coming up with a name for something a great name oh will retrofit the idea to the [ __ ] name like get the name uh because presuming like if the idea is bollocks it doesn't matter it's the packaging in many regards and I think the storytelling side but you know I still see inside of me that oh this almost like a a a purity like a a puritanism to like this is the way that it should be done it should be you shouldn't need to dress up the facts it should just be the the the raw data and the fact that it's truthful and honest blah blah blah it's like no dude like this things got to be sexy Victoria Secrets they even they are rolling back their change in branding from the last couple of years they're pivoting back towards sexiness so very very famous example from from Steve Jobs with the iPod where you could have called it digital MP3 player but instead what Steve Jobs said was a thousand songs in your pocket that's just a story and like for the people who are just like we don't need to dress up the technology it should it should exist on its own they would have called it digital MP3 player which is probably what Sony and Panasonic did and Steve Jobs said a thousand songs in your pocket which everyone can instantly be like oh that sounds great I love it that that's what I want it was just such a brilliant era of Storytelling does not compute the world is driven by forces that cannot be measured there's so many examples when you're watching a group of people or an individual do something and you're like why are you doing that makes no sense whatsoever you should have quit long ago you shouldn't be doing it but they keep doing it and if you expect that every person is a rational thinker and they're doing things that make sense that add up on the spreadsheet you're going to go through life completely Bamboozled at the number of people who don't and so I use this example in that chapter of during at the end of World War II the battle of the bulge when the Nazis attacked the Allies there was a big they made a big counter offensive it was a complete surprise to the Allies they really never saw it coming which is why the the battle was such a big deal and the reason they saw it coming is because the US generals the the Allied generals thought there is no rational World in which the Germans would Counterattack right now they don't have enough troops they don't have enough supplies they don't have enough fuel the weather is atrocious the geography is not in their favor so therefore we assume they're not going to counterattacked what they they missed was that the Germans were not rational thinkers at the time Hitler was not a rational thinker he was completely out of his mind and so because because the the Allied generals assumed that their opponent was rational they they they missed what actually happened that's why they were so vulnerable so going through life assuming it's the same with market bubbles if you assume that people are rational with their money like of course they're not then you're going to be completely Bamboozled when once a decade there's a massive bubble and people light their money on fire and you can't figure out what's going on what's going on is like things just don't compute there's a human element like the world is not governed by spreadsheets there's an emotional hormonal human element that's very hard to track impossible to measure but has some of the biggest outcomes in any of these activities in life who's archal hill archal hill was this crazy he was he's such a cool guy he was a physiologist about a hundred years ago uh and he was a big Runner he was he was an athlete and because he was a physiologist and an athlete he devoted a lot of his career to just trying to answer the question how fast can people run given like given my body given my aerobic capacity or given your body what's the theoretical theoretical limit on how fast we can run and he came up with all of these formulas he was kind of the early for uh uh guy who came up with V2 Max which which a lot of people are familiar with now to really measure like how people process oxygen how it's dispersed throughout your body the lactic acid build up in your legs and it came up with a formula for how fast people can run and it was very accurate so people like these athletes would come into his laboratory and he'd run his tests and he would say you know making this up he'd say Jim the fastest you can run a mile is six minutes and 32 seconds and Jim would go out on the track and give it all he's got and he'd run it in six minutes and 32 seconds like this formula was very accurate and heill actually won the Nobel Prize in medicine I think in 1922 but there was this Quirk about it in that his formula was never able to predict a race winner like in a competitive race you could not use this formula and predict who is going to win the Olympic gold medal in track and I think this this kind of bothered it bothered a lot of people in the field and bothered him as well that this formula was so accurate on the on the track on the test track and had no accuracy in the real world and they eventually figured out what was going on here which is that in a competitive race like the Olympics when the stakes are very high people get nervous they get excited they get rushes of adrenaline they get all these other emotions that cannot be replicated on the test track when the stakes are low that completely Alters your performance and therefore like his whole takeaway was your aerobic capacity your ability as a runner is not just about your machine your body it's your body within the context of all your in the moment incentives and the the crazy hormones and feelings going through your head it's those two things in combination that creates your actual capacity so I I I phrase this too of like if if you said the fastest you can run a mile is six minutes and 30 30 seconds and you say like I gave it everything I've got I can't do it faster but then if I said hey if you can do it in 6 minutes and 31 seconds I'll give you a million dollars you'll figure out a way to do it like like once the incentives change in the moment you become a completely different person um and and so I think that applies to a lot of things in life and it's why things don't always compute it's not just a spreadsheet you have to figure out what's going through people's heads so logic has its limits and our ability to be rational and make predictions is always going to bounce up against things that aren't able to fit inside of the model always and it drives people crazy this is just like best story winds where if you if you assume the world is governed by Logic you're going to be led astray your entire life because it never is whether it's the Germans deciding to attack when they shouldn't or trying to predict Athletes Performance I I grew up as a ski racer that was my sport not a very popular sport in America but that's one I follow and the greatest ski racer now of all time is a woman from the United States named Michaela shiffrin um and she she's she's the greatest skier man or woman in history she's absolute Beast she's incredible and she has this thing that she's she's spoken about this publicly it's not a secret that when the stakes are very high like in the Olympics or the World Championships she Before the Race will vomit and it's it's a thing she gets so nervous that her body just you know just kind of gives up and obviously that has a huge impact on like your hydration and your energy levels if you're throwing up before the races and one of the takeaways is like Micha shiffrin on the test track on on when she's training is not the same skier as she is in the Olympics her entire mindset is utterly different and even like the physical composition of her hydration is completely different because when the stakes get high and people start getting nervous and emotional they become completely different people so you would think that her skiing ability would just be like the strength of her core and her agility her flexibility and it's not like 90% of it it's just what's going through her head in the moment I have a d J friend who for a long time wanted to be on Eric PR's label very much idolized him and then after a decade and a bit of working and producing and making songs he ended up doing it and now supports pids all around the world he's Played Madison Square Garden New Year's Eve shows with supporting Eric at his hollow uh projector thing and uh there was a good chunk of time where he would throw up before he went on stage as well and you know you see him backst and he's just this super cool guy he's like sort of a buff like Northeastern British dude and before he' go up because he cared right he cared so much about what he was going to do and you look at you know the component parts of this particular person's talent and go ah you know like they are the function of this and this and this and this and this and you say yeah but what about the context and what about all of the other stuff that you can't imagine thinking about um the crazy Battle of the Bulge and the insanity of Hitler have you ever looked into to Theodore Morel that was his personal physician I've heard a lot about it just because I know Hitler was drugged out of his mind particularly in the last years of his life but I don't know many details about it dude if you have if you come across a Theodore Morel um documentary there's a few of them on YouTube that are great it's amazing this guy was a total quack he was injecting uh Hitler with bull Seaman um he was like on meth uh injecting him with cocaine like multiple times per day does this really uh interesting interaction between Hitler and musolini and it's one of these turning points in the war and I think that Hitler kind of goes really really crazy and flies off the handle and all the rest of it and uh it's thought that Morel had overdosed him with some drug so I often think about you know just how much of what happened obviously Hitler not internet I'm not justifying Hitler but I do I do don't chop this video up know I do sometimes think about how much of the the madness that we saw coming out of Nazi Germany was actually you know due to one particular quacky Physician's cupboard and then what he chose to do to the leader of the Nazi party and even for regular run-of-the-mill soldiers it's there's another thing where it's like it's impossible to know how you're going to react and respond until there's bullets flying over your head there's no amount of training and preparation that's going to prepare you for that you you'll know this isn't there some insane number of soldiers that went to was it maybe Vietnam and didn't fire or they were firing in the air they were purposefully not firing at the enemy I forget the exact percentage of it but that was true in World War II where they could tell even the soldiers that were in Frontline combat how many of them actually pointed their gun at the enemy and pulled the trigger it's a very low percentage and I think I I would be willing to bet that a lot of those people probably knew it going into it I don't know if I could kill another human being but I bet there a lot of it who went in with a lot of bravado and saying like I'm I'm going tar training I can do hit the targets in training and then you see the whites of the enemy's eyes and you realize it's just another kid just like you and all of a sudden you say I don't I don't know if I could do it and who are you and I to say that we wouldn't have do the same thing if you've never been in that situation you have absolutely no idea calm plants the seeds of crazy crazy doesn't mean broken crazy is normal beyond the point of crazy is normal it's just this idea that the reason there is so much volatility in a lot of things in life particularly the economy the reason that we have booms and bust the reason that we have recessions is because we have periods of calm and when the economy is calm and people are really optimistic they once they become optimistic they go into debt because they're optimistic about their future of course I can pay off this debt once they go into a debt and their optimism grows the economy becomes unstable once econom is unstable of course you're going to have a recession so it's this weird thing like in in a world in which there were were no recessions no bare markets stock market never goes down that is the world that guarantees the next recession because think if if if we passed a law completely hypothetical we pass a law the stock market cannot go down anymore the stock market can only go up the rational thing to do in that situation would be to mortgage your house and Sell Your Furniture and buy as many stocks as you could because they because they're guaranteed to go up yeah once you do that the valuations go to the Moon stock prices get bid up to the stratosphere and once the valuations are that high they're guaranteed to crash so this is like the irony of the reason that you have Market crashes is because there's periods of calmness and Comm always plants the seeds of crazy and it's so tempting to look at every boom and bust every bubble every market crash and say people were crazy like who do we blame here like who's screwed up and I just think it's such a natural phenomenon in in economies there was this economist back in the 1960s named hman Minsky from University of St Louis and during the 1960s there was this big idea that we are going to eradicate recessions that was a big idea in economic circles and Minsky basically said it's all [ __ ] that will never happen and his his theory was called the financial instability hypothesis and he laid out what what I just said if there were no recessions people would go into debt because they're optimistic once they go into debt the economy is unstable once the economy is unstable you're going to have a recession so because of that it's just an like such a clean chain of events that you can never eradicate recessions you can't eradicate booms and busts because calm always plants the seeds of crazy yeah you've got this idea about par paranoia leads to success because it keeps you on your toes and I guess this is a an uncomfortable realization uh that part of the reason that we are able to survive the chaos of the world is precisely the emotion that we are trying to mitigate like our our paranoia is the competitive Advantage which is keeping us going it's this irony of like people are super paranoid about their career or the business that they started and if you were to sit them down on the therapist couch and say why are you so paranoid they say because like I have this anxiety and I want to be successful because once I'm successful I won't have this anxiety anymore I need to become rich so I don't have to worry anymore so they become super they they they wake up scared every morning and because of that because they wake up scared and driven they're going to become super successful and then once they get to some level of success they say now that I've made it I can relax because I've made it this was the whole point of getting rich was so that I could relax and then once they relax the thing that made them successful which was the stress and paranoia is gone and that's that plants the seeds of their demise and that you see that with so many companies like companies that get fat and happy and lazy and they become the absolute top of their game and then they just become they they they they start to become oblivious and and and they start to lose it Sears is one of the best examples of like we don't think about much today but Sears which is a department store was the biggest department store in the United States similar to Macy's or something like that and it was the most dominant retailer that was probably ever existed I think Sears in its Heyday was more dominant than than Walmart or Target or anything like that and now it barely exists it still technically exists but it's an absolute shell of its former self and if you look at the history of ser that's really what it was it's like a hundred years ago they were scared and Scrappy and that's what made them so successful and then they became so dominant that they just got lazy and that and that of course led to their their their fall same with IBM same with General Motors same with AIG it's like be careful what you wish for for that because a lot of times the reason that you are so successful is because you have this trait that you are so eager to get rid of once you become successful and once once that happens like boom it's all over well there's another question kind of the reverse of this is a question around if we sacrifice the thing that we want for the thing which is supposed to get it what the [ __ ] are we doing like if we sacrifice happiness in order to be successful so that when we are finally successful we can allow ourselves to be happy if this was an algebra equation and I just removed success from both sides of the equation you would just be left with happiness right it's the parable of the Mexican fisherman GNA say the exact same thing but this is that this is an area where it does not compute enters the picture because life isn't an ALG equation if if people just did the equation what you just said would make perfect sense and people would be the Mexican fishermen but it's it it doesn't compute there's this element of because from what we were talking about earlier of like people's goal is not to become successful it's to become more successful than other people yeah so there's never goingon to come a point where people say oh I'm completely satisfied I can just sleep in and do some fishing and hang out with my wife it's always going to be I have to get to the next level I have to beat the next person next to me yeah there's a scene in Rick and Morty where they play the game of Roy have you heard of this no seen this it's it's super legendary on YouTube it's a one minute long clip you can watch it it's just Rick and Morty Roy it'll come up and uh it's a computer game where you play an imagined life as this guy and he works as a carpet seller and uh Morty goes and plays it and he's a football player and then he has a heart attack in a carpet store and then he goes back to the carpet store and he comes out and Rick says to him uh never go back to the carpet store Morty and then he gets in and this crowd sort of gets around his VR thing and they say oh my God he's taken uh he's taken Roy off grid Roy doesn't even have a social security number and it always makes me think about people that are playing the game and people who have somehow managed to break the thermodynamics of the game and the thermodynamics of the game like a a a good person that I think is at least in part broken them uh Ryan holiday and Tim Ferris both come to mind really how so because I I I I'm I'm not that close but I know both of those people how how so so Ryan appears to be someone who is was purposefully kind of like Cameron Diaz um reduced the trappings of Fame uh ramped up Simplicity as best he can and he'll have his demons and goblins and all the rest of it right just like the rest of us and there's layers and layers and layers of of whatever self-work to to get to um but it seems to me like he uh purposefully leans into uh doing Simplicity like he has his routine he knows kind of where his his mission lies and that seems to work the same with Tim that you know Tim has largely taken a pretty big step back from Super public life you know he's not guesting on tons of podcasts it doesn't seem like he's writing a book at the moment or at least he hasn't done for a little while you know he still does his show but even that it's you know it's not so much about the YouTube and the and the Instagram stuff it's like his audience and he owns this part of of of the audio stuff um you know I remember reading 13 reasons not to get famous one of my favorite ever blog posts by him it's so great it's so great I I I I take back I thought you were using those people as examples of people who got trapped in the fame but you're you're using them as examples of the opposite yes uh yeah I agree the Tim's post on 13 reasons not to get famous will make your jaw drop it's a [ __ ] Masterpiece it's great and you read there's nobody who will read that and and disagree with what he's saying like there is a massive downside to fame that I think once I don't want to speak for him but I think once he experienced it he pushed back at pushed back at it in a pretty successful way yeah it's very interesting um but yeah the power leads to success because it keeps you on your toes thing kind of also comes back to what we were saying earlier that um the people who we most admire are the ones who have the least admirable internal States right if you were to trade places with the texture of Elon Musk or Kim Kardashian or Conor McGregor's mind you would probably not fot the bill for the price that you'd have to pay and again hidden observable metrics again this is why I love the the fact that these threads all tie together even though they're disparate ideas there's a narrative that kind of weaves them all together and fundamentally it's our stupid desire for recognition and Accolade and Prestige and to be you seen and validated by the world and to be slightly higher than the people that are around us there's this idea I meant to say earlier on uh intergenerational competition Theory have you heard of this no so um it describes a situation where one of the biggest predictors of your quality of life especially when you smear it across an entire nation is how does this generation compare to its parents generation at the stage of life that it's at and you know we've heard it's been a bit of a metameme for a while you know like Millennials were the first generation to not do better than their parents but really with Gen Z I think that that is being felt very very closely and even if the um raw facts and data when it comes to uh cost of living minus inflation plus wages and all of the rest of it even if that kind of ends up not making too much of a difference the way that it seems I'm never going to be able to buy a house people are staying in the house you know the most common living arrangement for a man under 30 is still being at home with his parents right right and I think I think social media plays such a massive role in this of just who you're comparing yourself to now is a curated algorithmic highlight reel of the fake scenes in other people's lives and that becomes your Baseline to compare yourself against two and I I see this in my own life of like when I was growing up my definition of rich was the people who bought new pickup trucks and and a normal person drove a used pickup truck and you compare that to the current generation that grew up with YouTube and Tik Tok and Instagram whatnot their expectations are in a different Universe compared to my generations and and your and your generation and like what is that going to do to their well-being their psychological well-being you know it's not going to be good and the people who studied this Jonathan height of of NYU of like teenage depression and suicide side exploded when social media came out particularly when it came out on mobile devices not not went up a little bit it went vertical during those periods and I still feel like we're probably in the early a the early Innings of that cycle yeah I would agree and so it's it's it's pretty scary particularly as as a parent of two young kids who are you know four and eight what is what is their generation going to be like when they're 17 after they grown up influenced by social media in such a profound way what we've been able to facilitate is is uh industrial stale scale comparison yes that's that's fundamentally what social media I think you I think you I think you could take it one step further and say industrial scale anxiety is what it produces that's really what it was it's designed to make you look at other people yeah it's designed to make you look at other people and feel a little bit worse about yourself I looked at this study from Finland this week it was in my newsletter that um worked out that 15% around about 15% of the increase in young female mental health adverse mental health outcomes can be attributed to uh use of hormonal birth control and I'd said this when I first learned about the impact of hormonal birth control on uh developing brains maybe about a year ago I just sort of got it in the back of my mind and I meant to tell Jonathan about it because I I don't know if anyone has like factored in the base rate of the increase in contraceptive pill use among young teenage girls uh so there's a a Confluence of different things conspiring to try and and damage the mental health of everybody but yeah man it's it's it's not good and and you know from a comparison perspective think about it yourself think about how you feel I call it postcontent Clarity like after you've spent a good bit of time on your phone like you know if you watch one type of thing reading a BL reading a a collaborative fund blog or something and I'm like oh like you know I've spent five minutes reading this reading this thing what how do I feel after that do I want to ring my mom do I want to go outside do I feel like the world is actually working with me as opposed to against me have I got agency or after I watched some panel argument about politics or something I I want to just you know curl up in a ball and I want to eat [ __ ] food and I don't want to tell anyone that I miss them and you know that that very much is The Duality of of the internet and we always justify the toxic elements that we spend our time on by the needles in hay stacks that we sometimes find as my dad would say a streak of piss in a pile of [ __ ] I love it this is true like I I I definitely feel like modern politics is explicitly designed to piss you off and once you realize that that's the game it's like I it's not a game like who would want to voluntarily play that game of which you are guaranteed to wake up every morning and read your news uh site of choice for it to explicitly just make you a little bit angrier at the other half of the country once you frame it like that it's like why would you voluntarily play that game I'm going to choose to play a different game too much too soon too fast a good idea run steroids quickly becomes a terrible idea yeah there's this idea of Blitz scaling in startups which is like and look it it came from very successful entrepreneurs uh but it's this idea of like however fast you're growing like do it faster like like whatever good idea you have like do it 10 times better 10 times faster like go go go go go and I think with blitz scaling usually comes Blitz failing like there there there's a natural rate at which anything in investing or business or life relationships should go and if you try to push it past that it's going to break particularly true for relationships like like there's a natural rate in which you should go from meeting someone to marrying them I have no idea what that natural rate is g to be different for everyone but the extent that you're trying to push it further and faster than it's going to go it's always going to lead to disappointment so I think just understanding the natural rate at which these things need to grow to grow at and realizing that if you push them faster it's all going to break it's so important it's really important in investing where I I I said one time the fastest way to get rich is to go slow because that's that's what always gets people that's what always throws people off it's like they get this investing strategy or they're they're good at they're good at picking stocks whatever it is and then their natural intuition is like great now let's do it faster I can earn 10% a year like how do we get to 20 I can earn 20 how do we get to 40 and that's that's going to blow up 10 times out of 10 like the natural rate of how fast you should grow your wealth for the huge majority of people is probably between 5 and 10% per year that's the natural rate and if and your ab your willingness to push it beyond that is is is is eventually going to go over the cliff and like if you stay in that zone and just keep it going for your lifetime you win you you win the game you're GNA compound your wealth everything's gonna everything's gonna be great and it's the people who try to push it beyond that that are always going to end up as the losers it's like they don't hit the red button experiment like that there just one thing that you don't do and it's don't push it beyond that and yet the blowup risk is always a hidden metric whereas the additional 10% gain that you got last year is a very observable one who's uh who's Robert wlo Robert wow was the tallest human to ever exist he was I forget the exact number but I think he was pushing eight feet tall uh he just an ABS if you look at pictures of him it it doesn't look like a human being it looks like a cartoon he was he had a an abnormality in his pituitary gland that just bombarded his body with growth hormone for his entire life and what what I wrote about in the book is like if you if you think about Robert wow he was eight feet tall he wore I think a size 22 shoe his hand was like 16 inches across you would think of him as like the real life version of Paul bunan like you would think he would be like a superhuman just like the strongest man the best athlete and he wasn't he would he could barely walk he could he could only walk on crutches and when he did it it was like this horribly pained limp that he had he was he's super awkward walking around like his body just didn't really work and the takeaway was like you can't double the size of a human and expect double the output if you double the size of the human the entire thing breaks and you look at this in nature like most very large animals either have extremely long skinny legs like a giraffe or very short stubby legs like a rhinoceros but if you take a human that has like medium length legs and you just say double the size of it it doesn't work and W he was growing so he died I think in his late 20s he was very young and but the scientists and the doctors who were studying him said if if you grow much larger simply walking even with your cane your legs are going to snap because the like the the mechanics of the human body just did not support wow a leg and weight ratio of that amount and what actually killed him is almost as tragic like it was so hard for his heart to pump throughout his enormous body that he had very very high blood pressure and that led to an ulcer and the ulcer got infected and he died from the infection so and like it's actually such a tragic story it's amazing it's like he's always in the Guinness Book World Records and the like the he he was a basically a circus freak during his day but you you read about this man it's like it's a terrible terrible tragic life but it's the starkest example of you can't just double the size of something and expect double the output sometimes when you double size the whole system collapses yeah there's something about kind of a survival of the fittest as well though you've got this example about how trees grow sometimes and runts get eaten eventually but then when you force growth too much that's when it goes wrong there is definitely something about um I guess when the when the tide goes out working out who's swimming naked so to speak uh I think that's a useful side effect of growth yeah and and the same thing with Robert row like perfectly applies to companies you can't double the size of a company and expect just to get double the output because when you double the size of a company particularly like a startup goes from 20 employees to 100 employees or whatever all of the sudden your employee culture is different your hiring practice are different you need rules and regulations you need employee handbook and that might completely kill the culture that made the startup successful from zero to 20 employees so knowing the normal growth rate and the natural size of any of these businesses is super important Starbucks is another example I use in the of like back 15 years ago it was on this ridiculous growth binge and it was just like every street corner in the world needs not just one Starbucks but two and it found that it completely oversaturated and it completely killed the Starbucks experience it went through this depths of thep spare a couple of years around 2007 where Starbucks was really losing its way and it found that like whatever the natural growth rate for Starbucks was and whatever the the the right amount of stories that should have it went way far beyond that and needed to pull way back so all these examples of like successful companies good companies that try to push it too hard and it backfires on them those stories are everywhere what are there any examples of how this is this would apply to people's personal lives or the way that they show up in their day-to-day existence I think there's definitely a case I use the example of Travis kalanick who is the founder of uber uh and he later got pushed out of the company as someone who he had the exact right personality and management philosophy to bring Uber from Z to 100 and he was the exact worst person that you could imagine to bring Uber from 100 to a thousand and so there's a lot of times where your specific personality is going to work really well in this situation and be disastrous in another and I think that could be true at different phases of your life if you are someone who is the life of every party and you can drink people under the table and you're loud and you're boisterous that is an amazing personality when you're 21 if you are still that person at 47 it's probably a disaster that's not the personality you buy in large one at 47 so sometimes what works in one area like doesn't scale to other areas of your own life and if you don't realize that you can't change course it's it's a tough road for a lot of people I love it Morgan housel ladies and gentlemen Morgan you are one of my favorite writers I'm so glad that we've been able to get you back on you're coming on again in January I think in January and I I'm I'm scared to see the the set design that you pick for me because now I know that is it is a reflection is this going to be like some cute tea house that you bring me too and I'm gonna feel really bad about who you think I am perhaps yeah we'll have to wait and see uh but no dude I I absolutely adore this when's the book actually out when when does it get released November 7th November 7th right this will be out pretty much around about then everybody needs to go and buy this book Morgan H's first book psychology of money was a beast and this next one is is absolutely phenomenal uh where should St people go where else should they go to find out what you do and follow you I spend most of my time on Twitter my handle is first and last name Morgan howel I also have a Young net experimental podcast called the Morgan housel podcast I'm still playing around with it oh yeah Morgan I'll see you next year thanks Chris if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe