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Coming up next on Passion Strike.
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So I have no idea or neither does anybody else when the next bear market is going to occur in the stock market.
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But I know with certainty how people are going to respond with greed and fear and uncertainty and their tribal influences and how they interpret the media and the incentives of investors, the incentives of advisors, the incentives of the media.
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That s never changed and it will never change.
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So we know, even if we don t know what s going to change, let s put all of our attention in these things that don t.
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As a student of history, I m always most excited reading history when I read something that took place 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago.
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And you realize that if you just change the dates on what you just read from 1823 to 2023, every word would fit right in.
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So when you find something that doesn t change, you know you found something that s particularly important in the world that you should put a lot of your focus and attention on.
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Welcome to Passion Struck.
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Hi, I m your host, John R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world s most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.
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Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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If you re new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
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We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.
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Now, let s go out there and become Passion Struck.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Episode 416 of Passion Struck, the number one alternative health podcast.
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A heartfelt thank you to each and every one of you who return to the show every week, eager to listen, learn and discover new ways to live better, be better and make a meaningful impact in the world.
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If you re new to the show, thank you so much for being here.
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Or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member.
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We sure appreciate it when you do that.
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We have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans  favorite episodes that we ve organized into convenient playlists that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do during the show.
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Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started.
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I also wanted to tell you about the Passionstruck quiz.
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You can find it on the homepage of the Passionstruck website.
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It consists of 20 questions, takes about 10 minutes, and you can find out where you sit on the Passionstruck continuum.
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And in case you missed it, my interview from earlier in the week featured Morgan Housel, a mastermind in the world of finance, behavior economics, and psychology, and also the author of the international bestseller, The Psychology of Money, which has resonated with over 4 million readers globally.
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I engaged Morgan in a thought-provoking conversation, diving deep into his latest work, Same as Ever, Guide to What Never Changes.
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And if you liked that previous episode or today s, we would so appreciate you giving it a five-star rating and review.
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It goes such a long way in strengthening the passion in our community, where we can help more people to create an intentional life.
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And I know we and our guests love to hear your feedback.
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Today, we re diving into a crucial conversation with my friend Nate Clem, exploring how to thrive in a world overflowing with information and distractions, in an era where our natural response is to shut down,
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our own emotions to others and to the wider world.
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Due to the constant bombardment of stimuli, Nate s groundbreaking book, Open, offers a beacon of hope and a roadmap to a more expansive, creative, and wonder-filled way of life.
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In this episode, we ll delve into the heart of why we tend to close off when confronted with stressors or threats,
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and discover how we can, instead, train ourselves to embrace the fullness of life s experiences, even in the face of fear, outrage, or heartache.
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Nate s unique blend of new scientific insights, age-old practices, and deeply personal narratives sheds light on the modern challenges that make it all too easy to shut down.
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Join us as we journey through captivating experiential stories, from psychedelic-assisted therapy, to engaging with political adversaries, from the power of meditation to a host of other tools aimed at opening our minds.
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Nate also introduces the three shifts of opening, breaking free from the habit of mind-wandering, choosing engagement over withdrawal, and expanding our perspectives.
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So if you re ready to unlock a new level of freedom and experience life in its fullest, expansive form, this episode with Nate Klempp is not to be missed.
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Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.
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Now, let that journey begin.
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I am absolutely honored and thrilled to have Morgan Hassell on the PassionStruck podcast.
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Welcome, Morgan.
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John, thanks so much for having me.
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Happy to be here.
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You and I are both very interested in behavior science and psychology, as I understand it.
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You have a degree in economics from USC, and it s interesting because you got your start writing about finance and investing.
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But what s unexpected to me is that a lot of what you write about are life lessons that aren t confined to that field.
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What got you interested in writing about topics like history, psychology, business, and pretty much everything under the sun?
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Well, John, I think it s two things.
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One might seem important and one seems a little bit superficial, but the important one was just the realization that all of investing, all of finance, all of money management is really just the study of how people behave with money.
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And since it s a study of behavior, there is so much that we can learn.
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from other fields that are also the study of behavior that become directly applicable to investing in finance and money management.
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So I think there s so much that you can learn from pick a field, politics, military history, biology, sports, medicine, that when you dig into the flaws and the problems and the challenges of those fields,
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All of a sudden, when you start to connect the dots, oh, that s exactly how people deal with challenges in finance.
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So much of what this all boils down to is how people deal with risk, uncertainty, greed, fear, opportunity, those kinds of problems.
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So, I think if you are trying to learn about investing,
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and you are focusing all of your attention just on a finance textbook or an economics textbook, you re missing 99% of what s relevant to helping you become a better investor.
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Last week, Charlie Munger passed away, of course.
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And I think one of his legacies that he will leave forever is multidisciplinary learning.
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where Munger was of course an investor, but in a previous life, he was a lawyer and a real estate investor.
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And then he became a stock picker when he teamed up with Buffett in the 1960s.
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And all of his interests throughout life was just figuring out how the world works.
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He was not trying to figure out how the stock market works.
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He was trying to figure out how people work.
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If you are a finance writer,
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And every article or every book that you write is, here s what the Dow Jones did last week.
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Not only is that boring for readers, it s boring for you, the writer.
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It s not any fun.
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But if you can become a finance writer and talk about, and same as ever, there s stories about World War II and there s stories about NASA.
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So there s all these topics that have nothing to do with finance whatsoever that I think makes it more interesting for me, the writer, and hopefully more interesting for you, the reader as well.
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Well, I appreciate you bringing all that up.
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And I m going to put forward a copy here so the listeners can see your new book, Same as Ever.
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And we re going to dive deep into that.
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But before we do, I did want to ask you a couple of questions leading into it.
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So if the audience isn t familiar with you, your first book, The Psychology of Money, was a huge hit.
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To put this in perspective for the audience, typical financial book sells about 5,000 copies.
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You hit 10,000, you were absolutely killing it.
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And your book has sold now, as I understand it, 4 million copies worldwide.
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What do you credit this to?
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I think three and a half years later, we still haven t really figured out why.
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And I ve always said that, I think this is true in almost any field, that 90% of virality or extreme outsized success is luck.
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Luck in the sense that it s very hard to replicate and even hard to pinpoint why it happened to begin with.
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And I think that s true for almost any endeavor.
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You can look at, go on down the list of billionaires.
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Were they hardworking?
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Were they smart?
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Were they driven?
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Like all those, yes, of course.
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And they were also extremely lucky based off of all these different factors.
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I think there s almost no exceptions to that.
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And I was just talking about this last night with my wife.
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Psychology of Money came out in September, 2020.
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That was an interesting period in the book market because the world was still on COVID lockdown.
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Everyone s stuck in their homes.
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That was an absolute bonanza year for the book publishing industry because when everyone s stuck in their homes, everyone s, well, let s go buy some books, that ll keep us entertained.
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And also what was going on was
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The stock market was going bonkers.
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It was going straight.
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It has this ridiculous tech boom.
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And a lot of people were flush with stimulus money.
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So, a lot of people, you put those two together, they re stuck in their homes.
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They want to read.
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And for the first time in their life, they re more interested in money and investing than they ve ever been in their life.
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Now, obviously, when we picked September 20 as a published date for Psychology of Money, we picked that date at 2019.
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And when we picked that date, we had no idea that the world was going to be on lockdown and that the market was going to be going crazy.
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So, that was luck in itself.
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And this is what my wife and I were talking about last night.
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If Psychology of Money came out in 2017 or 2015, I don t think it would have a fraction of the success just because the time in which it came out, it was like all the stars aligned with that.
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If there is one thing that I think I m proud of in both books for Same as Ever and Psychology of Money, it s that everybody knows that the majority of nonfiction books could have been a blog post, could have been a magazine article.
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And even the nonfiction books that you read, you re like, Oh, I really enjoy this book, I m going to recommend it to people.
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A lot of times after chapter four you re like,
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Like, okay, I get it.
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I don t need 75,000 other examples here.
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And to me, the only way to combat that problem of the book that should have been a blog post is by writing very short, succinct chapters that could stand on their own.
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And there is a connecting theme between all the chapters, but rather than rambling on one topic for 200 pages, let s talk about 20 or 25 separate topics that could have lived on their own.
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What I mean by that is you can start either book on chapter 17 and the book will make perfect sense to you.
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It s not just rambling on one topic.
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And I think that is something that the online publishing industry figured out years ago, like how fickle people s attention spans are.
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So you need to be very succinct and to the point.
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And I think not a lot of authors have tried to bring that to the physical book world yet.
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And so I was I think that s what if I look back at the structure of both books, I think that s one thing that I m proud of.
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Yeah, the two of you who I ve seen do it really well are yourself and I m not sure if Jeff Scott Jeffrey Miller, but he writes in that way too.
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And it s easy to underestimate how short people s attention spans are.
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And you really have to keep their attention very quickly.
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And as an online writer, you learn that really very fast because it s easier to track the data.
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How many people read this article?
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How far down the page did they make it?
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You can track all of that in a way that s never really been trackable in the physical book world.
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So, if you grew up as I did and cut your teeth as an online writer, I think those skills become pretty natural of just trying to get to the point as quickly as possible.
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I think for the listeners who are out there, they re always interested in understanding how people write.
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And I find that there are probably one, two, three different ways that people, different people approach it.
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What is your secret to how you write books?
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I don t know if it s a secret because I don t know if this is good advice for anybody.
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It might be the wrong thing for me to do, but for better or worse, how I write in terms of the actual, like when I m actually sitting down to type.
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So this is different than the idea generation, but I m the kind of writer who I will write one sentence and then I ll sit there and stare at it.
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and stare at it some more, and I ll change one word, and then I ll think about that sentence as it relates to the previous five sentences, and I ll stare at it some more, and I ll change another word.
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And then until I m really convinced that sentence is perfect, only then will I move on to the next sentence.
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Because of that, when I get to the bottom of any blog post or chapter or book, whatever it is, when I get to the bottom, in my mind, I m confident that that s very close to the final draft.
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Now, most authors and most writing teachers will tell you that s a terrible way to write.
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What you should do is write one sloppy first draft, rough draft, and then go back and edit it and fix it.
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That probably is the right advice.
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For better or worse, I don t, though.
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In terms of idea generation, I spend the huge majority of my time
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casually unstructured reading.
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There s no intention.
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There s no, oh, I m trying to read so I can learn X, Y, and Z. I just got a stack of books at all times of topics.
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And I m like, oh, that seems kind of somewhat interesting to me.
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But always with the idea in my head of like, how can I take this story that I just read about in this book,
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and twist that into a finance lesson.
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And that s what I ve been doing for 17 years.
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And when you have that bug in your head, you start seeing these analogies everywhere, everywhere.
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I ll give you one example of this.
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I was on the treadmill last night here in my house, and I was listening to Coldplay.
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And the Coldplay song, Fix You, has this lyric in it.
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And he says, when you get what you want, but not what you need, what could be worse?
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I m on the treadmill, I m thinking that s exactly so many rich people s relationship with money and success.
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You get what you want, but not what you need.
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What could be worse?
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So I think once you start looking for these things of like, how does this relate to behavior?
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How does it relate to money?
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You see it everywhere.
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You see it in Coldplay songs.
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And that s the huge majority of what I do.
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Actually sitting at my computer typing is a very small percentage of what I do, just a couple hours per week.
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Yeah, you and I, it seems like both do a ton of extensive research and reading, and that s part of my favorite job of being a podcaster, having the opportunity to read because of the solo episodes I do, the blog post, and then the guest I need to interview.
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I think I fall more into the more common camp, which is I try to get my thoughts out on a page.
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or the blog I m writing or the chapter.
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But I also do what you do in some ways is that I m very concerned about the transition points and the impact and clarity and how what I m writing is tying into the previous section.
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So I do spend a lot of time looking at that as I m writing and then
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I tend to like to write it, put it away for about 12 hours overnight, and then come back to it the next day.
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And then I m able to breeze through it and make the corrections pretty easily the second time around.
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And I guess that s probably the right way to do it.
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One of the reasons I think I do it the way that I do is because it s hard for me to get really excited about what I m writing if I know that the previous five paragraphs are a sloppy mess versus I think I get really excited and I get energized when I m writing and I know in my head that the previous five paragraphs are really good.
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Then I m like, oh, this is a great article.
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Let s keep going.
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Let s make this perfect.
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And so, I think that s part of the reason I do it.
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I think it s a self-motivator for me to not move on to the next sentence until I m really confident that the previous sentence is golden.
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Yes, I know for me that when I feel like I have writer s block, I typically just ditch the whole idea because it ends up not being something that I feel like I can write about anyhow.
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So, I d rather not waste the time and move on.
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Well, let s move on to talking about Same as Ever.
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And in it, you start out by telling an interesting story involving candy bars.
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Can you tell us more about it and how it relates to the core concept of the book?
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Yeah, so this was last summer.
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I was having lunch with a guy who s a very close friend of Warren Buffett.
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And he told me the story that in 2009, he was driving around Omaha with Buffett in the car.
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Buffett s driving, he s in the passenger seat.
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And it s 2009, so the global economy is in shambles at this point.
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It s like the whole global economy is rubble.
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And Omaha was no different.
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There were like businesses closed down and boarded up.
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And this friend says, Warren, it s so bad right now.
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How do we ever get out of this?
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And Warren said, do you know what the best-selling candy bar was in 1962?
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And the guy said, no.
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And Warren said, Snickers.
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And then Warren said, do you know what the best-selling candy bar is today?
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The guy said, no.
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And Warren said, Snickers.
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And then that was it.
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That s the end of the conversation.
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The obvious takeaway is just stop trying to figure out how the world is going to change because nobody knows.
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Find something that is never going to change and put your emphasis or put your investment into something like that.
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And when I heard that, I knew that was, I was already deep into writing Same as Ever, but it was like, that was just like a perfect example of the point that I m trying to make, which is,
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Stop pretending that we know what s going to change in the future because there s just so much evidence that we don t.
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And in my 17 years as a financial writer, I think I ve become cynical about how bad the industry is at forecasting.
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The next recession, the next bear market, nobody can do it.
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And so with that acknowledgement, I think there s two things you can do.
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You can become even more of a cynic and just say, nobody knows anything, don t even try.
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Or you can kind of take that Buffett approach, the snicker bar approach of like, let s find something that we know is never going to change.
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These facets of human behavior that have been around with us forever.
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And then we know with certainty that those traits are going to be part of our future.
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So I have no idea or neither does anybody else when the next bear market is going to occur in the stock market.
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But I know with certainty how people are going to respond with greed and fear and uncertainty and their tribal influences and like how they interpret the media and the incentives of investors, the incentives of advisors, the incentives of the media.
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That s never changed and it will never change.
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So, we know even if we don t know what s going to change, let s put all of our attention in these things that don t.
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And so, as a student of history, I m always most excited reading history when I read something that took place 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago.
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And you realize that if you just change the dates on what you just read from 1823 to 2023, every word would fit right in.
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So, when you find something that doesn t change, you know you found something that s particularly important in the world that you should put a lot of your focus and attention on.
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Well, this brings me to another billionaire who you talk about at the beginning of the book, Jeff Bezos.
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And Jeff is someone I actually write about in my upcoming book as well, in a chapter that I write about him being an originality embracer.
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And it s really this combination of originality and adaptability that I talk about.
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But in your book, you write about that Jeff is often asked what s going to change in the next 10 years, but he s almost never asked what s not going to change in the next 10 years.
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And he says, I submit to you that the second question is actually the more important of the two.
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Why is it that the things that never change are important?
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Because you can put so much confidence into knowing how they ll shape the future.
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Yeah.
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So for a Bezos example, when he s talking about Amazon, he said, it s impossible to imagine a future in which Amazon customers do not want low prices, fast shipping, big selection.
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Impossible to imagine those things going out of fashion.
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And because of that, Amazon could invest all of its money
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all of its time and energy into doubling down on those things, knowing that they will be just as important 10 years from now as they are today.
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And you can t say that about new technologies, new computing systems, new supply chain lines.
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Things change all the time.
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And so if you are a car manufacturer today, you don t know what styles, what configurations, what engines are going to be in favor 10 years from now.
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You don t know.
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But something like low prices, big selection, those are going to be.
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So put your attention into that.
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And I think that idea really expands to a lot of areas in life.
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And that really is the premise of the book.
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Here are the things that regardless of what the future holds, and I don t know what it s going to hold, but regardless of what does happen, I know that people are going to respond and act in these 23 ways that I lay out in the book.
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That s great.
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And in the book, you actually touch upon how business leaders often let success cloud their judgment, leading to complacency and entitlement, which ultimately results in the loss of their edge.
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And this resonates with the theme that I discussed with Jim McKelvey, who you probably know, the co-founder of Square.
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And I was interviewing Jim for the book.
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He emphasized to me, as I was asking him, out of all these entrepreneurs that you work with, why do so many of them fail?
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And he said, they falter in their success because they lose focus on the unique problem that they were uniquely suited to solve.
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How do you see the interplay between managing expectations, as you discuss in both The Psychology of Money and Same as Ever, with maintaining a sharp focus on one s unique purpose, as McKelvey suggests, in the journey towards sustained success?
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I think what a lot of this is in terms of sustainable success, if you look at people who have been successful for a long time in their individual career or businesses that have been around for a long time, I think what a lot of it is, what made you successful to begin with was probably some degree of fear and paranoia, like a drive, a fear of not making it.
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And that s why your business was successful.
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That s why your career was successful because you woke up saying, I need to go solve this problem immediately.
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And then for a lot of people, once you gain some modicum of success, maybe your company goes public or you get a big promotion in your career, then you, what seems very reasonably, you tell yourself that now you can relax a little bit.
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Now that you ve made it to what seems like the mountaintop, now you deserve to be able to relax.
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And now, by definition, you have lost
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what made you successful to begin with.
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And I read this profile about NVIDIA recently, which of course is just ridiculously successful.
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And the unofficial motto of NVIDIA for employees and managers is, we are always 30 days from going out of business.
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And that just keeps them scared.
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They wake up scared that they re not going to make it.
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There s this great interview with Mike Moritz, who s the most successful venture capitalist investor of all time.
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And he s asked by Charlie Rose, he says, like, why is Sequoia, his venture capital firm, been so successful for 40 years?
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And he doesn t say intelligence.
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He doesn t say network.
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He doesn t say hard work.
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He says, we re always scared of going out of business.
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And I think that is so rare and so unique and much more common for individuals and businesses is to take what seems like a justified sigh of relief and to let your guard down a little bit.
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And then your expectations shift from scared that you re not going to make it towards egotistical that you ve already made it and then that success is somehow entrenched.
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And that s the downfall of a lot of companies, a lot of individuals.
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It s really hard to let go of.
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And it s kind of sad to admit, I think, because
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A lot of the reason that people are hardworking and grinding is because they envision a day in which they won t have to do that anymore.
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The reason you re working hard is that someday you won t have to work as hard.
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That s the goal.
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But then when you realize, no, it actually doesn t work that way.
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If you let your guard down, then you re going to increase the odds of failing.
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That is different.
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So to me, like one of the solutions to this that s written about in Same as Ever 2 is like, I ve always really admired people who quit while they were ahead.
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people who left on their own terms, people who said, look, I ve kind of lost the drive that got me here in the first place.
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So rather than just letting the cards fall where they may and just letting my guard down and doing that, I m going to take myself out of the game.
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Jerry Seinfeld did this.
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Many actors have done this.
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A lot of business people have done this.
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Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, they all left the companies that were their babies.
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And I really admire that.
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And I think if you don t go out of your way to do that, the huge majority of people, not everybody, but the huge majority of them will eventually, once they achieve some level of success, let their guard down in a way that turns them into a very different worker and a very different business person than they were before.
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Speaking of those people you just brought up, all of them are now embracing new challenges later in their life.
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And it s interesting because it got me thinking about, as you were talking, I had the pleasure of interviewing Stephen Kotler, who s a peak performance expert, about his latest book, Narcountry, a few months ago.
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In it, he discusses how to learn how to park ski in his mid-50s.
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And as someone who is also an avid skier yourself, what are your thoughts on taking up such a challenging activity later in life, particularly after the age of 50, which is unheard of to do this?
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Well, I hope he has a strong back for park skiing.
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As someone who was a park skier when I was 17 or so, I can t imagine the forces I would put on my joints today.
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So more power to him.
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I do think it s true that, just to state something shockingly obvious that s not insightful, your brain is a muscle.
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And if you don t use it, it atrophies.
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And I think that s, this is another area where people, when they retire,
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They think they can take a justifiable step back and say, I ve worked my brain for 50 years.
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Now I m going to give it a rest.
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And then it atrophies.
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And then I think for a lot of people, it s going to lead to some level of boredom or depression, if not serious mental illness that comes from that and like different changes to your brain.
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And so I always really admire people.
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Munger was like this.
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Munger, until literally the day before he died, was having Zoom calls with people where he s trying to learn from them.
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He d have Zoom calls with professors from Harvard.
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And he would just sit down and be like, teach me about how this chemistry process works.
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Just like the most curious act of mine you can imagine.
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I hope, I so hope that I can maintain that when I m 99 years old.
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That makes two of us because that s what for me keeps me going is that creativity that s in my life all the time.
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I can t even imagine what it would be like if I lost that and the ability to be innovative no matter how old I am.
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Well, I m going to keep going on with this theme of skiing.
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I love to ski.
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When I was younger, I used to venture into the back country.
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Can t do it anymore as it s.
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Turns out you were a much better skier than I think I ever was.
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And one of the things I think we were both always concerned about in the backcountry was the threat of an avalanche.
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Can you share your life-altering experience with an avalanche that you cover in the book and how it relates to events compounding in unfathomable ways?
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Yeah, so I grew up as a competitive ski racer in Lake Tahoe, California.
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I was on the Squaw Valley ski team and had this experience in 2001.
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And my two best friends were 17 years old at the time.
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And we would ski in the back country out of bounds where you duck under the ropes that say, do not cross.
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And cause that s where the awesome skiing was.
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It was all untracked and we had the place to ourselves and it was fun.
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And so when you do that, when you ski backcountry out of bounds, there s obviously no chairlift at the bottom.
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So when we got to the bottom, we would hitchhike back.
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We would ski down until it spit us out on a backcountry road and we d hitchhike back.
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So the three of us do this one morning.
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We ski down the backside of Squaw Valley on the backside of the KT22 chairlift.
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And we get to the bottom we hitchhike back and my two friends, Brendan and Brian said hey let s go do it again.
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And I didn t want to do it again.
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I think that the hitchhiking always kind of freaked me out.
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I was like it was a hitchhiking where I thought like we were always about to be abducted, I didn t want to do it.
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So it s like hey guys, you go do it again.
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And rather than hitchhiking back, I ll drive my truck around to the base of the mountain and pick you up.
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And then so, we went our separate ways.
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Brandon and Brian went skiing.
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I went to go get my truck and drove around the mountain to pick them up.
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And when I got to the bottom of the mountain, they were not there.
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And I didn t think that much of it.
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Prior to having cell phones, which we did not at the time, people were very comfortable being out of touch.
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It didn t freak people out if you re like, oh, I don t know where this person is and I haven t seen them in a couple hours.
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I figured that they had already hitchhiked back and I just miss them.
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And then the hours went on, the hours went on.
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And Brian s mom called me later that afternoon and said, hey, Brian didn t show up for work today.
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Do you know where he is?
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And I told her the truth, said, we skied down the backside of KT-22, and I was going to pick them up, but I don t think they ever arrived, and I don t think anyone s ever seen them since.
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And of course, we started piecing together what that could have meant.
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It seemed pretty serious.
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By about midnight that night, we had search and rescue involved.
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And search and rescue, when they entered the out-of-bounds area where I told them that we had been skiing, they found the fresh scars of a massive avalanche that had clearly just occurred, and just a few hours before that.
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And about 9am the next day after search and rescue, I had been searching for nine hours, a team of search dogs kind of homed in on a spot in the avalanche field and rescuers found Bren and Brian buried under six feet of snow.
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They were dead, of course.
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And whenever I tell the story, I always have to preface it with a thing like, look, you and everybody else has lost somebody dear to you at some point in your life.
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I know that experience for me is not unique in the sense
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sunset, somebody close to me died.
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Maybe the circumstances were different, but it had a profound impact on me when I started realizing that if I had gone on that second run with Brendan and Brian, 100% chance that I would have died with them.
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It was a massive avalanche.
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A big avalanche like that is so much force, so much power, nobody can really survive it.
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And so then I look back and it s like the most important decision that I ever made in my entire life was not going on that second run.
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And of course, I didn t put any thought into that decision.
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It was a dumb brainless decision that I d put no thought or analysis into.
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I didn t do a risk reward analysis.
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I didn t think about the pros and cons.
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It was just this brainless decision that is in order of magnitude more important than every other decision I ve ever made in my life.
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And I think when you take that to heart, and there are so many related stories in your life, in everybody s life, in the country, in the world of a decision you never thought twice about that went on to change everything for you.
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Then you realize like how preposterous it is to think that we can predict the future that you know where you re going to be in five years that you know where the world is going to be in 10 years we don t events compound where a little know nothing decision compounds into something incredible.
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Sometimes those compounding events can be great news.
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Sometimes it can be like.
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You held the door for somebody, and that person became your spouse two years later.
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Those kind of things happen too.
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And to me, it s just this observation of how much of the world hangs by a thread, that a tiny little whiff of nothingness can compound into an extraordinary event.
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The most famous of which is 1914 or 1915, whenever it was, Archduke Ferdinand is assassinated in Sarajevo.
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That leads to World War I, which leads to World War II, which leads to the Cold War, which leads to everything else since then.
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You can literally draw a straight line from this guy in Sarajevo being assassinated in the 19-teens to things like nuclear energy and rockets and microprocessors that directly came from that.
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So when you think about that, who are we to fool ourselves that we know what s going to happen next?
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Nobody does.
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And I included this in the first chapter of Same as Ever, because I really want to drive home the point of the entire book, which is that if we can t predict what s going to happen in the future, let s just focus on what we know is never going to change.
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You also touch on the captain of a ship who, when I was starting to read that section, I thought you were going to be talking about the Titanic.
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Yeah.
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It turns out not to be the case, but in how just the simple decision of to turn one boiler off changed the course of history.
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And maybe you can share that one too.
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Yeah, so the giant passenger ship, Lusitania, was setting sail from New York to, I think, Liverpool, and coal prices were very high at the time.
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And so to save on energy, the ship company decided to turn one of the boilers off.
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I think they had four boilers on the ship.
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They decided to run this cross-Atlantic journey with only three of the boilers running to save on expensive coal.
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Because of that, the ship was going about a quarter slower than it normally would on this voyage.
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Because it was going slower, it entered this part of the Atlantic at the very moment when a German U-boat submarine was also entering this part of the Atlantic, and the German U-boat sank the Lusitania, and that was a major precipitating event for rallying U.S.
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public support to enter World War I.
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was when the Germans sunk Lusitania.
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Many American civilians died in this period.
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And so, Eric Larson wrote a great book on Lusitania.
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He makes this point that if they were running at all four boilers, they would have reached their destination in Liverpool.
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This German U-boat was even in the waters.
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And that s just another example of how fragile the world can be.
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and how much of the world hangs by a thread.
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When you realize how much of major history really relies on these know-nothing events, it humbles you to think that you can predict what s going to happen next.
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It made me think about a fairly crazy event that happened in my life.
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I m a huge bike rider and I used to cycle outside all the time.
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And Saturday and Sunday mornings, I would do this big group ride.
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The one on Saturday would have 50, 60 people in it.
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And we were going at a good clip and all of a sudden,
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whatever reason I was having problems with my shoe clip in the pedal.
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And so I ended up leaving my position kind of in the middle of the pack at the time where I was with the riders and was drifting back so I could deal with it.
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And about a hundred feet later, I hear this screeching of tires and this car runs right into a group of riders right where I would have been.
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Most of them had broken bones.
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A couple of them had broke their back, broken neck.
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really turned out to be a really bad scene.
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And I just think back upon that, and in a fractions of seconds, an event that I was spared could have been completely different just by that one incident that who would have ever thought it would have compounded like that.
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So your point hits home for me.
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For sure, there is somebody who left for work at 7.53 this morning.
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And if they left at 7.52, they would have been killed in a car accident and vice versa.
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There was certainly somebody who was killed in a car accident this morning.
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And if they left their house 30 seconds before or after, they would have avoided it.
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And so many things are like that in the world.
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It s really kind of scary to think about.
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Tim Urban, the author, he writes, if you had a time machine and you can go back in time, you would be terrified of making any decision because you would be so cognizant of what that decision could eventually compound to in the future.
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Yeah, I think we all think about decisions that we ve made and how they would have turned out differently.
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Like a classic one for me is, I was a senior executive at Lowe s at the time, and out of the blue, I got a call to be interviewed by this startup company at the time.
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It was a few years in.
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called Red Hat, and I went for this interview to be their chief information officer.
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And when you re with a Fortune 50 company like Lowe s going to this tiny company, for me, I just wasn t impressed with the scale of the company, et cetera, at the time.
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I went through the discussion and Matthew Zulich was the CIO or was the CEO at the time and the original founder.
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And we got off to this amazing conversation.
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Long story forward, they ended up offering me the job and I passed on it.
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And as fate would have it, my first cousin went to Duke and his roommate was Matthew s son.
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And I got back in touch with Matthew through that.
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He says to me, you made one of the most colossal mistakes in history.
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I go, I have no idea what you re talking about.
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He goes, I knew at that time that I was going to be leaving the company and I was actually hiring this position to be my successor.
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And I look back upon that and just wonder what if given the trajectory of where Red Hat has gone.
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But as I look back upon it, I let my ego get in the way of seeing what could have been just a remarkable opportunity.
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Here s where the what if comes in.
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That s a wonderful story.
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But what if could have meant that you did take the job and it ended up being massively stressful and it could have ended relationships that you ve had with your friends because it took up so much of your time.
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The what if goes so far beyond how much money you could have made if you had taken that job.
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There are so many other things.
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So when you contemplate how different your life could have turned out,
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I don t think even when it s obvious when things would have turned out better or seem like this, I don t think it s necessarily better or worse.
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It s just different.
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Your life would have turned out very different than it did.
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But it s very easy to overlook the potential downsides of that.
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It s also possible that they would have hired you and after a year, you would have gotten fired or whatever.
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I m making all this up.
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And that because of getting fired, that crushed your ego.
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There s a million different ways that it could have gone.
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I think just acknowledging that how fragile these decisions can be is the point without really
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without really having a clear understanding of where exactly the path that it would have taken you.
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That s a really interesting point.
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And I m going to switch here to a little bit different topic, and that is the topic of social debt.
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Where I m going with this is you, as we have already discussed, have interacted with a diverse range of individuals from billionaires to even professional athletes.
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And regarding athletes,
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We often hear about their financial ups and downs, especially professional athletes rapidly earning and losing millions.
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How does this phenomenon relate to the concept of social debt and what can we learn from this?
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So, this is maybe three years ago or so, I did this consulting session with a group of NBA rookies.
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And the purpose of it was everybody knows the path of a lot of professional athletes where a lot of them grew up in inner city poverty, and then they get signed as a professional athlete, they make millions of dollars, their career is three or four years, and then once they got to get cut and they re not making money anymore, they re bankrupt.
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It s such a common path.
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for a lot of these athletes.
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And one of the NBA players, I think he was 19, he was a young kid.
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He said something that I thought was so profound.
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He s like, when you grow up in poverty and then all of a sudden when you re 19, you re making $10 million a year, that is not your money.
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That is mom s money, dad s money, cousin s money, grandma s money, neighbor s money, friend s money.
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You can t just tell all your friends who are living back in deep poverty, best of luck to you, I got my money.
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And he said a lot of the reason that
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athletes go bankrupt it s not because they bought themselves a mansion.
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It s because they bought their fifth cousin, a modest house and felt that they were obligated to do to help them out.
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That to me, I phrased as this concept of social debt and social debt can come in many forms.
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It s the pressures that society pushes on you to spend your money in a certain way.
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And for a lot of people, it s not necessarily very rich people who are buying their fifth cousin a house, but for a lot of people, it s the expectations that society pushes on you.
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towards art if you are this kind of person in this profession you need to dress this way and drive this car and live in this house.
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And for a lot of people those pressures, it s a legitimate form of debt, because
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If you get a raise or a big bonus, but then you have these social pressures to spend it all, to live a certain way, that is very much a debt that needs to be repaid before you can get any kind of benefit from the money that you have.
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And so, I think we see this everywhere.
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The biggest form of social debt is probably rising expectations.
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And everyone talks about price inflation, the price of goods and services going up.
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I think a much more dangerous form of inflation is expectations inflation, where your definition of what a good life is goes way up over time, over the course of your life.
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I think this is a lot of the case of modern history, in the West particularly, where since the 1950s,
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The huge majority of Americans have gotten much, much richer, higher incomes adjusted for inflation, way higher net worths, longer life expectancies, virtually everything has gotten better.
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But there s not a lot of evidence that we re happier for it.
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And I think a lot of the reason is because the expectations of what a good life is, has gone from
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an 800-square-foot house with one car, going camping for your vacation, wearing hand-me-down clothes, that used to be the expectation of a good life.
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Whereas today, for a lot of people at least, it s a 3,000-square-foot house with a three-car garage and two overseas vacations that keep on going down that list.
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I think that s a big reason why people, even though they are better off, they don t feel like they are because their expectations have inflated along with progress over time.
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So I think that too is a form of social debt.
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And the thing that s hard about social debt is that it s hard to measure, hard to quantify.
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So if you re talking about real debt, like your mortgage, you can quantify that.
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You can say my mortgage is $105,000, whatever it is, you can quantify it.
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How do you quantify your social debt?
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How do you quantify your rising expectations over time?
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Very hard to do it.
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So for a lot of people, they just pretend that they don t exist.
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And even though they are much more prosperous than they used to be, they get caught in this trap of pessimism of, oh, the world is broken.
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The world is not what it used to be because I don t feel like I m actually better off.
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Yeah, it s such a interesting topic.
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I mean, there s, we could do a whole podcast just on that topic.
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It intrigues me so much.
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I want to dive into a little bit more of the stuff you cover, but before I do that, I do have to steal something from the interview you did with Tim Ferriss, because I always love listening to his shows.
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As we discussed earlier, I can t ever listen to the whole thing because they re so long, but I happen to listen to a portion where he starts trying to get you to answer a question.
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about a billion dollars and what would you leave with your kids?
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And to me, I m less intrigued with that than I am with this aspect of it.
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This past week, I put out an episode with a serial entrepreneur and author you might know, Lee Benson, and he has a new book out called Value Creation Kid, which he s really talking about the fact that we need to let
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our kids figure things out on their own.
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And it s funny because as I was listening to your episode, I come home and I see this article about Jennifer Garner, the actress who advocates for something she calls benign neglect with your kids.
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I saw this.
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And where I m going with this is in your interview with Tim, you talk about an $8 billion family.
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And I was hoping through this lens, you could just talk about that a little bit more because I thought it was really intriguing.
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I did this consulting work for this family several years ago.
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The family s net worth is $8 billion and they earned it in a way that is very moral.
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They re not trying to hide it or whatnot, but this family is completely anonymous.
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If you Google their name, nothing comes up.
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There s no profiles or not on any Forbes lists, there s no pictures of them at ribbon cutting ceremonies for their donations.
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They re completely and utterly anonymous.
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And that is very intentional, they did that on purpose, including kind of like scraping their name from the internet, they donate all their money anonymously.
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And because of that,
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Unless you really know them and are close friends with them, nobody knows who they are.
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They can walk through the street and nobody knows who they are.
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Nobody recognizes them.
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They live a very good material life.
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They live like billionaires, but nobody knows who they are.
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And of all of the very wealthy families that I ve met, particularly their children seem the most well-balanced of anyone that I ve ever met.
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And I think it s because when you are the opposite of that, when you come from the rich families to live like a rich person, it is very easy, particularly for the children, but even the adults to gain this identity of, I m important, I m special, and I m better than everybody else.
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And that s a very dangerous mindset, of course.
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And since his family had gone out of their way to be anonymous, everyone else in town at the grocery store, they just treat them like normal people.
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That s really important.
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There s this great quote from Matt Damon, the actor, and he says, the day that you become famous, you retard socially and emotionally.
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You stop maturing socially and emotionally because everyone around you treats you differently.
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Everyone around you is nicer than they need to be.
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or nicer than they should be.
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They think your jokes are funnier than they are.
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They tell great, they tell you re funny, they tell you re beautiful, even when you re not, because they want to get into your good graces.
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And that is such a poison in world.
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So this family that went out of their way to be anonymous, I thought had done a better job than the huge majority of wealthy families.
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I also spoke with someone just last week whose parents are billionaires and he grew up with parents who are billionaires.
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He s roughly my age now.
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And he talked about how the money really did not ruin him.
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And I wanted to talk to him about this because I noticed how well balanced he was.
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And I kind of wanted to ask, how did your parents raise you despite your parents being billionaires?
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to become a well-balanced adult.
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And he said, it s because my parents never made money that big of a deal.
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And I said, what do you mean by that?
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And he said, a lot of the reason that rich kids are spoiled is because the reason the parents are rich is because the parents were obsessed with money.
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That s why they re rich.
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But it also meant that the parents went through life telling their kids, nothing matters in life more than money.
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And if you have money, you are better than people who don t have money.
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Whereas this guy s parents were the opposite.
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They had buckets of money, but his parents went out of their way to teach them like, hey, what actually matters in life are your values and your kindness and your ability to love and your honor and your dignity and your respect.
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That s what matters.
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And he just said that money virtually just never came up in the topic of conversation.
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And he knew that he had a bigger house and private jets and all those trappings, but it never came across to him that meant that he was a better person than people who did not have those things.
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Of course, these are all extreme examples.
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You re talking about the lives of billionaires.
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It doesn t seem that applicable to you and I and everyone else listening.
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But I think for a lot of these situations, the very wealthy person is just dealing with the same problems that you and I might just in a magnified way.
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And I think there s a lot that we can learn about that in terms of values that you want to leave your children.
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Over the weekend, I ran into two friends of mine who are a couple, and they were part of the producers of Good Will Hunting.
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And they later did Ben s Brothers movie as well as a number of others.
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But where I m going with this is they told me when they first met Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, that the two of them were so innocent, so just normal human beings.
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I said, Robin Williams was like a father figure to him.
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The stories are just fantastic.
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But I remember asking an ag.
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Now that you ve known these guys for decades, how have they changed? 
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And she goes, well, one of them has stayed down to earth and the other hasn t.
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And it s interesting how their two lives... Without many names, we know which one of those you re talking about.
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It is fascinating to see that occur.
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The other A-list celebrity that, at least from what I understand, has done an incredible job about this is Keanu Reeves, who A-list mega famous actor.
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But from what I understand, maybe the narrative is not 100% accurate,
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very down-to-earth, holds a door for old ladies, helps people out, just hasn t let that success go to his head.
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When you see it happen, there s so much honor that you have to give that person.
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I m going to bring up another person who I find that way, and that s Susan Cain, a friend of mine.
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And I think Susan is humble and is genuine as anyone I ve ever met.
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And one of the topics she and I explored on the show was perfectionism.
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And then more recently, I had a really in-depth conversation with Jennifer Wallace about her book, Never Enough, which is about toxic achievement culture, which to me is really a form of perfectionism.
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And this is something that you cover in the book, and I think it s an important topic right now.
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Why do you think there is a huge advantage to being a little imperfect?
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And what can the listeners learn from this?
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So much of it is like in your business, in your life, in your career, if you are always scheduled to 100% efficiency, as in every minute in your schedule is booked.
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And then for a lot of people, they re like, good, that s when I m maximizing my potential.
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I think for what you re missing there is how much of what matters in life and your career and your business
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is the creativity that you re going to get from unstructured thought, which is like for me, I think this is very common for a lot of people.
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I get my best ideas when I m running or driving or in the shower or walking my dog.
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I don t get that when I m sitting at my desk trying to be creative.
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Never.
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It always comes when you just have unstructured thought.
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And a lot of the best thinkers over time, Albert Einstein was like this, Bill Gates was like this, Abraham Lincoln was like this.
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They ve purposely structure.
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huge chunks of their day to have nothing in particular to do.
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And they would sit on the couch and daydream.
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They would go for a walk.
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They would call a friend.
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And that s where they get their best ideas.
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And I think it s counterintuitive because particularly in the workplace, what your boss wants you to do is sit at your desk and hit the keys on the keyboard.
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That s when your boss can look at you and be like, oh, they re being productive.
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But what actually matters for so many jobs
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what you want to be doing is actually just like sitting on the couch with your eyes closed, thinking through a problem, trying to be creative, thinking about what is this big business problem that I have and what is the solution?
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By and large, you re not going to get that in the conference room.
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You re not going to get that at your desk.
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You re going to get it going for a walk.
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So, the difference between what looks like good work and what actually is good work
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is profound.
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And a lot of what is actually the best work looks like laziness, going for a walk or sitting on the couch.
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So, there s this quote from Daniel Kahneman s old colleague, where he says, the secret for doing good work is to be a little bit underemployed, where you have free time in your day to let your mind wander.
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That s the secret.
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And it is completely the opposite of what most people would assume, which is that you want to have your day completely filled to the max, maximizing your potential.
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So Morgan, I can t conclude this episode without asking you a couple questions about the power of choice, which is something that is really at the heart of what we try to teach here and the power of taking action.
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And I want to talk to you about patience and scarcity in life choices.
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You ve spoken about and written about the value of patience and scarcity across various fields.
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How can these principles guide us in making more deliberate and meaningful life decisions?
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Well,
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Good opportunities for anyone are going to be very scarce over time.
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If you re an investor or in your career, there s not just an abundance of great opportunities being thrown at you every day.
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And so, I think for a lot of people in investing, I mean, it s definitely true in investing that how you behave 1% of the time
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is going to determine the vast majority of your lifetime investing results.
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Like how you behaved in October of 2008 or in March of 2020, when the world was collapsing and the economy, the stock market was collapsing, what you did during those months are profoundly more important than all of the decisions that you made in the subsequent years or decades that occurred after that.
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So, I think realizing that the world is driven by tales is a subset of thinking about scarcity and just realizing that
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No, it s the classic Pareto principle where a minority of the actions that you take and the decisions that you make are going to influence the majority of your outcomes is really important.
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So, I think it s true in careers, it s true in investing that the world is always driven by tales.
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And I think you can talk about this for global events too.
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I m a big news reader.
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I read the news every day.
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And in every day s news, there are dozens of news stories to read about and learn about.
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But if you look at the last 25 years, there s really only four stories that truly move the needle.
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9-11, the financial crisis, COVID, and one or two other things.
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It s like, it s always the case that in any decade, one or maybe two news events are more consequential than the thousands of others that occurred here.
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So I think that s a big part of learning about scarcity is just learning how much the world is driven by tales.
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You know, just look at the Cuban missile crisis as a great example.
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Okay.
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I have one other phone question for you.
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I read my books differently.
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I go to the back and then I go to the front and in doing so, I realized you have some hidden gems in the back of your book, a list of questions that tie back to the beginning of the book.
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And I m going to ask you one of them about genius or madness.
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How do you distinguish between a crazy genius worth emulating and someone who is simply crazy?
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For my own life, there are almost no crazy geniuses, to use that phrase, who I would really want to emulate.
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If you look at people who are mega successful, the billionaires, the A-list celebrities, the reason they re successful is because they have devoted 100% of their life to one thing for years or decades.
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That s why they re so successful.
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And the hidden part of that is that most of the time, that success has come at the expense of everything else in their life, their family, their friendships, their health.
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And I would never want that for myself.
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I would never want a life where I become a billionaire, but because of it, I get divorced and my kids don t know me because I spent all of my attention and focus building a business.
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I would never want that for myself.
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So I am glad, I m thrilled that those crazy geniuses exist.
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because they make the world so incredible with the new technologies that they bring, the entertainment and new media that they make, whatever it is.
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But I would never want it for myself.
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I think for myself, I want a simple and balanced life.
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That s what works for me.
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Now, it s important to point out that simple and balanced life would not work for Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg.
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It would not fit their personality.
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But for me, that s really what I want.
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And so, even though I like studying these people, for me, at least, it s a step too far to say, what are they doing that I can emulate?
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Okay, and then Morgan, lastly, where, if a listener wants to learn more about you, can they do so?
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I spend a lot of my time on Twitter.
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My handle is Morgan Housel, my first and last name.
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That s where most of my thoughts end up, for better or worse.
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Okay, Morgan, man, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and what an incredible honor, and congratulations on all the success of your books.
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Thanks so much.
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This has been fun.
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Thank you, John.
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please check them both out and subscribe.
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Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at PassionStruck.com slash deals.
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I also wanted to tell you about the PassionStruck quiz.
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You can find it on our homepage at PassionStruck.com.
5
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It takes about 10 minutes to do, consists of 20 questions, and we ll show you where you sit on the PassionStruck continuum.
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You can find me on all the social platforms at John R. Miles.
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You can sign up for my work related newsletter, Work Intentionally on LinkedIn or Live Intentionally
5
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our personal development newsletter on PassionStruck.com.
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You re about to hear a preview of the PassionStruck podcast interview I did with my friend, Nate Klemp.
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And we explore his new book titled, Open, and how to thrive in a world that s overflowing with information and distraction.
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And I think if you reduce down the cost of distraction to its absolute essence, it really is freedom that s at stake here.
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Because when we are tethered to our device,
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When we re checking our phone constantly, for example, around family members or we go for a play day with our kid and we re on our email or whatever it is, what s happening there is we re prioritizing the distraction over what I think we all would say matters more in that moment.
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So there s a way in which we re not free to live according to our highest priorities, to focus our time and our energy on what really matters most to us.
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Instead, we re just sort of sucked into this loop of craving.
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Remember that we rise by lifting others.
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So share the show with those that you love and care about.
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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen.
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Until next time, go out there yourself and become passion struck.