Welcome back to the podcast. We're rolling along. This is episode 12.
One quick note. I have a new book coming out later this fall. It comes out in November
7th. It's called Same as Ever. A Guide to What Never Changes. And it's about the behaviors
that never change over time. So what were people doing 500 years ago that they'll be doing
500 years from now? What never changes? I got this idea just based off of the belief that
we spend too much time trying, invading to predict what's going to change. What's the next
new technology? What's the next new industry? We're always trying to figure out what's
going to change. And we don't spend enough time focused on what never changes. What do
we know with certainty is going to be part of our future? That's what this book is about.
It's broken up into a bunch of short stories just like psychology of money was. You can
pre-order it now. I'll leave a link in the show notes. But I'm sure you are very good at
searching on Amazon as well. Hope you enjoy it when it comes out later this year. And
speaking of a bunch of short stories, that's what today's episode is about. I heard this
quote once. I forget where, but I thought it was so good. It was that people don't remember
books. They remember sentences. And I think that is so true. Even for an amazing book that
changed your life, the book that you recommend more than anything else. Maybe that book
is 300 pages and 100,000 words. And what you actually remember from it is a couple sentences.
Or if you short stories that you could summarize very quickly. What you actually take away from
a book that you love is a fraction of 1% of what was actually written there. And I think
that's fine. That's always how it is. People remember stories more than they remember facts.
More than that they remembered long detailed explanations of things. If you can just
wrap up your insights and the wisdom that you collect into a very short story, that's
the best that you can do because you are likely to remember it and recall it for the rest
of your life. So I've always been on the hunt for little stories, little quick stories
that I can think about and tell myself and remember and tell other people in 5 or 10 seconds
that I think summarize a lot of what matters in life and in business and investing. So
I've been collecting these four years. And I want to share with you 15 little short stories
today. These are completely random short stories. Each story has nothing to do with the others.
But I think the common denominator of these is that they all explain something that is
very important and fundamental to everybody throughout their lives. So here we go, here's
the first one. Just before he died, the physicist Richard Feynman asked a friend why he looked
so sad. The friend said that it was obvious. He was going to miss Feynman after he died.
Feynman responded that he had told so many good stories to so many people throughout his
life. Stories that would surely be repeated for years that even after death he would not
be completely gone. It's similar to the idea that everyone suffers
two deaths. Once when they die and another when their name is spoken for the last time.
Apollo 11 was the first time humans visited another celestial body. You'd think that would
be an overwhelming experience. Literally the coolest thing that any human has ever done.
But as the spacecraft hovered over the moon, Michael Collins turned to Neil Armstrong
in Buzz Aldrin and he said, it's amazing how quickly you adapt. It doesn't seem weird
at all to me to look out there and see the moon going by, you know? Three months later,
after Albein walked on the moon during Apollo 12, he turned to astronaut Pete Conrad and
said, it's kind of like the old song. Is that all there is? Conrad was actually relieved
because he secretly felt the same. He described his moonwalk as spectacular but not momentous.
Most mental upside comes from the thrill of anticipation. Actual experiences tend to fall
kind of flat and your mind quickly moves on to anticipating the next event. That's
how dopamine works. And if walking on the moon left astronauts underwhelmed? What does
it say about our own goals and expectations?
37,000 Americans died in car accidents in 1955. That is six times today's rate adjusted
for the number of miles driven. Ford began offering seat belts in every model that year,
1555. It was a $27 upgrade, which is the equivalent of about $200 today. Research at the time
showed that they reduced traffic fatalities by nearly 70%. But only 2% of Ford customers
opted for the seat belt upgrade. 98% of car buyers chose to remain at the mercy of inertia.
Things changed, of course, but it took decades. Seat belt usage was still under 15% in the
early 1980s. It didn't exceed 80% until the early 2000s, almost half a century after
Ford offered seat belts for the first time. It is so easy to underestimate how social
norms stall change, even when the change is an obvious improvement. One of the strongest
forces in the world is the urge to keep doing things as you've always done them, because
people don't like to be told that they've been doing things wrong all along.
Change eventually comes, but it is agonizingly slower than you might assume.
When the Black Death Plague entered England in 1348, the Scots up north laughed at their
good fortune. With the English crippled by disease, now was the perfect time for Scotland
to stage an attack on its neighbor. The Scots huddled together thousands of troops in preparation
for battle, which of course is about the worst possible thing you could do during a pandemic.
Barbara Tuckman writes in her book a distant mirror that quote,
"'Before they could move, the savage mortality fell upon the Scots as well, scattering some
in death and the rest in panic.'" Now, there is a powerful urge to think that risk
is something that happens to other people. Other people get unlucky. Other people make
dumb decisions. Other people get swayed by the seduction of greed and fear.
But you? Or me? No, never us. False confidence makes the eventual reality all the more shocking.
Some people are more susceptible to risks than others, but no one is exempt from being
humbled. David Cassidy seemed to have the best life
that you could imagine. A teenage heart throb who sold out arenas and was so popular that
his show turned into stampede risks. From the outside, it looked like as interesting and
lucky of life as anyone could ever hope for. Everyone loved him. He was rich. He was on
top of the world. But after he died in 2017, David Cassidy's daughter revealed that his
last words were, quote, so much wasted time. It's never as good as it looks.
The CEO of Bronco Wine, which sells the Charles Shaw two-bucked chuck wine at Trader Joe's,
was once asked how he's able to sell wine for less than the cost of bottled water. In
the CEO replied, quote, they're overcharging you for the water. Don't you get it?
Bobby Gingress was born unable to feel pain. She had a full sense of touch she could feel
the world, but a rare genetic condition left her completely unable to sense physical pain.
You might think that is like a superpower, an incredible gift that she got to benefit
from in life. But her life is actually dreadful. The inability to feel pain left Gabby unable
to distinguish right from wrong in the physical world. One profile of her summarized just a
fraction of it, it says quote, as Gabby's baby teeth came in, she mutilated the inside
of her mouth. Gabby was unaware of the damage she was causing because she didn't feel
the pain that would tell her to stop. Her parents watched helplessly. She would chew
her fingers bloody. She would chew on her tongue like it was bubblegum. She ended up in
the hospital for 10 days because her tongue was so swelled up that she could not drink.
Pain also keeps babies from putting their fingers in their eyes. Without pain to stop her,
Gabby scratched her eyes so badly that doctors temporarily sewed them shut. Today she is
legally blind because of self-inflicted childhood injuries.
My takeaway from this little story is that pain is miserable. But life without pain, without
the guidance of pain, is a disaster. Building the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s
was too costly for any private company to manage. So Congress offered subsidies. $16,000 per
mile on flat land and up to $96,000 per mile in the mountains. As to what was considered
flat versus mountain land, Congress relied on the opinion of geologists. One particularly
malleable geologist named Josiah Whitney was persuaded to declare that the Sacramento
Valley, which is as flat as a pancake, was actually the geological beginning of the Sierra
Nevada Mountains and it was therefore a mountainous region.
The railroad companies were so grateful for the sleight of hand that they persuaded the
California Legislature to rename the state's tallest mountain Mount Whitney. Everything
is for sale.
David Brooks makes the distinction between resume virtues and eulogy virtues. Resume virtues
are things like your income, your job title, the size of your house. Eulogy virtues are
things like being helpful and being loved, being honest, being remembered. In irony is
that people aspire for eulogy virtues, but they put all of their effort into resume virtues.
Physical attractiveness is something that everybody intuitively understands, but struggles
to put into words. What makes an attractive face? It's very hard to describe. You just
know it when you see it. Several studies have tried to crack the code, the most fascinating
of which I think is the idea that average faces tend to be the most appealing. If you
take a thousand people and you have a software program that generates a composite of their
average face, so a face with the average cheekbone height and the average distance between
eyes, the average lip fullness, things like that. That image across cultures tends to be
the one that people are most likely to judge as the most attractive.
One evolutionary explanation for this is that non-average characteristics have the potential
to be above average risk to reproduction. They may or may not actually impact reproductive
fitness, but it's almost like nature says, why take the chance? Just go for the average
one. People love familiarity. That's true not just for faces, but for products and careers
and styles. It's almost like nature's built in risk management system.
William Vanderbilt was one of the richest heirs to ever live, but hold onto your envy
because his life was hardly a joy. Just before he died in 1920, Vanderbilt told The New
York Times, quote, my life was never destined to be quite happy. Inherited wealth is a real
handicap to happiness. It is a death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.
The interesting thing here is that the other end of the spectrum, an overdose of ambition,
maybe just as miserable. Half a century earlier, Mark Twain wrote to William
Vanderbilt's grandfather, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Mark Twain wrote, quote, how I pity you
Vanderbilt and this is honest, you are an old man and ought to have some rest, and yet
you have to struggle to deny yourself and rob yourself of restful sleep and peace of
mind because you need money so badly. I always feel for a man who is so poverty-ridden
as you. Don't misunderstand me Vanderbilt, I know you have 70 million dollars, but then
you know as I know that it isn't what a man has that constitutes wealth. No, it is to
be satisfied with what one has. That is wealth.
Think of how big the world is, and now think about how good animals are at hiding. I now
think about a biologist whose job it is to determine whether a species has gone extinct.
It is not an easy thing to do. A group of Australian biologists once discovered something
that I thought was remarkable. More than one third of all mammals that were deemed extinct
in the last 500 years have later been rediscovered. Some of them were thriving. A lot of what
we know in science is bound to change. That is what makes it great. When a previously known
truth is later to be discovered wrong, we should also respect the idea that too many theories
try too hard to be facts. I had a professor in college who used to work for Adobe. He
said the engineers who built Photoshop had no clue how users would use every filter and
tool in the software. They just tried to develop every imaginable way to manipulate an image,
and they had faith that artists and designers would discover a creative use for it. A lot
of things work like that. Their value to the world isn't entirely known or predicted by
their creator. Visa found her de-hawk once said quote, a book is far more than what the author
wrote. It is everything you can imagine and read into it as well. Author James Patterson
said something similar. He said quote, one of the best things about reading is that you always
have something to think about when you're not reading. Mark Twain as he does put it best
when he said quote, Wagner's music is better than it sounds. Duncirk was a miracle. More
than 330,000 Allied soldiers pinned down by Nazi attacks were successfully evacuated
from the beaches of Freyitz back to England, ferried by hundreds of small civilian boats.
London broke out in celebration when the mission was completed, and fewer more relieved than
Winston Churchill who feared an imminent destruction of his army if the troops could
not be evacuated. But Edmund Ironside, commander of the British
home forces, pointed out that if the Allies could quickly ferry a third of a million troops
from France to England, while avoiding aerial attack, the Nazis probably could too. Churchill
had been holding on to hope that Germany couldn't cross the channel with an invasion force.
It was just too dangerous, too risky. But then his own army proved that it was quite possible.
Duncirk was both a success and a foreboding. Your competitors can probably innovate and
execute just as well as you can. So every time you uncover a new talent that you're
proud of, temper your thrill with the acceptance that other people who want to win as badly
as you do probably are not too far behind.
Historian John Meacham writes quote,
When we condemn the past for slavery or for Native American removal or for denying women
their full role in life of the nation, we ought to pause and think, what injustices
are we perpetuating even now that will one day face the harshest of verdicts by those
who come after us? This applies to so many things. Like what is the modern equivalent
of cigarettes, which were Dr. recommended just a few generations ago? We didn't know
that dinosaurs existed 200 years ago, which makes you wonder what else is out there that
we are oblivious to today. What company is the modern enthron? So obviously a fraud.
What do most people? Not a few wackos, but most of us believe that will look like something
between hilarious and disgraceful 100 years from now.
So much of history is just gawking at how wrong and how blind people can be. Sometimes
they are disastrously wrong and embarrassingly blind. Millions of people all at the same
time. And then you realize that today will be considered history in a few generations.
It's so unpleasant, but it is also so fascinating. That's all for this episode. Thank you so
much for listening. We'll see you next time.
