AI Summary #
The host discusses their new book, “Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes,” which explores the behaviors that remain constant over time despite societal and technological advancements. The host argues that humans often focus on predicting what’s new and exciting, rather than understanding what never changes.
In the episode, the host shares 15 short stories that illustrate key takeaways on life, business, investing, and human nature. Some notable quotes include:
- “People don’t remember books. They remember sentences.”
- “Pain is miserable. But life without pain, without the guidance of pain, is a disaster.”
The host also discusses various topics, including:
- The difficulty of changing social norms, as illustrated by the example of seat belt usage in cars.
- The importance of eulogy virtues (such as kindness and honesty) over resume virtues (such as wealth and status).
- The power of familiarity and comfort in shaping our preferences.
- The dangers of underestimating the persistence of bad habits and social norms.
Actionable advice or conclusions:
- Focus on understanding what never changes, rather than predicting what’s new.
- Prioritize eulogy virtues over resume virtues in your personal and professional life.
- Be aware of the power of familiarity and comfort in shaping our preferences.
- Don’t underestimate the persistence of bad habits and social norms.
Key takeaways:
- Humans often focus on predicting what’s new and exciting, rather than understanding what never changes.
- The behaviors that remain constant over time are often more important to understand than those that change.
- Eulogy virtues (such as kindness and honesty) are essential for personal and professional growth.
- Social norms and bad habits can persist even when we least expect it.
AI Transcription #
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 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 in vain 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.
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 a few 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 five 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 there 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 and 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, 1955.
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.
The 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 that 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 shows 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 Wind, which sells the child’s shot to Buck Chuck Wind 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?’’ Gabby 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 for its use.
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 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 too 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, 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’s 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’s 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.
These are found or de-hoc 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 its sounds.
Duncurk was a miracle.
More than 330,000 Allied soldiers pinned down by Nazi attacks were successfully evacuated from the beaches of Freya’s 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.
Duncurk 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 doctor 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.