AI Summary #
Here is a summary of the podcast episode:
The host shares a personal story about how a random fluke 16 years ago completely transformed his life. It started when he corrected a blog post by a stranger, Sham Gatt, who was writing for the Motley Fool, on Eddie Lampert’s college information. The stranger, Sham, asked for directions to downtown Los Angeles from LAX airport, and the host agreed to pick him up. This led to an unexpected friendship, where the host helped Sham get hired at the Motley Fool, a job that ultimately changed his life.
The host emphasizes how fragile the world is and how small accidents can lead to significant changes in one’s life. He argues that this highlights the difficulty of forecasting and why politicians often struggle to predict events. The host suggests that understanding the complex family tree of past events is crucial to appreciating how things happen.
Key points discussed include:
- How a random correction of a blog post led to an unexpected friendship
- How a small mistake can have significant consequences
- The importance of understanding the complexity of events and their interconnectedness
- The difficulty of forecasting and why politicians often struggle to predict events
Notable quotes include:
- “Risk means that more things can happen than will happen.”
- “If you know where we’ve been, you realize that we have no idea where we’re going.”
Actionable advice or conclusions include:
- Embracing the complexity of life and acknowledging that small accidents can lead to significant changes
- Understanding the interconnectedness of events and avoiding a false impression of causality
- Being open to new experiences and taking risks, as they may lead to unexpected opportunities.
AI Transcription #
See, I switched to happier intro music.
Too many people complain that the old stuff was too sad.
Hopefully that one’s a little bit better.
But welcome back to the podcast.
This episode is about how fragile the world can be and how small little flukes that nobody saw coming can completely transform your own life.
And haven’t forbid this podcast ever turns into just me telling stories about myself.
I really don’t think it ever will, but I’m going to break it for this episode.
And this is a story about a complete random fluk that happened in my life 16 years ago that totally changed everything about my life.
I think I was a good takeaway for everybody.
And after you listen to this, I think everyone all of you will be able to say, oh, I have a similar related story about my own life.
Take away from all these flukes stories is just how fragile the world is.
Particularly why forecasting is hard.
And everybody knows that forecasting what’s going to happen in the future, in the economy, and the stock market, in politics, whatever it will be.
The history of that is very bad.
And usually the reason why we are so bad at forecasting is not because people aren’t smart or because they don’t have the right information.
It’s because trivial accidents can be influential in your life in ways that are impossible to foresee.
I did a talk with the high school class a few years ago.
And one of the students asked me how I decided to become a writer.
And my response was I did it.
I’d never decided.
It was never planned.
I never saw it coming.
It was never part of my strategy.
It just kind of happened.
And the path led me here to become a writer is an absurd story.
One night in college, I remember it was late.
It was maybe midnight.
I was reading a blog post about a hedge fund manager named Eddie Lampert.
The blog was written by a guy named Sham Gatt, who I had never heard of.
Now I can’t remember where I found Sham’s blog.
Maybe I was searching for information about Eddie Lampert, who was an investor who I really admired at the time.
Sham wrote in his blog that Eddie Lampert went to Harvard.
And I knew that was wrong.
I knew that Eddie Lampert went to Yale.
No, obviously that doesn’t matter.
Who cares?
But using my student email address, which I rarely use, but it turned out to be very important part of the story, I emailed Sham to let him know that his blog was wrong.
Now I never do stuff like that.
Then or now.
I mean, the internet is filled with misinformation.
I have no idea why I thought it was necessary to correct him and email him and tell him that he got this minor detail wrong, but I did.
And Sham is a very nice guy.
So he responded and he said thanks and he’ll fix it a few minutes later.
So now it’s past midnight.
Sham sent me another email.
And he said, Hey Morgan, I see from your student email address that you go to USC.
And he said, I’ll be in Los Angeles next Friday.
I’ve never been there before, but what’s the best way to get from LAX airport to downtown?
Now, of course, it’s a weird thing to ask a stranger who just trolled your blog about how to get directions in the city.
But it’s a reasonable question, because if you’re familiar with LA, you know there is no good answer.
LA is the least transportation friendly city in the world.
And I have no recollection at all about why I did what I did next.
But I responded to Sham and I said, Hey, directions are pretty difficult.
I can pick you up at the airport and I’ll drive you downtown.
Just let me know when you get in.
Now USC where I went to school and lived is not close to LAX airport.
This was going to take me several hours, particularly in Los Angeles traffic, which is horrendous.
So why I agreed to do this.
I have no idea.
Again, I have no idea who this guy is.
Sham responded and he said great.
I’ll see you Friday.
Now I’m a pretty private guy.
I’ve never done anything like this before.
At this point in my relationship with Sham had consisted of 10 sentences of emails.
I didn’t know if he was 17 years old or 87 years old.
But two days later, I was driving to LAX airport to get him.
Now on the way back after I picked him up, we stopped at Chipotle to get some food.
And while eating, he said, Hey, by the way, I haven’t booked a hotel yet.
Is there one nearby that you could drop me off at?
And adding to the list of things that you should never say to a stranger.
I responded and said, Hey, why don’t you just crash on my couch?
And she said, wow, that would be amazing.
Thank you.
I texted my girlfriend and I said, Hey, I just met a guy named Sham online and he’s sleeping on our couch tonight.
And she responded and said, Excuse me.
And I said, I know I’m sorry.
I don’t know why I agreed to any of this, but that’s what we’re doing.
My girlfriend slept at her sorority house that night.
She was the only one of the three of us to make a good decision that week.
And the next morning, she came by to get her bags before class and Sham was still asleep on my couch.
She tiptoed past him and on her way out, he woke up and he lifted his head up from the couch and he introduced himself.
Literally that day, Sham went to his business meeting and I think he flew home later that day.
My girlfriend, who is now my wife, joked about it at the time about being the sketchiest thing that I have ever done.
Then I just met this random guy on the internet and invited him over to my house.
But I really like Sham.
He was a great guy.
And after he left a year went by and I don’t think we said another word to each other.
Now the next summer, I was interning at a private equity firm.
One day, and I remember this occurring probably within the same hour, two life changing things happened to me.
Global credit markets started to explode in 2007.
That was kind of like a preamble to the 2008 financial crisis.
And the private equity firm that I worked at was not in great shape.
And they told me that there would not be a full-time job for me after I graduated.
I could keep in turning for the summer, but I was basically done.
And so that really hurt because I was counting on staying there.
Ads, my full-time job.
So immediately, I needed to find another job as the economy was melting down in every financial firm was letting people off.
I also needed to finish a project that I was working on in my internship, which was researching logistics companies for this private equity firm.
Part of that research project was gathering information about this tiny company I had never heard of called Freightcar America.
As part of this research, I went to Yahoo Finance to try to find what I could about this company.
And I didn’t find much that I was looking for.
But just before I clicked away, I saw that there was one lowly article written about Freightcar America in the newsfeed.
It was a Motley Fool article.
And I clicked on it and it was written by Sham Gad.
And I said, hey, I know that guy.
He slept on my couch last year.
I emailed Sham for the first time since he had slept on my couch.
I told him how cool it was that he was writing for a publication.
And we chatted a bit.
And I mentioned that I had just gotten laid off an hour ago.
And I was looking for a new job.
And I said, if you come across anything, you know anyone who’s hiring, let me know.
I need it.
And he said, hey, the Motley Fool is actually hiring writers.
And he said, I could put it a good word for you.
He owed me a favor, of course.
And that was that.
The rest, at least for me, personally was history.
I became a Motley Fool writer and I stayed there for 10 years.
Let me be perfectly clear here.
Never in a million years did I want to be a writer.
Never did I think it was what I was going to do for my career.
I had no aspirations to be a writer.
I did it because I needed a job.
Sham helped me get one of the only jobs that was available at the time.
He helped me because he slept on my couch.
And he slept on my couch because he got Eddie Lampert’s college wrong in his blog post.
And I was a jerk enough to troll him and email him about it.
That’s the only reason any of that happened.
I told the high schoolers this story because I know that they were planning out their careers.
And they have an idea of where they’re going to go to college and what they’re going to study and what they’ll do and even where they will work after they graduate.
And I just wanted to tell them that’s rarely how the world works.
So much of life is driven by chance, an accident and flukes.
That’s true for the big stuff in the economy and it’s true for everyone’s personal journey.
Every current event big or small has a family tree.
It has parents and grandparents and great grandparents and siblings and cousins.
And if you ignore that family tree of how events in your life happened, of how, for example, you can go from correcting your guy’s blog post to finding a new career and writing that you never imagined.
It can really muddy your understanding of how the world works and it gives you a false impression of why things happened.
If you have view events in your life in isolation, without an appreciation for their long roots of how they actually happened, that ignorance I think helps explain everything from why forecasting is hard to why politics is nasty.
Let me give you a broader example here.
Take the simple question, what caused the 2008 financial crisis?
It’s a simple question.
What to understand the 2008 financial crisis, you have to understand the mortgage market.
Then you can ask, what shaped the mortgage market?
Well, to understand that, you have to understand the 30-year decline in interest rates that preceded it.
Well, what caused the fall in interest rates?
What to understand that, you have to understand the inflation of the 1970s.
Well, what caused the inflation of the 1970s?
Well, to understand that, you have to understand the monetary system of the 1970s and the hangover effects from the Vietnam War.
Well, what caused the Vietnam War?
Well, to understand that, you have to understand the West fear of communism after World War II.
And you can keep on doing this forever.
People like to say, to know where we’re going, you have to understand where we’ve been.
But I think more realistic is admitting that if you know where we’ve been, you realize that we have no idea where we’re going.
Events can compound in unfathomable ways.
And again, everyone has a story like this, whether it’s about your own career or how you met your spouse.
Sometimes the stories are great and they have happy endings, and other times they don’t.
In my new book, Same as Ever, I share a story very similar to the one I just shared with you about Sham that has a very tragic ending.
Final Professor Elroy Demson says, risk means that more things can happen than will happen.
Dig into enough stories like this in your own life or around the economy or throughout history.
And you’ll come to appreciate how different things could have turned out if it weren’t for a few little errors in accidents that happened along the way.
That’s it for this week.
We’ll see you next time.