Weekly Reading

Housel’s Postscript answers the question: How did we get to where we are today (the current U.S. economy and especially the state of the American consumer)? He answers this question with a story containing 10 scenes that take us from the end of WWII to the present: August, 1945. WWII ends. Low interest rates and the intentional birth of the American consumer. Pent-up demand for stuff fed by a credit boom and a hidden 1930s productivity boom led to an economic boom. Gains are

In 2011 professor of medicine Ken Murray wrote an article called “How Doctors Die.” He researched how doctors make decisions when they are the patient regarding their own terminal illnesses. He notes, “What’s usual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little.” It’s a common theme in professional services that the professionals don’t always take their own advice. All the biases and mix of personal values do not go away just because

Eat healthy. Exercise. Manage stress. Don’t smoke. These are common health recommendations that are broad and can be given to a large audience. It’s also understood that there are exceptions: for those about to go into heart surgery, don’t run a marathon. Kids can have some candy on Halloween. Recovering alcoholics are often encouraged to continue smoking while in rehab. Beyond exceptions, there also is nuance for individuals based on their specific circumstances. Allergies o

In a 2009 documentary How to Live Forever , interviewers asked a centenarian what the happiest day of her life was. Her answer? “Armistice Day [...] We knew there would be no more wars ever again.” Of course, having lived over 100 years, she was aware at the time of the interview that the 1918 agreement ending World War I was anything but the end of war. It was the happiest day for her because, after the devastation she had just seen in WWI, she hoped with every fiber of her

Airplanes “appear impossible”, wrote an article in 1889. Four years later in 1903, the Wright Brothers recorded their first flight. Many thought it was a trick, and nearly everyone was still skeptical about air travel for years. As long as six years later, another article said, “There will never be such a thing as commercial aerial freighters.” Just five months after that article, the first cargo plane took flight. It goes without saying that air travel has changed the world.

As I write this, the Brewers just started their series against the Dodgers, and the Packers just celebrated their win over the Commanders. As Wisconsinites, we enjoy our sports teams. But could you imagine if the Packers had to put on hats and gloves and play the Dodgers? Or if the Brewers had to throw pads on and line up against the Commanders? Likely this would not be pretty. Even worse, imagine if each team played by the rules of their own game? Half the players on the fie

Imagine it’s time for another car. The car you’d like to buy costs $50,000 new. Your options: spend $50,000 to buy new, spend $30,000 to buy used, or steal the car. Hopefully nobody reading this considers the third option, and hopefully that’s because of a moral compass. But beyond that, we’d recognize that if we tried to steal a car, the bill would come due soon enough. With prison sentences potentially reading multiple years for grand theft auto, this route likely would end

10 years from now, how different will your life be? Will you live in the same place? Spend your time doing the same things? Have the same hobbies/interests? Now think about your life 10 years ago. Did you live in the same place? Did you work at the same place? How did you spend your time? Who and what was important to you? Would or could you have guessed 10 years ago what your life would be like now? Most people between 18-68 assume that their life will not be very different

At the battle of Stalingrad in WWII, Germany had over 100 tanks waiting to be deployed at just the right time. When that time came, less than 20 worked. Despite the best engineering, those tanks (as they later found out) were susceptible to field mice nesting inside and chewing through the wires. Would Germany have won Stalingrad, and would the war have played out differently had it not been for those mice? As Housel comments on this strange course of events, “You can plan fo

Between the years 1800 and 2000, roughly 15 billion people were born. Consider how different the world would be if the following 0.00000000004% of those 15 billion had not been born. Adolf Hitler Joseph Stalin Mao Zedong Gavrilo Princip Thomas Edison Bill Gates Martin Luther King As we read in chapter 6 regarding tail events, there are a very small number of things that have an outsized impact. This is true with financial markets, and as we study the history of investing, we

Julius Wagner-Jauregg was a Nobel Prize winning physician who, in the early 1900’s before the invention of penicillin, learned how to treat neurosyphilis. It was often fatal, but Wagner-Jauregg increased the survival rate from 30% to 60%. Believe it or not, he accomplished this by injecting his patients with another disease: malaria. He found out that if patients had a high fever (which occurred with malaria), the fever would also help kill the neurosyphilis and double their

In 1989 a Ford Taurus, which is a sedan, got 18.0 miles per gallon. In 2019 when Housel was writing, a Chevy Suburban, which is a much larger SUV, got 18.1 MPG. Today, you can get fully electric trucks. In the 70s, there were projections that the world would run out of oil before 2025, where we are today. While there’s still a lot of conversations around oil use and production, we haven’t run out like the projections once estimated. Part of the reason is that we’ve found more

Last chapter we explored what happens to us when we see someone else driving a really expensive car. This chapter, let’s talk about the person actually driving the car. Assuming they bought the car (didn’t rent or lease it), there’s still far less information conferred than we might otherwise assume. If you see someone driving a $100,000 car that they bought, you don’t yet know their level of wealth or income. As Housel points out, “the only data point you have about their we

Housel used to work as a valet driver in an upscale part of LA and drove cars like Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Rolls-Royces. He likes cars, and when he drove these in his youth he had hopes of one day owning one. Now that he can afford one, he reflects on how he felt at that time. “When you see someone driving a nice car, you rarely think, “Wow, the guy driving that car is cool.” Instead, you think, “Wow, if I had that car people would think I’m cool.”  For Housel, the parado

When Housel was in college, he wanted to be an investment banker. He earned a four-month internship his junior year but only lasted one month. As he recounts, “On my first day I realized why investment bankers make a lot of money: They work longer and more controlled  hours than I knew humans could handle. Actually, most can’t handle it. Going home before midnight was considered a luxury”  (italics added). Around the office it was said that if you didn’t come in on Saturday (

The Disney franchise, founded by Walt Disney and now worth hundreds of billions, was not always a financial success. Walt started his work in the early 1920s, and by the mid 1930s his first studio had gone bankrupt. By that time, he had made over 400 shows, which were very expensive to create and financed by debt at a high interest rate. On the whole people seemed to like them, but they were not bringing in enough money to make up for their high cost. Then, in 1937, Disney cr

Jesse Livermore and Abraham Germansky were two individuals involved in the markets during the Great Depression. Both were very good, meaning they had both found legitimate ways to make millions of dollars by an early age. During the violent market crash in October 1929, Livermore was “short” the market. Without a longer explanation, this means he made money if the market went down in value. In a single day, he made the equivalent of $3 billion in today’s dollars. Germansky, o

At the time of Housel’s writing (2020), legendary investor and businessman Warren Buffett was 90 years old, and worth $84.5 billion. 40 years prior, when he was 50, he was worth “only” $0.3 billion – or 280 times less. And $81.5 billion of his $84.5 billion net worth came after his 65th birthday. Now in 2025, one month from his 95th birthday, his net worth is estimated to be $142 billion. So, what’s Buffett’s secret? According to Housel, “Warren Buffett’s skill is investing,

You’ve likely heard of Bernie Madoff, one of the most infamous financiers in modern history for his Ponzi scheme of over $60,000,000,000 (that’s $60 billion, if there are too many 0’s to count). What you may not know is that he was a very successful and legitimate businessman prior to his troubles. He helped people buy and sell stocks at a lower price, and was so good at it that his firm made between $25-50 million per year – all while offering lower prices for everyone else.

Bill Gates was one in a million kids whose high school had a computer in 1968. He didn’t do anything to get special access to it or to be at the right school at the right time – he was lucky. Of course, he had more than luck, he had hard work. Not all his classmates with the same computer access went on to found a multi-trillion dollar company. In fact, one of his classmates was also one in a million – his name was Kent Evans, and he died in a mountaineering accident before g