February 26, 2025 • 14 mins
*Originally aired 11/6/24*
As much as our era seems to be unprecedented, Human nature is same as it ever was. Our behavior around risk and reward has been very consistent over the millennia. On this episode, Barry Ritholtz speaks with Morgan Housel, author of the book “Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes.” Together, they break down what never changes when it comes to money.
Each week, “At the Money” discusses an important topic in money management. From portfolio construction to taxes and cutting down on fees, join Barry Ritholtz to learn the best ways to put your money to work.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was,
same as same as it ever was, same as ever,
same as it ever was, same as it ever was,
same as.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
It was indexing, massive technology concentration, the rise of AI.
It's a brave new world? Or is it? As much
as our era seems to be unprecedented? A lot more
is the same as ever. Human behavior, risk, opportunity, even
(00:41):
living the good life all tends to be well, if
not eternal, pretty close. We tend to focus on what's
different while ignoring all the things that remain the same.
I'm Barry Redults and on today's edition of At the Money,
we're gonna discuss why you should pay attention to the
unchanging nature of money and human behavior. To help us
(01:05):
impack all of this and what it means for your assets,
let's bring in Morgan Housel. He is the author of
Same as Ever, A Guide to What Never Changes. The
book has received widespread acclaim for its insightful approach to
thinking about risk and human nature. So Morgan, let's start
with your central premise, how consistent is human behavior across
(01:29):
the millennia?
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Well Berry, this is great quote from Voltaire, who said
history never repeats itself, but man always does. I think
that is such a good way to summarize history, that
the events never repeat themselves. The recessions, the wars, they're
different every single time, and that's what makes them so
difficult to predict. But the behavior how people respond to
recessions or bear markets, whatever it might be, is very
(01:51):
stable throughout history. How people responded to the risk and
the surprise of the Great Depression in the nineteen thirties
is exactly how they responded to the financial crisis of
two thousand and eight or the panic of March twenty twenty,
no different whatsoever. And that is important because we cannot
predict when the next recession is going to occur, when
the next bear market might occur. Nobody can do it.
(02:12):
But if you understand that the behaviors are stable over time,
then you can say, I have no idea when the
next recession is going to come, but I know exactly
how people will respond to it when it does come.
So it's putting your faith in forecasting the future in
something that is repeatable and predictable, versus fooling yourself into
trying to predict something that you can't.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
It sounds like the focus is less on predicting events
and more on understanding our own behaviors.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
That's right, that's exactly right. And you're doing that because
one is stable and predictable over time and one is not.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
So let's discuss the power of narratives. Why is it
that stories are so much more influential than data and
reasoning when it comes to us thinking about things like money.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
I think it's always been the case that the best
story wins, not the person who has the right answer,
or the best answer, or the answer that makes the
most sense. It's always the best story that wins. People
see that very often in politics, when it's almost always
the case for generations that the person who wins the
presidency is not the most competent or has the best policies.
It's a person who tells the best story. That has
(03:18):
always been the case, and I think always will be.
People don't have enough bandwidth, whether it's in investing or
politics or anything else, to truly parse all the data
and sift through all the data to find the best answer.
They need a quick SoundBite, they need a quick story.
They need the best story to make sense of what's
going on in the world. So if you're talking about
the economy or the stock market. Going through all that data,
(03:40):
I mean, that's an incredibly difficult thing to do. But
if you could tell someone a quick story. Here's a
story about Nvidia, here's a story about the US economy,
they can wrap their head around that in three seconds,
and it's much more compelling because it takes less effort
to do. Every stock valuation is a number from today
multiplied by a story about tomorrow. You take a number
from today innings per share, and you multiply it by
(04:02):
a story about tomorrow. That's the multiple that you're that
you're slapping to it. What's so important to there is
that the stories that people tell about what tomorrow might
be are so much more powerful and also fickle changing
than the number from today. And this is why there's
so much madness and chaos in the history of markets.
It's all just people clinging to and adapting to and
(04:22):
telling new stories about what the future might hold.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
So a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow.
That could be growth rate, that could be earnings, that
could be market share, it could be any sort of story.
And but that's a total unknown. Is that the power
of narrative.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Yeah. I mean, if you were to say, you know,
just making this up, that Netflix stock will be trading
at x dollars per share in three years, that sounds
like a reasonable thing to try to predict. But what
you are really saying is, you know what story investors
are going to believe about Netflix three years from now.
You know what kind of mood investors are going to
be in three years from now. And when you frame
(05:01):
it like that, it's absurd. How could anyone possibly know
what people are going to believe about the future three
years from now. Most people don't really understand what people
believe about the future today, let alone what they're going
to think about it three years from now. And so
when you realize that it's all narrative is driving it's
whatever people want to believe. The Memestock revolution, if you
want to call that, over the last couple of years,
has been the perfect example of that, where the number
(05:23):
from today was almost meaningless, or there was no number
from today, but the story about what it could turn
into tomorrow was extraordinary. And this is one of those
things that has always been the case. That was true
one hundred years ago, it is so much more powerful
today when social media allows the number of stories and
the power of those stories to proliferate in a way
that we've never seen.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Huh. Really fascinating. So let's talk about the nature of risk.
Why is it that we really don't understand it, and
why do we always seem to be so surprised when
a low probability event occurs.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
I think, look, if there is a one percent chance
of a very bad recession in the next year, and
a one percent chance of a very bad pandemic, and
a one percent chance of a war, and a one
percent chance of a natural disaster going down the list, well,
the odds at any one of those will occur are
very low, but the odds at least one of them
will occur are pretty good. And so if you have
(06:18):
a once in a century event, but there are hundreds
of possibilities, a one in a century recession, once in
a century, bear mark, whatever it is, the odds that
one of them are going to occur this year or
in the next five or ten years are very good.
So this is why we are constantly surprised when there
are big risks. So I've been an investor for twenty years.
You've been investing for longer than that. But what's happened
in the last twenty years, Well, it was the aftermath
(06:39):
of nine to eleven in the war in Iraq, and
then Lehman Brothers now COVID. In twenty years, you've had
like five once in a century events, and I think
that'll be the case going forward as well. Over the
next twenty years, I think we'll have five or ten
or maybe more events that are easy to call once
in a century events, but since there are so many
different versions of it, they tend to happen much more
frequently than we'd like to believe.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Yeah, you need a new name for these once in
a century events that we get every five to ten years.
To say, that's right to say the least. So I'm
glad you're putting this into a historical context. How can
we better understand history to both comprehend what's going on
today and to conceptualize what might happen?
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Tomara, this is a great quote that I love that
says everything feels unprecedented when you haven't engaged with history.
So if you're not a student of history, then every
morning you wake up and read the news and it
feels like this is the first time it's happening. This
is the first bear market, this is the first recession,
this is the first presidential assassination attempt, whatever it might be.
If you're student of history, you know that there have
been a million different flavors of virtually everything that's going
(07:42):
on today, and it's the same movie over and over again.
It's a different cast of characters, it's a slightly different script,
but it's the same movie again and again and again.
That doesn't necessarily make things more comfortable, because you deal
with things that are painful in your own life, painful
for other people, but you realize that it's not unprecedented.
This is the same thing, and that really push you, too,
towards understanding the behaviors of how people respond to these things,
(08:04):
versus trying to predict exactly what's going to happen next.
If you understand how people respond to what's always occurred,
then you have a good sense of how they're going
to respond next time.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
So one of the things that has always occurred is
that we tend to go through these cycles of calm
and chaos. Why is it that during the good times
we seem to plant the seeds for the chaos that
invariably seems to follow.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Well, look, when things are good in the economy or
the stock market, people naturally, normally rationally take more risk.
If the economy is really strong, you feel better going
into debt in your business and building a new factory,
Or if the stock market looks really strong, you feel
better allocating more assets to there. It's a very rational
thing to do. But when you do that, you, as
one of hundreds of millions of actors in the US economy,
(08:54):
have planted the seeds for the next decline. The more
risk you're taking in your business, the more risk you're
taking in your portfolio, makes the market more fragile, more vulnerable.
And so the irony is that if we never had
a recession, people would very rationally take a lot of
risk in their business, go into debt if we're never
going to have recessions, And the fact that they're going
into debt is what makes the economy fragile, and the
(09:15):
fact that the economy becomes fragile is what causes the
next recession. So it says, irony of if we never
have recessions, you would guarantee that you're going to have
a very bad recession in the future, and it's the
stimulus stock market. The lack of volatility is what plants
the seeds for future volatility, because you get complacency and
people take on more risk. And so when you view
it like that, you view volatility as completely unavoidable. When
(09:36):
the lack of recessions plants the seeds from the next recession,
it's guaranteed that we're going to have future recessions, future
bear markets. You view it as much more inevitable rather
than something that requires the economy to break or for
policy makers to make a mistake for it to occur.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
So we've been talking about how history sets our expectations
for what might occur in the future. Let's talk about
a gap between expectations and reality. What happens when that
gap gets to be too large.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
It's always been the case in the US economy that
if you look over a multi generation period, there's economic growth,
and it's usually substantial economic growth. If you look at
how we are living relative to our grandparents and their grandparents,
we've grown so much. It has also always been the
case that people look back and say, look, it's not
as good as it used to be. There are things
that were different in the past. And I think what
so often happens is that people's incomes grow, but their
(10:29):
expectations grow by even more. The average middle class American
today is living a life that John D. Rockefeller could
not fathom. They have technologies and medicines at Rockefeller, the
richest man in the world in his day, could not fathom.
But you cannot say that the average American should feel
richer than Rockefeller, because that's not how people's brains work
at all. Wealth is just relative to what other people
have around you, So you measure your life relative to
(10:52):
your neighbors and your coworkers and everybody else. And in
that situation, you can have a world where people's incomes grow,
their assets grow, and live a longer life, but if
everyone else is doing the same, you don't feel any
better off. And you can also imagine a world in
which our grandkids are living way better than us. They're
richer and they're healthier, but they're no happier for it,
because everyone else is going to be living that too.
(11:12):
They're all going to have the same cancer medicines, and
they're all going to have the same high incomes, and
so by comparison, they don't feel like they're that much
better off. When you realize that all wealth and happiness
is just comparison to other people, you realize that the
gap between your expectations and reality is really what you
want to go for to gain some sort of happiness
and contentment out of your money.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
And perhaps that's why social media has become so toxic.
All it does is raise people's expectations and their comparisons
rather than appreciating what they have.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
Yeah, because I mean, it used to be that you
compared yourself to your neighbors and your coworkers. Now you
compare yourself to a curated highlight reel of a bunch
of strangers, fake performative lives. And so no matter how
well you're doing, you can open up Instagram and be
bombarded with hundreds of people who appear to be doing
better and look better and are look happier than you are,
even if it's all bs and so, even though the
(12:05):
comparison game has always been the case, it is so
much more potent today than it's ever been.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
What we see on Instagram is the car of the house,
but we don't see the monthly payments.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
And you don't see the person bickering with their spouse
or dealing with their health problems or whatnot. It's all
the highlight reel, and sometimes it's the fake highlight reel,
and it leaves people to think that everyone else is
happier than you are. There's this great quote from Montesque
who said this three hundred years ago. He said, if
you only wish to be happy, that is very simple
to do. But people want to be happier than other people,
(12:39):
and that is very difficult because we overestimate how happy
those other people are. And he said that three hundred
years ago, well before social media. If you are around today,
I think he would look at that statement and say
it is ten times truer today than it's ever been.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Our final question, how can we balance optimism and pessimism in.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
Our own lives With money? I've always phrased it as
you want to save like a pessimist and invest like
an optimist. You ought to be very confident in where
we're going for your investments, but you want to be
very realistic about how hard it's going to be to
get there. I hope to be an investor for another
thirty or fifty years, and I'm very confident that fifty
years from now the market's going to be extraordinarily higher
(13:19):
than it is today. I'm equally confident that it's going
to be a very painful slog to get there. It's
going to be a NonStop chain of surprises and setbacks
and recessions and pandemics, on and on and on and
so I think that's how you balance it to very
optimistic on where you're going in the long run, and
very realistic about how difficult it's going to be to
get there.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
So, to wrap up, the world is changing faster than ever,
and we tend to focus on each incremental, unprecedented action
that takes place. We really should be focusing on all
the things that are the same as they've ever been.
I'm Barry Ridults. You're listening to Bloomberg's at the Money.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
The same as it ever was, the same as it ever.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Was, same as it never was. Even what my man was,
Time isn't old enough, Time as an after us, the
same as it ever was. It's the same as it
ever was.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
It m hm
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was,
same as same as it ever was, same as ever,
same as it ever was, same as it ever was,
same as.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
It was indexing, massive technology concentration, the rise of AI.
It's a brave new world? Or is it? As much
as our era seems to be unprecedented? A lot more
is the same as ever. Human behavior, risk, opportunity, even
(00:41):
living the good life all tends to be well, if
not eternal, pretty close. We tend to focus on what's
different while ignoring all the things that remain the same.
I'm Barry Redults and on today's edition of At the Money,
we're gonna discuss why you should pay attention to the
unchanging nature of money and human behavior. To help us
(01:05):
impack all of this and what it means for your assets,
let's bring in Morgan Housel. He is the author of
Same as Ever, A Guide to What Never Changes. The
book has received widespread acclaim for its insightful approach to
thinking about risk and human nature. So Morgan, let's start
with your central premise, how consistent is human behavior across
(01:29):
the millennia?
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Well Berry, this is great quote from Voltaire, who said
history never repeats itself, but man always does. I think
that is such a good way to summarize history, that
the events never repeat themselves. The recessions, the wars, they're
different every single time, and that's what makes them so
difficult to predict. But the behavior how people respond to
recessions or bear markets, whatever it might be, is very
(01:51):
stable throughout history. How people responded to the risk and
the surprise of the Great Depression in the nineteen thirties
is exactly how they responded to the financial crisis of
two thousand and eight or the panic of March twenty twenty,
no different whatsoever. And that is important because we cannot
predict when the next recession is going to occur, when
the next bear market might occur. Nobody can do it.
(02:12):
But if you understand that the behaviors are stable over time,
then you can say, I have no idea when the
next recession is going to come, but I know exactly
how people will respond to it when it does come.
So it's putting your faith in forecasting the future in
something that is repeatable and predictable, versus fooling yourself into
trying to predict something that you can't.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
It sounds like the focus is less on predicting events
and more on understanding our own behaviors.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
That's right, that's exactly right. And you're doing that because
one is stable and predictable over time and one is not.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
So let's discuss the power of narratives. Why is it
that stories are so much more influential than data and
reasoning when it comes to us thinking about things like money.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
I think it's always been the case that the best
story wins, not the person who has the right answer,
or the best answer, or the answer that makes the
most sense. It's always the best story that wins. People
see that very often in politics, when it's almost always
the case for generations that the person who wins the
presidency is not the most competent or has the best policies.
It's a person who tells the best story. That has
(03:18):
always been the case, and I think always will be.
People don't have enough bandwidth, whether it's in investing or
politics or anything else, to truly parse all the data
and sift through all the data to find the best answer.
They need a quick SoundBite, they need a quick story.
They need the best story to make sense of what's
going on in the world. So if you're talking about
the economy or the stock market. Going through all that data,
(03:40):
I mean, that's an incredibly difficult thing to do. But
if you could tell someone a quick story. Here's a
story about Nvidia, here's a story about the US economy,
they can wrap their head around that in three seconds,
and it's much more compelling because it takes less effort
to do. Every stock valuation is a number from today
multiplied by a story about tomorrow. You take a number
from today innings per share, and you multiply it by
(04:02):
a story about tomorrow. That's the multiple that you're that
you're slapping to it. What's so important to there is
that the stories that people tell about what tomorrow might
be are so much more powerful and also fickle changing
than the number from today. And this is why there's
so much madness and chaos in the history of markets.
It's all just people clinging to and adapting to and
(04:22):
telling new stories about what the future might hold.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
So a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow.
That could be growth rate, that could be earnings, that
could be market share, it could be any sort of story.
And but that's a total unknown. Is that the power
of narrative.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Yeah. I mean, if you were to say, you know,
just making this up, that Netflix stock will be trading
at x dollars per share in three years, that sounds
like a reasonable thing to try to predict. But what
you are really saying is, you know what story investors
are going to believe about Netflix three years from now.
You know what kind of mood investors are going to
be in three years from now. And when you frame
(05:01):
it like that, it's absurd. How could anyone possibly know
what people are going to believe about the future three
years from now. Most people don't really understand what people
believe about the future today, let alone what they're going
to think about it three years from now. And so
when you realize that it's all narrative is driving it's
whatever people want to believe. The Memestock revolution, if you
want to call that, over the last couple of years,
has been the perfect example of that, where the number
(05:23):
from today was almost meaningless, or there was no number
from today, but the story about what it could turn
into tomorrow was extraordinary. And this is one of those
things that has always been the case. That was true
one hundred years ago, it is so much more powerful
today when social media allows the number of stories and
the power of those stories to proliferate in a way
that we've never seen.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Huh. Really fascinating. So let's talk about the nature of risk.
Why is it that we really don't understand it, and
why do we always seem to be so surprised when
a low probability event occurs.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
I think, look, if there is a one percent chance
of a very bad recession in the next year, and
a one percent chance of a very bad pandemic, and
a one percent chance of a war, and a one
percent chance of a natural disaster going down the list, well,
the odds at any one of those will occur are
very low, but the odds at least one of them
will occur are pretty good. And so if you have
(06:18):
a once in a century event, but there are hundreds
of possibilities, a one in a century recession, once in
a century, bear mark, whatever it is, the odds that
one of them are going to occur this year or
in the next five or ten years are very good.
So this is why we are constantly surprised when there
are big risks. So I've been an investor for twenty years.
You've been investing for longer than that. But what's happened
in the last twenty years, Well, it was the aftermath
(06:39):
of nine to eleven in the war in Iraq, and
then Lehman Brothers now COVID. In twenty years, you've had
like five once in a century events, and I think
that'll be the case going forward as well. Over the
next twenty years, I think we'll have five or ten
or maybe more events that are easy to call once
in a century events, but since there are so many
different versions of it, they tend to happen much more
frequently than we'd like to believe.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Yeah, you need a new name for these once in
a century events that we get every five to ten years.
To say, that's right to say the least. So I'm
glad you're putting this into a historical context. How can
we better understand history to both comprehend what's going on
today and to conceptualize what might happen?
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Tomara, this is a great quote that I love that
says everything feels unprecedented when you haven't engaged with history.
So if you're not a student of history, then every
morning you wake up and read the news and it
feels like this is the first time it's happening. This
is the first bear market, this is the first recession,
this is the first presidential assassination attempt, whatever it might be.
If you're student of history, you know that there have
been a million different flavors of virtually everything that's going
(07:42):
on today, and it's the same movie over and over again.
It's a different cast of characters, it's a slightly different script,
but it's the same movie again and again and again.
That doesn't necessarily make things more comfortable, because you deal
with things that are painful in your own life, painful
for other people, but you realize that it's not unprecedented.
This is the same thing, and that really push you, too,
towards understanding the behaviors of how people respond to these things,
(08:04):
versus trying to predict exactly what's going to happen next.
If you understand how people respond to what's always occurred,
then you have a good sense of how they're going
to respond next time.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
So one of the things that has always occurred is
that we tend to go through these cycles of calm
and chaos. Why is it that during the good times
we seem to plant the seeds for the chaos that
invariably seems to follow.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Well, look, when things are good in the economy or
the stock market, people naturally, normally rationally take more risk.
If the economy is really strong, you feel better going
into debt in your business and building a new factory,
Or if the stock market looks really strong, you feel
better allocating more assets to there. It's a very rational
thing to do. But when you do that, you, as
one of hundreds of millions of actors in the US economy,
(08:54):
have planted the seeds for the next decline. The more
risk you're taking in your business, the more risk you're
taking in your portfolio, makes the market more fragile, more vulnerable.
And so the irony is that if we never had
a recession, people would very rationally take a lot of
risk in their business, go into debt if we're never
going to have recessions, And the fact that they're going
into debt is what makes the economy fragile, and the
(09:15):
fact that the economy becomes fragile is what causes the
next recession. So it says, irony of if we never
have recessions, you would guarantee that you're going to have
a very bad recession in the future, and it's the
stimulus stock market. The lack of volatility is what plants
the seeds for future volatility, because you get complacency and
people take on more risk. And so when you view
it like that, you view volatility as completely unavoidable. When
(09:36):
the lack of recessions plants the seeds from the next recession,
it's guaranteed that we're going to have future recessions, future
bear markets. You view it as much more inevitable rather
than something that requires the economy to break or for
policy makers to make a mistake for it to occur.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
So we've been talking about how history sets our expectations
for what might occur in the future. Let's talk about
a gap between expectations and reality. What happens when that
gap gets to be too large.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
It's always been the case in the US economy that
if you look over a multi generation period, there's economic growth,
and it's usually substantial economic growth. If you look at
how we are living relative to our grandparents and their grandparents,
we've grown so much. It has also always been the
case that people look back and say, look, it's not
as good as it used to be. There are things
that were different in the past. And I think what
so often happens is that people's incomes grow, but their
(10:29):
expectations grow by even more. The average middle class American
today is living a life that John D. Rockefeller could
not fathom. They have technologies and medicines at Rockefeller, the
richest man in the world in his day, could not fathom.
But you cannot say that the average American should feel
richer than Rockefeller, because that's not how people's brains work
at all. Wealth is just relative to what other people
have around you, So you measure your life relative to
(10:52):
your neighbors and your coworkers and everybody else. And in
that situation, you can have a world where people's incomes grow,
their assets grow, and live a longer life, but if
everyone else is doing the same, you don't feel any
better off. And you can also imagine a world in
which our grandkids are living way better than us. They're
richer and they're healthier, but they're no happier for it,
because everyone else is going to be living that too.
(11:12):
They're all going to have the same cancer medicines, and
they're all going to have the same high incomes, and
so by comparison, they don't feel like they're that much
better off. When you realize that all wealth and happiness
is just comparison to other people, you realize that the
gap between your expectations and reality is really what you
want to go for to gain some sort of happiness
and contentment out of your money.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
And perhaps that's why social media has become so toxic.
All it does is raise people's expectations and their comparisons
rather than appreciating what they have.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
Yeah, because I mean, it used to be that you
compared yourself to your neighbors and your coworkers. Now you
compare yourself to a curated highlight reel of a bunch
of strangers, fake performative lives. And so no matter how
well you're doing, you can open up Instagram and be
bombarded with hundreds of people who appear to be doing
better and look better and are look happier than you are,
even if it's all bs and so, even though the
(12:05):
comparison game has always been the case, it is so
much more potent today than it's ever been.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
What we see on Instagram is the car of the house,
but we don't see the monthly payments.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
And you don't see the person bickering with their spouse
or dealing with their health problems or whatnot. It's all
the highlight reel, and sometimes it's the fake highlight reel,
and it leaves people to think that everyone else is
happier than you are. There's this great quote from Montesque
who said this three hundred years ago. He said, if
you only wish to be happy, that is very simple
to do. But people want to be happier than other people,
(12:39):
and that is very difficult because we overestimate how happy
those other people are. And he said that three hundred
years ago, well before social media. If you are around today,
I think he would look at that statement and say
it is ten times truer today than it's ever been.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Our final question, how can we balance optimism and pessimism in.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
Our own lives With money? I've always phrased it as
you want to save like a pessimist and invest like
an optimist. You ought to be very confident in where
we're going for your investments, but you want to be
very realistic about how hard it's going to be to
get there. I hope to be an investor for another
thirty or fifty years, and I'm very confident that fifty
years from now the market's going to be extraordinarily higher
(13:19):
than it is today. I'm equally confident that it's going
to be a very painful slog to get there. It's
going to be a NonStop chain of surprises and setbacks
and recessions and pandemics, on and on and on and
so I think that's how you balance it to very
optimistic on where you're going in the long run, and
very realistic about how difficult it's going to be to
get there.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
So, to wrap up, the world is changing faster than ever,
and we tend to focus on each incremental, unprecedented action
that takes place. We really should be focusing on all
the things that are the same as they've ever been.
I'm Barry Ridults. You're listening to Bloomberg's at the Money.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
The same as it ever was, the same as it ever.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Was, same as it never was. Even what my man was,
Time isn't old enough, Time as an after us, the
same as it ever was. It's the same as it
ever was.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
It m hm
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