The Morgan Housel Podcast

Woodrow Wilson was the only president with a Ph.D. in political science.

He came to office having thought more about how a government functions than most before him or since.

One of his complaints was that too many people in government held the belief that it was a Big Machine: that once you set up a series of rules you could take your hands off the wheel and let the government run on its own forever. They viewed government like phys...

Mae West said, “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.” That might be true for some things – health, happiness, golden retrievers, maybe.

But in so many cases the thing that helps you can be taken to a dangerous level. And since it’s a “good thing,” not an obvious threat, its danger creeps into your life unnoticed.

Take intelligence.

How could someone possibly be too intelligent? How do you get to a point wher...

This episode discusses my take on what you should pay attention to when reading history. 

There’s a quote I love from writer Kelly Hayes who says, “Everything feels unprecedented when you haven’t engaged with history.”

It’s so true. History’s cast of characters changes but it’s the same movie over and over again.

To me, the point of paying attention to history is not the specific details of certain events, which are always r...

Behavioral finance is now well documented. But most of the attention goes to how people invest. But the study of how you spend money might be far more interesting -- and practical. How you spend money can reveal an existential struggle of what you find valuable in life, who you want to spend time with, why you chose your career, and the kind of attention you want from other people.

There is a science to spending money – ho...

There’s obviously a hierarchy of information. It ranges from life-changing good to life-changing disastrous.

That got me thinking: What would be the most interesting and useful information anyone could get their hands on?

Years ago I asked that question to Yale economist Robert Shiller. “The exact role of luck in successful outcomes,” he answered.

I loved that answer, because nobody will ever have that information. But if you did, you...

There are two big ways to learn: 

Active learning: Someone tells you what to learn, how to learn it, on a set schedule, on pre-selected standardized topics.

Passive learning: You let your mind wander with no intended destination. You read and learn broadly, talk to people from various backgrounds, and stumble haphazardly across topics you had never considered but spark your curiosity, often because it’s the topic you happen...

One sentence that knocked me off my feet when I read Will and Ariel Durant’s The Lessons of History was: "Learn enough from history to bear reality patiently, and respect one another’s delusions."

I love that so much.

The key here is accepting that everyone is deluded in their own unique way. You, me, all of us.

When you realize that you – the good, noble, well-meaning, even-tempered, fact-driven person that you are – have v...

My wife recently bought me an old book. It's called The Mathematical Theory of Investment. It was written in 1913 and it's as dry and boring as it sounds (but the old weathered cover looks awesome on a bookshelf). 

I flipped through it and thought, "Does any of this matter?" These formulas, these charts, this data?

Well, yes. 

But not nearly as much as the soft, behavioral side of inve...

Expiring skills tend to get more attention. They’re more likely to be the cool new thing, and a key driver of an industry’s short-term performance. They’re what employers value and employees flaunt.

Permanent skills are different. They’ve been around a long time, which makes them look stale and basic. They can be hard to define and quantify, which gives the impression of fortune-cookie wisdom vs. a hard skill.

But permanent skills co...

My new book, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes, is out today. 

Books are hard, a multi-year slog from start to finish. But I’m excited for you to read this. I think it’s the best writing I’ve ever done. And it was fun to write! My hope is that you enjoy reading it half as much as I enjoyed writing it. 

My first book, The Psychology of Money, was really about how you, the individual behave. Same As Ever is about how we, the ...

Daniel Kahneman says, "The long-term success of a relationship depends far more on avoiding the negative than on seeking the positive."

It's like that in so many areas of life. 

Most people know what they're good at, or at least they think they do. Flaws, though, tend to be nuanced, and we're often blind to them. 

This episode shares dozens of little flaws I often think about -- o...

Measuring wealth is easy. You just count it up. Measuring some of the downsides of wealth is so much harder and more nuanced. They can be so nuanced and hard to measure that many people won’t even believe they exist. A downside to wealth? How could that possibly be? 

Let me propose that the absurdity of talking about the downside of wealth is part of why wealth doesn’t tend to make people as happy as they thought it would. 

When the ...