Moment 208: The Dumbest Financial Advice Everyone Weirdly Follows That’s Keeping Them Poor!

Morgan Housel (0:00)

So I grew up skiing in Lake Tahoe, California, and I was a competitive skieracer. So all throughout my childhood and teenage years, I skied six days a week, 10 months a year, all over the world. And it was great. There were about 12 of us on the Squaw Valley Ski Team. We had grown up together, and we had spent our entire lives together. And when I was 17, this was in 2001, I was skiing with my two of my best friends, Brendan Allen and Brian Richmond. And we would ski out of bounds, which is illegal. You're not supposed to do it. We would duck under the rope that says, do not cross, and we'd ski out of bounds, because that's where a lot of the good skiing is. And when we would do this, it would spit us out on this back country road where we'd have to hitchhike back. There's no chairlift when you ski out of bounds, you have to hitchhike your way back. So we did it one morning in February, 2001, the three of us did it. And when we did it, we triggered a very small avalanche. And I remembered it so clearly. Like I can still feel it 21 year, 22 years later, I can still feel what it's like. It's the weirdest sensation that I've had in my life because when you get hit by an avalanche, rather than pushing on the snow to gain traction with your skis, the ground is pushing you. So all of a sudden, you're skiing along and you got control. And all of a sudden, boom, you have no control anymore. The ground is pushing you around. Probably similar to what it feels like if you're standing on the ground during an earthquake, like the ground's pushing you. But it was a pretty small avalanche, maybe came up to our knees, ended pretty quickly. And we kind of like literally high fived about it at the bottom and went about our day. We get back around to the base lodge. We hitchhiked back and Brendan and Brian said they wanted to do it again. They wanted to ski again. And I said, hey, for whatever reason, I just didn't want to do it. So I said, hey, rather than hitchhiking back, why don't you guys go do it again? And I'll drive my truck around and pick you up. So we said, great. We made our plans, went our separate ways. They went skiing. I went back around to take my boots off and jump in my truck and go pick them up. 20, 30 minutes later, I go to pick them up at the pickup spot, and they weren't there. And I knew it only took us a minute to ski down the hill. So 20 minutes later, I knew they weren't coming. I was not worried. I figured that they had already hitchhiked home. But so after waiting for another 20 or 30 minutes, I just left and went back to the lodge. I expected them to be there and they weren't. And I still didn't really worry. We didn't have cell phones back then, and people were just comfortable being out of touch. If you didn't know where your buddy was, it wasn't that big a deal. So we went about the day. I started worrying a little bit. I remember I stopped at Brendan's house, inspected him to be there, and he wasn't there either.

I remember calling and leaving a message on his voicemail, and I remember ending the voicemail by saying, I hope you're okay, man. Those are my last words. I remember that very clearly. The day went on, and I think at about four or five o'clock, Brian's mom called me, and she said, Brian never showed up for work today. Do you know where he is? And I told her what happened. I said, we skied the backside of Squaw, where we'd hitchhiked back. I was gonna pick him up, but they never showed up, and I haven't seen them since. And I also remember so clearly Brian's mom saying, oh my God, and hanging up the phone. And that was so like, so it's then we started getting worried. We called the police. The police didn't take it very seriously, because they thought, ah, they're out at a party. They ran off with a girl for the night. Like they weren't worried. But we finally got search and rescue involved. And rescuers of probe poles frowned, Brendan and Brian buried under six feet of snow. And they were, they've been killed from a massive avalanche. And so look, I think virtually everyone listening to this, I'm sure you two have lost somebody close to you, somebody that you love. So I know the experience was not unique in that way. But it was the first time that I had experienced loss. And it was the first bad thing that had ever happened to me in my life. So I had a big impact on me. And there were a lot of takeaways. I think at the time, I didn't have the cognitive tools to piece together what happened or to learn about what happened, like have any sort of takeaways. But as I got older and thought about it and looking back, I put together all these like realizations of what that did to me, how it changed me, and what were some of the lessons from it too. One that I talk about in the book that I think about all the time is my decision to not go with them on a second run was this completely brainless decision. I put no thought into that decision. It was not a cost benefit analysis. I didn't think through it, but it's the most important decision I've ever made in my life. 100% chance if I was with them, I would have died. And I had skied literally thousands of runs with Brendan and Brian.