Happiness Is a Skill You Can Develop

You’re not stuck at your current level of happiness
The first step to increasing your level of happiness is realizing you can. This is where a lot of people get tripped up. For the vast majority of people, some of their happiness—probably a lot more than they think—is in their control. This step is not easy. You might be stuck on this for a long time. More

Live Long Enough and You’ll Become a Philosopher

This podcast is a practical philosophy of health, wealth and happiness
Let’s talk about why we’re doing this podcast. It’s really a discussion of highly practical philosophy. Philosophy, as we normally think of it, is impractical. It’s abstract and obtuse—something written a long time ago in fancy language. We put it on a pedestal and it feels unapproachable. Sometimes it comes across like truisms. More

Finding Time to Invest in Yourself

If you have to work a “normal job,” take on accountability to build your specific knowledge
This is a transcript of the bonus material at the end of the giant How to Get Rich episode. A common question we get: “How do I find the time to start investing in myself? I have a job.” In one of the tweets from the cutting room floor, you wrote: “You will need to rent your time to get started. More
Jan 13 2020

Externalities: Calculating the Hidden Costs of Products

Externalities let you account for the true cost of products by including hidden costs
What’s a mispriced externality? You mentioned it on a previous episode. An externality is where there’s an additional cost imposed by whatever product is being produced or consumed, that’s not accounted for in the price of the product. This can happen for many reasons. Sometimes you can fix it by putting the cost back into the price. More

Net Present Value: What Future Income Is Worth Today

See what future income is worth today by applying a discount to its future value
Let’s talk about net present value (NPV). Net present value is when you say, “That stream of payments I’m going to get in the future—what’s it worth today?” Here’s a common example: You’re joining a startup and getting stock options, and the founder says, “This company is going to be worth $1 billion, and I’m giving you 0.1% of the company; therefore, you’re getting $1 million worth of stock.” More

Consumer Surplus: Getting More Than You Paid For

People are willing to pay more than what companies charge
Consumer surplus and producer surplus are important concepts. Consumer surplus is the excess value you get from something when you pay less than you were willing to pay. I get a lot of joy out of my morning Starbucks coffee. Obviously I’ve made some money. So if my coffee cost $20, I would pay it. More

Price Discrimination: Charge Some People More

You can charge people for extras based on their propensity to pay
Are there any other microeconomic concepts, outside of zero marginal cost of replication and scale economies, that are important to understand? Price discrimination is important. It means you can charge people based on their propensity to pay. Now, you can’t charge people different amounts just because you don’t like them. More