Morgan Housel

Like probably.

And so to answer your question, yes, there is absolutely time when signaling is important.

I think it becomes dangerous when the purpose of your signaling is I want to get the attention of strangers who are not in this with me, who are not part of the group that I'm trying to gain the respect and admiration of.

I'm trying to gain the attention and admiration of other people who I don't know, who are probably not even watching to begin with.

I think that's a lot of it.

I think you see this very often with people who have very poor manners, who are very gruff and say whatever's on their mind, that in their mind, they're like, I don't care what you think about me.

I don't care.

But the truth is like, they probably don't get accepted into groups and societies and like friend circles and cliques and whatnot that would really benefit them.

And so that's, I think that there's a joke where it's like, just be yourself.

is good advice for like 5% of people.

And I love that joke, that meme of like, most people should not be themselves.

They should meter what they say and how they behave around other people in a signaling way in order to fit in.

it's not working the way it should at the moment i think there's two things when we talk about like broad economic crashes and depressions on one hand i could say the economy is cyclical and that's the greatest sense of opportunity 1932 a stock market had fallen 89 but it was about to go absolutely parabolic rocket ship up

And so you can talk about that, be greedy when others are fearful.

But I think there's some survivorship bias in there because the German economy also collapsed in the 1920s and 30s.

And did they get a rebound out of it?

No, they got Hitler out of it is what happened.

And you could list a dozen examples of that and individual examples of when people whose career fell, their portfolio fell.

And was that –

an opportunity for them to grow.