Tom Frieden

Why we don't pay attention to those warnings.

And the Cassandra curse really indicates that we may know something bad is going to happen, but we don't act on it.

And why?

And in chapter two of the book, I talk about six of the drivers for the Cassandra curse.

And the underlying theme there is that our perceptions are wrong.

Our perceptions are inaccurate.

We think things about ourselves, about the world, and about the future differently.

that aren't really aligned with reality, and therefore we don't act.

I'll give you just one of these six drivers of the Cassandra curse, which is a fancy term called hyperbolic discounting.

And what it basically says is we shortchange the future.

If every smoker knew that they had a 50-50 chance of dropping dead after the next cigarette, not a whole lot of people will keep smoking.

But 50% of smokers, unless they quit, are going to get killed by tobacco.

So how then...

Do we break the Cassandra curse?

For each of the six drivers, I go through a way to break it.

In terms of the short-changing the future, the hyperbolic discounting, it's cool.

You can do two things.

One, you can use emotion and rationality to think of something far in the future as tomorrow.

Two, you can reward yourself or society with short-term gains that compensate for that longer term.

To give you one example of each,