Greetings. I've got some pretty intense franklies coming up, one on probability, certainty,

and identity. That's going to be next week because it's a little more involved than I thought.

I just got back from a snowshoe with the dogs and here's some thoughts going through my mind about a topic called loss aversion,

which is the cognitive bias where our human brains care more intensely about losses than we do about equivalent gains.

I was exposed to this at a young age in my mid-20s when I was managing

money and doing trades for billionaires at Solomon Brothers and at Lehman Brothers.

Here's a couple stories. I mean, I have hundreds of stories.

One guy was 80 years old and he owned a lot of apartment buildings in New York City.

He had $850 million worth of U.S. treasuries and all he did every day was have wait for

the coupon payments to hit his bank account.

And I remember one day there was a

problem with the QSIP number and his payment hadn't arrived of like $50,000 in interest

on one of his treasuries. He called me and he was so ballistic, so polite all the time except

he missed one interest payment.

And so his brain, this was like a super normal stimuli that that little bit of interest disrupted

his entire day because he wanted it.

And I was like, what the hell? And a little bit later, I had a guy that owned a lot of stock that he had gotten in a, you know,

and in the company he used to work for.

It was valued at like $2.

And we found out one day that some buyout happened for $24 a share.

So he just had an immediate windfall of like $80 million.

And he was pretty happy about it.

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