Nautilus

How Enormous Dominoes Can Help You Rethink Saving for Retirement

A still from Prudential’s commercial, showing the largest domino to ever be toppled. The point was to make a spectacle of the power of compound interest.Courtesy of Prudential

t’s a clear warm day in early August, and the Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert is lucky it isn’t windy. Towering right behind him stands a 30-foot tall domino. It’s 15 feet wide, four feet long, and weighs two tons. Gilbert, who is bald and has a thick white goatee and oval spectacles, looks

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Nautilus

Nautilus10 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
How AI Can Save the Zebras
Tanya Berger-Wolf didn’t expect to become an environmentalist. After falling in love with math at 5 years old, she started a doctorate in computer science in her early 20s, attracting attention for her cutting-edge theoretical research. But just as s
Nautilus3 min read
The Power of Regret
One of the primary motivators of human behavior is avoiding regret. Before the legendary behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky formalized prospect theory and loss aversion, they believed that regret avoidance was at the root of the h
Nautilus3 min read
Unraveling The Evolution Of Flight
The archeopteryx, a small animal that lived around 150 million years ago, resembles a cross between an ancient Jurassic dinosaur and a modern-day bird. Measuring about 20 inches long from its teeth to the end of its long tail, it had black-feathered

Related Books & Audiobooks