#362: Graham Duncan — Talent Is The Best Asset Class

"Everyone's genius is right next to their dysfunction." — Graham Duncan Graham Duncan (@GrahamDuncanNYC https://twitter.com/grahamduncannyc?lang=en) is the co-founder of East Rock Capital http://eastrockcap.com/, a multi-family office investment firm that manages $2 billion for a small number of families and their charitable foundations. Before starting East Rock 14 years ago, Graham worked at two other investment firms and started his career by co-founding an independent Wall Street research firm. Graham graduated from Yale with a B. A. in ethics, politics, and economics. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations https://www.cfr.org/ and serves as co-chair of the SOHN Conference Foundation https://www.sohnconference.org/, which funds pediatric cancer research. Josh Waitzkin https://tim.blog/2016/03/23/josh-waitzkin-the-prodigy-returns/, the chess prodigy who served as the basis for the book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer http://www.amazon.com/Searching-Bobby-Fischer-Joe-Mantegna/dp/6305910340/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, calls Graham "the tip of the spear in the realms of talent tracking and judgment of human potential in high stakes mental arenas." Click here for the show notes for this episode. https://tim.blog/2019/02/28/graham-duncan/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Marketing Solutions https://LinkedIn.com/TFS, the go-to tool for B2B marketers and advertisers who want to drive brand awareness, generate leads, or build long-term relationships that result in real business impact. With a community of more than 575 million professionals, LinkedIn https://LinkedIn.com/TFS is gigantic, but it can be hyper-specific. You have access to a diverse group of people all searching for things they need to grow professionally so you can build relationships that really matter and drive your business objectives forward. LinkedIn https://LinkedIn.com/TFS has the marketing tools to help you target your customers with precision, right down to job title, company name, industry, etc. Why spray and pray with your marketing dollars when you can be surgical? To redeem your free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com/TFS https://LinkedIn.com/TFS! This podcast is also brought to you by 99designs http://99designs.com/tim, the global creative platform that makes it easy for designers and clients to work together to create designs they love. Its creative process has become the go-to solution for businesses, agencies, and individuals, and I have used it for years to help with display advertising and illustrations and to rapid prototype the cover for The Tao of Seneca. Whether your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99designs http://99designs.com/tim. You can work with multiple designers at once to get a bunch of different ideas, or hire the perfect designer for your project based based on their style and industry specialization. It's simple to review concepts and leave feedback so you'll end up with a design that you're happy with. Now 99designs http://99designs.com/tim also offers custom video and will match you with the right video professional to help you explain your product, spotlight a service, and bring your brand to life. Click this link and get a free $99 upgrade http://99designs.com/tim. *** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. 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• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  Now would be the appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, the go-to tool for B2B marketers and advertisers who want to drive brand awareness, generate leads, or build long-term relationships that result in real business impact. Could be all of the above. I've had Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, on this podcast a number of times, often called the Oracle of Silicon Valley for many different reasons. And he, among other people and friends of mine, have made me more and more interested in LinkedIn as a platform, as an ecosystem, in the last few years. And it's very nuanced, it's very subtle, but can be used in some very powerful ways. With a community of more than 575 million professionals, LinkedIn is gigantic, but it can be hyper-specific.

• 1:07Tim Ferriss?

  You have access to a very diverse group of people, all searching for things they need to grow professionally. That is explicitly the purpose of LinkedIn. So you can build relationships that really matter, that can drive your business objectives forward, that can also have a high LTV, lifetime value. LinkedIn has the marketing tools to help you target your customers with precision, right down to, among other things, their job title, company name, industry, etc. This is important because better targeting equals a message that your customers actually care about. And it also means your advertising is more effective and cost-effective. So why spray and pray with your marketing dollars when you can be surgical? It just makes sense.

• 1:51Tim Ferriss?

  To redeem a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com/TFS. That stands for Tim Ferriss Show. So that is LinkedIn.com/TFS. Check it out. That's where you can go to get your free $100 ad credit. LinkedIn.com/TFS. Terms and conditions apply.

• 2:16Tim Ferriss?

  This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is the global creative platform that makes it easy for creators and clients to work together. From logos to apps and packaging to book covers, just about anything can be found on 99designs, which is a go-to creative resource for any budget that I've used for many, many years now. 99designs now offers, guess what, custom video, which is very exciting. They will match you with the right video professional to help you explain your product, spotlight a service, and bring your brand to life. And like I mentioned, I've used 99designs for all sorts of things. I've used them for book covers, some of the mockups for The Four Hour Body, for example, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller, illustrations, beautiful

• 3:00Tim Ferriss?

  illustrations, cover and inside illustrations for the multi-volume The Tao of Seneca, which you can find online for free. That is a collection of my favorite letters that I've read hundreds of times by Seneca, and other graphic design projects. Most recently, I used 99designs to update the illustrations and layout of my Five Morning Rituals ebook, which is something that I offer as an incentive on my website for people to sign up for my free newsletter. The illustrations turned out fantastic, and I loved working with the designer who we selected for the project. You can check out a bunch of these projects, you can see real-life examples of what I've done and the stories behind them at 99designs.com/tim.

• 3:43Tim Ferriss?

  The number 99designs.com/tim. 99designs will match you with the right professional for your project from their curated community of talented creatives and stay with you every step of the way, so you love the outcome. So check it out. Head to 99designs.com/tim to learn more and get started on your project today.

• 4:06Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types, whether they come from military, entertainment, sports, business...

• 4:21Tim Ferriss?

  It's a pretty wide spectrum and today my guest is Graham Duncan. You can find him at grahamduncan.blog, eastrockcap.com and at Graham Duncan NYC on Twitter. Graham is the co-founder of East Rock Capital, an investment firm that manages approximately $2 billion for a small number of families and their charitable foundations. Before starting East Rock 14 or so years ago, Graham worked at two other investment firms. He started his career by co-founding an independent Wall Street research firm. Graham graduated from Yale with a BA in Ethics, Politics and Economics. It's a lot of stuff. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves as co-chair of the SOHN Conference Foundation, which funds pediatric cancer research.

• 5:04Tim Ferriss?

  Josh Waitzkin, one of our very good mutual friends, will probably pop up here and there in this conversation. Thought of most often as the basis for searching for Bobby Fischer, although he would cringe to hear me limited to that, calls Graham, quote, "the tip of the spear in the realms of talent tracking and judgment of human potential in high stakes mental arenas," end quote. That is a very Josh sentence. And Graham, it is a real pleasure to be sitting here with you.

• 5:33Speaker 03

  Thanks, Ben. Thanks for taking the time.

• 5:35Tim Ferriss?

  And we've had many conversations. We haven't caught up in a while. We've also had terrible food poisoning together, along with Josh. So I feel like we've seen each other in high stakes, maybe not mental, physical arenas. We, if I recall correctly, almost decapitated each other when learning to paddleboard with Josh at one point. And I am excited to chat for a lot of reasons. Number one, I always learn something when we sit down and talk. And I don't think of you first and foremost as an investor.

• 6:18Tim Ferriss?

  You certainly do that very well, but I enjoy...

• 6:25Tim Ferriss?

  Watching your thinking and listening to your thinking. So I think that for people who are in the audience and who might be wondering right off the bat, how will this apply to me? It is hopefully transferable to just about any domain. I think that thinking, clear thinking, is really a lot of what we'll be discussing. But for people who just heard this bio and are kind of scratching their heads as to what you exactly do, how do you explain what you do?

• 6:57Speaker 03

  Well, I try to find people who are better at doing a thing than I am at doing that thing. And I first came to this 20 years ago. I had just started a firm with a professor of mine at Yale, and we were running this independent research firm. And I'd hired a sales guy who, we're two years in, and we're in a group meeting, and he says to me at a certain point, "Graham, what the fuck do you do here?" And at that point, I had some real imposter syndrome going because I was hiring and firing 30 people who are much older, much more experienced than me. And so I sat there for 30 seconds because it's a good question, what the fuck do I do?

• 7:38Speaker 03

  And I finally said to him, "You know, Robert, when you first interviewed to come to our firm, you were applying to be an analyst, and I was interviewing you as an analyst. And I didn't see your eyes light up when we talked about political analysis or economic analysis. But then you proceeded to stalk me for the following four weeks. You called me at home back then, you emailed me twice a day, and I had this moment of revelation. I was also interviewing salespeople. Robert should be our salesperson, and you trusted me enough to come and try it, and now you've built our entire business. And I'm not a good analyst, I'm not a good salesperson, but I put you in that seat, and now we've built this thing.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  I put you into this positive feedback loop that we're calling a business here."

• 8:26Speaker 03

  And that's what I do. And I feel like it's a, I wouldn't pick that skill out of a lineup as my thing. It's the cards I was dealt. It's what I end up being compulsive about and interested in, in this way. The world seems to like me doing it. But it's kind of an odd, it's an odd center of gravity. But today, I think about it as my mission in life is to get as many people as possible into positive feedback loops. And there's a, it's a good skill to have because it's right next to a weakness of mine, which is I'm kind of lazy.

• 8:59Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe that's why we get along so well.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  So I like getting the design right up front so that I don't have to, like if I'd had to be talking to Robert once a week as a political analyst, saying, look, you're not, do this, don't do that. That would have been, I don't, I don't want to put something into somebody. I want to have them do the thing that they want to do anyway. And if you, if you construct organizations and teams that way, you unlock a lot of stuff. So for me today, I use that philosophy a lot because I act in effect as a general contractor for families to manage their wealth. And in order to do that, my team and I meet over a thousand teams a year to try to hire the best investment craftsman of any given sub-strategy. And sometimes

• 9:42Speaker 03

  those craftsmen, those investment managers, who were trapped inside large organizations, start their own firms on their own or with their help. And you unleash all this extra investment energy and genius that they weren't accessing in their prior context. And we get to participate in that together with them. So it's now been 20 years, but I feel like I've basically been playing different variations of the same game.

• 10:07Tim Ferriss?

  And at that time, how old were you roughly?

• 10:10Speaker 03

  Twenty-four, call it.

• 10:11Tim Ferriss?

  Twenty-four. So we're going to, we're going to talk, I'm sure, a lot about this. And, well, I won't make this just a, a list of Josh quotes, but I mean, I was texting with him and he reiterated, I think, what you just said.

• 10:30Tim Ferriss?

  And Josh, my apologies. I know we didn't talk about me reading your text up front. But this is pretty safe. So a core genius for a grab is talent hunting. Finding funky A plus, that funky word on, at some point we're gonna talk about. A plus potential mental performers in the finance space. And then he goes on. Now, you have systems and frameworks that you use for this. At 24, though, I would be really curious to hear you try to describe what made you good at it then. Also, if there's anything that comes to mind. Is there any?

• 11:11Tim Ferriss?

  Is there, are there things that you see that other people tend not to see? Or are there

• 11:20Tim Ferriss?

  any types of questions that you ask yourself that even at that point, perhaps, you had picked up along the way? Is there, is there anything that comes to mind?

• 11:31Speaker 03

  Well, I think of it as having a certain taste in people. And I like taste because, and I think I had a certain taste back then, and it's evolved and I can articulate a little better than I could back then. But, I mean, if you think of taste, I like taste over judgment because judgment implies there's one answer. Whereas taste is, you have a certain taste in podcast guest, right? There's something similar to the group and you could pick a Tim guest out of a lineup in a way, right?

• 11:59Tim Ferriss?

  Todd, I reckon that's him.

• 12:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so taste, like, so I'm trying to think back then. I think the imposter thing kinda helped because I, I knew, I was trying to hire people who were better at doing a thing than I was at doing it, and I knew I couldn't do it. And so I was forced to say, okay, what constitutes excellence in this thing? And I, we had hired a bunch of, in that context, we'd hired a bunch of sales guys. And they, they actually didn't like cold calling. And a lot of sales guys, understandably, don't like the rejection of cold calling. And I found this one guy who, for whatever reason, thrives on it. I remember a couple of years ago, I ran into somebody who was a client or a prospective client of ours back then. And he said, "I still dream that this guy, Robert, is trying to get me on the phone."

• 12:49Speaker 03

  And I wake up in cold sweats in the middle of the night. We built our entire business on this guy. And that's, so there's like this, um, yeah. So I think it's seen, and I'm just, I find myself curious about what makes people tick in this way that I don't get tired of it.

• 13:06Tim Ferriss?

  And how has that taste evolved to today? So if a component of that taste, or at least alerting your spider sense, is identifying certain outliers, say in preferences or behaviors back then, like Robert thriving on cold call rejection.

• 13:30Tim Ferriss?

  What do your tastes look like today, or more recently? Or what constitutes your taste when you're scouting for talent or evaluating talent in, in the world in which you now operate?

• 13:44Speaker 03

  Well, I, I like framing I read once that people are like musical instruments and the range of notes they can play is dependent on the range of tensions that they've learned to hold. And I like that because it acknowledges that everybody, whatever they're playing right now, there is actually other notes they could play in a different context. So as an example, the tension I'm focused on right now in the investment manager world is I think there's something really interesting about the tension between someone's intensity and integrity, or if you double click on each of those, aggression and humility.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  And if you, if you were to rank, to try to use a concrete example, I've written an essay before about David Tepper. I don't know David Tepper. He's somewhat in the public domain. He's on CNBC. He's written some. And I think of David Tepper in many ways as the platonic ideal of a good hedge fund manager and a good investor. And one thing he holds is like, I think people who work for him, I've interviewed people who've worked for him. They experience him as, as that mix of like super aggressive in taking a position in an equity or debt security from zero to 20% of the fund with no, no hesitation.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Like if you were, and yet if you were on the other side of a transaction with him, he's not going to do something.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  That you characterize as, I mean, you would never say fraudulent, but he's not going to be overly aggressive, like he's playing the game because he enjoys it, but he has an ethical core. And I feel like that tension, Goldman Sachs, they have this term, is someone "commercial." And I think of that, I love that word, and I think of "commercial" as people who give off this vibe of, "I'm going to create more value than I capture here," versus somebody who's more transactional, is trying to capture all the value. And people who are commercial, who balance that tension of aggression and integrity, or aggression and humility, they tend to clump together, they like doing business with each other, and so you hit these pockets of people with that.

• 15:58Tim Ferriss?

  How do you test for something like that? Or stress test it, in the sense that I would imagine many of the people, if not all of the people, who make it to the point that they're interacting with you or your team have already cleared a lot of hurdles, they've already checked a lot of boxes, and many of them will be good at selling themselves, and no one is going to volunteer that they lack integrity. They'll be like, "Well, there is this one thing. I'm a very, very, very skilled and intelligent deceptive artist," or whatever. So how do you try to evaluate that?

• 16:41Speaker 03

  Well, one evolution of my process has been, I just treat my interview as one perspective, and then people think of references as this thing you do after the fact. To me, it's the whole thing. References and getting the sense of how someone's interacting in a repeat iteration game in this thing we call financial markets, to me, that's, there's a, people generate trust, and it's like this intangible asset that's around them, and the trust sits in the heads of everybody they've interacted with over time. And my job is to see how everybody else they've interacted with, their employees, their former bosses, their peers.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  End up relating to them in the way because of the body of work they've had in the past. And so like we did that dinner with Chris Fussell that time. I think Fussell and Stan McChrystal's language around trying to assess someone's credibility. And then based on that assessment, how much decision space to give them. To me, that's so beautiful and that's exactly how I think about what I do. So, and they have this formula credibility equals proven competence plus relationships plus integrity. And so what I'm trying to do, what I'm trying to understand, for instance, someone's integrity is understand how they behaved in prior moments of stress, right?

• 18:07Speaker 03

  So 2008 was an amazing, for anybody that's still investing who was around in 2008, it's a great moment to check in on how they behaved during that period because that was like an earthquake going off and it tested every single possible human relationship. It tested when people were partners in investing and they're both portfolio managers. A lot of people got divorced after that. Limited partners, the people who invest in hedge funds and the general partners. It tested those relationships, tested people's relationships with the banks. So if they've been around a while, to me, an interesting question is what happened in 08? Like, and I'm sure we'll have additional crises soon that will again enable us to separate those who behave well from those who behave badly in those periods of stress.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  So it's super reference focused. And then I have a series of questions I ask people that I feel like has high signal value. But, but again, I try to have a lot of humility and a light grip on my ability in one, you know, in a one hour meeting to, to figure that out.

• 19:12Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the, the high signal questions that are?

• 19:19Tim Ferriss?

  That you've filtered through over time and have found to be particularly useful. Do any come to mind or types of questions?

• 19:27Speaker 03

  Well, the meta one that I think applies, whether you're looking for, you know, an OBGYN, for your wife to have a kid or anything, is you ask somebody, if you were hiring somebody to do this, what criteria would you use to hire this?

• 19:46Tim Ferriss?

  That's a great question.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  Because what it captures is their definition of success and also captures some nuance that you wouldn't even known to ask about. So when my wife and I were looking for an OB-GYN, this was my question. And one guy said, "Well, what you're maximizing for is the downside. And if you have some sort of, you know, if the baby is in distress, you need a good NICU." So my primary criteria-

• 20:15Tim Ferriss?

  NICU is natal care unit.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  So, and the best NICUs are usually attached to teaching hospitals like Mount Sinai. So I would look for affiliation of that doctor with a good NICU. And then I would also act, his second criteria was I would ask the nurses, because the nurses know who freaks out during tricky situations and who's got ice in their veins and who makes good decisions, who treats people well in those settings. And the nurses, the good nurses want to work for the best doctors in that hospital setting. And I actually have this thought that the equivalent in financial markets is, are the traders. The traders are on the receiving end of a portfolio manager's decisions.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  And they often have a very strong sense of who the good investors are. Like David Tepper's trader, I bet, my, and again, I don't know this, but my hypothesis would be they're in awe of David Tepper because they're on the receiving end of when he's buying when everybody else is freaking out. Now, you have to be careful, and one of the arts of references, I think, is controlling for the context and the perspective of the reference giver. Traders like traders, right? So if somebody doesn't trade a lot- They may not think as highly of this portfolio manager who's really more of a buy and hold person and doesn't give them any business and they think is kind of lazy. Well, okay, that could be true, but it also could be just they run a super concentrated

• 21:45Speaker 03

  portfolio, they only buy one thing a year. So, but, so I really like, what criteria would you use? And the other great thing about that question is it improves your own criteria for the next interview, right?

• 21:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. That is, that's, that's, that's really, really fascinating. I was just chatting with a friend of mine, Toby, who's the CEO of Shopify, and the way he learned the business side is he went to Silicon Valley and met with, let's just call it, a dozen venture capitalists, dozen engineer, and each meeting he would pick up new questions, new terminology, be able to answer one more question, and it just improved his ability to vet not only venture capitalists, but also to learn the lingo and the terminology. Question related to the references themselves.

• 22:40Tim Ferriss?

  So, most folks out there, if they think of references, whether they have provided references or been a references or they're trying to hire, is you ask the person you are interviewing or will be interviewing for their references, they give references who they expect to give praise, and then you get in contact with those people. So, there's a piece of which questions to ask, and then there's the piece, and there are many others, of which people to talk to. How do you, what does your process look like for determining who to talk to as references?

• 23:20Speaker 03

  I actually think the candidate giving you references is usually, obviously, you want to find off-list references if you can, and one advantage of interviewing a ton of people in a given thing is often you know People that they've worked with in other contexts that they didn't give. But I actually find on-list references like bizarrely high signal value. Because what happens is after 10 minutes on a reference, people run out of, like, nobody wants to lie.

• 23:49Tim Ferriss?

  They run out of their script.

• 23:50Speaker 03

  They run out of their script. And so, one of my closest friendships in the business was when somebody who runs another family office was calling me on a reference on somebody. And at my job, I went into that call thinking, okay, I like this guy. We don't have money with him. I respect him. He stuck me in his reference list. Okay. And the guy sat on me for an hour and would not allow me to basically give, you know, a positive endorsement without specifics. And so I think of it as a net promoter score. So at the, you know, either at the beginning or the end of a reference, I'll say, okay, what I hear you saying is you're kind of giving this guy a seven on the net promoter score. Is that right? Did I hear that correctly? Or I'll just ask it directly.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  On a one to 10, what's your level of endorsement of this person? If I was calling you on a reference on, let's make up a fictional assistant that worked for you four years ago. And I was debating hiring them. Well, first, we know each other. So I would, I would do it in person. I'd track it down and say, Tim, so what's the skinny? But let's say we don't know each other that well and I'm calling on a phone. I would be trying to understand, okay, are you still in touch with that assistant? What's your, like, what's the social dynamic? I make it safe for you. Look, I am not, I'm calling 20 people. I am not passing any of that information back to the candidate unless you ask me to. So you need to make it safe for them.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  But, yeah, so, but if at the end I've got, in effect, an aggregate number of net promoter scores on a different person, you start to see patterns after reference number four. And, and then you know you can stop because you're hearing the same thing over and over again.

• 25:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, one, and this, I mean, I'm very primitive. Of course, you've done infinitely more hiring. But I remember this bit of advice that I was given by

• 25:45Tim Ferriss?

  Think about who it was. I'm blanking on who exactly it was.

• 25:50Tim Ferriss?

  Kyle Maynard is who it was. Quadruple congenital amputees, climb Kilimanjaro and was a star wrestler. Fascinating guy. He learned it, I think, from, might have been. It was from a very successful CEO and it was the rank X, could be anything from 1 to 10, but you can't use a 7.

• 26:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 26:10Tim Ferriss?

  And I have used that in restaurants. I have used that for so many things. And it removes that safe, mild endorsement.

• 26:21Tim Ferriss?

  When you are then speaking to these references who have been provided, are there any other approaches you use to ferret out weaknesses?

• 26:37Speaker 03

  Well, one meta, one stance that I think is really important is that I'm not trying to catch somebody in any way. I'm just curious and the references pick up on this vibe. And I wanted to help the candidate construct the best environment for them.

• 26:58Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  Right? Because there's no gotcha to it. Like, we're all crazy. We all have lots of weaknesses. And so one thing I see other people in equivalent roles to me do is they have this gotcha. One thing that I see other people who are in equivalent roles to me do is they have this gotcha thing, which I don't agree with. So all I'm trying to do is help the person get in the best possible context for them. And so that's, I feel like that stance elicits a lot more because then you're on the same side.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  Particularly if you're talking to a former boss or, you know. So that's, I guess that's how I think about it.

• 27:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, it's sort of the... The mindset with which you go into it and the tone that you transmit.

• 27:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. One question I like to ask is if I were going to hire a partner for this person to complement their strengths or weaknesses, what would that person be good at? Right? Because then it's like, and you have to be careful in an investment context, you want it to be another investing partner because, and then I actually use that. And then I can help, to the extent it's applicable, help that person try to make sure. Because there, there, one misconception I feel like people have sometimes is that there are products. In my opinion, in investment management, there are no products. They're only humans and that's why I'm so focused on the people side of it. And the only product is the mindset of the individual and the decisions they're going to make

• 28:32Speaker 03

  prospectively from here. Right? So if you were invested in a fund at Fidelity and the portfolio manager leaves and there's a new portfolio manager, from my perspective, that's, that's a completely new decision.

• 28:44Tim Ferriss?

  Totally.

• 28:45Speaker 03

  Right? Whereas some people have a mentality of, oh, I'm looking to put out, it starts with a, I think, a dangerous mindset, which is I'm, I need to put out some assets. And to do that, I'm going to invest in some products. I think you don't want to have the mindset of I need to put out assets. Like you always want to feel comfortable holding cash and there should be no pressure to put money to work. And then secondarily, it's to the extent you're going, and at, in my role, we're pretty indifferent on do we have people in-house or out, you know, out in the field. Most of the time, external teams are, the most commercial people want to run their own firms.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  And so we have a bias, we, over time have constructed what I think of as a team of teams. But it's not, you know, it's not a product of products. There is no, no.

• 29:37Tim Ferriss?

  No, that, that makes a lot of sense to me and. This may or may not be, I want to bring up a term that Josh suggested bringing up, and this may not be the right place, but that's okay, because this podcast is always all over the place, like memento. Wild, he said, "Ask Graham about wild gardening." Now, I'm gonna laugh if this is actual, literally, wild gardening, and it's just a complete non sequitur, but he put it in quotation marks.

• 30:09Speaker 03

  He, so he calls me the wild gardener, because I don't like to force it. I don't want, so there's a, there's a great piece in the Atlantic Monthly from years ago, where someone looking at the temperament of children, divided them into orchids and dandelions. And it's a little bit similar to the Susan Cain, high sensitivity, there's another thinker named Elaine Aaron, who has this concept of highly sensitive children, HSCs. And the idea is that if you get, orchids can be so beautiful, but they need just the right context.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  They need the right light, temperature, and dandelions are just lower maintenance, but maybe have less potential, that's not the right language, but they, the dandelions, you don't have to worry about the context as much. And so, I think of partly what I do is, back to the, the, the system design, is, okay, let's get everybody into a positive feedback loop, doing what they're actually compulsive about, what they actually can have a chance of being world-class at. And I don't like trying to stick a dandelion where it doesn't want to be, or an orchid where it doesn't want to be, and I, yeah.

• 31:29Tim Ferriss?

  So it's, let's, so we're talking about, we're covering a lot that relates to talent selection, and asking the right questions. We're definitely going to...

• 31:44Tim Ferriss?

  Spend some time on questions that you ask yourself as well, since that's in part, in large part what thinking is day to day. But I want to talk a bit about ambiguity or cases that are not exceptionally clear. So if you talk to, say, 20 references and all 20 come back and say, "This person's fantastic. Let me list the ways," then that's one thing. Or if they're all negative. But no doubt you've had instances where you get negative feedback, or perhaps you have

• 32:25Tim Ferriss?

  a lot of positive, but then one on a scale of 1 to 10 in severity is like a 9 or 10 in severity negative. How do you, how do you handle cases like that? How do you think through something that is not, at least at first glance, extremely obvious? A lot of life is like this.

• 32:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:45Tim Ferriss?

  Or if there are any cases, any examples, not naming names, but...

• 32:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think it's a matter of holding those contradictory perspectives as long as you need to, to make sense of them. And so, for me, people, my wife, my business partner can experience me as indecisive at times because I am so tolerant of holding the ambiguity on somebody being really good at something. Because everyone's genius is right next to their dysfunction, I think. And so, until you're clear on it, it can feel, and sometimes you just don't get clear, in which case there's no need to do anything. But one central strategy I have of dealing with it is just spending more time with them.

• 33:38Speaker 03

  You know, we got to know each other well on these intense surfing trips where we almost drowned, I almost beheaded you, and then we got food poisoning. But, and I like in general-

• 33:50Tim Ferriss?

  Welcome to Club Paradise, yeah.

• 33:52Speaker 03

  I like getting out of the conference room and not being pitched something across the table, and I like creating other contexts to interact with people. And if there's ambiguity or ambivalence, we'll look at an investment with them. If you look at something that's live with somebody, you learn so much about how they're actually underwriting it, the mental models they're using.

• 34:11Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean by underwriting it in this case?

• 34:12Speaker 03

  So, underwriting is a term used in the context of making an investment decision, and it refers to the body of work that an individual, or say, a deal team, has done to get comfortable advocating for an investment at a particular price. And so, like, people will say, "Based on my underwriting, the returns are attractive relative to the risk," in this case. And by saying "my underwriting," they are putting their personal reputation behind the projections, and they're taking ownership of the outcome of that analysis. So, if we were looking at a real estate investment in Washington DC, in a potential hotel, we would, rather than investing in a fund,

• 34:53Speaker 03

  we would, if we're getting a new partner, spend a lot of time on that, literally looking at that hotel investment and understanding how the sponsor is looking at the investment. And in that way, you get to know, "Oh, this is what they're really focused on, this is what their strengths are, and maybe we should keep an eye out for these weaknesses, or if we make the investment in a fund of theirs, this is something we'd keep an eye on."

• 35:17Tim Ferriss?

  And just for people who may not have put the pieces together, and I want you to correct me here, but you're, in effect, you have, as clients, your-

• 35:32Tim Ferriss?

  Limited partners, family offices. So these are wealthy families who want your help in then choosing different investment teams. And you are, in a way, I suppose, the team coach who is selecting the players.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we work with a handful of families who get to know us well and trust us to be their outsourced chief investment officer. They basically give us full investment discretion over their wealth outside of their personal property, and we manage that as one pool for them and diversify it across asset classes. So we invest that pool in, say, a commercial real estate project in Seattle that we make with our real estate partners that are local there, or in hedge fund partnerships run by the best teams we can find all over the world. So if somebody's got a fund, we'll look at their fund. If they have an SPV, a special purpose vehicle, where they're investing in a publicly traded security, or a private investment, we'll look at that. If they want to start a fund, we'll help them start a fund.

• 36:36Speaker 03

  If they don't need our capital in a seed context, but they just are looking for arms-length, normal, limited partners, we'll do that. So we try to be as opportunistic and open-minded as possible about it, and yeah.

• 36:48Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any other patterns that you've spotted in the talent you end up selecting that does well? And the reason I ask is that, from what I've observed, and this is not my world, but just hanging out on the sidelines every once in a while, glancing over at my perception of what you do, is that you're picking folks, meaning investors, who are... they're not Tepper necessarily, right? I mean, they are kind of rookie MVPs, or maybe that's not the right description, but you may not have a ton of data on these folks.

• 37:31Tim Ferriss?

  Feel free to fact-correct any of that. So are there any other characteristics that seem to pop up more often than not in these... in the people who end up doing well that you select?

• 37:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'd say in addition to that aggression humility tension, a second one I think about is originality and triage are these two. So we've noticed that the people who do best tend to have lots of ideas. There's an academic named Dean Simonton who's studied genius across field and he observed that whether it was Bach or any given scientist, the sheer number of compositions that Bach had were like 100 times more than average composers. And some of his lousy, his lousy pieces of music were inferior to his peers at the time, but then he also ended up with some great pieces. So there's something around

• 38:30Speaker 03

  just sheer quantity of ideas and original thinking that characterizes a lot of them. Specifically, you'll notice that in the language that people use. So I feel like as you, in any field, I think, when you start to achieve mastery, you start, often people start creating their own language to capture the nuance that they're seeing that makes them good at their thing. And in investment management, Buffett is kind of the Shakespeare of the industry and everybody is living in his language and in his mental models to the point where it's limiting. So I feel like a 25 year old sometimes will be saying, "I'm sitting on cash just waiting for the fat pitch." And I can't tell whether he knows

• 39:10Speaker 03

  he's quoting Buffett or not. And even if he's doing it consciously, he's living in this construct, which is a super useful construct, but the, if he proceeds to become the temper of his generation, he will, he'll generate his own language over the course of the subsequent 20 years. And so when people use a lot of jargon and cliches and language that at times doesn't feel like their own, to me, that's a sign that maybe they're a little bit earlier and they could use another stage of apprenticeship or, you know, they just that we would probably wait till, to a later stage. And then that second component. When people have lots of ideas, they're usually not that good at killing them.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  So it's a tension with this triage mentality of, "Look, I'm here to make money. I'm gonna force rank, somebody's gonna die here, and I'm gonna choose these, I'm gonna save these four people and let this guy die," right? It's that triage, high situational awareness, "Okay, I'm making live trade-offs here." I think that's a quality that really good portfolio managers have, where they can force rank their portfolio and they can kill their own ideas. And so you see that often. And then just back to aggressiveness. I was interviewing a guy and he was talking about what he's looking for. One question I like to ask people is, "If you were hiring an analyst, what criteria are you looking for in the analyst?" And people who've been managing money and managing people before begin to look for

• 40:37Speaker 03

  things in their analysts that make those analysts most valuable to them, right? And so there's often signal in the way they answer that. And this guy said, "You know what I'm looking for is a trace of fear in myself, that this guy is coming for me, that he will replace me." And I think what he's capturing is that level of intensity, that obsessiveness, that you see in a minority, probably in any field, because of just, they've found their game, the game they wanna play, and they're, they bring an intensity and obsessiveness to it, that over time, they're just working so much harder, and they're so, you know, it's like Wayne Gretzky finding, you know, hockey at age five, right? Like, he's just, he's obsessed, and he's just going over and over and over again.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  And there are people in the finance industry who are like that, who are just obsessed with investing in this really distinctive way. Warren Buffett, from a young age, obsessed. John Arnold, obsessed.

• 41:34Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned, you mentioned something I wanna come back to for a second, which I may admit, I don't think I'll misrepresent, I think I'll probably get it, but you mentioned Buffett and the terminology and the language, the phrasing that he popularizes, or originates that popularizes, and how people compare it that with...

• 41:56Tim Ferriss?

  And leading you to wonder whether they really understand what they're speaking about or simply repeating something from someone who's well regarded. And this makes me think of Richard Feynman and how his dad used to tell him that there's a big difference, and I'm paraphrasing here, but between knowing the label, right, the word or the phrase, and understanding what that label is intended to represent. And you can learn so much about not only others, but yourself and your own thinking by looking at the language that you use. And one of the questions I wanted to ask you, because it came up when you were in Tribe

• 42:34Tim Ferriss?

  of Mentors, was how you improve your own thinking. And something that stuck out to me, and I'm gonna kind of track it down here. This was in response to what is one of the best or the most worthwhile investments you've ever made, and I'll just, I'll skip around here. But the first line was, "I invest a disproportionate amount of my income in paying for an ever-growing collection of trainers and coaches." And you mentioned a handful, and one of them, you said, "is the most gifted listener I've ever encountered. She surfaces my hidden assumptions, the ones that hold me rather than me holding them, and teaches me to ask better and better questions."

• 43:15Tim Ferriss?

  How does, whether it's this person specifically or others, help you to surface your hidden assumptions? This strikes me as so, so key to just about everything. And investing just happens to sort of magnify the consequences in a very often obvious way of assumptions and faulty assumptions. But how would a coach help you to surface your hidden assumptions?

• 43:48Tim Ferriss?

  Or how might they?

• 43:50Speaker 03

  Well, this woman, Caroline Coughlin in particular, is within this Bob Keegan school of, he's a professor at Harvard and he has a theory about adult development, which is that the process of moving through adulthood is one of increasing your mental complexity and increasing the number of things that you used to be subject to, assumptions you had you couldn't see, and making them object over time. So, an example for many people would be if they grew up in a religious context, are they actively choosing their religious beliefs, or did they arrive at them because their

• 44:32Speaker 03

  parents and community, you know, everyone was swimming in those beliefs together? And so, what I feel like a really good coach can do is by listening of the way you're making, listening to the way I'm making sense of something can observe, "Oh, you're actually assuming X." Your grip, I think of it as grip, like, your grip on certain things is really tight. And if a coach can find what you're gripping really tightly and that you're actually not, you can't articulate the opposite of this belief you have, that might be a sign that you have identity or ego caught up in that thing.

• 45:14Tim Ferriss?

  Can you think of an example?

• 45:17Speaker 03

  So, one assumption my business partner pointed out to me recently that I seem to have, that I might be holding a little bit strongly, is what he was calling futurism, that I'm ready for things to be disrupted and paranoid about disruption, in this way that he observed is I'm holding, I got a little bit too tight of a grip around things. So, when we're investing in a hotel where there might be risks around climate change, I'm extra focused on the climate change. Or if we're investing in somebody, a value investor, who's often going long things that Silicon Valley's trying to disrupt. My partner's observation is I will be extra focused on risks around that. I think he's totally right.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  Once he said that, it kind of clicked and I realized, okay. Now, that doesn't mean I drop it. It just means when it comes up, it's more object to me that, um, so, uh, yeah.

• 46:14Tim Ferriss?

  And in a case like that, would you practice articulating the opposite? As you mentioned earlier, and I'm just, as my mind is digesting this right now, I'm thinking of, I don't, I mean, you have read, you've read so many books, it's just boggles the mind. Uh, and so, so you may be familiar with, it would, it wouldn't surprise me if you're familiar with Byron Katie, but the, she has something called the work, which I, I think is, you have to be careful with using it as your only hammer, because then you just start looking for nails everywhere. But the part of that practice is taking this belief that is causing you, and I'm not saying this is, this is an example here,

• 46:59Tim Ferriss?

  but causing you some amount of discomfort or stress or anxiety. And then going through the exercise of stating the exact opposite, right? So my dad should be, this is not a real example, I'm making it up, like my dad should be more attentive to my mom. And then you state it in a number of different ways, like my dad should be less attentive to my mom. My mom should be more attentive to my dad, et cetera. And you, you have to, as part of the exercise, look for data points or even the smallest shred of evidence that you could put down if you were trying to make those arguments.

• 47:39Tim Ferriss?

  And it helps to disentangle emotion and attachment from your initial kind of statement. When your partner brings to light,

• 47:50Tim Ferriss?

  Something that you might be gripping tightly like this. What are the next steps after that? Or is just the pointing out enough? It's kind of like looking at an optical illusion and you're like, oh, you see how, if you look at it this way, it's actually an old woman's face instead of an hourglass. And you can never again look at that and not see the old woman's face.

• 48:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, Byron Katie, I've been to multiple workshops of her. I think she's amazing.

• 48:14Tim Ferriss?

  I knew it, I knew it.

• 48:16Speaker 03

  So across the street here, there's a salad place, Sweet Greens, and I was in there maybe three months ago, listening to Byron Katie's new book, A Mind at Home with Itself. And Byron Katie and her husband, Stephen Mitchell, walk into the restaurant, order salads, and then proceed to sit right next to me. And it was the most unbelievable. I thought, I took a picture of it because I thought I might be tripping.

• 48:43Tim Ferriss?

  And then you looked over your computer later and no one was there?

• 48:48Speaker 03

  And I will tell you, they proceeded to have the most mindful meal I think I may have ever witnessed. There are some gurus who, out of context, you think, you know, are not walking their talk. In this particular case, I have, I can affirm that she is like her stage presence to the extent you've seen her on stage. All the time. And so I find her credibility on that extra high. Yeah, I think her thing of, you know, what's the belief? Is it true? What's the opposite of that? Can you absolutely know it's true? How do you feel when you think that thing?

• 49:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, what would you be without this belief?

• 49:25Speaker 03

  I think it's so powerful.

• 49:28Tim Ferriss?

  And also, just sorry to interrupt, but one thing that really caught me, because I spent a little bit of time with her a number of months ago, and I can sort of confirm what you just said. Like, she is exactly what you would sort of expect and hope her to be based on the books. Yeah, I mean, the metaphysics can get pretty mind bendy if you go in that direction. But the framing of using the word, we were talking about labels, belief, like, what would you be without this belief as opposed to thought is also really key.

• 50:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:03Tim Ferriss?

  Right, it's like something you take, it's a statement you take to be true, right? And it's just framing it that way puts it under a different lens, but.

• 50:11Speaker 03

  So to your question, I think I may have a little bit of ego identity around being unconventional or being into technology disruption and not thinking that the status quo is going to continue. And so what my business partner is pointing out is just watch that. And now that we have it on the table, when we're evaluating investment, it's, oh, you know, I don't want to be self-conscious about bringing up the paranoia because I think it's a useful lens to have, but being aware that I'm just a tiny bit subject to that is really useful.

• 50:45Tim Ferriss?

  And if you're looking at a team, whether that's within these offices, we're sitting in your offices right now, or it could be any team, really, but specifically, I guess, just to keep us on, keep us in your power zone, investing, when, when do you choose to teach each individual person to offset biases like this versus hiring another person to provide a counterpoint? And the reason I ask is, and I'm getting way above my pay grade here, but if you look at, say, Buffett and Munger, right?

• 51:29Tim Ferriss?

  And Buffett's searching for bargains and wants to sort of buy at a discount and then Munger is, I'm going to get slaughtered on the internet, I'm sure, but is sort of teaching him over time that there are cases where you can buy at market value or a fair price if the growth trajectory is really high. And they seem to complement each other very, very well. How do you think about?

• 52:00Tim Ferriss?

  So each person developing the counterpoint or ability to look at the opposite versus hiring to end up at that optimal mixture.

• 52:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, it's back to grip. So if I'm evaluating a team, I'm trying to figure out. So sometimes I'll hook up someone who is long Tesla with someone who is short Tesla. And when you're witnessing that exchange, you can see whether the person who's long Tesla and the person who's short Tesla, are they actively seeking, you know, disconfirming evidence? Or is it an ideological thing? And Tesla is a little bit of an extreme example because it's very ideological on both sides. It's not really a great example for that reason, but you can see it because it's more extreme that right now on Twitter, the shorts are and Musk and the people who are long are going back and forth.

• 52:53Speaker 03

  The vast majority of them are not actually looking to hold the other person's perspective. In a team context, you can witness whether there's somebody who's already there. In the hedge fund industry and the private equity industry, what's cool is that the boundary of the firm is pretty fluid. So sometimes a portfolio manager of one firm will have a close relationship with one to five other portfolio managers.

• 53:16Tim Ferriss?

  Can you define here just for folks, so PM, right? Portfolio manager. Who is that person?

• 53:21Speaker 03

  That's the person who's running the investment firm and who's making the investment decisions and sizing the investments in that portfolio. The main, it's the main role.

• 53:29Tim Ferriss?

  And inside, I mean, inside a large firm, you might have multiple PMs depending on...

• 53:34Speaker 03

  I'm using it, that's a good catch. I meant more CIO, but if you had...

• 53:39Tim Ferriss?

  Chief Investment Officer.

• 53:40Speaker 03

  Chief Investment Officer, exactly. But a portfolio manager within a large shop like Citadel will have external relationships sometime, and sometimes those buy-side relationships will be testing each other's thinking and the equivalent of that Buffett-Munger thing often exists across firm is my, so they don't have to be within the boundary of the firm.

• 54:03Tim Ferriss?

  So the looking for disconfirming evidence I want to stick with for a second. So this is... This is something you see certainly in any good scientist. I mean, they're not setting out to prove X. They are coming up with a hypothesis and then hopefully in as unbiased and objective a way possible, arguably not possibly fully, fully objective, trying to then assess and actively look for disconfirming evidence if it exists or if they can isolate it. How do you train?

• 54:46Tim Ferriss?

  How could one train themselves to get better at doing that? Are there? And it could be as seemingly indirect as you like. I'm just wondering. I mean, it would seem like one step would be developing what we talked about earlier, this ability to take whatever assumption or bias you have and then view it as an object so that you're aware of it. Meditation can help with that. Doing something like Byron Katie can help with that. Are there other things, whether they're precursors to looking for disconfirming evidence or that habit itself that can be, that help to cultivate?

• 55:28Speaker 03

  Well, I think an underlying paranoia that you're missing something is really useful and the best portfolio managers have that. They're just that sense that, and maybe you dial that up by remembering, by regularly reviewing all the mistakes you've made and thinking, okay, some percentage of the time I see things clearly and some percentage of the time I miss it. You know, one thing about financial markets in the publicly traded side is your hit rate is, you know, a really good portfolio manager's hit rate is like 65%. Like, that's off the charts. And 55% will do just fine in a lot of cases, depending particularly on their slugging percentage, what percentage of, how do they size the winners versus the losers?

• 56:13Speaker 03

  You want to size the winners, obviously, bigger than the losers. So there's something around, how do you maintain paranoia and humility?

• 56:25Speaker 03

  I think one tricky thing in the hedge fund space is being on the record in any way, in the form of writing letters, or being on CNBC, or being in the public domain, probably on the margin, makes it harder to drop it like a hot potato and go short. And to me, the most skilled portfolio managers have an identity not as "I am smart and therefore I make money," or "I am good at financial stocks," but the meta-identity is "I'm a moneymaker." And if that involves right now, if in this era, in this moment in history, that's going long Tesla, I'll go long Tesla. If I'll go short Tesla, I'll go short Tesla. But there's no baggage. I remember walking into a guy who we have a ton of money with,

• 57:10Speaker 03

  who I really, really respected. He was short SolarCity. And it was on the morning that Musk announced that Tesla was buying SolarCity. So it was a very painful morning for people who were short the stock. And I expected this guy to be moping around and super pissed at Musk. And he was laughing. He was enjoying the audacity. He feels like he's in this game. And oh my, I knew it was a possibility. I didn't think he was going to have the chutzpah to do that. Right? Like, that mentality, that humor, that lightness, that, "Oh, got this one wrong, on to the next one." If that particular portfolio manager ever wrote

• 57:53Speaker 03

  about something in a letter, he doesn't happen to. But if he did, I would have no qualms that the following month, he can easily be short the position he just... And so, one nice thing about financial markets is that long-short thing, the ability to make money by it going up and make money by it going down.

• 58:12Tim Ferriss?

  And change your position. This reminds me of something Josh decided some time ago, which was that he wouldn't, at least, maybe this has changed, but I doubt it has changed, given his current circumstances, which we won't get into, but very unlikely he's giving many keynotes right now. He stopped giving keynotes because he felt like it would entrench his thinking and calcify his positions, because he would be repeating these statements.

• 58:44Tim Ferriss?

  And concepts that you then be less likely to subconsciously or consciously to modify.

• 58:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:52Tim Ferriss?

  Right?

• 58:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:55Tim Ferriss?

  What, uh, this, this is something I, I ask everyone and you've heard this before, but are there any particular books that you have gifted the most to other people? They don't, they don't have to relate to what we've been discussing at all, but are, you are so widely read.

• 59:16Tim Ferriss?

  Do any stand out as books that you've gifted or recommended often to other people?

• 59:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, so in financial markets, I really liked this somewhat obscure book called The Aspirational Investor by this guy Ashvin Chawla, who runs Jim Simon's family office. Jim Simon started Renaissance Technologies, which is the dominant quant fund.

• 59:37Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing story. We're not going to get into it, but just, yeah, Renaissance is really fascinating. Please continue.

• 59:43Speaker 03

  And one thing I like about Renaissance and Jim Simon, he has this line on a New Yorker profile of him that he thinks what he has is really good taste in interesting problems. He uses the word taste and it's a similar, like, anyway, and this guy who runs his family office, uh, used to run the endowment at the Institute for Advanced Studies. And in the book, he identifies what he sees as the flaws in modern portfolio theory, which have totally dominated prevailing beliefs about investing for decades. And Ashvin suggests a totally different approach to portfolio construction based on how people actually behave and what they actually care about. And so that's, that's a book I give out a lot. There's, on the culture side, if somebody's starting a firm, I'm looking over your shoulder

• 1:00:26Speaker 03

  because I've got a bunch of them on the bookshelf here, Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan. Dave Logan goes through, uh, has looked at thousands of organizations and puts them into categories. And Phil Jackson, the former coach of the Chicago Bulls, has observed that that framework in, that Logan discusses in Tribal Leadership is the best framework for understanding world-class teams that he's come across. We can go into it if it's of interest. Culture Code by Daniel Coyle, I give people.

• 1:00:59Tim Ferriss?

  What do you find of value in that book? This book has come up a lot on the podcast. I still have not read it. It's come up in many different contexts. What is that book about?

• 1:01:09Speaker 03

  Which?

• 1:01:10Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry, the last one.

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  Culture Code. He's looking at a bunch of different cultures. Pixar, Navy SEALs. He's got three others or something. He's looking for patterns among what make people disproportionately effective as a culture. And I think he captures some of the nuance that if you're trying to set up teams, it exposes you to that. He'd be a good guest on the podcast.

• 1:01:44Tim Ferriss?

  Another book on my homework list. Check.

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  I also like The Tools. I give that out sometimes. That's by Phil Stutz and Barry Michaels. Have you ever heard of them?

• 1:01:52Tim Ferriss?

  I have. Are they screenwriters, work in entertainment?

• 1:01:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're psychologists and they're in Hollywood and they treat a lot of screenwriters.

• 1:02:02Tim Ferriss?

  I see.

• 1:02:03Speaker 03

  And this New Yorker reporter Dana Goodyear did a profile of them that highlighted them. And then they wrote a book called The Tools. And they have a bunch of good hacks in there.

• 1:02:15Tim Ferriss?

  Some of the most, I won't mention them by name, but a few of the documentary filmmakers who are on a very short list of documentary filmmakers who create massively commercially successful documentaries have recommended this book to me. That's how it first came up.

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  Just as an example, it's very apropos of Wim Hof. They have this whole analogy of saying that this model of to get to what you want, you have to go through some pain.

• 1:02:45Tim Ferriss?

  Just pause. Could you describe for people who Wim Hof, as if they haven't?

• 1:02:51Tim Ferriss?

  Oh boy. So yeah, Wim Hof, first, I think his first podcast interview was on this podcast. Interesting guy, but who's Wim Hof?

• 1:02:59Speaker 03

  Wim Hof has developed a way of exposing himself to the cold and a methodology around exposing himself to the cold that he now teaches to millions of people, thanks to you and Laird Hamilton and others highlighting him.

• 1:03:17Tim Ferriss?

  The Iceman, yes. A dubious honor in some cases because you do need to watch your fingers and toes, but he has a number of training approaches, although one sometimes wonders how much of what he can do is attribute versus training, but for cold exposure and also for breath-holding. I don't want to take us off the rails, but a quick note on breath-holding. Our mutual friend Josh almost died from a shallow water blackout in a pool here doing breath-hold training. Never do it in water. There's really no good reason.

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  So these guys have this metaphor of, they're basically coaching you on your self-talk and they say you should rub your hands together and say, "Bring it on," when you're anticipating doing something that is going to be painful. And they use the metaphor of going into the cold water at the beach and that regular embracing of discomfort is a skill that White Skin is also into and a theme of, like, learning to, he calls it, White Skin calls it the other side of pain, but it's embracing, getting used to exposing yourself to pain on a regular basis to the point where you don't bounce off of it.

• 1:04:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:38Speaker 03

  Stutz and Michaels observed that in their work with producers, agents, screenwriters, etc. in Hollywood, that people were avoiding doing the thing they needed to do. They were bouncing off of it. And so if you can create a skill and a mechanism to make yourself go into it and get in that habit, and they've got like six of them, and I think, and so I do this with my kids, like, we'll literally rub our hands together and be thinking, "Okay, bring it on to X."

• 1:05:06Tim Ferriss?

  So I wonder if Josh got this from you. I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if you guys independently arrived at this, but with his son...

• 1:05:14Tim Ferriss?

  He would take cold showers and he would always say, "It's so good." And he taught his son to say, "It's so good," with these short freezing cold showers. And I don't know, his son is probably, I'm making this up, four years old at the time. And also taught his son to enjoy going out in what other people would consider bad weather.

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:05:33Tim Ferriss?

  The rainstorms and so on.

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that's an example, right, of just making yourself, making the rain object. So I think what Josh is observing is that for most people, they are subject to the weather and they're experiencing the weather as acting on them.

• 1:05:49Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:05:49Speaker 03

  And a hack around that is to say, basically, "No, I enjoy the rain. I'm gonna find what I enjoy in it and make it not the world happening to me, but bring the locus of control internally." Yeah. That's what I think he's doing there.

• 1:06:03Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:04Speaker 03

  And it's a good parenting hack.

• 1:06:07Tim Ferriss?

  What, I mean, any other, well, if there are more books behind me, then feel free to mention them.

• 1:06:12Speaker 03

  I like Finite and Infinite Games, which has been going around a lot. His other book, Breakfast at the Victory.

• 1:06:20Tim Ferriss?

  This is James Karas?

• 1:06:21Speaker 03

  James Karas is really good. He, I had him to an event, a hedge fund retreat we had a couple of years ago and spent some time with him and he's, I think, he's a very profound guy. He was observing that, I asked him how he came up with the concept of finite versus infinite games, and he said he was watching his kids play and he noticed that there were some games, like card games or baseball, et cetera, where their whole motivation and intent was to have the game end and get the trophy. And then he noticed there were other games they were playing where they were more fantasy games, where their goal was to recruit other people to play in that game with them, such as him as their dad, and the goal was to keep the game going as long as possible.

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  And I think it's a super profound insight of the different ways you can relate to games in your life, if you can see the game you're playing. And that...

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I asked him for examples of infinite games, which he doesn't give in the book. He mentioned, as a Religious Studies scholar, he thinks Buddhism and Judaism are two infinite games. I guess in Religious Studies, neither of those has a central authority or a central army. So it's unlike Catholicism, they have difficulty making sense of why it persists over time. And so the framework of it's an infinite game, those people, Buddhists and Jews are recruiting, to various degrees, people into their game and wanting to just keep playing the game for its own sake. That was an interesting framing.

• 1:07:52Tim Ferriss?

  How does, how do, how does the distinction of finite and infinite games apply to finance? If it does?

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  No, I think it does. I mean, a finite player who's an investment manager would be, for instance, trying to hit a certain number of net worth and then leave the game, right? And that's okay, but it makes it less valuable of a partner from my perspective, and the incentives can get kind of weird once they achieve that net worth, if they actually stick to it. Now, the reality is, most people move the bar. There was a study recently that everybody wants to have, all along the income spectrum, everybody wants to have two times where they are right now. And, but, but I think there are, in general, I seek out partners who are playing, who I experience as infinite players, who are enjoying the game for its own sake and are

• 1:08:47Speaker 03

  going to keep playing and want to recruit other people in. And there's not, that's back to the distinction between being commercial and transactional. There's something about the abundance mentality behind somebody who's commercial, who's trying to create more value than they capture, that's like leaving room for other people in this way. So, yeah.

• 1:09:08Tim Ferriss?

  How do you, how do you, how do you test for that? Or how do you, if that is, it might be lower on the hierarchy of needs in assessing talent, but if it, if it is something that you try to assess, how do you assess it?

• 1:09:24Speaker 03

  The big, the big one is time horizon. If there, if there are somebody who's thinking, okay, I found this thing that I love to do, I'm going to do it for the next 20 years, and I'm not going to make short-term accommodations to what's going on in the market or with my limited partners or with my team. I experienced it around time horizon.

• 1:09:42Tim Ferriss?

  How do you, how do you ask around the question? Especially after this podcast comes out, you're gonna be like, okay, Graham wants long time horizon.

• 1:09:50Speaker 03

  You can see it just in the way they're setting up their business.

• 1:09:56Speaker 03

  No, there's, there are indications of just subtle mental framings on, am I, some people start investment firms because it's the time of their career where they've kind of,

• 1:10:14Speaker 03

  their friends have started investment firms, they can no longer stay at the container they're in and they need to start. But it's not an approach goal, it's almost an avoidant goal. It's like, okay, this is the time where I'm supposed to do this, so I'm gonna do this. Versus a different set that are like, okay, I found the thing I love, I found the ball I like to hit, and I'm gonna do it in this new form because,

• 1:10:38Speaker 03

  that implies to me a longer time horizon and I, it's a cliche, but a love of the game itself, like they're not, if you took away David Tepper's money and made him start at scratch right now, I think he'd enjoy it, like he's just found the thing he loves and,

• 1:10:58Speaker 03

  who else has long, Jocko Willink, I think, if Jocko, I would invest in something Jocko did. I think he has that exact, in fact, his mantra, right, is default aggressive. He has that mix of aggressive and integrity, or aggressive and humility. And you think, he's coming back from Iraq, he does SEAL Troop, and then he's entering your world, and he says, oh, this is this podcast thing, and then, you know, oh, coaching thing, and, from afar, and I don't know, I just really admire the way he's doing his own thing.

• 1:11:30Speaker 03

  He has, yeah, that, that mix of time horizon, having an idea, executing on it.

• 1:11:38Tim Ferriss?

  You guys should know each other. I'll introduce you guys, you would get along.

• 1:11:44Tim Ferriss?

  I want to stay with this for a little bit more in terms of sniffing around the direct question. And it seems like, perhaps much like your, tell me about, tell me about what happened in 2008. You can maybe, also along the lines of looking at how politicians have voted on things as opposed to asking them what they will do. It just made me think that looking at time horizon and intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations and so on, you could also assess, kind of along the same lines that Y Combinator has,

• 1:12:29Tim Ferriss?

  at least historically, by asking a lot of questions around what people do in their, what they've built in their spare time and things like that, which will not be a direct answer to the question, but could act as indicators that point to sort of a general pattern of behavior and motivations.

• 1:12:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I find Y Combinator's and Paul Graham's and Sam Altman's stuff high signal from my perspective. So like, they have this question they ask themselves, can you say this person is an animal and not smile? Like, you know, based on the references, based on your interactions with them. That's, I think they're keying in on the same quality of aggression or intensity that I am. Buffett uses passion and common sense. Riedelio uses assertiveness and open-mindedness. But I think everybody's honing in on this paradoxical tension that I was talking about earlier. So, sorry, what was, tell me the question again.

• 1:13:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, I'm not even sure I asked the question. I think it was more of an observation and wondering if there are other ways to ask around the direct question of time horizon, which, I mean, you already gave a few examples of, so I think it's been answered. So let's pick up on one thing you also mentioned in passing, which I'll refresh for people listening by reading a quote, and I'm going to get this name wrong. So maybe you could, this is a quote that you introduced me to. And it was one of two candidates for answering the question, what you would put

• 1:14:05Tim Ferriss?

  on a gigantic billboard anywhere, and you could put anything on it, sort of metaphorically speaking, right, a message to get out to millions or billions of people. So could you read this, because it is stuck in my mind, and I've revisited it so many times, but I don't know the proper pronunciation.

• 1:14:23Speaker 03

  Kwame Apia, who's a philosopher at NYU, actually, I think he used to be at Princeton, has this quote, "It's not how well you play the game, it's deciding what game you want to play."

• 1:14:33Tim Ferriss?

  Right, and so you had mentioned the game, if you're aware that you're playing the game. So what is the relevance or importance of this quote for you? And I'll read it one more time. So it's not how well you play the game, it's deciding what game you want to play.

• 1:14:47Speaker 03

  So I think that's a way of making your game, moving it from being subject to it, to object. So, an example would be, I think a huge number of people are obviously playing the game of making money, and they're keeping score in terms of how much money they make, or how much fame they accumulate, or how much power they accumulate. And making that game object to them, and then just making sure that you still want to play that game, is, I think, what his quote is about. I ended up writing an essay where I tried to capture the various stages of mastery in investment management, that's a blog that's on my site. And, to me, that quote allows you to kind of zoom out and say, okay, at different stages

• 1:15:32Speaker 03

  in my life, I'm going to play different games. What game am I playing right now? And can I see it? And in fact, that's what the coaches, and the coach I've used in the past, helps you do, is say, okay, you're clearly optimizing right now for this, just make sure you actually want, that's the game you want to play.

• 1:15:50Tim Ferriss?

  That the ladder you're climbing is leaning against the right wall. Let's just make sure.

• 1:15:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, check it out, let's see what happens. Yeah, so you can kind of, it allows you to kind of, it's like in a video game, it's the, what do you call that? God's eye view?

• 1:16:04Tim Ferriss?

  God's eye view, right.

• 1:16:05Speaker 03

  God's eye view of the game. You're like, okay, I'm down here in this corner of the mountain range, do I still want to climb this mountain, or is that a local maximum, and I should actually zoom out and head a completely different direction?

• 1:16:18Tim Ferriss?

  I think you've mentioned this to me before, it may even be in Tribe of Mentors, but it makes me think of the David Foster Wallace Commencement speech, which has been turned into books and is online in various forms. But yes, here it is, right here. That is the, this is water.

• 1:16:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:39Tim Ferriss?

  Right, and the story of, what is it? The two, the two young fish together swimming by the old fish, and the old fish doesn't pass. And like, "How's the water, boys?", or something like that. They're like, "What's water?"

• 1:16:49Speaker 03

  What's water? Yeah, exactly. I think that's what he's capturing so beautifully in that, in that commencement speech is that we all have water. There are things that are water to us at every stage of our life. And the fun project is to try to see it and see it at each stage. And when I think of even the development, your development over the course of the last several years on your podcast, like, you're able to see, you're wrestling with different stuff. You're able to see your own quirks in a different way than you were five years ago. And I think that's the process of adult development. That's what Keegan is pointing to as these different stages.

• 1:17:28Tim Ferriss?

  I do the podcast in part because it helps me to see the water. Right, it forces me to try to ask questions or make statements and articulate things that would otherwise just bounce around in my head, consciously or subconsciously. So the podcast is actually a tool for me to try to discern which water I happen to be swimming in, which is, which makes it a lot of fun.

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  The Greg McKeown, is that how you say his name?

• 1:17:53Tim Ferriss?

  I said it that way for a long time, McKeown.

• 1:17:56Speaker 03

  Greg McKeown's podcast with you recently on essentialism. When he tells that story of how he felt a ton of pressure to go on the work event, on the project with his consulting partners, rather than be at the hospital with his wife.

• 1:18:10Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:18:10Speaker 03

  As she was having a baby. That's a developmental, in Keegan language, that's a developmental moment where he's saying, basically, he's moving from socialized to self-authoring. He's saying, basically, "No, my partners don't define the scorecard here. The scorecard is my scorecard. I decide what's a priority to me. And I'm never gonna, I'm gonna remind myself of this the rest of my life by embarrassing myself, by telling this story over and over again, so that I don't do it again." I feel like essentialism is basically, that's what he's capturing. And I think in a lot of different moments on your podcast, that's, people are... Wrestling with, okay, what's, what can they see at that moment? What did they used to not be able to see? And that's the, it's kind of beautiful.

• 1:18:55Speaker 03

  It's the unfolding that we're all doing.

• 1:18:58Tim Ferriss?

  And you've had, you've had an opportunity to observe, I don't know, dozens, hundreds, thousands of careers, or at least look, examine probably, thousands of different careers. How do you think about careers or career advice? I know that we've had some exchanges using the metaphor of the river, which might be a good place to start. And then I have some other, some other questions related to that. But maybe we could begin with that.

• 1:19:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I like, I like the image of, of a river with two banks. One side is chaos and the other side is order. It's something Dan Siegel, who's a neuroscientist, came up with to try to describe what mental health is. Cause he argued the, the bank of chaos is schizophrenia and the bank of rigidity is OCD. And that you could basically put every mental illness on one bank or another. And that healthy integration is swimming in the middle of the river, in between those two. And I was thinking about how careers are like that, that you start off along the rigidity bank, apprenticing for somebody. And you're learning the jargon of that industry and you're trying to figure out how people

• 1:20:12Speaker 03

  define reality. But you're in somebody else's definition of reality. You're, you're refining reality and you're learning to be able to see. Whereas the other bank, the chaos bank is more asserting reality. That's where people who are swimming right next to that bank are just making stuff up on this massive, like I think of Musk as being right along that bank. And if some, if Tesla goes bankrupt, that will mean he lost his feedback with reality and, and kind of stepped onto the chaos bank. And if he pulls it off, he was swimming right next to it. Just Steve Jobs the same way.

• 1:20:46Tim Ferriss?

  Threading the needle.

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  Threading, right? So there's, and it's, you know, you see it in poets, you see it in writers. People who are right next to that bank are making, are, are super original. They're coming up with new stuff. We live in their paradigms to some degree. But you're right on the, if you, if you lose the feedback loop with the way the rest of the world is experiencing reality, all of a sudden you can seem crazy. And, and, and the danger of swimming, from a career perspective, of starting your own thing is you, starting your own thing, a lot of the times is a, a, a project of asserting reality. And if you do it too early, it can be very disorienting. And so you want to just swim back and forth.

• 1:21:29Speaker 03

  I, it's not to discourage people from starting their own things at a very young age, but just be aware that you're gonna, that's the project and you might want to come back and refine reality for a little bit and then go, and just see it as fluid.

• 1:21:41Tim Ferriss?

  Right. It makes you think of, and I'm not saying this is kind of a direct mapping, but as Pablo Picasso said, learn the rules like as an amateur so you can break the rules as a professional, something along those lines.

• 1:21:53Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:21:54Tim Ferriss?

  The, and you, you mentioned, you know, this bank of, of chaos and how those who sort of can swim right alongside it can harness this paradigm shifting originality. But as you've also pointed out, that same originality can have unintended consequences if they flop onto the bank like Steve Jobs and the magical thinking around.

• 1:22:25Speaker 03

  Around his illness.

• 1:22:26Tim Ferriss?

  His illness.

• 1:22:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:28Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Do the, if one wants to be top 1% in a given field, just arbitrarily to pull a number out of my ass, does that mean that they need to swim really closely alongside one bank or the other? Or is that a, a mistake in thinking? Is, or be perceived as being, yeah, top, a top performer? Do they, do they swim in the middle or do they oscillate between the two? Are they, are they different breeds, just in your experience?

• 1:22:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't, um, I think to be a top 1% depends maybe on the field.

• 1:23:02Tim Ferriss?

  Let's say your world.

• 1:23:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think within financial markets, um...

• 1:23:10Speaker 03

  You need a continual level of innovation to and adaptability to stay ahead because the games that were working five years ago no longer work. So for a while, there were a lot of event-driven strategies where people were investing in mergers and acquisitions and making a certain return percentage around that. That game has mainly gone away. And so I would say, I think of infinite players as playing with the boundaries of the game. So when Mike Burry came up with the idea of shorting subprime.

• 1:23:45Tim Ferriss?

  And then Mike Burry famously played by Christian Bale in The Big Short.

• 1:23:50Speaker 03

  Right, like that was an example of innovation and playing with the boundary of the game at that time because he wanted to express a view that was short the housing market and he found he had no, he didn't want to short stocks, he wanted to get more leverage on it. And he came up with that and then the banks offered that to everybody else and everybody else ended up, everybody else who came into the trade ended up following the trail that he had blazed on that from my perspective. There may be other perspectives on that, but that's my perspective. So, you know, is that, is that a long, I mean, as Christian Bale portrayed him, he was wrestling with his sanity at various points, having that trade on, at various points the

• 1:24:31Speaker 03

  fund was down a lot, his partners were abandoning him. So I do think there, there's something around pushing the edge of your field because people are going to catch up with you that is required. I don't know that, you know, I'm trying to think of other examples outside of financial markets of being top 1% or something, but I would say that, yeah.

• 1:24:56Tim Ferriss?

  It's less, it's less objective, but if, if we're looking at, say, successful authors, I think another example that. That I've seen you mention is Prusik.

• 1:25:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:09Tim Ferriss?

  And who wrote The Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but certainly towards the end got, one might argue, pretty loopy.

• 1:25:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's hard to think of top 1% in a Zen context, but I think original, I mean, you look at Rachel Cusk and Carl of Agnusgard, I don't know how to say his name, but those two authors, like, I think they're doing original things as novelists and are, they're not, I don't think they're at risk of flopping onto the bank of chaos, but they're doing original things. Yeah, I don't know how to think of it.

• 1:25:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, one, this is more just because I think you'd enjoy it and I can link to it for people who are interested. There's a model of cognitive function, or maybe, yeah, I suppose you could put it cognitive function and personality typing that has been, I guess it's a theory and a model from Robin Carhart-Harris, who's a scientist in the UK, called the entropic, the entropic brain, which I think you'd enjoy. So, for another time. What about, I'm just looking at my notes here. And I just have, I have a short, I have two words

• 1:26:34Tim Ferriss?

  based on conversations we've had leading up to this, but I don't have any context here, so "time billionaires." What does that refer to?

• 1:26:43Speaker 03

  I was, I was listening to a guy introduce a speaker a while ago and he was saying, you know, people don't really understand the difference between billionaires and millionaires. He said, you know, a million seconds is like 11 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. And I remember that kind of stuff.

• 1:27:03Tim Ferriss?

  Holy shit, that's a hell of a way to think about it. Make you say that one more time.

• 1:27:08Speaker 03

  A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is slightly over 31 days. And I was thinking about, Tyler Cohen has a thing about cultural billionaires.

• 1:27:20Tim Ferriss?

  Marginal revolution.

• 1:27:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:22Speaker 03

  In one of his books, he talks about cultural billionaires. And I like, I feel like in our culture, we're so obsessed as a culture with money. And we reify dollar billionaires in a way that it'd be nice to re-co-opt that term the way Tyler Cohen did with cultural billionaires. And I was thinking of time billionaires, that when I see sometimes 20-year-olds, you know, the thought I had was they have, they probably have 2 billion seconds left, but they aren't relating to themselves as time billionaires. And I was thinking about how if you could, what would Rupert Murdoch is worth $20 billion,

• 1:28:06Speaker 03

  he's 87 years old, what would he pay for, if he could take the next five years of someone's 20-year-old, healthy body, mind, et cetera?

• 1:28:18Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:28:19Speaker 03

  And for that 20-year-old, how would they price it?

• 1:28:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:22Speaker 03

  Right? Because I was thinking, at various points of my career, I would, I might have sold the next five years for something. And over time, it's kind of, my pricing has gone vertical, because the next five years, if I were to lose, and the key to this question is that you can't sell the five at the end of your life, you gotta sell them right now.

• 1:28:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:42Speaker 03

  Like, I don't know how I'd price it, because my kids are of a certain age that they'll never be again, that it feels, so, but I don't know that I live every day that way, and so I, but I aspire to. So, so I was trying to capture, you know, I heard Tim Urban on your podcast, and I started reading his stuff, and I just, I find his writing style and the topics he is interested in just amazing. He has this concept of life calendar.

• 1:29:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:09Speaker 03

  And I, I bought his life calendar, he sells it as a poster. And what he does is he puts a week for, he does a circle for each week. So he has 52 circles on the horizontal, and then 90 rows, so that you can see a 90-year life in weeks. And what's startling about the picture... Again, to this question of how long is a billion seconds? Is how short it actually is? And so what I did is I went through and I put where I am right now and I started filling in the circles as I go. And I put where my eldest daughter goes to college. I put when my dad is going to be 90. And I was actually thinking a good product, if there are any graphic designers out there,

• 1:29:54Speaker 03

  would be to partner with him and allow you to create a huge poster and select a photo for each week. And then, because it's such a graphical representation of your life in a way that's hard to convey in words sometimes. But so I've just been thinking a lot about time and how you, yeah, how you live. There's a quote I like that, you know, we're all very focused on the length of our life. How do you appreciate the width of it as you're going along? And somehow keeping that in your consciousness.

• 1:30:28Tim Ferriss?

  Would you, can you elaborate on that? The width?

• 1:30:31Speaker 03

  The width being this present moment we're sitting here having, you know, if

• 1:30:35Tim Ferriss?

  Sort of like the depth of attention?

• 1:30:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. The breadth of sensory inputs, the being, I mean, it's another way of saying trying to stay more present versus being extremely goal directed of whatever, whatever object, objective you have in your life right now.

• 1:30:55Tim Ferriss?

  And how do you, how do you cultivate that in yourself?

• 1:31:02Speaker 03

  So one thing is I have that life calendar literally sitting in my kitchen.

• 1:31:06Tim Ferriss?

  Pause, pause quickly, I'll buy you some time also. So Tim Urban has a blog, Wait But Why? I mean, calling it a blog is kind of funny because some of his pieces are 70,000 words, broken up into multiple parts. Also, just since you mentioned Musk, I mean, he was the, I believe, the only person asked by Musk directly who was a fan of the blog to come in and have full access to Tesla. If you, if the life calendar is a fantastic place to start, as is a piece called The Tail End, if you want a really acute sense of time, especially as it relates to how much time you might have left with parents, that is a fantastic piece. So You have the calendar.

• 1:31:44Speaker 03

  So that just to interrupt, so that piece, reading that piece made me try to engineer having my parents in New York much more frequently and I tangibly did that.

• 1:31:57Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no kidding?

• 1:31:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. So literally reading that piece had that big an impact where I was like, oh my god, because he points out the percentages.

• 1:32:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:03Speaker 03

  How if, if you, if your parents don't live in the same place you do, you will see them, by the time you graduated from high school, you've spent like 95% of the time you'll ever spend with them.

• 1:32:13Tim Ferriss?

  Total hours you'll ever spend with your parents.

• 1:32:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:15Tim Ferriss?

  And that's, I didn't know, I didn't know that about, about, about you and your family. After reading that piece, which was recommended to me by Matt Mullenweg, whose father passed away very unexpectedly, he recommended that piece to me. And that led me to really block out and make a priority, a, a trip or a gathering with my family every six months. That piece.

• 1:32:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the tail end.

• 1:32:41Speaker 03

  It's really profound stuff. So, but your question is, what do I do? So, I mean, all the standard stuff, I meditate, I use 10% happier app, or Sam Harris's app.

• 1:32:53Tim Ferriss?

  The Harris, the Harris brothers, even though they're not brothers, Dan Harris and Sam Harris.

• 1:32:58Speaker 03

  Dan Harris calls that whole crew the Jew boos, the Jewish Buddhists, which I think is great.

• 1:33:05Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know, just as a quick side note, I remember I was talking to Jack Kornfield, who's incredible teacher, I mean, probably the most empathic human I've ever met, I mean, truly walks the walk. And I asked him at one point, I said, you've got Goldstein, Kornfield, like, of the names, like Sharon Salzberg, I'm like, why are, why are, it seems like the entire crew who brought Buddhist mindfulness practices to the US in sort of the, let's say, I'm getting the timeframe slightly off probably, but kind of.

• 1:33:41Speaker 03

  Eighties.

• 1:33:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, like 70s, 80s, they're all Jewish. And he goes, that is a good question, this is just us having a private conversation, but he said, yeah, it sounds like a law firm.

• 1:33:53Tim Ferriss?

  And we went on to, we won't get to, but the Jeebus, yes. So Dan Harris, Sam Harris, both of those apps.

• 1:34:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I use both those apps. I try to be nostalgic for spending time with my kids in the present moment. So like my youngest right now, I think I can probably carry her on my shoulders probably a total of five more times. She's getting too heavy. And I know because I have an older kid that that's a distinct phase.

• 1:34:18Speaker 03

  But I don't, I don't, beyond those, keeping track, yeah, of how much time.

• 1:34:27Tim Ferriss?

  Those are all, I mean, those are good anchor points.

• 1:34:29Speaker 03

  The Gretchen Rubin line about how the days are long, but the years are short. Like, I think about that a lot.

• 1:34:36Tim Ferriss?

  There's one that, that, boy, I wish I could get the attribution right. It was actually, it was in Trava Mentors. It was a, it was in answer to one of my questions, it was in one of the other profiles. But for a technologist, I know that much. And it was, it was in answer to the question, what do you do when you feel overwhelmed or unfocused? And this was a question that he asked himself, which was, in effect, how much would I pay at sort of age 80, 90, looking back on my life, how much would I pay to relive this moment right now? And I ask that a lot, whether it's just like sitting on the grass, watching my dog play with a stick,

• 1:35:20Tim Ferriss?

  or any number of times, that's a question that I ask myself a lot. You know, 40 years from now, how much would I pay? And I think about, I mean, it's, it's.

• 1:35:30Speaker 03

  Sam Harris on his app has a great three-minute gratitude talk. And he says, imagine you died yesterday evening, how much, how much you would, what you would give to be back in this moment of having a shitty dinner with your kids and wife.

• 1:35:48Speaker 03

  Where you're all like in a bad mood and you're all in this very contracted state. And I think that's such a, again, it borders on the cliche, but it, there's something in just daily reminders of that. I think a lot about the Byron Katie thing of the past and the future are simulations in your head and the only thing that's actually real is this current now moment that we're in.

• 1:36:12Tim Ferriss?

  So we talked about a little bit earlier, well, we'll do a couple more questions and then we can, we can wrap for this round one on this podcast. We talked about your one option for the billboard, which was the Kwame quote. Are there any other quotes, statements, questions, words, anything that you might put on a billboard besides that?

• 1:36:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, another candidate would be this quote, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. Welcome to the party." And that's a mashup of Pierre Chardin, the, he's a French Jesuit priest and philosopher. And then there's a meditation on the 10% happier app called Welcome to the Party by Jeff Warren, where you're saying to every negative feeling, every, anything that comes up, "Welcome to the party." And he says, "Imagine you're an affable host."

• 1:37:22Tim Ferriss?

  I don't like that.

• 1:37:23Speaker 03

  And there's this great moment earlier this week where my son, seven-year-old, is still afraid of the dark in his room. And he was running back to get his clothes and he yelled out, "Welcome to the party, fear of the dark," which is so, made me so proud because he's able to, right, that fear is object to him. Like he can feel his feelings, right? He can feel his, but anyway, I like that quote because every time I read it, it shifts the, oh, this is our, this is what it's like right now. This is a human experience. And somehow this is our moment to have, yeah.

• 1:37:56Tim Ferriss?

  I really like that. No, I haven't. I really like it. I've been reading a lot of writing.

• 1:38:04Tim Ferriss?

  From Jesuits recently, for some reason, I don't, and I'm not sure if it's a Jesuit thing, or if it's just coincidence that I happen to be picking these up. I really don't know the first thing about the Jesuit order. But the line, "Welcome to the party," is so helpful because I've certainly read a thousand times in different forms, making your emotions an object, or not identifying, for instance, with "I am angry," but phrasing it in some fairly unnatural way, like, "I am currently experiencing anger," okay, fine, but this is much more memorable.

• 1:38:49Tim Ferriss?

  And it's being the affable host to your whole range of emotions, including like, when like the grumpy, cantankerous uncle shows up, and you're like, "Hey bud, welcome to the party, all right, look, you've had a hard day, have some, you know, go over, have some lunch, welcome to the party." I love it, I love it. Any others?

• 1:39:10Speaker 03

  I also love this quote from Mark Twain, right before he died, he was looking back at his life, and he said something like, "There isn't time so brief as life for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There's only time for loving and but an instant, so to speak, for that." And I like that because I think the perspective of somebody who's really old and dying is, I find somehow, extra high signal, because they're trying to draw your attention to something while you're still at an earlier place of your life. And somehow, I find myself thinking about that a lot, that all this stuff that feels

• 1:39:50Speaker 03

  so high drama, once you're, you know, when you're 90, looking at it, you're gonna be, you're just gonna say, "It was all noise," and there's, you know.

• 1:40:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, "or," right, "it's all noise," and/or, like, the day after you die, if you're looking down, and you're like, "God, what I would give to have that shitty meal that I thought was the last place I would want to be, what I would give to have that again." Graham, I always love spending time together and thank you for making the time.

• 1:40:22Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me. It was fun.

• 1:40:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, this is a lot of fun. I have a ton of notes I've taken for myself already and books I want to pick up. Welcome to the Party that I want to listen to. People can find you in a number of different places. I'll just repeat them. You can grahamduncan.blog where they can find that essay that you mentioned earlier. And eastrockcap.com, @GrahamDuncanNYC on Twitter if they want to wave, say hello on the internet. Is there anything else you'd like to mention, things you'd like people to check out? Requests you would have the audience, suggestions, anything at all that you'd like to say before we wrap up?

• 1:41:05Speaker 03

  Well, I'll just note, I helped produce this conference called the Sohn Conference. We do it in partnership with CNBC and we raise money for pediatric cancer. And we do that by bringing 15 hedge fund managers and venture capitalists together at Lincoln Center. They each bring an actual investment idea and we're doing it this year, May 6th, in Lincoln Center. So anybody listening, if you can afford it to donate, come. If you can't afford to donate, DM me on Twitter and I'll come up with some of our free tickets. But it's a great gift exchange we have where basically the hedge fund managers bring their ideas, people pay money to come hear them, and then we give that money to the leading pediatric cancer researchers. So that would be one.

• 1:41:50Tim Ferriss?

  That's the Sohn Conference Foundation, S-O-H-N, which I've attended before and found endlessly fascinating. Endlessly fascinating.

• 1:42:01Speaker 03

  It's a fun day.

• 1:42:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's a really mind-stretching experience. Anything else that you'd like to say?

• 1:42:12Speaker 03

  No, I think that's it. I mean, no.

• 1:42:16Tim Ferriss?

  All right, full stop. Graham, until next time. And we have a lot to otherwise catch up on, but thank you again for being so generous with your time and your caffeinated beverages. And to everybody listening, I will have links to everything in the show notes. The books, the essays, the various figures, people, thinkers we mentioned, which you can find, as always, at tim.blog/podcast and just search Graham or Duncan and everything will pop right up. And until next time, pay attention to the present.

• 1:43:00Tim Ferriss?

  That's all you got. All right, thanks, guys. Bye. Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered, it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do.

• 1:43:40Tim Ferriss?

  It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out, just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is the global creative platform that makes it easy for creators and clients to work together. From logos to apps, packaging to book covers, just about anything can be found on 99designs,

• 1:44:22Tim Ferriss?

  which is a go-to creative resource for any budget that I've used for many, many years now. 99designs now offers, guess what, custom video, which is very exciting. They will match you with the right video professional to help you explain your product, spotlight a service, and bring your brand to life. And like I mentioned, I've used 99designs for all sorts of things. I've used them for book covers, some of the mockups for The Four Hour Body, for example, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller, illustrations, beautiful illustrations, cover and inside illustrations for the multi-volume The Tao of Seneca, which you can find online for free. That is a collection of my favorite letters that I've read hundreds of times by Seneca, and other graphic design projects.

• 1:45:05Tim Ferriss?

  Most recently, I used 99designs to update the illustrations and layout of my Five Morning Rituals ebook, which is something that I offer as an incentive on my website for people to sign up for my free newsletter. The illustrations turned out fantastic, and I loved working with the designer who we selected for the project. You can check out a bunch of these projects. You can see real-life examples of what I've done and the stories behind them at 99designs.com/tim, the number 99designs.com/tim. 99designs will match you with the right professional for your project from their curated community of talented creatives and stay with you every step of the way, so you love the outcome. So check it out.

• 1:45:47Tim Ferriss?

  Head to 99designs.com/tim to learn more and get started on your project today. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, the go-to tool for B2B marketers and advertisers who want to drive brand awareness, generate leads, or build long-term relationships that result in real business impact. Could be all of the above. I've had Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, on this podcast a number of times, often called the Oracle of Silicon Valley for many different reasons. And he, among other people and friends of mine, have made me more and more interested in LinkedIn as a platform, as an ecosystem, in the last few years. And it's very nuanced, it's very subtle, but can be used in some very powerful ways.

• 1:46:29Tim Ferriss?

  With a community of more than 575 million professionals, LinkedIn is gigantic, but it can be hyper-specific. You have access to a very diverse group of people, all searching for things they need to grow professionally. That is explicitly the purpose of LinkedIn. And four out of five users on LinkedIn are decision-makers at their companies. So you can build relationships that really matter, that can drive your business objectives forward, that can also have a high LTV, lifetime value. LinkedIn has the marketing tools to help you target your customers with precision, right down to, among other things, their job title, company name, industry, etc. This is important because better targeting equals a message that your customers actually

• 1:47:14Tim Ferriss?

  care about. And it also means your advertising is more effective and cost-effective. So why spray and pray with your marketing dollars when you can be surgical? It just makes sense. To redeem a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com/TFS. That stands for Tim Ferriss Show. So that is LinkedIn.com/TFS. Check it out. That's where you can go to get your free $100 ad credit. LinkedIn.com/TFS. Terms and conditions apply.