#872: Graham Duncan — Talent Is the Best Asset Class (Repost)

Graham Duncan https://grahamduncan.blog/ (@GrahamDuncanNYC https://x.com/GrahamDuncanNYC) is the co-founder of East Rock Capital https://eastrockcap.com/, a multibillion-dollar multi-family investment office he launched in 2006. He is also Chairman of the Sohn Conference Foundation https://www.sohnconference.org/, which funds pediatric cancer research. This episode was originally published in February 2019. Show notes: https://tim.blog/2019/02/28/graham-duncan/ This episode is brought to you by: Shopify https://shopify.com/tim global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business: Shopify.com/tim https://shopify.com/timEight Sleep Pod Cover 5 https://www.eightsleep.com/tim/ sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: EightSleep.com/Tim https://www.eightsleep.com/tim/AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement: DrinkAG1.com/Tim https://drinkag1.com/tim5-Bullet Friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/?utm_source=timblog&utm_medium=timblog&utm_campaign=podcast-sponsorship, my very own free email newsletter: https://tim.blog/fridayTimestamps: [00:00:00] Start.[00:02:29] I think of Graham as far more than an investor. How does he describe what he does?[00:06:13] Absent the systems and frameworks he's honed over time, what made Graham a good talent hunter at the tender age of 24?[00:08:42] What constitutes taste when Graham is scouting for talent these days?[00:11:14] Upon meeting someone, how does Graham stress-test whether or not someone is "commercial" in the way they balance aggression and integrity?[00:16:49] One high-signal question Graham has found particularly useful when trying to determine the quality of anyone from a trader to an OB/GYN.[00:19:17] When interviewing a potential candidate, how does Graham vet their given references?[00:22:21] On approaching the reference process with curiosity rather than an attempt to catch anyone with a "gotcha."[00:25:34] Why does mutual friend Josh Waitzkin call Graham The Wild Gardener?[00:27:04] How does Graham deal with contradictory perspectives — when the data is telling him one thing and his gut is telling him another?[00:29:09] What does Graham do to familiarize himself with the way people underwrite their mental models (besides nearly beheading them)?[00:30:29] Graham talks about his role as an investment coach, of sorts, and how he picks the best "players" for the game at hand.[00:31:53] What other patterns has Graham noticed in the successful talent he's ended up selecting?[00:36:06] In what way have others helped Graham surface his hidden assumptions, and how might a coach do the same for others?[00:39:17] An example of when Graham's "grip" has been a bit too tight around his own beliefs.[00:40:09] What Byron Katie has taught us about articulating the opposite of such beliefs — and having a mindful lunch.[00:46:18] When evaluating a team, how does Graham think about each person developing the ability to look at the opposite versus hiring to end up at that optimal mixture?[00:49:12] How might someone train to more clearly see disconfirming evidence — and roll with the punches when their instincts lead them toward regrettable decisions?[00:42:21] What books does Graham gift to others most often?[00:56:11] An aside about Wim Hof and Josh Waitzkin embracing "the other side of pain" to get the most out of life.[00:59:31] How does James Carse's distinction of finite and infinite games apply to finance, and how would Graham test a potential teammate for compatible sensibility?[01:02:41] How likely would it be for Graham to invest in a Jocko Willink project?[01:04:16] Different people have different ways of sniffing around direct questions. Here are a few examples.[01:05:54] Graham explains what this Kwame Appiah quote means to him: "In life the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you're playing."[01:08:13] Going by David Foster Wallace's famous commencement speech, what's your water? Podcasting helps me see mine.[01:09:32] Graham's take on Greg McKeown's Essentialism.[01:10:31] How Graham sees careers as a river (with a nod of thanks to neuroscientists Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson's model of well-being).[01:12:53] Toward which bank do the top one percent in any given field swim? What if that field is financial markets? What if that field is writing fiction novels?[01:16:39] The differences between millionaires, billionaires, cultural billionaires, and time billionaires.[01:18:47] An idea for how Tim Urban might allow for personalization of his 90-year-life calendar.[01:20:00] Are you more concerned about the length of your life or its width?[01:20:38] Life changes Graham and I have both made as a direct result of reading Tim Urban's "The Tail End" piece at Wait But Why.[01:22:05] How does Graham try to appreciate the width of his life?[01:25:05] Aside from the aforementioned Kwame Appiah quote, what might Graham put on his billboard?[01:25:52] The power to be found in treating negative feelings like welcome party guests.[01:27:43] Parting thoughts from Mark Twain and Graham.* For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/timferriss See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

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

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  No, I would assume inappropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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

• 0:24Tim 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. 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

• 1:06Tim Ferriss?

  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. 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

• 1:51Tim Ferriss?

  here with you. Thanks, Ben. Thanks for taking the time. We've had many conversations. We haven't caught up in a while. We've also had terrible food poisoning together, along with Josh.

• 2:03Tim Ferriss?

  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. You certainly do that very well, but I enjoy watching your thinking and listening to your thinking. So I think that for people who are in the audience and who might be

• 2:47Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 3:11Speaker 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 had hired a sales guy who, we're two years in, and we were in a group meeting, and he says to me at a certain point, Graham, what the fuck do you do here?

• 3:39Speaker 03

  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 like, what the fuck do I do?

• 3:53Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  I put you into this positive feedback loop that we're calling a business here. And that's what I do. And I feel like 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 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 it's a good skill to have because it's right next to a weakness of mine, which is I'm kind of lazy.

• 5:08Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe that's why we get along so well.

• 5:10Speaker 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, do this, don't do that. I don't want to put something into somebody. I want to have them do the thing that they want to do anyway. 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. In order to do that, my team and I meet over a thousand teams a year to try to hire the best investment craftsmen of any given sub-strategy. And sometimes those craftsmen, those investment managers, who were trapped inside large organizations,

• 5:53Speaker 03

  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.

• 6:12Tim Ferriss?

  And at that time, how old were you roughly?

• 6:15Speaker 03

  24, call it.

• 6:16Tim Ferriss?

  24. 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 list of Josh quotes. But I was texting with him and he reiterated, I think, what you just said. And Josh, my apologies, I know he didn't talk about me reading your text upfront, but this is pretty safe. So a core genius for Graham is talent hunting, finding funky A+. So that funky word, at some point, we're going to talk about A+ potential mental performers in the finance space. And then he goes on. You have systems and frameworks that you use for this.

• 6:59Tim Ferriss?

  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, are there things that you see that other people tend not to see? Or are there any types of questions that you ask yourself that even at that point, perhaps you had picked up along the way? Is there anything that comes to mind?

• 7:25Speaker 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, 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, right?

• 7:50Tim Ferriss?

  Tall, dark, and handsome.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I'm trying to think back then. I think the imposter thing kind of helped because 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? In that context, we'd hired a bunch of sales guys. 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. 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 this guy, Robert, is trying to get me on the phone. And I wake up in cold sweats in the middle of the night. We built our entire business on this guy.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  So I think it's seeing, I find myself curious about what makes people tick in this way that I don't get. Tired of it.

• 8:42Tim 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.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:02Tim 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 the world in which you now operate?

• 9:15Speaker 03

  I like a 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. And 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.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  And I think David Tepper in many ways is 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 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 hesitation. And yet, if you were on the other side of a transaction with him, he's not going to do something 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.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  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 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. So you hit these pockets of people with that.

• 11:13Tim 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. And 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.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 11:41Tim Ferriss?

  I'm a very, very, very skilled and intelligent deceptive artist or whatever. So how do you try to evaluate that?

• 11:50Speaker 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 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, end up relating to them in the way because of the body of work they've had in the past.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  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. 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? So 2008 was an amazing for anybody that's still investing, who was around in 2008.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  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 oh eight? 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. So it's super reference focused.

• 14:01Tim Ferriss?

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• 14:43Tim Ferriss?

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• 15:27Tim Ferriss?

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• 16:10Tim Ferriss?

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• 16:34Speaker 03

  And then I have a series of questions I ask people that I feel like has high signal value. But again, I try to have a lot of humility and a light grip on my ability in a one-hour meeting to figure that out.

• 16:49Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the high-signal questions that you've filtered through over time and have found to be particularly useful? Do any come to mind or types of questions?

• 16:59Speaker 03

  The one that I think applies, whether you're looking for an OB-GYN 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 that?

• 17:17Tim Ferriss?

  That's a great question.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  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..."

• 17:34Speaker 03

  What you're maximizing for is the downside. And if the baby is in distress, you need a good NICU. So my primary criteria.

• 17:41Tim Ferriss?

  NICU is needle.

• 17:43Speaker 03

  Intensive care unit. 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 are the traders. The traders are on the receiving end of a portfolio manager's decisions.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  And they often have a very strong sense of who the good investors are. Like David Tepper's trader, I bet. 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 portfolio, they only buy one thing a year.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  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.

• 19:15Tim Ferriss?

  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 as an 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. So most folks out there, if they think of references, whether they have provided references.

• 19:58Tim Ferriss?

  Or bin of 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. 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. What does your process look like for determining who to talk to as references?

• 20:24Speaker 03

  So, 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.

• 20:52Tim Ferriss?

  They run out of their script.

• 20:53Speaker 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 I went into that call thinking, okay, I like this guy. We don't have money with him. I respect him. He stuck me on his reference list. Okay. And the guy sat on me for an hour and would not allow me to basically give a positive endorsement without specifics. So I think of it as a net promoter score. 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. On a 1 to 10, what's your level of endorsement of this person? If I was calling you on a reference,

• 21:37Speaker 03

  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 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 the phone. I would be trying to understand, okay, are you still in touch with that assistant? What's the social dynamic? I'd make it, say for you, 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. But if at the end I've got, in effect, an aggregate number of net promoter scores on a given person, you start to see patterns after reference number four. And then you know you can stop because you're hearing the same thing over and over again.

• 22:20Tim Ferriss?

  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, I'm thinking about who it was, I'm blanking on who exactly it was. Kyle Maynard is who it was. Quadruple congenital amputees. Clyde Kilimanjaro and was a star wrestler. Fascinating guy. He learned it, I think, from, it was from a very successful CEO. And it was the rank X, could be anything from one to 10, but you can't use a seven.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:50Tim Ferriss?

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

• 22:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:59Tim Ferriss?

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

• 23:08Speaker 03

  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.

• 23:22Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  Right? Because that's, 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

• 23:41Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  thing, which I don't agree with. Like, all I'm trying to do is help the person get in the best possible context for them. I feel like that stance elicits a lot more because then you're on the same side. Particularly if you're talking to a former boss.

• 23:57Tim Ferriss?

  So that's, I guess that's how I think about it. Yeah. Yeah, it's sort of the... The mindset with which you go into it and the tone that you transmit.

• 24:07Speaker 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? And you had to be careful, in an investment context, you want it to be another investing partner. And then I actually use that. And then I can help, to the extent it's applicable, help that person try to make sure. 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's side of it. The only product is the mindset of the individual and the decisions they're going to make prospectively from here. So if you were invested in a fund at Fidelity and the portfolio manager leaves and there's a new portfolio manager,

• 24:52Speaker 03

  from my perspective, that's a completely new decision. Whereas some people have a mentality of, oh, I'm looking to put out, it starts with, I think, a dangerous mindset, which is 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'd need to put out assets. Like, you always want to feel comfortable holding cash. And there should be no pressure, put money to work. And then secondarily, in my role, we're pretty indifferent on do we have people in-house or out in the field. Most of the time, the most commercial people want to run their own firms. And so we have a bias. We, over time, have constructed what I think of as a team of teams. But, you know, it's not a product of products.

• 25:34Tim Ferriss?

  That makes a lot of sense to me. And 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. He said, "Ask Graham about wild gardening." Now, I'm going to laugh if this is actual, literally, wild gardening and it's just a complete non sequitur, but he put it in quotation marks.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  So he calls me the wild gardener because I don't like to force it. There's a great piece in The Atlantic Monthly from years ago where someone looking at

• 26:11Speaker 03

  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 orchids can be so beautiful, but they need just the right context. They need the right light, temperature. And dandelions are just lower maintenance, but maybe you don't have to worry about the context as much. And so I think of partly what I do is back to 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.

• 26:56Speaker 03

  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.

• 27:04Tim Ferriss?

  We're covering a lot that relates to talent selection and asking the right questions. We're definitely going to 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. 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.

• 27:42Tim Ferriss?

  But no doubt you've had instances where you get negative feedback, or perhaps you have a lot of positive, but then one on a scale of one to 10 in severity is like a nine or 10 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. Or if there are any cases, any examples, not naming names, but.

• 28:14Speaker 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, my wife, my business partner can experience me as indecisive at times because I'm 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 that is just spending more time with them.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  You know, we got to know each other well on these intense surfing trips where we almost drowned, I misbeheaded you, and then we got food poisoning. And I like in general, welcome to Club Paradise, yeah. 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. 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.

• 29:26Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean by underwriting it in this case?

• 29:28Speaker 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, 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, we would, if we're getting a new partner, spend

• 30:08Speaker 03

  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.

• 30:29Tim Ferriss?

  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 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.

• 30:58Speaker 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.

• 31:41Speaker 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.

• 31:52Tim 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, feel free to fact correct any of that.

• 32:33Tim Ferriss?

  So are there any other characteristics that seem to pop up more often than not in the people who end up doing well that you select?

• 32:42Speaker 03

  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 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 just sheer quantity of ideas and original thinking that characterizes

• 33:27Speaker 03

  a lot of them. Specifically, you'll notice that in the language that people use. So I feel like 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.

• 33:41Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  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 he's quoting Buffett or not.

• 34:01Tim Ferriss?

  True.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  And even if he's doing it consciously, he's living in this construct, which is a super useful construct. But if he proceeds to become the Tepper of his generation, 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 they're own, to me, that's a sign that maybe they're a little bit earlier and they could use another stage of apprenticeship or that we would probably wait to a later stage. And then that second component. When people have lots of ideas, they're usually not that good at killing them. So it's a tension with this triage mentality of, "Look, I'm here to make money. Somebody's gonna die here. I'm gonna save these four people and let this guy die." Right? Is that triage? High situational awareness.

• 34:47Speaker 03

  "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. You see that often. And then just back to aggressiveness. I was interviewing a guy and 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 things in their analysts that make those analysts most valuable to them. 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."

• 35:30Speaker 03

  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. But over time, they're just working so much harder. It's like Wayne Gretzky finding, you know, hockey at age five, right? Like, he's obsessed and he's just going over and over and over again. And there are people in the finance industry who are like that. They're just obsessed with investing in this really distinctive way. Warren Buffett is, from a young age, obsessed. John Arnold, obsessed.

• 36:06Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned something I wanna come back to for a second, which 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, well originates that popularizes, and how people compare it that 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, the word or the phrase, and understanding what that label is intended to represent.

• 36:47Tim Ferriss?

  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 of Mentors, was...

• 37:03Tim Ferriss?

  How you improve your own thinking? And it's something that stuck out to me and I'm gonna track it down here. And this was in response to what is one of the best or the most worthwhile investments you've ever made. And 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." How does, whether it's this person specifically or others, help you to surface your hidden assumptions?

• 37:44Tim Ferriss?

  This strikes me as so, so key to just about everything. 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? Or how might they?

• 38:05Speaker 03

  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 to 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 parents and community, everyone was swimming in those beliefs together?

• 38:48Speaker 03

  And so what I feel like a really good coach can do is, by listening the way I'm making sense of something, can observe, "Oh, you're actually assuming X." I think of it as grip. 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.

• 39:17Tim Ferriss?

  Can you think of an example?

• 39:19Speaker 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 is trying to disrupt, my partner's observation is I will be extra focused on risks around that. I think he's totally right. Once he said that, it kind of clicked and I realized, okay.

• 40:04Speaker 03

  Now, that doesn't mean I drop it. It just means when it comes up, it's more object to me.

• 40:09Tim 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, you've read so many books, it just boggles the mind. It wouldn't surprise me if you're familiar with Byron Katie. But she has something called The Work, which I, you have to be careful with using it as your only hammer, because then you just start looking for nails everywhere. But part of that practice is taking this belief that is causing you, and I'm not saying this is an example here, but causing you some amount of discomfort or stress or anxiety. And then going through the exercise of stating the exact opposite, right?

• 40:53Tim Ferriss?

  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. And it helps to disentangle emotion and attachment from your initial kind of statement. When your partner brings to light something that you might be gripping tightly like this, what are the next steps after that? Or is just the pointing out enough?

• 41:37Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 41:48Speaker 03

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

• 41:51Tim Ferriss?

  I knew it, I knew it.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  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 took a picture of it because I thought I might be tripping.

• 42:17Tim Ferriss?

  And then you looked at her on your computer later and no one was there.

• 42:20Speaker 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. You've seen her on stage? All the time. So I find her credibility on that extra high. Yeah, I think her thing of 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?

• 42:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, well, what would you be without this belief?

• 42:53Speaker 03

  I think it's so powerful.

• 42:54Tim 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. She is exactly what you would sort of expect and hope her to be based on the books.

• 43:09Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 43:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:25Tim Ferriss?

  Right. It's like something you take, it's a statement you take to be true.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:29Tim Ferriss?

  And it's just framing it that way puts it under a different lens, but.

• 43:32Speaker 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, it's a useful lens to have, but being aware that I'm just a tiny bit subject to that is really useful.

• 44:08Tim Ferriss?

  Back in the day, this was 2004, maybe, I had someone approach me in a coffee shop and said, "G'day, mate," and introduce himself. Who was that? It turned out to be the founder of AG1, believe it or not, way back in the day. And people often ask me, what has survived after 20-plus years of testing every supplement under the sun just about? What actually has stayed in the rotation, in the toolbox? This episode's sponsor, AG1, is at the top of that very, very short list. I started using it close to 15 years ago when it was still called Athletic Greens. I put it in the Four Hour Body, didn't get paid to put it in there, and it's outlasted almost everything else that I've tried. One scoop covers your nutritional bases, right? Fills the gaps.

• 44:50Tim Ferriss?

  You want to eat good food, of course, but 75-plus ingredients, including probiotics, B vitamins, and whole food nutrients, act as, in my opinion, pretty cheap nutritional insurance. I take it first thing every morning with cold water, and at this point, it's automatic, leg brushing my teeth. If you're looking for one simple daily habit that supports gut health and fills common nutrient gaps, this is where I'd start. So check them out. Subscribe today to try the next gen of AG1. Listeners will also get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and AG1 Travel Packs with your first order. So start your journey with AG1's next gen and experience the difference firsthand. Simply go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drinkag1.com/tim.

• 45:39Tim 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 in your power zone, investing, 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, and Buffett's searching for bargains and wants to buy at a discount, and then Munger is, I'm going to get slaughtered on the internet, I'm sure,

• 46:24Tim Ferriss?

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

• 46:53Speaker 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 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. Right now on Twitter, the shorts are, and Musk and the people who are long are going back and forth. The vast majority of them are not actually looking to hold the other person's perspective.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  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.

• 47:52Tim Ferriss?

  Can you define here, just for folks, so PM, right? Portfolio manager.

• 47:56Speaker 03

  Portfolio manager.

• 47:56Tim Ferriss?

  Who is that person?

• 47:57Speaker 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.

• 48:05Tim Ferriss?

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

• 48:09Speaker 03

  That's a good catch. I meant more CIO, but if you had...

• 48:13Tim Ferriss?

  Chief Investment Officer.

• 48:14Speaker 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 firms. So they don't have to be within the boundary of the firm.

• 48:33Tim Ferriss?

  So the looking for disconfirming evidence, I want to stick with for a second. So this is something you see certainly in any good scientist. They're not setting out to prove X. They are coming up with a hypothesis and then hopefully in is 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 could one train themselves to get better at doing that? And it could be as seemingly indirect as you like.

• 49:14Tim Ferriss?

  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. Some 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 helped to cultivate.

• 49:40Speaker 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 it up 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 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. How do they size the winners versus the losers? You want to size the winners, obviously, bigger than the losers.

• 50:20Speaker 03

  So there's something around, how do you maintain paranoia and humility? 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.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  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, who I really, really respected. He was short SolarCity. And it was on the morning that Musk announced that Tesla was buying SolarCity. It was a very painful warning 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 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 about something in a letter,

• 51:49Speaker 03

  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.

• 52:06Tim 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 will 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 and concepts that he would then be less likely to, subconsciously or consciously, to modify. This is something I ask everyone, and you've heard this before, but are there any particular

• 52:47Tim Ferriss?

  books that you have gifted the most to other people? They don't have to relate to what we've been discussing at all, but you are so widely read. Do any stand out as books that you've gifted or recommended often to other people?

• 53:02Speaker 03

  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.

• 53:17Tim Ferriss?

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

• 53:23Speaker 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 this guy who runs his family office, 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 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 because I've got a bunch of them on the bookshelf

• 54:03Speaker 03

  here, Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan. Dave Logan 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 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.

• 54:30Tim 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?

• 54:39Speaker 03

  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.

• 55:06Tim Ferriss?

  Another book on my homework list, check.

• 55:08Speaker 03

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

• 55:13Tim Ferriss?

  I have. They, screenwriters work in entertainment?

• 55:17Speaker 03

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

• 55:22Tim Ferriss?

  I see.

• 55:23Speaker 03

  And 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.

• 55:32Tim 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.

• 55:46Speaker 03

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

• 55:56Tim Ferriss?

  So just to pause, could you describe for people who Wim Hof, as if they haven't? So yeah, Wim Hof, first, I think his first podcast interview was on this podcast. Interesting guy, but who's Wim Hof?

• 56:06Speaker 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.

• 56:22Tim 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 as 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.

• 56:52Speaker 03

  So these guys have this metaphor of, they're basically coaching you on your self-talk and they're, 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 Weitzkin is also into and a theme of, like, learning to, he calls it, Weitzkin calls it the other side of pain, but getting used to exposing yourself to pain on a regular basis to the point where you don't bounce off of it.

• 57:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 57:30Speaker 03

  Stutz and Michaels observed that in their work with producers, agents, screenwriters, et cetera, 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 so I do this with my kids, like, we'll literally rub our hands together and be thinking, "Okay, bring it on to X."

• 57:56Tim 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, with his son, 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 making this up, four years old at the time.

• 58:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:16Tim Ferriss?

  And also taught his son to enjoy going out in what other people would consider bad weather.

• 58:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 58:22Tim Ferriss?

  The rainstorms and so on.

• 58:23Speaker 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.

• 58:36Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 58:36Speaker 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. It's what I think he's doing there.

• 58:49Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:49Speaker 03

  And it's a good parenting hack.

• 58:52Tim Ferriss?

  If there are more books behind me, then feel free to mention them.

• 58:56Speaker 03

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

• 59:02Tim Ferriss?

  This is James Karas.

• 59:03Speaker 03

  James Karas is really good. 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, etc., 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're 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.

• 59:44Speaker 03

  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 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 breeds of people into their game and wanting to just keep playing the game for its own sake. That was an interesting framing.

• 1:00:28Tim Ferriss?

  How does the distinction of finite and infinite games apply to finance?

• 1:00:34Speaker 03

  If it does. 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 that 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 is a study recently that everybody wants to have, all along the income spectrum, everybody wants to have two times where they are right now. But I think there are, in general, I seek out partners who are playing high experience as infinite players, who are enjoying the game for its own sake and are going to keep playing and want to recruit other people. And that's back to

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:01:33Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:01:46Speaker 03

  The big one is time horizon. 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 experience it around time horizon.

• 1:02:02Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  You could see it just in the way they're setting up their business. There are indications of just subtle mental framings on, some people start investment firms because it's the time of their career where they've kind of... 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. That implies to me a longer time horizon and it's a cliche, but a love of the game itself.

• 1:02:51Speaker 03

  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 who else has long-term? Jocko Willink, I think 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 integrity or aggressive and humility. And you think, he's coming back from Iraq, he does SEAL Team training, and then he's entering your world and he says, oh, this is this podcast thing. And then, you know, oh, the coaching thing. And I don't know him. I just really admire the way he's doing his own thing.

• 1:03:29Speaker 03

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

• 1:03:37Tim Ferriss?

  You guys should know each other. I'll introduce you guys. You would get along. I want to stay with this for a little bit more in terms of sniffing around the direct question. 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 sort of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations and so on, you could also assess kind of along the same lines that Y Combinator has, at least historically, by asking a lot of questions around what they've built in their spare time

• 1:04:19Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:04:29Speaker 03

  I find Y Combinators 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? You know, based on the references, based on your interactions with them. I think they're keying in on the same quality of aggression or intensity that I am. Buffett uses passion and common sense. Ridalio uses assertiveness and open mindedness. But I think everybody's honing in on this paradoxical tension that I was talking about earlier. Sorry, what was? Tell me the question again.

• 1:05:00Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, 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 sort of 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. It was one of two candidates for answering the question, what you would put on a gigantic billboard? And you could put anything on it. So metaphorically speaking, right? A message to get out to millions or billions of people. So could you read this?

• 1:05:42Tim Ferriss?

  It is stuck in my mind and I've revisited it so many times, but I don't know the proper pronunciation.

• 1:05:49Speaker 03

  Chombe Appiah, 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.

• 1:05:58Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And so you had mentioned the game. If you're aware that you're playing the game, 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.

• 1:06:12Speaker 03

  Oh, 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 on my site. And to me, that quote allows you to kind of zoom out and say, okay, at different stages in my life, I'm going to play different games. What game am I playing right now?

• 1:06:57Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:07:11Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:07:15Speaker 03

  Check it every once in a while. Yeah, so you can kind of zoom, it allows you to kind of, in a video game, it's the god's eye view.

• 1:07:22Tim Ferriss?

  God's eye view.

• 1:07:23Speaker 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?

• 1:07:34Tim 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. This is water.

• 1:07:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:52Tim Ferriss?

  The story of, what is it? The two young fish together swimming by the old fish, and the old fish doesn't pass. I'm like, how's the water, boys? Or something like that. And they're like, what's water?

• 1:08:01Speaker 03

  It's water. Yeah, exactly. I think that's what he's capturing so beautifully in that commencement speeches, 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 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.

• 1:08:35Tim Ferriss?

  I do the podcast in part because it helps me to see the water. 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.

• 1:08:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:52Tim Ferriss?

  Which makes it a lot of fun.

• 1:08:53Speaker 03

  The Greg McKeown, is that how he says it?

• 1:08:55Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:08:57Speaker 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 as she was having a baby. 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 going to 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.

• 1:09:37Speaker 03

  And I think in a lot of different moments on your podcast, people are wrestling with, 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. It's the unfolding that we're all doing.

• 1:09:52Tim Ferriss?

  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 questions related to that, but maybe we can begin with that.

• 1:10:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I like the image of a river with two banks. One side is chaos and the other side is order. Something Dan Siegel, who's a neuroscientist, came up with to try to describe what mental health is. Cause he argued 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 define reality.

• 1:11:01Speaker 03

  But you're in somebody else's definition of reality. 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. Like I think of Musk as being right along that bank. And if Tesla goes bankrupt, that will mean he lost his feedback with reality 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.

• 1:11:30Tim Ferriss?

  Threading the needle.

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  You know, you see it in poets, you see it in writers. People who are right next to that bank are super original. They're coming up with new stuff. We live in their paradigms to some degree. But 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 the danger of swimming, from a career perspective, of starting your own thing is starting your own thing, a lot of the times, is 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. It's not to discourage people from starting their own things at a very young age, but just be aware that that's the project and you might want to come back and refine reality for a little bit and just see it as fluid.

• 1:12:14Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:12:24Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:12:25Tim Ferriss?

  And you mentioned this bank 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

• 1:12:46Tim Ferriss?

  Undetected consequences if they flop onto the bank like Steve Jobs and the magical thinking around.

• 1:12:53Speaker 03

  Around his illness.

• 1:12:54Tim Ferriss?

  His illness.

• 1:12:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:56Tim Ferriss?

  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 mistaken thinking? Or be perceived as being a top performer? Do they swim in the middle? Or do they oscillate between the two? Are there different breeds, just in your experience?

• 1:13:19Speaker 03

  To be a top 1% depends maybe on the field.

• 1:13:22Tim Ferriss?

  So let's say your world.

• 1:13:24Speaker 03

  Within financial markets, you need a continual level of innovation 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. 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.

• 1:13:59Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:14:03Speaker 03

  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. 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 as Christian Bale portrayed him, he was wrestling with his sanity at various points, having that trade on, at various points, the fund was down a lot, his partners were abandoning him. There's something around pushing the edge of your field because people are going to catch up with you that is required.

• 1:14:48Speaker 03

  I don't know that. Trying to think of other examples outside of financial markets of being top 1% or something.

• 1:14:54Tim Ferriss?

  Well, yeah. It's less subjective, but if we're looking at, say, successful authors, I think another example that I see you mentioned is Prisik. He wrote The Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but certainly towards the end got, one might argue, pretty loopy.

• 1:15:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's hard to think of top 1% in a

• 1:15:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's

• 1:15:15Speaker 03

  context, but I think original, you look at Rachel Cusk and Carl Ove Knausgaard, I don't know how to say his name, but those two authors, I think they're doing original things as novelists, and 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 about it.

• 1:15:33Tim 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, yeah, I suppose we put a cognitive function and personality typing that has been, I guess, the theory and a model from Robin Carhart-Harris, who's a scientist in the UK, called the entropic brain, which I think you'd enjoy. So, for another time, what about, I'm just looking at my notes here, I have two words 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?

• 1:16:12Speaker 03

  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, "A million seconds is like 11 days. A billion seconds is 31 years." And I remember that kind of

• 1:16:31Tim Ferriss?

  Holy shit, that's a hell of a way to think about it, yeah.

• 1:16:34Speaker 03

  It's like

• 1:16:35Tim Ferriss?

  Can you say that one more time?

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

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

• 1:16:48Tim Ferriss?

  Marginal revolution?

• 1:16:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, 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 Co-opt that term the way Tyler Cohn did with cultural billionaires. And I was thinking of time billionaires that when I see sometimes 20 year olds, 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, what would, Rupert Murdoch is worth $20 billion. He's 87 years old. What would he pay if he could take the next five years of someone's

• 1:17:34Speaker 03

  20 year old, healthy body, mind, et cetera?

• 1:17:37Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

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

• 1:17:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:41Speaker 03

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

• 1:17:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:59Speaker 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. I don't know that I live every day that way, but I aspire to. So as 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.

• 1:18:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:18:23Speaker 03

  And I bought his life calendar. He sells it as a poster. And what he does is 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. 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, would be to partner with Tim and allow you to create a huge poster

• 1:19:08Speaker 03

  and select a photo for each week. Cause it's such a graphical representation of your life in a way that's hard to convey in words sometimes. So I've just been thinking a lot about time and 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. Can you elaborate a little?

• 1:19:33Tim Ferriss?

  The width.

• 1:19:34Speaker 03

  The width, meaning this present moment we're sitting here having.

• 1:19:37Tim Ferriss?

  Sort of like the depth of attention.

• 1:19:39Speaker 03

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

• 1:19:52Tim Ferriss?

  Uh huh. And how do you cultivate that in yourself?

• 1:19:56Speaker 03

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

• 1:19:59Tim Ferriss?

  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. It's 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. 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.

• 1:20:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:20:44Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no kidding?

• 1:20:45Speaker 03

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

• 1:20:59Tim Ferriss?

  Total hours you will ever spend with your parents.

• 1:21:01Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:21:01Tim Ferriss?

  I didn't know that 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.

• 1:21:15Tim Ferriss?

  Block out and make a priority, a trip or a gathering with my family every six months. That piece, yeah, the tail end.

• 1:21:24Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:21:35Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:21:39Speaker 03

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

• 1:21:46Tim Ferriss?

  Well, 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, truly walks the walk. And I asked him at one point, I said, you've got Goldstein, Kornfield, like of the names, like Sharon Salzford. I'm like, why are, it seems like the entire crew who brought Buddhist mindfulness practices to the US in some of the, let's say, I'm getting the timeframe slightly off probably, but kind of,

• 1:22:18Speaker 03

  Eighties.

• 1:22:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, like seventies, eighties, 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. But the Jew Buddhists, yes. So Dan Harris, Sam Harris, both of those apps.

• 1:22:34Speaker 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 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, but I don't, beyond those, keeping track of how much time.

• 1:22:56Tim Ferriss?

  Those are good anchor points.

• 1:22:58Speaker 03

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

• 1:23:03Tim Ferriss?

  There's one that's, ah, boy, I wish I could get the attribution right. It was actually, it was in Trava Mentors. It was a, it was an 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 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, or any number of times, that's a question that I ask myself a lot. Forty years from now, how much would I pay?

• 1:23:48Tim Ferriss?

  And I think about-

• 1:23:49Speaker 03

  Tim Harris on his app has a great three-minute gratitude talk. And he says, imagine you died yesterday evening. What you would give me back in this moment of having a shitty dinner with your kids and wife? 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 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.

• 1:24:26Tim Ferriss?

  So we talked about a little bit earlier, well, we'll do a couple more questions. And then 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?

• 1:24:55Speaker 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, 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, anything that comes up, "Welcome to the party." He says, imagine you're an affable host.

• 1:25:28Tim Ferriss?

  I don't like that.

• 1:25:28Speaker 03

  And there was 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? Anyway, I like that quote because every time I read it, it shifts the, oh, this is what it's like right now, this is a human experience. And somehow, this is our moment.

• 1:25:59Tim Ferriss?

  Have you heard that quote before? No, I haven't. I really like it. I've been reading a lot of writing from Jesuits recently, for some reason. 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."

• 1:26:41Tim Ferriss?

  But this is much more memorable. 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. You know, you look at you've had a hard day, have some, you know, go over, have some punch." Uh, "Welcome to the party." I love it, I love it. Any others?

• 1:27:04Speaker 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 quote a lot. That all this stuff that feels so high drama, you know, when you're 90, looking at it,

• 1:27:46Speaker 03

  you're just gonna say, "It was all noise and there's, you know."

• 1:27:50Tim 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."

• 1:28:04Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:28:05Tim Ferriss?

  Graham? I always love spending time together and thank you for making the time.

• 1:28:10Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me. It was fun.

• 1:28:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, this is a lot of fun. I have a ton of notes that 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 know, 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?

• 1:28:50Speaker 03

  Well, I'll just note, I helped produce this conference called the Sohne 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, at Lincoln Center. So anybody listening, if you can afford 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.

• 1:29:31Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:29:41Speaker 03

  It's a fun, yeah, it's a fun day.

• 1:29:43Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:29:50Speaker 03

  Uh, no.

• 1:29:51Tim Ferriss?

  All right, full stop. Graham, until next time. And we have a lot to otherwise catch up on, but thank you again.

• 1:29:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks.

• 1:30:00Tim Ferriss?

  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. That's all you got.

• 1:30:29Speaker 03

  See you soon.

• 1:30:31Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Thanks, guys. Bye.

• 1:30:34Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric

• 1:31:19Tim Ferriss?

  things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

• 1:31:44Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:33:02Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:33:45Tim Ferriss?

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