Surviving The Great Reshuffle - Jim O'Shaughnessy | Modern Wisdom Podcast 326

Jim O'Shaughnessy is an investor and the founder, Chairman, and Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. Time, space and geography are collapsing. The richest people on the planet are no longer in charge of labour or buildings, they're symbol manipulators. The skillsets we need today are completely different to what was needed 50 years ago, let alone 500. Jim is here to give us some advice on how we can survive this catastrophic reshuffling. Expect to learn why 2020 was the best thing to happen to talented people in the developing world, the danger of grade-inflation in top flight universities, why we both have a man-crush on Rory Sutherland, why Isaac Newton was a dick and much more... Sponsors: Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at http://bit.ly/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on Reebok’s entire range including the amazing Nano X1 at https://geni.us/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Check out Jim's company - https://www.osam.com/ Check out Jim's Podcast - https://www.infiniteloopspodcast.com/ Follow Jim on Twitter - https://twitter.com/jposhaughnessy Rick and Morty and The Meaning Of Life 1 - https://hackernoon.com/rick-and-morty-and-the-meaning-of-life-6640df17e263 Rick and Morty and The Meaning Of Life 2 - https://medium.com/@dan.jeffries/rick-and-morty-and-the-meaning-of-life-part-ii-screw-enlightenment-become-an-adult-instead-e1b2ec832e4e Jim's Superthread - https://twitter.com/jposhaughnessy/status/1343371350493319169 Another Jim Superthread - https://twitter.com/antilibrary_vk/status/1164959690234593280 Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #greatreset #greatreshuffle #finance - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Chris, I honestly can count on one hand the number of people who I met, whose money we managed, whose goal was to make a lot of money. Not even five, it's actually four. And I remember each one of them because guess what? They are miserable and and they just they never have enough and they always want more than the next guy. And they're covetous and they're jealous and they're envious. And those are the most destructive sins because you can't have any fun with them. I mean, at least glut me and you're going to enjoy it, right?

• 0:36Chris Williamson?

  Jim O'Shaughnessy, welcome to the show.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  Christopher, great to see you.

• 0:40Chris Williamson?

  Great to see you as well. Look at you in your AirPod Pro Max.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  So these changed my life. I got them as a gift. Um, I had the kind of headphones you have on for most of when we did went remote on infinite loops. Those were fine. Um, and my son Patrick was like, Dad, and you know, he's the podcast king. So he's like, you've got to get these. They'll change your life. They have like, I don't know how many microphones in them. And when we were testing them. Well, let me put it this way. My wife's a street photographer in Manhattan. I won't talk to her with these on if she's on the street because I hear everything she doesn't hear. They're like ridiculously good. And then my producer was like, okay, let's run a test for the mic.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  He goes, he goes, I don't even know what to say. He said, the mic on those is better than the mics that I'm telling people to get for the podcast. So anyway, my wife got them for me for Christmas. So.

• 1:45Chris Williamson?

  Good wife, well played wife.

• 1:47Speaker 00

  Yes, she played very well and they're they're remarkable.

• 1:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I've got to put, so I've got the Pros. I'm a AirPod evangelist and I went the day that the AirPod Pros came out, I was in the Apple Store. The day that the AirPod Pro Maxes came out, I had a preorder through a buddy. And um, I have to say, out of the Pros and the Pro Maxes, I get a lot more use out of the Pros. Reason being that those are, they're a heavy beast to throw around. But you are right, that is a one unit podcast studio. That and a laptop with full charge and you can do a podcast from anywhere on the planet, which is pretty incredible.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I, well, you know, maybe we'll talk about it, but I think we're right in the middle of what I call the great reshuffle. And I think we're moving from being used to and having skill sets designed for the physical world, and we are moving into the digital world, and you need very different skill sets. But as you've just mentioned, time, space and geography are collapsing. And you know, you're in Newcastle, and I don't need any coal. So I don't need to go.

• 2:52Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I spent this Sunday, I got invited for a coffee from a friend, a podcaster, who's also in Newcastle. And he's a local lad, working class, local lad. And I was making jokes about the fact, oh, what are we going to go and do? We're going to go and shovel coal. He took me to the oldest railway line in the world is in just outside of Newcastle, and it's still got a functioning steam train. And they're shoveling, I shit you not, they're shoveling coal into it. It pulls up outside of the station, the guy's got a flat cap on, he's got like, black lung, him and his father, his father's lost a couple of vertebrae. It was so realistic. But dude, I've heard you talk about what you've just mentioned there, this changing of the dynamic, which is offering up opportunities to people with what would

• 3:37Chris Williamson?

  have been previously useless, but now very useful characteristics that they have. So someone, I saw this meme a while ago, this is so you, I saw a meme a little while ago, and it was a guy, a really sort of big buff guy in a smart shirt at the front of a Bed Bath and Beyond store. And it just had, it just had this thought bubble coming out the side of its head. And he said, 500 years ago, I would have been a proud warrior?

• 4:03Speaker 00

  Yes. This is the other, I call it the great unshuffling, but the other one that I also use for shorthand is revenge of the nerds. Basically, what's happening is, and that's, that meme, so we could spend the rest of the podcast talking about why memes have the effect they do on people. It's something I've studied a lot of, and we'll get into why. But anyway, that meme nails it. And that's why it's so funny. It's funny because it's true. And, and the whole idea, in, if you looked at the Forbes of 500, the first

• 4:48Speaker 00

  one they ever did, you know, that's the rich person list. They did the first one they did in, I think, 1982. If you looked at that, what you would find is the majority of people on the list inherited their money, okay? The rest of the people on the list made it through physical things, real estate, oil, steel, etc. Obviously, we're not burying the lead because everyone knows who's on that list today, and they are all symbol manipulators. And so I've been using that term for a long time because it's what I am, right? I don't make anything with my hands.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  I mean, it's all thought, right? And Bill Gates doesn't make anything. He figured out a way to turn his thoughts into billions and billions of dollars. Because once the thought is on the software, whatever, make one ship a million, ship 10 million, ship 100 million, doesn't matter. The unit cost of all the other ones is zero. So as we shift it into this digital world, and I kind of mark, maybe 2014 thereabouts, I started to really notice it.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  And then, so I started talking about it then, but not a lot, because a lot of people look at me like, are you barking mad, mate? I mean, what's going on with you? Covid happened. And trends that might have taken maybe as long as a decade got collapsed into a year. So Skype, you know, no disrespect to Skype, but Zoom comes in and eats Skype's lunch. And I found out why that was, by the way. They did it because Skype isn't meant for multiple participants.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  It's great for what we're doing, fantastic. I use Skype all the time to talk to friends all over the world.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Zoom is designed to have multiple participants and the whole experience was designed keeping in mind that people are, that this is not a phone call, right? So mindset meant a lot. But, but the point is, um, ideas about geography. Like, so I just hired a new colleague and he's in Bangalore, India. And, and so he, he's actually outside of Bangalore. But, but so let me tell you how he is a fantastic example of the trend to digital and what that means. So number one, his opportunity set over the last year exploded open.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  He was no longer having to look for jobs in his geography. He could look for jobs anywhere in the world. The prejudice against letting people do that evaporated, right? Because of COVID. And so all of a sudden, time, space, geography collapsed. Number two, I didn't look at his CV. His CV was Twitter and I watched him for nine months. So you go from an accreditation, an imperator from some very high and mighty institution, but all that piece of paper, a diploma, all that says is, uh, Jim, this suggests

• 8:33Speaker 00

  that Jim might be good at this. Really? Uh, because you know, I, my kids went to really great schools. My daughter went to Yale. My other two went to Notre Dame. I mean, these are really great degrees in the U.S. and they're all very talented luckily. But you know, we were talking about it and you know, they were talking about grade inflation, especially at places like the Ivies. Everyone gets A's. Well, okay. That means no one gets A's. But so it's just the, what people, the game people started playing was, I just gotta get in. I gotta get that stamp that from the Ivy and I'm gold. In the old days, that was true. Nowadays.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  Your resume or your CV is you show it every day on social media, in blogs and podcasts and everything, and it grows. And so the way I look at it, if you were a Bitcoin aficionado, you'd say, "Proof of work." Well, that's actually what's happening now. So Batzel, who I hired, he had a long history of proof of work, that he was clever, that he was able with technology. All of those things I got to see before even getting on the first Zoom with him.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  The third thing is the way you think. A linear thought process was rewarded in the physical world. A nonlinear thought process is going to be rewarded in the digital world. And we can talk a little bit more about what that means if you want. And then finally, the idea that you that the leverage the digital world gives you. I mean, Archimedes would be like, "What?" I mean, because I have a lot of friends who are single shops.

• 10:35Speaker 00

  And the leverage that they can gain through multiple distribution platforms, through, you know, selling a writing course, selling a speaking course, selling a blah blah. I just was on with another Brit and he was a very fine guy and he makes all of his money on YouTube. And so the thing that I found as kind of the that flipped the switch, so to speak. So Max Planck, the physicist, said famously that progress happens one funeral at a time, meaning that the old guard has their points of view. Not very few of them retain beginner's mind and they ossify. And frankly, they're wrong.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  But they're the ones in the dean's chairs. They're the ones who are determining who gets to go to Oxbridge. You know, so they die off and then the new ideas replace them and then repeat, rinse and repeat. That's gone. It's gone because COVID forced the world. This was a world reset. And so it wasn't like it was just the United States that had a lockdown, the UK had a lockdown, Brazil had a lockdown, Bangalore had a lockdown. And so we were all in the same digital boat together. And so it, out of necessity, erased those prior prejudices

• 12:01Speaker 00

  that would have kicked in absent COVID. So, I mean, and the other things that it has affected are really profound, but it has kicked us into the digital age, I think, maybe five to 10 years before we would have fully been there.

• 12:21Chris Williamson?

  COVID was the best thing to happen to talented people in the developing world and the worst thing to happen to talentless people in the developed world.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  Absolutely true.

• 12:31Chris Williamson?

  Um, I also learned about conceptual inertia from, uh, intellectual ideas historian, a guy called Thomas Moynihan, who's just written a history of existential risk. So the book is the history of X risk, uh, humanity and how it discovered its own capacity for extinction. And, um, what he talks about there is that, I can't remember who it is, it says history doesn't crawl, it leaps, but you do very much get, um, somebody proposes a new model, heliocentric, uh, universe to geocentric universe change. Um, then people resist the model. Then the model actually becomes proven or more people get on board

• 13:15Chris Williamson?

  with it and it actually becomes widely accepted intellectually or even rationally. But the substrate, the source code upon which society is built lags behind so, so, so slowly. The big organizations, the bureaucracies, they take ages to catch up. The litigation, that takes ages to catch up. And then the culture comes along really slow, just lumbering behind. And what you get with that is this conceptual inertia. And, um, yeah,

• 13:45Speaker 00

  I love that term.

• 13:46Chris Williamson?

  Conceptual inertia, it's awesome. I use it all the time now. You get the forcing function. If you have this forcing function, it doesn't permit anyone anymore. It's tightened the bottleneck so much for all of this stuff. The extraneous shit had to go. It's like if you don't, if you don't understand how to do remote working properly, how to use monday.com or Notion or Asana or whatever Teamflow program it is that you're using, if you can't do video conferencing, Rory Sutherland already had Zoom Fridays in his company

• 14:21Chris Williamson?

  four plus years ago. Zoom Fridays.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  That surprised me. So Rory's a great guy. I'm interviewing him for Infinite Loops on Friday.

• 14:29Chris Williamson?

  Your last one with him, your last one with him, I listened to while I was in Dubai is preparation for my one with him. Dude, the guy is, the man is a force of nature.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  He truly is. He truly is. I mean, oh my God, he, he frames things so well that I've always believed that if you can frame things, you can get people to understand things they can't understand with the wrong frame. Rory is maybe one of the best and most skilled reframmers of anyone I've ever talked to. He is brilliant. He is brilliant. And in addition, such a lovely man and what a great sense of humor. He's just, I love talking

• 15:15Speaker 00

  to him. On this point, it's sort of interesting. So, for example, Nick Bostrom, existential risk, I'm sure you're familiar with Nick.

• 15:27Chris Williamson?

  Bostrom as he's called, yeah.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  You're right. So, but, but he's, he's, you should read him. But who I'd even recommend you read more is a book I reread called The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, who is a quantum physicist at Oxford. And he does such an incredible job of building the intellectual scaffolding for why, when the Enlightenment happened, all of a sudden, we figured a ton of shit out. Because the, he says, basically, man, humans, we are universal connectors and explainers. And what he means by that is

• 16:11Speaker 00

  Pre the Enlightenment, the gods were in control. Why did this happen? The gods did it, okay? And then the church, which was representing the gods, they said, no, no, no, we know because we we have a line directly to that it was a god. Um, anyway, the Enlightenment came along and they're like, no, dare to know. You know, and and ironically, they used as Isaac Newton used um, uh, as the the the most or the saying for the society, um, uh, the take no one's word for it.

• 16:52Chris Williamson?

  Um, you know that you know that Sir Isaac Newton, when he discovered his theory of gravity, do you know what was happening then?

• 16:58Speaker 00

  I do, the plague.

• 16:59Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, so I'm a huge fan of Isaac Newton for a variety of reasons.

• 17:05Chris Williamson?

  Is it because he was weird as hell? Is that why?

• 17:07Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 17:08Chris Williamson?

  He's one of the weirdest humans in history, is that why?

• 17:10Speaker 00

  Absolutely barking mad.

• 17:12Chris Williamson?

  Totally crazy.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  And totally crazy. If you go through his his other books, right? All the other stuff, it's all on alchemy.

• 17:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  It's all on, you know, and he was insane. The other thing that I liked about him was he was a spiteful bugger.

• 17:29Chris Williamson?

  He used to like going to public hangings and stuff, didn't he?

• 17:32Speaker 00

  He loved it. And so at the same time, there was a fellow in Germany named Leibniz, who was a dwarf, okay? But Leibniz was also a genius. And he came up with basically with calculus. One could argue a little ahead of Newton. Newton was a master of public relations and he's like, no, no, no, no, no. Do you know one of his most famous lines, which is, if I have seen further than others, it was because I was able to stand on the shoulders of giants?

• 18:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  That was a dig at Leibniz. He was, no one knows this, but it's kind of like Andrew Marvell to his coy mistress. And your quaint honor turned to dust and into ashes all my lust. The graves a fine and private place, but none, I think, do they are embraced. You know what quaint was Elizabethan slang for? The woman's genitals.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  So

• 18:26Chris Williamson?

  It was a low key dig.

• 18:29Speaker 00

  But perfect because it it met its target. It was not a weapon of mass destruction. It was a smart bomb and it the only one who got it.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  Was the man that was aimed at, right? He's saying that because I'm a dwarf.

• 18:51Chris Williamson?

  That's so bad.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  It so so Newton is just such a fascinating character. I mean, because the other the other great use of Newton is he lost a fortune in the South Sea Trading scam.

• 19:04Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  And and and it caused him to lament that he could measure the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of men. And I I used to have a graph. I don't use PowerPoint very much anymore because I I find that when you don't use any visuals, people actually pay much greater attention to you. Um, but if I if I do use them, I only use a few. Uh, and one of the great ones that we used to use, uh, for a long time was a chart of the South Sea Bubble. And then a chart of the NASDAQ during the dot com era. And I obviously, of course, well, actually correlations don't aren't causation. No, but it's a great example.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  You gotta give me that. And and so Newton was just, he's another great example because one of the most brilliant men to live, right? I will concede and stipulate that barking mad. Most people don't know that about him, but still don't don't confuse the message. Physics with the messenger, right? Because that's what people, again, human operating system, we we bollocks that up all the time.

• 20:19Chris Williamson?

  So let's let's just dig into that. So separating the art from the artist or the message from the messenger is something that previously we were able to do. Because we the eye of Sauron and the sword of Damocles wasn't hanging over everyone in the same way that it is now. I wonder whether we're actually starting to optimize for people who are slightly less extreme than that. Isaac Newton wouldn't make it through university and being published. Now, let's say that there is a degree of insanity that needs to tinge the top geniuses,

• 21:01Chris Williamson?

  Genie. Let's say that there's an amount of insanity or craziness or no fucks given that has to be, it layers that, right? But now, that's an existential threat to the thing that you are supposed to be bringing to the market.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  Wow, that is a really interesting observation. So we're optimizing for more

• 21:26Chris Williamson?

  palatable.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  normal. Yeah.

• 21:28Chris Williamson?

  The palatable version of that.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  I have to think about that. I love that.

• 21:33Chris Williamson?

  I don't know if it's true.

• 21:34Speaker 00

  I don't either. Because, so I'm thinking of a couple of, so I'm a big philosophy and enlightenment type reader. I love it. And I hate the way people use enlightenment because it's all, you know, peace and love and, you know, we're gonna just, everybody's going to be happy. No, that isn't what enlightenment is. Enlightenment is truth realization. I am not enlightened. Let me hasten to say that. But I've read a lot of the writers on the topic and the one who I connect with the most is a guy by the name of Jed McKenna. But what I got to tell you about Jed McKenna speaks to your point. Jed McKenna is not

• 22:17Speaker 00

  his real name, or their real name. Jed McKenna is a completely fictional character that this author devised to tell us that we're all fictional characters. I love that, very meta. But why do I know that he's the real deal? Precisely because he's nowhere.

• 22:39Speaker 00

  He doesn't have a Twitter account. He doesn't have Facebook. He doesn't have Instagram. This guy could be monetizing his reputation to the tune of, I would, I would conservatively say 5 million US a year if he wanted to, because I've run into like his hardcore supporters and A, they don't know who he is, which I think is cool. But B, so he's solved for that, that way. Um, another example is so like a guy I've had on the podcast, Brian Romelli. So, so Brian, he's got a big Twitter presence. Um, he's got some really interesting ideas that have proven over time

• 23:22Speaker 00

  because he's, he's written about them for 20 years. And if you go back like I do and read his original stuff, he's pretty bang on. But he, he, he leans into it. He basically in his bio, he says, I'm a charlatan. I'm, I'm, uh, I'm, I'm a, I'm a thinker of, uh, of prohibited thoughts. Um, and, and so of course, what he does with that is he draws people who, who like those misfit toys to him. So, you know, he's got a hu, he's got 110,000 followers on Twitter and he's got a very active, uh, Substack. I don't know what it's on, but so here's another guy who solved for it.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Right? I think your question or observation that I need to think about is, does this affect a large enough cohort? So that it retards innovation? I don't, on the face of it, just given the speed of everything that of innovation, I gotta say probably not. But, you know, I was again, just having a conversation with my wife, who, you know, never wants to talk to me about anything because she's like, no, no, I don't, I'm not going down a rabbit hole with you for three hours. But this was a conversation she was actually interested in, which was like, was why is Tim Cook highly thought of at Apple?

• 24:51Speaker 00

  I mean, and I said, well, you know, she was like, he's no Steve Jobs. And I'm like, well, no, of course he's no Steve Jobs. They needed a Steve Jobs to get to where they are right now. But now, Tim.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  You're looking at some of the cool stuff that's coming out from Apple. And on top of it, he's a much more normal guy. And but so what did he do? He decided, I'm going to create such a fortress. That no matter what, I'm going to be able to fend off the attacks. Now, that happens, it's like Hemingway's line, how did you go bankrupt? Gradually and then suddenly, right? So am I open minded to the idea that some nutcase in a garage somewhere? Um, probably in Austin now, or maybe Miami. Um, uh, is going to come up with a thing that obsoletes the iPad? I think it will happen.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  I mean, I think what you'll see is you'll see a clear, transparent. Uh, things that can fold like a newspaper. But when you open them up, you can have whatever you want on it. You could have a sports, you could have a rugby match going on up here. You could have the, the Times of London to read over here. You could have Twitter open down here and it will all be seamless. So I fully expect to see that in the next 10 years.

• 26:19Chris Williamson?

  Where do people start with Jed McCann? What's the first thing they read?

• 26:23Speaker 00

  So, so he's got a three part, um, uh, a trilogy. Uh, called Spiritual Enlightenment, Enlightenment, The Damnedest Thing.

• 26:33Chris Williamson?

  That'll do.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  But I, but just let me put a warning label on here, okay? So I will, I will put up again, and I'll tag you on Twitter. I will put up two essays that I suggest people read by my friend, Dan Jeffries, before they go into Jed. Because Jed is hardcore. It's not all puppies and wonderful things with him. Uh, but, but he's very worthwhile with that previso.

• 27:04Chris Williamson?

  That'll be, that'll be linked in the show notes below. So going back to what you were saying there, um, about. Hard to fake signals of authenticity. That's what I think you were talking about. And I saw this with Sam Harris last year, towards the start of this year and last year. What I came to believe was that Sam had a non-typical perspective, which made him unpopular with both sides of the aisle. The way that you can guarantee disagreement in 2021 is to be in the middle. Because when you're out on the extremes, you guarantee agreement from at least one side. When you're in the middle, you guarantee disagreement from both. So what that made me think was, I can have greater faith

• 27:47Chris Williamson?

  that Sam believes what Sam's saying, because he has to pay such a high cost to hold the particular positions that he does.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  That, again, that is a wonderful heuristic to use, because you're right.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  And this is another part of this great reshuffling that I've talked about. So what's happening there is that traditional media has gone all Pravda. So, but for both sides, right? So, so if you're to the left, you're going to watch MSNBC in the US. You're going to watch MSNBC and CNN. And if you're to the right, you're going to watch Fox. What people don't understand is it's all propaganda, all of it. And it is so shocking to me. I stopped watching TV news 10 years ago because I was noticing it's starting down that path. Trump only accelerated it. Listen, man, the greatest thing that ever happened to the New York Times

• 28:50Speaker 00

  was Donald Trump getting elected president, because they were going broke. And then all of a sudden, Donald Trump got elected president. They decided, you know what? We're going to chuck this gray lady bullshit and we are going to go full Pravda. And we don't give a shit if it's right or not. It's going to be anti Donald Trump. And then you had like Fox doing the, well, if Donald Trump says it's right, then it's right, god damn it. And so you had these two contenders, right? Both of which are spewing bullshit. And these poor people.

• 29:26Speaker 00

  And again, this is a generational thing. Mostly the people I'm trying to convince to stop watching TV news are people older than seventy, right? The habit for them of watching TV news, back when it was Walter Cronkite, they just can't, they can't stop doing it.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  And, and, and younger people are getting it much faster. But, so, so what happened to traditional media, back to Sam Harris, was, and Matt, I always mispronounce his name, Matt Tibby, he's a great writer, very much to the left. I used to follow him when he was the lead writer for the Rolling Stone. Because I think one should, so my own version is, I don't have a party. The only thing that defines me is I'm fiercely anti-authoritarian of either the left or the right. I, I just, it always leads to bad things, in my opinion, if you study history. So, but my, I mean, like, if I went through my political opinions,

• 30:27Speaker 00

  some people, depending on the order in which I listed them, some people would say, "You're a left-winger." Other people would say, "What? That's a right-wing thought." And, and so, I'll just give you a couple of for instances. So, I think all drugs should be legal. Because the war on drugs is a sham. And it has corrupted so many different levels of our societies that, I mean, Portugal's a great example. They basically decriminalized, they didn't make them legal. But, guess what happened? You know, like, all of the bad crime, all that, just went plunging.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  I think that all non-violent drug offenders in prison should be released. I mean, that was, like, they were saying to me when Trump lost, they were saying, "What would be his big fuck you to everybody?" And I said, "If I was his advisor," and believe me, no fan of Donald Trump. So, if, if he asked me to be his advisor, I'd say, "Fuck off." But, but if I was, if I was gonna be able to be a whisperer or something in his ear, it would have been, "Pardon every non-violent person in prison on a drug charge."

• 31:45Speaker 00

  Can you imagine?

• 31:46Chris Williamson?

  It would have put such a stone in the shoe of everyone, right? Because they would have thought, hang on, this is so disjointed from what we thought that he would have done. Yeah, man, I mean, dude, when you're talking about that, this sort of nuance of opinions, this is Jordan Petersonism from years ago. He said it in the interview with the GQ lady, I can't remember her name. They sent Kathy Newman away, put her on a short course of steroids and training. And she came, she came back having read a little bit more sort of enlightenment philosophy. And that, you know, the one that I mean, well, they didn't, they didn't turn his microphone on and all that sort of stuff. And he said in that, and this is the first time that I heard it, and I've never got rid of it. He said, if I know one of your perspectives and from it, I can accurately predict everything else that you believe, then you're not a serious thinker.

• 32:27Chris Williamson?

  It's very unlikely, there is no reason in hell that your view on abortion should be impacted by your view on immigration. Or your view on the level of corporate tax, or your view on gun rights. But because we've lumped these things together, you end up with an increasingly partisan level of politics. That then gets fueled by a media that needs to drive clicks. Clicks are driven by an algorithm, which is enforced by things that you either really hate or really agree with. And it's when people say, well, like, I often get asked on other shows, why, why are we becoming increasingly polarized? I'm like, how can we not be?

• 33:08Speaker 00

  Right.

• 33:08Chris Williamson?

  How, it would be so unbelievable if we weren't up against all of this.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  So, so we know a lot about algorithms, that's what we do. The algorithms for traditional media are optimized for fear, uncertainty and doubt. And it's much easier to outrage people. So they're, they're max out on outrage items on both sides, right? And, and they keep people, I've likened it to an emotional plague. And because what's happened is we haven't given up on religion, we just changed the pews, right? So the new religion is politics and total compliance with the belief, talking points, if you will,

• 33:55Speaker 00

  is the price you must pay to be thought of as a good person.

• 33:59Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you're a heretic.

• 33:59Speaker 00

  I'm like, I'm a heretic. I proudly call myself a heretic, I'm an apostate, come at me, do whatever you want. But this also happens because.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  I don't give a fuck what people think about me. I, I don't, I don't want to offend people. And by that, I mean, look, I've been so lucky and so blessed in life. And like, one of the things that I enjoy doing is working with people, uh, younger people especially, not just in my field, but in a bunch of fields. I like this idea, teach, you know, Trent Griffith, who I just did a podcast with yesterday and he flipped it on me. And he started interviewing me, but he's got this great idea, which is, fits in with karma. But he, he calls it give to get. And what he means is, if he can only teach one lesson to a younger person, it's give.

• 34:55Speaker 00

  And don't expect or hope for getting from, so let's say, I give to you, Chris. And the wrong way to think about it is, now, goddammit, Chris owes me something. That's reciprocity, right? And, uh, it's in the book Influence and everybody knows about it. Trent's take on this, and Rory, I'm gonna ask him about it on Friday because I can, I already know what he's gonna say. But, uh, Trent's take is, no, no, no, no, no. Karma, you put it out and it, you know what? It might not come back from Chris. In fact, Chris might do something really dastardly to you. It comes back though.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  The wheel of karma just keeps going around and around and around. And you build good karma or bad karma and it comes back. And now, if you want to make that much less mystic, you're programming your brain and you don't even know it. Right? So, we, we're all meta-programmers of our own brain and we program our brains with the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves. And so, if you're putting a lot of bad karma out there, what your brain is doing is it's going, oh, okay, he likes bad.

• 36:12Chris Williamson?

  The algorithm's being reinforced.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  Yes, I will oblige him. He thinks the world is an ugly place, full of trouble and strife. That's what I'm gonna serve up for him, because my reticular activating system, you know, if I was talking to a neurobiologist, that's what he'd talk about, or she'd talk about. If I'm talking to one of these enlightenment people, they would say karma. But it's, it's not this mystic thing. It's, it's programming. And you're self-programming yourself every day. And that's how that all comes about. It's like, I have like four questions. I wrote a piece called, a long thread, actually, a series of threads, called "The Thinker and the Prover." And it's on an old model by a guy by the name of Leonard Orr.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  And he separates the brain into the thinker and the prover. And the thinker can think anything he wants. It can think three impossible things before breakfast, as the queen said to Alice in the Wonderland series. But once the thinker has thought it out and latched on, "I believe this." That's another reason why I present all of my ideas as hypotheses or thesis. Because the minute you say "I believe," what your brain hears is, "This is true." And not only is this is true, but this defines you as a human being. And that story starts revving up. But so what happens is, back to politics, right?

• 37:40Speaker 00

  So, let's say, well, take me as an example. I am in favor of a woman's right to have an abortion. I am opposed to capital punishment, because I don't think the state should be able to have the right to take a human being's life. But I also think that the taxes done wrongly will actually get less revenue for the government than more. That's, that's kind of a classic right-wing point of view. The others are kind of classic left-wing's point of view. Immigration, I think, and I, man, do I stir the hornet's nest when I put this up on Twitter or say it in a podcast. I think that the United States, right now, still, still, after everything,

• 38:26Speaker 00

  has a huge advantage that other countries don't have. And that is, the smartest people in the world want to live and work here. And my idea is, we should let them. And that means if they come here to go to university, and, you know, so I do it, I stage it, and first I say STEM degrees, right, science, technology, et cetera. We should staple a green card to it, and say, "Welcome to America. Go create." And, and yet, because of this, this whole orthodoxy, the, the, and, and label thinking, that's the other thing that drives me mad. People are,

• 39:06Speaker 00

  we're word thinkers, and labels negate us. And, and, and so the minute you label something, you know, "Rules for Radicals," that's what he says, label, personalize it. Stalin knew this. Stalin was, "One death is a tragedy. A million is a statistic." You, people are simply not going to get worked up over a million deaths. But when it's Ivan, who you know, and you know his daughter, and his wife, that's going to really rev you up. So, the point being, though, that traditional media knows what's happening. And all of their best people, Sam Harris,

• 39:48Speaker 00

  uh, Matthew, a ton of like, first-rate writers.

• 39:53Chris Williamson?

  But do you look at Substack at the moment? Matthew Iglesias has just left Vice, which was already a splinter off from the legacy media world, that just started to come alongside, but they never kind of really were, and they got a TV show, and it's still, but they were already a heterodox organization. And he said, "No, this is, this is still too bureaucratic for me. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go do a Substack."

• 40:19Speaker 00

  Yep, and that is what's gonna happen writ large. And it also explains why you see this hysteria among the traditional media. Because worldwide, well, especially in in America and the UK. Um, there was a deal. And the deal was, I'm gonna be a journalist. I'm not gonna make gobs of money, but I'm gonna have influence. And I'm gonna get to know all these important people and influence these important people. And it was a trade, you know, the hierarchy of needs that a lot of very smart switched on people made. Going away, it's going away.

• 41:02Speaker 00

  And so Substack, that's the future. And and you know, we'll have, we'll have our own channels, right? So I'm a big believer in reading people that I know I'm gonna disagree with. Just because I'm probably wrong, right? That's the other thing that it drives people crazy when I say this. But I mean, empirically speaking, look at history. Look at what this, back to our friend Isaac Newton. Look at what Isaac Newton believed. And with the exception of that gem about physics and calculus. Every one of his beliefs were wrong. They were wrong. And he was the smartest guy on the planet, Leibniz notwithstanding.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  Uh, but the point is, when you have context, right? It's like people getting all worked up about in this country, Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Tear down all his statues. You know, boo this man. Okay, let's put some context in. Let's understand that as horrible as slavery was and is.

• 42:14Speaker 00

  An abomination and something that all throughout human history was practiced widely. Go all the way back to the Helots in Sparta and the slaves in Greece. They actually had a more enlightened attitude about it than we than we in the West did. Because they you could make them free. You know, some of the greatest Stoics were started life as slaves. And so as the world progressed and we became more sensible, in my opinion, right? Slavery, that's an abomination. We 600,000 Americans died over it.

• 42:55Speaker 00

  The the most the highest death count of any American war, any war we've ever engaged in. Including our little spat with our friends from

• 43:04Chris Williamson?

  The one against yourselves.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Was the one against ourselves. It was brother against brother. And 600,000 Americans died for an idea. And that idea was slavery is an abomination. It has to be, it must be abolished. And and then what happened? Well, as you said earlier in our in our conversation, the cultural belief that that layer for a lot of people, even enlightened people, and this is what I want to emphasize here. Even for the most enlightened people, they still had these awful beliefs in their head. Right? Because they they had grown up in in a world that was described. Have you read Cloud Atlas by?

• 43:53Speaker 00

  I'm not blanking on his name, but anyway.

• 43:55Chris Williamson?

  I've watched the movie.

• 43:57Speaker 00

  So the book is so much better. I enjoyed the movie for just for fun. But but the book is like his magnum opus. And and it's brilliant on so many different levels. But one of them is that, you know, it's kind of a Zen like we're we're all we're all connected through time. And and but one of them, one of the stories, as you'll remember from the movie, was the the awakening, if you will, of the lawyer about the evils of slavery. And and he went from, you know, being the agent of his wicked father-in-law, who had very

• 44:37Speaker 00

  Neanderthal views about the world to being quite awake and his best friend being an escaped slave who saved his life. And, and so the, the, the point, the, the, the larger point, I think, is people fall into this without knowing they're falling into it. And suddenly, so I, I equate dogma with death, with brain death. If, if you, at your point about, um,

• 45:06Chris Williamson?

  One view extrapolate out, yeah.

• 45:08Speaker 00

  If you, I'm, I'm really not interested in talking to you because I, I don't think I can change your mind. That's another one of my beliefs. I can't change you, Chris. Only you can change you. I can help you if you're looking for that kind of help, but if you're not, I'm not going to help at all. Maybe someone else will, but that has to come from within. And, and once I really realized that, it, you know, I'm not so smart. It took me a while to get all this stuff. But I, I was working with an employee and I'm kind of like, you know, he just kept making the same mistake, same mistake, same mistake.

• 45:49Speaker 00

  And I got really frustrated until I finally figured out, I can't change him. Until he wants to change this, nothing will change. And in fact, he will dig in, he will dig in on the thing I'm trying to change. So I was doing him a disservice, trying to get him to see the light. When you are, when you are mired in a belief system that you tie to yourself, you literally can't see the light because your brain, these wonderful quantum computers that we carry around with us have amazing abilities to say, nope, nope, nope.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  And if, do I agree with it? Yep, yep, yep. And so people are honestly surprised when something that they deeply believe is proved fundamentally wrong and they will go to massive lengths to deny it. Flat Earth Society, my friend, uh, Tim Urban, who has Wait But Why, he has a great story about this. So there's a movie about the Flat Earth Society, right? So. Today, in 2021, with all of the photographs that we have from space and from the moon and from all of our satellites showing the sort of round, not really round, but sort

• 47:13Speaker 00

  of round world on which we make our lives an interesting thing. And, and, and they will basically invent anything to tell you you're wrong. No, you were hypnotized by aliens, this is all fake. And what's interesting is, when you're trying to convince people of deeply wrong beliefs, the best place to go and study is cults. Because cults have this down to a science. And, and here's the other thing, that I often say and people don't believe me. You want to know who the easiest people to fool are? The smartest people.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  Why are the smartest people the easiest to fool? Because they're smart! Because they understand, they know, like people always say, "Well, I'm not smart." They know they're smart, come on! You know, and so, their brain is like, "I am smart, I will automatically see all of the bullshit that they're trying to sling at me." No, you won't! No, you won't! That's the way that they get their hooks in. It's like, one of the best stories is one of the biggest, not biggest, but one of the most interesting victims of the Bernie Madoff scam, was a guy who published a book about how cons work and how to avoid them. It's just like, perfect! You can't make this shit up!

• 48:42Speaker 00

  And so, the other thing that's interesting about smart people, what else are smart people good at? Smart people are really good at building bulletproof narratives, that they first convince themselves of. I think, you know, and whatever. And, and, and then, so they, they keep iterating on that narrative until it's like, pretty bulletproof. And then they go and convince a bunch of other people because they're smart. And so, one of my heroes, Richard Feynman, the physicist, like, the quote I use all the time is, "The first rule is, you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." It's like this whole behavioral finance thing.

• 49:25Speaker 00

  I know that I would fall for every single one of those biases. I know I would. I, I know myself well enough, so I, "Yeah, oh, yeah." So what did I do? It's like a friend did this survey about behavioral biases. He talked to a bunch of investors or advisors, et cetera. And the question was, "What is your biggest behavioral bias and how do you deal with it?" And a lot of my friends, you know, they said, you know, confirmation bias, survivorship bias, et cetera. And they went in these long, "And this is what I do to deal with it." And, and my answer was simple. "What is your biggest behavioral bias?" And I said, "Being a human being." And it said, "How do you solve for it?

• 50:10Speaker 00

  I'm a quant." So, does that leave out a lot? Am I leaving knowledge, potentially, that is not available to me as a quant? You bet I am. You bet I am. But the idea is, the trade-off, the base rate, if you will, directionally, is good. Because virtually all of the greatest meltdowns ever, and, boy, I've been around for a lot of them, take super, super smart people, give them leverage, basically unlimited leverage, and...

• 50:47Chris Williamson?

  Well, one of the, one of my favorite mental models or biases is to never multiply by zero. And, God, I try and tell the boys this all the time. I have about 500 guys and girls that work for me for my events company between the age of 18 and 22. And there are essentially an unlimited number of zeros to multiply by when you're that age. And, um... Just trying to highlight a couple of those texting while you drive. But tell me, tell me what you're gaining. What is the play stupid games, win stupid prizes, right? Like, what's the prize that you're getting for texting while you drive? Unprotected sex on a one night stand. But tell me, tell me, that's, that is a big fat zero that you're going to multiply there, my friend.

• 51:29Chris Williamson?

  You can have spent the last four years of your life saving up your money. You've got your mortgage deposit ready for the house. You're going to buy a house quicker than anybody else that you know. You're ready to move away. You've got the visas even sorted. You've got this perfect graduate job out in America. That's 100 times, 150 times, 2000 times. I just got someone pregnant and I'm 22 years old. That's an 18 year, that's an 18 year quarter of a million pound liability that you've just created there. Zero. You can spend all the time that you want in the gym, working on my body. I'm doing my nutrition. I'm sleeping right. I'm eating right. I'm drinking, I'm watching, I'm working hard on my form. I'm doing my prehab and my rehab. I'm rolling my body out. I decide to ride a bicycle without a helmet or I decide to text while I drive.

• 52:13Chris Williamson?

  If, if you're very dead, it doesn't matter how fit you are. That's a big fat zero. And yeah, this is one of the, the unknown catastrophes that we can encounter are inherently catastrophic. And it's, you don't see it until it happens and it's only with the benefit of hindsight. A good example of this, I ruptured my Achilles playing cricket last year. It was the first time that I'd played cricket in 10 years since I'd played for a, I'd played for a decade, took a decade off, went back, first game, went into bat, was in bat for 15 minutes, loving it. Dad was over the far side. Dad was great because he always used to come to the games. Ping Achilles goes. Ended up being not too bad of a thing, actually. Quite an interesting personal development strategy.

• 52:55Chris Williamson?

  But at the time, I just thought, you're a fucking idiot. Of course this is going to happen. You haven't, you haven't played a plyometricly demanding athletic sport in a decade. And you thought that at 32 years old, you would just be able to get back into it. And one of my friends said, One of the most common ways that he sees people get injured that in his friend group, our age group, is people that used to play a sport when they were a kid, getting back into it about 10 years later. So this is a public service announcement to everybody. Just do, do six weeks of training, condition yourself back into it. Do not think that you can do the things that you used to be able to do 10 years ago.

• 53:41Speaker 00

  Oh, man, I'm gonna just steal so much stuff from you. I love the never multiply by zero. That's fantastic.

• 53:48Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me. Before we finish up, I've got a couple of threads open in my mind. I really want you to try and how would you prepare for the reshuffling? You know, you have preppers out there, like the the doomsday preppers, you guys in America love them. And they've got their bunkers underground. The reshuffling is occurring. The talents which previously served us are no longer the ones that we can utilize in this world. That's basically what the reshuffling is talking about, right? That what used to be a competitive advantage no longer is. And in this new world, we need to have new modes of thinking. We need to have new skills. What would you do? I take 30 years off your life. What would you do now?

• 54:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. So what I would do is I would watch broadly and read broadly. Just like if I was going to even use a metric to decide what I wanted to read, I would find people that I resonated with on social media and I would, I would take their recommendations. And if they said, hey, read the beginning of infinity by David Deutsch, I would read that book. And I would, I, I would learn to be endlessly curious, because Dorothy Parker was an American wit, had a wonderful quote, which is curiosity is the cure for boredom.

• 55:16Speaker 00

  There is no cure for curiosity. And, and if you can, and I find that it becomes almost a habit. So if you start getting curious about something, that makes you curious about other things. And so on and so on. I use the John Cleese from Money Python and so on and so on gif when I'm doing it on Twitter. But activate your mind. And this sounds like pedestrian information, but I can't tell you how many people that I've given this advice to and they're like, "Really?" And I'm like, "Yeah, really." Like, university? That wasn't your education. That was a certification and a socialization

• 55:59Speaker 00

  process, which you probably benefited from, by the way. But now, now that you've articulated, now your education begins, right? And so, consume as much as you possibly can intellectually speaking. So, listen to your podcast, listen to mine, listen to somebody who, like, listen to Sam Harris. Because you learn by listening to Chris's podcast that Sam Harris is an honest broker because he's at risk. "Oh, that's interesting. I think I'm gonna subscribe to Sam Harris." And I'm gonna listen. I subscribe, by the way. And, and so, the second thing,

• 56:38Speaker 00

  keep, this is so hard, don't become prematurely certain, right? Everybody just see it immediately, like, they see one thing about whatever, one of the issues we were discussing. And, and I'm certain that this is right. No, you're not. No, you're not. And, and that leads to what I call deterministic thinkers, right? So, we're deterministic thinkers living in a probabilistic world. That world just got a fuck-ton more probabilistic because we now, it's a universe, right? And I get to, I get to talk to Chris and say, "Hey,

• 57:23Speaker 00

  I'm looking for somebody in the UK because I want to do this." And you got, I got, right, I got just the guy for you. I Skype with him, I give him the job, it's done because you showed me the, you recommended him, you see his record. So, so the idea that, that you need, or even want, in a weird way, some imperator from an institution.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  That's going away and your imperator is you, right? So, so I would do that. I would really, if you took 30 years off me, I would learn how to program. Because that is such an amazing skill. And elite programmers, which I know a lot about now because of what we're doing in OSM and friends and things, man, it is, it's a, it's a power law. It's not, it's not like an arithmetic thing. When, when you are 10 times better in programming than this guy down here, you can't even begin, you're not even talking about the same universe.

• 58:35Chris Williamson?

  Are you talking about capacity to make money, ability to see the world, happiness? What are you optimizing for here?

• 58:43Speaker 00

  Well, so what I optimize for is knowledge. Because, and, and by that I mean, the whole happiness thing, that always has made me shake my head because I can't figure it out. I think that chasing happiness as an end goal doesn't work. What makes you happy is being able, in my opinion, could be wrong, but being able to do what you want to do, what animates you, when you want to do it, how you want to do it, and basically being able to do that.

• 59:25Chris Williamson?

  Do you know how close, do you know how close that is to Morgan Housel's description of what wealth is?

• 59:31Speaker 00

  So, so Morgan's a good friend of mine, disclosure. I, I do know how.

• 59:37Chris Williamson?

  Do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, and no one can tell you otherwise. That's his description of wealth.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  Bingo, and he's right. He's absolutely right. That's why his book, I recommend The Psychology of Money, fantastic book, because he understands what wealth really is. And, and so many people, especially in the United States, but. Also, the UK, it's a little different. It's certainly much different in some Asian. I travel a lot. So I've been to, you know, Bhutan, and I've been to Nepal. And I think it's great because I, I think the more you learn, the better. See, what am I optimizing for? I'm optimizing for learning.

• 1:00:16Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  And, and, and if you optimize for that, the rest kind of takes care of itself. And by that, I mean, so I'm an asset manager. I've been an asset manager since I was 27 years old. So I've been a, I've been a fiduciary all my life, all my adult life. Chris, I honestly can count on one hand, the number of people who I met, whose money we managed, whose goal was to make a lot of money.

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  Not even five, it's actually four. And I remember each one of them. Because guess what? They are fucking miserable. And, and they just, they never have enough, and they always want more than the next guy. And they're covetous, and they're jealous, and they're envious. And those are the most destructive sins because you can't have any fun with them. I mean, at least gluttony and then you're going to enjoy it, right? So, so everyone else, other than those four, everyone else became rich by doing something that fascinated them. Or that they were really good at. So, you know, we have some, from some professional sports people.

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  They were just so good at it. They were optimized for it. And, you know, they were built for it. They lovely gene structure, right? But they, they pursued it. They, they didn't make that rookie mistake that you made.

• 1:01:45Chris Williamson?

  Multiply by zero, yeah.

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, they were like, oh, no, no, no, been injured, not going to do that. So, so, but every one of them, and they come from a wide variety of fields. They were obsessed, almost, with something.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  And they just wouldn't give it, they wouldn't give up. They just kept going, they kept going, they kept going. And guess what? As a side effect of that, they were like some of the happiest people I've ever met in my life. It's like, I'm a very cheerful person, you know, despite Jed McKenna, because I kind of get to do whatever the fuck I want to do. And that's wonderful.

• 1:02:27Chris Williamson?

  Here's something for you. Here's something for you. I want to interject there. A lot of the time when I speak to people, um, I see a combination of a number of different things happening, survivorship bias and, and um, a narrow worldview from people who sit in a position, perhaps where you are now, where you have degrees of freedom, wealth, generally lack of boss, headroom above you to do the things you want, et cetera, et cetera. And I often wonder about whether or not their advice, how applicable their advice is to people who are before them, right? Because the person who has the things can talk about the model

• 1:03:05Chris Williamson?

  that they think should be pursued. But hang on a second, is that how you got to where you are now? Is that the way that you went through that? What are your sort of thoughts around this? Is there a period, is there a grind reel that people need to go through between sort of 20 and 40, something like that?

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  So again, really great question. I'm going to be stealing a lot of your questions and when I have people on my podcast. Um, so yes, there is a grind period. But to answer your question, I did things in a very unorthodox way. I started O'Shaughnessy Capital Management without any backers. And I believe that if I got this book, it's what works on Wall Street is propping up my computer here. If I got this book published, that would make my career. So I, I was, I, I like locked on to that. How can I make that so?

• 1:04:02Speaker 00

  Um, and that's a fun story and it required a lot more than you might think. But to people looking outside at me in say the ages between 27 and say 45, they would have said, man, Jim's not just a grinder. That's all he's doing. He's just grind, grind, grind, man. He's on a plane all the time. I don't want that life. That's awful. You know, to me. It was like I was doing what I loved. And, and so I think you need to, you need to look at what is the, what is the platform on which we are viewing this individual? Are we viewing them from the outside?

• 1:04:46Speaker 00

  Do we understand that what looks like a super bad grind to us is actually like sparking joy in them?

• 1:04:54Chris Williamson?

  Dude, let me tell you, you brought Tim Cook up earlier on. I was sat down with one of the head branding guys for Apple in the UK. It was the first, we've been shut down for ages. It was the first lunch that I had in like six months that wasn't made by me. And we sat down and he was telling me this story about, about Tim and he was at this private, super triple A level and above employee seminar thing out in America. And Tim's giving this, Tim's giving this talk. And someone asked a question to do with

• 1:05:29Chris Williamson?

  the passion, should I follow what I really love? Should I do what feels fun to me? I'm trying to do that, but the work, the work is hard. I, I, I thought that following your passion was supposed to be easy. And Tim said, no, no, no. Following your passion will be the hardest thing that you will do in your life. He said, you will have to lift the heaviest weight that you have ever lifted, but the tools will feel light.

• 1:06:01Speaker 00

  Wonderful. Wonderful. Tim is absolutely right. It's so funny, you know, I'm feeling Jungian, Jungian synchronicities here because we were having this conversation last night about, with my wife, about, you know, why Apple, why, why, why do I still think Apple's great? And I said, because it's a whole different deal. Tim Cook's.

• 1:06:25Speaker 00

  Tools have to be, by necessity, they're different than Steve Jobs' tools. And I so vibe with that statement because it's true. I mean, listen, Chris, I worked crazy hours. Here's another one that I often say, and I can tell by just looking at the person. I know you'll get it because you, this is the kind of guy you are. But think like an owner. If you can think like an owner as opposed to an employee, you retain, you just naturally retain much more agency within yourself. You retain much more responsibility within yourself.

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  You don't blame other people's when you fuck up. You fucked up. And that's the other thing that I tell people who are kind of afraid to fail. I do not know, including these four miserable fucks who only wanted to be rich. I do not know a single person who is rich, who didn't fail, sometimes spectacularly. And it was all in how they reacted to that. So I, I mean, I have a whole list, right? I, I, I put it up sometimes, mistakes were made and yes by me.

• 1:07:49Speaker 00

  And the way I look at it is, I learned so much from those failures that I couldn't have gone to the next level of where I went in my career without learning that. Right? So think like an owner. It's hard for people to think that way because it just is. But the, the, the quote from Tim Cook is absolutely right.

• 1:08:18Speaker 00

  What looks and feels at the time like, you know, sometimes, and we're all human beings, right? Sometimes when you're sitting in a hotel, I remember I had to do an actual book tour for my third book, How to Retire Rich, which, by the way, was the only book that I wrote for a general audience. And I was on Oprah Winfrey for it, and that was a trip. And anyway, but this, the grind was like deadly. It was like morning, you gave a talk and breakfast, and then you did a talk at a lunch, and then you did TV, and then you got on a plane and went to the next market. Insane. Like, that mentality, that was 1997. My miracle year, as Trent Griffith

• 1:08:59Speaker 00

  would say. And, and so, at the end, I'm like, okay, I just, I, I don't think I can eat another powdered egg. I, you know, I, I just, I just can't. But then I would just like rev myself up because I'm like, I would just remind myself, dude, you were just on Oprah Winfrey, man. You have women coming up to you in airports going, are you Jim O'Shaughnessy? And that's cool. That's cool. And so, looking from without, there was a lot of woe is me. Oh, I'm not home. And, you know, I came home every weekend because my kids were young, and I wanted to see my kids. And that was a deal breaker for me. And so, other people would say, well, but that just added to it. No.

• 1:09:45Speaker 00

  Get, when you are doing that grind, when you are lifting that heavy weight, and the tools are light, one of the things you've got to think about, too, is you can put provisos and Q24s, if we're going to get legalistic in here, into your own game plan. One of my provisos was, I don't care where I am on this three-week national tour and Canada, I am going to be home Friday afternoon, get my kids at school, spend the weekend with them, fly outside at night. And it was that hard on me? Sure, maybe. I was probably in a beautiful place like Whistler in Canada, and maybe I just wanted to hang.

• 1:10:28Speaker 00

  But it was more important that I had that built in to the deal, because that was more important to me. And, and so I can hear somebody right now listening and saying, "Whoa, fuck", you know, "I work for whatever, Lloyds or..." And, you know, "They, uh, they have this social media, they, I have to be anonymous." Okay, be anonymous. Doesn't matter. Jesse Livermore, one of the most brilliant guys in markets that I have never met, he's an OSAM partner, uses our data, writes these incredible pieces. I had a guy call me from, um, uh, one of the most prestigious universities in the United States,

• 1:11:09Speaker 00

  and he was like, "Dude, will you tell that guy that if he's gonna do that again, to submit an application for a PhD in finance, and he'll get it?"

• 1:11:20Speaker 00

  With that, with, that would be his thesis. He's anonymous. Nobody knows who he is. And now we're coming full circle back to this new age, right? Quality of Jesse's work is everything. You can, and the other thing that's interesting about, uh, being anonymous is remember that messenger, messin', uh, hating the messenger and, and so therefore hating the message? They, if you hate him, you don't hate him, because you don't have any idea who the hell he is, but you hate his message. Okay, that's fine, that's fair game. But, so, the last thing I would say is,

• 1:12:04Speaker 00

  don't spend, if, I'm a huge fan of writing with your hand. There's, there's reasons for why this works.

• 1:12:13Chris Williamson?

  And you're a lefty too.

• 1:12:15Speaker 00

  I am, yes. And...

• 1:12:18Speaker 00

  So if you want to know the fastest way to know whether you know something or not, try to write it out. Because if you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, it will show up on the page and you'll be like, "Oh, I thought I knew this." No, you didn't know it. And so like another thing that I do is I recommend that. Like people come to me and they're like, "How do I do this? Like I have all of these liabilities or these perceptions of a ceiling." And I'm like, "Perception is reality, man." If you believe, and I cannot tell you the number of people that I've worked with on this and the ones that got it soared, right?

• 1:13:03Speaker 00

  They put themselves in their own prison of their beliefs, right? And it's hard to come up with an escape plan if you don't know you're in jail. And so when you work with them and you have them write things out, they're like, "I can't believe I just wrote this down that I believe this. This is like bullshit. Why would I ever believe this?"

• 1:13:28Speaker 00

  So, so write. Write about what you want to be. Write about how you get there. Is everyone going to make it? No. I mean, that's the way the world works. And, and you know, the other thing, finally, retain your agency.

• 1:13:47Speaker 00

  Timothy Leary, who was vilified in this country, the perfect scapegoat. He actually was a very brilliant professor at Harvard, but he also kind of like Isaac Newton, liked the limelight. He liked the people talking about him. And so Nixon was like, "Oh, I'm going to make all of those non-addictive drugs, class one, and you're going to go to Fed Max for using them." And finally, that bit of ridiculousness is going away and they're finding miraculous recoveries from like PTSD and everything else. Anyway, Leary was a psychologist who was actually pretty gifted. And, and so he said, "We get imprinted at a certain age

• 1:14:32Speaker 00

  and it's very difficult to undo that imprint later on." As you might guess, Leary suggested that LSD might be a very good agent to help you iron print. And actually, they're finding that in the research they're doing, particularly with veterans with PTSD. Miraculous recoveries. And how any sane individual could be against this, I just don't know. These people like literally tried to kill themselves. But, but so what he said was, you get imprinted with a loser script or a winner script. The loser script, what do they do? Chris, it's your fault. It's, let's, let's say I suck at this podcast. And, and people

• 1:15:14Speaker 00

  are laughing and Jim had an off day, you know, he was pretty stupid. The loser script is, that was Chris's fault. And I, it was because of Skype. I didn't like Skype. I like Zoom. And, and I was hungry. And you're just going to see this laundry list, everything but me. That's a loser script. And if you can figure that out, and there are ways, by the way, to reverse that. And, and if you maintain your agency is the easiest way I've found, which means you got to own it. You can own the success, but you also got to

• 1:15:54Speaker 00

  own the total, total snafu. And, and when you do that, it's uncomfortable. And it's like Teddy Roosevelt, one of our presidents, had this great thing about the man in the arena. Now, we would say the human being or the man or the woman in the arena. And it's scary as hell, honestly. I'm, I just subscribed to a friend, he finally decided he's going to write for Substack and charge people. And so I'm DMing with him on Twitter, and he's like, I am terrified that I'm going to fail. And I'm like, dude. You took the first step, which takes a lot of courage. Just to keep leaning into it now.

• 1:16:35Speaker 00

  Like, I'll amplify you, I'll say, "Guess what? I just subscribed to, and I think you should too." Um, and, and so, I'm not, I'm not saying that this is easy. It's not. I mean, it'd be great, right? If, like, what, what's the joke, the meme about, uh, you know, uh, get money, uh, make it a zillion, bro down, you know, sell it? That's not the way the world works, man. And, you know, you're an entrepreneur, you know that. And, and like, my old joke was, "I would be perfect if I didn't ever have to employ or deal with another human being."

• 1:17:18Speaker 00

  Including me, by the way.

• 1:17:23Chris Williamson?

  Man, there's so much there at the very end. I'm trying to, I'm trying to sort of wrangle it all together. We're finite creatures surrounded by infinite complexity. So it makes sense that you're going to be scared. It makes sense that you're going to be concerned of things because inevitably you're in a battle against entropy that you can't win. In the end, entropy is going to win out. But my Twitter bio is correct. We locally reverse it. We locally reverse entropy. Talking about writing, the importance of writing, forcing your thoughts into words. When you have something that's in your head, if you don't have an outlet, like a podcast, or a friend that you can have a deep, meaningful conversation with for 30 minutes, once every week, which is a prescription I give, or a journal practice, morning pages, or whatever it is.

• 1:18:09Chris Williamson?

  If you don't have that, all of your thoughts are just notions. They're these ephemeral clouds and you can't grasp them, they're not concrete. And if reading 1984 taught us anything, it's that the quality of your language is directly proportional to the quality of your thoughts. Because without the words to describe the things you're thinking, the things you're thinking stay inside of your own head. And you don't even understand them in terms of the concrete for yourself. So that's important as well.

• 1:18:39Chris Williamson?

  Talking about taking the leap and just sort of jumping and learning to fly on the way down, I'm someone, I haven't had a massive amount of failures. I'm prudent, I'm a very, very prudent businessman. The way that I make my entrepreneurial decisions always is towards the side of caution. And I think I have something to learn there. I'm not really too sure what it is yet. I feel like I have something to learn, some sort of insight to learn around failing or around pushing harder, failing faster. I'm not really too sure what that is yet. But man, this, we could go on for forever and ever. And we will do it again. It's been too long to get you booked in, but I won't make it this long for the next one.

• 1:19:23Chris Williamson?

  Infinite Loops podcast. What else should people check out?

• 1:19:26Speaker 00

  Podcast, check out OSAM, Oscar Sam Adam Mary.com. That's where all of these research pieces that we do have a home. Check out Canvas. You can get to it through OSAM. We didn't even talk about that. And that's the way the world's going. We're in the fast lane of asset management, and we got a Maserati. And it's unbelievable watching this explosive growth. It's customization. And if you've ever had a bespoke suit, you don't want to buy one off the rack anymore.

• 1:20:08Speaker 00

  So that's a whole different conversation. We could do an entire podcast about that, because that's what we see coming. And once you, once you understand that you can get treated like you're on Savile Row, but you're paying Joseph A. Banks prices, that's a pretty nice deal. So check out Canvas when you're there. That's interesting. And then my son, Patrick, he has like, so he has an enterprise that I have nothing to do with. Colossus, it's called. It's all his. He came up with it. He's killing it over there. But the reason I suggest it is

• 1:20:50Speaker 00

  What it's becoming is like, if you want to know about, you fill it in. You go over to Colossus, you type your search term in, whoop, up come any podcast where there's a domain expert on it, up come the transcript, up come, we think you should read this. I said to him the other night at dinner, you're chasing all the MBA programs out, right? Here's another digital world, right? Because the leverage that is inherent in that, especially for young people, go over to colossus.com and I'm sure you have some kind of passion. Guess what?

• 1:21:31Speaker 00

  There's going to be a domain expert who is really compelling and what to read. So check that out too.

• 1:21:39Chris Williamson?

  Jim O'Shaughnessy, ladies and gentlemen, I will catch you next time.

• 1:21:42Speaker 00

  Cheers. Thanks, Chris. This was great.

• 1:21:45Speaker 03

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:21:55Speaker 04

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:22:02Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:22:06Speaker 04

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:22:09Speaker 02

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:22:11Speaker 04

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.