A Bit of Optimism - High Performance with Divesh Makan

Episode Date: January 24, 2023

Divesh is one of the most connected people I know. Charming and opinionated, he advises and invests the fortunes of the most successful and wealthiest people on the planet.  So I wanted to ask him what he's learned along the way and what we can learn from him.This is... A Bit of Optimism.For more on Divesh and his work check out: https://www.iconiqcapital.com/ 

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Well, they turn to Devesh Makan. problems? Well, they turned to Devesh Makan. Devesh is the founder of Iconic Capital, a wealth management and investment company with over $80 billion under management. And his clients are some of the richest, most powerful people in the world. So I sat down with Devesh to find out the kind of advice he gives, the things he has learned from these remarkable, high-performing human beings, and most important, what we can learn from him. And the result is surprisingly human. This is a bit of optimism. To be frank, the reason I wanted to talk to you is because I absolutely love the way you view the world. And every time I talk to you, I learn something new, quite frankly,

about how I should view the world. I just want to go on a journey with you and pick your brain about all kinds of random subjects that may or may not be connected. No, Simon, I'd love that. You know, I will tell you one of my joys, especially of last year, where you and I got to spend lots of time together, dinners, conferences, where we didn't

go to the conference itself, but we had our own little mini conference. One of the highlights was the framework you challenge on everything I think. You make me revisit my own frameworks. I live my life by frameworks. When I get challenged by them, by people who actually have a very solid case for why it's worth doing something different, or I'm not seeing the world in the same way or different way, it's an awesome place to be. So thank you. Well, I appreciate that. And I think the feeling is mutual. That's a great place to start. When you say you live your life by frameworks, what does that mean? So Simon, I found that, you know that as I meandered through my career,

there were different points in time I realized that I'm one of those people that don't need to be motivated. I'm self-motivating. I'm regimented in the way I approach things. So I don't need to be motivated to do my workouts, whatever else it is. So the way I found that I do that ultimately comes down to how I try to live my life. And I try to think of very consistent ways where I don't waste time or I maximize an experience. If I think of the two buckets of my life, experiences and effective work around how I do things. And what I found is if I have frameworks on what I will tolerate and what I won't tolerate, I'll give you an example. I was given some feedback that

people could never get in my calendar, which is odd because that shouldn't be the case for people I want to see. All of us have busy calendars. So I got some good advice, which I now implemented into a framework is once every couple of weeks, I'll go through my calendar and look at the worst 10% of meetings that I had. And I try to understand why is it the meetings were the worst 10%? Was something specific people said? Was it I wasn't prepared? Were the meetings just ones that I caved in after being asked 83 times for? But I wanted to get to a place where I understood why I was compromising for that bottom 10%

in the hopes that I don't compromise. And I try to do this across the way. Once every quarter, I go through my calendar by buckets. Where do I spend internal time, external time, client time, endowment time, whatever else it is, how am I spending that time? And what is it that I'm learning? And what impact did I have on the people that I'm touching? But that's a framework as an example. That's genius. Because I think what we all do, I'm guilty of this as well, is we say, I want this. And we look forward to the thing we want. And invariably it fails because what we don't do is go back and say, well, there's no reason I shouldn't have been doing this in the past. Why wasn't I? For example, I mean, let's take going

to the gym. We all do this. We all say next year, I'm going to go to the gym on a regular basis. But what we don't do is look backwards and say, why wasn't I going to the gym all last year? Was it a time constraint? Was it a motivation constraint? Was it that I didn't like the person I went to the gym with? And to learn from the reasons things weren't working to make things in the future work better, which is, if we think about it, just damn common sense. In the Air Force, every time they fly a mission, they have something called a hot wash, where they evaluate the mission that they just flew so that they don't make the same mistakes and do things better next time. Genius. Well, Simon, it's interesting because

I hear you talk about this all the time, inherently inherently in your day job. You always told me that you don't actually love reading books, but the way you get to read, for lack of a better word, and spend time with people is to talk to them and converse with them. And then from that comes out something. So in many ways, I feel like you do a very similar thing with how you interact with everyone, except you take it in soundbites and you'll always start a question with, imagine if, tell me more about that. The words you use open up a dialogue. And I think that's a framework I've tried to incorporate in my day job. How do I

change the way I ask a question? Because so much about how you ask the question leads to an answer that you may or may not want to hear. It's so interesting when you talk about the fact that I don't read and it's true. I have pretty bad ADHD and it's affected me my whole life. And I love the idea of reading, but I struggle to read. And that shocks people because they think I've read every book. I carried a lot of shame for many years about this because I'm expected to be this reader. But you're absolutely right, which is because I struggle to read in school, instead of saying, force myself to read,, instead of saying, force myself to read, force myself to read, force myself to read, and it constantly failing, I went backwards.

It's exactly what happened. The classes that I do well in school, why do I do well in those classes? It's because I've established a relationship with the teacher. And I go after class and I talk to the teacher if I don't understand something. And I have friends who are smart in those subjects, and I ask them to explain things to me. And I have friends who are smart in those subjects. And I asked them to explain things to me. And I realized I do well in these classes by talking to people. So I talk to people in all of my classes, I'll do better at school. And that's exactly what happened. I never realized that that was a framework, but that's so true. I have to go there because we can't avoid it. You are the most well-connected person I know that no one's ever heard of.

I know that you avoid the limelight. I know that you avoid interviews. I'm immensely grateful that you showed up here. And because you serve some of the most recognized and some of the wealthiest people in the world, you have formed intimate relationships with them and they have opened up to you. Have you found patterns in these very, very, very high performers, the highest performing people in our societies? Have you found either patterns of motivation or patterns of fear or patterns of insecurity that every time you stumble upon that realization, you're surprised that, oh my goodness, that person also has this

thing. First off, I'll say when I thought of myself in many ways is I realized that I didn't have to have all the answers. A lot of my job, I describe it as that I'm a mosaic of a bunch of great people asking me at any point a particular idea or a theme or a mannerism, and I can probably tell you where I picked it up from. Because I noticed it with someone like, wow, that was brilliant. The way you did that, the way you opened up that dialogue, the way you made that person feel, let me remember that. And I would build it up into me.

Like, hey, let me make it into my version of that version of what you did. So one is this idea of being a mosaic, which means that you never stop evolving. I don't ever feel like I've hit a pinnacle of anything. I'm always learning. And I don't care who I'm learning from. I don't care if it's the waiter, all the way across to some high profile CEO in some country. I'm always learning and I'm always looking to learn. So the thing that ultimately approaching your life with a mosaic is I don't walk in there with a particular agenda. I'm often sitting down with a person to talk about what's on their mind. And the secret is how do you get them to share what's on their mind, not what they're going to

tell you, but what's truly on their mind. And it starts off by treating them like a peer. And in many ways, you know, a CEO's job is a very lonely job because everyone above you, your board, you work for, and everyone below you works for you. So suddenly you're sitting in a very lonely place where the only friends that you get to have are the ones you made when you were eight, right? Because clearly, making friends now when you're a famous person is much harder. You have your spouse and your family around you, of course. And then you find a few business friends you've made over the course of time,

but even those are very limited number. So I find that what we can provide in many ways is just a perspective in the situation that they're in. And a lot of what I sense with that fear or that challenge or that problem is when they truly get to the question behind the question. It's never the question they're asking you. There's always a reason for that question. Yeah. People who are famous and people who are wealthy, they all go through and some of them still sit in what I would call a crisis of trust, which is when you reach a certain point in

your career, you start to realize, and you don't have to be mega wealthy or mega famous for this, even in a company, as you start getting promoted, you start to realize that your jokes are funnier and people are nicer to you. And you start to feel that people want something from you. And celebrities and wealthy people have their guards up because the assumption is you're talking to me and you're friendly with me because you want something from me. You want access, you want money. I'm just a resource to you. So they all generally have their guards up. Why is it that they break down their guards so quickly for you after one meeting or two meetings? And why should they trust you?

No, they trusted Bernie Madoff. And they trusted all of these folks who end up screwing them. And there's a very good reason they should be cynical. Why is it that they do trust you? I don't have perfect answers here, but I'll share maybe a few. Some of the things that I've noticed, people treat you differently in that scenario. You don't treat them like a peer, which means you don't talk to them like a peer. You don't get to tell them, I don't understand.

That doesn't make any sense. Or can you explain this a little more clearly? Because I don't know whether I agree with that. Those sorts of phrases are very challenging for people to say when you're sitting opposite someone who is very famous, very successful, celebrity, whatever the version is. it's someone who is very famous, very successful, celebrity, whatever the version is. Also, I think that in many ways, when I'm showing up in a meeting, a lot of my job is to be the resident expert in that particular topic. So what I have is perspective. And I'm not shy of sharing that perspective. You'll tell me yours, and I'll share with you why I agree or disagree, and some other ways to think about it. Okay, that's great. Have you thought about A, B, and C? And by the way, here's why A, B, and C have

worked in other scenarios. Tell me more about this here. And often I'll take very quickly a mix of business and personal into one. You know, when I got to the US, people gave me some advice, don't mix business with pleasure. Don't mix politics with work. And my point of view, I don't know I think about that I just think about having a conversation and it's going to get purple and it's going to get work in one because I don't believe you can disaggregate the two of them you know when I talk about my family I talk about my kids what I do with them I talk about my wife and the argument we have because I'm not around as much very reasonable dialogue and what I need to do to

get better at that at the same time I talk about the way that my wife influences a lot of my thinking and will share with me a perspective. So I think Simon, it's bringing your whole self to work and not being shy about saying what you think without feeling the burden of, oh my God, I need to impress you because I'm not trying to impress you. I'm trying to share with you perspective. And I think people don't get enough of that because the air gets thinner and thinner around them the more famous they get. The ideas are bubbling.

You know, what I find interesting about the peer conversation is, so here's the analogy. Little kids love me, right? One of the reasons I think that they love me is I don't treat them like little kids. I'm not like, who's a big boy? You know, I'm just like, hey, bud, what's up? You know, I talk to them as if they're my age. And it's very strange how kids respond to that.

Treating somebody like a peer doesn't mean putting yourself on their level artificially or bringing them down to your level. It just means I'm going to talk to you as if I'm me, and you're going to talk to me as if you're you. We're both going to put all the stupidity and the errors aside. So I think that's such a fascinating concept, what it means to treat someone like a peer. With our friends, if we have an opinion, you go, I'm not so sure. When we're with somebody who we're intimidated by, and we disagree, we go, well, maybe, as opposed to saying, I don't know, I'm not so sure and engage in that conversation, as you said, as a peer, but a peer doesn't mean equal in accomplishment or position. It means I'm me, you're you, we're both going to show up as the best of ourselves. It's interesting you say this, because I'm going to go back to one of the things you said earlier,

which is people worked with Bernie Madoff. What happened? And I didn't know Bernie Madoff. I read a bunch of books about him, of course, after the fact. Trying to understand the psyche of what made people make those decisions. I've actually talked to people who've met him subsequently and asked them, well, why did you do this? And it wasn't because they liked him,

because he wasn't that likable of a character. Not that he was rude, he just wasn't socially warm, right? So there wasn't that. They didn't trust him because trust is about a repeated behavior over and over again. They may have said, I trust him, but they don't know what that means. But they thought he was smart, right? Clearly, there was something there in their dialogue that led them to believe that he was smart. But when I pushed a little more, it often came because it was about scarcity. He made them feel like what they had with him was scarcity, scarcity of his time, scarcity of the product that he was selling. And that got to the second point.

I said, well, did anyone ever do any basic diligence? It was sounds good. Great. Johnny's in. I'll do the same thing. And Simon, where I go with this is, there was a boss of mine a long time ago, and he told me something which I didn't want to hear. And it started off because when I graduated from Wharton, there was a professor, his name was Mike Youseem. And Mike Youseem, he ran the ethics and leadership course for us there. And Mike made a comment to me. It still stuck with me because most of what I learned in business school didn't stick with me. This stuck with me.

He said, all of you are going to graduate very soon. And all of you are trying to find the most quantitative, deep technical job in the world because you feel like that's what you should do coming from one. And let me tell you, in talking to CEOs who are five years, 10 years, 15 years, 25, so on and so forth, he went up to 50 years out of school. Let me tell you, and he showed us a grid of what they value. And ultimately what it came down to is relationships, sales, and management of people. It wasn't how quick you could run your model, how good you are in Excel, how fast you are with your HP calculator,

how fast your mental math brain was. And all of us heard that. And then we went back and still looked for the most quantitative job we could find because that's what people did. It's how you felt great about yourself. But where that whole thing went is he made this comment. I remember that. Even I sort of ignore that because it's hard to want to do a job that didn't have that in it.

It's not what you graduated from Wharton to do. But probably two years into my job at Goldman, and my boss at the time has a little conversation with a handful of us. And he says, let me tell you something you don't want to hear. So I said, okay. And he says, people make decisions to work with people, whether it's investment banking, whether it's private equity, it doesn't matter what you do in finance or anything in life. People make decisions to work with you for three reasons. Number one, I like you. Number two, I think I trust you. And number three is I think you're smart. But he says, that's the order.

So all of you guys are trying to prove to me how smart you are. It doesn't matter if I think you're a jackass. It doesn't matter if I don't feel like what you're telling me has truth in it where I don't believe I can trust you. And then three, okay, you've got to be smart enough. But the smartest guy isn't the guy that I'm going to hire. That's not the way I make decisions. And Simon, I've never forgotten that. I've always thought about that. Yeah. And his business model was FOMO. He dealt in FOMO. When people did question him, he goes, so don't invest with me then. He was an asshole.

It can be in two forms, right? It can either be insecurity or it can be greed and ego. And either one of those will motivate us to work with people who we don't actually trust, we don't actually understand, but we'll do it out of fear or we'll do it out of greed. And ultimately, it's going to backfire. And to your point, the idea of being yourself and being transparent is you're not making anybody have to make a decision based on insecurity or out of ego, but rather, I trust you and I like you, to your point, or I like you and I trust you, in that order.

Along the same lines, we spent a lot of time looking at Elizabeth Holmes' company, the company that measures your blood with a drop of rice. So we went to meet the team. As a team, we met with that company nine times, maybe just 10. I'd gone to three of them, sort of nine, 10 meetings. And there were a bunch of things we ticked off. Good story, good market, good problem you're solving. Amazing if you could pull this off. But one part of the work we required, and we told them in the first meeting is, we are not experts in healthcare, especially within the lab world. So we're going to hire

a consultant to come do the work on the machine, which is the one that we don't know anything about. Right. She said in the meeting, absolutely, no problem. I was in the first meeting. So the fifth meeting, which I go to, the team is like, I don't get it. We've got all this stuff. They've given us all the information. We've talked to some of the customers.

But the last piece would be this diligence piece which they just won't engage on she says yes in the meetings but when we respond asking who do we connect our consultant we've hired from a lab corp or whatever the version was to do the diligence on your product on your machine they go right no silent and ultimately after nine meetings they just would not engage two rounds had happened since then. And we just couldn't get there, not because we were smart. We didn't know it was a fraud, not by any stretch of the imagination. What we did know is that the final check for us, which was required us to do some work with a consultant who could understand the machines, just could never get done.

Yeah. And that's why we ended up not doing that investment. Why I share that with you is that that's often in my world, a place where people struggle, where they'll do the things they're supposed to do. But sometimes they'll short circuit because they've asked, they won't get an answer. They want to follow the CEO. They believe in where this is going, but they aren't comfortable saying to the CEO directly, look, I've asked you for this. This is a deal breaker for us. I'm okay if you say no, but you have to be okay if I say no, but this is what's required. And Simon, in our world, I find less of that today than it used to be maybe 15 years ago.

Let me change tacks on you. You skillfully avoided a question I asked before, which is all these people you meet, are you starting to notice patterns? I'll share one, which is some of the very successful, highly regarded people that I've met, they've started opening up to me multiple things. One is they're bored, which I find fascinating because they're so good at what they do, it doesn't challenge them anymore. And that boredom, it affects their self-worth because they're just on repeat. And that's not what made them who they are. What made them who they are was figuring out a solution to a problem,

and now it's just put on repeat. That's number one. The other one, which I find even more fascinating, especially when somebody has been in a single industry for 20 or 30 years, is they have conflated, they have confused their work with their identity. And they know they're bored and they know the solution is to step away and do something new and different, but they're absolutely petrified because I am this, and if I don't do this, then who am I? I am this CEO, or I am the expert in this, or I am this famous person for this. And if I don't do that, then I'm nobody or I'm nothing. And you see this with CEOs who retire. They've been at the company for 30 years. They've been the CEO for a bunch of years. And they retire. And they have an identity crisis because their entire self-worth was tied to their job, not to who they are.

And I'm surprised how often this pattern comes up in highly successful people. You know, Simon, it's interesting. I think those are probably the two most important things. And maybe I'll share a few spins on it from the way I see it. On your first one, which is a fascinating and very common problem, maybe I'll paraphrase it in my world a little differently. When you were starting a company up, Simon, you started your company up, it was you with a bunch of ideas and you didn't know what was going to work. You had nothing to

defend. You had nothing to protect because you had nothing to lose. You were just sitting at home doing this thing in your head. And ultimately, every CEO, every founder does the same thing. But as the company grows more and more, they have to operate the company. And there's a couple of factors. One is the world expects you to behave a certain way and expects you to do certain things if you are a great CEO. When in many ways, sometimes you don't like those things. Like with its Steve Jobs hiring, you know, Tim Cook as his number two, because he didn't love operations. Well, maybe the world views a real CEO as someone who can operate the company themselves.

Maybe they don't, right? So one is this idea of what the world perceives you to be. But the second one, and the one that I see most of is, as your job becomes more and more significant, as your name becomes more significant, your role becomes more significant, your time for stimuli goes smaller and smaller and smaller to the point where you are only doing the things that your job entails. So suddenly, what typically I find, and it splits into two buckets, one is boredom, which is actually probably four clicks down.

You don't get to the word boredom. They would never use the word boredom. Yeah, yeah. I feel like I'm doing the same thing over and over again. Simon, I think as we all become more and more famous in our career, we end up cutting off stimuli around us where you can learn. Where do you find that young mind, that crazy idea that you could provide perspective to? Or maybe you can do the next version. You can iterate yourself to the next thing. I believe

that's why companies also struggle. To innovate is really hard because the innovative voice gets killed way before it gets to your CEO. And your CEO would never meet someone with a crazy idea because in your mind, I don't have time for that. So Simon, the first thing I find is that. The second ends up being, you know, back to your concept here is the number of people around you becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. One is trust, two is time, and three is I believe what I'm doing is what people believe me to be the person behind, right? Back to your concept on your second idea, which is, I am my job, my job is me. It's a real problem because you're already good at your job. And men in particular, I find are way worse than women. Women are forced to have multiple

personalities, multiple styles of operating it. You're a mom, you're a spouse, you're a CEO. I remember talking to one of my board members and she was two minutes late for a Zoom with me, runs a very significant public company. And I said, hi, how are you? And we were small chatting. I said, oh, she said, I'm so sorry I'm late. I said, oh, I'm short of something significant. She goes, no, no, no. The laundry ran long and I had to change it out. And I'm talking to one of the most powerful women CEOs in the world. She's telling me she's doing laundry on a weekday on Zoom. And that's why she was late. She had to change it out. I don't think I've ever met a man that'll tell me, I'm so sorry I'm late because I was doing some menial task. It's just not what men do. I was doing something important,

clearly, even though they were picking their nose, doing something useless, they would never say that. So I think women are better at this than men are. Men in particular tie the identity very strongly. And I think that's what I see a lot of. I wrote a note here and I can't read my own handwriting. Oh, I remember what I was going to say. I wrote a note here and I can't read my own handwriting. Oh, I remember what I was going to say.

You talked about how they lose their stimuli and the inspirational creativity parts of our brain aren't getting excited. And I think about how technology is actually supporting that lack of stimuli. For example, I used to read the newspaper or a news magazine, like Newsweek, for example, and I used to buy the newspaper or buy the magazine and I'd sit there and I'd leaf through it. And I'd obviously read the stories that were interesting to me. I would obviously ignore the stories that weren't interesting to me. But invariably, I would stumble upon something that I would never go looking for, but it was curiosity inducing and I would read it. In other words, there was serendipity. There was serendipity in a newspaper and serendipity in a magazine. And now everything

is so hyper curated for us. We're going to give you the news that interests you, which is true. And all my news feeds do give me the news that I'm interested in, but there's no more serendipity. I'm not learning anything outside of my own blinders because there's no mechanism for me to just go browse. It's ironic that we call it a browser because I'm doing anything other than browsing. And so give me the future of technology. There's starting to be a bit of a backlash against social media where the conversation now about the addictive qualities and companies' irresponsible wielding of mechanisms like death scrolling, because they know how to do it, and they know how to addict us. So there's starting to be a bit of a backlash.

Even in government, we're starting to go after tech companies. What is the future of tech? If you go back and understand why, it's actually interesting. This is a function of what we all wanted. For instance, all of us wanted the best quality clothes at the cheapest possible price. Because arguably, the reason why there's slave labor or child labor or whatever the version is of that word is because we all wanted to pay less. Do you want to pay more? Do you want to pay 80 bucks for your white t-shirt? Do you want to pay eight bucks for your white t-shirt? Well, it's pretty straightforward.

I can charge you 80 by just having adults in America make your t-shirt for you, or I can make it eight bucks by having a factory in Vietnam make it for you. So I'm being extreme, but a lot of it's driven by who we are and what we want. Now, go with that same logic. The other aspect of what technology was solving, how do I get more efficient with my time? What also happened with the word efficiency of time? Back to the lack of boredom in our lives, because boredom is where creativity often comes from, right? But when you try not to be bored, i.e. I'm trying to be more and more efficient. Simon, I'm patient zero when it comes to trying to be efficient with my time. I'm as broken here as anyone else. When you're that efficient with your time, you are looking for curation where I don't have to scroll through nonsense to get to what I'm looking for.

So when social media started coming along, it opened up my aperture to, oh, my God, I can talk to the whole world. And, you know, if you look at any sort of social media platform, the nature of what it was, and you can relate to this, is when you first log on and you become a member of any social media platform, you're like, hey, I wonder what all my old girlfriends look like. That's what happens with men. So you go online and you find out and, you know, you quickly realize that after your sixth chat, you've got nothing more to talk about because you've had 25 years of not talking to this person. You have nothing in in common then you go after all your old friends from school

you know you didn't like i wonder what jonathan smith is doing now no he seemed like a slob oh well look he is a slob look at this oh whoa you're so successful so you went through that chapter of your life and then that sort of peaks and drops then you get back to the real version which is look i want to interact with people that i care about, that are friends of mine, that I am friendly with, either school, work, life, whatever the version is. And what happens is that group starts curating their information. And my guess is most of your friends, Simon, look the way you do and talk the way you do. And like the reason why you and I are friends is because you and I have a lot of common value that we share, value between us.

I don't have very many friends who are part of the KKK. I don't. Right? However, go with this for a second. If I'm sitting at a dining table and, Simon, you put together a group of people and you said, look, this is going to be testy, but I want you all to meet each other. I've got one person from every fascist group in the world sitting at the dining table. So you can all learn from each other the perspective of the person. Assuming there's no yelling and no weapons, right? Maybe you'd walk away with, huh, I don't agree with anything what KKK guy said, but I actually learned something about

a perspective of what made the person so racist and biased. But there's no format for them because I only curate the perfect perfection of the people around me. So now go to technology. Technology is always in the service of what people want. We forget that, but that's what it's made for. Because if it wasn't, I would never buy the product. Even Apple, when they came out with the iPhone, of course, it was different from whatever we all imagined and trained us. But it was in the service of what we wanted to make our lives better, more mobile, music, whatever version was to come this package together. So now when I think of the future of technology, I think there's probably three or four buckets of it.

The question people normally ask with that is really a consumer focused question. Like what's happening to me as a consumer? And I think that the way that we're going to interact with artificial intelligence is going to be the most important 10 years ahead of us. And it's going to have a bunch of good things and evil things attached to it. And what I mean by evil is facial recognition is the form of artificial intelligence, like AI. facial recognition is the form of artificial intelligence like AI. AI is really the ability to teach a machine to look for a certain pattern and run that question over and over again looking for that pattern and getting results from that. It's simple as that and I think we're going to be struggling with ethical challenges. So the future of technology will be this amazing new

area probably the most aggressive and life-changing that we're ever going to see. At the same time, it's going to have this massive question mark on what is ethical and what is not based on what this aspect is. So that's, I think, the biggest consumer aspect. I assume one of the obstacles to the development of the technology is also people's comfort with that. And it's different from different nations, right? So in America, we don't like government snooping on us at all, but we're totally fine with the credit card company knowing absolutely everything about us and selling that information for a profit with our name and address attached. Whereas in the UK, for example, there's cameras everywhere, there's CCTV everywhere, and the population is okay giving

up some of their privacy in order to prevent crime. It's just totally accepted. And the population is okay giving up some of their privacy in order to prevent crime. It's just totally accepted. And the amount of cameras that they have in the UK, they could never have in the US. And depending on where you go in the world, the comfort level we have with government invasion and our privacy, I have to believe will affect the future of the tech as well, which makes it more complicated to have a globally available product because not every nation will want it or will use it for all the wrong reasons. That's right. So let's do some quick fire questions here. Okay. The future of capitalism.

Future of capitalism, unfortunately, I believe will be the same as the past of capitalism, greed versus fear. And we're going to go between these two and vacillate because money will always chase us greed to go fund the next set of crazy things. And fear is when we all run away when in fact, maybe we should be looking at things. So I don't think capitalism is going to change any iota. It'll be different actors, different words, but fear and greed will define it all.

So it'll go backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. What phase are we in now? I think we're coming out of fear, but we're probably six to eight months before greed kicks back in. And I'll give you an example, right? In the last four weeks, the price of Bitcoin has gone from $16,000 to $21,000. And I've got people who I've talked to, who, by the way, three months ago told me Bitcoin's a complete fraud. I would never touch it. It's a bad thing.

Calling me and saying, hey, Devesh, it's 21. Do you think it'll get back to 40? Because maybe I should buy some. I'm like, hold on. Didn't you just tell me you thought it was a fraud? No, no, no. Well, that's different. But I can make money on it.

So, Simon, this idea of greed is kicking back in again. Yeah, that's such a great example, which is fear when it's going down and greed when it's going up. Yeah. Our climate. This goes back to greed and fear as well, actually. Will we get a handle on this? Are we doomed? Or is there a middle ground?

Or what happens there? So I think we're going to get a better handle on it. I think it's just it's very difficult to come from a first world country and judge a third world country on their decisions around the underlying need for climate. Like for instance, a mother in Africa, if she could feed her child, but does something bad for the environment, she will do it all day long because you've got to feed your child. That's the way you think about it. I remember once being told by a very, very senior government official in China who said, Divesh, you don't get it. America had between 1900s and 1970 to destroy and pollute all the world, but it got them the industrialization that they've got today. Now it's our turn to industrialize, but we're being judged

because people like America screwed the environment up. Why is that my problem? I want to have my 70 years of also industrializing myself. It's an interesting perspective. I think we are more globally aware. And therefore, I think the millennial generation care about it more than we've ever cared about it before. My kids care about the environment more than I ever cared about it. And they pointed things out to me, ocean in particular. So I think that awareness will force us to be on the margin, slightly more thoughtful. And therefore, I think we'll will force us to be on the margin, slightly more thoughtful. And therefore, I think we'll be in a better place 10 years from now than we would have

been if we didn't. And of course, the logic is flawed. It's because we know more now. And timing is a real thing. You got to smoke 10 packs a day of cigarettes in the 70s. And you had fun and nobody judged you. Why can't I smoke 10? Because we know more. That's why. That's right. You can solve that with economics. You can figure out, look, I hear what you're saying. We know more. Here's what we can do to give you some competitive advantage that we didn't have before. So you don't feel like you coming from a different place. We learned a bunch of lessons. Let us help you so you can industrialize quicker, cleaner, smarter, faster. That's right. The same way, by the way, e-commerce in China is so much more sophisticated than e-commerce is in the US because they skipped

over the whole shopping mall concept. Not completely, but way more than we did in the US. They went straight to the good stuff. Here's the problem I'm facing right now. We have to end. I feel like I'm just getting started. This is the thing that I've always hated about you. Every time I talk to you, I have FOMO when the conversation ends because I need to learn more from you. And you talk so much about that idea, even though we've discerned it on patterns of very successful and high-performing people. I think it's important for every single human being, which is to be stimulated by things other than our work, to have hobbies, to have interests,

to do things other than doom scroll on Instagram when you've got a little spare time, like do a jigsaw puzzle, build some Lego, go for a walk, go to a museum, have a conversation with somebody who has a different world perspective than you. This idea of stimuli is not only illuminating, it's invigorating. I think that's exactly right. I think if I had to paraphrase that to two things, I would say one is curiosity. How do we all maintain the most significant level of curiosity we can handle? And given we all have jobs and things.

And the second one, which I'm working on, and I'm diligently working on it, I don't have it as one of my ultimatums, but I certainly am working on this. I don't have it as one of my ultimatums, but I certainly am working on this, is the room for boredom. And boredom means that in my dead time, I don't pick up my phone. I don't just read a book. I actually allow myself to be bored. And I'll end with this idea someone gave me. It was a very significant religious figure. And he told me, look, I'm going to tell you something

that you will not listen to, but I'm going to tell you anyway. You go to New York a lot. I said, yes. He says, have you ever gone into Central Park for a walk? I said, yeah, I do. Most mornings I go for a run. It's great. He goes, no, no, no.

Have you in the middle of the day gone for a walk in Central Park? And I said, no, why would I do that? He goes, well, the next time you're in New York, take off an hour, schedule it if you want to, and walk into Central Park, go find a coffee vendor, buy a cup of coffee, walk to the park, and sit on a bench and just look at people for an hour and then walk back. And so, I mean, I haven't really done that, even though I heard this a decade ago. walk back. And Simon, I haven't really done that, even though I heard this a decade ago. But my only thing I'm trying to do better at is allowing for that type of boredom to show up, because the point he was making was creativity and space to think comes from unplanned times where there's nothing to do. Can I give you a little bit of science that reinforces his advice to you? I'd love that. So our conscious

brains, our neocortex, which is our homo sapien thinking brain, this is the part of our brain we use to access our expertise or weigh the pros and cons, or it's the part of the brain we access when we have the brainstorming session where we think about ideas, right? Our conscious brains have access to the equivalent of about two feet of information around us, right? Our conscious brains have access to the equivalent of about two feet of information around us, right? Our subconscious brains have access to the equivalent of about 11 acres of information around us. Every conversation, every movie, every book, it gets stored somewhere. And you can't consciously access your subconscious brain because it's subconscious. It's not the thinking part of

your brain. Have you ever noticed that some of your best ideas happen when you're in the shower, when you're driving in the car, when you go out for a run? It's when you're not connected and you're, quote unquote, not thinking that your brain is still ruminating, not thinking, it's ruminating, and it'll give you a solution that you, quote unquote, didn't think of. It just sort of, it seems to show up out of nowhere. The value of the brainstorming session is not to solve the problem. It's to ask the question. The solution will probably happen a week later in one of these random times at one of these

random places. And so the reason to disconnect, which is when we have blank time, what we're doing is we're filling it in constantly with my phone, my texting, my this, my that. Let me just catch up on my calls. And we're actually not allowing rumination to happen, which means we are dulling our creativity. What I do is I put my phone in airplane mode. So there's no temptation and I know nothing's coming in and actually won't work if I look at it and I'll go sit on a bench or I'll go for that walk. Or even when we're sitting in a restaurant with somebody and they go to the bathroom, the first thing we do is pull out the phone as opposed to just sitting back in our chair and just like taking the room in.

And so that is correct. I love the science behind the logic. So thank you for sharing that. And Simon, like you, the only benefit of ending is I know that I'm going to have a sushi dinner with you coming up soon. I can't wait. Let me see if I can sum up what I've learned, right? There's a pattern in almost everything you've talked about.

And it goes back to the conversation where we started, which it is absolutely all about do I like you? Companies don't do businesses with companies. People do business with people. Even nations don't do business with nations. People do business with people. And sometimes we have transactional relationships where like, I need what you have. You're going to give it to me for a price that fits a budget. I don't like you. I don't trust you, but I need what you've got. And it's a transaction. And those relationships last as long as the numbers keep working out. But where relationships happen is where creativity happens. It's where trust happens. It's where joy

happens. It's where inspiration happens. It's where solutions are found. I think anybody who's going through a career where they found themselves stuck, bored, unmotivated, uncreative, confusing their identity with their work, all of those things, which are pretty universal challenges, all of those, the solution is the relationship. That if there's someone I can talk to, and there's someone who I can help who's dealing with the same thing, and there's someone I can have that who's dealing with the same thing and there's someone I can have that cathartic conversation with who's going through the same thing as me, I'm much more likely to solve my problem

because of that person, not because of me. That's great, Dad. I love that. Great summary. And that's what I've learned from you today that amongst the most successful people in the world and the work that you do

to serve the most successful people in the world, that the thing you do is actually not about how much money you can make them or how much you can give them, but it's really just about being a good, trustworthy, kind, and honest person. And that's the thing we should be striving for for success is to be that kind of person.

Hopefully we'll all be curious and be interesting at the same time. At the same time. Devesh. Simon, thank you. Magic, magic, magic. Thank you so, so much. Pleasure, my friend. I'll look forward to seeing you soon.

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