Investing Billions - E374: Why the Best Investors Prepare for Crashes Before They Happen

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

What if the key to outperforming isn’t taking more risk—but building a portfolio strong enough to survive volatility without breaking? In this episode, I sit down with Doug Hanly, CIO of the Louisiana State Police Retirement System, to discuss why liquidity, simplicity, and process are the foundations of durable investing. Doug explains why he views short-term government credit as the “supply depots” of a portfolio, how preparation during calm periods creates opportunities during crises, and why avoiding mistakes matters more than chasing complexity. We also explore governance, manager selection, portfolio construction, and how small incremental improvements compound into long-term outperformance.

Doug, last time we chatted, you said that one of your favorite asset classes in the world was government credit, short-term one-to-three-year credit. Why is that? Yeah, I'm sure that's not an answer you get a lot. The reason why I like short-term government credit is because we really know what we're going to get. So if you look at the early 1900s, the explorers, it was Omenston from Norway who got to the South Pole first. The reason why he was successful is because every 20 miles, he would leave the supply depots with a big bright red flag. clothing, extra food, supplies. That way, when the conditions changed, he was able to know where he was and get redirected. So our short-term government bonds serve that purpose. They are the supply depots of

our portfolio. They give us stability, but they also give us a lot of optionality and the ability to invest in higher returning things like small cap public equities involved with the AI trends or emerging market equities and things like that. It's so interesting. I had this long conversation with Larry Kochard, who is CIO of McKenna, UVA, Georgetown. And one of the things that we talked a lot about is the sustainability of the strategy. In other words, if you have this strategy that's very high beta, that's highly volatile and maybe returning 10%, but every three, four years, you have to sell at a 20% discount via secondary because you don't have the right balance and your ICS pressure on you,

that's a far worse strategy, not only a far worse ride, but overall dollars and cents, a much worse strategy than having something that's a little bit more diversified, less fragile, but actually gets executed. I actually read Larry Kodchard's book, and I worked with Kathleen Ritterizer, who was a co-author with him. And I think that philosophy resonated with me early in my career. And since then, I've always looked to implement some type of stability for the portfolio and view it not as the 4% return you get, but view it as the optionality you can get from being able to invest and stay in those higher returning asset classes. And you have 12% of your $1.5 billion endowment in these short-term securities?

Yeah, roughly about 12% of the portfolio is that liquidity anchor. If you go to our boardroom, it's named after Trooper Bobby Smith. And Bobby Smith, he lost his vision in the line of duty. And once he did that, he pivoted to become a motivational speaker and help out cadets and other people who are advancing earlier in their career. And it's people like Bobby Smith and other troopers who run towards danger when many people would run away. from danger. And because of that, it's our responsibility to have the liquidity on hand to be able to pay them their checks once they get their well-deserved retirement. That's what the short-term government credit helps us with. I actually teach a course at LSU, and we look at case studies of hedge fund

failures. And so, of course, we talk about long-term capital management. And long-term capital management, one of their trades was buying off-the-run 29 and a half-year government bonds and shorting the more expensive 30-year bonds. And when the Russian default crisis happened, the spread actually went against them even more. And the counterparties decided to pull the trades off the table. So they had to sell out of their positions at the worst possible time. And the lesson here is that it's the large leverage that they were taking around 30, 50x leverage that made these trades unsustainable. And so having this liquidity anchor in place helps us avoid those types of mistakes that we can learn from history. Last time when we chatted, you mentioned that when the market

it goes down, having these cash reserves allows you to play offense, maybe walk us through that. Let's say the market is down 20% tomorrow. What do you do? Yeah, so 20% down, it has happened and it will likely happen again. You know, I like to look towards Charlie Munger and I think he got it from a mathematician Jacoby. And to solve problems, he says to invert, always invert. So let's just invert that question. How can we lose the most amount of money following a 20% drawdown? And I think the way we lose the most amount of money is at 10% drawdown, we try to buy it back and try to make our money back, and then the market goes down even more, and then all of a sudden we're panicking and we're selling out at the very bottom. So we want to do exactly opposite of that. For us, it's a pretty

simple steps that we take. The first step is looking at our IPS and seeing if any asset class has breached the minimum level allowed, and then we'll simply rebalance back to target. Now, there are some cases where the minimum breach hasn't been reached yet, but there are still really good opportunities that we speak with our managers about and we are selectively seeing that we want to deploy capital into. As an example, if you look at the COVID crisis, you know, some types of car companies like Hertz were actually really in distress and they went through bankruptcy, Chapter 11 bankruptcy. And it was the opportunistic to stress credit managers who were able to step in, invest in the dip loans, get the super priority, but then also

get the foot in the door for the equity on the other side of the restructuring. And that investment was actually really successful. In public markets, we've seen a similar dynamic in the regional banks when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. Basically, the market sold off all regional banks. And some of our managers were seeing really great opportunities in regional banks that actually had strong balance sheets and good opportunities for return. And a lot of this is what you do before the crisis. A lot of people think about the crisis as it occurs. Maybe there's some willful ignorance and they're trying to avoid the idea that there might be a crisis. Maybe there's just poor planning. What do you do ahead of the crisis? in order to position yourself strategically for when the crisis arrives? Yes, we want to prepare during calm times so that we can be protected during volatile times. And we have the good fortune of having a lot of stakeholders and board members who are prepared to deal with adversity. And they know how to deal with adversity by being calm and following the plan.

So it's during these periods of non-turbulence, stable periods, that we like to educate our stakeholders on historical drawdowns, expected volatility, scenarios. That way, markets falling is simply part of the plan. So when Southwest Airlines in the 1990s to 2000s, they were one of the only airliners to have a dedicated fuel hedging program, and they just bought out the futures contracts every year. They paid a bit of a premium, but they knew what their expenses were going to be. That way, when oil spiked and other airliners who didn't hedge, their profitability suffered, Southwest was able to maintain very consistent profits.

And actually about 83% of profits of Southwest from 1998 to 2008 were as a result of their oil hedging program. And they had about $3.5 billion in savings because of that. And so the key for preparing is education, building confidence before things go awry. Last time we chatted, you said that asset management is a bit like exposure therapy. What did you mean by that? Institutional asset management as well as exposure therapy, both rely on. small marginal gains. If you look at the British National Cycling Team, they did not win any

tour to France's in 110 years. Then they hired a new performance coach, Dave Brailsford, and they won six Tour de France's in six years. And so huge turnaround. How did this happen? Well, Dave Brailsford, he implemented a new philosophy, and that was this concept of getting 1% better. And if there was any small thing that had the probability, any small probability of moving the team forward, they looked at it with an open mind. They implemented it and experiment it. As an example, they looked at how they were sleeping, the mattresses they were on, the pillows, they weren't allowed to shake hands with people anymore so they would stay healthy. He even painted the trucks white so that he could see any dust particles accumulating on the bikes.

And so that level of detail is the same mindset that we're applying at LSPRS. We look at our investment process, break it down. If you look at sourcing, for instance, a lot of CIOs rely on their former employers and their former networks to generate ideas. We had a similar setup, but we wanted to get 1% better. So we started reaching out to CIOs around the world from Hong Kong to Hawaii to North Dakota, Maine. And then every month, we actually have a group of CIOs locally in Louisiana that get together. And I like to ask them, what is their best manager idea? And what is a manager that everyone likes that they think is actually a bit overvalued or not necessarily a great manager? And it's through that process and through getting that 1% better in sourcing and perspective

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comes from what you as a CIO value and what your team gets value. and frankly what the IC values in the CIO, it actually goes back to the entire search process. When the IC sets out to pick the next CIO, that's when the culture is set. And once that culture is set and incentives are set, they're incredibly difficult to change on a granular level. It really starts from the beginning.

Absolutely. And it's always the small details that actually have a huge, powerful effect. So speaking of exposure therapy, you want to invest into a new asset class. How do you get your IQ? see your investment committee comfortable with that? We just had our monthly meeting and our executive director showed us the clip of Zootopia and the sloths at the DMV in Zootopia.

And if you go back to that clip, you'll see the sloth speaking very, very slowly. And I think there's great wisdom in that clip because I've been part of LPs before that look to initiate a new asset class and all of a sudden there's some mistakes or it's not necessarily as sustainable as it can be. And so in this sense, slowing down to speed up is what we implement. And so when we're looking to add a new asset classes, we ask three main questions. First, does it add unique value? The second, can we implement it effectively? As you know, David, for instance, in venture capital, you need to be in the top funds in order to really get the benefit of that. And then third, if returns are negative for a while, say returns are negative

for three years, does the committee, does the team understand the strategy enough to be able to hold during those tough times. So if we invest in a black box hedge fund, for instance, and it's down for three years, when we look around the table, nobody's going to be very confident that they'll be able to get out of it because nobody will really be knowing what they're doing in the first place. So those are the criteria we look for when adding a new asset class. And we actually added a new asset class target in infrastructure over the last few years. So we now have a 5% target to infrastructure. And as we looked at infrastructure, a lot of the managers we were looking at had about 10% annualized returns, a very strong opportunity set with about $106 trillion expected to flow into it

through 2040. And when you're investing, do you look to do it from fund-to-funds approach or through direct investments into funds? Our null hypothesis when we look at a manager is that the manager does not have the skill and ability to generate alpha. That is a very high hurdle to be able to have that burden of proof to show that you can actually generate alpha. It requires track record, an opportunity set, process, and all of that is very difficult. When you add on, say, via fund of funds, another layer of fees and performance fees, it makes it even more difficult. And I think the research shows that in buyout, it's very difficult.

Maybe there are some asset class exceptions like venture secondaries that fund of funds might make more sense. But in general, we started doing fund of funds when we were much smaller. Now that we've grown to around $1.5 billion, we're doing more direct. And that started in 2017. I think a lot of the industry believes performance fees align the, the, GP with the LP. And I actually have a problem with that because, you know, if you look at the link between effort and result and investments, it's not as strong as the link between risk taken and

returns. I think there's a better relationship between the risk taken. And so if you have performance fees for the managers, they're going to be incentivized to take additional risk with our money and they'll get rewarded for that. And you're consciously moving a lot of your net new capital from larger funds to smaller funds. Double click on that and why are you doing that? Sometimes when you invest in a fund, they do great investing in $500 million market cap companies. And then all of a sudden, you look and they're investing in $10 billion companies. Usually it's a function of the fund getting larger. This may be outside of the manager's skill set or their menu of what they can do. We were recently at our neighbor's house and they have

their TV up on the wall and two beautiful paintings of goats. And when we walked in, I, I, immediately noticed the goat paintings, and it was the first time I had such an appreciation for goats. And so we asked more about the paintings, and they told us that the painter only paints goats. And then they also told us that there's another painter who only paints pigs. And so if I want to get a goat painting, I want it by the goat painter. I don't want the pig painter painting my goat painting. And that's similar for funds. As smaller funds have a core competency as they grow, they may drift away from their core competency to collect the higher fees, to have a bigger business. And that style drift seemed to be pretty common in funds. And so

there are exceptions to this rule. I mean, for instance, you look at infrastructure. Sometimes being bigger in infrastructure allows you to get those big government deals. And if you want a stable investment in, say, the big airports or the big highways, you naturally have to be big. But then in other cases, for instance, say growth equity, you want to stay potentially small to invest in companies that are growing. And so finding that alignment between the fun size and the opportunities that is very important. Going back to what you said about alpha, you said you have to disprove the null hypothesis, which essentially means that you assume that alpha does not persist. The analogy that I use is you're on a subway platform. And alpha is like sitting, standing on one of those little tiles.

And as soon as you go one foot out of that tile, you no longer have alpha. That's how ephemeral it is. And to your point, I think there's this assumption that managers can scale or a good venture manager could be a great growth equity manager. A good private equity manager could be a great private credit manager. But more often than not, we're talking about 90, 95% of the time. That's actually not the case. Most managers are actually really best athletes at their one thing. That's essentially the philosophy that I grew up with in terms of the other employers that I've worked for. we were always looking for more specialists than generalists. Of course, there's a balance because

if you're too focused, your fund might totally collapse in some type of market event. And so you need to have some diversification, especially at the firm level, just to survive. But in general, the more specialists, the better. But also you want to make sure the fund can survive as well. I was speaking to Jeff Deal, who's acting CEO of Adam Street partners. And he gave me this framework that when a fund grows more than 100%, so more than two axes, that's a yellow flag for them, and they really double-click on whether that fund manager could continue to persist and continue to deliver alpha. And one of the ways that you could actually justify that kind of growth is through these co-invest vehicles. So the best way to show that a

$200 million fund could have actually deployed $400 million is actually to deploy $400 million. $200 million via the fund, $200 million via co-invest and basically prove it. A lot of managers try to recreate this hypothetical mirror portfolio where we got we put in five million dollars but we could have put in 10 million dollars and although technically you could reference that you call the entrepreneurs you could try to recreate it the chances of an LP or the majority of LP is really going through that exercise when they're overworked and have so many things going on are close to zero yeah it reminds me of back testing every back test I've looked at is you know 20% alpha and no risk and it works amazing. It's a similar mindset there. And I think anytime you're a manager that you can just

get started now, if you want to do a particular strategy or if you want to get bigger, start doing it now and have some type of proof to show that you can do it. And you compare good asset management to Einstein's famous equation, E equals MC squared. Why is that? A lot of times in our industry, complexity is the name of the game. If you present a complex strategy, you might sound smart. If you're a GP speaking with the LP and you sound smart, it's a bit of a complex strategy, you might actually get the LPs investment. The only problem with that is a lot of times those complex strategies yield about single digits net of all the diversification and whatnot. Support for today's episode comes from Square, the all in one way for business owners to take payments,

book appointments, manage staff, and keep everything running in one place. Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, running a boutique, or managing a service business, Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground. I was actually thinking about this other day when I stopped by a local cafe here. They use Square and everything just works. Check out is fast. Receipts are instant and sometimes I even get loyalty rewards automatically. There's something about businesses that use Square.

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you can get up to $200 off Square hardware when you sign up at Square.com slash go slash how I invest. The Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts nor complexity. Run your business smarto square. Get started today. Support for today's episode comes from Square, the all-in-one way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, manage staff, and keep everything running in one place. Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, running a boutique, or managing a service business, Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground. I was actually thinking about this other day when I stopped by a local cafe here. They use Square and everything just works.

Check out is fast, receipts are instant, and sometimes I even get loyalty rewards automatically. There's something about businesses that use Square. They just feel more put together. The experience is smoother for them, and it's smoother for me as a customer. Square makes it easy to sell wherever your customers are, in store, online, on your phone, or even at pop-ups, and everything stays synced in real time. You could track sales, manage inventory, book appointments, and see reports instantly whether you're in your shop or on the go.

And when you make a sale, you don't have to wait days to get paid. Square gives you fast access to your earnings through Square checking. They also have built in tools like loyalty and marketing, so your best customers keep coming back. And right now, you can get up to $200 off Square hardware when you sign up at Square.com slash go slash how I invest. The Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts nor complexity.

Run your business smartos Square. Get started today. Support for today's episode comes from Square, the all-in-one way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, managed staff, and keep everything running in one place. Whether you're selling lattes, cutting hair, running a boutique, or managing a service business, Square helps you run your business without running yourself into the ground. I was actually thinking about this other day when I stopped by a local cafe here.

They use Square and everything just works. Check out is fast, receipts are instant, and sometimes I even get loyalty rewards automatically. There's something about businesses that use Square. They just feel more put together. The experience is smoother for them. and it's smoother for me as a customer. Square makes it easy to sell wherever your customers are, in store, online, on your phone,

or even at pop-ups, and everything stays synced in real time. You could track sales, manage inventory, book appointments, and see reports instantly, whether you're in your shop or on the go. And when you make a sale, you don't have to wait days to get paid. Square gives you fast access to your earnings through Square checking.

They also have built-in tools like loyalty and marketing, so your best customers keep coming back. And right now, you can get up to $200 off Square hardware when you sign up at square.com slash go slash how I invest. The Square, you get all the tools to run your business with none of the contracts nor complexity. Run your business smart or square. Get started today. So what we look for is managers who make the simple things perfect.

And simplicity creates that repeatability and reliability. We recently added to a fund that has a clear 17-step process. And as they were discussing it to the I see, as an hour, outsider, I felt like I could easily become part of that fund, go through that 17-step process, and generate the strong returns that the fund had created over the long term. And so I think it's that simplicity, the transparency is very powerful. And E equals MC squared, it's three letters, but it describes much of the universe. And so I think that just goes to show that it is the simple things that are the most powerful. It goes back to these small compounding winds. When you look at

process, I would argue most people would disagree with me, but I would argue that it's a form of structural alpha. It's not literally in the structure. So it's not like you're buying via secondary. You're getting in 20% discount. But it's structured into the very DNA of the manager. You mentioned the 17 step process. So another way, if your alpha is getting lucky or some star manager, that's very fragile. But if your alpha is on an organizational level, here's what we do, here's our position, here's our messaging, here's what we'll say and do to the portfolio company. That could be a great form of structural alpha. That seems extremely simple. It's very not sexy, but it's one of those really sustainable edges that managers could have. I totally agree. It's, it's all about avoiding the

mistakes or the cost that don't necessarily need to be there. If you can simply just be simple, stick to what you do very well. You will do well. I think there's sometimes a bit of anxiety from GPs to feel like they need to differentiate themselves, but it's, it's a bit ironic because if you just have a simple, easy strategy that even I could do or anyone could do, it actually proves to be quite successful and you can still raise the money. If you go even one step upstream of processes, structural alpha, one of our core beliefs in our organization is quality is downstream of quantity, meaning if you want to get the best, if you want to be the best goat painter,

I'm sure that guy has painted thousands and thousands of goats. Now, it's also embedded in what he doesn't do, right? Once you start doing something over and over again, you get so damn good at that one thing because of so much iteration, that one little area of art that you wouldn't get if you were constantly not only painting other animals, but different landscapes. I think upstream, highly underrated is quantity. It doesn't literally mean if you're a venture investor, how do I make 100 investments this year? It means how do I take a thousand meetings? What you're saying is the repetition builds the skill? Just quantity. Just doing more quantity. An example on the media side for us is we do five episodes a week. And paradoxically, a lot of people think quantity is antithical to quality. You do more episodes, the quality goes down.

But we find out the quality goes higher and higher up. Why? Because every part of the value chain gets better, just to use the podcast as an example. Not only do we get more listeners, so we are able to book better guests, but the podcast itself gets better. I have more training approaching 400 episodes. Our editors now have 400 episodes of editing to do. We've done over 200 episodes in the last year just to give you a sense. So they're just like constantly improving. If you think about quality and focus, even more powerful to get that quality and to get that focus on anything that you do is quadgety and being not only narrowly focused,

but just continuing, just press that advantage over and over and over again. Again, one very unsexy and underappreciated, but I think that is the key to being the best in class. So going back to this E equals MC squared and the beauty in it and the simplicity, what are the downstream consequences of having a simple portfolio? The downstream consequences are greater clarity of what is happening and why, and it also allows you to build around what is working. So if it's simple, you understand what's working and what's not working, you then can build around it.

So we've been able to generate double-digit returns over the last three years. And our strategy is oftentimes akin to watching grass grow. It can be boring, but it is effective. So I will not be going to any conference saying that I did short, long swapsions on the VIX index and sounding smart. But I will, in a disciplined way, rebalance when necessary and continue to compound that capital. It's such an interesting analogy of watching grass grow. There is this friction as a management in terms of talent retention and consistency of strategy. and going back to the interview with Larry Cochart, he talks about because he wanted to recruit the very best

and the very best constantly want to be growing, constantly want to be doing, he built out this direct investment program for them so that they have deals always to look at and always sharpening their saw while staying disciplined and staying focused on this simple portfolio that could outperform for long term. That's an excellent approach. That really looks holistically at everything and takes a much longer term, more holistic approach. How is our talent developing, not just how our portfolio returns are currently, but how can we generate a culture and a team that will be able to sustain those returns. And so I think that's excellent.

So you work in partnership with a consultant group. Maybe double-click exactly how that relationship works. And how does that help you execute your strategy? We have a small but mighty team of five at LSPRS. And we're led by our executive director who connects the investment staff with the benefit staff and the legislature. And by working with the consultant, we're able to play to our strengths. We can play big when we need to.

It is a global consultant, but we can also play small. I mean, we're a one and a half billion dollar fund, and so we're able to access funds at our $100 million, but also the funds that are $50 billion. One thing we've done with our consultant recently is really negotiate fees and reduce our fees with our manager. Our consultant has that global scale, so it really brings a lot of leverage to the table in negotiations. And that has been very successful for our program.

We've had about five or six manager fee negotiations, saving millions. And so having both a small and nimble team with a global consultant has been very helpful. It helps us have that local insight, but also that large institutional reach. What's the best practice when it comes to working with a consultant? How do you get the most out of it? We treat our consultant as a true partner, not just as a vendor. And one best practice I've noticed is we want to encourage dissent and opposition with our consultant. There is no value add to having a conversation with a group where everyone agrees with each other.

So every time I have a manager idea, I'll send it to our consultant. consultant. And the first question I ask is, what opposition do you have? And that way, we've built a trust and a camaraderie with each other that we can actually voice what we believe the truth to be. And I think the closer we can get to the truth, the better decisions we're going to make on behalf of the plan. The second best practice I've noticed is killing weak ideas early. So if you look at Motown, one of the best and most successful record labels of all time, they had about 80 number one hits in the Billboard Hot 100 between the 60s and 70s. They would all get together on Friday morning at 9 a.m. in this little small white house, and anyone who had a song idea would voice it to the

group, and they had to answer one specific question. If you had one dollar left, would you spend it on the song or would you spend it on buying a sandwich? And everyone around the table had to unanimously say, I would spend my last dollar on the song in order for that song to even move forward in their process. And so that's the same mindset we use. I want the ideas to be killed early that aren't going to be getting into the portfolio. That way we can be efficient. We can spend our time. on things that actually will move the needle and get into that portfolio. Just to play devil's advocate, how do you incentivize your consultant who's really, your their client? How do you incentivize them to push back on you?

Well, the first is I tell them, I want opposition. I want disagreement. I want new, different ideas. I will never be offended if you tell me my idea isn't going to work. There's been multiple examples where I bring a manager idea to the consultant. They review it. They noticed something that I didn't necessarily notice, and we let it go. That saves us a ton of time, and now I'm spending my time on managers that actually can be great. I think it's just a matter of constantly reiterating with them that the value here is not necessarily just agreeing. The value is trying to find the truth. And so if we can get closer to the truth, that's where the value is.

I think sometimes the key to this is with anybody that works for you is to overcorrect. and to give so much praise when somebody disagrees with you, almost go overboard so that they have that psychological safety next time. And ultimately, these types of relationships where you're telling somebody to disagree with you, they can only really be built over time. Somebody disagrees with you, what do you do? Do you renew them? Do you pat them on the back?

Do you promote them? These could only be known in time. So those are always going to gradually increase as well. Few people are going to strongly disagree with you at once. And that's okay. That's kind of part of the process of the relationship. Yeah, I mean, I definitely don't want it to be performative and say, oh, I disagree with this. Oh, that's wonderful. We need to be genuine in our approach and genuine in the facts that may support an opinion. What happens is we do get agreement most of the time, I would say, but just having that understanding and the trust with each other that if you disagree, that is a good thing and let's look into it more. And the second we make a decision, we all move forward. We're not all, you know, not one of us is looking back and saying, oh, this should have been, this should have happened or not. We all move forward together once a decision is made. And so, having some timelines in place of a disagreement period and then a period where we move forward

I think is really important and it prevents having a negative environment overall. If you could go back to when you had just graduated your MBA program and you could give a younger dog only one piece of timeless advice, what would that be? When I was early in my career, say the first five or so years, I was not as aware of my thoughts as I became. So what I started doing is I started writing down my thoughts. So that way, when times were good, I wasn't getting distracted on what I didn't need to focus on. And when times were bad, I wasn't stuck and wasn't able to move forward. And so what I do is I'll go to a coffee shop. I'll write down my long-term vision and goals. And then I'll focus on the one or two things that day that I need to do in order to move

forward to that goal. Because as you know, data, attention, everything is everywhere and focus, being able to focus on what really moves the needle. There's this thought leader, Alex Hermose, focuses on small business and private equity. He's a little bit outside of the scope of the general institutional audience. He talks about the Stott experiment, which every day, you ask yourself the question, what is something that I could do that could 10X the business? And almost categorically, it's never linear. I'll give you a specific example.

So we were thinking about how do we increase more LPD dinners and do more community outreach. And then we thought maybe we should just do a CIO conference, do one event per year, put all the effort all the time into that, that would have the impact of 100 dinners. And we ask ourselves this thought experiment, which is if we just focus on this, can that actually 10x engagement with our audience? And we ultimately concluded that. Yes, it would. It's rarely the linear pursuit. It's rarely, oh, we should do two dinners or we should do 20-person dinners or we should do these three cities. It's really this true first principles thinking, untethered to previous thinking and previous ways that you've been executing your strategy that

often leads to these 10x returns. Yeah, and that's a perfect example of simplicity is power. Had you not asked that simple question, what can 10x our business? Your entire years may have been a different path that may have yielded something totally different. So it's that one step of asking what can yield a 10x for us that changes everything. And so it's that one simple question, that one small detail that has such a ripple effect. By the way, the inversion to this, and this is a bit controversial, but if you start every quarterly meeting or every strategic meeting and how do we get 20% more revenue this year, and let's say you achieve it, obviously a great outcome. But if you look at how

Elon Musk looks at it, he never anchors people on these incremental gains. He's always thinking about the next 10x, in his case, the next thousand X. But sometimes even incremental thinking and incremental anchoring on how you view the business itself can limit thinking and limit the creativity that takes to get to those 10x outcomes. That's a good point. And I have to admit, I have not thought of a thousand Xers yet. So maybe that simple change will, we'll produce some different ideas and things. That's very interesting. I think the way you frame your perspective and frame your thoughts makes all the difference. Maybe next year for our podcast, you'll be building Dyson Swarms on the moon. Be careful what

you wish for. You're one of most thoughtful CIOs. Upstream of that is your information diet. Talk to me about your information diet and how has that evolved? over time. I like to divide my day up into four chunks. The first part of the day, I'll look at the current portfolio and I'll take in as much information as I can about our current managers, our current investments. The second part of the day, then I'll start looking for new opportunities. New opportunities can come from everywhere. I think social media has started to play a much bigger role in investing than previous past and just being able to connect and see what people are doing where exciting opportunities are. I love listening to different podcasts to get perspectives

from different CIOs and investors. There's a great pool of data available for us. And we can look at, you know, the best LPs. We can look at their portfolios and see what they're doing, where they're investing. And that's very helpful. So that's the second part of my day. The third part of my day then is all about being social. So usually it's either manager meetings, either calls or in person.

It's speaking with other LPs as potential references. And it's all social after lunch. And then the final part of the day is all about review. Looking at my day, what went well, did I spend my time on the right thing? things, what moved the needle, and then revising it and preparing for the next day. Well, Doug, this has been an absolute masterclass. Thanks so much for jumping on the podcast and looking forward to doing this in person next time. We'd love that, David. Thank you so much. Thank you.