The Pomp Podcast - 300: Denise Shull On Using Modern Psychoanalysis To Be A Better Investor

Episode Date: May 21, 2020

Denise Shull is a performance coach who uses neuroeconomics and modern psychoanalysis in her work with hedge funds and professional athletes. She is also the founder of The ReThink Group. In this conversation, we discuss the market as emotions, the importance of self-awareness, keys to being a good listener, difference in investing and sports performance, and modern psychoanalysis. =============================== Blockset by BRD is your hosted blockchain infrastructure. Blockset enables enterprises and developers around the globe to deliver high-quality blockchain-based applications in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost. Using the services provided by Blockset, businesses can build professional custody solutions, accurate and near real-time portfolio management solutions, auditing platforms, commercial block explorers, and much more: blockset.com  ===============================  Crypto.com is the only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. Download and earn $50 USD using my code ‘pomp2020’, or use the link http://platinum.crypto.com/r/pomp2020 when you sign up for one of their metal cards today. =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Denise Shull is a performance coach who uses neuroeconomics and modern psychoanalysis in her work with hedge funds and professional athletes. She is also the founder of The Rethink Group. In this conversation, we discuss the market as emotions, the importance of self awareness, keys to being a good listener, the difference in investing in sports performance, and modern psychoanalysis. I really enjoyed this conversation with Denise, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

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Go check them out at Blockset.com. The next is Crypto.com. They're an all-in-one platform that allows you to buy, sell, store, earn, loan, and invest crypto all from one place. You can join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. You can download it and earn $50 using a code POMP2020 or use the link in the description when you sign up for one of their metal cards today. Again, Crypto.com. Not only do they have an awesome URL, but they allow you to buy, sell, store, earn, loan, or invest crypto all from one place. Go check them out at crypto.com. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily

letter to over 50,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com or go check out the link in the description. All right, let's get into this episode with Denise. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a

particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I am super excited about this conversation because I was just telling Denise that she has an amazing job. I'm frankly jealous of what she gets to do every day. So thanks for taking the time to do this. Thanks for having me. For sure. For those that don't know you and your work, maybe let's just start kind of what did you do growing up and then also from an education standpoint in order to start down this path? Well, so here's the funny thing. You know, I do like mental and decision coaching with psychoanalysis or variations there. But I started out working for IBM. And I mean, I really started out in college. I'm a nutrition and dietetics and biology major thinking I was going to do something in health care. then got swayed by IBM and thought I was going to climb the corporate ladder and

doing great and having big accounts and getting awards and then I thought oh my gosh if I wake up at 40 and I'm selling computers like so I ditched an opportunity to go to business school on a wave of actions and finagled my way into a program at the University of Chicago master's program where you can kind of design your own um and that was in what the time is called biopsychology which is like okay if we have a psychology like what's the biology of it like what does the brain do it's now called neuropsychoanalysis but better but anyway and then i was like literally i swear this is true like took a left turn in downtown chicago with a friend of mine who had been a floor trader at the

the options exchange and like became a trader with no plan like like and before i'd always been like what's my plan what's my and then that really ultimately led to this um so it's a it's a wacky story really and so what exactly do you spend all day doing right i think when people hear things like psycho uh analysts and and um all of kind of the cool sexy terminology they say i know that's important and uh i don't want to talk to that person because they're going to analyze me uh but what are you doing on a day-to-day basis so like i literally just got off the phone with a small hedge fund manager who's been in business for 20 some years he's got lots of things going on he's got like a private investment vehicle he's got a guy that's

had covid and is maybe not recovering and so like we just went through everything that's on his plate um and he's thinking out loud with me and i'm helping him you know sort through what he thinks and what he feels about each situation so that he can figure out like what he really believes and what he wants to do and and this is a call that i didn't really feel like i did much other than listen and provide a few sort of observations and he was like oh denise is so helpful but it's like Because you don't get the time to just sit back and talk to someone about like everything that's going on in your business and have that person understand and reflect and ask some good questions.

At its core, I'm always looking for what is the person feeling about what they're saying? Like he was talking about having two different possibilities for this special purpose access vehicle, like a company to invest in. And at first, he described the one company, and then he described the other company. I was like, oh, he definitely wants to go for the first one. And so I reflected that back. I think he was like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, whoa, he started to tell me all the – so it's a lot of listening, reflecting,

helping the person really just understand themselves better and get clarity. I mean, sometimes I psychoanalyze, but like I have another client, a private equity guy. He's always saying to me, Denise, what's your psychoanalysis with me? What do you really think of me? well i have yet to tell him because it won't help him for me to tell him um in in those situations right how much of it is when um they are just listening to you or you're just listening to them versus uh you're actually giving them feedback like the value of just sitting and thinking out loud and talking through it and then all of a sudden they're like oh i know

what to do because I just had to sit and think about it versus you're sitting there and say, ah, you're thinking about this wrong, or you're being incredibly biased and actually almost acting as like guardrails mentally. How do you balance the value between those two things that you provide? Yeah, I say I never give advice. Now that's less true than it used to be. It's been particularly less true during this crazy market period but I think of it in terms of I create my own analysis of what that person's going through what's really happening for them like where they're conflicted what they're confident that they probably can't see for themselves because it's just too

hard to see for yourself and then I try to ask questions such that then they'll figure out what I see. But what tends to happen is I do, you know, people do end up trusting me and because I have some market background and they want to know what I think. I'll sometimes early on in the client and say, we'll say, well, how would it be helpful to know what I think? I think my skill is really helping them know what they think, like really what they think and getting out of their heads, you know, and, and understanding what their intuition is, what their experiential pattern recognition is you know or like or where they're conflicted like like i had a guy another client well this is the one that i don't want to psychoanalyze

um i don't want to tell him what my psychoanalysis of him is um which by the way i'm not even allowed to do psychoanalysis that's a whole other problem um he wants to be a leader like that was really why he hired me to be more of a leader in his small organization um but yeah like he's really afraid of stepping out and taking a risk or afraid of disagreeing too much or even really kind of afraid of being seen so i'm like okay let's make a list of the things you want and what it takes and let's make a list of the fears you have i didn't i could see that they were in conflict right and i bet you can see they're in conflict as i explained it to you but it wasn't until he wrote them down in paper he's like wow i can't have this if i've got that i didn't tell him that

i i often give you know little pieces of homework you know make a list of write down this versus that to help people come to realizations but yeah it makes a ton of sense and i guess you've done this for a long time and you've come up with your own method uh as to kind of how to how to think through some of this stuff so maybe help us understand uh how uh the method works and then we can get into uh more of just like how the brain works how it processes risk and all that but what exactly is this method um bill well it assumes that how someone feels is the most important thing and that there's always a good reason for why the person feels the way they do like in their circumstances in their situation so it has like ultimate respect and it gives

ultimate respect for whatever the person's experience of their world is that's different you know that's different than a lot of methods that might have like a cognitive bias you know you're making this thinking mistake um we're not like that we sort of assume that you're all you You have some conflicts between things that are important to you on different timeframes, but basically everything makes sense. It's a matter of helping you sort it out. I think of it then as helping figure out what emotions they're conscious of, like what they know about themselves and what they don't know about themselves,

like the conscious emotional constellation and the unconscious emotional constellation. and where the unconscious one is getting in the way of whatever they want consciously but it's very you know it's very empathetic it's very respectful it's very it makes so like we know it makes sense it's just figuring out what's unconscious and what's in conflict and then leading them to it and in the process that what you find is some people want to know everything like tell me tell me tell me want to know a lot of people like want to know but then they have a whole list of reasons why no that's not right and that's not going to help me so we

categorize that as resistance in the same way a psychoanalyst would but differently than most methods we don't just we don't try to break through the resistance it's not about like we try to work with it so that the person changes on their own and the person comes to realize it Yeah. And I guess part of this is you have the pleasure of talking to what I'll call the full stack, right? Everyone from somebody who is a young person who wants to become a leader in an organization to somebody who is kind of, we'll call it middle management or middle of their career and maybe happy where they are and just want to get some better performance or may not be happy and kind of want to accelerate. But then you also talk to the absolute best in the world as well. And so as you've been doing this, what are some of the things that you've noticed, the best investors, traders, what do they do that separates them from everybody else? Is it simple things or are they more complex and nuanced? Like the top 1%, what separates them mentally from everybody else?

well if it's market investing in trading they understand that the market is just a social game that there's no like absolute that it's really just perception like and it's waves in the ocean of perception changing and so they're they're trading against other people's perception and you know however they analyze it whether they use technical analysis and charts or fundamentals and you know value that's just like a clue to how people's perception is changing so they just understand the market as human beings like waves in an ocean and it's a really different way to like to have internalized the market plus they use their feelings i mean they really do use their feelings like they know that conviction is an emotion and they can tell the difference

between when they're convicted in something for the right reasons or when they're like agitated and compelled to do something but it's for the wrong reasons like you know another investment didn't go well or the IRS showed up or like in my mind they're using their they're using their brain the way the human brain is really designed which is something I think neuroscience is really just starting to reveal to us and kind of the assumptions we've had about it centuries are wrong but they like intuitively come to that like they through their experience they they get the model of what's happening right and they get like a mechanism of how thinking about it works best right and do you feel like that that almost um it sounds like it

reduces the pressure of some of the decision making, right? If there are no absolutes, if you're simply playing this social game and the market is a signal of how everyone within that market feels, it feels like that's a little bit less of a pressure situation than if I said to you, you're going to be right or wrong on a daily basis. Is that direct? Yeah, I think that's true because it's it's not like you have to find a secret answer that's lurking out there you know beyond the clouds and you're you're you have less of a feeling that you're searching for the holy grail and more of a feeling that you're surfing and so it's like keep my balance you know and ride with the waves and that is easier it is easier yeah and would it be fair to say the

other thing that you said um that i i think i understand is that the best in the world are focused more on the decision making process rather than the actual decisions themselves i think that's true i'm not sure i said it but i think that is true that people have a um you know they have a strategy that they know at once you know they want to look at it this way this way this way, it checks this box, checks this box, checks this box. Now they also understand that they're predicting an unknowable future because that's what it is, right? Like none of us know what's going to happen in half an hour, let alone tomorrow. And by the way, the brain works on a prediction mechanism. So again, they're like in concert as opposed to creating friction.

um but we always say that like knowing the way that you interact with the market like whatever your strategy is and sticking with it is definitely the better way to go about it so that's a process yeah explain that more right so like is that a discipline thing when you say kind of understanding uh almost like your circle of competency and just sticking to that well it's how you understand it's like knowing through what lens does the market make sense to you like all often like on twitter all but i'll tell people figure out what your philosophy of the market is and what your philosophy of stops are and like people be like what's she talking about well you know first of all we do everything based on past experience and like the scaffolding

of beliefs so it helps to know what you believe because like all the information you're you're interpreting through your beliefs so i'm saying look make sure you know what you believe there are a million different ways to make money in the market you just have to figure out like what yours is just like you know there's a million different ways to play football baseball basketball right like people have their their specific combination what's the same so you got to figure out what that is like how does the market make sense to you like what's your analogy for it like does surfing do it because it's not a sport like but it's not a sport like football or baseball um and then how do you learn to stick with it and how do you understand when you're confident in what you're seeing and

when you're not? How do you learn to make choices when you're reasonably confident but not too confident? Which is a process of knowing like your own you know feelings like knowing yourself. Yeah you've mentioned kind of confidence or conviction a few times and one of the things that's always fascinated me is those two lines are very blurred. And also somebody can be convicted when everyone else isn't. And if it goes well, they look back and they say, wow, that conviction was an incredible ally to sticking with something and it ends up working. But obviously, if you are convicted in something and it ends up being wrong, then people look back and say, no, you were just almost religious about that whether it was investment or trade or whatever and it ended

up leading to your demise how how does that break down mentally in terms of it's the same conviction right but but it's almost uh driven somewhat uh in hindsight by what the outcome ends up being how do you think through that well what i ask people to do is like think of every single word they can possibly think of that relates to conviction or is like a degree of conviction um and then rank those come up with some sort of ranking and usually do one to seven from like the least convicted which people will use panicked or terrified or the opposite like too overconfident you know overly convicted if you will like you referring to um and always know where you are on your scale and you're going to move

you know you're going to move from let's say a six to a three but you want to be able to have a word for a degree of or an intensity of and you want to be able to have a word so that number one you're you're ranking it for yourself and you're getting to know literally your own physical experience of being convicted but then when it gets like you're so sure this can't go wrong it's like red flag you know flashing red lights like when you're so you know when you start to cross that line I found over the years of doing this that the best trades come out of this calm feeling that you're right like you're just sure I'm just right I just know it's right and at the same time you're I must be missing something because it can't be this easy and being able to

have both of those feelings at the same time where the the confident one isn't energized isn't like do do do do do it's just like I just know there's no but I must be missing something because it feels too easy and I know this time and time and time and time again clients tell me their best trades come out of that combination of feelings so we try to figure out where that is on like a scale of one to seven yeah it's very interesting that um it almost sounds like the preparation of having a system right or the scale as you said uh and always being almost able to gut check right and measure uh it really sounds like awareness like the self-awareness aspect of this is super super

important because it is able to identify the bias that someone may have in their decision-making process? Yes. The self-awareness is everything. So I think of it in terms of leading people to that and then giving them tools, you know, to develop it with mechanisms to develop it and track it. You know, bias to me is a slightly different thing because I think the more truly self-aware you are the less you're subject to the typical um cognitive biases yeah that makes sense and then how do uh in times of uncertainty like we have right now right earlier you talked about unknowns and the future being the biggest unknown but right now it's less about uh the future unknown i think there's just a lot of uncertainty uh which seems tangentially related but but uh

almost worse. Uh, how do you talk to people about, uh, processing information, making sure that they have the sound decision-making and then really operating in a, in a time where, um, every decision, every action feels like it just has more weight on it. Um, and there's a lot of uncertainty in the air. So the first skill is just to be able to sit with it is literally just to be able to tolerate the uncertainty and go, you know what? I can't make what I think is a good prediction or a good bet. That's a skill, like a lot of people can't do that. And I think we're seeing like a lot of decisions being made that are about assuaging the fact that that's an uncomfortable place to be. Because when you make a decision, it feels a little bit more certain

just because you decided, even though, you know, the California schools are my example of that. like a week or so ago they said you know no classes in the fall i'm like on may whatever it was 15th they didn't need to make that decision but it made them feel like more certain so there's the skill of just being able to tolerate it then there's like making lists of okay what what do we know what's not knowable um what can we maybe find out a little bit more about and when do we really have to make this decision like i know someone you know startup company new york thinks that they've heard me talk about like do i really have to make the decision and for what period of time um you know their lease is coming up i don't know when i think it's in

the fall and the staff has all been like are we going back are we going to sign the lease the co has been like i don't know not making that decision today we don't have to make that decision today but again like how do you do that you're just you have to be able to tolerate the fact that you don't know so there tends to be a bias for action and I think that bias for action is somewhat misguided now there's this idea that people default to inaction I think it's generally the other way around people want to do something to make the feelings go away just live with the feelings you'll figure out a better thing to do as time unfolds i've always thought of it uh whether it's right or not as uh people want to feel in control right and the way that you feel in control

is that you that you do something i can impact the situation whether it ends up being a good impact or not uh and one of my favorite studies i can't remember if it was vanguard or fidelity you know somebody did a analysis on the best performing uh accounts they had and in the retail sector it was people who had forgotten their passwords or died right because it was just they didn't do anything right right right right yeah my father my father was one of those just because he literally started buying stock and he never sold any i don't he didn't know how to sell him he put stock in dividend reinvestment programs which is he wouldn't have known how to sell yeah it looked it probably wasn't a bad strategy i guess the other aspect of kind of uncertainty

and especially right now i think is um um a time where people are thinking about this is fear right so uncertainty to me feels like uh again if you pull out a scale um it's not on the easy end but it's not on the most extreme of the hard decision making it's just uncomfortable aspect Fear is like the extreme end of, I am literally scared I'm going to lose money, make a bad decision, you know, whatever it ends up being. How do you talk to, especially large asset managers, right, where that fear, if it ends up becoming reality, they don't just lose 20 bucks, right? We're talking, you know, millions or tens of millions of dollars, other people's money. How do you talk to them about fear and kind of walk them through when they are fearful? yeah so a superpower question to be able to answer is what am i feeling and why am i feeling

so i try to get them to put that fear into words and i often try to try to get them to really get to why and so i've i've asked more in the past two months than i've asked in a long time what's the worst that can happen so again this is something i think is a little bit different about our method like we're going right at the fear and almost universally the worst that can happen actually if the person really tries to answer that question is some version of catastrophe you know they go through losing money losing investors losing employees losing their fun losing their spouse their life is a disaster i mean this is a long time ago but i went to someone tell me and my kids are drug dealers and prostitutes

like it's sort of a natural human tendency so down deep in there you have this catastrophe scenario and you don't realize it because you're not going down the rabbit hole because you're told not to by the way but it's that catastrophe prediction that's like just that's influencing you and what happens is when you look at it you go oh wait Well, that's probably not likely to happen, but even if it is going to happen, there's like a hundred steps between here and there that I can, you know, avert that reality.

So I, that's a long-winded way of saying I get all the fears out in the open and then we look at them, which ones are real and which ones are exaggerated, which ones are relevant to whatever decisions you got to make right now, and which ones are irrelevant, you know, meaning that they're about something else or they can be put off or um so it's like sorting through the spaghetti bowl of fear when it's using this research that says emotion differentiation or emotion granularity meaning like fear panic nervous nervousness worry doubt like all the different intensities being able to sort through that shows you act on it less it's ironic being able to sort through it gives you a wider range of choices and stops you from

impulsively acting on it just to feel better or to feel in control yeah it's really interesting uh again it's around awareness right kind of having an understanding of what's happening makes it uh less powerful to some degree like the force is being acted on you um the the age-old question I know somebody listening to this will ask is, are the absolute best in the world ever scared? Or do they have emotional control to avoid fear and maybe just sit with the uncertainty? Or does it ever get to that point? Well, I haven't talked to every last single one of them. So maybe there's somebody out there that's, you know, less human than the next one. but um it's actually i mean it's a strength to be able to admit

fear like and also in its pure form it's a source of information so i think the very best in the world understand it that way that you know some fears are are warning you of something you should be afraid of Some are irrelevant. The skill is to know the difference. So speaking of, what are you scared of when you go to work every day? What am I scared of when I go to work every day?

I don't know. I can tell you what I realized I was scared of using my own methods in the past two months. because i'm really good at doing i mean i teach people do this so i'm always doing this what am i feeling and why am i feeling it because i've learned it doesn't matter how bad it is if you get to the real why the energy and intensity of that feeling goes like poof like the distraction of it i think it's because your unconscious is trying to use the feeling to lead you to some useful piece of information so it makes you uncomfortable and then when you get the piece information goes okay got your attention i'll go to sleep so like i don't know mid to you know

late march um when the hospital situation in new york city was you know really horrifying and sad there were a few days there where i didn't sleep that well and i could tell i was agitated and obviously like i knew you know like there's ambulances and like this is a horrible situation and people are dying but still i couldn't like and then i realized i was brushing my teeth i'm like what am i feeling why am i feeling it and i'm like what if i have to go to a room and i realized that i had this like if me or my husband had to go to a room for something else that would be bad at that point in time right and literally then i was like oh okay that's what i'm afraid of well that's a perfectly reasonable fear right now and then i was no longer afraid and i slept like a rock that

night so it was just recognizing that I and that was a perfectly reasonable fear I mean I have another crazy situation that I did it with when Kavanaugh was being confirmed but it ends up probably not being for public consumption but same thing you know I was really agitated by it and got right down to the real reason that it was so I mean obviously it was going to be agitating to me as a woman and you know but I'm like why is this distracting me and like preventing me from working and focusing and then I like drilled down and what it really was and the end result was not good but I was no longer it wasn't disruptive the feeling loses its ability to disrupt yeah and so I guess like when somebody goes through that process right how do you then

take okay I've identified what the fear is so you know use the example of I might have to go to the emergency room do you then take that and put action into place or is it almost like this mental piece that comes with okay i now have identified what is driving the fear maybe the fear doesn't necessarily go away but uh like you said the intensity um is mitigated to some degree uh because there's the awareness of it so sometimes all you need is the awareness of it and then the agitation goes away like in that situation there wasn't really much I could do I mean like I just I mean I'll be first I have like a condition in my esophagus that it's narrowed at the bottom so sometimes if I don't chew

really really well the food gets stuck and I've been in emergency room twice in my life so like my thing was okay we'll make sure you chew like all the time um so sometimes you get to that lie and then you see what the real thing is and then you go oh this is what i need to do about that thing and by the way it's that's like way productive because you're answering the right question you're not off trying to get rid of the feeling because you think it's one thing and it's another but sometimes just knowing i mean like i have one portfolio manager that you know keeps a zillion positions on and trades a lot and i'd go to his office and we'd go for a walk in new york and literally start walking and be like i have this

thing and then there's currencies and gold and you know i was worried about blah blah and i'll ask a question and the next thing i know he's on his phone going sell such and such and literally as he said to me whatever he was worried about or conflicted it had come to him what he should do but it was the saying it out loud to me and me understanding it's important that the listener actually understands that caused him to know what movie should make his portfolio so in other words it could be either he could give you an action you need to do the action will be better over the long because it's going to be more accurate based on something more accurate or sometimes just the awareness is enough to to calm you down and then you know i

don't need to do anything about that right now yeah it's super interesting is that normally how you interact with clients like you go physically in person uh and whether it's in the office or go for a walk um is there kind of a method behind that uh madness actually my preferred method is to be on the telephone and it's to be on the telephone because it's kind of like being on couch and psychoanalyst office we are not looking at each other and so like I can have my eyes closed and I'm really listening to the tone of voice and I'm really listening to the pauses and like I'm really listening to how much agitation or hesitancy is there and if the client's not looking at me or not looking at their screen you know probably they're really listening to themselves right

so that's my preferred method so that's been a good thing for me about the lockdown um is that i've been available to a lot but i have certain clients who just they don't feel comfortable if they can't see me so yeah i go into their office in new york and most there's only one that's really ever insisted to take a walk on a regular basis i actually left shoes in their office because i'm like walking shoes are different from the shoes i show up how do you make sure that they're not looking at their screens while they're talking to you well I can't if it's on the phone you know I mean I can usually tell by their cadence you know I mean I I was born a really good listener but I'm an even

better listener now because I've been trained to do it and practice doing it and it just generally speaking I mean you probably know this during the podcasting we're doing i mean it's a it's an art to really listen and it's a real gift to give somebody to really really listen what are the keys what are the keys to good listening no judgment no just hearing what they're saying in a perfect world and we use this and this is this might sound contradictory to no judgment but like the feeling it gives us so there's a phenomenon um where someone's not in touch with the feeling but someone like like me or my team is listening you'll pick up on the feeling

so i got certain clients over the years i had one literally in the first 30 seconds i'd be angry irritated i had one that in the first 30 seconds my dog would start barking And I assume the dog could hear the person's tone of voice and energy. I wouldn't think that a human being wouldn't hear it. So no judgment. Seeing what feelings it gives you, that's what we call it. Hearing what's not being said. Hearing the conflict.

conflict. Like they'll say, I think this, and they'll go on as if it's, it's coherent. But if you're listening, you realize they just said two things that are in conflict and they don't realize it's a conflict. Yeah. It's paying attention. It's just paying, you know, the short version paying really close attention. Yeah. And I've always thought about, you know, on the podcast, for example, when you're talking with somebody, the more you focus on not just what they're saying, but how they're saying it you right it's like opening up a whole new world and it sounds like that for you is like on steroids right it's everything the pauses the cadence the tone you know the inflection points all of those things uh you're able to glean a lot of information

is what it sounds like yeah i like i can hear when someone's not telling you something like when they're thinking something but not telling me and then i'll think because like i know this say everything getting someone to say everything with no embarrassment and shame on their part helps them but they need help to do it oftentimes because they will judge themselves they'll think there are things they shouldn't say um so i i listen for that what do they not say what about uh in those moments of panic fear uncertainty uh any like late night calls where just people are freaking out you know people think i get that all the time and i don't um i mean i tell my clients you can email me or text me any time of the day or night and i'll answer

you in a reasonable period of time i don't get that many they just don't do i've had a few I the group of people that do it more are the athletes but even then they don't I'm well I'm not going to say that because as soon as I say it then it'll happen but what's the big difference between the athletes and the investment professionals people ask me that all the time um I mean I think the big difference is not so much between the people as it is the situation so investing or trading is just wildly different than sports you know first of all like the point in sports is to make something happen like you physically make something happen the point of investing or trading is to set yourself up for

something to happen it's a completely different environment um you you know the game ends um you either won or lost like it's clear you know the ball goes backwards it's not good in investing the game never ends the ball goes backwards i don't know is it should you get out or is an opportunity like it the level of ambiguity in investing is you know orders of magnitude greater than it is in sports which makes investing a lot lot lot harder than sports um but as far as the people themselves

you know athletes are playing a team sport think of the world in terms of the people like just like the best investors do um the athletes that that are in individual sports like the new york times did an article about lindsey jacob alice and me she's snowboard racer um you know that's i mean well she's racing for other people and she does actually think a lot about other people and how she's um and even like a pitcher i've been working with you know that's thinking about other people um you know i think i'm in some ways i'm like everyone's human and everyone's brain works like human being and i'm the risk of sounding whatever they're all the thing to me but but i do think very much what situation are there like three years ago i had a

general manager of a major league baseball team called me and i watched more baseball the following two weeks and i watched in the preceding like 50 years of my life because i wanted to what does it feel like to be standing at second base you know what i always think like i'll even i've even said to some clients what does it feel like to be you you know what is it that's what I want to know because I want to help them sort through that so they're able to operate out of the feelings that are helping them and giving them information and able to avoid the ones that aren't yeah it's pretty crazy before we uh go to wrap this up I want to talk about uh routines right um I played sports growing up, obviously, you listen to people, whether they are the best in the world at running

a business, investing, or just doing some hobby. Everyone always thinks about their routine. But it's usually, here's what time I wake up, here's when I eat, you know, and it's a lot of physical action. Is there mental routines that either you help people structure, or patterns you've seen in high achievers or high performers in terms of how they think about like that mental routine they go through? Well, you know, people do things like meditating and imagery, but they use it, you know, there's not a consensus as to how people use it. I mean, I try to get them in the habit of what am I feeling and why am I feeling it all the time and then picking the action that gets them the thing that they want like making sure they get re-centered in what they want

frequently you know whether that's every day or multiple times a day which is the thing you want more in the long term is often in conflict with thing you want less in the short term and so like instead of telling the routine I want is instead of telling yourself to do the right thing be leaning into the thing you want more and saying what have I got to do to get the thing leveraging desire like a routine of leveraging desire but i'm also very non-judgmental you know some people have a very like step-by-step i'm going to do this every day you know and other people just don't operate like that you know and i'm totally about let's figure out what works for you like in your situation and don't feel guilty that someone else does x y and

Yeah, that makes sense. There's a lot of people who wish that they could hire you and spend time with you and kind of benefit from all the great work you do. But they just can't, whether it's a, you know, for whatever reason is, what's your advice to them as kind of the like watered down version of the work you're able to do where they can just get started at least being more aware or starting to implement some of the things that you do in your practice and their everyday lives? just stop judging yourself like just like there's a reason you think and feel the way you do and you think and do the things you do so stop judging try to understand figure out why it is you know some of it's gonna be like if you perceive it as self-destructive it's gonna like there was a reason that developed over your life for some reason to keep you safe just figure out what it is and then figure out what you want and work with it so what this means is don't judge how you feel just know how you feel put it into words because the more you do that the less it's going to get in your way and you don't have to tell yourself do this do this don't do that like

makes me crazy like the discipline i just have to say this like in the brain research that like our frontal cortex is controlling us and keeping us disciplined we're finding out that's not the way it works we're choosing what we want we're choosing how we want to heal so lots of times people choose a short-term feeling to take away an uncomfortable feeling but to get the long-term feeling they have to do something different like they have to go work out today or whatever you know or you have to stay in a trade know what you what are you feeling and why learn how to answer that question and just don't criticize yourself i love how uh how simple of just like what am i feeling and why right it's something that's memorable and and uh you can do literally

without uh moving you could do it in your head and in the moment right um and that makes sense what uh what's the most important book that you've ever read oh the most important book i've ever read i don't even know what it's called it's called the red book in modern psychoanalysis um it's crazy book like this is gonna be the craziest answer you ever had i think it's it's called the red book well it's it the nickname for it is the red book but literally it's like the actual title is something like modern psychoanalysis of the schizophrenic patient or something like that so i'm going to say this because this matters there's a group of psychoanalysts they're called moderns they're different than freudians they

don't worry about like interpreting you're doing this because x y and z happened to you as a child but what they figured out is anger you don't know you have is a huge thing so back to not judging yourself like being able to know what you're angry about with no judgment can turn into a superpower and it can actually eliminate like self-destructive behaviors but it's so hard to do because we live in a culture where like anger is terrible and no one's supposed to be angry and don't be angry you know and get so criticized for it the modern psychoanalysts get amazing results um with with really severe mental issues through understanding how to work with anger and we've gotten like some amazing results

through helping people understand they're angry about something that when you think about it they have a darn good reason to be angry about so let's stop judging it let's understand sometimes it's all in the past there's nothing you've done about it but just giving yourself the respect of of accepting that like creates energy and it creates optimism um so that's like you know level three or four and i usually don't talk about it in public because people can't take it um but so so it almost feels like uh if people read that book they will get a different perspective on a lot of this work is that fair yeah but the average i mean that book's hard for even me to read like it's it's written by a psychoanalyst in the 1940s or 50s um

there's a hundred there's irony in calling it modern if it was written in the 40s or 50s right well then it was called modern you know actually the guy that started this was like kicked out of new york psychoanalytic which is a big deal and like it was probably because he said you didn't have to be a medical doctor to be a psychoanalyst and they were all like well yes you have to be a medical doctor he's like no and he actually took patients he'd cured of schizophrenia this is true story your listeners are going to think i'm crazy but oh well um and taught them to be psychoanalyst and he believed that you could do that but i'm trying to think of one that um oh here's a great one the body keeps the score by i i'm going to get his name on vanderkirk or vanderkill the body

keeps the score it's a current book and it's basically about how like things happen to us over our life and we're unable to deal with the emotions um and they get subverted into our bodies which then makes me think of another one the drama of the gifted child what is that it's basically about how like little kids you know if you're a smart little kid you kind of figure out what your family dynamic is early on and kids try to save their families you know one thing kids do by the way is like if there's you know whatever whatever whatever's going on their household that's not good kids are narcissistic right so they think everything revolves around them so they blame themselves you know if i just behave that better you know

mommy and daddy wouldn't be fighting when you're a kid that helps you because it gives you this sense of power and control in the situation for you and that helps you but you're you know you need to lose that as you get out of this what happens is some people don't lose it so they always blame themselves um and then you know you can imagine how that gets in people's way in adult life um the drama the gifted child takes you through that like how that happens and i've given that to a lot of clients who are like oh my god this is me um yeah i love it i love it not the typical books you're you're that typical listen this is why i asked the question right is because i think uh there there's a lot of books out there that uh are out of the mainstream

uh kind of what's popular and investing or business or technology whatever uh but they're great books right and so it's always fascinating to hear what uh what people choose um i ask every single person uh one last question and then you get to ask me a question to end it uh the question is about aliens are you a believer or a non-believer if the question is yes or no then i come down on yes okay what is the logic you use to get to yes i agree but what is the logic behind yes oh there's so much more than we can see but the short version is after shortly after my father died i went on a cruise to hear this guy talk about past life regression which i would have never gone to except he was a yale training

psychiatrist and my friend who was a mergers and acquisitions attorney in Kazakhstan oil and gas female so she's a serious woman said you got to hear this guy so I go to hear this guy and he's got a speaker with him who does like I guess you call it channeling I don't know what the word for it is but talk to the spirit world and I mean even it's been I don't know how many years but I'm like getting agitated my father spoke to me no uncertain terms through that guy it was yeah it was unbelievable unbelievable the things he knew like there was no other way it could be anything but so there's a lot we don't know so therefore if i gotta choose yes or no on aliens i'm gonna come down and yes i love that i've never i've never had anyone use that uh

that perspective to uh to come out like yes i almost ever yes leave it to me um so why do you believe in aliens my whole thing is um so one obviously the galaxies on galaxies on galaxies that are out there you know it's just this vast vast world um but i actually think uh there's two components and i have and i'll call up the bias of uh i have the benefit of uh you are the 300th person i've asked this question to so i've heard a lot of the uh the various um uh theories here but one is um the definition of alien is very broad and so if you just look at something like the things in the ocean there's probably things there that you i and every scientist in the world

has no clue about right it's just it's so big um and so does that fall under kind of alien life right so some people will put yes some people say no but on top of that the other thing is when you start to get into things around uh simulation theories or uh our ability to actually see right you know and there's an example uh dave column uh from cornell was i was talking about recently i think it was him uh where it's like look if you're an ant on a highway you only know like i'm trying to get across this highway right there's like this big thing that comes whatever but like you don't have the intelligence to understand kind of the vast world outside of you know your little kingdom of the highway right right and so if you think about it from that

perspective like what are the odds that we as humans uh were the ant in some other thing um it's not necessarily high in my opinion but it's not zero right and so when you start to kind of do math on all the different variations of uh of a theory like that it's like yeah there's probability uh would tell you that there's some other intelligent life out there uh i uh i also come at it from a let's make sure let's hope that we're the superior intelligence right i don't know we want to be the the inferior one um but but i think that's going to be more luck if of of anything yeah i there's we're powerless to do anything about that but i really i did just see an article and i can't i'm not gonna be able to remember it in it or but it was an incredible

publication about like the fbi's awareness of ufo you know and i mean i like i'm not the kind of person who's going to go down that rabbit hole right but i saw this and it was like a serious publication and a serious article and i'm like huh so the the reason why i probably and i'm obviously guessing here but uh back in 2014 or 2015 there was um a quote-unquote leak from uh of these ufo videos and this was on you know reddit and twitter and kind of went went um very viral in the conspiracy theory world uh but just recently uh literally during the covid crisis uh the um i think it was the defense department or whoever it is in the government agency side uh they actually released the videos and confirmed their authenticity and that's probably that is

exactly what it is yeah and and so it's interesting because they basically say look we don't know what this is uh they don't nearly go as far as kind of the conspiracy theory world of like hey this is aliens or you know any of that type of stuff but it's just uh this video was taken uh we do not know what the um you know uh yeah we don't know what it is yeah we can't say what it is and also the part to me that that you know frank i would kind of wave my hand at all of this except for uh very smart people people way smarter than me say look we don't have an explanation scientifically for how it moves that way right yes right when you get into that type of uh you know understanding of some of this stuff it's like look there's obviously things that we don't

understand in the world right there was a time when people didn't understand gravity now we have the benefit of gravity uh i'm sure there's other things that we'll discover over time but there is this uh allure of scientifically if we can't explain something but we can see it happening like what the hell is that right the attention so all right there's more than we know there absolutely is that's the truest thing i've heard all day um i appreciate you taking the time to do this this is awesome i really enjoyed the conversation uh where can people go find you um or the work that you guys are doing on a daily basis so my company's name is the rethink group and we are the rethinkgroup.net um i have a website i wrote a book called market mind games

which is like taking all this psychology and applying it to to market decision making and places like you market mind games there are a lot of those going on right now for sure awesome well thank you so much for doing this we'll make sure we link to all of that and we'll do this again in the future thank you so much appreciate it