The Tim Ferriss Show - #362: Graham Duncan — Talent Is The Best Asset Class

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Starting point is 00:04:08 This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types, whether they come from military, entertainment, sports, business. It's a pretty wide spectrum. And today, my guest is Graham Duncan. You can find him at grahamduncan.blog, eastrockcap.com, and at grahamduncannyc on Twitter. Graham is the co-founder of East Rock Capital, an investment firm that manages approximately $2 billion for a small number of families and their charitable foundations. Before starting Eastrock 14 or so years ago,

Starting point is 00:04:46 Graham worked at two other investment firms. He started his career by co-founding an independent Wall Street research firm. Graham graduated from Yale with a BA in Ethics, Politics, and Economics. That's a lot of stuff. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves as co-chair of the Sohn Conference Foundation,

Starting point is 00:05:01 which funds pediatric cancer research. Josh Waitzkin, one of our veryhn Conference Foundation, which funds pediatric cancer research. Josh Waitzkin, one of our very good mutual friends, will probably pop up here and there in this conversation, thought of most often as the basis for searching for Bobby Fischer, although he would cringe to hear me limited to that, calls Graham, quote, the tip of the spear in the realms of talent tracking and judgment of human potential in high stakes mental arenas, end quote. That is a very Josh sentence. And Graham, it is a real pleasure to be sitting here with you. Thanks, man. Thanks for taking the time. And we've had many conversations. We haven't caught up in a while. We've also had terrible food poisoning together along with Josh. So I feel like we've

Starting point is 00:05:48 seen each other in high stakes, maybe not mental, physical arenas. We, if I recall correctly, almost decapitated each other when learning to paddleboard with Josh at one point. And I am excited to chat for a lot of reasons. Number one, I always learn something when we sit down and talk. And I don't think of you first and foremost as an investor. You certainly do that very well. But I enjoy watching your thinking and listening to your thinking. So I think that for people who are in the audience and who might be wondering right off the bat, how will this apply to me? It is hopefully transferable to just about any domain. I think that thinking, clear thinking is really a lot of what we'll be discussing. But for people who just heard this bio and are kind of scratching their heads as to what you exactly do, how do you explain what you do?

Starting point is 00:06:57 Well, I try to find people who are better at doing a thing than I am at doing that thing. And I first came to this 20 years ago. I had just started a firm with a professor of mine at Yale, and we were running this independent research firm. And I'd hired a sales guy who we were two years in, and we were in a group meeting, and he says to me at a certain point, Graham, what the fuck do you do here? And at that point, I had some real imposter syndrome going because I was hiring and firing 30 people who were much older, much more experienced than me.

Starting point is 00:07:34 And so I sat there for 30 seconds because it's a good question, what the fuck do I do? And I finally said to him, you know, Robert, when you first interviewed to come to our firm, you were applying to be an analyst. And I was interviewing you as an analyst. I didn't see your eyes light up when we talked about political analysis or economic analysis.

Starting point is 00:07:54 But then you proceeded to stalk me for the following four weeks. You called me at home back then. You emailed me twice a day. And I had this moment of revelation. I was also interviewing salespeople. Robert should be our salesperson. And you trusted me enough to come and try it. And now you've built our entire business.

Starting point is 00:08:13 And I'm not a good analyst. I'm not a good salesperson. But I put you in that seat. And now we've built this thing. I've put you into this positive feedback loop that we're calling a business here. And that's what I do. And I feel like I wouldn't pick that skill out of a lineup as my thing. It's the cards I was dealt.

Starting point is 00:08:33 It's what I end up being compulsive about and interested in in this way. The world seems to like me doing it. But it's kind of an odd center of gravity. But today I think about it as my mission in life is to get as many people as possible into positive feedback loops. And it's a good skill to have because it's right next to a weakness of mine, which is I'm kind of lazy. Maybe that's why we get along so well. So I like getting the design right up front so that I don't have to, like if I'd had to be talking to Robert once a week as a political analyst saying, look, you're not, do this, don't do that. That would have been, I don't, I don't want to put something into somebody. I want to

Starting point is 00:09:16 have them do the thing that they want to do anyway. And if you, if you construct organizations and teams that way, you unlock a lot of stuff. So for me today, I use that philosophy a lot because I act in effect as a general contractor for families to manage their wealth. In order to do that, my team and I meet over a thousand teams a year to try to hire the best investment craftsmen of any given sub-strategy. And sometimes those craftsmen, those investment managers who were trapped inside large organizations start their own firms on their own or with their help and you unleash all this extra investment energy and genius that they weren't accessing in their prior context and we get to participate in that together with them. So it's now been 20 years but I feel like I've basically been playing

Starting point is 00:10:05 different variations of the same game. And at that time, how old were you, roughly? 24, call it. 24. So we're going to talk, I'm sure, a lot about this. And, well, I won't make this just a list of Josh quotes, but I was texting with him and he reiterated I think what you just said and Josh my apologies I know we didn't talk about me reading your text up front

Starting point is 00:10:34 but this is pretty safe so a core genius for Graham is talent hunting finding funky a plus that funky word on at some point we're going to talk about. A+, potential mental performers in the finance space. And then he goes on. Now, you have systems and frameworks that you use for this. At 24, though, I would be really curious to hear you try to describe what made you good at it then also. If there's anything that comes to mind, are there things that you see that other people tend not to see? Or are there any types of questions that you ask yourself

Starting point is 00:11:22 that even at that point perhaps You had picked up along the way this is this is there is there anything that comes to mind? well, I think of it as having a certain taste in people and I like taste because and I think I had a certain taste back then and it's evolved and I can articulate a little better than I could back then but I Mean if you think of taste, I like taste over judgment because judgment implies there's one answer, whereas taste is you have a certain taste in podcast guests, right? There's something similar to the group,

Starting point is 00:11:56 and you could pick a Tim guest out of a lineup in a way, right? Tall, dark, and handsome. I'm sorry. Yeah, so taste. So I'm trying to think back then. I think the imposter thing kind of helped because I knew I was trying to hire people who are better at doing a thing than I was at doing it. And I knew I couldn't do it. And so I was forced to say, OK, what constitutes excellence in this thing? And we had hired a bunch of,

Starting point is 00:12:26 in that context, we'd hired a bunch of sales guys and they actually didn't like cold calling. And a lot of sales guys, understandably, don't like the rejection of cold calling. And I found this one guy who for whatever reason thrives on it. A couple of years ago, I ran into somebody who was a client or a prospective client of ours back then. And he said, I still dream that this guy, Robert, is trying to get me on the phone. And I wake up in cold sweats in the middle of the night. We built our entire business on this guy. And that's, so there's like this, yeah. So I think it's seeing, and I'm just, I find myself curious about what makes people tick in this way that I don't get tired of it.

Starting point is 00:13:06 And how has that taste evolved to today? So if a component of that taste or at least alerting your spider sense is identifying certain outliers, say in preferences or behaviors back then, like Robert thriving on cold call rejection. What do your tastes look like today or more recently, or what constitutes your taste when you're scouting for talent or evaluating talent in the world in which you now operate? Well, I like a framing I read once that people like musical instruments and the range of notes they can play is dependent on the range of tensions that they've learned to hold.

Starting point is 00:13:57 And I like that because it acknowledges that everybody, whatever they're playing right now, there's actually other notes they can play in a different context. So as an example, the tension I'm focused on right now in the investment manager world is I think there's something really interesting about the tension between someone's intensity and integrity, or if you were to rank, to try to use a concrete example, I've written an essay before about David Tepper. I don't know David Tepper. He's somewhat in the public domain. He's on CNBC. He's written some. And I think of David Tepper in many ways as the

Starting point is 00:14:38 platonic ideal of a good hedge fund manager and a good investor. And one thing he holds is like, I think people have worked for him, I've interviewed people who have worked for him. They experience him as that mix of like super aggressive in taking a position in an equity or debt security from zero to 20% of the fund with no hesitation. And yet, if you were, and yet if you were on the other side of a transaction with him,

Starting point is 00:15:09 he's not going to do something that you'd characterize as, I mean, you would never say fraudulent, but he's not going to be overly aggressive. Like he's playing the game because he enjoys it, but he has an ethical core. And I feel like that tension, at Goldman Sachs they have this term, is someone commercial. And I think of that, I love that word.

Starting point is 00:15:33 And I think of commercial as people who give off this vibe of, I'm going to create more value than I capture here. Versus somebody who's more transactional is trying to capture all the value. And people who are commercial, who balance that tension of aggression and integrity or aggression and humility, they tend to clump together. They like doing business with each other. And so you hit these pockets of people with that. How do you test for something like that or stress test it in the sense that I would imagine many of the people, if not all of the people, who make it to the point that they're interacting with you or your team have already cleared a lot of hurdles.

Starting point is 00:16:20 They've already checked a lot of boxes. And many of them will be good at selling themselves and no one is going to volunteer that they lack integrity they'll be like well there is this one thing right i'm a very very very skilled and intelligent you know deceptive artist or whatever so how do you try to evaluate that well one evolution of my process has been I just treat my interview as one perspective. And then people think of references as this thing you do after the fact. To me, it's the whole thing. References and getting the sense of how someone's interacting in a repeat iteration game in this thing we call financial markets.

Starting point is 00:17:01 To me, people generate trust, and it's like this intangible asset that's around them, and the trust sits in the heads of everybody they've interacted with over time. And my job is to see how everybody else they've interacted with, their employees, their former bosses, their peers, end up relating to them in the way,

Starting point is 00:17:24 because of the body of work they've had in the past. And so like we did that dinner with Chris Fussell that time, I think Fussell and Stan McChrystal's language around trying to assess someone's credibility. And then based on that assessment, how much decision space to give them. To me, that's so beautiful. And that's exactly how I think about what I do. So, and they have this formula, credibility equals proven competence plus relationships plus integrity.

Starting point is 00:17:54 And so what I'm trying to do, what I'm trying to understand, for instance, someone's integrity is understand how they behaved in prior moments of stress, right? So 2008 was an amazing, for anybody that's still investing who was around in 2008, it's a great moment to check in on how they behaved during that period because that was like an earthquake going off and it tested every single possible human relationship. It tested when people were partners in investing in their both portfolio managers. A lot of people got divorced after that. Limited partners,

Starting point is 00:18:32 the people who invest in hedge funds and the general partners, it tested those relationships, tested people's relationships with the banks. So if they've been around a while, to me, an interesting question is what happened in 08? and I'm sure we'll have additional crises soon that will again, enable us to separate those who behave well from those who behave badly in those periods of stress. So it's super reference focused. And then I have a series of questions I ask people that I feel like has high signal value. But, but again, I try to have a lot of humility and a light grip on my ability in a one-hour meeting to figure that out. What are some of the high signal questions that you've filtered through over time and have found to be particularly useful? Do any come to mind? What are types of questions? Well, the meta one that I think applies, whether you're looking for

Starting point is 00:19:31 an OBGYN for your wife to have a kid or anything, is you ask somebody, if you were hiring somebody to do this, what criteria would you use to hire that? That's a great question. Because what it captures is their definition of success and also captures some nuance that you wouldn't even know to ask about. So when my wife and I were looking for an OB-GYN, this was my question. And one guy said, well, what you're maximizing for is the downside and if

Starting point is 00:20:07 you have some sort of you know if the baby is in distress you need a good NICU so my primary criteria the cues needle intensive care unit right so and the the best NICUs are usually attached to teaching hospitals like Mount Sinai. So I would look for affiliation of that doctor with a good NICU. And then I would also ask, his aggregate criteria was I would ask the nurses. Because the nurses know who freaks out during tricky situations and who's got ice in their veins. And who makes good decisions, who treats people well in those settings. And the nurses, the good nurses want to work for the best doctors in that hospital setting.

Starting point is 00:20:49 And I actually have this thought that the equivalent in financial markets are the traders. The traders are on the receiving end of a portfolio manager's decisions. And they often have a very strong sense of who the good investors are. Like David Tepper's trader, I bet. And again, I don't know this, but my hypothesis would be they're in awe of David Tepper because they're on the receiving end of when he's buying when everybody else is freaking out. Now, you have to be careful. And one of the arts of references, I think, is controlling for the context and the perspective of the reference giver. Traders like traders, right? So if somebody doesn't trade a lot, they may not think as highly of this portfolio manager who's really more of a buy and hold

Starting point is 00:21:37 person and it doesn't give them any business and they think it's kind of lazy. Well, okay, that could be true, but it also could be just they run a super concentrated portfolio. They only buy one thing a year. So I really like what criteria would you use? And the other great thing about the question is it improves your own criteria for the next interview, right? Yeah. That's really, really fascinating. I was just chatting with a friend of mine, Toby, who's the CEO of Shopify, and the way he learned the business side is he went to Silicon Valley and met with, let's just call it a dozen venture capitalists as an engineer. And each meeting he would pick up new questions, new terminology, be able to answer one more question.

Starting point is 00:22:26 And it just improved his ability to vet not only venture capitalists, but also to learn the lingo and the terminology. Question related to the references themselves. So most folks out there, if they think of references, whether they have provided references or been a references or they're trying to hire, is you ask the person you are interviewing or will be interviewing for their references. They give references who they expect to give praise. And then you get in contact with those people so there there's a piece of which questions to ask and then there's the piece and there many others of which people to talk to how do you what does your process look like for determining who to talk to as references so I actually think the candidate giving you

Starting point is 00:23:24 references is usually, obviously you want to find off-list references if you can. And one advantage of interviewing a ton of people in a given thing is often you know people that they've worked with in other contexts that they didn't give. But I actually find on-list references like bizarrely high signal value because what happens is after 10 minutes on a reference, people run out of, like, nobody wants to lie. They run out of their script. They run out of their script. And so one of my closest friendships in the business was when somebody who runs another

Starting point is 00:23:56 family office was calling me on a reference on somebody. And at my job, I went into that call thinking, okay, I like this guy. We don't have money with him. I respect him. He stuck me on his reference list. Okay. And the guy sat on me for an hour and would not allow me to basically give a positive endorsement without specifics. And so I think of it as a net promoter score. So either at the beginning or the end of a reference, I'll say, okay, what I hear you saying is you're kind of giving this guy a seven on the net promoter score. Is that right? Did I hear that correctly?

Starting point is 00:24:32 Or I'll just ask it directly. On a one to ten, what's your level of endorsement of this person? If I was calling you on a reference on, let's make up a fictional assistant that worked for you four years ago and i was debating hiring them well first we know each other so i would i would do it in person i track it down and say tim so what's this getting um but let's say we don't know each other that well and i'm calling on a phone i would be trying to understand okay are you still in touch with that assistant um what's your like what's the social dynamic I make it safe for you. Look, I'm calling 20 people. I'm not passing any of that information back to the candidate unless you ask me to.

Starting point is 00:25:13 So you need to make it safe for them. But if at the end, I've got, in effect, an aggregate number of net promoter scores on a given person, you start to see patterns after reference number four, and then you know you can stop because you're hearing the same thing over and over again. Yeah, one, and this, I mean, I'm very primitive. Of course, you've done infinitely more hiring, but I remember this bit of advice that I was given by, let me think about who it was.

Starting point is 00:25:48 I'm blanking on who exactly it was. Kyle Maynard is who it was. Quadruple congenital amputees, climbed Kilimanjaro and was a star wrestler. Fascinating guy. He learned it, I think, from, might have been been it was from a very successful CEO and it was the rank X could be anything from 1 to 10 but you can't use a 7 and I have used that in restaurants

Starting point is 00:26:12 I have used that for so many things and it removes that safe mild endorsement when you are when you are then speaking to these references who have been provided, are there any other approaches you use to ferret out weaknesses? Well, one stance that I think is really important is that I'm not trying to catch somebody in any way. I'm just curious, and the references pick up on this vibe. And I want to help the candidate construct the best environment for them.

Starting point is 00:26:58 Right. Because there's no gotcha to it. We're all crazy. We all have lots of weaknesses. And so one thing I see other people in equivalent roles to me do is they have this gotcha to it like we're all crazy we all have lots of weaknesses and so one thing i see other people in equivalent roles to me do is they have this one thing that i see other people who are in equivalent roles to me do is they have this gotcha right thing which i don't agree with like so all i'm trying to do is help the person get in the best possible context for them.

Starting point is 00:27:27 And so I feel like that stance elicits a lot more because then you're on the same side, particularly if you're talking to a former boss. So I guess that's how I think about it. Yeah, it's sort of the mindset with which you go into it and the tone that you transmit. Yeah. One question I like to ask is if I were going to hire a partner for this person to complement their strengths and weaknesses, what would that person be good at? Right? Because then it's like, and you have to be careful in an investment context, you want it to be another investing partner.

Starting point is 00:28:05 Because, and then I actually use that. And then I can help, to the extent it's applicable, help that person try to make sure. Because one misconception I feel like people have sometimes is that there are products. In my opinion, in investment management, there are no products. They're only humans. And that's why I'm so focused on the people side of it and it the only product is the mindset of the individual and the decisions they're going to make prospectively from here right so if you were invested in a fund at fidelity and

Starting point is 00:28:36 the portfolio manager leaves and there's a new portfolio manager from my perspective that's that that's a completely new decision right totally right whereas some people have a mentality of oh i'm looking to put out it starts with a i think a dangerous mindset which is i'm i need to put out some assets and to do that i'm going to invest in some products i think you don't want to have the mindset of i need to put out assets like you always want to feel comfortable holding cash and there should be no pressure to put money to work. And then secondarily, to the extent you're going – and in my role, we're pretty indifferent on do we have people in-house or out in the field. Most of the time, external teams are – the most commercial people want to run their own firms.

Starting point is 00:29:25 And so we have a bias. Over time, we've constructed what I think of as a team of teams. But it's not a product of products. There is no... No. That makes a lot of sense to me. And this may or may not be, I want to bring up a term that Josh suggested bringing up

Starting point is 00:29:49 and this may not be the right place, but that's okay because this podcast is always all over the place, like memento. He said, ask Graham about wild gardening. Now, I'm going to laugh

Starting point is 00:30:03 if this is actual literally wild gardening, and it's just a complete non sequitur, but he put it in quotation marks. So he calls me the wild gardener because I don't like to force it. I don't want... So there's a great piece in Atlantic Monthly from years ago where someone looking at the temperament of children divided them into orchids and dandelions. And it's a little bit similar to the Susan Cain high sensitivity. There's another thinker named Elaine Aaron who has this concept of highly

Starting point is 00:30:41 sensitive children, HSCs. And the idea is that if you get orchids can be so beautiful, but they need just the right context. They need the right light, temperature, and dandelions are just lower maintenance, but maybe have less potential. That's not the right language, but the dandelions, you don't have to worry about the context as much. And so I think partly what I do is, back to the system design, is, okay, let's get everybody into a positive feedback loop, doing what they're actually compulsive about, what they actually can have a chance of being world-class at. And I don't like trying to stick a dandelion where it doesn't want to be or an orchid where it

Starting point is 00:31:27 doesn't want to be and I yeah let's so we're talking about we're covering a lot that relates to talent selection and asking the right questions we're definitely going to spend some time on questions that you ask yourself as well, since that's in part, in large part, what thinking is day to day. But I want to talk a bit about ambiguity or cases that are not exceptionally clear. So if you talk to, say say 20 references and all 20 come back and say this person is fantastic let me list the ways then that's one thing or if they're all negative but no doubt you've had instances where you get negative feedback or perhaps you have a lot of positive

Starting point is 00:32:26 but then one on a scale of one to ten in severity is like a nine or ten in severity negative. How do you handle cases like that? How do you think through something that is not, at least at first glance, extremely obvious? A lot of life is like this. Yeah, yeah. Or if there are any cases

Starting point is 00:32:48 any examples not naming names but yeah I think it's a matter of holding those contradictory perspectives as long as you need to to make sense of them. And so for me, people, my wife, my business partner can experience me as indecisive at times because I'm so tolerant of holding the ambiguity on somebody being really good at something because everyone's genius is right next to their dysfunction, I think. And so until you're clear on it, it can feel, and sometimes you just don't get clear, in which case there's no need to do anything. But one central strategy I have of dealing with that is just spending more time with them. You know, we got to know each other well on these intense surfing trips where we almost drowned,

Starting point is 00:33:45 I almost beheaded you, and then we got food poisoning. And I like, in general... Welcome to club paradise. I like getting out of the conference room and not being pitched something across the table.

Starting point is 00:33:57 And I like creating other contexts to interact with people. And if there's ambiguity or ambivalence, we'll look at an investment with them. If you look at something that's live with somebody, you learn so much about how they're actually underwriting it, the mental models they're using.

Starting point is 00:34:11 What do you mean by underwriting it in this case? So underwriting is a term used in the context of making an investment decision. And it refers to the body of work that an individual or, say, a deal team has done to get comfortable advocating for an investment at a particular price. And so like people will say, based on my underwriting, the returns are attractive relative to the risk in this case. And by saying my underwriting, they are putting their personal reputation behind the projections and they're taking ownership of the outcome of that analysis? So if we were looking at a real estate investment in Washington, D.C. in a potential hotel, we would, rather than investing in a fund, we would, if we're getting a new partner, spend a lot of time on that, literally looking at that

Starting point is 00:35:00 hotel investment and understanding how the sponsor is looking at the investment. And in that way, you get to know, oh, this is what they're really focused on. This is what their strengths are. And maybe we should keep an eye out for these weaknesses. Or if we make the investment in a fund of theirs, this is something we'd keep an eye on. And just for people who may not have put the pieces together, and I want you to correct me here, but you're in effect, you have as clients, your limited partners,

Starting point is 00:35:33 family offices. So these are wealthy families who want your help in then choosing different investment teams. And you are, in a way, I suppose, the team coach who is selecting the players. Yeah. So we work with a handful of families who get to know us well and trust us to be their outsourced chief investment officer.

Starting point is 00:36:00 They basically give us full investment discretion over their wealth outside of their personal property. And we manage that as one pool for them and diversify it across asset classes. So we invest that pool in, say, a commercial real estate project in Seattle that we make with our real estate partners that are local there. Or in hedge fund partnerships run by the best teams we can find all over the world. So if somebody's got a fund, we'll look at their fund. If they have an SPV, a special purpose vehicle where they're investing in a publicly traded security or a private investment, we'll look at that.

Starting point is 00:36:34 If they want to start a fund, we'll help them start a fund. If they don't need our capital in a seed context, but they just are looking for arm's length, normal, limited partners, we'll do that. So we try to be as opportunistic and open-minded as possible about it. And yeah. Are there any other patterns that you've spotted in the talent you end up selecting that does well? And the reason I ask is that from what I've observed, and this is not my world, but just hanging out on the sidelines every once in a while, glancing over at my perception of what you do, is that you're picking folks,

Starting point is 00:37:12 meaning investors, who are, they're not Tepper necessarily, right? I mean, they are kind of rookie MVPs, or maybe that's not the right description, but you may not have a ton of data on these folks. Feel free to fact correct any of that. So are there any other characteristics that seem to pop up more often than not in the people who end up doing well that you select? Yeah, I'd say in addition to that aggression-humility tension, a second one I think about is originality and triage are these two. So we've noticed that the people who do best tend to have lots of ideas. There's an academic named Dean Simington who studied genius across field and he observed

Starting point is 00:38:08 that whether it was Bach or any given scientist, the sheer number of compositions that Bach had were like a hundred times more than average composers. And some of his lousy pieces of music were inferior to his peers at the time, but then he also ended up with some great pieces. So there's something around just sheer quantity of ideas and original thinking that characterizes a lot of them. Specifically, you'll notice that in the language that people use. So I feel like in any field, I think, when you start to achieve mastery, you start, often people start creating their own language to capture the nuance that they're seeing that makes them good at their thing. And in investment management, Buffett is kind of the Shakespeare of the industry. And

Starting point is 00:38:57 everybody is living in his language and in his mental models to the point where it's limiting. So I feel like a 25-year-old sometimes will be saying, I'm sitting on cash just waiting for the fat pitch. And I can't tell whether he knows he's quoting Buffett or not. And even if he's doing it consciously, he's living in this construct, which is a super useful construct. But if he proceeds to become the Tepper of his generation, he will generate his own language over the course of the subsequent 20 years. And so when people use a lot of jargon and cliches and language that at times doesn't feel like their own, to me, that's a sign that maybe they're a

Starting point is 00:39:37 little bit earlier and they could use another stage of apprenticeship or, you know, just that we would probably wait till to a later stage. And then that second component, when people have lots of ideas, they're usually not that good at killing them. So it's a tension with this triage mentality of, look, I'm here to make money. I'm going to force rank. Somebody is going to die here and I'm going to choose these. I'm going to save these four people and let this guy die. Right. Is that triage high situational awareness? Okay. I'm going to save these four people and let this guy die. It's that triage, high situational awareness. Okay, I'm making live trade-offs here. I think that's a quality that really good portfolio managers have

Starting point is 00:40:11 where they can force rank their portfolio and they can kill their own ideas. And so you see that often. And then just back to aggressiveness, I was interviewing a guy and he was talking about when he's looking for, one question I like to ask people is, if you were hiring an analyst, what criteria are you looking for in the analyst? And people who've been managing money and managing people before begin to look for things in their analysts that make those analysts most valuable to them, right? And so there's often signal in the way they answer that. And this guy said, you know, what I'm looking for is a trace of fear in myself that this guy is coming for me,

Starting point is 00:40:51 that he will replace me. And I think what he's capturing is that level of intensity, that obsessiveness that you see in a minority, probably in any field, because they've found their game, the game they want to play and they're they bring an intensity and obsessiveness to it that over time they're just working so much harder and they're so you know it's like Wayne Gretzky finding you know hockey at age five right like he's just he's obsessed and he's just going over and over and over again and there are people in the finance industry who are like that. They're just obsessed with investing in this really distinctive way.

Starting point is 00:41:30 Warren Buffett, from a young age, obsessed. John Arnold, obsessed. You mentioned something I want to come back to for a second, which I may admit, I don't think I'll misrepresent. I think I'll probably get it. You mentioned Buffett and the terminology and the language, the phrasing that he popularizes, well, originates and popularizes, and how people compare that with, and leading you to wonder whether they really understand what they're speaking about or simply repeating something

Starting point is 00:42:04 from someone who's well-regarded. This makes me think of Richard Feynman and how his dad used to tell him that there's a big difference, and I'm paraphrasing here, but between knowing the label, the word or the phrase, and understanding what that label is intended to represent. And you can learn so much about not only others, but yourself and your own thinking by looking at the language that you use. And one of the questions I wanted to ask you, because it came up when you were in Tribe of Mentors, was how you improve your own thinking. And something that stuck out to me, and I'm going to kind of track it down here.

Starting point is 00:42:46 And this was in response to what is one of the best or the most worthwhile investments you've ever made. And I'll just, I'll skip around here. But the first line was, I invest a disproportionate amount of my income in paying for an ever-growing collection of trainers and coaches. And you mentioned a handful. And one of them, you said, is the most gifted listener I've ever encountered. She surfaces my hidden assumptions, the ones that hold me rather than me holding them, and teaches me to ask better and better questions. How does, whether it's this person specifically or others, help you to surface your hidden assumptions? This strikes me as so, so key to just about everything. And investing just happens to sort of magnify the consequences

Starting point is 00:43:34 in a very often obvious way of assumptions and faulty assumptions. But how would a coach help you to surface your hidden assumptions? Or how might they? Well, this woman, Caroline Coughlin in particular, is within this Bob Keegan school of, he's a professor at Harvard and he has a theory about adult development, which is that the process of moving through adulthood is one of increasing your mental complexity and increasing the number of things that you used to be subject to, assumptions you had you couldn't see, and making them object over time. So an example for many people would be if they grew up in a religious context, are they actively choosing their religious beliefs or did they arrive at them because their parents and community, everyone was swimming in those beliefs together. And so what I feel like a really good coach can do is by listening of the way you're making, listening the way I'm making sense of something can observe, oh, you're actually assuming X.

Starting point is 00:44:52 Your grip, I think of it as grip, like your grip on certain things is really tight. And if a coach can find what you're gripping really tightly and that you're actually not, you can't articulate the opposite of this belief you have, that might be a sign that you have identity or ego caught up in that thing. Can you think of an example? business partner pointed out to me recently that I seem to have that I might be holding a little bit strongly is what he was calling futurism, that I'm ready for things to be disrupted and paranoid about disruption in this way that he observed is I'm holding, I got a little bit too tight of a grip around things. So when we're investing in a hotel where there might be risks around climate change. I'm extra focused

Starting point is 00:45:46 on the climate change. Or if we're investing in somebody, a value investor who's often going long things that Silicon Valley is trying to disrupt, my partner's observation is I will be extra focused on risks around that. I think he's totally right. Once he said that, it kind of clicked, and I realized, okay, now that doesn't mean I drop it. It just means when it comes up, it's more object to me. And in a case like that, would you practice articulating the opposite, as you mentioned earlier and I'm just as my mind is digesting this right now I'm thinking of I don't mean you have read you've read so many books it's just boggles of the mind and so so you may be

Starting point is 00:46:38 familiar with it would it wouldn't surprise me if you're familiar with Byron Katie but the she has something called The Work, which I think is, you have to be careful with using it as your only hammer because then you just start looking for nails everywhere. But part of that practice is taking this belief that is causing you, and I'm not saying this is an example here, but causing you some amount of discomfort or stress or anxiety, and then going through the exercise of stating the exact opposite. So my dad should be, this is not a real example, make me not, but my dad should be more attentive to my mom.

Starting point is 00:47:17 And then you state it in a number of different ways, like my dad should be less attentive to my mom, my mom should be more attentive to my mom my mom should be more attentive to my dad etc and you you have to as part of the exercise look for data points or even the smallest shred of evidence that you could put down if you were trying to make those arguments and it helps to disentangle emotion and attachment from your initial kind of statement. When your partner brings to light something that you might be gripping tightly like this,

Starting point is 00:47:53 what are the next steps after that? Or is just the pointing out enough? It's kind of like looking at an optical illusion and you're like, oh, you see how, if you look at it this way, it's actually an old woman's face instead of an hourglass, and you can never again look at that and not see the old woman's face. Yeah, the Byron Katie, I've been to multiple workshops of her.

Starting point is 00:48:13 I think she's amazing. I knew it. I knew it. So across the street here, there's a salad place, Sweet Greens, and I was in there maybe three months ago listening to Byron Katie's new book A Mind at Home with Itself and Byron Katie and her husband Stephen Mitchell walk into the restaurant that's order salads and then proceed to sit right next to me and it was the most unbelievable I thought I took a picture of it because I thought I might be tripping. And then you looked at it on your computer later and no one was there.

Starting point is 00:48:48 And I will tell you, they proceeded to have the most mindful meal I think I may have ever witnessed. There are some gurus who, out of context, you think are not walking their talk. In this particular case, I can affirm that she is like her stage presence, to the extent you've seen her on stage, all the time. And so I find her credibility on that extra high. Yeah, I think her thing of, you know, what's the belief? Is it true? What's the opposite of that?

Starting point is 00:49:20 Can you absolutely know it's true? How do you feel when you think that thing? Yeah, what would you be without this belief? I think it's so powerful. And also, sorry to interrupt, but one thing that really caught me, because I spent a little bit of time with her a number of months ago,

Starting point is 00:49:34 and I can sort of confirm what you just said. She is exactly what you would sort of expect and hope her to be based on the books. Yeah, I mean, the metaphysics can get pretty mind-bending what you would sort of expect and hope her to be based on the books. Yeah. I mean, the metaphysics can get pretty mind bendy if, if you go in that direction, but the framing of using the word, we were talking about labels, belief, like what would you be without this belief as opposed to thought is also

Starting point is 00:50:01 really key. Yeah. Right. It's like something you take, it's a statement you take to be true. Right. And it's just framing it that way puts it under a different lens. But so to your question, I think I may have a little bit of ego identity around being unconventional or being into technology disruption and not thinking that the status quo is going to continue. And so what my business partner is pointing out is just watch that. And now that we have it on the table, when we're

Starting point is 00:50:30 evaluating investment, it's, oh, I don't want to be self-conscious about bringing up the paranoia because I think it's a useful lens to have. But being aware that I'm just a tiny bit subject to that is really useful. And if you're looking at a team, whether that's within these offices, we're sitting in your offices right now, or it could be any team, really. But specifically, I guess, just to keep us in your power zone, investing, when do you choose to teach each individual person to offset biases like this versus hiring another person to provide a counterpoint? And the reason I ask is, and I'm getting way above my pay grade here but if you look at say Buffett and Munger you know right and Buffett's searching for bargains and wants to sort of buy at a discount and then Munger is

Starting point is 00:51:37 I'm gonna get slaughtered on the internet I'm sure but it's sort of teaching him over time that there are cases where you can buy at market value or a fair price if the growth trajectory is really high. And they seem to complement each other very, very well. How do you think about each person developing the counterpoint or the ability to look at the opposite versus hiring to end up at that optimal mixture. Yeah. Well, it's back to grip. So if I'm evaluating a team, I'm trying to figure out.

Starting point is 00:52:19 So sometimes I'll hook up someone who is long Tesla with someone who is short Tesla. And when you're witnessing that exchange, you can see whether the person who's long Tesla and the person who's short Tesla, are they actively seeking disconfirming evidence or is it an ideological thing? And Tesla is a little bit of an extreme example because it's very ideological on both sides. It's not really a great example for that reason, but you can see it because it's more extreme right now on Twitter. The shorts and Musk and the people who are along are going back and forth. The vast majority of them are not actually looking to hold the other person's perspective. In a team context, you can witness whether there's somebody who's already there. In the hedge fund industry and the private equity industry, what's cool is that the boundary of the firm is pretty fluid.

Starting point is 00:53:16 So sometimes a portfolio manager of one firm will have a close relationship with one to five other portfolio managers. Can you define here just for folks, so PM, right? Portfolio manager. Portfolio manager. Who is that person? That's the person who's running the investment firm and who's making the investment decisions and sizing the investments in that portfolio. It's the main role. And inside a large firm, you might have multiple PMs, depending on... I'm using it.

Starting point is 00:53:35 That's a good catch. I meant more CIO, but if you have... Chief investment officer. Chief investment officer, exactly. But a portfolio manager within a large shop like Citadel will have external relationships sometimes. And sometimes those buy-side relationships will be testing each other's thinking. And the equivalent of that Buffett-Munger thing often exists across firm. So they don't have to be within the boundary of the firm. So the looking for disconfirming evidence, I want to stick with for a second. So this is something you see certainly in any good scientist.

Starting point is 00:54:17 I mean, they're not setting out to prove X. They are coming up with a hypothesis and then hopefully in as unbiased and objective a way possible, arguably not possibly fully, fully objective, trying to then assess and actively look for disconfirming evidence if it exists or if they can isolate it. How do you train, how could one train themselves to get better at doing that? Are there, and it could be as seemingly indirect as you like.

Starting point is 00:54:57 I'm just wondering. I mean, it would seem like one step would be developing what we talked about earlier, this ability to take whatever assumption or bias you have and then view it as an object so that you're aware of it. Meditation can help with that. Doing something like Byron Katie can help with that. Are there other things, whether they're precursors to looking for disconfirming evidence or that habit itself that can be that helped to cultivate well I think an underlying paranoia that you're missing something is really

Starting point is 00:55:33 useful and the best portfolio managers have that they're they're just that that sense that and maybe you dial that up by remembering by regularly reviewing all the mistakes you've made and thinking, OK, some percentage of the time I see things clearly and some percentage of the time I miss it. You know, one thing about financial markets in the publicly traded side is your hit rate is, you know, a really good portfolio manager's hit rate is like 65 percent. Like that's off the charts and 55 percent will do just fine in a lot of cases, depending particularly on their slugging percentage, what percentage of how do they size the winners versus the losers. You want to size the winners obviously bigger than the losers.

Starting point is 00:56:16 So there's something around how do you maintain paranoia and humility? I think one tricky thing in the hedge fund space is being on the record in any way in the form of writing letters or being on CNBC or being in the public domain. Probably on the margin makes it harder to drop it like a hot potato and go short. And to me, the most skilled portfolio managers have an identity, not as I am smart and therefore I make money or I am good at financial stocks, but the meta identity is I'm a moneymaker. And if that involves right now, if in this era, in this moment in history, that's going long Tesla, I'll go long Tesla. I'll go short Tesla, I'll go short Tesla. But there's no baggage. I remember walking into a guy who we have a ton of money with, who I really, really respected. He was short SolarCity. And it was on the morning that Musk announced that Tesla was buying SolarCity. So it was a very painful morning for people who were short the

Starting point is 00:57:21 stock. And I expected this guy to be moping around and super pissed at Musk. And he was laughing. He was enjoying the audacity that he feels like he's in this game. And I knew it was a possibility. I didn't think he was going to have the chutzpah to do that. That mentality, that mentality, that humor, that lightness, that, oh, got this one wrong, on to the next one. If that particular portfolio manager ever wrote about something in a letter, he doesn't happen to.

Starting point is 00:57:54 But if he did, I would have no qualms that the following month he can easily be short the position he just... And so one nice thing about financial markets is that long, short thing, the ability to make money by it going up and make money by it going down. And change your position. This reminds me of something Josh decided some time ago, which was that he wouldn't...

Starting point is 00:58:21 At least, maybe this has changed, but I doubt it has changed given his current circumstances, which we won't get into, but very unlikely. He's giving many keynotes right now. He stopped giving keynotes because he felt like it would entrench his thinking and calcify his positions because he would be repeating these statements and concepts that he would then be less likely to subconsciously or consciously to modify. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:58:54 Hmm. What, this is something I ask everyone, and maybe you've heard this before, but are there any particular books that you have gifted the most to other people? They don't have to relate to what we've been discussing at all, but you are so widely read. Do any stand out as books that you've gifted or recommended often to other people?

Starting point is 00:59:21 Yeah, so in financial markets, I really like this somewhat obscure book called The Aspirational Investor by this guy, Ashvin Chhabra, who runs Jim Simons' family office. Jim Simons started Renaissance Technologies, which is the dominant quant fund. Amazing story. We're not going to get into it, but just, yeah, Renaissance is really fascinating. So please continue. And one thing I like about renaissance and Jim Simons, he has this line on a New Yorker profile of him that he thinks what he has is really good taste

Starting point is 00:59:50 in interesting problems. He uses the word taste. And it's a similar, like, anyway, and this guy who runs his family office used to run the endowment at the Institute for Advanced Studies. And in the book, he identifies what he sees as the flaws in modern portfolio theory,

Starting point is 01:00:05 which have totally dominated prevailing beliefs about investing for decades. And Ashvin suggests a totally different approach to portfolio construction based on how people actually behave and what they actually care about. And so that's a book I give out a lot. There's on the culture side, if somebody's starting a firm, I'm looking over your shoulder because I've got a bunch of them on the bookshelf here. Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan. Dave Logan goes through, has looked at thousands of organizations and puts them into categories. And Phil Jackson, the former coach of the Chicago Bulls, has observed that that framework that Logan discusses in tribal leadership is the best framework for understanding world-class teams that he's come across. We can go into it if it's of interest.

Starting point is 01:00:56 Culture Code by Daniel Coyle, I give people. What do you find of value in that book? This book has come up a lot on the podcast. I still have not read it. It's come up in many different contexts. value in that book? This book has come up a lot on the podcast. I still have not read it. It's come up in many different contexts. What is that book about? Which? Sorry, the last one.

Starting point is 01:01:11 Culture Code. He's looking at a bunch of different cultures. Pixar, Navy Seals. He's got three others or something. He's looking for patterns among what make people disproportionately effective as a culture. And I think he captures some of the nuance that if you're trying to set up teams, it exposes you to that.

Starting point is 01:01:41 He'd be a good guest on the podcast. Another book on my homework list check I also like The Tools I give that out sometimes that's by Phil Stutz and Barry Michaels have you ever heard of them? I have

Starting point is 01:01:53 are they screenwriters working in entertainment? yeah they're psychologists and they're in Hollywood and they treat a lot of screenwriters I see and there's a New Yorker reporter Dana Goodyear treat a lot of screenwriters. I see. And there's a New Yorker reporter, Dana Goodyear, did a profile of them that highlighted

Starting point is 01:02:10 them and then they wrote a book called The Tools. And they have a bunch of good hacks in there. Some of the most, I won't mention them by name, but a few of the documentary filmmakers who are on a very short list of documentary filmmakers who create massively commercially successful documentaries Have recommended this book to me. Yes. That's how it first came up. Just as an example It's very apropos of Wim Hof. They they have this whole analogy of saying that this model of To get to what you want. you have to go through some pain.

Starting point is 01:02:45 So just pause. Could you describe for people who Wim Hof is if they haven't? Oh, boy. So, yeah, Wim Hof, I think his first podcast interview was on this podcast. Interesting guy. But who's Wim Hof? Wim Hof has developed a way of exposing himself to the cold and a methodology around exposing himself to the cold and a methodology around exposing himself to the cold

Starting point is 01:03:09 that he now teaches to millions of people, thanks to you and Laird Hamilton and others highlighting him. The Iceman, yes. A dubious honor in some cases because you do need to watch your fingers and toes. But he has a number of training approaches, although one sometimes wonders how much of what he can do as attribute versus training, but for cold exposure and also for breath holding. I don't want to take us off the rails, but quick note on breath holding. Our mutual friend Josh almost died from a shallow water blackout in a pool here doing breath hold training. Never do it in water. There's really no good reason.

Starting point is 01:03:55 So these guys have this metaphor of, they're basically coaching you on your self-talk and they say you should rub your hands together and say bring it on when you're anticipating doing something that is going to be painful and it and they use the metaphor of going into the cold water at the at the beach and that regular embracing of discomfort is a skill that that white skin is also into and a theme of learning to, Waitzkin calls it the other side of pain, but it's getting used to exposing yourself to pain on a regular basis to the point where you don't bounce off of it. Stutz and Michael observed that in their work with producers, agents, screenwriters, et cetera, in Hollywood, that people were avoiding doing the thing they needed to do.

Starting point is 01:04:49 They were bouncing off of it. And so if you can create a skill and a mechanism to make yourself go into it and get in that habit, and they've got like six of them. And so I do this with my kids. Like we'll literally rub our hands together and be thinking okay bring it on to X so I wonder if Josh got this from you I mean it wouldn't surprise me if you guys independently arrived at this but with with his son he would take cold showers and he would always say it's so good and he taught his son to say it's so good

Starting point is 01:05:20 with these short freezing cold showers and I don't know, his son is probably, I'm making this up, four years old at the time. And also taught his son to enjoy going out in what other people would consider bad weather. The rainstorms and so on. So that's an example of just making yourself, making the rain object. So I think what Josh is observing is that for most people, they are subject to the weather and they're experiencing the weather as acting on them. And a hack around that is to say, basically, no, I enjoy the rain. I'm going to find what I enjoy in it and make it not the world happening to me, but bring the locus of control internally. That's what I think he's doing there. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And it's a good parenting hack.

Starting point is 01:06:07 What, I mean, any other, well, if there are more books behind me, then feel free to mention them. I like Finite and Infinite Games, which has been going around a lot. His other book, Breakfast at the Victory. This is James Kars. James Kars is really good.

Starting point is 01:06:24 I had him to an event, a hedge fund retreat we had a couple years ago and spent some time with him. And I think he's a very profound guy. He was observing that, I asked him how he came up with the concept of finite versus infinite games and he said he was watching his kids play and he noticed that there were some games like card games or baseball etc. where their whole motivation and intent was to have the game end and get the trophy. And then he noticed there were other games they were playing where there were more fantasy

Starting point is 01:06:55 games, where their goal was to recruit other people to play in that game with them, such as him as their dad, and the goal was to keep the game going as long as possible. I think it's a super profound insight of the different ways you can relate to games in your life if you can see the game you're playing. I asked him for examples of infinite games, which he doesn't give in the book. He mentioned as a religious studies scholar, he thinks Buddhism and Judaism are two infinite games. I guess in religious studies, neither of those has a central authority or a central army. So it's unlike Catholicism. They have difficulty making sense of why it persists over time.

Starting point is 01:07:40 And so the framework of it's an infinite game, those people, Buddhists and Jews, are recruiting to various degrees people into their game and wanting to just keep playing the game for its own sake. That was an interesting framing. How does the distinction of finite and infinite games apply to finance? If it does. No, I think it does. I mean, a finite player who's an investment manager would be, for instance, trying to hit a certain number of net worth and then leave the game, right? And that's okay, but it makes it less valuable of a partner from my perspective. And the incentives can get kind of weird once they achieve that net worth, if they actually stick to it. Now,

Starting point is 01:08:22 the reality is most people move the bar. There was a study recently that everybody wants to have, all along the income spectrum, everybody wants to have two times where they are right now. But I think there are, in general, I seek out partners who are playing, who I experience as infinite players, who are enjoying the game for its own sake and are going to keep playing and want to recruit other people. And that's back to the distinction between being commercial and transactional.

Starting point is 01:08:55 There's something about the abundance mentality behind somebody who's commercial, who's trying to create more value than the capture that's like leaving room for other people in this way so yeah how do you how do you how do you test for that or how do you if that is it might be lower on the sort of hierarchy of needs in assessing talent but if it if it is something that you try to assess how do you assess assess it? The big one is time horizon. If there's somebody who's thinking, okay, I found this thing that I love to do, I'm going to do it for the next 20 years and I'm not going to make short-term accommodations to what's going on in the market or with my limited partners or with my team, I experience it around time horizon.

Starting point is 01:09:43 How do you ask around the question? Especially after this podcast comes out, they're going to be like, okay, Graham wants long time horizon. You can see it just in the way they're setting up their business. I don't know. There are indications of just subtle mental framings on...

Starting point is 01:10:02 Some people start investment firms because it's the time of their career where they've kind of, their friends have started investment firms. They can no longer stay at the container they're in and they need to start, but it's not an approach goal. It's almost an avoidant goal. It's like, okay, this is the time where I'm supposed to do this. I'm going to do this versus a different set that are like, okay, I found the thing I love. I found the ball I like to hit and I'm going to do it in this new form because that implies to me a longer time horizon. And it's a cliche, but a love of the game itself. If you took away David Tepper's money

Starting point is 01:10:47 and made him start at scratch right now, I think he'd enjoy it. He's just found the thing he loves. Who else has long-term... Jocko Willink. I think if Jocko... I would invest in something Jocko did. In fact, his, is default aggressive.

Starting point is 01:11:07 He has that mix of aggressive and integrity or aggressive and humility. And you think of it, he's coming back from Iraq. He does CLT training. And then he's entering your world. And he says, oh, this is his podcast thing. And then, you know, oh, coaching thing. And from afar, and i don't know him i just really admire the way he's doing his own thing um he has yeah that that mix of time horizon

Starting point is 01:11:34 having an idea executing on it you guys should know each other i'll introduce you guys. You would get along. I want to stay with this for a little bit more in terms of sniffing around the direct question. And it seems like perhaps much like your tell me about what happened in 2008. You can maybe also along the lines of looking at how politicians have voted on things as opposed to asking them what they will do. It just made me think that looking at time horizon and sort of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations and so on,

Starting point is 01:12:23 you could also assess kind of along the same lines that Y Combinator has, at least historically, by asking a lot of questions around what people do in their, what they've built in their spare time and things like that, which will not be a direct answer to the question, but could act as indicators that point to sort of a general pattern of behavior and motivations. Yeah, I find Y Combinators and Paul Graham and Sam Altman stuff high signal from my perspective. So they have this question they ask themselves, can you say this person is an animal and not smile? Based on the references, based on your interactions with them. I think they're keying in on the same quality of aggression or intensity that I am. Buffett uses passion and common sense.

Starting point is 01:13:10 Redaglio uses assertiveness and open-mindedness. But I think everybody's honing in on this paradoxical tension that I was talking about earlier. So, sorry, what was, tell me the question again. Yeah, no, I'm not even sure I asked the question. I think it was more of an observation and wondering if there are other ways to ask around the direct question of time horizon, which, I mean, you already gave a few examples of, so I think it's been answered.

Starting point is 01:13:41 So let's pick up on one thing you also mentioned in passing, which I'll refresh for people listening by reading a quote. And I'm going to get this name wrong. So maybe you could, this is a quote that you introduced me to. And it was one of two candidates for answering the question, what you would put on a gigantic billboard anywhere, and you could put anything on it, sort of metaphorically speaking, right? A message to get out to millions or billions of people. So could you read this?

Starting point is 01:14:14 Because it is stuck in my mind, and I've revisited it so many times, but I don't know the proper pronunciation. Kwame Appiah, who's a philosopher at NYU, actually I think he used to be at Princeton, has this quote, it's not how well you play the game, it's deciding what game you want to play.

Starting point is 01:14:34 Right, and so you had mentioned the game if you're aware that you're playing the game. So what is the relevance or importance of this quote for you? And I'll read it one more time. So it's not how well you play the game, it's deciding what game you want to play. So I think that's a way of making your game, moving it from being subject to it to object.

Starting point is 01:14:54 So an example would be, I think a huge number of people are obviously playing the game of making money and they're keeping score in terms of how much money they make or how much fame they accumulate or how much power they accumulate and making that game object to them and then just making sure that you still want to play that game is I think what his quote is about. I ended up writing an essay where I tried to capture the various stages of mastery and investment management that's on, that's a blog that's on my site.

Starting point is 01:15:26 And to me, that quote allows you to kind of zoom out and say, okay, at different stages of my life, I'm going to play different games. What game am I playing right now? And can I see it? And in fact, that's what the coaches and the coach I've used in the past helps you do is say, okay, you're clearly optimizing right now for this. Just make sure you actually want, that's the game you want to play.

Starting point is 01:15:50 The ladder you're climbing is leaning against the right wall. Let's just make sure. Check it every once in a while. So you can kind of, it allows you to kind of, it's like in a video game, it's the, what do you call that? God's eye view. God's eye view, right. God's Eye View of the game. You're like, okay, I'm down here in this corner of the mountain range. Do I still want to climb

Starting point is 01:16:13 this mountain? Or is that a local maximum and I should actually zoom out and head a completely different direction? I think you've mentioned this to me before. It may even be in Tribe of Mentors, but it makes me think of the david foster wallace uh commencement speech which has been turned into books and is online in various forms but uh yes here it is right here that is the this is water yeah yeah right and the story of what is it the two the two young fish together swim by the old the old fish and the old fish doesn't pass and like how's the water boys or something like that they're like what's water yeah exactly i think that's what he's capturing so beautifully in that uh in that commencement speeches that we all have water there are things that are water to us at every stage of

Starting point is 01:17:02 our life and the the fun project is to try to see it and see it at each stage and when i think of even the development your development over the course of the last several years on your podcast like you're able to see you're wrestling with different stuff you're able to see your own quirks in a different way than you were five years ago and i think that's the process of adult development. That's what Keegan is pointing to as these different stages. I do the podcast in part because it helps me to see the water. It forces me to try to ask questions or make statements and articulate things that would otherwise just bounce around in my head, consciously or subconsciously. So the podcast is actually a tool for me to try to discern

Starting point is 01:17:46 which water I happen to be swimming in, which makes it a lot of fun. The Greg McKeown, is that what he says? I said it that way for a long time. McKeown. Greg McKeown's podcast with you recently on essentialism. When he tells that story

Starting point is 01:18:01 of how he felt a ton of pressure to go on the work event on the project with his consulting partners rather than be at the hospital with his wife as she was having a baby, that's a developmental. In Keegan language, that's a developmental moment where he's saying basically he's moving from socialized to self-authoring. He's saying basically, no, my partners don't define the scorecard here. The scorecard is my scorecard. I decide what's a priority to me. And I'm never going to, I'm going to remind myself of this the rest of my life by embarrassing myself by telling this story over and over again so that I don't do it again. I feel like essentialism is basically, that's what he's capturing. And I think in a lot of different moments on your podcast, that's what he's capturing and I think in a lot of different moments on your podcast that's

Starting point is 01:18:45 people are wrestling with okay what's what can they see at that moment what did they used to not be able to see and and that's the it's kind of beautiful it's the unfolding that we're all doing and you've had you've had an opportunity to observe I don't know, dozens, hundreds, thousands of careers, or at least examine probably thousands of different careers. How do you think about careers or career advice? I know that we've had some exchanges using the metaphor of the river, which might be a good place to start, and then I have some other questions related to

Starting point is 01:19:25 that. But maybe we can begin with that. Yeah, I like the image of a river with two banks. One side is chaos and the other side is order. It's something Dan Siegel, who's a neuroscientist, came up with to try to describe what mental health is because he argued the bank of chaos is schizophrenia and the bank of rigidity is OCD and that you could basically put every mental illness on one bank or another and that healthy integration is swimming in the middle of the river in between those two. And I was thinking about how careers are like that, that you start off along the rigidity bank apprenticing for somebody and you're learning the jargon of that industry and you're trying to

Starting point is 01:20:11 figure out how people define reality, but you're in somebody else's definition of reality. You're refining reality and you're learning to be able to see. Whereas the other bank, the chaos bank, is more asserting reality that's where people who are swimming right next to that bank are just making stuff up on this massive like I think of Musk as being right along that bank and if some if Tesla goes bankrupt that will mean he lost his feedback with reality and kind of stepped onto the chaos bank and he pulls it off he was swimming right next to it.

Starting point is 01:20:45 Just Steve Jobs the same way. He's threading the needle. Right? So there's, and it's, you know, you see it in poets, you see it in writers. People who are right next to that bank are super original. They're coming up with new stuff. We live in their paradigms to some degree.

Starting point is 01:21:03 But you're right on the, if you lose the feedback loop with the way the rest of the world is experiencing reality, all of a sudden you can seem crazy. And the danger of swimming, from a career perspective, of starting your own thing, starting your own thing a lot of the times is a project of asserting reality. And if you do it too early, it can be very disorienting. And so you want to just swim back and forth. It's not to discourage people from starting their own things

Starting point is 01:21:32 at a very young age, but just be aware that you're going to, that's the project and you might want to come back and refine reality for a little bit and just see it as fluid.

Starting point is 01:21:42 Right. It makes you think of, I'm not saying this is kind of a direct mapping, but as Pablo Picasso said, learn the rules as an amateur so you can break the rules as a professional. Something along those lines. Exactly.

Starting point is 01:21:55 And you mentioned this bank of chaos and how those who can swim right alongside it can harness this paradigm shifting originality. But as you've also pointed out, that same originality can have unintended consequences if they flop onto the bank like Steve, and the magical thinking around his illness. If one wants to be top 1% in a given field, just arbitrarily to pull a number out of my ass, does that mean that they need to swim really closely

Starting point is 01:22:39 alongside one bank or the other? Or is that a mistaken thinking? Or be perceived as being yeah top the a top performer do they do they swim in the middle or do? They oscillate between the two other other different breeds just in your experience Yeah, I don't I think to be a top 1% depends it maybe on the field Let's say your world. Yeah, I think within financial markets you need a continual level of innovation to an adaptability to stay ahead because the games that were working five years ago no longer

Starting point is 01:23:21 work so for a while there were a lot of event-driven strategies where people were investing in mergers and acquisitions and making a certain return percentage around that. That game has mainly gone away. And so I would say I think of infinite players as playing with the boundaries of the game. So when Mike Burry came up with the idea of shorting subprime. Mike Burry famously played by Christian Bale in the Big Short. That was an example of innovation and playing with the boundary of the game at that time, because he wanted to express a view that was short the housing market. And he found he had no, he didn't want to short stocks. He wanted to get more leverage on it. And he came up with that.

Starting point is 01:24:05 And then the banks offered that to everybody else. And everybody else who came into the trade ended up following the trail that he had blazed on that from my perspective. There may be other perspectives on that, but that's my perspective. So, you know, is that a long... I mean, as Christian Bale portrayed him, he was wrestling with his sanity at various points, having that trade on. At various points, the fund was down a lot. His partners were abandoning him.

Starting point is 01:24:36 So I do think there's something around pushing the edge of your field because people are going to catch up with you that is required I don't know that you know I'm trying to think of other examples outside of financial markets of being top 1% something but well I mean yeah yeah it's it's less it's less objective but if if we're looking at say successful authors I think another example that that I've that I've seen you mentioned is Persick yeah and he wrote the Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance but certainly towards the end got one might argue pretty pretty loopy yeah it's hard to think of top 1% in that novelist context, but I think original...

Starting point is 01:25:26 I mean, you look at Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knosgaard. I don't know how to say his name, but those two authors. I think they're doing original things as novelists, and I don't think they're at risk of flopping onto the bank of chaos, but they're doing original things. Yeah. I don't know how to think. Yeah. One, uh, this is, this is more just, just because I think you'd enjoy it and I can, I can link to it for people who are interested, but there's a model of, of cognitive function, uh, or maybe,, yeah, I suppose you could put it cognitive function, and personality typing that has been, I guess it's a theory and a model from Robin Carhart-Harris, who's a scientist

Starting point is 01:26:18 in the UK, called the entropic brain, which I think you'd enjoy. For another time. I'm just looking at my notes here. I have two words based on conversations we've had leading up to this, but I don't have any context here. Time billionaires. What does that refer to? I was listening to a guy introduce a speaker a while ago and he was saying you know people don't really understand the difference between billionaires and millionaires he said you know a million

Starting point is 01:26:56 seconds is like 11 days a billion seconds is 31 years. And I remember that kind of stuff. Holy shit. That's a hell of a way to think about it. Yeah. A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is slightly over 31 days. And I was thinking about Tyler Cohen has a thing about cultural

Starting point is 01:27:20 billionaires. Marginal revolution. Yeah. Yeah. In one of his books, he talks about cultural billionaires and I like that. I feel like in our culture, we're so obsessed as a culture with money, and we reify dollar billionaires in a way that it'd be nice to co-opt that term the way Tyler Cohen did with cultural billionaires, and I was thinking of time billionaires, that when I see sometimes 20-year-olds, the thought I had was they probably have two billion seconds left, but they aren't relating to themselves as time billionaires. And I was thinking about how if

Starting point is 01:28:00 you could, what would, Rupert Murdoch is worth $20 billion. He's 87 years old. What would he pay if he could take the next five years of someone's 20-year-old healthy body, mind, et cetera? Right. And for that 20-year-old, how would they price it? Yeah. Right?

Starting point is 01:28:22 Because I was thinking at various points of my career, i might have sold the next five years for something and over time it's kind of my pricing has gone vertical because the next five years if i were to lose and the key to this question is you can't sell the five at the end of your life you got to sell them right now yeah like i don't know how i'd price it because my kids are of a certain age that they'll never be again um that it feels so but i don't know that i live every day that way and so i but i aspire to so so i was trying to capture you know i heard um tim urban on your podcast and i started reading his stuff and i just i find his writing style and the topics he is interested in just amazing. He has this concept of life calendar, and I bought his life calendar. He sells it

Starting point is 01:29:11 as a poster, and what he does is he puts a week for, he does a circle for each week, so he has 52 circles on the horizontal, and then 90 rows, so that you can see a 90-year life in weeks. And what's startling about the picture, again, to this question of how long is a billion seconds, is how short it actually is. And so what I did is I went through and I put where I am right now, and I started filling in the circles as I go. And I put where my eldest daughter goes to college. I put when my dad is going to be 90. And I was actually thinking a good product, if there are any graphic

Starting point is 01:29:54 designers out there, would be to partner with Tim and allow you to create a huge poster and select a photo for each week. And then, because it's such a graphical representation of your life in a way that's hard to convey in words sometimes. But so I've just been thinking a lot about time and how you,

Starting point is 01:30:14 yeah, how you live. There's a quote I like that, you know, we're all very focused on the length of our life. How do you appreciate the width of it as you're going along? And somehow keeping that in your life, how do you appreciate the width of it as you're going along? And somehow keeping that in your consciousness.

Starting point is 01:30:30 Can you elaborate on that? The width? The width, meaning this present moment we're sitting here having, you know, if... Sort of like the depth of attention. Yeah, yeah. The breadth of sensory inputs, the being... I mean, it's another way of saying trying to stay more present versus being extremely goal-directed of whatever objective you have in your life right now. And how do you, how do you cultivate that in yourself?

Starting point is 01:31:01 So one thing is I have that life calendar literally sitting in my kitchen. Pause quickly, I'll buy you some time also. So Tim Urban has a blog, Wait But Why. I mean, calling it a blog is kind of funny because some of his pieces are 70,000 words broken up into multiple parts. Also, just as you mentioned Musk, I mean, he was the, I believe, the only person asked by Musk directly who was a a fan of the blog, to come in and have full access to Tesla. The life calendar is a fantastic place to start, as is a piece called The Tail End.

Starting point is 01:31:35 If you want a really acute sense of time, especially as it relates to how much time you might have left with parents, that is a fantastic piece. You have the calendar. So that just to interrupt. So that piece, reading that piece made me try to engineer having my parents in New York much more frequently. And I tangibly did that. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. So literally reading that piece had that big an impact where I was like, oh my God, because he points out the percentages, how if your parents don't live in the same place you do you will see them by the time you graduated from high school you've spent like 95 percent of the time you'll ever spend with them total hours you will ever spend with your parents yeah and that's I didn't know I didn't know that about about about you and your family after reading that piece which was recommended to me by Matt Mullenweg

Starting point is 01:32:24 whose father passed away very unexpectedly he recommended that piece to was recommended to me by Matt Mullenweg whose father passed away very unexpectedly he recommended that piece to me and that led me to really block out and make a priority a a trip or a gathering with my family every six months that piece yeah yeah the tail end profound stuff I think so but your question is, what do I do? So, I mean, all the standard stuff. I meditate. I use 10% Happier app or Sam Harris' app. The Harris brothers, even though they're not brothers.

Starting point is 01:32:56 Dan Harris and Sam Harris. Dan Harris calls that whole crew the Jew-boos. The Jewish Buddhists. Which I think is a great... Well, you know, just as a quick side note on that, I remember I was talking to Jack Kornfield, who's an incredible teacher. I mean, probably the most empathic human I've ever met. I mean, truly walks the walk.

Starting point is 01:33:18 And I asked him at one point, I said, you've got Goldstein, Kornfield, whatever the name is, like Sharon Salzberg. I'm like, why are, it seems like the entire crew who brought Buddhist mindfulness practices to the U.S. in sort of the, let's say, I'm getting the time frame slightly off probably, but kind of. 80s. Yeah, like 70s, 80s. They're all Jewish. And he goes goes that is a good question this is just us having a private conversation but he said yeah it sounds like a

Starting point is 01:33:50 law firm and and uh we went on to we won't get get to but the the jubas yes uh so dan harris sam harris both of those apps yeah i use both those apps um i try to be nostalgic for spending time with my kids in the present moment. So like my youngest right now, I think I can probably carry her on my shoulders probably a total of five more times. She's getting too heavy. And I know because I have an older kid that that's a distinct phase. But I don't, beyond those, keeping track, yeah, of how much time. Those are all, I mean, those are good anchor points.

Starting point is 01:34:29 The Gretchen Rubin line about how the days are long but the years are short. I think about that a lot. There's one that, boy, I wish I could get the attribution right. It was actually, it was in Tribe of Mentors. It was an answer to one of my questions. It was in one of the other profiles, but from a technologist, I know that much. And it was in answer to the question, what do you do when you feel overwhelmed or unfocused? And this was a question that he asked himself, which was, in effect, how much would I pay at age 80, 90, looking back on my life,

Starting point is 01:35:11 how much would I pay to relive this moment right now? And I ask that a lot, whether it's just sitting on the grass watching my dog play with a stick or any number of times, that's a question that I ask myself a lot. 40 years from now, how much would I pay? And I think about it, I times, that's a question that I ask myself a lot. Like, you know, 40 years from now, how much would I pay? And I think about, I mean, it's... Tim Harris on his app has a great

Starting point is 01:35:32 three-minute gratitude talk. And he says, imagine you died yesterday evening. How much, how much you would have, what you would give to be back in this moment of having a shitty dinner with your kids and wife. Where you're all in a bad mood and you're all in this very contracted state. And I think that's such a, again, it borders on the cliche, but there's something in just daily reminders of that. I think a lot about the Byron Katie thing of the past and the future are simulations in your head.

Starting point is 01:36:06 And the only thing that's actually real is this current now moment that we're in. So we talked about a little bit earlier. We'll do a couple more questions. And then we can wrap for this round one on this podcast. We talked about your one option for the billboard, which was the Kwame quote. Are there any other quotes, statements, questions, words, anything that you might put on a billboard besides that? Yeah, another candidate would be this quote,

Starting point is 01:36:52 We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. Welcome to the party. And that's a mashup of Pierre Chaudin, who is a French Jesuit priest and philosopher. And then there's a meditation on the 10% Happier app called Welcome to the Party by Jeff Warren, where you're saying to every negative feeling, anything that comes up, welcome to the party. And he says, imagine you're an affable host. I don't like that.

Starting point is 01:37:23 And there was this great moment earlier this week where my son, a seven-year-old, is still afraid of the dark in his room. And he was running back to get his clothes and he yelled out, Welcome to the party, fear of the dark. Which made me so proud because that fear is object to him. He can feel his feelings. But anyway, I like that quote because every time I read it, it shifts that, oh, this is what it's like right now. This is a human experience.

Starting point is 01:37:52 And somehow this is our moment to have it. Have you heard that quote before? No, I haven't. I really like it. I've been reading a lot of writing from Jesuits recently for some reason. And I'm not sure if it's a Jesuit thing or if it's just coincidence that I happen to be picking these up. I really don't know the first thing about the Jesuit order. But the line, welcome to the party, is so helpful because I've certainly read a thousand times in different forms making your emotions an object or not identifying, for instance, with I am angry, but phrasing it in some fairly unnatural way.

Starting point is 01:38:41 Like, I am currently experiencing anger. Okay, fine. but this is much more memorable right it's being the affable host yeah to your whole range of emotions including like when like the grumpy cantankerous uncle shows up and you're like hey bud welcome to the party all right look at you had a hard day have some you know go over have some bud, welcome to the party. You know, you look like you had a hard day. Go over, have some punch. Welcome to the party. I love it. I love it.

Starting point is 01:39:09 Any others? I also love this quote from Mark Twain right before he died. He was looking back at his life, and he said something like, there isn't time so brief as life for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There's only time for loving and but an instant, so to speak, for that. And I like that because I think the perspective of somebody who's really old and dying is, I find, somehow extra high signal because they're trying to draw your attention to something while you're still at an earlier place in your life. And somehow I find myself thinking about that quite a lot,

Starting point is 01:39:48 that all this stuff that feels so high drama, when you're 90 looking at it, you're just going to say it was all noise. Yeah, or it's all noise, and or the day after you die, if you're looking down, and you're like, God, what I would give to have that shitty meal that I thought was the last place I would want to be. What I would give to have that again.

Starting point is 01:40:15 Yeah, yeah. Graham, I always love spending time together. And thank you for making the time. Thank you for having me. It was fun. Yeah, this is a lot of fun. I have a ton of notes that I've taken for myself already, and books that I want to pick up. Welcome to the party that I want to listen to.

Starting point is 01:40:36 People can find you in a number of different places. I'll just repeat them. GrahamDuncan.blog, where they can find that essay that you mentioned earlier. And eastrockcap.com, at grahamduncannyc on Twitter if they want to wave and say hello on the Internet. Is there anything else you'd like to mention, things you'd like people to check out,

Starting point is 01:41:00 requests you would have of the audience, suggestions, anything at all that you'd like to say before we wrap up? Well, I'll just note, I helped produce this conference called the Sohn Conference. We do it in partnership with CNBC, and we raise money for pediatric cancer. And we do that by bringing 15 hedge fund managers and venture capitalists together at Lincoln Center. They each bring an actual investment idea. And we're doing it this year, May 6th, at Lincoln Center. They each bring an actual investment idea and we're doing it this year, May 6th, in Lincoln Center. So anybody listening, if you can afford it to donate, come. If you can't afford to donate, DM me on Twitter and I'll come up with some of our free tickets. But it's a great gift exchange we have where basically the head firm managers bring their ideas, people pay money to come hear them,

Starting point is 01:41:45 and then we give that money to the leading pediatric cancer researchers. So that would be one. That's the Sohn Conference Foundation, S-O-H-N, which I've attended before and found endlessly fascinating. I mean, endlessly fascinating. It's a fun day. Yeah, it's a really mind-stretching experience. Anything else that you'd like to say?

Starting point is 01:42:12 No, I think that's it. I mean, no. All right, full stop. Graham, until next time. And we have a lot to otherwise catch up on. But thank you again for being so generous with your time and your caffeinated beverages. And to everybody listening,

Starting point is 01:42:36 I will have links to everything in the show notes. So the books, the essays, the various figures, people, thinkers we mentioned, which you can find, as always, at tim.blog forward slash podcast, and just search Graham or Duncan, and everything will pop right up. And until next time, pay attention to the present. That's all you got. All right. Thanks, guys. Bye. Hey, guys. This is Tim again.

Starting point is 01:43:09 Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends,

Starting point is 01:43:46 for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out. And just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up,

Starting point is 01:44:10 I hope you enjoy it. This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is the global creative platform that makes it easy for creators and clients to work together. From logos to apps, packaging to book covers, just about anything can be found on 99designs, which is a go-to creative resource for any budget that I've used for many, many years now. 99design now offers, guess what? Custom video, which is very exciting. They will match you with the right video professional to help you explain your product, spotlight a service, and bring your brand to life. And like I mentioned, I've used 99designs for all sorts of things. I've used them for book covers, some of the mock-ups for The 4-Hour Body, for example, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller, illustrations, beautiful

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Starting point is 01:46:00 brand awareness, generate leads, or build long-term relationships that result in real business impact. Could be all of the above. I've had Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, on this podcast a number of times, often called the Oracle of Silicon Valley for many different reasons. And he, among other people and friends of mine, have made me more and more interested in LinkedIn as a platform, as an ecosystem in the last few years. And it's very nuanced. It's very subtle, but can be used in some very powerful ways. With a community of more than 575 million professionals, LinkedIn is gigantic, but it can be hyper-specific. You have access to a very diverse group of people all searching for things they need to grow professionally. That is explicitly the purpose of LinkedIn. And four out of five users on LinkedIn are decision makers at their companies.

Starting point is 01:46:49 So you can build relationships that really matter, that can drive your business objectives forward, that can also have a high LTV, lifetime value. LinkedIn has the marketing tools to help you target your customers with precision, right down to, among other things, their job title, company name, industry, etc. This is important because better targeting equals a message that your customers actually care about. And it also means your advertising is more effective and cost effective. So why spray and pray with your marketing dollars when you can be surgical? It just makes sense. To redeem a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to linkedin.com forward slash TFS. That stands for Tim Ferriss Show.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #362: Graham Duncan — Talent Is The Best Asset Class

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #362: Graham Duncan — Talent Is The Best Asset Class

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