#872: Graham Duncan — Talent Is the Best Asset Class (Repost)

23:53Tim Ferriss:you're on the same side, particularly if you're talking to a former boss. So that's, I guess that's how I think of it. Yeah. 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? And you had to be careful in an investment context, you want it to be another investing partner. And then I actually use that. And then I can help to the extent it's applicable, help that person try to make sure. One misconception I feel like people have sometimes is that there are products.

24:32In 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. The only product is the mindset of the individual and the decisions they're going to make prospectively from here. So if you were invested in a fund at Fidelity and the portfolio manager leaves and there's a new portfolio manager, from my perspective, that's a completely new decision. Whereas some people have a mentality of, oh, I'm looking to put out, starts with, I think, a dangerous mindset, which is I need to put out some assets. And to do that, I'm going to invest in some products.

25:06I think you don't want to have the mindset of, I'd need to put out assets. You always want to feel comfortable holding cash and there should be no pressure, but money to work. And then And secondarily, in my role, we're pretty indifferent on do we have people in-house or out in the field. Most of the time, the most commercial people want to run their own firms. And so we have a bias. We, over time, have constructed what I think of as a team of teams. But, you know, it's not a product of products.

25:33Tim Ferriss:That makes a lot of sense to me. And I want to bring up a term that Josh suggested bringing up. 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 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. 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.

26:16And 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 sensitive children, HSCs. And the idea is that 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 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.

26:56And I don't like trying to stick a dandelion where it doesn't want to be or an orchid where it doesn't want to be.

27:03Tim Ferriss: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. If you talk to, say, 20 references and all 20 come back and say, this person's 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, but then one on a scale of one to 10 in severity is like a nine or ten severity negative.

27:58Tim Ferriss: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. Or if there are any cases, 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, 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.

28:49But 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, I almost beheaded you, and then we got food poisoning. And I like in general, booking to club paradise.

29:08Tim Ferriss:Yeah. I like getting out of the conference room and not being pitched something across the table. And I like creating other contexts to interact with people, 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. 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 DLT has done to get comfortable advocating for an investment at a particular price.

29:41And so, like, people will say, based on my underwriting, 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 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.

30:21This 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.

30:28Tim Ferriss: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, you're limited partners, 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. 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.

31:16So 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. 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.

31:48So we try to be as opportunistic and open-minded as possible about it.

31:52Tim Ferriss: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, 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, in 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?

32:43I'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 Simonton who studied genius across field, and he observed that whether it was Bach or any given scientist, the sheer number of compositions that Bach had were like 100 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.

33:28Specifically, 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, 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 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.

34:01And 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 temper of his generation, he'll generate his own language over the course of a 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 little bit earlier and they could use another stage of apprenticeship or that we would probably wait to a later stage. And then that second component, when people have lots of ideas, they're usually not that good at killing them.

34:36So it's a tension with this triage mentality of, look, I'm here to make money. Somebody's gonna die here. I'm gonna save these four people and let this guy die, right? Is that triage, high situational awareness. I'm making live trade-offs here. I think that's a quality that really good portfolio managers have where they can force rank their portfolio and they can kill their own ideas. You see that often. And then just back to aggressiveness, I was interviewing a guy, and one question I like to ask people is, if you were hiring an analyst, what criteria are you looking for at 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.

35:18And 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, 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 of just they've found their game, the game they want to play. And they bring an intensity and obsessiveness to it that over time, they're just working so much harder. It's like Wayne Gretzky finding hockey at age five, right? Like he's obsessed and he's just going over and over and over again.

35:54And there are people in the finance industry who are like that. They're just obsessed with investing in this really distinctive way. Warren Buffett is from a young age, obsessed. John Arnold, obsessed.

36:06Tim Ferriss:You mentioned something I want to come back to for a second, which I don't think I'll misrepresent. I think I'll probably get it. But the mentioned Buffett and the terminology and the language, the phrasing that he popularizes, well, originates and popularizes, and how people can parrot that and leading you to wonder whether they really understand what they're speaking about or simply repeating something 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, between knowing the label, the word or the phrase, and understanding what that label is intended to represent.

36:47Tim Ferriss: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 track it down here. And this was in response to what is one of the best or the most worthwhile investments you've ever made. And 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.

37:24Tim Ferriss: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. Investing just happens to sort of magnify the consequences 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?

38:04This, well, then 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 to 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?

38:48And so what I feel like a really good coach can do is by listening the way I'm making sense of something can observe, oh, you're actually assuming X. I think of it as grip. 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? So one assumption my 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.

39:40So when we're investing in a hotel where there might be risks around climate change, I'm extra focused 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.

40:09Tim Ferriss: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, you've read so many books, it's just boggles the mind. It wouldn't surprise me if you're familiar with Byron Katie, but she has something called the work which I 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, right?

40:53Tim Ferriss:So my dad should be, this is not a real example, making it up, like my dad should be more attentive to my mom. 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 dad, et cetera. And 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, what are the next steps after that?

41:34Tim Ferriss: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. The Byron Katie, I've been to multiple workshops of her. I think she's amazing. I knew it. I knew it. 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, order salads, and then proceed to sit right next to me.

42:12And it was the most unbelievable. I took a picture of it because I thought I might be tripping.

42:17Tim Ferriss:And then you looked at it on your computer later and no one was there. 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, you know, are not walking their talk. In this particular case, I have, I can affirm that she is like her stage presence. You've seen her on stage all the time. Yeah. So I find her credibility on that extra high. Yeah, I think her thing of what's the belief? Is it true? What's the opposite of that? Can you absolutely know it's true? How do you feel when you think that thing?

42:50Tim Ferriss: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, 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 most. I mean, the metaphysics can get pretty mind-bendy 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 really key. Yeah. Right? It's like something you take, it's a statement you take to be true.

43:28Tim Ferriss:And it's just framing it that way puts it under a different lens. 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 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.

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45:24Tim Ferriss:So start your journey with AG1's next gen and experience the difference firsthand. Simply go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1.com slash Tim. and if you're looking at a team whether that's within these offices you know we're sitting in your offices right now or 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, and Buffett's searching for bargains and wants to sort of buy at a discount, and then Munger is, I'm going to get slaughtered on the internet, I'm sure, but is 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.

46:35Tim Ferriss: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, 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.

47:20It'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. So sometimes a portfolio manager of one firm will have a close relationship with one to five other portfolio managers.

47:52Tim Ferriss: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. I mean, inside a large firm, you might have multiple PMs, depending on. That's a good catch. I meant more CIO, but if you had a multiple - 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.

48:27And the equivalent of that Buffett-Munger thing often exists across firm. So they don't have to be within the boundary of the firm.

48:33Tim Ferriss: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. they're not setting out to prove x they are coming up with a hypothesis and then hopefully in is 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 could one train themselves to get better at doing that? And it could be as seemingly indirect as you like. 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.

49:26Tim Ferriss:Some 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 help to cultivate? Well, I think an underlying paranoia that you're missing something is really useful. And the best portfolio managers have that. They're just that sense that, and maybe you dial it up by regularly reviewing all the mistakes you've made and thinking, okay, 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 a really good portfolio manager's hit rate is like 65%.

50:07Like that's off the charts. And 55 % will do just fine in a lot of cases, depending particularly on their slugging percentage. How do they size the winners versus the losers? You want to size the winners obviously bigger than the losers. 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.

50:57And if that involves right now, if in this era, in this moment in history, that's going long Tesla, I'll go long Tesla. If 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 respect. and he was short SolarCity. And it was on the morning that Musk announced that Tesla was buying SolarCity. It was a very painful morning for people who were short the stock. And I expected this guy to be moping around and super pissed at Musk. And he was laughing. He was enjoying the audacity. He feels like he's in this game.

51:33And I knew it was a possibility. I didn't think he was going to have the chutzpah to do that. Right? Like 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, 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.

52:06Tim Ferriss:And change your position. This reminds me of... Something Josh decided some time ago, which was that he wouldn't, at least maybe this has changed, but I doubt it has changed given his current circumstances, which we will 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. 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?

52:52Tim Ferriss: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? In financial markets, I really like this somewhat obscure book called The Aspirational Investor by this guy Ashvin Chhabra, who runs Jim Simon's family office. Jim Simon 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 Simon, he has this line on a New Yorker profile of him that he thinks what he has is really good taste in interesting problems.

53:31He uses the word taste. 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, which have totally dominated prevailing beliefs about investing for decades. And Ashwin 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.

54:04Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan. Dave Logan 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. Culture Code by Daniel Coyle, I give people.

54:30Tim Ferriss: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. What is that book about? 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. He'd be a good guest on the podcast. Perfect. That's another book on my homework. Let's check. I also like The Tools. I give that out sometimes.

55:10That's by Phil Stutz and Barry Michaels. Have you ever heard of them?

55:13Tim Ferriss:I have. 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 New Yorker reporter Dana Goodyear did a profile of them that highlighted 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. That's how it first came up. Just as an example, it's very apropos of Wim Hof.

55:49They have this whole analogy of saying this model of to get to what you want, you have to go through some pain.

55:56Tim Ferriss:Oh, so just to pause, could you describe for people who Wim Hof as if they haven't? So yeah, Wim Hof, I think his first podcast interview was on this podcast. Interesting guy, but who's Wim Hof? Wittmann Hoff has developed a way of exposing himself to the cold and a methodology around exposing himself to the cold 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 is attribute versus training, but for cold exposure and also for breath holding.

56:41Tim Ferriss: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. 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 they use the metaphor of going into the cold water at the beach. And that regular embracing of discomfort is a skill that Waitzkin is also into and a theme of learning to, Waitzkin calls it the other side of pain, but getting used to exposing yourself to pain on a regular basis to the point where you don't bounce off of it.

57:30But Stutz and Michaels observed that in their work with producers, agents, screenwriters, etc. in Hollywood, that people were avoiding doing the thing they needed to do. 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. So I do this with my kids. Like we'll literally rub our hands together and be thinking, okay, bring it on to X.

57:56Tim Ferriss: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 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 with these short, freezing cold showers. And I don't know, his son is probably 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. Yeah, so that's an example, right, 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.

58:36Right. 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. It's a good parenting hack.

58:52Tim Ferriss: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 Karras. James Karras is really good. 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, et cetera, where their whole motivation and intent was to have the game end and get the trophy.

59:30And then he noticed there were other games they were playing where there were more fantasy 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. And 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. And 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.

1:00:10So it's unlike Catholicism. They have difficulty making sense of why it persists over time. And so the framework of it's an infinite game, those people, Buddhists and Jews, are recruiting Tiberius Sprees people into their game and wanting to just keep playing the game for its own sake. That was an interesting framing.

1:00:28Tim Ferriss: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 that 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, the reality is most people move the bar. There is a study which everybody wants to have, all along the income spectrum, everybody wants to have two times where they are right now.

1:01:05And, but I think there are, in general, I seek out partners who are playing high 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 in. That's back to the distinction between being commercial and transactional. There's something about the abundance mentality behind somebody who's commercial, who's trying to create more value than they capture, that's like leaving room for other people in this way. How do you test for that? If that is, it might be lower on the hierarchy of needs in assessing talent.

1:01:42Tim Ferriss:But if it is something that you try to assess, how do you assess it? The big one is time horizon. If there are 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. How do you ask around the question, especially after this podcast comes out? You're going to be like, okay, Graham wants Longtime Horizons. You can see it just in the way they're setting up their business. There are indications of just subtle mental framings on...

1:02:16Some 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, so I'm gonna 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 gonna do it in this new form. 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 and made him start at scratch right now, I think he'd enjoy it.

1:02:58Like, he's just found the thing he loves. And who else has long-term? Jocko Willink. I think I would invest in something Jocko did. I think he has that exact, in fact, his mantra, right, is default aggressive. He has that mix of aggressive and integrity or aggressive and humility. And you think he's coming back from Iraq. He does CLT and he's entering your world. And he says, oh, this is his podcast thing. And then, you know, oh, coaching thing. And I don't know him. I just really admire the way he's doing his own thing. He has that mix of time horizon. And having an idea, executing on it.

1:03:37Tim Ferriss: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. 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 you could you could also assess kind of along the same lines that why Combinator has at least historically by asking a lot of questions around 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.

1:04:29I find Y Combinators and Paul Graham's and Sam Altman stuff high signal from my perspective. So like they have this question they ask themselves, can you say this person is an animal and not smile? You know, 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. Ray Dalio uses assertiveness and open-mindedness. But I think everybody's honing in on this paradoxical tension that I was talking about earlier. Sorry, what was, tell me the question again.

1:05:00Tim Ferriss:Oh, 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 sort of 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. 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. It was one of two candidates for answering the question, what you would put on a gigantic billboard and you could put anything on it.

1:05:37Tim Ferriss:So metaphorically speaking, right? A message to get out to millions or billions of people. So could you read this? 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. Right. And so you had mentioned the game, if you're aware that you're playing the game, 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.

1:06:11Well, I think that's a way of making your game, moving it from being subject to it to object. 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 a blog that's on my site.

1:06:48And 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 that's the game you want.

1:07:11Tim Ferriss:The ladder you're climbing is leaning against the right wall. Let's just make sure. Check in every once in a while. Yeah. So you can kind of zoom. It allows you to kind of, in a video game, it's the God's eye view. God's eye view. 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 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 commencement speech, which has been turned into books and is online in various forms.

1:07:48Tim Ferriss:But yes, here it is right here. This is water. Yeah. The story of, what is it, the two young fish together swimming by the old fish and the old fish doesn't pass. I'm 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 commencement speech is that we all have water. There are things that are water to us at every stage of our life. And 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 wrestling with different stuff.

1:08:25You'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.

1:08:35Tim Ferriss: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 which water I happen to be swimming in, which makes it a lot of fun. The Greg McEwen, is that how you say it? I said it that way for a long time. McEwen. Greg McEwen's podcast with you recently on essentialism, when he tells that story 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.

1:09:11In 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 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 in your podcast, people are wrestling with what can they see at that moment? What did they used to not be able to see?

1:09:47And that's the, it's kind of beautiful. It's the unfolding that we're all doing.

1:09:52Tim Ferriss:You've had an opportunity to observe, I don't know, dozens, hundreds, thousands of careers, or at least look, 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 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. Something Dan Siegel, who's a neuroscientist, came up with to try to describe what mental health is.

1:10:29because 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 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.

1:11:11That's where people who are swimming right next to that bank are just making stuff up. Like I think of Musk as being right along that bank. And 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. Just Steve Jobs the same way. He's threading the needle. 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. But 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.

1:11:49And the danger of swimming from a career perspective of starting your own thing is 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 at a very young age, but just be aware that that's the project and you might want to come back and refine reality for a little bit and just see it as fluid.

1:12:15Tim Ferriss:Right. It makes you think of, and I'm not saying this is kind of a direct mapping, but there's Pablo Picasso that learned the rules as an amateur so you can break the rules as a professional, something along those lines. Exactly. And you mentioned this bank of chaos and how those who sort of 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 Jobs 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 alongside one bank or the other?

1:13:08Tim Ferriss:Or is that a mistaken thinking? Or be perceived as being a top performer? Do they swim in the middle or do they oscillate between the two? Are there different breeds, just in your experience? To be a top 1 % depends maybe on the field. So let's say your world. Within financial markets, you need a continual level of innovation and adaptability to stay ahead because the games that were working five years ago no longer 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.

1:13:49So 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.

1:13:59Tim Ferriss:And then Mike Burry famously played by Chris Chagel 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. He came up with that, 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 as Christian Bale portrayed him, he was wrestling with his sanity at various points, having that trade on.

1:14:36At various points, the fund was down a lot. His partners were abandoning him. 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, I'm trying to think of other examples outside of financial markets of being top 1 % or something, but I mean, yeah.

1:14:56Tim Ferriss:It's less objective, but if we're looking at, say, successful authors, I think another example that a scene you mentioned is Prisic. He wrote the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but certainly towards the end got, but one might argue pretty loopy. Yeah. It's hard to think of top 1 % in a context, but I think original, you look at Rachel Cusk and Carl Ovek-Nosgaard, 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.

1:15:33Tim Ferriss:Yeah, one, this is more just because I think you'd enjoy it, and I can link to it for people who are interested. There's a model of cognitive function. Yeah, I suppose we 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 in the UK, called the entropic brain, which I think you'd enjoy. So for another time. What about, 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. So 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.

1:16:23He said a million seconds is like 11 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. And I remember that kind of,

1:16:31Tim Ferriss:holy shit, that's a hell of a way to think about it. Yeah. Wait, Q said that one more time? A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is slightly over 31 years. And I was thinking about, Tyler Cohen has a thing about cultural billionaires. Marginal revolution. 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.

1:17:19And I was thinking about how if, what would, Robert 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, etc.? And for that 20-year-old, how would they price it? Because I was thinking at various points of my career, I might have sold the next five years for something. And over time, 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've got to sell them right now.

1:17:59Tim Ferriss:Yeah. I don't know how I'd price it because my kids are of a certain age that they'll never be again. I don't know that I live every day that way, but I aspire to. So I was trying to capture, you know, I heard 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. Yeah. And I bought his life calendar. He sells it as a poster. And what he does is 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.

1:18:37and what's startling about the picture, again to this question of how long is a billion seconds, is how short it actually is. 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 gonna be 90 and I was actually thinking a good product if there are any graphic designers out there would be to partner with Tim and allow you to create a huge poster and select a photo for each week? Because it's such a graphical representation of your life in a way that's hard to convey in words sometimes.

1:19:16So I've just been thinking a lot about time and how you live. There's a quote I like there. 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 consciousness. Can you elaborate a little?

1:19:33Tim Ferriss:The width. The width, meaning this present moment we're sitting here having... Sort of like the depth of attention. Yeah. The breadth of sensory inputs. 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 cultivate that in yourself? 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. It's broken up into multiple parts.

1:20:10Tim Ferriss:Also, just since you mentioned Musk, I mean, he was the, I believe, the only person asked by Musk directly who was 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. 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. So you have the calendar. 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.

1:20:48I was like, 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 % of the time you'll ever spend with them.

1:20:59Tim Ferriss:The total hours you'll ever spend with your parents. Yes. I didn't know that about you and your family after reading that piece, which 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 trip or a gathering with my family every six months. Yeah. That piece. Yeah. Yeah, the tail end. Profound stuff, I think. So 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.

1:21:37Tim Ferriss:Dan Harris and Sam Harris. Dan Harris calls that whole crew the Jew-Buddhist. The Jewish Buddhists, which I think is great. Well, just as a quick side note, I remember I was talking to Jack Kornfield, who's an incredible teacher. I mean, probably the most empathic human I've ever met truly walks the walk. And I asked him at one point, I said, you've got Goldstein, Kornfield, like the names like Sharon Saltzford. I'm like, why are, it seems like the entire crew who brought Buddhist mindfulness practices to the U.S. in some of the, let's say, I'm getting a timeframe slightly off probably, but kind of.

1:22:18Tim Ferriss:80s. Yeah, like 70s, 80s. They're all Jewish. And he goes, that is a good question. This is just us having a private conversation. But he said, yeah, it sounds like a law firm. But the Jubus, yes. So Dan Harris, Sam Harris, both of those apps. Yeah, I use both those apps. 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 of how much time.

1:22:56Tim Ferriss:Those are good anchor points. 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's, boy, I wish I could get the attribution right. It was actually, it was in Tribal 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 sort of age 80, 90, looking back at my life, how much would I pay to relive this moment right now?

1:23:36Tim Ferriss:And I ask that a lot, whether it's just like 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. Like, 40 years from now, how much would I pay? And I think about... Tim Harris on his app has a great three-minute gratitude talk. And he says, imagine you died yesterday evening. What you would give me 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.

1:24:15I think a lot about the Byron Katie thing of the past and the future are simulations in your head. And the only thing that's actually real is this current now moment that we're in.

1:24:26Tim Ferriss:So we talked about a little bit earlier. Well, 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. 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. He's 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.

1:25:24He says, imagine you're an affable host. I don't like that. And it was this great moment earlier this week where my son, 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 he's able to, right? That fear is object to him. Like he can feel his feelings, right? 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. and somehow this is our moment. Have you heard that quote before?

1:26:00Tim Ferriss: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. Like, I am currently experiencing anger. Okay, fine. But this is much more memorable. It's being the affable host to your whole range of emotions, including when the grumpy, cantankerous uncle shows up, and you're like, hey, bud, welcome to the party.

1:26:57Tim Ferriss:You're looking at your heart a hard day. Go over, have some punch. Welcome to the party. I love it. I love it. 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, heart burnings, 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 of your life.

1:27:36And somehow I find myself thinking about that a lot, that all this stuff that feels so high drama, you know, when you're 90 looking at it you're just going to say it was all noise and there's you know yeah or right it's

1:27:51Tim Ferriss:all noise and or like 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 yes 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 I want to pick up. Welcome to the party that I want to listen to. People can find you in a number of different places. I'll just repeat them, you know, grahamduncan.blog, where they can find that essay that you mentioned earlier.

1:28:34and eastrockcap.com, at Graham Duncan NYC on Twitter, if they want to wave, say hello on the internet.

1:28:42Tim Ferriss:Is there anything else you'd like to mention, things you'd like people to check out, requests you would have to 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 Sown 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. So anybody listening, if you can afford to donate, come.

1:29:14If 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 hedge fund managers bring their ideas, people pay money to come hear them, and then we give that money to the leading pediatric cancer researchers. So that would be one.

1:29:31Tim Ferriss:That's the Sohn Conference Foundation, S-O-H-N, which I've attended before and found endlessly fascinating. Endlessly fascinating. It's a fun day. Yeah, it's a really mind-stretching experience. Anything else that you'd like to say? 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, I will have links to everything in the show notes, 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.

1:30:23Tim Ferriss:And until next time, pay attention to the present. that's all you got. See you, Steve. See you. All right. Thanks, guys. Bye. Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up. Easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week.

1:31:03Tim Ferriss:It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, Again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday.

1:31:39Tim Ferriss:Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. You guys know I love wearables. I'm sure you do as well. And they're great, but they give you data. Typically, they do not give you solutions. That's why I absolutely love The Pod by this episode's sponsor, 8Sleep. I've been using their stuff for many, many years now. It fits over your existing mattress, tracks your heart rate with 99 % accuracy, plus respiratory rate, HRV, and sleep stages. It is wild how much it correlates accurately to the stuff that you wear on you. Then The Pod's autopilot analyzes your biometrics and automatically adjusts your bed temperature while you sleep.

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1:33:02Tim Ferriss:Not to be a salty old dog, but in the early 2000s, back in the day when I was running my own e-commerce business, the tools were atrocious. They tried hard, but man, was it bad. You had to cobble all sorts of stuff together. I could only dream of a platform like Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. And now 10 % of all e-commerce in the US is on Shopify. Now back to the early 2000s, then nobody even thought of AI. Who could have predicted even in the last 24 months, the magic that is now possible with AI? Shopify has has been ahead of the curve and they are packed with helpful AI tools that will accelerate everything.

1:33:45Tim Ferriss:Write product descriptions, page headlines, even enhance your product photography. Best of all, Shopify expertly handles everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash Tim. One more time, shopify.com slash Tim. In 2026, stop waiting and start selling with Shopify.