#210 Best of 2024: The Blueprint for a Transformative New Year

0:00:16 [Music]
0:00:20 Welcome to The Knowledge Project, a podcast about mastering the best of what other people have
0:00:26 already figured out so you can apply their insights to your life. I’m your host, Shane Parrish.
0:00:32 The final episode of The Knowledge Project for 2024 is a collection of the best
0:00:37 insights from the show this year. We’ve had some of our most popular episodes ever come out this
0:00:44 year and I’m excited to share some of the best ideas and our favorite moments in one episode.
0:00:50 These insights will set you up for an incredible new year. Thank you for listening and learning with
0:00:55 us together. We’re going to make 2025 even better. We have a lot in store for the podcast this year
0:00:59 until then. Happy holidays to you and yours.
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0:02:00 Hamburgler. Why are you calling? Rubble, rubble. McDonald’s has a new biggest burger called Big
0:02:05 Arch, made with two 100% Canadian beef patties, a new delicious sauce, and all the McDonald’s
0:02:10 flavors you love. And wait, you want me to help you get it? Rubble. Come on.
0:02:19 Compared to beef burgers on McDonald’s current menu at participating restaurants in Canada.
0:02:27 Let’s start with our most popular episode of the year featuring personal finance expert,
0:02:34 Morgan Housel. The skills it takes to get rich are different from the skills it takes to stay rich.
0:02:40 Do you understand this phenomenon more than Morgan? In America, we spend something like $100
0:02:46 billion a year on lottery tickets. $100 billion. It’s massive that people spend on lottery tickets.
0:02:52 And if you dig into who’s buying it, it’s almost exclusively poor people. They buy the vast majority
0:02:58 of lottery tickets. And the poorer you are, the more lottery tickets you buy. And these are some
0:03:04 people for whom they literally can’t buy food or they might be homeless. And whatever little money
0:03:09 they have, they go into a 7-Eleven and buy some scratcher tickets. And you might look at that and
0:03:14 say like, you idiots, what are you doing? This is the dumbest idea I’ve ever seen. And maybe that’s
0:03:19 the right answer. Like maybe you could just stop there. But in Kahneman’s framework, I think it
0:03:24 starts to make a little bit more sense. If you have someone in a situation like this who, in their
0:03:30 mind at least, they think, I can’t get a raise. I can’t build a career. I can’t get promoted. I’m
0:03:37 kind of stuck in minimum wage job. If that’s their mindset, then buying a lottery ticket might be the
0:03:43 only time in their life where they can say to themselves and believe like, this is my literally
0:03:48 ticket out of here. This is the only chance that I have to get ahead. And so it starts to make a
0:03:52 little bit more sense in that situation. And maybe you contrast that with someone who has
0:03:57 a very high net worth. They might be like, look, I can just put all my money in treasuries and just
0:04:02 live for the rest of my life to solve the interest. And when you have so much, you don’t need to take
0:04:06 the risk. Well, it comes down to perspective, right? So like if I could see what you see and feel
0:04:10 what you feel, that decision would be rational. Yeah. There’s so many things in life where you
0:04:15 can look at other people and the decisions they make, not just in money, but for politics, their
0:04:20 health decisions, whatever it might be, and fiercely disagree with it. But what’s easy to
0:04:25 overlook is that if I were in your shoes and had experienced what you had, had the same family
0:04:30 dynamic that you do, the same DNA that you do, I would do the exact same thing. And I think that
0:04:36 is a more important question to ask yourself. Like, what financial decisions would I make
0:04:41 differently if I were born in a different era, born to different parents, born in a different
0:04:46 country? And I think you can answer that question honestly, because you don’t know, but you know
0:04:50 there would be a lot of things different that are completely outside of your control. Where and
0:04:55 when you were born would have a massive impact. You and I should not pretend that if we were born
0:05:00 in the 1960s in Nigeria, that we would have the same views about investing in the stock market
0:05:05 over time that you and I do today. This kind of gets to the topic of luck. And a lot of people
0:05:09 when you bring up luck, they will say something that sounds smart that I fiercely disagree with.
0:05:15 They say like, oh, you should increase the surface area of your luck. You should like, oh, the harder
0:05:19 I work, the luckier I get was like some variation of that. And I’m like, no, if you can do something
0:05:24 that changes your odds of an outcome, it’s not luck by definition. Luck to me, the biggest
0:05:29 start where and when you were born, you can’t control it. Bill Gates couldn’t control it.
0:05:35 Elon Musk couldn’t control it, but it has a massive impact on where you’re going to go in life.
0:05:38 That to me is what luck is. It’s what you truly have absolutely no control over.
0:05:44 And then there’s also the not only the country you’re born into, but the socioeconomic household
0:05:50 you’re born into, the schools that you go to. How much of this is nature versus nurture versus
0:05:56 chosen nurture? The stat that I think is so astounding is that income among brothers
0:06:01 is more correlated than height or weight. So basically that means if you have a brother
0:06:08 who is rich and tall, you are more likely to also be rich than you are tall. It’s more correlated
0:06:12 than the literal DNA that you’re sharing with each other. Look, is it a perfect correlation?
0:06:17 No. Is it possible to be raised by a poor family and become rich? Of course. Is it possible to
0:06:22 be raised by a rich family and end up in the streets? Of course. But there’s a very strong
0:06:29 correlation between those two. I think people can get kind of testy when you talk about luck,
0:06:35 because if I say that you got lucky, I look jealous. And if I say that I got lucky,
0:06:40 I feel diminished in what I’m doing in life. So it plays a massive role,
0:06:44 but it’s very easy to ignore the impact that it has in the world.
0:06:50 How do we break down that contribution between luck and skill or what’s repeatable on our part?
0:06:55 Rather than saying, what is luck? I think it’s important to just say, what is repeatable?
0:06:59 What is something that happened that I could do again? And if we look at Buffett,
0:07:03 this guy standing behind our shoulder here, and let’s look at the course of his life.
0:07:10 I cannot, he cannot recreate the trading conditions that existed in the 1950s that
0:07:14 allowed him to buy blue chip stocks at three times earnings, whatever it was back then that he was
0:07:20 doing. He can’t recreate that. He couldn’t do it again. But could I or you or anyone else listening
0:07:27 try to recreate his patience, his risk framework? Yes. So that’s something we should pay attention
0:07:32 to. You want to find what is repeatable and what you could do again. And those are the things you
0:07:36 should just pay the most attention to. I think that’s fascinating, right? Because when we look
0:07:41 at Buffett, what we want is the outcome. And what we don’t think about is all the things that go
0:07:45 into creating that outcome. So what stays the same between all these different decades where he’s
0:07:51 done this, right? So he’s done it from buying net net, Ben Graham stocks, all the way to buying
0:07:56 great businesses, all the way to the patience to do nothing. And then once every 10 years,
0:08:01 deploy a whole bunch of cash. What is consistent across that period in your mind?
0:08:04 Two of the big ones, we could come up with dozens of things that are consistent with someone like
0:08:10 Buffett, but the two big ones are endurance and maybe tied to that capping a downside risk
0:08:15 that allows him to stick around for longer than anyone else. There’s also a psychological trade
0:08:22 of wanting to keep going longer than anyone else. I use this stat in my book that 99% of Buffett’s
0:08:27 net worth was accumulated after his 60th birthday. Like the vast majority of people, including me,
0:08:33 and maybe you, if we became a billionaire at age 60, would be done. She moved to Florida and
0:08:38 buy a private island and like live happily ever after. For him to be that successful and to keep
0:08:45 going full blast for what’s now another 33 years and still going stronger than ever is a very unique
0:08:51 characteristic that plays a massive role in his success. If Buffett had retired at age 60 or 50,
0:08:55 like a normal person would have in that situation, you would have never heard of him.
0:08:59 The whole reason he’s so successful is just the endurance. And there’s a, again,
0:09:04 there’s a psychological and a financial component to that, never getting wiped out financially.
0:09:10 And the psychology that will allow him to keep going full blast for nearly a century on end now.
0:09:16 But that sounds academically correct, but in temperament, incredibly difficult,
0:09:23 because I see my friends getting rich off like Bitcoin or something. And that makes me want to
0:09:29 change the patience that I have. I know how to get wealthy over time. We know historically that
0:09:35 what’s worked is saving money, being very patient, letting it compound decade after decade,
0:09:40 then all of a sudden you wake up with a ton of money and financial independence.
0:09:47 But if I see my neighbor getting richer quicker than I am, it makes me want to accelerate that
0:09:54 timeline. And my lack of patience sort of changes the outcome. Not having FOMO is the single most
0:09:58 important financial skill. I think it’s so important that you cannot ever imagine accumulating
0:10:03 significant wealth over your lifetime if you are susceptible to FOMO. Like if there’s literally
0:10:07 one thing, like one trait that you want that’s going to allow you to accumulate wealth, it’s the
0:10:12 lack of FOMO. Particularly in modern markets, I can get so crazy with social media and Reddit
0:10:18 and Twitter and everything. If you are susceptible to FOMO, there’s no hope for you over time.
0:10:23 I really don’t think that’s an exaggeration. And that being able to see your neighbor get much
0:10:30 richer than you and not being impacted by it is so incredibly critical and easy to overlook these
0:10:36 days. I don’t have that many financial skills. I could never be a stock picker. I could never be
0:10:42 a trader. I don’t have the intellect or the horsepower to pull that off. But I feel like I’ve
0:10:47 never been at least that susceptible to FOMO. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest to watch
0:10:52 other people getting rich. Brent Bishore, our mutual good friend, had a quote that I love. He said,
0:10:58 “I am perfectly happy watching you get very rich doing something that I would never want to do.”
0:11:04 And I think that’s a great way to frame it. I don’t get jealous or anxious to watch other
0:11:10 people get richer than I am over time. My investing strategy is to own index funds for as long as I
0:11:16 possibly can, to be average for an above average period of time. And I think that will actually
0:11:21 lead to an incredible outcome. Not only will it achieve the financial goals that I have for my
0:11:27 family, but I think over a long period of time, it will put you in the top decile at least of
0:11:31 people who are compounding money over time. I think it’s really hard to appreciate that what’s
0:11:36 short-term optimal and what’s long-term optimal are often two different things.
0:11:40 Completely different things. Howard Marks talked about this investor that he knew who,
0:11:46 in any given year, he was never in the top half versus his peers. He was never in the top 50%
0:11:52 of other investors. And over a 20-year period, he was in the top 4%. Because everyone else who
0:11:57 was beating him in a given year couldn’t keep it going. And so what’s your ultimate goal?
0:12:02 So much of investing is just to find the game that you’re playing. And I don’t look down upon
0:12:08 or criticize people who are short-term traders. Maybe that’s their game and for their investors
0:12:12 or for their… It makes sense for them. My game is different. I think your game is different. Most
0:12:17 people’s game might be a little bit different. And what’s important is that if your game is to
0:12:23 invest for the next 20, 30, 50 years that you’re not taking your cues from people who are playing
0:12:28 a different game of trading for the next quarter. And that’s where a lot of danger in investing comes
0:12:36 from. Hamburglar, why are you calling? Rubble, rubble. McDonald’s has a new biggest burger called
0:12:41 Big Arch made with two 100% Canadian beef patties, a new delicious sauce, and all the McDonald’s
0:12:48 flavors you love. And wait, you want me to help you get it? Rubble. Come on. Compared to beef burgers
0:12:57 on McDonald’s current menu at participating restaurants in Canada. It’s not easy to struggle
0:13:03 with substance use, but with the help and support you need, it doesn’t have to be quite so hard.
0:13:09 From taking the first step, even if you take it a hundred times, defining the right connection,
0:13:16 reaching out, and feeling supported, the thing that helps might not be the same for everyone.
0:13:23 So it can help to know where to start. Find supports and stories at helpstartshere.gov.bc.ca,
0:13:30 a message from the government of BC. Next, Blake Eastman, who has dedicated his entire life to
0:13:36 psychology and nonverbal behavior. And people are obsessed with recording the person on stage.
0:13:40 What’s more interesting is recording the audience. Because the truth is, I’m always asked how
0:13:44 did my presentation go? I don’t know. Let’s see the audience. A presentation is for that group
0:13:49 of people. So what often happens is a lot of communication experts will watch a presentation
0:13:52 and they’ll go, well, I think you should move your hands more or less. Or I think you should
0:13:57 speak up. They’re doing that through their perceptual lens. They’re not optimizing for the
0:14:02 engagement of the audience. So I used to record my presentation and the audience every third
0:14:06 presentation for three years. That’s fascinating. Why don’t we take that approach? I mean,
0:14:10 comedians effectively take that approach without recording the audience because it’s
0:14:15 based on, oh, that joke got a laugh. I’m going to use that next time. That joke fell flat.
0:14:20 I’m not going to use that next time. It’s the feedback loop is instant. So that’s how that was
0:14:24 such the value. Like when I was teaching psychology at CUNY, I was speaking like 80 to 100 hours a
0:14:30 week, both in my office and both instant feedback loop of what story worked, what story didn’t work.
0:14:34 Like, did that land, did that offend somebody? And you just start to develop this quicker repertoire
0:14:38 of things that actually work. But that comes from that audience interaction. But most people,
0:14:43 when giving a presentation, they’re not even present enough to do that because they’re so in
0:14:48 their head about the presentation. So it’s sort of a skill set that comes after you’ve been more
0:14:52 comfortable being on stage to be able to process and sort of predict the behavior of an audience.
0:14:56 What’s the biggest thing that gets in people’s way when they’re presenting?
0:15:03 Really, just the social construction that a presentation is something different. So people,
0:15:07 it’s got this whole cultural narrative. Oh, you got a, you have your big presentation coming up.
0:15:12 It’s hyped up as this different thing. You’re just talking to a group of people,
0:15:17 and they’re responding by shaking their head and nodding, and you’re setting up there. I think
0:15:21 that’s the first construct that needs to be broken. And then also just people just don’t
0:15:26 put in the reps. Like that’s something that just takes time. And most people work so hard for a
0:15:30 presentation, and they do it. And that’s like, oh, it’s flood of release where they should have just
0:15:35 done it every day for the next three weeks through a presentation, it’d be so much better.
0:15:41 What is putting in the reps mean? Does that mean crafting your story and positioning for the audience?
0:15:46 Does it mean your intonation? Like, how do you actually go about working on that? Like,
0:15:52 how would you make me an expert presenter if you had three weeks and you had one hour a day of my
0:15:57 time? So that’s so cool that you did that. So my question has always been, what was the constraint?
0:16:03 So if you said three hours a week, one hour a day of your time, the first week would probably be reps
0:16:09 of just, let’s get you comfortable. So the thing is, a lot of the nonverbal behavior stuff and
0:16:14 movement, I have found reliably that the most effective version of someone is when they’re
0:16:20 the most comfortable. Bar not every single time. So the whole joke is people think I teach like,
0:16:24 oh, stand this way. No, like step one is get you to the level where you’re the most comfortable,
0:16:29 where you feel the most free, and then build on top of that. So I try to get you there first.
0:16:34 And I wouldn’t be focusing on, I mean, it really depends. If you’re doing like a Ted Talk, that
0:16:37 was like 20 minutes, I’d probably tell you just to rehearse it and get that down. But we’re doing
0:16:42 like an hour presentation or the most presentations that people have to do. It would be all outlines,
0:16:49 repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. And it’s a, it’s a careful balancing act to like understand where
0:16:54 you’re at. Because some people with a lot of anxiety, I will know, or some people that are
0:16:59 trying to get it right. I won’t be focusing on little details. It’s a way more dynamic process
0:17:04 like, so some people that have like these facial things to getting better at presentations, like,
0:17:06 it’s different for every person. Because some, if someone you’re telling someone,
0:17:10 listen, you’re moving your hands too much, and they’re going to get in their head about moving
0:17:14 their hands too much, you’re going to start looking all weird. And some people can take a cue
0:17:19 and immediately change it. And other people just get them comfortable, just get them comfortable.
0:17:23 And then using video, but you’re gonna hear something else fascinating. So what do you show
0:17:30 people video of themselves? I work once work with this woman. I hope she’s hearing this because
0:17:36 I love her, but not to call her out. So I, she gives one of the worst initial presentations
0:17:43 I’ve ever seen in my entire life. She was extremely flat. She was like moving her hands. She literally
0:17:48 spoke like this for an entire 20 minutes. And it was like painful to watch. And at the end of the
0:17:51 video, I was like, okay, so let’s see what we’re working with. And I put her video on her like
0:17:55 projector. And the first thing she says to me is like, I need to know his job.
0:18:01 And it just shows you like that’s where that person’s perception is focused on. Like,
0:18:07 we’re focused on these weird little different things that no one else recognizes or no one
0:18:13 else cares about. And I truly believe that the most world class best presenters are truly about
0:18:17 their audience and not about themselves. They’re not trying to come across a certain way. They’re
0:18:22 trying to like, I even feel that now, like I’m stepping more into my own self after the first
0:18:27 20 minutes. Like at first, it’s a little bit, you know, it’s a little different. I’m trying to be
0:18:31 more measured. Now it’s more me coming out of it. And the truth is, how do you get to that
0:18:36 immediately and build from there and go right away into that? I want to switch gears a little bit
0:18:43 and talk about workplace and sort of power structures and social dynamics. How can you
0:18:48 teach me to understand the power structure at work and social dynamics? How would you go about that?
0:18:56 So power structures. Oh man, that’s such a good question. They are these invisible things. That’s
0:19:00 what I when we talk about reading the room in a corporate structure, that’s what we’re talking
0:19:04 about. We’re talking about power structure, we’re talking about permissions, all these things. The
0:19:10 first way to do it is to do this exercise where you sort of do a decision tree of the potential,
0:19:16 like show people what the potential landscape could be. So for example, let’s say all of a sudden
0:19:23 a new CEO gets pulled in and we want to say, okay, what is this CEO going through? Is this CEO
0:19:29 just pushed in by the PE company? Does the CEO have performance base incentives? Like what are
0:19:35 they trying to do? And just map out all what quote unquote is possible and then start using the data
0:19:41 and evidence that’s coming in on a daily basis to like cross out which one it is. And then sometimes
0:19:46 just straight up ask. I think that’s something that a lot of organizations don’t do. I can’t tell
0:19:51 you the amount of times where I’m just like, so I have this really cool perspective because I work
0:19:57 with often the entire C-suite. So like the COO, CTO, like everybody I work with. And it’s like,
0:20:01 you two need to talk about this because this is blocking, you two need to talk about this.
0:20:05 But the amount of communication that just doesn’t happen at like a personal level
0:20:12 or just a level that’s like blocking decision making, it’s kind of crazy. I think organizations
0:20:19 need to talk way more than they are in this siloed environment sometimes. If you just were able to
0:20:24 have those conversations, you would be able to navigate and see the power structures way easier.
0:20:28 And people just don’t have that social skill set that the people skills to sit down with someone.
0:20:34 And I’ve just seen a lot of people get power structures. Oh, I’ll give you a good one.
0:20:42 If you are falling in line with a power structure, it’s often very difficult to navigate it.
0:20:48 Meaning if it’s like, oh my God, this person is this and this person is this and I’m just this,
0:20:52 you’re very rarely going to be able to see eye to eye with that person because you perceive them
0:20:57 here and you perceive yourself here. And I feel like people do that a lot inside of organizations
0:21:00 and doesn’t give them that creative freedom to actually read what’s going on.
0:21:06 Is the delta between where you are and where you perceive the other person?
0:21:15 Like, does that influence your how? I mean, just from like, of what you have quote on quote permission
0:21:21 to do or say, it’s all a perception. Like, I’ve worked with people like executive, I’ve worked
0:21:27 with CEOs that are the most open. Every all of their behavior suggests that they’re the most open,
0:21:31 honest, come to them with problems. But people don’t come to them with problems because they’re
0:21:35 a CEO. Yeah, they say it over and over and over again. And I look at why they’re like, I don’t
0:21:41 want to bother the CEO with this. They said seven times this year, come to me with this specific
0:21:47 kind of problem. Yeah, you’re right. But I just don’t know. You get in your head like that.
0:21:53 How much of that do you think is cultural too? Because I worked with a CEO who said that. But
0:21:57 the minute you came to him with the problem, he basically like scream at you. That’s the
0:22:02 kind of stuff that I correct. So that’s the bulk of my when you say something. But your patent,
0:22:09 a lot of these people often just don’t understand a lot of executives don’t understand the impact
0:22:15 of their own behavior. So I have met people that are wonderful, wonderful, wonderful people.
0:22:21 But yeah, the way they give feedback, oh my God, it’s just ripped the person apart. And they’re
0:22:26 like, no, I love them. They’re one of my best people. I think they’re great. I’m like, well,
0:22:30 let’s take responsibility for what that interaction looked like. And that’s why
0:22:34 zoom and video is so important for me. Because sometimes when you work with an executive or
0:22:39 you work with anybody, and you tell them something, they don’t see it like the way that you describe.
0:22:43 But when you show them on video, that feedback, I was like, listen, go back 20 years in your
0:22:48 career. If you were given this feedback, how would you feel? They’re like, yeah. And I do this
0:22:54 cool thing. It’s the exercise that really works. So, you know, leadership principles and all that
0:22:58 stuff, I’m not there to tell somebody how to lead. I’m not there for any of that. I’m there just to
0:23:04 make sure that their intent is aligned with their behavior. So I do this thing where I’m like, close
0:23:10 your eyes and imagine your funeral and everybody you’ve ever worked with in your entire life is
0:23:14 there. What are the stories and things that you’re saying about you? And I just make sure that those
0:23:19 things are in alignment with their behavior. And they choose and solidify what those things are.
0:23:23 And then I kind of hold them accountable to making sure that they’re carrying out those things.
0:23:29 And this is marketing expert April Dunford. Who’s in charge of positioning at a company?
0:23:36 Good question. This has traditionally been seen as a marketing function. And even more specifically
0:23:43 in tech companies, we often say this is a product marketing function. But I don’t believe that.
0:23:48 I think that’s not the right way to think about it. If we really think about what we’re doing
0:23:54 in positioning is we’re getting really tight on who’s our competitor? How are we different?
0:23:59 What is the value we can provide to them to the customer and who exactly are those customers?
0:24:05 If we made a change in that, that would be a big change in the business. If I think about,
0:24:13 again, my CRM example, if we switch from being general purpose enterprise CRM to CRM for investment
0:24:22 banks, that’s a whole different company. So I don’t think marketing has, first of all,
0:24:29 they’re not talking to customers every day the way sales is. They don’t necessarily understand
0:24:37 the differentiation amongst competitors the way the product team would. And sure as heck,
0:24:43 the CEO is going to have something to say about where we’re selling and how we win in the market.
0:24:48 So in the work that I do with companies with positioning, we do it with a cross-functional
0:24:56 team. So we bring together product marketing sales, customer success support, and we bring
0:25:02 everybody together. And everybody comes with what they understand about customers and how we win,
0:25:08 and we work through the positioning together as a group exercise. Now somebody needs to be the
0:25:14 steward or the police of that positioning once we’ve said it to make sure that we are consistent
0:25:18 about that in the way we’re using it in marketing and the way we’re using it in sales. And that’s
0:25:25 typically marketing that does that. I also think it’s good to have somebody be the person that
0:25:30 puts their hand up and says, you know what, things are changing in the market. We maybe need to come
0:25:35 back together and check in on that positioning. But I don’t think that marketing should be able to
0:25:41 change positioning or look at positioning or do it on their own. They could try, but it won’t stick
0:25:46 because sales won’t believe in it. The CEO won’t believe in it. What we actually need is a cross-functional
0:25:51 team to get together and look at it, make some decisions, get everybody in agreement and alignment
0:25:57 on it. And then we can all go execute on it in our respective departments. And then marketing
0:26:02 can be the steward of here’s the positioning, here’s how we define it. This is the messaging that
0:26:06 comes out of that positioning. And then marketing be the person to put their hand up and say,
0:26:10 you know what, this big acquisition just happened in our market and we might need to step back and
0:26:15 relook at the positioning. It’s interesting that you say that when you’re talking about a sales
0:26:21 person and the first call, I was thinking, oh, if things don’t go as planned, the sales person
0:26:26 points to marketing, marketing points to the sales person, everybody points to product.
0:26:31 But you even expanded this. You have a cross-functional team of sales, marketing,
0:26:36 product, customer success, support. And then you have the CEO involvement at some point in there
0:26:41 too. Exactly. And when things are going well, everybody is a winner and everybody’s responsible
0:26:46 for success. But the minute you have a problem, everybody starts pointing the finger at everybody
0:26:54 else. How do you determine that’s a positioning problem versus a larger problem? It’s interesting
0:26:58 because, you know, I do this as work as a consultant. And sometimes companies will call me
0:27:03 and they think they have a positioning problem. And then I have a conversation with them and I’m
0:27:06 like, I don’t actually think that’s a positioning problem because there’s lots of reasons businesses
0:27:12 aren’t successful and positioning is just one of them. So typically, so sometimes companies will
0:27:19 come to me and they’ll say, you know what? Every company we talk to loves us. If we can get them
0:27:24 in a meeting, we close all that business. And that tells me that positioning is good. You’re
0:27:28 just not getting enough meetings. You’re just doing a terrible job at lead generation. You should go
0:27:35 fix that. You just need to get more at bats. Sometimes what you have is a sales execution
0:27:39 problem. Like there’s something in the way you’re executing in sales that isn’t working.
0:27:46 So my test is often like, so first of all, do you have good, happy customers that stick with you
0:27:49 and love you and are referenceable and whatever? Most of the companies that come to me and say,
0:27:58 yes, yes, we have that. Okay. Do you have confusion at the beginning of your sales process where
0:28:05 they come in and they just don’t get it? That gap between what a customer knows and what a prospect
0:28:12 knows. We can close that gap with good positioning. What role does storytelling play in all of this?
0:28:18 Storytelling is one of these things. Marketers think a lot about storytelling and obsess a lot
0:28:25 about storytelling, particularly on the consumer side, business to business marketers like to
0:28:29 think about storytelling. I don’t think a lot of B2B companies are doing an amazing job at
0:28:33 storytelling. What’s really funny about that is if you go over to sales, sales doesn’t care about
0:28:38 storytelling. They never talk about storytelling. And yet they’re the ones that actually are face
0:28:42 to face with a customer. And if anyone should be telling a story, maybe it’s your sales team.
0:28:48 Most of the storytelling stuff that you see, or at least what I learned as a marketer going through,
0:28:52 if you go to marketing school and learn storytelling, a lot of what you’ll see is this
0:28:59 hero’s journey structure for storytelling, which is very common in entertainment. It’s the way most
0:29:04 movies are written. A lot of stories are written with this hero’s journey. So in B2B storytelling,
0:29:10 we think about the hero as the customer. So the customer has a problem they embark on this quest.
0:29:15 They meet a guide. That’s us. We’re the guide. And we give them a plan, and we help them be
0:29:21 successful and avoid defeat as we have this hero’s journey. The problem with that storytelling arc
0:29:28 is there’s kind of no competitor in there. And if we think about what a buyer is actually trying
0:29:34 to figure out is why pick you over the other guys? A hero’s journey doesn’t really give us an arc
0:29:41 to do that. In the work that I do with customers, we start with positioning. So we get really clear
0:29:46 on what’s the value we can deliver that no one else can. Who are the customers that really care
0:29:54 about that? And then we want to build a story around that. The story that we’re trying to tell
0:29:59 needs to answer this question. Why pick us over the other guys? So in that storytelling framework,
0:30:04 we need to have a spot in that framework to paint a picture of the whole market
0:30:10 and then show where we fit and where everybody fits. So we shouldn’t actually be just talking
0:30:13 about us. We should be talking about the alternative approaches to the problem,
0:30:18 which means we’re going to talk about competitors or at least the approach that the competitors take.
0:30:26 In the work I do, we take the positioning, we translate it into a sales pitch.
0:30:34 That sales pitch has a storytelling structure that starts with a conversation around the market.
0:30:42 So we’ll talk about, look, we look at this market in a different way than our competitors.
0:30:46 And because we look at it in a different way, we built the product in a different way.
0:30:52 And your customer, you have lots of choices. There’s other products that you could buy.
0:30:55 There’s other approaches you could take to this problem. Let’s talk about that.
0:30:59 We think about this all day. We have opinions about it. We want to hear what you have to say
0:31:04 about it too. So this is the way we look at it. You could do it this way, this way, or this way.
0:31:07 And here’s the pluses and minuses of these different ways of solving this problem.
0:31:12 And this is a conversation with the customer more than me telling the customer stuff.
0:31:18 But at the same time, I’m teaching the customer about what we think is important in a purchase
0:31:24 decision, which most customers don’t know early in their purchase process. They’re trying to buy
0:31:29 accounting software. Half the people doing a purchase in B2B have never purchased a product
0:31:35 like yours before. So they’re doing this for the first time. They’re overwhelmed with information
0:31:40 on the internet. Every vendor says, we’re the best. No, we’re the best. No, we’re the best.
0:31:44 What we need to do in good sales storytelling in B2B
0:31:52 is help customers understand how to confidently make a decision. In order to do that, I have to
0:31:59 paint a picture of the whole market so they feel good that they understand, ah, if I choose this,
0:32:06 I’m choosing to go big on this and low on this. If I choose this, here are the trade offs for this.
0:32:10 If I choose this, here are the trade offs for this. Or you could choose us and here’s the trade
0:32:15 offs for us. Are we a good fit for you or not? That’s what we should be doing in a good sales
0:32:20 storytelling, in my opinion. And who does that really well, in your opinion? I have a bunch of
0:32:26 clients that I’ve worked with, but one that I think is doing an amazing job of this for a really
0:32:32 technical, complicated product is a company I worked with in San Francisco called Postman.
0:32:42 Postman does essentially a platform for developing APIs. This is a new concept.
0:32:49 Nobody had this idea of a platform for APIs before Postman came up with it. They do an amazing job,
0:32:56 I think, of talking about why APIs are important, so important that you actually don’t want a set
0:33:03 of disjointed tools across your organization to work on them, why that’s important. They’ve coined
0:33:09 a concept called an API First World, and then they’ve done an amazing job of storytelling around that.
0:33:13 So if you go on their website, on their homepage, and you scroll down about halfway,
0:33:23 they have a graphic novel called The API First World, and it’s a graphic novel designed for
0:33:29 technical people to understand this story of what’s an API, why is it important,
0:33:34 why do we really want to have high quality APIs, why is that important for your business,
0:33:40 and why do we need a platform to enable that. So I think they do an incredible job of that,
0:33:45 and they do it in a thousand different ways. If you see the CEO do a conference talk,
0:33:52 he’s actually not talking about the product as much as he is talking about the market and this
0:33:58 concept, and why we need to think about APIs differently. But if you are aligned with his
0:34:03 point of view on the market, you’re going to buy this product. But they’ve really done a good job,
0:34:09 I think, of developing a point of view on the market, helping customers understand the context
0:34:14 around their product, and the things that you need to understand in order to understand
0:34:20 why their product is valuable and why you might pick it. One of my favorite guests of the year,
0:34:27 84-year-old blueberry billionaire, John Bragg. What are the key indicators you look at
0:34:32 for your businesses on a regular basis to gauge how well they’re doing?
0:34:42 Condorator Buffet were a big EBITB believer. The cash they generate. If it’s through depreciation,
0:34:47 that’s all right. How much cash are we generating, and how can we service the debt,
0:34:53 and what can we buy with that cash? And there’s a private company that’s worked for us.
0:34:59 When we were building the cable business, there was lots of depreciation, but the cash flow was
0:35:06 good and still is. It’s the same in the food business as we invest in factories and so on,
0:35:13 and we also try to work the angles on the tax situation and use our depreciation.
0:35:20 Warner said in the past, he’s not a believer in EBITDA, but we are. We think it’s the cash that
0:35:26 the business generates. And so we’re always saying, “Well, what’s the multiple on EBITDA?”
0:35:33 And so we know what cash is coming, because you can usually cut back on your capital if you need
0:35:39 to. We’re always trying to measure how much free cash the business are generating, and what do we
0:35:48 have to either pay down debt or to buy more Buffet Stock or something similar? How would you
0:35:56 classify your management style? Historically, a lot of hands-on. I really don’t find the day-to-day
0:36:06 operations as much fun as I do the investment of the funds, and so I’m enjoying moving to a
0:36:13 head office role as compared with, but I still like to monitor. We still have monthly meetings
0:36:20 with all our major investments. So probably a little, people would say a little too much detail
0:36:26 and so on, but God, when you’re signing the checks and the notes, you won’t know what’s going on.
0:36:33 And so I would rather be well informed up front so that I can help if there’s a problem
0:36:39 that come to the problem late. Operating without surprises is pretty important to me.
0:36:44 There’s a trend in business sort of like getting away from the details as you move up in the
0:36:51 organization. A friend of mine one time said, “You can run any company with five points on the back
0:36:58 of a cigarette package.” That was years ago, but that’s really basic. Just what are the key items?
0:37:06 Is it revenue, is it sales, is it margin, and costs? I’m a big believer in being a low-cost
0:37:13 producer. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing. There’s no excuse to waste money. Your low costs,
0:37:18 you’re going to stay in business in the tough times. The key points are different in every
0:37:24 business. So I would say, for instance, in the food business, all about costs because you don’t
0:37:27 know what the revenue is going to be because we don’t know whether we’re going to have a frost
0:37:33 or whether the currency’s going to change or whether somebody else got a big crop or a poor
0:37:39 crop. But if we keep our costs in good shape, we’ll be out right in the long run. And I would say in
0:37:45 cable, you always have to look at cost, but capital is probably the biggest thing in the cable
0:37:52 business because you can make big mistakes and you don’t get spending. I would say if they had
0:37:59 dollars to get into programming that just didn’t work out. Every company, I would say every business
0:38:08 has, you know, the five points might be different. You’re 84 now? 84. And you’re still working full
0:38:16 days? I try to. Yeah, I do. I do. I enjoy it. And I work a little every night. I’m always reading
0:38:22 about stocks or reading business stuff. I guess I’m not working quite as much as I used to,
0:38:28 but I could share with you. I’ve given some money to an entrepreneurial school at University of
0:38:34 Prince Edward Island. Catherine Colbeck, who was the former Premier there and the business
0:38:43 schools named after her. And she was a friend of mine at university and a great person. And so
0:38:51 we gave some money to an entrepreneurial school. And I said, on the condition that you put 7-0
0:38:56 on the wall, what’s 7-0? That’s the hours entrepreneurs have to work every week.
0:39:02 I love it. Not 50, but 70. And entrepreneurs do work 70.
0:39:07 What role did Judy play in all of this? I’d say she’s a great mother. She’s been a full-time mother.
0:39:12 We have four children. I don’t know whether she didn’t have any interest in the business or I didn’t
0:39:18 want to share it. But I do like going home and not talking about the business. We have four great
0:39:25 children and we have eight grandchildren. She’s been just a very supportive mother. I traveled the
0:39:32 world for years and she brought up our children. Her role is a supportive role, but not directly in
0:39:37 the business. Is there anything looking back that you would have done differently? Probably,
0:39:45 if you said, sure, I have done differently, maybe. But on the other hand, I was very comfortable
0:39:54 doing what I did and I worked hard. But we bought our first cottage and the theory was that Judy
0:40:03 could be at the cottage for the kids and I could work, which worked out well. Basically, our philosophy
0:40:12 of life and so on, I wouldn’t change. We lived a low profile on a rural community and at the same
0:40:19 time had the ability to do whatever we wanted to. What role did Focus play? Focus in business is a
0:40:26 big deal. When it comes to business principles, there isn’t one day bigger than Focus. Just
0:40:35 stay at it and work at it. It’s amazing how hard work brings you good luck after a while.
0:40:41 Focus is absolutely critical. Probably the biggest, maybe the biggest single principle you can have
0:40:46 in business. Is there anything about decision-making that you’ve learned that you think most people
0:40:56 miss or would benefit from in all it? Stick to your knitting. I’ve seen a number of friends or
0:41:03 associates who made the first million and then thought they knew how to make the second with
0:41:09 ease and they would get off Focus, go buy another company that they didn’t know anything about,
0:41:21 and just not focused on what they knew. I think it’s fine to diversify, but you have to be careful
0:41:28 how you do that. Frank Sobey, when I was in university reading a Financial Times, I don’t know
0:41:37 which one, and I read a quote where he says, “Always keep the back door open.” So although we were
0:41:44 levering through these formative years, the real debt load was in cable where the cash flow was
0:41:50 quite consistent. The mistake many people make is they have a business, they make the first
0:41:56 million dollars, and now they get into things they know nothing about in too big a way. I mean,
0:42:04 if you want to test the waters, that’s one thing. I’m a great believer in not having all the answers.
0:42:10 I always say the guy that asks the question looks better than the guy that has the answers,
0:42:16 and so I’d like to have the questions. But people get to have the answers. We’ve all
0:42:24 been around associates that once they make a little money, they know more than the next guy.
0:42:30 Frank In your experience, how often have those people self-corrected after they’ve
0:42:36 started to go down that path? Frank I haven’t seen much self-correction. The guy that’s really
0:42:43 doing well when he speaks up, you listen to him. When he goes broke, nobody listens to what he is
0:42:48 saying more. So making a million didn’t make you smarter, and losing it didn’t make you stupider.
0:42:54 Talk to me about the role of patience and long-term thinking in terms of your success looking back
0:43:00 over the last 50, 60 years. Frank Patience is a real virtue. I don’t know whether I
0:43:10 have enough, but I’ve had to have a lot because we’ve built our team. We have lots of imports now,
0:43:18 but on the early days we’ve built our team on locals that didn’t have as much experience as
0:43:25 people from away, and some have turned out to be great entrepreneurs. But you have to have patience,
0:43:33 bring them along and get them exposed. One guy said to me, because I was trying to point out
0:43:39 the way I wanted to report, and the guy says, “Yeah, but John, you’re outside and seeing all these
0:43:46 boards and reports. We don’t see that.” Although you’re smart, just didn’t have the imagination,
0:43:54 but today tremendous executive. But it does take a little time, and patience, respect,
0:44:01 civility, those words are big in our culture. One of the things that you’ve said that I was
0:44:07 most intrigued about that gives me a lot of hope is that most fortunes are made after 50.
0:44:13 I was a member of YPO, like lots of other entrepreneurs, and you get rocked out at 50.
0:44:18 I remember saying, “For me, this is just the beginning because I built a base now. I haven’t
0:44:25 really made any money, but I built quite a base, and now I’ve got to take that base and move on.”
0:44:30 Most of my real equity, the way you would measure it, has come after 60.
0:44:39 But before that, I was building land basis and factories and people, but it didn’t show up
0:44:46 in the bottom line. But I was building a real base of assets. Then I could say that after 70,
0:44:53 we’ve done a lot better still. We’ve got the base going, and like the portfolio we have,
0:45:02 I didn’t really get started until 75 maybe. I shouldn’t say played around. We had maybe
0:45:09 a significant portfolio, and some people might, but not one that you would see written up in
0:45:16 New York Times or something. But when I decided when these interest rates were so cheap that
0:45:23 they didn’t have to be a genius to borrow one or two percent and invest in dividends at five,
0:45:28 so we didn’t. We could have sat back and done nothing, and not everybody was doing that.
0:45:39 We have a board, and I was explaining to them what my thoughts were and how I thought it would
0:45:46 work and what the downside was. Well, we’ve just plugged away at it, and we’ve got a couple of
0:45:51 billion of equity or more now in the portfolio. All that came late in life.
0:45:57 Parenting extraordinaire Becky Kennedy. One of the things I wanted to come back to outside of the
0:46:03 world of teens and maybe inside the adult world here is you said earlier how we think about someone
0:46:09 affects how we communicate with them. I want to relate that to how we think about ourselves
0:46:16 and that inner voice we have and how the stories we tell ourselves, and what are the common ways
0:46:24 that we sort of self-sabotage or get in our own way with these stories that we’re telling ourselves,
0:46:28 and we’re not being kind to ourselves, and we’re not being gentle, and that has all of these other
0:46:33 sort of implications. How can I treat you nicely if I don’t even treat myself nicely?
0:46:40 I mean, there’s so many examples of that, and I think most of us, we can get into the causes,
0:46:49 but most of us have learned to wire struggles next to blame. They’re very, very close in our
0:46:54 circuitry, and I say blame because it’s often a combination of other blame and self-blame.
0:46:59 I think blame is often a two-way street. Some of us maybe specialize more in self-blame,
0:47:05 some of us in other blame, but usually it’s a seesaw. When something’s hard or something doesn’t
0:47:12 go our way, maybe I yelled at my kid, and all of a sudden I’m a monster, I’m the worst parent,
0:47:17 I messed up my kid forever. It’s just like huge spiral, or I did a presentation at work,
0:47:21 and my boss said something that I don’t know if it was critical, but it was kind of ambiguous,
0:47:25 and I leave, and I’m like, “My boss thinks he’s so stupid,” and I’m like, “Oh my goodness, I’m going
0:47:30 to get fired,” and we just, like you said, we start telling ourselves stories, and then those
0:47:36 stories start to influence, of course, they influence how we feel, they influence then the
0:47:40 next action we take that usually is just kind of further reifying that story or really that
0:47:47 interpretation, and we can really get off to the races. Another image I want to share,
0:47:51 because I think this is really one of my favorites, and it really illustrates what we’re talking about,
0:47:57 is like if you picture yourself as the driver of a car. This is an ad from BetterHelp. This
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0:48:29 We all have multiple passengers in our car, right? So like some of us have imposter syndrome as like a
0:48:34 very, very noisy passenger. Some of us have it’s all my fault. Some of us have the world is going
0:48:38 to end and everything is going to go badly, right? We get into problems not when those things are
0:48:44 our passengers. We get into problems and those things take over the driver’s seat. And actually,
0:48:47 a lot of us, when we’re aware of those voices, we try to get them out of our car.
0:48:52 Like we do. We’re like, I shouldn’t feel that way. Or I know my boss doesn’t actually think
0:48:59 I’m stupid. Why am I thinking that? We either fight the voice or it kind of takes over us.
0:49:06 Like that’s usually what happens when I actually think mental health is not about getting those
0:49:10 voices out of our car. They’re there. They’re not going anywhere. But actually just like talking to
0:49:16 them when they’re in the passenger seat to ensure that they don’t take over the driver’s seat, right?
0:49:20 So for example, not first of yelling at my kids and maybe like, Oh,
0:49:26 there’s the I messed up my kid forever again, boys. Hey, it’s unfortunate, but you do tend to come
0:49:29 up whenever I make a little mistake with my kid. And like, okay, I’m just going to come back to
0:49:35 today like it is 2024. And, you know, I don’t really know what the next 80 years, you know,
0:49:39 kind of hold, but I’m pretty sure what I did today did not, you know, mess up my kids forever.
0:49:44 And I know you’ll say that again to me, but I’m just going to kind of keep you in the backseat,
0:49:49 right? Or, oh, okay, I don’t even feel great about my presentation and my boss to do this. But
0:49:54 there’s that my boss hates me voice. And it’s true. Whenever I even doubt myself a little bit,
0:49:59 I do tend to also think that my boss is about to fire me, right? And all of a sudden now I’m
0:50:06 actually in a relationship with these stories, right? Or with these parts, I would call them these
0:50:10 parts. And as soon as you’re in a relationship with a part of you, inherently that part of you
0:50:16 can’t take over you because you in the driver’s seat are like talking to it. And to me, that’s
0:50:20 what I actually teach adults and parents like all the time. It’s honestly like some of my favorite
0:50:23 interventions to teach kids how to do that when they’re young. I think it’s like one of the most
0:50:27 important skills I could take into adulthood with them. Because I think those are some of
0:50:32 like the ultimate coping skills in life. One of the other things we talked about earlier and I’m
0:50:36 sort of like going down a couple rabbit holes because we sort of covered a lot of ground really
0:50:44 quickly was regulating emotions. And not only do we as adults and parents have to teach our kids
0:50:49 or help them better regulate their own emotions, we have to often learn how to regulate our own
0:50:57 emotions. How do we do that? I get this question from parents often, right? Because the way kids
0:51:04 learn how to regulate emotions is through their relationship with their parents, right? It’s
0:51:08 not something you could get taught in a textbook. And it’s not to say when we get older, if we
0:51:11 don’t have a lot of those early experiences that helped us learn how to regulate our emotions,
0:51:18 which most adults I know a lot of them didn’t. It doesn’t mean we can’t get there. But our kids,
0:51:23 right, they kind of borrow our regulation in a moment and they kind of absorb it. And like I
0:51:28 was saying before, they kind of over time learn, oh, my emotion inside me that feels so scary to
0:51:33 me is less scary to someone else. And they kind of absorb that hope and they absorb that kind of
0:51:38 tolerance. And that really forms the foundation for so many of their coping skills. So parents will
0:51:44 say to me, okay, I actually get that. How can I do that for my kid? If I can’t, if I really do struggle
0:51:49 to regulate my own emotions, it seems like I’m teaching my kid and myself at the same time.
0:51:54 And we are. And like, that’s is just kind of the hand a lot of us for Dell. And it’s not an
0:51:57 impossible hand. It’s not an easy hand, but it’s definitely a winnable hand. Like, I know that
0:52:02 and I’ve seen it now with millions of adults who are, you know, winning a lot of their hands.
0:52:08 Um, and so I think there’s a couple of like concrete ways as adults that we can, you know,
0:52:14 start to learn how to better regulate our emotions. Right. Number one to me is just the word curiosity.
0:52:22 Like being curious about yourself is a foundation to regulating your emotions. Because it’s the
0:52:28 difference between saying, um, my kids whining, like who can stay calm when they whine all day?
0:52:32 Like, are you saying people like whining? I have to get to a place where I like whining.
0:52:36 No, nobody likes whining. Literally, nobody likes whining, but there’s a big difference
0:52:41 between not liking whining and, I don’t know, reacting and being in a state of reactivity
0:52:46 with screaming at our kids versus not liking whining and being able to regulate our emotions and
0:52:51 respond to our kid from a place of groundedness and sturdiness. Right. Still, nobody likes it,
0:52:55 but it’s very different. And curiosity to me gets us from point one to point two,
0:52:58 because instead of saying like, what’s wrong with my kid and why are they acting the way they’re
0:53:05 acting, we might say, what’s going on inside of me? What’s going on for me? What, what is
0:53:11 happening inside me? That is kind of a component of this reaction. Right. The idea that my kid’s
0:53:17 whining is an inherently making me scream at them. It’s a trigger, but there’s a story inside me.
0:53:23 There’s something that happens inside my body that frankly predated my kid’s existence.
0:53:28 So if I can get curious about that, right, then I can actually make a lot of progress. And to me,
0:53:33 I think it’s so easy to hear that and someone say, oh, so it’s my fault? No.
0:53:38 Like, I don’t know. I feel like we’re obsessed with the word fault. Like, it’s not your kid’s fault.
0:53:42 It’s not your fault. Like, why does it have to be anyone’s fault? Like, I don’t know why. Like,
0:53:47 it’s just, this is happening. Either we can be curious and like learn and do that learning,
0:53:52 probably live in a way that’s more in line with our values, feel more in control of ourselves.
0:53:56 Like, your kid’s going to benefit. But I promise you as the adult are going to benefit in areas
0:54:01 like way more like everybody wins. Right. And so I always say to parents, this isn’t a system
0:54:05 of like saying this is your fault. It’s a system of saying like, this is actually a place for your
0:54:10 empowerment and to like finally learn skills and skills always help us feel, you know, more powerful.
0:54:16 So one of my favorite emotion regulation skills to teach adults is something I call AVP. Okay.
0:54:21 And it’s like the simplest thing and has the most profound impact on people. Okay. So
0:54:27 AVP stands for Acknowledge Validate Permit. So I’ll teach each part.
0:54:33 Step one to regulating emotions is acknowledging them. And actually, this is a really good point
0:54:39 of the conversation relative to what we just said about this image in the car. So let’s say,
0:54:43 you know, my kid is whining. Step one, acknowledge like, well, I’m feeling really annoyed.
0:54:48 Right. Like, in a way, what I’m doing is like, I’m the driver of my car and annoyance in the back
0:54:53 seat is like starting to kind of make its way to the driver seat. And I’m like, Hey, there. Hey.
0:54:56 And that’s literally what I’m doing. I actually use the word high a lot because it always makes
0:55:01 me laugh. And to me, if I could add levity to like that process, it gets easier. So I’m like,
0:55:06 high annoyance or high anxiety, right? Or something like that. So step one is just acknowledge. You
0:55:11 can acknowledge by using a quote feeling word, like high annoyance or high sadness. A lot of people
0:55:15 don’t like really know the name of their feelings. And that’s totally fine. And you can also do it
0:55:20 in a more general way. Like, I’m feeling uncomfortable right now. Are you feeling about to
0:55:26 explode right now? I’m feeling tight right now. Any acknowledgement to is validate. And to me,
0:55:32 the best way that our body, I think likes to be validated. I don’t know why is the term makes
0:55:36 sense. I think there’s something where feelings feel like accepted by logic in our body when we
0:55:40 use that term. I don’t know. I haven’t like, I haven’t asked, but I think that’s what’s happening.
0:55:45 So I’d be saying, I’m really, really annoyed right now. Or, you know, when my kid was whining,
0:55:49 and I’d say to myself, well, that makes sense. Like, whining is pretty annoying.
0:55:56 It makes sense that I feel that way. That is a hugely helpful phrase in regulating our emotions.
0:56:06 Because the reasons our emotions get unregulated, right, is that they are exploding out of our body
0:56:10 in our behaviors. They literally, if you think about these moments of reactivity when I yell,
0:56:16 or the emotion is like coming out of my body and like through my mouth, right? It’s kind of like
0:56:22 a volcano, right? The opposite of that isn’t suppressing emotions because you just can’t
0:56:27 beat them. So it’s always, you know, an unwinnable, you know, endeavor. But we’re kind of saying when
0:56:30 you regulate an emotion, like it’s okay to live inside your body. Like it can just live there.
0:56:34 It doesn’t have to explode out of you. It can live inside there. Like it has a place. It has a home.
0:56:38 So if you think about those two steps already, like for some saying hi to it, like if you’re saying
0:56:41 hi to someone at a party, like maybe you don’t love them, but you’re probably like okay with
0:56:45 them being there because you said hi. And then you’re telling, you’re feeling like it kind of
0:56:51 makes sense that you’re here. And then P is permit, which actually just involves saying yourself,
0:56:55 I give myself full permission to be feeling this way, right? So another example of going
0:57:00 through an AVP would be like, I’m feeling really anxious right now and really, really worked up.
0:57:05 And, you know, that makes sense. Like I am managing my kid’s soccer schedules and, you know,
0:57:09 I’m thinking about what they need for dinner and I didn’t respond to that email. And I think tomorrow
0:57:13 is going to be a snow day and then my kid’s going to have canceled school and P permit, right?
0:57:19 I give myself permission to be feeling this way. And I think a kicker at the end is just adding the
0:57:25 phrase, and I can cope with it. And I can cope with it. I, you know, interesting enough, you’re
0:57:31 catching me on like last night, I was walking in Times Square. And as I do, I film videos myself
0:57:35 for Instagram when I’m like on my, on the way to the subway. So I was like filming myself and
0:57:41 this guy saw me. He’s this 28 year old guy stopped me. He goes, I’m a 28 year old man. I’m unmarried.
0:57:47 And I don’t have kids. And he goes, and I like, I’m so excited to see you. He’s like, you’re like a
0:57:55 celebrity to me. And he goes, he goes, AVP has changed my life. That’s what he said. This AVP has
0:58:00 changed my life. I’m reparenting myself. I know I never learned what some people learned in their
0:58:06 childhood. And I need to kind of reparent myself through those skills. And AVP has like, you know,
0:58:12 changed my life. And so there’s a couple of ways to use it. If regulating your emotions is new for
0:58:19 you, you can’t expect yourself to start to regulate your emotions when you’re in your most heightened
0:58:26 emotions. That would be like someone who has never taken a foul shot, taking a foul shot. Game seven
0:58:30 of the NBA finals when time has run out and the game is tied. Like that person is not making it.
0:58:36 You take foul shots and practice low stakes. And so the way I tell people to practice AVP
0:58:42 is literally going to their phone right now, setting a random time that they tend to be alone,
0:58:46 right? Not in the midst of things and just literally making a daily reminder that says
0:58:51 AVP. And when it goes off, you just stop and you say to yourself, what am I feeling right now?
0:58:57 And it can be like, I’m not feeling much. I don’t know. Well, that makes sense because this is a
0:59:02 new thing for me to check in with my emotions. So it makes sense that I’m not sure permission.
0:59:05 I’m giving myself full permission to not know how I’m feeling like there’s no way to get it wrong.
0:59:13 That’s what I’m saying. And I promise you, after a week or two, not only will you start to recognize
0:59:20 more things, but already that skill, that coping skill, will start to appear not in 10 out of 10
0:59:26 emotional situations. It will not, it’s not magic, but like in maybe two, three out of 10s.
0:59:31 And I think that’s like one concrete thing like all adults can do to start making progress.
0:59:37 And here’s business genius Brad Jacobs, who started eight multi-billion dollar companies.
0:59:43 Let’s deep dive on M&A. How do you think about it at a high level? And then specifically
0:59:50 walk me through your process for not only evaluating companies, but beginning to end,
0:59:55 including integration. M&A has been a big part of my business career, not in the first 10 years.
1:00:02 In the first 10 years from 1979 to 1989, I was in the oil business. It was all organic. We didn’t do
1:00:07 one single acquisition. So I’ll just trading and brokering and building up a business organically.
1:00:15 But since 1989, I’ve been doing roughly about 500 acquisitions. I’ve done a lot of M&A. I love
1:00:22 M&A. I love M&A as a way to create value for shareholders because I don’t know of another way
1:00:31 on a risk adjusted basis on a certainty level that is more likely to create massive shareholder value
1:00:38 than doing sensible M&A. In order to understand how to create value, I have to understand how
1:00:45 am I going to scale up the business. I only know how to create tremendous shareholder value
1:00:50 by growing a business tremendously. That’s how I know how to do it. And of course, it’s organic.
1:00:54 And I’ve had very good organic growths. The companies I’ve led have been well performing
1:00:59 companies that have had good market share and growing market share. And we’ve taken customers
1:01:04 away, we’ve taken business away from our competitors who aren’t managed as well.
1:01:08 But the real, when you look at the numbers, the real growth has been through M&A,
1:01:13 through acquisitions. What’s been my secrets on acquisitions? I’ll try to be concise because I
1:01:18 did a hour and a half podcast with McKinsey a couple of years ago with Andy West. That was the
1:01:22 only question. I asked one question and I babbled on for an hour and a half. It’s still a big,
1:01:28 people still watch that podcast because I really told everything about it. Here’s the gist. The gist
1:01:35 is, you first have to select an industry. You can’t just do M&A. So I spent the last year
1:01:40 going around studying dozens of industries, looking at hundreds and hundreds of acquisition
1:01:44 opportunities, mostly with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and some other friends, Sequoia and some
1:01:51 friends, figuring out, could I apply my playbook to this industry? Is the industry big enough?
1:01:57 Is the industry fragmented enough? Is there M&A to do? Is bigger better?
1:02:00 That’s not always the case. Are the economies of scale? Do you have a competitive advantage by
1:02:04 being bigger? Is there a way to apply technology? My companies have always been tech forward
1:02:11 to the industry because the industry is a little sleepy on technology. As the way I run a business,
1:02:16 the way I do the intake of people and the culture and the way we interact with each other and so
1:02:21 forth, is that something that’ll work in this industry, is applied in this industry? Is it
1:02:24 something related to something I know about industrial services? For example, most of my
1:02:30 companies since 1989 have been industrial services. I looked at many, many different industries and
1:02:35 I settled on the one that checked every single box, which was building products distribution,
1:02:41 and the name of my company is going to be QXO. M&A will be a big, big component of what we do.
1:02:47 There are 800 billion dollars of distributors in Western Europe and in North America, which is
1:02:53 where I want to plant my flag. I want to build a company that’s called 50 billion dollars.
1:03:00 I can do that. If there’s an 800 billion dollar size, I can take 6% of that through acquisition
1:03:04 and through organic growth. I can get to 50 billion dollars. There’s many other industries
1:03:08 that are nice, but I’m not going to be able to get to 50 billion dollars. I want to get to 50
1:03:15 billion dollars. So this industry, there’s a clear path of how I can do that. Now, I can’t just,
1:03:20 and there’s roughly about 7,000 distributors here in the United States. There’s about almost
1:03:25 twice that amount in Western Europe. So roughly about 20,000 distributors. You’ve got to be very
1:03:30 careful about who you buy. There has to be a reason why you’re buying that company. There has
1:03:36 to be a strategic, a compelling strategic reason of why you’re buying that company. What makes
1:03:41 sense for that? Why is that good for customers? Why is that going to make our business a better
1:03:44 business? Why does that fit with the other things that we’ve already bought and put together?
1:03:50 How’s it going to integrate well? I like to look at the multiples that I pay for an acquisition.
1:03:56 The price that I pay for an acquisition is very, very important because when I look at the levers
1:04:01 of how we create shareholder value, what contributes to that? The biggest lever, the biggest component
1:04:08 is the differential between what I raise capital at due to my relationships with mostly institutional
1:04:15 investors and because of the track record and what I can deploy that at on doing acquisitions.
1:04:20 The second biggest lever is how much can I improve the businesses that I buy? There’s many,
1:04:26 many levers, but those are the two biggest levers. When I’ve studied all these different
1:04:32 industries, I’ve studied historical acquisition multiples. One of the reasons I like building
1:04:38 products distribution is I believe that I’ll be able to buy companies at lower multiples of their
1:04:43 profit than I’ll be able to raise capital at. That’s going to be a big, that dasagio, that spread,
1:04:47 that difference, that Delta is going to create value, boom, just right away, right from the first
1:04:54 day. Now you asked about integration. Integration is extremely important. Anybody can buy a company.
1:05:01 It’s not that hard. You send a wire, you sign a document, it’s a few dozen pages,
1:05:07 lawyers have gone over it and you wire the money and you own it. So that’s not the hard part.
1:05:14 The hard part is after you’ve selected the right industry, after you selected the right companies
1:05:21 within that industry to buy, after you had disciplined so that you pay the right price
1:05:28 for all those, then you have to integrate them. I’ve never run companies that have hundreds
1:05:33 of different companies all running separately with different names and different SIF systems and
1:05:37 different back offices and there is some level of decentralization where you need to be closer
1:05:46 to the customer. But I have a very strong appetite for standardization, standardization of the ERP
1:05:51 system that you close the books with. So you close the books promptly right after the close of the
1:05:57 month and then you can have standardized dashboards. So all the managers have the same format of the
1:06:02 numbers they’re looking at, the KPIs, and they see them graphically very easy to understand.
1:06:09 I like to see so they can benchmark every location to every other location, every district to other
1:06:14 districts, every region to other regions. And for that you need standardization. I like to have
1:06:22 very standardized HRIS, Human Resources System, where all the people in the organization and we’ll
1:06:27 build this company up, we’ll have hundreds of thousands of employees. I need to have a standardized
1:06:33 data system for all of our employees. Everyone’s on the 401k, it’s the same exact way of doing,
1:06:37 all the benefits are the same, all the performance appraises are the same, compensation I can see
1:06:42 right away. I need to have transparency to the information about, I need to have the organization
1:06:47 charts very accessible right away. And every time we do an acquisition, I need to pull that
1:06:51 information up right away while we’re studying it quickly. So we have a competitive advantage
1:06:57 against other bidders to see what would the synergies be. So I need standardized HR technology
1:07:03 about everything. I need a standardized CRM, Customer Relationship Management System like
1:07:09 Salesforce.com or several others as well. And for that to be able to make sure we’re looking at
1:07:14 customers, the attractiveness of those customers, the profitability of those customers, the size of
1:07:20 their spend, so therefore the potential of those customers going forward, all the interactions
1:07:24 we’ve had with those customers. I need to see that in a standardized way, all across the globe,
1:07:28 everywhere, in every country we’re functioning in. So I need a standardized technology for
1:07:34 Customer Relationship Management for Sales Manager. So I’m giving, I need a standardized
1:07:39 internal social media. I happen to like, I’ve used Workplace by Facebook. It’s not the only one,
1:07:44 but I like that one really well. It’s nice and the interface is really, really good. So I like to
1:07:48 have everyone on the same one because I like to have one company with one culture where everybody
1:07:53 can ping each other. I like, I don’t want to have these silos of companies like sometimes you see
1:07:59 these companies roll up many different companies, but it’s all a mishmash. It’s all separate. I don’t
1:08:05 like that at all. I see a lot of these middle market private equity firms do that. They roll up
1:08:10 these small companies. They’re doing five, 10, 20 million dollars at EBITDA each and they bat and
1:08:13 they just buy a bunch of them and now they’re up to 100 million or 200 million EBITDA and
1:08:17 they just get a bigger multiple because they’re bigger, but it’s a mess. Whoever buys those,
1:08:20 whoever buys those companies, there’s a lot of work to be done. You’ve got to not standardize
1:08:25 everything and integrate everything and opportunity to improve them, but it’s a lot of cost and time
1:08:31 to fix all that stuff up. So I integrate from the moment that we agree to buy a company,
1:08:38 we’re starting the integration process and the day we close the acquisition goes up. We’re in there
1:08:42 and we’re standardizing everything as much as we possibly can and we’re communicating and
1:08:50 communicating quite a bit. A big part of the success for M&A is forming the relationship with
1:08:56 people and making sure we get off on the right foot and making sure that we don’t lose the great
1:09:03 talent and making sure we on the same time, we’re identifying the weak players and gracefully and
1:09:09 generously exiting them. So there’s a lot of different components to M&A. I’m summarizing a
1:09:13 lot of different facts in each one of those things. We could talk for an hour just on that block,
1:09:18 but those are the kinds of things that go through my mind in my approach to M&A. Nutrition and health
1:09:24 expert Rhonda Patrick. You know, I kind of have my own framework for approaching nutrition in
1:09:32 and it has a lot to do with, you know, I did my postdoc training in nutrition and specifically
1:09:40 looking at micronutrients. So these are about 40 or so essential vitamins and minerals that fatty
1:09:46 acids also and amino acids that we have to get from our diet. And those are in a variety of foods
1:09:51 and different foods have different levels and quantities of them. And these micronutrients
1:09:56 are running our metabolism, they’re running everything, our neurotransmitters that we’re
1:10:02 producing. So our cognition, just absolutely everything that is going on in our bodies. So
1:10:08 it’s important to get them because if we don’t get them, we can have deficiencies or insufficiencies,
1:10:15 which is quite worse because insufficiencies are kind of something that you don’t notice every day,
1:10:22 but there’s like insidious types of damage just happening each and every day. And it accumulates
1:10:27 over time and plays a role in age-related diseases like cancer and neurodegenerative disease. So
1:10:36 these micronutrients are things like, you know, calcium, magnesium, vitamin K, vitamin D, which
1:10:43 I’m sure we’ll talk about is actually something you can mostly get from the sun, omega 3. And so
1:10:49 when you think about the micronutrients that you need in your diet, it makes it a little bit easier
1:10:54 to think about what you should be eating. Okay, so well, let’s start with like some of the most
1:11:02 common deficiencies in micronutrients. We have magnesium. So almost half of the US population
1:11:10 is deficient in, or I would say they get insufficient magnesium intake. And magnesium
1:11:16 is, it’s at the center of a chlorophyll molecule. So chlorophyll gives plants their green color.
1:11:20 So it’s really easy to think about foods you should eat to get magnesium. You should be eating
1:11:27 greens, particularly dark leafy greens. So that’s something, you know, a framework where it’s like,
1:11:31 okay, well, I need to get my greens because they’re high in magnesium. Well, greens are also very
1:11:39 high in vitamin K. And vitamin K one, there’s two forms vitamin K one, you need it, it’s essential
1:11:45 when you when you take in vitamin K one, and it’s something like 35% of the US population is not
1:11:50 getting enough of that. And I’m sure, you know, in North American, Canada are very similar. I mean,
1:11:57 we have very similar diets. So vitamin K one is essential for all your blood clotting processes.
1:12:01 So you like in order to like, you know, have your blood clotting, which is important, you know,
1:12:06 if you have a cut or something, you know, an injury, you want that clotting to happen so that
1:12:13 you don’t have like a hemorrhage, right? So, so vitamin K is also, you know, high in leafy greens.
1:12:19 You can also get magnesium, sorry, calcium as well from greens. So that’s really an easy way
1:12:24 to kind of think about greens. The other, the other way, the other thing is omega threes,
1:12:32 right? So omega threes are very high in fatty fish. So this would be things like wild Alaskan salmon
1:12:39 or cod or mackerel sardines, like these are good forms of fish that have the marine types of omega
1:12:46 three. So that would be DHA and EPA. And those are very important for a lot of functions,
1:12:52 including brain health and cardiovascular health. And there’s a lot of evidence, if you actually
1:12:58 look at the evidence, a lot of work has been done by Bill Harris and his group at the fatty acid
1:13:04 research institute. And they have, they look at omega, the omega three index, which is a way you
1:13:09 can actually quantify your omega three levels. And that’s really good to be able to quantify
1:13:13 something. Because if you don’t quantify it, you don’t really know if you are getting enough of
1:13:22 it, right? So the mega three index is high in red blood cells. And sorry, it’s in, it’s, they’re,
1:13:27 they’re characterizing it from red blood cells, which is different than a lot of other ways of
1:13:33 measuring omega three, like for example, plasma omega three, which is basically kind of reflective
1:13:39 of your dietary intake the last week or so, the red blood cell or the omega three index is more
1:13:45 of a long term status. So it’s like 120 days for a red blood cell to turn over. So the omega
1:13:52 three index is a good marker of your omega three status. And people that have a high omega three
1:14:01 index, and that would be 8% or more, have a five year increased life expectancy compared to people
1:14:07 with a lower omega three index, which is more like 4%. Now people in the United States on average
1:14:14 have about an omega three index of about 5%. And you compare that to, for example, countries like
1:14:20 Japan where they eat a lot of seafood, their omega three index is around 10%. So, and they also have
1:14:25 a five year increased life expectancy compared to people in the United States. But there’s been
1:14:30 tons of studies looking at omega three index and life expectancy. And there’s been also like data
1:14:35 where they stratify stratify like looking at, you know, for example, and this I like talking about
1:14:41 this because I think it really puts in perspective the framework of nutrition and thinking about,
1:14:47 instead of focusing on what to avoid, focusing on what you need, because if you focus on what you
1:14:52 need, then it’s obvious what you don’t need, right? There’s no nutritional value in processed foods.
1:14:56 You’re not getting micronutrients. You’re getting calories. You’re not getting protein. You’re not
1:15:01 getting things that you need. So smoking is something that everyone knows is bad. You should
1:15:06 avoid smoking, right? It’s, you know, heart disease, cancer, you’re going to have a decreased life
1:15:13 expectancy, emphysema, all kinds of problems, right? Well, what Bill Harris’s group had done has,
1:15:20 they looked at life expectancy of smokers and non smokers, and then they categorized their omega
1:15:28 three index. And if you look at this data, it’s just mind blowing. So obviously, non smokers
1:15:36 that have a high omega three index of 8% or more have the highest life expectancy. And the lowest
1:15:41 life expectancy is smokers with a low omega three index. So there’s like, that’s the worst of the
1:15:50 worst. But when you look at smokers with a high omega three index, they have the same life expectancy
1:15:57 as non smokers with a low omega three index. In other words, smoking was like having low omega
1:16:04 three or having a low and omega three index was like smoking. And when I say the life expectancy,
1:16:10 if you look at the graph in the publication, the curves like overlay perfectly. It’s kind of freakish
1:16:14 where you’re like, whoa, like the people that are smoking, but they’re getting a lot of omega
1:16:20 three have the same like life expectancy of these people that don’t smoke, but have very low omega
1:16:24 three. And that’s kind of like, I like talking about that because I feel like it puts it in
1:16:29 perspective for people because like I said, no one’s really thinking about, I’m not eating my
1:16:35 fish today. I’m not supplementing with an omega three supplement to get those omega threes. But
1:16:39 people are thinking about, oh, I shouldn’t smoke because it’s bad. So again, it goes back to that
1:16:47 framework of thinking about what you need and starting there as opposed to like just like,
1:16:53 okay, what should I avoid? Because when you think about what should I avoid, then you’re not like,
1:16:57 people aren’t thinking about magnesium. They’re not thinking about the vitamin K. They’re not
1:17:03 thinking about omega three. And by the way, magnesium, I said about half the population
1:17:08 in the United States doesn’t get enough. They’re not eating enough greens. And unfortunately,
1:17:14 there’s not a great test for magnesium because our body stores magnesium in our bones. And so
1:17:18 anytime we’re not getting enough in our diet, our body pulls it out of our bones to like,
1:17:22 because we need it. It’s so important. You need it to make energy. Like without magnesium,
1:17:28 you can’t make energy. So nothing’s going to function. But you also, it’s needed to repair
1:17:33 damage. Like every time you have, you know, like right now, you and I, we’re, we’re having a
1:17:37 conversation, you know, we’re, you know, neurotransmitters are firing, we’re thinking about
1:17:42 things like that’s causing damage, metabolism, all that stuff causes damage on a daily basis,
1:17:47 but our body repairs that damage. But magnesium is a cofactor for these enzymes, these are proteins
1:17:51 that are doing everything for that to function properly. And so if you don’t get enough of that
1:17:56 magnesium to do that, what happens is you don’t repair that damage properly. And that can increase
1:18:00 the risk of getting a mutation that can lead to cancer. And so there’s all sorts of studies that
1:18:06 have looked at magnesium intake in cancer. And, you know, it’s been found that, for example,
1:18:13 for every 100, you know, milligram increase in magnesium intake, there’s something like a 20%
1:18:17 decrease in pancreatic cancer risk. And there’s been lots of studies like this looking at
1:18:22 magnesium intake in cancer risk. And so the higher the magnesium intake, the lower the cancer risk.
1:18:26 So again, it’s one of those things where it’s, you can’t look in the mirror and go,
1:18:30 as you’re brushing your teeth, oh, I don’t have enough magnesium today, right? Like nothing’s
1:18:35 like showing you that, but it’s happening. That damage is insidious. And I mentioned you pull it
1:18:39 out of your bone, like it’s pulled out of your bones. And that’s another thing it leads to osteoporosis
1:18:45 over time. So, you know, investing in magnesium. So in other words, remembering to eat your leafy
1:18:51 greens is getting your magnesium. So women need about, I’d say about 320 milligrams a day, adult
1:18:59 women, need about 320 milligrams a day of magnesium. Men need around 420 milligrams a day. And,
1:19:04 you know, this can change based on your physical activity level as well. So like if you’re physically
1:19:09 active, if you’re sweating, you sweat out magnesium, you also use it up for energy. So you might
1:19:16 actually require anywhere between 10% to 20% more than that level. So what’s called the recommended
1:19:21 daily allowance in the United States. So, you know, again, and people aren’t even meeting that.
1:19:28 So investing in magnesium is like a way, you can think about like also for bone health because,
1:19:32 you know, if you are getting enough magnesium on a daily basis, you’re not going to be pulling it
1:19:37 out of your bones. And therefore, you’re not going to, magnesium is important for your bones.
1:19:43 And so as you keep doing that year after year after year, it dramatically increases osteoporosis
1:19:49 risk, right? So there’s lots of reasons to invest in, you know, these micronutrients and to think
1:19:54 about the foods that you need to eat. And so, and beyond the micronutrients, it goes to the macros,
1:20:01 right? And finally, the guy who is beating death, Brian Johnson. If you can walk me through at a
1:20:09 high level, sort of the overarching day of blueprint, and what does it mean to live like Brian Johnson?
1:20:16 So the premise on this is I was posing the question, in the early 21st century, is it the
1:20:24 case that we have achieved longevity escape velocity, which means that for every one year of
1:20:30 chronological time that passes, can I stay the same age biologically? And if not, where are we at?
1:20:37 And so that’s the backdrop on what my daily routine is. And so what we did to establish
1:20:42 this routine is we looked at every single scientific publication that’s ever been done on
1:20:48 health span and lifespan. We then graded the evidence of these papers, and we then stack
1:20:53 ranked them according to effect size. And then we’ve systematically been implementing each one
1:20:58 of these protocols. So becoming the most measured person in history and using all the scientific
1:21:05 evidence. So my day begins really the night before I go to bed currently at 9 30 p.m. I just
1:21:13 changed my bedtime from 8 30. But it’s 9 30 on the dot. So it’s not, I don’t have a two hour
1:21:19 window of time. And I recently logged eight months of perfect sleep using my wearable,
1:21:24 which no human in history had ever done. So I wanted to demonstrate that you can get reliable
1:21:28 high quality sleep for this extended period of time. And then I wake up naturally, I never wake
1:21:36 up with an alarm, roughly 4 35 30 in the morning. And I will weigh myself the body composition,
1:21:43 like weight, hydration, fat, et cetera. I’ll take my inner ear temperature. I’ll take two pills.
1:21:51 I’ll do a few minutes of UV light therapy to start my circadian rhythm. It’s still dark in the
1:21:56 morning. I’ll go downstairs. I’ll make myself a morning concoction. I’ll take 60 pills. I’ll do
1:22:03 light therapy on my hair. I’ll like once a week, once a week, I’ll do my blood pressure.
1:22:11 I’ll then work out for about an hour in a specific protocol. I’ll come in. I will make breakfast,
1:22:17 which is a few pounds of vegetables. I’ll shower and do a skincare routine and get ready for work.
1:22:24 I’ll eat my second meal today. And then I work for the day. And then I have a evening and then
1:22:29 throughout the day, I’ll do various doctors appointments, medical procedures and measurement.
1:22:36 And then I have a wind down routine that I follow ritually. And what we’ve done is we’ve tried to
1:22:42 stack hundreds of protocols into my daily routine. Because we do so many things and we’re trying to
1:22:48 follow the evidence. I’m not able to just randomly do things that has to be highly structured in
1:22:54 order for us to control this experiment with the rigor we need for the results. And so we’ve just
1:22:58 done this for several years and fine tuned it. And we go through the process of measure me,
1:23:02 measure myself, look at the evidence, we do the protocol measurement evidence protocol again and
1:23:08 again and again. And I have a few dozen biomarkers that are pretty phenomenal. So for example,
1:23:16 my cardiovascular capacity is in the top 1.5% of 18 year olds. My bone mineral density is the top
1:23:23 0.2% of 30 year olds, which is age minute for that test. And my strength test, same thing,
1:23:28 like top 1.5% and 10% of 18 year olds. So the biomarkers across my entire body, whether it’s
1:23:36 my cardiovascular ability, my strength, my muscle, my muscle and body fat are the top 99.5%. So it’s
1:23:43 produced a pretty impressive list of biomarkers that indicate that I’m in pretty good health.
1:23:48 I thought your workouts were like 25 reps of exercise and stuff. Are you, is that giving you
1:23:54 the incredible strength? Yes. So it’s about an hour a day and you’re right. It’s like, you know,
1:24:03 20 plus. And so it’s mostly I try to flex and stretch every muscle of my body. So I don’t do
1:24:10 heavy weights that are hard in the joints. But yes, even doing these things, I do it every single
1:24:17 day. I don’t take any rest days. And yeah, I’m on my bench press. It’s a top 10% of 18 year olds.
1:24:22 And we use 18 year olds, a lot of people, I mean, with 99% certainty when I say this, people are
1:24:31 like, but wait a second, why not a 30 year old? It’s because you max out your weight to rep ratio
1:24:38 at age 18. So even though you can lift more in your 20s and maybe even your 30s, your ratio
1:24:45 peaks at 18, the same is true with your VO2 max, your cardiovascular fitness. And so we do a reference
1:24:50 to an 18 year old, not because it’s an easy way to pick off a number. We do it because according to
1:24:56 these age, these biological age standards, you’re looking at when the human when a male
1:25:02 peaks perform peak performance. And I think your last meal is at like 1130 a.m. That’s right. So I
1:25:07 have roughly, you know, 10 hours or so of fasting before I go to bed. Do you feel hungry when you
1:25:12 go to bed? I used to. I’m now normalized to it. And does that help your sleep? Like what happens
1:25:19 if you eat later? I assume this was all like sort of measured and the fasting. I eat my last meal
1:25:26 the day at 11am for the objectives of good sleep. Because I mean, there’s supposedly good benefits
1:25:32 on fasting. I think the evidence is still maybe developing. So I mostly do it for sleep because
1:25:38 when I eat my last meal the day, I have all my digestion finished. So when I go to bed,
1:25:43 my resting heart rate is around 46 beats per minute. And if it’s 46, I’m going to have a
1:25:50 perfect night’s sleep. If I eat at 5pm or 6pm, then my resting heart rate is going to be 56.
1:25:57 And when I do that, I’m going to knock off about 50% of my REM and 50% of my deep,
1:26:04 and I’ll increase my wake time by about 35 minutes. And so I’ve done so many experiments now. It is
1:26:09 algorithmic. And I know exactly what happens when I eat at what time and how it affects my sleep.
1:26:16 It sounds like blueprint is optimized for the sole variable of sleep. Is that correct?
1:26:20 I mean, so sleep is an important one. It’s the number one priority because everything else rest,
1:26:26 you know, hinges upon that. We are the first endeavor in history to focus on trying to rejuvenate
1:26:33 every organ of the body. So we have 70 plus organs and we’ve tried to quantify and rejuvenate
1:26:38 every organ of my body. We just tried to rejuvenate my thymus, which is a gland right behind your
1:26:46 chest here, responsible for your immune system. And so, you know, I can say I’m chronologically
1:26:53 46 years old, but the more important number is what is the biological age of my heart and of my
1:27:01 lungs and of my liver. And that’s really the more powerful predictor than a chronological number.
1:27:06 And where were you when you started blueprint? Were you basically your biological age for your,
1:27:14 like, was everything the same? No, I was coming from a pretty bad place. After being depressed for
1:27:19 a decade and running, you know, being a startup entrepreneur my entire life and having just gone
1:27:26 through a bunch of stuff, I was pretty beat up. And I was in a bad state. So I definitely subscribed
1:27:33 to grind culture, where, you know, you do things in society to try to earn people of respect
1:27:40 and have a position of a status in a social group to when you conform with these social norms.
1:27:46 And so like, when you hear a story about a colleague who worked on a program, a problem for
1:27:50 two days straight and didn’t sleep, it’s like, wow, they’re so awesome and amazing. You know,
1:27:59 it’s very hard to not be, you know, to be induced to think that that’s an emulation worthy behavior.
1:28:05 So I had to peel myself out of grind culture and find out that this is the thing is we are accustomed
1:28:12 death is the enabler of all things in mortality. You know, if you love country, die for your country.
1:28:18 If you want to pay the ultimate price of being a hero, sacrifice your life.
1:28:24 You know, if you want to achieve a mortality in your professional endeavor, have your work
1:28:30 to live beyond your death. Everything we think about existence is around death. And I was calling
1:28:34 question to death that maybe we have reached this time and place in human history,
1:28:40 where death is no longer inevitable. And if that is true, everything about our reality changes.
1:28:45 Do you think we’ll see a quantum leap in average age in the next 15 years?
1:28:50 To me, the most compelling contemplation is
1:29:01 trying to predict how fast intelligence is improving. So we humans have been the dominant
1:29:08 force of intelligence on this planet for 200,000 years. And we’ve been able to increase our
1:29:14 abilities of intelligence by forming better cooperation in our society with language and
1:29:18 all kinds of organizational methodologies. We’ve increased our ability to utilize our
1:29:25 intelligence with technological tools. We’ve now created intelligence in AI that is creating
1:29:32 better intelligence. And if you say what is the speed at which intelligence is improving,
1:29:40 it’s fast, faster than we can comprehend. And so when we model out the future and we say
1:29:48 what’s going to happen on a 10-year time span, we are unqualified to answer that question
1:29:56 because that time frame exceeds our own intellectual capacity to imagine. So it’s
1:30:02 the first time in human history where we, the superior form of intelligence, are up against
1:30:09 a wall of not knowing what to predict what comes next because it’s going to supersede us so fast.
1:30:16 And so this is the thing, this is why I come down to the only thing I know to be true in the
1:30:25 year 2024 is don’t die. That’s it. I don’t know anything else other than I want to be around
1:30:29 for what could be the most spectacular existence in this part of the galaxy.
1:30:34 Yeah, there’s a part of me that really believes if we take care of ourselves really well right
1:30:40 now, we don’t die. We’re going to get a lot of advantage from technology that thinks about things
1:30:45 in a way that we couldn’t even comprehend. I mean, you take the, for inspiration, if you say,
1:30:51 okay, well, point me to an example of where intelligence has been used that would give me
1:30:59 any sort of bearings on what I might imagine. Okay, so take AlphaFold. It was many people thought
1:31:05 solving the protein folding problem was unsolvable or would take us some unknown duration of time.
1:31:10 And DeepMind allocated their attention to that thing and solved it faster than anyone ever
1:31:17 thought possible. The same thing would go. And so when these groups of people that are very talented
1:31:24 focus on a very narrow problem, they solve stunningly hard problems faster than anyone thought.
1:31:31 And as these systems get better and use more broadly and as these systems create better systems,
1:31:36 this is why we are at this launch point. And, you know, is it going to happen in two years,
1:31:41 one years, five years? I don’t know. But it’s basically, if you zoom out far enough,
1:31:46 it’s in the blink of an eye at this point. And it’s a don’t die is don’t die individually,
1:31:51 don’t kill each other, don’t kill planet Earth. And when you’re building AI,
1:31:57 the objective function of AI is this don’t die ideology. So if you, I mean, what I’m trying
1:32:01 to say is like, so we’ve never been in a situation before where we’re baby steps away from creating
1:32:09 superintelligence. And when you’re at this, in this moment, we have this, this incredibly
1:32:15 practical question to ask, what do we do? Like, how do we think about reality? What do we care
1:32:20 about? What are our ideals? What are our objectives? And then if you start surveying the world of like,
1:32:25 hey, who can tell us how to practically think about reality? And you probe religions and capitalism
1:32:31 and communism and socialism and like any other group who can pull up and say, here’s a playbook,
1:32:36 here’s an instruction on how you actually think about reality. And that’s what I’ve been trying
1:32:43 to fill is that void is there is no philosophical stack that informs humanity on what to do on a
1:32:49 daily basis. For example, what to eat for breakfast all the way through the most complicated question
1:32:52 of how do you begin thinking about a philosophical alignment with AI?
1:33:09 Thanks for listening to our 2024 recap. Which guest was your favorite? I’d love to know. If
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1:34:07 to see what we have in store in the new year. Thanks for listening and learning with me in 2024. Happy New Year!
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