Welcome to The Knowledge Project, a podcast about mastering the best of what other people have already figured out, so you can apply their insights to your life.
I'm your host, Shane Parrish.
The final episode of The Knowledge Project for 2024 is a collection of the best insights from the show this year.
We've had some of our most popular episodes ever come out this year, and I'm excited to share some of the best ideas and our favorite moments in one episode.
These insights will set you up for an incredible new year.
Thank you for listening and learning with us.
Together, we're going to make 2025 even better.
We have a lot in store for the podcast this year.
Until then, happy holidays to you and yours.
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Let's start with our most popular episode of the year featuring personal finance expert Morgan Housle.
The skills it takes to get rich are different from the skills it takes to stay rich.
Do you understand this phenomenon more than Morgan?
In America, we spend something like $100 billion a year on lottery tickets.
It's massive that people spend on lottery tickets.
If you dig into who's buying it, it's almost exclusively poor people.
They buy the vast majority of lottery tickets.
The poorer you are, the more lottery tickets you buy.
These are some people for whom they literally can't buy food or they might be homeless.
Whatever little money they have, they go into a 7 -11 and buy some scratcher tickets.
You might look at that and say, like, you idiots.
What are you doing?
This is the dumbest idea I've ever seen.
Maybe that's the right answer.
Maybe you could just stop there.
In Kahneman's framework, I think it starts to make a little bit more sense.
If you have someone in a situation like this who in their mind, at least, they think, I can't get a raise, I can't build a career, I can't get promoted, I'm kind of stuck in minimum wage job, if that's their mindset, then buying a lottery ticket might be the only time in their life where they can say
to themselves and believe, like, this is my literally ticket out of here.
This is the only chance that I have to get ahead.
It starts to make a little bit more sense in that situation.
Maybe you contrast that with someone who has a very high net worth.
They might be like, look, I could just put all my money and treasuries and just live for the rest of my life just off the interest.
When you have so much, you don't need to take the risk.
Well, it comes down to perspective.
If I could see what you see and feel what you feel, that decision would be rational.
There's so many things in life where you can look at other people and the decisions they make, not just in money, but for politics, their health decisions, whatever it might be, and fiercely disagree with it.
But what's easy to overlook is that if I were in your shoes and had experienced what you had, had the same family dynamic that you do, the same DNA that you do, I would do the exact same thing.
I think that is a important question to ask yourself.
What financial decisions would I make differently if I were born in a different era, born to different parents, born in a different country?
And I think you can't answer that question honestly because you don't know, but you know there would be a lot of things different that are completely outside of your control.
Where and when you were born would have a massive impact.
You and I should not pretend that if we were born in the 1960s in Nigeria, that we would have the same views about investing in the stock market over time that you and I do today.
This kind of gets to the topic of luck.
And a lot of people when you bring up luck, they will say something that sounds smart that I've, I fiercely disagree with.
They say like, oh, you should increase the surface area of your luck.
You should like, oh, the harder I work, the luckier I get.
It was like some variation of that.
And I'm like, no. If you can do something that changes your odds of an outcome, it's not luck by definition.
Luck to me, the biggest are where and when you were born.
You can't control it.
Bill Gates couldn't control it.
Elon Musk couldn't control it, but it has a massive impact on where you're going to go in life.
That to me is what luck is.
It's what you truly have absolutely no control over.
And then there's also not only the country you're born into, but the socioeconomic household you're born into, the schools that you go to.
How much of this is nature versus nurture versus chosen nurture?
The stat that I think is so astounding is that income among brothers is more correlated than height or weight.
So basically that means if you have a brother who is rich and tall, you are more likely to also be rich than you are tall.
It's more correlated than the literal DNA that you're sharing with each other.
Look, is it a perfect correlation?
No. Is it possible to be raised by a poor family and become rich?
Of course. Is it possible to be raised by a rich family and end up in the streets?
Of course. But there's a very strong correlation between those two.
I think people can get kind of testy when you talk about luck, because if I say that you got lucky, I look jealous.
And if I say that I got lucky, I feel diminished in what I'm doing in life.
So it plays a massive role, but it's very easy to ignore the impact that it has in the world.
How do we break down that contribution between luck and skill, or what's repeatable on our part?
Rather than saying what is luck, I think it's important to say like what is repeatable?
What is something that happened that I could do again?
And if we look at Buffett, this guy standing behind our shoulder here, and let's look at the course of his life.
I cannot, he cannot recreate the trading conditions that existed in the 1950s that allowed him to buy blue chip stocks at three times earnings, whatever it was back then that he was doing.
He can't recreate that.
He couldn't do it again.
But could I or you or anyone else listening try to recreate his patience, some of his risk framework?
Yes. So that's something we should pay attention to.
You want to find what is repeatable and what you could do again.
And those are the things you should pay the most attention to.
I think that's fascinating, right?
Because when we look at Buffett, what we want is the outcome.
And what we don't think about is all the things that go into creating that outcome.
So what stays the same between all these different decades where he's done this, right?
So he's done it from buying NetNet, Ben Graham stocks, all the way to buying great businesses, all the way to the patience to do nothing.
And then once every 10 years, deploy a whole bunch of cash.
What is consistent across that period in your mind?
Two of the big ones, we could come up with dozens of things that are consistent with someone like Buffett, but the two big ones are endurance and maybe tied to that, capping a downside risk that allows him to stick around for longer than anyone else.
There's also a psychological trait of wanting to keep going longer than anyone else.
I use a stat in my book that 99 % of Buffett's net worth was accumulated after his 60th birthday.
Like the vast majority of people, including me and maybe you, if we became a billionaire at age 60 would be done.
He moved to Florida and buy a private island and like live happily ever after.
For him to be that successful and to keep going full blast for what's now another 33 years and still going stronger than ever is a very unique characteristic that plays a massive role in his success.
If Buffett had retired at age 60 or 50, like a normal person would have in that situation, you would have never heard of him.
The whole reason he's so successful is just the endurance.
And again, there's a psychological and a financial component to that.
Never getting wiped out financially and the psychology that will allow him to keep going full blast for nearly a century on end now.
But that sounds academically correct, but in temperament, incredibly difficult because I see my friends getting rich off like Bitcoin or something.
And that makes me want to change the patience that I have.
I know how to get wealthy over time.
We know historically that what's worked is saving money, being very patient, letting it compound decade after decade.
And then all of a sudden you wake up with a ton of money and financial independence.
But if I see my neighbor getting richer quicker than I am, it makes me want to accelerate that timeline.
And my lack of patience sort of changes the outcome.
Not having FOMO is the single most important financial skill.
I think it's so important that you cannot ever imagine accumulating significant wealth over your lifetime if you are susceptible to FOMO.
Like if there's literally one thing, one trait that you want that's going to allow you to accumulate wealth, it's the lack of FOMO.
Particularly in modern markets, I can get so crazy with social media and Reddit and Twitter and everything.
If you are susceptible to FOMO, there's no hope for you over time.
I really don't think that's an exaggeration.
And that being able to see your neighbor get much richer than you and not being impacted by it is so incredibly critical and easy to overlook these days.
I don't have that many financial skills.
I could never be a stock picker.
I could never be a trader.
I don't have the intellect or the horsepower to pull that off.
But I feel like I've never been at least that susceptible to FOMO.
Doesn't bother me in the slightest to watch other people getting rich.
Brent Beschor, our mutual good friend, had a quote that I love.
He said, I am perfectly happy watching you get very rich doing something that I would never want to do.
And I think that's a great way to frame it.
I don't get jealous or anxious to watch other people get richer than I am over time.
My investing strategy is to own index funds for as long as I possibly can.
To be average for an above average period of time.
And I think that will actually lead to an incredible outcome.
Not only will it achieve the financial goals that I have for my family, but I think over a long period of time, it will put you in the top decile at least of people who are compounding money over time.
I think it's really hard to appreciate that what's short term optimal and what's long term optimal are often two different things.
Completely different things.
Howard Marks talked about this investor that he knew who in any given year, he was never in the top half versus his peers.
He was never in the top 50 % of other investors.
And over a 20 year period, he was in like the top 4%.
Because everyone else who was beating him in a given year couldn't keep it going.
And so what's your ultimate goal?
So much of investing is just define the game that you're playing.
And I don't look down upon or criticize people who are short term traders.
Maybe that's their game.
And for their investors or for their...
It makes sense for them.
My game is different.
I think your game is different.
Most people's game might be a little different.
And what's important is that if your game is to invest for the next 20, 30, 50 years, that you're not taking your cues from people who are playing a different game of trading for the next quarter.
And that's where a lot of danger and investing comes from.
Next, Blake Eastman, who has dedicated his entire life to psychology and nonverbal behavior.
And people are obsessed with recording the person on stage, what's more interesting is recording the audience.
Because the truth is, I'm always asked how did my presentation go and I'm like, I don't know, let's see the audience.
A presentation is for that group of people.
So what often happens is a lot of communication experts will watch like a presentation and they'll go, well, I think you should move your hands more or less or I think you should speak up.
Like they're doing that through their perceptual lens.
They're not optimizing for the engagement of the audience.
So I used to record my presentation and the audience every third presentation for like 3 years.
That's fascinating.
Why don't we take that approach?
I mean, comedians effectively take that approach without recording the audience because it's based on, oh, that joke got a laugh.
I'm going to use that next time.
That joke fell flat.
I'm not going to use that next time.
It's the feedback loop is instant.
So that's how that was what was such the value.
Like when I was teaching psychology at CUNY, I was speaking like 80 to a hundred hours a week, both in my office and both instant feedback loop of what story worked, what story didn't work.
Like did that land that offend somebody and you just start to develop this quicker repertoire of things that actually work, but that comes from that audience interaction.
But most people when giving a presentation, they're not even present enough to do that because they're so in their head about the presentation.
So it's sort of a skillset that comes after you've been more comfortable being on stage to be able to process and sort of predict the behavior of an audience.
What's the biggest thing that gets in people's way when they're presenting?
Really, just the social construction that a presentation is something different.
So it's got this whole cultural narrative.
Oh, you have your big presentation coming up.
It's hyped up as this different thing.
You're just talking to a group of people and they're responding by shaking their head and nodding and you're sitting up there.
I think that's the first construct that needs to be broken.
And then also just people just don't put in the reps.
Like that's something that just takes time.
And most people work so hard for a presentation and they do it and they're like, oh, it's a flood of release where they should have just done it every day for the next three weeks, do a presentation.
It'd be so much better.
What does putting in the reps mean?
Does that mean crafting your story and positioning it for the audience?
Does it mean your intonation?
Like, how do you actually go about working on that?
Like, how would you make me an expert presenter if you had three weeks and you had one hour a day of my time?
So that's so cool that you did that.
So my question is always be what was the constraint?
So if you said three hours a week, one hour a day of your time, the first week would probably be reps of just let's get you comfortable.
Let's so the thing is with a lot of nonverbal behavior stuff and movement, I have found reliably that the most effective version of someone is when they're the most comfortable bar, not every single time.
So get you to the level where you're the most comfortable, where you feel the most free, and then build on top of that.
So I try to get you there first.
And I wouldn't be focusing on, I mean, it really depends if you're doing like a TED talk that was like 20 minutes, I'd probably tell you just to rehearse it and get that down.
But we're doing like an hour presentation or the most presentations that people have to do, it would be all outlines repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.
And it's a careful balancing act to like understand where you're at.
Cause some people with a lot of anxiety, I will know, or some people that are trying to get it right.
I won't be focusing on little details.
It's a way more dynamic process.
Like, so some people that have like these facial things to getting better at presentations.
Like it's different for every person.
Cause some, if someone you're telling someone, listen, you're moving your hands too much and they're going to get in their head about moving their hands too much, you're gonna start looking all weird.
And some people can take a cue and immediately change it.
And other people just get them comfortable, just get them comfortable.
And then using video, but you want to hear something else fascinating?
So what do you show people?
Video of themselves.
I work, once worked with this woman, um, I hope she's hearing this cause I love her, but not to call her out.
So I, she gives one of the worst initial presentations I've ever seen in my entire life.
She was extremely flat.
She was like moving her hands.
She literally spoke like this for an entire 20 minutes.
And I, it was like painful to watch.
And at the end of the video, I was like, okay, so let's see what we're working with.
And I put her video on her like projector.
And the first thing she says to me is like, I need a nose job.
And it just shows you like, that's where that person's perception is focused on.
Like we're focused on these weird little different things that no one else recognizes or no one else cares about.
And I truly believe that the most world -class best presenters are truly about their audience and not about themselves.
They're not trying to come across a certain way.
They're trying to like, I even feel that now, like I'm stepping more into my own self after the first 20 minutes.
Like at first it's a little bit, you know, it's a little different.
I'm trying to be more measured.
Now it's more me coming out of it.
And the truth is how do you get to that immediately and build from there and go right away into that.
I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about workplace and sort of power structures and social dynamics.
How can you teach me to understand the power structure at work and social dynamics?
How would you go about that?
So power structures, oh man, that's such a good question.
They are these invisible things.
That's what I, when we talk about reading the room in a corporate structure, that's what we're talking about.
We're talking about power structure, we're talking about permissions, all these things.
The first way to do it is to do this exercise where you sort of do a decision tree of the potential, like show people what the potential landscape could be.
So for example, let's say all of a sudden a new CEO gets pulled in and we want to say, okay, what is this CEO going through?
Is this CEO just pushed in by the PE company?
Does the CEO have performance based incentives?
Like what are they trying to do and just map out all what quote unquote is possible and then start using the data and evidence that's coming in on a daily basis to like cross out which one it is.
And then sometimes just straight up ask.
I think that's something that a lot of organizations don't do.
I can't tell you the amount of times where I'm just like, so I have this really cool perspective because I work with often the entire C -suite.
So like the COO, CTO, like everybody I work with and it's like, you two need to talk about this because this is blocking your, you two need to talk about this.
But the amount of communication that just doesn't happen at like a personal level or just a level that's like blocking decision making, it's kind of crazy.
I think organizations need to talk way more than they are in this siloed environment.
Sometimes if you just were able to have those conversations, you would be able to navigate and see the power structures way easier and people just don't have that social skillset, that the people skills to sit down with someone.
And a lot of, I've just seen every, a lot of people get power structures.
Oh, I'll give you a good one.
If you are falling in line with a power structure, it's often very difficult to navigate it.
Meaning if it's like, oh my God, this person is this and this person is this and I'm just this, you're very rarely going to be able to see eye to eye with that person because you perceive them here and you perceive yourself here.
And I feel like people do that a lot inside of organizations and it doesn't give them that creative freedom to actually read what's going on.
Is the delta between where you are and where you perceive the other person?
Like does that influence your how?
I mean, just from like of what you have, quote unquote, permission to do or say, it's all a perception.
Like I've worked with people like executive, I've worked with CEOs that are the most open every, all of their behavior suggests that they're the most open, honest, come to them with problems.
But people don't come to them with problems because they're CEO.
Yeah. They say it over and over and over again.
And I look at why and they're like, I don't want to bother the CEO with this.
I'm like, they said seven times this year, come to me with this specific kind of problem.
Yeah, you're right, but I just don't know.
You get in your head like that.
How much of that do you think is cultural too?
Because I worked with a CEO who said that, but the minute you came to him with the problem, he'd basically like scream at you.
That's the kind of stuff that I correct.
So that's the bulk of my, when you say something, but your patent, a lot of these people often just don't understand a lot of executives don't understand the impact of their own behavior.
So I have met people that are wonderful, wonderful, wonderful people.
But yeah, the way they give feedback.
Oh my God. It's just ripped the person apart.
And they're like, no, I love them.
They're one of my best people.
I think they're great.
I'm like, well, let's take responsibility for what that interaction look like.
And that's why zoom in video is so important for me.
Because sometimes when you work with an executive or you work with anybody and you tell them something, they don't see it like the way that you described, but when you show them on video, that feedback, I was like, listen, go back 20 years in your career, if you were given this feedback, how would you
feel? They're like, yeah.
And I do this cool thing.
It's an exercise that really works.
So, you know, leadership principles and all that stuff.
I'm not there to tell somebody how to lead.
I'm not there for any of that.
I'm there just to make sure that their intent is aligned with their behavior.
So I do this thing where I'm like, close your eyes and imagine you're at your funeral and everybody you've ever worked with in your entire life is there.
What are the stories and things that you're saying about you?
And I just make sure that those things are in alignment with their behavior and they choose and solidify what those things are.
And then I kind of hold them accountable to making sure that they're carrying out those things.
And this is marketing expert, April Dunford, who's in charge of positioning at a company?
Good question. This has traditionally been seen as a marketing function.
And even more specifically in tech companies, we often say this is a product marketing function.
But I don't believe that.
I think that's not the right way to think about it.
If we really think about what we're doing in positioning is we're getting really tight on who's our competitor?
How are we different?
What is the value we can provide to the customer and who exactly are those customers?
If we made a change in that, that would be a big change in the business.
If I think about, again, my CRM example, if we switch from being general purpose enterprise CRM to CRM for investment banks, that's a whole different company.
So I don't think marketing has, first of all, they're not talking to customers every day the way sales is.
They don't necessarily understand the differentiation amongst competitors the way the product team would.
And sure as heck, the CEO is going to have something to say about where we're selling and how we win in the market.
So in the work that I do with companies with positioning, we do it with a cross -functional team.
So we bring together product marketing, sales, customer success, support, and we bring everybody together.
And everybody comes with what they understand about customers and how we win.
And we work through the positioning together as a group exercise.
Now somebody needs to be the steward or the police of that positioning once we've said it to make sure that we are consistent about that and the way we're using it in marketing and the way we're using it in sales.
And that's typically marketing that does that.
I also think it's good to have somebody be the person that puts their hand up and says, you know what?
Things are changing in the market.
We maybe need to come back together and check in on that positioning.
But I don't think that marketing should be able to change positioning or look at positioning or do it on their own.
They could try, but it won't stick because sales won't believe in it.
The CEO won't believe in it.
What we actually need is a cross -functional team to get together and look at it, make some decisions, get everybody in agreement and alignment on it, and then we can all go execute on it in our respective departments.
And then marketing can be the steward of, here's the positioning, here's how we define it.
This is the messaging that comes out of that positioning.
And then marketing can be the person that put their hand up and say, you know what?
This big acquisition just happened in our market and we might need to step back and re -look at the positioning.
It's interesting that you say that when you're talking about a salesperson and the first call, I was thinking, oh look, if things don't go as planned, the salesperson points to marketing.
Marketing points to the salesperson.
Everybody points to product, but you even expanded this.
So you have a cross -functional team of sales, marketing, product, customer success, support, and then you have the CEO involvement at some point in there too.
Exactly. And when things are going well, everybody is a winner and everybody's responsible for success.
But the minute you have a problem, everybody starts pointing the finger at everybody else.
How do you determine when that's a positioning problem versus a larger problem?
It's interesting because I do this as work as a consultant, and sometimes companies will call me and they think they have a positioning problem, and then I have a conversation with them and I'm like, I don't actually think that's a positioning problem.
Because there's lots of reasons businesses aren't successful and positioning is just one of them.
So typically, sometimes companies will come to me and they'll say, you know what?
Every company we talk to loves us.
If we can get them in a meeting, we close all that business.
That tells me the positioning's good.
You're just not getting enough meetings.
You're just doing a terrible job at lead generation.
You should go fix that.
You just need to get more at bats.
Sometimes what you have is a sales execution problem, like there's something in the way you're executing in sales that isn't working.
First of all, do you have good, happy customers that stick with you and love you and are referenceable and whatever?
Most of the companies that come to me and say, yes, yes, we have that.
Do you have confusion at the beginning of your sales process where they come in and they just don't get it?
That gap between what a customer knows and what a prospect knows, we can close that gap with good positioning.
What role does storytelling play in all of this?
Storytelling is one of these things marketers think a lot about storytelling and obsess a lot about storytelling, particularly on the consumer side.
Business to business marketers like to think about storytelling.
I don't think a lot of B2B companies are doing an amazing job at storytelling.
What's really funny about that is we go over to sales.
Sales doesn't care about storytelling.
They never talk about storytelling.
Yet they're the ones that actually are face to face with a customer.
If anyone should be telling a story, maybe it's your sales team.
Most of the storytelling stuff that you see, or at least what I learned as a marketer going through, if you go to marketing school and learn storytelling, a lot of what you'll see is this hero's journey structure for storytelling, which is very common in entertainment.
It's the way most movies are written.
A lot of stories are written with this hero's journey.
In B2B storytelling, we think about the hero as the customer.
The customer has a problem.
They embark on this quest.
They meet a guide. That's us.
We're the guide and we give them a plan and we help them be successful and avoid defeat as we have this hero's journey.
The problem with that storytelling arc is there's kind of no competitor in there.
If we think about what a buyer is actually trying to figure out is why pick you over the other guys, a hero's journey doesn't really give us an arc to do that.
In the work that I do with customers, we start with positioning.
We get really clear on what's the value we can deliver that no one else can.
Who are the customers that really care about that?
Then we want to build a story around that.
The story that we're trying to tell needs to answer this question.
Why pick us over the other guys?
In that storytelling framework, we need to have a spot in that framework to paint a picture of the whole market and then show where we fit and where everybody fits.
We shouldn't actually be just talking about us.
We should be talking about the alternative approaches to the problem, which means we're going to talk about competitors or at least the approach that the competitors take.
In the work I do, we take the position, we translate it into a sales pitch.
That sales pitch has a storytelling structure that starts with a conversation around the market.
We look at this market in a different way than our competitors.
Because we look at it in a different way, we built the product in a different way.
Your customer, you have lots of choices.
There's other products that you could buy.
There's other approaches you could take to this problem.
Let's talk about that.
We think about this all day.
We have opinions about it.
We want to hear what you have to say about it too.
This is the way we look at it.
You could do it this way, this way, or this way.
Here's the pluses and minuses of these different ways of solving this problem.
This is a conversation with the customer more than me telling the customer stuff.
At the same time, I'm teaching the customer about what we think is important in a purchase decision, which most customers don't know early in their purchase process.
They're trying to buy accounting software.
Half the people doing a purchase in B2B have never purchased a product like yours before.
They're doing this for the first time.
They're overwhelmed with information on the internet.
Every vendor says, we're the best.
No, we're the best.
What we need to do in good sales storytelling and B2B is help customers understand how to confidently make a decision.
In order to do that, I have to paint a picture of the whole market so they feel good that they understand, ah, if I choose this, I'm choosing to go big on this and low on this.
If I choose this, here are the trade -offs for this.
If I choose this, here are the trade -offs for this, or you could choose us and here's the trade -offs for us.
Are we a good fit for you or not?
That's what we should be doing in a good sales storytelling in my opinion.
Who does that really well in your opinion?
I have a bunch of clients that I've worked with, but one that I think is doing an amazing job of this for a really technical complicated product is a company I worked with in San Francisco called Postman.
Postman does essentially a platform for developing APIs.
This is a new concept.
Nobody had this idea of a platform for APIs before Postman came up with it.
They do an amazing job, I think, of talking about why APIs are important, so important that you actually don't want a set of disjointed tools across your organization to work on them, why that's important.
They've coined a concept called an API First World, and then they've done an amazing job of storytelling around that.
So if you go on their website, on their homepage, and you scroll down about halfway, they have a graphic novel called the API First World, and it's a graphic novel designed for technical people to understand this story of what's an API, why is it important, why do we really want to have high quality
APIs, why is that important for your business, and why do we need a platform to enable that.
So I think they do an incredible job of that, and they do it in a thousand different ways.
Like if you see the CEO do a conference talk, he's actually not talking about the product as much as he is talking about the market and this concept and why we need to think about APIs differently, but if you are aligned with his point of view on the market, you're going to buy his product.
But they've really done a good job, I think, of developing a point of view on the market, helping customers understand the context around their product, and the things that you need to understand in order to understand why their product is valuable and why you might pick it.
One of my favorite guests of the year, 84 -year -old Blueberry billionaire John Bragg.
What are the key indicators you look at for your businesses on a regular basis to gauge how well they're doing?
Condorator Buffett, we're a big EBIT believer.
The cash they generate, if it's through depreciation, that's all right.
How much cash are we generating, and how can we service the debt, and what can we buy with that cash?
And as a private company, that's worked for us.
When we were building the cable business, there was lots of depreciation, but the cash flow was good and still is, and the same in the food business as we invest in factories and so on.
And we also try to work the angles on the tax situation and use our depreciation.
Warren has said in the past, he's not a believer in EBITDA, but we are.
We think it's the cash that the business generates.
And so we're always saying, well, what's the multiple on EBITDA?
And so we know what cash is coming, because you can usually cut back on your capital if you need to.
We're always trying to measure how much free cash the businesses are generating, and what do we have to either pay down debt or to buy more Buffett stock or something similar.
How would you classify your management style?
Historically, a lot of hands -on.
I really don't find the day -to -day operations as much fun as I do the investment of the funds.
And so I'm enjoying moving to a head office role as compared with, but I still like to monitor.
We still have monthly meetings with all over major investments.
So probably a little, people would say a little too much detail and so on, but God, when you're signing the checks and the notes, you want to know what's going on.
And so I would rather be well informed up front so that I can help if there's a problem than come to the problem late.
Operating without surprises is pretty important to me.
There's a trend in business sort of like getting away from the details as you move up in the organization.
A friend of mine one time said you can run any company with five points on the back of a cigarette package.
That was years ago.
But that's really basic.
Just what are the key items?
Is it revenue? Is it sales?
Is it margin? And costs?
I'm a big believer in being a low -cost producer.
Doesn't matter what you're doing.
There's no excuse to waste money.
You're low -cost. You're going to stay in business in the tough times.
The key points are different in every business.
So I would say for instance in the food business, all about costs because you don't know what the revenue is going to be.
Because we don't know whether we're going to have a frost or whether the currency's going to change, or whether somebody else got a big crop or a poor crop.
But if we keep our costs in good shape, we'll be all right in the long run.
And I would say in cable, you always have to look at costs, but capital is probably the biggest thing in the cable business because you can make big mistakes.
And you don't get spending, let's say if they had dollars to get into programming that just didn't work out.
Every company, I would say every business has, the five points might be different.
You're 84 now? 84. And you're still working full days.
I try to. Yeah, I do.
I do. I enjoy it. And I work a little every night and I'm always reading about stocks or reading business stuff.
I guess I'm not working quite as much as I used to.
But I could share with you, I've given some money to an entrepreneurial school at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Catherine Colbeck, who was a former premier there and the business schools named after her.
And she was a friend of mine at university and a great person.
And so we gave some money to an entrepreneurial school.
And I said, on the condition that you put 7 -0 on the wall.
What 7 -0? That's the hours entrepreneurs have to work every week.
I love it. Not 50, but 70.
And entrepreneurs do work 70.
What role did Judy play in all of this?
I'd say she's a great mother.
She's been a full -time mother.
We have four children.
I don't know whether she didn't have any interest in the business or I didn't want to share it.
But I do like going home and not talking about the business.
You know, we have four great children and we have eight grandchildren.
She's been just a very supportive mother.
I traveled the world for years and she brought up our children.
Her role is a supportive role, but not directly in the business.
Is there anything looking back that you would have done differently?
Probably if you said, sure, I have done differently maybe.
But on the other hand, I was very comfortable doing what I did and I worked hard.
But, you know, we bought our first cottage and the theory was that Judy could be at the cottage for the kids and I could work, which worked out well.
Basically, our philosophy of life and so on, I wouldn't change.
We've lived a low profile on a rural community and at the same time had the ability to do whatever we wanted to.
What role did focus play?
Focus in business is a big deal.
When it comes to business principles, there isn't one any bigger than focus.
Just stay at it and work at it and it's amazing how hard work brings you good luck after a while.
Focus is absolutely critical, probably the biggest, maybe the biggest single principle you can have in business.
Is there anything about decision making that you've learned that you think most people miss or would benefit from it all?
Stick to your knitting and I've seen a number of friends or associates who made the first million and then thought they knew how to make the second with ease and they would get off focus, go buy another company that they didn't know anything about and just not focused on what they knew.
I think it's fine to diversify, but you have to be careful how you do that.
Frank Sobey, when I was in university reading Financial Times, I don't know which one, and I read a quote where he says, always keep the back door open.
So although we were levering through these formative years, the real debt load was in cable where the cash flow was quite consistent.
The mistake many people make is they have a business, they make the first million dollars and now they get into things they know nothing about in too big a way.
I mean, if you want to test the waters, that's one thing.
I'm a great believer in not having all the answers.
I always say the guy that asks the question looks better than the guy that has the answers.
And so I'd like to have the questions but people get to have the answers.
We've all been around associates that once they make a little money, they know more than the next guy.
In your experience, how often have those people self -corrected after they've started to go down that path?
I haven't seen much self -correction.
A guy that's really doing well when he speaks up, you listen to him.
When he goes broke, nobody listens to what he is saying more.
So making a million didn't make you smarter and losing it didn't make you stupider.
Talk to me about the role of patience and long -term thinking in terms of your success looking back over the last 50, 60 years.
Patience is a real virtue.
I don't know whether I have enough, but I've had to have a lot because we've built our team.
We have lots of imports now, but in the early days, we've built our team on locals that didn't have as much experience as people from away.
And some have turned out to be great entrepreneurs.
But you have to have patience, bring them along and get them exposed.
One guy said to me, because I was trying to point out the way I wanted to report.
And the guy says, yeah, but John, you're outside and seeing all these boards and reports.
We don't see that. Although you're smart, you just didn't have the imagination.
Today, tremendous executive.
But it does take a little time and patience, respect, civility, those words are big on our culture.
One of the things that you said that I was most intrigued about that gives me a lot of hope is that most fortunes are made after 50.
I was a member of YPO like lots of other entrepreneurs and you get rocked out at 50.
And I remember saying, for me, this is just the beginning because I built a base now.
I haven't really made any money, but I built quite a base.
And now I've got to take that base and move on.
Most of my real equity, the way you would measure it has come after 60.
But before that, I was building land bases and factories and people.
But it didn't show up at the bottom line, but I was building a real base of assets.
And then I could say that after 70, we've done a lot better still because we've got the base going.
And like the portfolio we have, I didn't really get started until 75 maybe.
And we played, I shouldn't say played around.
We had maybe a significant portfolio and some people might, but not one that you would see written up in the New York Times or something.
But when I decided, when these interest rates were so cheap that you didn't have to be a genius to borrow one or two percent and vest in dividends at five.
So we did it, could have sat back and done nothing and not everybody was doing that.
We have a board. And I was explaining to them what my thoughts were and how I thought it would work and what the downside was.
Well, we've just plugged away at it and we've got a couple of billion of equity or more now in the portfolio.
Then all that came late in life.
Parenting extraordinaire, Becky Kennedy.
One of the things I wanted to come back to outside of the world of teens and maybe inside the adult world here is you said earlier, how we think about someone affects how we communicate with them.
I want to relate that to how we think about ourselves and that inner voice we have and how the stories we tell ourselves.
And what are the common ways that we sort of self sabotage or get in our own way with these stories that we're telling ourselves and we're not being kind to ourselves and we're not being gentle.
And that has all of these other sort of implications like how can I treat you nicely if I don't even treat myself nicely?
I mean, there's so many examples of that.
Right. And I think most of us, we can get into the causes, but most of us have learned to wire struggles next to blame.
They're like very, very close in our circuitry.
And I say blame because it's often a combination of other blame and self -blame.
I think blame is often a two -way street.
Like some of us maybe specialize more in self -blame, some of us in other blame, but usually it's a seesaw.
Like it's, you know, and so when something's hard or something doesn't go our way, right, maybe I yelled at my kid, right, and then all of a sudden I'm like, I'm a monster.
I'm the worst parent.
I messed up my kid forever.
It's just like huge spiral.
Or I did a presentation at work and my boss said something that like, I don't know if it was critical, but it was kind of ambiguous.
And I leave and I'm like, my boss thinks I'm so stupid.
And like, oh my goodness, I'm gonna get fired.
And like start to influence, of course, they influence how we feel, they influence then the next action we take that usually is just kind of further reifying that story or really that interpretation and we can really get off to the races, right?
Another image I want to share, right, because I think this is really one of my favorites and it really illustrates what we're talking about.
It's like, if you picture yourself as the driver of a car, we all have multiple passengers in our car, right?
So like some of us have imposter syndrome as like a very, very noisy passenger.
Some of us have, it's all my fault.
Some of us have, oh, the world is going to end and everything is going to go badly, right?
We get into problems not when those things are our passengers.
We get into problems and those things take over the driver's seat.
And actually a lot of us, when we're aware of those voices, we try to get them out of our car.
Like we do, we're like, I shouldn't feel that way.
Or I know my boss doesn't actually think I'm stupid.
Why am I thinking that?
We either fight the voice or it kind of takes over us.
Like that's usually what happens.
When I actually think mental health is not about getting those voices out of our car, they're there, they're not going anywhere, but actually just like talking to them when they're in the passenger seat to ensure that they don't take over the driver's seat, right?
So for example, not first of yelling at my kids and maybe like, oh, there's the I messed up my kid forever again, voice.
Hey, it's unfortunate, but you do tend to come up whenever I make a little mistake with my kid and like, okay, I'm just going to come back to today.
Like it is 2024 and I don't really know what the next 80 years kind of hold, but I'm pretty sure what I did today did not mess up my kids forever.
And I know y 'all say that again to me, but I'm just going to kind of keep you in the backseat, right?
Or, Oh, okay. I don't even feel great about my presentation and my boss to do this, but there's that my boss hates me voice.
And it's true. Whenever I even doubt myself a little bit, I do tend to also think that my boss is about to fire me, right?
And all of a sudden, now I'm actually in a relationship with these stories, right?
Or with these parts, I would call them these parts.
And as soon as you're in a relationship with a part of you, inherently that part of you can't take over you because you and the driver's seat or like talking to it.
And to me, that's what I actually teach adults and parents like all the time.
It's honestly like some of my favorite interventions to teach kids how to do that when they're young.
I think it's like one of the most important skills I could take into adult and with them because I think those are some of like the ultimate coping skills in life.
One of the other things we talked about earlier, and I'm sort of like going down a couple of rabbit holes because we sort of covered a lot of ground really quickly was regulating emotions.
And not only do we as adults and parents have to teach our kids or help them better regulate their own emotions.
We have to often learn how to regulate our own emotions.
How do we do that? I get this question from parents often, right?
Because the way kids learn how to regulate emotions is through their relationship with their parents, right?
It's not something you could get taught in a textbook.
And it's not to say when we get older, if we don't have a lot of those early experiences that helped us learn how to a lot of them didn't.
It doesn't mean we can't get there.
But our kids, right, they kind of borrow our regulation in a moment, and they kind of absorb it.
And like I was saying before, they kind of over time learn, oh, my emotion inside me that feels so scary to me is less scary to someone else.
And they kind of absorb that hope, and they absorb that kind of tolerance.
And that really forms the foundation for so many of their coping skills.
So parents will 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 to regulate my own emotions, it seems like I'm teaching my kid and myself at the same time.
And we are. And like, that's is just kind of the hand a lot of us were dealt.
And it's not an impossible hand.
It's not an easy hand, but it's definitely a winnable hand.
Like I know that. And I've seen it now with millions of adults who are, you know, winning a lot of their hands.
And so I think there's a couple like concrete ways as adults that we can, you know, start to learn how to better regulate our emotions.
Right. Number one to me is just the word curiosity.
Like being curious about yourself is a foundation to regulating your emotions.
Because it's the difference between saying, my kid's whining.
Like who can stay calm when they whine all day?
Like, are you saying people like whining?
I have to get to a place where I like whining?
No, nobody likes whining.
Literally, nobody likes whining.
But there's a big difference between not liking whining and I don't know, reacting and being in a state of reactivity with screaming at our kids versus not liking whining and being able to regulate our emotions and respond to our kid from a place of groundedness and sturdiness.
Right? Still, nobody likes it, but it's very different.
And curiosity to me gets us from point one to point two, because instead of saying like, what's wrong with my kid and why are they acting the way they're acting?
We might say, what's going on inside of me?
What's going on for me?
What is happening inside me that is kind of a component of this reaction?
Right? The idea that my kid's whining isn't inherently making me scream at them.
It's a trigger, but there's a story inside me, there's something that happens inside my body that frankly predated my kid's existence.
So if I can get curious about that, right, then I can actually make a lot of progress.
And to me, I think it's so easy to hear that.
And someone say, oh, so it's my fault?
No. I feel like we're obsessed with the word fault.
It's not your kid's fault.
It's not your fault.
Why does it have to be anyone's fault?
I don't know why it's like, it's just, this is happening.
Either we can be curious and learn and do that learning, probably live in a way that's more in line with our values, feel more in control of ourselves.
Your kid's going to benefit, but I promise you as the adult are going to benefit in areas like way more, like everybody wins.
Right? And so I always say to parents, this isn't a system of like saying, this is your fault.
It's a system of saying like, this is actually a place for your empowerment and to like finally learn skills and skills always help us feel, you know, more powerful.
So one of my favorite emotion regulation skills to teach adults is something I call AVP.
Okay? And it's like the simplest thing and has the most profound impact on people.
Okay. So AVP stands for acknowledge, validate, permit.
So I'll teach each part.
Step one to regulating emotions is acknowledging them.
And actually this is a really good point of the conversation relative to what we just said about this image in the car.
So let's say, you know, my kid is whining.
Step one, acknowledge like, well, I'm feeling really annoyed.
Right? Like, in a way what I'm doing is like, I'm the driver of my car and annoyance in the backseat is like starting to kind of make its way to the driver's seat and I'm like, Hey there.
Hey. And that's literally what I'm doing.
I actually use the word high a lot because it always makes me laugh.
And to me if I could add levity to like that process, it gets easier.
So I'm like high annoyance or high anxiety, right?
Or something like that.
So if step one is just acknowledge, you can acknowledge by using a quote feeling word like high annoyance or high sadness.
A lot of people don't like really know the name of their feelings and that's totally fine.
And you can also do it in a more general way, like I'm feeling uncomfortable right now.
Or I feel like I'm about to explode right now.
I'm feeling tight right now.
Any acknowledgement.
Two is validate. And to me the best way that our body I think likes to be validated, I don't know why, is the term makes sense.
I think there's something where feelings feel like accepted by logic in our body when we use that term.
I don't know. I haven't like, I haven't asked, but I think that's what's happening.
So I'd be saying, um, I'm really, really annoyed right now.
Or, um, you know, when my kid was whining and I say to myself, well, that makes sense.
Like whining is pretty annoying.
It makes sense that I feel that way.
That is a hugely helpful phrase in regulating our emotions because the reasons our emotions get unregulated.
Right? Is that they are exploding out of our body in our behaviors.
They literally, if you think about these moments of reactivity, when I yell or right, I'm, the emotion is like coming out of my body and like through my mouth, right?
It's kind of like a volcano, right?
The opposite of that isn't suppressing emotions because you just can't beat them.
So it's always, you know, an unwinnable, you know, endeavor, but we're kind of saying when you regulate an emotion, like it's okay to live inside your body.
Like it can just live there.
It doesn't have to explode out of you.
It can live inside there.
Like it has a place.
It has a home. So if you think about those two steps already, like first I'm saying hi to it.
Like if you're saying hi to someone at a party, like maybe you don't love them, but you're probably like, okay with them being there because you said hi.
And then you're telling, you're feeling like it kind of makes sense that you're here.
And then P is permit, which actually just is involved saying to yourself, I give myself full permission to be feeling this way.
Right? So another example of going through an AVP would be like, I'm feeling really anxious right now.
I'm really, really worked up and you know, that makes sense.
Like I am managing my kid's soccer schedules and you know, I'm thinking about what they need for dinner and I didn't respond to that email.
And I think tomorrow is going to be a snow day and then my kid's going to have a canceled school and P permit, right?
I give myself permission to be feeling this way.
And I think a kicker at the end is just adding the phrase and I can cope with it.
And I can cope with it.
I, you know, interesting enough, you're catching me on like last night I was walking in Times Square and as I do, I film videos myself for Instagram and I'm like on my, on the way to the subway.
So I was like filming myself and 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 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 celebrity to me.
And he goes, he goes, AVP has changed my life.
That's what he said.
He says, AVP has changed my life.
I'm reparenting myself.
I know I never learned what some people learned in their childhood and I need to kind of reparent myself through those skills and AVP has like, you know, changed my life.
And so there's a couple ways to use it.
If regulating your emotions is new for you, you can't expect yourself to start to regulate your emotions when you're in your most heightened emotions.
That would be like someone who has never taken a foul shot, taking a foul shot, game seven of the NBA finals when time is run out and the game is tied.
Like that person is not making it.
You take foul shots and practice low stakes.
And so the way I tell people to practice AVP is literally going to their phone right now, setting a random time that they tend to be alone, right?
Not in the midst of things and just literally making a daily reminder that says AVP.
And when it goes off, you just stop and you say to yourself, what am I feeling right now?
And it can be like, I'm not feeling much.
I don't know. Well that makes sense because this is a new thing for me to check in with my emotions.
So it makes sense that I'm not sure permission.
I'm giving myself full permission to not know how I'm feeling.
Like there's no way to get it wrong.
That's what I'm saying.
And I promise you after a week or two, not only will you start to recognize more things, but already that skill, that coping skill will start to appear not in 10 out of 10 emotional situations.
It's not magic, but like in maybe two, three out of tens.
And I think that's like one concrete thing like all adults can do to start making progress.
And here's business genius, Brad Jacobs, who started eight multi -billion dollar companies.
Let's deep dive on M &A.
How do you think about it at a high level and then specifically walk me through your process for not only evaluating companies, but beginning to end including integration.
M &A has been a big part of my business career, not in the first 10 years.
In the first 10 years from 1979 to 1989, I was in the oil business.
It was all organic.
We didn't do one single acquisition, so just trading and brokering and building up a business organically.
But since 1989, I've been doing roughly about 500 acquisitions.
I've done a lot of M &A.
I love M &A. I love M &A as a way to create value for shareholders because I don't know of another way on a risk adjusted basis on a certainty level that is more likely to create massive shareholder value than doing sensible M &A.
In order to understand how to create value, I have to understand how am I going to scale up the business.
I only know how to create tremendous shareholder value by growing a business tremendously.
That's how I know how to do it.
And of course it's organic and I've had very good organic growths.
The companies I've led have been well -performing companies that have had good market share and growing market share.
And we've taken customers away.
We've taken business away from our competitors who aren't managed as well.
But when you look at the numbers, the real growth has been through M &A, through acquisitions.
What's been my secrets on acquisitions?
I'll try to be concise because I did an hour and a half podcast with McKinsey a couple of years ago with Andy West.
That was the only question.
He asked one question and I babbled on for an hour and a half.
People still watch that podcast because I really told everything about it.
Here's the gist. The gist is you first have to select an industry.
You can't just do M &A.
So I spent the last year going around studying dozens of industries, looking at hundreds and hundreds of acquisition opportunities, mostly with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and some other friends, Sequoia and some friends, figuring out could I apply my playbook to this industry?
Is the industry big enough?
Is the industry fragmented enough?
Is there M &A to do?
It's bigger, better.
That's not always the case.
Are the economies the scale?
Do you have a competitive advantage by being bigger?
Is there a way to apply technology?
My companies have always been tech forward to the industry because the industry is a little sleepy on technology.
Is the way I run a business, the way I do the intake of people and the culture and the way we interact with each other and so forth.
Is that something that'll work in this industry?
Is it applied in this industry?
Is it something related to something I know about?
Industrial services, for example, most of my companies since 1989 have been industrial services.
And I looked at many, many different industries and I settled on the one that checked every single box, which was building products distribution, and then my company is going to be QXO.
And M &A will be a big, big component of what we do.
There are 800 billion dollars of distributors in Western Europe and in North America, which is where I want to plant my flag.
I want to build a company that's called 50 billion dollars.
I can do that. If there's an 800 billion dollar size, I can take 6 % of that through acquisition and through organic growth.
I can get to 50 billion dollars.
There's many other industries that are nice, but I'm not going to be able to get 50 billion dollars.
I want to get 50 billion dollars.
So, this industry there's a clear path of how I can do that.
Now, I can't just buy, and there's roughly about 7 ,000 distributors here in the United States.
There's about almost twice that amount in Western Europe.
So, there's roughly about 20 ,000 distributors.
You've got to be very careful about who you buy.
There has to be a reason why you're buying that company.
There has to be a strategic, a compelling strategic reason of why you're buying that company.
What makes sense for that?
Why is that good for customers?
Why is that going to make our business a better business?
Why does that fit with the other things that we've already bought and put together?
How is it going to integrate well?
I like to look at the multiples that I pay for an acquisition.
The price that I pay for an acquisition is very, very important because when I look at the levers of how we create shareholder value, what contributes to that?
The biggest lever, the biggest component is the differential between what I raise capital at due to my relationships with mostly institutional investors and because of the track record, and what I can deploy that at on doing acquisitions.
The second biggest lever is how much can I improve the businesses that I buy?
There's many, many levers, but those are the two biggest levers.
So, I pay close, when I've studied all these different industries, I've studied historical acquisition multiples.
One of the reasons I like building products distribution is I believe that I'll be able to buy companies at lower multiples of their profit than I'll be able to raise capital at.
That's going to be a big, that disazio, that spread, that difference, that delta is going to create value boom just right away, right from the first day.
Now, you asked about integration.
Integration is extremely important.
Anybody can buy a company.
It's not that hard.
You write, you send a wire, you sign a document, it's a few dozen pages, lawyers have gone over it, and you wire the money, and you own it.
So, that's not the hard part.
The hard part is after you've selected the right industry, after you've selected the right companies within that industry to buy, after you've had discipline, so that you don't, so that you pay the right price for all those, then you have to integrate them.
I've never run companies that have like hundreds of different companies all running separately with different names, and different SIF systems, and different back offices, and there's some level of decentralization where you need to be closer to the customer, but I have a very strong appetite for standardization.
Standardization of the ERP system that you close the books with.
So, you close the books promptly, right after the close of the month, and then you can have standardized dashboards.
All the managers have the same format of the numbers they're looking at, the KPIs, and I see them graphically.
Very easy to understand.
I like to see so they can benchmark every location to every other location, every district to other districts, every region to other regions.
And for that, you need standardization.
I like to have a very standardized HRIS, human resources system, where all the people in the organization, and we'll build this company up, we'll have hundreds of thousands of employees.
I need to have a standardized data system for all of our employees.
Everyone's on this for 401k.
It's the same exact way of doing all the benefits are the same, all the performance appraisers are the same, compensation I can see right away.
I need to have transparency to the information, but I need to have the organization charts, very accessible right away.
And every time we do an acquisition, I need to pull that information up right away while we're studying it quickly.
So, we have a competitive advantage against other bidders to see what would the synergies be.
So, I need standardized HR technology about everything.
I need a standardized CRM, customer relationship management system like salesforce .com or several others as well.
And for that, to be able to make sure we're looking at customers, the attractiveness of those customers, the profitability of those customers, the size of their spend, so therefore the potential of those customers going forward, all the interactions we've had with those customers.
I need to see that in a standardized way all across the globe everywhere, every country we're functioning in.
So, I need to standardize technology for customer relationship management, for sales manager.
So, I need a standardized internal social media.
I happen to like I've used Workplace by Facebook.
It's not the only one, but I like that one really well.
It's nice and the interface is really good.
So, I like to have everyone on the same one because I like to have one company with one culture where everybody can ping each other.
I don't want to have these silos of companies.
Sometimes you see these companies roll up many different companies, but it's all a mishmash.
It's all separate. I don't like that at all.
You see a lot of these middle market private equity firms do that.
They roll up these small companies that are doing 5, 10, $20 million EBITDA each and they bat and they just buy a bunch of them and now they're up to $100 million, $200 million EBITDA.
They just get a bigger multiple because they're bigger, but it's a mess.
Whoever buys those companies, there's a lot of work to be done.
You've got to now standardize everything and integrate everything.
Opportunity to improve them, plus a lot of cost and time to fix all that stuff up.
So, I integrate from the moment that we agree to buy a company, we're starting the integration process and the day we close the acquisition, we're in there and we're standardizing everything as much as we possibly can and we're communicating and communicating quite a bit.
A big part of the relationship with people and making sure we get off on the right foot and making sure that we don't lose the great talent and making sure we're on the same time we're identifying the weak players and gracefully and generously exiting them.
So, there's a lot of different components to M &A.
I'm summarizing a lot of different facts.
Each one of those things we could talk for an hour just on that block, but those are the kinds of things that go through my mind in my approach to M &A.
Nutrition and health expert Rhonda Patrick.
You know, I kind of have my own framework for approaching nutrition in that it has a lot to do with, you know, I did my postdoc training in nutrition and specifically looking at micronutrients.
So, these are about 40 or so essential vitamins and minerals that fatty acids also and amino acids that we have to get from our diet.
And those are in a variety of foods and different foods have different levels and quantities of them.
And these micronutrients are running our metabolism, they're running everything, our neurotransmitters that we're producing, so our cognition, just absolutely everything that is going on in our bodies.
So, it's important to get them because if we don't get them we can have deficiencies or insufficiencies, which is quite worse because insufficiencies are kind of something that you don't notice every day, but there's like insidious types of damage just happening each and every day, and it accumulates
over time and plays a role in age -related diseases like cancer and neurodegenerative disease.
So, these micronutrients are things like, you know, calcium, magnesium, vitamin K, vitamin D, which I'm sure we'll talk about is actually something you can mostly get from the sun, omega -3.
And so, when you think about the micronutrients that you need in your diet, it makes it a little bit easier to think about what you should be eating.
Okay, so, well, let's start with like some of the most common deficiencies in micronutrients.
We have magnesium. So, almost half of the U .S.
population is deficient in, or I would say they get insufficient magnesium intake.
And magnesium is, it's at the center of a chlorophyll molecule.
So, chlorophyll gives plants their green color.
So, it's really easy to think about foods you should eat to get magnesium.
You should be eating greens, particularly dark leafy greens.
So, that's something, you know, a framework where it's like, okay, well, I need to get my greens because they're high in magnesium.
Well, greens are also very high in vitamin K.
And vitamin K1, there's two forms.
Vitamin K1, you need it, it's essential.
When you take in vitamin K1, and it's something like 35 % of the U .S.
population is not getting enough of that.
And I'm sure, you know, North America and Canada are very similar.
I mean, we have very similar diets.
So, vitamin K1 is essential for all your blood clotting processes.
So, you like, in order to like, you know, have your blood clotting, which is important, you know, if you have a cut or something, you know, an injury, you want that clotting to happen so that you don't have like a hemorrhage, right?
So, vitamin K is also, you know, high in leafy greens.
You can also get calcium as well from greens.
So, that's really an easy way to kind of think about greens.
The other way, the other thing is omega 3s, right?
So, omega 3s are very high in fatty fish.
So, this would be things like wild Alaskan salmon or cod or mackerel, sardines, like these are good forms of fish that have the marine types of omega 3.
So, that would be DHA and EPA.
And those are very important for a lot of functions, including brain health and cardiovascular health.
And there's a lot of evidence, if you actually look at the evidence, a lot of work has been done by Bill Harris and his group at the Fatty Acid Research Institute.
And they have, they look at omega, the omega 3 index, which is a way you can actually quantify your omega 3 levels.
And that's really good to be able to quantify something.
Because if you don't quantify it, you don't really know if you are getting enough of it, right?
So, the omega 3 index is high in red blood cells.
And, sorry, they're characterizing it from red blood cells, which is different than a lot of other ways of measuring omega 3.
Like for example, plasma omega 3, which is basically kind of reflective of your dietary intake the last week or so.
The red blood cell or the omega 3 index is more of a long term status.
So, it's like 120 days for a red blood cell to turn over.
So, the omega 3 index is a good marker of your omega 3 status.
And people that have a high omega 3 index, and that would be 8 % or more, have a five year increased life expectancy compared to people with a lower omega 3 index, which is more like 4%.
Now, people in the United States, on average, have about an omega 3 index of about 5%.
And you compare that to, for example, countries like Japan where they eat a lot of seafood, their omega 3 index is around 10%.
So, and they also have a five year increased life expectancy compared to people in the United States.
But there's been tons of studies looking at omega 3 index and life expectancy.
And there's been also like data where they stratify like looking at, you know, for example, and this I like talking about this because I think it really puts in perspective the framework of nutrition and thinking about instead of focusing on what to avoid, focusing on what you need, because if you focus
on what you need, then it's obvious what you don't need, right?
There's no nutritional value in processed foods.
You're not getting micronutrients.
You're getting calories.
You're not getting protein.
You're not getting things that you need.
So, smoking is something that everyone knows is bad.
You should avoid smoking, right?
It's, you know, heart disease, cancer.
You're going to have a decreased life expectancy, emphysema, all kinds of problems, right?
Well, what Bill Harris's group had done has they looked at life expectancy of smokers and non -smokers.
And then they categorized their omega 3 index.
And if you look at this data, it's it's just mind blowing.
So, obviously non -smokers that have a high omega 3 index of 8 % or more have the highest life expectancy.
And the lowest life expectancy is smokers with a low omega 3 index.
So, there's like, that's the worst of the worst.
But when you look at smokers with a high omega 3 index, they have the same life expectancy as non -smokers with a low omega 3 index.
In other words, smoking was like having low omega 3 or having a low omega 3 index was like smoking.
And when I say the life expectancy, if you look at the graph in the publication, the curves like overlay perfectly.
It's kind of freakish where you're like, whoa, like the people that are smoking, but they're getting a lot of omega 3 have the same like life expectancy of these people that don't smoke, but have very low omega 3.
And that's kind of like, I like talking about that because I feel like it puts it in perspective for people, because like I said, no one's really thinking about, I'm not eating my fish today.
I'm not supplementing with an omega 3 supplement to get those omega 3s.
But people are thinking about, oh, I shouldn't smoke because it's bad.
So, again, it goes back to that framework of thinking about what you need and starting there as opposed to like, just like, okay, what should I avoid?
Because when you think about what should I avoid, then you're not like, people aren't thinking about magnesium.
They're not thinking about the vitamin K, they're not thinking about omega 3.
And by the way, magnesium, I said about half the population in the United States doesn't get enough.
They're not eating enough greens.
And unfortunately, there's not a great test for magnesium because our body stores magnesium in our bones.
And so anytime we're not getting enough in our diet, our body pulls it out of our bones to like, because we need it.
It's so important. You need it to make energy.
Like without magnesium, you can't make energy.
So nothing's going to function.
But you also, it's needed to repair damage.
Like every time you have, you know, like right now, you and I, we're, we're having a conversation, you know, we're, you know, neurotransmitters are firing, we're thinking about things like that's causing damage metabolism, all that stuff causes damage on a daily basis, but our body repairs that damage.
But magnesium is a cofactor for these enzymes.
These are proteins that are doing everything for that to function properly.
And so if you don't get enough of that magnesium to do that, what happens is you don't repair that damage properly.
And that can increase the risk of getting a mutation that can lead to cancer.
And so there's all sorts of studies that have looked at magnesium intake in cancer.
And, you know, it's been found that for example, for every 100, you know, milligram increase in magnesium intake, there's something like a 20 % decrease in pancreatic cancer risk.
And there's been lots of studies like this looking at magnesium intake and cancer risk.
And so the higher the magnesium intake, the lower the cancer risk.
So again, it's one of those things where you can't look in the mirror and go, as you're brushing your teeth, Oh, I don't have enough magnesium today.
Right? Like nothing's like showing you that, but it's happening that damage is insidious.
And I mentioned you pull it out of your bone, like it's pulled out of your bones.
And that's another thing.
It leads to osteoporosis over time.
So, you know, investing in magnesium.
So in other words, remembering to eat your leafy greens is getting your magnesium.
So you, so women need about, I'd say about 320 milligrams a day adult women need about 320 milligrams a day of magnesium.
Men need around 420 milligrams a day.
And, you know, this can change based on your physical activity level as well.
So like if you're physically active, if you're sweating, you sweat out magnesium, you also use it up for energy.
So you might actually require anywhere between 10 % to 20 % more than that level.
So what's called the recommended daily allowance in the United States?
So, you know, again, and people aren't even meeting that.
So investing in magnesium is like a way you can think about like also for bone health, because, you know, if you are getting enough magnesium on a daily basis, you're not going to be pulling it out of your bones.
And therefore you're not going to magnesium is important for your bones.
And so as you keep doing that, year after year after year, it dramatically increases osteoporosis risk, right?
So there's lots of reasons to invest in, you know, these micronutrients and to think about the foods that you need to eat.
And I, and so in beyond the micronutrients, it goes to the macros, right?
And finally, the guy who is beating death, Brian Johnson, if you can walk me through at a high level, sort of the overarching day of blueprint, and what does it mean to live like Brian Johnson?
So the premise on this is I was posing the question in the early 21st century, is it the case that we have achieved longevity escape velocity, which means that for every one year of chronological time that passes, can I stay the same age biologically?
And if not, where are we at?
And so that's the backdrop on what my daily routine is.
And so what we did to establish this routine is we looked at every single scientific publication that's ever been done on health span and lifespan.
We then graded the evidence of these papers, and we then stack ranked them according to effect size.
And then we've systematically been implementing each one of these protocols.
So becoming the most measured person in history and using all the scientific evidence I wake up.
So my day begins really the night before I go to bed currently at 9 .30pm.
I just changed my bedtime for May 30, but it's 8.
It's 9 .30 on the dot.
So it's not, I don't have a two hour window of time.
And I recently logged eight months of perfect sleep using my wearable, which no human in history had ever done.
So I wanted to demonstrate that you can get reliable, high quality sleep for this extended period of time.
And then I wake up naturally and never wake up with an alarm, roughly 4 .30, 5 .30 in the morning.
And I will weigh myself, the body composition, weight, hydration, fat, et cetera.
I'll take my inner ear temperature.
I'll take two pills.
I'll do a few minutes of UV light therapy to start my circadian rhythm.
It's still dark in the morning.
I'll go downstairs.
I'll make myself a morning concoction.
I'll take 60 pills.
I'll do light therapy on my hair.
I'll like, once a week, I'll do my blood, my blood pressure.
I'll then work out for about an hour in a specific protocol.
I'll come in. I will make breakfast, which is a few pounds of vegetables.
I'll shower and do a skincare routine and get ready for work.
I'll eat my second meal today.
And then I worked for the day.
And then I have a evening and then throughout the day, I'll do various doctor's appointments, uh, medical procedures and measurement.
And then I have a wind down routine that I follow, uh, richly.
And what we've done is we've tried to stack hundreds of protocols into my daily routine because we do so many things and we're trying to follow the evidence.
I'm not able to just randomly do things that has to be highly structured in order for us to control this experiment with the rigor we need for the results.
And so we've just done this for several years and fine tuned it.
And we go through the process of measure me, measure myself, look at the evidence.
We do the protocol measurement evidence protocol again and again and again.
And, uh, I have a few dozen biomarkers that are pretty phenomenal.
So for example, my cardiovascular capacity is in the top 1 .5 % of 18 year olds.
My bone mineral density is the top 0 .02 % of 30 year olds, which is age minute for that test.
And you know, my, my, uh, my strength tests, same thing, like top 1 .5 and 10 % of 18 year olds.
So the biomarkers across my entire body, whether it's my cardiovascular ability and my strength, uh, my muscle, my, my muscle and body fat are the top 99 .5 percentile.
So it's produced, uh, you know, it's a pretty impressive list of biomarkers that indicate that I'm in pretty good health.
I thought your workouts were like 25 reps of exercise and stuff.
Are you, is that giving you the, the incredible strength?
Uh, yes. So it's about an hour a day and you're right.
It's like, uh, you know, 20 plus.
And it's mostly, I try to flex and stretch every muscle of my body.
So I don't do heavyweights that are, uh, hard on the joints, but yes, even doing these things, I do it every single 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, and we use 18 years.
A lot of people, I mean, the 99 % certainty when I say this, people are like, but wait a second.
Why not a 30 year old is because, uh, you max out your weight to, uh, rep ratio at age 18.
So even though you can lift more in your twenties and maybe even your thirties, your ratio peaks at 18.
The same is true with your VO two max, your cardiovascular fitness.
And so we do a reference at 18 year old, not because it's an easy way to pick off a number.
We do it because according to these age, these biological age standards, you're looking at when the human, when a male peaks perform peak performance.
And I think your last meal is at like 1130 AM.
That's right. So I have roughly 10 hours or so of fasting before I go to bed.
Do you feel hungry when you go to bed?
I used to, I'm now normalized to it.
And does that help your sleep?
Like what happens if you eat later?
I assume this was all like sort of measured and the, the fasting I eat my last meal of the day at 11 AM for the objectives of good sleep.
Because I mean, there's supposedly good benefits on fasting.
I think the evidence is still maybe developing.
So I mostly do it for sleep because when I eat my last meal of the day, I have all my digestion finished.
So when I go to bed, my resting heart rate is around 46 beats per minute.
And if the 46 I'm going to have a perfect night's sleep.
If I eat at 5 PM or 6 PM, then my resting heart rate is going to be 56.
And when I do that, I'm going to knock off about 50 % of my Ram and 50 % of my deep, but I'll increase my wake time by about 35 minutes.
And so I've done these, I've done so many experiments now is algorithmic and I know exactly what happens when I eat what, at what time and how it affects my sleep.
It sounds like blueprint is optimized for the sole variable of sleep.
Is that correct? I mean, so sleep is an important one.
It's the number one priority because everything else rests, you know, hinges upon that.
We are the first endeavor in history to focus on trying to rejuvenate every organ of the body.
So we have 70 plus organs and we've tried to quantify and rejuvenate every organ of my body.
We just tried to rejuvenate my thymus, which is a gland right behind your, your chest here, responsible for your immune system.
And so, you know, I can say I'm chronologically 46 years old, but the more important number is what is the biological age of my heart and of my lungs and of my liver?
And that's really the, the more powerful predictor than a chronological number.
And where were you when you started blueprint?
Were you basically your, your biological age for your, like, was everything the same?
No, I was, I was coming from a pretty bad place.
I, after being depressed for a decade and running, you know, being a startup entrepreneur my entire life and having just gone through a bunch of stuff.
I was pretty beat up and I was in a bad state.
So I definitely subscribe to grind culture where you do things in society to try to earn people's respect and have a position of a status in a social group to when you conform with these social norms.
And so like, when you hear a story about a colleague who worked on a program, a problem for two days straight and didn't sleep, it was like, wow, they're so awesome and amazing.
You know, like that, it's very hard to not be, uh, did, you know, to be induced, to think that that's an emulation worthy behavior.
So I had to peel myself out of grind culture and find out that this is the thing is we are accustomed.
Death is the enabler of all things, immortality.
You know, if you love country, die for your country.
If you want to, if you want to pay the ultimate price of being a hero, sacrifice your life.
You know, if you want to achieve immortality in your professional endeavor, have your work live beyond your death.
Everything we think about existence is around death.
And I was calling question to death that maybe we have reached this time and place in the human history where death is no longer inevitable.
And if that is true, everything about our reality changes.
Do you think we'll see a quantum leap in average age in the next 15 years?
To me, the most compelling contemplation is trying to predict how fast intelligence is improving.
So we humans have been the dominant force of intelligence on this planet for 200 ,000 years.
And we've been able to increase our abilities of intelligence by forming better cooperation in our society with language and all kinds of organizational methodologies.
We've increased our ability to utilize our intelligence with technological tools.
We've now created intelligence in AI that is creating better intelligence.
And if you say, what is the speed at which intelligence is improving?
It's fast, faster than we can comprehend.
And so when you, when we make when we model out the future, and we say, what's going to happen on a 10 year time span?
We are unqualified to answer that question, because that time that timeframe exceeds our own intellectual capacity to imagine.
So it's the first time in human history, where we the superior form of intelligence are up against a wall of not knowing what to predict what comes next, because it's going to supersede us so fast.
And so this is the thing this is why I come down to the only thing I know to be true in the year 2024 is don't die.
That's it. I don't know anything else, other than I want to be around for what could be the most spectacular existence in this part of the galaxy.
Yeah, there's a part of me that's really believes if we take care of ourselves really well right now, we don't die, we're going to get a lot of advantage from technology that thinks about things in a way that we couldn't even comprehend.
I mean, you take the inspiration, if you say, okay, well, point me to an example of where intelligence has been used, that would give me any sort of bearings on what I might imagine.
Okay, so take alpha fold.
It was many people thought solving the protein folding problem was unsolvable, or would take us some unknown duration of time.
And DeepMind allocated their attention to that thing and solved it faster than anyone ever thought possible.
The same thing would go.
And so when these groups of people that are very talented, focused on a very narrow problem, they solve stunningly hard problems faster than anyone thought.
And as these systems get better, and used more broadly, and as these systems create better systems, this is why we are at this launch point.
And, you know, is it going to happen in two years, one years, five years, I don't know.
But it's basically if you zoom out far enough, it's in the blink of an eye at this point.
And so don't die is don't die individually, don't kill planet Earth.
And when you're building AI, the objective function of AI is this don't die ideology.
So if you I mean, what I'm trying to say is like, so we've never been in this situation before, where we're baby steps away from creating super intelligence.
And when you're at this in this moment, we have this, this incredibly practical question to ask, what do we do?
Like, how do we think about reality?
What do we care about?
What are our ideals?
What are our objectives?
And then if you start surveying the world, like, Hey, who can tell us how to practically think about reality, and you probe religions and capitalism and communism and socialism, and like any other group, who can pull up and say, Here's a playbook, here's an instruction on how you actually think about reality.
And that's what I've been trying to fill is that void is there is no philosophical stack that informs humanity on what to do on a basis, for example, what to eat for breakfast, all the way through the most complicated question of how do you begin thinking about a philosophical alignment with AI?
Thanks for listening to our 2024 recap, which guest was your favorite?
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