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Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.
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Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.
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Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.
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The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that to avoid going in infinite loops of thought.
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We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens — including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis.
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And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.
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With each episode we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.
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Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
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Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.
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All opinions expressed by Jim, Jamie and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
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This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello everyone.
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It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with another episode of Infinite Loops and we were talking beforehand and I think, I don't know, this one might actually go for three hours. Kidding. We'd make it two.
1:58
But I am delighted to have, as my guest today, Trung Phan, who is an online creator who delivers really smart threads and I actually mean that and really dumb memes. I mean that too. I love him.
2:11
Dude, like you are everywhere. You with Workweek.
2:18
You are doing an investment, not investment advice podcast.
2:18
You famously said that if you'd swapped out booze for caffeine, you'd already be a Rhodes scholar billionaire. Welcome.
2:33
Trung Phan: Well, maybe the Rhodes scholar part, I don't know about the billionaire part.
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I will take one of those two.
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Also, I started writing for Bloomberg Opinion recently.
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So if anybody sees my name there, that's where familiar might be.
2:46
I figure your audience is, veers toward that direction. I could be wrong though.
2:46
I assume based on your Twitter usage that you have quite a big under 25 following, is this right or wrong?
2:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's right. It's right.
2:57
And I'm also incredibly popular in India. So... Trung Phan: Come on.
3:03
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I got that, man.
3:03
Trung Phan: Is this from the podcast?
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Is this from podcast analytics? You come back?
3:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I, well, so that's a funny story.
3:13
Given my nature, I tend to be a somewhat competitive person.
3:13
And like, so, I knew that if I started looking at measurements and like who I was attracting and everything, I'd react, right? Trung Phan: Right.
3:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so I have several on staff who do all that stuff, and I never look at them.
3:27
I never look at how a podcast did, because I think that it would fuck with my ability to have people that I'm really interested on. Right?
3:34
And like, it's already proven it's case, like many, many times.
3:39
One of my highest rated, I learned way after podcast, was with a classic scholar who wrote a book about a mysterious religion. Trung Phan: Right.
3:53
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And like I thought it would be, my family, I'd have five listeners, at least.
3:55
And it turns out to be hugely popular.
4:00
Trung Phan: Well, that's your personal interest, right?
4:02
That's I think what you're saying, you're alluding to the point that you're just kind of letting your personal interest take you to where it goes and then good things happen.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly. Exactly.
4:11
And congrats on the new Bloomberg spot.
4:11
You know the first thing and I really do have tons of things I want to go over with you because your threads, man, they are really, really solid, but you know, every superhero has it's his origin story.
4:24
So walk us through your journey and your early career.
4:31
How did you get from A all the way to Z?
4:31
I know you went through all those letters in between, but- Trung Phan: Yeah. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ... enlighten me. Trung Phan: Yeah.
4:40
I will give the super-fast summary here.
4:40
So my parents are Vietnamese refugees to Canada.
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They got a way crazier story than me.
4:47
Like my dad was a young 20 something, a doctor during the war.
4:54
And he got out of the Vietnam in 1974.
4:54
So the false I got was 75.
4:54
He got up because he was working with Australian and New Zealand doctors, who were supporting the US war effort.
5:00
But it became pretty apparent that the South was going to fall.
5:07
So his New Zealand doctor, like friends and colleagues, got him a citizenship to New Zealand and they're like, we're going to get you to New Zealand.
5:17
You can study at University of Auckland, re-study all the medicines.
5:21
So you can go around the Commonwealth, which is essentially what ended up happening.
5:25
He studied University of Auckland and then was able to go to Canada with his new medical degree.
5:30
And then, because it's all part of the Commonwealth, you just had to take a couple of tests to transfer it over.
5:32
But I was born in the mid '80s, and I was born in Calgary, Alberta.
5:40
And the funny story with my parents as refugees to Canada was, they started out on the East coast and my dad was like, I got to get closer to Vietnam.
5:44
So they kept moving West, like literally started out in Nova Scotia.
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Like almost as far east, as you could get, then went to Ontario, Quebec.
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I was born in Alberta, and then nine years later we moved to Vancouver.
5:57
So he is like right on the water. So he finally did.
5:57
It took him like 15 years, but he did it.
6:04
After growing up in Vancouver, I went to school in Montreal.
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I know same university as your sometimes co-host Alex Danco, McGill University.
6:10
And after university, I really perplexed my parents because first of all, I dropped out of med school, pretty standard Asian stuff, right?
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They wanted me to do doctor, lawyer, all that stuff, dropped out of pre-med, not even med school.
6:26
And then I moved to Vietnam and they're just like, what is going on? And I moved to Vietnam.
6:32
I being, I literally moved to Vietnam party.
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Like there was no other, there was no other reason. And I accomplished that.
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I accomplished a partying. Yeah, thumbs up, right?
6:43
But while in Vietnam I got a little bit more serious about life.
6:43
I took my CFA there and then I also wrote and sold the comedy film script to Fox.
6:48
And this is kind of the reason I bring these two things up.
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It's kind of converged to what I do on Twitter now.
6:53
It's like shit posting and like business stuff, right?
6:57
So that's, if you were to call that A, the Z would be basically I wake up every day and try to make memes about business and tech.
7:03
And in between I worked at a FinTech company, spent some time corporate finance, but that's all the boring stuff.
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So, that's how we got to A to Z.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: That, I love the story.
7:15
And we have a lot of business in Canada.
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So I think I've been there, except for the Northern territories, I've been to every province in- Trung Phan: Okay. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ... Canada. I love Canadians.
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And it's Vancouver, is such a chill place, really, really beautiful too.
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I mean, if you're looking for real estate, well actually you guys are in a real estate- Trung Phan: Well, what I will say is this is, well in '94, when we moved to Vancouver, if you're looking for real estate and you literally worked any job and you threw a dart on the board, you call it the greatest real estate bull run ever.
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So thankfully that's what my dad did. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
7:52
That was an amazing thing.
7:52
So one of my beliefs is that to be good at, I kind of look at Twitter as performance art. Right?
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And I find that the people who are very literal have a really hard time on Twitter, because I think that the magic happens if you're smart, like you are, if you're funny, like you are, I think- Trung Phan: Thank you. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ...
8:19
humor really, really softens people up. Trung Phan: Yeah.
8:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And it makes, and by that, I mean that in a good way.
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It makes them much more receptive and like everybody needs a laugh. Right?
8:24
And so, if you can be entertaining, funny, but then also like write super high quality threads that we're going to talk a lot about later.
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I mean, that's kind of like the trifecta in my opinion.
8:44
And you definitely are the poster child for that.
8:44
You know, one of the things that I thought about you when I was getting ready for this and reading your stuff and watching, listening to some of your podcasts and stuff, I'm sure you're aware of the whole Scott Adams talent stack thing.
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I don't even think it's original with him, might be original with somebody else, but he made it famous.
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And so for, I'm looking at you and I'm like, okay, so he's funny, check, he's got really good writing skills, check.
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You are an amazing marketer.
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My friend Rory Sutherland would be like, he'll be excited for this podcast because- Trung Phan: Okay, amazing. Rory, shout out to Rory.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: There you go. You know finance.
9:24
Again, I was talking to someone who works for me here earlier and I was talking about the early days of Wall Street when I came on the scene.
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I think you're probably an exact contemporary with my son. Were you born in ;85? Trung Phan: I was. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay.
9:38
So you're my son's exact age.
9:42
So, and that was kind of when I was going to Wall Street, that was a very different Wall Street than what we have now.
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But the two things that would really get you far, was you needed to be smart, quick on your feet, but you also had to be funny.
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So thin skin people did not do well on Wall Street, and humor, obviously, as I just said, really, really important.
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So my question is, you have all of these attributes intentional or that was just the way you turned out?
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Trung Phan: I think the number one thing, and you touched on this so many times, it's the humor.
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Is like almost everything I do is driven by my want to put humor in the world.
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And that is very true, in the sense when I, when you're describing kind of my Twitter bio, smart threads, dumb memes, like the only reason I'll be honest with you, the reason I do threads is because we all know it's the growth hack for Twitter, right?
10:34
And we also know that a lot of people are abusing it and kind of just putting total click bait out there, which I'll be honest, I've done myself.
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Because you get an dopamine loop of like, oh my God, this is amazing.
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I can't believe how many followers are tagging on, but I do that because that's what Twitter incentivizes, but I only want a big audience so I can do more memes.
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More people see them, like that's the truth.
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And that's why when I mentioned, when I was living in Vietnam and I written and sold a comedy film script, it ended not getting made.
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It's actually a pretty crazy, funny story.
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I think some of your finance listeners will appreciate it.
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One of the problems we had was financing the film because Fox didn't want to finance it directly.
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There's so much corruption in Vietnam, they needed a buffer.
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So you have to get a local financier, create all these SPV's.
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And it just never ended up happening.
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But I thought 10 years ago I was going to be a Hollywood comedy screenwriter, or working writers' rooms for comedy.
11:27
So like all this other stuff is ancillary.
11:27
Like I guess, my finance knowledge, yeah, I have a CFA, but like I'm not really good at due diligence.
11:33
Like if I'm going to be honest with myself, I just don't have the temperament for going through financial models.
11:42
I can do the big picture stuff or understand it.
11:42
The writing stuff is probably the closest connected with humor, right?
11:48
It's like, and then yeah, the marketing stuff is actually more recently.
11:54
I wouldn't call myself a [inaudible] marketer is like, I want to say is I'm shameless.
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And the reason I am shameless, is because, and it took me a while to realize this.
11:59
There's just, nobody else is going to do it for you. Right?
12:03
And the example I always bring up is, you remember when Once Upon a Time in America came out with Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yep.
12:14
Trung Phan: So these are two biggest stars in the world.
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And I was just watching these YouTube's of them on like small Southeast Asian media networks.
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And like they're doing interviews because they have to.
12:25
And I'm like, man, if like Brad Pitt has to do an interview with like the Malaysian Entertainment Times, like I can push myself right?
12:29
And so like, it took me a while to totally get over, but I just don't care.
12:34
It's just, nobody, first of all, nobody else is going to do it for you.
12:39
And the reality is that even if you come off as self-promotional, nobody's going to care for more than a second.
12:43
Because if people only care about their lives, right?
12:46
So, that's how I think about it.
12:46
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I do too.
12:49
And like one of the things I coach lots of, or not lots, a few young people, but not just in finance by the way.
12:57
And I had one guy say to me, I just need to develop my brand, and I'm like, fuck the brand, man. Be yourself. Trung Phan: Yeah.
13:07
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And if you are authentic and you are distinctive and you are, and he was funny by the way, I'm like, when I go to your Twitter feed man, it's like another person.
13:12
I don't see anything funny.
13:20
You make me laugh like every five minutes when we're doing the Zoom, go do that.
13:24
And I just think that there's this fear, you said it, you alluded to it earlier, right?
13:29
One of the things you learn as you get older is, people, younger people especially, worry what other people are thinking about them. Trung Phan: Yes.
13:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: What you learn is other people aren't thinking about you at all man- Trung Phan: No one cares. No one cares.
13:41
They just literally do not care.
13:41
There's actually a very interesting, I'm going to completely butcher this, but this is a paper I read.
13:47
It was a psychology paper that explained actually how you could put your mind, into how people actually think about you.
13:56
You know, when you like, for example, we're having this conversation, but the reality is that I'm thinking about what I'm going to say next.
14:00
So I'm not fully focused on you a 100%, right? Which is unfortunate.
14:05
I know that I should be better about that, but that is basically the interaction that you should put your mind in the other person, right?
14:13
That's how they're thinking about you.
14:13
And if you think about it temporally, the way individually I think about it is this, a week ago I'll have a memory of something I did a week ago, but my memory of that is a bit fuzzy.
14:23
But that memory, that fuzzy memory, is basically what the real life interaction is with your other party.
14:28
That's how they're kind of thinking about you that fuzzy week ago, memory.
14:31
They're not all thinking about you.
14:31
They have all this other stuff going on their lives, right?
14:36
So, that temporal part I think is really interesting.
14:36
It's like, if you think about yourself, put yourself in your own shoes and think about what you did last week, that's how somebody's thinking about you in the moment. Right?
14:45
So like they're just not fully focused on you. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
14:49
That's human OS 101, right?
14:49
It's like Tony de Mello had a great quote, which is something along the lines of, "If you want to find out what your faults are, look at what irritates you and other people". So...
15:05
Trung Phan: That's great.
15:05
Jim O'Shaughnessy: We're actually not very bad at making judgements about external people.
15:06
We absolutely suck at self-assessment. Right?
15:12
And like every test you've ever seen, everyone is in the top 20% of drivers. Trung Phan: Yeah.
15:18
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And of course, men are much worse than women.
15:22
Men, even like people who are couch surfers will say that they're in the upper 20% for athleticism.
15:30
So we are seriously deluded.
15:30
And you know, we are, confabulating our own little hallucinations, making us the star of our particular movie, which makes sense, right? Trung Phan: Oh yeah. Sorry.
15:41
That is, what's the term, the exact word?
15:43
Is it like the protagonist syndrome or the main star syndrome, is where you just think you're going through life as the actor in this movie and everybody else is like a prop.
15:51
So I'll bring it back to, you mentioned your friend that is funny, but not really showing the personality.
15:57
The other thing I realized, just being more active online is when you go, when you have zero followers, and you tweet something or you put something out there, you're so worried that nobody's going to read it. Right?
16:09
But then when you go to the other side, you have like whatever, a 100,000, 300,000 followers, it's the opposite.
16:13
Now you're like, oh, if I put something out, I'm going to be judged and people are going to see it and they're going to be mad.
16:17
So like, there's just a continuum of anxiety, right?
16:22
There's just no matter what you do, and whenever you press send, you can have anxiety either way.
16:26
So eventually you have to get over it or you can't be a producer, which a creator, which is fine. Right?
16:30
Not everybody is meant or has a temperament to put content out in the world.
16:35
But as you've alluded to in so many times in your previous shows, not even alluded to, it's been direct.
16:38
It's like, there are very few things that are, have more optionality and asymmetric returns than just creating on the internet. Right?
16:43
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, absolutely.
16:46
And I think it's only going to get intensified.
16:46
And my friend, Matt Clifford, has a great term for it, and he calls the internet the greatest amplification tool in human history. Right?
16:59
So what's going to happen, at least my thought, I'm usually wrong.
17:04
So it probably won't, but like we're going to move from a normal bell curve, right?
17:11
Where everything, fucking everything is designed for that 68%. Right? Makes sense.
17:11
We're going to move from that to a chaotic distribution, a mathematical chaos with a very Peaky middle, and very long tails, and like all the interesting shits going to happen in the tails.
17:31
And so for creators, this is maybe the greatest gift ever, because like the gatekeepers are dying.
17:39
Why do you think that they're all like having these meltdowns that they're having, right?
17:43
Like right now we're recording this when the whole Elon Musk Twitter thing is going on.
17:48
And like, these people are literally melting down because they're seeing it all slip away, man.
17:55
They're seeing it just all slip away. Trung Phan: Yeah.
17:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I made a joke to one of my chat groups, was, next up Peter Thiel buys the New York Times.
18:03
Trung Phan: Let's be honest.
18:03
It's non zero probability, it might happen.
18:06
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Absolutely.
18:10
And, it's just like, I don't really have any time for isms or ideologies. And- Trung Phan: Yeah.
18:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The only thing that like, I avoid politics as much as I can because what's happened is this mind virus, it's a mental plague.
18:25
And what's happened is, you've got these people tribed up over here. Trung Phan: Yeah.
18:28
Jim O'Shaughnessy: These people tribed up over here and they are so deep into their ideologies, that literally they are not capable of independent thought, in my opinion. Right?
18:38
So- Trung Phan: And having a conversation, right?
18:40
They literally cannot have a conversation. Those two parties. Jim O'Shaughnessy: No.
18:43
And so why would you, if you're smart about it, you would be a cognitive miser and not spend one second of your time, arguing with someone who you'll never change their mind.
18:54
And there's a great book by Will Storr.
18:54
I'm gonna have him on later in the month, called the Status Game, that I highly recommend.
18:58
I was at my sons for dinner last night, he's like, dude, when you really like something, everybody fucking knows it.
19:09
Trung Phan: Everybody in the world.
19:09
Well, can you throw us, what is the TLDR on the Status Game?
19:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The TLDR is we are all playing it.
19:15
There is no way out of it.
19:15
I used to think you could win by standing outside the hierarchy, right? Nope.
19:24
We play it because we're human beings.
19:24
And like- Trung Phan: Yep.
19:31
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's just part of our DNA.
19:31
And so he ends, the examples he gives are amazing and true.
19:37
And you suddenly see how cults, death cults were very similar to Mao's cultural revolution to Pol Pot in Cambodia, to Vietnam, to a variety of things to, they all use the same formula, man.
19:54
And we're going to get back to that because you did a really cool thing on how to write a very persuasive speech.
20:02
But so, the point is that like deal with it, understand the way things are and then prosper and succeed.
20:14
So like, if I have any ideology, it's just that I'm fiercely anti-authoritarian of the, and the- Trung Phan: Yeah. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ...
20:25
we are all communist brothers together.
20:28
It's just, it doesn't comport itself with the way humans are designed.
20:28
And that's why it fails, fails, fails.
20:32
Trung Phan: The horseshoe theory at the four extremes, they both look the same. Right?
20:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And the meme, I love that meme by the way, right?
20:40
Where the idiots over here and the geniuses over here, and they saying the same thing. Trung Phan: Yeah.
20:44
All of them, yeah, the [inaudible], exactly.
20:46
No, the part that I think that you brought up, which is regarding the Status Games, and you say step out of the hierarchy, the example the immediately came to mind is like, think about Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, two of the richest people in the world, one and two, they can't even get out of it, right?
21:00
They're launching rockets, buying media properties, like they, and they spend, I mean, Elon literally spends a hundred hours a week trying to solve these problems, but then he just can't get out of it. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. No, you can't.
21:12
And like, so the way I look at it is good, man.
21:12
I mean, if literally, we need more Einsteins, we need more people who are coming up with these incredibly innovative solutions.
21:25
I'm massively pro innovation. Will there be problems? Of course, there will. There always are. Trung Phan: Yeah.
21:32
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right?
21:32
But, fail again, try again, fail better. Right?
21:32
Let's talk about the power of memes.
21:32
I have been fascinated with memes and symbols, and our ability to manipulate them and their power. Right?
21:48
There's, I first read about it in like the late nineties and of course Dawkins, dubbed the term memes, right? Trung Phan: Yeah.
21:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But this guy from Microsoft, I can't remember his name, the name of his book was The Mind Virus.
21:58
And it was about memes, M-E-M-E, right? Not memetic behavior. Right?
22:03
They are two different things.
22:03
But talk to me about, how do you see the power of memes?
22:09
Trung Phan: I think you've, I mean, it's been discussed so much, right?
22:14
And I think the way you framed it, starting with Dawkins, it really just it's this cultural transmission that just goes between people.
22:22
And the idea that I often go back to is, well, first of all, I'm going to butcher the quote or it's from NICHA, but he's just saying like, "People don't have ideas, ideas have people".
22:31
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's actually Jung, that's Jung. Trung Phan: That's Jung. Okay. That's Jung. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
22:35
Trung Phan: So, that is to me the greatest explanation of what a meme is.
22:35
Everybody believes that, and I believe this too, right?
22:44
I was in university, I was one of these kind of, you mentioned it, these political, I was like arguing about X, Y, Z.
22:49
I just trying to get any argument I could about these thoughts that I thought I'd formed on my own, but had just totally been fed to me.
22:52
And yeah I mean, that's what a meme is.
22:58
These ideas that individuals think that they've come up with.
23:04
But no, it's so much more powerful and somewhere deeply ingrained in the human psyche.
23:04
And it's just passing along using us as vessels.
23:11
And yeah, that's what it is.
23:11
It's not these, I know there's this simplistic idea that the memes are kind of these images, that are really funny, like we talked about mid twit meme, or like the gentleman holding one girl's hand and looking at another girl, like that type of meme.
23:26
I mean, those are, representations of the meme, but the larger abstraction is exactly that Jung quote, which I, when people ask me, it's like, that's the easiest explanation.
23:37
I think I'm going to be so over my skis, if I start digging into it, that I just say that I sound smart and then people will get it.
23:43
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it.
23:47
But you know, there's a lot of truth to it.
23:47
And people, of course, who don't study history, it's like Cicero had a great quote for those people, "who don't study history aren't and are unaware of what happened before they were born.
24:00
They remain forever children."
24:00
And so memes, now we just have a better delivery system, right? Trung Phan: Yeah.
24:09
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Through the internet.
24:09
But like Christianity was the first meme-able religion. And why was that?
24:15
Trung Phan: And the greatest ever arguably.
24:17
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Arguably.
24:18
Trung Phan: Well although Islam moved almost as quickly.
24:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And they were both great memer's. Trung Phan: Yeah.
24:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And what a meme was back then, was words, because we didn't have the- Trung Phan: Yes. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ... all of the tech. Right?
24:32
But so like Christianity got so big because it was the first religion essentially that said, hey, it doesn't matter where you come from, doesn't matter what color you are, doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman doesn't matter any of it. None of it matters. Prior to Christianity.
24:47
Everyone had their own local Gods. Right?
24:47
And so Alexander the Great, when he was conquering the world, one of the smartest things he did, was leave generals behind who he said, marry the locals, worship their gods. Trung Phan: Yeah.
25:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Because that's the way you're going to keep peace.
25:01
Along comes Paul, Saul beforehand. Right? He fell off his horse.
25:07
People hate me when I say this, it hit his head.
25:10
And suddenly he saw the light.
25:10
And anyway, but what he did was he came up with these precepts that were memes. They were killer memes.
25:17
They got, they were mind worms. Right?
25:17
And they got in people's minds and they spread, that's the other thing about a meme, right?
25:23
If a meme is incredibly good, the author of that meme loses control of it, because other people take it up as their own. Trung Phan: Yeah.
25:36
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And change it and do all that.
25:39
So I just think, it's a really interesting time to be part of this experiment.
25:39
Now you have a financial background, right?
25:46
You have a CFA, and many of your threads are touching on that.
25:46
And yet you studied sociology and history.
25:53
For me, that would be a huge hat tip, because I think, I have a degree in economics, only because I had four more credits than in history, honestly.
26:02
And like, useless pretty much, right? For what I was doing.
26:09
I'm a huge fan of continual learning, but what gave you the financial bug to get your CFA and all that kind of stuff?
26:19
Trung Phan: Oh, it was totally just a whole practicality thing.
26:22
I was living in Vietnam and you'll laugh with this story, because I moved to Vietnam when I was 23.
26:28
Again, just complete to my parents’ dismay.
26:28
I worked in construction as my first job after university, because I had a sociology degree, history degree.
26:32
Let's be honest, useless.
26:37
At the time, just completely useless. Right.
26:37
So my first job was in construction.
26:37
I worked for two months, saved a couple of grands, and I'm like, I'm going to take this, go to Vietnam and stretch it as far as really possible.
26:47
But when I got to Vietnam, I couldn't even get a job.
26:54
The number one job that any Western does when they go to Southeast Asia, or most developing markets is you teach English, right?
26:59
Just like your only ability that you have over the locals.
27:04
But I couldn't even get a job teaching English because none of the local Vietnamese wanted their kids to learn from another Vietnamese person.
27:10
They wanted a white person to teach their kid. Right.
27:14
So I couldn't even get the lowest hanging fruit employment opportunity in Vietnam, which just kind of woke me up.
27:19
I'm like, I might have to do one of these serious things.
27:19
And the CFA, it was the only thing you could do while you lived in Vietnam. Right?
27:23
I couldn't do a master's program while living there.
27:28
I still wanted to live in the country. I met my wife there.
27:28
She was from the Philippines.
27:34
She was there to launch MTV in Vietnam.
27:34
She had a very successful corporate career.
27:40
And we met in Vietnam and we had this ultimate move and we have a son now and we live in Vancouver.
27:46
But- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Congratulations. Trung Phan: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah.
27:48
The finance part, totally just because I was reading the tealeaves. I'm like, all right.
27:55
I don't think this film script is going to do the job, because I'm sure you have a lot of people that listen to your podcast are involved in the film industry.
27:59
When you option a film script, you're still in the 10 yard of your own end zone.
28:03
You have 90 yards to go and you're probably not going to make it. So reality kicked in.
28:08
Although, looking back if I had just been more active on Twitter in 2010 or 2009, because I didn't start until basically 2019.
28:16
If I'd done that 10 years earlier, who knows what would've happened, but no regrets. It is what it is. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
28:26
But let me ask you just to follow-up on that.
28:29
I'm very interested in the film industry.
28:29
You'll see me getting more active in that later on, because I think there's a huge opportunity for a certain type of production company.
28:38
But anyway, I know a lot of people in the industry as well.
28:46
A lot of friends who are directors, some actors, et cetera.
28:52
And Ron Howard, a friend of mine.
28:52
And I can say this, because he came on the podcast.
28:59
He's like, he lived out east because he didn't want his kids to grow up in the Hollywood atmosphere, because it's a company town, right?
29:04
The same way Washington DC is a company town. New York is not really.
29:10
People think finance, but also media fashion, lots of things.
29:17
And so one of the things that he was fascinated about was that finance had this staircase, right.
29:21
Where a young person, if they got their CFA, that was another step on the staircase.
29:28
Then they get an internship, another step.
29:28
And he was like, that's fantastic.
29:33
Because in Hollywood, no dice, there is no staircase.
29:33
And so do you see yourself going back and trying movies again?
29:43
Trung Phan: We all know the economics, right?
29:47
It's just so different, now.
29:47
10 years ago, the idea of being a Hollywood writer was quite attractive.
29:52
But now, you're kind of looking at the landscape and you're like, I don't know if this is the move.
29:56
And something you've experienced, and I've experienced it myself is, just building your own audience on your own terms is like what I'm doing with Twitter and all these other blogging or newslettering and podcasting.
30:07
Build it on our own terms.
30:12
Exactly what you're doing.
30:12
First of all, the dopamine cycles is way faster.
30:19
Writing a script for a year and having three people read it and then having a producer get back to you after 18 months is like, that's not the most fulfilling way to produce content. Right?
30:30
Whereas now I can just waste my entire day in a dopamine loop, putting out memes.
30:30
And this is not going to be new to your listeners and to you.
30:36
You've mentioned it a million times, is, just building your own audience.
30:41
The optionality is just insane.
30:41
So to answer your question, do I see myself going back?
30:45
Well, the first part of the answer is, actually, we created a TV show based around our field's ability to sell that script.
30:51
And CAA is actually currently helping us produce it.
30:57
So- Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it.
30:59
Trung Phan: Literally this week, we're filming the first two episodes of this show and it will be shopped to streamers afterwards.
31:04
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Incredible. Congrats.
31:05
Trung Phan: So there is that world, where I am still creating there.
31:06
But that to me is a total.
31:06
If nothing happens with those two episodes and that's the project's end of it, I'm just going to keep going, right.
31:16
It's like, it doesn't affect the fact that the best path forward.
31:16
And I've found, and I think I would encourage anybody else that is thinking about doing this.
31:22
You've got to build your own audience.
31:25
So the short answer is no.
31:25
I don't really see myself going back.
31:25
If it is, it would be ancillary to what I'm already doing as like, can I carve out another five, 10 hours a week in a writer's room to do something?
31:35
I think I could, I'd be happy to, but I want to keep doing it every day, the same thing.
31:40
Just making dumb memes every morning. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
31:43
That's fantastic, because I have the luxury and I've written about this and I've talked about it.
31:46
I'm not trying to monetize this podcast at all. I have no need to.
31:50
But listen, I also understand that there's a lot of younger people who really want to make their careers in the creative economy. And I'm all for that. I love it.
31:59
So as someone who's been incredibly successful at doing that, if you were dealing...
32:07
So you're 37, so let's say a 24 year old, fresh out of college, a lot of talent.
32:14
And they begged you for lunch and you accepted it and you went to lunch.
32:14
And their first question is so, man tell me, what steps, how do I do this?
32:19
How do I succeed as a creator in this economy.
32:26
Trung Phan: The peer optionality play, start a Substack. Get on Twitter.
32:28
You can do it pseudonymously, if you want to start with.
32:34
It depends on your career ambitions, right?
32:34
I wouldn't say shut down the door and go all in, immediately, because there's no need to do that.
32:38
And the reality is, when you're 24, your prefrontal cortex isn't even formed yet.
32:42
You don't even know what you want. Right?
32:46
I mean, that's the biological thing I always bring up.
32:46
It's like, I have had these conversations before.
32:54
And they're like, oh, what should I do for the rest of my life?
32:54
It's like, dude, literally your decision making part of your brain, it's not even formed yet.
32:56
Don't make any decisions.
33:01
So the first thing I say is like, you've got to maximize optionality.
33:06
So if you're in a career where having kind of this side hustle, quote unquote, would be potentially detrimental.
33:12
I'm sure a lot of old school, like white shoe law firms or consulting shops would not be super supportive of it. Be pseudonymous.
33:17
You can do it pseudonymously.
33:23
I mean, I was just listening to your podcast with Liberty, right? It's like Liberty.
33:23
Well, first of all, he doesn't have to be pseudonymous.
33:28
I know he is running his own money, but he still wants to keep that buffer.
33:32
If you're 24 and you are doing something a more serious of a career, where side work could impinge on your employment opportunities, just do it pseudonymously, keep the optionality open, right?
33:42
If you want to go all in, there are more ways to monetize.
33:48
But the number one thing is you just have to prove, you can build an audience, because I made this realization and I should have made it way earlier.
33:56
But this whole Apple privacy thing, which has completely changed the digital ad market, is just making creators even more and more and more valuable. Right?
34:01
I worked at The Hustle, it's a business tech newsletter, between 2020 until earlier this year for two years.
34:08
And they were acquired by HubSpot for eight figures.
34:14
But that kind of idea of a customer acquisition, which is what media does extremely well.
34:20
If you could do that, that would create value.
34:20
So let's bucket it in two things.
34:25
If you're doing a super serious career, do it pseudonymously.
34:25
If you want to go all in, number one, learn how to build an audience.
34:30
Some stuff we talked about before, be shameless, but also create great content.
34:34
And then humor, you got to sprinkle so much humor in there. But you become a vessel.
34:40
And so many opportunities will come up, because of your proven ability to acquire customers in this sense, attention. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
34:48
So I'm going to hold your feet to the fire a little bit there. Okay.
34:52
You've got to prove the ability to acquire people's attention. Well, yeah. How do you do that?
34:56
Trung Phan: Well, it depends on what medium you're using.
35:01
But on Twitter and we talked about it, the threads are unstoppable.
35:06
I suspect that there will be some algorithmic blow back to the threads.
35:13
Because I know they're actually building kind of longer-form essays into the platform.
35:17
So that could actually kill one of their top growth hacks.
35:17
But, I mean, there's other places you can write on.
35:23
LinkedIn, actually, has a huge content deficit.
35:23
That's why they're throwing money at creators.
35:29
You could conceivably become the king of LinkedIn.
35:29
I know if it makes you cringe, but that's where the arbitrage is, that's sometimes how you got to play it.
35:36
Well, let's put it this way. You put my foot to fire.
35:42
One of the things, you do have to be able to create good content. That's just reality.
35:45
But not in the sense of like, oh, if you create good content, the world will find it.
35:50
No, you've got to create good content and be a little bit shameless. So figure that combo. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. Yeah.
35:56
And that's interesting about LinkedIn.
35:56
One thing I did find when I started experimenting with announcing where our new Infinite Loops is up, right.
36:08
LinkedIn shocked me, as my guys told me, months later.
36:16
They were like, Hey, when you started putting up the episodes on LinkedIn, that was a huge spike.
36:22
And so I was talking to a buddy of mine up in Canada, and it turned out that in Canada, LinkedIn is taken much more seriously than it is here in the US. Right.
36:28
And one of the things, my friend, Dan McMurtrie, who I'm also an investor with in a VC fund for Bangladesh.
36:42
I had him at lunch and we were talking about how the world perceives things.
36:42
And he's like, one thing that I really find interesting is if you look at developing countries like Bangladesh, right.
36:53
If they say, when was the last time you were on the internet? It could be a month ago. Right.
36:59
And he goes, if you changed the question to, when was the last time you were on Facebook? Today. Yeah. Right.
37:06
Trung Phan: Facebook is the internet.
37:08
The same with Indonesia. Same with Myanmar.
37:08
Facebook is the portal of the internet. Right.
37:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
37:14
And Americans don't really get that.
37:14
And so we were talking about the financial success of Facebook.
37:20
We're quants, so I don't do deep dives on companies.
37:20
If they have the factors that I have tested historically over 100 years, then we buy them. If they don't, we don't.
37:29
We literally have no emotional take or no override on that.
37:36
So Dan does that, that's what he does. Right.
37:44
And that was really illuminating for me, because it's really good.
37:49
Americans are especially guilty of this, I think, because we're such a big country and such kind of a dominant country still, despite all of our problems.
37:54
A lot of Americans don't. I think, travel.
38:01
You went and lived in Vietnam. I'm like, amen.
38:01
So I've been on every continent except Antarctica.
38:06
I mean, Bhutan, what an eye-opener.
38:06
Cambodia- Trung Phan: Right underneath India. Right? Bhutan.
38:17
And then Cambodia, obviously, you probably went and saw the Angkor Wat temple.
38:17
It's just mind blowing, right.
38:21
Especially in the Western mindset, the North American mindset.
38:21
The lack of understanding of...
38:30
Pick Chinese history, four, 5,000 years.
38:30
The longest continuous civilization.
38:36
Even myself, I studied East Asian history.
38:36
I don't know a percent of that history.
38:36
And it is just so fascinating.
38:43
And how far back it goes, whereas, obviously in America from high school you learn about all the American history.
38:49
But it's like, I get that it's geographic.
38:49
But to your point about the traveling, and there was this kind of this myopia.
38:55
I didn't know myself, the Canadian LinkedIn connection, but that's because I'm stuck in American media. Right.
39:07
And it just proves your point. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
39:09
And so if you're young and you have the opportunity to travel, take it.
39:19
Because it is so mind expanding, it will so open your mind to other cultures and the other people's way of looking at things.
39:25
And that just makes you a better thinker, in my opinion.
39:25
And it gets you asking questions that you might not.
39:32
Trung Phan: Let me give you one really salient example, so I have a lot of relatives in Vietnam still.
39:36
And I don't want to get into the deep politics of Donald Trump, but obviously in North America, super polarizing, a lot of people dislike him at a very significant degree.
39:52
But if you go to Southeast Asia, remember, Southeast Asia is 700 million people.
39:52
And Donald Trump was really against the Chinese, who happened to be the regional hegemon and not liked by the majority of Southeast Asia.
40:05
So every single relative I had in Vietnam, when Donald Trump won, or when he was ruling against China. They were loving it.
40:11
I go onto my social feeds, my chats.
40:16
They were so happy that somebody was standing up to, frankly, the bully in their backyard.
40:23
And that for me was like, I don't have those feelings, but I had to respect that they felt that way.
40:30
Because I mean, Vietnam borders China.
40:30
The last land war China had was in 1979.
40:30
They sent 100, 000 tubes down to Vietnam.
40:37
So if you can't have that perspective, which you won't, if you live in this myopic view that you've kind of mentioned, or if you're not very well traveled.
40:47
It's very hard to navigate the world.
40:47
And this is also why I can't have these conversations, where we talked about the political stuff is like, I can't bring that up to somebody and put them in my cousin's mindset.
40:55
They wouldn't understand that.
40:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
40:58
Two reactions to that, that underline how important what you just said is, so, I was in Africa in 2019 in Kenya.
41:08
And we're driving around in Nairobi.
41:08
We were mostly in the preserves, right.
41:16
Doing photographs of the animals.
41:16
But we were in Nairobi for a little bit and we're driving around.
41:22
And as you probably know, lots of really horrible slums, like bad, I mean really bad.
41:31
But anyway, we're driving along and I'm just looking out the window and naturally people get really sick of me, because I just keep saying, why? Why? Why? Why is this? Why? Why? Why?
41:41
I got fixated on the fact that everywhere, there were portraits of George Bush Jr.
41:41
And I'm like, I'm not processing this. Right.
41:51
I'm like, I am so perplexed right now. I asked our guide.
41:51
I'm like, you do know that George Bush was widely hated in the United States. Right.
41:59
And I'm like, why are there portraits of him everywhere here.
42:05
Trung Phan: HIV, [inaudible]. Right?
42:08
He did- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Bingo. He gave them.
42:10
He gave the HIV drugs pre to Africa and- Trung Phan: Billions of dollars.
42:19
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And my guide got really passionate about it.
42:25
And he's like, well, maybe if Americans knew that he saved hundreds of thousands of African lives, because he gave those drugs. And I was flooring. I never knew that.
42:32
And so that is an amazing thing that you get through travel.
42:41
Your experience with your family in Vietnam. My experience in Africa.
42:48
The more you open yourself up to... You know what?
42:48
Other people might have a different point of view.
42:53
Trung Phan: That are valid.
42:53
That are completely valid in their life context. Right?
42:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
42:57
You've got to learn, especially, now.
42:57
If you want to be really successful, you better learn how to rethink almost everything.
43:04
Because if you can't, if you're stuck in the old way of doing things, you're just not going to do well. Right.
43:12
And we're going from linear to exponential.
43:12
We're going from deterministic to probabilistic.
43:20
And dude, if you can't figure that out, that's all she wrote for you.
43:27
Trung Phan: So I think this brings up a great point that you asked about me earlier about the sociology and history degree.
43:34
So I will say, the one value I did take from the history degree, is it forces you into these perspectives, right?
43:37
And Twitter is such a bad place to communicate these things.
43:43
And you talked about how you stay out of politics. I'm the same.
43:43
It's just no point just because you can't communicate the nuance in 280 characters.
43:47
And I'll give you the history example.
43:53
The most salient one for me, people can have multitudes of...
43:53
Just because you say one thing about an individual or support one thing doesn't mean you support everything about them. Right?
44:04
Churchill is the easiest example.
44:04
Was he a racist and colonialist?
44:04
I mean, a lot of evidence suggests that, yes, he had these quote unquote in the 1940s retrograde views, especially today. Right?
44:12
It's very difficult to look back in 2020 and judge somebody's views 100 years earlier.
44:17
Because, for example, 100 years from now.
44:17
I have a strong suspicion that the society in the 2100s will look back and saw that we ate me and saw that we were absolutely savages.
44:26
The way that the existing industrial meat economy is.
44:32
So you have to have that frame, right?
44:32
You have to understand somebody in their period not to give them a free rein or say that everything they did was great.
44:37
But then the other balance of that, which you see a lot of Churchill critics, they never give is like, he did the one thing that no one else in the world did, he stood up to Hitler.
44:49
And he literally was singularly responsible for staving off the total domination of Europe, just to give America time to get into the war and him finessing FDR, which is what he did.
45:00
The machinations that had to go on for him to convince FDR, to ultimately put America's industrial might behind the allied efforts.
45:13
You have to give credence to that. Right?
45:13
In light of all the other stuff.
45:13
And the other stuff is horrible.
45:18
There is a lot of horrible stuff.
45:18
After World War II, he wanted to keep the colonies.
45:25
My immediate family is directly responsible, have felt the pain of his worldview. Right?
45:25
Because, obviously, the French were the same.
45:28
The French and the British after World War II wanted to keep all their colonies around the world.
45:33
America's obviously like, yeah, this is not how it's going to happen anymore.
45:36
And, obviously, one thing led to another, between 45, 75, right?
45:36
That was how the Vietnam war played out.
45:42
But he did the thing that you cannot discount.
45:42
It was just so important.
45:49
That's the one example where I'm like, whenever I talk to someone, my man, it's like, you have to understand.
45:53
People can be also the best and the worst.
45:53
It's just like, you have to understand this.
45:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And what you're talking about, that's one of my soap boxes, is you're talking about having context. Trung Phan: Yes.
46:06
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Seeing things within context.
46:06
And context is really, really important, because, as you say about Churchill, yeah, a lot of really bad things.
46:13
And that one really good thing, that was a good thing.
46:21
When we were in Cambodia, our guide was exactly my age. I'm 61.
46:21
And so he made it through the Pol Pot genocide.
46:32
He was one of the coolest guys I've ever met in my life.
46:32
And when he told us his life story, he was weeping.
46:41
Because he was talking about his class.
46:41
He was a member of the intelligentsia, his parents group. Trung Phan: Right.
46:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so they spoke French, right.
46:51
Because of the French ruling in Cambodia.
46:51
They wore glasses, because they read a lot.
46:56
And literally out of his class of 62 made it through Pol Pot.
47:05
And what happened to him.
47:05
I would love to have him on the podcast for the whole story, because I'm not a crier and I was crying, because literally his parents saw what was happening and they said Yoko, you're going to so-and-so our relative in the deep countryside.
47:16
They took his glasses, smashed them.
47:23
And they said, the minute you get to the countryside.
47:23
Rub your hands on the bark of a tree until they bleed and then rub them more.
47:30
Because if you don't have calluses on your hand, they'll kill you. Trung Phan: Yeah.
47:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so he told this one story, which just made me shiver.
47:39
He's like, so all of this happened.
47:46
Unfortunately, his parents were both executed.
47:46
He's out in the country and the Pol Pot used kids a lot.
47:53
And so they come into town in the Jeeps with their machine guns, and they line everybody up and they want to see who's a collaborator.
47:58
And so the other thing his parents said to him was you don't speak anything but country Cambodian, because if you do you're dead.
48:06
So anyway, for too long he didn't read.
48:12
It was down to him and his friend.
48:12
The others, many didn't make it.
48:17
Many just got shot right away.
48:17
So it was down to his friend.
48:17
They'd made it through everything. Right?
48:22
The kids would start out with the big line [foreign language] and anyone who reacted got shot immediately.
48:28
And they looked at their hands, right.
48:35
The ones with smooth hands got shot.
48:35
And so now it's down to Yoko and this other guy.
48:42
I mean, just listening to him, it's riveting.
48:42
And he was like, so we made it, man.
48:47
We thought we were good to go.
48:47
And we made it through the...
48:47
We didn't know what French was, all this stuff.
48:55
And the kids were like, okay, you two can go and they're walking away.
48:55
And they're fucking sweating bullets.
49:03
And the kid, the Pol Pot kid shouts halt in French, and his friend halted.
49:16
Got shot in the back of the head. He kept walking. Trung Phan: Yep.
49:20
Jim O'Shaughnessy: He knew that if he didn't keep walking, he'd die.
49:20
And so when you hear stories like this.
49:20
And the inhumane things that human beings are capable of, this is why I'm like, I love the new world in many ways that we're going into, because we're going to kind of be forced to get our minds to open up a little bit.
49:39
So I want to jump to some of your threads, because they're brilliant.
49:47
They really are brilliant.
49:47
Trung Phan: I appreciate that.
49:48
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so I want to cover a couple.
49:50
I want to start with the Steve Jobs one, with the Picasso. Talk to me about that. Talk to me about that. Trung Phan: All right.
50:00
So for the listeners, I'll just kind of frame the context.
50:00
But I was told this by a former Apple employee.
50:07
So Apple had a university.
50:07
I don't know how active it is now, but Steve Jobs passed away in 2011.
50:12
But upon his return in 1997, over the following years, he wanted to instill kind of his lessons and his way to think about product and building company.
50:27
And I'll give you a good contrast.
50:27
So Amazon's very well-known for a writing culture, right. So no PowerPoint.
50:32
Bezos famously said, you have to do the six page memo.
50:32
And somebody wrote a book called Working Backwards about just all the writing.
50:39
It's like when you launch a product, you have to write an FAQ pretending the kind of questions that the customers might have.
50:42
So big writing culture at Amazon.
50:47
Apple does not have that culture, which is why Steve Jobs actually, he realized, he's like, okay, if I'm not here, how am I going to instill my product lessons if we aren't, as an organization, writing everything down and keeping track of everything?
51:02
So Apple U was, I think it was done with either a Yale professor helped launch it, but his product idea.
51:18
So Steve Jobs, one of the main lessons he had was about this Picasso painting, it's called The Bull. Picasso's Bull.
51:26
Should I do a visual here, man?
51:26
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Sure, go for it. No, we have YouTube.
51:29
So our YouTube listeners are going to get an added benefit here. Trung Phan: All right. So amazing. I might need a share. Oh, I got it. Okay. Amazing. All right.
51:35
So for the YouTube viewers here, here we go. This is Picasso's Bull.
51:41
It was painted in December. It wasn't painted. It is a lithograph.
51:51
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's a lithograph, right? Yeah. Trung Phan: Yeah. Stone prints.
51:54
So this was created in December 1945.
51:54
And I'll explain it for the listeners that aren't seeing it.
52:03
If you haven't seen this before, it's just 11 pictures of a bull, but the first one is like the full image of the bull, and each successive image, it gets more and more abstracted away.
52:12
So the first bull, it's like how you'd imagine Picasso would draw bull.
52:19
It's really, really nice and well done.
52:24
And then by the sixth or seventh bull, the skin's gone and you're seeing the outlines of the shape.
52:31
And then by the last bull, it's like seven lines.
52:31
And the lines are just what is left of the bull, but you could still tell what the product is, right?
52:38
He's abstracted away the bull.
52:43
And the exact word from Picasso was he was trying to find the spirit of the beast.
52:49
So Steve Jobs, obviously Mr.
52:49
Artsy Fartsy, kind of really embraced this idea, but it was an Apple code of conduct for product essentially.
53:00
And you'll notice this where, so Apple, what is Apple's mission from the mid '70s?
53:04
It was to make computer more personal, right?
53:10
That's why we've gone from, well, I guess the Macs in the '80s, or even the mid '70s, the very first Apple computers.
53:17
I'm sure, Jim, you probably used those original ones. Is this right?
53:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I did, yes. Trung Phan: Okay.
53:22
And then you go to the iPod, and then you go to the iPhone.
53:26
And then now, it's right in your ear and right in wrist, with the watch and the AirPod.
53:30
So Apple is literally getting more and more personal.
53:30
And one way that they're able to do that is by abstracting away all the nonsense.
53:37
People make fun of iPhone for getting rid of the headphone port, but the entire industry has embraced it.
53:42
So this is all part of, kind of, this Picasso idea where you start with the full shape of something, but then you abstract it away and answer the question, what is the job of this item?
53:55
What is the job of a phone?
53:55
Is it to have a headphone port? No.
54:01
If to listen to music is one of the functions you want, well, guess what?
54:05
We're just going to make AirPods.
54:05
So what I found interesting about this story is, when you look at a lot of the product histories that Apple has gone through, you see the bull in the product. So here it is. I love this one.
54:19
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love that.
54:22
Trung Phan: This is like, again, for the listeners, it's a history of all the Apple mouses, or I guess mice.
54:30
And you see the first one is this fully formed, like what you would think a mouse looks like, right?
54:37
But by the end, over a 20 to 30 year time frame, Steve Jobs and Apple just abstracted away, what is the purpose of a mouse?
54:45
It's just to move something on a screen. So it's a track pad.
54:48
It's literally just a square, right?
54:48
It's a metal square now.
54:48
So I did this thread, and my friend that works at Apple that told me to look into this, he had said that, it's kind of gone away a bit like, when Jony Ive makes you charge the pencil inside the iPad, that doesn't really feel like abstracting away Picasso, right?
55:11
And there's a lot of criticism too, of this design philosophy where Apple phones are famously very difficult to recycle.
55:18
So there's that part of it too, where they're so married to this idea that we're going to abstract everything away, but there are a lot of externalities.
55:32
But I have to say though, the mouse and the bull, it just looks perfect. It's perfectly done.
55:39
Here's the last thing I'll say was, and this is a famous story that I suspect a lot of your listeners have heard.
55:43
But it goes to the essence of Steve Jobs trying to find the spirit of the bull.
55:50
So when he came back to Apple in 1997, he was in a meeting.
55:58
And Apple was struggling through the mid '90s, they had released all these products that didn't really work, like the Newton.
56:04
They had a Pippin, which was like a game console.
56:09
And then Steve Jobs was in a meeting, got really upset looking at the product line, and then goes up to the whiteboard and just does a two-by-two square, right? Simplifies it.
56:14
And the top two titles are consumer and professional.
56:19
And the left side is desktop and portable.
56:19
He's like, "We're only going to do four products.
56:26
The professional desktop is the Power Mac 3.
56:29
The consumer desktop is the iMac.
56:29
The portable consumer is the iBook.
56:29
And then the professional portable is a PowerBook 3. That's it.
56:35
We're doing four products.
56:35
We're simplifying everything."
56:39
So Apple's all about simplification, getting to the heart or the spirit of the beast, if you will.
56:44
And the Picasso painting is a perfect example.
56:44
The last thing I'll add here, I know I'm rambling, is, I didn't make this connection until many, many years later.
56:51
But Picasso, The Bull is in Steve Jobs's famous ad, you know, the think different ad? So here it is.
56:57
For the watchers, there it is.
57:04
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Love it. Trung Phan: Yeah.
57:07
When he is doing the think different ad, one of the images is of Picasso painting the bull. So there you go.
57:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's fantastic. I love that story.
57:14
And back to, I mentioned, Will Storr's The Status Game.
57:20
He's got a bit in there that, his research is really deep and good.
57:20
So I believe, until I get corrected, that this is true.
57:30
So Jobs' wife was best friends with a woman whose husband was at Microsoft.
57:38
And this really bothered Jobs.
57:38
But they had to socialize all the time.
57:38
And so, literally, the guy who was really bombastic, he came with an early version of a tablet and he was showing it to Jobs, literally pushing it in his face.
57:56
And he's like, "This is the future of computing, man.
58:02
And fucking Microsoft is going to own it."
58:02
And literally the next day, Jobs goes in, calls the big staff meeting and says, we are going to make fucking phones that people want to use, and we are going to make iPads."
58:13
And so, it was a beef with a Microsoft guy that got him.
58:21
Trung Phan: Catalyzed him.
58:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, that catalyzed him.
58:22
And the other thing that I love about Apple.
58:25
So at the office, we're all PCs, but all my personal stuff is all Macs.
58:31
I was one of the first buyers of Macs. I think they're genius.
58:31
But the idea that you should be able to use an Apple product, like a Macintosh or an iPhone or an iPad without any instructions.
58:46
And so, this journalist didn't believe this pitch.
58:46
And so when the iPad first came out, he was on assignment somewhere in central America.
58:53
And so he is like, I want to test this shit out.
58:59
And he brought a couple of iPads.
58:59
And he was in a very, very poor village.
59:06
And he handed the box to a little kid, I guess he was seven or eight, or she.
59:06
And within 10 minutes, the box was open and the kid was using the iPad.
59:14
And he was like, holy shit.
59:20
Trung Phan: Spirit of the bull right there.
59:21
That's the spirit of the bull.
59:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it because it encapsulates everything that good design is about, in my opinion.
59:23
And I have a lot of friends who are engineers.
59:34
And so, they want to just keep packing shit with features.
59:39
And I'm like, you might love that, but your audience is going to be really, really pissed off because they're not going to get that.
59:46
And so I love that story.
59:46
And what I love about it is it captures much more than just Jobs and the bull.
59:53
It captures what direction should you be looking in?
1:00:00
And using that is a great way to do that.
1:00:00
The other one that I loved, and I want you to talk to me about is the famous 2004 dinner between Elon Musk and Bezos. I love that. I love that thread.
1:00:17
Trung Phan: Well, this one's funny because, for the listeners, I'm going to pull some of this stuff up.
1:00:21
I wrote a thread about a dinner that Elon and Jeff Bezos had in 2004 to talk about space, space travel.
1:00:29
Well, I did this thread twice actually. I had to update it.
1:00:41
Elon replied to both of them.
1:00:41
And though the second reply was absolutely hysterical.
1:00:48
This is right when Jeff Bezos went to space and then Elon just replied, "Oh, look, he can bench press a rhino now because business is so jacked."
1:01:03
But yeah, I think the story is fascinating because the interaction they had. So it was a dinner.
1:01:10
It was in Seattle, was where the dinner happened.
1:01:10
It was in a famous pub in Seattle, which is now closed, unfortunately.
1:01:16
I forgot the name of it.
1:01:16
But I'll show the viewers here on YouTube.
1:01:22
There is a famous photo of the two of them sitting at a table, but this is actually not the dinner.
1:01:26
This took place in 2008 at an economics event.
1:01:26
I'll pull the name off later, but it's slipping my mind.
1:01:34
But the dinner that they went to is super interesting because, it happens in 2004, and here's the excerpt.
1:01:38
So they met, and this is from Musk's words.
1:01:48
He says, "We talked about rocket architecture.
1:01:48
It was very clear technically that Jeff was barking up the wrong tree.
1:01:53
I tried to tell him that he was going down the wrong route."
1:02:00
And this is the money line.
1:02:00
"I did my advice to give him good advice, but he largely ignored me."
1:02:04
So this interaction they had, this is 2004. They clearly met before.
1:02:04
And I'm sure they swap messages every now and then.
1:02:11
But they have, as we talked about earlier, there's clearly this dick measuring contest between the two of them, right?
1:02:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right. Yeah.
1:02:18
Trung Phan: And what's interesting about this meal though, is that Blue Origin started, I think 18 months before SpaceX.
1:02:23
And SpaceX has just obviously blown it out of the water in terms of how far they've been able to build their rockets.
1:02:29
And then when Starship goes live, eventually it's going to be the greatest rocket achievement ever.
1:02:35
But the point about this meeting which is really interesting is because, so Musk had given Bezos advice on rocket architecture.
1:02:47
And some of the stuff that Bezos was looking at, I think he even explored like slingshotting something into space, which, fair enough, you can explore that to your heart's content.
1:02:58
But Elon had done a lot of the hard work in the three years that his company had been around, SpaceX.
1:03:03
And he was like, "Hey, Bezos, I'm just telling you, go down this route."
1:03:07
But you have to remember what Bezos was like with Amazon.
1:03:07
He wants to go down his own path, clearly, always experimenting. He wants to experiment.
1:03:14
And by Musk telling him not to do something, that would kneecap the way he works.
1:03:20
And he's obviously super, super patient.
1:03:20
So in Bezos' mind, he's like, okay, thanks Elon, thanks for dinner and telling me all these things.
1:03:29
I'm going to find out for myself. Fair enough.
1:03:33
But I guess the difference with starting an e-commerce company and starting with a rocket company is that rocketry really does have to abide by the law of physics.
1:03:45
And we know Elon is a first principles thinker.
1:03:45
So the approach he's taking is thinking through the problem of, what is actually possible?
1:03:50
So Bezos, he completely separated from that point.
1:03:58
I guess there's a time when they could have worked together, instead of diverting resources, which is exactly what's happening now.
1:04:03
Listen, I know competition's good. I get that.
1:04:06
But it's a little bit sad that these two couldn't find a way to work together.
1:04:14
But the reality is they also have very different missions.
1:04:14
Jeff Bezos wants to build a space economy.
1:04:19
He thinks there's a multi-trillion dollar space mining and hospitality economy that you can just do sub-rural space.
1:04:24
Elon wants to settle Mars to save human consciousness.
1:04:24
But I mean, Elon's mission though is much, it sounds high [inaudible] to a lot of people, but it probably attracts a lot more people too.
1:04:37
His mission seems a little bit more important than creating a space economy.
1:04:43
But the other part of the thread that I didn't mention, and it's very consistent with that dinner they had in 2004 where Bezos ignored Musk's advice was, so the coat of arms for Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space company, it has two turtles on it.
1:04:57
And the motto, in Latin, is, I'm going to totally butcher it, but it's "Gradatim Ferociter", step by step ferociously.
1:05:05
He's the mindset of, we're going to take it step by step.
1:05:11
He's like, we're not going to rush this.
1:05:11
Like, "Elon, thank you for your advice.
1:05:14
I'm not going to rush into it.
1:05:14
I'm going to take this step by step experimentation process that I've done with Amazon to great effect."
1:05:24
But Elon actually replied to also this tweet that I put out.
1:05:24
So I had two Elon replies on this thread.
1:05:30
And he actually said, "Jeff's interpretation of the tortoise and the hare, which is what the turtles is alluding to, was incorrect.
1:05:37
The moral of the story isn't that you go step by step.
1:05:42
The moral of the story is, if you're in the lead, you can't become complacent."
1:05:47
And that's exactly what, essentially, Blue Origin was doing.
1:05:47
It had the earlier start, it had more money because Jeff was obviously still building Amazon.
1:05:53
Whereas, Elon had to borrow 180 mil from his PayPal cash out.
1:06:00
But I thought that was really, really insightful from Elon. Not surprising.
1:06:08
He's like, "Well, actually, that's not the lesson here, Jeff.
1:06:13
That should not be the coat of arms."
1:06:13
He's like, "It's not that you do it step by step.
1:06:13
It's that, if you're in the lead, you can't be complacent."
1:06:17
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally true.
1:06:20
And I studied six years of Latin, and the only thing I use it for these days is gags, mostly.
1:06:28
But Latin terms, you got to be really careful because economists use them all the time.
1:06:34
And I always poke fun at them because one of the famous economic lines is a Latin phrase, and it's ceteris paribus, which means, all things being equal.
1:06:39
Well, sorry guys, all things are never equal.
1:06:44
And so that pickup on, if you're in the lead, you're going to [inaudible] be complacent. Man, hello?
1:06:52
One of the questions I was thinking about for you was, is the traditional company, are they going to make it?
1:06:57
Because it seems to me like you have a thread on Andrew Lowe who I've read a lot, he's a brilliant thinker.
1:07:12
And he came up with a new way to finance and create cures.
1:07:12
And as I'm reading your thread, I paused for a minute and I thought of Fields Fellowships.
1:07:21
And if you go and you follow the ROI on those Fields Fellowships- Trung Phan: It's insane.
1:07:34
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's catastrophic.
1:07:35
It's right through the moon, man.
1:07:35
And so I was just sitting there and thinking, is everything legacy corporations doing wrong?
1:07:41
I mean, it's just like everything.
1:07:47
Are they just going to be blasted away?
1:07:47
Or is inertia going to rule?
1:07:53
Trung Phan: Just some of these, look at a Google now.
1:07:57
Look at these big tech trillion dollar companies.
1:07:57
You're seeing the complacency set in.
1:08:02
I think Balaji Srinivasan, who I'm sure a lot of your listeners know, former Coinbase CTO.
1:08:08
He brings us such a great point about Google and how, if it was still being run with this energy of a younger startup, or even if Larry Page was still in power.
1:08:22
They haven't cataloged the blockchain or made it searchable.
1:08:22
And to Balaji, he's like, this is like one of the biggest own goals ever.
1:08:28
They know how to index the entire internet.
1:08:34
They could index the blockchain.
1:08:34
And there's block explorers now that you can use.
1:08:34
But if you have this suspicion that crypto, whatever you feel about it, has the potential to become a multi, multi multi-trillion dollar industry, the lowest hanging fruit is out there in the world for you.
1:08:49
You put a team of five people on it for Google to index that.
1:08:53
So I think, to your original question, it's just that complacency sets in.
1:08:53
It's why when you look at the Dow 30 from a hundred years ago, how many companies are left?
1:09:00
If you look at the Dow 30 from 30 years ago, how many companies are left?
1:09:04
I think the ability for single individuals or teams of single digits to do what they're accomplishing now, because of technology and the tool setting, and then obviously AWS has made it so easy to spin things up.
1:09:17
I'm not saying that they're going the way of the dodo, but if you don't have that energy, which is obviously so hard to do once you grow as an organization, it's probably more the same, it's the life cycle.
1:09:27
I don't think it's specific to now, to be honest.
1:09:31
I think the difference is that you can do more with smaller groups of people, but that's always been the case.
1:09:37
It's just not as easy as it is now with the internet and tooling that's available. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:09:43
So I mean, that's one of my themes is that complacency is death, and stasis is death.
1:09:43
And if you are not continually reinventing and killing your darlings, you're going to be in trouble, man.
1:09:59
And that's why I think free market economies where there's a rule of law are always going to win, because you look at Japan, and they have what they call the zombie companies that got supported, even though they were dead.
1:10:10
And they should have gone out of business.
1:10:10
And you see it with crony capitalism today in this country.
1:10:16
The innovation cycle is what made America what it is today.
1:10:16
And so, when I hear people saying like, "No, we shouldn't do that.
1:10:25
Or we should outlaw that." Sorry.
1:10:32
I mean, imagine somebody saying that in 1900, "No, we know everything there is to know about physics.
1:10:40
And so, we're not going to let you write a paper on this new, crazy quackery called quantum." No, absolutely not.
1:10:45
And every one of these innovations, if you understand history, and it's not just art, it's everywhere.
1:10:50
It's in physics, it's in art, it's in music, everything.
1:10:56
All of the innovators were initially shunned and hated and shat upon.
1:11:03
For example, the impressionists, do you know how they got that name?
1:11:03
They got that name as an insult from the French academy.
1:11:10
They said, "It's like children painting with their fingers."
1:11:16
And so, if you don't understand that, you're just not going to make it in the world that is emerging here.
1:11:25
And your point about Google not indexing the blockchain.
1:11:25
I mean, that's the first I've heard of that.
1:11:33
I can't believe that is true.
1:11:33
Trung Phan: It's the lowest hanging fruit they could have done.
1:11:36
That was their best way to enter such a regulatory hot potato of an industry.
1:11:42
They're like, whoa, we're just going to index this.
1:11:42
So we do this with everything.
1:11:45
It's like, we're not saying we're launching a coin like Facebook is, we're just indexing.
1:11:50
It's what we do anyways. And they didn't do it.
1:11:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Incredible.
1:11:55
And you just hate to see that because what a cool company that was.
1:11:59
And then you see when that fresh thinking, when that continually challenging yourself to improve.
1:12:08
And if you lack that, you're just going to be dead.
1:12:15
And this brings into mind another thing I wanted to talk to you about, which is this whole idea you wrote a great thread on, putting historical dates into perspective.
1:12:19
My friend, Tim Urban, does this brilliantly.
1:12:25
But talk to me a little bit about that one too, because again, what you're doing that I love is you're contextualizing things.
1:12:31
And people are like, "Really?" Trung Phan: Yeah.
1:12:37
Well, the number one favorite of that one was an individual within, I think, what is it?
1:12:43
65 years could have seen the first flight, which was Kitty Hawk, and then they would've seen the moon landing. Yeah, 66 years.
1:12:53
So this is the exact quote, "The moon landing was only 66 years after the first manned aircraft flight, 1903 to 1969.
1:13:06
Within a lifetime, humans went from not having any flying technology to flying 239,000 miles to earth.
1:13:12
I think this dovetails exactly what you said.
1:13:12
Without the energy and ability to innovate, and pushing yourself to do that, the motivation to do that, those type of things are not going to happen.
1:13:25
Going back to Google, quick thought is like, I'm not saying they're going the way of the dodo.
1:13:30
But I'm saying, if you look back at 50 years, you can identify that moment where, wow, this company, which has built arguably the greatest business model in the history of mankind kind of slipped and lost its way by not doing something it was so expertly positioned to do in the fastest growing industry in that period.
1:13:47
But back to the thread here.
1:13:47
Just some great ones is like Cleopatra. We have no idea.
1:13:58
Our perception of history is so [inaudible].
1:13:58
Cleopatra lived closer to the moon landing than the building of the pyramids. What? That is so ridiculous. So that was '60s.
1:14:10
So she was born in '69 BC, moon landing, 1969. Nice. Double 69.
1:14:10
But the pyramids was 2600 BC. I had no idea. I read that.
1:14:20
I'm like, this can't be right. This cannot be right.
1:14:26
The other one, which is funny.
1:14:26
And with all these things you always get the commenters and they say, "Oh, this is way off.
1:14:31
Or this is such a dumb comparison." But I love this one.
1:14:31
A well-traveled individual could have met Socrates, Confucius and Buddha.
1:14:36
They all existed at the same time.
1:14:41
And I love the theory around why they all came up.
1:14:41
I think some type of wide scale agricultural farming had made its way around the world.
1:14:47
And when society spent a lot less time just figuring out how not to die from starvation, you can just spend all day contemplating life.
1:14:53
And then now you get three of the greatest philosophers or whatever you want think about Buddha.
1:15:05
Humans that have these thought and frameworks and ideas that have just spread to the sub [inaudible].
1:15:12
Some of the strongest names ever were created between 400 and 500 BC. I love that one. That'd be amazing.
1:15:18
That would actually, Jim, if you're doing your TV or you're pitching a production company, that would be an amazing TV show.
1:15:22
Maybe you bring that to this day and age.
1:15:27
View all three of these individuals are back in 2022.
1:15:27
And then recreating the magic of 500 BC.
1:15:34
I haven't worked through the contours of it yet, but there's something there.
1:15:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it. I love it.
1:15:38
And I would add Lao Tzu to that list, the writer of the Tao Te Ching.
1:15:41
And I'm not a huge fan of Confucianism because he's all about rules and regulations.
1:15:50
And I'm like, that's the opposite of me.
1:15:50
Tell me to do something and I'll probably do exactly the opposite.
1:15:56
But I have a rebellious streak, and that doesn't go away.
1:16:03
I love that though, because it's like, and I love your idea by the way. Okay.
1:16:08
So we're coming into the close here.
1:16:08
So I want to do one that I think might be helpful with our audience and that is, you wrote this thing about the narrative speech. Trung Phan: Yes.
1:16:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And Ganz came up with it.
1:16:22
He's a Harvard PhD and everything.
1:16:26
It reminded me of this thing that they call the One Sentence Persuasion Guide.
1:16:32
And basically it was, you can get people to do anything for you if you encourage their dreams, justify their failures, confirm their suspicions, help them throw rocks at their enemies.
1:16:39
So walk me through the persuasion speech.
1:16:46
Trung Phan: So I have to preface all this by saying that the thread here, there's a really funny story around this.
1:16:55
So Martin Ganz, as you mentioned, he's a rhetoric professor, I believe. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. Trung Phan: Harvard PhD.
1:17:02
He worked on the Obama campaign.
1:17:02
So his method of communicating was called the Public Narrative method, but as a lot of people pointed out to me afterwards, it's essentially just the re-skinned version of Plato's rhetoric. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. I know.
1:17:17
Trung Phan: You got that, right?
1:17:19
But if you actually go into the quote tweets of this thread, I got called up by the entire University of Texas, Austin Philosophy Department.
1:17:24
No, I probably got a dozen comments, quote tweets being like, "Oh, look, this guy discovered rhetoric."
1:17:36
And like, "Oh, look at this tech bro.
1:17:36
Looks like he discovered Plato for the first time."
1:17:44
But it got really vicious.
1:17:44
And I started dropping the Kissinger quote, is like, "The reason why the professors fight so hard or academia fights hard is because the stakes are so small."
1:17:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The stakes are so small.
1:17:58
Trung Phan: So they're so pathetic, right? But it just proved it.
1:18:01
I had 50 year old professors that had nothing better to do with their time than go after a random thread on Twitter.
1:18:06
And I actually ended up cornering one of the dudes just because it was so outrageous.
1:18:12
You could still read the comments. It's crazy.
1:18:12
But I'm like, "Dude," I'm like, "You're a teacher.
1:18:16
What do you care how I'm framing this? Who gives a shit?
1:18:16
If somebody didn't know about this beforehand and they'd read it and they learned something, why does this bother you?"
1:18:30
This is the beef that came out of it.
1:18:30
They have a beef with Martin Ganz, because apparently Harvard didn't even have a Rhetoric Department until recently.
1:18:36
And people already have Harvard envy.
1:18:43
So now you add on the fact that you have a professor laying claim to rhetoric as a field, that was the guy's beef.
1:18:49
And I'm just like, "Okay, I get it.
1:18:49
But this has nothing to do with me."
1:18:56
So that's a preamble to all this.
1:18:56
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it.
1:18:58
Trung Phan: I highly recommend if people want to see, 50 year old UT Austin philosophy professors go after an Asian dude, there it is.
1:19:05
But so like you said with how you framed what you're trying to do with narrative and communication, you get somebody to throw rocks at somebody or to make them feel better about themselves.
1:19:19
The way that the Public Narrative method is framed is, and this is like, people will know the Greek terms for these.
1:19:27
It's like ethos and mythos, that whole thing, but let's just go with Ganz did because Obama followed it.
1:19:33
So we're going to go with Obama.
1:19:37
So the three parts are, you have the story of yourself.
1:19:37
So it's a personal story.
1:19:37
It's like, "I grew up here, this thing happened to me," X, Y, Z.
1:19:43
"This is why it's important to me that the following things happen."
1:19:50
Then the story of us, you talk about why your personal story is relevant to your listeners.
1:19:54
And then the last thing is a story of now, it's an urgent story where you're trying to get them to create action.
1:19:58
So again, this is not, I think it's broadly similar to pathos, ethos and whatever the third word in the rhetoric is.
1:20:10
But what's interesting is- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Logos, I think. Trung Phan: Logos. Yeah, right. Logos. When you look at...
1:20:12
So I knew this, but I didn't study it closely.
1:20:20
But when I did, I started looking at all these old speeches, they're all structured exactly the same, right? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yep.
1:20:26
Trung Phan: Obama's famous DNC Convention speech starts with, "My father was a foreign student born and raised in a small village in Kenya."
1:20:32
He's talking about his personal story.
1:20:36
And then he transitions quickly to talk about America as a country, what's so great about it. That's a story of us.
1:20:40
And then he has a call to action.
1:20:40
He's like, "Because I believe all these things, the next things happen."
1:20:44
But when you go to highly trained individuals, like corporate CEOs, they're the exact same thing.
1:20:49
They all have this story technique.
1:20:49
And Bezos famously did the antitrust opening statement, I think it was 18 months ago, in front of Congress.
1:21:01
A lot of people remember this, but he opens that speech with, "My mom, Jackie."
1:21:05
And he talks about his mom and his upbringing, the exact same way that Obama talked about his father and his upbringing.
1:21:10
And then he transitions into, "We as a nation.
1:21:18
Here's what Americans can do."
1:21:18
And then just as Obama's call to action was basically to ultimately vote for the Democrats.
1:21:22
But Bezos' call to action is a little bit different.
1:21:26
He said, "We got to work on climate change."
1:21:26
That was obviously to win points with Congress.
1:21:31
But I'll give two more examples, but it's really funny because this trickled all the way down to Vlad Tenev, the Robinhood CEO.
1:21:36
So when he was getting grilled by Congress over the GameStop incident, he starts this speech with, "I was born in Bulgaria."
1:21:49
And you're just really, you're looking at this.
1:21:49
And you're like, "Oh, my goodness, this is just everywhere."
1:21:52
Every corporate comms officer has just coached these individuals.
1:21:52
And it's clearly effective and Tenev's call to action, well, he transitions the story off, he's like, "Everybody should have financial freedom." Great.
1:22:07
Everybody's on board with that.
1:22:07
And then he talks about Robinhood's mission.
1:22:10
Elon had, the last one I had because it's obviously, a bit of Elon booster myself, but Elon had a very famous, a cold call when he started SpaceX.
1:22:22
He cold-called a rocket expert. His name's Jim Cantrell.
1:22:22
I actually interviewed Jim Cantrell. Interesting individual.
1:22:28
But he starts off the phone call with, "I'm Elon Musk.
1:22:34
I'm an internet billionaire. I founded PayPal. I sold it."
1:22:34
So that's the story of himself.
1:22:34
And then the next part is, " I could spend the rest of my life drinking Mai Tais, but I've decided I want to help humanity be a multi planetary species." That's us.
1:22:44
And his call to action is, "I need you to help me by Russian rockets to do it."
1:22:49
So this happened in like 30 seconds, but it's everywhere when you start looking, people or listeners, the Public Narrative, which Martin Ganz invented, but really is just rhetoric, it's everywhere.
1:23:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So I loved it for so many reasons and I love philosophy and I never...
1:23:13
My son graduated with a degree in philosophy and I had always read philosophy, just for fun because it...
1:23:19
Well, and learning, because I wanted to learn, if you'd learn how to think, you're going to be better than if you don't.
1:23:24
And the author, Howard Bloom has this great section in one of his books about Plato and it's like, Plato was the best fucking marketer in the world.
1:23:30
And he never takes credit for all of that stuff.
1:23:40
And he gives all these great examples, how he named many of his dialogues and his writings after very famous and rich Athenians. Huh? Why would he do that?
1:23:53
Because he invented the endowment model.
1:23:53
"Hey, if you die and leave all your money to the Academy, you're going to be famous."
1:23:59
He did all of these things.
1:23:59
He was the first guy to do it. So doff the cap to him. Trung Phan: Hat's off.
1:24:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
1:24:12
And people, they, "Plato. Plato and Aristotle..."
1:24:12
We've created these mythic figures, whereas when you get down and understand the man or woman behind this story, Plato's genius was he was an incredible marketer.
1:24:30
He was incredible at fawning over people.
1:24:30
The Republic, the book that he's often cited for and philosopher kings.
1:24:36
And I always get amused when people quote Plato at me.
1:24:42
It's like- Trung Phan: It's like, "You don't have any idea, you don't shoot Plato at me."
1:24:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: "You don't know anything, man, because I read a quote from Plato on Twitter." And it's like, "Okay?"
1:24:59
And usually, it's in politics.
1:24:59
Like, "The fate of men who refuse to become active in politics is to live under people who they despise." Okay.
1:25:07
So do you want to talk about The Republic?
1:25:07
Do you want to talk about why Plato wrote that book?
1:25:13
He wrote that book because Athens lost the war with Sparta and he didn't want to get his head chopped off or drink hemlock.
1:25:20
And so he's like, "Huh, I think I'm going to have to write a whole new book about this."
1:25:26
And by the way, people are going to listen to this and say, "Jim's dissing Plato!" I'm not dissing Plato. He was a great thinker.
1:25:37
Aristotle, his pupil, pointed out a lot of things that Plato got wrong. And guess what?
1:25:44
Other philosophers pointed out a lot of things that those guys got wrong. I love Plato. I love Aristotle.
1:25:48
I love reading, Heroclitis, the pre Socratic philosopher who got it all started.
1:25:48
These are great thinkers, but don't deify them, right? Trung Phan: Yeah.
1:25:59
Jim O'Shaughnessy: These are human beings and guess what?
1:26:01
Human OS, you can hack it. And the speech hacks it. Trung Phan: Exactly. Exactly.
1:26:07
The speech hacks it, right?
1:26:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The other genius about Obama in my opinion, I love watching that guy because one of the things that he did so well was he was able to create this beautiful mosaic with words, using a formula, but his brilliance in my opinion, was he created an environment where everybody who was looking at the canvas that Obama painted saw themselves. Trung Phan: Yes.
1:26:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That is like a really incredible superpower.
1:26:42
And even with his catch phrases and all that, just genius because it allowed, it played, it engendered in other people who heard it, very different things, right? Trung Phan: Yeah.
1:27:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It made them feel so good.
1:27:02
And I mean, that guy was a master, he was a master.
1:27:02
And again- Trung Phan: Absolutely a master. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ...
1:27:11
doff my cap to him because you could definitely learn from watching- Trung Phan: You mentioned Scott Adams earlier, and that he's got this master persuader and that's what Obama was. My last thought on this.
1:27:23
I know you probably got one or two more quickly after is- Jim O'Shaughnessy: I do. Trung Phan: ...
1:27:28
do not deify people, especially Martin Ganz at Harvard, if you're doing a deep thread because of UT Austin.
1:27:33
The UT Austin Philosophy Department will come roast you into oblivion.
1:27:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: We're going to start so many fights with this. Trung Phan: I know, man.
1:27:45
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it.
1:27:47
We're egging them on, let them fight. Trung Phan: UT Austin. The stakes are so small.
1:27:51
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Meanwhile, we're just chuckling the whole way.
1:27:55
And the other point that I just did one with my friend, Morgan Housel and we titled the podcast, The Best Story Wins.
1:28:08
I think Morgan's one of the best storytellers in finance. I think he is awesome.
1:28:12
I've known him a long time.
1:28:12
He's the real deal and- Trung Phan: Oh, he is incredible, absolutely incredible. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ...
1:28:19
And one of the things though that I try to gently persuade him about is, I've been doing this a long time, dude.
1:28:23
And if you are an actual professional investor, what you need to really understand is that narrative follows price.
1:28:36
Narrative does not create price.
1:28:36
And the way Morgan uses stories is very different.
1:28:36
Morgan is trying to get you to understand, "Hey, you know that thing you just..."
1:28:45
And I'm quoting Doug Adams on experience.
1:28:51
"Hey, you know that thing you just did? Don't do that anymore."
1:28:55
Morgan's trying to get people to understand the much broader picture, which I completely agree with Morgan that a great story is the only way you're going to get that to sink into people.
1:29:06
But the whole Game stock and everything, I was very amused watching it.
1:29:06
And I would talk to old timers.
1:29:14
And I'm like, "Do you think any of these kids realize that all those chat rooms were infiltrated by the hedge fund guys?" Trung Phan: Yeah.
1:29:26
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And with names like Diamond Hands Forever and shit like that.
1:29:27
And in the old days, they called that painting the tape, when you would do things that other people who weren't experienced would say, "Ooh, look at the stock. It just went up."
1:29:38
They asked, I can't remember.
1:29:44
Oh, Harriman, the railroad baron, was also a stock speculator.
1:29:44
And they asked him once, if he could move the price of a stock up to, it was at a 100 bucks.
1:29:54
"Could you move it up to 130 so we could sell there?"
1:29:54
And I'm getting these numbers wrong.
1:29:59
And so I'll be actually-ied on Twitter.
1:29:59
Trung Phan: Up and to the right is the key here.
1:30:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
1:30:03
So they asked him, "Could you move this from 100 to 130 so we can sell?"
1:30:03
And he's like, "No, I can't do that.
1:30:09
What I can do is I can move it from a 100 to 200."
1:30:15
And he goes, "And then you can sell it all the way down."
1:30:15
And he's like, "A little move, that's not going to inflame anyone's passions. A double?
1:30:21
People are going to go crazy for that stock."
1:30:21
So this has been the way Wall Street and any bourse has been run forever and ever, and ever.
1:30:28
And I just loved watching the narrative emerge, David and Goliath and all that.
1:30:35
And just, I would bring it up with younger people who really believed it.
1:30:41
And they got really mad at me.
1:30:45
Like, "What the fuck, man? You're an old guy.
1:30:45
You don't know anything about this."
1:30:48
Trung Phan: "You don't understand this." Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. Yeah. "You just like... You don't know...
1:30:52
This is David in Goliath."
1:30:52
And I'm like, "Okay, have it your way, but it's not." Trung Phan: Let it go. Yeah.
1:30:58
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I just let it go because it's like, whatever.
1:31:01
So the other one that I loved of yours that I just think is awesome is how they made Ted Lasso likable in 157 seconds. Trung Phan: Yeah.
1:31:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Talk about that one. Trung Phan: Yeah.
1:31:17
So as I mentioned, super amateur wannabe Hollywood screenwriter, but my actual Hollywood screenwriter friend, his name's Vincent Ngo.
1:31:24
He wrote the movie Hancock.
1:31:24
He used to work- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, cool. Trung Phan: Yeah.
1:31:31
He used to work with Tony Scott, worked a lot on those scripts, but he had taught me this idea of, when you observe a character in a show, they're always being put to choices.
1:31:43
Same with the book, but specifically in television, because it's such a visual, or film is such a visual medium.
1:31:49
Watch the choices that they're being put to.
1:31:56
A good writer will consistently and constantly be putting their main characteristic through choices and watch how they're reacting, because this is the way that you can paint a individual's, their personality without having to be explicit.
1:32:09
You know the saying, show, don't tell? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:32:13
Trung Phan: That's basically what he's saying.
1:32:13
So if you watch the pilot season, the pilot of Ted Lasso, so the first episode of the first season, they do it masterfully. It's unbelievable. So it is 157 seconds.
1:32:24
You meet the individual, Ted lasso, it's about four minutes into the first episode.
1:32:31
But when you meet him, he's constantly being put into these opportunities to show who he is.
1:32:36
So it starts off with just a big visual of him on a Sports Center screen.
1:32:43
And it's just him smiling and they just leave it there.
1:32:48
And the first physical action that you see him do is he's dancing with his team.
1:32:54
And you're like, "Oh my God, this guy's amazing."
1:32:54
But then he's on an airplane in the next scene, where he's flying to Europe to take over this coaching job, and a number of things start happening.
1:33:03
A fan sticks a phone in front of his face, showing him dancing like a maniac.
1:33:08
So that's an opportunity.
1:33:08
He can make a choice at that point, right?
1:33:14
Imagine it was you, and somebody stuck something in your face.
1:33:14
You'd probably be pretty annoyed, but he chooses to engage with the fan.
1:33:17
So he's showing himself to you as the viewer, and then quickly afterwards, the same fan that asked for a photo makes a very negative comment about him.
1:33:30
Again, it's another choice, right?
1:33:30
He could go either way, but he shows himself to be a gregarious individual.
1:33:34
And then the last two images are him fist pounding his coach friend.
1:33:40
And that shows people love this guy, and it leaves off in the 157 seconds with a visual of him looking wistfully at his family.
1:33:50
So that's it, it took 157 seconds.
1:33:58
And you'll notice, second season one isn't as great, but what you noticed from this capsule of a moment is it changes the way you watch content because a good writer, like an Aaron Sorkin, for example, the best of the best, when you watch how they write, they're constantly putting the protagonist to decisions.
1:34:16
And it's a great way and I think it's a great lesson just in general.
1:34:22
It's like, if you want people to be captured by the content you're putting out, you want to put them to decisions or you put yourself to decisions and you show them how you're choosing and that show and not tell.
1:34:29
You're not telling them who you are.
1:34:34
You're showing who you are.
1:34:34
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it.
1:34:35
Well, I could talk to you forever.
1:34:35
And this has been super, super fun.
1:34:42
I always ask my guests at the end of each one of these, you know the movie, Inception, right? Trung Phan: Yes. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay.
1:34:50
So, what I'm going to do Trung, is I'm going to wave a wand and I'm going to make you the emperor of the world for one day. Can't kill anyone.
1:34:58
Can't put anyone in camps, but you can incept them.
1:34:58
So you can whisper two things into their ears, the global population.
1:35:06
Everyone's going to wake up the next morning thinking it was their idea. Trung Phan: Okay.
1:35:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: What two things are you going to incept? Trung Phan: Ugh!
1:35:18
I wish I had prepared for this, but I think I will go back to some of the stuff that we talked about.
1:35:24
It's the idea of when you're speaking with somebody, to actually put yourself in their shoes and I'll give you a more tangible example than this generic truism I just said.
1:35:31
Now, whenever I get a response on Twitter that feels negative, I assume immediately that individual has good intentions with that message.
1:35:44
Sometimes you'll see something, you see the snark, you're like, "Oh my God, this guy's trying to be sarcastic."
1:35:48
The first thing I'd incept is just assume good intent with everything.
1:35:54
It just makes everything more enjoyable.
1:35:54
Even if it's not good intent, it doesn't boil your blood as much.
1:35:58
The other thing I would incept is I think the world probably be a better place if everybody got seven to eight hours of sleep a night, as much as possible.
1:36:08
So go get some good sleep.
1:36:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it.
1:36:11
Those are really great, especially the sleep.
1:36:11
Again, having lived 61 years, if you're paying attention, you can see that there are a lot of really simple things, like get enough sleep, like eat healthy food.
1:36:29
It's like these are really simple things and yet they make such a massive difference to the outcomes in your life. Trung Phan: Exactly.
1:36:41
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And I love the assume good intentions.
1:36:42
Malcolm Gladwell had an interesting book called Talking to Strangers. Trung Phan: Yes.
1:36:51
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And he's like, "Humanity defaults to truth," because if we don't, it's Mad Max.
1:36:58
It's the worst society in the world.
1:36:58
And so I love that one as well.
1:36:58
Well, listen, man, this has been so much fun.
1:37:04
Tell us, well, I don't even think you need to because everyone knows, but tell us where we can find you.
1:37:08
Trung Phan: Just the easiest, I'll keep it simple, is go to @TrungTPhan on Twitter, follow me or send me a message or send me some hate mail about the Rhetoric Department at Harvard. Just do that.
1:37:20
But that's the easiest, right?
1:37:24
There's a marketing move right there. Keep it simple. Don't bombard them. Go one place.
1:37:28
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it. This was fantastic.