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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 edition of Infinite Loops and I literally could not be more excited, because my friend Tren Griffin is on and is going to be in story mode.
2:24
The idea for this actually sprung from Tren's insatiable curiosity, something all of our listeners should pay very close attention to, you can be curious about anything, and you can learn things from anyone.
2:39
So never be afraid to ask a story, but it was about the painting that hangs behind me, and so I decided to do some work and dig up the journal entry I had about it, and we'll get to that maybe later on.
2:55
But one of the things that I just love about Tren is, before we started recording, he said, "Hey Jim, this is all Morgan Housel's idea."
3:09
And Morgan's a friend of mine and of Tren's, and he sold a million books, so Morgan has some good ideas, right Tren? Tren Griffin: Exactly.
3:17
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I want to mention one other thing before we get going and that is, I'm currently reading a book called Happy: Why More or Less Everything Is Fine by Derren Brown, the famous magician/mentalist, et cetera, and A, don't not read a book because it's just a mentalist or he's just a magician.
3:45
This is a great book, and one of the things that he mentions that I want to talk about is Danny Kahneman's idea between the experiencing self and the remembering self.
3:51
We'll get to it a little bit in a minute.
3:58
The remembering self is what you're going to learn from today, and one of Derren's hypotheses is we are spending way too much time and effort on the experiencing self, whereby the remembering self is the one that gets wise.
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The remembering self is the one who can share wisdom, like Tren is going to do today.
4:23
And so that's my little advertisement for why this is going to be such a great thing.
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One last thing, [Schopenhauer], was basically a pessimist by the way, but he did have a really interesting comment which was, everybody takes the limits of their field of vision for the limits of the world.
4:40
Tren, you know that isn't so. Welcome.
4:47
Tren Griffin: Nice to be here.
4:50
One of the things that I was thinking about when you were saying that is the whole [Rashomon] idea of different people experiencing the identical event and having a different memory of the past, reaching different conclusions, learning different things.
5:05
And what you realize is over time is that, as time goes by, people sort of rearrange the past sometimes, and sometimes really good friends have different memory of the same thing.
5:18
It can cause disputes because they think, I did that and the other person says, I did that, and what you have to realize is that you should be more kind when you're thinking about somebody else's recollection, because everybody has a different view and a different perspective.
5:35
And Rashomon was such a great play, movie, whatever, it makes you think that, okay, other people have different views and other people had different experiences and that's okay, we all learn from it.
5:47
And your view is maybe a little bit different from mine, but that's cool.
5:53
One of the things I wanted to do was tell some stories today, that I never told before, that are stories that I learned from, and other people will have different memories about these events, but that's fine.
6:04
I should be cool about it.
6:04
The one I wanted to start with was the Death Star.
6:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The Death Star.
6:10
Yeah, when I saw that one, I was like, oh, I can't wait, please.
6:13
Tren Griffin: Okay, so the death star was, it's just hard to imagine, but in the old days, cable was considered more of a delivery of programming and it was linear.
6:24
And there was fights, there's always fights between the content and the pipe, in terms of what the transfer price is.
6:36
And what happened was Rupert Murdoch, who to many people was a very scary guy at the time, just because he was so aggressive and so crazy and so willing to roll the dice, said, "I'm going to buy a satellite system in the US and I'm going to emerge it with this guy, [Charlie Ergen], who was younger at the time, and we're going to create this thing.
6:54
And everybody said, dude, those systems together, there's only three, that's going to create a death star for cable.
7:04
And [Ted Turner] who was a friend of [Craig Markowski], who I was working with at the time said, "We're going to be like the Russians, we're going to stop the Nazis from taking over.
7:09
And only one of us is going to eat."
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And [Malone] was involved because Malone had content and he had carriage and there were UK assets, and everybody's fighting with everybody.
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And to have real leverage in a negotiation, you have to have some of both.
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You have to have a little carriage and the little content.
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Anyway, they were all fighting and there was politics, there's must-carry and foreign ownership rules, and the FCC was involved, [Preston Padden], and you lobbed.
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Craig got involved because he knew all these people from cable.
7:47
And I was younger and thinner, and at the time, it was like amazing.
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It's like, Murdoch's on the phone, we're talking to Malone, and this guy, Charlie Ergen is crazy.
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And Ted Turner is like, this is like being in a movie.
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And it's so cool because you're learning from these people and they're learning, and you're watching Malone the negotiator and Murdoch the negotiator.
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The key take away from me on all of this, there's a guy named [Gary Howard] who worked for Malone, was sort of my guide to the Malone and [Liberty] world, was two things.
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Number one, this idea of wholesale transfer pricing, which is, you're always arguing over what your cogs are with your suppliers, and different people have different leverage over time, and there was this fight and he came up with this term that, run with me, which is wholesale transfer price.
8:34
But then the other thing was, as things evolved, these people were always thinking about opportunity costs and they were super practical.
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These people were frenemies in the craziest sense and they were always thinking about what my best alternative was, given the dynamic of what was going on.
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And to be a fly on the wall and watching them all operate, and their history and their personality and their characters, Charlie Ergen is a special guy, Murdoch is a special guy, Malone's a special person.
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And Craig, my boss, was a special person and I was involved, and I kind of felt like I was in a movie.
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And I was like Forrest Gump, I've told you this analogy before, in Beijing.
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I'm like, and the ping pong thing and history's being made and I'm right here.
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It's like, what am I doing here?
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But it's fun to watch and you learn, and so there's this dynamic and it was fun to be a part of history, but also to learn from [inaudible] negotiators.
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That's my sort of death star story and it was...
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In my year, I talked to you about this before too, which is, shortly after my magical year, when the internet was arriving, I knew more about the internet than the average bear, but there was still cable and there were the old interests and the new world was coming.
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Anyway, it was a great time, it was fun.
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[crosstalk], and to have experiences like that, that's what life's all about. You can't buy that. It's just fun. It's like a video game.
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I'm like, how can you not be excited about being involved in this, in the first person?
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Absolutely.
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Let me ask you, those are legends today, right? Tren Griffin: Sure.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: These people went on to do just incredible things.
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What primary lesson did you learn, or series of lessons?
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Were they about negotiation?
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Were they about how people might appear to be enemies, but are actually frenemies?
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What were your big takeaways Tren Griffin: My big takeaway was, it was early on in my understanding of [Santa Fe Institute's] complex system, but I sort of understood that when you're going into it, you have a lot of uncertainty.
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And as things play out, there are things that happen that you don't anticipate and you do anticipate, and the negotiators are constantly weighing what their interests are.
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In the beginning, Murdoch thought he would align with Ergen, and we'd do this thing and Malone would be behind him, but then the cable sort of rallied.
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And there were the political forces and there were economic forces and the internet was coming in and there were programming costs.
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In the end, Murdoch got what he wanted, which is better carriage rates.
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He abandoned the deal, AT&T ended up with DIRECTV, which didn't turn out too well for them.
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But the point was, from a technology standpoint, I knew that the internet was going to make all this irrelevant, but it was certainly important in the near term.
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Anyway, it's the complex system, but as everything evolved, the really smart minds were constantly eliminating sunk costs and saying, what's my best alternative now?
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Murdoch in the beginning said, I'm going to create the death star.
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As it evolved, Malone was able to convince him, no, the death star was not a good idea, that we should re juggle the things.
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So it was immensely practical negotiators dealing with uncertainty and being willing to say, nope, that was what I felt, that was what I plan to do, but this is the best thing for me now.
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They were constantly thinking about the present moment opportunity cost of their actions.
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And the way the whole thing ended up was Murdoch said, no, I'm not going to build the death star, but he got what he wanted.
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Malone got what he wanted.
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Ergen got a settlement for Murdoch. Everybody got something. It's all good. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
12:33
I'm going to repeat it to you, also for me, but also for our listeners, so that we're taking the right lesson here.
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The one I hear and resonates so strongly with me, two actually, is I have been on my little soapbox about teaching people the value of being probabilistic thinkers, as opposed to deterministic thinkers, because if you're a probabilistic thinker, you don't dig in.
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You just say, okay, these are all the things that might happen, I've got to maybe think about what I'm going to do in each one of those instances.
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And the second thing that I hear, which is gang, if we should just shut this off, and the only lesson you took from Tren today is this one, it would be worth your time listening to this podcast, and that is sunk costs are a fallacy and a behavioral bias.
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Now for anyone who might not know what those are, it's like, I might have spent $10 million trying to develop something and I stayed really committed to that, even though if I just wiped away my knowledge of my 10 million investment and said, would I do anything with this now?
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And I said, no, you've got to be able to be like that, because that's good money after bad, if you don't learn this lesson, right, Tren? Tren Griffin: Exactly.
13:56
One of the things that I really admire about Bill Gates, and I've dealt with him since 1980 on business deals, is he's super rational when it comes to ideas and sunk costs.
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And so if you challenge him on an idea or he asks you something, and he felt X, and you say, "No, it's Y."
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If you're right on the facts and you're right on the logic, he's one of the most easy moves to Y that I've ever seen.
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He doesn't say, I'll look stupid, I'll look like I didn't understand what was going on, whatever.
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Completely rational about, okay, and then he moves on.
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To be able to do that is not to have sunk cost and pride like, oh, I'm admitting that I didn't really understand this.
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He just wants to understand and that makes you such a better business person to be able to take those mentally sunk ideas and just say, oh, I know I thought this, but no.
14:56
It's sort of the Charlie Munger idea of what beautiful idea, what idea that was dear to you did you abandon this year?
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Did you really look at your life and say, oh wow, I thought this, now it's this?
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And dealing with Bill over the years, I've always admired the way he rationally says, okay, now I've changed my view.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: I'm going to translate again, just for my own lessons, selfishly.
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What I hear you saying is something I also deeply believe in, which is don't tie your ideas or your thesis's or hypotheses to yourself as a person.
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If you go into a mode that is, I want to learn, I want to make the best decision possible, if you've already tied it to you and your emotions, you're going to lose, I think. That's my belief.
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Tren Griffin: You're right. Leave your ego behind. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes.
15:55
Tren Griffin: Focus on the best decision given the facts you have right now, because a lot of uncertainty is eliminated over time.
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New uncertainty enters the picture, but as you get the new facts, be rational, think about opportunity cost and let go of your ego. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes.
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Tren Griffin: Make the right decision.
16:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Absolutely, and that is really easy to say and as I've watched it, it is really, really hard for a lot of people to do.
16:19
One thing, as you know, I'm an incredibly lucky guy and I've been able to meet people like you.
16:25
And one of the things that I have noted is that people who outsiders perceive as having a big ego, no, no, no.
16:33
They have a fragile ego.
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Those are very different things.
16:41
If you have a very fragile ego, you're going to want everyone to keep praising you and telling you what a guy you are and all of that.
16:46
And I personally think that's bullshit, and if you actually have a good ego, let's not even call it big, but a good ego, you're going to be able to say, I don't care.
16:58
You can hold to whatever you're doing over there, I'm just going to make my decisions based on the facts.
17:06
I'm going to try to learn some new things, which is a bonus, if you go into life as a learning machine, you're going to do much better than people who don't.
17:11
But to see it with these larger than life characters, that must have been just an incredible trip.
17:23
Tren Griffin: It was and the key thing is these people are all confident, but as conditions changed, as uncertainty resolved itself, as new things entered, they always made the rational decision that was best for them.
17:33
And so they didn't leave a lot of money on the table because of ego, and they were frenemies and they were perfectly well.
17:45
Malone eventually had a 20% interest in news and was able to extract a pound of flesh for that, but it was a beautiful thing, and so getting past the ego...
17:56
The second story I was going to talk about is another ego story, which is in 1990, Bill Gates' parents were very good friends of mine and mentors, they came to me and said, Bill's going to have a book written about him, actually two, they're going to attack him and it's going to be bad, and so you should help write an autobiography.
18:16
And I said, "Sure, I'd be glad to do that."
18:23
They said, we like your book, The Global Negotiator, it's great.
18:23
And we will get you a real ghost writer involved, but you'll be involved on the substance side and you'll get involved.
18:32
I said, "Great," and [Minue] was a publisher, [Alyssa Wagner] is a PR person.
18:32
I geared up, I did a ton of research, like this is how we're going to do it, we're going to tell the story.
18:40
And Bill was sort of busy running Microsoft and his parents were planning this, and all these minions were responding to that.
18:45
And eventually Bill sort of got involved in it.
18:45
He looked at me and he said, "I'm not going to do this.
18:50
I'm not going to spend my time writing an autobiography." This is 1990.
18:55
He was 35, we were both the same age.
18:55
I'm 35, I've got stuff to do.
18:55
And the key thing that he said, which was so important to me, which is, I want to go make history. I want to go do things.
19:06
I didn't want to write an autobiography. And he's still that way.
19:06
He's more interested in changing the world and learning new things.
19:13
He doesn't want to write a retrospective of his life, and so he didn't write it.
19:17
And the other thing is, he didn't care that the books came out. I actually grabbed him.
19:22
They're here my office, [inaudible] these autobiographies, which are... No.
19:25
They're sort of true, but there's ton of fiction in there.
19:25
And the fact is, he doesn't care.
19:31
The most he's ever done to tell the story of Microsoft was in this book called The Road Ahead, which I helped write as a convincer, I'm in the credits, but the important thing was, ego isn't what matters to him.
19:44
What matters to him is making a difference and changing the world and doing great things.
19:49
And making the world a better place and making something meaningful, and putting a dent in the universe, which gets into my third story.
20:00
And my third story is really the creation of the PC and the early days.
20:00
The story really in succinct form is, Bill and Paul were at this school called Lakeside and the Mother's Club did a rummage sale, and they raised some money and they bought some timeshare time.
20:13
And in those days to get a deck mini computer was $40 an hour for your timesharing, with your teletype, $40 an hour.
20:24
A new PDP would cost you, well, PDP-8 was like 18,000, which is in 1970s dollars, a little lot of money.
20:32
But $40 an hour for a kid who was 16, 17 years old was a lot of money too.
20:40
Anyway, they burned through the Mother's Club money, but they spent a ton of time trying to get used computers.
20:44
They said, we'll debug if you let us use the computer, or they tried to sneak in and use the university's computer and eventually got kicked out.
20:48
But the point was they wanted access to computers.
20:51
The lesson here was they really had a problem, which is, they wanted their own computer, but they didn't have one.
20:57
And then in progression, Intel came out with a series of chips and the chips were the 404, which came out and then the 808, which came out.
21:12
I sort of wrote down the dates here.
21:12
808 was in '72 and the 808 was a really interesting microprocessor, and everything was on a chip.
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Intel was doing amazing things, but it could run an elevator.
21:26
It could run this little machine they made, [inaudible], to do traffic counting, but it couldn't run a high level language to do general purpose computing.
21:36
But the two of them, particularly Paul with a hardwired, knew that it was going to be possible someday.
21:40
This is why when you're a VC, when you're investing, you want to find people who want to solve a real problem.
21:46
And their real problem was, I want a computer and I want it in my house and I want access to it and I have to pay for it.
21:50
Intel wasn't thinking that way, Intel was thinking, okay, well, this is something that you can run elevators, and one of the original ones was, we're going to be able to do different versions of calculators without reprogramming and things like that.
22:07
Anyway, so they were on this, and then Bill went to Harvard and Paul left his university and went to Boston.
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And they were walking through Harvard Square, in Central Square, the news stand there, and they saw this magazine about the [Altair], and it had the [8800] chip in it.
22:26
And they had done the math in their heads around BASIC and they knew, they didn't know, they thought that BASIC would run in this thing.
22:33
It was finally big enough to be a general purpose computer.
22:39
And even Intel, wasn't thinking that way at the time, because they were thinking, a lot of people are going to do things with this.
22:43
They're just thinking, no, we want what we had with the PDP, with timeshare, in our house, And that was the genius.
22:54
The other thing that was key was, they saw it and they knew, oh, it was going to be available.
22:54
And they also knew if Bill didn't drop out of Harvard then, if they didn't write operating systems then, it was going to be too late.
23:04
Bill, couldn't say, okay, in three years, after I graduate from Harvard and then I have a vacation, then we'll start.
23:10
No, he had to do it right then and they had to start working on it right now.
23:14
It's this idea of seize the moment, Charlie Munger's idea of opportunities come slowly like playing cards and every once in a while, there's a great one.
23:26
You've got to jump on that one. They jumped on that one.
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They were solving a problem.
23:31
They jumped on the idea and they did it.
23:35
The key lesson is, as you go through life, you're going to find great opportunities.
23:35
It'll be to join a company or to marry someone or to go on a trip or whatever, sometimes you've just got to do it.
23:45
And both those things were inspiring to me in terms of Bill saying, I don't care about the past.
23:51
I want to go make a dent in the universe.
23:51
That was the book thing, I'm not going to bother with that.
23:56
And the other thing was, sometimes you just have to jump and do it, and those were inspiring to me. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
24:06
To me, it's the jump and do it, that is the lesson that kids, hopefully younger people listening today, can understand, but I'll add a caution.
24:14
I went through a similar experience that you're aware of.
24:20
I saw the future, I guess, or I thought I saw the future, with online investment advice.
24:28
So I did exactly what you said, I jumped on it, I went all in.
24:28
I got a very fancy little patent to distribute investment advice over a worldwide network, and it failed.
24:44
And so a lot of people that I help, and I'm sure you do a lot of mentoring too.
24:51
So I'm sure that this is a similar experience for you, they fear that if they jump on something and fail, oh, everyone's going to laugh at them, everyone's going to say, "See what happens, see what happens?"
25:04
And I want our listeners to understand, and I think you agree with me on this. If you don't, tell me.
25:09
But I want our listeners to understand that that is not what happens.
25:14
Yeah, people who don't like you or your ideas, but they're never going to like you and your ideas.
25:20
So there's always going to be a certain segment out there. Just like, "Ha, ha, ha.
25:25
Look at O'Shaughnesy, he fucked that up."
25:25
But the fact is, even when you fail, you learn so many things, that it's so worth it. Right, would you agree?
25:39
Tren Griffin: Totally agree.
25:39
And your example is a beautiful one, because eventually you did Canva and a bunch of other things, which are logical evolutions of what you learned when you went through the previous one.
25:50
You also went through that and you learned that you should have sold out at an earlier point when you got the big offer.
25:54
So you learn these things.
25:54
And so the classic example of that was when the 8008 processor came out, they formed this little company called Traf-O-Data.
26:00
And in creating Traf-O-Data, they broke even, or they rushed them on about how much they made or lost or whatever.
26:15
But the point was they developed tools, and one of the tools was the ability to simulate a processor they didn't have.
26:18
You could go to a mainframe and simulate a microprocessor.
26:26
And so they had those tools.
26:26
So when they had to come up with basic fast, they already had the development tools.
26:30
Paul had developed them.
26:30
Bill was the one who wrote basic.
26:35
Paul was the one who said hardware, who wrote the simulator.
26:35
They were sort of like peanut butter and chocolate, and peanut butter.
26:39
And they had everything at the right time.
26:43
But the point was Traf-O-Data which was a failure or a push, was key to seizing the opportunity when the opportunity came to sell basic to [Walter] and move that on.
26:56
But in your case, so too, I go back to your case, you made a big leap when you Minnesota, right?
27:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: True, yeah.
27:02
Tren Griffin: To go and get in the investment business.
27:05
You made a big leap to write a book.
27:05
And this is where I talked to you before about it takes bravery.
27:11
Start a company, you got to be brave.
27:11
Write a book, you got to be brave.
27:11
Paint that painting behind you, you got to be brave. Like, "This is me. This is my painting.
27:16
You can criticize it, write a review about my book and tell me that it's lousy."
27:22
If you're not brave, you're not going to succeed.
27:29
And everybody falls down.
27:29
And if you don't fall down a couple times, you're not learning. So you got to go. You got to be brave. You got to do it. Let's go.
27:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally agree.
27:37
A friend of mine had a father-in-law who would always say, "Why cheer from the sidelines if you can play in the game?" And it's so true.
27:48
And so I hope what our listeners take away, especially our younger listeners, but also anyone who's whatever, my age, and they just decide, "You know what?
28:00
I want to do something else." Do it. Be brave.
28:00
Put yourself in the arena.
28:08
And yeah, does it take courage?
28:08
You convinced me that in fact it does, but the add-on there is what's the worst thing that's going to happen?
28:15
The worst thing that's going to happen is you're going to fail that time, but hopefully you're going to learn so much from that experience that it leads to better things going down the road.
28:26
This is not a dress rehearsal, unless you're Hindu.
28:34
But for most of us, this is it, one and done.
28:34
So life is not a dress rehearsal. It's the real thing.
28:41
Go and live it, because you don't want to be on your death bed and just be thinking, "Oh my God, all the great..."
28:49
because everybody's capable of having great ideas, everybody.
28:49
And your admonishment, which I think is excellent of, you know what, it's going to be scary, you're going to take courage, but take the leap. Right? Tren Griffin: Yeah.
29:06
It's sort of like you do a lot of journaling.
29:09
A lot of people have probably amazing journals.
29:09
It could be books or novels or whatever, but the act of saying, "Well, I'm going to show it to people," it's like, "Oh, I can't do that, because I could fail, I could get criticism."
29:21
But the point here is you really need criticism to be better.
29:28
So I'll tell you another Microsoft story.
29:33
So Bill G reviews are famous.
29:33
Bill Gates reviews are famous, and he is a great reviewer and he's tough.
29:42
I was in the review with this younger person presenting years and years ago, and Bill was leaning forward and rocking.
29:50
And he was drilling into this guy and nailing it, and "What about this? And what about this?
29:55
And you didn't think about this and this is wrong."
30:00
And it was just an amazing grilling.
30:00
And this person was just saying, "My God, what's going on?" But he responded well.
30:08
And then Bill said, "Okay, we got to move on to the next person."
30:15
And the guy left the room, his head was hanging down like, "God, I'm in I'm going to be fired, better go clear out my desk."
30:20
And the guy Lee leaves the room.
30:23
And Bill turns to everybody, he goes, "That guy is really, really smart.
30:28
We got to make sure we keep that guy."
30:28
And the point is in a Bill G review, if he's saying nothing, that's the worst possible thing.
30:36
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
30:38
Tren Griffin: If he's drilling in, if he wants to know what you think, he thinks you're smart.
30:39
If he's not saying anything, you're in deep trouble.
30:46
But there's this thing at Microsoft, we call it rude Q&A, which is, let's say you want to start a company or have a new job.
30:54
Sometimes it's good to go to someone who you trust who has good judgment and say, "Give me rude Q&A.
31:00
Come at me as hard as you can about my thesis."
31:06
And if you can't survive that, then you haven't thought it through. Right?
31:13
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
31:13
Tren Griffin: And so the rude Q&A is somebody getting so...
31:16
So Munger's reputation with buffet is being the abominable no man, which is part of his job is Warren comes to him and says, "I'm thinking about buying X."
31:21
And Charlie goes and throws up on it.
31:26
And Warren says, "Okay, well I'm not going to do that."
31:26
And what Warren says is sometimes he goes to Charlie say, "Well, I'm thinking about doing this."
31:30
And Charlie says, "Might not be a good idea."
31:34
And Warren says, "Okay, that means it's probably okay.
31:34
I'm going ahead with that one."
31:37
But you have to have someone who you can go to.
31:37
You don't have to, but it's good to have someone you could to and say, "Give me your best ideas why I shouldn't do this, why I shouldn't take the job, why I should."
31:48
And then you go, and then you got some criticism.
31:54
Say, "I'm going to go dig into that.
31:54
And then this is how I'm going to solve that problem," or whatever.
31:58
And shouldn't be just one person.
31:58
A lot of the key about having a good advisory board or a board is they know where the potholes are.
32:05
They had some experiences and they help you anticipate and think through things that you wouldn't otherwise.
32:12
Because we have a tendency to be over confident and professor Rosy scenario.
32:16
We've all studied with her.
32:24
And so rude Q&A makes you think and gets you on your toes, but also gets the adrenaline going.
32:30
Because if you make the leap, you better go.
32:30
It's like getting into really cold water. You better jump in.
32:35
Putting your toe in, going to get in kind of slow. No. You go. But when you go, go.
32:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
32:44
And what I take from that is a couple of things.
32:44
So the first thing, my grandfather taught me this thing, and we've discussed it called pre meditating your decisions.
32:51
And that's where you write out all of the potential things that you can think of.
32:56
It's really good if you're creative and love alternate histories. It can be fun.
33:01
I've done it quite a bit.
33:01
And sometimes by writing, you learn you have no idea what you're talking about.
33:08
So that in of itself is a great thing.
33:14
But your idea of the advisors is this idea of cognitive diversity, which I think is really, really important, because if you really want to be able to nail things, you really need to surround yourself with smart people who think differently than you do, because we often fall into the trap, " Well, this is the way I think, and this is right." Probably not.
33:35
And so having people who can point out, "Yeah, but did you think of this? Did you think of this? Did you think of this?"
33:46
Then if you withstand that...
33:46
The other thing that I take away that I've been advising people to do is don't create straw men, create steel men.
33:55
Learn somebody else's position or business idea, whatever.
33:55
Let's say you're opposed to it, don't do ad hominem or straw man.
34:04
Do a steel man and see if you can break that one down.
34:04
And if you can, then you're going to be prepared.
34:10
And to your point, you can create that steel man by seeking advice from people who think differently than you.
34:18
But I also agree with your conclusion, which is once all that's done, get going. Right?
34:23
Tren Griffin: Absolutely.
34:27
You got to be brave at that point.
34:27
But the key thing you mentioned before, which I could get into with other stories, which is, I've seen some amazing things.
34:31
I got lucky and was born in the right place at the right time.
34:37
And in Seattle where Microsoft, McCaw, Starbucks, Amazon, Costco.
34:41
And I have some relation to all of those in some way.
34:41
I know the people involved and I know the people involved directly or I know of the people involved.
34:57
But in every case, the founders surrounded themselves with people who were diverse.
35:03
They thought differently, they had different skills, they learned from them.
35:06
And so you take the Microsoft example, which is pretty classic, which is you had Bill and Paul. They were different. They were a team.
35:10
But then after that, the people they hired and then people bringing in, like John Shirley from Radio Shack as the president, Mike Maples came in from IBM, Frank Gaudette came in from the East Coast and was the early CFO.
35:21
All these people were very different.
35:27
They thought differently.
35:27
They had different skills.
35:27
And so in the early years of Microsoft, Bill was the CFO too.
35:31
And Gaudette came in and he was the guy who guided him through the IPO and all that.
35:37
But he was an amazing guy. And you learn from him.
35:37
Mike Maple Sr, amazing guy.
35:37
Everybody learned from him. Everybody grew from him. But it's this diversity.
35:44
And then you go to Amazon, the people Jeff fired, or at McCaw, like Steve Hooper, Wayne Perry, John Stanton, all the people, Craig surrounded him in addition to his brothers, none of them are the same.
35:55
They all have different skills.
36:01
They all have different weaknesses.
36:01
They're all different, but together they were a better team because they were all different. Nobody's like Craig.
36:09
Craig's dyslexic, he's analog, he's intuitive.
36:13
In that case, okay, well, you better have somebody who's really sharp and logical. This is Wayne Perry.
36:20
I go through all the names of these people at Costco or whatever, but it's the same principle, which is diversity is super important.
36:30
But also, if you know yourself, you know, "I'm not a finance person or I'm not a deal person or I'm not whatever."
36:38
And then with McCaw, one of the key things was they were an M and A company.
36:38
They were rolling up cable.
36:44
And then they sold that and doubled down on cellular.
36:44
They're rolling up cellular.
36:48
And eventually they realized, "Hey, we need someone who can make trains run a time."
36:48
And they hired Jim [Balsillie] in from McCaw.
36:53
And to have the self-knowledge to say, "Okay, we're good.
36:59
We've done a lot, but we need this new skill, and to bring somebody else in," that's self-awareness and understanding, " We're good at this, but we're not good at what it's going to take to get to the next level."
37:10
And Balsillie was an example of that.
37:10
I could give other ones, but anyway. None of us are complete.
37:16
We all need compliments and being aware enough to know what your compliments that are missing are, is a good skill to have.
37:25
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Absolutely.
37:28
And it comes back to good old Socrates, "The unexamined life is not worth living."
37:34
So in addition to it being, make your life better, I think it can be painful, but it ultimately, I believe is going to make your life better to examine it.
37:45
So the lesson I hear here and I've seen in real time in my own life is man, nobody is perfect.
37:51
If you think you are, oh, you're much more faulty than you think.
37:57
Because if you lack that, it means you lack self-awareness too.
37:57
So that is a great, great story and a great, great lesson.
38:03
Let's move on to, because I love this one, the story about the dot com boom involving Lucent and Amazon and FOMO, fear of missing out.
38:18
Tren Griffin: So '94 was an amazing example of business and history and everything.
38:27
There were so many things happening at the same time.
38:27
And it was my magical year.
38:32
And at the time I was working in a place called [inaudible] which is at Kirkland.
38:38
And we had just founded a company and I was a co-founder, and we were right next to Bill Gates' investment company.
38:44
Craig McCaw had just sold McCaw Cellular to AT&T, which is in another building.
38:51
And so the ex vice chairman of McCaw and of LIN Broadcasting, Tom Alberg was in the office next to me and he was working on another auction.
39:01
And it's complicated because Craig refused to go on the AT&T board, he refused to sign a non compete and he was going to go compete with them soon with Nextel but for a while, he was going to buy spectrum. Anyway.
39:09
So Tom was in the next office and unknown to me, Tom was talking with this young guy, Jeff Bezos about this company he was thinking about forming, and they were doing a seed round and Bezos was trying to raise a million bucks.
39:19
He's talking to Tom in the next office.
39:24
And I'm not even aware of what's going on, probably because I was traveling 500,000 miles a year.
39:29
So I probably wasn't there.
39:29
But anyway, and so eventually he wrote a check or $50,000 and the million bucks was one on four pre-money.
39:38
And so it was a pretty good time to buy Amazon, very good.
39:46
Now, I was never asked and I didn't know what was going on.
39:46
So I don't have any FOMO about that deal because I can't put it in my anti-portfolio because I was never asked.
39:58
Would I liked to have been asked? Hell yeah. But I wasn't. So that happened.
39:58
And so I don't feel bad about it and I feel great for Tom and everybody else.
40:05
Other friends of mine did, Nick Hanauer and other people made the same investment at the same time, worked out pretty well for them.
40:15
But I don't feel bad about it.
40:15
Now there was, was another fellow that I can't give you his name, but he was asked to invest in the Amazon, and he said no.
40:23
And so it's in his anti-portfolio.
40:23
And unfortunately, it affected his judgment because every deal after that he wrote a check for, because he was afraid that he'd miss another one.
40:37
And he completely threw caution to the wind because he missed this big one.
40:37
He didn't view that as sunk, he viewed that as, "Oh God, I can't take this.
40:42
I can't take this again."
40:42
And so he must've wrote 200 checks between then and 2001.
40:48
He had a couple of singles and maybe a double, but it was just a disaster.
40:58
But the point was he let the anti-portfolio miss drive his decisions.
41:06
And so FOMO was, he was fear of missing out on the downside.
41:10
Now, Lucent example is another one, which is, I know a friend who was going to go to work for a guy who sold his company to Lucent for billions of dollars.
41:21
He had this money and he was going to have a family office.
41:21
And this guy was going to work for the family office and help manage his money.
41:25
And what happened with this guy who sold his company to Lucent was he got Lucent stock, and he sold it at a great time to get a good price.
41:38
But then Lucent stocks started to drop.
41:38
And he said, "Well, I'd like to fund this family office, but I don't want to sell because it's gone down."
41:45
And he had loss aversion, which is he thought he was worth seven billion, now he's only worth six and a half.
41:51
And then he was worth $6 billion.
41:57
And he said, "Well, I can't sell now. I can't sell now.
41:57
I used to be worth $7 billion."
41:57
And this is loss aversion again.
42:03
And it went down to five, and then went down to four and went down to two.
42:11
He rode it all the way down and he couldn't sell because he couldn't let go of, "I used to be worth $7 billion."
42:18
And the rational thing to do is to say, "I'm not worth 7 billion, I'm worth six.
42:24
I didn't sell at the time, that's fine, but my opportunities right now are six."
42:28
And so in both cases, my miss on Amazon was fortunate because I didn't actually know about it, but this guy who did, it ruined him.
42:37
Not ruined him, he just made a lot of bad investments.
42:42
This guy at Lucent who sold to Lucent rode the stock all the way down because he couldn't give up on loss aversion. He couldn't give up.
42:50
And so the lesson there is to watch that.
42:50
And this is this thing Charlie Munger talks about.
42:54
You learn vicariously, which through stories like this, through examples like this, you learn what not to do.
42:59
Now, we all make mistakes and we're not going to be perfect and we'll do something similar to that, but try and take away the lesson.
43:04
These people peed on the electric fence.
43:09
If you're not paying attention, you're not learning from that.
43:14
And so those stories are particularly vivid and they illustrate loss aversion and FOMO.
43:14
So anyway, it was an amazing time.
43:23
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It makes me think of the quote from Marcel Proust that goes, "It was always thus impelled by a state of mind, which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions."
43:42
And so the lesson that I take away from that is twofold.
43:42
Develop a, we'll see, type attitude.
43:51
The Taoist Farmer is a classic tale, but I want to hear your story so we'll put that one to the side.
43:57
But also, don't either look at a big miss at your time at bet, or the home run that you hit, don't make those be the things that define you, because if you do, personally, I believe you're fucked both ways.
44:17
On the letting the missed opportunity, so you're, " Oh my God, oh my God. Oh my God." Well, move on.
44:24
Use it, learn, move on and don't let it dictate things.
44:30
But also, you make a big score and big success...
44:39
I often see people try to duplicate that, not so much in terms of the business plan or anything like that, but more in the terms of, "I need this person, I need this situation." No.
44:55
Heraclitus said before Socrates, "The same man does not step in the same river twice."
45:02
Life is fluid, life moves.
45:02
And I've found that people who are fluid and able to adjust, error correct, those are the people who go on to really do well over long periods of time. Does everybody? Of course not. Of course not.
45:18
Unfortunately, there are some...
45:18
there is a randomness to life.
45:26
Another good lesson that I would suggest everyone learn is position yourself if you can, so that if some serendipitous thing happens to you, that you totally weren't expecting, that you could A, see it, and B, take advantage of it immediately. You agree?
45:45
Tren Griffin: Totally agree.
45:45
And one of the things you learn when you see a lot of people over the years, I'm fortunate because I work with these people, a lot of interesting people.
45:56
And so they come through their office and I get to see what these billionaires are like.
46:02
And pretty soon you get a pretty good judgment... or CEOs or whatever.
46:07
And pretty soon you get a pretty good judgment and you say, "Well, this person's been very successful."
46:11
And they're what Craig McCaw calls health fellow, well met, which is they look like a CEO.
46:17
They've got great hair and teeth, but they don't know up from down.
46:17
They're good at politics, and they got into this position, God knows how.
46:24
And then there's some other entrepreneur comes in and you look at him or her and you say, "This is luck."
46:28
They were evolving this and it was like they hit the jackpot, it was the lottery.
46:39
And then other people come in and you say, "Wow, this person is so skillful.
46:47
And they have so many reverses and they've done things multiple times.
46:54
And their judgment is excellent."
46:54
And you get both outcomes and you can't assume...
46:54
One of the things that Bill Gates says is, "Just because someone's wealthy doesn't mean you should listen to them.
47:07
Just because someone that had one success."
47:07
Now, if someone's been repetitively successful, then the odds are that there's a trout in the milk, as Emerson said, that this person has skill.
47:19
And so it's repetitive skill, but you get a sense of it.
47:19
And some people you can just tell are just an empty suit.
47:26
And how they got into their position, God knows how it happened, and God help the shareholders, whatever.
47:30
But you get an intuitive sense for that.
47:30
But then also, you get a sense of this, person's full of ego.
47:37
This person's willing to learn.
47:37
The difference between those things are unbelievable.
47:44
This person understands on costs. This person doesn't.
47:49
This person sees opportunities.
47:49
This person's terrified. This person's brave. Like Murdoch.
47:54
Craig McCaw said to me once, "The only per person in the business world who scares Malone is Murdoch, because he's a gambler."
48:00
Malone would say, "Don't be in an auction with Rupert. Bad idea."
48:09
Some people just naturally have the...
48:09
And then like Charlie Ergen, another example, I talked about him earlier. He's a poker player.
48:16
He's always looking at the odds.
48:20
He's always keeping his options open. Loves optionality.
48:20
He's a fascinating person to watch.
48:29
And he runs a cheap operation.
48:29
I visited his headquarters once with Craig.
48:34
It's in a converted shopping mall. His office is in...
48:34
it used to be a 7-Eleven or optometrist office or something.
48:41
The hallways are as big as a mall.
48:41
They got some art out there, but he's cheap.
48:46
And he created that thing from nothing.
48:46
Denny Washington who's a friend of Craig's started with one bulldozer.
48:53
When you meet somebody like that, who built a construction empire, you realize this person's good and this person's smart, and this person works hard, and this person likes to build things.
49:04
Great story about Denny Washington is he bought this boat and he converted it into a luxury yacht he keeps up in Vancouver.
49:09
And what he loved to do was make the yacht into a beautiful yacht, down in the engines, "We'll fix this, we'll do this, we'll get this here.
49:17
This is the way you do this."
49:22
And then what I've heard is now that it's been built, he's bored of it, now that it's this beautiful luxury yacht.
49:29
Some people just like to build shit.
49:29
Some people like to build things, build companies.
49:34
I know a guy, unless he is running a company, his hands shake. He has to have an army.
49:41
He used to be in the Navy.
49:41
He has to have an army he's bossing around.
49:46
And so you watch these people and you'll go like, "Okay, there are all these different characteristics."
49:50
And maybe this person is a great operator, but not so strategic.
49:50
This person's strategic, not a great operator. This person has both.
49:56
This person has good judgment.
49:56
This person likes to build things.
50:00
This person sells anything that can get top dollar for.
50:00
And you get this, he's more of a trader.
50:06
And so it's just fun to watch.
50:10
To me, it's like Halo, but it's real life.
50:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
50:15
Tren Griffin: They're people and you've met them, and they're unpredictable and there's uncertainty.
50:21
It's the best video game ever. And that's what's fun. Business is so much fun.
50:27
But they'll be like, “Oh, this is business is boring. It's just numbers. ” So, it's people. It's uncertainty.
50:31
It's crazy things happening. It's opportunities.
50:31
It's, you got to be brave.
50:37
All these things going on.
50:37
And you think, that's not boring. That's not just numbers.
50:43
It's like, I'd rather do something, whatever.
50:43
And to me, it's like a video game.
50:43
Like, dopamine hits all day long. I'm talking to you. How great is this? This is fantastic.
50:50
When this is over, I got a board meeting. Absolutely great.
50:56
Like, cool people, new people, new things, new technology. Let's go. Wow.
51:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I am 100% on board with you on that one.
51:05
It's just like, you can have so much fun, right? Honestly, if you... I have found. I could be wrong. Usually I'm right.
51:15
But I have found that people who make money their goal...
51:22
I have met a few who made it.
51:22
They're miserable, number one.
51:22
But the vast majority of people that I have met, and I've been fortunate to meet a lot of these very successful creators, like you have, and the money was the last thing on their mind.
51:35
It was like, "No, I want to build this. I want to do this.
51:42
I want to have this to work on." Right?
51:42
Life is your canvas, and what, are you to leave it blank?
51:50
And so, the idea that everyone is different.
51:50
Yeah, of course they are.
51:58
I'm thinking of Taleb too, who, he has these little fits on Twitter that have gotten me sour on the guy.
52:06
But I kind of like what he writes, right?
52:06
So, he has that great example.
52:11
If you're picking a surgeon, right?
52:11
If the one guy comes in and he's six foot two and has got gray hair and his suit is perfect, and he's got the perfect white coat that's pressed.
52:22
And then the other guy comes in and he needs a haircut, and he's five eight and overweight, and his tie is askew, Taleb says, "Hire that guy."
52:28
The reason, very insightful.
52:28
Do you know how much harder that guy had to work to get in that room than the first guy?
52:37
So, that guy didn't have anything handed to him.
52:46
And what spurred that thought was your idea of the empty suit CEO, right, who got lucky.
52:53
They looked the part, right?
52:53
And so, the other lesson that I would add, I think you'd agree, but you'll tell me whether you do or not, is you've got to learn to look below the surface. Right?
53:06
You've got to learn to...
53:06
The book's cover is not the book.
53:06
I've seen a lot of humorous things saying, "Oh yes it is." But it's really not. Read the book too. Correct? Tren Griffin: Yeah. Absolutely.
53:23
Taleb's a great example, which is, I wrote a post on him. He liked it.
53:28
And he came to Seattle, and I said, "Well, let's get together and walk around Seattle, and I'll show you where all the cobblestones are."
53:35
He likes to walk on cobblestones. We'll do some flaneurie.
53:40
And we spent a marvelous day just walking around the city, talking. Mostly me listening.
53:45
And in person, he's a pussycat.
53:54
So polite, so kind, thoughtful, all that.
53:54
And online, he's more of a battler, but the point is that I like a battler.
54:00
I want somebody who's going to challenge me, and who's going to force me to confront hard things.
54:08
And that's what it- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, yeah.
54:11
It's like- Tren Griffin: Go ahead.
54:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Anthony de Mello, who's unfortunately died very young, but he's got a great series of books that I highly recommend everyone.
54:19
The one I'm thinking of right now is Awakenings and Awareness.
54:24
Those two are really good.
54:24
But he has this clever thing.
54:24
He says, "If you want to see what your own faults are, look at what bothers you in other people."
54:37
Which I think is great, because we're pretty good at judging externally.
54:37
We're horrible at self-assessment, for the most part. Do you agree?
54:42
Tren Griffin: Yeah, absolutely.
54:46
It's hard to have perspective on yourself, because you only have the one view.
54:53
Whereas if you bring in multiple views, you get a bigger picture.
54:53
And that's why it's so important to go out and look at whatever the problem is from different angles.
55:08
And then the other problem is it's hard to convince people of things.
55:08
And this is why I sort of had this idea of, let's do stories in this podcast. Because people are...
55:20
We both write books, and your books is tremendously successful.
55:20
[Morgan]'s tremendously successful.
55:24
And the key thing is people will listen to a story, and particularly people will listen to a story about a famous person better than they'll listen to just me talking about something.
55:35
And so, I wrote this post on Malone, or I wrote this post on a Bezos, or whoever it was.
55:43
And if they hear it as a story, they'll pay attention.
55:50
Business books, it's like a tiny town.
55:50
People are really like, "I'm going to write a business book.
55:55
I'm going to make big money." Like, sorry.
55:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No, you're not.
55:58
Tren Griffin: People don't read.
55:59
Which is I guess why Morgan's success is so amazing, right?
56:04
There are a few books, like yours, like Morgan's.
56:04
My Munger book is by far my biggest seller, but my Munger book sold a lot of books because Munger's an interesting guy.
56:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
56:14
Tren Griffin: He's always poking somebody in the eye, or saying something nasty.
56:17
And so it's like, "I want to hear what he says." You know? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
56:21
Tren Griffin: Like, "I don't want to hear what Tren says."
56:22
My negotiation book, which I offer free on the internet, it's a great book but...
56:29
It has some great stories by me.
56:29
Actually, it's all stories. And my co-author.
56:29
But the point is, it's hard to get people's attention. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes.
56:38
Tren Griffin: And so, if you have a story, it's like...
56:38
One of the great stories is '93, '92, something like that, Steve Jobs came up to Seattle.
56:44
Or I think it might have been in Palo Alto, because Craig goes down there a lot, because he went to Stanford.
56:48
And Steve was explaining the internet to Craig McCaw.
56:54
And he's saying, "Well, this is the way it's work and all that, and pretty soon you're going to do business on internet." Craig said, "Oh." He goes, "That's great. Let's buy it."
57:05
Craig actually said that. I can remember.
57:05
I wasn't in the meeting, but you said that, you know?
57:11
And he said, "Yeah, absolutely. I did say that."
57:11
But the point though is what they realized was, well, you can't buy it, but you can buy things around it. You can buy compliments.
57:19
But if I'm trying to tell a story about compliments, about some things, one of the concepts that I'm trying to teach people, younger people in particular, is sometimes innovation, you can't make any money from it.
57:32
It's all consumer surplus.
57:32
You benefit the consumer, it's amazing.
57:37
But you don't have anything that lasts.
57:37
And so, you have a business that doesn't have a mode and it disappears.
57:40
You innovate it like crazy, but it all goes to the consumer.
57:45
Munger does a great job of doing it.
57:45
But if you can say that with a story...
57:45
Talking to Bob Metcalfe, who invented ethernet, he said to me once, " Nobody ever made a nickel from my invention, from ethernet."
57:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
57:59
Tren Griffin: People made money around it.
58:00
So, there's different...
58:00
People say, "Well, there's no innovation."
58:04
Well, most of the innovation is consumer surplus, which is what this guy Nordhaus, who won the Nobel prize, proved, which is most of it goes right to the consumer.
58:09
And so, what you have to do is you have to say, "Yeah, but you got this thing that you're selling with it."
58:19
I mean, if you just take your whole podcast network or whatever, you're giving us amounts of value. Huge consumer surplus.
58:24
But you're also increasing some brand value for O'Shaughnessy, your business.
58:31
And all the things Patrick's done since we first started talking about diversifying OSMs, what they do.
58:42
But it's good for business.
58:42
And so, this is this principle we've talked about before I have, which is give to get.
58:47
You innovate, you give with open source or whatever, and then you have open core, and you have something, and related to that, you make money on or whatever. And all these... Like Twitter. People are on Twitter.
58:58
Most of them are content marketers. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
59:02
Tren Griffin: Most of them are selling something else.
59:02
With me, I'm just trying to pay it forward, because I'm not selling anything. That's not what I do.
59:09
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But I agree with the whole idea about the content marketing and everything else, and people don't quite understand.
59:11
And I love the way you've simplified it too. Give to get.
59:18
I would put it in terms of karma, right? The wheel of karma. Same thing.
59:25
It's really the same thing.
59:25
But I just find it so interesting that I'm pretty good at reframing things.
59:34
I'm pretty good at convincing people of things, like if I'm trying to convince them to do something.
59:39
And one of the things that I still stumble on is that one.
59:44
It's like, "No, but then they'll get... Then they'll get..."
59:44
And they're very secretive, right?
59:50
About no, no, no, no, no.
59:50
And I'm like, "Listen, man, I cannot underline this more deeply for you.
59:56
You could shout this from rooftops.
1:00:01
And for the most part, no one's going to steal it from you.
1:00:01
Nobody's going to like take all of your IP.
1:00:08
The things that go into that are far more complex," as to your point.
1:00:15
And the best way to ultimately profit your business, profit society, profit everything, is give to get. Tren Griffin: Yeah.
1:00:23
One of the things that's interesting about convincing people is, why do people hire consultants?
1:00:29
And the joke about that of course is the consultants are anybody from out of town who has an opinion.
1:00:36
And sort of, why do you listen to somebody from out of town?
1:00:36
And it's because, well, they must be an expert, right?
1:00:41
And so, I've experienced this in my own life, which is, there's some people, some very, very successful, who've sent their sons and daughters to me.
1:00:52
And they spend a day with me, and we walk around the city like I did with Nassim, and we talk about life.
1:00:58
And I tell them some things, and they seem to be listening.
1:00:58
And then they really have enjoyed the experience.
1:01:05
They feedback to me through their parents indirectly.
1:01:09
And really what I'm telling them is things that their parents have been telling them their whole lives.
1:01:13
But if your parents are saying, it's like, "Oh, you're so lame." It's like, "Whatever."
1:01:19
But sometimes it's good to have friends.
1:01:19
And so, this whole takes a village thing...
1:01:26
I was lucky when I was younger, in that learned a lot of things from Mary Gates and Bill Gates as mentors.
1:01:35
And there are a lot of things that my parents taught me growing up.
1:01:35
But to hear it from them was more convincing, but it was also more vivid.
1:01:41
I was also at a different stage in my life.
1:01:47
But it's sort of like, you have this wonderful experience.
1:01:47
I was talking to Bill Brewster about this.
1:01:52
You have wonderful experience.
1:01:52
Your kids will be about 14 and you could be like their hero.
1:01:57
But then when they're 14, it's like, "You're stupid, dad. You're an idiot. No one does that."
1:02:04
And if you're patient and you're kind, they still love you.
1:02:04
But if you're patient and kind, they'll eventually say, "Oh, dad's not so bad. He learned a few things. He's not terrible.
1:02:17
He's still kind of an idiot sometimes." But you know.
1:02:17
And so, they can come back.
1:02:22
But it's that hard point, where you go from a hero to a zero.
1:02:22
And it's again, they love you and they respect you. And they're polite.
1:02:28
My kids are polite, because that's just what we do. Griffins are polite.
1:02:36
If you're not polite, you're not a Griffin.
1:02:36
But the point here is though that they may have felt like, yeah, your thinking's kind of broken dad.
1:02:40
But if they hear it from somebody else eventually, or see it in life, they'll say, "Okay, well, Dad's wrong a lot, but on these things, he's okay."
1:02:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It reminds me of the quote attributed to Mark Twain, which we attribute almost everything to Twain or Plato or William Shakespeare.
1:03:00
But I think he might have actually said this one, and it was a joke along the lines of, "When I was 16, I was so embarrassed by what an idiot my father was.
1:03:12
And when I turned 21, I was shocked to see how much he'd learn in those ensuing years." Tren Griffin: Exactly. Exactly.
1:03:23
But one of the things I also talked to Brewster about, because he's got a young family- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Bill Brewster's a great guy.
1:03:29
I had him to my apartment.
1:03:29
I met him through Twitter, right? And so, yeah. Good guy.
1:03:33
Tren Griffin: But anyway, what I was in his explaining to him was one of the hard things in life is if you teach your children well, and give them opportunities to make mistakes and do things, they're going to be very independent.
1:03:46
And when they go to colleges, they're going to make good decisions.
1:03:50
And when they go through life, they're going to make good decisions.
1:03:50
Now, the downside to that is they're not going to call you every time they have to go to the restroom, right?
1:03:59
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
1:04:00
Tren Griffin: And so they're not maybe going to call you as much.
1:04:01
If you made them dependent, they maybe call you twice a day.
1:04:06
But that's not what a good parent does.
1:04:06
If you love your children, you will teach them to be independent and make independent decisions.
1:04:10
If you love them, you will do the things that will make them not call you maybe so much.
1:04:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
1:04:17
Tren Griffin: And you have to live with that and say, "This is best for them."
1:04:18
And then we switch that to business mentoring, which is when I do mentoring or counseling or being a friend in business, and they take a new job.
1:04:27
Like, "I've gone here," or in another division or another company, whatever.
1:04:32
And they say, "We'll keep in touch every week.
1:04:32
Every two weeks, we'll still talk."
1:04:37
And I just know from experience, like, no.
1:04:37
They'll check in when they have a big decision or something.
1:04:43
But if you are a good mentor, you know that this chick is leaving the nest, or this friend is...
1:04:50
You're [cohabitating] in business or whatever, in life as a mentor or as a mentee, whatever.
1:04:56
You know that it's never going to be the same, but you're happy for them.
1:05:00
You love them, and you want them to go off and succeed on their own.
1:05:05
Because you can only have so many friendships.
1:05:07
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Bingo. Yeah.
1:05:07
Tren Griffin: You can only have so many relationships of quality.
1:05:10
You know, some people have a million relationships.
1:05:10
And one of the things I wanted to talk about that you talked about earlier is the people I've known who've killed themselves from drugs, committed suicide, done things that are bad, like alcoholism and drug addiction, they didn't have purpose. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:05:30
Tren Griffin: They had money.
1:05:31
Oftentimes too much money. Right?
1:05:31
Cocaine's way of God's telling you, "You have too much money." Right?
1:05:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
1:05:38
Tren Griffin: They had money, but they didn't have purpose.
1:05:41
And if you don't have purpose, you can become lost no matter how much success you have or whatever. And so, find purpose. Do things that... Purpose.
1:05:46
Now, the other thing is, if you have purpose, you succeed better in life.
1:05:51
So, I know a fellow, and he's not the brightest tool in the shed, but he's got a company.
1:05:56
And he is amazing in that he runs this company totally.
1:06:02
And he's so interested in this business. It's really boring.
1:06:02
But by God, in this business, he nails it and he's growing like crazy.
1:06:08
And he's rich as [Midas]. He's unbelievable.
1:06:14
But he's not the broadest guy in the world, and he's not interested in lots of things. But by God, he knows X.
1:06:19
And that's just his thing, and he's happy.
1:06:19
But his purpose is to build this business, and he loves his business. Right?
1:06:25
And that's what Buffett always is amazing.
1:06:30
He'll be able to capital on this, is somebody says, "Well, I got to sell this business.
1:06:30
My kids are worthless," or, "I don't have any kids," or whatever.
1:06:34
"And I love this business more than life itself.
1:06:39
I got to get somebody to look after it.
1:06:39
I can't sell to the PE guys.
1:06:39
They'll carve it up and ruin it.
1:06:44
So, I'll sell it to Warren, because he'll take care of my employees, who I love more than my own family.
1:06:49
Actually, they are my family." Right?
1:06:49
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
1:06:51
Tren Griffin: And so, if you love your business, if you have purpose, your life is different, your life is better, and it's not taxed.
1:06:56
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
1:06:58
Tren Griffin: It's tax free, having purpose.
1:06:59
It's tax free, being nice to people.
1:06:59
It's tax free, taking care of people you love.
1:07:03
These things are all amazing, so have purpose. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:07:09
Tren Griffin: If you can have purpose and have a good business, that's the double. It's more than a double. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:07:13
So, I mean, a lot to unpack there, Tren.
1:07:13
I mean, so, on the parenting thing, I could not agree with more with you.
1:07:22
My wife and I sat before Patrick was born, and we were like, "Okay.
1:07:25
So, what do we want to do?" And we talked about it. We talked about it.
1:07:30
And ultimately, we landed on, our objective as parents is to raise great adults.
1:07:39
And when you think about that for just a minute, it precludes all of the habits that people fall into as parents when they don't have that purpose, right?
1:07:48
It's like, "Because I said so.
1:07:48
This is my house, my rules. You will do it my way." No, no, no, no.
1:07:54
You can't say any of that, because you're not raising a good adult.
1:08:00
You're raising somebody who has become a dependent, not independent.
1:08:07
And so on the other side, you got to put up with them being very independent.
1:08:15
Tren Griffin: Absolutely.
1:08:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But I never, ever encouraged any of my three kids to be interested in my business, right?
1:08:21
Because I come from a family business where that was the thing, right?
1:08:27
They really wanted you to be in the business, and they weren't subtle about it. And so, I didn't do it.
1:08:32
Patrick came on his own, right?
1:08:32
And it was, Patrick is who he is because of Patrick, not because of me.
1:08:43
And people just don't understand that.
1:08:43
And I just shake my head, because those are all his accomplishments. And you know what? I'm overjoyed.
1:08:56
My daughters are both incredibly successful doing what they love to do.
1:08:56
One is an author, the other is a standup comedian.
1:09:01
But you know, it's like, they're really good at it.
1:09:01
But the way you get there most of the time is you raise great adults.
1:09:07
And to do that, you've got to let them argue with you. It's like Trustafarians.
1:09:13
One of the things that...
1:09:13
I have what other people consider extreme points of view.
1:09:16
And one of them is don't saddle one of your children or your grandchildren with irrevocable trust. That infantalizes them.
1:09:23
If you're going to give them money, give it to them outright where you know what? They can lose it.
1:09:30
So, what happens, in my opinion...
1:09:30
Again, entirely in my opinion.
1:09:36
Every lawyer in the world disagrees with me.
1:09:36
But that's how people grow.
1:09:41
You've got to provide an environment where they can grow, and find a purpose, and find all those things.
1:09:47
So, I could not agree with you more.
1:09:53
The only thing that we didn't...
1:09:53
And I smiled when you said it.
1:09:53
The only thing that we did insist on like you did is manners. You have to be polite.
1:09:58
You have to have good manners.
1:10:06
And I was talking to my wife the other day when we were having dinner.
1:10:06
I'm like, "I can't believe that we're living in a world where having good matters is kind of this incredible advantage."
1:10:19
It was just required, right? Tren Griffin: Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.
1:10:21
The thing that applies though in business is when you have people who report to you, when you're a good manager, if you can have the same attitude...
1:10:34
In other words, the great managers hire people who could do their job. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:10:40
Tren Griffin: And they teach them to do their job.
1:10:41
And they delegate like crazy.
1:10:41
And the very best managers are exporting talent.
1:10:48
They take these younger people, or don't have to be younger, but they take people who are working for them, and they make them stronger and make them better.
1:10:53
And then other people poach them.
1:10:58
Usually within the company, sometimes not.
1:10:58
But you feel good, because you've contributed.
1:10:58
If it's in the company, especially.
1:11:04
You become known as like, "Wow, he or she is a great exporter of talent. He grows people. He cultivates people."
1:11:11
But also one of the things I try to counsel people is if you're going to grow, if you're going to be like Satya someday, and be CEO of Microsoft or whatever, it's like, you have to scale, right?
1:11:24
You have to learn to delegate.
1:11:24
You have to empower your people.
1:11:30
You have to have accountability and responsibility and all sorts of things, but you have to help them grow.
1:11:36
And if they can do your job, if you get hit by a bus, then that's a good succession thing.
1:11:42
But also if they can do your job, you're helping them grow. And when they go on...
1:11:46
I talked about this before, but when they go on, you have to smile.
1:11:46
Because that's part of your purpose.
1:11:53
Because when you're gone, you're gone.
1:11:53
But hopefully you'll sprinkle some fairy dust a little bit, and part of you will be there in terms of better people, better culture, better managers, better country, better city, better community, better neighborhood, better family. What's your model?
1:12:11
And for me, my father and mother are that way, in that they were pillars at times for others when they needed them.
1:12:19
It's like, what's my worst nightmare?
1:12:27
My worst nightmare is somebody I love is in trouble, and I can't help them. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. Tren Griffin: Right? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:12:34
Tren Griffin: That's the point of having money.
1:12:35
That's the point of having strength.
1:12:35
That's the point of preparing yourself.
1:12:35
So, being a standup person when somebody's in trouble who you love, and being able to do that.
1:12:40
It's like, I'm always going to be ready to do that, because I couldn't live with him myself if I couldn't. I had a friend who...
1:12:51
He didn't kill himself, but he did some unhealthy things with drugs, and I didn't even know it was happening.
1:13:01
And anyway, it caused his heart to fail and he died.
1:13:01
And to this day, I still regret that I felt I was super close with him, but I didn't even know he had a problem.
1:13:15
And I still look at myself and say, "Why didn't I know? It was my friend. I should have known."
1:13:20
He was happy all the time.
1:13:20
And I admired his happiness.
1:13:24
And I didn't realize where the happiness was...
1:13:24
Some of it was natural, but some of it was chemically induced. But I should have known.
1:13:29
If I was really his friend, I should have known.
1:13:35
And in a deep friendship, you should be intuitive.
1:13:35
I felt like there's questions I should have asked.
1:13:40
But I never want to fail people I love.
1:13:40
And you know, that's the purpose of money.
1:13:44
Money exists to give you options, to take care of people you love. It isn't to have stuff.
1:13:51
People who have the best experiences and the best relationships win.
1:13:51
That old joke about the person who has the most stuff in the end wins, that's bullshit.
1:14:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally agree.
1:14:02
Tren Griffin: Those are the people who shoot themselves or jump off a cliff or whatever. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yep.
1:14:06
Tren Griffin: If you want to have purpose, you want to be happy, your relationships, super important.
1:14:07
And then sort of having purpose. What is your purpose? What are you doing?
1:14:14
How do you make a dent in your family, in your community, in your neighborhood, in your city, in your country, in the world? Have purpose. Do good shit.
1:14:23
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Bingo.
1:14:26
And I just need to cut you a little slack on your friend, Tren.
1:14:26
We like to think we're mind readers.
1:14:35
We like to think that we know what even those closest to us are thinking.
1:14:35
The fact is, if they're trying to hide something from us, they're going to hide it from of us.
1:14:42
And as much as we try to figure it out, that's not your fault.
1:14:48
So, I mean, that's just my point of view.
1:14:54
I want to get onto the argument. Bill And Steve.
1:14:54
In your notes to me, you said, "This is business, not personal."
1:15:02
And of course, immediately I thought of the Godfather.
1:15:02
This is just business, right?
1:15:08
After they kill everybody.
1:15:08
But tell me about the Bill and Steve, just business.
1:15:13
Tren Griffin: Well, it was '89 or something like that.
1:15:13
I was in a meeting, and it was Bill and Steve, and [John Shirley] was the president.
1:15:16
[Bill Lincoln] was there. A bunch of people. I was in the room.
1:15:20
And they were arguing about buying a company.
1:15:20
And Bill and Steve were going at each other about whether it was a good idea.
1:15:26
And they had different views. And it was intense.
1:15:32
There were spittle going back and forth.
1:15:32
It was an intense argument.
1:15:39
And then it ended, and they reached a conclusion.
1:15:39
And I thought, "Boy, there's going to be some hard feelings here." None. Absolutely none.
1:15:48
They walked out of the room and was like, "Let's go get some lunch." And they all...
1:15:52
And it was a great lunch and everybody's happy, and all that. But it was business. It's not personal.
1:16:02
They had different views.
1:16:02
They resolved those views with a lot of demonstratives.
1:16:07
But they reached to a conclusion.
1:16:07
And then when it was over, it's like, "It's business, not personal.
1:16:12
I don't have any grudge."
1:16:12
There was no, "Your idea was better than mine, or "You won," or "I won."
1:16:12
It was just like, "Let's reach the best decision.
1:16:18
And this is business, not personal."
1:16:18
It's like Sonny being told by Tom Hagen.
1:16:25
Tom was saying, "Sonny, it's business, it's not personal."
1:16:34
But sometimes when you have an argument or when you're in, and this argument was rather intense.
1:16:42
The Reader's Digest used to have this thing, The most Interesting Person in the World, or Most Colorful, whatever it was.
1:16:46
I'd read old, moldy copies when I was at a house on Orcas Island up in the San Juans in the summer.
1:16:51
And Most Unforgettable Character, I think it was what it was called. Anyway.
1:16:57
But they're both unforgettable characters. What personalities. So interesting.
1:17:00
And what a dynamic between them. But it was intense.
1:17:06
And Jon Shirley, who was on the other side of them, he was Zen.
1:17:10
He was reviewing head counts.
1:17:10
And I was watching him, and he's like, "I want 20 people, you get four."
1:17:16
And while there's argument's going on.
1:17:16
But the point is that don't make a personal battle out of something that's just about ideas and about making the right decision.
1:17:28
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally. Yeah.
1:17:30
Tren Griffin: Some people can do that, and some people can't.
1:17:31
But this was particularly an example of leave your emotions aside and particularly, leave them behind. Right? Don't carry baggage. Don't carry ego.
1:17:42
It's sort of like this Zen story I love is...
1:17:46
You know the story where guy's running through the woods. He's chased by tigers.
1:17:46
Tiger chases him off a cliff. He falls off the cliff. He grabs onto a vine. Tiger's below. Tiger's above.
1:17:55
Turns to his left, nothing.
1:17:55
Turns his right, strawberries. Oh. Eats the strawberry. Delicious.
1:18:03
In the present moment, it was a delicious strawberry.
1:18:03
I may be dead in a little bit, and I almost died, whatever.
1:18:08
But enjoy the present moment.
1:18:08
Leave the baggage behind.
1:18:12
That's my view of the koan.
1:18:12
But maybe you have a different one.
1:18:12
But for me, it's like be in the present moment.
1:18:17
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Man, and it pains me to see these yahoos today.
1:18:18
Because guys, listen, you're trying to make everything personal here. Don't make it personal.
1:18:33
Because the litmus test, I think, and you outline it, which I think is a good way to outline it, it's ideas, right?
1:18:38
I mean, if you're trying to, we're fighting over the same spouse. Okay, I get that, right? Or potential spouse. I get that.
1:18:44
But like so many people have this outrage machine.
1:18:44
One of the things that does concern me, and I'm a big believer in where we're going, right?
1:18:53
And all of the technology and the leverage it'll give to people.
1:18:58
But this outrage machine where everybo- Don't take the bait.
1:19:05
It's obvious that they are trying to get this reaction from you guys.
1:19:05
Fear, uncertainty, doubt. Guess what? It sells.
1:19:14
If it didn't sell, they wouldn't be doing it.
1:19:14
And so it's like the other thing that I see evolving from it, or devolving from it, is this sort of helpless victim mentality where, "Oh, poor me. Poor me." You know what? Are you a human being?
1:19:32
Do you have control over shutting that particular thing off?
1:19:41
People need to understand, they have to be responsible for curating their sources.
1:19:47
They have to be responsible for who they listen to, or who they decide not to listen to.
1:19:52
So I love that example, and I just hope that folks listening will really take it to heart because that's a critical one.
1:20:04
How about the ITU Conference?
1:20:04
This is something I don't know about. With Africa as the key.
1:20:13
And you said you need to appeal to reason, or not to reason but to their interests. Tell me about that one.
1:20:19
Tren Griffin: So the world is complicated place.
1:20:21
But there are more countries than there are big countries.
1:20:29
And when you go to a place like the UN, US gets one vote, and so does Mozambique, and Côte D'Ivoire, whatever the country.
1:20:38
And so you have this whole developing world that has a lot of votes, and sometimes you need to get rules that govern the world, like space law, like radio communications, things like that.
1:20:52
And so, you have to basically convince the world that this is a good thing and it's in their interest to think this way.
1:21:01
And so, it was a big eye opener for me to be at a conference like this, to realize that, okay, well, the US just can't dictate policy, that we have to come up with reasons that they think that this is their idea.
1:21:12
And also, that they're going to be distrustful of the US, Russia, China for being bossy and political, and so they're going to look to other people as leaders.
1:21:20
And strangely, oftentimes it's Canada, New Zealand and Australia that they look to, because they're not bossy and they're not as aligned, and they're not just looking after parochial interests.
1:21:39
And so, sort of what I learned there is really around getting into the big negotiation, getting into the other people's shoes, and then figuring out what really drives them, and how to motivate them.
1:21:53
And it's really pretty simple, which is appeal to their interests. They know they're smart.
1:22:00
They don't have the resources, they've got a problem with trust in their society or whatever it is, in terms of organizing, and they've got tribal interests that they've been fighting for hundreds or thousands of years, and they're trying to resolve these things, but they do know what their interests are.
1:22:14
And so, in dealing with people in general, it's sort of saying, "Well, you should do this because X is logical."
1:22:21
And that's a hard argument to make sometimes.
1:22:28
It's easier to make just like, "Well, this would be good for you.
1:22:28
And here are the reasons."
1:22:32
And showing them that it's good for them, like, "Wow, this is really good."
1:22:38
And so, it's a practical side of life in terms of motivation and incentives.
1:22:38
Munger's got this idea that year doesn't go by that he doesn't increase the amount, then realizes that incentives govern almost everything that works.
1:22:57
And if you change the incentives, then you can change the result.
1:23:01
If you don't change the incentives, then you're going to keep getting the same result, which is what Einstein said was insanity, which you keep doing the same thing over and over again.
1:23:07
So we need to change the incentives.
1:23:07
So the way Congress has operated, incentives are wrong right now, right?
1:23:11
In a lot of business situations, the incentives are wrong.
1:23:11
In business, a great example of this is because of RONA and a lot of ratios taught in business schools, we got companies in the US trying to get assets off their books.
1:23:26
They ship manufacturing to Asia.
1:23:31
And Asia basically has turned that into a cash machine.
1:23:31
And our economy's been hollowed out. We can't make stuff.
1:23:36
And so we're dependent, and we got this poured in Los Angeles, Long Beach.
1:23:41
And we can't get enough stuff in because we outsourced our ability to make things.
1:23:47
And one of the things that I admire a lot, and I hate about myself is my hands are soft. Right?
1:23:55
I admire somebody who's a fisherman, who's a mechanic, who's a tinkerer, who makes things. And their hands are...
1:24:03
Some of them are like myths, right? And that's real work.
1:24:08
I had some jobs like that in college, like working in the log yard I talked about recently.
1:24:14
And we need to get back to that.
1:24:14
We need to make things in this country again. Okay. How do you do that?
1:24:18
How do you appeal to people's interests?
1:24:18
Well, you can start to say, "Well, gee, can you buy a car right now?"
1:24:23
"Well no, I can't, because we don't have the chips."
1:24:26
"Well maybe we should make some chips in this country. Maybe we should." It's great.
1:24:27
We do a great job with software and services and all that, but you still need stuff. You still need atoms.
1:24:34
So anyway, changing the incentives is the lesson I took from that experience.
1:24:40
The other thing I took from that experience, it's in Geneva, ITU, and the Swiss are the richest, unhappy people I've ever met. Everybody's frowning. Everybody's frowning.
1:24:55
Little kid running around the restaurant, they're having apoplexy just frowning.
1:24:59
Can't use a drill in your apartment after 7:30.
1:25:05
We can only use it between 7:30 in the morning and 3:30 in the afternoon.
1:25:05
It's like, everybody's scowling. They're rich though.
1:25:09
They got nice cars, all that.
1:25:09
And then the Africans who are there for this conference, they got nothing and they're happy. They got a sandwich.
1:25:20
As the words of Zevon's saying, it's like, "Enjoy every sandwich."
1:25:20
They're in the present moment, because they know their life can end tomorrow.
1:25:24
And so, you got poor, happy people, and rich, unhappy people.
1:25:30
And if you're not looking at that saying, "Wow, maybe I should be happier with what I've got." From those two extremes.
1:25:35
And so what I love about Africa, and there are a number of times, is happy in the moment. Let's dance. Let's play music.
1:25:43
Let's be happier right now, because we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.
1:25:50
And if you don't take that away from your visits and your experiences with Africa, you're missing the joy of present moment, which is circle around again, it's very Zen, right?
1:26:00
Like strawberry, it's delicious. Enjoy it now. Next week, you'll plan.
1:26:05
Let's not plan to enjoy the strawberry. It's good.
1:26:12
I've got crab waiting for me at home. Right? I got it yesterday.
1:26:12
I'm thinking about the crab.
1:26:20
Listen, it's going to be delicious. Right now, that's Zen. That's present moment.
1:26:25
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Totally.
1:26:25
And it's also a very Daoist path as well.
1:26:28
Zen and Daoism being very, very similar.
1:26:28
But Africa in particular, I adore Africa.
1:26:28
I've only been there twice, but for extended times.
1:26:35
And I learned more from our African hosts and friends than...
1:26:47
I don't know if I had another three week period where I learned as much as I learned when I was in Africa.
1:26:57
And I'm totally with you on their attitude.
1:26:57
They are some of the coolest people I've ever met in my life.
1:27:05
And it also does come back to that.
1:27:05
It comes back to the, "Hey, be happy now." Right?
1:27:11
And we had one guide who we actually got very close to, and he was like, "The thing that I just cannot figure out about you Americans is you're king of the world. You have everything.
1:27:20
And it seems that so many of them that come here are miserable."
1:27:28
And I got to tell you about our Swiss driver when we went there the last time. And he picked us up. He was really happy.
1:27:33
And you know me, I'll ask anyone anything.
1:27:44
And so I'm like, "Do you mind if I ask you something?"
1:27:44
And he's like, "Yeah, sure."
1:27:49
And I'm like, "Please don't take this the wrong way, but it's been my experience, and I've been to Switzerland quite a bit, that most of the time, most of the people I've met are pretty dour and pretty unhappy.
1:28:01
And you seem like you're like almost jumping with joy."
1:28:01
And he got this big smile on his face that I saw in his rear view mirror.
1:28:07
And he goes, "Well, I'll tell you why."
1:28:12
He goes, "You are my last customer.
1:28:12
And tomorrow, I am flying to Australia." And I went, "Okay."
1:28:22
And he goes, "Switzerland makes me miserable because that which is not forbidden is required.
1:28:29
And that which is not required is forbidden."
1:28:38
But the very thought that he could free himself from that and move to Australia was what was making him happy.
1:28:43
And so, live in the moment, guys.
1:28:43
And by the way, we're not trying to bag on the Swiss here. They are lovely.
1:28:49
Tren Griffin: That's a beautiful country. Nice people.
1:28:51
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So we're not bagging on.
1:28:54
What we're talking about, gang, is the attitude.
1:29:00
And the attitude can make you.
1:29:00
And again, Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl.
1:29:00
I've reread that book so many times because I mean, talk about dire circumstance, he was in a concentration camp in Germany during World War II. And purpose, right?
1:29:13
If you reread the book, what you'll find is that he maintains that he lived because he had a purpose. His purpose was to be...
1:29:26
Tren Griffin: He said that you could tell when somebody lost their purpose, they would be dead soon.
1:29:29
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes, absolutely.
1:29:32
Tren Griffin: He learned to spot it.
1:29:34
But it's an interesting point about culture in companies, which is it's super important, and it's also highly varied and there's no one solution.
1:29:44
But you need to have a consistent culture.
1:29:44
And so when Craig McCaw was rolling up cable TV, and then cellular, they would buy all these little properties, and not little.
1:29:50
They'd be half a state or a quarter of a state or a few cities or something like that.
1:29:55
But each company had its own culture.
1:30:00
And oftentimes, they had to fire the founder.
1:30:00
Because until they fired the founder, they couldn't unify the culture.
1:30:06
Because you can't have...
1:30:06
And Switzerland's amazing in that they have all these different Cantons, and it's very localized, and it's amazing system.
1:30:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, absolutely. I agree.
1:30:17
Tren Griffin: And democracy has existed for a long time.
1:30:19
But having a consistent culture in a company creates so much... It's friction-reducing.
1:30:29
And one of the things I worry about, about the pandemic, is younger people aren't in the building and they're not learning as much about culture.
1:30:34
And so, they've been with a company like two years now, it's very hard with a video call to really understand what culture is about, and to observe it is different than in person.
1:30:53
And so anyway, but culture's super important.
1:30:53
And some cultures are fun, and some cultures are not.
1:31:00
And some cultures value this.
1:31:00
You don't have to be the same, I mean.
1:31:05
But what's fun about startups is it's the time when you care the least about the money and the most about the mission.
1:31:11
And missionaries succeed so much more because they endure diversity.
1:31:17
But also they get to that stage where, "We got nothing, but nothing.
1:31:17
And we're living on the edge of our seats, and we could run out of money next week, but it sure is fun being together.
1:31:28
And it sure is fun going through this journey together." And so having friends.
1:31:35
The interesting thing about Twitter, it's big.
1:31:35
But Fintwit is small enough, so there is a camaraderie, there is a culture. People are more polite.
1:31:40
I don't go on political Twitter.
1:31:47
There are parts of it that I don't involve with.
1:31:47
But there is a certain decorum that is good.
1:31:55
And there's this discipline around.
1:31:55
If you say something stupid, people are going to point it out.
1:31:59
But there is a certain decorum which is missing in other parts of Twitter, which I appreciate.
1:32:06
It's also small because it bores most people because they don't understand how much fun it is.
1:32:10
It's the best video game on earth.
1:32:10
You don't need any Metaverse.
1:32:16
I'm in this "Tren-verse", right?
1:32:16
I'm in the "Tren-verse" right now. And it's fun.
1:32:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, you know what?
1:32:22
You just named this episode.
1:32:27
"Welcome to the Tren-verse." I love it. I love it.
1:32:27
All right, my friend, I have one more, because I'm looking at the clock.
1:32:34
I have one more that I just have to hear about because when I saw it on your email, I was like, okay, I'm really looking forward to this.
1:32:39
And it was Tren's first mob hit experience.
1:32:47
Please tell me about this.
1:32:47
Tren Griffin: So when I was young, about nine years old, I was playing at my friend's house, which is by a lake called Lake Washington.
1:32:57
And all of a sudden, there were cop cars everywhere.
1:32:57
And policemen going through the hedges and all over the place. We're going, "Whoa."
1:33:04
Little kids' eyes big as saucers.
1:33:09
And we walked down to the lake where they're all headed.
1:33:09
And we look, and in the water is Mr.
1:33:14
[Shichi], and he's face down in the water, in about four inches of water. And he's clearly dead.
1:33:21
And so, I'm saying, "Oh, that's Mr. [Shichi]. We knew him."
1:33:26
Now, we also sort of knew that he was part...
1:33:26
There were two competing mob families in Seattle.
1:33:30
Now, in Seattle, we have Junior Varsity mob.
1:33:30
The mafia is not varsity. Right?
1:33:30
And they're a little more polite, but they're still known to rub somebody out.
1:33:36
They had charges, and they're fighting over numbers and pinball, all that. Anyway.
1:33:39
But someone had come over and probably garroted him, or I don't know how they got him.
1:33:46
And then, they took him down the lake, and they put him in the water.
1:33:50
And then, so it was a mob hit.
1:33:50
And then the guy who was the prosecutor at the time, guy [Mandy Carol], had a brother-in-law who's the coroner.
1:33:55
And he basically took the body to the coroner, and the coroner did an autopsy with no witness, which is against the law.
1:34:07
And then they took the body and cremated him. And that was a scandal.
1:34:07
The other crime family who had rubbed him out had obviously made a payment.
1:34:16
And Seattle, at the time, had a [inaudible] policy, which is if you're south of Yesler, anything went.
1:34:22
There were gambling parlors and bingo and prostitution. It was crazy.
1:34:26
The polite society was on this side of Yesler.
1:34:33
So anyway, so that was a scandal, ended up bringing down the prosecutor. The new group came in.
1:34:39
Seattle was cleaned up in '67.
1:34:39
But the point was it was an early experience to life. And I was always a kid.
1:34:48
I was always old when I was young.
1:34:48
And like you, I was always asking questions. "Why is this? Why is that?"
1:34:56
When I met with somebody, "What's your business? What do you do? How do they charge? What is it? What are you doing?" Whatever.
1:35:03
And so I wanted to know about why Seattle was crooked.
1:35:03
And my grandfather knew because he was a well-known real estate developer/businessman, ran big family office.
1:35:07
And I was fascinated by the mob, how they made money on pinball machines, how they made money distributing music.
1:35:21
And so, but it was also like it was real.
1:35:21
There was a dead body here, and this is serious.
1:35:26
And as an eight year old, it sobered me right up. So, that's the story. So, that was my first...
1:35:33
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It has that effect, right? Tren Griffin: Yeah.
1:35:38
So it was my first mob hit.
1:35:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: What I find interesting about that, I think one of the reasons you and I get along so well is because we have very similar stories, it seems. Because St.
1:35:48
Paul, where I grew up, was used to be called Saint Mudd. And basically, St.
1:35:56
Paul in the early '19s and '20s was a safe haven for gangsters.
1:36:07
And it was a safe haven for gangsters because the then police...
1:36:07
And by the way, I learned all this from my grandfather because I was born in 1960.
1:36:13
What the fuck would I know.
1:36:13
So anyway, but I was asking him because I was reading on, and I'm like, "It kind of seems like St.
1:36:19
Paul seems a lot calmer today."
1:36:25
Because I was really interested in history and looking at pictures and everything.
1:36:29
And so he tells me the whole story.
1:36:29
And he is like, "So the deal that the police chief in St.
1:36:34
Paul made with mob and the John Dillingers of the world is safe haven unless you commit a crime here.
1:36:44
If you commit a crime in St.
1:36:44
Paul, Minnesota, we are going to come for you with everything we got.
1:36:52
And so at some point, some minor mobster did a crime. And that was it. That was it.
1:37:03
The cops rounded them all up.
1:37:03
And sure, there was a lot of not...
1:37:03
My bet is they weren't Mirandized, if you know what I mean.
1:37:11
Tren Griffin: In the old days, it's not the way it worked. Yeah.
1:37:13
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No it didn't at all.
1:37:15
But again, you can learn so much from that and from experiences.
1:37:15
So man, this has been like, let me put it this way.
1:37:24
You named your own episode. Thank you, for me.
1:37:24
Because we do try to come up with great names for these, but also this exceeded my expectations, Tren.
1:37:38
And the thing about it that I'm taking away, and I hope our listeners and watchers, by the way, because people are going to see us talking as well because we're doing a release on YouTube as well, which we talked about before the recording.
1:37:50
Because the young folks who helped me out here convinced me that I didn't understand YouTube.
1:37:55
And then I did a little homework, and I was like, "Yeah, they're right. They're right. I'm wrong. So we'll do that."
1:38:00
But I could do this all day.
1:38:07
Tren Griffin: We'll do it again.
1:38:11
We'll space them out a little bit.
1:38:11
I got many, many, many more stories.
1:38:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, fantastic.
1:38:14
Thank you so much for sharing. Tren Griffin: Thank you. It's fun. It was fun.