How to Live an Extraordinary Life (Ep. 242)
In conversation with Anthony Pompliano
“Dear kids,
Firsts are exciting and somewhat perplexing. This is the first entry in a book I’m going to keep for you; its direction not yet known to me. Thus, the thought of giving you something created over the years excites me, but I am also perplexed about what I really want to write here.”
So began my first letter to my children on April 22, 1985.
The letter concludes with a piece of advice that, I confess, has aged somewhat more gracefully than many other of my past self’s bold assertions:
“You will always be only as good, only as happy, only as successful as you perceive yourself to be. Happiness springs from within, never from without. Virtue too; honor; and love. All the things that make a life worth living. Thus, if you are unhappy, don’t look outside yourself for causes, the reside within; likewise, if, like me, you are happy, understand the source within your soul.”
I’ve long maintained that there is no greater gift for your grown children than a collection of letters written through their formative years (I even wrote a piece about it over at my friend
’s ).It’s no surprise, then, that the new book by today’s returning guest — who just happens to be Polina’s husband — had me at “hello.”
At just 36, the investor, entrepreneur, and media powerhouse
has already invested in circa 200 companies, served in Iraq with the U.S. Army, built & sold multiple businesses, and created one of the world’s largest independent media platforms.You don’t accomplish all that without learning a thing or two, and Anthony decided to share his most valuable insights with his two children in the best way possible — by writing them letters, 65 of which are collected in his wonderful new book, How To Live an Extraordinary Life.
Now, four years and 228 episodes after his first Infinite Loops appearance, Anthony returns to dig into some of these hard-earned insights — from the uniting traits of the world’s smartest people, to the luxury of pessimism, to why luck isn’t real.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
Highlights
If you’ve only got five minutes to spare, here are a few edited highlights for you:
It’s OK to Say, “I Don’t Know”
Jim: “But again, I met you back in 2018 and you were kind enough to put an old, like me, on your podcast and try to get me to understand crypto. And as I recall, Anthony, I failed pretty miserably, didn't I?”
Anthony: “You taught me a very important lesson that day, which was... You were one of the first three people on the podcast. And I think 50% of the questions I asked you, you responded with, "I don't know." And I just remember saying to myself, "Well, if Jim O'Shaughnessy can publicly admit he doesn't know 50% of the time on a topic that ..." I think you were interested in trying to figure out, but you were very clear, "Look, I'm not an expert on this." It's probably a lesson for the rest of us that it's okay to say, "Hey, I don't know, and I'm trying to figure it out alongside everybody else." So it was very helpful to me and I think people really enjoyed the other 50% of your answers, which were not "I don't know" and were quite intelligent and helpful.”
Today is Practice for Tomorrow
Anthony: “What's interesting is, I didn't know this until I had the benefit of hindsight, which was, every time I was doing something, “this is the most important thing in the world, I'm going to do it for the rest of my life, this is it,” whatever. And then I one day just kind of popped my head up and I said, "The thing that I just accomplished […] was actually the culmination of A, B, and C things that had fed into it." And so I was uniquely positioned to do it. And so a great example is a lot of people externally will look and say, "How did he build all of these media properties?"
What they don't know is I had tried multiple times in different variations. There's a medium blog that's out there somewhere. There was a interview show in Raleigh, North Carolina. All these different things that had kind of been almost practice for what ended up really working and taking off.”
Carve Your Ethics in Stone, But Your Opinions in Sand
Anthony: “I was watching politicians flip-flop all the time. And what was so funny about it was they get attacked for it. “Oh, you're a flip-flopper.” […] In business, you actually are rewarded and encouraged to change your mind when you get new information. It's a sign of intelligence. And so I started thinking about how do you teach your kids when do you change your mind? When is it appropriate versus when is it not?
And so really what I said to myself was ethical decisions are kind of the red line. Look, in ethical decisions, you should make the same decision every single time in your life, regardless of how you are presented with different options. Everything else, really just your opinion on things, can be changed based on what information you receive.
And so trying to think through, “Am I facing an ethical kind of dilemma or am I facing a opinion or business decision or whatever?” And if you can always just make sure, okay, if it's an ethical thing, I know exactly what to do is do the right thing. Everything else is open for interpretation based on whatever the latest information I have is.”
Ambition Can Kill Companies
Anthony: “How many businesses that ended up being frauds over generations now were actually good businesses if they just hadn't tried to take that one extra 10% leap in, whether it's a public market earnings report or whatever?
I tell founders this sometimes, and they always are like, "Wait, why are you telling me this?" I say, "Ambition can kill companies just as much as mistakes, and errors and everything else.” So you got to know when is the time to be ambitious and when is the time to mitigate ambition suffocating your business because you're so focused on how much revenue, how many employees, or whatever. Well, maybe right now actually it's time for you to gather everyone around and become resilient and then create that new foundation so then you can go be ambitious again.”
Why Luck Isn’t Real
Anthony: “The more somebody believes in luck, the lower agency they probably are, and the less somebody believes in luck, the higher agency they are. […] Two people can go through the exact same situation, have the exact same physical injury, and you go talk to one of them and they'll say, "Wow, I was so unlucky to be in that situation and look, I lost my leg or I lost my arm." But you go talk to the person in the hospital bed right next to them and they'll tell you, "I'm so lucky to be alive." And so it's very much a psychological concept, not a mathematical one. Now the beauty of that is research shows that you can become luckier by simply thinking you're lucky. You don't even actually have to increase the surface area of luck. You can just say, "Hey, I'm a lucky person." And you start to realize, “Wow, I was walking across the street and I didn't get hit by that car. I'm so lucky.” Right. “I was walking in today and my key worked.” […]
You start to almost think like you're on a hot streak, right, and it becomes this thing where you start to see the positives versus everyone has been in a world where you're just like, nothing can go right right now. You become very down and kind of depressed and things like that. And so really the point of the letter is that you have agency and you can do things to improve your situation.”
Most of Your Decisions Don’t Matter
Anthony: “The other thing about power laws - 80/20 is kind of the Pareto principle. All that I say in the book that I actually think it's like 95/5. It's not 20% of your decisions, it's less than five, maybe even one in 99. I mean it is, yes, that is a good guiding principle to do 80, 20, but it is much, much more kind of magnified than that.
And so we've done this in some of our businesses. At the end of the year we look back and we say, “if we only got to make two or three decisions, what were the two to three decisions that we made that led to most of the outcome?” And one year, I mean this sounds insane, one year we looked at and we had a very good year, we made one decision with the balance sheet to invest some capital off of the balance sheet, and that drove 99% of the return for that year. And so we sat there and we said, we could have made that one decision and all just not worked the whole year and we would've had nearly the same outcome […]
And so then going into the next year, we said to ourselves […] maybe we should actually change the way that we think about decision making and what's important. And you learn, right, and you kind of go from there.
And so I do think that understanding power laws is less about trying to replicate them all the time. And it may be about avoiding the big amount of decisions or actions that aren't going to have an outcome. So it's like less than it being creative and “let's go find 20 more new power laws.” Instead, maybe it's about, well, let's just reduce the 20 things we're doing down to two because we think one of these two is the power law. And it's kind of like a subtraction thing, not an addition thing.”
Full Episode, Transcript & Links
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, hello, everyone. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. My guest today I've known for a long time. I met him when he very kindly extended me an invitation to his podcast of the time called Off the Chain in 2018. My guest is Anthony Pompliano, who is the man, the myth, the legend. As I was saying to you, man, before we started to record, I don't know how you have packed so much into 35 years. Founder and CEO of Professional Capital Management, you founded and invested in hundreds of companies. You've got one of the biggest financial media platforms of anyone I know. But again, I met you back in 2018 and you were kind enough to put an old, like me, on your podcast and try to get me to understand crypto. And as I recall, Anthony, I failed pretty miserably, didn't I?
Anthony Pompliano:
You taught me a very important lesson that day, which was ... You were one of the first three people on the podcast. And I think 50% of the questions I asked you, you responded with, "I don't know." And I just remember saying to myself, "Well, if Jim O'Shaughnessy can publicly admit he doesn't know 50% of the time on a topic that ..." I think you were interested in trying to figure out, but you were very clear, "Look, I'm not an expert on this." It's probably a lesson for the rest of us that it's okay to say, "Hey, I don't know, and I'm trying to figure it out alongside everybody else."
So it was very helpful to me and I think people really enjoyed the other 50% of your answers, which were not "I don't know" and were quite intelligent and helpful.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, I had a lot of fun doing that. And "I don't know" is one of the most powerful things, in my opinion, you can tell to somebody, because everybody always wants to have the answer. There's a great book by Peter Drucker called Adventures of a Bystander, and he does little vignettes of people that he met throughout his life. And one of them is this guy who was a merchant banker in London, and he was, this is in the 1930s, so a hundred years ago. Anyway, this guy was this really eccentric, colorful character named Ernest Friedberg, if I'm remembering correctly. Anyway, there was a scheme that everyone in the city of London wanted to get in on, and he had these two young guys running his merchant bank. And so they brought the guy in. They were so psyched that they got this guy into their office because he was the hottest thing in London at the time. And so gives the spiel. The old Friedberg sits and nods and nods, asks him a bunch of questions and the guy leaves. And then Friedberg looks at his two young partners and he goes, "That man is a fraud. We're not putting a dime in his scheme."
And of course the young guys are like, "What the fuck? Do you realize how lucky we even are to have him come?" And they went, "Why? Why are you saying that?" And he said, "He had an answer to every question I could think of. An honest person doesn't and will admit that he doesn't know." And that really struck me when I was reading it, so I've been in the habit of saying, "I don't know", but I really leaned into it after that because it really is kind of true. Everybody that has a pat answer to everything, my radar goes off and it's like, "Hmm, maybe I'll reconsider."
Anthony Pompliano:
It reminds me, Jim, of young people want to boast about their wins to present that they're better than they are. And then successful older people want to downplay and only talk about their losses or the times where they messed up to try to humanize and pretend they're not as successful as they are. And so you could tell where somebody is in their career based on the way that they present information as well, because everyone is trying to be somebody that they're not to a degree. And so if you watch, and I love going on YouTube and watching many of the great investors and listen to their interviews, and everyone knows that they're good investors.
Look, your track record is out there for 30 years and they'll start talking about, "Well, we're just trying to figure it out." And you're like, look, that is part of it, though, is the intellectual humility of saying just because the last 30 years were good doesn't mean the next five are going to be good. But I do find it funny that the younger people try to pretend to be the older people and the older people pretend to be the younger people.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I talk with a lot of young people in the various verticals that we have at OSV, and the thing that I try to impress them with, there's kind of two things. The first is failure is a ladder. So many of these people are really terrified of failing publicly. And I'm like, that's the only way that you're going to make any progress because mistakes are portals of opportunity. And if you look at them that way, you're going to learn so much more. And to try to go into something thinking that you're never going to fail is just crazy. It's absolutely insane. And the second thing is, and you've got it in your book that we're going to talk about quite a bit today, is nobody's watching you with an eagle eye and like, "Oh, he made a mistake or she made, oh, she's wrong. He's wrong."
No, that is not the way the world works. And yet, the idea of youth doing that, I was that way when I was young. I was a proselytizer and, "This is the only way to invest. And let me tell you why, I will tell you." And then after, the other thing that we look for when we're looking at founders and things is we want people who've been kicked in the face a couple of times because, and just to make it about the market, if you are successful long-term in the stock market, you have been punched in the face so many times by the market that you better be humble because that's the only way you're going to get ahead and it just works so much better in my opinion.
I want to talk, though, about your new book, which I love, How To Live An Extraordinary Life, which you wrote for your kids. Now, your wife, who is glamorous and also successful, Polina, did a piece about the letters that I wrote to my kids, completely different reason. And I kind of wish that I'd taken your course with guidance and things like that. I hope it kind of emerges from the letters I ended up. But what I did was I wrote a bunch of letters for each of my children and they all got the same letters, but on their 21st birthday.
What was the motivation here? I know that you said that you kind of worried that you were going to die young and stay pretty and you didn't even think you'd make it to the incredibly young age to someone like me of 35, younger than my two older kids. But was that the-
Anthony Pompliano:
Yeah, I think it was a combination, right? So I don't know why. I always just had in the back of my head that time is finite that you get here on earth and everyone always acts, even if they come to maybe the realization that time is finite, that you have 80, 90, a hundred years. If you look at the number of people who think they're going to live to a hundred versus the number of people who actually do, there's a big gap. And it isn't in favor of the people who think they're going to live to a hundred. So it's just much shorter than people expect. And especially if you look at things like health issues or whatever, even if you say, okay, the average life expectancy in America for a male is 72 years old or whatever, there are a lot of people who die at 55 or 60 or 65.
And so it doesn't sound like that big of a difference between 65 and 72, but that's still seven years and it's seven years where you're really starting to think about, hey, what did I do in my life and who do I want to spend time with and those things? And so for me, I opened the book with what I think kind of puts you in the perspective of when I started to write these letters, which was every single time someone would ask me, "What do you want to do when you get older?" I would say, "Well, I got to do it before the age of 35." And to be honest, it was kind of half a joke, half I did feel that way. And then when I went in the military, I think that's when it really hit home. So I deployed when I was 20 years old to Iraq.
And that's when I realized, hey, one, life is definitely finite and we're increasing the odds here that you don't make it to a hundred. But also, two, was I had the fortunate opportunity to deploy with guys who are older than me. So at 20 years old, I got deployed from college, literally during my junior year get pulled out of college, I go, I'm worried about what party's on Friday night. What's the football game? Or whatever. These guys have kids and mortgages and they're working two jobs and just real life stuff. And so it opened my eyes to, hey, there are real life consequences and stresses and things like that after here. So because I am young and I don't have those responsibilities, I may be able to do some things now that I won't be able to do later.
And so where it showed up in a negative way is I remember when I came back and I talk about in the book, I was driving my motorcycle a little too fast. It was kind of like, you feel like you're Superman. If Al-Qaeda can't kill you, this 18 wheeler that happens to be going pretty fast down the highway as well probably doesn't stand a chance. So thankfully I made it through that period and matured a little bit. But then the good places where it shows up is when I went back to school to finish, which was really important to my parents, I took it much more seriously. All of a sudden now you can tie, okay, what I'm learning in school actually can help me later versus before maybe you were just doing it because somebody told you, hey, get a good grade or whatever. So I think that was a huge piece.
And then the second part is Polina really, I think she pushed me when our first child was born, like, "Write your child a letter." And so the first one I wrote isn't in the book, and it was more of just like, you're here, great to meet you. This is awesome. I'm a dad. Almost like I literally was writing to a newborn. Not very publishable. But what it got me thinking about was, okay, God forbid something does happen to me. What would I want to put down? And so for years I'd kept a note. First it was on paper, and then eventually I started do it on my iPhone. Just anytime I would learn something that was kind of like a pithy one sentence takeaway, I would write it down. And so when I decided to write the letters, I said to myself, let's just start with whatever I think I should know. Let's just turn one into a letter. And so the very first one I wrote, I believe is the first letter in the book, which is how you do one thing is how you do everything.
And frankly, it was therapeutic. It was almost like I was writing the letter and, yeah, I was writing it to them, but I was writing it and it was reminding me, this is who you aspire to be as well. And so one turned into two pretty quick. I think Polina was surprised that I wrote a second one. She was like, "Usually again, I got to pull teeth to get you to do something." And by the time I got to, I don't know, somewhere between five and 10, I was, oh, this is a good thing that I want my kids to have. It's actually helpful to me. And if I put a goal out there, then I will actually go and finish this. It may take a while, but I will finish it. And so that's when I said, "What if I just turned this into a book?"
And so the dirty secret is I had signed the book deal already, but it was for a different book, which maybe one day I will write, but I had momentum here and I was enjoying it. And so it was, let's not try to force something that doesn't feel natural. Let's just go write the book that I want to write right now. And so that's the book that you got in your hand.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
So personally, as you know, I think the power of writing both for yourself and for others, your kids, is such an amazing tool and I am so delighted to see your book doing so well because if you can get just, let's say you sell a million copies and if you get even just 10,000 people writing letters to their kids or loved ones or whatever. Man, I think that's going to be just a huge addition to people's toolkits because it's something I've done since I was a teenager. We're creating Sim Jim in our on-prem AI and going through all of my old journals, it's really cool to see what I thought about the world when I was 20.
And I also, as I mentioned, did letters for my kids that we gave on their 21st birthday. But I want to focus on some of the lessons because I think so many of them I just resonate so much with. And the first or the second one, you already mentioned the first, is today is practice for tomorrow. And I love the way you phrase it because that's right, it is practice. And guess what? When you're practicing something, are you always going to do it right? No, you're going to screw it up a lot of times. I always use, I have a lot of grandkids. I'm very, very lucky. And watching a child learn how to walk is such a great metaphor. Can you imagine if we took the mentality of, no, you can't do that, it's too dangerous, you might hurt yourself, et cetera, and applied it to a child learning how to walk? No one would ever walk.
Anthony Pompliano:
Yes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I mean, it would never happen. And so when people read that, are they taking that from the chapter in the letter?
Anthony Pompliano:
Yeah. What's interesting is, I didn't know this until I had the benefit of hindsight, which was, every time I was doing something, “this is the most important thing in the world, I'm going to do it for the rest of my life, this is it,” whatever. And then I one day just kind of popped my head up and I said, "The thing that I just accomplished or just done was actually the culmination of A, B, and C things that had fed into it." And so I was uniquely positioned to do it. And so a great example is a lot of people externally will look and say, "How did he build all of these media properties?"
What they don't know is I had tried multiple times in different variations. There's a medium blog that's out there somewhere. There was a interview show in Raleigh, North Carolina. All these different things that had kind of been almost practice for what ended up really working and taking off. And so I started to get pretty fascinated with this. And it's timely that we're talking today because over the weekend I read a book called, The Art of Learning. And it is Josh Wadsick, I think is how you pronounce his name, who was the next Bobby Fisher as he was growing up. And he was this great chess player.
And in it he talks about two types of learning. He describes one which is an entity based intelligence, and another which is an iterative based intelligence. And so the best way to describe it is entity based intelligence is somebody who is let's say, playing chess and they keep winning. They keep getting told, it's because you're smart. You're a winner because you win. You're winning because you are smart. And so when they lose, well, the only thing they know is that's the opposite of winning. And so now I'm not smart and I'm a loser. And so that's obviously destructive to a child because they are going to lose at some point.
Instead, the idea of iterative based intelligence is you're winning because you're working hard, you're winning because you've put the time and effort in, you're winning, and it's the kind of process is really what is driving it. And so when that child loses the natural reaction is not, I'm stupid or I'm a loser. The reaction is, well, I need to work hard. I need to go back and keep kind of iterating to get this figured out. And so I do think that that's a very unique way of looking at the world is we want more iterative kind of intelligent people. And so the idea that today is practice for tomorrow, fits right into that because every single thing you're doing today, whether it works or it doesn't, it's a lesson. And I always like the old, there's no winning and losing, right? Or right and wrong. It's just either I won or I learned. Very similar I think in life. But if you were to go and you were to ask, go back to investing, the best investors, I think they learn more from their losses than their wins.
And so you need that. It's kind of like as an input if you don't have the losses. I love, I think Jeremy Giffin's got this great framework where he talks about before and after the fall, and he's like, when you meet somebody, the Army equivalent is if you've ever watched the movie 12 Strong, they have General Dostum who is overseeing one of the Afghan military units. And the US forces go and they meet up with him and he refuses to talk to the US leader. And instead he scans the room and he finds somebody who's standing in the back and he says, "That's the guy I'm going to talk to." And the US leader, young guy right out of training is super pissed. He's like, "I'm the leader." And he says, "You don't have killer eyes. That guy has killer eyes. He's got the thousand yards stare. He's seen some shit. You haven't."
And so before and after the fall, very similar of, once I heard that and I started to see it in the world, I said, oh, there's a humility that comes with post fall. But also, there's a difference in the risk mitigation or the risk analysis. There's a difference in how you allocate capital and all these things that just goes back to the tee ball player in little league baseball should not be as prepared for the game as the high schooler. Who should not be as prepared as the major league baseball player. And so you need practice to be able to do this stuff. And I think that just reminding yourself of that's important.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And again, I agree with you completely, and I like the way you put it, the notion that you're going to have everything figured out wherever you are in your life. The people I'm attracted to are people who basically admit, wow, I have so many wrong ideas and I got to try to root them out. I've got to try to replace them. I've got to try to upgrade my skill set, et cetera. That ties into the person after the fall. I had the grave misfortune when I wanted to be in the stock market. I was a kid. And so I had some money and I had developed this very technical options trading program, and I was programming the computer. I had Texas Instruments, and I got that one because it had 16K of RAM. So I'm really dating myself. Anyway, on my first trade, I doubled my money. And of course, I was 20 whatever, and I thought, "Oh my God, I'm the king. I am the smartest man in the world."
And then, of course, the world disabused me of that notion for the next several years. But as you say, it was the next several years where I learned everything. And so being open to that I just think makes you a much more anti-fragile person because it shows you you got to pivot, you've got to iterate, you've got to just keep doing until you get to that groove, and then you got to figure that part out too, right? In my opinion, life is growth, right? Death is stasis. And the ability to have high agency is super important. But you have another thing in the book that I also agree with, which is, hey, carve your ethics in stone, but your opinions in sand. I love that word-smithing, but talk a bit about that.
Anthony Pompliano:
This came to mind because I was watching politicians flip-flop all the time. And what was so funny about it was they get attacked for it. Oh, you're a flip-flopper. Oh, you're, whatever. In business, you actually are rewarded and encouraged to change your mind when you get new information. It's a sign of intelligence. And so I started thinking about how do you teach your kids when do you change your mind? When is it appropriate versus when is it not? And so really what I said to myself was ethical decisions are kind of the red line. Look, in ethical decisions, you should make the same decision every single time in your life, regardless of how you are presented with different options. Everything else, really just your opinion on things, can be changed based on what information you receive. And so trying to think through, am I facing an ethical kind of dilemma or am I facing a opinion or business decision or whatever?
And if you can always just make sure, okay, if it's an ethical thing, I know exactly what to do is do the right thing. Everything else is open for interpretation based on whatever the latest information I have is. And so if you start to look for this in the world, you will find that actually when people change their mind on ethical situations, that usually leads to really poor outcomes. And one of my favorite books is Clayton Christensen, a couple years ago wrote a book called, How Will You Measure Your Life? And he had been diagnosed with a terminal illness or an illness, and he, I think knew, hey, I don't have as long as maybe I want to have with my life. And so he started thinking about some of these topics. And in the book he talks about ethics and he says, "Look, I went to business school at Harvard Business School and all these great people and stuff."
And he goes, "And some of my classmates went to jail later on in their careers." And he says, "Was it worth it?" And he talks about, "I don't think these were bad people. I knew them." But through a series of iterations and developments in their career, they made little tiny decisions that compounded. And then next thing you know, and I think he actually went to, I think he was in business school with one of the Enron executives. And he says to himself, he's like, "Look, nobody sets out to create Enron in the form that it ended up, but let's change the accounting for one quarter or one week." And then next thing you know, you end up with this massive issue. And so I do think that by having kind of the, again, ethics in stone, you just always know I'm always going to make the same decision there. It gives you the confidence then to change your mind on non-ethical things, which are opinion based decisions you may face.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, the road to hell, being paved with good intentions is a great proverb. And I've seen it so many times in my career. And like you advise your kids and others in the book, I have a real bright line around ethics versus situational things, opinion things. So one of the things that I decided really early in my life was I will always honor my word. It doesn't have to be in writing. If it's a handshake, it's the same as if I've got a contract. And I got to tell you, man, there have been times when that really backfired on me.
Anthony Pompliano:
Shocker.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
But the way you build a reputation is block by block, and it takes time. And what does Buffett say? It takes a lifetime to create a reputation and it can be destroyed in a day or a few minutes or one bad decision. And the Enron example is a great example. A lot of those guys, I knew some of those guys too. A lot of those guys did not go in with their master plan to con everyone in the world, right?
Anthony Pompliano:
Yes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
They went in with good intentions. And then it also illustrates the power of negative compounding. Like everybody understands, or most people understand positive compounding. Things can compound negatively too. And the minute you make that tiny little concession, right, you know what? Nobody's going to notice. Let's just accelerate this earnings. And then it becomes, oh, we signed a thirty-year contract. Let's take all of the profits we're anticipating over that thirty-year and book them this quarter, and that leads to bad things.
Anthony Pompliano:
Well, also, Shane Parrish did a podcast episode a while ago on a podcast called Stray Reflections, and I don't know how popular that podcast is, but somehow I found it, and I found this episode, and I was listening to it recently. And he talks about the importance of positioning. Everyone looks at the decision, but so many people don't realize that it's the positioning that either empowers or creates good or bad decision making. So the example that he uses is, he's got a kid who's got a test, and they don't do well on the test. So, he says, "Well, did you get a good night of sleep the night before?" "No." "Because you were cramming." "Did you study?" "No." "That's why you had to cram." "Did you eat a good breakfast that morning?" "No." "That's because you slept in." So, you went into the test in bad positioning which obviously was going to decrease your performance.
If you take it to the Enron situation, there's a whole idea of if you keep creating bigger and bigger expectations, and you can't fulfill them, then you start to get desperate. But how many businesses that ended up being frauds over generations now were actually good businesses if they just hadn't tried to take that one extra 10% leap in, whether it's a public market earnings report or whatever? I tell founders this sometimes, and they always are like, "Wait, why are you telling me this?" I say, "Ambition can kill companies just as much as mistakes, and errors and everything else. So you got to know when is the time to be ambitious and when is the time to mitigate ambition suffocating your business because you're so focused on how much revenue, how many employees, or whatever. Well, maybe right now actually it's time for you to gather everyone around and become resilient and then create that new foundation so then you can go be ambitious again." Again, it's an art, not a science, but I do think that positioning is a really interesting way to think about why do people make some of these bad decisions.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, I agree. My friend, Annie Duke, calls looking at just the result, resulting. Like, "Oh, bad test. You're a bad student." That's resulting. If you don't do that and look at the other things that contributed to why on that one snapshot of a test you didn't do well, you're going to get a much better understanding of base rates, for example. People ignore base rates for the most part, and yet they, in my opinion, are the most valuable information you can have access to because, and I always use the example when I try to take it out of investing and that realm because, for whatever reason, people's brains seem to shut off when you're trying to talk to them in that way about investing.
But then I say, "Okay, hey, Pomp, would you go to a doctor if you had something wrong with you who looked at you, didn't do an exam, and looked and said, 'Yeah, you know what, these little yellow pills, a pharm rep just gave them to me, I think that they're going to fix your problem and tosses them over to you." I'm going to run like hell out the door from that doctor if he doesn't show me or she doesn't show me long-term, double-blind tests, understand what my condition is, all of those things.
Insurance is another great example. Can you imagine if the life insurance industry operated from just a gut level? Like, "Hey, even though all of your tests, all of your male fore-bearers died at age below 50 of a heart attack, you're obese, you have diabetes, you have all of these problems, but we like you so much, we're going to give you a $50 million life insurance policy." They're going out of business.
The actuarial table, the base rate, all of that is vital information in so many areas of life, and people just totally ignore it. And that has always perplexed me, and especially on this theme of people like that, one time, that becomes, and I love the bright line you put here, that's an ethical issue. And if you fuck that one up, it doesn't really matter. It doesn't really matter how great that business could have been, how great that project could have been, you're on the wrong slope in my opinion.
Anthony Pompliano:
Well, it's also, which one can you afford to be wrong on is another way to think about this. And so you can afford to be wrong in your decision-making a lot when it's non-ethical things, but what I have seen in various news stories, current events, people who end up doing bad things, once they begin to make an error on an ethical decision, it snowballs. It's like some weird thing where they've breached a, I don't know, an activity that they previously wouldn't have done, now it's like, "Well, I've already done that before. Just do it again." And then next thing you know, you're just like, "Okay, well that took it to the extreme."
So I don't know. I try not to pretend like I have all the answers or preach to people about that. That's one of the challenges with writing a book like this is first you have to make it very clear to people that every single person's extraordinary life is different. Mine may be sitting inside reading on a weekend, yours may be, I don't know, being in Monaco partying or Ibiza or whatever, and both of those can be extraordinary lives for the different people, but also I call out in the beginning, some of the letters compliment each other, some of them contradict each other, and it's because there's different points in your life.
And so sometimes things apply, but other times they don't, and part of my hope in people reading this book is you got to be smart enough to know what to apply when. Nobody else can do that for you. You just want to have a toolkit that you can reach into and grab what you need when you need it. But really you're the person grabbing the tools. So if you are working on a car, and you need a screwdriver, but you grab a hammer, good luck.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Exactly. And the idea is very apparent to me, but it's good to bring that up in our conversation for people listening and watching because what you're doing is saying, "Hey, right now I find these to be really good suggestions that will get you ahead, kids, but you know what? Subject to change as I learn new things." Out of curiosity, as you read the book, the actual physical book, what are you looking at and thinking, "You know what? I don't know that I believe that piece of advice."
Anthony Pompliano:
Well, when I first look at the book, I'll tell you a good story, which is a classic entrepreneurial kind of journey, which was the book cover that you're looking at is very close to what I originally set out to want to do, which was some people like them, I happen to not like the book jackets that are put on books. I take them off to read the book and all this stuff. And so I had another book called Rules for a Night, I think it is, by Ethan Hawke. And so I'd read that, and I have a very nice kind of embossed cover like that, and it kind of felt timeless. And so I said, "I want something like that." And the publisher said, "That's a horrible idea. Let's do something else. Here's all this data and studies and blah, blah, blah, all this stuff." And by the way, they're right on having the quotes and the testimonials and the book jacket, and every single thing they said is correct, but it really just came down to like, "But I want this other thing."
And my gut is telling me that it's kind of a power law. If you do something different, you better be right because most people who do something different are just wrong and stupid, and so I'll take my chances, but let's see. But what was interesting is when they brought the book to the book buyers outside the United States, they immediately, in many Asian countries specifically, but other places got feedback, "You can't have a black book cover. That color is the color of death that will not do well here." And so the book is actually red outside the United States.
And so it was this belief of I have this really passionate feeling about the book cover, but let me actually listen to the experts. These people know better than I do. And so that was the first thing is the book cover in the United States I really like. The one internationally is red because they were like, "Don't be stupid." I said, "Hey, Charlie Munger said, don't be stupid. I'm going to try my best to listen for once." So that's one.
In terms of things in the book, I don't think there's anything that I don't believe. I think that maybe there's a severity dial that usually happens. And so a friend of mine asked me, he said, "Hey, you wrote a book that very quickly could be seen as being almost too simplistic." The challenge in writing a book like this is you want things that are very memorable and very simple, but you also need to be profound enough where they're something that people will try to implement themselves.
And so I have a chapter in the book where I write a letter to my kids, and I say, "Hey, you should go for a walk outside. When things are on your mind, just go for a walk outside." That is almost so simple that it is dumb to go for a walk outside. But at the same time, I've never gone for a walk outside when something's on my mind and come back, and I'm like, "Man, I shouldn't have done that." And so it's important, but it's very simple.
And so as I was talking to a couple of friends who read the book immediately, of course, you're good friends and latch on to all the stupid stuff and start giving you a hard time, and one of them said to me, "Oh, we're going to go for a walk outside?" Immediately just giving me a hard time. And I was joking with him, and I said, "Well, when's the last time you went for a walk outside?" He's like, "Every time I got something on my mind." And so I do think that those things of the severity of how much do you believe something also depends on, well, are we talking behind closed doors? I actually believe it. Or do I want to seem cool to my friends? And people change their opinion. So that severity dial I think is important.
And the other thing too is one of the chapters is about if everyone throws their problems on a table, you'll grab yours back real fast, and actually your problems are not as bad as other people's problems. It depends on who else throws their problems on the table. So I always laugh at, if you talk to somebody who's really, really wealthy and the things they're worried about are like, "Oh, I can't find someone to cut the grass at my fourth home." You're kind of like, "What? The horror. The horror." By the way, for the average American, getting someone to cut their grass is a foreign idea. Forget the fourth home. They're the ones, they don't even have a lawn, they just live in an apartment or something. And so the comparison ends up being important.
And so from that perspective, I actually think I may believe these things more and more the longer that I sit with them rather than less which hopefully means that they're more timeless. That was my big goal with the book is just like, how do you write a book that is just as relevant a hundred years from now or 50 years from now that it is today? I won't probably be here to find out if it is, but maybe if it's relevant 10 years from now, then that's good enough, and I should be happy with it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And also, you make a good point that there is a huge difference between simplistic and simple. I often say, "Hey, good investing is simple, but it's really hard." A lot of things, take a walk outside every day, touch grass, all that kind of stuff sounds very simple, but a lot of people think, "Ah, I'm too busy. I can't do that." And then again, we get back to negative compounding because those kinds of things are really good to get your mind in the right frame for what you're trying to deal with, et cetera.
I also love your point about throwing your troubles on the table. You're going to grab your own back really, really fast. And another thing you talk about are the common traits of the smartest people you've met. I've been super lucky to meet some of literally the smartest people in the world, and I was really struck by the similarities that I took away and you took away. So run through some of those too because again, some of them are simple and straightforward, but as a package, they are probably something really good for readers to kind of aspire to, "Hey, I want to find those people."
Anthony Pompliano:
So in the book, I have seven that I put together, and they're all around growth and not being subject to the stasis. Stasis equals death is a hundred percent how I think about it, and what I think is interesting are there are intentional ways to grow and then there's the unintentional way. And intentional ways are, they read a lot of books, and books is kind of one form, but they may listen to a lot of podcasts or read a lot of blog posts or whatever, but they're just constantly consuming new information that other people have put time and effort into creating. And some of the times they're looking for more nuance or detail around something that they're thinking about. Sometimes they're looking for new ideas.
But also I read a lot of books, and I'm looking to discover not only new ideas, but new people. I'll read about somebody, I'll read their biography, and they'll mention somebody. I'll go and I'll Google and be like, "Oh my God, I never even knew this person existed. How stupid am I? I'm glad nobody knows that I didn't know about this person who did this thing." So I think that's kind of intentional.
But then the other thing that they will do is they'll put themselves again in the right position. And so the last two points that I put in this list are they surround themselves with intelligence, and they seek to understand every perspective on a topic. And so what they're doing is they're saying, "Look, maybe I'm just going to go hang out with my smart friends, and they'll throw something out that I had never contemplated before, or they will present a topic that they're interested in."
One of the things that people obviously know me publicly for is all the Bitcoin stuff, and if you go back and you talk to a lot of the early people, the way they discovered Bitcoin was they were at dinner, or they were with a friend, or it was all word of mouth. There's no Board of Directors, there's no marketing team, there's no CEO of some decentralized computer network, and so that organic spreading of an idea really depended on whether you were open-minded or not. And so I heard about Bitcoin, I think, in 2012 probably, pretty early. I was real dumb, and I didn't do anything about it. And so it took me a number of years, three or four years, until I was like, "Hey, maybe this thing I should start learning about it." That three or four year difference I like to think was my education on not being open-minded, and it probably cost me hundreds of millions, if not maybe a billion dollars. Now, again, if you live your entire life looking at what could have been, you're never going to be happy, so you got to kind of just chalk it up to, "Okay, fine, but I learned the lesson." But it'd have been nice to make a couple hundred million dollars because I listened to a buddy rather than think I was too smart.
And so I just think that in my experience, when you meet these people, you're always surprised at how similar they are, and if you ever have the opportunity to see them interact with each other, it's like I was listening to a podcast years ago. I was driving the car, Polina was with me, and I don't want to say what podcast it is because people will start trying to figure out who was who. But I said, "This is like listen to a Ferrari talk to a Honda Accord." There was just one person who was just super intelligent, I mean just on it. And the interviewer was just like, "Explain that more." It was just a complete mismatch of intellectual horsepower.
And so Ferrari and the Honda Accord, well, what happens when you put a Ferrari and a Ferrari together? And you're just like, "Oh my God, this is watching some magic art form of these just two hyper intelligent people going at it." And so I do think that smart people seek those opportunities out the same way that maybe a really good basketball player wants to play with other really good basketball players. And so the more that you start to pick up on these habits or these kind of common attributes, then when you meet people, you start to put them in buckets. You say, "Okay, this person is really high intellectual horsepower, has really unique ideas. That may actually be different than somebody who's really high intellectual horsepower on a very specific topic without original ideas." And so depending on what you want to learn or be around, you start to pick and choose those people which has really helped me.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And I believe very much in cognitive diversity as opposed to as what many are trying to sell in kind of prepackaged form, cognitive diversity is really important. I have a lot of blind spots, and wouldn't it be great if I had somebody on my team who didn't have those particular blind spots, but was also really switched on? And I love the thing about the podcast. I have been in more than one negotiation where there were multiple parties where we were negotiating with them. And I'm thinking of one in particular where my lawyer called me on the phone, and this will date me because it was back in the early part of the century, and he called me, and he goes, "Who are we talking to today? Mr. X or Mr. Y?" And I went, "Why?" And he goes, "Well, because Mr. X is running double pentiums and the other guy can't even boot up DOS."
Anthony Pompliano:
But it's true, right? It is. There's a deal actually right now that a friend of mine is working through, and he's trying to buy a business. And my friend is very intelligent, very intelligent. He does this for a living. He can talk through the terms of this deal in 20 minutes on a phone call. The seller has never done a deal before, and so I've been looking at a number of deals with him, and we've gotten close in different forms and factors or whatever, and what I came to realize was people think that doing a deal with somebody who's never done one before gives you an advantage. It actually may be a disadvantage.
And if you look at Silicon Valley, one of the best things is that there are some market norms, and there's common documentation like the Y Combinator Safe and things like that where it's kind of just like everyone focuses on the important part, which is, are you going to do the deal or are you not? And then there's almost like an autopilot of what is standard and not standard. That really helps a lot of deals get done. And so it evens the playing field between the Ferraris and the Honda Accords, whereas in maybe the more traditional private equity world, if somebody's never sold a business before, this is the single most important transaction of their life. It's their life's work, and they're ready to sell and all this stuff, they're really going to pay attention to every single word in the document. And by the way, they got four attorneys that all are going to look at every single word.
And you just go through this whole thing, you're like, "Okay, having some degree of commonality, of understanding of documentation, et cetera, how powerful and important is the YC safe to the success of Silicon Valley?" Pretty good, right?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yep, yep. I agree. And it's actually a really good point about the person doing the first deal. They're going to pay much, much closer attention to everything, particularly if it's, as you say, they're selling their life's work.
Another part of the book that I think might end up being controversial is your idea that luck is not real. So a while back there was our mutual friend, Morgan Housel, wrote a thing on luck. And so I took to Twitter and did a thread on how I viewed luck. And I'm the first person to say, "Hey, man, I'm one of the luckiest people in the entire world, right?" Kind of born on third base or as maybe even sliding into home. But the idea that you can increase your luck is one that appeals to me and one I believe in, and I've got a young friend, George Mack, who says, "You can increase the surface area of your luck through almost every decision you make."
If you're presented with two opportunities. One is, "Ah, I'm tired. My girlfriend's coming over. Let's just Netflix and chill." Or, "Hey, I got invited to this really cool party. Lots of people I don't know are going to be there." If you pick that one, what are you doing? Well, according to George, and I agree with him, you are increasing the surface area of your luck because you're going into something unfamiliar with people you don't know, giving you lots of opportunities. But what's your view on that and the very forceful, luck is not real?
Anthony Pompliano:
Yeah, obviously I know that it will cause for a conversation at maybe the best, but the more somebody believes in luck, the lower agency they probably are, and the less somebody believes in luck, the higher agency they are. Now, usually what people are describing when they talk about luck is probability. And to your point, increasing the surface area of luck, really what you're trying to do is you're trying to increase the surface area of the probability something positive happens versus negative happens. And so I've always liked the kind of Warren Buffett, "Hey, I won the Ovarian Lottery." Like, "Hey, I was just born in the right place, right time to the right situation, and that was obviously much better than if I had been born somewhere else."
Now, if you get very technical about it, technically it's just a math probability, but if you think about what is really the value in the perspective of the Ovarian Lottery, it is that you have an optimistic and a positive spin on imagine just being able to be born here at this time in the way that I was. And so really the point is, and what I described in the book is that two people can go through the exact same situation, have the exact same physical injury, and you go talk to one of them and they'll say, "Wow, I was so unlucky to be in that situation and look, I lost my leg or I lost my arm." But you go talk to the person in the hospital bed right next to them and they'll tell you, "I'm so lucky to be alive." And so it's very much a psychological concept, not a mathematical one. Now the beauty of that is research shows that you can become luckier by simply thinking you're lucky. You don't even actually have to increase the surface area of luck. You can just say, "Hey, I'm a lucky person." And you start to realize, wow, I was walking across the street and I didn't get hit by that car. I'm so lucky. Right. I was walking in today and my key worked, or whatever thing.
You start to almost think like you're on a hot streak, right, and it becomes this thing where you start to see the positives versus everyone has been in a world where you're just like, nothing can go right right now. You become very down and kind of depressed and things like that. And so really the point of the letter is that you have agency and you can do things to improve your situation. And sometimes they are based on probability. What is the probability that you and I go to a bar at a certain time and we meet each other and there happens to be a third person that also has a unique interest that's similar to ours, blah, blah, blah, whatever and we have a great conversation? Probably pretty low. If you were delayed by 10 minutes or I was delayed, there's all these things that feed into it.
But if you start to think to yourself, I'm so lucky everywhere I go, I meet cool people. Maybe it has more to do with you just being energetic, outgoing, willing to talk to people, etc then it is everywhere you go, there's cool people. Right. And so I do think that there's this kind of agency component of it. Now I will say that there's an Instagram account that I recently saw and I DM'd this guy and he's got 1000 followers. And I said to him, I said, "Do not stop what you're doing. This is going to be a very, very big account. This is cool." He walks through the streets of New York and he films himself giving really positive compliments to people. So he may be walking past you on the street and he'll say, "Excuse me, sir, that sweater looks amazing on you. It just fits you perfectly. You look awesome. I hope you have a great day."
And you can imagine in New York City, people in media are like, what do you want? Why are you being so nice? Their radar goes off. Right. And he just turns and he just keeps walking. And he does this a couple times and he's got ones, he'll say to people, I really like your tattoos. Or there's a guy in Bryant Park that's kind of moving some of the construction materials and you can tell the guy's kind of down and he says, "Hey man, we just really appreciate you doing the work you're doing here. There's not many people who would show up to work every day and work hard and kind of put their body through what you're doing. Just keep at it. There are people out here who appreciate you." And you can tell the guys like, what's going on? Right. But what it does is it starts to show that that guy is probably so happy every day because he's walking around, he's saying compliments. He's doing all this stuff that there is no, I'm so lucky I get to meet cool people every day.
He goes out and he meets cool people. He goes and he finds them. And so it is controversial to say luck is not real because actually what you find is that people who have good things happen to them, feel uncomfortable taking credit for it. So they will constantly downplay their investment, or their action, or the time and energy that they put towards something and they'll just say, "Hey, I got lucky." And you see investors are classic. You're talking to somebody, they're a multi-billionaire and you're like, how'd you do it? I just got lucky. Good time, good place. You're like, dude, you work 90 to 120 hour weeks. You were obsessive about this thing. You put all this time, energy, whatever into it, and you're smart and you made a lot of good decisions. But yes, you got lucky. You're right. Okay.
To some degree, it's a cop out because it's like an intellectual, like pulling the ladder up behind you. Right. You're like, "Hey, you were successful." Rather than tell people how you did it, you just pulled the ladder up and you're like, "Ah, if you're lucky, you can do it. If you're not, you can't." And so by putting it in there, hopefully that will cause people to think a little bit more about agency and kind of paying it forward. Tell people how you did it so that you're not pulling the intellectual ladder up and kind of leaving the next generation behind.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Man, there's so much to unpack there because I agree with you wholeheartedly. I used to when I was fucking around on Twitter, whenever, when anyone said like, "Oh, they're just lucky." And I had this GIF, right, of this guy with a rain cloud following him around, and my quote was, "Everything is luck said the most unlucky man in the world," because I completely agree with the premise that you can make your own luck. Right. So in response to Morgan, I was like, "Hey, there is dumb luck, right?" You win the lottery or just whatever, it's just totally a random probability that just landed on you. And then there is informed luck. In other words, you keep your aperture wide open, you keep your viewpoint wide open, and it gives you the opportunity to see and sense unusual things occurring.
And then to your point about agency, right, you have to take action. You have to say, wow, I bet this isn't going to last. I'm going to go jump on that right now. And so the idea of agency also is something I think a lot about because it alone can trump like, agency and persistence can trump IQ, can trump most things. And again, back to George, he's really great at coming up with these clever ways of looking at it. He's like, "You want to know who the highest agency person you know is answer this question." If you were put in jail in a third world emerging country and you had one phone call, who would you call to get you out? And that is your most agentic friend.
And one of the worries that I have, like I'm doing a lot with O’Shaughnessy Ventures because I just think that there's so many people rooting against things. Right. I hate that. That's bad, that's awful. And I just think we would, like your guy walking around giving people compliments. There's so many things that are so cool right now happening that there is so much to root for. Right. And the energy that you get back when you're rooting for as opposed to against, like you really don't have to be terribly smart to be a pessimist, right? Oh, that'll never work. Oh, that's dumb, right? And so this idea of optimistic, realistic, realists, I'm not talking Panglossian pie in the sky, but literally an optimistic framework and outlook married to high agency. What a formula.
Anthony Pompliano:
I heard 50 Cent the rapper say this once and it stuck with me, which upsets people. But I think the general point that he makes is definitely applicable. He said, "Growing up nobody was depressed. That's a luxury. We were worried about what are we going to eat. We were worried about how to be safe. We were worried about ABCD things. Where I come from, depression is a luxury." And what I took away from it was our country and our civilization is so advanced we can sit around criticizing it, right? If you go back, there's this great book, I think it's called The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert Gordon maybe. And in it, basically he talks about the period between 1870 and 1940 and how much technological progress we made. And he says at the beginning of that period, there's a house and it's basically isolated, that has no connectivity via roads, via electricity, via water, via sewage, any of that stuff.
But by the end of that period, it's fully hooked up to the system and ready to go. And he talks about the invention of the elevator and how important it was to be able to go up, not out, which used to be the thing is you got to just keep expanding further and further out. But the fact that we could build up and how much density could now go into a city or an urban area and all that stuff. And so during those times, there were not people criticizing, they were building, they were looking for growth. And so I do think pessimism is a luxury, which sounds really kind of weird, but it just comes back to this idea of your life is probably pretty good if you can walk around being pessimistic all day. And so maybe the number of pessimists is a sign of economic development and civilization kind of progress that we've finally reached the point where people can sit on Twitter all day and just complain about things. We made it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Louis C.K.'s got this great bit where he is talking about the first time he experiences WiFi in an airplane and he's like, "You're like, I can't believe it. I'm 30,000 feet above the air and I can surf Twitter and the internet and everything else." And he goes, "Then the minute it goes out, you go, what the fuck?"
Anthony Pompliano:
It's true.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It really is. And I'm a huge believer in travel. I think it broadens your mind more than many other activities because you see how other people live, how other cultures work, et cetera. And I remember being in Bhutan, if you've never been, I highly recommend going. It's like an amazing, amazing place, but they're a developing nation and my wife and I were taking a walk in a village there and they had no electricity, like none. And yet this group of kids runs up to us, huge smiles on their face and all they want to do, and so we start talking with them, the ones who spoke English. They came up to us because obviously Americans and they wanted to practice their English. Right.
And so the older kid who was pretty good with his English, I'm like, "So tell me your story and everything." And Anthony, everything he said to me was the most positive outlook on life. And when we were back at the hotel, I looked at my wife and I'm like, "Man, wouldn't it be great if we could import that into the United States, that kind of attitude?" Like this kid, no electricity in his village, not much going on, and yet everything, I'm so excited about this, this and this, and I'm learning this, this and this, and I was just so taken by it. So I think that you're right, when you create such an advanced economy, it's much easier to be pessimistic. Dr. John Sarno highlighted the idea of these mind body issues where ulcers or bad backs or stiff necks, guess what? They only happen in super advanced economies. Like elsewhere, they don't exist. And so,-
Anthony Pompliano:
Of course.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
I think that, yeah, I think that,-
Anthony Pompliano:
We're just the idiots who sit in chairs all day while the rest of the world is up and moving,
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Right. Exactly. Kind of live your life as a verb, not a noun is good advice. The other thing that you talk about that I also believe in is power laws are like everywhere. One thing, and I want your opinion on this, I have the view that the power laws are actually going to be more available to more people now because the tails have gotten much longer in the distribution. And by that I mean in the old days, if you wanted to be a TV star, well you had Lucy Lucille Ball to contend with. Right. Nowadays, there's so much media that you can be on. You can go into a niche part of TV and your power law can take over. Same thing in podcasting and Substacks and all of those types of things. There are all these new smaller hills but hills nonetheless that you can conquer. Do you agree?
Anthony Pompliano:
Well, I think that just objectively that's true. Content is a great way to look at it. It used to be that there was only a couple of TV stations, so if you wanted to be quote, unquote famous on TV, then you had to be one of 20 people or 50 people. Now there's been fragmentation, which usually is looked at negatively, but now you can be famous to 1000 people or 10,000 people. You don't have to be famous to the entire country. You don't have to be on the five TV stations. Now you can be on the millions or hundreds of millions of TV stations in terms of social media accounts and things like that. And so I think that technology has obviously changed it for the better, but I also think the severity of the power law is moving in a direction that it'll benefit people.
And so maybe the best way to describe it is the power law of let's say writing a book used to be, do you get on The New York Times bestseller list or not? I know many friends, not even one or two, like at this point a lot of friends who have sold a hell of a lot of books. Could have been based on the numbers on The New York Times bestseller list, but they weren't. It's editorialized, they self-published, they did all this kind of stuff, whatever. And so there's a lot of people who would say, oh, based on some antiquated criteria, you didn't make the power law as that criteria. Friends who made a million dollar selling books, they don't care about a list.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Right.
Anthony Pompliano:
They're like, just put me on the seller's list. Right. I don't need to be on The New York Times bestseller list, just put me on the revenue list. And so I think that that stuff happens. The other thing about power laws 80, 20 is kind of the Pareto principle, all that I say in the book that I actually think it's like 95, five, it's not 20% of your decisions, it's less than five, maybe even one in 99. I mean it is, yes, that is a good guiding principle to do 80, 20, but it is much, much more kind of magnified than that. And so we've done this in some of our businesses. At the end of the year we look back and we say, if we only got to make two or three decisions, what were the two to three decisions that we made that led to most of the outcome?
And one year, I mean this sounds insane, one year we looked at and we had a very good year, we made one decision with the balance sheet to invest some capital off of the balance sheet, and that drove 99% of the return for that year. And so we sat there and we said, we could have made that one decision and all just not worked the whole year and we would've had nearly the same outcome. That makes us dumb. Why would we spend all this time, energy, all this stuff, whatever? And so then going into the next year, we said to ourselves, you can't say that every year it's going to repeat and you're not always going to make good decisions, but maybe we should actually change the way that we think about decision making and what's important. And you learn, right, and you kind of go from there.
And so I do think that understanding power laws is less about trying to replicate them all the time. And it may be about avoiding the big amount of decisions or actions that aren't going to have an outcome. So it's like less than it being a creative and let's go find 20 more new power laws. Instead, maybe it's about, well, let's just reduce the 20 things we're doing down to two because we think one of these two is the power law. And it's kind of like a subtraction thing, not an addition thing that can be an outcome once you start seeing the power laws everywhere.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah. And it also helps you focus the mind on what is really going to move the needle and what could lead me down a path back to luck. I always loved Cormac Mc Carthy's quote, "You'll never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from." And so to kind of focus on never multiply by zero, right? Multiplying by zero always gets to zero. And so I agree completely there. Well, we're closing in on time, man. I could have actually made this, like everyone's banging on, I hate long form podcast. I could have done four hours with you here, my friend but.
Anthony Pompliano:
I think that less than 10 minute content and more than two hours based on the data on our platforms, that's the content that does well. People either want the quick hit or they're going to sit down and let's go on a journey together. So long form I'm a big fan of you should do more and more of it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And as I do, I will invite you back on because I recommend the book to everyone. I loved reading it and it's sold out right now though, isn't it?
Anthony Pompliano:
I did not know that you could sell out on Amazon. That is a new idea to me. It did that. They refreshed, but then now we're hearing in some other countries, like I got an email today, the UK only had three copies and the woman's like, "I don't want to buy it because then nobody else can get a book." I was like, "You just buy. That's okay. If you buy three copies, I won't be mad." So we're working on it, but I think we should be in pretty good shape and we'll see when all the sales data comes out.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Well, I'm delighted to see you having so much success with it. You definitely deserve it. As you know, because we've been on the podcast before, we do have that final question, so you get another chance. We're going to make you the emperor of the world. You can't kill anyone. You can't put anyone in a concentration camp or a reeducation camp, but what you can do is we're going to give you a magic microphone and you can say two things into it that is going to incept the entire population of the earth. Whenever their tomorrow is, they're going to wake up and the two things you've said, they're going to think were their own ideas and they're going to look and say, unlike all those other times, I'm going to actually take action against both of these things right now and continue to do so. What you going to incept?
Anthony Pompliano:
One of my favorite letters in the book is all about call your friends just for no reason. Just call and just say, "Hey, what's going on?" And I explicitly say, it's not for them, it's for you, right? It'll make you feel better and you'll learn, but you have to be genuinely interested if you do it. If you're the idiot who calls and then you're like, and you really don't care, you're not listening and you're like watching TV, it doesn't work. But I think that's one of just, like interact with people, especially young people today who kind of hide behind computer screens, I think is probably a big one. So maybe love is the answer type thought process. And then the other one maybe is an investing one, which is I think the next, I don't know, 20 years, 50 years, whatever, some long period of time is just going to be defined by the devaluation of whatever fiat currency is your local currency.
And so yeah, there's kind of a simple, just investors are going to be winners and savers are going to be losers. And so it runs counter to so much of personal finance of save, save, save. And so that doesn't mean go buy some risky whatever alt coin or stock or meme coin, whatever you can do just fine as many people have for a very long time just buying the S&P 500 or whatever. But just don't sit with 100% of your net worth in cash and think that you're going to save your way to that house or save your way to whatever you want. And so everyone's different. Everyone's got kind of different risk profiles and responsibilities or whatever, but I think that's probably on the investing side, just they're going to devalue it. I promise. They may do it faster and slower at different times, but they're definitely going to devalue it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Great advice, both of them. And there's empirical evidence behind your second one. So for What Works on Wall Street, we looked at varying investments, but we took inflation, we stripped inflation away. If you'd put money, a dollar in U.S. Treasury bills, which many perceive as the safest investment in the world back in 19 whatever, 27. Right now, what would it be worth? About a $1.80. The same investment just invested in the S&P would be worth well over 400 bucks. And that which appears safest in the short term is often riskiest in the long term and vice versa. So I think both of those inceptions are going to help a lot of people. Well Pomp, this has been super fun. Really, really love the book and wish you all the best with it and hope to see you again soon.
Anthony Pompliano:
Thanks so much, Jim, I appreciate it.
Hi Jim, I've been reading Infinite Loops for a long time now. Especially loved this one. How can I reach you?
Looking forward to this one. Thanks for being an awesome human!