”Human + AI Beats Both Alone" - Alix Pasquet on Analog Training

I run a hedge fund. We are very different than others, uh, in many ways, and we like to deal with a few things. One is finding the inefficiencies of our business and exploiting them. And then the second thing that we like to do is finding the problems that often people are not even aware of and solving them. And both these things give us an advantage on top of the advantages that we have and helps us accomplish our goals, right? Uh, which is make a lot of money for our partners with as little risk as possible.

Um, and one of the problems currently popping up in our business is, uh, young people no longer are trained like the boomer or unk PMs that are out there, right? Um, and the problem with that is the young guys are, they're very good at, you know, they they they they are taught modeling, uh, freshman and sophomore year in college. They are taught the accounting, they are taught all of that stuff. But the problem, and by the way, they're very good at it. I could never compete with the current students that are in in schools today. Um, the other day I was at my alma mater and I was looking at the incoming crew of students. I'm like, these kids trance me intellectually. Um, but what do they lack? They lack what we call analog training. And I'll go into to to uh what that is, okay?

But first, um, we have a problem. The problem is Idiocracy. Now, I don't know if you've seen this movie. It's a hilarious movie from uh, I think 20 years ago. It's about a guy that that in an army experiment gone gone wrong gets put uh in a uh uh in a cell that stores his body for 200 years and then a couple hundred years he comes back out. And even though he was an average man in his current time, he ends up being a genius 200 years from now because of how bad society has deteriorated. And one of the examples is crops are dying because 200 years from now the idea is to put Gatorade on crops to make them grow. And he comes out, he's like, "No guys, we should put water." And ends up solving a famine crisis. Um, now, you know, this the picture on the right says Idiocracy was just supposed to be a movie, not a documentary. There is a certain element of of society becoming idiocracy. Uh, um, and and by the way, if you think business and culture setters are trying to help solve this problem, they're not. Um, uh, if you watch the latest Joe Rogan, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck podcast, they talk about how movies today to be able to make money, they're making them to deal with people that are looking at two screens at the same time, both the movie and the screen. So throughout the movie, they put in scenes that it reiterate what the plot is to make sure that it's okay while you're not paying attention that you still capture what's going on. So instead of making it you live up to the movie, they're having the movie live down to where current state of society is and just in my opinion, making it worse.

Now, I know I sound like a [ __ ] boomer, and I I know I am, but we're seeing this uh come in in the results of young investors today and the the output and the work that they do. Okay. By the way, the other uh sign that this might be a problem is a lot of Silicon Valley executives don't allow their kids to use the products they built. They don't allow them to use cell phones till a certain time. They don't allow them to use iPads till a certain time. You know, they're sending them to schools like the Waldorf school that doesn't allow computers. You know, it's just literally using analog tools. There's a school in Switzerland that I'm thinking of sending my son to when he's a certain age where there's no phones allowed, no computers. All you do is read and write memos for for a semester. That's very powerful in terms of of of you know, thinking under constraints and the problem with modern tools today is they don't have constraints and that's very dangerous.

Hey, thank you so much for listening to all open. If you want to be able to attend talks like these live, sign up for my substack below. I'll be posting all future events there and I'm looking forward to seeing you.

>> All right. You saw me talk about this before. Uh, this is the generational battle. Now, this is a global problem that I just like the slide because it shows it in the US. So, so currently the baby boomers have $76 trillion. Uh, Gen X, which is my generation, we have $37 trillion in wealth. The silent generation, so those are my grandparents, your great-grandparents, uh, they have $19 trillion. And then millennials have $13 trillion. And then you have the zoomers, the baby zoomers, sorry, the excuse me, the zoomers that have, you know, we actually don't know, but they're they're ramping up. What's happening here is the first baby boomer is reaching 80. Actually, he's reached 80 this year, right? And that wealth is trickling down. Okay?

So, let me step back. We're very thematic in our investing. It's not just that we want great fundamentals, but we want themes that are pushing those fundamentals forward. You know, it's one of the secrets of investing is you want to be part of great themes. Last night I had dinner with a very strong PM, probably one of the best PMs in the world, and he was talking about his analyst class from 1999, and how all the ones that went into tech are worth 50, if not 100 times the ones that went into other sectors, despite the the in his opinion, the IQ's of the guys that were in the other sectors were way better. And why is that? Because they were part of the the right rising tide in terms of wealth creation. There are reasons why technology was the right sector and theme to be pushed in. Um, now, is it going to be the right sector and theme to be pushed in in the future? I don't know. But but still, it helps to have the best weapons, right? So thematically we look for themes like we call this the boomers to zoomers theme that what is happening with wealth as it trickles down to Gen X, then millennials, then baby zoomers. But one of the things uh that you'll see is the Gen X guys were the last generation to be trained with analog tools but really know how to use digital tools as well. Whereas the millennials and the zoomers were more trained with digital tools. And the problem with that is they lack the thinking under constraints that we had when we were reading, writing, you know, using things like, you know, these like notebooks, right? Um, and it it constraints are powerful because they force you to to to break them. Uh, and thinking without constraints uh can be very dangerous.

And and by the way, um, to use the analogy, the way you train special forces in the military is you don't give them the special weapons that can shoot around corners, the goggles where you can see all your teammates are at night, the infrared goggles and all these things from day one. No, you drop them in the jungle with a knife that they have to hold in their mouths and you say, "Dude, see you in two weeks." And the guy's like, "I don't have any food." Work it out. By the way, we're going to be messing with you in these two weeks. So, you better learn how to survive. You first learn how to survive with your mind first. What we call in our in our business the 10K and a pencil approach. I want you to be good enough that you don't need any of the tools. You have a 10K. You read it and with a pencil, you're able to hammer out what is this business worth? What are the three things that matter and where do you think is going to happen in the in the next 18 months to three years? That's it. Very, very hard for the new school kids to do that, by the way. Okay.

So, we talk about this a lot in my firm. Uh, it comes from my background as a professional gambler. Um, I never looked to play against professionals. That was a waste of time and money. You looked to play when you were gambling against rich people with big egos that did not know how to gamble as well as you did, right? Same thing matters in business. Same thing matters in the military. You know, there's a saying in the military. Um, if you find yourself in a fair fight, you haven't planned your mission properly, right? And one thing that you'll see in what we call internet 3.0, and I learned this from a very talented PM called Doug Douglas Schwarz, uh, he was teaching me about internet 1.0, internet 2.0, internet 3.0. And internet 1.0 and it was like Yahoo, Geocities, and the the first internet sites which was disrupting traditional business but not really. Internet 2.0, which was Amazon, Google, Facebook, that really disrupted a lot of businesses. Think about traditional ad agencies, traditional advertising, newspapers, yellow pages. I mean, do you guys even know what yellow pages are? You know, these are all businesses that were disrupted by internet 2.0. And then internet 3.0, which is AI and blockchain enabled internet, in our opinion, is going to be even more disruptive, but more importantly, internet 3.0 is going to eat out internet 2.0 and most likely crush them as well. Um, and what you'll see is whenever you study a business, it's just like an ecosystem. You have to study who are the predators and who are the prey, right? Who are the companies that are literally going to wipe out um uh the other other companies? When you study an ecosystem, it's always predator prey dynamics, right? The top predator, like a pond where there's like big fish, medium-sized fish, small fish. The big fish sometimes prey on the medium-sized fish. So medium-sized fish sometimes bring a small fish. It's really interesting, by the way, when you introduce another predator to a pond. What usually happens is the top predators try to fight the new predator, but then they realize it's really costly. So those guys turn on those guys, the middle guys, and then the middle guys then turn on the small guys, and you get what's called an ecosystem wipeout where everybody just wipes start wiping out each other until they stabilize u ecologically. Again, this happens in companies. If you study, for example, when Amazon when Amazon entered sports retailing, they fought Dick's Sporting Goods first. Then Dick's was like, "Yeah, I don't really like fighting this Amazon guy." So, what did they do? They turned on everybody else and literally started wiping out guys. Um, so one thing you'll see in the age of AI is that the predator prey dynamics are amplifying and accelerating. Okay, take a look at what's going on with SAS software today, right? Where the AI companies supposedly are wiping out these businesses. By the way, in some cases, it's unclear if they've impacted them, but they've impacted their narratives, which impact their multiples, and people perceive then that they're being impacted, and then that might impact seeks uh that they sell. It might impact consumption. It's actually unclear if there is going to be an impact. We think in certain cases there are, by the way, but what's clear is that the predator prey dynamics are amplify and accelerating. Okay, and it's happening across business.

There is also um there are other things that drive predator prey dynamics. Uh, by the way, very important book to read is the book on this. It's called From Predators to Icons, exposing the myth of the business hero. By the way, was written by a French academic and then translated by another academic. So, you have to be a bit careful. It's also fairly clear, you know, to me that these guys might be socialists um or at least maybe perhaps not socialist, but perhaps French. Uh, but they describe how the best entrepreneurs start out as predators and then eventually redo their their history to look like icons. So we see them as today as iconic and then we're like, we have to behave like they do, but we forget that what got them to be to become who they became was they became like predators, right? And it's and again, predator dynamics are amplify and accelerating. Okay, so just just recall that.

Then we have uh Master Nan. So there's a Chinese uh master called Master Nan. I I had to study him when I was a kid um because my parents uh had me study him and he's brilliant and you can read his books and uh Joshua Ramo mentions an anecdote uh from Master Nan in his brilliant book called The Seven Sense, which is about power, fortune, survival in the age of networks. Genius book. Also, you should read uh The Age of the Unthinkable, in my opinion, the best strategic book uh uh ever written for a bunch of reasons, especially in modern times. But Master Nan uh has an anecdote. He says the disease of the 19th century was the flu. Why? Because it was the first time people were coming from rural areas and to cities and people were not used to these cities and being packed all in one place, we had the disease called the flu. Right? And then he says the disease of the 20th century is cancer. And the reason why is we created all these ingredients and labs that our bodies are not used to and put it into our food, into our environments, and our bodies are rebelling and it's causing uh cancer. Right? But he says the disease of the 21st century is going to be madness. And the reason why is because we're being connected because of modern communications tools to cultures, philosophies, societies even that we're not really supposed to be connected to as humans. And we actually don't know how to deal with that. And that's why the disease of the 21st century is going to be madness. Already, you're kind of seeing signs of that. Things that pop up and down, pop up and down in society. Um, and it's happening very fast and unbelievably, it's as if people are like have the memory of a goldfish. They believe in things and they stop believing and almost forget the fact that they believed in it. And part of the reason I think is the the digital uh uh uh intoxications that are that are happening.

All right. Now, I talked about this in your last uh thing. It's very important to know how to compete with AI. Um, we call it competing with the machines. Imagine a world, James Cameron world, where you have a bunch of Terminators running around. How would you compete with them and even defeat them? And and and AI in many ways, uh, us, for example, in my firm, we don't use the AI tools. We've decided they are extremely dangerous to use. Part of the reason we think they're dangerous to use is AI tools, we believe, are portfolio management tools. They're not analyst tools. An analyst needs to operate under constraints. You know, when you suboptimize an analyst, you actually optimize the performance of a fund. Whereas, if you overoptimize an analyst, it makes them lazy and less creative, right? Creativity is driven by a lack of resources, not an abundance of resources. Right? That's actually a principle of our business. We call it sidelor. Uh, creativity is driven by a lack of resources. And and when you look, you give AI to an analyst, you ask questions, it almost gives them a sense that, oh, I answered the question. No, all it does is gets you to the consensus point of view faster, right? Whereas if it took a week to have a consensus point of view before, today you get to a consensus point of view within a day with AI. But the problem with that though is that it's in the friction while you're thinking about something that you come up with the questions that you really have to answer. It's when you're in the field talking to a customer that you come up with the the right questions. It's when you're testing out a product that you come up with the right insights, not when you use the AI tools. Okay?

So, an analyst has several investment skills. Recall of past patterns, mental visualization of a business within the feedback loop of its ecosystem, reading between the lines. So, what reading between the lines is a CEO says in a transcript, this is what is happening. And you read between the lines and you're like, uh, yeah, that's what he says, but here's what his incentives, his culture, and what they're not saying is, right? As an analyst, it's very important that you have to you read between the lines. Uh, make leaps of judgment. A leap of judgment is when you analyze a business and you're like, "Wow, they have a problem with their sales department." And then you say, "Oh, they have a problem with their sales department because there's something wrong with the board of directors." Right? You just you you think the the location of the problem is not where the solution of the problem is, right? And when you when you study, by the way, it's very important to study systems thinking, complexity, chaos theory, ecology, that kind of shows you that systems like companies behave in very strange ways. You try to solve something at the part of the system where the problem is, it doesn't fix it. Often, you have to fix it somewhere totally different. Like, for example, um, I used to have a problem with my knee and I go to the knee doctor in America and the American doctor is like, "We we're going to cut open your knee and cut and shave this so that your knee can work." Then I'm at my acupuncturist, which happens to be a Chinese doctor. And he's like, he looks at me, he's like, "What's wrong with your knee?" I'm like, "It hurts." And he's like, looks at me, he's like, "It's not your knee, it's your hip." I'm like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "Well, your hip is weak." So the the muscle is taking the bone, your your your your thigh bone, and actually shifting on top of your knee, and now your knee is hurting. So I'm like, what do I do? He's like, just do uh hip exercises, strengthen the muscle. Two days of those exercises, my knee pain went away. So, which do you prefer? Knee pain or $35,000 surgery and three months of recovery, the American way? You know, let's let's let's go towards fixing it the Chinese way, right? So, so again, a leap of judgment. You know, that's a very powerful analytical uh skill. Okay? And then synthesize, putting everything together where you're like, okay, you study competitive strategy, you study valuation, you study governance of the business, and you're able to synthesize all of that into insight as to, hey, it's a long or dude, everybody's wrong, it's a short, right? Our insight about AI is that AI tools inhibit or dull all of these skills, especially in rookies, especially in young, young analysts. Okay.

All right. Very important to read our freestyle future in uh in this book by Tyler Cowan. There's a chapter on freestyle chess. Freestyle chess is when uh tournaments are between humans or human plus computer teams or computer teams, and everybody is just freestyling. You can use whatever you want. And the insight is human plus computer ends up being both human and computer, which is interesting. So, it's a combination of analog thinking, human and digital thinking. That's going to be the combination that we think wins. If you were to only pick one, in my opinion, I would just pick analog for a lot of reasons. And by the way, frankly, you know, to be to be very open, for reasons that competitively we cannot disclose publicly, we've actually found flaws in the digital tools that make people make catastrophic mistakes. And for competitive reasons, I'm not allowed to say it, but trust me, they're there. Look for them. One of the places you'll find it is in this chapter. If you're going to read it. Since the young people don't read anymore, maybe you'll never find it, but read this [ __ ] chapter. Trust me on this. One of his insights is that in a analog plus digital way, both secrecy and deception go up. That's interesting, right? Why is that? And is that also happening at companies? Important question to answer.

All right. Young people don't read anymore. This is a quote from Henry. Uh, and I'll read it out loud because I think it's important. It says, "Reading books requires you to form concepts, to train your mind to relationships. A book is a large intellectual construction. You can't hold it all in your mind easily or at once. You have to struggle mentally to internalize it. Now, there is no need to internalize because each fact can instantly be called up again on the computer. There is no context, no motive. Information is not knowledge. People are not readers but researchers. They float on the surface. This new thinking erases context." He's talking about computer thinking. It disagregates everything. All this makes strategic thinking about world order or, by the way, on companies, nearly impossible to achieve. Reading books requires you to form concepts to train your mind to relationships. A book is a large intellectual construction. You can't hold it all." Sorry, I just realized that I'm repeating this twice, but forgive me. Okay.

What does Henry mean? Well, it means that when you're thinking about a book, not only are you absorbing the intellectual capital of the writer, you know, it took him two years to write it, you can read it in less than three days. For me, I always thought that was magical that I could take all that knowledge from somebody and take it to me in a couple days. But it allows you to imagine what's not written. You see, companies, the things they do that give them an advantage, especially when they're crushing another company, they're not going to put that in a 10K or 10Q. Neither will a hedge fund manager that has competitive advantages. He's not going to put in his memos or his letters, "This is what we're doing to get an edge." No, they don't have to disclose that. I wouldn't disclose that if I was them. But when you read, the questions you'll ask will more or less find what those advantages are if you're looking for them. Okay. So, it's very important to read. Have to remember to disagregate this quote later.

All right. Other problems. So, we talked about it. Do you have a question, Ethan? Okay. Uh, other problems. We talked about artificial intelligence. Here's another problem. By the way, this is our term for it. I don't know if it has a term in the investment business, but we call the junior senior problem. Hedge funds are realizing that they don't need to hire junior guys anymore. And the reason why is a lot of AI tools are as good as the junior guys now, right? And the other problem is when the portfolio manager asks a junior guy, "Hey, that's great. Congratulations. You tell me that it's a long, it's a short, but this just happened. What's the CEO thinking right now?" The junior guys have a hard time explaining that. Whereas the senior guys that have seen a lot more reps, that have read all the books, that have read uh all the memos, they're like, "You know what? Here's what I think the CEO is thinking. I may not be right, but at least you give the portfolio manager some options as to what the the the CEO of the company or what might be happening that is not in a 10K or 10Q or even a press release, right?" And what the the the PMs are realizing is I don't want to hire junior guys anymore. I want to hire just senior analysts, people that have seen a lot more reps. One of the ways you see reps, by the way, is reading. Okay.

Another problem. There's a mental health epidemic going on. This is a serious, serious issue. We see people that are self-sabotaging left, right, and center right now. It It's happening more and more. And not only that, they don't know how to deal with uh this mental health problem. There's too much hyperstimulants. There's too, there's a lack of, the nutrition is freaking terrible. No one it spends time on recovery activities. Spiritual practices are on the downside. It uh, there's all sorts of mental health problems that are popping up. You know, there's a comedian Sebastian Maniscalco. He's blaming it on the internet because he says if you know, if you were crazy 50 years ago, you didn't really find other people that were crazy like you. He's like, "Today, if you like to dress like a baby, you can find people on the internet and get together at the conference of everybody that likes to dress like a baby, you know, and and it's hilarious, but it's true, you know. The internet can be very dangerous for for for for that stuff." Um, okay.

Other problem, the millennials and zoomers have the attention spans of gnats. Okay. Very dangerous. Very, very dangerous. Fertility is crashing. It's a catastrophe. Meaning the the ability to having kids, and it's happening globally, by the way, where people have less and less kids on a on a yearly basis. It's even been happening in my country where I'm from, where in Haiti, where we literally [ __ ] like rabbits, but for somehow le we're having less and less kids every year. Right? Okay. Talked about Master Nan's disease of the 21st century. And then there's something else that is happening, which is when you talk to an analyst, he hasn't read all the books about the historical context of our business. So he looks at a situation and it doesn't remind him of a past period, right? It doesn't remind him of, hey, this is actually what happened in the late 90s with this group of stock. That can be very helpful, by the way, to for for judgment. Okay?

But there are solutions to all these problems. This is my mentor, Peter Kaufman. In my opinion, uh, me and a group of guys, we all call him Uncle Peter. Um, I am forever grateful for the things that Peter has taught me and to this day, I'm like, "Wow, they're probably in my opinion, definitely in the top five of investment teachers out there. I put him on top with Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, Peter Kaufman, Michael Moesen, and I would put Peter Thiel in terms of people that I've learned so much for investing. I mean, there are others as well, by the way. Some that don't like to be named, but Bill Miller, you know, people that I think I've learned a lot from uh on investing um or being a great person. And there's these quotes that Peter loves and he he gives you these pens with these quotes on them. And one of them is, "What the pupil must learn, if he learns anything at all, is that the world will do most of the work for you provided you cooperate with it by identifying how it really works and aligning with those realities. If we do not let the world teach us, it teaches a lesson. Teaches us a lesson." And he says, "Most geniuses, especially those who lead others, prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities, but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities." I actually believe that analog training is powerful for for these for as an unrecognized simplicity, but also to help us find the ways to align how the world works.

All right. Here's one of the first tools, analog tools I'm going to teach you. Um, frameworks. So, what a framework is is it's a list of ways of thinking that you look at an investment through, right? Or a life situation. So, for example, um for relationships, the five languages of love is a great book for relationships. Not everybody's loves the same way or not everybody experiences love the same way. And you, if you're with a friend or a boyfriend or girlfriend and you don't know their love language, you might be having communication issues. Your love language not the same. That's a framework that helps you. The pro it's not always correct, but the probability of using that framework and it being very powerful is is very helpful to judgment and decision-making and also results, right? So here are some of the frameworks. There's many more than this, but here are some of the ones I like right now. So, Mike Maples, who runs a VC firm and has had very successful investments, some 100 baggers, um, he has these frameworks. One of them is when he's looking at a at a company, he asks, "Hey, have they stumbled on an insight?" So, do they know something or have an insight that the world doesn't realize yet? Right? And then another framework he has is, did the company harness an inflection point? So, it's one thing for Uber to exist, but what was the inflection point that Uber or Lyft, by the way, uh, Mike was an investor in Lyft and actually made a lot of money in Lyft. What was the inflection point that Uber leveraged? Well, it was the creation of the iPhone, right? The iPhone enabled all of these different uh uh uh businesses to exist. Right? So that's what he means by an inflection point. And the third one, which by the way, I think is very powerful, is he calls it founder future fit. And that's his f favorite framework where the founder that he's investing in, he wants him to already be in the future. So he gives the example of Eric, the founder of Zoom, our current host, and and says if you look at Eric when he created Zoom, he had already been working at Cisco on on web a video conferencing for 10 years. So when he created Zoom, it was already a product that was of the future. We just hadn't used it yet. The saying, by the way, comes from uh found the future fit comes from this the saying, "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet." And that's a very powerful uh uh uh way of thinking because when you invest in a company, are they doing things that you know, it's like what it's like everybody's going to have this eventually. It's it's the guy is the founder future fit. If you look at a founder that has found their future fit, by it's Elon. Elon clearly is living in a in the future and we're just like, it's just not evenly distributed yet, but it will be. Okay.

You have standard equity frameworks. So, value stocks, there's things that matter to them. Do you know them? That's a framework. It's a frame that allows you to work, right? Growth stocks, restructurings, turnarounds, events, spin-offs. By the way, in the early odds, there was a group of investors that said, "Okay, the best value investments in the world. Let's study all of them and find out what they have in common." Same for growth, same for turnarounds. And by the way, when they were the only ones that had this approach, it was very powerful. They made a lot of money. Part of the mistakes they made is they taught it to everybody else. Now, everybody has it. And then that that approach actually started declining in results. Same for shorts. What have been the best frauds? What do they have in common? And whenever you look at another fraud, do they do does it also apply? Same for fads. Same for failures. Failures is stuff like um a bankruptcy, right? Uh, what have been the fakes? So fakes is when I I call them fake value. Fake growth is something that looks like a growth company, but it doesn't have the return invested capital and eventually it's going to crack. Same for value, fake turnarounds. We love when a turnaround is failing and we love to short those. Uh, by the way, we do short stocks in my firm. We love shorting stocks in my firm and we're pretty good at it. Let me, you know, touch wood because the market goddesses are listening and this is when you're being, oh, you're good at it. Watch this [ __ ] boom. And they hit you, you know. So, so, so it's something that we look to be very good at. Uh, the short side because I love running money long short. Right now, for example, I don't know what's happening in the market. I haven't even looked at the opening yet, but I know that the market's going down. My shorts are protecting me.

So, Peter Lynch and One Up on Wall Street, he has a list of final checklist page uh chapter 15. Must read. By the way, those two books that you see, you can be a stock market genius and One Up on Wall Street has created more sention and billionaires than probably any other book. Should you be reading them? Yes, you should. Very important to study and read mental models. My mentor, Charlie Munger. Uh, Charlie Munger is everybody's mentor at this point. Um, I miss him dearly. Um, a very wise man. By the way, I'm very much into elder culture and it's something that we're missing that younger people miss today is they don't spend enough time with their elders. You see an elder, he has the battle scars. He's made the mistakes. If you go and ask them, "Hey, I'm thinking about doing X. What do you think I should do or how do I go about it?" Very often he'll give you insights and he's like, "Look, when I tried to do that, here's what happened and let me show you the scar on my back right for for when I [ __ ] up when I did that." And and I think a lot of younger people are losing elder culture. You know, they're they're they've made the mistakes before. You know, they have insights. Go talk to them. Very important. Uh, uh, but mental models. Charlie says you got to take the best mental models from economics, psychology, philosophy, physics, evolution, biology, and and and have them in your mind because when you're looking at a situation, very often it's those different tools that are going to help you. Oh, here's what's happening. And mental models help your memory. So, so people, they've done studies on this. People that use mental models remember more because when you look at something or you read something, the mental model is like the hook that in your mind, whatever you're reading, you hang it on. Right?

By the way, u few things to remember. One, all models are wrong, some are useful. That's not a quote from me. That's Mary Galman, right? It's like when you're looking at a reality and you're taking a model, putting it on top of it, it's like putting a map on top of the reality. The map is not the territory, right? That's actually a principle from NLP, uh, neural linguistic programming, which if I shouldn't include a slide on this, god damn it. Um, sorry, one second. And I will. So NLP um is a science from the 70s. It's more or less been forgotten for a bunch of reasons. There's still a darance to it. I was trained in it. Is how do you take the best and study what they do and be able to replicate that? It's actually there's a science for it. It's called NLP. And one of the things they say is whenever you're looking at somebody's map, you have to understand that the map is not the territory that it represents. That if it was really the territory that it represents, the map wouldn't be the map. It would be the territory. There's things that are missing and you have to to understand that. And and and then the last thing is mental models. Uh uh one example of them is Pareto distributions, right? The 80/20 rule, by the way. So one of our best insights came from applying the 80/20 rules. I did a series, it's on it's on YouTube. You can watch it actually. It's called Idea Ingredients. What makes great ideas? And I listed 20 things. And my business partner said, "Look, you have 20 things. If you run a 20/80 rule to it, right? 20% of those 20 things are going to give you 80% of your results. So what do you look for an idea that are the four things, 20% of 20 is four, that are the most powerful things in an idea?" And that alone has multiplied the value of our business, right? So, just the 80/20 rule and applying that um uh in your life is is extremely powerful. You know, so if you make a list of 20 things to do, say, "Hey, what are the four things and give me 80% of the results?" And only focus on these things. If you look at a company, very often a company, u uh 20% of their products give them 80% of the profitability. Right? So those are all things that you can do to to study.

All right. Art of War principles, very important to study those. Uh, there's a great, the the principles. So if we look at a company, we always look at the company through Art of War principles. We say, okay, how does this company attack its competitor's strategy, right? The reverse of that, how does a company protect and amplify their strategy, right? How does a company disrupt the alliances of the competitor? So, for example, uh uh we love companies that go and all right, they have a great sales guy. Let's try to hire. Oh, really? Their their CFO just quit. He was really good, but he quit for political reasons. Okay, let's hire him. Disrupt the company's alliances. You see, the hidden part about business is the predatory behavior of businesses on top of each other. They're never going to put that in a 10K, right? So, it's very, the the and it happens, by the way. They just never talk about it unless it's like inside baseball stuff. Third principle, attack him where he is weak. Fourth principle, use the environment against your enemy. And fifth principle, foreknowledge and spying. You know, corporate spying, corporate intelligence, in my opinion, is as big as countries spying on other countries. In fact, there's one country where shall rename nameless, but their entire spying apparatus is on literally spying on American companies and stealing the best secrets. By the way, um, but anyways, okay.

Another principle, have time on your side when you're investing. Do you have time as an ally? That the more every day goes by, the value of the business increases? Have time on your side could also mean, do you have timing right? So when we're investing, I always say to myself, "Hey, if I hold this thing one week, one month, does the business get better as the passage of time happens? Do I have an advantage?" Very important. I know it sounds like to you guys, what the [ __ ] is talking about, but trust me, dig into it. One from Peter. Where there's mystery, there's margin. Very important. When there's mystery around a company, often there's very high margins at the company. When there's mystery around a way of doing things, there's margin, there's profitability. Another one, it's one of our favorites. I learned it from uh actually a bunch of investors that don't like to be named. It's better to observe than to predict. Everybody wants to predict in the investment business, but very few people actually observe. You cannot predict that a moat of a business is expanding. Maybe if you're good at it, but you can observe. Wait a second, their moat just got better. They made this acquisition. This is going to increase their bargaining leverage. Like, for example, um, am I allowed to talk? No, we can't talk about current holdings. But but there's a company. They are they weren't vertically integrated before. They were just allowed to buy another company that allows them to vertically integrate and it's giving them such a competitive advantage that we believe they're going to go from 6% market share to 30% market share in the next 5 years. And if that happens, we think it's going to multiply the value of the business and we're already observing that it's doing so. And in fact, one of the uh uh our senators came out with a letter talking about how this company is going to be a dominant player and the FTC should not allow it the deal to go through. And the letter reads like a bull case on the company. It's that good. In fact, we took that letter and attached it to our memo. So, we're like, that's how good this thing is if it's allowed to go through. Um, and again, can you observe? We predicted that it's going to happen. We're already observing that it's happening, right? Invert, always invert. If you say, "Hey, Elise, how do I succeed at this?" I'm going to invert that question and have you ask, "Hey, how do I fail at it?" You got to know how to fail at something before you win. Inversion. If you say, "Hey, how does this company uh uh take market share?" I would say, "Well, how does this company lose market share?" First, you know, you want to invert things. And this, you know, Charlie Munger, this was one of his favorite principles. Double down on what is working. Something is working for you, do more of it. The nine emotions. Uh, we love businesses or even in our writing and our content creation, we put in the nine emotions. Vanity, greed, lust, fear, relief, addiction, nostalgia, envy, novelty, right? Think about Instagram. Well, I mean, what is this? An iPhone. Vanity, greed, lust, fear, relief, addiction, nostalgia, envy, novelty. Instagram. Vanity, greed, lust. Google, vanity. It's literally all the nine emotions, right? Whenever you invest in a business, does the business have the nine emotions embedded in it? Right? Uh uh I mean, excuse me, let me rephrase that. Does the relationship between a customer and a business, is it based on the nine emotions? Like, for example, what's an airline? I mean, relief maybe. None of these. And that's why airlines are terrible [ __ ] businesses. Terrible. You know, the only thing that makes money from them is literally the points on the airline. And that's not the airline. That's a credit card company that they're mixed with that you get these points. And that's literally greed, really, right? Airlines are terrible businesses. There's, you know, the the there's no emotion. It's literally your your relief that you get off of it. Uh, unless you're flying private, by the way, uh uh uh where you come at it and you're like, yeah, this is great. Um, but anyways, okay.

Last principle, the question is the answer. Uh, whenever somebody's wants an answer, I'm like, focus on the question. Much more important. It's a Buddhist aphorism, but it's very true. I want you guys, we're hitting up on time, so I'm going to speed up. I want you guys to learn stress and recovery activities. Part of analog thinking is happens mostly when you're in recovery, not when you're in stress, right? It's when so stress activity is like brain exercises, endurance activity, physical exercises, you're stressing yourself. And people that stay in stress too long, that's when mental health problems get triggered, anxiety, and all that stuff. Whereas if you're actually recovering, it allows your subconscious and your conscious to go and learn the lessons and extract on them. So recovery activities like acupuncture, massage. Uh, by the way, if you're a risk taker, it's very important that when you wake up, you don't do anything that is even more stressful. So a lot of people, first thing they wake up, they go work out or they do something like get on their phone, and it's something that immediately stresses you. It's very important when you sleep, you wake up, you do something that deepens the recovery of you having slept. And the other reason why you want to do that is as a risk taker, when you're an analyst or PM, while you're sleeping, your subconscious goes to work on all of the positions you have, on all the risks you have on. So you wake up kind of stressed, right? And that stress over long periods of time, not only stress your days but stress your years. And that's what causes um burnout. It's what causes uh um people leaving our business. You see, there's a very high attrition rate in our business. You know, there's a lot of guys, we remember the guys that have made it, but we don't remember the guys that have failed and have left the business, right? It's like the guys that tell me, "You got to concentrate your book." And you say, "Why do you concentrate?" And the answer always comes to, "Well, Charlie and Warren survived the 70s when they char I think Charlie was down 70%. Warren was down 60%." But I'm like, "That's Charlie and Warren. Tell me about the hundred other guys that concentrated and we don't hear about those. Don't don't cite to me the survivorship bias." Right? So, so again, going back, one of the best things you can do as a risk taker when you wake up, get a massage. Seriously, twice a week if you have money. Twice a week I have a masseuse come 6:30 in the morning, 90 minutes massage. It distresses you and gives you a lot of energy throughout the day. If you don't have that, get a Rumble Roller. It's a It's a It's a foam roller with nubs on it. It looks like a torture rack. Uh uh roll your entire body. It distresses you. Get a Theragun. A Theragun. You can get them. They're they're decently expensive, but they're worth it. And you literally use a vibration all over your body. It distresses you. Same with a zillion. It's a massage pod that replicates.

Jatsu shots, massages, and it's been one of the best gifts. You lie on it and it massages out of you. Now, it's unbelievable how often you're doing a recovery activity and you untense, and then that's when an insight that you've been trying to generate on a business or a stock, a stock or an idea comes to you. So, recovery is very powerful because while you're tense, you won't have an insight. It's the second you get rid of the tension that your subconscious is like, "By the way, you know that problem you've been trying to figure out? Here's a solution."

Sauna. Very important to do sauna. Okay. The data now is, is you can't argue with anymore. All-cause mortality drops, uh, stress recovery, uh, uh, uh, uh improvement. Um, but also, as we talk about next, it's a great way to deal with your hyper-stimulants. Okay.

Cold therapy. Now, I'm not a big fan of waking up and then dudes are like dunking in ice and literally causing all sorts of health problems to themselves. But once a week, uh, you do cold therapy after you've warmed up, after, after a workout, and you dip yourself into the ice, stay as long as you can, come back. It's very, it's, it's, it is very powerful, but don't do it more than once a week because it takes about three to four days from your body to recover from it. If you do it every day, you're just stressing your body out and it's actually causing harm. You, you need recovery. It's like you do a very powerful workout. If you do that every day, you're going to break down. But if you wait a couple days, you do recovery in between, it's very powerful. Same for when you're stressing your brain.

By the way, hot-cold showers and naps. I'm a professional nap-taker. I went through a period last year where, without realizing, I stopped taking naps, and I, all sorts of health problems started popping up. Every day, 20 minutes to an hour, put your head down, sleep, just rest your head. Very, very powerful. Uh, okay.

How to deal with hyper-stimulants. This is, I think, one of the causes. Uh, guys, excuse me, one second. Hyper-stimulants are a big problem in modern society: sugar, porn, social media, nicotine, caffeine, Adderall, cannabis, recreational drugs. These are things that are extremely, extremely powerful, uh, and mess with your brain in all sorts of ways. Um, by the way, I'm not talking a big game. I'm as addicted to some of these things as, as everybody is. I'm pretty sure I'm addicted to Instagram, uh, uh, in a, in a, uh, uh, in a big way, and I have to literally do digital detox, uh, all the time. Uh, I'm addicted to caffeine. Uh, you know, I go on and off caffeine. Uh, I'm back on it right now, and it's like I go to this restaurant. It's owned by a friend of mine, and the corporate chef happens to be a coffee Jedi. Okay. Like, you, you, like, have one sip and you get taken to this dreamland. I love coffee, okay? But I'm an addict. I have to get off of it every once in a while because hyper-stimulants, they make your highs higher and they make your lows lower. So, in our business, you're constantly dealt with ass-kickings. You know, you own a stock, it's down 50%. When you're on hyper-stimulus, you don't handle it as well. It's very important to know how to wean yourself off of it. One of the most powerful hyper-stimulants today happens to be social media, AI, and, and just digital avalanche. You have to learn how to deal with that. Learn how to detox from it. Hydration and sauna is a very powerful way of weaning off of hyper-stimulants. If I start wanting to get off of caffeine and want to get the effects of caffeine away from me, I try to do 20, 25 minutes of sauna every day for three, four days. Right? One of the best rehabs, uh, in the country. Uh, what they do is for people to get people off of drugs is massive sauna sessions, hours and hours per week in sauna because you literally sweat out the gunk and the residues of the hyper-stimulants. Very important. Okay.

Cycle on and off of it. I have one of my mentees right now that secretly has been taking Adderall without us, uh, knowing, and it's starting to have an impact on him. Okay. Very important to know how to weed yourself off of these things.

Digital detox. This is obvious. Uh, one thing I like doing it, Friday to Saturday for 24 hours. No phone, no computer. It, it's, it's very restful. Uh, I do physical exercise, spend time with my family, play board games with my son. I review my last week, I plan my next week. It's a very powerful 24 hours.

One, this is probably one of the most powerful spiritual practices I can recommend to you because this trains every single analytical skill without you knowing that it's being trained, including visualization. So, what Yoga Nidra is, is you lie down as comfortable as possible. You don't move, and you listen to a script of an individual bringing you through visualization exercises where you visualize body parts that you have, and you go through all of them. And in doing so, it brings you to a state of relaxation that is between being awake and sleeping. You're not sleeping. You're not awake, but you're in the in-between. And that in-between happens to be where insight generation comes, where you can visualize, where you can recall past patterns, where you can read between the lines, and when you can make leaps of judgment. 25, 30 minutes. You should do it once or twice a week. Also, people that do it have stronger immune systems, recover from all sorts of mental health issues. It's extremely powerful as a spiritual practice.

Now, by the way, you should be doing other spiritual practices. Prayer, very powerful. I don't recommend meditation. Everybody's like, "You got to meditate, bro." No. Be very, very careful with meditation. Meditation is too powerful for people to do it when they don't know what the hell they're doing. Especially if you've had childhood trauma. So, a lot of guys that meditate have bad trips. And the reason why they have bad trips is while you're meditating, if you have childhood trauma you haven't dealt with and you haven't thought about it for a while, the childhood trauma comes back, and it's like, "Surprise, [expletive]," and then boom, you get hit with it, and you don't know how to deal with it. So, a lot of these meditation coaches, by the way, it's worked for them. They teach you how to meditate, but then they've never dealt with somebody that's had a bad meditation experience, and they don't know what to do. And when you go to meditation retreats, there's a reason why sometimes in the halls there are people that are crying. They literally have breakdowns. And the reason why is whatever's wrong with you tends to pop up in the meditation. I happen to be lucky that I don't have any of these issues, but I know people have had. Meditation is very dangerous. If you do it, you got to do it with somebody that knows what the hell they're doing, right? Don't just do it. And then, but one of the problems also, lack of vulnerability is people, uh, meditate, they have problems, they never talk about because they don't want to seem like, "I have a problem." No. Be very careful with meditation.

Uh, Josh's MIQ process. So, Wadekin has a process. It's an analog process that I love. If there's a, so, for example, one question we're struggling with today is, "How do I become better at position sizing?" So, I brainstorm on that. Right? But what he recommends you do is you brainstorm before a break. So, you're about to work out, brainstorm on the question, and while you're working out, forget it. And then afterwards, take your journal out and then brainstorm on the question again. And he says that, and he's right, there's actually a great book on this called The Breakout Principle. I have it somewhere, where while you're working out, your subconscious goes to work on the question you were trying to answer. Very powerful, and it's true. Uh, uh, and that process of journaling, taking a break, answering the question, getting into the habit of that, Wade says that that's how you generate insights. Um, and he's right. He's right. The, I, I don't do it as religiously as I used to. Uh, but I do do it every once in a while when I'm struggling with stuff like how to be a better PM, position sizing, trading acumen, exposure management, uh, and idea selection. Um, very powerful process.

Board games and card games. Use them as personal laboratories. So, my personal lab has always been backgammon and poker, but Gin and chess, Go, bridge, other board games. We like Settlers of Catan. Uh, these are, Monopoly. These are all games that have a lot of business lessons in them. If I learn a principle, like when I was learning, uh, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, as principles, I used those principles in my backgammon and in my poker, and it improved both my backgammon and in my poker. Right? So, board games are a great place to go test stuff out, test out a mental model, test out a principle, test out a book, and then see if it adds value to your investing. And the reason why you need a personal lab, like Tony Stark, he has Jarvis in his personal lab, is in your lab, the risks are very small, but if you learn something that gives you high reward, you can then apply it to your investing. Right? The first time I learned the concept of Moats, for example, from from Warren, I applied it to backgammon, and it was like literally staring me in the face, like, "Oh, the concept of Moats is all over backgammon." Which is interesting.

Reading setup. Don't just read. Take a book, uh, you know, and just start reading. Set it up for success. Especially if you're a younger person and you have the attention span of a nap. If you've got to be alone to read, be alone. [clears throat] If you get energy from being surrounded by people, be in an office, read, and or a cafe. Put your phone away. Turn it off if you have to. Put it on. Do not disturb. You don't need the distractions. Use earplugs. Okay? Don't use electronic, uh, noise-canceling first. It's too expensive. An earplug, you have to charge it. Earplugs, you put it in, it blocks all the sound out. Um, I have the attention span of a nap myself, by the way. So I have to put earplugs on. Use Pomodoros. Uh, I, I take a timer, put it for 90 minutes, and I know that for 90 minutes, it gives me the freedom to just read. I can focus for 90 minutes, right? Start reading. It takes you 15 minutes to concentrate. If you get distracted, it's okay. Recognize a distraction, like a meditation. Go back to, to what you were reading. Even if it was a really good idea, let it go. It's okay. Do not highlight while you read. If a passage is interesting, put a checkmark. Problem. The highlight is it takes time, right? And then also, all you're doing is mentally training. I have to keep this. You're training your endowment effect bias, your, your loss aversion. I don't want to lose this. And odds are you're going to highlight it. You're never going to review it anyways, right? But make a checkmark on it. Review it afterwards. And at the end of the reading session, write down in the book if you liked what you learned. And this will train your recall. Very powerful. For people that have real attention spans, while you're reading on Kindle, listen to the Audible. Hey, that's actually been a very successful. Sometimes if my mind is too frayed, I'll do that. I'm reading a book, listen to it. So, you're both reading and listening. Uh, it's helpful for retention. It's a modern digital tool to solve the analog problem.

Learning projects. Now, I recommend you do digital deep dives on all of these different topics. These are the ones that I've spoken, uh, that, that I've chosen. Phil Stutz, uh, this guy in the middle here, who, in my opinion, is one of the wisest human beings that's ever lived. Peter Thiel, uh, you should watch all of, all of Peter's interviews. You should read all the essays he's written. You should read the books on him. Uh, he has mental models that are very, very powerful and can help both your private investing, your public investing. Rory Sullivan, who, in my opinion, if you want to learn how to deal in the age of AI, you have to read Rory's mental models. And then, in my opinion, the greatest competitor that's ever lived, uh, Tom Brady. Uh, I happen to be a Brady fanboy, and I've learned more from him than probably any investor I've ever studied.

Analog. Learn public speaking. Learn selling. Uh, we just did a study, um, wealthy families that keep their wealth across generations. But in studying that, we found a lot of wealthy families that have lost their wealth across generations. And what did the wealthy families that kept their wealth have in common? Is that though the founder knew how to sell, the second generation often never learned to sell because they never needed to, or even worse, looked down upon it. And when you stop selling, you stop getting wealthy. Wealthy people tend to be great salesmen. We've been taught as society to look down on sales. No, take it very seriously. Learn how to do it. And then last, writing. Learn how to write. Very powerful mental exercises from the CIA. So, these are the two books given at the CIA to train analysts. There are others. You can literally buy them or find them. It's actually unbelievable to me that they publish this [expletive], but they do. Maybe it's because they publish the old stuff, and the new stuff, uh, is even better. But this old stuff is pretty good. There's some exercises in there like timeline analysis. You have to learn how to do it. And then ACH, Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. Very powerful way to lower your biases and solve the mental problems that you have.

Okay, we're coming up to the end. Here's the advice I always give this advice. I gave this advice in the last pod that we did together, Ethan. Mentor and teach. This is an analog process. Use coaches. You don't know how to do something, find a coach. Pay him if you have to. If you can't afford it, find a mentor. Do stuff for him so that he teaches you the stuff for free. Watch out and prepare for your 40s and your 50s. Midlife crisis dynamics are real. I've warned you. You guys are not dealing with this stuff now, but it's coming. And when you're dealing with it, remember I told you, right? Build leverage into your personal and business life. Uh, I talk about this a lot. Capital leverage, code leverage, content, community, contractual structural leverage, conditional leverage. I have a YouTube on that. Go watch it. Um, very powerful. Successful people, or even, you know, people that have not even, like, accomplished great success, but you'll see leverage in their lives. Like, "Oh, he did this. It was a form of leverage." For example, creating content, what Ethan and I are doing now, is a form of leverage. It's going to help us accomplish our goals, right? Actually, let me talk about this for a second. I have three goals for my business. I want really smart, wealthy people to invest in my business. I want a very smart analyst or PM at another shop to be like, "Hey, we need to call El-leaks and share our best ideas with him." Third, I want a very smart person to say, "I want to work for this guy." When you create content, at least when we create it, it helps us accomplish all three of these goals. That's leverage. You create it once, and it's out there working for you forever. Very powerful. Have a spiritual practice. Have thought partners and confidants. There are people you need to share it with. There's a lack of vulnerability in our culture right now. You know, there, there's this, uh, meme going around where somebody is, is like, "Guys don't talk about their feelings. They don't talk about their problems." Like, "Are people interested?" You know, it's like, "No one." You know, we have a, I have a group of friends. We're like a male support group because we share this stuff with each other, and, and people when they hear like, "Wow, like, can I join?" And part of the reason, like, we're all fairly healthy people, is like we share this stuff. You need thought partners. You need confidants. And by the way, one of my problems with therapy, even though I do think it serves a purpose, is that you have a conflict of interest, right? The longer you go, the more the person gets paid. So, there's almost not a solute, uh, uh, uh, a way for you to solve your issues. And also, great therapy, I don't think changes you at the therapy level. I actually think it changes at the spiritual level. So, that's why Phil Stutz, which is, uh, this guy, teaches you, the bald guy here. Um, read all his books, okay? Read, uh, The Tools. Read Coming Alive. Read, uh, read everything. Watch the documentary that Jonah Hill did with him. Very important. Okay. And then know how to build the right rituals. So, I talk about this a lot where every day I wake up, and I did it this morning, even. I read three letters from other hedge funds or investment firms that are public. I go through the 13F of a manager that I respect, and I go through the companies, and I read an idea memo every day. It takes me about 90 minutes. Okay. You do that every day, and then it's an analog process, and it feeds you.

Anyways, that's it. There's more I could say, but I had to fit it in an hour and 20 minutes. Let me know. Do you have any questions? We can start with you, Ethan.

Yeah, thank you so much. Um, you talked about the Pareto principle, and I want to do something similar for this, cuz there's a lot of ideas you said. Um, if there's one thing, what is the single most important thing out of everything you've mentioned, and how should a young person implement it within their own life? Um, you know, as early as now?

>> Read. Okay. Take a book, and you can only do this with non-fiction. Um, and do, do inspectional reading. Have we talked about this?

>> I don't think so.

>> Okay. So, inspectional reading is, there's a great book. It's called How to Read a Book. And chapter 4 on inspectional reading gives you a process that you should do before reading every non-fiction book. And what you do is this. Take the book, and you go to the table of contents, and you read it. Just read it. Then you go to the back of the book and read the index. It literally says page 365, keys to success, right? And you, you read it, and you write down the things that interest you in the table of contents and, sorry, and the index. Then you go back to the front and you read the introduction. In this case, the preface and the prologue. It's like five, six pages. Then you go to the back of the book and you read the last chapter, the conclusion, right? Then you go back to the first chapter and read the first and last page of the chapter. Then do it for every chapter. Oh, I forgot. Um, so after you read the table of contents, after you read the index, go to the middle where there's pictures and look at and study all the pictures. And the reason why you have to do that is when you read something, uh, we remember visuals 99.9% of the time, whereas we remember words much, much less percentage. But when you know a picture, it allows you to put the words onto the picture, and your memory actually goes up. And then after you've read the first and last page of every chapter, if there are, let's say, graphs, go back and study all the graphs. And what you'll see is that by having done that, you'll get the 20% of the book that gives you 80% of the value. And then you can determine, "Do I really need to read this [expletive]?" If it's a good book, odds are you will, right? Very, very powerful analog process to do. I personally do it. I try to do it three, four times a week. Uh, I try to read a book a week. More often, it's like a book every two weeks. Uh, my son and I have a, a nighttime ritual where we read together, you know. So, he's reading right now, um, this graphic novel series, which actually looks really cool. I'm reading one of Phil Stutz's books, Lessons for Daily Living, and it's literally wisdom after wisdom after wisdom. But generally, you get a book, I just got given one actually, and you want to read it inspectionally. Like, for example, this book, um, I'm writing about it, Only the Paranoid Survive. There are key concepts for surviving in the age of AI, and this book, you know, Andy Grove wrote this in the '80s, for God's sakes, you know, but yet this is, this is going to matter a lot in this age. By the way, this book is actually not about paranoia. Everybody's that hasn't read it, what they talk about is like, it's about being paranoid. No, it's about strategic inflection points. Yes, you should be reading about strategic inflection points, you know. So, so I would say that that would be the most important of the things. But listen, there's never only one thing. Okay? Practice some of the things that I talked to you and try to incorporate them in your life. Uh, somehow, uh, it's part of the, the, the analog training. Uh, but reading, reading is going to be the, the most powerful thing I recommend you do. But hold on. Once you've read a book and you liked it, what should you do? Book reading helps you create content. Take your notes, share with your friends. Uh, call friends to discuss the book that have read it. If you love the writer, cold email the writer. Say, "Here's what I liked about the book. Can I ask you some questions about the book?" If you're a student, invite the writer to come speak to you and your classmates. You know, this is a piece of leverage. Know how to leverage books. A book, a $5 book can make you millions of dollars. It's insane to me that people will [expletive]. It's insane. Insane. But thank God. You know why? Because I'm going to compete with them, and we're going to crush them because they don't read. Thank God. And by the way, so you know, imagine the, the generational, uh, battle, right? Where, excuse me, you know, the young people, you guys are about to inherit money. You're not going to know what to do with the money. In fact, pe, the, some of the financial businesses are realizing that education, financial education is paramount today. Why? Because we have some of the youngest, most financially literate people that we've ever seen. And in that predator-prey dynamic between Gen X and the Zoomers, who do you think is going to win? You know, if I were you, I would set up for you to be the predator. The way we see it now, Gen X is the predator, right? So, very important. Read, please. And by the way, why am I telling you to read if competitively it's bad for me? Well, a lot of the, I actually believe that the market isn't just a zero-sum game. I actually believe it's both. It's a zero-sum game and a positive-sum game, too. If I teach a lot of people how to make money, somehow it's going to come back to me and help me make money, you know. Already, you know, Ethan, the last podcast, it's kind of crazy how good a following you have, the young people that have come to me and given me ideas, given me ways of doing things, you know, it's, it's very, it's, it's very powerful, right? So, read. It's a great book, by the way, if you haven't read it. I used to be obsessed, uh, by this guy. It's, uh, Tycoon, the Life of Sir James Goldsmith. Uh, I used to play backgammon at a club in Paris in the '90s. Um, and Sir James was a member. He was the first guy to ever look at me and be like, "Hey, you should be in investing." Uh, and I was like, "Why?" Uh, but he had a business partner called Roland Franklin. And Roland was the other guy who was like, "Hey, you know, you should go into stock trading or something with stocks." Uh, and I end up reading a lot about Sir James. Very important. I even read about his best friend, a guy called John Asprey. An amazing book. Actually, I have his book right here. Uh, The Passion of John Asprey. I love John. Love John. But anyways.