#680: Richard Koch — Revisiting the 80/20 Principle, The Power of Optimistic Journaling, Studying History to Improve Investing, and The Grand Beliefs of Winners (Plus: The Toxic Beliefs of Losers)

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cybernetic organism living tissue over metal mental cellar. No Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show where it is my job to interview and deconstruct world class performers to tease out the stories, the routines, the habits, the beliefs that you can emulate to improve your own lives. My guest today is a fan favorite he's been on once before. He always delivers a lot of actionable

advice and learnings. His name is Richard Kosh, K O C H Richard is an entrepreneur, investor, former strategy consultant, and the author of several books on business and ideas, including four. on how to apply the 80-20 principle in all walks of life. His investments have grown at an average of twenty two percent compounded annually over thirty-seven years and have included Philofax, Plymouth Gin, Belgo, Betfair, FanDuel, and Auto One. For those who don't have any reference for that, that is absurdly, absurdly. Good. He has worked for Boston Consulting Group and was a partner at Bain Co. before joining Jim Lawrence and Ian Evans to start LEK, which expanded from three to three hundred and fifty professionals during the six years Richard was there. In 1997, Richard's book, The 8020 Principle, reinterpreted the Pareto rule, which states that most results

come from a small minority of causes and extended it beyond its well known applications in business into personal life, happiness, and and success. The book, rewritten in 2022, has sold more than a million copies, been translated into roughly forty languages, and has become a business classic. It was named by GQ as one of the top twenty five business books of all time, and it is a book that has had a huge impact on my life and one that I have recommended for at least a decade at this point. Richard's latest book is Unreasonable Success and How to Achieve It. He has two upcoming books. 8020 beliefs, which identifies the very few beliefs in our lives that strongly influence what we do, and therefore the results we get, and we talk about some of these 80-20 beliefs in this conversation, as well as 8020 daily, a collection of 365 short daily readings using the 8020 philosophy to achieve the good life. You can find him online at Richardcosh.net. Again, that's Richard K O C H

Net. And on Twitter. At Richard Cosh. eight. twenty.

And now, without further ado, please enjoy a wide ranging I think very fun, certainly very actionable conversation with Richard. Cosh. Yeah. Richard is so nice.

To see you in person. And he's sitting across from you. It's so wonderful to see you sitting across from me as well. In my kitchen table as well, which is uh fantastic. Thank you very much for coming. Absolutely at your kitchen table in this Beautiful house. Which is full of natural light, looking out. Yeah.

All sorts of greenery, the birds in the background couldn't be more pleasant. And before we started recording I Took a bathroom break, as I often do, part of my pre game ritual. And I walked past a fireplace and there was

A small square piece of wood with three words on it. Gambits Payout. Payout. And I thought I should ask about that first. I'm sure there's a story behind it. What is the story behind this? Well, I'm an investor in a company called What's Three Words. I don't know if you've heard of What Three Words, but the the basic idea is that there are trillions of squares On earth.

And each square is about the size of just outside my front door. And it's a method of trying to identify where people are. In order to have deliverers. happen. Where the address system is not particularly good.

So I'm an investor in this company. It's a wonderful, wonderful British company. Could you explain just maybe by way of example what that means? So they're satellite identified squares? Yes. And you don't even need to be online. But it's basically mapped. And therefore anyone that's got the key to it. Can deliver. to where someone is. It was originally design by a guy who was in the music business.

And he and his band would arrange to meet at Glastonbury or somewhere but of course The master of is vast, you know, there's a huge field there. And they would always miss each other. So he reckoned that you know, if you could find a way of describing something which was not a whole series of alpha numeric things, you know. the a s you know, huge long

meaningless thing. But with three English words. Could be in any foreign language as well. then you would be able to find exactly where the person was and exactly where they get the stuff delivered. So they might want it in the garage, for example. They might want it in a different joining part of the house and and so they basically spent a huge amount of money mapping

The whole world. into trillions of these little squares. And the system now works. And car manufacturers can use it in order to provide directions and mapping and it's a wonderful system. And it's very, very economical. There is a unique three words for everyone.

If you're involved in a car crash or Accident of any kind. You can identify where you are to the emergency services or to anyone else. In order to be found as quickly as possible. Without any mistake, without the ambulance or the police going here and there and you know, basically trying to find where you are. So I didn't anticipate going

down this side avenue, but it's interesting, so I'll pursue it and then we'll come back to the These particular three words. Which hopefully are not like doxing you and exposing you in some strange public way. But if, for instance I have something delivered to my front porch and it's Banana eggplant. Susan. Whatever it might be.

If I then travel And have a car accident. How does that The system would be able to find where you were. We're in a completely different location.

You wouldn't have those three words, there'd be a completely different three words. I see. I see. Associated with the other. So all you would have to do would be identify where you are on the telephone. You you just basically drop a pin. And then they can find you. Wow. And does that involve some type of hardware pairing where you have some type of card or any piece of hardware that identifies where you are to match it with the The database of the system. It requires you to actually have the car.

Right. The part of the system. I see. So Mercedes is on the system, various other car manufacturers are. And they're going through the process of basically signing up all the big car manufacturers and some of the small ones as well around the world. Well, you know, I have to just say that you have such an eclectic range of investments in Seemingly well may perhaps not seemingly, completely disparate. sectors and technologies serving completely different I suppose well niched down customer bases, not to say that they're small. Some of them are very huge. Where do these three words come in?

This is what By complete coincidence I've got Right outside my front door and it's Gambit's And payout. No.

I'm a strategy guy. I do strategy in order to make money. by venture capital investments. And Gambit, yeah, that's the strategy. And then payout. It's huge bonanza. And you know, I'm I don't want to be big headed, but I've done very well in my investments and you know the payout is uh the operative word. And that's why we're sitting in this nice house and all the rest of it. Yeah. So aren't I lucky? I don't I don't know. Everyone's gonna hate me. They're gonna think oh guys so smug we don't like him.

No I think the numbers speak pretty well to the track records. I think it's it's fair enough to say. It would be more concerning, I think. If you had the line related to the twenty two percent compounded annually over thirty seven years and then we were sitting in some back alley and you were eating out of a garbage can, that would be more incongruous and cause more problems. Well lots of people come to see me and they think I've been in a much more palatial place. And of course what happens is that you buy somewhere and you live in it. I've been living in this particular house in Portugal for some of the year. For I'm not very good at mental arithmetic. It's actually fifteen years. Yeah. Nobody can fact check you, so it's okay. And and so you know, it's a nice place, but it's you don't

Get the impression that it's not Versailles. Yes. I think it's Very Comforting. It has a comforting feeling to it. What is it called? Higga something like that in Zen. I've got a fish pond that I do all my thinking on.

And the fish go round and round and wait for me to feed them. So let me ask you, this is gonna be a whole collection of diversions, but that's sort of how my mind works. So in the last conversation that we had You mentioned the fish pond and You also mentioned Related to the fish pond, And I quote.

Oh dear. Yeah occasionally I go and sit on my fish pond with a notebook and say it's time to think about some reflections. I make a point of only doing that when I'm in a good mood. I never do it when I'm actually feeling slightly down. It's something you do when you're being expansive rather than when you're doubting yourself. Could you Say a bit more about that, if that is still the case.

Yes. What would you like me to say? Why is that important? Because I think that many people, including myself, if I'm feeling stuck or overwhelmed or whatever, that is often when I journal most. But you did the opposite. That's true. That's true. I mean I know that you have made a a very good speech about Fair

And the importance of people Revealing their fears. And I thought to myself, well maybe I should do and just fine. Yeah, because you know, I've I think I'm actually quite good at being upbeat, but I'm not very good at being downbeat. I've never had I mean I obviously respect the fact that a lot of people have mental problems of one sort or another. I've never felt down for more than about three hours, I think. Wow. Yeah, and Uh it's something to be very grateful for. Uh yeah, I would give you every dollar in every one of my bank accounts to trip.

Paid for that. What I'm very good at doing is actually imagining upside. And a lot of people say the whole point of being a venture capitalist is that you think about the downside, what can go wrong and all the rest of it. I disagree with that because in the venture capital business you make a huge amount of money on very few investments and you probably lose money on nearly all the rest. That hasn't actually been completely true about me, but I've only lost money on probably about three or four investments. Total loss. Richard wants him zero.

I'm very lucky. I do genuinely believe that I'm quite good at what I'm doing, but I have been unbelievably Every single major investment has had an inflection point somewhere, which was Sure not. So before we get to the look, because of course. By virtue of having some systematic way of approaching and vetting

Or finding and vetting investments, you've systematized increasing the surface area. that expression from someone else. Whose name I'm sadly forgetting. Before we get to that

Let's talk about the journaling. So not when you're feeling down, but when you're feeling expansive. What Does that look like that? Let's do it. In regard to investments and then we're doing in regard to

more important things in life. But as far as investments are concerned, what I say to myself is, what are the opportunities which we're not fully exploiting? And I'm a great believer. Tim. There are always Huge opportunities out there. There are there.

But most people don't grasp that. Most people don't believe it. And most people don't do anything about it, even if they believe it. And I'm one of the people who actually is a mega mega Optimist in regard to things that we're going to do.

are important to me and the investments are quite important to me. So I try and imagine how do we make A hundred times return on this investment. Not how do we try and make Ten times return. And of course it doesn't always work. And my Success stories cluster in the sort of you know ten to twenty five times.

Total investment. Because one of the things that I do is if I've invested in a company and it's going really well, I buy more shares in it. So I increased my stake in the company. So the average return is not gonna be a hundred times, but on the first tranche of the Betfair investment it was a hundred times. So what I'm trying to say is how could this be Unbelievably successful. What would have to happen to make it unbelievably successful? Yeah.

And sometimes it's Relatively easy. Sometimes it's actually not that difficult to do. Can you give an example of a case where it was maybe easier or simpler than people would expect.

Well, Betfair is a very, very good example because this was a company which in the early days ran out of money. Could you just for people who didn't hear our first episode, and I do recommend everyone listen to the first episode because there's a lot of history and a lot of context. But these are independent episodes and they can be treated as such. But for people who are not familiar with Betfair, would you mind just saying a sentence or two about what Betfair is? Betfair is the world's largest, by a huge margin, the world's largest beting exchange. And what a better exchange means is that you and I exchange bets. Now obviously We don't do it in person, we do it through a uh website. And it's all anonymous.

But nevertheless, it's not a system that's used for still the great majority of betting. in the world takes place with bookmakers. Bookmakers are these horrible things. No, these are terri terrible people'cause they've got big satchels. You go to the races the horse races or the greyhound races. And you see these people arrive with You know, satchels and of course you don't really know how much is in there. But when they're going home They're bulging because actually what they do is they take a profit on each race and they construct the book such that unless there's a very, very unusual movement in the betting at the very last minute. They're totally covered. They always make a profit.

On each race. The over round Depends on the number of runners in the race. But it the overround goes from ten percent usually to about twenty five percent. And in a race with a large number of horses such as the Grand National, it can be as much as a hundred and fifty percent, which means that for every dollar that someone wages.

Fifty cents profit is made by the bookmaker. Now, on races which are not as important as the Grand National or has very few horses in them. It might be as little as ten percent. But it's a huge amount of money. And so There was a guy called Burt Black, Andrew Black, to be more formal. And he came up with this idea. Why don't we make an electronic system like the stock market where

Bets can go through this thing. And instead of people having to pay ten percent or twenty percent to the bookmakers each time. They pay two percent. Two percent commission. And they only pay if they win, so on average it can be one percent. And so it's hugely better.

Sounds like a commercial advertisement, doesn't it? But you know. I'm no longer on the board of Bitfit and I'm not terribly sympathetic to them'cause they won't let me lose enough money. And that's another story. But they restrict the amount of money. Then I lose uh sometimes I win, sometimes I lose on a year. If I'm actually losing money They actually restrict the amount of money I can put in as the

New steak. And I tried to tell them. But you know, I've got a lot of money and I don't think they believe me. So I've never gone to the stage of actually sort of you know sending in my audited financial statements or anything like that. But Yeah. I'm out of favour with Betfair and they're out of favour with me. But it's a wonderful system because if you gamble a lot

It means that your money can go much further. You can make larger stakes and you can actually win money. With the bookmakers, it's impossible to win money over more than a very short period of time. Because they close the account. Yeah. Huge house advantage, and then they cut their losses. Yeah, and so so it's a comeback. Okay, so Bitfair. Disintermediation. So classic technology play in a sense. And you were saying

You're communing with the fish at the fish pond. Notebook in hand. Maybe it was not exactly the fish bun, but the the exercise will work. And you ask how could this be? a hundred X return. Or how could this be an an extraordinary success? And it was an example of where there was perhaps a

Simple. Tweak or edition or something like that. What did that look like? Firstly, but the concept I just thought was unbelievable because anyone who's a serious gambler should be betting through a betting exchange. They should not be betting through bookmakers. That's a really dumb thing to do. But it was easier than that because the company started And I have to say this, and and I hope they're not listening, but the people who started the company didn't really know what they were doing and they d no reason that they should have known what they were doing. I mean they're they were brilliant in their own way. Andrew Black absolute genius. But he'd never worked

in a company as a manager. He'd never worked in financial services. He'd never worked in gambling. He'd been a professional gambler, so he understood gambling. But he didn't understand business. and they were pretty thin in terms of the other people who understood business. So they went around the City of London, this was back in two thousand, the year two thousand, and they tried to raise money From professional. Venture capitalists and anybody else that would be a professional, so investment banks and people like that.

And They all came back. sort of you know, totally incredulous. And you haven't got anybody who's been the chief executive of anything in your company. You haven't got any people who've actually worked in business before at a senior level. How do you expect us to give you money for this idea, however brilliant the idea was? And

All of the professional people, the people who ran the Racing Post, the newspaper and all the rest of it, took a look at it and thought, you know, this idea is not going to fly. It was perfectly obvious to me as someone who was a gambler that it was really attractive. That you know, my money could go much further, I can have bigger bets, and I wouldn't have to fatten the sexuals of these horrible bookmakers. So It was a blinding glimpse of the obvious. It ought to grow enormously. But not only that Ten

It was growing. So after nine months they ran out of money. But raise money in the first round from uh friends and family. And people have mortgaged their houses and you know, they tried to put as much money in as possible in, but they weren't rich people and they didn't have a lot of money. Sounds like gambling. Yeah, exactly. Well gamblers as well, probably. Some of them. And so they ran out of money and then they went back to all the people that they'd seen before.

Professional venture capitalists and said, We run out of money. Can we have some more? And they said, Well we w weren't gonna give you money in the first place. We're certainly not gonna give it to you now that you're on the verge of bankruptcy. It's important to look at the causes of that. If it's because growing faster than you can manage, that's a quality problem. That's the point. It was growing at thirty percent a month. And then it went up to forty percent. I looked I asked them what

Just tell me one simple fact. Every month since you started, over the last nine months, what were your billings? And what was the growth rate? The numbers were tiny, really tiny, but the growth rate was fantastic. Um At one point they were growing at sixty percent and a hundred percent. I think this was just about the time that I put my money into it. Which meant that the monthly

Revenues were doubling. And anyone who understands anything about Arithmetic and exponential growth. knows that that doesn't have to carry on for very long before you have a very big business. And if I had a very big business because I didn't have to have

setting shops and other premises and they didn't have to have a whole lot of overhead. They had a fairly simple Internet system and that was great. And they spent money, you know, they had to upgrade it over time as they got more customers. But the Margins in the business for them. were very high. They were only taking

Two percent of The total amount of money stake the total amount of money staked pretty soon became very, very large. And their costs were a fraction. Of that two percent. So it didn't take a genius. Sitting on the fish pond.

To say hey. If they continue to grow at this rate for the next five years, or even if it went down to ten percent a month then I'm gonna make a a fortune out of this. And I put as much money as I got into that company. It was a million and a half pounds of time. It's all the spare cash that I had. And then when the opportunity came to buy shares from some of the early investors, I pwn it up again. Where did you get the money to pony up?

From successful investments that I've made before. I see. So there was some intervening period. Yeah, before that. First of all I invested in File Effects and that made a seven times return. This was in the nineteen nineties. Then I invested in Belgo, the Mule Freet Restorum muscles and chips. French fries. And that made me uh six times return. Then I invested in Plymouth Gin, where I was incredibly lucky, which is another story, but

We s happen to get the Top spot. on the ratings of the experts on gin, the P V C television got together Thirty experts.

so called in tasting gin. And the gin which they selected. Did they all have the last name Cosh? No. We didn't even pay them any money. No, I mean uh we didn't know that this this was going on. We got cool. From uh food and drink protocol at BBC and said you might want to tune in at seven o'clock in the evening. Wow. We had no idea.

That was a very unlucky investment and we sold it to Vincent Sprit, which was the Swedish state liquor monopoly. Which owned Absolute vodka. And they paid us.

more than they should have done for the company and w you know, we we made a sixteen times return on that. So let's let's hit pause for a second. So a couple of things I want to mention. First Is We're gonna segue into sort of a a broader lane outside of venture capital. I do want to say you're mentioning the uh

Not bookies. What was the what was the term that you used? Most doer bookmakers. Bookmakers, yes. Who take the percentage. I will say that has an uncanny resemblance to some venture capitalists, not all, who rely on their management fees and not their performance bonuses. As a friend said to me, he went to business school and there's a very famous, I won't mention him by name, venture capitalist. Venture capital is a lot like sex, he said. When it's good, it's great. And when it's bad, it's still pretty good. But you certainly

Have the multiples to speak to the bona fides. Let's Take a step back and this Actually relates to our conversation over dinner last night where we were having Some very, very nice.

White wine with mackerel, one of my favorites. If you're not eating mackerel, folks, I tell you you're losing out in any case. I asked. Everyone around the table, what they studied in school. So we can expand on this, but you mentioned history. And I asked a number of follow up questions. So how Is it?

that you go from studying history to being the successful founder of strategy consulting firm and uh private equity slash venture capital firm. Do those things tie together? Yes, uh they're absolutely tie together. Because history is great at teaching you just think. So history's all about counterfactuals, you know, what could have happened as well as what did happen. What were the causes of the First World War? Why did Lenin manage to establish the communist state which lasted for seventy years? Why did Hitler, who was complet

Looney. And a very nasty piece of work. How did he manage to become the Chancellor of Germany in nineteen thirty three? And then the rest is unfortunately all History. Those questions are difficult questions and I think the teaching of history I'm I'm very passionate about teaching of history in schools in particular. I think it's the the

best possible way that people can think about. Scenarios. And venture capital investing is absolutely thinking about scenarios. And they can imagine How something will go very badly wrong and a whole of money is lost and they can imagine How you can make a huge amount of money.

Could you speak just for a definition of terms again? We covered Bad Fair. Counterfactual. What does this mean? It means it didn't have to happen like it happened. So a counterfactual to the outbreak of the First World War in nineteen fourteen. Would be

There was no war. The Kaiser went to see His relatives in Buckingham Palace and they had a drink and they decided that they they would defuse the situation. And sure the Archduke France Fernand had been Assassinated.

You didn't necessarily have to mobilise all the troops in Europe. Because one guy had been bumped off by an anarchist on and And the whole story of that assassination is pretty insane as well. Just the number of things that had to happen for that to even turn out. Exactly. So so all these things were complete freak. I think

Lenin coming to power was a complete Freak. That would not have happened if the Germans and the Swiss had not given him safe passage. in Leningrad, what became Leningrad, St Petersburg at the time.

And if Lenin had not got there, the democratically elected social Revolutionary party. would have been in power. And it was a middle of the road I suppose you call it left wing capitalist. political party. It was a bit like the British Labour Party or the Democrats in in the US today.

If we take the examination of history, we put it under a microscope, we see these many examples where things didn't have to turn out the way they turned out. And there are multiple failure points or potential failure points. If something very tiny hadn't happened, then this very large thing would not have been a consequence of it. How do you And if if I'm interrupting and you had more to add beforehand, please feel free to do that. But how do you then connect that to say

Making us successful. Investment. If you could just connect those dots. Okay. The future is

Terribly, terribly uncertain. I mean one of the great historians uh was at Oxford When I was a student there was Alan Taylor, A. P. Taylor. A socialist left wing sort of Guy.

A very, very good historian. He said the future is a land of which there are no map. So When you look back in history Everything seems inevitable. But when you look forward in history

It's wide open. And so In thinking about an investment, you always got to say, what is the most likely thing that can happen and what are the outlying things that could happen. So the most likely thing for Betford, for example, was that

the growth rate of sixty percent a month would go down to ten percent a month or five percent a month. But all we then need to do is to run the numbers on what the implications of that would be for the future. And a a more cheerful scenario, an even more cheerful scenario would be the the growth rate Was sustained for a little bit longer. At a tiny

And then you'd make a huge amount of money. Another scenario would be the government closed it down. Because there was no legislation. Which covered On online. Exchange.

Yeah, that happens a lot more in tech than people would like to admit. Yeah. You know, they could have been closed down and You know, there's a Labour government there and Thank God the Labour government was

Not a loony left Labour government. And you know, you can just see the story. All these poor working class people Who haven't got very much money. Being taken to the cleaners by this nasty That thing is strange.

Now are you speaking about the Not the nasty bookmost of it. No politicians would forget about the bit that they don't want you to know. But nevertheless, you know, it was trading on gambling and and gambling's an addiction, it's like alcohol, et cetera, et cetera. So a lot of people from the left and the right are opposed to gambling. So it it could have gone wrong. But then you do an expected value calculation and you say, Well, if it doesn't go wrong I can make a hundred times my money. If it does go wrong.

I lose all my money. Let's assume that the probability of it going wrong is more than Ten percent. Then you still on an expected value basis as long as it wasn't your only investment, but if you've got a portfolio of investment, then you could just go ahead and make the investment. So my next question was gonna be how you assign probabilities. I would love to know how you think about that. Because this applies not just to investing. I want to make this clear to folks. We're talking about investing because it is a discrete, explicit way of looking at points on the scoreboard. It's a little easier

To assess success and failure. Right. Imagine if baseball didn't have any statistics, right? It's like how would you say who is a good player? You track the numbers and you can do that in investing as well. Whereas in life, if we're talking about somebody who is quote unquote successful, but we don't have metrics, it's a lot harder. But this type of thinking applies to so much more. How do you assign probabilities. How do you think about assigning probabilities so that you can do the expected value. And if you could run through an example just for people who aren't familiar with that type of simple calculation.

That'd be super helpful, but how do you assign the probabilities? Because that seems like one of the toughest challenges, maybe. Now there are people And some of them I've employed in the past, you know, who would go through a whole series of uh spreadsheets in order to try and work out But I just say What's my best guess? And then I will

Temple. the best guess or or half the best guess, and then I've got a a low case and a high case. It's very, very simple. Do you think that being an optimist or seeing the upside more than you see the downside is a liability in that case? Well it it's a liability unless the optimism is justified. And and at that stage I'm trying to be realistic. And I might ask other people who are more sane than I am. that is less optimistic to actually make the same calculations and then I just look at what the results of those are. But it's not

Rocket science. Especially when you have Even a few months of Data. I mean you have something to look at. It's not just an idea on a napkin.

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Can I just say that this question about history being important, I've got another empirical justification for this. Because I would bring into the court. room exhibit A, which is Bill Bain. Now Bill Bain was the founder of Bain and Company, which was probably the most successful Strategy consulting or consulting firm in the world during a nineteen

eighties, nineteen seventies, nineteen eighties. It was founded after the Boston Consulting Group set up by Bruce Henderson, who was a pioneer. He was like that. Charles Darwin of strategy. You know, he believed in competition and he saw basically a Darwinian world of competition and he worked out

System for that. And Bruce founded the Boston Consulting Group, which I worked for for a time. They fired me. So I still think it's a wonderful, wonderful company and I think they're probably right to fire me. But And that story we covered in episode one for people who want to dig into that. I wouldn't tell the story if it if it hadn't been a happy ending. The happy ending actually hinged very much on Bill Bain. Because when I knew that B C were going to fire me, Tim.

I arranged an interview with Bill Bain and I was very lucky to do that'cause he was the head of the company. But they were looking for people at that stage because they were growing at forty percent a year. And g there's a theme in this, which is very, very high growth. Billbine was a a complete genius because He was a historian. He did not have an MBA. He did not have an engineering degree. He did not have a quantitative degree of any kind.

He was a historian. And He then met Bruce Henderson. When he was trying to raise funds, he gave up history research. Oh, that's very boring. And then he got a job with his old university. In Tennessee. And his job was to raise money. So

Since Bruce Henderson was an alumnus of the university. Bill goes to see Bruce. And Bruce Refuses to give him any money to the university. But says Why don't you come to Boston because I'd like you to meet some of my colleagues and we might give you a job. We're totally aghast at the idea that Bill Bain should become

not just a member, but quite an important member of uh Boston Consulting Group. They said this guy Is really intelligent. But he's totally unqualified. He has no Credentials whatsoever.

And Sure, he's very intelligent, but lots of priests are very intelligent. We're not gonna hire a whole bunch of priests, are we? So I'm sorry if I'm digressing a bit. Well I think that would go down quite well, actually. Uh Anyway. So

Bruce then hands at the end of the day, he hands these assessments that All his senior people had made a Bill Bone, all of them giving a thumbs down. to actually hiring him. And he

First of all. Bill, what do you think about What my colleagues have said. And then Bill Bain reportedly said to Bruce Bruce Henderson, with the greatest of respect to your Colleagues, they are wrong.

Because I understand how to make a consulting firm very, very successful and I know how to sell. So people who've got a lot of money are chief executives of companies. 'Cause I've raised a huge amount of money for the university even though you decided in your mean way. And it didn't exactly s spell it out quite like this not to do that. So I'm gonna be very successful. Thank God that he rejected Bill Bain's plea for funds for the university. Otherwise, what a trajectory that could have been. So Bill Bain then worked in the Boston Consultant group.

He was one of the co inventors of the Growth Share Matrix, the cows, the stars, the question marks. This is the greatest how can you not know this? This is the greatest bit of strategy. Take a piece of paper and draw a line down and and and four quadrant. of the market. Whether it's high or low, but below ten percent or above that. And the other Access is the relative market share.

So a business that is In the Trop. Left hand quadrant because B C G drew there. grass backwards.

But it was high relative market share. In other words, in very simple English. It was the leader in its particular niche. And Moi. Investments have all been my successful investments have all been in star businesses.

Did you mention a cow? Am I making that up? Did you just mention a c you said star. Well, there's some other word that you threw in. Cache cows. Cows. Like how do cows fit into this? Okay. I just want to make sure I'm the right mood to get it. Okay. Got it. Cash cash. Honestly, I haven't had anything to drink. No, we drank a lot last night. I haven't drunk anything today. No. So A cash cow is the leader. Now you're speaking about language, I they think a cash cow is something that throws off cash because it's low growth and it's very profitable because it's the market leader. A star business is a business that is in a high growth Market.

And therefore is gonna grow much faster. And because it's the leader in its segment, it's going to be very profitable if it isn't very profitable already, because it's going to have either higher prices than people who are have a lower market share because it has less brand reputation or less popularity. Or It's going to have lower costs because it's got greater scale, or it's going to be both. It's like sailing across. The Atlantic and discovering that there's, you know, land at the other end, even if it's not the Indies. Once it's done, everyone says, We'll go to America. But before it's done, it wasn't obvious.

It enabled BCG. and then later Bone and Company to make Tens of millions of dollars. Very early in the game, when they weren't very large. Quick question about that. Is that in their selection of clients and therefore banking on future billing? Or it was using that as a way of thinking about helping their clients. Exactly. The latter. So in other words, they go to big diversified companies. Don't forget in the nineteen seventies. Right. They would go to a GE and be like, You need to get rid of these

And and one of the things that you had to get rid of were most of the question marks, which were very high growth, very sexy because they're in very high growth markets like artificial intelligence today. But Never Having Uh Cattenhells.

chance of actually becoming the market leader. So what BCG said and what Boning Companies said to those companies is sell them You know, get out while the guy's good. Because if it's a sexy business, sexy market. But never gonna be the leader. Never gonna make any money. I did get interrupt with a very mundane question. A cat's chance in hell. Is that a real expression? For cat. Yeah, we've I I have heard snowballs chance in hell, but does get thrown in the house. I misspoke. Oh wait, I've never heard that either. Poor dogs too. Dogs chance in hell. No, no, that's okay. I don't want to interrupt the flow. I just the imagery is so strong and you're you're adorable. Dog is right next door.

Well, of course dogs were on the matrix as well. But cats weren't. Which was catastrophic. Oh You are you are the master of the puns. I've noticed this. I'm descending to Toguru. Don't worry about it. Oh boy. So this matrix. And you said they did it backwards. Does that mean that something that's going well would grow up into the left? No, it's a meaning.

The thing which had the greatest sales. was on the left rather than the right. Normally you would say if it's bigger I mean this is something I don't approval at all. Which is that, you know, we tend to think about time. Uh

Always Disappearing and that if something's bigger It's actually Gonna be

BCG put the bigger thing on the left. So the cash cow and the Star. Were on the left. Logically.

They should have been bigger than the other side. And I don't know. Someone made a mistake and it just got grandfathered in, you know. Um It was one of the greatest charts. Oh, I'm not criticizing that chair. I just I guess it was but they made a mistake, yeah. Yeah. Well, you know. Just think how how big it could have been if they'd just All right.

Let's segue for a second here. Broadly speaking. How do you apply some of these principles? And I know we've discussed this on some level before and you mentioned Oxford, we are gonna come back to Oxford purely out of self interest. I have a question about that, but What are some of the ways that you have found most effective to apply some of this type of thinking?

to your own life, or in terms of looking at In the case of your investments. these critical few investments because like you said, in venture capital and in many types of investing, if you look at people who have amassed Vast sums of wealth. They generally have high concentration.

And then they in some cases diversify to sort of protect against downside and and sustain wealth, but to build it. people usually have very concentrated positions. To do that. If there is some element of skill involved, you need to know how to separate the sort of critical few from the trivial many.

What are some of the most impactful ways that you've applied that type of thinking, eighty twenty principle, et cetera, to your Your own life outside of business. What? You supplied the answer, which I was

Wanted to give you. But but the answer is the eight twenty principle is the link. Between the investment performance and venture capital is an extreme form. of this. It's not eighty twenty, it's ninety nine one. Or something like that. And network businesses are the same thing and

Wealth. It's the same thing, you know. I mean Just think about But it's also Musk, you know, just think how much money they've managed to make out of

Essentially one investment each. Which has been fantastically successful. So the eighty two eighty principle Runs through like a in a stick of rock with the seaside's name is sort of, you know, always running through. It runs through the whole of my thinking.

In terms of my own Success or money. But also things like happiness. I'm trying to think one are the Few things that I need to do.

In order to attain. What I want. What is the twenty percent or what is the one percent or whatever. And I think in happiness

And I'm very, very keen on talking about happiness because I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Personally and for other people. Happiness depends on very, very few things. For a start there's an argument which says that

we have a baseline happiness level. And we gravitate back to it. and is connected in some obscure way to genetics. I've never actually seen a good explanation of how it is related to genetics. But nevertheless, it is intuitive in a way and and people give examples of When you get married. You're suddenly very happy or when you fall in love, you're very happy. When you get married you're still very happy. A year later you may be no more happy than you were a year before you met

Mr. Wright or Miss Wright. And so that's temporary. And you revert to your habitual baseline. happiness level. And this baseline happiness level also is evidenced when people win the lottery. Lottery.

Right. They have a lot of money, they spend a lot of money. Or have a catastrophic accident. In some cases, right? Yeah. driving their pause rather too fast. Yeah. The evidence actually on on lotteries is very mixed and it isn't as simple as people say. All the evidence

If you look at it on a subjective level of people reporting is that people who are wealthier are actually on average happier. than people who are poor. And this is true if you look at it in countries, it's true if you look at it within a particular country. And it's also true if you look at it in terms of people's lives. I don't know very many people who become very rich who are much more miserable than they used to be, or indeed not happier than they. And It's often said that the pursuit of material things is useless. But what about medicine? What about dentistry?

You know, before the twentieth century. Very few. Children. actually lasted beyond five years. And

As a result of medicine improving immensely. And also hygiene improving immensely. That's down to a a negligible level. Imagine the trauma for a mother or father Yeah, in seeing Three or four of the children die before the age of five. That's a huge amount of human suffering.

And that's Removed. People forget about that. Dentistry, you know, when I was growing up, a visit to the dentist Well, A cause for great

trepidation. And I remember the dentist having this drill, this enormous drill pretty in my small mouth when I was about nine years old. And it just made such a horrible noise that you just knew it was gonna be painful, even if it wasn't particularly painful. Nowadays you don't get that. Dentistry has improved immensely. And dentistry actually also affects lifespan. And you look also at the fact that unless people get cancer these days, they're likely to last much longer than they would have done. a generation ago, much longer, you know, maybe depending on the country, might be the average length of life might have been fifty years.

About Not that long ago, you know, thirty or forty years ago. And now it's eighty. No. What does that mean? Well, It not only means that people can live longer and healthier lives than they used to live, but it also means that there are fewer bereaved people, and that also is an enormous cause of pain and suffering. How do we jump from the macro the sort of societal

national level. to the personal. So for yourself, you said very few things. really matter when it comes to happiness and just for Not to beat a dead horse, but this is kinda my role.

How would you define or think about happiness? Just so we Are all on the same page as to what that means to you. Is it just a general sense of well being? Yes. I mean well the way that sociologists and psychologists do that is they ask people to rate their happiness on a one to ten scale. And they interpret the results. It's a subjective rating. And a lot of people say, Well, people don't really know whether they're happy or not, or they pretend to be happy when they're not happy. I just don't believe that. I think that people generally do know how happy they are.

And when they give you a rating they are giving you an honest rating. But If you ask people Have you actually deviated significantly from what you say now? You say eight, okay, so that's pretty good. Very good. Today. Was it true that you were always in a range of six to ten?

I mean that's something that For example You value Noah Harari whom Oh no, you've interviewed.

There's a a little bit of leeway there, but there's not a hell of a lot of leeway. But have you ever met someone who's had a really miserable childhood and then when they left home I've actually enjoyed life a lot. I've met many many people. For sure. That shouldn't If the baseline

level is correct. The argument goes much beyond that, which is to say even if it was correct You don't have to assume that it's immutable. You don't have to assume it cannot be changed. And If you want to be

happier. There are various ways of doing it. Th again, one of the best documented findings of sociology is that people who are married are happier than people who are not married. Now, of course, there's no worse than an unhappy marriage or partnership. I make no distinction at all between a long term relationship and and a marriage,'cause not everyone gets married these days. Uh It's

A very good bet. To be married rather than to be single throughout your life. So But coming back to eighty twenty, that's one thing that you can do, which is to make sure that you have a long term relationship with someone, preferably someone that you really like. It's gonna make a huge amount of difference. And uh there are various other subsidiary things, for example I think it's very important if you're

From a purely selfish point of view, if you want to be happy, you want to be in a relationship with someone who's very happy themselves. Yeah. It makes a huge amount of difference. You know, there's some people just incredibly difficult to live with because they're miserable. It also, you know, all the research shows that there's a guy who's got a love lab called Don Gottman. I I think he's in Chicago. Yeah, Gotman. There are very few indicators of whether people are going to get divorced or whether they're going to have a happy long term relationship. One of them is that they're friends. They actually like each other. Well, that's a blinding glimpse of the obvious, isn't it? But how many married people do you know who actually

really don't have the same interests or they don't share the same past times uh in any regard. They might have different values. But they're married, you know. Well That's a pretty dumb thing to do. So the first thing to do is make sure that you have a successful long term relationship. And if you do that You're going to be

Pretty happy. The second thing that you must do, according to all the research, is you've got to love your job. Now many people don't love their jobs. And one of the reasons that they don't love their jobs is because they're doing it for money. Now I think money's wonderful. I think money can help to make you happier. But if To earn a lot of money.

You have to work for a boss who's an ogre or you know, just not very nice or inconsiderate or makes you work very, very long hours and you know, doesn't really care about your welfare. You're gonna be much more miserable than working for a boss who's relatively relaxed, cheerful. Happy person themselves. But how many people?

Don't like their boss. It's ridiculous. Absolutely you should resign or you should poison the boss or bump them off. Absolutely. So killing of the boss first. Sorry. No liability. It's not what he said. And we don't like lawyers anyway, so go away and send your lawyers' letters to gamble. Anyway, you get the picture and then

You know, one of the things that I say in the eighteen twenty book which you've very kindly helped So it's it's worth Reading from people the eighty twenty twenty principle. Why don't you spend more time on the things that you like? So a lot of people say, Well pleasures, you know, this is not very spiritual, you know.

People like pleasures. Would you rather spend an evening with people that you enjoy spending an evening with, or would you rather spend an evening with people that are miserable? I think the former, yeah. And it's amazing I go around asking people Who are your best five friends in the world? And people come up with a list. And then I say, Who are the five people that you spend most time with? And very often

The lists are completely different. And that tells you that that person they might be happy. But they're certainly going against the grain. They're handicapping it. Yeah. And again, people you know, some people like living where they live. Other people find it noisy and unpleasant, other people find it too boring. Why don't you Go and live somewhere.

that you actually really like, that suits you, that has the same sort of people. that you enjoy seeing in the street. Why don't you do that? Most people Just doesn't cross their mind. I mean I think in America it's one of the redeeming features of America is that people do move around a lot.

But we're talking in Portugal and The indigenous Portuguese. They don't move. There are a relatively few number of things that you do, and of course you have to read one of my books to find out what they are, but they're Absolutely obvious.

Well, hold on. We'll get plenty of people to read the books because I recommend the books and I actually gave I mean I gave you some wording, you know, some writing to use when you launched the revised edition of the eighty twenty principle, which I never do because it had a huge impact on my life. But not to over tease people when you are working with Or talking to friends. Or Others about.

Happiness. What are some of the questions that you ask them? Like the five Who are your closest five friends, who do you spend the most time with and Incongruity there. It goes a bit beyond eighty twenty. I'm now writing a book called eighty twenty beliefs. And in order to do that I've interviewed fifty people that I know very well and uh who I trust to tell me the truth and they trust to

Tell me some of the Uh, intimate things about their life, uh particularly what went wrong. And My awesome

Two questions. Very simple questions. One is Is there any belief? That has really made a big difference in your life. That at any stage you have changed.

So you used to believe X and now you believe Y. And Ninety percent of the people. Nine out of ten, as people know it's a very small sample, but it's a extraordinary coincidence if they're all saying this and it's not quite True generally.

say that they have at some stage changed an important belief. And the belief Yeah. I'm not talking about something which is an academic belief, you know, where you might believe that one politician is better than another or you might believe in green values and we might not. I'm talking about belief that has made a big difference in your own life. And why has it made a big difference in your own life? Well, it's because you've acted in a certain way.

And that's generated certain results. So I ask people. What belief have you changed? And very often That in fact almost invariably

Triggers. But I actually believed something which was not in my own interests and I call that a toxic belief. For example, a friend of mine who's about sixty years old. She looks a lot younger.

We'll call her Sally show it is. Sally had quite a nice life. She moved from England Which is you know is cold and rainy and horrible. Uh, to South Africa, which as you know is sunny and very nice. To Cape Town, actually, which is the nicest place in South Africa unless you happen

Und uh Track wild animals. It's good for almost everything else. Got wonderful beaches, got mountains, got very nice food. And it's quite cheap as well. So, you know, it's good idea to go to Cape Town if you It's slightly dangerous now, so but that's another matter. Anyway, she had a very Nice life.

Until the last five years. And in the last five years. Catastrophe struck her husband. was diagnosed in the very early stages of having Outside's disease.

And he decided With Sally a chance. he would commit suicide. Obviously, an awful thing and trauma. You know, for for her as well.

And then Shortly after that happened, Covid happened and Covid you know, there are many hard luck stories about Covid, but but the one which uh Sally tells is uh She had two dogs and the dogs were very important to Yeah, and particularly important after her husband was gone.

And She in in the Covid regime in South Africa, she wasn't allowed to take the dogs out. At any stage. Uh for twenty four hours of the day.

Without Risking. imprisonment and having the dogs shot. In other words, you couldn't take them out Mm. Do their business or anything like that.

You couldn't take them out for any exercise and if the police stopped you they would quite likely shoot the dogs. And put you in prison. Yeah. So she decided that this was not a very nice society to live in any longer. She loved living in South Africa, but then she decided to to do something about it. The point is For the first fifty five.

Years of her life. She'd followed the lead of her husband. and other people. She'd gone with the flow. The way that she explained it to me was saying, I believe Keserasara Whatever will be, it will be. The future's not ours to see. Keserasara. So in other words she trusted to fate and fate was very good to her. When her husband had gone and when the Covid regime in South Africa was so unpleasant, she decided that she could no longer go with the flow and she took A very brave decision that she would uh

Yeah. Sell a house in Cape Town and come and live as it happens in Portugal. And that Has been Enormously

Successful. Absolutely to come back to my earlier theme, it's transformed her happiness. By pure chance. She's meant. Oh that she's

Getting married to now. They're very happy together. And she's very I mean, you can see that her eyes line up. She's really, really happy. Three or four years ago she was in the depths of depression and sort of w you know, she was wondering whether she should follow her husband in terms of committing suicide. So

It is possible. If you take charge. do something. And that's why I hate this concept of the baseline happiness level. Because Mark said philosophers.

have tried to describe the world, the point is to change it. And similarly your happiness levels, you know, you It's no use them telling you about the uh baseline happiness level. And saying well. They don't say it, but they almost imply that it's inevitable and you can't transcend that. So if you're an eight, you're stuck between six and ten, depending on

The weather and circumstances and Whether good things have happened to you that day or whatever. But You know, you can't go down to a three, or if you're a three, you can't go up to a ten. But there are many cases that I know. where people have actually transformed themselves.

You know, I know someone who was incredibly miserable for a very long time. And why was he miserable? This person was miserable because He grew up in a very well off upper middle class family. He said he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. And he expected that life would carry on in being easy.

And of course when he left home and had to earn a living, he discovered that actually things work. Very difficult. Now, things were not quite as difficult as he imagined they were. I mean, for example, he started a very, very successful business, and he ran that business for six years and made a lot of money from selling it. So when I was talking to this chap who I'll call Alexander

Alexander, I said, You must have got a degree of self confidence and Good feeling. from your experience in starting and running and selling this business.

You must be joking. Those six years were years of high anxiety. I was constantly Firefighting. It seemed so difficult to me. It seems so difficult. And I said to him, Well, you know, it didn't seem difficult.

Observing it. And then he said well actually It was because I expected things to be easy. And you remember. M. Scott Peck wrote. A book which starts Life is difficult.

things about life, if you understand this, you can transcend it because you anticipate that things are going to be difficult and you can take pride in sort of you know overcoming difficulties. But if you expect there are going to be no difficulties, obviously you're going to be disillusioned and so paradoxically there's miserable sounding philosophy which says life is difficult is actually a wonderful philosophy. Because it means that you can take pride in getting over difficulties. But when you're confronted with difficulties, what you do is like Alexander and say, It's too difficult. It shouldn't be this difficult. Then obviously you're going to be miserable despite objectively

Having a great success. Yeah, it makes me think of and I I wish I had the attribution, but happiness equals reality minus expectations in a sense. And this is also very reminiscent of Marcus Aurelius and Meditations, of course, but how did Alexander if he did Make the switch. Did he make the switch? He did make the switch, but it took him about twenty years. He said from the time that he'cause he started business when he was in his early thirties. And from being age forty onwards Then he

Gotten into a pretty dark place at one stage. He's and then he started going to twelve steps meetings. Where people sit around and say Yeah, I've had these difficulties. I've reconstructed my life.

And I'm on the path to recovery. He also took some therapy and he also reflected. On why? He was miserable. And he did realise it was miserable'cause he expected life to be easy and it wasn't.

Very often. Having the insight into what a toxic belief is is the first step to actually being able to overcome it. Very often we don't realise What

Toxic beliefs we have. And therefore We Suffer from them. I mean in my own case.

I had a pathological need to be successful. And when I was in my early twenties, as I recounted, I got employed by the Boston Consulting Group, which was wonderful. I love the company. I still think it's a great company. I still think the people in it are very interesting intellectually very interesting as well. And the whole thing, you know, was great, except for the fact they didn't like me very much. So you know, that was a bit of a

Bit of a problem. I suffered. I mean, I know that this s this sounds ridiculous, but I really suffered in my soul for two or three years being miserable because I wasn't successful. Successful meaning financially successful. I wanted to be successful. This was my first serious job. I hadn't been successful in my two previous jobs either, but there were good reasons for that, at least I could rationalise them. I worked for Shell and it was a terrible company to work for because it was very bureaucratic and people were thinking about

how much they were going to make when they retired and could they retire at fifty rather than at sixty five. So that you know a risky a ridiculous company. And then I worked for another company which was much, much better, but I I wasn't particularly successful at that either. So it was very important to me. that I got good credentials, I got a good business school degree, I got a a good degree from Oxford. I knew I was intelligent and actually I was able to make quite a lot of money even in B C because they had a system of billability which said You get paid according to how many hours you bill. And I made sure that I billed a lot of hours and I had various strategies for for doing it. But I couldn't do what the BCG people really admired, which was heavy duty financial and market analysis. I'm actually I think dyslexic with numbers. I'm not very good at mental arithmetic. I'm very good at the end. You needed a fish pine.

Anyway, may may I pause so don't I wanna bookmark for a second, but I can't let this go because This is just how I am. I'm like Suti with an apple core. Some inside baseball. Richard's lab loves Apple Cores. The ways for billing.

hours successfully. What were some of your your ways for billing hours successfully. Well, I made sure that I had some clients that liked me. And I did a lot of work which was solitary. In other words, the case team was me. And maybe a a junior assistant.

And I was actually quite good at selling business. As long as they We weren't looking to be wild in terms of heavy duty analysis. And I'm quite intuitive, you know, so I I could come up with what the company should do and they quite like that. But my colleagues didn't like that. And the more successful I was at selling business, the more they frowned on it because you said, you know, you're not using a proper case team, you're not doing it the BCG way. Where's the heavy duty financial analysis where's the final presentation?

road to Damascus stuff and there's a vision, you know, you prove that black is white and that they're investing in all the wrong things and they're stupid. Whereas I wouldn't I wouldn't go along to clients and say you're stupid. I would I would say, you know, you're very clever because you're doing this and the other what this, that and the other was what I wanted them to do, not what they really were doing. So I used a little bit of elementary common sense and psychology. So yeah, I had some clients who really liked me, but You weren't fitting to the fit the template. But my point is you're pathologically addicted pathological belief that that I had to be successful and B C G stupid. Yeah, you had the constraint on it. Stupid.

You know, and then afterwards I thought well Am I not suited to strategy consulting? I said, Yes, I am suited to strategy consulting. I understand the concepts very well. I can actually work out what people should do. You're not bad at emotional intelligence, and So Why not I give it a go at another firm? So I went long to talk.

McKinsey. They rejected me. So that was fine. And then I managed to weasel away to go and see Bill Bain. Now this is where it gets very interesting for me at least. Because I had this appointment with Bill Bain to get there. I got through the London office, who were very desperately short of people. So they thought that I would Do And they sent me off to see Bill Bowen.

And that was so lucky. For me, because Bill Bain was actually a historian. I didn't know this at the time. And so he said, What was your undergraduate degree? And I said, History And then we had a twenty minute conversation about history of counterfactual stuff. And he obviously enjoyed that. Mr Bain, I really want to know

why it is that your company is growing faster than the Boston's consulting crew. And I really want to understand If there is a formula behind it. What the formula is. And this was music to Bill's ears,'cause what he'd done was work out a way. of having a relationship, long term relationship with a client. B C would work for anyone. Bonin and Company again, it's eighty twenty consistent, would only work for the

Top Dog, the chief executive. In a large company. And they wouldn't work for the head of a country, they wouldn't work for the head of marketing or anything like that. And They would Again, like me on the fish pond, they would then say, How big could this be? In other words, we don't want to continually be churning

Clients. Am I right in saying that they also faulted into that had the some type of requirement that they would offer sort of category exclusivity or not work with I will not work with you client, your competitors, but in exchange I ask and what would they ask? They'd ask that you don't work with our competitors. In fact they put it broad more bluntly than that. They said, We won't work for your competitors and you won't work for ours.

And the affrontery. You know, it was Breathtaking. And and of course they did it quite smoothly. You know, Bill was a great salesman. He didn't actually want to sell business. as soon as possible, he managed to

Delegate that to uh to other people. But It was incredible. He was saying we have got something really valuable to offer. They believed in the formula. They believed in the gross share matrix. Even though it involves shooting dogs, but but It was like

Evangelical. You know, and people compared to the Bain is to the moon is and they talked about Bainers and the rest of it. There was a lot of truth behind that. Because They were fanatical and the most important thing in the performance appraisal was attitude. Um When I heard that I thought this is ridiculous. This is just brainwashing. But actually I came to believe that it was true.

Yeah. All of the people in Bone and Company were On the same side. In BCG there were factions. You know, there was a faction which was the English people thinking that they were smarter than the Americans, for example. And as the intellectual f faction and there was the banking faction. You know, basically it was like a mosaic. And

A lot of energy was being generated. But it was across purposes. So in Boning Company there might be less intellectual firepower, but there was more energy because everyone was working in in the same way. How did they assess attitude? Do you remember? Yeah, they sent you to charm school. Ha ha

And if you didn't if you didn't pass through the charms. Well, hold on all that. Alright, so elaborate on what this means. I'm guessing you're not, you know, practicing walking with a book on your head and arranging silverware. What were you what were you doing? They didn't send me to Charms School. I was too senior to get it. So What happened in that interview? was uh Bill Bain and I got on like a house on fire. He enjoyed the interview. He went and got

One of the top five people in the company beneath him. guy called Ralph Willard, who's big fat man, but enormously cheerful and enormously optimistic and can do sort of person, and also a very clever man and a very nice man. I say that because he liked me a lot. But Bill Bain said to him You know, I've had this great chat with Richard and I think we want to hire him. You don't do that.

It it undercuts your bargaining power and all the rest of it. So you said to Ralph, you know, will you talk to Richard and work out how much we're gonna pay him. And then of course that was an invitation to me. to tell them how much I was earning a lot of money in the Boston Consulting Group and Ralph looked at me and said. You may be very good, Richard, but you're very expensive. Anyway. And I became a partner in Boning Company in record time.

I remember there were people in Boston Consulting Group who when I was fired as a consultant were managers and they want to become Vice President, which was equivalent to a a partner. in Boning Company. I became a partner from being a consultant. Within a year. And that was faster than these people in B C could get promoted to vice president from from manager. So they couldn't understand this at all.

And the truth is that Bill Bain decided there and then that I could be a partner of his. So of course I liked working in bank. But you had to Step outside of the maybe implicit applied to yourself, which was

I need to be successful within B C yeah. So it was good enough to be successful within bone company. The reason that I was asking all these questions though, Tim, was that From the very beginning, from the very first week. But I'd been in BCG.

I knew that I wanted to start a strategy consulting firm. Why did I want to start a strategic consulting firm? Because they made a lot of money. And One of the things that I had had as an ambition from nine years old was to be a millionaire. But I saw Strategy consulting and being part owner of the strategy consulting firm, having seen or

Imagined anyway, how much money Baine and Company was making most of which ended up in Bill Bain's pocket. I wanted to be the owner of strategy consulting firm. So I was asking Bill what the formula was. Out of visceral interest.

And you know, he thought well Richard w really wants to understand the Bane way of doing things. That wasn't true at I did want to understand it, but I didn't want to s understand it'cause I wanted a fifteen year career in banking company. What did he say? In terms of formula. Well and now he explained the relationship, the whole thing. You know, he explained the speech that he would give to the chief executives, you know.

We won't work for your competitors, you won't work for ours. And the he had various things but one of the other dicta that he had was to say to them. We are going to make a lot of money for you. Your profits are gonna go up. But

We don't want you. Place any arbitrar on our budgets. So if we recommend at the end of the study, which has been very successful That we do something else.

You are gonna say yes. Basically It's a partnership. We're gonna make you a lot of money. You're gonna make us a lot of money. And Bill Bain was

This is another thing about being a historian rather than a business person or an MBA. He wasn't really fascinated. By the nuts and bolts of consulting. He was really interested in making money. And he recognized that

This was highly leveled because The Companies that he was working for were very big companies and they were quoted on the stock market. So you knew what the value was of getting a certain increase in profits and increasing the growth rate. uh revenues and profits.

And so It was Very easy to see, like me sitting on the fishbond and thinking about That's fair. That this was

A formula for making an extraordinary amount of money. And that he later capped that. Bye. Going into the private equity. Business.

And helping those companies that they invested in make a lot more money. So they did the same sort of analysis. Yeah, Bane Capital, yeah, exactly. And Bank Capital made more money. Actually including for most of the early pain partners, because they put money into it, which then became enormously valuable.

So anyway, that so Bill Bain. Is exhibited. I In terms of proving. That historians can can make money. And not only that, it goes deeper than that. Which is

Like Bruce Henderson. Bill Bain stopped consulting as soon as he possibly could. There's a lovely story about this. I don't think I've put in any of my books. But the lovely story was that He would be asked by a new client.

to go and work on a case and in the early days it was quite difficult to refuse if it was done in Brad Street or Baxter Travanor Bill Bain going to say, No, I'm not going to work on this assignment. I want to have an easy life. I don't want to do consulting. So what it would do is go along with Ralph Willard to to see the chief executive at the beginning of an assignment. The chief executive has asked that Bill Bone actually works on the assignment. Bill didn't say yes, but but he arranged a meeting with the chief executive and Ralph Willard and himself. And they would get in and they would they would have some pleasantries. He would talk about sport, you know, last night's baseball match or whatever. And he would research whether the chief executive was interested in that particular sport. Anyway, they'd talk about that for five minutes. And then

Boombone would then Stand up. It's stand up. And say to the chief executive. I'm sorry, but I've got to go now.

And the reason I've got to go is I want to leave you with Ral. You're like Ralph. Ralph is really good. Ralph is better than me. And then you've stand up and walk away. And go back to Boston. So the startled chief executive would then do something they'd turn to Ralph and say Are you better than Bill Bain? And Ralph would say something this is all worked out in advance. Ralph would say

Well Bill certainly thinks so. And I happen to think that his judgment is very good. And the collapse in laughter and the chemistry would be assured from from that point onwards. I must tell you this because the the thing that was quite extraordinary about Bill Was he worked out how to run a consulting firm without doing any work or with doing probably about Two days work a month. And and the the way that he did that, apart from extreme delegation, was that he had a monthly worldwide partners meeting. And all of them partners had to attend now.

I thought it was nonsense to go from London. Uh Boston for a one day meeting. And so I didn't turn up for the first day of uh The first drinks in the evening.

And one of my colleagues who was later to be a partnered with me in in L A K Ian Evans. was whispering on the phone. He was saying, You've got to get here, you've got to get to Boston. Bill was furious. And I said, No, I got a client emergency, I don't want to go to Boston anyway, you know, I don't want to fly o it's ridiculous flying overnight and I don't like He said, You've got to get there. So when I turn up, Bill makes a bee line for me and I say to myself, This is great, Bill thinks on it.

Important. And he said to me, Richard, did you Did you not know that we were starting the partners meeting this evening with with drinks and dinner? And I said yes, I had a a client Emergency bill. I was beginning to stutter at this point. Uh and he said, Richard, I wanted to be clear

When we have a partners meeting, you have got to be here or you will no longer be a partner. And then he would smile. Then he smiled and said welcome and have a drink. So that was that was how he was like. He had red lines, you know, basically all partners had to be there at the partners meet. Not only that, but what they had to do was to say on the clients that they were responsible for How much revenue they made in the previous months How much revenue are they gonna make in each of the next three months?

They did that in front of everyone. But of yes, of course. Yeah. Public humiliation or public um Applause. Applause, yeah, exactly. And people would actually they they break into applause and someone, budget was going up, you know. That was the one thing that was Concerned about You know, if it been Bruce. For a start, Bruce would never have a partners meeting, you know, he didn't see the point of that. To him it was all a matter of concepts. He wasn't really interested in the revenues industry.

If they were good enough and to continue opening offices and swan round the world and sort of you know, basically terrorise the consultants in a different office. Then Bruce was was happy. Bruce was not a very nice human being. Uh he was a genius. A global campaign of terror from branch to branch. It was so bad that demotivating people that all the people underneath him eventually said to him, Look, Bruce, y this is not working. People would go to Cytilis who was the head of what the London office when I when I was there and say Do you know what he did to me? And actually saw it

mentioned this during the memorial service for Bruce Henderson after he died. And he said Sylvain's very dry sense of humor. He said, It was not necessary To ask who they were talking about. You know, I mean I used to joke about it and said, If you hear that Bruce is on his way, jump out through the window. Escape. So let's come back to Toxic beliefs. I imagine I've been thinking about this myself for my my own

history and there's certainly examples, but some of them that I've then changed. I mean there's a recency bias here. They would be for instance, I could never reengage with art the way I thought that I did or I the way that I did when I was younger. And I have. It's only been in the last month and there are reasons for that, but it has led to such an uptick in my general sense of well being and happiness that it's head spinning. It's really Unbelievable how much of a difference it's made. I mean it was an integral part.

of my entire life for so long and then I just let it go because I was time to grow up and be an adult and focus on career, et cetera. But for people who are listening and they're thinking to themselves, I'm sure I have disabling beliefs, but it's kind of like a visual blind spot. We all have a visual blind spot. Most people I would say Sure. Most people listening. probably not even aware that there is a visual blind spot. And then they certainly.

Given that that's the case, even if they do know, they don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. How do you find your own Toxic belief. Or is there a Common Set of

Yeah, there are there are Such as what will be will be as a common toxic belief. Another toxic belief is that life should be easy. Another toxic belief would be That

It was absolutely essential. like me to make money or to be successful in this particular job. That would be a toxic belief. Another toxic belief which is very widespread. Is if the organization tells me to do something or to move to a job that I don't really want It will be a black mark against me. To not actually take that promotion.

And I remember Two people were teachers and they both had the experience of being asked to do something which was an administrative matter. And they both did it and they both hated it. One of them was to be head of year. Now what head of year means is you're responsible for discipline. And what that means is that if a kid's a naughty you go and talk to their parents and You can imagine that's not a particularly pleasant job. It's always sort of, you know following up on uh problem and Teachers like teaching, believe it or not, you know, that's the whole point. And so they said I I love teaching in the classroom, but having

Yeah, the particular person I'm thinking of. Having done this head of year thing for six months. I Decided that It was very stressful and I didn't want to continue doing it. But I thought So I had to do it.

And I talked to This is To come back to your question, this is one of the ways of doing it is talk to a friend. She said, you know, I talked to my brother about this and he said Nonsense, you know, they they won't fire you.

And it won't be a black mark if you tell them that you don't want to do this.'Cause nobody wants to do it. And so she went to the headmaster and said Yeah. Exactly that. And he said, Okay, yeah. Yeah, we could see that you weren't happy and that you carry on.

Yeah. And far from it being a black mark against her, sh the next year she was promoted to head of English. So we build up this picture in our mind that the organizations are much more ogre ish and sometimes the boss is much more an ogre than they really are. Sometimes they are an ogre, of course, but very often they're not. And The organization. is more realistic than the individual. But there's often the sense that people who have

An overdose of the what I call the Protestant work ethic. Think you can't disagree with the boss, you can't disagree with the organization. That's another very common Toxic belief. In the book Eighty Twenty Police, I will list about a dozen which I think encompass the great majority. Of toxic beliefs.

But there's one way. Which is to get A friend. Go out, have a meal, have a few drinks perhaps, and sit down and then

Hand them a list of toxic beliefs and say I think I might be suffering from a toxic belief. Which one do you think it is? And of course they'll zoom in on the one which is obvious. It's always easier to spot someone else's toxic belief than it is to spot your own. And then you swap and you r return the favor. And you say, Yeah, that's probably right.

Let's have another round of schnaps. You know, Bill, I've been meaning to tell you. I'm gonna help you out here. This approach. Of peer review. is so incredibly valuable and I have multiple cases throughout my life of going through this exercise in one capacity or another, not necessarily with toxic beliefs.

but I read a book ages ago in high school, actually, called Mental Toughness Training for Sports. And it completely changed my life and experience at the time, which I don't say lightly, but It provided you with Effectively. Various

criteria, qualities, let's say, and then you're ranked from one to ten or something like that. And the recommendation in the book was take this page. Make copies, give it to five people who know you really well. could be coaches, teachers, they don't necessarily have to be peers in the sense of other students in my case, and have them rank you from one to ten in these various Categories and then for anything, say less than a five, here's your next action. And it was

Remarkable to me how The divergence between how self aware I thought I was And how completely blind I was. to certain weaknesses. And that informs Every step I took after that.

with wrestling specifically, and I went from being At best middle of the pack, probably let's just say lower thirty percent in terms of technicality and performance to being probably for a period of time the best wrestler on the team for that subsequent season. It was remarkable how quickly

change could take place, even with longstanding beliefs or behaviors like the change doesn't have to. least in my personal experience, it doesn't have to take a long time. No, it doesn't. I mean

I I actually categorised the fifty people Forty of them said they had a toxic belief. How long did it take? For them to realise the toxic belief existed. And how long did it take to actually

Change the belief into a more positive belief. And it was remarkable. Tim Uh But in Nearly all cases.

Once someone had actually recognised the the belief, once they'd rumbled it, as it were. Then it was very easy. If people didn't rumble it, say rumble. Rumble. Rumble is a great English w expression. It means when it they've discovered it. Oh. They've flushed it out. I'm gonna use that and confuse the shit out of all my American friends. So once they'd realised, if you like. No, I like rumble. Rumble. I go. Once they'd rumble the belief, then it's easy to get Rid of it.

But if they didn't. Then they could carry on for twenty years. And then they might go through a lot of therapy, they might go, you know And gradually. Discover it.

But There's another method which I have discovered is very effective, which is if someone is suddenly or at least in the next last six months or last year. much unhappier than they used to be. Um particularly if they're suffering stress. Then there's a toxic belief.

lurking there which need to be rumbled. you don't automatically jump to knowing what the toxic belief is. But if you say Actually Great unhappiness or Great stress.

Is a signal that there is a toxic belief. Now let's try and work out which one it is. So I actually had a slight disagreement with my agent about this'cause I sent her an early draft of the book. And she said, Well You know, I'm not convinced it's as easy as you say to change

A toxic belief. And I said, Well actually You're right about that. My dear Agent. You're absolutely right about that. But That's because they don't realise that they've got it. And once they realise that they've got it, then it is remarkably easy. Because no one wants to be unhappy and stressed.

If I n understand the cause of it, obviously. And too often we actually think things which are not in our interests. They're Ideas which have been implanted. in us by our parents, by our teachers, by our schoolmates By our friends. Or the in the general culture.

But we actually must do something. And one of the things that is my particular bug there is working hard. You know. People think there's some virtue in working hard, and of course working hard, you know, some people like working hard. But beyond a certain point it becomes counterproductive. And It's always

Because They were brought up that way. You know, we used to think That If you were a decent human being trying hard to be good and rest of it, you had to work hard, it was part of the package. But

There are so many examples of people who don't work hard who make a much greater contribution like Bill Bain or Bruce Henderson. Despite having a charmed life. Once we've Somehow.

Come to a major insight which can have huge consequences. And you don't need to work hard. When I was working at the Boston Consulting Group, seventy or eighty Hours a week. I was failing. The longer I work, the worse it got. And the worse the stress got. To the point where, you know, I was thinking of throwing up

Work all together. They are related to each other. Is there an opposite to the toxic belief yin to the yang. Yeah. Well I guess it's not quite yin to the yang. There's a minor opposite and the major opposite. Minor opposite. Oh, very important is what I call good beliefs.

So I then Ask my second question. of people. You remember the first question was, Have you changed an important belief in your life? Which I don't define it as a toxic belief'cause I said it could be good or it could be bad, but it always turns out to be bad.

And then my second question is, Well tell me about the three or four Beliefs that have made a difference in your life. Where you've actually acted. Upon those beliefs. And which

Two or three or four. beliefs or maybe uh only one belief. Do you actually Believe. Has that actually been a good belief from that point of view. It has good consequences for you and for other people.

Then you get another list of about ten. For example, some people say I follow my conscience. Which sounds very sort of goodie goody and all rest, but actually it's Psychologically. Makes a lot of sense because if you follow your conscience you can make a decision and you always feel good about yourself from that point of view.

Other beliefs which are very useful are karma, you know belief that What goes around comes around and sooner or later if you're a bastard, it will catch you out. You know, people will stop inviting you to dinner or they'll they'll say nasty things about you or whatever. People's reputations are very important and particularly in in business, but in any walk of life I think in any walk of life actually.

People who are disrespectful or Don't behave well. eventually get found out in some way or another. So karma's another one. Kindness, just the idea of kindness. This is particularly popular amongst women, I have to say, in my sample, very small sample, probably not statistically significant. But a lot of women Almost half of the women mentioned kindness. And I knew

Because I knew the people That they were kind people. They weren't just saying that pro forma. What was the belief? That sort of kindness is a virtue or something. The children he said my mother said. I particularly praise my children when they've been kind to other children.

So it's kind of the a double whammy. From that point of view. But it's you know, you go out of your way to make life A little more comfortable for people that you can see are suffering. And I think you know, despite

Sounding a bit sexist. I think women generally are more attuned to that than most men. Oh other beliefs which are important. One of the things which I found very, very interesting was that Most of the people who were apparently happiest, and I s believe were hapist, had either a religious belief

Or a philosophical belief. Which made sense to the world. It might be a belief in evolution, for example. Totally contrary to what most people think. It should be a religious belief. But if people really did.

believe that there was some logic to life. Whether or not It might be that There was no logic. But anyway, something that explained Everything. Evolution's very good at that because people can explain almost anything by evolution, usually fallaciously in my view. Or if people have a religious belief. It didn't matter if they were Buddhists or fundamentalist Christians

It didn't really matter. Whether the belief was intellectually respectable or not. If people really believed it, then it was quite effective in terms of the actions that people took. And you don't have to do the right thing for the right reason. You can do the right thing for the wrong reason. And so

The people who were less happy Didn't have any strong. religious or philosophical. Exactly. Yeah. meaning of reality in some sense. One of the other beliefs which was very important was optimism. People who were optimistic were happier.

And more productive than people who were not. And Books have been written about how you can actually become more optimistic. It's not something which is immutable. There are ways of becoming more optimistic. These are the minor opposites to the toxic beliefs?

Yes. N some of them not quite so minor. Right. So good beliefs. So toxic beliefs, good beliefs, and what else do you think there are? On top of that. I mean it's gotta be better than good. Or bigger than good. Because the problem with grand beliefs is that they are

Grand and they may be grandiose as well as grand. So they're not necessarily good and when they're not good they're extremely bad. But they are beliefs which are almost messianic. Very interesting thing this. Of my fifty people. Eight of them.

had actually A belief. Which they got. When they were very young. Usually before they were teenagers.

Which was completely unfounded and completely implausible. So in my own case it was that I would become a millionaire and you're by extra extrapolation very rich. Completely. I mean, I think I've described before how that happened, but it was a complete accident. But once I'd got the belief, I started thinking, What would I need to do? in order to become a millionaire.

So one of the things that I did was start a stamp company company collecting postage stamps and it wasn't wildly successful but it did teach me a a few things and which did make a little bit of money. And then I was always looking for ways to make money. Again related to Stamps. When there's a commemorative issue uh an event happens like England winning the World Cup.

as as happened in nineteen sixty six when I was sixteen. So Overstamped. The existing stamps with England winners. So it was kind of l almost like a toy printing outfit. And those stamps went on sale.

at the post office. You can imagine everyone wanted the England winner stems. And They were sold out. In most post offices. Throughout the the day. And what I did was I get on my bicycle and I went to every single post office in Windsor.

and tried to buy as many of these stamps. And some people would refuse to sell me any. Some people would say you can have three. Other people would give me whole sheets of the things as long as I could pay for them. And those became immensely valuable. Now it it made me a few thousand pounds. But you know, it all helped and it was the looking for opportunities like that that Made a big difference. What are some other examples of Grand beliefs.

A very common one is I want to be prime minister or president. No. You might. Smile at that and say that's completely unrealistic. There were two people in my sample.

One said, I want to become Prime Minister. This person is now A cabinet minister. If they hadn't have had that belief, although it's very unrealistic, probably he won't become Prime Minister, but you'd never know. He's got a chance of becoming he's got a lot closer to it than most people would wouldn't think. Another person's grand belief was that they would play a prominent role in politics without defining what they'd be. That person's ahead of Probably the most respected London think tank at the present time. So it gives you a focus and it gives you an ambition and it you

Sensitized to try and find Those opportunities. Yeah, it creates a selective attention. Yeah. Another person had the belief that they would find a cure for cancer. No, it hasn't happened yet, but this person is making Considerable progress on that. And I think there's a fifty fifty chance

That in your lifetime, if not in mine. He will actually do that. It's extraordinary. For someone who was not a scientist, who was just an engineer. He's now going to scientific conventions and talking to people about about that. So

It's a grand belief. Hitler's Grand belief. the Jews should be wiped out. So, you know, the grand belief is not necessarily a good thing. Um

You know, that was quite a commonplace belief in Vienna when he Are there other positive historical examples of this that stand out to you. Well Winston Churchill is the opposite of Hitler. His Belief will stop.

Hitler. And I don't know if you've gone into the career details of Winston Churchill, but he was incredibly unsuccessful. He actually was a

cabinet minister very early on in his life. But he messed everything up hugely. He was responsible for several h hundreds of thousands of people dying in the Dardenelles in the First World War. He was responsible for taking Britain onto the gold standard at a completely unrealistically high exchange rate against the US dollar. In nineteen twenty five. He was opposed to

a very minor measure of self government in India in the nineteen thirties. He lost all credibility with his senior Colleagues, he got thrown out of the cabinet. He was in the wilderness completely in the nineteen thirties. And the only thing that saved Churchill's career was Hitler because He was an extreme patriot. He thought the British Empire was uh

Best thing on on earth. He'd grown up in a environment and in a at a school at Harrow where they sang songs about Queen Elizabeth the First. Defeating the armada. So you can see that

Given a conditioning like that. If someone like Hitler comes along, he thinks well Possibly this is a threat. to the British Empire and I've got to do something about it. There's a fascinating story. in one of the biographies by Andrew Roberts, the most recent biography of Churchill, when he was sixteen years old, and this is well documented, he told a friend

that there was going to be a future terrible war. He didn't give any dates or anything like that. But he said during this war I'm going to rise to a very high position. In England. And in my high position I will save London. from being bombed. How old was he when this happened? Sixteen. What do you make of that?

That's very specific. Well, it is. And he said it to someone who became a a minister and who actually wrote it all down. contemporaneously. And Andrew Roberts believes the story. Well The way that I interpreted that is that Churchill was delusional. He thought in a s very school boyish sort of way, that England was going to come under threat.

which is not totally implausible, that there'd be a war and that he Winston Spencer Churchill would be the person who saved the country. Well, That was Nuts. But actually when Hitler came along and started

Appearing to be a a menace to Britain. Who in the whole of the British establishment would say We better Worry about Hitler.

Almost nobody else worried about Hitler. The Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said Hitler's a man we can do business with. When he gives his word, he will stick to his word. David Lloyd George said the same thing.

So did many other writers, including George Bernard Shaw. You know, they thought Hitler May have come up with some ridiculous ideas in the nineteen twenties. But He was beyond that. He wasn't going to do anything bad. But Churchill said

Mark my words. The Munich Agreement in nineteen thirty eight is a complete disaster. Hitler said he's not going to invade Czechoslovakia, he's not going to invade Poland. Don't believe him. And uh Neville Chamber said no, he's given his word, his signature to the the bit of paper that I

carrying us peace in our time. And You know, it was complete rubbish. So when Hitler had done his worst in nineteen forty. The only person that they could choose to replace and it will Chamberlain was actually.

Churchill. The King didn't like it. The majority of the Conservative Party didn't like it. The Labour Party didn't like it because he'd been very rude about the trade unions and had broken the general strike in 1926. He was very unpopular. But nevertheless, he said this is what we must do to save The world. And he did.

It's unbelievable. So delusions can be very Helpful. Sometimes. As I listen to these grand beliefs and as the audience listen to these various grand beliefs, they may have some questions of their own. So the question

Number one might be What if I cannot identify one of these Do I need to try to identify a belief because maybe when I was a kid I thought I would be an astronaut, but I'm not an astronaut. How do I go about Finding that grand belief or

Is the exercise to try to create a new grand belief that I can then Use or is it both? Well how would you answer? These questions.

I don't think that everyone Tim should actually have a grant belief. I think you you either have it or you don't. And I don't think there's much point in trying to manufacture A grand belief because When you're beyond the age of fifteen, it's probably pointless anyway.

the great value of having a grand belief is that it Changes your whole mindset. when you're at a very impressionable age. Most people when they get beyond twenty and all the rest of it would So this is unrealistic. The whole point about a grand belief is that it's unrealistic. But

You don't realise it's unrealistic and therefore you might possibly achieve it. There were three other instances of people who in one form or other believed that they were gonna make a lot of money or be very successful. And Because they This is in your sample set. In my sample, yeah. So there are eight people who had a Grand Belief out of fifty.

So very, very small numbers, but I was staggered. I thought I was the only one with one of these stupid Juvenile beliefs. So it's much more common than perhaps uh and most of them had not told anyone else that they'd had this Belief.

I remember there was one of the ones who had a political belief said that His belief was held up to ridicule in the school assembly. After he'd left. He left uh Age sixteen.

And went to a sixth form college because he couldn't stand being in the school, which was a very regimented traditional school. And he said that the geography master stood up in assembly. And said

You might know that. When people leave school we ask them Why they're leaving and what the Future. career is going to be, what job they think they're going to have in the future. And he said, and this person wrote down Prime Minister.

And he said. You know. It's Ridiculous for one of you to think that you're going to be Prime Minister. And actually found out about he didn't identify who the person was but confirmed the the validity of his decision. This was someone who left three months ago, you might remember that they left and they look like this. No, he didn't say that. But my friend was incandescent w so he reports with anger, saying, How dare this man?

who's only been a geography teacher in his whole career. Judge say it's completely unrealistic for you to become Prime Minister. That just made me more and more determined to become Prime Minister, or at least to get close to it. And so these beliefs are quite Visceral. I mean they you know, whether they're good beliefs or bad beliefs, I think beliefs at an early stage. They're the flip side of a toxic belief. So for example My actual grand belief was that I'd make a lot of money, I'd be a millionaire. But Later on.

I had a toxic belief which was a variant of that, which is nothing in my life is more important than making money. And it was so ridiculous. So When I had made a lot of money in in the year two thousand, my net worth doubled. And it doubled very much in the last three months, and that was because two companies that I'd invested in

FanJuel and Auto One were the companies. In the case of Auto One they did an IPO in the first quarter of the following year. In the case of FanJuel There was an offer made. Bye. Flutter

Which was in a way descended from Betfair to buy out the minority stake of which I was part in Than you. It was a very generous offer. So there I was, I had three hundred million pounds in cash. And my network had gone up. To a billion pounds from from five hundred million pounds. Sorry if that sounds like boasting, but but But the old thing was I was miserable.

And I was miserable'cause I felt responsibility. Here I'd got this sort of, you know, wonderful track record of twenty two percent compound after tax returns. And I just felt What do I do in the next five to ten years in order to continue this track record? So there I was desperately trying to spend this money. I invest in the company we talked about earlier, what three words, and made a very large investment in that. And invest in some other companies. And

It was stressful because you know there was a lot at stake. And then I I suddenly had a a realisation at the end of that year, this is stupid. Why should I feel? Under stress.

To make more money. When I've already got more money than I can possibly spend in my lifetime. Even giving it away is gonna be you know quite difficult. Don't write in to me, please, and ask me for donations. Because I've decided what to do with my money and it's it's not it's it's not one for you. Um but anyway. How stupid can you be to have a lot of money and be anxious about it? But the strength of the belief.

was very strong. I mean it lasted for a very long time. Yeah. So you know, I do think that these grand beliefs can sometimes be toxic beliefs as well. How did you pattern interrupt in the sense That Like your experience. I've heard of many experiences in some cases from acquaintances or friends.

very often from others outside of those circles who get to a point they are what they might consider post economic. They've worked so hard or made very smart decisions, but they put a lot of energy into getting to a point where they don't have to worry about money and they find new ways to worry about money. Right. So it used so used to be reaching a number, they surp far surpassed that number and now it's about their annual compound and annual growth rate. Something like that. They find a new way to worry about money. They know it's stupid. But they cannot seem To stop.

Or they don't have compelling alternatives so they keep playing these dumb games with themselves. How did you interrupt that? It's either very difficult or it's impossible. Or it's very easy.

And this is the it's the flip side about it so far. I mean I I I actually came to when I was I was thinking about beliefs and I said, you know, there are all these uh toxic beliefs and uh isn't it strange how people have got these toxic beliefs? And then I realised I had one myself. It was a variant. You know, it wasn't I needed to make money, it was very Important and it was the most important thing. And I said to myself So I mean my only advice. to people is to say, you know, is it gonna make you happy? And also is

Getting rid of the belief going to Enable you to get rid of some stress. 'Cause stress up to a certain point is very functional, but beyond a certain point it's paralysing. So You asked yourself a very simple question and we should ask ourselves these whenever we're thinking about our lives in a serious way, we should say Is it making me happy? What beliefs do I have and is it making me happy? And if it's not making me happy, it's not going to make other people happy. I mean one of my points about happiness is that happiness is probably the least selfish thing that you can pursue.

Because if you're happy you're gonna make a lot of other people happy as well. If you're miserable. Yeah, you're gonna make other people Miserable. And whenever I'm Tempted to be. A bit downbeat or misanthropic. I say to myself

This is very selfish. So get out of this particular Pattern of thinking. Yeah, you know, like turning away these sincere Loving listeners who want to ask you for all your money.

Well on those So I I I need to scratch an itch that I mentioned earlier, and this is related to Oxford. So I'm gonna give you a cue and then I'd love for you to unpack it and then I have a bunch of selfish questions or self-interested questions at the very least. So the Oxford experience for 991 people, and that's 99 slash one. So think again along the lines of 80 20. Ninety nine one, which perhaps you could explain, but what is the Oxford experience? For ninety nine one people, or what could it be? I've been talking to the head of my old college

What is the name of your old college? I'd rather not say it actually, but I shouldn't. People can look it up very easily. What is it? It's bottom college. Bottom college or W A D H Does that expose you in some strange way? I mean it's giving the game away a little bit. It might be premature because we haven't done it yet. Oh yeah, I see what you're saying. Right, right, right. So we could scratch that. That's fine. Don't scratch it. Editor don't scratch it. So.

It started because they were interested in me making a donation to the college and I said, Yeah, fine, I can make a donation to college but Rather than make a donation, uh can I also give you some thoughts about you know about your finances and and uh the head of the college was very gracious and said, Yeah, that's fine. I'm sure he was thrilled. We love donations with lots of strings attached. I'm just kidding. And I said, Yeah, okay. You said, We're losing money on our undergraduates. Every undergraduate that we educate Costs us twice.

what we can actually charge. They can charge nine thousand Two hundred pounds a year. And we make a loss on that because we've got a tutorial system. A tutorial system is very Labour intensive. A tutorial system means that instead of people going to lectures, what you do is you have a tutor And either alone or with one other student.

You go and see them every week. And they give you a subject for an essay and they tell you which books and articles to read. And then a week later you go along to them again with a bit of fear and trembling and you've got your essay there and they don't sort of tell you to hand it over, they make you read it out. It's just a form of sadism. And then they interrupt you halfway through and say, Well, it's interesting you say this, Richard, but isn't it true that and then they give you a complete opposite view and you get challenged And that's very good for you, although it's terrifying to start with. And you can actually get into quite an intelligent discussion. And you as a student, you know, eighteen year old student

Have got the benefit of the personal attention of someone who's a world expert in this particular field. And uh Telling you But your thinking is all screwed up. Or sometimes very occasionally they tell you that's that's really good. Yes, you've got you're onto something there, but have you also considered this that and the other? Yeah.

It's a wonderful system. I think I would never have made the money that I've made or have whatever success I've had in life had it not been for that experience of having that tutorial system. So I'm very happy to to give my old college some money. But I said look Let's try and work out why you're losing money? And they say, Well it's very simple, you know, we're losing money on every undergraduate. Okay. So I say, Well Maybe you should have more graduates. And they say, No, we don't want to do that. We like teaching undergraduates. We think it's very useful. And we're quite passionate about that. So you've got to continue teaching these undergraduates.

Why can't you charge more money? We can't charge more money because that's set by the government. Why can't you get more overseas students? We can't get more overseas students because the regulator won't allow us to go over a certain percentage. So then you're I'm sort of running out of ideas. And then I said to look. Oxford terms last for eight weeks, don't they?

And they said yes, and there were three terms a year. So Even I can do the mental arithmetic that three times eight is twenty four. That's twenty four weeks of the year. that you're actually operating this educational factory. Let's call it a factory. And Again, even I can work out that the capacity utilization on that basis is forty six percent.

You know, you're closed more than you are open. Is there a way of doing it? And I said, Well Let's think about the eighty twenty principle. The eighty twenty principle says that if you want a new set of customers, you might as well go for customers that can afford the most

And that can benefit the most. So I'm gonna call these people ninety nine one people. So what you want to do is go and talk to The most very successful companies. In Britain and throughout the world.

And identify the very most successful people within those companies. Very probably they're going to be the people at the top of the company, aren't they? Or the the close to the top of the company. Okay. It's quite become quite fashionable and I think very useful for people to have a period of sabbaticals. You know, this originated, I think, in academia itself. But More and more companies of very successful companies, investment banks, consulting firms, even venture capital firms, marketing experts Anyone who's found a corner. Where they've got a very high

relative market share. They're very successful at doing what they're doing. They're making pots and pots of money. But the people who are at the top of those companies actually very often who've been responsible for making lots and lots of money. are exhausted volcanoes. They've been doing the same thing for the last ten years. They need some new ideas.

And they also need a break. So one of the things that my old firm does Alike uh I got a guy called Stuart Jackson who became the chief executive long after I'd disappeared, and he said You've got to have a three month sabbatical every five years. It's not optional.

You know, you've got to do it and you've got to do something which refreshes your mind as well as your body and all the rest of it. So I think Perfect. What we'll do is we'll do sabbaticals for people who have been very, very successful. And what are we gonna do? We're not gonna talk about business. Because most of the people who are good target markets for this what I call the Oxford experience or the Watermick experience are going to be people who in one way or another relate to business. They don't have to be in business, but if they're going to make a lot of money, you know, they could in theory be um artists or they c you know, they they could be

Brain surgeons. Most likely they're going to be related to business. So what we're going to do is set up a course which has nothing whatsoever to do with business. But which is a good intellectual training. And so Let's come up with a list of ten things that you can teach that people might be interested in buying. And they came up with a list and it includes things like the history of art. It's amazing how many people who have been very successful and know nothing at all about art actually

want to study the history of art. It's a very it's but very fashionable subject these days. So there's history of art. There's philosophy. Yeah, again, that's a lot of interest as you know. In Greek and Roman philosophy. So let's study.

There's also things like The history of the last three hundred years. Again, uh quite a few people have said to me, including former Investment bankers. My weak suit is actually history. I've got no context.

For the modern world. I don't understand how the modern world developed. Other people said. What about psychology or sociology? And so on. So that you know, we've got a list of ten possible options. Oh. Meditation. Meditation is enormously important.

grist behind. It's not just sort of, you know. touchy feely sort of stuff, you know, there are some v really profound roots to meditation and you have to understand the history of Buddhism and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Can you teach that? Yes, we can teach that. So what I said is okay. What we do is we get people to come from organizations We mix them up.

in terms of background and we put them in triads when in Trios. groups of three people and then they have the tutorial system and they come and they agree to study uh you know the same subject for eight weeks. Uh A seventeenth century beautiful seventeenth century college.

More than College Oxford were the most Wonderful gardens behind. Never mind that the weather is terrible. Uh people are going to really benefit from this experience. And we'll do it in the spring and the summer. So that's all right. So you don't have to worry about that. My main question that I wrote down. In preparation for hearing all about this was best time of year question mark. Well it's the spring and summer vacation. So it's basically from My

June, July, August, September. Yeah. So th those are the times that it's safe to go to England in my book. And if you live there anyway. It doesn't make any difference. Yeah, sure. If you're already there, it doesn't matter. How would you think about and I understand this hasn't been

decided, but how would you think about pricing something like that? Just for a window into Are you expensive? No, my my idea is that we throw in Everything, the tuition. We throw in lots of uh food. We throw in the accommodation in this seventeenth century beautiful building.

Slightly impractical, but not. And we throw in food. And most important of all, we throw in lots of wine'cause we've got wine cellars, which are very fine wines. And we make it a very enjoyable experience. And we also have weekly lectures and apart from the tutorials, but the tutorial is the sort of you know, bedrock thing. And how do we price it? We charge fifty thousand pounds. So it's about Seventy thousand dollars or something like that. Yeah.

And it's a lot of money. But for an organization that's been very successful and is thinking about sending, you know, half a dozen people, it's nothing. It's a it's an absolute drop in the ocean. And if one of those people comes up with a creative idea which is going to generate A new product or a new way of doing business. Comparable perhaps to what Bruce Henderson or Bill Bain came up with. Yeah, as a result of thinking. That's what they did. You know, they thought very carefully and they were very bright people. You know. If they come up with an idea like that as a result of the

Sabanically is gonna pay for itself many, many, many times over. And also The other great attribute is that we'll organise people into groups of three people. They can't be from the same organisation. They have to be from a different background and they have to be from a different country. And

It's gonna be a very intense experience for those three people and they're gonna get to know each other. They might hate each other at a result of the eight weeks they spend together. But they might become best friends. Or they might work out a business rationale where the organizations in some way can collaborate with each other. So this is a wonderful idea. And uh you know, they should be queuing up. So anyone who's very interested in this Contact me and I'll put you in touch with the warden of Wadham. And He can sign you up for this. We should figure out a contact form so you're not getting seven million emails about this. We'll figure that out. We'll put something in the show notes. And uh let me ask you then a couple of a few ideas. I'll throw out some ideas too. So there's there's an event that I've attended before called Dialogue, and I haven't been in a while.

But in the early days especially, I really enjoyed it when the the groups were smaller. And Thinking about oh man, if I ended up kinda like movie Step Brothers, if people have seen that, it's a comedy. But if bunking you know if one of my Two. team members of the triplets if I didn't get along with one, but I had to see them every day for eight weeks.

I might just leave. I might pull the rib cord if I'm being honest with myself. But with the one Not saying alternative, maybe it's a compliment just to diversify the interactions, but what dialogue does very well is they have a sign seating for every meal. And they decide on the composition of each table and then one person is tasked with it this is typically for dinners.

Leading the conversation. So there's one conversation per table. Jeffersonian style. So in in this case it's generally more than three people, so it'd be five or six or seven or something like that. And it's absolutely spectacular. It makes such a big difference. I will say That if there is the possibility if I could put it a bespoke Request. You bought a freebie? No, not a freebie, I'll pay. But the I think there would be a huge demand also from entrepreneurs, maybe they are the CEOs of companies they've built who are looking for

A Defensible excuse they need something that will not look like unemployment on LinkedIn for say one or two or three months. to rest themselves and get out of the Exhausted Volcano Category.

I think there would also be a huge demand for that as far as upside and financial possibilities, that's all great and that's icing on the cake, but they just want a fucking break. Hang out and have some wine around some car. Can you imagine working in a high pressure organization for twenty years, clawing your way to the top of that organization, and then finding that they still want you to work? Fifty or sixty hours a week. Fifty well, not fifty two weeks a year, but maybe forty eight. Oh sure. I mean

And then on your time and then on your time off you're thinking about the stuff that's then your only option to go from mega mega work is you'd retire and then you've got nothing to do. Yeah. Don't do well in retirement, generally. So my my Bestoic request, which is more of a suggestion, but if it ends up happening, then I will certainly participate. If there were In addition to history of art. an art option that was more hands on.

So I'll get very specific here. If you could bring in some people who were formerly or currently, but probably formerly given the duration, say artists, concept artists, background artists, et cetera from places like Pixar. And maybe you had a couple of different tranches, right? There was say very, very beginner starting from scratch, folks who were doing gesture drawing and so on, using traditional materials, but then also having some folks who are bringing in digital tools, which has has been a huge key to unlocking

My ability to enjoy art again. It's the ability to hit undo. My God, is that a lifesaver. I would absolutely participate in that. And I I would probably participate in other things. Lan language, for instance, is there an option to really just focus on that. It sounds lovely. So in any case, I think that's what I'm doing. No, I think your your request is right. I mean I think art is hugely important. I absolutely believe uh the Western civilization would not be what it is today if it had not been for the Renaissance and the artists and you know, we wouldn't have all these beautiful churches with with the frescoes and you know, we wouldn't have lots of things and art moves on, you know, and art's

I don't know. It's it is it probably is cumulative to a degree because people invent perspective, for example, and then all the art looks a lot more interesting. And then people do tech stuff. So, you know, that it's another dimension and all the rest of it. So it's progressive. But it's also There are different periods. You know, even Picasso had about six different periods of it of his life. He didn't always draw people like they were You know, sliced up. You know, it's it's uh I th I think art is enormously important. Don't forget artists either, you know, I mean I happen to know

One of my best friends is an artist who's got Two paintings in the Tate not the modern one, but the old one. Yeah. Delighted to come along and talk to people and Look at the art of someone like you. I mean uh you showed me that some of the pictures y that you've been drawing Yes, and I thought that fantastic. I actually I w I said to myself, I want to show that to Colin Smith who's the chap involved. I'd really like to introduce you to him because he might think they're they're no good, but I doubt it. I know. And I I think

People need encouragement. People do need encouragement and uh I actually I'm gonna this is very much out of left field, but I wanna put it out there. If you are an artist, specifically a comic book artist, or if you're involved with sequential art in Portugal, please Ping me on Twitter because last night

I'm not gonna name names, but The girlfriend of a mutual friend of ours show me Art that was made by a seven year old. Here in Portugal. That blew my mind. This kid has so much potential. He's

So Incredibly developed for his age. I don't think he's had any formal training whatsoever. It's incredible and it would just be such It would make me so happy to try to connect him with Someone in Portugal who's

walking the walk and is doing what he dreams of doing because I think he could be one of the greats. I mean it sounds like a very big statement, it is, but I was absolutely blown away by how talented this kid is. So I'm not that kid. I am but I do know that I have some predisposition. I've resurrected this interest, this love. And

To have These experts. who are practitioners who love what they do, who are not just teaching material, right? Because you could go and try to memorize Wikipedia for material, but they're imbuing you

With a sense of excitement and passion and love and ultimately hopefully helping you to develop confidence so that you can actually continue exploring these things. I just I love everything about it. Yeah, and I I think it's very important for business as well, because business is increasingly

A matter of Beauty. I mean you think about the Apple devices though they are beautiful at a certain level. And you know, Steve Jobs apparently took the people to MoMA in New York. Museum of Modern Art there. And said, you know, what we want to do is create things which are in the same category. That sounds like a crazy left field sort of thing to do. But it worked, you know, and and they did create you know, I think the iPhone is actually quite a beautiful thing.

Job studied calligraphy also. And I will say that They're the direct implications of Art and I was reading an excellent book. I'm blanking on the name. It's about the function and history of comics. Really wish I could remember the author's name, but I read this book. And I believe it was in this book that he talked about art and defined it as anything that does not have

human produced art. Does anything that does not have a fitness function in the sense of Reproduction. Or survival.

Anything that falls outside. Anything that's not useful. Yeah. But what is more useful? The Bucy. I don't object here, but I'm saying. So we we could we could definitely go down a rabbit hole. I think we need more wine for that. Maybe tonight we'll have a good argument about this. Yeah, I think I think I'm a white belt signing up to spar with a black belt here, but the point I was gonna make is is there are the obvious connections, right? Steve Jobs studies calligraphy, that informs the typefaces of the Macintosh, et cetera, et cetera. But then there are

These perhaps non obvious radiating effects that I've experienced where I'm getting involved with playing around with painting. I mean, I spent two and a half hours digitally painting something yesterday. It was very challenging. I made all sorts of mistakes, but I was completely engrossed in it. And lost in a way. maybe found in a way that

I often experience in deep states of meditation. But I'm not gonna meditate for two and a half hours. on a daily basis, this was effortless in a sense. And If you could imagine what if I could accrue some say the benefits of meditating for two hours a day while doing something else.

Or Put in a in a more maybe. concrete sense, you know, recharging your batteries, what would you do with that extra energy? So what I've found is by doing this thing, which even some of my friends have said kind of they haven't labeled it frivolous, but they're like, Okay, man, hey, whatever floats your boat, fine. That's great. You know, enjoy it. Hello, dog. Am I speaking your language? Do you like beauty too? What a lovely pooch. The dog is wagging her toe. What a lovely pooch. I have experienced this new wellspring of energy.

Which I can then apply to everything. So it's Also Helping me to grow this fundamental underlying currency of energy that then applies to everything else. It's just been incredible. So I do hope

people are able to find more options for themselves. And I want to mention one thing before I forget, which is if you want to delve into history. Maybe we can get some recommendations from you too. But one of my favorite ways to delve into history in the last Ten years has been listening to what is still my favorite Podcast. It's an oldie but goodie, Hardcore History by Dan Carlin. I had him on the podcast, interviewed him ages ago. I suggest

that people could start there are series on World War One, series on World War Two, but I really enjoyed Prophets of Doom is one option. They're very long. They're like audio books. In this case, this is probably four hours long. Prophets of Doom, which talks about Lutheran reformation and all sorts of craziness that happened subsequent to that in Germany, which you can listen to and wrath. of the cons, which is about Genghis Khan, I think is the pronunciation they use in that. And it's four or five episodes.

On the Mongols and Jengis Khan, who was an incredibly fascinating, incredibly intelligent, very sophisticated strategist. Not necessarily just the sort of f folklorean brute that many people associate his name with. Anything else that you would like to talk about before we Wine to a close.

And maybe perhaps Grab a bite to eat. That we should discuss anything else I didn't ask that you'd like to touch on. Anything at all. There is one other thing, which is I'm not only writing one book, I'm writing another book at the same time, and the this book is called Eighty Twenty Daily. I know that you're interested in stoicism, for example, and there have been a very successful set of

Daily readings, so you have three hundred and sixty five readings for it. It's uh it's a it's very good, if a little tedious after a certain time. I said, Well why wouldn't it be a good idea to have a set of readings related to not just the eighty twenty principle, but what I call the eighty twenty philosophy. Because without being too grandiose, I do think There are huge debts which I haven't

Plum personally, I'm sure there's far more there. about the eighty twenty principle. You remember But when it was first suggested to me that I write about the eighty twenty principle, I told the editor who was concerned I could probably spin it out to about five pages, but I certainly couldn't write a book. I ended up writing four books about it. And they're not Desperately repetitive, I think. Maybe slightly repetitive. But I've set myself the task of writing three hundred and sixty five

Ideas. About Life, the universe and everything. Which are related in some way. Some some people might say rather tenuous way in some cases, but which are fundamentally related to eighty twenty. And to me, uh eighty twenty is far more than a technocratic thing. Uh it's about creating a better life for yourself and for other people. And

To do that, you need to be able to get results. in a way which is very highly productive. So it sounds technocratic, but it's actually quite deep. So for example, you were talking a few minutes ago about the im impact of art in terms of increasing energy. Well, I think that's a very eighty twenty concept in itself. Totally. I haven't got one of the three hundred and sixty five daily readings about that, but I will have, I think, by the time I've I've finished anyway, this book uh is gonna come out next year, as indeed eighty twenty beliefs is going to come out. It's gonna be sensationally successful with putting my optimistic uh on my marketing and investment hat on. And I actually think people will find it very

Very interesting. And if you don't Blame me because I've tried hard. To make it every single one is about a different subject, but they're all related to each other in one way or another through the eighty twenty principle. And it's attempt to say It's about living. So there's a lot of stuff in there which says one way or another. Don't work too hard. There's a lot of stuff which says one way or another. Don't

follow the rules, break the rules. There's a lot of sort of, you know, nonconformist In a way, it's I suppose it goes back to Yeah. flower power and all that, you know, which I think is

You know, much misunderstood. the attempt to stimulate creativity and get out of the strait jacket of working too hard and being Monochrome. And boring.

No, I think business is not Boring and monochrome. And the people in the nineteen fifties who did it. Did it one way, but we can do it in a multi-coloured. A a much more enjoyable way.

Get enjoyment out of life, but also do things which are gonna help other people in one way, giving them ideas or giving them inspiration or whatever. Anyway. So that's my little Advertisement, as you Americans would say. Uh for 8020 dice. Richard, that's an advertisement. Oh wait, I'm American. I did it. I will be first in line. Your writing, I've said this before, I'll say it again. Your writing has had a huge impact on my life. And I will certainly be first in line for both of these. eighty twenty daily and eighty twenty beliefs, it never gets old. It always bears repeating, reinforcing, recontextualizing, seeing in new situations and scenarios. The eighty twenty principle

power law distributions they're everywhere. It's not limited to business at all. Business just happens to be at times a very crystalline chessboard on which you can see things that are hard to see in other places, but it shows up in biology. It shows up in every aspect of life you can possibly imagine. And for that reason I will continue

to read and reread your work and think about these things and journal on these things. They're so incredibly Powerful and so Leveraged. If you want Two.

Mimic Archimedes and find a lever long enough that you can move the world You have to pick the right rocks to put them under and you have to choose the right levers. And these are principles that are incredibly helpful for doing that. Yep. Well, thank you very much indeed, Tim I can't say uh thank you enough. That's very grateful to you. Thank you. Absolutely and to everybody. Listening.

You can find Richard at RichardCosh dot neck. That's Richard K O C H dot net. You can find him on Twitter at Richard Cosh eighty. Twenty? The new books are 8020 Beliefs and 8020 Daily. As always, we will have show notes.

at tim.blog slash podcast with links to everything. And Till next time, be just a little kinder than necessary, not just to others, but also to yourself. And sometimes that involves cross examining your thoughts, not believing everything you think. And Thank you all for tuning in.

Take care, everybody. Thank you. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bold Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out. every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kinda like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading. albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcasts.

guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun again it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out Just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser. Tim.blog slash. Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by 8 Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat is my personal nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling the back on, putting one leg on top, and repeating all of that ad nauseum.

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without the need to use a wearable. So go to 8Sleep.com slash Tim, all spelled out, 8Sleep.com slash Tim and save$250 on the 8Sleep Pod cover. That's 8Sleep.com slash Tim. 8Sleep currently ships within the US, Canada, and the UK. Select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's 8sleep.com slash Tim to save$250 on the 8Sleep Podcover. This episode is brought to you by SecureFrame, Secure Frame's industry leading compliance automation platform, paired with their in-house compliance experts and former auditors. helps you to get audit ready in weeks, not months, so you can close more deals faster. I polled a ton of you online.

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