If we want advice on how to build a company, or lead an organization or do big things, we will read interviews or watch videos from the titans of industry and leaders of government. We will turn to those who have already done it. The question is who do they turn to when they need advice and they're trying to figure out their problems. Well, they turn to D'vesh Mackin. Davesh is the founder of Iconic Capital, a wealth management and investment company with over eighty billion dollars under management, and his clients are some of the richest, most powerful people in the world. So I sat down with Davesh to find out the kind of advice he gives, the things he has learned from these remarkable, high performing human beings, and most important, what we can learn from him. And the result is surprisingly human. This is a bit of optimism, to be frank The reason I wanted to talk to you is because I absolutely love the way you view the world, And every time I talk to you, I learned something new, quite frankly, about how I should view the world. I just want to go on a journey with you and pick your brain about all kinds of random subjects that may or may not be connected. La Simon, I'd love that, you know. I will tell you one of my joys, especially of last year, when you and I got to spend lots of time together dinners, conferences where we didn't go to the conference it south, or we had an old little mini conference while the highlights was you know the framework you challenge on everything. I think you make me revisit my own frameworks, and I live my life by frameworks. So when I get challenged by them, by people who actually have a very solid case for why it's worth on something different, or I'm losting the world in the same way or a different way, it's an awesome place to be. So thank you well. I appreciate that, and I think the feeling's mutual. That's a great place to start. When you say you live your life by frameworks, what does that mean? So, Simon, I found that as I meandered through my career, there were different points in time I realized that I'm one of those people that don't need to be motivated. I'm self motivating. I'm regimented in the way I approach things, so I don't need to be motivated to do my workouts. Whatever else it is. So the way I found that I do that ultimately comes down to how I try to live my life, and I try to think of very consistent ways where I don't waste time or I maximize an experience. If I think of the two buckets of my life experiences and effective work around how I do things. And what I found is if I have frameworks and what I will tolerate and what I won't tolerate. I'll give you example. I was given some feedback that people could never get in my calendar, which is odd because that shouldn't be the case for people I would want to see. All of us have busy calendars. So I got some good advice which I now implemented to a framework is once every couple weeks, I'll go through my calendar, look at the worst ten percent of meetings that I had, and I try to understand why is it the meetings worth the worst ten percent? With something specific people said was that I wasn't prepared. Were the meetings just once that I caved in after being asked eighty three times for But I wanted to get to a place where I understood why I was compromising for that bottom ten percent in the hopes that I don't compromise, and I try to do this across the way. Once every quarter, I go through my calendar by buckets, where'd I spend internal time, external time, client time, endowment time, whatever else. It is, How am I spending that time? And what is it that I'm learning and what impact did I have on the people that I'm touching. But that's a framework as an example, that's genius because I think what we all do, I'm guilty of this as well, is we say I want this, and we look forward to the thing we want, and invariably it failed because what we don't do is go back and say, well, there's no reason I shouldn't have been doing this in the past. Why wasn't I? For example, I mean, let's take going to the gym. We all do this. We all say next year, I'm gonna go to the gym on a regular basis. But what we don't do is look backwards and say, why wasn't I going to the gym all last year? Was it a time constraint, was it a motivation constraint? Was it that I didn't like the person I went to the gym with? And to learn from the reasons things weren't working to make things in the future work better, which is, if we think about it, just damn common sense. In the Air Force, every time they fly a mission, they have something called a hot wash where they evaluate the mission that they just flew so that they don't make the same mistakes and do things better next time. Geene, Well, that's interesting because I hate you talk about this all the time inherently in your day job. You always told me that you don't actually love reading books, but the way you get to read, for lack of a a better word, and spend time with people is to talk to them and converse with them, and then from that comes out something. So in many ways, you know, I feel like you do a very similar thing with how you interact with everyone, except you take it in the sound bites and You'll always thought a question was imagine if tell me more about that, the words you use open up a dialogue, and I think, yeah, that's a frame work I'll try to incorporate in my day job. How do I change the way I ask the question? Because so much about how you ask the question leads to an answer that you may or may not want to hear. It's so interesting when you talk about the fact that I don't read, and it's true. You know, I have pretty bad ADHD and it's affected me my whole life. And I love the idea of reading, but I struggle to read, and that shocks people because they think I've read every book. I carried a lot of shame for many years about this because I'm expected to be this reader. But you're absolutely right, which is because I struggle to read in school. Instead of saying force myself to read, force myself to read, force myself to read, and it constantly failing, I went backwards. It's exactly what happen. Said the classes that I do well in school, Why do I do well in those class It's because I've established a relationship with the teacher, and I go after class and I talk to the teacher if I don't understand something. And I have friends who are smart in those subjects, and I asked them to explain things to me. And I realized, I do well in these classes by talking to people. So I talk to people in all of my classes. I'll do better at school. And that's exactly what happened. I never realized that that was a framework. But that's so true. I have to go there because we can't avoid it. You are the most well connected person I know that no one's ever heard of. I know that you avoid the limelight. I know that you avoid interviews. I'm immensely grateful that you showed up here. And because you serve some of the most recognized and some of the wealthiest people in the world, you have formed intimate relationships with them and they have opened up to you. Have you found patterns in these very, very, very high performers, the highest performing people in our societies. Have you found either patterns of motivation or patterns of fear, or patterns of insecurity that every time you stumble upon that realization, you're surprised that, oh, my goodness, that person also has this thing. First off, I'll say, when I thought of myself in many ways, is I realized that I didn't have to have all the answers. A lot of my job I describe it is that I'm a mosaic of a bunch of great people asking me at any point a particular idea or a theme or a mannerism, and I can probably tell you where I picked it up from because I noticed it with someone like Wow, that was brilliant. The way you did that, the way you opened up that dialogue, the way you made that person feel. Let me remember that, and I would build it up into me like hey, I let me make it into my version of that version of what you did. So one is this idea of being a mosaic, which means that you never stop evolving. I don't ever feel like I've hit a pinnacle of anything. I'm always learning and I don't care who I'm learning from. I don't care if it's the waiter all the way across to some high profile CEO in some country. I'm always learning and I'm always looking to learn. So the thing that ultimately approaching your life with the mosaic is I don't walk in there with a particular agenda. I'm often sitting down with the person to talk about what's on their mind. And the secret is how do you get them to share what's on their mind, not what they're going to tell you, but what's truly on their mind. And it starts off by treating them like a peer. And in many ways, you know, a CEO's job is a very lonely job because everyone above you, you're bored. You work for and everyone below you works for you. So suddenly you're sitting in a very lonely place where the only friends that you get to have are the ones you made when you were eight, right, because clearly making friends now when you're a famous person is much harder. You have your spouse and your family around you, of course, and then you find a few business friends made over the course of time, but even those a very limited number. So I find that what we can provide in many ways is just a perspective in the situation that they're in. And a lot of what I sense with that fear or that challenge or that problem is when they truly get to the question behind the question. It's then with the question they're asking you, there's always a reason for that question. Yeah. Yeah. People who are famous and people who are wealthy, they all go through and some of them are still sit in what I would call a crisis of trust, you know, which is when you reach a certain point in your career you start to realize and you don't have to be mega wealthy or mega famous for this. Even in a company, as you start getting promoted, you start to realize that your jokes are funnier and people are nicer to you, and you start to feel that people want something from you. And you know, celebrities and wealthy people have their guards up because the assumption is you're talking to me and you're friendly with me because you want something from you, you want access, you want money. I'm just a resource to you. So they all, you know, generally have their guards up. Why is it that they break down their guards so quickly for you after one meeting or two meetings? And why should they trust? You? Know, they trusted Bernie Madoff, and they trusted all of these folks who end up screwing them, And there's a very good reason they should be cynical. Why is it that they do trust you? So, I mean, you know, I don't have perfect answers here, but I'll share for maybe a few some of the things that I've noticed people treat it differently. In that scenario. You don't treat them like a peer, which means you don't talk to them like a peer. You don't get to tell them I don't understand. That doesn't make any sense, or can you explain this a little more clearly, because I don't know whether I agree with that. Those sorts of phrases are very challenging for people to say when you're sitting opposite someone who's very famous, very successful, celebrity, whatever the version is. Also, I think that in many ways, when I'm showing up in a meeting, a lot of my job is to be the resent expert in that particular topic. So what I have is perspective, and I'm not shy of sharing that perspective. You'll tell me yours, and I'll share with you why I agree or disagree and some other ways to think about it. Okay, that's great. Have you thought about AB and C. And by the way, here's why AB and C have worked in other scenarios. Tell me more about this here and often I'll take very quickly a mix of business and personal into one. You know, when I got to the US, people gave me some advice don't mix business with pleasure, don't mix politics with work. And my point of view were I don't know I think about that. I just think about having a conversation and it's going to get purple and it's going to get work in one. Because I don't believe you can disaggregate the two of them. You know, when I talk about my family, I talk about my kids, what I do with them. I talk about my wife and the argument we have because I'm not around as much, very reasonable dialogue, and what I need to do to get better at that. At the same times, I talk about the way that my wife influences a lot of my thinking, and we'll share with me a perspective. So I think, Simon, it's bringing your whole self to work and not being shy about saying what you think, yeah, without feeling the burden of oh my god, I need to impress you. Because I'm not trying to impress you. I'm trying to share with you perspective. And I think people don't get enough of that because the egg gets thinner and thinner around them the more famous they get. No, the ideas are bubbling. You know. What I find interesting about the peer conversation is, so here's the analogy. Little kids love me? Right. One of the reasons I think that they love me is I don't treat them like little kids. I'm not like, who's a big boy, you know, I'm just like, hey, bud, what's up? You know. I talk to them as if they're my age, and it's very strange how kids respond to that. Treating somebody like a peer doesn't mean putting yourself on their level artificially or bringing them down to your level. It just means I'm going to talk to you as if i'm me, and you're going to talk to me as if you're you. We're both going to put all the stupidity, the errors aside. So I think that's such a fascinating concept, what it means to treat someone like a peer. With our friends, if we have an opinion, you go, I'm not so sure. When we're with somebody who were intimidated by and we disagree, we go, well, maybe as opposed to saying I don't know, I'm not so sure, and engage in that conversation. As you said, as a peer. But a peer doesn't mean equal in accomplishment or position. It means I me or you were both going to show up as the best of ourselves. It's interesting you say this because I'm going to go back to one of the things you said earlier, which is, you know people worked with being Bernie Madoff, like what happened, and I didn't know Bernie Madoff. I read a bunch of books about him, of course after the fact, try to understand the psyche of what made people make those decisions. I've actually talked to people who made it subsequently and asked them, well, why did you do this? And it wasn't because they liked him? Because he wasn't that likable of a character. He wasn't not that he was rude, He just wasn't socially warm, right, So there wasn't that didn't trust him, because trust is about repeated behavior over and over again. They may have said I trust him, but they don't know what that means. But they thought he was smart, right, Clearly, there was something they in their dialogue that led them to believe that he was smart. But when I pushed a little more, it often came because it was about scarcity. He made them feel like what they had with him was scarcity, scarce if his time, scarcity of the product that he was selling. And that got to the second point, and I said, well, did anyone ever do any basic diligence? Sounds good? Great, Johnny's in, I'll do the same thing. And Simon, where I go with this is there was a boss of mine a long time ago, and he told me something which I didn't want to hear. And it started off because when I graduated from Wharton, there was a professor's name is Mike you seem and Mike you see him. He ran the ethics and leadership course for us there. And Mike made a comment to me, it's still stuck with me, because most of what I learned in business school didn't stick with me. This stuck with me. He said, all of you going to graduate very soon, and all of you can try to find the most quantitative, deeply technical job in the world, because you feel like that's what you should do coming from one. And let me tell you. In talking to CEOs who are five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty five and so on and so forth, they went up to fifty years out of school, let me tell you. And he showed us a grid of what they value and ultimately what it came down to, his relationships, sales and management of people. It wasn't how quick you could run your model, how good you are in Excel, how fast you ye with your HBO calculator, how fast your mental math brain was. And all of us heard that, ah, And then we went back and still looked for the most quantitative job we could find, because that's what people did. How you felt great about yourself. The way that whole thing went is he made this comment. I remember that even I sort of ignore that because it's hard to want to do a job that didn't have that and it's not what you graduated from Warton to do. Two years into my job at Goldman and my boss at the time has a little conversation with a handful of us and he says, let me tell you something you don't want to hear that said. Okay, He says, people make decisions to work with people, whether it's investment banking, where there's private It doesn't matter what you do in finance, it doesn't matter or anything in life. People make decisions to work with you for three reasons. Number one, I like you, Number two, I think I trust you, and number three is I think you're smart. But he says, that's the order. So all of you guys are trying to prove to me how smart you are. It doesn't matter if I think you're a jackass. It doesn't matter if I don't feel like what you're telling me has truth in it. Where I don't believe I can trust you, and then three, Okay, you're going to be smart enough, But the smartest guy isn't the guy that I'm going to hire. That's not the way I make decisions. And Simon, I've never forgotten that. I've always thought about that on a consistent basis because it allows you to be yourself. Well, it requires you to be yourself not to go too far down this rabbit hole. But I watched the Bernie made Off docuseriies on Netflix. Yeah, and his business model was fomo. He dealt in fomo. When people did question him, he goes, so don't invest with me. Then he was an asshole. It can be in two forms, right, It can either be insecurity or it can be greed and ego. And either one of those will motivate us to work with people who we don't actually trust, we don't actually understand, but we'll do it out of fear, or we'll do it out of greed, and ultimately it's going to backfire. And to your point, the idea of being yourself and being transparent is you're not making anybody have to make a decision based on insecurity or out of ego, but rather I trust you and I like you to your point, or I like you and I trust you in that order, you know, along the same lines, we spent a lot of time looking at Elizabeth Holmes's company, you know, the company that measures your blood with drop a. Right, So we went to meet the team that as a team we met for with that company nine times, maybe just ten. I had gone to three of them, sort of nineteen meetings, and there were a bunch of things we ticked off. Good story, good market, good problem. You're solving amazing if you could pull this off. But one part of the work we require, and we told them in the first meeting, is we are not experts in healthcare, especially within the lab world. So we're going to hire a consultant to come do the work on the machine, which is the one that we don't know anything about. Right, she said in the meeting, Absolutely no problem. I was in the first meeting. So the fifth meeting, which I go to, the team is like, I don't get it. We've got all these stuff, they've given us, all the information, we've talked to some of the customers, but the last piece would be this diligence piece which they just won't engage on She says yes in the meetings, but when we respond asking who do we connect our consultant we've hired from a lab, hope or whatever the version was, to do the diligence on your product, on your machine, they go radio silent, and ultimately, after nine meetings they just would not engage. Two rounds had happened since then, and we just couldn't get there. Not because we were smart. We didn't notice a fraud, not by any stretch of the imagination. What we did know is that the final check for us, which has required us to do some work with a consultant, you could understand, the machines just could never get done and that's why we ended up not doing that investment. Why I share that with you is that that's often in my world a place where people struggle, where they'll do the thing they're supposed to do, but sometimes they'll short circuit because they've asked, they won't get an answered. They want to follow the CEO. They believe in where this is going, but they aren't comfortable saying to the CEO directly, Look, I've asked you for this. This is a deal breaker for us. I'm okay. You say no, but you have to be okay if I say no, but this is what's required as I'm been in then our world. I find less of that today then it used to be maybe fifteen years ago. Let me change tax on you. You You skillfully avoided a question I asked before, which is all these people you meet, are you starting to notice patterns? I'll share one, which is, you know, some of the very successful, highly regarded people that I've met, they've started opening up to me multiple things. One is their board, which I find fascinating because they're so good at what they do it doesn't challenge them anymore. And that boredom. It affects their self worth because they're just on repeat, and that's not what made them who they are. What made them who they are was figuring out a solution to a problem, and now it's just put on repeat. That's number one. The other one, which I find even more fascinating, especially when somebody has been in a single industry for you know, twenty or thirty years, is they have conflated. They have fused their work with their identity, and they know their board and they know the solution is to step away and do something new. And different, but they're absolutely petrified because I am this and if I don't do this, then who am I? I am this CEO, or I am the expert in this, or I am this famous person for this, and if I don't do that, then I'm nobody or I'm nothing. And you see this with CEOs who retire. They've been at the company for thirty years, they've been the CEO for a bunch of years, and they retire and they have an identity crisis because their entire self worth was tied to their job, not to who they are. And I'm surprised how often this pattern comes up in highly successful people. You know, Simon, it's interesting. I think those are probably the two most important things. And maybe I'll share a few spins on it from the way I see it right on your first one, which is a fascinating and very common problem. Maybe i'll paraphrase it in my world a little differently. When you starting a company out, so I mean you started your company up, it is you with a bunch of ideas and you didn't know what was going to work. You had nothing to defend, you had nothing to protect because you had nothing to lose. You're just sitting at home doing this thing in your head. And ultimately every CEO, every founder does the same thing. But as the company grows more and more, they have to operate the company. And there's a couple of actors. Is the world expects you to behave a certain way and expects you to do certain things. If you are a great CEO in many ways, sometimes you don't like those things, like with it's Steve Jobs hiring you know Tim Cook as his number two because he didn't love operations. Well, maybe the world views a real CEO of someone who can operate the company themselves. Maybe they don't, right. So one is this idea of what the world perceives you to be. But the second one, and the one that I see most of is as your job becomes more and more significant, As as your name becomes more significant, your role becomes more significant, your time for stimuli goes smaller, smaller and smaller, to the point where you are only doing the things that your job entails. So suddenly what typically I find, and it's splits into two buckets. One is boredom, which is actually probably four clicks down. You don't get to the word bottom. They would never use the word boredom. Yeah, yeah, I feel like I'm reading the same thing over and over again, Simon. I think as we all become more and more famous in our career, we end up cutting off stimuli around us where you can learn. Where do you find that young mind, that crazy idea that you could provide perspective too, or maybe you can do the next version, you can iterate yourself to the next thing. I believe that's why companies also struggle to innovate. Is really hard because the innovative voice gets killed the way before it gets to your CEO, and you are CEO would never meet someone with the crazy idea because in your mind, I don't have time for that. So Simon, the first thing I find is that the second ends up being you know, back to your concept. Here is the number of people around you becomes small and small, and one is trust, two is time, and three is I believe what I'm doing is what people believe me to be the person behind. Right back to your concept on your second idea, which is I am my job, My job is me. It's a real problem because you are ready good at your job, and men in particular, I find our way worse than a woman. Women are forced to have multiple personalities, multiple styles of operating in where you're a mom, you're a spouse, you're a CEO. I remember token to one of my board members and she was two minutes late for a zoom with me. Runs a very significant public company, and I said, Hi, how are you and small chatting? I said, oh, she said, IM so sorry I'm late. I said, oh, I'm sure of something significant. She says, no, no no, no. The laundry ran along and I had to change it out. And I'm talking to one of the most powerful woman CEOs in the world. She's telling me she's doing laundry on a weekday on zoom and that's why she was late. She had to change it out. I don't think I haven't met a man that'll tell me I'm so sorry I'm late because I was doing some menial task. It's just not what men do. You know, I was doing something important clearly, even though they were picking their nose or you know, doing something useless, they would never say that. So I think women are better at this than men are. Men in particular tie the identity very strongly, and I think that that's what I see a lot of the I wrote a note here and I can't read my own handwriting. Oh, I remember it. I was gonna say. You talked about how they lose their stimuli and the inspirational creativity parts of our brain aren't getting excited. And I think about how technology is actually supporting that lack of stimuli. For example, I used to read the newspaper or a news magazine like Newsweek, for example, And I used to buy the newspaper or buy the magazine, and I'd sit there and i'd leaf through it, and I'd obviously read the stories that were interesting to me. I would obviously ignore the story that weren't interesting to me. But invariably I would stumble upon something that I would never go looking for, but it was curiosity inducing and I would read it. In other words, there was serendipity. There is serendipity in a newspaper and serendipity in a magazine. And now everything is so hyper curated for us, like we're going to give you the news that interests you, which is true, and all my news feeds do give me the news that I'm interested in, but there's no more serendipity. I'm not learning anything outside of my own blinders, because there's no mechanism for me to just go browse. You know, it's ironic that we call it a browser, you know, because you're doing anything other than browsing, and so give me the future of technology. There's starting to be a bit of a backlash against social media, where the conversation now about the addictive qualities and companies irresponsible wielding of mechanisms like death scrolling, and because they know how to do it and they know how to addict this. So the starting to be a bit of a backlash. Even in government, we're starting to go after tech companies. You know, what is the future of tech? You know, if you go back and understand why, it's actually interesting, this is a function of what we all wanted. You know, for instance, all of us wanted the best quality clothes at the cheapest possible price because arguably, you know, the reason why there's slave labor or child labor or whatever the version is of that word, is because we all wanted to pay less. Do you want to pay more? Do you want to pay eighty bucks for your white T shirt? You want to pay eight bucks for your white T shirt? Well, it's pretty straightforward. I can charge you eighty by just having you know, adults in America make your T shirt for you, or I can make it eight bucks by having a factory in Vietnam make it for you. So I mean extreme, but a lot of it's driven by who we are and what we want. Now go with that same logic the other aspect of what technology was solving, how do I get more efficient with my time? What also happened with the word efficiency of time back to the lack of boredom in our lives, because boredem is we're creatively often comes from right. But when you try not to be bored, I'm trying to be more and more efficient. So I mean I'm patient zero when it comes to trying to be efficient with my time. I'm as broken as anyone else. When you're that efficient with your time, you are looking for curation where I don't have to scroll through nonsense to get to what I'm looking for. So when social media started coming along, it opened up my aperture to, oh my god, I can talk to the whole world. And you know, if you look at any sort of social media platform, the nature of what it was and you can relate to This is when you first log on and you become a member of any social media platform, You're like, hey, I wonder what all my old girlfriends look like. That's what happens with men. So you go online and you find out and you know, you quickly realize that after your sixth chat, you got nothing more to talk about because you've had twenty five years of not talking to this person. You have nothing in common. Then you go after all your old friends from school, eve people you didn't like. I wonder what Jonathan Smith is doing now? Now he seemed like a Oh well, the key is a slob look at this or wholl You're so successful. So you went through that chapter of your life and then that sort of peaks and drops. Then you get back to the real version, which is, look, I want to interact with people that I care about, that are friends of mine that I am friendly with, either school, work, life, whatever the version is. And what happens is that group starts curating their information. And my guess is most of your friends, simon, look the way you do and talk the way you do. It like the reason why you and I are friends because you and I have a lot of common value. That we share values between us. I don't have very many friends who part the KKK. I don't, right. However, however, go with this for a second. If I'm sitting at a dining table and Simon, you put together a group of people and you said, look, this is going to be testy, but I want you all to meet each other. I've got one person from very fascist group in the world sitting at this dining table, so you can all learn from each other the perspective of the person. Assuming there's no yelling and no weapons, right, maybe you'd walk away with h I don't agree with anything what KKK guy said, but I actually learned something about a perspective of what made the person so racist and biased. But there's no format for that because I only curate the perfect perfection of the people around me. So now go to technology. Technology is always in the service of what people want. We forget that, but that's what it's made for, because if it wasn't, I would ever buy the product. Even Apple when they came out with the iPhone. Of course it was different from whatever we all may imagine and trained us, but it was in the service of what we wanted to make our lives better, more mobile music, whatever version was to come this package together. So now when I think in the future of technology, I think there's probably three or four buckets of it. The question people don't we ask with that is really a consumer focused question, like what's happened to me as a consumer? And I think that the way that we going to interact with artificial intelligence is going to be the most important ten years ahead of us, and it's going to have a bunch of good things and evil things attached to it. And what I mean by evil is facial recognition is the form of artificial intelligence like AI. AI is really the ability to teach a machine to look for a certain pattern and run that question over and over again looking for that pattern and getting results from that. It's simple as that. And I think we're going to be struggling with ethical challenges. So the future technology will be this amazing new area, probably the most aggressive and life changing that we're ever going to see. At the same time, it's going to have this massive question mark on what is ethical and what is not based on what this aspect is. So that's I think the biggest consumer aspect. I assume one of the obstacles to the development of the technology is also people's comfort with that, and it's different from different nations, right, Like, so in America, we don't like government snooping on us at all, but we're totally fine with the credit card company knowing absolutely everything about us, you know, and selling that information for a profit with our name and address attack. Whereas in the UK, for example, there's cameras everywhere, there's CCTV everywhere, and the population is okay giving up some of their privacy in order to prevent crime. It's just totally accepted. And the amount of cameras that they have in the UK they could never have in the US. And depending on where you go in the world, the comfort level we have with government invasion in our privacy I have to believe will affect the future of the tech as well, which makes it more complicated to have a globally available product because not every nation will want it or will use it for all the wrong reasons. That's right, So let's do some quick fire questions here, Okay, the future of capitalism, future capitalism, you know, unfortunately, I believe will be the same as the post of capitalism, greed versus fear, and we're going to go between these two and vacillate because money will always chase his greed to go fund the next set of crazy things. And fear is when we all run away, when in fact maybe we should be looking at things. So I don't think capitalism is going to change any iota. It'll be different actors, different words, but fear and greed w will define it all. So it'll go backwards and forwards, backwards. And for what phase are we in now? I think we're coming out of fear or we probably sixty eight months before greed kicks back in. And I'll give you an example. Right in the last four weeks, the price of bitcoin has gone from sixteen thousand to twenty one thousand. And I've got people who I've talked to who, by the way, three months ago, told me bitcoin is a complete fraud. I would never touch it. It's a bad thing, calling me and say, hey, devesh, it's twenty one. Do you think it'll get back to forty because maybe I should buy some. I'm like, hold on, didn't you just tell me you thought it was a fraud? No, no no, no, what that's different? But I can make money on it. So Simon, this this idea of greed is kicking back in again. Yeah, that's such a great example, which is fear when it's going down and greed when it's going up. Yeah, our climate this goes back to greed and fear as well. Actually, you know, will we will we get a handle on this or are we doomed or is there a middle ground or what happens there? So I think we're going to get a better handle on it. I think it's just it's very difficult to come from a first world country and judge a third world country on their decisions around the underlying need for climate. Like, for instance, a mother in Africa, if she could feed her child but does something bad for the environment, she would do it all day long because you've got to feed your child. That's why you think about it. I remember once being told by a very very senior government devision in China who said to Besh, you don't get it. America had between nineteen hundreds and nineteen seventy to destroy and pollute all the world, but it got them the industrialization that they've got today. Now it's our term to industrialize or we're being judged because people like America screwed the environment up? Why is that my problem? I want to have my seven years of also industrializing myself. It's an interesting perspective. I think we are more globally aware, and therefore I think the millennial generation care about it more than we've able cared about it before. My kids care about the environment more than I ever cared about it, and they're pourting things out to me ocean in particular. So I think that awareness will force us to be on the margin slightly more thoughtful, and therefore I think it will be in a better place ten years from now than we would have been if we didn't. And of course the logic is flawed. It's because we know more now, and timing is a real thing. You got to smoke ten packs a day of cigarettes in the seventies and you had fun and nobody judged you. Why can't I smoke ten? Because we know more? That's why. That's right. That's mean you can solve that with economics, right, you can figure out a Look, I hear what you're saying, Yeah, we know more. Here's what we can do to give you some competitive advantage that we didn't have before. So you don't feel like you coming from a different place. We learned a bunch of lessons. Here's let us help you so you can industrialize quicker, cleaner, smarter, faster. That's right, by the way. E commerce in China is so much more sophisticated than e commerces in the US because they skipped over the whole shopping more concept, not completely, but way more than we did in the US. They went straight to the good stuff. Here's the problem I'm facing right now. We have to end, and I feel like I'm just getting started. This is the thing that I've always hated about you. Every time I talk to you, I have fomo when the conversation ends, because I need to learn more from you, and you talk so much about that idea, even though we've discerned it on patterns of very successful and high performing people. I think it's important for every single human being, which is to be stimulated by things other than our work, to have hobbies, to have interests, to do things other than doom scroll on Instagram when you've got a little spare time, like do a jigsaw puzzle, build some lego, go for a walk, go to a museum. Wonder you know have a conversation with somebody who has a different world perspective than you. This idea of stimuli is not only illuminating, it's invigorating. I think that's exactly right. I think if I had to paraphrase that to two things, I would say, One is curiosity. How do we all maintain the most signific liver a curiosity we can handle and given we all have jobs and things. And the second one, which I'm working on, and I'm diligently working on it. I don't have it as one of my ultimatums, but I certainly am working on. This is the room for boredom. And boredom means that in my deadtime, I don't pick up my phone, I don't just read a book. I actually allow myself to be bored. And I'll end with this idea. Someone gave me. It was it was a very significant religious figure, and he told me to come and tell you something that you will not listen to. But I'm gonna tell you anyway. You go to New York a lot? I said yes. He says, have you ever gone into Central Park for a walk? I said, yeah, I do. Most wanting to go for a run it's great. He goes, no, no no, no, Have you in the middle of the day gone for a walk in Central Park? And I said, no, why would I do that? He goes, well, the next time you're in New York, take off an hour schedule if you want to, and walk into Central Park. Go find a coffee vendor a cup of coffee, walk to the park and sit on a bench and just look at people for now, and then walk back. And Simon, I haven't really done that, even though I heard this, you know, a decade ago. But my only thing I'm trying to do better at is allowing for that type of bortom to show up. Because the point he was making was creativity and space to think comes from unplanned times when there's nothing to do. Can I give you some a little bit of science that reinforces his advice? Is I'd love that. So our conscious brains are neo cortex, which is our homo sapien thinking brain. This is the part of our brain we use to access our expertise or weigh the pros and cons or it's the part of the brain we access when we have the brainstorming session where we think about ideas. Right, our conscious brains have access to the equivalent of about two feet of information around us. Right, our subconscious brains have access to the equivalent of about eleven acres of information around us. Every conversation, every movie, every book, It gets stored somewhere. And you can't consciously access your subconscious brain because it's subconscious. It's not the thinking part of your brain. Have you ever noticed that some of your best ideas happen when you're in the shower, when you're driving in the car, when you go out for a run. It's when you're not connected and your quote unquote not thinking that your brain is still ruminating, not thinking, it's ruminating, and it'll give you a solution that you quote unquote didn't think of. It just sort of it seems to show up out of nowhere. The value of the brainstorming session is not to solve the problem. It's to ask the question. The solution will probably happen a week later in one of these random times, at one of these random places. And so the reason to disconnect, which is when we have blank time, what we're doing is we're filling it in constantly with my phone, my texting, my this that let me just catch up on my calls, and we're actually not allowing rumination to happen, which means we are dulling our creativity. What I do is I put my phone in airplane mode so there's no temptation and I know nothing's coming in and actually won't work if I look at it, and I'll go sit on a bench, or I'll go for that walk, or even when we're sitting in a restaurant with somebody and they go to the bathroom, the first thing we do is about the phone as opposed to just sitting back in our chair and just like taking the room in. And so that is correct. I love the science behind the logic. So thank you for sharing me as I'm would like you this. The only benefit of ending is I know that I'm gonna have a sushi dinner with you coming up soon. I got wait. Let me say if I can sum up what I've learned right, there's a pattern in almost everything you've talked about, and it goes back to the conversation where we started, which it is absolutely all about do I like you? Companies don't do businesses with companies. People do business with people. Even nations don't do business with nations. People do business with people, and sometimes we have transactional relationships where like I need what you have, You're gonna give it to me if for a price that fits a budget. I don't like you, I don't trust you, but I need what you've got, and it's a transaction. And those relationships last as long as the numbers keep working out. But where relationships happen is where creativity happens. It's where trust happens, it's where joy happens, it's where inspiration happens. It's where solutions are found. I think anybody who's going through a career where they found themselves stuck, bored, unmotivated, uncreative, confusing their identity with their work, all of those things, which are pretty universal challenges, all of those the solution is the relationship that if there's someone I can talk to, and there's someone who I can help who's dealing with the same thing, and there's someone I can have that cathartic conversation with who's going through the same thing as me, I'm much more likely to solve my problem because of that person, not because of meat there. I love that great summary, and that's what I've learned from you today that amongst the most successful people in the world and the work that you do to serve the most successful people in the world, that the thing you do is actually not about how much money you can make them or how much you can give them, but it's really just about being a good, trustworthy, kind and honest person. And that's the thing we should be striving for for success, is to be that kind of person. Hopefully we can all be curious and be interesting at the same time at the same time. Davesh Simon, thank you, Magic, Magic, Magic, thank you so so much. Thanks my friend. I'll look forward seeing you soon. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to learn more about the topic you just heard, please check out the Optimism Library at Simon sinek dot com, where you can get access to more than thirty five undemanded classes about leadership, culture, purpose, and more. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other.