YouSaid · the spoken record

Graham Duncan

lines on the record: 153
first: 2025-02-04
most recent: 2025-02-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Know why, but that feeling when Randall Stupman said that's the mark of a good leader, I aspire to take that feeling and I hope maybe partly what you just said is you feeling me rooting for you. I feel like I felt that and so I know it and then I can pass it along and the gift keeps on moving in that way. That's how I would answer that.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going to answer that professionally because it's more useful. The kind is in an absolute sense, it's obviously my parents in the way they raised me. And in a professional setting, the level of risk that Stuart Miller took in entrusting this kid to manage his money and then navigating the financial crisis together and then this feeling of him rooting for me all the way through, I would put that in that category. I've never really had a boss. I started that company with a professor. I've done all these things, but I've had one or two bosses and it didn't go that well. Not really an employee kind of guy.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That if you have an extremely high stakes decision that involves a person and you're agonizing about it and there's a lot of leverage to the situation, I just enjoy that inherently.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're trying to make. And if I've met the person they're trying to decide about, I can sometimes give them a feel for unexpected positives and unexpected negatives that they may not have seen yet. And when I do these gatherings, sometimes I'll have people go around and say, call me if you need help with X. And people answer that at such different. It's a little bit like the criteria question of what criteria would you use to hire somebody. People answer it at such different conceptual levels. And like one famous hedge fund healthcare guy said, if you or any of your family members get sick, call me and I'll help you find. You're such a beautiful sediment. That is his highest use. Like he does know the energy in the room radically shifted when he said that. And then from then on, the offerings were much more high level and generous in this beautiful way. Call me if you need help with my current formulation of that would be”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of applying it to me, I feel like at this stage I'm very open to what the world wants rather than trying to assert reality, I'm more letting it unfold and trying to surrender a little bit and see what comes in. I think I'm good at, I can be of service in putting to people together all the source dynamics we've talked about or finding the right fit for somebody at that stage of life. I really like giving high context advice when there's a lot at stake, whether that's picking a business partner, picking an investor, picking a spouse, I think picking a nanny is oddly high stakes. And I like really care about it on behalf of that person's kid. And so around that, like I can act as a sounding board for people and hold the complexity of the decision.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are no style points. The lack of gap between principal and agent is so thin. It was what I would aspire to. And that the amount of money total provides leverage so that you can play interesting games and find interesting people and have it be worth their time. This stage, I kind of want license to hunt big game. I already have some big opportunities in mind. my own chip stack is not quite big enough to closing those deals but if somebody shares my taste and my map of reality and says oh yeah you're right then that would feel very satisfying it's like the ease of it is the quality of it”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's somebody who's got similar taste in people that I do or that I can sense their taste in people and it's a subset of mine and I can constrain the things we invest into that. And then the ability to hunt for opportunity in an extremely opportunistic, unconstrained way, where because I have so much money at risk, there's this mutual trust and credibility. And it overlaps with how”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Group at Goldman. And I remember thinking, actually, Vinod Kosla has this line that if you can hire somebody that your anchor client could not hire themselves for some reason, but is blown away by try to do that. And I think, oh, I did that, like I found it turned out Adam and Stuart knew people in common and had been involved in similar deals. Adam had done a lot of real estate. And they had a similar, enough of an overlap in sensibility that that ended up being an amazing higher end more than a higher ended up being the co-founder and co-CIO with me. And then we could build a great business.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had been working with one of the co founders, Greenlight, Jeff Keswin, in running a fund of hedge funds and doing some seeding, with keeping an eye out for how to be source on something myself and got an introduction to someone who was advising the Miller family. I wanted that sense of selecting people, empowering them. I had observed that a lot of fund of funds people and endowment allocators had this scarcity mindset and were very focused on fees and felt like they would be taken advantage of and kind of disgruntled all the time. I thought there was an opportunity to approach it as being on the same side of the table of let's take risks together, let's make money together and have that be the overall gestalt of the place. Adam Shapiro had been a year ahead of me at Yale and we talked about working together over the years and he was in the special situation.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is it related? Yeah, the tolerance for the ambiguity. The willingness to take risk, to not play within on somebody else's board. Yeah. But I think you're right that it's a nice image of you try chaos and then you go back to order as a default. And then you try chaos. And it's like a repeat iteration game. There's a quote I love from Michael Singer, who's a spiritual teacher of sorts. And he says, eventually you will see that in the way of the Tao, you're not going to wake up see what to do and then go do it. And the Tao, you are blind, and you have to learn how to be blind. You can never see where the Tao is going. You can only be there with it. I think there's something like that. It's like the tolerance to be blind and not know and just experiment and figure something out is very hard to do at any stage of your life, but particularly when your rent is due and you have”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he closes with one of your favorite quotes, I think, on Joseph Campbell, follow your bliss. There's a follow your bliss element to it in trusting the universe that if you get in touch with the thing you're compulsive about and that you love, the world will come to you. It's a trust fault and it's hard. And I remember during that period thinking, I'm very interested in people and information networks. There's an element of almost being an anthropologist. And we were like thinking like, how does that fit in? I had that ignition around Dan Stern that we talked about who had run reservoir. And so that was one compass point through that period.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one would be just patience and not overweighting. If you're doing that at what Bob Keegan would call the socialized stage of your life, where you're really focused on approval of other people and where you are in the system and being, quote, relevant, you got to make that as object as you can and not let it freak you out. Tom Morgan did this five-minute talk at zone. Have you watched it? That was great. It sounded great.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wilderness period. I remember somebody giving me grief for how many different email addresses I had. And that really stung at the time. I was like, ah, yeah, he's right. Like, fuck. I've had like three email addresses in two years or maybe more than that. Four.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had the opportunity to sell it to one large news organization, the professor ultimately didn't want to sell it to them. I asked him to buy me out at that multiple, which he did. They ended up selling to the Financial Times a couple years later. I was producing someone else's show, and I wouldn't have had the language for it at the time, but I kind of wanted to try out being source and having my thing be at the center of it. I tried to start several businesses. There were failures.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I found a woman who was a documentary filmmaker. Just had bizarrely high signal reads of what was going down. I later, I think I found out, 80% chance in retrospect she was sleeping with the finance minister at the time But whatever it was, it was like very high signal and bizarrely accurate. And we had hundreds of stringers in effect, and we would be able to publish things that were more hunches than... Normal newspaper would at the time”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then eventually we charged even more than that. We built a big business. I remember I started to develop kind of a feel for how information leaks through a system. And I remember we were trying to track what was going on around in 97, 98 around the Russian emerging markets crisis. And what you're trying to do is find people that are in the rooms where stuff is going down and are willing to talk to you. It was like an intelligence operation. You're trying to figure out whether when somebody's telling you something and they could be a journalist, they could be a professor. They could be a former central bank official. Are they overstating what they know? Are they telling you exactly what they know? Because there's an incentive to overstate it. And I realized I was good at finding people who were a credible threat at having access to an information stream that was relevant to a given thing. And in the Russian case.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Larry Summers called us a private sector CIA. I built a business a little bit around a Tom Friedman-like character who was very good at narrating what's going on and a feel for how events might unfold. He was a really good writer. So we had, in essence, a newsletter business. At first, we tried different business models, but I was out cold calling people and trying to sell them these services. And I had a, I think we were charging $400 a month. I wasn't getting any meetings. And on a LARC, I decided to try saying, oh, actually, we charge $20,000 a month. And all of a sudden I got five meetings right in a row because they were like, who the hell has the ball?”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a moment of ignition. This guy is in a world that is extremely interesting to me of financial markets meets politics. I didn't even know this was a thing. And it was a very small class. And over the course of it, he offered me a job of after graduation, starting a company with him, which I ended up doing.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Ian Shapiro, this professor, had done his PhD at Yale in the, I guess in the 80s together with a guy named Richard Medley who dropped out of his PhD program and went on and ended up working for Soros and being a partner at Soros, being his kind of in-house political intelligence guy. And so I remember there was this moment I was sitting in my room senior year. I had already selected all my classes and Ian Shapiro emailed me that there's this interesting professor visiting professor and I should check out his class. Actually, I gave him grief for this later. He didn't pound the table on it, but he was like, you might want to check it out. I was in my gym clothes and the class was in like an hour. I remember thinking, okay, do I go to the gym or do I play out this option? And thank God I played out the option because I went to that class. I was like, oh my God, this guy is.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a great moment in an interview with what Serena Williams husband. Yeah, he talks about dating her and thinking he was kind of a tech guy in San Francisco. And he thought he knew what hard work was and he thought he knew what training hard was. And so he was kind of macho about it. And then as he started dating her, he was like, oh my God, the number of hours a day, the sheer intensity is at just a whole other level of what Serena does than what I thought was possible. And I remember thinking, oh, he's capturing exactly that moment when you see a person do a thing, they're bringing something to it.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's that belief in what's possible, right? Sometimes I would interview analysts who I realized were not calibrated on what excellence was. They had been at mediocre banks and mediocre hedge funds, and they thought they knew the territory, but I was experiencing them as not. So yeah, I think it's super profound.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He ended up writing a book and I built with my dad's help at the time, I built out a huge Lotus Notes database of all the literature around workplace democracy. And he ended up using a bunch of the things I had found and credited me in his book. And he became a real mentor. He's South African. He and I are still in touch. And it was kind of a intellectual touchstone of quality that I could measure somehow.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sense of taking initiative and of being like, I wonder if you're just reading things that are in the public domain. Can you intuit what the next thing is from that?”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So making it through that over the course of the year, I got better at writing because of the paper week and I got my footing and decided I could make it, the confidence that that felt formative. And then sophomore year, I read a paper by a professor which implied that he was going to roll out this application of his political philosophy to a bunch of different domains. And I remember sitting there thinking, oh, that's going to require a lot of work. I wonder if he needs help and if that's an opportunity to apprentice under him. His name is Ian Shapiro. And I emailed him at 11 p.m. at night and he emailed right back and said, yeah, actually, I do need people for exactly that project. And he and I grew very close over the subsequent two or three years and I did a ton of research and kind of learned a standard of research from him. But I think that”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No longer allowed as a term, but I was at that guy's wedding, George's wedding 15 years later, and is sitting at a round table where it was all directed studies alums. And somebody else told that exact story. It turned out half the table had called their parents because George was reading Plato in the Greek.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was just the experience of being with so many ambitious, smart people kind of blew my mind. My freshman year, I was in a program called Directed Studies, had to apply to get into, and it was 60 kids, and you had full professors teaching you classics. And I was in this philosophy class. Out of the 60 kids, seven of them are from St. Anne's, the school in Brooklyn. And I'd gone to public school in New Hampshire. Two of the St. Anne's kids were reading Plato in the Greek. At first, I mistook one of them as the TA. And when I remember calling my parents saying, I don't think I'm going to make it. Definitely in directive studies at Yale if this is what the standard is. The other thing was you were writing a paper a week. It was intense. And they called it directed suicide at the time. I'm sure”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that you could always, this optimism, you can always tweak it a little bit and make it slightly better. My dad always said I was very coachable, which I think is true. So I was able to evolve my technique, I think, pretty effectively and pretty quickly because I just wanted to win. I didn't experience much friction.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a threshold of, okay, I'm going to get used to the pain and be okay with that. There was also a big difference between, at first won a couple national championships in the double. And it was striking how different it is to be out in the water with just one other person compared to being just yourself out there and how there's nowhere to hide. And so I feel like I learned partly just a training mindset. I was fortunate in that the club I worked at was mainly training national team members like adult national team members. So we had fancy boats and we were videoed in every practice. So you'd go home and watch video and constantly work on your technique. And so that training mentality that my friend Josh Waitzkin is very focused on applying to any profession today is that confidence that the investment in the training pays off was one thing I learned.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of pain tolerance, so the race is, depending on how fast you row, it's 2,000 meters in a single, you'll do it between like seven and eight minutes. And so that's a length. It's not a sprint and it's not a marathon. You're producing an incredible amount of lactic acid.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like that's something I aspire to for my kids because I feel like that experience for me, it locked in this sense of my identity being I can outwork other people if I just try hard enough. So when I subsequently hit challenges like having launched East Rock a year before the Great Financial Crisis, I had this underlying confidence that it could only get so bad somehow because I can always fall back on working hard. I've seen it before, so it's tangible in this way. Like I believe it in my bones. And that underlying confidence that I'll figure it out, I feel like when a kid has that or a grown-up has that, it allows you to operate from integrity in periods where it's stressful.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've talked earlier about containers and how different the reality is in each container. And I think of the water as they're making sense of reality based on their lived experience within a given field and within a given company. And you don't want to take somebody out of water that's working really well and just assume it applies somewhere else and try and think of an example. If you were working at Goldman Sachs in the 90s, there was a certain way of doing business that if you took that person out, somebody was extremely commercial and extremely successful and you put them in a different firm with a different style of doing business, they could be seen as a super sharp elbowed or super something and just being conscious of how different it is moving from container to container. And they aren't necessarily aware.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think many people are blind to the way that they're creating the interaction themselves with the other person. And so if you're interviewing somebody, the example I use in my essay is like if you're interviewing somebody and you're nervous and holding your breath yourself, often they will start to do that and then you experience them as nervous, but actually you are the prime mover on that. That's why references using the interview is just one piece and what's so hard is The interview is so vivid in your mind you're inclined to really wait it. But the reality is if you can do really good references then you can control for the fact that you've created the other person.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Metaphor that Sam Harris uses when you're trying to get someone to understand the non dual perspective. And his point is just that if you and I were looking at this window and there was a very strong reflection, but you were focused on the building outside that using language to get you to see the reflection is very hard. And I like it in the hiring context because”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it probably makes me frustrated to work with at times. But then I think friends would say, then I can act very decisively. Much faster than they would think when it lines up”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Point where everybody else is losing their minds. I'll notice it when I'm working with somebody else on a reference process or on a given human decision. And I'm like, I feel no need to make up my mind. There's all this evidence on both sides on X. It would be useful to make up my mind. It's like, I'll just keep eating the grass over here and then I'll go over here. It can be maddening for people who are working with me.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My wife knows my elephant well, people I've worked with, white skin knows my elephant well. It's like, so it would come out in adjectives from them. I'm extremely comfortable with ambiguity. And so I like to hold, I think one of the characters in Shogun apparently does this. I've just started watching it.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get at the elephant because it's the pattern of behavior over time that you're hearing from multiple people in different contexts.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like Jonathan Height's metaphor of the elephant and the rider, which he says he came to in a psychedelic trip. And it resonates because both on references and when you're interviewing a candidate, there's some percentage of the time where you're interviewing the writer. And his idea is that they're two separate, I guess it could be just the ego and the unconscious, but it feels like it's more than that. You have to distinguish between what somebody's saying How self-aware are they and are they speaking for just the writer or for the writer and the elephant? And an example would be like everybody knows that you need, quote, should be high conscientious and detail oriented in most professions on most things. But the reality is some people aren't. And understanding in a reference process, like the implications, where are they on that? And the implications.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much you can see, how much you know at that moment, and then kind of enjoying the process of figuring them out together with other people. There's also just this point, the felt experience of finding it so accurate. I can often find in the reference something that is highly relevant to what ends up happening later and how I end up experiencing that person. I've just seen the power of it. I do believe that there's a signal in there. It's not 100%, but it's like 75%.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the origin story is I worked for Ted Sites, who had learned it from the Yale Investment Office. Their emphasis on it and their professionalism around it was kind of my window into that words like, oh, it's not quite true. When I met Ted, I had started a reference-oriented business and was pitching him as a client, and then I ended up joining him. So I was kind of already onto it, but he was so good at it that I felt like I learned a lot from, in effect, the Yale Endowment lineage of references. And they were maniacal about it, like they tracked down college roommates and that sort of thing. And then I wrote that piece, What's Going on Here with this human, partly to put myself, like I reread it before I do references because it's captures a mood. I'm trying to get myself back into the mood when I'm in the zone of holding somebody at the humility about how”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, and have a feel for. You are in the cycle, obviously, that requires a macro judgment that most people wouldn't have or that may not be available in any given period.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and then that led to just these, just crazy different that we have all these stories about after the fact. I think there's a past dependency and arbitrariness and luck component that we in retrospect tell stories about skill and other things. Of course, real life is it's both and it's messy. So that's one.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing is just the past dependence of it. You happen to have launched in a period where your first year, you made either good returns or bad returns. And then we tell all these stories after the fact. But remember, there was a, it's Cliff Azenes, AQR. There was another manager who launched at the exact same time, very similar pedigree”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And excited at the same time. Munger spoke at Son Australia a year before he died and he had this amazingly poignant thing where he said, I was talking with Warren this morning and we were both saying like if we could just watch what happens the next 30 years and then he said not even participate just watch think how beautiful I oscillate back and forth between fear around how my kids will navigate that reality. And we as a society, and then Tyler Cowan's frame of like, number one, it's happening no matter what. And number two, it's the return of history. Like there have been other eras that felt like this. And so that's how I try to rationalize it.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you have a gazillion dollars in your managing hedge fund. Like, what? So, I feel like if you told me there was some shift in, I don't know what it would be, but just in the game itself over the next five to ten years that it's useful to be so opportunistic and so flexible that you're fine with that and you flow with it rather than getting stuck. And it matters more during periods of punctuated equilibrium.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would basically be the same decisiveness, the open-minded with a point of view, like at a high level, that's the same. There are moments where in 2008, 2009 were like this, where you're on the field and the game itself changes in these structural ways. And people that can handle being comfortable with that level of change of, no, you thought you had cash at a bank. Actually, you don't. Oh, yes, you do. No, you don't. Those sort of movements of the game like I remember at the time there were several managers who I would not have guessed felt wronged by, they were short. And when the SEC banned short selling, there was one guy in particular who just felt like that wasn't fair. It felt like the sentence underlying everything he said was that's not fair. And that's a version of, I feel like, trying to be right rather than making money. Like, what? Nothing's fair. Is that fair?”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think existential questions about AI and how it'll reshape the world aside, I think it'll morph and commercial pragmatic, aggressive, humble people will continue to thrive in the system, but it may take lots of different forms.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if you define it at the right level, it is, which is back to the That maybe founders versus or startup founders versus hedge fund managers and private equity managers is a tricky distinction that the game, think of AI coming onto the scene and how much disruption that'll cause in investing, but how many new opportunities. And maybe it'll be a startup founder who's organized as a company that ends up making the most money. I was talking with a somebody who's deep in the AI world recently and they're paranoid that there may already be AI at scale in markets. And I thought that was such an interesting idea, even if they're wrong. Like, oh, it's the kind of thing that's going to happen sooner than you think. And then weird stuff's going to happen.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, a handful, I think, of John Arnold is working on the machinery, the platform of the country in public policy right now in a way that's consistent with that is not financial markets per se, but he seems like he's heavily engaged. I felt like Bill Gates' controversy aside, I don't know if you think of him as an investor in that distinction between founder investor, but at the beginning of COVID, I felt like he was acting that way, like he was caring genuinely for the system more than his own interests. I feel like Mitt Romney is in that category right now as a former investor whose politics aside is seems to, from my perspective, from afar to be, it's care of the system itself. You know, when Dreka Miller is concerned about the debt and playing the role of a modern bond vigilante, that's him saying, like, guys, I see this. We've got to be careful here.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think there's a consistency to what I think is that master level where their identity is up one at the level of I'm a money maker. I'm not a portfolio manager that invests in this sector. I think that shift is one elemental piece.”
2025-02-04 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Duncan - Talent Whisperer - [Invest Like the Best, EP.409] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source