Season 2, Episode 2

Host: Matt Hall

Guest: John Jennings

John Jennings (00:01): As we're talking, the markets are experiencing a lot of volatility with this Coronavirus. I've read a lot of experts talking about what's going to happen and nobody knows. It's a tough sell to tell an investor, "I'm your advisor and I don't know what's going to happen." Because we don't. But I think you invest better acknowledging that uncertainty, building a portfolio that will allow the market to underperform than it is trying to do something which is impossible, which is predict the future or provide certainty where none exists.

Matt Hall (00:33): Welcome to Take the Long View with Matt Hall. This is a podcast to help reframe the way you think about your money, emotion, and time. The goal, helping you Take the Longer View.

Matt Hall (00:46): John Jennings, I love your name because I love alliteration. Beyond your name, I love who I know you to be. John Jennings is one of the most interesting people you will come across. Trust me on this. He is fascinating and not in a weird way, in a lovely Dr. Seuss kind of way.

Matt Hall (01:07): I think he deserves to be famous though I don't think he cares about fame. I'm sharing the idea of fame for John because I want you to know he's worthy of your attention, even if you're not familiar with his name or his work.

Matt Hall (01:20): Let's go over some bio bits to help you, dear listener, get to know John Jennings. He writes something called the IFOD, The Interesting Fact of the Day, and I love it. I regularly forward his IFODs to friends, colleagues, and even clients of our firm. His daily thoughts often tickle my brain into an active state. They are meaningful, relevant, poignant, thoughtful, and I could go on.

Matt Hall (01:47): I think they started naturally. John was telling his two children interesting facts of the day when they were little and he found that other humans enjoyed hearing these facts, so he started passing them on. John reads a lot and really enjoys researching and writing about things he comes across, so the IFOD scratches an itch in a very healthy way.

Matt Hall (02:06): Does IFOD pay the bills? I think not. So what does Jennings do for work? He's a big deal. John is President and Chief Strategist of the St. Louis Trust Company, a leading multi-family office. This means he helps the ultra affluent. Unlike most of the people in my industry, I have deep respect for him, his firm, and what they do for their clients.

John Jennings (02:27): Back at you, Matt.

Matt Hall (02:28): Thank you. And if that's not enough, John is an adjunct faculty member at Washington University's Olin School of Business, where he teaches in the Wealth and Asset Management Master's program.

Matt Hall (02:39): And wait one more thing. John is also a Forbes contributor, meaning he writes rockstar content for Forbes. He's also a lawyer by training, a hardcore vegan, and a loving husband and dad. John Jennings, welcome to Take the Long View.

John Jennings (02:52): Thank you. I'm super pumped to be here.

Matt Hall (02:55): Good. One of the things I've noticed about people who are on this show, I have a fair number of people who are lawyers but not lawyers. That's you, right?

John Jennings (03:04): That is absolutely me. I feel like my time practicing law was my residency. I'm so glad I did it and I'm so glad I moved on.

Matt Hall (03:13): Why do you think that is though? Because my last guest, he was a lawyer turned woodworker. Danny Meyer was about to be a lawyer, turned restaurateur and hospitality guru. I may be missing someone, but there seems to be something there, where people have this idea of being in the law, but they end up applying maybe the way they think or learn somewhere else.

John Jennings (03:31): I think for me, I loved law school. It was fantastic. If practicing law was like law school, I would still be doing it. But the law, I think I underestimated how much toil there was. That was a major reason for me. And also when you're a lawyer, I felt like I was helping other people live their lives, but I wasn't living my own.

Matt Hall (03:54): Okay, well let's go to your IFOD, Interesting Fact of the Day. How did this get started?

John Jennings (03:59): So my father went and visited my brother, who at the time had kids about my age. My kids were four and seven. He came back from this trip and we went on a horseback ride. He said to me, "John, you're a really good father." And I was like, "Thanks, Dad." He goes, "But your brother is an excellent father." And I was like, "Why? what's he doing right that I'm not doing?" He said, "Your brother spends more time with his kids and is more interactive with them."

John Jennings (04:31): That really shook me, partly because of sibling competition, and partly because I thought I was a better father than I guess I was. So I started every night telling my kids an interesting fact of the day, partially because I wanted to spend time with them and they seem to really enjoy it. Not so much the facts, but just the time we spent together.

John Jennings (04:48): But then I started emailing these facts to my father to show that I was being a good father. I copied in family and some friends and it just started growing. This was from about 2007 to 2010, so I started with six or seven people on my email, and my email blast got to be about 100 people.

John Jennings (05:07): Then I shut it down for a while. I just got too busy with the rest of life. Kind of like working out, if you don't do it for a while, if you skip a few, it's easier to just continue to skip. I started it back up in 2017, made it more professional, made it into a internet blog, and it's grown nicely. It really scratches an itch for me.

Matt Hall (05:25): What have you learned as you've put the facts out that people are into? Is there anything that surprises you or disappoints you?

John Jennings (05:33): Yeah, I call it the Interesting Facts of the Day, but it should be called Things That I Think are Interesting.

Matt Hall (05:40): Well, I noticed even on your website, you distinguished between the posts that you think are the most important and the ones that are actually the most popular.

John Jennings (05:48): I'll give you an example. In, I think it was 2017, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to a group of scientists that created something called the LIGO detectors. This was amazing. What it did is it registered gravitational waves from the collision of black holes that occurred billions of light years away, and it confirmed general relativity. It's some of the most precise instruments ever created by humanity. I was completely blown away by this and it got about 100 clicks.

John Jennings (06:16): My blog post of Why are Starbucks Sizes Called What They Are, Why is a Tall a Small and a Venti the Biggest? just blew up. So really what I learned is people find interesting things that affect their daily lives. Things that are more theoretical, some people find interesting, but they don't have as broad appeal.

John Jennings (06:38): So I try to balance a little bit. I don't really obsess on the clicks, so every once in a while I'll try to throw in something that's a little bit more relevant. But again, it really is what I think is interesting to share.

Matt Hall (06:52): You know, I was trying to think about anything else I could get delivered into my inbox. And by the way, I treat my inbox like a sacred place. I don't want anything in there that is sort of unnecessary. I subscribe and have the Interesting Fact of the Day in my inbox because I feel like you educate or inform me in a way that is not boring. It's most of the time. I probably was one of those people who didn't click on the physics piece. I don't remember the Starbucks piece, but let's go over maybe a few of the ones that are most recent, and then a few that are the most popular.

John Jennings (07:27): So what tends to be most popular over time are things that get picked up high in Google on whatever topic, which is kind of interesting because they're pretty random. So the top clicks ones are what can 16 year olds legally do? How many people are seven foot tall or taller? How many books are published every year? For a long time I got a lot of clicks on my one, do lemmings really commit mass suicide? The answer is no, they don't. There was actually a thing that Disney did. Those just get picked up by Google.

Matt Hall (07:58): One time you told me that doing this IFOD relates to your life's purpose.

John Jennings (08:04): It does.

Matt Hall (08:05): How does it connect?

John Jennings (08:06): Yeah, so probably about five years ago, I read this article, which has then been turned into a book. It's actually a recent IFODs on, How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen. Yeah, it's really fantastic.

Matt Hall (08:18): This is a great post, listener. If you hear this, you should go to Interesting Fact of the Day, John Jennings, and look at this Clayton Christensen piece.

John Jennings (08:27): The whole article is really, really fantastic. I haven't read the book. I probably should. But he makes the point that most people just go through life doing day to day things and they lose sight of what's most important to them.

John Jennings (08:38): Like he gives an example of so many of his Harvard Business School classmates are divorced, or they don't have good relationships with their kids. If you ask them that when they were 20 years old, they would have said, "The most important thing is to have good relationships with my family and my kids and my friends." But they go off on this other path. And so it's important to have this direction, this life's purpose, and that he spent every day, hours a day for over a year, trying to figure out his life's purpose.

John Jennings (09:01): So I decided to do the same thing, not hours a day, but about 15 minutes a day after I meditated, it took me, I don't know, six or nine months. I decided that I have a few key parts of what currently is my life's purpose. One of them is I want to learn, I want to be a lifelong learner. I majored in finance, which is really a career prep degree.

John Jennings (09:18): So I said to myself, "I want to learn a lot of things beyond finance and investing in law," which is really what I'd been focusing on for a few years. I thought, "If I do this, it doesn't make sense just for me to become more of a know-it-all. I'd like to share it. I would like to help other people access some things that maybe aren't making it into the daily flow of news and things like that." So that was part of it.

John Jennings (09:41): Another part of my life's purpose is to have every interaction I have with people a positive event. This has been really hard because you'll get a call by a telemarketer or a survey person, or you're at the airport and your plane's delayed, like mine was last night by three hours, and you're irritated. If your goal is, "I want this person to have a positive experience with me," you stop. You have to stop and recognize them as a person. If a telemarketer calls, I want to be their best call of the day or the week.

John Jennings (10:14): That has made a huge impact on my life. My wife calls me on it all the time when I'm not doing it. She's like, "Oh, Mr. Make Everybody's Life Good, you could've done a better job there." So this whole blog fits partially into what currently are some aspects, I have other aspects, of my life's purpose.

Matt Hall (10:35): How do you find the discipline to do this every day?

John Jennings (10:40): I used to send it out every single weekday and I've allowed myself to stray from that. It's as little as two, but usually three or four times a week, rarely five times a week anymore. I don't watch hardly any TV and I don't use almost any social media, which frees up more than enough time to read and research and write. I write them in the evening and edit them once in the morning and off they go with all their grammatical errors and issues.

John Jennings (11:09): It's just something I love to do. If I'm busy or I don't feel like doing it or I don't have a good topic, I don't. So really it's a reflection of I still love to do it and if I stop loving to do it, I won't do it. I don't expect to monetize it. It's not about the clicks.

Matt Hall (11:22): Do you ever get any pushback from people or upset people with any of your posts? Any post that's been controversial?

John Jennings (11:28): Yes, so I sent out one, the fact that there were studies that pride might have an evolutionary purpose, that if you do something that fills you with pride, it's usually something that's beneficial for society. I got some pushback and actually some people that unsubscribed with some notes where they were kind of upset, saying that, "Pride is a sin and there's no purpose for pride that's good and that it's not good to have pride."

John Jennings (11:52): That was not my intent at all. I wasn't making a religious statement. But yeah, that was really surprising to me that there was that much pushback. But in general, I try to stay away from topics that are political or religious in nature or things that are hot button issues.

Matt Hall (12:07): You seem to know so much about so many different topics. Let me give you an example. One of your posts, and correct me if I don't get it just right, one of your posts was like the 100 Best Alternative Bands.

John Jennings (12:22): Yeah, that was fun.

Matt Hall (12:23): I don't even know 100 alternative bands and I certainly wouldn't know how to rank them all. How had you gone about collecting your own personal lists?

John Jennings (12:33): Yeah, yeah. Well, to be fair, it wasn't just my list. I ranked some bands high that I'm not a huge fan of. But music, alternative music and more specifically indie music, has been an obsession of mine for years, so it's really playing to a strength of a hobby.

John Jennings (12:48): It was really hard to narrow it down to 100 quite frankly, but I did quite a bit of research. I looked at a lot of different people's lists, some that I thought were very good, some I thought not so good, and used my own judgment of which bands have been influential. It's more about being influential rather than do I like them in terms of how great of an alternative band they were.

Matt Hall (13:06): Are you a musician yourself?

John Jennings (13:07): No, not at all. I'm like the opposite of a musician.

Matt Hall (13:12): I said, I think in the intro, you're a hardcore vegan.

John Jennings (13:14): Yeah, yeah.

Matt Hall (13:15): Is that a fair label?

John Jennings (13:16): You know, I used to be, I'd say for the first five or six years I was vegan. By the way, my wife has advised me that the more accessible way to describe it as plant-based. I've not moved to that yet, but I think she makes a good point. That vegan sounds judgy and she's probably right. There's this joke, how do you know if somebody's vegan? Just wait, they'll tell you.

John Jennings (13:34): So I try not to be that person. Now for the first five or six years I was hardcore vegan, like 100% vegan, checked every single label. I was very into being 100% vegan [inaudible 00:13:47] like 96% vegan. If something has a little dairy in it, fine. If I've been over served a bit and I come home and my kids have ordered a cheese pizza, I might have a slice.

Matt Hall (13:57): But what does being vegan do for you or what's it really about for you?

John Jennings (14:01): It's really about how I became vegan, which is really a kind of a mental health story. I've had issues with obsessive compulsive disorder since late teenager-hood, early adulthood, and it's really upped and flowed, and it's something that runs in my family. Most people think of OCD and they think, "Oh, well, you're tidy. You like to keep things neat. You wash your hands a lot," and that's true. Some people with OCD, that's their deal.

John Jennings (14:24): Really, if you think about OCD, an obsession is a thought that you have that causes you anxiety or worry that's usually irrational. A compulsion is what you do about it. Because the thought is irrational, the worry's irrational, it doesn't help. So it's just this cycle that occurs.

John Jennings (14:39): For example, late in my teenage-hood for an entire year, I listened to nothing but Led Zeppelin. It wasn't just that I only listened to Led Zeppelin, I wouldn't listen to the radio, I wouldn't put myself in situations where I'd hear other music. The thought of listening to a song that wasn't Led Zeppelin gave me a sense of panic or doom. It's really an incredibly ridiculous thing to think about.

John Jennings (15:00): So there's been these different episodes throughout my life in different time periods, and I've been doing pretty well here for the last year or two. But in 2002, a lot of things were going on in my life. Arthur Anderson, where I worked was imploding. We were starting our current company. We had just had a child, which is incredibly stressful, I'm sure everybody but me in particular, we were buying and selling a home.

John Jennings (15:21): Anyway, I had a lot of stress. I developed shingles, I wasn't feeling good and I became convinced that I had heart disease. So I started going into my doctor every week going, "I can feel my heart beat all the time. It's skipping. I know I have heart disease." He ran some tasks. He said, "You do not have heart disease." I said, "I know I do."

John Jennings (15:37): Somehow I happened upon a book called Eat To Live. It's about being vegan. In it many chapters dealt with the health effects and it said, "If you become 100% plant based, not only do you stop your heart disease, you reverse it." So I called my doctor at Wash U, very medical, very research oriented. I said, "Is this true?" He said, "It is true. It's been proven in multiple studies." I said, "Why didn't you tell me?" He said, "Well, you don't have heart disease."

John Jennings (16:01): It still didn't convince me, so I announced to my wife, "I'm going to be vegan. It's not going to affect you. It's not going to affect the kids. It's just ridiculous." Probably six or seven months later when my obsession with this health issue that didn't exist was over, I had been vegan for seven months. I lost a lot of weight. My cholesterol had come down. My blood pressure was better. I felt great.

John Jennings (16:18): The way I put it, I don't mean offense to people, but that's how I think about it. I had lost my taste for flesh, so it's how I live my life now. I can't imagine eating meat. I had a period of time where I was really concerned and would have nightmares about being accused of a crime I didn't commit or maybe I committed a crime and would have to go to jail, and in jail they wouldn't allow me to be vegan. This is fruit loops, but that's how, that's my point. That's how I felt about being vegan is that my biggest worry was going to jail. Not because I'd be in jail, but because I would have to eat meat in jail.

Matt Hall (16:53): So this had a big impact on your life. Has it impacted your kids or your wife's life?

John Jennings (16:59): Yeah, both good and bad. So the good is my entire family is vegetarian. My wife is mostly vegan. She eats eggs. I think her health has benefited and I think it's helped us as we've aged. My kids are vegetarian. I think given my rigidity with food and viewing some food is good and some food is bad, especially years ago, I'm much more relaxed about it. But I think it created a toxic food environment on our family that hasn't been necessarily good for my kids. It's not so much being vegan as it was my obsession with being vegan. My kids were raised in this environment of there's good food and bad food, which isn't really healthy. I really feel bad about that at times.

Matt Hall (17:39): I know you wrote an IFOD about dumb questions people ask you-

John Jennings (17:44): Yeah, about being vegan, yeah.

Matt Hall (17:45): ... but is there anything you wish more people who might be listening or just in general in the public understood about being plant-based or being vegan that you think is misunderstood?

John Jennings (17:56): I think the biggest misconception is that if you give up eating meat and dairy, which a lot of people like and thinks delicious, that you no longer like food. If you think about it, there's all sorts of different cultures that eat all sorts of different things. It's really like moving to a slightly different culture where the food is amazing.

John Jennings (18:13): Like I love to eat as much as I ever have, even back when I was a meat eater 18 plus years ago. People that I know that have become vegan will say the same thing. They'll say, "Oh my gosh, I still love to eat, the food's delicious. It's amazing." So it's not really like you have to give up anything. You're just changing your paradigm about what you eat. It's like moving to a different culture.

John Jennings (18:35): I think another thing people misunderstand is you don't always have to eat at a vegetarian or vegan restaurant. I mean, any restaurant you go to with a few modifications, you have to be picky, but many dishes can be made plant-based or often they have a special menu if you ask. Or if you go to a place that has more of a chef, especially if you tell them ahead of time, they will definitely make often an amazing vegan meal.

Matt Hall (18:58): Do you think the plant-based or vegan movement will plateau or will it continue to expand? Will more of us become plant-based in the future and if so, why?

John Jennings (19:11): I think by necessity people will become more plant-based just because of the issues with climate change and water and population growth. It just, it's a very inefficient way to feed seven or eight or nine or at some point 10 or 11 billion people. To say we're going to spend all this water and grain, et cetera, to grow a cow or a chicken or a pig. Then turn around and a small fraction of those calories end up going into the meat to feed people. I just think it ends up being difficult. There's big environmental effects. I think in order to mitigate climate change, I think moving much more to plant-based will be necessary.

John Jennings (19:48): I think firms like Beyond Meat, which has done amazing in terms of being a public stock, and Impossible Burger, which is still private, but it seems to be everywhere now you can buy an Impossible Whopper. I think meat substitutes are going to be the answer for a lot of meat eaters where it tastes very similar. Personally, I get kind of weirded out by Impossible Burgers and Beyond Burgers because it tastes meat like to me and like I said, I've lost my taste for flesh. I don't want things that taste like meat. I want things that don't taste like meat.

Matt Hall (20:16): Obviously this podcast is called Take the Long View. Is there any long view example or parallel with either the IFOD or your eating philosophy?

John Jennings (20:26): Yeah, I think especially with the eating, it is about balancing your long term health with your short term action. So study, after study, after study have shown that people that are vegetarian or vegan have a lot lower incidents of heart disease and diabetes and a lot of cancers and a lot of things.

John Jennings (20:47): And like anything, it's the short term, "I want to have this and I want to have this ice cream or this mac and cheese or the steak right now because it tastes good, even though I know long term it's going to affect my health." So I think like anything, it's balancing the current desire with long term what do you want your health to be? What do you want your identity to be? So yeah, absolutely.

Matt Hall (21:10): I think I really respect your long term commitment to the way you eat. You seem unwavering.

John Jennings (21:19): It's who I am now. I think the key for any behavior change is you make it a habit. One of the best ways to develop a habit research shows is to make it part of your identity. One thing that was easy for me in becoming a vegan is I announced, "I am going to be a vegan," not so much to other people but to myself. So when you say you're a vegan, that means you don't eat meat. Like I don't, it's not who I am. It would be against how I view the world to do that.

John Jennings (21:48): Another a short versus long term, taking the long view on IFOD, is as I've looked at it, it's not about any particular post, and it's not about any particular number of followers or clickers. It's about over time building a base of information.

John Jennings (22:05): So it's how I view reading, which is you can read any particular book and go, "Oh I learned a lot or I learned a little, I agreed or disagreed." But hopefully from every book that you read, you'll pick up some grains of sand, as I think about it, like here's some things that I identify with or that has informed my thinking.

John Jennings (22:23): Over time in all these different areas, you'll have at least a little sandbox or maybe even a beach as all these grains of sand accumulate. So it's really over time creating the discipline to repeat all the small things that have a big effect, a long time out.

John Jennings (22:39): So that's one of the things I like about the IFOD is just this base of knowledge that I'm growing for myself, especially since I was a career prep finance major, I didn't have the benefits of a liberal arts education to broaden my worldview.

Matt Hall (22:54): You know, one thing that's interesting is your work is in sort of the wealth space and you write for Forbes, but you rarely write IFODS about money.

John Jennings (23:04): Yeah, yeah.

Matt Hall (23:05): Let's talk for a second about your work and what is your job and what is your unique ability?

John Jennings (23:11): I think everybody has a super power, maybe even more than one. It took me a while of thinking to figure this out, but I think it's important for everybody to play to their strengths and their superpower. So my superpower is to take disparate ideas and to synthesize them and make them fit together or know what to do with them.

John Jennings (23:29): When I realized this, I started moving both my career and what I do, IFOD, and teaching, and Forbes, and all these things towards that direction. It's been very fulfilling because it's something that I love to do and I think it's my special thing that's been my superpower.

John Jennings (23:45): In terms of Forbes, it's been a recent thing. I started at the beginning of December of 2019. The biggest thing has been I thought I wrote decent, I never considered myself a great writer, but I thought I was okay. I've hired these amazing editors that help me get the articles ready for Forbes. I have learned that I have so far to go, like how I was writing, and I wrote a lot for our website and a lot on investments, but not for the IFOD. It's more on our website here or there for a publication. Just really wasn't compelling and it's really been a wake up call.

John Jennings (24:23): In fact, I had a call a few days ago with my main editor, Lori, and I just told her, I said, "Lori, I'm just so frustrated that I can now see what good writing looks like and I'm not able to do it." And she said, "John, what was your timeframe for thinking that you'd become a good writer? Did you really think it'd just be two months?" I was like, "Well no." She'll go, "How long did you think it'd take?" "Well, years."

John Jennings (24:45): And she said, "Okay." She goes, "That's number one." She goes, "Number two, I'm your editor. I've a Master's in Journalism from Columbia and I've been doing this my entire career. I should be able to improve your work." That's really been the most interesting thing for me about writing for Forbes is how far I have to go as a writer.

Matt Hall (25:04): I like the way you think about investing and wealth management. You want to talk for a second just about what your philosophy is or what your approach is around investing?

John Jennings (25:18): Yeah, a few key things. I think, first of all, good investing is mostly about behavior. It's about reducing fees, it's getting your tax under control. But if you can get the behavior right, that's by far the most important thing. It's almost like going back to the Clayton Christensen, what's the direction of your life? I think you have to know what's the direction of your investing. You have to invest in a way that's going to line up with how you can behave well.

John Jennings (25:42): I think a lot of the financial system is set up to sell a false sense of certainty to investors and also take what I think is the harder way to approach things. I think most of the investment industry is set up as, "We're going to put you in investments that are going to outperform the market." That's really hard to do.

John Jennings (26:03): Something that sounds about the same and is subtle, but it's very different, is what if you set up a portfolio to allow the market to under perform? So the market itself is flawed, that it's over allocated to expensive companies and under allocated to cheaper companies and it's bigger companies instead of smaller companies. There's all these issues with the market. If you set up your portfolio, so the market under performs, it's hard to do. It's simple, but it's not easy. That is a better path to go.

John Jennings (26:35): Related to that is that the issue of uncertainty. A primary human motivation is the resolution of uncertainty. When we feel uncertainty, our bodies produce cortisol, which is a stress hormone. In some circumstances, we like it. When we read a book, we don't want to be, "Oh well, I know what's going to happen." You like that sense of uncertainty in the twist, in the plot of the book or the movie. One reason you like it is when that uncertainty is resolved, we get a dose of dopamine.

John Jennings (27:03): We really don't like uncertainty over the long term and we want to resolve it. What the financial industry does is they sell certainty, but it's false certainty usually, which is saying, "I know what the market's going to do," or, "I'm going to shift you here. I'm going to shift you there".

John Jennings (27:19):We listen to experts that are horrible at predicting because we get a little dopamine rush when we think we have certainty, but it's really not. As we're talking, the markets are experiencing a lot of volatility with this Coronavirus. I've read a lot of experts talking about what's going to happen and nobody knows.

John Jennings (27:38): It's a tough sell to tell an investor, "I'm your advisor and I don't know what's going to happen," because we don't. That's a tough sell. But I think you invest better acknowledging that uncertainty, building a portfolio that will allow the market to underperform than it is trying to do something which is impossible, which is predict the future or provide certainty where none exists.

Matt Hall (27:58): You work with the 1% of the 1%. What do you wish more people understood about that audience?

John Jennings (28:06): Yeah, I think first of all, they're just people. I think it was in The Great Gatsby, it said, "The rich are different than you and I." On one hand, while that is true, they're still just people and they still have family issues, and they still worry about money. If anything, sometimes they worry more about money. It can be a huge burden to have fantastic wealth.

John Jennings (28:28): I think another thing that's surprising probably to most people is somebody who may have a lot of wealth, you don't know what to do with it. Most people, they're just going through their day to day lives, trying to make enough money to put food on the table, send their kids to college and go on vacation. That can be their overriding sense of purpose.

John Jennings (28:44): When you're freed up from that by having a lot of money, sometimes that can be disconcerting to figure out what you want to do with your life. If it's no longer the pursuit of material things or career, what is it then? What is your purpose?

John Jennings (28:58): I think that is something that a lot of wealthy people, very wealthy people, have to face, that a lot of other people can just be distracted from. Figuring out what do I want my wealth to do? Where do I want to leave it? I don't want to ruin my kids.

John Jennings (29:13): So probably the chief concern our clients have, and I think the super wealthy have, is how do I not ruin my kids? That's the number one concern. It's not how do I get better investment returns? It's I don't want my kids or grandkids or great grandkids just to be nonproductive, non-happy coupon clippers.

Matt Hall (29:31): Yeah, we've had a psychotherapist friend of mine on this show a couple of times. My question to you is how much of your job is technical and quantitative versus psychological and maybe emotional or behavioral guide?

John Jennings (29:49): It's 62 to 68% behavioral and psychological. It really is. It's mostly behavior. So again, with what's going on with the Coronavirus, it's all about behavior right now. In the face of uncertainty and what's exactly going to happen, will it become a pandemic, what's the economic effects, et cetera?

John Jennings (30:07): It's all about behavior and what does good behavior look like in the face of extreme uncertainty. If we help our clients through this, that will be the most important investment thing we can do. It's not about did we get them in the best venture capital fund or have the exact right this or that investment. It's going to be did we help them through a tough time with the best behavior possible?

Matt Hall (30:32): Many years ago, a friend of mine put me up to be a judge in a rural town's queen contest. So a young person from this town would be nominated as the queen and I was going to be one of the judges. The judge had to come up with a question that you would ask every single person, one question and that was it. You stuck with that. My question was, "What are you doing when you feel your absolute best?" I was blown away by some of the answers. What are you doing when you feel your absolute best?

John Jennings (31:08): Yeah, it's really, it's connecting with people. When you asked this question, the first thing that popped into mind is reading because I love to read, it was writing because I love to write and research. But no, it's really connecting with people. It feels good if I've added something to their day or their life.

John Jennings (31:23): Really it's the thing I like best about the IFOD is because it's allowed me to connect with people. It's probably why I'm sitting here talking to you right now. This last week, I've seen clients on both coasts. When I saw them, each of them said, "Oh, I loved this or that post and this was so great," and we started talking. It was this connection that we had because, "Oh my gosh, wasn't that interesting?" Or "I was surprised at this or that."

John Jennings (31:47): In fact, two days ago, the person said, "I had no idea how to wash my hands appropriately until I read your post on hand washing. I had no idea that that's how hand-washing worked." That's really fulfilling for me, but it's really connecting with other people.

Matt Hall (32:03): It seems like the IFOD has been such a great outlet for the busy thoughts that are swirling around in your head, either from all the stuff you read or things you're investigating are naturally curious about, and I love it. I view it as very generous thing you're doing because you could have just kept doing it with your girls. And so I like that your dad sparked the initial competitive juices, and that the outcome was something that benefited more people than just the people under your own roof.

John Jennings (32:32): Yeah. Well, I hope people see it as a benefit. I hope it's things that are a little bit out of the way off the beaten path. I try to throw in every now and then things that I've read, that I've researched, that have really had a positive effect on my life. So those get peppered in, like the Clayton Christiansen things, some things on habits and behavior. So I hope that's helpful to them.

Matt Hall (32:52): I think you're writing really jazzy titles too, but bringing, even if you look at some of the Coronavirus stuff you've written, hopefully it brings a certain level of logical, rational, fact-based thinking to something that can be the opposite.

John Jennings (33:06): Yeah, and what's interesting is I've found there are so many things, so I typically don't just use one source because there's all these things that I will hear that are put out there as very fact based, and they're not necessarily wrong. Maybe they're just outdated now and there's new information.

John Jennings (33:21): So like for instance, I had heard and then a few people also had sent me, because I like to write on physics things now and then or space, is that one reason there's life on earth is that we're not constantly bombarded by meteors or asteroids. Because Jupiter provides this amazing screen for us because it has so much gravity. The things that would have hit the earth get pulled away from us because of Jupiter's gravity. I mean that is fascinating.

John Jennings (33:48): When I dug into it, I found it's completely wrong. It was right or considered right I should say at one point, and then has been disproven by other modeling. I am stunned at how often, probably 10% of the time I'll go down the path of something that is supposedly true that is no longer true or maybe never was true. It's just an urban myth.

John Jennings (34:09): With the Coronavirus, I've been spending a ton of time and effort reading on that because it's important and because we just wrote something on it to our clients and what to do investment wise. My IFOD today was on the Coronavirus and there was just so much misinformation out there about this thing. I think the biggest concern with this is the panic that people are going to do things that don't make sense that could be negative for the community as a whole because misinformation.

John Jennings (34:34): So I see part of my purpose with this is every once in a while to hit an important topic like the Coronavirus and say, "Okay, here's some important information and it's from the World Health Organization, is from the CDC, is things you can trust. It's not just from random people out there with conspiracy theory."

John Jennings (34:49): So I feel good when I have something like that and it resonates with people. Like the hand washing one, like if there's 20 people that wash their hands more effectively, maybe that stops the spread for one person.

Matt Hall (35:02): Well, let me say this. I was investigating a school for my kid recently. I said to one of these kids, "Hey if I met a kid that graduated from this school later on down the road, what would be like, what are the hallmarks of this place? Like the things that this school sort of infects?"

John Jennings (35:20): Good question.

Matt Hall (35:22): He came back with a great answer quickly. He goes, "Kind, curious, leader."

John Jennings (35:29): Wow. That the big three.

Matt Hall (35:31): Those connected with me. I think that's part of what I like about you. I think you're all of those things and I think you're also a truth seeker. I like the way you go after information irrespective of whether it lines up with what you thought before or not. I think we need more of that. So I really appreciate your way, the way you do things and the way you approach gathering information and sharing it, and it's fun.

Matt Hall (35:54): I'm interested in helping people learn things, especially about the markets in a way that doesn't feel like learning. I think you do such a great job with that. In a different style than maybe other people, but I love it. So keep doing it.

John Jennings (36:08): Thanks.

Matt Hall (36:08): Where can people learn more about John Jennings or the IFOD?

John Jennings (36:13): The easiest place is the IFOD, which is www.theifod.com. That's my blog. There're links on there to my bio and my Forbes articles and things like that.

Matt Hall (36:27): Anything we should've talked about we didn't? You didn't tell me your definition of success.

John Jennings (36:32): Oh yeah, yeah. So I have been collecting, I plan on writing about this in the near future. I've been collecting various definitions of what it means to be successful. It's a very personal thing usually, for some people it's more outward.

John Jennings (36:47): But one that really spoke to me is success occurs when you can schedule your day around having a nap. There's a lot of people that can't do that, but I do think that's a great definition of success. It means you have enough control over your life that you can actually nap when you want to. And being a big napper and someone that likes to nap at work periodically, that really resonated to me maybe because it makes me think that I'm successful.

Matt Hall (37:12): You have a nap room?

John Jennings (37:14): We do, well it's called the Zen room and it's multipurpose. It has a reclining chair that goes almost all the way back. It's like Emirate airlines, first-class. It is used for napping or meditation or lactating. If we have people that need it for lactating, I have to be careful about my nap scheduling.

Matt Hall (37:37): Do you come out of your naps more productive you think?

John Jennings (37:40): Absolutely, yeah. I think the key is I wrote about naps and I-

Matt Hall (37:44): 30 minutes, right? That's it, right?

John Jennings (37:46): Yeah, I talked to a Harvard researcher. He said, "If you're going to nap, it needs to be 20 to 20 maybe 30 minutes at the most, so you don't hit a deep sleep cycle. Or it needs to be 90 minutes. So you need to go all the way through to cycle in and come out." So I don't do many 90 minute naps at work. I usually try to do 25 minutes. Yeah, absolutely, more productive. The world looks more fresh and exciting and fabulous.

Matt Hall (38:09): Yeah, I like that definition. Learned something new, John Jennings. Thank you, man.

John Jennings (38:13): Thank you.

Matt Hall (38:19): What does wealth give you the freedom to do in your life? Please note, the information shared in this podcast is not intended as advice. The intent is to share meaningful experiences. I am likely not your advisor nor wealth manager nor financial planner, and my opinions are my own and not necessarily shared by Hill Investment Group. Investing involves risk. Consult a professional before implementing an investment strategy. Thank you.