No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
Exploring the Impact of John Boyd's Theories on Investment Strategies and Market Behavior with John M. Jennings | Ep 38
Imagine unraveling the complex theories of the legendary John Boyd and discovering how these principles could significantly enhance your investing strategies.
We do exactly that in our latest engaging conversation with our guest, John M. Jennings, as we delve into Boyd's famed paper, Destruction and Creation, while exploring the fascinating parallels between war fighting and financial markets. Our exploration doesn't stop there, as we further analyze the insightful contributions from Chuck Spinney, Boyd's main collaborator, and debunk the common misconception that equates the economy to physics rather than a biological or evolutionary system.
Join us as we navigate through the ever-changing financial markets, attempting to discern patterns and decipher the landscape that constantly evolves. John guides us through intriguing instances such as investing in the 'Nifty 50' or 'Dogs of the Dow', shedding light on the rise and impact of hedge funds in the 90s. We also discuss John Boyd's thought-provoking maxim of avoiding labeling someone as an expert and its implications within the investment sphere.
But what if our understanding of the markets is hazed by our own cognitive biases? This episode takes a profound look at how cognitive closure, assumptions and our behavioral traits can significantly influence our investing decisions. John emphasizes the importance of flexibility in our belief systems, as rigidity can leave us vulnerable to market fluctuations.
We leave no stone unturned as we discuss the significance of behavior on investment success, especially with large lump sum investments, and the challenges of promoting a concept that embraces uncertainty.
So, brace yourself for an exciting journey into the compelling world of John Boyd's theories and their remarkable influence on investing.
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So, john, I heard a great podcast of you speaking with a previous guest of this show, hunter Hastings, who's a co-author with me on two papers on John Boyd applied to entrepreneurial theory, and I sent you some stuff. And then you reply back with an article that you had written about John Boyd and his article is famous, really is only published piece Destruction and Creation. Why don't you share with us what you were thinking when you discovered that and some of the applications that you may have seen in the asset management space or investing space?
John Jennings:Yeah, I was in a meeting five or six years ago probably, and I remember who it was with, and somebody referenced John Boyd and I was like, who is John Boyd? He's like, oh, my goodness, you don't know who John Boyd is. You are missing out. You need to go read some John Boyd. Of course I read the biography of John Boyd that everybody reads and I was just completely blown away.
John Jennings:And on the creation and destruction point, that really spoke to me because I had been doing a lot of research on my book, which is really about investment, mental models, and partially had really liked the idea of really it's the old problem of induction, right? So it goes back hundreds of years and Boyd's creation and destruction somewhat rests on this whole problem of induction. I think it was David Hume the philosopher that really hit on it and I was just like, oh, what an amazing concept. So I went and read that paper. That's like what, seven or eight pages, and it's one of the most dense, and I don't mean that in a bad way, I mean the ideas per sentence or per square inch of paper, which is like unbelievable.
John Jennings:And I'd read previously about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, I'd read about Godel's theorems and everything but still had to go back and read and refresh myself on those before I could even make it through the paper and then had to read it again and again and parts again and again and then I just saw it as a challenge to be able to write a blog post. So I have a blog that published a few times a week. To write a blog post that could sort of explain it while still doing it justice, because it's so big.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, it's not at all easy to understand. I'm a Bachelor of Arts in History, right undergrad, even as a master's with economics. I had to read and read it over and over because to your points very dense, there's a beautiful epistemology by Chuck Spinney, who was Boyd's primary collaborator, that helped him construct the Udallupinus Final Form. And once he came out with that in 2014, and we'll link to that it's a it made destruction creation not only readable but really informed the rest of Boyd's work, because everything that Boyd riffed off of from that point forward till his death goes back to that, that sort of three pronged approach of entropy, uncertainty and incompleteness. You know second law of thermodynamics, uncertainty principle and the incompleteness theorem.
Mark McGrath:And then that was his snowmobile, which you wrote about in the article. That was his snowmobile. How do we make sense of the world as these circumstances unfold? Now, I've been under the impression for you know my almost when I was in asset management for almost 20 years this is the most applicable place to apply it. This is one of the best environments in that it's always changing, it's always fluid and you also have nothing but human decisions presenting themselves by form of price movements and business decisions and everything. It's the best place for applying Boyd's theories. What do you think of that?
John Jennings:Yeah, I think it is. It's like this laboratory of you know human decision making and you can just see how complex adaptive systems work. And it's just crazy. And you look at economists and, like, I loved economics, I took a lot, I majored in finance, but I took a lot of economics courses and I love economics. But you know, I think that the number one problem with economics is they have what Andrew Lowe of MIT, who's an economist, describes as physics envy, right. So basically, what economists want is something like Newton's, you know, laws of motion that will govern the economy and the complex adaptive system that is the economy. And it doesn't work. They put math and formulas into everything and math and formulas don't govern how humans interact with each other in a changing external environment and feedback loops on their decisions. It just doesn't.
John Jennings:And what Andrew Lowe of MIT says is really the economy is less like physics and it's more like biology. It's like evolution, right, Just sped way up, where things are adapting and changing over time and there's all this randomness that occurs, that has real effects, that is usually impossible to predict. But you know, what happens is you get theories like Andrew Lowe, who has come up with what he calls his adaptive markets theory and no one has heard of it. And it's because it's not satisfying, because as humans we want patterns. So to have someone, even from MIT, say, hey, guess what? You know I'm going to tear down your ideas that you're going to be able to express these patterns with all these formulas, and it doesn't work well.
John Jennings:And then Benoit Mandelbrot, the father, the inventor of fractal geometry, you know he wrote this amazing book called the Misbehavior of Markets. He took fractal geometry and applied it to, you know, the change in prices in the financial and economic markets and it just showed you can so much better model what's going on in the economy and the financial markets with fractal geometry than you can the bell curve. But no one's ever heard of this because it doesn't set expectations for the future. Like you can't make money off of it, you can help you, not lose money. But you know people don't want to buy the idea of uncertainty and chaos, right?
John Jennings:But I think really what John Boyd you know, if you look at him talking about the Blitzkrieg and all that, it's like, if you can get to where you can thrive in uncertainty and chaos, you're going to be the winner. Or like in the Blitzkrieg and what Germany did. They said since we thrive better in chaos, we're going to create chaos. Right, and then we're going to be able to thrive on it. But, to your point, in the financial markets, we don't need to create the chaos, it's always there.
Mark McGrath:You've got the chaos daily. There's no rhyme or reason to anything of this constant ebb and flow of price movement of you know, literally billions of people in the world coming to market, whether they're going to stock exchanges or whether they're going to buy something at their local store or whatever, and you can't, to your point, create a formula or an equation to explain exactly what they're doing, because it's all asymmetrical. And I think that people are looking for symmetrical solutions like linear formulas. They try to explain all that and it's absolutely impossible.
Mark McGrath:It's kind of like we've had guests on a talk about McNamara's kind of, you know, quantitative body count strategy. You can't do that when those numbers are reflecting on individual actions and individual choices and individual decisions. We also mentioned patterns and of course you know that's Boyd's most famous presentation was patterns of conflict and what's interesting about those patterns is all the human traits that, to your point, fractal right. These things happen at the low level of the individual riflemen or the squad or the platoon or at the organization. It goes all the way up and down, but the patterns emerge from how humans interact with the circumstances that unfold. It's just that you could probably write patterns of investing using the same principles.
John Jennings:You should do that. Maybe that should be book number three. So this was book number one, my book, the Uncertainty Solution, how to Invest with Confidence to Facing the Known. Book number two is more on wealth and happiness and purpose.
Mark McGrath:Maybe book number three will be the patterns of Well, we'd be happy to co-authored that with you, because we have a lot of the Boyd stuff down and it goes to speak to the universality of the stuff as long as there's humans present. This is where Boyd's theories not only work, they're totally applicable. And again, the nature of everything, investing everything, business decision making it's right at home there. The other thing that you mentioned was evolutionary biology, which, to his dying day, literally on his deathbed, that was one of Boyd's massive inputs to the final version that when I say final, the version that he left of the Oodaloo before he passed away.
Mark McGrath:His favorite book was how the Leopard Changed its Spots and that was by Brian Goodwin and that was a book on evolutionary biology. And you're right on. I mean, that's what's informing his thinking, it's not trying to find math equations for what people are going to do when they go to market, it's how are they behaving as organic organisms, because I think that people forget that the market itself is a process, but the market or any business or company, that's organic, it's people, it's made up of humans.
John Jennings:Well, yeah, and I think one of the biggest difficulties is that people have an investing, whether they're individuals or I find this with actual investment professionals is this inability to accept that there can be things that are both true at the same time, that are opposite, and F Scott Fitzgerald probably won't get the quote exactly right, but he said the mark of a first race intelligence is being able to hold two opposing thoughts in your head at the same time without going crazy. He said it more eloquently than that, but that's what's so difficult. So you have these two things that are opposing but true at the same time, which is patterns do exist in the financial markets, in the economy, they absolutely do. But you also have this thing that is opposing to that, which is that they're constantly changing. And you can have these overarching patterns, but they're different and they change and the new ones come up. And what's so important to understand? It gets back to creation and destruction, where you infer the general from the specific, but then you need to continually look at tearing down your general rules because, as your specific instances change, and knowing when to do that, what's an outlier versus when is the pattern changing?
John Jennings:And you see this constantly investing in the 60s and 70s, leading into the 70s, you had this idea of investing that you'd invest in the nifty 50. So a lot of listeners may have heard of this, and it was these 50 blue chip companies that as long as you invest these companies, you were going to do amazing. And for a long time you did, until you didn't, because, basically, too many people piled in. Everybody knew about this investment and it just went on and on and on and then all of a sudden it didn't. And then there was the opposite feedback loop and there was another similar one called you invest in the dogs of the Dow. So if you invest in the worst performing members of the Dow, at one period of time they became the best performing, and you do cycle and cycle. But then too many people started doing it and destroyed it.
John Jennings:And then we saw this with hedge funds. I mean, it's just the pattern repeats over and over, but it's a different pattern every time. So you saw the rise of hedge funds. So hedge funds did really well in the 90s and kind of sailed through the dot com crash. And so what happened? People started piling into hedge funds. And then hedge funds there was too much money chasing, too few investment opportunities. And then hedge funds their alpha, which is a measure of outperformance, was very positive and a little positive and almost nothing than quite negative after fees. And we see this over and over again. But it's a different pattern every single time. Right, but it does follow this general idea of pattern and again, this is the importance of tearing down. You see a pattern, it's a general pattern based on the specific instances, but then you need to reevaluate all the time of what's going on.
Mark McGrath:And it's not enough to be an analyst, you also have to synthesize. That's one of Boyd's major points and one of the prime components of orientation is, analysis is not enough, and, as you know, that the industry is filled with tremendous analysts. Well, what do we do with that? How do we break that down? And how do we build that snowmobile to try to have an understanding or anticipation of what could be next? Do you find too that when things get so excessively aggregated, or you see crowds, crowds moving into things, I mean really what you're describing? That's behavioral traits that have a negative effect on our orientation. Right, we're operating with bad mental models that we're putting in our orientation, so we're coming up with misaligned observations.
John Jennings:Yeah, I think that's true and failing to appreciate just the randomness and chance, what happens when you have a complex adaptive system, and how hard it is to really understand what the output of a system is going to be when it's a complex adaptive system, jumping to causation when none exists. We've evolved to be these pattern recognizing machines. If you think about it really, what uncertainty is, as its very basic definition, is our inability to spot a pattern. Being able to spot a pattern gave us a survival advantage back when the world was really dangerous and we were evolving as a species. Your ability to see seasonal patterns, weather changes, the migration patterns of prey, those berries or mushrooms poisonous or nutritious these things gave us a huge survival advantage. Those that were better at spotting patterns survived longer, and thus we are their descendants.
John Jennings:When we can't spot a pattern, it makes us feel anxious and worried, and sometimes it can trigger a fight or flight response. We're constantly in the lookout for patterns. We can't see them, we feel bad, and so then we want to resolve that. In addition, our physiology, which is fascinating, also gives us an incentive for resolving uncertainty, because it causes us to calm back down. We get a dose of dopamine which makes us feel pleasure. We want to resolve uncertainty.
John Jennings:This idea that we don't like uncertainty and we want to resolve it is actually what's known as a primary human motive. It's operating usually behind the scenes, but it's always there, influencing our behaviors and our decisions. As part of that, when we have a bunch of randomness or noise or whatever is going on, we're constantly trying to see patterns or we're wanting to have causation or explanations for things constantly. A lot of times, there isn't a pattern or there isn't a good explanation.
John Jennings:What's really hard when it comes to investing and especially being an advisor, like I am, is your clients look to you and they want you to be able to make sense of the world. They want you to be able to say B happened and it was caused by A, not just. Well, sometimes things just happen or we can't predict what's going to happen. It's hard to do, but that's what we want is. We want certainty, because it's this underlying human motive, and we're willing to set aside how the world really works and turn to a fairy tale instead, these explanations that don't make sense or patterns that don't really exist, because that's what we crave. We do that by listening to this expert opinions on forecasts for what's going to happen in the future, because it makes us feel like we have certainty, even though, if you do any research at all, investment in economic expert opinions are atrocious in terms of predictions.
Mark McGrath:This is a great segue to a very critical Boyd Maxim was number one. Don't ever call him an expert, ever. He would take massive offense to that because what he would say is that when you're calling me an expert, you're telling me I'm a know-it-all and I have no more further capacity to learn If you know destruction, creation and other things. It's a model for learning. That's how we continuously learn. The second thing is analysts, because he said that the worst thing you can call me after that would be an analyst. Because if I'm an analyst, you're calling me a half-wit. You're telling me that I'm really good at breaking things down period point blank, and I stopped there. I can't synthesize, so I'm not an analyst. And a synthesis to create novelty, right To create something new that didn't previously exist. Then, when you think of the best portfolio, managers, the famous, famous investors.
Mark McGrath:I mean, we know all the stories of everything. It seems to me oftentimes that they have a different view of the world. Their view is largely differentiated from what everybody else is thinking. You were talking earlier about how things can be opposing. The same thing can be opposing and true. That's ambiguity, and that was another thing. That was Boyd's favorite thing. The average investor could look at something and say, oh my gosh, I'm staying away, I'm never going there. Then a savvy investor with a completely different orientation is going to have his or her observations implicitly guided and controlled by being differentiated to see opportunity, by looking at the same set of facts, by seeing opportunity where others saw tremendous risk that they want to get involved in. Yes, yeah, absolutely.
John Jennings:It makes me think of, in terms of two opposing things being true. The first is to have a differentiated result in investing. You have to be different than the herd, right? But on the other hand, you have this idea of the wisdom of crowds, which is the herd is usually right. So you have these two opposing things of there's a reason why conventional wisdom is conventional wisdom it's because there's often truth to it. But to be different, you have to do different things and you have to have a good reason for doing it. The idea of just being a contrarian isn't just going to work out, because you've got to be the contrarian at the right place and at the right time. Right, and we like the comfort of being in the herd, but that's not going to differentiate you. You have to be able to go outside the herd.
John Jennings:And what's really hard with public stocks, so publicly traded stocks is, if you think about it, there's really three ways to outperform, and you have to at least one. The first is that you have better information, and again this gets to the orientation point, the observation point, the first O and UDA. So you collect information, but the problem is with public stocks is it's nearly impossible to have better information. Basically, what's happened with the internet and different securities laws and things like that is everybody has the ability to have the same information at the same time. It's hard, maybe you can get a little here or there, but it's really hard. The second is you can have better analysis, and that's really hard because there are so many incredibly smart people that have gone into investment management because it's so lucrative. I mean people that should be doing something more important with their lives, and I say that as a member of the wealth management industry. I mean there should be people out there doing amazing things and like physics or biology or something, that are instead working in investment management firms. And I found this over the years, like we'll talk to an investment manager and they'll be like oh, this is how we view the markets and this is how we analyze things and it makes perfect sense. You're like that sounds fantastic. And then you meet with the next one and the next one and the next one, and they're all a little different, but basically everybody is doing really smart analysis. So it's really hard to be like okay, my analysis is different but yet valid. It's really hard, but the third way you can outperform in the public markets is to have better behavior, and this is really the only one that can persist in the public markets. So it's almost like when you go through the OODA loop and you're like, okay, I'm going to observe, I'm going to take my data, I'm going to orient, I'm going to decide, I'm going to act. So in the public markets it's a different way to apply it than it is in the private markets, where you absolutely can have better information and insight and analysis and some of these other things in the private markets, because it's not just this just crazy playing field where all these intelligent actors are just grinding each other down.
John Jennings:And if you look like, there's few, if any, just famous public stock managers anymore. I mean, there used to be, oh, bill Miller, and he beat the S&P 500 for 15 years running, and you had Peter Lynch and some other great ones, even Warren Buffett. So Berkshire Hathaway and it's the one I own two single stocks, it's the one major position that I have in my portfolio, berkshire Hathaway but I buy it more for behavioral reasons. I mean, berkshire Hathaway is so big, it's so hard for them out to outperform and a lot of the things that Warren and Charlie were doing have been ground away, right, so there's so many people that can replicate so many aspects of what they do in terms of like value investing and their analysis of companies. So now the, the famous investors, are people that are doing private investing. So it is people like Mark Andreessen, right, andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm, and others that are playing in different sort of of markets. You know, you get different people in different areas Again, because things have changed, you know, and there's these great opportunities in private markets now and as a result, you know, the the number of public stocks has shrunk.
John Jennings:People, you know, companies are waiting longer and longer to go public, and so, anyway, it just shows the landscape changes and you have to be able to say I'm gonna continue to observe and orient myself in an ever-changing landscape where a lot of the patterns repeat, but they repeat in different areas, right, and so maybe I'm gonna move my efforts from finding investments that outperform from the public markets to the private markets, and then the private markets will change, kind of like they did with hedge funds, right, as money plows into different areas. It's like, okay, where are the continuing opportunities, or should I just throw in the towel? And and and and so a lot of I'm hearing what you're saying.
Mark McGrath:Public markets would be successful in thriving in markets over time, one has to continuously shatter their correspondence to what they think is real or true. They have to continually break, create. I'm sorry they have to continue to destroy their orientations and create a new one. They have to revise, they have to update because it's always in the state of ceaseless flux. It's always changing and if they don't change they're gonna become obsolete or irrelevant.
John Jennings:Absolutely. And, and you know, people become too dogmatic about what they believe, you know, you have these people are like, oh I, you know, I am a value investor, value, value, value, value. And they just continually hit their wall of value or the same thing on growth or anything else, and realizing that they're, you know, obviously, different times of these different things. Things work and at some point it could be like, oh all the, you know, you look back and in 1992, fama and French came out with their, their, you know, the four factor, no, the three factor models, four factors now, but the three factor model which is, you know, basically stocks outperform bonds and value outperforms growth and small performs large, and not recognizing the fact that after that was published and people started looking at the data and going, oh wow, that's true, the more and more you had people invest in value and in size. Small size then affects that research or the results. Right, the results going forward may well be affected by how many people believe that, and that's the fascinating, complex, adaptive system nature of the stock market.
John Jennings:So the important thing is to have these mental models around investing. By the way, that's what my book is about. My book is about investment mental models. So it's what things? You know what mental models are out there and knowing which ones to apply when right. So it's like you have this like quiver full of arrows and you know. It's like which one of these arrows or which multiple these arrows I'm not going to pull out as I make decisions in this ever changing.
Mark McGrath:So when I have multiple perspectives, they have multiple things to think about. I'm able to see markets differently. I'm able to be more agile within the space.
John Jennings:Yeah, or or you know, and sorry for the sirens here in the background. So you know, I think a part of it too, though is is in the stock market. It pays to be inactive it really does and it pays to have you know not to react with emotion and not be trying to thinking you see patterns where maybe none exist, and to set guardrails for your behavior. Because, again, behavior is the is the most important aspect of, of investing, and so a lot of it is not reacting to things that you think are happening and to and again, I have an entire chapter on market cycles, so it's like understanding in general the patterns of market cycles. But the point isn't to use the pattern market cycles to be able to call tops and bottoms and to move in and out. It's it's instead, it's it's to control your own behavior, so you're not piling in and making really dumb decisions at the top or at the bottom, like you're not going to be able to tell exactly when the top or bottom is, but you can start saying you know, here are the aspects I'm starting to see. The suggests we're reaching an inflection point and it could be next week or it could be in three years, we don't know. But in response to that, here's how I am going to behave, knowing that things will change. All trees don't grow or trees don't go to the sky. There will be a change that is coming. I just don't know when. It's like. It's like you're on the train, train tracks and you know it trains coming, you can see it in a distance, but you don't know when it's going to get there. You know it's like, I don't know if it's going to come in a week or in three years, but you understand, in terms of these market cycles, how you're going to react. So again, my book is not about here's how you should invest, because how can I possibly know? I don't know who the individual readers are, their financial circumstances, and I don't know what's going on at the time that they read it. And even if I did, I couldn't say here's how you invest, it's how to think about investing. It's kind of like what John Boyd did is. He didn't say, hey, marines, this is how you should fight. He said, hey, marines, this is how you should think about fighting, right? Because I don't know what's going to happen and everything's going to change. You know, even your strategy is going to change on the battlefield and that's why it's so important that everybody has trust, they have alignment in terms of the model, but then everybody can make their own decisions right. And when it comes to battle, it's the same thing with investing. It's like, okay, here's all these mental models and work on knowing which ones to apply when, but it's not a cookbook or recipe. Here's how you should invest. And I'll tell you.
John Jennings:This is a challenging topic because, like the uncertainty solution the title of my book the solution is to embrace and accept the uncertainty and then to dig deeper and say I want to know how the world really works, which is chaotic and uncertain and full of mild and wild randomness. It's not a world filled with bell curves, it's a world full of fractal geometry and power law distributions. You know crazy things that happen. You know I'm going to accept that world and not cookie cutter. You know supposed certainty and it's a tough sale.
John Jennings:Like my editor, when I was working on this book with her, she was like it's like learning. There's no Santa Claus. I'm like, yes, but that's reality. And if you can accept that and you know, mark, you and I have discussed as you worked in the investment management industry when you would talk about these things like creation and destruction of the Oodaloo, you know you were met with skepticism or blank stairs, because that's not what people want. They want certainty, they want the physics, they want the formulas. They don't want to say things evolve and change and we don't know how they're gonna evolve. In Jays, we will just tell you that they will evolve and change, like that's very unsatisfying. So for those of you who are interested in investing, yeah, the full disclosure.
John Jennings:I have one, I think that's the brilliant side of it is that finally there's a book that teaches people this is a way of thinking, and it's interesting, and as a Marine, of course.
Mark McGrath:I love the parallel that you draw. That's exactly what war fighting is and war fighting that anybody can get online for free. Just type in MCDP one war fighting. You can download it, you can print it out and you can cross out war fighting and you could put investing and you could cross out war fighting and put portfolio management. And for years and years and years I said here just take this, let's just take this chapter, let's just work on this one. It's about uncertainty. Let's cross out war fighting, let's cross out enemy and put competitors. Or let's cross out, let's cross out war and put markets or something like that. And what was crazy about it? And no surprise to us.
Mark McGrath:But what people would say is like I don't understand. It's applicable to. It's not just about Marines fighting in combat, it's applicable to everything Because, as you say, it's a way of thinking. The other thing that you said I think this is brilliant is about, you said, dogma and becoming dogmatic. And so many get stuck in these dogmas. And right back to John Boyd. John Boyd, one of his admonitions was you have to challenge all assumptions, otherwise what becomes doctrine today will become dogma forever after. And what people don't realize about dogmatic ways of thinking because I would run them all the time, well, I'm an old value guy or I'm an old bond guy. I just, you know, I just. The problem with that is that they're massively vulnerable to the rate of change, to market anomalies, to other things that they're not anticipating because they're not creating and destroying. They're not destroying and creating their understanding of the marketplace.
John Jennings:Yeah, absolutely, that's spot on. And you know, there's another concept, how people deal with uncertainty, and it's called the need for cognitive closure. And it's pretty fascinating. It's right along these lines. And these sociologists that came up with it they noticed, based on a lot of research and testing, that what happens when we can't spot a pattern or we're feeling uncertain, is that we kind of flail around and we look for an explanation and we seize. So the first aspect is we seize on the first one that fits our worldview, that seems to make sense, that we'll explain. And again, it's because we want certainty, we want the world to make sense, we want to be able to attribute a cause, right. So we seize on an explanation and then we freeze on it. So we don't want to revisit the uncertainty we felt when we came up with the explanation, right, or that we seized on it. So we seize and then we freeze. So then we don't want to change.
John Jennings:And the problem with this is obviously twofold First of all, what we seized on may well not be true and second of all, even if it is the world changes and the main sociology Ari Kruglansky, if I'm pronouncing that right who came up with this. You know he had these fascinating things to say about it with respect to COVID. Like, covid was just this in a nutshell whether you were, you know, on the right or on the left or in the center, in terms of, you know, I guess, pretty correlated your political views of how you viewed COVID. You know, if you had people that said, oh, this is just like the flu, right? So that was the way they dealt with the uncertainty of a pandemic was like, oh, this is just like the flu, maybe a little worse. Then they seized on it and they freeze, no matter the contrary evidence. And then on the left you had the same sort of thing. You had people saying, oh, you know, the world's ending and we need to take all these precautions, whatever.
John Jennings:And then when the vaccines came out, it was like, okay, everybody has to get vaccinated. And, you know, maybe that made sense for the first strain. But as the virus evolved and the science changed and it looked like the vaccines were less and less effective and it didn't stop the, you know, even if it kept you from being really sick or dying, it didn't stop the spread. You know, nobody wanted to change their viewpoint on vaccines and the view was, oh, if you didn't get vaccinated you're evil. And as the science changed, they didn't want to change that view and you had it on both sides, you know. And the people saying oh, I'm going to wear a mask, you know, I still know people that wear masks every day now, and then other people like I'm never wearing a mask, it's just a point of pride, you know. And it was just fascinating that people seized on whatever explanation fit the worldview and sometimes their politics, and then they wouldn't change as the science learned more and the virus evolved. It was fascinating.
Mark McGrath:Investors and actors in the markets is sort of the hive mind or things that come from you know, things like mass media and other things that get people to think. You know, in one way or the other. We've had John Robb on and we're going to have him on again. John Robb, if you're not familiar with, he wrote a tremendous book called Brave New War, and what an amazing book and applicable from a principal standpoint to all of this. But one of the things that he's always talking about is a lot of the sort of the mass consensus of how it forms and how it develops and, ultimately, how it's overriding our orientation and shaping our orientation such that we observe things a certain way or decide to act a certain way and learn a certain way that are not necessarily aligned with our own wants and needs or not necessarily aligned with reality.
Mark McGrath:And we're talking earlier about, say, causation. Right, and how many times do you watch? First of all, you walk into a brokerage house or whatever and CNBC is blaring not only in the lobby but in everybody's office and if somebody you know you're listening to that and you're being droned into that all day long. And every time the market would close, it says oh, the market's up On news out of Europe this and that. Oh, the market's down on news out of China.
John Jennings:Yeah, ridiculous, which is ridiculous, like this whole single cause attribution. You have millions of investors trading hundreds of shares, or billions of shares of stock a day, all for their various reasons. It's affecting the market and it's like, oh, there was this one, this one single print. It's like maybe I sold some shares of the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index last week because I needed to rebalance my portfolio. Maybe I was like, oh, based on my investment in the business of planets up, and I'm gonna sell and buy bonds, and it had nothing to do with whatever. The news was out of the Fed meeting or whatever, and yet it's still the market move because of what the Fed said. Or again, the news out of China or whatever. It's just. But again, it's this idea we want the world to make sense, and including the stock market, and in terms of the in the media, what people believe, regardless of whatever flavor of media, because we all have the media we like and then we have the ones we don't like. Right and so.
John Jennings:But what happens is and this was one of the most mind-opening things I read years ago from a sociologist. He said the truth is whatever your social group believes it to be. And think about that for a second and how true that is. And the point is is that we will seek out social groups that believe what we do, and if we start changing our beliefs from a social group, we'll switch social groups, and it can explain why a huge swath of the American populace believes the election was stolen and another huge swath believes everything was fine, right, and it's because, whatever social group you're in, you're just like who are these other people? It's just absolutely bizarre and if you and I were on different sides of that, we could talk to each other till we're blue in the face about all the different facts that we have and we wouldn't change either's mind at all because we're gonna believe what our social group believes, and it explains so much about politics and religion, but also investing or anything else in the world, and it's interesting.
John Jennings:You look at the rise and the fall and the rise and then the winter or whatever, of cryptocurrencies and there are people, with respect to crypto, that their main belief and their true believership of crypto is the fact that we should have never gone off the gold standard, right? And you have this group. They're like, okay, we shouldn't have got out of the gold standard and any little bit of inflation is confiscation right and that is an absolute belief that some people have, and then it leads to cryptocurrency is gonna save us all from it, and then you'll have other people that have the opposite view of inflation and or crypto or whatever, and it's just fascinating to see the different views based on whatever you find the group that reinforces your own beliefs.
John Jennings:Yes, because we get into that mindset of wanting to believe with the past and you don't want to be the group that you care about your beliefs, which is the hardest thing to do.
Mark McGrath:And we don't want to. And you were talking about earlier, about Robert Corum's biography of John Boyd. As you go through that biography, boyd the fighter pilot changed your art of war is the title. You go through that and you realize here is somebody that embraced discomfort, that was okay with volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity and was riding it because he could look at it differently and he was okay being right or wrong on his own versus the crowd, which that's an off-putting feeling to a lot of the people. And as you go through that biography, there were a lot of people that didn't like him for that because he wasn't a quote unquote team player or a group person.
Mark McGrath:You hit on behavior too and what I find interesting about that. So behavior, just saying we could put in some psychology, like our emotional state. Years ago, when I was a young wholesaler out in the field, there was an advisor who had a undergrad, a master's degree from I won't say their names, but very prestigious, globally known universities and a chartered financial analyst. And he said that if I could go back 40 years and restart my career, I never would have studied finance or business.
Mark McGrath:I only would have studied psychology and understanding the emotions and behaviors around the decisions that we make, but not only that, but how we even view markets in the first place and how we handle the information. Yeah, I think that's spot on.
John Jennings:And what we found is it's interesting we work with a really wealthy family, so we're mainly in the 50 to $500 million range. Our average family has $230 million on average Meetings about 170. So we were with a really, really wealthy family so we can invest in whatever. So they're credited qualified purchasers, all that jazz, and we get pretty good access to different things. So you'd think that like the bigger portfolio, so that the $70 million portfolio they can invest in higher level managers and get into private equity and everything without perform. But what we found is that a lot of times it's the small portfolio that do the best and it comes down to behavior Cause.
John Jennings:Imagine you're like in a client meeting with your advisor and let's say you're a $100 million family and you have like $75 million in a single portfolio, then a smattering of smaller ones and including this, like $100,000 account that you set up for your grandchildren and trust or something you know, and your advisor's like, okay, let's say it's March of 2020. And the world seems like it's falling apart COVID, the market's down 35%. Your advisor says this is a perfect time to sell tens of millions of your stocks and buy bonds, because that's what the math says, we're gonna rebalance your portfolio and you're gonna be like, no, I really don't wanna do that. Who knows what's gonna happen. Everything's shutting down. I heard the NBA may be canceling their season. We can't. You know all these things are happening and you go okay, we'll wait. We'll wait, we'll talk about this in a quarter or two.
John Jennings:But how about this $100,000 one for your grandchild? You're like, oh yeah, sure, who cares right? Or, you know, the $2 million one for this or that. Yeah, that's fine. And what we found is that's why. It's not about the underlying investments, it's about the behavior, and what good investing behavior looks like is a lot easier to do with a small account than is a larger one. It's really hard, and what we've found is that a lot of clients come to us when they've exited their business, so they've sold their family business, or maybe they were the wealth grader and they've gotten in a few hundred million dollars, and it is so hard to invest one big lump sum of cash. It is so incredibly hard, just, you know, behaviorally, and there's all these you know, ingrained biases that are gonna be hard about doing this. So we've done, you know, invested billions and billions of dollars of cash and there are no magic beings.
John Jennings:You have to overcome some of your ingrained biases and set disciplined rules in place for how you're gonna do that. It's pretty fascinating. There is no secret sauce, I'll tell you. So we're, first and foremost, a multifamily office. We work 63 families and a lot of them, maybe even most of them, have money elsewhere. So we may be their primary, you know investment manager, but they'll be like oh, you know, I had, you know, I have money with my golf buddy at Morgan Stanley or the money at, you know, merrill Lynch or Goldman or whatever.
John Jennings:And because we're a family office, we're like fine, we'll, you know, we'll download and report on it, we'll interact with them, we'll team with them, we will pull in all your portfolio. We'll, you know, we'll take into account what we estate plan. We'll oversee the entire portfolio investment management with this as a portion. So we download every night from over 70 banks and brokerages, which means these are portfolios that are mainly run by other people, and it includes, you know, goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch and Northern Trust and Bank of America and US Bank, and on and on and on Right. So if you can think of them, we probably download and we get to see not what they say they do. We get to see what they actually do and I will summarize what we have learned after doing this now for 20 plus years, which is there is no secret sauce. There is nobody out there that we're just like, oh my God, they're killing it Right.
John Jennings:And I'm saying that there aren't individual investments that do absolutely. There are absolutely, you know. You know different private equity investments that do great. And I'll tell you, a lot of private equity, we invest in private equity. There's a lot of private equity that beats the, you know, the public markets. I'm not saying there can't be great investment performance, but I'm telling you, when we look at you know, if I were to pick on Goldman or Morgan or Merrill or something when we look under the hood for everything that they buy, that's like wow, that was a home run. There's almost always an offsetting strikeout or there's two strikeouts for every you know home run or triple or whatever.
John Jennings:And when you performance report on it and you just see all the expense and the taxes and the churn and the unnecessary complexity, it's just mind boggling, you know, and just the inability of most portfolios to keep up with you know, a 70, 30, you know, if S&P 500 and bond portfolio, the inability of the vast majority of portfolios to keep up with that just shows you that it's really about behavior.
John Jennings:In fact, even if you take the endowment model, so everybody wants to invest like Yale it's the so-called Yale model or endowment model popularized by David Swenson, kind of the architect of it, you know. As of the data of last year I haven't seen this year, but the data of last year if you take all 735 reporting university endowments, most of whom have over, you know, a billion dollars. You take their investment performance, their average and median performance is indistinguishable over one, five, 10 and 15 years from a 70, 30 index portfolio indistinguishable. Now there are some like Yale and Stanford and Washington University, where I'm here in St Louis, so I actually teach at the business school there. They were actually number one last year and number two the year before. So there are some that can deliver outsized returns, but it means that most of them aren't because you have these huge outliers and then it averages out. It just goes to show you that many of these attempts to go and emulate Yale or do things that are actually gonna outperform often lead to underperformance.
Mark McGrath:Whereas if you just say I'm just gonna index, it's a copycategory, you know you're gonna at least take the market performance which is gonna be better than most everybody else Peter Lynch and Bill Miller and others and as I recall from you know reading over the years and studying behavioral economics and behavioral finance, behavioral investing that many or most of the investors in said portfolios lost money. Many of the average investors were actually losers over the same time periods because they bought it hot, sold it cold and yeah, oh, oh.
John Jennings:The vast majority of people who invested in Bill Miller's extraordinary run lost money because you had to be there at the beginning to get those returns if you invested. And again he's rebounded back. So this is just as of his decline. But yeah, it's kind of like the difference between time-weighted returns and dollar-weighted returns or internal-weighted returns. So the time-weighted return for Bill Miller and his investors was incredibly positive.
John Jennings:The dollar-weighted return, which takes into account the timings of when the flows occurred, showed that people plowed in too late to really gain from his amazing returns. And we saw it with the hedge fund industry as well. It's the exact same pattern right when most of the money that's invested in hedge funds has enjoyed their underperformance, you know, because they piled in after most of the great performance happened. And that's the tough thing about investing is a lot of times you got to be in early in order to really reap the benefits of the returns. If you come in too late after you know, it's like once the pattern is established, it often gets destroyed Again, like the nifty 50 or the dogs. Now the hedge fund industry is even star investment.
Mark McGrath:Simple, not easy, right? So we constantly we've alluded to it earlier how people are always looking for the easy button, the quick fix, the fast recipe, the magic formula, whatever. But in that, in a world of complexity, which the markets are filled with complex, adaptive systems, billions of them coming in every day, why is simplicity what we should be yearning for and searching versus what's easy?
John Jennings:Yeah.
John Jennings:So, and I love this concept of simple but not easy, because if you find something that is simple but it's not easy to follow not always, but it likely means that it's right, right. So, for instance, take Warren Buffett's adage that you should be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. That's incredibly simple, but it is not easy to follow, and I think many, many things are like that that end up being true, especially in investing. So in investing, the investment management industry largely exists to justify its own existence. If people in the investment management industry were like OK, here's the deal. If you go out and do what Warren Buffett said to do in one of his letters, which is he didn't say everybody should do it, but he said when he dies, the amount that's going to his wife is going to go 90% in an S&P 500 index fund and 10% in a bond index fund and that that's what Warren Buffett said people should do. Imagine if everybody in the investment management industry is like oh yeah, that's great advice, that's what we're going to tell our clients. Everybody be like I can do that on my own. I can go to Robinhood or E-Trade or Schwab and I can do that on my own. What do I need you for investment manager? And, quite frankly, if you did that over time again, you would likely be 90 plus percent 95 plus percent of investors out there, maybe 99%.
John Jennings:But what an investment advisor is going to do is they're going to want to justify their own existence, and I'll tell you they can justify their own existence. I'm an investment advisor. We charge a lot of money for what we do, but the main value we bring is on investing its behavior. We're going to help, we're going to make your portfolio as simple as it can be, and then we're going to help you with your behavior. But then we're a family office, so we're going to pay your bills, we're going to manage your charitable contributions, we're going to manage all your state planning entities. We're going to help you with the state planning. We're going to do all this tax stuff. We're going to do all these other things. So if somebody pays us all this money, they feel the value from that. That allows us to say, hey, we're going to be more simple in this portfolio that we're going to create for you. We're OK saying I'll tell you, we have a client that on her portfolio is $150, $170 million or something. It's in two funds. It's in a bond fund and it's an all country world index that we slightly tilted more domestic than it is, but that's it. It's incredibly cheap, it's incredibly easy behaviorally and her portfolio it's just rocking and rolling.
John Jennings:And can you imagine Like if we weren't her family office? Because she'd be like why am I paying you all this money for you to put me into two funds? But in our first year and a half of working with her, she was recently widowed. When we worked with her they're working with her. We met with her every single week for over a year, like we had that much going on and that many things we were doing for us. And she was like, oh my gosh, you guys are indispensable. But imagine if we were only her investment advisors and we're like you know not her name, but Mrs Smith, let's meet once a year.
John Jennings:All we're gonna do is rebalance to your 75, 25, stock bond, two funds. I mean there's no way, but I'll tell you doing that, that simple way of investing. I can't tell you the proportion and what exact index you should follow, but that sort of simple investing is likely going to be whatever listener, whatever else you're doing out there and I'll tell you I say this with total humility because my 401k plan is in four Vanguard index funds a bond fund, large cap fund, small cap fund, international fund. I never look at it. It rebalances I don't even know how often twice a year, four times a year, whatever. I have no idea and it is outperformed.
John Jennings:I went back when I was writing my book. I looked it is outperformed my outright portfolio where I can invest in whatever I want. So here I am. I'm the president. I'm the president, chief strategist, of a firm that oversees $15 billion. I've written a book that's mainly about good investment behavior and my simple Vanguard account has outperformed what I do, and it's because I don't have as good behavior. I look at my portfolio too often. I tinker, I buy individual stocks here and there, not often.
Mark McGrath:I mean, it's not too far off but goodness, I think we'll have to do another episode to get you on that, james.
Mark McGrath:Damian, who he's had in the podcast and book rules with Victory, but he talks about something too which was a major influence to Boyd, underappreciate and you've said it in your work that sometimes inactivity is better than activity and most of the street, if you will, or the investment world, is trying to get activity, because that's how I mean fees are generated, right or whatever, and sometimes it's better just to sit on your hands and do nothing.
John Jennings:It's almost always better sitting on your hands and do nothing. I'll tell you, an important mental model for investors to have is, when you go to make an investment decision so I'm talking about selling something and buying something else realize that on average, it'll be a loser. I can't not everyone will, but on average, like most of the time, it will be a loser and this has been shown in multiple studies, including even a professional investor. There's this great one of pension plan sponsors, but I'll tell you that the study that I go through my book that is so well illustrates this is called Boys Will Be Boys a Study of Gender Differences Investing, or something like that.
John Jennings:And these academic researchers got a discount brokerage firm to give them 10 years of data on 35,000 accounts, individual accounts and what they looked at is who invested better, and they found that it went like this single females, married females, married males, and then with single males bringing up the rear, and they looked at why that was the case and they found that both genders were equally as bad at making investment decisions, regardless of marital status.
John Jennings:On average, most of the time, whatever they sold out perform whatever they bought. So the reason the single females outperformed the single males and on down the line was they traded less. So they traded 45% less than the single males. So if, on average, every time you make an investment decision, you lose, you know it's like the people that didn't go to the casino right, didn't place slot machines ended up with more money at the end of the day, and that has been shown with other studies, been shown with pension plan sponsors and it's important to keep in mind. And I think if you go back anybody let's listen, if you go back to your own investment portfolio.
Mark McGrath:Is it every read? Jack's way is market decisions both, and look at what your investment decisions were.
John Jennings:I think you'll find that it's the same case. The same series of interviews with all kinds of traders Was a loser.
Mark McGrath:Whether they're fund managers. There's an old series of them. There's like the very famous one that had, you know, a lot of the trend following traders and future traders, but a lot of it is interesting how it dispels so many myths of the greatest traders aren't in there looking at screens all day long and shouting and throwing order tickets and doing all this crazy, crazy stuff. They're usually quite patient, they're quite disciplined and I think it goes back to what you were saying about behavior. They've got their behavior under control, they've got their emotions, they've got their psychology under control and they probably do something to work at it to improve that. Maybe they're doing yoga or exercising or swimming or running or doing something to promote their mindfulness.
Mark McGrath:Bring us home with you know you do a great job of talking about information. I think that this is something that people completely mess up. But what I loved about your how you categorize it. It's very similar to how we would do it in the Marine Corps, how we would parse information, starting with data. Why don't you walk us through that? Because I think that, not being able to discern and identify these things, people really set themselves up for failure if they don't understand the categorization of information, so bring us home with that.
John Jennings:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's something called the wisdom hierarchy and there was a Russell Aikoff was an organizational theorist that came up with this. It's brilliant and basically information, or information, is one of the categories too, but it goes data at the bottom of the base of the pyramid, then information, then knowledge and then wisdom. And what data is? And I'll give you an example. It'd be something like housing starts, so you just get this data from. I guess the Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps this like just housing starts, right, so it's just raw data. It's very plentiful, it's everywhere in the world, but it's not all that useful on its own. Information would be taking data and organizing it in a way that gives you some insight and some usefulness. So you can take housing starts and you can look at it, maybe over time, and you can look at it by zip code and you can say, oh, multifamily versus single hand, family houses over a million versus 500 to a million versus. You can start seeing how different sectors of the economy, both in terms of wealth and geography, are doing with respect to housing starts. So that's information. So that is a lot more useful than data.
John Jennings:Knowledge is taking information and this gets more to like the void idea of synthesizing right. So you synthesize it. You say, okay, I have now housing data and I'm gonna use that and I'm gonna put it together with unemployment claims and interest rates and GDP growth and other things and I'm gonna use that. I'm gonna have this knowledge about where we might be heading in terms of the market cycle. Wisdom is the very top and that's using your experience to know what to do with the knowledge and this is how to make decisions. So this is kind of like the the decide and act right. If this is, the others are. It's kind of like the observe is kind of data and information, and you get into orient, which is kind of knowledge, and then decide and act as like. What do you do with this knowledge? And that's wisdom. And wisdom is to know that you cannot time market tops or bottoms, that you're probably gonna be wrong, and to do it successfully you'd have to be right twice, at the top and the bottom, or at the bottom of the top, and you would know, based on wisdom, how you should act and what, what sort of actions you should take or, more importantly, what in investing, what sort of actions you shouldn't take right, and some of it's counter cyclical. So you'd be saying, as the economy is booming, maybe I'll be working on reducing my leverage. If I'm a business right, or if I'm an investor, I'm gonna do the very hard thing. I'm gonna sell stocks and buy bonds because my investment discipline says to do that. Even though everything's screaming, I went to pile in and make more money, and so that's a really, I think, important way of viewing the world, and wisdom is what's most important.
John Jennings:But we tend to get caught down in the data and information areas. And I'll tell you, most of the investment management industry is about showcasing data, information or knowledge, and is really light on the wisdom. And I'll tell you, I'm the chair of a $250 million endowment. I've been on all sorts of different charitable investment committees and things like that, and what I love is these investment managers always come in and they present to us and they spend all this time explaining what's currently happening or what's happened in the past. So it's like, okay, here's all this information. And I guess their hope is is that, by showing us that they have their handle on all this sort of information or knowledge, that we're gonna be like you're a talented investment manager. But really, what differentiates a great investment manager from everybody else is how they apply wisdom.
John Jennings:And again, these are things that are simple and not easy. So the wisdom would be we're gonna be inactive. We're gonna have a simple portfolio it's interesting. We're gonna focus on costs and taxes, and you alluded to it in your article Energy Media. We're not gonna look at our portfolio. One of his driving forces A lot of things that I first saw in my life, by the way Spending years to come up with destruction and creation was he was trying to figure out why me?
Mark McGrath:How did I come up with energy maneuverability theory, where there's eminent PhDs and engineers and scientists all over the world, yet I'm the one that came up with it and it goes back to what you just said. Having that wisdom of experience in his years of flying fighter jets, I would, yeah.
John Jennings:Yeah, yeah, first and foremost he was a pilot. Yeah, well, and it was fascinating. I guess he went back and got what his master's in engineering at Georgia Tech or someplace I mean just amazing Just shows his quest for information or his quest for knowledge and wisdom. Because, to take that sort of learning and the way he thought and put it, with the practical experience of being a top fighter pilot, an instructor, it's those things that came together that were very rare. Did other people do that? Yeah, I'm sure some people did. My uncle was a fighter pilot, in fact, was like the chief test pilot for the F-15 program, flew in Vietnam and everything, and majored in engineering at University of Illinois super smart. So there's other out there that are really smart engineering people and fighter pilots, but it's this small little group and it, you know, I guess it goes back to what we started with, then his personality is plus and plus.
Mark McGrath:The structure, creation, the mission of that.
John Jennings:The intent of that was to really improve our capacity for free and independent action, whereas my uncle was just a really good fighter pilot.
Mark McGrath:If we can't continuously learn, we're never gonna be able to adapt. And if we can't adapt, we can't survive, let alone thrive. And it's again for the markets, world of markets and the ebbs and flows and the stocks of bonds, just the chaos and the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, aka VUCA. What a wonderful place to learn about Boyd, to talk about Boyd, to think about Boyd and to apply the theories, because they're gonna present themselves everywhere. The only requirement is you have humans that make decisions.
John Jennings:Yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah, and the investing area is perfect for it. And I was telling you, I think before we started recording you know I had read about Boyd, I had done some studying of Boyd and yet I don't mention Boyd anywhere in my book. I think it helped inform my views of uncertainty and patterns and everything, but I didn't even link, like the oodle hoop and creation and destruction to investing until we first saw it. Oh my gosh, it doesn't unclick. I was going down the Charlie Munger route. That's the power of it. We'll have lots of content to speak about this. Who's probably got his idea of Mindelmars from Boyd?
Mark McGrath:That's why I think it's so important. And, as you say, you know the themes in the books. We've said this to guests. Ponch was famous on, I think, our ninth episode with Ines at Belito. He said so you know nothing about John Boyd, yet you know everything about John Boyd, because all of these things are inherent, Successful. People are doing these things. If you're thriving, this is exactly what you're doing, and the awareness that he helped create around it with his ideas, that's what empowers people. That's what because it always comes down to Boyd Remember people, ideas and things. It's how we think and it's our cognitive power that we're all equipped with. And when we free that up to break those models, to create and destroy the models, revise and update them, that's how we get to that place. So Um.
John Jennings:Mm-hmm.
Mark McGrath:Well, I will definitely be directly quoting John Boyd in my second book, which is on more wealth and happiness and purpose in the face of abundance Especially as concept of being somebody versus doing something Amazing. Yeah.
John Jennings:What I mean. Look at, you know, he never had material riches and, if anything, at every turn eschewed them. It was like I'm not gonna go that direction. But yet here we are. You know when did he die? 1997? So you know, here we are. So, long after his death, he's still talking about the impact and the contributions he's made, and it's not just like two dudes talking about. I mean, he's had major effect on, you know, definitely the military, but other areas. You know he chose to do something which you know it's kind of interesting, I think. You know it caused him to be somebody, but not in the way he meant to be somebody. He became somebody that was, you know, really made an impact and has a lasting legacy which so many you know, he's the captain of industry that generated hundreds of millions of billions of dollars.
Mark McGrath:Well, I think that was all over that.
John Jennings:It shows that ideas can go on and on forever.
Mark McGrath:So the book is the other material thing we're also going to go to learn more about your work, and everybody can read your great article on Boyd, which we'll link to. I also am a subscriber to your IFOD, so yeah, yeah.
John Jennings:Yeah, yeah, the interesting fact of the day yeah, so johnmgenningscom, johnmgenningscom. And yeah, my blog is there. You can subscribe. We'd love to have you know people as a subscriber. More about me, more about my book and the interesting fact of the day I just write on just random things that are hopefully you know, hopefully sort of interesting.
Mark McGrath:The one that I have Cookie that will probably come out tomorrow and is on how to do nothing in helping us continue to develop the work of Johnmoy.
John Jennings:I had to throw in the product productively because we're in America.
Mark McGrath:Well, we'll do it. We'll do it again. We've got a lot more to do, so we'll do it again, for sure. Thanks.
John Jennings:I had a great time, totally different than any other podcasts I've been on In a good way.
Mark McGrath:All right.
