Brent Beshore - Adventures in Permanent Equity - [Joys of Compounding, EP. 34]

Alright friends, today's episode is brought to you by Portrait, the AI research platform built by fundamental investors, four fundamental investors. Now we've become huge fans of both the people and the product behind this exciting company, and so we are fired up to be collaborating with them in season 3 of the Joc. For founding Portrait, David Plahn spent a decade as a Bicide analyst at some of the world's leading investment firms, including our friends at SlatePath Capital and the BALPOST Group. Now even as some of the best resource firms in the world, David kept bumping into a reality that may resonate with many of you, never having enough time to research all the compelling ideas across his desk. This tension inspired him to build Portrait. The research platform that delivers the equivalent of an army of capable analysts, ready to help you focus on the most actionable ideas with unprecedented speed and depth. 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To study greatness in order to help you find and compound your life's work, is fast as possible for as long as possible. I'm Paul Beuser, and I'm Rick Berman, where your hosts and each session, our teachers, will be some of the world's most compelling people from across the vast range of human achievement. This show is brought to you by Pine Grove Studios in collaboration with Colossus. The hosts of the show, Rick Berman and Paul Beuser are the co-founders and co-CEOs of CEDA Grove Holdings and co-CEOs of CEDA Grove Management Company. All opinions expressed by any of Rick, Paul, or their podcast guests are solely their own, and do not reflect the opinion of either CEDA Grove Holdings or CEDA Grove Management Company. This podcast is intended for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as the basis for investment decisions. CEDA Grove Holdings are clients of CEDA Grove Management Company, may maintain positions and securities discussed in this podcast. I went to Washington, Lee, because my dad sent me two books a million, and they all these college books. Washington, Lee, was most difficult academically in the country. It had produced the most presence in CEDA Grove's school in the country. Super serious school, doing serious things. I picked it though because it was the number two party school in the country. That tells you anything. That was the trifecta for me. I get to do big things, and I get to party all the time. Those were the auspicious beginnings. I applied to one school, got in, never looked back. Washington, Lee, was fantastic, really enjoyed it. I got done with my major thing into my sophomore year, which is politics. My dad was a lobbyist growing up and involved in government relations, government sales. That was kind of the thing that I knew, and I really enjoyed it. I studied politics, and I just blitzed through every politics requirement for my major by the end of my sophomore year. I had two years of college left. I was really involved in my fraternity, speaker bureau on campus, which allowed me to meet all kinds of really interesting people. That's me, David Boyce and Conrad Anchor, discovered Mallory Body on Everest. All kinds of people is crazy. I didn't know what to do for two years. I met this guy named Harlan Beckley. Harlan was a man unlike any other man I'd ever met. He was kind and generous and gentle and encouraging and just full of care from the moment I met him came across as so different. I was deeply attracted. What is that guy doing? What is going on? He led the Shepard Poverty Program. It's an interdisciplinary study of human capability. He came in from a perspective, "Hey, it's not a left issue. It's not a right issue. It's a human issue." He brought this really interesting outside perspective to, "How do we study human capability? What are we doing with our lives? What enables flourishing?" Anyway, I took the intro class and just fell in love with the study of it. I was part of the first graduating class that minored in poverty studies. I studied urban poverty, rural poverty, US poverty versus international poverty. What are we talking about? I might just, straight dollars, we're talking about relationships or we're talking about communities. How had industrialization impact poverty, urban rural divide? It was really interesting. I got to do a capstone study and go to the Johnson Library down in Austin and do some original research on the War on Poverty. It was really an amazing, impactful thing. Then ultimately, French developed with Harlan that lasted a lifetime. Harlan, unfortunately, passed away late last year unexpectedly. I'm actually going to be going to his funeral here in a few weeks in Virginia. There's a few people in my life that have impacted me more than Harlan. It really set my life on a completely different trajectory. Well, I love hearing that. We often talk about finding mentors early. Sounds like he's just had an incredible impact on you and I'm sure many, many others. I actually remember playing on those Washington and Lee courts, by the way, decades ago. Oh, wait a minute. We're not getting into tennis yet. Let's just go straight into tennis. For sure. Straight into tennis. For a few minutes more. What do you say to young people today when they ask you about things like, what should I major in or what kind of school should I go to or what kind of education should I be seeking? I think it was maybe a toss up over the last 10, 15 years because it seemed like coding and engineering in particular were going to be the future. Now we're seeing anything that's stem-based, that there's a right and a wrong answer to. Anything that a computer can do now, including code, is basically becoming irrelevant. And really, what everyone values me included as an employer, most of my skills these days are what most people have considered soft skills. It's discernment and wisdom about what matters and what doesn't. What do you decide to put your time and resources into? How do you communicate? How do you decide what to edit when AI is producing something? I'd say more than ever. I feel more confident that liberal arts-based education is the only way to go. It is not about what you know in terms of facts. I mean, we need to have some facts and memorization to have the discernment to understand which direction to take. But being able to recall a specific date or being able to have a skill set to write certain types of code anymore is just really not that valuable. It's really been commoditized. And so what hasn't been commoditized and I don't think what will be commoditized is relationships and wisdom being able to understand what we should do and not just what we can do. We had Will Thorndyke in our class up on campus a couple weeks ago. My condolences. Several of the students asked, "What do you look for in early founders or for talent and joining your team?" And one of the things he kept coming back to was communicating crisply. We've noticed that you've been writing again. You have a long history of being a writer, you're using your liberal arts muscle. You've been sharing about how you start your day by thinking and praying and reflecting and writing. Why do you write to not only write but to share those reflections with the outside world? Writing is a way that I feel I'm able to think. I feel God's presence and most strongly when I'm writing. It's incredible. It's almost like a conversation. Things will pop into my head that I didn't really even know that I thought and until you test them, you really don't know what you think. At least I don't. I need some sounding board. And so I'm writing like I would have a conversation with somebody. So I'm always thinking about who I want to talk to and I'm imagining typically one person. So every time I write it's typically one person in my mind that I'm writing to. to, I'm trying to communicate with them in a way that elucidates the ideas that we're discussing, that we explore and kind of plum the depths. I think there's no stronger way to attract the right people and repel the wrong people. There's a lot of us on this planet and there's a lot of ways to do this life. There's an endless number of paths to take. I have a very specific path on the right way. We all believe our worldview is the correct one. I want to attract people who share my values and how I think the world works and I want to impact people with what I believe to be true. I'm a Christian. I followed Jesus. I want to tell people the good news. It's the best news that I had ever heard. I was naithiest in my 20s and was lost and I was rescued and it's changed my life. These are the things that I think about and how different my life outcomes would have been had I not been rescued. A lot of Christian themes in my writing, of course being a Christian is not all about just sitting alone and thinking great thoughts about God. It is about going out and making contact with the world and blessing others with what you've been blessed with. But a big part of that for me is being able to try to be thoughtful and part of his expressing gratitude for what God has given me and for the crazy adventure that I'm on. I get to meet two beach bums like you guys and get to come on and talk about tennis primarily, which is the purpose of this podcast and do fun stuff like that. I recall over the years you've had these peaks and valleys around this idea of communication before X was Twitter and you were on there quite a bit. You've built some incredible in-person events now to communicate with people. What other reflections do you have? Parals, pitfalls, but also the blessings and the impact you can have through communication? Integrity is really being the same person wherever you are. One of the things that drives me crazy and I think social media in particular encourages this is to be somebody different online than you are offline. The greatest compliment somebody can pay me is when they meet me and they say, "Oh my gosh, you're exactly like you are online." I guess that's good unless you hate what I am online, but I try to be the same person wherever I am. If you have a conversation with me in a coffee shop or an event or on the internet, I'm going to try to be the same person broken and flawed and messy and I'm going to try to say sorry when I should and believe me, I said plenty of really, really stupid things. I mean, if you're not embarrassed by what you wrote even five years ago, you're probably doing something wrong. I have a lot of stuff that I don't agree with that I've said in the past, but I mean, there's plenty of stuff that I put out there that I'm grateful for. One of the things that writing, communicating and events and all these things to build community have done is give me a community. I feel like the most blessed guy in the world, I have a treasure trove of long time friends. I mean, there's no way to form a decade relationship outside of being friends for a decade. I feel like I've gotten to see you guys when you were snow monkeys. You were all bundled up and lived in the great north and now I get to see you with beach bombs. There's a real joy in that to see you in an environment that was bureaucratic, had a lot of red tape and how you all, to your credit, gracefully navigated that. I wouldn't have lasted five seconds in that environment to see you all out on your own with no structure, flourishing and thriving in that environment. It's just really a beautiful thing and I think that's what I've been given the writing. A lot of my best friends have come through the internet. I was just some rando in Columbia, Missouri, buying small crappy little businesses through the power of the internet, which is a real gift. Tractored people who said, "Hey, I agree with you on that." I think you're nitty-ditty over here and I was like, "Excellent. That seems smart and I should probably change." Or, "No, I think you're wrong on that and we can have it out." I very firmly believe in the power of thoughtful discourse. That's extremely becoming a lost art. There's a real temptation. I even feel it to dunk on people. Mark Andreessen and Senra just came out with the podcast and I couldn't more strongly disagree with one of their things they talked about, which was there's no value to introspection and great men of history have not been introspective. I think it's absolutely stupid. It's one of the dumbest things I've ever heard in my life. But I don't know, Mark, personally, I've listened to a lot of stuff he's done. I know David and I've had lots of introspective, interesting conversations with David. That's the cool thing about the internet is you can see something that you disagree with and instead of the temptation is to dunk on them. I just replied back and I was like, "Hey, that doesn't seem. True. For a guy who goes on to podcasts a week like Mark does an introspects about his life, it seemed to be self-contradictory. That's the cool part. They can throw stuff out there and people can tell them they're wrong, but you don't have to hate on the people. They're not idiots because they believe it. Maybe what they said was stupid, but I've said stupid stuff all the time. First of all, thank you for calling us monkeys and bumps. Very kind of you. That's what friends are for. I do love your point on integration. I figured we were going to get there eventually. Not only just, I think when Paul and I made this transition and set up "Sater Grove" it did involve a mood of Florida and it did involve a radical realignment around the values that we shared probably at the centerpiece of it was this notion of integration. Let's not be one person over here or one per on certain days and then be a different person on the weekends. Let's not leave any of our beliefs, any of our values, any of the ways we want to live, any of the patterns of our day aside for the sake of work or for the sake of family. Let's just bring it all in under one giant tent. I see that in your life, we were talking about your 2025 permanent equity annual letter and it literally starts out with this section called "Fear of Man" which is a pretty strange way to start an investor letter, but for people who know you, not surprising that you would use an opportunity like that to reflect on something that you think could be critically important to a lot of people, but also to be just vulnerable. Rather than try to be that investor leader that has everything figured out and only touts their successes, you talk about it being "the character flaw that has plagued my life" embedded in that is this notion of through introspection, having it kind of revealed to you that much of your life you had this people please or orientation which is the only way that you would have said yes by the way to this podcast. So I'm glad you still have a little fraction of people please are left, but just maybe say more about why you felt compelled to frame your annual letter just around that particular idea. It is a strange way to open up an investment letter. I did it because it's real. I want to be real. I live so much in my life pretending. It's like I ran a theater and I was a character in the theater. I learned in an early age what people really wanted for me was performance. It would be useful. And if I was useful and I performed then people would like me and keep me around. It was a way to be safe and matter and belong. I looked at the people in my life who seemed to have it figured out and they were performing. High performance culture. I just did another way through my teens and into my 20s. I'm maniacally focused on what I thought mattered in each one of those stages and especially in my 20s. How do you make as much money as quickly as you can? How do you set yourself up to have "complete freedom"? My real goal was just to be able to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. A very cheap version of freedom is what I would call it. It's taken a lot of pain and suffering. I mean I look at almost lost my marriage multiple times. I lost a lot of friendships. I went through a season of depression. There was a season of depression and almost losing my marriage from the outside looking in at the peak of success. It was in my late 20s that one of the fast growing companies was Missouri History. Remember making a million dollars for the first time in a year in my late 20s and I was just miserable. Everything tasted great. I'm 43 now. I was 28, 29 then. So it's a long time ago. It's been pushing 15 years, 14 years. I just remember feeling empty and feeling like, "Okay, so the rest of our lives, I take money and I turn it into more money and then I go and buy things with that money." That's life. That's what I thought was going to deliver to me peace and joy and happiness. It just didn't for me and it doesn't seem to do it for many people. So I was like, "Okay, well if that's not it, then what is it?" And around that same time is when God rescued me and I got introduced to all these crazy people who followed Jesus and I was like, "You have you kidding me? I've made fun of you now for a decade or more and now you come to find out that maybe the thing." God started to slowly change my heart. But I realized that I still had so much of that desire to perform and I really just shifted it from a performance for me to a performance for God. We talk about this idea in the Bible. The fear of God is a good thing, right? The beginning of wisdom is the fear of God. When we say fear in the Bible, we don't mean the type of same fear I have as a fear of man. It's basically it's a reverence for God. But I think it's really hard and in my life I've really struggled to shift from seeing God as somebody who expects things from me. I've recently had this revelation. This is not to impunity, but I don't think this is what they meant. But when I hear Tim Keller say, "You're blessed to be a blessing." What I hear is you're only blessed to be a blessing. What I hear is you are nothing more than a conduit Brent for my blessing other people. I used to describe myself as an ambassador for God. Well, ambassadors can be recalled. Ambassadors can be fired, right? You gotta do a good job. It's a performance-oriented mentality that unfortunately is just further reinforced through a lot of religion. A lot of a Christian culture is this idea that we've got to perform for God. It's the exact same thing. The fear of man, fear of God, if you look at it as, "Okay, I've been given certain things, and I need to in order to matter and belong, I've got to perform." What we're doing is we're working from a position to gain love and acceptance and protection provision. Instead, what God says is the beginnings of the earth. Before I lay the foundation there, I knew you. I knitted you to the earth. I brought you into being through community. I love you because I love you because I love you. I don't love you only because of what you can do for others. In fact, that's not the primary thing. Yeah, sure. Of course, love me and love your neighbor. The loving of the neighbor has to come out of an overflowing of the love God. We can't give away what we don't have. It's an ongoing revelation that I've been experiencing now for 13 years. It still feels fresh and new a couple weeks ago. I feel like I had a major breakthrough where God's like, "No, no, Brent. If it feels heavy, it feels burdensome. That's not from me. I've given you freedom. I want you to go walk and freedom. My fear of man has been a lot of, "Do I matter in belong? Am I safe? Am I okay?" In the investment business, I mean, if you look at the brutal game, what have you done for me lately? What type of returns can you generate for me? We can be, quote, unquote, "friends." As long as you hit your IRR targets and generate at a multiple and invested capital, we can be friends. And as soon as that doesn't work anymore, then I'm going to cut you off and I'm going to go with somebody else. It's a tough thing to be in a transactional world that I don't know how well we're made to be in. We're going to get into this, how you upended the private equity model, the way that you knew best, which was this 27-year-life fund, named Permaniquity. That should be somewhat immune to these things you're talking about. The quarterly returns, the needing to prove yourself year after year, you gave yourself three decades. Link those two things. You got a lot of this right. In a way, there almost no one does around incentive alignment, at least from our point of view, and we're obsessed with the alignment of incentives. And you kind of learned what not to do, and you went and did this. Why then still are you feeling these pressures? No matter what we do, it takes a long time to get the stuff worked out of the suit. We're born this way. Nothing could be more perfectly aligned to be able to ignore short-termism, taking shortcuts and all that stuff, to please people than having long-term capital. The reality of it is, there's still future fund raises. We do have more capital to raise in the future. I think that's another pressure to potentially perform. I think I'm really, really weak, and I think I'm susceptible to incentives probably even more than most people. I remember the whiteboard session that Paul, you and I did 10 years ago, you asked me, "Why do you want to do all this? And why not just do the thing that everyone else does and that's a much easier path?" I think I said at that time, I was like, "I don't think that I would do well in that system. I'm very competitive. I'm going to try to win at the game that I'm playing and playing the traditional private equity by lever-stripping flip model would have really encouraged the worst of my nature. I'm so weak, I'm susceptible to temptation that I'm trying to set up guardrails in my life that allow me to potentially resist a lot of those temptations. Permanent equity obviously is named nothing's permanent, but it's better than the Diet Coke of Permanence or the semi-permanent equity or something like that. It has a better ring to it, so forgive me for the false advertising. I want to come back to this idea of introspection. In a certain framework, minimizing introspection may be useful, particularly from the context of a VC operator that has many, many founders. I hope that the people who hear that don't think I should have less introspection in my life. It's timely because Arthur Brooks, who's an incredible professor, he's one of these communicators who I think is able to frame many Judeo-Christian concepts and make them extremely accessible. He's got this new book coming out on finding your meaning. Some of his podcasts on the subject come from self-reflection. The self-reflection is the main tool to discover your meaning, coherence. Then the second is our purpose. What is the why for being here? And then the final is significance. All of those are kind of existential questions. All of those require self-reflection, reflection around the world that we're observing in history. He said in that 2025 letter that you can't build a good life on distorted reality, which is very powerful. And again, we mentioned our friend David, who often talks about virtually all of the founders and great leaders of the past and how the vast majority of them are what he would call a cautionary tale. I would love to hear from you the inversion of that. What actually is a good life? How would you advise based on your own experience that others take steps toward building one? The easy questions. What is it being of life? Patrick asked us this years ago and I'm like, "You know what? I haven't actually thought that through enough." But now that we have a class called investing in a good life, it's incumbent on us to at least ask smart people about the topic and try to unpack it for ourselves. That is the question is what is the good life? I remember Uso Anas getting my law degree, the pinnacle of the legal world is to be a big firm lawyer. That's what everyone's pushing you towards if you have the capacity to do it. And so I remember going in for interviews during my first year in law school and I would ask the partners, "What is life like at the firm?" Oh, it's fantastic. Look at this place. We have this big office. We work on important work. And I said, "Okay, well, talk about your personal life to me. How does it work with your family, the hours you work, the relationships you have?" The answers universally would alternate between I have no relationships that matter and I don't think relationships matter. Something along the lines of, I do the best I can with the small amount of time that I have. What it really came down to was I didn't see a path to having a good relationship with my wife, having a family, having friends. If I was going to go into a big firm law, I'm chasing worldly gain as much as I can and I can still see that cautionary tale. I was like, "You talk about incentives. The incentive and big firm laws to work as many hours you can, bill as much as you can, that billable hour is going to be the metric in which you measures your entire life." Little Johnny's soccer game, you can bill three thousand bucks an hour. It's going to take you five thousand dollars to go to see Little Johnny's game and I don't think that's worth it. It completely distorts your world view. And I think this is where, if you're good at running, you can run really fast in the wrong direction and it only gets you further from where you want to go. The question before you start running is where are you trying to run to? For me, over the course of my life, what I can tell you is I'm paying attention a lot more to what gives me peace and what takes peace away from me. When do I wake up and I say, "Man, that was an amazing day." And when do I wake up or when do I get down the day and I say, "Ah, man, I feel irritable, I feel off." Weirdly enough, it usually does not have to do with circumstances. I lived all of my 20s and most of my 30s in circumstances that most people from the outside looking in would have said are the peak, been blessed to have four children. They're healthy, beautiful wife who loves me and I love her permanent equity since all gave me the pep talk and the white board and patting me on the button and told me to go out there and get some. It's gone pretty darn well. Made a lot of money, built a decent size firm here and things have just worked out. Most of that time I've been anxious and hurried and frustrated. I did not have a lot of peace. For me, the good life now I'm realizing is to love people well and to be loved, to be known. Anything that gives me the opportunity to become more known and in deeper relationship with people that I care for and love, that's a good day. Anytime I have an opportunity to truly see somebody, it's to say, "Hey, how are you?" And then I usually try to ask it a second time because the first time it's the good, good, and the second time is no, no, no, no. How are you? Because the reality is we're all either entering into a season of suffering, in a season of suffering, or exiting a season of suffering. Those are the only three options. Can you have joy in the midst of suffering? Is the question. Can you have peace in the midst of circumstances that aren't fantastic? Because I know that has to be possible because I experienced no peace in the midst of great circumstances. So if the inverse is true, it has to be. The more that I can hold things with open hands and say that everything I have has been given to me as a gift and to be appreciative for the gifts that are unexpectedly small, every day we're given 10,000 blessings. So many blessings that if we sat here and just counted them, I look around the room and I'm like, "Look, I'm dry. I'm out of the elements. The temperature is right. I had this fantastic clothing. I have breath in my lungs. You can just go on and on and on. We could spend all day talking about the blessings that we've been given. We're always going to have 10 problems. Always. I used to have this imagination and I was like, "Okay, if I could just solve these next five problems that I have, then I won't have any more problems." And turns out you get through those five problems and you got five more and five more and five more and we're told in this life you will have trouble. There will be fizzles and thorns. The question is, what then in the fizzles and thorns provide peace and joy, a joy that's far more than happiness? You can get some temporary happiness in a Scotch bottle. I don't think that's joy. When I experienced joy the other night, we had some of our dear friends, my wife's birthday, and they invited us over. We'd never played majong. I thought it was for old women. We're like the only people who allowed to play majong. Apparently we're old now. So we're allowed to play majong. But we were invited over. A couple of them had learned to play majong. And so we had a night of just hanging out, drinking and eating and playing majong. And it was the most joyful, wonderful thing. It was just being in the presence of friends and enjoying each other's company, laughing. That is where life is abundant. Life is abundant and saying, "Thank you to the giver of all good gifts and for all the blessings that we have and to enjoy one another. For who we really are." C.S. Lewis has this great quote about, "If you could see people for who they really are, we'd be tempted to worship them. But we're so clouded and covered and we were able to do it." all these masks and all the stuff that gets junked up on us that we can't see the real us through there. I'm trying to spend my days praising God, thanking God for who He is, being secure in His love, seeing the adventure He wants to take us on. Who is He going to bring into my path and what resources do I have to potentially help that person? It's an adventure. I love that you mention joy and also peace. The Hebrew word Shalom is often used as a proxy for peace. With you is actually more definitionally wholeness and completeness. That's something that I continue to long for and it's something that doesn't seem to be on offer in very many places around the world. We just lost little hults. Our legendary football coach and his funeral was on campus a couple days ago and he has this quote about happiness. If you want to be happy for a day, play golf. If you want to be happy for a week, go on a cruise. If you want to be happy for a month by a car. If you want to be happy for a year, win the lottery. If you want to be happy for a lifetime, put your faith in Jesus. Putting aside whatever your beliefs are at the time, what Lu is saying, we can all relate to. All of us try to put our faith, put our trust, put our hopes into something or somebody else. At least my experience sounds like it's like yours where it doesn't work out well when you're seeking that in the wrong places. This notion of joy, when you look at it from a Judeo-Christian lens, the way the joy is used in scripture is a byproduct of a life of virtue. It actually is a sense of belonging, like you referenced, a sense of well-being. It's found ultimately in this life with God and real communion. The pinnacle of Western life seems to be, okay, we're going to go on a fabulous vacation. That's the thing that everyone's likely having to work my tail off so I can save up some money so I can go to Bali or wherever, eat and drink and just gorgeous and everything's provided for me and I've got this great service and I bought into that for a long time and I would mark on my calendar, okay? I'm going to trudge through the next six weeks, eight weeks, I'm going to fight through the thistles and thorns and then I'm going to get to vacation and all my hopes and dreams are going to come true. I'm going to be relaxed, my wife's going to be relaxed, we're going to have lots of sex, it's going to be awesome. Everything's going to be fantastic. Drink's going to be great. I'd find myself on vacation and this happened over and over and over again and I could not figure it out. I was miserable. I was miserable on vacation. I couldn't understand why and then it suddenly occurred to me that for me what vacation does is I was so in a works-based mindset, so in a performance-based mindset that when I didn't have anything to perform for, what do I do? Who am I? If I'm not achieving or accomplishing, if I'm not bettering myself, if I'm not learning something new, if I'm not making more money or building something of meaning, who am I? And then simultaneously, because everything's provided for you and everything's friction free, there's just great food and great drinks and everything's available for you and room service comes in and picks up everything and you look at your window and it's just mountains or beautiful beach or whatever it is. What I found myself is turning inwards. Place Pascal would call this "incurviture." I had this really double whammy of it would turn me inwards and I'd start looking at myself and I didn't like what I saw and I didn't really like me. I didn't have anything to distract me with. I didn't have anything to perform to go do. So I was kind of like the bicycle that lost steam and all the sudden I just fell over and I couldn't figure out every single vacation I would get into fights with my wife. I would be irritable and I knew it was me problem until I realized I'm like, "Oh my gosh, this is my whole life. I'm ignoring who I am in the day-to-day of adult life instead of addressing it instead of getting the bottom of why am I miserable? Why do I need to work hard?" And by the way, I think this goes back and I want to lovingly say this to Mark Andreson and DeCenra. The reason why they don't want to be introspective is because they don't want to look at what the reality actually is. By the way, you can make a lot of money by not being introspective. For a VC, I think it's incredibly self-serving and I think harmful. And I'm not saying that Mark's an evil genius that's like, "I'm going to tell people not to introspect so they'll make me more money." I don't think that's the case at all. But I do think that there's an entering incentive there. If I'm going to give somebody money and I want them to go and turn into more money, what's the last thing I want them to do? The last thing I want them to do is to potentially derail the current plans. I just want them to put their head down. Don't be introspective and work for 10 straight years to build as much wealth and powers they possibly can that I get to share in. That will ship wreck your life. I mean, you will hit the rocks of reality at some point and slide. But I think that the reality is I went through the same thing. So I have a lot of empathy for it. And today, today, I will wake up probably three days a week. And the first thing I think about is, "Man, I'm worthless and I need to go prove myself today and what can I do that will make me matter today?" And then I got to remember, "Oh my gosh, I have lost the plot." That's not the true story of reality at all. And I have to sit with God and I have to read and pray. I have to read my Bible and I have to remember, "Okay, no, no, no, no. That is the story that I'm an orphan. That's the story that none of this matters, that none of this is going to last. That's the story that I'm just some random accident. And I came from nothing and I'm going to nothing and nothing matters except for eat and drink and be merry for tomorrow we die." I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no. That's the opposite of reality. And when I can drag myself before God and say, "God, I need help. I am weak and I am broken and I need help." And then God fills me with His love and says, "No, no, no, no, Brent, Brent, Brent, I made you unique. I made you to be you. You don't have anything to fear. I am with you and I go before you and everything. I work all things out for your good and my glory. My goodness, when I actually let that sink into my heart, there's no fear. All things, everything, my sin, my brokenness, my heart circumstances, death, disease. I think it was Tolkien who said, "The bad and the sad become untrue." The most beautiful thing, when I can get myself into that mindset, peace washes over me. A joy washes over me. I just naturally, the gospel explodes out of me and I'm just grateful for who I am. I'm grateful for what I've been given. I deserve nothing and I've been given everything. I've been made a son of the king. I don't need to go prove myself. It is the most upside down thing in the entire world. The whole world screams me out. It's the only thing that matters is your performance. If you don't perform, if you're not beautiful and you're not smart and you're not wealthy and you're not powerful, you are nothing. What Jesus says is, "No, no, no, no, no. Everything's level at the foot of the cross." By the way, that's offensive to somebody. I remember the first time I actually heard the gospel. I'm sure I heard it many times. The first time I understood the gospel, I was pissed. I can just distinctly remember where I was. I was like, "You're kidding me. I've worked my ass off my whole life to prove myself. I've worked my ass off to make and to earn and I've earned a lot." You're telling me, "None of that matters." The guy I was with was like, "Yeah, none of it matters." I was angry. I was like, "How dare you? Are you kidding me?" Then you let it wash over. You're like, "Oh my gosh, this is the thing I've been looking for my whole life. This is the thing that I thought I was going to get when I worked hard that I never could get." I was a constant state of dissatisfaction. It's like, "Oh, no, no. The thing that's on offer is free. It's pure grace. It's a gift." All I got to do is receive it. This compounding point, I think there's a lot of related points. It's the gospels, it's nature, it's history, and it's the human predilection to fight against the simple learnings that are all around us and to want to control. We met 10 years ago who was through Peter Kaufman, our mutual friend who said we had to meet. He's had such a profound impact. There's so many mental models that he's come up with. He's learned from his now passed on legendary mentor, Charlie Munger. I want to read from your 20-25s letter and then try to bring out a couple of these points because you talked about this idea of control and need for speed. You said our world glorifies explosive growth and change, action. That's what gets the headlines and usually gets my attention. But it is steady, seemingly unremarkable, uninterrupted progress that delivers outsize returns over time. We're not talking about Rick's and your tennis game. We might get there later. Peter talks about this. Our friend Chris Baghtalks about it too. The Piper Method, persistent incremental progress, eternally repeated. This message is there. It's in the gospels. It's in history. I remember Peter would come to our class and have a picture from Victoria in England. It was a screenshot from an old story book from Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol. Everyone knows the story and you watch it at maybe the holiday time every year. Ebenezer Scrooge is living out exactly where you're talking about Brent, the temptation. And yet at the end there's this release. Whatever you want to call it. It could be a spiritual experience. It could become smarter, business highs. It becomes a family man. He releases control and realizes the blessings he has. And what Peter would say is we watch that every year. Every great book, all the great novels. They say the same thing. We need to be reminded all the time. And yet we yearn to control and move faster than is normal. Nor logo is the redwood. Rick and I are tempted too. Even though we have Greg and we have no team. We feel like there is this temptation to kind of run faster, find new things instead of just in the end. enjoying what we have and knowing that if you let things play out, that's actually the true meaning of work. This is what we try to talk about in our class. It's not that you don't want to aim for excellence. It's not that you don't want to build amazing things, but the idea is not only do you not peak at the end of your life, it peaks many generations down the line and essentially never peaks. Wherever that goodness is, it's so hard for us to manifest that. So I mean, it's helpful. It's not surprising. I think we feel the same way, even though we have so much good going on. A couple of times a week, you just find yourself in sort of a dark place near and then you wake up and hear it's at the beach. So usually this unhelps with that. But you realize all the blessings you have and all these compounding machines around your companies, relationships, students, family, our kids, our parents. I'm curious when you kind of merge a lot of the spiritual quests with some of things Peter and many others have taught you, what other learnings come to mind from that season when I own a we were coming together, what other learnings come to mind. And by the way, after you respond to that, I unearthed the secret letter that a young boy's Brent B. Shore sent to Charlie Munger. It was pretty bold what you wrote. I'm going to talk about a couple of things in a minute, but yeah, just curious. Now reflecting and throughout this conversation now some of these topics, how Peter impacted you and what was that like 10 years ago when we were coming together amid some of this emerging thinking. I came to faith 12 years ago. I was just a baby believer whenever we first met. I still had a foot in both world at that point, relationship with Peter 10 years ago. It's closer certainly that it is today. I haven't gotten the opportunity to chat with him recently, but I'm forever grateful for who exposed me to, introduced me to people on this call or on this podcast. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Peter and such a thoughtful master connector. A guy who's really seeking wisdom, when I think about people who are seeking wisdom, think of Peter, I think of obviously his mentor, Charlie. I had the pleasure of getting to spend a little time at Peter's request with Charlie and it was clear. He was seeking wisdom into his 90s as hard as anybody. Everything is the Lord. The way our perspective works is there's no idea that it's outside of God. Everything, I think that we would see a lot of the stuff that's secular. It's all in the Bible. As you read more and more and you study more and more, all these concepts are there. I think that Lord wants us to have a good life, wants us to live well. There's a grain to the universe that all this stuff, all the worldly wisdom, is just biblical wisdom that's been extended and contextualized to our modern day. Peter has all these little booklets that he gives out. They're little treats. I've collected a lot of them. I'm sure you guys have too. As I've reread some of them over the last couple of years, I see a lot of that. Biblical wisdom coming through in more of a secular setting. It doesn't mean it's in less biblical. I think a lot of these ideas of compounding, I mean, look, as believers, we should have the longest time horizon of anybody. Everything we do matters into eternity. There's an amazing short story called "Leaf by Niggle." It's one of my favorites is by Tolkien. It's this idea that the things that matter that we work on, they do extend into eternity. So permanent equity in what you all are doing as Hader Grove is merely just an extension of God as a God of excellence. The most joyous parts of our life are the things that compound. And by the way, the things that compound are relationships. Yes, money compounds, but relationships are so much more valuable in how they compound. Money typically flows from relationships and from creation of value and from being excellent and all this stuff works together in this beautiful cycle. I was a student of all the secular ideas and how do you make money? By the way, I made plenty of money that way. I made a lot more money since I stopped following that track and started following God. Why is that? Because God created all of it and all of it is under His reign and rule. And there's a temptation, I think, we can have that worldly wisdom causes us to create self-reliance, self-soverity, but I think can be really dangerous when I wasn't a follower of Jesus. It would make me condescending and arrogant and prideful, not that I needed much encouragement to do that anyway. It really led me down a path of not being able to enjoy the very things and destroy a lot of the relationships. And again, where God wants us to be excellent in the way in which the fruits of that are harvested, if we can just say, "Hey, these are all a gift," because I wasn't born. I didn't choose when I was born. I didn't choose the area I was born into. I didn't choose the gifts and the skill sets that I'd been given. Yeah, sure. I worked hard, but I participated with God in that. So all of it is a gift. And the more that we can look at it from that perspective and say, "Look, all the wisdom of the world, whether it's from Charlie Munger or Peter Kaufman or whatever, God sovereign over that." We should take those ideas and take them seriously and test them against biblical wisdom. And I'm overjoyed that a tremendous amount. I'm going to say almost everything that I've read that Peter's wrote and all the ideas he put out there and a lot of the stuff that Charlie put out there. Man, it is God-given, beautiful, gifted wisdom that I hope gets passed down for a long time and things that I'm trying to instill into our organization. I mean, it's beautiful how those things fit together. I love that you brought up duration. I never knew that. I recall you all meeting in the whiteboard. I think we all had lunch afterwards at the purple porch co-op. Rick tentatively accepted my invite. I don't know what he was doing. Bren was not playing Elite Tennis 10, 11 years ago around that meeting. So I didn't think that I had any other reason to be there. I wish in hindsight that I did have more wisdom. He looked up a picture of me and I was about 65 pounds heavier than I am now. And he was like, "What is that dude going to do on the tennis court? There's nothing. There's nothing he can do." He's booked by its cover. It's true, Brent, that you are half the man you used to be. But that anecdote around you saying, "I'm not sure how good I would be at that conventional PE game." One of the beliefs that we hold on to with Sator Grove and in life in general, again, this notion of radical integration. If it's works, it's got to work across all of reality. We're not looking to somehow bring life to Sator Grove that don't align with values that we want to live outside of Sator Grove. It just doesn't work. We've always said we just have to find a different profession if we can't figure out how to do this investing bit. But I think duration is one of the most powerful levers here. The traditional VC game. It's a game right now that mostly is played where time is not on anybody's side. You raise a bunch of money, usually at evaluation, that at the time is aspirational. And then you've got to just sprint to that next milestone in order to please an excited of investors. And then you've got to do it again, and then you're at the A round and then the B round, etc. One of the great counter voices to that is Alto's ventures, our friends Ho Han and Anthony and the team and their advice to all their founders who talked about this when he was on our podcast several years ago is actually to try to get the profitability as quickly as possible. Because that extension and extending duration extends your optionality. I would go over there. We have this crazy notion that sits at the centerpiece of our values at Cedar Grove, which is that love wins. I think most people just assume they look at my head shot and they think, oh, these guys are a bunch of hippies and that's cool, but that's also insane. And I'm not investing in that. I'm convinced if you look across history and Paul is and Greg, you look across history over the fullness of time. Love actually is the most powerful force. But in most systems of investing business and the other kind of human systems, it doesn't generally work that well. The big portion of this is when you compress your timeline, you have to begin to play some other games because over the short term, guess what? Love doesn't always win. It's really over this eternal arc, which is what we are lining toward. Hearing your talk, it reminds me of this from your Christianity when Lewis says, I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. It informs all of the other vantage points, maybe as a bit of a segue to talk more about work and permanent equity. What should our relationship with work be alongside our broader identity? The short term is an interesting thing, depending on what your definition of winning is. What does it mean to be a great man? What is greatness? There's a very limited definition of greatness that is popular in our culture of this singular titan of a man who makes this mark on history and is remembered. That is a great man. Nothing but flex. That is a pretty modern definition and that's a very limited definition from an aspirational standpoint. If you look at again, what sinners talked about is all the men, almost all of them that have achieved sort of titan level status are all quote unquote cautionary tales. I actually would say as my experience is that there's really no way to go wrong if you are operating from love, not for love. If I'm loved, I walk into a room no matter if it's a courtroom trial where I'm in the defendant or if I'm in a negotiation, I'm trying to think of a highly adversarial situation. If I go in there and I'm like, look, I'm loved no matter this outcome, I'm going to do that thing better and I'm going to perform and I'm going to show up better and my internal state of being. I'm going to have more joy and peace. I'm going to live a quote unquote great life no matter what the circumstances and outcome become. I think that leads into the discussion of what is the place of work. A lot of my career, my work was where I found my identity and purpose. It's where I asked people the question all day long every day, am I worthy? Do I matter? Do I belong? Will you love me?" And the problem is there's a rabbi who calls it fish love. You sit down and you have a piece of fish for dinner and you say, "Oh, this fish is incredible. I love this fish." Well, what are you saying? Well, I love this fish because of what it does for me. I'm consuming the fish. I'm eating the fish. I didn't know what love was, real love, until I met Jesus. Because I didn't have a category in my head of what it looked like to love something, to enjoy something without consuming it. This is where, for our work, if our work is to benefit us purely and to tell us that we are somebody who matters and somebody who belongs and to give us an opportunity to prove ourselves, I think that we are going to end up a cautionary tale. That's certainly the path that I've been on. When that started to invert and I started going to work and I started saying, "Okay, all this is a gift. I joke that I'm the Forrest Gump of Private Equity." People laugh at that and they're like, "Oh, that's self-deprecating." And if I get time to sit with somebody and tell them actually what really happened, they're like, "Oh my gosh, you really are the Forrest Gump of Private Equity." My goodness, you are incredibly blessed. I'm like, "I know. It's crazy. I don't know how I'm here." The more that we look at work is being a gift that we receive and being able to participate with God, the more that we can take ourselves less seriously at joke at the beginning of this podcast, or we're serious men doing serious things, we're compounding, serious work, we're financial professionals. Both organizations are registered with the SEC and FINRA. We have standards to uphold. This is serious stuff. The more that I believe that bullshit, the more that I get stressed out and I get uptight and I get irritable and frustrated and demanding with people. The more that I consider myself an unsurius person doing unsurius things and just trying to love people, everything sends to go way better. And I make way more money and everyone lives a way better life. It's the exact opposite. The image I have in my head of this is my dad when I was a kid. I was like, "Hey, son, today we're going to go build a deck. We've got some wood over here. We've got some nails. We're going to go build a deck." And I was like, "Yeah, dad, I'm going to go build a deck with you." And I get out there and I'm like, "Hammer in a way, I'm building this deck." And by the way, I look over and this deck is getting built. This is incredible. And then I come to realize that the tools I've been using are like the plastic toy, hammer, the nails are like little plastic nails. And I'm not actually hammering anything. My father's actually doing the work for me. But man, he loves being with me and loves having me out on that deck with him. And I get to participate with him and what he's doing. And I get to look around and I get to say, "Man, I had fun swinging my hammer." And it felt like I was really doing stuff. But when I look around, everything that I have has been given to me, everything's a gift. And I just get to enjoy the presence of my father. And I get to have fun and see who else shows up on the deck to help us. And we get to go on this adventure together. That is to me the picture of work that gives me joy and that gives me peace. And it gives me flourishing and prosperity. If that's the vision of work I have, I can go and leave it at the end of the day and not stress out and ruminate. Which by the way, I think rumination is actually what Mark Andreessen was talking about. I think he confused two very different concepts. One's introspection, which is incredibly valuable. Greatness could not come except through introspection and rumination, which is like an unhealthy self sabotage spin cycle downwards. But I think unfortunately if it's all on us and we're all self reliant and we have nowhere else to go to get hope, we can ruminate. And I think that's unhealthy. The more that I look at work open handed and just look at it as love actually does win short medium and long term. Depending on your definition of winning relationships are really what matter and that I can look at each person and say I have no idea why I'm in that room. Shoot, I met Paul. I thought that I was going to get a bunch of money from Notre Dame. I actually had this whole thing in my head that I was like, man, Notre Dame incredible institution. Great story history. Sure they have some idiots that work there. I mean Paul and Rick. But other than that, they're going to give me a bunch of money. And I'm going to be writing off into the sunset when I met with Notre Dame. They did not think highly of me. Paul, you and I liked each other, but unfortunately you didn't have any power. You were just a pretty face pretty face of public equity. Unfortunately, I didn't fall in that category, but they had no interest in me. I think it was what a 20 minute meeting and they were like, this is laughable. In fact, one of my favorite quotes from all of my fundraising was you're telling me the opposite of private equity is going to give me a better return than private equity. I'm sure my answer was yes sir. I was laughed out of the room. But my point is that I thought in my head God put me in that room because Paul was going to give me a big bag of money and I was going to go do good things with it. If Notre Dame had offered me 20 or $30 million and said, hey, we want to do a permanent capital vehicle with you. Here's $20 or $30 million. I would have taken it in a heartbeat and signed my life away. And that would have been absolutely the wrong decision. I would have been beholden to Notre Dame. I wouldn't have gotten to work with you guys. I really wouldn't have gotten to know you guys very well at all. My career would have been stunted. I would need it way more capital. I wouldn't have been able to get it. I've realized that the more that I want to hold on and control the more I know for sure the reason why I'm there. It turns out poorly. I have no idea why God puts people in my life. I have no idea. And just all I can do is just love them and take the next step and develop a relationship and see what happens. Brent, it's an incredible story. Huge mistake for us. And I still rue the day that our buddy, Patrick or Shannasey stole the deal instead. And the rest is history. He's never didn't got to. So it's always somehow we all benefited. It's full circle. The letter I referred to you had written it to monger like two weeks prior to our faithful meeting. You were talking about manners being slow to anger amongst a lot of other things you've gotten better in that category. Brent. Not quite as onri as I used to be. Is that what you're saying? The idea of uninhabited island. So no competition playing an infinite game and then system design. And that relates to like incentives team. We could talk a little bit about that with permanent equity. I wanted to bring this up generally, but now I'm thinking about it in different white. You coming into that meeting wanting institutional capital. It's almost like none of us knew the system as well as we do now will keep learning how this world works and how investing works and. And then we had a major problems and all that. But it was kind of the opposite of everything you had written among. If you have been beholden to an institutional investor. If the outset while you were still in this hyper learning phase. The growth would have been stunted and another lesson on things maybe don't seem as they aren't as they seem to be. And there's so much more we don't know that's obviously the case today when we listen to this conversation five years from now. And I'm going to laugh about this. I really want to talk about the whiteboard you and I have like two hours. You said you flew in you're the entire day in our old jobs typically you know an hour maybe in a meeting and then you're moving on to the next thing. We're in that little glass room and I'm looking around. I have the whole day you look to be like do you have a whiteboard and I think we had just convinced some folks said it which have one of these roving like boards we move it into the name to the expert room name after father has bird. You spend like an hour running on this whiteboard another three hours talking about the whiteboard. You've actually done what you said there it was mindset of the 2.0 something different. It wasn't about building firm it was about building a new model and I remember you like on each category of sourcing operations would end up becoming capital camp main street communications sales marketing. You actually have the playbook and you have this idea that it could scale. What was that vision Mike is you were looking retrospect. What that was and then how do you think it's changed 10 years hence the listeners that may not know I knew absolutely nothing about how the capital markets worked I knew very little about actually traditional private equity. I knew so little that I remember I emailed Paul probably two days before the visit. Hey I usually wear blue jeans can I wear blue jeans and he was like absolutely not please do not wear blue jeans you need to put on real big boy clothes do not show up in blue jeans. Okay I'm glad I asked he's like yeah no problem usually like super nice about I'd never been in front of another institutional investor is real raw straight off the streets of Columbia Missouri. I had no idea that the norm was to spend an hour with somebody so I just figured like hey he wants to have me up for the day I'm going to spend a day I've booked the entire day like let's just roll. So anyway ever in your gratitude for the kinds that you showed in a complete idiot punk kid all those years ago and that you didn't make me feel stupid and early is more stupid than I should have felt. You said well what do you want to do and I said well give me a whiteboard and I'll show you. It pretty much mapped out exactly what we have done fast forward 10 years from then and taking that whiteboard and said just execute on that whiteboard. That's pretty much what we've done the design was not used debt. I really wanted to have capital so that I wasn't capital constrained I said look there's an ocean of these small to medium sized businesses that are out there. There's going to be the silver tsunami all of the demographic data and you look at who owns these businesses the vast majority are owned by people who are old and getting older within next two to three years is what I thought about time. The cresting of the silver tsunami which turns out not to be true really interestingly not because of advancements in health care especially for on the wealthier side of me if you think about the types of businesses were buying or three plus million dollars in free cash flow they're typically closely held that means that the owner is going to be. Well the first thing that I think about the silver tsunami is going to be wealthy before we give them a check those people are living longer and working longer the silver tsunamis just cresting now I think probably over the next five years because it really was between advancements and health care and then all the Wars and all the things. It's created an instability that's causing people to work longer as well. So we've seen like a 10, 12, even maybe even the 15-year shift in retirement amongst a lot of people that own these businesses, but I actually was glad because I thought I'd maybe even missed the tsunami, but we hadn't, I wanna have long-term capital. I wanna buy these things and hold them and make 'em better and cash flow 'em. You ask me all kinds of great questions. Well, how do you find these things? I said, well, you'd find 'em by putting out a lot of content in the world and hosting things and telling people who you are and you'll attract to write people and repel the wrong people. And you were like, oh, that's interesting and ask me a bunch of questions about that. And that's pretty much what we did. And it worked to date. Every single deal we've done has been an inbound. We've never gone outbound for any capital. 100% of the investors we have are all inbound. They've always raised their hand and said, hey, either I gotta introduce to you through somebody or I listened to or read something you wrote. We'd love to have a conversation slowly over time and we don't raise capital very often. We develop a relationship and then occasionally we raise capital and there are investors. How we found employees is the exact same way too. It's we tell the world who we are and what we're looking for and people come inbound. And so it's been 10 years of capital and opportunities and people are the three categories that we kinda sit in the middle and it's like a three-sided teeter totter. We've been able to level up and develop these systems and processes from a selection of business model standpoint. We've really honed in on two main factors that drive a lot of our decision making. One is margin. So the higher your margin, the more important you are to a customer and the faster you get paid, the more important you are to a customer. And if you get paid fast and have high margin, you're really, really important to a customer. We found out that when there's turbulence, the things that are large components of a larger business ecosystem get the most scrutiny and small components get less scrutiny. And so this is not what we thought 10 years ago, but now we're looking to be a small component in a much larger ecosystem that has durable demand and we're looking for whatever the part we play in that to be a smaller but highly compensated and quick paid participant in that system. We made plenty of mistakes in the process and learned that the hard way. And we can talk about that if that's interesting, but those are the types of businesses now that we gravitate towards. A big difference in our team that did wipe out this out was I didn't want to have a traditional private equity model where you had the partner driven model where a sort of partner is responsible for doing it all, finding the deal, negotiating the deal, delogancing the deal, documenting the deal, closing the deal, managing the deal, all those things. Those people are incredible that can do that. I think they are extremely rare and usually they're not good at everything. They're good at a portion of it and they're mediocre at the other parts of it. I firmly believe in Adam Smith's divisions of labor. We wanted to find people that could operate in their zone of genius instead of a breeding system where we have traditional private equity partners. Like I mapped it out on that whiteboard, we have incredibly intelligent, thoughtful, driven people at every stage, the lead every stage and they work together in an overlapping manner. Now it makes us pretty unusual, pretty different. We do virtually all of our diligence and documentation in-house. We're not outsourcing judgment to a third party law firm or third party accounting firm to tell us if we should buy a deal or not or how much we should pay for it. It's all done the work's done internally because we believe that we'd rather go more slowly but I initially thought it may be because it's to be slow but we want to get to know these businesses because we're gonna own them for a long time. We're not gonna flip these things. It's been amazing to see how it's worked out. We've tweaked the model along the way. I was very anti-bored as a director's for a long time. We've actually moved now to a small board model for a variety of reasons. You learned things on the way. What I put on that whiteboard 10 years ago, it's largely been done. I compare that to our own experience just over the last five years with Sator Grove. I can't believe how much evolution we've had to go through to get to a place of relative coherence. I guess I wasn't in that meeting but I recently relistened to what I think was maybe your first podcast ever, which was about 10 years ago as well. Maybe six, nine months after you and Paul were together with Patrick. It was one of the very first invests like the best. I think back in 2016 and the title was cultivating the disaster resistant compound interest machine. There's just so much of these insights that were already in place. You're still a young guy. You were a very young guy then. For me, it begs a question. You studied politics and poverty at Washington and Lee. So you didn't learn this stuff necessarily there. I think you dropped out of your MBA program. How would you characterize your evolution as an investor and your education as an investor? Patrick first reached out to me and he was an analyst. I can't remember what his title was. It was nothing special. Some firm and I had no idea who he was at all. And we got to know each other through Twitter and then he asked if he could visit. We got to be friends. Ultimately ended up doing some work together. And I remember him telling me, he's like, "Hey, I think I'm gonna start a podcast." And I was like, "Brother, world doesn't need another podcast. "Man, don't do that. "That's not gonna be successful. "It's gonna be a complete waste of time." I remember when he asked me, he's like, "Hey, I understand, but would you be "one of the first handful of guests or whatever?" And I was like, "Man, for you as a friend, "yeah, and of course, I'll do you a solid." The lesson in there is never take career advice from me. So anybody who's listening to this, anything that I say that's career advice, just completely ignored. I'm an idiot. I remember $28.29 made more than a million dollars. For the first time in my life, I was like, "Oh my gosh, like I'm rich. "We can fly anywhere on Southwest Airlines. "Any time we want, we have the most money "in the history of the world. "This is incredible." And I was like, "Well, now what do I do with it?" I had no background in investing. I didn't really understand a lot of the basics. And I knew I didn't though. I mean, that's maybe the one thing that I had is an awareness, God forbid I call it introspection about what I do and don't know. I realized, and I was just way out of my depth, I was like, "Hey, what do I do? "Do I just take this money and hold it "in like a bank account and then buy other businesses with it?" I didn't really know what I was doing that first time. I mean, the first business I ever bought, it's just again, another side note. I remember getting an under L.O.I. and I was like, "Oh, you're tired of my lawyer." I was like, "I don't know anything we're doing." Do you know what we're doing? He's like, "Oh, we gotta do diligence." And I literally googled, "DO diligence." Do diligence. I didn't have any idea what I was doing at all. I, in fact, I got two weeks out from closing and I was like, "Wait a minute. "Okay, so if I give him all my money "and he takes all his money out of the business, "how do I make payroll?" And so I called him up on the phone and I was like, "Hey, his name is Mark." I was like, "Mark, I got this weird thing. "Maybe you can help me answer this. "I give you all my money. "You take all the money out of the business. "How do I make payroll?" And he's like, "Well, you gotta line a credit, right?" And I was like, "No, I didn't get one of those." And he's like, "Well, the business is gonna immediately fail." And I was like, "That's a problem. "I guess we can't do the deal." And he was like, "Yeah, I guess we can't do the deal." Like, "You're an idiot." And I was like, "I for sure am an idiot." That's correct. We've all spent a bunch of money and we're all down the path. I was like, "Could you win me the money?" He ended up graciously giving me a line of credit on his own business that he sold to me so that I could keep it in business after I bought the business. So, true force gum, a private equity. But afterwards, so I do that deal. We started doing really well. I said, "Well, the other businesses I had outside of that business started doing well, had all this cash flow. I knew I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know what to do." And so I just started studying all the great investors and I started trying to figure out like, "How do people actually make money?" That was the question that I started with was, "How do people make money?" I started studying Buffett and Munger. I printed out every Berkshire letter. I started studying this guy Howard Marx. I printed off literally every single Howard Marx letter. I just started meticulously. It was like my job for about a year. I just meticulously went through and I would stop. Every time I would not understand a concept, I would stop and I would highlight it. I would not move on until I had mastered the concept until I felt comfortable with the concept. And so I would read and read and read. I mean, I was reading at that point probably five or six hours a day. I mean, I kind of looked at it as my full-time job was to figure out what the heck to do with this money that now I had. Now I started studying Malone and I, you know, all the Thorn-Dike people in the outsiders. I studied all of them. I wish Will had come out with his book slightly earlier so it would have saved me a lot of time in curation and I could have just zapped my brain with what I should have done. As an example, all those guys in the outsiders do things differently. And they all have a slightly different way of looking at the world. And so what I realized was, okay, I resonated with a lot of what Berkshire was doing, but not all of it. And I resonated with a lot of howard Marx thought, but not all of it. I could see the entrepreneurial spirit like John Malone, Teladine and Henry Singleton, all these different people. I would kind of take bits and pieces of it and then I would make it my own. I think you got to study the greats, study how other people think about the world in order to make your own music. You got to study the people have done it before you, before you can make it your own. And so that was my path. I mean, that was my education. I didn't really have anybody too early on. It was doing it with me. I found Eric Jorgensen and Shane Parrish at one point. We kind of had a text chain going where it was like the nerd crew and a guy named Jeff Inello shout out to Jeff too. We would all share learnings and that's how I ended up meeting Peter Kaufman at Berkshire meeting and that's how I ended up meeting you guys and life's weird like that. - It's interesting thinking about how you landed the mid-set alchemy of ideas. I'm really interesting in center of structure. The old adage show me the incentives. I'll show you the outcome. This is different than private equity. You outlined in the letter this year a bit on fees that was pretty eye-opening. You want to share that? We're broadly with folks. It's fascinating. Let alone that you're 27 year life fund. You can hold things a long time. How did you stumble upon these answers and what were you sharing around fees? - This is like common knowledge that the institutional private equity is two in 20. So you get 2% rip on the total asset value that's kind of under management. And then you can. get 20% to be upside. What's really guaranteed, and there's nothing to do with your performance is that 2%. We're all comfort seeking, we're all safety seeking creatures. What does traditional private equity do? If you say you raise $100 million starter fund in private equity, what's your incentive? You're incentive is to raise a $400 million and then a billion and then $2 billion and then $5 billion. Then biggest capital base is you can race. Why? Because you get that 2% off of it. And the 2% is really where you get rich consistently. And I just knew for my heart, I'd found this little niche in smaller companies, huge base of those companies. Like if you look at the pyramid structure of American business, as you get towards the bottom, as you get to the lower end of the lower middle market, the base just gets enormous. There's a tremendous number of companies that make $2 million, $3 million, $4 million, $5 million a year. There's very few companies that make $50 million a year. So as you raise more capital, everyone's competing for the same known assets and it becomes a much more efficient market. I joked in my, I think it was 2017 annual letter right after I raised the first round of capital that I believed this area of the market is the most inefficient legal market in the world. Maybe the market for cocaine or something is more inefficient. But it's the most inefficient legal market in the world. And what that means is that skill matters. I wanted to be in an area of the market that was off the run or skill mattered. The letter to Charlie Munger as you referenced, being on this beautiful island where there's opportunities everywhere, that's how I felt when I first realized what I was operating in the lower end of the lower middle market. I just didn't want any incentive to move up. I think there are two ways to run an investment firm. You're either running investment firm to create mediocre outcomes, acceptable outcomes on the largest capital base you can have, which is one path. And I think that's the path that most people take. The size of their AUM and their success in that model is basically dictated by somewhat by returns, but mostly by storytelling and by deal making with LPs and debt providers. That's one path. Frankly, that path has just never interested me. I wanted to keep a capital base fairly small, but shoot the lights out in returns. And that's the other path. You're going to try to generate the highest absolute return you can or create the largest firm you can. We take no fees of any kind. We take no reimbursements of any kind. There's no cash that comes from the LPs or the portfolio companies. Really important. Neither one. To the GP outside, if we take a percentage of free cash flow as we return it back to investors. So the only way we get paid is on real cash-- we call it beer money. Unless you can buy beer with it. We don't charge fees on it. It's real deal beer money that goes back to our investors and we take a percentage of that. I don't think legally I can talk about what that percentage actually is for a variety of SEC rules, but it's higher than 20%. Significantly higher than 20%. Why is that? Because there's no two. Because we're not taking a fee. And so a lot of people are like, wait a minute, your fees are higher than traditional private equity. And we push back and say, OK, have you run the math on what you're paying with that 2% and by the way, how the 2% interacts with the risk side of the equation? The short answer is most people don't want to think. I guess most people are not introspective. And they just say, well, what you're doing is more expensive than 20. And so the answer is no. And what I was really trying to show in the annual letter this year is when you actually strip out the returns and say at the end of the day, all that matters is total return on capital. And then who gets to keep one? That's all that matters. Total return on capital, who gets to keep one? I think the latest institutional investor magazine or one of the associations puts out all the fees is like 106 types of fees that private equity charges. 106, I think, is all the ways that categorizes types of fees. We charge one of those, literally only one of those. And so when you compare 106 different types of fees to one fee, you've got to be really clear on how do the 106 fees all add up? All the matters is how big's the pie and who gets what slice of it? Private equity traditionally gets a very large slice of it. I say in the letter, it depends on how you calculate things, but 30, 40, even 50% of the returns go to private equity, depending on the return profile and the situation and the risk preference and all that stuff. It's a much higher percentage than 20, which is what people initially think. The key other number that you had after describing that percentage is two thirds of fees are fixed here regardless of performance. This is one of the things we learn so much in our former lives in the institutional investing world. You happy to pay for a high quality product where there's win-win outcomes. But when someone's guaranteed to make that much of the fees, essentially no matter the outcome, not only is it win-lose, you just know where those incentives will take you. When you see this often enough, it leads to bigger funds or selling your winner before you should. If you talk to a traditional private equity, you ask them, where's the biggest heartache? They don't talk about the businesses that went under. They talk about the business that they had to sell prematurely, that they knew was just an absolute banger. And they had to sell it because they had to raise another fund to keep the firm going. And so how do you do that? You got to put points on the board. So you take a short-term pop, a really great outcome to show your next set of investors that you can do good things. You let this incredible compounding opportunity, which are rare. It's really, really, really, really rare. So hard to find these opportunities and when you do, for God's sakes, don't sell them. That's our whole model. Never be a force buyer, never be a force seller. Largely things are going to work out. So much folly goes on just by having to buy something and having to sell something. As dumb as that sounds, I think you can generate outsize returns if you do nothing other than have average intelligence, average picking, average management, average leadership, all these things can just be average. As long as you just don't have to buy something and you don't have to sell something, I think you'll generate pretty significant upsize returns compared to the market. There's so much room to innovate within the investment management industry. All you hear about is how maturated the industry is and all these conventions and these asset classes that were once cottage industries are now grown up and this is how you do things. And I just love this call to build your own mosaic. And it aligns very much with how Paul and I thought about say to grow white sheet of paper, what do we want to build? Everything's possible. None of the ideas were ours. None of the singular ideas were novel. They had all had their root in somebody else who influenced us, our operating budget, you know, Nick sleep, nomad partnership, sleep, Zakarya, Will Barker, Josh Terraceoff. We had seen other investors operate with this corporate orientation. It's like, okay, that makes sense to us. Build a foundation inside your investment firm. Chris Han, the Children's Investment Fund, decades before we built, Seder Grove Foundation. But when you put them all together and all the work that still needs to be done around I think alignment of incentives, you've certainly shown one very compelling path based on first principles. I think a lot of people will walk through what you did if they take the time to think about it and say this is very actually rational. It's like kind of classic. It's going to piss off a lot of the lawyers and GPs that have done it the other way, but it makes really good sense. Peter Kaufman would say, this is win-win stuff. And so I just hope folks who are out there who, whether you already have your investment firm built or if you have a dream someday of building a firm just know there's like so much white space to do things a little bit differently or maybe a lot differently. There's so much about our industry that could use renewal. It's important to understand that it's so easy to listen to people who tell you that you don't know what you're doing, that you're an idiot that you're gonna fail. When I first started raising the first fund, we had nothing. Small track record using our own capital, compounding at a very high rate of return, but it was small. I remember us telling, hey, here's what we want, the fee structure to be, here's how we want it to work, here's all the, and we're so different in so many different ways. No debt, long term, totally different fee model, different how we structure the firm. Everything was completely different. I had numerous people who were way more experienced than me, way more educated than I was, who told me all the reasons why I was gonna fail. Your colleagues, another day, no freaking way. They told me, no way. A hundred people can tell you know, one person or two people can tell you, yes, and you can still go do it. You can just go do things. I would just encourage anybody who's listening to this who says, yeah, yeah, but there's so many headwinds standing out and being differentiated and having people tell you you're wrong is a lot better than not mattering. Our firm, we create a very strong reaction in people, people look at us and say, either that's the dumbest thing that I've ever seen and that's never gonna work, or I totally get it and I'm with you. I have a couple of their friends right now that are really struggling to raise capital in the private equity world because they look and sound like everyone else. And if you look and sound like everyone else, you become a commodity. And it kind of goes back to even tying this into the personal side, what should work look like? Are you wearing a mask where you look and sound like every other person who you'd expect to look and sound like you? Are you playing a character in the theater? Are you in private equity and you're in the private equity theater and this is how private equity people dress, this how private equity people talk? This is what we read. We all read the same things. We all listen to the same things. We all regurgitate the same bullshit over and over and over again. You've commoditized yourself. You personally, you're commoditized and your firms commoditized. And in that case, the winner in that, if it's a commodity thing is just gonna be strictly transactional, there's gonna be zero values to it. It's gonna be, what are the returns you can put up and what have you done for me lately? And to me, that is the path to hell, personally and professionally. I tell a lot of folks who might want to be unconventional in the way that they want to build, it comes back to duration. How patient can you be? You've got novel ideas. Maybe they're not accepted immediately, but you need to build everything all at once. Do you really need to launch with hundreds of millions of dollars on day one and for it all to look clean and crisp? If I had launched with $100 million, and day one, I would have lost all the money. I needed to get my ass kicked for like a decade in order to be able to take on capital. I had to get educated by learning and failing through honestly years of misery and heartache and difficulty and confusion. I don't know how many people a month come in my door and say, "Hey, I want to do what you've done. "I'm going to raise 50 or $100 million." And I'd never bought a business. I've never done a deal. And I'm like, "Hey, man, you can do that "and you're probably a lot smarter than I am. "And maybe it'll all work out." If I had done that, I would have lost all the capital. I would have had a completely different career at this point. It was actually a blessing that I had to grind it out with little capital for a long time to be able to hone the skills and the systems and come to these realizations. Compounding it should be slow. If it looks like a rocket ship from day one, it's probably going to be pretty flimsy and you're going to have to get lucky. It's in our contracts that we have to talk about AI in every session, our agents will all revolt. And I tell Paul, like, "Look, this is the reason why "I had never built any hard skills. "I'm not disruptable." - Rick has encoded or opened Excel in 15 years and it's perfect. He hasn't for do it now. So I'm good. So I don't know how you're feeling. I know you have no fear of man, but artificial intelligence is coming for you too. You've been writing a lot about it. I know you've got some strong views, but maybe just give us a thumbnail sketch of what you've learned, what you're observing in your life and in business. And what does this mean for all of us? - Light switch went on for me, probably 18 months ago. I really saw what was coming and I was like, "Oh my gosh, AI is going to change everything. "It's the next wave, it's the next internet, "it's the next disruption. "We found a PhD in AI, we hired him, "went through a whole bunch of experiments all last year. "Not all of them were complete failures, "but just did not turn out the way we thought it was going to. "Things would break, things wouldn't work." And by this way, this guy is fantastic. There's not impugment on him at all. In fact, I think he's great. The technology just wasn't there until about November, December of last year. All of a sudden, everything changed. When Claude Coer came out, it brought, what the coders had been able to do maybe two or three months before it brought it to the layman, now you're able to just build things. And I mean, I remember this revelation late January. There were a couple big projects to be working on all last year, AI based projects, and we couldn't get any of them to work. And we just kind of given up and moved on. And Claude Coer comes out. Within about 15, 20 minutes, we had created one of the projects that we'd worked for five months on and had hundreds of hours in. It took us about 15, 20 minutes to create it, and it worked flawlessly. And we were like, holy crap, this is going to change everything. We're kind of living in the midst of that now. I mean, in the last three months, we built more software and have impact to the businesses more positively than, I mean, the previous 10 years combined. Our decision making hasn't changed. Our relationship first mentality hasn't changed. AI is going to disrupt the things, frankly, that I don't think humans maybe were built to do. I think that one of my arguments that I made in one of the essays about AI that I wrote was that a lot of Marxism is based on the pushback, which I think in some ways is rightly placed that industrialization made men into machines. We're not built to be machines. We're not made to be machines. What gives us joy and peace and hope and all these things are not sitting at the same desk every day or sitting on an assembly line and punching the same thing and doing the same thing repetitively over and over again. We're built to be like God. We're built to be creators and innovators and relational. My hope is that AI actually removes a lot of the need for temptation towards treating each other like machines and being mechanistic and how we think about the world and actually frees us up to be far more relational and how God made us to actually be. And so I actually have a lot of hope around AI. I would say like any technology, we as a human race do not have a great track record of taking technology and freeing us up to be more like God. We have a lot of track record of taking technology and trying to be God and trying to displace God from the brick and the tower of Babel on. First opportunity to use technology didn't go great and hasn't gone great since then. So I think there's gonna be a lot of trials and tribulations, a lot of pain along the way. I think there's gonna be a lot of temptation to isolate and become self reliant. Those that can take a step back and look at the provision and the abundance that comes from AI, have a real opportunity to invest more in their marriages, more in their friendships, more in their children and be able to be more creative and passionate. God like in the best ways, go and participate with God and co-work with God as opposed to being machines and cogs in a wheel. It reminds me of Paul and Philippians talking about Jesus not taking his God likeness as something to be grasped but rather something to be poured out to others and that pouring out is the Greek is a canosis. It's a self-empting. And if somehow this technology enables us to through even greater creativity, provide even greater levels of self-empting, of service, of self-expression, all kind of at once, it could be an even brighter future. If we had to kind of put you on the spot and say, so far to date has AI helped or hurt your businesses collectively, what would you say? - For sure, help. Of all the portfolios, maybe in the world, we're probably most beneficial. This has to be most beneficial for AI. I mean, we're doing brick and mortar things from a competitive standpoint. I mean, we're able to bring resources to these smaller companies that are unusual for that size of company. And so we're in a really good position. I wrote another essay on this topic. AI will create more disparities between those who have and those who don't have. It creates inequality. All technology basically creates greater inequality. Like we are born equal in worth. We are born unequal and talent. If you take all three of us on this call, maybe Rick would spare slightly better, but like put me 300 years ago, I'm just not gonna go great for me. I'm not gonna go great as a farmer. I'd be the guy, the crazy guy, trying to do all kinds of other stuff. And I just need to plow my field and tend to the sheep or whatever, and I'm just not gonna do that very well. Every time technology advances, and I think AI is an acceleration of this, there's going to be a magnification of certain skill sets. And I think the skill sets of creativity and relational development and communication are gonna be skyrocketing, I think in value. In a world of abundance, what really matters is that you have the wisdom and discernment to put resources in the right place and make the right bets. Wisdom only gets more important. My heart really goes out to the guy who's maybe a mid-tier lawyer at a large firm. There's a real danger for people in that position that AI is going to replace a lot of that work. There's gonna be a lot of pain and suffering in the short term. And maybe that guy is able to get through it and pivot and do something different. I think there's gonna be a lot of people who look at and say, "Hey, I did everything right, and I'm gotten screwed, and I'm not okay with that, and there's gonna be a lot of pain and suffering associated with that." And software land, that seems very scary right now because that code is antiquated and with co-work and other tools that have come out here in the first half of '26, feels like you can rewrite this stuff essentially instantly. Well, we're finding, I just got back from Europe, actually, again, with Will Thornick and a few other mutual friends at a conference with a bunch of serial acquires, is that AI is unearthing just another almost like classical challenge with business, definitely small businesses and large businesses have their own version of this. And that's just change management. The COO of one of our companies created this very simple 2x2, which is, "Are you willing to change? "Can you change?" Which box do you fit in? So those who are willing to change and who can do it are like thriving in this new world. Even in software companies, they're not being disrupted. And police, they are the eight and four of those SMBs they're serving. If you're willing to change and you don't really know how to, there's a period now where you can get to speed and maybe do that. If you're kind of in the other quadrant and don't want to change and are unable to, it's where it's very dangerous. Just like with any technology, what a lot of our companies have learned is this is an amazing time going offence. Like what you said, you can bring resources to bear that a lot of small companies can't otherwise have, just because they're busy doing their thing, maybe they don't have that broader perspective, but it's still really hard to make people use these incredible tools. How are you guys dealing with that? How do you, across these myriad industries, actually just get people to want to change? All we can do is help them see it and give them the opportunity. And at the end of the day, I mean, people got to make their choices, right? And some of the industries, it's not really applicable to a lot of the work that they're doing, or in the fence building business, swimming pool building. There are areas where the actual construction and the actual physical labor of those things is untouched by AI. How can you do the administrative stuff better, the marketing better, the finance better, all those things, we call it everything tastes like chicken layer of business that we like to be involved in? So it's really helpful for us to be able to, through our boards of directors, help educate those people in the companies, and then just tell the CEOs, hey, we're helping do some work over here. You should notice anything other than increased output, better efficiency and what you're doing. And they're like, great, that's no problem at all. Now, some of our CEOs are gun hoe and actually are in businesses that are e-commerce based. They are running full speed and they're automating teams and they're doing incredible work. What we're trying to do is, we're trying not to lay off anybody right now as a result of AI. What we're trying to do is up tool people. So we're trying to. and have them step up into better work and bigger work instead of letting them go. We've got a lot of AI tools now for customer service. We have a couple direct consumer businesses. We have customer service people in those businesses. Now AI is able to handle, call it 70, 75% of the customer service needs. That doesn't mean we're laying off 75% of the customer service staff, what we're selling them now is, okay, your job is now to provide a much higher level of service and you're able to have more time per customer. So really make it count and let's make the outcomes, let's drive outcomes for our top customers way more than we could in the past. They're happy to do it and by the way, this goes back to my core thesis of like less like machines. Everyone wants to be working on higher and better uses at things of their time. And so the customer service person who's writing the 70 of sizing thing back to the customer a day, they're like, oh my gosh, I can't wait to get home this sucks. The person who's like, oh, this person just bought $12,000. They needed to be rerouted to this new shipping address and there's some customs issue. That's a way more interesting problem to tackle than the 70th thing of the same thing of the day. My hope is that we're treating people like we want to be treated. We're trying to live out what we actually talk about. Certainly imperfectly, we have to apologize all the time, but depending on your worldview, AI either gives you the opportunity to create abundance or gives you the opportunity to cut a bunch of people and reduce a bunch of costs and suck out as much cash as quickly as you can. You have to make a decision which life do you want to lead? What do you think's the right way long term? I'll leave it up to your listeners to make that decision. You know what becomes even more valuable in the age of AI? Tennis. Tennis? Yes, tennis. Tennis is always more valuable. Right answer, Brenta was not going to be what I was going to say. Well, indirectly it was. I was going to say building community, which you and your team are just masterful. I actually got to Main Street, Kaplacamp for the first time ever this past year. Paul's been going, I've almost gone a couple times. As you both know, I don't leave the Sunshine State very much. And when I do, I've got high expectations for what's going to happen. And I am telling you, I know you're not looking for more people to go to this event because you've got plenty of demand. I was completely blown away. I'm in hook line sinker every year. It might be because I think one day we actually did play tennis three times in a single day. When DA Wallick showed up, he was speaking twice the next morning. He's like, pulls me aside. He's like, listen, I just want to be clear. I'm here for the tennis. I had to actually go out for a third time that night with Matt and hit more with him, which I never minded. That guy is actually incredibly talented for not playing very much tennis. I guess it's not surprising given everything else. He's picked up musician, biotech investor. I want to ask you kind of in closing, I do want to take these are sort of the two topics. You're passionate for building community. And actually, as you've written about tennis is something you love. But I think you've derived a lot of learnings too, just from playing, but starting with Main Street, which is in September this year, little different timing, which should be great. We got incredible weather in November, but I think we're all blown away. What are the ingredients behind putting together two or three days of what felt to so many that I talk due to be just very magical? And you want to talk about innovating off of like the typical investor business summit conference, whatever, it feels nothing like that. And yet, I'm sure business was done. Transactions were made, I'm sure. We agree, we agree, we agree, sure into the 20 person barrel sauna on the back of a trailer. They were sitting outside the event. One point I was so committed to that barrel sauna. They were literally started like wheeling it away while I was still in it. What a great way to start every morning, like 6am, cold morning, back and forth to these ice bath, cold punches and this beautiful barrel sauna. We're actually, we did make a ton of friends. I think you could fit 15, 20 people in there. What have you learned? I mean, you've been at this for a long time thinking about how you bring people together well. What would you want to share? Most events have nothing to do with community. Most events are transactional people who are coming to transact. You're looking for who your target is and to try to talk to enough people for a short amount of time where you can size them up and see what can you get out of them. You're looking over the person's shoulder to see the next person as soon as you can. The content's kind of, it's fine, it's mediocre. You're not going to really learn anything. You're going to do business out in the hallway. You're going to need some crappy food and you could write it off. That's the typical conference. I've gone to those conferences. They were so sucking for me. I never wanted to go to another one. I really just started thinking in the same way about private equities. What do we really want? Like if I'm to go to an event, what is the thing that I would leave and say, "Man, that was something that I want to go back to every year. I can't wait for the next one." And really what it came down to for me was I desired actual real friendship before transaction. Like doesn't always work like that. Sometimes you got to do transaction first and friendships grow out of it. But man, leading with transaction is just not a good way to live life. I don't know how else to say it. And I've learned because I've done it. I've been a transactional plenty in my life and it's served me poorly. And so when I think about designing Main Street Summit, I'm like, okay, how do I get people an opportunity to collide and create an atmosphere where people feel cared for? It's really hard when you're hungry or tired or you feel constrained to not feel transactional. So one of the things we intentionally try to do is create abundance. Everywhere you go, there's an abundance of food, abundance of drinks. It's always available. We try to create a setting where you can be exposed to new things and to interesting things and to activities where you can do things together, shooting guns with the Navy seals or playing tennis or doing a barrel sauna or creating a custom knife. I mean, we actually have a knife forger there or seeing a crazy firework display out of a biplane over the Missouri River, which was another thing we did. We had to actually have two boats and dive teams on the Missouri River in case the guy crashed. All kinds of crazy stuff was going on. All these things is to take 15-ish hundred people and we have 34 locations, 35 locations all throughout downtown Columbia, Missouri. So we take over the entire town, the coffee shops, the bookstores, the art galleries, all the things. And we converted into one big opportunity to create friendships. And the message from stage is, hey, I want you to show up as your real you. I want you to take off the masks, get comfortable, eat some good food, have some fun. And we try to design it not just for extroverts. Every event is designed only for extroverts. So if your introverted is like, oh my God, what am I doing here? I hate every minute of this. We try to actually design it for introverts. We give lots of opportunity for quiet space, space where you can recharge. We want to give opportunities for small groups to gather, breaking up in the lunches and dinners and giving lots of meaningful opportunities for collision. It don't feel forced, it felt very serendipitous. And really the overall purpose of all this is I hope you meet a new friend. I hope you're able to be the real you. That's the stories we've heard. I mean, we've heard of a lot of deals getting done. We've heard of a lot of value created. That's all secondary. That will all come as a result of relationship, community. Well, it's a beautiful happening. Everybody rowing in the same direction, being delightful and delighting folks who are there. And I didn't know there were any knives or guns that's not my speed. Well, not with your long hair like that, and sound a lot. It just shows you there's plenty there for anybody. I think for you and I, as you get older, sport is great because it helps keep you in shape. And it's been valuable. I know in your journey toward getting more fit and gaining more vitality. And I think for both of us, tennis is kind of more than that. You've written a little bit one of your colleagues from permanent equity was talking about how you really like to play singles because there's enough about it that's fair. If you prepare, if you put in the work, there's enough you can control a lot. And yet there's also still plenty of chance. You do have an opponent. They can have their best day or not a good day. What does tennis taught you? And particularly like things that you feel like you've been able to sort of port over to the rest of your work in life? I'm here because of tennis. I'm a person because of tennis because my dad was my mom's tennis coach. I am the byproduct of a love for tennis. Both my parents were in grad school at the University of Colorado. My dad was getting his PhD. My mom was getting your masters. My dad was putting himself through his PhD program by coaching tennis. He was a multi sport athlete in college and a tennis player and teaching tennis in Boulder. He's a lot of very interesting stories. Me and my mom, and so here I am, I grew up playing a tennis to some degree, but I actually really settled in on basketball. Basketball was my thing until I realized as a fairly short, relatively unathletic overweight kid that was probably not going to be a good outcome long term. Those roles were all taken in every NBA team at the time. Yeah, exactly. I didn't see a lot of people that looked like me playing professional basketball. So I decided to get back into tennis and played all four years of high school and I was supposed to play in college. Washington Lee had an incredible D3 team. It was always top five ranked. So I wasn't going to make the varsity team. I probably would have been a hitting partner, but I got a bad concussion right before school and couldn't do that. And so I kind of dropped it for at least 10 years, if not 12 or 13 years. I put on 50 pounds in my 20s. I remember having this realization, my wife and I, we were in the mountains and she wanted to go hiking with me. I couldn't go hiking. I had a little over 250 pounds and my joints just ached and I was out of breath. And I didn't realize I was so maniacally focused on making money and being quote unquote successful in business. I just completely lost sight of my health. My 30s started to get it back, really struggled, yo-yo diated until I was 40. And then I basically said, hey, I need to take this so seriously that I need to make this basically my job until I can get it figured out. Start breaking it down, rebuild everything. A lot of counseling around food, lot of. of exploring family history and why I wanted to eat so much and what's kind of in the suit and then completely rebuilding my habits. And I went from working out once every two or three weeks to working out every day and complete identity shift. I called myself a fat kid. I was an excuse to do all kinds of fat kid things and honestly had friends who said, "Hey, can you stop doing that? You don't need to damn yourself. You can be fit, you can be healthy." I went from over 250 pounds. I think I'm high 170s now and it's definitely transformed my tennis game. So tennis is a lot easier when you're not lugging a 50, 60 pound dumbbell around the court playing best tennis in my life except when I play with Uric, which I can't seem to put anything together. But loving it, I'm just super active now and obviously the energy for my kids, I had no idea I was gonna have a son. We thought we were done and surprise had a son five years later and he's two and I'm gonna be an old man by the time he really wants to ball. So I got to stay in shape so I can play with him. That's at least my current thinking. I'm on the same path, man. Tobias just turned three yesterday and you're way older than me like you're ancient. So it totally makes sense. I love hearing about your parents. I love that this is multi-generational. I mean, Eric, of course, your wife loves tennis. She's awesome. You guys go to tennis, turn them us together. One of your daughters is playing and it's been a big part of our friendship just to be able to have an excuse to get together, to be together, of course, so much else happens around it. But then we get to exercise. We get to challenge one another and we initially talked about doing this all in person and incorporating some tennis. That will happen. There is also rumors of a fantasy camp coming at some point with our mutual friend Matt Daily, former coach to Coco Gough and Dennis Shapavalov. And this has just been so fun to spend this time with you even if it was Ramolya. Listen, we're friends, but we're such fans of you. We're such fans of the things that you're putting out in the world. We're fans of the way you do things, but mostly who you are and that willingness to acknowledge that you're on this journey to be vulnerable, to share those learnings in a way that's very unique. Keep going, keep being a light, keep shining bright. Let's do this again in a couple of years. Let's definitely do it again in person, but Brent, it's just always a blast to be with you. It always feels like we're going to church and we're going to school at the same time. So thanks for all the lessons today. - I appreciate you guys so much. And like I said, you guys have been wildly impactful on my journey. Paul from the time in that Notre Dame conference room when you told me I couldn't wear jeans and I just got in some early rejected by the people that actually mattered at the endowment to the time you introduced me to your Iowaska-Sharman partner of yours. That's what Rick looks like to me. I don't know, I've never met one, but that's why I always appreciate my head. It's been a blast. I love you guys. I can't wait for hopefully many more decades to come a friendship. Likewise, man. So good to be with you.