Dan Villalon: Hands on with a Renaissance Man (Season 2, Episode 8)

Richard Feynman, he's an American physicist. He died maybe 30 years ago or so, and on his chalkboard, the last thing that he had left there was, "What I cannot create, I do not understand." And I find the appreciation, the understanding, the ability to convey an excitement or an understanding to others is so well facilitated by actually having to have done it.

Welcome to Take the Long Long View with Matt Hall. This is a podcast to reframe the way you think about your money, emotion, and time. The goal: helping you put the odds of long-term success on your side. Dan, that's my whistle. Uh, Dan Villalon is our guest, and he's a managing director and co-head of Portfolio Solutions Group at AQR Capital Management. I think really what you're going to like about him is he like me, is obsessed with distilling complex information down into simple, palatable bits that we can all grab and use for ourselves. But in his role, he oversees the team responsible for advising clients on portfolio challenges, developing custom analysis, and writing white papers and other research. Dan is also a member of AQR's Multifund Investment Committee, which oversees the design, construction, and implementation of multi-asset, multi-strategy portfolios. And additionally, Dan co-writes, produces, and hosts AQR's podcast, The Curious Investor. I love that title. And Dan earned his BA in physics from Pomona College and an MBA with a concentration in analytical finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Dan Villalon— what a great last name. Try to say that, listener. Dan Villalon, welcome to Take the Long View.

Thanks, Matt. It's great to be here. I love the whistle too.

Oh, thank you. I do too. We all need a signature in and out. And, uh, I whistled that on my way into the office and, uh, the day doesn't start unless that happens for me. So anyhow, I want to start in an interesting place. You weren't always in the investment business. You at one point were in the wine world. How'd you get in the wine world?

It's a bit of a twisted path that took me there, which, which we get into, but I was a physics major in college and there's a bunch of reasons I chose that subject to focus on, but By the end of college, I realized that it wasn't something that I wanted to continue doing as a graduate student or kind of in my professional life. And I kind of had my quarter-life crisis. Hopefully that means I'm not due for a midlife crisis if I kind of got it out of the way early. So the morning after graduation, I just drove up to Napa Valley and interviewed at any winery that would be willing to speak with me.

You just got in the car and drove to Napa Valley and thought, someone will want to chat with me.

You know, it's funny, I wish that there were kind of more thought or kind of preparation that had gone into it, but that's literally what happened. And there were a few people who were willing to chat with me. You know, I wasn't looking for some sort of fancy job. I had never taken a biology class or an agriculture class or anything my whole life. So I was really going into this completely ignorant. And one of the jobs I was interviewing for was a barrel roller. And so, you know, kind of wine is stored in barrels and it's aged there for a little while. Those barrels don't stay perfectly stationary through the years. Someone needs to rotate them every once in a while. And it looked like that's what I was going to be.

So you come to this position like humble and ready to do almost anything, including roll barrels of wine. How did you find your place in that world? And actually, just for the audience's benefit, I've always wanted to have someone from the wine industry on the podcast because I think it takes a really long view, or patience and discipline, to create a special wine. It's really— I guess agriculture in general requires patience and discipline and some luck and some art. So how did you get in and what did you do?

So I echo completely. If you ever want to know what long-term, what waiting feels like, wine is it. You know, because you could have a bottle in glass for 20 years before you have any idea what it's going to be like. And if you open it too early, you'll never know what it was like when it was sort of ready to be opened. Well, so I kind of got this offer for Barrel Roller, and I was going to have to get my forklift license and start in a couple months. But then something really lucky happened. And I, you know, I've never discounted the role of luck in life. The assistant winemaker of the winery that kind of offered me the job quit, and she was going to be the head winemaker at a different winery. So I got a call from the head winemaker asking if I could start the next day doing something a little more complicated, a little more involved. And I couldn't have asked for something kind of more interesting. One, it was something that I really, you know, didn't know anything about. I was sort of enthusiastic and curious, but, you know, I'd never grown grapes before. My kind of objective, my mission, my, my job was to figure out the best way to grow the grapes throughout a season. And this was kind of neat because, you know, I think a lot of people, when they think of wine, it's sort of this sort of romantic ideal. It's something that's been going on for thousands of years. But in some sense, the methods are also thousands of years old. You know, you have these sort of like rules of thumb for making decisions. You know, if it's a really hot week, then maybe you give the plants a gallon of water. And then if it's a cool week, maybe only half of a gallon of water. But it wasn't really precise. It wasn't really scientific, you know. And I'm coming at this with sort of my physics background, and, and what I want to figure out is what are the underlying mechanics? How does this work? Can we do better? Can we do better than sort of these rules that have been handed down, you know, generations upon generations? Now, of course, whenever you get into anything that has sort of both a science and an art component, you encounter some hesitation, some critics, you know, are you sort of destroying the romance of winemaking by bringing formulas to it? And that's what I was supposed to do. What I've kind of come to realize is that the problems that I was trying to solve there are actually the very same I've sort of encountered ever since. Even after leaving the winery, you sort of start to recognize that certain challenges just come up again and again, just wearing a different face through your life. So maybe I'll describe what I was trying to do at the winery, because talk about taking the long view. It was 2 years before I kind of did what I was supposed to do, which I think for many people is 2 years too long. Yeah, we wanted to produce really just great wines, and the winery I was working for is called Pine Ridge Winery. The year before I got there, they had just won the number 4 wine in the world from Wine Spectator magazine. Wow. And so, you know, it can only go down from there, right?

Yeah.

So what they wanted to figure out was, is there any way that we can grow smaller grapes? Now, the reason you'd want to grow a smaller grape is if you kind of visualize a sphere, and let's say that's sort of the grape. If you were to shrink that sphere, what happens is the ratio, the amount of surface area, or for the grape skin, to volume, or for the grape juice, increases. So smaller grapes have kind of a higher ratio of skin to juice, and that's a really good thing when it comes to wine critics, because wine critics are looking for sort of tannins and deep colors and all of these kind of characteristics that really come from the skin of the grape as opposed to the juice. So all else equal, if we get more skins relative to juice, we we should have even better wines. Okay, so that was kind of the theory. So how do you do it in practice? Well, the best way to grow smaller grapes is you just don't water the grapes that much. You know, if you overwater a plant, you would get just giant grapes. You'd have too much juice, not enough skin. So what we had to do was figure out, okay, how much can I torture these poor things? How little water can I give the grapes so that they continue to live, but they don't, they don't thrive, they don't get too big. We want to keep these things kind of small and concentrated. Okay, well, lesson one, you know, in retrospect, this seems like such an idiotic thing for me to kind of list as a discovery. Grapes can turn into raisins. Raisins do not turn back into grapes. And so if you don't water the grape enough you end up with something that you can never get back to. You end up with a raisin. You're not coming back. And, you know, I think throughout life up to that point, everything I had done, uh, was kind of a process that you could sort of go back on. You know, in physics, like a spring, you could kind of stress the spring by pushing it down and it comes back to its original form. Or in school, you know, if you do poorly on a test, there's a chance that you can do well on the next one and kind of make up the grade. In nature and a lot of real-world processes, there are kind of dead-end streets. Once you push something harder than it can go, you might not be able to get back to what you were hoping to get to. And that's sort of the first professional failure, frankly, I ever faced. The first year, I built this model, and the model told me exactly, precisely, you know, to a decimal point, How much water should I give all of these different grapes in order for them just to eek by and survive? I didn't leave any room for error. You know, I had a sense of what the weather forecast was going to be for the next week, so I knew how much to water them. Forecasts always have errors, and I was just too aggressive. The winery had about 300 acres of vineyards throughout Napa Valley. We ended up with several tens of tons of very high-end raisins after that first year. And, uh, that it was, it was nearly fatal to the program, uh, that, that I was trying to, to start up.

But the big takeaway, it sounds like— and I find this really interesting because it could be a perfect metaphor for the time we're in now— is like, um, we could become a raisin. We all have a breaking point. There isn't enough sort of self-care or watering we all may reach some breaking point. We have had a guest on, a psychotherapist who has said that toughness is less about how sturdy you are and more about how soft your knees are, how much you can bend and flex and move. And I think what I hear you saying is in the grape lesson, they didn't flex and move always. They could break.

Yeah.

And the breaking point equals raisin. And even though the spreadsheet made it crystal clear what to do. In reality, it didn't bend back.

That's exactly right. And that was the lesson I carried into the, the second year. You have to have kind of bendy knees. You kind of have to have a little bit of extra water in the ground in case you have a day that's just hotter and drier and windier than you had expected, because it's very often you just can't get back to the program when you're forced and you can't handle the stress. So in the second year, what we did was we figured out, okay, well, there's a sort of an optimal— there's sort of a perfect amount of stress, sort of a perfect amount of just a little bit of water to give these plants, but we should probably give them a little bit more. We're willing to kind of do something less than optimal in order to realize the long-term kind of result. And there's other things that we learned along the way. Different grapes have different tolerances for stress. Cabernet Sauvignon, that's sort of what the winery was best known for. That is a grape that can take a lot. It can take just brutal dry heat and be okay the next day. Chardonnay, not so much. You have to be kind of more gentle. And figuring out, you know, I don't want to sort of personify the grapes too much, but kind of figuring out their preferences or better their tolerances is a key to figuring out how do we endure, how do we endure this difficult program that's going to take us through an entire year, an entire growing season, so that we're successful in the end when it comes time to harvest these things.

What did you learn about yourself in that experience?

I think one of the things that I learned was I love new challenges. I, I love new kind of problems. Like I said, I had, I had no background in viticulture. I actually started taking courses at the same time at UC Davis. You know, they've got this fantastic viticulture and enology program just to try to play catch-up with what was going on. What I liked about it was you might be able to succeed at something if you're patient with the process of learning. If there's some sort of new discipline, a new set of problems that you haven't thought of before, You gotta be gentle with yourself. This is advice I give to all folks starting out at AQR. You know, we get sort of new analysts and they're ambitious people and they just can't wait to hit the ground running. And they always ask for my advice. You know, I'm the old timer there and what would I suggest they do to succeed? The first thing I always tell them is to be patient with themselves. The first 6 months are really about just figuring out what the problem is. You've got plenty of time after that to actually go about solving it. And I think that is a huge predictor of success. Often if you dive in too early, you end up with knees that are too stiff for when the problem actually comes and gets you.

Yeah. You know, you have, I would say, like the confidence to show up at a winery and you may say it's humility or just intellectual curiosity, but you have the confidence to show up and say, I could be valuable here. I could do something. Without any prior experience. You also had the nerve to say, "I'm gonna be a physics major." I don't have any friends who are physics majors. How'd you make that decision?

You know, you're very nice in sort of describing my mindset there. I think for physics, I have to admit, I think it was some combination of curiosity, which is always great, but also arrogance. I wanted to know how the universe worked. And I thought physics was going to be the clearest and most powerful way to learn that. You know, to me, the universe in high school was a bunch of atoms that just sort of moved around and bounced off each other. And I wanted to know why was that? And so physics seemed like, okay, this would be the place where I go for all of the answers. And with that knowledge, I should be able to apply it to all sorts of different contexts. The thing that I liked about physics was it was the first place where I just got my butt handed to me over and over, you know, I had these problem sets that were just so brutal and would take multiple days. And it was a great introduction to taking the long view academically. I would go into courses, get crushed early on, and then just try to hack my way through, find buddies that I could work with, you know, lab partners, study buddies, just to get these kind of problem sets done. In fact, my lab partner throughout my time in undergrad remains one of my best friends today because we sort of had this shared intellectual torture. For so long. It's a great thing for building resiliency and I think relationships.

So I know there are theoretical and practical components to physics, and you turn out to be a maker of things. I know this about you now. You make stuff. How did you get inspired or find the audacity to believe you could make more than just like a Father's Day mug?

You know, I bet my dad doesn't have that anymore. Yeah, I think, you know, up until then, uh, whenever I was supposed to make something, it was because I was told, you know, make this mug, make this bench, and it was never really anything that was sort of useful. Uh, they were just sort of, um, sort of holiday appropriate, I guess. It was in physics that was sort of the first time I ever made something functional or something that I would kind of need And I caught that bug and it has never gone. I remember one of the first times that I kind of had to build something. We were in lab and we had this device, a laser or something, and a screw was missing. I was like, what? You know, this first, where did the screw go? Second, these are kind of weird components. You know, this is a custom-built screw for a very specific tool for a laser. You can't find these, you know, on Amazon or at the hardware store. And we couldn't do the experiment. So my professor said, well, Dan, go down to the basement. We had a machine shop in the physics building, and there's this machinist there, Glenn, Glenn Flohr. And, you know, he said, well, what's the problem? I said, well, we're missing a screw. He said, well, let's build one. I had no idea that was even an option, you know. And, you know, I had no idea how to build it. And Glenn was a maker. He said, you know, well, let's take a look at the threads, let's measure them. Here's some metal. Let's turn this piece of metal into a screw. And from that day on, whenever I was in the physics building, I would always go down to the basement, see what Glenn was working on. He coached me through building numerous things through undergrad, through college, and in fact was instrumental to my senior thesis. I was really interested in what physicists call nonlinear systems, or what kind of most people just refer to as chaos. Kind of unusual or kind of crazy outcomes. And I had to build a machine that would have a chaotic process and then every second or every 2 seconds kind of snap back to, to sort of starting conditions. It was called controlled craziness. And to actually make controlled craziness, I needed Glenn. I needed to actually build something to prove a point. And that was just something that I sort of took away after college, and I think that sort of itch to make stuff drives a lot of what I do today.

So like, someone told me you make surfboards. Like, you yourself, by yourself.

You don't have a company, you don't have a surfboard company.

You make a surfboard. What makes you think you can do that?

Before I started at AQR, I had a little bit of time off. In fact, I had a week off, um, And I'd heard of these boat builders up in Maine, and they were wooden boat builders, so like real kind of traditionalists. And they had just started getting into surfing, and they were building these kind of hollow wooden surfboards. And I just thought that was so neat. You know, how could you actually construct something where you need to bend wood in order to fit some form? That I went up there, spent a week with them kind of before work started, And I think it was sort of 10 hours a day just learning that craft. You know, I don't claim to be expert at it, but by actually making something, by kind of the process of creation, you develop an understanding or appreciation for all forms of that thing. You know, you never look at, say, a surfboard the same way if you've built one before, and you never taste a wine the same way if you've made one before. My favorite physicist, Richard Feynman, he's an American physicist, and he died maybe 30 years ago or so. And on his chalkboard, the last thing that he had left there was, "What I cannot create, I do not understand." And I just thought, "God, I was looking for a motto. He took care of it for me." And I find the appreciation, the understanding, The ability to convey an excitement or an understanding to others is so well facilitated by actually having to have done it yourself. Podcasts are another thing. You know, the appreciation I get for hearing a podcast is double, at least for someone who's actually tried to do one. You just learn so much about not just the surface, but everything that goes into it.

Well said. Haven't you made a ukulele?

Oh yeah. So, so after I made maybe 3 different surfboards, And then I realized I had a problem. Well, one was all the time I was spending on these things, but the more practical problem was I can't use the surfboards. What good are these for if no one is able to enjoy them? So that's when I switched over to instruments. So I started with ukuleles. The first one I ever made, I gave to my father-in-law. He does not play music, so I figured he'd have no idea if it was good or bad. From then, I started making it for people who actually knew what they were doing, and I find that To me, I get such a charge when a project is done and I've handed it off and someone else is using it. I try to be sort of as rigorous as I can when building something so that when it is done, I have no doubts about the thing. You know, I think a lot of people who kind of torture themselves thinking like, oh, I could have done it this way, or maybe I should have done it this way, when they're done, it's kind of a sense of anxiety because they're always wondering how they could have improved something. So for me, I try to torture myself throughout the process so that by the time I'm at the finish line, I'm ready for the next thing and, and not having to look back anymore.

How, how nice. Okay. Well, let's shift from your interesting background to more of current life. So you created a podcast, you have a co-host, but you have a podcast called The Curious Investor. I like it. I think we're trying to do similar things though. We take a slightly different path there. I want you to tell our listeners a little bit about The Curious Investor, the aim of it, the inspiration for it.

Great. Okay. Well, The Curious Investor, I'll start with the title. The ambition that I've had, the ambition that my co-host has had, was not to sound smart. All we want to do is uncover some important ideas. And so when we were coming up with the title, we were thinking, okay, well, you know, the most famous book The most widely read book on investing ever is The Intelligent Investor. Let's not make any claims as to our intelligence. Let's make this The Curious Investor. What should people be curious about? What, what kind of information should they be excited to learn about? And that was sort of the driving force in terms of the content. In terms of the tone though, this, this was fun. So my officemate is the co-host Gabe Fagali, and we were just sort of chatting one evening at work about this old NPR show called Car Talk. He was saying, hey, have you ever— you know, my parents used to listen to this show. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, Car Talk. Man, my jaw just dropped. I grew up with that show. It was just so funny. The hosts, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, they were total authorities on the topic, but they were having fun the whole time. You almost got fooled into learning or being interested in their area of expertise. and it was just so easy to listen to. That was the sort of precipitating genesis of the podcast was, can we do something like Cartok? So, you know, we had to make a whole bunch of decisions along the way. The thought for our podcast compared to most of the ones that we had heard in the investment community was it was going to be sort of content-centered. So we'd take an idea and then the host would be speaking about the idea rather than the guest being sort of the central figure. When we were doing research, you know, we came up with a list of— I think the file's called Podcast Dos and Don'ts— and these were going to be our kind of Ten Commandments when we were recording these things. And I remember the most important one was never treat any fact or idea in a vacuum. Everything needs context. So what does a number mean? And in finance and investing, we talk a lot about risk-adjusted returns. We say, oh, this thing has a risk-adjusted return, or a more fancy sharp ratio of 0.3. What does that mean? Is that good? Is that bad? Anything, we had to provide some sort of comparison, a comparison to something that the audience knows about. If it's a new idea, how does that relate to old ideas? For me, kind of the driving force that underlied how we actually wrote and kind of scripted the episodes, you know, the guests could, they could just kind of talk about whatever they wanted, but we would always have to take a cut and say, OK, this is how it relates to something you know about. This is what it means. This is if that number's high or low. And we hope that kind of thread carried through all of the episodes. Yeah.

Car Talk. Yeah, I remember Click and Clack. I think they were from Boston, right?

Yeah.

And they're brothers?

Yes. Yeah.

And I think you nailed it. They would make talking about cars so funny and interesting that even if you didn't know anything about cars and and didn't desire to do your own repairs. They had fun banter. They were fun people to listen to, and they had good, good sense of humor.

It's tricky, you know, because when it comes to investing, it's okay to have a sense of humor. I think it's actually a good thing, but you want to be a little more careful with that when it comes to investing than maybe with car repair. But we still tried to have a little bit of fun. And so at the end of all of our episodes, this is sort of the Easter egg for the serious listeners. You know, after we did the disclaimer, you know, past performance is not indicative of future performance, we'd always include a couple of our favorite outtakes from the interviews. And a lot of times it was just great material from folks that you would have never expected based on what you know about them from the outside or what you heard in the episode, the sort of humanizing moment where it's like, ah, you know what, 'Not only did I learn something from this person, I think I could get along with this person too.' And I think that's one of the neat things with the podcast medium. It's inherently more of a kind of relationship with the folks that you're listening to than, say, writing a paper. And so I think highlighting some of the humanity is vital to differentiating, you know, this medium versus others.

So you've had two seasons of the podcast. What have you learned in this process? I know what the original what the idea was and, and the inspiration. You've had some big-time investment people on your podcast. You've also had some food people even. There was an episode where you had a lot of big-time food people on the podcast. I've had Danny Meyer on my podcast, and I know you've had one of his colleagues on the one that was about— that had a connection with food. What have you learned from two seasons of doing it?

You know, I'd say the most surprising thing, at the risk of sounding kind of like a sentimentalist, it gives me great hope for humanity. The thing that surprised me most is that the episodes that I thought were going to generate listens and the ones that I thought were going to be sort of less listened to, I wasn't able to predict. And the way I was sort of thinking about it was, okay, well, if I get some famous chef, I'm going to get just a ton of listens. Or if I get some famous hedge fund manager, I'm going to get a ton of listens and maybe the episodes where I have sort of just someone that might be good but isn't sort of famous, maybe I won't get too many people clicking on it. And actually, similarly, we were thinking, okay, well, we made episodes that were as short as 14 minutes and ones that were maybe as long as 23 minutes. And there's a little bit of a span there. And another one of my thoughts was, okay, well, the longer episodes people probably won't click on or listen all the way through and the shorter episodes will be more popular. We found the opposite result. And this just went against everything that I had been told in terms of how people consume content. You know, typically I'm a paper writer. When I write papers, I say, okay, well, I gotta keep it short. I gotta be mindful of the audience because the audience doesn't want to spend all day reading a paper. With a podcast, I found that the audience is content-driven. They actually don't really care that much about the length. And they also don't really care that much about if it's a famous guest. And this was not at all what I expected. And I've spoken to a few kind of podcast hosts and producers subsequent to this sort of realization. And they're like, "Yeah, no, Dan, of course." It's because people listen to a podcast for the content. If one episode's twice as long as the other, the listener assumes it's because you have twice as much content and they are more than willing to listen to the whole thing. The only reason it's long is because the host, who they trust, has determined that it's worth going this long. And I just found that so refreshing that there is this medium where people are actually hungry for content and they're willing to give you an extra 10 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it is, and they're willing to listen to someone that maybe they hadn't heard of before because they're still likely to learn something.

Yeah, I can relate to that experience. It's hard to predict what people will be most interested in. It's really tricky. It's not the famous name.

You know, it's one of these things, like, every thought I had going into it, I thought famous name. We need to have a famous name to kick off this part of the season in order to generate interest. Yeah, not how it works. Yeah.

You work with very bright people. You work at a firm who's highly technical. How did you become the distiller of complicated information? How did you become the person capable of simplifying the messaging out of a place like Applied Quantitative Research?

Yeah, the name itself sort of connotes an impossibility in terms of comprehension. I think for me, the number one thing that's been helpful is realizing that the goal The goal is to be understood. And with that simple guiding principle, it becomes kind of easy. It helps you answer certain questions like one, one extension is drop the jargon. I think a lot of people who want to be perceived as smart like to use fancy language so that they sound smart. That's one of the worst things people can do to be understood. And so figuring out how can I describe some concept in terms that —don't have any jargon. You can write it down, cut out all of the scientific-sounding words, and come up with a synonym. Does it hold? If it doesn't— this could be painful— if it doesn't make sense, you probably don't understand it well enough in the first place. You know, it can be tough at first, but this is definitely a case of practice making perfect. I'm a visual learner. I find pictures always make things easier, especially if I can kind of draw it live. It's so much easier for someone to follow. My favorite physics professor in college, the advice he always gave was, "If you can't solve a problem, draw a picture. And if you still can't solve it, draw a bigger picture." And to me, this process of refining what's the visual representation of this thing that I'm trying to understand, it's really helpful. For audio, I find that analogies are great. I think all too often people shy away from analogies because you lose something in coming up with an example that isn't exactly the topic, but I think that's wrong. Analogies give some reference point for people to understand what it is that you're trying to teach them or convince them of. People are pretty good at paying attention to stuff that they understand, and if you can give it a twist via an analogy, something they don't expect to hear, I find that those are great tricks for the process of distillation because it kind of sticks in folks' minds.

Yeah. Okay, so what do you wish more people more of the listeners of this podcast understood about successful investing. You work with some of the smartest people in the world. You even have awards for the best new ideas around investing or papers around investing. You have the Insight Awards. You have, I think, uh, the ability to hire some of the most talented people. You are truth seekers. What do you think, knowing what you know, that you wish more people understood about success, what it takes to be a successful investor?

It's funny that you kind of gave so much context for the question because my answer is going to seem diametrically opposed to all of this sort of reaching for perfection and excellence. I think the single thing people need to better understand about successful investing— I'm going to steal this from Cliff. Cliff Asness is the CIO of AQR. I'm sure he stole it from somebody else. But that is, a decent process that you can stick with is probably better than a perfect, a great process that you have to abandon at the wrong time. This is something I learned in Napa, you know, kind of pushing the grapes for perfection. You get raisins, um, when just a little perturbation occurs. With investing too, you know, it's such a competitive field. People take it very personally because it's, it's their wealth. They want it to be as good possible. And so they over-engineer certain decisions. They kind of are overly precise in terms of their expectations. Markets are about the noisiest process I think I've ever— and this is coming from a guy who studied chaos in physics— coming up with some process that is robust. You know, so many people are focused on rigor. It's really robustness that you need to worry about, coming up with something that might not be perfect, but as long as you can survive doing it for a long term, you're more likely to do better than the one who kind of was so precise in creating something that ultimately they had to sell as soon as they saw their first loss.

Well said. Well, Dan, I appreciate that you are making things to help us understand them better. I like the way your brain works. I mean this as a compliment. I think it's handsome. Uh, and thanks. Thank you for letting us in for a minute to examine your journey and what you do. If people were to study you more or learn more about you, where do you want them to go or what do you want them to do?

There's sort of an easy way to do it and then a slightly harder way to do it. The easy way would be just to give the Curious Investor a listen. I'm not going to ask for any ratings or reviews here, but even though, you know, it was definitely a team effort, my co-host, my officemate, and I, wrote, produced, the whole deal. The way it was structured is very reflective of how it is that I think, how it is I try to explain and describe a problem. And so if you ever wanted to kind of get in my head, listening to that show would be a pretty good start. The way that would take a little bit more effort, if you want to know who it is I want to be, and when it comes to, wow, explaining stuff, Dan really likes to do it. What is sort of my beacon, you know, what is my North Star It's that physicist Richard Feynman. He's written a ton of books. One is called Six Easy Pieces. And what he does is he takes 6 concepts from physics and describes them arguably at the 8th grade level. And these aren't simple concepts. One is quantum mechanics. But when you read that, you actually understand the intuition for what's going on. And to me, that's the greatest moment when you encounter an idea that you'd never thought of before, when you see a picture that you could have never visualized before. That sort of moment of discovery is something that gives me such a charge. That's who I try to emulate when it comes to what I do, what I, what I create, what I build.

Mm, wonderful. Well, I can't wait to be with you sometime in person again. Until that time comes, I look forward to sharing this episode with listeners, and I really appreciate your time that you spent here with us. Thanks so much, Matt.

This was a blast.

All right, thanks, Dan. Dan said he makes surfboards and ukuleles. What's the last thing you've made? Maybe something that took a long time. Please note, the information shared in this podcast is not intended as advice. The intent is to share meaningful experiences. I am likely not your advisor, nor wealth manager, nor financial planner, and my opinions are my own and not necessarily shared by Hill Investment Group. Investing involves risk. Consult a professional before implementing an investment strategy. Thank you.