John Jennings: His IFOD, OCD, Plant-Based Eating, Investing and Coronavirus (Season 2 Episode 2)

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

Welcome to Take the Long View with Matt Hall. This is a podcast to help reframe the way you think about your money, emotion, and time. The goal? Helping you take a longer view. John Jennings. I love your name because I love alliteration. Beyond your name, I love who I know you to be. John Jennings is one of the most interesting people you will come across. Trust me on this. He is fascinating and not in in a weird way, in a lovely Dr. Seuss kind of way. I think he deserves to be famous, though I don't think he cares about fame. I'm sharing the idea of fame for Jon because I want you to know he's worthy of your attention, even if you're not familiar with his name or his work. Let's go over some bio bits to help you, dear listener, get to know Jon Jennings. He writes something called the IFOD, the Interesting Fact of the Day. And I love it. I regularly forward his iPods to friends, colleagues, and even clients of our firm. And his daily thoughts often tickle my brain into an active state. They are meaningful, relevant, poignant, thoughtful, and I could go on. And I think they started naturally. Jon was telling his two children interesting facts of the day when they were little, and he found that other humans enjoyed hearing these facts, so he started passing them on. John reads a lot and really enjoys researching and writing about things he comes across. So the IFOD scratches an itch in a very healthy way. Does IFOD pay the bills? I think not. So what does Jennings do for work? Uh, he's a big deal. John is president and chief strategist of the St. Louis Trust Company, a leading multifamily office. This means he helps the ultra affluent. And unlike most of the people in my industry, I have deep respect for him, his firm, and what they do for their clients.

Back at you, Matt.

Thank you. And if that's not enough, Jon is an adjunct faculty member at Washington University's Olin School of Business, where he teaches in the Wealth and Asset Management Master's program. And wait, one more thing. Jon is also a Forbes contributor, meaning he writes rockstar content for Forbes. And he's also a lawyer by training, a hardcore vegan, and a loving husband and dad. Jon Jennings, welcome to Take the Long View.

Thank you. I'm super pumped to be here.

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

That is absolutely me. So I feel like my time practicing law was my residency. I'm so glad I did it. And I'm so glad I moved on.

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

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

Okay, well, let's go to your IFTODT, Interesting Fact of the Day. How did this get started?

So my father went and visited my brother, who at the time had kids about my age. My kids were 4 and 7, and he came back from this trip and we went on a horseback ride and he said to me, John, you're a really good father. And I was like, thanks, Dad. He goes, but your brother, "Is an excellent father." And I was like, "Why? What's he doing right that I'm not doing?" He said, "Your brother spends more time with his kids and is more interactive with them." And that really shook me, partly because of sibling competition and partly because I thought I was a better father than I guess I was. So I started every night telling my kids an interesting fact of the day, partially because I wanted to spend time with them and they seemed to really enjoy it. Not so much the facts, but just the time we spent together. Time we spent together. But then I started emailing these facts to my father to show that I was being a good father, right? And I copied in family and some friends, and it just started growing. So this was from about 2007 to 2010. So I started with, I don't know, 6 or 7 people on my email. Then my email blast got to be about 100 people. And then I shut it down for a while. I just got too busy with the rest of life. And kind of like working out, if you don't do it for a while, you know, if you skip a few, it's easier to continue to skip. So I started it back up in 2017, made it professional made it into an internet blog and it's grown nicely. It really scratches an itch for me.

So what have you learned as you've put the facts out that people are into? Is there anything that surprises you or disappoints you?

Yeah, so I call it the Interesting Facts of the Day, but it should be called Things That I Think Are Interesting.

Well, I noticed even on your website, you distinguish between the posts that you think are the most important and the ones that are actually the most popular.

Exactly. So I'll give you an example. So in, I think it was 2017, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to a group of scientists that created something called the LIGO detectors. This was amazing. And what it did is it registered gravitational waves from the collision of black holes that occurred billions of light years away. And it, it confirmed general relativity. And it's some of the most precise instruments ever created by humanity. I was completely blown away by this. And it got about 100 clicks. My blog post of why are Starbucks sizes called what they are? Why is a tall a small and a ventile the biggest? Just blew up. So really what I learned is people find interesting things that affect their daily lives, things that are more theoretical. Some people find interesting, but they don't have as broad appeal. So I try to balance a little bit. I don't really obsess on the clicks. So every once in a while I'll try to throw in something that's a little bit more relevant. But again, it really is What I think is interesting to share.

You know, I was trying to think about anything else I could get delivered into my inbox. And by the way, I treat my inbox like a sacred place. I don't want anything in there that is sort of unnecessary. I subscribe and have the Interesting Fact of the Day in my inbox because I feel like you educate or inform me in a way that is not boring. It's most of the time. I probably was one of those people who didn't click on the physics piece.

Yeah.

I don't remember the Starbucks piece, but let's go over maybe a few of the ones that are like most recent and then a few that are the most popular.

Yeah, so what tends to be most popular over time are things that get picked up high in Google on whatever topic, which is kind of interesting because they're pretty random. So the top clicks ones are what can 16-year-olds legally do? How many people are 7-foot tall or taller? How many books are published every year? For a long time, I got a lot of clicks on my one, do lemmings really commit mass suicide? And the answer is no. No, they don't. That was actually a thing that Disney did. You know, those just get picked up by Google. How does—

one time you told me that doing this iFOD relates to your life's purpose.

It does.

How does it connect?

Yeah, so probably about 5 years ago, I read this article, which has then been turned into a book, and it's actually a recent iFOD post on "How Will You Measure Your Life?" by Clayton Christensen.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, it's really fantastic.

This is a great post. Listener, if you hear this, you should go to Interesting Fact of the Day, John Jennings, and look at this Clayton Christensen piece.

And the whole article is really, really fantastic. And I haven't read the book. I probably should. But he makes the point that most people just go through life doing day-to-day things and they lose sight of what's most important to them. He gives an example of so many of his Harvard Business School classmates are divorced or don't have good relationships with their kids. And if you ask them that when they were 20 years old, they would have said the most important thing is to have good relationships with my family and my kids and my friends. But they go off on this other path. And so it's important to have this direction, this life's purpose, and that he spent every day, hours a day for over a year trying to figure out his life's purpose. So I decided to do the same thing, not hours a day, but about 15 minutes a day after I meditated, it took me, I don't know, 6 or 9 months. And I decided that, you know, I have a few key parts of what currently is my life's purpose. And one of them is I want to learn, I wanna be a lifelong learner. And I majored in finance, which is really a career prep degree. So I said to myself, I wanna learn a lot, things beyond finance and investing and law, which is really what I'd been focusing on for a few years. And I thought, you know, if I do this, it doesn't make sense just for me to become more of a know-it-all. I'd like to share it. I would like to help other people access some things that maybe aren't making it into the daily flow of news and things like that. So that was part of it. Another part of my life's purpose is to have every interaction I have with people a positive event. And this has been really hard because you'll get a call by a telemarketer or a survey person, or you're at the airport and your plane's delayed like mine was last night by 3 hours and you're irritated. And if your goal is, I want this person to have a positive experience with me, you stop, you have to stop and recognize them as a person. And if a telemarketer calls, I want to be their best call of the day or the week. And that has made a huge impact on my life. And my wife calls me out all the time when I'm not doing it. She's like, "Oh, you know, Mr. Make Everybody's Life Good, you know, you could have done a better job there." So this whole blog fits partially into what currently are some aspects. I have other aspects of my life's purpose.

How do you find the discipline to do this every day?

I used to send it out every single weekday, and I've allowed myself to stray from that. It's as little as 2, but usually 3 or 4 times a week, rarely 5 times a week anymore. And I don't watch hardly any TV, and I don't use almost any social media, which frees up more than enough time to read and research and write. I write them in the evening and edit them once in the morning, and off they go with all their grammatical errors and issues. It's just something I love to do. If I'm busy or I don't feel like doing it or I don't have a good topic, I don't. So really it's a reflection of I still love to do it. And if I stop loving to do it, I won't do it. I don't expect to monetize it. It's not about the clicks.

Do you ever, you get any pushback from people or upset people with any of your posts? Any post that's been controversial?

Yeah, so I sent out one, the fact that there were studies that Pride might have an evolutionary purpose, that if you do something that fills you with pride, it's usually something that's beneficial for society. And I got some pushback and actually some people that unsubscribed with some notes where they were kind of upset saying that pride is a sin and there's no purpose for pride that's good and that it's not good to have pride. And, you know, that was not my intent at all. I wasn't making a religious statement, but yeah, it was— that was really surprising to me that there was that much pushback. But in general, I try to stay away from topics that are political or religious in nature, or things that are hot-button issues.

You seem to know so much about so many different topics. Let me give you an example. One of your posts, and correct me if I don't get it just right, one of your posts was like, "The 100 Best Alternative Bands." Yeah.

That was fun.

I don't even know 100 alternative bands, and I certainly wouldn't know how to rank them all. How had you gone about collecting your own personal list?

Yeah, yeah. Well, to be fair, it wasn't just my list. I ranked some bands high that I'm not a huge fan of. But music, alternative music, more specifically indie music, has been an obsession of mine for years. So it's really playing to a strength of a hobby. It was really hard to narrow it down to 100, quite frankly. But I did quite a bit of research. I looked at a lot of different people's list, some that I thought were very good, some that I thought not so good, and use my own judgment of which bands have been influential. It's more about being influential rather than do I like them in terms of how great of an alternative band they were.

Are you a musician yourself?

No, not at all. I'm like the opposite of a musician.

I said, I think in the intro, you're a hardcore vegan.

Yeah, yeah.

Is that a fair label?

You know, I used to be. I'd say for the first 5 or 6 years I was vegan. By the way, my wife has advised me that I think the more accessible way to describe it is plant-based. I have not moved to that yet, but I think she makes a good point that vegan sounds judgy, but she's probably right. There's this joke, how do you know if somebody's a vegan? Just wait, they'll tell you. So I try not to be that person. Now for the first 5 or 6 years, I was hardcore vegan, like 100% vegan, checked every single label. And I was very into, you know, being 100% vegan. I'd say I'm like 96% vegan. If something has a little dairy in it, fine. If I've been overserved a bit and I come home I'm home and my kids have ordered a cheese pizza, I might have a slice.

But what does being vegan do for you or what's it really about for you?

It's really about how I became vegan, which is really a kind of a mental health story. I've had issues with obsessive compulsive disorder since late teenagerhood, early adulthood, and it's really ebbed and flowed and it's something that runs in my family. And most people think of OCD and they think, oh, well, you know, you're tidy, you like to keep things neat, you wash your hands a lot. And that's true. Some people with OCD, that's their deal. Really, if you think about OCD, an obsession is a thought that you have that causes you anxiety or worry that's usually irrational, and a compulsion is what you do about it. And because the thought is irrational, the worry is irrational, it doesn't help. So it's just this cycle that occurs. For example, late in my teenagehood, for an entire year, I listened to nothing but Led Zeppelin. It wasn't just that I only listened to Led Zeppelin. I wouldn't listen to the radio. I wouldn't put myself in situations where I'd hear other music. And the thought of listening to a song that wasn't Led Zeppelin gave me a sense of panic or doom. It's really an incredibly ridiculous thing to think about. So there's been these different episodes throughout my life in different time periods. I've been doing pretty well here for the last year or two. But in 2002, a lot of things were going on in my life. Arthur Andersen, where I worked, was imploding. We were starting our current company. We had just had a child, which is incredibly stressful to, I'm sure, everybody, but me in particular. We were buying and selling a home. Anyway, I had a lot of stress. I developed shingles. I wasn't feeling good. And I became convinced that I had heart disease. So I started going into my doctor every week going, "I can feel my heartbeat all the time.

It's skipping.

I know I have heart disease." He ran some tests. He said, "You do not have heart disease." I said, "I know I do." And somehow I happened upon a book called Eat to Live. And it's about being vegan. And in it, many chapters dealt with the health effects, and it said if you become 100% plant-based, not only do you stop your heart disease, you reverse it. So I called my doctor at WashU, very medical, very research-oriented. I said, is this true? He said, it is true. It's been proven in multiple studies. I said, why didn't you tell me? He said, well, you don't have heart disease. It still didn't convince me, so I announced to my wife, I'm going to be vegan. It's not going to affect you, it's not going to affect the kids, which is ridiculous. Probably 6 or 7 months later, when my obsession with this health issue that didn't exist was over, I had been vegan for 7 months. I'd lost a lot of weight. My cholesterol had come down. My blood pressure was better. I felt great. The way I put it, I don't mean offense to people, but that's how I think about it. I had lost my taste for flesh. So, it's how I live my life now. I can't imagine eating meat. I had a period of time where I was really concerned and would have nightmares about being accused of a crime I didn't commit, or maybe I committed a crime and would have to go to jail. And in jail, they wouldn't allow me to be vegan, which is Froot Loops. But that's how— that's my point. That's how I felt about being vegan, is that my biggest worry was going to jail, not because I'd be in jail, but because I would have to eat meat in jail.

So this has had a big impact on your life. Has it impacted your kids' or your wife's life?

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

I know you wrote an iPod about dumb questions people ask you.

Yeah, about being vegan.

Yeah. But is there anything you wish more people who might be listening or just in general in the public understood about being plant-based or being vegan that you think is misunderstood?

I think the biggest misconception is that if you give up eating meat and dairy, which a lot of people like and think's delicious, that you no longer like food. If you think about it, there's all sorts of different cultures that eat all sorts of different things. It's really like moving to a slightly different culture where the food is amazing. Like, I, I love to eat as much as I ever have, uh, even back when I was a meat eater 18+ years ago. And people that I know that have become vegan will say the same thing. They'll say, "Oh my gosh, I still love to eat. The food's delicious, it's amazing." So it's not really like you have to give up anything. You're just changing your paradigm about what you eat. It's like moving to a different culture. And I think another thing people misunderstand is you don't always have to eat at a vegetarian or vegan restaurant. I mean, any restaurant you go to with a few modifications, I mean, you have to be picky, but many dishes can be made plant-based or often they have a special menu if you ask, or if you go to a place that has more of a, a chef, you know, especially if you tell them ahead of time, they will definitely make often an amazing vegan meal.

Do you think the plant-based or vegan movement will plateau or will it continue to expand? Will more of us become plant-based in the future? And if so, why?

I think by necessity, people will become more plant-based just because of the issues with climate change and water and population growth. It just— it's a very inefficient way to to feed 7 or 8 or 9 or at some point 10 or 11 billion people to say, we're gonna spend all this water and grain, et cetera, to grow a cow or a chicken or a pig, and then turn around and a small fraction of those calories end up going into the meat that feed people. I just think it ends up being a difficult, and there's big environmental effects. I think in order to mitigate climate change, I think moving much more to plant-based will be necessary. I think firms like Beyond Meat, which has done amazing in terms of being a public stock Impossible Burger, which is still private but seems to be everywhere now. You can buy an Impossible Whopper. I think meat substitutes are going to be the answer for a lot of meat eaters where it tastes very similar. Personally, I get kind of weirded out by Impossible Burgers and Beyond Burgers because it tastes meat-like to me. And like I said, I've lost my taste for flesh. I don't want things that taste like meat. I want things that don't taste like meat.

You know, obviously this podcast is called Take the Long View. Is there any long view example or parallel with either the IFOD or your eating philosophy?

Yeah, I think, I think especially with, you know, with the eating, it is about balancing your long-term health with your short-term action. So, I mean, study after study after study have shown that people that are vegetarian or vegan have a lot lower incidence of heart disease and diabetes and a lot of cancers and a lot of things. And like anything, It's the short term. You know, I want to have this. I want to have this ice cream or this mac and cheese or this, you know, the steak right now because it tastes good, even though I know long term it's going to affect my health. So I think like anything, it's balancing the current desire with long term. What do you want your health to be? What do you want your identity to be? So, yeah, absolutely.

I think I really respect your long-term commitment to the way you eat? I mean, you seem unwavering.

It's who I am now. I mean, it's not a— I mean, I think the key for any behavior change is you make it a habit. And one of the best ways to develop a habit, research shows, is to make it part of your identity. So one thing that was easy for me in becoming a vegan is I announced I am going to be a vegan, not so much to other people, but to myself. So when you say you're a vegan, that means you don't eat meat. Like, I don't, it's not who I am. It would be against how I view the world to do that. You know, another, you know, a short versus long-term, taking the long view on the iFod is, as I've looked at it, it's not about any particular post and it's not about any particular number of followers or clickers. It's about over time building a base of information. So it's how I view reading, which is you can read any particular book and go, oh, I learned a lot or I learned a little, I agreed or I disagreed, but hopefully from every book that you read, you'll pick up some grains of sand as I think about it. Like, you know, here's some things that I identify with or that has informed my thinking. And then over time in all these different areas, you'll have, you know, at least a little sandbox or maybe even a beach as all these grains of sand accumulate. So it's really over time creating the discipline to repeat all the small things that have a big effect in the long time out. So that's one of the things I like about the IFOD is just this, base of knowledge that I'm growing for myself, especially since I was a, again, a career prep finance major. I didn't have the benefits of a liberal arts education to broaden my worldview.

You know, one thing that's interesting is your work is in sort of the wealth space and you write for Forbes, but you rarely write IFODs about money.

Yeah. Yeah.

Let's talk for a second about your work and what do you think your— what is your job and what is your unique ability?

I think everybody has a superpower, maybe even more than one. And it took me a while of thinking to figure this out, but I think it's important for everybody to play to their strengths and their superpower. So my superpower is to take disparate ideas and to synthesize them and make them fit together or know what to do with them. When I realized this, I started moving both my career and what I do, you know, IFOD and teaching and Forbes and all these things towards that direction. And it's been very fulfilling because it's something that I love to do and I think it's my special thing. That's been my superpower. In terms of Forbes, it's been really— it's been a recent thing. I started at the beginning of December of 2019. And the biggest thing has been, you know, I thought I wrote decent. I never considered myself a great writer, but I thought I was okay. And I've hired these amazing editors that help me get the articles ready for Forbes. And I have learned that I have so far to go, like how I was writing. And I wrote a lot for our website and a lot on investments, but not for the iPod. It's more on our, you know, more on our website here or there for a publication. Just really wasn't compelling. And it's really been a wake-up call. In fact, I had a call a few days ago with my main editor, Lori, and I just told her, I said, you know, Lori, I'm just so frustrated that I can now see what good writing looks like and I'm not able to do it. And she said, "You know, Jon, what was your timeframe for thinking that you'd become a good writer? Did you really think it'd just be 2 months?" I was like, "Well, no." She goes, "Well, how long did you think it'd take?" "Well, you know, years." And she said, "Okay." She goes, "That's number one." She goes, "Number two," she said, "I'm your editor. I have a master's in journalism from Columbia, and I've been doing this my entire career. I should be able to improve your work." That's really been the most interesting thing for me about writing for Forbes is how far I have to go as a writer.

So I like the way you think about investing and wealth management.

Yeah.

You wanna talk for a second just about what your philosophy is or what your approach is around investing?

Yeah, a few key things. I think, I think first of all, good investing is mostly about behavior. I mean, it's about reducing fees, it's getting your tax under control, but if you can get the behavior right, That's by far the most important thing. And it's almost like going back to the Clayton Christensen, you know, what's the direction of your life? I think you have to know what's the direction of your investing and you have to invest in a way that's going to line up with how you can behave well. And I think a lot of the financial system is set up to sell a false sense of certainty to investors and also take what I think is the harder way to approach things. So I think most of the investment industry is set up as, we're going to put you in investments that are going to outperform the market. And that's really hard to do. Something that sounds about the same, but, and it's subtle, but it's very different is, what if you set up a portfolio to allow the market to underperform? So the market itself is flawed, that it's over-allocated to expensive companies and under-allocated to cheaper companies. And it's, bigger companies instead of smaller companies, and there's all these issues with the market. If you set up your portfolio so that the market underperforms, it's hard to do. It's simple, but it's not easy. That is a better path to go. Related to that is the issue of uncertainty. So a primary human motivation is the resolution of uncertainty. So when we feel uncertainty, our bodies produce cortisol, which is a stress hormone. In some circumstances, we like it. So when we read a book, we don't want to be, oh, well, I know what's going to happen. You like that sense of uncertainty in the twist in the plot of the book or the movie. And one reason you like it is when that uncertainty is resolved, we get a dose of dopamine. So we really don't like uncertainty over the long term and we want to resolve it. And what the financial industry does is they sell certainty, but it's false certainty usually, which is saying, I know what the market's going to do, or I'm going to shift you here, I'm going to shift you there. And we listen to experts that are horrible at predicting because we get a little dopamine rush when we think we have certainty, but It's really not. As we're talking, the markets are experiencing a lot of volatility with this coronavirus. And I've read a lot of experts talking about what's gonna happen. And nobody knows. It's a tough sell to tell an investor, you know, I'm your advisor and I don't know what's gonna happen because we don't. And that's a tough sell. But I think you invest better acknowledging that uncertainty, building a portfolio that will allow the market to underperform than it is trying to do something which is impossible, which is predict the future or provide certainty where none exists.

You work with the 1% of the 1%. What do you wish more people understood about that audience?

Yeah, I think first of all, they're just people. I think it was in The Great Gatsby, it said, "The rich are different than you and I." And on one hand, while that is true, they're still just people, and they still have family issues, and they still worry about money. If anything, sometimes they worry more. About money. I mean, it can be a huge burden to have fantastic wealth. I think another thing that's surprising probably to most people is sometimes when you have a lot of wealth, you don't know what to do with it. Most people, they're just going through their day-to-day lives trying to make enough money to put food on the table, send their kids to college, and go on vacation. That can be their overriding sense of purpose. And when you're freed up from that by having a lot of money, you know, sometimes that can be disconcerting to figure out what you want to do with your life. I mean, it's— if it's no longer the pursuit of material things or career, you know, what is it then? Mm-hmm. What is your purpose? And I think that's something that is something that a lot of wealthy people, very wealthy people have to face that a lot of other people can just be distracted from. Figuring out what do I want my wealth to do? Where do I wanna leave it? You know, I don't wanna ruin my kids. So probably the chief concern our clients have, and I think the super wealthy have, is how do I not ruin my kids? Kids. That's the number one concern. It's not how do I get better investment returns? It's I don't want my kids or grandkids or great grandkids just to be nonproductive, non-happy coupon clippers.

Yeah. You know, we've had a psychotherapist friend of mine on this show a couple times. And my question to you is how much of your job is technical and quantitative versus psychological and maybe emotional, behavioral guide?

It's 62 to 68% behavioral and psychological. I mean, it really is. It's mostly behavior. So again, with what's going on with the coronavirus, it's all about behavior right now. I mean, in the face of uncertainty and what's exactly going to happen, you know, will it become a pandemic? What's the economic effects, et cetera? It's all about behavior. And what does good behavior look like in the face of extreme uncertainty? If we help our clients through this, that will be the most important investment thing we can do. It's not about did we get them in the best venture capital fund or have the exact right this or that investment. It's going to be did we help them through a tough time with the best behavior possible.

Many years ago, a friend of mine put me up to be a judge in a rural town's queen contest. So, a young person from this town would be nominated as the queen, and I was gonna be one of the judges. Wow. And so, the judge had to come up with a question that you would ask every single person. One question, and that was it. You stuck with that. And my question was, "What are you doing when you feel your absolute best?" I was blown away by some of the answers. But what are you doing when you feel your absolute best?

Yeah, it's really connecting with people. When you ask this question, the first thing that popped into mind is reading, because I love to read, and it was writing, because I love to write and research. But it's really connecting with people. It feels good if I've added something to their day or their life. And really, it's the thing I like best about the IFOD is because it's allowed me to connect with people. It's probably why I'm sitting here talking to you right now. This last week, I've seen clients on both coasts. And when I saw them, each of them said, oh, I love this or that post, and this was great. And we started talking and it was this connection that we had because, oh my gosh, wasn't that interesting? Or I was surprised at this or that. In fact, 2 days ago, the person said, I had no idea how to wash my hands appropriately until I read your post on handwashing. And I had no idea that that's how handwashing worked. That's really fulfilling for me. But it's really connecting with other people.

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

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

I think you're writing really jazzy titles too, but bringing— even if you look at some of the coronavirus stuff you've and hopefully it brings a certain level of logical, rational, fact-based thinking to something that can be the opposite.

Yeah. And what's interesting is I've found there are so many things. So I typically don't just use one source because there's all these things that I will hear that are put out there as very fact-based, and they're not necessarily wrong. Maybe they're just outdated now and there's new information. So like, for instance, I had heard, and then a few people Matt Hall also had sent me, because I like to write on physics things now and then, or space, is that one reason there's life on Earth is that we're not constantly bombarded by meteors or asteroids because Jupiter provides this amazing screen for us because it has so much gravity, and the things that would have hit the Earth get pulled away from us because of Jupiter's gravity. I mean, that is fascinating. And when I dug into it, I found it's completely wrong. So it was right, or considered right, I should say, at one point, and then has been disproven by other modeling. I am stunned at how often, probably 10% of the time, I'll go down the path of something that is supposedly true, that is no longer true, or maybe never was true, and it's just an urban myth. And with the coronavirus, I've been spending a ton of time and effort reading on that 'cause it's important, and 'cause we just wrote something to our clients on what to do investment-wise, and my iPod today was on the coronavirus, and there was just, there's just so much misinformation out there about this thing. And I think the biggest concern with this is the panic that people are gonna do things that don't make sense, that could be negative for the community as a whole because misinformation. So I see part of my purpose with this is every once in a while to hit an important topic like the coronavirus and say, okay, here's some important information. And it's from the World Health Organization, it's from the CDC, it's things you can trust. It's not from random people out there with conspiracy theories. So, I feel good when I have something like that and it resonates with people. And, you know, like the hand washing one, like, you know, if there's 20 people that wash their hands more effectively, you know, maybe that stops the spread for one person.

Well, let me say this. I was investigating a school for my kid recently, and I said to one of these kids, "Hey, if I met a kid that graduated from this school later on," down the road, what would be like— what are the hallmarks of this, this place? Like the things that this school sort of infects everybody with. Good question. He came back with a great answer quickly. He goes, "Kind, curious, leader." Wow. And I really—

that's the big three.

Those connected with me. And I think that's part of what I like about you. I think you're all of those things. Thank you, brother. And I think you're also a truth truth seeker. I like the way you go after information irrespective of whether it lines up with what you thought before or not. I think we need more of that. So I really appreciate the way, the way you do things and the way you approach gathering information and sharing it. And it's fun. I'm interested in helping people learn things, especially about the markets in a way that doesn't feel like learning.

Yeah.

And I think you do such a great job with that and a different style than, than maybe other people. But I love I love it. So keep doing it.

Thanks.

Where can people learn more about John Jennings or the IFOD?

Yeah, so I think the easiest place is the IFOD, which is www.theifod.com. That's my blog and there's links on there to my bio and my Forbes articles and things like that.

Anything we should have talked about we didn't? You didn't tell me your definition of success.

Oh yeah, yeah. I have been collecting, I plan on writing about this in the near future. I've been collecting various definitions of what it means to be successful. And it's a very personal, it's a very personal thing usually. For some people it's more outward, but one of them that really spoke to me is success occurs when you can schedule your day around having a nap. Mm. You know, there's a lot of people that can't do that, but I do think that's a great definition of success. It means you have enough control over your life that you can actually nap when you want to. And being a big napper and someone that likes to nap at work periodically, you know, that really resonated to me maybe because it makes me think that I'm successful.

You have a nap room?

We do. Well, it's called the Zen Room and it's multipurpose. It has a reclining chair that goes almost all the way back. It's like Emirates Airlines, right?

Nice.

First class. And it is used for napping or meditation or lactating. If we have people that need it for lactating, I'm, you know, I have to be careful about my nap scheduling.

Do you come out of your naps more productive, you think?

Absolutely. Yeah. And I think the key is, I, you know, I wrote about naps and I thought and talked to—

30 minutes, right?

Yeah.

That's it, right?

Well, yeah, I talked to a Harvard researcher and he said, if you're gonna nap, it needs to be 20 to 25, maybe 30 minutes at the most so you don't hit a deep sleep cycle. Or it needs to be 90 minutes. So you need to go all the way through a cycle and come out. So I don't do many 90-minute naps at work. So I usually try to do 20, 25 minutes. Yeah, absolutely more productive and the world looks more fresh and exciting and it's fabulous.

Yeah, I like that definition. Learn something new, John Jennings. Thank you, man.

Thank you.

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