John Jennings; Life lessons learned from managing the money of millionaires.

John Jennings [00:00:00] Why expert predictions of the future are in general so bad. And a key point is, is why do experts continue to try to predict the future? And I'm talking about like, you know, political predictions and economists and investment forecasters and things like that. And a key thing is we are designed, you know, we've evolved to, to look for patterns 'cause it gives us a glimpse into the future, right? I'm Jeremy Ash, a retirement community, CEO, living in Eureka, Illinois. And you are listening to the Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:34] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Well, if you're watching, you can see that we are in studio today. I had John Jennings of the St. Louis Trust Company come to the studio and actually record an interview. This is a fascinating conversation with a renaissance man that is well read. He can talk about art and how to make decisions. And also because he is a part of managing people's wealth that have hundreds of millions of dollars, he talks about what is the meaning of success? What do you do if all of your material needs are covered? How do you find satisfaction in life? This is a phenomenal conversation and John Jennings is a great person to chat with live and in person. I hope you are getting together in person with people as the vaccines roll out and we start to come out of this pandemic. Before we get to the interview, I wanted to let you know about the book club. This month we are reading Michael Creighton's Jurassic Park. And I have been absolutely stunned with how different this book is than the movie. And it is way more compelling and interesting than even that classic movie was. So if you're interested in joining the book club and you find that maybe by knowing that it's the last Sunday the month at seven 30, it can give you that extra little effort to get the book done in time, then I hope you'll go to vance crow.com/podcast and click on the link for how to join. We often do these in virtual reality, but you don't have to have a virtual reality headset to join us.

Vance Crowe [00:02:06] You can also join on your computer or your cell phone. Another big piece of news coming out is that we are finally releasing one of the classes that we developed inside of the network. How to introduce yourself confidently. This is a class that the network actually helped me to decide was really important to produce. People introduce themselves informally all the time. Whether you're going to join a class for the first time or you're at a networking event, or you have a small chance to be able to describe who you are and what your business is or what you offer as a service. And people find that oftentimes they have so much to include that their introductions never make them feel very good. So what we do in this class is review how to tell a story that is retold by others. How many details can you include so that people feel like they know you but you haven't overwhelmed them? And how can you end your introduction so that people know what they can come up and start a conversation with you about so that you have the very best people in that room come up and start the best conversations with you. This is a really interesting class. It's one that's been developed over time and I'm really excited to share this with you. So if you're interested in checking this class out, you can go to store Articulate Ventures to purchase this online class and use it at your own speed. We found that people on the network really loved it and it dramatically helped them feel more confident and comfortable when they go to explain who they are and what they do. Alright, without further ado, we are going to head to this interview with Renaissance man, John Jennings.

Vance Crowe [00:03:44] John Jennings, welcome. Thank you. It's a podcast.

John Jennings [00:03:46] Yeah, I'm excited to be here.

Vance Crowe [00:03:48] Yeah, this is the first in-person interview I've done with anybody that's not my wife in more than a year. But you and I were having such a good conversation the other day. I thought, Hey man, if you're down with coming down, let's, let's do this in person.

John Jennings [00:04:01] Well, you know, it's been almost four weeks since my second shot of the Pfizer jab, so I've, I'm feeling relatively bulletproof.

Vance Crowe [00:04:09] And when you think about the, the vaccine, are you concerned about other people that are not vaccinated? Is that, are you gonna start like, looking out for that?

John Jennings [00:04:18] Yeah, I, you know, I, I feel pretty good about the efficacy and you know, I think even if you end up getting it, it, it ends up being pretty mild if you're vaccinated. So, no, I, I just, you know, really, it's just so liberating and I'm just going about my life now.

Vance Crowe [00:04:32] Were you worried about coronavirus when it was

John Jennings [00:04:35] Oh yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:04:35] Endemic. Yeah, yeah,

John Jennings [00:04:36] Yeah. Absolutely.

Vance Crowe [00:04:37] Absolutely. Tell me more about that.

John Jennings [00:04:38] Yeah, so I wasn't all that worried, like, oh, I'm gonna get it, I'm gonna die. But I knew enough people that had it that just got really sick. I just said, you know, this just stinks so I don't want to get it. And I, I kind of figured, you know, I, I did a blog post, I dunno ways back and I call it the COVID Go Golden Rule. And it's not necessarily about what you want to do for yourself. You should ask, am I being part of the solution or am I being part of the problem? Being part of the solution meant, you know, wearing a mask, social distancing, doing all those things. 'cause you don't wanna spread it. 'cause even if I had it and I was asymptomatic, I'd be part of the problem. So I really tried to, to be good about social distancing and mask wearing and all that. But it wasn't out of a, just a, a huge sense of fear. It was just seemed like the right thing to do

Vance Crowe [00:05:28] When I was watching all of this. Like I have this bent towards liberty that I assumed everyone else had. Yeah. And this was a very, it was important thing for me to, to lose that naivety, like liberty is something you have to want. Yeah. And you have to want it at number one. And one of the things I found that I didn't think of before is you can use someone else's desire to do good for others, to convince them to give up their liberty.

John Jennings [00:05:53] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:05:54] And that is the way that I felt about the, you're not doing the mask for you, you're doing the mask for everyone else. And so that way if I am not complying with the mask ideal, then I'm somehow selfish. And I thought that this was an interesting

John Jennings [00:06:07] Trick

Vance Crowe [00:06:08] Of logic that, that that may all, that may simultaneously be true. That is correct. Yeah. You are doing it for other people, but then also has like really serious ramifications for for liberty.

John Jennings [00:06:21] Yeah, it really does. And and it was interesting. I'm having my bathroom redone, so I have a lot of, you know, kinda workers in our house. And I was talking to one of 'em the other day and he's like, you know, I, I don't believe in masks and I'm not gonna get vaccinated. And you know, what I said to him is, is as I also believe this, but I was also trying to speak his language and I said, why don't you wanna get vaccinated? He goes, well, I just don't trust the government. I just don't trust any of it. And you know, I, I just am worried about the long-term effects of the vaccine. I said, well really why I would like you to get vaccinated is because I would like the government out of my life. I don't want them to tell me I can't go to restaurants or bars or I have to wear masks and I don't wanna be told I can't go to the Cayman Islands and go scuba diving, which I love to do. And they won't, you know, they won't let Americans in or only a limited handful. So I said, if you would get vaccinated and then all your friends would get vaccinated and we get to, you know, 90% vaccinated vaccinations in the us we don't have to worry about any of this anymore. And he was like, yeah, that's really interesting. And I think I probably didn't convince him.

Vance Crowe [00:07:30] It's an interesting concept, like the trust of government or really the trust of anyone. Like I am naive in my level of trust. Like, and I have to watch myself with that because when the mask thing first came out and they were saying, don't wear masks, my wife is an eternal preparer for everything. Yeah. So we had hundreds of masks here.

John Jennings [00:07:50] Oh nice.

Vance Crowe [00:07:50] And so they were like, they're no good to you. You should give them to us. Yeah. So we did.

John Jennings [00:07:56] Oh wow.

Vance Crowe [00:07:56] And then when they did the, about face on the masks being like, no, now everyone is required. That's when I was like, I'm out like, like this. If you can have a noble lie, you know, I think that's kind of a Aristotle's concept.

John Jennings [00:08:11] Noble

Vance Crowe [00:08:12] Lies get real dangerous real fast. Because once the government becomes convinced that their lies are noble, then you have a challenge that who should you trust? Should you trust the, the government that believes they know a truth better than your independent thoughts on things. For sure. And

John Jennings [00:08:28] I, and I think it's fascinating to look at different cultures and how they've reacted to the pandemic. So for instance, Asian cultures, as we all know, you know, they, they were they quickly and easily universally adopted mask wearing when COVID hit. In fact, I think a lot of 'em were wearing masks before COVID hit. And if you, you look at it, yes, in America we have this sense of individualism and liberty and that's so important. And in some of these other cultures, they actually put the, the health and benefit of others first. So they're more of a communal sort of thinking. Like you, you think about your society first and your individual second. And a fascinating study looked at, well why is that the case? And they've looked over the history and for various reasons, a lot of these Asian countries and cultures have had a lot more in terms of epidemics and pandemics. So they've learned to work together to fight disease. Where here in the west, and maybe we're, you know, not packed in as much together. We haven't had that. So we haven't had the practice. And if you think about it, you know, the, they had, they had the first sars they've had, you know, more of the, the, the mers things like that have occurred over in these other cultures. And they were fully prepared. And for us it was this test drive. And of course we split politically, which, which was unfortunate. So it's, I think it's fascinating.

Vance Crowe [00:09:44] Yeah. There is something to be said for how density changes a culture. And for the United States we had for 200 years almost infinite growth potential. Yeah. There was just so much space that, that people could just keep going, keep going west, and then eventually you have to start building up. And once you start piling a certain number of people on top of each other, the way that things are in a lot of Asian cultures,

John Jennings [00:10:08] Your

Vance Crowe [00:10:08] Culture has to change. 'cause you can't have the individualistic mentality. And so then you have to have somebody that comes in and mediates how are all these relationships gonna work?

John Jennings [00:10:19] Right, exactly. And and I think it was Frederick Jackson Turner who was a historian and back in the, I think late 19th century, he came up with his frontier thesis of America that what made Americans exceptional was that we always had a frontier. And that, that that was just part of our ethos and our culture. And he had these concerns that once the entire United States was settled, that if we no longer had a frontier, we would lose something. What it meant to be essentially American. And I think we could see a bit of it pop up again in the sixties with, you know, Kennedy and his moonshot. Right. So that was the next frontier, kind of to steal from Star Trek there a little bit. And then you look around now that what, what is our frontier? And maybe we don't have one.

Vance Crowe [00:11:04] Well, and then if you don't, then what happens to those traits that people used to be valued for bravery, for standing, for liberty, for trying things in the face of, of danger.

John Jennings [00:11:17] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:11:18] All of those people that we've had a high selection pressure for that we want those people to raise up in the hierarchy now all of a sudden don't have a place. And now they're being told no, all these traits, they're not only not needed anymore, they're considered toxic. We want them out of here.

John Jennings [00:11:33] Yeah, exactly. I think that's, that's so true. And one of, one of these other people that was working in my bathroom, he, he had something very interesting to say when we got into, into all this. He said, he said, John, I think the issue with America right now is it used to be that we all thought we were heading towards the same destination, but we just had different ways of getting there. 'cause I think the two sides now think that each other's trying to take the country in an entirely different direction. And obviously there's other, been other points in our history with where this is the case. I mean, obviously the civil war, I'm sure there's been other times, but I think that that's a spot on observation. And I think that's why we look at each other with, with such, you know, skepticism and judgment is because, you know, one side is like, oh, you know, the, the other side's gonna turn us all into socialists. And the other side says, oh, you know, we're all becoming, I don't know, fascists or whatever. And, you know, there's just no common ground.

Vance Crowe [00:12:32] Yeah. There's an really interesting social psychology student right now. He's getting a degree at Cambridge. So he, he tech, he tweets all of the stuff he's reading about. One of the things he posted that really struck me was that the perception in the US is that the other side, if you're on the right, then the left, the left the right that you perceive that they dislike you more than you dislike them.

John Jennings [00:12:54] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:12:54] And at first I was like, no, that's not true. I know that the other side dislikes me more than I dislike them. Yeah. And I was like, wait a second. Yeah, no, that's probably true. 'cause I don't actually

John Jennings [00:13:04] Deeply

Vance Crowe [00:13:05] Dislike people that are on, you know, a moderate left. You know, like I I also really don't particularly like people that are on an extreme. Right. Yeah,

John Jennings [00:13:13] For

Vance Crowe [00:13:13] Sure. Right. So it makes sense to me when I sit back and think about it that it's, it's in someone else's interest, but not the regular people. To have this sense of polarity is to believe that other people hate me more than, well,

John Jennings [00:13:24] Well none of us get outside of our bubbles. And I, I just recently, well, you know, I I actually turned 51 tomorrow.

Vance Crowe [00:13:31] Oh, all right. Happy

John Jennings [00:13:32] Birthday. Yeah, thanks. But so when you're 50, you age outta YPO and YPO is young president's organization. And so you have to be a president or CEO of a, of a firm of a certain size. And there's all these events. But one of the amazing things is you have these forums. So there was nine of us in a forum, and we'd meet at least once a month. And you share all sorts of things, you know, issues about your, your kids and your business and health and, you know, your, your hopes and your fears. It's really amazing to, to get to know these, these people. And in my forum, almost everybody was of a different political persuasion than me. And it was so good for all of us because I highly respect every single one of these other eight people. We really care for each other. And I learned so much from them about why they have the views they do. And they learned a lot from me. And, you know, I was like the, the token, you know, I don't consider myself a liberal, but to them I was a liberal. Right. And it was just amazing for me to get outside of my social bubble and to deal with other people. And I, I truly believe that some high percentage of Americans, 70 80% of Americans agree on most things and that we do want common things. And there may be some different ways of getting there, but it's really on the extremes that, that, you know, again, this this worker in my, my bathroom the other day, you know, I, I think that's the impression that, you know, the people on the right think the left just, you know, they want us to be a socialist or maybe even communist country. And if you actually sit down and talk to most people that are, you know, like you said, center left, that's not what they want at all.

Vance Crowe [00:15:05] Well I think, you know, you really hit it on the head about the future, right? Like, if you don't have a vision for where is it that we can go, then there's no, there's no way to build together. You know, my wife and I often find that whenever we hit a point where we're like not in sync, it's because we don't have an aligned vision for where are we gonna be in a month, where are we trying to get to in a year or in a few years. And so that's when we get back to first principles. Right.

John Jennings [00:15:32] But it seems

Vance Crowe [00:15:33] Really difficult right now to even say, how would you have a conversation with a group of people about where we want to be Yeah. In five years.

John Jennings [00:15:43] Yeah. You know, have you ever read any of Jonathan Haight?

Vance Crowe [00:15:47] Oh yeah, sure,

John Jennings [00:15:48] Sure. Yeah. So, you know, he has the, here's the great analogy that really we have this elephant, which is our preconceived notions, our our emotional view. You know, who our identity. And then we have this writer, and the writer is reasoning and logic, but the rider exists to serve the elephant. Right? So the, the second you try to nudge an elephant, the rider defends what the elephant is. So, you know, I think what happens is we end up just talking past each other. 'cause we're, our riders are talking to each other and it's not making any difference at all. And I think for us to come together or to, you know, to, to change people's views of things, it takes a bunch of elephants that are all friends, all nudging each other in a certain direction, right? So you have to have this leader that comes in, I think, that says, okay, I'm gonna lead your elephants and we're gonna turn it a little bit and not talk to the riot. And and I think that's fascinating. And I think what a lot of people on the left don't get about Donald Trump is like, he spoke to people's elephants directly, right? Like there was a huge swath of America that were like, oh my gosh, like this guy gets me on like a cellular level. And it became this emotional attachment. And then you had all these other people in the media and everywhere else than just trying to talk to these people's rioters and it, it didn't move a thing.

Vance Crowe [00:17:08] Yeah. And I think that there's some parallel here with, I think people were celebrating the, the end of religion in a big way because you threw off the reigns that were using that were being used to hold people back from all of the potential paths that they could take. So I think there was like a very large celebration that, hey, look, we're no longer beholden to this concept that the earth and the stars move by this thing. Yeah. And, and now we're free to do what we want. But one of the things that you lose when you don't have a religion is there's nobody talking to the elephants or the riders. Right. Right. Now we're all heading in all sorts of different directions.

John Jennings [00:17:46] Yeah. That's fascinating. There's something that I like to, to call, I, I haven't really seen this written about much, but I call it the paradox of modern modernity, of being modern. You know what I'm trying to say here? And it, you know, we all hate uncertainty. Well, we like a little bit of uncertainty. We, we want, we don't wanna know how to book or a movie ends and we like to gamble because of the, the surprise, you know, that, that you get. But in general, we don't like uncertainty. Our primary human motive is to resolve uncertainty. So when we feel uncertain, we feel stressed, our fight or flight response kicks in, and when we resolve it, we get a dose of dopamine, which is, which is pleasurable. And, you know, so much of the world was so uncertain in, in ancient times or, you know, even just a few hundred years ago. And so we turned to explanations that were often, you know, supernatural. So if, you know, if you go to very ancient times, the idea that the sun would rise and march across the sky and set was, you know, the, the Greek God helios, you know, with this chariot carrying the, the sun across the sky. And a lot of different cultures had that. And, you know, religion explained a lot of the things about the world. So when something happened you'd say, okay, it's, it's god's will or this or that, or I'm gonna sacrifice an animal, what have you. But what science has done is it's beaten back a lot of those supernatural explanations. But what is left is just irreducible uncertainty.

Vance Crowe [00:19:09] Oh, that's not where I thought you were going.

John Jennings [00:19:10] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:19:11] Okay. Interesting. Yeah,

John Jennings [00:19:12] Yeah. So you, you, you no longer can say, oh, well, you know, I, well a lot of people still do, but for, for much of human society now when things happen you say, well that just happened because the world is uncertain. You know, and I'll give you an example. So in, in, I, I'm a a pretty good skier, very good skier for mid-Westerner. Okay? So I've been skiing since I was four

Vance Crowe [00:19:33] Years old.

John Jennings [00:19:33] And I always thought that like, people that got injured skiing were not very good skiers or not in very good shape. And it was at the end of the day or whatever. So in, in January of 2016, I was skiing with a buddy in Vale and I was on a, not a challenging slope for me at all. Like we had done, you know, some sort of, you know, big black or double black, you know, mogul run or whatever. And we took a little break and then we're like going down like this easy run, but pretty fast. And the weather conditions weren't great. And the next thing you know, I'm missing a ski and I fall really hard. So it ended up I shattered my collarbone. I had a few hours later I had surgery and I had a plate and 16 screws put in. And it was so unnerving to me because it just brought home to me, I mean, it it, in the grand scheme of things, you know, I, I got better and everything's fine. But what it brought home for me is, I mean, things just happen. Like you can be a good skier, you can be in good shape and things just happen. And I think it's the same thing too, like car accidents happen and disease happen. You can eat well and exercise and still fall, you know, victim to a, to disease. And, and I think a bit, that's, that's why we have this sense of anxiety as a society that seems to be increasing is partly is this beating back or as you put it, the end of religion for so many people and now you're just left with the world is uncertain.

Vance Crowe [00:20:52] That is very insightful. That's a hundred percent true in my case too. And I find that the way that I limit that uncertainty is I'm always like, man, I'm just really glad I'm not one of those people that can die in a car accident. Right? Yeah,

John Jennings [00:21:04] Exactly. You

Vance Crowe [00:21:04] Start to believe that you do 'cause you're like, it hasn't happened so

John Jennings [00:21:07] Far. It hasn't. And

Vance Crowe [00:21:08] It happened to all these other people, but not me. Well,

John Jennings [00:21:10] It's the whole problem of induction, right? So you take the, you know, it's like NASA lib and his, his book, the bla black swan talks about the thousand days of a Turkey. You know, the first 999 days every day the farmer comes out and gives him food and water and he is just like, oh my gosh, this guy's amazing. I love him, he's fantastic. And then a few days before the Thanksgiving and he chops off his head, like there was nothing in the, the 999 previous days that would've told him what was gonna happen on day 1000. And, and it was interesting, real quick story. I was, I was flying, I don't know, it was, when did that book come out? 2007 or something? So it was not long after that book came out and I was flying from New York and then we were going to Chicago and then, you know, changing planes and coming down to St. Louis. So we were, we were flying Southwest Airlines, so we were flying, you know, somewhere over the, you know, like Pennsylvania or somewhere. And I'm reading this book and, and I read that example of the Turkey and I, I close it and I go, wow, that's like really amazing. And, and I travel quite a bit for business. I'm like, you know, back, you know, I guess when I was a teenager or something, I used to get nervous flying. Now I've flown like thousands of times and like my blood pressure doesn't even go up at all my heart rate. I don't worry about it at all. We hit turbulence, everything's cool. Like I have zero concern about flying. I was just sitting there thinking like, how silly is that in some respects, because something could happen, like now and a minute later there's this noise and then the plane shutters, I'm like, what was that? And everybody in the plane starting to talk or whatever, whatever. The plane starts losing altitude.

John Jennings [00:22:41] And then the captain comes on and he goes, no need to worry. But one of our engines just engines just stopped working. And I was like, are you

Vance Crowe [00:22:52] Freaking kidding me? Like

John Jennings [00:22:54] What a coincidence. That is amazing. And he is like, so we're gonna land in Indianapolis, you know, 'cause there's a long runway and it's close and we're, we're gonna be able to get it down. Okay. What I was thinking is like, well, you know, I know a plane can fly with one engine, but is there something going on here that could cause the other one to go, wow, this is really freaky. And you can hear people like praying and everything. So, so we land and also talking about like just an amazing culture, Southwest Airlines. So we pull up to the gate and the flight attendant says everybody's cheering and there's like fire trucks everywhere and everything. So everybody's cheering. We pull up the gate flight attendant says, okay, well we're gonna let you off the plane for a little bit, but don't go anywhere 'cause we're gonna make a few tweaks to this engine and then we'll get back on and finish our trip. And there's like this like pregnant pause

Vance Crowe [00:23:36] And she's like,

John Jennings [00:23:37] Just kidding. I mean, to go through an experience like that and to have the sort of corporate culture where the flight attendant jokes about it was just amazing. So there I, you know, that that thousand days of the Turkey has ever etched in my brain because of the experience I had while reading it.

Vance Crowe [00:23:54] Well that you just reminded me, comedy is one of those things that you know, is your brain subverting uncertainty, right? Yeah. So it's, you think the joke, the only way a joke is really funny is you think you know where it's going and then all of a sudden it changes. Yeah. And yet it still makes sense. Right?

John Jennings [00:24:10] And

Vance Crowe [00:24:10] I think one of the ways that you, it's

John Jennings [00:24:11] Not surprise that relief you get when you find out. Right?

Vance Crowe [00:24:14] And that, that, and like once you've figured out the pattern that's there, you get that dopamine release or as my friend Kate Crosby calls it the click. Right?

John Jennings [00:24:22] Oh really?

Vance Crowe [00:24:22] And that click is one of those things that we're we are we we love, right? Yeah. We love that click. And I think one of the things that I observed is I wonder if we could have done the Coronavirus lockdowns if there had not been a massive legalization of marijuana. Oh

John Jennings [00:24:39] Yeah. Right.

Vance Crowe [00:24:41] 'cause I think that one of the things that marijuana does is it gives people that click artificially.

John Jennings [00:24:46] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:24:46] And I think that what otherwise would've been too many people being locked in their houses. Yeah. Not having, having so much uncertainty Yeah.

John Jennings [00:24:55] That

Vance Crowe [00:24:56] Without the massive influx of pot, I think that you would've seen bigger pushback against it.

John Jennings [00:25:03] Yeah. That's fascinating. If now that you mention it, you know, I've just kind of seen in my social group, you know, I probably shouldn't reveal this, but just this real increase both in drinking and in recreational marijuana usage. Yeah. And

Vance Crowe [00:25:17] I think it's the click for

John Jennings [00:25:19] Sure. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:25:19] Because like I know that, like, so, you know, for me the, the biggest reason that I like doing marijuana is that it's like there's something that I couldn't piece together. Yeah. They were disparate ideas and then you're like, ah, I get it. And I understand it. Yeah.

John Jennings [00:25:36] And

Vance Crowe [00:25:36] I, and I get that feeling of it. But then you wake up the next day and you realize, wait that click. Yeah.

John Jennings [00:25:41] That

Vance Crowe [00:25:42] Was kind of artificial. It was not anywhere near as profound of a thought and yet I just now 12 or 18 hours or whatever has elapsed. So I had to finally like disassociate the click from it because that's the reason people get a dependency because our brain is designed to find patterns. It that our brain is entirely de dependent on that. And had we not had this huge influx of legal marijuana, I think people would've had a much stronger pushback in different ways. For

John Jennings [00:26:13] Sure. I think that's right. And yeah, speaking of patterns, so I'm, I'm writing a book on investment middle models and the chapter I just finished was really a lot about patterns. It was about why expert predictions of the future are in general so bad. And a key point is, is why do experts continue to try to predict the future? And I'm talking about like, you know, political predictions and economists and investment forecasters and things like that. And a key thing is we are designed, you know, we, we've evolved to, to look for patterns. 'cause it gives us a glimpse into the future, right? So that's a, a great survival mechanism. So when we can't see a pattern, there's stress and we see a pattern, we get, again this, this dopamine release and you know, even experts just see all sorts of patterns and meaningless noise. Right? And one of the stories that I tell in my book, and I think this is gonna resonate with everybody 'cause you've either thought this way or it's happened to you, is, is is the, if you think back to the, the, the Rams and the time that they went to the Super Bowl a second time, right? So this is when we, we being, you know, a Rams fan, we, we went up against the, the the rookie six round draft pick Tom Brady. And he, he, you know, he broke our hearts. But you know, we, the, the Super Bowl was down in New Orleans and we had a 14 win, two season loss, won both of our playoff games. And we go into the Super Bowl as 14 point favorites, right? So I went to that game and you know, Brady does, does this last, you know, last minute drive and, and the Patriots win.

John Jennings [00:27:44] So I was at a bar afterwards with, with some people I, I sort of knew and some other Rams fans. And, and I pointed out like this kind of amazing coincidence that I had only gone to three games all year and all, it was only the three losses. So I went to the two regular season losses in the Super Bowl and they were just like, wow. Like what are the chances? 'cause usually if you're big enough fan that you went to the Super Bowl, you would've gone more than just to two regular season games, then you wouldn't gone to maybe some other playoff games. I was just like, what are the chances? And I started saying, maybe you are the only person Jennings that went to only the three losses of this amazing season. And then, and it was probably helped along by alcohol. People started saying, you're the cause like be you are the cause of the loss. And people started to get mad at me. Okay. So I leave New Orleans, you know, unscathed, right? I get back home and you know, I, I tell this to a few friends and acquaintances and family members and people start saying, as the next season approaches, don't go into to any games. Don't do it. And I do, I go to the first two home season, home games, season games, and they're both losses. And then the cries for me to stop going to the games are even louder. And like, these are, you know, the intelligent people and and I say to them, each one of them, by what possible laws of physics is me showing up in the 60,000 foot or 60,000 person stadium gonna affect how the Rams do. They're just like, I don't know, but it's there. And like, that is an perfect example of us recognizing patterns One exists, there's absolutely a pattern there, but it's meaningless.

John Jennings [00:29:18] It's an absolute meaningly meaningless pattern. And then we have this, the second part of it is we have this drive to explain. So the explanation isn't, oh, it's just random noise. And I could have been the only person that went to the five losses out of the prior 22 games possible. But it doesn't mean anything. And I think all of us look at these patterns and we try to explain them and most of the patterns are meaningless. And this is why we look at coincidences like this coincidence, and we, we ascribe meaning to it. Right? So it's, it's a fascinating topic.

Vance Crowe [00:29:51] I'm totally with you. The, and it's so powerful if you can spot a pattern that other people can't see, we describe you as a genius, right? Yeah. Right. And we just got done in the book club reading a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court.

John Jennings [00:30:04] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:30:04] And the way this guy at the very beginning of the book gets out of being put to death is he knows that there's an eclipse coming and they don't know. Oh

John Jennings [00:30:12] Wow.

Vance Crowe [00:30:12] So the fact that he's able to predict this Yeah.

John Jennings [00:30:15] He

Vance Crowe [00:30:15] Means he can actually start saying, now I, now I control the sun. Right? Yeah.

John Jennings [00:30:19] Because

Vance Crowe [00:30:20] I can.

John Jennings [00:30:20] Oh yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:30:20] And so you watch how all of the people respond to that. And I think that that's the same thing, like

John Jennings [00:30:26] When

Vance Crowe [00:30:26] People wanted to start knowing who should I depend on for future information about the markets? Well, there was this one guy that before the 2008 markets crashed, he said they were gonna crash. Yeah.

John Jennings [00:30:38] And

Vance Crowe [00:30:38] So therefore I'm

John Jennings [00:30:39] Gonna listen to him.

Vance Crowe [00:30:40] I'm gonna listen to him.

John Jennings [00:30:41] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:30:41] And you see this all the time. Yeah. That the, that this, and like anyone can look statistically and say like, well there's no chance that he knows better than everybody else. Yeah. And yet yeah.

John Jennings [00:30:50] That,

Vance Crowe [00:30:51] You know, Michael, Michael Burberry, whatever his name is, the guy in the big short

John Jennings [00:30:55] Yeah. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:30:56] I mean that was essentially an advertisement for his firm.

John Jennings [00:30:59] It was

Vance Crowe [00:30:59] That he was able to predict that

John Jennings [00:31:00] We saw it with a hedge fund manager, John Paulson, like his, his fund. You know, he, he, I think he made like $2 billion personally just from his fees in 2008. So yeah, he saw it. He he did, you know, a, a big short too. But,

Vance Crowe [00:31:14] You

John Jennings [00:31:14] Know, and I think what's, what's why I bring up John Paulson is his second fund was a gold fund, right? So he said the next big thing's gonna be gold 'cause we're gonna have runaway inflation and, and people aren't gonna believe in fiat currencies anymore. So people piled into his fund and they're like, Hey, this guy got the, you know, the financial crisis, right. We're gonna pile into his gold fund. Of course it did horribly. Like it was the absolutely wrong time to be in gold. And, but it just shows that just because you get one thing right, it doesn't mean you figured everything out.

Vance Crowe [00:31:40] Yeah. I mean, I remember the end of that movie, right. Was the next big thing is going to be water. And then everybody was like, oh, that's obvious. That's exactly right. And maybe it is, I don't know. Right. But it does seem like when you wa that's the reason a documentary Yeah.

John Jennings [00:31:55] Is

Vance Crowe [00:31:56] So powerful, right? They're like, we've revealed these patterns that somebody else has figured out and now we can tell you where it's all going. Yeah.

John Jennings [00:32:02] But

Vance Crowe [00:32:02] You're in a unique position for this because you do manage people's money.

John Jennings [00:32:06] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:32:06] Yeah. And so you are expected to know the future in some

John Jennings [00:32:09] Yeah. Our firm oversees nearly $13 billion. So Yeah. It's, it's responsibility.

Vance Crowe [00:32:14] So how in the world do you explain to people, put your money in my trust? And

John Jennings [00:32:18] I don't,

Vance Crowe [00:32:18] But I promise you I can't see the future.

John Jennings [00:32:20] Yeah. And I don't know. Yeah. So that's, that's really challenging and it's actually something we've learned to discuss with prospective client families and, and if they don't like that, you know, they're not gonna be a fit long term. So, you know, in fact, I can think of in the last few months, we just had a prospective client family, and they were just like, okay, you know, we're interviewing a number of firms and they had just sold their business and have a ton of money and a really attractive client to us in terms of, of of, you know, being a fit and, and all these other areas. But they were like, you know, we're asking each firm, you know, what, what do you think the stock market's gonna do this year and the next few years? And et cetera, et cetera. And, and our answer was, we, we don't know. Like every year I write, I'm a contributor on Forbes, and every year I write a, a stock market prediction. The prediction's the same every year. It'll probably be up, but it might be down. And that's just based on, and that could even be wrong. But that, that's just based on over time the way things have have worked out. I have, I have more, you know, stats and stuff backing that up. But any more precise than that. And, and you're probably wrong. I mean, unless you're just, you're just lucky. So, you know, and this is a big point in my book, and it's, it's kind of the basic theme of the book, which is if you realize, if, if you admit the ignorance that you can't predict the future, and that the world, especially the stock market is just inherently uncertain, you acknowledge that and then you invest that way, you'll be a better investor. That this idea that you have to be able to predict the future to invest is just absolutely wrong. In fact, it'll lead you astray because it doesn't work out.

John Jennings [00:33:52] You know, there was a study, you know, Jim Cramer from Mad Money on CNBC, you know, very popular show, you know, this, this investment firm looked at a bunch of his predictions over, you know, many years and they found that he wa he, he was correct about 47% of the time. So about what a coin flip is. And there's study after study after study showing that experts are usually no better than a, a coin flip. But the more confident the expert is, the worse they are. So the more famous the pundit, the worse they are. And that's because overconfidence interferes with our ability to, to, you know, predict. So there was a, a again, I have all these studies, so you know, stop me if I'm telling you too many studies, but you know, I'm writing a book on this. So they, they, there was a study from 2004 where they took undergraduate students and then professional stock pickers. They said, okay, here's a, here's a list of 20 pairs of stocks. I want you to go down. Here's all this information on the stocks you can look at. You know, we're gonna give you, you know, their, their past performance, their analyst projections of earnings, all all this different information, the price, earnings ratio, et cetera. So each group of, of participants was, was told pick one of the two stocks from the 20 pairs and we'll see who, you know, which stock outperformers within the next, you know, whatever year. And they also asked them, how confident are you in your predictions? So the students were sort of confident. They were, they were about like, I think 59% confident. And they were right. They picked the correct the winner 49% of the time. So exactly, basically 50 50 chance they, and most of 'em, when they asked how did you pick the stocks, they said, we just guessed. So the investment professionals were nearly 70% confident that they had picked winning stocks and were only 40%.

John Jennings [00:35:30] Correct. And they asked, where did you, you know, how did you pick the stocks? And none of 'em said, they guessed, they said, I looked at the information you gave me, but I'm an investment professional. I know these stocks, I know these industries.

Vance Crowe [00:35:40] So

John Jennings [00:35:41] Over and over all these studies have shown, the more confident you are about your predictions and your knowledge, the worse your predictions are. So you really want to be with an advisor that says, I'm not confident in my ability to predict the future. And in fact, I don't know, let's take that ignorance and let's invest you that way. It reminds me of on Origin of the Species, you know, has a much longer title by Charles Darwin. You know, he, he, he sets out the theory of evolution and the last paragraph, he kind of apologizes for it and says basically, you know, I'm tearing down this idea of there was a supreme being that just micromanaged and caused all this. And he's really saying, you know, it was a lot of randomness and chance that creates evolution. And, and I love this phrase, he goes, but I believe that there is grandeur in this theory of life. And his point is that it's, it's more beautiful to think about evolution than it is this more simple concept of there's a sa supreme being that was, you know, micromanaging, you know, creation. And, and that's kind of how I, I view the investment markets. That there's grandeur in the view that there's so much randomness and chance and luck and everything going on that, and, and you should invest acknowledging that instead of thinking you have to be able to predict the future, which is really just a fool's errand. You, you just, you just can't do it consistently. But based on the patterns, like if you do get some things right, you think you're good at it.

Vance Crowe [00:37:10] I, I think that this also plays out in, in things that aren't markets, things like art. You know, I, so my mentor is a 101 year old guy that taught me to love art. And I kept saying, you know, Pete, if we go around your, your house here you have Andy Warhol's cats, you have eros, you have, you know, Marguerites like you have, you have fantastic art. How did you know that these were really good? And he was like, I just didn't think very much about it. I either liked a piece or I didn't. And I remember reading a study where the, where they brought people in and they said, okay, you can choose between these two pieces of art. One is an abstract piece of art and one is like one of those kinda like, hang in there kitty things. Right? Yeah. And so then they said, you have to choose one of these and then, you know, just, just go on and you can take it home. And it turns out when they just let people choose, most people chose the abstract one, right? But then they brought another group of people in and they said, okay, now you've gotta choose between these two, but you've gotta tell us why you're choosing it. And so when people had to explain why they chose it, then they chose the kind of hang in their kitty, very simplistic. There was something they could explain, they could, wow, you know, I think it's very motivational and that helps me understand it. And then that they did was they let people go home and then six months later they contacted them. And the people that had chosen the abstract art, the odds that it was hanging up somewhere in their house was, was a amazing, like 80%.

Vance Crowe [00:38:46] But the people that had chosen the art based on, oh, we had to explain it, they had almost all either put it away in a closet or given it away to a friend.

John Jennings [00:38:55] Wow.

Vance Crowe [00:38:55] And so it says something about when you have to ascribe meaning to the intuition that you have going on it in and of itself changes your decision making behavior. Yeah. Wow. And not necessarily for the better. Yeah.

John Jennings [00:39:08] That's fascinating. Are

Vance Crowe [00:39:10] You an art collector?

John Jennings [00:39:11] No.

Vance Crowe [00:39:12] Why?

John Jennings [00:39:15] I, I'll, I'll say this, we do go to like the Clayton Art Fair and this and that. We do buy art, but you know, we haven't done anything that's a, a, you know, a collection. And, you know, the most expensive art I've ever bought is, you know, single digit s But what I do have is a Samsung, the Frame TV over my fireplace.

Vance Crowe [00:39:35] I saw this on your blog. Yeah. This is so, so tell me about this.

John Jennings [00:39:38] Yeah, so it, it, it looks like a painting when it's turned off and there's an art store and you can pick from thousands of works of art and there's some, some great masters in there. You know, there's a lot of Van Van Gogh and Cezannes and OTs and, and things like that. But then there's a bunch of other things that aren't there. Like they're speaking of impression. I mean, there's no Roy Lichtenstein or, you know, not Impressionism, but, but more modern, there's no Lichtensteins or Rothkos or Pollocks or anything like that. But there's a, and there's just a lot that you haven't heard of, but almost every day, either me or my wife chooses a different work of art and then it hangs and it looks just like a painting. Like people will say, don't you have a TV in here? Like, where do you watch tv? I'm like, that's a tv. And they're like, are you kidding me? So yeah, it's, it's pretty cool. So, so in some respects, I guess I am collecting art now, but they're just digital.

Vance Crowe [00:40:36] And

John Jennings [00:40:37] For my $5 a month subscription to the Samsung Art Store,

Vance Crowe [00:40:41] Art is one of those things that it's, I I had no exposure to it as a young person, like v virtually none. And then even when I did start to get exposed to it, I I, I had no way of being able to say whether I thought something was good or not. But once Pete taught me art is whatever you think is beautiful, I, I often have this like a story for young people that are thinking about getting married. Pete and I, the very first time he ever met the woman that became my wife, we, we were at his apartment in New York and he was absolutely insistent that we walk 20 blocks up and go to this art museum. But he was not gonna go, he was just sending Ann and I Oh wow. And then right as we're about to walk out the door, he says, Vance, come in here. And he pulls me aside and he says, now when you go to the art, don't look at the art. Look at what she sees in the art and ask her what she sees because whatever she sees are the eyes that she's going to view you with. And that's when I was like,

John Jennings [00:41:40] Holy cow.

Vance Crowe [00:41:41] Whoa. So we go, and that's what I did was I was like, what do you see here? And what do you see? And I could tell that this woman was infinitely positive, like could always find a way to, to like something, even if it was harsh or jarring. But that's when you start realizing art has so much more power that than I think what I ever had had any concept of. Yeah. And I think that it's way, way more important the older I get, the more important art is to me. I don't need to own it.

John Jennings [00:42:12] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:42:12] But it is very important to me to be exposed to it.

John Jennings [00:42:15] Yeah, for sure.

Vance Crowe [00:42:17] So one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about with art is this article I read called Enter the Super Sensorium. So it's this entire article written by this, I don't know, he is a neuropsychologist or something, but he's basically saying your brain when you go to sleep is trying to do what, what dreaming is really all about is your brain trying to take all this information that you got throughout the day and the patterns that you thought you had seen, it's gonna break those apart and try and match it up in some different way. So the way he describes this is, are you familiar with this concept called overfitting?

John Jennings [00:42:54] Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Vance Crowe [00:42:55] So it, for anybody that doesn't know, it's like you show a artificial intelligence, a picture of a dog, you wanna teach it what a dog looks like. You show it a thousand pictures of a dog, but you accidentally showed it a thousand pictures of a brown dog. And so by doing this, you now, if you show it a picture of a deer, it says brown, four legs, tail. That's a dog that's overfitting. So what this article about the super sensorium is, is he's saying when you go to sleep at night, your brain is taking all the associations that fit patterns that you already knew and it's breaking them apart. And it's refitting them in new and interesting ways, which is why when you wake up in the morning, you suddenly can remember where you put your keys when you couldn't

John Jennings [00:43:33] After

Vance Crowe [00:43:33] Looking for 'em for hours or you, there's some problem, some mental model you were working on, probably as you're writing you get really frustrated at night, you go to sleep, you wake up the next day and you're like,

John Jennings [00:43:42] I got it.

Vance Crowe [00:43:42] It's right there. So that's what he is saying

John Jennings [00:43:45] Is

Vance Crowe [00:43:45] Going on with that. And his overarching point is, one of the reasons that we have lowered the, there are so many people that say I don't get dreams, is that if you expose yourself to entertainment, it is not the same thing as art. Entertainment is always giving you something where you're fitting into a groove. Like you said, you know, we kind of don't know the ending, but like everything already matches, all the art types already matched. So when you expose yourself to art, you're filling your brain with new things that need to be fit into the pattern. So you're actually forcing your brain to have a lot more electricity, so to speak, while you're dreaming. Yeah.

John Jennings [00:44:18] You know what that reminds me of is, is I just read recently this amazing, I don't know, it's like 10 page long essay called Creation and Destruction.

Vance Crowe [00:44:26] It

John Jennings [00:44:26] Was by a guy named John Boyd, and he has since passed, but he was a fighter pilot

Vance Crowe [00:44:32] In Korea.

John Jennings [00:44:32] Oh yeah, yeah. So

Vance Crowe [00:44:33] Yeah, the OODA loop.

John Jennings [00:44:34] Yeah. So he created the OODA loop for, and for people that know what that is, it's, it, it it's for observe, orient,

Vance Crowe [00:44:42] Decide,

John Jennings [00:44:42] And act. Right? And this, this, this concept of creation and destruction is partly what gave him the OODA loop. And the ooda loop basically means that you should do what's unexpected and you should surprise your enemy if you have one, and you should move very quickly. And there's all, I mean, it, I'm way oversimplified it when, when John Boyd would brief people, the Pentagon on this, his minimum amount of time he want them to set aside a six hours. Right? So, so it's very, you know, it's very in depth. But, but John Boyd, what he said in creation and destruction is that really creativity comes from these both of these things that you have to take something and you have to destroy it and break it into its component parts, and then you put it back together and he, you know, it's almost the difference between deductive reasoning and induction. So destruction is deductive and, and creating something is inductive or it's the difference between, you know, analysis and synthesis. And he gives this example, and, and it, it may not get all of them, but he said, if you look at, let's say somebody going up on the, on a, a mountain skiing, right? So you think of, okay, you have the, you have the, the chairlift and the skis, and you think of like a, a, a kid on a bicycle and you have the bicycle and you have a tank and you have all these other things. He goes, break 'em down in their component parts. So you're gonna have like these, you know, 30 or 40 different things. So you're gonna have like the, the turt of the tank and the treads of the tank, and you're gonna have the, the bicycle wheels and the handles and the ski lift and everything.

John Jennings [00:46:14] And he goes, if you take all those, the question then is how do you put them back together completely differently that you've created something new? And you know, I I, I put the, you know, when I was reading this, this essay, I put it down, I thought about it a while and I wasn't really coming up with anything. And you read on and he says, you can take, you know, parts of the bicycle and the chairlift and the tank treads, and now you have a snowmobile. And I was like, wow. Yeah. So I, I think what you're saying with this, this article is he's saying, we're, we're breaking things down, we're doing this destruction or this analysis, and then our brains put things back together and maybe in different ways, right? So instead of taking a tried and true pattern, which may be a false pattern, you take different data and information and you say, let's jumble 'em up and put 'em together differently.

Vance Crowe [00:47:06] Yeah. My dad used to do this thing that when I was younger, he used to drive me absolutely insane. Which was, he would, he, you know, we'd have our furniture arranged in a, in a way, and then most people, once the furniture is put there until you get a new couch Yeah, that's,

John Jennings [00:47:19] It all

Vance Crowe [00:47:19] Stays there, right? But every couple weeks, my mom would go away for something for the evening and he would be like, Vance, come in here. And we'd start moving furniture around and like, then every time you enter the living room you're like, ah, it's all different. But it did make the entire experience of being in our house. It's like being a new room in a new room.

John Jennings [00:47:37] My wife does that all the time. I'm just like, really? Are we gonna rearrange furniture again? She's like, yes, we are.

Vance Crowe [00:47:43] I think it's a good idea. And as you're describing this, and I've read a lot of John Boyd, I would say your description of the way he thinks about this is really on point, man. I have, I, the OODA loop has been an interesting concept because I hear people referring to it all the time, and it's a little bit like, don't you just react to what's going on around you? Isn't that all he is saying? But it's actually much deeper. Yeah.

John Jennings [00:48:05] Well, and, and he thought that most everybody didn't get it. Like, we all look for shortcuts and you know, this, this, this idea that it's linear, that you do these four things in a row, you know, he said, you know, that's, that's really not what I'm talking about. Like, it's much more random and creative than you just follow these four things. And he's like, you know, and one of the keys is, and and, and this was interesting to read 'cause it's, it's a lot of how we've, we've set up our company is he's like, if you are the, the general or the head commander, you know, the key is is that you have all these, you know, subordinates that you completely trust and they trust you. And you have to give them a lot of freedom to follow the OODA loop to, to observe, orient, and decide and react on their own. Like that you can't, it's, it takes too long for you, for them to report to you. You decide and you give it to them. And then there's this power and all these different people having different views of what it means in their situation and that they have to bring their own talent and creativity to it. And if you think about it, that's sort of against, you know, at least my impression of how the military is usually structured, right. With this very strict chain of command. And he turned it on his head and said, no, you've gotta trust. And at each level you've gotta trust those around you and those below you in, in, in sort of the, the organization. And that's really what we've done with our company. And part of it is just me not wanting to work that hard.

John Jennings [00:49:37] Right. So I'm, I'm president of our company and I realized a long time ago

Vance Crowe [00:49:42] Say a little bit about your company. Yeah. So follow along with

John Jennings [00:49:44] You. So we're a multifamily office, so we work with 60 families. There's 55 of us working on 60 families. They're all extremely wealthy all over the country. It's really fun and amazing. You know what we do, our goal is to be indispensable partners to our client family. So we do investments in family office and estate planning and, and you know, any and all things, you know, financial for the, for these families.

Vance Crowe [00:50:08] So this is people that have like many millions of dollars and they've gotta figure out, hey, we can't just keep it in cash, but we can't just like let it ride in the stock market. So we wanna figure out, hey, how, how will, what will happen if we die? How do we manage our taxes? How do we, do you do all the way down to bill paying and those kinds of things. Yeah.

John Jennings [00:50:24] We, yeah, yeah. Not for every family, but for, we do bill pay for a lot of 'em, we do, you know, cashflow management and budgeting and, and everything else. So yeah, very wealthy families and with a lot of complex affairs because as you have money and especially as that rolls through the generations, you have, you know, you have investment partnerships and private real estate and shared houses and trusts and transactions between trust and entities. So yeah, it's, it's pretty, pretty interesting and fascinating. And, and what I realized years ago is, you know, if I tried to really, you know, if we were more command to control and centralized decision making, like I would have a just a ton of, you know, I, I just wouldn't sleep. I would just have to work all the time and you know, really Well

Vance Crowe [00:51:12] Your emails would be infinite. Yeah.

John Jennings [00:51:13] Would be,

Vance Crowe [00:51:14] 'cause it would be like, it would be, I need you to make this decision. Right. And I can't move forward until that decision is made.

John Jennings [00:51:19] Yeah. So about 10 years ago I was talking to one of our clients that was the CEO and chairman of a a Fortune 500 company, you know, this huge company. And he's just brilliant. And I said to him, you know, what is your advice as we grow? So at the time, I dunno, we probably like 25 or 30 employees as we grow, you know, what is your advice that we can keep our culture? And he said, you know, and this is not what I expected. He goes, what you should do is you need to have a lot of small teams and no middle management. He said, the whole reason corporate structure looks like it does is based out of the military and World War II and Korea and et cetera were, you know, a lot of these people returning from the war that went into to corporate America or became management consultants. And this idea that you have a general and before below that you have, you know, full blur colonels and lieutenant colonels and then majors and captains and all these divisions and battalions and squadrons and all this thing. It was, it was really based on this concept that goes back to, you know, when there was calvary, you know, how many, you know, horses could a commander see in battle? Right. Or, you know, how many fighting men could you see? And this is like why you had this pyramid structure. And he goes, but it's ridiculous and it doesn't work on how you manage people. Instead you need to have a bunch of smaller teams of people you trust that are little, little experiments of trial and error. And you take the best ideas from these teams. And he goes, do not have middle management.

John Jennings [00:52:51] He goes, because this military way of thinking, you have to have all these layers of officers. He goes, don't do that. It cripples and kills companies. And, you know, that really spoke to me. And again, i I don't have like carte blanche, you know, it's a lot of people and a lot of culture and you know, business partners and everything. So it's not just me, but we all talked about that and other things that we had read and said, yeah, we're gonna create this company that's very flat. We're not gonna have a lot of hierarchy, we're not gonna have a lot of command and control, and we're gonna allow each of our partners, our principles to follow their own OODA loop, which I didn't know was an oodle loop. I only learned about that recently. So Yeah, absolutely.

Vance Crowe [00:53:31] Wow. I mean I, so we hear a lot of times that we're stuck in the, you know, our school system is based on the factory worker, but I'd never heard the concept of the bureaucracy inside of corporations. But you see that it, that it, like so much of the work that gets done is done by the very, very bottom of the hierarchical structure. Yeah, for sure. And then everybody else is just absorbing some amount of, of work and then most of it is dissipated as heat. Yeah.

John Jennings [00:53:58] Yeah. And

Vance Crowe [00:53:59] People don't, I mean, like what modern man says, I want to go work inside of a bureaucracy. Yeah. Like no one,

John Jennings [00:54:06] No one,

Vance Crowe [00:54:06] Right. Because you don't have the, like you had said, the the benefit of being outside of a bureaucracy is you can say, Hey, there's the goal we're trying to get over now I can do anything I want to get over that. Yeah.

John Jennings [00:54:18] That's,

Vance Crowe [00:54:18] That's fulfilling. That's when you get to find the click and you get to take those dopamine hits that you get from discovering a pattern and making it happen. But in a bureaucracy you see the click and then it's four months before anything can happen because of it.

John Jennings [00:54:33] Yeah. And, and bureaucracy, I, I agree with my client and read a bunch more about it. I, I think it does kill companies and then once you get to a certain size it really becomes difficult. You may be aware of Dunbar's number that says, you know, you can really only kind of know 150 people and then there's different levels. Like you'd only have a handful of like really close friends, then you have other friends and acquaintances, et cetera. But you, you really can only know the name of and something about around 150 people. And, you know, whether that's right or wrong, I think it's, it's a, it's,

Vance Crowe [00:55:01] Oh, I, in my experience, it's a, it's totally accurate.

John Jennings [00:55:04] It may not be exactly 150, but yeah, that exactly right. And, and I think when you look at companies, there is this tipping point once you start getting, you know, a hundred, 150, 200 people where you don't know everybody anymore and you don't, you know, in our company with 55 people, you know, not only do I know everybody's names, I know probably every single person's kids' names and I know their spouse's names and I know in general where they live and I know something about them. And I go to lunch with everybody in our, well, pre pandemic. I go to lunch with everybody in our company once or twice a year. And during the pandemic I have people over to my house to sit outside and you know, sometimes we watch blues games, sometimes we just cocktail. So you can do that, but once you get beyond a certain size, you can no longer do it. And some companies have taken this to heart and, and I believe it was the company Gore-Tex, all their plants and offices and divisions, they've kept to 150 people. And this is partly because of this Dunbar's number. And they said, you know, as a huge company, you know, we're gonna have more than 150 people, but we wanna have these, these smaller enclaves of 150 people that work together as a team. And I just think that's so important. And it's interesting. And YPO, again, I've learned so much from YPO, but you know, I'll talk to people and like, it seems like the main goal for their company is growth. If they wanna get bigger and bigger and bigger and, you know, make more and more money. And that may be well and good, but I always ask the question, well why, like, why do you want to grow and why do you wanna get bigger? Because it sounds to me like a lot of the things that bigger companies have to deal with are horrible. Like, and, and this is something I've, I've learned as we've gotten bigger, you know, 55 employees, 60 clients, it means that there's almost always a problem.

John Jennings [00:56:39] There's some employee, you know, there's always some issue or an issue with a client or there's always something that's going on. And you know, back when we had, you know, say like 30 people and 30 clients, you know, it was like half the number, right? So as, as you get bigger, there's just more room for inter you have so many more interactions. I mean, it's, it's probably exponential. So my my, you know, it, it's probably four or eight times as big when you have 60. 'cause you have so many more interactions and so many more people to, to manage and, and and deal with. And I just can't imagine wanting to work in a place that has, you know, hundreds of people, which I had before. I used to work at Arthur Anderson and it was, you know, it was huge. And

Vance Crowe [00:57:17] The biggest challenge though is we live in a world that is rewarding economies of scale. Yeah. And so quality becomes this very difficult thing, you know, so a a lot of people that I interact with all the time are farmers and they wanna keep their farm as a family farm. They don't want to have to grow. But in order to be able to keep up with the margins of the, of the world, you have to go Yeah. As big as you possibly can.

John Jennings [00:57:42] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:57:42] And the only limiting factor is like for a dairy farm, people don't realize is you, you know, eventually there is a falling off that you just can't bring hay in from, from far enough way or you just can't get rid of the manure. So you, you have to, you can only pack so many dairy cows in.

John Jennings [00:57:58] Oh really?

Vance Crowe [00:57:58] But outside of that, right, you can just keep let, oh, well we'll just keep adding farm, you know, field after field after field. We'll just buy more combines, we'll hire more workers. So it this expansion, whereas most people want to have that kind of quality life. What, how do you think this gets meted out in a modern world? Is

John Jennings [00:58:16] There, well, actually, you know, one of our prior conversations, we talked a bit about Peter deal's concept of secrets, right? So this is something that you believe, and it's not just that you believe it and others don't, but it's almost like if you talk about it, somebody else is gonna think it's crazy. So, and, and one of my favorite discussions with this, it's Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz. And he gave the commencement speech at the Columbia University Engineering School probably like 20 15, 20 16. It's a, the entire speech is just amazing. I highly recommend anybody listening to look it up on YouTube. But at about minute five, he talks about the idea of secrets. And he says, okay, what I am is I'm a venture capitalist and I invest in companies and lemme talk about what I do in terms of ideas. If someone comes to me and they say, my idea is I wanna make cell phone batteries last longer. He's like, that is an amazing idea and I'm not gonna invest in your company. 'cause everybody thinks that's a good idea. So like Panasonic and Samsung and Apple, and everybody's gonna be doing that, so I'm not gonna invest in that. He goes, but I'll give you an example. He goes, few years ago I had somebody, somebody by the name of Brian Chesney come into my office and he said, I have this secret. And the secret is I have been renting out an air mattress in my living room and I've done some research. And I, I found out that it used to be, you know, back before we had cars and planes and trains that people stayed at ends. And because they didn't travel very far, they knew what the end was gonna be like. They'd go, oh, it's like Gertrude's Inn. I know that's pretty nice. And that's, that's better than Sam's Inn.

John Jennings [00:59:49] So you knew where you were staying, but then as we became more mobile, you needed to know the quality where you're staying. So that's when you started getting Holiday Inns and Howard Johnson's and Ritz Carltons and everything. 'cause you know, the level, like if you stay at a courtyard by merit, which I often do when I travel, I know what I'm getting. But the, what's happened now with the internet is you don't need that any longer because you, you can see it online, you can have reviews. So my idea is I want people to start renting out rooms in their house. And Ben Horn said, Ryan, that is a horrible, horrible idea. Like, what if, what if you rent out your room to a serial killer? He goes, but it's fascinating. Tell me more. And he goes, so of course I invested it and it's Airbnb and it's an amazing investment. So you have to have, like, to really be successful, you have to have a secret. And our co and where I'm coming around to your question, our company's secret is that there's a trade off in business between customization and scalability. And it's true probably in every business, but especially in financial services. So people move towards scalability because it's more profitable. But our secret is, is we don't do that. We stay as custom as we can possibly be. And the secret is that's a really good business and it's quite profitable and almost nobody else is doing it.

Vance Crowe [01:01:06] Oh man, I John, that is beautiful. Well, thank you. I I absolutely love that. And I think because it gets at, and we've both talked about the, the zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. Yeah. Right. It gets at that concept, right,

John Jennings [01:01:20] Right here.

Vance Crowe [01:01:20] Yeah. Somewhere around, it's in the book club. So it that, that concept of, of finding a way to be happy with quality.

John Jennings [01:01:26] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:01:27] And you know, you, so you have for, for people that don't know you have a prolific blog that you're putting things out. I don't know if it's every day or almost every day.

John Jennings [01:01:34] It used to be every single day. And now it's, I don't know, two or three days a week, which is much healthier. You know, I really worked with my therapist a lot on not sending it out every single day.

Vance Crowe [01:01:44] Well, so you, the, one of the latest articles that you had was on success. Yeah.

John Jennings [01:01:49] And

Vance Crowe [01:01:50] You know, I read that after a particularly rough time just recently being like, what is the goal of what it is that I'm working on? Yeah.

John Jennings [01:01:59] And

Vance Crowe [01:01:59] You know, you read, you wrote things down there that I was like, actually I maybe already have success and I just am not recognizing it. So talk about that article.

John Jennings [01:02:09] Yeah. So I've, I've been collecting definitions of success for years. I forget what caused it to happen, but I, I just thought it was interesting. And I guess part of it is dealing with, you know, and helping these client families where, I mean, you know, our average client family is like $200 million. So it's like every single one of them, you know, in terms of a common, you know, non wealthy person would be like, I just won the lottery, or, you know, a huge lottery.

Vance Crowe [01:02:32] I won the super lottery. Yeah,

John Jennings [01:02:33] I won, I won the, you know, I won the big Powerball, you know, and after taxes and payout, this is what I'm left with. And, and so it's, it's interesting to see it, it it's allowed me to have this perspective that success isn't necessarily just money. Right. And it's not, it's not just building a great business. I mean, I've seen some, some people that built amazing businesses and sold 'em for a ton of money, and on one hand you'd go, they're incredibly successful. But, you know, sometimes that can be destructive to other areas of life. So I've, I've collected these definitions of suce success and this blog post was my three favorite definitions. And you know, the first is kind of funny, but it kinda leads in the other two. And, you know, one that I read years ago was, you know, you're, you're successful if you have the ability to schedule your day around a nap. And it just says you're in control of your schedule instead of your schedule being in control of you. And it means that you have a certain amount of freedom and control of your life. And that is a real luxury. And you know, I know a bunch of people that aren't able to do that.

Vance Crowe [01:03:27] Well, it's funny you mentioned that. So I used to work at Monsanto and I was hyper successful there. I just really hit a niche. I was focused on something. And one time I wanted to take a nap, so I laid down in my office, I closed the door and somebody came in and found that I was napping and they were outraged. And I was like, what does, what, does it matter if I take a nap? Like, it is, is there some, it's, that's not getting done. But it was like, yeah, absolutely. Like you're gonna pay for this. Yeah.

John Jennings [01:03:54] Well, and partly 'cause of this definition of success, because I enjoy, I mean, if I'm tired, I take a nap, right? And, you know, sometimes if my schedule doesn't allow it, but in general, a lot of days I can take a nap if I, I need to. And so when we designed our new offices a few years ago, we actually have a room that's for napping. Well actually, it's not just for napping, it's also the room that is used by our, our new mothers in terms of, of, of lactation. So back pre pandemic, I felt like I, I felt pretty good about napping there unless, you know, we had somebody that was regularly using the room for a more important reason. And, you know, then you kind of feel bad if I'm going to somebody I am like, hey, you know, I'm just kinda wondering, you know, kinda what your lactation schedule is today.

Vance Crowe [01:04:35] Because I'd like to, I like to take my

John Jennings [01:04:36] Nap. I like to have a nap. But, you know,

Vance Crowe [01:04:38] But,

John Jennings [01:04:38] But again, I'm in this, this unique position where I'm president of the company, so I almost want to let it known. And I do that. I nap occasionally in the nap room. We call it the zen room, actually, speaking of the zen or motorcycle maintenance, because I think, you know, I would like people to recognize that, man, if you're tired, take a break. And if you need to nap, do so. Right.

Vance Crowe [01:05:01] And naps to me are the time when I get the most vivid dreams. Because you're just in the like, level one, level two sleep. Yeah, for sure. In fact, lately I've been having this street, so I take naps and my dad used to have a room in his own little brokerage house that he would just go back and take naps. But lately, my dream when I wake up is I can see myself being just this tiny speck of consciousness. And you zoom out and you're in St. Louis, and then you zoom out, you're North America. Oh

John Jennings [01:05:29] Wow.

Vance Crowe [01:05:29] Then the earth, then you know the universe and you realize the only place that I can experience right here in this consciousness. Yeah. And you are asleep, wake up. And so I have this like, being like thrown into the world.

John Jennings [01:05:43] Wow.

Vance Crowe [01:05:43] And then you're, you know, it's two o'clock in the afternoon and you're like, oh, I better get to work. I gotta get some done. I know, right? And, but like, I think about that and when I read your definition of success, and I was like, that is, that is so powerful because you're right. Like that's, it's the one

John Jennings [01:05:59] Thing I want the

Vance Crowe [01:05:59] Most in the world is the ability to feel consciousness in the middle of the day. Like an awareness that you're, the fact that you have a spark of life is so rare and so unique

John Jennings [01:06:10] That,

Vance Crowe [01:06:11] That you can only experience it if you're aware of it.

John Jennings [01:06:14] Exactly.

Vance Crowe [01:06:15] So the other two definitions

John Jennings [01:06:16] Is success. Yeah. So one of the other definitions, and and I think this a spoken, I've, I've gotten a lot of great feedback on this. I actually had a friend of mine call me last night, who's the CEO of a company. And he was just like, I needed to read this, I needed to read it. Now he's like, you don't know this, but I'm in an inflection point in my career and I needed to hear this. And I've had a few other people email me or text me and say, you know, I'm in inflection point. And really the one that spoke to them is this, this idea. And I, I had read in a book years ago and, and it was kind of success, not in, you know, success was more income, but that the, the secret is, is that as you move up the income ladder, you're paid more and more for who you are rather than what you do. And that, that really spoke to me, and it's something that I, I really try to mentor a lot of the people in our company on because, you know, you start out doing, and especially if you're good at something, and I, and I had this situation where, you know, I, I was trained as a, a lawyer and I was a estate plan tax lawyer at a big law firm that worked at Arthur Anderson. And I did a lot of technical tax stuff. And I had this, this performance review when I was about 30 and the head of the tax division, and I always remember this 'cause he was, he, he did all these reviews of like all, everybody that was a manager and above at the tax division. And he actually took the time and effort to really think about me and really focus on my career. 'cause he could have just said, which he did, you know, Jen, you're so smart, you do such good work. And he said, you are one of the best technical tax people I have ever worked with. Like, you make our office here in St. Louis better you help everybody around you, you are such a resource. And he could have stopped there and I would've like, awesome. He goes, but if you continue on this path, you will never make partner here.

John Jennings [01:07:50] He goes, we can always buy technical people that have true success, have the soft skills. They can bring in business, they can deal with clients, they develop relationships, they have networks, they invest in others, they lead, they learn, they teach, they do all these things. What do you want to do? You'll have a fine career if you're just a technician. I was like, oh my gosh. So I went and thought about it, came back and I said, I want to be instead of just do. And it was really hard because I knew I was great at something and I didn't know that I was good at this other thing.

Vance Crowe [01:08:23] Yeah, you're at a local Optima and the only way to get better at the other one is to give up, like being the technical expert. But that's really, really uncomfortable.

John Jennings [01:08:30] Yeah. And and early in our company, I was the estate planning expert in our company, and then I then I was the investment guru in our company and I was like our private jet expert and all these other things. And at each stage I gave them up. I, I hired or, you know, you know, really put forth us hiring people that replaced me in those areas. And I'm no longer any of those things. I mean, I know some about it still, but I've replaced most of, or a big portion of what I do. And, you know, really I've seen with my career what my value I bring is network and ideas and you know, contributions, culture, all these intangible things. And that I believe that everybody has their own superpower, at least one. Some people have multiple. And I want our people to see what their superpower is and move towards it. And hopefully that means they can make this leap from, you know, spending most of their time doing to most of their time doing something else that's more intangible, but may bring more value. And I, I just think, you know, personally, it's more fulfilling for some people they love just doing it and that's great, you know, but I, I think it should be a conscious decision or a conscious choice, you know, what do you want to be, not just what do you want to do every day? And you know, I have these friends that talk about retiring, so I'm, you know, turning 51 tomorrow and they'll be like, oh my gosh, I can't wait to retire. What's your number? And like that concept is just like foreign to me. You know, if they said, you know, what do you wanna be doing in 10 years? I want my job to look a lot different than it is now, but it's because I'll move on to other things and find new interests and give up other things that are, you know, more doing.

John Jennings [01:10:06] And yeah. So I think it's, it's, it, it's fascinating

Vance Crowe [01:10:10] And people really responded to this article that you wrote.

John Jennings [01:10:13] Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's interesting what I've learned by writing this blog, which is called the interesting fact of the day, if you wanna find it, it's the IFOD, the interesting fact of the day.com. But, you know, some things are just fact facts. Like, so a few weeks ago I did one on, you know, what's the brightest beam of light in the world? And it actually is the, the spotlight that shoots out the top of the Luxor hotel that's, you know, shaped like a pyramid. And there's all these facts on how incredibly bright it is, and it's just, it's just crazy bright. So, you know, that's, you know, I think that's pretty interesting. A lot of people thought that was interesting. But the thing that really, you know, the, the ones that get a lot of clicks and get passed around, I get a lot of comments on are the ones that are more philosophical, like definitions of success or, you know, some reflections on being an adult and how we're all just making it up as we go along. And, you know, it's things like that that I think really resonate with people, which has been interesting to me. And, you know, things that I think are super interesting that don't get a lot of clicks or comments. It, it's just interesting to me. They need to be things that are relevant to people. So, you know, years ago, I, I, you know, I did one on, you know, what happens to a bullet shot straight up in the air, you know, just, it's fascinating and, you know, very few clicks or you know, about the, these LIGO detectors that detected, you know, the collision of two super massive black holes in their gravitational waves. And the Nobel Prize in, in physics was actually granted to the scientists that came up with this in 2017. And they were the most precise instruments that have ever been created in the history of humanity. And it's just amazing and fascinating.

John Jennings [01:11:45] And finally, you know, a hundred percent confirmed that Einstein's theory of general relativity and like, it got like one fifth of the clicks that an average day does. So it, it, it's just interesting to me to see what people think is interesting.

Vance Crowe [01:11:59] That is one of the most profound things about producing content is like I, I'll do an interview that I think is like doing cocaine or something. I interviewed this guy named Lee Cronin, who I, I would guess will be the first person to make the jump between chemistry and biology make che make inorganic life for the first time. Oh

John Jennings [01:12:18] Wow.

Vance Crowe [01:12:19] And like you put that out there and people are like, eh,

John Jennings [01:12:21] That's

Vance Crowe [01:12:21] Okay. Right. But I put out one with a, with a mom that works on a pig farm and that, you know, she's raising three kids that people just go bananas over it. Yeah. And like for me, I have no idea why. And the, the, the harder I look at the why, the less I'm able to grab it. But I know from all the articles that you're suggesting, like the, I do love the facts. So I, I know the room in the Luxor Hotel gets 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah. So I'm reading your thing, but I, I understand where you're coming from on that and I, I wonder why it is that the philosophical is so drawn because I think the woman that's the mother of three kids on the pig farm, what we ended up ultimately talking about is how are you managing the stress of

John Jennings [01:13:06] Yeah. Raising

Vance Crowe [01:13:07] Kids

John Jennings [01:13:07] And well, it like that it relates to the listeners everyday lives. And and I find that in my blog, like if it relates to somebody's every day life and it allows 'em to, you know, maybe have a slightly different perspective or do a little bit better or think a little better about themselves, you know, the on, on the being an adult one, I mean, one of my main points on on that is, you know, especially being a parent, we're just all making it up as we go along. And even in business and everywhere else, we're just making up. We don't know what we're doing. And you know, we, we do gain experience and that's, that's great. But you know, we, every day is a new day and, and we just do the best we can. And I got a lot of people saying, oh my gosh, Jennings, you just seem like you have everything so figured out. It was so amazing to hear that you don't, you know, and, and I think it's almost like the, the Facebook or the Instagram effect where everybody just only puts on their good days. You know, they only, they only post pictures when they look amazing. And, you know, I've, I've become obsessed with my Peloton and one of the, one of the instructors on her Instagram feed and, you know, she's super fit and so she, she did this little video and she's like, here's what I look like, you know, in this outfit posing like this. And she goes, now watch me bend over this way. And you saw like these little rolls of fat. And, and again, she's like super fit. She's like, you know, that's what doesn't go on Instagram, you know, and, and she goes, and what you all don't understand is like, I look at myself and I see those roles of fat and I'm like, oh man, come on. You know? And everybody else is just like, oh, you're so fit. I'd love to be like you. And, and you know, I think it, everybody thinks maybe some people have things figured out and they don't

Vance Crowe [01:14:39] Yeah. You know, you mentioned Peter Thiel earlier. Yeah. Who's somebody that I really follow. And one of his philosophers that he finds a lot of value in is a guy named Renee Gerard. And Rene Gerard I think will become, he's like Carl Young, like where he was really out of vogue, and now I think there's going to be a lot of people that start reading and falling. But one of the things he talks about is a concept called mimetic desire.

John Jennings [01:15:01] And

Vance Crowe [01:15:01] It's not memes, MEME, but Mimetic is in mimic. And he basically says,

John Jennings [01:15:08] The

Vance Crowe [01:15:08] Human beings, our superpower, the reason that we are able to outcompete Neanderthals is that we cooperate. And that cooperation is the human superpower that also has some self-limiting functions, which are, we don't know what we want. And so you look out at the world and there's so many things that you could want that you have no idea what to go for. So instead what you do is the same thing that a little baby does, right? A baby when they first start meeting their parents, they're watching them and they're trying to make the same mouth gestures as their parents. And then they're trying to figure out, well, what does mom and dad want? I'm gonna look and I'm gonna want that too. Well, when we get older, we start looking at, I don't know what I want out of all these things, whether it's a car, a beautiful house, or a higher up on the hierarchy. So instead I'm gonna look to what other people want, see what they're looking at, and then I am going to have that same desire. And if I do, it actually puts me in line with the tribe in a, in a way that is beneficial, right? Yeah. Because if we all want the same thing, then we can have desire coordination and desire coordination makes it so you can have a stable society. But all of these things came about before Instagram, right?

John Jennings [01:16:16] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:16:16] Before you have these massive collections of what is it that people want, what is it that they desire? And that like, you know, putting your desires onto social media and then having them be these, it, it seems like digital mobs that, that are disconnected from group cohesion, right? Yeah. It's like hijacking your cooperative brain and putting you in a, in a very weird space.

John Jennings [01:16:39] Yeah, totally. And I've had the experience, I can think of at least one where, you know, a client sold a business and they went from, you know, being wealthy, but illiquid extremely liquid. And we talk a lot about, you know, how much can you afford to spend based on your goals or whatever. And like the amount he could spend was just a ton of money, like just ridiculous. And he said, you know, I don't know if I can spend that much every year. And we're like, well, you don't have to. And he's like, well, what would it it look like if I did? Like, what are your other clients spending money on? Like, do you have anybody that spends this much money a year? Like hell yeah. It's like, well, what do they do? Like what do they spend money on? What should, what should I be buying and doing that other people with this much money have? And I mean, that's really to your point, and we were just kinda like, you know, we, we'd suggest that you spend it more on experiences than things, and you know, you do, you, but we don't. Right. We, we, you're right, we judge each other by everybody else. And you know, we have, we have clients that just have an amazing amount of money, you know, like hundreds of millions of dollars that still look at their, their friends that maybe have, you know, billions and go, you know, I'm not that wealthy and I can't do everything that I want to do. And on the other hand, we have other people that, you know, are just like, I have more money than I ever thought IW would ever have and, you know, I'm fine. So, you know, I I think, you know, being wealthy really has to do with, you know, what do you want versus what do you have not the absolute amount of what do you have? You

Vance Crowe [01:18:04] Know, and this kind of goes with what we were talking about with Boyd and the vision that you have to have. Like, so I brought this idea up with you before the camera started, which is the, the Long Now foundation, which is this concept started by a guy named Stewart Brand who wrote the Whole Earth Catalog. And the idea is that agriculture started about 10,000 years ago. And once you have agriculture, then all of the other things that go along with civilization can happen much, much more rapidly. So you go from, you know, farming to satellites and being able to launch something to Mars, right? Right. We did that in 10,000 years. Yeah. So they ask the question, it

John Jennings [01:18:41] Allowed specialization. Right, right,

Vance Crowe [01:18:42] Right,

John Jennings [01:18:42] Right.

Vance Crowe [01:18:42] So then they say, well, where will we be 10,000 years from now? Right. Yeah. And trying to figure out, so they used to have this lecture series where they would ask people, tell us about what you think the future will look like in 10,000 years. And basically they gave up because nobody could even touch that. Yeah. The only thing that could would be something like sci-fi. Right, right. I know you're familiar with the dark forest, the, but it's an interesting idea to think about

John Jennings [01:19:07] What is

Vance Crowe [01:19:07] The longest thing that I could do to make a difference into the future. Right. Do you find that, that the people that you're representing, do they want to have a legacy that lasts?

John Jennings [01:19:19] Yeah. A lot of

Vance Crowe [01:19:20] A hundred years or a thousand?

John Jennings [01:19:21] Yeah. A lot of them do. And, and they will just in terms of the trust they create, which is pretty fascinating. So there, there was something, and still some states have it, but it was called a rule against perpetuity. So you couldn't create a non charitable trust that lasted, you know, forever. And the actual rule is a trust, interest in a trust must vest or fail within lives and being plus 21 years. So it comes out to about a hundred years. But now you can create trusts in many states, including Missouri, where we are now,

Vance Crowe [01:19:51] The,

John Jennings [01:19:51] The go on forever. And, you know, we've been trustee or our families have, have trust that we're created in the thirties and forties. And so what you have is these beneficiaries that didn't know the people, you know, their ancestors, they're just like, oh, you know, it's, it's, you know, I'll just throw, throw out a name. You know, Betty Jones, you know, my great great grandmother. I never knew, you know, I'm, you know, a beneficiary of the Betty Jones 1937 Trust. Right. So, and you know, because they created the wealth and they created these trusts also, you know, I think the stories about these people end up living longer. Right. So, you know, there's a, one of our client families, the, the patriarch, or excuse me, the matriarch died at her 80th birthday party. So she was sitting at a table surrounded by all her children. She was like at a hotel, they were having like a party, and she, she said this, this was her last words, what the hell is wrong with my red socks? And then collapsed on the table. And I guess she, you know, used to have fainting spells, so they just thought, you know, you know, grandma or mom or whatever just fainted. So it kinda carried her to the hospital or she was dead. So that was it. And you know, I think that story is pretty amazing. So if she was somebody that wasn't wealthy, it probably would've persisted somewhat. But the fact that she was so wealthy and it created all these trusts that have her name on it, you know, it's just like this family lore of, you know, how this, this, you know, matriarch died back in, I think it was late 1970s.

John Jennings [01:21:24] Right. And she had created these trust in the thirties. So it's, it's pretty fascinating.

Vance Crowe [01:21:28] I'm finally at the point in my life when my friends are starting to sell businesses and they've now come into

John Jennings [01:21:35] Money

Vance Crowe [01:21:36] If they wanted to do something that they, what's what's a way that you think legacy, they should think about legacy as they've come into

John Jennings [01:21:43] Yeah. Wealth. Yeah. I, I really think it's modeling what they view as as important and having that passed down through generations. Like we work with families that, you know, we, we work with a family that, that has around a billion dollars. When you add up all their assets, I mean, it's not all just liquid wealth and they don't spend very much like their kind of like their family ethos is, we don't flaunt our money, we all work hard and you should kind of live within your means. And they could be spending, you know, 10 or a hundred times more than what they are. And the money's just like piling up. I mean, part of, and, and this is something that I think a lot of people that, that don't deal with wealth, really wealthy people don't understand. Like for a lot of them, their big issue is what do we do with all this money? Yeah. And I work with a number of families that are that way. And then others, you know, it's like, you know, our main thing is service. You know, you know, whether it's charitable or political or something. I mean, you can think almost like the, the Kennedy family or the Bush family or you know, how they, you know, really were dedicated to, to, you know, service politically or service to your country. And you know, that we have other families that, you know, there's in every generation people are in the military. And so I think there's things like that that can make its way through the generations. We have some people that actually are, are great kind of books about their legacy, you know, you know, here's a history of my family and here's where we are now. And, and those are, those are really cool too. I, I think regardless of after a few generations, you know, it's

Vance Crowe [01:23:09] Who

John Jennings [01:23:09] Knows what's gonna happen. And at the end of the day, after a few generations, I think the memory of all of us, unless we're super famous kind of phase. Right.

Vance Crowe [01:23:16] Yeah. And even if you are super famous, right? The thing that's left behind is a Disneyland understanding of you. Right? Yeah. Like, you know, I mean, how much does Christopher Columbus love the legacy that's been left behind about him? Right? 'cause people know virtually nothing about him

John Jennings [01:23:29] Or things that aren't true. Like, you know, George Washington and the Never Telling a Lie and the Cherry Tree and, you know, all this. I mean, a lot of those things which, which aren't true are the things that are, are still spoken and remembered about them. So yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:23:41] John,

John Jennings [01:23:42] This has been

Vance Crowe [01:23:43] Fantastic. Yeah. I really appreciate you coming by here doing the first

John Jennings [01:23:47] I could talk to you all day.

Vance Crowe [01:23:48] Oh man, I, the feeling is mutual. I'm, I'm, I'm just concerned about the rest of your day. If people wanted to check out your blog, where would they go? Yeah,

John Jennings [01:23:57] So it's the, the i fod T-H-E-I-F-O-D dot.com and you can subscribe again. I send stuff out, you know, 2, 3, 4 days a week. Some of 'em are interesting and some of them aren't.

Vance Crowe [01:24:10] Well, you had said you're gonna join us for book club

John Jennings [01:24:13] This month. Yeah, absolutely.

Vance Crowe [01:24:13] We're doing Jurassic Park. Yeah. Which is surprisingly horrific. Yeah.

John Jennings [01:24:18] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:24:18] Have you started it yet?

John Jennings [01:24:20] I, I read it way back in the day. I, I, I, I went through and read, you know, and Drama to Strain and Jurassic Park and a bunch of other Michael Crichton's, you know, back, I don't know, maybe in the nineties. So I've read it previously, but I've read so many books since then. I cannot wait to start it again.

Vance Crowe [01:24:34] Well, I'm so for anybody that thinks they know the Jurassic Park story, like you have No, I had no idea. So in the book, I'm not giving anything away. Yeah. The first two people to die from dinosaurs are children. Yeah.

John Jennings [01:24:48] Right.

Vance Crowe [01:24:49] So you're like, whoa, this was not in the, in the movie. Yeah.

John Jennings [01:24:52] So

Vance Crowe [01:24:52] We're gonna do that. I don't know if you'll have a VR headset by them, but we're gonna do it in vr.

John Jennings [01:24:57] Oh, well then I will. Okay. There you have it.

Vance Crowe [01:24:59] You, you will love this. Yeah. It is fantastic. Alright, John Jennings, thank you for coming on the podcast.

John Jennings [01:25:03] Thank you.