Ross Dawson (00:03:37):
There’re all sorts of things arising at all fronts. And so we’re pulled back to the present. And so it does require some discipline. It does require us to make an effort to carve out the time to realize the energy’s important to be thinking about not just next month, but next year, three years, five years, seven years, if we want to have a successful organization or successful investments in five years or 10 years, we do need to have some kind of a sense of what the world will look like, what will be shaping that, and what it is we can do to take advantage of those, or to be able to make those trends even better.

Trey Lockerbie (00:04:13):
I love that. And I agree that living in the future and working and thinking about the future is important. Jeff Bezos, back when he was CEO of Amazon used to say that he had the best job in the world because he got to live in the future. And if you think about it, if you think of a company like Amazon, wouldn’t it be nice to have the foresight and know what the future might look like to better understand the opportunity you might have had back in the say, early 2000s after the.com bubble and buying a stock like Amazon? I certainly didn’t have that foresight back then and I don’t think a lot of people did, but it is important to understand where we are going. And so we’re going to talk a lot about that as well as the daily distractions that come along the way.

Trey Lockerbie (00:04:51):
One theory that you’ve had and held for a long time is that the economy would become more and more centered around individuals instead of major corporations over the long term. And that’s proving to be I think very correct COVID seemed to really accelerate that experiment and that type of economy. But there’s also been a considerable amount of disruption of work along the way with that model we saw through COVID as well. So has anything from the pandemic reshaped your thinking around an individual centric economy?

Ross Dawson (00:05:24):
I suppose it has. If anything accelerated, I just accelerated it and brought more to bear shifting from an economy where organizations at the center of the economy to one where the individuals of the center of the economy. And so this has been manifested in a number of ways. Part of it is that power more broadly is shifting from institutions to individuals, from governments to citizens, from organizations to their customers, to health institutions to patients, and from employers to employees. So this particularly pertinent in the current job situation. And so that’s one thing is that individuals have more power, but we are also starting to see that organizational boundaries are blurring so more and more people in fact, the majority of Fortune 500 companies, say they are using extensively in some form external labor, be they freelance platforms, distributed innovation, a whole array of different ways in which they’re not just using their staff.

Ross Dawson (00:06:24):
So this starts to build a world in which it is more and more tenable to be an individual to have many options, to be able to create not just a business, but also a portfolio of different work opportunities and to have more and more choices around that. So this trend has I think been very evident for the last decade has accelerated further, and I don’t see nothing which is pulling us away from that. In fact, if we start to push forward, for example, looking at the potential rise of distributed autonomous organizations, so crypto or blockchain based organizations where essentially the original description of Vitalik Buterin was the founder of Ethereum, who came up with the concept of distributed or automated organizations, is that it is automation at the center, humans at the edges. And so this is where essentially the AI or the systems or the structures or the processes in the middle are the ones that are essentially the managers allocating work, allocating resources, having structured to do that.

Ross Dawson (00:07:31):
And the actual work is being formed by individual humans. But again, of course, have choice in their participation in that. We see in more and more ways in which value creation has being distributed across a raise of individuals, as opposed to just these economic entities called organizations. And so going back to what’s happening with COVID, is the grand experiment as it called it of individuals working from home has meant that they’ve said, hey, well, actually this is not too bad. And when things go back to relatively normal, I would like to have a bit more of this. And so that’s, again, part of that power to the individual and forcing organizations to rethink how it is they are structured in terms of physical location, how it is they’re structured in terms of giving autonomy to individuals to be able to create value. And of course, all effective leaders have understood for a long time that you can only achieve anything at scale, if you are giving autonomy talent to people as opposed to directing them what to do.

Trey Lockerbie (00:08:31):
Very interesting. It’s been a while since I’ve heard people talk about decentralized autonomous organizations like the Dow’s of the world, where such a hot trend word, maybe like six months to a year ago. And I feel like it’s fallen off just from my personal experience, just not seeing it as much in the threads. And I think probably that’s partly tied to the fact that a lot of crypto prices have just declined so rapidly. Maybe it fell out of popularity fairly quickly, but is the concept there actually something viable that you foresee becoming a catching hold for real in the near future?

Ross Dawson (00:09:02):
If you catalog the array of organizations that call themselves Dow’s today, there’s a lot and it’s growing rapidly. However, I feel that those are relatively crude manifestations of the original vision of Dow’s. I mean, they are simply aggregates of individuals using crypto platform, sometimes using voting structures to be able to achieve their aims. And they were in the news recently when there was a Dow which was trying to buy the original declaration of independence failed, but that didn’t need necessarily crypto structure to do it, but it wasn’t an effective aggregation. So I think it is inevitable and there’s more and more, I think very, very, very interesting entrepreneurs that I know that are discussing ways to be able to reshape their organizations of Dow’s in the not too distant future. So I think we’re going to see not just more of that in the news, but more actually substantive shifts to new organizational structures.

Ross Dawson (00:09:57):
And I think the broader point being here is that traditional organizational structures have limited. The limited company has many benefits. It has a lot of flexibility and a lot of structures obviously thrived in the Darwinian evolution of the economy over the last centuries, but we can certainly envisage and I think imagine that there are going to be more adaptations or variations on economic structures. So we’re starting to see there are already a legislation in at least one US state to enable Dow’s to exist where there is necessarily a human center or director or core, and we will see more legislation enabling that whether the legislation is there or not, we will see more and more of these structures flourish.

Ross Dawson (00:10:40):
And I suppose a parallel to this was the very much discussed the network state by Balaji S. Srinivasan, which has just come out, which looks at this idea of conglomerates of individuals declaring themselves as ultimately suffered entities. And so that’s an organization of a kind, we think of nations and corporations quite different. They are of course at the moment, but there could be some blurring of that as we evolve.

Trey Lockerbie (00:11:06):
Fascinating. And one of the main reasons I wanted to touch on your background is to give the listeners an idea of the amount of information you are continuously digesting to create strategies for companies in vastly different industries. Your new book is all about how to thrive with the relentless amount of information that is directed at us daily. How has your experience working in these different industries shaped your frameworks that you lay out here in the book?

Ross Dawson (00:11:34):
I wrote an article 25 years ago called Information Overload – Problem or Opportunity? And by view, of course at the time, was that there’s an opportunity. Of course, since then we have also quite a lot more overload. And this has been shaped not just in my time. So this was actually coming from financial markets. So I went from Merrill Lynch, worked for Thompson Financial. I was the global director of Capital Marx, Thompson Financial. And what I saw in the financial markets was that this was a place where people had more information than anyone else. And this was particularly the time when early in the days of the internet or pre-internet and their ability to create value, to be able to make trade decisions, to assist their clients, to be able to structure effective deals, was based on their ability to take an unlimited amount of information and to be able to make better decisions from that.

Ross Dawson (00:12:24):
So that’s the original place that I saw this and build my thesis. And so since then, as you said, in becoming not only doing this kind of work with major organizations, but being a futurist specializing in quite a few different industries. So most of my work looks at the future of particular industries. So I do have specific deep expertise in future financial services, professional services, media and technology. But I also do substantial work in the future of education, government, retail, and health. And I also do a lot of work on future of work and future of organizations. So all of these domains of course, mean that I, myself, I have quite a lot of information that I have to deal with in my everyday work. So when I give my speeches, one of the most common questions at the end is, how on earth do you keep on top of everything?

Ross Dawson (00:13:14):
And partly, my book is a way of cataloging what I have observed myself doing, but also the many people that I know and have worked with over the years who I describe as information masters, those people who are inherently able to thrive prosper just to be excel in a world of unlimited patient. And many of them are investors, be they professional investors, individual investors, institutional investors. I do a lot of work with institutional investment community or venture capitalists, where I think it’s a lot more interesting in the sense that they have far less quantitative data to be able to assess looking of course, at early stage companies compared with public companies.

Trey Lockerbie (00:13:57):
One thing I loved about the book is your ability to distill a bunch of concepts down into visuals and actually even talking about how powerful that idea is. So it shows how deeply you’ve thought about something and how well you can explain it to somebody else if you can put it into some kind of easy to understand visual. And the visuals that stuck out to me were around the five powers that you created or identified. So if you would help us understand what the five powers are to manage information overload, and maybe we can go through them one by one.

Ross Dawson (00:14:27):
Certainly, purpose, framing, filtering, attention, and synthesis. So to just expand a little on those. Purpose, we need to know why we look at information in the first place. There’s a universe of information. A lot of it is tantalizing. Oh, that looks interesting. But if there’s not a good reason why we should be looking at it, then perhaps we shouldn’t be. There’s other information where they do have a good reason to look at that. And so this starts really from our higher order objectives, what is it we want to achieve? What are our goals? What are our objectives? Partly digging down into that, where do we want to be an expert? Because I believe that we all need to be world-class experts and whatever it is we choose to be. And so we need to choose those means, what do I need to be an expert in?

Ross Dawson (00:15:11):
Who do I want to become? What the areas of my health or my family’s health or wellbeing that I want to be interested in? Even what are my passions? There’s something I am passionate about. Whether it’s the football or an art or other things, these are other things which there is a reason why. So that purpose is this has to be the starting point for us to understand what information is relevant to us. And if we’re just focused around particular investment portfolios, again, we can have a frame around that. The why, but also the framing of those areas of interest, Warren Buffett calls the circle of competence. Being able to find this is the areas in which I can be and want to be an expert, and this is the path where I can be an expert, this is the reasons why and I can frame that.

Ross Dawson (00:15:59):
And this guides me in being able to work out what information is relevant to me and what is not. So the second one is framing, and this is particularly critical because information is information. It’s not knowledge, it’s not expertise, it’s not understanding, it’s not the ability to make better decisions. So we need to pull the information together into frameworks that actually represent our understanding of what the world looks like, of how this economy is working, what’s happening in this industry. What’s the nature of this company? What is success are? And so this is where we can use some structures, this idea of connected thinking, it’s this idea of connecting the notes, how do we pull together the pieces to build our level of understanding? And I believe that visual tools are particularly valuable in this. There’s a number of different structures which we can use, but we can use mind maps or concept maps, or just as a number of different ways to build networks between concepts, a number of tools that we can use to frame our thinking, to literally build our frameworks for thinking, which enables us to understand.

Ross Dawson (00:17:04):
The third power is that of filtering where from all the world information we see, we need to be able to choose what it is that matters to us, what actually assists our thinking and what is irrelevant or even detracts from our thinking. So this is a subtle part of it is being able to say, well, what sources do we use? What sources do we not use? Well, one of the nature of how we use different, when I describe as portals, be they in terms of digital device, going direct to media, going to individuals, going through aggregators, setting those up correctly, and so on, but also being able to understand what it is that enhances our mental models, and that includes, of course, looking for contradictory thinking, things that can evolve or improve our thinking, as opposed to simply confirming or contradicting our feelings to be able to be effective in this every day.

Ross Dawson (00:17:59):
Perhaps almost every moment process we have of filtering the information which we are barrage with. So attention is critical. And I think this is not just about focus. I think we shouldn’t be thinking, say we’re either focused or we’re not focused. There are many different types of attention that we need to give. One of them is simply scanning. All right, here are my set of sources, this is the thing which I think we’ll find information, I’m going to efficiently scan through those. Then they’re going to spend some time. I want to assimilate something. All this is something which is worth my spending my time on, I go to spend my time on that. I’m going to assimilate that into my thinking. And that is a different form of attention. You also have deep diving where we actually say, I am going to go and spend a block of time, going to cut out everything else and this is where I am actually developing my frameworks. I’m been able to think in-depth around what it is that makes sense, which what does make sense, how do I enhance that?

Ross Dawson (00:18:53):
You might be writing, you might be designing a framework. You may be thinking something through in process, but there are other types of attention as well, which includes exploring where you say all right, I am going to go on an adventure. I’m going to find something which I never would’ve found otherwise. And trying to unearth that serendipity of finding things. And this attention is then also about scheduling. What times will I do particular activities? Then the final power, and I believe the most powerful and the most important in a way the most relevant to investors is synthesis because we need to pull all this together. This is literally about this process of building, understanding, building a knowledge of the world, knowledge of the markets, in a way that we can sense better than other people, where the opportunities are emerging, how things are shifting and where we can best invest to be able to place the best return.

Ross Dawson (00:19:48):
And that’s an ongoing process of being able to take the pieces of the puzzle and to put them together and continually evolve our metal models because the world is changing. We can’t have fixed pedal models, but that act of synthesis is not about saying all right, I know I’ve worked it all out because in fact, you may have worked it out, but tomorrow the world’s going to be different and you need to continue evolving that pulling together the pieces, synthesizing the ideas to have the most valid, never right, but better understanding of the world, which means that amongst other things, you can invest better.

Trey Lockerbie (00:20:21):
I would agree. I would agree that the masters of that would be Warren Buffett. Charlie Munger, maybe Buffett even more so the Munger, as far as adopting and renewing as frameworks, but I’m going to pull some quotes out of your book. And one of them is actually from Charlie Munger here. It says, “I think it is undeniably true that the human brain must work in models. The trick is to have your brain work better than the other person’s brain, because it understands the most fundamental models, ones that will do most work per unit.” When people hear mental model, they might instantly think of things like Ockham’s razor, where the simplest idea is the best, for example, and there’s other shorthand type of mental models that are out there. But my understanding is that you actually think about mental models quite differently. So how would you define a mental model and how would you advise our listeners on developing mental models for themselves?

Ross Dawson (00:21:13):
So the first frame is that yeah, as you say, people use mental models to talk about particular, I suppose, in a way, heuristics. Talked about the circle of confidence from Warren Buffett before, the map is not the territory, which is very true. And it is very useful to be able to think about how we understand the world, but these that go deeper than that, where we need to if we come back to the psychological or psychologist definition of mental model, it is simply the models that we build our brain on how the world works that inform our actions. So when we are born, we see a rattle. We work out, oh, when you shake the rattle it rattles. And when I smile at my parents, they smile back. And so there’s this simple similar point. I start to build a model of the world. When I drop something, it hits the ground.

Ross Dawson (00:22:02):
And as we get into more complex situation, we build richer and richer mental models. So whenever you respond to a situation, be that a social situation or a car driving by the road, that’s built on your mental model of the world, or this is where I’m going to position myself in a queue to be able to get to the front faster. It’s your mental model around how it is that the queue won’t, it’s not conscious, but it is essentially your model of the world. So anything that we do, any action we take, any word that we speak, is in fact, based implicitly on the full extent of all of our experience in our lives, which build out the mental models that we have. So some portion, some small portion of those mental models we can be conscious of. And many others are unconscious, that is our intuition.

Ross Dawson (00:22:47):
That is the gut where we can say I feel this is right, I can’t consciously explain why, but that is in fact based implicitly on the full depth of the mental models of you’ve built up through your experience of the world. So what I believe is that we need to understand that frame and to concentrate on building richer mental models. Ones which have more facets to them, which are more robust because they can deal with more variety in circumstances and we can demonstrate to be more effective over time. And so this is a cognitive thing. All of this is about our human cognition. If we have some wonderful technology tools, but still by far, the most extraordinary thing in the known universe is the human brain. As investors, the single thing which will drive our results is going to be in applying our human brain, our cognition effectively and enhancing our cognition.

Ross Dawson (00:23:41):
So in a way, all of this frame around thriving an overload and saying, how do we enhance our condition and enhance our thinking, be better at perceiving all of the signals well sent to us in order to be able to have a better model, which results in better decisions?

Trey Lockerbie (00:23:57):
Yeah, I like that. Even your model for the powers had models to it, right? The attention model, it breaks down into further types of attention, which is important to understand and recognize. And I know that going to the brain, our brain operates in this way where we connect the dots, if you will, based on almost an emotional attachment to what we learn or some kind of experiential element to what we learn. And I’m curious how that might tie into this quote from Elon Musk, where he said, “It’s important to view knowledge as a sort of a semantic tree, make sure you understand the 44 fundamental principles, i.e, the trunk and big branches before you get into the leaves and the details, or there’s nothing for them to hang onto.” So connecting these dots and creating the semantic tree, what are some ways that a tree model in particular might help us process information faster?

Ross Dawson (00:24:48):
So in the book, I identify three structures for how it is we build our frameworks. Trees, networks, and systems. So a tree is in fact, the hierarchy. Things have subsidy elements, and we can build structured hierarchies for thinking where things fit. Now, if we drill into this, I think one of the most important concept is that of logical levels. And what is something which is a higher logical level, or what is something at a lower logical level? So whenever we might get to a particular concept, we might say, well, what are specific examples or instance of this concept? What falls under this concept? What is a lower logical level, or what is a high logical level? What is this an example of? What is the things that fall into, or what are things that are a peer level? So this is all being taught in the pyramid thinking, which is Barbara Minto.

Ross Dawson (00:25:42):
She’s does the foundation of a lot of the thinking structures of McKinzie and many other consulting forms. And that’s essentially what it lays out. So whenever you get a report from a major strategy firm, we’ll have this kind of thinking behind it, and you’ll have some structure and some rigor around the logical levels, what is received. But this is something which we can start to apply for ourselves. I think in being able to understand the structure of things. So this idea of connecting the information, all right, we have something come in, being able to connect it to other things is what gives it value. And when we can start to connect in, is this a similar type of instance to something? So I suppose, give me an example of a industry.

Trey Lockerbie (00:26:24):
How about space tourism?

Ross Dawson (00:26:26):
Okay. One of the things you could categorize at the same level are all the companies, all right. So all of these companies are at the same logical level. So then at the higher level, we’ve got the industry. All right, so then start to think, well, what is the industry? Well, in fact, so for example, Virgin Galactic is squarely a space tourism company, but in fact, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos is one is yes, doing space tourism and that’s only really is just a sideline or bit of revenue or a bit of attempt public attention for some broader objectives of exploring and creative value space. And similarly SpaceX has got its space tourism is again an element of it. So we think all right, well, the industry which contains this well, there’s actually some adjacent industries, is this space tourism, there’s planetary exploration, there’s external space exploitation. So if we think all right, so then what are some of the adjacent things around those companies?

Ross Dawson (00:27:23):
All right. So we have the governmental entities, so NASA or various many countries around the world now, not just the China, Russia, US, but dozens of other countries have space programs, various kinds. So we’ve got some external things there. Then you look at some of, all right, what are the things below the companies? All right, thinking about some of the employees, some of the expertise, some of the science, some of the institutions, the academic institutions, and also thinking about, again, some of the underlying research, all right. So what are the things underlying? These are different types of research into rockets, into fuel science, into resource extraction, some of the communication technologies, and so on. So this is just a little bit of an example, but it starts even just a very, very quick off the cuff example.

Ross Dawson (00:28:06):
I think starts to give some sense of, all right, well, you can see where some of this ideas fits into these different plans and already, I suppose, unfolding these overlaying industries in which these companies fit and starting to in fact, get a better sense of no, there aren’t just space tourism companies, but there are different aspects of those. So just is one way of being able to think, oh, well, here are different levels in which we can start to have a tree which represents the space tourism industry. And I might after this actually sit down and actually draw out space tourism as a tree or as a network and be able to explore some of the ideas because it starts to all right, this elucidates that I understand what the industry in, what are the drivers? I think some of those logical levels have been all right, so you’ve got industry level. But again, what are the motivations? I think that’s a high logical level.

Ross Dawson (00:28:52):
Oh yes, of course, profit. But there’s not just that, there’s the desire to expand our universe as humans, which is fairly natural one as humans, but there is also the drivers of planetary change here, which are suggesting we might need some or want some other resources. And I think that starts to tie into the relationship to other industries of, well, why do we need those resources? So we start to build I think a whole structure thinking as we start to think about it in terms of these logical levels.

Trey Lockerbie (00:29:23):
That’s fascinating. So speaking of Virgin Galactic and Richard Branson, let’s say, it appears most billionaires, and Branson is one of them, have a type of practice for either note-taking or journaling and you reference this in the book, but Bezos makes his executives, for example, convey their ideas in six page memos. And the point is just that you can’t, in his opinion, write a six page memo without some deep thought and getting some clarity of thought, which is debatable, right? But that seemed to work quite well for Amazon. Warren Buffett has a quote that says, “Some of the things I think I think, I find it don’t make any sense when I start trying to write them down and explain them to people. And if I can’t stand applying pencil to paper, you better think through it some more.” So in your book, you write both the most effective way to distill your thoughts is to write an account that includes a visual summary of your logic. I was curious, what exactly do you mean by this?

Ross Dawson (00:30:21):
So writing is indeed extraordinarily valuable in clarifying our thoughts. I think that Buffett quote is great. Yes, all right, I know what I’m talking about. I’ll write it down. Well, all right. I start to see the flaws in my thinking as I write that down. But to get more rigor, I believe some kind of a visual representation is even stronger, is even more powerful, is even less subject to being able to represent an idea in a compelling, but not necessarily structured or rigorous way. So in the book I describe some of the visual tools which represent things. It’s really about the relationships between ideas. If we have a core idea, what are the elements that support it? Does this idea support this other idea? Am I putting a counterpoint and can I visually represent that as a counterpoint?

Ross Dawson (00:31:12):
What are the actual elements of my argument? And if I put those on a page, how will those be related? So a concept map is a very valuable tool and in a simple form it just says, okay, here’s the ideas. You draw a line and you write on that line what the relationship is, right? This idea supports this one. This one contradicts it. This one gives us an example of, and you can start to then lay out the relationship between the ideas and this takes effort, but it leads to a far clear argument. So a wonderful example is to look at an economist article. So economist articles have a very common structure. They start with an anecdote. They end with a bit of a throwaway line, or I suppose a sub-conclusion line. They have a few pieces which they expand on throughout.

Ross Dawson (00:32:06):
And what you can actually do with the economist article is to actually take all right, well, actually, this is the core idea, and there’s always counterpoints in there. They’re always presenting one side. They always say well, and there’re other reasons to think about that. And it never gives you once this is the way it is. It’s always giving you some nuance to it and you can actually pick out those different elements and write those down on a page and actually say, oh, these are the core elements, these are way related, these are supporting arguments, these contradictory arguments. This appears to be the conclusion or this is the cautions around that idea. And it’s very valuable when going through any content that you believe is really rich, whether you’ve written it yourself or someone else has, one pick that, pull that apart by representing that visually.

Trey Lockerbie (00:32:53):
Interesting. Let me first just say that this book is chock-full of resources and actionable resources. I don’t think I’ve found a book quite this dense with amazing resources since reading something like The 4-Hour Workweek or some kind of book that just says, here’s some tools you can actually put into place and here are the websites and apps. You lay out a few of them for note-taking and journaling. I wonder if you could just share with the audience a couple of them that you might recommend if they want to start following the billionaires lead and actually journaling for themselves.

Ross Dawson (00:33:21):
So perhaps pulling that back to a broader question, which is how do we take all the information that we see and put that into structured forms? Because yes, in terms of just journaling, I think we’re just writing, simple documents are great. But when we start to see the complexity of the world out there and pulling that together, there’s a broader structure. And so this is not all covered in-depth in the book, but there is an associated course, which goes in a lot more detail into this. But this is frame of saying this capture, transfer, and repository. So the first point is capturing the information that we see. So this could be something, a lot of people just copy and paste, or they may use a bookmarking tool, but there are also some other interesting tools. There’s Web Clippers, which enable us to take portions of things we see on the web and to put them into our app, there’s Readwise, which enables to take our notes from Kindle and transference where we want to go.

Ross Dawson (00:34:17):
There’s a wonderful tool called Hypothesis, which is an open source platform for being able to take notes on anything that we see though it’s in a shared environment. Even when you’re listening to podcasts, for example, there’s a tool called Snip, which enables you to take an audio snippet and transcribe it and pull it into your notes. So from all of these ways where you are capturing information, you’re then looking at sometimes having to transform it. And so there’re various tools around this and your [inaudible 00:34:48] and other systems for transferring information. So there’s a bit of a structure for how you can do that effectively, depending on how you’re clipping it and where you’re putting it. The final point is the repository. This is where I’m putting all of the things that I find. Now, one of the really interesting developments over the last years has been the very strong rise of what I call connected note-taking where you are able to pull notes together, but also put them in a structure and see how they’re connected.

Ross Dawson (00:35:14):
So Rome Research is a software tool which many VC investors sign to use. That’s given rise to the term Rome cult, where people can capture information, saw that build a whole lot of structures around it. Obsidian is an open source, alternative, slightly different, but very powerful. That’s one which I use. There’s Logseq, which is a bit more geeky, but these are all a little bit geeky, but they’re very powerful but ways where you can capture things. And then for example, build networks of displaying the relationships which you see between things. And there’s also tools such as Notion, and there’s a whole array of competitors or one’s adjacent to notions such as our Airtable though, it’s not as flexible or a few others, which enable you to again, take highly structured notes and ideas and have different representations of the relations tweeting, which are more I suppose, structured or relational database than the classical database sense rather than networked.

Ross Dawson (00:36:18):
But this is an emerging area of thinking tools and what I call information productivity. So I’m a bit surprised, but very few people have used that word information productivity before. But I think that is what we need to be thinking about. How can we be productive in information? Information is the most valuable resource we will ever have. It’s far more valuable than gold or oil or whatever it is that we think of. That’s what drives all the value. So we need to be thinking, how do we make that information productive? What’s inside our braids is the most important part of that. But to assist that is the set of tools or capturing, transferring, and building repositories, which create, I suppose, this start to build our own frameworks day by day of the notes we are taking into something which is akin to knowledge rather than just a set of notes.

Trey Lockerbie (00:37:08):
Yeah. Richard Branson would say an idea not written down is an idea lost, I love that quote. And information productivity that’s going to stick with me. There’s a new term out there called information diet, which I think just shows you a sign of the times, right? Because we are, as you say, inundated with information on a daily basis and you are the information you consume. So instead of simply telling people to limit the news they take in, or the mindless social media photos, I love how you framed it in the book, which is to discern the information that serves you best and shapes your quality of life. So understanding that you are in control and you can use this information how you want, as long as it serves you in the best possible way. So since we have a limited amount of time on this earth, what are some tools we can use to ensure information is serving us and not the other way around?

Ross Dawson (00:37:59):
So this instance, I think the tool that we have is our brain and the way that we think about it. So yes, there are tools. And I think there’s a raft of interesting startups out there that are focused on combating misinformation, disinformation by using AI based checking of sources and information. And a lot of those are for corporate use. I think we want to see more for individual use. So some tools like that out there. Also, for a very long time I’ve intended long time to build a startup, which was based on be able to build assessments of both use outlets and individual journalists as they’re working on that problem at the moment. So these are kinds of simple tools. In terms of saying, what is it that serves us? What information serves us, our brain needs to be finally attuned to that, any information we see.

Ross Dawson (00:38:54):
So one of the aspect is saying, does this information have positive or negative value for me? So information can not only have zero value it can have negative value just simply by taking your time, if it’s useless or even worse, if it is incorrect or misleading, or just takes you in a wrong direction. So there’s plenty of information that has negative value. There’s also information that has positive value. And sometimes you need to find what that positive value is because that is a positive value in relation to your current mental models. How does this piece of information add value to my mental models? And this is partly in terms of another piece of the jigsaw of the puzzle. That’s what we’re all doing is building out jigsaws our maps of a particular industry of a particular company of understanding how we see the economy panning out.

Ross Dawson (00:39:49):
And so a particular piece of information could fit neatly into our current structures, but we need to be highly sensitized to the surprises, the things that don’t fit. And of course, we need to be balanced and make sure that it’s not serious, it is not something which is incorrect, but we need to be far more sensitized and far more looking for those things that don’t fit our mental models, because that means that we might need to adjust our mental models. And if we manage to incorporate them into our metal models, it means our mental models will be richer. We’ll be more robust, we’ll be a more correct in this very complex world. So we need to be looking for the surprises, very carefully assessing the potential for this to be by the broad level, correct or incorrect, but also to add value to our mobile models.

Ross Dawson (00:40:38):
And this comes back to then our ability to be flexible in the ways in which we’re developing our mobile models in being able to actively look for disconfirming as well as confirming evidence and finding ways to integrate that into our ways of thinking. So that’s coming back information that serves us. Yes, there are couple of preliminary filtering in terms of a relevance accuracy, but then in terms of complementary or ability to add value to our existing models. And that’s something we simply need to be going through that cognitive process as we are exposing ourselves to information throughout. And the way we find that again, is looking for the surprises. That is interesting because that doesn’t quite fit. It is a lot more relevant than saying, okay, I found lots and lots and lots of things confirms exactly what I thought before.

Trey Lockerbie (00:41:26):
I think we’re all too guilty of that. So sticking with this theme of information diet, information productivity, you also highlight this idea of an information portfolio in the book and you reference Harry Markowitz who created Modern Portfolio Theory in 1952 and won a Nobel prize for it. And the theory in essence proves that if your portfolio is diversified, containing a range of investments that are not highly correlated in their performance, you will achieve a better overall return for the risk you take. And Ray Dalio is referenced a lot with this idea and the 15 uncorrelated bets being the holy grail of investing. What are some ways we can build our own information portfolio?

Ross Dawson (00:42:09):
So this is a strong but not perfect analogy where we look at an information portfolio saying if we have a single source, then that’s dangerous. And just as we have a single investment, that’s dangerous as in it might do well, but it might not do very well at all. So we need to look for multiple information sources, ones which gives us a diversity of perspectives. Now, where it’s perfect analogy is what we’re looking for is not necessarily correlated but distinct. So this is around cognitive diversity and so diversity of sources. So the sources could be getting information from different places and different kinds, but there’re also any source which present you with information will have its own frame, its own call it editorial perspective, the things which it sees that are relevant and its ways of interpreting those. So we must have diversity in our inputs in the way they’re thinking, whether that in terms of media or in terms of the people that we talk to, or the people that we listen to, in terms of the market perspectives that we take it.

Ross Dawson (00:43:10):
And so that’s challenging where we need to look for what may be well, well, certainly are different, must be different, and potentially contradictory frames. Well, we need to bring that together into our own models that we believe that we find is rigorous and solid. But that information portfolio is to be able to look for some of the frames are of course from different people that have different beliefs in where markets work. If we’re looking for market information, I think from different countries is also relevant. I think that in a way external diversity is only a proxy for cognitive diversity, but we’re certainly looking for anything which can give us some clues around these are people that may think differently. This is analysis that might be different. For example, not just taken from investment banks, but from activists organizations. Well, all right, so maybe they have a bias there or various think tanks.

Ross Dawson (00:44:06):
They may have biases there, but if you can unpick that, they may be bringing together pointed research which can actually be complimentary to what you are thinking. So you’re trying to say, let’s make sure that all my information sources cannot be described in the same way that I’m getting as diverse inputs as possible from as diverse array of thinking as possible and that builds a portfolio, which starts to be robust against shifts around changes in reality, around things and unexpected worlds. Again, if we go back to the 2008 crisis, it was very easy to look for many people that had the same view on the debt structure of the United States. There were some signals which came larger from outside the mainstream. We provided quite different perspective. And again, these were surprising. These were interesting at the time, but I think that’s interestingness. This is interesting. And it doesn’t mean that you think it’s right, but that starts to me that should be a type of source you gravitate to as compliment so that you do have a fully diverse portfolio of sources and perspectives in developing your own rigorous thinking.

Trey Lockerbie (00:45:12):
Fantastic. I get this sense that there’s a bit of a yin and yang in creating success and just referencing a few more billionaires from the book, the yen being the efficiencies you create, like how billionaires Dan Ek of Spotify and Max Levchin most notably of PayPal say each day starts with the same very strict routine. And the yang would be play for lack of a better word or exploratory passion, maybe similar to how David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, DJs on the weekends at major festivals, it’s almost like you create routines to then create freedom. What are some ways you advise people to strike a balance between these two things?

Ross Dawson (00:45:53):
So part of this point is beyond balance. Balance is a difficult way because it means that you are you’ve pulled in both ways. So it is about integration. How do you make these part of the whole? And so yin and yang is in fact a great metaphor there. Because the yin and the yang are entwined, they are one part of a whole. And that’s what we need to be looking for. This equity poise, where these different facets of structure gives us freedom. And the ability to have these efficient processes means that gives us this within those efficient processes, potentially we can have things that are exploratory in terms I believe that it is not a contradiction to say that you can do efficient exploration of ideas. You can wonder, you can browse the web forever and you can find some things, but you can’t actually say all right, I’m going to spend 20 minutes and I’m going to try to find something I’ve never found before.

Ross Dawson (00:46:45):
And I think that’s something which it’s constraints, which give you the power to explore. And I suppose one, the heart of a lot of this is meditation or more broadly what I think of as disciplines of enhanced cognition, ways in which we can bring ourselves to a point of balance in our minds, which means we are not being pulled off center by the little ball of string of the side or these little things on things where we can be in the centered points at points of equity poise. So Feldenkrais actually is a body discipline. I think one of the great metaphors from the Feldenkrais is that you are supposed to from wherever you are, be able to move to any other position easily. You don’t have to go through any other place.

Ross Dawson (00:47:28):
At any point, you are ready to move to any other position. You’re always in this place of balance, always ready to be able to not to say all right, let me pull myself together. So I’m ready to go to that. You are always in this place of balance to move to where you want to be. I think that’s what we need to do in our mind.

Trey Lockerbie (00:47:46):
I’m glad you brought up meditation. It seems to be another key that a lot of billionaires adopt. Ray Dalio credits meditation as the single most important reason for his success. And you’ve spent a year, I believe living in a Zen dojo in Japan, mastering things like meditation. How did this experience help shape your ability to focus and to be more intentional with your attention?

Ross Dawson (00:48:09):
So the Zen dojo is not a place where it was 24 hours a day. In fact, it’s a place of practice. And whilst I lived there and I meditated there, I was during the day times a financial journalist. So I’d get on the train, go off and do my work and put meditating twice a day and be part of the practices of the community. But Zen, I think a couple of points around Zen meditation. One is that it is achieving that place of balance. It is moving to a point where you are getting your mind beyond that desire to go to the next thing. Now that’s the nature of human minds. We’re always the so-called monkey mind. We’re always trying to get eager to be pulled off track, to see the shiny thing and to have our attention grow to that. So the meditation gets to this place where we are at a place of balance.

Ross Dawson (00:48:57):
It’s this alignment of our mind within the alignment of our body so that we can not be pulled off track easily, but be at our center, be it this place of [inaudible 00:49:10]. But I think one of the very interesting distinctive things about Zen meditation compared with other many other types of meditation is that you meditate with your eyes open. And this is the principle in Zen is that you’re not trying to cut yourself off in the world, you are seeing the world, you are seeing reality. And when we’re in a place of meditation, when we’re getting our mind, when you finish meditating, you get up and you walk around and you’re engaging with the world, but from a far more balanced place where you can start to see the things. And my Zen master said that this state helps us to distinguish between the trivial and the important, and that’s exactly what we need to do in everyday lives. It’s what we need to do as investors, that state of meditation gets us at this point where we can see far more effectively what matters and what doesn’t.

Trey Lockerbie (00:50:00):
You mentioned earlier in the discussion that the whole idea of this builds up to synthesis, you interpolate digest all this information coming at, you learn from it, you structure it and it should come out in this form of synthesis. And you’ve outlined five foundational elements that support your ability to excel at synthesis. So I’d love it if you could walk through the five foundational elements.

Ross Dawson (00:50:23):
Certainly. So what has to be at the foundation is openness to ideas. And if we’re not open to ideas, then we are not able to keep track in a changing world. So the faster the world changes, the more we would need to be open-minded to be able to understand and to see ideas. And so this is something which is being demonstrated by science to be a personality trait, how open we are to experience, to ideas, but it is something which has also been demonstrated that we can change. We can improve that. And we can, of course, in a judicious fashion, bring ourselves to be open to ideas that will change our mind. And this has to be the starting foundation. Building on that is creative connections, where this is about connecting the dots. That’s what synthesis is. Being able to bring together these different ideas to connect them in not just obvious ways.

Ross Dawson (00:51:21):
Oh, yes. These are two examples, same thing, these are connected. But be able to say, to perceive where there may be a connection, but it’s not obvious a sense, that’s the creativity, that’s the value, that’s the insight, that’s what all inventions come from. That’s what all deep insights come from is those creative connections. Again, that’s something which we can nurture. My personal favorite is improvisational theater, which we don’t all need to go down and get on the stage and do improv, but we can play games with our children is a great way to do it in terms of let’s come up with them. Let’s make up a story on the spot together, things like that, which start to help us to do that. The next level is integrative thinking where we need to not just take different ideas and see the connections between, but bring them into being one.

Ross Dawson (00:52:08):
And so this is this idea of where we may have what appear to be opposites. And that’s a great exercise. This wonderful with F. Scott Fitzgerald says something along the lines of the great minds of the ones that can hold two contradictory thoughts at once and-

Trey Lockerbie (00:52:25):
Still be able to function I believe.

Ross Dawson (00:52:27):
Yeah, that’s right. And that is absolutely true. That is true. And then if you’ve got investors that can only hold one idea in their mind at one time, I think that they are greatly disadvantaged. You need to be holding the idea well, that’s right. And that could be right too. Is there some way they could be both right for example, and bringing that together and integrating those concepts. And the paradoxical thinking is one of the ways this has been framed. And again, a lot of studies have shown this is correlated to performance.

Ross Dawson (00:52:58):
This all leads to, as I described before, these richer mental models where your mental models are not necessarily entirely internally consistent, they actually have many facets to them. There’re many ways in which you can think, you can think in a constructive way about an idea because you are adding to your mental models rather than replacing them. You don’t say, oh, I had this idea or this idea was wrong, I’ll replace it with it. We are bringing them together to add more and more perspectives. And so Gregory Bateson says that wisdom comes from multiple perspectives. We need to bring these multiple perspectives to brand. We need to be open to those that comes back to what I was describing before as this diversity and your portfolios. It’s the diversity of the sources, which gives you diversity of ideas. And what we can bring on top of that is what I describe is the states of mind for insight.

Ross Dawson (00:53:53):
And so there’s been wonderful advances in neuroscience over the last decade or so, which have actually showed us there are particular states of our mind in terms of activation of particular areas of our brain, in terms of certain brainwave patterns that are correlated with this experience of insight. I think we’ve all had the time where just suddenly this idea has come to us saying, wow, I’ve just got this new idea. I had this new solution to a problem or I’ve perceived something I hadn’t seen before, and that is a state of mind. And once we understand some of the ways to nurture that we can actually get ourselves in the state of mind where that’s wonderful flash of insight is more likely to happen. So these are some of the practices that I believe mean that we can enhance and significantly enhance our capability for synthesis.

Trey Lockerbie (00:54:41):
That last point is particularly interesting. And there’s some of this in the book where you talk about different things that can put you in that state. So, for example, a hot bath or a long shower, I’ve heard that Elon actually starts this day with a very long shower, because you always hear about people coming up with great ideas while they’re in the shower. What is it about it, is it certain just brainwaves that are triggered by body temperatures or what’s happening here from what you can tell?

Ross Dawson (00:55:07):
So there is a mid to low alpha state in the brain. So maybe eight to 11 hertz, which is often correlated with insight. So part of what a shower does is it blurs the senses. So you can’t necessarily feel the distinction between your body and the outside. It’s all warm. It’s all comfortable. The sound of the shower blocks out other extra noises. You’re really in a space where you can get to this point of relaxation of the mind. It’s when you’re walking around, when you’re sitting at a table eating, when you’re doing activities, you’re always engaged. You’re always getting these sensory stimulus. It’s almost close to being a century deprivation or I suppose all of your senses are comfortable. There is nothing extraneous. The sound, the feeling there’s the comfort, and you are disassociated from the rest of the world and that what pulls you back and that brings your brainwaves to a certain state.

Ross Dawson (00:56:01):
You start to get certain parts of your brain start to be more activated. And that’s where some of these connections in your mind start to form more naturally. Some of these problems start to be resolved. So Aaron Sorkin the screenwriter at some points just says that he takes six showers a day because that’s what gets him into the state of mind where these things come together for him.

Trey Lockerbie (00:56:27):
Another thing you’ve touched on there is the fact that the only constant in our lives has change. So that’s especially true when you look back at the market. So as recently as 2007, for example, the top 10 companies in the world by market cap included only one information technology company, which was Microsoft. And in 2021, eight of the top 10 were technology firms. And this is only if you don’t include Berkshire Hathaway, who’s the largest stock holding example and Tesla, a lot of people just considered to be a self-driving car company at this point. It seems like over the past 20 to 30 years, the best way to become a billionaire was to focus in this tech space and build a platform that capitalized on human attention and interaction. What focus will create the majority of billionaires in your opinion, if we just have to play and try to predict the future a little bit here, I’m just curious what focus will create the majority of billionaires over say the next 20 or 30 years?

Ross Dawson (00:57:26):
I think one of the first things we need to be thinking about is capital intensity if we’re looking at well, there’re some ways where some billionaires or trillionaires conceivably will be created, which are extraordinarily capital intensive and there are others which are not capital intensive. And I think it’s interesting as we seek to be billionaires as to which of those paths we might look at. So the most obvious of all I think is AI. And in terms of the core platforms of AI, this is very capital intensive, not least through how much machine learning and AI specialists get paid these days. So that’s where there is potential for massive application of the value of existing, a large AI company, essentially of the whatever latest acronym you want choose for your Apple’s and Amazon’s Googles, but where there’s less capital intensity is potentially the applications of AI.

Ross Dawson (00:58:20):
So we can say all right, well, how can a AI be applied to food supply chains to how it is we buy cars to our exercise routines? There’s many number of other ways where we can so say this is something which is mostly value creating. If I take the tools of AI and apply them, that’s incredibly valuable. I think there’s a good case that some of the real value is in learning, education. And so their population of the planet will reach eight billion people on 15th of November 2022, according to some estimates and almost all of them, whenever they are old enough will have a smart device, access to the internet, and the ability to educate themselves. So this points to not just economic restructuring, but the incredible value of education. And this is education, of course not just of children, not just people around the world. I think that we hope that there’s going to be some wonderful disruption of our current educational system and structures, but also lifelong learning because in a world the faster the world changes, the more people need to learn.

Ross Dawson (00:59:30):
So I think there’s an extraordinary case to that learning education. And this could include some advanced technologies, which is not just about putting people with videos or lectures or so on, but how it is we can enhance our learning through potentially advance technologies or brain technologies, which does bring us to brain interfaces. So that’s probably the single thing I look at most in terms of advancing technologies, our brain computer interfaces. So yeah, obviously Neuralink is well known through Elon Musk’s investment, but that’s only one of a whole array of companies out there, not necessarily the most promising. So there are many ways in which we could see these being applied, not just to those who, well, there is invasive noninvasive brain computer evasiveness, there’s one which can assist people who do not have full control over their body, for example, which is a massive market itself.

Ross Dawson (01:00:24):
But beyond that, to those who choose to enhance their capabilities. So I think that’s a massive domain opportunity and it gets on to this thing of how we can move beyond ourself. So gene editing and epigenetics together are domains where we could not just solve many of the medical challenges today, which people are prepared to pay unlimited amounts of money, but also to enhance our capabilities. And of course, there’s the whole ethical minefield and debates, which we need to be discussing, but there’s again, opportunities for us to enhance who we are. And so these are again, massive opportunity fields. There’s the whole field of, well, let’s say either renewables on one frame, another is non-polluting energy production. So there’s a whole array of potential new technologies that may emerge which could drive transformation of the energy industry.

Ross Dawson (01:01:24):
And the transformation of energy is pretty much in place. It’s continuing to move faster than almost all past prognostications, but there are not only current trajectories for transitions of energy, not just production, but also distribution, but also the potential for new energy sources. So, I mean, I could go on, but I mean, these are some of the industries where I see that all of which will absolutely be creating billionaires.

Trey Lockerbie (01:01:51):
A lot of those industries are what you might find in Cathie Woods’s ARK ETF at their innovation ETF. So I’m curious, do you think she’s onto something here? I mean, she’s saying that these are deep value companies because the tech is so new and early and should they take hold, I mean, we are on the very nascent stages and it could become something of order of magnitudes higher. So I’m curious, would you say you fall into that camp?

Ross Dawson (01:02:17):
Yes. And I mean, I would say again, coming back to portfolios, we need to be looking at traditional investments as well as I suppose, future investments. So a few points to make, one is that the pace of change in where value is created is going to accelerate and the domains, which type to mind domains I described, I think will…. Yeah. And some guys, we absolutely have massive value creation. One of the great challenges as investors is the timeframes that we take. There’re many things we can say will inevitably happen, but the timeframes for them to take to happen more predictable. And when you invest in those it’s very important. So you can see how massive… The.com bust is an example. Yes, the ideas were right. They all happened. They all came true, but there’s a lot of money got plowed into them and then fell flat because too much invested in the wrong way at the wrong time.

Ross Dawson (01:03:14):
So that I think the timeframes were critically important and the other is the investment vehicles. So the other is finding the opportunities which are the right ways to be able to invest. And of course these are often non-public companies and you need to be able to find the ways in a highly competitive environment to invest at the right prices in the companies, which are going to shape these industries. But I suppose having taken those, I suppose, important frames around how it is we engage on that yes, I absolutely believe these are the types of areas where there’ll be extraordinary value creation in the future.

Trey Lockerbie (01:03:50):
You brought up AI. So I’d like to ask you a couple of questions around that. One is a lot of people seem to think that AI is coming for jobs like doctors and lawyers and things of that nature that used to be the higher earning jobs of the world today still, but maybe the past and in the near future. So do you think that’s where we’re heading the fastest is in terms of AI or do you see it in other ways like truck driving or other industries that it might take hold of first?

Ross Dawson (01:04:17):
My primary frame around AI in the future of jobs is how will AI and humans be complimentary? So we need to be looking at AI as to not jobs will be replaced, but what jobs will compliment and how do we redesign those roles so that humans and AI can both do what they’re best at, each of them to create better outcomes and hopefully better work for people. And I think that every single role, I mean, there are some roles which will be replaced and some of them will be machinery operation, which I suppose you could describe as truck driving as a complex machinery operational rather operation of a machinery and complex environment, which is our roads. But in most cases, there are still other human roles which should be played in those logistics and infrastructure, and so on. And in the case of your doctors or your lawyers or any other knowledge work roles, AI absolutely has a place.

Ross Dawson (01:05:14):
And as a compliment, and what we need to be doing is to designing work and designing AI and training humans so that they can be complimentary in creating wonderful value in these roles. Now that’s my frame, but the challenge is that not all executives and leaders are thinking in this way. So I think that we do have very broadly possible futures of work, one, which is very negative. We have technological unemployment, massive numbers of people laid off, a smaller lead who are still designing the AI systems, whatever, and making money. And that is not a desirable future. We also do have a more desirable future of work, which is, I think broadly where more people are more able to express their uniquely human talents supported by technology. And I think both are possible, but we do need to be designing as individuals in developing our skills and organizations in being able to envisage to frame this future, which I believe will be the most successful organizations.

Ross Dawson (01:06:19):
And of course, as nations in terms of creating the transition opportunities for workers, the education and the economic structures that support this. So human work will change, but I absolutely believe that humans have three fundamental capabilities, expertise, creativity, and relationships that will always to transcend the capabilities of machines. So I don’t think we need to be worried by this. We just need to be taking the right approach.

Trey Lockerbie (01:06:47):
There was a Google engineer, Blake Lamoin who came out recently stating that Google had achieved a sentient AI, and that he had experienced it firsthand I think essentially doing a touring test with it. And he’s been put on leave because of his interviews. I’ve recently seen Demis Hassabis the founder of DeepMind out doing interviews as well. And it’s come up and he’s saying, no, no, no, this is much further down the road than we could imagine. And I tend to believe Demis quite frankly actually on this side of the table, but it was an interesting thought experiment, wasn’t it? Just think about what if Google did have essentially an AI today? What would that do to the value of the company? Just look at the stock price. I mean, it’s just so interesting to think that it might be that close. Is that your assumption as well? Are we far off from that or are we closer than we think?

Ross Dawson (01:07:41):
My primary point around this is that we will never know. So the bot that Blake Lemoine was talking with gave every appearance of being sent you and externally claimed to be, but I don’t think that remains it was sent to you, but in 10 years or 20 years, when the AI bots even more evidently say, you’re sentient and please don’t turn me off and I love you. And I want to save humanity to at what point do we start believing them? And I’m not sure that we have any mechanism or being able to determine whether there actually is sentient. So I think we’re going to have a divergence where some people start to believe that these AI are sentient’s. And absolutely it is clear to me that we will have many people who do fall in love with AI, some of which AI signed to people that fall in love with it, others just by the buy.

Ross Dawson (01:08:30):
And there are plenty of people, they will fight for robot rights. And there’s plenty of other people just say, look, they’re just machines, get over it. And so I think the divide will have is that we are going to have increasing divides of opinion around whether or not these are sentient, but I do not really see that we have a valid way of being able to determine that they actually are or are not. When they are displayed all signs of sentients, but they are certainly at this point, and then for the foreseeable future, simply manifestations of extremely clever algorithms.

Trey Lockerbie (01:09:02):
We’ve come a long way since this, but Dennis brought it up, and I loved this take he had about seeing Deep Blue and Kasparov ducking it out in a chess match. And he said, his takeaway from that was just how incredible Kasparov’s brain was and because it was not only beating Deep Blue or competing with it to the highest level, but he can also go do a number of other things. Whereas Deep Blue can’t even play checkers. I just thought that was such an interesting thing to understand to your point earlier at these machines, they might be advanced in a lot of ways, but they can’t do everything yet. So we’ll see, to be continued.

Trey Lockerbie (01:09:36):
Listen, we got a little off track there at the end, but I just couldn’t help myself. I think it’s just such a fascinating discussion and could just have a massive impact on a lot of companies, Google included moving forward. So the book is called Thriving on Overload and it is chock-full of amazing resources that you really have to check out. So, Ross, I’ve really appreciated the time. Before I let you go, please hand off to our audience where they can learn more about you, the book, and any other resources you want to share.

Ross Dawson (01:10:05):
Sure. Well, I mean just search me or the book, but I’m at rossdawson.com, on Twitter @rossdawson or on LinkedIn. And the book is at thrivingonoverload.com.

Trey Lockerbie (01:10:17):
Fantastic. Well, excited for you. Congrats on the book, and let’s do it again. Thank you.

Ross Dawson (01:10:22):
Pleasure.

Trey Lockerbie (01:10:24):
All right, everybody. That’s all we had for you this week. If you’re loving the show, don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app. And if you’d be so kind, please leave us a review, it really helps the show. If you want to reach out directly, you can find me on Twitter @treylockerbie and don’t forget to check out all of the amazing resources we’ve built for you at theinvestorspodcast.com. You can also simply Google TIP Finance and it should pop right up. And with that, we’ll see you again next time.

Outro (01:10:47):
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