#872: Graham Duncan — Talent Is the Best Asset Class (Repost)

**Tim Ferriss** (0:24)
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show. Where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types, whether they come from military, entertainment, sports, business.
It's a pretty wide spectrum. Today, my guest is Graham Duncan. You can find him at grahamduncan.blog, eastrockcap.com, and at grahamduncannyc on Twitter. Graham is the co-founder of East Rock Capital, an investment firm that manages approximately 2 billion for a small number of families and their charitable foundations. Before starting East Rock 14 or so years ago, Graham worked at two other investment firms. He started his career by co-founding an independent Wall Street research firm. Graham graduated from Yale with a BA in Ethics, Politics, and Economics. It's a lot of stuff. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and serves as co-chair of the Sohn Conference Foundation, which funds pediatric cancer research. Josh Waitzkin, one of our very good mutual friends, who will probably pop up here and there in this conversation, thought of most often as the basis for searching for Bobby Fisher, although he would cringe to hear me limited to that, calls Graham, quote, the tip of the spear in the realms of talent tracking and judgment of human potential in high stakes mental arenas, end quote. That is a very Josh sentence.
And Graham, it is a real pleasure to be sitting here with you.

**Graham Duncan** (1:52)
Thanks, Ben. Thanks for taking the time.

**Tim Ferriss** (1:53)
We've had many conversations. We haven't caught up in a while. We've also had terrible food poisoning together along with Josh.
So, I feel like we've seen each other in high stakes, maybe not mental, physical arenas. We, if I recall correctly, almost decapitated each other when learning to paddleboard with Josh at one point.
And I am excited to chat for a lot of reasons. Number one, I always learn something when we sit down and talk. And I don't think of you first and foremost as an investor. You certainly do that very well, but I enjoy watching your thinking and listening to your thinking. So, I think that for people who are in the audience, and who might be wondering right off the bat, how will this apply to me? It is hopefully transferable to just about any domain. I think that thinking, clear thinking, is really a lot of what we'll be discussing. But for people who just heard this bio and are kind of scratching their heads as to what you exactly do, how do you explain what you do?

**Graham Duncan** (3:11)
Well, I try to find people who are better doing a thing than I am at doing that thing.
And I first came to this 20 years ago. I had just started a firm with a professor of mine at Yale, and we were running this independent research firm. And I had hired a sales guy who we were two years in, and we were in a group meeting. And he says to me at a certain point, Graham, what the fuck do you do here?
And at that point, I had some real imposter syndrome going, because I was hiring and firing 30 people much older, much more experienced than me. And so I sat there for 30 seconds, because it's like, what the fuck do I do? And I finally said to him, you know, Robert, when you first interviewed to come to our firm, you were applying to be an analyst, and I was interviewing you as an analyst. I didn't see your eyes light up when we talked about political analysis or economic analysis. But then you proceeded to stalk me for the following four weeks. You called me at home back then, you emailed me twice a day, and I had this moment of revelation. I was also interviewing salespeople. Robert should be our salesperson, and you trusted me enough to come and try it, and now you've built our entire business. And I'm not a good analyst, I'm not a good salesperson, but I put you in that seat, and now we've built this thing. I put you into this positive feedback loop that we're calling a business here, and that's what I do. And I feel like I wouldn't pick that skill out of a line up as my thing, it's the cards I was dealt, it's what I end up being compulsive about and interested in, in this way. The world seems to like me doing it, but it's an odd center of gravity. But today I think about it as my mission in life is to get as many people as possible into positive feedback loops. And it's a good skill to have because it's right next to a weakness of mine, which is I'm kind of lazy.