Balaji Srinivasan - Optimizing Your Inputs

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:49)
My guest today is Balaji Srinivasan, a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. Balaji is known to challenge conventional wisdom and he lives up to his reputation in this conversation. We discuss a wide variety of topics, including advancements in health tracking, ways to evaluate your own information diet and how technology is driving decentralization and what that could mean for countries, corporations and individuals.
Before we transition to the episode, if you enjoy this conversation with Balaji, I recommend the Ethereum episode on our newest show Business Breakdowns. You can find that episodes and more on your favorite podcast player or at joincolossus.com. Now, please enjoy my conversation with Balaji Srinivasan.
So Balaji, I think the best place to start is with three interesting concepts that you've been thinking about more recently, the first of which is information diet. I love this concept. I devote my life to this concept as well. Like what goes in determines a lot of what comes out. Why did you get interested in this? What does information diet mean to you? What are you doing about it?

**Balaji Srinivasan** (3:50)
For a long time, I've been interested in genomics and metabolism and things like that. I did my graduate work in this space and I taught bioinformatics at Stanford and I started a genomics company. And so I've been interested in health for a long time.
And there's an interesting study many years ago and there's been follow-ups on it since, the saying you are what you eat. I mean, you don't really think about this but when you eat something, it's literally incorporated into your body.
And if you were smart about it, you might be able to track and say, okay, when you eat this piece of chicken or this lettuce or what have you, where are those lipids, those carbohydrates, those proteins, et cetera, where are those incorporated exactly? Does it go to your eye? Is it just all diffuse? Does it gravitate towards particular things or what have you? And so there's interesting studies that have been done on exactly this where they're trying to track where it ends up deposited. Obviously easier to do in animals than it is in humans. You literally are what you eat in the sense of your body is reconstructed by this stuff.