Episode #405: Gio Valiante – Prepare For The Masters With A Masterclass on Peak Performance in Athletics & Investing

Episode #405: Gio Valiante – Prepare For The Masters With A Masterclass on Peak Performance in Athletics & Investing

 

Guest: Dr. Gio Valiante is regarded as one of the most successful performance coaches in the world. He’s currently the Head Performance Coach for the Buffalo Bills and works with some of the top golfers on the PGA Tour. He was previously the Head Performance Coach for Point72 and Steve Cohen.

Date Recorded: 8/1/2022     |     Run-Time: 58:32

Summary: In today’s episode, we have a masterclass on peak performance! We kick it off by hearing how Jack Nicklaus played a major rule in leading him to work with people in high finance and professional sports. We talk about the need to balance mastery vs. ego orientation, how to handle fear and anxiety and still perform at your best, focusing on process over outcome, and how to balance confidence with overconfidence. Be sure to stick around until the end to hear the commonalities he sees between greats like Tiger Woods & Steve Cohen.

Sponsor: If you’re seeking the less obvious and are curious about the ever-changing world and how it affects investing, The Active Share podcast is for you. Hear thought-provoking conversations with thought leaders, company executives, and William Blair Investment Management’s own analysts and portfolio managers as they share unique perspectives on investing in a world that’s always evolving. Listen to The Active Share on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or TuneIn or visit here.

Comments or suggestions? Interested in sponsoring an episode? Email us Colby@TheMebFaberShow.com

Links from the Episode:

  • 0:40 – Sponsor: The Active Share Podcast
  • 1:13 – Intro
  • 2:06 – Welcome to our guest, Gio Valiante
  • 2:44 – How Gio began to work with investors and athletes
  • 12:58 – Balancing mastery vs. ego orientation
  • 19:49 – Gio’s advice on facing fear and anxiety
  • 27:16 – Building a toolbox to constructively channel and deal with fear
  • 35:19 – Parallels between working with top athletes and top investors
  • 47:56 – The importance of letting go from attachments
  • 55:11 – Learn more about Gio; giovaliante.com; Linkedin; giovaliante@gmail.com

 

Transcript of Episode 405:

Welcome Message: Welcome to the “Meb Faber Show” where the focus is on helping you grow and preserve your wealth. Join us as we discuss the craft of investing and uncover new and profitable ideas, all to help you grow wealthier and wiser. Better investing starts here.

Disclaimer: Meb Faber is the co-founder and chief investment officer at Cambria Investment Management. Due to industry regulations, he will not discuss any of Cambria’s funds on this podcast. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Cambria Investment Management or its affiliates. For more information, visit cambriainvestments.com.

Sponsor Message: What does a two-time World Cup-winning coach, a major league baseball team owner, a top chef, and a luxury fashion designer have in common? They’ve all been featured on the “Active Share” podcast. If you’re seeking the less obvious and are curious about the ever-changing world and how it affects investing, the “Active Share” podcast is for you. Hear thought-provoking conversations with thought leaders, company executives, and William Blair Investment Management’s own analysts and portfolio managers as they share unique perspectives on investing in a world that’s always evolving. Download the “Active Share” podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, and TuneIn.

Meb: What’s up, y’all? Today, we have the perfect episode to get you prepared for the Masters to start tomorrow. Our guest is Dr. Gio Valiante who’s regarded as one of the most successful performance coaches in the world. He currently works with some of the top golfers on the PGA Tour and is the head performance coach for the Buffalo Bills. He was previously the head performance coach for Point72. In today’s episode, we have a masterclass on peak performance. We kick it off by hearing how Jack Nicklaus played a major role in leading him to work with people in high finance and professional sports. We talk about the need to balance mastery versus ego orientation, how to handle fear and anxiety and still perform at your best, focusing on process over outcome, and how to balance confidence with overconfidence. Be sure to stick around to the end to hear the commonalities he sees between greats like Tiger Woods and Steve Cohen. Please enjoy the episode with Gio Valiante.

Meb: Dr. Gio, welcome to the show.

Gio: Thank you, Meb. I’m glad to be here.

Meb: I’m live from my mom’s basement in Littleton, Colorado. Where do we find you today?

Gio: I’m in Winter Park, Florida, just outside of Orlando.

Meb: I may be in the other Winter Park tonight in Colorado skiing where it has one of the coldest places in the country, the icebox of the West, as they call it. But you spend a little time here too, right?

Gio: That’s right. We have a cabin outside of Nederland up in Ward, Colorado, and I play a lot of golf at Pinehurst Country Club out there and get to Colorado as often as I can. It’s a great place.

Meb: Well, cool, man. We’re going to talk a lot about all sorts of stuff, golf, investing, psychology. What’s the right title for you, psychologist, performance coach? What’s the best way to describe you when you’re talking to your friends and family?

Gio: Yeah. It’s been an evolving thing. I was a college professor. I know that. Like, I was definitely a college professor for 13 years and elevated to the level of full professor. And since then, it has meandered, right? Because as an academic, I was doing research in psychology and started working really well with golfers. And I never set out to be a sports psychologist, which is interesting, but the type of psychology I was learning so easily lent itself to sports, and specifically golf, that when I started toying with the ideas, the cause and effect was pretty dramatic to the tune of 50 wins on the PGA Tour with golfers that I “work with.” But, again, it wasn’t really working. I was teaching. I was teaching about psychology to these golfers, they would go apply when I was teaching them and go win a bunch of golf tournaments. So, I got labeled as a sports psychologist and I wrote two books that are under the heading of sports psychology, right? “Fearless Golf” and “Golf Flow” are both sports psychology books. And I’ve published in academic journals on sports psychology, but I’m not really a sports psychologist.

And then what happened was in 2015, I think it was, I was out at the U.S. Open in Chambers Bay out in Seattle, Washington and I got an email from Steve Cohen’s chief of staff and said, “Hey, one of our portfolio managers was at a speech that you gave, attended a speech that you gave about sports psychology.” And they invited me to speak to Point72. And I went and spoke at Steve’s house to about 150 people about how I was getting the results I was getting with golf because, again, it was…And I say this humbly, but almost intellectually, it’s interesting how you apply a theory and you get results, but they were asking how I got the results I was getting with golfers in such dramatic fashion, again, to the tune of 50 wins. So, I went and gave a talk and…

Meb: You said the secret is finding really good golfers. That was the secret.

Gio: Yeah. Well, the thing is on the PGA Tour, Meb, they’re all good golfers.

Meb: Yeah. So, you say you play Pinehurst. By the way, what’s your handicap? Where do we peg Dr. Gio?

Gio: Well, I got three kids, so they are my handicap. My kids are the handicap, but probably about an 8 these days…I probably shoot to about an 8 handicap.

Meb: All right. Got you.

Gio: But, anyway, I went to Point72 and Steve said, “Hey, we could use some of this around here.” And so, then I became a performance coach. So, it evolved from college professor to sports psychologists, to performance coach, and now I have a stable of really good clients, some on the PGA Tour, some in the NFL, some in the NBA, and many in the world of high finance.

Meb: Good. We’re going to come back to all these topics. We got to rewind a little bit because you did your PhD at Emory. Am I right?

Gio: That’s right.

Meb: All right. So, my wife also did her PhD at Emory, but in a little different topic, she was a philosophy gal, and I’ve definitely visited a few times down there and rubbed elbows with a bunch of PhDs from Emory. So, we can catch up about that later, but I want to hear about the transition because it’s interesting to me…Walk us through the timeline on how you started to get some of these clients, whatever the right word is.

Gio: Sure. So, I was an academic, pure academic, level one research school, two degrees, University of Florida, and like you said, PhD at Emory. And William James, who is probably arguably one of America’s greatest thinkers, the father of American psychology but also philosophy, but a first-rate mind. And William James had observed about his own life that he was either going to go to medical school or be an academic. And he said that they’re incompatible, that the applied life is really different from the philosophical reflective life. And if you want to be great, you have to choose. So, listening to James, I had chosen the intellectual academic life. I was a pure researcher, pure academic, love the academic life of reading, and writing, and research, and then teaching college at the undergrad and graduate level. But what happened to me was I got pulled out of…I wasn’t searching.

But the research I was doing, it was within an arena called social cognitive theory, which was largely amplified by a guy named Albert Bandura at Stanford University. Probably the world’s greatest psychologist of the last 50 years is Albert Bandura. He’s a giant in the vein of PGA and Freud and Yung. And he’s probably the only giant in the field of psychology out of the last 50 years. Nobody had taken social cognitive theory and applied it to either sports or finance. It was applied in other domains. And that’s what happens is there’s 50 divisions of the American Psychological Association, right? There’s military psychology, there’s school psychology, educational psychology, marriage and family psychology. And sports psychology is one of them, but they all are so quarantined off that oftentimes breakthroughs in one area are not being shared in other areas. And I try to be consilient in my thinking, meaning…Carol Gilligan said that theory blinds observation, the idea being when you have a worldview, it often quarantines your mind off to other points of view.

So, for example, if you have a back injury and you go to a chiropractor, they’re going to see a chiropractic solution, and a surgeon is going to see a surgical solution, and an ortho sees an orthopedic solution. So, wherever you go, people find solutions based on their worldview. And I try to break free from that by really delving into all areas of philosophy, sociology, psychology, math. I mean, I really try to be a consilient thinker. And so, for me, it was, I was reading social cognitive theory and saying, “Man, this applies to sports, but this is golf.” And I knew a bit about golf because my father played. I played in high school. And at the University of Florida, I had friends on the golf team, but it was just such a perfect fit that I wrote a thought piece one night at 2:00 a.m. because when you’re an academic at Emory University in a PhD program, all you do is read, and think, and talk, and think, and read, and don’t sleep.

And at 2:00 a.m., when I was done with my regular work, I just wrote about a 20-page thought piece. In the thought piece was a profile of Jack Nicklaus. It was about 2000. And what happened was, at the time, there was no email, someone photocopied my thought piece and they gave it to a guy named Davis Love III, he was a PGA Tour golfer who then took the lead at the master’s and referenced my thought piece. And then so, people started calling me as if I was an expert on golf. So, I would talk to golfers and then they’d go sort of win. And one guy won the Georgia section of the PGA and then golfer, after golfer, after golfer, after reaching out to me, started winning such that Jack Nicklaus…

In 2002 hadn’t made a cut on the PGA Tour two years, he invited me to travel with him up to the Memorial Tournament up in Ohio that he hosts. And I stayed with him at his house. And it’s surreal for me, right? I’m making $42,000 a year. I’d written a thought piece that had Jack Nicklaus as a psychological profile and he asked me like, “How did you know these things about me?” And I said, Jack, “I didn’t. I look at all your interviews. I reverse-engineered your thinking, and this is the assumption, that you had to be this way.” And he loved it. And then he made the cut. He hadn’t made a cut in two years.

So, the golf, and this is when Tiger Woods was on the tour for four years. So, the whole world was looking at golf and looking at Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus and they asked him, “Where did this come from? You haven’t played this well in so long.” And he referenced to me, and that was the shift. When Jack Nicklaus, who had askewed sports psychology his whole career says, and I quote, “He’s the only sports psychologist I’ve ever met who’s worth a damn.” So, like, that’s high praise from Jack.

Meb: Take us back. What was the analysis that had Jack sort of like insight and breakthrough at this time? What’d you just tell him, was it just 20 pages of just be the ball? What was the mindset?

Gio: In their case, he started with the why. So, one of the first questions I ask really anyone who thinks they want to work with me, it’s like, “Why do you do what you do?” And it’s not the Simon Sinek stuff. I don’t find that particularly rigorous, but I’m glad somebody’s talking about the why. But prior to Sinek, real psychology was delving into the why. And what happens is if I can know why you do what you do, or why Jack Nicklaus, or Justin Rose, or Jordan Spieth, really anyone, why they do what they do, if I can know the answer to that question, I can know, with pretty good probability, about five other things about that person. I can know what informs their confidence, why they lose their confidence, when they lose their confidence, and how they react. I can know the manner in which they likely lie to themselves, to the degree they externalize success and failure or internal…

That why question is so powerful. And what happens, people tend to bucket into one of two categories. Like, if I say, “Why do you play golf?” If you tell me that it’s because “I want to win trophies, and I want to be famous, and I want to get rich, and I want to be the man, and I want to beat other people,” like, all those traits bucket into what’s called an ego orientation. So, people do things because they want to embolden or enhance or improve their ego, their sense of self. The other category is people say, “Well, because I love the challenge. I love learning. I love to solve hard problems.” Like, there’s an intrinsic motivation. You realize that whether people are partially intrinsically or extrinsically motivated, the degree to which they need other people’s approval, the degree to which they love solving hard problems versus having things done easily for them are two radically different profiles of a person that tell me so much about them, and you can actually forecast the way that dominoes will fall in their career.

And so, Jack read that and he’s like, “Man, that’s how I used to play.” But when you become famous, there’s a psychological shift that happens. It happens to almost every golfer. I often say, “I felt like the undertaker of a small town, that if you were a really, really great golfer, you almost had to come visit me because the things that kept happening that would undo great golfers’ games.” And Jack read that and it just blew his mind and he went and started to play better. And, in fact, a month later, he went on ESPN. He was on a fishing show, because he loves to fish for bonefish, and they weren’t catching any fish. And he had referenced that piece again. He said, “That’s okay, I’m a mastery fisherman, not an ego fisherman.” He started to view himself a certain way. And so, that was the beginning. And I will say that that concept, whenever a golfer reads that, they see themselves in one of those two. And when I can shift a golfer down the right path, that’s what’s led to really a lot of the success on the PGA Tour.

Meb: Let’s stay there for a minute because the curious parts to me too is you see this all the time. And I wonder how many people who may actually start out ego-driven, they’re young, they want to prove themselves, they want to make a bunch of money, they see all these things and maybe have a little success and then are actually able to make that transition maybe to mastery, do they usually stay in one camp or is there some fluidity there?

Gio: Yeah, no. When you profile the greats, they’re almost…well, they are categorically mastery-oriented. But what happens is interesting, is we talk about that psychological shift. So, we can talk about really investing in golf, but let’s talk about golf for a minute and then we’ll shift to the world of finance. So, every golfer begins playing golf and staying with golf because it’s just awesome. It’s an amazingly fulfilling game in every way. So, you start out playing golf because you love it. You’re out there until the sun sets and you don’t want to go home, but you have to because you can’t see the ball, but you can’t wait until your mom or dad drives you to the golf course the next day and…You see it everywhere in the world. You see people chasing the game. You see really, really wealthy people, really, really famous people, really, really accomplished people, once they find their way into golf, it’s like they don’t leave because the game is so hard, but it’s so telling about you as a person, it reveals us. So, people get addicted to the game of golf.

What happens is that obsession and that love of the game, because of those things that are in place, you become really, really good at it. So, what happens is the developmental path is you become good at golf, so maybe you get a college scholarship. So, all of a sudden, you get to college and because of your love of craft, your love of challenge, your love of learning, well, now you get special dorm room, and you get cool shirts, and you get your own sort of perks, and you’re on campus, and you’re a college athlete. So, what happens in the mind is you start to realize is, “Because of this thing that I love, because of this, I get this. When I play good golf, I get recognition. I get to play on the team.” And then it goes all the way to the PGA Tour and you start making money. But the psychological shift happens when the thing that you get becomes more important than the game, whether it’s wealth, or validation, or fame, or trophy. So, what I always say is it’s okay to be both mastering and ego, but there’s got to be an order. It’d be like Einstein saying, “I’m going to get into physics because I want to win the Nobel Prize.” It doesn’t work that way. The game is too hard.

What the research shows is for mastery-oriented individuals, when you dive into something because you love it…Will McKinsey living out of his van in Montana because he loved to snowboard. Like, for three years, lived out of a van. You see it in a lot of domains, triathlon, and you see it with runners. I saw it recently with kayakers, like people who are willing to sort of, they were…Mountain biking. I was with a mountain biker two days ago. And so, what happens is people who are pursuing something for the passion, their memory is better. Anxiety is lower. We call it deeper cognitive processing, like all the things that relate to success. But when we shift and we’re doing things for the optics or the veneers of it, like it’s not that I love golf, but I want to project myself a certain way.

This happened to a golfer named Rory McElroy, for what it’s worth, who was probably the most talented golfer outside of Tiger Woods of the last several generations. No one would deny that. And he came out as a 17-year-old, 18-year-old, 19-year-old, 20-year-old golfer and took the golf world by storm, won everything, won the U.S. Open, I think, by 9 shots. And Jordan Spieth is another example to a lesser degree. So, what happens is you come out, you love golf, you love to compete, but then you sign a $200 million Nike contract. And he’s in commercials for Omega watches, talking about being a superstar. And what happens is you could really see the shift. And I was early on this. And I think I offended Rory because somebody had mentioned it to him. I didn’t mean to do that. I was just on the golf channel making an observation saying like, “He’s in trouble.”

And I was on a panel and the four other people on the panel, all professional golfers and analysts like, “Oh, you don’t know what you’re talking about, blah, blah, blah.” And I was in advance of Roy McElroy’s career taking a shift for the worst because I was listening to how he was describing how he was thinking about golf. And like, he just shifted from mastery to ego. And I know what this path looks like. And, oh, by the way, he went down the tubes. And I can send you that clip later and you can see it. Two weeks later, everyone on the panel said, “Oh, now we see what Dr. Gio was…” This is when Rory had a meltdown at the Masters…

Meb: Or did they just say you jinxed him? They’re like, “The Dr. Gio jinxed Rory.”

Gio: No, he hadn’t listened to the interview. But, anyway, so, you start seeing what happens is ego-oriented people versus mastery. And this is the interesting thing, is what they do with failure. And this is both true in investing and in sports. So, for a mastery-reoriented individual, someone who’s pursuing something because they love of craft, love of challenge, they’re on their own path, and they fail. The reaction to failure is typically curiosity. It’s like, “What’s going on? What am I missing? How can I solve this problem?” For ego-oriented individuals, when they fail, the reaction is embarrassment. I really want you to think about this. If my motivation is Kaizen, I want to get better at this thing that I love to do and I don’t get it right, I might be frustrated, but I want to solve that problem. If my motivation is to impress you, if my motivation is to impress the media, if my motivation is to prove to other people and I fail, the natural reaction is embarrassment.

So, you can see now, two different paths, failure hits because failure is built into the big leagues. How do I react to failure? This is curiosity. I’m going to keep getting better. This is embarrassment. Now, what we know about embarrassment, humiliation, is it’s right up there with the most painful psychological reactions. Like, there’s grief. There’s the grieving and the loss of a loved one. There’s the grieving and the loss of a breakup. And there’s embarrassment and humiliation. There are a few things more psychologically painful than embarrassment. So, if you invite embarrassment into your world that, “If I fail, I’m going to feel humiliated,” it’s like a throw switch in the brain. It’s like pulling a fire alarm, shuts a building down. The amygdala part of the brain, when you introduce humiliation or embarrassment to somebody, it shuts down their talent and they start playing scared. And what we know, in every achievement domain, you start playing scared, you’re done.

So, you could see, there’s a really logical path, a causal chain from if you tell me why you do what you do, that I can actually see the way that the dominoes will fall, I can anticipate how you’re going to react to failure and I also know that failure is imminent, and then when you react with humiliation, you start being desperate. You start overtrading, you get out of positions too soon, you have no conviction, and on, and on, on and on. It’s a cluster of bad habits. And what most people try to do with the analytics, risk teams, and hedge funds all over the world is say, “Here’s your trading behavior. We have to change the behavior.” What they’re not doing is understand, that behaviors’ an expression of the why initially. So, it’s all fascinating to me.

Meb: Yeah. There’s a quote that I attribute to our buddy Mark Yusko that says…and it may just be an old trading axiom, I don’t know. But he says, “Every trade can make you richer or wiser, but never both.” And it’s often talking about losing and failure as an investor, and this applies to all walks of life, but as a badge of honor and scars that you can learn from. And we talk a lot on the show about having to be a good loser, particularly in the investing world, but applies so much in sports too. So, it’s easy to say, okay, fear, we can recognize it, and it’s a huge problem in golf, and sports, and in investing too. But how do you conquer it? Is conquer the right word? How do you become aware of it and deal with it? Like, what’s the coaching advice to that?

Gio: Well, that’s a really good question. You know, fear and anxiety are probably two of the most heavily funded research areas within psychology. Fear and anxiety, things like PTSD, like real problems. So, fear is a difficult one. In the absence of real trauma, there are absolutely strategies. So, for example, there’s a concept in psychology known as self-efficacy. And self-efficacy is just operationalized confidence. So, just think of self-efficacy as confidence, right? So, within that research arena, there are three…So, this is true of you, everyone who you work with, everyone who’s listening to this, and everyone who’s walking down my street, that underneath the veneers of who you are, there are three belief systems that are always at play.

It’s your self-concept, which is how you view yourself. So, if I were to ask you to give me 5 or 10 words to self-describe, that would essentially be your self-concept, it’s your identity, it’s how you view yourself. Running in with that is your self-esteem, and self-esteem is how you feel about yourself. So, self-esteem and self-concept, they’re somewhat related, like, if I give great descriptors of myself and I like myself. But then the third one is self-efficacy, which is your confidence. So, you’ve got three different self-views. What we know is self-esteem is problematic in the research literature because it’s predictive of exactly nothing. It doesn’t predict whether you’re going to be good or bad at something. It’s just a feeling. And it’s interesting and it matters to overall psychological health, but in the achievement domain world, it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t empirically relate to anything. Self-concept, how you view yourself sort of matters. In the right situation, it’s important to feel important.

But the most important one is this idea of self-efficacy, which is confidence, right? And here’s why. Your confidence tends to get informed by four types of experiences. Number one is your past success and failure. So, if you’ve been successful time and again, and again, and again, and again, you’re likely to be more confident that you’ll be successful in the future. The problem with them math around that is the brain tends to overweight failure. In other words, losing money hurts more than making money feels good. So, I want you to really think about this. If you are an investor and a trader and, you know, when the markets are open 250 days a year and you’ve got a 20-year career, so, what’s that, 5,000 trading days, call it 5,000 trading days markets are open. And you happen to be right, let’s say, 60% of the time. So, 40% of the time, so 2,000 trading days you are wrong, 2,000 iterations of anything. I did the math wrong there, but it doesn’t matter.

What actually matters is that the brain overweight’s the pain that comes with failure and it is amplified when you’re an ego-oriented person and embarrassment, like the pain of embarrassment that you have to tell your wife or your family that you’re in a draw, or that you got fired, or your management team, or your risk officer, or the founder of your firm. And so, what happens is confidence is informed by the wins, but we overweight the losses, which is why, over time, even though investors develop more skills, they tend to become more risk-averse. The research shows that, over time, we become more risk-averse. And this is in a world where you get paid for smart risk. So, it becomes a bias. Essentially, if you don’t have a toolbox for dealing with how you’re going to handle failures, if you don’t have a process around failure, you will eventually start trading from a place of irrational fears, just math, unless you have a particular type of brain that you can shed that or, or, or.

Meb: Like the Eli Manning, just chuck a few interceptions and come right back to the line of scrimmage.

Gio: Yeah. Like, athletes at the highest level have all found a way to deal with fear. For example, Tiger Woods. Here’s what Tiger Woods said in his book. He says, “I refuse to give into fear, real or imagined, or to be afraid either consciously or unconsciously of anything or anyone.” Like, what? Let me think about the greatest athlete, arguably in the history of sports, if you want to do a comparison of Tom Brady, Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Phelps, and you get them all in a room, I think this is true, and I’ve been around a few of them, they’d all agree that what Tiger did is the hardest because golf’s the hardest of the things. It puts such a premium on your mental game and your physical game in the ambience. So, I think most people, it’s debatable, but like what Tiger did, that body of work, I put it up probably better than any of those guys.

The question to someone like me becomes, “How the hell do you do that in such a hard game?” How are you against 139 other of the best players in the world for about 5 years, it’s pick ’em. One guy versus 139 other guys, and you’re going to go with this guy. He won eight tournaments in a row. Like, what? So, what’s the belief system that informs that body of work? Well, that belief system is rooted in what I just said. It’s, “I refuse to give into fear, real or imagined, or to be afraid, either consciously or unconsciously, of anything or anyone.” If you could take that belief system and insert it into any investor, all of a sudden, you’re removing one of the primary biases, all the language these days on cognitive biases…One of the biggest biases has to do with two things, right? It’s fear and sort of the desire that’s in that eternal dance with fear.

What Tiger is saying in that statement is, “I’ll acknowledge my fears.” He’s not saying, “I refuse to feel it.” What he’s saying is, “I refuse to give into it. And it can be real or imagined. It doesn’t matter. I’m not giving into it.” And it could be of anything or anyone. All of a sudden, you see the equation is, “I’m not going to be afraid of people judging me. I’m not going to be afraid of failing. I’m not going to be…” It’s like, “I’m just going to have a playbook for dealing with fear writ large.” And you take them, you apply it to Jack Nicklaus, Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Patrick Cantley, who was one of the greatest, best young golfers in the world in the States, and all of the best investors I’ve ever seen or worked with, they all have a playbook to deal with fear and to find a way that those failures don’t create the bias of, “I’m trading from a place of fear.” And when they feel that they are, they have a playbook for compensating so they’re not their own worst enemy.

So, that’s step number one. And there’s about 20 other things I can talk about. I feel like I’m talking too much, but the idea of managing the emotion of fear, how you’re going to deal with the type of failure, and embarrassment, and frustration that leads to that fear is of paramount importance if you want to be great at anything, particularly a world like investing or sports.

Meb: I mean, if we could just briefly…I feel like we could do a dozen episodes on some of these topics, but this concept of building that toolbox, I imagine some of the hack golfers like myself on here listening to this…and I was going to say, you know, the last five times I played this course, I shanked it into the lake every time. So, Tiger’s not shanking in the lake, but maybe he hits it in the rough or something. And you say, I have this toolbox to deal with it. Like, what does that actually mean? Because I feel like a lot of people listening to this would be like, “Okay, well, great. It’s easy to say.” Not to be scared of the tee box, but, son of a bitch, I’ve hit it in the lake every time. So, now how do I…? I can forget it, but then I’m just going to hit it in the lake again.

Gio: Right. No. That is an awesome question. That defines the late-early part of my career. Psychology, we talked about, there’s two different types of knowledge. There’s conceptual knowledge, which is to know something, content knowledge. And then what’s called procedural knowledge, which is to know how to do something, how do you bridge that divide from theory to practice? So, in the early part of my career, as a young sports psychologist, which I guess I was at the time, I’d tell golfers, “Hey, you got to be confident.” And, oftentimes, they’d be like, “Okay. How do I do that? Because I don’t feel confident right now.” And I say, “Well, the theory says you should do this, and this, and this.” And so, transitioning from the conceptual how to the procedural do, I think is probably, for me, if I were to sort of audit and critique my own career to date, I would say, that’s the biggest leap I made is teaching people the do, how to do confident, how to be confident, not just think of it.

I’ll tell you one of the things that’s at the center of the work that I do with my clients writ large, and that has to do with the psychology of attachments. So, attachments are huge. Here’s what I mean. There are two benchmark statements. And this is just my opinion, by the way. Anyone listening, you can roll your eyes. You can say, “That guy’s a …” and I accept all of it. Critique me all…This is just my worldview and the research I’ve done. And if you have better answers out there, I’d love to hear from you. But this is where I’ve arrived as a scholar. So, there are two benchmark statements in golf and in investing that I use. What I taught golfers is there’s one essential question you have to ask yourself. And that question is, what’s my target?

And when I said this to my former advisor, I said, “Yeah, so, I’m doing this work with golfers. It’s going really, really well.” And he goes, “Oh, what’s the predicator?” I said, “Well, I teach them…” And he goes, “You’re telling me the best golfers in the world don’t understand that they should be picking a target on every shot?” I said, “Remarkably, no.” He goes, “How could that be?” And I said, “Well, it’s not that they don’t know it, it’s just there’s so many distractions.” Because, all of a sudden, they think, “The guy in my group is playing better, and there’s the leaderboard, and oh, my God, look, who’s watching.” There’s so much information happening that they forget the fundamental fact that you should pick a target on every shot and that you should make a fearless swing at that target. And that’s a very clarifying question.

And so, golfers all around the world are out there, and if I ask them like, “Hey, are you a competitive person?” They’re like, “Yeah, I’m a competitive.” I’m like, “Well, who are you competing against?” And then they get the deer and the headlights of, “Well, are you competing against other golfers? Is it against the past? Is it against other players in the leaderboard?” Like, if you call yourself competitive, who are you competing against? If you can’t answer that question, then you’re chasing a phantom here. And so, what I always tell golfers is you should be competing against the golf course architect or against the golf course itself and every shot, have a target. Like, that is the litmus test. That’s the clarifying state and everything else dissolves.

For investors, depending on the particular type of investments, different for private equity maybe and startups and such, but I’ll put it out there anyway and people can vet the idea. What I say is you should deploy capital proportional to the opportunity in the moment. And I think that’s a really obvious statement. You should deploy capital proportional, meaning the amount of capital you deploy is proportional to the opportunity itself in the moment. And people can roll their eyes and say, “You got a PhD for that?” Okay. But try investing professionally for a living and realize how difficult it is to do what I just said because investors deploy capital for all sorts of reasons.

They deploy capital into…let’s use Restoration Hardware because it’s on my mind. I’m going to put more money into Restoration Hardware because I lost money on Restoration Hardware and I know it’s a good company, and in my mind, I’ve got to make money the same way I lost it. Well, that’s not deploying capital proportional to the opportunity. You’re deploying capital because you lost in Restoration Hardware. Or maybe you made a lot of money in Restoration Hardware and you need a win so bad, you’re going to go back to your wheelhouse because we regressed to things that made us feel good at some point. That’s not rational. That’s not deploying capital proportion to the opportunity.

Let’s say I’m a golfer who…I’m sorry, I’m an investor who made…generated $20 million in P&L last year and my payout’s going to be, I don’t know, let’s call it $5 million, $5 million check each of the last 3 years. And so, I’ve saved $10 million and I’m in a real career trajectory and I’ve got $15 million saved and I’m at a good point in my career, I think it’s going to be like this forever, so I buy a piece of land in the Hamptons and I build a $9 million house. And as they’re doing construction on a $9 million house, the expenses have ballooned, because they always ballooned to $14 million and I’m in a draw. And oh, by the way, my process which has worked each of the last 3 years and I’ve generated $15 million or $20 million of personal wealth and now I’ve got a $15 million expense on top of the lifestyle that I’ve built around my wealth because I fly private a little bit here and there and I’m flying first class, and I’m in a draw.

And so, my prospect for making money this year is down, and all of a sudden, I need to make money because I’ve got these fixed expenses in my life. So, now, you’re imposing your needs on the market. You are not deploying capital proportional to the opportunity that presents itself. You’re deploying capital because you need to make money to pay off an expense. So, I can go example after example, after example, after example of how some of the smartest investors in the world do not invest rationally. And, by the way, this is true of quants and systematic traders as well. People are like, “Well, that’s why we have systematic training. And that’s why we’re quants. We trust them out.” Really? Okay.

So, here’s the bias there, the quants…And, by the way, I did a lot of math in grad school at Emory University. Five doctoral-level statistics courses. I love math. It’s the language of science. But people create algorithms and systematic processes as much to guard against their own biases as the fact that it’s good fiduciary habits. And what happens is even though the algorithm is static or malleable, the person deploying it, that’s a human being pulling the trigger there. So, to think that quants, and I’ve worked with many of them, many, many of them, don’t have biases is the height of all folly. That’s like, good luck with that.

So, again, what I’m going to say is go back to the litmus steps. We should deploy capital proportion of the opportunity in the moment. And if you’re doing that and you have a process around that…and there’s a wash, rinse, repeat like the back of a shampoo bottle, right? If you want to know how to be a great investor, look at the back of a shampoo bottle, lather, wash, rinse, repeat, have a process. Stick to that process. Independent of the variability of the market, run that process and in aggregate, over time, should be able to make a lot of money if you’re smart, and talented, and rigorous, and so forth.

Meb: Well, it just brought up a memory. We talked to investors a lot in this particular topic where they talk about their positions. We often ask them, we say, “Does your portfolio look like kind of an ideal portfolio that if you had a blank piece of paper you would implement today?” And often, if not majority of the time, the answer is no. And the analogy goes, “Go look around your garage. If you had an empty garage, would you go buy all the things that you currently have in the garage?” And there’s never been one person ever that’s like, “Yeah. I would buy exactly that exercise bike from 20 years ago,” and on, and on, and on. And so, there’s a quote recently by Adam Grant where he’s like, “I don’t want my ideas to become identity.” And I think it works both ways where people just, these attachments they have, and it works particularly with the investing world. Once you have a position or have an experience with the market, it triggers a whole cascade waterfall of problems or emotions that then get attached to that.

But while we’re kind of in this genre, I would love to hear…You went from primarily golf and sports-focused to the investing world. And I think the older crowd listening to this podcast will know Steve Cohen as SAC. The slightly younger crowd will know him as Point72 and the youngest crowd will know him as the owner of the Mets. So, he is got all three of those hats. But tell us a little bit about any differences. You kind of go from the greatest athletes in the world to some of the titans of the investing world.

Gio: So, listen to this, you’re asking about my transition from golf to Point72. So, I’d worked with a few investors prior to Point72, so I knew a little bit about the language. But when Steve had invited me to sort of come in and be on staff at Point72 and be sort of the in-house performance coach, there’s a lot about your world I don’t know. I know the psychology of it and so forth. So, what happened was is we both agreed that it would be a mistake for me to just jump in and be an employee and I didn’t want to put myself in that position. I was a professor at Rollins College, had a great job and a great life. So, I started working with four of his PMs initially. And so, let’s just work with four. Let me sort of figure some things out. So, I was in Colorado actually on sabbatical, interesting enough, I was living in Colorado and I flew to Point72 twice a month.

Meb: Hanging out in your cabin. That’s very Thoreau of you.

Gio: It was very Thoreau of me. It was arguably the best and most idyllic time in my life because my cabin has no Internet and has no cell phone service. It was built in 1940s. I would have to come down the mountain to check out anything. It was awesome. So, what happens both in the PGA Tour and in the hedge fund world is “demand in the arena” the person in the arena. You have to earn that respect. PGA Tour golfers are not going to give you their time or attention for any other reason than they believe you’re going to make them better. Portfolio managers…now, at Point72, no one was forced to work with me. It was never, “You have to work with you.” It was always, “If you want to.”

On the PGA Tour, I started with one golfer, Heath Slocum, Chad Campbell, and grew to a stable of some of the best golfers in the world. Worked with over 100 PGA Tour golfers. At some point, I had worked with all three medal winners in the 2016 Olympics. Henry Stinson, Matt Kuchar, Justin Rose, Justin and Matt more than Henry. But it was all word of mouth. It was, “Hey, I heard you can help me.” Golfers have always called me, “Hey, I’ve heard you can help me.” And my answer is always, “I don’t know, but I’m happy to try.”

The PM community, I started with four, and I was on sabbatical with the intention of returning to my professorship. And what ended up happening was at the end of my sabbatical, it had grown, my stable of PMs had grown to, I think, 15 or 16 at Point72 and Point72 said, “Hey, we’d love you to stay and come on full time.” And I thought, “This is working out really well.” And I love the work. And that’s the thing that I listened to, talking about mastery orientation. I love working with portfolio managers and investors and the reason is because the horsepower, the IQ points. Wall Street attracts really, really, really smart people. And at that time in my life, I’d been doing a lot of teaching, but I didn’t feel like I was learning a whole lot. So, I thought, “Yeah. I’ll give it a shot.” And my stable had grown to 15 or 16 PMs within Point72. And by the time 5 years had gone by, I had 90% of the investing community at Point72.

Meb: What’s wrong with the holdouts, the final 10%?

Gio: I think for the same reason. So, I’ll give an example, a golfer named Jordan Spieth and I had dinner in 2015. And he was doing really well in the PGA Tour. Not great, but good. And he said, “Your books really helped me. I was thinking maybe we should work together.” And after a three-hour dinner, I said to him, I said, “Jordan, you don’t need me. Like, you’re thinking perfectly, you don’t get bullied by the fact that you don’t win enough. Like, you’re fine.” And he went out and won that week by 10 shots and then had one of the best years in the history of the PGA in 2015.

Meb: Cheap dinner, man.

Gio: Yeah, right? But this idea that if you have a process that’s working, not everyone needs a psychologist. Not everyone needs coaching. And I’ve had enough success that I don’t need the work. I can say to people, “I don’t really think you need a whole lot of help.” And I say, “Listening to your talk, it’s perfect.” And even though I probably had met with every PM at Point72 at some point, like some guys got to figure it out, and they know themselves. Like, Ari …. used to write about the importance of knowing yourself. And if you know yourself, and you know the markets, and know your habits and your biases, like you don’t always need me, and I’m okay with that. And if you need me, maybe you need me once or twice a year. You don’t need me once a week. And there’s a whole myriad of reasons.

But getting to work with people with PhDs in theoretical math from Harvard University and getting a chance to work with former captain of the Harvard hockey team and just these intellectual giants. And I celebrate smart, and the fact that I can go toe to toe with these people is, to me, it makes me so proud of myself because these are real pedigree, Ivy league, MIT, Stanford, competitive people who want to talk to me, I’ll take that all day long. So, I’ve found and continue to find Wall Street an intellectually invigorating place. And I love the game. I love the challenge.

Meb: One of the areas seemingly an investing world that might be a little bit different is the markets, in general, there’s an element of randomness. I don’t know if you’ve ever had any professional gambler clients, but there’s a similar challenge, which is you can have the right process and the outcome may not work out. Whereas, I feel like a lot in sports, you can go, the harder you work often has very direct outcome results. The more you practice, the better you get. And sometimes just like you get stuck in an environment in the investing world that can last a really long time, depending on how you approach the market. Obviously, the hyperactive trading or the people doing on a very short timeframe, that’s different than the people doing it on months and years. As you spent time and kind of did this engagement, was there an element where you said, “Okay. Like, here’s a very specific difference from the golf sports world that I need to address that has like a measurable impact,” or was it actually pretty darn similar across the board?

Gio: The answer is yes. Really different and really similar. And it’s funny you say that, because people have asked me a lot, “You know, what are the similarities and differences between golf and investing?” And I’ve really parsed that out lately, and I’m going to actually write a thought piece on it pretty soon. Probably the biggest parallels between golf and investing is the variability of the outcome. So, golf, it’s score, investing, it’s P&L. So, let’s just start there. When you think of the difference between chess and poker, and chess and backgammon, the difference between those two games is randomness and variability. So, backgammon, it’s the roll of the dice, that’s a variable. And in poker, it’s cards, you know, that’s a variable. Whereas, chess, it’s just direct mono a mono, 100% control over the board. So, when we talk about games that have variability and outcome, when that outcome can meaningfully impact your life, your potential to earn money, which, by extension, your potential to feed your family, feed yourself, take care of self, get insurance, and so forth.

Whenever your wellbeing in life is governed by things over which you have little or no control, that brings anxiety into play. Government policies that impact your life, people go crazy over various things, exercise, influence, monetary policy, just all the things that influence your life and that you don’t have control over. So, what happens is with this variability is that people tend to attach to results. So, let’s talk about that as an A priority concept. Like, just assume that if you’re a human being, unless you’re in a half of a percent of people, like, you’ll attach to various things. So, for example, we attach to the past. Someone criticized me or made fun of me when I was in fifth grade and I never let it go, and like, you’re attached to the past. To the future, people attach to the future. It’s, “Oh, man, what if I never make another dollar? What if I never find love? What if…?” We create our own anxiety because we project ourselves into an uncertain future. That’s an attachment.

What we know is that people also attach to short-term results. And so, you’re making money, you feel good, you’re losing money, you feel bad. As a golfer, you’re making birdies, you feel confident, bogies, you lose your confidence. And so, our mindset, if we don’t have a proper way of viewing it, tends to look like our P&L. What’s that old saying? You’re making money, it feels like you’ll never lose money again. When you’re losing money, it feels like you’ll never make money again and your psychological aperture changes if you don’t have a … or someone like me to hold you on that line or someone in your firm or whoever you work with. And so, this idea of the psychology of attachments that we tend to attach to short-term results and then we react to them.

And so, what happens is this, and I’ll use a metaphor. If this is my results and this is me and I’m attached to my results, as the results go, I go with them. And so, what happens? I have no freedom. So, what you realize is freedom and attachment cannot coexist. This is freedom, this is attachment. This is P&L, this is my mental wellbeing. If I’m attached to P&L, I have no psychological freedom, which means I have no objectivity. I have a bias. If I am attached to short-term results, there’s absolutely no way that I am making clear objective decisions about the opportunity in the market. So, it begs the question and it brings to play, what I would call…And this is what I do with all my clients. Once a week, we detach, we actively let go of things that are in our mind.

So, for example, ask ourselves a simple question every Friday, “To what am I attached that is influencing my mindset that I don’t want to be there, that I didn’t put there by volition or will, that I haven’t chosen?” Well, I can ask myself the question right now, “What am I attached to? Well, I’m attached to the quote that the plumber gave me to re-plumb my house. I’m attached to that. Oh, I’m attached to, in fifth grade, the teacher told me to mouth the words to a song in the school play because I have a bad singing voice. That really hurt my feelings. I’m attached to the fact that my portfolio was up 30% because the market was at…Now I’m only up 10%. So, I gave back 20% and now there’s a built device to recoup that loss because I had already spent that money and I was budgeting, or retiring,” or this and that. So, all these attachments that we have, and people don’t take the time to let go, to detach from things that are irrational. The fact that somebody cut me off or took a parking space. I mean, people are walking around, it’s like Pinocchio, right, with all these strings. And everyone’s walking around as a bundle of attachments, but they have no psychological freedom.

And, by the way, this isn’t me. This is Henry David Thoreau, “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” And scale that to humanity. So, unless you do some real work around letting go of the things that are hemming you in as a human being, there’s absolutely no chance that you’re functioning at your optimal level. Kelly Slater, greatest surfer in the history of surfing, went through a slump in his career. He had a film crew track his “comeback year” when he won, finally, I think after several years of being irrelevant, he won the world title. And when he released the documentary, guess what he called it? He called it “Letting Go.” Because in order for him to regain or to reinvent himself, he had to let go of the past. He had to let go of his failures. He had to let go of who he used to be, had to let go of all of it and reinvent himself with psychological freedom so he can go and be fearless.

And so, this idea of letting go that people don’t let go of the past, they don’t let go of bad trades, they don’t let go of pain, they don’t let go of slights, they don’t let go of the thing that hem them in, we don’t let go of failure, so failure defines our lives. And so, in the absence of having a process around letting go of the things that…The movie “Fight Club,” it’s one of the great movies of my generation. There’s an awesome scene in which Tyler Durden says to his alter ego, he says, “Let that which does not matter truly slide.” What a line. And this is what people mostly don’t do. We attach to things that don’t matter. We live our lives with this internal dialogue talking about shit that does not matter because we don’t let it go. And the beauty of the inside of that line is, Let that which does not matter truly slide.

Like, if you can truly let go of things that don’t matter, the type of creative freedom that comes into your mind, it’s like being reinvented as a human being. Steve Jobs talked about this, by the way. When he was kicked out of his own company and released…the board and fired him…And this is before he had founded Pixar, he was walking around aimlessly. But what he said is, “No one had any expectation. I was free.” And what happened, what filled the void of that freedom was a period of creative expression that led to Pixar. And so, sometimes these detachments are forced and sometimes we have to do the work to let go of things.

Meb: So, I want to hear about how to do the work and break these chains because if I go upstairs, I talk to my wife and I might say, “Babe, just let it go,” the reaction I’m going to get is not going to be a positive one, or my 4-year-old. But I think a lot of people listening to this probably identify some things they would love to be free of or let go. They just don’t know how. And this is probably the topic of many more hours, but do you have any just general suggestions for those people that want to actually try to put this into practice?

Gio: Sure. So, this is where we borrow from religious tradition, right? So, if you look at, whether it’s Christianity, Buddhism, or the Islam faith, one of the things that all religious traditions have in common is some form of prayer. So, I’ll use Christianity as an example. Church every Sunday, grace before dinner, say your prayers. Well, why can’t I just go to church on the first day of the year, tell God I’m sorry for my sins, and try to be graceful and then I’m done for the year? And so, what all religious traditions suggest is that in the absence of actively practicing your beliefs, you will default into a worse version of yourself. Like, if you don’t go, and in the Christian tradition, it’s you’ll end up with original sin being driven by the seven deadly sins, like sloth, greed, lust, all these things that get us in trouble. But 2,000 years to get it right and they’re still maintaining that you have to actively practice your beliefs. Hinduism, it’s true. Buddhism, it’s true. In the Muslim faith, it’s true. In the Jewish tradition and faith, like, you have to have habits.

Same is true of letting go of attachments. If you don’t actively practice letting go of things, you will default to a state of attachment and you will not be free. So, you can go to your wife or anyone and say, “Hey, you need to let it go.” You’re right, it’s not going to go over well for many reasons, by the way, a myriad of reasons, I’m sure. Because in as much as I talk about things with all my clients, marriage is at the center of it.

Meb: And also, she’s an Emory PhD and, man, once those wheels start spinning, she’s going to be thinking about it all night. Next thing you know, it’s a 20-page thought piece and I’m the center of it. Here we go.

Gio: Yeah. And she’s like, “What do you mean by that?” Yeah. That’s a bad look. So, how to let go of attachments, just get in the habit of actively practicing letting go of attachments. You’ll be bad at it at first, everyone is. But the more you do it, the more you sit and you ask yourself, “What am I attached?” And close your eyes and you just sit with your thoughts and you identify the attachments and you just tell yourself, “Let it go.” And you just keep repeating the phrase, “Just let it go. Let it go.” You’ll have a moment where you’re like, “Oh, my God, I just let it go. Like, I’m free. I’m free of that.” And the active practice of letting go of attachments leads to the type of psychological freedom required to be good, anything you do. I’ll say it again. The active practice of letting go of the things to which you are attached is required for you to be really, really good at anything.

And I defy anyone to argue that point with me. The only argument I’ve ever heard that could even come close to disagreeing with that is, “Well, you should hold onto your failures and channel them in motivation.” Like, let’s look at Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan. Like, in his Hall of Fame speech, Michael Jordan called out his high school coach. “Remember you cut me, man. You screwed up.” So, I understand holding on to slights and channeling them to try to have fuel and motivation for the journey as the Chinese proverb says. Problem is when you attach to those slights too powerfully and they define you, you handle failure in a way that leads to failure more often than success. Independent of that argument, there is no argument. You’ve got nothing to say in my opinion. So, that’s really partially central to a lot of the work that I do with my clients. It’s like we’re actively letting go of the attachments that compromise our psychological freedom because we need to see the world as it is and not through our biases and our own histories, and so forth.

Meb: I was laughing as you were talking about letting it go because for anyone with young kids, and you said you had three, and think about turning that into a “Frozen” soundtrack. Well, good. Look, man, this has been a blast. I have like six more pages of things to talk to you about. What you were talking about reminds me so much of this discussion of process and performance, which so many in our world, even at the top echelons of institutions managing in the hundreds of billions, if not trillions, they talk a lot about process and performance and then don’t behave that way. Often, they do on the buy-side, but maybe not the sell-side. I’ve yet to have an investor call us up and say, “You know what, Meb? Your performance is too high. So, we’re going to sell what you’re up to.” It’s always on the flip side.

Gio: I want to comment on that because I have a statistic I pulled up for you. This really matters to anyone who wants to be good at something. From 2002 to 2005, Tiger Woods had 1,540 putts from 3 feet and in. He missed three of them. So, I want you to really think about this, 1,540 times over the course of 3 years, Tiger had a putt inside of 3 feet in. Now, this is in wind, in rain, imperfect greens, left to right, right to left, uphill, downhill. Fifteen hundred times, he only missed three of them. Can you imagine the type of discipline, rigor, commitment to process required? Like, that is the greatest single statistic I’ve ever read in sports. People have no idea how hard it is. That’s why there’s nothing that Tiger did that was…Like, that is the tell of how good he is.

You want to hear how good Steve Cohen is? Here’s how good Steve Cohen is. I asked his wife this. I said, “I have a quick question. How many days off does your husband take?” I hadn’t known Steve for that long. She said four days off in the time that she’d known him. So, if you go 40 years, 250 trading days, call it 10,000 days, we’ll just average. Ten thousand days, Steve Cohen took off four. You know why? He was in the hospital. And as soon as he woke up from surgery, he had them set up monitors as the story goes. In other words, Tiger Woods shows up every day for his craft. Steve Cohen shows up every day for his craft. The everydayness, showing up and being present in the moment for what you’re doing really matters.

And so, when you tell me about this buy-side, sell-side, and having a process and a commitment to a process, you want to see who lives at the tail end of the curve? It’s people who keep showing up. It’s Tiger Woods. One thousand five hundred and forty putts from 3 feet, missed three of them. That is an insanely hard thing to do. Ten thousand trading days, for a guy who doesn’t need the money, missed four of them. He was in the hospital. I admire that kind of commitment so much. And I can give you example, example, and, guess who these people are, they all occupy the tail end of the curve. It’s not talent. It’s not IQ points. It is those things, but it’s also the everydayness of showing up for the job.

Meb: I’m just picturing two visuals as you were talking about this. One is the Tiger Wood putts, I just picture like the three that he missed, it’s either like a ladybug or an earthworm just like moseying around. And I also picture Stevie Cohen being in the hospital bed and like unplugging the EKG machine and then like plugging in the Bloomberg so he has it like where it was there. And I’m going to reference you on this one because this is from one of your pieces. But you talk about, I think, a perfect quote to kind of wind this down, is the Thomas Edison. “The reason a lot of people don’t recognize opportunity is because it usually goes around wearing overalls and looks like hard work,” which I pull from you. Dr. Gio, where do people go? They want to call you up to say, “You know, I’m the world’s top poker player. I need some help. I’m in a rut.” Where do they go to read some of your missives? Any good places?

Gio: Yeah. I just put up a website. I don’t know if it works, but it’s like giovaliante.com. Or you can find me on LinkedIn or email, giovaliante@gmail. I don’t know. There’s all sorts of ways to find me. And I’ve got a couple of really good people around me that field all that stuff and parse it out and we get back to everybody. We don’t ever leave anyone abandoned. We know the world’s a hard place and the work people do is really, really hard. So, if you want to get to me, you’ll get to me and we’ll have things in place to help everybody.

Meb: Awesome, man. Dr. Gio, thanks so much for joining us today.

Gio: Thanks, Meb. Have a wonderful day there in Colorado, buddy.

Meb: Podcast listeners, we’ll post show notes to today’s conversation at mebfaber.com/podcast. If you love the show, if you hate it, shoot us feedback at feedback@themebfaber.show.com. We love to read the reviews. Please review us on iTunes and subscribe the show anywhere good podcasts are found. Thanks for listening, friends, and good investing.

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