Hello, listeners.

Welcome to another episode of the Jacob Shapiro podcast.

We are going to be doing things a little bit differently today.

So instead of talking about what happened in the world and markets this week, we're going to talk about what's been happening at cognitive investment, some of the changes that we've been doing at cognitive investments, and what the future of cognitive investments looks like.

If you're not interested in any of that, if you are literally just here for the straight geopolitical content, you don't want to hear about CI and what we're doing, then you shouldn't listen to this episode.

Then turn off.

We'll have another episode on Monday that's coming out with a really great guest and our normal content.

We'll go back to it.

But if you've been curious about, you know, why my title has changed recently and why I'm now a head of geopolitical research at the bespoke group, and why Rob is head of CIO at the bespoke group, but we're still doing things with CI.

But the podcast is the Jacob Shapiro podcast.

This podcast is the answer to all of your questions.

And really what we talk about in this podcast is we are creating something that we are roughly calling Club CI.

We've alluded to this a couple times on the podcast in the past, and some people have reached out, but here we get into actually so what is bespoke?

How is cognitive investments changing?

What is Club CI and how can you get involved with us?

If you want to learn more about these different things, we say it at the end of the episode.

But if any of this sounds interesting to you, you can email me at Jacob ognitive Investments.

If you've emailed me already, don't worry, I have your email address.

If you want to email me again, that's fine, too, but I've added you to the list.

We've been building this in the background.

We are really going to start building this for real over the next couple of months, and we're aiming to kick off club CI at the beginning of next year.

So if you've already written in, you should be getting communication from us in the next couple of weeks about what that looks like or other things that you have to go through to get into Club CI.

If you're worried that I haven't gotten your email, please feel free to send me again at Jacob dot Investments.

Otherwise, I think that that's all I just want to underscore.

If you are here just for the geopolitical content you're not going to like this conversation.

This conversation is about CI and what Rob and I are doing and about ways to engage with us further.

We're really excited about it, and I hope that some of you are, too.

Otherwise, listeners, if there's anything else that's on your mind, I've already said my email address enough times in this introduction.

Take care of the people that you love.

Cheers, and see you out there.

All right, we are back at it for our weekly chat.

We're going to do things a little differently this week, in part because it may not feel this way, because the last couple of weeks in particular have been so busy in geopolitics and markets.

But this has been a relatively quiet week.

I mean, we're recording on Thursday, so maybe I'm going to look bad.

Something will happen in the next 24 hours.

But, you know, there's some things about that Canada, India, diplomatic spat that are interesting, and what's going on in the Middle east continues in general, but it really does feel like we're in this election.

Pre hangover.

I don't know what you call a hangover before you actually get drunk for all, but do you have a term for that?

The calm before the storm?

There must be a french.

There must be a good german word or a french word for the hangover before the hangover or something like that.

But it really is what's on everyone's mind, and it's what I keep getting asked about.

So we thought it might be a good time, rather than focusing on what's going on the world this week to tell you about what we've been doing at cognitive investments.

Because if you've noticed us on social media, there's a title changes.

Rob and I are doing all sorts of interesting things.

We've alluded to a mysterious club on the podcast in recent weeks that some of you have reached out to us saying, yes, we want to have more information, and we have not followed up with any of you in any meaningful sense.

So we wanted to take a step back and talk to you about what's been happening with CI over the past couple of months and what our direction is going forward.

Rob, I think there's a lot to get in.

There's a lot to get into here.

But I think maybe the first thing that we just have to talk about is not that everybody on this podcast is following our social media profiles with bated breath, but you and I have both taken titles at the bespoke group, so maybe we should talk, at least at the very high level, what is the bespoke group and what are we doing there?

And what is this relationship between CI now and what we were doing before at CI?

Because then I think we can back into all the things that we're pushing CI to do in the future.

But I think at first we should talk a little bit about that.

Yeah.

So I can start and then feel free to jump in where you like, essentially.

So CI, we started as a wealth management firm, and we've spoken about bespoke group in the past a little bit.

Listeners may remember that Matt McClintock has been on the show several times, and we'll be back again soon to talk about trusts and, you know, have a very interesting discussion around the history of those issues.

Matt is one of the founders of Bespoke and a senior managing director.

Essentially, what we've done is all of the sort of investment and wealth management services that Jacob and I and the team have been providing.

We've moved them over to bespoke and joined bespoke, you know, as team members.

So I am, you know, the CIO of Bespoke, and Jacob is a senior level, you know, jack of all trades client.

I don't know, what is your title?

It's a guy who interacts with high level clients and gives them advice in addition to being the chief geopolitical strategist.

Yeah, mover and Shaker, essentially.

And this is very exciting because, as you may have gathered from the discussions with Matt, bespoke has a broad team of people who are specialists and have extraordinary expertise in things that we do not, including all of the elements of how to own assets.

Tax planning, estate planning, international plan b, providing multiple jurisdictions for your assets, for privacy and protection.

All of these issues, we won't go into them now because that's a separate conversation, but just, they're very, very good.

So we are able to focus on what we do best, which is essentially providing people with generational wealth, with investment strategies to navigate and to compound that wealth over many years, essentially focusing on geopolitics and technology revolutions.

I mean, that's in a nutshell what we do, but we're doing that with bespoke and what a place did.

You wouldn't.

I mean, that's the high level for me.

Yeah.

And it's.

We have a niche, I think, in young entrepreneurs.

So you use the term generational wealth, and you and I get excited about some of these things, and I don't know that all the other listeners will get excited about jurisdictional tax planning and things like that.

Although it's more interesting than you think of when you actually get down to try and answer these questions.

But our client profile has really tended towards people who have built wealth themselves, who have done something different, who have gone against the grain and now are looking to manage their assets in ways that are against the grain.

And so it also means that we get to do things like advising on businesses.

Both Rob and I have done research and consulting in the past, so it's not this sort of, okay, here, we're going to put you in this fund and this fund and charge a percentage, and then we're off to play golf.

And you can come with this if you want.

We're getting to do a lot of the work that we were always excited about.

The only downside, really, in all of this rock, because I think you're right.

We get to do more interesting work.

We get to focus on the things that we're good at, rather than a lot of the logistical things.

And we get to add on their expertise in the areas where they're so good.

Is that at CI, when we were running money through CI, we didn't really have a minimum.

And we were talking about both building a community, but also trying to build a wealth management firm at the same time.

And I think you and I both came to the conclusion that those were sort of things that cross purposes.

You can't really give tailored, bespoke advice to someone about their hard earned money and then also turn around and say, okay, we're going to also have this, like, sense of community where we're all going to do stuff and think about things and read books together or whatever it is that you do in community.

So there's obviously people who would have been eligible for our wealth management services while we were doing things.

While we were doing wealth management under the banner of CI may no longer be sort of eligible until they become wildly successful in their careers via bespoke.

But we didn't want to lose touch with some of those people.

And also, I think, I mean, I'll speak for me here, but I think I'm speaking for you, too.

I think we hadn't really built out that human side of cognitive investments to its full potential.

And we've been here now for a couple of years.

We've been podcasting every week.

We've been writing research reports, we've been sending out the global, all these different things.

And we really wanted to focus a little bit on building that CI community club planet.

I don't know if we've actually landed on, I think club is the word that we've actually landed on.

So CI now gets to go through this process where we're moving the asset management under bespoke, and now CI is somewhat of a blank slate and we're trying to turn it into a company that is really about human capital and that is about making connections between people.

There's two broader trends that I want to tie into this, because this has been a major focus for me since before I met you, Jacob.

You know, you saw the early kind of drafts of what I wanted CI to become.

And, I mean, a lot has changed and we've pivoted to different things over the years, but that hasn't really changed is the focus on human capital and turning.

Turning it into a bit of a community.

And here's why.

There are two major trends that I've always thought about, really in the last ten years, and that have really accelerated, and CI is going to focus specifically on those trends.

And those two are what I would call the breakdown of the public sphere, in a sense, of the open Internet not really being an ideal forum for many people and getting worse.

And with AI generated content, it's going to get much worse, and that's probably going to happen very soon.

So we've always talked internally about seeing the future as kind of curated communities, closed gardens, where you have sort of a private space of like minded people not echoing what each other think, but sort of a certain mindset in terms of openness, you know, intelligence, curiosity, stuff like that.

That's where sort of the puck is going in terms of online engagement and relationship building, because when you're out there in the open, it's just the norms are breaking down.

So we wanted to create a closed garden like that for ourselves.

And in large part, this is what CI club is that we're going to talk about.

The second big trend is the notion of human capital.

And you use that term, and a lot of people have heard this before, but I just want to dwell on this for a moment before we get into details, because it's very easy to hear that term and ignore it or think that you know what it is.

And I guess what I will say, and we'll talk about some of the specifics around what we're actually implementing to do this.

But what I would say is, of all the innovation that we research and write about and invest behind thematically, of all the big themes around computing and biology and bioengineering and blah, blah, blah, the thing that I think is the most exciting for the next 20 years is the growth opportunities, the innovation opportunities around human capital specifically.

And by that I mean focus, productivity, well being.

And those are very wishy washy terms that people tend to not understand.

But when I say that there is the potential to increase productivity by multiples, it's not just about using a computer or using AI or some technology externally.

It's about sort of combining science and engineering and technology with sort of internal or psychological kind of factors to make yourself flourish, I guess, is the term that Nareth would use.

And we'll speak about him in a minute.

But I can't exaggerate how we're just at the cusp of using these tools to get extraordinarily better.

I guess that's what I would say, yeah.

Those are two trends to focus on.

And I'm also struck by I'm usually doing all this highfalutin geopolitical analysis and it's macro fundamentals, and where are the trends going and how are businesses or investors supposed to think about how to situate themselves within these trends?

But one thing I've learned in doing this micro geopolitics series, and this is on my mind a little bit because I'm recording today from Niagara on the lake in Canada, and I just put out a little piece on Niagara on the lake, on the sub stack in the Niagara Geopolitics series, is that all of the great changes or innovations or stepwise increases in capacity that we've seen.

There are always individuals behind it, and it's always coteries of individuals who are coming together from different environments, who usually join forces and then create something spectacular.

So, like, for the last couple of days, I've been thinking about the Erie Canal and the Wheeland Canal, the St.

Lawrence Waterway, and all of the construction and imagination and innovation that had to go into building these absolutely colossal 7th wonder of the world level infrastructure projects that don't happen.

If this person doesn't meet this person in 1813, or this person in the british army is worried about british naval dominance on Lake Erie.

And this guy in Canada says, oh, we have to raise money to do this thing.

And this guy invents the special locking mechanism that allows it to happen.

You don't get those sorts of things happening if you don't have, first of all, those closed gardens, people that you trust that you're talking with, that you're sharing ideas with, that you have enough confidence in your own abilities to voice your ideas, but enough humility to listen to other ideas and figure out how they plug into yours, but then also have enough human capital to say, okay, here's the trend, here's the opportunity.

Here is where the puck is going.

This is what we need to do to get it done.

Like, we need to sign this free agent, we need to draft this person, we need to invent something, we need to create something in order to realize all of these things.

So I agree with you that there are all these great changes happening in these areas, and that technology allows us to do this in ways that people didn't before.

The way that closed gardens used to work was really rich people who had spare time on their hands could make stodgy, not stodgy.

They're actually very nice social clubs that had these beautiful buildings, really nice food and alcohol and cigars.

And they could compare collecting statues of egyptian alabaster, whatever the heck it was, that they considered a good use of their time and their human capital.

But technology allows us to democratize is the wrong word, but to connect with a lot more people in a lot more different places, to do a lot more and to leverage that human capital in interesting ways.

And at least for me, the part about this that is most exciting for me is just from the people that we've already connected to and that have been interested in, and not to toot their horns too much, but y'all are all incredibly interesting.

Like, way more interesting people listen to this podcast than I ever thought were going to listen to this podcast.

And I get so many ideas just from exchanging notes with readers or with listeners, or when I go to these conferences, hearing where people's pain points are, and they ask me, well, how can you help us fix this?

Or how, what is the right way to think about strategizing this?

Like, I think when you put together that human capital within the closed garden, like, we can actually go out and create things and make change in meaningful ways rather than just talking about it, which is the business that you and I have been in for a long time.

Yeah, there's a self selection process at work that's different from the traditional club, as you mentioned, because, you know, we're pretty niche.

But I think we're very fortunate in that the people who have found this podcast like, or found us like, we're not, you know, we're not out banging the drum about what we're doing very much.

And I think because it's requires a little bit of effort to seek out and pick up on what we're doing, the quality of the people who have been engaged in this have been off the charts, and it's mostly outside of the US, believe it or not.

I think the latest numbers are us listeners are 45% of the total.

So it truly is.

Its skews to the english speaking world, but it's truly a global audience, which is very interesting and exciting.

It's also being now, you and I started working together almost five years ago now, which is absolutely insane.

When we said earlier, the relationship with bespoke allows us to focus on what we like and what we're good at, rather than all the other aspects of wealth management.

Basically, the other aspects about wealth management are client acquisition.

One of the things that I've learned in my time doing this sort of work is that the relationship between client acquisition and actual research, and making actually good decisions and understanding a client really deeply, there's actually no relationship between those things.

And that if you have a personality that is really good at understanding someone's family or understanding someone's company, and understanding how they, you know, what their goals are for the future and how you can help them strategically allocate their resources so that they realize those goals.

That's a very, very different personality than, hey, like, let's.

Let's figure out what you got, and let's.

Let's create, you know, let's meet your friends, and let's go out and let's get friendly, and let's, like, there's just a very different personality and listeners.

If you couldn't tell, neither Rob nor I have the.

The personality of a salesman.

Rob, I'll tell you a funny story, and then we can dive straight into.

Into Club CI.

I was.

My wife and I, it's been a crazy couple of weeks for us for a lot of different reasons.

So we were in bed, and we were just going through Instagram reels because we just needed something mindless to turn our brains up.

And there was this reel.

It's like a short TikTok, I guess, but.

So there was this reel that came up, and it started with this woman's voice, and there was a picture of a cloud.

It was like a big thunderstorm cloud.

And she said, think about what you would call this cloud.

And I, immediately, without hesitating, said, cumulonimbuse.

And my wife kind of looked at me and the reel went on.

If you call this a storm cloud or a thundercloud, you are probably a normal and well adjusted human being.

If you call this a cumulonimbus cloud, you are probably autistic.

And obviously that's nonsense.

And it was just something for entertainment purposes on Instagram.

But I have been joking around my house whenever I do something and my wife gets mad at me, hey, I'm autistic.

This is just my autism coming up.

And I say that to say not good at client acquisition, largely because of my autism.

My autism makes me really.

Anyway, I shouldn't joke about that too much, but it was a funny moment, and I thought it was anyway, if I haven't scared off and politically incorrected the listeners at this point.

Rob, let's talk a little bit about what is club CI, this closed garden human capital engine that we're talking about, what are we envisioning?

So club CI is a club where there's a process for joining.

It's something where Jacob and I will be evaluating individually everyone who seeks to join, just to make sure that mindset and Fitzhe are correct.

But essentially, it's a club that provides really three things.

The first is content, and that's access to all the stuff that we're doing internally in terms of research, unique insights, the knowledge platform, which we've talked about many times here.

The second thing is community.

And that's community, both in sort of a broadcasty kind of way.

So access to you, Jacob, and unfortunately to me also, because I'm always tagging along with you through sort of ask me anythings events, get togethers, just more regular, frequent contact, both online and in person, with different events, which are details we can get into as we go along.

But even more important than having access to you and me, it's having access to the other people in the community.

And this is very important and very specific, because what we want to do here is we want to create a sort of generalist learning society of people who are doing very specific things.

And that's been our experience so far, is the people who listen to this podcast and interact with us.

You people are really cool.

You're really interesting.

You're doing, for the most part, unique niche things, and we want to tap into that.

And we want to give everyone else the access to your knowledge, your domain specific knowledge, to spur creativity and to get better at what they do.

And this is worth a podcast in itself, the idea of generalist learning.

But essentially, when you really look at where creativity comes from, how people excel within their own fields, it's generally by being exposed to specialists in other fields who can create exposures to mental models that they hadn't previously considered, who can give truly outside of the box sort of views on problems that someone might be dealing with in their own field.

I mean, it's basically, it's the Santa Fe Institute model.

We're just aping it and making it better.

This notion that by being exposed to other people who are doing very specific things, everyone gets better, everyone gets more creative, everyone sort of expands their minds and excels within their own niche.

So the community is a big aspect.

So content number one, community number two.

And number three is specific tools and programs to build human capital.

And we'll talk about narrowth and make time flow specifically.

But essentially, at the high level, what this is, is over the years, Jacob and I in particular have developed specific tools that we use.

A lot of this was brought in by partners that we work with.

But essentially what we're talking about are tools, software, various sort of methods that we've developed over the years to just become more productive, to become more focused, to manage your time better.

And I don't know, is this the right time to talk about an introduction to make time flow and narrowth, or what do you think?

I can see that that's on top of your mind, but I think we need to sketch out Club CI a little bit more, and then we could talk about some of the aspects of Club CI.

So if somebody is a member of Club CI, I think we're also talking about doing events every year as well and trying to connect people in that sense.

Yeah.

So those are the three kind of broad things that one gets for being part of this club.

Specifically what that means is in terms of community and content.

That's an online community where we have sort of a special platform that a friend of ours has developed that were going to apply for this, thats specifically designed for this sort of thing.

Its monthly aspie anythings with me and Jacob, sort of regular check ins, somethings going on thats important in the world.

Iran just shot missiles at Israel.

What does it mean whenever theres big alerts or just regular check ins?

Sort of a broad get together online that's included.

And then at least twice a year, there will be in person meetings.

So probably one in the US and one somewhere in Europe.

But those will be multi day intense get togethers.

And we're working to set these up with people who are experienced at operating really great in person events, because doing that well requires, you know, organization and sort of finding a delicate balance between not enough people, too many people, you know, the balance between people and personalities and just creating an extraordinary experience.

So very excited because the partners that we're working with to create these have a lot of experience in doing this very well.

So those would be very intense multi day events at sort of a destination kind of place, sort of a get off the grid sort of feeling, and really dive deeply into some of these topics, both geopolitical, technological and human capital.

Related?

Yeah, and you and I have both half joked, I think we're actually more serious about it than not, which is as we scale here and as we get more successful in general, the idea of a french chateau somewhere that is closer to you than to me, but which I would still really like to go to, to buy and rehabilitate is the clubhouse and the club center is something, when this grows up to itself, might be something to actually utilize.

There's also.

There's going to be two different tiers within the club, so we should probably talk a little bit about that as well.

Correct.

So there are two tiers.

The first tier are members and the second tier are fellows.

And the main difference between the two tiers is members will be paying a lot more.

I mean, just to lay it out there.

And the reason is because they participate in the intensive in person events, and those are expensive.

They're going to be very nice members.

I think the idea there is that would be more someone who is a little bit older, a little bit more established, maybe someone who's allocating capital, maybe someone who's in charge of a large business and having to think about these things because they're applying them in a day to day way that has significant consequences for their organization or for their family and members.

I think a big part of the idea is that they would get great value out of having exposure to the full community of members and fellows.

So getting insights in terms of investment opportunities, startup opportunities, building businesses, speaking to someone who has expertise in a very specific area, for instance, that they may need to know about for investment reasons, that sort of thing.

So that's the member tier.

The fellow tier is going to be much lower ticket.

It won't involve participation in these sort of intensive in person events, but essentially it's everything else.

And the idea behind the fellow tier is that this is really geared because we've had a lot of people contact us, quite frankly, over the years who have been like, hey, I really want to become a client.

I want to work with you guys.

But they're like 23, and they have, which is totally understandable, they have no wealth to manage, which was always our business.

So Jacob and I, quite frankly, were always like, well, what can we do to build a real group, to collaborate with all these great people?

And that's where the idea of the fellows comes in, because the fellow may not have the budget to spend for the full in person experience and everything, but the fellow pays with knowledge.

I think that's the way to think about it.

So we're creating this community, and the idea is that every fellow will be doing something that is of interest to everyone else.

You may be working in a specific area of computer engineering, you may be geographically located in a place of interest, and we have a very global audience, so that's very much the case.

You may have experience running a certain kind of business or in a certain industry, whatever it is.

The idea is that a fellow will typically be a younger professional who's developed this specialist expertise, and they will participate as much as they will consume in the community and in the knowledge platform.

So we'll really.

We're thinking of having two requirements to be in the fellow group.

The first is to, you know, have a quarterly sort of update for the group and for me and Jacob about what's going on in your area of expertise.

You know, something that is interesting and important that an outside observer may not really know looking from the outside.

And the second idea is to have what we call chalk talks, which one of the early members who's going to join this is a surgeon in the US, and I was telling him about the idea, and he mentioned that doctors have this notion of chalk talks where you present and basically teach someone something within your area of expertise, because physicians obviously have so much knowledge they need to accumulate over the years.

And it's just this very efficient way where it's a five to seven minute bam Bam bam presentation of like, oh, here's a concept within my area of expertise.

Here's this disease.

But in this case it might be, here's this technological trend, here's how to think about managing inventory right now in this business that I work in, because we're dealing with these issues, whatever that may be, something that's designed to educate and enlighten the rest of the group and make them better and expose them to new ideas and things that are going on outside of their usual ken.

So those are the two tiers.

And the idea is that we would probably have a lot more fellows than we would members.

And the more fellows we have, the more valuable it'll be for everyone because of this notion of like minded people contributing into the pool of generalist knowledge, their own specialist insights.

Yeah, I just want to dwell for 1 second on what ultimately a club is.

We're talking about building an affinity group of like minded people.

So, obviously, and you can tell in Rob's voice and also in my voice, we're excited about this and we're nerdy about this, and we're both sort of tickled to know that there are people who are also as nerdy as we are out there and who are interested in these things and we want to be friends with them.

It kind of just boils down to that in some ways.

So ultimately, like, what we're talking about is building a club of like minded people who are interested in not just geopolitics, but history and how technology is evolving and people who don't want to be on the sidelines for that, people who are in meaningful ways in their own areas of expertise, at the forefront of change in those areas and pushing things forward.

We want to put those people together and have them talk to each other and have them know what the other is doing.

I think one of the promises of the Internet, when it first really got big in the nineties and the early two thousands, and I think its promise has gone unfulfilled here, is that it was going to democratize knowledge and it was going to democratize access to everyone, and you were going to be able to connect with people that you were never going to be able to before.

And I think it was true for, like, a very small period of time.

There was a golden age where you could actually reach out to people via email and they would reply, where when you got an inbound LinkedIn message, it wasn't from some creeper who, like, wanted to sell you services or like, who was actually a real person who just wanted to get access to you.

And sort of the proliferation of spam and of AI and of bots and of all of these things, it makes it so that, like, I don't even pick up my phone anymore unless I recognize the phone number I, like, automatically don't even really look at LinkedIn, at some of these other social media platforms, because I am so inundated, so overwhelmed with spam messages, whether it's everything from, hey, can you hire me to, hey, I want to code your website to, hey, here's this porn website, come look at it, and blah, blah, blah, blah.

It's never ending.

I just started what?

My fourth email address, because that's the only way I can figure out how to do these things.

And I've tried different apps.

Anyway, the point being, we've gotten into a world where there is so much activity online and there is so much out there that it's actually, for me at least, it's impossible to touch something and figure out if it's real or not.

And I think that's also a part of what's going on here for us.

I just want to jump in and interrupt you for 1 second, because I want to add, it's not just the spam and the explicit sales calls and all the crap.

What do people do on LinkedIn like this?

I struggle to understand this website.

Are these real humans making human communications?

Because the kind of shit that people put on there is so weird and wooden that I just blows my mind.

But what I'm getting at is it's not just the explicit stuff.

It's the way also that I think the open social media creates incentives for even very, you know, intelligent, interesting people to put out content and communicate in a certain way that's designed to capture attention, to emphasize the hot take, to emphasize, oh, I'm going to have this very controversial thing, even though it's probably not right, just because it'll get more engagement than otherwise.

And that's created even within the group of, like, good, intelligent, interesting people, it's created a dynamic that's just not very nice.

It's just not very good.

So part of the benefit of having a closed garden like we're talking about is hopefully we can engineer this in a way where everyone isn't shouting for attention, because that's not how this is designed to be.

And people are just, I don't know about you, but I'm just so sick of hearing people online shouting for attention.

And I've just tried to tune 98% of that out.

I'm sick of that.

And I'm also frustrated at the inability to have meaningful conversations about important issues because it's not just there is the shock jocks and the lowest common denominator for attention.

There's also people are, and rightfully so, this happens, even me, even though I fight against it.

I mean, people are afraid to sometimes speak what's on their minds or afraid to ask questions or show ignorance because they're worried that they're going to get canceled is the wrong word, but they're worried that they're going to get all of these angry people who are going to yell at them and say, you're a fascist or you're an idiot, or you don't know what you're talking about.

I'm like sort of a sadomasocus.

So I actually don't mind looking at the comments on podcasts and videos.

But like, I've been doing this long enough wherever I, you know, even though I obviously have kept doing it, because I think that the podcast and the content that we put out has value.

But like, even us, like you go on, like, the comments on some of the social media platforms, they're absolutely insane.

Like the awful things that some people have said to me because of like, you know, thoughts that I have brought up on a podcast that aren't even that well formed, where it's just like you and me talking.

It can be really demoralizing and intimidating to be in an online space where if you say the wrong thing, suddenly you're castigated as some horrible person.

And so it might sound silly to try and build a closed garden in a time where you have Facebook and LinkedIn and WhatsApp and you're on all these groups.

God, do I need another group that I need to be part of?

But I just want to emphasize what you said about really that first trend that you talked about at the beginning of this conversation, which is we're moving towards a world in which there's not going to be anything real on any of these platforms.

It's all going to be AI generated content that people are putting out in order to get the clicks or in order to do whatever because, you know, they're want to satisfy their KPI's.

You can feel it already happening.

When you talked about LinkedIn, you might forget, like you and I met on LinkedIn to a certain extent.

Like, you sent me an email that got blocked by my stupid spam blocker and you sent me a note on LinkedIn.

And that was how I, like, you know, figured out that you were.

And I was suspicious of you at first.

I was like, are you a nigerian prince offering me millions of dollars?

Like, I don't understand what's going on here.

And my experience of LinkedIn in particular, it's actually a good example.

Like, when I first got on LinkedIn, it was actually really, really helpful and it was a great place to make connections with people who might become clients.

Like, I got a couple of consulting contracts off of just reaching out to the right person on LinkedIn.

That's gone now.

It's been completely taken over by the endless sending ads or this that, or sending ads or sending requests to get hired, or I'm this outsourced guy that's going to do this thing for you, or just straight up spam a friend request from somebody that looks like they might be interesting to you and it's a picture of a 20 year old asian girl in a bikini, even though the title is the thing, it's like, okay, well, I'm pretty sure that this is not the head of the family office of Blah blah, blah.

That's probably not going to work.

So, yeah, I just think those things have been taken over, and I think that if you care about connecting with people in a digital realm, and this goes back to something you talked about.

Matt McClintock, we've only just started talking about the theme of privacy that we're working on.

Like, in some ways, like, one of the reasons I'm so excited to work on a group or to work with a group like bespoken in the context of all this is that maintaining privacy is going to be really important, and maintaining the security and integrity of people's thoughts and conversations, that's also going to be really important.

So we're going on and on, but I just.

We started off with some technical things, but I think ultimately, if you're thinking about what Club CI is, it's about people who are interested in the things that we're interested in, who are interested in taking insights and using them either in their professional lives or to build things that can help change the world, and then who also just want to like each other and want to be able to ask each other dumb questions without being called a fascist or without being, you know, yelled down as an idiot or things like that.

And remarkably, the space for doing those things is getting smaller and smaller and more constrained in the general domain.

And that's why, at least for now, we're talking about going back to the close guard before we close.

Rob, I know you want to talk about the productivity aspect of it, so why don't we talk a little bit about.

Because I don't want it to be the be all, end all of the podcast.

But I think the things that we're talking about with Naruth and the productivity space are a good example of the type of things that Club CI will provide to its members that maybe you're not thinking about.

So maybe let's just close with a couple thoughts on that.

Yeah, and I'll try not to go on and on because I know you're planning to have Nareth on the podcast to do a full interview, and he can put this all into his own words much more artfully than I can because I sort of blunder around it.

But there is value in me talking about it a little bit because I've been Neerith's guinea pig for the most part, for the last two years and can speak to it as someone who has benefited directly.

So let me speak to my experience a little bit, and then you can combine that with the perspective that Nareth will provide from his side.

So very briefly.

And Nareth, I know he listens to this podcast and actually, God help us, he plays it for his kids.

He mentioned that the other day.

So hopefully it's okay.

I have at least one friend I know that listens because he says he likes the sound of my voice and he falls asleep to it.

So whatever purpose you're listening to the podcast for.

So hello to Nareth, and pardon me if I'm butchering any aspect of this, but real quick.

Nareth Carlisle and his wife Helie, who are business partners and created make time flow, are based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

That's how we know them originally.

Nareth is a physician, originally from South Africa, but he's a physician at Mass General Hospital, Harvard trained.

I mean, quite frankly, like top of the game, like, you know, in terms of that field, very, very successful physician.

And was living that life essentially just burned out.

You know, doing the whole residency thing.

Just no free time, feeling imbalanced.

All the stuff that we deal with all the time except with doctors.

And I can tell you this because my wife is one and Jacob knows as well.

It's sort of that on steroids.

Well, I'll interrupt you now and just say, yeah, we're talking about closed gardens and social media spaces.

I mean, I think this is probably going to happen in medicine, too, because you and I both have front row seats for people who are medical professionals.

And Nareth is an example of this.

The way that especially the us healthcare system, but not just the us healthcare system, is set up is absolutely demented.

And if you actually want good care and people who care like, and people who are not just in some machine that is designed for profit, but are actually thinking about your health in a forward looking way.

And, you know, things like longevity, which has become a real interest of mine and which I hope will become one of the main things that we talk about in this club because I really don't have anybody to talk to about it.

Like, I think this trend that we're talking about is going to be relevant in so many different domains, and I think medicine is probably going to be one.

Anyway, sorry, go on.

So anyway, that's Naras background.

And essentially what he did was he recognized that he was not happy with his quality of life, his productivity, his balance, all of those things.

And he sort of set himself to learning everything that he could about the literature and the science around balance, productivity, time management, focus, well being has created a framework for applying best practices in those areas.

I think that's how I would describe it.

It's not a system.

It's not a gimmick.

It's not a, you know, there's no acronym.

Nareth is just a super smart guy who's developed a system to implement the best learnings that people have.

And he changes the system when new research comes out.

It's sort of a living, organic thing.

And that's what I think is so attractive about it because it's not like I've done all the systems.

Like, I'm an ambitious guy.

I'm sure a lot of the listeners are in the same boat getting things done and this and that and this tool and omnifocus and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

He sort of is sitting on top of all of that and evaluating all of it and digesting it and presenting it to me and to you in a framework where we can implement what's best.

I think that's how I would describe Nareth at the high level.

And what he does.

And literally what that is is it's sort of methods for time management and things like that.

But it's also technology.

So I think the best way to describe it is science and engineering to promote a all of those aspects of human wellness and flourishing and productivity and balance.

So literally, I have a colored timer on my desk right here that I've been using for years, which ties into Nareth's whole system.

And it directs my attention and flow throughout the day.

I mean, we're getting way into the weeds, and we won't.

But there's a ton of thought that's gone into this.

On top of all of his other accomplishments, Nareth is also a very talented computer engineer.

So he's built all of this himself, custom handmade software and hardware to sort of implement these best practices.

So that's what it is.

And let me just give you a very brief, very, very brief, because no one wants to hear about my personal stuff.

But part of the reason why I'm so excited about this is because the effects are so tangible.

Right?

Like, just to delve into somewhat personal stuff very briefly.

I have a lot going on.

I have three kids.

I have a teenager.

I have a three year old, and I have a baby.

That alone is enough to just kill you.

I have two businesses.

We don't even talk about it.

But I have a full time job as director of research and partner of off Wall street.

That is a very demanding job.

And we're doing all the stuff at cognitive, and I'm CIo at bespoke and doing all the great stuff there.

So I kind of have three jobs, two and a half.

If you consider cognitive as all fun stuff.

That is a lot on my plate.

So what I can say is that using Nareth's tools and approaches and his personal interactions and methods and stuff like that, it's almost like, do you remember in the three body problem, when they first are in space and they see for the first time sort of the fourth or the fifth dimension or whatever it is?

And it's like it's, and they describe it like it's you.

You spend your whole life looking at a two dimensional photograph, and then you look up and you see the three dimensional world.

That's what it sort of felt like.

It's like, oh, my God, there's so much time in the day.

And when you really implemented ways to avoid just, like dicking around and wasting time and losing focus, and use these methods to organize yourself, identify your goals, identify how you're going to attack them, block out your time, direct your focus and attention.

Breathing exercises to remain calm and focused.

Like this whole thing, it's like discovering a new dimension in your life.

It's like, oh, my God, you can really accomplish so much.

And not in a way that's harried or hectic, in a way that feels good, just physically good.

Like leaving the day feeling like, oh, I feel calm and collected, not like I just ran a race.

So all I could say is, it's been truly extraordinary.

And I'm not just bullshitting.

I don't really bullshit about things like this.

And I'm working with Naruth and giving him lots of feedback to help shape these tools and design them over time.

But that is a key aspect of the club, is giving people access to Naruth's system, Naruth's tools.

I mean, he's doing this with, with other groups.

Like, he does presentations for groups at MIT, everyone in the sort of Boston, Harvard area and then beyond.

He's working with companies and stuff like that.

But this is sort of a very special group.

And Nareth is going to, I guess, officially become sort of the human capital advisor to cognitive and work with us on everything that we're doing going forward, which is very, very exciting.

So, yeah, that's a big part.

The other thing I would mention just briefly, is another friend of cognitive who I'll just keep nameless for now because it's pretty nascent.

But I guess what I would say is this is a very successful venture capitalist who's done a lot of work specifically around Aih, and he wants to work with us to create programs essentially to help club members implement AI in whatever they're doing.

Because this is like when you think about productivity, when you think about accelerating your own human capital, this is the most important tool.

This is like learning how to use a computer in 1980, but much more important, much more powerful than that.

Even so, I'm very excited about that.

That's a little more, we'll keep that under wraps until a little bit later.

But that's the idea, is creating an environment to accelerate what you're doing and just kind of try to implement some of these changes and benefits that personally I haven't been enjoying.

And you, as well as you start to, you're drinking the Nareth Kool Aid more just recently as you get kind of set up on the system.

But I am, and one of the reasons we're indulging here and talking about this is because I don't foresee us talking about the club that often.

Like, we needed to talk about it, to say that it existed and tell people that, you know, we're sort of ready to start fielding interest, but I don't want to.

I think this will be one of the few times that we actually come out and talk about it meaningfully.

And for me, one of the most exciting parts is, yes, Nareth is great, but I'm excited for the entire suite of things that we're going to be able to do because the offerings will probably change as we go based on the people that actually join, because there are so many different areas, whether it's productivity, whether it's longevity and health, whether it's.

I sort of think of it as typical, but I've developed an expertise in geopolitics and thinking about, well, how do you go into new markets?

Or how do you think about political risk when you're talking about manufacturing something in a foreign country?

You have developed an expertise in business analysis and understanding.

If you're a startup or if you're trying to mentor somebody into how to run a business and thinking about the non sexy, everybody wants to talk about the idea and how it's going to change.

And I've so often been with you and you're like, okay, well, let's go look at the balance sheet for a little while and then we can go talk about there's all these different levels of support throughout the club that are going to be there, and people who are all moving in that sort of same general direction of what they.

Similar values, what they want the world to look like, similar interests.

And I just think there's a lot of opportunities there as well.

So this is just one of them, because you've got somebody who dissatisfied with what he was doing, so created something really cool.

You've got you and me who are have too much on our plate, and then suddenly like, oh, there's like a marriage between these things, and there might be something really, like, really constructive to come out of that.

It's those sorts of connections that I'm really excited for in the context of this.

All right, we went on for 53 minutes about this.

Rob, is there anything else you want to tell people, or should we?

How should people express interest?

I'll put this in the intro as well, but if people are interested in this, how should they express interest?

And what can they expect in terms of follow up to come?

Yeah, so on the nuts and bolts, they should just email you directly.

I think that's the easiest thing people know how to do that.

Jacob ognitive investments as far as follow up, we're going to be launching this at the beginning of the year, officially.

So between now and then is the time when we're going to evaluate people who are interested and say yay or nay, because we have limited time to do that.

And that's the block of, or the period that we've set aside to engage in that.

So this will be sort of closing at the end of the year.

Not permanently closing, probably, unless, you know, unless we decide that.

But this is something that if you're interested, you should jump on it now and do not hesitate, at the very least, to learn the details and evaluate whether it's right for you.

So, yeah, those are the nuts and bolts.

The only thing I would add, just at the high level and just following on what you said, I mean, ultimately, we've talked about a lot of stuff here, but the idea for this club is essentially, do what we do, get exposure to the things that we do, meet like minded people who are in this group because they're attracted to the sort of stuff that we talk about here every week, and that's how they heard about it.

The things itself will change and evolve over time, and we'll add more and come up with new ideas.

And I have a whole list of ideas that I don't even want to talk about because some of them are just kooky.

But the idea is that we will always have more ideas.

And this is bringing you into our world, I guess, is the way to summarize it.

Join our kooky world of weird, nerdy, obscure knowledge and tools and flashing lights on the little box on my thing and getting excited about that.

Yeah, you're so conditioned, Rob.

Like, we're looking for the kooks, so the kooks are going to think, ah, this all sounds absolutely cool.

Like, so we're going to build a closed garden where you and I are not so kooky.

All right, we'll leave it there.

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