What to you do right now, how did you get there?

I mostly do addition and subtraction to understand how companies make sense, mixed in with some contract negotiation and playing a moderately under-informed lawyer. (Jenny: So you're an investment banker.) Quite some time ago, I had an interest in the markets and decided to pursue it. Through middle school reading, high school investing, and college classes that prepared me to do actual finance related things, I built up a toolkit that let me do the job I'm doing now. The actual path to getting here was through a series of internships and relevant classes that ultimately led me here, along with some hard work, then some more hard work, then you show up and you're there.

What do you ultimately want to do?

I love investing fundamentally, and I think it's one of the most interesting and diverse applications that one can have in a productive way. In that regard, it is something I will continue to do. Whether or not it is through this capacity or another one is unclear. I couldn't tell you one way or another. For the general concept of "do I want to continue thinking about how to invest and these types of issues" — that is definitely a yes.

Do you feel like you found your purpose in life?

I'm actually very competitive despite how laid back I seem. I want what I do to have a more direct impact on helping people in some way, shape, or form. The way I think about it is almost like in basketball: my value-above-replacement player/person/analyst right now may not be a positive number, so that's a bit of a struggle. [VAR: if you took this person off the team and filled it with the best guy from the minor leagues, how does that look? If that's a big change, you took off a great player; if it's little change, you took off a low-significance player.] There are people who could do my job, if not do it more competently than me, so that's one of the things that has caused me to struggle with my current occupation and how I am currently employing my knowledge of investing. That's basically the only thing that I find less than fulfilling about my job today, and I think it will ultimately at some point lead me to found a company or form a partnership where I would have some non-zero of value above replacement, so that I'm more meaningful.

Tell me a bit about your family and how you grew up. What were the resources that were available to you?

I am the eldest of two brothers. My younger brother is 2 years younger than me. We grew up in the same house in Houston for as long as I remember. I had a middle class upbringing, though probably lower middle class when I was younger. My dad's architecture business has since picked up, so my parents are doing well for themselves now. I've seen the transition from having to always pay attention to everything and live within our means to being less concerned with the day-to-day expenses in that regard. Growing up, my parents were very, very supportive; they were certainly not helicopter parents that were always on top of me. To some extent, that was an earned freedom. By the point where I was in middle and high school, I was generally doing well and taking care of what I needed to take care of for school. In a broader context, with the comfort afforded by that middle class upbringing, I never had to worry about basic necessities, so I could come home and sit on the computer reading The Motley Fool for a few years. That's what I was able to do to lead me to where I am today. The root of it was having access to lots of books, being pushed into reading a lot from a young age, and having the fortune of being born into a family in the 21st century.

How did you develop your passions and interests?

My dad's an architect, and my mom does graphic design and interior design. It's a bit of a mystery how I stumbled into investing. My grandfather on my mom's side actually gave me the Motley Fool Investing Guide for Teens, which sounds hilarious and ridiculous as a gift, and yet... if that's what you read when you're 12 or 13 years old, sometimes you end up thinking, "Hey! This stuff's easy!" (It's not really that easy, but it gives you some of the basics in a digestible format at a level you can comprehend.) That was my hook. Add that to the fact that I was able to pursue my curiosity on the Internet, and had plenty of free time to do so. Couple that with having worked summer jobs following middle school — I worked for either my dad or a financial management company every summer starting from 8th grade -- and my having saved every penny, I decided that I wanted to apply it in investing. I got pretty lucky in that I found a productive way of doing addition and subtraction.

A friend of mine suggested to me in my junior year of college that we follow the mantra of "learning through doing" with investing. We started an investing organization that had a component of basic, introductory, anyone-can-get-this approach to economics and investing to see how all the big pieces fit together. The dues collected for the organization were invested on the basis of the members' votes. We threw them into the deep end right away to force them to figure out what they wanted to invest in. It's a skill that was not only useful in the professional sense, but also in the "everyone in America expecting to retire will at one point have savings" sense, so you have to figure out roughly how you want to save and invest your money.

How do your personality traits (such as your love of competition and problem solving) lend themselves to your interests?

I've always been pretty competitive and had an intellectual curiosity to really appreciate figuring things out. That may have led me to my interests in investing and helped affect how I view the world. To be able to remain rational even when everyone else is panicking is a great way to think. When you realize this at an early age, you try to impose that upon yourself when the situation arises again. In a sense, this personality is who I've always been, but in a sense, it's driven by how I've evolved.

Is there a central philosophy you live your life by?

I'm not explicitly of any particular philosophy. Probably the closest is stoicism: what's in your mind is probably the closest to reality; fear is not something worth worrying about; I'm not interested in material things, etc. That lends itself inherently to a certain way of thinking about how to view opportunities. That's the kind of framework for how I approach things, and that biases me when I'm making decisions. I'm very unlikely to say, "This material thing is what I'm really striving towards". I'm more likely to say, "I'd like to learn a lot about XYZ because I think it's interesting or important or worth learning". That decision matrix/bias is something that not everyone may agree with. One thing more universal than that is what tests you can apply when looking at decisions. The most rational way to approach a decision is through an opportunity cost framework. That's the basic economic idea of when I'm doing one thing, I can't be doing another — time is scarce. Full stop. We live in a continuum of time, and we have only one continuum on which we live. (Well, there is a physics argument for another time. Let's leave it at that.) When you're considering an opportunity cost, there's not only the black and white, but also options that stem from that choice: "Here's the stuff with bucket A, subsequently I expect these buckets to be presented". And you have to think of the full opportunity cost from a choice. People are afraid of volatility [in doing something risky with their lives] so that's something else to consider — if you want a low volatility life, then you probably want to just work at a typical job.

How do you factor in emotions into your decisions?

That's where the question gets hard. You really have to understand yourself, what you value, and what you expect from yourself and the world. Those are really hard questions. If I told you that there's a job that's god-awful miserable and will pay you millions of dollars a year, and there is a job that is the best thing you can imagine doing and you will have full control, working with the best people in the world, etc. and you are going to have to pay your savings all the way down to $0 by the end of the year for the privilege of that position, there's some spectrum in there and everything lands at some point on the spectrum. You have to figure out where you want to land. Maybe you're lucky and some of the things you really enjoy doing happen to overlap with some of the things that will be easily quantifiable (fiscally or free-time wise); then it's easy to decide.

To make those decisions, you've got to be really in touch with yourself. How self-aware of you?

I am acutely self-aware. Acutely self-aware barely even gets to it. Many of my waking hours are spent thinking about why I did something or what I would like to do as a consequence of it. My personality type is just barely an introvert on the Myers-Briggs type. I appreciate that a lot of what I said is introvert-like. Having an appreciation for what's around you is important. Whether or not I'm good at making these decisions is an open question. I've only ever made a few big decisions in life. I chose to go to the middle school I went to, but I was told where I was going to elementary school. I chose to go to the high school I went to, partially because my friends were going there but also because they seemed to have better academics. I chose to go to UT because I got into a great program (Plan II Honors) and made a calculated bet that I could get into the Business Honors program. I chose to do an internship at a financial planning organization, I chose to start the student investing organization and dropped all of my other activities besides sports, and I chose to pick an internship and full time position at my current company. In aggregate, I've made six decisions.

Who are your influences?

Being interested investing, the biggest influences are (in order of importance): Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, Seth Klarman, maybe even Bill Gates. A lot of what I've said is derivatives of what Munger has said. If you read his work, everything I say will be an echo of him. Following that, there's the barrage of various people I've found interesting over the years. In my personal life, the people I've been most influenced by are certainly my parents, who have been supportive with whatever my decisions have been. Having seen my dad go from working at a company in my childhood to starting his own architecture firm in early 2000s, and then watching him build and grow that business, it's helped me see what it's like for someone to really commit to starting something on their own. That was really influential for me. When I'd come home at night during high school, my dad would always get back after me. From time to time, we'd talk about his views on things and how he thought of the world. It was always interesting for me to see how he thought about his decisions and how they structured their business. In starting out, the firm was just my dad, his partner, one employee and no clients (in contrast to many firms starting out, who steal a key client over). But they knew their business. In architecture, you have a clear market to address. They just knew they wanted to do commercial real estate, with clear expectations for what they wanted from their clients and determination to do it better than anyone else. That's not an easy thing to do — it's not quite inventing the wheel all over again, but you're taking a lot of risk on.

For your dad, how did he get the confidence to know he could do the work better than anyone else?

My dad and I kept things pretty broad, and we mostly talked about general business principles. There was only one instance when he talked about specific architecture principles. He mentioned to me about how one of the designers wanted to do something slightly different with the proportion of the wall, but that would change the structural implications of the design. The math is x and y and z, and what doesn't work just doesn't work. He's an architect, not a structural engineer, but he had the depth of knowledge to know what would work and what wouldn't. That's critical. Once you can appreciate what everyone else is doing well, then I think you can say, I have a decent idea at what I'm doing and you can forge your own path. That's my interpretation from what my dad has said. The technical precision side of things is very important for the relatively refined practice that architecture is.

Do you feel you are independent or different from your peer group? As you may know, much of what sparked my interest in this project was the sociological concept of the Odyssey years or emerging adulthood where young people are still developing themselves and undergoing this "Odyssey" to find their selfhood. Do you feel any affiliation or resonance with this concept?

I think I exhibit a lot of the traits of the millennial generation. I'm techy and feel like everything should always have a solution. I recognize and appreciate this culture of your twenties being a period to develop your career and not have to worry about other stuff like raising a child. In terms of how much I'm with that peer group, I am in a lot of ways, but it's really hard to distinguish the conclusions I've arrived at logically versus what traits came from my being swept up in it. I'm sure there's some aspect of cross-pollination in there. Trying to understand where you are in a continuum is extremely hard. Having that self-awareness is really, really challenging. In terms of the sociocultural shift, I haven't paid much attention to that trend, so I don't really know if I'm currently in the midst of my own "Odyssey". We're really just an integral of the sum of time we've spent on earth, and the sum of those experiences represents who we are. We have no ability or degrees of freedom beyond that because that is the entire sum of us. Given there are no degrees of freedom beyond that, it's really hard to get that extra perspective outside of ourselves.

Do you have any perspectives on education, such as the benefits of formal training, informal learning, etc.?

The most important thing to learn is how to learn. I say that because the formal education people go through generally endows them with some basic skills. If you've only developed those basic skills through rote learning instead of trying to solve problems and figure out why, then each incremental step gets incrementally harder. People start to feel like they're "bad" at math or some point. It might partially be due to natural aptitude, but if you had learned subjects like math and science in a way that help you understand why all along, you're more likely to think critically and creatively. Taking the time to think through a problem and boil it down to the basics is critical to any subject. For example, with psychology or praxeology (the study of the doing of things, as opposed to the study of how the human mind works), the example I like to give is with incentives: incentives are the fundamental, must basic thing you can analyze about a person. A person is a self-contained entity. You apply incentives to a person, and then stuff happens. If you understand how incentives work, you'll understand how people act when given incentives. Learn to boil down the basic principles, approach something you know nothing about, read a lot, figure out what's important, read some more, and then reread until you can appreciate the nuances. The process of gathering as much info as is desired to be informed and continuously curious builds you into a stronger position, both from an intellectual standpoint and from the ability to cope with the unexpected and process what you already know. The ultimate point of learning is to have a base of knowledge and to be adaptable and be able to expand a base of knowledge.

What is your perspective on money? How do you determine what is worth spending vs. saving for?

It's a claim check on society, which is a store of value. Everybody agrees that money stores value — that's how cooperation works. From a very basic level, more money theoretically means more services done, but you could be a terrible person and still end up with lots of money, so I'm not going to correlate money with goodness or happiness or success. Income seems to correlate up to a point with happiness strongly, and then above that point, weakly. I believe that point in the US is in the $70,000ish range. The point being, people tend to be happy when they have enough so they don't have to worry about life's basic necessities.

Personally, as I mentioned earlier, stoicism is closest to where I land. I'm not terribly concerned with what I should buy with money, other than the couple of things I think money is worth spending on. As for those things you want in life... that's a hard question, but the best I've come up with is being able to have a fulfilling existence in terms of the work you're doing. I hopefully will be able to find something fulfilling that I don't have to pay to do, but to the extent I have to pay to do it, whatever. The other side of the coin is that in general, money is primarily a road to controlling your own time. Controlling your own time and happiness (a strong derivative of what I just said about doing your own work) are the two things money is worth spending in the pursuit of. You can take that however your heart desires. If you're a Materialist or Epicurean, you can say happiness derives from going out and buying LV or Gucci or whatever-the hell-stuff, or the finest foods and vacations to the most exotic destinations. Maybe that's just what you want to do — to travel and meet people and see interesting things. If I'm even roughly right about the few things worth pursuing being happiness and control of your time, people can prioritize that as necessary to themselves.

Do you think your POV is rare for your age/generation?

I'm not sure how many people spend time thinking about what money means or what it's worth. When I say money's only uses are to control your time or control your happiness, I've never heard "oh that's what I thought all along!" Not immediate acceptance or rejection, it's just not necessarily something that had been considered. But like I said, it's hard to see beyond yourself. Also, I live in a bubble. It's a bubble of the people I've interacted with my entire life — great schools, honors programs in college, and a bulge bracket bank. I have met people outside that bubble in my daily interactions, but the overwhelming majority of people I interact have very similar experiences to me. And so, that bubble biases every view that I have. To the limited extent I can judge myself against other people, it's further limited by the fact that I have a very poor understanding of the broader sense of other people. Outside of this bubble, I have much less experience. One of the ways I've tried to measure this is by the Harvard factor — the number of people you know divided by the number of people who went to Harvard. Use Harvard or Ivy League or something — that will give you a sense of the bubble. I haven't figured out a good way to quantify the bubble, but it definitely exists.

Do you think you should diversify, stay the same, or dive deeper into bubble?

A little of all — something I seek is cognitive dissonance. I try to seek out opposing evidence that could suggest I'm wrong. That mental exercise, applied to the bubble, is trying to meet people well outside of the bubble. I'm probably not nearly as good at that as I should be. Speaking from an ideal perspective, it's something that should definitely be done so that you have a better appreciation for the world around you. Having general worldly understanding is a valuable trait. On the other side of things, in terms of the people with whom you interact daily, the focus and ability and interestingness of those people ultimately rubs off on you. In that regard, it's silly not to try to surround yourself with people whom you find impressive and interesting and good to be around. I think that is very important, especially in daily interactions.

What advice would you give yourself 10 years ago? What do you think future-you would tell current-you?

Myself, ten years ago... that would be me about to go to high school. Uh, that's terrifying to realize (we're not gonna go there). I would literally only tell myself to go to Bellaire (my high school) and have fun. That's it. Maybe I'd tell myself to buy Apple stock. I would totally give my past-self investing advice. (Jenny: Yeah, you totally would.)

Future-me (who doesn't have the magical power of stock picking) would tell my current self to try to learn as much as possible, and try to interact with interesting people. That's the most fun thing in the world: to work with, talk with, and play with interesting people and do interesting things. Learn a lot. ■