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

Why does it matter? Because the formal interview is almost worthless — and almost nobody does the high-signal alternative correctly.

Graham Duncan has spent 20 years evaluating over a thousand investment teams. His operational conclusion: the formal interview is one data point, references are the primary dataset, and almost nobody runs them correctly. This conversation is a master class in how to actually read people — and it transfers far beyond finance.

• References done right consistently outperform interviews — even on-list ones, because people run out of script after ten minutes and the real signal starts • "If you were hiring someone for this role, what criteria would you use?" is the single highest-signal question in any evaluation — it works for surgeons, fund managers, and anyone you're vetting • The best performers hold contradictions simultaneously — aggression with humility, originality with ruthless triage — and most people can only do one • A 20-year-old has roughly 2 billion seconds left. A billion seconds is 31 years. Almost none of them are pricing that asset correctly.

The interview is one perspective. References are the whole thing — and most people run them completely wrong.

Almost nobody who gives a reference wants to lie. After ten minutes, they run out of script — and that's when the real signal starts.

Duncan's process: go off-list when possible, call 20 people, and assign a net promoter score out loud. "What I hear you saying is you're giving this person a 7. Did I hear that correctly?" The directness unlocks what polite endorsement never will. A follow-on question — if I were hiring a partner to complement this person's weaknesses, what would they need? — typically yields more information than the entire positive endorsement preceding it.

Two fundamentals: make it safe (nothing goes back to the candidate; you're calling 20 people) and approach from genuine curiosity, not a gotcha. References pick up on the vibe. Once the same pattern surfaces four times in a row, you have your answer.

'If you were hiring someone for this role, what criteria would you use?' is the highest-signal question in any evaluation.

This works for any high-stakes evaluation — hedge fund manager, surgeon, executive assistant. It reveals how someone defines excellence in their field and surfaces nuance you wouldn't have known to ask about.

When Duncan and his wife were interviewing OBGYNs, every doctor got the question. The sharpest answer: what you're optimizing for is the downside. Primary criterion: NICU affiliation, because in a distress scenario, the quality of the nearby neonatal intensive care unit determines outcomes. Second criterion: ask the nurses, because nurses know exactly who keeps composure under pressure.

The compounding benefit: every time you ask it, your own criteria improve. You carry a new lens into the next conversation. The question isn't just a probe — it's a calibration mechanism that sharpens your own judgment with each use.

What predicts long-term performance isn't raw competence — it's which contradictions a person has learned to hold simultaneously.

Aggression without integrity is just ruthlessness. Intensity without humility is brittleness. The performers Duncan looks for hold both sides simultaneously — and the pairing is genuinely rare.

He frames people as musical instruments: the range of notes they can play depends on the tensions they've learned to hold. His reference point is David Tepper — capable of moving from zero to 20% of a fund in a single position without hesitation, and yet, according to people who've been on the other side of deals with him, not exploitative. He plays to win, inside an ethical core.

Goldman Sachs calls this being "commercial": creating more value than you capture, rather than capturing all of it. Commercial people find each other. They cluster and prefer doing business together because the exchange doesn't feel zero-sum. You can't evaluate for it across a table — only through the pattern of how others have experienced this person over time.

Elite performers generate ideas at absurd volume — and they're equally ruthless about killing them.

Bach's worst compositions were inferior to his contemporaries. He had them anyway — a hundred times more output than average composers. Researcher Dean Simington found this pattern across fields: genius correlates with sheer volume of original work, not just quality of the best pieces.

In investment management, this shows up as original language. The tell for someone who hasn't yet arrived: they're still inside someone else's vocabulary. A 25-year-old investor who talks about "waiting for the fat pitch" without knowing he's quoting Buffett is still inside Buffett's architecture. Someone who'll become the Tepper of his generation will spend 20 years building his own.

The counterforce is triage — and the two are in genuine tension. "When people have lots of ideas, they're usually not that good at killing them." The best portfolio managers force-rank their positions and let their own best ideas die. Screen for both.

The best investors don't identify as smart — they identify as 'moneymakers,' and that single shift removes the biggest structural constraint on performance.

Duncan walked into a manager's office the morning after Musk announced Tesla was acquiring SolarCity — gut punch territory for anyone short the stock. The manager was laughing. "He was enjoying the audacity. He feels like he's in this game. I knew it was a possibility. I didn't think he was going to have the chutzpah to do that."

The meta-identity Duncan looks for: not "I'm smart" or "I'm good at financial stocks," but "I'm a moneymaker." If a manager praised a position in his letter, he can still be short that same position the following month. The position was never about being right.

Most people carry the opposite architecture. Being right becomes identity. That attachment — to a thesis, a strategy — functions as a structural cap on performance. It's not a character flaw. It's just weight the moneymakers don't carry.

Starting your own thing too early isn't just risky financially — it can disorient you in ways that take years to recover from.

The chaos bank is schizophrenia. The rigidity bank is OCD. A healthy career swims between them — but jumping to independence before you're ready means stepping onto the chaos bank before you've built the feedback loops that would tell you you're drifting.

Neuroscientist Dan Siegel's river: one bank is refining reality — apprenticing, learning existing frameworks. The other is asserting reality — generating new ones, swimming where originality lives. Musk was right next to the chaos bank. Tesla surviving meant he threaded the needle. Bankruptcy would have meant he'd stepped onto it.

"Starting your own thing is often a project of asserting reality. If you do it too early, it can be very disorienting." Before the leap, honestly locate yourself: are you still primarily inside someone else's definition of reality? If yes, the chaos bank will cost more than you expect.

A 20-year-old has 2 billion seconds left. Almost none of them are pricing that asset correctly.

A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is slightly over 31 years. Rupert Murdoch has $20 billion and almost no time. A 20-year-old has roughly 2 billion seconds. One of those things is reproducible.

The thought experiment: what would an 87-year-old billionaire pay for the next five years of a 20-year-old's healthy body and mind? Critical constraint: you can't sell the five years at the end of your life — only now. That's what makes the price go vertical. Duncan says his own pricing "has gone vertical" — his kids are at an age they'll never be again.

He keeps Tim Urban's life calendar in his kitchen — a full human life visualized in weeks. The remaining space, once you mark a few anchor dates, is startling. If someone with billions but no time were bidding on your next five years, what's the number?

Coaches don't give you answers — they find the beliefs that are gripping you so hard you can't see them.

The assumptions that cost you the most are the ones you can't name — whose opposite you can't articulate. They function as the floor you're standing on.

Duncan's coach surfaces the hidden assumptions that "hold me rather than me holding them." His business partner flagged one recently: a reflexive paranoia about disruption. When evaluating any investment exposed to technological change, Duncan's attention goes there first — extra weight, extra scrutiny. His partner wasn't saying the view was wrong. Just: are you aware you're doing this?

Once named, it became object rather than subject. He could feel it surface, recognize it, and decide consciously what weight to give it. The self-test: pick a strong conviction and try to credibly steelman the opposite. If you can't, something is holding you. Once you can see the grip — even partially — you can't fully unsee it.

The informational edge is shifting — and it's going exactly where formal credentials can't follow.

The thread connecting everything Duncan describes — references over interviews, the moneymaker identity, the chaos-order river, the coach who finds the grip — is a single project: making visible what doesn't surface on its own.

As credentials proliferate and AI-coached interview prep becomes trivial, the signal advantage shifts entirely toward what can't be prepared for: how someone's references actually talk about them once they run out of script, which beliefs they're defending without knowing it, whether they identify with being right or with making money. The formal pitch gets easier to optimize. The stuff underneath it doesn't.

The people who can see what isn't on the surface will keep compounding. Everyone else will keep interviewing.

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Topics: talent identification, investing, career development, references, decision-making, performance, time management, mental models, coaching, portfolio management, human behavior