What Happens When Smart People Don't Google?

The firehose of information we're all trying to drink from without looking bad is impossible. Add in people with overly practiced talking points and pair them against those with unpracticed off-the-cuff "oh you'll pay for that online later" talk and it's a mess out there. It's an itch I had to scratch. It's an invitation I had to get some friends together to talk about.

There's something about watching Premier League coaches shake hands that feels oddly revealing, especially as I'm watching the rest of the news these days.

Are we about to see a long-lost brotherly hug? Are we going to get any glimpse of courtesy, or feigned finger touches and zero eye contact? What do we make of one coach arriving conspicuously late, and is it a display of dominance executed by time management alone?

It's true - I've spent countless weekend mornings on my couch analyzing these micro-interactions, pulling critical clues from fleeting moments that most people wouldn't be wrong to miss. It's a strange side-hobby, I know. But when I finally confessed this obsession to my friends Dave Nadig and Jason Buck during a podcast, something clicked.

Me: "I feel like the only thing I have left going in myself right now is basically like handshake analysis. All weekend."

Their eyes: "oh really."

I didn't get mocked. I didn't get sheer confusion (even if I also tried to relate it to professional wrestling). Instead, it sparked the fifth fascinating tangent of our conversation up to that point. Dave reflected that perhaps we've "abandoned a lot of the niceties and norms of modern society... and now we're just out in the open playing the status games and the posturing games and the tail sniffing and the tribalism."

And that's how you go from handshakes to societal breakdown in one messy, beautiful conversational leap.

Friends as Safety Nets (a theory)

We're two episodes into "Click Beta," which is a middle school science experiment of a monthly podcast on Excess Returns, and I'm starting to understand why it feels so good to do it. Despite some of the comments (the internet is still the internet), I've rarely felt this safe taking intellectual risks in public.

Our format is simple: one agreed-upon topic, plus we each bring a surprise topic nobody else sees in advance. And, quite crucially, "nobody googles nothing."

Part of me is horrified even as I'm typing this out. When Dave reaches for examples while discussing sovereign wealth funds—"This looks a lot less like Norway, which is a great example, and a lot more like, I don't know, Libya, Venezuela"—I'd be scared to comment normally, but I also know he's not delivering a rehearsed thesis. He's thinking in real time.

And nobody calls him stupid. Nobody fact-checks under the table to take him down. We just keep building on each other's thoughts, comfortable in our shared uncertainty. Because we are not going to solve any policy debate about sovereign wealth funds, but we very well may find some cracks in each other's logic around the questions these headlines make us each want to ask.

There's a safety net in this otherwise unsafe tightrope walking exercise and it isn't being right—it's feeling safe saying this stuff to each other.

The Art of Not Having an Opinion

Listen to this last episode and count how many times you hear:

"Could we pick a subject that's more impossible to figure out?"

"I don't understand why we wouldn't be investing it completely broadly, right?"

"I don't know either. I just tossed that grenade in, so to speak, to see what would happen."

In a world where everyone's expected to have confident takes on everything, there's something almost revolutionary about saying "I don't know" without shame. Can we do more of this? Maybe we can lead by example. It's definitely not a science, so let's call it an art—you don't have to have answers, and you can just keep asking questions in a setting like this.

Why This Matters (and why this is not a total waste of time)

I get to be around a lot (A LOT) of really smart, successful, talented people. I'm very fortunate in that way. And, it's made me understand deeply, that good thinking isn't always clean. It doesn't arrive fully formed and perfectly articulated. It meanders. It doubles back. It sometimes contradicts itself.

But when done in the company of people you trust, people who are interested in understanding rather than winning, it leads somewhere worthwhile.

I've started getting messages from listeners saying they enjoy the show because "it feels like they're a fly on the wall with their friends." That's exactly the vibe we're going for, the conversational equivalent of your kitchen counter (plus or minus a couple drinks), when nobody's too busy trying to impress anyone else.

So here's to confusion. Here's to experimenting in public. Here's to playing with ideas before rushing back to our day jobs, where we don't have the luxury of not knowing.

"Click Beta" isn't just about markets. It's about how to not know things and stay friends in a hyperconnected, hypercritical, totally insane world.

Maybe that's something we could all use a little more of.