Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Colossus | Investing & Business Podcasts

Ric Elias - The Art of Living Well

·1 hr 25 min·5 clips

Ric Elias describes the 90 seconds before his plane crashed, realizing he was going to die and the regrets that changed his life forever.

Ric Elias and Dan Hesse founded Red Ventures in January 2000 with $2 million from business school friends, nearly went bankrupt by November of that year with only $117,000 remaining, and survived by selling direct marketing consulting work until they found their model in 2004 to 2006: helping brands defend against Google's aggregation of consumer intent through performance-based customer acquisition, taking a share of incremental revenue rather than agency fees. The company bootstrapped for a decade before taking investment from General Atlantic in 2010, and grew to include Bankrate, CreditCards.com, The Points Guy, and a UK property data business. Elias describes Red Ventures as an operating private equity platform with permanent capital, differentiated from traditional PE by genuine operational improvement rather than financial engineering: companies bought at ten times earnings often became four times within two years under their management. The conversation moves into deeply personal territory around Elias's experience as a front-row passenger on US Airways Flight 1549 in January 2009, which crash-landed in the Hudson River with no fatalities. Elias describes the three-and-a-half-minute descent, the certainty that he was going to die, and the three commitments he made to himself: to eliminate negativity from his life, to reconnect with people he had allowed relationships to drift with, and to commit fully to being present for his children. He draws a distinction between being good, an external measure tied to circumstances, and being well, an internal state of peace and alignment with one's own values that persists regardless of external conditions. He frames this around a period of personal crisis unrelated to the plane incident, noting that things can be externally terrible and internally peaceful simultaneously. The episode addresses money as a corrupting force beyond a certain threshold, the body as something that requires compounding investment starting in one's twenties, and the concept of well-being as two separate words, with well representing inner alignment and being representing presence rather than constant doing. Elias argues that energy, not time, is the true scarce resource and that the goal is to invest energy only in things that return multiple currencies simultaneously.

As heard by us

A spare, serious account of near-death, clarity, and the habits that matter after fear.

Ric Elias turns a plane emergency into a plainspoken meditation on what remains when control falls away. Patrick O'Shaughnessy keeps enough room for Elias to move from the explosion and the captain's three-word warning, "brace for impact," to the minute and a half that reshaped…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Press play if you want one story to reset your sense of priorities.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy