To Stay at Their Best, Wall Street and Silicon Valley Keep Paying for This

In Billions, the hedge-fund founder Bobby Axelrod — known to everyone as Axe — has two people beside him. One runs operations: people, logistics, how the money moves. The other is Wendy, and she never touches money: no earnings reports, no orders, no risk book. She does one thing all day. She keeps the people who manage hundreds of millions, or billions, able to pull the trigger when it is time to pull it, and able to stop when it is time to stop.

Wendy had been at the firm almost as long as the firm had existed.

The clearest proof of her position is the night Axe, from one bad call, put the firm more than a billion dollars down on paper. He did not call a lawyer first. He did not call a partner first. What he told his wife was that he needed a marathon session with Wendy — that there were things only she could give him. The two of them spent that night walking, talking and eating in the office, until Axe said out loud the sentence he least wanted to say.

Even on the day he was taken in, Axe did not go home to say goodbye to his wife and sons. He went to Wendy to apologise. The arrest happened beside the 9/11 memorial, where everyone he had worked with in the financial district died. The person who walked out with him was Wendy.

Axe said Wendy was his lucky charm. And it was not only rivals who came to poach her: Taylor — the quant genius Axe's own fund had found and trained, who then left to start a shop of their own — came to recruit Wendy too.

Taylor, the first time they sit down with a coach, opens by listing their own credentials: over 900 hours of therapy, and which schools of it. It sounds like showing off, or even a provocation: I know as much as you do, so do not try to bluff me with the word "professional."

Only Wendy caught Taylor's opening line, and treated it as the foundation for working well together. The man who later took Wendy's seat reacted by patting Taylor twice on the cheek, answering as if to compare sizes: "One, this isn't therapy. Two, I've had far more therapy than you have." Clearly, he had not actually heard what Taylor said.

Which points at something counterintuitive: these are brilliant people worth hundreds of millions, and what they need has never been an expert who lectures them — with AI they learn faster than anyone they could hire. So if it is not someone teaching them how to run the kingdom they built themselves, what are they paying that kind of money for, year after year? Four real cases follow. Their methods look nothing alike; underneath, they arrive at the same place.

The character is not invented. One of the inspirations for the show is the hedge fund SAC Capital: in 1992 its founder, Steve Cohen, brought a psychiatrist into the trading room, and that psychiatrist — Ari Kiev — is part of the model for Wendy. Before that, Kiev had been the first psychiatrist on the U.S. Olympic Committee's sports medicine committee, working on the same problem with rowers, bobsledders and basketball players.

What he did in the trading room was consistent. One on one, during trading hours, he had a trader describe what he had just done and what he had felt while doing it. He had them write down, daily, their emotional reactions to market moves. Then they went back over it after the close.

He drew the boundary sharply, and said so plainly: "I am not so interested in your childhood experiences; I am interested in what you are experiencing in the context of the trade." He described himself as a trading strategist more than a psychiatrist.

In other words, he did not touch strategy. The trader set the strategy. His working assumption was that you already have a good strategy and that your enemy is your own reaction pattern.

Jim Loehr came to this from the tennis court. Through the 1980s and 1990s the champions Monica Seles, Pete Sampras and Jim Courier went to him when they were in a trough. What he worked on was not technique but form: not the inability to hit a good shot, but the inability to last — the feeling of going suddenly blank in a big match. His best-known device is the "16-second cure": in the seconds after each point, push your shoulders back, fix your eyes on the racket strings, take one slow breath, let the last point go, and only then decide how to play the next one.

In his reading, top performers rarely collapse from weak willpower. They collapse from depleted energy. He later split a person into four linked layers — physical, emotional, mental, spiritual — and coined the term corporate athlete: the athlete and the executive share the same underlying problem, long stretches of pressure with bursts in between, output without recovery, until the decline is not a slope but a cliff.

What he designs is a deliberate pairing of expenditure and recovery — when to go all out, when you must come off, plus a repeatable routine the body learns to read as "time to return to the old rhythm." That method travelled into companies, and into law enforcement and the military. Seles has said that in those years almost nobody in the United States wanted to talk about the mental side; Courier has said that accepting that kind of help then amounted to admitting weakness. What he asked for was concrete: after a burst of high intensity, come back to your old level systematically.

Bill Campbell had played the game and run a company as CEO of Intuit, and from 2001 he was the outsider at nearly every Google executive meeting. What he looked after was not strategy but how a group of people works together — the fatal blocker in Silicon Valley is rarely technology or market, but a handful of very strong people who will not yield to each other. His creed was to work the team, then the problem. The investor Ben Horowitz put it precisely: "I would call Bill not because he could tell me what to do, but because he could understand how I felt, one hundred percent." The people he coached included Steve Jobs.

But this category has one precondition, and it is the biggest one: the person across the table has to be willing to put their ego down and be mediated. The moment a core founder refuses to be candid and keeps playing for power, it stops working. It leans entirely on personal standing and trust, so it does not standardise and does not scale — after he died, that way of mediating was very hard to reproduce. So whether any of these methods works was never a one-sided thing: it takes a working partnership with the person using it, the way Wendy had one with Axe and with Taylor.

Matt Mochary is the most in-demand name in the field right now, and his firm publishes both the price and who delivers it. For Matt himself: 12,500 dollars a month, and on average one session a month. For the coaches he trained: 10,000 dollars a month, including two to four sessions. Either way, you can reach your coach by email, Slack or text in between. Which means the people sitting across from Matt himself are a handful of top founders and a few core VC partners. Everyone else gets a team coach.

His own explanation for why the job exists runs only a few lines: many people report to you, but you report to no one. Yes, you report to a board — but not really. You do not share everything with them. They are not your true thought partners.

There is a second layer under that. The higher someone sits, the better they are at wrapping avoidance, fear and self-deception in a reasonable-sounding case. So what a retainer client buys was never a methodology — his methodology is published in full, free, in his book. What they buy is a real person who knows all their secrets and whom they dare not lie to. Lying to an AI, or handing it a selective version, costs almost nothing psychologically. Lying to someone you meet every month, who remembers what you said last time, is much harder. It is also why Baize's one-to-one is a human service: what you pay for is not words that feel good.

So his job is not to judge for you. He asks until you name your biggest obstacle, and then he holds you to what you said you would do about it. How meetings run, how you hire, how you spend your time — there are templates for all of it. What he watches is whether you did it.

All four are focused on the person: one watches the reaction, one manages the energy, one builds the team, one holds you to account. Not one of them is selling knowledge.

Put the four together and the point is not whose method is better. It is two things: the further up you go, the more heavily this gets paid for — a psychiatrist stationed in the trading room at one end, an outsider starting at ten thousand dollars a month at the other; and the method keeps changing. There is no agreed standard, and everyone is still experimenting.

More important: this is not a one-off purchase. That psychiatrist stayed at one hedge fund for more than sixteen years. The man who started on the tennis court kept at it for over thirty. That football coach coached Google's chief executive for fifteen. The Silicon Valley arrangement renews monthly and kept renewing. Four entirely different methods, one shared view: this is not a single delivery. It is a relationship that has to stay in place and be available at any time.

Who	When they intervene	What they make you do	Where it breaks
Ari Kiev a psychiatrist the firm hired	Mid-session, the moment after a bad call	Describe the action and the feeling; write it down daily	He handles execution, not strategy. If the strategy is wrong, no amount of composure saves it
Jim Loehr a performance psychologist	In cycles, when depletion is the problem	Pair output with recovery; rebuild the rhythm	He can fix your energy, not your judgment — biased calls still happen under pressure
Bill Campbell a friend inside the team	In meetings, in corridors, at any hour	Turn a group of people into a community	Barely reproducible — it ran on decades of relationships, not process
Matt Mochary an external account-holder	Before decisions and after them, one to four times a month	Answer for what you said you would do	The mechanism is rented; it stops when the payment does

So what is the shared thing? None of them sells knowledge, and none of them sells prediction. Nobody is paying to be told what happens next, and nobody needs someone to explain the obvious to them — they know more than the people they hire. What they buy is three things: not being dragged around by yourself when your state is bad, being told when you are about to go wrong, and staying in your best range over the long run. Put another word on it: risk control.

And risk control only works if there is a stable enough reference to hold things up against, repeatedly. The four cases buy "someone beside you." Baize offers a reference that does not move with how you feel today: the structure on the chart does not follow your mood. It simply sets what you actually did next to what it has always been — to help you recalibrate the path, steady your footing in a trough and come back into form, instead of struggling harder and getting less. The smarter a person is, the easier it is to be self-deceiving — not from stupidity, but from being so good at building a reasonable case for what they already chose, until they work even harder to prove themselves right on the wrong road.

So should I go hire a coach?
That is not what this piece is arguing. The one thing these routes share is a stable outside reference that tells you when your state is off. That reference does not have to be a person, and it does not have to be billed monthly.

I already know a lot. Why come back to the same question?
Because the bottleneck is not knowledge. The smarter people are, the easier it is for them to be self-deceiving — not from stupidity, but from being very good at building a reasonable case for whatever they already chose. Long-term behaviour change does not come from understanding once. It comes from the same thing being checked against, repeatedly. See Why Knowing Yourself Cannot Rely on a Questionnaire.

Will Baize give me emotional support to help me feel better?
The biggest difference is that Baize will not tell you what you want to hear just to keep you happy — which is exactly one of the reasons the people in this piece hire advisers. Kiev said outright that he did not care about your childhood, only about your emotional reaction inside the trade; Mochary asks what your obstacle is and then holds you to it. What happens here is narrower — the structure gets described, and you bring what actually happened back to compare. If you are in ongoing emotional distress, please seek professional support offline.

I am not a top performer, and I am nowhere near decisions that big. Can Baize still help me?
The investors and executives above simply face bigger swings and more uncertainty, which is why they are willing to put more time, money and energy into this. Your decisions matter just as much to your own life — especially at a few key turning points, where they compound over the long run. So the question was never whether this works for you. It is whether you are willing to put in the work and make changes that may not feel comfortable in the short term. It is like going to the gym to reshape your body: not because you are worse than everyone else, but because change starts somewhere uncomfortable.

The valuable thing is not the answer. It is a stable reference you can keep checking against — which is exactly what Baize does: the same question, brought back as often as you like.

It is not a one-time delivery that ends when you finish reading. The decision you made three months ago — looking at it now, does it line up with what your chart describes? Where it does not line up, was the judgment wrong, or was your state wrong at the time? The more often you ask, the more there is to line up. The detail of how to do this is in You Have Reviewed for Months. Why Has Nothing Changed?

Start with the last time you were stuck, and try asking Baize these:

• When I made that decision, what state was I in?
• Last time I got something wrong — was the judgment wrong, or was my state wrong?
• If I am going to track one thing over time, which one should it be?

It answers against your chart, not as a general-purpose assistant.

Daily Review (free) is for accumulating your own line-by-line record. Stage Progress (free) is for seeing the difference when you look at the same thing again later.

You do not have to ask everything at once, and it does not end after one round.

First time on Baize and not sure which step comes first? The full order — chart, question, review, coming back — is in First Time on Baize: Where to Start.

This page is for cultural study and self-reflection. It is not a predictive promise, nor medical, legal, investment or career advice.