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- [00:01]
A
The lesson in some ways that I drew from Howard, that's been life changing for me is you can't predict the future, but what you can do is accommodate yourself to reality as it is.
- [00:17]
B
I'm Robert Brokamp and that was William Green, the author of Richer, Wiser, Happier how the World's Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life. Really one of the best books about investing and investors that I've read over the past few years. In this replay of an interview from February of this year, I caught up with William to discuss what successful investing comes down to. Personality traits of market beaters and the investing lessons from Charlie Munger, Howard Marks, John Templeton, and Arnold Vandenberg. An investor you may not know about, but you should. So William, you've interviewed countless investors over your career through your writing your own podcast, and you could have made this book just about cold hard facts about investing investing principles. But it's not just that, right? You do many sort of mini biographies of famous investors and not quite such famous investors. You explore their life stories, their work habits, psychology, in some cases spirituality. What led you to choose that path for this book?
- [01:24]
A
I think part of it is just that I'm so full of existential angst that I'm always trying to figure out how are we supposed to live? And so part of that obviously is figuring out what role money plays in our life. How can I create a life where I'm free to do what I love to do? How can I have financial independence and financial security? But I think all of us sense that that's not enough. And so I'm always looking at these questions and thinking, yeah, but so then what actually will constitute a rich life? What will constitute an abundant life? Is it possible to live in a way that's truly aligned with who you are and yet also be part of the group? Is it possible to live with integrity and honour and truthfulness? Or is that kind of naive in a brutally Darwinian, capitalistic, dog eat dog environment? Or how do you deal with the fact that the future is unknowable and yet we have to make decisions about the future? So for me, a lot of what's happening is that I'm actually wrestling with these questions myself. And I just happen to be in this very unusual position that I've had extraordinary access over really the last 30 years to these incredible investors who are so thoughtful. So when I was full of existential doubt and I was wrestling with one of these questions, I would get to talk to them about it. So I would get to talk to someone like Bill Miller, for example, who I've probably interviewed for the best part of 100 hours over the last 25 years or so. And Bill had beaten the market, famously for 15 years running. And so I interviewed him at the height of his fame when everything was going beautifully. But then I also interviewed him when it all fell apart during the financial crisis. And then I also introduced interviewed him when he rebounded massively. So I would go see Bill after the financial crisis, for example, when I was going through pain myself because I had edited the international editions of Time magazine and then got laid off in the middle of the financial crisis. And I would say to Bill, so how do you deal with pain and suffering and failure and public humiliation? You know, how do you wrestle with it? And here I would have one of the smartest, most thoughtful people who'd gone from managing $77 billion at his pinnacle to something like 800 million. And he would say to me, well, look, you know, I studied the stoic philosophers for many years, and he was actually, he was in a PhD philosophy program many years ago. And he said to me, I know from the stoics that I can't control my reputation or what people say about me, but I can control my own actions, my own behavior, my willingness to deal with my mistakes and be honest about them and learn from them. And so really for me, I just had this crazy access to people like that. And so anytime I was going through anything, I would want to ask them about it. And then I wanted to share what I learned with the readers. So in some way, I sort of almost think of it as a stealth spiritual book or a, almost like a self help book for investors where you're wrestling with these profound questions about how to live, how to think, whether you can construct a really happy and abundant life, what habits are required to get you there, how you should behave, and how you should think more wisely.
- [04:59]
B
Yeah, I think there's no doubt that anyone who reads the book will certainly come away with some investing lessons, but with definitely some life lessons as well. When I look through the people that you profiled and the things that they believe, it struck me that there were two things that came out in almost all of their lives and they're somewhat contradictory. One is they spend a lot of time learning about other investors from other investors, maybe even cloning what they have done. But then, number two, the best investors are also mavericks. They're really blazing their own path. So let's start with that and talk a little bit about the cloning aspect.
- [05:38]
A
Yeah, it's a very perceptive comment. And in a sense, the first chapter and the second chapter conflict with each other totally. Because the first chapter is about Mohnish Pabrai and the idea that really, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, what you should do is study people who are wiser and smarter and more experienced than you, reverse engineer what they did and figure out how to clone it. And the second chapter is about Sir John Templeton, who's a total emblem of being non tribal free thinking. When I asked him if anyone had influenced him, he said, no, nobody at all? And I said, no.
- [06:17]
B
Not even his parents?
- [06:18]
A
Yeah. He's like, yeah, not even my parents. And so in a way, those two chapters are contradictory, but I think there's something. And look, this goes back to that beautiful line from F. Scott Fitzgerald where he talked about the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind without going crazy, that that's sort of a mark of intelligence. And I think that's true that usually the great truths are contradictory. So I think with the great investors, one of the things that struck me about them, that makes them such a good filter to study the world, is that they're great pragmatists, and so they'll just do whatever works. So for a lot of them, even if they're very independent spirited and non tribal, they're just pragmatic enough that they're going to say, well, what's everyone figured out already? And so Mohnish, in a way, is a perfect example of this, because he's someone who grew up very poor in the outskirts of Mumbai and discovered early on that he had an extraordinarily high IQ and then stumbles on a book by Peter lynch in Heathrow Airport that mentions Buffett and realizes that Buffett is the master of compounding and says, well, let me just reverse engineer this game and figure out how he compounded at such a rate. And so Mohnish discovers that basically the principles of investing are almost as timeless as the principles of physics. And he says it really comes down to what Ben Graham taught Buffett more or less, which is basically that the market is irrational, that it's bipolar, and that you want to take advantage of that bipolar nature and buy stuff when it's very much out of favor and at a deep discount. And so then he looks around and he sees that almost nobody else is doing this, that the world is sort of made up of all of these people who are failing to understand the fundamental laws of investing. And he says, well, look, if nobody else is going to do it, the Indian will do it. And so he starts describing himself as a shameless cloner. So for me, this is one of those principles that goes very deeply through investing and life. And so when I'm studying Mohnish, I'm thinking. And Mohnish has become a good friend over the years. So I'm studying and I'm thinking, okay, so what can I learn about the way Mohnish not only invests, but the way he constructs his life? And one of the things that's so striking about Mohnish is that almost to an antisocial, you could say almost sociopathic level, he just says, I'm not going to do anything that I don't want to do. He's like, I'm not interested in all of the mumbo jumbo related to marketing my funds, so I just don't have any meetings with prospective investors. And he'll have lunch with someone, and he'll just say, well, did I enjoy that lunch or not? And he's like, if not, I'll never see that person again. And so he's basically cloned this from Buffett, who he realized just lives in a way that deeply aligned with who he is. So I think you can take these principles and then say, well, yeah, so, okay, I want to learn how to clone as an investor, but I also want to learn how to clone in other areas of my life. And that kind of fascinated me that these master principles do run through every area of your life, I think, not just investing. They. They turn out to be very helpful in other areas of life, too.
- [09:42]
B
One line you had when we talk a little bit about the maverick side, you said, to beat the market, you must be brave enough, independent enough, and strange enough to stray from the crowd. Because after all, if you're going to beat the market, you have to be doing something different than the market.
- [09:57]
A
Yeah. And they are odd, these people. I mean, they really are. I think I've become more and more struck by this over the years, that they're so fanatical and so intense and so extreme in much of what they do. And I remember Mohnish went to Charlie Munger's house after the book came out, and he sent me a video where he said, charlie, what do you think of William's book? And Charlie said, oh, I love the book. It's a great book. And Mohnish said, what did you find interesting? Were there any insights you found particularly interesting? And he said, yeah, how many of us got divorced or separated. And he said, it's totally understandable because the game was so absorbing that all of our spouses felt neglected. And I think that's true, that to be really extraordinary at something, you, on the whole, are going to be pretty extreme, pretty obsessive. There are a few of these people who are reasonably well adjusted and have great families and. And lovely people you'd like to sit next to at dinner. And I do like basically everyone I wrote about because I tended to focus on people I liked and admired as humans. I wasn't just focusing on rapacious billionaires who the only talent they had was for making money. I wanted to learn from people who I thought were admirable as well, that there was something special about the way they lived. But they're deeply eccentric, very extreme.
- [11:27]
B
One thing that I took away from the book is that just about every of them, every one of them reads and reads and reads and reads, often to the exclusion of doing anything else, whether it's meeting other people or attending to their personal lives.
- [11:43]
A
Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, Munger would always talk about Buffett's strength being that he was a continuous learning machine. And I remember Mohnish describing to me how Munger would just sit there in this big lazy boy chair with these bright lights behind him with two stacks of books and journals and the like on either side. And he said it was just like this conveyor belt, just motoring through stuff, some of which he skimmed, some of which he read fully. But Mohnish claims that Munger would read about 500 books a year. And then if you add the fact that he had incredible recall, there's. The way Mohnish put it was it was like he'd been alive for 300 years. So there's a huge advantage to this idea of applying compounding not only to money, but to things like the compounding of knowledge, the compounding of wisdom. So in some way, it's like they're intellectual athletes rather than. Rather than physical athletes. I think, on the whole, I mean, I was joking about Tom Gaynor at some point, the CEO of Markel, about the fact that he would never be in an Olympic beach volleyball team. He was basically perfectly built for this game of kind of sitting and reading and thinking. And maybe because I'm pretty idle and indolent myself, this is one reason why I was so drawn to these people. I think I'm very drawn to. To the idea that you can sit around and think and read and learn, and that somehow gives you an advantage in life. And there's something sort of deeply subversive about me I guess that was drawn to these sort of slightly strange subversive creatures who had sort of cracked the code of the markets. And they're all sort of anti authority in a way. They're all sort of thinking for themselves, questioning conventional wisdom and outwitting the market and outwitting their peers. And so I think for a journalist in a way like me, there's something very appealing about that because I'm calling you from a room in London where I'm staying for a few days. And I grew up in England. I went to Eton, which was, you know, this famous boarding school where we were literally locked up at 6:15 every evening. And so I just, I think I sort of bridle against rules and there's something about these, these rule breaking mavericks, breaking the code that, that's deeply seductive to me.
- [14:25]
C
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- [15:38]
B
Can be classified along the value and growth spectrum, I would say most of the investors that you profile lean toward value. Not exclusively you do. Talk to Will Danoff, the Fidelity Contra fund, very successful fund. Bill Miller I think could be classified one way or the other. I mean most of his net worth I think is an Amazon or something like that. He's along the ways, little of both sides there. But first of all, to the degree that you do you think that's a fair characterization and if so, value investing has Been a tougher sell over the last five, 10 years. Are there principles these investors still offer us even if their style of investing is out of favor?
- [16:19]
A
Yeah, these distinctions, as you know, between value and growth and the like are pretty nebulous. And the thing that Munger once said to me, I had this extraordinary two hour zoom call with people like Munger and Lou Simpson, bunch of great investors like that after the book came out. And one of the things that Munger said to me, and these are his exact words, I've tried to sort of tattoo them on my forehead, he said, all investing that's successful comes from getting more value than you pay for. But then what he said is, look, there are a lot of different ways you can do that. So he said, you can do that. Like Bill Miller, where Bill went and figured out back in, you know, 1999, 2000, that Amazon, which most of his peers thought was going to go bankrupt, was actually incredibly valuable and would be worth an enormous amount. And Bill at one point a couple of years ago said to me that he was the single largest individual shareholder of Amazon, not named Bezos. So I mean, you know, he's built an enormous fortune there, but he's also in recent years built an enormous fortune in bitcoin. And so there's a free thinking willingness among a lot of the great investors just to look for things that they think will be more valuable. And there's so many paths up the mountain. But I think in terms of a takeaway for the rest of us, one thing that very much struck me, I wrote a chapter about simplicity. And I think it's very helpful to reduce the complexity of investing to a few simple rules that you basically are pretty sure are approximately true on average over time. And so for Danoff, when I went to visit him in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I thought, oh, there's some great secret sauce to this guy managing over $200 billion with this amazing record over the last 30 years. He said, yeah, it all comes down to three words. He said, stocks follow earnings. And so he didn't really care about the valuation that much unless it really got absurd. He was just trying to buy companies that he felt that they're best in class companies and over time they're going to do great. And all things being equal, if their earnings double, their stock price will probably double. And so that led him to buy things like Microsoft and Tesla and Berkshire Hathaway. Very high quality stuff. But he made it sound sort of simple. And Bill Miller, who's a good friend of will, Danoff said to me, will Danoff claims that he's not that smart. And so he keeps it really simple. And he's like, that's nonsense. He's really smart and he's really driven. And I think that's another thing that these guys there is this intensity and this ferocity. So even if the principles themselves are quite simple, these. The application of the principle requires an amazing degree of intensity. And I remember Bill Miller telling me once that when he first met Will danoff Something like 30 years ago, I think they went to some meeting in Phoenix where they were introduced, and they're both really likable guys. And someone says to Bill, oh, meet Will. And Bill holds out his hand and says, hi, Will, nice to meet you. And Will Danoff doesn't extend his hand and says, I'm going to beat you, man. I'm going to beat you. And I think that gets at the intensity of it, that gives you a sense that. I think at one point in the book I write something like that sometimes the real secret of success is nothing more mysterious than the fervency of a person's desire. And so I don't think it's that the principles are that hard. I think the application can be very, very difficult. But again and again, you come back to the idea with people like Howard Marks or Joel Greenblatt or Charlie Munger that it's really about buying things at a discount to what they're worth. And so that fundamental principle of the margin of safety, I think, is probably about as resilient and timeless and robust a principle as there is in investing.
- [20:28]
B
Now let's talk a little bit more about that margin of safety, because many of the investors you profile did talk about why it's important to understand the risks you're taking, not to take too much risk, and to always be in a situation where you are going to be okay no matter what happens. The term unfragile was used. Talk a little bit about how they think about which investments to buy, the right sizing, and maybe how much to have in cash so that no matter what happens, they're still going to be okay.
- [20:58]
A
I think the most fundamental rule, in a sense, is that you've got to stay in the game. And so you have to set yourself up to survive despite the fact that the future is unknowable and that anything can happen. And so one of the things that Howard Marks talked to me about is just the importance of not overreaching. He would say, look, given the fact that you don't know what the future holds. You have to ask yourself, will I be able to survive an uncertain future? So that requires you to. To set aside enough cash, not to have leverage, not to have too much debt, not to be living beyond your capability. But also, he pointed out, it's very important not to underestimate how emotionally and psychologically fragile you might be. And his view, of course, is that people say that they'll be fine if the market goes down 20, 30, 50%, but then when it actually happens, they tend not to be. So this question of, I think figuring out how you'll cope in drawdowns is hugely important and just not deluding yourself. So I think one thing that I started to ask myself is, where am I fragile, both in my portfolio and my life, and how can I reduce that fragility? And so I think if you have all of your money in one asset class, or all of your money in one bank account or one brokerage firm or one currency, you're playing with a loaded gun. And so you just want to assume that terrible stuff can happen. And I remember Charlie Munger, at one point, I went to a Daily Journal meeting, the company he was chairman of back in 2017, and I remember him saying that he had had four drawdowns of 50% over the course of his lifetime. And he said, so you have to. And Berkshire itself had gone down 50% three times. And so he said, you have to set yourself up so that you can survive those drawdowns with grace and aplomb. And he said, if you don't have a drawdown like that, the chances are that you're not taking enough risk, you're not being aggressive enough. So I think this idea of just setting yourself up to survive, both emotionally and and financially, is really key. And I think of this a lot in terms of my own life. I'll often think this is very much cloned from Charlie Munger. I think about trying to avoid situations with asymmetric risk on the downside that can be catastrophic. So think of things like driving while drunk, or texting while you're driving or. Or cheating on your taxes or cheating on your spouse if you happen to love your spouse and don't want to wreck your marriage, things like that. These are things where there's tremendous downside and limited upside. And so I think just this idea that you want to remove fragility is very important. And there's a beautiful line from Nassim Taleb. I stole the. The phrase antifragile from Nassim Taleb. There's a beautiful bit in one of his books where he says the fragile breaks with time. And so I think one of the things we learned from Howard Marx is we don't know when something will break and we don't know if it will break. But the longer you go on doing stuff that makes you fragile, the more you're playing with fire. Right. So if you cheat on your expenses once, you'll probably get away with it. Cheat on your expenses or on your spouse or whatever, 50 times sooner or later you're likely to get into trouble. And so I think again, these principles that are very powerful in investing turn out to be incredibly helpful in life.
- [24:57]
B
Another common theme with many of the folks you profiled was the ability to basically estimate odds and probabilities of something. And that's partially what investing is. I'm going to put my money here because I think it's going to be worth more in the future. But. But I have to assign some sort of probability to that. And for many of them, they basically learned this from playing games, whether it was playing poker. A lot of them love bridge.
- [25:22]
A
Yeah. In some ways, the greatest emblem and icon of this is Ed Thorpe, who I write about in the introduction to the book. And Ed I often think of as the greatest gambler in history, the greatest game player in the history of investing. I mean, this is, this is the guy who not only figured out how to beat the casino at blackjack, but then figured out how to beat the casino at roulette and then figured out how to set up this hedge fund that basically didn't have a losing quarter in 20 years. So when I talked to Ed, one of the things that I was trying to figure out is not only how you succeed in investing, but how you apply that kind of game players approach to life. If you were approaching life, how would you stack the odds in your favor so that it was likely to work out? And he used the example of health. And he said, look, there are certain illnesses or predispositions you might have, and those are like the cards you're dealt. But then it's your choice whether you get vaccines, whether you get a checkup every year, whether you eat well, whether you exercise and the like. And so it's really all about how you play the hand you're dealt. And that's been really helpful to me because again, it goes back to what Bill Miller was talking about with the stoic philosophers. You have to distinguish between what you can and can't control. And so I think what they're doing a lot of the great investors is just they're focusing on what they can control. And so for, for, you know, when Ed Thorpe, when I, when I was fact checking the book, I was asking him how he dealt with, with the COVID crisis and he was like, oh, thank you for asking. And it turned out to be unbelievable the way he dealt that. Like really early on, before there was a single reported death in the U.S. he'd analyzed the data from Wuhan in China and figured out what this meant, but also by drawing on deductions from what had happened during the Spanish flu in 1918, which had killed his grandfather. And so he figures out before anyone had been reported dead in the US that something like 200 to 500,000 people likely to die over the next year. And so he puts himself in isolation with his new wife before anything happened basically, and buys masks and buys detergent and the like. And so again, it's like this insistence on analyzing the data for yourself, thinking for yourself, independently looking and giving total primacy to staying in the game. And what could be more fundamental than staying in the game by actually literally surviving? And so I just thought that was a beautiful emblem of how to think about life. And similarly, Munger would often talk about only playing games that you're equipped to win. Munger, when he was asked for career advice, said at one point, look, if you're 5 foot 3, don't become a professional basketball player competing against people who are 8 foot tall. Find something where you have a natural talent, where you have natural advantages and that you're obsessed with. And so that again, super practical advice, just both in investing in life to stick with games that you're equipped to win. So for someone like me, who's not really interested in sitting around reading annual reports all day long and is not very numbers oriented, I'm much more of a word person. It just doesn't make sense for me to be, you know, buying individual tech stocks and the like. So I have to be very realistic in looking at my own strengths and weaknesses and then stick to games that I can play.
- [28:55]
C
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- [30:01]
B
I have to point out the and you explain this in your book how Ed Thorpe managed to play roulette. And that is he had basically a computer that he made of his own and I think with some help with somebody else, and was activated by his toe, which gave him basically an estimate of the velocity of the ball, which increased his odds of picking the right place where the ball would land.
- [30:25]
A
It's such a beautiful example because really what he did is he turned a game of total chance into a game of skill by giving himself a little bit of extra information. And so then you think about how to apply that to investing and you say, well, so is there any reason to think that I have an advantage over someone like Will Danoff or Bill Miller in picking individual stocks? And if I don't, if there's no reason, I mean, I asked Ed Thorpe this, I said, how do I know if I have an edge? And he's like, well, basically, look, if you have to ask that question, the odds are that you don't have an edge. And so this is not really an admission of failure. It's really liberating. Once you look at yourself with self honesty, you can say, well, okay, so there's a great default position here. I can just invest in an index fund and that's absolutely fine. I don't need to be the best in order to succeed. What I need to do is keep my expenses down, stay in the market for the long term, keep adding to the pot, keep not erode my gains by doing stupid stuff like trying to time the market. And so in some strange way, it's hugely empowering to recognize your own limitations.
- [31:45]
B
Let's dig a little deeper into a few of the characters that you discuss in the book and maybe you could talk a little bit about their lives and then what you think are the most important lessons investors should Take for them. And let's start with someone you've already mentioned, John Templeton.
- [32:00]
A
Yeah, Templeton was a deeply eccentric figure, and I got a glimpse of this when he lived in the Bahamas in this beautiful gated community called Life at Key, where people like Princess Grace of Monaco and Sean Connery, AKA James Bond, lived. And I remember walking on the beach once, and I went there a couple of times, and I remember sort of hiding behind a palm tree and sort of watching this strange looking figure, this old man, then about 85, with a hat with a visor and ear flaps and his face just slathered with white sun cream. And he's pumping his arms and legs up and down in the ocean to exercise. And he apparently would do this about 45 minutes a day. And I remember thinking, God, this is so strange. Here I am, I've come to see this great sage, you know, this guy who I think he'd average something like 14.5% a year for 38 years. I mean, this incredible return, which I think means you turn like 100,000 into 17 million or something. I mean, a really, truly great investor. And I'm thinking, oh, it's going to be like going to meet this profit. And here he is, this really odd duck, pumping his arms in the water, wearing a ridiculous visor. And then when I get back to New York, I interviewed someone who said the thing that people like Templeton and Buffett and Soros have in common is this willingness to be lonely, this willingness to do things that make them not look that smart. And that, for me, was incredibly helpful to realize that someone like Templeton just had no problem at all diverging from the crowd. And he had done this extraordinary bet back In World War II, after Nazi Germany had invaded France and the world really seemed like it was coming to an end. I mean, I think the Dow got down to something like 381 at some point, if I remember rightly, around 1942. He buys 104 companies that are all 104 stocks that are all trading under a dollar. And this broker says to him, well, obviously we didn't buy the 37 for you that were in bankruptcy. And he's like, no, no, I want those too. And. And so just the courage of this guy to buy at what he regarded as the point of maximum pessimism was an extraordinary thing. And then to hold them through the chaos of World War II until basically he got to a point where he'd made five times his money off these things. And so I think in a Way, it gives you a sense that to outperform, you've got to have this ability to think for yourself, to keep your emotions in check when other people are either madly exuberant or panicking and desperate and selling. And what was amazing is when he started in his career, there was only really one book that he had read on investing. I mean, nothing was available. And so he figured this stuff out for himself. And so I think part of what he had done is he'd lived through the Great Depression, when people like his father lost almost everything. I mean, his father said to him at one point, when he was at Yale, his father said, I can't even contribute $1 to your education. And so I think Templeton had seen all of these people in rural Tennessee, where he was from, who had lost everything. And he realized the best time to buy an asset is when other people are desperately selling. And so one of the things that I got from Templeton was just this idea that you want to stay away from your own emotion. Beware of your own emotion. Beware of your own ignorance. Beware of your overconfidence. I remember him once saying. He said to me in quite a. I would say, kind of a slightly mean way, I felt a little bit like he was slapping me around the head. He said something like, why would you think that you could choose the best asset manager, the best fund, the best asset class? Just have a little humility. And so he said to me, basically, what you want to do for the regular investor, you want to own about five or six funds that give you exposure to different asset class, different parts of the market, rather than assuming that you can choose the one thing that's been hugely helpful to me in practical terms, whenever I get carried away, I remind myself of that simple idea of let me have about five or six assets that are not totally correlated, and I'm more likely to survive than if I roll the dice and put everything on red.
- [36:40]
B
Yeah, I would say he's probably the person most associated with the idea of being optimistic when everyone else is pessimistic. And then the other way around, as you write in the book, he did that during the dot com craze when everyone was overly optimistic and he shorts a bunch of IPOs. And then, of course, he turns out right and makes millions of dollars.
- [37:02]
A
Yeah, I think he made something like $90 million, if I remember rightly. And I'm friends with his great niece, Lauren Templeton, who is hedge fund manager as well. And I do one thing that's interesting, that Lauren Told me a year or so ago when we were in Switzerland together at a Valuex event there, I asked her something about Buffett, and she said that whenever Buffett's name came up, his face would drop. And she said he really admired Buffett tremendously, but he was so competitive that it sort of pained him to hear Buffett's name. So I think that's really revealing. Even someone who is brilliantly clever, like Templeton, and unbelievably successful turns himself into a multi billionaire. He was still so competitive that the mention of Buffett's name was a source of pain.
- [37:57]
B
That's so funny, especially for someone who, by the way, was also very religious. Let's move on to Howard Marks, co founder of Oaktree, who you call the philosopher king of finance.
- [38:10]
A
Yeah, Howard has this extraordinary background where he went to Wharton and was very artistic, and he wanted to study art. And he got thrown out of the art class immediately because they basically were oversubscribed. And they said, where do you study? What's your name? And he said, howard Marks, Wharton School of Finance. And they said, right, you're the first out. And so he had to figure out what to do. And he flukes his way into a Japanese studies class where he discovers this concept of mujo, which is basically about impermanence. It's the idea that everything changes, nothing stays the same. And this turned out to be an incredible stroke of fortune because it becomes a kind of guiding principle in his investing career. And he would attribute it in large part as a great source of his success. So the lesson, in some ways that I drew from Howard, that's been life changing for me, is you can't predict the future, but what you can do is accommodate yourself to reality as it is. So you look at reality and you say, okay, everything is changing. Everything is in flux. Nothing stays the same. Companies that were once powerful will die. Industries that were out of favor will rise again. Countries that were in power will fall apart. And so you just recognize this fundamental Buddhist truth, right, this Zen Buddhist or Tibetan Buddhist truth that everything is in the state of flux. And then you say, okay, so if that's the case, let me accommodate myself to reality as it is. So when the conditions are too ebullient, for example, and everyone is just throwing caution to the wind, you want to accommodate yourself to that reality by saying, well, let me drive a little more carefully. It's as if you're driving on thin ice, and you just want to make sure that you drive 30 miles an hour, not 70 miles an hour. And likewise, when there's too much pessimism priced into the market, then paradoxically, the market is possibly less risky, and you want to gun the engine. And so he did this during the financial crisis and made something like $9 billion, if I remember rightly, by betting on toxic things that nobody else would touch. And so I think this, again, it's a very powerful principle, not only for investing, but for life. You're looking at the reality as it is. A friend of mine got a really bad health scare recently, and I'm trying to convince him, these are the cards you've been dealt. Now you have to adjust to it. One of the things that Howard often quotes is from Peter Bernstein, who's an amazing author, who wrote this book, against the Gods, about the history of risk. And Peter said something like, the market is not a very accommodating machine. It won't provide you with great returns just because you need them. And so I think just in investing and life, just to look at reality as it is in this unvarnished way and adjust your behavior accordingly is very realistic. And the other thing about Howard that I really admire is, is he's very wary of what I would call master of the universe syndrome, where you start to actually think because you've become hugely successful, that you know, and this is one of the great risks in investing, is overconfidence. And so just to keep reminding yourself of your own good fortune and your own capacity for overconfidence and hubris is very, very powerful. So I think for the rest of us, particularly for men, it's worth remembering that men have a particular capacity for overconfidence. There's actually a study that I think they did at Columbia University where they found that men systematically overestimate their knowledge by something like 30%. And I remember talking about this to Samantha McLemore, who's Bill Miller's successor, the terrific fund manager and very wise and thoughtful person. And we were laughing about a great story related to this that Michael Lewis had discussed on his podcast. And basically, there was some woman who was saying that she was descended from Marie Curie, who had won, I think, a Nobel Prize for economics and a Nobel Prize for Physics. And some idiot man helpfully pipes up and says to her, it's actually pronounced Mariah Carey. And this is one of those things where you just want to remind yourself, if you're a man, that we should be particularly aware of our capacity for overestimating what we know.
- [43:00]
B
Let's move on to a third person probably most people aren't familiar with him, but you had mentioned that maybe the person you admire most, and I have to agree with you. So introduce the world to Arnold Vandenberg.
- [43:13]
A
Yeah, Arnold is such a wonderful human being. And the way I think of Arnold is that he's not the most successful investor I've ever met, but he's the most successful human being I've met in the investment business. And part of it is that he was dealt such an awful hand. So he started off, he was sort of least likely to succeed. Most of these people were born three feet from the finish line. They went to Wharton or Harvard or were incredibly clever already. And they were born in the US where they had great advantages riding the fantastic economy for decades. Arnold had exactly the opposite. Arnold was born on the same street as Anne Frank in Amsterdam as a Jewish kid in 1939. So he was in hiding for the first couple of years of his life behind a fake wall in the closet of a Christian family who hid his family. And then he was sent to an orphanage. And amazingly, a 17 year old girl who didn't know his family risked her life to take him into the countryside to hide him in a Christian orphanage. And he more or less starved to death there. I mean, by the time he got out of the orphanage at the age of six, he told me that basically he couldn't walk. He was just sort of shuffling along on his knees because he was so malnourished. And then he comes out and his parents had actually been sent to Auschwitz during the Holocaust. But unbelievably, both of them survived. And they come and pick him up and they take him home. And he said, I couldn't even recognize them at that point. And he said, I just didn't even care. He's like, I would have gone with anyone to get out of that place. And so they moved to East Los Angeles to a very rough neighborhood where on his first day at school, his mother sends him to this really rough school dressed in lederhosen. So he gets beaten up at school constantly. And he's this thin, emaciated, malnourished kid and he barely makes it through high school. I mean, someone. He overhears his mother talking to a psychologist who basically says, look, he's probably got brain damage from having been so malnourished. And so he grows up thinking that he's stupid, knowing that 39 members of his family have been killed by the Nazis. So he's full of rage. Then he gets married to his high school sweetheart. Who runs off with another man. So he's full of rage and disappointment, and he turns around his life in the most extraordinary way that is such a triumph of the human spirit and becomes a very successful investor over decades. And you look at this and you just think, well, wait a second, with my minor problems in comparison, what can't I do to gain control over my life, to turn things around? And so part of why I end the book with Arnold is because I think he's such a beautiful role model for actually how to live and how to play your cards in the best possible way. And he's continued to be a great role model to me. He called me. He keeps calling me to give me advice. He knows how idle I am. And so he would do things like sending me a trampoline because he wanted me to exercise more on the trampoline, or he would. A couple of weeks ago, he called and he said, I'm working on a program for you, William. I'm putting together various books about nutrition and health. And he's so excited about. Here's a guy in his mid-80s, very successful guy. He just wants to help. And there's something so beautiful about that. And I don't know, I think this is one of really, the secrets of life is when you look at who among the great investors is happiest consistently, I see that it's people who have some mission beyond their own ego, beyond themselves. They're trying to lift up other people. And Arnold is such a beautiful example of that. He just gets. He just gets such joy out of helping people. And actually, he said to me again and again, I mean, so many times, he says, because of your book, I've been able to help so many people because people reach out to me, and I've been able to help them. And so last time he said this, he said, so, thank you, thank you, thank you for helping to fulfill my dream of helping other people. So you listen to that and you're like, oh, what a spectacular human being. The dream was not to make billions of dollars and lord it over other people by being in his fabulous mansion and driving around in his Lamborghini. It's like, no, he has a house in Texas that cost him like three hundred and something thousand dollars decades ago. And he drove the world's cheapest car for many years. But then his wife, who he adores, bought him a Lexus. And he said, I was too embarrassed to want to drive it at first, but. But I saw how much pleasure it gave her. And after a while I got used to it. And so I look at that and I just think, this is a guy I actually want to be more like, if I could be less selfish, kinda use whatever gifts I have to lift up other people, I'm likely to be happier.
- [48:40]
B
Well, William, this has been a fascinating discussion. Thank you so much for joining us.
- [48:44]
A
It's been such a delight. Thanks for the opportunity to chat with you.
- [48:51]
B
As always. People on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about. The Motley fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley fool editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. I'm Robert Bro Camp fool on everybody.