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The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network
TIP676: Richer, Wiser, Happier Q4, 2024 w/ Stig Brodersen & William Green
02:14:45
Stig talks with co-host William Green, the author of “Richer, Wiser, Happier.” With a strong focus on building meaningful relationships and traveling with friends along the path, they discuss what has made them Richer, Wiser, or Happier in the past quarter.
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- [00:01]
Stig Broderson
You're listening to tip.
- [00:03]
William Green
In today's quarterly richer, wiser and happier episode, I'm joined by my friend and co host, William Green. We start the episode reflecting on whether the opposite of a virtue can also be a virtue in both investing and in life. We then transition into a discussion about the Nomad Partnership and why Nick and Zach resonates so deeply with us in the value investing community. William and I have been working together for three years now, but. But we're also good friends and learning from the titans in our industry. We talk about empowering each other and also the pitfalls of traveling along the same path with friends in business. That leads to a discussion of the intersection between authenticity and honesty and why it simplifies your life when you put quality front and center in your decision making. As always for all of our episodes, I hope you will join William and me on our quest for a richer, wiser and happier life.
- [00:58]
Stig Broderson
Celebrating 10 years and more than 150 million downloads. You are listening to the Investors podcast network. Since 2014, we studied the financial markets and read the books that influenced self made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Now for your hosts, Stig Broderson and William Green.
- [01:30]
William Green
Welcome to the Investors Podcast. I'm your host, Dick Brodersen and today I'm here with my co host, William Green. William, how are you today?
- [01:37]
Nick Sleep
I'm very well. It's lovely to see you as always. We had our usual technological difficulties where I couldn't see you and then you just reminded me to turn on the recording. So, yeah, all is as usual with the William Stig partnership.
- [01:53]
William Green
You know, I still don't get it, Willem. Like, I've been doing this for more than 10 years and all my calls start with can you hear me? I can't hear you. Like you would think by now we would have figured it out.
- [02:03]
Nick Sleep
But I have a particular relationship with technology where it just never seems to work. I always am in this state of confusion. So here's hoping for the best.
- [02:13]
William Green
So we have three topics for today and let's see where we go. We always go in different directions, which is the wonderful thing about these discussions, William. But the first thing we want to talk about is that the opposite of a virtue is also a virtue. And this is something that we talked about the other day. Unfortunately it wasn't recorded. So now you have a chance to talk about it. And I'm a one string banjo. I should probably come off by saying, and whenever you mentioned it first to me, I was Thinking, well, that's just like investing. So if you want to be successful in investing, you have to be very humble. You have to know that you will be wrong. Not all the time, as in with all your investments, but you would often be wrong. And you have to be okay with that. You have to set guardrails up for yourself to be wrong. And you have to think about risk. You have to think about precision sizing. But then on the other hand, to beat the market, you also have to be in the other camp where you have to be confident and you want to stay the course whenever things get choppy.
- [03:11]
Nick Sleep
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack here. And the first thing I should say is that I stole this idea from Annie Duke, the author of books like Thinking in Bets and Quit. And I interviewed Annie on the podcast, I think, two years ago. What happened really is that I read books in a strange way. So I was reading Quit latest book before our interview. And I often don't start at the beginning of books. I dip in at the end. I look at the bits that most people ignore, like the acknowledgements and the footnotes and the end notes. And so I'm something like 250 pages into the book, and I'm looking at the endnotes, which are in tiny print. And Annie mentions in this endnote that she spoke to Phil Tetlock, the author of famous book Super Forecasting, when she was starting work on this book Quit, and she was saying to him something along the lines of, look, I'm kind of worried because Angela Duckworth wrote this famous book on grit, right, which is all about how you should stick with stuff. And it's an amazing virtue, this kind of resilience, this ability never to quit. And here's Annie writing this book, saying, well, actually, quitting is also a virtue, because if you have a terrible hand, for example, whether you're a poker player, as she was, she was a very successful professional poker player who made millions of dollars playing poker, or you're an investor and you've made a lousy investment and you've suddenly realized that you were just wrong, which is something Mohnish does a lot, right? Mohnish's ruthless when he figures out that he's made a mistake, just gets it out of his portfolio immediately. So if you figured out that you were wrong and that you should quit, quitting is a virtue. Folding your hand is a virtue. And so she talks about this with Phil Tetlock and Phil, who I've never met, but who's written this Remarkable book, Super Forecasting, that actually admonished, gave me once said to her, the opposite of a great virtue is a virtue. And he said, the opposite of grit is quitting, which is also a virtue. And so then I was looking at the notes in the book, and I really like the fact that there was this kind of provenance for this idea that Phil wasn't the first person, by any means, who'd said this. So I think when I look deeper into those endnotes in Anna's book, it turns out that Thomas Mann, this great novelist, wrote an essay In, I think, 1929, right as the world was going into the Great Depression and the crash, he wrote an essay on Sigmund Freud. And he said, a great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth. And then it turns out the Nobel Prize winning physicist Niels Bohr also said profound truths are recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth. And this was so important to Niels Bohr that apparently he had a coat of arms that said in Latin that opposites are complementary. So this is kind of really interesting. And then I have a great teacher, Michael Berg, who's been on the podcast, amazing guy who has said recently, every important truth is paradoxical. And Howard Marks has said the same thing, right? When you talk about the paradox of risk, for example, how it's always talking about the paradoxes within the market, so how does this actually apply to us is a much more important question. But when you have an array of really, really smart people figuring out the same thing, you're like, okay, I've got to take this idea seriously, that it's not one thing that's true. The opposite is also often true. And so you think about this with investing. And if I go back to my conversation with Annie Duke on the podcast, I was talking to her about the stupidity of my investment in Alibaba, which I'd bought basically because I'd had this conversation with Charlie Munger and Lou Simpson, who both had been buying the stock. And Lou Simpson's explained to me why it's screamingly cheap. And Lou was one of the greatest investors of all time and had, I think, an even better record than Buffett when he was running Geico and was widely tipped to be Buffett's successor at that point. And so these were pretty amazing people. And they're telling me this is an incredible buy and it's incredibly cheap, and so I buy it. And then of course, it goes horribly wrong. And so I was talking to Annie Duke about all of the biases that were at play here, right? All of the things that screwed up my judgment, right? So things like authority bias, right? Where I listened to these guys who are really smart and I didn't actually do any due diligence. And then these things like sunk cost fallacy, right? Where I was already deeply committed, I was already in the losses, as Annie would put it. And so I'm sort of throwing good money off to bad. I'm not saying, okay, I should just quit, sell this thing that I don't understand and that's gone wrong and move on. And also, as she pointed out to me, I think there was another really important bias there, which was the bias where you kind of. You have to finally admit your mistake and take your loss. So I think it's your loss aversion, if I remember rightly, from Kahneman or one of those great behavioral psychologists. So one of the things that I said to Annie is, yeah, but I have this five year rule where if I buy something, whether it's a stock or a fund, I'm not allowed to sell it for five years. Because this is a great virtue, right? To be patient, to insist that I should, before I make any investment, I should really understand what I'm doing and I should commit to it. And it's long term. And I know that over the course of my lifetime as an investor, I'm going to do better if I'm patient rather than impatient and impetuous and trading. And so that's a real virtue, right? That kind of behavior. And Annie said to me, yeah, but you shouldn't hold everything for five years. She said, you can say, I'll hold for five years unless. And she said, you always need to have some unlesses. So what she said, that was incredibly helpful, I think, even though I ended up ignoring it in terms of my actual practice. What she said is, whenever you own something and it starts to go wrong, one of the things that saves you is that you need to have what she calls kill criteria. And so she said, you have to set these before you make the investment. And so you say, okay, if this happens, if these terrible things happen, I'm going to sell this investment. And each quarter maybe you set new kill criteria. So you're always gauging whether it's working out as you expect it. And so she said, look, the situation has changed. You didn't expect Jack Ma to leave. You didn't expect the Chinese government to turn on technology stocks and become kind of brutal in its regulation. The situation's changed. And so maybe this is one of the unlesses. And so I think that's a good example of this complexity where there's a virtue on one hand, which is patience, and there's a virtue on the other hand of saying yes, but when the situation changes, I have to revise my opinion. The other thing that she said that I think was an incredibly helpful practical tool where she said, you actually need to have a quitting coach. She was friends both with Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler, so two Nobel Prize winning economists who are great experts on how the brain screws us up and how our prejudices and biases screw us up. And she said that Kahneman had actually basically officially appointed Thaler to tell him when he was being an idiot and to point out when he was wrong about stuff. And so again, it's like it's a kind of practical tool to overcome our tendency to be blind and irrational. But then, I don't know, I still decided I don't want to do anything, I don't want to sell, because I just think I'm better off being patient on the whole. And also, as my position in Alibaba went down 60%, it became less and less important, and so it didn't really matter. And then I kind of like the fact that I've made this mistake that I can talk about in a way that's helpful to me to remind me of my own fallibility and stupidity and blindness, but also hopefully helpful to other people because it's a way of pointing out how we screw up and as Charlie would say, rubbing my nose in my mistakes. And so I haven't sold. And I talked to Tom Russo, one of the great long term investors about this a year or so ago, a couple of years ago, and he had trimmed his position in Alibaba and he said, look, I was wrong. I underestimated the risk from the Chinese government. And I said, yeah, I'm not selling because I have this five year rule. And he said, yeah, well, you'll probably do better than me. And I was looking yesterday and it's sort of suddenly surged in the last few weeks because the government, I guess, has become less ornery and difficult. And so I saw it, it hit a low of 67 in the last year and now has bounced back to about 110 or 117 yesterday. And so all of this stuff gets at the complexity of things, right? And so I think there are various lessons here and we should probably talk more in a bit about how this relates in other areas. Of life, because that's almost more important than how it affects us in investing. But I think one of the lessons is simply life is complicated. It's not simple, it's not this or that. And so you want to be less dogmatic and more humble and more open minded and accept the fact that humans are contradictory. Right. I mean, here's Tom Russo, great investor, great long term investor, telling me why he's sold and why he's probably wrong. And actually, in the first place, when Lou Simpson told me he had been buying, he said, yeah, I just bought it yesterday, so it'll probably go down 50% immediately. And it did. And I don't know, we're always dealing with uncertainty, we're always dealing with complexity. So it's a reminder to be more open minded, to be less dogmatic. And I, I think to have this idea also that often in life it's not an either or situation, it's a yes and it's yes. I want to be patient and stick with my decisions and push myself towards patience, and that'll help me over the course of a lifetime. And I also wanted to revise my views when I can see that I'm wrong and that something, you know, something dawned on me, a risk appeared that I hadn't actually recognized. And so this reminds me, I just interviewed Jason Zweig on the podcast yesterday. This will come out in a couple of weeks, possibly before our episode comes out, this episode that we're recording now, Stig. And he reminded me that there's a beautiful line in the Intelligent Investor, which he's just revised the book that Buffett always says is the greatest investment book ever written, where Ben Graham, who's a great classical scholar, was quoting Ovid, an ancient author, who said, you will go safest in the middle course. And he said, I think this principle holds good for investors. And so he was drawing on this ancient myth actually of, I think it was the son of the God. Apollo was going to drive his chariot to the sun or something like that. And the father, who is more experienced, says to the son, you know, don't go too far, son, you know, go the middle way. And the son, of course, ignores him and is, you know, torched and destroyed. So it's a reminder always to take the middle path. And even that is complicated because actually, if you think about the great investors, on the whole, they're pretty extreme on the whole. They're people who have tremendous confidence in their own beliefs, tremendous conviction that enables them to go against the crowd and think differently. From the crowd. And yet they also have the humility to guard against the possibility that they're wrong. And so one thing that I always remind myself of, I always come back to this great quote from the author F. Scott Fitzgerald, which I wrote down here because I tend to forget it. And he said the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. And one of the examples that F. Scott Fitzgerald gave is he said one should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless, yet be determined to make them otherwise. And I think that's really helpful, that reminder that you can, you, you can look at the state of the world and you can say, well, the environment is totally screwed and there are wars everywhere and you know, there's so much debt. And yet be determined to make things otherwise, to correct the situation, to, you know, you can say, well, I'm just one person, I'm kind of useless and I'm powerless. And it's like, yeah, and also really powerful and can affect an enormous amount of change. So both of these things. So the ability to hold two contradictory ideas, two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
- [15:30]
William Green
We probably all want to have rules to live by to some extent. And even those people who do not want to uphold rules create their own rules about not upholding other rules. And the world is just more complex. If I can put in a cheeky quote here, I would quote the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard who said, get married and you will regret it. Do not get married and you will also regret it. I don't know what to make of it. I don't know if it was a good thing that I came up with it now, but it is one of those things. It's complex. You can't be like, it's always better to marry. And you have those relationships, whether it's with a spouse or with a friend or whatever. It would be where you would say stay the course because it's tough, but you go through it and you're stronger on the other side. And it's so good that you, I think any duke would probably say, stick to itiveness. That's the word that comes to mind. But then you have the other one, which is there's a lot of toxic relationships out there and you actually need to distance yourself as quickly as possible and which is witness. It's not always hindsight 20 20. It's not always easy to tell.
- [16:39]
Nick Sleep
I Think it's a reminder that, as you would say, in an uncertain world, certainty is very dangerous, that having total certainty that you're right and that things are one way is really dangerous. And I think we have a natural need to simplify, and it's really important to simplify. But I think Munger used to quote Einstein saying, yeah, you should simplify as much as possible, but not too much. And so I think one of the things that's a mark of maturity, probably, is this realization of how little we can actually be certain about, and the fact that you do need some guiding principles, but you need to hold them fairly lightly. And so I think the world is set up. So there are all of these kind of contradictions and dualities, and there's a sort of dynamic tension that you have to play with. So I think about some of the great lessons that I've learned from the best investors that I've written about and talked about over the years, and I can always come up with the opposite, right? So think about, for example, the importance of concentration on a small handful of stocks where you know that they're likely to be mispriced. So this is the Munger approach of waiting patiently by the side of the stream like a spear fisherman, until you see a fat, juicy Sam swim by, and then you spear it. And when I spoke to Munger about this, he's like, yeah, well, that's great if your judgment is good and you're right, but if you're wrong, it's terrible to concentrate. And so we also tend to focus on the small number of people who've succeeded while concentrating in a small number of positions, whether it's a Li Lu or a Nick Sleep or a Buffett or a Joel Greenblatt. But at the same time, there's a great argument for diversification and safety. And there's a very important study that I talked about with Jason Zweig that I've been thinking a lot about recently. It's a study, I think it's called Shareholder Wealth Enhancement or some sexy name like that. And it's by Hendrik Bessembe or Bessembinder, I don't know how to pronounce it. And he studied something like 28,000 stocks from 1926 to 2022, so very long span of time, nearly a century. And he basically said that I think it was 3.4% of the total of all of these stocks. Something like 966 stocks basically accounted for the cumulative net gain of the entire US stock market. And he said that basically 25 stocks accounted for about a third of all of the wealth that the stock market created over that period. So you take a finding like that, that it's like a handful of super stocks that really make all the difference. Walmart, Amazon, Apple, Google, Alphabet, things like that. And you could say, okay, well, the odds of my actually owning those is pretty small if I'm going to have a concentrated portfolio of eight stocks or 10 or 12 stocks. And so maybe I should actually be really broadly diversified and own an index fund, because then at least I'll benefit from owning them. And as they become more and more important stocks, they'll become a bigger part of the index and I'll get to benefit from them. That's a very logical conclusion. Then you look at someone like Peter Keefe, a great investor who I had on the podcast, and he said, well, yeah, that's true, but my job is to find those stocks. My job is to find the 3.4% of the total, the 966 stocks that created all of the cumulative gain to the entire stock market. So you can interpret the same data both ways, and you can say, yes, it's an argument for diversification, or, yes, it's an argument for concentration. And so I think, because I naturally have, maybe as a journalist and as a writer, I see everything in shades of gray. I always see the opposite. I'm not like my brother, who's a litigator, he's a lawyer, and he's able to take one side of the case and argue it brilliantly, really aggressive, brilliant way. And he's been hugely successful doing it. I always see the contradictions in the shades of gray. And I think my portfolio probably reflects that. So I probably have a third of my family's investments in index funds. And I'm not recommending this to anyone else. I'm just saying this illustrates my own ambivalence about my ability to do anything. And then I have a few actively managed funds. And so I'm hedging in a way. I'm saying, yes, it's possible to beat the market. So I want to invest with a handful of people I trust who have very concentrated portfolios where they are looking for those great stocks, because I can see that concentration is a virtue. In a world where it's very hard to know much. You want to have a few opportunities to outperform and find a mispriced bet. And most of the time the market is more or less efficient, but sometimes it's not, and sometimes you get these fat, juicy salmons. And I want to position myself by aligning myself with people who understand that and understand that that's a great way to beat the market. But at the same time, I'm aware that I'm probably wrong and they probably will fail, and that it's really hard to beat the market after expenses and after taxes and that they'll have mistakes, too. And so I also index. And so I think in a way, you end up hopefully structuring your life so that it reflects your own personality in a kind of nicely aligned way. And so maybe something about my ability to both concentration and diversification of virtues. It's very consistent with my fascination with this quote that Annie Duke came up with about how the opposite of a great virtue is also a virtue.
- [22:29]
William Green
There's a lot of survivorship bias, and that bias comes through concentration one way or the other. It's so easy to look at someone like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos and say, this is what they've done. We should be doing the same thing. And then, of course, there are so many others who've tried doing the same thing. And perhaps it was luck, perhaps those gender was just Martin smarter, who knows?
- [22:53]
Nick Sleep
And probably both of those things are true. And so I think what we're talking about is living in a world where both of those things that are contradictory can be true.
- [23:02]
William Green
I know you were seeing Nick Sleep the other day. There was something unclazing along. I'm actually not completely sure, but if I can just tee it up for you. I don't know Nick's leap, but so many others who are listening to this have read his letters actually on your recommendation and have a lot of respect for the process. And the way they found those three stocks, I want to say was Amazon, Costco and Berkshire. And they also had other stocks, but due to their concentration and also just those stocks performed well, they became very significant. And then they just continue to compound for them. And I've heard a lot of different people, very, very smart people, talk about Nick Sleep and Zach, including in your wonderful book, William, and trying to come up with the reason why they were successful and as successful as they were. One of the challenges that I find with them, and this is going to sound a bit sour, that's not the intention at all. But we were talking about this whole thing about survivorship bias is that we've increasingly been asking the guests we have on the show to document track records. And we want to make sure that we present the best guests and I cannot find a relationship between what people say and their results. All the guests we have on the show say that they have good process and they want margin of safety and solid balance sheets. Like they're saying all the right things. The Nomad partner letters are obviously very, very insightful. That's not what I'm saying. But my point is just more like how to separate that. Nick and Zach clearly has an amazing process, not just because they say they have, but also because you can see it in results. How much of that is survivorship bias? How do you. You know them better than most, William? How do you see that?
- [24:53]
Nick Sleep
It's very complicated. It's very complicated, and we'll never know. I think one thing that's pretty clear to me from the amount of time that I spent with Nick, which is much more than I spent with Zach over the years. But Zach is absolutely brilliant as well, and a lovely guy. One thing that's clear is that they figured out something very important. They figured out an idea that's very important. So there are an array of concepts that I write about in that chapter of the book that I think quite a lot of people regard as the most important chapter. Certainly Mohnish did some concepts that I think are hugely important. Whether or not you think they account for the success of the fund or not, they're worth internalizing these concepts because they'll actually make a difference to you as an investor and in your life. And so one of the most important concepts is that they focused on things that last. They deferred gratification. And in a world that's extremely short term, where most people are focused on ephemeral information that has a very short shelf life, they were focused on things that were of more enduring importance. And so they ignored all of what Nick described as the wiggle guessing, I think was his term, where they just weren't interested in things like, you know, does this recovery look like a Nike swoosh? Or like this letter or that letter. They were asking these very fundamental questions, one of the most important of which was to say, what's the long term destination for this business? What is a good long term destination for this business? And they would do this, what they would call destination analysis. And they would work backwards from that. And they would say, what are the inputs that would get us to this desirable destination in 10, 15, 20 years? And is management doing things that will get us to that long term destination? So are they adding value to their shareholders, to their customers? Are they treating their employees well? Are they controlling costs? Are they operating in an ethical way? Are they treating everyone in their ecosystem well? And that way of thinking in a very short term world led them to these three companies that have idiosyncratic founders who were extremely focused or idiosyncratic managers because sometimes the founders also were replaced. But they had managements that thought incredibly long term in an incredibly short world. So they ended up with massive positions in Berkshire, Amazon and Costco, as you said. And when I asked Nick a couple of weeks ago if he'd found anything else like that, he kind of hadn't. I mean, all these years later he has an investment in asos, which hasn't turned out very well and which they're trying to turn around. I think he owns about 3% of the company and I think it'll, you know, what do I know? I'm guessing there's a lot of upside there, but it hasn't worked out well so far. And he hadn't bought anything else. There was nothing else that he found that could convince him would be as good as those three anchor positions that he owns, which basically all of his money is in, and more or less all of it. That's really interesting. So even for him, as this expert on what he calls scale economies, shared, right, Companies that build scale and as they do, they keep plowing back those benefits to their shareholders. And so it becomes this kind of righteous cycle where they kind of grow by sharing. Even he couldn't find another company that really did it to the same extent as Costco or Amazon or Berkshire. That's very revealing. So I don't know, it's difficult to tell exactly what it is that explains their success. And there can be a total disconnect. And we create stories, narratives about things that may or may not reflect reality. But I think they tapped into some very important truths. The ability to think long term, the ability to share the benefits. You know, for a company to share the benefits in a way that enables you to continue growing so that your success doesn't become an anchor, a weight around your neck, but actually helps you. Because as you get more and more revenues, you don't just keep all of that profit for yourself, you share it with your customers and so you make their life better and better. I think they tapped into some really important principles. So that, in a way, is what I've been focusing on. Because when I started writing the book, I thought, well, what happens if one of these people blows up? What happens if one of these people I celebrate turns out to be a disaster? And so I thought, okay, well, given that the investing world results are really lumpy and we live in an uncertain world, and it's likely that someone's going to really screw up terribly, let me focus on the ideas they embody that I think are really important, the insights that they embody that are really important. And then even if the person turns out not to be everything that I thought they were, the idea is still worth studying. And I think that's a really important lesson in life. Like often great teachings are taught by people who are pretty lousy or mediocre individuals, or people who turn out not to be nearly as good as you thought they were in many ways. And I remember having a struggle about this personally, where I was very conflicted about something because an institution that I really trusted was going through a terrible period and it raised all sorts of questions that were problematic. And Arnold Vandenberg, who's very wise, who I write about at the end of the book and I've had on the podcast a couple of times, said to me, it doesn't matter, William. He said, their teachings have really helped you. And he said, you really have to distinguish between the teacher and the teachings. And the teachings have been really helpful. And so, I don't know, I think you focus on the concepts, you focus on the lessons that help you, and so you don't have control over the results. I mean, the results. Some incredibly good investors who live their life in an honorable way and behave decently and treat their shareholders honestly and have good principles and a good framework for which to invest are still going to have terrible luck or turn out not to be as talented as they thought. So we don't have control over the outcome. But I think it's still worth studying the concepts, the ideas, the insights, and seeing whether they have enduring value.
- [31:18]
William Green
Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [31:21]
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- [34:49]
William Green
All right, back to the show. I've been speaking with a lot of people about your wonderful book and I like this sentence.
- [34:57]
Nick Sleep
I just like the way this sentence is beginning st Wherever it goes from here is good.
- [35:02]
William Green
Oh, I should probably give you start by giving you then the downside, something I struggled with over the past few days. So I ordered another 20 books because I gift them away to anyone who drops by. And you have been very, very kind and signing books. And so I get them in bulk. And now the Danish authorities have sent me a letter and they're like, you're an import company. It's like, I'm not an import company. Apparently the reason why I am is because I've been buying so many of your books that I've been gifting to other people that they want me to register like I'm an import company. Anyways, all that aside, whenever I speak with people about your book, they typically mention three things. They mention the first chapter with Mohnish. They mention chapter six with Nick and Zach. Sometimes they just say chapter six and then everyone's supposed to know what is in that chapter. And then they talk about Vandenberg. But I would say that more than half Vesu Men and Nagant Sagan. I think that's really interesting why that's the case. But I want to hear your thoughts on it. Have you experienced the same thing, William? And why is that? It really resonates with people.
- [36:15]
Nick Sleep
Yeah, it's an interesting question. I do see people connecting with other chapters very deeply. To me, the most important in a way is the epilogue, which is where I write about Arnold Vandenberg. I mean, that's a very important chapter to me. But the chapter about Nick and Zach is very important. That's the one that took me longest. I took about six months working on that, which is kind of insane. And I tried to get it as absolutely perfect as I could. I mean, really, I tried to make every word as perfect as I could. And there was a certain kind of madness in it. And partly I think it embodies some very deep principles both about investing and life. And so part of it is that it's about quality. It's about leading a high Quality Life. It's about structuring a partnership that's high quality. And so they were deeply influenced by Robert Persig and what he would call the metaphysics of quality. And so I would say that if you think of it in kind of David Hawkins kind of terms, and we've talked a lot about Power versus Force and other books of David Hawkins, and I know you're a little bit ambivalent about power versus Force, but in David Hawkins kind of terminology, it makes people go strong. That chapter, I think reading about Nick and Zach makes people go strong, and it's because they embody something that we know is deeply valuable. And when I. When I saw. And it's funny as I say that, my whole body came up in chills, which, as I've said before, sometimes makes me think, oh, that's my body telling me something is true. And when I ran this by Chris Begg, he said to me, oh, yeah, truth bumps. And so there's something about Nick and Zach that makes you go strong. And when I saw Nick a couple of weeks ago in. In England, I was asking him how Zach was doing, and he starts talking to me about what Zach's been doing in terms of his philanthropic stuff. And without wanting to go into too much detail, the amount of pride and joy that Nick took out of the fact that Zach has been quietly giving away most of his fortune anonymously. I mean, giving away most of his fortune, but all of it anonymously and doing these amazing things to change people's lives. It was kind of a really beautiful thing to see. It's like, I think Zach wanted to keep it quiet. You know, he's done it anonymously. And Nick can't help himself. He's so proud of his friend. And that's a really beautiful thing that makes you go strong. And likewise, when I was fact checking the book, I was going through the chapter in a great deal of detail with Nick and Zach, and there was a lot of stuff that I was kind of worried they might sort of panic and say, oh, my God, we were too candid about this. Zach was very candid about what happened to his father, where his father was basically cheated and ripped off by unscrupulous people. And it kind of, you know, it was part of the reason why he was so determined to be honorable in his own financial dealings is that he saw the unscrupulousness of these people who just totally fleeced his father and led his father basically to bankruptcy, if I remember correctly. And I don't know when I Think about Nick and Zach. Oh, yeah. So what I was going to say. So I was worried when I was fact checking that Zach was going to say, I've been too honest about this. Can you delete some of this stuff about my father? Because it's kind of embarrassing. I don't want to hurt my father. And in fact, if I remember correctly, the only thing in that whole chapter that Zach asked me to change was where he said I had basically written about what Nick's fortune was worth. At this point, I'd said whatever it was, a ten figure fortune or whatever. And maybe I'd been more precise, I can't remember. And Zach said, nick will never tell you this, but he'll be uncomfortable with you saying that and could you not mention it? And so the only change he wanted was something to protect his friend, who hadn't even said this out loud, but he knew his friend well enough to know that his friend would be embarrassed at portraying himself as a very rich guy in print. And there was something kind of really beautiful about that, I think when you read about Nick and Zach, this isn't to make out that they're angels and they're perfect and that everything is, you know, like, we're all flawed individuals, I'm sure. You know, I think it's dangerous to lionize anybody and assume that anybody is some kind of saint, but I think they're really wonderful people. And I said to Nick, do you guys still share the office on Kings Road in Chelsea? And he's like, yeah, yeah. And so they folded their fund years and years ago, and they still share the same office, they still work together. And so when you think of Nick saying to me, good behavior has a better shelf life. Their relationship is proof of that. These are two people who did the right thing in terms of the way they treated each other, the way they treated their shareholders, the way they focused on information that has a long shelf life instead of temporary, ephemeral, superficial nonsense. And they won. And so when I was writing the chapter, it seemed kind of moronic, like a huge risk for me to write about two unknown people who'd never given an interview basically, and had closed their fund. I mean, really, you're going to spend six months writing about that? In retrospect, it seems like a kind of masterstroke, but at the time, it felt hugely risky. But what I figured out when I was writing what we would call the nut graph, which is the sort of the kernel of a story, whether you're writing an article or a chapter. And you're saying this is what all comes down to. I think what I said is this is a morality tale in which the good guys win. And I think that makes people go strong. You're like, wait, I can behave in an honorable, decent, kind, logical, rational way and I'll win. That's amazing. I think that's one reason why it resonates deeply with people.
- [42:29]
William Green
I absolutely love that. And I love, whenever you're talking about good behavior, having a longer shelf life, I want to use that as a segue into talking about honesty and authenticity. This is something that I certainly struggle with, finding that right balance. And it's something we talked about quite a bit here on the quarterly call. So we have here, William, both on and off, I should say. And I wanted to talk about this from a different perspective today. And so I heard you on another podcast some time ago and where you were the guest, I should say, and you got asked, and I'm probably paraphrasing here, but the interview asks you if you ever have been interviewing someone you didn't like, whether it was your podcast or book or whatever it was. And I found that to be interesting for a number of reasons. I personally have gotten a question myself many times and I'm always uneasy about it. Sort of like, again, going back to this whole idea of good behavior, have a longer shelf life. And don't get me wrong, I've certainly interviewed and done business with people that I don't like and people who, you know, listeners listening to this podcast would know. And I can easily understand why someone would ask that question. But it's also a tricky question because you put it in the public space. And again, I don't know how you feel, how others feel, but I probably wouldn't like if someone in the public space said, you know, I've been interviewed 300 times and being interviewed by Stake was the worst experience I ever had. Like, I wouldn't like that. And so how can I like if I would say, oh, this investor is absolutely terrible person. Like, I wouldn't want that. And so, of course, and I should also say, like, on the record, but also being asked off the record many more times off the record. But the value investing community is very small. And I would imagine someone as prominent as you, William, if you said xyz, you didn't like, for whatever reason, even if you phrased it in a really, really nice way, it could still be out on social media or at least talked about in the value investing community pretty fast. And one of the things that you said to me whenever you joined tip was let's make sure we don't do anything that can't be on tomorrow's newspaper. It's sort of like the Buffett type test. So at the time we talked about if we're talking about stocks, we have to talk about it in a way. And with certain deadlines, people don't speculate that we prop up one stock to dump it or whatever. And I think that was so brilliant. So I know I'm tying a lot of different things into the same story here, but you also get asked by good people and you want to be as authentic and truthful as possible. And so you might get asked, should I invest with investor xyz? And whenever I get that question, I'm sure you've been getting that question many times too. Is that most likely I want to say no. And perhaps it's because they're not as good as an investor. Perhaps they're just better storytellers than they're investors. And sometimes it can be difficult to see through. Perhaps it's a brilliant investor, but you just don't want that person in your ecosystem. And so you're dealing with a person who asks you a question. You want to be respectful, you want to be truthful, but you also don't want to say anything bad about someone who isn't even there to defend themselves and before throw to you, because this could sound like this is one of the value investing community, very small niche thing. I think we consume out a lot more and say this is something we might all experience in our workplace or in our local football club or wherever we go. I don't think the dynamic is too different whenever you talk about other people. So how do you deal with that?
- [46:18]
Nick Sleep
William I've wrestled with this a great deal. I think one of the most helpful things that's been a guideline to me over the years later I haven't always applied it, is Buffett said something along the lines of praise by name, criticized by category. I'm almost certainly getting that wrong. But the principle is there that when you're saying something nice, you can name the individual and say they did this extraordinary thing, but you criticize by category. And I think if you look at my book, you'll see that there's one person who gets criticized pretty viciously in the book only, and that's me. I'm most brutal in talking about my own mistakes, my own self delusion, my own greed, my own envy, my own impatience, my own irrationality. And that was Very conscious. There are a couple of places where I mentioned somebody else doing something that I thought was tawdry, but I did it very carefully. I mean, even. There's a footnote where I talked about, I think it was, it was probably in actually the chapter about Nick and Zach where I was talking about the behavior of various investment banks during the financial crisis. Oh, before the financial. Oh, no, this is actually, I guess in 1999, 2000, where they were pumping up all sorts of terrible stocks that they would take public and would totally fleece their shareholders. And I mentioned a person who in court testimony, I think, had described various companies that they were taking public as crap, awful, and using worse swear words than that. And I said, I'm not saying this to single this person out. I'm saying this to illustrate just how careful we have to be about the incentives of Wall street to take advantage. The financial incentives for people, decent people in many cases. And likewise in one chapter where I talked about a firm trying to gather as many assets as possible, even though you know that that's probably going to hurt results, I'm like, these are not immoral or stupid people. They're people who understand that their finances depend on it, their kids education depends on it. You know, so I, I think that's one thing that I've taken pretty seriously is trying to praise by name, criticize by category, and if I make an exception to that rule, really think about it, really make sure there's a good, good enough reason for it. But then the truth is that often in private I'll badmouth someone, you know, famous investor who I've interviewed who I think is kind of like immoral or unethical or rapacious or something. And you get a certain burst of energy from badmouthing someone. And there's a logic to it. And I'm discussing it with friends who, you know, and I'm being provocative probably so I can get their view of it. But I always feel bad about it afterwards. I always feel like a little bit solid by my own behavior. It's not something I like in myself. And I was talking to someone earlier this week who was telling me I should interview a particular person on the podcast. And the person who suggested is someone I respect a great deal. And he's recommending a friend of his. But the person he's recommending, I know something about him, about the way that he treated his girlfriend and that it was kind of abusive. And even though I've heard that kind of secondhand, like I don't Think I want to interview that person. Like, even if he's really wise and really smart, I don't really want to interview him. I'll see, I'll have more of a think about and I'll try to figure out whether. Whether I got wrong information or I'm confused or something. But I take that stuff really seriously. Like when I hear something about a person that just in some ways makes me go weak, I'm like, I don't really want them in my ecosystem. I don't really want them on the podcast. There's a famous investor who's someone I've thought many times I want on the podcast. And I was scrolling through X or what was formerly known as Twitter recently, and I see this exchange where this guy with a huge following is basically berating someone who's totally unknown and is posting a perfectly sensible comment on something that he's written. And he calls her an idiot and stupid and kind of blasts her. And I just thought I really wanted to write. He wrote something like, you're stupid, you're just stupid. And I wanted to write, you're a bully, and then just block him. And he doesn't even know I exist, probably. And I resisted writing you're a bully because I'm like, I don't need to do that. I don't need to do it publicly. But I did block him. And he's kind of an important guy, someone whose opinions are things that I should be paying attention to. Really, really smart. But I don't really want him in my head. I don't want him renting space in my head. And I know maybe that was a mistake. Maybe you don't want to block people, maybe that's a form of closed mindedness. But I certainly don't want to give him space on the podcast if he's a bully and a thug like that. But I have a particular horror when it comes to bullying. I really don't like that. And when powerful people bully unpowerful people, I think that's particularly awful. So I don't know, I sort of trust my instincts with this stuff. If I want someone out of my ecosystem, yeah, I'm just going to steer clear of that person. I don't need him on the podcast. But then I try increasingly to hold my tongue. It would be very easy for me to say who it was and badmouth him. And it's like. What I often find is that when I have a partial view of someone, it turns out to be so biased and incomplete. And so I think that's also really important. It's like this guy who was a bully is also much else. That's great. And I had this conversation recently when I was in England. I went to this wonderful event at this beautiful estate called Goodwood where I got to hang out with people like Nick Sleep and the like and James Anderson, these fantastic investors. And there was a brilliant guy called JB Straubel there who I think is still on the board of Tesla and was a co founder of Tesla and is truly brilliant. He runs a thing called Redwood now and he's one of these great kind of green tech entrepreneurs. And he was absolutely crucial to the success of Tesla as one of the co founders. And someone said to me was the one person who Elon Musk never fired, never wanted to fire, because he was basically the smartest guy Musk ever met. He is a very brilliant guy. And I said to him one evening, I asked him these uncomfortable questions about Musk. And I felt slightly guilty for asking it, but I wanted to ask anyway. And in the provocative way that a journalist does, I said to him some of the things that I hold against Musk, my reservations about Musk. And I said to him, what frustrates you about people's views on Musk? What are we failing to understand? And I've never interviewed or met Musk, but I have friends who've interviewed him. And, and so I, you know, I've read a fair amount about him. And he said, well, he can be all of these things that you can say and many more, and why do you need to put him in a box? Like, why can't all of these contradictory things be true? You know, as someone said to me recently, this wasn't J.B. strab. Someone said, yeah, Musk is a bit of a bully, but he was also bullied himself when he was young. And you know, I think it's a reminder that people are complex. You know, there's that beautiful quote from the poet Walt Whitman who said, I contain multitudes. And so again, this gets at what we were talking about in the first place, about how the opposite of a great virtue is also a great virtue, that people are complicated. And so when you try to reduce someone to one thing, it's usually dumb that you can be simultaneously kind of monstrous in one way and really wonderful in another way. And sometimes your virtues are also flaws. Like being obsessively focused on excellence and quality and doing the best possible job as a writer or an investor may also mean that you neglect your family and Your friends. And so nothing is simple. It's all complicated. And so when I'm critical of someone, I'm constantly trying to remind myself I'm missing stuff. It's more complicated. Human nature is more complicated than that. And even when I'm blocking someone on social media, I'm probably wrong to be blocking them. I shouldn't shut so much out. And yet at the same time, I don't want a bully in my ecosystem like that. So I don't know. It's complicated.
- [55:50]
William Green
I remember, William, some time ago, I don't know, even years ago now, I was complaining to you that one of the reasons why I did not want to be on Twitter was because there was too much bitcoin content out there. And I felt it was very toxic for me, and I just didn't want that in my ecosystem. And I found it very ironic that the bitcoin crowd felt that the value investing community was like a cult. And I don't even know if you remember this, but I sort of expected some kind of, I don't know, sympathy, or at least that you were agreeable with to some extent. But you really turned the table and then historically said to me, well, the value investing community is like a cult. And I absolutely love that you said that, William. And then you went on and talk about how in an increasing secular world, perhaps the value investing fills some kind of need, where, yes, it's about making money, but it's also about how to live a life and you're in a scorecard and, you know, don't do things you don't want to see on the paper next day and whatnot. So just. Thank you for being so nuanced about that, William.
- [57:05]
Nick Sleep
Well, it's a very interesting idea that in part comes from Brian Lawrence, a friend of mine who also appeared on the podcast, who pointed out that when Charlie Munger died, there was this unbelievable outpouring of love and admiration for Charlie. And I think I said to Brian, I don't think it was on the podcast, I think I said to him privately, why do you think it is, like, what's going on here? And he talked about how in an age that's relatively secular, where a lot of people aren't going to church, aren't going to synagogue, aren't going to their mosque, they're relatively agnostic or atheistic. There was something about Munger where he. He almost filled that gap and he became like this kind of secular sage, I guess. And I think the value investing community, in some ways part of the appeal of it is that there's this sort of moral underpinning there, that there's a sense that there are these values that are embedded within value investing. It's not even an accident that it's called value investing. I mean, it's looking for true value, for intrinsic value in things that are often overlooked. And when I was working on Guy Speer's book with him, if I remember rightly, I think I called the last chapter or one of the last chapters the Quest for True Value or the Quest for True Values or something like that. And I think that was a moment this probably a decade ago where I realized, oh, this isn't just about value investing. It's actually about the search for value. It's about how do you live a valuable life, how do you operate in a value driven, honorable way. And when I was reading the new version of the Intelligent Investor that's about to come out, there's a 75th anniversary commemorative edition that Jason Zweig has updated, which why I interviewed him on the podcast the other day. I was very struck that when he was commenting on the postscript, he has comments on each chapter. And in the postscript he wrote something along the lines of, the advice in this book isn't just about what kind of investor you want to become, it's about the kind of person you want to become. And so here at the very root and foundation of value investing, Ben Graham writing the Intelligent Investor, it's about the kind of person you want to become. And when you look at the book, it is pretty moralistic in places. There's one place where I can't remember what the example was of all of this imprudent, dumb behavior that investors were exhibiting. But Graham literally writes, can such heedlessness go unpunished? There's something very moralistic about that. But he wasn't moralistic about it. I mean, he was sort of, he was sort of whimsical and poetic about it. He was a wonderful writer. But there is something kind of, you know, he's not like an Old Testament prophet, you know, like, you know, saying, you know, there's fire and brimstone or whatever, that's going to punish the heedless. But he was also aware that when people act in an imprudent, dumb, foolish way, they're likely to get their heads handed to them. And then it really struck me, there was something in the book, in Jason's commentary on it, where he said, do you want to spend the rest of your life trading like a maniac or do you want to treat investing as a way to achieve serenity? And that really struck me. I was like, oh, wait a second. The way you invest, it's, as Charlie would say, everything is one damn relatedness after another. So it reflects the kind of person you are. So are you investing in a way where you're just kind of gunning the engine and you're trying to make short term profits and you're trying to screw your partner as much as possible and screw your shareholders as much as possible, or are you treating investing as a way to achieve serenity and freedom and optionality in your life? And I think those are really interesting kind of moral, moral questions, but they're also very practical questions. You could say, I'm going to index or I'm going to give my money, I'm going to split my money between a couple of index funds and then a couple of funds run by people I trust who have low expenses and who I think are honorable and are long term and smart and have talents that I don't have. You could do that and say, that's going to allow me to focus on the things that I'm good at and that I care about most and I'm not going to spend thousands and thousands of hours doing something where I'm unlikely to beat the market and I do better to focus on helping other people and exploring what I'm best at. Or you could say, yeah, I'm unlikely to add any value and I'm unlikely to beat the market, but I really love this game. It's really fun. And so what Jason and Ben Graham would say is, okay, so then have 5% of your money in a kind of Mad money speculation account and keep it segregated, even keep it at a different institution and don't add to it, whatever happens. And you can gamble with that and that's an outlet, but the rest of your life operate in a more disciplined, patient way. And so I think at the heart of the Intelligent Investor, which, as Buffett has said, is, you know, the greatest investment book of all time, even though it's a little tired in parts. And Jason's done an amazing job updating it and making it even more relevant today, at the heart of it are these very important moral questions about how you want to live, what sort of person you want to be, whether you want to be honorable. And I think that's one of the reasons why, throughout the book, you find these quotes from philosophy and literature. I mean, Graham's favorite philosopher was Baruch Spinoza, who wrote a book called Ethics. And there's something where he quotes Spinoza and he says, all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. And I was thinking that, and I'm like, oh, wait a second. It's the metaphysics of quality. It's exactly what Nick and Zach were tapping into by reading Persig. And I'm sure that Persig, who is a philosopher, would have studied Spinoza and would have seen Spinoza talking about how all things excellent or as difficult as they are rare. So I don't know. I think even when you think about how cyclical the world is, how the market goes through these periods of what Ben Graham would call alternations of exhilaration and deep gloom, there's a sense that people get carried away. They become kind of greedy, overconfident, delusional about their own capabilities and the fact that trees, they believe, grow to the heavens. And so I think what someone like Graham is reminding you of is, no, try to remain prudent, try to remain humble. Try to understand that the world is cyclical. Try to understand that things are always uncertain, that you don't understand everything, that you're probably wrong about many things, that you believe that you can't predict the future, that the predictions about the future are kind of futile. And so take a middle way path. As we were saying before from Ovid, the middle path is slightly likelier to lead to a good result and not end up with you being flamed going up in flames like the son of Apollo as he tried to ride his chariot to the sun. So I don't know. All of this stuff really is related. There is a moral aspect of it. And so do we want to call it a cult? The value investing community? That's a little bit excessive and hyperbolic, but it's a little bit like Charlie liked to use the phrase, you'd be as popular as a skunk at a garden party. Or he said that my book would be, what do you say, about as welcome as rat poison for many people in the financial community, because, like, I'm pointing out, a different way of operating that's not really in their best interests. And so I think using. Using hyperbolic language is okay. It's fine to call it a cult. There is something about the value investing community that's a sort of secular religion in a way. And when we go to omaha every year, 40,000 people or 35,000 people or whatever it is, we're renewing our vows, we're reminding ourselves, oh, there's this way to Behave, that's different. And Guy Spear made this clear to me many, many years ago when I was quizzing him about owning Berksh Hathaway for so many years, because he's owned it since probably about 1999. And Mohnish would always criticize him for it and would be like, why don't you invest in something that's going to give you higher returns but also really admires the fact that Guy ignores stuff like that and just holds it. And part of Guy's reasoning is I want to have Berkshire in my portfolio because I want Warren and Charlie in my portfolio. I want them in my ecosystem to remind me of how to behave. And so I think there's a deep truth here that you want to bind yourself to people who operate in a moral, upstanding, righteous way that we aspire to operate in ourselves. And it slightly tilts the odds towards us behaving well ourselves because we all have both sides in us, right? We all have the capacity to be immoral, rapacious, put in a certain environment. I think we're all going to act in ways that we wouldn't admire that much. Some of us are more susceptible than others, but I don't think anyone is that pious and anyone is that holy. I'm slightly exaggerating, but I think we all have these negative capabilities. And so one reason why you want to surround yourself with people who behave well for the most part and say the right thing and mostly do the right thing and live up to those values is that it lends support and credibility to these things that you believe in. So when you're, when your own conviction wavers, you're like, no, no, it's okay to behave in a moral way. No, no, it's okay to treat your partner fairly. No, no, it's okay not to be paranoid and always assume that everyone's out to screw me. So I do think there's a positive aspect to being part of this value cult, but it comes with a risk which is that you can become over religious about it and you can close your mind and you can say, well, there's only one way to do it, there's only one way to invest, and only one way to be. And one of the beauties of someone like Bill Miller who has said to me before, there's something kind of overly religious about the value investing community. One of the beautiful things about Bill is that because he's so open minded, he's able to question things that other people in the value investing community taker's Gospel. And so the idea, for example, that you had to buy things cheap by certain measures below their intrinsic value. He was able to look at something like Amazon and say, well, no, there's tremendous value there. This back in 1999, 2000 or even earlier, there's tremendous value there that people aren't appreciating. Even though it's unprofitable and even though it seems to be losing a fortune, there's something that they're doing that's very extraordinary. And so he was able to be more expansive in the way he defined value investing. And it's funny, when I talked to Charlie about this, Charlie said something along the lines of, well, all successful investing is about buying more, getting more value than you're paying for, something along those lines. And he said, but there are many ways to do that. He said, you could do that by buying cheap, unloved stocks, but you could also do that by buying Amazon when it was unpopular. And I saw that as kind of a reference to whether I'm right or not. I saw it as almost a reference to Bill Miller that it's like, oh, Bill saw something that other people didn't see, that there was value that traditionally would have been ignored. So I think it's just a reminder that, yes, we want to be supported by the virtues of this cult. The fact that it reminds us of how to behave, how to operate principles that are timeless, but at the same time, don't close our minds and assume that there's only one way to Jerusalem. This is one of the things that Jason writes about in the book, is that I can't remember who it was he quoted. Oh, I think it was Max Heine, who was Michael Price's mentor, said, there are many paths to Jerusalem. And so this is one of the dangers of religiosity, both in investing and life, is that you assume there's only one path. And it's like, yep, there are great virtues in this path, but there are other paths.
- [70:16]
William Green
Yeah. And it's kind of interesting after you said that there is almost like a cult around the value investing community. I can't help but see some things in a slightly different light. And I found myself and others in the value investing community, to quote Buffett. And it's almost like some people sometimes would quote the Bible and say Matthew 17 or whatever they're saying. It's like seas candy, tangible, net Book Value 1972. It's almost like whenever you listen to it and use substitute different words, I think there's something to be said about that. And I can't help but wonder, especially for someone like Bill Miller, because he's so much an insider, but also have done things his own way. It's almost like. But then you are not one of us. And sort of like being asked those questions like, oh, are you no longer one of us? And it probably just speaks to the contrarian nature and how clear Bill Miller thinks about things that he's like, yes, but I can take the good things, and I would leave out some of the bad things. And I do think that. I think it's almost a. I'm about to say, rite of passage. Perhaps those words are perhaps too strong, But I certainly felt there was a period of my life whenever I found Buffett and Monger, which I almost make sound like when I found Jesus. Again, you can substitute different words. And I was thinking, I should do things a certain way, or what would Buffett do, what Jesus do? And then realize that eventually, just because Buffett or Mungo would do one thing, or they wouldn't be interested in that thing, it would still be okay for me to do that because it fit in the way that I was wired. And you mentioned before, and people probably have different opinions on that, but I think that was actually before we started recording, just to make sure that the listeners follow our conversation here. And we talked about the limitations of what we knew. And you talked about how Munger, as brilliant as he was, perhaps had cut himself off for certain things within spirituality and literature.
- [72:28]
Nick Sleep
Well, yeah. Part of my craziness that people don't know about, that I inflict on Stig every time we talk is I always read him, I think always. I always read him a couple of sentences or a paragraph from the Zohar, which is this ancient mystical book written in Aramaic before we start. And there are various reasons why I do this. I think it puts you in a different state in some way. It probably puts Stig in a state of annoyance and bafflement, but it puts me. It puts me in a better state. But so I randomly pick a passage. So I call this Zohar Roulette. And so the passage that I read ends with this sentence where it says, but we did not have the merit of seeing deeper into the secrets of wisdom and attaining greater knowledge. And I always think, you know, there are particular things that I'm shown when I open books randomly, which may or may not be true, but it feels meaningful to me. And so for me, this randomly chosen paragraph from the Zohar, which in Aramaic, it means the Book of Splendor is about our limitations, the fact that there are secrets of wisdom that we actually that aren't granted to us. And I once, after I first interviewed Charlie, I sent him a couple of books. And one of the books I sent him was by a great kabbalist called Rav Ashlak, Rav Yehuda Ashlag, and it's called the Wisdom of Truth. And I was very curious. I was like, well, here's a guy, Rav Ashlag, who kind of saw everything. And I wonder if Charlie, who's maybe the wisest man in the investing business, will connect to it. Because Charlie had talked about Maimonides, this great 12th century, I guess, rabbinical sage, being a hero of his, because Maimonides led a very engaged life. He was a very successful doctor to the royal family and stuff like that, I think in Egypt, if I remember correctly, but was also a great writer. And he wrote this very famous books, one of which had an amazing title. He wrote a book called the Guide for the Perplexed, I think it was, or either the Guide for the Perplexed or the Guide of the Perplexed, which is an amazing title. So I send this book to Charlie and he just sends me back a two word letter saying something like thank you, which made me think he's never going to read this. And he can't see that there are things that Rav Ashlag sees that are really deep truths. And maybe that channel just isn't open to Charlie or maybe I'm wrong and maybe I'm delusional and who knows? But I think these are important reminders that there are always limits to our knowledge. And this is something you see again and again in Ben Graham's writing. Just the sense that the world is a strange and complex place that it eludes attempts to categorize and be definitive. And so there's this beautiful thing that Charlie pointed out with Ben Graham himself, which is Ben made much of his fortune by investing in Geico with his partner when Geico was incredibly cheap. And he and his partner, who Jason Zweig says really was the one driving this deal, put Basically, I think 20% or something like that of their fund, the Graham Newman Corporation in Geico, when it was really not that cheap, but moderately priced. And so they made this massive concentrated bet in a high quality company that they held for something like 25 years. And that one bet, which I think it went up something like 200 times, outweighed all of the stuff that Graham had done really carefully. Buying cheap stocks using the methods of value investing that we all know is coming from Graham. So here's the great patron saint of value investing, of buying cheap stuff. And as Charlie pointed out, actually, the thing that made him most money was a concentrated bet on something that he then held for a tremendous amount of time. And Jason said that Graham was kind of a little bit sheepish about this. You know, he. He admitted it in the postscript to the Intelligent Investor. He was honest enough to say, yeah, you know, and this happened. And he basically said, was this one true stroke of genius or was it just a piece of luck? Who knows? And so I think that's an admission that things are complex and contradictory and they don't fit in great categories. Like, even the patron saint of value investing was in some way the patron saint of growth investing. And as Warren always points out, you know, growth and value are wedded at the hip. They're not really separate. And so we live in a world where we're constantly thinking dualistically. I think we have to. We have to say, well, you know, this is good, this is bad, this is moral, this is immoral, this is dumb. This is sensible. So we do this because it's useful and practical. But actually, once you start to look more deeply, you realize that there's a tremendous blurring of those categories. And so part of growing up is to realize, no, no, it's much more complicated than that. You think of your parents, or you think of your siblings, or you think of your closest friends, and you're like, well, are they this or are they that? Are they moral? Are they decent? Are they kind? Are they loving? Are they flawed? Are they. You know, and it's like, yeah, all of the above. And so am I, and so is everyone, you know, to different degrees. So it's difficult. You don't want to drive yourself crazy and become paralyzed by this sense of complexity because we need these simple rules and guidelines and operating principles so we can get by. But we also need to be honest about the fact that often they're wrong. Often they're kind of, you know, as Tom Gaynor would say, maybe they're directionally correct, but there are times where you don't necessarily want to be honest because you want to protect the other person's feelings. And so if they tell you, if they say, was my dinner any good? You say, yeah, it was really delicious, when actually it was really awful. Or, you know, they say, you know, I think I'm looking better. Right? And you're like, yeah, yeah, you look fantastic. And you know that they're sort of falling apart and they're, you know, so I don't know. Yeah, so truthfulness is a virtue and so is the kindness that enables you to protect the person's feelings. And so it's just, it's all complex, but you don't want to get paralyzed by it. So think again of that F. Scott Fitzgerald quote where he said, yeah, you need to be able to hold these contradictory ideas in your head. But he said, but you still need to function.
- [79:00]
William Green
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- [82:35]
William Green
All right, back to the show. I'm going to tell you a quick story about breakfast, which sounds like the worst segue you could possibly imagine, William. But I've started to adapt this mental model that is that no one is crazy, probably comes across as crazy in the first place. And whenever you really continue to ask the other person why they say what they say, why they do what they do, it's not that crazy. To you. It might be crazy with your implicit assumptions it might be crazy, but in their world it's not. So I was out going for a walk with a friend yesterday and I don't know how we came to talk about it, but we talked about breakfast at hotels for whatever reason. And I said to him, oh yeah, I never have breakfast at hotels. If I'm traveling alone, I would usually do that with my wife. But if I'm on the business, whatever, and I'm just by myself, I never go down for breakfast, even if it's included. And he was like, why? He was like. And I was like, yeah, I'm sitting in a room having some fruit or toast, whatever. And he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, that doesn't make any sense at all. You can have great breakfast or you can sit in your room not having great breakfast. That's the easiest decision ever. The rule is always great breakfast. And I said to him that in his world he probably likes great breakfast and he's a very sociable person. Yes, of course you would always choose the better breakfast. I come at this from a different angle every time I travel. I'm always a bit of a pain, I'm always a bit uncomfortable. I usually like going there seeing people, but I'm not a very sociable person. And if My day starts 8:00 around other people just having breakfast all by myself, I start getting stressed at 8 o'clock and I sort of get stressed from not waking up in front of my computer answering emails. So my equation is not great breakfast or bad breakfast. Perhaps it's me that crazy, but where I'm coming from, it's chill morning feeling that you're head on points by checking your email. So you make sure you're caught up or be stressed around other people and then carry that stress with you the rest of the day whenever you're actually supposed to be on and perform, which you're not supposed to do during breakfast. And so some of you might be thinking out there is stick talking about breakfast, like why you talk about breakfast. But my point of telling this story is more that you might disagree. But if you really ask into why people make the decisions and really understand where they're coming from with their values, most people are not crazy. And so when William is saying before our calls we would start with a so how roulette. And he jokes about that it might be it put him in the right set of mind and it put me in that a state of annoyance, which it doesn't I should say for the record, William, but that's also because we come at this from very different angles and it represents very different things for us and no one is crazy.
- [85:37]
Nick Sleep
I have one thought on that that I think is worth sharing, which I discussed with Guy Speer when I had him on the podcast last spring, I think. And we were talking a lot about the situation in Israel, but we were talking about how to talk to people who disagree with you, how to talk to people who view things from another perspective. And we were dealing with this very, very sensitive topic that means a lot to us and we're trying to do it in a sensitive and thoughtful way that would actually be helpful for people who are grappling with this in the same way that we were and people we loved who thought about things differently than we did. And one of the things that I think I quoted was an insight from David Brooks, the New York Times journalist who had been on a podcast with Andrew Sullivan. It's a podcast I really like, that I really recommend to people. You have to subscribe to it. I think it costs about $50 a year to get the full version. It's called Dishcast. And Sullivan is just a really smart person, and his politics and views are very different than mine. And I like the fact that I can listen to this guy who makes tremendous sense, who doesn't come from the same background as I do. And he was interviewing David Brooks, and David Brooks had been around the world, so talking to people who saw things differently to him. And the question that he basically used a lot, if I'm getting this close to right, that'll be good. Was, what experience, what personal experience led you to that belief? And so you're not saying you're an idiot. I don't understand why you would have this really foolish political belief. You're saying, what personal experience led you to that belief? And once you're open and then you shut up, and then you listen and you actually have the person explain, well, here's why I hate this politician, or here's why I love this politician, or here's why I'm ambivalent about this politician, you know, then you can start to learn. And I think it's. I think it's a respectful way to go about things, and it invites understanding rather than division and separation. And so if we started to unpack, I mean, if you, as a journalist, said to me, why are you so crazy about the Zohar? Like, why do you do that? Why do you have it on your desk when you write? Why do you have it on your desk when you do an interview? What led you. What personal experiences led you to that experience? You start to unpack it, and you're like, oh, I mean, I. Literally. One of the things that I fiddle with while we're talking is a rock from the ceiling of the cave in which the Zohar was written or revealed in the north of Israel. And the rock fell on my mother's head and from the ceiling of this tooth, you know, this cave that's thousands of thousands of years old. And I have the rock on. On top of the Zohar here. And for me, it's like, there's something kind of beautiful about the fact that, like, something literally fell on us from the ceiling that I've taken with me. So I have a piece of a piece of this room, this cave that is sort of the source of the most powerful spiritual teachings that I've studied, probably. That's strange. Life is just strange. And so I want to be rational and I want to explore ideas in a rational, thoughtful way. But I don't want to close off the side of myself that's open to stories and mysteries and intuition and all of these things that aren't so provable, aren't so amenable to just sort of straight, logical analysis. And it's one of the reasons why I think probably wrong is the wrong word. But I was going to say why Charlie was wrong not to read literature. I think it's a mistake to close yourself off, some of the greatest minds of all time, to what they wrote, where they're writing about human nature, writing about the way we live our lives. And. And I think part of Ben Graham's greatness was the fact that he was steeped in literature, that he was translating a Uruguayan novel from Spanish, that he spoke multiple languages and could read fluently in Latin and Greek and translate into Latin and Greek. And so it gave him this breadth and this expansiveness. But at the same time, by being narrower in certain ways, Munger was able actually to go really deep within nonfiction and to study science and mathematics and many other fields, engineering, all of these things that a novelist typically wouldn't study. So again, it's like two virtues, right? You go broad or you go narrow and deep. And both are good, right? You want to read very, very broadly and expose yourself to literature and philosophy and spirituality. And you also want to go really narrow and be like, yes, I'm just going to really understand this one subject. And both of those things are true and virtuous, and in some ways it's deciding what you're optimizing for. So I'm optimizing for this kind of mad breadth. So after my conversation with Jason Zweig yesterday about the intelligent investor, one of the things he was mentioning is, well, so Ben Graham's favorite philosopher was Spinoza. So I'm like, I haven't read much Spinoza at all. Like a few quotes here and there as far as I can remember. So this morning I ordered Spinoza's collected works and it was like 80 something dollars for this beautiful hardback edition. And it's like, it's kind of stupid. I'll probably dip into it. I might forget that I have it, but it might actually change my life or it might deeply enrich my life. And last night I ordered on my kindle this book, the Invention of Solitude, which is an autobiography, a memoir by this great novelist, Paul Auster. And I just started reading it last night, and I'm like, oh, this guy really writes. And I hadn't read a novel of his for maybe 30 years, where I read this beautiful novel called the Music of Chance, as Americans would say, the Music of Chance, which is all about randomness. And my friend John Gertner, who's a great writer who wrote this book on Bell Labs, the Idea Factory, said to me, we were talking about coincidences and synchronicity, and he's one of the great writers about science. He's a New York Times Magazine science reporter. He said to me, oh, you should really read Paul Auster's memoir, the Invention of Solitude, because it's full of all these strange synchronicities that he's talking about. And so I'm just constantly looking for new stuff that may or may not resonate deeply and may enrich my mind and my understanding of things. And I'm not doing it in a linear way, as you would, where you're like, I have to buy this book and then finish it and then move on to the next one. So both of those approaches are totally valid. Neither is better or worse. It's just you're always trying to decide, what am I optimizing for? Am I optimizing. So your breakfast anecdote is just a microcosm of this question. What are you optimizing for? I mean, for me, I just came back from three or four weeks of traveling in England. Boy, did I eat a lot of poached eggs in the morning. And I don't know, I kind of. I kind of enjoy that when I'm going away. And then I came back to New York, and I. I was like, I shouldn't have any more poached eggs. And so I ordered an omelet the other day, and they brought me an omelet with ham in it. And I'm vegetarian, and I don't eat pork, you know, because I'm Jewish, and it was Rosh Hashanah. And so here I am, sort of atoning for my sins, trying to start my new year, and I bite into a thing of ham. So again, it's like. It seems kind of meaningless, but for me, it has a much bigger meaning for me. I mean, I went later in the day to Michael Burke, who I mentioned before, and I'm like, you always say everything comes from the creator. And I'm like, so my ham this morning in My omelette, is that from the Creator? And he's like, yeah, everything that's from the Creator, too. Even the thing that violates your religious beliefs, your spiritual beliefs, beliefs, your traditions. That also is from the light of the Creator. And so I don't know, in anything that you do, there's this sort of narrow, superficial meaning to it. And there's this deeper meaning to it, if you look at it that way. So I don't know. Everything is a kind of microcosm of something bigger.
- [94:02]
William Green
I was speaking with my wife about this interview here a few days ago. And I said to her, the most exciting thing about this discussion here with William. Is going to be about how to travel with friends. And so I really want to make sure that we talk about that. And then my wife asked me, because we bought the first newspaper in, I don't know, 15 years. Like a physical newspaper. We're the generation that don't necessarily have done that. And she asked me if I wanted to read that. And I said, the opportunity costs are so high compared to these nonfiction books I can read. And then I thought to myself, it's probably a good thing that I speak with William soon. So he can set me straight. So as I become a little less structured. So I'm going to see if I can dive into this topic here about traveling with friends. And I come at this from different angles. It has been such a wonderful journey so far traveling with you, William, because we see. I think most people like to say that they're very different from their friends. But I also think that it's very difficult to be friends. If you don't have some shared values. And probably from the outside, they look like you're very similar. Such as business and such as life, I guess. But it has been absolutely wonderful to learn from you. And to continue to engage with you about life, about business and the intersection between the two. And that's what I really want to talk with you about here today. And I remember you said something to me, which I think it was even a quote for someone else. But I'm going to give you full credit, just so you know, William. And so don't travel with friends until you're 40. And only travel with friends after that. And obviously, that completely resonated with me. Because I could put a checkmark and say, now I'm 40. So in my normal, structured way, I took that snippet that I could put a checkmark to. Which was probably not the intention at all. But I've been thinking a lot about that recently because I've turned 40 and I felt that I've or I know I spent my 30s building tip. I started roughly more or less a month, two before or after. I don't even remember exactly when, but it's around the time I turned 30. And I feel like the time is right for me to engage in another, bigger project. Not that I'm leaving TIP by any means, I should say. Hopefully it's a project that will complement TIP in some way. But I wanted to talk a bit about this selflessly, and then I wanted to hear how you engage with that, because being in that mindset of traveling with Friends, I thought about this next venture I should start. I should do that with friends, which was a bit different than the way that TIP was started. I knew Preston, we became good friends, but we weren't close. Whenever we started tip, it was more like we didn't really know anyone else who interested in Warren Buffett. We want to write a book about Buffett, then we want to go to Omaha, and it was like, let's do a podcast. So it was a bit different. And one of the things that I'm looking into right now, just as a point of reference, not because that is the entire point of this conversation, but I'm looking into acquiring smaller private businesses in the uk And I'm really thinking about how to incorporate this idea of traveling with friends. And so I come at this from many different angles. One of them is that I have this strong sense of responsibility whenever it comes to the TIP team. And one of the things I really want to do by acquiring a number of different companies is not only to make money, which obviously would be very, very nice, but I also have this selfish mission of providing lifelong employment for good people at the TIP team. And I cover this to some extent with the idea that having a number of different businesses, especially if you team up with really, really good people, you can typically find good jobs for them. Not at any cost, not any, but very good people can usually create a position around them. And one thing I want to say is that I don't want this to sound like TIP by any means, is like a charity, but we don't really optimize for shareholder value. And there are many profitable projects that I just don't want to take on, partly because I think the team wouldn't enjoy them. And I like working with happy people. And if people are not happy, I'm not happy. So it's kind of selfish for me to say, let's not do it. And I'm really worried it's going to erode the TIP culture. And that being said, the idea of acquiring small private businesses, traveling with new friends is also a very different journey that I'm on right now with tip because to some extent, I am intrigued by the idea of how would it be actually to run a business where you optimize for shareholder value and then bring friends on that journey. And if you just allow me to go a bit out of tangent, like I haven't done that already, I find it a bit ironic how many people, including myself, for many years, especially if they come from a business background like I unfortunately am, but they would swear that the purpose of a company is to optimize for shareholder value. That's what you're taught. That's what Milton Friedman told us. But then they're also the first people to say, oh, this company is cutting costs. I'm not compensated well enough. We don't have great food in the cafeteria, whatever they're saying, which is two sides of the same coin of optimizing for shareholder value. Anyways, I can't help but notice that. But I think it's been an interesting experience so far traveling with friends. Most people I've talked to have actually said, don't travel with friends. Don't, don't, don't. The worst thing you can do whenever you start up a new business is to travel with friends. And I found that to be an interesting take. And perhaps they're right. I'm in the very early inning of this venture. I probably come from this naive perspective that succeeding with friends is just more fun. But I'm also not completely blind to the fact that a friendship can really sour if the partnership doesn't work out. And unless you have some kind of mentor, mentee type relationship. I always had the idea that friendships are best if there is some degree of equality. And it doesn't by any means have to be financial equality. As I'm saying this, even though this is an investing show, that's not my point. But there had to be some kind of equality in a friendship, at least for me. And one of the things that I found challenging now as I'm entering this new venture with friends, is that money becomes front and center, and then all of a sudden it might not be equal. And so let's say that I would invest a million dollars. Nice round number. But the million dollars represent one thing to me and something different to another person. So to me, a million dollars is definitely a very significant amount of money for Me, I would pay a lot of attention. And then at the same time, it wouldn't change my life if I lost a million dollars. I don't know if I come up like a complete jerk when, but it wouldn't. Then it brings this interesting dynamic where I might be bringing a friend on this journey who doesn't have a million dollars, and then would put in perhaps more time, whatever it might be. But that's sort of like, I feel to some extent that could mean that the person is sort of like working for me, which I kind of feel kind of odd because we're friends, right? And then there's the other thing, which is if you're going to buy businesses, a million dollars won't get you anywhere. So you have to team up with people with 10/ million dollars to spend to just acquire small businesses. But then it's also like, so am I then working for my friend who put in $15 million in this venture. Oh, but that also feels off because we're supposed to be friends. I can't really be working for friends. I want to be working with friends. And so I found that dynamic to be surprisingly challenging. But also it piques my interest in so many ways. And I wanted to ask you, William, how you have experienced it, because your friends with some of the wealthiest people, like, where it's certainly $1 million or $50 million is nothing to them or very, very little to them, that's one thing. But you're also significantly more financially successful than so many other people than your peers. So how do you travel with friends in business? I know that's a very big question, but I want to throw it over to you, William.
- [102:41]
Nick Sleep
Yeah. First of all, I'd say the origin of this idea actually is a conversation that I had with Chris Davis, who's on the board of Berkshire Hathaway and who's a very successful investor in his own right. And he's been mentored by Buffett Amonger and Bill Miller and is very close to Tom Gaynor, and he's very close to Mason Hawkins. I mean, he knows very well this sort of elite of great investors. And he's a lovely bloke, very thoughtful guy. And he said to me that he had given this advice to his kids recently where he said, I'm a little blurry on the number, on the actual age I used in giving this advice to my kids. But he said, either before you're 40 or possibly before you're 35, never do business with France. And then he said, after you're 35 or maybe 40, only do business with France. And he said, basically there's a turning point where you hit the age of about 35 or 40 or whatever age you want to choose. There's a turning point where you've built up enough insight and wisdom and also data about the people you know that you're able to make better judgments about who to avoid and who to work with and collaborate with. I think there's something really wise there that, and actually it's funny, I think about an investment that I made many years ago. This would be in my 30s with a really close friend who totally lied to me. And I'm not even sure that this friend realized that these things they were saying were lies. But I lost a fair amount of money because of the person's self delusion and lack of morality. And this was an extremely talented person, Very, very talented. And there were other very well known institutions investing at much higher price than me. So it could have worked out very well. And that really did wreck the relationship with this close friend of mine. But then another time I invested with a family member and it didn't work out. But the person had been very honest and you know, it was just bad luck. It was a perfectly good idea and it didn't work out for various reasons, but they lost money as well. They put in, you know, they were aligned and they were truthful the whole way through. And I still have a very good relationship with that person. It's not someone I'm close to, but there was something about the fact that they were, they were truthful and operated in good faith that meant, you know, I didn't, you know, I'm just like, well, so this happens sometimes things don't work out. Not every venture works out. That, that's fine. So I think that points out that there's definitely danger to investing with friends and relatives. But then I think about someone like Ed Thorpe, who I interviewed for my book, who, when I asked him, what's the secret of a happy and abundant life? Given that Ed Thorpe is not only one of the greatest investors of all time, but one of the greatest game players of all time. The guy who beat the casino at blackjack and baccarat and roulette and bona fide genius as a game player, I was like, so how do you stack the odds in your favor in life? And he said, well, who you spend your time with is probably the most important thing of all. So if that's the case, why would you not want to do business with people you like and admire and who are honest and talented and honorable. And I look at all of the great investment partnerships that lend credence that way of operating. Think of Nick Sleep and Case Zakaria, who we talked about before Nick and Zach. You think about Warren and Charlie, who clearly, you know, I mean, they were friends for 65 years, right? It's an extraordinary friendship that beat, you know, that built this company just with extraordinary amounts of value. And it was based on this kind of honorable partnership, right? And think about when I asked Charlie what the secret of a happy and successful life was, and he starts talking about relationships, and he said, look, we have a very simple model. If you, if you want to have a good partner, be a good partner. And so very profound practical advice on how to do business with friends. Be the thing that you want them to be. Be honorable, be trustworthy, be kind, be compassionate, be rational. Then you look at a partnership like Joel Greenblatt and Rob Goldstein, who've worked together for decades. And Joe, when I had him on the podcast, he talked about this idea of Charlie being the abominable no man for Warren, that Warren could trust Charlie to challenge his views. And he said Rob, his partner, respected him enough to do the work and challenge everything that Joel thought was true. And likewise, Joel respected Rob enough to do the work and challenge his ideas. And they were searching for truth in an honest way. And we're treating each other as equal partners and with great respect. Then you think about Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh. Again, a great partnership. And when I was fact checking my chapter about Howard Marks in Richer, Wiser, Happier, I think pretty much the only thing that Howard was really anxious for me to. To do in that chapter remedy, if I remember correctly, is he really wanted to make sure that I gave enough credit to Bruce Karsh, which is really interesting. Again, it's like the point I made before about Zach looking out for Nick when I was fact checking the chapter about him, here was Howard wanting to make sure that Bruce, his partner over decades, got equal credit. So you get a sense from those relationships of the power of aligning yourself with high quality people who wish you well, who are honest, who don't let their ego get the better of them, who treat the other one as a true partner, and who try to be a great partner to them. So I think that's really helpful. In practical terms, you want to know that you're aligning yourself with someone who is truly high quality and wants the best for you. And that's difficult. And so I think about when I've invested in funds. I mean, one thing I'll tell you is part of the lesson I learned from investing with that friend who kind of lied to me about this private company that I was investing in is just never to invest in private companies again. Just doesn't play to my skills. Why would I do that? I don't have any particular expertise. I didn't really want to do the due diligence and so I just stopped doing that. Basically have a rule that I hope I'll never violate, which is I'm just not going to invest in private companies again. Doesn't play to my strengths. I do think I have some advantage, perhaps some edge possibly in analyzing funds run by people who understand the value of concentrated value investing. That's kind of contrarian long term, more like the spear fisherman, the Munger esque spear fisherman waiting for those rare mispriced bets. I think that's an area where I understand the principles behind it. And I also, I know a lot of those people who do that. I know them personally. And so I'm able to triangulate as a journalist would and say to one person, tell me more about this other person, what do I need to know about them? And so I have a sense in that ecosystem, I think of who's good, who's honorable, and so I think I have some advantage there. So I've invested in a few funds over the years within that kind of specialty of concentrated long term value investing. And there, I think there's a very important, there's a very important clue in the fee structure. Right. So it's not just I'm aligned with people who have the same kind of beliefs and concepts about investing. I'm also looking to see, well, have they actually structured it in a way that favors them over me. And in each of these cases they're people who are perfectly happy to forego more profits for themselves by closing the fund when it's very small, by not marketing the fund, by being very honest and open in their, in their communication about their mistakes and having very reasonable fees. So they're only getting paid if they do well, basically. So I'm reasonably pragmatic there in looking to see whether it's structured in a way that's reasonable. And I think I'm just more equipped to do that than I was when I made investments in private companies where I'm just not equipped to do it. But then I'm also a little bit irrational about it in the sense that I'm I'm collecting funds and money managers who I want in my life. So in the same way that Guy Speer has Berkshire in his portfolio because he wants Buffett in his life, I also own Berkshire partly for that reason, to a great extent for that reason. But I also want people like Chris Beck, who I had on the podcast, or Josh Tarasoff or Guy. I want them in my lives. They're people I really like. I like to associate with them. And so it's a little bit irrational, but not entirely irrational because I think they're high quality people. I want to spend time with them, I like hanging out with them. I know them well enough that I think they're unlikely to do anything dishonest or dishonorable or recklessly stupid. But I'm also aware that I have great problem in my own wiring, which is that I tend to see the good in people and to look for the good in them. And that's maybe great as a human being and as a friend, but it's dangerous as an investor. And so I'm conscious of the fact that I might be blinded by, I guess Munger called it the liking tendency. I think it was one of one of the biases in his 25 Causes of Human Misjudgment essay. And so I also actually hedge against my own fallibility and blindness by owning several funds. And I'm very wary of not wanting to over diversify because then I basically just create an index fund with much higher expenses because I'm still going to trail the market but with much higher expenses. So I'm wary of that. And I think that's a problem that the funds I own are probably a little too similar because they're long only somewhat value oriented, but also buying high quality companies that can endure for many years. So there's a little bit too much correlation there. But then I think about what Sir John Templeton said to me, which is that you should have, a regular investor should probably have about five or six funds, but Templeton said they should be investing in different parts of the market so they're not too correlated. And I think that's a problem. When I interviewed Adam Shapiro on the podcast recently, one of the things he said to me, both on the podcast and off, I think was that it would be great if I had more exposure to things like private equity or private companies, venture capital that just weren't correlated in the same way. And that's just not really available to most people unless they're rich enough. And I, I don't have those sort of resources to be able to have so many different funds that aren't correlated. So I don't know. I'm. I'm slightly. I'm getting in bed with people who I trust. I'm on the road with people I trust who I think have the right principles. But I'm aware that I might be blinded. I'm hedging against my. My fallibility. I'm checking with other people to see where I might be wrong. So you're not really allowed to disclose what's in people's holdings, for example. But in one case, when I was in Vancouver going to the TED talks, I asked Mohnish to take a look at one of the portfolios. And I said, can you just look at this and tell me if you think this guy is any good? And he looked and he's like, yeah, yeah, you're in good hands. He's smart. It wouldn't be the same portfolio. Mohnish would, but it was a way of me. Of me just making sure, am I blind here? And likewise, I was thinking about doing another work project where I'm going to do some editing for someone, which I'm very resistant to doing because it's very easy for me to do too much of it. And I get kind of sidetracked away from my own thing. But I asked my wife yesterday, do you like this person? What do you think? And she's like, such a lovely person. Such a lovely person. And so that's really important to me. I'm using her judgment to check my own. So. And then, you know, one other just very simple piece of practical advice I would give when you're thinking about kind of whether you want to travel with friends, whether you want to do business with friends. Ray Dalio said something very helpful to me where he said, you're trying to surround yourself with people who have qualities that basically compensate for your own flaws. And so he said, if you can recognize your own flaws and deficiencies, that's really important because then you can compensate for them with the people you surround yourself with. So I just think as you're trying to figure out whether to partner with friends, you want to keep some of these things in mind, right? So Manga saying to have a good partner, be a good partner, using almost like journalistic techniques of triangulation to ask other people what you might be missing, hedging against your own fallibility so that you're not placing too many bets on your judgment, you know, not placing too much of your financial wellbeing. On this one bet and simultaneously making sure that the people you're surrounding yourself with have different and complementary talents to your own. And also, I think just people who are honest with you, people who, like Charlie for Warren or Bruce Karsh for Howard Marks or Rob Goldstein for Joel Greenblatt, who are going to tell you when you're wrong, who are going to tell you, I think you're missing this. I hope there's some practical advice in there that's helpful. But I have to admit, when I'm trying to decide whether to partner with someone and you and I ended up partnering with each other, it's very deeply intuitive for me. I mean, I'm really, I'm thinking, do I like this person? Do I trust this person? And then you go back to something that Tom Gaynor said to me, which is, I think this was on the podcast that I did with him where he said, you start by extending trust and extending love to the other person, and then you see if it's violated or honored. And so I think you start by, with any partner that you have, you behave well and then you see whether they're worthy of that behavior. And if they're not, as Charlie would say, you get toxic people out of your life very, very quickly. And it doesn't mean that you have to badmouth them or get in a lawsuit with them, but you just sort of, it is like, yeah, no, I don't really want to be in a partnership with this person. But I think Tom's point, which is very well taken, is that when you act in that way and you filter out the people who violate your trust and your generosity and your kindness quickly, you end up with this amazing ecosystem of trust based relationships that compound. And so I think you and I have seen over the last three years what the other one is like to deal with. And so there's nothing. I mean, everything I've seen in the way you've dealt with me has been like, oh, Stig's really lovely and really honorable guy. And so long as he continues to be really lovely and honorable guy, why would I not want to keep being partnered with him? And when we came up with the idea recently to do a richer, wiser, happier masterclass, we discussed the terms. I don't think we ever did anything in. I mean, you sent me an email at one point laying out the terms. Neither of us ever signed anything or anything like that. There's just, I mean, that's kind of reckless in some ways, but in a way it's like A test that both of us are seeing whether the other one will behave honorably.
- [119:19]
William Green
Yeah, that's a good point because I was actually going to send you, or I did send you an email the other day where I wanted to recap some of the things. From the first email, actually, I couldn't find it. And here I am priding myself of being very structured, but I think I spent like two minutes looking after it. And then I was thinking to myself, it doesn't matter. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter. I couldn't find it. I mean, I can probably find it if I spent more than two minutes. But the world doesn't run on contracts. It runs on trust. And very much in the spirit of the richer, wiser, happier masterclass that is the case. And I'm happy, I should say, for the record, that I passed your filter.
- [119:58]
Nick Sleep
Well, think of the thing that Nick Sleep and Kei Sicario said to me. They said that once you decide the quality is your filter, it simplifies so many decisions, so many things become really clear. So once they decided, okay, what's the quality move in this situation? Then you can look at so many things like, well, how am I going to charge my shareholders? How am I going to communicate with them when I make a mistake or when I'm uncertain about it? How am I going to treat my partner? How am I going to spend the money that I make if the venture goes well? Is it all for me to buy a yacht or a plane? Or am I going to share it with society to make society better while also making sure that my family is okay? And so I think that simple filter of wanting to make high quality moves is really helpful. And again, it's kind of contradictory, right, because we talked before about the complexity of life, how everything, the opposite of a virtue is also a virtue, how everything is so uncertain. But we do need these simple guiding principles and so to pick a few simple guiding principles that you're going to stick with. Like, what's the quality move here? I remember once a great spiritual teacher in London listening to a lecture of his, an Israeli guy, and he said, he said, you can really just ask, is this good for my soul or not? And I remember thinking, I've never written about that, but I remember thinking, wow, that's a good filter. Is this good for my soul or not? Think of destination analysis. What Nick and Zach were saying, does this move me closer to a good final destination? Whether it's for a company, a business, or when we keel over, are people going to remember us fondly. And so I think we need simple guiding principles whether we're going into a business venture or not. And so maybe one of the great shortcuts in life is to go to people like Buffett and Munger and see what they've written and see what they've said and have that be your default position. So then, like a Bill Miller, you have the open mindedness to question everything that they said, but your default position is, well, these guys are smarter and wiser than I am. Let me understand what they figured out. And then you look and you think, okay, well who did they study? Well, Charlie studied Ben Franklin. Let me go back and read Ben Franklin and see how he would have operated. And then at the same time be aware that he was flawed as well. I mean, I remember Charlie saying to me something about how Ben Franklin, I think he said it to me not, but maybe it was at the daily Journal meeting that I attended during the bit afterwards where we were all asking him questions, where Charlie said that Ben Franklin never made up with his son, who had different views than him. They remained alienated and estranged for the rest of their lives. And Charlie said, so I've done a better job than Ben did of letting go of my resentments. And so that's really interesting to me that Charlie was actually benchmarking himself against Ben Franklin because he couldn't find that many people who were as smart as he was. So he had to go into history and hang out with the eminent dead in order to see, well, so how should I behave? And then you go back and you see, well, Buffett wrote in his preface to the Intelligent Investor that nobody other than his father influenced him as much as Ben Graham. So you're like, okay, so let me figure out, what did Ben Graham do that was special? And Buffett talks about how generous spirited he was in sharing his ideas and his wisdom and his insights and his time. So you're like, okay, so I want to learn about generosity of spirit from Ben Graham. And then you're like, so where did Ben Graham learn? And you're like, oh, he learned from Baruch Spinoza, this great philosopher. So let me study that. So I don't know. I think with all of these things, it's a great shortcut to study what people who are wiser and smarter and older than us figured out.
- [124:02]
William Green
William, going back to this idea here of being friends working together, how is the dynamic different? And how do you handle, let's say, scenario A, where you are to some extent doing business with a friend, let's say Jason Sweig. But no money are changing hands whenever you're interviewing Jason, because Jason is, I would imagine, happy that the work gets out, that the 75 year book, now the Intelligent Investor comes out. You're happy you get to speak with Jason and do a brilliant interview. I'm sure it's going to be amazing. So it's sort of like that's a softball question. But that's the easy one because it's sort of like a win win. And then there's the other one where money exchange hands. Let's say that in this case, Jason would ask you to edit a book. This is a completely generic example. I don't know if that's ever been the case. But you would have to spend hundreds of hours doing hard work, probably fun work, but also really hard work. And you would need to be compensated, like in dollars. And it's not a win win for you to edit it. It's a win for you to get paid to edit it. But you still want to work with a friend because you want to spend time with good people. How are the dynamics different from scenario A to scenario B? And how do you handle that?
- [125:18]
Nick Sleep
I don't know. One thing I'll say when I invite people on the podcast, for example, when I wrote about people in the book, I'm not doing stuff just as a favor to anyone. If I'm inviting someone on the podcast, I have to believe that there's something very rich that the audience can learn that merits them spending two hours in this person's company or an hour and three quarters. And it's a big investment of my time. I spend days preparing usually, and that person fills my thoughts for days. So their ideas and insights have to be worth sharing. So the fact that they're a friend means I'm likely to know them and trust them and think that they have deep wisdom or practical insights that are valuable. But I have a sense of maybe slightly self righteous duty to the reader or listener that I think comes from my history as a journalist. I went to Columbia Journalism School, which is probably the best journalism school in the world, where you learn all about journalistic ethics and you're supposed to be serving the reader or listener, not yourself or your own business relationships or anything like that. And in some ways I'm in a very unusual position where since I became an author and a podcast host and the like, I've kind of crossed the line in interesting ways where I'm writing about or focusing on people who I tend to like or admire. That's not something that I could have done if I were a journalist at the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, where you're supposed to have more objectivity. It's a different approach. There's tremendous value to that sort of relatively objective. I don't think you ever are truly objective, but the relatively objective approach of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post. I mean, I remember when I was editing the Asian edition of Time, someone wrote a profile of a famous person who it turned out was a friend of hers. And I was like, you absolutely cannot do that. You can't. You know, it's totally verboten for a magazine like Time, or at least it was then. I can't speak for what it's like now. So having distance, journalistic distance is very, very important. I'm in a slightly unusual position because I'm trying to highlight certain ways of thinking and living and investing that I think are instructive. So I'm not objective. But at the same time, I do still have that deep sense that I'm serving the reader or listener. And I, and I'm not going to violate that by doing something where I would put a person I really like, but who I think is a terrible investor or who I really like but is immoral and rapacious or, you know, I'm not going to do that. And I, if a couple of months ago I had an opportunity to interview someone kind of famous on the podcast who had a new book coming out and I started to look up like his Wikipedia entries and stuff and I'm like, nah, I'm not, I'm not letting this person on the podcast. Like, you know, they're a famous kind of billionaire, if you can believe their figures about themselves because they've clearly lied about their wealth in the past and they've got all these non disclosure agreements with their ex wives that, you know, and I'm like, no, I'm not going there. I, you know, it would be good for the podcast. It would be good for, you know, to have this famous person on because I don't want to shine a spotlight on this person. So I just walked away from that. When it comes to editing or writing projects, you know, where you're collaborating with someone, I have a really simple rule which is that I only work with people I like. So I think in the past that wasn't always the case. There were times where I actually couldn't afford to walk away. And it's not Like I'm so rich or successful that I can do what I want and walk away from everything and be totally high minded. But I'm in a comfortable enough position and I live within my means enough that I'm, you know, and I'm wary enough of debt that hopefully I can just say no, I'm just not going there anymore. I'm not working with someone I dislike or someone who I think is kind of an ass or is unpleasant or who could make my life worse. And that's been tremendous. That's an amazing gift. And I think the freedom only to work with people you like and admire is a really wonderful thing. Because I feel like I got burned a few times over the years either in the magazine business or the book writing business where I worked with someone I didn't, you know, who I didn't feel behaved very well. They probably felt the same about me. But that's been a huge gift. Only work with people you like and admire.
- [130:12]
William Green
I don't think there are any better way to end the episode, William, yet. I should ask if you have any concluding remarks. I kind of felt I stole that one, but it was a wonderful way of ending the episode.
- [130:21]
Nick Sleep
We should let people recover and not listen to me droning on anymore. But I really enjoy chatting with you. It's always, it's always a real treat.
- [130:32]
William Green
Likewise. William, thank you so much for making yourself available for this wonderful conversation. Thank you. I really appreciate it.
- [130:38]
Nick Sleep
Thank you. Lovely chatting with you.
- [130:40]
Stig Broderson
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