← The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network
The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network
TIP687: The Art of Thoughtful Wealth Creation w/ William Green
01:59:05
Kyle Grieve is joined by co-host William Green, who explores topics like the art of cloning and the nuances required to do it effectively, and more.
Loading summary
Transcript32 lines
- [00:01]
Narrator
You're listening to tip.
- [00:03]
Kyle Grieve
Many listeners of the show, myself included, have gained a wealth of knowledge from William Green. I've learned just so much from his excellent book Richer, Wiser, Happier, and from listening to his exceptional interviews on tip. But I never had the opportunity to chat with him, so I invited him onto the show to discuss some of the primary lessons from his book and share some of the knowledge that he's accumulated over his years of journalism. After this episode ended, I got a chance to talk with William about the art of podcasting and he said something incredibly profound to me. Whenever he interviews people, he's intentional about getting to the essence of what they're trying to say. So even though he'll over prepare for an episode, he's also done just so much research and understands his guests at such a deep level that if an interesting point comes up that he thinks requires more depth, he's willing to explore those ideas even further. My first question in today's episode deals with the essence of what William was chasing when he wrote Richer, Wiser, Happier. As you'll hear, his primary focus was trying to make the best sense possible out of just an uncertain world. Now, while there's no definitive blueprint for achieving this, his years of interviewing extraordinary investors have taught him that success often comes down to tipping the odds in your favor. The essence of his excellent book was to learn strategies, principles, processes, insights, habits, and personality traits that outperformers have utilized to improve their odds of success. An absolutely invaluable approach in navigating life's uncertainties. Our conversation Explore topics like the art of cloning and the nuances that are required to do it effectively. We dove into contrarianism and if it's a trait that can be learned. We discussed Charlie Munger in a lot of detail, as well as some of the inner workings of his mind from which I think everyone can draw incredible insights from. We also addressed focus and noise and how investors can guide their thinking to improve awareness and also make better decisions. Then we spoke about simplicity. We spoke about quality. We spoke about optimism spectrums and the importance of being part of a close knit community if you're looking to sharpen your ability to thrive in an unpredictable world. This episode is just packed with value. Now let's dive into this week's conversation with William Green.
- [02:12]
Narrator
Since 2014 and through more than 180 million downloads, we've studied the financial markets and the books that influence self made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Now for your hosts, Kyle Grieve and William Green.
- [02:39]
William Green
Welcome to the Investors podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Grieve, and today we welcome very special guest, my co host, William Green, onto the show. William, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:48]
Kyle Grieve
Hey, Kyle, thanks so much for having me. This is a particular treat for me. It's the first time we've ever officially talked on air, although we talk a lot privately.
- [02:56]
William Green
That's right. Should be a blast. So I've had the pleasure here of getting to work with you now since the summertime. So I feel like I've gotten a lot more knowledgeable about, you know, just who you are from those experiences and not just from, you know, reading your book religiously. But William has some great news here. So his book Richer, Wiser, Happier is going to be released here in paperback form. And I thought it would be just good to get him on here, ask him a few questions that are related to the book, and maybe chat a little bit about some of the learnings that he's gotten from being part of these smaller communities over the years. So let's kick things off, William. So in the opening chapter of your book, you mentioned that investing kind of became your outlet to create wealth by just simply outthinking others, which I love. You also share that writing the book was a way to kind of uncover these principles, processes, insights, habits, and personality traits that help just these legendary investors that you studied achieve these incredibly impressive long term outperformances. So to start things off, if you had to choose just one overarching theme from that book, that's had kind of the biggest impact on your own journey to get richer, wiser and happier, what do you think it would be and.
- [03:57]
Kyle Grieve
Why it changes the whole time? I think I keep coming back and thinking like Howard Marks kept saying, this is the most important thing until he finally wrote a book where there were what sound like 15 or 20 most important things. So it does keep changing. But I wrote the book in a strange way where actually the final part that I wrote was the introduction. And so I'd written all of the chapters over almost five years. And then I came back to the introduction and then I had to say, okay, so here's what it all adds up to. Here's what it all means. And so what I figured out is really the overarching theme that I kind of uncovered through this very painful process of reporting and writing this thing over many years. I figured out the most important theme really is this idea that, okay, we live in a very uncertain world where we have no idea what the Future holds, we really have no idea. I mean, we can, we can pretend, we can listen to all of these soothsayers on Wall street and beyond and in the news who claim to know, but either they're deluding themselves or they're trying to delude us. But the reality is, despite that we are not powerless. There are things that we can do to stack the odds in our favor. And the reason you want to study the great investors is because they're extraordinarily pragmatic about probabilities, about thinking through this question of what choices can we make that will very subtly tilt the odds in our favor. And I think in some ways, the person who embodied this best for me was Ed Thorpe, who I wrote about in the introduction, who is just this extraordinary genius who I. I mean, he was sort of the ultimate game player right early in his life. He most famously figured out how to count cards and beat the casino at blackjack. Then he figures out how to beat the casino at roulette, which is outrageous, right? So he and. And this legendary partner of his, Claude Shannon, who's a. Was a famous scientist at Bell Labs and at mit, made a. The first wearable computer. And Ed went to the casino and he would actually activate this thing with the big toe in his shoe, and he could tell how fast the rotor wheel and the ball was spinning. And so it takes this game of chance, and he adds a little bit of knowledge, a little bit of information that gives him an edge. And that's such a sort of emblematic way to approach life, right? It's saying, I'm not going to play this game that's just random. But if I can give myself a slight advantage so that I can keep playing the game and over time the odds of success are going to work in my favor, then I'll do it. And so one of the things that I found curious was that you could find these approaches, these principles that worked in investing and markets, but they would also work in business and they would also work in life. And so when you start asking someone like Ed Thorpe, as I did over this three hour breakfast in a beautiful hotel in New York, when you start asking him, okay, so if you approached life as a game and you think about how do you stack the odds in your favor in life? Ed actually is incredibly thoughtful about that as well. And so over this amazing breakfast, he starts saying, well, okay, so your health, for example, is a really good emblem of what we're talking about here, this approach to life. He said, you're dealt certain Cards, right? Genetically, you're dealt certain cards. That's the hand you're given. But then you influence the outcome by the decisions you make about how to play that hand. So, for example, if you decide that you're going to exercise, or you decide that you're going to eat well, or you decide that you're going to get your annual checkup from your doctor, or you decide that you're going to make sure your vaccinations are up to date, you're increasing the odds of a happy outcome. Now you still actually don't know whether the outcome could be good. You know, my wife, right before I came on the interview, called me and she was walking down the street with our dog and this woman turned into her in a car and stopped literally like a couple of inches ahead of her as she was walking across the street. She didn't have control over that. That was in the hands of the driver who somehow turned recklessly and didn't look at her. But you increase your odds if you look carefully. If you. And not crossing the street when you're drunk or when you're. Luckily, my wife doesn't really drink more than about half a glass of wine a month. But you know what I mean. These decisions about our own behavior, they don't mean that everything is going to turn out well. But over time, if you behave stupidly, if you behave recklessly, it's going to come back and bite you in the butt. And if you behave sensibly, it's more likely to turn out well. And I think what I found really interesting was that you could see this way of playing the odds really in every area of the investor's life, right? You could see it in the type of information they digested. You could see it in their approach to being continuous learning machines, to use Charlie Munger's phrase to describe buffet. You could see it in the way they would set up this kind of quiet, thoughtful, long term lifestyle that enabled them to think more peacefully and more dispassionately about markets and odds. You could see it in their investment style, in the way that many of the great investors would just sit back very calmly and wait for moments of disruption when everyone else was very emotional and they could pounce with what Charlie would call gumption and take advantage of these rare mispriced bets. And so you'd see it in their habit formation, right? I mean, you'd see them decide, okay, so I don't just want to compound money. I'm going to, I'm going to benefit from compounding with good habits. So if I meditate, it's not going to make a huge difference on the day, perhaps, but over five years, 10 years, 20 years, if I meditate or if I exercise or if I'm kind to people, it's going to start compounding. So I think in a way, that's the master principle, that's the overarching principle. And I. I guess I spelled it out a little bit in, in the introduction, but I think it's easy to miss. I mean, I did a lot of cloning of other people's books, right? And I studied very carefully books by people like Malcolm Gladwell and Atul Gawande and Oliver Sacks. And I could see, okay, so here's someone like Gladwell who would have one great idea, like the Tipping Point or Blink or outliers. He would have one major theme, and then he would have all these variations on a theme. And my book was similar in a sense, except that there were so many themes. I mean, in a way, it's almost like nine books. It was, like, crazily ambitious. But I think the overarching theme, the thing that brings them all together, is the fact that if you behave in the way that's outlined in each of these chapters, you're subtly stacking the odds in your favor. And you still might be screwed because we live in such an uncertain world where terrible things happen to great people who are incredibly rational. But you're much more likely to succeed if you operate this way than if you don't.
- [11:01]
William Green
Speaking of cloning, those great authors you just spoke to, I want to talk about cloning because cloning is just one of my favorite metal models. And I really enjoyed how you put that specifically at the very beginning of your book. And I know you did that kind of intentionally so. There's a couple things I want to mention, though. I've heard Mohnish Pabrai on numerous times in his interviews say how he feels that humans have this kind of natural aversion to cloning. And so from my observations, when I look specifically at a lot of the value investors that you outline in the book, or just people that even aren't outlined in the book, it seems like a lot of them have succeeded specifically by cloning specific traits or strategies from people like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger and all those types. So I'd love to get your opinion. You know, what do you think the average person thinks about cloning, and is everyone capable of it, or do you think there's just a Small subset of people who are kind of, you know, have that survivorship bias, and we see them cloning people, but maybe make up a very, very small minority of the population.
- [12:00]
Kyle Grieve
I think cloning's an absolute superpower, but you have to understand how powerful it is. And so I think part of what happened to me is that because I'm old friends with Guy Spier, who's possibly Mohnish's closest friend, I got to know Mohnish pretty well over the years. And I would go to Omaha with him for the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. And when I wrote an earlier book called the Great Minds of Investing, I went out to Irvine, California to his office there and spent a lot of time with him there. And then one time we flew back on a private plane that Guy had rented from NetJet. So we were chatting about cloning and things like that on the flight back from Omaha to New York. And so then when I came to write this book, I knew that Mohnish was just extraordinarily thoughtful. He has this brilliant mind and he thought very deeply about this stuff that I think nobody else had really thought about. And so I decided right at the start, literally, actually before I even got a book deal, I went to India with Mohnish and spent five days with him crossing India. I mean, we did crazy stuff. We went to all of these, not to all, but a lot of schools that his foundation, his charitable foundation, Dakshana was funding. And we even shared a bunk bed in a train one night on an all night train ride from I think it was Mumbai to Kota or the other way around. And the reason I wanted to do all this and spend all of this time with Mohnish is that I realized he had figured out this one unbelievably powerful idea that I needed to focus on in the first chapter of the book, which is that you don't really need to be original, what you really need to do. I mean, it's great if you are original, it's fabulous. But if you're like most of us and you're just pretty smart, pretty talented, pretty diligent, it's much wiser to say, let me look at people who are smarter, more knowledgeable, older, more experienced, wiser, more successful, have figured out already and let me reverse engineer it really carefully and then replicate what works for me in their approach. And Mohnish's point is that almost nobody bothers to do that. Partly, I think, because they don't get that this is an important approach, but partly, I think because as he would put it, there is this kind of natural resistance, almost this sense that it's tawdry and vulgar and unoriginal, you know, to. To just say, oh, that works really well. Let me rip that off. And so I think that gives a tremendous advantage to anyone who actually understands both the power of the principle, but also, as Charlie would say, you know, Charlie, one of my favorite lines from Charlie was, take a simple idea and take it seriously. Take a good idea, take it seriously. And so when you encounter something like cloning, the key is actually the degree of fanaticism involved in the application. And so for me, this has become really a central principle in my life because I've seen it work so well. And so I'm applying it the whole time, and I use it in very small ways, right? Where something like my website, which I just updated this week after about three and a half years of meaning to update it and never doing it, I wanted to have William Green dot com, but it wasn't available. So I looked at Michael Lewis's website and various others, and I see, oh, Michael Lewiswrites.com. and so I just cloned that immediately. So I have William greenwrites.com or when you and I were trying to figure out what time to have the masterclass, I'm like, oh, well, one of my guests on the podcast, Michael Berg, he teaches this amazing monthly class for an international audience over, over Zoom. And he does it at 1pm Eastern Standard Time. And I'm like, I'll clone that. It'll probably work for people in London. It'll work for people in Toronto. So these very simple decisions, I clone. But then you can do it with investing, right? So you can say, okay, as Mohnish did, what are the underlying principles behind Warren and Charlie's success? So one of the things that Charlie said to me on a Zoom call that I had with him once is he said, look, all successful investing involves buying more than you're paying for, getting more prospects than you're paying for. And he said, look, there are different ways of doing that. He said, you could do it by buying Amazon, as Bill Miller did many, many years ago, when everyone thought in the value investing community that Amazon was vastly overpriced and was going to go bankrupt. And Bill was like, no, this has an advantage that people aren't seeing, and it'll become apparent one day. And so he found value that other people didn't see there. So there are different ways of doing it, but they're all reflections. They're Variations of that fundamental theme of buying. As Joel Greenblatt said to me, value an asset and buy it for less. Buy it for much less than it's worth. And that's the whole essence of investing. So I think you want to study what these people have figured out and then reverse engineer it. But then you want to do it in so many ways, right? You can model yourself on these people, so you can literally do things like what Li Lu, this great investor who managed part of Charlie's fortune, did, where, when I went to visit Li Lu in Pasadena once, he. He had in his office a bust of. Of Charlie as a physical reminder, I guess, to behave more rationally in the way that Charlie would. Guy Spier has the same bust in his office in. In Zurich and in his home in Zurich, in the library in his home. I have the same thing in my house, which Guy bought for me many years ago and sent to me. It was made in India, cast in India. And I discovered recently that I think Mohnish told me that he auctioned one recently for $26,000 for Dakshana. So my wife was less enthusiastic about getting rid of my statue of Charlie Munger when she heard that it might be worth $26,000. But these are physical reminders of certain characteristics that we want to emulate. So it's not just emulating their investing principles. It's looking at that sculpture and thinking, okay, at this bust, at this bronze bust of a balding, bespectacled, nonagenarian guy who passed away a year ago at 99. It's a way of. It's a kind of physical cue to remind myself to try to emulate the characteristics that Charlie embodied, like integrity, a sense of honor, a sense of decency, sense of rationality. You know, a huge emphasis on the power of positive sum relationships where nobody, you know, where he made sure that his suppliers got treated well, that his partners were treated well, everyone was treated decently. You know, he didn't believe in life as a zero sum game. And so, you know, once you start to actually think really seriously about cloning in all of these, these different ways, it. It radiates out in such a beautiful way. And you start to see, oh, wait a second. So Amazon, in a sense, was cloning cost cut. And, you know, this is one of the things that Nick Sleep and Casekaria figured out when they saw the prime membership thing for Amazon. They were like, oh, it's like the Costco membership card. And Nick Sleep said to me, it's like Costco on steroids. And so I think this, in a way, it's like a muscle that you're trying to build. It starts with an understanding of the power of this actual practice of cloning, understanding that it's something that we're resistant to, and understanding that it's been very beneficial in the past, whether it's to, I mean, look, Warren, Warren clearly cloned things from Ben Graham. I mean, he, he cloned things like the fee structure that Ben Graham had when Warren set up his limited partnerships in the 50s. He mimicked the fee structure that Ben Graham had, but then also he ended up diversifying much less than Ben Graham. Right. So I think this is a really key point. It's not about slavishly following what someone else does. I think to clone in an intelligent way, you want to take the principle, take the spirit of what the person has figured out or the company has figured out, and then you adapt it to suit your own temperament and your own talents and your own situation and circumstances. And so one of the things I ended up writing about in the conclusion to my chapter on Mohnish, which I was thinking about just this morning, is Mohnish became obsessed with truthfulness, and that's clearly really important. But he drew it from David Hawkins book Power vs. Force. And I started to think, well, yeah, so the idea of focusing relentlessly on one virtue is really important, but why should it be truthfulness? Why shouldn't it be kindness? Why shouldn't it be compassion? And so for me, kindness is probably more important than truthfulness. They're both pretty important. But I mean, when I interviewed Mohnish on my podcast and I pointed out that maybe he'd got the wrong principle from David Hawkins, he said something along the lines of, well, it's easier for me to be truthful than for me to be kind. Which is an incredibly candid, an interesting insight for me, maybe it's easier to be kind than truthful. I don't know. So maybe I, maybe I, I tilt towards that. I don't know, I'm not self aware enough to tell. But I, I think that's a really good example of something where you, you take the idea, the spirit of cloning, this, this principle of focusing intensely on one virtue, but then you adapt it. You ask yourself, well, am I Mohnish or do I have a different approach? I mean, for me to clone Mohnish's unbelievable concentration on 2, 3, 4, 5 stocks would be suicidal because I'm not as unemotional as Mohnish. I Remember once asking Mohnish about how he felt, how he dealt with the stress when his fund was down something like 67% in 2008. And he said, I don't feel stressed. And I said, really? You're serious? And he said, yeah. He said, my wife at the time didn't even know that we were going through this kind of crisis. She wasn't aware that there was any pressure. And he just told the truth to his shareholders. He said, it's not because of the market that we screwed up this much. It's because I made this dumb mistake and this dumb mistake and this dumb mistake, and almost nobody redeemed from the fund. And then he bounced back unbelievably, and it was all fine. So, I mean, that's great if you're totally unemotional and you can make these dispassionate bets on really cheap stuff. I am not totally unemotional. And so for me to clone, that would be really dumb. So, yeah, I mean, just to wrap up this idea, it's a superpower to clone. It's an unbelievable muscle to build. But you've got to make it true to who you are. You've got to make it suit your talents and your temperament. And you also, you don't need to clone everything from the person you're cloning. So you could say, well, you know, this great investor or that great investor is unbelievably honest and unbelievably smart and unbelievably thoughtful, but they don't play nicely with the other kids. And I work in a team, and so I want to clone somebody else when it comes to figuring out how to manage a team. I mean, Mohnish doesn't give a damn about, you know, team dynamics. He's just, you know, he's just not interested in working with a team. Neither is Warren, really. And so, you know, whereas I have a guest who I interviewed recently on an upcoming episode of my podcast, which a famous investor called Bill Priest, who is one of the Baron's roundtable members. And he just operates brilliantly in a team. He's just really amazing at operating in a team. So I would very carefully clone what he's figured out about teamwork and how to get the best out of people and how to. How to use the people in his team to challenge his own views. Mohnish feels like he doesn't want a team because then you have investing by committee and you can't think independently. So there are so many nuances to this. But you Know, this goes really deep. I mean, if you really study cloning, it just becomes something that you want to make a central tool in your life.
- [24:16]
William Green
Yeah, absolutely. And I know in the masterclass, you know, it gave me a lot of time to really think about stuff that I wanted to clone. So I went and went through and looked at, like, different characteristic traits that I want to clone from other people that I'm currently working on or maybe want to add in the future. And I think it's a really, really helpful thing for anyone to do because you'll find that there's some people that you highly respect already doing things that you want to do. And, you know, like Charlie Munger said, if you want to live a good life, deserve it. And I think just doing things that other people are already doing who have lived a good life. There you go. That's kind of your blueprint to live a good.
- [24:48]
Kyle Grieve
So did, did anything come out of. Out of that, specifically? Who did you decide to clone and what did you decide to clone? Like, are there any actual real breakthroughs in what you're doing?
- [24:57]
William Green
I think for me, it was a lot of just seeing what I'm already doing and maybe being a little bit more intentional about the specific things. You know, looking at people like Warren Buffett and I mean, him and Charlie, honestly, there's a lot of things that you can just kind of lump together and like, just like their ability to treat people kindly and like you said, like the win win thing, that's just. That's. That's been a huge kind of thing for me, that. A big learning and just showing that there's a different way to do business that I think a lot of people just, either they don't want to do it or they don't care about these win win relationships. But like, just to your point, there you were talking about Charlie and how he always had these win win type relationships. There was a little. It made me think of this point from. Damn right. Where so he had this initial partner in his partnership and things didn't end up going the way they both wanted, and they ended up separating ways. And basically, in order to make this guy, I guess, save face, they gave him a portion of the fees that they would make from the, from the partnership. And you know, he could have just said, no, you're out, but he did that because he knew that was going to be a win win for both him, the partnership, and for his friend that they parted ways with. So it's just little things like that. That was a really Big insight for me. And that's something that I'm trying to kind of melt Weld into my life as much as possible.
- [26:18]
Kyle Grieve
I actually think it goes back to that idea from Charlie of take a simple idea and take it seriously. If you just take that one idea and it becomes a guiding principle, it has a very profound effect because it's such a simplifying filter in so much of what you do. Because, I mean, I've talked about this before in my dealings with Stig, our partner at the Investors Podcast Network. We don't really seem to do anything in writing, in contracts. There's just this sort of assumption that we're going to take care of each other. And he has exactly the same policy with Preston. I'm sure he has the same thing with you. And that radiates out once you start to decide, oh, well, I'm actually not going to try to screw these people and get the best deal. I'm actually going to very consciously make sure they're okay and that the person on the other side of this deal would be happy. That's very powerful. Because the thing that I think Charlie figured out, because he was so rational, he was not sentimental about these things. He said to me at one point, he said, look, Mohnish is so mathematical and so logical that he said he knows that he's going to be richer and more successful if he treats people decently and honorably, if he's. If he's really ethical. And he said, people like me and Mohnish, we don't deserve much congratulation for being so ethical. We know that we're going to be richer and more successful because we're ethical. And so once you understand that, it has a very profound impact and it gives you permission to behave in a certain way. I was very struck a few months ago when I was in England. I met with Nick Sleep at an event and I asked him about something that he had learned from Charlie, where Charlie had said to him, I can only teach people what they already almost know. And I thought it was a beautiful insight. I'd never heard this before. And so I think we already almost know that we should behave in this honorable win win fashion. But there's a part of us that thinks, yeah, but maybe that's just woefully naive and I'm going to get screwed in this way and taken advantage of in this way. And what if I'm the naive one who acts that way and I get my head handed to me and then you watch TV and you See succession and billions and the like. And you see all of these rapacious businessmen doing unbelievably well. You know, I mean, there are so many examples, right? And so it takes an act of faith in a way to say, I'm not going to operate that way. I could operate that way and I'm not. And what happens, somewhat miraculously, in my experience from observing Charlie and Warren and Tom Gaynor and Tom Russo, all Mohnish, all guy spier, all of these people who operate that way, they draw incredible people into their lives. And these people also have that same mentality of win, win. So when you surround yourself with people who operate that way, your life becomes kind of magical because you're not always watching over your shoulder for someone to screw you. And it just becomes much easier. So I think this is one of the reasons why I love studying the great investors, is because they're not sentimentalists. I have a tendency to be sort of sentimental and. And mystical about all of these things, and they're, like, deeply pragmatic. Right. So when you say to when. When I think about Mohnish and I think about the amazing things that he's done for charity to lift tens of thousands of people out of poverty in. In India, you know, it's very easy for me to become sentimental about it. And, you know, I think of these beautiful sayings, like this saying from the Talmud about, you know, he who saves one life, saves the world. And I sort of think that's true. And Mohnish is like, nah, he's like, the world's kind of meaningless. And, you know, if you can just leave it a better place and do a good job with your kids and help people and, you know, that's good. The rest of it's just a game. And I don't know if he truly believes that. I think it's somewhat true to what he believes. Maybe it's totally true, but he's not being sentimental about it. He's. He's like, no, life will be better if I help a lot of people and it's just a game and let me figure out how to do it. So there's something just so deeply pragmatic about it. And then, you know, as Charlie would say, I observe what works and doesn't work and why. And so you observe what works in the. In. In these people's lives, and you try it in your own life. And then you say, huh, that's weird. I behaved honorably, and it had this beneficial effect. I had this one time with Mohnish I don't know if I ever told you this story where early on when my book came out, Mohnish was going to buy a huge number of copies as gifts. He's always incredibly generous about giving gifts of books. Every year I got my first copy of Poor Charles Almanac From Mohnish maybe 20 something years ago, and he decides he's going to buy lots of copies of my book. And so I put him in charge with this bulk seller. I had a publicist at the time who was trying to arrange for me to sell lots of copies by bulk. And Mohnish writes me and he says, is that the best price? And I look at it, I'm like, no, it's a crap price. Like, wait, why, why, why is this more expensive than it should be? And it turns out that it was going through a different bulk seller because they would be counted for the best seller list or something like that. I mean, there's all sorts of machinations of a bestseller list. And so I wrote back to him and I said, no, no, you would do better to buy it through this other seller and you'd get it for like, you know, a dollar or two less per copy. And it didn't occur to me to lie about it. I'm like, well, I've written a whole chapter about Mournish and about power versus force and telling the truth. I'm going to tell him the truth. And he writes back and he's like, oh, okay, that's absolutely fine. I'll buy it through the seller they want to sell it through. So he knowingly goes and buys it more expensively because the publicist had said that that would help me. And it was just a really interesting experiment to see this little microcosm of. Wait a second. So if I take this principle from David Hawkins of trying to be more truthful, it actually doesn't hurt me. It ends up weirdly with this honorable guy helping me. And so I think you just test these things out and you see, huh, these principles are pretty powerful. Let me do more of that. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [32:52]
Narrator
Buy low, sell high. It's easy to say, hard to do. For example, high interest rates are crushing the real estate market right now. Demand is dropping and prices are falling even for many of the best assets. It's no wonder. The Fundrise Flagship Fund plans to go on a buying spree, expanding its billion dollar real estate portfolio. Over the next few months. You can add the Fundrise Flagship Fund to your portfolio in just minutes with as little as $10 by visiting fundrise.com WSB that's F U N D R I S E.com W S B Carefully consider the investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses of the Fundrise Flagship fund before investing. This and other information can be found in the Fund's prospectus@fundrise.com flagship. This is a paid advertisement. Listen up folks. Time could be running out to lock in a historic yield@public.com the Federal Reserve just announced a big rate cut, and the plan is for more rate cuts this year and in 2025 as well. That's good news if you're looking to buy a home, but it might not be so good for the interest you earn on your cash. With public.com, you can lock in a 6% or higher yield with a bond account. So if you want to lock in a 6% or higher yield, you might want to act fast. And the good news is that it only takes a couple of minutes to sign up@public.com and once you lock in your yield, you can earn regular interest payments even as rates continue to decline. But hurry, because your yield is not locked in until you invest. Lock in a 6% or higher yield with a bond account only at public.com WSB that's public.com WSB brought to you by Public Investing member Finra Sipc. As of 9 26, 2024, the average annualized yield to worst across the bond account is greater than 6%. Yield to worst is not guaranteed. Not an investment recommendation. All investing involves risk. Visit public.com disclosures Bond account for more info. If you're a startup founder, finding product market fit is probably your number one priority. But to land bigger customers, you also need security compliance. And obtaining your SOC2 or ISO 27001 certification can open those big doors. But they take time and energy, pulling you away from building and shipping. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta is the all in one compliance solution, helping startups like yours get audit ready and build a strong security foundation quickly and painlessly. How Vanta automates the manual security tasks that slow you down, helping you streamline your audit. And the platform connects you with trusted VCSOs to build your program, auditors to get you through audits quickly, and a marketplace for essentials like pen testing. So whether you're closing your first deal or gearing up for growth, Vanta makes compliance easy. Join over 8,000 companies, including many Y Combinator and tech star startups who trust Vanta. Simplify compliance and get $1,000 off@vanta.com billionaires. That's V A N T A dot com billionaires.
- [36:13]
William Green
All right, back to the show. Let's continue riffing here on Charlie Munger here, seeing as we're going pretty hard on that. So your chapter that you had on avoiding foolishness, I think tied in really well with a lot of the lessons I learned from reading his book. Damn right. Which I'm sure you've read as well. And you know, I just found, I found it so fascinating that Charlie Munger's approach of just reducing standard stupidities was such a powerful edge for him in the market. I mean, it's such a, like, like you just said, you know, it's a simple idea, but he took it very seriously and I think he, he executed on that at such a high level. But you know, one of the most interesting parts, I think is his emphasis on avoiding self defeating emotions that you pointed out in your book. There was, you know, anger, resentment, self pity. And you know, he famously just said he doesn't do them. But you know, for us mere mortals who have emotions that are maybe harder to control, I'm interested in learning more about how you would suggest investors or just, you know, everyday people work on maybe defeating these more easily triggered emotions that kind of sabotage them from making optimal decisions.
- [37:19]
Kyle Grieve
Yeah, I don't think you ever defeat them. I think part of what, as I understand, I've worked on this a lot and I've talked to people like Daniel Goleman, who wrote this book on emotional intelligence and has become a friend. I've had him on the podcast, I think probably three times now. And he's an expert on meditation, but also on the brain. And he was a science writer for the New York Times for many years. Very remarkable guy. And he explained to me that it's not really about overcoming and defeating this stuff. He's like, you're still going to get anger, you're still going to get envy, you're still going to get anxiety, but be aware of it. And so I had this actually just on my, on my way to the office here where, where we're recording this. I was stuck behind a whole array of trucks and cars as they were sort of chopping down trees and stuff. And I was late as I always am. And so, so I was getting kind of frustrated and so I very consciously started to focus on how I felt. And I literally, I mean, I don't usually do this, but I literally found myself talking aloud in the car and saying okay, so where are you feeling the anger? Where are you feeling the frustration? And I was like, oh, okay, there's a little bit in the forehead. Like I feel my forehead tightening and oh, there's a little bit of pressure in my chest. Oh, what's happening in the back of my head? Oh, that's interesting. There's actually pressure in the back of my head. And then I'm like, what's happening with the breathing? I start to realize, oh, yeah, my breathing's getting a little constrained. And then I wasn't trying to change it. I. I relaxed a little bit, but I was actually really just focusing on observing it. And then a couple of minutes later I'm like, okay, so has it subsided? Is it gone or is there a little bit of a residue there? Yeah, maybe there's a little bit of a residue, but actually it's kind of gone. It's kind of gone. And then I see there's a car double parked. I'm having to go on the opposite side of the road to get around. And I'm like, oh, no, there's annoyance still. And so I. Sorry to be so granular and self referential about it. But it's literally, it's observing this stuff in your body. So it's not that it's not happening, it's that you're observing it. And then you're saying, because you're aware of it, maybe you can make more skillful decisions about what to do with it. One of my favorite examples in the investment world of this is from my friend Ken Shubenstein, who, after being a very successful venture capitalist and private equity guy, quit the investment business to become a neurologist. And I had sat in on Ken's class at Columbia business school where he taught the advanced investment research class, which is an amazing class. And I audited it one one year a few years ago while I was working on the book. And because Ken is such an expert on the brain, he's really thought through these questions of how you deal with emotion, how you prevent the emotion torpedoing your judgment. And so Ken would very consciously not make decisions when he was in various suboptimal states, right? So he would talk about when you're hungry, angry, lonely, tired, in pain or stressed. These are great preconditions for making lousy decisions. I remember telling someone this once and he said, what else is that? That's. That's all of my states. But so one of the things that Ken would do is as he found himself getting into those states, he would Very consciously slow things down. Because in, in the same way as I was saying in the car where I was asking myself, okay, has it subsided yet? There's this sort of peak of the emotion where you feel the anger or, you know, and sometimes when you're angry, you're really just like, possessed. It feels like you're almost demonically possessed. And you just kind of, you're like, I'm not gonna say this to my wife. And then 10 seconds later, you're like, oh, God, there I go again. I've just blown up this thing, and now I'm gonna be in the doghouse for two days because I couldn't control myself. I've got better at that over the years. But I, I, I still lost my temper the other day when I was struggling getting into New York City and terribly. And I parked terribly, and my wife's like, do you want to get out and I'll park for you? And just my poor little male ego just kind of, you know, it's so ridiculous because it's like literally my wife taught me to drive when I was 25, so there's no reason why I should particularly 32 years later or 31 years later have any pride about this. But I just was so irritated. So there, there are times where you're kind of taken over by it, but I think you're more likely to get back to normal if you're aware of what's going on. And sometimes in the moment where you're feeling kind of overtaken by anger, just to walk away, just to know nothing good is going to come of this. Let me just take myself out of this situation. Is very helpful. But when it's less fiery emotions like anxiety, which I have plenty of, I mean, I think that's why a lot of people. It's much less than it used to be. But I think that's why a lot of people end up meditating is initially because we have anxiety. And then you get in the deep end and you start to be like, no, no, this is way, way, way more profound. And the applications this are way deeper. But you know, for anxiety, when it's sort of lower key, it's just kind of a, you know, you know that you're not going to make great decisions because you're just worried. You're a little jumpy, you're a little angsty. Just to get back to a few key habits that you know are helpful is a really practical thing to do. And so what Ken Shubenstein said to me is, look, we know that there are four things that promote brain health and brain function. There are four habits that have been scientifically proven to help. So we know that meditation helps, we know that a good diet helps, we know that good sleep helps, and we know that exercise helps. And so when he was under a lot of stress during something like the 2008 period where his fund was getting killed, and because he didn't have a gate, lots of his shareholders were cashing out at the worst possible time when stocks were incredibly cheap and were using the money so they didn't have to redeem from other funds, that it erected a gate that stopped them getting out. And so it's just a terrible time for Ken. And so he very consciously got back to these basic habits. So even something as small as saying that, he started to make a point of eating more fish and more vegetables, more salad, and he stopped mashing up chocolate chip cookies in vanilla ice cream, which was a particular temptation for him. So just knowing that you want to simplify your lifestyle and get back to these basic positive habits that promote good decision making is very helpful. And what I found that I really cloned from Ken over the years is when I find that I'm getting overwhelmed because I just have too many things going on. I'm juggling too many projects. I really try to radically simplify my life, and sometimes in a kind of antisocial way. I literally didn't go with my family to Thanksgiving because they were going to Massachusetts, and I'm in New York, and I had so many deadlines, and I'm like, it's just going to push me over the edge. And in some ways, that contradicts everything that I always say about the importance having a balanced life and, you know, emphasizing the value of relationships and stuff. But yesterday, as I was driving my daughter into New York City, she said to me, you were totally right not to come on Thanksgiving. And she had sort of overwhelmed herself by overloading her system with too many things. And so knowing what an appropriate speed limit for yourself is in terms of the amount of complexity you take into your life is really, really important. And so those are a few very practical ways to deal with your emotions. The other thing I would say is look at this book that David Hawkins wrote called Letting Go. And look at chapter two of that, because it's just got this very powerful technique for dealing with emotions where you're. You're watching the emotion and you're seeing where it's showing up somatically where. Where it is in your body. But you're not trying to change it. And so this, I guess, is what I was trying to do in the car. And Hawkins point is that the thing that keeps the emotion going, these negative emotions is resistance. And when you have kind of radical non resistance to them, they sort of dissipate on their own because as we know from studying Buddhism and the like, everything is impermanent, everything changes. And so, or in Christianity, this too shall pass, right? It's going to pass. And so you want to just try to avoid doing anything incredibly stupid while under the influence of dumb emotions. And Charlie had, I think, an emotional advantage, a wiring advantage, that he didn't really feel these emotions. But when I said to him, how do you resist these emotions? He said, well, I just don't let them run. I don't even let them start. And he said, because I know they're stupid. And he said, I'm trying all day every day to be less stupid. And so the knowledge itself is helpful. So even knowing that something like self pity is actually self defeating and stupid, that it's going to hurt you, is very powerful. Or knowing that anger or a desire for vengeance is stupid is very helpful. And Charlie was very consciously looking at other people he could clone to figure this out. So I remember once at a Daily Journal meeting when he was chairman of the Daily Journal. I think this is back in about 2016, 2017, during the time after the meeting where a few of us sort of super fan disciples were milling around and asking him additional questions. Someone said to him, what would you ask Ben Franklin if you had dinner with Ben? And he said, I've had all my conversations with Ben. And so in his own head, he'd already been sort of talking to Ben about how to live. And he starts talking about how Ben Franklin never managed to overcome his resentment towards his son, who had very starkly different political views to him. And it really tore apart the relationship. And he said, so I've done a better job than Ben of letting go of resentment. I thought that was such a revealing comment that for someone like Charlie, who couldn't benchmark himself against many living people, he was benchmarking himself against the eminent dead. And he was very consciously saying, this giant Ben Franklin, who I absolutely revere, screwed up on this one front and he wrecked his relationship with his beloved son. And let me not do that because I know that resentment is stupid. What an amazing example that is.
- [48:10]
William Green
I wanted to move this. We were talking about cloning. I wanted to move this to an area that maybe is harder to Clone, and that's contrarianism. So I really liked your book because you, in your kind of chapter on contrarians, you talked about Sir John Templeton, who, I think, you know, he's probably one of the best examples of a contrarian that you could possibly get at in the. In the world of investing. And so, you know, he kind of made. He started his. His quest, you know, buying stocks that no one wanted during the Second World War or buying stocks overseas when Americans were just not going to do that. And so then you also added a really interesting point that Francois Rochon made, which was that he felt that some of the best investors were missing what he called the tribal gene. So, you know, you know, genes, some of them are turned off, some of them are turned off. And I guess in some people, hopefully, this tribal gene is turned off. And that offers some unique advantages. But I'm interested in learning from you since you've spoken with so many of these incredible investors over the years. Do you think contrarianism in these investors is a trait that they're able to learn over time? Are they able to mold their way into that? Or do you think that you're kind of born with it, and if that's the way you are, that's the way you are, and that's how you express it in various aspects of your life?
- [49:24]
Kyle Grieve
I suspect, like most things, it's a mix of nature and nurture. I remember Templeton saying to me that during his childhood, his parents never told him what to do. And he had. He'd once gone on. Gone on this trip, I guess it was a road trip, and he takes his family. He's given the map, I guess, and he's told that he's navigating, and he takes his family massively in the wrong direction. And his parents just never said anything. And then finally he figures out, oh, God, I've taken us in the wrong direction. And he said, that was such an amazing education to have to learn from your own mistakes. Similarly, I think Nick Sleep said to me once that he went to this posh boarding school in England, but all of the other kids were boarders and didn't leave. And he actually was a day boy because he lived nearby. And so he wasn't sleeping there at night. So he. He even had a job in a local pub the weekends. And so he said, I became very comfortable with not being part of the crowd. And it's possible that we're just creating narratives that prove our point. I always remember Howard Marks beginning a sentence when I interviewed him once saying in my myth of myself, and I loved that phrase, right? So I have this myth of myself that I think of myself as, you know, one of 10 Jews who went to Eton, this very posh English school, and a Jew with a birthmark at a school of 1300 really posh English boys. And so that's an amazing kind of circumstance in which you would become extremely independent minded. And I am extremely independent minded. I mean, I think that's one reason why I'm so drawn to, to the investors I write about is because, like me, there's some deeply subversive, independent, smart aleck aspect of them where they're figuring out how do I crack the code of the markets, how do I crack the code of how to live so that I don't have to take any orders from anybody and can just live the way I want to live. So in my myth of myself, that's become part of my identity. But is that really who I am or is it just, I mean, how much of it is in my DNA as a descendant of people? You know, my, my great grandfather who literally had to Flee as a 14 year old from, from Ukraine and Russia speaking no English, speaking only Yiddish, and going as a Bristol merchant to Cincinnati and almost starving to death and ending up in Glasgow, you know, and having a son there who became an eye surgeon, who was my grandfather, who then sent my father to really good schools and my father ends up becoming a judge. Then my dad sends me to really good schools. So in my myth of myself and my family, that sort of made me who I am. But I don't really know. I mean, some of it may just be wiring, some of it may be emotional. I mean, you, you look at a lot of the great investors and they're just emotionally wired, independent of their conditioning to be not team players, to be very independent spirited, to be very contrarian. And I remember Chris Davis, who's an incredibly thoughtful observer of this and was very close to Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett and Tom Gaynor and Bill Miller and his father and his grandfather were both great investors as well. So, I mean, nobody has observed great investors more closely and talks about them more eloquently than Chris. And Chris, I remember talking to me about his father, Shelby Davis, who's really great investor. And he said, he said, yeah, he was such a loner. He said he would just sort of sit in our house in Tuxedo, in Tuxedo park with like a stack of annual reports on the phone and he just, you know, it it just was digging up information all day long. And he said it was a very lonely existence. And he said that for a lot of the great investors, he said it was clear that when they were at school or university, they didn't really like team sports. They tended to like sports where it was just them. You know, maybe they were playing tennis or squash or something like that. You know, they weren't, they, they weren't in the lacrosse team or the football team or something like that. They weren't president of their class. They were loners. I think that's a very interesting observation. And so I think if there's a takeaway here, part of it is that we want to be self aware, right? We want to know how we're wired, what we're comfortable doing. I remember when Mohnish asked Warren early in his career if he could go work free for Warren. And Warren wrote back this very polite note saying, sorry, I just know that I operate best on my own. And you think of Ray Dalio, who I had on the podcast a couple of times, and Ray said to me, look, life is. Life is just about finding suitable paths, as he pronounced it. I would pronounce it paths, suitable paths based on a knowledge of your, your own character, your own nature and your own values. And I think, again, it's a very simple idea that's very profound. So, so you have to know how you're wired and then set yourself up to play games that suit your particular wiring. And so for someone like Mohnish, he's bizarrely well suited for this game where you just sit quietly in a room and you look through masses and masses of companies and you make very, very quick decisions about, well, this one looks rubbish, this one looks rubbish. This doesn't get through this filter. And then you get to a few that seem really interesting and then you get maniacally focused on doing deep dives. And once in a while you find something extraordinary. I remember him once writing to Guy Speer and he said, look, If I do 50 deep dives a year, every four years, a company like Raysas, which is this Turkish stock that you bought, will drop. I'll find one Raysas every four years. An extraordinary multi bagger. That's a very systematic way of thinking. If I do 200 deep dives really intensely with my big brain, sitting quietly in my room and taking a nap in the afternoons, as Mohnish does, and going to play racquetball and going cycling and stuff, and having no appointments and not really ever being prepared to meet With a prospective investor, eventually I'm going to find a few really great mispriced bets. And so Mohnish has just managed to set himself up in this really sort of slightly antisocial way which suits a guy who's slightly misanthropic. I mean, I love Mohnish. Mohnish is amazing company and funny and brilliant, but he's aware enough of his own nature to say, you know, I remember many years ago when he talked to me about his early career managing a tech consulting company and he's like, I'm just not interested in having all of these weepers coming to me complaining about their problems. And so that just doesn't play to his strengths. He's figured out how to operate in a way that plays to his strengths. I think for all of us, really understand whether you should be part of a team, whether you should be operating on your own, whether, whether you're good with systems and practices and, or whether, you know, you're non linear. And then I talked to Ray Dalio about this at some length. This idea of just finding, surrounding yourself with people who also complement you, who make up for where you're weak. So it all is basically built on self, self awareness, I think.
- [57:08]
William Green
So sticking with the theme here of self awareness, I want to talk a little bit about Howard Marks, who has been one of my biggest influences. He's obviously a person who's super aware and his book, excellent book. Two of his books are. He mentions this whole point about cycles and kind of not necessarily knowing where you're going to go, but being aware of where you are in that cycle. Who knows if it's going to go up or down, but just, just being aware, aware of where you are in that cycle. And I think to me, a lot of the things that I've learned about Howard Marks is the fact that you, you've already alluded to this, that we can't predict the future. Right. I mean he, he talks about that basically in his whole book as well. But there's always going to be people out there talking about predictions, whether that's, you know, the next quarter, a month from now or year, for a year from now, five years from now. So. But the fact is, if you look at some of the best investors, most of them, they're not really focused on that. And I think that's a really big insight. So from your experience with talking with a lot of them, I'd love to know how can the average person who unfortunately tends to be very focused on things that they shouldn't be, such as predictions and noise and macro environments and interest rates. How can you best kind of develop a level of awareness that helps you really focus on the things that are going to truly matter?
- [58:30]
Kyle Grieve
Yeah, I think some of it is just educating ourselves. So we know that Wall street is full of people who are trying to sell us on a dream that works well for them, but probably doesn't work well for us. And so to go into it not, I was going to say, not cynically, but skeptically, you can go into it pretty cynically. Go into it cynically and say, was it Charlie's phrase where he said, with advisors, especially mistrust advice, that's especially profitable for them? I'm slightly gobbling it, but you get the point. And so look at people's incentives. I mean, he, he, Charlie talked beautifully about incentive caused bias. If you look in his essays on the 24 or 25 causes of human misjudgment, this whole idea of incentive caused bias is incredibly powerful. So I think you have to look at all of these soothsayers who are trying to sell you on the idea that they know that they can tell where the market is going, or they can tell what short term moves in the market mean, or they can tell what's going to happen geopolitically or politically. And just look in your own life, look at the news and ask yourself, if I look with my own eyes, does this make sense? Does it make sense that it's predictable? When I look at the fact that we had no idea that Syria was going to lose its leader after 70 years, I mean, none of the experts predicted that. Right. There are so many complex interactions going on that everything is just wildly unpredictable. And so I think this is very liberating once you start to look and you start to see just how much is unpredictable, whether it's the market. I mean, think of, think of Howard saying to me, I think this in the chapter called Everything Changes that I wrote about Howard, when I went back and fact checked with him during the COVID pandemic, he said, look, this has become the biggest thing in our lives. Covid and most people were not even aware that it could happen, let alone that it would happen. And so for him, it was a reminder of the importance of humility. They're a reminder of the fact that we can't know the future. And yet there's this miraculous paradoxical thing which is once you actually accept that you don't know the future and that nobody does, and that the people selling on this nonsense are lying to you or themselves or both. It's very liberating because then you can focus on what you can control. And so then you can start to say, okay, let me prepare for an uncertain future. And so what does that mean to be prepared? As, as Howard would say, it's really critical not to overreach, right? So you need to make sure, but you don't have too much debt, you don't have too much leverage, that whatever happens in this uncertain world where nothing is knowable, where the future is unknown, that nothing is going to just absolutely tear apart your life. And so you don't want to have all of your assets in one country, all of your assets in one asset class, all of your assets in one bank, all of your assets within one brokerage firm. I think then you're really playing with a loaded gun. So you just want to say there are so many things that can happen in this strange world and in markets, eventually they will happen. And so think of, for example, home bias, which is one of these famous biases where people in their home country bet much more on stocks from that country. What would have happened if your country was Cuba? What happened to my mother in law's family? I mean, my wife's grandfather was a successful, very smart doctor in Vienna, and then the Nazis invaded and he had to flee and he ends up in Cuba, which also was not a place you particularly wanted to build your fortune over the next decade. But luckily he then moved to New York City eventually and it was okay. And so what if the market you're in now is Germany and the government is collapsing in Germany? And you know, you look at the UK where I'm from, and you know, I'm, I, I, I've been invested in Guy Spears aquarium fund for many, many years. Probably 24 or maybe nearly 25 years, probably. And so I look at his returns over 26 or 27 years since the start of the fund, and it'll always have the UK market and the S&P 500 and the MSCI and, you know, these different things that he can benchmark himself against the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It's stunning to see just how little the UK market has done over 26, 27 years. I mean, I think last time I checked it had averaged something like 3% a year, something like that. So if you were someone like me, or like my father or like my uncle or like my grandfather, who is inclined to invest in your home country, and your home country was England, you were in deep trouble and so just knowing that we live in an uncertain world where we have no idea whether the US Is permanently advantaged, which I would say in a world where everything is impermanent seems very unlikely, or whether this is just another pendulum that will eventually swing back, I think you'd be wise to hedge against the possibility that it's just another cycle, that it's just another pendulum. I think I spoke to Laura Garrett's a great international investor about this when I had her on the podcast, and there were some statistics we shared on that episode about just the periods in which emerging markets massively outperformed the US for many years. And then the pendulum would swing, right? Because something gets really cheap and the opportunity to become so compelling that it sort of turns, and eventually it becomes attractive enough that prices rise just when everyone has kind of capitulated and given up on it forever. And so I think you're just. Instead of. This is maybe one of the great insights from Howard, I think, is this idea of just preparing for uncertainty, never overreaching, and being aware that even though history doesn't tell us what's going to happen, it's kind of a pretty good guide to what could happen. The fact that cycles tend to be temporary, and sooner or later, the pendulum will swing. And yet, at the same time, Howard's very humble about this. And I remember a couple of times I interviewed him, he would talk about the Fang stocks, and he would say, well, I just. I'm very skeptical because I know that trees don't grow to the sky. And so, as a result, he was deeply ambivalent about things like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, and the like. And as a result, didn't benefit nearly as much as people who were much more reckless or saw something that he didn't see. And it's complicated. It reminds me of this comment. Howard once told me he had lunch with Charlie, and at the end of lunch, Charlie sort of stood up and said, anyone who thinks this is easy is stupid. It's not easy, right? I mean, Howard was hopelessly wrong in being so skeptical. Well, maybe he was right to be skeptical, but the outcome was totally different than he expected. And so it just gives you a sense of why we should be humble. If Howard, who's way smarter than I am, was so hopelessly wrong about the fangs, what do I know? And so I need to hedge against my own stupidity.
- [66:36]
William Green
So let's shift this and talk a little bit about simplicity. So you had a chapter in your book that was called Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication which is wonderful. And there was one lesson from Joel Greenblatt that really stuck out to me. It was this key insight that a strategy should be simple, logical and deeply believed in. I think that it just really stuck with me. And you know, it just, it makes so, so much sense because you have to have this kind of conviction because the market is going to punish you at some point in time. You, you have no idea when it's going to be, but it's going to be at some point. And you're, you're going to have times where you think that your strategy just, it doesn't work right. You're going to be challenged. But you know what a lot of people end up doing is they drastically change their strategy. And there's a lot of downsides to that because you're essentially going from something that you know and maybe has some track record of actually, you know, providing value in the past to going to something that you don't know. It's unknown. So I just kind of wanted to pose this question because let's say there's newer investors here that maybe invest started investing after the great financial crisis. You know, they haven't really been punished too much other than, you know, maybe, maybe the, the post Covid issues that we had. But even those types of people who maybe haven't experienced these gut wrenching moments when their conviction is tested. How do you think these people, to your point about Howard Marks and preparation, how do you think these people can prepare themselves to kind of handle these times and hopefully stick with their strategy that'll eventually work, but might not work for multiple years out?
- [68:05]
Kyle Grieve
It's such a good question and such a difficult one actually to deal with in practical terms because you don't really know how you're going to respond when everything goes haywire. And one, one thing I can see from having been through multiple periods where things went haywire is I've never sold in those periods. So I can see that I'm, I'm wired enough not to panic. I can see that I'm in, I think in every case I've bought more when I could. Probably not enough, but I, I bought more. So I sort of, I sort of know myself enough that I understand the principles, enough that at least even when I'm paralyzed by fear and uncertainty during these very intense periods, I don't panic into bailing out. So I think that self awareness, looking back at what you've done in the past is very helpful. But if you've never been through anything like that I mean, if you're relatively new, it's very hard to know. And so I think you have to kind of assume that, like most humans, you are going to be subject to these really intense emotions and ask yourself, if I were down 50%, would I really be able to add to my portfolio? Would I really be able to buy? Would I really understand well enough not to liquidate what I own? And it's very valuable to study history and to know what can happen. So Munger, I think, had four drawdowns of 50% in the course of his investing lifetime. And once he said, look, he said, if you don't have a 50% drawdown, it may be that you're not being aggressive enough. Munger was more aggressive than most of us and less emotional. I've had things be down. I had one fund that was down 46% in 2008. It was pretty painful because I lost my job at the same time. And so one of the things that really helped me was that I didn't have any debt. And so I was very conscious because I'd been a journalist for many years. I knew that the magazine business was always in this kind of slow disintegration that then suddenly turned into a collapse. And so I was like, well, let me at least not be the one who's caught swimming naked where lots of debt. And so I literally. I didn't own my own home. I rented a home, plenty of cash, and I have money in the stock market. I never really had much in the way of bonds because I always thought bonds were really boring. Although I think that's probably how Marx would argue that now the returns are attractive enough that you should definitely be thinking about owning some bonds. Maybe I own a little bit, but not much. And so the fact that I was not overexposed was hugely important because then my stock portfolio got really slammed during the financial crisis. But what I hadn't realized is, oh, I'm going to lose my job at the same time as my stock portfolio gets really slammed. And so I think one of the things you want to ask yourself is, if there were a perfect storm and two or three or four things were to happen, what would I do? And I think of someone like Bill Miller, who I've interviewed an enormous man over the last 25 years. Bill, during the financial crisis, really had a perfect storm where, you know, he got divorced. So he lost half his money in the divorce. He was on margin, and he made an analytical mistake. And it was amplified by the fact that he always loves Debt. And, you know, Bill is genius and it's an amazing investor and it worked out fine. And he has a tolerance for risk that is significantly higher than the average humanoid. So he was fine and is now back to being a multibillionaire. So good, good luck to him. But I, you know, he even, he said to me, look, I, I'm glad that I didn't have so much leverage, that it ruined me and that I'm glad that I was able to keep the emotional strength that I didn't curl up like a tortoise in its shell, but actually continued to buy stocks in the midst of that mayhem. And he sold his yacht during that time to buy stocks. I mean, you know, I mean, he didn't sell his plane, but he did sell his yacht. So I, I don't know. This is a slightly long winded way of saying. I, I think, I think you have to really consider how emotionally vulnerable you might be and how bad things could get if multiple things happen. And you want to be aware that times of great profit tend to make us complacent. And so understanding that things are cyclical means that during the good times, you should very consciously shore up your position. And so one of the things that I did in the decade or so after the global financial crisis is I thank God it was a good decade in the end for me, though, it felt pretty rough at the time, but I bought a home with not a huge amount of debt, and I bought a car with a tiny amount of debt, and now I have no debt on either of my cars, you know, so I very consciously, I have a fair amount of cash, and I very consciously reduced my risk during the good times. I still think I'm probably overexposed to the stock market, probably overexposed to the U.S. but I think if there were a 50% drawdown, I wouldn't be a forced seller. So you want to make sure you're never going to be a forced seller. And so one of the things that Howard said to me, that I think I wrote about in that chapter, everything Changes is he said, you need to be aware of your own emotional vulnerability so that you're not going to panic out of the market. And so, so you're sort of looking at all of these forms of fragility, your recurring financial obligations, right? You don't want to, you don't want to get a really expensive office during the good times, that's then going to be a recurring expense. You don't want to load yourself up with debt on your cars and your homes and your holiday home during the good times on the assumption that it's always going to be good because we live in a cyclical world where it can really go wrong. It's quite hard if you're temperamentally just the sort of bullish optimist. I happen to be temperamentally more pessimistic and more bearish. I think that's probably one reason why I became a writer and not a hedge fund manager or venture capitalist or something. But I think it also is probably a product of that long history of being Jewish and being from a family that had to flee. There was always a sense of very viscerally in my DNA there's a sense things can go badly wrong. Let me prepare for it. And so I don't know, I think you don't want to be so pessimistic that you don't invest. I mean, I still love the stock market. I'm still heavily invested in the stock market. But you just want to prepare yourself for turmoil. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [75:34]
Narrator
Heads up folks. Interest rates are falling, but you can still lock in a 6% or higher yield with a bond account@public.com that's a pretty big deal because when rates drop, so can the interest you earn on your investment. A bond account allows you to lock in a 6% or higher yield with a diversified portfolio of high yield and investment grade corporate bonds. So while other people are watching their returns shrink, you can sit back with regular interest payments. But you might want to act fast because your yield is not locked in until you invest. The good news is that it only takes a couple of minutes to sign up at public.com lock in a 6% or higher yield with a bond account only at public.com WSB that's public.com WSB brought to you by Public Investing member Finra Sipc. As of 9 26, 2024, the average annualized yield to worst across the bond account is greater than 6%. Yield to worst is not guaranteed. Not an investment recommendation. All investing involves risk. Visit public.com disclosures Bond account for more info. If you're a startup founder, finding product market fit is probably your number one priority. But to land bigger customers, you also need security compliance. And obtaining your SOC2 or ISO 27001 certification can open those big doors. But they take time and energy pulling you away from building and shipping. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta is the all in one compliance solution, helping startups like yours. Get audit ready and build a strong security foundation quickly and painlessly. How Vanta automates the manual security tasks that slow you down, helping you streamline your audit. And the platform connects you with trusted VCSOs to build your program, auditors to get you through audits quickly, and a marketplace for essentials like pen testing. So whether you're closing your first deal or gearing up for growth, Vanta makes compliance easy. Join over 8,000 companies, including many Y Combinator and tech star startups who trust Vancouver. Vanta Simplify compliance and get $1,000 off@vanta.com billionaires that's V A N T A.com billionaires buy low, sell high it's easy to say, hard to do. For example, high interest rates are crushing the real estate market right now. Demand is dropping and prices are falling even for many of the best assets. It's no wonder the Fundrise Flagship Fund plans to go on a buying spree, expanding its billion dollar real estate portfolio over the next few months. You can add the Fundrise Flagship Fund to your portfolio in just minutes with as little as $10 by visiting fundrise.com WSB that's f u N-R-I s e.com WSB carefully consider the investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses of the Fundrise Flagship Fund before investing. This and other information can be found in the Fund's prospectus@fundrise.com flagship. This is a paid advertisement.
- [78:49]
William Green
All right, back to the show. So let's shift this to one of the most popular chapters in your book. And the reason I'm saying this is because part of the Richer, Wiser, Happier masterclass that we put on. One of my questions was what were some of your biggest takeaways from Richer, Wiser, Happier? And I got an overwhelmingly lot of people that said that it was the chapter about quality that covered Nick Sleep in case Akaria so I wanted to go just a little bit off off that though and just talk a little bit about Zen and the and the Heart of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is this book that I know heavily influenced them. So I've read it once and, and honestly I found it a slog to, to get through. You know, I think I actually found the ideas that I think they took from that book to be way more illuminating both from their, their, their, their letters which I highly recommend people read. And just from reading your book I think that, you know, you can probably skip that book and still get some of the insights. It's a strange book but clearly, you know, there are people that have that have taken a lot from it, but it's not everyone's cup of tea. The overarching theme of quality. I understood that, you know, going into the book, that's kind of the type of insights that I was looking for. And there are a couple of interesting things I found. But like I said, you know, I think that you and them covered it already. So I'd love to know, you know, what are some of the key qualities in terms of the partnership structure that Nick and Zach created that you think that they took from understanding Quality from, from reading that book?
- [80:19]
Kyle Grieve
Yeah, in a way it's, it's, it's flattering what you just said, that you got this kind of essential view from my book of what they got from Persig because I also did the same with, with David Hawkins. I probably did the same with the Stoics where I would look at the source material that had inspired these great investors and then I would think, what's the essence of what they got from this thinker? And then I would write about that in an incredibly condensed way that I hope sort of distilled a really powerful lesson from it. So I've read Percy a couple of times, that novel, and I agree it's funny. My editor, Rick Corgan at Scribner, who's famous editor who's had like 100 bestsellers, it's his favorite book, but he's very, you know, Rick is very philosophically oriented. So I, I sort of understand that. I don't think it's a wonderful piece of writing, but I think it's a very, very interesting book and, and the ideas are powerful and it's worth getting a small book called On Quality which Josh Tarasoff, a well known hedge fund manager who's a friend of mine, gave me and I actually a couple, I think about two years ago, I organized a Zoom call where Josh and Brian Lawrence and Nick sleep and Matt McLennan and various other friends of mine got together over Zoom and chatted about that book On Quality because it's a sort of, it not only has Hersig's views from Zen and the automotorcycle Maintenance, but also from this other famous novel of his, Lila, and from some of his letters and from writings his wife. So it's a sort of condensed way of getting at these ideas. But for me, I think in the paragraphs that I wrote about Zen and the Art of Maintenance, I pointed out that what Percyk said in that novel is there's a beautiful way and an ugly way to do everything. So whether it's sewing a dress or mending a chair, there's a beautiful way and an ugly way of doing it. And so he talked about the metaphysics of quality and he capitalized the word quality. And so it becomes this big sort of philosophical explanation, exploration, but really it's kind of this vague, nebulous term, right, where you're just saying you sense that there's a high quality way to do things, just as you can sense when I'll sometimes go on a podcast and I can just tell, because I have this BS meter for this sort of thing, I can tell where they stopped reading my book or whether they never read the book or whether they, you know, and you just know they're not prepared. And sometimes they're so charming that they can kind of get away with it. And then when you go on a podcast and someone has really read it and thought about it, you're like, oh, and you pay a different type of attention. And I remember Nick sleep read that chapter of the book and he said, or started reading the whole book and he said, oh, this book is very different than I thought it was. Now I have to pay a whole different sort of attention to this book because I see what it is you're doing. And that was great. That was great praise, right? Like he saw, oh, this isn't just another book. This is something where you're really aiming for quality whether you hit it or not. And so I think, I think the most, the first idea that we really need to draw from them and from Percy is just this sense of like, do. Do I want to live a life of quality? Do I want to actually think about the high quality way to do everything that I do? Like, do I, Do I want to be the person who does a crappy job preparing for podcasts? Do I want to be the person who does a crappy analyst report for my boss? Do I want to be the person who, you know, half asses it when I, you know, write a chapter of a book? And so for me, I just decided at a certain point, in a slightly bloody minded, stubborn, obstinate way, that I was going to optimize for quality in everything that I did. And when I say everything that I did, I don't do it with things like exercise or nutrition. So I'm selectively optimizing for quality. But with my book, at a certain point, I just decided I am going to make this as beautiful and deeply reported and thoughtful as I possibly can. And if it fails, it will not be for want of me trying. And I'm not saying that in a self aggrandizing way. It's like I really decided that I was playing for keeps and I was going to try to write something that would be read in 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. That's totally different than when I was a magazine journalist and I was at Time magazine. And sometimes, you know, I would be editing the Asian edition of Time and then the European, Middle East, African edition of Time. And sometimes, you know, the magazine would go to bed on a Saturday night, late at night, and you'd get articles in, there would be breaking news and someone would file a story late on a Saturday afternoon or Saturday evening, and if it came in as a mess, you had to roll your sleeves up and just get it across the finish line, just make it okay. That was a different game. And you know, we played that game beautifully. We did it. I mean, it was an amazing magazine in so many ways. Incredibly talented people there to do that high wire act. But I think that simple decision of deciding in a world that's so full of shallow, ephemeral, useless nonsense, do I want to be contributing shallow, ephemeral, useless nonsense, or do I want to bet on the side of quality? That's a very powerful and important filter. And that's something all of us, I think, should be thinking about. And there's more and more of a push to do. Charlie would put it asinine stuff, really moronic stuff that just adds no value. And so one of the things that Nick and Zach did is they just very consciously said, if we're running a fund that is a metaphysical and almost spiritual experiment, as Nick put it in the Nomad letters, what would it look like if everything were guided by this notion of quality? What does that mean in terms of the companies we bet on? What does that mean in terms of the way we ingest information? What does that mean in the way we structure our fees? What does it mean in the way that we treat each other? And what does it mean in the way that we treat our shareholders? And so they structured their life in this very countercultural, ornery way where they were just getting rid of all of what Nick called the sin and folly of Wall Street. And so one of the things I loved, I had this amazing interview where after spending a lot of time talking to Nick, who's unbelievably enigmatic, I mean, Nick never talks publicly, then finally we kind of become friendly, if not friends. Since then, I'd say we've become friends. And finally I'd won enough trust that Zach, who's even more enigmatic and private, if anything, than Nick, he came and spent the afternoon with me as well in their office on the Kings Road in London. And so he started talking about their lifestyle and the way they work together. And we're sort of sitting there in this office and he's literally. Zach doesn't even have a desk. I mean, he's so non tribal. He literally doesn't have a desk in this big, beautiful office that's full of light. He just. He just has like a La Z Boy chair. And then they've got this. I'm sitting there with them next to these two beekeeper suits that are hanging on the wall that are like their matching beekeeper suits. I mean, these are profoundly idiosyncratic individuals. And they're really charming and funny and nice and they're finishing each other's sentences because they like each other so much. And so you start to think, okay, so how has their relationship been built on this notion of quality? And you realize, oh, well, okay, when they structured the company, Nick had been this super successful investor who'd worked at this big hedge fund marathon. And Zach had been absolutely tortured as this analyst or really a broker at Deutsche bank, which he hated and was totally unsuited to because he was the least salesman, like, salesman. And so you could easily, when they formed the company, Nomad, you could easily have said, well, you know, Nick is the alpha male. He would be the dominant. The dominant one. And so Nick immediately says, well, so let's just own it. 50, 50, the two of us, we'll just split it all, 50, 50. And Zach says, no, I want to have 49%. I want you to have 51%. And that way anytime we disagree about anything, which they never ended up doing, you'll have the deciding vote. And so Nick said to me, when someone hands you a loaded revolver like that and says, here, shoot me if you want, what are you going to do if you're modeling yourselves on Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett and you don't view life as a zero sum game, you don't take the gun and shoot your partner. You treat him really honorably. And so the whole relationship was built on kindness. And I saw this because when I was interviewing them, the fund had been closed for several years. They'd returned three and a half billion dollars to the shareholders, and there they are still sharing the same office. It was an amazing thing. And they didn't come into work that often, but they still wanted to share the same office. And when I saw Nick a few months ago in London and then also in this beautiful estate, the Goodwood estate in the English countryside, I was asking him how Zach is doing. And he just beams as he's talking about Zach and he starts talking about the philanthropy that Zach is doing. And you see, he's so proud of his friend. There's something just so beautiful about that. And so one, one of the things that Nick said to me is good behavior has a longer shelf life. It's a really profound observation to say, okay, so let me build my business relationships and my personal relationships as much as I can, despite all of my flaws and foibles and God knows we all have a lot of them, let me build them on good behavior as much as I can, rather than trying to shoot the guy with the revolver. And then they did exactly the same thing with their fee structure where they just kept making the fee structure worse for themselves and better for their shareholders. So they got to a point where they would put their incentive fee in a bucket where they couldn't get the money for years. And so if they subsequently lost money, they would just never get that money. And so at a certain point during the financial crisis, I think they knew that they would have to work for free for year after year after year. And Nick said, we kind of liked that. We kind of liked the fact that we were working for free. And you know, they, they sort of enjoyed wearing a hair shirt in the sense that in a world where most people were self seeking and behaving in a slightly tawdry, self interested, incentive bias way, they were going to do the opposite. And so I think then you apply this notion of quality in so many different areas and it ceases to be a really vague, useless, nebulous notion and actually becomes really very practical. So you say to yourself in any situation, I'm sure I did this when I was thinking about what to tell Mohnish about those books that I, that he was buying. You think, all right, what's the quality move here? The low quality move, if you're inverting like Charlie, was basically to lie to Mohnish and say, no, no, no, you're getting a great deal. Just go for it, dude. I think it's fair. And you know, it's clearly 20% lower than the normal retail price, so you're doing just fine. The high quality move is to say, oh, I'm so sorry. The reason they're doing this is because they figured out it's going to benefit me in this way. And so it just becomes this really useful filter. And so one of the things that Nick and Zach did that was so countercultural, they started to close the fund for the first time when it reached something like $100 million in assets under management. That's crazy. If what you're trying to do is build a profitable business, that's kind of suicidal. But they didn't really care about it being a profitable business. What they cared about was getting great returns. And they thought if we're maximizing odds of getting great returns, the assets will follow. It doesn't really matter. I think part of it, it goes back to what you were saying before about Francois Rochon being non tribal and talking about the non tribal gene. I think part of it's that Nick and Zach just were so non Wall street to their core. I mean, Nick, you know, really wanted to design gardens and just, it never worked out. His landscape architecture career never really worked out. And Zach really wanted to be a meteorologist. So they weren't like born to make money. They, they actually just happened to be really, really smart. And when they encountered the problem, the intellectual problem of how you find a business that's going to do well over many years intellectually, it really interested them. And so they were able to come up with, you know, this beautiful insight that there was one business model that was better than all of the rest where they, they focused on, on, on what they called scale economies. Shared. But you know, when I saw, when I saw Nick in England, it was pretty clear they found it really hard to find more companies like that. There aren't many like that. But, but it led them to a portfolio where they owned enormous amounts of Berkshire, Amazon and Costco. So it's really a beautiful example of a lifestyle constructed around a principle that's really powerful, this principle of quality.
- [94:29]
William Green
I want to talk about a recent, more recent interview you did with Brad Stalberg where he kind of described the spectrum between two things. One was this toxic positivity where everything is portrayed as being perfect. I think you see this pretty often on social media where you know someone's life, if you know them really well, could be unraveling. But you go look at their pictures and it looks like their Life is a 10 out of 10. And then on the other side of that, of that spectrum is, you know, nihilism or despair where everything feels broken and hopeless. I think it's, you know, it's just such a fascinating framework and I think it really applies really well to investing as well. And I love this point because, you know, I think that there's probably a specific area where I think a lot of the best investors sit on this continuum. And you kind of just admitted to yourself there that you tend to be more, more on the pessimistic end, although I don't know if that counts as nihilism or despair. But I just want to get your insights and see where you feel most of the great investors sit on that spectrum.
- [95:23]
Kyle Grieve
Yeah, I remember once interviewing Chuck Acrae, a great investor, where I wrote about it. Not great length, probably a couple of pages of the book, but he's a remarkable investor, had an incredible long term record. And I said to him that I'm pretty pessimistic by nature and actually I think I'm less pessimistic than I used to be. And he said, well, good luck with that. And I'm like, what do you mean? And he said it's not a great characteristic for an investor to be pessimistic. I think it's a balance. Howard Marks, who we talked about before, said to me once that he would have been terribly suited to being, say, a venture capitalist because he's not a dreamer, he's not into blue sky dreams of untold growth. I mean, it was really hard for him to take advantage of the fangs. As we said before. He was also very skeptical about things like Bitcoin. But on the other hand, one of the things he said to me is, look, I'm not being paid to be chicken. And so he's like, I have to be aware that I'm wired in a way, I'm wired in a way where things are going to go through this filter and I'm going to see them in a more worried way than certain investors. Right. So Howard is pretty conscious. And it's interesting, Howard comes from a similar background to mine. And so it's interesting, I think in his DNA too is probably the sense of things can fall apart. We live in a deeply uncertain and impermanent world. And so he's aware of the fact that his natural wiring is going to color his analysis of anything. And so again, it comes back to this really important point about self awareness. So to accept the fact that you're wired a certain way and that that lens is going to distort reality if there's such a thing in some way, either to make it look gloomier and scarier than it might be, or to make it look sunnier than it might be. And so once you're aware of, of your own Temperamental bias, you can start to hedge against it and create workarounds. And so one of the best workarounds you can have, obviously, is to have a sparring partner. And this is one of the reasons why it was so helpful for Howard to have Bruce Karsh as a partner. So during the financial crisis, they could really talk things through and say, well, look, there's a limit to how bad things can get. And at least at a certain point, he said it was kind of. It wasn't. Usually Howard would look at any situation as in probabilistic terms, and we'd just say, well, there are an array of different probabilities for this outcome, this outcome, and this outcome. And here are the odds I assigned to them. And it was so dire, potentially during the financial crisis that he said, either it's like it's the end of the financial system or it's not. And if it's not, then the mistake would be that I failed to buy during this incredible crisis. And so he and Bruce made this incredibly bold bet and ended up making, I think, about $9 billion, something like that, by betting on toxic bonds and the like that nobody else would touch. And sandwich makers and companies like that that were absolutely detested, and they were buying stuff at a fifth of the price that private equity firms had been previously buying. So they were buying so cheap that all of the pessimism was priced into them and that they were these asymmetric bets that if they were right, were going to be incredibly lucrative. And so I think understanding your own biases, your own temperamental inclinations, very important. Partnering with somebody who can talk to you, not not only discuss these things, but actually expose the ways in which you're probably blinded and prejudiced and biased is very, very powerful. And so you think of, say, someone like Annie Duke, who is a guest on my podcast, who, who told me that she was. She was friends with Richard Thaler, the famous Nobel Prize winning economist, but she was also friends with the late Danny Kahne, another Nobel Prize winning economist. And I was very struck when she told me that Daniel Kahneman had literally appointed Richard Thaler to point out his own blind spots and biases, to tell him when he was being stupid. So I think that's a very powerful thing to say. Okay, If I'm wired this way, I'm likely to skew my judgment in all sorts of unhelpful ways. So let me surround myself with people who can challenge my view and point out where I'm blind. But then also I think it Helps to be a little bit pessimistic and a little bit skeptical because the first thing is you've got to survive. And so it may be that my pessimism and skepticism seems pretty dumb after a really great period, basically Since World War II, I mean, we've gone through, what is it, 79 years that, with a few pretty brutal hiccups and also depending on what country you actually lived in, it's been a pretty golden era for much of the world, at least for countries like the US But I'm looking back a lot longer. I mean, you know, I'm thinking about times 3,000 years ago when everything fell apart. And so if you're trying to slightly depends what game you're playing. I want to survive and get to the finish line. And so I'm really happy to have Berkshire Hathaway as part of my portfolio because I like the fact that he's sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in cash. And does it bother me that I don't own bitcoin and that it's gone up so much? Not really. I mean, would have been nice to own it, but I still, there's still a part of me that sort of waiting for it to collapse. And maybe I'm entirely wrong, but I won't be at all surprised if it collapses. And I know people will, will now berate me for saying this, but I just think we live in a strange world and maybe it'll win out. I think there's obviously a much, you know, and I'm talking about stuff I don't really understand, as people will no doubt point out in their responses to this, maybe it'll win out, but we live in an uncertain world and we don't really know. And I think it would be perfectly sensible for me to have had, you know, 2, 3, 4, 5% exposure to cryptocurrency. Would be perfectly, perfectly sensible to do that. But for me, I'm optimizing for getting happily to the finish line. And so I don't need to be that speculative. I, I need to make sure that I do well enough that I don't ever have to work for anyone I dislike or do anything that I really dislike or, you know, be tempted to behave in a, you know, in a tawdry, unethical, self serving way, you know, for financial reasons. And so, I don't know, I may, maybe the virtues of pessimism and skepticism have become undervalued in this bullish period and we'll be reminded of their benefits by subsequent periods So I want to.
- [102:58]
William Green
Shift this over to talking a little bit about your experience just being part of kind of these close knit groups. So I personally have been helping run the TIP Mastermind community with my co host Clay and then I've also been helping set up the richer, wiser, happier masterclass with you. And, and it's basically I'm actually a member of the master class. I'm not really running it, you are, which has been pretty awesome. So you know, I, I, I feel like that's kind of been my first real entrance into working with close of people who are all trying to improve themselves at a really, really deep level and not just a superficial level kind of like you were just referring to there. So I know you though personally are not really new to being parts of groups that are trying to help each other improve. I know you were once part of a group that Charlie Munger was a part of it for a short period of time. So can you maybe discuss a little bit about how being part of these groups has helped improve your life?
- [103:52]
Kyle Grieve
Yeah, I think the most powerful realization came to me from I guess I started to have these meetings every Friday morning with three friends who were all really remarkable people and they're very successful investors and they're brilliant guys, they're really evolved, really thoughtful, really interesting, really soulful people. And we're all studying the teachings of a particular, of a tick, particular Tibetan Buddhist teacher who's amazing. And so we would meet every Friday, typically at 8am sometimes earlier and we'd call in even if we were traveling basically. I mean, so sometimes you'd call it ridiculous times, sometimes you'd have to reschedule 7am once in a while we'd, we'd miss it. It's been going on for probably a year and a half, something like that. And you know, I resisted the idea, at least in my mind initially because I thought, you know, God, this is such a big time commitment. And then, and, and one of the friends is this guy Yen Liao, who's very well known hedge fund manager, who's just a brilliant and beautiful human being. And, and Yen said at a certain point this time is sacred. And you know, he, he hadn't, I don't think he had ever done anything in his career that wasn't in some way directed right. Like he knew what every hour was going to yield. I mean he's such a driven, intense and process driven, process oriented, systematic person. And here were these sort of slightly aimless, unstructured times where we're just talking about, you know, we would start by talking, by having a kind of check in where we talk about what was going on, and then maybe we'd discuss particular principles or things we'd learned or stuff we'd learned from the teacher. And then recently, this great teacher has been calling in from Kathmandu and teaching us. So, like, last week, I probably spent like, two and a half hours. And then Dan Goleman will join, which is kind of amazing because he's unbelievable as well. And. And his wife, who's incredible. Tara, who's also a great psychologist and an author. And so I think what I saw in this very visceral way is that setting aside time to be in a group that discusses stuff in a very personal, intimate way is so powerful. And so we would just do it over Zoom. But one of my friends who's in the group is this guy Matt Ludmout, whose office I'm sharing as well. Uh, so he's become a very close friend. He's a. A money manager as well. And he's been studying Buddhism for probably 45 years or something very seriously. And he used this phrase, friends along the path, which I guess he had taken from Tibetan Buddhism. I think I may be misquoting. And that idea has really stuck with me. And that's. That's what we've used in talking about and. And structuring the masterclass, is to say, well, I want a small group of friends along the path who are going to help each other and support each other and be candid and are learning together. And so we ended up. We decided to have maximum of 20 people. And so. So we structured the richer, wiser, happier masterclass, basically where it's 20 people meeting monthly over zoom, and then a few meetings in person. And because of this idea of friends along the path, what's beautiful and liberating about it for me is I don't feel like I have to be the wise man who knows everything, who's teaching everyone, you know, all of these investors, because a lot of these people are really, really successful investors. I mean, there are people who manage, like, $25 billion in the group and, you know, really terrific investors, really smart people, people who run 20 companies, you know, very impressive group of people. If I were trying to pretend that I was smarter and wiser about investing, I would be in deep trouble. I'd have even more imposter syndrome than I have already. One of the people, literally, at one point, as you know, his previous job was head of the physics department at Stanford before he went into being a quant hedge fund manager. I mean, it's like, what am I going to teach someone who's still an emeritus professor of theoretical physics at Stanford? I mean, the guy's so smart and, and so the idea of being friends along the path is kind of beautiful because then it's just like we're all learning together. And so I think, I think if there's a takeaway here, it's the idea of creating space in your life for meetings with people you really like or who you could really like. You know, they don't, they don't necessarily have to be people you know really well, but a small group of people who are really serious about learning and improving themselves and sharing ideas and making it a real time commitment so that it's not, so that it's actually structured in there because we're all so busy. I mean, there are so many reasons why we shouldn't do this, right, because we have such busy lives. But it's, I think, as Jens said, it's really become like this kind of sacred space. It's been a huge life enhancer for me. And I think part of it for me grew out of the realization that the secret sauce for Charlie was not just that he was brilliant, it's that he had this ecosystem of incredible friendships and relationships. And so he set up various things in his life where, for example, he had this weekly Zoom breakfast with really smart people. So Rick Garan used to call in and I, I, so I guess that they had to go remote during COVID And you know, Lou Simpson, who was legendary investor at Geico, would call in this great investor in Australia, in Sydney called Mark Nelson, who would call in and Ron Sugar, who is a CEO and you know, and, and they would invite guests sometimes. And so they invited me one time and I, I knew that like the week before, I think, or a couple weeks before, they had invited Howard Marks and, you know, anyone would, you know, die for the opportunity to be on a, you know, two hours Zoom breakfast with, with Charlie and all of these people just discussing, discussing ideas. But I thought it was really interesting that he had structured this into his life. And then similarly, according to Mohnish, he had a. Charlie had a regular Friday afternoon bridge game at the LA Country Club. And so Mohnish would get invited at the last minute when one of these old codgers was feeling too sick or something, and he would just drop everything and go and play. And I think they had lunch there as well. And then Mohnish told me that Charlie also had structured things. So I think every week he would have a zoom call where his 20 or so grandchildren or great grandchildren or whatever it was, would be invited on the zoom call. And so I think what's interesting is the recognition that you need to invest in relationships, not, you know, in. In terms of building a rich life. You need to invest in relationships, but it's so important that you actually have to structure it in. And. And so I think you and I are on this journey where we're kind of exploring where this can go. So we're probably about three months into the Ritualize a Happier masterclass, and I. I'm really loving it. I didn't know how it would be, but I. I think it's kind of a beautiful thing. And they're amazing people. And. And so you and I are discussing may. Maybe we'll do it again next year and we'll do a new cohort of 20 people. But there's also a part of me that's thinking about how to make it a more kind of permanent, kind of infinite community where you have a small group of people of friends along the path. Because I want more of this. I did it with a book group. I set up a book group several years ago where it's just a whole array of writers. Everyone was a writer. I think we'd written more than 20 books between us, and. And we would just meet to discuss classic literature, like, really great fiction. So we would read Nabokov and Flaubert and Tolstoy and, you know, really Proust, great, great stuff. Melville, Jane Austen, things like that. And we would meet over dinner, and so we. We would have good food, good wine, chat about great literature with great friends. It was people like Jason Zweig, who's great columnist at the Wall Street Journal, or Nina Monk, who's a wonderful writer who's now moved to France. John Gtner, who wrote the Idea Factory, and a friend of mine, Ramin Barani, who's a great filmmaker who made a wonderful film called the White Tiger, which you can see on Netflix, well worth watching. And so just to sit around chatting with people like that about great fiction while eating was one of the great delights of my life. And it became too complicated and too difficult to keep going. But I think that kind of. That gave me a sense that part of what you want to do in life is create these containers that bring together people you care about. And then it was also great editors. We had a former editor in chief of Barron's and a former editor of Worth. I mean, really wonderful people, really thoughtful. And I remember once a friend of mine, briefly was a member of that group who had been the editor in chief of Sports Illustrated. And we were reading Anna Karenina and he sort of pauses at one point. We're making all of these great sort of literary analyses and he's like, is anyone aware that this horse racing scene is one of the probably the greatest horse racing scene in the history of literature? Just the fact that you're sitting there with the former editor in chief of Sports Illustrated and he's talking to you about that, or that you can discuss, you know, the brain and economic biases with Jason's wife is also there with you. You know, it's just an amazing thing. So this is a very long winded way of saying, like, if you're trying to construct a really rich and abundant life for me, this has to be a part of it. Like to structure communities where you're learning together and you're supporting each other. It's just a really beautiful thing. It's been hugely life enhancing.
- [114:10]
William Green
Well, I think that's a good place to end this conversation. So I just want to say, William, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your profound insights with me and our audience. And also, I'm eternally grateful. You're in my orb of people that I get to learn from because I've already learned so much from you and I look forward to learning a lot more here in the future.
- [114:30]
Kyle Grieve
Thank you so much. It's great to be a friend along the path with you, Kyle. I really enjoy chatting with you.
- [114:36]
Narrator
Thank you for listening to tip. Make sure to follow. We study billionaires on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on episodes. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com this show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.