AIC Conversations - Guy Spier (Founder and Managing Director, Aquamarine Capital)

all right okay good morning it's great to be here this feels very serious uh it feels like a cnn interview we felt like a cnn crew walking through richmond to get all the way here um guy we know you like coffee how do you like your coffee done and do you have them how many coffees do you need in the morning to wake yourself up so you know what you've started me on a question i didn't know it was there but it's great question so um you know you know that too many coffees is not enough i've never heard that before well the other thing that's going to be on my holiday card this year is a quote that i love which is you know everybody's got to believe in something i believe i'm going to have another coffee [Laughter] so uh if i don't have coffee in the morning it's not like i develop a headache or anything it's just that um i feel like something's missing something like that now what i really enjoy about and you've now in had the benefit of some expresso is that apparently the those espresso the espresso extraction method is leaves quite a bit of the caffeine behind and just takes the taste so you actually have quite a bit uh significantly lower caffeine content in espresso extraction than if you do for example french press because in french press you just get everything that was in the bean whereas the steam apparently the way it goes through the coffee is really good at extracting the taste but not extracting the caffeine but i i would tell you that i think that uh four or five coffees a day or four or five of those or something with those espresso shots in them is relatively normal for me but you know what i should what i should really tell you is that uh the the reason why i like coffee is that i'm self-medicating and that came so so there's a kind of i think that in in my case it's there's nothing bad about it but i have uh i i have difficulty controlling my attention and that is a now i think a well understood sort of way in which some people's brains function and coffee helps me to focus my attention that's the thing that it does so it's a kind of a self-medication it's not actually the most ideal self medication or medication so i've actually tried on some prescription i've tried a little bit of ritalin i've tried something called vivants which actually does it way better without the caffeine but i prefer to just have the coffee so i don't take that medication but i think that i started liking coffee because i realized that it gave me it gave me that focus if you like and if you like um if you take medication for adhd it gives you that focus without the adrenaline and what coffee does is it raises your heart rate and it has some other um impacts on your body but yeah i could talk endlessly about coffee but what i would tell you is that i don't know that much about coffee i know enough about coffee to deliver um tasty doses of coffee to myself but there are people who know way more about coffee way way more so i'm talking about self medication and coffee actually up to six cups of coffee uh is shown to correlate with uh decreased levels of depression but the exception is as long as you don't put in sugar so no sugar yeah and i would tell you that again i don't know the chemistry of coffee but i've but the little that i know the chemistry is really uh is you'd think it's just i don't know i you think it's relatively simple but there's some really and at least to my understanding of it complex things that are going on so when the steam goes through the coffee it's extracting all sorts of oils and those oils give the coffee texture and flavor and you know the right coffee bean the right extraction method will optimize that and then the milk when you steam milk well there's a kind of an emulsification process don't ask me but that creation of that microfoam again gives the milk texture and if i understand it it changes the chemical structure of the milk and there's a sweetness that comes out of the milk i mean this is my wife made this coffee for me i think it's really well steamed milk and um and so you don't need sweetener because this tastes pretty sweet as it is so uh i don't know if coffee prevents me from being depressed i'd be fine with that that's i would just tell you i mean we're somewhere on social media i've been clinically depressed once it is a terrible thing and it's a scary thing and anything that helps somebody avoid dropping into a depression and if coffee is the thing uh blast away you know one of the things that wanted me to move to switzerland is that bright sunlight in winter time uh helps prevent everything not so much clinical depression but winter blues and the reason why i love the mountains in switzerland is that even in the coldest darkest zurich winters if you get out into the mountains get above the clouds you get the bright sunshine spend a day doing that and it feels great so and even get sunburned in the process exactly which happens often guy um we know you've had a lot of interviews and so we wanted to start off on a bit of a different note i figured it would be an interesting idea to start off by discussing books partially it's because we as students have the time and the chance i assume so to read a lot of books while we're studying um and it's also because i feel there are certain uh titles or pieces of literature which you also mentioned in the education of value investor that paint a good life story for you so i have a list here yeah but i wanted to start off with jordan belfort's memoir wolf of wall street yeah so you know and i saw this i was reviewing your questions this morning i've not read the book i've watched the movie just once so the name of the firm in wolf of wall street i should it should come straight to my mind stratton oakmont i mean i knew that name when i worked at dh player that was a that was a known farm and they did similar things and um i mean you know with well it's in the book 14th floor is where the brokers were there were guys who were former drug dealers there there were definitely prostitutes who went up in the elevator i was on the second floor and what's extraordinary for me is that i just didn't say i'm out of here and we can dive into why i didn't do that and before we went on camera we were talking about why people wouldn't leave a country like mexico and so we can talk about that but um you well i wrote about in the book from the movie it's exaggerated no what did i say it's it's exaggerated but at its core captures what was going on there and the world of actually i would tell you the world of finance has changed a lot so i think that at the time the way those guys felt about the regulators was that yeah they're there but we can keep them at bay and perhaps all of those people going to prison so a whole bunch of people from d.h blair went into prison actually even sons and law of the owner that was the beginning of the sac and at the time it was called the nasd the national association of securities dealers saying no we're not going to allow this we have to regulate you more strongly so i think that that that was in the 2000s and then obviously after the financial crisis i think it changed really dramatically in a way that was is as significant not that i lived through it the changes that happened pre and post the crash of the 1930s so i realize now that i'm working in a regulated industry and just deal with it and um the reg you know certainly to stop the kinds of things that were taking place uh in the wolf of wall street but also to stop the kind of i mean i read an interview with dick fold at lehman brothers i mean kind of the way he ran lehman brothers was kind of pretty extraordinary really and look the the our western democracies they eventually get the right idea and they're going to say we're not going to allow you to do that anymore just we will not we're going to we don't care if you're less efficient we could we don't care if you make less money we don't care if your shareholders less money make less money we're not going to allow you cowboy like to bet the farm for example in that case on rising house prices and to have a crisis that happens so but it's incredible that early in my career that was possible what's more incredible i could have changed that what's more incredible is that i stuck around for a full 18 months that is what is shocking and it's a bit of a it's a bit of a pessimistic book to start off with to be honest because before you came to d.h blair you were both at oxford university yeah in harvard business school yeah so tell us about that that experience and what the hell like why do you go from oxford and harvard to that and that is you know how could i have had such bad judgment and how could i have been unwilling to listen to a number of people who said that is not a good idea guy and i insisted i remember my i was like 25 years old i my 25 year old self wanted to do it to a degree that i remember one university professor just saying i i realize now remembering his faces i said oh i'm going to go work at the h brother and he says i think that somebody like you should go for something better than that you know trying to put something more between the lines and he doesn't want to quite come out and say that is a very bad idea and i'm kind of insisting so he says who knows maybe the guy wants to be a crook which wasn't the case um so look i think that i i exhibited very very bad judgment in choosing to go and work there i had some reasons which i can which were not good enough reasons but you know just be aware that you could be the smartest guy on the planet you can have the best education on the planet but if you exhibit bad judgment none of that's going to save you you know and and i think maybe if that professor that i've i don't remember his name but he would have said is this good judgment on your part to do this maybe maybe that would have gone in somewhere but i think that you know funnily enough i have a so we all rebel at some point from our parents and i was somebody who hadn't really rebelled from his parents up to that point i think that was a little bit of rebellion on my part and in a certain way we we ought to rebel in safe ways you know god smiled on me because well first of all i wasn't involved and i was kept far enough away from it that i didn't see it but imagine that i'd allowed greed and i'd allowed some sense of lack of moral judgment to get myself more involved in some of the activities of the brokerage firm on the on the 14th floor and suddenly i i have a criminal record because i went too far i mean that's that's kind of scary and i think that you know i've been watching a lot of jordan peterson videos a really really amazing guy and he says that we all have a monster inside of us and if we don't recognize that and tame that monster and use that monster when we have to then we're not really full personalities and we don't really know we're not yet fit for the world and i think that sort of some way if you look at the early part of my book and you look at there there's a greed monster in there you know better acknowledge that better know that it's there better no better no have a dialogue with that greed monster rather than to walk around pretending that that greed monster doesn't exist in a certain sense we should be more comfortable around somebody says look i'm greedy and i recognize i'm greedy or i'm ambitious beyond anything you can imagine and i recognize that and here's how i'm here here's how i'm working with that to live a productive life if you like so but the person who pretends they're not greedy or who pretends they're not enormously ambitious and doesn't engage with that part of them so uh you know it it's an interesting question if that professor had said look i get it you're ambitious and you're greedy are you going about this in the right way tell me about your ambition tell me about your greed all right and now tell me why this is the best way to pursue it and funnily enough it that's you know warren buffett actually maybe warren buffett addresses his greed and he says i'm long-time greedy and that's great because because you just take that and you say well long term is that the best way to i can tell you though that showing up at d.h blair and being a vice president and quite a few of my classmates business school classmates were envious of me and uh um you know and i was vice president how ridiculous external scorecard and you talk yeah you talk about the external scorecard in your book and uh and also the social pressure of your classmates and you know wanting to post in the alumni you know in the in the alumni meetings and you know showing that you've done well exactly i've done a deal you know but you know talking about you mentioned recovery and you mentioned warren buffett i assume you've read the book in uh 1996 to 1997 um lernstein's biography of warren buffett yeah um how did that change the course of things so uh uh i think that i should reread that book i haven't read it recently and i don't even have a copy around um so literally the reason why i picked up intelligent bust was not because warren buffett had written the introduction but i thought entirely it's great book types like well i think i'm intelligent so you know i didn't read the introduction but i read the book made enormous amounts of sense i go and read the introduction uh discover you know i so i've said it before but you probably heard me say it but i'm going to say it again it's so powerful you're not alive if you don't feel envy you know you guys are all at the lse of course you're going to feel envious of either a uh friend who does something that you would have liked to do you know or if somebody who's maybe just a few years ahead of you or maybe of bill ackman or of somebody that is useful information you know it's like listen to that because that is the envy is coming from somewhere and and we can use that you know use that for the positive so by some miracle i was able to use the envy that i felt for warren buffett and what was the envy that i felt i sort of sitting there under pressure to bring deals in you know because that's snake pit but um and and i have to sell a nasty place effectively i have to find these people who want to raise money for their companies and i have to sell dh blair as a source of funding you know i'm like what what a nasty environment we're on a nasty job really because because i'm only getting the dregs anyway and then i have to convince the drugs to deal with the drugs you know and there's like this is my life and i'm thinking wow and there's warren buffett he doesn't have cell to have us i have to sell drugs to the drugs he's just sitting there and he's you know he's talking about this great company in this great business and whether he's going to invest 500 million dollars here or there i'm envious of that i wish i was in his shoes so envy is a is an amazing emotion you should be grateful when you feel the emotion of envy worth adding because i still struggle with this and i anger and i'm going slightly off topic for a second when you feel anger also very powerful and over powerful it's a very valuable emotion anger says my boundaries have been violated and then you know the the staying from somebody is that and getting angry is easy but angry getting angry with the right person in the right place in the right way so to take that anger and say okay i'm feeling anger towards this person this organization usually it's a person now how do i so my boundaries have been violated what boundary has been violated how do i reset this and i think that there's always a you either want to cut the person out of your life you know there's one reaction which is an overreaction the other reaction is ah it's nothing you know now you're not giving them feedback and getting that middle ground but so the envy drove me to read um uh lowenstein's biography and i don't know how often it happens to you there are some books that you read i read and they're interesting there's some books that i read or i feel like i ought to read them so i'm gonna sort of stick with it and then there are some books that you just like swallow whole they just just goes in and i kind of that's what i felt about the lowenstein biography just sort of like it just i just soaked it up and it was it was kind of you know warren buffett was living inside my head and at the same time i was i was getting a hold of the annual reports of you know cap cities abc geico and i was reading those and understanding learn you know just remember and i've said this before but it's still i i had business plan after business plan with with no um audit statement with with not not real accounts just hockey stick projections i mean such garbage you know and then i then i open up coca-cola you know and it's like 18 billion dollars of revenues and i don't know ten billion dollars of operating income and eight billion dollars of pre-tax earnings i'm like oh my gosh and it's year after year after year those numbers aren't exactly right but that's the way it felt to me and i just said i like this how do i do this and like you know so but yeah the lonesteen book actually i need to reread it because i think it's probably the best biography of buffalo probably it doesn't have the later yells so um but yeah fantastic book and fun but to read but look so another hero he should be everybody's hero really is um and i haven't read enough about him but abraham lincoln it's so funny because donald trump says i'm i'm the best president since abraham lincoln you know if i was in debate against donald trump the line i would want to use i say donald trump you are no abraham lincoln but abraham lincoln was an incredible guy just an incredible guy and abraham lincoln understood failure in fact he felt like a failure for large parts of his life and um he understood being bested you know in the world of politics he was bested so many times he either lost or forfeited an election to somebody else and he just did it and he developed these deep reserves of um kind of an understanding that the world is a difficult place and the world can deliver nasty and bitter lessons to you and that's just part of it and just you know live with it and work with it and so what am i trying to say the the lonesteen biography is extraordinary but it's not the only biography it's not the only hero and um you know the funny thing is is that i i admire warren buffett and all of those things i'm pretty sure that i don't want to be warren buffett and i don't want to have my life just like his so there's there's a kind of a life cycle that one goes through i think when you have a hero where it's okay to get to the other side of it and say he's an amazing guy i've learned so much from him i admire him but i also know that he's got i have things that he doesn't have and he has flaws to his personality as well and that's so you kind of go through a life cycle and i think i've been through a little bit of life cycle on that and probably warren buffett would be happy because when i met him at this lunch so there's a story from the talmud of these of these students who were so enamored with this amazing rabbi and teacher that this is a story in the talmud all right just they would hide under his bed because they just felt like he was such a saint that even the way he interacted with his wife in bed at night was something that they wanted to study so they would hide under his bed there's a story in the talmud so i'm sitting at lunch i say you know i tell him that story and i say you know i'm i'm a bit like that with you do you realize that's like sort of it's like every single thing is like something to learn from and it's so funny you say oh well i would check under my bed before i go to sleep tonight just in case you're hiding there he's got this amazing sense of humor like he just came up with that and um and so he'll be happy to know that i've kind of gone through the complete adulation stage i think that when somebody if somebody adulates you the way i've agitated ron buffett it's sort of a relief for them to know that you see them as a as a not yeah a full human being exactly and and you love them and admire them and adore them with their flaws and that and the flaws are okay actually so uh yeah but there's the lowenstein book and i think that look the in a certain way the book we all know like i watched the movie of wolf of wall street i didn't read the book i wasn't all that interested to read the book but um they say when you're studying literature is yeah watch the movie but read the book first and then watch the movie as made to understanding the book and i would say especially when it's a live person you know the book is just one way of building up a 3d picture of the person so we shouldn't anchor too much over one particular book build up a 3d picture of who that person is and if they if you admire them and have them in your life so but roger leinstein did an amazing job with that but really amazing job so i'm glad you've touched on mentors and yeah the word cloning yeah and i mean passive interviews is something you've mentioned but could you explain to us more about what you mean by cloning yeah you know the people who have influenced you over the years yeah and just lastly if you were 21 saying our age so so the word cloning is i actually don't think it's the word that i prefer to use it's it's comes from i think it's in monash's book but monash talks about cloning and um you know cloning is a scientific time for i think it's you take a dna and you make a copy of it and so uh but i think that and i used the word cloning because i'd learned the idea from monish but it actually goes deep into what makes us human beings so and again um when i write stuff and i get edited by my friend william green he always takes all this potted science and he says now we're not putting that in there because but now he's not editing me so i can't talk about it um you know mirror neurons are this so what an amazing thing our brain is because scientists the way i understand it from my readings of things like scientific american and new scientists there's a model in our head or there are there are there's a whole part of our brain that's given over to modeling what is going on with somebody else so right now my brain is modeling your feelings you know i kind of get a sense of how you feel about me about being in the room um why do our brains have that is an interesting question you know i so i hope i hope that you'll allow me you could edit this out i guess so we share a common ancestor with the great apes goes back five or six million years the stone age started three million years ago or so um we got fire we we mastered the ability to use fire about a million years ago bronze age so so stone age is like we see that they were using stone tools bronze age is i think no more than 30 000 years ago or perhaps as little as 10 000 years ago when we started being able to work with bronze and iron age is like i think less than 3 000 years and computers is like three decades so you've got six million years worth of evolution all the way down to more recently where basically we're um hunter-gatherers and so i find this fascinating and it i kind of it's drawn from uh yuval hariri's book sapiens and from guns germs and steel by jared diamond where he kind of does they both do this kind of big history thing and says why are we the way we are and so all of that i just did another detour as you can see why some mirror neurons we clearly are able to model in our heads what somebody else is thinking and feeling and i believe so so part of what's going on is that the way we learn is that we model what is going on with somebody else and so um you know i would imagine we're going out you know hunting and gathering and the younger person sees how the more experienced person reacts to a certain environment and the mirror neurons in our head teach us how to do that we're not going to be able to do that if we're out there in that environment alone we're not going to know how to react to the stone falling the deer that shows up whatever it is so that process of that is mentorship and mentorship is not that the person sits down and says here's how you do it it's that by feeling what they're feeling i now learn what i need to feel in this situation and so i think that when we have a mentor or when we clone people it goes to the very very core of our humanity we're actually activating some very powerful wiring that in a certain way in a modern world we got disconnected from but and i'm not going to be able to cite somebody on it but somebody famous and well-known and highly respected educator said that what we're actually doing if when we educate somebody is that we're not showing them how to do it we're actually showing them the feelings around what to do and we're giving them that inspiration and once they have that inspiration so so that is so that is all a very long way of within quite a bit of potted science in as you can see or here that is a long way of saying that i think that when we do when we clone people when we model them when we have mentors we're engaging in some very very ancient wiring and i think that as a general rule when we engage the ancient wiring we're actually on the right track because because we just not you know we're not going to overcome six million years of evolution with 30 years worth of computers so we need to engage that wiring in many ways modern technology has divorced us from that so when we decide to take on a mentor we're we're re-engaging that wiring and the point that's the point of it actually i guess if you like and so um i stumbled across it but when i sat and i wrote uh in my office and i said what would warren buffett do in my shoes um i was actually engaging that same wiring i was engaging wearing neurons and to some degree i can say i'm lucky because i could have him as my mentor even though i had never met him but i guess my point to here in this room is we we don't have to have met the person and they don't have to tell us what to do we can just know enough about them to say what would they do in my shoes and we may not get it right but um so i think you there's a second part to the question was who who to model yeah so you know we um one place to look is uh so so the the first thing i think is utterly critical if it's going to work is um the person has to activate emotions inside you so i i don't think i can say often enough for myself to remember this emotions are guide posts they're not just this thing out there that we just uh like sort of pay attention to when we have to deal with the women in our lives or something like that you know or the let's just say the um because we don't want to you know significant other yeah that kind of takes it takes all sorts of things into account exactly they are they are signpost to action so i would say but this by the way goes does does this person activate um my emotions because because warren buffett for some reason activated my emotions but somebody else would have been a different individual so who knows exactly what it is that activates that but we have to trust that sense and then i guess you know what what's really important is what values does this person represent are they living a life that um i would like to live because i think that i i could imagine i mean actually funnily enough if we take the guy that i worked for at d.h blair the head of the jordan belford wolf of wall street farm that i worked at i had a certain amount of envy for him i kind of he was a successful guy he was reputed to be wealth at the time half a billion dollars which seemed to me to be like an enormous amount of money and he ran a business and he was successful and he had a big family and uh so i had so so my emotions were activated there and he was available to me he was willing to have me in his office but he was not the right guy to have as a mentor because he played fast and loose with the law if you like and actually look he's really really smart guy he had other people break the law for him so yeah when when he got investigated by the nesd or it was the sister firm not the one that he was closely related to so uh so that i think that was in a certain way my downfall there so you want to you want to get maybe some if you're not sure get some guidance from other people and people that you trust like is this a guy should i should i mean so i think today today somebody that i would want to um uh clone is reed hastings there is so much about reed hastings that i'm just so impressed with in a thousand different ways and i think that i mean as books here actually i'd want to understand how he's achieved what he's achieved now reid hastings is i think a highly highly ethical guy but if i wasn't sure so let's take somebody else so he's a guy to clone um i think that jeff bezos is just like you know it's like he's beyond anything but obviously he's he's a guy to clone or to try and understand how he is become who he is and and actually as i saw the question this morning i think that i mean i again it i don't know how the hell he cloned the guy because he seems to be such a genius as elon musk i mean who who would not want to try and clone that guy but but there's another book that is on my reading list that i've delved into a little bit i think it's over there schwartzman's book i think he's i think that when you get into more finance types i think that you know there's the danger of cloning somebody who has actually used shortcuts and they've been successful at hiding their shortcuts so i think that i read a book about carl icahn when i was younger and i was really really impressed with him i don't think that i want to clone carl icahn i think there are things i mean you just need to watch that youtube video of his interaction with bill ackman i don't know the facts of what happened there something to do with um oh there's some transaction that took place and uh uh there's something insurance it was called but i don't want to get into relationships like he seemed to have with bill ackman at the time we can sort of leave it as at that but you want to be more careful or and something else someone wants to be careful of is that when you haven't met the person they will cultivate a persona that doesn't show the whole truth i think the guy at d h blair cultivated a persona that didn't show the whole truth it was much easier to do that because you didn't have the internet you didn't have a thousand different articles about you i mean when i wanted to do my due diligence on the guy at dh blair i had to go to the harvard business school library and i have to had to pull out microfilms of the new york times to see what articles were written about him and i saw a couple of articles that was it that was kind of like what i could do it's not like going into the internet or going into some online database and typing in a search term uh seeing what comes up but the final so so but even today people work hard to cultivate persona persona that doesn't capture all of who they are and doesn't necessarily capture all of why they became successful and so you want to be careful in choosing that person but you start with and i you know i don't know if i can do it on the interview but um we can do it now we can do it later who who do who does generate that sense of envy it's like you know who does it for me who's not in finance is steven spielberg so you know you talked about movies i have zero artistic ability so i i believe i i appreciate art in all sorts of forms but i have zero in terms of creativity but i asked myself i kind of if you could walk step into anybody's shoes and be living their life wouldn't it be i mean i think that steven spielberg has had such an amazing life with so many amazing people and he's created these worlds in these different movies whether it's you know close encounters of the third kind or you know movies about the holocaust or movies that have uh you know saving private ryan i mean so many and that seems to me like to be like an extraordinary life but i think that they're high quality guy just not something that i'm capable of so i don't think i could learn that much from him yeah and uh the you know the issue with mentors sometimes is as you briefly mention is there needs to be a lot of material on them for you to to take in to be able to learn from them which is often hard you know you don't have the you don't have a huge choice sometimes in certain industries um and you also talked about being you know finding a mentor who's been honest about their failures and shortcomings and and certainly a huge what what's what surprised me in the book is how honest you are throughout the entire through the entire book you know you talk about blow ups that you had at home during stressful times you talk about you know your shortcomings your personal shortcomings your career shortcomings um you're very you're very honest about this so can i just step in there for a second i hope it doesn't break your train of thought but um so that was part of the motivation to write the book so you know they they say that pearls are created when there's something there's something in there a piece of sand that irritates the oyster and and i was looking for mentors and it irritated me that people were not being honest and eventually i'd be like yeah that's not the full story is it i know you're hiding certain things about yourself see the last time that happened in my opinion is the book about jack ma and you know i probably get the chinese secret service onto me or something but i'm sorry jack that is that is not even half the story and you know you don't even give a clue and just the story of how ant financial got out of the hands of yahoo and and like sorry jack that is not honesty but but what inspired me was that so i've met met um monish pabrai and some reason he talks to me about mahatma gandhi and so then i come out of that and i buy mahatma gandhi's book and it's sitting on a bookshelf somewhere then someday i read it and uh you know so so i pick up mahatma gandhi's book and i feel like within the first 30 pages he starts talking about his um his dalliances with prostitutes i'm like oh my gosh this is the autobiography of mahatma gandhi and he's talking about his dialects with prostitutes it's psychology and then he talks about eating meat and you know it's like eating meat is like the hugest sin for his family but that was a an inspiration for me so i said if he can be that honest and i have to say that reading the book about nelson nelson mandela my long road to freedom and uh i hope that members of his family won't be upset with my saying this he did not achieve the same level of honesty with the reader as mahatma gandhi did and so this comes through one way or another you kind of figure it out so i wanted to do that and what happened to you know it's a certain act of courage to do that but i was inspired by somebody who wasn't alive let's just remember that and when you say you're looking for mentals it's true you're not going to find somebody like reed hastings who kind of talks about how he built this extraordinary media business but you know abraham lincoln i talked about abraham so we can delve into the past and you know charlie munger's famous statement we can hang out with the eminent dead if you like but yeah the book is honest and there's a reason for it to be honest i wanted to be honest both because that was the purpose of writing the book and also it was great psychotherapy for me i know where i was when i wrote the chapter on dh blair i know exactly where i was and where i was when i finally said to myself yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna put this in the book you know i was like come hello hi water no matter what happens and i just wanted sorry you had a question could i keep going oh good go ahead monish has a so you he he says it in such a harsh way and it's kind of shocking but i think it still probably triggers that you can be a mass murderer and the world will forgive you if you're honest about it and you asked honest forgiveness for what you've done people in a certain way don't care how bad you've been they care about whether you whether you're honest about it and when whether you're confronting how bad you've been honestly which by the way is the appeal of donald trump he makes he he just says it straight yeah that was locker room talk yeah i've i've i've had a lot of fun with women in my life i you know that's who i am and you know i've never wanted to cause any woman any harm and people are like you know i don't like him but he's being honest about it and the world is reacting so badly i think the people who who do virtue signaling don't realize how badly the world is reacting to it because people don't say it they say i don't like it i'll i'll kick you out at the voting booth and that's why the next week is going to be so freaking interesting but sorry i want to i want to keep going on this because it's just so important and it's so amazing i mean because jordan peterson explains it better than it's been explained to me today is the world is a very very complicated place and there's absolutely no way that one human being can either understand it or predict it but when you're bru where you're honest when you say it how it really is you're setting yourself on the side of how things will unfold whereas if you try and modify the truth if you try and hide something if you try and present in a different way to what it really is you're setting yourself against reality and so it's more likely that reality is going to win because it's just infinitely more powerful than we are as human beings so being honest and truthful first of all with ourselves and second of all with the world is extremely extremely important for a successful life and um and so in a certain way the book was an exercise in that if you like so sorry i interrupted you or stopped you from continuing uh um i mean and you you do you do have moments in the book where you you actually stop and you go i i'm not sure whether i should write this or not you have mo you have several moments like that in the book so and i don't mean to toot your horn too much but if if there is you know you taught you've talked about you know a lot of the world knows you for having cloned or having tried to you know learn from warren buffett you've adapted that to your own personality as we spoke about earlier but if there's one thing that we would want to clone from you as students or aspiring investors what would that be i feel like i want to throw the question back at you and say yeah what would that be but there's there's so many things and there's so many things we're going to get into um in this interview or which we want to discuss you know one thing is definitely is definitely the compounding of goodwill that whole concept um and but but also for example you just mentioned the uh seeing reality as a greater force than than any individual for example i've never thought of it that way um so i i i it's not fair of me to throw the question back at you although i don't mind doing unfair things and that's okay but um uh so i i think that when when we clone um again i can't tell you what to clone because that would be kind of telling you what should engage your emotions and i can't tell what's going to engage your emotions in fact you don't know what's going to engage your emotions so that's something that you have to each individual has to figure out for themselves and we can definitely take cues from other people but if i if i if i say what what lessons do i think that i can impart to um students i think that i mean uh so so towards the end of the book i think i i write something along the lines of get the right people in your life because they'll teach you everything that you need to know and once you've gotten those people in your life so don't worry about modeling a spreadsheet industry something get the right person who will be able to bring you to wherever it is that you need to go um and so how do you do that and actually i i think that if i so that getting around the right people is is is perhaps most important thing and actually if i if i stop and think about it i don't think it's in the book but so yeah since the book and i don't yes so i i did a i went on a 10-day the passenger meditation retreat uh i lasted three days what happened the other seven days um i can talk about so i lasted three days i aspire to do a 10-day pass in a meditation retreat again sometime in the future and we can dive into why i only lasted three days but those three days were extraordinarily powerful and i came out of that i don't want to say changed person but i explored areas mental areas that i don't think i would have been able to get to if i had not gone and done that and i i just to give it a very short indication i mean we all have now you can get all these meditation apps on the phone after having done that retreat any guided meditation with some idiotic voice telling me what to do open my eyes close my eyes no and by the way any stupid music no the only thing that that that i want are the timed bells or something that gives me a sense of passing of time every five minutes or every 10 minutes but um getting the right people in your life but also the ability to sit alone and just accept what is going on and to think about it rather than to do would be i think some of the most profound lessons i'd want in part but um getting the right people in your life and how you go about doing that there are some really really practical skills to go about doing that that uh so if the if the big idea is get the right people in your life and you know one of the ways to do that at scale is to grow goodwill but then there are some very very practical skills and i'll give you one again from my poor family they had hearing jordan peterson's name every five minutes but but here's something incredible so we all have friends who studied engineering you know do you know and and so so engineers are more interested in things than in people so engineers have some engineers have a hard time socializing and they get a very high sense of anxiety when they go into room where there are a lot of people so the simple fix or possible fix that jordan peterson gives to those people is you know when you go into a social situation and you're feeling nervous what do you do you look at your shoes that makes you more nervous your hands start sweating you don't know what to do you keep looking at your shoes and what jordan peterson says is just look into people's eyes the way the both of you are right now with me because so you didn't notice what you just did but i said that and you blinked and you had a little bit and you just nodded because the minute you're looking into somebody's eyes there's a whole bunch of um systems in the brain that engage in mirror neurons and god knows what and then you can come out of yourself and you can become so that's an amazing fix and that is kind of a clique type you take a kind of a what may feel to the engineering type an uncomfortable step an unnatural step lift your eyes up from your shoes and focus on somebody's eyes in the room and you'll see that you'll start feeling safe and comfortable i find those kinds of so when i talk about writing thank you notes that is effectively what i'm addressing i'm addressing what are the kind of the basic fixes that we can do with our interactions with the world to start the process of growing goodwill to start the process of getting the right people into our lives and you're not going to be able to get the right person into your life if your only choice is a group of people at a cocktail party if you can't talk to anyone so your first step with the engineer is who who's socially awkward is not well you've got to go and find somebody who's got the right moral qualities and the right no you just got to find somebody so you need to teach that person how to look somebody in the eyes and so growing goodwill is a big idea but there are so many little pieces that can be a part of that and and kind of their their um uh their building blocks and what's important as we have a conversation like this here is that we don't you know we don't know where somebody is on this i think i strongly believe that there are some basic building blocks for success that i still don't have and um so i am so i hate calling up people who might invest with me our mutual friend chantal knows all about that and i think you know there's a certain element of the engineer standing at his staring at his shoes that is going on with me and so i can talk in grandiose times about growing good will but that is a building block that i still need to acquire in my life fully and own it and internalize it and but interestingly enough if i get the right team around me i have an amazing team around me right now and if i'm honest with them about my failings so like i think i have a real problem here you guys need to help me with it please if you catch me staring at my toes or avoiding talking to people i need to be talking to me catch me and make me do it is kind of the way i kind of learn and overcome that and that's perhaps a part of getting the right people in in your life but so what am i you what is the lesson get the right people in your life for sure but don't walk around saying that figure out what the building blocks are for you and everybody's different one person will be like oh yeah i walk into a cocktail party and like i'm talking to everyone now it's my my issue is selecting the right person another person is just getting to talk to people then thank you notes is just a little building block and interesting enough just for your interest so there's a part of me that's shy that needs to conquer that the thank you notes was a stepping stone or is a stepping stone because i might not be able to call the person up and say but i'm okay to write a thank you note so great so we've spoken about you know values of life philosophies and so many other things how have all these things influenced your investments approach yeah and i guess that you've already heard from me i've made enormous mistakes i don't think i can tell you about uh i don't think i'm qualified to say what is what is the right investment approach i've talked about um make sure that whatever you do get the power of compounding going for you and now i remember what i was going to say which is that realize that when you're a student and you're studying what people are saying why are they saying it and realize that they themselves may not fully understand why they're saying what they're saying so i'm just going to give give you a few of the sort of the ways in which people communicate and you have to look at the meta communication so there's a guy i haven't met him i'm unlikely to meet him he publishes something the boom doom and gloom report uh the nature of this communication is that it says i'm going to scare the living daylights out of you about some event that might happen and that scaredness is going to grab you it's going to grab you by the routines and circuits in our brains that are designed to pay attention to something that is going to be scary so that's going to get me that's going to get your eyeballs or get your attention on me then i'm going to i'm going to pivot from scaring the hair out of you to telling you what you need to do in order to protect yourself that is a common theme in investment newsletters primarily but also some investors raise money that way and it's a routine if you like and i think that i saved myself an awful lot of brain cells and an awful lot of grief when i was able to identify that early because once you've identified that that's what you what is going on i can switch it off and and there you know i never mentioned the boom doom and groom report and at least in that the guy who writes it who's based in hong kong is in a certain way being honest with the reader he's saying this is the boom doom and gloom report and so like come here for boom doom and gloom you know that's what you're getting in inevitably what he says is buy gold you know so he's what is called a gold bug like the world is going to have a hard basket everything's going to fall apart and the only thing that's going to work is gold buy gold so the minute you know that with a minute i know that i can but there are some investors who do that as well uh and so that's a whole class of communication that one can say do i want to expose myself to here's another i'll just give you a couple more um there's the macro analysis you know i'm gonna write so that the way the macro analysis goes is i'm gonna write so eloquently because i've been trained to do it about the macro economy that you're gonna get the feeling that i actually know what's going to happen next and you're going to read like these paragraphs of make you feel like i have got incredible insight and therefore because i've got incredible insight you're going to invest with me or you're going to follow my recommendations and uh you know so so that is a an art form it's it's it's it's incredible to see when people do it well but the brutal harsh reality is nobody knows what's going to happen next you know as howard mark said nobody knows but but that kind of writing draws people in and in investment banks the people who are super good at writing that way they're called investment strategists you know they're called macro analysts and so there's a game going on the game is they pretend to the people who want to hear that kind of stuff that they know what's going to happen next the reality is that their people for the farm because the the unwritten understanding is i'm going to make you feel like i know what's going to happen next and therefore you're going to come and do your trades with us are you going to come and invest your money with us so you're going to come and engage with us so there's so we've got boom doom and gloom uh you know chicken little skies falling on our head you need to listen to me i will save you then there's um uh there's the macro analysis guy and then you could go into uh you know the person who knows an enormous amount about about a specific space so it's like biotechnology is going to take over the world this is where the future is i know so much about it you know or um cloud computing i know so much about it or whatever it is so there you know it may be that somebody really does have an industry uh an an industry specialty and they actually do know a lot about the industry and they're a good analyst but in general somebody knows a lot about an industry or a particular area does not necessarily make a good investor so um so all of that you know you you graduating from lsc you're going into the world you're going to be swimming in that soup you know and and and i think that you need to know or you need to start developing a sense of uh what is it that is in front of me what is unwritten what is not said about this piece of communication there's actually the imp and you know in the world that we're in with youtube and instagram what have you we lack context and actually the context is everything and we can see how badly we can be manipulated in politics when they take clips that are out of context but that's going on in the investment world as well so we we need to see that and understand that you know the newsletter doesn't land in your inbox saying hey just that you know my business model is that i send this out to three million people out of the three million people half a million get gets so scared that they're dialing the phones all day long and i got people on the other side of the phone that take the people who are scared enough and have enough money and i open up accounts on them that is not said you just see the email in your inbox so um and you know the people who are really just working to compound money they have figured that out so i'll i'll give uh you know i just need to stop and make sure that they won't be upset that i say these names but we've all heard of lilu lilu runs money for um charlie munger he's not out talking to anyone you know he's not he's not giving interviews the way i am so there's one i'll give another name josh tarasoff uh you should try and interview josh tarasoff but he probably is going to say no because he's just said no that interferes with my thinking i don't want to do it there's another guy called irvind he teaches a class at i believe boston college and harvard business school that again is not out there talking he's not out there saying stuff to the world and so that's important to realize so so if you plan on compounding the difficulty is is that the people are quietly compounding we can't learn from them yeah i just want to find them okay so that's fine so we have to learn from the people who are communicative but what bias do they have and what bias or what is what is contextual to the communication i'm receiving that i need to take in in order to get the full picture and i would tell you that so so um i wrote a book was the book a net positive for my investment performance it's not clear to me i can't unequivocally say yes and i can't unequivocally say no why did i write the book i wrote the book uh for a number of reasons but at least a part of it was to feed the part of me that's narcissistic so so there's there's all sorts of biases to communication which relate to i want to build my business and if i tell you the full story about what i'm doing you're not going to send me your money so i'm not going to tell you the full story and i've given you some of those examples and then there's just personal biases so um uh i i write a book and in some level it kind of feeds narcissism inside me it's like it feels good i want to kind of be known in the world and there are other reasons to write it as well good reasons like i want to be honest i want to share with people something that i think is important to share so it's not the only reason um but i guess you you when you when you're evaluating guy's spear why is guy spear doing this interview you want to know is there is there a drift is there a is there a bias there is there something that's not said that uh ought to be said and and actually i would say in my case when i talk about people like lilu or um arvind or josh i think they're actually living in a certain way a better life because there is a limit to what being in the public eye can give you and what actually will happen and what happened to me for a period of years after writing the book is that it's amazing how the ancient myth so that we all know the image of narcissus i like the best the salvador dali um painting narcissus the story of narcissus is that i don't actually know the full story but he fell in love with his own image and he fell so in love with it that he fell into the water and drowned you know and that's a nice little myth but it is not um it is extremely relevant to the story of me after my book was published because i had some very difficult years in the fund because i'd done a little bit of that and what is important for you to know is that why did that happen i didn't i was aware that of sorry keeping one's ego under control and of the dangers of narcissism but i wanted the book to succeed and that is an understandable and um it's totally fine to want a book to succeed it's totally fine to want to promote your book of course you want to promote your book but at what point does promoting your book become an exercise in narcissism if you like so there are all sorts of when you see communication from people and you want to learn but you will not get the best lessons and the best insights if you don't see all of the context in which it's happening both business reasons why they might keep stuff they might not say something and also personal biases like is this guy communicating out of narcissism and i would tell you look howard marx is an amazing guy you know you don't need me to say that warren buffett has said that my friend william green who's publishing a book has said that but also he does not take investment decisions on a daily basis the oak tree has now been acquired by brookfield asset management they're in a certain way in the fundraising business howard marx is an amazing brand communicator and so we have to realize that when howard marx writes a memo he's also doing that you know and and it's it's a harsh thing to say and and i in a certain way feel like i'm yeah who am i to question what karl marx karl marx howard mark how the hell did that come from to question what howard marx is doing but i think that i'm better off knowing that that is and charlie munger has this thing you know never ask a barber if you need a haircut that's right so you know no and and what charlie mungus says is apply a windage factor so yeah you can ask the barber if you need a haircut and the barber will tend to want to see that you need a haircut more often than you don't and so it's not you know with howard marx realize which way the wind is blowing with guy spear which you know is that why is he doing this what par how do so we have to be really smart about how we learn from the world we should never ever be in a situation where just studiously taking notes from anybody even the most and it started actually when i realized that i was sitting with the guy who was the former i think he was like the former ceo of one of the berkshire insurance companies and he's sitting next to me at a dinner in new york and he said this one thing and it was so powerful and valuable well it i didn't realize at the time but i realized now he said you know the thing about warren buffett he said to me is don't just pay attention to what he says pay attention to what he does and so and and i can't remember what it was in the context of but but that that so so listen to what i say listen to what howard marx bill ackman george soros you name it but then pay attention to what i actually do and see if that aligns and build a 3d picture of the person so i don't know if that's investment advice i don't know what that is but i have a follow-up question to that it feels like there's a lot of questioning in what you've just said so questioning people's where's the what are the bias what's where the motivations yeah would you say that's central to investing for you you know the the richard nolan was professor of accounting at oxford oxford at harvard business school he did many things that were just so valuable it's just incredible accounting not the most interesting subject one thing he did was he he did this in class and i've done it a couple of times and i've given talks he said he took everything in front of the audit report all the kind of colorful photographs and stuff and he ripped it out he said he tossed that in the bin i don't think that's entirely right because um you should read the letter but you know the accounts are really really important but he said something else he said when you look at any set of accounts who prepared them you know the accounts are not neutral who prepared the accounts what are they trying to communicate to what audience what slant are they trying to give it there is a slant try and identify the slant and the accounts of publicly traded companies are not neutral you have um you know i'll tell you so um i am a client of salesforce and it's very painful to me for me to see that the company's done way more than a 10x and i was aware of this cloud business model 10 years ago and i didn't invest but i went through the 30 not the uh is it 13 f fighting the proxy statement not so long ago and you can see very clearly that there is a fight going on between um mark benioff and his board mark benioff on the one hand is a billionaire but he's getting paid a salary of tens of millions of dollars a year and the board is saying what these some members of the board and certainly some institutional investors are saying this is egregious you know and you can see how the way the numbers are presented is is a result of that kind of to and fro so i guess i'm just making the same point now with respect to company accounts but look it goes yeah i mean it goes to if you're going to read and i haven't i brought his name up if you're going to try and read and understand karl marx understand his biases understand him in the context of the world in which he lived in terms of his relationships what what was it and what bits are missing from the communication uh but in terms of just going back to your original question investment approach um uh i've taken far too long and i've i've well this is another interesting thing so why did i not buy apple when i understood it why did i not buy amazon when i think i understood it as well as anybody else did and i was slavishly saying yes but my hero warren buffett's not buying it so i can't buy it you know not happening because i'm a i'm a died in the world value investor so if you slavishly follow heroes too much then you can you can miss out on stuff and it's an interesting balance because i've i've said in the past that if you if you clone investment ideas it's like bowling with with the cartons up you know you're you're inevitably going to get the ball more or less the right place and if you're so if you're worried about compounding which you should be then that's a good thing at the same time at what point do you at what point do i say i know enough to be able to say yeah warren buffett's not doing this but i'm okay to do this if you think too originally too soon you may do some serious damage to your ability to compound but if you don't at some point allow yourself to think originally you're going to leave opportunities on the table in life and you know henry ford had he had the statement he said somebody should be learning at least till age 40. so even start trying to be creatively original until you're at least age 40. and i think that that was said you know 50 years ago or more and life expectancy has increased so we could take you know 50 is the new 40s so don't you know but they're they're great questions and um and i would also say look i don't think there's there's there are things that bill ackman has or here in london chris hahn has that it and it's an emotional orientation to the markets that i don't have i just don't have it so that's kind of you know so you're asking me for in for insights where i really do feel like i'm an imposter i think the news that i can give you is that you cannot have it and still do just fine because you know yeah and on that last last line you've in a recent interview likened um investments or investing approach to a drunk in a bar as a student that's very that's that's great that's good yeah it's great i mean if it's uh if the investment approach is a drunk in a bar then wow a lot of students are going to be happy so can you explain that more and i guess to start off with why do so many investors think that they're a fighter pilot well you know realize that so i i started with the book saying i'm going to be brutally honest with the world about who i really am and i'm in this lucky place that and i really did have to face up to the possibility that um i'd be brutally honest with the world about who i really am and they'd be like well that's great but i'm pulling my money from you right now thank you so much so i can afford but but now i'm on the other side of that and people say yeah okay but i know who he is and i'm happy to be invested with him so i feel safe to continue to be brutally honest but realize and again if we go back to the different styles of communication even if they're not scaring the living daylight side of you or being you know macro geniuses or some other kind of genius there's a huge amount of investment communication which says i know what i'm doing so you can trust me so it's kind of a scary thing for a guy who's trying to build a business or a woman who's trying to build a business or a non-binary for that matter is trying to build a business and say um uh i don't the hell know what i'm doing so i'm lucky that i can i can do that but we're at our strongest when we recognize our weaknesses because then we can turn our weaknesses into strengths and so i think that that's the key to being in any way successful and i happen to think that i have a very significant number of weaknesses and it may may genuinely be the case well relative to some of the most incredible investors on the planet i have more than when compared in that peer group i have way more weaknesses than they do i can't get rid of them they're part of my makeup but i can be honest about them so the guy is a fighter pilot is pretending and some of them at least are pretending to their investors that there's something that they're not you know i'll tell you a story that two stories one guy is a guy i won't remember his name it was one of the most public and phenomenal flame outs ever so he ended up in one stock leveraged and the stock symbol was mch and he was leveraging that stock and it was a gas natural gas company and gas was trading at like four dollars per barrel per mcf which is the kind of unit of volume that you trade and he was convinced it was going way way higher and this company was highly leveraged to the price of natural gas and instead the price of natural gas collapsed and that was the end of his fund and uh he stopped redemptions so he had the clause in his investment contract that allowed him to stop redemptions and the last i heard he's managing a bar in um somewhere somewhere in the united states and and has the rump of the fund still going so but there was a reason why i was telling you that and again i've i've lost my train of thought so remind me where what the question was fighter pilot you were just going into right so he communicated like that he's like this is this is you're gonna see you know i'm aiming on the target and he had this belief about himself that that's who he was and it turns out it wasn't the case now in contrast to that you have mike bury and we've all seen the big short so you know if you're an outside investor i don't remember the mcf governor you got the mcf guy and you got mike barry you know and mike barry is this incredibly brilliant guy who turns out to have been right and he made an enormous amount of money but then on the other side he got the other guy so is it the mcf guy or is it mike burry and i think that you know mike barry if you would if you look at the movie and you look at that story and i guess for people who are listening mike barry is a guy an investor a fantastic analyst yeah in the period prior to 2008 realizes that there's this enormous bubble in the housing market and that it's going to go south and he bets an enormous amount in a leveraged way using credit default swaps against the housing market and um investors get super scared they get super upset some of the investors pull their money out before it happens but then we get the crash of 2008 nine mike barry makes insane amounts of money for his investors and he retires and so mike barry says yeah i know there are people who think of themselves as fighter pilots and are not i'm not one of them trust me when you're on the outside you have to say well do i trust this or not and it's not shoes that i would like to be in and what i believe is that the person who thinks they know may know or they may not know so mike barry the history of that is that he he said i am that guy who knows and this will work out spectacularly the guy who did mcf also thought he was that guy and so how do you know so mike barry would say yeah but i knew i wasn't that guy but the guy who blew up also thought he wasn't that guy so so you know now i want to try and pretend to myself in some situation i'm the fighter pilot you know and and then you know how do i know that i'm actually mike barry or maybe i'm and i think that there's a far better thing to do which is just assume you're not the fighter pilot even if you may well be the fighter pilot because you just don't know and all of this what i'm what i'm kind of getting at and talking around is this well-known experiment that i can't reference the name but they take a room of i don't know fifty hundred people and if you and they have them all flipped coins so you know you they're unbiased coins and so you have a room of 100 people everybody flips the coin you know comes out heads for half tails for half the people who get tails are out of the game and you have 50 people they all flip a coin you got 25 12 down to one and then they interview that person and they genuinely believe that there was something special about them jenny i think this might be in nassim taleb's book full by randomness fooled by randomness is literally being fooled by randomness mike barry how do you know you know that there it's clearly 50 50 chance but the guy who and they do they repeat this experiment multiple times so how do i know all of that is a very long and laborious way of saying assume i'm a drunk in a bar that's not saying i am a drunk in a bar but um i'll give you another story of um uh oh what is an oh damn dammit why am i not remembering the name of the fund um this had a nobel prize winning uh economist and uh they were based in connecticut they had enormous amounts of money anyway they were convinced they were geniuses and in 999 times out of a thousand they would have been proven right there was a one of the thousand chance if the markets went the wrong way and spreads diverged in a certain way rather than converged that uh they'd be proven wrong and guess what so here's a something else this is a very powerful this may be the best lesson the best thing that i can share with you and it's kind of like it's almost spiritual life will seek out your weaknesses the world will find and the more successful you are the more likely it is to happen expect your weaknesses to be uncovered by life um you know if you have an aversion to a certain kind of risk that risk will find you if you have a predilection for narcissism or a predilection for a certain kind of ceo of a company or that risk that weakness will find you so sooner or later you're gonna we're all if we plan on being successful we're gonna have to confront and conquer our worst weaknesses because our strengths will our strengths will help us to be successful so those strengths will continue to work for us but sooner or later as our strengths allow us to be successful the weakness will become more and more prominent until eventually that's the thing that's going to take you out if you like and that's what happened that's what in a certain way happened with this mcf guy so it happened with the fund that i wish i remember the name of and um so why don't start with that up front and say i'm gonna focus i'm going to become super aware of my weaknesses today that's the point of the drunks and bars and my point there is we know that the human brain it turns out that one of the best ways of thinking about the brain is that it's like all these different personalities knocking around you know so you've got that you've got the reptilian brain you know that's easy for me to describe the routine brain is like it's less intelligent than a dog it just goes do i fight flight do i do i fight this thing do i run away from it or do i just freeze and do nothing and that that uh so you know significant others we've all been in fights with significant others where that reptilian personality takes over and you either want to slam the door on the person or you want to shout in their face or you're just going to like i'm going to ignore how this is flight fright freeze so you got that personality you got various other personalities you've got that you've got the hunter personality you know just seeks out you know whitney tilson says um i want to wait until i'm trembling with greed you know that's a so so the drunks and bars kind of says i'm actually a collection of these very strange personalities knocking around in my head and i think that i'm in control but i'm actually not in control and we have plenty of evidence that shows that in so many circumstances we're not in control minute you go and say well actually i'm a bit like a drunk in a bar uh now we're gonna set up the bar in a way that's gonna help me out so you know structure your life in such a way that in spite of all of those flaws all of those different personalities knocking around we're more or less going to get to the right results so if i was a drunk in a bar you know and obviously we know that getting too drunk is bad in fact let's just argue for this purpose of this conversation being drunk is a terrible outcome and i'm an alcoholic in a bar might be you know so you know i'm going to go to my bar designers i'm going to say listen all the alcohol we're going to have it under lock and key yeah and it's going to be completely out of reach and by the way because i'm an alcoholic and i know that it's good to drink water you're going to put a bunch of vodka bottles but you're going to just fill them with water it's going to say vodka on it and i'm going to be drinking water all day long i'm going to structure my environment in such a way that so i'll give you an example of that so i'm very lucky to have an amazing relationship with my father he's a very significant investor of mine and my wife noticed that when i talk to him when marcus is stressed and i talk to him my stress levels go down that's the equivalent so it's like you know if i'm stressed call him up and talk to him he's an amazing companion to have so you know that's kind of like the bottle of looks like vodka but it isn't and that's good for me set yourself up james clear actually fantastic book even though i didn't enjoy as much of it as i ought to the first time atomic habits he actually has you know all you need to do if you want to eat less hobnobs is just put them slightly out of reach and and that seconds of you know do it so that you just have to climb onto a chair or you know lay out your sports club you know some people the way they do is they go to sleep in their sports clothes they put on their sports clothes because that extra friction of so you know this is all relevant to investing in a thousand different ways where something is not healthy or unlikely to or has a high probability of leading to a bad investment result just put it a little further out of reach and take the things that are going to give a better investment result and pull them in that's the point about the drunks and bars and actually once one wakes up to that it's like it's it's not just for investing it's for life in a certain way it's for staying fit staying healthy having good relationships and again it all goes back to jordan peterson was that why you stopped using bloomberg terminal i'm putting it out of reach so so you know i just wrote an essay that i'm i'm super pleased about yes it was but you know and what i wrote this essay about is that you know i we all have i think but i'll talk about me a love-hate relationship with the internet not just bloomberg because how do you deal with this funnel of information and you can't be effective in investment research without using the internet i mean that's where you're gonna go that's your first source of information so it's at once this amazing uh knowledge gathering machine and at the same time a source of distraction from the boom doom gloom report from a thousand different other things and my first attempt was actually not the right answer but it was at least an attempt which was uh switch the bloomberg monitor off put the bloomberg on a standing desk have a library with no computers in it my my 2.0 of that now is actually you can see it laid out here so uh what i do in every office that i'm in now if i possibly can is i have two desks facing each other on the one side there's the computer screen but i can go to the other side where there's nothing and i can do non-computer related work and so i think that it's not about having the bloomberg monitor or not or even about having it switched on or not but having routines that allow me to so it you you that was too granular it was not granular enough it wasn't down into the micro it was too macro it's not yes or no you can't say no computers in my life because they're too useless or sorry not too useless but they the negative outweighs the positive we have to get into more granular thing and i mean there are all sorts of things so i would say the um evernote actually helps me because i now rather than tweet something out or rather than read it in the moment i clip it and read it later and it will take away distracting ads and what have you i think one of the big benefits actually over bloomberg is that it takes away it's a standardized way of looking at something so you know you get a news report it's it's like it's there just the text in a lot of cases and i think that's really really useful but um within the bloomberg monitor i would say that i uh when they first came out so you could have either the kind of viewer screen or you could have the bloomberg monitor cover the whole thing like a launchpad they called it launchpad and first i was like i'm gonna have a launchpad you know i'm gonna have like i used to have four screens i'm gonna like there's like this whole array you know and then i actually realized no no launchpad get rid of it uh i have the browser and i will go on individual things and look because because actually bringing all that information up at once is too much and too many opportunities for distraction so it's not yes or no to the bloomberg monitor it's not yes or no to the internet it's getting diving into the weeds and saying what yes what no so in a certain sense if we go back to the drunks and bars it's not go into the bar or not you have to be in the bar but now where's the vodka bottle where's the water bottle you know the super super alcoholic stuff has to be completely behind lock and key actually i i decided to download tik tok because i wanted to see what my children are watching and uh you know we have so i understand how when you got the blue the the sort of the notification thing lights up on facebook that's kind of little hit of dopamine but something about the way the tiktok platform is set up is like the hits of dopamine are like way way stronger so actually what i decided with tok is that i don't have it i if i want to check in on tik tok i have to download it then i have to connect it look at it and then i delete it afterwards and that's my sense of putting something slightly out of reach and actually after watching the social dilemma lori my wife deleted facebook from her phone so i think that's something that many people are doing they're saying okay i'll check social media but not on my phone so social media is only available on on their computer which is a completely different experience so so i think that we we live in an age where we have to we're not we're we're beginners at starting to engage with in i mean a great example is my son my son built a computer i'm very proud i'll look at my son he can build a computer that was great and actually playing games sometimes is great but playing games all day every day may be not great so so i think that that's a challenge that we all have i'm not telling you not to use a bloomberg monitor i'm saying be intelligent about it yeah i think my idea is to jump into the fire round yeah sure this is i'm extremely excited for this yeah um so i've prepared a couple of short-ish questions which i want you to expand on um but it's going to be in a rapid fire mode so the first question and you you talk about plenty of books yeah in the education of value investor what is the book you've gifted most to your friends family and anyone you meet yeah so so i had the benefit of seeing these before and so what came up for me i don't have the notes in front of me now but um recently i've been gifting simon sinek's book the infinite game and there's another book by somebody else called the infinite game and i think it's a wonderful book with some really great insights so i've been gifting that um think and grow rich by napoleon hill getting a nod here so i guess you've seen it how to win friends and influence people is a spectacular book so i think that those are the three that i've been doing the most of then i i a fourth one that i've been doing quite a bit recently is by a guy called songkai irons he's a german guy and it's called how to take smart notes and i've been particularly enamored with a guy called nicholas luman i don't know if you have followed him but it's all about how to manage myself in the knowledge acquisition process and i talked about a little bit in this essay that i wrote so uh that's four i've actually uh ordered the note-taking book after finding it on your twitter oh that's great yeah hopefully it helps me out with university uh but it will it will i know that will help you with life i believe so uh another yeah it's not a book but i will just tell you that there's this tool that i've just started using that i think is extraordinarily powerful it's called rome research and uh it's kind of a note-taking app you can argue but really really interesting and it's helping me to you know so so this guy so so this is all recent finds for me and it's not books but i feel compelled to share because i've just written about it and i think they're amazing guys so a guy called thiago forte he's just had a baby i know that because i follow his twitter feed he talks about building a second brain and uh it goes to sanchez aaron's book taking smart notes and um so we think using our environment and so we have limited short-term memory we have to take the things that we see and we have to write them down or capture them in one way or another and then we learn and expand our knowledge by interacting with those notes outside of us those notes outside of us could be considered to be a second brain if you like well there may be part of our brains um i think that's extraordinarily powerful sanket aaron's book gets into it but so does thiago forte and another woman who's here in london called anlor i don't know how to pronounce her name probably and or less labs and laura conf she's here she's originally moroccan and you should interview her but that's a whole other story and for thiago fortes if anyone wants to check that out i believe that's forte la forted labs yes that's right and and uh and laura is nest labs that's labs and they both were called to my attention by a guy called david perrell who will be extraordinary david underscore purell extraordinary success will be extraordinarily successful so yeah and so you mentioned rome research yeah um i'm very interested in hearing what is one purchase and hopefully it's not rome research but what is one purchase under a hundred dollars that you've made recently that has brought you the most benefit to your life so recently can be we can we can expand that a little bit the cappuccino i had yesterday i liked your coffee i saw that question but but now i'm i'm not i'm blanking on what it would be i actually what i want to go with on that is um the moleskine notebook actually because i i've learned how to use so i now have a system for using the moleskine notebook and i i'm i'm really excited about it and i guess because it's helping me a lot so yeah i'll just um this is actually well this is these are these are sort of like initial notes on on george buckley i actually i pulled out the photograph and he's just a guy that i want to follow a little bit more closely and i'll just i didn't realize i was going to do this but i'm gonna turn back to uh and this is like this is um something that if you look on online it's called a common book but this is where i capture when i'm not in front of a computer fleeting notes and uh there's something else that i found from the ft here on um how people buy cars so i don't know uh but so the moleskine notebook the way there's a whole process by uh process so you know on a blank page i will write on this side and i will leave this side blank so that i can come back later and see something that i wrote and so here's something where i was taking notes on something on this side but i have plenty of space to fill out on this side and then you know this is just i don't know this is i don't know exactly where i got it from but there'll be an index and the funny thing is that the index is never the first page so page 22 is the index in this thing so here i go to page 22 and if i want to find stuff so here i have page 24 is blank page 58 has got notes on trupanion so i kind of have an index there and then i'll number the pages so that i can go through to page 58 and i can see the notes that i wrote on tripania now so so look i as a student took notes so i'm used to thinking with a pen and paper in my hand but um so as somebody who'll be familiar to the brits is dominic cummings you heard of dominic coming so if you go to his blog his blog is still up the guy whatever you think politically the guy is incredibly smart and ha either has good ideas himself or is connected to good ideas so he switched me on to this idea of spaced repetition so i took notes on tropanion i didn't put a date on this but you know and that that it's scroll it would be hard for me to read but there were some saying points that i took down on that company now i come back to it and i'm actually reviewing so i'm doing spaced repetition there are salient points which are now be getting committed into memory so so actually a moleskin when well used is an extraordinarily powerful thinking tool and i'm super excited about it because now it's becoming and i have since i started doing this and it started during lockdown i have about there's about six or seven of them that i'm slowly uh filling out and so i feel like my capacity to take in and absorb the right knowledge has gone through the roof and you know the simple and you know i've experimented with different ones so tamoya river is a japanese one but i actually like the moleskins the most so anyway that's my 100 purchase yeah and i don't own shares and moleskine i would tell you that i did look at them up so so yeah i was kind of frustrated because this is an italian luxury goods company their sales are about i think about 160 170 million euro right now and i thought how interesting i'm gonna that could be something that i might want to buy shares in and they were acquired by a belgian automotive distribution company called ditteron now the the and this is a minuscule part of their business so you know nothing doing but anyway yeah there we go moleskine so in that question you also answered that uh you you started doing that quite a bit during quarantine yeah so we have a tweet from you here that says uh things i can do during quarantine for march 13th read annual reports take long walks skype with family and friends write thank you notes and do zoom calls yeah um is there anything that surprised you during quarantine and any any new habits that you started i started the podcast that was that was useful and fun uh and i did something i'd wanted to do for a long time and the quarantine gave me the opportunity to do it so that was great um i think that all of this learning this approach to learning has been great but i think that so that that's all been wonderful i think that so podcast and really on really managing myself far better than i've ever managed myself in the past has been really wonderful and i've had some really good due diligence conversations with people so that's been great the negative has been to realize and i think that they say that this may be hitting one in five members of the population uh i thought we were more than blessed with the extraordinary spacious homes that we could live in i thought that we'd have no problem as a family in lockdown i didn't realize the degree to which young people including our children need contact with their peers and we went through a six-month period where our children did not have contact with their peers and that's created strains in our family and we are amongst the most lucky and so i say if it's created strains in our family what kind of strains is it created in other families i think that the lockdowns are the most vicious and unfair imposition on young people and i don't my best sense is that you guys aren't as hard hit as teenagers but it is extraordinary and enormously unfair for the people who are vulnerable to make to impose on beha behavior on people who are not vulnerable and i i think that you know i'm not a scientist but i think the political system has gone it wrong and do we want to reduce deaths absolutely do we want to reduce the spread of the virus to the vulnerable absolutely but that should not come at the expense of the lives of young people who've got their whole lives ahead of them uh people who are vulnerable can self-isolate they can take all kinds of evasive action to make sure the virus doesn't get to them uh but and you know if your grandparents of young children if does that mean that you don't see them well that's possible but that doesn't mean that every young person shouldn't go to school you know so um there been some positives but believe me i would i would prefer not to see the disruption that is happening in people's lives and uh matt ridley said something which i wish was getting more coverage which is if the medical community community were to evaluate the lockdowns as if it were medicine it would be dismissed very quickly for the very dangerous and significantly negative side effects if it was held if if the lockdowns were held to the same standard that any medication is held to they would be they would be ruled out of hand you know so in any case i i don't know you know it's got nothing to do with investing may have nothing to do with the interview but i it is i believe that we're going through a kind of a madness i think that uh for reasons i don't fully understand the governments aren't able to get a grip of what is the most rational thing to do and i think that the inc the enormous lack of compliance that we're seeing in populations as populations recognize that and you know the interesting thing is we were talking about russia uh and um i two or three years ago i made myself read war and peace which is just an amazing book and they talk uh leo tolstoy talks in war and peace about you know the days when the the napoleon had won the battle of borrodino and is marching on moscow and this is like this is possibly the worst crisis as a country that russia ever had i mean russia the state had been formed and now they're being invaded and not just being invaded the the invader is winning and is marching on moscow and the the end the end message that i took away from that book is that you know generals here and there politicians and the ruling class here and there saying all sorts of things at the end of the day it was the reaction of the common man in day-to-day decisions that won the war for the russians and against the french and got the french out of russia i think that that's what's going to happen here in the coronavir chrono chronovirus is you've got dr fauci in the united states and you've got the scientific committee community here and you've got you've got the politicians and you've got lockdowns and the enter way i don't think that's going to make much difference the population are going to do what they're going to do and that's the most important thing and i'm just really sorry for the impact that it's had on my family and the impact it's having on the on on other young people but um i don't know what to do about it i mean i think that part of it is that younger people are less politically plugged in and in a certain way maybe something that's i mean none of us are uk citizens and we're here in the uk right now but young people have to say wow our interests are not being represented we better get some we better better organize and make sure that they hear our point of view nobody's actually hearing young people's point of view on this and you know it's in terms of the ethics somebody who's 80 years old you know if you if it's not just it's how many years do you have left to live and the content of those years and it is unfair to impose costs on young people when they have their whole lives ahead of them and this is going to make huge differences to the outcomes in their lives you actually should wait in favor of the younger people you know so yeah guys moving on from quarantine i have a photo of you here in monash this is from 2019 can you explain about your love for ted and your involvement with the organization yeah well it's uh i think the ted is suffering because because you can't do online what you do offline and um think that look i i don't think that going to ted has helped my investing at all but life shouldn't just be about investing i think it's made me it's given me a richer life and you know you better damn well enjoy enjoy the journey because it's one journey so to end up um there's a joke some rich guy died uh do you know how much of his fortune he left behind the guy says i don't know how much and the answer is all of it so i don't think that it's helped i don't think it's hindered and who knows it might have helped but i've had the opportunity to um walk across the street with bill gates it was right next to me it was kind of cool i've had the opportunity to have many interactions with lilu at the ted conference that's been extraordinary i was titillated by the opportunity to stand in the same room as um uh sergey brin uh one year and so that's all kind of reid hoffman was there one year so that's all pretty freaking cool same time did that bring me i think and the talks are there's something really special about being in the room with those talks and i i i was before we went i don't know what my life would have been like and who i would have been had i not been attending the ted conference so i think that i've become a more interesting person my family's become a more interesting place i think it's i think that but here's the takeaway for for you guys and anyone who wants to listen in is it was an investment and maybe you're getting that in social capital so i had this conversation with a member of my family yesterday have you have you listened i'm sort of pausing because this could be a whole 20 minutes and i don't know how much the reader is the listener is interested in this but uh this how lucky i am that i heard this talk by i don't remember his first name collier is his last name first reunion at business school he says you guys are all going to do fine financially but as the reunions go on more and more of you are not going to show up to reunions and by and large when you don't show up to reunions the reason why you're not going to show up yeah there'll be someone who just lived the other side of the world who didn't have time but one of the most significant reasons is that you'll be going through issues with your family you'll have a divorce probably and um many of you will be getting divorced in situations where you didn't have to get divorced it's because you just didn't invest the time the energy to have the best possible marriage and the best possible family that you have he said you guys have all been trained over the last two years at business school and probably before to know a lot about your financial balance sheet but trust me it's going to be fine but you're going to completely ignore all these other things and i have one message to give you which is take care of that side of your balance sheet and so you know what is that social cap psychological health whatever it is that we can treat we can kind of consider that you know look at the balance sheet of a company and you know the accounting looks at accounts receivable and inventory and cash and long-term investments and add it you know in a personal accounting add it into your kind of personal balance sheet what what is my psychological capital what does that look like and what does that mean you know what what have i done with myself that makes my life worthwhile and so if if i go and visit the antarctic it's an expensive trip but nobody can take that memory away from me it's there or that's the with my family for the rest of our lives that's an investment in the social or psychological capital some kind of capital of our family or and if i go and run a marathon if i do a triathlon that's uh adds to me and so i think that where ted fits in is in that framework and um so it was an investment in my future self or uh a better life better life not in terms of having a ferrari parked outside but better memories and the people who seem to live the most successful lives there's this i think it's bernie siegel who's an oncologist and you know how do you deal with people who have terminal cancer who can't necessarily get rid of it and then there are these amazing stories where somebody's diagnosed with terminal cancer and is cured from it or they they and and bernie siegel's belief is that either way who knows whether it helps but use the diagnosis to give yourself permission to do whatever you want to do and you know in a certain sense what we all want to do is make the world more beautiful that's the most meaningful life and so whatever way you can find find ways to make the world more beautiful today because then you'll be on a great journey and you'll be investing in your sort of social and psychological capital if you like i'm diving into something and i'm getting nod so i'm going to keep going with it but the question that i ask which is i just think is a fun question imagine for a second i have imagine for a second that my net worth is 100 times chelsea clinton's net worth let's imagine for a second that she and i are the same age and let's imagine for a second that she and i were are both american citizens all of which is not true but let's just imagine for this it is the more or less it's mr guy spear and chelsea clinton and the question is who's more likely to become president of the united states or hold high political office of any kind and even given that the political capital of the clinton family is not what it was i don't think we'd be have a hard time saying that it was chelsea why it's really interesting i you know assume for a second that we have the same intelligence and the same social skills her in that case in our case you call it political capital is way higher she's met more heads of state she's met more people who can help her leaders of the democratic party you name it and what is really important about that is that that capital is not taxable so you don't get taxed for that and we could run the same ex we could run the same thought experiment so i think that to invest in yourself in that way that you have really first of all psychology you have memories when you go through a difficult patch you can say well i've been living a good life but then to invest you in yourself in terms of who knows who in the society you live in knows who you are and appreciates that you exist and and would want to help you or would want to do business with you and you know why would you in a soccer game for example play by the rules and allow yourself to lose when if you kind of break the rules a little bit you could win and again forgive me for saying jordan peterson has the answer because you're not just playing that one soccer game you're playing a series of games and you want to be invited to the next game and the person who cheats in the soccer game might not be invited to the next game so you're engaging in a bidding contest for some company that's being auctioned off and you could break the rules and win the contest or you could keep by the rules and possibly lose the opportunity you play by the rules because you want to get invited to the next auction and so ted is a way of investing in that social capital and i can tell you that i came at it like with the thank you notes for the kind of a selfish i'm gonna you know go meet sergey brin and i'm gonna convince him to invest a bit or whatever it is and i think what what's really important to recognize is we talked earlier on about um you know greed engage with that greed don't don't pretend it doesn't exist and then use that greed in a positive way so it's okay to go to the ted conference and with that sort of kind of acquisitive uh uh sort of the desire to win it's okay engage with that because i let you know you'll find a way to use it in a more in a more wholesome sense and so it's okay to do it and that's how i went to ted and yeah i did change my view of the world a lot i think that i can count bruno jason as the european director as a friend and he's introduced me to some people and it's been great to have him in my life really great so um there's ted yeah guy moving on to uh the last photo and a more cheeky photo is of your time at uh your alma mater university could you expand on this photo and also tell us what would you what you would have done more of at university that's so interesting um so that is here let me take a look it's it's so that's up on the internet i didn't even realize it's up on the internet but um so that's me i didn't realize there's a gap between my teeth there and um uh the guy in the middle his name is kevin tan i don't know where he is right now but the guy on the right is called nikolai irons actually um nikolai is on twitter now so you can tweet him and say hi to him uh he actually like me now how moves between london and zurich so he's back and forth between london and zurich and i think that in this case one of us had just done our final exams and we were celebrating you know you get these photographs where somebody's dressed in the exam taking clothes and they get covered with uh sort of like cream and stuff and so i think that's what was taking place but i'll tell you something that's interesting and given my enormous misjudgments for example with dh blair and other things but there was one thing that i'd figured out which is an interesting thing i'd figured out not then i was too young then but but before i went to business school i remember telling a friend somebody who's probably part of this group of friends and he and i said if i can just get a hundred million dollars to trust me the knife will be okay i said if i can get 100 million dollars to trust me they're not gonna when somebody trusts you with that much money they're gonna stop you from sending your children to the schools they want to attend they're not gonna stop you from taking a vacation from time to time they're not gonna stop you from flying business class so that's that's kind of the goal and i actually you know that was that was a smart goal that was a good goal to have actually so that's what's going on there it's amazing you have a cycling photograph there you don't want to take this i do now i mean referring to quarantine how much cycling did you do during quarantine and what is when do you do cycling and how how much do you enjoy it because i find it awfully painful to be honest so uh do you like eating hot food not not not for me yeah i do yeah right it's possible you will understand the phenomenon i have it from my mexican wife so this doesn't work for me but it does work for her so i see her eating and there's a super hot sauce and you can measure the hotness of sauce so it's super hot and this is causing her pain yeah but then she finishes the mouthful and and she she does more hot sauce and then it causes her more pain and is like do you understand that i do so yeah it's anathema to me too and i can do mild source i'm a kind of a beginner i can do mild source mild hot sauce like what is mild for you is that sriracha or uh i don't know that i can tell you that anything that is in a restaurant is mild okay in a in a western country or a northern european country for sure is mild so why am i telling you this because she has the pain but then she wants another one and so i went on one of my first um calls with somebody and and he explained to me that he said look cycling up hills is a bit like eating your chili pepper you eat it and you go ah that was you know wow this is so painful when you're eating it once you're done you say um that was rather good i think i'll have another one and daddy you understand that don't you and my wife and i watching my wi-fi and um can't do anything else on a bicycle can't read can't look at your phone can't even talk to somebody so uh so that that is it may be that right there i am forced into a zone where i'm just cycling and so i find that psychologically very very rewarding not to mention that i enjoy eating and if i go cycling i can eat a lot afterwards and so that feels good as well um it's funny because you know i would have liked to have thought that i would be a more avid tennis player for example and that i'd be you know like this guy jorge paolo leman is big into tennis you know he doesn't go cycling he's the he's the guy who's behind the inbev um the huge beer companies brazilian family also this children by the way brazilian swiss uh one of the richest men in switzerland when he's in switzerland came to live in switzerland because it was a kidnapping attempt on his life in uh in brazil they are going to they're behind on shoes and they're going to take on shoes this is a kind of a swiss trainer brand that roger federer has invested in but anyway so he's well known to be into tennis and it's a more social sport but there's something about the solitaryness of cycling that really appeals to me i think that what's hard for me when i look at that the photograph that you have there or the extra image that you have is that i've done so much so far less cycling that i really would have liked to have done you know uh there are i don't know how many calls or mountain passes in switzerland and i've done like two you know so one of which is albis but cycling is a great sport i should give it a shot um and to to wrap up um i have one final question and that is if you could put if you had a giant billboard in the center of every university in the uk yeah what would you write or put on it yeah lockdown sock no actually so i had the opportunity to think about this and i had one i had a couple of other um snarky ones actually this one's snarky as well but it's the one that i'd put up there you're not as great as you think [Laughter] and um that comes from a famous line that golda meir gave to her minister so she was one of these so there's before i go there you know margaret thatcher with the only female in her cabinet there's a spitting image where the weight is coming to serve her and her cabbage she says uh what would you like and she says uh i'll have the you know would you like fish or meat and she says i'll have the meat and then the waiter says oh and and the vegetables and she says she turns to a cavity says yeah the vegetables will have me to smell which but anyway so this is called mayu prime minister of israel single woman all male cabinet and she apparently says to the cabinet meeting don't be so humble you're not that great [Laughter] so so yeah you're not that great i think and that why first of all it's of course it's so wonderful to have an elite education but you do much better by focusing on what the elite education didn't give you and the biases that uh you have as a result of it i also think that it's a you know say that to england or great britain you're not that great i mean i i just think that there's a transition that the uk i thought it had been through it but the uk has got to go through a transition that other european countries i think the netherlands is through it so the national netherlands was a great power had an empire a small empire had properties around the world they've accepted who they are i think that germany has done a fantastic job of accepting germany's just an amazing place i mean there's a book that just came out in the uk called why the germans do it better uh which um i was going to say something negative about it but i i was slightly disappointed but maybe because i know germany quite well but i i think that you know i mean i don't know if you guys visited berlin i worked there so so modern berlin is is a very very special place is it it's a special place because the people who made it special if you think of the bundestag and the way they recreated that dome in glass it was a really intelligent saying hey we're about our history we're also about an openness and we want to have you know you think of that and then you compare that to the houses of parliament you know which is so untransparent in so many ways and they wanted to say we want to create a transparent democracy and and then you have the um memorial to the murdered jews of of europe and i think that it's right next to the brandenburg gate they took prime real estate vast tracts of primary estate they could have made it into a park they didn't even make it into a park so so germany is a country that is engaged with its past and it's a very honest way and and it's you know and it's a bit like if i engage with my demons greed for example uh ambition then i'll be a better person on the other side so germany's engaged with demons very very well i think that actually well france is still engaging with its demons you know and uh it's currently engaging britain hasn't even started unfortunately and and the debate is you know when you when i look at the debate over colonialism it is it is such a it's not a rich debate it's a very is you've got you've got two sides you've got one side that wants to wants to um sing rule britannia and uh the other side that wants to tear down statues you know and it's like can we get somewhere between insisting on singing real britannia and tearing down statues like let's find that middle ground and what does it say about a place that that middle ground is not being talked about in the newspapers that i read and and it starts off you know drunks and bars you're not a fighter pirate you're drunk in a bar starts off you know germany post world war ii we're not that great we just lost the war we just signed a you know berliners and ruins and what does it take for the united kingdom to say we're not that great because once you say once you actually honestly say we're not that great now you can begin the task of developing a persona and a culture and a sense of self that fits with what you actually are which is pretty great actually but you've got to start with that so i think that that's what i i'd want to put up i mean for me if i just go out of the university so where we are right now is not that far from a uh a roundabout called the hogarth roundabout and um the whole garth roundabout people who drive into london will know it because if you come into london in a taxi from the m4 you'll hit the first set of lights is next to a porsche dealership and then the next set of lights is the hogarth roundabout and over the hogarth roundabout there is a flyover let's it's five that i happen to know because my grew up in the area that flyover was built as a temporary measure post world war ii and that flyover is still there more than 60 years later and if this was switzerland or if this was germany or this was even france it's like they're just you're not that great if that's what you have as as your infrastructure you're not that great and and if if if you're about transparency in democracy but you have a building that does not represent transparency at all and there are many other ways in which you're not transparent what are you actually doing sorry this has got nothing to do with investing but what does it take to get the broad masses of the middle of britain to find themselves comfortable with their past colonial past feudalism kings but also to be resolute in walking into a better future with the valleys that you have that seems to be something that is missing in british culture right now it's missing in the in the way people talk about the country not missing in germany in my opinion um i don't think it's missing in the united states and i think france is trying to do it but they're not even trying so the so you're not that great as a way of saying start trying there's a long way of making that point but yeah okay yeah thank you so much for the interview today i really appreciate it um upon trying to check out your book in the library at lsc i actually found that the copy is missing so clearly somebody liked it so much that they just took it because it me it's exactly it still says that it's in place but it's really not so for all those that are watching um we'll see if guy can sign this copy of the book and then we're gonna give this book to the library so it's actually going to be in place and please don't steal this copy guy thank you so much yeah i really appreciate it yeah it was really fun it was great interviewing with you yeah thank you thank you thank you all three of you earlier in the topic of of cloning yeah you mentioned warren buffett and obviously you're uh famous for forbidding 650 000 yeah and 100 uh for a lunch with warren buffett so i'd just be interested to hear um about that experience yeah and how that experience sort of impacted you as an individual i mean you know it really was life-changing and and it was life-changing in in so many ways i mean i didn't that was not all my money so i was a third of that thankfully uh but it was still an enormous amount of money i could have bought a ferrari for that as an investor in the company i think about that from time to time um so i look charlie munger talks about hanging out with the eminent dad so we don't have to be in the same room as our mentors as long as there's enough material written about them uh we can read their books and watch their videos online now and all of those things but boy is there a benefit to being in the room with them and so i got to do that and there's a difference between being at the berkshire meeting with 50 000 other adulating fans and being in the room with five or six of us or seven or eight of us and so there were it because you this is why zoom at least in its current form is not gonna is is never gonna replace at least not in its current form um meeting in person because there are all these micro things that take place that just don't and so i mean it's really horrible to realize that you are not as smart as warren buffett and there was still a part of me that thought that i might be i definitely didn't feel that way when i came out of the room after after having had the launch and uh it was painful but valuable you know just i can tell you that i mean i think that i've quoted from that launch two or three times just in this talk but the small things like he's he's considered to be a miser you know but he tipped the waiter i don't know he gave him a solid wad and i'm sure the wads were not one dollar notes so two three four hundred dollars maybe more uh so where's the my silliness there but that was also an example of him him saying to himself i'm in this restaurant every year i want to have a reputation of being a solid tipper but why it's it's just a smart thing you're a guy who's worth billions you don't want a waiter who hates your guts so make you know they could do all sorts of things they could spit in your soup they could so so give a solid tip so that that was you get these kind of the personal interaction i also got the sense of the sort of i haven't seen this in any of the biographies but it kind of a smart atticness there so um i made a joke about my investment mistakes and he looks across the table to me and he says i don't make any mistakes that's not true i mean he airlines he's insurance company in australia there are all sorts of mistakes that he's made but but there's an element to his personality that wants to be right you know so you start so i think that the launch was perhaps the beginning of seeing him as a human not as a god if you like but i think that then there's the kind of the meta knowledge and i think that we've discussed how in many cases it's not the actual thing that you want to know about it's the actual thing in the context of what it's coming as uh we talked about you know how newsletters need to be seen in the context of who's producing it and what motive they have the the launch was the realization part of the learning for me from the launch was the realization that you guys have done it so so when you find the right person it's okay to invest serious amounts of yourself into being around them because you'll benefit um you guys did it by coming all the way out to richmond to talk to me you've invested basically a day of your life to expose yourself to me it's kind of um uh it's uh it's extraordin i feel extraordinary that you would do that i feel impostor syndrome but you do it by doing that you're actually doing the same thing you're saying not everybody was created equal in the world not everybody is worth equal amounts of time and when i find somebody that i can learn from it's worth investing in the day the train ride the camera equipment the preparation work and to really expose myself and so as a result of that launch there's been more than once when i specifically rooted myself through irvine just to spend time with monish babri because i knew that that was a positive thing get the right people in your life or a great podcast john lee dumas have you listened to him i don't know oh my god john lee dumas entrepreneur on fire and what he says is you are the average of the five people you spend most time with so get around the right people and that may mean investing time so lilu invites me to his 50th birthday party and i flew out to los angeles from zurich in order to spend time at that birthday party because i knew there would be some extraordinary people there so i was there just to be at that and that was kind of the insight that i got in a certain way the ted conferences like that and so that meta knowledge of invest in yourself and in extraordinary experiences around extraordinary people will make an enormous difference and you you mentioned earlier uh the idea of social capital and how important that is and i think that's just another really great example of how your case with warren buffett or you can directly invest into an experience that will aid your own social capital so yeah and i was reading an interview with lionel barber who's the former uh editor of the financial times and he was talking about some of the more interesting conversations that he'd had and one was with prince andrew that was interesting not because the subject was interesting but it's in the ft you can read it but it talks about putin and meeting with putin and the conversation he talks about meeting with miracle so think about this if if i had the opportunity to go and hang out in any way shape or form with lionel barber i'm hanging out with the guy whose life and thoughts are informed by meetings with vladimir putin and with angela merkel those are he's an extraordinary guy so we can do the same thing i lucky enough you guys come and talk to me part of perhaps the attraction is that i had lunch with warren buffett so my social capital went up sure and there are all sorts of ways that we can do that so here's what here's what i'd be willing i well from time to time i'm willing to do it so uh okay so you have which of these people so i i spent effectively for a three-hour lunch i spent a third of the sum that you mentioned how about how about spending the same amount or an hour at lunch with henry kissinger would you do that well how about david cameron would you do that you know i'm not saying but but actually i it's not clear to me that investing the money to do it is a dumb move because you because you now have that experience it never goes away from you never ever goes away from you so don't always focus on keeping the money in the bank sometimes spending the money and sorry there's another so this might be one of the best takeaways of this whole thing so um so you'll get somebody says all right that's ridiculous i wouldn't spend money on that so somebody would say somebody would laugh at me and say oh you spend money on lunch with warren buffett i got to see him for free for xyz reason and they'll and they'll kind of imply well you didn't you spent money where you didn't have to spend money um i've done this in due diligence so i will pay pay an expert to have a conversation with me and tell me about an industry and i think in the past i would say well why the hell should i pay the expert they're just going to sit and talk to me and i'd get frustrated because i know that if warren buffett was to call them up to have the same conversation they're going to talk to warren buffett for free and so here's a model that i think is i think it's probably an accurate description of how life and the world works is that early on you have to pay a high price for those things and then if you're half successful later on you will not have to pay at all perhaps so somebody early in their career spending real money or making a huge investment is not a dumb move and the guy who sort of says well i you know i'm not gonna go and do that and when i'm successful enough those people are gonna flop to me no you will you will get successful through doing those things it was okay to spend the money on the lunch with buffett at the time uh and that may make it more likely that sometime in the future i won't have to spend any money to spend time around equally extraordinary people and so that's in itself a big lesson actually and i think that there the you know another way to look at that is there are investments in social capital that one can make that that are likely to appreciate an investment in social capital that are likely to depreciate and i or all that look like investments that aren't so um you know everybody talks about if if you decide that you're ever interested in wine excuse me oh dear i cough does that mean i have covered i was just one cough um but so you're looking at a beautiful car or a beautiful rug or a beaut and and and the person the salesman said oh it's a fantastic investment you know they're trying to convince you that an asset that is without doubt a depreciating asset a bottle of wine is an appreciating asset bad idea very very bad idea don't think of it as an investment so think of social capital i think the launch of profit is a big gift that keeps giving in all sorts of ways i get invited to the buffett brunch at the berkshire meeting there are some extraordinary people there i've i can tell stories um give one example the comptroller of u.s currency was there one year and laurie sat next to her and then she invited us we managed to visit the treasury the original treasury building in washington which is right next to the white house and we got a tour of the note printing facility was ones of two us dollar note printing facilities and it's pretty amazing to see where they print money and we were right there and the printing right next to the printing presses um pretty freaking awesome but so that is a gift that is appreciating it continues to give today is an increase in social capital blowing a bunch of money on a birthday party with your friends and there are some pretty rich and wise people who do that where you just have a dissolute time that does not appear to me to be much maybe there is but so so even within the world of uh in spending money or resources to be around somebody there's things that have the likelihood of appreciating things that don't have the likelihood of appreciating investing in a college education hanging around the people you hang around with is most certainly and appreciating it and appreciating social asset um wasting your life going after a british honor commander of the british empire obe cb probably not a good investment of your time and energy but it's great to even just make the distinction so yeah

Channel: LSE SU Alternative Investments Conference

Views: 9,439

Rating: 4.8526316 out of 5

Keywords: Guy Spier, Investing, Warren Buffet, Hedge Fund, Education of a Value Investor

Id: KpVdU0dyWFI

Length: 142min 43sec (8563 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2021