In Life and Investing, Enjoy the Work, Enjoy the Process, It's Worth It with Guy Spier

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representatives are not licensed brokers broker dealers market makers investment bankers investment advisors analysts or underwriters we do not recommend any companies discuss we may buy and sell securities and any company mentioned and may profit in the event those securities rise in value we recommend you consult with a professional investment advisor broker or legal counsel before purchasing or selling any securities referenced in this podcast [Music] [Music] welcome to the planet microcap podcast i'm your host robert kraft and thank you all so much for your support and for tuning in you can follow planet microcap on twitter at bobbykraft that's b-o-b-b-y-k-k-r-a-f-t you're listening to episode 173 if you have any questions or comments please feel free to tweet at me or shoot me an email at our craft at snnwire.com and when you do get a chance if you like what you hear please rain review planet microcap on itunes it really helps provide feedback for me and spread the micro cap message now i wanted to start off by thanking everyone who attended and participated at the planet micro cab showcase virtual we had a record turnout and it's because of you that we're able to surpass all of our expectations we'll be announcing our next virtual event soon and stay tuned for all the information about our 2022 planet microcap showcase which will be in person at bally's hotel and casino in las vegas i gotta say i was just there over the weekend and vegas is back so i'm really excited to get back there soon now for this episode of the planet microcap podcast i spoke with guy spear he is the managing partner and principal at aquamarine capital and the author of the education of a value investor we were introduced by matthew peterson managing partner at peterson capital management he's a great friend and joined me on this podcast for episode 133 so i highly recommend you go and check that out i've known about guy for a long time and couldn't believe that this would actually be possible so i'm incredibly humbled that he joined me for our conversation for those who don't know guy nor read his book uh guy got his start in microcap land and not only did we chat about those experiences but we also discussed his journey of self-discovery discipline understanding oneself and how that can help you as an investor if there's one takeaway that i had and it was an incredible reminder that in life and investing enjoy the process enjoy the work chances of success are small so you know get better right so i know i am i'm enjoying that ride i'm enjoying that journey and i just wish that uh with all my being for each one of you thank you again for tuning in to episode 173 of the planet microcap podcast and please enjoy my conversation with guy speer [Music] welcome back everybody to the planet microcap podcast i'm your host robert kraft and i'm very excited to introduce our next guest today he is uh joining us all the way from switzerland the author of the education of a value investor as well as the cio at aquamarine capital it is guy spear and for those of the french uh speakers you know ghees i'm going to go the english version so guys thank you for for joining me today how are you doing hi everyone it's a pleasure to robert it's pleasure to be on the show with you and everyone it's pleasure to meet you all at least virtually in this uh setting uh as as robert is allowed to call me gee you can call me gee any time you like but i've learned that i should not call robert in the conversation that we had prior to starting by the word the three-letter word that begins with b and ends with b and has an o in the middle so i'm not going to do that you can no no bob is cool it's rob if someone calls oh oh my gosh bob hey look when we're listen we're already look it's i think it's five o'clock where you are right now at least so we're we're technically at the bar you we're at the bar you call me bob all day so everyone do not do not flip the first letter from a b to an r whatever you do you know b is fine the r is not the r is fine so long as it's part of a six letter word but not if it's part of a three-letter word i get it you know what and now as a result i'm gonna get trolled and i'm going to have to change my name or to be being okay with being called rob so i thank you you can just cut this part of the conversation if you like you know nah this is too good i like i like the bench well no you know what we were chatting about right before we went we went on uh on to record was talking about clubhouse you know i i recently admitted to you i deleted it because i was i was getting too many notifications and that was always a signal to me of like all right if i don't want to get the notification i might as well delete it you know yeah everybody has a different way of in their their relationship with apps and stuff like that but have you been enjoying the the process are you still going to keep using it or what do you think i mean i i think that i i i do really well on um in live talking so i find it far easy to talk about what i'm thinking than for example to write it down i find that far harder and so i think it's a medium that naturally appeals to me it's also medium that naturally appeals because it's sound only and i think i thought that was very special so i got invited in sometime in february promptly spent about three hours a day on the app for the first two weeks browsing around finding out about a bunch of people i got i was i you'll enjoy this in one of my first calls i was on there with perez hilton he's like from los angeles and the friend who'd invited me is friends with somebody who's friends with paris hilton the next thing i know i'm in a room with eight people with about 600 followers and paris hilton's just woken up and for me it's like sort of afternoon or so and i don't know i mean i didn't know who he was but so that was not that interesting for me but there's guys like brett weinstein who's this this sort of like big name podcaster that i think has a lot of interesting things to say and every now and then you have elon musk who's there he was he was doing a call with some of the guys from robin hood i believe and so that's kind of is there's something very exciting about feeling like you can be in a room you can even ask some of these people a question they could go up on stage and then i've hosted a couple of rooms and that's also been fun but my problem is twofold one is that whatever you say doesn't go anywhere so what's worthwhile here robert is that we're talking and these words are going to be recorded for posterity which is kind of cool and they can be replayed and they can be listened to this long form it's um ever potentially evergreen content so uh that that is a problem uh and there was another one that just slipped my mind but it'll come back to me because i'm i'm super jet lagged i just got in from new york city this morning but um the the oh yeah the other one was the just the time sink i found it very hard to go into the app and not be there for like three hours and so that was problematic as well yeah i know the recording part that was that was for me too i'm like you know this is great i could share my thoughts i could bring people on but i'm at the end of the day like this is just this is potentially such great content that i can't record it and share it it's just showing up i mean i get it for brand building and all that but i just it didn't compute in media brain of mine yeah and i think that the problem that the i mean i guess they could force you to sign a user agreement as when you sign up that says i understand and accept and agree that i may be recorded and what i say may be maybe replayed somewhere else but that that could have had a huge dampening effect on sign ups so um but look the fact of the matter is people can record there's ways to record clubhouse conversations even if they don't allow it and maybe they're just trying to hit a critical mass of users and then they'll allow recordings and maybe what they'll do is they'll say look and then you know we could do this conversation effectively we could have had it in clubhouse with a live audience uh which could be also very fun i mean some of the best podcasts are where somebody gets interviewed in front of a live audience and you sometimes hear the audience's laughter and it creates us there's a live live effect which is really powerful so i'm not willing to write it off or anything and um you know i i'm also i i think that what what i understand happened i don't have the details is that they were in development but they realized that they had this unique opportunity to launch the company during lockdown and that was a smart thing to do and so they launched it about 18 months earlier than they wanted to launch it which i think was smart of them really smart and you know as a as a guy who invests in public markets i'm super frustrated that so many of the very best ideas are emerging in private markets they're emerging around companies like andreessen horowitz who i think are the key investors in clubhouse and sequoia fund and others and you know i i have to wait till coinbase goes public at the 60 billion valuation and you know sort of like 120 times revenues or whatever it is well let's let's start let's go down that rabbit hole a little bit because that's something that bothers a lot of us as microcap investors and looking at microcaps is that not as many great companies are going public earlier or they're doing it not in the u.s you know they're going to canada or australia or something like that so i mean what what have you noticed there as well what's been your impression it was a perverse effect of sarbanes-oxley i believe and also the legislation that has a different name that came out after 2009 and it had the best intentions but had a perverse effect and so it became far more expensive for companies to go public far more expensive companies to maintain their listing and uh it's it's had dampening effect on that part of the market there's no question about it i mean uh some of my most successful investments were not properly listed companies so we're talking about pink sheet companies or companies that lost their listing from nasdaq but it wasn't so super expensive for them to keep the listing it wasn't so super expensive that they found a way to take themselves private they just said okay we'll be unlisted whereas now they just say they've the good many of the good companies just say well we're going to go private uh or we're just not going to go public in the united states and yeah it's a big problem and um not that i want to sound political but it's possible i don't know what was on their agenda but i'm certain that the kinds of people who were in the republican party had it been elected back had on their agenda to simplify i mean they simplified a lot of taxation as i understand and i think they would have had it on their agenda to simplify this i mean effectively the result has been as you said to drive business outside of the united states and what's the point of that and the markets that they're going to are far less transparent than what the united states had so but it's the nature of the game robert that i've come to accept that when you're in the financial services industry the plus side is you get to hang out look at computer screens talk to people on the phone read stuff make a decision every now and then it's pretty nice life it's great work if you can get it and the downside is that you're going to be regulated and the regulator doesn't know you know they don't know how to spell investment investing so to speak they're they're kind of very ignorant of and they and the regulatory hand comes with a it paints in a very coarse painting it's not a fine painting that they do and that's just the nature of the beast that's part of the game and so we we have to keep adapting and adjusting uh and um the truth of the matter is i mean we you didn't ask me but so uh i mean one company that i made a lot of money in uh was a so it was a british maybe not micro cap but it was an ulta aim listed so not listed on any of the major exchanges in the uk it was a company called weetabix they they make cereal uh and in the united states uh you know the smallest market cap i invested in was about 10 million dollars market cap and uh there was another one with 20 or 30 million dollars market cap but um you know you you need there's a lot that you need to get right in in companies that are that small and you need to sort through an awful lot of promotions an awful lot of outright frauds and an awful lot of situations where even though they look cheap and they probably are cheap uh there's a there's a group of management that are sort of using the vehicle as their retirement fund and they figured out a way never to to be removed and so in a certain way it's like a bit like a closed end mutual fund that can never be broken open so to speak so so there's a lot of things that can happen in the small cap world that you really have to pay a lot of attention to and make allowance for in one way or another that you don't have to if you get to larger cap companies yeah well you know one of the questions that i i um because one of the things i did to prepare for for our interview today um was uh listen to your google talk that you did with sarah back in 2014 who by the way is amazing yeah isn't he a lovely guy so i heard him speak at the microcap leadership summit um in chicago i think it was a couple years ago and he's he's quite incredible very soft-spoken but i mean just so much knowledge but yeah at that talk along these same lines somebody asked you uh during that chat about how what you're doing requires just such a great amount of effort you know as a value investor you know doing just so much due diligence on companies that you will be adding to portfolio and he asks you you know if you don't beat the s p is it worth it you know and i and i asked that question a lot to myself when you think about micro caps you know is it worth it we're doing so much just tough work here to try and find one or two investments obviously when you find a winner and and it's life-changing of course then you say it's worth it but sometimes like that that is a slog you know so for you i'm sure you asked your that's your that question to yourself all the time is it worth it um you know is life worth it what is worth it you know so but i mean i think so i i remember that question and he put me on the spot uh i think that um he asked it more pointedly than that he said you know i'm sure he did i don't ask questions very importantly at all he said he said you've you've um you've beaten the s p up to now but who says you'll beat it in the future and maybe you've gotten here and it's just luck you know and maybe when you get to the end of your career you'll be able to look at it and say this was just luck i applied no skill and um and i kind of it may i mean i was prepared for it but it made me it would make anybody uncomfortable because it's asking the question that charlie munger has asked which is you have a whole bunch of super smart people in the investing profession who if anything um destroying value because because because they'd be you know you'd be better off just putting the funds onto autopilot so so yeah is it and then and then you know so kind of like you you know if you're if you're this guy who's preaching um sound investing and capital allocation and you know taking care of the resources of society and then it's at the same time you're actually negative you're destroying value you know you're a negative economic value-add that's that's not great and what charlie munger says that's just denial people are doing it because it's a good living if you can get it and they're just in denial and then you asked another question is how to feel personally and um look i i can tell you robert i so far 23 years i've beaten the s p by uh you know by two percent margin it's not as big a margin as i would have liked it's not it's not the the you know the mid double digits that i would like it's it's like it's right around 10 annualized and um so it's not it's not the number you know i started off in this doing this and i thought oh i'll get 18 annualized if i'm really good and i'll at least get 15 annualized and here i'm sitting with uh five percent less than that but i don't know that the portion of the money that i'm running which is my own family's money i don't think i would have compounded it even at that rate if i had not had it in this vehicle and i'd not been doing what i'm doing so and i would say even now that you know i think that all of our investors sleep well i think i take little to no risk and um there's a value to sleeping well at night even if you just match the s p or even perhaps slightly underperform it uh so and then i guess that you know the simple answer or the simple response to your question is that no matter what you do in life the probably it's so hard to succeed and the probability that you'll fail or that some other event will take you out while you're trying to succeed at whatever the hell is you're trying to succeed at you better like the process you better enjoy it you better feel like at the end of the day that you've done a good day's work a satisfying day's work and you know you might be painting away for 30 years and turn out to be van gaal or you or you might be painting for 30 years and turn out to be an absolutely no name and by the way van gogh died a no name so you just better be satisfied by what you're doing every day and um i think that for that reason some of the people who do really well whether it's microcap or other kinds of investing because they really enjoy the process of digging and finding stuff out about things and that you know figuring out how stuff works and how things are put together and why things tick is just really exciting for some people it's not exciting for others uh you know my wife would rather i learned how to change light bulbs and how the refrigerator works when it breaks down and you know she gets a handyman to do that but you know and i'm i am interested in how some companies work i guess so is it worth it and it seems to me i mean we for the listener robert and i've never met in person but it seems to me that you you clearly love the process i mean you'd do that you'd say i i got the feeling you'd do if you were paid to do it if you had to pay to do it i mean oh i would do it i would do it for free this is the i mean i mean the pot listen we just started taking advertising on the podcast so i have been doing it for free but i i would even if we got never another dollar for for doing the pot or anything like that or even if we sold the business whatever it is like i would just hope to continue to keep doing this podcast yeah because it's just it's just that much fun by the way real quick on that note that you said about what my wife would like me to do that i don't know if you see my shelf i'm just hoping it makes it through this interview at this point you know we'll we'll see if it does i'm not i'm not totally sure um but but would you would you say you're how's your love of the game changed over the years i mean if you if if anybody listening has read your book and full disclosure i haven't read the full i haven't read the book yet i will be reading the book but you know i'm going through some of the problems you can do the audio book if you like you can do the audiobook i wanna i wanna read i i told i told you i told you offline i don't oh i don't always have the most time to read but there's certain books that i do like right now i'm reading the uh phil knight book the nike book and that it's taking me a minute but it's it's just i i do i do enjoy the physical book and uh and and getting after but i mean i think that how would you say i think that uh if what's interesting for me is that i'm uh i'm no longer doing the work that i do because i need i do need to put food on the table but i know i can put food on the table without doing the work so the work is no longer about keeping the wolf away from the door it's about um what do i actually want to be doing with my life and how do i want to be living my life and you know i have i'm 55 years old so you know i'm not 25 55 years old uh you know okay so if i'm lucky and i live to 100 that'll be another 45 years that would be great but i might die at 75 years and that would be 20 years away that's not so far away anymore so how do i want to fill my days what actually do i want to have my days filled with and for example i was having lunch with a guy yesterday who had read my annual report a friend a good friend a very smart guy a former intel engineer and and he said oh you you know you could you could juice your returns by doing um by by doing covered call strategies for example or by selling puts instead of just buying the shares and i kind of said to him yeah you're absolutely right i could but those extra seconds that i'd have to spend looking at the monitor the seconds i could spend looking at the view from the beach for example or walking in the mountains and i actually choose not to make the money that i could make from doing that because it's just not something that i want to be doing end of story and to get to a place where i'm i'm consciously saying you know yeah i could try and optimize the portfolio but if i've got to spend an extra you know 40 hours a week doing it looking at a monitor then i don't think i want to do it anymore and that also comes down to investing so it's only in the last four or five years i've realized that there are some companies that even if i was clear to me that i could make a lot of money i don't want to invest in them because i don't think they build the world in the right way and it's not like being a passive minority investor i'm kind of building the world if i buy their shares but you know i just don't want to be a part of it in any way shape or form so uh there's a french lottery company that a friend of mine has been pushing on um you know you just have to look at your twitter feed to find out what your your friends are you used to be you had to go to a bathroom have a beer and then they had a little bit of beer they'll tell you what the stock that they really like now you just have to look at their twitter feed so i'll mention his name because he said it in public it's a it's a company called uh it's a french company called frances de jour and they have a monopoly a state monopoly on um on lotteries in in france and i you know i mean i know lotteries provide entertainment but i find it somewhat distasteful i kind of pretty much ruled it out and i've ruled out a bunch of other things i because i just want to invest in businesses that build a society in a positive way if you like their positive contribution and so you get i get to choose where i do my research if you like and i'm still learning where those places are and i'm updating my ideas about whether where those places ought to be so i've been trying to learn more recently about cloud computing as everyone is just to sort of understand where the economy is going but i choose to do that i don't have to do that um yeah and and then i think that i think that when somebody's starting out in their investment investment career you're looking to talk to as many people as possible because every every new conversation teaches you something new and um if i had the same energy as a 25 year old i'll also talk to as many people as possible but i think that now i'm looking for smart people smart ways to talk to people so you know i could talk to these 20 people or i could do market research interviews with these other 20 people or how do i figure out the person who knows the answers to all of those questions and talk to them and is there a way to talk to them for example well that that actually hits on one of the questions i want to ask you and i i it was you talked about this also in the google talk a little bit but well it was mentioned i'm not sure who's explored as much as maybe we can right here is is why are the right mentors and partners critical to that long-term success not just on wall street but in life and for you i mean how do you know which ones are the right ones you know i'll tell you um one of the ways to well the only way actually to to um to discover who the right mentors for you is is when and i'm curious i'll ask this question of you robert i'm curious to see what you say sure you kind of like have you start having a powerful reaction to somebody and it's not necessarily positive but you just start having you notice you notice like a powerful reaction like i hate that person or i'm so envious of the life that they have i think that actually often one of the best places to look for a mentor the right mentor for for me is am i envious if i'm envious that means they've activated something in me and they've you know one shouldn't suppress those feelings emotions are a call to action so you know if i'm hearing envy calling then i can ask myself why am i envious of that person because usually envy kind of says you know the the emotion of envy says to me let's say guy that person's got something that you want and i'm gonna make you feel envious about it because you actually could get it you know you could get it or you know you deserve it and so that kind of triggers well what are they doing that i'm not doing what what can i do that would uh make me closer to where they are and maybe look i could you know i was envious of warren buffett but i could never have i could never wake up one day and have a father as a senator or not a senator or a congressman that wasn't going to work for me but other things were so that doesn't necessarily mean that all the actions can be taken but i think my point to you is that it's very visceral that the decisions that one had one ought to take i think in life are visceral they come from what you're actually feeling it's not some kind of zen place where you go and meditate on the mountain and somehow the thought appears it's like if you're feeling raging emotion then that's probably a good thing that that's you know that can be channeled in in very very powerful ways um and so you know you could even argue that it's not it's not me that selects the mentor it's the mentor that selects me so to speak you know and there's this wonderful phrase when the when the student is ready the teacher appears it's kind of a similar kind of idea you know don't you know if somebody keeps presenting themselves in your life whether they're in your physical life or just presenting themselves as a person i think that i haven't done enough of sort of standing back and saying why is this why is this and what should i do about it because just they present so some part of my mind is pulling them in to my thoughts but then to say well why is it being pulled in why is that person what is it about that person that's digging something in me so um you know and i i would say that i'm revere warren buffett and was so happy to go and have lunch with him that time and all of those things um but i i don't i no longer envy his life i don't want to be warren buffett you know i i warren buffett uh and it's been i'm not the only one who said it he he's so happy living the life that he's leading that's a too narrow life for me i don't want to spend my life i don't want to spend my time get making money off covered call strategies for example and um so you know i think that for example charlie munger raises more envy in me right now uh another kind of sorry i'm pouring myself some tea here i've made myself a pot of tea there's my english pot of tea and i got some milk here forgive me there's the milk i think charlie munger does raise more envy in me because he's done so many other things he's read far more broadly he's built student dorms he's donated to all sorts of charities he's got this big and wonderful family he's mentored people like lee lou and others uh to become better ambassadors so you know i think that um he's a broader personality who's lived for me uh a far richer life you know i'd rather have his life than uh warren buffett's life and um of course now warren buffett if you gave warren buffett charlie manga's life there'd be too much distraction and he wouldn't want that he'd be very unhappy in charlie munger's life because he just wants to keep it down to the so that those narrow basics of investing so guy how have you been able to channel what some would say is one of the seven deadly sins the you know envy and have you been able to channel that into something that becomes a positive reaction for you because that's a very difficult thing to do yeah i mean it's a it's a great question robert a really really great question i'll i'll take a slightly easier version first because and then we'll see if we can get to envy so so you know anger uh so i wouldn't call yeah i guess envy is a kind of a sin but anger uh you know somebody said and getting angry it's easy is easy but to get angry with the right person the right place in the right way now that's really hard so anger is a signal that your boundaries have been violated and then the question is well what do you do about those violated boundaries and you ought to do something but it may not be walk up to somebody and yell at them uh it might be whatever it is there'll be a an intelligent strategy to to kind of figure out how not to let those boundaries be violated again so i mean i think that that in in the case of envy i mean i i'll give an example of uh uh envy that i've experienced in the last few weeks and in the last few years is that i was a student with a whole number of people who are now running the united kingdom in one shape or another so none of them are friends of mine now because they're too busy and that world is a small world where they all talk to each other and they don't have time to talk to people from outside that world but boris johnson was never a friend but david cameron was never a friend either but i shared tutorials with him i knew dido harding these are all people that people in the uk would know she was the year above me at business school and i hung out with her with other friends for a certain period of time the former foreign minister of the united kingdom or you don't call it foreign minister in the uk you call it uh uh i can't remember foreign secretary is a guy called jeremy hunt and he was a guy that i hung out with in career of all places and was a friend not a close friend but was a friend at oxford so i feel envy for those people uh because i kind of feel that i could have been as successful as them in british politics and i feel like they should somehow acknowledge me as part of their circle because in a certain way well and not a certain way i i believe i'm as smart as they are and as capable as they are and i feel also a slight amount of anger because i think that they would benefit from my insights because i've had a very different life to their life and kind of in a certain way oxford's failed uh it's that generation because by putting people like me and them together in the same university we were supposed to become lifelong friends and that that kind of cross fertilizers but that never happened and so you know i spent time thinking about that and uh you know i mean one option would be to say okay i'm done with investing i'm gonna go into british politics but you know i'm still figuring it out so i i don't think it's easy but i think that um you know so so so it's a call to growth envy is a call to growth you have to grow you know there's i i believe if you look hard enough you'll find i will find with regard to that actions that i can take i'll tell you one that i think maybe the right direction is that i've toyed with the idea of starting an a publication so there's a company called ruffa in the united kingdom they're quite a large asset manager and once a year they produce a very very nice sort of like review document review i mean the the it would be a bit like the new yorker something like that with kind of a collection of great writing and so that you know the response may be to say okay well here's here's a way i can give vent to that so i think the question to interrogate oneself you interrogate myself with the with the emotion of enemy to say okay so you're feeling envy what action can you take that's going to kind of bring you closer to what you're envious about and it's something to do with having power and influence and having people respect me if you like and respect me in a broader sense than just in the financial world and so you know in the same way with you get super angry at somebody it's like okay what boundaries have been violated what's the best and most productive way for me and them to communicate this in a way that life gets better so you know envy's envy's far tougher in a certain way than anger because because sometimes what's underlying envy you know is like just you know i i spent a long time feeling envious of bill ackman now this is an example from my book why was i envious of bill ackman because i was there running a small fund he was running a big fund i was trying to be master of the universe he was master of the universe i was living in a very nice apartment with no park views he was living in a kick-ass apartment with park um and views i was envious of that and and you know my first way to getting there was just to try and work harder smarter more aggressively and you know make my way in the world of new york hedged funds but ultimately through thinking it through i kind of said to myself do i really need all of that actually how about you just change the scenery so i found another way to deal with that envy the minute i came to zurich all that envy disappeared i didn't feel any envy anymore for any of those people because i was living an extraordinary life maybe maybe the what i'm reaching for is that envy is a call so if you're really satisfied with your life then you don't feel envy for people who have more of anything if you're a movie maker and you great make great movies yeah you know steven spielberg's movies have been more successful perhaps but you don't feel envy for him you're happy for him as you're happy for the success of your movie so i think it's a call to growth and it's a call to change something in my case moving to zurich took care of my um envy of bill ackman for sure i didn't have any envy for him after i moved to zurich so it's a really interesting emotion and one that probably does not get written about enough and is not used enough to guide action but you know i think it's i think it gets confused with greed right you know it's it's i i mean would you say there's a big difference i mean you talk about in your book how you started off as wanting to be like that gordon gekko going on wall street you know greed is good you know the line i mean they're highly it's true they're highly related and since i wrote the book i've had i haven't read enough but you know um the guy whose book was published at exactly the same time as mine peter thiel zero to one he studied he studied this french philosopher when he was at stanford called i've tried to read his stuff it's not it's pretty targeted but but you know i got i think i got the basic idea which is that humans are designed to compare themselves to other and to want what other people have got and there are whole businesses built on this so you know you get a few chinese rich chinese ladies walking around with the louis vuitton handbag and now all these chinese ladies want louis vuitton handbags why do they want it they want it because they've seen some figure who's got a louis vuitton handbag so um you know the the greed i think is just say saying i want more i don't have to compare myself to anybody else i know that i want more and greed is also this idea that more than you need so you know the greedy person says i don't care if i can't sail in two yachts at the same time i want two yachts you know i need two yachts i don't care if i can't spend the extra billion dollars i absolutely need the extra billion dollars whereas envy is just wishing you had it because somebody else had it i mean they're closely allied really really closely allied but but i think you know me acknowledging and recognizing my own greed which i did in the first chapter of my book was extremely liberating and uh you know something that if david cameron i don't know how close you followed british politics but um he's uh that's in the course there's a sort of scandal with a non-financial company called green cell that was uh supposedly the next best thing in finance and the former prime minister david cameron got involved and lobbied the um uk government to help this company which ended up going bankrupt for all sorts of reasons that i think that i could have told him beforehand was very very likely to happen given the business model but the reason why he was doing that was agreed he wanted to make a lot of money on his stock options basically and i think that it was far easier for me to analyze and learn the lessons of my episode at dh blair because i just said yeah i was greedy i was greedy i was looking to make a lot of money quickly and had my head handed to me i mean that is a that is a story that is a theme there's a theme in financial markets for sure every day somebody wakes up who wants to make money a lot of money quickly absolutely i mean i gotta ask i mean you know you you moved to switzerland you that helped you get rid of the envy that you had for black and and probably other other envious aspects of your life as well but do you wish you had that mentality when you were first starting out or would you not change the thing because it got you to where you're at today do i wish i had rich mentality your your current mentality of yes still having envy for things and that keeps pushing you in certain respects but how you were able to when you moved to switzerland then you let go of that envy in quite a big way you know but but do you wish you kind of had that mentality when you first started well i mean i think that if you don't you're not feeling emotions in a certain way you're not alive if you're feeling envy and and can't find a way to kind of progress against whatever goals that enemies generating and that's a super unhappy and frustrated place to be and so i don't want i don't want that level of envy back i want i want the progression i want the constant emotions not too intense and i want me responding to those emotions in a productive way not a non-productive way i mean i'll give you a way in which i respond to emotions unproductively i um if i'm tired and i'm stressed and it's late at night you know something like a bowl of cereal is just really great it's just a really nice thing to do if you're 25 that's probably fine but if you're 55 and you and you don't want to put on a lot of weight that's not going to help you very much that is that is me feeling anxiety and not having a good outlet excuse me and not having a good outlet for my anxiety so uh you know i was feeling envy and i didn't have a good outlet for the envy and so you want to feel the emotions but then you you got to find an outlet for it you know and you've got to find some way to let it go and i think that life productive energy comes not because you kind of generate it from nothing but because you feel these emotions and you channel them in the right direction and if you can channel your emotions in the right direction your personal power is through the roof because so many people think that they have to deny certain emotions and pretend they don't exist and you know you that just never happens i mean they're gonna come out one way or another you know and um it's kind of tantalizing because if you get it right then you know there's just there's just no stopping you and what you can achieve and the thing is you achieve it on the same level of energy that you'd put into whatever else it is that you do and i would tell you that you know uh um men who i don't believe that you can be unfaithful in a marital relationship and be as as successful in business i think that many of the most successful men in business are taking all that sexual energy and they're kind of finding ways to be creative in the business world and they're not dissipating their energies they're kind of using it in some way or other and um you know in the same way that if you're if you're gay and you stay in the closet and you're using up all this energy to cover up who you are i mean it's tragic for so many reasons but one of the reasons why it's tragic is that you know you what energy have you got left after you've done all of that you know and how can you be creative and live a productive life if you're so busy covering up who you are and um it's really fascinating actually so these are such interesting ideas and there are books that are written about managing your energy and it's like it's it's really important really really important and it's it's the key to a successful life and i'm certain it's key to a successful life in investing and um yeah sorry i i'd have gone on to another point but but my jet lag i thought well paul's and let's see where robert wants to go next continue on another monologue no no we were i i was i was loving everywhere we were going with that you know it's just it's it's maximizing your creative output right and figuring out ways in all walks of life not just with investing and creating new investing ideas but just in general you know you make i mean you make a lot of good points there and i'm sure there's been a ton of research done on all of it yeah but the knowledge is not as widely spread as it ought to be and there's another aspect which ties into what you were asking early is is it all worth it you know investing is something that we do for the future so we're doing something now that will pay results pay you the payoff you know if it's real investing the payoff is is one year maybe five years away but we also have to live like we might die tonight because we might you know the asteroid might hit the earth tonight or god might decide to switch the whole thing off or you know or our nervous says you know like i know a guy who's 32 years old he died of a brain aneurysm perfectly healthy guy and it's just tragic so you gotta you gotta like the kind of so that's kind of like the balance in investing and by the way i see you have it you freaking love the work that you do even if the financial payoff is five ten years into the future but but there's a kind of you know there's a there's a there's a seeking emotion or seeking mindsets that you know if you have a dog and you know our dog loves squirrels i mean there's pretty much most things will keep him on a leash but he sees squirrels and he goes absolutely ape or maybe it's squirrels at a certain part of time of the year or the month when they're exuding certain kind of uh scent but you know that's the seeking function you know ears go down he's like he's on the hunt he's never going to catch one of these things but anyway but that you know the search seeking something is like so much fun in investing and when you think you're onto something it's very cool you know you know it's it's it's interesting that you said you you've you've realized that about me because it's true and and it's actually one of the reasons why i feel like i'm still don't feel as confident as an investor as i probably should be but it's only because i hear such i i'm just i know there isn't one way of doing things and there's so many different ways that you can put you know just speaking to investing to make money in markets that it's because for me it's a constant trying to you know i'm constantly learning about myself that it's a constant search for okay well what what works right you know and i feel like a lot of people listening probably feel that same that same feeling but actually i i also get the sense i mean we haven't collaborated on anything but but it's actually a very creative process for you so it's very unusual that even most people you would imagine that most people who are in the business of analyzing and discovering microcap securities would be analyst types but you're actually in i mean you're a kind of creative analyst type you're looking for things where other people wouldn't know how to look for them or trying to find an a way of looking at them that will uncover hidden value whereas other people may not have figured out that way of looking at it which is kind of interesting i mean i don't know because we haven't haven't spent all that much time together but maybe the next time if we do another interview i'll have read a bunch of your stuff and then uh you'll probably just listen to i'm not much of a prolific writer by any means uh we share that we share that very much in common i'm not a i'm not a huge i you know i used to like writing a little bit more back in the day but i might now now with this medium it's just so much more fun to share share stuff this way i don't think the only thing that i would tell you is that writing is really tough and uh but it may be that if you if something is important enough to you and you go through the great difficulty of doing that what you get on the other side is pretty special because writing really forces you to decide what you think about something right and so i know i'm not done that's true in your case but i think in my case i ha you know i i said to myself i'm a terrible writer because when i write i just go through enormous amounts of pain and then i got to a place where i realized that actually some of the pain that i feel when i'm writing is kind of like because i'm trying to figure out what i think and that's moving the furniture around inside of me and that's a painful and difficult process but anybody would find it painful and difficult and that pain is actually what makes it good writing on the other side and you may find that as well i wouldn't i would tell you that uh if you do a good piece of writing then that stands forever you know it's just there forever after i guess a podcast is as well but but i don't think it has the same kind of duration it's a really good piece of writing so i'm sure yeah it's something that lives on a paper versus a fine yeah you know right and and i guess my point is that don't let the pain be a reason not to write if you feel compelled to write something don't let the pain turn you away because the pain may just be a signal that you're about to do something really important and yes it's going to be painful but i think that in my writing of the book and certainly in my writing of certain chapters i went through enormous pain to write them but at the other side i was a changed person changed way for the better i mean you know and to take one example chapter one of my book takes me takes you through you know my wolf of wall street experience and all its gruesome glory and the pain of writing that chapter was not the words on the page getting the words on the page it was the willingness to actually tell the reader what had happened and that was painful but doing that and coming to re coming to the realization that i was willing to tell the reader what happened i was willing to own up to being that person who had was greedy enough to go and work at a wolf of wall street place that was where the pain was and that was an extraordinarily productive thing for me because it allowed me to come clean with the world i wasn't trying to hide a part of my past anymore and to pretend it didn't it hadn't happened and didn't exist you know guy another question that i had for you and this is actually um because you know we were hooked up through matthew peterson at peterson uh peterson capital and uh thank you matthew a little shout out there and uh you know i hit him up to say hey you know look you know you've had many conversations with guy you know him a little bit better than me you've gone to the valuex guy like what are some questions that maybe you or or you know core followers of guy would probably want to know and he he was awesome he sent me a video he's at a barbecue with with a friend of his a gentleman by the name of stan from atrani capital and i thought he asked a really phenomenal question about you know just just from a philosophical standpoint about the the definition of value investing and and how that's changed over the years and and defining it and where we're at right now because it seems i mean this listen we could probably do another three hours just on this question yeah right but you know for you right now you know what how do you think about value investing what what value means well first of all we should just pause on matt for a second uh i got to know matt because we were both invested in a company that had to go through bankruptcy court which was one of the best things to come out of that was the relationship with matt and he's i think a really lovely guy and i think he's uh he will he will end up he'll turn out to be one of the world's great investors and one of the reasons why that will happen is because he gets his relationships with people right i've seen him and um you know i think that he's very lucky i think he's blessed by his parents because i think it comes from having good childhood and good relationships with his parents and then before you were going to ask the question i thought oh so this is the way it goes matthew gives robert the question that he doesn't want to ask guy directly but then he just loves it to robert so robert can ask him which would have been fine as well but um uh you know i i think that so there's somebody that uh i you you should certainly follow and um to the extent that you want to get things published outside of your publishing world uh he's called john miljavik he publishes something called the manual of ideas and he tweeted not so long ago that saying that you know all this low price to book low price to earnings all of those kinds of quote traditional measures of value were just a lazy man's value investing and what's happened in the last five years at least is that you have to do way more work to kind of understand what's going on behind the numbers in that you have some businesses that don't make any money that show zero profit you have some company companies that making an absolute fortune but they have super profitable reinvestment opportunities and they're in reinvesting all of their available cash and they're being able to make it look like it's current expenditure whereas it's actually investment expenditure and so you know all of that distinguishing between those two and the many different variations in between requires real work it requires real digging and so to find uncover value today you need to be doing that digging and that digging is hard work and what people were doing in the past was quote lazy man's value investing i mean when i started doing this 25 or 23 years ago there was a significant portion of the market that was looking at charts who didn't believe the fundamentals counted so you had a whole bunch of competition that had the wrong models in their head now everybody that i know of is a very is a fundamental investor they agree that the value of the i mean it's a it's a given the value of the company is is in some way related to the underlying value of the business and then people didn't even see that or understand that or agree with it and so the competition today's is at least got the right models in their head and so you have to you know the famous i don't know if it's famous but there's a story that i enjoy so two men wake up on the african plane and there's a lion about to chase them and one guy starts putting on his running shoes or gets ready to run and his friend says you're never going to outline run the line the guy says i'm not planning on outrunning the line i'm just planning on outrunning you you know so uh only one of you is going to be line launch that day and and that's the nature of you know you've got to run faster or better than the other people and um so you know just to bring this rambling thought to a close uh all intelligent investing is value investing uh intelligent investors want to look to the business and they want to be able to value the business and simple valuations of the business don't work anymore because your your competition are people who can also do simple evaluations of businesses and there have been a few people who've been able to kind of update their thinking about how to look at businesses especially you know cloud computing businesses and other new you know over-the-top uh content businesses where they've been faster than others at recognizing that something new is a fuzz and they've they've earned extraordinary rewards from doing it and for me all of that is value investing it's all intelligent investing you know i i guess i know that people use it and i cringe when it happens when they kind of say value versus growth you know it's like but uh you know all intelligent value investing is value investing all intelligent investing looks to the value of the business good analysts will find will figure out uh uh you know they they will go way beyond simple metrics to figure out the value of the business and um you know many of them are intelligent investors even even perhaps some of the people who've been buying snowflake at you know 13 000 times revenues you know it's a rough estimate right yeah so my one response i have to that is you know you bring up the idea of competition amongst you know when you're amongst analysts but you know one thing especially you see in microcap is it's very much a team sport you know um investing just in general you know so i mean on one on one hand you can have this competition between other intelligent investors you know who's who has the better strategy or pick the better stocks but at the end of the day you know wouldn't do you care about it sharing that information so that others can not just obviously sharing maybe the idea and then go and invest in it but also to help you potentially learn more about it so you want others to be better than you in that yeah i mean that so so uh you know any of us who are in the business of researching and analyzing stocks are in the business of managing information and you know the reason why so many people who do it tend to have uh good intelligence they have high iqs is that it's not always obvious what to do with the information that you have and in many cases perhaps in i don't want to say in all cases but in some perhaps the majority of cases you do want to share but figuring out how to share in what way with the right person you know with somebody who gives who who gives back uh with somebody who's going to help you deepen your knowledge uh and are not going to come back to you with some idiotic response all of those things take an enormous amount of insight experience wisdom intelligence and so but but at the end of the day you know my point to you would be that yes so investing is something that can be done when you hunt in packs but you better pick the right pack to be a part of because some packs like to eat members of the pack you know and you think you're on the same side and it turns out that you're not but also at the end of the day anywhere you look at it when you're buying something a share of a company somebody else is selling it and you better have a good sense that the person who's selling it uh you know you you want to know you want to have a good sense that they're not selling it for reasons that are inimical to you like they're an insider and they know so much more than you about what the actual prospects of the company are which of course would might might be very foreboding in another example it just may just be that they need liquidity they've bought a new home and their shares have tripled in value and they want to take some money off the table and buy a new home i mean so but you are you are when you buy something somebody else is selling you better have a sense of why they're selling to you and i would tell you that's a heuristic that i use all the time so you know i'm unlikely to own shares of um snowflake at such a high valuation in spite of such extraordinary and i just for your readers and listeners and compliance i don't own any snowflake um uh but but you know i'm not going to go i'm you know so all i want to know is where i'm going to die so i don't go there charlie munger said all he wants to do is avoid stupidity and you can get quite far in life very far in life but just avoiding stupidity in a certain sense i i want to only buy shares of people who are either distressed or upset or have foreshortened time horizons or you know some some tangible reason that i can see why they're selling because if i can't see that reason then you know maybe i don't have such a good deal and so that for me rules out all ipos because somebody's selling it to me they have a reason to sell it to me you know there's there's a research service called tigas which is really good i don't know if you've come across it but not it's it's not true of every single company that's antiguas but the vast majority of companies antiguas are there because somebody wanted to do the research and if you look up forgive me i keep bringing the name of the company up because i'm reading his book right now um they're like you know like half of i'm exaggerating but half of all the interviews on tigas are for this company snowflake and see this is an enormously promoted company and a lot of people who want to see it succeed and we've got written investment research about it i don't want to buy shares in that kind of environment i want to buy them when everybody's hating it or when the sellers at least are you get by drift so um i don't remember what your question was just the idea of investing being a team sport and i think to summarize very quickly it's about picking the right team right just like picking the right mentors right understanding the right mentors and partners at the same time at the same token it you can you can take that same concept and you know use it for a team and so to become a better investor within that team sport of investing um so first of all everybody plays it differently right and there are there are some really significant skills so here's something that i did not know 23 years ago that is kind of so totally obvious to me now which is that i do my very best and i think i succeed at treating anything that is told to me as private until i have permission that person who originated it gives me permission to share and that's kind of like a life strategy in which if i do that if robert figures out that that's the case then you may be more willing to share stuff with me that is not for public consumption and it might not be for public consumption for all sorts of reasons it might not be it might be that you don't want to embarrass somebody or that you you yourself are not allowed to share it except in certain circumstances but i i saw this in an investment investment bank a friend of mine that you can really build trust by doing that by contrast there may be some you know trial teammates where not only do they share information that you didn't want them to share they front run you on everything that you do so another thing that i uh always do it was just kind of honorable but again well is is long-term greedy you'll get better results over the course of a lifetime is if somebody's originated an idea for me so they're like sort of doing research uh they talk to me about it we do some research together i won't buy it until they give me permission to buy so i want why is that i want people to feel like they can come and talk to me about their ideas and that that i can see that idea flow without them being worried about whether or not i'm going to front run them or not and just go and start buying and driving the price up in liquid security and so there again learning how to behave myself and selecting my friends as people or my my teammates my my packmates there's people who understand those same set of rules is kind of critical actually um yeah and i think that you i mean i get the sense robert that you could run a class on that actually how to how to hunt stocks in teams what to do what not to do what to share what not to share how to go about sharing how to go about buying you know it'll be it'll be five minutes don't share anything that's not public nothing will that well that anyway that's the law yeah that's the law but no no but i i i was a bad joke but yeah i know i know exactly i know exactly what you're saying but um so look i want i i think we could again go probably for another two three hours here but you know i'll save that for the next time we do chat uh because i do i think it's time you you're jet lagged like i want you got to get some sleep here soon so my my my final question for you today is you know what what investing experience would you say impacted you the most of everything you've gone through you know what what impact what what experience of has really impacted you the most you know i got to talk about a couple of microcut stocks that i invested in okay about those please do everyone everyone's going to fast forward to the end now well uh so i don't know how i found it well i do know i was interested in for-profit education and i thought it was an amazing space i'd had an investment in devry education that had done extraordinarily well for myself and i found this company that uh it was it had started off as a video conference business video conferencing business 20 years ago so it was called evci educational video conferencing inc but that business had not succeeded they were too early and uh they bought a for-profit college called interborough college and they were doing something that i think was pretty special in that they uh they were really helping college dropouts get a college education now this was not a harvard education but that you know their prospects on the job market after they've gotten this education were way better than they these were people so they'd help them with their graduate equivalency certificate ged and um well the way it happened is i went and talked to them and they had an overhang of debt and i and a friend uh we we bought shares we we converted we bought the debt and converted it to equity at the current market price and so like like i and a friend each bought a million dollars each and we each have each and ten percent of the company after the conversion something like that and that removal of the debt overhang uh and and some i think uh reasonably good business management resulted in the 7x on the share price and i was kind of like that's the kind of thing that can happen in a micro cap you're probably like yeah that happens to me every day guy what's the big deal now that was the the positive and then then so the negative was that uh the the management um and this is the problem with small caps is that you really better know that the management team is on your side because it would have been impossible to remove them and they decided that they had done really well with this business and they should all take huge salary increases they who took huge salary increases to the extent of like 50 percent of uh ebit or you know earnings and so it was a very very significant chunk and the business ended up getting pulled apart because the obama administration was very very against these private for-profit educational establishments they just felt like there were there was parts of the industry that that the obama administration felt were fraudulent because they're kind of offering this degree certificates uh to in a way that the government didn't like i think it's it's less of a clear picture than the obama administration made out but um but you know i didn't make seven times my money but i did make about three and a half times my money which wasn't a terrible outcome for that investment so how's my so i mean i learned a lot in that story alone and and i actually talk about it a little bit in my book um [Music] i mean look in a certain way every every investment requires a postmortem and every investment teachers are something really doesn't it but that you know that's that's one little potted story i learned a lot about what to watch for in management teams why why because i i kind of tried to help the management team to understand that what they were doing was a rational uh first of all if they wanted to take the extra money they should have taken its capital gains not as current income second of all it was the exactly the kind of thing that would have drawn the attention of the regulator which it did do and uh i didn't understand why they would do it and i think that one of the big lessons for me from that investment is that often you see behavior which looks completely irrational but until you fully understand the circumstances the people taking that taking those actions you know you can you will be able to see that it may not look rational to you or to an outsider but from the perspective of where they sit they're actually doing a completely rational thing and in this guy's case the ceo who was a significant shareholder was going through a nasty divorce and um he was in danger of having to give up half the shares in the company to his wife and it was it was beyond a nasty divorce it was raging warfare and the guidos perspective uh and he realized that if he took current income he wouldn't have to give that over to his wife at least not until the divorce settlement come through so somewhere in his mind he thought it was okay to raid the company at least a little bit for high salaries and you know it's sort of like if the wife was going to get half the shares then he was going to find a way to make the shares worth not very much so those kinds of factors are something that happens in small cap investing that you really have to watch for and understand but then you know some of the world's great companies have not have been micro caps that came public in kind of some weird way and actually i would tell you robert i think i should spend more time looking for them and one of the things that happens to me is that you know i'll screen for them but but then i get sort of um you know there's a very high uh fraud and crap factor at that end of the market and i get fatigued because you're kind of looking through it's a bit like panning for gold you know you've got to get through a lot of sand before you get a speck of gold and sometimes get just tired of padding through all the sand and it's just like one after another you know and you just and then the hard thing as well is that i'll see marginal situations and i ask myself well maybe if i dug here i would be able to identify that this is so marginal meaning that you know it might be a diamond in the rough but it might not but you know what if finding out if it's a diamond or rough takes you 100 years of polishing you know to see if it's just stone or diamond and i think in many cases you know it's like you you have to commit to doing an enormous amount of research to figure it out and so maybe a lot of a lot of that sort of panning for stuff is trying to figure out where where can i actually make three phone calls and get in and get and figure it out you know but you know i would tell you that i think i was on the phone earlier today to a guy who i think is a brilliant analyst and i i'm not trying to be falsely modest here i don't think that i'm a brilliant analyst i think that if you start this business the way i did i didn't have all the time to develop into some kind of brilliant analyst even if i had the intellectual capacity because i was busy building business and we joked about how i was both ceo but also postman that's not entirely true but for the significant part of the life of this business the time that i could have spent analyzing was spent licking stamps and you know writing checks and doing all of that kind of jazz and um yeah how'd i do you did you did great you did fantastic you asking me well i think i think we'll end it there guy because i we're we got we're gonna we're gonna put you to bed you know i think we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna talk we're gonna tuck you in and let you let you do things so and the thing is like yeah i i didn't want to delay anymore i didn't want to keep you waiting and so so so chantal scheduled you in which is yeah hey you know what if it had to it had to you know it's all good that's how that's how i treat these things you know i i it's i always like to be available whenever the guest because i know you're giving your time to me yeah you know so it's for me it's look i'm in l.a time i know i if i got to wake up at 4 a.m my time did you do it sometimes oh my god oh yeah but if you uh the interview with yourself saurabh you did saurabh no no i interviewed uh dr sanjay bakshi and he's he's based in india and so that that was a bit of a time i think that was the late that was the latest interview i ever did it was i think we were at like 7pm first but it's so powerful because you just don't know who's going to listen to it you know and then the next thing you know you've got connectivity to someone and what i tell you is if if if the listeners if your listeners like this and you want more i'm happy to do more you're clearly a lovely guy and you've got an enormous amount of uh people skills and eq and you're effusive and fun to talk to so you know if you want to come back for bite two of the apple it's also possible you'll be like no that was bad enough for the first time guys i've i have way more questions you know the one thing one of my one of my longer questions i was going to throw it to you is like uh because i studied philosophy a little bit and well all through all through high school and then a little bit i thought it was going to be a philosophy major that was my i thought that was my calling i was all just excited about it and just loved like ancient ancient greek philosophy and everything but i haven't i haven't read any of it in a long time but that's one thing that i i've i've been finding that outlet in doing the podcast and speaking with investors like you is just you know just just get just getting the getting that getting that back a little bit you know it's uh you know i felt like my my philosophy training stopped when we i stopped at post-modernism and i feel like it's evolved so much since then or post-modernism has just has so many different branches since then and investing in business i feel like has really taken hold in a way that i don't think anybody had really ever thought it would you know i mean you had adam smith who's probably the most famous business you know philosopher out there but but sin but since then and only until you know over the last 20 25 years you know with warren buffett with monger i mean they're quoted just as much as any famous philosopher at this point that's true right you know that's what i find really fascinating and i think that actually for those of us and i i think i put myself into you know i i'm primarily my best medium of expression is spoken word not written words and so for those of us who do like the spoken word you know this whole podcast thing has just opened up a whole universe of stuff that was close to us we kind of like you know we're at a relative disadvantage when it was just the writers the pen writers because they had all this means of expression but those of us who are better talking better thinking on our feet didn't but now the world's opened up to us can you imagine socrates had a podcast how amazing the symposium podcast would be that is a great that is a great analogy well not it's a great thought it's a fantastic thought i hadn't thought that but you're absolutely right it would have been amazing it would have been amazing it just how how many new ideas we would have access to you know and not just you know through through played not just through i mean he did you know he did take a lot to write a lot down of his thoughts but you know just how amazing it would be you know you have plato there you know he's the producer he's clicking record for socrates versus uh this is already ready all right all right let's let you go guys where can everybody go and find more information on you and and and follow you on on all social media it's you you you're asking me the question yes actually i was just going to rewind a second oh sure because uh on the research front one of the ways you can research in packs now is through twitter and oh yeah into it and the kind of research finn to it not the kind of stock trading fin twit it's kind of an amazing place to meet people and learn more and so and and i'm after i watched a fantastic introduction to how to use twitter properly by david perrell with a guy called matt kobach i'm pretty active on twitter and and so that's probably the best place to find me is at gspear on twitter and uh i do try to respond to all the dms that i receive so one way or another even if the if the message may be send me an email but i give out my email through the dms but i think that's probably the best way to find me is on twitter and that's the place where i'm most active and i got a website guyspear.com and my business website is aquamarinefun.com but but twitter will take you there you'll find your way to me on twitter that's kind of you to ask thank you and of course um my books available on amazon and uh you know a little bit of you know a thought for all of your listeners actually i have a rule for myself now if i meet somebody in my life who's written a book or i know i'm going to meet somebody who's written a book i try to read the book before i meet them because it's kind of like you know instead of doing the first step of getting to know them and forcing them to recounts because every first book is autobiographical anyway you kind of get that out of the way it's like you've read the resume already type of deal and so you know and most of the time people put a lot of thinking into what they write so you get a more condensed version of who they are a better version in a certain way than um than what you see in person so in that case i have to apologize for having not read your book you met you met matthew you've read my book so that's all right he knew me well i'm sure told you lots about me oh yeah he sent me he actually sent me some underlying screenshots uh from the book that he took that he thought would be good to chat about today so i i'm very grateful to matthew for introducing us and look this is not the last time we'll be chatting i mean i think we should start our own pod called the financial therapist and just bring and just bring some pm's on here and and maybe some uh some individuals you know like here we're gonna figure out who you are and then we're gonna and and and then we'll help you that'll that'll show you whether you're a valuer we could do that as a clubhouse conversation and then we could do we i'm happy to try stuff i if i find the time and then we just host it on our separate channels it kind of be you'd get two files and it's just hosted on two separate channels if you like that'd be fun very funny yeah it's great to meet you i is that from just the the sorry this really is the blue thing behind you the blue thing behind you is that from uh arrival no this is actually uh a patent for a surfboard oh i see yeah so it was given as a as a gift a while ago i'm a big surfer i love to serve i miss the la bamba swell this weekend but you know that that's what happens when you have a 15 month old so so uh you know i'll get the next one and then take care of the 15 month old oh yeah the waves will always be there that's for sure all right great great to meet you robert great to meet you too thank you thank you this podcast is for informational purposes only and is not an offer or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell securities snn network sn and inc and the plan of microcap podcast and the representatives are not licensed brokers broker dealers market makers investment bankers investment advisors analysts or underwriters we do not recommend any companies discuss we may buy and sell securities and any company mentioned and may profit in the event those securities rise in value we recommend you consult with a professional investment advisor broker or legal counsel before purchasing or selling any securities reference in this podcast this episode of the planet microcap podcast is brought to you by friedman llp a top 40 global accounting tax and business consulting and advisory firm providing a full spectrum of services for public and private companies since 1924 contact friedman when you will need to raise capital and adhere to u.s standards the freedmen partners will work diligently with you to provide the financial assurance regulatory and transactional services you need when the stakes are highest freedmen make sure you are well equipped for more information and to get a friedman free consultation please call 856-830-1660 or email neil levine at n n-l-e-v-i-n-e at friedman llp.com again for more information and a free consultation call 856-830-1660 or email neil levine at n-l-e-v-i-n-e at friedman llp dot com

Channel: SNN Network

Views: 2,299

Rating: 4.9344263 out of 5

Keywords: Wall Street View, Stock News Now, SNN, SNN: Stock News Now, StockNewsNow.com, SNN.Network, SNN Network, Investing, Investor, Investors, Investment, Investments, MicroCap, MicroCaps, MicroCap Stocks, Value Investing, Value Investor, MicroCap Investing, MicroCap Investor, Penny Stocks, Management, Volatility, Enterprise Value, Planet MicroCap Podcast, Planet MicroCap, Diversification, Guy Spier, Aquamarine Capital, Warren Buffett

Id: ZdPhu-Fw3Ws

Length: 83min 25sec (5005 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021