Mohnish Pabrai’s Q&A Session with MBA Students at Columbia Business School – March 18, 2021

[Music] [Music] [Music] okay great well um manish uh welcome to uh applied securities analysis uh i think i mentioned to you but it's a class of about 75 students the mix of first and second year columbia mbas really appreciate you making the time uh to speak to the students and join us today uh really lucky to have you and you know i know all the students are really excited to have you here and your thoughts and also see what questions you you have for them as well um you know look manish really needs no introduction but i'll provide a brief background um he's the founder and managing partner of investment funds which he founded in 1999 uh prior to that he started his own i.t consulting uh company transtech in about 1991 and i think it was uh with under a hundred thousand of savings and credit card uh borrowings which uh he turned around and sold for about 20 million in 2000 uh so he definitely has the entrepreneurial blood and blood in him which i believe has been a little bit of an inspiration from his father um look he's one of the most well-known value investors of our time uh is really well read as you can probably tell from his reading list that he puts on his website and has a really fascinating background so look it should be a very fun uh and lively discussion today um he's written two books uh which i'd highly recommend all of you add to your bookshelves and reading lists uh one the dondo investor which um i believe told me from wrong but it's the jaw3 word for endeavors to create wealth or something close close to that i believe um and the mosaic um and then finally he's also started the dakshana foundation uh that helps impoverish students in india train for the iit and medical entrance exams before we begin manish i just also wanted to introduce you to my co-professor michael herman um mike if you just quickly say hello um i'm just trying to find you on my screen but yeah i'm here hi manish thank you so much for taking the time great to be here right um so so manisha suggested we do uh just go straight into q a um and i guess his only request is that the students send no easy pitches pitches this way or i guess he'd like to call it only deadly curveball so i hope you guys have some challenging questions for uh for for many today i thought he just feel you know it's a great quote um and we have about an hour uh so you know when you're still thinking i could kick it off kick it off with a couple questions questions and then we could turn it over the students but before we can uh begin manish uh is there any sort of opening remarks or anything uh you'd like to mention before we kick things off yeah so i'm i'm hoping that we can change the format a little bit on the roof i hope you don't mind me kind of you know uh messing with your uh well-planned agenda but uh maybe i could ask the questions you know we could we could switch it after you do a couple of questions could i ask some questions okay and then we can go from there i i just got you know i did so many webcasts where i get asked questions i decided i want to ask some questions is that okay that's that's perfect well when doing this i want to kick it off with one question and then we'll uh we'll we'll give you the floor uh if that works and uh i think i told manish that this year's criteria for the pitch competition is uh you know uh ten braggers over ten years and so i think he's very intrigued to hear some of some of these thoughts um but uh so that sounds great um so look manish maybe even just kick it off would love um maybe if you could just uh you know kick things off by describing your journey as a value investor and i think it's always really interesting to hear of people's stories and how they've evolved and you know in particular what got you into value investing what were some of the key uh points of evolution and your point you know in your career in your sort of evolution as a value investor and then sort of most recently how that sort of tied into your i think you recently talked about your focus on growing pies or spawners as uh you you've coined the phrase um and so you know how that transition has gotten to you to uh you know to to to the 10 to 100 x's or growing fives and spawners that you like as you like to call it yeah uh so i'll drop anyway first of all pleasure and honor to be here uh colombia is hallowed ground you know the origin is an epicenter of value investing so i think uh all of you are uh you know in a wonderful place uh probably the best institution on the planet for what uh subject we are discussing at hand so i think it's uh it's tremendous and i think it's a very tough program to get into so congratulations to all of you and i'm sorry your uh experience at columbia colombia's got somewhat mutilated uh by the virus but uh hopefully it still uh uh works out okay but uh so anyway it's it's always fun to speak to columbia students i i always enjoy that you know uh i think in uh 94 i was uh before before my my kids were born i was a vacationing with my wife in london and on the way back you know we were flying from london to chicago and i was just looking for a book to read and um so i picked up uh one of peter lynch's books uh i think one up on wall street and uh until that point you know i may have bought a stock or two here or there but i really had no understanding of investing or even you know knew much about the industry or any of that so i read peter's book on the fly and i really enjoyed it i said wow this is really good stuff and he did so well and then i uh looked up and i found here the second book you know i think beating the street and i read that book and i really enjoyed that and i was ready to read another 50 peter lynch books but i ran out of peter lynch books there were only two and uh so i still wanted to kind of pursue this area and in one of the books he talked he talked about this guy warren buffett in very reverential terms and i had never heard about this guy buffett and i you know looked him up and i was lucky the first couple of biographies in buffett had just come out a year or two before that lowenstein and uh and such [Music] and those and then you know the berkshire letters and such so that opened up a very big new world for me uh and it was really exciting and i was just you know uh it was kind of like i think drinking from a fire hydrant it was just i was just you know absorbing as much as i could and um at that time i didn't even know that there is such a thing as a hedge fund you know i didn't know that the hedge fund industry even exists i was aware that there was a mutual fund industry and i was somewhat aware about how mutual funds functioned and so when i read when i read buffett's approach to investing a couple of things struck out to me so one of the things that struck out is that what he was talking about is what i would call the laws of investing and these laws are investing from my point of view like the laws of physics it's like gravity works one way you know you can't just say i don't believe in gravity and it stops working it still works and so i i felt like these were like the holy grail they were the laws of investing but then when i looked at the mutual fund industry and i saw kind of what they were doing it was diametrically opposed to everything buffett was talking about so buffett was talking about concentrated portfolios these guys had 200 stocks he's talking about you know buy and hold and understand the business and all that the mutual funds were like turning over half the portfolio every year so everything seemed to be and and the results the mutual fund results reflected them not following the laws of investing so in 94 i had sold a portion of my business and after taxes everything i had a million dollars first time ever i had cash that i had no use for in my life and uh so it was just sitting around and and i felt that i said you know nobody is following this guy buffett and i bet if someone followed him uh they would do really well they you know they because the whole world is doing something different so i said why don't i take the million dollars i have and why don't i start to invest it in equities and figure out because a lot of things buffett was talking about you know he talked about i'm a better businessman because i'm an investor i'm a better investor because i'm a businessman i could understand business okay and i felt like because i could understand business when i looked at a publicly created company i felt like in many cases or in some cases i could understand them and then i could figure out which ones to invest in and then use his frameworks and uh and that worked really well i mean the million became like 13 million in five years and uh some dumb luck in there and um and uh i said to myself you know monish i knew i knew we could do this you know and look it's it works you know just have to follow the rules that it works and uh so that was how things got going and then in 99 about five years later a bunch of friends asked me to set up a partnership and then that eventually had to provide public funds and so on so that's how the journey got going and then i think uh more recently last year because i had so much time to contemplate my navel last year because i wasn't on airplanes uh it's always a good idea to contemplate your navel and uh so if that led to you know led me to nick sleeps letters uh and you know if you guys get a chance a nomad investment partnership nick sleep letters you can ask god google he will take you there and uh so i read those letters and it really i mean i've known nick sleeper he's been a friend of mine i think almost 20 years but nick himself went through an evolution so i was surprised when i read the letters in the way he had evolved and i realized that i was barking up the wrong tree and so uh i was always in the mood mainly because i think markets are so euphoric in 99 2000 they were so overvalued i went to more classic graham you know buying 50 cent dollar bills and selling them at 90 cents and i realized when i looked at what nick was doing that the really the holy grail was to find long-term compounders and not to sweat it if the company is a little bit overvalued basically use the same framework in owning a business as a founder does and uh so that's a pretty significant shift but it makes life really easy because you know you don't really have to sweat the valuation so much you don't need to put a fine you know exact number on it and so on and and you're generally wanting to as long as the business is not in secular decline you're generally you know letting them ride and of course there are tax efficiencies that come with that as well so that's a relatively new uh journey that i'm on and uh it's exciting and uh so we'll see we'll see how it goes so that's uh sort of what's been going on great um and and maybe maybe just my second one and then i'll turn it over to you to uh to ask the questions um but i would love to just on this you know sort of understand how you you know you have you know in the daunter investor you talk a lot about the concept of heads i win tails i don't lose a lot um and you know in terms of margin of error i would love to just maybe delve into you know examples of how you thought about sort of margin of error because i think it's a really interesting concept and then also in context of you know thinking about spawners and growing businesses you know i think if you have an example they tend to be smaller and maybe a wider range of outcomes uh for these businesses and so how you sort of you know think about margin of error in context of you know the the spawners or these you know the businesses you're not focused on yeah i mean i think you know buffett says uh the focus really should be on the downside uh you know so you really have to make sure that the downside is very solidly protected and if the downside is well protected almost uh the upside almost takes care of itself uh so so you know when when i wrote the thunder investor and i wrote about the patel's i mean my own my own experiences and invest as an entrepreneur and this is not just my experience is the experience of almost all non-venture-backed startups so venture back starters make up maybe one tenth or one percent of all startups maybe less than that non-venture-backed startups is what is everything that drives the us economy the non-venture lifestyles and so the people who start these businesses everyone thinks they're risk takers but they are the opposite of risk takers entrepreneurs do not take risk they do everything in their power to minimize risk and so they try to put the orange as much in their favor uh when they take this when they take these these bets so for example in my own case when i started my business i pulled thirty thousand for my for a 401k account and i was 24 years old i wasn't worried about my retirement savings at that point and uh i took 70 000 in credit card debt and and i researched uh bank personal bankruptcy laws at the time they've changed those laws since then but at that time if you declared bankruptcy uh personal bankruptcy uh pretty much everything was cleansed and you couldn't declare bankruptcy again for seven years which actually meant that you became a better credit for people to give your credit card themselves because they knew you couldn't screw them again they knew they got screwed once but they knew they couldn't get screwed a second time for at least seven years so you're actually your credit improved so the way i looked at it i said okay this hundred thousand that i'm putting in let's say it blows up let's say the business fails right so i say the 70 000 is visa and mastercard are my venture campus okay and they are just great venture capitalists they took no board sheets they never asked me what i'm doing this was beautiful and if it didn't work i could just go and declare personal bankruptcy and it'd be just wipe clean and the 401k you know i'd get a job and we'd rebuild that so and i was single at the time and when i left my job my employer told me my boss told me we would love to have you back if you come back they said they told me when your business fails they didn't say if your business fails they told me monish when your business fails you can come back we'll give you like a 20 raise we'll give you a promotion and you'll be all set we'll be happy to have you back so i said this is great okay the business fails i declare bankruptcy i go back to work i have a better pay so where is the risk right so this is how the brains of most early stage entrepreneurs which are non-venture-backed work venture-backed guys they've got an iv they're a different universe forget about that so iv trips are really bad for you because you know it's better to spend your time getting customers than trying to get some vc to fund you i always feel it's better just get customers so anyway what i'm trying to say is that early stage businesses most early stage businesses that the entrepreneurs who start them do not take risk they do everything in their power to minimize risk and of course what happened with me was the business never failed i never went back to work i paid visa mastercard off they got very lucrative you know interest terms everyone is happy you know no problems so i think i think the same framework comes across in investing because just like you know as an entrepreneur you try to minimize downside risk the same thing in investing you should always look at what happens if things don't go the way you're thinking what's the protection because you know capitalism is brutal uh it's creative destruction most businesses that get started won't make it even if they make it they won't go 10 years or 20 years and by the time a business enters the s p 500 it has already passed its problem you know so it's already the the elements which will lead to its decline are mostly already in place and very few businesses last 50 years almost no businesses last 100 years so it's it's pretty hard great uh minis i know the students probably had a ton of questions but why don't we why don't we kick it off questions you have and then at this time we can uh we can we can go and uh you know you know go go some of the questions the students have so there are 25 teams in the class which is great we have the purging contest coming up in a couple of weeks and most of you have your 10x and 10-year ideas already in your heads you may not have your pitches ready but you at least have the ideas i am desperate i'm desperate for those ideas so if you would please share with me the names of your ideas and maybe three sentences like which you would give to an eight-year-old of why it's gonna kick ass and we're not gonna post this video till at least may so none of this is gonna be this is just between us girls okay just purely between us girls conversation so basically whoever wants to go first second whatever i am all yours all right well we we've been uh we've been uh you know coaching them on the 60-second pitch so this this might be a good good time to use the to put that into practice if we have some great volunteers so i guess if there's any any brave volunteers they want to you can just go by the way the hand feature and i can i can call them out if there is anyone who wants to take a stab at it with a company of choice we got we got one volunteer uh for me uh bill deadly do you wanna please give us your 60 second pitch yeah thanks so much for coming today really appreciate it uh so my team is connor flood enjoy saying we're pitching boyd group services they are a roll up of auto collision and glass repair services they have about three percent share of a very large market good returns and strong balance sheet and cash flow to continue rolling up what's the name of the business again i'm sorry i didn't get the name boyd group services okay it trades in uh on the toronto exchange byd as a ticker okay and what's the market cap uh it's about five billion cats so it's like four and change you guys so it's is it going to 50 billion uh no but i think it can go probably to 20 billion over time all right pretty good i'm uh i'm appreciate of the idea and uh were there any others that came close that you looked at and then discarded uh yeah we had a bunch of ideas connor joyce feel free to hop in i think we looked at uh we looked at vale for a while we looked at snowflake we looked at graph deck which i think you own or owned at one point um guys am i missing anything else i guess not oh yeah that's those are the other okay well i appreciate that bill uh thank you very much uh cheers anyone else um yeah dickson hi monique thank you so much for spending time with us uh my team is working on angie it's recently rebranded to ng in corporate it's a it's the largest online marketplace for home services in the us multiple the size of the closest competitors and it's undergoing a business model change from a traditional lead generation model to a fixed price pre-priced model which we believe will significantly increase the tick rate and improve the margins going forward it's still a very under penetrated market right now so there's a lot of room for growth uh what's the market cap right now is around eight billion i'm sorry eight billion okay and so is it going to 80 billion we think there is a it's within possibility within the next decade okay and were there any other ideas that came close um not not really to be honest well we didn't spend too much time on other ideas and this is owned by it's controlled by isc i should mention oh so it's one of the iac businesses correct it's the main isc business right now they still own 84 percent of the business okay and what's the picker again a-n-g-i oh this is uh yeah so zandi's list that's right okay yeah i'm sorry i didn't think there was anxiousness yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that's uh yeah no uh i use yelp services a lot so i i appreciate the business model okay so it's great thank you next uh we have uh two more volunteers uh or three more i guess chirag hi hi monique so um so our team is researching and working on copart so copart is a online b2b bidding platform for the car salvage auction market so basically you have car sellers on the seller side which are insurance companies and car fleet owners and used car dealers and on the buyer side you have a whole sort of you know car car rebuilders dismantlers and used car dealers in mid in the emerging markets and what we feel is that copa's differentiated business model and its superior execution skills they've kind of enabled it to gain market share in a duopolistic market in so they they kind of control almost 40 45 market share in the us and the other second player is is also around 40 percent of the market and we feel that co-part is well positioned to kind of further expand its market share in its core business segment which is the insurance segment and then also expand its presence in the non-insurance segment and and kind of further strengthen its position positioning in the international source markets of uk and germany which are the largest uh car markets outside of the us and just just like very quickly why we feel it's a high quality business is because of its superior track record of capital allocation average return on equity of around 30 plus free cash flow margins of 10 has grown at almost 11 over the last six years in in terms of top line and 26 in terms of the bottom line and we feel that at its current valuation you are essentially getting the international business for free and uh so you know did you read the biography of the yes what's the name of that book i forget the name from junk to gold yeah so i really enjoyed that book yeah uh it's a very good book and i think it's a great business and in fact one of my uh one of my investors in uh uh one of my funds actually a former investor now he's pretty high up in i.t for them a very smart guy actually in texas and uh i actually looked at the business but what's the current market cap it's around 25 billion dollars and what do you think the market cap is in ten years around uh 200 billion dollars so how are we getting to 250 billion you know mr ackman is not going to be happy with three or four x so so this is this is my this is according to our base case we're still you know building the best case scenarios i think this is a very conservative like again assuming all sorts of margins or safeties uh i think this is at least in any case you should make this much return and definitely to the best case scenario there are going to be a lot of other things that we need to underwrite which we're still working on yeah actually one thing i mean i really like the co-part business i think it's a it's an exception business and also they have one of the tailwinds they have is that these cars now have so many sensors and all that so small things lead to salvage yes you know the car is five six years old and there's a minor damage it costs more than uh what the car is worth and so it's going in the direction of uh of course and i think just uh you know in the book the the company has some very good principles you know and so uh so i really like it so thank you for sharing that uh were there any any other businesses that came close for you guys i mean i would request to shar and athena to share because i think this one was from my side but they had some interesting names as well okay bashar if you want to share your your picks that you had that discussed we also looked at viva the healthcare sas system but we felt like the market understands their growth pretty well tushar had a paper company that he had in mind where is tuchar yeah no i was i was proposing a packaging company and the business didn't seem as as as strong as gokart when we spend more time on coconuts we dropped that okay thank you for sharing who's next okay we we got we got two more volunteers and uh and at the end i can i can send you the list of the 25 so you have all 25 pitches so you you'll have that do two more and then we'll go go to questions how's that all right oh yeah no way though we might have we might have a couple more so maybe we get four i just saw a couple more hands raised um okay so we'll go to uh frank and then we'll go to noah sure thanks for coming so uh this is uh frank we're pitching a stock uh called ali's the secret is olli listed on nasdaq it's a six billion uh market cap company it's a discount retailer and basically what it does is uh it buys close-up deals so from you know bankruptcies or cancelled orders you know from walmart those kind of things they buy those at the significant discounts and then you know put it in the store and you know sell it at you know customers at various significant discounts as well so the company currently has a you know over three times 300 stores that seem very uh uh consistent uh 15 of keger in the store count over the past you know 10 years i think the moment is very good it could easily grow to you know a thousand stores maybe two thousand stores so you know we do see uh you know summer business here and white mode and we like the business what did you say the symbol was oli oh ollie's bargain i i've never seen their stores around where the where are most of their stores located uh they are mostly in suburbs like are they in california they're not in california uh they are mostly still on the east side east coast and also like they've recently expanded to texas and uh we believe one day they will reach the west coast so that's why there's a lot of white space and uh so are they doing uh clothing or what type of merchandise uh not typically like basically the home goods stuff like the basic stuff you know small electric electronics and i guess a pretty odd range but mostly necessities for your paper and stuff like that okay and so uh basically when you so who would be their competitor there are a number of competitors like um maybe you could say like uh dollar stores but like dollar stores they will be not branded names like they will sell like branded you know merchandise but as a significant discount and like some of their competitors might be big loss if you've heard of it and you know tuesday morning but they all have their own life problems but all this is seeing very great moments right now and uh you know one thing that's interesting to me is that i think i've written about in my first book i wrote about that funeral services of the great business oh and uh ollie's is in the funeral services business you know yeah you may not have thought about it that way but the thing is that like for example if you look at uh tj maxx for example yeah it's sort of like yeah yeah so businesses that are either in recycling or funeral services are very good businesses so always is you you might say it's recycling maybe fuel sources might be a little yeah but but but generally those businesses have very strong characteristics because they have it's very compelling for a customer the second thing is they may have a little bit of a costco aspect to them in the sense that when you go into their stores different times when you go in there's different inventory so there's a little bit of a bizarre type situation here you get surprised right yeah they might have some big you know inventory of big tvs come in or something yeah that's exactly what happens they call it treasure hunt so yeah the treasure hunt right yeah so uh those businesses can be pretty good but also that you know they have to execute and scale yeah one of the things about scaling is that unlike costco you've got to keep feeding the machine right tj maxx has to keep feeding the machine yeah so uh that might that might get more difficult as things go on but oh yeah but they have a you know spectacular you know buyers team dipped down very good you know we've just done cost with experts you know everybody's sort of a you know there's more than enough then they could buy so you know buying has been you know going so far so good for them all right well thank you for sharing thank you all right who's that we we have we have we have three more and then we'll uh we'll we'll flip it at the position to ask you some questions um uh if that's good so we have sagar uh sorry no uh noah up next and then we'll go to sagar yeah himanesh thanks for being here so uh my team we are pitching danmer scientific which is the only commercial manufacturer of marine biodegradable plastic resin so their product say a chip bag would degrade in the ocean in 12 weeks without leaving any synthetic material behind wow and they're solving the massive plastics waste problem they're sold out with take or pay contracts from blue chip customers through plan 2024 capacity and they're protected by significant r d modes and a first mover advantage and we believe they can build new facilities at over a 20 percent roic and use cheap project financing the business currently trades at about a four billion dollar market cap and we have a base case moic of eight times in ten years okay and then what's the ticker symbol d d n m r d n m r yeah all right and uh did any any other uh businesses come close or so the the nearest competitor is a company called rwdc and it was actually founded by the dan in danimer he left about six years ago so clearly a lot of the uh ip here sits in his brain but these guys are barely scratching the surface on the addressable market okay thank you for sharing next yeah oh sorry go ahead hey uh this is sire neil and i are pitching broom ticker uh vrm it's a five billion dollar market cap 1.3 billion dollar revenue used car ecommerce platform in united states the company went public recently in june 2020 and is trading at a relatively cheaper consumer tech multiple of 1.7x a price by revenue the company represents a great opportunity uh where it is trying to streamline and nationalize the used car inventory marketplace model apparently the u.s used car marketplace is a 800 billion dollar industry which is highly fragmented filled up with largely mom and pop stores and room is trying to consolidate the market currently online e-commerce players represent only 0.5 of the overall market and as uh this post-covered inflection where consumers are becoming more adept at buying used cars online kicks in this ecommerce penetration is expected to go up as high as 50 in best case and in base case maybe 20 to 30 percent we believe that room could sell for potentially more than a million cars by 2032 and with an rpo of close to 20 000 us dollars it represents a 10x in 10 years and do they compete with carvana they do they do they have different models so carvana does like a traditional used car model where it goes region by region versus groom which is trying to truly bring the e-commerce efficiencies by going national and then redistributing its inventory basis uh data observed in each market okay and why has the stock behave differently from carbon yeah so recently uh groom is relatively more risk evers so during kovit it bought down its inventory from uh up to 8 000 cars that it had in june 2020 the ipo to almost 2 000 cars because it couldn't predict how quick the market would rebound and unfortunately for them the market rebounded quite positively and they were left with lower inventory lower number of uh online posting of cars and that's why their sales kind of took a dip compared to what the analysts were projecting and that made the market a bit apprehensive okay well thank you for sharing anyone else on a loophole are we done let's service a mute let's let's do one more uh minish and you want to uh do you wanna i guess finish off uh finish us off on the pitches sounds good honor and manish thanks so much for being here i'm on a team with uh maggie and danielle in this class we're pitching a company called pagerduty which trades under the ticker pd which currently has a three billion dollar market cap pagerduty provides incident management response solutions to customers across a variety of industries so for example if you're an online retailer and your website goes down pagerduty is going to alert the correct members of your it teams and help provide intelligence to both troubleshoot and prevent that sort of problem from occurring in the future so we believe that pedro duty has a first mover advantage in the space and is going to benefit from the tailwind of the increasing importance of the virtual and digital space for customers uh generating a larger and larger share of their revenues over time okay and uh what are the revenues of the company sure so uh maggie and danielle i believe uh and i have worked on the model so the company has actually experienced a pretty significant uh revenue keger over the past five years to about 40 million so a pretty significant growth in the past five years to i believe about 200 million today okay well thank you for sharing thank you very much you know uh one uh question i had on group is that i didn't hear any pitches that were less than 100 million or less than two or three hundred million was there a minimum market cap in the contest or now yeah so the minimum market cap i think to your point i think it was it was a billion dollars so uh that was the criteria sort of a billion dollar plus uh market cap uh north america listed uh with the two criteria with uh you know uh you know seven to ten x potential for ten years all those rules took away all the fun [Laughter] i think i mean maybe maybe uh bullies wasn't going to potentially source those funds so we needed a minimum minimum size for the business but uh yeah i know definitely the the the ten brackets become easier if you can go sub uh one billion dollars for sure yeah so i because i was just wondering if i felt that there's it's it's definitely harder as you get into the billions the pickings become slimmer but on the other hand you know you pick some five and five million market cap may not be fair and trade by appointment you know so uh so that that might be uh might be an issue so uh but no it's a it's wonderful to hear the pitches and of course you know one of the issues i go through as an investor is you know the first thing that goes through my head is is this within circle of competence right i mean it's the first thing i'm processing and probably 99 of stuff is outside my circle of competence so a lot of the pictures actually are just straight over my head you know they weigh past my pay grade so they become hard until i i spend more time and try to figure them out but it's it's great to see the diversity there's a wide range of businesses and i think the the purging contest is really really cool because it just drives things in a very practical way so that's wonderful so uh would you like to switch back to me answering questions uh i mean it's so open-ended but uh if if that works if we can uh switch it back and uh yeah so let's uh let's see what you guys have on your mind sure all right okay so uh if everyone just wants to whoever has questions just raise your hand and then we'll just go through a list of it for as much time we have um as you move as your hands up is that from before or did you did you have a question to pay this off um that's before but i can kick us off as well so manish i was curious um been reading a lot about your different definitions and one that was particularly interesting to me was the city of the the uber cannibals and that kind of constant uh rebalancing every year looking at where cannibals was curious to what led you to develop that new newer definition and uh what you think of the prospect of that in the medium to long term yeah so i think the cannibals is a term coined by charlie munger as it relates to buybacks and such and uh uber i borrowed from the ride sharing company to uh as an added prefix to it uh but basically the the idea is that if a business has a lot of stability in its operations uh where you know there's going to be some sort of high probabilities of you know continued prosperity and cash flows and it's you know not ridiculously priced it can be a really good use of capital and we've seen some examples uh i think a good two good examples are uh nvr and autozone uh so nvr over i think 25 years or something has bought back like 80 percent of their shares and their business hasn't grown much but the the stock has gone up i think uh more than 400 fold in the last 25 years and it's a home builder you know it's not some tech company or something like that but but they are very capitalized and they pretty much in they have religion where pretty much they take a hundred percent of net income and sometimes more than 100 of that income and dump it all into buybacks and they also don't try to time the market or try to figure out the stock price too low or too high or whatever they just autopilot buying back shares and uh it's worked out very well for for them and their shareholders and the same with autozone you know it's it's an okay business but i think the buybacks have really contributed so i think that if certain businesses with certain characteristics sign on to these types of programs and they go long term i think you can do very well one of the things i learned in terms of the over cannibals is rebalancing them every year is not a good idea what we really want to do we want to find the future nvrs and you really cannot get a hockey stick at some point where you just keep buying back the shares and then at some point the multiple takes off and everything takes off so it can be really good if you can identify company dna that you know buys into that and is going down that path it can be really good great uh next we'll go to uh dixon thank you professor i'm honest with you again um i have a question so you just now you mentioned that you were more focused on the downside as an investor but i think um you admitted also in the recent podcast you did with professor um santos that you have a tendency to go into situations where the outcome could be binary because of high leverage and maybe turn around situation so can you just maybe share with us why so and how are you navigating away from them and for example the experience with horse head for instance and with those experience how do you think about averaging averaging down right now well so i never deliberately deliberately go into situations that are binary outcomes i mean those those are not appealing to me sometimes i end up in situations where eventually it becomes a binary outcome or it's gone south so that's that's a different situation but i do try hard at the outset before the investment is made to try to figure out what could go wrong and if those things go wrong what could happen to our investment results with the with the position and generally speaking we try to not go into situations where so investing is probabilities you know i think any business has some probability of a zero you know it could be very small but it's not it's not non-existent so every business has uncertainty in the future and could have serious difficulties in the future uh which may not be predictable so we we can't just say that something is an absolute investing in the game of probabilities what we do want to do is we want to try to maximize the probabilities of a good home run and minimize the probabilities that we have a permanent loss of capital so if things don't work and i end up with approximately what i started with that's a great outcome i would take that bet all day long and if things do work then i get a multibagger so if if that's the kind of equation i'm looking at then that equation is very attractive if the equation is that there's a significant probability of a zero coupled with a very high also probability of a multibagger that's not of that much interest so we definitely want to have downside protection sometimes we end up in situations i mean horsehead is an example at the time the investment was made it wasn't a risky investment what ended up happening is that they were trying to build a new plant which continuously kept getting delayed and had cost overruns in the meantime they had shut down their old plant and in the end they ran out of runway you know where their the zinc prices collapsed and their you know all their financials went upside down so it's definitely within a bell curve of probability but i did not expect it to be to go to that extreme end of a bell curve but we learn you know so one of the things i learned from that experience is that you just cannot assume that when managements embark on these you know ambitious new plants and things like that that they will go as planned you have to put in a margin of safety i have another investment right now for example a company in india called rain industries which is again been building some new plants and such and they've had some cost overruns and some delays but it has not impacted the business because the size of those investments relative to the mothership is well understood and even if those plants never i mean if it was zero in those plants for example the business would not get affected this would still survive and thrive and so that was missing in the horoshad situation the what if this doesn't work at all so uh we live and learn and uh so that was a good learning that came out of that thank you great um next up we'll go to uh joseph zane thank you professor thank you manish so uh so i'm actually from the same team with frank which is the only spartan homeless team so i think you actually just mentioned that uh ollie's a business model is kind of like a funeral service i i really didn't i mean get this point so or maybe could you elaborate on this comment a little bit more yeah so so for example i mean if if you look at ollies for example let's say some manufacturer has a million too many flat screen tvs they made right and they need to they need to get rid of them ollies is the burial ground for those tvs they're going to give those tvs a honorable barrier and actually not really a burial they're going to give them an honorable recycling you know so basically the thing is that everything that is living and breathing today will die right and all kinds of manufacturers will always have issues with too much inventory or unwanted inventory or you know costco just returned a huge bunch of stuff and so on so this need to recycle and find those somewhat damaged goods a new home is a continuous need so funeral services just let me take a step back my book the first book which talked about funeral services is out of print but if you go on my blog chai with pubrae all the chapters are there as pdfs and they're the the chapter of the funeral business so if you look at traditional funeral services business they're really good businesses because number one none of you will will tell me that after columbia business school i'm going to run a funeral home that is not what you aspire to do most 20-somethings don't say i'm going to be the tycoon of funeral homes okay so people don't aspire to enter the business okay the second is that when your grandmother dies and you're looking for funeral services i hope you don't take the low bid okay you don't call 10 places now she may not have been that great a person but even then you won't call 10 places and find the cheapest place i hope you won't do that so you're typically going to try to go to a place with your family has used in the past there's some kind of connection whatever or you know which is good and you typically don't negotiate bottom of the barrel services if they tell you would you like flowers at the service you're not going to say no okay so generally speaking the business when they're selling their service uh they don't have pricing pressure okay and the second thing is i don't know who's going to die in peoria in 2022 but i know how many are going to die in peoria illinois in 2022. okay so there's a recurring revenue to funeral services which is beautiful so all of these things actually make models like tj maxx really really good models because uh eve so some examples of either sort of recycling flash funeral services businesses are ebay for example ebay is recycling and funeral services great business tj maxx is a great business and you can just go down the list you know ollies their competitors big lots all of these guys are great businesses because these mismatched inventories need a home and i mean you know when i look at like i own a i have an investment in serotonin right they are converting the seers into other things one of their tenants is tj maxx no issues with the business very strong financials great tenant because of the underlying nature of the business retail is a terrible business but within retail recycling and funeral is a great business so it's a it's a good area to look at thank you so much okay that's a really really interesting uh way to think about it um we'll uh jump over to now yeah uh hi manish thank you for coming and talking with us today i first got to know you uh five or six years ago when i was reading guys dia's book the education of value investor and you and guy jointly bought a ticket to have lunch with buffett right so i'm curious to ask uh how was the experience how is your relationship with guy today and in general how do you get along with other investors my relationship with guy is awesome in fact this morning he called me and then he was showing me he's he's hanging out in clusters in switzerland which is near davos and he just bought a home there and he was just showing me the view which is spectacular it was really good you know the lunch with buffett when i told my wife that i wanted to bid for this lunch she you know has seen a lot of quirks in me over the years and she just thought it was just another stupid quirk and she said whatever and uh then after the lunch and since then she said that other than marrying me it was the best thing you ever did so that that lunch and i i did not have this plan uh that lunch is continuing to play dividends endlessly okay it's it's actually tremendous because like one of the things that happened at the lunches i told i told warren at the at the lunch i said look uh warren uh you know my wife arena is uh a great fan of yours but her true love in life is charlie okay and he's very competitive so he said you know uh he tells he tells her listen charlie is just this old fart he's very very boring okay i am the guy who's interesting okay not him okay so he said now to prove to you that i'm the real thing and charlie is useless i'm gonna set you guys up to have lunch with charlie okay and now you can bribe warren and have lunch with him but there's no such bribing mechanism with charlie okay so i just thought warren was kind of joking okay then three days after the lunch i got an email from buffett's assistant going to monger's assistant saying hey i met these guys in in california wonderful couple blah blah and they seem to have the misconception charlie that you are more interesting than me of course they're wrong but i've told them to meet you for lunch and then they'll you know have their head screwed on straight after that then you know we had lunch with charlie so it was like buy one get one free okay it was great okay and of course i ended up enjoying the charlie lunch a lot more than the buffett lunch you know charlie is unplugged okay it's always unplugged you know he's doing going and if you think he's unplugged in the daily journal meetings or the berkshire meetings you have not seen him one-on-one one-on-one is completely unplugged you know like he would say something and i would just turn and said did god just use that word did god just say that yes i think and then while i'm thinking about that god says that word again okay so it's this it's really funny but anyway so what ended up happening is um charlie and i ended up becoming friends we ended up becoming you know i i played uh a lot of bridge with him and his friends at the la country club which was a lot of fun because you know rick goran passed away but rick goran and charlie and couple other guys used to come for bridge and we used to meet for lunch before the bridge game so i'd be sitting there and there'd be charlie and rick in front of me okay and i'm like pinching myself saying is this real what's going on and then i would ask them all these questions about the 60s and you know the western pacific stock exchange and all these things that they were doing and all these different stories they had they were just it was just hilarious stories you know so so anyway the the thing is that that lunch has led to you know probably several dinners a year with charlie in his home a lot of bridge games and then on the warren side that friendship also continues you know i got to know warren's assistant really well because we were setting up the lunch and all that debbie is wonderful and i guy and i told debbie listen uh can we take you to lunch you know and uh she said look if you come to omaha on thursday when the meeting's on saturday because friday is crazy thursday we can go for lunch so for several years guy and i used to show up in um on thursday and then we'd go to lunch with debbie okay the lunch with debbie or the lunches with debbie were 10x better than the lunch with one okay because i would get all this you know like i would say all these stories like for example you know the wall street journal usually is printed uh very early like it's i think by 2 a.m or 3 a.m it's printed and warren had figured out some way of getting the paper uh you know not at seven a.m but like you know if he was up late he would get it almost the night before and and then you know just the way you know i i got a lot of details and like you know i used to ask debbie this was like going back maybe 10 years i said debbie does he have a mobile phone so she starts laughing so she says he has a mobile phone it's usually sitting in my desk okay and she said that when he goes out of town i charge it and i give it to him okay and he says that she told me the only thing he knows how to do with it is to call me okay so he says anytime he has to use it he calls me and says have such and such guy called and then he knows how to answer the phone and that was it okay that was the extent and charlie has never used a mobile phone in his life okay so here's you know some of the biggest apple shareholders and that's the situation with mobile phones but anyway i got a lot of you know interesting data about how warren functions and also of course since i've met him many many more times and one time he gave guy and me a tour of his galactic headquarters and uh like so he takes us to the coke machine he says this is my coke fountain and then you know he pours himself a coke so anyway what i would just say is that i would i just wanted to have lunch with him to thank him you know i had no ulterior motive other than to just be able to face to face thank you but what ended up happening was there was just all this other stuff and you know there's a there's a meeting on sunday in omaha for the managers you know all all the berkshire managers and the board members and all that and warren invites guy and me to that sunday branch okay and every year guy and i think that this is it we're not gonna get any more invitations we've been getting invitations like ten years because sometimes we'd be at that brunch and i'm sitting with guy and right behind us bill gates and bono are talking to each other okay so it'd be just all these surreal things going on or you know that uh that nfl player you know with the long first name and last name su nagamizum su whatever his name is i can't even pronounce it he'd be hanging out and then i'd see he's like the gentlest creature you know i i look and say you could never harm anyone he said yeah that's how i am normally except on sundays you know so so anyway it was uh it was just been wonderful and it continues you know that lunch took place now i think uh 13 years ago but it continues so it's uh it's been great wonderful nothing nothing to regret yeah amazing thanks for sharing the story thank you all right andru we are gone we've gone past time but i have no pressing no pressing engagements so we can go as long as you guys want to go okay why don't why don't we say okay you wanna say we go to about 5 30. does that work for you manish yeah that sounds good i guess 5 30 eastern so probably sorry 2 30 your time so it's not 5 30 your time um um [Laughter] but another really interesting i'm sure it'd be great to be a fly in the wall particularly for uh to hear charlie unfiltered which uh i guess most people think is unfiltered even in the public audience um uh so i guess next we'll uh we'll go to uh shiraz which i think you may have heard from him already in in one of the pitches yeah hi hi hi manish um that was a very fun conversation so i'm not sure i should be asking this theoretical question now but my question is is is more around margin of safety and that's a term that's widely used across the investor community right and and different investors kind of have a very different thought process around it like for some it's more about being able to buy at this at a good discount to their belief of intrinsic value for some it's about buying a high quality business even if that's a fair fair price because then the safety net is around the quality and the quality of the management team and even on the valuation side some want to apply conservatism across all parameters be it valuation be projections be the market opportunity whereas some want to get the business and the market more accurately and want to just use this level on the valuation side so just wanted to get your perspective in your experience and during your evolution as an investor which which which of these levers do you kind of spend more time on or prioritize and which ones are which leavers you don't care much about and try not getting caught up in that you know analysis paralysis cycle yeah so i think that if you if you looked at ben graham and you know all of what he was talking about he he relied on hard asset downside protection right and and part of the reason he relied on hard asset downside protection is because he came out of all the turmoil of the great depression and all that you know the 1930s with the stock prices and doing what they were doing uh and he saw all the decimation of wealth that took place at that time right and so in many ways you could say that ben was scarred from that experience and so the what came out security analysis that came out from that experience was very much uh you know we are going to invest in a manner where no matter what happens we cannot lose money okay the problem with that approach is it also crimps your upside so if you if you buy some crappy business that is trading at one third of liquidation value probably it doesn't have much upside either you know that's the nature of the beast right and so warren actually evolved from there and the big evolution for them came when they saw what happened with c's candy right and so cease candy experience because he paid he paid more than 25 million dollars for book value of less than 5 million right he was paying several times book value which to him was a big step in a different direction but the seized investment led them to make the coca-cola investment and when they made the coca-cola investment again it was the same thing the downside protection was not hard assets the downside protection was the brand and all the embedded memories we all have of coke in deep in our psyche so uh even when he made the investment in apple the downside was not in the hard assets you know it was in the in the brand value and what you know link customers have to that company so i think when and and the other thing is you know something munger pointed out is that ben graham always focused on all these you know net-nets and downside protection he made all his money on geico and geico he made money on geico not because he bought it cheap he made money because it was a great business and so when we look at margin of safety i think we have to be a little more flexible because typically you're not going to get all of the above you're not going to get heavy downside protection in terms of hard assets where even in worst case times you come out ahead and at the same time have 100 bag of potential so the two generally will not go hand in hand it may happen once in a while but it will typically not happen all the time and so i think we we need to look at downside protection we need to be uh comfortable that the downside may not be protected purely with hot assets and they we may even go to the point of saying that if things don't work out we may have a problem but the odds of that are really low you know so when you look at businesses like you know you look at gopard or any of these other kinds of businesses you can't really get to downside protected with hard assets but a combination of the culture the values what the reputation means in customers minds the links with the insurance companies and the links with their uh all the other ecosystem that's what's giving you the protection and uh so so you need to get comfortable with that got it no that's helpful thanks thanks for sharing that sure thank you um sean yeah uh could you maybe elaborate on your thought process when you're thinking that it was okay to you know break your phone okay uh just because of the you know the tax penalty that you have to pay as well as you know the credit card obviously apr is really high so were you already thinking that you're gonna be able to generate superior returns above that 25 apr rate or and like second question is like you know the question kind of popped up as soon as you were talking about the brands but like uh like twinkie brand was obviously strong brand but that brand got you know that company went bankrupt um so just would love to know what was uh made that more of an exception and like what characteristics that enabled that well so first of all about the 401k and the credit card so at the time i was 24 years old i was single and as far as i knew i had no kids okay so basically the thing is that there was um i i knew i had one clear shot okay where i could completely fail and nobody really would get affected and the my biggest asset was my future earning potential which was not being i was not mortgaging my future earning potential so i knew that i could always get another job and i had a long runway that i could work for a company or whatever else and get paid well so what i was putting at risk was really not the 100 000 i borrowed because the 70 000 could get written off with the bankruptcy and so on it was really the 30 000 right and so the 30 000 my take was if it goes away it's not the end of the world because i i can restart and uh you know get back those go savings and so on so i didn't really but what i could see on the other side was that i would have at least felt that i gave it a solid shot right if i just stayed in corporate america and just didn't do that then i would always be wondering and as i got older or if i got married in that kids and all that the equation changes you know everything changes then because then the risk factors become higher you know you just i mean uh i used to at that time have a subway sound sandwich for lunch and a subway sandwich for dinner and i was my lunch and dinner together was seven dollars okay so i had no expenses and you know so things were pretty uh and i was happy you know i was i was very happy having a subway sandwich for lunch and you know because i was so excited about the work that i was doing and the things i was trying to build and all of that so i realized the interest rate was high and and i realized the 401k i'm going to pay penalty and all that but i just said you got to do what you go what you can do with what resources you have and i didn't see much risk in just blowing those up so that's why i went for it yeah and i think i think it's you you talk about this in the book but i think you know people tend to compute risk and uncertainty a lot and it's a very common thing people confuse in investing and i think it's such an important distinction but uh if it's one that uh you know a lot of people could have uh intermixed the other things you know your question on brands 98 or 99 of businesses are not going to get to the promised land so capitalism is very brutal if we just went through the list of companies that you guys gave me and we just 10 years from now looked at that list one of the things that will be there in that list would be a high mortality rate not just that they didn't get to 5x that they're not even where they are today they've gone backwards and of course i don't know which ones you know we wish we knew which ones so i think that capitalism is very brutal just because you have a great brand doesn't mean you're going to get there a lot of great brands perish brands brands need a lot of care and attention and nurturing to get to where they are or where they should be and if they go through neglect even for a short period of time it can have a very detrimental impact so business businesses are very fragile creations and that's why what we want to try and do we want to look for the exceptional business that is not so fragile and then then once you find the not so fragile business then you also want to find them at a cheaper price and all these other pieces so i think when you put it all together this is why investing is not so easy no i was asking the first question because i also don't have any much money and i really want to invest so i was really thinking about breaking my 401k as well as you know getting that credit card well well i would say that your the columbia alum lilu should be your role model so lilu came from china penniless he did three degrees at colombia at the same time and he was on student loans and the float of the student loans which is from the time they gave him the loan to the time he had to pay the money he used that float period to invest the money and when lilu graduated he had over a million dollars okay and in some cases i think he bought some russian assets as like tenth of one percent of i mean p of 0.1 of p or 0.5 or something you know so he he made some crazy investments and he got there and in my opinion that sounds a lot more risky than what i did you know but uh maybe in lilu's mind it wasn't so risky because he may have understood those bets a lot better than i do so i think that your situation of not having much money is a very common situation for a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of people so you really need to substitute money for what's between your years and especially in this economy there are lots and lots of entrepreneurial opportunities where money is not required that game stopped so so so many shows i'll tell one more fun fact about the uh the case competition is there's a cash prize uh that's donated by uh by pershing square above 150 000 but for the top two winners and generally it's encouraged to uh you know put some of that money into a charitable foundation so uh and part of it just to get people to start thinking about that in early age and i know you uh so maybe it's a two-for-one special but i know uh you know you've uh started the dakshana foundation so maybe we can aid nudge people to you know consider that and we'd love to just maybe spend a couple minutes on you know what prompted you to start that instead of your you know i think it's very personal thing but your approach or your framework for how you know of philanthropy yeah well i mean i think that if i think it was a buffett who said that even if you are a slightly above average investor if you spend less than you earn over a lifetime you cannot help but get extremely wealthy it's just natural you know it's the runway and compounding and all of those things so basically we are in a very blessed situation and i think almost everyone in this room is going to end up with more wealth and assets that they can use which is wonderful and so in my case once i could see that we were getting there we actually even gone past that point there were a couple of things that struck out at me was one is that there are really only two things you can do once you have more wealth than you can use first of all the ability to use wealth beyond a certain number which would actually increase happiness is very hard to do so uh there's very few things that you could buy which cost a lot of money which would actually increase happiness i mean like i'll just give you my example i think that if i owned a second home it would reduce happiness you know i mean it just would add i mean some remote real estate somewhere and you know some pipes burst or some you know crazy maintenance issues whatever i don't need to deal with that right so most things that you would think of spending money on is not going to help you and the best things in life actually are free so it doesn't translate so bottom line is that i could see in 2005 2006 that we were on a trajectory where already there were substantial wealth uh it was going to keep growing and there was no way to use it really and so there are only two choices when you have more than you need you can either give it to your gene pool or you can recycle back to society those are the only two choices you have and giving it to your gene pool actually is a disservice to them because the fun is the journey the fun is having limited resources and carving your own path and figuring it all out you know like uh i think uh buffett says that if you're jesse woman's son you're not really going to be helped by starting 100-yard dashes at the 40-yard line you know you're not going to become the greatest printer doing that it's okay if you get to start hundred year dashes at the three yard line or the five yard line but not at the 40 yard line so you know uh like he says give your kids enough money for them to do enough for them to do whatever they want but not enough for them to do nothing right so once once it was very clear to me that a large inheritance was kind of stupid uh then then you're only down to recycling to society and you know i'm a competitive guy i'm a numbers guy so i like to win and i was really disappointed in the way charities functioned i always looked at charities and i saw that they would hold a fundraiser or whatever and 60 of the money went to raise the funds you know and whatever so when i'd look at and then the other thing i'd see is they'd have 10 initiatives and there was no measurement which initiative did well so just like in investing i felt like i could do it better so i said you know what uh once i got to 50 million i said we'll give away two percent of wealth every year we can give us about a million and i said i want to do it in a manner where which is like investing where we look at high returns on invested capital in this case it's high social returns on invest capital and so one of the key decisions dakshina made so most charitable initiatives which are very good initiatives to put money into do not lend themselves to easy measurement most charitable initiatives do not lend themselves to easy measurement i mean if if you were you know donating clean needles to heroin addicts for example some inner city somewhere it becomes difficult to measure it's probably doing good probably doing a lot of good but when you start looking at you know what would happen if you change it this way or that way whatever it's these things become just hard to measure so what i did is i inverted the problem in honor of monger invert always invert so i said that i'm only going to look at initiatives where measurement is easy so i just looked at all the different charitable initiatives and i just threw away everything which would make measurement hard and i went for the ones that were easy and so then we ended up with this model where we you know trained kids for the iits in med school because for them to get to those institutions there's an independent third party that tests so we don't have control over that test or the results but we can look at that outcome and know how effective we were and so dakshina is very highly effective because every year when our kids take these tests and they go to iit and all that we get to see what we did right and wrong and if our numbers drop we then go back and fix it we're continuously every year we're continuously improving and changing and tweaking how we do things and that's only possible because we have a feedback loop giving us data in in capitalism there's a natural feedback which is your profitability if your business doesn't make money you are gone but in charitable giving if i'm the rockefeller foundation and i have a billion dollars and i give away five percent a year i will never run out of money because probably the investment returns are more than five percent but even if they drop it'll be five percent of whatever that so you'll never run out of money so you could every year do useless things and there's no feedback loop and you would never really pay a penalty just so the penalties we say we pay in capitalism for being stupid just don't exist on the non-profit side so these were some of the thoughts that led to dakshina and actually worked out way better than i thought i ended up with a great team and they do all the work and i take all the bows and everyone's happy with that so it's great you know it's a very interesting approach and you don't commonly see uh you know the business approach applied to uh philanthropy so i think that that combination's uh you know really interesting and probably you get more impact for a dollar um so you know it'll be a good plug for uh for the winners to uh consider the dictionary foundation um and you know i'll show you what about it is it's a great cause um i know we should be getting close to 5 30 here so um maybe just two quick ones to wrap up one one just for fun i know you have a massive bookshelf behind you you have a very good reading list on your uh website is there any sort of two or three favorite uh books that you have for uh the classes you know even evening evening weekend well down to investor at vapor is number one but um this is my most recent book i'm reading and i really like this book a lot and i think that i am finding things that i can apply in my life with this book so you know there's the tv anchor on cnn sanjay gupta you know this is his brother uh who wrote the book sunil gupta and uh it's uh actually he's uh he's very self-deprecating and great writing style and actually has some many good things to say and so if you were a startup trying to raise money or if you were a hedge fund trying to raise money or if you were a company trying to get customers any of those things i think you can apply his stuff in so many different ways so uh i'm really enjoying this book and the other book that is coming out on april 20th which may be even better than this book is called richer wiser happier and it's by a guy named william green and there are two particular chapters that are my favorites in that book one is the chapter on nick and zach you know of the nomad partnership nick sleep and case the career so there's a chapter on nick and zach which is exceptional and the other chapter is on me and i'm not sure which chapter is better but you can decide but i think those are the two chapters you gotta you gotta read and and in that book i am the opening batch so it starts with me which is why i love the book so much but anyway i think backable is a great book but even if i was not in the book i would still recommend it because nick and zach are so good but it's william green is a very gifted writer and uh i don't know how many hundreds of hours i had to spend with him and how many nights on indian trains we we were together but we spent a lot of time together and he did that with all the people he interviewed and stuff and uh and he just did a great job so i think that book is uh going to become something of a classic because this is just the way he's he's done it it's he's got a chapter on howard marks he's got a chapter on a bunch of who's who in investing so it's uh it's really good so those are the two i would uh recommend and um just one other thing i would just say is that you know we were talking about the the business approach to philanthropy so when you do philanthropy it's a mix of heart and head you have to combine heart and head the problem with most charities is they are huge hearts and no head and that doesn't work you know these are these are great people wonderful people to hang out with but useless at running charities okay and you also can't be the other end you can't be all head and no heart so it's really a combination you have to have a big heart but you definitely need horsepower uh you know coupled with that with that heart so so i hope you enjoy that but i really enjoyed this session and thanks for letting me ask you some questions and uh send me all 25 of the pics that'd be great we we we we will menish and look on behalf of the class uh you know really appreciate you making the time uh you know thanks for your wisdom on both investing and on life uh you know i know this is very interesting for everyone here uh so you know uh you know i know you've got a very good schedule so really really appreciate the you know the time and and giving us an extra 30 minutes but this is a lot of fun all right thank you see you bye [Music] you

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Rating: 4.921773 out of 5

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Id: NEB2RfRgBSQ

Length: 85min 20sec (5120 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021