Value School (Madrid, Spain); Q&A with Mohnish Pabrai on July 9, 2021

[Music] [Music] [Music] i hope you get to enjoy this as much as uh i'm sure we will and it is really our pleasure and an honor to to have you here and always so enjoyable to listen to your wisdom it's my pleasure alberto thank you so one thing that just comes to my mind uh there's many things we can talk to about but you know just you know when when so many people in this industry call it asset management investors portfolio managers whatever very few have the background and the ability to have been running a business and in your case not only you will run a business you founded a business you were an entrepreneur at heart you went through how hard it is to scale to deal with uh suppliers with customers to i don't know meet payroll to do things that on the other side investors we don't we don't really get to understand unless it's in your skin so so i wonder as you as you did that and eventually saw your business before you became uh officially a professional investor if you could explain how that really helped you or if that gives you an edge it would be and it's i think it would be an interesting angle for people to hear that yeah sure you know buffett has two quotes you know he said i'm a better investor because i'm a businessman a better i'm a better businessman because i'm an investor there's a interplay between the two and i think i think the second quote which i like better is he says how can you explain to a fish what it is like to walk on land and he says a thousand years of talking to a fish about walking on land does not have the same impact as one day actually walking on that and so basically the thing is that i actually get perplexed when i look at professional investors who have never run a business because uh i think at a deep level they're they're kind of missing some very fundamental so you really cannot look at businesses through spreadsheets and in fact entrepreneurs who are running businesses typically don't use spreadsheets you know they usually have three or four variables that are going to drive most of the outcome in their head and they focus on those three or four variables and as an investor you need to get to those same variables to understand what the outcome might be and it's hard to get to those variables if you have not been in the driver's seat yourself so i think it's a huge advantage to have had you know run a business met payroll and scaled and had all the hr issues and you know marketing branding issues and uh and so on so i think those are uh those are important uh to understand and it's also important so you can try to project what is the likely trajectory of the business it's very dangerous to project the likely trajectory through excel nothing goes in a straight line and so actually understanding the messiness of business is important yeah that's interesting you know the other day a few weeks ago when i was reading the book from your friend william green which i have it here for for people it's a fascinating book i i never recommend i haven't read so so richer wiser happier which obviously you are chapter chapter one of these amazing great investors and it came to my mind that i was picturing the two of you guys driving in in india and all the chaotic uh traffic and things that for you are natural because you grew up there until you went to college and for him he was he was panicking right he wasn't used to that chaos and that ecosystem that seems so foreign to many of us who visit not just india to asia we see that it is so hard to live your day with so much competition just the fact of getting food on the table which we we find very basic there's so much competition so i wonder if growing up in that ecosystem that for some of us might consider chaotic allow you to see order where other people don't when you're looking for stocks and you kind of in the low pe environment you kind of i kind of picture this as a line line but there's a lot of traps but you have over the years being able to pick these gems and this so i wonder if growing up in this environment to help you or you think this is genetic that your skills no i think that's a that's a good question and uh it was a lot of fun hanging out with william in india for we were together for i think five or six days and uh you know most people who go to india you know tend to stick to the major cities and usually their travel is with airplanes and such we were actually going to visit different areas of uh the foundation i work on and so we went very deep into rural india and uh so it was not just india that he was experiencing and he was experiencing in india that uh usually most people would not and uh so he had you know stick a shock to the power of sticker shock if you will you know so he was uh but william's been around the block i think he had a great time and uh and it worked out well but i think that one of the things that you see when you're growing up so you know i had uh wonderful parents and i had a lot of structure and stability in the household went to good schools and so within the chaos you also see a lot of organization and one of the things you see which you appreciate which i appreciate about many other countries because of my experience in india is you cannot paint a country with a wide brush in one color so uh it's really a rainbow you know it comes in many colors so for example within india you know when i was growing up coca-cola was within the fabric of course later they were thrown out because they wanted to nationalize them but when you looked at some of these companies like coca-cola and other large businesses in india you saw very well organized operations lots of structure great people etc so when i look at different emerging markets or you know developing markets around the world for me it's very clear that there are there are lots of great uh teams and entrepreneurs and businesses inside that chaos and one has to kind of dive in and start separating them out and figure it out and so i think the the childhood experience i had in india gives me a lot of comfort so like for example we have some investments now in turkey and whenever i bring up turkey to any of my friends or anyone else or they just say oh you know the currency or the leadership or and it's too wide a brush you know yeah the currency has issues leadership has issues there's inflation but when you you know feel all the layers through that you can find great businesses and great teams i can transcend all that so that's what the direct result of the experience i had alberto if i may i would like to read uh one question from the audience this is jose jose remarks that mr probably recently bought alibaba which uh makes him uh jose uh think that that's because it's a at a good price the question is mr probably are you are you not afraid of china yeah i mean like so a good example of what we just spoke about is that uh i think it would be too wide a brush to take a complex country like china and you know put it into three sentences if you will so i i mean i think there are great businesses and great management teams all over the world and uh there are many of them in china and uh you know i think like charlie munger would say that the chinese are natural entrepreneurs they're actually natural capitalists who were trapped in a socialist system and so when those shackles were lifted you know you actually unleashed something quite dramatic and uh you know i would say capitalism and entrepreneurship is still very embryonic in china but it is uh it is coming about really quickly so i think i would be i mean given my circle of competence i think most of china would be off limits for me just because i just probably couldn't understand it well enough small sliver of it i think i can understand and especially if you look at some businesses like let's say if you look at a business like tencent or if you look at a business like alibaba these two companies specifically very early in their journey had western investors or non-chinese investors and both these companies right from the beginning i think of them more as being happened to be based in china and because it's such a large market happen to have most of their operations in china but they're really in many ways multinational in their views and how they look at things they've had a lot of i would say non-chinese infusion into their dna and thinking very early and many of those elements are a bit positive for them so yeah i mean i would think that i think china is a is a would be a difficult country for most investors because you know you need to understand the nuances a little bit of it i think can be understood yes i will now read another question this time coming from manuel in your 2020 letter you mentioned the big evolution you have had can you share the nutshell of it have you perhaps abandoned deep value investing no i'm i think it's uh like kind of like a it's more like a swiss army knife and adding i would say not one knife but maybe four or five new knives to it so uh so i think that you know a lot of my experience and i would say biases relating to great businesses and compounders uh was colored by the experience i had in the late 90s and early 2000s so when i first started investing in you know the mid 90s i had had i'd run a i.t business which had grown very quickly and i had seen the power of having you know capital light high roe tech businesses and what they could do in terms of scale and growth and i in that period i was mostly invested in in tech businesses around from 95 to close to 99 or 2000 but then when the when pablo iphone started in mid 99 i could probably see the the nasdaq bubble popping not much before anyone else probably maybe three to five months before it so there was uh there was a lot of euphoria and i was very concerned that this thing doesn't look uh sustainable and so i had taken a different path when paprika started and so the first year you know from mid mid 99 to mid 2000 we were up like 70 more than 70 while the nasdaq had already crashed and so on and part of that was because i kind of sidestepped the euphoria and i remember in kind of early 2000 i was visiting microsoft headquarters in seattle and redmond washington and actually one of my early investors was a former microsoft employee very early and he had mentioned to me hey listen uh if you're ever in seattle i could introduce you to a bunch of current and former early microsoft employees who are ex-employees who may have an interest in your fund and at that time you know the fund was very embryonic i was just getting going i said i'm going to be there on thursday you know so i spent a day visiting microsoft in early 2000 at that time it was amongst the most valuable companies in the world uh there were three companies in the world in early 2000 which had a market cap of over 600 billion microsoft ge and cisco all three of these businesses were valued at over 600 billion there were three most valuable businesses on the planet and i told these microsoft employees i met that it looked like a bad investment to me i said it's a great business but a bad investment and because i think at that time their cash flows were well under 10 billion so it was trading at you know 60 70 times earnings it was pretty richly priced and uh they said to me oh you really don't understand our business you know this thing goes up like clockwork and so i actually told them i said look you earn your livelihood for microsoft all your portfolio maybe 80 90 of it other than your is microsoft stock or options and uh probably not a good idea to have all of that so i said give me a little bit of it and they probably thought of me as a cheesy salesman you know so microsoft did continue to do well after 2000 but from 2000 till about 2012 or 2013 uh the stock was flat uh zero returns for 13 14 years even though revenues had increased dramatically profits had increased dramatically because it was just so heavily overvalued and not only was it flat it was a very roller coaster ride it would be it had been very hard to put onto the stock it lost 60 70 percent of its value in the next two or three years then it came back then again in 2009 8 and 9 again lost a lot of value so it was a very tumultuous ride in those 13 14 years and so while i had a strong belief in high growth and compounders when i started in the mid 90s i went to graham in the late 99 early 2000 time frame because i knew that i would have downside protection so i switched from basically a growth tech investor into a gram investor and that actually turned out to be really wonderful because all the indices did terribly for the next 10 15 years because they were just so elevated the nasdaq was very extreme it dropped almost 80 percent from the peak from 2000 to 2002 or 2003 but what i forgot to do is i should have switched back i should have switched back in maybe 2013 2014 because the best way to invest is to own a stake in a business which generates high returns on capital and has a long growth one way ahead uh run by great management if you can find that combination sometimes even if you pay up for that combination it can work out quite well and microsoft actually is an interesting example of that so if you had you know stayed with microsoft from 2000 and somehow you were able to stomach the ride you know it's not a it's not a great outcome but you have about more than three times starting capital even from an elevated level i mean it's not a great return 3x in 21 years is uh not that interesting but at least you didn't have a loss of capital yeah because they they had tailwinds so when i read about you know william green had sent me uh the books galley copy about a year ago and when i read chapter six which was on nick sleep it reminded me that i need to go back so nick has been a good friend of mine for close to two decades wonderful guy and uh you know he's somewhat uh reticent to be out in public but you should try and nudge him and see if he'll do something with you guys and uh so nick himself had been on the same journey as i had where he started out as a deep value investor he was buying things like zimbabwe cement you know where it was trading at less than one times earnings and there was issues with you know the state had confiscated a lot of your land and materials and you had uh you know currency control there were a lot of ugly things about that but you know he went in and he uh he evolved from there to understanding amazon understanding uh nuances of uh you know what he calls the scaled economy shared and it's it worked out very well for him so i realized that i had overdosed too much on graham for a long time and of course the the way to live life is to overdose a monger and less on graham so i i used to be buffett and monger in the mid 90s then i was graham for probably close to 20 years and now i'm getting back to next sleep and buffett and so on among her and i actually think it's a mix of the mix of both that works well so uh sometimes you can find incredible deep value investments that will do better than great compounders and most of the time great compounders will do the best so it's a it's good to keep some flexibility now i'm just gonna add to that that you know when when you i was just picturing you as if you were a musician and you know you're going to play heavy metal you have certain guitar if you're going to switch to blues you have to change the guitars so i was wondering in your mind when you're dealing with the universe of color the low pe or the cigar bot or whatever people call it or when you go into compounders which you've done both as you were saying do you really switch your hat do you change the way you think or how do you do that no actually it's a very similar model i mean i think it uses the same parts of your brain at the end of the day what i'm focused on is i put a dollar out today and what am i getting in five or ten years right and in the gram way usually you're trying to you know maybe you're buying a two dollar bill for a dollar you know you're getting 50 60 off then it's just a matter of how long that convergence takes and that drives your result in the manga method you're putting out a dollar but the dollars increasing in value over time and again it's the rate of increase and how long that takes so so they're they're they're not that different and you know sometimes sometimes the interesting thing is that the two worlds meet and uh it's really orgasmic when the two worlds meet so for example like you know last year i invested in not last year in 2019 i invested in this company in turkey and uh when i invested in the business the market cap was like 20 million and liquidation value was like maybe 500 600 million somewhere around there and so it was a total no-brainer as long as you know the main thing i was just checking is is all this real you know the main focus is that you know what part of this is real and what part is is a fraud and i couldn't find any fraud so we went in and turkey has mostly short-term investors they have very high trading volumes because the market participants use think of it as a casino so this particular company for example i think every 15 17 days the entire free float was turning over you know people are basically in turkey will invest for a few hours they want to buy something for ten dollars at 10 a.m and sell it for 12 at 3 p.m and be done that's the model and uh good luck with that so we ended up owning a third of the company for about seven million dollars and i knew that the it wasn't a cigar but they actually had some great assets and not only did they have great assets they had two really good capital allocators on top of that so just in the last two years the 500 million have moved to probably 800 or 900 million uh the liquidation value has moved and uh the market has gone from like 20 million to like north of 100 okay so there's been some movement in the market cap in spite of the currency these all dollar numbers the currency didn't really matter and uh but the important thing here is that we were buying something at uh you know five percent or four percent of liquidation value and that liquidation value is going up okay so you know i would say this is next sleep on steroids you know and uh the only negative is that we could only put seven million in because it was so so small but what i can take from the next sleep framework which is which would not be part of the gram uh book is just set it and forget it so as long as the capital allocators are in place and uh you know they're doing things even if the discount goes away just stick with it so sometimes the two worlds collide and like i said when the two worlds collide that's really you only need that to happen a couple of times in your lifetime you'll do fine the same thing happened in i think in 2015 we bought a company in india called rain industries and that was trading at what i would call a future pe of one so the company had a market cap of 200 million dollars and they had revenue of close to two billion and i thought there was they would come a year in the next three four years where they'd make 200 million in one year and i said you know i just want to see what the stock price is then you know whether it can still be at 200 million if they make that much in one year and so rain actually by 2018 had gone to more than a 2 billion market cap from 200 million it went up almost 10x because that earnings came in but by then i fell in love with the business and the management team they were really good so even though it was really cheap it wasn't really a cigar box so it wasn't a great business but it was a good business with a great capital allocator and uh so um that that can also work and so i think that you know it's all of the above you know you can do well with alibaba where you're definitely not buying below liquidation value and all those sorts of things and you can do well with the peo ones so i think it's good to keep a flexible mindset i will now read one another question from the audience this is uh munesh munesh milwani mr prabrai it's really a pleasure having you what do you think about current valuations really worth waiting for the next downturn or do you still identify some 10 20 time baggers in this context thanks well i think that 10 baggers are few and far between it's difficult to find those in any market you know and uh i would say that it's uh you know i think it's it's a treasure hunt to do that so i'm not a market timer and i think that there are undervalued businesses at all times it's just that the you know the geographies and the industry and different things kind of change so there's a book that i really like which came out many years ago called trend watching it was written by ron insana he was he used to be an anchor at cnbc and usually news anchors are not good writers but ron and silent did a good job so that book chronicles a wide number of bubbles it's just a you know story of all these different bubbles around the world at different times and what you come out after reading that book is that bubbles have exist all the time in different markets different asset classes different geographies different industries you know it's just part of the human experience humans vacillate between fear and greed and so you will get some areas of the markets which are ridiculously overvalued at times and you at the same time you can also get markets which are deeply undervalued all of the above so when i look at markets today usually it's difficult to tell when you're in a bubble it's it becomes a lot easier to tell in hindsight but some things in my mind are clearly bubbles right so if i look at you know the market caps of gamestop or amc or bitcoin you know i would put these in bubble territory right of course when you say that about bitcoin you're committing blasphemy but such is life you know any eggs thrown cannot get to me through the video so it's okay so so i think that we always have uh some areas where you can clearly tell there's a bubble and it doesn't matter what i'm saying is that whether i'm right or wrong on bitcoin is not relevant if i am not long or short it's irrelevant whether i'm right or wrong what i what really matters is am i right on the things that we actually invested so it is not clear to me that we are in bubble territory in large swaths of the market i think it's clear to me that there is pockets of the market that are bubble territory but it is also clear that we are not in value territory with a large u.s tech or large chinese tech and so on and those are really exceptional businesses but you also are paying up to own those businesses so they may work out well they may not it's kind of hard to tell but i don't think those are in public territory they just may not be deeply discounted so i think the approach is a treasure hunt there are like 50 000 businesses around the world and they all have different things going on with them every day and a company can hit a air pocket or a headwind which is very temporary and the market takes it out back and shoots it and you should pay attention to that very good another question from one of our viewers mr buffett has mentioned earlier that if he had smaller amounts like less than 1 million he could get 50 returns per annum do you think the same and if you do how would you go about doing it yeah so i think warren is very different from us in the sense that very few people would have the intensity of pursuit of value that he would have so for example when he was running very small amounts of capital he used to go through the moody's manual and the moody's manuals are not published anymore but i went on ebay and i bought a couple of moody's manuals just from the 50s you know people were selling them and just you know for nostalgia you know someday they might be worth something and if you go through these moody's manuals they're very fine print they would have maybe four or five companies on a page and there are thousands of pages okay so it had thousands of businesses and he was doing a quantitative screen manually you know looking at one business at a time and looking at things that didn't make sense like sometimes he'd find a business that makes 25 million a year trading for 15 million dollars for example okay then he'd go and you know look into what was going on with that company so he was in deep dive board uh cigar butts were perfectly fine for him and he did exceptionally well so i think that the 50 a year is definitely possible with small group small amounts of capital following a gram approach but one needs to be very dogged about it so warren went through those um moody's manuals not once he went to them at least a couple of times and one time at a berkshire meeting i think maybe 20 years ago someone asked him mr buffett you know how can i look at all these stocks you know there are thousands of stocks tens of thousands of stock and his answer was start with the a's and most people and actually it was actually a very correct answer the thing is that warren would not have a problem sitting down and going through 20 000 stocks one at a time and he would be happy sitting there from seven a.m till midnight every day spending you know two three minutes five minutes ten minutes on a stock and just keep going and he could do that for months so if you have a temperament like that where you can just put all your attention into something like that then it's going to happen and you know there's a saying which is which was written maybe 3000 years ago maybe 25 100 years ago in the upanishads which are these more kind of philosophy books in india than spiritual and it says that as is your wish so is your will as is your will so is your deed and as is your deed so is your destiny and then the punch line is your deepest desire is your destiny so if you wanted to make 50 a year and you had a million dollars and it was your deepest desire and you were willing to put in the work it would happen you just have to clone what warren did which is extreme patience with extreme ability to work hard and uh with extreme action when you find no-brainers i think in his 50 he would probably not have more than three stocks and you know warren used to always say even 15 20 years ago that 99 of his net worth was in berkshire hathaway and he doesn't say that now because the one percent that he had outside berkshire has actually grown significantly more than the compounding inside berkshire and the reason for that is that that one percent many times he had one stock okay so he put the entire one percent in his highest conviction idea and if you were going to do the 50 you probably would not have more than three stocks i mean you know i couldn't do it but if we were running let's say 20 or 30 million dollars in capital and i had told my investors we would concentrate very heavily i tried to get as large a position as i could in that turkish company out of that and then it would be meaningful right it might be a third of the capital one-fourth of the capital and four percent of nav with one-fourth of your capital put to work good things might happen to you yes absolutely there is one more question coming in from our viewers um knowing the angeli family and its holding company xor do you think xor has a long runway despite being concentrated in the auto sector john elkan is a good friend of mine wonderful guy and i think he's very thoughtful and i think he's a very good capital allocator and a good leader and he was thrust into that position with a lot of family tragedy unfortunately very early and and i think john is a learning machine so i believe i mean i haven't had these conversations with john but i believe that in the long run the agnellis will hold on to ferrari forever i wish i had done that too it's a mistake i made but i don't believe that they will retain their stake in the rest of the auto sector for decades on end i think that in in some period of time when the things are more favorable i think they may they may look at doing something i mean i think the thing is for them it is so apparent right you have fear of chrysler which is now stellantis and then you have ferrari and you just look at the economics of the two businesses and it's just night and day and it's the same family that owns both the businesses and you know many times ferrari has a higher value making 10 thousand cars a year then uh sterland is making you know more than it's almost eight nine billion cars a year it's uh ferrari's uh earnings maybe more than half or two thirds of the company making you know millions of cars with just 10 000 cars so you just tell you the favorable economics of one business versus the other so i think over time xor will end up with more and more of its capital outside of the mass market auto market good there's another question from one of our viewers any recommendation to avoid suffering during a downturn market your friend william green explains in his book that great investors are able to behave without fear in those periods being one of the most relevant competitive advantages in order to reach superior returns yeah i mean i think that you know charlie munger says that you know three times in the last few decades berkshire lost more than half its value and uh it didn't bother them it's you know irrelevant so i think that you know there was a saying i grew up with is if if wealth is lost nothing is lost if health is lost something is lost and if character is lost everything is lost so at the end of the day you know i think the way one should look at the portfolio is understand what it's worth not understand what the markets every second are pricing it at uh because the two can diverge quite a bit and if you don't have leverage in your life you don't have margin loans and you know some asset drops 50 or 70 in price and you don't need to sell those assets to you know keep the lights on it's irrelevant for the most part because it is in the nature of auction driven markets that you will have very wide variance between price and value and we see that all the time so for example if i took all the stocks the new york stock exchange you know put them on a dart board you know small tickers and i just throw darts any stock i look at you know the price range in a year would be 50 to 100 or 70 to 130 it's a wide range if i look at the value of my home on zillow for example every day for a year it may not move more than ten percent five percent you know the movement is very very narrow because one is an auction driven market and the other is the market where intelligent buyers are interacting with intelligent sellers so auction driven markets will always overshoot and undershoot and it is that overshooting and undershooting that helps us make money so i love auction driven markets because it gives us those opportunities but you also have to be willing to take the pain where you're holding something and it's dropped a lot in price as long as the underlying asset is still valuable and worth a lot more you don't have any leverage or anything else you can just write it out no problem yes definitely another question from danielle as you mentioned by purchasing process prx you get a stake in 10 cent at a discount why do you think the market has not recognized this and do you see it as a long-term compounder well i mean i think we i mean i would say holding company discounts in the equity markets is a very common occurrence it happens all the time and i think that i was listening to uh i was reading a transcript of one of the naspers calls where cousbecker was talking he said look if i own a picasso worth 10 million and i own a matisse which is also worth 10 million and i tell you that you can buy both for me you may be a picasso fan but you not may not be a matisse fan or you may be a matisse fan but not a picasso fan so if both are shoved down your throat you'll say okay 15 million right you'd be unwilling to pay 20 million so if you look at if you look at it from that point of view you know process if you just at a high level look at it they've got i don't know let's say 200 billion of 10 cent stock in process and they were like 40 billion or something in other investments right so 240 billion and i think the market value may under 150 billion well part of it is your you know it's kind of the picasso and matisse given to you together how do you make sense of this right and um but yeah i mean i think that some of the parts discounts is very common in equity markets and sometimes the market gives you things on a platter and that can be great very good david asks if you find similarities in the investment strategy of nick sleep and terry smith they seem pretty similar finding the best businesses and holding until they develop their maximum strength yeah so actually terry smith i am still studying terry smith i don't have a good view on him yet i started reading his book so i cannot make too many intelligent remarks about that the guy seems to be seems to know what he's doing but maybe if you ask me that next time we talk i might have a better answer good very good another question from one of our viewers who are some of the investors that manish follows who work with small sums i have a lot of friends who are relatively new in the investment management business some of them have you know quit their jobs and gone into it and so on so forth so i would say i have i have quite a few friends who would be managing let's say less than 20 million dollars for example many of them are very thoughtful and i think they will grow and scale over time but uh we'll leave them nameless for now very good alberto would you like to ask one question yourself i mean one thing that comes to my mind is that and i think has to do with how you live your life and when you go through the book of willing green but so many others as you study the lives of great investors as you know they build an edge based on their psychology and the impairment on basic basically sometimes be unemotional when people are emotional all these behavior that provides an edge versus just analytical behavior and so i wonder what do you think about balancing your life where sometimes you're too unemotional in the market and you are like that with your wife you end up losing her or with your kids and you end up losing them because they grow up and then by the time you try to come back it's just too late right and so many of the people as you know presented in the book have already changed wives one or two times or not gonna say names but they might have had a bad relationship with their kids or they lost them or whatever so i wonder how you think about that it's a very balanced difficult balance to go through yeah i mean i think that i think william makes a good point that basically some of the traits that might make you really good as an investor may make it difficult to develop deep nurturing relationships but i don't think it's an either or i think it's just i think that's uh those personalities are a little bit complicated and uh if you look at someone like warren buffett so buffett says that and his daughter says that you know daughter says that her dad was basically a math nerd and really didn't connect well with society you know he was very introverted and in his own world and warren would say that susie is his first wife helped him a lot to become a well-rounded person and so she worked on and uh so he immediately acknowledges that he was a huge debt for uh helping him become a more fuller person but i think that warren is extremely singular in his interests and pursuits and i think his younger son peter peter said that you know my dad wasn't the kind of person who would join me in the backyard and throw baseballs at me for example but he said that he was very consistent he'd be at home for dinner every day for example so i don't think warren had a lot of an intense you know what we would consider a natural uh fathering relationship with his kids i'm just guessing that i'm just reading between the lines of what these people are saying because just of the way he was but i think that like he had a partner who made up for that to a very large degree so you know she overcompensated for like for example i think when he was when he was working on his home when he first started investment fund he had a little office off the bedroom he pretty much would be there from like 7 a.m to 10 p.m okay and just come down to meals and then go back up again right because he was just sewing grass the moody's manny how could you give up the moody's manual you know the treasure hunt is all and susie compensated for a lot of that but in the end what what happened is that susie left right so in the 70s she left she moved to san francisco and they had a somewhat unusual they still remain married but they were separated and i think part of that was that the nurturing that his spouse may have wanted was not fully there right so i think for value investors it can work out fine with the families and all of that if even if they have those personalities if you have the right partner or the right fit of a partner which would be harder to find and and such but if you can find that then it can work but i think that sometimes these two post you know the demands of a great marriage or the traits that would lead to a great marriage and the traits that would lead to being a great investor can sometimes be an arts yeah i mean i just wonder since you personally know warren and charlie and i know you have dinner with charlie here in l.a quite often so maybe you know him better but with your interactions with them personally i wonder how has that affected your life personally well i mean i think yeah i think my friendship with charlie is a lot deeper part of it is because he's in the same town and such and uh yeah i mean i i think that uh it has it has really been uh instructive for me to observe charlie when he's with his friends and when he's with his family and when he's with his grandkids i've seen him in different settings and i think charlie is extremely well-rounded you know in the sense that he doesn't have the but he also doesn't have the singular interest you know for him the investing is just one interest you know he has an interest in designing student dormitories he designed his own catamaran boat and uh he has many other interests you know and uh so he's he's a lot broader he's not so concerned about okay what's been my you know lifetime annualized compounding rate and things like that i think warren would be much more focused on those things so yeah i mean i think it's been wonderful to observe it and uh a lot of things that i learned from charlie he never said them to me i just saw them you know i i love from observing him and uh and it's been uh yeah i have to pinch myself sometimes because you know how wonderful is that you know that some swanny kid from mumbai is you know periodically having uh baking bread with charlie you know it's out of this world experience i would think manish this this may well be the last question and i'm very happy it is because i was actually discussing with my wife your chapter in william green's book and i talked to her about the very same thing that this viewer is going to ask you about his name is david and he says i love the chapter of willem green's book about donis life could you give us some update about the dakshana foundation and development plans for the next years thanks for the philanthropy work okay yeah that's uh that's wonderful in fact one of the things that's going on right now in dakshina is we are evaluating a tweak or a change to our model and if it works we will even be willing to abandon the model we have because this model looks superior on paper it looks superior uh so what we're looking at is that you know i think when a lot of us go to college and we look back after 10 or 20 years there's a very small amount of things in terms of classes and things that really impacted us for the most part it's uh it's inefficient it's you know typically universities and colleges are like large aircraft carriers they're very bloated costs and such uh so we're looking into a kind of a joint venture with another entity where we would take kids out of high school and train them for two years on software engineering and entrepreneurship so we would identify skills up front which would tell us that these kids have kind of natural traits which would likely make them good entrepreneurs and you know we can look at their math and other skills in terms of their programming and other skills and if we can in two years give them those skills then you know some portion of them might go off and do their own own business whatever else and others would still get gainful employment at you know the various tech firms and so on so instead of a present model where we spend two years with the kids then they go to undergraduate degree for four years and then they enter the workforce this would actually cut about four years off that process so we want to see we want to experiment with this to see how this can work and if it can work and what the outcomes are and so we're going to experiment with that but yeah dakshina is doing great it's a combination of heart and head i think that's the problem that most philanthropies have is they are usually too much heart and too little head so we look at it in many ways like we do a business where we want to look at what is the input output of money going in and you know good to society coming out there's been a wonderful team it's worked out really well so far and we know we will fail at many things but we'll be happy to try that's wonderful work that you're doing through your foundation alberto we're coming near to the end of our session i don't know if you would like to deliver some closing remarks i thank you both alberto and monique for being with us tonight this has been so much fun manis uh this is amazing and thank you so much i hope everybody had a lot of fun there too bad that we kind of have people here and see people but hopefully you can come to spain and we can have some tapas and have the real people which i think is the best energy it is very high on my list actually i am really looking forward to spain is a high on my list country to visit i love the love the food and uh looking forward well you have friends here mr pabrai we would love to show you around show your value school and we will do the best we can so that you and your companions have a wonderful stay with us mr barai alberto great having you tonight with us thank you for all the things that you've done for valley school including this session alberto you know what i'm talking about and we wish you both the best thank you it was a pleasure

Channel: Mohnish Pabrai

Views: 23,644

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Id: dm3QTpBbXcM

Length: 53min 26sec (3206 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 24 2021