Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Morgan Housel – Walking and Thinking - [Invest Like the Best, EP.04]

Episode Date: October 4, 2016

In this week’s episode, Patrick and Morgan Housel explore the differences between private and public market investing, how to foster innovation and creativity, how businesses are structured and organized, and how Morgan finds interesting books and topics to write about.  Morgan is a prolific writer and researcher, who recently left the Motley Fool and is now a partner at the Collaborative Fund, a venture capital fund in New York City.  Enjoy!   For comprehensive show notes on this episode go to investorfieldguide.com/housel/ For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast.  Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub Follow Patrick on twitter at @patrick_oshag

Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investor field guide.com. Patrick O'Shaunicey is a principal and portfolio manager at O'Shaunacy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaunacy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Ashonasi asset management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. My guest today is Morgan Houssel, who just about all my listeners will already know. Morgan just left a longtime post at the Motley Fool to join the Collaborative Fund, a venture capital firm here in New York City. Morgan is a good friend. It will hopefully be a recurring guest on the show. In this episode, we discussed the differences between private and public markets investing,

how to foster innovation and creativity, how businesses are structured and organized, and how Morgan finds interesting books and information. For show notes, visit investorfieldguide.com forward slash Housel, H-O-U-S-E-L. And now, please enjoy my conversation with Morgan Housel. All right, well, thanks, Morgan, for being here with me today. I think this might be the first, hopefully, in a series of these conversations between you and I, touching on all sorts of stuff. I hope so.

So maybe what we can start with, given that, you. You've recently made a change in your career. I think you're going to be doing some similar things that people know you for, but in a new venue. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your decision to move from the Motley Fool to the Collaborative Fund. Yeah. First, I would say I really thought I would be a writer at the Motley Fool for my whole career. I worked there for nine years.

I started there when I was a junior in college. And to me, it was a dream job because what I did five days a week, seven days a week, was read stuff that I was interested in and then go and write about it. And that was it. That was effectively my job description from A to Z. And I loved it. Even after nine years, it was still every morning. It was like, I can't believe I get to do this.

This is fantastic. I had to ask myself, though, if I worked in the exact same job, same company for my whole career, would I at the end of my career look back and say, I regret not trying something new? And it took me like two years to answer that question. and I finally figured that the answer was yes. Even if I love this on a day-to-day, this is great. I love everything I'm doing. If I'm 70 years old, am I going to look back and be like,

man, I wish I had branched out a little bit. And I was like, yeah. So two years ago, I met a guy named Craig Shapiro, who runs the collaborative fund. I think he had read some stuff that I wrote, and he emailed me one day, and he said, hey, if you're ever in New York, let's grab breakfast. And his luck would have it, I was going to New York the next day.

So it was just kind of like a blind date. we met two years ago. And instantly, within 10 minutes, I remember thinking myself, like, this is the kind of guy I want to work for. I just felt like we see eye to eye on where the world's going and what matters in investing. And it was just pretty clear that I really like this guy's philosophy. And then you reached out to me about a year ago and said, hey, let's do something together. And it still took me like nine months before I could finally pull the trigger and said,

okay, let's do it. So I've worked there for two weeks now. That's great. Already writing a lot. Yeah, you know, my job isn't going to change that much, at least at first. You know, I'm going to get into doing a lot of different stuff, but right now I'm still writing and speaking and doing stuff like this. So was any of this, we'll get into some of these topics today, you've obviously been

a lot of time writing about all called public markets and investing and are now in the venture world or moving into the venture world. Was any of this motivated by your curiosity or interest in that shift? Is that deliberate? Well, I think I wanted to do. something new, but I didn't, you know, I'm not going to go out and become a doctor or a lawyer. I don't want to, you know, not that new. I got to stay within my field, but do something new. And frankly, if you think, you know, if I was, if I've been writing about dollar cost averaging

into index funds and now I'm getting into venture capital, that's about as removed as you can get within one's field. And that to me was, was pretty exciting. And just in the last two weeks that I've, I've been at the fund, I've learned so much. I feel like I'm a freshman in college, just learning something brand new. Even though it's within the field of finance, there's so much that not only that I didn't know, but things that I thought I knew that I'm realizing now were wrong. And I've enjoyed it so much. That's going to keep on going for years or decades. I hope that I'm still learning something new. So that's really exciting to take it from that approach. But still, it's also encouraging, too, that it's still within the field of finance that I've worked in for a decade. So the example that I give is

My dad was an ER doctor for 25 years. Burnt out of the ER, night shifts. It's crazy. After 25 years, he said, I'm done with the ER, but he didn't want to retire. So he became a general practice family doctor. So he was qualified to do that. Like, that's within the field of medicine, but it was totally new to him. He had to learn the field of family medicine from the ground up.

But he was still within his field. He was still a doctor then and he was a doctor now. And that's kind of, I feel like it's something similar. to what I'm doing. It's like, it's still within my field of competence, but it's brand new. Do you think that the, I guess, the diligence process and the investing process seeking inefficiency, I guess, right, something that you can get for less than it's worth in the venture world is really distinct from public markets investing, or do you think it follows a lot of the same rules and ideas? There are so many philosophies, I think, that carry over,

whether, like, no matter what kind of investing you're doing, whether you're an index investor, a stock picker, private equity, venture capital. So many of the theories around risk and around opportunity and in psychology all carry over no matter what you're doing. But there are so many differences, too, between how due diligence works at one level compared to venture capital. And I would say, you know, for stock pickers or asset allocators, a lot of the due diligence and the research is done in a spreadsheet.

It's, let's crunch these numbers. What was revenue? What's net income? What is EBITDA? And let's build a model and that's going to tell us, you know, where things are going next. In venture capital, there's often, there's no revenue. Sometimes there's not even a product. And you move away from the analytical side to the fuzzy world of I really believe in this guy.

This guy is pretty passionate. And I think a lot of people look at that and say, that's bullshit. Like how do you, what is due diligence if your due diligence pitch is, I met this guy and he seems really passionate. Right. And I understand that criticism. I would counter by saying after, and I think this is something that you would follow on with. I think there is so much bullshit in every side of finance due diligence, that the investment banker is making the models of here's why we think this deal is going to work, the people

that are backtesting so many strategies, stock pickers that are building, you know, discounted cash flow models, there's a lot of nonsense there as well. And I think that's more dangerous because since you have data and you're building a model if you're a stock picker. It's easy to say, well, I built this complicated model in Excel, therefore it has to be right. You know, I spent two weeks building this really complicated discounted cash flow model. And therefore, I'm really going to believe my forecast down to the decimal point. Whereas I think in venture capital, we know that, like, the range of potential outcomes here is enormous.

I had dinner with a CEO of a startup last night. I don't know him well enough to say his names. I don't want to, I don't know if I'm allowed to tell this story. But it was so refreshing to hear. He's, he's undertaking the startup that is incredibly ambitious. And he's well funded, well backed. He's a pretty well-known guy. And one of his trusted advisors, confidants, mentors, let's say, came to him and said,

let's call him Jim. He said, Jim, I don't think this idea is going to work. And Jim said, like, yeah, that's a true statement. Like, the odds are, this won't work. Like, the odds are severely stacked against us. And then one of his other advisors came to and said, like, look, I looked at, I've kind of looked at the data, and I think there's maybe a one in 50 chance that your idea works. And he's like, one in 50, that's great. Like, that's better than I thought.

That's amazing. So that mentality, I think, is just so different from the world of the other end of investing where, you know, if you're a stock picker, an asset allocator, where you're trying to get to precision. Where in venture capital, the range of outcomes are known to just be, you could drive a truck through them. Yep. But that's what the expectation is among the investors who are investing in the funds, among the CEOs. The expectations are this could be 100x or very likely a zero. So I want to come back to some of these broad points about venture and young businesses, right? Sort of the one in 50 chance being a good chance, right?

That's a unique environment. It's the frontier, right? It's experimentation, tinkering, and then sort of amplification when something works really well. But before we get back into that topic, I want to touch on your personal system for exploration, for reading, for writing, for deciding what gets your attention. Maybe we'll start with reading. That's something that obviously we share in common. Where did that start for you? When did you get interested in reading? How do you find books and what sorts of things are you trying to accomplish as a reader? I was a late bloomer with reading. If you can go back, my high school experience, I more or less didn't have a high school education. I grew up ski racing in Lake Tahoe where it's kind of viewed as school was getting in the way of sports.

And I, as a lot of my peers at the time, kind of did an independent study program that when I was 16, I got a piece of paper that said diploma at the top. But my high school education was almost non-existent. So I was definitely a late bloomer in exercising my brain until probably my early 20s when I got it together and went to college. So I didn't start reading consistently until I was probably like 22, 23. But once I started, once I got into it, it just took off. And since then, I read quite a bit mainly because, well, not mainly, but one of the main reasons I think. If you're a writer, the only way you're going to improve your writing and where you're going to get your ideas is from reading. I think that's a common question that a lot of writers get from other people is to say,

where do you come up with these ideas? And the answer is like, you read all day and they come to you. And so reading is part of the job. Sitting at your desk and reading a book might look like you're slacking off, but that's part of the job. And there's a great article by Derek Thompson of the Atlantic recently, who he was talking about. In a lot of jobs, the difference between work and pleasure kind of like seep into each other. And they don't have much distinction anymore. And that's, I think, true with writing and reading because I could ask you know on a Saturday if I'm reading a book is that pleasure or is that work it's both if I was retired I would still be reading this book but also by reading this book I got an idea that I can go out and do some research on and then write an

article about it so they kind of go hand in hand and I think this is probably true for yourself as well if if and when you retire you're going to read as much if not more but at the same time your reading influences your work today so they go hand in hand. Where I find books, I think it's, the majority is people who I read who write blogs. And I'm not just saying this because I'm on your podcast, but I get a lot of my reading ideas from you and your book list that you send out. It's the same way that I go about reading blogs is that there's so much material out there that you need a filter and some curation. And you need a trusted list of people who are going to point to other sources. People like Tadas,

Viscontas and his website, Abnormal Returns. I trust. I trust. that everything he links to in that blog post is going to be worth my time to read. He's my trusted filter. And I think you need that for reading books as well because there's, I mean, millions of books out there. How do you sort through the good ones? I rely on recommendations from people who are smarter than me to go through that. And there are so many blogs that do that now that there's an endless supply of book recommendations.

Yeah, Bill Gates has become famous for this. It's a really popular thing to do. Yeah, not only does he recommend books, but he writes a little review. Here's why I learn from it. Here's why you should write it. And he's such a voracious reader that there are dozens, maybe hundreds on his site. For those listening, there's some very famous people that do this, but one that you may or not have heard of, probably haven't heard of, is a guy named Kevin Simler. So Kevin was, he'll be a guest on the podcast at some point here, an engineer, an early employee at Peter Thiel's company, Palantir.

And one of the best essay writers out there, he runs a website called Melting Asphalt, which is amazing. just to an essay, mind-blowing. And there's a section of the site that's like a reading pipeline with mini-reviews. So definitely recommend checking that out if you're searching for good books. When it comes to writing, and I guess reading is sort of the way of collecting the raw material, and then writing is maybe the craft of trying to understand that and communicate it. So how do you decide, you know, for example, you've written, I don't know, three or four things since starting a new job already in just a couple weeks, how do you decide,

what to write. Is it just sort of a bubble to the top sort of organic process or is there something more deliberate behind it? I don't think there's anything deliberate at all. And I almost never sit down, sit down at the desk and say, okay, let's think of something to write. I think if you try to do that, you're just forcing creativity, which just leads to poor ideas at best. Yeah. C-minus ideas at best. And this is true for most fields, but like painting or music or poetry. I think the best ideas come to you when you're in the shower or in the grocery store or just walking down the street. There's a science behind this that you're just going for a walk down the street is going to spur more creativity than sitting at your desk trying to force it.

So it's still hard. It's not an easy thing. But I would say most of my ideas just come to just come randomly during the day going for a walk or just sitting in the kitchen making some food or in the shower and then all of a sudden you're like, oh, I got it. There it is. And you just piece it together. It's usually just a compilation of like, what have I read in the last week and what stat did I get from this book? And how can I weave that into the story that I read online and just weave something together and piece it together? Yeah, I mean, I think fundamentally innovation is old pieces and new patterns, right? And those new patterns being able to recognize them, I feel, is never intentional. It's always subconscious.

It's just like pack raw pieces and data into your subconscious, let it bubble around, kind of like a barbecue or something. like you can get all the same ingredients for a barbecue, barbecued ribs and throw them in a quick friar and it's not going to taste the same as if you let them simmer. And I've always found the same thing that it's all about just being curious and collecting stuff and then kind of relying on whatever subconscious process, who knows what's going on to let it find new patterns. You mentioned something earlier about, you know, if you were tired,

you'd still be doing this. One of the questions we ask at our firm is, and this is sort of about the age. of automation that we live in. If you had, you know, whatever it is, $100 million tomorrow, would you still work here? And obviously, you want to hear the answer to be yes. But oftentimes what we'll hear is yes, but I would never do tasks X, Y, and Z again. You know, I'd come in and tell my boss, look, I want to be here. This is great. But there's no way I'm ever running a performance report again or something like that. And I think that that's a neat way question to ask

yourself to identify aspects of what you do, which are probably easy to automate. Because more often than not, if you're a creative-winning person, repetitive stuff is just the worst. That's also the easiest thing to get rid of. So we're in an interesting frontier and a bit jealous of your new foothold in the venture world where it's going to be all about that moment of creation, right? New patterns. So to the extent that people can start collecting information in whatever field they're interested in, I think that is, that's probably the first step. Beyond reading, what else do you do every day? Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with reading, writing, or your job, just things as a human that you find valuable to do all the time.

Yeah, something that I've done since I was a teenager, and this too was never deliberate. I never, I can't really, you know, there's no story behind this, but I walk a lot. Just by myself, no headphones, nothing, and just just go for a 40-minute walk. That is when I think the best and figure things out, not only at work, but just trying to figure out what am I doing in life, what, you know, trying to figure out a big decision. When I sit down, it's like my brain shuts off. I feel like I only think when I, when I walk. So I try to make a pretty big effort of doing that. It gets a lot harder in the winter. Yeah. Which I'd like to see. Does my article quality go down in the winter as I walk less? I should look into that.

But yeah, that's one of the big things. I have a one-year-old son. so my day to day in the last year has been significantly different in the day to day in the year. It's been disrupted quite a bit. But to be honest, most of it is reading and writing. And not necessarily sitting down with a book, but scanning Twitter, scanning blogs, which might look pretty inefficient. But I think that's where a lot of the best ideas come from, just scrolling up and down Twitter. And what catches your eye? And then you find something that catches their eye and you just keep pulling that thread and go deeper and deeper and try to find something interesting.

One of the things we've talked about a bunch offline is the other side of the world of investing that gets far too little attention, which is saving the expense side of the equation. With most systems, there's an inflow and an outflow, and we talk a lot about growth of our wealth, of our portfolios, the best investing strategies. Obviously, you've written a lot about that. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your personal views on the other side of the equation of the saving, the managing expenses, living more simply, because I've been very impressed with not just your thoughts on it,

but how you actually live your life. Yeah, it's clear as day, inarguable, that the only way you can grow wealth over time is to spend less than you make. It doesn't matter if you're making minimum wage or your Bill Gates. You have to have a difference between your spending and your income. And I think that is so simple that people don't think about it very much in finance. It's just not something that we talk about very much.

We talk about asset allocation and interest, rates and valuations without thinking like the base of the pyramid is you know if we're trying to grow wealthier over time yes investing is a big portion of that but the single most important portion is the single most important portion is how much are you saving and it's crazy i'm sure you see this as well a lot of people in our field who make a tremendous amount of money don't save that much money and therefore the investing aspect is not that important to them because they don't have that much money to save. And on the flip side of that, I know so many people with modest incomes, $50,000, $60,000 a year who are swimming in money. And they're not investing geniuses.

It's just, they've just created a lifestyle around it that doesn't, that, that doesn't promote frivolous spending. They live simple lives with simple tastes and simple pleasures, and they just, I think the important thing about that, when people talk about frugality, it's instantly thought of, oh, you're a miser, you're living an uncomfortable life. You know, your house is freezing cold in the winter and scorching hot in the summer. And I think that's not necessarily the case. A lot of the people who I know who are very good with money live pretty good lives. There's so much excess that you can take out on the spending side without digging into your

quality of life. And I think it comes down to a handful of things. School, house, and car. For most people, those are the three big things. like where are your expenses going for most people it's your housing payment your student loan payment and your car payment if you can tackle those three things all the other things that we talk that personal finance experts talk a lot about you know cut out the latte you know bring your lunch to work doesn't matter at all

right if you know if you're cutting out the latte that doesn't make a big difference if you have an eighteen hundred dollar month student loan payment so forget the car for a minute because you know that seems just like another version of a pissing contest you know a status and a signaling tool talk about school. What do you think about college? Do you think it's worth it? I mean, it's, it's used to be, that used to be a universal answer. Of course, it's worth it. What do you think? Do you think that it's, it's too expensive? What it will look like in, you know, 20, 30 years? I think it absolutely is still worth it for virtually almost everyone. I'm making this up, I'm going to say 90% of people in their

late teens, early 20s, college is the right thing that they should do. Where I disagree with a lot of people is it's often framed as there are two options. If, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, If you're not, if you don't have family support to, uh, to help pay tuitions, there's only two options. There's don't go to college and there's a hundred grand in debt and nothing in between. And that's what I fundamentally disagree with. My own college experience, I started at a local community college. A lot of that was because as I explained, my high school background was less than, was less

than honorable. So like I had to start at the community college level. But there were so many benefits of that is, you know, I went to community college for two years, which is so cheap, it rounds to free. I mean, at the time, maybe the price has gone up. At the time now, I was paying, I don't know, $300 a semester or something. It's virtually free in the realm of tuition. And I was taking all the same GE courses that anyone else at a public or even a prestigious private school would have, introduction to biology and, you know, History 101. And by the time, after two years of that, I transferred to a private university. I went to

USC and all of that transferred. All of those credits transferred right in. So I ended up going to community college for two years and USC for two years. I got my degree from USC. That's all anyone knows. That's what's on my resume. I went to USC. I got a bachelor's from USC. But I paid a fraction of the price of anyone else because I took my two, my first two years at community college. And you could take that a step further. I think my advice for people who don't have the resources to go to more expensive schools is to go two years at a community college and then two years at a state school. You can do that in almost any state and you still might need loans to do that, but maybe it's $20,000 in loans and not $200.

You raise an important point, which is, you know, your resume says USC. So let's reframe the question a bit. So I'm a little bit more of a skeptic on the value of college. You're a skeptic of the value of USC because you went to Notre Dame is what you're saying. Clearly an inferior school. But I think the sort of career stamp, the first job that it helps you get is a big part of getting a bachelor's degree. Yeah. Which I think, if you think about what a bachelor's degree signals, it signals that you learn some things. Maybe, maybe. I was a philosophy major and you didn't really have to do a whole lot to get a philosophy degree. You could kind of read a little bit and write a little bit and pontificate and there's your B.A. So my question is, and for me personally, if it wasn't for the signaling value that comes with a college degree, certainly a prestigious one, I would have far preferred to spend those four years doing something more hands-on. And it seems like college's value is

mostly about, because you can learn anything you want on your own. Totally. I'm sure there's some exceptions. Maybe if you want to be an architect or an engineer, you want some more formal training. Doctor. Doctor. But a lot of what you need, you can learn on your own. Certainly almost everything I learned in college, you could just go read and do it for, 10 cents at the library. Absolutely. I'm better. Learn it right.

Right. So it seems like what you're paying for is, one, the signaling tool, the status of the school, and two, the network, right? That you meet people and you probably still stay in touch with a lot of them. And that can be extremely valuable and maybe worth the price alone. But that's where my skepticism comes from, that a lot of people I know spent college not really learning. And I've always learned much more in the working world where the,

there's consequences. You know, you really have to be accountable and learn very quickly. So it's an open question for sure. Yeah. And definitely the signaling aspect, you're right that even for most fields, with the exception of hard sciences, engineering math, a lot of the skills that you're going, a lot of things you're going to learn in college are not going to be applicable to whatever job you're going out to get. But as a 22 year old, you're showing your employer, look, I did this for four years. I follow the rules. I check the boxes. When someone told me to do X, I went out and did X. And that's the only thing you have on your resume. So people, when you say, it's just a signaling, but that's important.

That's extremely important, both for employers and for you as a student to make your way in the world, to show someone, look, I'm only 22 years old. I haven't accomplished much in life, but I did this. I followed the rules for four years. Since you've started going down this path of, you mentioned you said to me one time, it's almost like a game to see how little you need to spend and not have any sacrifice and happiness. Is it possible that it even goes to the other? way that you get more happiness or joy when there's less stuff? My wife and I, it's different for everyone, so I don't want to say this is how you should do it. But for my wife and I, we get more pleasure getting rid of stuff than we do buying stuff.

If we take a big load to Goodwill, that makes us way happier than going out and buying something. And I would say our buyer's remorse for stuff is pretty high. Our degree of buyers remorse for virtually, I just bought last week to, nice top of the line monitors. New computer. I got a new job, let's upgrade the system. I got these two really nice ones.

And I got them and I sent it up and I went, eh, the old ones were fine. It's amazing how, like our wiring is all anticipatory, right? So the surge of pleasure happens a lot more when you're expecting something. Oh,

totally. When I ordered these monitors, I was like, oh, I can't wait to get them. This is going to be so great. Can't wait. And then they came and I went, you know,

got the boxes. and it's like a kid on Christmas. And I open them up and they're beautiful. And I'm holding them and it's like, oh, this is great. And then I set them up and I start using them and it's nothing. But I experience that happens so often. But I still, there's going to be something next week that it's like, oh, I got to go out and do this. It's amazing how it's the hardest lesson to learn.

It happens to me all the time too. And it's like an investing, right? There's these, I think Danny Keniman was the guy who said that these behavioral biases are kind of like mirages. Like you can see them or things. think you know them, but then you're still going to suffer, suffer the consequences and maybe never learn the lessons. Because so much of this is we're not dealing with rational thoughts that you can, that you can really move around in your head and have control over.

A lot of it is just dopamine and serotonin that you have not a lot of control over that you're going to be at the influence of. So let's shift and talk now about creativity and innovation, given the venture, skew to your career now. and maybe start by talking about the piece you wrote recently about the Wright brothers and sort of the general gist of your message there. Yeah, so the Wright brothers is, I think, a fascinating story because we know in hindsight that when the Wright brothers conquered flight in 1903, that was one of the most monumental

moments in human history, not only in American history or modern history, but in human history. We had tackled a new form of mobility and transportation that, I, in hindsight is one of the most important methods of transportation, given its influence in wars and agriculture and e-commerce. But what's interesting, if you look back at the Wright brothers, when they did their first flight in 1903, almost nobody noticed. And not just that day or the next day, but for years,

not a lot of people paid attention to the Wright brothers. There are a lot of interesting historical accounts that a lot of people didn't believe that they could fly or when they actually saw them flying, thought it was a trick, thought, oh, there's a wire and there's somewhere, this is just some sort of illusion, I don't buy it. And even the people who really saw it and understood what they were doing thought, that's amazing, that's a cool toy, you boys build. And they just didn't really grasp it. So the first flight was 1903. And the first big mainstream reports of what the Wright brothers were doing came in 1908. And I wrote in this article, I even found in

1904, a year after their first flight, an interview that the New York Times did with a hot air balloon tycoon racer at the time, and they asked them, because there's a lot of talk about airplanes back there, back at the time, they asked them in 1904, what are the odds that humans will be able to fly someday? And he said, maybe, maybe someday, but not now, not now. And that was a year after the Wright's first flight. And the point I wanted to make in the article is, I think if you look back at a lot of inventions, you see that same trend occurring. There's a big gap between inventing something that in hindsight we know is transformational and convincing the world that you did something transformational. That can also take 10 or 20 years. We see that with the telephone and the light bulb.

Penicillin is one of my favorite ones. It was first, it was discovered in 1929. And between 1929 and It was basically a laboratory toy. We knew we had this thing that could kill bacteria. And we knew it worked in living beings. We didn't really know what to do with it for 15 years. And it took until World War II until we had legions of ill soldiers. Someone said, hey, we have a lot of infected soldiers in Europe right now. We should try to use this stuff.

And it wasn't in two. So it was 13 or 14 years from discovery until using it. But you would think in hindsight, as soon as we discovered penicillin, oh my gosh, we solved one of the most fundamental problems of human history, which is infection. But we didn't really figure that out at the time. Yeah, so there's an amazingly similar example from a book called Diffusion of Innovations, which is an amazing book for anyone that's interested in this topic about scurvy. So scurvy used to kill more people than warded in early kind of sea-going days. and in 1601, a guy named a captain named James Lancaster, I think was his name, did a control study, like a modern, you know, scientific study where he had two control ships

and one test ship. And on the test ship, he gave people citrus, right, lemon juice. And no one had scurvy. Everyone was fine. And on the other ship, half the people died. So he basically figured this out in 1601. It was totally ignored. He couldn't get anyone to do it in the British Navy or Admiralty.

it wasn't until 150 years later that another doctor re did the same study same results and then it was another 48 years after that until the Navy finally adopted it so almost 200 years it was 1795 by the time that was standard practice how many people died within those 200 years yeah I mean oftentimes it would be half the ship half the ship right and so for me like that's the classic question of innovation is not just the idea but the timing and we'll call it the field the the group of people the influencers that take waste makers, if you will, who affect whether or not something gets adopted. Any thoughts on that kind of dynamic in the venture world or the business world, I guess, as you're thinking about new products or new services or new business of how to balance, not just finding the great idea, but one whose time has come? Well, I think in venture capital, as I was saying earlier, it is a completely well-known, expected normal part of the process that a large portion of the investments you make will fail. And I think the important thing to add on to what you just said is that if a business fails, it doesn't mean that the idea that it was pursuing was wrong and shouldn't be taken up again.

It may have just been early. And there are a lot of, one of the fundamental things that we ridicule from the dot-com boom, and we should ridicule, it was pets.com. This is like the poster boy of the ridiculousness of the dot-com era. And it was in terms of its valuation and whatnot. It was ridiculous. But, you know, Pets.com was, you know, order your pet food online, which you can do on Amazon today. And Amazon made a successful business out of it. And there are so many examples of businesses that at one point in time didn't work and were ridiculed. And people would say, look, that doesn't work. And then 20 years later, it works.

So I think a lot of innovation that fails, doesn't fail because it's wrong. It just fails because the world isn't ready for it. And there are so many pieces in between invention and sustainable consumer adoption. that need to take place. So with Pets.com, you know, Amazon needed to build, you know, they needed more people on the internet, you needed more customers. They had to build those customers up from selling books and then selling other stuff. And then Amazon took 20 years to build up a huge base of customers.

They had to have their relationship with the shipping networks. And they had to achieve scale doing other things so they can get huge discounts from the shipping networks. And now they're at a place where Amazon has built up such an amazing business that they can ship a 20-pound bag of dog food to your door. They could probably do it same day. now with Amazon Prime Now, I think it's called. So the things that we ridiculed 20 years ago, we're doing today profitably. And I think the question that is almost impossible to answer,

I won't even try to undertake it, is what are we ridiculing today? What am I ridiculing today? And what are you, Patrick, ridiculing today that will look at back at 20 years and say, how could we have not seen that coming? Why were we so stupid to do that? And I think the odds that you and I and everyone else listening are doing that and will shake their heads in 10 or 20 years is 100%. Everybody does that. What about the potential advantage of the way that people structure businesses? So again, this seems this is like one of those accepted truths that maybe in 50 years will seem like an absurdity where most businesses are still in that kind of hierarchical command and control reporting line departments, you know, marketing department here and the sales department here,

etc. Have you done any interesting reading or research into other kinds of organizational structure whether it be startups or more established business, my guess is it's more in startups that you find interesting or that people might want to think about? Well, the really interesting ones, and I don't know if I'd recommend this because it's so extreme, but both at Zappos and another company called Valve, which makes video games, effectively have no hierarchy in the company.

I might be misstating this, but I'm pretty sure no one at Zopos reports to anybody. It's just everyone's on a team, and they're working, and they collaborate, and do stuff and get it done. And they have, you know, they do have a CEO, but there's no formal hierarchy of you report to me and I'm telling you to do this.

And I think for both of those companies, it has worked. I know at Zappos, it caused a lot of consternation, and they lost a lot of employees when they went that route. But I think there's something to be said that if you want to unleash as much creativity in people, you need to give them as much freedom as possible. And you can't do that at a lot of companies because there are a lot of workers, a lot of people who can't be trusted with that much freedom.

So the only way that it can work at Zappos or Valve or any other company is if you just get completely compulsive and obsessive with hiring the right people, which is itself is an incredibly hard thing to do. But if you hire enough people, if you hire the right people that you can trust, which I think you can only do at relatively small companies. But hire people that you can trust to say, Patrick, I'm going to give you freedom to work on whatever project you want. No one's going to be breathing down your back. There's not going to be monthly reviews and targets you have to hit. I'm just hiring you because I know you're going to go do a good job. Now go do it. If you can hire people who you can trust to do that, the outcome is incredible.

I just don't think that it is that expandable to a lot of businesses. So I don't know much about Zappellus, but I know a lot about Valve and Valve is, it's literally no hierarchy. There's a joke that the founder often can't get the games. It's a software company, video game company, can't get the games he wants done because no one will do it with them. And it's self-organizing, meaning stuff organically creeps up and they might have an idea for a game. And if one person can convince others to work on it with them, a team forms and there might be a leader, but that leader won't by de facto be the leader in the next project because he's probably not the appropriate person. He or she's probably not the appropriate person to do it. And what I find

incredibly appealing about it, at least philosophically, who knows in practice, like you said, really hard in practice, is that it eliminates what is this kind of pervasive rent seeking within established institutions that why in the world would someone at the top of a hierarchy want to mix things up and make it flat when they are capturing rent, so to speak, on the revenues of the business. So it's this unbelievable, and I think, again, this is a private company. These are all kind of hearsay. But there's a lot of people that say that Valve is the, the or one of the most profitable companies per employee in the world. They meant money. Meaning multiples of earnings per employee of a company like a Facebook or a Google.

And surely it's all about the people. But one of the interesting backstories about Valve was they realized when looking at some analytics about what programs were on the most computers in the mid-90s. They expected it to be Windows. And it turns out Windows was number two. The first was a video game called Doom, which I don't know if you played it, but I certainly played it as a kid. And Doom was created by this like 10-person, you know, hacking team in Texas or something like that. And the light bulb went off that, look, all that matters is this creative kind of frontier aspect of business and innovation. And you don't need a lot of people to do that. And I wonder if, I think you've read about this and I'd be curious to know your thoughts. You know, we see a declining

lifespan for, say, S&P 500 stocks. The era of conglomerates is gone. Now it's more the peer play era where there's spin-offs and carve-outs and more efficiency with less scale, which is like the opposite of what it used to be under the sort of command and control, Henry Ford, hierarchical world of business. Do you think that that's going to continue, that there will be fewer and fewer, which there have been and small? all are more decentralized kind of corporations in general? I hope it does because I don't think the history of the centralized business is something to be that excited about.

I think what's obviously true and it's always going to be true is that the larger businesses, the more controls you need to put into place. And I think that's true for Valve and Zappos. I have no idea how big Valve is, but I imagine if it gets to, you know, several thousand employees, if it's not already, it's going to be a lot more difficult to run that structure. So always companies like Walmart and ExxonMobil and Microsoft will need to put in more restraints and more controls on their employees. And that's always going to come at the cost of creativity, I think. What advice would you have for, I guess, younger people out there, maybe not just starting their careers, but early in their careers in terms of skills or skill sets that you think are either overvalued or undervalued in that kind of paradigm, right?

So assuming that there's more interesting organizational structures in the future and we already, know that there's going to be far fewer careers where it's you join a company and you're there for the rest of your life that just doesn't really happen anymore what skill sets are either over or undervalued in your view i've seen so many people who are on paper brilliant their test scores their grades uh are off the charts but they lack i think the main skill that these people lack and is one of the most important and not discussed enough i think skill is empathy and that i think in the workplace, and this is growing in importance, is so vital and important. Your ability to interact with coworkers and clients who see the world different from you and say, you know, I never

thought of that. It's not how I view the world, but I understand where you're coming from. Your ability to do that is so incredibly important. And you see all these people who are brilliant, their textbook brilliant, their PhDs from MIT's, but they can't interact with other people and they ultimately fail in life. So many of them. Fails, you know, that's a tough word. But on the other hand, there are so many people that don't have a lot of the formal technical skills that other people do, but their personal skills, their emotional intelligence is off the chart. And those are the people that succeed the most. And people with the intersection of the two, of technical skills and personal skills are really the people that take off.

But we don't stress the personal skills very much in school, especially when you're young, it's technical skills, technical skills, like what coding language can I learn, what math can learn? And that's really important. I don't want to discount that. If I could rearrange the education systems, particularly in college, the one thing I would do, I think, is put more emphasis on the personal skills that you need to succeed in the modern workplace.

You see it all the time with young workers that come, in and they're hungry and they're smart, but they don't know how to get along with people, particularly people who disagree with them. That, I think, is the most important skill, is your ability to understand where people who disagree with you are coming from and try to see the world through their eyes. This one investing statistic, I use this a lot because I think it shows the point. If you were born in 1970, then during your teens and 20s, your young formative years, the S&P 500 went up tenfold in your teens and twenties. If you were born in 1950, then during your teens and

20s, the S&P 500 was effectively flat after inflation. So you have two different generations, the same period of their life, and the stock market did something totally different. Went tenfold for one group, went flat for the other. Those two groups are going to grow up throughout their lives viewing the stock market different than one another because they came of age seeing a totally different world. And you can use those examples. for so many things in life that this generation, this group of people, this race, this religion, this industry sees the world different from you do. And you're going to disagree with a lot of the things that they say, and it's so important that you try to put yourself in their shoes

and try to see where they're coming from. Do you think there are ways, so I don't know about you, but if you think about like introversion, extroversion as a sliding scale, and the best, the best litmus test I ever heard for introversion versus extroversion is when you go into a crowd, do you lose energy or do you gain energy? And so there's some nuance there. And I would say I'm like kind of in the middle, but definitely a leaning introvert, which makes some of these empathy skills or networking skills difficult to execute on. Is there anything that you suggest for people maybe on the more introverted side where

some of these soft skills are less of a natural asset to develop them? I say something, this is for me, I don't consider myself introverted. I don't have a problem talking to people, but I prefer it to be no more than two people. That's really the case. And a lot of times when I'm in meetings with 10 people, I don't say a word. And then the meeting gets out and I go back to my desk and I email people and I say, hey, I wanted to bring up this, this and this. That I should have brought up in the meeting. But in a room of 10 people, I don't want to pipe up.

If it was a meeting with two people, I would have no problem interjecting and saying, hey, this is what I think. But with 10 people, I don't want to do it. So for me, I try to structure that around. I don't like big meetings, so I try to avoid them. If I need to talk to people, I wanted to be one-on-one. And I'll, rather than sitting at my desk and talking where other people can hear us, which makes me kind of uncomfortable, I'll say, hey, let's go for a walk, just the two of us to talk about this.

That's how I have dealt with what might be my extroverted side, is just trying to keep personal conversations, face-to-face conversations, as intimate as possible. What are some maybe resources that you haven't mentioned elsewhere or don't mention often? These could be journals or books or individual authors, TV shows, anything that you've learned a lot from or gained a lot from that you could share with people. I've talked about this and written about this before. One of my favorite activities, I live in Washington, D.C., so I have the Library of Congress nearby. and at the Library of Converse, they have every edition of the New York Times, Washington Post,

Wall Street Journal, going back to some of them in the 1850s, every single edition on microfilms. You can go in and find a newspaper from 1901 and throw it in the computer and read it. And I absolutely love reading old newspapers. There's a tendency to think old newspapers are junk. You know, they're what your hamsters piss on that you put in. you throw them in the trash. Yesterday's newspaper is not worth looking at anymore. And I get so, I've learned so much, I get so much pleasure from going back and reading really old newspapers, 1890, you know, 1910, 1920. And just what were people talking about back then? What did

advertisements look like? What were people buying back then? What were important stories back then? And I think that kind of gets back to what I was talking about with empathy of just trying to put yourself in their shoes is what did people think back then? And the cool thing about newspapers is that there's no hindsight in there. It's like, this is what people were thinking in 2001 or 1890. This isn't a historian looking back and trying to guess what people might have been, you know, selectively. This is what they were talking about on this day in 1870. That to me has changed how I think about a lot of things, mainly that the events, the events that we think were obvious in hindsight at the time were not.

And I did this a lot with investing where I went back to, you know, the day the stock market peaked in 1929, what was written about in the Wall Street Journal? You know, the day before the Great Depression began and the market was on its trek to fall 90%. What did the Wall Street Journal say? And if you go back and read it, the answer is not much. And we look out in hindsight and say, 1929, stock bubble, so obvious, so obvious. And in a lot of ways it was. People were talking about it in 1929, but not to the extent that you would think.

You go back and read it, and it's a lot of the analysis at the time was, you know, maybe stocks are overvalued, but business is still strong. You know, we don't foresee anything crazy going on. And if you really try to put yourself in their shoes at the time, you think, yeah, that makes sense. And the biggest events, world wars and depressions and market crashes, I think only happened because of a crazy confluence. I hate the phrase perfect storm, but a perfect storm of events that come to. that cause the Great Depression. And a lot of the stuff is just not foreseeable before it happens. And when you read old newspapers, that becomes clear.

That's a really, really neat tactic. And I guess we don't have the proximity that you do to the records, but I'm sure you can probably look up a lot of this stuff too. Seems like that would apply to really old books as well. A book that you can still get in print that's hundreds of years old, obviously it's lasted for some good reason. And maybe that's another tactic that people could take for finding some unique angle. So I think you and I are both pretty active in the worlds of Twitter and just kind of personal brand,

I guess you could call it, where we're putting a lot of work out there and sharing it. I've found that maybe the best way of learning outside of books is all of these unbelievable people that write essays or produce some interesting knowledge content that there's no way I would have ever known or discovered. I would never have met you probably, you know, 15 years ago. I think you and I met on Twitter. Yep, it wouldn't, it would have never. In fact, I remember, I remember tweeting you and saying, hey, are you Jim O'Shaughnessy's son? Yep, yep.

I remember that. Yeah, I remember it too. And so it's this kind of interesting new world where you can connect and people are pretty friendly with really smart, interesting people. Are there any thinking of people as a resource, any people that you follow whose work you read, whose businesses you appreciate. And let's caveat this by saying, let's avoid the usual suspects here.

You and me having a conversation can turn into preaching to the choir pretty quick. So anyone kind of under the radar that you recommend people check out or read? Yeah, if you asked me this two weeks ago, I would struggle answering that question because the people who I read are the same, probably a lot of the people listening to this podcast

or that you read as well. I found a guy a couple of weeks ago, He's not totally under the radar, but pretty much. His name is Mike Daryano, and he writes a blog called Waiterspad. Yep. Have you heard of? I have, yeah. He also wrote a book called Lessons Learned from Failed Startups.

I thought was really good. But his blog Waiters Pad, I had never heard of it. I'd never heard of anyone linking to it. I don't know. I don't remember how I found it, but I started reading it. And instantly, it just clicked instantly that, oh, this is good. And basically what it is is he listens to podcasts. and then does kind of summary write-ups on him,

but not just no, kind of adding in his own thoughts and weaving together old podcasts. So, hey, in this podcast, Jason Zweig said this, which reminds me, Barry Ritzholtz once said this, and he wheezed together really well. He's a great writer. So there was a blog I never heard of. I don't know where I found it,

but when I did found it, I am spending hours on it. I thought it was fantastic. Very cool, two that I would throw on that pile. The first one is an anonymous, doctor. I think he is a psychoanalyst or something like that, a psychiatrist. I don't know his name, but his website is called Slate Star Codex. This is one of these old school...

Terrible name for a website. Well, terrible until you see how many comments he gets on some of these posts, which number in the thousands. And this guy writes some incredibly complicated but accessible meditations, especially on things in the medical world, like, for example, the epixtapy. pen controversy that's been in the news. He wrote a really thoughtful piece on that. But this guy has, I have no idea how he could possibly be a practicing MD and have time to do this. But it's really incredible. And in the show notes, I'll link to a couple examples. And then the other person I would put,

even though now he is probably like the philosopher king of your new world for more traditional public markets investors, Paul Graham, I think, is the gold standard for thoughtful, interesting essays in the modern world that they're all free, they're all on his website. And I would argue that if you dedicated yourself to reading in whatever order you want, all of his essays, that you'd have a better education in business and in life, frankly, than most college degrees. I agree. Yeah. And a lot of his, you know, he's a venture capitalist, but a lot of his, most of his essays are not about venture capital. A lot of them aren't even about investing. It's just kind of about life. Yeah, there's one called, uh, what you can't say.

I think that's what it's called, about how to find kind of contrarian ideas. And it's a good segue into my next question, which is, you know, he picks points in time of fashion trends or trends in the world that in hindsight just seem completely absurd. And he uses that to say, well, that means that there's lots of absurd things today, too. And so there will be things in any era, and today's no exception, where something is widely accepted and it's utterly ridiculous. And we'll look back on it. That is utterly ridiculous. So I'm curious in the world of investing, and we'll call it the financial advisory world, the asset management world, the venture world, if you like.

What things, if any, do you think we'll look back on as aspects of this kind of financial services space as just completely ridiculous or wrong in 10, 20, 30 years? I am not of the belief. I'll answer that question by saying what I don't believe we'll look back on. I don't think active management will... will die like some people think it will. There's obviously a huge trend towards indexing and quote unquote passive investing.

I think the itch to do better than average will always be there no matter how much evidence is there that most people won't, that will never go away for the same reason that Vegas won't go away. There's something fundamental about the human condition that just wants to, you know, will always believe that there's going to be more opportunity there. And I think that's rooted in the fact

that there is always opportunity to do significantly better than average. There is always the next Tesla and the next Apple, and there always will be. And since they will always be there, I think active management will not go away. It is shrinking and it will continue to shrink. But I think that will, in 20 years, there's going to be a significantly large mutual fund industry of active fund managers. So that's what I think will not go away. I think, and this isn't that boldest statement, because this is a trend well underway. But I think we'll look back at fees as ridiculous. And the fact that asset managers, you know, again, this is already declining,

but that asset managers can make dynastic sums of money per year for mediocre results. People are waking up to that and they will continue to wake up to that. And if I had to guess, I would say in 20 years, a good asset manager will make as much money as a good doctor, which is a great, there's nothing wrong with that. Surgeons make good money and they drive Mercedes and they have nice homes, but they don't make $400 million a year. Yeah. And I think that is one of the things,

and we're already seeing that particularly among institutional investors who for years went along with the high fees and now are kind of saying, hey, what am I getting for this? What about in the financial advisory space? So this is an area where you're going to know a lot more than me. I'm in the asset management business. What trends are good? what things are vestigial and dying, you know, maybe if you were a young person looking for a financial

advisor or a service, could be a robo, could be your answer. What should people look for and what should people look to avoid? So I'll give one example. My wife's cell phone contract is up for renewal. She can get a new phone with AT&T. You know, she's eligible for a phone upgrade. Her and I, we went online the other day, AT&T.com, logged into our account, and we said, what are our options, let's figure it out. And we just couldn't figure it out. I just couldn't get, there are all these different packages, all these different options. I just couldn't really figure it out.

So we said, okay, let's go to the AT&T store this weekend. We'll talk to a guy. And I thought that is a good example of, I think, where financial advising is going, and that there is a huge push, a great push of online automated, betterment, wealth front. That's phenomenal. I have so much respect for those guys. and I think the majority of millennials, when they get into the span of their career where they're accumulating assets, those are the companies that are really going to win big.

And Vanguard and Schwab, too, that have their own sort of online robo advisors. But there is still, to take this back to the AT&D example, there's always going to be a point where you're like, I don't get this, I want to go talk to a guy. The information that's online is great, but it's, I'd want to look someone in the eye and say, what is this? And therefore I think the good financial advisor, the face-to-face advisor, is not going to die. And I think the people who really will win in the financial advisor over the next 20 years are the people that marry the two, that have an online automated platform for 99% of what you need, but hey, you can still call me and talk to me. And, you know, someone who does that really well right now is Vanguard.

If you have, I forget what the threshold is, it's high. I think it's either $1 or $5 million with Vanguard. you can call a Vanguard CPA and say, hey, I don't know how my social security options work. Can you explain it to me? And a human will talk to you about it. A qualified human will talk to you about it. That is, I think, the model that's really going to win

in asset management is marrying technology with human interface. And as it stands right now, it is by and large one or the other. It's either Edward Jones or Betterman. That's kind of unfair. But that's kind of what it's where things stand right now. now. And the future is going to be marrying Edward Jones, so to speak, with Betterman. So it sounds like you think the rule of the advisor or the best outcome from hiring a financial advisor is someone that can kind of steer you through, difficult to navigate waters,

decisions, et cetera, keep your cool. In that spirit, I'm curious if you had to think about the person or individual act, the nicest thing that anyone has ever done for you in your your career professionally. What would it be? Who would it be and what would it be? The first I ever got into investing was reading Jason's Weig when I was a late teenager, maybe I was 20 years old, and it just clicked with me not only because it made, it made sense, but I'm just thinking this guy's such a good writer. And it was a couple years ago. I think I, what was it? I met Jason's Weig randomly at an event one time and just shook his hand and I was starstruck and it was two seconds. Nice to meet you by. and I emailed him and said, hey, I'd love to grab lunch with you sometime.

And he accepted, and we ended up having a conversation for hours. And I was legitimately starstruck around Jason. He was, you know, he was just larger than life in the field of investing and writing, which is kind of what I wanted my career to be at at the time. And he was so supportive with his time and supportive. So he's someone that I look back at if it's just like that helped. me so much. And I think most people who are as busy as he was, if they get an email from a stranger that says, hey, I want to have a three-hour lunch with you, would say, no, I don't have

time for that. So that's, that, that, that stood out to me is, as, it's pretty big. What about, um, same question, twisted. So if you had to identify the nicest thing that you've done that I've done. This is going to be more difficult. Yeah, always is. I, because of, Because of that experience with Jason and a couple other people, on the rare occasion that someone emails me and says, hey, I'm in college and I'm thinking about getting into finance or writing, even when I read those emails, I always grunt and say, I don't have time for that.

I don't know this person. The tendency is to just hit delete and pretend it didn't happen. I always try to make an effort to say, like, okay, just, you know, here's what I think. You can always call me. I prefer you call me because it's easier than typing. So I try to reciprocate what people like Jason did for me as well. Yeah, this was like one of those classic dinner table family conversations that we had.

Were these two questions? I find it always is an interesting answer. And it's harder to answer the second one, right? Yeah. And the answer to the first one for me was, it wasn't professional, but actually sadly I had a cousin who passed away recently, he was our age, kind of a freak occurrence, really awful. But I would name him as the guy who did the kindest thing to me,

and it was a different version of what Jason did for you, which is when I went to Notre Dame, I transferred as well, just like you did to USC. I went to a smaller school in Minnesota, which is where my family's from, again, just like you, because I was a complete waste of space in high school. I was thinking the animal house, who is at Douglas Simpson Day that has the 0.0.0.

GPA or someone that doesn't have a GPA. Mine wasn't quite that bad, but it was close in high school. So I transferred after getting my act together into Notre Dame, and this cousin's actually a second cousin. I didn't know him all that well prior to this meetup. He was there as well. And he spent months integrating me completely selflessly with no expectation of anything in return even if he wasn't going out. He would call people and say, you know, my cousin's coming out. it was unbelievable at, you know, age 18 or 19. And because of him, I met my wife. I met the guy who is my best man, most of my other groomsmen, you know, good friends.

It's amazing how big of an impact someone willing to take their time, someone better established than you, willing to take their time to integrate you. That's an unbelievable, hopefully like a pay it forward kind of thing where I haven't done anything that good yet. but hopefully, hopefully I can. Last couple questions. If you had to identify, and books has been a common theme, but I think it's a good one. If you had to identify, say, two or three books that have literally changed your life. This is another question I've started to ask everyone.

I asked myself this question, and it was shockingly a few, very small number of books. If you had to identify a couple that were really, really life-changing for you, what would rise to the top of that list? One, and it wasn't that long ago that I read this, maybe two years ago, three years ago, a guy named Benjamin Roth. He was a lawyer from Ohio, and he was just an avid diary keeper. And he kept an extremely extensive detailed diary during the Great Depression. Started in, I think, 1928 and finished it in, I think, 1942, which was maybe shortly before he passed away. But every day would document, he was an incredibly good writer. what was going on in the country and what did he see around town and just random tidbits what did how are his neighbors fighting more in 1933 when the economy was worse versus versus how they were before how were people dealing with the rise in bankruptcies and bank runs which was a huge deal in the early 1930s so it's an amazing diary and his son put it together and published it in i think 2010 so not that long ago And that to me just stood out as I've read so many economic textbooks and things about the Great Depression that are all hindsight.

This gets back to again, I was talking about with old newspapers. They're all looking backwards about what happened during the Great Depression, you know, looking backwards, writing from today, looking back to then. This was, he was writing this in 1930, 1933, and it was, this is what I see in the world today. And what's amazing about it, two things really stood out to me was the similarities between what he wrote back then and what people were saying in 2009, 2010, when we were just coming out of the Great Recession. The similarities were uncanny about how it changed politics. You kind of saw a rise in 2010, what we called the Tea Party, kind of something similar in 1932. You had a big revolt against bankers and central bankers. You had a huge fear of the hyperinflation that was always right around the corner, which that was a huge fear in 1931, 32, which seems crazy now because now we know they had deflation back then.

That was their biggest problem, but they were scared shitless over hyperinflation back then because of the central bank actions, which was the same thing in 2010. That, you know, in hindsight, we know we had very tame inflation, if not deflation. but the gold bugs were out in force in 2010. So the similarities really struck me between the 1930s and the 2010s. And I just, I love the book. I think I read it in one sitting because it just grabbed a hold of me. And then another set of books that caught my attention for the exact same reason

because there were first-hand accounts was there's a historian named Frederick Lewis Allen who wrote a trilogy of books. They're called Since Yesterday, Only Yesterday, and The Big Change. And since yesterday is on the history of America in 1920s. Only yesterday was the 1930s. And the big change is how America changed from 1900 to 1950. And they're just incredibly well-written and well done. And this is not a shocking statement, but how America changed from 1900 to 1950

is orders of magnitude different from how it changed from 1950 to 2000. From 1900 to 1950, we went from horse and buggy to jet. and 1950 to 2000, we went from jet to faster jet. The changes that took place during the first half of the 20th century were just off the charts. And interestingly, a lot of the biggest changes took place in 1930s when the economy was on its knees. And in 1940s, where, because of World War II, the amount of innovation that happened, sometimes literally overnight, was off the charts. So during the 30s and early 40s, which we think about as a dark time in world history, you had the Great Depression in the World War, in hindsight ended up being some of the most, if not I would say,

the most innovative time maybe in U.S. history. Yeah, you've mentioned it to me once before, maybe a week or two ago, and I haven't read it yet, but it sounds like just an awesome, awesome, totally under the radar book. They're so good. Because not only is it an amazing topic, but this is the most important thing for books, He's just an incredibly good writer. Yeah. So you just, you don't have to reread paragraphs like you do a lot of history books.

It just comes to you and you can just kind of sit down and read it. It's great. So last question. As you close a great chapter with the Motley Fool and move on to new things, thinking back on your time there, if you had to think of one, maybe even two really colorful, fun stories from your time with the Fool, what would they be? What stands out in your memory? Yeah.

So actually how I got stories. started at the Motley Fool as a story in itself. I was, it was 2007. I was a junior at USC, and I was reading a guy's blog, just an individual blog, blogspot.com at the time. And I forget what it was, but this guy, he was an investing blog, but he wrote something that was wrong, just factually inaccurate. It wasn't big, but just misstated something. And I was a jerk about it, so I emailed him and said, hey, you're, you're wrong. This is what is, what is, I wasn't, here's what actually happened. And he wrote back and said, oh, you're right.

I'll update that. Hey, by the way, I see your email address is USC. I'm coming out to L.A. next week, we should meet up. And I said, sure, you're an investor. I'm an investor. Let's meet up. And then, so it was great. Let's have coffee next week.

Let's stay in touch. He emailed me the day before he was going to come in. You guys, you guys name is Sham Gad, I should say. Sham emailed me and he said, hey, I'm flying to LAX. what's the best bus to take to downtown L.A. And if you're familiar with L.A., the answer is there's not much. So I said, I'll pick you up.

I'll pick you up at the airport. And he said, really? I said, yeah, I'll pick you up. I didn't live close to L.A. X. At the time, but it was like, I'll drive. I'll come get you. I'm not doing anything else. So I went and picked him up at the airport,

never met the guy other than a couple of emails. Picked him up, started talking. And as we're driving back to my house, he said, hey, is there a cheap hotel near your house? And I said, no, but you can crash on my couch. you want. You know, I met this guy. I've exchanged two emails with a complete and utter stranger, but we hit it off and he was, he's an avid investor, I was an avid investor, so we just totally hit it off, had dinner, had drinks, he crashed on my couch. And then a couple months later,

I figured out that he was writing for the Motley Fool and he said, yeah, you shouldn't apply. And I never once in my life up until that moment thought I want to write about investing. But interesting, it was mid-2007 and I was working at a lot of, a private equity firm at the time and credit markets started blowing up and I realized I needed to find a new job the private equity fund was not doing well credit were freezing we're getting lines of credit pulled from underneath us so I needed to do something else and Shams said oh you should consider writing for the Motley Fool and I said okay I'll let me do this on the side until I find a job at a hedge fund and I ended up

staying nine years and it all started because I let a stranger sleep on my couch serendipitous so that's other advice that kind of raises the last question I guess other advice for young people that are interested in investing specifically, not just generic skill sets, but someone that is, you know, the junior in college like you were and into investing, maybe he's picking stocks or whatever the dimension they might like. Do you think it's a good time to go into this industry? Do you think, and if so, what should people consider and do? I do think it's a good time to go into finance. I think there's a lot of opportunity because a whole industry from venture capital to, you know, if you're, you know, something like

Betterment or, you know, just the average Joe investing is being turned upside down right now. And it's pretty, it's an exciting time to be in the industry. The advice I would have for young investors, not necessarily going into the industry, but young investors is I would recognize that almost every great investor gets more humble as time goes on. I think that's even true for the Warren Buffett's of the world. I think Warren Buffett is more humble in his 80s than he was in his 60s. I think it's true for me.

I think that's probably true for you. And I would always try to keep that at the top of your mind when you're 22 years old and you really think I've got this figured out. You know, you probably don't. And that might sound discouraging. That might sound like I'm, you know, random. But I think that's true for so many investors that the more experience you gain in this field, the more humbling it becomes. And that's not to discourage you out of investing. I think investing is one of my great hobbies and my central focus.

I'm so interested in it. So it's not to say that you shouldn't try it investing. That's not the message at all. It's just to constantly be asking yourself, what am I missing? Yeah, it's always harder than you think. There's no doubt about that. Well, that's a great place to end. So for now, until next time, hopefully we'll be able to do this a few times in the future.

We'll leave it there. Thanks so much for joining me. Thanks, bad. Hey everyone, Patrick here again. To find more episodes of Invest like the Best, go to investorfieldguide.com forward slash podcast. If you're a book lover, you can also sign up for my book club at investorfieldguide.com forward slash book club. After you sign up, you'll receive a full investor curriculum right away and then three to four

suggestions of new books every month. You can also follow me on Twitter at Patrick underscore Oshag, Oshag. If you enjoy the show, please leave a quick review for us on iTunes, which will help more people discover Invest Like the Best. Thanks so much for listening.