We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - Classic 15: The Great Minds of Investing

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. In today's classic episode, Preston and I are speaking to William Green. We originally interviewed William back in May 2015 as episode 38, and looking back, this episode stood out to us as something very special. It wasn't only because of the book we discussed, The Great Minds of Investing. The book is outstanding. But William stood out. And he did it in such a special way that when we in 2021 were looking for a new co-host

Starting point is 00:00:28 for The Investors podcast, we couldn't help but think of William. In this interview, William is very thoughtful. And you can tell how he long ago realized that investing is about so much more than the money. It's about living the best possible life. So without further ado, let's jump to it. We study billionaires and this is episode 38 of The Investors Podcast. Broadcasting from Bel Air Maryland.

Starting point is 00:00:55 This is the Investors Podcast. They'll read the books and summarize the lessons. They'll test the waters and tell you when it's cold. They'll give you actionable investing strategies. Your host, Preston Pish and Sting Broderson. All right, how's everybody doing out there? This is Preston Pish, and I'm your host for the Investors podcast. And as usual, I'm accompanied by my co-host, Stig Broderson, out in Denmark.

Starting point is 00:01:25 And today, we have a really fun guest for you. His name is William Green. And William, he's got an education from Ackron. which Guy Speer, who we had on our show earlier, also had his education from Oxford. So I got a question for William after this introduction. But he also studied journalism at Columbia University in New York. He's a writer. And I'll tell you, he has written for some top-tier companies like Time, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, the New Yorker, the economist.

Starting point is 00:01:55 And he specializes in investing. And he just came out with a brand new book. The name of the book is the great minds of investing, and it has a profile of all the top investors in the entire world. And he sent us a copy of this book, and let me tell you, this is a beautiful book. I think somebody actually qualified as being a sexy book. And for investing, that's a real accomplishment, William, because not too many people can make an investing book look sexy. Thank you. So my question for you is, did you know Guy from Oxford, or did you meet Guy afterwards?

Starting point is 00:02:28 It's a good question. Hi, first, thanks so much for having me on. I'm just thrilled to be here with you. Guy, I did know at Oxford, but very, very vaguely. And I actually realized there were many years later in a sort of flashback, that 15 years later, I remembered him as this sort of dashing-looking young bloke with a, with a sort of red scarf. I think I resented because he was much better looking than me. And then I became friends with him when we were both in New York. We had both left, left, left, London and moved to New York. And we kind of randomly met and we became friends. And what I didn't realize until many years later is that I was actually one of the first investors in his fund, which I, you know, I'm not sure I did it through tremendous due diligence or intelligence. I think I sort of intuitively thought he was really smart. And I think sometimes in investing, we're kind of, we just get lucky.

Starting point is 00:03:23 And I've been an investor with, I probably for 15 years since then. and we've become close friends and collaborators on his work. Yeah. So for people that are joining us that maybe didn't listen to one of the earlier episodes, we interviewed Guy Speer. He's the hedge fund manager for the Aquamarine Fund. He, him and Moniz Pobrai, who we're actually going to talk about in this interview, are very close friends.

Starting point is 00:03:44 And Guy just gave us one of the best interviews. If you haven't listened to our interview with Guy Spear, you need to definitely go back and listen to that. But Guy told us about William and this book that he's been writing. So we've been anticipating this book since around. Christmas. We've been really excited to get our hands on it. And then whenever I saw it, I was like, wow, this thing's crazy. Like, it is an awesome book. But anyway, we had a surprise for you lined up today, William. Guy was going to dial into this call and just congratulate you and just tell you,

Starting point is 00:04:15 you know, congrats on the book. But he got caught up in Houston with the storm that they have down there. He was actually traveling on his way to Boston. He got stuck in Houston, and he's actually on a flight right now. So he wasn't able to dial in for the interview, but he was totally planning on making it. He's here in spirit. Guy has been a tremendous support to me in many ways. And one of the things that's fascinating about Guy that I learned by spending a lot of time with him because, you know, I virtually lived with him and his family in Zurich for a while while we were working on his book, the education of a value investor. And one of the things I learned from Guy is this idea that he and a friend of his Ken Schubenstein, who's a professor at Columbia Business School, had discussed, which is

Starting point is 00:04:54 this idea of compounding goodwill. And Guy really lives this way, like this idea that you're constantly doing things to help people. And so I think it's a really fascinating twist on the whole idea of compounding money. You know, it's a sort of, it's a sort of more profound version of it. So he's well worth studying, I think, like most of these investors, he's worth studying as an investor, but also as a human being, because you learn stuff about how to live from the best investors. That's the thing Stig and I can definitely say is that once we met Guy, he is such a giving person. Like, he would not stop. Like, it was just like, oh, here's another person that can help you out. And this like, guy, like, how can I possibly repay you at

Starting point is 00:05:36 this point? And he wants nothing in return. That's the thing that's just so amazing. But anyway, let's start talking about your book here. So William, tell us a little bit about yourself on how you found yourself as a writer really coming into this realm of investment. How did you get attracted to the, to the writing of investors? It's a slightly unlikely and unexpected story even for me, because I grew up in England, and as you say, I went to Oxford. I studied English literature at Oxford, and I moved to New York when I was about 21 and thought that I would be a great novelist or storyteller and would write beautiful long pieces for the New Yorker and would be a sort of artist. And I would get the business

Starting point is 00:06:17 section of the Sunday New York Times on Sunday. And I literally would just toss it out. I would turn to the book review, which was really interesting to me. And I regarded business and investing and money as kind of crass and vulgar. And I thought, you know, these people who just devote their lives to making money are kind of superficial and they live meaningless lives. And then in my early 20s, I started to invest. I had sold a small apartment that my brother and I had owned in London. So I had a little bit of money, not a huge amount, but I started to invest.

Starting point is 00:06:51 invest. And I started to really study investing. I would read endlessly about mutual funds and the like. And it reminded me somewhat of what had happened to me when I was a kid when I was about 15 at boarding school. I went to Eaton, which is this sort of very posh, slightly oppressive English boarding school. And I had sort of secretly discovered horse racing and gambling on horses. And I set up a betting account at a local turf accountant, as they're called in England, in Windsor. And I used to sort of sneak out when everyone else was rowing or playing cricket. And I would go to this betting shop and I would bet on the horses. And initially I made money and I thought, wow, this is fantastic because I'm never going to have to work. And then I discovered

Starting point is 00:07:36 that actually I lost and I immediately stopped betting on horses because I wasn't interested in it for the thrill. I wanted to make money by playing this game. And in a way, when I was in my early 20s and I discovered investing, it had the same kind of thrill and fascination to me. It was this game. And you thought, well, so if I can be smart and use my brain in an intelligent, thoughtful way, I can actually make money without really doing that much hard work,

Starting point is 00:08:06 which I think is what people like Bill Nygrin and John Spears, who we feature in the book, also discovered. But they were kind of, you know, it was almost an excuse not to have to do things like mowing lawns for $6 an hour. Well, it's a function of probability. I mean, that's what people don't realize is as you go to the track, it's a probability game, like your odds of winning. And when you invest in a company, something, some catastrophic event could happen tomorrow to that business and it could go, you know, completely bankrupt. And that's a probability. It's a real small probability.

Starting point is 00:08:36 It's very small compared to like your track racing. But it's still a probability. and I think a lot of people need to respect the fact that there's definitely a, there's an odds to it no matter how you shake it. I don't care what anyone says. There's definitely an odds. Yeah, and it's a game at some level. And I think the best investors often are people who don't have any emotion involved in the game. They truly see it as a game.

Starting point is 00:09:02 And so then part of what happened to me was that I started to write about investors for various publications. So, for example, I profiled Bill Miller for Fortune. I went to the Palmas and interviewed Sir John Templeton for Money Magazine. I would write about Marty Whitman and his attempt to find a kind of apprentice who could match his greatness. I wrote that for Forbes. I interviewed Bill Rulain, who was the guy who when Buffett closed his limited partnerships in the 60s. He said to his shareholders, you know, you should invest with this friend of mine, Bill Rulain. and over the next, whatever, 30 years we've been to beat the market by something like

Starting point is 00:09:41 four and a half thousand percentage points at the Sequoia Fund. So I interviewed this series of incredible investors, and I became kind of fascinated by this question of what made them special, what they had in common, why this tiny percentage of great investors was able to kind of defy gravity, if you like, and beat the market. And so that became kind of this abiding intellectual passion of mind. But then I would say in the last few years, my interest in investing is kind of deepened as I've got older. I'm in my mid-40s now and you become maybe hopefully a little bit more soulful as you reach middle age. And I started to be interested in these guys, not just as a way of thinking, you know, how do I get rich and be as lazy as possible.

Starting point is 00:10:27 I start to think that these guys like Buffett and Munger or Monish Pabri or John Spears or whoever you want to talk about any of these great investors, they're repositories of tremendous. tremendous practical wisdom. You know, they figured out certain things about what works in life and what doesn't work in life. And, you know, they're not flawless. There are plenty of them who've, you know, had terrible marriages and legal problems or whatever, you know, I mean, like all of us, they're human. But I think they've figured out a great deal about how to live successful lives. And so I think part of what this book is about is, yeah, how do you get rich? How do you figure out, you know, ways to get rich? But part of it is much deeper than that. And I come back again and again in the interviews to questions about things like, you know,

Starting point is 00:11:14 what's made you happiest? What's given you a sense of fulfillment? What disappoints you? When you look back, what do you regret in the course of your life? Where do you get your strength in moments where, you know, you're going through the ringer and life is not working out for you? And so I sort of, I guess I look at investing in a slightly different way to most people. I'm fascinated in it as a financial game, but I'm also fascinated in it as a kind of microcosm

Starting point is 00:11:43 that teaches you about how to live. If you study and reverse engineer these very brilliant, very successful people's eyes. Yeah. I also fascinated William about how to make the returns yourself. Like a lot of people would look at someone like Ron Buffett and say, I want to replicate what he's doing. I wanted to make these returns myself or as a person do a thing, he is probably better than I will speak, I will just invest in Brooks Hathaway and then, you know, to sit back, relax, and enjoy my family in my life. One of the things that struck me about Buffett, it's interesting that you immediately bring up Buffett as we talk about the greatest investors. The thing that really struck me,

Starting point is 00:12:23 sort of surprisingly, was I had always thought Ben Graham was kind of the most important investing mind of the last century. And actually what you start to see is Buffett is kind of the most important investing mind. But he just has this. extraordinary influence. And again and again, I would talk to these great investors, and they would talk about discovering Graham, and they would talk about Buffett. And so it was kind of fascinating to me that actually, it may be that the greatest influence in the world of investing truly is Buffett at this point, and not Graham, who was his master. You know, it's, I had the same opinion. So whenever I started reading and studying Buffett, I immediately went to Graham because I knew that that was his source of,

Starting point is 00:13:04 or his foundation of investing. But then the thing that I really had, had an appreciation for Buffett was the fact that he took Graham's basically like cigar butt approach, but he really morphed it using Charlie Munger. I know a lot of people know this story, but his ability to basically take that and really kind of change it in a different direction where he was going after great business as opposed to ones that were kind of dying, I think was what really set him strategically apart from Graham and why so many people got such an attraction to Buffett because he kind of took it from a dark, negative way of investing to this really bright and luminous way of investing that had a profound impact on society. And I think

Starting point is 00:13:45 that's one of the reasons why so many people make that change in transition. Would you, would you agree with that, William? It's a very interesting point. I think it's, I think you're right, but I think it's probably slightly unfair to ban Graham. I think I think Graham came up with a couple of very, very profound insights that are still as, and even that is under playing it very significantly. You know, these ideas like the margin of safety that he came up with, it's an incredibly profound concept, if you think, that applies not just to investing, but to everything in your life, you know, this idea that the future is tremendously uncertain, and so you need to build in some kind of margin of safety. And, you know, I was telling someone recently that, as I, as I

Starting point is 00:14:30 I've been teaching my son to drive, if you can call me a teacher of driving since I'm not great myself. I have a 17-year-old son. And I keep saying to him, you know, remember Buffett, remember Buffett. You need to check in your mirror. You can't, you know, and then you need to look around. You can't just change lane. You know, you've got to have this margin of safety. And I've really internalized that idea from Graham.

Starting point is 00:14:52 So I think there are many very profound ideas from Graham, you know, the idea that you don't really want to be yanked around by the market. that the market serves you, that it's not your master, it's your servant. And so I think there are very profound things that come from Graham. But then, you know, Joe Greenblatt made a very similar point to me that you made about Buffett, about how Buffett kind of added this one twist to Graham, which is, cheap companies are great, but if you can find cheap, good companies, that's even better. And Joe Greenblatt said to me, you know, that one twist made Buffett the real. richest or one of the richest men in the world. And Joel was saying that, you know, when Joel went

Starting point is 00:15:36 to Wharton, right, and he had these professors who kept saying to him, you know, the markets are efficient. And just visually, he didn't believe it. And then he discovered Graham, like many of these investors in this book, you know, it was almost a religious epiphany. You know, he discovers Graham and it changes his mind about everything. And he suddenly has this framework of what he described as a sort of very simple framework to see the world. And then he adds a few years later what Buffett taught him. And so he said those two principles, you know, by marrying Graham and Buffett, really that's how he ended up making, you know, 50% a year returns to his first decade as a hedge fund manager. Yeah. Yeah. And William, I'm actually curious about your own experience because you said

Starting point is 00:16:21 like several times that a lot of the people that were really influenced by Warren Buffett. And it was almost like a religious experience that you would have someone like David Winter in the book who is a fantastic investment himself said that it's like religion. Either you believe in it or you don't believe in it. And you have people saying, I found the intelligence and the best and like, like, really, right? So what was your own personal experience, rebellion? Yeah, you're absolutely right. It really is almost like a, like a religious thing. And Buffett has always said either you get it or you don't, you know, and if you don't get it, you're kind of never going to get it. And so for me, when I started to invest in my early,

Starting point is 00:16:59 you know, I would see, I would read these things that would say, you know, you want to have half your money in growth funds and half in value funds. And for a couple of years, I kind of did that. And in the end, I got to a point where I just had nothing that wasn't value. I mean, for the last 20 years, I've only invested in value stuff. And it just, it just makes intuitive sense to me. I think I'm, I mean, I have none of the investing greatness of the people in this book. But like them, I'm naturally contrarian. I like to go against things. crowd. I don't necessarily think the hood is, is, you know, has this tremendous wisdom. I understand that indexing is an incredibly powerful thing and that, you know, it might even be that I'd be much

Starting point is 00:17:41 smarter just to index. But intuitively, the idea of going against the crowd, being contrary and buying stuff that's cheap is very, very appealing to me. I think one of the things that's interesting to me is that when, when you look at all the people in this book and at most of the great, great value investors, they're kind of iconoclasts. They're these mavericks and eccentrics who temperamentally go against the crowd. They question everything. They're kind of deeper thinkers. And I think, but I think by nature, I grew up as somebody who questioned everything. And even if you think about the fact that, you know, as a 15-year-old, I was sneaking out to gamble on the horses rather than, you know, going to play cricket or rowing in England,

Starting point is 00:18:24 I was trying to figure stuff out. And it may have been kind of roguish, but it was it was me trying at a very early age to think. So how do you beat the system, you know, by using your intelligence? And when I look at someone like Joel Greenblatt or Monish Pabry, these are guys who are kind of masters of beating the system through using their intelligence. And it may be that for almost all investors, it's not a smart thing to do. that you're much better off indexing. But I do think there's this, there's this tiny group of investors who,

Starting point is 00:19:01 who kind of show us the way, who shows that if you're really smart and you get your emotions under control, you can win the game. And that's, that's what fascinates me. And maybe, you know,

Starting point is 00:19:12 maybe it's kind of a mirage, you know, that I keep chasing after this, you know, this possibility that I'm going to be that tiny percentage that beats the market. But, you know, over the years, I invested with Guy, obviously, who's done very well, who's beaten the market by

Starting point is 00:19:29 hundreds of percentage points over the years. This is Guy Speer. I invested it for a long time I invested with Marty Whitman. I have a separate account with Marty. And, you know, I did it right off to the tech bubble burst. And everyone was sort of miserable about stocks. And I set up this account with Marty because, you know, he was a great bottom feeder. He was a great, a great guy at buying busted tech stocks and other things like that. And the other guy I invested with, who I'm still invested with, is a very brilliant guy who I was introduced to by Bruce Greenwald, the famous professor of value investing at Columbia.

Starting point is 00:20:05 And that's a hedge fund manager in Boston, a guy called Andrew Weiss, who hasn't had a losing year in 24 years with his hedge fund. And that, to me, you know, he kind of saved me during the financial crisis, because Guy had a terrible time and, you know, really had a bad year, like many of, many of the sort of fairly concentrated value investors. And why made 1%. And so, you know, this is why I sort of still cling to this idea that even though there's a hell of a lot of logic to investing in an index fund, actually, you get tremendous benefit, you know, by being a long-term contrary in value investor if you have the temperament for it. And I think we've got to give respect to all these guys in your book and all these people that you're talking about William. These guys are very smart.

Starting point is 00:20:57 They have dedicated their life to understanding like fundamental aspects, like accounting and just this hardcore. Like they are digging in this stuff for hours every day. And I think a lot of people don't necessarily have that respect for the people they're going against. They really are trying to beat the market. If you're a person who's just like trying to do it like one day out of the week or whatever and you're just really kind of and not into it. I mean, really into it. I would argue you really do need to stick with an index. Would you agree with that based on all the interviews? I think it's a very important point. I think you're absolutely right. You know, early in my career as a finance writer, I went to the

Starting point is 00:21:38 Bahamas, as I was mentioning to meet Sir John Templeton. And I, you know, I was asking him for advice myself. And he said to me, you know, you have no business buying individual stocks on you're a professional, basically. He said, it's such hard work. You know, you need to be tremendously diligent. And he said he didn't buy individual stocks anymore at that point. I guess he was in his 80s at that point. And, you know, I mean, a lot of people would disagree with this and would say, no, no, I do fantastically by doing individual stocks. But, you know, Jean-Marie Eveyard said to me, he doesn't really manage his own portfolio anymore because he doesn't have a team of analysts who he can send out to do the research since he's now in his mid-seventive.

Starting point is 00:22:20 I guess, and he's more sort of emeritus figure at his fund business. Bill Nygren said to me that he said there are plenty of great investors who kind of trying to go half time later in life. And he said it's always a disaster. He said the investment business is so difficult that either the throttle is fully on or it's fully off. And so I think you do have to be very intensely involved to do well. But that said, I think there are certain advantages that an individual investor might have, because if you think about it, the pressure that these guys are under, the professionals to perform every quarter, you know, there's tremendous institutional pressure from their bosses saying, you know, look, you've underperformed now for three years running and how come you don't

Starting point is 00:23:08 get this new paradigm of investing in internet stocks, which is what happened to Eveyard. Don Yachtman had the same way his own board tried to fire him. And they said, you know, you're no longer investing in accordance with the principles of your own fund. And so Yachtman at the time had probably 10% of his fund in Philip Morris. This is in the late 90s at a time when I think it was trading at a P.E. of six and had dividend yield of about six. And, you know, he's getting fired virtually and managed to survive this war with his directors. Your shareholders bail out at the worst possible time. So if you're an individual investor and you have the right temperament, you do have an advantage in that you can stick with it, but you need an extraordinary temperament to do it.

Starting point is 00:23:51 You know, so all these guys are handicapped by the short-term interest of the people that are giving them money. You know, you look at guy and you look at, he's got a community of people that trust him and our value investors and understand that it takes time and you might not have results right away. But I think for a lot of these other hedge fund managers, especially the ones that, you know, that you have in the, that you display in the book, These guys are totally handicapped by the people that are invested with them with their short-term interest. Right. And this is part of the genius of Buffett, right? It's the Buffett realized that by having a corporation, that he had a captive capital, that you wouldn't be subject to people panicking and bailing out.

Starting point is 00:24:33 And so I guess that's my question. Why do you think more of these guys don't adopt that model? Now, I know Monish Pobrai is going to be doing that this year where he's starting his own corporation. but why are these other guys not doing that? I don't understand it. You know, one of the things that's fascinating about Monash is that he says often in life you have the best ideas are all out there and yet nobody does it. And he said when he started off investing, he studied, he started Buffett obsessively. You know, Monash has this sort of obsessive, brilliance to him where he just sort of, he, he studied

Starting point is 00:25:07 something and kind of takes it apart, dissect it, and understands it perfectly and then mimics it. And he said he looked around at the mutual fund world. And he said, it was just staggering that all of these guys could see how someone like Buffett had done extraordinarily well, not least by having a very focused portfolio. And they would own hundreds of stocks. And they would own hundreds of stocks that were overvalued. And so he said, he said, you looked at this and you just knew that they were toast. And so I think it's a really fascinating idea that you can, the fundamental ideas about how to get rich in investing, are not that elusive.

Starting point is 00:25:45 I mean, we kind of understand that, you know, yeah, there are a lot of different ways to skin the cat. You can get rich a lot of different ways. But there are basic tenets of investing that we kind of know work. And yet people continue to panic, to bail out at the worst time, to buy high and sell low. And so I think what I came to realize is that the challenge is as much temperamental as it is intellectual, that you can, you know, this is one of the things that Bill Miller said to me is that during the financial crisis, he discovered that all of his analysts who claimed to be contrary and value investors were not value investors at all. They were value investors so long as it worked.

Starting point is 00:26:25 And in the moment when it ceased to work and really ceased to work when you were getting killed, they suddenly just didn't have the temperament for it. And so I think it requires, you know, to do the right thing, to apply investing principles that work, not only requires a kind of intellectual understanding, but actually a sort of wiring to be able to do it. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future.

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Starting point is 00:30:59 I think the thing that Monash and Warren both share is the fact that they look at things through the lens of I'm an investor and I'm also a business owner and they have that business sense. And whenever I think you mesh those two together, you get such a better outcome. And I think that's one of the brilliance with Buffett and Monash. But I want to explain something to the audience just so that they understand it in case they didn't understand what we were talking about there. So when we were saying that Warren Buffett, what he's done is he's basically flipped the hedge fund model on its head. So whenever a business becomes overvalued in the hedge fund realm, that's when everyone is giving you their money.

Starting point is 00:31:36 And that's when you don't want it because you can't employ it properly. And then whenever the market crashes, everyone wants to take their money away from you. And that's whenever you need it because you're able to buy stocks at really cheap prices. So it's very hard for a hedge fund manager to be successful because they're getting the capital at the wrong times. And so what Buffett did is he flipped that model on its head and he incorporated a business, which he bought Berkshire Hathaway. And that's a whole other story. But under Berkshire Hathaway is where he's making all of his stock picks. So now if you have a person that wants to sell their stock in Burkshire,

Starting point is 00:32:09 Berkshire Hathaway, guess who can buy it back at a cheaper price? Well, Buffett can. He can actually buy back the shares from the people that are selling it at the wrong time. And then if the market takes his company extremely high, he can actually sell more shares on the open market, raise some cash and keep it within his company. And so he's basically taking that model and flipped it on its head. And that's why we were asking, William, why do more people not do that? And it gets to a broader point, which is something that Guy Speer discussed with me, a tremendous amount when we were working on his book, The Educational Value Investor,

Starting point is 00:32:42 which is that how your company, your investment firm is structured is actually tremendously important. You know, people tend to focus on this issue of, you know, is the stock cheap and stuff like that? It doesn't really matter if your, if your shareholders are going to bail out at the worst possible moment, so you're not going to have any cash to invest anyway.

Starting point is 00:33:01 And this is what's happened with a series of the greatest value investors, is that in these moments of crisis, their investors just panicked and ran. And so Bill Miller, who I'm a great admirer of, who I think really is an astonishing mind, brilliant, brilliant man. Bill Miller found that his assets went down 90% from peak to trough. You know, he initially was managed $70 billion. He said to me that that 90% figure turns out to be quite a standard figure.

Starting point is 00:33:32 He said that the same thing happened to Bob Rodriguez. I know that Yachtmann at certain points had all of the money flat out of his fund. Jean-Marie Eveyard during the late 90's tech bubble when he underperformed for three years in a row drastically when everyone else was getting rich, had, I think, his assets went down from $6 billion to $2 billion. So in exactly the moment where there's tremendous opportunity, your shareholders tend to bail out. And so this is a perennial problem. And it's, you know, one of the things that Joe Greenblatt has done, which is really fascinating because Greenblatt is a game player is he's trying to figure out how do you create a system where you're not sabotaged by kind of the foolishness, stupidity, panic of your investors. And so originally what he did, he's done in a number of ways.

Starting point is 00:34:26 Originally what he did was he set up a hedge fund that was very, very concentrated. and he and his long-time investment partner did unbelievably well. And after five years, they returned half of their shareholders' money. And after 10 years, they returned all of their shareholders' money. So then suddenly, they didn't have to worry at all about their shareholders panicking. So that's a, I mean, that's a very luxurious thing to be able to do. But it was so that he didn't have to deal with the emotions of his shareholders. Because running a concentrated portfolio, sometimes he would find that in a matter of weeks,

Starting point is 00:35:00 he lost 30, 40% of his money. And he could deal with it because he knew that the stocks were incredibly cheap. But his shareholders just couldn't. And so then he's done another thing more recently, which is a different way to solve the same problem, which is in 2012, he set up a series of mutual funds and hedge funds that in something like 300 very undervalued stocks, they have long positions in those stocks.

Starting point is 00:35:26 And then they short 300 very overvalued stocks. And so what he's trying to do is sort of remove a tremendous amount of volatility and an emotion from the process by having a sort of systematic approach. And he said to me, you know, the returns are not going to be as good as the returns of my concentrated hedge fund. But it doesn't actually matter because the shareholders are going to be able to stomach it more likely to be able to stomach it because it won't have that volatility. So I think, you know, to be a really good investor, you really need to figure out this. emotional, psychological side of investing, you know, not just, yeah, I bite into this idea that value investing and being contrarian is really smart. You actually have to figure out how am I going to respond when my portfolio is down 50% and simultaneously I get laid off because, you know,

Starting point is 00:36:19 the business world is imploding too. You know, are you still going to be able to be rational? Are you still going to be able to buy it? And that's what these great investors have is, is not just the intellectual understanding of these concepts, but the kind of visceral psychological strength to be smart and opportunistic at those moments of crisis. And William, I can't help asking, is that also how you evaluate who should manage your money? Is that not by only looking at the track records and their philosophy, of course,

Starting point is 00:36:48 but also how they manage through the last crisis, for instance? It's a really interesting question, because, you know, how do you really assess this? I mean, you know, I mean, think about it. When someone goes through a divorce, for example, there have been these studies that show that money managers returns really are affected by a divorce. How do you know what your money manager is going to go through? Not just a financial crisis that they're going to be able to deal with,

Starting point is 00:37:18 but they might have a divorce. They might have a sick kid. You know, Donald Yatman had this extraordinary. wrenching thing where his daughter had had a terrible stroke and, you know, was in in a locked-in state where she couldn't move anything other than her eyelids. And, you know, so how do you, how do you guess whether your money manager is going to have the psychological strength to deal with hardship? So I've had this debate for years with this very close friend of my Jason's wife, who's a brilliant columnist at the Wall Street Journal, personal finance columnist. And Jason, Jason,

Starting point is 00:37:54 who's interviewed more great managers than anyone on earth and is a brilliant mind in his own right, indexes his own money. And I've always said to him, you know, you're just smart enough to come up with the wrong solution. You know, you're one of the few people who actually could beat the market. And yet you end up indexing. And he's always said to me, you know, yeah, maybe you can identify the guys who can beat the market. But, you know, then they're under so much institutional pressure, so much pressure from their bosses, so much, you know, there are so many human things that can go wrong. And so I think it's a perennially fascinating debate, you know, that even if you pick the right guy, will he continue to be the right guy? And I haven't truly resolved this.

Starting point is 00:38:37 And, you know, we can we can look back at someone like Buffett and say, after all these years, yeah, he was the right guy. But, you know, I didn't invest with him 15 years ago because I thought, well, he's already too old. You know, it's sort of, it's sort of like when I was a teenager and the Rolling Stones did a reunion tour. And I thought, well, they're all in their fortits. I'm not going to go see them. I missed it. And now that I'm 46, I'm like, God, I wish I'd gone to see the Rolling Stones.

Starting point is 00:39:02 And in the same way, you know, I wish I'd not thought, well, you know, Buffett is, you know, it's the law of large numbers. He's managing too much money now and he's kind of old. I kind of missed it. You know, so these questions of evaluating greatness and writing it and sticking with it, a tremendously difficult. Well, I don't mean the boast, but I did see the Rolling Stones. Now I'm jealous.

Starting point is 00:39:30 All right. Hey, I'll get in the next question. And they were not as good as what I thought they'd be. So I'm just going to throw that out there. So you don't have to feel so bad. You should have invested with Buffett instead, you know, and skip the Rolling Stones, put the money for the tickets in Bush Hathaway B shares. You're right.

Starting point is 00:39:46 I should have. All right. So the question I got for you, I was immediately captivated. by the first person that you mentioned in the book, Erving Khan. And the picture in the book, I love that picture. And your photographer was amazing in this book. He is a very talented individual. But the picture of Irving, he is sitting down.

Starting point is 00:40:04 He's very old. And unfortunately, Irving's passed away since the interview. How old was he whenever you interviewed him, William? I think it's 108. And in the photograph, he's 108. And, yeah, we really haven't focused sufficiently on my extraordinary partner, Michael O'Brien, who really is the reason why the book exists, because he started five years ago taking these incredible photographs of these great investors. And he started with Charlie Munger.

Starting point is 00:40:33 And since then, he's photographed all these guys like Buffett and Bill Ackman and Irving Khan and Joe Greenblatt. And he's just extraordinary. And he has this kind of ability to get very up close to these people and to get them to engage with the camera. And one of the things that he does is is he doesn't talk during the photo shoots. He just sort of motions with his fingers, you know, to raise your chin a bit or turn to the right of it. And so I think the subjects, whether it's Buffett or Munger or any of these guys, they see his intense engagement and they're very intense.

Starting point is 00:41:08 So when you look at someone like Buffett in his photo, you know, he's looking directly at you and there's a sort of aliveness to him. And so there was a particular challenge for Michael O'Brien, the photographer when he was taking this picture of Irving Khan, which I talk about in the introduction to the book, which is that Irving kept nodding off in between the shots. And Irving, you know, he was 108 years old and he was tired and his eyes were starting to fail and his hearing was starting to fail. And his grandson, who works for Khan brothers, who's an analyst at the family firm, who's a wonderful guy, Andrew Kahn, who's an analyst there, was sort of standing

Starting point is 00:41:48 outside the frame asking, asking Irving Khan, tell them about the stock that you bought in 1928, you know, or the stock that you shorted, magma copper, which you shorted during the, you know, the crash of 29. And so Irving sort of wakes up during the photo shoot because he's telling this wonderful story of the first stock that he bought in 1928 and 1929. And so it captures sort of the aliveness of this extraordinary man. So I had a similar challenge when I was coming to interview him because Andrew Con, the grandson, just said to me, he's too sick, he can't talk to you. And I was sort of in despair because, you know, I didn't want to do a potted thing where I went

Starting point is 00:42:31 to the clips and read what everyone else had said. And so we ended up coming up with a solution which worked to a degree that I almost couldn't have dreamed of, which is that I wrote out a series of questions, probably about six questions, but they were sort of deep questions. There were questions I really cared about. So things like when when you look back on on the 108 years of your life, what are you really proud of? What, you know, what's the key to a fulfilling life and not just a, not just an extraordinarily long life? And then his grandson, Andrew, took these questions to him.

Starting point is 00:43:08 And over several days, interviewed his grandfather on my behalf and wrote down the answers and sent them to me. And there was something about it. got that email and, and, you know, usually you'd be disappointed that you hadn't interviewed the guy in person. And I was tremendously moved by the email. And, you know, one of the things that he said, I mean, there was tremendous investing advice. There was tremendous life advice as well. So I'll, I'll share both if you don't mind. So the first thing I said to him, you know, what's the single most important piece of financial advice you can share with our readers? And he said, safety. He said, considering the downside is the absolute most important thing you need to learn as an investor.

Starting point is 00:43:51 And he said, you know, you need to deal with this before you think about making profits. And he had this lovely image. He said, everyone's in such a hurry. He said, you know, they can make a horse gallop. But can they see where they're going? And he said, if you slow up and you don't take crazy risks and you don't lose money and you keep your eye on the downside, you're going to do way better than your gambler friends in the long term. And this to me was a very profound idea because for one thing,

Starting point is 00:44:21 I had made one incredibly stupid investing mistake in the course of my investing career. I'm sure I've made more, but this was a spectacularly stupid one, where I had invested in a private company that was run by a friend of mine that had incredible technology. And initially it shot up and I was thinking I was the smartest guy, And I felt like I belonged to this exclusive community of very, very smart people. You know, Goldman Sachs invested at something 40 times the valuation that I invested in. And I just felt so smart.

Starting point is 00:44:54 And then it just kind of imploded. And I sort of did a lot of soul searching about it afterwards. And I realized the degree to which my ego was involved. And that if I'd been, if I'd had my ego under control more, I hadn't cared more about impressing other people or, you know, being in with a smart rich set, whatever, I would have had a lot more money. And, you know, I'm, you know, I'm a writer. I'm not a hedge fund manager. And so, so making stupid mistakes counts for me. You know, I, you know, I sort of pay for my kids to go to college and stuff. And so, you know,

Starting point is 00:45:30 the things that I've done really well over the years were the things where I just quietly invested with value guys and I stuck with it for many years. And so, so listening to having to having Conn, It was like one of those things where you hear something that you know already, but when you hear it from someone who's 108 and who's lived through World War II, Vietnam, the crash of 29, and you hear how he survived and prospered, you think, man, I wish I'd been smart enough to learn that before, but I'm pretty darn glad to have learned it now. The other thing I would say, I was mentioning that he gave very important life advice,

Starting point is 00:46:05 and this is a recurring theme in the book. We're trying not just to tell people, you know, Here's how you invest. Here's how you get super rich. You know, I want to learn from someone like Irving Khan. What gave you pleasure in your life? What gives you pride? What gives you satisfaction?

Starting point is 00:46:19 And he said, look, it's a difficult question and it's going to be different for everyone. But he said family is very, very important. And looking back, what really gave him pleasure was family, having healthy kids, building Khan brothers, this firm that's kind of great. And, you know, it's not a huge firm. It has about a billion dollars in assets. now by his son Tommy, who's also in his 70s. But I took that very much to heart.

Starting point is 00:46:46 You know, it's very easy to get carried away and think that everything is about getting rich. And, you know, you look at someone like Irving Kluen, and he never was flashy, he never was buying fancy boats and big houses. You know, his son, Tommy, would take him to a fancy French restaurant and his dad would just order a burger, you know. And the only thing he spent his money on really were books.

Starting point is 00:47:08 And so I, you know, when you look at someone like Ovin Khan, is he, is he the greatest investor? Did he, did he build a massive fortune? Did he, did he average 40% a year? I don't really think that's the measure of his greatness. I think there's a kind of, there's a kind of life wisdom that you get from him that, that, that's very, very important. Two things that I was, I first want to talk about your idea that you were saying here about family, because I think, Everybody knows that deep inside with their own intuition. I'm just amazed at how often I ignore my own intuition.

Starting point is 00:47:46 And I think everybody else probably does it too where you know what the right answer is. You don't have to ask anybody. You don't have to read about it in a book. You already know the answer. And I just wonder, I ask myself this question. Like, if I started listening to my intuition more every time that I know those answers, just imagine like how much more profitable and fruitful we had all become if we just actually listened to our own intuition.

Starting point is 00:48:11 It's a very profound idea. And I, you know, look, I started off as a sort of know-it-all cerebral intellectual who felt like you can, you can crack every nut with your brain. And increasingly, I've become more intuitive and perhaps less rational. And I think, you know, I'd like to think you get wiser as you become more intuitive and less rational in a strange way. And I, Guy Spears said to me, a fascinating. thing about Warren Buffett at some point, he said that he's pretty convinced that Warren actually

Starting point is 00:48:45 makes all of his investments intuitively and that there's, you know, I mean, there's the, you know, Malcolm Gladwell talks about this, right, with thin slicing that you, you know, you don't really know what's going into an intuitive decision. You know, there's tremendous amount of experience and judgment and rational activity going on. But I went to Howard Marks, who's also really a genius. I mean, Howard Marks had a wonderful, wonderful mind. And I said to him, do you think that's true about Buffett, that he makes his investment decisions intuitively? And Marx agreed, and Marx, who's utterly brilliant, agreed that he basically is intuitive too. He said, he said in his early days, he thought that everything was down to his intellect, that that was how he was doing anything.

Starting point is 00:49:29 And increasingly, it's intuitive. And so I think there's this very profound balance, right, where you want to think as dispassionately and rationally as possible, but you don't want to ignore that message inside you. And I once spent a lot of time interviewing Jeff Vinnick when he was managing, I guess it was after he had managed the Magellan Fund, which is the biggest mutual fund in the world. And Vinnick said that when he had made an investment in a very cheap stock and it made him physically nauseous to own it,

Starting point is 00:50:00 he knew that it was a good investment. and Soros, you know, listened to the fact that he got tremendous back pain as the sort of signal that something was wrong with his portfolio. And so I think, I think for all of us, you're very wise to be connected to your sort of intuitive sense while obviously not disabling your sort of rational analysis. I mean, you don't want to be in the middle of a financial crisis and saying, yeah, I just feel good about myself. You want to be sort of, you know, brutally analytical at the same time. Absolutely. I always quote this thing to my kids. There's a wonderful line from E.M. Foster, where he says,

Starting point is 00:50:42 only connect the pros and the passion, and both will be exalted. And I think that idea of connecting the pros and the passion applies to everything, right? It's the intellect and intuition. It's everything, really. Yeah, it's really funny. Stig and myself and one of the people that writes for us, her name is Netra. We all three took a personality test. And one of the things that it does in the personality test is it weighs your sensing versus your intuition.

Starting point is 00:51:11 And so we all took that and it was really funny to see the results. And one of the things I want to highlight is Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, those guys all on these tests all sensed very high on the intuition piece of the test. And intuition versus sensing is one of the variables of it. That's fascinating. So both Presidents and I, we are big fans of Monash, and he's really someone that we've been looking into. Even though he's kind of a private person, I'd say. I don't know what your impression is, but at least the impression that we have. But I would actually like to hear if you can give us any background information in Monish.

Starting point is 00:51:47 I mean, he's obviously a smart guy. He's having 26% annually for 19 years, and soon he's going to launch his new company that's been listed here in the fall. or that is at least what the rumors are saying. But could you give us any background information on Monash? Yeah, Monash is absolutely fascinating. I flew to Irvine, California to meet Monish and spent the best part of six hours interviewing him. And I would see for the next couple of days,

Starting point is 00:52:15 I was kind of buzzing, you know, because he's so large than life and so full of personality. I have such a brilliant mind that you kind of, you're almost on a high after talking to him. And one of the things that's really fascinating about Monash is that basically he started out as a tech guy, right? He studied engineering and he took a class at Clemson College. He was an immigrant from India and he took a class at Clemson College, not a very well-known university. And in finance.

Starting point is 00:52:48 And he said he just thought the finance students were idiots. And he said none of them would be able to cope with his electrical engineering class. And so he totally dismissed the idea of an investing group. career. And his finance professor saw his grades and just he was so off the charts that he came talked by such a wide margin that his finance professor said, you know, no, you ought to become an investor. And Monash dismisses this, sets up a tech company, which ultimately he sold for about $6 million. And along the way, I think this is in about 1994, he reads about Buffett, really because he'd been in, I think money should have been in an airport and he stumbles across a book by

Starting point is 00:53:28 Peter Lynch, reads Peter Lynch talking about Buffett, starts to study Buffett and starts to think, well, wait a second, how did this guy accumulate money at such high rates of return? And so he starts to sort of reverse engineer what Buffett did. And he said, basically, I figured out that the Buffett was laying down the laws of the investing universe. And so what's fascinating about Monash is that he has this idea that you really don't need any original ideas in life at all to do brilliantly. And so Monash describes themselves as shameless copycat. And so he just dissects what Buffett does and later what Munger does. And he launches a 30-year game to turn $1 million into $1 billion by compounding at 26% a year.

Starting point is 00:54:18 And so what's fascinating to me is this idea that you can kind of reverse engineer the great minds and figure out, how do I apply this to my own life? And Monish has done this in this sort of maniacally focused way in every area of his life. So the structure of his fund is based on the limited partnerships that Buffett had in the 1950s. So you have an annual hurdle where you have to make 6%, I think. And after the 6%, you just get 25% of all of the profits, and there's no management fee, no annual management fee. So if you do really, really well in your investment returns, you make an enormous profit as the money manager. But if you're a bad investor, you make nothing.

Starting point is 00:55:04 And so it's a really nice alignment between the interests of the shareholder and the interest of the fund manager. And likewise, he looks at the degree of concentration. in a small number of holdings that people like Buffett had. And he's like, yeah, I'm going to do that. Why would I want a portfolio of a hundred stocks? If I have a hundred stocks, there's no way I'm going to beat the market, because I'm going to really be matching the market. I'm just going to be a closet indexer.

Starting point is 00:55:30 So I think what's really fascinating about Monish's is this very important, fundamental idea of how you rip off other people's great ideas. And what Monish said to me is that we have this kind of, of obsession with being original thinkers. We all kind of feel like there's something almost holy and righteous about having our own ideas. And he's like, look, I have no shame at all about going through the portfolios of someone like Bill Miller or David Einhorn or Buffett and saying, why is this terrible company in this guy's portfolio? And he said, if you look at someone like Miller's portfolio, when you know that Miller's really smart and he's made an incredibly dumb bet on

Starting point is 00:56:12 airlines. You've got to say, why the hell has he invested in airlines? He's got to have seen something that I haven't seen. And so part of what he does is to look for things that we know are terrible. Like Buffett and Munger had always said that airline stocks are terrible. And here's Miller saying, you know, they're wrong and I'm making a massive bet on airlines. And Miller, of course, made a fortune in the last few years betting on airlines. And so to me, there's something very, very profound about this idea of copying and mimicking other people's best ideas. And so when I left Monash, part of what I was excited about was this idea of, so how do I apply this to my own life? You know, and so when I, so one of the things that I did, which,

Starting point is 00:56:57 you know, maybe I shouldn't say, but I thought, you know what, there's a certain, there's a certain poetic beauty in cloning the cloner. And so I, so I went off and bought one of the stocks that Monish's portfolio, you can, you can see. his 13-filings. And so I thought, well, that's really interesting. He's got 47% of his money and just two stocks. I'd be pretty smart to own one or two of his stocks. So I kind of cloned the cloner. I copied the copycat, which gave me sort of, it gave me sort of poetic pleasure. But then I started also to think, what do I learn from all of these people? If I apply this idea of copying the great ideas, what do, what do I learn from, say, spending time?

Starting point is 00:57:40 with Tom Gaynor, who runs the Markell Corporation, or John Spears, who's a well-known value investor, Tweedy Brown. And, you know, you start to look at these questions like how they give away money, for example. And you think, well, that's really interesting, because when I interview all of these great investors, the happiest ones seem to be more philanthropic. And, you know, maybe it's an absurd generalization, but I think actually to some degree it's really true. So I think you can apply this idea of reverse engineering and copying great ideas really in any area of your life. And it's a very, very powerful concept. So whenever I see something about Monash, I don't have the same connection as you,

Starting point is 00:58:20 so I had to watch him on YouTube. It's still pretty good there, right? But I always get the impression that he's very authentic. Like he would be saying, I really like to take a nap every day. So he has this couch where he can take a nap. And he's saying, I don't think I'm the, I don't have the same brilliant mind as a lot of other billionaires. So I would just copy what they do. I mean, he's really, to me, he seems like the most powerful thing about Monash is that he's so authentic about what he can and can't do.

Starting point is 00:58:55 Do you agree with that? That's a very perceptive observation on your part. I think part of the strength of Monish and also of Guy Speer, who's very, very close. to Monich. So there's a sort of mind melt going on there. They've discussed a lot of these ideas. Part of the strength comes from the fact that they're true to who they are. And I think, I think it seems kind of paradoxical, right? This idea that you're cloning and copying other people's ideas and yet you're having to be true to who you are. And it's a nuance, but it's an important nuance to understand that at some very deep level, Monash believes that you need to be, you need to be

Starting point is 00:59:35 correctly aligned within yourself. And so you need, he believes, you know, if you're a sociopath, you need to be true to your inner sociopaths, which guy disagrees with. Guy, guy who's kind of a ball by that idea. But, you know, Monish said to me that, you know, he wasn't a great CEO. He didn't really like to nurture young talent. And when he was running a tech company, you know, obviously he has a brilliant mind and he could do it very well, but it didn't really play to his strengths. Whereas being a hedge fund

Starting point is 01:00:08 manager, he's the consummate game player. He has no emotion. He's totally brilliant at the sort of mathematical probabilistic side of it. So figuring out how to be true to who you are, how to play to your own strengths, I think is absolutely central to the brilliance of someone like Monash. So it sounds to me like his new holding company that he's getting ready to start. He's probably not going to be the CEO of it. He'll probably just be the investment officer or something. Is he going to outsource, is he going to hire somebody to fill that role since he doesn't enjoy that piece of it? I think it's an interesting question. I think a big part of what you do in running a business like that, which will clearly be replicating

Starting point is 01:00:52 what Buffett has done with Berkshire, is you're allocating capital. And I think, I think Monish is extraordinarily well suited to that. But I think he's trying to a stretch. You know, he's not, he's not comfortable just doing what he's always done. And so he realizes that there's this tremendous strength in having an insurance business because you, you know, as Buffett figured out, you get the float, right? You get the premiums from, from your insurance customers, but you don't have to pay out for quite a while on their claims. And so you get to invest that money. So it gives you a tremendous structural advantage. So because he's a great game player, you know, he's stats.

Starting point is 01:01:33 the deck in his favor by having captive capital investors who can't fail out at the worst possible moment and by having this ability to invest the float. So I think that trumps the fact that he's not someone who, you know, loves nurturing 22-year-old employees who are going through emotional crises. You know, I think it's, you know, the bigger picture is that it plays tremendously to his strengths. So, you know, Guy is very intrigued by the possibility that Monash could turn out sort of to be the Buffet of our generation. I'm not sure anyone can turn out to be the buffet of our generation. But I think, you know, Monish really stands out as an extraordinary middle-aged investor, I guess is about 50 now. Bill Ackman stands out as someone who's very

Starting point is 01:02:21 extraordinary. You know, the book is sort of full of these very great older, older investors. some of them in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and then Irving Khan at 108. But I think there's this newer generation of people like Akhmann and Monich who are also pretty remarkable. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up, and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer. VANTA automates your compliance process and brings

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Starting point is 01:06:02 All right. Back to the show. So I got a question that wasn't on the questions that we plan on asking. And I've been studying Ray Dalio a lot. And I know that he wasn't in your book, but I'm curious to know your thoughts on Ray because whenever I look at somebody that could potentially replace Buffett as far as being an investing genius for the years to come in the next 10 to 20 years, I think Ray Dalio could potentially be one of those guys. I find it very interesting that Dalio is a macro guy and he's also a hedge fund manager. So he didn't take the same model that Buffett had, but yet his returns are just phenomenal. So I was curious if you knew anything about Ray Dalio or just from being a hedge fund manager.

Starting point is 01:06:41 I think Dahlia is a fascinating man. I actually have an interview Dallio, but I've read a great deal about him as you have. And he's clearly fascinating. I mean, a real iconoclast as well, you know, this whole idea that he has of radical truthfulness, you know, that people in his office have to tell each other the truth. They have to be direct. They can't talk behind one another's backs. I think if you talk behind people's backs, you know, it's three strikes in your out.

Starting point is 01:07:10 you're literally fired. It's something like that. I mean, you know, it can sound kind of like a crazy, a cult-like place where they sort of, they record your conversations and everything. But I think actually at some level, he's dealing with the same ideas that people like Monash are dealing with, that you want total truthfulness. And, you know, I think he's also fascinating in this idea that he tests his hypotheses by getting other people to challenge his ideas.

Starting point is 01:07:39 And so there's this sense. that you don't really want to be an investor who just says, yeah, I know best. You need, you need people to come in and say, this is why you're wrong. And I think that's a, it's a fascinating aspect of value investing, right, is to, is to be simultaneously to have this tremendous self-confidence to go against the crowd, but also to be humble enough and open enough to think, what if I'm wrong? And I think Dahlia embodies that. Nigran, Bill Nygrin, told me a fascinating thing but he'd learned from Michael Steinhart, who he was friendly with, who also is another great hedge fund manager,

Starting point is 01:08:14 who's totally different from the type of money managers we're talking about. You know, Steinhart had amazing returns by trading, you know, you could turn over his whole portfolio in a couple of weeks, as I understand it. But Steinhart also had this idea that Nygren learned from him, that you needed to do devil's advocate reviews. And so there was this idea of devil's advocate reviews where you got the biggest bear and the biggest bull on a particular stock, to come in and have lunch with you.

Starting point is 01:08:42 And Nygren adopted this from Steinhart. And any time he's about to buy a stock, he has someone on his staff, literally doing a devil's advocate review saying, here's why you're done. Here's what can go wrong. So I think Dahlia and a lot of these others embody that very powerful idea. I love that.

Starting point is 01:09:00 I love that too. And William, I can't help by comparing Dallio and Moniz, also because this is something Preston that I have really been digging into. because the thing about Delio is that he has this culture and this company. He has a lot of people around him that can tell him when he's wrong. But it's a much larger setup than someone like Moniz for instance.

Starting point is 01:09:21 Like he basically doesn't have a set of, well he has a secretary, but he doesn't have a team analyst. A part-time secretary. I think he has about two or three part-time secretaries. Yeah, because he's been asked this and again, well, I don't have your connections or it's not like, I'll go friend Haramachandra said next to him. I'm so in US at the annual meeting this year, you know, I have to watch him on YouTube. But one of the things he did say on YouTube was that he didn't want to keep around him. I mean, he tried that. And that didn't work because there was too much noise. It's really hard to say no to someone who says, this is the analysis I spent three months

Starting point is 01:10:00 on working on. He would say, I don't think so. I don't feel it. And like a better words. So do you think it's like it's a question of having the best setup or again, do you think it turns back to who do you are as a person? What's what fits you? Yeah, I think it's a very profound and important point. You need to find a setup that's true to who you are. So, you know, if, you know, look, if I if I'm investing, I don't think even, even though I'm quite contrarian and I'm quite good at buying stocks when other people are panicking, I don't think I really have the patience to spend all my time doing spreadsheets. And, you know, I just don't want to do all the number-related stuff.

Starting point is 01:10:44 So I need to be self-aware enough to say, that's never going to be my strength. But I need to invest with someone like Guy or Monish who can do that stuff for me. And I think for each of us as an investor, knowing yourself is incredibly important. And so Monish has these sort of antisocial. where he tells the truth, he doesn't couch anything in soft words. I mean, he's a very charming, very likable guy. I smile as I talk about Monash because I like him very much. He's very large than life character.

Starting point is 01:11:16 But, you know, he's rude and brash in a kind of very enjoyable, entertaining way. And he's not necessarily a team player. He's a brilliant game player who can sit there quietly in his room, in his office in Irvine, which is not in a fancy building. It's in a, you know, it's basically in an industrial park. He doesn't need to impress anyone with how rich he is or how fancy it is. He's created his own setup where he's detached from the world. He's detached from Wall Street.

Starting point is 01:11:43 And he's thinking very clearly. Guy Speer has done the same thing. He figured out that when he was in New York, it messed with his head because he's friends with people like Bill Ackman, who were managing billions of dollars and becoming multi-billionaires. And there were all of these marketers around who were saying, you know, I think you should really be running a $5 billion. a fund. And it's very, very hard to be true to who you are. And so Guy figured out he needed to go to Zurich and be very quiet, very detached from the crowd. Guy has sort of, you know, this wandering mind where his mind sort of all over the place because, you know, he's got a brilliant,

Starting point is 01:12:21 brilliant intellect, but his mind is all over the place. And so he figured out, I need to, I need to create an environment where my mind can be like a calm pond, where I can really think. And so I think for each of us as investors, you really have to think about your environment very, very carefully. And that includes who you work with, who you hang out with, how you set up your office. You know, we would, we had this discussion, Guy and I often about, you know, whether you should have your Bloomberg terminal there, you know, whether your Bloomberg helps you or not. Or, you know, having this fire hose of information coming at you can be a tremendous benefit. to some investors, you know, who need to trade every three seconds or whatever.

Starting point is 01:13:07 But for someone like Monish, who's investing for, you know, five years in a stock that's beaten down and he's hoping to quadruple or quintuple his money, why does he care what's happening in the next 10 seconds? And so I think figuring out who you are and what works for you is a very profoundly important aspect of investing. So, William, we're big fans of Joel Greenblatt as well. And I know you've talked about him a little bit earlier. But I'm real curious to know if he has something new. What's really got his attention these days whenever you were interviewing?

Starting point is 01:13:45 And for people out there, Joel Greenblatt has this magic formula. He's written two books, two fantastic books, about more of a systematic way to invest like Warren Buffett. But I'm real curious to know what has his interest more recently. You know, Joel is a really fascinating character because, you know, this goes back to the point that Bill Nygrim was making, that you need to be fully focused to be a great investor. Joel is kind of an aberration in that he has this tremendous mind that goes in multiple different directions. And so if you look at Joel's career, he's had three or four different ways of investing over the years. he started off as a focused investor, a very concentrated portfolio.

Starting point is 01:14:31 Later, he came up with this magic formula, which grew out of, I think it was something like a $35 million research project that he and his partner funded, where they were trying to figure out how do you systematize the way that we've been investing all these years at Gotham Capital, which is his hedge fund firm. And he came up with a couple of very simple measures such as high return on capital. that sort of encapsulated what Buffett does and what Ben Graham did. So then he writes a book that sells more than 300,000 copies. He's written multiple books.

Starting point is 01:15:11 He's a superb writer. He's been a philanthropist in a really interesting way. So he's been an absolutely fundamental kind of driving force in the charter school movement in New York. And he's done all of these different things. he kind of, and at the same time, he's been a professor at Columbia at business school for something like 19 years where I don't think he gets paid. I think he does it just because he likes to, he likes to feel that he's passing on his knowledge to the next generation. And so, you know, he starts his class basically by saying, you know, this is not about the money. And if

Starting point is 01:15:47 all it's going to be is about the money, you're going to have kind of a meaningless life. So you need to share the proceeds of what you make. And so he's a very, very multifaceted individual. The thing that I think is really fascinating, at least to me, is the kind of common denominator in his approach to all of these different things, whether it's education, philanthropy, investing, writing. He's trying to figure out how you beat the system in a kind of replicable way. So this idea that there are ways of doing things better if you use your mind to solve the puzzle. And so he started off, as we mentioned before, at Wharton, where his professors insisted that markets were efficient. So then he spent much of his life figuring out, no, if I invest the way Buffett and Graham talk about, then I can prove that the market's not efficient. So that's one way in which he beat the system.

Starting point is 01:16:45 Then he creates this new set of funds in 2012 that I was mentioning before with the 300 long, 300 short stocks, where it's, again, it's a way of removing emotion from the process so that you systematize your investments so that your your shareholders are less likely to sabotage themselves by becoming very emotional. So then he's done a similar thing with education. He funded these charter schools that educate very underprivileged kids in difficult areas of New York City. And he was trying to figure out how once again you beat the system by providing tremendous education to these kids with limited resources. And so I would say that in all of these areas of his life, he's looking for these replicable, systematic approaches to winning the game.

Starting point is 01:17:35 So I think he's a really fascinating case. He's got this kind of relentless curiosity and intelligence to him. And it was interesting to me when he came into our meeting, I was sort of reading a book because he was a little bit late. And he's immediately asked me, so what is the book? what's it about? What do you learn from it? And I'd say a lot of the great investors were sort of inside their own heads. You know, they would talk. And he was very, very engaged with me. It's like he's trying to figure out what can I learn from this. And so there's a kind of hungriness to his

Starting point is 01:18:08 intellect, which I think is part of his brilliance. So it's really interesting that the way that you describe that because one of the things that Charlie Munger says whenever he's talking about Buffett is that Buffett is a total learning machine. And he says that that's his greatest, you know, quality. That's the thing that has made him his, it's really his essence. And you're really kind of describing the exact same thing as the way you were describing this with Jewel Greenblatt, where he's just, he's trying to find a complex problem, whether it's education or investing or whatever it is. He finds these complex problems.

Starting point is 01:18:42 He tries to figure out how he can re-engineer some type of process that makes it more efficient. And then not only does he figure that out, but then he shares it with all these people. And I think that's the part of it that I like the most is that he's teaching the students for free. He's putting all this stuff. I know he has an online form and community. I mean, it's just totally amazing. It's awesome. I think for a lot of these guys, they're not ultimately motivated by the money.

Starting point is 01:19:08 And I think they start off very motivated by the money. You know, they think, you know, well, give me tremendous independence. And maybe they want the toys and baubles. that you get from money and the prestige and stuff. And then I think gradually, for a lot of them, the money becomes kind of uninteresting. And so I think for someone like Greenblatt, it's really about solving the puzzle.

Starting point is 01:19:32 That's the thrill. It's how do I use my brain to figure out a better way to do this? And so I would say that for him, part of the pleasure of being a great investor is proving his professors at Wharton wrong again and again. So it's like not, not only did he do it with the concentrated portfolio hedge fund that he ran early in his career, but then he's done it about three other times.

Starting point is 01:19:55 And he even came up with a better way of indexing. And so there's a kind of restless brilliance to his intellect that I think you see with Charlie Munger, where Munger is, you know, Munger will not only give away money to, you know, Stanford, but he'll say, no, I want to design the dorms as well. or he'll not only get a catamaran, but he'll say, I'm going to design the catamaran. And so I think some of these guys are very narrow, and some of them are intellectually kind of voracious. And the ones that interest me most are the ones who are intellectually voracious.

Starting point is 01:20:31 You know, so Munga has an incredible mind. I think Bill Miller has a really wonderful mind, and Miller is a great investor, but Miller's background is nothing like the sort of narrow background that a lot of these investors have. You know, a lot of them have have MBAs and went to, you know, Columbia and Harvard and Stanford and Yale and stuff. Miller was studying philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and then went into military intelligence. And he is a total learning machine. You know, he's applied, he's applied lessons from, you know, the Santa Fe Institute, chaos theory, all of these different things. And I, one of the reasons why I find him such a riveting character is that is that his brain is

Starting point is 01:21:13 so alive. You know, he's constantly learning. And it was fascinating to me that when we were talking about the financial crisis, you know, where he really got hit badly and was really going through the ringer, I was asking him, I was asking him, how did you deal with it emotionally? And what he was reading during the financial crisis was Seneca and Epictetus, and a book that Vice Admiral Stockdale had written about being tortured as a POW during the Vietnam War. And so for For Miller, there's this sense in which philosophy is very much alive and it's something that you use to inform the way you invest to help you handle adversity, but also really to teach you how to analyze difficult situations. So he was always obsessed with people like Wittgenstein, William James, it was one of the reasons why he made a fortune of Amazon because he was fascinated by this idea of how people misperceive reality, which is something he'd learned from William Jameson. It was one of the reasons why he made a fortune of Amazon because he was fascinated by this idea of how people misperceive reality, which is something he'd learned from William James, who was a psychology professor at Harvard and from Wittgenstein.

Starting point is 01:22:18 So I think these people who, as Munga would put it, have multiple mental models can have a tremendous advantage. So when reading your book, all of these 33 different characters that has very different personal traits, but still a lot of them had this philanthropic trait. And especially Mason Hawkins, he was someone that really impressed me. Could you tell me about your interview with him and specifically about the O'Rod culture he's talking about as his fund? Mason Hawkins is really interesting because he had a, he had a, he had a, had a meeting early in his career with Sir John Templeton, who became a kind of friend and mentor to him. And Templeton emphasized to Mason that you, you know, if you're really just doing this for yourself,

Starting point is 01:23:07 it's of pretty limited usefulness. You know, if the goal basically is to buy yourself fancy planes and stuff like that, you know, are you really having much of a life or making much of a contribution? And Mason Hawkins took this very much to heart. And he made philanthropy and this idea of sharing wealth, part of the corporate DNA of his firm, which is Southeastern Asset Management. And one of the things that was intriguing to me was when he was talking about who he hires at Southeastern, he said that one of the six or so main criteria is that the people should be generous. And he said, unless you're willing to share your excess wealth, it's unlikely that you're actually going to be that successful as an investor because he said at a certain

Starting point is 01:23:51 point, your passion is going to wane. Your discipline, your drive is probably going to wane. And so to him, it seems absolutely integral, this idea that you're making money not just for yourself, but so that you can do stuff philanthropically. And I think, I think that's a really profound idea. You know, for a lot of these guys, we look at them and we kind of idolize them because they're rich and then they're on the covers of Forbes and Fortune and Business Week and the But at the end of the day, you know, what have they really done? Like, will we, will we look at them because they were multi-billionaires when they were dead? Or will we admire them because they did extraordinary things philanthropically? You know, I think that that's such a strong point to really get through on this interview. I know from my own, my own self, whenever I was just researching different people that have had large financial success, you look at Rockefeller. One of his biggest things that he talks about, and he pretty much goes down in the books as being the wealthiest person. of all time. One of his biggest things was 10% tithing. He absolutely believed that he had to give away

Starting point is 01:24:56 at least 10% of whatever it was that he was making. You saw the same thing with Carnegie. In fact, between Rockefeller and Carnegie, they had this race, this philanthropic race. You look at Buffett, you look at Dalia. You look at all these guys. And they are just giving away. Look at Bill Gates. I mean, the foundation that him and his wife have set up is just amazing. And I think all these guys, that are just really at the top, the guys that are really, you know, the true professionals in this field, they are enormous givers. And I think that that's just so important to highlight to people as they're trying to make their own contributions in life. I think it's a very profound and important idea. And I would say it works on a number of levels being generous. You know, there's this,

Starting point is 01:25:39 you know, we were talking before about a guy and Ken Schuvenstein discussing this idea of compounding goodwill. I think it works in a pragmatic way that if you're kinder and you're more sharing and you're more decent, you end up with better relationships. You have a better life. And so one of the things that was fascinating to me in the book is there are certain people you look at who are just enormously rich and enormously good investors. And you know, you're sort of awed by them initially. And then there are people you look at who are really successful human beings. And you look at them and you think, wow, this is a guy.

Starting point is 01:26:15 really, really admire. And with some of them, maybe it gets back to the point we're making before about intuition as well as rational analysis. When you're sitting with someone and you're kind of looking in their eyes, you can sort of see, is there a glow there? Is this person alive? How happy are they? And I would say there were several people who seemed totally alive and totally vibrant, had this kind of glow to them. And on the whole, they tended to be the people who were more generous, more philanthropic, kinder, more focused on their families. And I'm not trying to be sort of moralistic about this, you know, but, but it works. I mean, you look at, you look at people like Tom Gaynor or John Smith.

Starting point is 01:26:58 These are very, very decent people. And they're kind of, there's a, there's a sort of kindness to them. And without wanting to get sort of mawkish or sentimental, you look in their eyes and they feel very alive. There's a kind of warmth to them and a humility to them. And so I think, you know, I have this discussion with my daughter where she said to me, of these two guys, who's more successful? One of them was Marty Whitman. And I said, well, you know, Marty Whitman came from nothing and, you know, had nothing during, you know, the, during the 1920s. You know, he was worried about buying a pretzel for one cent during the 1920s, you know.

Starting point is 01:27:39 He really had nothing. And now he has all of these scholarships for underprivileged kids in really difficult neighborhoods. He does it in the Palestinian territories. He's done it for underprivileged African American kids. And so is he more successful or less successful than somebody who's worth $10 billion? I would argue that probably he's more successful. Yeah. You look at Tony Robbins.

Starting point is 01:28:06 I think he's a perfect example. And the thing that I really like about, these people in the way that they're giving. Tony Robbins went through this experience in his life where he wasn't able to even pay for a meal and there was this person that came up and paid for a meal for him. And now he's on this rampage where he's feeding the stick. Do you remember the number? How many people he feeds in a year with free meals?

Starting point is 01:28:27 I would say 50 million. Yeah. It's like 50 million meals a year is how many meals he's paying. And so what I really like is how these people had such a negative experience early on in their life. and it shaped them and just transformed them and they remember that. But then when they go back and then they use that negative experience to basically come full circle and they just bring so much beauty into life with the way that they contribute using Tony Robbins as an example. And I think so many other people have similar experiences.

Starting point is 01:29:00 Maybe they weren't educated early on and then they found a way to contribute later on. And it's just it's really neat to see that come full circle with some of these different people. But go ahead. Yeah, so William, I was thinking about Fentenberg. Yeah, so William, I was thinking about Fentenberg because he truly had a very, very difficult beginning, probably also compared to a lot of the other people that you have in your book. Could you perhaps tell us about his story and your experience interviewing him? Yeah, Arnold Vandenberg is a perfect example of what you guys were just talking about, of someone who comes from tremendously difficult circumstances and somehow

Starting point is 01:29:37 transforms their life in an extraordinarily dramatic way. So Arnold Vanneberg was born Jewish in 1939, not a very not a very fortuitous time to be born into a Jewish family in Europe. He was born on the same street as Anne Frank in Amsterdam. And so for the first couple of years of his life, he was hidden. And the family was terrified that the Nazis would come into the house and would hear him cry and they'd all get killed. So at a certain point, they, his parents made this tremendously difficult decision and decided that they would split up. They would have him hidden away in an orphanage. And so a 19-year-old girl who didn't know the family comes and smuggles Arnold Vandenberg out of the house across Amsterdam, takes him out of the city and hides him in

Starting point is 01:30:26 an orphanage where he spends the next few years. And Arnold said to me that one of the things he wrestled with later in life was, why on earth with this girl who didn't even know us? risk her life to save to save mine. And he said it also astonished him that her father was prepared to risk his own daughter's life to save him. And he said, he said it tormented him this question for many years, like what had motivated her and father? And he said, he said that later in life, he had a psychiatrist who said to him, well, it's simple. He said, you know, some people, their life is more important than their values. And for other people, their values are more important than their life. And she was one of one of those people. And Arnold decided very early on

Starting point is 01:31:11 that because he'd been saved by this girl, he wanted to be the sort of person who lived a kind of value-driven life. You know, he, you know, the drama of his story just continued. His parents both were taken to Auschwitz, and they remarkably, they survived. And they came to pick him up from the orphanage when he was six. And he told me that he couldn't recognize them. And he said, I didn't care. He said, I was so desperate to get out of there that I would have gone with anyone. And he said he was so frail that his father couldn't even pick him up. His father was afraid to hold him. It was very malnourished and he couldn't walk at the time. He was, he was sort of crawling around on his hands and knees. And his parents actually thought he had brain damage because he was kind of slow

Starting point is 01:31:54 and he'd been so malnourished for all those years. And they moved to, I think, East Los Angeles to a pretty rough, rough area. And Arnold, you know, is his, skinny immigrant kid and he's getting beaten up and just having a terrible time. And at a certain point, he starts fighting back and he starts rope climbing, which apparently in those days was a kind of competitive gymnastic event. And he becomes incredibly strong by rope climbing. And he has this total transformation in his life where he realizes that by visualizing, by visualizing how to do something in a way that this other champion, Road Climber, had done it,

Starting point is 01:32:40 he can kind of impersonate what they've done and he can kind of realize his own dreams through sort of the strength of his own self-belief and mirroring what they've done. And so he begins this extraordinary transformation. And at a certain point, decides, you know, I'm going to try to become a money manager. And, you know, he said to me, I have no innate skill as a money manager. You know, he's an incredibly truthful, honest, decent bloke. And so, you know, if there's something he can say that's negative about himself, like, no, I'm not that smart or I have no innate talent for this, he'll tell you it. So he literally, he takes a photograph of a well-known, prominent investor in Barron's, and he sort of pins this photograph to his desk, I think, under the glass

Starting point is 01:33:25 surface on his desk. And he sort of starts to visualize himself being a great money manager. And he becomes obsessed with hypnosis, with all of these, these ideas of sort of visualizing your dreams. And so his transformation from this kind of incredible hard luck story of a kid growing up with really no chance of success, it's just an extraordinary transformation. And these days he manages about $1.6 billion. He's beaten the market over 30 or so years. And he's just sort of a remarkable guy. And he talks a lot about mastering your own mind, the degree to which everything is possible if you gain control over your own consciousness.

Starting point is 01:34:07 And so there's a kind of practical wisdom to him that I think is very deep and fascinating. And, you know, he's also, he's also this very sharing person. So he's one of the things that I loved about him is his hobby is basically to give people books. And so since I've, since I've had my conversations with him, I must have a half a dozen conversations with him. He keeps sending me books. He's just like this lovely, generous guy. And he said to me, you know, there's nothing that makes me feel better than when I've given somebody something or shared something that's changed their life.

Starting point is 01:34:40 And he said, you know, as far as I'm concerned, that's why we're here. And so I think there are people in this book who are really remarkable moneymakers. And then there are people in this book who are really remarkable human beings. And it's not mutually exclusive. you can be both. But I think on the band of Berg is a really good example of someone who's a truly remarkable human being. William, speaking of Van Berg and the thing about giving books a way that they can change other people's life, which book would you give away to someone that was very dear to you that could change that person's life?

Starting point is 01:35:15 That's a great question. There's one book that I read in the last year that had a big impact on me, that was something that had had a big impact on Monash Pabri, also on. on Guy Spear and actually also on Arnold Vandenberg, which is a book that you may or may not have read called Power versus Force, the Hidden Determinance of Human Behavior. And it's by this guy, David Hawkins. You know, one of the ideas in it is that you just want to be totally truthful and honest.

Starting point is 01:35:42 And if you're totally truthful, really at a deep level, then you sort of resonate with people because they sense your, integrity and they can tell when you're lying. And even if, even if they don't really know rationally that you're lying, they sort of intuit it and they can, they sense that there's something misaligned about you. And Monash has taken this idea very much on board. It's, it's very integral in everything that he does, even, even the way that he communicates with shareholders. Same, same with Guy. Guy in his book, the educational value investor, just wants to tell the truth. You know, if he messed up in some way, he wants to, he wants to, he wants to, he wants,

Starting point is 01:36:25 to tell the truth about it. And I think that's one reason why his book is, so, you know, 26,000 copies already, because it, you know, people, people want you not to lie. And I think so many people in, in the financial industry and business feel this, this sense that they have to market themselves and they have to, they have to kind of put their best foot forward. And, you know, Arnold Van der Boeck called me after our interviews and said, I need you to understand something. He said, my returns have not been great in the last few years. And the reason they've not been great is because I messed up. I made these mistakes, which I'm now going to explain to you.

Starting point is 01:37:03 And he said, you need to understand that this is not because the market has gone against me. This is because I messed up. And there's something incredibly powerful about somebody who's prepared to tell you the truth in that way. And I think most people would say that that was a really dumb thing. to do and that you should obscure any bad stuff about what you've done. But I think it resonates in a very deep way if you behave that way. I totally agree with you a thousand percent. And I think the reason that it works so well is because it's immediate credibility. And I think people don't realize that I think everyone is so scared and they're actually being driven by their own fears of

Starting point is 01:37:48 people then judging me in a negative light or whatever it might be. But I think what they're failing to look at as the positive piece to it of whenever you are truthful like that, you have immediate credence and immediate truth that I know I can trust you. And truth is, and trust is what glues our entire society together. When you trust one another, that's what holds it all together. And amazing point. And I think you sense it in, in your relationships with people. You know, I was reading something that Buffett said recently. it was actually an old speech of his, and he said that in 41 years, I've never seen Charlie take advantage of anybody.

Starting point is 01:38:31 And think of the power of that, to be partners with someone who you can say, this guy never tried to take advantage of them. He never lied, never took advantage. That's an astonishingly powerful thing. Now, there must have been times in the short term where if Munger and Buffett had behaved immorally, they would have profited. And yet they chose not to. And I would argue that that's one reason why 40,000 or so people go to Omaha each year. It's not because Buffett is the greatest investor of all time, although he is, it's because he tells the truth. And so I think, however you

Starting point is 01:39:10 come at this idea of telling the truth, it's, you know, whether it's through power versus force, this book by David Hawkins or it's through being, you know, a student of spirituality or it's through studying Buffett. It doesn't really matter, but it's a very, very powerful idea. And, you know, we're all liars at some level. We all do things that we're not proud of and conceal stuff. So this is not to make out that any of us is totally righteous. But I think when you see people like Buffett and Munger trying to tell the truth, it makes you, it makes you want to be to move in that direction. I think, I think realizing that you can become one of the richest men in the world while being truthful and honest is a very, very powerful lesson. And that's, that's probably

Starting point is 01:39:59 the most important lesson that we, we get from, from Buffett and Munger. Fantastic. Just for our audience. So William Green, as you can see, absolutely brilliant mind. The name of the book is The Great Minds of Investing. It is just amazing book. The Pictures in this book, the writing in this book, just fantastic. So William, we cannot thank you enough for coming on the show. This was such a pleasure. I know that our audience is just going to eat this up and really enjoy the conversation. So thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. It's just been a real delight for me to chat with you both. You're great. Your questions are terrific and I love your show. So it's a real privilege for me. Thanks, William. Really appreciate it. So really that's all we have for you

Starting point is 01:40:44 this week, we really want to thank William Green for coming on the show. He just provided us such a fantastic interview. His book is amazing. The name of his book is The Great Minds of Investing. You can go to Amazon.com and check out his book. I highly recommend it. The people that he has in there and the way that their profile is just really fantastic, and I think you'll really enjoy it. So we really appreciate everything that everyone's doing out there for us. If you're leaving reviews on iTunes, thank you so much. You have no idea how much that means to us. We'll see you guys next week. Thanks for listening to The Investors Podcast. To listen to more shows or access to the tools discussed on the show, be sure to visit www.com. Submit your questions or request a guest

Starting point is 01:41:27 appearance to the Investors podcast by going to www.com. If your question is answered during the show, you will receive a free autographed copy of the Warren Buffett Accounting Book. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. This material is copyrighted by the TIP network and must have written approval before a commercial application.

We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - Classic 15: The Great Minds of Investing

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