We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - RWH013: Move Slow, Win Big W/ Thomas Russo

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hi there. My guest today is Thomas Rousseau, a renowned global investor who's beaten the market by an enormous margin over the last four decades. As I wrote in my book, Richer Wiser-Happier, Tom is the ultimate long-term investor. His biggest holdings include several stocks that he's owned since the 1980s, including Nestle, Heineken and Berkshire Hathaway, which is written up from around $900 per share to more than $4303,000. $30,000 per share over the last 40 years. As you'll hear in this conversation, Tom's firm has gradually built a stake in Berkshire

Starting point is 00:00:37 that's now worth about $1.4 billion. I first interviewed Tom about eight years ago, back when he was 59 years old. During that interview, I asked him if he expected to own Berkshire and Nestle for the rest of his life. Without a moment's hesitation, Tom replied, yeah, I would think so. In a market that's filled with trigger-happy speculators who trade their investments hyperactively, Tom is a true outlier. As I see it, his supremely patient, long-term mindset is a huge competitive advantage in a world

Starting point is 00:01:11 that's increasingly short-term and impulsive. In this conversation, Tom explains the key investment principles that have driven his enduring success. He also talks about what he's learned from three legendary investors, Warren Buffer, Farit, Charlie Munger, and Bill Rueyne, who racked up incredible returns over decades at the Sequoia Fund and helped to train Tom back when he was a young investor. I hope you enjoy this conversation. Thanks so much for joining us.

Starting point is 00:01:42 You're listening to The Richer, Wiser, Happier Podcast, where your host, William Green interviews the world's greatest investors and explores how to win in markets and life. Hi, everyone. I'm thrilled to be here with today's guest, Tom Rousseau, who's one of the great long long-term investors of our time. It's lovely to see you, Tom. Thanks so much for joining us. Well, thank you very much for the chance to do so. I look forward to having this time with you. I wanted to start by asking you about a life-changing encounter that you had back around 1982 with Warren Buffett when I think you were studying for your joint law degree and MBA degree

Starting point is 00:02:28 at Stanford University. That's right. And I wondered if you could tell us what he said that was so valuable and how that encounter shaped the way you've invested over the last 40 or so years? Yes, I think the thing that struck me the most was how values laden the meeting was. You understand that that's the same Stanford Business School, where down the hall, upstairs and to the right, was a Nobel laureate, Bill Sharp, whose premise in managing and harnessing the power of investment is that it's all mathematical. And it all has through with a regression of prior returns against a benchmark against risk that seemed to be the market risk.

Starting point is 00:03:08 There's so many assumptions. And Warren just talked about the things that were important to him as he placed money. And at the time, that had become a more important question than it would have been 10 or 15 years ago because in those earlier episodes, Warren might have talked quite a considerable amount about coming up with net current value and liquidating value and then measuring the price against those measures and the margin of safety if we were together 15 years earlier would have been deemed a discount between the price paid and the value of those collective assets within a business. But they would have been finite and they would have been based on the measure to which

Starting point is 00:03:50 you receive more than what you paid. The next steps would have to try to release those trapped dollars into trap money and have it come back to you and then you could redeploy it again and have it come back and redeploy it again and have it come back. And each of those, you calculated the intrinsic value in roughly the same way, added everything up and then divide by the number of shares. And if the discount is wide enough, you buy it and then you just wait until some force comes long to close that discount. And what happened is that it turns out to be difficult to manage large pools of money. And so he sort of grew to the point where it's harder to deploy capital that way. And you don't develop any kind of skill of business judgment, which was the next chapter.

Starting point is 00:04:28 We actually were in a class where the lecture happened about the time if he was moving to that next chapter. He had bought Seas Chocolate several years before our session. And they had paid $30 million plus or minus for the brand and for all that came with it. And what they discovered is owning that powerful brand. They had something which they hadn't adhered to before, which is called economic goodwill. It's called it arises from the fact that the purchaser, of that chocolate doesn't believe there to be an adequate substitute. And without the sense of an

Starting point is 00:05:04 adequate substitute, they will bear price increases begrudgingly, in some cases willingly and even enthusiastically, because in some measure, the price paid is part of the bargain because the recipients of a gift of that chocolate knows that somebody stepped up and paid a little bit more. And so when they bought the business, Warren, I gather this to be true, took on the responsibility for pricing chocolate, because once he realized that the price paid as part of the benefit received, he wanted to make sure that the price was always confidently raised and recognizing that if he kept his side of the bargain, that the consumer would take that on. Now, his side of the bargain included something else, which is very interesting.

Starting point is 00:05:46 It was more strategic, which is that there are lots of chocolate companies like Seas Chocolate back in those days. And they all fought for market share, and so they cut prices, which of course, was was exactly the opposite approach that Warren took, which was to raise the quality of the chocolate, raise the price, and then have that feedback loop, keep their clients lawfully. The other trick is he realized, and this became very important later in my life, he realized, so he said, that in order to make a good return for a year in an investment with C's, you have to be willing to suffer, and be willing to not earn a good return for eight months of the year, because you really only

Starting point is 00:06:25 make money during the four sort of pillar holidays of Easter and Valentine's Day and Christmas and Thanksgiving. And the rest of the time, you're lucky to break even. But it's only because you suffer through that, that you end up being the chocolate of choice at the higher price when it called upon to serve. Now, where that would evidence important features that if you were, if just, lucky enough to just buy that seized, the typical buyer would command a team of analysts who'd come in and they'd come back and say, Eureka, I see what's going on here. You're not doing anything eight months of the year. You should really put in ice cream during the summer and soup, you know, hearty soup during the cold of winter and really get the

Starting point is 00:07:04 full leverage off of those assets, sweat those assets more. And of course, it's exactly the wrong step. And that was the beauty of Warren's insight is that he didn't have to deliver profits every month, every quarter, every four months, whatever public companies often have to suffer from, the expectations of a place upon them by Wall Street. He figured, out that he's much better off by maintaining the structure, kind of shutting down for the months when there's no activity, but just maintaining a skeletal crew, being always there for someone who needed the product and charging a lot for that. And I took from that the strength of brands, the notion of being willing to show losses, even when you're building well.

Starting point is 00:07:45 And I think he wrote a few years ago in the annual report that they've, that 30 or 35 million dollar investment has made them over $2 billion, something like that over the decades. So it's a beautiful example of the power of a brand, a really great brand that you can write for decades, which has become a fundamental theme in your career. Yeah, but I'll say there's another piece to what you just brought up, which was that he didn't, he feels as a chief executive of the enterprise, Berkshire Hathaway, he treats it like a partnership. And he wants to make sure that his partners know the value of what they have. Now, he's not going to tell them the value of what they have because I guess he must think that's part of the fun of the game, or it's his competitive advantage to know his own intrinsic value on a per share basis. But when he wrote that in the annual report, he did so around the

Starting point is 00:08:35 time that he was beginning for the first time ever to consider, meaningfully consider, share repurchase. And a part of his expressed need for preparation for engaging in that activity is he had to come to terms with the inevitable sense of being at odds with your partner, because you're going to be buying from your partner, those shares that you know exactly what they're worth as the CEO of the company. And the seller can only approximate what they're worth. And he felt deeply enough that he thought it was important at that early states to describe the bounty that was delivered by Cs. He talked about the extraordinary bounty that was delivered by Geico since they bought full control of that. And each time he says he just wanted to make sure

Starting point is 00:09:24 that the components that one would want to look at. And most recently, he went to those five pillars that proetcher he had his equities, his operating companies, and the other assets that collect for Berkshire's valuation. And so he's struggled with that in a way that makes me feel more comfortable as a partner of his in Berkshire Hathaway, which is that he's, he's thinking, about how to make sure that we don't make a bad trade to his advantage. A couple of really foundational principles that I think came up in that first meeting with him back around 40 years ago. I remember you describing to me, and when we talked about this a few years ago,

Starting point is 00:10:03 I think when I first interviewed you probably about seven, eight years ago, one of them is related to what you just said, that he's kind of looking out for your best interest as a shareholder treating you as a partner. And you quoted to me him saying at the time, you can't make a good deal with a bad person. And I wondered if you could talk about that because you've said that I was reading one of of your recent shareholder letters and you said, it's my belief that Berkshire has the least amount of agency cost of any company I follow. And this is such an important idea and it's a piece of jargon that it's easy for us not to understand. Can you talk about that sense of treating

Starting point is 00:10:38 people decently, not taking advantage of your partners and reducing agency cost, which turns out to be one of the greatest risks facing all investors? is. Yes, yes. I completely agree on the final point there. And it really is the tendency of someone to try to make another person's assets to which they're hired to supervise and to maintain and to develop and grow. But rather than hold those truths to be fully self-evident as the proper objective, they let slip in along the way a few here for me, a few here for me. And I was thinking about it one day not that long ago. I was looking out to the neighbor's house. The lot line was planted with raspberries. And this lady who was in her late 80s, I didn't get around very much

Starting point is 00:11:21 anymore. And I stopped by and I see her. She said, you know, I miss a lot. She said, but what I really miss those fresh raspberries, we used to get a lot of them. And I was looking out one afternoon with her lawn crew who were charged with the task of, you know, maintaining a decent looking lawn. You know, they came around the corner. It was out of the, out of the, out of the view. And they just dropped everything and ran to that raspberry bush and just, you know, ate it clean. And therein lay her problem, which was, they were so. producing, but agents, her agents decided to take them for themselves rather than to allow her to enjoy them as she once did. And it's not a corporate story, but I think conveys the

Starting point is 00:11:57 principle, which is that in business, you have, you have structures where you have options, plans that are based on certain criteria. And Mr. Buffett will say this, is that one of the most critical jobs that they have at Berkshire is calculating appropriate compensation systems. And I recall him saying years back that he had something north of 140 different executive comp packages with his senior most teams, each one separately struck and each one commanding about three pages. Now, if you ever looked at a comp book for the public market counterpart of the book that Warren drafted in three pages, you realize it's several hundred pages long. And it doesn't necessarily incent what you really want to incent. but it's more protective than it is collaborative. And we deal with that reality.

Starting point is 00:12:47 And mostly the compensation that's used today has a substantial component that's equity linked. And so that equity link invites into the operations and the expectations and the deliberations of a company, it invites in the presence of Wall Street. Because if it's going to be equity length, they will have all sorts of reasons to explain to you why if you do the following seven things, you'll hit the time. target, they'll make their numbers. If they make their numbers, the shares will trade up. And you'll have an overweight for that particular thing. And you go from being underweight to overweight.

Starting point is 00:13:21 I think I just read quarterly results that came in the last week. And it had to do with a brewer. And the brewer was committing to making some substantial investments. And in the process of doing it, it disrupted their reported profit schedule. And the Wall Street voice was unanimous. know, they miss their numbers. You probably want to look somewhere else to deploy those cash because, you know, they missed their numbers. And of course, we celebrate that because if they miss their numbers, because they're expanding and developing in a thoughtful way in the first place, we'd like to have them miss their numbers by even broader margin, if it meant that they're investing up front with more vigor. And that's really the tradeoff. I'd say, we're on the other

Starting point is 00:14:03 side. On Wall Street, there's a very standard parlance called cash flow conversion. ratio, which is a common language and a common expectation that is often commanded. And basically it wants you to give back almost all the cash that you earn, give it back to the investors. And 100% cash flow conversion ratio is you're giving it all back. And our goal is to have it to stay put in the company. We chose the company to invest in because they had the prospects for the capacity to reinvest. And not all companies do. And so the last thing we want to do of the businesses that we most esteem would be to take them out of that reinvestment model. And that's where the kind of the mischief takes place as it relates to agency costs, is that your

Starting point is 00:14:47 compensation will be set largely by the stock market recognition of what Wall Street allows them to think is the level which they're optimizing their responsibilities of the company. And our view of that is that they're taking a very long view and they're pouring substantial money and the building out the infrastructure that will reward people 10 years from now, but they'll do so as a result of the successful deployment of the capital into expansion. And unfortunately, when you embark upon a plan like that, it's going to weigh adversely on near-term results because you will be funneling your investment spending, and it will mean that you're operating at less in full capacity, and there's disruption in general of trying

Starting point is 00:15:29 to keep workplaces in order and all the rest. So when you're investing for the future, you're burdening the present. And we're perfectly comfortable with that tradeoff because we're interested in more gain, paying today for more gain tomorrow. So it's a totally different mindset with Warren and Charlie, right? They're paying themselves, I think, $100,000 a year each. And so probably in that stack of compensation documents, they're the ones who get paid the least. And so they're making money with you, not off you. And then at the same- And we have the right to participate.

Starting point is 00:16:02 Yeah. And you've participated to an extraordinary degree, right? I think you first invested around 1982. And you must, when the stock was around 900 or something, and now it's about $445,000. Yeah. And you must have invested these days, what, somewhere between a billion and a billion and a half,

Starting point is 00:16:20 two billion dollars in Berkshire Hathaway? So this is a huge bet for you. No, no, no. So it would be our firm. No, no, that's what I mean. The assets I oversee. Yeah. I think it's closer to a, probably about a billion, four, billion, three billion, four.

Starting point is 00:16:35 And we're delighted to have the ability to have those assets. And then people often say it's sometime of criticism, why would I want to hire you to buy what I could buy for myself, I could buy it myself with more? And what people don't realize is there is an extraordinarily high benefit that. it comes from the structure in which all of the activities take place at Berkshire. It's not just a matter of, it's not an old-fashioned conglomerate where you have, you have some kind of vision that everything will work smoothly with one another and create this synergistic top. Rather, it's some ways different. It's the send it back to Omaha story that I think is what is at the heart

Starting point is 00:17:16 of what makes Berkshire unique and interesting, which is that when you have a family business, call it TTI, which is run by a guy named Paul Danforth. I think his name is, I'll have to take a look. But anyways, and Warren bought that business, I don't know, 15 years ago. And it grew at 50, its operating margin 15% per year for the entire period that he had held that it. It was up sort of threefold in 10 years. And all along the way, he gated himself on the cycle of reinvestment, but he would make investments. It was an electrical contractor, distributor business. And the killer application there is that they have everything under one roof from all the different manufacturers in the world of these different products. And so if you're trying to run a lean

Starting point is 00:17:59 manufacturer company, you might be inclined to work with TTI because with just one call, they can composite the order sent it to you by 8 o'clock the next day in your business. And it requires deep inventory to find a huge warehouse and a commitment to customer service. That means you'll never let them down. And the people who run that, those companies begin to think that they can't do without the services of TTI. And we're always in the marketplace looking for businesses where the consumer can't live without the product that our businesses offer. Now, he was an interesting case because he was able to deploy the money internally.

Starting point is 00:18:38 But many people are really great managers of the electrical wholesale distributive business like this. Are fabulous managing their team, projecting out within the next team capacity, and a host of other features. They're excellent at it. But many of them, you know, once they end up with a pile of money at the end of the year, they really don't have a need for it. And in that case, it goes to Omaha and it fills the pot. Now there's $140 billion of that money waiting for someone within Berkshire's family

Starting point is 00:19:05 to have a project that they themselves want to jumpstart. And I heard about this sort of anecdotally through Kevin Clayton at one point. And I said, what's life like for you after Berkshire acquired you? And he said, well, we stopped having to worry about capital. And it's a two-sided word. It's that we have to worry about deploying it when we have no good ideas or that we want to give it to someone else so they can deploy it. But ideally, they'll have something to grow organically.

Starting point is 00:19:30 But if they don't, the forced requirement that they do something smart with money that they face as often as a public company gets them in trouble. In Kevin Clayton's case, he says that for him at least, the thing that's changed by joining Berkshire, was that he would have an opportunity to call Warren up, the best strategic consultants into the world and ask him what to do as he considered an investment. And he said that Warren would fly him up in the indefensible at the time. And they'd sit down. And Warren would say, what's on your mind? And then Kevin would sort of give the first question, the second question. And he said that by the time he had heard halfway through the second question, he began to have a sense of the answer.

Starting point is 00:20:08 And by the end of the third question, he knew exactly what should be done. And the power of it was that he also owned the idea. Because by virtue of answering the answer the answer the answer. the questions that Warren asked, he ended up having what ought to have been done revealed. And now, I think one of the really big values within Berkshire has been the success rate of their investments and measured in some ways by the mistakes not made as a result of those three questions against many different scenarios. The mistakes not made and those that should be made are made with full gusto, no questions about how much money to spend.

Starting point is 00:20:43 But funnling all of this activity under one approach is that if you're not, if you're not, you have money, you don't have an idea where it should go, send it to Omaha. If you have a project, you have to have to fund it, go to Omaha and get the money. And it's all based on sort of one-offs and not some kind of conglomerate magic. But it's the reason why one of the reasons why we're so enamored by that company is that consultative role that's been played so well. And Tom, when you look at the next generation of Greg Abel and Ajit Jane and Todd Coe and Ted Weshler, I know it's an awkward question to answer publicly. and you're probably inclined to be polite.

Starting point is 00:21:19 But how do you assess this question of whether they have the right stuff, whether warrants irreplaceable, whether they can safeguard the culture? Because obviously a huge amount of your own assets are writing on there. I think when I looked last, you had about 18% of your portfolio still in Berkshire. Yes, I think it's really more like 15. And I don't know, Berkshire may have come down a little bit. It was quite a bit higher for a part of this year as the story about the buyback sort of rippled through.

Starting point is 00:21:44 But in any case, it's still in mid-teens, let's say. And again, there are so few who are set up in the way that Berkshire is set up that it gives them an advantage. I think of all the different big investments that they made the public equity put options that they, in a sense, underwrote it's the form of insurance, $5 billion of premium, $30 billion of assets that needed to stay at that level 10 or 15 years out. And nobody else could bid on it. So Aijit has, in a situation like that, this extraordinary advantage, that there will be periods of time, as Warren has taught us by showing us a table at one of the annual meetings was showed the premiums written and the combined ratio and the amount of premium that they have. And Berkshire would not write for half a dozen years in a row, nothing. And then over that time, the cycle rolls through and then all of a sudden it turns south and you can't make any money.

Starting point is 00:22:44 in insurance underwriting. Then you can't make any money, but you're going to lose your fortune, and it's even worse still. And it's only until it's even worse still that suddenly Berkshire shows up again and starts to underwrite at a time when others wouldn't because the capital in the industry had been impaired because of the losses. And Berkshire had all the capital in the world to deploy with extraordinary and favorable terms. And so I think their discipline, their patience means that they're able to see better opportunities before they swing. As he said, it's proverbially swing for the big fat pitch.

Starting point is 00:23:19 I think that's the case where the big fat pitch was percolating along. In the case of the put options, no one else would bid on that in a sense because you had to pass the movements through the equity market valuation shifts to mark accounting. And so after they received their premium and began down this long journey together, over the course of the first five years, I think they They passed through income $10 billion worth of losses. And very few insurance companies would be willing to take on that kind of naked exposure. At the same time, the insured had the comfort all along, even as those losses mounted, that Berkshire was good for it because they have $100 billion worth of cash and their Fort Knox.

Starting point is 00:24:03 They promote the fact that they are Fort Knox. And so they're the last place that you can go when you really, really need insurance. And I think that they will continue to have the ability not to act. And so I often say that Warren's, you know, blessings in some ways is that he's willing to do anything and he's capable of doing nothing. In that scenario, he did no underwriting for the seven years plus or minus that he showed us with zero premiums written. And then when the terms were indescribably attractive, he started to write like, man,

Starting point is 00:24:39 for about four years and they shut it off. And so I think Aijit was his partner. I understand in all of those big risks. And I can't imagine someone whose instincts would be better served for that time than Aisheets. And so I assume that he'll find someone else to share the thoughts with as Aijit and more in theory reportedly share their analysis together. And he'll go forth for as long as he's able and well. He's of a generation, of course, older than Todd, not midway between Ted, I guess, and Todd. And then Ted would be midway between the two.

Starting point is 00:25:16 And, you know, it just presumes good health in the case of Acheats' ability to continue. And Greg Able, you know, has, I think as, as I've seen him operate only through the annual meetings, I spend very little time with him outside that open forum. But he has a very shirring manner and seems like. like someone who can take on an enormous amount of responsibility. I do know, I've heard Todd Combe speak in many occasions over the course of the last year, and I get a sense that he's been invaluable in both the portfolios that he and Ted manage are both terrific. And then the assistance that they both start to give in the form of those questions. And in one case, for Todd,

Starting point is 00:25:59 it meant to even move down to Geico's, to Geico land, wherever that is, and became responsible for managing Geico in this, as it conducted a sort of revision of how they assess risk proactively and used technology. Interestingly enough, used technology to replace what had always kept them out of trouble just fine using the sort of analog and pre-digital type tools that they found created alignments that they could use to anticipate where risks might lurk based on history, not necessarily the modeling. They're mixing it up a bit now as they found that the, the industry moved on and those who are tooled with technology has an aid seem to have jumped to march on them. And so I think that's all under going some change. And you'd have to say

Starting point is 00:26:46 that Todd earns his stripe as he comes home with the outcome that will arise from there. And then Ted, I understand, has had a huge role in several of the biggest positions, not overly heralded, I don't. He's also been seconded off to closing transactions on behalf of Berkshire, when Warren has, as he said in the end of report, this is his disclosure that when there's times when he just can't do something, he's had Ted go out and do that, and it's been terrific. Another important investor who a lot of our listeners probably won't remember, but who played a really important formative role in your life.

Starting point is 00:27:24 I think you worked for him from about 1984 to 1988, is Bill Ruehain, who I write about briefly in my book and who I was lucky enough to interview. 20 or so years ago. Can you talk a bit about him? Because he's such a remarkable figure and people seem to have forgotten him to some degree. And just to fill in our listeners, he's famous partly because when Warren closed his limited partnerships in, I think, 1969, and people still wanted to invest. He said, well, maybe you should invest with this friend of mine, Bill Ruin, who's extraordinary. Yes. And Bill proceeded to beat the market by thousands of percentage points before his death in 2005. Yeah. Even with holding 50% cash for the two or three years when I was there, there was this cash bubble that just didn't get deployed because in some measure, that was 83 through 89. And the period, call it 78 to 83, offered them such attractive opportunities to invest money at steep rates that they had become a bit spoiled and were less interested in coming back with capital if it was released.

Starting point is 00:28:29 to a position during my period of time for the capital bill. So that was, and then, and then ultimately, they were kind of proud of the long and off they went and they continued to add enormous months of return for investors. And a couple of things about Bill is, you know, it's not at all surprising that he is, as you said, that people may not, may not realize or may soon forget. The fact is, he applied very legal in the process. And so he didn't have a need for people to say, there's Bill Rowan. He was perfectly content to be extremely. we thought leading investor. And a couple of things about Bill Rewain really stand out for my relatively limited time there, but nonetheless, one that I cherish and I felt extremely

Starting point is 00:29:12 fortunate to participate in. One thing that was clear with Bill is that he had a terrific sense of humor. And at the same time, he had a very secure, tight group of friends who shared the extraordinary talent and ability with a sense of humor. So as you know, they went away as a group once a year and they went to retreats. They talked about best ones that included all this, you know, Sandy Goddessman was there and Bill Rowan, Warren Buffett, Munger Tolls, where Charlie was there and Tolls was there and David Dodd and Ben Graham. I mean, just to celebrate a group. And they talk on subjects that had to do with accounting and investing. But they also were playful. And so, And didn't let this process of trying to find investment in Nirvana overwhelm their balance into their lives.

Starting point is 00:30:04 I sort of tend to think of that as the post-World War II generation. Mostly all of his closest and colleagues had some role or another during the war. At the same time, at some point, he had an involvement in a sort of a startup company. So this is back in the 60s. And I guess the lineation between being strict value and startup companies and the equivalent of early versions of private equity, there's a lot of stuff happening in the early 60s, as you know. And Bill participated in some of it through a technology offering that took place.

Starting point is 00:30:40 And so I was impressed to see that reference to a data, some kind of data processing company. 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 first. 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. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year bringing together activists, technologists, journalists, investors, and builders

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Starting point is 00:34:37 and start hearing... Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com. slash WSB. Go to Shopify.com slash WSB. That's Shopify. dot com slash WSB. All right. Back to the show. There were a couple of other things I remember when I interviewed him really struck me

Starting point is 00:35:01 where he said that he was so declarative about it that it was like, oh, I don't need to think about that anymore. He said, nobody knows what the market will do. And he said, this is my firm conviction. I just don't believe anybody knows what the market will do. So he just said, the key is just to buy something cheap. And he said, when you find something that's really cheap, you should load up on it. And that sort of reminds me of you as well, his willingness to concentrate in a few really

Starting point is 00:35:23 good ideas and then hold them for a long time. Yeah. It's a very good point. And he was super concentrated, though. He would have 20 plus 30 plus percent in this specific holding and would have three or four holdings in a portfolio. So it's a very important point. And you don't know which way the markets are going to go.

Starting point is 00:35:42 And so you're going to have that market at risk. So he would have had plenty of times when the market was not conducive to near-term performance. But anyways, obviously, he reigned supreme over time by virtue of being more right than wrong on those companies that he felt most conviction towards. Now, the other thing is, at the same time, he had good instincts on how to manage risk. I remember one of the positions when I really started out there was called John Blair. And John Blair was a media rep company and it had to do with the fact that TV agency, advertising agency was trying to place advertisement more broadly into users' hands who didn't know the user, the broadcasters. And this group came up called media consultants, let's just say, who helped place all that stuff.

Starting point is 00:36:30 And there was a company called John Blair and they owned a big piece of the company. They're very close to the management, all the rest. But by the time I arrived, which was 1984, they were worried because the big position of it. And the dynamics within the ad agency were changing. And so they wanted to make sure that they wouldn't be left behind as that change took place. And so they did some deep dive research as a team people clustered together, the deep dive research. And they realized the business was at risk. And so once realized, they had the sad misfortune of realizing it was at risk as it was eroding in the public market.

Starting point is 00:37:07 So it was 42 when I showed up, it was 39, then it was 36. and then 31, they're doing the work and increasingly uncomfortable with what you're learning about. And at some point, that trajectory down where the bill then said, okay, to the trader, sell. Sell. And at what price? Just sell. And the point was, Bill had resolved that the business is better times were behind them. And he didn't fall prey to this unbelievably typical failing in Wall Street, which is to say, yeah, it's true. It's impaired. As soon as it gets back to the recent highs, I'll let go and sell it. And then we'll put the capital somewhere else. But of course, it never gets back to the most recent highs. It's a trap. And so he did not suffer that. He finished the thoughts. The thoughts suggest that something that is no longer as what once was in time to sell and then sell. And so I think that's one of the more important lessons that I've carried from that training. And I'd say that, you know, as I think of my own own pluses and minuses, the one minus would be that I probably am less decisive as was Bill

Starting point is 00:38:17 on that notion of than sell and fall prey to that human instinct, which is then sell, but a little higher. It was interesting, though, I could see when you changed your mind about something like Altria or Wells Fargo, you were pretty ruthless when it actually came to pulling the trigger and getting rid of them. Can you talk about that? Because you, I mean, as we'll get to, you own a lot of stocks for 30, 40 years. And yet, when you saw something like Wells Fargo or Altria shift away from what you liked, you sort of dumped them in instantly, almost, it seems. Yes. Well, that's what I'm supposed to. That's what we're supposed to. That's what I was just suggesting. Bill did so well. And you picked two important examples. Altria had every reason to think

Starting point is 00:39:04 that they had a quite glorious future. They were what was left standing from the company craft, And so they had the domestic tobacco business, they had a host of other related businesses. And the shares were modestly priced. They had every opportunity to make sure buybacks increase. But for some reason, and it's most likely found in the executive compensation package because you can't make sense of it otherwise. Out of the clear blue, one day this business, which was sort of thought they put together domestic cigarettes, the brand leaders Marlboro, and they had 51% of the market.

Starting point is 00:39:41 And even though the business is declining, he will continue to accelerate on the decline. It all penciled out to being a fruitful and likely to be rewarding investment. But on top of that, it wasn't capturing the exciting prospects to what might shift it from being considered dull in value to being sort of hot fire. And so they stepped across the way and bought into a position for $35 billion on a reduced risk product to help smokers quit. smoking. And they came upon a, at the same time, for $11 billion, I think the number was a cannabis company that would express their cannabis products through joints and through candies and all the other stuff. And they bought that. So in one fell swoop, they had massively

Starting point is 00:40:28 leveraged up their balance sheet. One of them was duels, right, which is controversial. The dual. Jewel was the big one. It cost them $34.5 billion from the time they bought it to the time they just recently wrote off some of the final bits, it turns out to be about $34 billion of capital destruction. And anyways, when they bought that, both of those, we knew that there was trouble and it made no sense, given their willingness to leverage up so much and compromise what they, as Warren says, over the years, Warren has often been asked, why do people do really stupid things? And this would be one of them. And Warren said, you never really know why, but he said, there's a

Starting point is 00:41:10 is this situation where very smart people for some reason or other want what they, they're willing to risk what they have and they need for that which they can't have and don't need. And so that was clearly a case. If you thought about the macro risks, you're picking up by making those moves as they did, it was, you know, in some ways a form of, you know, suicidal kind of psychology in some sort. And then with the same sort of thing with the cannabis, it was just a slower fuse. The trouble, why I go to such colorful lengths with Jewel, the real issue there was they found themselves with this product that they marketed to younger users than they legally are allowed to. And it hit that particular age group and it created a real roar among parents and many well-positioned

Starting point is 00:42:02 parents and the whole process really became one of punishment. And we didn't want to stick her on. So we sold it. And that was perfectly reasonable. We never looked back on that. The other one, what was the other? Well, Wells Fargo, which also got into reputational risk territory. Exactly. And again, why ever would they risk what they had? And then, you know, I have a sort of a spin on that whole saga, which is slightly different. And I think that part of the lack of the lack of of supervision, part of the lack of culture as it related to self-policing, those who were in a position to make bad decisions, the self-policing process that would have been there since Richard Krodcheck, I think his last name was, it was a CEO for decades, and other prior

Starting point is 00:42:51 managers. They were all distracted because of the acquisition that Wells Fargo made of Norwest at the end of the collapse of 1999, I guess it was, when the baking crisis hit such a hard wall. No, I excuse me, it's the Lehman Brothers collapse, which created this outcome. If you can imagine this, at Wells Fargo, I think management from Wells Fargo went home that Friday night thinking that they were going to be acquired by Morgan Stanley. And, you know, the froth that existed over that extraordinary weekend ended up. up that they ended up instead buying Northwest Bank Corp. Two cultures never really melded. And they were just extraordinarily different. One was West Coast Base. One was based in Charlotte. And they didn't

Starting point is 00:43:42 share values. And they were very different banks. I think that left an awful lot of pockets unsupervised. And rather than go back and unravel the trouble, my decision reflected my belief that the trouble was going to endure for a very long time because there was a very strong political tone to the solution. There are many billions of dollars that were paid in penalties by wells. And none of those had any suggestion that they were sufficient. There was just a sense that this would go on for a very long time. In fact, even today, they're still paying out large penalty payments from that conduct that took place during the period of collapse of livenment and misbehavior that followed. And case, we had a position that we felt could provide us with much the same kind of exposure run by a

Starting point is 00:44:33 person who we quite esteemed named Jamie Diamond, and it was JP Morgan. So we sort of, we came out of Wells in light of the political challenges that we knew that they would face, believe that they would face for the coming decades and found Jamie to have, his shares were equally lower as where Wells is at the time. So we sort of made a swap and had a position since the, than at JPMorgan. A lot of your reputation has been built on these very long-term investments in great consumer companies like Nestle, which I think is probably your second largest position, which you've owned since I think about 1986.

Starting point is 00:45:10 Brown Foreman, which owns Jack Daniels, which I think you've owned since 1987. Yeah, same thing. Heineken, which is what late eight is, early 90s, something like that? 86, 86. Amazing. So these companies... It's productive year. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:45:24 So these companies that you've... owned for 36 or so years already. Can you talk about what these businesses embody in terms of the two great principles, really, that are at the heart of what you do, this capacity to reinvest and the capacity to suffer? Because I think it's such a profoundly important idea, such a great insight about what makes a company durable over decades. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So take your pick, Hyneker and Brown-Forman, whichever you want to talk about, Tom. I think they have really so much the same. You start with products that with strong brands, with strong enough brands, the consumer doesn't believe there could be an adequate substitute for. That's sort of what we start

Starting point is 00:46:06 with when assessing the potential merit of any investment. And is that going to be an enduring reason? Or is it something that can be wasted and frittered away or is it one that could be competed away? And, you know, the people who you grow up with, if you go back 30 years later and they're still having their same cars or whatever it is that might define who they tell other people they are by what they have remain enduring. And that notion that brands, which is what would at the heart of what we tend to specialize in, brands are valuable because they help people shorthand describe who they are by what they have. If you wear an IZod shirt, if you wear a Faragawa tie, if you wear this, Hermes bag for $6,000, they're all laden with, with, with

Starting point is 00:46:52 the confirmation of what and who you are. And I think that's in such a high order of need states that I tend to think of it is more enduring than most people do. Most people would say, for example, we own a position in Reishmont. And Reismont has an own intern Van Cleef, and they own in turn Cartier, which are two really tightened of the luxury goods industry. And people say, yeah, But that's cyclical, you know, because, you know, down-term people will stop? I sort of say, will they stop giving out wedding bans? Will they stop wedding rings? Will they stop, you know, the Rolex watch, which in certain countries, you know, when a young

Starting point is 00:47:31 woman turns 25, she gets a Rolex watch, things like that. My belief is that they're not nearly as discretionary as people think they are. And the best example of that at all is Apple, Apple, Macintosh, laptops. If you think that that's a discretionary purchase, then you don't have a teenage daughter or son. I don't want to have seen it. Anyways, because you go home and deliver to them their favorite, your reasonably priced Hitachi desktop and watch your child fall apart immediately in front of you because it just won't do. They need the sense of belonging that comes to that blowing back Apple. and it's a fabulous part of that business, which is the stickiness, the unwillingness to switch,

Starting point is 00:48:18 the high switching costs, I guess you call it. And so that brand is what we really find. In the case of, in the case of Richemont, their total addressable market is jewelry, global. And of that market, only 10% of that market's branded. The balance, 90% is the addressable market, which we have in front of us, shareholders of the two most powerful jewelry brands in the world. And so that's a position which allows us to then reinvest into making sure that they have the right locations, pricing goods at the right price, coming up with the right innovations because you don't want to seem overly innovative because it's all about traditions. And so we see there the kind of business that I would like to own 100% of myself if I had the choice or the ability to. But we don't. And so we

Starting point is 00:49:10 We then find it to exist in this example in the public company now. Then the question is, what about Johann Rupert? He's the family heir to the fortune that controls the Richmond. Will he invest the right amount of money? Will he cut corners? Will he do even lacking a big Wall Street package for compensation? Will he nonetheless do the same thing as unreviewable head of the business? And our answer to that is no, that they do think of us when they make decisions.

Starting point is 00:49:40 This is my belief. I've met him. I do believe that he thinks about the outside shareholders and the duty that he has to them. And so that checks off the agency cost. The capacity to reinvest is checked off because, you know, converting 10% to 90% of the market that's not branded. That same story, by the way, is true of selling Beard Hinegan in Africa. At the same time, I bought the Rishma position. We bought the Heineken position. And that belief was that they had the leading beer, and they had cash flow from around the world, especially from markets where the growth rates had slowed. And so they had capital, and they had presence, they had presence, longstanding presence, much like RETA and Riesma. They had presence in markets that are 100 years old.

Starting point is 00:50:28 And so the trick is, of the 400 million barrels of beer-like liquids consumed each day in Africa, only a hundred of that is bottled, brewed traditionally with the equipment of the West, it's pasteurized, it's bottled, it's taxed, it's marketed. So one third, actually one fourth of the market is Western style. And the three quarters that await are total addressable market. The investment case will be made by the mature cash flows that come from the West. Now, that's kind of the way Heineken set up in 1986. And so it played its way through the day.

Starting point is 00:51:07 It kept growing by new countries, kept growing by different brands. They came up with Heineken 0.0 recently, which is an alcohol-free hyniquin, which is the number one alcohol beer, free beer in the country. And all the things that made them succeed to just last year when they had the great fortune of winning 20% points of the Indian market through transactions that took place during the pandemic. where they were the best position to buy it because they were partners with that business for the prior 25 years. So when they bought it, they now had 60 plus percent of the business. And they can begin to do what we've long wanted India to do, which is to develop a bottled beer, taxed beer, attractively priced beer.

Starting point is 00:51:54 That's now under Heineken's watch. So it has all of the management insight and capability of the world's leading brewer. and they're going to deliver that to a nation of thirsty drinkers. I was amazed, Tom, I had been reading your shareholder letters for the last few years. Yes. And I was telling my wife over dinner last night this amazing statistic from one of your letters, which is that I think 20 million Indians per year advanced to legal drinking age. So over the next five years, we're going to have this new market of 100 million people

Starting point is 00:52:23 that a Heineken can deliver. And that seems very emblematic of what it is that you're doing. Exactly. You're hitting this expansion into emerging and developing markets. And I met too. I was with Heineken management earlier this week. And we were talking about their priorities of where will they reinvest going forward. And they have, as I said, India, they're extraordinarily charged up.

Starting point is 00:52:49 I think it's an unusual opportunity. And by measurement, the Indians today consume 1.5 liters of beer per year. They like it. They are becoming more, their consumer disposable income is growing as a nation. And they have a fondness for King Fisher Beer, which is the brand that is at the heart of that company. So I am ecstatic. They will have the capacity to spend hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars building from a market that has one and a half liters. By contrast, India is 30, China is 38 liters per capita. The U.S. is 66. Germany is 99. The Czech Republic is 142 liters per capita. Heineken has presence in all those markets.

Starting point is 00:53:39 142, the Czech market, they have a presence there. Anyways, we couldn't be happier. We're in a position now where one of our longest standing investments is about to rebirth itself. One other area that they succeeded in demand, amazingly through a lot of interesting steps and turns is Brazil, where they sell more Heineken than in glass bottles than in any other market in the world. There's a nuance in investing in the beverage industry, which is that if you get, if you're large enough in one of the developing emerging markets, you will have the ability to serve that market using recyclable, returnable glass bottles. If you think about a 30-cent bottle as a part of a six-pack that goes out and never comes back, that's $1.80 packaging costs in that six-pack. If the bottles come back, instead of 30 cents a bottle, it's three cents a bottle.

Starting point is 00:54:30 And you take six of those, it's $0.18 instead of a dollar eight. And so they will have some substantial competitive advantage. They will be building fresh greenfield route to market and brewing. And then they'll have the benefit of that extra marketing that comes from the returnable glass bottles. and they have, you know, 60 plus percent of the marketplace. And so mature market cash flows come to support the buildout. They have a high rate of return on that spending, which is great because otherwise the money,

Starting point is 00:55:03 we just sort of, they'd struggle with how to place it if they didn't have this thirsty engine kicking it. And so we have a very long-term field. But I will spend most of my time over the coming month because some of this is just coming to fruition, just assessing how big the capacity is for them to re-employ capital and how will it secure their belief among the consumers in India that there's no other product they would rather do or can do without. If you were right on that 20 million, that's an amazing number. So that's a great example of this importance of the capacity to reinvest.

Starting point is 00:55:38 I wanted if you could just quickly run us through an example of something like Nestle investing in Espresso or Berkshire investing in Geico. There's an example of this other really central theme of yours, which is the capacity to suffer. Yes. Well, it is a perfect example of it is Nisproso, which as you can imagine, that some degree of hostility, when even proposed, it was proposed to be, Nispresso was going to be a premium, home-delivered premium individual coffee serving kit, where there's a cartridge that's so fresh in its release that it will feel like you have it from a real bariscery.

Starting point is 00:56:17 but it's actually coming from your kitchen on a little device that sits next year, orange juice press. Anyways, they saw the opportunity. It's very hard. I don't know if any of you've tried to brew home espresso. It's hard to do it because it's some European trick that they get, we don't. And this is a great equalizer because it's a great cup that comes out. But it costs them.

Starting point is 00:56:40 And they did not break even for 15 years on this. And the product was canceled by the chairman several times along the way. And zealot, messianic people buried inside Heinz and Nestle pulled it to the side and said, we're not going to let you die. And they kept it going and then passed some more hurdles and they went a little longer. But today it's a $5 billion platform, sort of three and a half billion in capsules, which are quite profitable. And the other one and a half is machinery, which they sort of pass through, but it has some

Starting point is 00:57:10 marginal profits, but they really make the money, the disposable cartridge. And that's a good example. Well, another good example would be, I'll share this one with you, because it's domestic. The beauty about Nesty, again, is just like Heineken, just like others that we've spoken about. My goal is to tap into the places in the world where the populations are still growing, consumer income is still advancing. So we tend to look for that redeployment of capital, especially closely when it goes into new markets, especially those new markets where we know that there's been a history of interactivity with the brands,

Starting point is 00:57:43 but the market's just waiting for more spending power and more capacity to deliver inside that market, and that requires the investment. And so we love it when companies say that they're making sizable investments to expand it into their capacity to serve a market, which is proved to be thirsty for their products. Just a different story has to do with EW Scripts, which is a newspaper company founded by the Scripps family. It had 100 papers around the country. They're all more profitable in the other one. And it's a business. The newspaper business, daily newspaper business, monopoly town businesses, has been one which consumers cannot do without for decades.

Starting point is 00:58:23 If you needed to know that, just think back on any of the houses or homes you've lived and know if you're growing up and ask yourself whether or not was the case that the richest family in any given town you're in was the newspaper family. I don't know that that's the case, but it typically is because they had such an extraordinary monopoly on local stories. And so people had to read those, you know, who was drunk, who was the quarterback on the high school football team, who scored the goal, all that stuff that you got to have to be a member of a citizen. Now, what they didn't do is they didn't make the turn to the internet. And they sort of fell flat, put it on solutions that were truly local, but didn't have the ability to cross over it and cure them from most of their other newspapers.

Starting point is 00:59:06 But there was a professional there who sold the scripts companies radio stations and had proceeds from it. And he had an idea that he'd like to do. And he went to the family that controlled the board. As a quick aside, I haven't yet described one of the key components of the model that we try to apply is that the companies that execute best on our behalf tend to be a still run by founding family members. is we think that we can attach ourselves to their long-term desire to grow their wealth slowly, but securely, and to be mindful of not having to pay taxes along the way. And so EW. Scripps publishing company, as they were approached by one of their key executives

Starting point is 00:59:50 who sold out the business of radio, had money and petitioned to them that they permitted to spend it on a new advertising-supported cable company that would embrace both the house and the garden. He thought it might be called the HGTV, Home Garden TV network. And the family looked it over and realized that they had capacity. They had a musical station band that played background music for all the different, they had 12 or 14 different TV stations. So they had television ad salespeople. They had mixing equipment, the graphics equipment, everything you needed to power up a TV

Starting point is 01:00:27 station they had. So Home and Garden TV network would borrow from some of those. internal capacities. And the family said, we'll dedicate those internal capacities to trying to make this work. And you have $150 million. That's it. You can spend that. But when you're done with that, you're done with it. And so they hired two people the first year, seven the next, 15 the next, and 40 the next year, they're up to 70 and they're ready to go to market. And they lost exactly $150 million along that path. And so the last day before they switched it on, they spent, they passed through their income statement, the last money in that 150.

Starting point is 01:01:05 And it opened a great fanfare of success. And fast forward, the newspaper business that suffered through that construction process underwrote the investment, their newspaper business, the TV business all went sort of awry because of the internet. But this digital broadcast network thrive. And they ended up selling it for just somewhere under $10 billion on a business that harness all the power of their various media-related assets. But in order to deliver that product had to suffer through the investment spending pressure on earnings that took place. Understand that

Starting point is 01:01:42 their other businesses were earning money along the way. But as those operating losses from the buildout mounted, it looked like the companies reported net income was going down sharply. It wasn't. It still had the base business, and they had losses reported on top of the base business. But at the end of the day, that beginning profitability that was concealed with an ACTV ended up being a torrent. And it was an extraordinarily high utility. And people who liked the home of the garden couldn't do without that network. And the viewership today is still extraordinary. It was built with the money that came from having the capacity to reinvest.

Starting point is 01:02:23 They had the people, they had the talent, they had the equipment, and a board who gave the management team a capacity to look really bad. And why that matters is that he has to report to the public company. He has to report, and he will go to the public company and say, we had a great quarter, but the numbers don't look that interesting. And he says that for about three quarters in a row, and he's going to have an activist knocking on his door. And that activist knows that all of those investment spendings have burdened the income.

Starting point is 01:02:55 And if they just turned off the spigot, they would show a big jump in profitability. It would destroy the asset value of what they built, but they could show more near-term earnings. And it's that trade-off that takes place between what a family-controlled company would do for their own wealth and what a Wall Street Council company might do for a quarterly boost to reported profits. 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 compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered

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Starting point is 01:06:40 See the difference? Yeah. I think you're getting at something really profoundly important on that we've talked about in the past, which is, in a sense, there are these two mentalities, right? There's the short-term mentality that's embodied by a lot of Wall Street, which is hyperactive, impatient, not aligned in terms of interest. It's looking out for its own interests. And then there's this other slower, more patient, more thoughtful mindset that you embody

Starting point is 01:07:05 with your own investment, your own investing style. We strive to, yes. Yeah, that's a different, it's all about delayed gratification in a sense, because instead of going for the quick hit or looking good in the short term. It's trying to do things that are wise in the long term. And I wondered if you could unpack that a little for us, because it seems to me this is one of those master principles in life that when you, in a world that's becoming increasingly short term, the real prize goes to the people who are thinking more long term. Right, but they can't act long term unless they have the governance and the board support that protects against the, you know, the

Starting point is 01:07:45 visit from an activist or even a takeover person who feels that, who often know that what looks like it's declining, as it was a case in scripts as newspapers, that old business looked like it was declined at an accelerating rate. They can easily figure out, as can we, as there's no miracle on this, that the investment spending is really why the decline was taking place. And the other business was actually quite flourishing. And, you know, thank you very much. I'd say, I think the script's example is pretty good one. The other one is this one with Berkshire Halfway taking $5 billion a premium to underwrite for someone who very easily possibly for the wrong reason had to show that $35 billion of equity index values still added up to the number that they had

Starting point is 01:08:35 to show during the course of that 15-year period, they had to maintain that level. And so when Warren and said that he'd protect them against the clients that level. He committed his whole balance sheet to making up for the shortfalls because, as I said, the end of each year, there was a mark to market that described what decline in value was for the portfolio, those four stock exchanges that Berkshire insured would collectively remain over 35 billion value. And it cost his reported earnings for those years. And his balance sheet had a huge hole in it that said payables under insurance recovery, which meant that if at any time they want to close it out, they would have to settle up with that, cap them out.

Starting point is 01:09:18 Of course, the story ended well. The global markets recovered. Berkshire, you never get to reverse those negative reports back, but in fact, they didn't end up losing any money. They're better off for having the structure that allowed that all to take place and for them to be allowed to invest in something that has upfront optics that are troubling when there's the sense that the long term is pretty secure. That tradeoff is what really gives power to somebody who's bidding against a person who thinks that it's just a really tight spread and it'll be lucky to

Starting point is 01:09:50 get by. I think what's fascinating, Tom, is that this idea of going against the short term and deferring gratification, that it applies not only in business and investing, but in life. And I remember after we discussed this once several years ago, you emailed me because I've been asking you for examples of this in books and the like. And you were like, well, less jam today for more jam tomorrow, the three little piggas, etc., a childhood tales that inculcate thoughtful people with the message of deferred gratification. Is that what I sent you? Yeah, you email me. And after that, you said, society has, however, created endless reasons why decision makers mistakenly prefer more jam today, even at the expense of jam tomorrow. And you said, much investment opportunity arises from

Starting point is 01:10:34 being able to take the other side of the short-termism bet. That seems to me a really profoundly important insight that as the world becomes more and more short-term, both because of the pressure of Wall Street, political pressure, which makes societies do stupid stuff in terms of their energy consumption and the like, but also in our own lives, right,

Starting point is 01:10:54 where we have these constant dopamine hits from our phones and our Twitter feeds and the like. What you really want to do in life is push against those short-term temptations. Does that resonate with you? I think so. And then how do you implement it and how do you live it are both extraordinarily hard challenges? And so I observe it and I recount it and have gone through EW scripts.

Starting point is 01:11:20 We own those shares. They delivered a terrific result to us as they went down the path, which took advantage of the fact that they knew that their viewers would probably stay put and they could absorb the burden on the reported profits near term that the price, proper amount of spending would certainly generate because they had in their pocket the votes from a board that was family control and that was interested in long-term gains. Now, all of this at some level, going very back to the start of this afternoon's conversation, one of the other things that Warren said to that class in 82 was that you want to never

Starting point is 01:11:58 forget that the only break you get as an investor is the non-taxation of unrealized gains. So you should take advantage of that, make sure that what you invest in, as Warren said, allows you to be right once. You come up with the business, it's correct. It has a capacity to invest, it has management that's long-term minded, that protects, that's protected by boards that are often beyond control. And they just said about creating something that's disruptively advancing their long-term, that asset value on a per share basis, which is how we settle everything up.

Starting point is 01:12:30 It could be advancing that tremendously, even while reporting trouble. in the execution, which is inevitable. So your whole life in a way has been the opposite of short term, right? I mean, we talked before about your biggest holdings like Berkshire, Nestle, Heinrich and Brown-Forman. These are things you've owned 35 to 40 years. So I'm wondering in a world where everyone is getting more short-term, how have you managed to set yourself up so that you can tune out a lot of the noise

Starting point is 01:13:00 so that you can move slowly and delay decisions that there must be a lot of pressure to do something now. And I remember you saying, yeah, I remember you saying, don't just do something, sit there. How do you manage to maintain that mindset, which is totally countercultural? That's a good one. It's just what I've said. I believe in. I illustrate those beliefs by examples, which I hope sort of conveying the plot in some ways. And then I spend time letting my investors know that these are core principles that we intend to stick to. And there will be times when we're out of favor, there be times that we're in favor. And please remember that when we're vastly out of favor, that we're never as stupid as they think we are. And that when we're

Starting point is 01:13:46 terribly in favor, sadly, we're never as smart as we think we are. I do think that it's a deeply held belief. We look for investors who have a similar point of view. That's the number one way to make sure that you have a fighting chance to take advantage of opportunities where near-term gain results in long-term pain and take advantage of the opposite currents in our case. It's you just have to make sure that that's what your investors know that that's what you're setting out to do. And along the way, we'll get it wrong, in which case we'll have to part companies with something. you have to make sure that we guard against the temptation to misthink that just because we said we're going to stay long-term focused means that we have to stay long-term.

Starting point is 01:14:29 Because there will be times when we make a mistake and we're supposed to head for the hills immediately. That wouldn't have been the case with Wells Fargo because we'd owned it for a very long time, but we sold fairly soon after the contagion that came about as a result of their acquisition of Northwest became apparent. We moved with dispatch, with Altria, the same sort of thought process. It just was different and it showed a different aspect and we were prepared to move. We've come through this period, Tom, where obviously in some ways you were out of favor for a few years

Starting point is 01:14:59 because for about a decade, people could just roll the dice on any hot tech stock in the US and they would make lots of money without any real consideration for price and valuation and the like. And you're very disciplined about these things and also very global in your approach. And then it kind of the bubble burst recently and obviously we've seen all of these great tech, leaders come crashing down to earth. And I noticed that you've been kind of looking through the rubble. I was reading in one of your recent investor letters that you've been looking through the rubble. And one thing you got excited about of all of these former darlings was Netflix. Can you talk a bit about why of all of the hot tech stocks that have crashed Netflix fits your parameters?

Starting point is 01:15:41 Well, it is one of a couple. I mean, we had a position which we started during the turmoil in Alibaba. And Alibaba, the thinking there is they are absolutely positioned in a way that the Chinese consumer cannot do without them in terms of the extensiveness of their command over the e-commerce. And in fact, our Western companies who wish to sell their products to Chinese consumers cannot do without Alibaba. If you're Johnny Walker, you're Jameson's, your Hineken, whatever number of Cartier for sure,

Starting point is 01:16:17 that Cartier is so enamored with Alibaba that they have crossed shareholdings in some of the e-commerce platforms. And they also co-owned pieces of Farfax, which is one of the auction houses in China. So both of them had come down sharply in price. We hadn't owned any of them, as you suggest, up until. November of last year when we put a small position on it in Alibaba. And we said at the time, we understand that the biggest risk here is one of agency costs. And it's a whole nation that serves as your agent in some ways and their proclivity to pull from you what ought to be

Starting point is 01:16:57 yours was just so vastly more profound than we had feared. We marked the position with a sort of be careful stamp because we weren't sure. And that's something that we've learned is, even more entrenched in sort of the difficulty of keeping what you create. There's also been in China particularly, there's been massive, massive distractions as a result of real estate, which was built to bust in some ways, as is so often the way in that case, that means that the people who build it make an awful lot of money, but the banks that fund it end up socially distributing out the cost more broadly. And I think we're about to go through one of those in China, maybe already going through

Starting point is 01:17:38 But with Alibabaaba, Tom, which I mean, I probably should have disclosed before. I own Berkshire, which I intend to own for many years, but I also have a small position in Alibaba, which continues to get smaller because it's been cut in half. And a couple of our listeners who, we had lots of people send questions in over Twitter. And a couple of people, one is called Matt Cummins and what, who said, if a stock price gets cut in half, what's Tom's criteria for when to buy more and possibly double the position in that scenario. And a guy called Chill Daily said, how do you know when to sell a position?

Starting point is 01:18:15 And I was thinking with something like Alibaba, where clearly you and I and Charlie Munger and many smarter people than me have been wrong so far, how do you decide whether to cash out, whether you were just wrong, whether China's too risky, or whether to stick to the position or add to it? Well, it's been from almost the first day,

Starting point is 01:18:35 and financial was the catalyst that caused the drop initially that we were able to put a small position on at the same time in Alibaba. And that was a fairly substantial reorientation of financial service venture that Alibaba profited mightily from. And it promised to have far less profits for them ever since really we entered the investment. But it was that direction was suggested, but it wasn't sure. And it's become more clear and sure over the holding. period, which is about a year and a half, I guess, for us. But it's quite possible. It's our belief that the valuation has come down along with the share price. And the certainty with which we believe some of the businesses would grow and contribute has raised. And so, for example, that is the

Starting point is 01:19:24 cloud business. And the politicization of the cloud business, I gather from one of my colleagues that TikTok had, I think it's the case that they had been a user of their cloud business. And Alibaba's cloud business, but would not be allowed to going forward for a variety of reasons. And then more recently, the dual listing question, the Hong Kong listing versus the requirement of change accountings. That last one is what gave me the sense of Warren's comment, which is you don't get extra points for degrees of difficulty. And the degrees of difficulty that have surfaced by watching the Chinese government treat capital across a host of different areas, whether it's educational testing, whether it's the casino business, whether at the board level, whether it's

Starting point is 01:20:13 the way that the financial service business has been treated. There's so many areas. And lastly, the cloud business with its intrusions, it reaches so many areas that define complexity that I realized that we probably took on more need to know decisions that we have to make. every day we hold the shares, then I realize at the start. And I would say in part, because the situation worsened over the course of the holding period. It's a far more complicated investment. When you look, Tom, at China and the increasing risk, presumably that China invades Taiwan, the increasing regulatory risk. Or that we invade Taiwan with the current situation of the day, but go on. Well, I mean, increasing risks, geopolitics,

Starting point is 01:21:02 increasing conflict between the U.S. and China, all of these human rights issues. Someone wrote to me last week and said to me, it's kind of a moral issue. You just shouldn't be invested in China. Like it doesn't mean you can't make money, but why put your money there? And I sort of initially dismissed it. And then I was looking at it. And I was like, actually, it's quite possible that he's right. Like maybe, like, why do I need the complication? Why do I need the headache? Why should I be supporting the persecution of Uyghurs and Tibetans. Yeah, it's a horrible thing. What do you think?

Starting point is 01:21:34 How do you play this out in your own mind? Well, it's just one of those things that I just said. Warren, as so often is the case, he has given us the answer. And that is, you get no extra credit for degrees of difficulty in investing. So, for example, we have a position in Google. Google, Google has one of the absolute most fabulous cloud businesses. And I've held this position, ongoing position in small position versus a four or five times larger position in Google.

Starting point is 01:22:05 I've held the small position in part because of the possibility that Baba would get us into the Chinese cloud business. But it's not clear. That's become politicizing as well just recently because of this TikTok move by the government. And so many of the things that we have bought with seem to degrade. down to political, a political outcome. And those political outcomes seem to break largely in the favor of the domestic participants. In which case, I go back to what Warren said is you don't get any extra credit points for degrees of difficulty. And indeed, we can take advantage of that

Starting point is 01:22:38 insight and keep our capital and find something else that's more promising. And we're prepared to do that. More broadly, when you think about these issues of morality and investing, It's complex this, and I'm not trying to be judgmental or moralistic about it. I worry about this stuff a lot myself. But obviously, you own Philip Morris. It's a big physician. You own Heineken, Pernar, Brown-Forman, these big alcohol and tobacco sellers, not to mention food companies that, you know, full of sugar and the like.

Starting point is 01:23:07 How do you think about these questions of where to draw the line morally? I mean, are there things like weapons manufacturers or casinos or polluters, massive polluters, where you'll draw the line, you'll say, no, I don't accept that. How do you think through this issue yourself? As you identify, I like strong brands. And it just so happens that among the strongest brands are in what areas you just described. And so I am led there by my sense that those businesses are good, are offered a very certain reinvestment rate. They're strong businesses. As far as sort of society's demands from them, I sort of let society make those demands.

Starting point is 01:23:51 You know, I wouldn't, there's a host of things I probably wouldn't invest in, but I'm sure I invest in things that others wouldn't. For example, energy, Exxon, we don't own it on behalf of clients. What we've realized as a world that the verver with which issues relating to the environment have crept up have run straight into sort of the messiness of European and energy requirements. And so I think right at this time, we're having some exposure to how complicated the world is, especially on the part of all of us who in different areas have causes, that we just as soon mandate be treated differently. And I would say, for example, energy right now is one.

Starting point is 01:24:31 But it's very complicated. And, you know, Warren's purchase of $62 billion worth of energy shares squarely presents that question because it's, I haven't bought energy shares, but. you think about whether you can or you should. And Warren, I think, has clearly said he can and enacted with that assurance. And I have a feeling it has to deal with, you know, the reality that we may wish it weren't so, but we'll be with oil for a very long time. And especially Warren will be because of his mid-American energy activities and because of Burlington Northern and a host of other areas. They'll just be confronting energy as a cost of good soul going forward.

Starting point is 01:25:09 I think the world will end up probably a little more nuanced than it would have been, for example, on the issue of energy just a year ago because the stridency bumps up against the political reality. And the world's not going to be happy if Jeremy freezes. I was very struck, Tom, when I was reading through your last, I think, 10 investor letters, how there's a very consistent thread of focus on the environment in your writing. And there's a terrific line that I'll quote where you said, Our companies have long realized that the environment is not only to be included in their deliberations, but actually should be worshipped.

Starting point is 01:25:45 And then you said companies whose pollution gives businesses bad names are actually not representative of thoughtful businesses, waste left over from organizations that call themselves business-minded, actually detract from business results. And I was very interested by the detail that you went into in talking about how Heineken and Nestle in particular. Yes, that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, have become these good corporate citizens. Can you talk about just very quickly a couple of things that they're doing?

Starting point is 01:26:12 Because it seems to me, for example, with Nestle, this goes way beyond kind of just whitewashing and trying to make themselves look good. There's something actually quite dynamic and profound going on. Oh, yes. Mark Snyder is all in on sustainability. And most of the platforms that you would measure best practices by in terms of the environment. And that's the question of pacing. And what you ought to put out as the audacious goals for actually deploying capital and getting to work.

Starting point is 01:26:43 So I think they put out $5 billion worth of plans for their plastic bottles for Perrier. Just go right down to the old-fashioned packaging for food, the investment in plant-based protein, which they now have a billion dollars worth of business doing. Now, many of those check off sort of familiar, comfortable boxes, but they are, I think, truly and deeply felt. up and down the organization of 340,000 people who work for Nestle. And so I spend a fair amount of time with them and I come away feeling like that, the management level all the way down to the associate level, that they are mindful and also desirous of outcomes that allow them to continue to run their

Starting point is 01:27:25 businesses. And as I said in that write-up, the waste is waste. And when you start with that mindset, you then seek solutions where you can take the waste and then crack it and derive it. So, for example, I was with senior management from ABNB, InBeb, Budweiser yesterday. They now have, I think, some $2 million of revenue that's involved with their processing of the spent barley, malt, and oats that go into beer. And it's a commercially viable business. And before it was just poured out into the, into the sewer or fed to animals, that they're applying techniques to understand.

Starting point is 01:28:04 what it is that they once called waste, so they can extract from it something that's no longer called race. It was interesting to me, Tommy, you pointed out in one of your letters that Heineken has shifted to using these glass bottles that are reusable, something like 40 times, and I think it had halved the amount of wastewater they use over the years or something. Or maybe it was they reduced the water it takes to produce a liter of beer by half over decades. Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:28:30 It made me think, is, I'm not trying to say that these businesses, you know, I'm not trying to say that these businesses are particularly pious and holy and all of that. But it strikes me that innovation is going to play such an important role in the actual real world efforts to reduce carbon emissions and the life. Likewise with Philip Morris, right? I mean, Philip Morris developing less dangerous cigarettes. I think Philip Morris is a pretty reprehensible company in many ways and has a terrible history. But actually, it may have more benefit for humankind by developing less dangerous cigarettes than a lot of the charities that are around. I don't know. What do you think? I ran late. I ran late this afternoon for our discussion, as I was with the CEO of Philomoros. It's the first trip

Starting point is 01:29:10 back to the United States since COVID, and the extent to which that company has transformed itself, 30% of its customers do not smoke cigarettes. The movement towards an oral pouch or for a non-burning unit, which is called an icos, heat not burn, it means that they're delivering to consumers who want nicotine, an adjustable dose of that product independent of combustion. And combustion is the source of harm. And they believe that by 2030, they'll be 50-50, and by 2040, they'll be, in a sense, no more cigarettes coming from them. And already 30% of their consumers do not smoke cigarettes. It's a transformation that's been extraordinary. They spent $12 billion on this, along with $4 billion of acquisitions in the last,

Starting point is 01:30:01 month to make sure that they are in a position that they can see, activate on the future that they see. It really makes me think. It's kind of like when I think back politically about someone like Lyndon Johnson, right, who in some ways was an awful human being but did some remarkable stuff in terms of civil rights. Sometimes these, you know, we tend to look at companies and think, oh, capitalism, it's terrible. And, you know, companies do awful things. These companies, maybe they've despoiled the environment and killed lots of people with their products and stuff. But we're so dependent on them to get better. I'm not articulating this well, but can you sort of explain? What are your thoughts on this? From where I said, from where I said,

Starting point is 01:30:41 and you're right. I mean, I own spirits companies and beer company, a cigarette company. The conversations that we have, the actions that they're taking, you know, to have 7% of Hynickens beer now and something called a 0.0 no alcohol beer and to celebrate that as an option. And choice is what increasingly is being offered. And I think with choice, you go down the list and you have a chance to choose what you want. And I would venture to say that if you join me on a visit with the management of the companies that we do want, you'd feel as do I, that they are marching down a path that's quite different than 30 years ago. And I think it's a predecessor to what will be the next 20 years.

Starting point is 01:31:23 We won't slip back on this stuff, the best I can tell. I must say this last line of investigation is an important one. And it's amazing, honestly, to see how the ESG expectations and expressions of goals and desires run square into the world that we now confront in a very different way than it did, even just a year ago. A year ago, we had all sorts of companies stating their intentions to have drastic changes underway. And in the face of the Russian, you know, Ukraine war, you know, food sourcing, reliability of food is going to become an issue. Gas and oil and everything else will become

Starting point is 01:32:03 an issue as we enter the harder periods of the year. And it's going to push back on the resolve of people who are normally bought into the virtues of sustaining our world because it is a primary question that we have to get right. But it's compromised at this moment by virtue. through the harsh conduct that the world is going through with COVID and with the war at some level with inflation, reprioritizing where people are spending money. And I do hope that we come back out of this period that we're going through, more sober about what demands we should have and then more focus on sort of how we go about making the changes that we'll benefit from as a nation and as a world. When you look at these various risks like inflation or conflict with

Starting point is 01:32:51 China or COVID or the war in Russia. I remember you writing recently that you said basically we haven't been through a period like this. You said we today live through what to my mind is the most unusual collection of worries that investors have had to grapple with in my 40-year-long investment journey. What do you worry about most as you look towards the next two, three, five years? Well, I mean, I think probably the most has to be both the Ukraine and Taiwan, because they both provoke very complicated individuals who ultimately oversee nuclear warheads in some fashion sort of aware of one another and their mutual positions up against the broader world. And it's really the scariest aspect.

Starting point is 01:33:40 And then beyond that, I guess my comment about how odd it is to have the issues that do come up to do so in this context, it would be to make sure that we don't fall back on and expect easier terms from those who have the right to produce, but still demand from them as much as we have been, but just understand that we'll be privy more nuance as we go through this process because it's not nearly so clean as apparent as I think people felt it could have been 18, 24 months ago in terms of steps that you take to be absolutely rid of the problems of oil, for example. Well, that's probably, given what Germany would let you know, they'd like to have arranged for the coming winter, it's probably more aspirational than implementatable at this

Starting point is 01:34:28 moment. And then just to make sure that we go through with a science-based, outcomes-based review of what it is that we want to accomplish in order of priority. And the first would be to somehow make sure that we get through these issues with these flashpoints like Taiwan and the Ukraine at the moment. If I remember rightly, Tom, you must be about 67 at this point. And I can see that you work like crazy. You've always have this intensity. You were rushing off to your next meeting, which I've had to force you to push back.

Starting point is 01:34:59 I feel guilty about. Not even think of it. Thank you. How do you sustain this level of intensity and drive? I mean, what's motivating you to keep working at this point when clearly you don't need it financially. You built it immensely successful business. Why do you keep going? Why not hang up your spurs after 40 years of doing this? It's purely curiosity and also sort of a desire to make a contribution. But curiosity is just something that is wired in me. And I heard from somebody who

Starting point is 01:35:30 happened to visit with my fourth grade teacher back in Wisconsin where I grew up. And they've shared a moment about our times together. And she said, God, you, is a pain, always asking questions. I think there's an element of that that just continues. I'm curious. And I think that's something I give wide birth to because I'm just interested in a range, a broad range of different options. I'm sure much like you and others as well. It seems almost like you're defining characteristic, Tom, curiosity. Because I remember once years and years ago being at the Markell meeting, and Tom Gainer had just finished talking, and I was sort of naturing to Bill Brewster, I think, afterwards. And I look over and I see you in a corner of the room chatting with this group that was around

Starting point is 01:36:14 the CEO of CarMax. I just thought it was really interesting. I could see that you were hustling. Like here you are, you know, in your 60s, a sort of grand figure in the investment community. And you were still hustling for information and for perspective and context. As described, I feel the attachment to. And then also, the contribution that comes from this. If we add value, we're adding value to causes that are important, and then we can also support things as well we can. I was told at some point by a person who described the path they took on a measured life as one that in your early years, you learn it, your middle years, you earn it, and then your later years you return it. And I sort of feel like

Starting point is 01:36:57 I'm sort of moving down that path. It will end up being supportive of needy causes. And I think that don't be a source of great satisfaction. But we should probably keep that quiet between ourselves to make those who might want to share in this fun work harder to find out that I have this interest. You were also in this interesting position where your son, Christopher, who I think is about 39 now, joined your firm back in 2019 as a senior research analyst and is obviously being groomed to play a major role in the firm's future. And I wonder if we could just end by my asking, if there's anything in particular that you're really trying to teach him in the same way that people like Buffett and Ruyn and Jack McDonnell, who is your first great professor at Stanford,

Starting point is 01:37:40 they taught you really key lessons. Is there anything that you're teaching Christopher that we can benefit from? Well, I think I learned through being around Bill and the rest of the people you mentioned just a moment ago and learn through hearing them, in fact, conduct themselves and then hearing after meetings how they would assess the character of the people who I met. That seemed to be the one thing that would be most likely to come out in each case is, what do you think about this person? I don't trust them.

Starting point is 01:38:08 I don't like them. And it's just that sizing up of the character because that's the first, but it's also defining the question to get right. And I would like that to make sure it conveys well to Chris and to Chris's colleague, Timothy Quinn, who's our director of research and who is the assistant. Distant portfolio manager, December Vic partners, which is what is the heart of our business. And so Timothy has an extraordinarily important role to play. And he and I and Christopher have that same kind of conversation.

Starting point is 01:38:38 And it has to do, again, with how do we feel as a result? It's very interesting because many people might say, you know, what is this, how do you feel about something? And I'm reminded of it's Charlie Munger's story that took place at the annual meeting of Westcoe some years back, many years back of that. And Charlie talked about character and about the judging character and how it works. He said he was reminded of a friend of his who had the largest private business in L.A. And that person's business was run by a sales director who had done the best job of any ever for the firm. And at the same time, the founder and the owner of the firm felt uncomfortable with the person.

Starting point is 01:39:17 And it was a growing level of discomfort with the person. And he found that he was losing sleep. and he wasn't feeling good. And so he finally had to call the guy in at some point. And he said to the guy, I understand that you've done nothing but extraordinary things for our firm and we just couldn't be happy with it. And then he lowers the boom and says, but there's something about you that just leads to be feeling awkward and uncomfortable.

Starting point is 01:39:41 And I've struggled with this for a long time. And I find I'm losing my appetite and sleeping less well. And I'm too old and too rich to lose my appetite of not to sleep well. And so I've decided I'm going to have to let you go. I'll do so with the highest of recommendation and with a very large lump sum upon departure. But I just can't put my arms out. I don't know what it is. I thank you for all you've done.

Starting point is 01:40:03 And I wish you well and what you will do. And that was it. And the beauty of that story is that the man who was as successful as he was, listen to his stomach, listen to his gut. There is a whole another layer to what we do. in addition to the sort of the numbers and the caliber of the business franchise and all the rest, it's about judging people. And I like the story that Charlie shared with us because you're not going to get something quantitative about your assessment of a person. But if you

Starting point is 01:40:33 spend your whole life reading, reading the great works of art, literature, all the stuff that you might do to try to program your mind to absorb and process important things. And then you have something as profound as he was going through. And you ignore it because it's just a belief, you're really shortchanging yourself for the kind of work that you do to protect yourself, quite frankly, for the long term. And so I hold that as an interesting memory of what really very, very important people end up doing at some point, which is to make decisions based on informed facts and all the rest, and then with a decent component of belief. And it gets back to that really important comment that Buffett made to you all those years ago

Starting point is 01:41:13 back in like 1982 about how you can't partner with a bad person. And I'll leave you with one thought, Tom, or one story that you don't know, which is I asked a friend of mine the other day who's been invested with you for probably 20 years or something about you. My friend sent me, well, basically told me this story, explaining that at one point, this couple, they decided to diversify more. They've done incredibly well with you, obviously, over many years. And they're like, well, we should probably diversify a bit more. And so they asked you this kind of awkward question, which is, can you recommend some other people that we ought to invest with, which is sort of insulting. ways. And my friend showed me the letter that you sent in reply. And it was such a wonderfully gracious letter that you wrote where basically you offered three suggestions. You sent their contact

Starting point is 01:41:59 details. You explained why you admired them. And then you said, and yeah, and I can write a message to these people introducing them to you. And my friend wrote to me, and I'll quote, this gives you an idea of what a class act the man is. I mean, he's so honorable and elegant. there are not many people who would so gladly have given me these suggestions, but Rousseau did. Oh, well, thank you. Yeah, so I just thought I'd leave you with that because it gives, and when I heard that, I sort of thought, I'm much more excited to interview Tom, even than I was before, because I know that you're a terrific investor and you're very thoughtful and that these ideas

Starting point is 01:42:32 about the capacity to suffer and the capacity to reinvest are really profoundly important. But the fact that you also behave in that sort of way, I think that has an effect and it and it just makes me feel better about the fact that I've got to spend all this time interviewing you over so many years. I feel like you're a very high quality individual, so thank you. Well, thank you. Well, I couldn't be more happy to have had the chance to spend more time with you. It's been a terrific afternoon, and let's make sure we don't wait so long to do it again. I'll look forward to it. And I'll let you get to your next meeting. Tom, great to see you. Thank you so much. Take care. Okay. Be well.

Starting point is 01:43:08 Bye. All right, folks. That's it for today. Hope you enjoyed this conversation with the great Tom Russo. I think this theme we discussed of deferring gratification and thinking long term is hugely important, and I'm convinced that it's really one of the keys to a happy and successful life. If you want to explore this subject further, you may want to check out chapter six of my book, Richer Wiser Happier, where I write about Nick Sleep, Case Sicaria, and Tom Russo, all of whom are grandmasters of patient, long-term investing.

Starting point is 01:43:37 As I write in that chapter, in a world that's increasingly geared toward short-termism, and instant gratification, a tremendous advantage can be gained by those who move consistently in the opposite direction. In any case, I'll be back with you again very soon with some terrific guests, including Matthew McLennan, Annie Duke, and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Schiller. In the meantime, please feel free to follow me on Twitter at William Green 72, and do let me know how you're enjoying the podcast. It's always lovely to hear from you. Until next time, take care and stay well. to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to we study billionaires by the Investors Podcast Network. Every

Starting point is 01:44:19 Wednesday, we teach you about Bitcoin and every Saturday we study billionaires and the financial markets. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision consult a professional, this show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted. before syndication or rebroadcasting.

We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - RWH013: Move Slow, Win Big W/ Thomas Russo

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