We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hi there, it's wonderful to be back with you on the richer, wiser, happier podcast. Today's episode is one of my all-time favorites. Our guest is a legendary British investor named Terry Smith, who manages the Fund Smith Equity Fund. Since his fund's inception in 2010, Terry has racked up an average return of 14.8% a year by investing in a global portfolio of high-quality companies that are extremely, durable. Cumulatively, he's beaten the MSCI World Index by more than 200 percentage points over the last 14 years. The Financial Times describes Terry as one of the UK's most renowned

Starting point is 00:00:44 stock pickers. Bloomberg, which includes Terry on its list of billionaires, calls him the UK's most popular money manager. Territ's success, both in markets and business, is even more impressive when you consider the odds that were stacked against him. As you'll hear, he grew up as the son of a truck driver in the 1950s and 60s in a very rough and tumble area of East London that was best known for poverty and deprivation and bomb damage from World War II and plenty of violence, including the criminal enterprises run by the infamous cray twins. In this conversation, Terry talks in depth about what it took to drag himself out of that environment to the pinnacle of the investment game. You'll get a keen sense of the analytical skills, the investment principles, and the sheer

Starting point is 00:01:37 grit and determination required for him to become an investing legend. He's come a long way, both literally and figuratively. Now, in his early 70s, he lives on the tropical island of Mauritius, off the coast of Africa, about 6,000 miles from London. In his spare time there, he practices martial arts, spars regularly with much younger fighters, and also indulges in his hobby of building a collection of more than 200 cars. As you'll hear, Terry is a remarkable character. Ferociously driven, fiercely intelligent, charismatic, funny, charming, combative, shrewd, and I would say pretty tough.

Starting point is 00:02:22 I suspect he's not the easiest man in the world to live with or work with, and I was slightly wary of him going into our conversation, but I ended it by liking him a good deal and hugely admiring his strength of character and really the sheer resilience and indomitability of the guy. In any case, I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. Thanks so much for joining us. You're listening to The Richer,

Starting point is 00:02:51 Pfizer Happier Podcast, where your host, William Green, interviews the world's greatest investors and explores how to win in markets and life. All right. Hi, folks. I'm absolutely delighted to welcome today's guest, the legendary British investor, Terry Smith, who's calling in from his home on the island of Mauritius, where he now lives. Terry is the founder, CEO and chief investment officer of an investment firm called FundSmith. His Fundsmith Equity Fund is the largest stock fund in the UK, I believe, with more than

Starting point is 00:03:32 $27 billion in assets under management. Bloomberg, which includes Terry on its index of billionaires, often describes him as the UK's most popular money manager. He's definitely one of the most successful with a cumulative return of over 600% since the fund's inception in 2010, which is roughly 200 percentage points or so better than the MSCI World Index. Terry, it's lovely to see you. Thanks so much for joining us. Nice to join you. Enjoying it so far.

Starting point is 00:04:01 So far, we'll see how it goes from here. We're off to a good start. I wanted to ask you about your early years. I've read in different places that you were born in the east end of London in 1953 and that you came from a very modest background as the son of a guy who I've read in different places that he drove a bus or he drove a truck. And my sense is either way that it was a relatively poor area that was probably damaged a lot by the Blitz when you were growing up there in the 1950s. And I wondered if you could just

Starting point is 00:04:30 give us a sense of what it was like growing up in the East End, what your family was like, and really how those early years shaped the person you'd become. Yeah, I mean, it wasn't a very nice place. As you rightly say, I mean, it was still very damaged by the war, the Blitz in particular with lots of bomb sites. And some of the housing was prefabricated housing, which was built for temporary accommodation. And it was a very poor area. If you look at the store, you know, statistics of the time for what it was worth. In terms of educational facilities and achievement, it was the worst metropolitan borough in Western Europe at that time, West Ham, which is where I technically was, for Escape West Ham, which is where I was saying. Pretty poor. The story I always

Starting point is 00:05:09 tell people just to illustrate it is I went to Odessa Road Primary School and in the very harsh winter of 1963, we had outside toilets and they froze over. And so we were sent home from school. And when I say sent them to go, I don't mean for the day, I mean, this lasted for like six weeks or something like that. And that would have been great, apart for the fact we also had an outside toilet home, which also froze over. So it wasn't a big help. And the house I lived in with my grandparents and my parents and my uncle and various other people

Starting point is 00:05:37 was a very modest house, which has been knocked down in a some clearance program since I lived there. And he had no hot running water and it had no bathroom and he had no inside toilet. I mean, that's kind of where I was. And the one thing I would say more than anything else about all that is it gives you a big incentive to try and do something better. And tell me about your parents? Yeah, my father was, as you've touched upon already, a lorry driver, truck driver, very talented driver.

Starting point is 00:06:06 You don't have to be to drive buses and lorries, but he drove other things as well. Worked for a company, his undoing was he worked for a company embarking in Essex, which amongst other things made brake linings, which I guess was where he got involved with them. And the problem was that they used asbestos, and that was his undoing. He got, people say asbestosis, but that's a kind of loose term. He got mesothelioma and lung cancer and was wiped out by that in due course, as was the entire shift at the place.

Starting point is 00:06:33 And my mother was worked in various very, very, very modest job. She was a cleaner. She worked in a factory making dartball. She worked at a factory making brooms and so on. So they were, yeah, it is a very poor sort of background, frankly. And where do you think you got your intelligence from? Were both of your parents really smart? My father, I think, was one of these people who was trapped by his background. He was one of 12 children,

Starting point is 00:06:58 which is pretty amazing, and had to leave school at 14 and go to work, so there was no alternative. But he was clearly very intelligent man. In the time when people did crosswords in newspapers, he regularly won crosswork competitions a day and every week a book or something would arrive where he was winning cross-border. And he did eventually, before he died, aspired, and became a manager of the Cold Storage Transportation Facility and things like that. So he, you know, he was clearly a who had native intelligence sort of brain power, who hadn't backed the education to be able to capitalize upon it, I would say. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:07:30 I often think of my grandfather who grew up in London and who left school at 12 because he was like this poor Jewish kid and didn't have, you know, from an immigrant family and didn't have at a certain point the soul in his shoe had worn out so much. They actually couldn't even hold it together with newspaper because there was nothing to hold the newspaper in. And so he became an apprentice Taylor, but he was a world-class bridge player. which makes you realize, oh, God, how much intelligence there must have been that sort of got wasted because they were just doing these menial jobs or really, really underpaid jobs.

Starting point is 00:08:03 So do you feel like you've been very much shaped by that background? I mean, I know you've said before that you really, money was important to you. Yeah, money and just the feeling of wanting to escape as much as just money, I think. I mean, the thing that more than anything affected by thinking, which is strange, people ask, they always ask things, and there are teachers I could talk about, and my mother I could talk about as well. But one of the things was, in 1968, I went to the ABC cinema in Upton Park, which is, you know, between us and the West Ham Football Ground, and I watched the Thomas Crown Affair, the movie. As I always say, you know, it's Steve McQueen. That's a pretty good start. He's

Starting point is 00:08:40 wearing several rows suits. He drives a Rolls-Royce, and flies a glider and plays polo. It's like, and I literally watched this thing and thought, there's another world out. there isn't there? There's just another world out there. So you think that that was the start also of you wanting to collect all of these beautiful cars that had been in movies and the like? Yeah, probably. I've got that Rolls, Ross, as it happens. But yeah, partly that. And my father as well, he was very interested in cars and motorcycles. And one of the earliest photographs I've got of me is me sitting on my father's motorcycle. And so I could sort of

Starting point is 00:09:15 ride motorcycles and drive cars and fly planes and helicopters and things. from a, you know, relatively easily. He definitely had a talent for it. It wasn't just that he was drove buses and trucks. He had some talent beyond that, I think, probably. So now the image I have in my mind, Terry, is that you're sort of the Steve McQueen of the investing world. Well, as it happens, Steve McQueen's first name wasn't Steve.

Starting point is 00:09:37 It was Terry? Yeah, Terrence, as is mine, yeah. That's interesting. I'm sure it's just a coincidence, as I say. Yeah, they named him after you. No, no, no. born before me. No, I'm kidding.

Starting point is 00:09:50 I know you're a big fan of boxing and you've talked a lot about and then became, I think, a Muay Thai practitioner as well. Yeah, I've been to Thailand a couple of times and stayed in Mai Tai camps for weeks and trained at Mai Tai. And I do Mai Tai. I sponsor a Mai Tai fighter here in Mauritia. She's actually in Cambodia at the moment. She just fought for a belt in Cambodia.

Starting point is 00:10:14 But I train with her most days and I've got a gym, a kickboxing gym. here in Berisha, which I bought and equipped and gave to the coach and the kids to use. And I turn up occasionally and train and spa with them. I'm a kind of a curio. I'm this old white guy who turns up. And does this grow out of coming from a relatively tough area as a kid? Tell me about that. Well, I went to Stratford Grammar School.

Starting point is 00:10:42 And the school uniform was a red as an owl. In fact, I went past there quite recently, and the concrete owl statue is still outside. And so the badge was an owl, which was on your cap and your blazer. And I had to walk past the secondary modern school on the way home. And so I got into a fight more nights than I didn't really on the way home. You can imagine some kid going to the sort of the local posh school, as it was regarded a bit, coming home with an owl on his head and his blazer was, I may as well have just drawn a target, you know. And so my uncle who lived in the house, my uncle John, was, amongst other things.

Starting point is 00:11:16 things a boxer. And so after a bit of this, he said, I think I'm going to teach you out of fire. And so he did. And it was something I've liked. I've always liked and felt at home going into boxing gyms. So, you know, in boxing gyms, whether they're in London or Mauritius or New York, I've always kind of liked the atmosphere of going into them. I said here, when I was setting up the gym for the kids, I went to see them in a municipal hall that they had, where they had no facilities really. They didn't have a boxing ring and they couldn't keep their stuff there. And I went in there and somebody who knows I'm a bit of a softy for these things took me along to see them and train with them and so on. And they said, well, what is it you most like about this? And I said,

Starting point is 00:11:56 they just remind me of me when I was at their age, you know? This is their outlet. This is something which they probably look forward to every week, you know. What do you think you were like at that age? What was I like at that age? I don't know. It's difficult to, difficult to guard. Probably shy, intense, I would say, probably for that age. Sponge. A sponge, yeah. I read an article that you wrote, I think, back probably in 2011 when smoking Joe Frazier, that the great boxer had just died relatively young, I think, 67 of liver cancer.

Starting point is 00:12:34 And there was a beautiful quote there where you quoted George Foreman saying, I kept knocking him down and he kept getting up. after six times I was awarded the championship of the world. He was still trying to get me when they stopped the fight. And I was wondering, that seemed to me, there's something about that resilience and determination that clearly resonates for you personally. Yeah, I much admire people.

Starting point is 00:12:59 I mean, people, obviously, Ali, certainly on that, in that era was regarded as fantastic. And he was, but he probably wasn't the greatest professional heavyweight of all time. I think Joe Lewis and Rocky Marciano got better records. he probably wasn't the greatest heavy way all time. Tiofielio Stevenson, the Cuban amateur, had a fantastic record as well. But he was a huge global personality.

Starting point is 00:13:20 And in so being, he needed, and that's why I tried to bring out the article, he couldn't be that on his own. He needed to fight other men. And Foreman and Fraser in particular, but also Ken Norton and some others, if he hadn't had those, he couldn't have been great like that. But those men that he thought were different to him,

Starting point is 00:13:35 because if they weren't different, it wouldn't have worked. They need to be different styles to engage the enemy. And one of the things that I think it brings out is that your enemies and those you engage with shape you. The way that you engage with them and so on, it shapes you. And one of the sort of the common sort of thoughts that people have on Smok and Joe was that he was a sort of slugger and so on. He wasn't. He wasn't that. If you look at the analysis of the first fight, the fight of the century in Madison Square Garden, where he knocked Ali down and broke his jaw. Eddie Fuchs, his trainer, had trained him very specifically.

Starting point is 00:14:11 He worked out that Ali couldn't throw an effective uppercut and was vulnerable at that point. And so he said whenever you get within Ranger Frog, and eventually he called him throwing this uppercut. And it was just a piece of know, Eddie Fuchs, because boxing is, you know, people think it's just fine. It's a lot of analysis goes into successful boxing as well. Eddie Fuchs trained four of the five men who beat Ali. It's probably not a coincidence. Probably not a coincidence. When I think of your life, and we'll get into this, obviously, a lot more as this conversation unfolds,

Starting point is 00:14:42 there is something about your reputation as being this kind of combative guy, and there's also something, I think, just in terms of the drive and the grit that it must have taken for you to get out of the East End of London and become a billionaire and be as successful as you've been, when you think of yourself, like does the image of you as a sort of, as a fighter, as someone who's kind of defined, is that sort of your comative and determined? Like, what's your own image of yourself? I don't really see myself that way. I think I'm a big softie, actually. I really do, you know.

Starting point is 00:15:17 And I think I am in many respects. I think a lot of people who know me well might tell you that, as opposed to the sort of the public image that people have got. If you look on my, on my WhatsApp where you can put a phrase, I've got a phrase up there. I like movies, by the way. Apart from the Thomas Crown Affair, I finance movies a bit as a hobby. It is a hobby.

Starting point is 00:15:38 It's not really an investment. And I have movie night once a month with friends. I've got a little private cinema and I've run that in, etc, etc. The quote is from the cult movie assault on precinct 13, which not many people will have heard of now, but it's about a convict who's on the way, I think, to death row. And he's been a bus. The bus gets diverted to a police station, which is closing down. And there's some suspect in there who's been involved in a clash with the gang.

Starting point is 00:16:03 And the gang come and attack the police station to get him. And of course, it ends up with the convict, a girl, the policeman, fighting for their lives against all this. And at one point, the girl says to him, what I can't understand she said is why you didn't take off, because they sent somebody out to get help. Why didn't you take off down that drain and just leave it? Because then you've got to have escaped. And he says, there are two things in life a man should never run from, even if it costs him his life. One of them is a man who's helpless and can't run with him. And I like that.

Starting point is 00:16:33 I like that approach, basically. And I don't think, it's not, it's a somewhat more selfless approach, I think, than the one that people might think that you're talking about portraying there. Of course, the quote ends, people think that the quote, which ends there. One of them is a man who's helpless and can't run with him. And the quote ends there. And they say, well, you've only got half the question. You know, the quote does end there because the girl says to him, what's the other one?

Starting point is 00:16:56 And he just looks at her. Ha. The toothed of brother. Yeah, I'm a big softy, really. Yeah. Well, I mean, as the great poem said, we contain multitudes, right? I mean, you can be a softie and also be pretty tough. Sometimes, yeah.

Starting point is 00:17:13 Yeah, I think, yeah, I think that's right. And, yeah, I would say it's a bit like that. It depends on the circumstances and the situation and who I'm with and what I'm doing and lots of other things. But, look, you don't get out of where I was. to where I am without a lot of determination, obviously. Yeah. My classmate, who is my best friend in school,

Starting point is 00:17:35 who I'm still in touch with him, but I'm in touch with both him and the guy I sat next to when I was five, which was interesting. And he assures me that out of the sort of the boys in our class, the only two who are at liberty and not dead are me and him. Really? Yeah. He kind of, because he stayed in London and kept in touch a little more than I did. He sort of says, stop.

Starting point is 00:17:56 you are the only two guys who were left alive and not in prison. That's amazing. That's amazing. So did you have great role models in those years? I mean, was there a teacher or an athlete or someone? Or people you knew who invested or did well in business? Was there anyone you looked to and you thought, beyond the movies, let me be more like them? Anyone in business.

Starting point is 00:18:18 I mean, I couldn't possibly have started there. I mean, business wasn't something I encountered other than doing various menial jobs until I was in my 20s. I had a good primary school teacher, Mr. Wirehouse, my last year in primary school, he basically, I guess if you said, what did he do, if anything at all? He probably gave me help, impetus, if you like, to pass 11 plus and get to the best grammar school in the area. So I remember him fondly, fondly, although he was quite tough sometimes, you know. I mean, this was an era of corporal punishment, you know, I mean, he was quite tough. And then when I was in secondary school, Dennis Blow, my history teacher, who, bear in mind, nobody in my family had ever been to university. So, you know, getting the grades and going to university was a process applying for university,

Starting point is 00:18:59 which nobody, I couldn't go home and say, what do you think I should do? It wasn't going to work terribly well. And so he kind of helped me with that. And he was a history teacher and he's the guy more than anybody else kindled my love of history. And I did a history degree at the university that he himself had attended. And that was a big help when I think about it. I could have done other things at other universities. And people said, oh, you could have gone to Oxford, okay, but you could have done this.

Starting point is 00:19:21 I'm very happy that I did what I did because I had his sort of help and support in thinking through that process in doing it. And lots of differences. Going back to the, you know, great and determination, my mother. My mother was the kindest person I think I've ever met as far as I know. She never harmed anybody. She would be mortified if she harmed anybody. Sort of person who, I mean, obviously we're dealing in a different era in terms of going into shops and buying things. If she came out and the shop had given her too much change, she would be back in there giving it to them, right?

Starting point is 00:19:47 She'd be mortified by the idea. And her kind of, you know, what people would now call moral compass was quite an important thing, I think, as well, in terms of how she treated people, I think. My uncle John, who I mentioned earlier, he was a boxer and sometime villain. He was a good guy. What sort of villain? A villainous villain. I mean, this was the East End of London, the craze ran the East End of London during this period. He was a guy who was involved in operations of that sort.

Starting point is 00:20:22 Yeah, interesting, very interesting. And so then to get back to your trajectory of your career, so you had gone to Stratford Grammar School, this very good school, and I think I'm right in saying you won the physics prize. You were obviously a smart kid. You went to the university in Cardiff to study history. I think I'm right in saying you got a first-class degree, graduated in 74. And then you went off and got a job at Barclays,

Starting point is 00:20:47 And you spent a few years, well, you were there for nine years, starting around 1974. And it was not glamorous when you started. I mean, you joined as a graduate trainee and ended up becoming a bank manager. Can you talk about those early years at Barclays and how it sort of shifted you into a different world and different way of thinking about the world? Again, we'll talk about mentors a bit, probably. But I chose Barclays. I mean, I didn't have to do what I wanted to do when I was in the university. So I went to all these so-called milk-ground interviews where companies come.

Starting point is 00:21:20 And I was interviewed by the metal box company, by Unilever, by Marks and Spencers, by Barclays, by Nac-West, all these companies. And how to make a decision. I made it on the, you might consider perverse basis of the one that gave me the toughest interview. I thought, yeah, I'm going to go with that. A guy called Roger Brocklehurst. I remember him well, gave me the toughest interview. I like these guys. So I went and work for them.

Starting point is 00:21:42 It was a training program. They put me through courses on everything you can imagine, law, accounting, et cetera, credit, through all that, which is very good. And I always say to people, people ask me for career advice. I say, get a job, take all the training courses, number one, right? I think it was Lucy Kellerway writing the FT said that the sort of the dot-com era, the gig economy and the digital age. You've done great disservice to some young people who just want to start a business. No, go and get some experience first, right? Go and get some training first.

Starting point is 00:22:10 Then have a think about all that. So I did all of that. And then they, Barclays had nearly gone bust in the 73, 75 secondary banking crisis. And their own management accounting was lamentable. I mean, they had none. Basically, they had audited accounts, which were produced three months after year. And you could look at them and see the balance sheet and the income statement, the cash flow. But actually having a budget and monitoring against budget and working out what your exposure was for assets and liabilities and interest rates and current.

Starting point is 00:22:38 Nothing. I always said, when I discovered this, I said, we would never have left. money to a company with our level of management information. Anyway, what they did was, they grabbed me out of what I was doing in training for commercial banking and sent me off to do an MBA. They sent me to Henley to the Management College. And I did a very peculiar or different kind of MBA, one with different, you did three months in classrooms, three months in a company, three months ago.

Starting point is 00:23:02 And I did that across different businesses and learned a lot of different things like production engineering and human resources management and all kinds of stuff like that, manpower planning with different organizations. And they hadn't told me this, but they were going to form a finance department. So they had a guy called John Spencer, who'd been with Pete Marwick, and they made him head of the department. They made a guy called Devick van der Weir as the first sort of CFO, really. This guy, John Spencer, who I'm still friends with to this day, friendly with his day, still work together with, to this day after nearly 50 years. And a guy from Steve, Slater Walker, which had blown up very recently, the Jim Slater acquisition room, me and a couple

Starting point is 00:23:43 of other boards and said, you're the finance department. And what do we do? We wanted to create this management accounting, management information, budgeting, forecasting, planning thing from scratch. And so I got to sit there and do that for the next three or four years. And that was great. And I had a good boss in so far as he was a good mentor. And he really liked to go sailing.

Starting point is 00:24:06 and I got one of those deals which I think you do get sometime, which is I did his job when he was away, which meant he could go off for six weeks and go sailing. And so I learned an awful lot. I got an awful lot of early responsibility doing that. So, you know, I was basically the manager straight underneath the CFO, managing the bank's finances, if you like. What do you think you learned by looking under the hood and actually?

Starting point is 00:24:29 Because obviously, I mean, this has been part of the key to your success as a stock picker, is that you understand the accounts. What did you see by actually being on the inside and looking under the hood? Loads of things. I mean, lots and lots of things that you see. I mean, one of them is cash flows and profits are completely different things. I mean, they are clearly related. Accrual profits or accrual accounting is a way of spreading cash flows across reporting periods.

Starting point is 00:24:54 But, you know, you can have plenty of profits and go bust. It's the two things that you know, that you've got to be very careful with businesses does require leverage or borrowing in order to function, which banking does, right? Because the margins for error in terms of success or failure are very slim at that point. When you're on 20 to one leverage or something like that, it doesn't take long to go bust, you know? It really, you can do it quite quickly by taking risk, you know, in that regard. So there are lots of things I've been. But in the course of doing that job, in those days, the investor relations industry, which we've now got

Starting point is 00:25:28 where companies have IR officers or didn't exist. There was no such thing. Nobody had one, not even one. So what would happen is these people called brokers analysts would ring up and they would ask for the finance director who didn't like taking their calls. So he put them through to, well, my boss or he wasn't there. So me. So the phone would ring and it would be a bank analyst working at a stock broking firm in

Starting point is 00:25:48 London or New York, whatever, who would start questioning me about the results or the forthcoming year and what was going on and where we were positioned in relation to property lending or less developed country lending or whatever. And I dealt with all these people and that was fine and learned quite a lot from them about how the market viewed us over time. And I had investors who would come in as well, you know, from their capital group and people like that and they come into interview and I would tell them about that. And then eventually one of them said to me, you're wasting your time. You know that, don't you? And I said, what do you mean? I'm wasting my time. He said, you're going to do very

Starting point is 00:26:21 well. He said, yeah, they've told me sort of I'm on the sort of fast track up towards the board possibly or something like that one day. And he said, I said, I'm absolutely certainly. He said, but you're really, you're just going to have a career and you're going to be quite an important guy a bank and then that's going to be that. He said, I think you should come and work in our industry where the rewards are much greater. Obviously, if you fail, then there's not the same sort of parachute that you might get in your job here.

Starting point is 00:26:47 He said, but I don't think you will. And he said, you're far more like, you know, this is a partnership. You'll end up being your own boss. He said, and I think you get it. And I said, oh, okay. So I quit the bank and went off and became a bank analyst. Much of the shock of everybody involved, who increased the. the managerial turnover by literally 100%.

Starting point is 00:27:06 People don't quit and go off. I said, well, no, I'm going to be a bank analyst. And I went and I joined a stockbroking firm and I became a bank analyst. So you went off and you became an analyst, I think, first to the company called W. Greenwell & Company and then you ended up at Barclays-Dezoit Wed, which was where you were until the late 80s. And there's a famous story told about your time there. I think about a week after you joined as a banking analyst that sort of cemented your reputation

Starting point is 00:27:37 as someone who would speak your mind even when it annoyed the hell out of people in positions of power. Tell us what happened. It wasn't actually a week after I joined. I mean, I joined sometime in the summer of 1986 just before Big Bang in London. And then I wrote a piece on the bank sector, a piece of research in the run up to Christmas and left it for publication. These are the days when you left it, the publication department ran it out and mailed to people. And I went off for a holiday. I can't remember where I went. And so I said, I'm going

Starting point is 00:28:06 away over Christmas and New Year. And I left my number two in charge of everything. I've got this research to do. Anyway, he went out for a lunch in the days when people did go for a lunch with the FT banking correspondent and gave him a copy. And of course, on the first working day of New Year, there was absolutely no news anywhere in the financial words. So the front page article Well, Belancholym says BZW says sell Barclays. And, of course, I mean, everybody went completely crazy about this. Yeah, that wasn't allowed. People didn't put out some recommendations generally.

Starting point is 00:28:41 Anyway, you're doing it on the company. And I said, well, yeah. And through Gridette, the management of Barclays said, yes, it is absolutely wonderful. It proves the independence of our investment banking subsidiary. And the boss said, I think you're going to have to leave because you've got no career here now. And so I left. And that was that. You know, and I guess, you know, I've kind of, not for the first time, I've reclaimed the moral high ground a notch too high for people's comfort zone.

Starting point is 00:29:09 I've got to say, looking at what happened subsequently with Barclays, I was right, because this was 86. And by the turn of the 80s into the 90s, they ended up cutting the dividend because of the size of their property losses. So I was talking about their inability to lend without incurring higher than average bad debts, was the basic of the thesis I was putting forward. Then there was an even more dramatic reprise of a similar story where you end up at UBS, Phillips and Drew. So in 1990, he became head of UK company research there. And for people who don't remember this firm, it was a pretty prominent investment bank and stock broker and asset manager in the UK.

Starting point is 00:29:48 And I think Phillips and Drew had been founded in like the 1880s and then acquired by UBS. And so you come in at an interesting time, right, where there are all these companies like Polypec and British and Commonwealth that were going bankrupt while seeming to be in good health. And you weighed into this with your usual delicacy and gracefulness and tax. And do what? Tell us what happened. I probably did show rather more tack than you're giving me credit for. So I, together with a guy who was a transport analyst, I worked with him on it, I said, why don't we write a piece of research about why this is happening,

Starting point is 00:30:25 why we've got companies which are reporting record profits and going bust six weeks later. Big companies, right? And so we wrote a research paper 20 30 pages long, which looked at 12 methods by which companies cook the books, right, that they managed to report profits that didn't exist or profits without cash flows or got liability out of partnership. And we wrote that and it was, for what it's worth, voted the best piece of research published in London that year by the sort of Reuters. You need to back up a bit.

Starting point is 00:30:49 Why was I hired by UBS? They'd been involved in a thing called the Blue Arrow Affair shortly before they hired me. Blue Arrow was a UK shell company run by a man called Tony Berry, who owned Spurs, I think, for a while at the football club. And he used that to bid for a company, a much, much bigger company, because this was a shell company called Manpower, Temporary Services Company, based in employment service company, based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And it was a huge acquisition, and they did a 750 million pound convertible, which sounds

Starting point is 00:31:17 quite a lot of money, but try and think back to 1989 in terms of the size of that deal. It was done by the lead banks were Barclays and that way. ZW and UBS and NatWest. And the issue was a complete flop because the deal was a complete lemon. And instead of admitting that they were stuck with the 750 million pounds, they put it on their market making book, which was exempt from disclosure. Now, this was regarded when it became apparent as a bit of a foul by two people. One was the institutions, because a few of them had bought these bonds, not very many,

Starting point is 00:31:48 but they thought the whole issue was sold because they published newspaper, sort of advert, saying, successful issue, triumph, da-da-da. you know, and they felt a bit of grief. So they stopped dealing with people like UBS over it. And the, the regulatory and sort of police authorities who went and arrested the CEO, the head of research, the head of trading, and the head of sales. So the head hunter rang me up and said, because I've been a bank analyst for a number of years, successfully seven years, I think I've been a bank analyst. I'd like to do something more. I'd like to do something looking at the whole market because, you know, wider scope of things rather than doing banks forever. I think I know quite a bit

Starting point is 00:32:25 without banks, like to do something new. And so he rang me out the blue and said, look, UBS have got a vacancy because of these arrests. They'd like to hire you. And I sort of said, oh, okay, fine. I'll go for that. And I sort of said, well, what do you want out of me? And they said, obviously, we want to be profitable. We want you to reclaim the moral high ground with the institutions who, you've got this, it comes back to the visa day. You've got this reputation for telling things how they are. And we'd like you to use that to rebuild our reputation institutions. So I said, sure. So I published this piece of research. And that was all. well done and so on. Then I got a phone call from somebody at Random House, the publisher,

Starting point is 00:32:59 and said, we think that we could sell a book if you could write a book? Could you write a book base? I said, yeah. So I went to the UBS management and said, I've had this approach. I think it might be a good idea because you're trying to do some more high-grained stuff. And they said, yeah, good. I said, and I think this will be another sort of, you know, feather in our cap to doing that. What do you think? They said, yeah, if you want. So I said, do you want the book to be UBS's book or Terry Smith's book? I said, It's very much, I said,

Starting point is 00:33:24 fine, okay, so I wrote the book. And, of course, the thing is, people have written other books

Starting point is 00:33:29 on creative accounting in the past one, the first one, by any means, but if you look back to some of those, they use company A by its company B,

Starting point is 00:33:36 and I actually use real companies, right? And when we got to all's publication, the publisher said, you've quoted annual reports in there. I said, yes, he said, I think you need to write

Starting point is 00:33:45 to all the companies and tell them that you're using that in case they wish to claim copyright. I said, it's a public document. And he said, right to the company. So I said, okay, fine. So I wrote a letter to all the companies saying, Hunter Smith, I'm publishing a book on accounting. I'm going to quote from your 1988 annual report.

Starting point is 00:34:01 I hope that's okay. Let me know if it's not. Of course, having seen who I was and so a couple of the companies realized what was about to happen. And the next thing I know is I get called in by the chairman of UBS who says, we're going to stop this book, aren't we? I said, I don't think we can do that? And there was a sort of, I don't think you've understood what I've just. just said, I'm telling you to stop the book, right? I said, I think you find the book's mine, not yours, because that's what we agreed. Okay, I'm giving you the instruction to you go and tell them. I said, what reason shall I give them? Well, there's going to be a huge route over this, you know, and I said, so I'm going to tell a publisher, note the connection between the word publicity and

Starting point is 00:34:41 publisher, the same verb, right, that he's got a book on accounting, which he thinks it's going to sell about 5,000 copies or something like that. But now there's going to be a huge part. I said, Have you come across a book called Spy Catcher that Mrs Thatcher tried to ban? I said it's mainly about a guy who was in MI5 complaining about his pension. I said, but it's sold out when you tried to start it. I said, we're telling you, we're going to fire you and sue you. I said, okay. And so I got fired and sued.

Starting point is 00:35:07 The book got published. The publisher regarded, this is the funniest thing he'd seen, the best thing he'd seen for a long time. Stop the press long enough to put across the corner the book they tried to ban. It's amazing. I mean, you got suspended initially. for quote unquote gross misconduct. Then you're fired. They sued you.

Starting point is 00:35:27 So as I understand it, you had to settle out of court after about 18 months. But the book was number one in the best sell list. I mean, it knocked Stephen Hawking off the, you are the Stephen Hawking of the investing world. Not just the Steve. I'm going to try and tell you that as compliment. Okay. But yes, it did. I mean, but clearly it wouldn't have done that.

Starting point is 00:35:48 I mean, you know, I hope there were, you know, some people might have. I've read it in regard it as quite. And the interesting thing is, I think it has stood the test of time in a number of regards. I think that's a more interesting way. The 40 years, over 40 years later, over 30 years later, there are examples in there which stand the test of time. The one on pension fund accounting, I think in particular, stood the test of time in there. So I think it was an okay book.

Starting point is 00:36:12 I don't think we've sold hundreds of thousands of copies without them trying to stop it and sue me and things like that, though. Yeah. And in many ways it made your reputation as somebody who was candid and had integrity and had the courage to tell it like it is. But also, it seems relevant that everything you did was based on a real understanding of the accounts, the finances, which seems to have been, I mean, it sounds so prosaic, but that's kind of been one of your competitive advantages in an industry where most people don't seem to bother. But they don't know. I can give you as many examples as you prepare to listen and record to of where we know that people in the industry don't read the accounts. I mean, we have the accounts for a reason, you know. And there's all kinds of, they look at management slideshows and all

Starting point is 00:37:00 kinds of, how about reading the actual accounts? I mean, there's lots of examples of this. I mean, we have one on IBM. We looked at IBM in 2010 and rejected it. Well, wisely so, as it turns out, as a stop. But when we're doing it, we found that I need to go look at number, we found a $2 billion error in the cash flow statement for the last year. And so we sort of rang up the IR department and said, look, we're these guys, we're doing this, we're looking at that, we're just going to ask you something about your customers. There's this number in here that we can't make this work. And they said, they did the usual, we'll call you back. And they said, we've been in touch with the finest of all. You're absolutely right. The cash flows out by

Starting point is 00:37:35 $2 billion. We said, anybody else rang up? They said, no. And I don't think it's because other people have discovered it but couldn't be bothered. Let's have read it. It's like, oh, okay, then. It's very interesting. I mean, so it seems to me, I mean, just in terms of keeping score for our listeners and giving them and viewers and giving them a sense of some of the morals here, I mean, part of it, obviously, as you said before, is an emphasis on cash flow and due diligence.

Starting point is 00:38:02 And part of it, it seems to me, one of the great lessons of your career is just focusing on economic reality over reported earnings. Yes. I think economic reality is it. If you read what we do at Fundsmith, I would be confident you probably have in preparing for this. We talk about companies with high returns on capital and high gross margins and great cash conversion and growth and so on.

Starting point is 00:38:26 But when we found those, and I mean, anyone can find those going through looking on Bloomberg or another data source to find them, do you then have to pause and ask yourself a very important question? How do they do that? What's the economic reality as you say? But what product or service are they selling to people that enables them to generate good margins, they enables them to get good returns of capital, enables them to convert profits into cash, that keeps competition somewhat on bay.

Starting point is 00:38:52 What do they actually do? And I mean, you do get investments in companies, particularly in the modern era where people buy all kinds of stuff without understanding it, just on the basis of them mentioning AI. Oh, right. Okay. What do they actually do? And it's amazing. I mean, we've for years of maintaining this, people have latterly come to believe it a bit.

Starting point is 00:39:12 But if they actually speak in gobbledygook, it's not a good sign, you know? We need people to tell us, yeah, in straightforward, which we try to do in what we do in investment. We try to tell people in straightforward terms what it is we do and what we don't do. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right, I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo

Starting point is 00:39:50 Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year bringing together activists, technologists, journalists, investors, and builders from all over the world, many of them operating on the front lines of history. This is where you hear firsthand stories from people using Bitcoin to survive currency collapse, using AI to expose human rights abuses and building technology under censorship and authoritarian pressures. These aren't abstract ideas. These are tools real people are using right now. You'll be in the room with about 2,000 extraordinary individuals, dissidents, founders, philanthropists, policy makers, the kind of people you don't just listen to but end up having dinner with. Over three days, you'll experience powerful mainstage talks, hands-on workshops on freedom tech,

Starting point is 00:40:35 and financial sovereignty, immersive art installations, and conversations that continue long after the sessions end. And it's all happening in Oslo in June. If this sounds like your kind of room, well, you're in luck because you can attend in person. Standard and patron passes are available at Osloof Freedom Forum.com with patron passes offering deep access, private events, and small group time with the speakers. The Oslo Freedom Forum isn't just a conference. It's a place where ideas meet reality and where the few. future is being built by people living it. If you run a business, you've probably had the same thought lately. How do we make AI useful in the real world?

Starting point is 00:41:15 Because the upside is huge, but guessing your way into it is a risky move. With NetSuite by Oracle, you can put AI to work today. NetSuite is the number one AI Cloud ERP, trusted by over 43,000 businesses. It pulls your financials, inventory, commerce, HR, and CRM into one unified system. And that connected data is what makes your AI smarter. It can automate routine work, surface actionable insights, and help you cut costs while making fast AI-powered decisions with confidence. And now with the NetSuite AI connector, you can use the AI of your choice to connect directly

Starting point is 00:41:51 to your real business data. This isn't some add-on, it's AI built into the system that runs your business. And whether your company does millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you stay ahead. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get their free business guide demystifying AI at netseweet.com slash study. The guide is free to you at net suite.com slash study. NetSuite.com slash study. When I started my own side business, it suddenly felt like I had to become 10 different people overnight wearing many different hats. Starting something from scratch can feel exciting, but also incredibly overwhelming and lonely. That's why I

Starting point is 00:42:32 having the right tools matters. For millions of businesses, that tool is Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. from brands just getting started to household names. It gives you everything you need in one place, from inventory to payments to analytics. So you're not juggling a bunch of different platforms. You can build a beautiful online store with hundreds of ready-to-use templates and Shopify is packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions and even enhance your product photography. Plus, if you ever get stuck, they've got award-winning 24-7 customer support.

Starting point is 00:43:12 Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, 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. slash WSB. All right, back to the show. There's a big chunk of your career that I'm sort of leaving out here that maybe we'll come back to later where you were running public companies.

Starting point is 00:43:43 But since you bring up Fundsmith and it's so relevant to our discussion here, let's dig in more to what it is you do here at this firm that you found it back in 2010 and that's become a kind of a really great emblem for what I would call the art of quality investing, which is a phrase you use in the introduction to your book. investing for growth, where you describe your approach as quality investing. There's a lovely phrase in that introduction where you talk about seeing an ice cream van that has an advertising slogan on the side, which is it's quality that counts. So this is sort of at the heart of what you do. Tell us about the attributes you're looking for when you're trying to identify

Starting point is 00:44:24 these high quality companies. Well, I mean, in financial terms, we're looking for a higher return on capital employed. Let's start with that. Warren, Buffett said it's the single most important measure of performance in his 1979 annual report for what it was. And he seems to have done quite well since, so probably we should listen a bit, you know. And it is because if you invest with me, you want to know what return you're going to get. You're going to put your money in the bank. You want to know what returning it.

Starting point is 00:44:49 You want to know what interest rate yield you're going to get? No, the risk. When people invest in companies, say, I'll ignore that. No, you're buying your portion of their capital. What return do they get on that capital? That's question number one, because there's a great Charlie Monday. a quote, which is over the long term, the performance of your shares, if you hold them for long term, will start to gravitate towards a return that the company generates. And he's not putting forward

Starting point is 00:45:12 a theory here. It's a fact. And so we look at return on capital employed and people look at all kinds of earnings growth and so on. If you're prepared to give me access to capital, either by you sending me more or me retaining your earnings and you ignore the return on capital employed, I'll generate earnings growth for you at lower and lower returns, which plenty of companies have done at but I see Tesco for details, right? It's like, oh, it's a disaster. So we look at return on capital employer. We look at gross margins.

Starting point is 00:45:39 We look at the difference between sales revenues and cost of good sold. What do they mark things up by? Because companies take stuff in, they take in components, ingredients, services, labor, and they put a markup on it. And again, in normal life, you're going to a shop. You can imagine them having a markup. All companies have that markup. What is it?

Starting point is 00:45:59 And the size of that tells you a lot of things. it tells you about their pricing power, their brand strength. It tells you about their defenses against inflation if the cost of goods goes up. We obviously look at profit margins, but most people do. We look at cash conversion. And what percentage of the profits arrive in cash? Is it 100%, 80%, 120%. There are companies that make more than 100% of profits in cash, usually by the method of paying people more slowly than they get paid. And that's beneficial, fairly obviously, because cash is the only thing in the end. You can pay the dividend. things like. So we look at a raft of financial metrics for these companies. And every year we give

Starting point is 00:46:38 that to people in terms of our portfolio and how it looks and how it looks against the indices and so on and so forth. And then as I say, we start looking at things like, well, what do they do? So it looks good. Do they have brands? Do they have control of distribution? Do they have intellectual property? Do they have an install base of software or equipment that they service and sell spares and so on and upgrades to? How do they do this? We've got to have an understanding. How do they get to those numbers? What drives them to get to those numbers? And then we look at things like the management.

Starting point is 00:47:08 They're not in the sense of, you know, are they good manager or bad managers? Traditionally, what most people mean by that is they have a meeting with them and how did they come across? I've met people who can present brilliantly but are bad managers and people who can't present to save their lives who are very good managers. Right? So, no, no, no. Let's get to the nitty gritty of talking to these people and ask them all the usual questions. what's happening here and what's happening on what's that product and in this region. What we really want to know is every year you have this company that produces this return,

Starting point is 00:47:39 these profits and cash flows are rife, right? How do you decide whether to give it back in a dividend, buy back shares, invest in the business, or buy things, right? Those are your four basic choices, two of them, obviously, subsets of one, which is giving money back. How do you decide between those? And we're looking for people who've got a grasp of how that works. and what they do, which is honest, and that matches something like the way that we think. So they go, well, actually, I mean, I've met managers, I've done projects for managers

Starting point is 00:48:11 in public companies over years where they say, my stock's undervalued. Oh, no, you're busy acquiring things. Yes, yes, buying lots of things. Why don't you buy your own stock? What? What? What would I do that? A shrink.

Starting point is 00:48:23 But surely the company you know best is not the companies you're acquiring. It's the one you've already got. You must have that pretty well. yeah. And you're telling me you think it's undervalued. By the way, I've checked. I think you're right. Why don't you buy those? No, no, no. It's like you're looking for people who've got an honest and intelligible approach to that as well. So great financials, how do they do it? People are honest and straightforward and intelligent in their application of this. That's it. When you're interviewing management and you're trying to figure out whether they're rational in the way

Starting point is 00:48:55 that they allocate capital. What do you find helps in terms of your meeting style? Like, is it better to be charming? Is it better to be combative? What actually works for you when you're trying to figure out whether these guys are rational in the way they think about allocation of capital? Usually it's to try and start with going down the route of trying to get them to talk about how they view it without giving them too many clues, as it were.

Starting point is 00:49:23 Right? So, you know, something like, you know, well, how do you decide your priorities, you know? Don't say anything beyond. Don't say, well, you could do this, we could do that, you could measure it. No, no, don't give them a roadmap. Just leave it as, obviously, you want to point them down the route of talking about this, but you want to point them down the route of talking about it with as few signposts as possible to see whether they've actually got a framework, you know? And sometimes that I've got a framework. I mean, combative, it may surprise we're not usually all that combative. I mean, we are. with people who we think in the end are trying to tubus or just not listening to what we're trying to tell them, particularly we own quite a lot of their shares. You know, we will become, like we did with Unity for in the end. It's kind of like, guys, we will become competent because we own these shares for a long time. You've completely ignored us.

Starting point is 00:50:08 You're ignoring us now, and we don't think you should. And you're treating other people who arrived in the last five minutes better than us. So we'd really like you to focus. And we will become competitive. Like, you know, they say, oh, we've got an active investor. And we've invited him on the board. And it's like, great, you know. But I don't want to go on the board.

Starting point is 00:50:23 I will turn it down if they ask me, not that it's ever particularly likely, but why are you doing that? Right? Why? I'm trying to get them to the point. And we look, we can get you managements who will give you, I don't think you want it probably, but we can get people, managements who will give us a reference who say, Fundsmith turned up. They did all this in terms of our business.

Starting point is 00:50:41 They bought a big stake. Then we had an activist who said, we've got to cut costs and we've got to split the business, we've got to do this. And not only did they vote against that, but they talked to the proxy voting agency and said, I think these people are wrong. What are they going to do is injure this business. I mean, we will actually stand alongside them and fight for the business if we think that someone's doing something wrong in that regard.

Starting point is 00:51:00 So far from being competent, sometimes we're their best friend, you know. One of the things that's very striking about your portfolio is that obviously you have a lot of these very well-established self-financing businesses with these high returns on equity and durable competitive advantages, very much Buffett-style companies. But a lot of them are really old. I mean, I remember you once saying that the average company in your portfolio was founded in 1883. I don't know if that's still true. Can you talk about 100 years now?

Starting point is 00:51:29 It's 1920 something, I think. That's extraordinary. Can you explain that? Because we're in an era where so many people are just obsessed with the new technology, right? And AI, this and, you know, biotech and drones or whatever it is. And here are you focusing very heavily on 100-year-old. companies. What's going on here? Because it's not that you're ignorant about technology. No. But mostly winners keep on winning. It's come the way the world is. The Stern Business School in

Starting point is 00:52:01 New York produces a table. I think they produce it annually. And it's good or bad companies. And what they have is companies by sector. And they analyze thousands of companies. So they have the sectors. So there's consumer stables and consumer discretionary and pharmaceuticals and healthcare and mining and minerals and banking, all these sectors, hundreds and numbers of companies each one. And they do a very simple calculation of whether a company creates that destroys value for the year that they're looking at. But they've got the data over many years. And what they look at is the return on capital employed, you know, the Buffett thing that he focused on in 79 that we focus on, less a guess at the weighted average cost of capital.

Starting point is 00:52:36 People get their knickers in a terrible twist about whether it's a guess, right? The exact number doesn't matter. And so they take off a weight average cost of capital and come, is it taking in money at a weight average cost of capital and making a positive spread, in which case it's creating value, or is it making a negative spread, in which case it's a machine for destroying value? And then they show you the sections. Let me tell you, almost every year they do it, you go, oh, right. So the good companies, the ones creating value are, oh, the consumer staples, consumer discretionary, healthcare, information technology, and then what's all the bad stuff?

Starting point is 00:53:09 Oh, it's banks, real estate, insurance, heavy engineering and manufacturing, mining and minerals, oil, gas, and transport, in particular airlines. are all bad. Now, every dog has its day, right? There will be a year somewhere in the cycle where mining is good or airlines are okay, you know, of course there is, you know. But good things don't become bad and bad things don't become good. So that's the first point is, on the whole, we're not suddenly going to find all the good companies have become bad companies, all the bad companies, it persists. And the reason it persists is because of competitive advantages in those sectors. There are certain competitive advantages that those sectors and the leading companies within it enjoy.

Starting point is 00:53:51 It's what Buffett calls the moat, their defensive mechanism. How do they keep those sharp elbows that keep you out, right? Because we can all look at Coca-Cola and see it's got good returns, but how are we going to get in there? And we've got to get past PepsiCo and Dr. Pepper first, where we can get a crack at there. And they've got this means of defending themselves. There's no doubt that we are in the era where there's been change. And we can sort of look around us and go, well, in the time that, that I've been in business, we've seen change in terms of computing and the internet and mobile

Starting point is 00:54:23 telephony and, you know, and social networks. And maybe we're seeing something now in AI, maybe, maybe not. I don't know. And it is a period of change. And there's no doubt that you've got to be alive to it. And I think we are alive to it. Not everything that we've got was founded in 1920. Now, we've got meta and we've got Microsoft. And we've got some stuff that's more recent. But before we allie upon the idea that there's never been more change in this, bear in mind I did a history degree. And you need to think back to earlier periods in history. You're sure that this is the most change we've ever seen.

Starting point is 00:54:56 Because if you were involved in the communications business across the last sort of the two centuries, you would have started in the telegraph business where they put up wires, typically alongside railway lines, and you sent Moore's code. That's how you communicated, right? Dot dash, dot dash. and then somebody came up with the means of having a microphone so you could have the voice. So we attached a microphone to the wires. Now we could talk to each other.

Starting point is 00:55:19 And then somebody invented radio. And after we'd had radio in place for a while, two things evolved from that. One was we could talk to each other without being connected by a wire. Ah, that's different, isn't it? So, you know, ships at sea and people who are traveling and could communicate. And knowing that you could communicate to the many. You could broadcast. That's a bit different, isn't it?

Starting point is 00:55:41 Then along came somebody who said, never mind that, I've got this thing. You can look at each other while you're communicating. You can have television. You can have either video or you can have broadcast television. Then along came the internet. So if you're involved in this, it's been a hell of a lot of change already, hasn't there, along the way?

Starting point is 00:55:55 So, you know, recency bias is something I think that a lot of people suffer from. It's tempting to think that we've got more change now than we've ever had before. I'm not utterly convinced. There's so much to unpack here. And I wanted to highlight a few things for our listeners before we move on, right? So one thing that's very distinctive about what you do, which is very much in tune with Charlie Munger, right? I wrote a chapter in my book about Munger and just not being a fool, avoiding standard stupidities. A lot of what you do is just avoiding certain things, right?

Starting point is 00:56:28 So certain sectors you're avoiding. Munger is great, I think, because he does have this idea that if you invest in good stuff, you'll be all right. Roughly speaking, you could take our entire investment philosophy and boil it down like. If you've got good stuff, you'll be all right. That's it. That's it. You might not be the best fund, or you might not help people with everybody in the world, but you'll be alright. Good stuff.

Starting point is 00:56:52 Sorry, I interrupted you in the middle of talking about, my idea. No, that's such an important insight. I mean, and the ability to sort of make it very simple, right? Just buy good stuff. I mean, I remember you saying at one point, you don't need to own the abominable. absolute best stocks. You need to own a lot of pretty good, you know, really good companies that are resilient and durable and then avoid the crap. And so tell us how you figure out what bad companies look like. Like when you're looking at the financial statements and you're looking

Starting point is 00:57:25 for warning signs, because a lot of what you're doing is a getting rid of lousy sectors and be getting rid of lousy companies. I mean, an awful lot of it comes down to just knowing. It's like you, there aren't good airlines. I mean, like, your people say, what about Ryan and stuff? Every rule has an exception somewhere out there. But on the whole, there aren't any. And if you look at the last 20 years of data, it's lost something like 5% versus its cost

Starting point is 00:57:54 of capital on average every year. It's a machine for destroying value. That's just what the statistics tell you. So that's what analyzing the statements will tell you, either in aggregate or individually. Then you go, I wonder why they are a bad industry. Let's think for a moment. Every single major factor involved in those companies is outside their control. This is another thing to look for.

Starting point is 00:58:14 You're looking for companies which have certain things they can control and work on the things they control. They don't worry about the things they can't control. They work on the things they can control. Airlines can't control the frequency with which you fly. Now, load factors vary, right? They can't control atmospheric conditions. Things happen to stop them flying from tunnel, volcanic dust clouds and things like that. They can't control the main input costs, which are fuel, oil price, staff, largely unionized and so on, and the cost of airplanes.

Starting point is 00:58:45 Basically, they are buying airplanes from two suppliers. And then you get onto this. Hopefully, this is a rhetorical question. Is an industry a good industry or a better industry if there are fewer from an investment standard? point, if there are few participants or many participants, well, the answer surely is few participants, right? I mean, ideally one would be great, but, you know, if we've got to have it, a duopoly is okay, you know, visa and master card, coping Pepsi, so on. Last time I checked, and I'm sure I'm out of date before anybody sort of rings up, well, writes under your podcast,

Starting point is 00:59:17 he's an idiot. But the last time I haven't bothered checking for a long time, there were 3,000 airlines in the world, right? Then bear in mind this, out of those 3,000 airlines, why had a large number of the owners and operators aren't even trying to make money. They're national flag carriers, right? They're owned and operated by governments using your money. They don't care. They really don't care. Or they're owned by entrepreneurs who really like their names on the side of planes. So when you look at sectors, you say, well, I've got the financial statistics and it's the opposite what we do. Okay, so the statistics look good. How do they make that? How do they make that? Now, they're really terrible why, but we can look at all the reasons why. We can look at those terrible sectors and look why.

Starting point is 00:59:59 So, you know, if you look at mining and minerals or oil and gas or transport, including airlines and banking and investment banking and insurance and real estate, it's dire. They're just dire sectors. You say, you need to begin the discussion about the individual company that somebody's telling you about. You almost need to begin to think about it. Think back to the Stern Business School and it's good versus perspective. But trickier is when you get into a sector which is commonly populated by quite good companies, but you get businesses in there which are not good. And that does happen sometimes. Just like you occasionally get sectors where they're bad sectors, but there's a good one. Let me give you a couple of examples, you know, out of there. You know, if we looked at in consumer staples, just a sector that is generally good.

Starting point is 01:00:44 And we looked at Kimberly Clark, a company that makes toilet tissue and kitchen towel and tissues and so on. it's not a great business, I'm afraid. The business of making paper towels isn't something where there's a great deal of brand loyalty. I don't know how many people go down the supermarket and feel. They've got to buy Scotics, or they've got to buy clinic. They just want a paper towel. They're really not concerned about it as much as they would be if they put this into their body, if it were to about food and drink and medicine and so on.

Starting point is 01:01:12 It's not got the same kind of price. And it's in the consumer safety, but it's not great, is it? And then you mustn't get hooked up on sector descriptions. Sometimes people will say, well, you don't, do you invest in chemical companies? No, terrible. But you owned a company called Sigma Aldrich. It was taken over. We did own it.

Starting point is 01:01:29 It wasn't really a chemical company. What it was was a company. Yeah, it literally made chemicals, but it made little pots of chemicals, which it supplied to biochemists doing experiments and tests. And so they were trained as biochemists to use its catalog, its online catalog. So when they got an experiment or test to do tomorrow or day after, they go on the catalog and order their ingredients and the little pots turn up with all the stuff. That's what they supply. And what they're really in is in the fulfillment business. They're supplying stuff

Starting point is 01:01:56 to help you do. They're supplying the stuff that will do. You don't really work out what the bulk cost of the container of chemicals is. You just want to know that it's going to be there waiting in a laboratory the morning when you come in. And then, of course, the final frontier is they have a certain amount they supply, which is corrosive or poisonous or radioactive, in other words, difficult. And that gives them an edge as well in terms of the ability to safely supply ingredients like that. And so it literally had chemical on the tin, but it wasn't really. It was actually a company which had trained scientists to use its ingredients and experiments. And its average supply, it wasn't, you know, it's not like a bulk chemical company supplying thousands of tons of

Starting point is 01:02:36 phosphate or something. Their average pot cost 400 bucks last time I looked. And that, so it says it's chemical, but it's not really. So you've got to be careful about that. The ones that cross-o-liller are in a sector that's good but are bad, or in a sector that's bad, but there's the old good one. You have to be careful. So when I look at your list of top 10 holdings in your flagship fund, and I see things like Meta and Microsoft and Nova Nordisk and Striker, which I think you've owned since the inception of the fund 14 years ago, or L'Oreal or automatic data processing, Visa, Philip Morris Waters and Alphabet, can you take a couple of those that kind of illustrate what you're looking for in a business? that sort of embody what you love? Yeah, yeah, I know. Let's take a couple of words. Microsoft, you know, it's the world's leading supplier of computer operating systems.

Starting point is 01:03:26 Your computer probably works on it. My computer definitely works on it. The vast majority of business computing is done using its operating systems. If you go back to when we bought it, that was its leading business, Windows. And it had the servers and tools, professional business. It had a change of management, which we were hoping for shortly after we bought it. And its new management took it into other. things which were linked into here. So, you know, it's now advised with Amazon Web Services

Starting point is 01:03:51 to being one of the leader in the provision of cloud computing services. So, you know, using distributed computing rather than having the computing sitting here on our desktop, using the cloud to back up our information and process it and do it on a common platform, is something which is they've basically been one of the two leaders in since that thing. They're also leading in gaming. Although they've screwed up the mobile telephony thing and handed that to Apple, basically. That was before we bought it. And they have actually made a comeback in business computing in terms of mobile devices with the Microsoft Surface and so on and so forth. And we'll see where they go in AI. But all of this is built into a company which has

Starting point is 01:04:30 regularly produced high growth in revenues and high returns on capital. I'll tell you what they are. We're talking. Give me a second. I just log on to my system. But also what's relevant, is you bought it during a period where it was out of favor. So, I mean, you often talk about this issue of valuation with quality companies. There's a very interesting thing, a chart that you have in the introduction to your book, Investing for Growth, where you talk about how you would actually have been justified paying a 281 PE for L'Oreal back in 1973 or 126 for Colgate or 63 for Coca-Cola. So you're willing to pay a reasonably high price for high quality. But then there are things like Microsoft where actually you bought it when it was really undervalued.

Starting point is 01:05:18 Can you also talk about how you think about this issue of valuation when it comes to high quality growth companies? Because it's very thorny particularly at the moment with a lot of the magnificent seven. Yeah. For a really good company, we are very bad. One of the things we're very bad at is estimating the impact of compound returns as human beings. When you look at the difference between a 10% and total and offset compound return, the difference over 20 or 30 years isn't 25%.

Starting point is 01:05:51 People don't realize actually it quadruples the capital value in that differential. Wow. And we're very bad at that, you know, unless you sit down and compute it yourself. And so people don't figure that out, I think, very well, which means that commonly, things which are able to make persistent eye returns and growth do not get full valuation. L'Oreal is a great facing point with that particular calculation. It's astonishing. But if you look at that table, you're going to pay the 100 for Pepsi, 100 times p for Pepsi in that. But look, as much as we acknowledge that, and we do acknowledge that markets, whilst they're not completely perfect,

Starting point is 01:06:26 are completely imperfect either. They generally, on average, they price good companies better than bad companies. So we're going to have to pay a higher price for our good companies than the average. I mean, oh, it's a bit expensive. Yeah, well, it's going to be because it's a better company. But once in a while, some form of madness overtakes them, and they offer you something which they really shouldn't, right? It's kind of like, how does it happen? So we started buying Microsoft when it was $25 a share.

Starting point is 01:06:50 It's $420 something today, right? And it's been in our top performance eight years running. This shouldn't happen with a company this size. It was trading on a P of about eight when we bought it. Because, you know, Steve Belmont, I don't know, Mr. Bellman, I don't really want to be critical of him, but he hadn't been a happy period when he was there. And they'd missed out on the whole mobile telephony thing. Then they bought Nokia and that would be pretty disastrous.

Starting point is 01:07:14 And they bought Skype, which had been pretty disastrous too, which is ironic given that teams is now such a success. And so there we were. And when we have looking at things like it, so we look at something like this, it's a company with returns on capital around 30%, right? And revenue growth now, you know, it's been coasting about 20% for a long period of time. this shouldn't happen. If we think we found one of these, and we have found them time,

Starting point is 01:07:35 we found it in IDX, infection equipment, we found it in Microsoft, we found it in Domino's Pizza back in the day. We sit down and think, are we missing something here? And what we tend to do as a sort of check on sanity as much as anything else is go and look at what the detractors are saying.

Starting point is 01:07:50 What are the detractors say? What are they saying is the reason? And I remember an awful lot of the Microsoft stuff, roughly speaking, just said, well, it's not Apple, is it? Well, no, it's not, is it? We figured that out all on our own. Very famously, in my view, the Financial Times lex column,

Starting point is 01:08:08 and I do know which journalists wrote it at the time, but obviously they haven't got a byline. Unfortunately, said when it was $26 a share, nobody should own it at this price. And they were right, but not in the way that they meant it. And it's like sometimes when people are just absolutely mad about things, about you shouldn't own this, you do get this opportunity where a large, very good business

Starting point is 01:08:30 gets offered to you at a price where you just shouldn't get. Meta was another one after the Cambridge Analytica thing. You know, meta really was a give-me in terms of it. I mean, it's gone up 500% or something like that since that point where we owned it. And you, you know, we received a cacophony of invective from people about how we shouldn't own it. I mean, I mentioned in the, I quote my previous annual letter in this year's annual letter saying, I'm always thinking of having a fund that just buys the one share, everybody tells me not to own. because they're working off emotion and anecdote, right? You know, people were saying, nobody's using Facebook anymore.

Starting point is 01:09:07 I mean, I remember saying nobody's using Facebook. I said, oh, right, okay. Where do you live? Well, Tumbridge Wells. I said, oh, am I in Jakarta? Are kids using it in Jakarta at all? Well, how would I know? I said, well, I think that's kind of more important, don't you, than Tumbridge Wells?

Starting point is 01:09:22 So your kids are not using it anymore? What are they using? Instagram. I said, you do know they own that too. The plural of anecdote isn't data. Just deal with the facts. There's an old TV series from the 50s called Dragnet, and the detective, who's name I can't remember,

Starting point is 01:09:41 would always be interviewing a suspect, a witness to something that had just occurred, a murder or a robbery or something like that, and they'd be gaveling and they'd say, The fax, ma'am, just the facts. It was a very nice thing in, and I think it was in investing for growth, your book which collected your letters from the first 10 years of the fund where you quoted the Simon and Garfunkel song, the boxer, where you said,

Starting point is 01:10:08 Amen. And here's when he wants it. He is disregards the rest. Yeah. I mean, look, you can get an awful. I'm quite serious now. You can get an awful lot of stuff from the movies and from song lyrics. Because people spend quite a lot of time sometimes on movies and on film lyrics.

Starting point is 01:10:23 Yeah. And on song lyrics. And so sometimes they've got a bit more meaning than just some. but is Simon and Garfunkel playing a nice tune. I mean, one that we quote all the time is the movie All the President's Men about the Watergate Affair, which has got so many quotes out of anywhere. And, you know, the bit where Deep Thro is the FBI deputy director, I don't know what it is, but he's giving information to Woodward paid by Robert Redford, and he meets him in the car park.

Starting point is 01:10:51 And one of his critical piece of advice is follow the money. Yeah. More money. If you want what's going on, just follow the money. And there's lots of examples of things like that. You know, we play to ourselves clips when we're explaining things day and day. There's the bit in Casablanca, where the gendarme goes to close down Rick's Cafe. He blows his whistle and he says, this place is closed down.

Starting point is 01:11:12 I'm shocked, shocked to hear there's been gambling here. And one of the waiting stuff comes by and goes, you're winning, sir. Whenever we read one of these things about, yes, apparently somebody has been bribing people to do business in Nigeria. We always play the Casablanca kit, right? I remember Howard Marks quoting to me Clint Eastwood in Magnum Force saying a man's got to know his limitations. I quote that one too all the time. A good man knows his limitations. He's told by the chief of police is being asked to deliver the ransom to the bad guy.

Starting point is 01:11:43 And he says, we don't want any gunplay from you, can I? And he said, I was a cop for 20 years and I never ran an officer of my weapon. He says, that's good. A wise man knows his limitations. It's great quote. The movie is littered with great quotes that you can. that you can learn something from, in my view. So this idea of how people hear what they want and disregard the rest is really important.

Starting point is 01:12:03 And you've operated in a team for a long time, right? You've had Julian Robbins, I think you've worked with for 38 years, and he's your head of research, and he helped you co-found the firm. You sometimes talk with him as your designated, your designated successor, if you retire at the age of 145. And, yeah, tell me. Robbins as we know then. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:12:24 Tell me how it helps to have a partner like that. Because I see this a lot, right? With, I mean, look, Howard Marks talked to me about Bruce Cash. Joel Greenblatt talked to me about Rob Goldstein. I've interviewed Charlie a lot, right? Who, you know, obviously was the abominable no man for Warren. Talk about how it helps in terms of just dealing with your own blind spots and potential biases and the like to have partners. Yeah, I think that Julian is very intelligent.

Starting point is 01:12:57 He's also got a first in history, by the way, and very honest. And he's different to me. And amongst the differences are that he sometimes sees things in terms of the subtleties of what's going on that I miss. And he's got a very, very good way of pointing them out to me without pissing me off. Basically, he can get me to understand something without getting into a fight over it. And that's quite important that he just says, no, I wouldn't buy that because of this. And have you thought about this in terms of, and he's almost got a way of saying, like, you know, buying L'Oreali will go, well, you know, I think if you take the P.E ratio,

Starting point is 01:13:36 roughly, look at it in a mirror and add your car license plate, it's okay. And really, he's just dupy-p-priced, right? I mean, and somehow he manages to get my, like, I know, he might have a point about looking at it that way. And I go and buy it. And really, I really, I really, no, he just talked me into that, didn't he? He realized that if I hadn't been talked into it, I would always have been sitting there going, no, it's a bit too expensive. And then we never owed it.

Starting point is 01:13:59 So he just found a clever way of bloody spoofing me into it, didn't me? You know? And he did. And he's got a great inquiring mind. He actually really likes the stock market. And he's lived in America for, I don't know, 30 years now. And he's got a wealth of knowledge about America and the stock market that he brings. brings to bear in a way that I simply can't.

Starting point is 01:14:24 As much as I deal with Wall Street and worked on Wall Street and I'll never have that length and depths of knowledge that he's got, you know? You have a very interesting sort of emphasis on the US in what purports to be a global fund, right? I mean, when I checked the other day, I think it was 74% in the US. And obviously, you know, there are these issues over where a company is domiciled and all are like, you know, France is about 9%. That's not real sales in the US.

Starting point is 01:14:52 We had a company that was US and in that number, they had zero in sales in the US. But it's clear that the US is a massive hunting ground for you. I mean, with all these companies like Microsoft and meta, when you think about this issue of what makes the US special and whether this is just a sort of a permanent, if anything, is permanent advantage or whether it's just another kind of pendulum swing. and sooner or later, you know, the pendulum will swing back to emerging markets or whatever else. What do you think?

Starting point is 01:15:24 I mean, you know, you used to have an emerging markets fund and then you've closed it at a certain point. Like, is the U.S. just the persistent winner? We're right, by the way. We've continued since and we're right. Look, the U.S. is the biggest economy in the world. Let's just start with that, shall we? Secondly, it has the most active capital market in the world. So when we're talking about where companies are listed, you know, increasingly as you'll see much of the chagrin

Starting point is 01:15:47 of people in London, companies are listing in America, which are not in America. So I mean, you know, given that it's the biggest economy and given that it's got the most active capital market, I'd almost say if you're doing what we're doing, why haven't you got more companies in America than it was? How does this work then, right? Because if you are a company thinking of listing, if I were thinking of listing, why would I think about doing it in London? The greatest depth of market, the biggest liquidity, the most investor attraction is in New York,

Starting point is 01:16:17 isn't it? You know? And then you think about how companies become big and very profitable companies. One of the things that helps American companies is that they get the opportunity to build their strength in the biggest market in the world before they move out and take on the world. So, you know, whether it's in technology or healthcare or consumer and so on, they sit there and they become the dominant player then. Then when they reach out into the wider world, it's very difficult for people to compete with them. You know, when Coca-Cola and PepsiCo arrive in the UK, do you really think that Britwick are going to give them a run for their money? And so that's in their own market.

Starting point is 01:16:53 How about once we get to an adjacent market? So in Europe, how's Britvick going to do there against Coca-Cola? When they've, you know, it's like a boxer who's pumped up in the gym, who's been fighting, you know, he's been in the cronk gym in Chicago, fighting the best heavyweights in the world in sparring, and then he turns out when he's finding a hometown fighter somewhere in another country, like, I wonder how this is going to go. So you just got to bear on it.

Starting point is 01:17:19 It's the biggest economy with the biggest capital market and the companies, the Coca-Cola's and the Microsofts and the strikers and so on, have had the ability to build a fantastic base there before they move out into the wider world and take on the local competition. Then you get on to other factors as well when you look at the world at large. You know, Europe, you know, the great saying is America innovates. Europe, China replicates, China or Japan replicate, and Europe regulates. I mean, some of the stuff that's going on in Europe, like the Digital Markets Act, they may as well put up a sign here saying, high tech, not welcome, I would say.

Starting point is 01:17:53 And it's kind of sad if you see what's driven the market in recent times, because look at the heights of technology in terms of the companies. And I know I am, a billion of other people going, well, that's a bit worrying in terms of the size of their domination of returns. But what's the biggest UK technology company? God knows. There's nothing really famous, is there? Well, I'm talking about listed in the UK. sage, which by the way, is a good business. I've got nothing against Sage. Please don't

Starting point is 01:18:19 take it as that being it. It's a very good business. In fact, but that's it. An accounting software company based in Newcast, who is the UK's biggest indigenous technology company. And I'm embarrassed to say I've never even heard of it. So that's, I mean, I'm based in New York and I've never heard of it. It's funny you should say that. We happen to know that when they were looking for a chief executive, and by the way, this is not meant to be in any way acquitted in the courage of it. I think he's a good guy. But he's an internal appointment. The reason is the internal appointment, amongst anything else, is they went out to headhunters to try and get a CEO. And when will you start?

Starting point is 01:18:50 If you were looking for a headhunter for a software firm, you'd start in Silicon Valley pretty much, wouldn't you? So they got a headhunter there and said, go around, see if you can find any COOs or number twos or whatever, we'd like to step up. And the response you've just had is the response they got from everybody. Never heard of it. God, I don't think that Europe is about to overtake the United States in any of the areas that we've identified as being good businesses. No, I can't see any. Anyway, I can't say China is difficult because you don't truly own the business, right? I mean, you are actually in partnership with the Chinese government for good or real,

Starting point is 01:19:20 particularly in the high-tech businesses. And Japan, at least until very recently, businesses weren't run for the benefit of shareholders. They were run for the benefit of the employees and why Japan, as it were, you know, returns on capital and things like we're discussing. We're like, hmm, okay. So that's why we haven't got very much. It's not that we don't like them. We actually have a bit of a soft spot for European companies in here.

Starting point is 01:19:42 industries that we like, which are run by families, and have a very long-term perspective. So if you have a look at our portfolio, things like L'Oreal, LVMH, Atlas Copco, you know, we do like them. But they're rare, they're rarities. Sorry, I interrupt you there. Go ahead. No, I was just wondering because I, I mean, it's interesting that there's a discussion between two Englishmen who are not living in England. So that tells us something about... We're not coincidence, that, is it? Right. I mean, and both of us, I think, love England and love being there, but there is a dynamism when you move out, certainly when you move to New York. But when you think about the future of the British economy, when I go back, I sometimes feel like,

Starting point is 01:20:24 I mean, I only really go to London, and I'm no doubt going to annoy lots of people here, but I feel like it's almost become a kind of playground, at least in the areas I go to, which are not that representative, has become a playground for the foreign rich, right? It's not really dynamic as an economy. It's more a really wonderful place for other people to come and spend. It's true of London, I think, and I'm a Londoner, so I feel strongly about it. I think it's the greatest city of the world probably, but I'm obviously not exactly objective in that opinion.

Starting point is 01:20:56 And it's sad, I think, that what you describe is at least partly true. Well, that really explains the British economy and where it stands for all. I think also what the British economy has been good at in terms of innovation, and it's got a great record of innovation in healthcare. It's got great drugs and other areas. It's got it in technology in a number of regards. Arm, in terms of

Starting point is 01:21:17 low power chips for mobile telephony. They've dominated that over time. It's got it in a number of brands as well. It's over time that it's developed, which has been very good. But it's I think that the problems

Starting point is 01:21:33 that it exhibits are in the end, I think there is in my view, an anti-entrepreneurial, anti-capitalist, whatever we want to call it, spirit abroad in the UK. And it's been problematic, I think, for a very long time. I don't think, I think one of the biggest differences with America, and like you, I love New York. I had an apartment in New York for some time and spend a lot of time there is, I think on the whole, and I realize this is a generalization, Americans wish to emulate success, Britons wish to destroy it or criticize it. That's my take on it. And I'm afraid, you know,

Starting point is 01:22:07 I don't think that's helpful, really. You know, we've got to learn to appreciate people who are successful and applaud it and wish to emulate them and multiply it, not bring them down in some way. So the other thing about the UK is I think you're probably right about London, but once you go outside London, the thing that becomes evident to me is a number of things. One of them is it's being somewhat hollowed out. I mean, the industries which we used to rely on for manufacturing have by and large gone. But going back to what I was saying earlier about progress, that's not new.

Starting point is 01:22:37 You know, if you take the textile industry, it originated in the north of England, the Industrial Revolution, then it migrated to America in the northeast after the Civil War, and then it migrated to places like Hong Kong, and then it's migrateded for places like Hong Kong to places like Mauritius. And then it's gone to, as this become a middle-income country, it's gone to places like Ethiopia and Cambodia and Cambodia and Madagascar. And it keeps moving. And you have to move on yourself. It's no good saying, well, I think we're stuck, I'm not lamenting the absence of the textile

Starting point is 01:23:02 industry from the dark satanic bills in the old England. You have to move to new industries. But you do need to move to new industries. You don't need to have half the population employed by the public sector, which it is. That's not going to be helpful, right, because they aren't actually going to create anything whatsoever. Here's a statistic for you. The poorest state in America is Mississippi. And the median income in Mississippi, and I can give you an exact figure, but not on this call, but is about 44,000 U.S. dollars.

Starting point is 01:23:32 Now, that's the same as the median income of the UK. What went wrong? because something's definitely gone wrong. I mean, think about, because I think one of the things that strikes a lot of people when they travel around America outside of the main conurbations is how poor America is once you get out into the out of the boonies. Well, yeah, but the UK is pretty poor all over, you know, outside of those enclaves of London and a few other major cities, the UK is as bad as not just America, but the poorest state in America. I'm not being party political in terms of my views on this. I'm, you know, my view is if they, I don't vote in elections in the UK, I'm not on the electoral register, but if they had an election, they had a draw, they could bring me

Starting point is 01:24:12 and I'd let them know which way I would have voted. But, because that's my view on them, essentially. But both sides of the divide in the UK seem to me to have a rather large responsibility for this lamentable state of affairs. 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.

Starting point is 01:24:40 VANTA automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered platform. So whether you're prepping for a SOC or running an enterprise GRC program, VANTA keeps you secure and keeps your deals moving. Instead of chasing spreadsheets and screenshots, VANTA gives you continuous automation across more than 35 security and privacy frameworks. Companies like Ramp and Ryder spend 82% less time on audits with Vanta. That's not just faster compliance, it's more time for growth. If I were running a startup or scaling a team today, this is exactly the type of platform

Starting point is 01:25:18 I'd want in place. Get started at Vanta.com slash billionaires. That's vanta.com slash billionaires. Ever wanted to explore the world of online trading but haven't dared try? The futures market is more active now than ever before, and plus 500 futures is the perfect place to start. Plus 500 gives you access to a wide range of instruments, the S&P 500, NASDAQ, Bitcoin, gas, and much more. Explore equity indices, energy, metals, 4X, crypto, and beyond. With a simple and intuitive platform, you can try.

Starting point is 01:25:55 trade from anywhere, right from your phone. Deposit with a minimum of $100 and experience the fast, accessible futures trading you've been waiting for. See a trading opportunity. You'll be able to trade it in just two clicks once your account is open. Not sure if you're ready, not a problem. Plus 500 gives you an unlimited, risk-free demo account with charts and analytic tools for you to practice on. With over 20 years of experience, Plus 500 is your gateway to the markets. Visit plus 500.com to learn more. Trading in futures involves risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Not all applicants will qualify.

Starting point is 01:26:35 Plus 500, it's trading with a plus. Billion dollar investors don't typically park their cash in high-yield savings accounts. Instead, they often use one of the premier passive income strategies for institutional investors, private credit. Now, the same passive income strategy is available to investors of all sizes thanks to the Fundrise income fund, which has more than $600 million invested in a 7.97% distribution rate. With traditional savings yields falling, it's no wonder private credit has grown to be a trillion dollar asset class in the last few years. Visit fundrise.com slash WSB to invest in the Fundrise income fund in just minutes.

Starting point is 01:27:19 The fund's total return in 2025 was 8% and the average annual total return since inception is 7.8%. Past performance does not guarantee future results, current distribution rate as of 1231, 2025. Carefully consider the investment material before investing, including objectives, risks, charges, and expenses. This and other information can be found in the income funds prospectus at fundrise.com slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right. Back to the show. There's certainly a tremendous dynamism in the U.S. that I think, I definitely remember, when, during the financial crisis, when, you know, obviously the US kind of triggered a lot of the world's problems and everyone, everyone was sort of gleefully saying, you know, well, the US is finished

Starting point is 01:28:04 and, you know, now things. And if you lived here, you just had this sense. It's so dynamic and the flow of capital to good ideas is so quick. Speaking of which. But the willingness to deal with things when they go wrong, I quoted in my letter, I said, you know, we had Unile, but where we had a, you know, a battle that lasted many years. I mean, you could say through two, CEOs to try and get the place straightened down. In comparison with Nike, you know, the chief executive screwed up the bricks and mortar. He's gone. Right. That's it. And I, I, people have all terrible. I don't think it is terrible. One of my mantra is about running a business is, I don't think you should ever be allowed to fire people unless you've been fired yourself, right?

Starting point is 01:28:43 Because you need to know what this feels like. And if you're going to sit in a room and you're going to actually fire people, you need to be able to talk to them from a position of empathy, I think, in my view. So I'm not in favor of just, you know, going like a chainsaw of people, but I am in favor of dynamism. And dynamism only comes that you're describing in part from grasping not just money going for new ideas, but also how to deal with problems. You know, the dynamism of changing where people are living, what jobs they're doing, who they work for is, you know, the US is in another league, I think. I think you're unusual also in that you've not only been a very successful stock.

Starting point is 01:29:21 picker, but you were actually a very successful CEO. I mean, you've been a CEO of two public brokerage companies, one of which I think you built into having about 3,000 employees and the other you floated and there were lots of mergers and demurges and the like. And this is back in the 1990s and 2000s. And it reminded me when I was reading about your past as a CEO of the quote from Buffett, where he famously said, I'm a better investor because I'm a businessman and a better a businessman because I'm an investor. And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you learned as a CEO that's helped you as an investor.

Starting point is 01:29:59 Yeah. I mean, look, one of them is that change requires time quite often, notwithstanding me saying, you know, acting quickly is good because even if you act quickly, you've still got change to implement. You might change the person. You've got to change and quite often money and effort and lots of other things. I've got a very good friend of mine who's got a steel business in the UK. And he said when he was a quoted company, which he's not anymore, he went private.

Starting point is 01:30:22 And that was a, he said the analysts ringing up, asking him about how to change things, reminded him in the following. He said, they think that I've got these two buttons on my office wall, a red one and a green one. When I come in the morning, I press the green one, which is labelled to make money. And then when I put my coat on to go home at night, I think, oh, must remember to press the old red bun. He said, it's a bit more complex. We've got to design products. We've got to get orders.

Starting point is 01:30:44 We've got to build mold. out. And I think unless you've actually done that, it's difficult to understand. I mean, it's like people who sometimes come out of running a fund and then try and build a fund management business. And I said, well, it's like when I was head of research at UPS. People used to come to me because one of our analysts was a very heavy guy, been a hammer thrower at college and put on a lot of weight. And when he sat on the toilet seats, he used to break them because you know they stand on these little blocks that they're up there. This guy, if he wasn't kidding. And people would go and say, I just cut my ass on the toilet.

Starting point is 01:31:16 And I'd have to say, Lakers, could you just sit down a little bit more carefully because I've got people keep coming in? It's like, you know, the way I would put it is the day job isn't glamorous when it comes to managing businesses. Quite a lot of the day job isn't sort of striking a pose like Rodin's the thinker and having great strategic thoughts, right?

Starting point is 01:31:33 It's actually about execution and implementation. And a lot of execution and implementation does involve dealing with toilet seats and the like. It just does. And it's not that different with your investing, right? With your investing, you've talked about how so much of it, yeah, you have these grand theories and principles and stuff that are kind of timeless. But then there's the blocking and tackling day to day where you're listening to conference

Starting point is 01:31:59 calls and you're doing modelling of, you know, free cash flow. I say to every new recruit that we've had with some success but not universal, I say before they begin, I say, I use the exact phrase, the day. job is not glamorous. What we do is not sitting here having great thoughts on investment. I said, we don't sometimes have one for a couple of years or more at a time. The number of Microsofts and Idexes and things that we pull out that is relatively rare. And if you've got one, we'd love to hear about it. But when you've got three in the first week, we're going to get a bit suspicious. The reality is it's about modeling and collecting data and listening to calls and writing up notes,

Starting point is 01:32:40 looking so that we've got a record that we can read back through and read what's gone on historically. And that's really the vast majority of what we do. And you told me right before we started, before we started recording about a sign that you had in the office. Can you tell us about that? Because in a way it embodies this mindset of kind of dogged incremental progress and not screwing up. I put up the five P's, so five uppercase P's in a frame. And the five P stands for preparation prevents piss poor performance. Don't turn up for something without having prepared.

Starting point is 01:33:13 Don't go to a company meeting and you haven't read the last results and the note that you wrote before, you know? And it originated from a time when I was in Broking and I went on a trip to Scotland when I was at UBS, a head of research with the CEO and a salesman. The salesman, I'd come from another broking firm and I'd look to our Scottish biop stickers and they were terrible. And the salesman said we were number one or top three or something in Scotland. We clearly weren't. And so we decided we've resolved this by going to Scotland. Why not? and we were there having a meeting with the general accident, as it was in Perth.

Starting point is 01:33:43 They were lovely guys, I knew them. But, you know, they were lovely guys, but with that nice steely, you know, sort of bit in the middle that you get with Scots, which is good. And they were having the conversation about what they thought about the service. And they said, well, what do we think about the service? How much do we pay you last year in commission? There's a broker. I kind of looked at the salesman. And he said, I don't know.

Starting point is 01:34:01 I said, you don't know. They said, we paid you four million pounds or something like that. Well, I don't know. This is how much we pay you the year before. I don't know. Fire me a minute. So they said, what they were telling us was, they were giving us, never mind sitting in meetings like this or filling in surveys, they were voting with their wallet, all right?

Starting point is 01:34:21 Anyway, I came out of the meeting and I said to the CEO, I would fire that guy. I said, going to a meeting with you in the room, no, mind me in the room, and you don't have the basic information on the client to hand is just a no-no. I mean, that tells you right off the back what we're doing with here. And it's like, you know, there is no excuse for that. There's no excuse for turning up to interview a company, be interviewed by an investor. If I'm being interviewed by an investor, if you were coming on and say, Terry, I want to interview you about my holding infund.

Starting point is 01:34:51 And you go, well, do you know how much I've got invested in funds with? No, I haven't actually got a clue. William, how much have you got? It would be a bad start, wouldn't it? When did I invest? I don't know, actually. I mean, we've got data on this, but if I hadn't take the trouble, have you made money or have you lost money with me?

Starting point is 01:35:06 How much money have you made? Have you been putting money in or taking money out? out. And the idea of turning up without doing all this work is just preposterous in my view. I sort of wonder if when I look back at your youth, right, where you, you know, you came from this poor background and then, you know, you're like this working class kid going to university college in Cardiff and then you, you know, you get your MBA, but it's not, it's not from Harvard or Wharton, right? It's from Henley School of Management, you know. And I, I'm wondering if like there's something about having been an outsider and having to fight for everything that you've done.

Starting point is 01:35:39 that's been really key to your success. I wonder if there's something very central to your success that you've had to kind of scrap and be tenacious and work harder. And you were always sort of this super competitive outsider. Does that resonate with you? Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate, actually. I think that's a large part of this. I've never been part of whatever the establishment is.

Starting point is 01:36:04 I mean, I suspect we've got a new establishment now that's replaced some of the old establishment in time. I've never been part of that. I've never wanted to be part of it either, actually. It never struck me that I particularly wanted to join any club or anything like that, literal or metaphorical in that regard. And, yeah, I have always felt that I was a bit of an outsider and I had to work for things. And I think it's probably a good thing on the whole to be in that situation.

Starting point is 01:36:31 I had a conversation with somebody who were having a dinner and at the dinner with someone's son who was eaten. And when the terrorists were leaving, and he said to me, I got a fire son, I'd send him to eat. And I said, would you? I wouldn't. He said, why? He said, it's where everybody runs the world goes. I said, I just don't see this as a great positive. I think, you know, I would rather that he went to a very ordinary school and found out how the world really works, you know. My friend, the steel man who I'm telling you about, it's a family business. He's a style of family that's owned it for several generations. and he refused to go to public school and put himself into grammar school. And I think it's to his credit, but also to his benefit.

Starting point is 01:37:14 Because I think, you know, when you're walking through a founder and talking to people, you might be able to understand a little more what their issues are and what they're doing if you actually have been alongside them from time to time, you know? It's such an interesting issue. You know, I went to eating and I went to Oxford, but I'm a Jewish kid with, you know, from a family that fled from Russia and Ukraine and Poland. And so I remember going to a friend's house. For an outsider, Aetton.

Starting point is 01:37:42 Yeah, exactly. I mean, Bruce Greenwald once said to me, oh, yeah, the Jew from Eaton. I mean, there were 10 of us. Yeah, I'm surprised with that many. I think there were a few who were pretending not to be. I mean, I think there were some who concealed that they would use. And so I think being an outsider, I mean, for me being an outsider and an inside, somewhere between the two.

Starting point is 01:38:05 So I'm comfortable interviewing anyone or talking to anyone because I, you know, I was at school with people like Boris Johnson and David Cameron. So I know they were nothing really that special, right? You're not that intimidated because you. Josh. Use my cat of my Castle Blank. I'm shocked. Shocked to hear that.

Starting point is 01:38:23 I mean, they were very, I mean, Boris, Boris, I remember when I was a little boy. I mean, I was 13 and he was the head boy. And he was, he was clearly incredibly character. charismatic and a big personality. But the idea that these sort of entitled, very bright Etonians who knew how to write Greek verse should be making big impactful decisions about the future of the country just because they'd gone to eat in an oxen. I mean, it was kind of laughable if you knew them because I knew what a fool I was. And I, you know, I mean, I came top in English in my class. I mean, I was as smart as a lot of those kids. And I know that I'm a

Starting point is 01:39:01 war on. But I think the ideal place if you can get to it, and I don't think many do, is to be able to get along with and communicate people with people, whatever, pretty much whatever their background. And if you're going to do that, I think then you've got to about the right place. You know, if you can be at Buckingham Palace with Boris sitting alongside you having lunch, and I have been at Buckingham Palace with Boris sitting over having lunch, and at the same time, you can go to the boxing gym with the young black kids. Then I think you've reached a good place, is my view. And I feel sometimes I'm fortunate in that regard that I can do both those things and not feel particularly out of place in either one, you know.

Starting point is 01:39:40 It's interesting to me that one of your clients early on was Sir John Templeton, and you've talked in the past about going off to the Bahamas to Life at Key to see him and Mark Colossico, his chief investment officer. And I write in my book about Sir John because I went off and interviewed him in the Bahamas and spent a day with him 25, 26 years ago. And in some ways, you seem to have kind of recreated his life where you've gone off to Mauritius and you're sort of away from the madding crowd, thinking for yourself. Can you talk about, in some way, whether, a, I'm right in thinking that Templeton somehow influenced you, maybe in the same way that that movie early on influenced you, and you thought, oh, there's another way to do this.

Starting point is 01:40:23 And also how it's kind of been an advantage to you to set yourself up in this very independent, non-tribal way, far away from Wall Street and the city of London. I actually emulate Templeton in more ways you might think, because he, as you probably know, used to walk in the sea every day. Yeah. I go for a swim out to the reef and back whenever I can, which is, you know, two or three times a week at least. And my colleagues say, oh, that's interesting.

Starting point is 01:40:49 You're doing what? And I do, weirdly, if there's nothing else going on when I'm doing, I do think about him. It's strange, isn't it? I just doing an actor is similar to what he did in the Bahamas. But yeah, it definitely didn't influence me to see somebody like that at work. And I always remember very early on when he talked about how to react or not to events. He said, you know, I mean, obviously between way free internet.

Starting point is 01:41:12 He said, you know, the papers arrive a day later. I get the Wall Street Journal the day after it's published. So by the time there's a problem, it's too late to panic. And he was making an important point in a trivial way about that. The events, we often write up in our daily news run-ups, we write to each other, and we look back over periods of time, sometimes only a few weeks, sometimes a few months and so on and so on, if somebody had gone to sleep on that day and woken up on today, and we've had all these events in the middle that happened where, you know, terrible, great things have happened in terms of elections or wars or pandemics and so on. Since the market is at the same level, if they didn't look at any of the intervening events, I wonder what they would conclude. Nothing's happening. So was anything that happened terribly important then?

Starting point is 01:41:57 Because mostly the answer is no. No, it's not. And I think he and Buffett, although I've never met Buffett and so on, from the way that he's explained it, it is valuable. And there've been other people, I think. They're not the only people who've done the, you know, I don't want to be in the swim. I talk to people who I know in the industry who operate from London or New York.

Starting point is 01:42:18 I mean, I always say a lot of these guys need GPS to get outside of West One or SW1. I mean, we don't know how you do it. And I say to them, why are you there? And they go, well, I like to stay in touch with the companies. I say, you're an investor in proctor and gamma. I said, yes, so I might say they're in Cincinnati, right? And the reality is, you're scratching and they like to be able to go and talk to other people doing what they're doing, whether they're brokers or other managers. And they like to be able to beat them for lunch and meet them for drinks and pick up that.

Starting point is 01:42:50 They like to compare notes on what they're all doing. And the reality is they don't really want to stand out from the pack too much, which is fine. I mean, there's the old John Maynard Keynes quote there. The worst thing you can have from your career is to differ from the norm, even if you're successful, it's still a asthma to people. And they mainly don't want to get that far out from the norm. And if you're trying to invest for the real long term, being in that is unhelpful, really unhelpful.

Starting point is 01:43:19 How do you actually structure your lifestyle and your lifestyle and your life? your ecosystem there so that you're able to operate in this very long-term patient, independent, spirited way and sort of resist, you know, even the pressure to think about short-term results and stuff in an increasingly short-term world? We don't speak to any brokers, not one. We don't take any research from brokers. We don't speak to them. We do it ourselves.

Starting point is 01:43:46 So we've got, why? Well, you know, boxes are paid to fight, so they like to have fights. Lawyers are prayed to have disputes, so they like to have disputes. Brokers are made on transactions. Guess what they like to do? We were brokers. I was a broker. I was a broker. We've done this job. We know what's involved, right? We don't speak to any of them. We don't take any research from them. I get a small tsunami of stuff that comes through asking whether people could give me a service with that. The answer is no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So we don't take any of that. We're completely cut off from that. The fact that I'm in a different time zone, I'll hope, as well. I mean, for the first, four hours of the day, I don't have anyone outside Mauritius, my car, I've got a dozen colleagues

Starting point is 01:44:27 here who are awake. So I've got quite a large part of the day where I can mull over what I've read and what I've taken in the previous day and think if there's anything that I need to do about it or say about it or ask about it without any incoming whatsoever from people. And so that really does sort of, and also with regard to Wall Street, you know, I'm going to switch off looking at things after I've been speaking to you. I'll go on and have a look there. But I'll switch off and this is something really, really big, something, you know, Microsoft goes bust, give me a call. But you know, outside of that dump, you know, and so the remoteness does help. The other thing about Mauritius in particular

Starting point is 01:45:06 is I think people talk about the world and living in another part of it can be quite important, I think. You know, I'm living in an island that's about 800 kilometres off the coast of Africa, which has got a majority Indian population. And you can tell almost everything you need to know about British is from the national holiday system. There are two days a year for Christians, two days a year for Hindus, two days a year for Hindus, two days a year for Tamils, two days a year for Muslims, two days a year for the Chinese, plus National Day and the abolition of slavery. In other words, people talk about diverse societies. It's a diverse society, you know. People who in the street, if they don't know where you are, will speak to you in French, first of all, right, if you're white,

Starting point is 01:45:46 and if you're black in Creole. Those are the commoner languages here. And they're pretty good connecting flights into China and India. And we're in the same time zone as Dubai. And gradually, Baviris means a different perspective on the world begins to enter your consciousness, I think, if you live somewhere else, you know? So you've set yourself up in a very, in a very free and independent way. I mean, it's been a long journey from, I mean, literally a long journey, or like 10,000 kilometers away from London.

Starting point is 01:46:18 But, I mean, you've, in a way, the fact that you weren't part of, the part of the in crowd that you weren't sort of growing up, you know, going to parse schools and then going to work in Mayfair at a hedge fund and stuff, has enabled you to kind of chart your own course in a very unusual way. Yeah, I think it has. Yeah, absolutely right. And look, let's not rule out of other things, luck as well, or you need luck, right? But yeah, I also, I had some mentors along the way. You know, I've mentioned a couple of them and probably two or three, for mentors along the way. When people ask me about careers and what to do,

Starting point is 01:46:53 and they want to set up the latest fintech. I always say, get a job, but an organization will provide you with training, right? Take everything that they offer. And if you can, find a mentor, somebody who will teach you how this works, and in doing so give you experience that you otherwise won't get, you know?

Starting point is 01:47:12 And sometimes it's quite painful. I mean, being mentored is not always a positive experience. You have difficult ones as well. Well, I always remember when I was working in branch banking, and we used to have to balance the accounts. The branch itself has a balance sheet for its operations, you know, in terms of loans and deposits and everything like that, and capital that's, you know, we're operating on the supply. And you used to have to balance those, and all the individual accounts, the ledgers

Starting point is 01:47:37 that went into it. And I remember the not being able to balance one of the ledgers and I was a graduate training and the manager's assistant took it off me and said, yeah, okay, went into his office and came back an hour later and went, I've balanced it and I didn't go to university. You do need people from time to time to tell you you can do, you should be doing better than this. It's not all people think, you know, the whole world of positive reinforcement. Once in a while, someone needs to tell you you got it wrong.

Starting point is 01:48:03 Yeah. It's an interesting balance, right? Because in some ways, when I look at your life, I think, you know, yeah, you're this, this tough sort of indomitable guy. And in some ways, there is a, you know, I mean, you're obviously a very likable and charming guy and gregaris and you've had people who've worked for you for or with you for a very long time for decades. But at the same time, you're clearly an intense and tough and slightly combative, scrappy guy. And I'm wondering how that works in the rest of life out of business and investing,

Starting point is 01:48:33 because I look at so many of the great investors. I mean, this is one of the things I often quote on this show, Charlie Munga said to me that what struck him when he read my book was just how many of them ended up divorced or separated. And I wonder, that like when you when you look back on your life and obviously you you know you got divorced you've had contentious relationships in the life in your life how do you turn off the intensity that makes you very successful in work so that then you can come back into dealing with a wife or a girlfriend or kids or whatever and actually not have that same mentality kind of overrun everything I don't think if I've got a problem in that regard I don't think my problem is

Starting point is 01:49:17 is approaching the remainder of my life with the same approach that I approach business. I think I am able to see the two things quite separately and approaching differently. I think what is difficult, however, is when you get into situations which are very intense, no, no, this is home life and I'm going to cook dinner or bath the baby or whatever you're going to do, you may not still be able to get that out of your head. So whether or not you can engage properly, sleep properly, is not something that you can just do by thinking about it, you know. It does stay with you sometimes.

Starting point is 01:49:53 And I think that can be problematic. You know, it's not whether you're treating everybody like they're in work and you want to see their numbers and you want to, you know, get them to engage in PPP, P, B, B, B, or that's not it. I don't think it's as simple as that. It's just as similar as if you've had an intense time, it can be difficult to switch it off in you. and therefore whatever it is you're doing,

Starting point is 01:50:17 you may not perform very well in relation to it, to the simplest level of sleeping, for example, or something like that. You've got something running through your mind. It may keep running through your mind, and you may not be very comfortable to be with at that time. And that's probably... The other thing is, I think,

Starting point is 01:50:33 if you do do things like running your own business and you do run businesses, including your own business, and you do it intensely and successful and all that kind of thing, one of the things that people who are with you have to buy into or not is you will do whatever it takes. And some people can't buy that. They want to be the center of your world.

Starting point is 01:50:52 And you say, well, you can't always be that. I've got this thing over here that I do. And maybe you've got things that you do. Or maybe you haven't. I don't know. But there are times where I go, no, I'm going to go and do that now. And they go, well, that's not very good because I really like to go and do this. You go and do it.

Starting point is 01:51:06 I'll pay. You've got to do it. But I'm going over here to do this right now. I've just, you know, I feel I've got to do it because it's required. And some people find that quite difficult to accept, you know. Where do you think that ferocity and intensity of drive and focus comes from for you? Is it just competitive? Is it kind of a bit like being a fighter, being a boxer?

Starting point is 01:51:28 Where does it come from for you? I think it comes from a balance of things. I mean, one is growing up in very bad circumstances, you know? I think, well, you could say, well, there's lots of people who've got very bad circumstances. Yeah, but how many of them escape, as it were? And I think it mainly comes from that. You know, if you, you know, you're in very poor circumstances in, you know, bad weather conditions and living in a terrible place and it's quite violent. One thing or another, it probably does breed within you a determination that's otherwise difficult to encapsulate with people, you know, very difficult to encapsulate with people.

Starting point is 01:52:02 And I think that's it, you know, it's, you know, when I went to see the kids in Mauritius, who we set up the boxing gym for, and it was, you know, The girl that they got me involved in, people know I'm a bit of a suckup of these things. She won some fights and got a few trophies and so on. But the mother was a prostitute, right? I mean, she was living in a shack and so on. And they know that I'm like that. But anyway, I went to see her and I went to see the club

Starting point is 01:52:28 and I saw their circumstances. And they said, oh, it's terrible, isn't it? I said, yeah, I'm going to help. I said, let me tell you something. I said, if you're looking for world champions, they come out of gyms like that. They don't come out of air-conditioned gyms, right, with drinking fountains, right?

Starting point is 01:52:41 they come out of gyms where, you know, basically, you know, there's buckets that people spit into and that's where they come from, right? Real, you know, real grit down there. That form with some kind of iron in the soul, I think. And it does. Yeah. How do you think about this whole issue of giving back and sharing and lifting up other people? Because I was talking to my mother yesterday and I said to her, I'm going to, she's in London.

Starting point is 01:53:08 I said to her, I'm going to interview this guy and I told her about you. And she said, I disapprove of him. And I said, why? And she said, you know, he makes too much money, doesn't pay enough tax, doesn't, you know, there's too many flashy cars, a couple hundred cars. And she's like, why isn't he doing more to solve society's problems? And I said to her, I'll ask him. Like, how do you think about that?

Starting point is 01:53:29 First of all, I'd like to say that your mother, obviously, criticizing a man's mother is dangerous torture. She doesn't know her. She doesn't know how much tax, I'd day, with the greatest of respect. No, I'll introduce you to my mother. you'll find she's about as formidable as you are. Great. Yeah, we recruited somebody a while back who told me a story about his mother and I said,

Starting point is 01:53:49 I want to hire your mother. Yeah. Yeah. I think she sounds like a perfect employee for us. Oh, yeah. Let's get it. And so I, it's funny you should ask that because it will at least maybe in part answer your mother's question, which is to say that I believe that balance for people or giving back

Starting point is 01:54:08 or whatever you do. There are a number of things I'm very strongly guided on by. It should be private and it should be with your own money. I am anti to the point of disparagement with the people who go in for glitzy events, you know, absolute return for kids kind of thing. And we'll have a big event and we'll invite the prime minister and we'll all bid, you know, a million pounds for a pair of socks or whatever the hell it is. And we'll give all the money to get. No, the reality of that is first of all, you're doing it because it makes you look good and you feel good doing it. And the second thing about it is you're quite often in those. And the number of people are going to go, well, I've got this charity and I want this,

Starting point is 01:54:42 and you could take part and do that for it. And I go, so what's going to happen here is I'm going to give you the money, and then you're going to go up front it up and do all this. And there's a certain degree to which I have to have people like that, because I'm not going to run any things because I'd be extremely bad at it. Right. So, yeah, of course, you know, guys, what you're really saying is, can I pay for you to go and get free?

Starting point is 01:55:00 That's what in some cases. And a lot of people who raise money for charity, I think, first of all, they don't keep to my private rule. And secondly, they don't keep to the, it should be your money rule. I try, by and large, to keep to both rules. And so, again, going back to your mother, she doesn't know what tax off by and she doesn't know what I do in my money. But I do give what I would personally regard as very significant sums of money

Starting point is 01:55:24 to a wide range of things, not just boxing gyms for kids, but a lot of other things as well. But how do you think of the parameters, like, because I'm assuming that there's something, about helping to give people opportunity that resonates for you as someone who managed to get out to do it? Like, how do you think about a good way to help people? Well, that was another point that was coming into. Private, with your own money, and in practical ways, wherever possible, that affects them in the way that you've just touched upon,

Starting point is 01:55:55 which is opportunity and the ability to grasp it. So I have a new wife, I'm pleased to say, and she has a stepson. I have a stepson as a result. And we've got him into school in the UK. And we, I said, look, what do you want to do here? You can stay in government school here, and basically be trained in the underclass here to be a gas pump attendant or a gardener or a security man, or we could send him in the UK if he passes admission, obviously, and so on. And we send him to the UK. That's good. And he seems to be prospering, which is good. So what I've now moved on to is a scheme to take two Creole children, Her Anam, from Berisha, into the school, so that once we've got it for, we will have at least two children in every year in that

Starting point is 01:56:35 school. Now, you know, I'm sure you're aware of the school, they haven't been eaten, the price of schooling in the UK. But the time we take the fees, the new VAT, the uniform, the equipment and the flights into account, we're getting into some reasonable dough there, basically. But the thing I really like about it is it will be of practical help to lift some of those group of children out of their background to give them an opportunity. And, and this is the really important part, I think, some of them, I hope, will think of coming back to Mauritius to change the community in general, by the fact that they have the ability to hold down important roles in government or the private sector and so on. And that's the sort of thing

Starting point is 01:57:15 that really I like. Enjoy that a lot, because I can see the practical consequences of doing it. Now, I don't want them to name the Terry Smith wing after me. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think about the story at all, in fact. In fact, in terms of getting these things to work quite often does require some sort of input from the government to get schools to respond here and do that. So they, I say the, I say the minister, you can put your name on it. You can say this great initiative by me. You're a politician. You love this, right?

Starting point is 01:57:41 Put your name on it, right? I don't want my name on it. So your mother's never going to be, almost never going to be reading about me doing this. She might read that the president of the Labour Party of Mauritius has come up with this wonderful scheme to institute creole children into UK public schools. Yeah. It's good to have a mother who holds us all to account. She'll listen to my episode and she'll say, yeah, I didn't like that one as much.

Starting point is 01:58:03 that guy was great. So having exacting parents is helpful. Your mother, apart from her lack of knowledge of my personal affairs, which is understandable. But she should perhaps try and change some before. I think she's veering a little close to that UK dislike of success that I was talking about.

Starting point is 01:58:23 It's an interesting question. Yeah, I mean, tell me about, you know, obviously having grown up without money and then over the years you've become very wealthy and, you know, you bought a couple of hundred beautiful cars and the like and a yacht and stuff. And a lot of the very, I mean, I write about this in the epilogue of my book, Richard Wiseer Happier, where I talked to a lot of people who've won the, you know, hit the jackpot financially. And my sense is that, you know, as I would put it, the toys and baubles are kind of nice,

Starting point is 01:58:52 but they only go so far and that in some ways the real gift of the money is that it's... Say again? Worse than that. In what sense? Well, the toys and the bobbles actually get in the money. way of pleasure quite often, you know, owning things of that sort mainly is a headache. You know, so if you've got a boat, you end up having a crew, and then the crew, you know, somebody has sex with somebody else, somebody's found out doing something here, they run it

Starting point is 01:59:16 into the key side at the top. And so, you know, really, I've got to say the amount of real pleasure that one gets from doing those kind of things is not high in my view, right? So what, I mean, if you take the car collection, for example, I think buying expensive and fast cars, and I've got some expensive and fast cars, I know no doubt about that, but I've got a very wide range of cars. My earliest car is from 1903, and I've got a section of cars which are failures. I deliberately collect failures. And so, you know, and the reason for that is I think that they tell us things. Why do we have, I always say, why do we have post-mortems on human beings?

Starting point is 01:59:50 Well, isn't just because doctors like messing around with cadavers, it's because if we die in, suspicious circumstances or difficult to determine, they might want to know why, just in case there's a new illness or foul play, and something needs to be done. about it. And I'd like the idea of looking at cars, you look at other things if you want if I like cars that are failures, are seeing what, if anything, we can learn. We'd learn out of these things. Because it might be useful to learn something from time to time about how other people have screwed up in history, you know? Has it informed your skepticism about Tesla? Because you're, I mean, it's interesting. When you think of the magnificent seven, right?

Starting point is 02:00:25 I mean, you own a bunch of them, but you've said that Tesla and Nvidia wouldn't get through your quality parameters. And the Tesla probably never will. And I hadn't really made the connection that here you are a car expert. And like, is there some connection between your car collection, the failures and your skepticism about Tesla? Remember my Stern business school, you know, good company, bad company thing. Automobile companies are all bad without any kind of exception. every single one, Toyota, Ford, BMW, Mercedes, the whole lot, right? They destroy value.

Starting point is 02:01:02 If you really like them, you can go and buy them all on a P.E.4, if you want, and there's Tesla on 99 times, right? It's a bad business. Why is it a bad business? It's very capital intensive. You have to build factories, right? Fairly obvious. And models development costs a lot of time and money.

Starting point is 02:01:17 And then here's a problem. If I'm invested in consumer staples and you buy some toothpaste or cat litter or whatever you buy, when you run out. you have to go buy some more. And so that keeps, even in a downturn, you might eke it out, might squeeze the tube a bit better, might go and buy some cheaper cat litter than a number two brand or own brand. I don't know.

Starting point is 02:01:37 So that's a little bit problematic, but it's not big problematic. Whereas if you've got a car and you feel a bit hard up in a downturn, just keep the car. Don't have to change your car. I always quote Mr. Mahadu, who is my taxi driver here in Mauritius, who is an exemplar of this. He drove me around in his Toyota Axi for 360. thousand kilometers. The poor chap died. And now his son's driving it. So you only don't have made a bean off that car in 20 years, right? And it's still going strong. I can tell you, I see it on the roads floating around with his son driving it. It's a really bad business because what that

Starting point is 02:02:10 means is that it's hugely cyclical. Unlike toothpaste and cat litter, when the demand stops, it just stops. And so it's huge capital involved, big development costs and demand, which goes up and down enormously. And then you can get on to the other subjects involved, which is, so that's car companies and Tesla's a car company, which is, you know, are batteries the future of electric vehicle transport? I mean, I don't know the answer, but there's certainly some reasons to be skeptical about it in terms of range, in terms of use of depletion of resources, in terms of disposal, et cetera, et cetera, the hydrogen fuel cell as an alternative if there was any instructor. So, look, put it all together, and I just think, I'm a big,

Starting point is 02:02:53 sort of admirer of many of Mr. Musk's achievements in a lot of respects. That man's, that man's got energy of balls. There's no doubt about that. But I'm not sure cars is the way forward. I mean, if cars are the way forward, why don't you just go and round up all the other ones and buy them? It's interesting. I mean, the fact that you've been collecting cars that date back to 1903 and the fact that you got a first in history all those years ago in Cardiff, like really informs your sense of wanting to own companies that endure, owning sectors that tend to, you know, persevere and be valuable through good times and bad. I mean, there's some interesting through line there in your life.

Starting point is 02:03:32 Well, they got the 1903 is an Oldsmobile curved dash just to let you know. It's not got a steering wheel. It's got a tiller that you steer it with. And it was the first mass production car. The Model T-Ford was not the first mass production car. The Oldsmobile Curved Dash was the first mass production car. And there's history involved in that. There's history involved in the Model T-Ford.

Starting point is 02:03:51 The Model Model Model City Ford is a fantastic story of an industrialist and what he achieved, I think. I've got one. And I think it's a – the stories behind the cars, in my view, are more important than mostly the cars themselves. I'm interested in the stories, you know. I'm interested in the Ford GT 40 from 1966 from Ford v. Ferrari. And I've got one. And I like it. I can remember that those episodes when I was a child of how, you know, Ford worked out and went on Sunday,

Starting point is 02:04:21 sell on Monday and try to buy Ferrari. And not only did they not get Ferrari, but he sold out a fear and diss Henry Ford. And, you know, upsetting Henry Ford was a bad thing to have done, really, because he went and built a car that beat them. And in fact, Enzo Ferrari managed to cause the development of at least two cars by upsetting people, at least two, by upsetting people, the full Gtty being one, and the Lamborghini being another. Mr. Lamborghini made tractors. He still does make tractors. He still does make tractors. And he bought a Ferrari, which didn't work, like they quite often didn't work then, and took it back to Ferrari at Marinella and said, you know, this is wrong with the clutch and that's wrong with the clear box and so on.

Starting point is 02:04:58 And apparently Amzo Ferrari said, what do you do for a little bit? He said, I make tractors. And he was like, and he was so upset. He went and hired a team of six young automotive engineers and designers. The oldest of whom, I think, was 26 and built the Lamborghini mirror and demolished Ferrari's road cars. Ferrari calls nearly as many good cars to be built by annoying people as he did by actually making cars.

Starting point is 02:05:21 Yeah, you also have things like the 1968 Ford Mustang, right, which was the car that Steve McQueen drove in Bullitt, and you have, I think, the Aston Martin, DB5, the James Bond drove in Goldfinger. So you're living out the movies. Yeah, well, yeah, look, yeah, I like movie cars. I think if you said what are you trying to do with the car collection, I mean, it's about there's a guy who's got a museum in Naples in Florida called the Reds in. Institute. And he's got a book called The Archaeological Automobile. And his thesis is that the

Starting point is 02:05:55 car is the single most important object with which human beings interacted in the 20th century. It's not a bad thesis. And I think he's certainly got a point. And I think there's an awful lot of human development history in cars through the multi-fold and industrialization and all those sort of things, the rise of Japan, the movies, TV shows, Morse's Jaguar, the Saints Volvo. part in our consciousness is enormous, I think, and they evoke quite a lot with people, you know, and quite a lot of it, particularly of a certain age group, I think you find people in motor museum, and I've talked to a lot of people in motor museums about cars, is they'll say they'll find families walking around and somebody will be in tears.

Starting point is 02:06:36 And I say, is there a problem? I go, my father had one of those, you know, I remember as a child, it evokes emotion in them. And so I'm a believer in the stories, you know. I mean, the one I like on the Model G-Faul is Henry Ford, with the Model T-4, put it on the production line. And in so doing, he cut the production time of a car from 12 hours to 93 minutes. And in doing so, he obviously cut the cost of production very significantly. Then he did the really clever bit. He cut the price.

Starting point is 02:07:05 What most people would have done face with that is just made more profit. He cut the price. In so doing, he took the car from being a placing of the money classes into something where he invented the middle class in cars, the middle class market in cars. Cars then were sold to doctors and bank managers and lawyers and dentists. He invented the middle market by doing that. It's just a fantastic story, I think. For a man who, going back to how people have viewed, a man who many would review as a sort of robber barren industrialist. Yeah. Nick Sleep and Case Zakaria, who you may have come across from Nomad, who I wrote about a lot of my book, talk a lot about just seeing that scale

Starting point is 02:07:44 economists shared model that they saw in Ford and then they saw it in Costco and then they saw it in Amazon. So it comes up again and again, this ability to resist, you know, pocketing as much money as you can. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Is there anything you take from your history as a collector that you can actually apply to investing? Like, are there, I mean, I assume it's sort of somewhat, somewhat different art, but there's something in terms of the pursuit of quality that runs through both. There's also the fact that most things will come around. You know, every time I've ever thought of buying something and I've thought, you know what,

Starting point is 02:08:20 I'll give in, I'll buy a Lamborghini Diablo in black because the red one is never going to come up. Guess what happens one minute after you bought the black one? Oops. Also, don't trust auctions. I know from cars I've been involved in an auction that people at auction, put other people at auction, put other people logged on to bid and let them bid against their car to get the price up. And so you don't trust what... It's the same with dealing with markets. Do not trust what you see on the screen in share price action as equaling reality. There could be a lot of

Starting point is 02:08:58 reasons why that price is moving or somebody's dealing, you know? Yeah, I've seen more than one example. I think there's one coming up this weekend at Kissimmee in Florida where there's a very important car for sale where if I were bidding on it and I'm not, I would look at that and say, I wonder if there's anybody else there who is in fact the vendor, because once the bidding starts and it's clear that somebody's come into buying it, the vendor might use somebody to put in competing bids. I'm not to get stuck with his own car. Well, yes and no, because if he gets stuck with his own car, they'll just ring you up later

Starting point is 02:09:31 if you were the highest bid and say, that guy didn't come through with the money. Do you want to be good for your bid? Before I let you go, Terry, because you've been incredibly generous with your time. I just wanted to ask you one final thing, which is actually about Sir Keith Park, who's this hero of yours, who is Air Chief Marshal. And one of the really tangible marks that you've left in the world is that there's now a statue of him in Trafalgar Square in the heart of London that was unveiled in 2010 because you led this campaign to get him on it.

Starting point is 02:10:01 Tell us just a little bit about him and why his story resonated so deep. for you? He's a New Zealander and he came from New Zealand in World War I with the Anzac Corps who fought with Gallipoli which of course was utterly disastrous and most people would have gone home then I guess he didn't he volunteered for the British army and fought in the Somme he was invalided out from the Somme after being blown off a horse artillery horse by a shell and it was just unfit for the army so he volunteered for the newly formed Royal Flying Corps where he flew Bristol fighters and was credited with 18 kills. Quite good going. He then transferred from the RFC to the newly formed RAF and won the trust of Hugh Dowding, who was the head of

Starting point is 02:10:46 Fighter Command, who had a theory on how to combat German airpower. The Germans had about 2,800 planes in the Wolfwaffe. The RAF had about 650 fighter planes, so they were heavily outnumbered. And Dowding realized that what they needed to do was not try and win the battle. There were lots of people, as you can imagine at that time, particularly Lee Mallory, the guy who ran that group in Cambridge. Let's give Jerry a bloody nose. We don't need to win the battle. We just need to not lose. This is a bit like companies.

Starting point is 02:11:13 We don't need to own the best company. We just don't want to own any bad ones. So he would feed the fighters in in penny packets, if you like. And it became a standing joke with the Luftwaffe for pilots, as it were, sort of gallows humor, the bomber pilots, who, as a battle ground on, would say, oh, here they come again. those last 10 spitfires. Because if they hadn't been told, they wiped out there, and they hadn't. So they would always have some fighter planes in the sky because Operation C-Lion, the invasion order for the invasion of Britain, the first requirement was air supremacy, because they were

Starting point is 02:11:43 terrified of the roller crossing the English Channel with the Royal Navy at large. So they had to be able to neutralise the Royal Navy from the air. They couldn't do that without air supremacy, and he was going to deny them air supremacy. Now, he needed a trusted associate who would implement that strategy. And that was Park. And Park did it to the letter. And people of war gained Park's decisions over that summer from June through to October, roughly. He made daily decisions about deployment. And they never managed to significantly improve on his decisions in terms of trying to do it. He under intense pressure every day, did that. And of course, he was himself a fighter pilot. He'd been in World War I as a fighter pilot. And he flew his Hawker Hurricane, OK1 registration, around the airfield from day to day at the end of the day, finding out, what had happened, what was happening in tactics, what morale was like, what the damage was, etc. So he had that.

Starting point is 02:12:34 Anyway, he won the battle. In one of those wonderful pieces that only the Brits could do, Lee Mallory, then interceded with Churchill to say that Dowding and Park weren't aggressive enough. And so after they'd won the frigging battle and got Dowding fired and Park sent off to training command, right? Anyway, he was sitting in training command when they realized they had a bit of a problem with Malta. Malta was the key island for trying to stop the Africa Corps being reinforced from mainland Italy and was in the way and it was being bombed to hell and back.

Starting point is 02:13:01 And so they put, they put Park in there to man the air defence. Smiling Albert Kesselring who ran the Luftwaffe, must have thought he was a very unlucky chap because he managed to lose to Park twice. Because Park then beat him in bloody Malta as well. And he was a fighter on his way there. He was being thrown in by a Bristol bow fighter. And they spotted a German warship on their way into Malta. And Park insisted that they press an attack.

Starting point is 02:13:25 They were nearly shot down. and he was a fighter. He would fight. But he understood the men. There were lots of good photographs of him having Christmas lunch with the men and all that sort of thing. He would fly around the airfields and so on. Anyway, again, in typical British style and in something I much admire in his regards, he left at the end of the war, went off to Asia for the end of the war and come on,

Starting point is 02:13:44 went back to New Zealand, was mayor of Auckland briefly, and then disappeared into obscurity and was gone. And there was a book by Stephen Bungay, the historian, who actually, fun enough, was a historian who worked in lawyers and insurance. return to history, which I thought was the best book on the battle, the most dangerous enemy. And in it, he has this wonderful phrase. He says something that really caught me in the end. He said, Park was like a wizard in an Arthurian tale. He traveled literally halfway around the world to defend the country, which wasn't even his own country. And then having successfully done so, he just disappeared. And he said, there is no memorial to him anywhere in the world, neither in England nor a museum. He said, there's a Keith Park crescent that beginning.

Starting point is 02:14:26 wear a drum, that's it. And I, my father was in the RAF and I was a keen flyer when I was young. I used to fly gliders and planes and helicopters, qualified to fly all of them. And I guess being a historian, reading Bungay and with that background, I thought, I'm going to do something about it. And so I got the planning permission and I got the statue fabricated and I put up the memorial to him and got the park family involved. Fortunately, the park family supplied some very good members. His great-great-nephew was a movie guy and his great, great niece turned up and pulled the call to unveil it. The surviving Battle of Britain pilots all took part in the campaign and turned up for

Starting point is 02:15:04 the events to Trump. Because getting a statue put up in central London of a white, straight war hero is not exactly what you call easy in this day and age. Yeah, that's so interesting. So in some ways, part of, I mean, obviously there's this extraordinary heroism and his historic role is really important. I mean, there was a wonderful quote from one of the vice-martials saying he was the only man who could have lost the war in a day or even an afternoon. So, I mean, his role in actually defending Britain was hugely important.

Starting point is 02:15:40 But there's also the aspect of him just being an unsung hero and him being an outsider. And I can see why that would resonate for you as well. Yeah, it was. I think so. Yeah, I think absolutely so. It's interesting because when I was doing that, you can't memorialize without. So I went to New Zealand, I met the family, a very nice extended family. So this is what I'm planning to do.

Starting point is 02:15:58 Do you approve? And so on and so. And we're all very supportive. They, you know, lobbied Parliament in New Zealand. We've got every party in New Zealand to sign a letter going to the mayor of London saying that they wanted this to happen. That was all very good. And we got to the unveiling and invited as many of the family to come as could.

Starting point is 02:16:13 And we got his great, great niche to pull the cold with one of the home a battle, one of the problem about the Britain. But I said, in the build up to it, it was interesting. I said, what do you think about inviting the jury? that's the ceremony because I said in some respects in a spirit of reconciliation maybe we should but I think you should tell me what you want to do and they said Uncle Keith never forgave them every day he had to make these decisions to send young men to their death ever left him right and that comes back to your saying about him being an unsung and an outsider and hero yes all those

Starting point is 02:16:44 things and he made good tactical decisions every day which worked and under extreme pressure over long periods of time. And every time he knew that he took those decisions, he knew he was sending guys who were 20 years of age, many of them under-trained out to die. And he knew that, and he did it because that was what his job was. But it didn't mean that he did it, feeling very cheerful about it sometimes, I imagine. Yeah, such a rich and interesting story. Thanks so much for sharing that with us. And thanks for being so generous with your time and your insights. I just really enjoyed spending the last few days deeply immersing myself in the mind of Terry. So thank you. It's been a great pleasure getting to speak with you.

Starting point is 02:17:25 One story to go with is about a car. And I think it's a car that exemplifies. If you were trying to get a link between cars and investment, there's a video on YouTube which you can look up called How One Man Made the Perfect Car. I commend it to you. And are you familiar with the McLaren F1? I mean somewhat. I know that you have one. What happened was Gordon Murray, who was the man behind the wild success of McLaren under Eton center and so on, literally decided one day, actually at Geneva Airport, I think, with Ron Dennis and so on, they never made a road car before. They're going to make a road car. And he decided that the basis for making it was they were going to make the best road car

Starting point is 02:18:03 that ever had been built, and I would suggest ever will be built, given the way that things have moved on since then. And I think he achieved it. He made a car, which is extraordinary. I mean, I've got a 1995 example. It does 243 miles per hour. This is a 30-year-old car, right? Okay. It's extraordinary. And if you watch that, one of the things you'll find striking is he made a very fast car. It's also a very safe car because it's a carbon fiber monococop and so on. But, and it's actually a practical car. It's got three seats and it's got luggage. You can get, it comes with a golf bag. You can get your golf clubs in it. I don't play golf. But he never took any interest in how fast it was going to go. And if you remember my owner's manual,

Starting point is 02:18:45 one of the things I mentioned in there is obliquity, not aiming, for the sort of objective. I say, I've been fortunate to meet an awful lot of very rich people. I can't think of one of them who got very rich trying to make money. They tried to make things and services. They tried to do things better than other people. They had an idea or an impetus to do things better than other people. And I think Henry Ford didn't want to make money.

Starting point is 02:19:10 He wanted to make cars. And he wanted to make him better than other people made cars. And that's what got him to where he went. And I think that McLaren F1 is a perfect example of obliterate. It's a fantastically fast car. And when you think that that was 30 years ago, making that thing, and by all accounts, Gordon Murray never once asked them to do any kind of calculation about how fast the car would go.

Starting point is 02:19:34 It went fast as a result of how he designed and built it, not as a name. So in a way, I guess to round this off, it all goes back to the slogan on the ice cream truck. It's quality that counts. I think it does. it is. And my view of that car is there will never be another car like it in the history of cars. I mean, you know, the idea that you have this thing that does 243 miles an hour. It has no power brakes. It has no power steering. There has no anti-lock brakes. It has no four-wheel

Starting point is 02:19:59 drive. The only thing that that car is is you and the car. That's it, which is how Ronan Atkinson's car, Ralph Florend's car, Elon Musk car, and Bernard Brasrider's car, all got crashed. The car is more capable than the person sitting in the seat most of the things. time. Huh. Really interesting. It's been such a delight chatting with you. It comes back to the Magnum Force quote.

Starting point is 02:20:23 Yeah. You can sit in that car and drive it, but you should be aware of something. Yeah, a man's got no his limitations. I hope that is what you wanted or something like what you wanted. Oh, it's been a great pleasure. And one of these days I'll make it out to Mauritius and hopefully I'll actually see what it's like there. Come without letting us know.

Starting point is 02:20:40 We make you very welcome. And tell your mother that my check is going off in 16 days time. she would be shot, shot rather like Inspector Renault and gasplagged her at the number on it. Excellent. I certainly am. She'll be very happy to hear it. Terry, lovely meeting you. A real pleasure.

Starting point is 02:20:59 All right. Take care. All right, folks. Thanks so much for listening to this conversation with the remarkable Terry Smith. If you'd like to learn more from Terry, you may want to check out the website of his investment firm, which you can find at www. fundsmith.co.uk. He's also written a couple of books, including an anthology of his writings from 2010 to 2020. It's titled Investing for Growth, and it's subtitled How to Make Money by

Starting point is 02:21:29 Only Buying the Best Companies in the World. I'll be back very soon with some more terrific guests, including the return of two of my all-time favorites, author Pico Iyer, and hedge fund manager Christopher Begg. In the meantime, please feel free to follow me on X at William Green 72 or connect with me on LinkedIn. And as always, do let me know how you're enjoying the podcast. It's always a pleasure to hear from you. Until next time, take good care and stay well. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow Richer, Wiser, happier on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on episodes. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to The Investorspodcast.com.

Starting point is 02:22:13 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 - RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.