We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP 007 : Peter Thiel's book - Zero to One (Investing Podcast)

Episode Date: November 4, 2014

In this episode of The Investor's Podcast, the panel discusses the ideas of Peter Thiel. Peter is a famous Silicon Valley Billionaire who founded PayPal and Palantir. He also owned a 10% stake in Fa...cebook. The Investors, along with Hari Ramachandra, discuss Peter's new book - Zero to One.  BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. New to the show? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Check out our Favorite Apps and Services. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Bluehost Fintool PrizePicks Vanta Onramp SimpleMining Fundrise TurboTax HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It takes less than 30 seconds and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This is episode seven of The Investors Podcast. Broadcasting from Bel Air, Maryland. This is the Investors Podcast. They'll take complex things and make them seem insanely simple. They make your boring drive-to-work feel exhilarating. They give you actionable investing strategies. Your host, Preston Pish and Stig Broderson. Good morning, everybody.
Starting point is 00:00:30 This is Preston Pish. And as usual, I'm accompanied by my co-host, Stig Broderson. And today we have brought back Hari Ramachandra from a previous episode, Episode 4, where we were discussing Monish Pabrai. And so today we brought Hari back onto the show because we're going to be discussing a book that all three of us had read. Last week, Hari and Stig and myself were talking about a stock pick, IBM, that had been performing or was in the market, had lost a lot of traction and was trading at a lower price. And so the three of us were sitting around talking about whether we thought IBM was a good pick. And it just kind of came out that Hari was reading one of the same books that Stig and I were recently reading, which is 0 to 1 by Peter Thiel. And so today's episode, and this is the start of what we're going to be doing here for about every other week.
Starting point is 00:01:20 Stig and I are going to be reading different executive books, books by billionaires. And we're going to be summarizing and discussing the high points, the parts that we didn't like, the parts that we did like. and we just thought it'd be really nice to bring Hari back onto the show since he was reading the same book and we can extract some of his opinions and some of his ideas that he gathered from this very important book as well. So without further ado, I'm going to start off by just giving an overall summary of the book and who Peter Thiel is, so that everyone kind of has an idea of what it is that we're reading. And then we'll just kind of go through and hit the highlights of what we thought about the book. So Peter Thiel is a German-American entrepreneur and billionaire that was a co-founder of PayPal.
Starting point is 00:02:01 A lot of people realized that Elon Musk was also kind of a co-founder of PayPal. He was actually founded a company called X.com. And that and PayPal kind of merged into the same business. As everyone knows, PayPal turned into a billion dollar business. Some of the other businesses that Peter Thiel, who's the author of this book, Zero to One, he also had founded Palantir, which is also a billion dollar company. A lot of the work out in Los Angeles. Angeles with their police department with a lot of these cameras that pick up license plates and
Starting point is 00:02:37 things like that is from his company Palantir. He also had a very large stake initial investor in Facebook where he owned a 10.2% stake in Facebook. So this gentleman is obviously a very accomplished person. He has the ability to find himself on the leading edge of a lot of these startup companies that turn into multi-billion dollar businesses. And he's obviously a very interesting character. So his book was a fascinating read for us. We highly recommend it for entrepreneurs because in the book he talks a lot about being a founder, what he had to do in order to bring his business from literally nothing into the billion dollar category. And throughout the book, he talks about the steps and the way he thinks in his thought process in order for that
Starting point is 00:03:25 to happen. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to highlight the top three points that I had from this book, and then we'll go around and talk with Hari and also Stig to kind of get their feedback. So the first, and I think the most prominent theme in this book is the idea of competition. And for anyone who reads a lot, if you've read the Blue Ocean Strategy or you've read Wallace Waddle's book, The Science of Getting Rich, a very similar theme in both of those books in that they talk about if you really want to create wealth to society, you can't compete with everybody else out there, you have to create something new. And I think the key word
Starting point is 00:04:03 there is the word create. I think a lot of people whenever they want to start a business and they want to start something new, they look at what somebody else is doing or what somebody else has accomplished and they try to mimic that and they try to do the exact same thing. And Peter's main theme in this book is if you're doing that, you're pretty much starting off on the wrong foot. because you have to think of something that you think would add value to society, that would bring value to people, and then you have to create that from the ground up. And that's where you really create extraordinary value. And I think that that's how, I mean, you look at his business like Palantir with his new business that he started. He's reduced the crime rate in L.A. I mean, I don't know what the actual percent is, but it's enormous because of this new, you know, software, hardware integration that he's put on these. police vehicles. So it's pretty interesting to kind of get into his thought patterns of why he feels
Starting point is 00:05:00 competition is bad and why going against the grain and kind of going in the opposite direction has really led to all of his success. So that's the first point that I really pulled away from the book. So the next point that I have is really the scalability factor. And what Peter's talking about here is say you come up with a great idea and you feel like you can go into this new niche and not have to compete with anybody. He says, if you really want to create something big and something that's really going to make a major impact of society, it has to be something that's scalable. So you can't go out and just create something that would only apply to a market of 10 people or 100 people. You've got to really think big if that's what your objective is. So I found that theme littered
Starting point is 00:05:40 throughout the book where he talks about the scalability factor. And the third thing that I want highlight is this idea of backwards planning. I don't think that he addressed this a lot in the book, but where he did, I found it extremely profound in that he's talking about in the book, he's talking about how do people feel like they're lucky if things are driven by luck or is it something that was actually created and planned for? And Peter obviously sides with the latter in that he feels like people get to where they're at, although there is luck involved, here and there. It's truly a result of a planned thoughtful effort that actually gets them to that place. And so he says it's really truly backwards planning. He tries to think where could something
Starting point is 00:06:29 be or where do I want to be in 20, 30 years from now? And he puts that milestone on the calendar. And then what he does is he tries to figure out, okay, what are all the steps it would have to occur between now and that milestone in order for me to create that, create that situation? And so he then drops, you know, minor milestones from now until that major accomplishment and how he is going to work towards that accomplishment and that goal. So those were the three main things that I kind of extracted out of the book. And I found the book just an extraordinarily good read. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Starting point is 00:07:05 And the book, just so everyone knows, the book originated. Peter was going back to his alma mater, which is Stanford University. He was providing lectures to the students at Stanford. And one of the students whose name is Blake Masters was taking very detailed notes on these lectures that Peter was providing to the class. And after it was over, evidently Blake and Peter continued talking and it turned into this book, which is zero to one. So with all that said, I'm going to go ahead and hand it off to Stig to kind of have Stig tell you maybe one or more themes that maybe he found throughout the book that he found quite interesting or something that maybe I omitted. So Stig, go ahead and give us your point of view. Yeah, so I want to start off with the whole thing about competition, because that was really one thing that I stumbled across.
Starting point is 00:07:53 So we all learned that competition is good. And guys, I teach this stuff. I teach to my students that competition is good and monopolies are bad. And I'm so surprised by this because Peter Thiel, he's just, you know, turning this completely around. And what he's saying is that monopoly is a good thing. And monopoly is a good thing because, and he talks about Google. And he says, well, that's really, really good because if you have a monopoly, you will make a lot of profit and you can, and then you can start to innovate. You don't have to fear that someone will outcompete you tomorrow.
Starting point is 00:08:28 You can just innovate and you can just make the world generally a better place. And I thought that was really, really interesting. Another thing I really enjoyed, that was his idea about the clean tech bubble. I never really saw this whole clean tech thing as a bubble. I guess I more saw it like failed projects or failed companies. But the real thing was interesting. And he was saying that it's not enough that you are in an industry that you know is going to grow. Because I think that even though we had a lot of failures in the clean tech industry,
Starting point is 00:09:03 it's still an industry that's going to grow. And he compares that to the dot-com bubble. And I think that's probably something higher knows a lot more. about than I do. But when you saw the IT bubble, even though IT has grown a lot since then, a lot of companies couldn't provide anything. They were just a part of a technology wave, so to speak. They couldn't, they didn't have their own competitive advantages. And I thought that was a really, really good advice and also a good advice for stock investors. That's probably the two things I want to highlight. First, that predominantly is a good thing, and then how to look at
Starting point is 00:09:41 bubbles and competitive advantage. So, Harry, what do you take? Hey, Stig. Thank you. And, Kristen, thanks for inviting me back on the show. I agree with some of the points you just made about the book 0 to 1. It's a fascinating read. And the author is as fascinating as the book is.
Starting point is 00:10:04 He has accomplished a lot. He is not somebody who is writing books, but he is somebody who is somebody who is working on his thoughts in the valley. And one of the themes that I found running throughout the book is contrarianism, which Peter Thiel stands for. And one of them is about competition too. Like a lot of us think competition is good. Economists think competition is good for the society.
Starting point is 00:10:35 But Peter makes a lot of interesting points in the book. Like one of them is capitalism and competition are actually antinemes, not synonyms. I found it a very interesting point. Yeah, that's an interesting idea. And I know whenever I read that, I wasn't like, oh, that's, I had to think about that for a little bit. You're right. And also he talks about the psychology behind competition. why human psychology is set up in to kind of push us towards competition.
Starting point is 00:11:12 It's like the crowd-like behavior. And when I was reading about this, I felt, you know, a lot of these has been spoken by Buffett and Munger and many of our value investors from a long time. And that's contrarianism again, the lemming-like behavior of human beings where we all share the same idea, whether it's in investing or in silly.
Starting point is 00:11:33 Lakeon Valley. In fact, Elon Musk once famously said that in the valley, a lot of great minds are chasing small ideas. One example is how many photo sharing apps do you need? But there will be a lot of smart engineers doing that. And in the same context about competition, he also talks about the buzzword disruption. Now, everybody wants to be a disruptive company. And Peter says, that's actually bad. He says you don't want to start your bearing, breaking things. Rather, you want to focus on building things. By saying you're disruptive, you're attracting fears competition. So that was very interesting for me. And a lot of things that, like, goes against the conventional wisdom. One other point that I would like to highlight before I end is the interview
Starting point is 00:12:27 a question that he likes to ask anyone who he meets as an entrepreneur. It's like, tell me something that is true that almost nobody agrees upon with you. That was a fascinating question. In fact, I kept thinking about it after I read the book to explore, do I know something that nobody else would agree upon with me? And I would be interested to, you know, like, discuss with you and get to know your thoughts as well about that question. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
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Starting point is 00:17:08 Back to the show. So it's funny you brought that up because that was the next thing I was going to talk about as soon as you were done because this was really kind of one of the biggest things in the book that whenever I heard that, I was like, because I listened to the audio book of it. And whenever I was driving in my car and I heard that question, I was like, wow, I don't know how I would answer that. And the question in the book was, it went like this. When Peter Thiel interviews anybody that he's getting ready to hire, he asks them, what unique truth do they know that very few people agree upon? And so I heard that question and I was like, man, I don't really know how I'd answer that.
Starting point is 00:17:48 But that's a fantastic question because it goes totally in theme with what Hari was talking about is how much of a contrarian Peter Thiel is and that he wants to know that one nugget that you know that no one else agrees on and then he wants to dissect it and understand why you have that opinion. Because if you can give him a good reason why you have that opinion, he might try to exploit it and turn it into some type of business or something that he can offer to society if he can illuminate that truth that maybe only you know because he knows that there's an enormous market there that can be capitalized on. And it's just, I mean, it was really probably the neatest thing I think I found in the book was that specific question that he asked people when he interviews them.
Starting point is 00:18:29 Stig, do you have any comment on that one? No, I'm pretty sure that he would never offer me a job because I couldn't come up with anything. I would have given him the worst answer ever. But it really kind of shows you how smart Peter is in that, I mean, this. is this is a person who's extremely intelligent and kind of looks at the world in a completely different point of view. I mean, he really does look at things in inverse and then tries to, you know, figure out if there's any truth there. And if I find that really interesting, I was reading in Buffett's shareholder letters. I can't remember what year it was. I would say it was probably like the late 80s, maybe early 90s or something like that shareholder letter. And he
Starting point is 00:19:11 talks about this mathematician, whenever you're ever trying to, to, solve a very difficult problem. His solution was to always invert the result and you'll find the solution. And I just really kind of find that in total harmony with Peter Thiel's book and the questions that he asked and the way he laid things out. I just found it really ironic and kind of interesting. Yeah, Christian, I think even I found that fascinating the way Peter Thiel thinks and a lot of what Munger and Buffett have been writing about are very similar. Oh, yeah. Yep, totally agree. So, okay, so that kind of covers our highlights of what we liked about the book. But let's go around the horn and ask what we didn't like about the book or maybe something that we didn't completely agree with or kind of maybe just saw it from a different angle. So, Hari, we'll start with you first on this one if that's all right. And you go ahead and highlight something that maybe you didn't like. Sure. One of the things that I wouldn't say I disagreed, but I kind of kind of kept.
Starting point is 00:20:14 thinking about after I read the book was his discussion about the role of luck and the importance of planning. In fact, he even quotes some of the famous billionaires, including Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, who all attributed much of their success to luck. Warren Buffett has famously said that he won the O'Aerian lottery because of the fact that he was born as a white Caucasian male in United States during 1950s, had it been any other thing, like he says, if I were born in Bangladesh, during the same time, I wouldn't have accomplished what I've done because of the system.
Starting point is 00:21:02 Now, Peter Thiel disagrees with that and argues that you can plan your success. That I found to have kind of, you know, lack of evidence in the sense that, He misses the context in which Buffett is talking about. There are certain things that you can plan about, plan your business, plan your daily activities. You can't plan where you're born. Yeah. And I think that I don't think Buffett is against planning,
Starting point is 00:21:36 but Peter takes it out of context in the book. So, yeah, and I think I agree with you on that. I think that, you know, when you look at everyone's situation, what you're born into, plays an enormous impact of how difficult it is for you to achieve at the same level as other people. I totally agree with that. And I think that that is due with a little bit of luck. But with that said, I do agree with Peter in that I feel like anybody could accomplish whatever it is that they're setting forth or whatever they're putting their goals towards. It's just a matter of how much more of an uphill climb do they have because of where they might have started in that process.
Starting point is 00:22:17 So it's kind of interesting. I agree and I disagree all at the same time. Go ahead, Hari. So you're one of a good point. And even about planning, he says you can plan your success. And he also gives good examples of startups, both his and his co-founders, which succeeded because they had a good plan. And in one of the chapters, and I believe it's in your executive summary too, he lays out all the things that you should think about before you start a company.
Starting point is 00:22:49 And then it flies against what Munger has talked about in some of his talks where he says, we never have a master plan. We make the best use of the situation as it goes. Because according to Munger, it is dangerous to have a plan because you get a task. to your plan and you lose sight of the reality of things. I'm sorry to interrupt you, Harri. I totally agree with that idea of you have to make decisions in time right now as you're going through. And it kind of contradicts us.
Starting point is 00:23:25 We're telling people, hey, you can plan. And Peter's book says you can plan towards something. But at the same time, you see people like Charles Koch. We're reading a book on Charles Coke right now. And one of his biggest things is you have to be flexible. You have to be able to make decisions right now based on the other experiences in your opportunity cost that's associated with. You hear Charlie Munger say that all the time. You hear Buffett say that all the time about opportunity costs, time right now, making decisions is one of the most important things that you can understand as an investor in order to take advantage of the most lucrative opportunities as they're presented.
Starting point is 00:24:04 That's a good point, Christian. And in fact, I read this book by Reid Hoffman. In his book, The Startup of You, he talks about not just having one plan, but he says you should have plan A, B, C, and D. And this is kind of, you know, the middle ground between Peter Thiel and the other version where you should never have a plan, wherein you're not married to one plan, but you know if plan A fails, you have plan B to fall upon. So he says that not just entrepreneurs or businesses, but even everyday professionals should have multiple plans so that they're not surprised if something goes wrong. Absolutely. And just so everyone knows, Reid Hoffman, who Hari's referring to, was one of the co-founders of PayPal with Peter Thiel.
Starting point is 00:24:56 And now is the founder of LinkedIn, also another billionaire, part of what they call the PayPal Mafia. It's a bunch of people that all co-founded PayPal that are now billionaires. Like Elon Musk is another one in that organization. Okay, let's go to Stig. And Stig, go ahead and highlight something that you. Did you have anything else you wanted to piggyback on what we were just discussing? No, nothing to add. That was great, guys.
Starting point is 00:25:20 It's really high-level thinking. I think that the thing that I thought about is probably not as high-level, but I was actually a bit provoked already like 10 seconds in the book. I think it was. It was already in the preface. And that was this whole idea about you need to come up with something new. It was not enough to be successful if you just improved something. If you just improved best practices.
Starting point is 00:25:48 That was not the way to think. You should think of groundbreaking new technology. And I think that, well, I understand where he's coming from. And he's also a tech guy. And not saying there's anything wrong with it. But I think it's also important to say to everyone out there that is not billionaires. I'm sure that includes myself that you can achieve great success by improving existing practices. If you can come up with something that can save the cost of making tin cans by 10%,
Starting point is 00:26:20 you're probably going to be a millionaire pretty, pretty fast. And I think that's something that he's completely missing. looking at a guy like Warren Buffett. If you really studied Warren Buffett and started the books and studied the people that influenced him, Warren Buffett didn't invent something. He didn't come up with anything groundbreaking. He actually did what other people said. And perhaps he made it 10% better or 5% better.
Starting point is 00:26:47 But that was his thing. Warren Buffett is not original. He's not unique in any sense that he's a learning machine. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination, risk and regulation are ramping up, and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer. VANTA automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together
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Starting point is 00:30:20 No, that's all right. I mean, I totally agree with you. You know, whenever I was looking at the different parts of the book, the thing that really kind of popped out at me is what's wrong with taking a product that already exists and making it better for society? I think that he was kind of looking at it maybe in a more extreme fashion of if, you know, a perfect example that I think of whenever I think of like extreme competition is car sales. Like if you own a car dealership, there's so many of them throughout the,
Starting point is 00:30:48 the U.S., and they're all competing, and then what the result of that is, is that the margins, from a business owner's perspective, the margins become razor thin, and it's just fierce competition, and there's so much blood in the water. So it's hard to be extremely profitable in that, and the only way you can is if you just continue to own yet another car dealership and another car dealership until the size of the enterprise is the real value. And so I think that there's two ways to look at it. You can look at fierce competition or you can look at something that has a little bit of competition and you're improving in it, making it better for society. And I think that for a lot of people that maybe want to start their own business, that's probably the best
Starting point is 00:31:27 place for them to start is being in something that's not fierce competition, but a little competition and improve the product in the way that they know how. And they get their feet wet being a business owner and can kind of understand how the whole process works and then maybe they step into the next realm. And you've got to understand, Peter Till, he's a multi- type billionaire. After he sold PayPal, he was a billionaire at that point. And it was easy for him to go and slide into this company, Pallantier and some of the other ventures because he had an enormous amount of capital in order to do these extreme type business ventures that most people don't have that. You know, they're just not in that position to start off that way. So I think that, you know,
Starting point is 00:32:08 in general, the book is fantastic because it makes you start thinking about things on a little bit of a different perspective, but I think in certain spots, maybe it might be a little bit extreme because of his own personal experiences in the way that he saw things. So, Harry, I saw you had something you wanted to add. I think even I felt the same while I was reading the initial chapter. But as I read through the book, I think one thing we should keep in mind is to put Peter Thiel in the context of Silicon Valley and technology. A lot of his advice is focused towards the tech entrepreneurs. And as Pristin mentioned
Starting point is 00:32:46 during the beginning of the show, this book came out of his class in Stanford aimed towards entrepreneurs who are in the technology business. And I would take his advice in that context. It doesn't apply to
Starting point is 00:33:02 every business. In fact, he says cloning is bad, but if you see a lot of industries, cloners are more successful than inventors. But in this particular book, his audience, I see, are tech entrepreneurs. And his advice for them is start new markets. Don't compete with the Googles and the Facebooks of the world.
Starting point is 00:33:28 No, I think you got a good point, Hari, in that I think it is pointed. A lot of his comments are pointed towards Silicon Valley and not really business in America in general. But Stig, I saw you had something you wanted to say. Yeah, and you definitely ride, Harry. I think it was actually on purpose that he started to, I don't know, provoke or what else you would call in the preface. Because he says something like, if you want to be the next Bill Gates, you will not invent Microsoft. If you want to be the next Max Zuckerberg, you shouldn't start up a social network. And then he says, you shouldn't learn from them.
Starting point is 00:34:04 You should start something new. And I was like, wow, I would really like to learn a lot, like one-on-one with both Bill Gates and Max Zuckerberg. But perhaps you're right. Perhaps I was just thinking too much in terms of my own world, my own investing world, was nothing is new, not in terms of Silicon Valley. And that's probably, I mean, that's why we're so happy that you here today, Harry, because you have a background in LinkedIn and you are stationed in San Francisco. So it might be easier for you to pick this apart.
Starting point is 00:34:38 Okay, so at this point, Stig and I want to go ahead and transition into answering one of the questions. that one of our listeners had submitted to our show. And this one comes from Jonathan Owen in Japan. And here's his question. Hi, Preston. Hi, Stig. I enjoy listening to your podcasts on my train commute to work in Tokyo.
Starting point is 00:34:58 And I just want to say how much I'm enjoying tuning in. So my question relates to Warren Buffett's rule about holding for the long term in order to avoid accruing tax charges. There are some governments, though, that provide tax-free ways for their citizens to invest in the stock market, therefore eradicating this tax consideration. I know that the UK and Japan have some such tax-free accounts.
Starting point is 00:35:24 So my question is, if in an ideal world there was no such thing as capital gains tax, would the Oracle of Omaha's rule on holding for the very long term still be a relevant and useful guide to follow. All right, Jonathan. Fantastic question. This is a very thoughtful question. Stig already has something prepared, so Stig go ahead and fire away and answer Jonathan's question. So, Jonathan, first of all, I'm really in this. I'm located in Denmark and I pay 43% in capital's gains tax. So that was actually the first thing I thought about when I heard your question. But to get serious, I would say that I would probably still in a non-tax world look at holding stocks forever or at least for a very long time.
Starting point is 00:36:13 However, the argument is definitely less strong than was before. And the reason for that really relates to timing, because the reason why we want to hold on to stocks for the long run is not only to avoid taxes. That's also because it's an outstanding company that will return a lot of profit back to you as a shareholder. So, as soon as you enter a game where you have to switch between stocks, even if there's no taxes, that's simply just a much harder game than finding very good stocks
Starting point is 00:36:45 and holding him for a long time. I don't know if you have anything to add that, Preston. So this is what I'd say, Stig. So I think if you're looking at it purely from a swapable, if you want to swap from one asset to the other asset, and you're not going to pay any capital gains or any friction to do that, I mean, have at it. You can be able to swap from one to the next as much as you want. But I think Buffett's rule, it definitely equates to one of the the main reasons he has that rule is because of that friction of swapping. But I think the other reason, which is the second part of why Buffett has that rule, is because Buffett knows that finding a great business, a business that has great management, has great fundamentals, has a
Starting point is 00:37:24 great product and service that has a competitive edge, it's hard to find. There's very few businesses out there that really kind of fit that category, that they have a truly strong competitive advantage. So I I think Buffett's way of looking at it is if you find that business that has that competitive advantage, that has the large margins, that doesn't have a lot of debt, has great management, that's probably not something that you want to get rid of. That's something you're going to want to hold for the long haul. And whenever you find that business, let's say that it does start having poor performance down the road, it's going to be something that's going to be more gradual and something
Starting point is 00:38:01 that you can transition out of slowly, opposed to abruptly. And I think that that's kind of how, I guess that's why he has the rule. You've got to find a business that you could own forever because you're looking for those qualities, you're looking for those pieces that would have each one of those elements in it. And I think that that's really kind of the essence and the true root cause of Buffett's reason for having that rule. So Jonathan, really appreciate the question. We're going to send you a free signed copy of our book, the Warren Buffett Accounting book. And we hope to have a lot more questions in the future.
Starting point is 00:38:33 So if you have a great question like Jonathan's, be sure to go to our... our website, or you can type in Asktheinvestors.com and record your question there, and we'll play it live on the air if it's a great question. So I just want to throw out to all the listeners that Stig and I are typing up executive summaries on every book that we read, and we're going to be doing a book every other week. So if you're interested in receiving a copy of our executive summary where we're outlining chapter by chapter what we took away from this particular book and any book that we do in the future, feel free to go to our reading list, which is. President Stiggs Investing Book Club.
Starting point is 00:39:08 It's right there on our web page. And you can see all the books that we're reading. You can download our executive summaries. And if you sign up on our mailing list, we'll send these out every two weeks. It's usually about three to five pages, four to five pages, typed up, written notes. So if you end up reading the book, fantastic. You can kind of use that as study notes as you're going through it. And if you don't read it, it's a good way to execute your 80-20 principle of spending 20% of your time getting 80%
Starting point is 00:39:35 percent of the results, go ahead and reviewing the study notes that we type up. So we'd also like to thank our guest, Hari Ramachandra, for joining us today. Harri's from the website, bitsbusiness.com. So if you'd like to check out his blog, he'd love to have you over there. And he puts out some fantastic articles and reviews. So I would highly recommend that blog. I know it's a place where Stig and I go in there and read everything that Hari writes. So we can't promote that highly enough because he's a fantastic writer and really has some
Starting point is 00:40:04 great insights, as you can see from this interview. So that's all we have. Harri, do you have anything you wanted to add? That's it, Kristen. Thanks for having me on the show and look forward to your executive summaries. All right. Thanks, Harry. Okay, so really appreciate everybody tuning in this week. I really hope you liked our summary of zero to one. Make sure you sign up on our mailing list if you'd like to receive our executive summary of that and any executive summaries that we do of books in the future. The next book that we're reading is The Science of Success by Charles Koch, who's a billionaire worth about $43 billion. Very interesting read. I highly recommend people go out there and kind of read that before our next episode if you want to join us and
Starting point is 00:40:43 follow along. I really appreciate everyone joining us and we'll see you next week. Thanks for listening to The Investors Podcast. To listen to more shows or access to the tools discussed on the show, be sure to visit www.theinvestorspodcast.com. Submit your questions or request a guest appearance to the Investors Podcast by going to to www. www. asktheinvestters.com. If your question is answered during the show, you will receive a free autographed copy of the Warren Buffett Accounting Book.
Starting point is 00:41:12 This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. This material is copyrighted by the TIP Network and must have written approval before a commercial application.

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