We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP 121 : Super-Investor Mohnish Pabrai - Part 2 (Business Podcast)

Episode Date: January 15, 2017

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: Why Mohnish Pabrai recently invested in Southwest Airlines. What Mohnish Pabrai’s biggest investment mistake is, and how he later made more than $100 million becau...se of it. If Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger consider any macro decisions in their investment approach. Why the airline industry is a terrible sector, but might still be a great investment at the moment. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Mohnish’s new website: Chai with Pabrai. Mohnish’s Book, The Dhandho Investor – Read Reviews for this book. Mohnish’s Youtube Channel. Kevin Freiberg’s book, Nuts – Read reviews of this book. Charlie Munger’s book, Poor Charlie’s Almanack – Read reviews of this book. Sam Walton’s book, Made in America – Read reviews of this book. NEW TO THE SHOW? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts.  SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: River Toyota Fundrise 7-Eleven The Bitcoin Way Onramp Public Vanta ReMarkable Connect Invest SimpleMining Miro Shopify 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 We study billionaires, and this is episode 121 of The Investors Podcast. Broadcasting from Bel Air Maryland. This is the Investors Podcast. They'll read the books and summarize the lessons. They'll test the waters and tell you when it's cold. They'll give you actionable investing strategies. Your host, Preston Pish and Stig Broderson. All right.
Starting point is 00:00:30 How's everybody doing out there? This is Preston Pish, and I'm your host for The Investors podcast. And as usual, I'm accompanied by my co-host, Stig Broderson, out in Seoul, South Korea. Today's episode is the second part interview with Moniz Paprai, one of the very best and most respected investors in the value investing community. If you haven't listened to the first part interview, I would strongly recommend that you go back and listen to episode 120 first. But for this episode, we can't wait to continue our interview with Monash. and I will kick this up with the first question. So, Mnizh, despite your massive success, you're famous for being very humble and simply
Starting point is 00:01:09 calling yourself an investment cloner, meaning you're looking at the investments from other fund managers and you make the best ideas you own if they're within your circle of competence. How do we learn how to clone what Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are doing? Well, I think first of all, both Warren and Charlie have been very generous and they have put a lot of stuff in the public domain. I mean, almost everything that they have is in the public domain. The only thing you can glean maybe from some of these meetings is the calibration of what is more important and less important, that sort of thing. But for the most part, almost every insight that they have is in the public domain.
Starting point is 00:01:46 There's very little that is going to come out that is going to be, you know, because they're not people who hold back. They're very generous on that front. So I think it boils down to going back to the Swami, which is take a simple, idea and take it seriously. So I think that the important thing for people who want to follow in the footsteps of Warren and Charlie is a couple of things. The first is, are you wired for it? Each of us has different wiring in our brains. And by the time we are five years old, the psychological template that we have as humans is not going to change for our whole life. Who we are as people is destined by our genetics and the first five years of life experience.
Starting point is 00:02:30 It's very almost impossible that you're going to reprogram that. And so if you're wired to be a high-speed trader, you're not going to be able to take over the Warren and Charlie system and be happy in life. You might be able to do it and be super unhappy, but you wouldn't have a great life if you did that. So the first question that investors need to ask themselves is, does the glove fit?
Starting point is 00:02:52 and does the glove fit question is not an easy question because what you have to do is after you read an annual report, you have to ask yourself, hey, you know, I spent two hours reading that. Would I have preferred doing that or watching a Star Wars movie, for example, which one would have preferred?
Starting point is 00:03:14 And yeah, it's great to watch Star Wars movies also, but the thing is when you look at your choices of how you spend your time, the question you have to ask is what type of activity gives you the greatest satisfaction and puts you in alignment? You know, what puts you in great alignment? And with both Warren and Charlie, they have an intense desire to learn, an intense desire to read and an intense desire to keep understanding new things, a very intense desire to do
Starting point is 00:03:42 all those things. And that has to be part of your five-year-old personality. and if it is part of that, you're on the right path. If you're a guy who doesn't like to read and just wants to talk to people, for example, that system's probably not going to work and you're probably not going to be a great investor and such. So I think that it's not for everyone. In fact, I think it's for a sliver of humanity. But for that sliver of humanity, if they were to drill down on Warren and Charlie,
Starting point is 00:04:11 they can pick up a bunch of great habits, which can be in alignment with the way their brains are wired anyway. and that would be a truly lulap looser effect at that point. You know, Moneish, I have a question going off of, you were talking about how Charlie and Warren have put so much into the public domain, which, I mean, I couldn't agree with you more, especially when you look at all of his shareholders' letters and you go back and read it. It's amazing what he shares through all the years. One of the things that I guess I'm not convinced on,
Starting point is 00:04:40 and I'm curious just to hear your thoughts, I feel like they understand credit cycles a lot better than what they discuss at the shareholders' meetings and in public. I think if I was going to guess, like you get them behind closed doors, I think that they really understand credit cycles a lot better than what people let on. And I guess they're understanding a macro is much more profound than what people think. So like we look at their balance sheet right now at Berkshire Hathaway. It's $70 billion they're sitting on cash. and for me, I can't help but think that when they're sitting on such a large amount of cash, and you go back and you look at any credit cycle before it's unraveled itself,
Starting point is 00:05:21 they've always been sitting on a very good sized position of cash in order to buy things back at fantastic prices. I guess I'm curious what your opinions are on it personally. Then I'm curious if you'd ever heard them discuss anything on this. Yeah, actually, I've had some detailed conversations actually with Charles. specifically on this. I can't go into a lot of detail because it touches on things that I don't think I want to talk about publicly
Starting point is 00:05:47 and I don't think he'd want to talk about publicly but I can tell you this that what you see is what you get. So Charlie and Warren have a very simple system and the simple system is they are not trying to hoard cash that is not part of the system.
Starting point is 00:06:04 Their system is if an opportunity shows up and that opportunity makes sense they will put cash to work. They are not going to be particularly concerned if 9-11 happens the next day or the Fed's at zero or what's going to happen in the next 10 years.
Starting point is 00:06:23 They truly run their affairs with the understanding that you really have to understand the business and you have to invest based on the understanding of the business. I mean, if you analyze Warren's purchase of Burlington Northern, the railroad. I think he gleaned some insights into railroads
Starting point is 00:06:45 that were not at all understood by Joe Public, not even understood by railroad analysts. I think he understood a number of things about the irreplicable nature of that infrastructure, the fact that all these bridges and underpasses in the U.S. had been redone to allow double-decker trains over a long period of time, the fact the labor relations had changed, the fact that trains had become more efficient,
Starting point is 00:07:09 and the fact that versus trucking, they were, you know, many times more efficient in moving a ton of freight and so on. So there were a number of Dula Blasafax that came into a Burlington Northern decision, just like the Coho Cola decision. And they were so overwhelmingly in his favor in terms of the intrinsic value of the business
Starting point is 00:07:31 being so much higher than where it was that quite frankly, it didn't matter that much what happened in the next few years to the economy. And if you look at the Burlington Northern value today, it may be four times what they paid for it, three or four times what they paid for it. And how could you have such a wide mispricing on such a large asset? So the area that they spend their time on is exactly that,
Starting point is 00:07:59 which is figure out the business. I mean, precision cast parts. Precision cast parts, they had to figure out the business. And Warren did mention that if interest rates were higher, they may not have offered as much money. So precision cast part of one of those that they were sitting on the edge, right? Right on the edge of the precipice or whether to go or no go, if you will. But, you know, they loved the manager and they went for it because of the manager. And the manager was a huge part of the equation.
Starting point is 00:08:27 And so I truly believe that they understand a lot of things about macro. But I can, my reading everything in the public domain and, whatever private interaction, I'd be willing to make a pretty sizable bet that micro Trump's macro for Warren and Charlie in a very major way. They are looking to buy businesses well below the intrinsic value where those businesses will have staying power for decades because they have lots of capital. They can't go sloshing in and out of different things. They have staying power for decades and they will deliver good returns for decades. And then the rest of it is just noise, they don't care about the rest. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
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Starting point is 00:13:23 are using a Schiller P.E., it might be priced at a 4% right now. And if you'd look at a 10-year treasury, I mean, it's what, 2.6 now. I know it's come up a lot in the last, a little bit of, time. But he's not investing in just the S&P 500 at that call it 4% return. He's deciding to sit on a tremendous amount of cash. And I guess this is the magic question is, is where is he drawing that threshold of I have to have an 8% return or a 9% return that I'm expecting to get in order for me to employ that cash and not go after a measly 4% return? I guess that's the thing that I just constantly think of where are they drawing that threshold? How are they making that determination
Starting point is 00:14:06 that I'm going to value liquidity over a 4% return if you were going to take the S&P 500? Yeah, and I think the way they're making those decisions is they want the decision to be a no-brainer. So what they are looking to do is I don't think they're sweating the details on the S&P versus their 10-year treasury and all those sorts of things. I don't think that's really your driver. What they're looking for is can they land an exceptional asset in the hands of an exceptional manager with a moat that is getting deeper by the day? That is the key. Those are the factors that matter more than anything else. I mean, if you look at the co-purchase from 1988 to 2016, how many economic cycles have we had?
Starting point is 00:14:54 How many Fed, you know, loosening and tightening cycles have we had? All of that is irrelevant. It's the business and what the business does that trumps everything else. So I think investors basically should take them at face value. I think investors are just doing themselves a huge favor if you just eliminate any macro thoughts from their brains. I mean, it is hard enough to figure out the future of a business. Don't try to figure out the future of the world. And don't try to figure out the future of a country.
Starting point is 00:15:27 Just try to figure out the future of a business. That is hard enough. Don't go beyond that. So speaking of micro and Moran Buffett, one thing that comes to mind is Berksa Hellerways's new holdings of four airline companies. And I think some people definitely were highly surprised by this since Buffett several times has warned about the industry and he even called them a death trap for investors. Now, the positions were somewhat small and giving the same.
Starting point is 00:15:57 size of them. It's probably performed by Ted and Todd, his portfolio managers. But the incident thing about this is that based on the enterprise multiple, the companies actually looked very attractive before Berkshire scooped them up. So my question is basically twofold here. I'm curious to hear your thoughts about the airline specifically and also how much emphasis you put on valuation metrics like the enterprise multiple for tricky industries like the airline business. Yeah. So, you know, actually the airline investment is a really good example of how Warren only
Starting point is 00:16:34 selects the manager and does not interfere with what they do. So I'll get to airlines in a second, but there's a story I remember about many years back, Geico did not accept the American Express card. And, you know, Berkshire had a large position in Amex. And so the Amex CEO, I forget it was Ken Shornow or Harvey Golub. called Warren and said, hey, Warren, you know, I try calling the CEO of Geico and he won't even return my call. Can you ask him to just take my call? Not to accept Amex, just take my call. And Warren told him that I can't do that. He said, the reason I can't do that is because
Starting point is 00:17:17 if I call the Geico CEO and say, hey, take the Amex CEO's call, he's going to read more than that into that sentence. And he's going to think that there's a mandate of some kind to maybe accept the Amex guy. And he says, whatever I feel about whether GEICO should accept Amex or not is irrelevant. That decision rests with the CEO, so he told the Amex CEO, keep calling and be a pest and pound him every day, but do not ever utter my name. You're on your own.
Starting point is 00:17:50 And all the best, and I hope you make the sale. So the Todd and Ted relationship with Warren is one where Warren is not going to tell them, do this and don't do this. Now, clearly, Tor and Ted are very smart people. It's clearly one of them who bought this. I would guess it's Ted because he's had some history in the past of making airline investments. So I think if you go look in Peninsula and such, he's done some things with airlines. I think that Ted is very well aware of his boss's extreme hatred.
Starting point is 00:18:22 for airlines, but he also understands his boss has given him a mandate to deliver returns without taking ridiculous risks, right? And so the good news is he's exercised his freedoms and such a leverage, which is great. Now, why did he do that? Well, you know, I think that what happened is, I think the airline situation is similar to the railroad situation. Basically, you have an industry which has really bad economics. You know, your dumbest competitor sets your price
Starting point is 00:18:56 and you have a duopoly from where you need to buy your airplanes and your workforce is unionized and you're selling a commodity. You know, on all fronts, your host and then, you know, you have no control
Starting point is 00:19:12 over fuel prices. You know, so something like one third of your cost or your operating expenses is out of your control. What a great business to be in. But the thing is that one by one, many of these things are no longer true. So, for example, I don't think we are going to see high fuel prices for any sustained period of time, maybe ever.
Starting point is 00:19:39 And the reason is because the United States is a swing producer. And the United States was not a swing producer before. and the United States production cannot be controlled because it is 10,000 independent entrepreneurs making those decisions. It's not Saudi Arabia making those decisions. Plus, on top of that, we have an interior secretary whose three most beloved words are drill baby drill. So we have an EPA where the head of the EPA wants to abolish the EPA. We have the head of the energy department coming in who also abolish the energy department. So the United States is going to take the shackles off the frackers in a very major way.
Starting point is 00:20:23 And even the technology that existed for fracking three years ago versus today is night and day. I mean, just the other day I was reading that Chesapeake did some well, which went two miles, first time ever. And then the horizontal runs were huge. And I mean, on a number of fronts, it broke all kinds of records. And it's going to drop their, you know, poor barrow costs very significantly. That trajectory is going to keep continuing. In fact, if oil went to 75 or 100, you would see far more innovation come in into the fracking area. So I think that it's a safe bet that for any sustained period of time, unless we had weird things going on, like you shut down the Strait of Harmoos or something, we are not going to see high oil prices.
Starting point is 00:21:05 So that takes away one big huge monkey that is on the back of the airlines. And the second is that it used to be a brutally competitive industry with more than a dozen players. and they've all kind of merged with each other. And we're left with, you know, five or six players of any meaningful size in the U.S. And the top three or four, in fact, have somewhat oligalistic positions.
Starting point is 00:21:31 So, for example, if, you know, when you have hubs in places like Dallas Fourth Worth as, as American does, then if your travel takes you around that area, American has pricing power because of those hubs and gates. So just like United has power in Newark and Southwest has power at Las Vegas and so on and number of California airports.
Starting point is 00:21:53 So the different pieces are getting to the point where there is rationality and these airlines have all been through such a bloodbath in the past that the CEOs of almost all of the major airlines now have seen the movie before and are not interested in going there again. And so they are not focused on market share. They're focused on profits. And at the core, they have tailwinds because air travel is growing. I mean, I don't know if you've been on a flight lately, but there are no empty seats. I mean, their load factors are through the roof. The fares aren't really that cheap, even though fuel prices are cheap. So I think that these guys are in great shape.
Starting point is 00:22:36 And many of those things are unlikely to change for a while. Monash, I know that you recently took a position in Southwest Airlines. Bershya did that too, by the way. Could you explain to us why you recently decided to invest in Southwest and not say Delta American United or any of the other airlines? First, I mean, I looked at all the airlines and Southwest is an extremely unusual company. It is like no other airline company that I know of. I mean, I think that for the longest time, if you had put up the Berkshire Hathaway
Starting point is 00:23:10 stock chart next to the southwest stock chart, the stock performance blew it away. I mean, this was an airline operating in environments where fuel went up and fuel went down and everything in between and they still blew out Berksha Hathaway. I have a person who was one of my first employees in one of my first businesses, TransTech, and he came to work for me 25 years ago and very talented IT person. Obviously, he's become a very senior guy. and he was very senior employee at United for a while, and now he's an independent consultant.
Starting point is 00:23:43 So for a few years, he was flying in and out of Southwest headquarters because he was working on an IT project for them because they're going through a lot of system changes. And my conversations with him were not related to the investment. I've had conversations with him about Southwest, just shooting the breeze for several years. But just to give you some examples of what he said that,
Starting point is 00:24:06 it's the only place where he would go into a meeting with a bunch of Southwest employees. And he's one of the only people who's not a Southwest employees. And before the meeting started, everyone would hug him. Okay. They all have hugs. And then they'd get down to business, right? And the ticker of Southwest is love. And he said, Monash, at United, no one ever hugged me.
Starting point is 00:24:31 And at no other business that he ever worked at, did anyone give hugs? So Southwest has an extremely unusual culture. If you walk into their headquarters, they do not allow any type of art on their walls. The only thing you can put up on walls are pictures of friends and family. And I think they've given license for any employee to take any picture of their friends and family and put it anywhere in the headquarters that they want to. And so when you walk in there, it's like a place,
Starting point is 00:25:04 like no other place you've seen. And the way Southwest hires its people, I already told you that humans are hard-cored at the age of five. You are not going to change humans after the age of five. All you can do is try to make sure you bring in the right humans. And so what Southwest does is in their hiring processes, they are far more concerned with the psychological makeup of the person than the capabilities of the person.
Starting point is 00:25:35 They believe they can teach capabilities, but they cannot change the psychology. So they're looking for people who have a certain psych makeup. And have you flown Southwest lately? Yeah, I have. You know, they have that Baltimore, big huge hub at Baltimore, right?
Starting point is 00:25:52 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can't avoid them. You know, when you die and go to heaven, you're going to change planes in Baltimore. And so you have that huge Southwest hub in Baltimore, and you're going to use that. But when you go on a Southwest aircraft, you know, so here's how I feel.
Starting point is 00:26:09 I go on a United Aircraft or an American aircraft and I'm in business class and it's fine. I go on a Southwest aircraft and I'm in coach and I usually find I'm happier. I'm a happier state of mind in coach in Southwest versus business on American. And why is that? I don't know why is that.
Starting point is 00:26:30 I still haven't figured out. I keep asking myself the question, why do I feel happy being in Southwest? And I don't know exactly why, but the thing is, it's a happy place. Yeah. You know, they've made that narrow tube a very happy place. And why is it a happy place? Because they've hired a certain type of people and they've given them a lot of flexibility. The other airlines have tried repeatedly.
Starting point is 00:26:50 They've tried repeatedly to clone Southwest. So United set up Ted and they shut it down. Delta set up song and they shut it down. All these guys would do, they thought, oh, the formula is you have one airplane 737, you fly them point to point, and you fly the airplane nonstop. And the time between takeoffs and landings is 25 minutes or something. They cloned all of that. They still couldn't make it work because the thing that is the hardest to clone and the thing that none of the airlines can ever clone about Southwest is the culture. American can try as hard as it wants.
Starting point is 00:27:29 It can never clone the culture in a hundred years. United can never clone the culture. Delta can never clone the culture. They've tried and fallen flat. So, you know, if you read, there's a book called Nuts, which is a biography on Herb, Keleher, and on Southwest, there's a number of books on Southwest, a number of HBS cases on Southwest.
Starting point is 00:27:49 I think if you just drill down on the company, this is a very unusual company. This is the company with a very happy workforce. This is a company which has a very unique culture. This is a company where twice a month, the management loads bags on airplanes, on and on. I mean, it had a level 5 leader, Herb Keller, who's left the scene a long time ago.
Starting point is 00:28:12 And even though he's left the scene, the culture has not changed at all. Just like Berkshire's culture, you know, even 20 years after Warren is gone, the culture will be intact. So did I answer, question on Southwest. Definitely, definitely. And I'm really happy that you also brought in the term level 5 leader because that was actually something that we just covered on the podcast. So
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Starting point is 00:32:23 mistakes are a blessing. Adversity is a blessing. You know, I truly believe in what Marcus Orillius says that to have misfortune and prevail is good fortune. And so if we were really wise, we would hope and pray for lots of misfortune. Because when I look back, when I look back on my life and I look back on some of the critical points, what I have found is that the points at which I took a leg down were the points of greatest learning. We don't learn when we do well because there's nothing to learn. You know, things look great. And so I think that for my vantage point, I think mistakes are wonderful because the mistakes are great teachers. And I find myself making mistakes all the time.
Starting point is 00:33:15 And after, like, I have a few mistakes I've made even the last few years. And I look at those and say, how dumb were you to make these mistakes? But I also know that I will not make those mistakes again. And that is a tremendous advantage to basically reduce the error rate, if you will, as you go on in life. So I think when you look at the, when I think about the, I haven't thought about in terms of the greatest mistake. You know, one of the biggest mistakes I had happened just before a bribe fund started. You know, the dot-com boom was on in a big way. And I thought I'd found a way to
Starting point is 00:33:51 ride the wave, if you will, upside without downside. It was like some of the incubators that were coming up at the time. And I'd raised about, I think, about four million or so in capital for that and what, 2.2 million of that of my own money. And the entire amount went to zero. And so the investors, the outside investors who had put in money all saw it go to zero. And I saw it go to zero. So we lost that four million. It felt terrible about the money loss of these people who had put in money were some of the nearest and dearest people to me.
Starting point is 00:34:29 You know, they were longtime friends and family and so on. But there was a lot of success that came to provide. funds in the next several years that would not have come if that mistake had not happened. So if I look at absolute dollars, there was more than a hundred million, a couple hundred million made that wouldn't have been made if that four million hadn't been lost. Now, the same people didn't make that. So there's an asymmetry there. But I couldn't see it then.
Starting point is 00:35:04 I just felt terrible about it at that time. and a few years later I looked back and I say wow, that was really good. That was a good thing for me to get hit that hard at that time because the lessons don't sink in very well if there are other people's mistakes. It's unfortunate and this is one of Mungers and Buffett's great strengths is they actually are really good at learning from others' mistakes.
Starting point is 00:35:31 And so they try to avoid most of them. I'm not as good at it. I have to do them on my own more than I'd love. like. I hope I get better at learning from other people's mistakes because it's so much cheaper. So I would say that clearly the 99 time frame, we had that mistake, 99, 2000. Then we've had, we have others in the financial crisis. We had a company Delta Financial that went bankrupt. We had horsehead holdings that went bankrupt earlier this year. Very tough things because that was a hundred million dollars that we, I mean, we had invested 70 and had gone
Starting point is 00:36:02 up to more than 100. And in the end was zero. and tough things to deal with and tough lessons. But the good news is that we live and learn and by investors have been very gracious for the most part about these things. And I think we will do better in the future as a result of the mistakes. Absolutely. I believe that Buffett's quote, you know, rule number one, don't lose money, rule number two, don't forget rule number one.
Starting point is 00:36:28 You know, going back to your question about him keeping cash, him keeping cash is because of that quote. It's not for macro. What they want to do is they want to make sure bets or as close to sure bets as you can get and keep their error rate down. And so that's really what is driving the cash more than anything else. Very, very interesting.
Starting point is 00:36:51 So, Monash, the last question I'd like to ask you, that's about a really good resource for our listeners out there. And if you could endorse up to three investing books, not including Graham's books and not including Buffett's shareholder letters which I can see that you're smiling now because that was probably what popped into your mind right away the reason I was smiling is because you left me a wide opening
Starting point is 00:37:16 which was great because you didn't mention poor Charlie's Almanac and so first of all I would say that if you're excluding the Graham and Buffett books I would say poor Charlie's Almanac is a book that I try to reread every year and every year when I reread it, I find brand new things that I can swear
Starting point is 00:37:35 were never in the book before. Somebody just put them in there. And so I pick up more insights. And just his speech, the psychology of human misjudgment, that speech, every time I read it, I pick up more insights.
Starting point is 00:37:48 So I would say that that one book, in my opinion, is better than a college degree. I think if someone just imbibed that book and read and reread it a few times, you would do quite well. You know, the other insight that I've learned is that business autobiographies are really good. I mean, if you read, you know, Sam Walton's Made in America, for example, I mean, I think the business autobiographies are really good because they really help you get in the mind of these phenomenal entrepreneurs.
Starting point is 00:38:23 And such. So if you can read some of those, you know, there was one that was written by Harvey Firestone a long time ago. It's a book that was recommended by Peter Kaufman. It's in Poet Charlie's Almanac. I think it's men and rubber or something along those lines. It's a phenomenal book. And that was written, I don't know, close to 90 years ago or something. And I think those insights are very valuable today. So I think that if you're interested in airlines, you know, studying. Ryanair, Michael O'Leary, Southwest, and such is going to be really, really helpful in helping you figure things out. And you don't need too many of these insights to do well. I think the thing is that just a couple of these insights can be enough to give you a significant tailwind of the portfolio. All right, Monish. I know I speak for our entire audience when we just say thank you for coming on the show. Your insights are just amazing. It's just so much fun to talk to you too. You're so easy to talk to. But if people want to learn more about you and they want to go to your website or go to your Twitter feed, if they want to see your book, the Dondo investor or whatever, where is the
Starting point is 00:39:34 best place for them to find you on the internet? Yeah, well, so first of all, it's been a pleasure. I think both of you do a great job, great service to the community. And I wanted to say that, you know, I was living under a rock for a long time. And I had never been on Twitter. I didn't even understand Twitter. But then when we got a Twitter president, I decided that, you know, if it can elect a president of these great United States, that I should kind of go on to Twitter land. And so very recently in the last few weeks, I set up a Twitter account. And actually surprised me. I've got very quickly more than 5,000 followers, which is great. And I'm having a lot of fun because I set up a blog recently called Chai with Pabri. So anytime you want to have a good
Starting point is 00:40:19 cup of tea, you know, just come to the blog and that'd be great. You know what I like about your Twitter feed is so many people that are really accomplished like yourself, they stand up a Twitter account, but it's not them that you're like interacting with. It's some person that they hired or whatever. So huge kudos to you, Mr. Pabry, because I know I've had a couple interactions with you. And just so our audience knows, go on Twitter and follow Monash because he will respond to
Starting point is 00:40:48 some of the tweets that you send him and it's just an amazing opportunity. All right, good stuff, guys. This was all that we had for this week's episode on The Investors Podcast. We'll see each other again next week with a new episode. 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. www.theinvestorspodcast.com.
Starting point is 00:41:12 Submit your questions or request a guest appearance to The Investors Podcast by going to www. Theinvestors.com. If your question is answered during the show, you will receive a free autographed copy of the Warren Buffett Accounting Book. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. This material is copyrighted by the TIP Network and must have written approval before a commercial application.

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