We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP345: Richer, Wiser, Happier w/ William Green

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. On today's show, I sit down with William Green, the author of Rich or Wiser Happier. During our conversation, William draws on interviews that he conducted over 25 years with many of the world's greatest investors, including Sir John Templeton, Charlie Munger, Bill Miller, Joe Greenblatt and Howard Marks. We will explore how the best investors can teach us not only how to become rich, but also how to improve the way we think, reach decisions, assess risk, and build resilience. The best investors are master game players who consciously maximize their odds of long-term success

Starting point is 00:00:35 in markets and life, but also minimizing any risk of catastrophe. You don't want to miss out on this one. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation with William Green, and I'm sure you will too. Let's jump to it. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Welcome to The Investors Podcast.

Starting point is 00:01:14 I'm your host, Dick Broderson. Today, we're bringing back William Green. We interviewed William back in 2015 about his book, The Great Minds of Investing. And that was just a fabulous book that I've been gifting to friends and family ever since. And today, I have the pleasure of inviting William back talking about his newest book, Richer, Wiser, Happier. William, welcome back to the Emasters podcast. Thank you so much for having me back. I'm thrilled to be here with you again.

Starting point is 00:01:41 William, our listeners know that I'm an average reader, and so far your book is by far the best I read and re-read this year. So I just wanted to say that going into this. This is really going to be a treat for our listeners. But I wanted to jump right into your wonderful book by reading a quote. It's simple. If your life is more important than your principles, you sacrifice your principles. If your principles are more important than your life, you sacrifice your life.

Starting point is 00:02:10 So this was said to famous investor Fentenberg by his psychiatrist. And to me, this was the most profound story you have in your book. And as you also state in your book, there is nobody in the investment world who you admire more. So my question to you is simply, why? Arnold Vandenberg is a very extraordinary person, and he's not by any means the most famous person in this book. He interviewed so many famous investors who are kind of household names, people like Charlie Munger, Buffett's partner, Howard Mars, Joe Greenback, countless others. And here's this guy, Arnold Bannabberg, who's relatively obscure. He's, as I say in the book, he's not a billionaire, he's not a genius, he's not a household name.

Starting point is 00:02:54 And yet, if I were to pick one role model from all of the great investors, that I've interviewed over the last 25 years, it would be Arnold Bannibor. I end the book with him, actually, and spend the whole of the last section trying to explain why it is that he embodies what I regard as not only financial success, but a truly abundant, truly successful, truly prosperous life, which includes many other things beyond just being extremely rich and having extraordinary investment returns over a very long period. And I think what astonishes me about Arnold in many ways is that he was dealt the worst possible hand in life. And so I think in many cases, when I'm writing about great investors, they had extraordinary advantages, right?

Starting point is 00:03:38 They were incredibly smart. They went to part of business school or Wharton. They had loving families. They were born in countries where they had, you know, these demographic advantages like Buffett's and he won the ovarian lottery by being born in the US at the right time and writing this enormous wave after World War II. Honol Vanneberg, by contrast, was born with every disadvantage. Just to give you a sense of it, he has a remarkable story. He was born on the same street in Amsterdam as Anne Frank. And this is in 1939. He was Jewish and the Nazis were just about to invade the Netherlands. And Arnold went into

Starting point is 00:04:20 hiding, basically, spent the first couple of years in hiding these parents. And they had these non-Jewish friends in Amsterdam who hid them behind a double wall in their apartment. But there was this terrifying risk that if the Nazis came and searched the house, he or his brother, who was called Sigmund, might cry. And the Nazis would find them and they would kill all of them. And if he was sent to Auschwitz, the first people to die were the babies and the women. And so his parents made this extraordinarily bold decision, which was to have him basically sneaked out of, out of Amsterdam, out of the house, taken into the countryside by a total stranger who was this teenage girl who saved his life. And I named the girl in the book because I kind of want to do her on it,

Starting point is 00:05:08 because really she is responsible and she arrived at the train station in the countryside and there was a group of Nazi soldiers actually talking and didn't notice the fact that here's this teenage girl who's putting her life at risk to save this little Jewish kid. And so Arnold spent the first six years of his life, well, until he was about six, was in an orphanage being hidden in this orphanage where they basically saved his life, but at the same time they had no food. And so he was malnourished. By the time he was about six, he pretty much couldn't walk.

Starting point is 00:05:40 And his parents, meanwhile, were sent Auschwitz, but actually managed to survive. And when they came to pick him up when he was six, his father said, Basically, he was skin and bones. He was scared to pick him up. And that if he'd been there for a few months longer, he simply wouldn't have lived. So you have this guy who started with the worst possible hand. He's abandoned by his parents. He felt like his parents had sent him away because they didn't love him.

Starting point is 00:06:04 He then moves to L.A. He's beaten up by everybody. Even his father used to beat him up. So he had this terrible childhood and comes out with all of this rage. They thought that he was malnourished, that his brain had been. affected at this very formative age, and he barely made it through high school. So the fact that this guy who had nothing, who had no financial education, didn't even go to college, was able to transform his life, teach himself to invest by studying Ben Graham's books,

Starting point is 00:06:39 somehow build an extraordinarily successful money management business, despite that start in life, I think he's just one of the great achievements in life that I've ever encountered. And what's extraordinary about Arnold Bannemberg is that it wasn't just that he figured out how to win the investment game, basically by studying very simple rules that he learned from Ben Graham and then following that with this kind of maniacal ferocity and self-discipline. It's that he somehow took all of his character flaws, like this tremendous rage that he had, this resentment towards his parents, towards Germans, towards the world, towards his first wife who left him for someone else. And he somehow managed to transform himself. So he's become this

Starting point is 00:07:24 incredibly loving, kind, generous, warm person who spends his whole time kind of helping other people. So there's a fullness to his life where you look at him and you think he's not just financially rich, he's actually managed to build the incredible relationships and help so many people. And I end the book with him basically pointing to this filing cabinet of his, just full of letters from people who said that he had changed their life. And he said to me, that's my bank account. And so that's why I regard Arnold's the ultimate role model in a way. It's like, yeah, he's been incredibly successful financially.

Starting point is 00:08:01 Yeah, he's had great returns over 40 years. But he actually, he's managed to take a terrible hand and turn it into a winning. There is so much unpack from this story about Matt and Burke, about life, about fortune, about resilience. It's just an amazing learning about him. So thank you for introducing him to all of us, William. Thanks. When I started writing the book, when I started being interested in investing, I guess as a younger man,

Starting point is 00:08:30 I really thought investing in it all about how you get rich and how you become financially independent and how you achieve this total financial security. And I think that's true at some level. It's an incredible game that way, and the rewards, if you're good at it, they're incredible. But there's also this kind of inner game of investing where it's about much more than that. And so I think one of the things that I became fascinated by as I got older was just done, and I'm not that older. I'm 52 now, so in the prime of life. I became more and more interested in what I could learn from them about other things, not just how to get rich, but actually about how to think better, how to live more wider.

Starting point is 00:09:08 And so when I was working on this book, I very consciously focused on people who I actually admired and liked. And so if you look at, say, the difference between this and an earlier book, like the Great Minds of Investing, I went big on certain people. There were people like Howard Marks or Joe Greenblatt or Arnold Vandenberg or Bill Miller who, you know, or Charlie Munger, who I just look. These are people whose lives I want to, I want to actually penetrate in a very deep way so I can actually figure. out what have they figured out about how to think, how to live, how to stack the odds of a successful life in their favor? And so that's not an accident if you're looking at the Arnold Bannembert story and thinking, oh, there's something more to learn here. It's because I was actually looking for guidance. I'm not just trying to figure out how to get rich from studying these

Starting point is 00:09:57 investors. I'm actually trying to figure out, how can I live better? And then I'm trying to share those lessons with readers. Because I'm in a very privileged position that I get to talk to people. And And so if I can say to you, here's what you need to learn from all of probably 20, 30, 30 interviews that I've done with Arnold Vanneva here are the lessons. That's an incredible privilege for me to be able to share those lessons. So that's what I'm trying to do. So it's very heartening and cheering to hear that it's resonating with you because that means I didn't squander the last four years of my life. I definitely don't think you did. William.

Starting point is 00:10:34 I hear this story for so many people, like, or email or Twitter, whatnot. And especially whenever you go out to Omaha, the first week of May for the annual shareholders meeting, like so many people found were on Buff because, you know, here's the richest dude or one of the richest dudes out there. And they came for the secret formula to stock investing, but the state for advice on life. I've heard that story so many in time. I think it's so true. Absolutely. I've been multiple times for the meeting.

Starting point is 00:11:03 I would always go and sit with Guy Speer and Monish Pavry, which is a, which is a, you know, a fun experience in its own right. I always remember going one time and hearing Buffett just saying, why would I want to buy six or eight homes? So there's certain point, it would actually make my life worse rather than better. And it's funny, I don't remember all of the investing advice he gave that year. That's the thing that I remember. It's thinking, oh, so here's this fantasy like this guy who's made billions and billions of dollars and yet he's giving it all away, or pretty much all good away. And so, yeah, I think it's those life lessons. lessons that actually, that are the things that stick is this whole genre within the world

Starting point is 00:11:44 of investing, of studying worldly wisdom that I think Munger and Buffett, you know, Munger took the phrase from Ben Graham, I think we talked about worldly wisdom. I think that's sort of the, there's an inner and an outer of everything. That's the inner of investing. The outer is, yeah, I want to get rich and I want to be financially free and independence. I'm not answerable to anyone. inner is I also want to lead a decent life and an ethical life and try to be a better person. And I think create more value for other people in life.

Starting point is 00:12:13 And I think that's what you get from people like Buffett and Munger and Arnold Bannberg and Joe Greenblatt. And I think we sense that. We sense that they're not just out to line their own pockets. You sense that there's something deeper there. And I think that that's what kept bringing 40,000 people a year, Omaha. I think you're absolutely right. And I think it's also a good segue to my next question.

Starting point is 00:12:37 You mentioned quite a few iconic investors there, and you interview all of them. And perhaps one of the most prominent in your book is the later John Templeton. One of the things that you wrote real stood out to me. You said that Templeton didn't just master the markets. He mastered himself. So what did you mean by that? Templeton was a very, very extraordinary person. He's the most self-disciplined person I think I've ever met.

Starting point is 00:13:03 I should probably back up and tell you a bit more about why he was so remarkable. Hamilton, you could easily argue, was the greatest international or global stock picker of the 20th century. And he had this extraordinary 40-year record as a fund manager, an incredible record, and was a total pioneer of international investing. So I went to the Bahamas to spend a day with him about 20 years ago. And I thought, you know, well, here's this icon, this wise old man, this pioneer. of international investing. And I was ready to kind of meet the sage. It was sort of my Wizard of Oz moment going behind the curtain. And what I actually found was quite off-putting,

Starting point is 00:13:43 which was that he was this very kind of severe, self-disciplined man. There was something very tough about him, a kind of hard-edged him. It's hard for me to explain this. And I'm not trying to be rude about him because he was extremely corply. I mean, the first, and charming, the first thing he said to me in this lovely sort of sudden plang that I won't impersonate was, my time is at your discretion. I'll spend as much time with you as you require. So he was very generous with me. But at the same time, there was this kind of coldness and coolness and steelyness that I found very off-putting. And it took me many years, actually, in sort of wrestling with myself for 20 years, to figure out how close that was to the secret of his success. And really what I

Starting point is 00:14:30 figured out is he was utterly obsessed with making the most of his time, making the most of his money, making the most of his energy, making the most of his thoughts, his health, his emotions. And so he had this supreme self-discipline where, for example, one person I interviewed said to me that the first time he met Sir John Templeton, Thompson said to him, meet me at 402 p.m. I have another meeting at 4.13. And likewise, people who he used to work with at Franklin Templeton, His company said that he used to take these scraps of paper that he would write on, and then he would kind of staple them together. So here you have this multi-billionaire who would insist on riding coach anywhere where he flew.

Starting point is 00:15:13 So all of his years were buying their own jets. And he said to me, I never thought it was wise to waste anything. And he lives in this sort of exquisite place where Sean Connery and Diaga Khan and people like that, or Prince Rainier Monaco had homes. And I asked him if he would go sort of yachting and swimming and all of that in this beautiful area. And he said, no, I don't think we were born to have pleasure. I think we're supposed to be useful. So there was something very severe about him that I think I found off pudding.

Starting point is 00:15:42 And partly I think I found it off pudding because I'm so not self-control. And so I think when I saw his self-discipline, it kind of exposed my own inadequacies in some terrible way. But I think if you're going to be extraordinarily successful, you do. You do need to master that in a game. You do need to figure out how you're going to control your thoughts, how you're going to control your emotions. Because investing is such an emotional game. And here you have this guy who literally he said, if he had a negative thought, he would grab it and banish it to where it came from. I think in those days I found that extremely off-putting old stern self-discipline.

Starting point is 00:16:22 But if you think about all of the things that he lived through, you know, he lost his first wife in a motion, motorcycle accident, suddenly finds himself as a widow with three young children to raise. He went through World War II, where he made this kind of historic, brilliant, contrarian investment. He lived through so much. And to have that kind of internal resilience, that internal self-discipline, that self-mastery, I think is priceless. And so I've been in this kind of 20-year argument with him in my head, where I gradually come

Starting point is 00:16:53 around to thinking, well, he was totally right and I was totally wrong. You know, I should have focused much more on this inner game. 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 Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year,

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Starting point is 00:21:27 He always had this special character. And I don't mean that in Cecil in a negative way, but I feel it's what made him great. But it was also what probably for you and also the time in your life whenever you met him, you can correct me of wrong, probably wasn't as reflective about life as you have been since and what he spent at the age where whenever you met him. I have this section of the book on sources and notes where I'm telling people, you know, go look at this, go look at this, these are things that have helped me.

Starting point is 00:21:58 These are incredible resources. And some people won't notice these at all, but there's something where I actually talk about reading his books in the last couple of years. And he wrote these kind of spiritual books on the spiritual laws of life. And I mentioned in that section on additional resources is that as I read this book, I literally blush and said out loud, oh, no, and groan. And the reason was that I actually realized that there was stuff that I'd failed to learn from him,

Starting point is 00:22:25 that he was trying to teach me 20 years ago, that I was actually just too close-minded and too biased and too judgmental for here. One of the great lessons for me from spending time with Templeton has actually been that he was this extraordinarily open-minded and inquisitive person. So he was trying to explore things, for example, like, can you scientifically prove that prayer works? And so he would bankroll studies at Harvard, for example, to study scientifically the power of prayer. So here's a guy who was so open-minded that he's annoying religious people by questioning whether prayer works, and he's annoying the scientist by applying science to prayer.

Starting point is 00:23:09 And here was I, this kind of 30-year-old upstart who just sort of rolled me. my eyes at this stuff. I said to him, do people regard he was a coup? Because I was so close-minded and so judgmental, I wasn't open to learning from him. I think about him constantly, because it's a kind of reminder that I need to keep my own mind as open as he kept his so that my prejudices and biases don't blind me to what people like him were actually trying to teach me. And he was a man of faith. He wasn't trying to ridicule anyone whenever he was doing it. Like you mentioned, He was just so open-minded that he just wanted to test it out. As confident as he were, he's always doubting himself.

Starting point is 00:23:50 He's famous for saying the, I'm probably paraphrasing here, even the best investors are wrong one-third of the time. He just wanted to test everything. He said to me he had made over half a million investing decisions in the course of his investing career. And he said in this very formal way that he spoke, that about a third of his decisions were the opposite of wisdom. That's a really interesting idea to be as brilliant as him and yet as aware of his own

Starting point is 00:24:18 ability to be wrong as he was. One of the great practical implications of that is that you have to hedge against your own palability and your own ignorance. I often think about one very practical thing that he said to me, which is he said, he said, for a regular investor, you really ought to own four or five different funds and they ought to be in different areas of the market and that you should never be arrogant enough to believe that you can pick the one advisor,

Starting point is 00:24:47 you can pick the one investor, you can pick the one country. And I can't tell you how many times I've thought about that over the years. So any time I'm inclined to get carried away and think, I'm going to bet everything on this one brilliant investor that I've met, I sort of go back and I think about Templeton, I think if someone is smart with Templeton

Starting point is 00:25:05 who came first in his class at Yale, while also working full-time and having to pay his way through college. If someone as smart as him was wrong a third of the time, when he knew so much more than me, why would I have the arrogance to believe that I could pick the one great stop, the one great fun, the one country? And so in some ways, the fact that I didn't particularly warm to him and the fact that I had this slightly contentious day with him

Starting point is 00:25:35 where I felt at certain points that he was whacking me around the head being wrong about things. Actually, it has been really helpful for me because it's forced me to keep wrestling with what he was trying to teach me. It was an uncomfortable experience interviewing him in some ways. But I think he challenged me to think differently and to be aware of my own blind spots, the fact that I was so judgmental. That simple awareness that he had, which is such total common sense,

Starting point is 00:26:01 that you shouldn't overestimate your own abilities, has enormous implications, I think, for all of us that's in about. William, thank you for sharing your experiences with Templeton. Let's fast forward, 21 years. You spoke to the best investors throughout COVID, and of course, hindsight is always 2020. Today we talk about how evident it was that the global markets would be supported after the first crashed. But as it happened, at least to me and to many of our listeners, it wasn't clear at all that

Starting point is 00:26:34 the market would behave that way. I think if you came from outer space and you were told like there was this crazy pandemic killing millions of people, you probably wouldn't be thinking that the stock might would soar. You would probably think something very different. So knowing that you wrote a lot of your book in 2020 and through the pandemic, do you have a fun story of how it was to speak to the best investors during such a challenging time? It was a huge challenge actually adapting for me as an author to what happened with COVID. I had written and reported much of the book before that.

Starting point is 00:27:10 And then, you know, there was pressure just to kind of get it to the publisher, get it to the market. And I actually kind of insanely decided, no, I'm going to go back and interview all of these key people again and talk to them about how they're adjusting to this, because this is such a seismic, apoccal event that I want to see how they react to it, because that really tells you an enormous amount about who they are. So I went back and interviewed about 16 of the major characters in the book. to figure out how they were adapting to COVID.

Starting point is 00:27:39 And what really fascinated me was that they all reacted in ways that were totally and utterly characteristic of who they were. So, you know, to give you one example, Monish Pavry, who I know you've had on your show multiple times, who's a very brilliant, not particularly emotional, stunning game player, brilliant, calculating the odds of things and winning this game with investing. He didn't get upset about COVID at all. He's looking at this thinking, okay, how do I play this game?

Starting point is 00:28:05 And he spent years not investing in the US. He hadn't found a single stock in the US for a couple of years. And then in the midst of COVID, CERTage Growth Properties, which I have to dispose, I actually own because I clone monies, the ultimate cloner, Seritage growth properties was this mall operator. And so you can imagine the absolute worst thing in life you want to own in the midst of the COVID crisis, when all of the retail malls are closing, is a company that owns, you know, whatever it is, 80 malls around the US. And so the stock just collapses. The Monash goes in and

Starting point is 00:28:40 buys 13% of Ceretic, which has since gone up, 120% something like that since last spring. So that was kind of quintessential Monash, right? It's all the game. Here's this disruption that provides this extraordinary opportunity. Then I look at someone like Tom Gaynor, who hopefully we'll talk about more later, who's an extraordinary guy who runs the Markell Corporation, which he really wants to be this kind of iconic corporation that's a kind of role model to people for how to behave. So I asked Tom, are you hiding out at home? Are you working from home?

Starting point is 00:29:14 And he's like, no, because we have all of these employees who are out on the front line who are exposed. And so how can I ask them to expose themselves and just be hiding out at home? So he was going in every day to work. He would wear his mask and there were only eight or ten people in headquarters. So they were being very careful because he was a very prudent guy. he was really trying to be a role model, which is what he is in life.

Starting point is 00:29:35 He's like Arnold Vanneberg. He's a fantastic human being who is a role model. And so that was how he reacted to COVID. And then the third person I'll mention, who in some ways was the most fascinating of all, was Ed Thorpe, who I described in the book of probably the greatest game player in the history of investing. And Ed, who's now in his mid-eight is, is just total genius, right? Utterly brilliant guy. He's the guy who figured out how to count cards.

Starting point is 00:30:01 he figured out how to beat the market first of blackjack and then at roulette. He actually, he and this partner of his at MIT, created this, the first wearable computer and he would activate it with the big toe inside his shoe. So he could calculate the speed of the roulette wheel. So he could figure out where, based on the velocity of the ball and the speed of the roulette wheel, where the ball was more likely to land. So he actually even managed to win a roulette. And then he had this hedge fund that didn't really.

Starting point is 00:30:31 with money in a single quarter of a 20 years. I called a thought back during COVID, and I said, how have you dealt with this? How do you see this rationally and objectively? And he sort of pausing me, he said, thank you for asking. And he then launches into this amazing explanation of how he dealt with it. And basically, you have this guy who's the ultimate game player, the ultimate calculator of odds. And he explained to me how from the very start when there hadn't been a single death in the US, not one death reported. He basically calculates the true fatality rate of COVID based on unreported deaths. He paid particular attention to unreported deaths. He's getting all of the data from Wuhan and China and analyzing it. And he figures out before a single death has been reported

Starting point is 00:31:18 in the US, that there are going to be 200,000 to 500,000 deaths in the US over the next 12 months. he calls his family together, I think, in February 2020, and he said, this is what's going to happen. We need to get supplies now. Let's get masks. Let's get detergent. Let's get all of the supplies that suddenly a month or so later everyone else realized were important and couldn't get because the stores had been cleaned out. And you know what he does? He literally places himself in isolation with his wife and decides, no, I'm not going to talk to anybody.

Starting point is 00:31:53 I'll see my kids outside with masks on, but that's it. And he calculates his own risk of dying of COVID. He's the only person I've ever met who literally has calculated the percentage chances of dying if he contracts COVID. I thought what was really fascinating is you have the ultimate game player, figuring out the odds, looking at the evidence independently, weighing the evidence, and that this is so typical of the way that he approaches life. So he said to me, when there's something important in life, you need to check the evidence

Starting point is 00:32:23 to yourself. You need to think independently. That was the case with the way that he gambled in casinos where he said, you know, all of the experts said you can't actually win a blackjack. You can't beat the casino of blackjack. And he's like, I checked to see if that was true. And he figured out that it wasn't true. He figured out how to count cards. He did the same thing with roulette by giving himself the extra information by calculating the velocity of the wheel. So he's actually able to give himself a tiny edge. And here again with COVID, he's giving himself an edge. He said, look, I'm not going to get scared.

Starting point is 00:32:56 There's no point being scared. That doesn't help me. But I'm increasing my odds that I'm going to survive. And I thought that was so emblematic of the way that the best investors think. They're always trying to put the odds on their side. They're thinking probabilistically at all times. And one of the single most important lessons I've learned from the greatest investors, not least from Ed Thorpe, is that you just have to survive catastrophe.

Starting point is 00:33:23 you have to avoid catastrophes and stay in the game. And COVID in a way is the ultimate example of that. If you can possibly maximize your chances of staying in the game and just not getting it, or just not getting it badly, or just not dying, that's pretty important. And so over the last year where I've been really, really careful, I think constantly about Ed Thorpe. And it's sort of a check for me to be able to think every time I want to run out and do something stupid. I'm like, well, how seriously should I take this? Well, here's what Ed told me.

Starting point is 00:33:56 And so I think that's one of the great ways that we can use the best investors is to kind of think about what's the rational approach to this? There's the irrational approach to dealing with COVID, which is, yeah, let it rip. Let me just go out without my mask, have as much fun as possible, go to a bar. And then there's the rational approach, which is Ed Thorpe thinking, well, I have no comorbidities, but I am 84 and I am vulnerable and here's how I need to I think that ability just to look at the data, look at the numbers, analyze things independently, think for yourself, is so essential in life.

Starting point is 00:34:31 And it was really wonderful for me to see that that applies whether you're trying to win a blackjack, trying to win in the stock market, or trying to survive COVID. For audience listening to this, they might be thinking, I'm not Monish Paprai. I'm not at Thorpe. And I can testify to that. Speaking of Monish, we always bring him on on the first weekend of May whenever there's the Brexit weekend. It's always pre-recorded, but we launched it that weekend.

Starting point is 00:34:58 So that would be two weeks from whenever you're listening to this episode here with William. And no disrespect to our mutual good friend, Manish, whenever I'm saying this or to any of other guests, but whenever I'm asked by all audience, like, who's the smartest guy you've talked to? I often come back to at Thorpe, which is surprised a lot of people because as much as he was so unique, so successful, for different reasons, also because he's a very private person, he doesn't have the need for glamour as some other investors probably have. So a lot of people just don't even know about him. And whenever you talk about, you know, how he tried to,

Starting point is 00:35:34 he went to Vegas and like, there was the time whenever the mob was running the city and all that people sort of like get the wrong impression of him. But like he was so much like ahead of his time, not just whenever it came to gambling, but like he says himself, then he turned into options trading, coming up with Black Shoals, before Blacks Yoles, and how he made a ton of money on that. And so he's just such a fascinating person. And whenever you speak to him, not only does he look 20 years younger than what he is, but he's one of those people where he sort of just feel like he's just going on a different level than the rest of us. And even some of the great investors that we had on. So, you know, some on Listers might be thinking, well, William, I'm

Starting point is 00:36:13 reading your book. I'm not Munch. I'm not at Thorpe. They're just wired different. than what I am. And I would say that one of the people who probably seemed a bit more reachable, at least for me and perhaps also for the listeners, were someone like Tom Gainer, which we just had on here some weeks ago. And I don't want this to come off as Tom Gainer is not super smart. I think everyone who's speaking with with Tom Gainer would say he's brilliant, right? I think that one of the things that was really neat about hearing from him was that it sort of came down to habits to some extent. It was about what you could control. It was not necessarily being wired too differently, even though I would argue that someone is smart as Tom might be wired differently.

Starting point is 00:36:57 And so, could you talk to us about how Tom is as a person and how his habits have helped him achieve such an outstanding long-term track record? I think it's a very perceptive comment on your part. Tom is highly intelligent, but I think there's a difference between regular human beings. from people like Edgalli Munger, Bill Miller, Jeff Gunlack, who I think are just, you know, we're all people I've interviewed a lot, and they're all just operating in a different realm. And whatever I try to do, I'm just not going to be smart as those guys. And so one of the first rules of investing, I think, is to be self-aware

Starting point is 00:37:37 and to know what game you need to play based on your skills, your talent, your knowledge. There are so many things about Tom Garner that I admire. one of the things I admire most is that he's what I would call the patron saint of steady progress. He's not setting out to hit the ball a mile out of the park by betting on one stock or working unbelievably hard for 13 years and then retiring from the business. He's winning this game over 30, 40, 50, 60 years. So for regular investors like us, I think, you know, who maybe aren't wired to be superstars. I mean, some of the people listening to this podcast are glad to be superstars and great. Go figure out how to be Monich and how to be Bill Miller and how to be Edgill.

Starting point is 00:38:26 I think Tom Gaynor is an extraordinary role model. One of the things that struck me, there's a beautiful metaphor for how he approach his life, is the way that he actually approaches weight control and exercise. He mentioned to me that when he started at Markell managing their investment portfolio at the age of, I think, 28, he weighed about 190 pounds. And gradually because he sort of sat around just reading about stocks and companies and thinking, his weight just gradually drifted up north of 200 pounds. And at a certain point, he said, I'm going to lose one pound a year for the next 10 years, which sounds like an absurdly unambitious goal. But it turns out that most people put on, most men, anyway, middle-aged men, as I can attest, put on one to two pounds a year. And so what Tom figured out is these small incremental improvements add up over time.

Starting point is 00:39:20 And if instead of putting on two pounds a year, I lose one pound a year and I do it over 10 years, that's actually massively powerful. And he did the same with running. He starts running five minutes a day. He hates running. He starts running five minutes a day every week, then does 10 minutes a day in the name. next week, 15 minutes a day for the next, 20 minutes a day for the next week. And what he said to me is, but at some point, you bedded down this habit. You know, you baby stepped your way into this habit. He said to me, the secret of success, both in investing and life, is just to be a little

Starting point is 00:39:51 better than you were the previous day. And so it's that steady, dogged persistence that actually over 30 years means that he's now lighter than he was when he started at 28 at Mark Al. He told me, yeah, today I was 189.6. So here he was sort of 30 years after he started there. And he'd actually managed to keep his weight down, which kind of triumphant. What's interesting is that if you apply this same sort of metaphor for seeing the world to investing, you actually see exactly the same process that's steady compounding growth in what's happened with his portfolio at Markell. So when I last checked about it probably a year ago on the performance of his investment portfolio within Markell,

Starting point is 00:40:34 He'd average 12.5% a year for 29 years. The stock market heard average, the S&P 500 is average, I think, 11.4%. So at that rate, it doesn't sound extraordinary, right? I mean, so he'd beaten the market by 1.1 percentage points over 29 years. But he'd actually, if you calculate, that means that a million dollars turned into 34 million dollars. That's really worth causing and internalizing. 12.5% a year over 29 years under million dollars into $34 million. million. Whereas the S&P, I think, went up about, he would have made about $25 million,

Starting point is 00:41:10 $1 million turns into $25 million. So that's a relatively small margin of outperformance that was worth basically $9 million in increased gains. And he's taking much less risk than most people. And at the same time, Markell's stock has done much the same. So Markell has just gradually, gradually grown through this kind of steady compounding, steady improvement day by day by day. So Markell went public in 1986 had a $40 million market cap. Now it's about $16 billion. The stock has gone up 137 fold since then. What Tom said to me is, look, it's the same process.

Starting point is 00:41:48 It's steady compound. It's the avoidance of catastrophe along the way. And so for me, this is an incredibly powerful lesson, both for investing in life, that I don't actually need to be extreme. I don't need to suddenly start starving myself to lose 20 pounds. I need to cut 300 calories a day or I need to use a Peloton bike every day or five times a week or whatever. I think you basically do 150 minutes of exercise a week and you get 80 or so percent of all the benefits of exercise. So you don't have to be extreme.

Starting point is 00:42:21 Tom used this beautiful phrase with me where he said, he said, I'm radically moderate. And I actually think there's a tremendous profundity to this. And I talk about it with my kids a lot. I have a 19-year-old daughter and a 22-year-old son. We often talk about this idea of being directionally correct, which is Tom's phrase. So you're not trying to be extreme. You're not trying to hit the ball out of the park. You're trying to adopt habits that are directionally correct.

Starting point is 00:42:48 And so that applies really to it applies to exercise. It applies to nutrition. It applies to working hard in your career. It applies to being a continuous learner like Buffett or like Tom Gaynor. And what fascinated me with Tom is that here you have this regular human being, highly intelligent, highly disciplined, just with this fanatical commitment to dogged persistent incremental progress. And when you look back 30 years later of what he's done at Markell, and you look back at the type of person who he's become, you see the astonishing rewards of that kind of incremental steady progress. And that's wonderfully inspiring because actually what it means is that if you and I set out to be just pretty disciplined, but continually getting better of whatever we do, continually learning, that's hugely powerful over time.

Starting point is 00:43:39 And I think this idea of success actually being the result of small incremental gains sustained over time is a very difficult one for most people to get because you don't you don't see the right. rewards in the short term. So there's almost a leak of faith. You have to think, well, this is probably true. Let me do this 40-year experiment. And I think what's fascinating with someone like Tom Giner is that you see, well, the experiment work. And that's so true. I think for all listeners, we always were back to wealth. And, you know, Warren Buffett is famous for saying you just have to be slightly better than average and then just do it for a very, very long time. We can calculate how that would be. And I think the point, you're really getting at here is that that's a principle compounding anything in life.

Starting point is 00:44:28 We don't have to talk about money. It could be wisdom. It could be health. It could be so many things. So I really like how you're phrasing it to your kids whenever we're talking about being radical, modest. We're not looking to be extreme in any direction. As much as 40 years experiment might sound discourage to a lot of people.

Starting point is 00:44:48 I hope that they hear it and think it's actually the opposite. What should be discouraging is doing something like, you know, you know, but it's not. You have to do this program and then you will lose 80 pounds in like 42 weeks. That's hard. But like you mentioned, one pound every single year or every six months or whatever it is just over a very, very long time. That might be a more encouraging goal to set for ourselves. It's another thing that Tom Ginnett said to me that sounds so mundane and trivial and yet

Starting point is 00:45:18 actually is really profound and applies to everything in life. He said to me, unless he's traveling, which he does quite a lot in normal time, he weighs himself every single day. And he said, the reason I do that is because if I don't get massively off track, then I'm kind of okay because it's really hard to get yourself back on track. But he said, if I put it on a couple of pounds, then I'll just work out a little more and I'll be a little more careful about what I eat. And he said, that's basically how I approach the whole of life is just try not to get massively off track because, you know, If you can basically remain centered and not have to go back to go the whole time, you're going to win over the long term. And if you apply that to investing as well, you just don't want to have catastrophe. If you get knocked out of the game by losing 70% or 80% or something off something bad, it's so difficult to go back to go and recoup those gains.

Starting point is 00:46:14 And so this idea of not trying to be extreme, but of trying to have consistent improvement over many years without the catastrophe. of, say, you know, as Ed Thorpe was saying about COVID, you know, if you survive, Matthew McClennon, also another brilliant investment, who manages over $100 million, said to me, you have to survive the dips. This idea of just kind of remaining in the game and consistently improving and allowing compounding to do its magnificent work for you is so powerful. I think what I didn't understand earlier in my life, I felt like, well, I have to gamble. I have to be extreme.

Starting point is 00:46:52 I have to roll the dice. And maybe for some people, when they're young, that's the case. If you're starting out with nothing and you need to get a nesting, maybe that's smart. I don't know. In some cases, you know, if you're something like Joe Greenback, brilliant at trading options early on, maybe you can do that. But I think for most of it, just get into investing in stocks and then keep adding, keep learning, keep getting better and let compound do its work is so powerful.

Starting point is 00:47:20 It sounds so mundane. We resist the simple solution. But in investing, who knows, I joke in the book, it's not like Olympic diving where you get extra points for difficulty. And my friend Ken Schuvenzheimer, who was a very, very brilliant guy who was a very successful hedge fund manager, said to me, part of the problem is that highly intelligent people seek really complex, sophisticated solutions. And so you have all of these great investors who did incredibly well at school and were always

Starting point is 00:47:50 always afforded for solving difficult problems. And so when it comes to investing, they're like, well, this has to be a really difficult problem. And then you have someone like Buffett saying, yeah, I'm just trying to jump over two-inch hurdles or do two-inch cuts. And I think there's deep wisdom to that idea of actually trying to keep it simpler and trying to put these long-term forces like long-term compounding in your favor without disrupting through doing anything dramatic.

Starting point is 00:48:18 So what Tom Gana said to me is people get themselves in trouble with extremes. So I don't need to be extreme. And he said, over time, what you find that's really surprising is that you end up kind of becoming number one-ish, as he put it to me, because the competitive field just thins out so much. So the idea of simply trying to survive and endure and put this process of long-term compounding to work is so powerful. To me, that's kind of had a life-changing impact, just to understand.

Starting point is 00:48:46 and how people like Tom Gander are doing without disrupting that process. And I think that's a very profound, William, and something I would encourage all the listeners to do, because we also have to be mindful about that there is a survivor bias here in the show when we are studying successful investors. Now, I'm not one of those people, and I'm sure you are not either, William, knowing you for a long time. You don't believe in efficient market hypothesis. I'm not just saying that people like Warren Buffett, Monis Pop, right, they're just lucky.

Starting point is 00:49:14 That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is that if we look at people with a lot of wealth, by definition, they have to be concentrated. Because if they're concentrated, that's just the fast path to racks and to riches. So I think it's very important that as we study these people, that we just make sure to account for that, which is why I just found it so insightful to hear you describing, talking to Tom Gainer about how he's doing it. Because like money, he likes to quote Nick Slebe, and we feel like we get to talk to

Starting point is 00:49:45 talk about both monies and Nick Sleep later here today, but like he's saying that Nick Sleep has this thing about the greatest investors or entrepreneurs who doesn't sell. It was absolutely loved that quote, but if more than anything, then there's a survivor bias. You know, Mike Sagerberg looks like a genius because he was the one. He was smart, but you know, there was probably also an element of luck there. And because he didn't sell, he made a lot of money. You don't hear about all the people weren't Mark Sagoberg, but perhaps were as smart as him. So I just think that's an important thing just to keep in mind.

Starting point is 00:50:17 Guys, I mentioned the other day, he was on the phone. He said that he knows someone. I think this is a friend of his who is very wealthy successful hedge fund manager. He basically debt everything on one stock. And it went to hell. And everything went against him. And he's like, yeah, he runs a bar now. He's like, it's a really nice bar, but he runs a bar.

Starting point is 00:50:35 And so, you know, I think you want to remember when you're reading about all these great investors. You want to remember, yeah, but who were the ones who overreached? Who were the ones who messed up? And so I think one of the things, when you talk about concentration, which is such an important concept, because it's, as Templeton said to me, you have to diverge from the market in order to beat the market. So concentration is one of the great ways to do it. But then you look at someone like Tom Gaynor as a radical moderate.

Starting point is 00:51:02 Tom has much of his money, probably two-thirds of his money in his portfolio in the top 20 holding, which is relatively concentrated, but he actually owns a hundred stocks, or thereabouts, which is relatively diversified. And he's unapologetic about that. It's a sort of golden meme, as Aristotle would say. It's somewhere between both extremes of courageous and cowardly. And I think that's a really interesting dynamic tension there between having the courage to concentrate, which maximizes your chances of winning the game, and having the awareness of your own, limitations that lead you to diversify. And as with most things in life, both of those things are true, even though they're the opposite. We say the F. Scott Fitzgerald, I said, I think, said that a sign of intelligence be able to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time.

Starting point is 00:51:57 And I think what someone like Tom Gainer is able to do because he's a, because he's a very reasonable, sensible and measured human being is to hold these. two opposites in his mind, concentration and diversification. He invested in things like Amazon, Google and Facebook, but he didn't invest that much because he wasn't certain how he could value them. He wasn't certain if they were cheap enough. And so he was exposed to that sector of the market, but he didn't go crazy. A dollar cost averaged his way in. I think that's a, he's an extraordinarily good model for us, unless we haven't had the super skills of a Bill Miller or a Charlie Munger says, you know, yeah, you can have a well-diversified portfolio with three or four stocks.

Starting point is 00:52:44 But I can't because I'm not Charlie Munger. Right. I think that's such a good point because, you know, as you may remember, Buffett and Munger were asked about placing big bets and Buffett said, you know, any reasonable investor should invest up to 70% in one. And then Munger tried for that and said, well, back in my early days, I was more than 100% in the real estate project. And that was including leverage. Like, it was back in the old days in California, whenever he was developing properties out there. But whenever I listened to that, I was like,

Starting point is 00:53:16 I was a bit taken back and it was a bit discouraged. But then I came back to what you were saying before here, William Ware said, that's probably a true statement if you were a Charlie Munger and if you're Warren Buffett. But for the rest of us, probably don't put 70% in the same stock in your portfolio. And so it's just very important to think about that. And you know, Whenever you go into that aroma, whatever you're doing and you're checking out those quote-unquote super investors, it's just very evident to see different approaches. And someone like Tom Gainer, I think it's as much as you're talking about, that's being diverse. And I think it is to many people.

Starting point is 00:53:53 We also have a bunch of people who only invest in index funds. And for them, it might seem concentrated. Then we have, you know, the die-hard value investors. And they're like, if I, they would take Monis Pop Rice, it pays from his book and saying, you know, you only place 10% bets. And for him, that's a small bet because it used to be much more. But because of Horset Holdings, a few other things that he made it was just playing mistakes. He's now, I'm humble, I don't want to bet too big, I'm just doing 10% per position now,

Starting point is 00:54:23 which probably sounds ludicrous. That may be a cost that it's 10%. But if something is a big winner, he allows it to get enormous. And I think I have a huge admiration for mine. He's brilliant. And if I were Monash, I might take those ribs. But as I point out in the book, Guy Speer owns a lot of the same stock with Monash because they talk a lot about these things. But Guy said to me, look, I don't have balls of steel like Monash.

Starting point is 00:54:49 And so I really have to invest in a way that's comfortable for me. I invest in Guy's funds for more than 20 years, right? And one of the reasons is that his temperament is closer to mind. He's a little bit more fearful. well, a lot more fearful than Monash. And I'm slightly fearful as well. I want to survive. And I feel like Guy is likely to survive because he's very conservative.

Starting point is 00:55:15 And so I think one of the, I'm not saying this is an adult businessman, the guy, although he's a close friend of mine. I think the real point is you have to know yourself. You have to be not self-deluded about your ability to handle pain, stress, and volatility. one of the most important rules in investing is just to invest in a way that suits your own temperament so that when things go wrong and the market is collapsing, you're not going to do anything super irrational. It's going to knock you out of the game. And likewise, when things are getting kind of heavy and everything surging,

Starting point is 00:55:52 you kind of need to know that you're still going to be people around about it. I don't know. I once set in on a close, what did it across, a Columbia business movement? my friend Ken Schuvenstein was teaching on a box investment research. And he used to get these incredible investors to come in. And one of them was a very well-known investor who was talking, you know, not to be quoted publicly. So I won't name him.

Starting point is 00:56:13 But he invested in a fund. And he said, one of the reasons why I do that is that I'm hedging against myself. I thought that was such a wonderful insight that here you have this brilliant guy who's got an incredible record. He was managing a family office at that point. And yet he was hedging against himself. And so he had this, this awareness. of his own fallibility that made him just have this insurance policy.

Starting point is 00:56:35 But I think for all of us, that kind of self-awareness about our own fallibility, our ability to be wrong, our ability to overreach. Howard Mark said to me, look, I'm inclined to be a little bit of a chicken. I'm kind of fearful. And so during the financial crisis, I had to remind myself that my investors are paying for me to be prudent, but they're not paying for me to be a chicken. And so he invested, I think he said to me, over 15 weeks, he and his investment. partner, Bruce Kush, invested five or six hundred million dollars a week while the market

Starting point is 00:57:06 was collapsing, which doesn't sound like a very fearful human being at work, but he was aware that his filter is to see the world who are slightly cautious, slightly nervous perspective. He has to compensate it. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer. VANTA automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered platform. So whether you're

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Starting point is 01:00:43 insightful whenever you're talking about, you know, hedging against yourself. We study a lot of different things here on the show, and we also study biases. And I can't help but mention that there are some people who have a hard time realizing that they're wrong. And it's typically men. It's simply the better educated they are, the harder they have, acknowledging that they're making a mistake. And it's also the more money than they make. So there are different characteristics. You can just tell why something like long-term capital management that banged up 1998, why that blew up, because you just have these characteristics. And, you know, the financial world is filled well, highly educated men making a lot of money, not being able to hedge against

Starting point is 01:01:22 themselves because, you know, they are quote-unquote always right and they don't know whenever they're wrong, which again takes me back to this survivor bias that we have, you know, studying these fantastic investors. Like, yes, they have been very concentrated and yes, it seems like a concentrated strategy is the right strategy for them, or perhaps they were an element of luck. And it sort of like takes me to the next question that I had about show Marie Yves-Long. This is a guy that we haven't talked too much about here on the show. And what you describe in your book is something that happened in the late 1990s. Let me just set the scene. So if a lot, like many other value investors, performed poorly in that time period, you know,

Starting point is 01:02:01 this was the time whenever the dot-com Bob was building. And it was a very troubling time for him, not just professionally, but also personally. And perhaps many value investors feel the same way today. What happened, William? John Marie Evayat is this French-born value investor. Many of our middle-Aish and older listeners will remember well. John Marie had extraordinary returns for about 18 years, and he built this tiny fund from, I think, something like $15 million to he had about $6 billion in assets. And then he has these three terrible years in the late 90s.

Starting point is 01:02:40 So from about 1997 to 2000, terrible years of underperformance. the dot-com bubble was heating up and everyone was investing in these crazy telecom and internet stock, were just sort of soaring. You would have a company would go public and would go up 600% on the first day of the IPO. And here you have John Mary as this as this guy who literally described himself when he when he first read Ben Graham's book. He said, I was illuminated by Ben Graham. And he compared it to actually this religious conversion of a French writer, Hordel, who stood in Notre Dame Cathedral and found God. And so, you know, here was Jean-Marie, found his financial god in Ben Graham and decided, no, I'm going to invest

Starting point is 01:03:23 with Graham's principles of always wanting the margin of safety, always wanting to buy things that are 30, 40, 40, 50 percent discounted their net asset value, not going to get caught up in fads. And they served him brilliantly for 18 years, suddenly in this crazy market, which I guess we've seen a little bit lately, he looks so hopelessly fossilized, so hopelessly wrong. And he said, he had this wonderful quote. He said to me, after one year your shareholders are upset. After two years of London performance, they're furious, and after three years they're gone, which is exactly what happened to him.

Starting point is 01:03:56 So his $6 billion in assets suddenly goes down to something like $2 billion. And you can imagine all of the people on the business side of his company, which in those days was owned by Societe General, this big French bank, They were saying, well, what are you thinking? Why aren't you buying any of these tech and internet stocks? How come you don't see what everybody else can see? Which is this new era and this new paradigm. He said, I look at myself and say, why don't I see it?

Starting point is 01:04:22 Why can't I see what they're seeing? And he told me this extraordinary story where he said, one of the executives, Societor General, he had described Jean-Marie as half-seignele. And John Mary, I think, was 58 or 59 of the time. He went home and he said to his wife. who's this sort of tough-minded investment banker. He said, I heard that they said I was hot seen up.

Starting point is 01:04:44 And he said, she looked up with one eye over the newspaper and said, only half. And tremendous pressure internally within the company, where the board started to say, why aren't you doing this? The shareholders started to bail out. I think what's really interesting to me is that there are these internal and external pressure that make you do stupid things,

Starting point is 01:05:06 that are the enemies of resilience. And so many people at that time were saying, well, you know, everybody else is seeing this, everybody else is making so much money. Let me just do this. Let me roll the dice. And then you have someone like Jean-Marie Elliott. He was so stubborn, so indomitable,

Starting point is 01:05:23 that he simply said, I'm not only any of this stuff. And it was exactly what he had done in Japan in the late 80s, when I think by about 1989, the Japanese stock market was so overvalued. It actually had a bigger market captain, the US and UK markets combined. And he in about 1988, I think, didn't own a single Japanese stock, which were an international investor at a time in the middle of this fad, where everyone in Japan, was unbelievably stubborn, unbelievably independent-minded. So he almost lost control of

Starting point is 01:05:54 his fund, Societre General, during the tech bubble. And they ended up basically, as a big French bank, they didn't want to do anything too tackless and too mean. You know, he said to me, usually when you, when you fail, they would just sort of put you in a little office on your own so you wouldn't make any trouble. And so they found this kind of tactful way to get rid of him. So they sold his firm to his investment firm to another company called Anholz-Waichroda, an absolute pittance. And the timing was just sort of comically awful. So this was, I think the deal went through in about January 2000. And in March 2000, the bubble wars. So you had things like Cisco, which had been, you know, had gone from, say, $100 billion.

Starting point is 01:06:35 market cap to a 500 billion market cap in less than 500 days, suddenly lose 80 or so percent of its value very, very quickly. And so all of those heroes who've been kind of recklessly investing in the tech level were just washed out. And then Jean-Marie wins Morningstar's Manager of the Year award because suddenly he starts to out perform massively over the next three, four years. And a couple of years later wins the inaugural lifetime achievement from Morningstar for having gone it against consensus, as they put it, and exercise tremendous prudence on behalf of his shareholders. And the assets which had come down from $6 billion to $2 billion in this firm ended up actually soaring to over $100 billion. So for me, Evayor's story is a fantastic morality about all

Starting point is 01:07:22 of the forces that conspired to destroy resilience. And it's very easy to look back off at a great record of a great investor. And it was almost inevitable. And I thought what was kind of fascinating about going back and seeing how he dealt with this hellish period was that you could see just how easily it could have got away from him. He really thought he might be fired in 1999, might lose control, he might not stay in the game. I think one of the morals for regular investors like us is that we do have one tremendous advantage, which is that we don't have shareholders who can yank their money at any point. And I think that's one of the tremendous advantages that Berkshire Hathaway has is that it has permanent capital. And so Buffett and Munger are able to make

Starting point is 01:08:07 really smart long-term decisions in the midst of a bubble or in the midst of a crisis without actually worrying about their board members or their shareholders or anyone else complaining. Everyone complains everyone for at least the last 25 years. Everyone has said Buffett had lost his touch. And he just keeps fucking away doing the right thing, being smart. And I think that ability to structure your life and your investment so that you have control, so that you're not going to get washed out or forced to do something stupid at the worst possible moment is incredibly important. And so things like just as Buffett would say, you know, never being dependent on the kindness of strangers, you know, just having enough money and cash and not enough and not so much

Starting point is 01:08:53 leverage that you'll get forced out of the game at the wrong point is really key. And Evayard talked to me about in some ways how jealousy was at Buffett. I wanted to talk about Joe Greenblatt and Nick Sleep. Besides being great investors, they also have in common that they have returned their investors money, something that they, by the way, having come with Warren Buffett. But it's something that most asset managers would hardly ever consider. And I always find it fascinating that asset managers make that decision since they're basically saying goodbye to a lot of money that they could pocket themselves.

Starting point is 01:09:27 This weren't necessarily the case for Joe Greenblatt and Nick Sleep, but traditionally in the States, two-third of the revenue that they're generating for their funds, the asset managers, that is, that comes from fees, that doesn't come from performance. And it's looking to become more and more prevalent that it comes almost entirely from fees, especially given the interest rate environment that we end. But staying here on topic, one of the things I also find fascinating is that why do these asset managers want to take on that stress in the first place? We have to consider that many successful asset managers are typically financially independent, and they don't need to manage money to sustain their lifestyle.

Starting point is 01:10:03 So could you please talk to us about the considerations that people like Joe Greenblatt and Nick Sleep are having whenever they make the decision to either up in or up out of the game of asset management for clients? Joe Greenblatt is a remarkable example of hugely successful investor who kept his ego under control and as a result was able to do things that maybe some very successful money managers weren't able to do. Just to introduce Joel, I've interviewed several times, and the most memorable in a way was going out to his house in the Hamptons and seeing he's got this exquisite view of the ocean. And he's got this beautiful lawn there with a basketball hoop and a pool and surfboards.

Starting point is 01:10:46 And, you know, he's there sort of looking really healthy just on the brink with sick-year birthday, sun-tanned, relax with his sleeves rolled up. And he's wearing these beautiful, they're the little loafers with bare feet. And I just thought all of these sort of aspiring plutocrats on Wall Street are like sweating it out in there. in skyscrapers down on Wall Street. And here's Joel who just won the game. And it's just quietly here sitting with his beautiful furniture outside, overlooking the ocean. Since I described Joel as kind of a giant among giants.

Starting point is 01:11:14 And he's also charming and he's likable and he's a great writer and he has five kids and he's a couple of dogs. And he's kind of an image of success for me in many ways. And Joel had this spectacular record of Gotham Capital where basically over 20 years, he averaged 40% a year, I think, after expenses before fees. The miracle of compounding is such that that actually means you're turning a million dollars into $836 million, which is quite a feat. There's no doubt that Joe is one of the giants of the field.

Starting point is 01:11:47 What's interesting is that after about five years, he returned half of the invest in money. And after 10 years, he and at that point, his partner, Robert Goldstein, who came on a little after, returned the rest of the money. And so from that point on, they were just answerable to know it, not vulnerable to the winds of shareholders, as we discussed with John May Everiard. They just could do whatever they'd walk with, right? And I think that gave him tremendous freedom. So when I said to him, can you explain to me how you were possibly able to pull this off and have such an enormously successful run over those 20 years, he said, well, the first thing is, we remain small. And I think, you know, one of the things that this enabled,

Starting point is 01:12:28 him to do, I think at his peak. When he returned that money, they only had about 300 million in assets. So he said to me, look, we could have basically any amount that we wanted. They could have had a multi-billion dollar fund, which would have given him enormous fees. But he wasn't really drawn to maximizing his own wealth. He said to me, you know, money's fine. I have nothing against having money. I have to be rich. But he said, I'm really, it's not really what ultimately me motivates me as solving problems. And so I regard him as a codebreaker who was really interested in the game of investing. It was an intellectual pursuit. It wasn't about becoming as rich as possible. So he figured out, well, I'm much more likely to win this game if I remain

Starting point is 01:13:15 small and nimble than if I have a big bloated fund that's hard to maneuver. And so, for example, in 1993, there was this investment that he made that, you know, he described as kind of the ultimate investment, kind of the perfect investment, where there was a spin-off where Marriott hotels were splitting up and it spun off post-Mario in about 1993 and everybody hated post-Mario. It just looked. It was full of toxic properties. It just looked awful. And he analyzes it and he realizes that it's just the most unbelievable mispriced gamble and that, you know, nobody's going to look at it because it's so small that most institutional investors couldn't bet on it and it was so toxic that nobody is going to want to have it in their portfolio and have people

Starting point is 01:14:00 sort of say, really, you invested in that. And because he's independent, answerable to no one, only managing his money and his family's money and his partner with Robert Goldstein's money, he can do whatever the hell he wants. So he actually invested 40% of his assets in this tiny little toxic spin-off that everyone hates because basically he said to me, well, look, it was trading at $4 a share. And I can see that it has $6 a share. of assets that are totally unencumbered by debt. And then they have this subsidiary that had lots of debt and might be worth nothing, but I might actually be worth an enormous amount. And I'm getting that for free. And so he said, because I couldn't lose money, that's why I was

Starting point is 01:14:40 prepared to bet so much. So that's, so he said, I'm not betting an enormous amount because I can make any other gains. I'm betting an enormous amount because I can't lose. And so he said, if you're not going to lose, basically all of the other options are good. And so if you think about the boldness of that move, putting 40% in a single stock, which I think tripled over the next few months, that's something that you could never do if you were investing outside his money. And he said that, you know, he had much of his money usually in six to eight positions. He would usually have about 80% of his funds assets in six to eight position. And so he said, you would have times where you'd lose 20, 30% of the value of your portfolio

Starting point is 01:15:22 in a matter of days every two or three years. So he said, but the average investor, they simply can't handle that level of volatility. But he said, for him, that's just fine. He can handle that volatility because he knows what he earns. He understands why it's cheap, why it's undervalue. So I think for someone like Joe Greenblatt, the fact that he returned all of that money

Starting point is 01:15:43 meant that he could remain small, make these very aggressive bets, meant that he could handle volatility without anyone questioning him. And it meant that he meant that. that he was simply answerable to nobody, which seems to me almost the ultimate luxury for a lot of these investments. And it always confuses me in a way by people who are already rich or enormously rich in

Starting point is 01:16:06 some of these cases, want to give up their freedom and be answerable to board members and shareholders and have them all questioning them and criticizing them. And it seems to me that the ultimate luxury is to be able to say, no, no, no, this is how I play this game and I'm just going to, I'm just going to do it and I don't need to maximize assets. I'm just going to win the game and crack the code. I think that's something that Joe Greenblatt, power I, and sweet, they all have in common that they're kind of these brilliant game players, these brilliant code breakers. They're not managing their money to maximize fees and maximize the amount of assets under management so that, you know, in some way that

Starting point is 01:16:48 feed their ego. They all have ego and they're, you know, they're probably happy to be recognized as geniuses, and probably happy to have people throw billions of dollars with them, and probably happy to make more money for themselves or fees. But it's not, it's not the ultimate goal of the game for them. So I think having your ego under control in that way and understanding the size of assets is a huge anchor, I think that's very important. It's also about how you play the game. You know, you mentioned Manish. He's very adamant about he has structured his fund. He doesn't want to speak to investors other than one day a year. He's very upfront with that. He doesn't want to answer to anyone. I also think that's also an important

Starting point is 01:17:28 thing to say whenever you're talking about this. Managing money can be extremely stressful, perhaps not this time around. And perhaps we could actually transition into the story with Bill Miller and what happened during the Great Recession with him. You can just structure yourself many different ways whenever you're managing money. And like you're saying, William, it is sort of puzzling that you would have people worth hundreds of millions of dollars, even billions of dollars, and they are sort of like living through that stress, even though that they could up out of that, which always puzzled me. And I think one of the reasons why they're doing it might be that they're just so competitive and they just so much enjoy the game of compounding wealth, not because

Starting point is 01:18:09 it's wealth, because it's a number, it's fun growing numbers, that even though you could say, just stop, you're destroying yourself with that. They're just committed to that. That's just been their habit now. But William, you've interviewed Bill and spoke to him so many times and know him so well. What did Bill Miller go through during the Great Recession? I once worked out that I think I've interviewed Bill somewhere between 80 and 100 hours over the years, because maybe about 20 years ago, I did a profile of Bill, maybe a eight, nine page profile of Bill for Fortune when he was first investing in Amazon and everybody thought he was a moron for doing so that it was just going to go bankrupt any day. And so I've been

Starting point is 01:18:55 in kind of a 20-year conversation with Bill. And one of the benefits of that is a tremendous amount of trust that you build up over a long time. So when a financial crisis happened that he just got eviscerated, I was able to go visit him in Baltimore and kind of ask him pretty personal questions about what it was like. And Bill, to his great credit, was unbelievably candid about what it was like emotionally, intellectually, in every sense. And so as one of the great contrarian investors, Bill had always benefited by utterly unemotional when other people were panicking. And his default position had always been to buy whatever was most hated. He just assumed that the crowd was wrong and that they were based on behavioral finance.

Starting point is 01:19:43 that we know that people overreact bad news recall. So when I first was interviewing him back in about 2000, I remember he had invested something like $50 million in a company called AES. And I was with him at his alma mater. We'd kind of, we'd flown in on his private plane, which he had because he had this 110 pound wolf found that he liked him, like, oh, that wasn't on that trip. And I remember standing with him at his alma market and calls his office in Baltimore and says,

Starting point is 01:20:09 what news? And they said, well, AES has collapsed. They just missed their earnings. estimates and he basically, maybe he'd bet a hundred million dollars and he lost 50 million before lunch time I figured out. And he just immediately said to them, double the bet, double the bet. And he said, I'm going to figure out later what's going on. But my default position is double a bet because people are overreacting with it. And this could be the thing that leads my tremendous outperformance. He'd had this kind of this habit again and again that could work. And then the

Starting point is 01:20:37 financial crisis comes along. And he does kind of the same thing. So all of these toxic stocks, that are melting down like Merrill Lynch, countrywide financial, all of the things you've least wanted to earn. He's learned the lesson from his boss that he's like, well, these are dead. Everyone hates them. People have overreacted. The Fed is going to come in and it's going to save the day. And these companies that are the most beaten up are actually going to rebound the most.

Starting point is 01:21:04 So he just loads up on all these stocks. And it turns out that this isn't a normal situation. And he said to me that basically he underestimated. his ability to be catastrophically wrong. So he'd made plenty of mistakes over the years, but he'd been right so many times that he said at a certain point it stops to seep in. Everyone's always telling you how brilliant you are.

Starting point is 01:21:23 He pulled off this unimaginable feat of beating the market for 15 years consecutively. And I think, you know, and he is truly brilliant. And I think he had started to believe in his own brilliance, even though intellectually he knew that he was vulnerable and he could fail. I think probably there's an element of hubris there. So then when the market tanked, when it really blew up, his smaller fund lost about 65%, I think, in the year.

Starting point is 01:21:48 But his bigger fund lost about 55%. And much the same has happened with Jean-Marie Evio. People just pulled out at the worst possible moment. So you had all of these people panicking. His assets went down from someone at $77 billion to, I think, $800 million. And so, you know, the worst thing, what Bill said to me was the worst thing was basically about 100 people not laid off from this company. like Mason because of my screw up. He's like, I screwed up and a hundred people lost their jobs.

Starting point is 01:22:17 That just tormented. And so he said to me, you know, look, I'm the son of a taxi driver. I grew up with nothing. To go to McDonald's on your birthday was an incredible treat. And so he said, I don't really mind losing my money. But to lose shareholders' money and have people lose their job because of me was just the torment. And so he was very candid. he said, look, I put on 40 pound period.

Starting point is 01:22:41 He said, I know I should be eating salmon and broccoli and drinking pariette, but he's like, you know, no, when I'm under stress, I'm going to eat Chinese food, you know, takeout and I'm going to drink wine. And he said, you know, he's like a person can only take so much pain. And so he's like, I'm certainly not going to eat salmon and broccoli. So I think it had an enormous toll on him. And this thing that I admire tremendously, among many things about Bill, I used to admire. tremendously the fact that he just has this exquisite mind. I mean, there's nobody more intellectually thrilling in dilute than Bill. He just has this beautiful, beautiful mind.

Starting point is 01:23:18 He collects ideas, and his mind is just utterly brilliant. And so I always admired him for that, really from the time I was about 30, when I first did interview him. And what I came to admire about him more and more was actually just the tremendous indomitability and honor and candor that he showed during the financial crisis. where everything fell apart, he was publicly shamed, he was publicly ridiculed, people were saying what a moron he was for overreaching. He handled it with such a plumb and such good grace

Starting point is 01:23:49 and such candor about admitting his mistakes and learning from his mistakes. And he said to me at one point, this isn't in the book, he read to me some or remembered some message that someone had posted where they said, they called him an ass hat. And they said,

Starting point is 01:24:04 that ass hat Miller screwed up again or something, fush. So the sort of vitriol of the encounter online with people saying what an asshat he was and how stupid he wasn't. He said, that's really hard here people saying how stupid you are. But he said, you know, he was always obsessed with Stoic philosophy. And we talked about how during the financial crisis he read Epictetus and Seneca and he went back to Vice Admiral Stockfield book, books of a philosophical pilot. He really applied these philosophical teaching and Stoicism, where he basically said,

Starting point is 01:24:37 I'm not in control of how people think about me or what they say about me or what my status is. He said, I'm in control of my own behavior, trying to behave virtuously, trying to be candid about my mistakes, trying to learn from them, and trying to get back my shareholders' money as much as I can. And part of the tragedy is that a lot of those shareholders, they bailed on him at exactly the wrong time. And what's extraordinary is that kind of predictably, over the next decade, he had this stunning recovery and ended up being in the top 1% of all fund managers because he is brilliant. He said to me, look, when I was trying to figure out how to recover from that period,

Starting point is 01:25:15 he said, I think I know the difference between expensive stocks and cheap stocks. And I think I've proven over the last 20 years that I can find inexpensive stocks. And so he's like, if I just keep plugging away, it's going to work out. And so for me, there's a great honor in the way that we'll handle the crisis. and bounce back. It had kind of a profound effect on me because I think as I, you know, we always have this fantasy that, well, if we become hugely rich or hugely successful or hugely famous, we're going to be really happy and then everything will work out. And when you look at someone like Bill or any of these investors, you realize they've all been ringer at some point.

Starting point is 01:25:53 They've all been true. There's a right in the book. One of the great lessons from Bill's like, there's tremendous honor in persistence in just this simple virtue of the system. So it's saying, yeah, I screwed up. Yeah, I got knocked on my ass. And I'm going to get up, does myself off and try despite the public shaming to do what I do, make good to the people who didn't put. He said, I was really happy. I said to him, you know, do you feel like you vindicated yourself and you've shown everyone? And he said, no, actually the pain and suffering from that period hasn't faded. I still feel it in a very raw, in a very raw way. But he said, I'm really happy that most of those, almost all of those 100 people lost their jobs, found new jobs quickly,

Starting point is 01:26:36 and we helped them buy new jobs. Most of them bounced back really well. And he said, I'm really happy that I didn't hide like a turpull under my shell after I'd been so badly beaten up by the stock market and not buy. And in fact, what he did is, you know, he quietly was selling his yacht and putting the money in really busted stocks. And he made this enormous turbocharged bet on Amazon buying auctions at exactly the point when everyone else was bailing up. So actually, that period seemed like a total humiliation and public shaming turned out to be the basis for his tremendous success over the last decade. And so for me, there's a slightly long-winded story. There are tremendous lessons in Bill Miller's recovery

Starting point is 01:27:20 from that period in the way that he handled, in the way that he handled adversity, learned from it. I had tremendous pleasure when I went to interview him and I went to his house and to his office. And I got this sense of, oh, here, Bill has actually got to this point where he's living truly in alignment with who he is. He owns his own investment firm. He's working with his son and with close friends. He has the same personal assistant that he had at Lake Mason 20 something years ago when I first interviewed him. So he's got these kind of these loyal people that he trusts working with. He doesn't have a board checking on him and questioning him.

Starting point is 01:27:55 He said to me, you know, he was invited to give a keynote speech somewhere. And he said, well, I would have to wear a tuxedo. I told him, no, I've thrown away my taxi and I'm never buying another one. I found it quite moving, having seen Bill over 20 years, to see this kind of victory where he's living in alignment with himself, unconstrained, able to invest the way he does, think the way he does, where jeans and a black t-shirt to work every day, have total control of his time. And I said this to him, and he's like, oh, yeah, that's the best. I think this is kind of the goal for most of us in life.

Starting point is 01:28:28 It's to live in a way that's fully in alignment with who you are, however peculiar you are. You want to live in a way that's deeply in alignment with your inner self. And I think there was something quite touching about seeing this arc in Bill's career from the giant who was beating the market 15 years in a row, which is when I first interviewed him, to the humiliation of the financial crisis and then to this incredible lost act at the age of 70 to have actually realigned everything so that he's in control of his investing life, his time, his shareholders. And now he manages about $2.5 billion, I think.

Starting point is 01:29:06 It's not $77 billion that was it his deep. And he has no interest in building an army of analysts, gathering his many assets. He's true to who he is. And that's kind of wonderful and inspiring. William, what a wonderful note to end this interview one. And as everyone out there listening to this can probably tell, I love this book. I love Richer Wiser Happier.

Starting point is 01:29:28 I can only encourage you not only to pick it up, but also to pick it up for friends and family. William, where should people go and pick up your book? Thank you so much. The book is called Richer Wiser Happier and the subtitle is How the World's Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life. And you can find it anywhere. You can find it on Amazon and your independent bookstore. You can come to my website, which is Williamgreenwrites.com, which I,

Starting point is 01:29:54 In the spirit of Monish Pabri, I cloned from Michael Lewis because I saw that Michael Lewis's website was called Michael Lewis.Rights.com and I thought, well, he's great. I'll just rip off what he's done. And you can follow me on LinkedIn, you can follow me on Twitter, where it's William 3.72 is my name, I believe. I'm going to be teaching a course called richer, happier, wiser.com, I think, is the landing site. It's based on the book. So if you, if you pre-order the book, I can get into this course for free. It'll be free sessions with about an hour and a quarter hour and a half each talking about these different aspects of how to become richer, how to become wiser, how to become happier.

Starting point is 01:30:29 And write to me, tell me what do you make of the book, what had an impact on you, who I should interview in future, who's had an impact on you, who you think of the greatest investors that I've missed, some of whom I will have asked to give me interviews and simply didn't give them to me, and some of whom people I don't know about were extraordinary. But yeah, I hope you enjoy the book. I'm sure everyone will, and I know I've been selling your book hard. and with good reason. It is truly a wonderful book that you're written. And I do promise our listeners, it won't be another six years before we bring you back. I hope I can convince you

Starting point is 01:31:03 to come back later this year, William. I would love to. It's such a pleasure, talking to. You mentioned the other day you read the book three times, even though it hasn't come out. And I think the depth of your understanding of these issues and your preparation, how serious you are about these deep questions of what it takes to be a successful investor. And also to build a successful like that really shows in your in your questions and your discussion and the quality of the show. It's no accident that we study billionaires has become such a success. I feel like I got in almost at the beginning about five or six years ago when I last spoke to you. And it's just been a real pleasure to watch the show go from success to success.

Starting point is 01:31:42 It's not an accident. You guys put in an enormous amount of time for preparing for these interviews. And you ask really thoughtful questions. spend so much time over the editing and stuff. It's kind of like the Tom Gainer last, and you know, you keep plugging away, doing the right thing, being directionally correct, and it works out. You guys are a living proof of this, so congratulations. Thank you so much for saying so, William.

Starting point is 01:32:06 Speaking of editing, I don't know if my ego can handle it, because it means so much coming from you, so perhaps I would need to edit some of that. But thank you so much, William, for being so kind, so generous, but your compliments, your time, the wisdom that you are conveying to the listener and to your reader. So thank you so much for making time here today, William. Thank you so much. It's been delightful. All right, guys.

Starting point is 01:32:28 So as we're letting William go, just two quick things. The first one is that we have a raffle where you can win William Green's book, Richard Weiser, happier. You just send an email to contact at theMS.com. That's contact at the amsterspodcast.com. And you enter by telling us the best story you have for the Berksie Hallewey's annual shareholder's meeting. It could be you hanging out with the TAP crew. It could also be an entirely different story that doesn't include TIP at all, but your best story from the annual shareholder's meeting

Starting point is 01:32:56 in Omaha. And the other thing is make sure to subscribe to this podcast. You can do that on Apple podcast, Spotify or whatever you're listening to this. Just search for We Study Billionaires and make sure to subscribe. All right, guys, that was all that I had for you this week. We'll be back again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to millennial investing by the Investors Podcast Network and learn how to achieve financial independence. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision consult a professional, this show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP345: Richer, Wiser, Happier w/ William Green

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