We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP461: The Next Investing Revolution w/ Jim O'Shaughnessy
Episode Date: July 1, 2022IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: 02:00 - The 4 horsemen of the investing apocalypse, according to Jim. 12:01 - How and why certain factors change over time. 18:27 - The best approach to using disco...unted cash flow models. 26:32 - Whether or not GDP and therefore Market Cap to GDP ratios are still relevant value indicators. 59:30 - How Jim built OSAM and why he decided to ultimately sell. 1:07:54 - What Jim learned from his highly successful and philanthropic grandfather. And a whole lot more! *Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. OSAM Website. Infinite Loops Podcast. OSAM Research. What Works On Wall Street Book. Why Do Individuals Exhibit Investing Biases Study. Trey Lockerbie Twitter. Our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Check out our favorite Apps and Services. New to the show? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: SimpleMining Hardblock AnchorWatch Human Rights Foundation Unchained Vanta Shopify Onramp HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It takes less than 30 seconds and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm
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You're listening to TIP.
My guest today is investing pioneer and quant legend Jim O'Shaughnessy.
Jim is the author of multiple books, most notably the popular classic What Works on Wall Street.
Jim has also put out research papers predicting the bursting of the tech bubble as well as the bottom of the 2009 bear market.
Jim holds multiple patents for his investing strategies that he implements as CIO of O'Shaughnessy asset management or O'SAM for short, which recently was sold to Franklin Templeton.
Jim also hosts his own podcast called Infinite Loops, which I highly recommend.
In this episode, you will learn about what Jim calls the four horsemen of the investing
apocalypse, how and why certain factors change over time, the best approach to using
discounted cash flow models, whether or not GDP and therefore market to GDP ratios are
still relevant value indicators, how Jim built Osam and why he decided to ultimately sell,
what Jim learned from his highly successful and philanthropic grandfather, and a whole lot
more. Jim brings an amazing balance of wisdom and humor to this discussion. I hope you enjoy it as
much as I did. So without further ado, here is my wide-ranging conversation with Jim O'Shaughnessy.
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. I'm your host, Trey Lockerby, and today we have
have such a special guest, a legend, a titan in investing. Very excited to have you on. Jim O'Shaughnessy.
Welcome back. Thank you, Trey. If you would, would you come introduce me to my wife. I could really use
that. I'm available for hire anytime, Jim. I'll make it worth your while because she says I'm a legend
only in my own mind. And I have a suspicion that she might be right. Well, I said welcome back
because you were actually on her show a few years back. It was episode 57 and Jim, I don't know,
we're at like in the 500s now or something. So it's been a minute. But I wanted to just quickly
get something out of the way here, which I'm sure a lot of our listeners are wondering,
does what works on Wall Street still work? And I want to say, yes, it does, right? Because,
you know, I actually quote you all the time on the show, I think, about saying, you know,
the last arbitrage is human behavior. And I wanted to kind of get that out of the way because I want to
talk about some other stuff. One other quote that I wanted to lead off here with is one of my
other favorites. You have this great line about the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Who are the four horsemen and are they here with us now in this room?
So actually, the real quote is, the four horsemen of the investment apocalypse are fear,
greed, hope, and ignorance. Fear, greed, and hope are all emotions. Ignorance is the only
non-emotion. And I believe that fear, greed, and hope are responsible for greater losses
in investing than any bear market because they access an ancient part of our brain that we
think we've got control over, but we really don't. So by way of example, my friend Jason Swagg
gives a great example of this. You know, when you have a client come in and say, you know,
here's the portfolio, here's how it's done, here's what we would suggest you invest in,
but we want to make sure that this is right for your risk profile. And oftentimes that's done
in a variety of methods. And a simple one is often asking the client, you know, how do you think
you could handle, say, a 20 or 30 percent decline at your portfolio? Well, interestingly,
men specifically, women are better at this, actually. In fact, there's a lot of studies showing
women are better at investing, we'll come back to why that is in a minute. But if you ask them that in
a public space and there are other people in the meetings, there's a bunch of behavioral things going on
right there. But they'll say, yeah, sure. And Jason's analogy, which I think is quite wonderful,
is it's like showing somebody a picture of a snake and saying, does this scare you? They say no,
and then actually throwing a live snake in their lap.
What happens between the two scenarios is massively different.
Our brains, and this is evolutionary psychology, deep in our human operating system is the
fight or flee, and that kept us alive so that we could ultimately become the dominant species
on the planet. However, it's still active.
And when you intellectually know something, it's very different than emotionally knowing something.
Our emotions specifically fight or plea are hardwired.
In other words, they don't let, for the most part, they don't let the prefrontal cortex take them over and say,
well, calm down now.
I've got this.
I'm the planning aspect of the brain.
You just settle down.
No dice.
Because honestly, they have to be.
And so are they here in the room with us?
I'm not afraid.
I'm filled with hope, so yeah, maybe.
Maybe that one's here.
But the other ones are simply the main reason that I have found being in this business for 35 plus years, that time and time and time again, something bad happens in the market.
People freak out.
They're convinced that it's going to zero.
And they sell usually at or near a market bottom.
And then vice versa, when a bubble is being inflated.
That too motivates the greed aspect and the FOMO, fear of missing out, and gets people to, as a friend of mine, quite humorously put it, price what they're investing in at the price to magic ratio.
That's perfect.
Obviously, the reason I'm asking is because the market is seemingly correcting.
It has corrected.
It might just be going into full on bare market now.
And so a lot of people are, you know, now their rationality is being challenged.
And so this is where investing really gets hard.
And even though it can be simple, it's very hard.
And I'm kind of curious about quant-style investing because I wonder if some of those
strategies might start to look like they're broken.
So how have you built such a successful company based on keeping investors calm and reserved
during times like these?
So we do our very best to qualify.
We work with advisors and brokers.
We don't work with the end client.
And when we're interviewing a new candidate that wants to work with us, we pay very special attention to things like how quickly did they sell out of an investment that they had maybe only made a year or two before.
Listen to what they're saying, very, very careful. You can make a lot of inferences about somebody's ability to actually hold on through downturn.
Now, you're not always going to get it right. We had a client that had been a client of my absolutely first company.
which was Oshanasi Capital Management.
And he stayed with us through all of the iterations of I was at Bear Surins for a while
and then OSAM.
And quite literally, when I went down with my head of private client services, I thought
of him as a good friend and still do.
But literally, when he saw me, he goes like this.
And he says, Jim, I know the briefcase you're carrying is filled with all sorts of tables
and charts and graphs that explained to me why this is a massive buying opportunity. And he said,
I just don't care. And that was during the great financial crisis. And, you know, in the scope and
scheme of things, very understandable attitude. There were people who believed that, you know,
the entire banking system was going to collapse. I didn't believe that because I had studied the Fed.
And I knew that one of the reasons that the Fed is there, despite as many haters, is to act as the buyer of last resort.
And that's in fact what they did in the great financial crisis.
So that all sounds very calm and measured, right, as we're talking here in 2022.
If you are, if we were having this conversation in January of 2009, and I'm not saying you, Trey,
specifically, but many, many would look at me and say you are out of your mind.
Cannot you see Lehman Brothers, which has been around more than 100 years, failed, Bear Stearns,
which had never had a quarter since the 1920s where they lost money, for sale to J.P.
Morgan. Jim, you don't understand the facts on the ground, man. This is it. This is the cataclysmic
bear market to end all bare markets. And my response was, as it always,
is that's certainly a possibility, but there is a huge difference between possibilities
and probabilities. We bank everything we do on probabilities. If you think about it, if I was going
to take every possible thing scenario into account, I'd never leave my house because literally
the possibility I get into a car accident and die, the possibility that somebody, you know,
intentionally kills me or randomly kills me or whatever, there is an infinitesimal possibility,
some bigger than others, but it would basically prese you in place, cowering, in the fetal
position, because when we're talking possible, almost anything's possible. Is it probable? I think
not. So to answer your question specifically, all of our work has some what I would call foundational
principles. For example, in general, over time, directionally, these strategies work with a pretty
high base rate. In other words, the base rate is how often overall one, five, ten year rolling
periods did that strategy do better than its bench month? And we look at things like valuation,
we look at things like momentum, we look at financial strength. There's a whole host of things
that we look at to determine whether a stock can get in or not.
But on the point as in terms of your strategy is broken, well, one of the things that I'm very
proud of is right now, I think that we have the finest research team that OSAM has ever
been lucky enough to have.
Some major, major brainpower in there.
And one of the things that we do, it's like the old joke back in the 90s when Quant was
kind of new.
Everyone would go, well, what do you do all day?
Golf.
I mean, you know, you're not interviewing companies. You're not doing any of that. And I responded, then as now, no, but we are continually trying to refine and improve our research. And if you look through just any one of our strategies, for example, the biggest one is called shareholder value or market leader's value is the technical name. But if you look at what that strategy started at and what it is today in terms of the underlying factors and all of the various things, we improved it.
continuously. Not massive improvements, but improvements nevertheless. And then simple things
like that will just improve our results for the most part is we, I was very hated by my research
team about 12, 14 years ago when I set them out on a data cleansing operation. Very few people
understand how actually dirty or incorrect, if you will, the data is from a variety of sources.
And so we had to source it, very unhappy work. I did a little,
just so that I felt like I was contributing.
But the fact is, I think that's how we managed to continue to improve and hold the clients.
Well, going back to your 2009 reference, you had this great paper in 2009 about a great
buying opportunity.
And at the top of that paper, there's this amazing quote by John F. Kennedy that says,
the Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word crisis.
One brush stroke stands for danger, the other for opportunity.
In a crisis, be aware of the danger, but recognize.
I think that was just such a great pull for that exact purpose of that reason. But to your other
point about these factors, I mean, one in particular that everyone kind of is aware of nowadays is the
idea of price to book. Since retail investors may not have the research that you do, how are we to
maintain conviction over some of these factors knowing that they can evolve and change over time?
Specifically to that factor, I would advocate investors don't really look at it anymore.
And that is based not on my opinion, but on very deep research that we did.
We published several papers about it.
We had a podcast about it.
And it has to do with the changing nature of valuing businesses.
Price to book was great for, you know, industrial type companies.
And typically price to book, a low price to book was very good going forward.
A high price to book meant probably over price.
The other thing about price to book, even back then, is,
If you do get a horrible bear market like they got in the crash of 1929 in the ensuing depression,
price to book is also a pretty good proxy for bankruptcy risk.
So if you actually look at the behavior of low price to book stocks in the 30s,
you will see that there was an inversion with the stocks that had the highest price to book
doing much, much better than the stocks with the lowest price to book because in fact they did go bankrupt
because of the economic situation of the Depression.
But, flash forward to today, the idea of brands as intangible assets is self-evident.
I mean, why is Apple valued at what it's valued at?
A big part of that is its brand.
Same with Nike.
Same with virtually any kind of company you're thinking about Amazon.
So the intangible aspects that valuing brand brings to the table,
sort of negate the whole Riezen Vieira of Price to Book in the first place.
So we actually removed it from our composites.
We use composites of factors for all of our algorithmic selection of securities.
And the challenge there is that often people are really, really reluctant to change their
mind about something that's been working well for them.
I know there are some other asset managers who still claim Price to Book is quite
good. Again, I'm basing this just on, you remember, you too young, but there was a show called
Dragnet, and Joe Friday was this cop who'd ever smile. And he was like, whenever he interrogated
somebody was just the facts, ma'am, just the facts. And so that's what we're looking at,
just the facts. And since there are a huge number of other valuation metrics that we can and do
use, we saw this as a pretty easy choice to make. I mean, something that had worked very well,
a lot of academic studies on, I mean, French pharma, which got the ball rolling, used price to book.
Many, many other academic studies did as well. I have it in my book, of course. In this edition of
the book, I do, I hedge a bit because we hadn't gotten all of the other deeper research,
but even when we included the 30s, because we got the crisp data, which is the data from
the University of Chicago, Center for Research and Security Pricing, thus the an acronym.
And we're able to run it.
We're like, oh, okay, this is something that is material.
This is something that we didn't know at the time.
Now we have this new data.
And so we removed it.
So the way that our strategies work, I think, you know, to be fair, this is probably
true of all quant investors, is that they refine them as they do additional research.
I think the bigger question for a quant specifically is not how much.
did you change your model over time and was it all based on evidence? For example, a generational
buying opportunity that I published in March of 2009, that wasn't me. It wasn't Jim Gwock striding
into the office and saying, oh, I am going to say this is a generational opportunity. That was the data.
That's why you very, very seldomly see papers from us making that kind of call. The data was
screaming at us. Wow, this really, really is presenting a huge opportunity.
But the better question around quants, in my opinion, is did they override their models? And we learned
after the great financial crisis when a consultant who called specifically for a large brokerage on
quants came out and told us, and honestly, it floored me then and still floors me as I think
about it now, that over 60% of the quantitative managers that he followed had overridden their
models because of the financial crisis. To me, I tend to be a kind of a purist on this.
If you're a quant and you override your model without it being based on research, but is based on
you panicking, all you've negated your entire past tracker because that was contingent
and built upon the idea that you do not override your model. And so for me, somebody wants
to ask me, I'm retiring actually from OSEM at the end of this year. I think you might have
seen that. And I'm doing that because
I think the team there is just incredible and everyone's in great hands. And frankly, I have some other
adventures that I think would be fun to work on. I wouldn't have done it, of course, if the team wasn't
like, as I said, the best team I've ever had. But the idea of when I got asked the question,
what are you proudest of? And I said, I'm actually proudest to the fact that I never overrode one of our
models. And here in the relative calm, well, it's not relative calm in the markets, but let's say it was
last year in the relative calm of a market where everything's going stratospheric. That doesn't sound
like much, but when times are like the great financial crisis, listen, those are scary times.
And I run human OS too. And so I was lucky that at least my Vulcan infusion saved me from
overriding the bottle. So from what I've studied about you and actually we recently had Dan Rasmussen
on the show and through that research, I was listening to your conversation with him. And as I
understand both of you, you know, you're both data-driven, which means you're kind of more focused on
the rear-view mirror than, you know, they're going ahead and forecasting where we're going.
So it sounded like you were in agreement with this idea that discounted cash flows, for example,
or those kind of models are sort of should be thrown out the window as well, right, as far as
just our inability to forecast, and that kind of goes against a lot of what we've learned
as, you know, traditional investors. So I'm kind of curious what your stance is on that in particular.
Yeah. So I wouldn't advocate throwing
something like price to cash flow out the window. Dan, I love him to death and he looks like a Boy Scout,
and then he manages to throw Molotop cocktails. And one of the reasons I love him is his research is
incredibly thorough. And he like me is sort of a, here's what the numbers say. You can argue with it.
You can say you don't like it, but this is the empirical evidence. From our point of view,
we still believe that many of the metrics, as you say, looking in the rear view mirror,
That's set. There's no speculation as to what those numbers were. And our point of agreement with Dan
would come more on the forward-looking estimates. I am not doctrinaire on this, however. I am
absolutely open to models that, in fact, I used a couple in my early days that looked at consensus
estimates, because if you take the wisdom of crowds as actual, and it works pretty well,
the aggregate of all of the analyst estimates was pretty darn good. As a matter of fact, one of the things that I did in a strategy that did use forward-looking numbers was simply study historically what the aggregate guess was, right, and then compared it to the actual. And I just said, isn't it interesting that it's almost always about 10% wrong? Usually did they guess they say a dollar and it comes in as 90 cents. So what I did was simply build that discount right into the,
consensus estimate, and it was pretty darn good. So I'm very open to, like, if I was looking at
either financing a new quant or anything like that, and they were going to use the idea of forward,
I'm not going to dismiss them out of hand. I'm going to ask, okay, what's your methodology?
How are you deriving those estimates? You know, how large is the sample of the estimates?
One of the things that I love and I wish the United States would allow more of are these prediction markets.
So I would want to see all of that.
And one of the things that I advocate, especially in markets like this, is if you're young, right, I call you a time billionaire.
And so you have a lot of time.
And unless you believe that the world is in fact ending, then I would recommend that you find a farm in a very underpopulated state.
and, you know, put antibiotics and guns and everything.
But if you're not that extreme, the better bet is to just keep putting money into the market
as a young person.
I believe that, well, for example, if you look at all rolling 20-year periods, real returns,
so inflation taken out, there's never been a 20-year rolling period where the market in the
U.S. at least was negative.
Now, it has been negative in other markets.
But in the United States, given the size of our economy, given the size of our economy,
given the size of our stock market, it's never been negative or a 20-year period. Now, does that
mean it never will be? No, of course not. Some horrific, horrible thing could happen and it could lead to
a 20-year negative number. In fact, it got close for the 20 years ending 08. But again, probabilities.
If you can think probabilistically and tone down and control your emotions, what's going to happen
is that over time, directionally, these models are going to continue to work. And, you know,
to try to be very specific and say, yes, it will compound at 13.23 percent. That's nonsense.
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I'm glad to hear you say that.
I mean, the tool we have on our website is an IRR calculator that actually has the probability
feature, right?
So you can plug in your own different predictions in there.
So I want to pull a couple of other quotes I've heard you say, and I want to get some clarity
around this as well.
So I know that, for example, you're not much of a Buffett guys, I've heard you say, but I've
also heard you say that GDP is useless.
So I'm not trying to pull these out of context, but I want to be a lot.
want to definitely put this together in my mind because I know that Buffett is well known, for example,
to have this market cap to GDP indicator as far as whether the market is cheap or not. And a lot of
value investors, I think, rely on this kind of indicator in particular. So if GDP is now useless,
and we should talk about why I think it plays into that sort of price to book discussion we were
just having. But we should talk about why that is. And if so, does the market cap to GDP ratio
work anymore in your opinion? So when you bring a person who has been sainted while he is still
alive into the conversation, that's another great example of human operating system. The odds are
heavily stacked against me to say that Warren Buffett is wrong on any particular thing. Listen,
the guy is the most successful investor, at least that I've been able to find in history. So he's
doing something right. And I think that the idea of GDP, however, is,
a separate issue. I don't know. He might still say that. I don't know how much he still uses that,
but like the price to book, the challenge with GDP is if you look at the way it's calculated,
it is calculated for a country that only has industrial style concerns. It does not take into
account any of the things where America is the world leader, for example, technology.
An example.
This might be a little old.
So if somebody listens and looks it up and says, Jim was wrong.
Jim was wrong.
This is an old example, but I'd love to hear that if I was wrong, I'm wrong often.
But you look at Intel as a company, right?
And they make all the chips.
And why are they interesting?
Well, they're interesting because the way GDP is calculated is the sale of the ship, right?
and what did it cost, you know, to make that chip. What people fail to consider is what Intel really did
was retain all of the intellectual property where they would design the chips right here in the good old
US of A. But then they would ship them to a variety of wafer manufacturing, chip manufacturing
companies, usually in emerging markets that had to complete cutthroat competition. They were all in terms
of the quality as you rate their ability, they were all at the top. And so all they really had to
compete on was price. And so they would get like a razor thin margin in the emerging market,
send it back to the United States. Intel marks it up considerably more and has essentially
captured all the profit of that transaction. Apple does it with iPhones, for example. If you look
at the percentage of market by distribution of phones, Apple is not number one. The various
Android phones put together are much bigger, much, much bigger. And yet when you look at the share
of profits from the sale of smartphones, Apple is the clear winner. And so, none of that gets
captured in GDP. So for the same reason that I think that price to
book needs to be put back on the shelf. I think it would be great if some group of economists came
up. I mean, that'd be a great book almost. If a group of the younger economists out there,
like systematically sort of examine, okay, why is price to book no longer good? What should we put
in its place? Why is GDP no longer good? What should we put in its place? That would be a real
contribution, I think, to the economic literature as well as investors using that particular
literature. So to sort of sum up, you know, I remember reading and I can't remember the exact
formula, but if you read a lot of history on investing, what you see is some people, like in the
1950s, were swearing on this, some differential between the earnings yield on stocks and bond yields.
And it was really simple. So if the earning yield on stocks was below bonds, get out of stocks,
go into bonds, right? And vice versa. Well, that changed.
something in the early 60s, I think, late 50s. And it never went back to the other way until you got
the super high rates in the first half of the 1980s or the second half of the 1970s. So it was wrong
for like most of the biggest bull market in history. So I think that you always have to just
look, okay, what are these numbers that I'm using? How are they derived? Does that derivation
still makes sense and does the concept, if you will, of a GDP to ratio or to replacement cost
or, I mean, there's a lot of interesting wants, right? It's just we haven't found any efficacy.
And believe me, we've tried. We haven't found any efficacy in using these as filters either
in the going long, we're a traditional long only manager, but we've experimented with tons
of timing models too and have found basically a few of them actually do work. But the
fortitude, the emotional fortitude that you would have to have, it's pretty extraordinary. My friend
Wes Gray has a really interesting model that works, but it's hard for him to keep clients in it
because there's a lot of false positives. And when it really works, it really, really works.
But, you know, again, because of the way we look at things, signal fail, signal, fail,
signal, then this doesn't work. And usually, as I like to joke, that happens after the fourth one,
signal succeed.
Well, I bring that up, actually.
This is so fascinating.
I know if there's something kind of misleading about GDP and being a quant, you know,
garbage in, garbage out.
There's a lot of people out there with this narrative that, for example,
the Fed can't raise interest rates because of our debt to GDP ratio, right?
Or as far as just the simple amount of debt.
And it's a different story than where we were even in the 70s and 80s.
So with that kind of in mind, I'm kind of curious what your take on the debt level,
is and how much further you think the Fed could go?
So I normally don't comment on this primarily because I'm probably just as ignorant about
these types of things as anyone else.
And so let me caveat with that ahead of time.
I am not an, even though I have a degree in economics, I am not an economist.
I am a practitioner and practitioners look at the world very differently than economists do.
The points that I would make about the current discussion, if you will, being had around the debt to GDP, et cetera, is it is true that we have seen a Fed take unprecedented action in the market if we just look at the Fed's history back to 1913, right, when it was created.
And then, you know, you had a lot of theorists saying modern monetary theory, et cetera.
That would be just a completely different discussion in and of itself.
So yes, the Fed has taken unusual steps primarily as a reaction, in my opinion, to the very, very dangerous
situation that evolved during the great financial crisis. Now, can the Fed just do whatever it wants?
I don't think so, really. I think that ultimately markets step in. And like, it's fine if the Fed is
keeping interest rates artificially low, right? Because, you know, if you're a real, you know, if you're a
rational actor and you can borrow money at 1%. Why on earth would you not? And if you look at what
happened, that's exactly what happened, right? You got things like, you know, the board apes and
crypto and a variety of NFTs and everything. And let me hasten to say, that doesn't mean that those
might not emerge or a version of them and successful down the line. It does mean that some of the
prices you were seeing, like Beeple and these astronomic prices being paid for NFTs, was, in my opinion, a result of these artificially low rates that even a rational human would say, oh, if the bank's going to be willing to loan me a bunch of money for nothing, I'm going to take a huge loan. Now, what's happened currently is, and usually happens afterwards, when you flood the system with money, inflation,
seems inevitable. The only time it isn't inevitable that many people point to is when it doesn't get
put officially into circulation. So, for example, when the Fed started on the easing strategy,
most of that money wasn't getting out into the economy. It was actually on a ledger between all these
various banks. So if you looked at M1 and got very alarmed, right, like, good Lord, look at the
chart on M1, you have to keep in mind that a lot of that, in the early days, was,
ledgers on a bank transaction. And so that doesn't get into the economy. People can't actually
spend that. When they can actually spend it, hello inflation. And I think that there's many,
many things happening here. But one of them is inflation is probably higher than the official
rate that's being stated. I know a lot of people put a lot of work into showing actual price
changes for the average American, and those price changes are a lot bigger than the so-called
stated rate of inflation. And so the question, as you put it to me, though, is the Fed's hands
tied in their ability to raise rates? The answer is no. And you want to look at a fantastic
example of it. Look at Paul Volcker, breaking inflation by raising rates to historic heights
with the tacit buy-in of Ronald Reagan, who was president at the time, because when you do that,
you cause a very severe and deep recession. So if we're thinking like, well, they would never do that,
well, yes, they would. They have in the past. And if you get a similar reaction from the Fed today,
that's what will happen. And, you know, markets are future discounting aggregate best guest
estimates of what's going to happen. So I think if you're looking at the markets,
behavior over the last since basically the first of the year, the market's sort of saying,
oh, thank you for that wonderful bucket of ice water you just put over my head. Now I've got to
start worrying about the Fed's going to like really, really jack up rates. And remember, too,
that the Fed is not the ultimate decider of interest rates. They affect them, obviously,
through where they set the discount rate at. But many banks are going to charge what the market
it will bear. And then you have the additional concern of demographics coming into flight, right? So I'm
the tail end of the baby boomer. I would argue that I'm not a baby boomer. I was born in 1960.
And the analytical work on people in my cohort finds that we have almost nothing in common with
the real baby boomers. But the point is, so the real baby boomers are probably in their 70s now.
A lot of them have hung on with their stock portfolios because, again, it's what they knew. They got into
stocks when everyone hated, or at the end of everyone hating them, stocks treated them very,
very well. And they look at bonds and they're like, yeah, but it doesn't pay me anything.
So if we see a situation where rates on bonds became very attractive to people, you might see
baby boomers doing a bigger shift of asset class from stocks to bonds, which of course would be a lot
pressure on the price of stocks. All of that being said, do I believe in the prospects of the United
States of America? Absolutely. I mean, like, despite all of the problems and everyone at each other's
throats, we still have the rule of law here. We still have the Bill of Rights. We still have,
you know, the government designed to not be able to do anything too radical because of the various
branches. Our founders did not trust the average human being very much. And so they designed our
government to make it really hard for the government to become very tyrannical, which I think is a great
thing. And so, yeah, I am still wildly bullish on the prospects of this country. Does that mean that
I might have to grin and bear it through a horrible recession? Yeah, I might have to. But again,
I come back to the notion, if you just look at odds, right, the odds are really, really high
that this country in particular, because of all of its advantages, is going to do very, very well.
Finally, circling back to the question about the debt ratio in the United States, we are also the only country in the world as the world's reserve currency that has the privilege of pricing its debt in its own currency, which its central bank controls.
What better way to essentially default on massive debt than having great inflation, take it away?
And so you can speculate, well, maybe foreign lenders will not allow U.S. debt to be priced in dollars.
I would say don't hold your breath on that one.
Very interesting.
Yeah, I was bringing it up.
I mean, you mentioned the 70s where Paul Volker jacked up interest rates.
And I think our debt to GDP around that time was in the 30.
So it was a different scenario than where you are now.
But to your point about GDP, it seems like that number is kind of underselling the U.S.
And I've heard this argument a lot where it's like, and I don't know if how the Fed is looking at this,
but they could be saying, yeah, we might have a lot of debt, but look at all these assets we have, too, right?
Not only the world reserve currency, but how amazing are these assets that we hold? They're the best in the
world. I'm just curious if what we just saw just now speaks to your experience, being in markets
a long time, knowing that things can change. So I really believe in this idea of imbued or saturated
intuition. Somebody who spends 35 years looking at markets, studying markets, sees these patterns happening.
And immediately, you know, the famous story of George Soros getting a backache.
And the saturated wisdom, if you will, kicks in.
And so perhaps their take is going to be a little bit different than others.
Yeah, things got crazy.
And people bid things to unsustainable levels.
But they always do.
And like as long as we have history of markets, now we're back to fear, greed, and hope.
And we're back to arbitraging human nature.
Because look, I don't know what the market's going to close today.
I have no idea.
Zero.
What, at the end of this year, the market will, how much it will be down or up.
As we extend our timeframes, my ideas get stronger and stronger.
And, you know, when you start asking me about 10 years, 15 years, I go from being pretty
bearish to being very bullish.
But the default, I think, is, listen, if you could successfully time markets, you would be
the richest person on this planet.
And, you know, Elon Musk, I don't think, tries to tie markets. Now, people who don't like him might say he did that with those coins. But the fact is, those are temporary dislocations, if you will. I am much more interested in the directional movement of various asset classes. And in the case of U.S. stocks, I think directionally, they're heading up. That does not mean that we might not have a wicked, wicked bare market. And if the Fed decides to raise interest rates, that means,
that we could have a significant recession. The challenge with all of this is, let's say somebody's
listening to our podcast, right? And they've read my book or whatever, and they think that I know a lot
about the market. And so they say to their significant other, you know, I just heard Joe Joshi,
who's like totally always bullish on the market. He said he was worried about the market here.
Let's wait. The problem is waiting until the water clears, the water never clears. And so the default
assumption that I urge all investors to do is consistently put money into the market, right? It's
really, really simple. If suddenly, if let's say you have a dog, right, and you buy a week's worth
of his food every week at the supermarket, and let's say it costs you $10 and you have enough cans
to feed your dog for the next week. If you walked into the supermarket and you saw that they were having a
special on the dog food and it was only $5 to buy all the cans, do you run home and return those cans of
dog food, of course not. You bulk up on it. You might even buy four weeks or five weeks.
Only in the stock market, it seems to me, to people like rush to sell when there's a bargain.
So if you're listening and you're interested in the stock market and, you know, trying to learn new things about it, just remember it's not easy, but it's simple.
Consistent investment in a diversified portfolio. Just keep doing it. Keep doing it. And times on your side.
Yeah, if Sir Isaac Newton can't time the market, certainly, we probably can either, right?
I love this quote. I wrote it down. I'm going to remember this. The water never clears. I just say
that that's so accurate. What a cool picture-esque of what you're talking about there.
You know, I pose this question to a couple of people, but I have a feeling you'll give an answer
that's backed a little bit more by data. I've basically heard, you know, Buffett and Munger say
with investing, you know, those who are seeking excess alpha and they're not indexings, let's
say. They basically say these investors, they have it or they don't. I think what they're referring to
is the 4-2 maybe to manage down markets and a couple of other things.
But what does the data that you've researched?
Because I know you've spent a lot of time studying psychology and the human brain.
Is there data to back this up?
So, yeah, there is.
And the data specifically is around the ability to delay gratification, right?
And there's a study which is under some scrutiny because it apparently has not replicated.
But everyone's familiar with it, right?
And it's the one where the little kids put in the room with two marshmallows.
And I can't remember the exact way they do the study.
But if he only or she only eats one, they'll give him like several more.
But if he eats or she eats two, they don't give him anymore.
And it's basically a proxy for that individual's ability to delay gratification.
And that is a really interesting marker for human beings.
those who can delay gratification, those who have patience, and those who persist.
All of the studies that I've seen or we've conducted actually show that like raw intelligence,
it's great to have, yeah, but if you took somebody who had an IQ of a hundred, whatever gifted
it is, 140 or where thereabouts, and then contrasted them with somebody who has a 120 IQ,
which is typically the IQ you need to get into legal or medical school.
You can't make any prediction based on those two numbers.
This guy could be a nervous nelly and just flip out whenever because he's so smart,
he can think of all the really out there scenarios about what could go wrong.
And this guy is just persistent.
So if I were like if you said, Jim, you've got to invest in the careers of these 10 young
people who have distinguished themselves in investing.
What I would look for is persistence, patience, and the ability to follow a process.
PPP, patience, process, persistence.
If you persistently use a well-supported by empirical evidence process, you will be rewarded.
Will it work for you always?
Of course not.
During the times that it's not working for you, you will be ridiculed, you will be called names,
people will make fun of you. And that's just part of the drill here. Unless you decide you want to be
Bogle and be the king of indexing, which is, by the way, a totally acceptable choice for many
investors. In fact, I would say the preferable choice if you're just not like us, a stock market
junkie, but you just know you want to save and send your kids to good schools and have some money
in retirement, that's a perfectly acceptable way to invest money. But the idea of those three peas,
persistence, process, patience, those are going to be the winners. And by the way, the Warren
Buffett of 2039 or 2040 is going to get there in a much, much different way than our Warren Buffett
got there. He took advantage of the conditions, if you will, on the ground. This gets back to
kind of this idea of saturated intuition. But then he grew. He used to invest like his idol and teacher
Ben Graham, who wrote the securities analysis and the intelligent,
investor. And that was called the margin of safety and buy sell garbuts and etc, etc.
By super cheap companies and then selling them when they reach what you think they're worth.
And yeah, that's one way to do it. None of our value stuff does that particular methodology.
If you do get a serendipitous amount of those companies, yeah, I'd say scoop them up.
But so what Buffett did was decide, no, no, no, no, I'm going to evolve myself. And he did.
And so don't sanctify any belief.
right? Because the sacred is unquestionable and it becomes doctrine. And every time if you study history
and you look at ideas, you look at institutions, you look at all of these things, when you make
something sacred and if you question it, you're a heretic or an apostate, very bad things happen.
Learn from everyone. Study Buffett, study Gram and Dot. Study the momentum guides.
study everything that you think there is a reasonable hypothesis underneath for that particular
school of investing. You'll probably end up with a hybrid, but that's fine. I used to, I was much
more of a proselytizer when I was young in terms of, you've got to do it this way. This is the
only way, right? And then I realized I was young and foolish. There are a lot of different ways.
The key thing is you've got to find something that's right for trick, right? And that could be very
be different than what's right for Jim. One of the biggest mistakes I ever made was designing
my own strategies to round one, iteration one. For me, I have a really high risk tolerance. And
it was pointed out to me that, Jim, these are like really crazy good, but when they're not
working, they're crazy bad. And so we evolved that as well. But the point is, you've got to find what's
right for you. And then just let it happen. Let it work. It sounds is boring. It's boring.
I mean, successful investing, honestly, should be about as exciting as watching Patreon.
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slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right, back to the show. Okay, so from there, I've got a few
ideas. First of all, I want to double click on saturated intuition again, because you brought it up a
couple of times. And then there's a genetic question in my mind for what you're speaking to and how
much of a factor that might be. And then there's also this third point that I did want to circle back
to from what you said earlier about women being a much better investors than men. Do any of those three
go together? Is there a through line through the three of them? I think that there might be a bit
of a evolutionary reason for why women are better investors than men. Women are far more patient.
Women are also far more likely to admit what they don't know. Men are very unlikely to admit what
they don't know because of the way we evolved as a species, right? And so Terry O'Dine,
professor who at the time he did the study was at Berkeley, he might still be at Berkeley.
I lectured to his class once. He's a very nice guy. He's also a super smart guy. And he has
a interesting study. I don't know if it's been updated because I haven't looked at it in a while,
but basically empirically showed that women were in fact better investors than men. And, you know,
I joke, testosterone is your answer there, right? Testosterone is a very useful thing to have,
but it comes with a lot of downsides. And some of the downsides are abrupt action, being hypervigilant
and mistaking your hypervigilance for, oh, market's going down.
That means it's going to end.
I have to act now to save my life.
And so the man will get out.
And then, of course, men are also much more overconfident than women.
Can you tell I have nothing but older sisters?
But the fact is, women are more patient.
Women do not try to pretend that they know something that they don't.
For the most part, for the most part, again, I can just hear that somebody saying right now,
Actually, Jim, you know, there is this group of women who do not fit this profile.
Yes, I understand that.
I'm talking broadly.
And the empirical evidence is on their side.
The saturated intuition, well, I don't know that that breaks down by sex, men versus wisdom versus women.
I do know that women in many, many psychological tests demonstrate a probably higher what I would call practical intuition.
And again, how much of this, we'd have to really disambiguinate, how much of this was because of our evolution,
how much is because of the societal game rules that we're playing under, etc.
But I think, obviously, both sexes can, if they are at something long enough, can get this imbued or saturated intuition and make use of it.
And again, with genetics, like, that's such a hot button issue.
And, I mean, I understand.
I'm more of a, let's just look at the data and show us what the.
data shows us. And, you know, there are many twin studies, identical twins. I'm originally from
St. Paul, Minnesota, which was the twin cities. And these studies were actually done at the
University of Minnesota, the original ones that I'm referring to, where they found identical twins.
So in other words, clones, you share 100% of your genes with that individual who were separated
at birth. There's a brilliant book on it. I have here was written in, I think, the late 70s, early
1980s by the professor who did most of the research and very, very decisive, if you will,
that our genes do determine quite a bit of our predilictions, our attitudes, things like that.
There was another study done by some Swedish, I think Swedish researchers, actually included,
if you go to my profile on Twitter, it's me giving a talk at Google, talks at Google about
why this stuff is really hard. And one of the slides includes that from this study,
looking again at identical twins, not separated, but looking at how they invested. The researchers' academics
determined that approximately 35 to 40 percent of our investment behavior is genetic and cannot be
educated against. That's the real killer line in their report. It's like, no matter how hard you try,
you can't blood will out, so to speak. And so that's where I think the genetic thing comes in.
much less so on the intelligence side, much more so on the persistence, patient, and ability to
follow process. And I would add, just from my own personal experience, your ability to admit you were
wrong, because when you're wrong, a lot of people take that as some sort of loss of base.
I'm just the opposite. I love when I'm wrong because I can learn from, why was I wrong?
What was I thinking that led to the decision I made? And that's one of the reasons why I recommend
that everyone keep journals.
Like, I didn't start these journals at age 18 because I knew that human memory was very unreliable,
but they taught me that human memory is very unreliable and consistently updates itself to what we
believe today, which is why you can have this hindsight bias what everybody knew,
and they don't even know they're doing it, right?
And again, they, me, anyone who's a human being can do it.
It's really cool, though, when you're going through an old journal and you just have made
a comment that you would swear to in court that that was how you felt back then. And then you,
in your own handwriting, see, oh, I didn't feel like that at all back that. It's quite jarren,
but it's also quite liberating because it allows you to understand your own foibles and then
into it, okay, so this happens with everyone. Let's use this as a learning opportunity to make our
process better continually. So fascinating. For those wondering, I think that study is
called, why do individuals exhibit investing biases? And I won't, I want to embarrass myself by trying
to pronounce the names because I'm terrible with names to begin with. And it'll be in the show notes as well.
Okay, so shifting gears slightly here, Jim, I have a couple more questions for you. And one is around
your entrepreneurial nature. I'm an entrepreneur myself, so I'm kind of selfishly interested in this,
but you've built numerous companies. And most notably, Oh Sam, which actually recently sold to Franklin
Templeton. I'm curious what the impetus to sell the company was. I know it was kind of tied to
this canvas product that you guys had built.
So I'm kind of curious what your experience was like selling something that you spent
decades building.
So bittersweet, to be sure, it's, I was so funny.
I was just having this conversation with my wife last night.
And, you know, sometimes entrepreneurs treat their companies like their children.
And you never want to sell your children, obviously.
But also, I think the right thing to do, given these circumstances.
And if we take a step back, the ability to come.
customize people's portfolios to their particular needs and tax situation and employment
situation, I think is going to be the next massive category in asset management. I think it's going
to be as big, if not bigger than ETFs. And I thought that a long time. I started a company
called Netfolio, which was essentially the same thing. The tech back then wasn't up to the snuff
that we have today. And then, of course, my own prediction came true and the internet collapsed. But
it never stopped me from wanting to continue to support that. It was actually my son, Patrick,
who came into my office and was like, you do know that we built like a killer death star here,
that we could just flip it around and let our clients, you're kind of like your idea for
portfolio. And I'm like, do tell. And thus, what we call strategy indexing was born. The benefits
of this evolution in asset management, simply it's difficult to overstate how.
how good they are for people, from our ability to tax manage your portfolio. So that situations
which would normally make a person frightened, right, like the current market activity that's going on,
actually get refrained in that individual's mind and like, oh, I'm not going to pay as much
taxes because they are actually tax managing my portfolio for me at OSSA. The ability to immunize
you, let's say you're an entrepreneur and you own a significant portion of your,
wealth is in your private company shares and your private company is tech or whatever,
we can immunize that position for you so that your portfolio with OSAM through your advisor
does not have any exposure because you have way too much there. We can also give you a real
ESG portfolio. ESG has been coming under a great deal of scrutiny recently and a lot of
very well-known and respected people are saying some pretty negative things about ESG. And
My view on ESG was always, I would never package a product in a mutual fund or whatever
where I presumed that I was the font of wisdom, which would know what you were going to find
socially relevant. However, when we had Canvas coming online, we were able to put 50 different
levers in there that you and your advisor get to pick. So you literally, let's say you're a huge
believer in our need to have pure carbon emissions. You can specifically click that particular lever,
and that's what happens in your portfolio. Let's say we had a client who wrote a great book
about women investing and starting businesses, and she wanted her portfolio to have a tilt
to companies that where women were 20% or more of the C-suits or on the board. We can do it. But equally
important. Let's say you come from a red state and you like the idea that hunting is fun and
guns should be around and like, okay, I might not share your opinion, but what I want it for
our offering to be was something where the individual on the other end got to reflect their
actual desires, cares, what they want to see win and what they want to see lose. I can't dictate
that to that to people. Now, if they do some kind of crazy thing, we're trying to build in a situation
where we can quickly backtest that type of strategy and say, you know, you might not want to do that.
But the point is, we are not picking. The client is picking and they truly will get a portfolio
that does reflect their social concerns or organizational concerns or any of those things.
And then finally, you know, you just might, for no real rational reason at all, hate five
companies in the S&P 500. When we launched this, my friend Howard Linson was nice enough to give us
the Howie 495, which got rid of the five companies in the S&P 500 that Howard hated. And of course,
it was a joke and whatnot, but we wanted to show the flexibility of it. The technology scales.
And so the way I put it is, this is the way it was back in like the 1930s when every rich person
had a bank that invested just for them, right? It's always been kind of a little rule of thumb of
mine is try to see to the end of something. So if you look in our field, okay, so how did rich
people get treated back then? Well, they all had chauffeur cars. Hello, Uber. They all had
multiple vacation homes. Hello, Airbnb, or whatever the more luxurious one. They all had
individual portfolios. Hello, Canvas. And so what we're able to do with the leverage technology
allows for us to do is to treat everyone like that they were the king and queen of Shiba,
right? And I don't know necessarily whether this will ever get down to like an app on your phone.
I would love that, but you also have to be careful because you don't want people just like,
you don't want to ever gamify it, in my opinion. But back to why would we sell?
So I have seen two really significant innovations in asset management over my crew.
Well, three. The first indexing. Back when I started in the 80s, Bogel and his team were still being made fun of by Wall Street for the most part. When he launched that index fund, by the way, the number of headlines in American papers, like calling him a communist, saying an American who wants to settle for average, it was on American. Absolutely. He took so much flack for that, that I just chuckle every time when I see the dominance of indexing today. So indexing,
Major innovation, low costs, big, very important.
The next innovation was ETFs, exchange traded funds.
They wrapped up a mutual fund in a more efficient manner.
I missed the vote.
I have a piece called Mistakes Were Made and Yes, by me.
I was asked to launch by the American Stock Exchange, a series of exchange traded funds
when they were just coming out and I was like, yeah, nah.
And obviously, they very, very innovative and got better.
On to the stage walks custom indexing or custom portfolio creation.
Once you see the benefits of this as an affluent investor using an advisor, you not only will
never buy another package.
Now, again, this is my opinion.
And I'm giving you a bit of a sales job here too, because we believe in Canvas, obviously.
But that's important to keep in mind.
I personally think that once you see these benefits, you'll never buy a package product again,
thus the sale to Franklin Templeton.
Quite frankly, I wanted OSAM to be the company that dominates custom indexing.
And when you looked at little old OSAM, we were punching above our weight in terms of people's
awareness about us. But when it comes to actually being the leader in a massive new category
in asset management, you need a lot of tools. You need wide distribution. You need the kind
of heft that a trillion and a half dollar money manager can exert on your behalf. And so I simply
looked at it and, you know, Patrick and I talked about it. It was like, at the end of the day, we want
this to win because we think investors are going to like do much, much better by it. And so that was
kind of what drove our decision. Amazing. Well, that just kind of goes to the integrity you have and
ties into all the research you've made public along the way throughout your career. I mean, very
philanthropic of you. And I wanted to lead that.
actually into my last question for you, which is around your grandfather, Ignatius, Aloysius
O'Shaughnessy. My goodness, what a name. What an amazing name. But at one point, he must have been
the most successful people alive. I mean, he was widely successful, I believe, from oil. But he
proceeded to give 95% of his wealth away before he died, which is just mind-boggling. So you got to
spend a lot of time with your grandfather, especially later, it seems, and we're a witness to
some of these givings. What kind of impact do you think that may have had on you and possibly your
career? So I think it had a very deep impact on me. I have just hold my grandfather in the
highest esteem that he not only was probably one of the richest people in the country.
In fact, I saw an old magazine from the 30s that said everyone thinks Joe Kennedy is the richest
Irish Catholic in America. There's a guy in St. Paul called IA. O'Shaughnessy who could buy
and sell them 10 times over. But what really interests me about my grandfather was exactly that,
that he gave so much of his own money away during his own lifetime. And that's kind of like
now just getting hinted at with the gates and buffets of the world. My grandfather always said that
money was a lot like manure. It stunk to high heaven when it was piled up in one place,
and it acted as a beautiful fertilizer when you spread it around. And so I believe that.
And I believe that there's just so much that you can do to help.
And look, let's not say we're looking for sainthood here.
It's in my genes and it's in my examples and everything.
And so I believe strongly in it.
But at the end of the day, I think we all do things because they give us pleasure.
And rather than, oh, I'm so good and noble about how I'm going to help my fellow man,
I really don't believe that.
I think you really don't do things unless they make you feel good.
And that makes me feel good.
I love giving money to things I care about.
And, you know, I love participating with my time about things that I care about.
And as far as my grandfather, I mean, what an incredible example.
And I just think it's in our genes that that's how you do things.
You know, I'm going to be starting some new ventures after I retire from Osam because I want to.
Because I, you know, that's another thing I learned from my grandfather, never retire.
Because my grandfather was one who always said to me, and you mentioned that I managed,
that I managed to be able to spend a lot of time with him because my grandmother had died
on my dad's side before I was even born. I was the martini baby. I was six years younger,
six and a half years younger than my next sibling. My granddad came to our house twice a week
for dinner. And I just got to, he had like incredible stories, incredible stories. And he was
really funny. But he was also like, he was very kind of open about why he thought you should do
things a certain way. And so I learned so much from him, not only the philanthropic aspect,
but how to run a business, how to, you know, how to take care of people. Like, one of my big
beliefs is you should push all the decisions down. People at the top of the organization have no
right deciding on what trading system you're going to use. And yet it's the instinct of a lot of people
who are, you know, higher up that, well, we should use this one. And my answer always is, no,
we're going to go talk to Lenny and find out what he wants because he's the one who's the one who's
doing it. And my grandfather taught me that. And the thing I think that he taught me that I've made
the most use of that really was the reason I started the journals was what he called premeditating.
Which is basically running a Monte Carlo simulation, but on paper. And the reason I think it
helped me so much is that when you premeditate, you have to document. And it's hard to explain
why this is true. But once a thought gets moved from your head to paper, it becomes a real thing.
and you start thinking about it very differently than it's just, oh, I'm going to write that
novel someday, you know, no, you're not. But if you like have it written out, the other thing
that premeditating is really good at is, A, do you understand the thing you say you want? Sometimes
you don't. And then you've got to go, okay, step back. Maybe I don't want that. Other times,
there's something you really do want, but as you run the various decision trees, you see that the
number of potential bad outcomes for you or your family or for whomever outweigh the good outcomes.
And so you don't do it because of that. And most of all, though, it just gives you a sense for
how much do you really want this thing, number one. Number two, do you have the means to make
this thing happen? And so that was another great lesson from my grandfather. I have huge respect
and for his memory and for everything he did. And I think that carries on. I mean, so does my son.
and he was his great-grandfather whom he never met. The generations were big in our family.
The reason he was Ignatius Alawishusius was because he was the 13th child. These were some serious
Irish Catholics. They never took with me, but I one time had a funny priest looking at me and I was an
altar boy and he's like, we're never going to get you, are we? I'm like, no father you're not.
But back then, very, very serious Irish Catholic. A lot of his charity went to, like he put Notre Dame
on the map, for example, by making one of the first big donations there and many, many, many
others. But I think honestly, for me, the thing that moved me the most emotionally was at his
funeral, at the wake, which was held at a university, University of St. Thomas, which he basically
built. It was the wake part was held there. And a very scruffy looking man, clearly,
probably homeless. And this is 73. So not too much homelessness back that. Came in and everyone,
I was just kind of like watched, I was 13, right? I'm kind of like watching everyone's reaction.
And you see people kind of like recoiling a little bit.
He walks over, looks at my grandfather in his casket, leans in, kisses him on the forehead, does a cross and walks up.
And I just saw it like, what did my grandfather do for him?
Obviously something huge.
And to me, I mean, I'm not a very emotional person, but just thinking of that, that was what, like, that really was what got me.
And so life is short.
And, you know, I'm not a Hindu.
I don't think that this is a dress rehearsal.
I don't think we get reincarnated.
As my daughter, Kate, once said when she was just a little girl when we were talking about reincarnation on a family car ride,
my son Patrick, who everyone knows and Kate were there.
Patrick was like hemming and hoeing about, well, there's this and there's this and there's this.
And Kate must have been three and a half.
And I said, what do you think, Kate?
She thought for a minute and she goes, Daddy, I don't think that you can relight a match once it's been blown out.
And I'm like, whoa.
Wow.
So life short, enjoy it, have fun, help other people, make you feel better.
Life is short, Jim.
And that just makes it all the more profound that you spent some of your very valuable time with us today.
I really genuinely appreciate it.
And not only that, all the wisdom and research and information and everything else,
experience that you're sharing with us in our audience is just so highly valuable.
And I really appreciate it.
So thank you for taking the time.
My pleasure.
Thanks.
All right, everybody.
That's all we had for you this week.
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