The Guy Who Studied Buffett for 25 Years

I have a thought experiment for you imagine if you could just snap your fingers and suddenly there was a second version of you a second body brain your eyes your ears the way you think the way you operate but with one caveat one change it would do whatever you said to do you know what I would tell it to do I would tell it to go study the art of investing investing like Scott Galloway says is like having an army of capital go wage war for you right instead of you working for money your money

works for you I love that so how do you get great at something well you would study the greats and that's exactly what the person who's coming on this podcast today has done he's gone back and for 25 years has studied everything that Warren Buffett Charlie Monger all the great investors what they have done read every single annual letter go and read all the reports study their how they grew from bit by bit block by block step by step and not just learn them in the book but then went and practiced it and so I

wanted to ask this guy what did you learn about investing and what can I learn how can I spend an hour or two with you and download 10 years of your brain his name is Guy spear he's a very cool guy a lot of people really respect guy cuz he is a just incredibly humble interesting guy I think you're going to love this conversation so enjoy this episode with guy [Music] spear I have all these notes about where to start cuz I'm like oh he's value investing there's going to be good investing knowledge but the

thing I was actually curious about when I was doing my research was about this group that you had called the posi oh yeah and I don't know if the posi still exist or this was just a moment in time but can you explain what was the posi who was in it what was it well what's happened to me is I've discovered that I love Warren Buffett value investing bathway so I want to be all over anything that's got to do with that and in New York City there's this Ruan conif firm that has a friend

of Warren Buffett's two friends of Warren buffets that run it and they have a mutual fund and they have an annual general meeting and I get invited to some event before or after and there's a guy Whitney Tilson there who's like Master Network to the power of Master networker and we're introduced to each other and we're one year away from each other at Harvard Business School and the next thing I know he invites me to meet other people and he doesn't invite me to the group on its own he invites me to meet this person

over there or that you're sort of like hey go have a coffee with that guy and so before I know I've met three or four members of this group and then it it was Whitney who put together uh a group of five or six of us who were all fascinated by Warren Buffett who all wanted to become better investors and we'd meet I think it was sometimes we'd meet even once a week in in one of our members offices there was a member that had an office in Midtown and we'd present ideas and Whitney's friend

bill akman was part of that group for a while that's how I met bill akman for the few times I'd met him and I wasn't really aware of what that was or why well I I kind of we' had study group at business school and obvious you want to get together with friends who have common interest but I didn't realize what a powerful tool for Success it was until at that dinner lunch first meal with Mish pabai where he talked about forums YPO forums and he said you should you should get into one you'd benefit

and then then I got switched on but uh but that posy met for about I think it met for two or three or four years and we're still part of an email chain I mean Whitney will send out an email send out a happy birthday message to the group some have become very very good friends of mine and some are uh I'm not even sure where they are now so you what was happening so you're meeting let's say once a week or every couple of weeks and you go to someone's office and you said you

had you would all the commonality was you were all investors who were fans of the buffet style of investing value investing what would happen at these groups you show up what actually is there some structure did you just somebody's got a stock that they're interested in and you start debating it what would happen so what I what I remember is that you needed to show up up with a written a written stock idea everybody or one person just one person and then you discuss it in depth at that meeting then the following meeting another person

would come with a written stock idea that you would distribute hand out give the handout and then you'd talk it through and obviously at the end of that like a half an hour 45 minute sort of talk through that there'd be various other ideas that were discussed but as a result of that what would happen I remember once sitting in a car with with Whitney driving somewhere in New Jersey to visit a company called is it was called iswe Interactive Services worldwide Inc iswi that had gaming software for TVs for example so there were sort

of followon meetings that happened both social and business related or somebody would I realized this is at a time when transcripts of conference calls were not available so somebody would listen to a conference call and they'd make notes and they would pass them out by email for example so there's a kind of the structured part of those meetings but what is really really fascinating is that unstructured sort of like somebody mentions something or says something and I think that many of these best ideas come because somebody says something that is really fascinating so as a

result of this uh I we're at a dinner somewhere bill was at this dinner and he started talking about mbia and he started talking about how the asymmetry of the bet on the credit default swaps on mbia and it was not I could have read that in a document I could have that but it was the way Bill talked about it that really stuck in my mind I thought wow that is really fascinating and so that kind of meta information if you like is is what you really get out of it can you tell the

farmer Mac story because I think that was a a great example of what what came out of the yeah so there I am investing started off investing I'm Investing For Friends fools and family is I think how monish would put it so but I'm scared I'm very very scared because I really I don't know what I'm doing what's a Harvard NBA a guy pretends to himself in the world that he knows what he's doing when he actually doesn't you know but I knew that I didn't know what I was doing so you know so so

you're looking one of the ways in which I approached that challenge was to look for people who did know what they were doing who were I thought they knew what they were doing and to kind of try and um uh unwind what they did to to backfill to reverse engineer what they' done and do the same thing so I I got all sorts of investment ideas through that and i' obviously I was studying Warren Buffett and I was also studying a guy called Tom Russo and I can give examples of for example Tom Russo was

invested in Nestle and I started I kind of like wow Brands that's a really powerful way place to look where else can I find consumer Brands so you know Freddy Mack and Fanny May at the time were these um government sponsored Enterprises kind of a duopoly SL Monopoly highly highly profitable enormous ban sheets but were super successful at making money for their investors but also for organizing the mortgage Market in a way that made sense for everybody so there they are and so I'm doing what I normally do which or normally do which had made

sense for me is look for similar kinds of situation because Buffett was invested in yeah so he was invested there you're looking at Buffett for ideas see you're saying what's similar to those all right real quick I want to talk to you if you are new to business if you are just getting started maybe you're new to this podcast you're trying to get out there and do your first business there's a lot of people who listen to this podcast that fall into that category and HubSpot has made something pretty cool for you most people in

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go on this journey check it out it's the ultr entrepreneurship kit the link is in the description below this video check it out and enjoy and I actually had an investment in Freddy Mack uh and uh uh was making quite a bit of money in Freddy Mack was very very happy with that investment and so I'm saying what other similar government sponsored Enterprises are there and I uncover Farm MAAC so farmer MAAC is also a government sponsored Enterprise and their goal is in the same way that Freddy and Fanny are funding the mortgage Market by

buying these mortgage back Securities buying and issuing mortgage back Securities these guys were doing the same thing but in farms Farm loans so they would buy up Farm loans package them up and resell them with their guarantee and uh the claim was that they were reducing the cost for Farmers to borrow while at the same time creating valuable Securities for investors to buy and I thought wow this is incredible this is really really good and it's minuscule and I just freaking love this and so I think I probably did present on pharmer Ma and uh

I kind of like sat down with the posy and said hey you guys check this out this is uh you know this is the next Freddy Mack and Fanny May except Freddy Mack and Fanny May are sort of like tens of billions if not hundreds of billions of market cap this thing's got a market cap of if I'm not mistaken maybe one or two billion and there's plenty of room to grow all that jazz maybe two or three later uh Whitney says to me you know that company you presented well I think Bill amman's either

short it or he's about to take a massive short position and he wants to talk to you so I'm like okay so uh I I take the call from Bill and bill says look I just feel like I I need to tell you I kind of got the idea indirectly from you but I'm uh I've just taken a a massive short position in Farmer Ma and I feel like I need to tell you I think that the company is borderline fraudulent and um uh I was like okay you've got my attention you know there's a

there's a saying who's wise he who learns from every man who's Wise Guy spear who learns from Bill Amman and I kind of said look you know this is important to me um can I just come down to your office yeah come on down he says prove me wrong prove prove to me that I'm wrong so I go down to his office and uh I also remember that the black file he had like sort of huge several meters worth of files where he had taken so every time one of these government sponsored Enterprises issues a

mortgage back security it's kind of like a kind of like an IPO there publicly public filings available you need to know you know they're issuing uh debt on the one side to fund their asset purchases on the other so what are their asset purchases what are the terms of this mortgage back security and so he downloaded I I have to confess and I I hate confess in this but it's true I hadn't downloaded one I took them at their word and and you know we he kind of said look when you look at the the

entities that are created by Freddy and Fanny each one of these mortgage back Securities has hundreds if not even hundreds thousands of different individual mortgages and the individual mortgage sizes would be anywhere from $50,000 $100,000 to half a million and uh and they're kind of like they're classes of mortgage and there's distribution across the country so these might be from east and west coast North and South different income categories he said I've downloaded I don't know he downloaded a number of uh the farmer Mac ones he said like there's there's three mortgages inside you said

that doesn't create kind of the distribution the risk of spreading it's it's like it's just three it's like that's like a bank loan it's just three different things that have gone into a kind of a bank loan this is not and the mortgage sizes were far larger uh in and maybe three was an exaggeration but 100 or 200 rather than tens of thousands so much more risk yeah and he just said look this is business lending this isn't this isn't a mortgage back security there's no way you can call this a mortgage back security you

know I debated him I said look it's got It's got a government guarantee behind it he said yeah it's got a government guarantee but what they're doing is they engaging in business related lending from his perspective this was a a lending against a business not lending against Real Estate and it just didn't deserve to be there so was he right I think he was right absolutely and and look uh what what was clear to me in that moment was that I had not done the depth of analysis that he'd done and I first of all

I hadn't downloaded those documents I could have downloaded them I hadn't downloaded them or maybe maybe they weren't I could have located them and found them it wasn't as easy to find as it was would have been today but I could have found them and I'm kind of torn between wanting to stay and learn more and and rush back to the office and put in a Cell order and literally I mean I I got back to the office and I put in a sell order I I I knew I didn't know it well enough I

knew that the points he made were good and uh and I sold it by the end of the day lucky enough the fund was small felt super relieved that I'd sold it and then uh either I or Bill or Whitney got a meeting with the management so what happened there was absolutely astounding to me actually the management came with its pre-prepared presentation and they were ready to go through the presentation and of course it's very dangerous when a management does that because they Lead You In the direction they they may not even do it consciously

they're leading you in the direction they want you to go and bill says look I know a lot about the company I prefer if we dispense with the presentation we just go to the questions that I have for you they were a little nonplused by that but uh uh they they agreed to it they they didn't really have much Choice and then bill came with the same kinds of questions that he posed to me that I didn't have good answers for like why is this different to business lending how can you call this a class

when there's only a small number of loans inside and they're all inside and when they're all of different sizes whereas a mortgage back Security will have you know many many many single family homes and they they didn't have any good answer says at some point the CEO said well maybe this might not be the right investment for you which is a pretty pretty weak I don't know if that makes it into my book but uh that was a pretty weak thing to say and I was kind of absolutely shocked shocked uh and it's one of

the one of three stocks that I've shorted in my life actually when presented with a counterargument instead of Simply you know explain they should know their business better they should be able to answer those questions they just took their ball and said okay maybe don't play with us yeah exactly and look bill was a way better at that point a way better analyst than I was I had all sorts of other things I needed to be doing and just to keep my little business afloat so there are all sorts of good reasons as well for

why I was unable to dive that deep but it showed how from time to time if you don't do the analysis all the way especially when you're going to a place where other people haven't been you're going to get it wrong there's an example that comes to mind when you say that in my life in the in the entrepreneurial sense but I I have a friend who is uh a good bud of mine and and a bit of a mentor to me we made a deal with one of my businesses to for him to help

me out and so he says okay great I'll help you out I said um hey can we meet on Friday Friday comes around and I'm expecting I just thought this is how business works I thought we're going to meet on Friday so Friday noon that's when the the the video call will start and then we will start to talk and we'll discuss some ideas and then maybe after we discuss there'll be some actions and basically in the like 72h hour period before he just went to our site we have an e-commerce site and so he

went to our site and said and just immediately opened up at Google doc and started writing uh a bunch of like really hyper tactical observations of things that were messed up in our own product there's a weird thing that happens with your own product where you spend so much time at the back of your business you never like use it as a customer whereas he just went and used it as a customer he went into our ad account and and he laid out this Google doc that was like two pages bullet point no fluff words

in between it was just try adding this remove this this is missing hey you wrote this here but that doesn't this this link doesn't work in your ads try this segmentation strategy try this try this try this and he had laid out this two-page docket so by the time we showed up at the meeting I was like oh well I guess we don't really need to disc you already did an audit basically and told you Dove so deep deeper than I'm doing in my own business which was embarrassing for me at the moment but it

was so useful and it became a real eye opener of like oh this is how the best people operate which is that when they're going to do something they just drill right in to the source of the of the issue if we're trying to grow the the answer to how we grow is going to be in the actual product mechanism and he went right there he found a bunch of opportunities and it was like there's nothing to discuss like make these changes and then let's see let's talk after that you know why would we talk

before and it was a real eye opener for me and H how the best people operate they go straight to the Tactical stuff of like what could we just simply be doing better in the in the funnel what strikes me about that is that what extraordinary Act of generosity so he was giving you sort of like something that he was giving you the best part of his brain and he was giving it to you just out of the desire to give and and it feels to me obviously I wasn't there he's giving it without any

agenda and uh just maybe he loves to do it or because he really cares about you or because he knows about a lot about the topic and and that that seems really special friend because there are people who know a lot but they just don't have the time they either don't want to have the time or genuinely don't have the time to talk to you about your stuff and so that that's pretty pretty special especially if he wasn't investor yet or he wasn't an employee yet yeah yeah I think we're we're both Tony Robbins uh

you know uh I don't know fans or notic uh and he has a pH you know the secret to living is giving and he talks about you know almost like in the hierarchy of needs you get past yourself can you tell a couple of the lessons that you got from Tony or maybe that what what shaped you out of uh out of that CU you you like me are a self-improvement kind of infinite learner mindset person I think a lot of the audience because that's what I like to talk about is also wired that way

I would love to hear maybe some stories or some some big takeaways for you so I think that in total I've I've done sort of like eight or nine Tony Robin seminars in my life including a big one in Hawaii and I'm just curious what what number are you on if I I want to know if you're more of an expert than me or vice versa no less than that I've I've been to two and so I've been to two or three two or three but they all they were all the uh upw you Unleash

the Power Within I didn't do his like kind of deeper stuff but then I just kind of devoured a lot of his old material specifically like if you go on YouTube there's really great stuff of him when he was very young uh talking and you know not all of it is the stuff he talks about today but he has some really good stuff that actually for business people is useful about public speaking about um sales about marketing about persuasion and he he doesn't do a lot of that material now but that was some of my

favorite stuff that he did back then so so that's where I'm at and I think that what what comes up for me as you say it is so you know there's this moment where in a way my destiny is um is on a knife edge with this meeting with Mish pabai and because I took the decision to to to approach him without an agenda I got a very different Mish to the person I would have gotten if I'd have approached him with an agenda and first meetings are always very important and so the decision to

go to my first Anthony Robins seminar was a bit like that I had this really good friend in New York City who she says to me oh you're in San Francisco there's an Anthony Robin seminar there you should go it might change your life and I remember at the time because I had this weekend planned with friends I was like you know I'm going to go it's some where perhaps my deep wise the deepest wisest part of me knew that just to go hang out with friends would be something like same old same old whereas

going to the seminar might give me something new so uh you know I I show up at this seminar Anthony Robin's like six foot something tall and you know and and he's getting us to uh jump up and down there's a huge amount you know as you've heard a thousand times anybody's done Anthony Robins Mo emotion has got Motion in it if you want to feel good about yourself you need to look at your physiology and look at how you're moving and change the way you're moving in order to change your emotions and I'm like

this kind of snarky Brit at the back you know I'm just like what is this and looking at my watch and thinking why did I waste the money maybe I can still go out hang out with my friends but I did the firewalk and once I'd done the firewalk I was in a different place and so so for those who don't know he he kind of Whi those who want to be whipped up into a state in which you feel very confident to walk across a bed of hot coals and uh you walk across them

and you don't get burned and you know there's all sorts of spiritual or non uh physical reasons I you know is I think that the main thing is is the state of mind that you're in and the firmness with which you walk if you walk in that way anyway it was like I it really did that metaphor of how if you have the right psychology and you have the right physiology there are extraordinary things that you can do as a human that metaphor went in for me such that I now stayed the rest of the

weekend and in my case I was a guy who had my head up my rear end I was uh I had achieved some early academic success in life and I was getting to be quite bitter because I wanted success but the things that I'd learned the routines that I'd learned to get success and at this point I'm aged 27 28 29 they weren't working for me and I I I I'm sad that I see other people who are in kind of similar circumstances and I think the younger you are when failure hits you or when

difficulty hits you the better it is because the more likely you are to develop strategies and to adjust and to try different things but I was at a point where I was kind of starting to get stuck in my ways and I really needed a very powerful kick in order to it wasn't enough that new things weren't working and Anthony Robbins did that for me and so after that firew walk I was really quite enthusiastic about everything that came out s after that and I couldn't stop talking about Anthony Robins when I got back to

New York and started reading NLP and started neural linguistic programming and started like really diving into the self-help bookshelf to find more material that would help me in that way and I think that in my case I was so badly programmed for the kind of earlier part of my life that I needed you probably did fine with one or two Anthony Robbins upws I needed every single one and I'm and I'm super grateful to him for giving me that I mean you know there was a point on that first night where where he he kind

he kind of said and and I bought it so there was the firewalk and he said look you think I'm here to make money out of you and he kind of said look I'm definitely here because it's a business and you guys have paid money to be here and there's a lot you know yes I definitely make money out of this but it's not the true motivation I really want to help you I really really want to help you guys in this Stadium get a different result from your life and and that actually I mean

you know one of the books that Mish gave me to read when I first met him was this power versus Force book by David Hawkins and I went strong at that I he didn't strike me as just selling me a yarn I was like okay I I'm I'm willing to open myself to this he's he actually wants to I don't know if he can help me but he's at least that's the intention he's expressed and I believe him you know then what I knew was that I had an enormous amount of rewiring of myself that

I had to do and and so I started doing that rewiring and it was that rewiring the process of rewiring myself and taking actions that I'd learned to do because I'd started doing Anthony Robbins that got me in front of mish pabai what would be an example of a rewiring so like a before my brain thought this way or worked this way and after so I I had this awful attitude that I was smarter than most people that I met and you know first of all I was way less smart than I thought I was

you know and this that it's not important how smart you are it's how smart you are relative to how smart you think you are and I had this arrogant attitude that once I cat somebody as not worth my time I didn't really need to pay attention to them and there's there's a moment it's either in the seminar or one of the cassettes and at the time I was listening to cassettes of Anthony Robbins by the way I had a collection of the cassettes and there's the story that Anthony Robbins tells about walking up to maybe

it's Norman Vincent Peele or another of these Health heel people and Anthony Robbins says look I've I've read your book and nothing's changed and and the guy says how many times have you read my book Anon Robin says well once he's like go read it five more times and then come back to me and so one of the books I picked up was Dale cari's book how to win friends and influence people that came well before I discovered that Warren Buffett really learned a lot from Dale carnegi and Dale carnegi sort of sits there and

says the most important sound in anybody's mind is their own name what a freaking concept you know I was too busy trying to you know having studied law and economics and what have you and I was not connected to that but so so that's just the awareness oh my God you don't bother to remember people's names you don't remember bother to address people by their name is it a surprise that you're not getting the results that you want and so I I then made an effort and it it especially to somebody who grew up in

the UK you in in the US people will do it a lot they'll meet you they say and they'll say how do I pronounce your name to make sure it's pronounced correctly and then they'll use your name a lot and it's struck me as being a little disingenous but actually I started doing it I made myself do it I said you know why this into yourself and around that time and this is not from Anthony Robbins I'd read the um psychology of influence and so I was like reciprocation reciprocation I need to do reciprocation I

would buy bags of sweets and hand out sweets to like the Dorman to the taxi driver to whoever the hell it was so I had all these big theories of how the world worked from you know these great professors and writers of textbooks and what have you and I could spend hours writing essays about how the world worked but i' never really spent time understanding how one-on-one interactions work and how do you get people to feel positively oriented towards you on a micro level in real life you know and and it just like shocking look

I think in my case there's a few things going on I think that I'm just that module is not very good it's not very welldeveloped in me uh I take my wife for example we'll go to some social events you say Do you realize the guy was you were standing too close to him or do you realize they wanted to go five minutes before you actually allowed them to go and I'm like no please help me and I think that I've made some progress just not something I'm very good at and yes we should specialize

and the things that we're really good at but we need to be bring a few things up to the bare minimum Basics and there were a few things with me that I was missing that were just not the bare minimum Basics it's funny in your book you talk about how when you were young you were like this Gordon gecko wannabe I wrote that phrase down you're like I was a young Gordon gecko wannabe I wanted to be rich I wanted to be powerful I wanted to run Wall Street you join DH Blair which basically was

like modeled after I think Stratton like the the thing the firm that's feat featured in Wolf of Wall Street like the penny stock in a firm and then DH Blair goes down a few years after you leave and you're at this point where you know you've gone to Harvard Business School you got the job on Wall Street you you wanted to have the slick back hair and all the money and the cars and the power and then you have this kind of Turning Point which is uh you know the Tony Robbins event which starts to

get you to think about other things you go study NLP you study the Chini book about persuasion and you know how to win friends and influence people you start working on on other things there's a great Tony Robbins line where he says you know school is great but learning is more important and you know his point is that it doesn't matter what you what happens when you're in school like the point is to learn sometimes it happens in school and sometimes it happens out of school but the learning is the thing not the schooling yeah

and so it's funny to me that it seems like you actually got your your Masters after you left Harvard Business School and and started to pick up all these other traits that were important to you can you tell the story of the the handwritten notes because I found this you know initially when I read this and I've heard this before I kind of wrote it off as this sort of simpleton cheesy idea and it's now coming to my life three or four times so what did you read in that book and then how did that

lead to ultimately I think you meeting Mish was from a handwritten note also so can you tell that little story I think there's there's something I need to learn there because I've heard this three or four times never implemented it maybe this is the time so in the Chini book there is a story of the person who was the most successful car salesperson for the longest time and the way if I remember correctly Chini writes about it he just says he just wrote uh a thousand cards a year saying I like you and I don't

know if he actually said I like you if you go and do an Anthony Robin seminar you'll learn about matching and mirroring and this idea that it's very interesting they had well the word like to like somebody and alike we like people who are similar to us and the the idea is if you just match and mirror what they're doing speak at the same speed wear the same clothes have the same hand gestures they will so I sort of say I literally I just said to myself because I'm feeling raw and angry in a way

because because I want success and I'm not getting it and so I'm willing to try things that I haven't tried before and that's kind of key and in a way having gone to DH Blair I've burned my bridges I can't go back into all sorts of career choices where if I had not gone to DH Blair they would have had me so in a way I'm kind of desperate as well and with this idea well you know a thousand notes a year that's more or less three notes a day I'm not going to leave leave

the office until I've written three notes that basically say I like you uh and so I realized that saying I like you feels a little weird and so you know but but thank you feels a lot better so I I I think I can do that and if I leave the office without having done that it means I actually don't want success that badly and somehow if I'd written those three notes I could forgive myself for not getting success if I did that thing I think that in a way that was me showing up and

I just as an aside I I see people often their children of friends where they're not showing up for themselves and they're not even trying and I think the worst thing is to fail either an exam or some test that life gives you without having shown up so if you're going to fail fail fully and honorably by showing up and doing the best you can because then the failure means something that was my way of saying I desperately want success I'm even willing to spend the extra x amount of time at the office to write

these notes because I'll if that's what what it takes to succeed then I'll do it and if I find something better to do I'll do that but for now leaving the office that's what I can do and actually funnny enough I remember in one conversation with Whitney Tilson he was like guy you know all of my friends are telling me you're writing notes it's like you think really think that's gonna get you anywhere in life it was kind of like kind of ridiculous and for some reason again I said to myself I don't mind looking

like I'm a fool and I think I think many people inhibit themselves because they're afraid of looking a fool I really don't mind looking at least at the time I didn't so uh I didn't stop me from doing it and I just wrote endless thank you notes to people and even better or often better is to send them something that you know will interest them now can you can end up spending a lot of money if you're sending them each an expensive book for example but it might have been a print out of a transcript

and I realized that actually often whatever I'm sending them I really didn't care genuinely about the people I was writing to I was doing it because I was going through the motions in a way I was faking it so then you know I'm writing note to XYZ person and I actually take the time to think about them a little bit and I realized that I the act of writing the note changed my insides made me care about them a little more so I was actually becoming more caring through the act of writing the note and

this idea that sometimes you don't have to feel it to do it do it and you'll feel it later and that's absolutely fine that's a huge point right there I just want to add one thing uh almost going back to the Tony Robin thing he tells the story when you're at the event he's like okay uh we're going to play a game look around the room find everything red find as many red things as you can winner is whoever finds the most red things look around look for red look for red look for red look

for red and all of a sudden you're looking around you see that the fire alarm is red you see that the chair is red you see that the screen has a little red thing on it you see red everywhere he says all right close your eyes and tell me about something blue and everybody laughs and it turns out we didn't see anything blue we were so fixated on red yeah and he said there's a part of your brain uh he said he's like there's a couple things there number one when I told you to look

for red you suddenly saw so much red when I told you to look for blue when I asked you what was blue you saw none because you were only looking for red yeah and he says there's a part of your brain called the reticular activating system which is a it's your heat seeking missile it's the part of your brain that actually says ignore everything there's too much stimulus only pay attention to what matters but what matters is you get to program that yes and so when you're searching for when looking at buying a car and

you're thinking about maybe I'll buy a BMW suddenly on the road you see that's that that's that BMW oh that's the one with the different Wheels that's the one with the trunk space and you start to see B it's not that the BMWs suddenly appeared it's they were always there but your brain had called them white noise before and now you've told your brain BMWs matter pay attention and so there's a how do you use this part of your brain to your advantage and so what you were doing with the notes where you said doing

it will cause the feeling later which is if I'm going to write the thank you notes that means I need to thank them for something so I need to pay attention to something that I appreciate about them or I need to pay attention to what they're interested in in order to give them this note and you become suddenly a more caring interested person because of that gratitude works the same way I know I had this practice where every night I would say you know this me and my wife who would say all what's give me

three things three things you're grateful for today moments of the day you were grateful for so not like I'm grateful for my family's health this abstract concept but like what was a moment of the day and at first it's really hard and you realize man I'm such a jerk I I don't even pay attention to my life uh you know how could it be that I just went through the emotion State and had nothing you do that two or three days and suddenly during the day you start stashing it you say oh that'll be one

of my three things for the night you train your brain to look for things to be grateful for which makes you a more grateful person and that was such a huge unlock for me and what you're describing is essentially a a similar phenomenon a similar pattern where the act of writing the notes caused you to then be more interested in other people and genuinely care about them and you know what's interesting for me is there was a certain point at which I would get interns to do just that I'd just say your job as an

intern is just to get a list together of people that you care about because they're and and write notes to them and you know I don't think that there's even one case or none comes to my mind right now where where somebody really implemented it and and it kind of like really frustrating for me because it's not a zero sum game it's not like if you do it and somebody else we know does it it may diminishes us it actually enhances all of our lives and it's not clear to me exactly why some people end

up doing it and some people don't I would tell you that what just blows me away is that uh you know Warren Buffett gets this Warren Buffett is giving gifts to me he's writing the equivalent of thanky notes to me I'm a nothing in his life and he's not doing it every day he's not necessarily doing it every year but every two or three years I he sends me something or does something via his assistant like Warren Buffett is doing that you know wait really so Warren buff buff it sends you something like a thank

you note or something like I mean it's like a holiday card but but here's the I mean I I don't know if we're doing video I could I have one that pull out so so do you let me step away for a second and pull it out and demonstrate it bear with me because because of course I have it up on my wall hang on a sec so uh Warren uh this is I don't know how many years after I've met him not right away that's for sure I get a holiday card from Warren in

the post and I'm just going to put it up for a second and then we can talk about it it is so clever so uh let's see um uh you can see that and uh there we go yeah Warren Santa I can't read the text but I see Warren Warren Buffett with Santa so of course I framed it but the key there is is that it's a card which is I mean I'm going to look at it now because I need to remember so it's 2011 and he's crossed out Geico Burlington Northern Santa Fe and

mlan and then sort of like companies that he maybe would want to buy it's got eggon mobile Wells Fargo Google and you know there's Warren next to Father Christmas there and but here's the key so he says either I finish this list by Christmas or I occupy the North Pole probably it was around the time of Occupy Wall Street but then what he's done is he's written he's scrolled on it and I don't know how many of these he's does every year guy happy holidays I enjoyed your 2010 report Warren and so you know what

well you know so the key there is is like the other side's got nothing on it because who cares because you know maybe guys's going to frame it you don't want to put anything on that side and and what makes it special is he's personalized it to me and he's understood that that is an enormous gift to the people who receive it and you know I you literally this is a this is a mish expression you when I received that you needed to peel me off the floor I mean I was but and what am

I to him you know really of all the people that he knows what am I to him he's had dinner parties with Katherine Graham in Washington where he's met heads of state and head of the Commerce department and the head of the central the Federal Reserve and now he's sending that to me and he's doing reciprocation he's giving out the equivalent of sweets he's giv out the equivalent of a thank you note he's showing this individual that he in some way just cares about me as an individual and he's doing it in pretty efficient way

for him and in a way that allows me to get all excited and tell Shan Puri all about it in a podcast I mean he so he understands this stuff he freaking understands this stuff well I think that's amazing I did not know that he does that so that's very cool we had a guy jessle itler come on the podcast and he does this as well he I think he handwrites thousands of cards every year and he talks about the value in this um but you know I need to hear ideas four or five times

before I actually go Implement them I'll tell you another similar story that's like this we met a guy who knew Kobe Bryant he trained Kobe's daughter before she passed away in that in that you know the tragic accident and I was like tell me some kobe stories and if you read on the internet all Kobe stories are like Nike Kobe they're Black Mamba Kobe which is basically about this ruthless competitor hard work kind of an on the court but like you know for the right reasons and and that was the brand there but this guy

who actually knew Kobe told me like a a different side he's like and he's like Kobe would call my mom on her birthday he's like and who am I same thing who am I to him uh unbelievable that he would FaceTime my mom on her birthday I don't know how he even knew her birthday I don't know how he did it but like from that day forth you know my mom was the biggest kobby Bryant fan in the world another guy mentioned the same thing he said he told this story and I'll give you the

short version which is he goes to this pickup game he plays with Kobe and the guy plays terrible and Kobe's like come on man are you gonna make a shot are you what's going on he's joking with him and the guy says hey man hey man I'm a volume shooter I need to take lots of shots okay it's not about making you high percentage I'm a volume shooter and so Kobe laughed and you know a month later they the guy comes in the gym Kobe's playing and Kobe turns uh sorry Kobe's playing his game this

guy's helping out on the side eventually this guy's leaving and Kobe says hey man volume you're just gonna leave without saying bye and the guy's like oh I didn't even want to bother Kobe that's why I didn't say bye he's like I couldn't believe that this guy a stopped me to say by and B remembered that thing about me and the trainer asked Kobe he's like Kobe like you have you're amazing with people's names or remembering like one thing about them you know why is that and he said well you know feels good in the

moment right but but beyond that he's like look this will be the only five seconds I maybe will ever interact with this person but for the rest of their lives they're going to tell everybody they know they might tell 3,000 people over the next you know the rest of their life about Kobe Bryant and he's like so it's so simple for so lightweight for me it's nothing for me right it cost me almost nothing and yet for them it can be a huge payoff and that they will go and tell the world about you know

this amazing interaction they had so it's only 5 seconds for me but it might last years down the road yeah and it's same thing Kobe got it he he understood that well and I think that what's fun about these things is that you want to make it yours so you don't want to necessarily follow the guy spear formula well um I also want to ask you about investing because you know that's what you're known for I want to start with a quote from you that I found interesting I don't fully get it so I want

you to explain it to me you said infesting is like being a drunk stumbling around at a bar trying to find a drink yeah and I think you were contrasting it to the idea of investing being you're like a fighter pilot you just scanning you lock your Target and you just you know laser beam it what do you mean by that I don't fully understand yeah so another I'm not going to get the terminology wrong because I'm not a big bowler but if you go bowling last time I went bowling every single ball I bowled

went into one of those side channels it was very upsetting to me I mean I was really bad but then you if you're a child especially you can get them to put up curtains so that it doesn't go into the side Channel and uh you know it's this idea that you get on when I've the few times I've been bowling I want to hit the kingpen or the pen at the front and knock them all over and what a satisfying feeling and that's what you try that's what you think you're trying to do but actually

you're just trying to keep it off the edges you know and anything that you can help you can do to stop yourself from having it fall into those edges where you kind of lose everything is a good thing and so spend less time time aiming for the for the for the skittle at the very front instead spend more time thinking just to keep it on the runway rather than in the sides and set myself up such that when I miss really really badly I'm still going to be okay that is more important than actually hitting

on the targets it's going to be more important for me or for many investors not it's not the question of whether you select that winner it's going to be about how you run your portfolio in such a way that you don't have massive massive of losses you know we spend a lot of time being impressed with success impressed with people who seem to have succeeded whether it's companies like Google whether it's individuals like Jeff Bezos and a large enough number of others and this is this uh fo by Randomness idea of Nasim TBS that many

of those people are lottery winners they were in the right place at the right time and yes they were working hard and yes they had all the attributes but also they were lottery winners and we need need to be really really careful when we study success don't study lottery winners and there's a well-known phenomenon that even the lottery winner subjectively thinks that they had some input into their success and the famous example there is that you get a room full of uh any number of people and you have them all flip coins and you keep

them flipping coins they will after a certain number of flips be somebody who managed to to flip nine heads in a row 20 heads in a row depending on how many people there are and how lucky you are and in interviews and I I wish I could actually cite the study they ask the person who threw the nine heads and they're convinced they had something to do with it so this is just like a really really important phenomenon to be aware of and stay away from so how do I set my life up in such

a way that given the enormous Randomness I succeed well enough no matter what and that is a is a far more laudable goal than trying to ape the success of somebody who won a lot fre ticket you know you said something in your book that that I liked you go I don't know what it is about me but when an idea captures me like I throw my my all into it like For Better or For Worse like if somebody you know it's the handwritten note thing right like okay that's the thing then I'm gonna do

it all I'm all in on doing that and it see sounded like when you got interested in Buffett you didn't just read about Buffett or study kind of like his his high level philosophies it sounded like you went and you ordered the annual reports of the companies that he bought in the years before he bought them yeah to try to sit down as if you were Buffett and try to read them through his eyes can you describe this because I thought that was pretty fascinating I never heard somebody talk about something like that but there

was something in there that to me felt like a valuable practice or a impressive version of really throwing your all into into something versus just tiptoeing around or Surface level investigation of an idea unlike what I did with farmer Mac for example just to get back to ear part of the conversation where I did not do that that's what I should have done but didn't and there's been I think it's been three times maybe four times in my life where I've lost sleep over something where I've sort of like I've stayed up saying I kind

of want to do it now I wna I want to get my hands on anything related to it and that happened to me with Warren Buffett and Berkshire hathway sitting at this stratan Oakmont type Place DH and saying I want a life that looks more like that guys and I hate what my life is and then doing whatever the hell I can do to get closer to it in any in a in a way Sean in a in a sense of desperation you know there so the idea of this like this masterful person who sort

of orders up the annual reports and goes through them carefully no it's a sense of desperation I'm so desperate I'll do anything even order his any reports because that's the only thing I got you know and so you know I my father kind of says to me I'm talking to him about this he says well why didn't you go and apply to him for a job why don't you go visit him in Omaha I'm like father he's I was a guy who was smiling and dialing pounding the pavement looking for deals for DH Blair he

wasn't going to be interested in Mr gu bear showing up so I I felt like that was a dead end but I was doing what I thought were not dead ends and to understand everything I could about him was not a dead end and and it was absolutely instructive and I remember the feeling of you know getting the you know and you had to call up the company say I'd like to receive some copies of your annual report then they'd take your mailing address and then they'd mail it to you by by snail mail and

now the an reports arrive and I'd never seen a company like this two years at business school I hadn't seen the accounts of companies like these and those it's funny because it's a it's a welln saying you want to buy companies that just drown in cash I hadn't seen you Coca-Cola company drowning in cash I mean just enormous amounts of money cash being generated way more than on the income statement and it's kind of like an embarrassment of riches and to somebody who's looks at the average of All American corporations if you spend your time

with most American corporations you're not going to see the outliers like a company like Coca-Cola that really is just this extraordinary outlier and so it really was an eye opener to me and I kind of like my obviously my my jaw didn't actually was like I was like wow that's what this guy looks for that's like insane that's I I didn't realize I wonder what other companies like this exist so this is 1995 and Warren already understood so much because he was just sitting on Coca-Cola but you know and the story of Coca-Cola is as

I understand it is that he' bought C candy and C candy opened his mind up to these businesses with pricing power powerful brand that people don't want to switch away from but yeah and so obviously I I was going down a steeper learning curve than Warren Buffett had been down if you like so and so you you order these reports you're reading them you're trying to understand what he looks for and then was there anything else that was formative at that time for you to develop the mindset of a value industri to sort of immerse

yourself and speedrun this education to try to really level up so one formative thing sounds like ordering reports sitting down I think you even described it like sitting down like Buffett like walking like him talking like him drinking the drink that he sit down with Diet Pepsi or whatever he drinks and and really trying to you know sit in their shoes for a minute um was there anything else that was very formative in in your development there just two things there so one is that um obviously drinking the diet Cooks is not necessary and you

know eating Stakes or whatever but reading the an reports is for sure and so when in doubt do it all and then maybe over time you'll figure out what's meaningful and what isn't but drinking The Diet Cokes really isn't that important but also I think that and and I just get excited to think about this doing that goes to the very very core of our Humanity as a species because that's what we do we learn from generation to Generation by modeling I mean this matching and modeling matching and mirring in Anthony Robin's case cloning as

as as Mish PAB calls it is a very very human thing to do that's what we do that's how girls daughters learn from their mothers hunters learn from their Elders so so I was doing something that was kind of natural very very natural in a way it's very unnatural for us to send people to University to have the model professors who don't know anything about business if their plan is to go out and be business people so there are two sort of uh insights that I had that I subsequently realized were good insights about uh

what to do the one was you know so I can't get Warren Buffett as a mentor for me much as I would like him as a mentor for me but if he was my mentor what would he say and this beautiful idea that we often all of the time maybe we don't actually need the real person we need to know enough about them to know what they would say if they were present and so this idea of me ask saying what would if if Warren Buffett was here right now if he was in my shoes

what would he do and I think it's funny because I don't want to live a life like Jeff Bezos lived actually at the end of the day so I've never asked myself the question if I was Jeff Bezos what Jeff Bezos do in my shoes but I think it's a just an unbelievably powerful question and uh and help me get going and this is this technology of success that I think that Tony Robins would call it the technology of success that in a sense I wish that we could teach it at school you know because

they because in a way it's success by numbers it's it's not that hard you know imagine that the person you admire is in your shoes what would they do now try doing that see if it's working for you it might well work for you can can you give the uh I think there a monish thing I don't know or maybe he got it from somebody else the two gas stations across the street I thought this was a great metaphor so yeah it comes from um a good to great so yeah it's a beautiful uh idea

that I haven't thought about for for an enormously long time the idea is and this is a story I think is in his is in his book good to Great uh two gas stations opposite both opposite sides of the road and the guy in the gas station you know when he gets a customer he's made some money he Paints the wall of the gas station he puts out some flowers he uh makes his gas slightly cheaper and these are all actions that the guy on the other side of the road opposite him could do not

only could he do he's seeing the other guy do it right in front of him right in front of him and the fact of the matter is that in so many cases in life the guy on the other side side of the road who has all the opportunity to do exactly the same thing as the winning gas station just doesn't do it and uh you you come to this situation n years down the road and it's very hard to understand why one is so successful and the other isn't and so you know the the way

I think I tell the story in my book is you I'm sort of sitting with Mish and he's told this story a few times now and I'm like yeah yeah what a dumb guy on the other side of the road he isn't copying any of the things that the that the the one with the successful business is doing and and I don't know exactly what happens when I actually you're the guy on the other side of the road because here's Mr monish pabai doing all these things and you're not doing any of those things why

the hell not don't be such a freaking idiot what was something Mish was doing that you should have been simply copying oh that guy uh you know he comes out and washes the windshields of people giving G getting gas and they love it and that's why you know that little action is leading to success what was something that was a little action you could have copied you know getting a around the right people so something and it's taken a while for this to kind of seep into me and now I kind of feel like I

I own this phrase or I I'm fully familiar with it so Mish will talk about a sales engine or a marketing engine and maybe for those you know in a sense Sean I've never built a big business I just have a little investment shop with five people I'm like the little watch maker you know and I have a few people helping me make watches but you know the realization that what I need to do is break down the actions that I see need to be taken into repeatable steps and then build an engine around them

so that means uh enable people around me not just me to do those things and then to scale them up and do them in a larger volume so there's a there's a limit say to to how many thank you notes you can write but uh but but if you kind of like decide that you're going to generate Goodwill in a certain way how can you scale that up in what ways can you do it in a way this this value x uh event that I do every year or this um this value X BRK is

a way of scaling up Goodwill and building an engine for creating the kind of good feelings that you want to create inside of people and so that idea of building an engine what engines do you have what engines are firing up inside your business is is certainly straight from Onish PAB right another huge thing huge huge thing for me was the realization that I was investing enormous amounts of time talking to prospects and that in a certain way that was an enormous waste of my time and it just blew me away when I discovered that

Mish didn't waste any time talking to prospects basically if you weren't ready to invest with monish he didn't want to spend time with you and he had an engine of how people were going to find out about him and so you know I re and and then the first time I implemented that when I declined a meeting I said well if you're not invested with me I'm not going to meet with you was huge actually so I was going to say you know I'm there in my office I'm reading the the Coca-Cola any your reports

I'm saying what would Warren Buffett do in my shoes and then there's get around the right people just find a way to get around the right people no matter how um spirous you think that connection is so for me and it really was a great distinction for me I was so desperate for success I was so frustrated I said well if I'm going to travel to the b i away meeting every year and that's going to get me a little Clos to Warren Buffett I'm going to do that but I actually think that my annual

pilgrimage and it's correct wording to call it a pilgrimage and I can get into it if you like to go to the Bur haway meeting every year has exerted a really really powerful positive gravitational pull for me in the right direction and again I think that I get super excited about that because these are not genius moves they're not like sort of I had to be so capable so smart all of those things it's something that anybody can do you know oh I want to live a life that's more like the life of Warren Buffett

I'm going to start going to his annual meetings because that's going to rub off on me in some way and what's interesting is I could have in that moment that time around 1995 said oh but I don't ever want to live in Omaha I hate the coffee in Omaha there are many things about Warren Buffett that I actually not big fan of there are all sorts of things that I love doing that Warren Buffett has no interest in doing and and I see that stop people and it's like the fact that I'm going out to

Omaha doesn't mean I'm about to turn into Warren Buffett it doesn't mean I'm about to live his life it's still going to be my life I'm still going to do the things that I like to do but I'm going to have that rub off on me and that's in my view what a real pilgrimage is all about and it's about regularly getting together getting around people who are the kind of tribe that you want to become more like and that's just Destiny in there you know right you bumped into Buffett right at the uh you're

a close reader of my book it's a true story is just hilarious so this was the meeting where they were voting in the B shares there hadn't been B shares up to this date and I don't remember the name of the location it certainly wasn't where it is now the big Stadium or the big Convention Center downtown uh and um I'm in the stores I'm going to the toilet and out comes Warren Buffett and he turns to me he says he just he's clearly done a number two because otherwise you wouldn't have been in the

stores I always get a little nervous before those these things before he goes off and again this was one of these moments where I just like dropped to the floor as I couldn't believe it my hero was just standing there and look why did he talk to me this was not he was not in the streets although I've heard stories of him showing up at people's parties in in in Omaha I mean well known around town at least when he was younger he was talking to me because he felt like he was amongst family he

was with a Burkshire shareholder and therefore he was family I was family to him and but that was a you know I'm there dressed in a suit I'm I'm Mr New York investment banker I've got an MBA I mean I'm still got all of that wiring going on inside of me but that was that was kind of like a uh what would Anthony Robins call he broke my patn right right well I have a question so you have your fund and and I think you own a bunch of Burke B in your fund right it's

like 20% of of your fund and Buffett doesn't take any Buffett Burkshire doesn't have any management fee or any carry right you're just buying a piece of bathway if you do that why this is kind of a a silly question a stupid question but like if all the fund managers sort of idolize Buffett and I think most would say I I might not be better than him or as good as him but I you know I will try to learn from him as much as you can why would anybody buy anything besides Brookshire if you

wanted to do value investing you know people say well should I invest in bsh hathway or should I invest in the index because they say look I think that Warren Buffett's getting older B hathway just hit a trillion in valuation and you know I think the index might be better and one of the things that I want to say to them is look realize that the index is impersonal and you might get spooked out of the index and I I think that many people if they buy Burkshire shares and they attend the Burkshire meeting and

they they really kind of become closely connected to the company they're more likely to be in for the Long Haul and be in for the ride and so it's not just um the choices whether to buy Burkshire or to buy the index for example it's how do I impact my own behavior through my investment actions and the realization that when we invest if we buy Burkshire or we buy the index we buy something else we're also making our own bed and we're also creating the environment in which we'll be in and we're in a kind

of a relationship with these things what I discovered when I shorted uh uh farmer Mac just to go back to that one of those Original Stories was that I became all twisted inside I kind of didn't like my internal wiring when I was doing that Berkshire hathway strengthens my internal wiring ing in the right way and and it's I think it's a really important question to ask if I become a shareholder of this thing or if I buy this asset what does that do to me as a person how does it improve or or deteriorate

my thinking and that's the reason to own burer and uh and I actually tell people that's a reason not to own the index because the index is unbelievably impersonal you you'll get manipulated into all sorts of things well the other thing I want to ask about is just performance so you uh so I asked my guy helps me with research I said okay what's the performance let's say of your fund over the Long Haul and it looks like you basically beat the beat the S&P 500 by some amount I don't know the exact numbers but

SLI n and a half% versus eight and a half% or something along those L is that right like since you started it's about it's about 80 basis points at this point great uh and is that by the way is that net uh certainly net it's net of everything yeah net of everything cool so good job that's uh that's something that's obviously very hard to do is to beat the index over a uh 25 years yeah more than 25 year timeline so that's super impressive at the same time in the last 10 years I don't think

you've beat the SP 500 in most of those years but that's a long time I'm thinking put my putting myself in your shoes man the psychology I don't know what I would do you know Bas I I would just be running around with my head cut off like basically if I over a 10-year period yeah wasn't doing the main thing I wanted to be doing or you know and I felt this by the way in my 20s I wanted to be a successful entrepreneur and for eight straight years I failed yeah and I remember what

that felt like at the time it was crushing Soul crushing for me to to be doing that I wonder how do you manage your psychology in a period of time where your performance is not as good as you want because you seem like a really well balanced well-regulated emot you know emotionally regulated guy but at the same time this is the game you're playing and how do you manage psychology during a window of time like that so yeah it's a it's absolutely spectacular question it's funny because I did a sort of dry run through I'm

going to be talking about uh the fund to our investors in in a day or two's time and I think it's like it's seven or eight years that I've underperformed the S&P index in this case and so I don't know why it always comes up for me when I think of this is the question that was asked me just after ID published my book and I was invited to give a talk at Google and uh the out performance was looking better at that point than it was it is right now and a very smart engineer

asked the question how do you know that the out performance you've gotten to date is not luck and my answer then as as it would have to be now is we don't know I'm just one data point and amongst thousands of data points and so you know you you would argue that 25 years is a long period of time but eight years of underperformance in that 25 years is also a long time and so you know this was already a year or two ago where I said um in the face of underperformance what am I

going to do am I going to say this sucks this isn't working I need to Str change my strategy and risk uh everything that's dear to me potentially or I'm I going to say look I understand what I'm doing somehow the Market's not rewarding it the way I would like it to be rewarded but I know that what I'm doing will in the even in the worst possible cases lead to a really really good life even if I am underperforming and if I take for starters you know the My First Investors friends and family had

never invested in equities before so in their case even if they're underperforming the S&P they're vastly outperformed that what they would have gotten in fixed income and all the cash instruments that they have there they've won many many many times over and and I actually got to have I like to Call it Courage where where I kind of realized that the key is to compound and to take make moves that I know will enable me to compound and if I can end up beating an index then that would be great but but I cannot jeopardize

compounding for the sake of beating the index I have to focus on compounding and and that leads and and if if you step back I mean I think that you know this this idea of playing the infinite game so many people think they're playing a finite game but they're playing an infinite game explain the difference finite and infinite games yeah yeah sorry so so uh finite so so this clear distinction between finite and infinite games a finite game is one which has a clear set of rules a clear uh space in which it's played out

both in terms of time and physical location so an example would be chess there's a set of rules it's played across the board and there's a winner and a loser according to the time controls or a game of American football it's played in American football pitch there are nend players each side the game starts it ends there's a winner there's a loser declared according to the rules and but the thing is the most important things in life are infinite games what is an infinite game an infinite game has no clearly defined rules no clearly defined

game space no clearly defined time when it begins and ends and one of my favorite examples for an infinite game was the Cold War the Cold War was fought across many battlefronts whether it was the southeast Asia or you know building nuclear missiles or rivalry between the superpowers in all sorts of ways it didn't not really clear exactly when it started and here's the thing and it played itself multiple rules multiple places the in in the infinite game you don't really win or lose usually one or more of the players just decides to drop out

in the case of Russia Russia kind of in a way imploded and dropped out of it what's the most important point the key the key mistake that we make so often in life is we think we're playing a finite game when we're playing an infinite game life is an infinite game investing is an infinite game so how many people I would tell you out of I don't know how many funds that were around at the time that I started how many around today and it's like less than 2% now some of the people left that

game of investing because they actually were utterly superb made enormous ounts of money and decided to go and do something else a famous example of that is Nick sleep he's in William Green's book and and so that those people there were those people but I I did a study of this about 10 years ago and there was a lier database where I could look up all the funds that were around at the time they don't really give their reasons for dropping out if because but in many cases it because they had an an implosion of

one kind or another and so you don't want to be the guy who employs well I mean I I enjoy listening because I think what's cool about your mindset and is very different than the environment that I live in which is you I've lived in Silicon Valley here for the last 12 13 years is everybody here wants to be Zuck everybody here wants to be Elon everybody here wants to be in in your case it would be Buffett right and the Venture Capital game is a you win and you get all the glory or most

likely you you know you fizzle out and lose and um my life really improved when I as myself what game do I even want to be playing and I moved basically an hour outside of Silicon Valley which helped just to not be right in the center of it and you it seems like what you're trying to do is not be the next Warren Buffett although if it ha if if your performance actually happened to be the way it's not you would be be annoyed by it but your goal is compound well and live well yeah

and I think that that is a much more achievable goal that you've been able to achieve versus putting your happiness or selfworth to to some moonshot type of outcome and I think I really respect that about you because I think it's it's not going to get movies made it's not going to get articles written about you you're not going to be in the cover of Forbes with that attitude but those are the people who you know the guy swimming in the lake happily um you know with his kids who's living well and gets to do

what they enjoy every day reading and writing and talking and to me that is a life well-lived and I had to almost deprogram myself from the media I was consuming which was kind of shaping me to want something that I didn't really want especially once I knew the odds of success in that game and so you know it really helped me to shift my thinking that way so you know you're a good example of that for me if I do the same contemplated action given the same set of circumstances throughout the rest of my life

how's it going to turn out so there's this sort of like just this once Justus this once do this just Justus this once get blind drunk just this once drop out of an airplane with without a parachute because it'll be fun and just to ask the question and for me for example just take this meeting just help this person just give this person a uh an internship and uh I think that something that is helping me to say no more often to those things to say well if I in every time I'm faced with these

circumstances I say yes to this how will my life look and if every time I'm faced with these circumstances I say no how will my life look and it it makes it far easier to come to a quick no and an understandable no where I can say to the other person look I'm sure you can understand I can't say yes to this and and I'm sure you can understand because if I did here would be the consequences and so and I think that that's a huge part of Warren Buffett's wisdom never ever fall for the

justi this once another one of those is if everybody in the world did this contemplated thing that I'm contemplating on doing what would the world look like and I think that a world in which everybody's trying to be Zuck is utterly miserable really really miserable by contrast a world where everybody is writing their own story a world in which everybody's trying to discover some a new scientific discovery uh that is a really really beautiful world and it's possible it's really possible you know uh so so I'm I'm doing a sort of part-time a history degree

for fun and uh so I've been thinking quite a bit about Empires you know and and we kind of like I think the way that we feel today across the planet is that Empires ought to be a thing of the past there was a period when Empires were built we don't want to build Empires like the Roman Empire or the Persian Empire or many different Empires that were around do we you know we could imagine a world where every man every every working person is doing the equivalent of being a watch maker or a novelist

why does it have to be on a grand scale you know so long as the work that you're doing is satisfying and you're creating something that that is of beauty overs worth it has its worth in itself isn't that a more beautiful world actually yeah that's a it's an interesting point because also the other side is true too which is if nobody was Zuck if nobody was Elon uh then we would also have a problem and so I think the answer isn't be one way or the other but like you just said what what is

the satisfying version of life for you and if you could figure out that answer for yourself and just act in accordance with that that's really powerful I think for somebody like Elon this this is the satisfying version of life for him I don't think he would be satisfied doing what I'm doing or what you're doing and so I think we need that sort of the ecosystem has to have that diversity in order for it to work I I think it's a great point you just said like this it's almost like this action in The Limit

you know if every time I was in this circumstance I did this thing if every time I was craving chips I ate chips where does that lead me yeah if if everybody did this action if everybody just took from the cookie jar what happens there's nothing left right and so I think that there is a that's a very powerful question that simplifies I'm a big fan of single decisions or Frameworks that simplify thousands of future decisions yeah and that seems like one of them we should wrap up with this can you just leave me with

I am a newbie on my what I would call the buffet Munger school of thought which is around partially around investing partially around how to conduct oneself how to avoid you know the trappings uh you know what was the theer talk like the before common causes of human misjudgment yeah yeah causes of human misjudgment so things like that what are the best essays that I should go read if I was going to go read three things what would you point me to the kind of the the Pinnacle you know either essays letters blog posts could

be books but I'm looking for the shorter version if you have them I'll give the an the answer that I think most people want to hear and then I'll give a non-answer which I think is more valuable uh but I'll start with the actual answer so you know I think you got to go to the SCE you got to go to the buffet letters you got to go to the transcripts and all the recordings of the annual meetings which are phenomenal and obviously as as you brought up I think that that poor Charlie's Almanac really

is just an incredible collection of stuff that is that's not too much and some of it can just be listened to online but it's it's it's an amazing start but so there's there's the answer which is kind of pretty straightforward but then what I want to give is a non-answer which I think is far more important which is that I can't tell you or anybody else what to read because you're a different person in a different space your brain is a different so so people say what can I read to learn about dot dot dot

the answer is you know pick up 20 books that you think might lead you in a good direction and go through them quickly and ask yourself the question once you've kind of flicked through and read a few pages is this getting me somewhere or not if it's getting you somewhere keep reading it and if it's not put it down maybe tomorrow will be a good day to read that book and I really do believe that we like is too short and our reading time is too short to force ourselves to read things that aren't giving

us win after win after win and so if you go to the buffet letters and it's not speaking to you put it down quick don't waste your time don't have that sense of obligation that you're supposed to be reading go go use up your valuable brain energy your to on something that really works for you so what I really want to say is you know start with any reading list but start iterating quickly basically yeah I like that that that is the answer I needed not the answer I wanted uh which is good you have

a good quote by the way that that stuck with me you said I treat my library like a cocktail party uh you know you're going to mix and mingle and hop from one conversation to the other and if it gets boring you go grab a drink I love that metaphor because I I also am a promiscuous reader and I just didn't have the the right mental model or metaphor for for how to treat you know this this stack of books that's here in my room but I think a cocktail party is is a good one

guy thanks for doing man this is a really fun conversation that I was looking forward to and I got to say one thing about you that's really cool probably I'll leave you just with a compliment which is I texted a few people before this that you were coming on I said give me uh what's a good story or nugget and I was disappointed at first because they didn't give me like a specific oh you got to ask him about this which is what I'm looking for it's a it's a shortcut for me in my research

but the the way people talk about you is incredible you're like a mench right like people just have such a high regard for your character and who you are as a person to them like what's a brand it's what what people say about you when you're not in the room what's a reputation that's what people say about you when you're not in the room uh your brand your reputation is very very strong amongst people I respect the way they think about you is is that you are sort of um you know just such a value

Giver so you know congrats to you on that that that is it showed me something that I can strive for like oh how would people talk about me if somebody asked them in this way would they would they do this today I don't think honestly no that's the answer is no they would not talk about the same way but that became a bit of an aspiration well I'm delighted and that's extraordinary kind of them whoever hell said that thank you so much [Music]