YouSaid · the spoken record

Bill Bernstein

lines on the record: 73
first: 2025-06-13
most recent: 2025-06-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I think that the reason why is because he didn't do 90% of the other things he said he was going to do. He was going to repeal Obamacare and give us a big, beautiful healthcare system. He was going to redo our infrastructure. He was going to establish peace in the Ukraine on day one. And I think that his talent.”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. This is completely, there were adults in the room during the Bush presidency, and there were adults in the room during the first Trump presidency. They're all gone now.”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, that's one way to do it. Or you might know that 3 times 17 is 51. And then you could double it. Double it, exactly. And so this is a math problem that a reasonably bright middle school student can handle. None of the three trumps could do it. Okay. And so this is the guy who's now directing our economy. So that's different. All right. Well, how different was that from 9-11? All right. 9-11 was sure different.”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's the whole point. And Don Jr. laughed. He thought it was funny. Ivanka said, oh, no, you don't have to be able to do math to do real estate. Or investing for that math. But the most interesting response was Donald's. He said, no, it's $112. And he argued with Howard Stern about whether it was $102 or $112.”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we've talked about this one, the Rosetta Stone of Donald Trump is a call-in show he did with Howard Stern, along with his daughter and his son, Jr. And Howard looked at him and said, quick, multiply six times 17, all right. None of the three of them could do it.”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, this time certainly was different, never before in American history has a colossally incompetent American president tried to crater the economy. And it's very different. Do you think that”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And so that's the difference. If you can suppress that fear, you will do very well. And if you can't suppress the fear, then you probably will die poor.”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's extremely accurate. Let me tell you a personal story. I have a good friend who is a wealthy person, and that has enabled this person to have a career in public service. And she's done very, very well. And one day after I'd known her for many, many years, she told me that her sister was poor, all right, or did not have a lot of money. And I said, I don't understand this. Does she disinherited? Did she make the family angry? And she looked at me straight in the eye and she said, no, she was afraid of stocks.”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's something called the default mode network, which is a part of your brain that becomes electrically active when you're at rest, and which turns itself off when you're doing any focused task. And it turns out you can locate it anatomically on imaging studies. And people who have well-developed anatomically well-developed default node networks tend to be very good at reading other people and have good emotional intelligence. The opposite of that is in people who are on the spectrum, who have small default node networks and are not good at reading other people.”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you know, he said something on one of your interviews that stuck with me for the past 20 years, which is that he pays close attention to the headlines because he knows that if something is above the fold, it's already been impounded into prices and can be safely ignored.”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, what did I do? I went out, I did what anybody would do in that situation, which I spent $95, which seemed like a king's ransom at the time for the Ibbatson Yearbook. And I transcribed all $985 data points into a spreadsheet, which I had just learned how to use, you know, sometime around 1990. And then that was the start of my models. And other people provided me with data. Ken Fisher, bless his soul, supplied me with a fair amount of data. And I, you know, impersonated a professional investor at certain large banks and was able to get data sets from them as well.”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Theoretically, yes, practically no, because there are few sentient beings in this quadrant of the galaxy that can tolerate 100% stocks.”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's that directly falls out of Charlie Munger's dictum, which is that, yes, compounding is magic, but the first rule of compounding is never to interrupt it unnecessarily. And you're most liable to interrupt compounding, to panic and sell during the worst 2% of times. So you design your portfolio for the worst 2% of times, which means that it should be more conservative than you think it should be the other 98% of the time. And it's a suboptimal allocation to have less stocks is suboptimal. But what I like to say is that a suboptimal allocation you can execute is better than an optimal one. You can't execute.”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is 20 years old or 25 years old and just coming out of their education and think they're going to be the next Warren Buffett. The bad news is you're trading against Warren Buffett.”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Samuelson once wrote, I think in a private letter that the markets were microefficient but macro inefficient. And what he meant by that, by micro efficiency, was that as the both of us know, it is brutally hard and getting harder by the day to pick stocks in time the market. If you don't know that, you're in big trouble. But the markets are also can be macro inefficient. So the overall markets can overshoot in one direction or the other. It's very hard to almost impossible to figure out exactly when that's going to happen. You can look at a market that's able to frothy and you can say, I know what's going to happen. I just can't tell you when. So that to me is the best explanation or the best description of macro and micro efficiency there is. But I mean my message to anybody who”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, especially whenever anybody talks about innovation in finance describes it as reinventing the wheel only in slightly more unstable form.”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, he's also a historian He's written several historically deep books, particularly about Bernard Baruch. But he certainly describes the historical episodes of manias and panics. I guess the other one would be John Kenneth Galbraith, whose history of 1929 crashed. Was non Perill. I mean, it was just absolutely superb. You know, it's one of those books that you just can't help but, you know, snickering out loud with every paragraph.”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh dear. Well, Jim Grant, of course, would be at the top of anyone's list. And then the person who's right at the top of that list was a Scottish guy who lived almost 200 years ago, Charles Mackay, who wrote extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of Krautzer, actually memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. And he described all of the things that we've been seeing over the past couple of decades, more than 200 years ago.”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Indeed. If you're the prom queen, then the most important thing in the world is how you dress and how you look. And that's how you judge other people, brains, athletic ability, political ability don't matter. Well, financiers are exactly the same way. If you're at the peak of your skill set is your quantitative ability, that is how you judge other people. Other people can't understand your models, then they're stupid, all right? You have to, you know, the conceit of finance is that basically the math is all there is to it and that you don't have a limbic system. They deny the existence of their emotions and their psychology. And that's what gets them into trouble. They don't understand the history and they have that feeds into mass fear and mass greed and mass delusions, which is why I wrote that particular book.”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a historian by the name of Robert Kaplan who said that all of history is half geography and half Shakespeare. And when I heard that, it resonated. I realized that investing is the same way. It's half mathematics and half Shakespeare, and you have to manage, you have to master both of them. If you can't master both, you're dead in the water.”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't need to spell it. Yeah, I mean, you can solve differential equations as easily as most people brush teeth. But if you don't know the history, you're going to have your head handed to you, which is what happened to them. So I discovered that I enjoyed writing history. And so that's how I segueed into writing history.”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, it kept me off the streets, and secondly, I'm easily bored, so I do move from thing to thing. And it occurred to me, oh, about forty years ago that I live in a country that doesn't have a functioning social safety net. And so I was going to have to invest and save on my own account to accomplish that. And I approached it the way I thought anyone with scientific training would do, which is I consulted the peer review literature, I read the basic texts, I collected data, I built models. And by the time I had done all that, I realized I had something that was useful to other small investors. And so I began to write things up. And I discovered that when you're writing about investing, one of the key subjects that you have to nail down is the history of finance. If you don't know the history, you're dead in the water.”
2025-06-13 · Masters in Business · Efficient Frontier Advisors Co-Founder & Neurologist Bill Bernstein · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source