YouSaid · the spoken record

Bryan Lawrence

lines on the record: 112
first: 2024-04-28
most recent: 2024-04-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Chris Davis in 1998, I think I'd been a banker for five years, maybe six years, 1999. He hands me this recording of Charlie Munger giving a speech about the psychology of humanist judgment. And my first reaction was this guy, Munger, just seems to be a pretty, you know, there's a lot of hutzpah challenging academic psychologists with no academic background at his own. And I listened to it and I'm like, wow, this guy makes more sense about this area of human behavior than anyone I've ever heard talk about this. And it just kind of led to a reassessment of a bunch of stuff. And ultimately, you know, I left Lazard in 2004 to set up Oak Cliff. And it was just a seminal moment for me. There's some other reasons I left Lazard, but that, you know, Chris giving me that really set me on a different path. The reason Chris and I joke about this is each of us has a list of books that we want our”
2024-04-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH044: How To Beat The Market w/ Bryan Lawrence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, well, Chris and I joke about this a bunch. Like, my father had started as an investment banker, and it was pretty obvious to me that being an investment banker was an interesting thing to do. As I came out of business school in 1993, and I very much admired this guy, Felix Roden, who had developed a very interesting professional career, a financially successful, but also was important in the affairs of New York City, saved it from bankruptcy in the late 70s. I admired a career like that, like a broad, intellectually stimulating, financially rewarding career. So that's what I had chosen to do. And there was no real success by my father to cause me to do something different. However, my father was giving me these letters of Warren Buffett. You should read this. And I was dismissing it because, you know, sons and fathers sometimes, you know, they don't necessarily speak clearly. They may speak lovingly, but they don't, you know, they don't do exactly what the other one tells them to do.”
2024-04-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH044: How To Beat The Market w/ Bryan Lawrence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Guess, I mean, it's just maybe it's a quirk. I really enjoy it. And some of my oldest friendships are there. And I think it's a really good value system.”
2024-04-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH044: How To Beat The Market w/ Bryan Lawrence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I can be pretty self focused, self interested. I like to pick stocks in compound capital. I mean, I'm not a capitalist, but I think that to spend time in a place like that and to have your children spend time in a place like that and have your children become friends of children of your best friends, all of whom are steeped in that kind of value system where the houses cost a tenth of the houses in the Hamptons. And it's not about the money. Like if you're living in a community where the most expensive house is a status symbol, that's a certain type of community. If you live in a community, Social currency is your ability to organize something effectively. I kind of like that community better. That's a community of get it done regardless of background.”
2024-04-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH044: How To Beat The Market w/ Bryan Lawrence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gave in the mid 90s. Bill Clinton was a political master, and he was asked how do you, if you're going to a town you've never been to before, how do you arrange for a political rally to happen? How do you make sure that people show up and are fed? Are there to listen to what you have to say on your whistle tour? And he said, it's important to call the mayor because obviously people elect him, but half the people didn't elect him. So he's only liked by half of the people. And it's important to talk to the used car dealer. He's probably the richest guy in town. A small town, that's the richest guy. The guy you really want or the woman you really want to organize your event is the chief of the local volunteer fire company because that person has been selected by the community to get stuff done. That person can find pizza for 250 people and can organize an event. And if he says or she says, let's go do this, that people will show up. I find that really interesting to hang out with the people in the community who are trying to make that happen. So that's a little bit of what.”
2024-04-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH044: How To Beat The Market w/ Bryan Lawrence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Italian guys, and they put out our fire Very next day, my father joined the fire company in the neighboring Italian community. On Fire Island, you disaggregate into, you know, we're in the WASPI community. There's the gay community, the Italian community, the Jewish community. My father and a couple friends were so upset with the performance of our volunteer company. They joined in the Italian community and I joined there too. So I was a firefighter for 38 years, first in that community, then I came back to my community. And now my son is a firefighter himself, 22 years old. And to watch that example be paid forward is very cool. There's also this, I don't know if this is relevant, but this is a thing that's sort of an interesting point about firefighting. 70% of the firefighters in the United States are volunteers because there's not population density enough in 70% of the places where people live in the United States to afford a professional department. So volunteer firefighting is very much a cultural thing in a lot of the United States. And there was an interview, Bill Clinton.”
2024-04-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH044: How To Beat The Market w/ Bryan Lawrence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There. The unifying thing is that virtually everything is run by volunteers. So if you have a tennis program, sports program for your kids, swimming, it's all, you might have some professional staff, but the curriculum, the hiring of the staff is all done by volunteers. And at the center of the community is the fire department. And the reason the fire department is so important is the houses are up on posts because every now and then you get an overwash from the ocean, storms. And a house up on posts made of wood that's been there for 60 years is like a bonfire. And there are repeatedly fires. And there was a fire in 1983 that knocked four houses down and killed three people. And I remember standing watching the fire happen in our volunteer fire company was underprepared and our fire had to be put out by companies that came from a community from the east, from one of the gay communities on Fire Island, and from a community from the West.”
2024-04-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH044: How To Beat The Market w/ Bryan Lawrence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I think people can have talent and they can have drive, and there's a lot of that around. I think there's another thing people can have, which is I kind of think of it as almost like a fiduciary gene. Like, do you want to do the right thing? And is that part of what you bring to the world? And I'm not knocking people who are more interested in focusing on themselves, but I like to like an environment where I'm with other people who are trying to do the right thing for the people around them. And I think a lot of that is my father's example and a lot of it is this community on Fire Island where I grew up and spent summers and my children have been and some of my best friends are. And that community, it's about 130 houses in a little area. It's 135 acres. A lot of it is swamp. And the houses are very unremarkable. Wide economic range of backgrounds.”
2024-04-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH044: How To Beat The Market w/ Bryan Lawrence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hard work looks easy. And you see their easy success, and you say, gosh, it must have been easy to do that. It was not. There's a lot of effort that goes into it. I think that's been a powerful lesson. I think another very powerful lesson is the value of always trying to do the right thing for your partners to build that reputation over a career and to have a reputation for doing the right thing when no one is looking is a very powerful thing. And it results in loyalty from people. It results trust from clients. And sometimes it's not easy to do, but he makes it an imperative. And that's been a real example.”
2024-04-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH044: How To Beat The Market w/ Bryan Lawrence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you basically have two choices as the child of a successful guy, you can coast because your life is easier or you can kind of step it up and try to live up to it. And I'm very much in the latter camp because I've seen the difference that hard work makes and I've seen what hard work really means. And I think that there's something about his effort, which I think about a lot. He's always showed me that the last 10 or 20% of effort, whether it's time or intensity, results in massive outperformance. And so it's important to be intense all the time. It may look easy from the outside. When you see great success, you're like, oh my gosh, it was easy for that person. There was a bunch of luck involved. And luck certainly is involved in success, but a lot of it is the result of intense work. The Italians have this word called sprezatura, which is someone who makes”
2024-04-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH044: How To Beat The Market w/ Bryan Lawrence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Well, thanks for the question. He's an amazing guy and an inspiration to me. He started a business within a company called Dylan Reed, an investment bank, which spun out in 1997 as Yorktown partners. And it's had a lot of success investing in oil and gas companies. And that success came to him as a result of a lot of work and later in life. And so he was 55 when it spun out, when it became independent, and really started to make its mark. He was 55, I was 30. So I think an important thing for me is that the early part of my life, there was not this. And so I was fully baked when this started to happen. And the lessons that I absorbed from him, like watching him do this, you know, the intensity of it, I think if you watch something like that happen when you're young, I don't really know what that's like. I know what it's like watching it emerge later in my life.”
2024-04-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH044: How To Beat The Market w/ Bryan Lawrence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's a good question. I think I have a desire to only do something like this if I feel there's stuff to say. I don't really think the idea of doing a podcast for the sake of hearing myself talk is terrific. So the question in doing something like this is, do I have something interesting to say? And what I've grown convinced of listening to the podcasts you've been doing with others is that some of the subjects that you've been touching on are interesting things. I've just grown more comfortable with the idea that you and I could have a good conversation. We've been having these sorts of conversations for 10 years. So I thought maybe we try to do it in podcast form and see if it was interesting.”
2024-04-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH044: How To Beat The Market w/ Bryan Lawrence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT