YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Davis

lines on the record: 183
first: 2024-03-05
most recent: 2024-03-05
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

“Screen. It's actually one of the reasons I'm fairly optimistic that whatever replaces this Shitty little, you know, five inch rectangle that we all carry around in our pocket. That is a very, very poor way to get information. This tiny little screen. And, you know, when you think about VR and AR, of course there'll be much more satisfying ways to take in information and that will be the functional equivalent of what that big newspaper page was, which if you think about it, it's like the IMAX of computer screens. You'll open up the old, you know, the old Wall Street Journal of Financial Times, how big it was. It's actually sort of amusing. If you were to look at a paper from 20 years ago versus today, even a print paper like the journal, it's probably 40% smaller, maybe 50%. You don't realize it's happened a bit at a time, but just how big a newspaper used to be.”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a little bit like that sort of hard form. I love that joke about the efficient market theorists where they're walking down the street and there's a $20 bill and one says, are you going to pick it up? He says, no, because if it was real, somebody would have already picked it up. And this idea that sometimes by taking that shortcut, well, of course, I'm an old newspaper lover. And so I'm heartbroken at how few newspapers I can read in their traditional format. And so I have to get better at reading on a screen. And I'm not very good at it. And it's a real handicap. But what I loved about reading a newspaper is I wasn't always sure where my eye was going to go, what I was going to focus on. And it was often the case that something might have caught my eye in a way that it doesn't when I'm scrolling on this tiny little...”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can remember the title. I can't remember who wrote it. In fact, I'm going to look it up after we're done because I haven't thought about it in so long. And it does seem peculiarly relevant. But it was this idea, a little bit like Brave New World with the man beating himself, the primitive. And they think, you know, but it's this idea that living this completely alienated life, it may not be a source of happiness after all.”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Takes place on the deck of this boat when they see some lunatic in a little sailboat, and he's about to get run over because, of course, the great ship is on autopilot and can't possibly move. And this guy is scrambling and trying to get out of the way and, you know, bringing the sails around and just narrowly escapes being run down and all the people on the deck are saying, what a moron, what a stupid, here we are living this life of luxury and eating our caviar and that lunatic is getting wet and the waves are washing over and he almost died. And there's this moment where as he sort of recovers himself, he waves to them. And they all feel enormously uplifted. They wave back and, you know, and they feel this sort of, they were acknowledged by somebody who's really living. And it was a very, I mean, I read it in high school.”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ever read a short story? Who the hell wrote it called the Leviathan? It was, you know, written at a time of sort of the mechanical revolution. So it was in the Industrial Revolution. And it was sort of a futurist. And it was about the fact that it was based on the idea that there was a ship that had been created that was so big that it would, the bow and the stern would never simultaneously be in the trough of a wave. And therefore, it would move sort of absolutely fluidly through the ocean, from crest of wave to crest of wave. And of course, it did not work at all. The ocean's much bigger than that. But this guy wrote a short story sort of saying, you know, that this is the future, this incredible floating palace of luxury. And the short storyteller...”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We love getting better at stuff. We're tinkerers, you know. We want to improve. We want to learn. We work together. We turn little things into competitions. You watch the way kids play. And so this idea that somehow the fact that I can push a button and AI could write my annual report or write a reference letter for somebody that I care about for something that they care about. Well, I have no doubt that that can happen. I just think that then I'm alienated from that product. And for me, the process of creating that annual report, which is probably read by six people nationwide. Probably five of them are probably in our compliance.”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the experience. And I said to them, so why do you think work is different? What is it that makes you think that work should be different than college? So you got your degree with a lot less effort. So you got the outcome. Why are you so unhappy? And of course, you're unhappy because you were alienated from the experience. Well, how can't it be the same at work? If you really think the goal of work is to invest as little as you can in order to get as much payment as you can. Of course it's going to suck. And of course everybody's going to cheat and you're not going to have friendships and you're not going to learn anything. But this idea that that is how we're wired, that that's what we really want is so demonstrably false. We crave competence. We crave it is just, you know, it's been our superpower as a species, you know, stories is part of it.”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And at our place. And they were obsessed with this wanting to work remote, you know, this idea that, hey, I want work to kind of be not interfere with my lifestyle and, you know, and it's interesting because they all had been in college during COVID. And so I said, so, you know, tell me about COVID and college. And it sucked. It sucked. And I said, why? And they're like, well, one, you didn't learn anything. Two, you didn't develop any relationships. And then three, and this was really powerful, is everyone cheated. They felt so degraded”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, by the time I was working for him, he was probably already in his 70s. So a lot of his peers had long retired. And, you know, I wasn't sure anybody was reading this. And I mentioned that to him. And he said, well, we write it for ourselves, the discipline of every week going through, you know, reporting on any company that had reported earnings, what was happening with inflation, what was happening with investment returns. Was there any specific company news? What had been the performance of the indices, which we would calculate by hand? There was no. And were there new mutualizations happening, whatever. But I was realizing in this coming wave of AI, the idea of being alienated from your work, not realizing, I was interviewing some interns potential interns.”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, which is you write it for yourself and shaded so amazing that you say that on the walk in, you know, I've been a fabulous book on AI. It's called The Coming Wave. It's written by one of the co-founders of DeepMind. And I was listening to it this morning and it was talking about obviously the ability of the AI models already to do very good writing. And so that exact anecdote was on my mind as I was walking over here because I was thinking about how strongly he said the writing is not about the product for the client. It's about what you learn by writing for yourself. It is. So it didn't matter that we sent out this insurance letter. I don't know. We probably sent out a couple two, three hundred copies a week.”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going on and are listening to him at the other end of conference calls when we were traveling as kids. He was very much always comfortable being a remote worker before that was fashionable. I mean, my dad was out of New York State for six months a year from really, I think, from the late 70s on. And so that meant he was working, you know, I remember the first cell phone, you know, the big thing that looked like almost a crate that he would carry around. And it's not that he was short-term trading. He just wanted to make sure he never missed a conference call or a earnings release or, you know, he used to say, you know, you call 10 companies, you learn one thing, you call 20, you learn two. And, you know, so it was sort of a numbers game. And so we were always hearing one side of that conversation, whatever it was. And that was, you know, from the time we were little kids on.”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is true. I mean, again, because my parents were divorced, I had the gift of being exposed to two very different households and both very admirable in some ways and very dysfunctional in some ways. And I would say that my mom from an old Boston family and her mother was Australian. And there was a lot more formality there, you know. And my dad is structurally informal and structurally inclusive and that more the better. And he was very comfortable with us being included in that. He felt like he didn't want that all to be a mystery. I never viewed him as some businessman that went to an office where I didn't know what happened there. Every one of his kids understood and can do a pretty good impression of him on the phone with the trading desk. And, you know, what the hell's going?”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It being so out of left field, you know, the idea of somebody dying. He said, you know, the point is this guy that was so brilliant, but it never occurred to him that he could die of rabies. So I don't know how much my father intended that lesson to be a lesson about hubris or about domain knowledge or about the closeness of tragedy or just about we were in the country now. And so if we got bitten by anything to be sure to tell him, I just remember that being something so out of left field and being so different than anything that we had ever talked about.”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got different things out of it. There were ways in which the business stories really resonated. I don't know if I've ever thought of that question in that way. I would say one story that really struck me in that I was remembering the other day was about a man who, as he described it, one of his inventions, he was a brilliant polymath, businessman, inventor, and he invented the yellow tennis ball. I remember him telling that. And he was telling us this story because the man had been bitten by a bat and had done nothing about it and had died of rabies. This enormously successful”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very close at the founding of Intel. So it was an area that he was interested in, but he just thought these guys, you know, Steve Jobs, these guys seem crazy. But that would be a good example of what we would talk about at the dinner table, him talking about how some guy showed up in his office in Sandals trying to raise money for an IPO of a tech company. And it's an enormous strength of his. It's just that, you know, passionate curiosity and his enthusiasm was infectious. Are there any particular stories that stand out about moral lessons or businesses that still stick with you today that you try to pass along? I mean, the list of business lessons is sort of endless. I mean, in other words, that was just sort of constant. I mean, just going, I'm not sure how much it was stream of consciousness for him versus here's my lesson plan of trying to shape my kids. And of course, he had six kids and everyone.”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stories about what was going on. I mean, I was just thinking of it the other day because it was the anniversary of Apple coming public. It must have been the 40th, I think. But anyway, I'd heard something about it. And I remember my father telling this story about these hippies in his office at fiduciary trust company, you know, in downtown New York, respectable trust bank. And he said, this guy shows up in sandals. He couldn't believe it. He said, how can a guy show up trying to raise capital for a business and show up in sandals? He's like, I'm not going to invest with any damn hippie. But of course, he was trying to teach us a story about, you know, about respect and knowing who you're meeting with, but also this sort of the craziness of the idea that these young hippies were raising money for some crazy computer company. And, you know, he had been.”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything. You know, it's how we learn. We imitate, we study, we lionize people, we vilify people, and we affect behavior that way. And I would wish that we told more stories about scientists, about what it was like for Heisenberg pacing around this island in the North Sea trying to coming to terms with the math of quantum mechanics and losing his sanity because it couldn't be right. It couldn't be right. It was such a disturbing implication. But going all the way back, I would say my father had an amazing ability to turn businesses into stories. And so every day when he would get off the train excited, he would, you know, we'd pick him up at the station and we'd come home and we'd have dinner. He just always had...”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who was I with that was talking about how humans think in stories? And it makes sense if you think over the course of evolution how wired we are to learn by storytelling and story listening. And I've always argued that like if we really want kids to get excited about STEM and like learning science, you know, throwing a bunch of formulas at them and calculus, it just, it's going to work for some whose minds really can see that. But I sure wish every freshman in high school or every sophomore in high school was taught the biography of science. Think of the movie Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer will probably draw more people into physics than STEM funding in high schools will. It's this idea that, you know, we're wired to sort of have heroes and to admire them. The whole story of Homer.”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My family on on his show, which my grandfather had been on independently of my dad. And then I had been on. And so that was sort of a nice thing. And I think given the idea of how important that show was growing up, there was something nice about that. But I think there was a lot of banter. I was generally this sort of the table provocateur. But my dad's a great sort of storyteller. He has breadth of information, like what he knows about and his ability to describe businesses as stories. You know, it's funny. I don't know if we'll get to this, but I was just with...”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What were your dinner table conversations like growing up? You know, particularly with my father, we would be out there on every other weekend. And so, of course, that would begin on a Friday, which meant that Wall Street week was on. And my father is very anti-television. And not even in a sort of fanatical way. He's just not interested. He just finds it an amazing waste of time. And it is one of the things that I really admire about him. But Wall Street Week was an exception. I felt like Lewis Rukaiser must be a relative or something because he was in the dining room, you know, a little TV watching Lewis Rukaiser speak. It's funny when I was near the end of Lewis's life, I went on the show and he made this comment that he had had all three generations.”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kids to, you know, I don't know if you ever fish, but in fishing, there's this thing about fishing the seam, you know, where you find two bodies of water moving at different rates. And in that seam between those two bodies of water, there's often a lot of marine life. And so I think children of divorce are very good at fishing the seam. And so my father would put up some policy about doing chores and collecting kindling. And, you know, he had moved out to the country and commuted.”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A sense of the cows are dogs coming out of the air. They're dog shit everywhere. I mean, it was really, and I think just as a 10-year-old kid or whatever, the sense of chaos was just, it was sort of overwhelming. But the point is that if I had been happy to charge 50 cents a walk, that law came into place and I could charge $5, $10. People would pay me to come twice a day. And all of a sudden, you know, I'm making, you know, $100 a week. It was just, you know, I liked that feeling. I liked that feeling of having the independence of money and having. So it did sort of take off then. Did your father or mother give you an allowance growing up? They did. It was a little unreliable. My parents were divorced. And so, of course, that allows.”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, by then, I had worked in the Humane Society, I had cleaned a lot of animals' cages. It was not something I was at all squeamish about. But boy, people would pay you anything to clean up after their dog. And there were all sorts of strange inventions that looked like sort of hedge clippers, but they would have a bag on the bottom or you'd try to get it under your dog before they went. Nobody had any idea and nobody had signed up for it. So in fact, there were some tragedies where people, dogs were jumping off the top of apartment buildings because what happened was people were so appalled at the idea of cleaning up after their dog that they would go to the roof of their building, where of course it couldn't be policed and they'd let their dogs crap up there. And so there was a period of a few months where dogs were jumping off of buildings. And, you know, it was, when I say New York was chaotic in the 70s.”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't want to make it sound like I came out of the womb in entrepreneur or something, but I loved the freedom of being of having money. And so I started a dog walking service when I was probably in third grade or second grade. And my parents rule was I couldn't cross streets with dogs, but I could go around the block many times. And so, you know, and it was a way of getting a pet without having a pet. the mayor passed the pooper scooper law. I mean, again, going back to New York in the 70s, you just can't imagine the amount of dog crap that was everywhere. I mean, it was just part of walking down the street. There were songs about it. It was just everywhere. And so, you know, this law was passed that you had to clean up after your dog. Well, people couldn't imagine it. Like they really couldn't imagine.”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was boring, it just seemed narrow. And, you know, I think, yeah, as a kid, Was this driven by your father saying go get a job or was this all self-driven? Well, I give my parents enormous credit. There was a rule from about the time we were 13, which was, you know, you were allowed in the house three weeks without a job. So that sort of got you through Christmas break or spring break. But the assumption was you were going to work in the summer. And that was sort of the assumption all the way through. But to their credit, they felt like if it was an internship at the Bronx Zoo or whatever or working at the Humane Society, that was fine, you know, and they would pay you for that if the job didn't pay you. Everybody had summer jobs and it would never have occurred not to. I think I was a little bit more obsessed with the idea of, you know, I don't.”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The light that switched. I realized that, you know, maybe I was looking at this person with the wrong context. That was a big changing point. I'm glad you asked about that. And you were sort of going in a different direction. Your grandfather being a capitalist. And at the time, you were sort of exploring veterinary school and theology. You know, I threw myself into whatever vocation was sort of at the top of my mind. I threw myself into. I could really imagine that sort of life. And so in that sense, I was very curious. I never, at that stage, I was young enough that I didn't think about capitalism or communism or industry. I always viewed my father and grandfather as somehow doing research. studying businesses. And it was a very, so it wasn't that I assumed that what they did.”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Adolescence, in essence, when you're able to sort of see an adult. And it was a little bit like a switch went on. We developed a very peculiar relationship. I was sort of his chauffeur. I would drive him, you know, to the airport on Monday mornings at 5.30 or 6 in the morning so he could get back down to New York and those car rides I saw a different sense of him. And it just flipped a switch in our relationship that really lasted all the way until he died. And it allowed me to see a lot more nuance and a lot of complexity. I think of the, you know, the old expression, no man is a hero to his valet. Well, that's probably true with kids and grandkids too. They have a very narrow way of judging people. And, you know, when Churchill said that shows the limits of the valet, not the man. Well, that was sort of the...”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of patriarch. And increasingly, I became interested in just the breadth of his knowledge. I mean, it was amazing how he was just reading all the time. He was curious all the time. It's almost like he didn't have time for antics. And I think sort of a switch went off then when I realized sort of people in general, but in particular, there was so much more than this very narrow view of looking at him within our family system. And I became sort of curious about why there were always people coming to visit at the house. Why Kissinger would come or Cap Weinberger or executives from companies or heads of colleges. And what was it that people wanted to see him? This man that as kids we thought was so boring or pompous. And it was just at that moment in”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Within our family system, he was sort of viewed as this very aloof, very unloving, sort of distant, and even sort of pompous. and almost sort of a caricature. And so we had to kowtow and be polite. And I just remember my father, you know, always making sure we had good manners at the table. You know, he was not popular among the grandchildren. And I think that my grandmother, his wife, was just this incredibly warm human and just so full of love and light. I used to say, if you average them together, you'd get normal. And that was true in a lot of dimensions. And I think that that summer that I worked for them, I was able to sort of see much more of him, see him outside of the context of this.”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to start with your grandfather. And if I understand correctly, when you were 14 or no, 15 and 16, you were working for him up in Maine as a cook and a chauffeur, and that really cemented your relationship with him. I want to talk about some of the lessons you learned from him. He was in many ways a great man and in many ways a very difficult and very flawed person, which I guess just makes him human. And I think it was...”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
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2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This conversation needs no introduction. Just dive right in. And if you don't recognize the name, you will love this conversation. It's not just about investing. We talk so much about life and living. Oh, it's just fascinating. Tom Gainer introduced us and it was like finding this older brother you never knew you had. Our conversation was supposed to go for an hour and ended up being nearly three hours. I almost missed my flight. We discuss topics such as risk, including unique insight from his front row seat on the board of Berkshire Hathaway, why retirement has no appeal, the value of writing, resiliency, raising kids in an environment of privilege, cultivating a long-term mindset, assessing management quality, how he sees the market, how to change your mind, and so much more. This is the most honest and raw I've ever heard Chris in a conversation or seen him before. I really hope you enjoy it.”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your host, Shane Parrish. A quick favor to ask before we start. Most people listening to this podcast on Apple or Spotify haven't yet hit the follow button. If you can hit the follow button right now, I would appreciate it. The more people who follow the show, the better the guess I can get. Thank you so much and enjoy the conversation. If you'd like access to the podcast before everyone else, special episodes just for you, hand-edited transcripts or you just want to support the show you love, join at fs.blog slash membership. Check out the show notes for a link. Today my guest is Christopher Davis. A member of the board of directors of Berkshire Hathaway and the Coca-Cola Company and the chairman of Davis Select Advisors, an independent investment management firm founded in 1969 that oversees about 20 billion in client assets. If you recognize the name”
2024-03-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT