YouSaid · the spoken record

Christopher Begg

lines on the record: 99
first: 2023-05-28
most recent: 2023-05-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Thank you so much, William. And our first lunch, your audience should know that William Mahai had our first breakfast in New York and our connection on so many things that were, I mean, I think we went on for two and a half hours. It was just such a fascinating conversation. And so a lot of connection points.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is there any final word you? Mr. Serbia, that's right. I just have to say that you're such a wonderful researcher of people and preparing for a discussion like this. This is probably one of the most best conversations I've ever shared with someone, all your preparation and what you're doing and providing for your listeners is profound. So I'm very grateful”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Glad you brought that up because I was recently, I did a kinesiology session with a great practitioner where he was kind of going through the body and doing those tests. He's like, oh, what happened to your shoulder? And he knew exactly, because I was going weak. And he's like, oh, yeah, that was an injury dating back five years ago. But what Hawkins did, which you know from reading those books, is he would actually read certain books. And certain books had a strength to them, right? The Bible, the Zohar, like all of these incredible texts, sacred texts. And so I started reading these books just to read them because sometimes your mind doesn't even know what your conscious of, right? And so sometimes reading these classic important books, they're working on you in a way that is very powerful because the words and the...”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that when we talked about finite and infinite games, I like those words. I chose those words very carefully because they were words that I thought had no opposite. They could exist on their own. It's like happiness. Happiness has like a counter of unhappy. But what's the counter of joy? Like true joy is just, it's like this internal quality that kind of lives on its own. And I think love kind of exists in that same moral and integrity, gratitude, humility, trust, simplicity. These are words that feel infinite to me. And so they have a special place. And I think that's why I chose those carefully.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That can see our system differently than we can see our own, and we can solve problems that are really unique. So I think about these really abundant outcomes that are potential from machine learning, data collection, augmented intelligence, and consciousness.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one of the cool things about that book, because one of my studies this last three month period has been on kind of a species umveld or their umveld and their ability to sense the world. So what does it feel like to be a bat or a whale? And you start to think about all their sensory apparatus or their magneto reception, how they see magnetic lines. And imagine a future where we are actually having a conversation with whales or conversation with dolphins. And this isn't far off. I mean, I have an app on my phone where just through spectrophyraphy, I can tell the exact sound of a bird and what species it is. You don't think we're going to be with machine learning figure out what they're communicating to each other? That's not far off. And that's what this book, How to Speak Whale, was raising the question of, at some point we will be able to have a conversation with species.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's an uneven path, right? It doesn't look perfect. It's kind of, it's a jagged path, but that's the asymmetry of the path. And I truly believe that. I think that some of what we're seeing in our own states of augmented intelligence, both individually and collectively, I think consciousness is at a space where I'm not sure five years from now, ten years from now, what that's going to look like, but I think we're going to have profound change in our collective intelligence as humanity. And I was just reading a book called How to Speak Whale.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, thank you for reminding me of that mantra. And that became his coat of arms and his seal as this beautiful thing. And I think I put it in the letter as well. The final line of Lila when Robert Persig said, anything I name will cease to be dynamic quality, but that's the best I can offer you is this word. And he's like, if I could offer anything, he said what dynamic quality is, it's good. But good as a noun. And it was interesting because that's one of those enematic things that you're just like, what does he mean by good as a noun? But good is that leading edge, that horizon edge of where we're going, where we're becoming, and where we ought to be. And that ought to be is somewhere, it's a more beautiful world that our hearts know as possible, which is a line by Charles Eisenstein that I believe that that's the direction that we're headed. That's the vector we're on.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do more things. And I think it needs to be oriented in a way over time to be improved. The same with social media 1.0 can be improved. And there are side, there's second order effects that aren't positive for humanity, and those things get tweaked. But the world, I do agree with Carnegie, and I agree with Nick that the world does grow better. And it becomes more abundant and that we continuously solve toward this asymmetry of good, which is kind of this tailwind that's behind us. And yeah, I feel that very strongly.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Carnegie nailed it. And it's interesting because I had a long conversation yesterday about this very subject because we were debating about the fears of artificial intelligence. And I don't have this overly optimistic view that it's good for the world. I have a realist view of it. But I think like anything, when you look at the evolution of social media and you look at the evolution of artificial intelligence, As you have big change, you could see it in both ways, but as along a path of evolution, it's natural that we are using, that we're augmenting intelligence using tools and technology. And artificial intelligence is a manifestation of additional tools, additional technology that's bringing to bear to”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll take you there. And it's just, I don't know why I always find myself, it's a very peaceful place, but it's a very nondescript gravestone for this wealthy person. And at the cemetery, Sleepy Hollow, there's these big mausoleums. And he's got this very tiny two gravestones, but he set this rock that was carved from Skeebo, which is his estate in Scotland. And it always just reminds me of just how humble he was, how much he gave back. But that comment that you have about depth of knowledge and being very good at over his career, he developed an expertise in a number of different things. He was a bridge builder. He mastered the telegraph before anyone did. He could do it by ear. He kind of went into steel at a time.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Carnegie is such a great hero for many reasons. He was not just a hero of capital creation, but of philanthropy as well. I mean, he's someone like, you know, the retired almost at 50 years old and spent the rest of his life giving his fortune away in a really thoughtful way, building libraries. I think over 2,500 libraries were built. He was a great thinker as well. If any of your audience is ever in Tarrytown or upstate New York, I highly recommend going to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. I've been there maybe five times to his grave.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was a very unique way to think about value creation. I think that's really just an important kind of artistry, the way you expressed it. It's painting your own canvas.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's such a beautiful expression. I was thinking about that exact line the other day. Josh and I, I think both approach FOILEN very differently. And we're each painting our own canvas in how we even look at a way that the lines that he's carving on a wave are different ones that I'm looking to carve. There's no right way. It's just how we're expressing the art. And I think investing is the same way as I'm not trying to do it the way Buffett did it. I'm trying to do it the way that makes sense for us. And we're going to tweak that over time and our expression of what value investing is going to be is evolving and hopefully getting better and iterating and the kind of businesses that we want to invest in are going to look different in the future than they did in the past the way that Nick really was able to evolve looking at Amazon, which was reinvested its good deal of free cash.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think all of these manifestations of ego get in the way of our true expression. And that's the goal for, I think, for me and for anyone is just to have what Josh calls that unobstructed self-expression that is unique to you. That's the full expression of your art. And that's what art is. It's really on that leading edge of dynamic quality. It's an expression of you becoming and you're full of self. So yeah, it's something that I think as a progression and none of us are perfect at it, but it's a nice objective and goal to have.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's so beautifully articulated. I think of this thing that I think it was Meister Eckhart said that we want to be transparent to the transcendence of light. And I think that we all have this inner light. And it's unique to us. But when we filter it with our ego and we filter it with our expectations on who we are supposed to be or who we're trying to emulate, it loses the sense of who we are. And I think if you, by knowing yourself, know thyself, you start to remove those obstructions, then you can become the essence of your full capability. So that's kind of how I think about it. And the ego is not just I. It's not just an enlarged version of I, but it can be an enlarged version of we. Like you think that when there's a we, there's another side of that.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a little suburb of Boston. And as you alluded to, I love spending time in the jungle. And in the jungle has been an inflection for our family and kind of having two geographies that lend itself to a real diverse experience with nature and with a community. And yeah, so geography, I don't think it's by design when Warren moved to Omaha and the experience he's had in Omaha and Charlie and Santa Barbara and LA and what's that contributed to their productivity. I think makes a big difference.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it certainly aligns with my temperament. I think the amount of time that Scott and I spend on thinking about the portfolio is probably at the same number of hours as anyone else that's running an active portfolio. It's never off. The mind is never off. It's constantly thinking of how do we lose and how we're thinking through that dynamic nature of a competitive situation. It just doesn't lead to activity. It leads to us just calibrating qualitative assumptions, making sure that we thought through it holistically, and then just wrapping all of those other responsibilities and roles so that we can have balance. And I think geography is really important, William, to be honest with you. It's something that has always been a priority is that we look at East Coast is headquartered.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that the three really important lessons that I bring to a daily practice, embodied experience in a meditative experience and a contemplative experience are all free. They can be all done in a small room with 45 minutes of time, even if embodied experiences doing push-ups and stretching and then leading a breathwork, Wim Hoff is a great, he's got an app that I use once in a while that's a beautiful portal to a meditative practice. So I think these things are quite accessible. And, you know, we've really oriented our life to live quite simply and to have nature in close proximity. So a lot of what we're doing is spending time outdoors in nature where the access is just there. And it's not something that is... There's a charge for, and that's been really important to us.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so after our conversation, for example, I'm doing a conscious connected breathing session with someone that I really respect. And that's about an hour of very deep circular breathing that is contemplative in the beginning. And then I lead it into a meditative exercise that's been really profound as I've kind of brought this into my usually that's a couple weeks that I'll do something like long period like that.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Turns out. The second is contemplation or a contemplative exercise. And that's where the mind is active, right? The mind is engaging in creative thinking. And sometimes you have a couple different things that I'll do here. I'll do a meta meta contemplation, which is kind of an act of loving kindness to people in my life. And that's kind of a nice way to kind of express gratitude. active mind. And then I try to have a practice of meditation daily where you're trying to quiet the mind and the ego to almost zero and try to engage kind of in a very deep kind of mindless spaciousness to your thinking. And I usually use breathwork to start in a contemplative exercise leading to a meditative exercise, which is the breath I find to be a really incredible portal to deeper meditation.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A place where I can surf, that's a nice expression for an hour to just have an embodied workout. There's three things that I'm trying to do throughout the day is I'm going through what I call kind of an embodied experience, which is something that's very physical. That could be surfing, could be foiling, could be yoga, could be something that you're just physically active.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think Josh has a slightly nuanced approach, so I'll answer the way that I've approached time management in the day, and I've learned things from Josh as I applied this. So my morning usually starts quite early. It's about a 4.30 wake up. And at that point, it's really my most productive time. So I'm devoting time to journaling, I'm devoting time to reading, really important reading. That's the usually the first hour and a half of the day is really usually things that I've been developing in my subconscious overnight, things that questions I've put to my subconscious and how to maybe some things unlocked that I'm able to kind of work through, whether it be investment related or creative thinking related. And so my first hour is kind of in that thinking space. Usually at that time, if it's a normal day, I love to.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They make an enormous effect. And he also approaches, I think, anything that he does from a world-class level. I think when he has what success looks like in FOILing, he's probably thinking in realm of what is the best in the world look like in this art. And so that's the progression that he's taking. It's something that I see as we're in a toe partnership. We need to bring each other to the highest level. And it's a very shared experience when we're out there and we're putting ourselves each other in very dangerous places and critical places that we need to develop a partnership that's very much in sync. So that's taken a long time to kind of get to the level that we're at.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, when I think about Robert Persig's book, Zen and the Automotorcycle Maintenance, there was an expression in that where what Robert was trying to say was like, you know, it was getting understanding the details and quality of, say, in the art of motorcycle maintenance. It's the same with FOIL. One of the things that I'm so impressed by Josh is he deconstructs every aspect of the sport. And so down to equipment, playing with shims, I mean, there's not a time that we're not on a different piece of equipment. Like we're constantly testing, constantly iterating and trying new things to get little increments of improvement. And that's a beautiful gift that he has in the learning process. And it's taught me to kind of think about that in any art that I'm trying to get better at is what are those incremental little bits of improvement? And you add all those up over time.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sports that I've ever done. I compare it to powder skiing where you have this effortless flow state that kind of lasts over a long period of time. And some of our, you know, when we're toe foiling or being towed in by, say, a jet ski, you release the rope, our rides on this small board on wing can be over two minutes long, which is just miraculous when you think of say an average wave that you may surf could be less than 15 seconds. So it's been an incredible journey. And he's got an incredibly, he's a gifted learner, so he's really taken this on. He's beautiful foil surfer in general. And we both progressed. And it's been fun doing it together.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is where you Exactly, exactly. And it's a wonderful expression of flying. It's a very similar engineering technology to like a wing of an airplane. And so a lot of the fluid dynamics are very similar. You have no friction from the board. The board is above the water. You're riding about three feet, two and a half feet above the water, and you're riding on a wing. And there's a front wing and there's a back wing. So it's this, there's a complexity to it, which is very satisfying because now you're kind of surfing above the water, you're surfing on a wing. There's a lot of very engineering tweaks that can change the dynamic of what is a successful flight and what isn't and what is more effortless and frictionless. So we took this art on together and we continue to do it today. And it's been an incredible journey of frustration, of learning, of elation, probably one of the most amazing.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're like, it was a wild learning curve. And that was about five years ago. But that was an art that we both took on at the same time.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Taking up the art of surfing. And it was something that I had always loved and really had spent more time doing over the couple years before we met. And so we had that in common. And when Josh takes on a mountain like you had with chess and martial arts and jiu-jitsu and that, you know, he takes it very seriously. It's a very much a learning curve. It's a training process, which is all encompassing. It's very, very serious. We took on the art of this very stylistic individual, which was just surfing, and we did it together in the sense of traveling together and thinking about best practices and how can we get better. And I think it was one summer where I suggested we try out foil surfing and I brought a foil and we tested it behind the boat.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. Yeah, Josh is a great, great friend and great human, and I've learned a lot before I met him. And now since after, we met and I'm doing the math, August of 2015. And it was in August that I had, as I usually do, I was kind of thinking of books that have influenced me. And so I reached out to Josh to see if he'd be a speaker in the class in the following semester. Right away, which I think is his normal tendency is he said no. And I said, oh, okay. And we just happened to be in a very similar geography that summer. So I said, I'd love to grab lunch. So we agreed to lunch. And after a beautiful conversation, we were walking out. And he's like, I'll actually do your class. And one of the things that I think both of us were very passionate about at the time.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Parts of that, and the habits around each one of those categories and how I kind of orient my week and learning and so forth is all kind of to try to create that balance.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To me, it's balance. And when I think about what the compounding of joy looks like, it is this balance of a number of different roles and responsibilities. So the first is my craft of investing, which is how I employ myself is really a beautiful expression. And that is deeply important to me, but also like thinking about family and time allocation to friends and community service and what I call total wellness, which is the mind and body and investing in that. And then spiritual. And so how does time allocation look across all of those so that it's a balanced approach to life? And we've tried to orient our family around that we create spaciousness so that we can enjoy all.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Delayed gratification and benefiting from compound interest versus a short term award, this concept of no finish lines, constantly learning. You know, and Jim and I developed a beautiful friendship afterward. We were kind of going into the pandemic at the time. We met just before. And he had asked me to read a manuscript of a book that he was working on called The Poetry of Money. I remember he was giving me chapters as we're going into the pandemic and it was so beautiful and just to be sharing this time with him. And then he stopped producing, you know, and then he passed away shortly after that. I don't think the book was ever published, but maybe someday it will be. But it was just a great friendship and to share that time with him. He's such a, he wrote some of my favorite books and she was such a thoughtful person.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think what's fascinating about a lot of these important written pieces is they are very paradoxical, right? It's not something that can converge to an answer, but often diverges to a paradox. So it gets you thinking with both sides of your brain, right? You're left like, oh, I see it this way, but your right sees it something different because it sees it in the context of the whole. And that's why some of my favorite books are that way. And certainly finite and infinite games helps to share words around this spectrum from short term to long-term thinking. And I think one of the things that is so fun about that is there's such a delineation between this world of instinct and that we're kind of driven this way to act in this more abundant way, which is on the other side, no finish lines. And it's a clear delineation of the”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This way, right? The fragments of Heraclitus or Lao Tzu, Da Ching. You sit with a passage and it just works on you, right? Like the Zohar, right? For you.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jim Cars, maybe one of my favorite guests I've ever had in the classroom. And he was in his early 90s, I think, when he came in and we shared this time in a fireside chat that was just so beautiful. And he shared with me the story when he wrote that book. It was originally like 400 pages. And he was just about to take a sabbatical in France. And he had taken the manuscript with him and he lost it. He lost the original finite infinite games. And he came back from sabbatical and he had this due date that he had to produce a book and he just wrote it with what he remembered it to be. But it became much shorter. And if you've read Finite Infinite Games, it's almost like poetry, prose. It's so beautifully succinct and encrypted in a way, right? It just leaves you thinking like some of my favorite books of all time.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that one of the, if you look at a spectrum, I think about kind of a spectrum from fear to love. And in that fear to love, in that realm of fear is our instincts. And we are instinctually driven for two things, to survive and to procreate. So find a meal, find a mate is what William Durant said. And I think when we can evolve from this state of instincts, we go into a state of reason. And reason is now we're using knowledge and wisdom and we're making very intellectual pattern recognition. And that's great. We've evolved from his instincts we can control the instincts and we can make intelligent decisions. I think this next phase out of reason is into a state of insight. And insight is where we're starting to arrive at a flow state.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Financial stability and security is so important to Berkshire. And he goes into very detailed on why they hold U.S. treasuries and why they don't invest in annuities. And you start reading that. And it's very applicable to the period that we're in, the bank runs and so forth, on anticipating when there will be a difficult period and preparing for that because it's inevitable. That's part of the asymmetry that we're seeking in the businesses that we seek to is that they're patient without tiring of being patient. Most people, it's really hard to be patient. It's uncomfortable to be patient. But if you're patient without tiring about being patient, that's kind of the quality that I think a lot of these, you know, certainly Orn and Charlie have demonstrated. So scarcity and abundance.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think whatever craft that you're seeking some level of mastery at, it becomes like an unobstructed self-expression. It becomes, it probably looks as close to play as you can get. This idea of what Lila was, was this idea of like eternal play. And I think that that's the letters are manifestations of the learning process. And it's a bit fun for me to write up something that I'm learning about that I'm interested in that I think is applicable to the investing process. So that's been an enjoyable medium to share those ideas. I just was rereading Buffett's 50th anniversary annual letter. And it's a beautiful, some of your audience may want to revisit that because he spends a lot of time articulating the reason why”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very adequate and very beautiful, William. Thank you. And thank you for how deeply you read the letters. That was in what you said. It's very gratifying to me. So thank you.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This idea of networks, anything that scales, it's scaling through a beneficiary of how things are distributed. And so when I think about learning now, I can learn through my own mediums, those first three dimensions, but also I can increasingly find that things are shared to me, things that are really interesting are shared to me through a network of people that know what I care about and love. I'm constantly being, if it's an idea, if it's 800 students that have come through the class, they know what kind of exceptional companies that we're on the lookout for. So we're getting those kind of things. We're getting readings in that network of learning has really been enormously beneficial to kind of parsing really interesting knowledge through the system.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You start to see the whole picture. And I talked about that Spinoza quote, to see things under the aspect of eternity is to see the timeline of evolution, how things have evolved, how they've progressed. This is very much a contextual expression of learning. And when I think of left brain versus right brain, which is you had mentioned Ian McGilchris, amazing work the matter with things, I think when your left brain orientation you can be fixated on one dimension. Right brain, which is the creative side, but it's also the contextual side, can see the whole picture. And so that to me was a real next level expression of learning. And then it gave rise to a fourth dimension, which was an expression of networks. And when you look at, say, Jeffrey West wrote a beautiful book called Scale, and he works at the Santa Fe Institute. When we think about...”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Approach it through the art, sometimes through poetry. I would look at it through the history of it. And I just wanted to touch it from all different well to find it from its origin story on, take it to the present. And those would be, I could be in areas of human history. I could be in biology. I could be in physics. And then over time, I was like, okay, I'm developing more, I'm more two-dimensional in my thinking. And I've developed a little bit more depth, more breadth of knowledge. But then I realized that wasn't really the final expression of learning. And Peter kind of introduced me to this idea of looking at a timeline.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember early on in my learning process, I was frustrated with being one dimensional in my thinking. And one dimensional can manifest by being having one depth of knowledge so you know a lot about an industry perhaps, but you can also be one dimensional by having a breadth of knowledge, but you just know a little about a lot of things. And that felt very inadequate. So right away, I was like, how do I build a system where I can actually have a depth of knowledge and a breadth of knowledge? And so I had to reformulate how I was learning. And so I developed a method for taking blocks of time. So I would take three blocks, three months, and I would go as deep as I could on a subject in those three months. And I would set a deadline and I would move on. But the subject could be something like evolution. And I would approach the subject from a 360 degree view.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ideas, meaning let them go away so I could be reborn to something that's more true, more profound, more insightful. Because we all hold on to these biases that are kind of static in nature. And so that hair over the wave is just a symbol for me to remind me of, am I being dynamic or am I static in my expression of, you know, maybe it's an investment portfolio that I have or ways of thinking and just constant renewal.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think of the two busts that Charlie Munger talks about that he has in his office. He has one of Benjamin Franklin and then the former prime minister of Singapore. On you, and you know, they're just symbols of excellence. And as I look around my office here, there was one symbol that I found when I was kind of looking at Egyptian hieroglyphs. And it's a hair over a wave. And when I saw the hair over the wave, I'm like, that is a beautiful symbol. And I started reading about it. And the hair over the wave hieroglyph is the letter W or the Greek goddess Wenit. And when it was the goddess that was believed that gave fertility or renewed basically the renewal of water to the Nile, which then irrigated crops. So it was the symbol of rebirth. And so when I look at the symbol, which I've kind of taken to be my own, I think about what are those ideas or dogma that you say that I might have confirmation bias around that I'm willing to die to those.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The fire as well. So it's just this wonderful thing, and the Charles W. Morgan whale boat, which is the only surviving whale ship that we have. It's at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. They have one replica that I found that's a hexagon. And it's this beautiful, clear hexagon. You can actually buy one. And it sits on my desk. It's almost like a paperweight, but it reminds me of those six-sided attributes with the center being the seventh point. In essence just happens to be this beautiful seven letter word. And so the essence of win-win or the essence of moat, these are things as I look at the deck prism around like, okay, this is illuminating something that otherwise would be dark.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something simple like Piper, if you actually were to dissect the win win counterparties, you'd see that they spell essence. You'd see that the eight layers or the seven layers of competitive advantage actually spells essence. And so when I'm thinking, it kind of winks at me in a way because that's exactly what we're doing, trying to find the essence of business, their competitive advantage. So these strikes me as truth. The question you have about the deck prism, the deck prism is this wonderful that you saw on whale boats, but it was a way that in those days pre-illumination, that light from a deck of a boat would strike this clear glass object and it would illuminate the bottom quarters of a ship. And it actually served as a pretty cool device because if there was a fire below deck and everyone was above decks, they could see.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I wish I had one in this office because I'd have a prop to show you, but I love symbols. I love the way I learn, and this was an inflection of my own learning, is, you know, I would be like I think most people is reading and devouring as much reading as possible. But there was one point in my life where I said, am I really memorizing this material? Am I really able to recall it? And this is something that Peter Caufman is just so brilliant at. So I needed to create a mechanism that I could have in a memory palace a way to recall information. And once I started to develop an architecture and framework to do this, that worked for me, my learning in recall just went exponential. And so for me, what works is, you know, you'll hear me, this is internal because I often don't share, but I create acronyms for things I'm trying to remember.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We talk a lot about the joys of compounding, which is, you know, I think first articulated by Warren in his early Buffett Partnership letters, but I think about the compounding of joy too. And I think that those little bits of kindness that you can offer others, whether it's a student who's coming through uncertain about what he wants to do, and you can be spend a little extra time and then maybe lend yourself to be a reference. And I just wrote a reference for one of my former TAs who's interviewing different places around the world. Man, that fills me with joy, you know, to be able to do that. So it's cool.”
2023-05-28 · We Study Billionaires · RWH027: High-Quality Investing w/ Christopher Begg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT