YouSaid · the spoken record

Graeme Forster

lines on the record: 102
first: 2023-10-13
most recent: 2023-10-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You build an asset manager, you build Bloomberg, you build any organization. How do you handle succession? And in asset managers is really difficult because you usually have a founder. Founder builds the business up if they're successful, then what? Then what”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, edge is a tricky one, right? And everyone tries to define their edge. Everyone's trying to look for their edge. And I think if it was so simple as to say, hey, do this, and then you've got an edge, then everyone would do it and it wouldn't be an edge. So it has to be a number of things, and you have to balance across a number of different variables. I would point to a few things. One, we talked about how, and this links to the second part of the question, how does that, you know, an everyday investor develop an edge and how should they think about investing? It's those three things. It's the three key variables. Number one, longevity. And that really comes down to ownership structure. The really tough part of this business is succession.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Either because we miss those opportunities, they were fundamentally mispriced and we missed them, and I think there's a little bit of that in there, or they just did well, right? The randomness and they had a few hits. All the valuation went up to a fairly extreme levels. So one of a combination of those three things have happened over periods of time. The last five years have been a good example of that. The late 90s are good example of that. You go back to the late 60s, you saw exactly the same dynamic. So you go through these periods and you just have to be patient as long as you're generating a good absolute return for your clients. I think our clients are happy and they recognize you go through these big cycles.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably the most efficient. Now, the problem, as you say, you have to deal with is if they go through a long period of performing very well, then you have to stack up against that. And that's the issue we've had in terms of if we look at the world on equally weighted basis, we've added a lot of value for clients over the last 10 years. If we look at a sap weighted basis, it's been much harder, much harder.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And AI was the metaverse. And I know that. That's right. I'll give it time. Who knows? So there's 3,500 investable stocks or more in the world for us. We treat them on a unit basis. In any one of those 3,500 stocks, you could see a big, big miss pricing. And so the chances that we end up in the biggest seven stocks in the world are quite slim on that basis because what's the chance you're going to have the most inefficiency in the bigger seven stocks?”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, a lot of people have, right? That's the challenge. So two points I'd make. One, fang to magnificent seven. It changes, right? The basket changes, and it's just the next big thing. Two or three years ago, it was NFTs and all this sort of, and now it's AI and large language models. There's always something comes up. And then it sort of emerges from the ashes, and they're all relevant new technologies, but you just don't want to get caught up too much in the high”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So really the tough part of what we do is we have to run a portfolio of equities for our clients. And what we're trying to do is just find the best ones. There's always the best ones, right? The market's very rarely narrow, so narrow that everything is efficiently priced and there's no opportunity. And if that is the case, then that's okay. You can just hold something that gives you 7% a year over time, and that's fine. But there's always opportunity, and it's just a question of finding it. And you need a lot of depth. That comes from the analysts looking at these different niches, and you need a lot of breadth. You need to just turn over a lot of stones and cover a lot of ground.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of people forget that as an investor, you're a price taker, you're just waiting. You're just waiting Prices to give you the opportunity to buy at a discount to the true worth of the business. And so the critical component in terms of managing a portfolio or finding great ideas is flexibility because you're not dictating what the market does. You're just waiting. So having the ability for capital to move to the most dislocated ideas is absolutely essential. So if you go back and look at the history of our funds, sometimes we're very, very heavily invested in one country. Sometimes we have zero. That's exactly how it should be because inefficiencies aren't static. They move. Right. They”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then they recommend a list of those into a paper portfolio and you track the performance of that over time. And it's quite a useful mechanism to have that for the analysts themselves because it's a learning mechanism as a recommendation mechanism for portfolio managers and thinking about how to allocate capital. And what we find over time is the top three or four ideas coming from key analysts who are really deep in the weeds generate a lot of outperformance. And that's the key. It's just being close to your business, really tearing it to pieces, understanding what it's worth and buying at a good price. And that's really the lifeblood of the firm.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the key things, one of the differentiators potentially of the firm is that all of our analysts run paper portfolios. So all of our analysts are working in niches. They could be a Japan analyst or UK analyst or financials analyst. And their job is really to know the company's well, tear it under pieces, build them back up again, figure out what they're worth. And through that process, they determine.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone wants to be looking in areas that nobody else is looking and buying into fear, selling into greed A better way, I think, to describe what we do is just differentiated thinking. So not necessarily looking for things that are bombed out, although that can be very fruitful in terms of thinking about which areas potentially oversold or there's too much fear around them. A more fruitful way is looking for apathy. People have just lost interest or just a differentiated view on a business. That's how I describe our style is just assessment of intrinsic value. So that's deep company work.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that this word contrarian is interesting, right? Because we talk about contrarian investing and everyone wants to be a contrarian. I love that”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Commodities are tricky, right? But what you can do in terms of as an equity investor, you can say what is a normal sort of commodity price deck for... And then say how much free cash flow can that business generate on that typical price of oil or gas or whatever it is you're looking at? So that's one of the things we're looking at is what is a normalized pricing? What sort of free cash flow can you generate? And how can you grow from that base? And that gives you a rough value for the business. The commodity industry is very fruitful because it's so volatile. So you get massive swings in the price of the shares, you get massive swings in the market cap of the companies. And you don't get that much swing in the true underlying value in the businesses. So that's been an area that we've been investing in for a long period.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the strategy. So those are the two of the longest standing strategies that we launched the Japan strategy, which there's very interesting things happening in Japan now in 1998. We've got an EM strategy. We've got an international strategy, which we launched in 2009, which is non-US. Those would be the main ones. We do have multi-asset strategies called Balanced, which we launched in 2014-15.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're really focused in terms of what we do with equity investors typically. So a company analysts, we look for intrinsic value of businesses, we look to buy at a significant discount. Our main product, our flagship is global. That's been running since 1990. We actually have a market neutral hedge fund associated with that. Which is really better neutral.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's just enormous. And, you know, one of the key things as an investment firm is you have to recognize your errors. and you have to learn from them and you have to have a robust system internally to make sure that there's biases, those errors you're making are picked up and addressed so you can do better in the future and I think if anything we are on the other side so we're too we're too explicit about the errors we make And I mean, but it is endemic in the industry because the industry is incentivized to grow assets. And hence, admitting errors is not something that you want to do on TV.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it means the manager has to do things like reserve, has to be stronger balance sheet, and therefore you're not paying out dividends to partners. So you have to make that decision to reserve. And you're just taking on more volatility as a business”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we put this in place, we thought this was it. The floodgates were going to open. Everyone was going to follow. And the reason why they follow is it's such a tough thing for a manager to do. And so the client, we should get a lot of clients sort of saying, okay, finally an aligned fee. And it would be so popular with clients that it would be very difficult for other managers not to follow. And we've not seen that, which is interesting. And I think one of the reasons is it's very difficult for the manager to sustain that type of fee. Because you're transferring the volatility from the client to the manager.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, to the extent that. Well, it really depends on the extent to which we've outperformed. Because if you have performed a lot by a lot, there's a point where the firm itself needs to take some cash flow to keep the lights on. But in regular cycles, a little bit of outperformance, a little bit of underperformance, you're just refunding that fee.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do we avoid that you build alignment into everything you do? You try to build alignment. So you're trying to find clients that really understand you. Number one, so that they know the type of volatility that they're going to get. They're not going to make, you know, when we get to those inevitable tough periods. They understand that. They recognize it. And we're always communicating with them to sort of help them through those periods. And the second is the fees. If you're refunding fees to clients in those periods of tough performance, that really does align you. They say, okay, you're suffering, we're suffering, that's okay. Everyone's suffering, and you get a much stronger result in terms of clients sticking with you through those cycles.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That reduces the volatility to an extent. It also aligns clients and improves client behavior because one of the key things another problem with the industry is it's all very well saying you can outperform the market. But what you have to be able to do is outperform on a dollar weighted basis. See that's a combination of you doing good things and generating returns, but also the client acting in a way that's not pro-cyclical, i.e. not investing more money after good performance and pulling out after bad performance. And it's chronic in the industry to see the dollar weighted return for clients be much below the actual return of the funds that they invested.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just about 20 years, yeah. So it leads to much stronger alignment with the client and has a lot of positive outcomes. Number one is it reduces the volatility a bit. We talked about the importance of risk management and volatility when we're underperforming. We're refunding the fees.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We refund the fee. So, what happens is let's say you outperform by 5% in the first six months of the year, that fee on the performance that we generate for our clients, a proportion of that our performance goes into a bucket or an escrow account, if you like. And then if we subsequently underperform by 5%, let's say, over the next six months, so you're flat on the year Client shouldn't have paid a fee And that is the case. So we refund the feedback from the bucket, it goes back to the”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's your decision making, and that's where we try to pull that out at interviews. What about emotional intelligence? The biggest returns you can make are at the most extreme points in markets. It's like sitting down at a poker table. There's one hand a night that really matters. You need to make the right decision in that hand, and that dictates whether you go home happy or you go home sad. And it's exactly the same in markets. And you need a very level unemotional way of going about things and to be able to make good decisions at those extreme moments is absolutely critical. Those three variables, IQ, RQ, EQ, intelligence, rationality, and emotional intelligence. And so that's what Orbis was trying to draw out. You can't draw it out or interview. So that's where you have the systems we have in place to assess people over time, what they're good at, what they're not good at. But that's really what drew me to the firm.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Table, absolutely, right And you look at what Warren Buffett says you give away IQ points so you can get some of these other things because the other things are even more important. You think about two people going to look at the same data and come to very different conclusions. And that's rationality, that's judgment. How do you assess judgment? That's a different thing than IQ. That's unbiased assessment of data is a different thing.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, when I went to interview at Orbis versus other firms, they're just so different in the way that they interviewed. It wasn't, you know, they were trying to pull out not just IQ. I got a ton of IQ questions, right? You got interviews. It's like, can you answer this puzzle? Tell me about this mathematical thing. It's all IQ, but investing is, I don't know, 20% IQ.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And if you're in a quant fund and your clients say you've underperformed for the last three quarters, and I don't quite understand the black box, how do you retain, how do you drive that alignment between the client and the business? And so you need shorter-term returns. You need less volatility so that you can't sustain. So I think that's why the quant side doesn't focus on that fundamental side too. So that's, you know, why did I choose Orbis is because if I looked at Orbis, when I looked at this sister company, Alan Gray, which goes back to 1973, they'd sustained this long, very long period of excess performance, six, seven, eight percent excess return over the market over very long periods of time. And they done that, you know, at Alan Gray, they've done it for 34, 35 years, and obviously they've done it for sort of 16, 17 years when I joined. And very few companies can sustain performance over that length of time with it being a pure fluke. So the fascinating part was what drove that. And that drew me in.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the ultimate signal in terms of determining where a price goes over the long term is the value of that business. That's the signal. That's the signal that won't go away because it's the base of the whole efficient allocation of capital. It's the base of the whole market. It's not the little signals that you're trying to pick up day to day to figure out where a price is going to go. That's the thing that should sustain. So that's what drew me to the fundamental side, thinking the fundamental side will sustain over long periods of time. Now the fundamental side can adapt. It can bring in more and more technology to help it to assess that core variable which is intrinsic value, which is the true underlying value of the business. I think that's what will happen. It's interesting as to why the quant side doesn't try to figure out what intrinsic value is. And I think the problem with it is the prices move much, much faster than the intrinsic value of the business. In order to figure out what the value of the business is, you have to see it.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's absolutely what the quant teams are doing around the world, what the quant funds are doing. They're analyzing tons and tons of data, they're looking for the little signal that drives price moves, and hence that's how they generate their returns. As I thought about what is going to sustain over the long term, what is the ultimate signal in markets? What is the ultimate signal? And for me, what is a stock? What is an equity? It's a piece of a business. You own a piece of a business, right?”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, it was interesting because the background I had in mathematics, I really had a decision to make. Do you go quantitative route or fundamental route? And it might surprise you to imagine that I thought the future was more on the fundamental side. And I came to that conclusion because if you think about what the quant side does and what the fundamental side does, they're both trying to find the signal in.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Makes an enormous difference. And so when you run that simulation and you get that distribution of wealth, what you notice about the people at the top end is they avoid those big negatives. If you lose 50%, Got a double to get back to where you were, and if you're compounding at 7% a year, which is what markets have done, it takes you about 10 years to get back to where you were. It's a long time, and so watching your downsides is very important. So, those two things longevity, a little bit of excess return and risk management would be the key.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's a 300 to 400 times sort of improvement in your end wealth phenomenal. Amount of compounding over a long period of time. And the third, the one that nobody talks about is risk management, risk management. And so that's not just we talk about risk management in terms of buying at a big discount intrinsic value. And then that gives you that capital sort of buffer. The last thing you want to do is buy. Above intrinsic value because then that's where you get capital impairment. But the big thing that we don't talk about that people should talk about is just variance. Volatility. People say, oh, volatility, you can just, it just goes up and down. That's fine. But it makes a big, big difference to your long-term outcomes if you can just avoid those big losses.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just simple. It's just math. Stick to it over long periods of time and it's much harder in practice because you have to put that longevity into your process. The second is excess returns. If you can just increase your excess returns a little bit each year, massive difference. It makes a massive difference over 50, 60, 70 years, even just a percent. So, you know, our sister company in South Africa have done 8% above the benchmark For 50 years.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let it compound over time. You know, watches it pending and just stays in the game. Another good example, the best example of this is endowments here in the US. Phenomenal institutions, and they're set up to be perpetually around, they stick around. So if you take the Met Museum, I'm sure you've been to the Met Museum here in New York. Their endowment, I think, is around 5 to 6 billion. Phenomenally large number for a single institution in Central Park. And I'm sure they're very intelligent and diligent investment committee. The key thing for them has been longevity 130 years of compounding has got them to where they are today. Stick around is the big, that's the key.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It sounds incredibly easy. And if you write it down on paper, you can run the numbers. It's there. It exists. It's clear. Three things that matter. Number one, longevity. I talk about that study. That was a study of randomly selecting returns from the S&P 500. And that group of 1,000 investors gives you that very non-linear outcome in terms of wealth. That tells you if you change your inputs a little bit like you said around if you work hard, etc., you can push yourself a little bit to the right on that wealth distribution. If you do that because it's nonlinear, you can get big, big improvements in your end wealth, massive improvements. So there are really three key inputs to that. One is longevity. Just sticking with it. Warren Buffett, what's the statistic? 95% of his wealth has generated after the age of 65.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely not. No, that's right. But I mean, and it's, you know, the pie grows as well. The more people work, the more productive they are is the other element to it.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% so that on the lottery side is pure randomness. And it's a negative EV game. Every time you play, you lose a bit of money in probability space. If you are, if you're playing cards, playing poker, there's more skill. And if you're very good at it, you can eke out win positive EV outcome and grow your wealth in a very lumpy fashion. In capitalism, it's the same, right? There's a lot of skill, there's a lot of luck. And if you work hard and you do everything you possibly do, you probably climb the ladder and you can push.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Need to see them, or you won't play, and you need to be the 900 million, and you need to see the winner, and you need to see them change their life and all of the joy and inverted commas they get from that. That's why you play, because you see that big payout. And we see Elon Musk and we see Warren Buffett, and we see these people at the top of the capitalist pyramid, and we think, huh, play the game because we can see them. They're very visible. And I think capitalism is a big function of capitalism is having those big winners. And then everyone, you know, wants to take part.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very uneven outcome, right? Very, very wealthy people and a lot of own. Was it point one of the world own 50% of the wealth or something, just some crazy number? That is a function of Capitalism. It's not a bug, it's part of the system. And I think it's an essential part of the system. And a little bit like the way the lottery, you see these big, big payouts right at the top”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think the lottery is fascinating because I'm sure we'll talk about this, but we did a study recently where we took a thousand investors hypothetical investors. And we said, okay, if they've got a 50 year time horizon. In terms of their investment time horizon, and you're simulating a return profile from, let's say, the S&P 500's bell curve of returns over the last 100 years. So you're sampling your returns each year for these 1,000 investors over the next 50 years. And you see a wealth path for each of those investors. And what you get at the end is a very, very uneven distribution of wealth. That's a function of returns. That's a function of capitalism. It's a function of log normal returns that we see in stock markets. It's exactly the same. You see they're exactly the same nonlinear wealth distribution in real life.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's absolutely right. And I mean, it's two sides of the same coin, really, because you're paying your $2 and you're dreaming of the big jackpot. There's an element of that pulling the lever. I used to go to... Casinos when I was in college, and I would see people, they were almost, they would have these cards, and it would be the membership card for the casino, and it would be attached to their belt, and it would be plugged into the slot machine. And it would look like they were one and the same, right? They were connected by it. And they would sit there all day, zombified. That's an addiction. That's absolutely an addiction. But it's the same mentality of that little buzz you get when you win something or the dreaming of the big payout.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I didn't want to spend my life in academia where the money's not bad depending on what you do. But I would always be in that situation of sort of bumping up against that barrier. It limits your choices in life if you don't if you have that constraint.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting very little feedback from your actions until years and years down the road. So it draws people in. They'll have big wins. They'll buy a stock, it'll go up, and can do this. And they keep going and they keep playing and they keep going. And so it is a game. It's a field that drives a lot of inefficiency. And I think that inefficiency is sustainable. And so that's one of the reasons that drew me. And the other reason that drew me in was, I think the relationship we, you and I, everybody has with money Is heavily dictated by their upbringing. And so, if you have spent your childhood making compromises because you're always bumping up against the barrier of not having enough money, it changes the way you look at money for your whole life. 100%.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like people who play the lottery. Why do people play the lottery? They know it's a negative expected value game. Do they? Maybe they do. Maybe they don't. But they see the potential to win the big. The big jackp And they also, you know, they get a little wins here and there through the lottery, right? It gives them a buzz. It's why do people go to the casino? They gamble. So game playing with large elements of uncertainty draw people in. who aren't necessarily suited to the rigor of the activity. And if you think about what's similar to poker in that regard, it's investing very, very similar. Massive levels of uncertainty. In fact, more uncertainty in the investment world in the poker world because you're making these long-term decisions.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the same thing, right? It's the same skill set. And so during my PhD, I started playing a lot of cards. He was Omaha and poker. Gin and then backgam and all these games, interesting from the sense that Luck or uncertainty play a big role, and that's interesting. I thought that's an interesting element of those games. And one of the things that drew me into that wasn't just the intellectual side of it. How do you make decisions under uncertainty? Uncertainty itself And what that does. And, you know, if you're a chess player, it's almost pure skill. A poker player, I think it's maybe 40% skill, 60% luck over short periods. And what that does is it draws in a lot of people to the game that maybe don't appreciate that kind of the rigor that goes into the decision making.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I started during my PhD getting into game theory. Decision making under uncertainty and all these interesting areas which were a bit tangential.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very, very political. And the deeper you go within a field, the less the people who are funding the research understand about the research. So it gets very bureaucratic and you spend a lot of your time, in my view. Trying to build your funding to do your next project. And so one reason for looking for an exit, if you like, from academia, which has its positive elements, right? Academia, you get the feeling of fulfillment of doing something that's... Good for the world in theory”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some people do, right? That's quite a relevant question. So a big part of the thesis, which we sort of started around one year in. After getting kind of the basis right, how do you treat this was in agricultural system? So how do you treat disease? When do you treat and how much is it going to cost? And it's basically an optimization problem.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was really an add on you're thinking about the spread and control of disease. Given this is academia. The big focus is on how do you do it? Not really on what it costs”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that is an incredibly complex area of mathematics to the point where you spend weeks and weeks proving that one isn't equal to zero. That's how fundamental you get right back to the axioms.”
2023-10-13 · Masters in Business · Graeme Forster on Global Longevity Investments · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source