YouSaid · the spoken record

Guy Spier

lines on the record: 138
first: 2024-08-18
most recent: 2024-08-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You bringing it up. It's really, really important for anybody who listening to this, whether you're an individual investor, whether you have friends and family money or you have large pools of money. I was investing at that time for my father and one or two business partners of his. They came from the agricultural chemicals industry. They understood very little about finance. They barely knew what a stock or a bond was. And it was just so, so well, Guy Spears investing for us. And I had to take into account that they were my investors and I had to take into account that a large drawdown in the first three or four years would potentially jeopardize my career and my little business that I was starting. I couldn't assume that they were sophisticated investors. And so that was part of my story. And that drove my decision to be extraordinarily conservative in my commitments to equity. So the vast majority of the portfolio was in ladder bonds. And I think.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much you bet when you write and how much you bet when you're wrong. I mean, it has to be dollar average because otherwise you're not actually measuring what the person actually did. And a key part of being a successful investor is committing big bucks to juicy opportunities. There's no, it doesn't seem to me that one should get any reward for saying, look, me and Duff and Phelps is the example you wrote. And for the reader's interest, it was something that went up seven times in the two or three years that I owned it before it was sold. It was a very successful investment. But I invested far too little in it relative to what I ought to have invested in it. And I don't get any credit. I shouldn't get any more credit. I get credit for finding and investing in it, but I shouldn't get any more credit for the fact that I didn't put a huge proportion of my portfolio into that seems to me to be just a very important part. And it's really, really hard. And of course, we have all this hindsight. So at the time, I didn't feel like that was the right thing to do. And I appreciate.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, just to be clear in Akamarine Fund's portfolio, it's clearly dollar weighted. My returns are in proportion to the actual dollars invested in various different investments. I guess what you're suggesting is that one should say, no, what I want to do is just take my top 20 stock picks and just do the average of those and the returns of the averages of those. And I think that I agree with Charlie Munger. I find that complete anathema because it's not doesn't measure anything real. Unless I actually was equally weighted in each one of those of the different picks. And if I guess that would have required a constant rebalancing, which is possible, if I actually chose to do that, then yeah, I measure my dollar weighted. But then the dollar weighted and the average actually would equal each other. I mean, I think that the decision to be in cash, not to be in cash, the decision of how much one allocates, I mean, the famous statement by George Soros, it's not if you're right or if you're wrong.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first million somebody wrote, the first million is always the most difficult. And once you've got it, you don't want to do it a second time.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Give up the long tail on the upside, the possibility of becoming a billionaire or whatever, in order to avoid the worst outcomes on the downside. That's for sure. And I think we all ought to be able to do that. And thinking in the same way, if I just go back to your previous question, nobody's telling you what myth to have, but be aware of the mythological dimension of what you're doing. So in this case, nobody's telling me what risk to take or not to take or anybody else for that matter. But be aware not just of your evaluation of the risk for the particular life path that you're on, but imagine a thousand different life paths and think about how it plays out in each of those because you don't actually know which one you're on. And you need to be okay and all of them is a kind of seems to me to be a very, very powerful model.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What you can own is through your hard work and application, but your genes created the mind that you have. So it's actually in a way not yours. And so, yeah, I mean, look, I think that that replaying, you know, imagine a thousand different replays of Guy Spear, Aquamarine Fun 26 years or whatever else, and trying to understand what that distribution looks like and how you might change it is a powerful way of looking at the world that really was switched on to me by Ole Peters, this guy from Ergodisti Economics and Luca Delana. She's a really, really smart way to think of the world. And I think that as we get more successful, then we want to run our lives, and I guess I said this my annual letter, which is where you're picking it up from, where all of those thousand different, the distribution of those thousand different reruns are all satisfactory. And I'm willing.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've paid very little poker in my life, but it makes me think of the very little golf that I've played. And I don't know if you've played any golf, but when I think I've actually succeeded in hitting one or two holes in one on a three-part hole, and boy, does your spirit soar. I mean, that is just one of the most incredible things. Of course, that's like one in a thousand, one in 10,000 for me. And I get a lot more. But yeah, it's fascinating. It's kind of an interesting exploration of that feeling of I'm a freaking genius or I suck. I don't think that I'm unlucky when I hit it into the weeds or into the long grass or whatever. But it's such a powerful human reaction to go that was all me. And actually with my children, my son was saying, well, I'm a smart guy, deserve this. And I'm like, wait, you didn't do anything to get the genes that made you smart. So why do you deserve it? Actually, you own none of it.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Arose during the time, and there's interesting sort of feedback loops here that my book had been published. And I was determined to make the book a success. And so I had quite a bit of attention on doing things that helped make the book a success but did not necessarily make me a better investor. And I'd like to believe that in a rerun, I would avoid that mistake. And I think that you have to be clear with yourself. Am I going to be a journalist and try and get as many eyeballs as possible? Am I going to be an investor? Those are two different things and I don't think you can do them as the same person. And that is clear to me now. It wasn't clear then. So long story short, I'd love to cut out the mistakes and the majority of those thousand times, but I think that actually those mistakes to 50-50 that I would have done them. And so I would place my performance in the very middle of the distribution of those thousand times.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would have made a huge difference. In the one case, the investment in horsehead and then doubling down on it at a point where they were ramping up their debt. And we're getting into a different technology that they didn't understand is a pretty huge mistake. So in my ideal world, I could have like cut that out. That would count for a huge difference in outperformance. And I'd like to believe that in those thousand different reruns of my life, There's a smaller proportion of those reruns where I made that mistake and that there is a larger proportion of those reruns where I chose not to double down on the investment at the wrong time and where actually I didn't make the investment or where I noticed that the debt levels were rising. So at the same time, I can't really evaluate the probability that I would have not made that mistake and I would come out.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So just for the listener, these are the kinds of incredibly thoughtful questions that Stig wrote to me and shows that you got a few brain cells in there that are ticking over. So when I look at my track record, first of all, I'm proud that it's beaten the S&P, although not in the last recent history. And I'm proud that it's done that net of every single expense. So it's a real outperformance over those 26 years. And Chris Hahn, I've mentioned him once before, 6%, 7% outperformance versus the S&P, I believe. So that's kind of like an astounding number. That's an Omaha number, if you like. And do I wish that I had some very, very more significant outperformance? Absolutely. And I can look back and see some really humongous mistakes that I made that”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is being challenging that. It's changing that method. And they'd be like, no, no, no, no, that's not the way it works. And actually, Bitcoin is changing that potentially forever. And so again, become aware of that. Don't have to agree, but be aware.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Buckingham Palace, the symbolism of that, just to bring it back to you and allow you to refocus where you're going to go next with your next question is it's like there is a mythological dimension to so many things that we do. And nobody's telling us what myth we should live by, but become aware of that myth, become aware of that story, be in a relationship with it because it will make your decision so much wiser and so much better. And Joseph Campbell did that for me. And just I brought up Yuval Harari. The reason why I did is because Yuval Harari talks about how so much of what creates modern civilizations are the stories that we tell as a common myth, as a common story. So he talks about the story of money. We all agree that money has value and it's only because we all agree that's a kind of a myth that in a way is being challenged now by dare to say it bitcoin.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could have done is just sprinted across the finish line and taken the first place. And instead, he grabs the Kenyan and he says, we're not past the finish line. You need to keep running. There's another 20 meters to go and runs behind him with his hands on the Kenyan runner's shoulders. And in a split second, he made that decision. So many people would have just run across the finish line. And he was playing the infinite game. He was saying there's more to this than just winning this race. And when he was asked afterwards, why did you do that? He said, look, the guy won the race. He beat me. We were dueling each other all the way through. But I just couldn't keep up with him. He was a better runner. And so he won. And I wasn't, it would have been a violation of that myth for me to run ahead of him. And so what's incredible about that? I don't know what he's doing right now is that he won in a much bigger sense. So we talked about my office.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Down and say, Look, there is actually a different ethos by which you could play this. There's an Olympic spirit here. And I'll give you one example of that, which is a, I think he's a Spanish runner that just came up on my Twitter feed recently at a competition about three years ago. So he was running in a cross-country race and the Kenyan runner was ahead of him and they ran kind of as a duel between the two of them. They were far ahead from the pack. And at the very end of the race, with about 20 meters to go, this man, Ivan Fernandez, I think is his name, this man, the Kenyan runner, who's won the race at that point, thinks he's crossed the finish line and he's starting to look at his watch and he's starting to look around and he's broken into a walk and he's just delighted that he's finished. He's actually not crossed the finish line. And this runner comes up behind him.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Knowing that she had XY genes, the right thing to do would have been not to compete. And that's this kind of like the rules behind the rules. That's just not cricket. Hey, the game we're actually playing Algerian team is not a game of win-at-all costs according to the rules. It's a game of creating friendship amongst men and creating respect across athletes and across countries and across time zones by allowing a fair fight. And I was on the tennis court yesterday with my daughter and her boyfriend and my wife. I've played more tennis than them. I could have smashed the ball. I could have won six love, six love if I'd have wanted to. Instead, I played at their level and we actually played the game and we modified the rules to try and get the rallies as long as possible. But what are we trying to do? We're actually trying to have fun. And forgive me. I hope this is not too rambly. But what I would love to do with the Algerian team in Man Khalifa.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be winners, we plan to take home the most medals. And that is a kind of like a myth, sort of like war, if you like. The world that would be you have been used in the past is Manichaeism, which is kind of like life is just a struggle between good and evil and it's just a constant battle. And we're going to be the good ones and we're going to fight according to the rules. Whereas the other side, the people who are crying out, JK Rowling, for example, has been a big advocate for this, are crying out and says, first of all, this breaches a basic sense of unfairness. And in an article that somebody wrote for the Daily Telegraph, where I'd have to look her up, where she wrote, even if according to the rules, she had the right to compete, the fair thing to have done would have been to withhold even if she was a functional or she was declared female at birth and met all these criteria to be female.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About ourselves, about ourselves as individuals, as families, as societies, then not be conscious. And I think a bit like what I was talking about, symbolism with the royal family, nobody's telling somebody to live by one myth or another myth. I think that the exhortation is just be aware of the myth that you are living by, of that common understanding of what it is that you're doing. And in a sense, what you have in that boxing fraca is that the myth or the kind of like the underlying ethos with which this Algerian boxer is approaching the women's boxing tournament is the game that she is playing and her coaches and the Algerian Olympic team are study the rules and figure out if you can win according to the rules and the goal is to win according to the rules and life is a battle and there are winners and losers and we plan”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that would be an example of that's just not cricket, is what the British would say. I think that just trying to tie that in with Joseph Campbell, actually another person who comes up for me, as you say that, is Yuval Hariri, who he does it in a slightly different way, but I think that Joseph Campbell, anything by Joseph Campbell, what he woke me up to is so the title of one of the books is called Myths to Live By. sort of like mythological thinking Why would a rational person engage in mythological thinking? Well, the reason why we engage in it is because it's part of us, whether we like it or not, that there are motivations that we have and stories that we're telling in a voices about the meaning of what we're doing and why we're doing it, that we are far better to be conscious of those stories that we're telling about.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know if you're following this women's boxing at the Olympics, and if you take a very, very narrow reading of the rules as the Olympic International, so there's this Iman Khalif woman, and I think that she is now in the finals with another person with XY chromosomes, which are kind of male chromosomes. If you read clearly according to the rule book that the International Olympic Committee has written on how you define female and male and what allows somebody to compete as a female, they meet the criteria, period, end of story. But there's when you see these boxing matches between somebody who's an XY chromosome, which is effectively a functional male, versus an XX chromosome, which is a female, what you see is even if they're labeled female, that you see a man punching a woman and it offends that basic sense of decency.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Behind the rules. And so the rule book doesn't cover it all. There's plenty more, and there's a kind of a shared understanding of what this game is supposed to be about. And that should modulate your behavior. And in a way, I mean, that's just not cricket. And it sort of come, the things that you don't do, even though they're not in the rule book. It comes down to understanding perhaps that people in that game are not playing to win. They're playing to, or they're not playing to win that game. They're playing to win the infinite game, which is the game of continuing the relationship with these people and making them like you and want to play another game with you and displaying your personality as being willing to take the win when it's acceptable to take the win but also being willing to stand back and not push your advantage to the very limit because it would be kind of not right to do so. And actually I just feel compelled to say it. I think that I”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm so glad that you found your way to Joseph Campbell. I mean, I don't know how I found my way to Joseph Campbell, but he just blew me away. He was the key that unlocked so many things for me. I think that there are writers that I've read that in a way have helped me to come home to myself. For example, there was a civil war going on inside me between my rational side and the side that had studied science and wanted to believe to exist just in the material world. And then what do you do with this whole mythological side or with this religious and spiritual side? And he gave me the key to understand that there's like two sides of the same coin. And what you're talking about there, if I understood it correctly, is the term that the British would understand so well if you don't think you don't understand rugby, I'll take you into even a more esoteric sport. And the famous phrase is, well, that's just not cricket. And this idea that there are rules that are”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there is a kind of an association there where I come into work every day. So on the back of the card, there's a drawing of that. And so that's me directly learning. And I want to live in Buckingham Palace or working in a Buckingham Palace. And I've chosen the environment that I work in. And I want to give people a sense of where that is. So I did a drawing. And so understanding that symbolism and that everything we do has a symbolic nature and we ought not to ignore it. So there are a few things that I've learned from the royal family.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You get to the key information easily and presenting it to you up front in a way that were no nonsense, no bells and whistles and no fluff kind of organization. And that is a communication. And that is a symbolism. Or if you think of the Berkshire Hathaway meeting where Warren and Charlie appear, well, now it's just Warren, but they would appear on that table with nothing else, just an ordinary backdrop. Darren Away is the symbolism that they want to create. But that doesn't mean that I have to ape Warren and Charlie, I don't and I don't have to ape the royal family. So just give one example in our company holiday card. We actually did a line drawing of my office building or the office building where I work. So what's the point there? Well, it is where I work. And on one hand, it's kind of like completely irrelevant. What's important is what's going on in my mind. On the other hand, people deserve to know where I work.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wanted a really good design for my annual report, and there's this awesome woman called Cecilia Wong, who's been helping me. She designed the cover of my book and I met her through William Green. So I'm with her and I'm saying, look, I'll show you examples of annual reports that I think are really, really good. And you're going to help me to do something. I said, look, Cece, like the best example I have is the Berkshire Hathawayani report, but it's not designed. And I showed her the webpage. And she's a genius, I can tell you. She used to design the covers of Time magazine for Asia. So she comes back to me and she says, guy, you don't realize both the Berkshire Hathaway annual report and the website are extremely well designed. And there's a design desire like the website has got nothing there. And she says, no, this is what it's saying. It's saying we're not about extraneous fluff. We're about the words of Warren Buffett. We're about to...”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's say Chris Hahn says, Oh, that's a great honor. I don't need to come to the ceremony. And actually, if you want to knight me, you can knight me anywhere. It's okay. And let's say the king's not got much time and he says, yeah, that would really suit me as well. Well, no. The formality of doing it in that way in front of people at Buckingham Palace with a sword, with probably some kind of letter or seal or something, it creates a symbolism that is important for everybody around it. The royal family is extremely aware or the people around them. They don't want to desecrate that imagery. And on the one hand, the person I was more than five years ago would have said, who cares? But actually, we all do better when we understand that pretty much not everything, but an enormous number of things we can do has a symbolic side to it. And the symbolism is important. And that doesn't mean we have to ape the royal family.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We kind of pay attention to that association. So I'll give you an example that is just recent. I mean, it was a conversation yesterday. So I do this charity lunch now every year. And the latest one that I'm going to meet is going to be in New York. The person said, look, I'll meet you anywhere. I really don't care. As long as we spend the time, I'm really happy. And the person I was five years ago, the person who'd not studied the royal family in the same way as I have now, I would have just said, yeah, sure, well, then let's just meet anyway, some way that's convenient to you or to me. And actually, I insisted, I said, no, we're going to meet at somewhere that's meaningful and symbolic. So in this case, we're going to meet at Smith and Walensky's, which is where I had my original launch with Warren Boffett. Because even if we go back to the King of England and we take, let's say, Chris Hahn, who is a famous investor who was given a knighthood in recognition of his services, the huge amounts of money that he's donated to charities.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Palace is really, really important. It helps the British public to connect and feel a certain way. In a way you could say it's a ritual. So what I realize is that doesn't mean that I have to inhabit Buckingham Palace or that I have to have some grand office building, but I need to be aware of the symbolism of what I'm doing. And you could even say of what your business is doing. So to give one example a very long time ago, I remember seeing it was an interview with Warren Buffett in Fortune or Forbes or something like that. And apparently what I remember reading was that he insisted in being photographed at McDonald's. He said, or at a sort of a family burger place. And that symbolism for Warren Buffett was important. He knew what he was trying to present to the world. And so it's not that you have to be in Buckingham Palace, but I think that we are more effective in business.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One actually looks closely at Buckingham Palace, what you see is that it's a massive facade and actually it's quite kind of, I wouldn't say small and cute, but it's all about the facade. And when you drive through the facade on the other side, it's actually quite ordinary. And so it's about presenting a face to the world. And I think that we talk a lot in the value investing world about having an inner scorecard and about having the same, being the same person in private as we are in public. But there's, I think that I've learned about that actually, and it's not so much the facade, it's the way you create authenticity. So is the king of England also the king of England if he's standing in the middle of the street somewhere? Yes, he is. But if he's going to make a statement or if he's going to make an award or if he's going to appear on his birthday, that symbolism of appearing on the balcony of Buckingham.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Access to physical and worldly power, and the Pope or religious representatives who kind of had access to another world that eventually split. But the association that humans have in their minds with a royal family to association to kind of like the etherial godliness stuff that we could never reach is still extraordinarily powerful. And so obviously the royal seal of approval is an incredible thing. Because it gives you an association with that. Royal families, it seems to me, use all sorts of tools to enhance that association, that sort of like other worldliness, that sense that you've gone through the looking glass and you're in the world of the gods, so to speak. So if you take Buckingham Palace, it's a symbol and it's also sort of an accessory for the royal family. It's a statement about their power and their incentivity in British life.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The business world prefer to get recognition from Warren Buffett? Absolutely. But they also don't mind getting recognition from me. So that is one sort of like minor minor way in which we can extend our moats through the royal family. I'll just give you a couple of other thoughts before I let you come back and maybe redirect me a little bit more precisely. So if we think of royals and we think of the history of royal families or kings and queens in Europe, it goes all the way back to emperors, it goes back to the Roman Emperor. The key about the Roman Emperor. And if you go before that to, for example, the Egyptian emperors or Pharaohs is that they were also considered to be gods. And there was a kind of an interesting split in European history where the emperor was no longer a god, was a human. And they're kind of like there was a period of confusion, but ultimately the role of king, the person who has”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a way of exerting soft power and extending your moat. So the more people I can recognize in my life in a genuine way, and it can be as simple as writing them a note or a letter is going to actually enhance their loyalty to me because you can imagine my loyalty to Warren Buffett is enormously increased through that letter. It was high anyway. And you can imagine that the loyalty towards the royal family is severely enhanced and increased through those recognitions. And I think that many people go through life desperately hoping and wanting and desiring to be recognized themselves. And here you have the monarch who actually has a whole administration that is dedicated towards the monarch, recognizing other people. And one can say, yeah, well, they're the monarch. But the fact of the matter is we can all do it. And would somebody in”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that I realized that I did far too little of it. So just before this thing started, we had very short time for the listener. Stiggy, you had a birthday card from me. And in a way, that's me saying, I recognize you. It's a very, very simple recognition. So Warren Boffet understands this and it pisses me off that everything I've learned from Warren Boffet, I realize, but he sent me a letter and he kind of like, and what was the letter? He'd read my annual report and he liked it. And so he wrote me letter. I was blown away. And of course, what I did was put it on the wall. But how different is that from a royal seal of approval? How different is that from granting an OBE or a SU or something to somebody? It seems to me that it's the same thing. So to try and answer your question and make one very, very small point around the royal family in the UK is that recognition”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of knighthoods, various different degrees of exclusivity that I don't know much about, like Knight of the Garter, and I don't even know all the names. And then there's a basic somebody. And then there's titles like OBE and CBE. But I started to realize that those titles are given out in subtle ways to adjust and to kind of like make quiet behind the scene statements about what kind of society the royal family wants to see. And I kind of looked at that and said, what can I do that's similar? Stop being angry at them and start thinking, what can I do that's similar? And I realized that recognition. So these titles, they're not anything physical. You're not giving out a castle. You're not giving compensation. You're not giving stock options. You're not giving any of those things. Purely giving recognition to people is something that we can all do.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Key to the functioning of British democracy and the British Constitution. So I went through an evolution where I felt like I was a Republican. And then I came to this grudging acceptance and understanding that the royal family was absolutely central and key to British public life. And it was only in the last maybe three, four, or five years that I discovered that I could actually learn from their behaviors. I guess I hope that this comes to Moats, but I would start with, I used to think that all the titles that the royal family can give out or that the king can give out in the case of the UK were just very, very stupid. And then I realized that there's quite a lot of discernment and care that goes into giving out knighthoods and there are various different kinds.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody's suggesting that one should learn from the ancestors of these royals through violence or other things to get where they are. But if we think of these kind of like juggernaut blockbuster businesses like Coca-Cola and American Express or Nestle, and in a sense those are kingdoms. And inside of those kingdoms, there are people who kind of like royal families, if you like. So what have I learned from trying to understand? So the first thing that happened to me if I think of the royal family that I know the best, which is the British royal family, not personally, just through observing them, is that I went through a period of being a sort of a strong Republican where I kind of like enjoyed being on the subway on the tube in the UK and saying things like off with their heads. And so every single member of the Royal family, I deeply apologize for having said that because I don't think it's, well, I can totally see why the British royal family is absolutely”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So as I was trying to think about it, let's be clear. I mean, first of all, royal families and, well, any kind of nobility, the history of that nobility will have been that at some point they will have either fought a battle and won and they would have taken a castle or maybe in later European history they would have been have given property in reward for a service to the monarch. But at the end of the day, underlying all of that, what is it, Karl Marx, all property is theft. So I'm not sure that we can, because now in the world of business, we're playing according to rules. We're not engaging in violence. There are tools that we use. Maybe it's innovation. Maybe it's all sorts of ways that we try and get advantage in the business world, which I don't think are particularly relevant for how royal families achieved their position. So let's just get that out of the way.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It goes both ways when the listener finds out about the questions, you'll see that it's also like holy moly. I've got to try and do justice to these questions.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a pleasure to be with you, and you've prepared an amazing set of questions which made me think quite a lot. So that's impressive. And I approach this conversation slightly nervously because your questions come from a place of curiosity and interest and desire to learn. So there's nowhere for me to hide.”
2024-08-18 · We Study Billionaires · TIP653: Track Record and Risk w/ Guy Spier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT