YouSaid · the spoken record

Matthew McLennan

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108
first
2022-10-02
most recent
2022-10-02
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Well, I think in some ways there were various motivating forces at work. One may argue being of Scottish origins originally way back when, that there may be some aidavistic tendency there with money, but that's probably just wishful thinking on my part. And then there was necessity. I mean, I think despite the fact that I had a really fortunate childhood in terms of being very happy and being exposed to a lot of thinking and life experience, we didn't have a lot of basic necessities. And so I think there was a motivational force of wanting to live a more comfortable life, not from a material purposes per se, but for a sense of personal freedom, not feeling encumbered by one circumstance. And that had some motivating force to it for me. And then my grandfather, who I mentioned before, he would invest in the stock market on the side. And I remember in high school, I just became...”

    2022-10-02 · We Study Billionaires · RWH014: The Resilient Investor w/ Matthew McLennan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “If you will, it was actually a good thing with the passage of time. However, disappointing it was for me at the time to realize that I couldn't learn all of these absolute truths.”

    2022-10-02 · We Study Billionaires · RWH014: The Resilient Investor w/ Matthew McLennan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Having had that notion instilled in me early on was useful because it sort of sowed a seed for becoming at peace with the notion there are certain forms of uncertainty that you just can't unravel. And you need to sort of respect those spaces a little bit. And I think it has informed how I've approached investing in later years. But it's also popped up in different forms of work. I mentioned Karl Popper, but I remember Fischer's work when he talked about the difference between risk and uncertainty risk being something that you can narrowly quantify with statistics and uncertainty being where you don't even know what the range of distributional possibilities are. Going on to folks like Steve Wolfram in the field of complexity, which we can no doubt talk about later, but having that seed planted by my grandfather, that sort of metaphysical source of anger.”

    2022-10-02 · We Study Billionaires · RWH014: The Resilient Investor w/ Matthew McLennan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “It was as a child, you know, I always liked puzzles and trying to crack the code on whatever it was, solving a Rubik's cube or figuring out how to At any given game. And I think he could see very clearly that I like to get to an absolute truth, like the proof of a mathematical equation. And he introduced me to this notion that life is actually More complex than the sort of simple games or truths that I was trying to unravel and that much of truth is unapproachable. And in fact, it wasn't until I was in college and many years later reading other works that I realized that this was a sort of a whole field scientific methodology and I became pretty interested in Karl Popper who wrote about The notion of falsification, and Karl Popper had a term for this.”

    2022-10-02 · We Study Billionaires · RWH014: The Resilient Investor w/ Matthew McLennan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “He was a formative figure for me, and I guess everyone Is the beneficiary of having various mentors in their life. And he was one of the first mentors from the outside of my parents, obviously. And he was an interesting man because he was a doctor. But aside from being a doctor, he, like my mother and father really, had a bit of a spirit of adventure. And he went to live in Antarctica in the 1950s. And the Australians, the Russians, and the Americans had to share a common base for survival back then. It was in the early stages of the Cold War, but he lived in Antarctica for 18 months. And I think that was an incredible experience for him because he was a philosophical person by nature. He went to discover the truth in his own words and realized that he couldn't, that however much he thought it was asymptotic in nature and he could approach various truths but never really touched them. And that left an impression on me. And he came back when he retired from his medical”

    2022-10-02 · We Study Billionaires · RWH014: The Resilient Investor w/ Matthew McLennan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Well, we're all very excited about the notion of having television. It's one thing to have books, but occasionally as a kid, you want to watch some television. And my father got a television and he hooked it up to the car battery. So we had a night in watching television, which was very exciting. But the next morning, when my father went to go to work, he reversed out and dragged the TV through the front door behind him. So that was the end of the television experience, at least for a while. And, you know, those kind of little mishaps, sort of amusing sort of punctuation marks on a childhood. I sort of remember it fondly we even had a koala come into our house once and the house was built around these eucalyptus stumps and the koala came in one night and climbed up and my grandfather who was a doctor realized that koala wasn't very well and wrapped him in a blanket and took off some ticks and nursed him back to health and he was back out in the forest the next day so it was a childhood full of little surprises”

    2022-10-02 · We Study Billionaires · RWH014: The Resilient Investor w/ Matthew McLennan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Papua New Guinea, reality turned out to be a little different from what was envisaged. The home didn't get connected to the power grid for the first seven years. So we had this beautiful little cedar home that they helped build. And there was a rainforest on one side. And again, a fairly idyllic place to grow up. And it was a house full of books. While we didn't have electricity, we had gas lamps and a cast iron stove. And if you wanted to shower, you could put a black plastic bag out in the sun and heat it up and hang it under a tree with some burlap around it to take a shower. So it really was living in the sticks. And it wasn't until I went to high school in Brisbane at a boarding school because there was no high school in my town that I got to experience the big city. So it was an unusual but a very happy childhood.”

    2022-10-02 · We Study Billionaires · RWH014: The Resilient Investor w/ Matthew McLennan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Well, my parents went to New Guinea really for adventure. They were Australian and are Australian, living in Brisbane today, but they were adventurous souls, and my father was a land surveyor, and he got a job up there helping to survey the mining communities. And my mother and father went up there thinking they were going to live this particular adventure. And there was one E-type jag I heard up in Papua New Guinea that they planned to buy, but they had me instead. And my first six years were really up there before the independence of Papua New Guinea in the 1970s. And it was an amazing place to be a child, very free walking through the markets and the sense of adventure. When we moved to Australia, we wound up living in a little town called Montfill. And Montfill was a thriving metropolis of about 400 people. And we had a beautiful little home on a block of land that my parents had found. It was a dream block of land, but like their dream in”

    2022-10-02 · We Study Billionaires · RWH014: The Resilient Investor w/ Matthew McLennan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT