YouSaid · the spoken record

Nima Shayegh

lines on the record: 99
first: 2025-12-21
most recent: 2025-12-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Fewer than 10 holdings, I might find one or two new ideas in a year. The rest of the year is spent, you know, quote unquote sharpening the axe. That simplicity gives you an enormous amount of space for reflection to try to think clearly, space to make long-term decisions without distractions, space to have close relationships with every one of Rumi's partners. In more than six years, we haven't had a single redemption. which I think is some kind of record for a strategy that's sort of flinging up and down depending on the year, but it's really a reflection of having found, you know, so grateful to have found partners who are truly high quality and are aligned in, you know, our goals and our thinking. I think there's always an inherent tension, though. And it's something that I've been wrestling with.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“want to live in long term. That was really critical. And I can't tell you the number of times I've seen someone very talented, you know, lovely person build this sprawling investment business only to privately resent a lot of the complexity that comes along with it. Less time becomes devoted to the craft of investing. More time is spent managing people or fundraising or doing administrative tasks. For me, personally, the craft of investing was the part that I loved. That's how I wanted to spend, you know, the majority of my time. And that meant that the structure had to be exceedingly simple and free from unnecessary complexity. The work had to fit my temperament. And it had to sort of match your energy in some sense. Today, I run one portfolio.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, edge is a funny concept we would talk about another time You know, my view is that whatever you build, whether it's an investment partnership or anything else, it ultimately lives downstream from how you choose to live and the values that inform that. And so I've always tried to ask myself, what are you actually optimizing for? Because if what I'm doing is not in alignment with the answer, My personality is such that I will not last very long. I'll start to feel that imbalance internally somewhere, even physiologically. And in investing in particular, the power of compounding reveals itself when you stay in the game for a really long time. Longevity carries most of the freight here. So for me, the first principle in deciding what to do was to ask, to build the house that you want.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Devoted to reflection. And it's not intuitive for most people to think that going for a walk may be better for your portfolio than adding another scenario to your Excel model.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're always wired and you're reactive to every little data point and you're just staring at ticks on a screen, maybe that will help your results for the next month or two months or six months. But over the long term, it will completely destroy your health. It will destroy your physical and mental health. It will strain your relationships. And ironically, it will make the investment decision worse at some point. And it's sort of perverse that the harder you push, the harder you try at investing. the shorter your runway. And in the end, you know, compounding is all about the number of years. And so I think creating space in your life is something that I learned from him and something that's invaluable. So much of modern investing is preparing a memo or updating a model. There's so much reactivity and to his point, you know, so much little time is intense.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think Lou lived a pretty balanced life in the years that I knew him. He would read broadly. He had this amazing. You know, he would make it a priority to exercise. He would in the mornings, he would go for a long walk or he would go for a swim. I remember on one occasion, it was definitely in the middle of the week, and I think the market was open. And I think our portfolio was probably down quite a bit that day. And he just called me up and he said, you know, there's this new exhibition at MoMA in Chicago. Do you want to go with me? And I said, great. And we just spent the afternoon wandering around, you know, looking at art. And, you know, this is very different from the kind of experience that you might have at many, many investment firms. So I won't claim to have all the answers about this. But what I do know is that if you intend to have a long-term investment journey and you have surrendered to a lot of this volatility, I know that if you're constantly sprinting.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is one of the best investors of all time. And he's just sort of ho-hum about his portfolio. Whereas if you went into the Monday morning meeting of many large investment firms, you would hear people pounding the table on probably mediocre ideas in many cases. And I think there's something that's objective about his humility. It allows you to see things clearly. And his humility wasn't performative. It wasn't like this inauthentic, humble bragging. It came from a real awareness in how little we actually control. And I think, you know, Buffett's line about the ovarian lottery, I think captures that spirit so well. We all like to believe that we are the sole cause of our own success, that things are so deterministic. But in truth, you know, so much of anything that goes right in life and investing is really just the beneficence of life.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. You know, it brings to mind a friend of mine offered me a definition of humility that I think is remarkably precise. I think it's the best definition of humility that exists. He said that humility is the awareness. It's your awareness of your utter dependence on all that exists and your interdependence on everyone around you. The opposite of humility, of course, is like a self-centered perspective to think that we did it all alone, that we're the ones in control. That clouds your perception, it distorts your judgment. And this dynamic was so clear when Lou talked about his portfolio, when everyone else would pitch their great ideas, Lou would say things like, you know, I think the portfolio is just okay. Maybe it's a little tired.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Uninterested in indulging that kind of self congratulatory aspect of himself. He was quick to say, I don't know, when someone would disagree with him or challenge one of his beliefs on a company, he wouldn't get defensive. He would simply say, yeah, you know, maybe you're right. I should think about that more. I truly believe that his humility was his lack of egoism was the reason why he was a good investor was a big reason why he was a good investor because it gave him a clearer perception of reality.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It kind of opened a window that there was just a different way of being in this work. It didn't have to be this hard-charging zero-sum way of operating, this kind of hyperactive way of operating. Lou carried himself with remarkably little ego. And that was so different from the archetype of person that you typically run into in the investment world. You know, the normal experience is that you come across folks who are very bright, very hardworking, but for whatever reason, they insist on puffing up their accomplishments and telling you all about their most recent investment win and their assets under management. All this sort of thing. And Lou was just so different from this. Some of his most extraordinary achievements would just sort of slip out accidentally after having known him for years. You know, he seemed deliberate.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I would sit there at the UCLA coffee shop trying to reverse engineer why Lou bought Freddie Mac or Moody's, you know, why he bought Nike in the early 90s and held it for 20 years or more. And now, you know, Jerry was this person behind these decisions, stepping away to make coffee for probably visibly nervous 20-something-year-old kid who hadn't done anything yet and who was so early in his compounding journey. And I remember thinking to myself, you know, I should be making you the coffee. And when he returned, he didn't launch into some kind of monologue. He didn't try to assert how smart he was. He would ask these questions with this very sincere curiosity. And it was this remarkable receptiveness for someone with his experience and with his reputation. And, you know, that first meeting left such a deep imprint on me because”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Financial TV on. It was like the library of a scholar, a comfortable chair, a couple piles of reading material, and this just very calm presence that immediately struck me. And he looked at me as he led me inside and he said, you know, make yourself at home. Let me make you a coffee. And I remember that that line just sort of stopped me in my tracks because here was someone who had compounded capital at world-class rates for decades, someone who Warren Buffett had praised many times over the years. And someone that I had been studying from afar since college, you know, my idea of passing time between classes in college was to pull up an old Berkshire Hathaway 13F. And in some of those early years, you could actually scan down and see which holdings belong to Lou and which holdings belong to Warren.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Formality, no pretension. And he led me into an office that was really the polar opposite of the office that I had just been in, you know, the day before. There were no Bloomberg terminals. There was no.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To rigorously cross examine every little detail of my investment thesis. And so mostly out of insecurity, I lugged along with me to Chicago, this very thick stack of research material with charts and valuations and everything. I was sort of ready to go to battle intellectually speaking. And I remember stepping into the elevator with my suit and tie on and your heart's beating a little faster than usual and I lugged along my data points with me and my thick stack of research. And it's one of those long elevator rides of where your ears are sort of popping along the way. And I remember thinking I'm going to be met by an assistant or ushered into some kind of waiting area. And instead, you know, the door's open and it's just Lou himself standing in the hallway, very unassuming.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. You know, every time I think of Lou, the memory that always comes is the first time that we met. And I was in my mid-20s at the time. And as I said, as you mentioned, I was working at a more or less traditional investment firm, which was Pimco. And I remember the energy that I carried with me at my first job was this sort of over analytical habit. I had this formality, this intensity. And when I arrived in Chicago to meet with Lou for the first time, I carried a lot of that energy with me. The context of our meeting was actually to discuss a company that I thought he might be interested in. And in my mind, I imagined this very intimidating investment legend was going”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That are resilient despite the inevitable sort of turbulence that life presents. And I think it really simplifies life to opt out of a lot of these things that are outside of our control.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think that this work is, it's almost unnervingly simple. You know, the investment business is really quite simple. And at the end of the day, it's about trying to understand the economic reality of a business. And as they said, Lou used to say all the time that it's about predicting, it's about understanding the future economics of a business. Now, to the extent that the macroeconomy is going to have a huge impact on the future economics of this business, then it may not be a great business to the extent that going into a recession is going to hurt the business or to the extent that there will be competitive onslaughts at some point or a product might fail, for example. Things can happen in businesses all the time. And I think the idea is to own specific businesses.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The market snapped back so quickly that he didn't deploy his capital fast enough. And so he made the right decision at the highs but didn't make the right decision at the bottom. And this to me was very instructive because you have to make multiple decisions correctly to really take advantage. And I think in his estimation, he thinks that he added some value net of all of that. But it may have just been better to remain fully invested and just roll with the punches. And so that's kind of the approach that I've taken to thinking about this.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I found that it's not worth having a lot of anxiety about when those periods come. It's much better to just know that they will come. There's a story about Lou Simpson that really was instructive to me about this. And it was his experience in 1987. So he went into the 1987 period thinking that stocks were very overvalued. And I think many smart people at that time believe that stocks were very overvalued. He couldn't find anything to do. So he actually took his portfolio to 50% cash early in 1987. And you might think this is incredible. This is clairvoyance, what amazing market timing. And when he reflects on that period, she sold stocks at the highs and paid his taxes. And then the market crashed and he sort of deployed a little more capital.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is the U.S. fiscal situation unsustainable and going to lead to a crisis at some point? These are all very interesting questions. But over a long time horizon, they just don't matter that much. And spending a lot of time sort of ruminating on these kinds of questions has been an expensive distraction for many people over many years. As far as I'm concerned, there will be severe bear markets over time and there might be even one or two”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Course, you know, Berkshire Hathaway itself has declined by 50 multiple times over the years. So the list goes on and on. I'm kind of a nerd in looking at these old records because they fascinate me. But we know that these periods of extreme volatility and underperformance are just very normal. So the question then becomes, given that reality, how should you structure your environment for that inevitability? How should you structure your life and your business and your environment? And what I found is that when you have a truly long-term orientation, you start to just have to surrender in some ways. You simply stop engaging with certain kinds of questions. For example, will there be a recession next year? Is the market about to crash? Is AI a big bubble that's about to pop?”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The 1970s, where Charlie Munger had 80% of his capital in two stocks. I think it was blue chip stamps and the New America Fund. And they were both very cheap stocks. But his portfolio declined by more than half in two years. And those two years alone made the prior seven years of returns, I think something like zero cumulatively. Even Shelby Davis, I was reading recently, I think she has personal portfolio in the 1970s declined by 60% because he had margin debt at that time. You know, in the last few years of the 1990s, Lou Simpson himself was 50 or 60 points behind the S&P 500. And that little stretch of performance actually wiped out like a decade of outperformance against the market.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. I think that the studying investment history at any level makes it clear that over the course of a multi-decade investment journey, there will be these large periods of underperformance and large declines inside of those periods. Just glancing casually at some of the notable investment records of history, this just becomes quite obvious. You could look at the 1930s and great investors like Ben Graham's fund, I think, declined by 70%. And he was still making distributions out of his fund. And so I think the starting capital was down maybe 80% by the end. The personal portfolio of John Maynard Keynes, I think, declined by 80% in the 1930s in the portfolio that he was managing at Cambridge, declined by like half. You could go to”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's a complex problem. And when I reflect on what is the root quality going on here, I think a lot of it has to do with risk aversion. And that's across the spectrum. That's not just the investment products that we were managing. It actually goes into the institutional level. It goes to many of the people overseeing these institutions. There is very little tolerance for volatility. No one wants to look wrong for any short period of time, even if it means that your longer term results will be much better. There's very little tolerance to for discomfort of any kind. And so the bias and the incentive structure is to just operate in a way that will keep the assets. And if that means, you know, slightly less performance over time, I think that that's a trade-off that this industry has made.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think six months in I was reflecting on this, and it was a little confusing to me why people like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger and Lou Simpson and the like were able to compound capital at 20 plus percent for decades, despite being essentially a person in a room without a computer. Whereas we're sitting here in our very large offices working really hard, you know, cortisol is in the air with great pedigrees and our ties on. compounding at basis points about the benchmark. Not to say that that's not an admirable thing to do, but it just felt like I was missing something in some ways. Now I was incredibly lucky that there were certain people at Pimco that took an interest in my development and they really wanted to teach me how to think about things the right way. And so from that perspective, it was an incredible learning.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was so lucky to have had that kind of experience where you essentially have an ability to fly around the country to meet with executive teams as a 22-year-old to get access to any piece of research. We had central bankers would come and advise us on the economy, you know, former central bankers would come and advise us on the economy. And so you would think that we had every possible resource. We had PhD computer scientists that would come run correlations on different asset classes. And we had hundreds of analysts that were flying around the country to meet with companies and form opinions on specific securities, you would think that we would have every possible resource there is to compound capital at extremely high rates. And yet,”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and I think, you know, Rumi actually has a quote, which is that all things are known through their opposites. So I think in some ways that experience working at a place with that sort of intensity was what clarified and sort of gave me a sense for what I wanted to be doing long term. And the experience of PIMCO, I was very lucky because I was hired there directly out of undergrad. So I was the youngest analyst on the team by some years. And it was this intense environment. And you're right, we would get to the office 445, 5 a.m. You would have a suit and tie on. It's usually dark when you arrive in the office. It's usually dark when you leave the office. There's this culture that you're kind of expected to have a smart sounding, cogent opinion on every little economic development, every little piece of news that's related to one of your companies.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it just took you a while to figure it out. So, when you notice that you're actually becoming more and more impressed, and you notice that emotion within yourself, that is something to listen to, I think.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Using their emotions enough. In my experience, when you discern whether the CEO sitting across from you is trustworthy or not, or whether you experienced the craftsmanship of a product, these are all pre-intellectual. There's sort of a, there's a direct perception and you sort of know it when you see it. Even subtle emotions can tell you something important. What I mean by that is when I reflect on my ownership of a business, right? Like you've owned a company for a few years. When you reflect on just how that feels within you, that can tell you a lot. When you own something for a few years and you find yourself becoming more and more impressed with the business as time has gone on, that's a signpost by itself because the normal experience is that you own something for a few years and the mediocrity of it just becomes more and more evident.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think another way that this egoic perspective shows up in the investment world is this illusion of control. And I'm as guilty of this as anyone. Early on as an investor, it was very natural to think if you just build that perfect spreadsheet or if you make the hundredth customer call, then you're getting closer to reality. And we usually have to learn the hard way that reality seldom bends to the whims of our spreadsheet and all that activity may be simply be masking our inability to just say, I don't know what's going to happen. The map is not the territory. And by contrast, emotion can be incredibly beneficial to investors. It might be blasphemous to say, but I don't think investors are...”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Terrible mistakes because the ego is what distorts our perception. We already have this capability to discern quality. We have that Cheshmadell, but we develop this egoic perception that kind of muddies the mirror of being able to see clearly, distorts our perception. When I look around our little microcosm of investing, I see this ego showing up all over the place. It could come in the form of self-preservation. For example, I can't own that because it'll make it harder to raise money. You know, you hear that all the time. Or I can't sell this losing position because it will be admitting to my clients that I made a mistake. And the ego is unable to admit error. The ego thinks it already knows. So then the behavior becomes, well, I'm just going to hold on to this losing position even though I know it's not the right thing to do.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And I think that there's even more to that. You know, this idea that we should shut off our emotions as investors, I think is a mistake. In my judgment, it's not so much emotions per se that get us into trouble. I think it may be the human ego that really gets us into trouble. And there's a subtle difference, right? You know, the human ego is like this armor that we build that tries to protect us against the uncertainties of life. It's the part of us that operates from fear. It's the part of us that, you know, when we realize how little we actually control in life, we develop this ego to try to protect ourselves. It's sort of self-preservation. And when we make investment decisions from that place, of course, we will make”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Yes, blown away in us is that experience that I'm referring to. And unfortunately, it's not an industry term that you can quantify one out of ten, but I think it tells you a lot about the quality of something that you're encountering. And it's anything as simple as your favorite restaurant. You have a perception that tells you when the quality of that restaurant has either improved or deteriorated, there's something within you that knows. Oftentimes it's emotional. It's physiological. You know, we all have this commonly held dogma that you're supposed to turn off your emotions when you're an investor. And I'm not sure that that's always right.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's plenty of open spaces that it decides I'm going to skip these open spaces and I'm going to go a little further and see if I can find an even better spot. And then it just pulls in perfectly and it stops. It finds its own parking spot. And I'm thinking, this is almost a miracle that this exists. And very few people, I think, understand the power of that technology without having felt, had a direct perception of it themselves. And I think that that is one example of coming face to face with quality. You know, there's plenty of other examples. I'm sure the first time that we all touched an iPhone, we thought this is some incredible black magic. And the first time you got same data delivery from Amazon where you order a book and it shows up to your doorstep in two hours, you know, some of these customer experiences, it's worth just listening to them because they tell”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, this is actually quite timely because, or Tesla got an update just this morning and I was out, you know, testing it. It's version 14.2, which is the latest update that the company has rolled out. And it's hard to explain what makes this product special, but overwhelmingly when I take my in-laws for a ride or my parents or friends who are not familiar, there's this kind of moment of awe. And the example that I was talking about before was that we were driving to Costco one evening. And I clicked the button in the car and it's navigating through all of these construction zones and it pulls over for emergency vehicles and it gets on the highway and it gets off the highway. I haven't touched the steering wheel or pedals the whole ride. And then it pulls into the parking lot of Costco.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's qualitative. And seeing with a qualitative perspective is so important, I found in investing. And in terms of the pre-intellectual awareness, sometimes intuition is framed as this sort of superpower that you have to develop. And I think that it's less about developing or sort of achieving a superpower and more about clearing away everything that's muddying or perception. I truly believe that all human beings have this capability to discern and perceive non-material qualitative truths. These are things like trustworthiness and sincerity and ambition and beauty. These are qualities that you can't model them and you can't quantify them. You can't measure them. But there's something pre-intellectual that can actually grasp and Recognize those qualities when you're in the face of them.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think that in most cases, the roots of a business are too hard to tell. It's sort of not obvious. And I think the first thing to note is that you only really want to swing when it's pretty obvious. In Buffett's parlance, there's no call strikes. But there are some cases where you can know with some confidence what the roots of a business are. In Persian, we have this very old expression that is probably more than a thousand years old. And it is Cheshmadel, which literally translates to Eye of the Heart. And it's this idea that the heart is more than merely this organ that pumps our blood. It's actually a faculty of perception and it's capable of grasping non-material truths. And whether we like it or not, we live in a reality.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's precisely those qualitative invisible factors that live upstream from the financials that everyone else is sort of focused on.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those cases, it's usually the case that you have a sense for the roots. So what are the roots? The roots could be something like the motivation of management, the culture of the company, the quality of the product, the alignment with customers. None of that shows up on any spreadsheet. You can't model it. You can't quantify it, but they're actually the most real parts of a business. So the question to me became, if the roots are what truly matter, Why isn't everyone focused on them? And the challenge from my perspective and actually the opportunity is that the roots require some intuition. So it wasn't all about getting better at Excel and suggesting that the stock market investing in the stock market requires intuition, I think makes many people uncomfortable because it feels subjective and it feels squishy and it feels very hard to communicate.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Week's unit growth, it's next month's inflation print. You know, it's all of these quantifiable pieces of information that are devoid of reality, devoid of context. And so what would be the root? The roots of a business are all of these qualitative forces that are causal to the future economics of a business. Lou Simpson used to always say that All investing is figuring out the future economics of a business. And that statement might sound easy enough to just blow right past it, but it actually creates an extraordinarily high bar. Most investors tend to fixate on the current economics, the current branches. They fixate on the present reality. But every once in a while, you can get a really deep sense for what the future economics of a business might be.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“that can measure and try to predict what's going on. But it's still the case as it's been for much of the last century that almost no one compounds capital at very high returns for all that long, despite the fancy tools, despite having tons of incentives, despite working really hard, it's just still very difficult. And so I reflect on this and I wonder what is it that we're missing? What is it that we're missing? What is it that I'm missing? Because I started out as being really technical and really focused on mathematics and quantification and everything is about reason and science. And sure, but it felt like I was just lost in the branches and I missed the roots. And so what is it about branches and roots as it relates to investing? So the branches are what everyone can see and measure its last quarter's margins. It's this.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. The way that it's actually come together for me is this idea of branches and roots. Rumi has this quote that I love where he says, maybe you're searching among the branches for what only appears in the roots. And I think that that quote has a lot of significance for investors. And when I just reflect on the investment industry broadly, I noticed it both in myself, but I noticed it in the industry in general. And it's this idea that if you can just get more precise, if you can quantify reality, if you can sort of measure things, the industry today has swung so far in the direction of quantification. You see it in expert calls and credit card data and web scraping technology. We have these extremely powerful tools today.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not sure, but I think it's definitely true that this willingness to think for yourself was definitely hammered into me as a child, not so much with investing for sure, but this tendency to not accept what is the commonly held view or the mainstream view or what the news media is talking about all the time or the narrative, but to try to figure out what's actually going on. My parents certainly instilled that in me pretty early.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In high school, you know, once you turned 18, I learned that you could actually just go sign yourself out and you didn't need a Parenote anymore. You could just say the reason you were leaving and sign your name and then leave. And so there were many occasions where I would not be all that interested in whatever it was that we were studying. And I would sign myself out and I would ditch school. And ironically, it wasn't that I would ditch school and go to smoke cigarettes on the side of the building. No, I would go to Barnes& Noble and read something much more fascinating. And I think that that natural inclination to go deep in areas that I was very interested in was a bit of a foreshadowing to invest in for sure.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a little embarrassing when I reflect on it now, a little funny as well. When I was thinking about what led me to investing, I was kind of playing back all of these different parts of my life. And one of the commonalities is that it was always really difficult for me to buy into something that my heart wasn't in it fully. And I remember on many”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just confess to like a gambling problem. But from the very beginning, investing was felt like the ultimate kind of intellectual adventure. It was this microcosm where you could practice your discernment and your creativity and your temperament and your reasoning. And you got this objective feedback loop, which was so appealing. It was incredible. It was sort of an amazing thing that you could professionally pursue your natural curiosity.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's different from those same sort of dinner conversations that we were having, which on the surface may have been about literature or poetry or something like that. But really, it was about observing human nature, understanding human psychology and sort of seeking the essence of things. What's the nature of things, seeking, you know, trying to figure out what's really going on? Now, at the same time, in Persian culture, there's this running joke that you can be anything you want as a profession, anything you want. any kind of doctor or engineer that your heart desires. And so when I decided to become an investor, there really wasn't much precedent for that. You know, I would be, I would tell that to someone in my circle and you could see the response would be something like, so you want to be like a bank teller? And I would say, no, you know, I want to invest in the stock market. And you could just see on their face some concern.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“part of my orbit whatsoever. And I think that the initial spark of interest in investiging was sort of born out of insecurity, if anything. I remember seeing how both the dot-com bust and the 2008 financial crisis impacted so many people around me, people that I loved. And there's this particular discomfort when you have no understanding for something like that, which is happening and sort of reshaping society. You don't know why it happened. You don't know what's going to happen. And really having just no sense. And so I sort of made it a priority to learn a little more about this world. And as I started to learn more, it really felt like this very natural extension of my temperament and interests. And ironically, it's not all that.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, thank you for the question. My parents came to the US. They came to Southern California following the Iranian Revolution. And like many Persian families of that era, they basically had to come here and start from scratch. I was the first generation to be born and raised in the US. And my family is full of intellectual curiosity. Many people were educators multiple people have authored books. You know, my family has a handful of really talented musicians, but almost no one, very few people in my family were all that interested in business. Dinner conversations in my house would sort of migrate to philosophy or classical music, definitely not interest rates or the stock market. So business was never really.”
2025-12-21 · We Study Billionaires · RWH064: A Soulful Path To Stellar Returns w/ Nima Shayegh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT