YouSaid · the spoken record

Terry Smith

lines on the record: 143
first: 2025-02-09
most recent: 2025-02-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Without letting us know, we make you very welcome and tell your mother that my check is going off in 16 days time and she would be shocked, shocked rather like Inspector Renault and Gaza blanked her at the number on it. Excellent. I certainly am.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it does. I think it is. And look, my view of that car is there will never be another car like it in the history of cars. I mean, the idea that you have this thing that does 243 miles an hour, it has no power brakes. It has no power steering. It has no anti-lock brakes. It has no four-wheel drive. The only thing that that car has is you and the car. That's it, which is how Rowan Atkinson's car, Ralph Lorenz car, Elon Musk car, and Bernard Prash Rider's car all got crashed. The car is more capable than the person sitting in the seat most of the time.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interest in how fast it was going to go. And if you remember my owner's manufacture, one of the things I mentioned in there is obliquity, not aiming for the sort of objective. I say, I've been fortunate to meet an awful lot of very rich people. I can't think of one of them who got very rich trying to make money. They tried to make things and services. They tried to do things better than other people. They had an idea or an impetus to do things better than other people. And I think Henry Ford didn't want to make money he wanted to make cars and he wanted to make them better than other people made cars. And that's what got him to where he went. And I think that McLaren F1 is a perfect example of obliterate. It's a fantastically fast car. And when you think that that was 30 years ago making that thing, and by all accounts, Cordray never once asked them to do any kind of calculation about how fast the car would go. It went fast as a result of how he...”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What happened was Gordon Murray, who was the man behind the wild success of McLaren under Out and Center and so on, literally decided one day, actually at Geneva Airport, I think, with wrong Dennis and so on, that they'd never made a road car before, they were going to make a road car. And he decided that the basis for making it was they were going to make the best road car that ever had been built, and I would suggest, ever will be built, given the way that things have moved on since then. And I think he achieved it. He made a car, which is extraordinary. I mean, I've got a 1995 example. It does 243 miles per hour. This is a 30-year-old car, right? Okay. It's extraordinary. And if you watch that, one of the things that you'll find striking is he made a very fast car. It's also a very safe car because it's carbon fiber monocoque and so on. And it's actually a practical car and it's got three seats and it's got luggage. It comes with a golf bag. You can get your golf clubs in it. I don't play golf. He never took any...”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Story to go with. It's about a car, and I think it's a car that exemplifies if you were trying to get a link between cars and investment. There's a video on YouTube which you can look up called How One Man Made the Perfect Car. I commend it to you. And are you familiar with the McLaren F1?”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An outsider and here, so all those things. Andy made good tactical decisions every day, which worked and under extreme pressure over long periods of time. And every time he knew that he took those decisions, he knew he was sending guys who were 20 years of age, many of them under-trained out to die. And he knew that and he did it because that was what his job was. But it didn't mean that he did it feeling very cheerful about it sometimes, I imagine.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was, I think so, yeah. I think absolutely so. It's interesting because when I was doing that, you can't memorize sometimes without this. I went to New Zealand, I met the family, were very nice, extended family. So this is what I'm planning to do. Do you approve? And so on and so forth. They were all very supportive. They lobbied Parliament in New Zealand. We've got every party in New Zealand to sign a letter going to the mayor of London saying that they wanted this to happen. That was all very good. And we got to the unveiling and invited as many of the family to come as could. And we got his great, great niece to pull the cord with one of them all about the Briton plate. But I said, in the build-up to it, it was interesting. I said, what do you think about inviting the journalists to ceremony? Because I said, in some respects, in a spirit of reconciliation, maybe we should. But I think you should tell me what you want to do. And they said, Uncle Keith never forgave them. Every day he had to make these decisions to send young men to their deaths, ever left him, right? And that comes back to you saying about him being an unson.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now I have, and I was a clean flyer when I was young, I used to fly gliders and planes and helicopters, so I qualified to fly all them. And I guess being a historian, reading Bungay and with that background, I thought I'm going to do something about it. And so I got the planning permission and I got the statue fabricated and I put up the memorial to him and got the park family involved. Fortunately, the park family supplied some very good members. His great-great-nephew was a movie guy and his great-great niece turned up and poured the cord to unveil it. The surviving Battle of Britain pilots all took part in the campaign and turned up for the events trump because getting a statue put up in central London of a white straight war hero is not exactly what you call easy at this day and age.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Airfields and so on. Anyway, again, in typical British style, that means something I much admire in his regards. He left at the end of the war, went off to Asia for the end of the war in command, went back to New Zealand, was Mayor of Auckland briefly, and then disappeared into obscurity and was gone. And there was a book by Stephen Bungay, the historian, who actually, fun enough, was a historian who worked in lawyers and insurance, returned to history, which I thought was the best book on the battle, the most dangerous enemy. And in it, he has this wonderful phrase. He says something that's really caught me in the end. He said, Hark was like a wizard in an Arthurian tale. He traveled literally halfway around the world to defend the country, which wasn't even his own country. And then having successfully done so, he just disappeared. And he said there is no memoir to him anywhere in the world, neither in England nor in Museum. He said, there's a Keith Park Crescent at Biggin Huera Drum. That's him. And my father...”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then interceded with Churchill to say that doubting and Park weren't aggressive enough and so after they'd won the friggin battle and got dowding fired and Park sent off to training command. Anyway, he was sitting in training command when they realized they had a bit of a problem with Malta. Malta was the key island for trying to stop the Africa Corps being reinforced from mainland Italy and was in the way and it was being bombed to Hellenback. And so they put they put parking there to man the air defense. Smiling Albert Kesselring, who ran the Luftwaffe, must have thought he was a very unlucky chap because he managed to lose the park twice because Park then beat him in Bloody Water as well. And he was a fighter on his way there. He was being thrown in by a Bristol bowfighter and they spotted a German warship on their way into Malta and Park insisted that they press an attack. They were nearly shot down. He was a fighter. He would fight. And he understood the men. There were lots of good photographs of him having Christmas lunch with the men and all that sort of thing. He would fly around.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That strategy. And that was Park. And Park did it to the letter. And people of war gained Park's decisions over that summer from June through to October roughly. He made daily decisions about deployment. And they never managed to significantly improve on his decisions in terms of trying to do it. He, under intense pressure every day, did that. And of course, he was himself a fighter pilot. He'd been in World War I as a fighter pilot and he flew his Hawk Hurricane OK1 registration around the airfields from day to day at the end of the day finding out what had happened, what was happening in tactics, what morale was like, what the damage was, etc. So you had that. Anyway, he won the battle.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were lots of people, as you can imagine, at that time, particularly Lee Mallory, the guy who ran that group in Cambridge, who were, let's give Jerry a bloody nose. We don't need to win the battle. We just need to not lose. This is a bit like companies. We don't need to own the best company. We just don't want to own any bad ones. So he would feed the fighters in in penny packets, if you like. And it became a standing joke with the louvail for pilots, as it were, so Gello's humor, the bomber pilots, who there's a battle ground on, would say, oh, here they come again, those last 10 Spitfires. Because they haven't been told they've wiped out their, and they haven't. They would always have some fighter planes in the sky because Operation Sea Lion, the invasion order for the invasion of Britain, the first requirement was air supremacy because they were terrified of the role of crossing the English Channel with the Royal Navy at large. So they had to be able to neutralize the Royal Navy from the air. They couldn't do that without air supremacy. And he was going to deny the mayor supremacy. Now, he needed a trusted associate who would implement.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's a New Zealander, and he came from New Zealand in World War I with the Anzac Corps who fought at Gallipoli, which of course was utterly disastrous. And most people would have gone home then, I guess. He didn't. He volunteered for the British Army and fought in the Somme. He was invalided out from the Somme after being blown off horse, artillery horse by a shell. And it was just unfit for the army. So he volunteered for the newly formed Royal Flying Corps, where he flew Bristol fighters and was credited with 18 kills. Quite good going. He then transferred from the RFC to the newly formed RAF and won the trust of Hugh Dowding, who was the head of fighter command, who had a theory on how to combat German air power. The Germans had about 2,800 planes in the Worth Waffe, the RAF had about 650 fighter planes, so they were heavily outnumbered. And Downing realized that what they needed to do was not try and win the battle.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A very important car for sale where if I were bidding on it and I'm not, I would look at that and say, I wonder if there's anybody else there who is in fact the vendor because once the bidding starts and it's clear that somebody's committed to buying it, the vendor might use somebody to put in competing bids. Problematic he gets stuck with his own car. Well, yes and no, because if he gets stuck with his own car, they'll just ring you up later if you were the highest bid and say that guy didn't come through with the money. Do you want to be good for your bid?”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At this particular, there's also the fact that most things will come around. Every time I've ever thought of buying something and I've thought, you know what, I'll give in. I'll buy a Lamborghini Diablo in black because the red one is never going to come up. Guess what happens one minute after you bought the black one? Oopsie. Also don't trust auctions. I know from cars that I've been involved in at auction that people at auction put other people logged on to bid and let them bid against their car to get the price up. And so you don't trust what a bid it's the same with dealing with markets. Do not trust what you see on the screen in sheer price action as equaling reality. You know, there could be a lot of reasons why that price is moving or somebody's dealing. I've seen more than one example. I think there's one coming up this weekend at Kissame in Florida where there's”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Story, I think. For a man who, going back to how people have viewed a man who many would review as a sort of robber barren industrialist.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is they'll say they'll find families walking around and somebody will be in tears. I say, is there a problem? I go, my father had one of those. I remember as a child, and it evokes emotion in them. And so I'm a believer in the stories, you know. I mean, the one I like on the Model G4 is Henry Ford with the Model G4 put it on the production line. And in so doing, he cut the production time of a car from 12 hours to 93 minutes. And in doing so, he obviously cut the cost of production very significantly. Then he did the really clever bit. He cut the price. What most people would have done faced with that is just made more profit. He cut the price. In so doing, he took the car from being a placing of the money classes into something where he invented the middle class in cars, the middle class market in cars. Cars then were sold to doctors and bank managers and lawyers and dentists. He invented the middle market by doing that. It's just a fantastic.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I like movie cars. I think if you said what you're trying to do with the car collection, I mean, it's about trying. There's a guy who's got a museum in Naples in Florida called the Rebs Institute, and he's got a book called The Archaeological Automobile. And his thesis is that the car is the single most important object with which human beings interacted in the 20th century. It's not a bad thesis. And I think he's certainly got a point. And I think there's an awful lot of human development history in cars through the multi-ford and industrialization and all those sort of things. The rise of Japan, the movies, TV shows, Morses Jaguar, the Saints Volvo, they're part in our consciousness is enormous, I think. And they evoke quite a lot with people. Quite a lot of it, particularly of a certain age group. I think you find people talking in motor music. And I've talked to a lot of people in motor museums about cars.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Built the Lamborghini mirror and demolish Ferrari's road cars. Ferrari calls nearly as many road cars will be built by annoying people as you did by actually making cars.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Upsetting Henry Ford was a bad thing to have done, really, because he went and built a car that beat him. And in fact, Enzo Ferrari managed to cause the development of at least two cars by upsetting people. The full GT4 had been one. And the Lamborghini being another. Mr. Lamborghini made tractors. He still does make tractors. They make tractors. And he bought a Ferrari, which didn't work like they quite often didn't work then, and took it back to Ferrari at Marinello and said, you know, this is wrong with a clutch, that's wrong with the clear box and so on. Apparently, Amazon Ferrari said, what do you do for a living? He said, I make tractors. And he was like, and that game was so upset.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“1903 is an old mobile curved dash just to let you know it's not got a steering wheel it's got a tiller that you steer it with and it was the first mass production car the Mocklet Ford was not the first mass production car said the Oldmill curve dash was the first mass production car and yeah and there's history involved in that there's history involved in the model two model two is a fantastic story of an industrialist and what he achieved, I think. I've got one and I think it's the stories behind the cars in my view are more important than mostly the cars themselves. I'm interested in the stories, you know. I'm interested in the full GT40 from 1966 from Ford V Ferrari. And I've got one and I like it. I can remember that those episodes when I was a child of how Ford worked out and went on Sunday sell on Monday and tried to buy Ferrari and not only did they not get Ferrari, but he sold out Africa and dissed Henry Ford.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know the answer, but there's certainly some reasons to be skeptical about it in terms of range, in terms of use of depletion of resources, in terms of disposal, et cetera, et cetera, the hydrogen fuel cells, an alternative if there is any infrastructure. So put it all together. And I just think I'm a big sort of admirer of many of Mr. Musk's achievements in a lot of respects. That man's got energy and balls. There's no doubt about that. But I'm not sure cars is the way forward. I mean, if Cars the way forward, why don't you just go and round up all the other ones and buy them?”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You feel a bit hard up in a downturn, just keep the car. Don't have to change your car. I always quote Mr. Mahadu, who is my taxi driver here in Mauritius, who is an exemplar of this. He drove me around in his Toyota Axio for $360,000. The poor chap died. And now his son's driving it. Toyota haven't made a bean off that car in 20 years, right? And it's still going strong, I can tell you. I see, on the roads, floating around with his son driving it. It's a really bad business because what that means is that it's hugely cyclical. Unlike toothpaste and cat litter, when the demand stops, it just stops. And so there's huge capital involved, big development costs and demand, which goes up and down enormously. And then you can get on to the other subjects involved, which is, you know, so that's car companies and tests as a car company, which is, you know, are batteries the future of electric vehicle transport.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Remember my Stern Business School, you know, good company, bad company thing, automobile companies are all bad without any kind of exception. Every single one, Toyota, Ford, BMW, Mercedes, the whole lot, right? They destroy value. If you really like them, you can go and buy them all on a PF4 if you want. And there's Tesla on 99 times, right? It's a bad business. Why is it a bad business? It's very capital intensive. You have to build factories, right? Fairly obvious. And models development costs a lot of time and money. And then here's a problem. If I'm invested in consumer staples and you buy some toothpaste or cat litter or whatever you buy, when you run out, you have to go buy some more. And so that keeps even in a even in a downturn, you might eke it out, might squeeze the tube a bit better, might go buy some cheaper cat lid and a number two brand or own brand, I don't know. So that's a little bit problematic, but it's not big problematic. Whereas if you've got a car,”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Buying expensive and fast cars, and I've got some expensive and fast cars, I have no doubt about that. But I've got a very wide range of cars. My earliest car is from 1903, and I've got a section of cars which are failures. I deliberately collect failures. And so, you know, and the reason for that is I think that they tell us things. Why do we have, I always say, why do we have post-mortems on human beings? Well, isn't just because doctors like messing around with cadalas, it's because if we die in suspicious circumstances or difficult to determine, they might want to know why, just in case there's a new illness or foul play and something needs to be done about it. And I like the idea of looking at cars, if you look at other things if you want it, but I like cars that are failures and seeing what, if anything, we can learn out of these things because it might be useful to learn something from time to time about how other people have screwed up in history, you know?”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The toys and the bauble is actually getting in the way of pleasure quite often. Owning things of that sort mainly as a headache. So if you've got a boat, you end up having a crew and then the crew, you know, somebody quits, somebody has sex with somebody else, somebody's found out doing something here, they run it into the quayside at the top. And so really, I've got to say, the amount of real pleasure that one gets from doing those kind of things is not high in my view, right? So what I mean, like if you take the car collection, for example, I think.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your mother, apart from her lack of knowledge of my personal affairs, which is understandable, but she should perhaps try and change some before. I think she's veering a little closer to that UK dislike of success that I was talking about.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think about the story at all, in fact. In fact, in terms of getting these things to work quite often does require some sort of input from the government to get schools to respond here and do that sort of thing.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the UK. By the time we take Fees the new VAT, the uniform, the equipment, and the flights into account. We're getting into some reasonable dough there, basically. But the thing I really like about it is it will be of practical help to lift some of those group of children out of their background to give them an opportunity. And this is the really important part of the link, some of them, I hope, will think of coming back to Mauritius to change the community in general by the fact that they have the ability to hold down important roles in government or the private sector and so on. And that's the sort of thing that really I like. Enjoy that a lot because I can see the practical consequences of doing it. Now, I don't want them to name the Terry Smith wing after me.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was another point that's coming into private with your own money and in practical ways wherever possible that affects them in the way that you've just touched upon, which is opportunity and the ability to grasp it. So I have a new wife, I'm pleased to say, and she has a stepson. I have a stepson as a result. And we've got him into school in the UK. And we said, look, what do you want to do here? He can stay in government school. and basically be trained in the underclass here to be a gas pump attendant or a gardener or a security man or we could send him to the uk if he passes a mission obviously and so on and we send them to the uk that's good and he seems to be prospering which is good so what i've now moved on to is a scheme to take two creole children per annum from mauritius into the school so that once we've got it full we will have at least two children in every year in that school now you know i'm sure you're aware of the having been to eaten there's the price of schooling”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Run these things because I'd be extremely bad at it. So, yeah, of course. But it's kind of like, guys, what you're really saying is, can I pay for you to go and get credit? In some cases, a lot of people who raise money for charity, I think, first of all, they don't keep to my private role. And secondly, they don't keep to the, it should be your own money rule. I try, by and large, to keep to both rules. And so again, going back to your mother, she doesn't know what tax I pay and she doesn't know what I do with my money. But I do give what I would personally regard as very significant sums of money to a wide range of things, not just boxing gyms for kids, but a lot of other things as well.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Yeah, we recruited somebody a while back who told me a story about his mother and I said, I want to hire your mother. I think she sounds like a perfect employee for us. Let's get And so it's funny you should ask that because it will at least maybe in part answer your mother's question, which is to say that I believe that philanthropy or giving back or whatever you do, there are a number of things that I'm very strongly guided on by. It should be private and it should be with your own money. I am anti to the point of disparagement with the people who go in for glitzy events, you know, absolute return for kids kind of thing. And we'll have a big event. We'll invite the Prime Minister and we'll all be a million pounds for a pair of socks or whatever the hell it is. And we'll give all the money to give. No, the reality of that is, first of all, you're doing it because it makes you look good and you feel good doing it. And the second thing about it is you're quite often in those circles. The number of people are coming in and go, well, I've got this charity and I want this and you could take part and do that for me. I go, so what's going to happen here is I'm going to give you the money and then you're going to go up front it up and do all this. And look, there's a certain degree to which I have to have people like that because I'm not going to.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, I'd like to say that your mother, obviously, criticizing a man's mother is dangerous. She doesn't know how much tax I pay with the greatest respect”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But anyway, I went to see her and went to see the club, and I saw those circumstances. And they said, Oh, it's terrible, isn't it? I said, yeah, I'm going to help. I said, let me tell you something. I said, if you're looking for world champions, they come out gyms like that. They don't come out of air conditioned gyms, right? With drinking fountains, right? They come out of gyms where basically, you know, there's buckets that people spit into them. That's where they come from, right? Real grit down there. That form was some kind of iron in the summer, I think. And it does.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it comes from a balance of things. I mean, one is growing up in very bad circumstances, you know? I think, but you could say, well, there's lots of people who grow up in very bad circumstances and not like that. Yeah, but how many of them escape, as it were? And I think it mainly comes from that. You're in very poor circumstances in bad weather conditions and living in a terrible place and it's quite violent. And one thing or another, it probably does breed within you a determination that otherwise difficult to encapsulate with people. Very difficult to encapsulate with people. And I think that's it. When I went to see the kids in Mauritius who we set up the boxing gym for, and it was the girl that they got me involved in, people know I'm a bit of a suck up at these things. She won some fights and got a few trophies and so on. But a mother was a prostitute, right? I mean, she was living in a shack and so on. And they know that I'm like that.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It may keep running through your mind, and you may not be very comfortable to be with at that time. And that's probably the other thing is I think if you do do things like running your own business and you do do run businesses, including your own business and you do it intensely and successfully and all that kind of thing, one of the things that people who are with you have to buy into or not is you will do whatever it takes. And some people can't buy that. They want to be the center of your world. And you say, well, you can't always be that. I've got this thing over here that I do. And maybe you've got things that you do or maybe you haven't. I don't know. But there are times where I go, no, I'm going to go and do that now. And they go, well, that's not very good because I'd really like to go and do this. You go and do it. I'll pay. You go do it. But I'm going over here to do this right now. I'm just, you know, I feel I've got to do it because it's required. And some people find that quite difficult to accept, you know?”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think if I've got a problem in that regard, I don't think my problem is approaching the remainder of my life with the same approach that I approach business. I think I am able to see the two things quite separately and approach them differently. I think what is difficult, however, is when you get into situations which are very intense, no matter how much you think, well, no, this is home life and I'm going to cook dinner or bathe the baby or whatever you're going to do, you may not still be able to get that out of your head. So whether or not you can engage properly sleep properly is not something that you can just do by thinking about it. It does stay with you sometimes. And I think that can be problematic. Not whether you're treating everybody like they're in work and you want to see their numbers and you want to engage in PPP.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're operating on the supply, and you used to have to balance those and all the individual accounts, the ledgers that went into it. And I remember not being able to balance one of the ledgers. And when I was a graduate training, and the manager's assistant took it off me and said, okay, when I went into his office and came back an hour later and went, I've balanced it and I didn't go to university. You do need people from time to time to tell you, you should be doing better than this. And it's not all people think, you know, the whole world of positive reinforcement. Once in a while, someone needs to tell you you got it wrong.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think he has. You're absolutely right. Let's not rule out other things luck as well. You need luck. But yeah, I also had some mentors along the way. I mentioned a couple of them. And probably two or three, four mentors along the way. When people ask me about careers and what to do and they're all, you know, they want to set up the latest fintech. I always say get a job with an organization that will provide you with training. Take everything that they offer. And if you can find a mentor. somebody who will teach you how this works and in doing so give you experience that you otherwise won't get you know and sometimes that's quite painful i mean being mentored is is not always a positive experience you have you have difficult ones as well i always remember when i was working in branch banking and we used to have to balance the accounts the branch itself has a balance sheet for its operations you know in terms of loans and deposits and everything like that um and capital that's”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two days a year for Muslims, two days a year for the Chinese, plus National Day and the Abolition of Slavery. In other words, people talk about diverse societies. It's a diverse society. People were in the street if they don't know who you are, will speak to you in French, first of all, if you're white. And if you're black in Creole, right? Those are the common languages here. And there are pretty good connecting flights into China and India. And we're in the same time zone as Dubai. Gradually By various means a different perspective on the world begins to enter your consciousness, I think, if you live somewhere else, you know?”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Read and what I've taken in the previous day, and think if there's anything that I need to do about it or say about it or ask about it, without any incoming whatsoever from people. And so that really does sort of, and also with regard to Wall Street, I'm going to switch off looking at things after I've been speaking to you. I'll go on and have a look at it, but I'll switch off unless there's something really, really big. Microsoft goes bus, give me a call. But, you know, outside of that, don't bother. And so the remoteness does help. The other thing about Mauritius in particular is I think people talk about the world. And living in another part of it can be quite important, I think. And you can tell almost everything you need to know about Mauritius from the national holiday system. There are two days a year for Christians, two days a year for Hindus, two days for Urgus, two days a year for Tamil.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't speak to any brokers, not one. We don't take any research from brokers. We don't speak to them. We do it ourselves. So we've got why? Well, you know, boxers are paid to fight, so they like to have fights. Lawyers are paid to have disputes, so they like to have disputes. And brokers are paid on transactions. Guess what they like to do? We were brokers. I was a broker, right? Jillian was a broker. We've done this job. We know what's involved, right? We don't speak to any of them. We don't take any research from them. I get a small tsunami of stuff that comes through asking whether people can give me a service. The answer is no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So we don't take any of that. We're completely cut off from that. The fact that I'm in a different time zone, I'll hops as well. I mean, for the first four hours of the day, I don't have anyone outside Mauritius. My car got some colleagues here who are awake. So I've got quite a large part of the day where I can mull over what I've...”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said, yes, some Cincinnati, right? Scratch, and they like to be able to go and talk to other people doing what they're doing, whether they're brokers or other managers and they like to be able to meet them for lunch and beat them for drinks and pick up. And they like to compare notes on what they're all doing. And the reality is they don't really want to stand out from the pack too much, which is fine. I mean, there's the old John Mayne Arkanes quote, the worst thing you can have from your career is to differ from the norm. Even if you're successful, it's still elastoma to people. And that they mainly don't want to get that far out from the norm. And if you're trying to invest for the real long term, being in that is unhelpful, really unhelpful.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so on, and say, if somebody had gone to sleep on that day and woken up on today, and we've had all these events in the middle that happened where, you know, terrible great things have happened in terms of elections or wars or pandemics and so on. Since the market is at the same level, if they didn't look at any of the intervening events, I wonder what they would conclude. Nothing's happening. So was anything that happened terribly important then? Because mostly the answer is no. No, it's not. And I think he and Buffett, although I've never met Buffett and so on, from the way that he's explained it, it is valuable. And there have been other people, I think. They're not the only people who've done the, you know, I don't want to be in the swim. I talked to people who I know in the industry who operate from London or New York. I mean, I always say a lot of these guys need GPS to get outside at West 1 or SW1. I mean, I don't know how you do it, right? And I say to them, why are you there? And they go, well, let's stay in touch with the companies. I say, you're an investor.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually emulate Templeton in more ways than you might think because, as you probably know, used to walk in the sea every day. I go for a swim out to the reef and back whenever I can, which is two or three times a week at least. And my colleagues say, oh, that's interesting. And I do weirdly, if there's nothing else going on when I'm doing it, I do think about him. It's strange, isn't it? Just doing an activity similar to what he did in the Bahamas. But yeah, it definitely did influence me to see somebody like that at work. And I always remember very early on when he talked about how to react or not to events. He said, you know, I mean, obviously we're doing way free internet. He said, you know, the papers arrive a day later. I get the Wall Street Journal the day after it's published. So by the time there's a problem, it's too late to panic. And he was making an important point in a trivial way about that. The events, we often write up in our daily news write-ups, we write to each other and we look back over periods of time, sometimes only a few weeks, sometimes a few months.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the ideal place if you can get to it, and I don't think many do, is to be able to get along with and communicate people with people, whatever, pretty much whatever their background. If you're going to do that, I think then you've got to about the right place. If you can be actoring Palace with Boris sitting alongside you having lunch, and I have been at Buckingham Palace having lunch, and at the same time, you can go to the boxing gym with the young black kids, then I think you've reached a good place, is my view. And I feel sometimes I'm fortunate in that regard that I can do both those things. And not feel particularly out of place in either one, you know?”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That he went to a very ordinary school and found out how the world really works. My friend, the steel man who I was telling you about, it's a family business. He's a style of family that's owned it for several generations. And he refused to go to public school and put himself into grammar school. And I think it's to his credit, but also to his benefit. Because I think when you're walking through a foundry and talking to people, you might be able to understand a little more what their issues are and what they're doing if you actually have been alongside them from time to time.”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate, actually. I think that's a large part of this. I've never been part of whatever the establishment is. I suspect we've got a new establishment now that's replaced some of the old establishment in time. I've never been part of that. I've never wanted to be part of it either, actually. Never struck me that I particularly wanted to join any club or anything like that, literal or metaphorical in that regard. And yeah, I have always felt that I was a bit of an outsider and I had to work for things. And I think it's probably a good thing on the whole to be in that situation. I had a conversation with somebody who were having a dinner. And at the dinner with someone's son who was at Eton. And when the pair of us were leaving and he said to me, I've got five son. I'd send him to Eaton. I said, would you, I wouldn't. He said, he said, where everybody runs the world goes. I said, I just don't see this as a great positive. I think, you know, I would rather...”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got invested in Fastworth. No, I haven't actually got a clue, William. How much have you got? It would be a bad start, wouldn't it? When did I invest? I don't know, actually. I mean, we've got data on this, but if I hadn't taken the trouble, have you made money? Have you lost it?”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Looked at the salesman and he said, I don't know. I said, you don't know? They said, we repaid you four million pounds or something like that. This is how much we pay you the year before. Five million. So they said, well, they were telling us was they were giving us, never mind sitting in meetings like this or filling in surveys. They were voting with their wallet, right? I came out of the meeting and I said to the CEO, I would fire that guy. I said, going to a meeting with you in the room, never mind me in the room, and you don't have the basic information on the client to have is just a no-no. I mean, that tells you right off the bat what we're dealing with here. And it's like, you know, there is no excuse for that. There's no excuse for turning up to interview a company, be interviewed by an investor. If I'm being interviewed by an investor, if you were coming on, say, Terry, I want to interview you about my holding in front. And you go, well, how much do you know?”
2025-02-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH054: Billionaire Brit w/ Terry Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT