YouSaid · the spoken record

Tom Gayner

lines on the record: 150
first: 2024-01-23
most recent: 2024-01-23
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

“Talk with the people who are running these businesses, and I see the opportunities that are flowing in front of them. And I see the way in which the architecture of Markel has provided them with this base of both financial, intellectual, social, emotional foundation such that they're able to make the most of the circumstances they have. And I don't mean that narrowly financially. I mean that they're able to help other people and it's just fun.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For Markel, when I started at Markel, we had 300 and some people. We now have over 20,000. And that's 20,000 people multiplied that by the households that are involved because of the organization. We have a place where 20,000 people can find sustenance for their daily needs and take care of themselves and their family. They can learn and be creative. And because of what they do in serving customers, I mean, it's hundreds of thousands. Maybe it's millions of people when you're really connect the dots of what we have been able to build and construct and how all of that exists because we're doing something for somebody else and they're happy we're doing it and want to do more of it with us. That just seems like a really good system that I enjoy being one of the architects of and being part of to continue to keep that going forward. And as I sit in business meetings and”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Continue to be able to do the things that I do. I've been happily married for 42 years, three kids who are adults and standing on their own, a couple of grandkids now. So the idea that this life and being part of an organization.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess it's part of that childhood background of not being the fastest or the strongest or the swiftest or pick first for the teams and stuff. So I just got used to just being steady and subtle and Appreciating that in the fullness of time, it would work out. So again, and getting back to that luxurious position of all the conditions you laid out of being willing to stand alone, depending on the environment where that's acceptable. I can't remember your third contract, but those sorts of things. I have been gifted with those circumstances and I've made personal choices which have reinforced that. It all worked. And I recognize not everybody has those same gifts and environmental circumstances that I've been faced with, but these are the ones that Been available to me, and I've just tried to be.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's part of it. Other part of it is it doesn't look like it works every day. There will be periods where people will be, you're the batter. And again, Buffalo uses the example, Ted Williams, the hitter. He's only going to swing at those pitches that are in the precise part of the strike zone that he has determined are favorable places for him to swing that bat. And the ability to just sit there with the bat on your hand and have a strike call on you from time to time. And as Buff says, in the investment world, there are no called strikes. You get to look at pitch after pitch after pitch without having to swing. That is boring for people. It's not stimulating enough. It's not fun enough. Well, for me, it is. Just different.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's simple, but it's hard. And one of the things that's hard about it is that as an individual, you have to let go of your own ego to be willing to accept what the universe has handed to you. You can't make that happen. You have to let that happen. And people who are gifted and smart and intelligent and high energy and want to do things, it is not their natural inclination to be able to embrace and accept. That are done on your behalf rather than by your act of work.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reinvest 60 cent dollars from 100 cent dollars of staying with the position you already have. That's one of them. The second... Algorithm at work to use one of the terms of art and language that everybody flaunts these days. The great algorithm in life is do more of what's working. So the first share of Berkshire in 1990, I can't remember what the last time I bought more of it was, but within the last year or two. So I've consistently bought that stock for years, done the same with Markel personally. Bought my first shares on the IPO in 86. I bought more when I joined in 1990. I bought consistently along the way at higher and higher prices. that's doing more of what works. And in general, that's proven to be a pretty effective thing to do over time.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Getting back to that notion of opportunity cost, I think the case to sell something and buy something else should be compelling. So the tie goes to the runner that's there already. Secondly, there's tax efficiency in that for us in that assume that we have something that we bought and generally speaking it has kind of worked out, you have a gain there, which is unrealized and unrealized means untaxed. So we have the tax liability accounted for on our balance sheet. But in essence, that creates a loan from the government for the tax portion of that unrealized gain. So if you sell something that has a big gain to it, you are not reinvesting 100 cents on the dollar. You're reinvesting 80 or 70 or 60. And so the next idea relative to what you already have a gain in must be super compelling in order to”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Eric little the runner, and he was a person of deep faith, and the Olympics got scheduled such that his race was on Sunday, and his sister, who shared his faith and his spiritual disciplines of the idea of the Sabbath, tried to tell him, you know, don't run. That's a violation. And I can't remember the exact line, but Eric Little responded. He says, you know, but God made me fast. And I feel his joy within me when I run. I have some glimpse. and essence of that and that I think this is what I was put on earth to do and I enjoy it and I've been relatively good at it so I'm going to keep doing it until I can't run anymore”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Haven't found it yet. I feel like this is what I was put on earth to do. It's fun. I enjoy it. And again, like we were talking about being at the keyboard and writing and you feel the joy. I mean, I feel like, you remember the movie Chariots of Fire?”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“where we are active buyers of businesses, sellers of businesses have been conditioned to use that phrase. So if you come in and try to academically explain the limitations or what adjustments you need to make, they're going to sell that business to somebody else. And sometimes you should be happy about that because you don't want the business. But sometimes they have a really good business. And so your job is not to teach them how to think differently about their thing. Your job is to understand what economic reality is and make a rational decision is would this be a good decision for Markell or not? So you need to be comfortable and operate like Debrinen did in two separate and distinct cultures and distill what you're really talking about. And it's neither good nor bad. It's just a translation exercise.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you're using an old example of Ebada and you're talking about something like a TV station or a radio station or a newspaper to go back into history, just to make the examples easy, those are businesses that did not require much capital expenditure relative to the business they had. So while the A, the amortization might be a big number because it costs you a lot to buy it, you can safely add that back because you're not going to have to reacquire that radio station that you already have. You've paid for it. So the accounting convention requires you to expense some amortization. And by the way, those accounting conventions change from time to time as to how amortization is calculated and treated. But I think you get the gist of it is you need to be able to understand what it really means and take it from a 60% map to a 90% map. And the reason you need to do that is for Markel”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of a territory that is a 60% map, not a 90% map. It is a map. And it does tell you something about the territory. Now, if you're talking about oil companies or steel mills or heavy capital intensive businesses, it's not a good map because the D that you're subtracting out to sort of talk about the earnings power, not only is that D real and shouldn't be subtracted out, if you're really thinking about it economically, it should be 2D or 3D or 4D because the next well, the next mill is going to cost you more than what you're depreciating against. And the worst thing about that is if you're a manager of a business like that and you're using EBITDA, you're fooling yourself and you're underpricing your product and you might be in a position where you might know that, but that's what all the competitors do. So you're forced into that situation. Those are situations I don't want to be in.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a phrase and it is a term of language that a lot of people use. And there was a Russian ambassador to the US named Alexey Dubrin. And he was, I think, from Kennedy through Nixon, or maybe even Ford or beyond. I mean, a long time. So that guy was the Russian ambassador to the U.S. for decades. And he was fully Russian. He was born in Russia, raised there, educated there, but he'd been in America so long that he was very good at American idioms and the American culture such that he was spectacular in his role as an ambassador because he was able to understand and comprehend both cultures which had a lot of differences. So Ebada is almost an ambassadorial world. Charlie Munger is correct in the pure accounting sense that tells you, I mean, that is a map.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bullshit earnings. Yeah, every time. It's one of those things that sort of like fiction. There might be some degree of difference between what Munger the Smart Guy thought and what me, the less smart guy thinks.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that accounting is pretty good. It's reasonable. And I can get my head around it. And it seems to me if I'm looking to protect myself from inflation, I would rather own shares of Disney than an oil company when I see those kinds of patterns. The other one I track is the price of a pint of Guinness. And that goes back to 1757 and the price of Diageo shares, which are the owner of, and we're owners of both of those companies. And one of the reasons is I think that they have fundamentally good businesses that add value, that consumers love and trust and are whatever the costs to operate Disney World, to produce a plan to get us, whatever they are, whatever currency it's denominated in, I think that's something consumers will pay those costs and some margin of profit for the companies such that”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Since it opened in 1974. And you know what? The price of a single day admission at Disney World has compounded at a faster rate than that of a barrel of oil. And I think the accounting is better. I mean, there are fixed costs of the hotels and the monorails and all that kind of stuff. They continuously need to be refreshed for Disney World to remain a relevant property.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You think about that as being an inflation protected kind of asset, but not really. Because once all the oil is gone out of that particular well in order for the company to continue to exist, you're going to need to make capital allocation decisions and capital expenditures, which set you up to find and pump the next well. And accounting is all oriented towards historical cost of what it costs you to drill that last well, not what it's going to cost you to drill the next well. That has always been a fundamental challenge to me, and I don't know the answer. I know the accounting is not helpful. So therefore, it's just not been an area that I spend a lot of time investing in. And his counterexample, and in fact, this is one of the charts I keep in my office, is I have a price chart of a barrel of oil compared to the single day admission at Disney World.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not a great natural resources investor that's not really been in my circle of competence or something that I have a lot of expertise with. So I don't think about it a lot. Now, what I do think about it is in the context of, so for instance, and Buffett talks about this example all the time, in oil wells.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back to Shelby Davis' comment. If I saw a company that was using a lot of option stuff, I would just put my pencil down and say, I just don't like that. So it's in the too hard pile and I'm not going to try to calculate that to the fourth decimal point. I just don't want any part of it. That caused some errors of omission. There are some companies that I wish I had bought, even though they went beyond my personal preferences and tolerances for what I would have hoped would have been the practices that they would have followed. But I learned some of those lessons and I'm sure I'll continue to make some mistakes like that because I'm sort of imposing my own moral judgment when I draw that line. But I have to. I need to define what's acceptable to me and what isn't. And I'm sure I'll get it wrong sometimes. I'll get it wrong a lot of times. So just try to be humble and recognize where you got it wrong and something is able to power through something a particular.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To think about economically what it means. So, for instance, one of the reasons that I did not participate in dot-com 1.0 is that is when option accounting was at its worst. Now, it has improved somewhat, and the practices of options have shifted more towards restricted stock and things like that, where the accounting is better and more straightforward and more aligned with economic reality. So I would always economically adjust when I saw big options to think about what the actual cost would be and used it in an option is basically an interest-free loan. I took an interest-free loan and I bought that stock and you used the current market rates of interest to account for that nominal sum of money that in essence is being lent behind an option. That's kind of how I would true up and try to figure out what the actual cost of it would be. But second thing, going.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you should take the second year of accounting, which is cost accounting, managerial accounting, where that notion of opportunity cost and fully allocating cost get loaded in beyond that point in the world we find ourselves today, it might be somewhat counterproductive to keep going too much into accounting theory because you tend to get lost in the details rather than understand the economic substance underneath what accounting is trying to tell you. There's an old saying the map is not the territory. So no matter how good your map is, it is only limited in its ability to actually describe the territory that you're talking about. Now you need maps, but don't over-rely on maps and don't think that maps contain the entire truth. They contain 70% of the truth, 60%, 80%. I don't know, a good function of it, but not all of it. So just always be able.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think it's very good. And in fact, as sometimes some people will ask me and typically students or younger people, what should they study? What should they learn to be a better investor or a better business person? And among the things, and this is my training, I'm a CPA and I was an accountant by training. I say, well, I think you take the first year of accounting, the one-on-one courses.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Between engineers and technical people and innovators and entrepreneurs and wild promotional financiers and that marriage between the two yields technological progress, but usually at great cost to a lot of people and great wealth for some people that may or may not be a good thing. But I don't know how that happens without those wild extremes. And if you think about America writ large versus many other places in the world, we let that, we encourage it as part of our DNA, part of the culture where that happens. It doesn't happen so much in other parts of the world. And we have been the net beneficiaries as a society from the innovation that comes about from the fact that we operate with a pretty wild west mentality of that sort of stuff. So it's just interesting to observe.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An optimal way, and again, I'm a satisfier, not an optimizer, but because I look at that, I think if they had the chance to make that decision all over again, they probably wouldn't. So that's just one tiny little story, but you could tell it a million times in a million different ways over the last last five or ten years. And some of that's great. And going back to Ulysses says Grant and Mark Twain, if you look at the period of the Gilden Age and what happened with railroads and the characters, shall we say that were involved in the funding of railroads so many of the stories are the same things you see happening in the financial markets of the last couple of years. But that's not totally a bad thing because, for instance, after the railroad financiers came and went, what we were left with is a society was the railroads, which made things better. So technological progress.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of money got allocated and sifted and sorted that way. And if you think about that story of companies that never were able to intrinsically support themselves and pay the bills out of existing cash flow, but were reliant on the capital markets to fund them and then the behavior of somebody who ought to have known better. I mean, Unilever did not act.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So everything got funded, every idea, no matter what. And that created circumstances as an example, and I don't want to be too specific, I'm not an expert on this, but I was thinking about this the other day when I was shaving and I shaved with a Gillette razor. And I knew a guy who was a little more into the world of venture capital and that end of the spectrum than I was. And there were several shaving companies that came along and tried to displace Gillette. And I think Dollar Shave Club was one of those. And I think they ended up getting bought by Unilever for a big sum of money. And I don't think Dollar Shave Club ever intrinsically made much money itself. But Unilever felt so threatened by them that they spent a bunch of money to buy it. In the fullness of time, I don't think that probably was the best decision for Unilever.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of 0% interest rates or low interest rates. But there was no such thing as a bad idea. Any possible idea that you had had no pushback on it from needing to service the debt. So the capital allocation decisions that we have made as a society in the last five years, I think we're made in the context of no gravity, no curfew, no counter example, no sense of opportunity cost. What are you giving? Nothing, do it. Go.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That'd be like a 6 p.m. curfew. So if you're a kid, you're coming from school, you eat dinner, and there's a 6 p.m. curfew, nothing bad is going to happen. I mean, you're done. And as interest rates come down, you can sort of think of that as curfew getting later and later. So if the curfew goes from 14 down to 12, maybe that's a 7 p.m. curfew. So you wolf down a bite of dinner and maybe you can go outside and play for a little bit before you need to get back in at 7 o'clock. But still, not too much. And as interest rates keep coming down lower and lower, the curfew is getting later and later. And by the time the curfew gets to midnight or past midnight, that is effectively no curfew. And as one comedian once joked, he thought they should turn off ATM machines after midnight because no possible good comes from getting cash out of an ATM machine after midnight. And I think that's a good point. And the idea.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I've struggled during the era of ultra-low interest rates to try to just understand it and wrap my mind around it. So for instance, when Susan and I graduated from Virginia college and we started in the working world and we bought a house, I think our first mortgage was at something like $14 or 15%. And I can promise you every discretionary penny that we had went to pay down that mortgage. I mean, that was just a crushing force in our life that we oriented ourselves around getting out of that particular debt for the mortgage that we took on to buy our first house. And if you think about 14 or 15% interest rates like existed in the early 80s.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I challenge people, tell me something that exists in the world that is not in one of those two bubbles in the Venn diagram. So that's actually a helpful mental construct to have. There was one CEO who I encountered one time, and he referred to his company as a not yet company. So they did all these things, but when somebody would say, do you do such and such? He would not say no. He would say, well, not yet. Tell me about it. Should I? And I love that mindset. So in many ways, Copied that, learned that. So in the construct of an insurance business or a non-insurance business, when somebody proposes something to us, I go, well, I think it ought to be able to fit in one of those two bubbles. Let's talk about it. Let's think about it.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. The framing of that X or Y is too limited. It's really X or not X. So that's YZM73. It's like a comedian says, why are all plans lettered? Everybody says they have a plan B. How about plan two, plan three? So in addition to the letters, they're the numbers involved. So it's not just X. It's all not X. And I joke, I mean, I love Venn diagrams as a way of illustrating things and articulating things. And if you think about Markel, Markel group writ large, well, there's one Venn diagram that would include all things insurance. So we have an insurance business and insurance related businesses that would fit in that bubble of the Venn diagram. And then we would have a bubble that would say non-insurance.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the real learning comes from asking that base level question and participating fully in the conversation with thoughtful, reasonable people. What the answers are”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that question seems rather timeless to me. So if somebody says, all right, we're going to hold this stock, my colleagues will say, well, you like this thing over here. Doesn't that mean if we're holding this that we're not buying that? And discussion, I mean, that's an accurate statement. So we talk about it. And sometimes I say, you know, you're right about that. And this is so much more compelling than that that we ought to indeed make that shift and make that change. Sometimes it's a lot grayer, a lot more nuanced and you don't know. But that question always of what are we not doing because we're doing this, I don't care whether you're talking to a four-year-old or 40-year-old or a 90-year-old, that's a relevant question.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess the first example that comes to mind is just the role of being a parent and how I tried to teach my children about that. And again, very simple concepts. And just at the dinner table when ideas were proposed or plans were being drawn up or requests were being issued, the question is if we do that, what are we not doing?”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because the people who were also around the table who might not have had exact personal responsibility for the decision, they know they were part of the process. And as such, they tend to be forgiving, supportive, helpful, and resilient in facing the consequences. And what do we need to do to make it better?”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's a very nuanced point. And in fact, I do use the phrase. Now that I'm the sole CEO, it's good to have one throat to choke. So yes, people make decisions and there is an individual that will be accountable and identified with the decision. But any individual who would make the decision without using the resources that's available to them of their friends, their peers, their colleagues, the data, that's stupid. So let's try not to be stupid. We're going to make mistakes, but let's not make stupid mistakes and it's not, as a former chairman Alan Kirschner used to say, let's not keep making the same stupid mistake. So while we have people who are responsible for any given thing, the embedded networks that exist and groups that exist, it's very helpful for people to make those decisions and feel comfortable and feel supported when they are wrong.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of long term relationships. All of those things work together to create a system. It's like LEGO blocks where you look at this great LEGO structure. Well, that huge LEGO structure that you see was built one little tiny block at a time. And those blocks have integrity. So that's the same sort of model that I dreamed for for Mark Ellen by and large has worked pretty well for a long period of time.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jeff Bezos' two pizza roll, you know, she wants his teams to be of a size that two pizzas ought to satisfy everybody. So even within the 20-some thousand employees that we would have at Markel, generally speaking, almost every single decision is made by a small group of people who have accountability to one another, who have the responsibility to make the decision and the authority to make the decision, and are operating in such a way that they get feedback from their peers.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there are a couple of tools and techniques. So, one you referenced earlier, Mark Leonard, his great business leader. He talks about the concept of base rates all the time. What's the base rate here? So to always go back to what the underlying base rate of something is and explaining or reconciling why it is you think this thing is going to be different than what the base rate, that is a very important discipline. Another important discipline we would have at Markel is this idea of autonomy and that the businesses are running autonomous fashion. Well, my wife, who was the CEO of one of those businesses until her retirement, it was a relatively small business unit. And she said, there's no place to hide. So within that unit, it would be unlikely that people would go on too much of a flight of fancy and get overly complex because there's daily feedback in a small enough unit with a small enough number of people sitting around one table.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On an airplane or traveling, I'll read the Kindle and I'll go back and forth just so that I always have it at my fingertips.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Walking and playing bridge and swimming and all kinds of things. That's just an interesting example. And again, we could spend days in my office looking at book after book after book. And I love having the physical copies of the book because when I walk into my office, the spines of those books catch my eye and they remind me of what it is that I read. And I love reading. I have a kindle. I use it all the time. It's like traveling with the Library of Congress. So I like that, but I also respect the work that authors do. And again, the Munger tribute. Munger talked about buying a biography for 25 bucks is the best investment you can make. Because for 25 bucks, you're getting about three man years of a person's life that went into writing that book. So as a tip to the authors who did that, normally if I like a book, I'll buy the Kindle and the physical copy to tip them a few bucks for the work that they did. And if I'm sitting at home or in my office, I'll read the physical copy. If I'm writing.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whatsoever of how these plans were working out and reading about him and reading about the fact that he just walked and walked and walked and walked and swam and just physically tried to process this period of epic life and death, existential uncertainty with”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sustained his wife and family after his death. So I was going to pick one biography to read first. I would read that one. But over and over and over again, I mean, if you come into my office, you'll see a wall of books. Probably half of them are biographies. One that comes to mind from an earlier point of the conversation is Admiral Nimitz. And if you think about Admiral Nimitz in World War II operating in Hawaii, at that particular time, he would the plans would be made. There would be an intense planning exercise in an attempt to optimize the circumstances and situation that the Navy was in. And in order to remain in stealth mode, there was no radio communication. So basically Nimitz might be back in Hawaii for two weeks, two weeks before he had any feedback.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And again, he wrote his biography at the time, there was not a presidential pension. And unfortunately, his daughter did not marry well. She married one of the great And he was bankrupt. I mean, he had no money and he knew he got sick and the cancer was developing. And you can almost read that book and feel the race against time that he was personally involved with. Basically, because that book, with the help of Mark Twain, who was a friend of his and a contemporary, provided the income that”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, for instance, I like U.S. Grant. I think he's one of the most underrated presidents we've ever had. His background was as a quartermaster. So as he came into his role, his spot as a captain and a major and a colonel was not firing bullets. It was in logistics and making sure that the soldiers who were on the front lines had food in their bellies, had blankets to protect them when it got cold, had uniforms to wear, and had the armaments that idea of logistics and support and supply goes beyond the tangible items of supply. It's a mindset of otherness that I think Grant embodied. Grant was also fighting for the good guys, for a noble cause. And the idea that you are using your skills and your gifts for something that is good, those two force multiply with itself.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My father was a fundamentally kind man. He was just nice. He was nice to people. He always treated people with dignity and respect no matter what their circumstances or position in life was. We lived in a small town. He was a CPA. He did people's tax returns. He owned a liquor store, so would see the people you would see in a liquor store on a day-to-day basis. He did encounter all walks of life. And I observed him treat anybody he dealt with basically the same way. And that was a laugh, a smile, a hearty handshake, trying to help somebody out if he could. I really don't know how to put a finer point on it than that. And so I'm doing it his whole life.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wanted that meal at the restaurant, or you wanted to see that movie, or you wanted to see that ballgame. It's so that you could discern whether this was a person who you really could work together with in all kinds of circumstances over long periods of time. And that's what our business is. Cultivating relationships with customers, trying to do things for them to make their life better. And if we made their life better, they tend to pay us fairly. And we get to be creative. We get to feel like we added value. We get to learn stuff. We get to have fun. And we get to build these relationships that just make life fun. And to the extent it works, you keep doing more of it. And when you get snookkered, you stop.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, some of these are a little too painful to talk about, but it's important to be able to make mistakes. That's important to be able to size the mistakes such that when you learn them, they're non-fatal mistakes and they're mistakes that you get better and wiser and stronger and faster on account of. But you can't foresee everything and forestall it. I think you should trust your judgment. So for instance, to the extent that you went through some dating process before you got married, that was really a process of getting to know somebody to see if their values overlapped with yours enough that you really thought you could get along together for decades. That's what dating is all about. And a business, so much of what we do is in effect a dating process. You're doing business with somebody, you're interacting with them. You go to the movies, you go to a restaurant, you go to a ball game, all those kinds of things. It's not so much because”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would be subject to the same sort of social influence. So my habits tend to be relatively frugal and modest and not flashy. So somebody who's flashy and not modest and not frugal, that sets off some red flags that cause me to be a little more vigilant and hyper than I otherwise would be. Somebody trying to fool me would engage in the kind of behaviors that I feel more comfortable with. And maybe my guard would be down because these markers tell me that that's fine when in point of fact it's not. And that's also when the people around you can see and alert you to a blind spot that I might have to be sensitive about that. So far the record's been pretty good. We've not had much of a problem in that regard, but that would be what I would worry about.”
2024-01-23 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Tom Gayner: Invest Like The Best · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT