YouSaid · the spoken record

William Bernstein

lines on the record: 114
first: 2019-04-18
most recent: 2019-04-18
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

“That's a really good question as to what percentage of schizophrenics become homeless. It's a very high percentage of them. Really? Yeah, I mean, they're the ones who are most visible because those are the ones who are shouting at the top of their lungs as you walk by them on the street.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, if you dole out food in a homeless shelter, which you very quickly find out is there's three populations of people. One are substance abusers. Two are schizophrenics. And three, an equally large... People, a group of people are people just like you and me who are working their rear ends off and are extremely conscientious, but they got a bad draw. They lost their job, they lost their health insurance, they became ill, they went bankrupt, and they wound up living in their car”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably just like any other complex social phenomenon, it's a list of factors, weather and the very high cost of housing, its geographically dispersed so it can accommodate a lot more homeless people without making people too upset, just a whole range of things, yeah.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, serious problem is one factoid that I've seen repeated. I've not verified it, which is that if you take Los Angeles out of the analysis, the homeless rate in the United States is actually falling.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it is. It's what happens to any city when it becomes too popular and the cost of residents, the cost of real estate goes up is you get out of whack. Of course, you know, we have the ultimate example of that is San Francisco, which has gotten to be this ludicrously bifurcated place that is populated, but with this, you know, bimodally, there's this one.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I do. You know, there aren't very many people in this world that I actually envy, but you're one of them. There are a few things that I enjoy more than talking to people who have interesting things to say. And that seems to me to be all that you do. Whoever you feel like talking to, you can get on this program.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On BS, yes. And what is BS? BS is not just things that are necessarily false. Sometimes BS can actually be true, but it's just words that are spoken that have no reference, no intentional reference to the facts. And of course, we've now enshrined that in our commander-in-chief”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and of course there's this famous moral philosopher named Harry Frankfurt, who will be known forever after for a little 68-page essay. That's right,”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I still believe the basic precept and the analogy that I like to use is that in the era of radio and television, it was so centrally controlled that getting into a fight with the national powers that be, whether it was the media or the government or the government-controlled media, was like bringing a knife to a gunfight. Now both sides have guns. What I really didn't anticipate, and I don't think anybody anticipated even five or six years ago, is that you've enabled the worst players in our society. And that's the industrial grade. That's your phrase, by the way. Industrial grade.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the Russians produced, mass produced their radios in a couple of factories. It was very centrally driven. And they made a mistake that the Nazis didn't make. The Nazis were smart enough when they made their radios, and the Nazi regime basically came into being pretty much at the dawn of popular radio in Germany. And they made sure that their radios were not tuned well enough to produce foreign broadcasts.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who could produce about three pieces per minute of alphabetic type and basically bring it down to the artisan level? So what Gutenberg did was he didn't invent the printing press. What he did was invent efficient, the efficient production of movable alphabetic type, which was a far more subtle invention.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a fascinating bit of technology which is that of course he didn't invent the printing press. The Chinese and the Koreans had it. They even had the Koreans even had moving alphabetic type. What Gutenberg did was to make the production of that type much more efficient. If you think about running a printing press or printing a book, you're talking about literally owning hundreds of thousands of pieces of type. And if you're casting that individually via the pre-existing processes, that was something that was open only to governments, the Chinese government was able to do it back then. There were some Korean printers who could do it. And that was about it. Gutenberg invented a metal alloy process of casting that enabled a skill typecaster, my favorite word, a typecaster.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, just to give you one small, very anecdotal, very small example, my medical school tuition was fifteen hundred fifty dollars a year. I came out of medical school with almost zero debt. Good luck doing that today.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing we should be doing at base is we should be investing far more money in education. I find it remarkable that the people who rail against the public school system and the money that we supposedly waste in that system will happily spend three and four times that amount every year to send their kids to private school.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. You know, we should increase do things, it increased social mobility. The United States, in fact, has the lowest social mobility of any developed nation. If you are born into the bottom quintile of income, the odds of getting into the top quintile of income are only 6% in the United States. It should be 20% in a perfectly egalitarian system. In most developed countries, it's about 13%. Now, when you look inside the United States, it's very interesting what you discover is that in Silicon Valley, for example, if you're born into the bottom quintile, the bottom fifth, you have a European chance of getting to the top quintile about 13 or 14%. But if you're born into the bottom quintile in Alabama, you've got a 3% chance. What does that tell you? It tells you that people in Alabama are not investing enough in their young people. And so that's probably the prime.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, those are the first two things that you need to do, but you need a broader social welfare network. If you lose your job, you shouldn't lose your health insurance.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Global economy and a national economy is simply to have a system that compensates the losers and to think that you can cut off trade and not compensate the losers, which is what this administration wants to do, I think is the height of folly.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Increased tariffs, and you're going to find yourself in the situation of the Iowa soybean farmer who is going to lose his farm very shortly because of the Trump tariffs. Are you going to find yourself as a consumer paying three and four times for your shirts and your electronics, what you're used to, or of automobile manufacturers whose costs have gone up because of metals tariffs? So clearly trade benefits an entire the entire nation. And you saw that in reverse during the 1930s with the trade wars that followed the Hawley Smoot. But there are always losers. Okay, there are textile workers who've lost their jobs. There are auto workers and steel workers who've lost their jobs. And you have to, you know, the key to a successful”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that is most satisfying about writing nonfiction is to come up with historical examples of modern phenomena that are three and four hundred years old and even thousands of years old. And there's this wonderful story of these riots that swept London around the year 1700, having to do with the textile trade where weavers stoned and attacked Parliament, the East India Company offices, as well as the home of the governor of the East India. It was basically the Seattle riots 300, 300 years ago. And the reasons for it were exactly the same. They were people who were out of work. So, you know, clearly, we're much better off now because of trade and cut off trade.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, sure. And there's actually a trace of interest rates that goes back at least 4,000 years and perhaps as much as 5,000 years. You know, if you're a farmer, a sedentary farmer in Babylonia or Samaria, you need credit. You need to borrow money for farm implements and to build a house, but most importantly to buy seed corn. And of course, you're not borrowing money. You're not even borrowing silver. What you're doing is you're borrowing seed corn from your wealthier neighbor. And that seed corn has a cost of capital. Typically in very primitive agrarian societies, it's probably around 100% per year.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think we're in a much safer world than we were, say, seven or eight centuries ago. And we've also gotten to be public health authorities have gotten to be really good at disease prevention as well.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That wasn't the mechanism of the plague. It was more of an airborne disease. People would develop a cough and transmit disease that way. And it was just very, very rapidly spreading. Now, the thing that's really interesting is that we worry about international air travel and how rapidly diseases spread. But we've not seen anything nearly as deadly as the plague or, for that matter, the influenza outbreak that occurred after 1918. And the reason is the danger is not mixing. It's not mixing. That's the danger.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And that infects the Genoese traders who then basically carried the disease first into, I believe, the port of Messina in 1346, and then within three years, a quarter to a third of the population of Europe was dead, the damage in the rest of the world, which was much worse. Probably it killed as much as 90% of the people in the main ports of Egypt as well as in China.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Asia Minor, or actually in what's now the Ukraine. And there's this terrible siege of Kafka where the Mongols are besieging Kafa and they throw over, they catapult over the city walls these corpses. Biological”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, fleas. Yeah, fleas on rodents and the animal that, you know, back in that part of the world was an animal called the Tarabigan. And the rat was, they didn't, the fleas didn't learn to jump onto the rats until much later. And this was present in East Asia, Northeast Asia, and probably in the Indian subcontinent as well. And then during the 12th and 13th century, you get a period of time called the Pax Mongolica, when the Mongol tribes conquered territory all the way into Eastern Europe. Genghis Khan and that whole group and the other Khans, yes. And so they opened up trade, land trade routes. And of course, the fleas hopped a ride on the camels. And they got to a place called Kafa.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a fascinating thing that epidemiologists like to talk about, which is that when you, at least medical historians like to talk about, which is that when you look at the world around the year 1000, you had these pools of people, these civilizations and tribal societies that never communicated with each other, didn't talk, didn't deal with each other, didn't even know that they existed. And so they each developed their own gene pools that people outside that pool were totally vulnerable to. And so there is this organism called Yersenia pestis, the plague bacillus, which existed in ground rodents.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, of course you're not reading 100 books. What you're doing is you're climbing the bibliographic tree. And you might read a few of those books all the way through. But what in fact what you're really doing is you're reading lots of book sections, just maybe a couple pages or even a paragraph or two from each source. And then you're branching out into the bibliographic tree, into the reference sources. And it's this tree that goes out several branches. And the nice thing about it is you know when you're done, when you keep coming back to the same sources over and over again, when you reach that point that you're being referenced back to the same academic articles, the same texts, the same secondary sources, you know that you're done.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was on the media. It was on the history of communications technology and media. But the point was that I had just as much fun writing both, and I feel just as good as about both. If you don't enjoy the process, you should not be writing.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you can only pick a thousand pieces to make the picture with. So it's a difficult process. And it's a skill set, I guess, that not everyone has, but it's something, you know, is one of these things I discovered I actually knew how to do. And it's an enormously enjoyable process. This particular book was quite successful. The book that I wrote after that was an absolute flop.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A book like this takes about four years to write. Really? Yeah. And the process is you start by doing just a truckload of reading. When you write a book like this, you're probably reading about somewhere around 50,000 pages of material. And the analogy I like to use is it's kind of like you've got a puzzle, this enormous jigsaw puzzle to put together, and you're given 10,000 pieces.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, put him through. Yeah. And so he said, you know, we want you to write a book about the history of world trade. And I said three things. Number one, I don't know anything about it. Number two, I'm not interested in it. And number three, you've got the wrong Bernstein. And there was this sort of pregnant pause at the end of the line, and he said, well, we actually did have lunch with him last week, and we offered him the book. And he said he was busy. He was busy writing his history of the Erie Canal. But Peter said, there's this other Bernstein. And that's how I got to write the book.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. Yes. And Peter Bernstein gets into that story because a couple of years after I had written Birth of Plenty, I get this phone call from an acquisitions editor at Grove Atlantic by the unlikely name of Brando Skyhorse.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leading edge nations, the England, the United States, and most of Western Europe, growth rose to about 2% per year, which compounded over the centuries has produced the enormous improvement in standard of living that we have. And I wanted to know why 1820, because the Industrial Revolution had started almost a century before that, there was something else that was happening, and I wanted to write about that. So that was birth of plenty, which was modestly successful, and it also became a calling card as well that got the attention of other publishers.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, when you start writing about finance, you realize that the history is so very important. And we got into that in one of the last segments as Santiana famously said, if you don't know your history, you're doomed to repeat it. And nowhere is that more true than in finance. And I discovered that I enjoyed writing history. In fact, it was the part of the books that I wrote that I decided that I liked the most. And so after I had written two books of finance, The Intelligent Asset Allocator and the Four Pillars of Investing, I approached my then publisher, McGraw-Hill, and I said, I would like to write a book about the growth inflection that occurred during the early 19th century before, you know, about 1820 or so economic growth in most nations was very close to zero. And then in the...”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but, you know, at the end of the day, human beings are the apes who seek status. For sure. And they're good evolutionary reasons having to do why people do that. And so when you become wealthy, you're basically painting a great big bullseye on your chest for the bad actors in the business. And the more wealth you display, the more likely you are to get hit. by one of these people,”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, by individuals, the Australian system as well. And of course, the Australian system, you have mandated savings rates that are now going to be well north of 10%.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I think that there are several systems that work well, and I'm certainly not an expert on them. But the Dutch and the Canadian systems are well-funded at the national level.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“society which is that we live in a world where you're expected to do your own retirement saving and planning and investing. And the analogy that I use is it's kind of like you step on the airplane to go to Chicago and you turn right off the jetway to go to your seat and the flight attendant says, oh no, no, no, no. You're turning left. You're flying the airplane.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it really depends upon the level of expertise of the client. You know, there are some people who are absolutely fine with, for example, an hourly basis, but those kinds of people have to be comfortable making their own transactions. Once you're in the model where you're the one who's making the transactions, you've got discretion. I don't think that model works anymore. I could be wrong, but I just don't think that it does. And, you know, there's the new fee model that Jason's wig wrote about recently. Yeah, just last week. Subscription of a subscription model, which I think, I don't know, it sounds to me like a hybrid of the two. So it depends upon how much hand holding you've got, but it gets to a more basic problem in our...”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Four years ago, and I like to joke back then that we were both pushing 70 with a short stick, and that stick is now well broken. And so we really don't feel like taking on new clients at our age. That's number one. And number two, it's not fair to be taking on a new client when you're both getting the maximal social security benefit.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the thinking is that both of us have already had careers and we're at an age when we don't want to do anything that isn't fun. And it's not fun managing money for people who don't know anything about finance. So we restrict our practice to people who have a solid basis of knowledge of financial theory and of financial history. Wait, I have to say.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty much, yeah, pretty much. And some people do say no, but I didn't, and I was fortunate enough to be in contact with someone who already had advisory service up and running a woman by the name of Susan Sharon. And we got together on the internet, and we've been in business for the past 21 years.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, when you publish finance books and you find yourself quoted in national media, people start asking you to manage money. It's that simple. And so at a certain point,”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investment authority on share dilution and long-term equity returns, very important article because it showed that in the long term its dilution of shares or its opposite net buybacks that determine returns. And so you can explain, for example, the really just awful returns of Chinese stocks. This is a market with a lot of economic growth in back of it, but the returns have been about the worst of any large national market because of the dilution. On the other hand, when you look at the winners over the past hundred years, you know, countries like the US, Sweden, Canada, the UK, Australia, South Africa, those have been the countries that have diluted their share pools the least.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't changed my point of view very, very much. I mean, one of the sort of sardonic things I like to say about finance and how it's different from other serious fields of endeavor is that if you want to be a good doctor, you've got to internalize thousands of medical articles and pieces of research. The same thing with law and all the case law. You have to know. But I'm pretty sure that any competent practitioner could put up a list of two dozen peer-reviewed articles that if you knew them and you had fully internalized them, you would know pretty much all that you have to know at a practical level. So that's another way of saying there's not much new that comes out every year that's worthwhile. I mean, just the past several months, there was an article published by the Abu Dhabi.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm afraid I do. And, you know, and I think there's certain products that should just flat out be outlawed. I think that double and triple and inverse ETFs are basically a mathematically certain way in the long term of losing money. And the rationales that are given for their use are that, well, they're useful for short-term timing. Well, you shouldn't be doing that either. I mean, that's, you know, short-term timing of the market is one of those activities that's up there with high risk sex and skydiving and visiting a saudi consular facility.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there's certain things that should just flat out be felonies. It should be a felony to place, for example, an insurance product within a retirement account.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I think it's a superb idea, and I think it's only a start. I think the odds that we're going to see that in this administration, whether it lasts another two or two or six years, is about the same as you and my starting at Shortstop for the Yankees.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What you also find is that physicians and a lot of people really don't understand the conflicts of interest that are inherent in the business, which is a very polite way of saying that the financial services industry may be the country's largest repository of criminal activity.”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How that particular movie ended. There's a psychological aspect of investing, which you've alluded to. People become overconfident. And it's not just that they're overconfident about their ability to invest, but they're also overconfident about their ability to bear risk. If they're smart, they throw something into a spreadsheet. They throw a simulation into a spreadsheet. And they say, ah, here I've lost 30 or 40 percent of my money, but it only lasted for a brief period of time. I can ride that through. But there's a big difference between doing that in real time and doing that in a spreadsheet. And the way I like to describe that is it's kind of like the difference. between crashing an airplane and a flight simulator and doing it for real. Your pucker factor, as pilots like to call it, changes. And then finally...”
2019-04-18 · Masters in Business · William Bernstein Discusses Neurology and Investment · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source