Howard Marks: how I make money while you worry about a market crash

if you wait until you have nothing to be afraid about probably the opportunity has passed i feel like i could rude to where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a less how is good to see you again we had a lot of fun last time and we were like look i don't know if other people would like that but we loved that and then over a million people listened to the last one and so this morning i was reading here at this blog post about how you changed your mind about ai you you had written i don't know a couple months back about the possibility of an ai bubble and then as a good thinker tends to do you got new facts you sort of reassess the situation you wrote a new post about ai do you wanna summarize the story of how you you changed your mind on ai well the story is very simple i have this son named andrew he's a vc he's dealing with a ai every day his companies use ai some of them create ai etcetera i had written the first memo around december ninth as i recall and then in early february he's a dad so much has happened you have to update the memo and so i i rewrote the memo entirely you i was i was reread one of your old books and you repaid repeat this phrase a bunch which is like important to be rational and you can't get seduced and just making something is a good idea because that's when smart people can make bad decisions when you get emotional about something but then when i was reading part two i was reading it and i was like howard you sound a little seduced you sound a little seduced you sound like you're into this are you at all approaching this in an emotional way you think it it depends on your definition emotional i upgraded my opinion of ai and its potential because its ability to talk about its own strengths and weaknesses to use humor to put information in the context of me to use what it knows about me and you know this is really exceptional stuff there's a quality to ai or more than one quality which are unprecedented in my opinion the first the obvious one is autonomy all the other technological innovations from the railroad to computers to the internet etcetera were all tools or things to speed up and increase productivity there's never been anything with the quality of autonomy the idea that it you can give it a job and not tell it how to do it and it'll figure it out is really unique and the it what comes with that yeah of course is this nagging concern that it may take over so that's that's really important the other thing and this is not kind of quantifiable is there's never been anything in my opinion so unpredictable i don't think anybody knows the shape of the future so i i've have never had that sense before i never say i never thought that that the internet for example was beyond comprehension or beyond prediction do you think that ai will be able to do what you do and i know you talk about this in the the memo and i gotta be honest when i read it i you know i almost felt like you know you read stories about warren buffett reading the moody's manual page by page eight hundred companies and trying to digest that information well ai i can do that in in a heartbeat right like you a lot of the things that that go into making investment decisions they i can do very well very fast and then also it's advancing so fast so you know whatever we thought it could do three years ago is laughable compared to what it can do today and as you pointed out even three months ago so i guess in your heart of hearts do you think you know in the in the future the next howard marks is not a not a human but but maybe a human with ai or just ai everything i say on the subject i preface with on no expert but i think i told the story in the memo about the fact that index indentation put a lot of people out of the equity business because you know it it disclosed that they couldn't do what they claim to do and most active equity investors under perform the averages and ai will un fro or def f another group of people whose talents are not as great as as they p i used to say about computers you know when i went to school and learned about computers all they could do was read remember add subtract and compare they could do it with a lot of data they could do it really fast they could do it without making arithmetic mistakes they could do it without making emotional mistakes so while the list was limited it was still better than most people now what's the list for ai is the list for ai who unlimited or limited that's that's a big part of the question right there mh i don't and i don't know the answer and i make you do and then is there anything left that ai can do and one example is i think we've helped our clients over the years by not investing with bad people and sometimes you talk to people and for un unbelievable reasons you just say you know don't feel right as as somebody said to me the hair on your on your neck goes up and if that's true and if ai doesn't have hair on its neck then maybe there's a role left for experienced investors with judgment i i believe so first of all there will always be things for which there is no history to train on and to the extent that that a certain big percentage of what ai does is knowing history and recognizing and extra patterns there will always be stuff for which there is no history there are just some people who have a better understanding of the probability distribution that defines events i was reading this book on steve cohen and there was this part where they describing how he was kinda like the man at a very young age they were like he can just feel the ticker he just like is in tune and in flow with it and i was like oh that's beautiful but like that's i can't replicate that and i was always curious about that because i think in one of your books i think you said something like i can't make i can make someone better but i don't think i can make them great can you talk to that about like what it is that makes someone who is a good investor good but also how the average person could get better like it or do you believe that's not that's not even possible that you just you have it or you don't well in in my first book the most important thing columbia which published the book we were talking about the book they said well write us a sample chapter so i sat down and i wrote a chapter that i had never that even thought about and it turned out to be the first chapter in the book and it says on this show we have spent hours talking to some of the best investors alive well lucky for you at the team at hubspot they have pulled out the principles that matter most and turned it into a very simple easy to read wealth guide it's thirty five principles from the top investors we're talking guys who have been on the pod like howard marx man par bra morgan h cathy wood and a ton others so these are all frameworks their mental models their rules basically how to play the long game and how to avoid ruin you can get it in the link below is the most important thing is second level thinking captain level thinking basically says if you don't see anything different from everybody else you can't possibly be superior so to be superior you have to at some point see something different from other people what's called the variant section that you have to either think that the the the that the consensus of investors overstate the quality of the company the growth rate of the company the earning power of the company or or maybe the multiple at these errors and you have to have this barrier perception and you have to bet on your perception and you have to be right so that's for that's sector level thinking i say in the book and when people ask me i say can you teach me to be a sector level thinker and the answer is no i i said i say in the book i don't know but i think it's i think it's more no than yes because i what i say is i can teach you the importance of being a second level thinker like i just have in this chapter but i can't tell you how to have perceptions that are at odds with the consensus of investors and correct you know invest this saying can't coach hide and i think there's something called insight and i think some people have it and i don't know if ai can have it because when you know when you talk about artificial general intelligence and and ag is when a computer or ai can do everything that a human can do can it do that don't know and that when i talk about the the the mysteries of ai that's that's a big one of them are there things it can't won't be able to do even when it reaches full flower can you think back to some of the biggest calls that you've had how strong do that feel did you still have doubt or was it one hundred percent conviction i'm curious to hear what it feels like great i think in our last episode we talked about the day in went under you know was september fifteenth maybe of o eight and we had thought that there was gonna be a mess and we had raised it in the distressed debt world the biggest fund in history prior to o seven was our o two fund which was two and a half billion and in o seven eight we raised eleven billion for a a distressed fund because we thought that that there was a a lot of distress coming and we had it on the shelf it wasn't it was for deployment when the stuff hit the fan and limo goes under which i think qualifies as saying the stuff has hit the fan but people are talking about the end of the world and all the financial institutions are gonna melt down and everything having to do with money is gonna atom so we were faced with the question do you invest the money and there's no pattern recognition for the end of the world and there's no you know in the in the pandemic a harvard epidemiologist said when we make decisions we have data analog to past experience and well at the time of the le and bankruptcy we had no data and no prior experience we only had sufficient so if this is an interesting question can ai have engaged in this kind of thinking and what we said is that if the world if the financial world melts down and we invest doesn't matter but if we don't invest and the financial world doesn't melt down then we didn't do our job so we have to do it and we invested on that basis and bruce who runs those funds invested an average of four hundred fifty million dollars a week for fifteen weeks seven billion in a quarter on that well was it only on that we also un quantitative measures assuming the world doesn't melt down we were getting great bargain we were buying the debt of companies where we would break if companies that had been bought out by private equity guys two three four years earlier if they ended up being worth a fifth or a fourth of what they had paid we would still be okay so that was pretty easy quantitatively but we we were absolutely not confident you weren't confident no i thought you were gonna say the no of that no no but i mean we we're the kind of people who always say i could be wrong or it could work in a in a way that's never been seen before and so we all we always i wrote a memo three or four years ago called taking the temperature about the five major calls macro calls that i made in the last well in the last twenty six years and they're all with some doubt when the markets are crashing why are they crashing they're crashing because the news is terrible i read the same newspapers i watched the same shows on the i'm attached to the same news feeds i see the terrible news it looks terrible to me i overcome it in some way and conclude no i should invest but i'm not in the un to have what everybody else is reading if you do these things without any t extrapolation you know maybe there's something wrong with you but you know people who look at the world prob holistically and admit to ignorance and uncertainty can't act with without t extrapolation hey can you tell me about raising eleven billion dollars because you said that like very casually like so we raised an eleven billion dollar fund and that's like if i just said hey i just turned water into wine i think for for ferocious people is i i'm just actually curious how does that happen is that is that you go to people and you say hey we think the world's you you make a really persuasive case are you using a pitch deck is this just prior relationships are you selling upside are you selling safety against downside and fear like what what actually goes in to raising eleven billion dollars like that so there's a list of things number one certainly prior experience relationships people have you know we started this business in nineteen eighty eight and so we're talking about twenty years later and in the eighty in the twenty years we managed a lot of money and had very good results for a lot of people and so you can work on that reservoir of goodwill number two that this strategy is particularly well suited for crisis and we had managed money through a few crises ninety ninety one and o one zero two and done exceptionally well so we were able to convince people that number one so many of your investments are set up for prosperity this is a good way to hedge it by making an investment that we'll do particularly well if if the stuff hits the fair but we were also able to call attention to flaws in the environment the things that gave rise to the global financial crisis we could talk about and we could point out and you know the fact that the market was not acting as a disciplinary which is its main job main job is to is to you know people come in and say a lot money for this this and this and the market's job is to say no that doesn't make any sense though it's a stupid idea we're not gonna invest in that that's the job and sometimes the market doesn't do that job and when the market doesn't do that job then dumb ideas get financed nas and and when they turn out to be dumb people lose money so i think we were able to convince people that some dumb things were happening and then of course there's a great respect for for bruce ka for the investing he's done of over the years i think those are the main reasons why we were able to do it and by the way you hit the nail on the head we did it in advance of the crisis the best time to invest is in a crisis you can't raise money during the crisis because the news is so terrible so you know my wife and i have a favorite movie we watched called spy game with robert red and he says in the red red says when did noah build the ark before the flood you gotta build the arc before the flood you have to have some sense that the that there may be a flood but one other point in the in the prior twenty years there had been these occasions when we thought there was gonna be a great investment opportunity and it we were generally right because we took the temperature of the market accurately and we raised the large funds and we invested in it and we made a lot of money but then our next fund was smaller because we thought the opportunities weren't as good now most people in the investment visit they have a fund that does great the next fund is bigger because they can sell on the bank of those results but we make it smaller because we think those results mean that things have appreciated and are not so attractive and i think that having done that for twenty years i think we gained a lot of credibility and people tend i think people tend to say whether howard and bruce say there's a great opportunity they're not just trying to raise money they really believe it and they're and they tend to be right and sometimes you had to speak against your own interest and admit your limitations and admit your uncertainties so in nineteen nine eight we had the meltdown of long term capital management we had a russian rub crisis we had a panic in southeast asia and especially with long term going under one of the skilled portfolio managers young portfolio managers that oak came to he says i think this is it i think we're melting down it's all over and i said well tell me your concerns and he laid out his concerns and i said okay i i understand it now go back to your desk and do your job you know a battle hero is not somebody who's una afraid it's somebody who's afraid but does it anyway if you're running into a hell bullets and you're not afraid there's something wrong with you but you do it anyway because it's what you have to do and i don't wanna elevate i'm not saying we're analogous to a a combat hero but you have to do it despite your t termination and if by the way if you wait until you have nothing to be afraid about probably the opportunity has passed that's a great point you mentioned bruce and i wanted to ask you about this because it seems like you guys have had a very long term partnership matter of what thirty plus years i think people don't talk about that enough the value of compounding in a relationship and how to be a good partner for the long term you know a bad partnership can ruin you but we don't really talk about what it takes to make a great partnership at the same time if you were gonna teach me and sam if we said hey being and sam wanna do this podcast for thirty years or you know i have a business partner ben i wanna be in business with him for thirty years what do we gotta get right to do that well it's a great question and it's very important bruce and i have been partners for thirty nine years this month and it's one of the greatest things in our lives after i think we would both say that after family and and maybe some good friendships it it's really the best thing we've had we've worked together closely for all that period we've obviously produced a lot of success had a lot of fun have have never had a fight we have inter intellectual disagreements but we've never had a fight probably because neither of us is really a financial maximize and a lot of fights are probably about money the bedrock of our relationship is mutual respect and i think it would be very hard to have a successful long term relationship with the partner if you didn't have respect for each other and that ties into something i wrote in o two i think but in o two i wrote a memo called the most important thing and there was a section in there which talked about having a successful partnership and i said the key to a successful partnership is shared values and complimentary skills if you don't share values i don't think it can have a successful partnership let's say one person is super aggressive and the other is a chicken one person is super ethical and the other one likes to cut corners i don't think you can have a successful relationship partnership and i've seen many many you know i mean friend of mine when i was a kid at and t went public can you imagine that days before at eighteenth he was was public but anyway they went public that it was the biggest deal in history and and they had a full page tombstone ad in the newspaper and it listed all the investment firms that were the investment bankers and there were probably forty and a friend of mine ed rams dell used to carry that at iran and every time when went out of business he would mark it off and eventually i think they almost all disappeared except for goldman sachs but why do they this why do they go under you have some cowboys and some chickens and you know in in the when in bad times the chickens say the cowboys are getting us killed and in good times the cowboys say the chickens are holding us back and they dispatch each other so you have to share values in my opinion the other thing is you have to have complementary skills so the beauty of a partnership is when your partner can do things you can't that means that you are both additive to each other synergistic if i can do everything you can do or if i think that what do i need you for it's not gonna last very long because eventually i'm gonna say you're over paid i don't need you and the beauty of my relationship with bruce is that we both recognize that there are things that the other is good at that we're not and that the other wants that is willing to do that we don't wanna do for example from the very beginning bruce approached me in in eighty seven with the idea of a distressed that fund you know i went into the high yield bond business in seventy eight and he had a a background in law and got into some distressed investments which went well and he said came to me and said we should do and stress that fund and and it was quite a novel idea but from the beginning you know i go on the road and talk to people and bruce days back and manages the money i go on podcasts with people like you and bruce doesn't but the third element is you gotta be appreciative and you have to thank your lucky stars that you have a partner who will do the stuff you don't wanna do can you do the same towards parenting because both on this episode and last one you referenced your son a bunch do you have any insights into how you've been able to raise a kid that you not just love but you enjoy being around well you know i think it was forbes thirty here forty years ago had an article about so and so who was the only shrink with an office on wall street and they asked the guy about his patience problems and he said that his patient's problems and they were all men of course because it was wall street a long time ago his patient's problems were inverse proportional to the support they got from their fathers we had people over for dinner last night and one of the guys we we're talking about so and so was a character of some kind and one of the guys said well you know what his father treated of like hell i just never wanted to be that father and it's amazing how many men and especially so successful men have to assert their superiority over their sons maybe daughters too but i think it's more with sons and i guess it's for idea or or something else but it's what a terrible thing that you have to if you had this kid and you have to prove your smarter and so you know i mean i always let andrew be smarter than me in in some things and of course i always gave him full support in the things he wanted to do if your kids wanna do something and a it's not gonna be in j and yeah i maybe there's no b let him do it like when when when my daughter was getting out of lower school and had to choose an upper school she applied to the two good schools in la got in and we let her choose my wife and i had a sense for which one we wanted or go to but we concluded that i got you or say we could be wrong our choice could be the wrong choice and anyway of the two choices while one might be better than the other neither was a bad choice so if that's true let the kid make the choice and they get experience with making choices and maybe the eddy experience with making incorrect choices which is very important hey let's take a quick break you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow well the breeze assistant from hubspot can help it works right inside hubspot you can draft campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all using your actual customer data so you don't create just content you create content that converts check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses on the subject of choice i have a i'm i'm interested it to know you know when you were younger you let's say you're twenty one years old and you're trying to figure out what you wanna do with your life probably one of the more important questions you should figure out at some point is what do i wanna actually do every day for eight hours a day that half my waking hours and i doubt that you know a lot of nineteen year olds wake up and say i wanna work with distressed debt and bonds you know this not a un that's not a noble answer at that stage what do you think is the right approach to figuring out your thing first i wanna say of front end that think you described i did it a a terrible job of i was unconscious the decisions i made in my first twenty years as they say in in in religion i did not apply intention i just i let other people make the decision i made decisions have hazard i didn't think about it a lot i'm embarrassed at at how terrible my decision making process was in fact it's it's a mis to apply that term but having said that i i think it's desirable to make your choices with intention well reason etcetera and what i tell kids is my favorite quote is from a writer named christopher mo who said there's only one success to live your life your own way i think it's a beautiful quote you know i go to wharton and harvard and and all these places in columbia and and i say and you know the fact that you're in this room probably means that you can live your life your own way you probably have what it takes to live your life your own way intellectually and work ethic that does that work but you have to figure out what it is that's the hard part who are you and what i say to them is try to find something that will play your strengths avoid your weaknesses and make you happy what that means is well that sounds obvious who who who the hell wouldn't wouldn't follow that instruction well the answer is what it means is you can't let your friends decide what you should do you can't do things because your friends are doing them you can't let society decide what you should do you can't let your parents decide what you should do you have to think it after yourself having said that it's very difficult because it's hard to know yourself and we know that in twenty years you'll be a different person how can you make a decision today on what will make that person happy very difficult but you've got a try that's my advice which which i didn't take when i was a kid and i was der but i got lucky while you eventually did become as you described what living well intention yes something must have changed what do you remember did you do any exercises to become that way not that i recall i think part of it you know and i said i said for the next twenty five years i didn't do it that took me up till roughly ninety five which is when i left with bruce to start oak tree that was really that's so weight so you think that up until the age of fifty or forty nine you were floating or living according to other people well not not just add but just not making good decisions conscious decisions you know why did i go to citi bank investment research department when i got out of university of chicago in nineteen sixty nine because i had a a good summer there the year before why did i move from the equity research department to the bond department because my work in equity research was unsuccessful and i was told to get out why did i move to california in nineteen eighty sunshine palm trees i just can't claim that i was making good decisions i got sent to the bond department as citi bank in nineteen seventy eight and three months later the head of the bond department calls me up since i was i didn't have that much to do i was fairly idle and he says there's a guy named milk or something in california and he deals in something called high yield bonds do you think he can figure out what that means that was just luck you know if you if you read math va well and outliers it was just luck bright time right place and if that call if that call came at time and i had been out at lunch maybe somebody else would get the call and and they'd be me your your humility is very striking to me we have a lot of people in this podcast that i i think you know claim to be humble or try to be humble you you you really are extremely humble person i mean one note i wrote down is from now on at the top of all my investor memos i'm just gonna start it with i could be wrong but because i i think whenever i make an investment i'm so boast full about the my my excitement and my exuberance and why this is right and why is the right move to do and i think you know you've you've kind of infected me with a little bit of your your humility there well you you make the investment because you believe in it but it's important to see the other side and know what you're doing by the way churchill said he's a he's a humble man and he has a lot to be humble about but mark twain says it ain't what you don't know if it gets you into trouble it's what you know for certain to just ain't true and i always tell people in line with what you just said aren't no sentence that starts with i could be wrong but or i don't know but ever got anybody in into trouble the sentences that get people into trouble are i'm a hundred percent convinced that and if you if you really feel that you're a hundred percent right and you bet like you're a hundred percent right and it turns out it was only eighty twenty and the twenty comes up that's how you get into pick crawl so i think the thing that i think the thing that mark twain said was incredibly important yeah last memo sean sent me about some deal yet was bet everything you have this is it mortgage of house hey can i ask you about buffett you know buffett famously has said you know he reads your memos i assume you guys have interacted do you guys hang out what's what's he like and give me some some warren buffett stories from boom from your your life your experience well bruce actually was always a buffet watcher and if you go back to the eighties no i don't think anybody had heard of buffet maybe not the nineties i don't remember exactly in the in the late nineties people said well buffett lost it because he's not in tech and then of course tech b and then they said maybe bluff knows what he's doing but in a anyway when en ron melted down and ron did most of its mis behavior through off balance sheet entities and there was a lot of opportunity there and so we became the largest holder of the dead of one of them it was called os and warren was the second largest holder and i don't remember how it came to pass but he gave us his proxy and he let us run that position for him and bruce did a master job of restructuring that company and we came out with the big they win so this was around o two so around all three or four warren wright bruce letter and he says you know nice job on on os and if you ever find yourself in omaha let me know we'll have lunch so bruce and i write him a letter of bruce rei letters it's it happens that howard and i will be in an omaha this week can we take it to lunch and and so with that's how we met and the relationship of had a lovely start and it went on like that add we never actually did any business together after that because you know he was always looking for something big that he could acquire and and we don't we don't really deal in big acquire things but it was a very nice personal relationship and i don't i've never said this to anybody else before but in o nine i wrote a memo in which i mentioned him and i sent it to him and i said i wanna make sure did you see this memo because it mentions you and he says i do see the memos in blah blah and i have seen this he says and by the way you should write a book and if you do i'll give you a a blurb for the book and that's why i wrote the first book most important thing i always thought i'd write a book when i retired but instead you know when when you get that kind of note for him a guy like warren buffett you you can't let it sit so that was that was a start of that but you know i i've been fortunate to visit him a few times and and it's it's a big class is there any part about the warren my mistake the buffett personality that you think like popular lore gets wrong or is inaccurate no i think it's mostly what you see is what you get the one thing i'll say that i don't think people know about they don't get wrong they don't know about is the depth of his love for charlie and warren sent out a a note i think it was a thanksgiving last year and he said you know i'm not gonna be at the berkshire meeting and i'm not going to be writing this or lad whatever it was and he talked about his relationship with patrol and anybody wants who should get get hold of that letter and see it because it's it's you know we talked earlier about the importance of the partnership and how great a contributor to your life it can be and and that's what that's what he had bat charlie i think he i think as i recall he talked about charlie being the big brother and and and himself being a little brother and i think we can say that about my relationship with bruce and for one reason and another he's always been very kind to me about my role you know and generous about my role and he okay so he's he's certainly as smart as i am and has talented as i am maybe in different ways but there was always this this feeling of respect and affection and love and and and the as the more time passes the more we're conscious of that he and high end that's what warren and charlie had and it was beautiful thing to watch and also the the warren used to love tell funny stories about trolley of which there were a lot and their relationship was always refused with humor okay so you've probably have heard this on the podcast but if you're running a company i think that the number one attribute that will determine if you are gonna succeed in business is how fast you can learn from others specifically how fast you can learn from other entrepreneurs but there's a problem with that i have this problem and in fact you probably have it too that's one of the reasons why you listen to my first million in the first place the problem is that finding other successful entrepreneurs to learn from it's a pain in the butt and so that's why a few years ago i started a company called hampton you can check it out at join hampton dot com we have thousands of members and they exist for this exact reason so here's how it works if you're a founder that does at least three million in revenue and you make it through our incredibly thorough vetting process we then match you and put you a group with nine other entrepreneurs you meet in real life in your city once a month and it becomes your peer group that will frankly change your entire life it's changed mine i'm in the group as well and so if you're a founder that does at least three million in year in revenue check out join hampton dot com again the url is join hampton dot com did they make a lot of the decisions together i mean i've read a little bit about and their relationship was a a little challenging for me to understand because i don't think they've ever lived in the same place yeah did they talk daily i don't know exactly how they made their decisions but think well i think warren used charlie as a sounding board a logic checker you know i think this makes sense that kind of thing of course charlie great credit is that warren buffett used to engage in what we call cigar by investing i don't know if you know about this but cigar bought investing means you're walking down the street and you're look in the gutter and you see a used cigar and you pick it up and you conclude that it has three puffs left so you pick it up it's disgusting thought you pick it up and you smoke it and to get three plus for free that's the ga investing but and and you know warren would buy you know really cats and dogs because they were cheap and charlie great contribution was talking warren out of cats and talks out of cigar butts and his revolution was that he convinced warren not any company at a great price great companies at a good price most people credit that as charlie greatest contribution so but you know synergistic mutual respect love complimentary skills it it interestingly they probably had the highest combined iq of any partnership in history but they were different kinds of iq charlie was more of a class assist and human and a man of letters and warren of course was an incredible computing machine a man of a a man of letters sean we need to bring that back that sounds that sounds beautiful and what's beautiful letters charlie you know when we would get together he wouldn't talk about investments or money or companies mostly he would talk about ideas well let's let's wrap it with one one last quick one which is give us some homework where give us a book that shaped the way you think or you thought brought some good ideas to the forefront what's a book we should read as recommended by howard marx so one is a short history of financial euphoria by john kenneth go this was very influential in my thinking and it teaches you about the mental weakness that gives luck give rise to booms and busts and of course you know taking a objective view of cycles is a big part of what i do so that was very unfortunate and i was lucky to get to meet call breathe and then the other book would be fooled by randomness by nasa nicholas and it talks about see i'm a great believer that a lot in in life is random and so this is one of the reasons maybe it's my rationale for not being such a a decisive thinker tale lab basically says in the short run anything can happen because a randomness on this and this determines our attitude toward risk our attitude toward portfolio construction our attitude toward published records you know you see a published record i had a great return that here is he great investor did he get lucky that here etcetera so and i so i think that i think that told by rail this is really and i've written to memos if anybody wants to you the what we used to call the classic comic version they can read the memos rather than reading the whole book but i i think it's very valuable and i would recommend it strongly well we appreciate man this is fun i hope so we gotta do one with your son actually that would be a lot of fun well we did one in january of twenty one called something of value because he moved through the disaster in the pandemic and i thought that the the opportunity to for three generation of marxist to live together was a great was of great value and we spent most of the time arguing about value interesting and and and i think that i think with the possible exception of the latest ai memo i think that one got the most positive reception but but we'll we'll we'll keep working together and you guys don't don't need a an excuse for for another session thanks thank you for playing therapist for us okay thank you so much howard that's it that's a pop i feel like i could rude to world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a road less travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break to talk about a podcast because if you're listening to this you like podcast and what's better than one podcast another podcast and let me tell you another podcast you should check out it's called success story if you like hearing about different success stories and hearing q and a sessions with successful business leaders or hearing keto presentations or just checking out conversations about sales and business and marketing tactics is a great podcast for you so check it out wherever you get your podcast