TIP812: Mohnish Pabrai on Berkshire & Letting Winners Run

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25:35You know, I love that you say that. One of the things I've been thinking a lot about with this whole Buffett and Manga framework is this idea of it's really difficult to solve hard problems. So one of the best ways is just to complete it to avoid them. But then at the same time, they're all also things you want to take on. You know, it's sort of like you always want to make sure that you keep your promises. And you know, one way to do that is not to make any promises, but it's also a poor life if you don't make promises to people that you really care for. But then you also have the struggle, but the struggle is where the meat is.

26:09That's still the good part. It's wonderful. If I can go back to, this sounds very operational after. This is a wonderful quote that you just listed up and here I am. But I know you invest in a lot of emerging countries. This is one of the many wonderful reasons why I like to invest with you. But do you ever have any issues withdrawing money from those countries?

26:29Stig Brodersen:Well, our investments really very heavily are in one country outside the US, which is Turkey. I was drawn to Turkey because it was screening cheap, but we didn't invest in these businesses because we wanted Turkish exposure. We invested in these businesses because they were exceptional businesses available at cigar butt prices. And I think one thing to keep in mind is that for most businesses, almost all businesses, the micro is going to trump the macro. So how well we do with our Turkish businesses is probably 95 % dependent on what the managers of those businesses do and what is the nature of the markets they are serving.

27:20Stig Brodersen:It's really things inside and around the business. Very little has to do with the macro. So anytime I bring up some Turkish business to someone, they'll say, what about Erdogan? Right? And quite frankly, that the focus on going after the leadership of a company, a country, as being your number one factor you're concerned about is very myopic. I mean, the important thing is, what is the quality of these managers? What is the quality of the business? What is the size of the market? How well are they executing? I think those are much more important questions because usually, I mean, the companies we've invested in, there is no real advantage the leader of Turkey is going to get by trying to go in and mess with those companies.

28:15Stig Brodersen:It's just, he's got other fish to fry. So it's always important to focus around and inside the business. Preston Pysh, MD Okay. That makes sense. You know, I'm always trying to figure out some of that long tail risk. And one story that stuck with me, I used to play a lot of poker back in the day. And there was one story that always sits with me, and I think it's applicable to investing. And so for a guy who's been banned in Vegas, I thought you would appreciate this story. but so it's about in poker. So in poker, you can have the so-called nuts, so that's the best hand. And so you can say that in life, nothing is zero or 100%, but then you can be like, hey, but in poker, if you have the nuts, you have the best hand.

29:01So what is your risk? And then there was this Dol Bronson, this old poker legend, he said, well, whenever you played in Texas back in the day, even if you had the nuts, someone would pull out a gun, and then he would just take your money. So even 100 % is not 100%, just so you know. So the reason why I mentioned that, that was sort of like where I came from. I was thinking, I understand the thesis or like to think so in Turkey.

29:26Stig Brodersen:And I was like, is there like a long - I told my investors, and you've probably read this, but I said, look, if you are invested in any of the Pabrai funds, and they're very concentrated, in some cases, one stock is more than half the fund. And I said that, if you have less than 20 % of your net worth with me, you have nothing to be concerned about. Okay. And if you have more than 20 % of your net worth with me, you can trim the position. In fact, I recommend you trim it. Right? So if someone has one-fifth of their assets with Pabrai funds, and when you look through those one-fifth, probably no more than 10%, 12 % of their net worth is in one particular company, that's plenty of diversification.

30:12Stig Brodersen:I mean, let's put it this way. Walmart went public in, I think, 1970 or 72. I think maybe 72 they went public. So it's been, what, 28 and 26, so like, you know, 54 years since they've been public. The heirs of Sam Walton own more than what they owned in terms of the percentage of Walmart that they own today versus when it IPO, because Walmart has bought back shares, 46 % of the company is owned by family members, 56 years after the IPO. And they are not diversified. Pabrai funds is diversified. Okay. The Walton family is not diversified, but the Walton family would be far worse off if they had listened to the helpers.

31:06Stig Brodersen:You don't need to listen to the helpers. The helpers are just helping themselves. The reality is that most entrepreneurs and most people who have become billionaires have, through that journey, had 90%, 95%, 99 % of their net worth in a single stock. They don't lose sleep over it. We somehow accept that some couple running a Chinese restaurant has 90 % of everything in the restaurant. They're just busy working. It's not even liquid. They don't lose sleep over it. And here we have a portfolio that we can buy and sell every day, and we want to own one of everything. I mean, that just makes no sense.

31:56No, I think it's a good point. And there was this expression, the cup is already full, which basically means that people already have an idea of how the world is. And so actually, I was having a conversation with Guy about this some time ago, and we talked about you and your portfolio. And he talked about how concentrated you were, not in a bad way, but he just does it a different way, as I'm sure you know. And my rebuttal to that was because Guy's thinking someone would put all his wealth into, let's say, copyright funds, which is probably, if you are not an investor, you probably want money to be fully invested in copyright funds.

32:39If you're an investor in Berkshire Hathaway, you want Buffett to be fully invested in Berkshire Hathaway, but you can size accordingly. If you feel it's too much, put 10 % in or 3 % of your net worth or whatever in copyright funds, and then you are diversified. And I think a lot of people are missing that whenever they're looking, oh, look at the concentration here. Yes, but what is your true exposure of that? And it probably comes from this feeling of control where we feel like if things are going well, we feel like it's okay. Oh, Minus is just doing his thing. But if we get something back and it's, oh, that doesn't look as...

33:14It's different if you run your own restaurant, you can just feel, I can just do this differently, but I can't control what's going on in Turkey or whatever.

33:22Stig Brodersen:So... I was reading one of the investment letters of an investment manager who shall go nameless. They were very early to invest in Constellation software. Mark Leonard, too. Unbelievably great manager, built a great business, et cetera. Constellation has compounded at 30 plus percent, 35 percent since they went public, whatever. These guys were invested early, et cetera. up. Anytime the consultation position got to 10 % or more in this fund, they trim it. In my opinion, a great fund manager should, after 20 or 30 years, end up with 95 % in one stock. Because what Warren has told us with the 4 % rule, that's like a law of physics, is it is very difficult to find companies like Constellation.

34:20Stig Brodersen:Constellation is a very rare company, just like the company I have in Turkey, Races, is a very rare company. And so when you find yourself in the happy position of owning it, owning a small portion of it, and the guy is compounding and he's doing his thing, and Mark Leonard, he now has cancer, he stepped away, he's the chairman, did not take a base salary. No bonus, no base salary. And he flew commercial. Then he said that, I'm too old for commercial. I need to fly business. So what he told the company is, I'm going to be flying business, but I'm going to be paying personally. So the company used to pay for his coach travel.

35:04Stig Brodersen:Now the company pays nothing and he travels business. I mean, look at the ethics of the manager. Okay. And the other thing is, so when I look at a business like Constellation, I actually see a business like Constellation as far less risky than a business like Walmart. I think Constellation is a more resilient business than Walmart because it is 1 ,000 businesses in one. I mean, Walmart is also many businesses than one, but not 1 ,000. By the time you get to the sixth or seventh business of Walmart, the rest may be very small. Walmart is an exceptional company as well. But just if you look at resilience, I would bet, for me, Constellation is more resilient.

35:57Stig Brodersen:When we are investors, investment managers running a portfolio, and these people who have invested in Constellation, they're listening to every conference call, and reading every annual letter, they know that company cold, and they know how good that company is. And to me, it is desecration of the temple. When you sit there and say, it's not going to go over 10%, the temple just got desecrated. Manish, I want to take the opportunity to talk about one of your older investments. It's actually, it's the frontline investment back from the fall of 2002. And you might be thinking, that's such a ridiculous question.

36:39Is that really because Steg really wants to co-op with brand new questions? Is that why we're talking about something that happened 24 years ago? No, that's actually not why. I think, to be fair, one of the reasons is that I think that there's some similarity to the whole Metcol thesis. But anyways, one of the things that asset managers love to talk about is their eras whenever they, if I put you on here a bit on the spot money is where they say, oh, I sold out too early. I only made 55 % on frontline. I could have made 100x on that. And so sometimes SMN just like to talk about their emissions.

37:14Preston Pyshysh But I think I wanted to talk about it, and I'm a bit sneaky about it, so please forgive me for this. Preston Pyshysh But beyond the lesson of exiting too early with a wonderful business case here, what key insights or principles did you take away from the frontline investment that have influenced how you approach similar opportunities today?

37:33Stig Brodersen:So as you know, with the frontline story, and just to give your listener the cliff notes version of it is that I bought a stock with basically no downside. Very quickly, I doubled my money and patted myself on the back and exited. And then I saw it go up, you know, 200x after that or more, right? Now, in the fall of 2008, you know, God loves Monish a lot. And the proof of that is that in the fall of 2008, I was going to make a trip to San Jose, California. And I was saying, oh, you know, I'm in San Jose, have some time, who can I meet? And I see that Michael Burry lives in San Jose, California.

38:19Stig Brodersen:and I don't know Michael Burry very well, but I sent him an email and I said, Michael, you know, this is Monish. You may or may not know me, but I would love to meet you in your office if you have some time. And he says, come on over. Okay. And so it's like September 2008 or something. So I go to Michael Burry's office, which you saw in the big short, you know, the short his office, his office looks like that, all these papers all over and all that. And as soon as I go into his office, he launches into CDSs. Okay. And he's going, picking up all these things. Like literally, he didn't even say, hi, Monish, welcome, whatever.

38:54Stig Brodersen:He just goes straight into CDS. And God, who loves me so much, brought me to the epicenter of CDSs. Okay. There's no human on the planet who could have explained CDSs to me and the whole, you know, housing market implosion, et cetera, which is going to happen in the future better than Michael Burry. And it's going so far above my head so far. And so poor God, he thought Monish is a capable guy. And he said, if I just send him to Mecca and show him the sermon, everything will be obvious to him. Of course, God did not understand how dumb I am. Okay. Now, so, you know, this whole frontline thing happened and, you know, I got a double and I went up 200x.

39:47Stig Brodersen:Last year, I happened to have a trip to Norway. I'd never been to Norway in my life. I'm at this conference for offshore drillers, whatever, in Norway. That's where I went. They say that we have a field trip, which is not on the schedule. If you guys want to go on the field trip. The field trip is to the headquarters of Frontline.

40:15Stig Brodersen:So I said, you know, God has a sense of humor. Okay. I said, I'm going to go on this field trip because I know that's why he brought me to Norway, not for the offshore drillers. He wants to rub my nose in. He wants to rub my nose It wasn't my mistake. So I go to the headquarters of Frontline and we go into, and you know, it was an out-of-body experience. So when I go into the headquarters of Frontline, it's very high-end Persian rugs. It's very ornate, extremely ornate, old school, mahogany interiors and all that, but they have a lot of art all over the place. And they have a lot of ships, replicas of ships.

41:03Stig Brodersen:Those replicas of ships, they're like four feet, five feet. There's a VLCC. These are the very large crude carriers, which went up 200x. I'm walking around and seeing that I owned 2 % of all of this.

41:24Stig Brodersen:Fredrickson did all of that. Then I go, There's a door that opens and it's right on the harbor. I mean, it's the most beautiful building right on the harbor, all these boats and everything. Such a nice office. I said, God wanted you to see this Monash. He didn't want you to die just knowing that it was a 200x, whatever. All those VLCC, everything got paid by a tiny rounding error of the returns on that investment. And so I like the way God has a sense of humor with me. You know, I knew the frontline trip was not to, hey, I'm going to make you some money. It was like, hey, I took you to the altar.

42:10Stig Brodersen:You decided not to get married. And I want to show you what could have been if you had gotten married. I love it. So you wanted to know, I'm sorry, the similarity between frontline and what? What were you saying? the Metcol thesis. Yeah. So actually the Metcol thesis is more similar to a company called Ipsco than it is to Frontline. And you may recall that Ipsco was a Canadian steelmaker. And this was a beautiful math game. It's like playing blackjack in Vegas. Okay. What a blessed life. I wake up one morning, I look at Ipsco. Ipsco is a Canadian company with a$40 stock price. They have$15 a share in cash on their balance sheet, no debt.

43:03Stig Brodersen:They have publicly announced that for the next two years, they're going to produce $15 a share of cash flow each of the next two years. If you just hold the stock for two years, you have$45 in cash. Stock is currently at$40. Plant, equipment, inventory, everything free. Okay. What's not to like about that? Then, of course, the issue was that in year three, it's a cyclical business. They make tubular steel. Cash flows could be negative. They could go below zero. But I said, why entertain such morose thoughts? okay, let's just hold the stock for two years and see what happens. I want to see Mr. Market price this thing at$40 when there's$45 of cash on the balance sheet.

43:52Stig Brodersen:So I put 10 % of the funds in Ibsco. One year goes by and the company announces the third year is also going to be $15 a share. Now we are at$60 on the balance sheet. The stock price by now has moved to about $90, which is a little bit more reasonable than the stupid$40 we're sitting at. Now, when it's sitting at$90, I'm thinking, Monash, we have long-term gains. We have a double. well done, and we need to be out of here. While I'm going through these thoughts, I wake up one day and I see the stock is at$1.55 a share. It jumped from$90 to$1.55 because some Swedish company came in and offered$1.60 a share.

44:44Stig Brodersen:Now, Mark Twain says that truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense. Why that Swedish company didn't make an offer of$50 when it was$40 a share is something I will never understand. But they did offer the $160. One femtosecond after I read that, I exited my position. I've always had great nostalgia about Ipsco. Then on Twitter, where about 260 ,000 of my close friends hang out, one of my close friends on Twitter post, hey, Monish, this console energy position by David Einhorn looks like your Ipsco bet. I read that and say, oh, God, he still loves me so much. Because now through Twitter and through X, he gives me what he's thinking.

45:45Stig Brodersen:So anytime someone says something like Ipsco, I'm going to look at it. Such a beautiful experience. No downside. So I look at Consul Energy and the guy's right. It looks very similar to Ipsco. They are forward selling. They've got visibility in the future. It's not as clean as Ipsco. Ipsco was just with a bow on it. It was just picture perfect. You couldn't do. This was not as clean as that, but it was very favorable risk reward because of what the stock price was, what the cash flows were coming in and so on. And so I said, hallelujah, Ipsos is back. And we don't need to think much. We already have that framework in the head.

46:31Stig Brodersen:So I went in and bought console and I started studying the coal business. Then I find that on the MetCole side, Consul was Thermal Coal, they're a very good company. But on the MetCole side, it's even more favorable. So, I switched the bet from Consul to Alpha and Warrior. Then, one month before Charlie Munger passed away. I had never in all the years I was friends with Charlie Munger ever requested that he meet me. I always met him when he wanted to meet. So he would say, Monish, come for dinner. I'd come. I'd never ask for anything. He's too busy. But that year in 23, for the first time, I was feeling that I need to meet Charlie.

47:26Stig Brodersen:So I reached out to his assistant and said, I'd really like to connect with Charlie. She said, oh, here's some dates and weekends, whatever. What do you want to do? I picked a Saturday and I flew from Austin to meet Charlie. It turned out that exactly four weeks after that, he passed away. We had what was to be our last meal together in October 2023. When I'm talking to Charlie, console energy comes up. Charlie says that he's invested in console. This was in May of 2023. And I told Charlie, we both bought the same stock, a coal company, within two weeks of each other, without ever having spoken to each other about it.

48:16Stig Brodersen:So I said, how strange is that? So he says, Monish, it was bound to happen. I'm glad, glad Charlie felt like that, like bound to happen. Why is he saying that? But then I told Charlie in October. I said, Charlie, I was orgasmic about console. But then I ran into Alpha, Alpha Meteorological Resource. And it was even better than console. So I said, I'm going to send you a write-up on alpha, and I think you should switch. You should switch from console to alpha. So I sent him the write-up. And six days before he passed away, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, he was still buying alpha stock. What I love about Charlie is he's 99.9 years old and it's irrelevant what his life expectancy is.

49:09Stig Brodersen:He's still excited to make bets. And so he was buying alpha literally till he passed away. And so, I mean, I think these are these are just great bets because no one wants to be in coal. It's a four-lettered word, and people don't want to even spend time thinking about it. And that's all okay with me. No problem. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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52:55Stig Brodersen:I love that over 10 ,000 companies from startups to big enterprises trust Vanta to handle this stuff so they can focus on what actually moves the needle. Get started today at vanta.com slash tip. All right, back to the show. I'm going to make an ambitious bridge here, Manis, because people think that they're getting an investing show whenever they listen to you, but you also give good marriage advice. And one of the things that you, for example, have told me is that remember that the mistress is not always better than the wife. I just think the one line in itself is just like, Why did I ask? But anyways, it was one of the things you said to me.

53:38So I'm going to send one back to you that you should not go back to your ex-girlfriend unless it's for the right reasons and not for the wrong reasons. And the reason why I came to think of that, and I know it's a bit of a stretch here, but I was looking at frontline, I was looking at the Metcol, and I had this idea of this supply opportunity whenever the demand goes parabolic and the supply can't go online, and then what happens, and so on and so forth. And then it dawned to me, whenever someone like Manish would double his money, but lose out on a 200-bagger, is there something lingering where we all know that we shouldn't be making the money back the way that we lost it, or whatever metaphorical way you want to put that?

54:23But how do you protect your own bias against saying, I should have had a 200-bagger in front line, and now I see the same thing in this thesis or whatever. And so now I want to make that bet because now I learned the framework. And so you're making those bets for the right reasons. How do you protect against yourself and only take the good from your past experiences and not the bad?

54:44Stig Brodersen:Well, I think that's a wonderful question and it's a very important question. So one of the lessons that took me many decades to learn is not to sell a good company or a great company when it's fairly priced or even overpriced. I was always trying to sell things at 90 % of fair value. That was a very bad framework to have because we don't know what actual fair value is for a great business. Only when it gets egregiously overpriced, there's no way you can justify it, is when you can consider exiting the business because of the 4 % rule. What Warren has shown us and what the stock market has shown us is that the true great compounders are few and far between.

55:35Stig Brodersen:They are going to end up in your portfolio. Your job, when it ends up in your portfolio, is not to be trigger happy. The reality of investing is that this is a very forgiving business. So let's say, for example, there's some controversy whether Walmart was part of the Nifty 50 or not in the 1970s. Let's take the case it was part of the Nifty 50. It was 2 % allocation to Walmart out of 50 stocks. And let's say the other 49 stocks went to zero. So we made a$100 ,000 bet in 1970 or whatever, or 1972, and 98 ,000 of that has gone to zero. So all the companies that were there, which some of them were very good companies like McDonald's and Coke and all of that, let's say they all went to zero.

56:27Stig Brodersen:And you only had the 2 % that you invested in Walmart. If you carried that till today, you blew out the S &P. So you blew out the S &P with 98 % error rate, holding on to just one business. Because that one business outperformed the S &P by so much that it outperformed significantly. So there's a very strong asymmetry here where the winners can be truly spectacular winners. So it's not so much that if you hold on to five companies, that it may have been better to sell three of them. You don't need to be optimized. You own all five, and that allows you to own the one or two that just go spectacular.

57:16Stig Brodersen:So, the important thing is that not to get cute. So, for example, if you look at our Wagons Fund, we have the Constellation businesses in there, the Mark Leonard Constellation businesses. They have a good future. I have no crystal ball that tells me what those companies look like 10 or 20 years from now, but I want to let them run. I want to let them run. We have the coal companies. I also don't know what those look like 10, 20 years from now. We want to let those run too. It looks favorable. We want to let them run. We have some Turkish bets in there too, like Reza, et cetera. We want to let them run.

58:00I think that when you put enough of these things

58:03Stig Brodersen:which have great characteristics, the world is a messy place. Things will come from left field. We don't know what happens to these different companies at what point. But it's almost inconceivable that all of them fall apart. That Constellation falls apart, and the cold beds fall apart, and Turkey falls apart, and our offshore drillers fall apart. Everything falls apart. In fact, I just can't see that. I can see that maybe one or two of them might have some issues, but I don't see it across the board. So we don't need to be right to the fourth decimal. We also don't need to know which one of these is going to be the one.

58:48Stig Brodersen:They're all there. Let them all run. Let them go do their thing. We just watch in the sidelines, see what happens. And that's it. So whenever you're saying that, you're mentioning Walmart and saying the 50 stocks, you need to hold on, and it's a 2 % position. And I think I'm probably the only one of your investors in Powered Funds who wants you to be more concentrated, because I have this bias where I feel the highest conviction ideas, and that's what you're doing personally. I only have five stocks, probably because I don't understand a lot of things. And so I have a bias towards concentration.

59:23But then to your point, if you have 50 stocks and then just 2 % allocation, you just hold on for 50 years, and then it beats the S &P 500 if the 49 others go to zero. How do you think about position sizing? Are you thinking differently about the 10 by 10 framework, for example, in copyright funds, and that we talked about in the past, or how should we square the circle?

59:46Stig Brodersen:Well, the ETF laws and rules require plenty of diversification, much more diversification than I would naturally. That's my natural bent. So we are not going to have large positions there, which is fine. In Pabrai funds, we've never wanted to put more than 10 % into anything. That's also fine. Basically, I think at the end of the day, if you've got a spectacular winner, it's going to take care of itself even with a small position size, as long as you don't trim, as long as you don't desecrate the temple, we're all fine. We don't need to go all in with a big conviction, the winners are going to get there.

1:00:30Stig Brodersen:No matter where they start out, they'll get there. So just be relaxed and patient, and they'll be fine. In fact, that's exactly what happens in index investing. We don't get to see what's happening with the sausage factory, how the sausage is made with the index. But effectively, what's happening in the index is that it keeps the winners for a very long time. and those few 4 % or 5 % of companies are driving the whole end result. Preston Pysh, MD, PhD I'm looking at all these mental models and trying to figure out how to go back to first principles. And you're typically in trouble whenever you're listening to someone who's talking about first principles, because they seem to go in all kinds of directions whenever you do.

1:01:10But I was trying to think about Darwin and what he taught us about survival adaptation. And I wanted to give you that framework, and please feel free to question the premise in the first place, but have you learned anything from Darwin about how to avoid ruin and compound capital in investing?

1:01:29Stig Brodersen:Well, there's a wonderful book written by a great investor called Polak Prasad, called What I Learned from Darwin About Investing. And it's one of the best investment books I ever read. I think it's a wonderful book. And in fact, I learned a lot from Polak. and pullock is a interesting guy he he lives in singapore and he runs a fund it's i think about about five billion or so i don't think they're taking new capital in he's posted his entire portfolio on their home page and basically there's no movement in that portfolio if they buy a company they're married to the company they might do five years of research before they buy a company But once they buy the company, they're pretty much all in forever.

1:02:15Stig Brodersen:It's a very wonderful framework where they think of themselves as owners of these businesses. These are businesses with truly exceptional corporate governance, very well-run businesses. They can be very basic businesses, but they're really well-run. I think Darwin says that the species that survive are not the strongest or the biggest, but he says the ones that are the fittest. It's survival of the fittest. I think that applies to investments big time. So, if we look at a company like, let's say, you look at a company like Microsoft, I mean, the evolution that business has gone through over the last six decades or whatever they've been around is unbelievable.

1:03:13Stig Brodersen:I mean, they've continuously reinvented themselves. And each time they've reinvented, I mean, Microsoft was threatened with extinction so many times. If they had not zigzagged, they would have gone extinct like everyone else did. That's an example of a business that's a very fit business. Even though it was a big business, what was important was the fitness of the business. When we look at business like Walmart, for example. That's also a very fit business because they've been so fanatical about delivering value to their customers and efficiency and taking costs out of the system and all of that, that they've taken out everyone and built their footprint.

1:04:04Stig Brodersen:So yes, we want to have the fittest businesses. One of the definitions of fitness is lack of leverage. So when you look at these businesses, you want to see management teams that have the ability to zigzag. And you have a capital structure that allows you the freedom to zigzag. And so I think, yeah, there's a lot of things that you can learn from Darwin that you can apply in the corporate world, which would be helpful. Preston Pyshko Well, let's jump from Darwin and then to our friend Guy. I think Guy would appreciate that we make that jump, but especially in this tricky situation. But I wanted to round off the episode by asking you, Manish, what's the most important thing that you learned from Guy, both whenever it comes to investing, but also about living a good life?

1:04:56Manish Barsky Yeah.

1:04:57Stig Brodersen:Well, first of all, Well, Guy's situation is very unfortunate, very sad, actually. I was so heartbroken, probably still heartbroken. Guy and I are very different people. I would have never predicted that someone like him would be my best friend. I mean, we are so different in how we think about things. I recently wrote a letter to Guy, an old-fashioned letter. I told him that I've often wondered, why do we have a connection? Why do I feel such a strong connection with you? Why do you feel such a strong connection with you? I told him that I concluded that it was because he sees me. You remember the Avatar movie?

1:05:54Stig Brodersen:I see you. You don't remember, Stig. You have to go back and see the movie again. Okay. You've got too much going on. You watch the movie. So, in the movie, there's a point, and they bring it up several points where they make the comment, I see you. And I see you is very deep. And what I was trying to, what I felt with Guy, I still feel is he gets me in a way almost no one gets me. And I get him in a way almost nobody gets him. So I told him, Guy, I think the reason we have this connection is because you see me and I see you. And I remember that one time, Guy and I were going to take an overnight train in India from Mumbai to Delhi.

1:06:55Stig Brodersen:The train leaves at around 4 p.m. from Mumbai and it gets into Delhi around 10 o 'clock in the morning. It's an overnight train. And it's a beautiful train. is the Rajdhani. It's a very nice train. He and I had a two-person private compartment. I told him, Guy, I want to just tell you something, just when the journey was about to start. I said, You see that there's that button there? That's a bell. I said, When you press that bell, the butler is going to show up, and the butler will do whatever you want. but I said that I want you, the first time you press that bell, to drown the butler in cash.

1:07:43Stig Brodersen:I said, the first time you press the bell, don't ask him for anything. Just hand over. And I said, drowning in cash in India,$25 is enough. Okay. He's almost going to have a cardiac at that point. So I said, just ring the bell. So he rings the bell. The butler shows up. Guy gives him the 25. And I'm going to take a little detour for a second before I can continue the story. another friend of mine who used to be an engineer installing cellular networks in Africa. He used to work for AT &T. So they'd go to different African countries and he was in charge. So he said that one time he went to Ghana, okay?

1:08:32Stig Brodersen:And they always put him up in the best hotel, Accra, right on the ocean, beautiful hotel, right? So he says that the porter carrying my luggage to go to my villa, I gave him a dollar,$1 tip. And the guy looked at the dollar and he said, he gave me a full military salute. And he said, no one has ever given me that type of salute or that type of respect ever in my life. So he said, I gave him another dollar and said, can you please do it again? He said, I was giving away a lot of dollars because of the salute. And he said, It was awesome. So anyway, coming back to Guy. And so the guy shows up, gives him the$25.

1:09:18Stig Brodersen:He's like, he's almost died. It's like almost half his month's salary or something. And he said, yes, sir. What can I do for you? So Guy says, nothing right now, please. This was just, we just wanted to say that we're so happy to have you, etc. And the guy couldn't believe. He couldn't believe that we had called him. Thank you. And I said, now, Guy, feel free to ring that bell as often as you want. Okay. And he's going to drop everyone else and be here. Okay. Now, Guy loves to have tea, right? And I said, don't you want some tea, Guy? He says, yeah. So in that 17-hour journey, Guy must have rung that bell like 30 times.

1:10:04Stig Brodersen:Okay. Like there was tea coming every 45 minutes. And then, you know, he's FaceTiming his wife, Lori. He's in an orgasmic state, okay? He's in an orgasmic state in a third world country with a train, whatever. And he's telling his wife, Lori, that in the compartment, we don't have to go to a dining car. In the compartment, they bring me my tea, they bring me biscuits, they bring me this, bring me that. And then I tell him it's slightly cold, they bring me a new one, this, that, whatever. And then he says, for dinner, white tablecloth, everything in our suite, right? And I think he's continuously FaceTiming his wife, telling her this, that, whatever else is going on.

1:10:42And I told Guy, Guy, I see if you were traveling with anyone else, they would not be able to

1:10:50Stig Brodersen:understand what's really going to get you excited. And so that was just a wonderful experience. And I felt many times when I'm doing something, he'll make some comment and I'll say, what? He's looking straight into me. He knows exactly what I need. It was just so beautiful. Wonderful. I see you. Watch the movie again. You said Avatar, didn't you? Avatar, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Go out and watch Avatar. Let that be the final words for this episode. Manish, thank you. Thank you so much for your service to the value investing community. And how poetic that you say all these wonderful things about Guy. I'm sure he would say the same thing about you.

1:11:36And we published this over the Berkshire weekend. Any concluding remarks here before I let you go?

1:11:43Stig Brodersen:Well, you know, Stig, I always enjoy our conversations. And you always impress me so much because every time I'm thinking, Stig is going to have such a hard time. You know, he's asked me everything already. Poor guy has to watch so many hours of videos and all that. But you outdo yourself each time. It's so much fun. Thank you so much. Oh, thank you so much for saying so. All right. We'll see you soon.

1:12:33Stig Brodersen:guarantee of future results. Listeners should do their own research and consult a qualified professional before making any financial decisions. Nothing on this show is a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any security or other financial product. Hosts, guests, and the Investor's Podcast Network may hold positions in securities discussed and may change those positions at any time without notice. References to any third-party products, services, or advertisers do not constitute endorsements, and the Investor's Podcast Network is not responsible for any claims made by them. Copyright by the Investor's Podcast Network.

1:13:02Stig Brodersen:All rights reserved. .