Jason Zweig on Ben Graham, Luck versus Skill, and Investing Self-Control

Jason Zweig

It's great to be with you, William, and we'll leave the compliments aside — but thank you.

Jason Zweig

So my dad was a remarkable guy. He was born on a farm between Albany, New York and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, during World War I. He had kids later in life. He served three tours of duty in World War II because the military lost his records. So he was a farmer, he was a political science professor, he was a newspaper publisher, he became an art and antiques connoisseur, and he was an athlete — he played semi-professional baseball for a couple of years.

He captained a ship in the Navy during World War II, because the Army had a few boats, and my dad was in charge of a minesweeper. His tours of duty took him to South America, the coast of Africa, the Indian Ocean, the South Pacific. He didn't see a lot of combat duty, but he saw enough. Among the many things he taught me was one of his favourite expressions: there's nothing so noble or so horrible that human beings can't do to each other. He was an extraordinary man in a lot of ways, and he was a great storyteller too, and a crusading newspaperman as well.

Jason Zweig

That's correct. In the late 1940s my dad was working on his PhD in political science at Ohio State when, as he put it, he got bit by the newspaper bug, and he just dropped everything and bought a newspaper on the Ohio River, right across from the West Virginia border, in what was then a very poor part of Ohio. There were numerous pottery factories there, because there's a lot of workable clay along the banks of the Ohio River. Apparently one of the towns — all the workers were in the grip of a corrupt union boss who was terrorising everyone and shaking them down for money.

My dad got a bunch of tips from people in the union, and at the next union election he wrote a lot of editorials and investigative journalism exposing this guy as corrupt. The labour union boss's goons came after my dad — slashed his tyres, threatened to beat his then-pregnant wife. As he recalled one of them saying: 'If you don't knock off them stories, we're going to beat that baby out of your wife with a crowbar.' And that was my dad's first wife. Then they ran him off the road on a foggy night, and almost crashed his car down the banks of the Ohio River. But in the end journalism worked — justice prevailed, the union boss was thrown out and a new guy came in. I think my dad spent the rest of his journalism career trying to find another story as good as that one and never really did — most journalists get a handful of great stories in a lifetime, and he had an amazing one. But he was an example of quiet courage.

And I think the other story about my dad that really stays in my memory, William, is that in 1981, when my dad was dying of cancer, I was home for a visit, and the phone rang, and a voice said, 'Is this the Zweig residence?' — a very polite, formal-sounding man. I said yes, can I help you, and he said, 'Is Irving there?' I said yes, but he's not really able to come to the phone, can I take a message, and — as I recall the man's name — he said, 'Well, could you tell him that Glenn Irwin is on the phone?' I knew everything about my parents' business and a lot about their life history, and I had never heard of this man.

I told my dad, and at that point it was very difficult for him to move around the house, because his lung cancer had spread to his legs. But he looked at me, and then a light came on in his eyes, and he said, 'Oh, I'll speak to him,' and he came to the phone with a great deal of difficulty. If you've ever listened to a stunning conversation that you can only hear one half of, it always sticks with you. My dad took the phone and said, 'Glenn,' and after a long pause he said, 'Yes, I remember.' The person at the other end started telling him a story, and my dad kept nodding and saying, 'Yes, I remember, yeah, I remember,' and I saw something I had never seen — I saw my father cry. I couldn't hear almost anything of what Mr Irwin was telling him, but they talked for about ten minutes, and at the end my dad said, 'Thank you very much, I hope so' — which I immediately inferred, and I think correctly, meant that Mr Irwin had said to my dad, 'I hope I will get to see you while I still can.' When he hung up, I said to my dad, 'Who was that?'

And my dad proceeded to tell me the other half of the story.

Sometime around the late 1930s, my dad was a student at Union College in Schenectady, New York, and he was walking to class one morning behind another student. My dad noticed he was Black — at that time he was either the only Black student, or one of maybe three, at the college. My dad had never seen him before, and they were both walking along, minding their own business, when suddenly, from behind a few trees, a bunch of white guys jumped the Black student and started kicking him and beating him up. My dad immediately dropped his books and jumped in and fought back, and took Glenn Irwin's side even though he didn't know who this kid was — it was obvious to him who was right and who was wrong.

Momentarily campus security came along and broke up the fight, and they all got dragged to the office of the president of the university, a very famous scholar named Dixon Ryan Fox. Of course the white kids who had jumped Glenn Irwin all blamed him — they said, 'We were walking along minding our own business and this' — using a racial slur — 'guy attacked us, so we had to fight back, and then this kid came along and made even more trouble, and that's what happened.' Fox turned to my dad and Glenn Irwin and said, 'What's your side of the story?' Glenn Irwin was so scared he couldn't speak, and my dad said, 'Well, President Fox, maybe you remember me from when I was admitted to Union College' — because my dad had gotten a rejection letter when he first applied that said, 'You're qualified for admission, but the Jewish quota is filled,' because in the 1930s most elite educational institutions in this country had a policy that they would only admit so many Jews.

So my dad had immediately got in his family's wagon — because in those days they didn't have cars — and ridden to Schenectady, which was probably twenty-five or thirty miles away, and waited outside President Fox's office all day long until his secretary said he could go in. He said to the president of the college, 'You sent me this letter, and it said the Jewish quota has been filled. Well, as you know, President Fox, the winds of war are gathering in Europe, and young American men may be called into military service — should I tell the US Army that the Jewish quota has been filled when I'm drafted?' So he's telling this story, and President Fox says, 'Yeah, I remember you, young man — why don't you tell me what really happened?'

What happened in the end was that the thugs who attacked Glenn Irwin were expelled. Glenn Irwin went on — if I remember right, he became a chemical engineer and a senior executive at a major company in the US. What to me was so striking about this story is that my dad had never told any of us about this — my mom had never heard it, in fact the day it happened my mom didn't even hear about it, because all this happened between me and my dad. I think that's really the definition of quiet courage: when you do something that noble and you never even talk about it. He completely transformed this man's life. Obviously Mr Irwin was calling because somebody had told him Irving Zweig was very sick, and they hadn't spoken in over forty years.

Jason Zweig

Well, I want to be very careful here — I would never compare the daily or weekly practice of what people like me do to the kind of courage my dad exhibited on occasions like that. But I am guided by something a little different, which is: when I first became the mutual funds editor at Forbes magazine, in 1995, Jim Michaels, the editor of the magazine — of course you knew him as well, William — when he gave me the job, at the end of our conversation I said to him, 'Do you have any advice for me?' — because mutual funds editor at Forbes was actually his first job when he came to the magazine, or one of his first jobs. He thought about it for a second, and then he looked at me and said, 'Don't get anybody's blood on your hands.' That's stuck with me and has stayed with me ever since.

I think it's very important for journalists not to think of themselves as crusaders, not to become self-righteous — we're not better than the people we write about, we're not even better than the people we criticise in our writing, but we do represent our readers. What Jim was trying to tell me is that you have to treat your reader's money as if it were your own, and you have to have that sense of responsibility where you can't recommend an investment approach, or critique something, if you wouldn't put your own money behind what you're saying. I think there is a moral component to that — one expression I like to use is that in the financial food chain, the individual investor is like a piece of plankton. There are sharks and barracudas and little fish and minnows and shrimp and krill, and then down below all of those is the individual investor. It's just so easy to pander, to tell people what they want to hear — and that's not our job. Our job is to tell them what they need to know.

Jason Zweig

Well, I guess a couple of things. I had great mentors at Forbes — Jim Michaels was one, Bill Baldwin was another, and maybe even more importantly, because I worked more with them, Allan Sloan, Gretchen Morgenson, Allan Frank, Howard Ritky — there were just incredible reporters at Forbes in those days. It was a journalistic culture of cynicism and scepticism, and also a fair amount of anger — the reporters and writers really didn't like the way corporate America and Wall Street behaved a lot of the time, and I just drank that up and absorbed it. And fearless, which is unusual — Jim Michaels, who looked a bit like Mr Burns in The Simpsons, a satanic-looking guy, was just so fearless and tough. He edited the magazine for thirty-seven years.

Before I joined the magazine I wrote a trial story exposing a guy who was worth hundreds of millions of dollars — I think the headline was 'Mining the Suckers,' because he was a mining entrepreneur. The guy didn't talk to me, and on my very first day at Forbes, after I'd been hired on the strength of this trial story, this mining millionaire flew in from Singapore to tell Jim Michaels what an appalling guy I am and how I should be fired. So literally on my first day in this job I thought, I'm going to get fired on the first day. I remember Jim Michaels writing to me and asking me for the facts — I backed up various things I'd written, and he wrote back and said, 'All right, I'll just politely tell him to piss off, then.' It was so phenomenal to have an editor with that courage, that he was prepared to take on interests that were powerful and could sue. I'm not sure that would happen anymore — I don't think there are that many magazines and newspapers willing to take on those powers with that kind of fearlessness, because the business isn't so lucrative that you can survive that sort of war.

Jason Zweig

Well, Forbes was Forbes, and a handful of other publications had the luxury then of being incredibly profitable. Although I don't remember the company, I distinctly remember writing a story that was so critical that the company pulled all of its ads from Forbes for the next year. I couldn't tell you at this point who it was, it was so long ago. I remember, right after this happened, bumping into Jim in the hallway or someplace, and he said, 'Congratulations,' and I said, 'What did I do?' and he said, 'You got them to kill all their ads for a year.' The thought that an editor would say that to a reporter today is pretty far-fetched, but in those days it was really a badge of honour.

Jason Zweig

So I think one formative experience I can remember — this was probably before I was the mutual funds editor, or maybe right after — we did something at Forbes that at the Wall Street Journal today we would not be able to do. I, and I think another reporter, called every major brokerage firm and basically impersonated an investor — said, 'I'd like to buy some mutual funds, how do I go about this, what's the sales commission, how much will it cost me every year' — asking about the expenses of the fund. So far as I can recall, not a single one of those conversations was truthful — virtually every broker we spoke to told us something that was false. I guess I learned two things from that: one, don't trust anybody; but two, not everybody tells you things that are false because they're lying — a lot of people tell you things that are false because they don't know any better. The problem is, from the point of view of the end consumer, the individual investor, it almost doesn't matter — if somebody is misleading you, you don't really care whether that's intentional or not. But the conclusion I came away with is that a lot of people in the community that sells investments to the public are either lying or ignorant, and that view has never really changed. Do I think the average financial advisor is a liar or a fool? No — I think most of them are honest people doing their best to earn a living and help the people they work for. But there's still way too many of them who aren't, and woe betide the client who makes the wrong match.

Jason Zweig

Of course it is. The big problem I have is that most financial advisers don't give financial advice — what they do is recommend portfolios, and they're basically investment managers who aren't really qualified to manage investments, which is why they're financial advisers rather than portfolio managers working for Fidelity or another major firm. They call what they do financial advice, but really all they're doing is recommending portfolios, and most clients need more than just portfolio recommendations — they need financial planning advice. Most financial advisers would rather run these little portfolios than give people the advice they need.

Jason Zweig

So, at the risk of disappointing you with a simple answer, I'll say that I've always loved my work so much that I throw a lot of myself into it, and when I'm not on the job I don't want to think about my job — I don't want to do my job when I'm not doing my job. For example, I think the only financial movies I've ever seen are Wall Street and The Big Short — I make a point of not watching any movie that's about finance. Wolf of Wall Street, Boiler Room — I guess those are the four best, but I haven't seen them and I don't plan to, because I don't want to think about investing when I'm not thinking about investing. That's really the answer. I don't want a portfolio that I have to monitor when I'm not monitoring portfolios — when I'm not working I want to be doing something else.

Jason Zweig

Well, first of all, I think there are many ways. Max Heine, who was Michael Price's mentor at Mutual Shares, used to say there are many roads to Jerusalem, and I think that really is true. Just as the concentrated small-cap-value approach you described has a lot of appeal, the opposite does too — there are tons of money managers out there who've built amazing records buying overpriced momentum stocks. I think the key is something people don't talk about very much: a money management firm that isn't structured from the start to optimise for long-term outperformance is never going to be able to sustain it. One of the keys is having a mental and economic alignment between the manager and the clients — if you have the wrong clients, it doesn't matter whether you have the right portfolio; if you have the wrong portfolio and the right clients, they'll be able to see it through with you.

When I read about firms, or encounter or talk to managers at firms that have designed the structure very deliberately — how the fees are set up, will you close to new investment when assets grow beyond a certain level, how do you handle redemptions, how often do you communicate with your clients and what do you tell them — I think the firms that invest the most in that kind of design, and in recognising that successful investing is about creating a community, do best. The members of that community are the companies the portfolio is invested in — those are your investees. Then there's your investors, your clients, and then there's the investment manager. You should think of those things as a triangle, and unless it's an equilateral triangle, it won't be able to sustain its own weight — because when push comes to shove and markets go haywire, one or more of the legs of that triangle will snap. The best firms are the ones that really plan for that in advance.

If you think about the managers who've built amazing track records over the course of decades — Buffett, Munger, or Wilmot Kidd at Central Securities, whom I wrote about late last year — these are people who really have designed their business as if it were an investment, and that's a large part of what's enabled them to succeed. It's not so much what you invest in, it's not even so much how you invest, but how you integrate that process with the business and with your clients, so that it all works together and you minimise the risk. You're not just managing investment risk, you're also managing the business risk of people getting too enthusiastic and euphoric at the wrong time, and also people getting too pessimistic and pulling their money at the wrong time.

Jason Zweig

I'll try. One way I like to think about it is that there's a skill to being lucky. I know you've heard me tell this story before, William, and technically it has nothing to do with investment management, but people often ask me how I got to edit Graham's book The Intelligent Investor. They expect me to say, oh, the publisher did a beauty contest, brought in ten different writers, had each one write a sample chapter, or interviewed people, or whatever — but that's not what happened at all.

I had read a book, and then interviewed the author, called The Luck Factor, by the British psychologist Richard Wiseman. He had done a big nationwide survey of people's attitudes toward luck, and when all the surveys came back, he and his team were going through them, and there was one that really jumped out at him — I'm massively paraphrasing, I'll get all the details wrong, but the essence of it is correct. This woman had said, 'My husband died, two of my kids had cancer' — or 'have cancer' — 'I lost my job, I got it back, but I'm a very lucky person.' He said, 'I really need to interview this woman.' So they brought her in, and he said, 'You've described all these terrible things that happened to you, and yet you say you're lucky — why do you say that?' And she proceeds to tell him this story: after her husband died and her kids got sick, she felt very depressed, as anybody would, and she was really struggling, and then she decided she needed a rule. The rule she came up with was that whenever she's about to go into a room full of people, she thinks of a colour, and then she goes into the room and walks up to the first person wearing anything of that colour and says, 'Hello, my name is —' whatever her name was. Professor Wiseman looks at her and says, 'Well, what does that have to do with luck?' And she says, 'I always have a date on Saturday night.'

So I had just read this and heard the story from him, and there was a huge party at Time Inc — you and I, I think, were both working there at the time — hundreds of journalists there, I forget what the occasion was, and I was talking with, as usual, my closest friends, not really socialising with the group. But before I had walked in the room, I had said to myself — I'm not sure which colour it was, but I'm going to say blue — I had said blue. I looked across the room and there was somebody I knew wearing blue, and I said to my friends, 'Excuse me, I really have to go talk to her' — it was our mutual friend Nina Munk, who's a wonderful writer. I lost her in the crowd, and I thought, I haven't talked to her in three or four years, ah, the heck with it, forget it — and then I thought, no, I have to talk to her because she's wearing whatever colour it was, blue. And I found her because I was looking for the colour, and we had a wonderful talk about nothing in particular, and life went on, and I went back to work the next day.

But it turns out a couple of days later, her book publisher takes her out to lunch to congratulate her for finishing her wonderful book on the takeover of Time Warner by AOL — Fools Rush In — and her publisher says to her, 'Oh, you could help me with one thing — we have this book by this guy who's dead, Benjamin Graham, I think his name is, and it still sells, but it's old, and we need to update it — who do you think would be good for that?' And she said my name. She insists to this day that she would have said my name anyway, but I'm not so sure about that — I think she might have said, 'Well, I don't know, there's like five different people you could try, one of them is Jason Zweig' — but instead, because I just so happened to run over to her because she was wearing the right colour, she said my name, and that's why they hired me.

So the thing is — that was despite the fact that I was trying to outwork everybody else in financial journalism, despite the fact that I had all these great contacts, despite everything I threw into my job — why did I get this honour of a lifetime? Because Nina Munk happened to be wearing a dress whose colour I had thought of, because I had read a book. Skill is hugely important, and it matters, but much of life — maybe most of life — is shaped by just these weird moments of random chance. The more professional you are, and the more intellectual effort is involved in what you do, the more vehemently you will deny the importance of luck, but it affects everyone in every field, and it's hugely important in asset management too.

Jason Zweig

Yeah, it's not. I don't understand why people get so angry when others attribute their success to luck. I don't find it threatening that I'm lucky — the one thing I worry about is that my luck will turn — but being lucky doesn't diminish you, it doesn't make you less skilled, it just means that on top of whatever skill you have, you've also been blessed, either by powers above, if you believe in that, or by random coincidence — you've been blessed with luck. That's a very important thing to remind yourself of.

The first conversation I ever had with Warren Buffett — we were speaking off the record, but I think I can share this part of it — one of the first questions I asked him was how he thinks about himself, given all the praise he gets and the track record he's built up over the decades. This was in the summer of 2003. Do you think you're a genius, with all the people telling you you are? He paused for a long time, and then said, very matter-of-factly, 'No, I think I'm lucky' — and then he went into his concept of the ovarian lottery, which I think is incredibly powerful, and also irrefutable. If Warren Buffett had been born in another time or a different place, he wouldn't have been Warren Buffett. If he'd been born a century earlier, or even a decade earlier or later, he wouldn't have amounted to what he ended up achieving. And if he'd been born in a different place — what if he had been born in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, or Yangon, Myanmar? We would never have heard of him.

I remember him telling a story to Guy Spier and Mohnish Pabrai at a charity lunch he had with them, back in, I think, 2008 or so, where he had just come back from a trip to China with Bill Gates, and he was talking about how he had seen some guy pulling in the boats — roughly correctly enough that we can get away with it — and he said that guy, however smart he is, could never have done what I've done, because he just wasn't born in the same place. He didn't have — at that time, Ben Graham's books weren't available in Mandarin. So even the good fortune, not just of being born in America at that time, when it was booming, but actually having access to Ben Graham, was transformative.

Jason Zweig

So Graham was just extraordinarily brilliant. One detail you omitted, William, was that he was offered those three positions on the faculty at Columbia at age twenty, because he was admitted when he was sixteen. And the other detail I love is that Graham applied to matriculate at Columbia when he was fifteen, and Columbia — as only Columbia could — lost his application, because otherwise he almost certainly would have been a college freshman at age fifteen. He was such a star student that three of the university's strongest departments wanted to hire him to teach before he'd even graduated — that gives you some sense of his brilliance.

The other anecdotes I love about Graham are that late in his life, after he retired, he was travelling in Latin America and heard about this wonderful novel published in Spanish by an Uruguayan writer — his name I think is de Benedetto — so Graham taught himself Spanish and translated the novel. He also wrote a Broadway play that was produced on Broadway. He held several patents, including one for an improved calculator, and when he was twenty-one or twenty-two he had an article on advanced calculus published in the Journal of the American Mathematical Association. Graham was as close to a Renaissance man as Wall Street has ever seen — one of his hobbies was translating Homer into Latin and Virgil into Greek, and he used to play multilanguage Scrabble with people when he lived in the south of France, where you could make a word in whichever language you chose, and Graham would of course try to intercept your word with a word in whatever language he felt like. Something tells me he won most of those games.

So he was extraordinarily brilliant, and I think that really helped him as an investor. One of the most indelible memories I have as a financial reporter — I'm not going to name any names — many years ago, probably in the 1990s, I was at the Morningstar investment conference in Chicago, and after the day sessions a bunch of portfolio managers went out to dinner, and I tagged along. We got a private room at some restaurant in Chicago, and there were probably a dozen managers around the table. At one point there was a lull in the conversation, and I said, 'I have a question for everybody at the table' — they all went silent, and I'd made it clear we were off the record, so nobody would ever get named, we were talking freely — and I said, 'I want each of you to tell me what your hobby is.' I point to the first manager, and he says golf. Second manager says golf. Third manager says, yeah, I like golf. And around the table it went, and finally the last guy, after everyone had named golf, said, 'My hobby is tennis.'

So my point is that what made Graham so great was that he was multidimensional. Most professional portfolio managers are extremely dull people — they work very hard, they do nothing but think about investing, a lot of them think about investing all day long, all night long, all weekend long. Peter Lynch used to brag about taking a briefcase of papers home and spending his weekend reading 10-Ks and 10-Qs, and I personally find that very credible. Graham wasn't like that — when Graham was still not an old man, when he was about sixty, he quit, he stopped running professional portfolios, and he just decided he would go read books and write books and do the kind of things he enjoyed. And there was a lot of romance involved as well — that was when he was a little younger, I think.

Jason Zweig

Well, in other contexts I have called Graham the Wilt Chamberlain of Wall Street — he was a big believer in free love, let's put it that way, he got around, the old boy — and yet at the same time was also a kind of model of integrity when it came to the way he treated his clients in the investment business. It's a fascinating character — there's a complexity and a contradiction there.

Jason Zweig

Exactly — that's interesting, that emphasis on integrity. I think that's totally right, and it is interesting and complicated. I mean, Graham was not the person you would want to model your relationship advice on — I think anyone who has a partner or spouse or significant other should be very glad if their partner doesn't act like Ben Graham. However, anybody who's a client of a money management firm would want their portfolio manager to act exactly like Graham. He succeeded in compartmentalising that — maybe it even, in some odd way, helped him, maybe being a little disorderly and breaking the rules in one part of his life helped him observe the rules in the other. It's interesting to speculate about — I've never really thought about it that way.

Jason Zweig

Yeah, that's such a good observation, William. The anecdote that stands out for me from Graham's life story is that when he was a very small child — this was after his dad had died — his mother had to cash a cheque, or make a withdrawal, at the bank, and she asked Graham to take it. Graham had to go to the teller, and the teller said, out loud, to the bank floor, 'Is Mrs Graham good for this amount?' It just stuck with him — it was maybe five dollars or something, which of course in those days was a lot more than it is today, but it still wasn't much. I think Graham was traumatised by loss, and in several of his books and articles he has this expression: 'the future is something to be guarded against.'

I think this is the biggest knock on Graham — the criticism so many people have been making of him for twenty years, and I think it's valid. Charlie Munger makes the same point — one of the first times I interviewed Munger, he said to me Graham was afraid the Depression would repeat, and he always saw another depression around the corner, and all he cared about was surviving that. In The Intelligent Investor he talks about the difference between protection and projection — growth stocks, growth investors, are in the projection business, they're trying to extrapolate a fabulous line of growth into the future, they're projecting it, and Graham cares about protecting — he's worried about the downside, because he really suffered it and really felt it. Both Buffett and Munger went through the Great Depression, but they were much younger than Graham, and they saw the country come roaring back. Graham had been through many more severe cycles — he was a young adult when the Federal Reserve was created, so he had lived through the Panic of 1907, when there was no lender of last resort and it wasn't clear if the financial system would survive. So he was obsessed with the downside and protecting against it.

If I were revising the book today, that would be the main issue I'd be struggling with — how do we reconcile the need for protection with the importance of projection? We're not investing for today, we're investing for tomorrow, and if all you do is protect, then how will you prosper tomorrow? I think that's a valid criticism of Graham's approach.

Jason Zweig

Temperamentally, yeah — I mean, sure, I'm a worrier, but I also am an optimist. I've seen too many good things happen in my own life, and frankly in the world's life, to be a pessimist. I think it was — I forget who it was, an Israeli prime minister, either Ben-Gurion or Golda Meir — who said, 'To be a realist, you have to believe in miracles.' It's kind of true — you think back a decade or so ago, who would have expected cloud computing, or fracking, or that the US would be energy independent? That seemed impossible fifteen years ago. Progress doesn't stop, as negative and horrible as a lot of the headlines are, and as worried as I am — as I think any thinking person has to be — about the polarisation in our society, the rising resentment and distrust of expertise, the anger across the political spectrum at the other side. I just don't know how you can really be a pessimist.

Jason Zweig

What Peter said was that survival is the only path to wealth — I think that's exactly what he said. For anybody who doesn't know, Peter was just this extraordinary figure — he was over ninety when he died, he worked on Wall Street for over sixty years, he was an economist, a portfolio manager, and probably the most sophisticated observer of the investment management business I've ever come across, and wrote a beautiful book called Against the Gods: A History of Risk, which is one of the great books — I somehow have a signed copy that he inscribed to me, and I have no recollection at all of whether he gave it to me. This is the joy of middle age — I truly don't remember if I met him.

Jason Zweig

Yeah, but it's really true, because the thing is — I think Peter is giving us the bridge that solves this conundrum you raised with Graham, the bridge between protection and projection — if all you do is project, you may well not survive, and if all you do is protect, you may not have enough growth to really thrive over the long term. You need to do both — you need to protect your downside, you need to have that margin of safety, but you also have to ensure you haven't truncated your upside too much. Graham got out of the market in the late 1960s or so and never really got back in, and he was probably a lot more conservative than he needed to be. On the other hand, once you win the game, stop playing — he had all the money he needed or wanted, so what would he put it at risk for? I think the single most important principle any of us can take from Graham's emphasis on protection is: don't take a risk you don't need to take. That's true if you're a professional portfolio manager, and it's true if you're just an individual investor — you should take intelligent risks, which means risks you need to take and understand.

Jason Zweig

So this is — Peter was a huge fan of Pascal's wager. For anybody who doesn't know, the great theologian and philosopher Pascal proposed this thought experiment which has become known as Pascal's wager. The basic idea is: either God exists or he doesn't, you have a choice between living an ethical life or not — if you live an immoral life, you'll have a lot of fun while you're doing it, and if you live a moral life, it probably won't be as much fun while you're living it. So you're basically wagering: does God exist or doesn't he? If God exists, then you don't lose anything as the person who lived the moral life, but the immoral person is in a lot of trouble.

Peter really emphasised framing things in terms of Pascal's wager, which is not so much the way most people think when they invest — most people think, how much am I going to make if I'm right? Peter's point is you also need to ask, how much am I going to lose if I'm wrong? It hurts a lot more to be wrong than it feels good to be right, and being wrong once, if you're too wrong, can take you out of the game permanently — if you get wiped out, you're done.

Jason Zweig

Yeah, correct. It's kind of interesting — this is another area where Buffett and Munger really diverge from Graham. Graham invested in categories of securities — if railroad stocks were cheap, he would just buy every railroad stock that was cheap, and he wouldn't buy one, he would buy dozens. If he thought utilities were cheap, he would buy every utility he could find that was cheap. Graham was a huge believer in diversification, and Buffett and Munger are not. I think the right way to think about it is that diversification is inverse to the likelihood that you have superior knowledge and you're actually right — the more sure you are that you know what you're doing, that you're doing something not everybody else is, and that there's an asymmetry between the downside and the upside, the more you should put in that asset. Great investors will tend to be under-diversified, because they feel, or their experience tells them, that they should concentrate. The problem with that is that people aren't very good at assessing how valid their signals of confidence are — it's part of normal human behaviour to be overconfident, and if you're overconfident about the things you're over-concentrating in, the result is not likely to be very accretive in the long run.

Jason Zweig

Yeah, and William, it's worth emphasising for people the sequel — Bill was almost looking forward, in a way, he was almost looking ahead, because he did the same thing seven or eight years later with financials, and he wasn't right, and then the sequel to the sequel is he did the same thing with Bitcoin, and was right.

Jason Zweig

Yeah, it does, and I think the challenge all great professionals face is this push and pull between the sense that you are exerting actual skill and the need for humility. Whenever I hear anyone talk about being humble, I want to throw up — if you're talking about your own humility, then you don't have any. I had a conversation a few years ago with a guy I was friends with, who I was helping with a memoir that hasn't been published, a multi-billionaire art collector, and I was talking about how someone had said something about humility and vanity, and he said, 'No one is more humble than I am' — and I sort of burst out laughing, because I thought he was joking, and then I realised, no, he's totally serious. Here is this multi-billionaire saying, 'Nobody is more humble than I am.' Humility — wonderful, I'm the best at being humble, look at me.

I think the key is that combination — you can't be good at something if you don't think you're good at it, and if you've been a professional investor for years with a successful track record, it's sort of inconceivable that you'd come into the office each day saying, 'Oh God, what am I going to screw up next?' You come in with a sense of exerting your skill and demonstrating your power and your facility and your knowledge, and without that you'd be lost. On the other hand, you can't let it go to your head. Ultimately I think the only way to resolve humility is with paradox — there's a wonderful expression, I think somewhere in the Tao Te Ching, that says something like: the truly healthy man has a soul without knowing it. It's that you want to be humble, and you seek to be humble, but you don't really expect to achieve it, because if you did, you'd end up sounding like the person I was just describing.

Jason Zweig

So the first time I ever met Buffett, which, as I think I mentioned earlier, was in July 2003, what really struck me about him was his warmth and empathy — it really feels as if you're the only person he wants to talk to. He is incredibly good at focusing his attention on you as a person — he asked me at least as many questions about myself as I asked him, and very interesting questions. When I later learned more about his background and development as a person, I realised that came to him after decades of what must have been brutal, relentless effort — if you read the Alice Schroeder biography of Buffett, he was so shy when he was young that he was almost literally socially paralysed, he couldn't speak to people. So through Dale Carnegie courses, through just discipline and effort, he remade himself into the kind of person he wanted to be. How many people do any of us know who have completed a self-transformation like that? It's almost like — most alcoholics would never use this term, but it's almost like someone who's a recovered alcoholic — he didn't want to be the person he had been, and he became somebody entirely different. I think he's applied that kind of emotional discipline and steely power to his day job as well, in a way that most of us probably aren't capable of doing.

Every investor I've ever met — if you say to them, 'Will you buy more stocks if the stock market goes down 10%?' — I've never met anybody who would say no, I wouldn't do that. But when the stock market goes down 10%, it's gone down 10% because a lot of people were selling — so what does that tell you? When the stock market goes down 10%, Buffett sits up and starts looking, because he says, 'Oh, this is getting interesting,' and the more it goes down, the more interested he gets. That's why I use the term 'inversely emotional' — and when I've discussed it with him, he says, yes, that's correct. 'I use other people's emotion as a cue for my own — when other people are enthusiastic, I become pessimistic, and when they're negative, I become positive.'

Jason Zweig

So I think the most remarkable experiment I participated in was at Emory University — it's a little too complicated to describe here, but to boil it down to the essence: I was presented with a choice problem, A or B, and there was a reward associated with the choices, and I was in the MRI scanner trying to solve these problems while my brain was being scanned. My conscious mind was working like crazy trying to figure out what to do, and while I was deliberating what the optimal choice was, my right hand, which was hovering over the button press you use to record your responses inside an MRI machine, my right index finger was going ding, ding, ding — because my unconscious mind had figured out the answer, even as the prefrontal cortex of me was totally flummoxed by the problem. The unconscious mind, the one that had gotten the reward, was like, 'Oh, the reward is over here — stop thinking and go get the sugar water,' because that was the reward, basically a sweet drink they were piping into my mouth. I remember flying home on the plane, looking out the window, and just saying, holy — what the hell just happened to me? It's really humbling when you discover there's this sort of subterranean creature living in your head doing all this stuff, and you have no awareness that it's going on — and frankly you never will, unless you're exposed to those kinds of conditions, which are obviously extraordinarily rare.

Jason Zweig

So, as I know you're aware, William, because you helped him do it, Guy Spier has written a lot about the importance of — I'm going to call it — investing hygiene. That term 'hygiene' comes up a lot — Danny Kahneman uses it in his new book, Noise, he uses the expression 'decision hygiene.' It's a term I love, and I think that's the key. One of the phrases I like, that I've often used when I talk with fund managers and institutional investors, is: anything that can be made a matter of policy and procedure should be made into a policy and procedure. The idea is you want to take your subjective judgement out of the process, out of the decision process, as often and as thoroughly as you can — you don't want to remove it completely, because you're not a machine and you haven't been hired to be one, but wherever it isn't essential, you want to get rid of it. So you want rules and policies and procedures, and a lot of if-then statements in your investment process — if this stock goes down 25%, then, if I own it, I must re-evaluate it to see if I should be buying more and averaging down, or whether something fundamental about the company has changed and I should sell; if I don't yet own it, then, because it's on my watch list, I should be evaluating it as a purchase, because it's just gotten a lot cheaper. Everything should be an if-then statement that can be an if-then statement, and the more rules and policies and procedures you have, the more checklists and watch lists you can build into your process, the better your hygiene is.

Then, of course, the other key, which Guy Spier has written about, and you've written about extensively, is it's not just what you do, but where and how you do it. Sir John Templeton managed money from Lyford Cay. Buffett manages money from Omaha. You don't have to work on Wall Street, or in Manhattan, or on Bay Street in Toronto, or in the London financial centre, or Hong Kong, or whatever — it could be very constructive for you to be doing what you're doing in the middle of nowhere, where you don't have those influences. Anything you can do to break the usual pattern of reaction and response, and hot emotion, can be really powerful.

Jason Zweig

Yeah, well, first of all, thanks for the kind words, William, and I think we should tell our audience that over the years you haven't just edited me, I've also edited you, and taken great pleasure in that, regardless of which side of the red pen I was on. But yeah, I think one thing that's important for everyone to think about is that investing is a head game — but isn't everything? When you watch two of the world's greatest tennis players hammering the ball at each other across the net, who's going to win — the one who's bigger, stronger, faster? Maybe. Or is it going to be the one who stays focused, and who doesn't let his or her own mistakes ruin the match? I'm a very poor recreational tennis player, and one of the reasons I sort of stopped doing it was that I found I would get so frustrated at my own mistakes that I couldn't calm myself back down. There's a useful lesson in that, which is that skill in one domain doesn't really carry over to every other — I think I'm very good at managing my investment emotions, but I'm really bad at managing my tennis emotions.

Investing is, above all else, a head game, because everyone we're competing with in the financial markets has pretty much the same resources at their disposal. After Reg FD in the United States, no analyst really gets some inside scoop before some other analyst — everybody has a Bloomberg machine, everybody reads the Wall Street Journal, stock quotes are instantaneous, there's a hundred-and-whatever-thousand CFAs around the world. It's an unbelievable, competitive marketplace — so what would distinguish the greats from the very goods? It kind of has to be something they're bringing in from outside, which is their own character. If you want to be great, you're going to have to put as much effort into cultivating your character as you do into managing your portfolio.

Jason Zweig

So the first day we officially started working together, Danny did something amazing, which is he did the planning fallacy exercise with me. The planning fallacy, for anybody who doesn't know, is that when people commence large or complicated projects and estimate how long and how difficult they will be, they look at the inside information available to them — who's doing this, what are we trying to do, what resources do we have, how good are we — that's the inside view. The outside view is: who else has tried stuff like this, and how hard was it for them, and how long did it take them.

So Danny sat me down, and we did a planning fallacy exercise — he said, 'So how long does it typically take people to write a book?' and eventually we got into details like how many words a day is it realistic to write, and how many days in a row can people write. We went through all this, and he was very open and very adamant — he said, 'I'm doing this because I want us both to be realistic about what we're getting into, because I know that if we don't do this, we'll be absurdly overoptimistic.' At the end of the exercise, after he had grilled me for over an hour, we mutually decided it should take a year and a half, maybe two. That would have been 2007 — the book came out in 2011. He almost quit about twenty times, and we underestimated by at least half.

But that is the remarkable characteristic that Danny has — he approaches everything with a clean slate, and he doesn't take anything for granted. I remember at one point we were making small talk about something, my kids were very young at that point, and I said something like, oh, my wife and I are kind of strict parents, and he turned to me and said, 'Why?' — and I suddenly realised I didn't know. I was like, yeah, why do we do that? I don't know. And another time we were walking along the street and someone came by, gushing over their dog on the leash, going 'goo, goo' at it, and Danny said, 'That's something I know nothing about — why do people do that?' I said, 'Our dogs are wonderful, Danny,' and he said, 'No, but why do people love dogs as much as they love people?' That ability to look at the world as if you've never seen it before is really extraordinary — to take every fact presented to you and treat it as some kind of alien object you know nothing about. He gave me many gifts when we worked together, but I think that was the greatest, along with letting go of sunk costs, which I think is so important, and he really taught me that.

So we had worked very hard on a chapter of the book — I'm not sure at this point which one it was, I'm going to say it was probably the chapter about Paul Meehl's research. Paul Meehl was one of the great psychologists of the twentieth century, and a hero of Danny's. We had worked on this chapter for weeks, and we finished it, and it was beautiful, and I went to bed that night feeling very pleased with what we'd accomplished. I woke up the next morning and had all these 'Danny-grams' in my mailbox — anybody who knows Danny Kahneman well talks about Danny-grams, which are these emails he starts sending around two or three in the morning, incredibly dire and pessimistic, and they just keep getting darker. I think the first one's subject line was something like 'This will not do,' and then it became 'This is terrible,' and then the subject lines became things like 'Horrible,' 'I am ashamed,' 'This is ridiculous,' and then I think there was one that said 'Disaster.'

So I'm reading these, and my forehead is dripping sweat, my palms are sweating, I'm feeling nauseous — and then, maybe around eight in the morning, comes an email that says, 'I think I can fix it.' Danny is not much of a sleeper, and when he wakes up in the middle of the night he just gets up and does this. By the end of the day he had completely rewritten the entire chapter — it was as if it had been written by another person, almost a person from another planet, the tone was different, the substance was different, the organisation was different, the material he used to make the points was all different, and it was great. The next morning I went down to his apartment, as I did every day at that point, and I walked in and said to him, 'Danny, how did you do that?' He just turned to me — he was making coffee — and said, 'I have no sunk costs.' That was just his way of saying that if it didn't work, try something else and see if that'll work. For a writer, and I think for anybody who makes decisions of any kind, that's a very valuable lesson — you can't let go of everything you do and start from scratch, but whenever something isn't working beautifully, you should smash it and start over, and see if you can make it work beautifully.

Jason Zweig

Well, thanks for the question, Alon, and enjoy the book. I don't think there's any doubt in my own mind which bias has been most harmful and difficult for me to overcome, although of course I could be wrong — for me it would be overconfidence. A few years ago I wrote an essay called 'Overconfidence: An Autobiography,' in which I told a story about my first week in college, in which I made a total, complete idiot of myself in front of all my classmates, without understanding that's what I was about to do. It's a moment that has lived with me ever since, and I don't think I'll ever forget it.

One of the beauties of working at the Wall Street Journal, and having hundreds of thousands, in fact millions, of readers, is you can't really make a mistake and get away with it — to the best of my knowledge, within about thirty seconds of when a column of mine is published that has an error in it, the emails start to come in. That does keep me honest. Making mistakes isn't enough to keep you from being overconfident — what helps is making mistakes and learning that you made them, and I'm very fortunate that I have an audience that will immediately let me know if anything I say isn't accurate. It also helps to be married, or to be in a long-term relationship with somebody — I don't know if you know the wonderful line from H. L. Mencken, William — Mencken was a great American journalist in the early part of the twentieth century — I love one of his expressions, that a man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.

Jason Zweig

Yeah, I mean, I had both the incredible good fortune and the misfortune of growing up in a very unusual way. I grew up on a farm at the end of a dirt road, twelve miles from the nearest stoplight, in the middle of nowhere, and I was far and away the best student in my teeny class — probably the entire school. By the time I was eighteen I thought I was brilliant, because, I guess, by academic comparison, that's what the numbers were telling me. And then, of course, I got to college and found out that everybody else was brilliant too — suddenly I wasn't valedictorian of a class of thirty-one students, because five of them had dropped out over the course of my senior year in high school, I was near the bottom of my class. That was a really powerful lesson to me.

The other difficulty you run into is that when you do anything for a long time, you eventually learn stuff, and the real danger for a journalist, and I think for investment managers as well, or any kind of investor, is thinking you know all the answers and eventually running out of questions. So the longer I do this, the harder I work at making sure I don't run out of questions, and trying to keep digging into things I don't know enough about, or things I know nothing about, to keep myself hungry. That's another way I think you can try to keep your head from swelling.

Jason Zweig

Well, I guess I'd say — I'm sort of quoting myself from the column I did today — you can be right about the future and be wrong about how to profit from it. Think back to the fourth quarter of 1999, or the first couple of months of 2000: if you believed, as an investor, that the internet was going to change the world, and that it was going to be the biggest fundamental shift in how the economy worked in at least a generation, you would have been absolutely right. But that doesn't mean you should have gone out and bought Yahoo and Cisco and WorldCom and Global Crossing at hundreds of times earnings. The question isn't whether a technology is disruptive — because new technologies come along all the time, and a lot of them are disruptive — the question is whether it's disruptive and priced appropriately. A lot of the estimates of the future market for various disruptive technologies are very aggressive — back in the late nineties people were making estimates for the growth of the internet that were ridiculous, which is why every internet stock traded at bubble valuations. If you had bought only Amazon, and maybe eBay, you would have done very well, but if you had bought all of them, you would have done terribly — if you had bought indiscriminately, you would have lost almost all your money. So that's the real question.

Then I think there's another element people are missing, which is that disruptive technologies don't just disrupt the entrenched technologies, they disrupt themselves. It's entirely possible that what we'll see in crypto is this kind of massive, endless cannibalisation, where new coins arise constantly and push the earlier coins aside. One element I do think a lot of younger investors don't fully appreciate is that entire markets can disappear — this is one reason Graham was pessimistic, and I don't think he was wrong in this respect. Just because there's been a deep, liquid, active market for an asset for a long time doesn't mean there always will be — if the world changes, and it moves away from that asset, the market for the asset, and the asset itself, will basically disappear.

After my parents were in the newspaper business, they became art and antique dealers, and specialised in eighteenth-century American furniture — pieces we would have sold to some of the finest museums in the country for ten or twenty thousand dollars or more in the 1970s are today probably worth a quarter or a third of that, because nobody wants eighteenth-century American furniture anymore, and the market has basically gone away. My dad loved to tell a story about Tiffany lamps: when he was a teenager, during the Depression, my aunt, his sister, was just starting to date, and my grandfather — who, in addition to being a farmer, was also an estate dealer, he would buy entire houses full of people's furnishings and resell it as a way to make it through the Depression — had bought the estate of a New York state senator who lived in Albany, and the contents of that house included a very large collection of Tiffany lamps, dozens of them. My grandfather brought them all home and stuffed them into the farmhouse, and my aunt said to her brothers, 'I can't bring any boys home because of these ugly lamps.' My grandfather went on a horse-buying trip out to Montana or South Dakota, as he did every summer, and was gone for a week or two, and finally my aunt complained so much about the lamps that my grandmother said, 'It's okay, I'll take the risk — get rid of the lamps.' So my dad and his brothers loaded up the farm wagon with all the Tiffany lamps and drove to the local dump, and it was a beautiful sunny day, and they had a javelin contest, picking up the Tiffany floor lamps and heaving them onto the top of the dump — my dad described how beautiful they were, smashing in the sun, all red and green and blue and yellow. My grandfather came home a few days later and beat the crap out of all the brothers. My dad was telling us this story, I don't know, in the late seventies or early eighties, and today those lamps would be worth millions of dollars collectively, but in 1932, or whatever that was, they were junk — nobody wanted them, they were such junk that my aunt couldn't bring any boyfriends into the house because they would make fun of her for having these ugly old lamps.

So that's what can happen — markets can just disappear for generations, or permanently. You can't take a liquid market for granted — ask somebody who owned equities in Russia in 1913, or in Germany in 1938. That's why Graham believed in preparing for disaster, and believed in the importance of protection. If you're investing in a speculative asset class, and all you're doing is projecting, and you're not putting any energy into protecting — you're not asking yourself what could go wrong, and what would happen to me if it does — then you're not really investing, you're speculating.

Jason Zweig

Right, of course — I think all of us know from our own personal lives that wildly unpredictable things happen all the time, and then we turn to our investment portfolios and say, well, we're in control here — and it's kind of like, no, that's not the way the universe works. You just have to accept that.

Jason Zweig

Yeah, I guess I see it a little differently — I think of having a thick skin as being open to learning. If I agree with you about everything, then I can't really learn from you, and it's easiest to learn from people who disagree with us. I just don't understand the way society seems to be devolving toward the belief that everyone who disagrees with me is an idiot, and anybody who thinks I'm wrong is my enemy. I try to regard people who think I'm wrong as my intellectual friends, because they can teach me — if what they're trying to tell me is wrong, it can't harm me, but if what they're trying to teach me is right, that's hugely important for me to know. I guess the same kind of openness applies to adversity, in an odd sort of way — setbacks in life teach us lessons and make us stronger, and if you're too afraid of that, you can't learn from difficult experiences. If you're trying to shut them out, you have to just accept them and roll with the punches.

Jason Zweig

So, well, I wish I could say I have a really good work-life balance, but I don't — the pandemic has really wreaked havoc with that, and I'm not proud of it, I've been working way too hard and not playing nearly enough. But yeah, I mean the important principle, I think, to the whole question of money and happiness, is that people don't really learn from their own mistakes — they say things like, 'I really want that new car,' or 'I really want to renovate my kitchen,' or 'I really want that piece of jewellery, or those shoes, or those five-hundred-dollar sneakers,' or the new Peloton bike. Possessions and material goods don't really do much for people's happiness, because of adaptation — as soon as we possess something and take it into our daily lives, we start to get used to it, we acclimatise to it. The simplest way to think about it is new-car smell — the last time you bought a car and got in and smelled that new-car smell, whatever that is, you're like, ah, I love the smell of this car — and then it's gone after two weeks, and after a month or two the cat has scratched the back seat, the kids have vomited on the upholstery, there are muffin crumbs in the gear shift and coffee stains on the upholstery and mud on the floor and the fenders are dented, and a little while later the mechanical problems start. That's kind of the way most material possessions work.

The way you use money to improve your happiness is through purchasing experiences — which means basically memories that you create with friends and family, vacations, celebrations, flowers and feasts, as Danny Kahneman likes to say, anything that brings people you love together, because as time passes the event actually grows in positive emotion for you when you think back on it. The other thing is making yourself a better and more well-rounded person — taking courses, volunteering for non-profits, committing to your place of worship, anything that puts you in a position to join with other people doing things that help other people, that can bolster your spiritual growth — so you don't just write a cheque to your favourite philanthropy, but rather you volunteer for that philanthropy, you wash the floors or serve the food at the benefit, whatever it might be — something that commits you not just with your wallet, but body and soul.

Jason Zweig

Yeah, I mean, I do have causes I care about — in my case a lot of them are environmental, and there are some others as well. I also want my kids to have some security — Buffett has that wonderful expression, you should give your kids enough money so that they can do anything, but not enough so that they can do nothing, and I think that's pretty wise. I guess, for any of us, when we think about leaving a legacy, it's usually about something we do, not something we have. The best epitaph I know of was actually the motto of the great Flemish artist Jan van Eyck, which was Als ich kan — loosely translated, 'I did the best I could,' which I think is wonderful. What more could you ever ask from a person? If the legacy you leave is that other people would say about you, 'He did the best he could,' or 'she did the best she could, they did the best they could' — that's pretty good.

Jason Zweig

Oh boy — we're really ending with the morbidity, aren't we. Well, gee — I hope my kids would remember me as fair and always honest. Honesty is, I think, my greatest, maybe my only, virtue as a parent — I think I've always been honest with my kids. The thing I hope I imparted to them is the importance of trying to find something you believe in and just give it your all.

You know this story, William, but maybe not everybody listening has heard it — so when my dad was very sick, a couple of months before he died, I came up from college to visit home, and, as he always did, not long after I got there he asked me what I was reading, because books were very important to him. Of course, I was a college kid, so I was full of myself, and I very proudly said, 'Kierkegaard' — the Danish philosopher, who's pretty dark, by the way — and my dad said, 'What is he telling you?' I happened to remember this beautiful line I had just read, while I was on the train, that Kierkegaard wrote: 'No individual can assist or save the age — he can only express that it is lost.' I thought this was so beautiful and sad, and sort of jaded and existentialist, and my dad — he was in a lot of pain at that point — but he said, 'Yeah, he's right.' And he paused, and said, 'But that's why you have to try to save and assist the age.' I thought that was just incredible — not just that my dad had out-existentialised the great existentialist, but that he had put his finger on something that was incredibly profound, which is: life is hard work, careers are hard work, families are hard work, and it can be very tempting to give in and say, this is bigger than I am — but that feeling is part of what should keep you going.

Jason Zweig

Well, thank you, William, although, aside from embarrassing me, you're also making me feel old. Yeah, I mean, you just do the best you can — I just place a lot of store in what Jim Michaels said, that we talked about at the beginning, that you don't want to get anybody's blood on your hands, and that's a pretty good guide. I often tell fund managers that they would be better off if their firms always asked, 'Would we want our mothers to invest in this?' Out south and in the west you'll often see this bumper sticker on cars, WWJD — What Would Jesus Do — and I'd like to see a bumper sticker, WWMB — What Would Mom Buy. If you're designing some investment product you wouldn't be proud to have your mom own, maybe you should bury it out back and not try to sell it to the public, because if it isn't good enough for your mom, it isn't good enough for anybody else either. I think that's one reason we revere Buffett and Munger — they're not just great at making money, they've done it in a pretty honourable way, treating their shareholders as partners, transparent, admitting their mistakes.

Jason Zweig

Absolutely — I think that's really important.

Jason Zweig

No, I don't think so — I think we covered a ton of ground. As long as we fully disclose to people that we've been friends for a very long time, and hopefully that survived this interview — barely.

Jason Zweig

My pleasure, William — always great to be with you, it's a real delight.