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and one thing that might help someone with that is humility which is something you're a big fan of and that's a key Cornerstone of our investment culture here yeah good you're also a fan of Peter Bernstein I believe and I just wanted to read a quote from him humility is an enormously important quality you can't win without it survival in the end is where the winners are by definition and survival begins with humility can you reflect on that a little for us oh well that's that's a great quote from Peter I have a lot of respect for Peter Bernstein um um first of all it it kind of goes without saying but I'll say it anyway you can't succeed if you don't survive and one of my favorite adages is don't forget the man who was six feet tall who drowned crossing the stream that was five feet deep on average the concept of surviving on average is irrelevant you have to survive every day which means really that you have to survive on the bad days and so that's why I say you have to arrange your Affairs which means you're financing your capital from your investors whatever it is or your portfolio so that you can survive on the bad days so that's that's one thing but humility it's all about humility you have to you know Dirty Harry the said a man has to know his limitations uh Mark Twain said that that when you're when you know something for certain you can get into big trouble it's absolutely the truth and um you know nothing in our business is certain and anybody who's certain is is is really missing missing the point so and we say something similar to how you say it which is that we always have to know what we don't know yeah and when you and I had that prep call we we competed with each other about how much we knew that we didn't know what you won because you've been knowing what you didn't know for longer than I'm not knowing what I don't know but you know it's uh I I wrote two memos uh in the middle of 20 in the middle of pandemic in probably June of 20 I call uncertainty and uncertainty too talking about the importance of how uncertain things are the importance of acknowledging that especially to yourself we have to be honest with ourselves and uh and there's something called intellectual humility which I think is extremely important you know what that means intellectual humility very simple the other person could be right and if you go into a discussion and say with this with the belief that the other person could be right you're going to have a much more productive discussion do you think like just one last question for you on humility something we've talked about is um sometimes it's harder to be humble when you're losing actually when you're winning you can just that you can be humble and it looks very gracious but when things are working against you sometimes it can be more difficult no I think I think it's it's hard for most people to be humble at any time because they're they're they have these defenses that that require them to overlooked their flaws and their limitations and uh so you know look I think that thing about experience is what you got when you did what you wanted turn that around what did you get when you got what you wanted if you look at a human endeavor I believe strongly that success carries within itself the seeds of failure and failure carries the seeds of success what do you learn from success I can do it I can do it again it's easy I can do it in other fields I can do it with more money I can do it alone it was me it wasn't a team and these are horrible lessons so I think the success teaches terrible lessons because it plays to our ego and and uh you know I think you'll learn more from from your failures and and hopefully you learn humility on this is that how do you balance that the importance of knowing there's incompleteness of knowledge with the fact that ultimately you have to make some decisions because you're managing people's money all these things are about balance if you assume you know nothing you can't function if you think you know everything you're going to get in trouble you have to strike a balance and and hopefully it's inappropriate think about confidence if you're an investor if you don't have confidence then every time you you buy something if it goes down you're going to sell it because you're afraid it's going to go down more and you're going to be a abject failure you have to have confidence you have to if you if you buy something it goes down you have to reuse it reassess your thesis and and if it's intact you have to buy more or you can't be great uh but on the other hand if you if you have hubris and you feel you can't possibly be wrong and every time something goes down you blindly Double Down then you're probably going to get into trouble and maybe be asked to leave the industry um so but so you have to have this balance confidence but not overconfidence uh humility but not over humility and then one um question for you just on pushing on this concept of knowing what you don't know so we have a lot more data now by definition than ever in the history of the world and on one argument you could say then that's going to help us know more things because we can prosecute this data and come to conclusions that we couldn't have otherwise done we can apply AI machine learning get new insights on the other side something we say on our team sometimes is a TS Eliot quote where is the wisdom that's lost in knowledge where is the knowledge lost in information right where do you fall out on that are we smarter look uh we have more data and we have more tools for analyzing the data but uh my son and his wife and family came to live with us for the first three months of the pandemic March April May of 20 and then um I wrote he and I actually he contributed uh but I wrote a memo in January of 21 called something of value about that experience because it was a great value for us to live together that time and and uh but he he pointed out something very valuable which was that you know Buffett talks about having bought dollars for 50 cents and he really did because nobody else knew what which end was up you know uh I would say I bought some dollars for 60 cents uh I can't find those anymore and and Andrew made the point that readily available quantitative information about the present can't help you be superior as an investor or it's not sufficient to be superior you have to work with that stuff you have to understand it and process it but it's not enough because everybody else has it readily available and it's quantitative so everybody can process it and it's about the present so there's no conjecture no uncertainty no vagary so readily available quantitative information about the president cannot hold the secret to being a superior investor it has to be something else and what could those things be you have to do a better job of uh understanding uh the import of those uh of those data you have to do a better job of evaluating the qualitative the quality of the CEO the quality of the product the likelihood that the company will be able to follow a pro a successful product with another successful product uh the quality of the accounting whatever it might be or you have to be better at understanding the future so in I wrote a memo called investing without people in which I talked about what will happen with AI and and and so forth and and machine learning and so forth and it'll profoundly change our business and it'll put the hacks out of business but I don't think that it will replace the best investors because the best investors are the people I said in the memo I don't think that a computer can meet five Executives and figure out which one's the next Steve Jobs I don't think it can look at five business plans and figure out which is the next Amazon these are subjective judgments about the future not based on past data how's the computer going to get the information to make these decisions now what computers do is they handle a lot of data they handle it fast they don't make mistakes uh they don't make computational mistakes and they don't make emotional mistakes so that's a pretty good list that'll put a lot of people out of business in in the investment business but it will not in my opinion make enable a computer to be the the Warren Buffett of of its day shall we say
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