Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…The GEICO story is the perfect transition to another topic I want to have you educate us on. You also said to me once that passing and missing are all in your head. That's just a construct. You can always invest. The Buffett GEICO story illustrates that so beautifully. He bought, he sold, he bought, he sold. He bought a part, then bought the rest of it. You can always invest. Tell us more about that. This is the thing, if you've been around for as long as I have, you get to know these companies. Of course, we defined our circle of competence for just our own portfolio. But just as an investor, we've all been doing public investing now for decades. I've encouraged people to just do that. We have our 401(k)s structured in a way that we could individually manage it. We want everybody to do that so that they get to practice with this tiny little 401(k), which is no longer that tiny, by the way. Now, we have the benefit of decades of experience when we have serious money to manage on the public side. It's a fascinating journey. This concept of you get to know these companies over the period of many years and many decades and you get to see these teams. Once in a while, whether it's a 2008 crisis or dot-com crash, you have these strange things happen in the external environment that gave you this amazing gift. If you have a mental database of various companies that you know about—different models, different teams—you could really get to know some of these public companies quite intimately. I've been quite impressed by meeting some folks on Twitter who really know their businesses. They're public investors. They have no special access to those management teams like we do and yet they really know their stuff. Like, wow, I've been very impressed. Some of the CEOs, we didn't invest in some of these companies, but I know these people. I realized these people have never met the guy but they know them. They really do, they study them. You could study these CEOs. They're on videos on YouTube, they're on podcasts. You could read through the quarterly earnings calls, and they're going really deep. If you start to go really that deep and then you follow them for 10, 20 years, you really do know. There's a guy, Tom Russo, another IGSB guy who speaks in that same class. I think he's been investing for 37 years ever since he saw Buffett speak at the class in the '80s. He followed some of these companies like Nestle for decades. I remember him talking about meeting some factory manager in China more than 20 years ago. He does a factory tour. He's just always looking into those companies. It's the same company. He's still invested in it, but now that factory manager has become some bigwig executive in Switzerland. This is the Phil Fisher Scuttlebutt.…

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