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They settled in the neighborhood of Samblas, highest rate of heroin use in Europe and immediately started helping the young men and women cooked on heroin.
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Our job was like bring addicts back to the house and these men and women became like older brothers and sisters to my brothers and me.
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Welcome to Infinite Loops.
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We're going to talk a lot today about this incredible moving and cinematic book shooting up. The book is out now.
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I highly, obviously I'm biased because we're publishing it, but I've read it more than once. It is an amazing read.
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Please enjoy this episode with Infinite Loops.
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Jonathan Ter, welcome to Infinite Loops. Let's set the scene. It's 1985.
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You're seven and mom and dad tell you and your brothers, "Hey guys, we're going to move."
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So um my parents were Christian missionaries and they had been in um lived in Mexico before we arrived in Spain.
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So I'd really at that age only really known life as a missionary kid and basically your parents sort of tell you where you're going to live and it's you know not necessarily the US wherever your relatives might be.
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And so we they moved to Madrid and my father wanted to work with university students and be a student chaplain.
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But they settled in the neighborhood of Samblas uh because the the rent was cheap and at the time that had the uh highest rate of heroin use in Europe and there was a very large uh gypsy camp and it was like a central drug dealing point for the whole of Madrid.
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And so my parents settled there and immediately started helping the young men and women who were um you know hooked on heroin and the the dream of becoming a student chaplain sort of went out the window.
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Uh not least because a lot of the students had very little interest in what my father was you know bringing them.
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Uh they'd had quite a lot of uh you know Catholicism under Franco and so on and so the 70s late 70s and early 80s was uh you know a time of laoida in Spain.
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But there's this tremendous need in the neighborhood.
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So my father and mother uh decided to like give us pamphlets.
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And so the book starts with um and I still remember very vividly.
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We had to like fold all the pamphlets which took forever.
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And we'd go out and it had our home uh address and our num the number our phone home number.
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And our job was like bring addicts back to the house.
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Um and so they would do it like on a Friday evening in general.
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Um but they would do it in the weekends.
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And that was how we started meeting all these strange cast of characters who eventually the drug center started.
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They realized the need was so overwhelming and they started a drug center with one addict and these men and women became like older brothers and sisters to my brothers and me.
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>> So again, when I read that section, I'm like in a 2026 sensibility.
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That sounds a little dangerous, right?
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Because didn't the pamphlet also have a skull and crossbones on it and like it had thing saying it's going to be your last love of your life or something to that effect.
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Oh, I I remember vividly.
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It had a a skeleton with a skull and this sort of hand, its claw sort of, you know, motioning at the reader and then it had basically the the heroin represents sorry, the skeleton represents heroin and death.
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And it was like frightening for me to read it as a kid and and of course that was the point which is like you're giving it to the addicts trying to scare them to get off heroin.
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Um, but many of the addicts I think knew that like uh you know you could die of overdoses.
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The life on the street was not one that was particularly pleasant.
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So many of them really did want help.
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Um, but yeah, that was uh some of my not the earliest childhood memories, but it was, you know, among the earlier memories that are very vivid.
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>> Let's see if we can put you back into that young boy's body. I mean, were you scared?
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Were you exc I mean, what what were the emotions?
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>> I think it was probably more excitement uh than anything.
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And my my brothers and I just thought like uh we we tended to have this view that my father was uh invincible.
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He'd been like a college wrestler in the US and he could do like 31-handed push-ups and walk up flights of stairs doing handstands.
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He was just sort of very strange, very strong figure.
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And so going out trying to meet addicts was just this adventure, you know, find them and bring them back.
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But there were some of the addicts when they did come to our house and it comes out in the book like Mahara, one of them, his nickname was crazy.
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And he got the nickname because a dealer had stuck a a gun in his face and he grabbed the barrel and stuck it in his mouth and dared him to shoot.
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So they all thought he was crazy and they might have been uh right, but he he would squeeze my hand, you know, and wouldn't let go and and so I I would yell and hit him back and uh so some of the addicts were pretty rough and brutish and most of them, you know, had uh held people up at knife points or, you know, uh one of the characters in the book was like a bank robber.
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Um you know, we knew people who had killed others over drugs.
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Like it was not a particularly safe place.
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particularly safe place. and my wife and others reading it like the mother of a dear friend of mine you know reading the book before it got published they said I was very angry at your father when the book started out and and you know so it is a quite shocking to think of like
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putting sort of seven 8 n 10 year olds in those positions you had a grandmother who was actually voiced that >> yeah she came to visit for Christmas um and and I still remember it very vividly uh Raul who was the first addict in the center uh was was visiting and he hadn't showered and his, you know, breath stank of, uh, you know, alcohol. He was a bit
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He was a bit hung over and he like went to give her a kiss on both cheeks, which you do in Spain, um, as a greeting.
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And so she she recoiled and was like holding her her bag and then she told my father that he was going to ruin our lives and, um, I was very relieved that uh, none of the addicts spoke English and, you know, so didn't know what she was saying, but I don't think she ever changed her opinion throughout her life.
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>> And what was your dad's reaction when she said that?
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she said that? So I think he had already had many conversations with her and he he had a my father had a very odd experience which I recount a little in the book but he had a he studied um economics at Cambridge and in England and got his MBA from Harvard in 1971 and
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and then he had a religious experience and ended up you know uh becoming a minister and so I think my uh grandmother thought that he had thrown his life away to you know leave an education that could have taken him down one path in life and go down a completely different one. And so uh and
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And so uh and and she she believed that you know mo most of her life.
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I think they did reconcile towards the end.
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>> And and not only an intrafaith conver conversion he was raised Jewish on Long Island, right? >> Yes. Yeah.
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He grew up in Masipiqua uh you know Jewish.
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And so it was uh it was after Harvard Business School um that he had a he he did a lot of LSD and particularly with a chemist at MIT.
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He used to make it um you know so and that was back in the day when everyone did it.
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Um he said that he wasn't doing LSD that day but as it was he had a vision of heaven and hell and that changed his life.
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>> Uh did it get him reading William Blake?
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I I think he so he was a very even though he was doing economics and um business he was sort of hyper literate like my mother person and and that's another big theme in the book is like they were always reading literature to us at dinner and so he did read quite a lot of uh William Blake and um Dante and and then a lot of sort of um things of a philosophical and theological nature like St.
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and Augustine City of God and confessions and so on.
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And that was like our long long devotionals uh for breakfast and dinner which we deeply resented at the time because we just wanted to go either do our own you know reading of you know books that we found more interesting or just go to bed.
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But that was an aspect of the book that I found really interesting because I'm a big believer that education never stops and and the idea of your formal schooling.
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That's just the beginning, right?
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And so some of the smartest people that I've ever had the pleasure of talking with, etc.
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, had experiences not identically similar to your own, but they grew up in families where everyone was reading all of the time.
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And I that I really took that as ah okay, I understand why Jonathan became a road scholar.
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>> And yeah, I do think that um the great and I and it comes out in the book at one stage my parents didn't even have enough money to send us to even like the missionary school that didn't cost all that much.
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and my mother homeschooled us for two years.
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But the thing that she uh said was that the job of a teacher isn't to to teach the student something.
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It's rather to inspire the desire to learn.
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And if you have that, then you can teach yourself.
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And just I think when parents have a lot of books around, just by serendipity, the children are going to end up picking books up and and reading.
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And so there's a high correlation between like the number of books in the home and the educational attainment of the kids.
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And so I think um that's one of the big things I got from my uh family life at home.
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And one of the things that appeals to me as an investor is this sort of constant uh education that you know there's there's something out there that you can study and find and it doesn't matter what your interests are.
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You know you could be interested in in butterflies or I was interested in in college uh 15th century Spanish ladino which is 15th century Spanish mixed with Hebrew and you know if you want to go away and find the books in the library they're there and you can do something with it you know.
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Well, like uh Charlie Munger said, uh I've never met any person in life who was a success who was not constantly reading.
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And you know, that's my former life was asset management.
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And you you could tell you could tell when you were at the conferences, you could tell when you were chatting with other uh pros who was a massive reader and who wasn't.
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And I it's something I subscribe to as well.
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Let let's get back though to to those early days because that I just kept thinking to myself, wow, I don't know how I would have done as as a a boy in your position.
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What about your brothers?
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Was there was there a lot of difference in the way they interpreted things going on?
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Like what were the conversations like?
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>> There were four of us.
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Um even though only three of us were on the cover of the book because the youngest at that time Timothy would have been like at home with my mother looking after him.
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Um but the our nickname in the neighborhood was Roshmanos Delton which is the Dton Brothers and there was a French cartoon uh which was aired on Spanish TV at the time called Lucky Luke.
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And the bad guys were this band of brothers in Descending Height and it's based on the Dton brothers out west who are bank robbers and so on.
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So, you know, we took it as a compliment that, you know, and we were the band of four brothers.
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And so, I think a lot of, you know, our interactions with each other, there's a lot of complicity and um, you know, our adventures and things we did.
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I think they also viewed it as an adventure.
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And my my father and mothers said that we didn't have money, we didn't have drugs, like the addicts weren't going to do anything to us.
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And then furthermore, I think because we were just so strange, we're like blondhaired, blue-eyed boys, you know, fish out of water.
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The addicts sort of looked at us like, you know, mascots or like pets, you know, tagging all tagging along as the drug center was starting uh more more than anything.
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So I think it was they had they had similar to me a sense of excitement and and adventure.
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The other thing I I lived through that period as a young man.
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Um, so I was 25 in 1985 and I remember visc viscerally remember the um when AIDS came on the scene because like the shunning the uh people who would not admit Tom Hanks made a great movie called Philadelphia >> uh about it.
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um what was going on because Spain much more as you mentioned Franco Catholic much more conservative country.
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>> What were the reactions when because another part of the book that just blew me away one of your guys had been in prison and he said that there was more heroin available in prison than out but they shared two syringes. >> Yes.
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And I I remember vividly it's in one of the chapters in in the book.
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You know, there's some things where you you have to jog your memory a bit or you have to sort of fill in the blanks and connect the dots when you're writing a memoir, which is inevitable as long as it's done trying to capture the spirit of the conversations or the way things were.
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But I remember it very vividly.
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We had been playing out got back and I thought my father was going to punish us for not coming home on time for dinner.
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And then they sat us down in the living room without getting a lecture and they actually wanted to tell us about the HIV virus that was spreading.
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And so almost all the addicts had shared needles on the street.
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Uh and you know often it was very small groups of people where you might share with one or two friends and then the blood hadn't dried and if someone else had the virus which they didn't know at the time of course um they they would have got it.
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they they would have got it. But then as you mentioned my friend Kdi was in Garavanchel which is the largest prison in Madrid and the they theorized that's probably why the virus spread so quickly which is that you had sort of you know whatever one person was going to have
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you know the 200 people might get and so my parents told us about it in 1985 so it wasn't like it was unknown the surgeon general report had come out that year but as you pointed out there was even if there was the knowledge there about how it transmitted and how it didn't one people who were HIV positive or had AIDS were viewed as lepers. So in
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So in the US, you know, it was primarily the gay community initially.
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Um in Spain it was very much the sort of heroin addicts, intervenous drug use.
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In Africa it was the heterosexual disease.
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So each region had different groups but but they were all essentially sort of social paras and lepers.
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And so one of my early memories is my father telling me of going to the hospital where a lot of the family members didn't even want to touch their own children in the hospital because they didn't know if they could get it or not.
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And I thought, you know, if my parents explained it to me and told us that we could, you know, give women in the drug center a kiss on both cheeks as one does in Spain or hug the men, you know, I thought, well, surely they must have read the surgeon general report, too, or at least known about it.
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And I met the um as part of the um fact-checking process at the end of the book and making sure everything was accurate, I had referenced a doctor at Ramonikal, which was the main hospital in Madrid, and I used to spend a lot of my time there, and it's in in the later parts of the book.
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And they said, "Well, you the editor was saying that you mention him.
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What's his name and can you run it by him?"
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And so I thought, "Sure."
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So I got in touch with um Dr. Luis Buhon.
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And then it was extraordinary.
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He said uh reading your he was said he would move to tears reading the book, but he said, "Jonathan," he said, "I feel like we were passengers on the same train in different carriages looking out on the same landscape."
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And then he sent me videos that he had where he had appeared on Spanish TV.
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And and they were like from 1992 or 93.
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from 1992 or 93. and some of the videos and people were asking them basic questions like if you swim in the same pool as someone who is HIV positive can you get AIDS and so it wasn't even a matter of scientific knowledge being available it's that most people still didn't understand or have it and still
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treated people you know uh like lepers and I just got as I was reading that part I kind of thought man already heroin addict so they're already at kind of the bottom of the social order and then heroin addict with AIDS like how did how did the people that you knew well who were in that category h how did they deal with that? So I think
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So I think for for many of them uh they didn't talk about it.
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You know there were some people I know who died without their families even knowing like why they had died. They died of pneumonia.
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You know that was the the reason.
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I I know a couple people even to this day uh who their families don't know where they you know got the cocktail and survived.
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know got the cocktail and survived. um you know one I won't mention their name for obvious reasons but like didn't want to be in the book you know um even though I had contemporaneous documentation and notes and you know from their story uh so it is something that caused shame and and to some people
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still call shame causes shame but um a lot of the the leaders in Battel it's not that they go around announcing it in the street but they're certainly not embarrassed by their past it's just part of their life story you know as they work helping other people >> the other thing that I was struck by was like your mom and dad back then. I
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I remember some of the more strident Christian evangelical types like literally saying that this was a plague sent from God.
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>> Yeah, that was Jerry Fwell. >> I know.
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And like your mom and dad to their credit were like that's absolutely incorrect.
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But did they get any like push back from their fellow missionaries?
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Um, so the my my parents would go back to the US like once every four years.
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Um, and so it's not like they had extensive interaction with a lot of American Christians during that period in in the US, but at least my parents supporters were always uh supportive and and loving and, you know, weren't put off by it.
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Um, a lot of the missionaries in Spain from the the mission um were very supportive of Battel.
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Battel. But I do think that you know so my my theory is the closer you are to something you know the more people become real and you know there's empathy that's created and I think that a lot of the people who you know like fall well on others in the US you know basically
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it it's easy to hate someone or uh caricature someone that you don't know and so I think a lot of it comes from distance rather than um people who are close to it so most of the people were very close to my parents actually like knew people by name you know and it's very hard to hate someone that you Yeah. >> Now, let's go to uh the makeshift uh
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>> Now, let's go to uh the makeshift uh drug rehab that was your part your apartment.
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Talk a little bit about that. What What was that like?
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So, in the very early days, the they would have the Friday night meetings and then the addicts would come in all throughout the week.
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So, often we, you know, come home from school or see there'd be addicts sitting in the living room chatting with my parents, planning like to take them to a drug rehab center.
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And my parents realized they needed to start a center in Madrid because there was almost no centers at the time and most of them were outside of Madrid.
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There was a young uh Australian missionary named Lindseay McKenzie and and a a New Zealand missionary Mike Hall.
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They ended up marrying each other, but they Lindsay basically and Mike were working with my parents.
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And it was Raul, that sort of stinky, swelly, sweaty man who like g my grandmother a kiss on both cheeks who said he needed help and asked if he could move in with Lindsay at his apartment down the street.
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And so he moved in with Lindsay into his apartment.
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And then Raul was a very charismatic figure, you know, he used to like help hold people up at knife point, but everyone knew him and respected him.
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And uh he then invited eight of his friends into Lindsay's apartment.
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And so you had Lindsay and it was a packed apartment.
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We're not talking like a big one.
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It's a small apartment living with eight recovering men.
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And a lot of the women in the building naturally the elderly mothers like objecting to like watching men come in to detox, you know, with menacing tattoos and uh you know unshowered.
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So they they left the the building and found an abandoned farm near the airport, moved in and then they invited their friends in.
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So there were like 30 men living on the farm.
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like 30 men living on the farm. And so the drug center just the need was so great grew you know almost exponentially in the early days just through this transmission of love and compassion and trying to help people uh detox and so was the first and brought his friends in and it was like a chain reaction
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>> and now it's one of the biggest in the world right >> it's it's very large I don't know the exact numbers of like competitors or other charities but it's in 20 countries and there's 2,000 addicts living in the program and it's been going for 40 years >> and all of that started it in your mom and dad's and Lindsay's apartment. >> Yeah. >> Yeah.
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>> Um the thing that I think you do really well in the book is you mentioned earlier we have this tendency to other people, right?
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And like that that dehumanizes them.
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It makes them objects as opposed to humans.
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And you do a really really great job of bringing the humanity to the surface of all these people, right?
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Like literally most people hear Yeah.
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Rob's people at gun at knife point or gunpoint, robs banks.
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Uh and they immediately label put into a category and look no further.
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Was that natural in you or was it just proximity? What was it?
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Um, so like these are all uh I mean it should be obvious to say it's a memoir and there are quite a lot of memoirs where there's a lot of fabrication involved, but like these were people I genuinely knew and I often knew them as sort of fun characters who' been in my living room or I'd seen out at the farm before I even found out their life story or the fact that they had robbed people at knife point.
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You know, quite often I'd hear their story later.
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And so to me, these were like, you know, older brother figures before they were ever I mean, I knew they were all heretics, but before I knew that some of them had been more violent or more criminal and, you know, locked up than others.
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And I think that to your point about writing, I think it's very easy to caricature people.
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And um you know e even uh you can edit this later if you want but even like JD Vance for example like I think the way he presents his family his mother his family or even the whole region is like basically sort of caricaturing and pathizing like a class of people you know um in in terms of addiction.
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And in in my view the best thing you can do as a writer is to try to render people honestly which is to say that everyone has some strengths some faults.
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people are ultimately very complex no matter who they are.
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And I think it's not only bad writing to render them as flat and caricatures, but it's also sort of very anti-humanistic, you know, because ultimately these people are there.
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We all have a shared humanity.
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And what I was trying to do was to make them come alive to the reader in a way that I remembered them. And I hope I succeeded. >> Oh, no.
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Spoiler alert, he succeeded.
21:48
Um, what did your brothers think about the memoir when you said, "Yeah, I'm going to publish it."
21:54
What What did your your mom has died, but what about your dad? >> Uh, yeah.
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So, I uh I started writing this, believe it or not, uh, about 20 years ago, and so I was working as an analyst at SACE Capital.
22:05
I was living on the Upper West Side and one weekend I I went to um Barnes & Noble on 82nd Street and uh saw this uh book with a beautiful uh cover and um Bruce Davidson and it it's titled Flying Over 96 Street, memoir of an East Harlem white boy.
22:22
And I picked it up and the pros is beautiful and it was a story of a blonde hair, blue-eyed boy, his parents had moved him to East Harlem in the 1950s and he grew up in the 50s and 60s during the civil rights era.
22:32
And uh I I just thought it was like such a beautiful uh evocation of a time and a place and his friends some of whom had passed.
22:39
It was sort of very allegic and I just thought someone needs to do this for my friends you know my friends had passed and so that was the impetus for for writing shooting up and so my brothers and and mother and father had read an early draft which was not as good as the final draft as things work.
22:55
Um but they they they liked it.
22:58
They didn't say all that much.
22:58
My mother loved it, that thought I was full of hope, which is, you know, the captured the spirit of Battel through my eyes. My father liked it, too.
23:04
But that the and then I basically just put it away when it got, you know, some some rejections and, you know, you and I can talk for hours about the publishing industry, but years years later, um, great mentor of mine in in London who's a retired fund manager.
23:18
Um, you know, he was talking about his parents and he said, and I mentioned shooting up and he said, "You really should get this published before your father dies. My father's now 79.
23:24
uh he had a minor stroke last year, but he's still working helping people running the drug rehab center.
23:29
And so I I I didn't want to bother my brothers, but I sent them the final version asking them what they thought because obviously and I wouldn't like censor or change things, but at least I wanted them to know what was in there.
23:40
And uh even though there's quite a lot of uh painful and honest things about the whole family and about each brother and myself included, um they they told me my brother told me it's like very very sad but very beautiful and thank you for doing it.
23:54
And so my brothers are very supportive.
23:56
My father uh half jokingly says that he thinks I was too hard on him because he comes across as a a bit of a very charismatic visionary figure but also a disciplinarian and I call him the autocrat of the breakfast table.
24:06
And uh which I stole from Oliver Wendel Holmes. So no plagiarism.
24:11
Um it's uh you know just people who have very strong father figures will recognize that.
24:15
And uh and I I told him I could have added more and the conversation ends.
24:19
But he thinks that I told the story sort of as it was and from the inside. >> Yeah.
24:26
Your your dad definitely comes across in both ways though, right?
24:28
Like I I I didn't leave the book thinking, "Oh, his dad was awful."
24:34
Quite the contrary, right?
24:36
Like he's he's a very charismatic guy and you could see why he would do what he did.
24:44
Um let's talk about your mom for a bit because she's very different. than your dad. >> Talk about her. >> Certainly. So, it's funny.
24:53
>> Certainly. So, it's funny. One of the like the cultural uh sort of touchstones um in in Spain is uh Doniote and Doniote is uh ultimately you have sort of the idealistic knight and then you have the sidekick who's central and he's the realist and you know doesn't charge at the windmills and is trying to restrain the lord and I often thought of my parents as donkey and central banana and
25:16
I made a reference to that in the book and you know I I mentioned like my father might have been the ring leader of the ter circus but my mother kept the show on the And she really was that way, you know, like she she had mastered all the details and made sure everything was packed and made made sure that we showed up at the right place at the right time and knew everyone's names. She was
25:32
She was incredibly kind and and loving and she tended to talk a lot less than my dad, but she was very very wise and whatever she said was pathy and like to the point and you remembered it.
25:42
And so it's funny when people read the book, it's not that they don't quote my father, you know, who who talks quite a bit through the the book, but like most people come back with a couple lines from my mother.
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>> And that was I think the nature of her.
25:54
>> I I was noticing I read it on uh Kindle uh the the pre uh version and the the ones that I was highlighting were mostly your mother and that was her way.
26:07
And the funniest thing was like after when I was doing the the editing and adding more to round out some of the characters, I I realized I still had like almost all of her emails.
26:17
And so I then was able to put some of those emails into the book.
26:20
And like that's her speaking for herself.
26:24
It's like not me inventing or anything like that.
26:25
And you can really hear her voice and what she was like.
26:26
And um she was just this extraordinarily kind loving woman.
26:31
And um you know when she did uh pass uh there's 1,500 people came to her funeral and thousands more watched it on the internet and it was clear like spending decades helping other people dayto-day and not a grand way but just a consistent loving way.
26:47
You know how many people she really was able to touch. >> Yeah.
26:50
And that was a strong takeaway for me too.
26:53
It's just like if you can just those incredible but yet simple acts of kindness.
27:05
Just look what happened from that whole thing.
27:08
And it's it it's a theme that I think about a lot because um you you you never know.
27:16
It's like oh why should I bother doing this or this bother? >> Yeah.
27:20
you know, talk to that person as opposed to label them and and look away, right?
27:26
Because some of the stories in here are just like that's why I say cinematic.
27:31
I I can see this I can see them on the screen and that's because your writing is so good, you know, parenthetically.
27:39
Um, as one who has both a book publisher but also a film company, um, I'm really learning that it's almost all the writers and uh, and and and you do such a a great job of that.
27:56
Le, let's go forward a little bit and and talk about Timothy.
28:02
>> So, uh, there were four brothers um, in in in my family.
28:04
Uh, David, the oldest, but two years older than me.
28:07
Uh then myself, I'm the second oldest.
28:09
Uh then Peter, who's about almost two years younger than me, a little less than that.
28:14
Um and uh actually less than that.
28:16
He's like one year, two months in one day.
28:18
Um and then >> we would in an Irish family, you would call them Irish twins. >> Yes.
28:23
We were like Irish twins and and Peter like very very close um to each other.
28:28
We were always like a great apart.
28:29
My my school was so small they would they would often pair the grades, you know, so he and I spent a lot of time together in class.
28:33
Um, and then Timothy who was five years younger than me.
28:37
Uh, and we were all very very tight, very close.
28:40
You know, we'd wander around the neighborhood, play soccer together, football.
28:44
And, um, in, uh, it's a turning point in the book, obviously, a little bit of a spoiler for the listeners, but it's, um, you know, it came out in big adaptation in the Telegraph, but Timothy, I was extremely close to him.
28:58
So, we had a a house where David and Peter shared a room.
29:01
I shared a room with Timothy. Shared a bunk bed.
29:04
I used to walk him to school every day and then I my uh my father would have these long breakfast and uh we'd often listen to the news before that and he would explain things to me and then whenever I'd go on the walk to school I
29:16
would then try to impart that to Timothy and try to teach him things and uh I was like chatting with one of Timothy's friends recently and he remembered I I taught them Newton's laws of of motion like you know and uh helped them with their science project and so I was
29:30
always trying to teach Timothy things and uh we both absolutely love jazz and you know, listen to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and um it was missionaries go back to the US uh you know it varies by mission but in ours it was once every four years and it was uh
29:44
summer of 1991 uh we went back to United States and we were on a road trip and the my brother David was driving the car and there was a car accident and so a lot of the book um obviously has to to do with HIV and AIDS and there's the loss that begins there. Um but but that when when we lost
30:04
Um but but that when when we lost Timothy in a in the car accident.
30:06
Um then you know we felt very very acutely the uh the pain of losing uh you know a son or a brother and uh we had a much more profound empathy for the families you know who had lost sons and daughters to overdoses and who had you know lost sons and daughters um to to HIV.
30:27
And it completely changed my life. I was 15 at the time. I just turned 15.
30:33
And I think like you never recover.
30:35
You never become the person you were before again.
30:38
You don't get over death.
30:41
And when I wrote this book, uh what I really wanted to do was to try to write a book that would uh be something that might touch other people and let them know that they're not alone if they're suffering.
30:55
you know the people who are suffering uh who have lost someone or who experienced grief.
31:02
Um you know I literature and books were a big part of our life and CS Lewis's a grief observed was a book that we read at dinner table.
31:09
Um, I hope that uh, shooting up might be one that people can read and to those who have lost uh, that it can um, you know, let them know they're not alone.
31:19
And then those who haven't lost, it might give them a sense of what grief is like to those who live through it. >> Yeah.
31:27
And that section hit me particularly hard because I lost my oldest sister when I was 11.
31:35
And it like I I was kind of shocked as I was reading about it in your book how it all just flooded back in.
31:42
And your remark about it changes you forever like literally now from the vantage of adulthood.
31:50
I realized that you know I w I actually I was 10 because it was in 1971 and my birthday was in May.
31:56
So I but I stopped being a child that day and the effects that that has both good and bad.
32:06
It's not all bad, >> right?
32:08
Like you get some personality characteristics that you probably wouldn't have had otherwise.
32:12
The ability to cope much better, the ability to calm down in a crisis, etc.
32:18
But, uh, it it is one of those things that people who haven't experienced it, it's it's it's kind of like your first child.
32:29
I I would tell all my kids, you really don't know how much I love you unconditionally, and you won't know it until you have a child.
32:39
And then the first of my children to have a child was my son, Patrick.
32:42
and he came out holding my grandson Pierce and looked at me and he goes, "I had no idea how right you were."
32:48
And and so like those incredibly emotional uh moments in life, you really kind of have to experience them.
32:59
H how did how did your mom and dad deal?
33:04
>> Uh so I I think that um there's a great line I I read as I was finishing the editing and I um I hope I edit it to the book.
33:12
I hope I edit it to the book. um but if I didn't I I should have um and was someone who had lost their son said that um you know our our grief is as unique to us as fingerprints and I think and I thought it was a beautiful line um and very true and I think that everyone
33:26
responds differently there's no one way of responding to grief and uh divorce rates go up significantly after uh the death of a of a child particularly because you know marriage is hard enough anyway uh you have different personalities but you then throw factor in sort of people responding differently
33:43
where you know people either withdraw into themselves or uh things might be misinterpreted or you know there's all sorts of things that happen and it was a very difficult period for my parents um one of my father's friends when he read the final draft the proofs uh said we should really leave out some of the
34:01
things about your parents after Timothy died you know like you would you know um that don't don't mention them and I I just thought one like it's dishonest and uh two I think that like the No one's going to read the book or no one so far has read the book and said, "You know what? Your parents were such awful
34:16
Your parents were such awful people, you know, having a hard time after your brother died or or fighting, you know, like people the universal reaction from what people have told me is, you know, I can't believe your parents kept on going."
34:26
That was my reaction, right?
34:28
like I I remember obviously when you're 10 that you're seeing the world from a very different perspective, but I just remember the uh what what I would call stonefaced and like trying to help.
34:43
I remember my mom right after my sister died lying on the couch and just like with a blanket over her and I just would do anything I could to try to cheer her up.
34:55
Uh, my sister said that's why I got so funny was because come on, mom.
35:05
But I I think your line about it being dishonest to leave that out is bang on because it's messy.
35:11
It's really uh one of the most complicated and horrible things to go through in your life.
35:18
And I to to leave all of that out would be incredibly dishonest and it wouldn't get people who haven't experienced it, thank God, um to understand, wow, I maybe I better prepare for this.
35:37
>> And I'm so sorry for your loss.
35:37
And you know, I I hope that I hope the book for those who haven't experienced it at least brings them a little closer to understanding um sort of, you know, what people who have experienced it go through.
35:49
Um, but I also think that to to your point about honesty, I think readers have a an inbuilt [ __ ] detector.
35:57
>> And if you're not uh presenting an honest story, whether it's about the junkies, you know, who are comp complex characters of F, good, and bad, or my own parents, then they think they're reading a hagography, you know, or they think they're reading a book that's meant to preach or teach.
36:10
Um, and it's very definitely not.
36:12
It's a it's a human story.
36:14
And to that extent like the the best thing that you can do to honor the memory of of people um is to present them as they were you know with the good and the bad.
36:24
>> 100% agree on the readers having [ __ ] detectors um and 100% uh agree obviously because we published it here in the United States.
36:34
Um that this is the kind of thing that changes people I think.
36:40
Um, and I was when Jimmy brought me the project and I and I read the book and I'm like, "Wait a minute.
36:46
He can't find a publisher in the United States?
36:52
What the heck is going on?"
36:52
Um, let's talk about that a little bit.
36:55
Uh, because um, I I used to on my first book I went to a Barnes & Noble or a Borders.
37:06
Uh, this is pre- internet, right?
37:06
and and I got one of those really thick books about publishers, houses and agents and all that and literally on a typewriter typed a hundred letters saying I want to write this book. Will you publish it?
37:19
And I kept and I we got lost in a move but I kept all the rejections.
37:26
So I had a hundred responses.
37:29
Um many didn't even bother responding.
37:32
Um 98 were no and some of them were hysterical.
37:37
How dare you even consider sending us this letter.
37:40
Please don't ever contact us again.
37:43
Um what what was what was your experience because the UK publisher you you know you had that but >> yeah so the I mean and it's not like people were falling over themselves in the UK either to to publish it and the the the typical response was it's a it's a beautiful story.
38:00
It's very moving, but I'm not sure there's an audience for it. Right?
38:04
And ultimately, a lot of publishing today is that you have to have a platform.
38:08
You know, often social media or you have to be a writer who already writes for a big publication where people are, you know, weekly or monthly getting your pieces.
38:16
And it's very easy for you to plug that or at least uh piggyback on your existing readership.
38:22
And I run an investment fund, right?
38:24
And I I'm not on social media because I'm trying to look after uh my, you know, the investments, work with my analysts. and so on.
38:30
with my analysts. and so on. Not my analyst or we as a team but u that's what I spend my time doing so I don't have a platform as such and I I used to be on Twitter I you know shut that down when I started my fund and so I can see like why and then I don't write you know
38:45
every month for the New Yorker so it just got a lot of rejections but also I I think uh my agent put it very well he said publishers are not uh angel investors they're venture capitalists they're trying to go out and find something that's already working you know And and so my agent was like, "Do an excerpt that goes viral." I was
39:02
I was thinking like, "Well, I mean that would be nice, but I don't know which chapter that might be."
39:07
And so the the irony is that people strange.
39:09
So the people have read the advanced review copies.
39:12
They've given it away to friends, people I don't even know who've then sent me notes, you know, long notes telling me how they've been moved to tears, and then they've been sharing it with people.
39:21
been sharing it with people. I just in London um two days ago for the the London book launch and I had sent it to an Anglican bishop um you know who I thought might enjoy it you know because it's a crossover book in the sense that you don't have to believe anything to believe it >> but my parents were missionaries and I
39:38
thought you know this is something that this particular bishop who's been involved in some of these areas might enjoy reading he doesn't read anything he said and so he basically like gave it to his assistant the assistant thought oh this looks interesting picked it up read it loved it so gave it to his wife, gave it to his daughter, the whole family read it. Then he insisted the
39:54
Then he insisted the bishop had to read it.
39:56
The bishop absolutely loved it, recommended to everyone he works with, and he's now like promoting it on social media.
40:00
Uh his name is Graham Tomlin, just a terrific guy, right?
40:03
But like I don't know them, and so I know that the book resonates.
40:07
So this idea that the book doesn't have an audience is crazy.
40:09
And you can see if you look at like JK Rowling or John Gisham, you know, tons of rejections.
40:15
John Gishman had to buy half the first print run for his first book like to help the publisher, you know, because it was too risky.
40:21
And then you have like uh Ellie Visel had 15 rejections and it took Andre Malo, you know, who was a Nobel Prize winner to get his publisher to publish it.
40:29
And then of course the rest is history where Visel got the Nobel Prize.
40:32
But like there's it's uh going back to our our industry with Canes, this is like a a beauty contest where you're not picking the most beautiful woman, you're picking who other people might think is the most beautiful woman.
40:44
That is interesting because what I used to do is what you're doing now.
40:49
Um, and I think that one one of the things that drew me to the market and Wall Street was I just looked at it as the most intoxicating puzzle like I want to figure this out.
41:04
And I used to say like investing is the Olympics of business, right?
41:11
because you you don't need domain knowledge on just one thing.
41:16
You you need to be across every industry and how how did your experiences inform the way you make your investments?
41:25
I I've got to believe that they had a fairly big impact.
41:31
>> So the I I think one of the major impacts as we were talking about earlier is the self-education aspect.
41:35
is the self-education aspect. Um and one of the things that attracted me to investing is I I enjoy new uh challenges and learning and I think that with uh the investing world the world is always changing right so even if you're looking at the same companies you're learning more um every
41:53
day or every month and then you're often looking at new industries and you know I uh genuinely enjoy the process of learning and you know the the previous uh company that I worked with with my colleagues eggs which I was a founder of variant perception provided research to um asset managers and family offices and
42:12
it was like a couple years before I started the fund I was spending an enormous amount of time trying to understand the question of why were corporate profit margins so high and you know in the typical way I would have done when I was being homeschooled is like let's go find all the books so I went away and tried to do as much
42:25
reading as I could on this question and that led me down the rabbit hole of you know looking at industrial structure and you know going away and trying to read 100 books on uh you know that and tons of scholarly articles and annual reports that led me to write the myth of capitalism. Wrote another book like our
42:40
Wrote another book like our internal sort of monopoly guide looking at sort of how industrial structure affects investing which you'll never see the light of day.
42:47
It's you know we have it at prevat but it's like these things like I often uh think by writing or at least clarify the thinking um and and that really comes from I think uh learning and you know I I forgot to mention it comes down the book like my my older brother when he went off to college two years ahead of me he sent me all his college textbooks.
43:04
So, I learned, you know, and took all the advanced placement tests through that.
43:08
But it's like you can teach yourself anything, you know, if you have the drive in the books.
43:11
Um, and that's sort of what I think I've brought to like the investing uh angle.
43:18
>> Yeah, I definitely think that of the most interesting and best investors that I've been lucky to meet, that is the one throughput.
43:27
I don't think I've ever met anyone who's really good at investing that is not just a voracious reader.
43:34
And and by the way, not just reading business stuff, reading widely because like I I used to joke I got more uh ideas from the Dao De Jing than than I did from you know uh Ben Graham's tome.
43:55
Uh, I'm kind of partially joking there. >> No, but the irony.
43:58
So, there's one book that I would highly recommend uh to the to the viewers of this podcast.
44:02
Um, it's called Ben Graham, the Einstein of Money, right?
44:05
Uh, >> that's a great book. >> It's an amazing book.
44:07
And when you read it, you realize like no criticism to Buffett, but like Buffett's a very limited man in terms of what what he reads.
44:14
Like Munger and even Graham were his sort of, you know, sidekicks who brought other things to bear.
44:19
But Graham was a polymath.
44:21
you know, he he read extraordinarily widely for fun.
44:24
He would translate from Greek into Latin and Latin into Greek, you know, and he was fluent in many languages and decided when he had made all his money to move to the south of France, you know, spoke fluent French.
44:35
And you realize that like you you don't some people I think incorrectly have sort of um beatified, you know, St.
44:42
Warren uh and and I know and I'm deeply grateful for everything I've learned from him.
44:46
But a lot of people I I've I've found even with like I live in the Bahamas but Sir John Templeton where they like the caricature of the person rather than the person himself.
44:54
And so they fixate on well well Buffett just stays at home and reads annual reports.
44:58
That's all I should be doing.
44:59
When in fact like the a lot of the people in Buffett's life and his mentors and best friend were reading you know widely across all areas. >> Totally agree.
45:07
And Graham as a man was always kind of my hero.
45:10
Like his life was so fascinating.
45:15
And you you're absolutely right.
45:18
He was an incredible polymath and and I loved the whole moving to the south of France, you know, doing plays translating Greek and Latin that, you know, that's the that was my inspiration.
45:32
It's like and I and I listen Warren Buffett. Yes. St. Warren. I get it all.
45:37
I I kind of admire Warren for what he really is as opposed to the cartoon version of him. >> Yeah.
45:46
And I think most people, at least when I've spoken to people, they might own Snowball.
45:50
I don't think they've read it.
45:52
And if you read Snowball, you realize he's a lot more complicated and interesting than whatever caricature version people have, you know, from reading quotes. >> Way more.
46:00
And like people I I would know the Buffett, you know, groupies, right?
46:08
And and they would literally get angry with me because I would say what to me was obvious like Warren Buffett gets to be Warren Buffett because he gets a premium because of all of what he's done that no other investor could ever get.
46:26
Do you think any other investor could have saved Solomon Brothers? No.
46:28
It was and but what does he get for that?
46:32
He gets deals that no one else can get, right?
46:38
It's like when he backed Goldman during the financial crisis, he was very extractive.
46:46
And you know, I always would contrast the, you know, Uncle Warren playing the ukulele and eating seas candy as like that's a really good disguise. You're a killer.
46:57
>> Well, I think like uh it was Michael Lewis wrote the Trials of St.
46:58
Warren, which you can find online.
47:00
I believe it was with Esquire.
47:02
Um he since sort of walked it back.
47:03
Maybe because he wants wanted wanted to interview Warren again. I don't know.
47:06
But like Warren Buffett was a is is is a very um contradictory character in the sense that a lot of the things that he like tells people not to do he does himself.
47:15
Uh and and actually like if you look at his portfolio um his average holding period is about 12 months when he talks about the holding period forever.
47:23
Now there's a prao distribution to that which is he has some enormous holdings he's held forever. Yep.
47:27
And then he has quite a lot of turnover historically, you know, away from that.
47:32
And so he's he's just a much more interesting character than like most people are even aware of. >> Yeah.
47:39
And as you point out, Snowball, all you got to do is read that book. >> Yeah.
47:44
>> And then you will see the real Warren Buffett. >> Is it true? I don't know.
47:47
I This just came to mind uh that he wouldn't talk to the author ever again >> uh after the book was >> after the book came out.
47:54
And that's like another thing I was very aware when I was writing my own book, not to get back to it, but more like the problem, the perils of writing honestly. Yeah.
48:02
>> Is that often people were written about honestly don't enjoy it.
48:06
>> Somebody asked me, why don't you write an autobiography?
48:08
And I said because I don't want to be cancelled.
48:13
I said if I ever do write an autobiography, it will be published postumously.
48:18
Uh and and I I think that's very true and that and that's again we should get back to it because one of the things when I read this the first time and I'm like hell yeah we're going to publish it was like you are incredibly honest in this book and in an era when everyone is pretending right like virtue signaling and all all that kind of stuff th this is just so refreshing to me And I learned just so much more reading your book.
48:51
Like the the characters just come alive in a way and and it's the juxosition, right?
48:59
It's like most people see somebody and a lot of these guys are pretty rough characters, right?
49:04
But underneath that's where all the good stuff emerges.
49:09
Um, do you keep up with people um that that you met during that part of your life?
49:19
>> Yeah, they're they're basically like family, believe it or not.
49:21
So, a lot of the early most of the early generation um did die of AIDS.
49:24
Um and there's and I insisted on having photographs in the book. Yeah.
49:29
Um even though a lot of memoirs don't have any photographs, I just thought one, the story is so crazy, you know, or off the wall to use the words of one of the blurbers.
49:37
Um they like I I but these are real people.
49:39
I thought you have to put the photos in because like it really happened.
49:42
Um so a lot of the early addicts in some of the photos died but the sort of second generation and once the cocktail the highly active anti-retroviral therapy in 1995 came out then you know if someone was HIV positive became like being a diabetic.
49:58
It became treatable you know chronic but treatable.
49:59
And so almost all the leaders of Battel today, you know, came after that initial period. And they're alive. Many are HIV positive. Not all of them.
50:10
Many are still working away helping people.
50:12
And they're like a family uh to me and and my brothers, my father, you after my father had a stroke, helping look after him.
50:18
And so, um, what's funny is like they're very honest about their own lives, the vast majority of them, you know, with one or two exceptions.
50:25
And you know they it's like and they feel that if they weren't honest they couldn't help other people right so it's like they can say well I came from this background and you know uh things are going okay for me now and that provides hope to the new men and women who come into the rehab center.
50:45
>> What does your father think looking back has he has he changed any of his views dramatically?
50:53
I mean, I think he's mellowed a lot.
50:56
>> Age tends to do that to you.
50:58
>> Yeah, he was like very strict and disciplinarian and, you know, it was very little no TV for the first eight years and then very little after that and and then a lot of like long long devotionals and so on.
51:07
I think like probably once he felt his job as par of parenting was sort of done or at least he'd succeeded partly, I think then he sort of uh relaxed quite a bit more and um and then I yeah I mean I wouldn't even know all the ways he's mellowed but he very definitely has.
51:22
Um, and I describe him at the end of the book, um, as an old lion, and I I stole that quote from, uh, Kermit Roosevelt when he texted his, um, family that, you know, Theore Roosevelt had died and he wrote, "The old lion is is dead." >> Yeah.
51:36
How has it impacted your parenting style?
51:40
>> Uh, I mean, my son is is only two, so I I think I'll discover more in the years ahead as to, you know, how I might parent.
51:46
Like, right now, you know, he's sort of pre preiterate, but he's he knows all the letters of the alphabet.
51:52
I'm trying to like I only speak him in Spanish.
51:53
Um I want to make sure that he's fully bilingual.
51:55
Um I feel very fortunate that um you know I grew up bilingual in Spanish English and then that sort of led me to um do French and Italian and I feel it there's there's a quote I have in the in the book which comes from the Jewish writer where he said um reading the Bible in translation is like kissing the bride through veil.
52:15
And I think that uh while you can read translations, you know, there's something about the essence of the culture and just a feel that you only get when you're in the language.
52:26
And so I want to make sure that Nathan, you know, has even though he'll never have the childhood I had.
52:30
Um, you know, like you can't repeat that.
52:32
U that he at least has some of the elements there.
52:37
Um, and I and I also hope that, you know, even though we live in the Bahamas, he can as he grows up, he can be very involved in charitable work and even go back to Spain.
52:43
And I'd love for I used to spend my summer times working in the drug rehab center.
52:46
I hope they can do the same.
52:48
>> Jumping back to investing and analysis, does it change the way you think about markets by being multilingual?
52:55
>> Um, I mean, I I certainly think that uh the US is is very fortunate that it is so large that you don't really have to go out of the US to invest and then many US companies are multinational.
53:05
So even there if you want to reach the rest of the world, you don't have to invest abroad.
53:11
Um, so, so in that way, like if all you did was stick to the US, like you'd be pretty well served.
53:17
Um, but I do think that speaking other languages, living abroad makes you more aware that there are companies outside the United States that might have wonderful business models that are worth looking at, that are worth digging into.
53:27
Um, and then obviously with Spanish, Latin America, when the fund started, um, it was 2020 and COVID was happening.
53:34
And so we were looking at all the and and typically I'm a very contrarian person, so I'm generally not chasing whatever is the hottest thing.
53:40
I'm trying to figure out what do people hate and why are they wrong and you're trying to buy a bargain.
53:45
And so COVID happened and uh you had particularly like airports, airlines, online travel agents, restaurants, anything that like you where you couldn't travel and people weren't going out, they were losers.
53:55
So you know one of the largest positions of our fund when we started was uh group Puerto Cra, which is the ticker omab and we you know held that and uh did phenomenally well.
54:08
But it's like I think a lot of American investors might not have bothered because it's I mean they do have annual reports in English but it's not in the US and you know if you want to start doing a lot of due diligence on it some of it's in Spanish.
54:21
>> So >> and uh staying on that theme how do you think your experiences that you so eloquently write about here?
54:28
How do you think they changed or informed the way you invest?
54:32
Well, so it's interesting.
54:34
The uh the drug rehab center uh is is totally free and the way that it operates is by running secondhand furniture stores, gardening teams, painting teams, like it runs businesses and the addicts uh run those businesses.
54:47
So I grew up basically working in business um you know helping in a small very small way as a teenager but working businesses.
54:55
businesses. So I I was just very fascinated by business models uh by you know cash is king right like uh there and particular when you start looking at you know a gap accounting or accounting manipulation like when I think of investing now I'm thinking like well where is the cash right and the addicts had never studied accounting right many
55:13
of them to this day don't know accounting but they bring the receipts in and the cash in at the end of the day to the central office and they intuitively knew that the business should have more cash at the end of the day than it did you know when the day started and I think a lot of businesses don't actually understand that. And so
55:25
And so that was like a very key lesson.
55:27
I'm like, if people who dropped out of school when they're 12 or 13 know that, you know, and it works, like that's probably something to it.
55:36
>> It's like Dave Chappelle's You can never outwork a crackhead.
55:41
>> And they're like very industrious, you know?
55:43
Uh you just have to channel that industriousness in the right way. >> Yeah.
55:46
Did Did any of the people who beat heroin go on to like be really successful entrepreneurs? >> Yeah.
55:54
>> Yeah. quite a few um they would generally be set up like sort of you know small businesses but like quite a few for example did plumbing and heating uh painting uh a variety of different uh businesses you know and I can think of like one in particular unfortunately he
56:12
passed away a couple years ago but like you know he he ended up believe it or not employing a lot of other heroin addatics former heron addicts and then the children of his friends who had been heroin addicts uh in his business and it's a beautiful thing. >> Yeah. when revisiting and and polishing >> Yeah.
56:23
when revisiting and and polishing the the draft because you started writing this a long time ago. What changed?
56:30
What opinions when you read them from something you wrote like 20 years ago and then reread now and you're like, "Oo, I don't think that anymore at all."
56:40
I think it wasn't so much that like I didn't that I was changed things I was thinking.
56:44
I think that um well one like when I started writing the and I'd done quite a lot of writing before but it was all essentially non-fiction and the economics and history and so I'd written like two honors thesis in undergrad.
56:56
I'd written my Oxford dissertation and and all of that you're telling the reader what they need to know about history or economics.
57:04
You're trying to as as you know as clearly and cleanly as possible.
57:08
Memoirs, even though they are real, are have to be novelistic in their approach, which is to say that great writing is show don't tell.
57:14
And you're trying to sort of paint a scene uh and you bring the reader in and you don't tell the reader what it is they need to know.
57:21
Like the scene itself will tell them. And that's good writing.
57:23
And so there wasn't enough of that in the first uh draft.
57:27
And then uh secondly, I think like uh I mentioned Flyinger 96 Street.
57:33
my dear friend Tom Weber when I handed him like my first draft uh he said Jonathan he said I'm not sure you're old enough to write a memoir and I thought you know I was very upset at him and I realized like some of the things that were missing in the early draft were some of these sort of being very honest
57:48
about my parents or myself and so on and it wasn't that I was like trying to be dishonest it's just that when you're writing it you know you're trying to protect everyone and you you're trying to be too thoughtful and does that really belong there but then with a uh some added time and perspective, you realize that that is the essence of life. You know that and and and I and I
58:05
You know that and and and I and I hope to be a better human is that it it isn't binary, right?
58:11
Like there are people in your life that might upset you one day and that you might love dearly the next and it doesn't mean you ever have to write them off and you can love them and um and it's the same way about family.
58:20
And some people were like that have interviewed me about it, they're like, well, you know, did did you turn on your parents evangelicalism and Christianity?
58:25
And it's like, well, why why would I have to like reject them?
58:30
you know, it's like they they can live the have lived the life they led and you know, I can live the life I lead and but I think for a lot of that binary thinking was there and so I think just having more honesty and more layers of complexity made the final book I hope better.
58:46
Oh, I think it definitely did.
58:46
I and you know we we're so sympotico on the way we look at so many things because that came through absolutely in the book like I agree with you that this yes no zero 100 binary that that isn't really even thinking >> because anyone with eyes and ears and who interacts with other human beings or looks in a mirror knows that it's a continuum.
59:14
And and just because you might not now I disagreed with my father all the time that doesn't make it that you know he was a horrible man.
59:24
It was just like he also gave me some of my best qualities and some of the things that I got really good at was because of him. Right.
59:32
him. Right. and and the this this kind of black and white that that that's a horrible way to if you want to learn anything about other human beings or life in general >> and I I find currently like even though the book's not about it and you know uh friends and family have told me to stay
59:51
away from it but like thinking of our current political and cultural moment it's one of the things that I find most disappointing and distressing is like if you read like one one website you know it's like you're living in a parallel universe and you read another. It's sort
1:00:03
It's sort of that way and you're they're not even in the same sets of facts and so people don't even speak to each other and then there's this sort of demonization of the other side.
1:00:12
Um and and so it it leads people to be unable to speak to each other to not even have the same vocabulary to not see the shared humanity.
1:00:20
And I think that that's uh deeply depressing.
1:00:22
Well, again, we're very very sympa sympotico on that, too, because I I it's just it it is sort of society at the beginner level.
1:00:37
Like othering other people because they happen to have a disagreement with you about a political position is insane to me.
1:00:46
And like the this this whole movement you it it kind of reminds me of like when you look at the totalitarian societies, one of the things was separation from family and you believe everything.
1:01:02
I mean all you got to do is I I I use a meme that shows a a a drawing of George uh Orwell and it says did I call it or what?
1:01:16
because this this putting into camps and categories is just so low.
1:01:19
It's not even thinking >> and and I just hope that we can get to a different place because I completely agree with you.
1:01:30
Um it I I've always believed that if you could figure out all of my social or political beliefs by hearing one of them, then I'm brain dead. >> Yeah.
1:01:44
I I have been completely brainwashed.
1:01:46
I'm not thinking about anything ever at all.
1:01:48
And I've just descended into brain death because that's crazy.
1:01:54
And yet it's the litmus test.
1:01:57
You know, if you're not if you're not for this, then you're against it.
1:01:59
If you remain silent, you're part of the problem.
1:02:04
What if I just don't have an opinion? Right?
1:02:05
An example, my parents showing love to everyone.
1:02:08
showing love to everyone. My parents like never asked anyone what their political views were like before they showed them love or you know they didn't have to have like their you know particularly if you think of like America with the culture wars unfortunately you know like there no
1:02:20
wedge issues like well you know we can only love you if you agree with us on this and it's sort of contrary to the essence I think of the sermon on the mount and showing love and so I hope even though the book has nothing to do with politics if people can come away with a greater sense of empathy and a shared humanity it'll make me happy. Uh
1:02:34
Uh well I think it will achieve that because um as you say you you're you're not writing this at all in a political sense but it does carry over right and and like the litmus test making everything conditional is not a good way to interact with people.
1:02:53
Um I I will show you compassion and love if you vote for my guy.
1:03:02
Then you're not really showing them.
1:03:04
you're making it a transaction and that's the reward.
1:03:06
Uh but it's not a reward really because it's fake.
1:03:09
It's not real compassion. It's not real love.
1:03:14
And and so I I definitely think that um that that really comes through in the writing as well.
1:03:21
What's been the reaction from a reader?
1:03:23
you mentioned the bishop uh but that you've just kind of like when when you got it either heard from the person or got a letter from them or read something that they wrote about it where you're like yeah that I nailed it.
1:03:38
Um, so I I think the like if no one ever bought the book, and I certainly hope people do and enjoy it, but the the main character, one of the main characters, Raul, I'm still very close to his wife, Jenny, and his daughters were um three and five when Raul died.
1:04:01
And uh I you know, I'd gone off to college at that stage.
1:04:03
And I gave them the final draft of the book.
1:04:05
And I didn't realize because they were so young, they didn't have a lot of memories of their dad, uh, Sephi and Kelly.
1:04:12
And uh, they both sent me these sort of beautiful notes telling me that they felt that the book had brought their father closer to them, you know, as he comes across in the book and all his humanity and a lot of anecdotes and stories.
1:04:26
>> Wonderful character >> and he was like so much more interesting than I could even put on page.
1:04:28
But the fact that they felt that they could discover more of their dad and felt closer to him.
1:04:34
And I just thought my job as a writer is done, you know, not one for like making him more real, but two, the fact that they could be closer to someone who, you know, they didn't have that many memories of.
1:04:43
And I was just that for for me that that was that was it.
1:04:47
That was the highest the best thing I ever got.
1:04:49
>> Are are you contemplating any more of this type of writing or are we going to stick with uh markets and non-fiction?
1:04:54
I >> I think markets uh it's funny.
1:04:57
Infinite described as my first memoir.
1:05:00
And I'm like, I don't have another one in me. >> Well, you never know. >> Still a young guy.
1:05:06
>> I think I probably need another 10 to 20 years of like investing world and then maybe write, you know, I it's funny, my friend Edward Chancellor.
1:05:11
I had dinner with him last Friday in London.
1:05:12
But he um you know, he worked with Jeremy Grantham on um the Permab Bear book, which is his me Grantham's memoir effectively, even though Edward did a lot of the writing with him.
1:05:25
And I was thinking like maybe if I'm old enough there might be a book like that.
1:05:30
But no, there I'm going to focus on the investing, focus on my investors, uh you know, our companies and uh it'll be quite a few more years before I do do a memoir if I do one. We'll have to see.
1:05:43
>> Uh do you do you like writing or is it like Dorothy Parker said, I hate writing, I love having written.
1:05:50
>> I'm probably more in the Dorothy Parker camp. >> Yeah, me too.
1:05:52
But at the at the same time I do find that um I don't think by writing but I clarify and extend the thinking and then you can you know get sort of further validation in terms of like research. I do enjoy that process.
1:06:06
Um but I currently find for example that the the my writing uh itch is scratched by writing my quarterly letters to investors.
1:06:12
You know I don't need to turn it into a book.
1:06:14
Um and that that's what I do.
1:06:16
I I sort of do think by writing.
1:06:16
I started keeping journals when I was 18 and I still have them all.
1:06:24
And one of the things that I think it really does help is um you know when it's just knocking around in your head, it's still amorphous, right?
1:06:36
And when you're forced to actually write it out, you realize very quickly, well, that's really stupid.
1:06:44
I can't believe I was thinking about going down that path.
1:06:48
>> I mean, you make a very interesting point.
1:06:49
point. um one of my my dearest friend uh Tur Muny and we had started a business together demonics which we sold at Corvvis that Bill Gates owned at the time and so I've like he's very close and we spent so many hours together but he was sent me a long blog post about
1:07:02
this issue which is that um even though I love this podcast he said that the danger of the modern world is that many people listen to podcasts and don't read and obviously we're talking about the importance of reading but you know you you can say whatever you want in a podcast and you never have to sort of
1:07:16
formally lay down the logic or the steps or show the footnotes notes and so you can end up with like a lot of uh crackpots and insane theories and podcasts that never get tested and and writing itself is a test of you know you have to remember what was three pages before you have to make sure that
1:07:32
there's a logical connection you have to get the the the research right so I think that writing itself does have that very powerful influence and it it would be a very sad thing if we essentially revert to like almost a preiterate homeriic age where we all live on podcasts and have no written I I actually agree with that. I
1:07:49
I generally speaking uh when I'm uh looking at other podcasts, not this one.
1:08:00
Uh I read the transcript um rather than listen.
1:08:03
Um and I and maybe that's just because I just love to read.
1:08:06
Um but um I think you're absolutely right.
1:08:11
I think podcasts are really great um for like like what we're doing right now.
1:08:17
People are going to get to know you.
1:08:19
They're going to get to know the book and like, oo, I I should pick that up, right?
1:08:23
So, they're great at getting to know people or getting to know ideas.
1:08:27
Um but they should lead elsewhere, >> right?
1:08:33
They should lead to I mean, if you're really into it, you should write about it, right?
1:08:37
Because you're absolutely right.
1:08:39
It has to have the footnotes and it has to be tested and it has to be all of those things.
1:08:44
I think that they're really great for exposing people >> to new ideas or new people or whatever, but then you got to take the next step and and I I I obviously I wouldn't have started a publishing company if I felt that people were going to stop reading.
1:09:03
As a matter of fact, I actually think uh when I talk to much younger people like Zoomers um that I'm seeing a tendency to their what they are loving are long form content actual physical books as opposed to uh on an uh Kindle or an iPad.
1:09:22
Uh so I I definitely fingers crossed have have hopes for that.
1:09:30
One of the things that uh we do on Infinite Loops that uh I and I was trying to guess what you were going to say after reading your book.
1:09:38
Uh what we do is we we make you emperor of the world.
1:09:43
Um you can't put anyone in a re-education camp. You can't kill anyone.
1:09:49
But what you can do is we're going to give you a magic microphone and you can say two things into it.
1:09:52
And unlike every other idea that the people of the world have ever had, the entire population of the world is going to wake up whatever their next day is.
1:10:02
And your two things you say into the magical microphone, they're going to think we're their own idea.
1:10:09
And they're going to say, "You know what?
1:10:11
Unlike all the other times I've had these great ideas, either in the shower or when I got up, I'm going to act on both of these two things right now."
1:10:19
What What are you going to incept?
1:10:22
I mean, I think there's no need to reinvent the wheel.
1:10:23
I think the big problem in society is not that we don't uh have good values, is that we don't live by them.
1:10:31
And I think that um you know, do unto others as you'd have them do unto you.
1:10:35
If everyone woke up the next day and did that, I think the world will be a much better place.
1:10:37
Um >> so the golden rule and that's your first one. That's a good one.
1:10:45
>> I think that would solve a lot of problems. >> I agree.
1:10:49
>> And then probably I would say don't hurt others.
1:10:50
I think so much of fascism, totalitarianism or chauvinism or you know uh you you do away with that.
1:10:57
Now obviously the world doesn't work that way which is why you do need uh militaries and you do need the police and you do need people to protect you and you do need as Orwell said sort of you know men who can meet violence to others at night.
1:11:10
Um but if I did have that magic wand you know probably one I'd do >> th those are are two wonderful ones. The book is out now.
1:11:19
I highly, obviously I'm biased because we're publishing it, but I've read it more than once.
1:11:25
Uh, and it is an amazing read.
1:11:29
Um, available everywhere in the United States in the UK.
1:11:35
Um, and the way things are these days, they can get it if they're not in one of those two locations >> instantly via like Kindle, iBooks, or whatever their preferred platform is.
1:11:46
Well, Jonathan, fantastic book.
1:11:46
I I think it uh I I loved it when I read it the first time.
1:11:53
I loved it even more when I reread the final edited version. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much.
1:11:59
It's been an absolute pleasure. I'm a huge fan of yours.
1:12:00
So, it's a great >> And I have yours.