Apostolos Apostolopoulos interview with Soo Chuen Tan

So, Apostles, thanks for making an exception to your personal no-media policy to have this interview with me. Of course, of course, I'm excited to do it. Alright, so let's start by telling me your personal story. Sure, so, you know, so as likely most can tell by my name, I was born and raised in Greece in the suburbs of Athens. I'm the oldest of three brothers. I'd call my family middle class, so, you know, I think we never really wanted for anything as we were growing up, but my brothers and I always knew that we would have to make it on our own eventually. Both of my parents worked very hard to ensure that, you know, we all had the best education possible, which is probably the best gift that they ever gave us. All three of us ended up going to good universities, you know, and even though my family is now spending three continents in four cities, I'm in New York, one of my brothers is actually London, another one in Sydney, and my parents are in Athens, we're all actually very close to each other. So, I think my parents did a pretty decent job, right, to gen. I think you were a possible first try, a recent Alexa, okay. Right, I would agree. So, I went to a Greek American school, called Athens College for most of my school years, including middle school and high school, and what I realized early on is that the only true education is self-education. So, even though it's, you know, nice to have resources and then, you know, good and famous schools, and it's even more important to have good mentors, right, they usually are in these schools. At the end of the day, you cannot expect others to instill knowledge in you. So, throughout all my years, you know, as far back as I can remember, I taught myself by reading a lot, by trying to understand what I read from first principles, as opposed to learning things by heart, or just for, you know, scoring highly in an exam. I was, you know, typically at the top of, you know, most of my classes in those school years, especially maths and sciences, except a couple that I thought were not going to be that useful in life, such as, you know, ancient Greek, for example, which I think so far have been proven right on that one. Now, I was exposed to investing from a very young age because of my father. My father was a banker, Helen, his career, he eventually managed money for mutual funds and then for various Greek investors, mostly kind of the world's individuals, but investing globally and mostly in Eastern Europe. Now, as you can imagine, this was a small industry in Greece, right, in the 90s, into the 2000s. Capital markets were still developing and there were many opportunities and inefficiencies as a result of that. My father, I remember he often called this setup as, you know, being the one-eyed man in the land of blinds. Now, about 13 years old, you know, I kind of knew that my dad was dealing with stocks, that stocks had something to do with companies and numbers going up and down on the screen. And one day, I just asked him to explain to me what all this actually means and what I vividly remember is that he told me three things. One, that each of these numbers that you see on that screen correspond to the price that you can pay if you want to to buy pieces of real companies. That per year issue tells you how many years you have to wait until you make your money back if the profit of the company stays the same. And that the second richest person in the world does the same job that he does. So, as you can imagine, you know, I remember now my third and year old mind is calling a thousand different directions, right, of what this all could mean and how exciting it all sounded, right. I wasn't thinking like that. So, shortly after that, actually, I got ahold of Warren Buffett's letters. And even though I was somewhat young during this time, a lot of what you were saying, I took in quite a bit of it and a lot of light bulbs just started turning on in my head. I knew that, you know, as early as 15, that this was what I wanted to do in my life, I would become an investor. And I remember actually writing a thesis for a high school economics paper on the bubble of 1999 in the Greek stock market, when, you know, and actually that paper didn't really get a very high grade because it did not clearly fit into a theoretical economic model and it was to behavioral apparently. So, you know, so I remember, but I remember that and then I also remember taking money from a couple of friends who had grown tired of, you know, hearing me talking about stocks and asked me to actually buy a couple of stocks on their behalf instead. So, you could say this was my first money management experience. And I also bought, you know, few stocks for myself using my allowance. Now, every decision I made from then on was with the goal of becoming an investor. Now, about 16 years old, I had to decide whether I wanted to continue with a Greek educational system for the last two years of high school or do the International Baccalaureate Program. Now, if I chose the latter, that would mean that I could not stay in Greece for university, right? I would have to move to another country, most likely the US or the UK, which, as you can imagine, was a pretty big decision to make at 16. And, you know, however, I remember it being a relatively easy decision and the reason I think was I knew exactly what I wanted to study. I knew where I wanted to study it. And I knew that if I wanted to achieve greater things in life, both academically and professionally, my odds were much better outside of Greece, right? This is a country that, you know, while achingly beautiful that I wanted to visit a lot has and had multiple challenges. So, since I was 16, I knew that I was likely to be a first-generation immigrant and I was right. And I was actually rather excited by the idea. Now, what I ended up doing is I started economics at the London School of Economics in the UK, which was actually very helpful in building the foundations behind understanding fundamental structures of businesses. Supply and demand concepts and many economic mental models, especially as those were taught in micro-economics and industrial economics, right? And I also learned a little about accounting, right, which is the language of business that has been especially helpful, right, in what we do. I also studied economic history, while I was at LSE, you know, I was particularly intrigued by the economic history of the United States and how a country was, you know, less than 5% of the world population could end up accounting for more than 20% of the global economic value act. And so, I eventually decided, you know, while I was in the UK to come to the US right after I graduated from LSE and try out an alternative education system to the British one. So, I ended up attending the Master of Finance program at MIT, where, you know, I actually learned a lot about all the interesting and funky ways that modern finance has evolved. Yes. And I met Yusuf and quite seriously, so a classmate at MIT, who was previously at Columbia, sent me the decision job description from the Columbia Careers website, and he said this job was made for you. I remember that well. I asked a good friend and embossed him to actually interview you before you came down to Stanford to the office. And up to today, he's convinced that I did that because I wanted to make sure he would legit before I shelled out the train. I remember that very clearly as well. Yeah, so I also remember that at the time, I mean, this year he was two years old, had three people was managing under $100 million and, you know, was in a very modest warehouse. Sorry, I mean, office, one floor down from a current office. And, you know, after meeting and spending time with you, I thought that you actually made a lot of sense. I realized that, you know, I had found someone that had the character, the investment philosophy and, you know, was starting to build a business structure that was required to build a long-term investment enterprise. One that, you know, I could potentially go on and maybe one day do great things with. And 11 years later, you know, this has been my first and only job. And I hope it's my last. You know, building this firm together with US partners for all these years and going back through everything we have gone through has been everything I could wish for as the, you know, 15-year-old back in Greece dreaming about them. Well, thank you. So, what were your formative experiences in your life that made you the person that you are today? Yeah, so there were a few. I'll go in chronological order of what I can remember. So, when I was five years old, I remember that my father's sister gave me a children's fantasy book written by a old doll. And I think that's where I actually first caught into reading. I remember reading most of his 20 or so children's books before I turned seven. And then I, what I did after that is I went and read every book that I could actually find in my house. And I think that's kind of what got me, you know, at first into the habit of absorbing information from written text and also perhaps, you know, living in my head a little bit. And, you know, I also remember that my grandfather, who was a chemist, gave me math problems and riddles every time that I saw him as I was growing up. And that's kind of probably when I first really got excited about math. I remember the first test that I scored at the top of the class at, which was a math test and third grade. And I remember that it was quite a feeling and one that became quite addictive thereafter. I think that's when I started becoming competitive, you know, that drive to excel actually remains throughout my school years, you know, year after year, exam, semester exam into university and then later in life. And, you know, what was good I think was that I was generally left alone by my parents from a young age. So, I actually became quite independent early on. Nobody ever really told me that I had to study, for example, you know, I did it because I enjoyed it. Nobody ever told me to work hard either, you know, I did it because it kind of worked for me early on. I saw my parents coming back from work late at night, you know, almost every day. So, I got into that habit. I eventually realized I also lived in a tiny country, you know, in a world with 7 billion people, which was also a world that would only become more and more competitive. So, I realized that, you know, I needed to keep working hard to compete, especially as I left that cocoon that was Greece, right, and went on to competitive global universities and then, you know, to our extremely competitive world of investing. Now, I discussed, you know, a bit earlier, how in my middle and high school years I often took to my father about investing. My father was, you know, actually extremely generous and excited about teaching me, you know, in a candid manner about his work and what he was going through throughout his career, as well as his own life experiences, right, from which I learned a lot. So, for example, you know, he lost his own father at 17. He lost most of the money that his family had, and he had to support, you know, a family on his own from that very young age. So, he treated me like an adult. You know, he had a big influence in me. I got to learn a lot from him and, you know, instead of asking, you know, various random questions that, you know, 15-year-old would typically ask, you know, his mom and dad, I go to ask things like, you know, how does this business make money? Or, why is that company successful and the other one isn't? Or, you know, why did the internet bubble happen? Or why are you buying this talk, you know. So, I mean, I obviously had no context or skills at the time, but trying to understand these things really in life, and especially realizing what I wanted to do at that age, giving me an advantage that I didn't realize how lucky I was to have. I mean, most people, you know, don't know what they want to do at 30, let alone at 15. So, I realized that later on in life. Now, let's see, I actually really got into economics, you know, again, largely in a very self-taught manner, similar to how I did at school. I think I actually didn't physically go to a single lecture during my time there. I learned everything by reading and using alarm materials such as lecture videos and exercises. And I found that to actually be a much more effective way to learn, right, than a much more efficient way of teaching, actually, than the traditional way. So, what I did while I was in the UK is I started a website called the Open Academy that, you know, basically hosted thousands of lecture videos and exercises from various universities around the world. And this, you know, fun trivia, this happened about a year before Coursera actually came along, and all my education became kind of a bigger thing. Now, you know, I eventually realized that running the Open Academy was going to be a full-time job, right. And while the venture could have worked out, if I devoted 100% of my life myself to it, investing was my true passion. You know, the Open Academy was my first entrepreneurial experience, and it was one that made me realize that, you know, building something from scratch can be done with the right people, the right motivations, the right ideas. But above all, you know, it requires devotion, it requires hard work, and it requires a lot of luck. So, instead of founding Coursera, you decided to become a stockman. Exactly. Not going on that. So, moving to more recent events, relatively speaking, you know, I mean, obviously building this area alongside you has definitely been a formative experience. You know, do you realize that I actually have spent more than a third of my life, and more than 70% of my adult life was this area. You know, it is here that I learn almost everything I know about investing in business analysis here, I learned about all the intricacies, nuances, difficulties, and, of course, the exciting parts about building an investor. And I think it's a great thing to do with this area. And I also find it, and I found it extremely interesting that, you know, as we develop as investors ourselves and learn more about, you know, businesses of this area. Build more mental models, have more aha moments, which are otherwise known as moments of clarity where, you know, to borrow a bathroom or ice connects to our brains. I can connect most of these aha moments to the aha moments, you know, based on reading his letters and analyzing his past decisions, I think Buffett himself had, as he himself developed as an investor, right, over his very long career. The nice thing is that, you know, we're still in the early innings of a multi-round investigation and, you know, his teachings, his writings, his decisions, and his philosophies will be around for us to continue studying for years to come. So, nothing that we will paint our own painting, but, you know, he's the beautiful one to look at for inspiration. And, you know, finally, just don't take this too seriously or proudly, but, you know, the usage has been a big influence, you know, perhaps unintentionally or by sheer false of will. After all, I've spent more than 70% of my adult life with you in this area. I have learned a lot of things from you, not just, you know, about investing, but also about kindness, about humility, resilience, ambition, honesty and integrity. And, in some, you know, quite important ways, I think I'm a better person because I'm at you. Well, that is one of the most genuinely touching and correctifying things anyone has said to me. Yeah, I mean it. So, you know, finally, I mean, obviously my parents have also clearly been significant influences. You know, I talked about my father extensively and how he was one. They wanted to taught me a lot about investing, about hard work, about life. He also taught me about, you know, how to send me for yourself as no substitute. You know, and then my mother has actually been equally influential. So, born in Germany to a German mother and a Greek father, she was the one that taught me about kindness, generosity, honesty, discipline, of course, hard work. And frankly, you know, she's likely where I got my risk of origin from, which, you know, I think is a very valuable tool to have as an investor. Just going back to Buffett's first two rules of investing, being number one, not to lose money, and number two, not to forget rule number one. She's the kindest, you know, most genuine and loving person I know, and I also owe a lot of the person I am to her. I very much agree on it as a special person. So, let's move on to our next topic. How do you think about epistemology? So, what does it mean to know something? Yeah, so this is an especially important question for what we do at this hearing. And, you know, one that, you know, I think we think about a lot. I'll talk about it from the perspective of how it links with how invests. So, the pursuit of truth is one of the fundamental tenets of our philosophy, right? At the end of the day, you know, we have access to all the information everybody else has. And using that information, we need to make informed decisions about whether or not to make an investment. Now, this depends at least in part on our ability or, you know, like they're off to make an educated assessment of what the future will look like for a particular business. Now, if we knew that the future of a certainty, you know, we would all know what the business was worth, right? And, you know, our job would be very easy. We would just buy businesses that are offered to us at a discount to that certain value, right? Our job would also probably not exist, right? That's a strange world. So, our starting point is, and I think it has to be a belief that we need to anchor on, which is a belief that any business is worth a present value of all each future cash flows, right, that accrue to its owners until that business ceases to exist. Now, if you think about this, this is quite different from believing that the business is worth what someone else is willing to pay for it, right? Which is, I think, a reductionist, in my opinion, quite pointless way of thinking that doesn't lead itself, lend itself to much, you know, thoughtful analysis, right? So, for example, you know, if the stock market closes for 10 years and, you know, no one trades a single share of Coca-Cola is Coca-Cola worthless, right? Now, you know, as a result, I think, you know, we think that intrinsic value is out there to be found, right? And this will generally cash flows eventually, even if those are not known today. So, we have to make assessments on what these cash flows will be based on limited information, which is, you know, often noisy, right? It can be interpreted in multiple different ways, and it's based on kind of what we think we know, what we think we don't know, how much of what we know, sorry, how much of what we don't know is noble, and how much of it is actually unknowable, right? And even after we do all that, uncertainty will still be about, right? So, as a result, knowledge, I think, as far as investing is concerned, is based on belief, right? And that belief is formed by logical, you know, empirical and justified reasoning. That's, you know, I think that at its core, investing is inherently probabilistic, right? And that appropriate A-Pri-i and A-Post-i reasoning are central in doing it, right? I think a good parallel for all the statisticians out there can be made with statistics and regression analysis, right? So, I think it's in simplest form, right? A regression is just an attempt to identify and simplify a potential causal relationship between two variables. So, you have a bunch of random observations on these two variables, and you're trying to figure out if there's a causal relationship between them, what that might be, and most importantly, how sure you are about both of these things. You're never 100% sure. The scatter plot of the two variables do not form a perfect line, right? There's always an error term. That is why, you know, what they call a non-hypothesis in statistics says that there's a relationship between the two variables, but you can never prove that really. I actually could be intervening third variable. Exactly. And, you know, all you can say, right, is that you have not found enough evidence to disprove it. And therefore, it is reasonable to make that original relationship you identified as being the probable truth, right? Now, if you do however find that the relationship between them is too random, right, or there are other variables, as you mentioned, that maybe, you know, affecting this, then you can conclude that you can now hypothesis is unlikely to be correct, and then reject it, right? So, we see this in investing all the time, right? I mean, this is just an oversimplified version of what we see, but we see it all the time, and, you know, we applied extensively in how we actually do it for the research. Yep. Well said. So, we discussed how you got interested in investing, but why are you a value investor? Because it's the best job in the world. I mean, I'm probably quite biased, but, you know, I think that's actually true. So, honestly, I think, you know, investing is my calling. You know, having done it for 11 years, I still can't imagine doing anything else. You know, learning has always been very, very important to me. I can't think, actually, of another business where you get paid to learn nonstop, you know, for your entire life. Given how many interesting businesses they're out there, you know, run by interesting people, how complex evolving, and, you know, interconnected the world is. I think it's a guarantee, right, that there will always be something new and out there to find out, you know, I, and we have learned about hundreds of businesses over the last 11 years. And we want some of them, you know, from commercial rates in Greece, to developers in Brazil, to salvage car auctions in the US, to Coca-Cola bottleers in multiple continents, right. And, you know, what never ceases to amaze me is that, you know, the more you know about business, the more you realize you don't know about it. And, you know, I think the satisfaction of coming to kind of aha moments is quite difficult to top. Now, as I said earlier, you know, I always figured things out on my own, right. So if an argument doesn't hold up to logical inquiry and it is not internally consistent, I really don't mind disagreeing with everyone in the world who may say that it does. Regardless of how many or how many, you know, how smart those people might be. In fact, you know, I think I kind of enjoy it when it happens. I think you would agree, so, you know, right. Oh, speak for yourself, apostles. I'm a far more agreeable person. Sure you are. Now, being a good value investor, I think, requires one psychology to be balanced, right. So not too optimistic and not too pessimistic. I think it also requires one to understand that, you know, business is a business, right. And the fact that some people may be willing to buy X today and then sell it at half of X tomorrow says a little about the business and more about the psychology of these people, right. In fact, I think that true long-term value investing is actually extremely rare, right. And I think that if it's structured properly, it can lead to sustainable and outsized results, right. So I think there's a true arbitrage here, truly building and holding a company, sorry, truly buying and holding a company for decades is almost unheard of in modern public markets. Most investment management firms do not have the duration of capital or the patience to do this. Or there, you know, usually are other principle Asian issues that cause short-termism to prevail in the end. Now, as a competitive person and, you know, as a value investor, I'm not sure you like arbitrage, especially when those happen at that scale. You know, I think human behavior is actually predictionably, predictably irrational. People tend to be excessively optimistic when things go well and excessively pessimistic when they don't, right. And fortunes have been made from taking advantage of just this simple rationality, right. As Buffett says, be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. I think the fun fact though is that it's not being said is that the human brain is not actually designed to do that, right. So, you know, when people were running from the lion, they all run together, right. You know, back then, I think it was for a good reason, right. The conferian person who stopped to check if the lion was in fact hungry was likely it's dinner, you know, but thankfully lions are in cages now. So, I think, you know, having the psychological makeup to recognize emotional reactions, right, including these fight or flight the ones, and consistently and truthfully follow Buffett's mantra to be fearful when others are greedy when others are fearful, gives us a significant advantage, right. And, you know, I have personally seen more than 10 dislocations right over the last 11 years around the world, you know, some of which were quite significant, right. For example, you know, in 1 year 2020, and I think a significant portion of our returns can be traced back to the investments that we made during those dislocations, right. And what I do remember is being quite greedy during most of those times, and equally quite fearful for long periods outside of those times. I would agree. So, now, what have you learned about building a business during time that you've been here? Sure. So, building a business, I think, is, you know, very exciting, but also extremely challenging, right. So, I think it takes a lot of original thinking, I think it takes partnering with the right people, takes passion, takes drive, resilience, hard work, and, you know, of course, luck, right, to build something out of nothing. And, I think, building a lasting investment in the price, right, is especially demanding, right. So, there are relatively low barriers to entry, right, in the investment management business. Everyone technically has access to the same information, right. There are a lot of smart people out there, and there's a lot of noise, right, in investment track records, especially short ones, which makes it difficult for investors to differentiate between luck and skill. Now, having said that, you know, one of the most surprising facts, right, that I came to realize about this business, is that there are actually very few truly long-term investors, value investors out there. And, this number has actually been coming down over the time that even I have been in the business. Obviously, holding periods of publishing the trade stocks, for example, are a fraction of what they were 20 years ago, and, you know, those are in turn a fraction of what they were 50 years ago. So, more and more people, you know, just trade stocks, right, like Sardines, basically, on a daily basis, without much regard for the fact that there are pieces of real businesses. And then, fundamental investors, you know, that say, are long-term investors, rarely behave as much, right, because of a multitude of factors. So, you know, that includes structural asset liability mismatches that create foreselling, right, at the exact wrong time during dislocations, inherent short term mistaking by both, you know, them and their investors, employing turnover, principal agent issues, you know, to build incentive misalignments that exist in the modern day investment management industry. So, there are very few investors truly buying and holding any more for decades or more, right, even private equity firms, for example, right, they tend to have planned exits only a few years after the first invests, and, you know, they usually hope for someone to come and buy the investment, the higher price that those expected exit dates. Now, with those dynamics in mind, you know, despite some of these issues, right, I think our biggest and most exciting entrepreneurial challenge has been and continues to be attempting to find and dig a few modes, right, around the desiring investment and the price. The first one of those has been finding and partnering with philosophically aligned investors, right, who are truly long-term investors. And I think we have been lucky in that regard, I'm sure you'll agree. We have lots and subspenders because, you know, our capital is long duration, both because of legal structure, but also because our investors truly get what we do. I think they understand that, you know, playing offense during dislocation is vital to our success, right, and that everybody is better off sticking together and learning and leaning in during such times. Our club acts, you know, also align incentives, right, in a way that is not actually very typical in our industry. And, frankly, with your investors, it's true partners, right, in extensions of our team, right, we often ask them to help us with their research, for example. Now, building those partnerships, you know, building mutual trust in several cases, deciding not to partner with potential investors, who will believe our, you know, may not be sufficiently philosophically aligned, actually requires a tremendous time of time and effort. Agreed. But more than anything, I think we just got very lucky. We're incredibly fortunate to have the partners that we do. Oh, absolutely. I totally agree with that. Now, you know, secondly, I think that it is vital to hire and retain the right people, that is people who share our DNA, right, and embrace and continue shaping our philosophy. I think at the end of the day, right, our business does not require any hard assets, right, the most important asset that we actually have is human capital. And I think we have also been lucky to your point in this regard, right, we have a very capable and growing team of outstanding individuals who are, you know, great at what they do. They're generally amazing people, right, and truly represent what I think these are in DNA is. And, but I think continuing to kind of find the right people is a very important challenge, right, as we grow and one that, you know, we devote a lot of time to. Finally, last but not least, we've given our, you know, uncommonly long holding periods, right, we seek to create strong partnerships with our own portfolio company management teams, who often come to know us and respect us for our long-term view of their businesses. And, you know, to travel alongside them through, you know, both good times and bad, helping them with their businesses, you know, however, however we can and whenever we can. With these dynamics in mind, you know, I think we have created several competitive advantages, right, that we talk about a lot. So, I think our structure allows us to invest over very long-term time horizons. It allows us to wander off, you know, the beaten path and look at companies all over the world, right. And think about structures of businesses and, you know, how businesses look like over long periods of time, like a business owner would do, right. And I think we can do all these things while maintaining a very strict price discipline and while continuing to be psychologically wired to be contrarian investors, right, especially when taking advantage of those price dislocations. I very much agree. You know, this is a difficult business. We need all the advantages that we can get. Absolutely. So, how have you evolved as an investor since you joined Disari? Well, I was 22 when I started at Disari, right. So, in percentage terms, you could say that my evolution approaches infinity, right. Were you in a Mieber? And this is true for anyone who's divided by close to zero, right. But, you know, more seriously, I think that, you know, I, as well as a firm as a whole, right, have become better at recognizing partners and developing more nuanced and calibrated mental models and applying, you know, those mental models to different businesses. And, you know, in different geographies, you know, I think knowledge accumulates and compounds, right. And it's frankly quite humbling to paraphrase Einstein, you know, the wiser we become, the less we know. And, you know, I also think that, you know, I've expanded my circles of competence as more of these are how moments have accumulated over time, right. So, you know, I think as a firm, we have a better understanding of search costs, for example, another switching costs, you know, nuances around when that network affects, you know, in terms of being used quite quite a bit in our industry, actually create sustainable entry variance and one that doesn't happen. You know, I think quantifying, identifying scale economies, some costs, when those matter, scarce assets and, you know, other barriers to entry. And then I also think that, you know, I and we have become better empirical researchers and investors. So, I think we have found better and more repeatable ways to empirically test our hypothesis, right, and have held ourselves to a continually rising bar, right, of what evidence is needed for us to gain confidence in our thesis, right. And I think as, you know, as a young economist, right, some of my early challenges at the firm were around trying to apply economic models to observe behaviors, right. In many cases, not succeeding. And that's simply because, you know, people more times than not, you know, do not behave the way that rational home economic is being some economists expect them to behave as. Really, no, people are perfectly rational all of the time. Yeah, so, you know, economic models are helpful, right, at starting point, but they're always a gross simplification and, you know, oversimplified, with oversimplified assumption, right, of what reality is. As a result, you know, they're almost always wrong, right. And a lot of times, you know, I think what we've learned over time, what I've learned over time is that seeing what people do, and most importantly, what they consistently and predictably do, even if that behavior may seem irrational, right, to one's eyes, I think has helped us develop better and better mental models. And of course, you know, I have also learned from mistakes, right. So, you know, for example, to be more cognizant of nuances and different business cultures around the world. And how different people work, and think, you know, from, that are, that are, that are, that are from different places. Incentives and, incentive structures of management teams, you know, off-balance your liabilities and various other lessons, right. And I think thankfully, you know, our mistakes have been infrequent, right, and our batting average has stayed respectable after all these years. So, you talk about mistakes, but what were your biggest eureka moments during a time at this ring? So, I think for intellectual property protection purposes, I will have to decline in answering this question. But, but joking side, I think there's a few of them, right. And I'll just give you an example that I think brings a picture. So, I think one industry that both you and I struggled with in this ring, in this ring's early years was branded consumer products. So, in fact, you know, we heavily debated the question of why people would continue paying premiums to buy brands, right. And why the supernormal profits made by brand owners would not get competed away over time, right. And most importantly, you know, we wondered about what makes certain brands fail, and you know, others continue to strive with passing of time. So, I don't think there was a single aha moment, but over multiple empirical case studies, I think my thinking and understanding of how people make these repeatable and predictable decisions evolved. As Buffett said, I think, you know, my eyes just connected to my brain, right. So, I remember, you know, an aided brand awareness and market share study that was conducted in the 1920s, and then in the 1990s, which as respondents to name the top brands that they can think of within, you know, many different product categories ranging from, you know, chewing gum to raincoats, right. And what was striking, I think, was that there was only a small number of cases, right, where the leading brands of the 1920s were also the leading brands of the 1990s, both in terms of market share and mine share. And, you know, for example, like the leading shoe brand, you know, in the 1920s was Douglas, right. And in the 1990s it was Nike. And I don't think a lot of people here would have heard of what Douglas is, right. The leading motorcycle brand, you know, in the 1920s was Indian, you know, and today it's, you know, a more familiar Harley Davidson, right. So, I think it was interesting, you know, to see this, but what was more interesting though is to see which brands actually survived, right. And one learning, I think, was at search costs often actually outweigh the utility of switching away from certain more habitual kind of purchases, right. We also studied the distribution of, you know, several FMCG companies, right around the world, including, for example, sparkling beverage distribution businesses around the world, the serial industry in the US and the instant noodles industry in Asia. And I think a key learning here was that, you know, distribution advantages that certain incumbents develop can make it, you know, hard for new entrance from, you know, for new vendors from making successful, you know, for raising the markets. And, you know, we eventually got more comfortable, right, as a result of these learnings with some of these FMCG businesses and has seen so several times, right. Yeah, our consumer brands experience has been a fun and continuing growth journey for us. So, speaking of fun, what are some of the most funny stories you have from work? Yeah, so I think there's a few, you know, so a couple of you can remember, so we, you know, I think we fancy ourselves as having very high attention to details a team. So here are a couple of, you know, examples of our famous powers of observation. So many years ago, I'm sure you remember, my dad was, you know, staying with me here and somehow you such an convinced him to take a picture of me, you know, sleeping past my alarm clock, right. And then, you know, you convinced him to send that picture to you. He did it all by himself. And yes, exactly. And then, you know, you then went along printed and large copies of that picture and pasted them just all over the office, including my desk and my chair. And I remember, you know, vividly kind of coming in the office and being extremely focused on something I wanted to discuss with you a thing about one of our portfolio companies, right. So, I just proceeded to completely miss the fact that there were a bunch of enlarged pictures of me literally pasted all over the office, right. And instead, you know, just kept talking to you about this analysis that I was working on. And, you know, I was actually wondering, like, why were you sniggering, right. And then, you know, you finally burst it out laughing and pointed out how oblivious I was of my surroundings. And, you know, I think more recently, something kind of similar to that, you know, I remember Latin bought a massive cardboard cut out of a brown bear, you know, because we're all so bearish, right. And early one morning, he came in and he placed it right at the end of the office, right, to, you know, kind of greet the desiring team as we walked in. And he thought that it would be funny kind of to see our reactions to it, right. But what happened then was that one by one, you know, each of us proceeded to enter the office and shuffle into each of our rooms without making any comment about the fact that our life size, very real looking bear was stunning at our entrance. You know, so Latin waited all day for someone to ask about the bear during all our meetings and so problems all the sessions during the day. And no one did, right, until that evening, and when you asked James, oh, by the way, who brought the bear. So, you know, I think our keen powers of observation apparently doesn't, you know, doesn't extend to our physical surroundings. But, you know, I think we laugh a lot of the work, right. And I think we appreciate each other's humor. And I think it's actually great to have that. Yeah. So, okay. What are your hopes and dreams for the desiring team and for the firm? Sure. So, ultimately, you know, I would like us to one build an investment firm that we're proud of, right. And then our entire lifetimes and two, kind of have a lot of fun while doing it. So, you know, I would like to continue to be creative about how we paint the desiring painting. You know, we're obviously a very competitive team, right. And we want to win. So, I think generating healthy returns for investors over many decades is ultimately the main reason for us to exist. However, I'd like to do this in a way that, you know, we can all be proud of, right. It was honesty, you know, integrity character, intellectual curiosity, intellectual humanity, passion, long-termism and, you know, this continues kind of sense of self-improvement. You know, we do not want us to compromise on any of these qualities, right. I think the, the how matters just as much as the what, which I think you'd agree with. And I would also like us to do this with, you know, a team that stick together, right, and grows together and maintains the culture in DNA that we have built, you know, firm cultures inevitably evolve, right. As new people join them and ours will inevitably too. However, I think that if we find the right people and, you know, I think these changes will be for the better, right. And I think that that has actually been our experience. At the end of the day, you know, we spend most of our waking hours with each other, right. And I want every member of this team, right, you know, including present company to be excited to go to work, you know, every morning, right. And, you know, I think that, I mean, my dream is that, you know, 30 years from now, we'll have our own, kind of, mini version of Berkshire's sannual meeting, right. So, one where our investors, you know, team members, portfolio company managers that, you know, have worked together for 40 plus years, you know, come together to celebrate, right. What we have accomplished and look forward to an even more interesting future, right. You know, I hope and I think that we will continue learning and becoming better investors, right. And business builders as we collectively gain more experience, right. And learn more about the businesses we own and about new businesses. You know, I think we're still at the very early stages of both of our investing and our business building journeys. And if the last decade is, you know, a good example of how our learning can compound going forward, I think our best years ahead of us. I am counting on that being the case of Postalos. Thank you. So, this was a lot of fun. Great. I had a little fun as well. Thanks, Jim.