Episodes

Dan Ferris: The 2024 Stansberry Research Conference and Alliance Meeting is back this fall in Las Vegas. And for the first time ever, they've extended their early bird discounted ticket pricing, which means if you reserve your seat today, you can save $450 off your ticket. Head over to www.vegasearlybird.com to find all the details and get your discounted ticket. The Stansberry Conference is truly one of the best business, mixed with pleasure, industry events out there. Past speakers have included Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary, Dennis Miller, and Steve Forbes. And of course, all your favorite Stansberry editors will be there, too, including yours truly. I mean, I hope I'm one of your favorites. [Laughter]

I look forward to this event every year, it's great getting the chance to meet our listeners from the show, whether it's chatting during a break, or grabbing a beer at the end of the day, or whatever. So I hope you're planning to join us. It's a great event, go to www.vegasearlybird.com to get your discounted ticket before prices increase. That's www.vegasearlybird.com. So come on out and find me in Vegas, and say hello.

Gary, welcome back to the show. Always good to see you.

Gary Mishuris: Thank you very much for having me.

Dan Ferris: So it's been a little while. We had you on before in July 2022, and a few things have happened since then in the world.

Gary Mishuris: Yeah, a few.

Dan Ferris: A few. So generally speaking – actually, before we do anything, let's just remind our listener of what kind of investor you are. How would you describe yourself as an investor?

Gary Mishuris: Sure. I'm a long-term concentrated value investor. I'm mostly bottom up and also a big believer in behavioral biases and mental models, using them in terms of both defense to help myself make better decisions and also taking advantage of opportunities.

Dan Ferris: All right, a man after my own heart. So what I was going to say before is, since it has been a topsy-turvy almost two years since you've been with us, has anything changed for you? Are you finding ideas more difficult or less difficult to find? Has anything changed significantly for you as you allocate capital for clients?

Gary Mishuris: Sure. Hard to believe, but I actually think for me it's been one of the more challenging periods ever. I've done this for almost a quarter of a century, so it's been tough to find ideas on the bottom-up basis. And I was talking to another investor the other day, and the last time I had this much difficulty was 2007, which is not to say that we have some kind of imminent collapse awaiting us, but it's just hard. If you juxtapose quality of businesses and people running them and the track to price, there's just not a lot there that I'm finding. Now, maybe I'm missing things. I'm always trying to stay humble and make sure I'm not presumptuous that I have all the answers or even half the answers, but it's been really, really hard.

Dan Ferris: I can't say that surprises me with the market really taking off last year and into this year, making new highs, being rather expensive by all the usual metrics that folks use. So what do you do? How do you hang onto your clients at a time like this, because clients like it when you find lots of ideas and you're – hopefully, you're performing enough in line with the market to make them happy. Is this a good time to hang onto clients or a tough time?

Gary Mishuris: You know, I have a group of clients that are fairly sophisticated. That's not to say that there won't be frustrations. Everyone's human, right, but I think that there's certain self-selection where people who've selected to join me, I kind of understand what they do, and I think they expect me to focus on process over outcome. I think that the other thing that is kind of important is that you have to have a temperament to be successful in this business, and so if you start worrying about what clients are going to think or what someone else is going to think, you're going about it all wrong.

One of my prior shops, we – whenever we'd be talking to a new client or an existing client, and they would ask, hey, how are you finding the market? Is this a good time to invest? You know, the leader of the group would be like, oh, it's a great time to invest. Yeah, give us a lot of money. And I was always like, come on, man, just level with people, just be honest. Because listen, this is not transactional business. Even if you were to put your businessperson hat on, you're not trying to get someone to buy – rent a vacation share or whatever it is. You're trying to hopefully build a long-term relationship, and like in any relationship, if someone is BS-ing you right up front from the beginning, OK. So let's say they invest with you, what's going to happen is at the first sign of turbulence, they're going to want out.

So you're not going to do them favors, you're not going to do yourself that much of a favor, and I think my approach has always been look, if things are tough, I tell people things are tough. By the way, the corollary of that is when I tell people, hey, this is a really attractive time to add capital or put new capital in, I think I have a lot more credibility than the guy who says it's always a great time to invest, I'm always going to do great for you. So I think honesty – it might be old-fashioned, but I do think just being honest most people goes a long way. And also, I really believe in, over short intermediate term kind of timeframes, focusing on inputs rather than outputs. Because you're going to drive yourself insane checking the markets five times a day. It's like, listen, you try to lose 50 pounds. In college, I lost 115 pounds over 18 months. You don't want to weigh yourself five times a day as a measure of progress. You might want to ask did I eat well, did I exercise, did I stick to my plan, and believe that if the plan makes sense and you execute, over time you'll get there. And that's, I think, the way I think about investing.

Dan Ferris: Yeah, you know, that reminds me. Of course, talking to a value investor, half the things you say are going to remind me of a Warren Buffett quote, but there was a quote that he had about not being able to play the game if you're always looking at the scoreboard. So people are obsessed with the scoreboard, and as you know from studying the behavioral economics and finance and things, that's just – people are just too vulnerable to making lots and lots and lots of mistakes as they focus on the scoreboard. And so in other words, you found a group of clients who know you and trust you, they've self-selected as you say, and they trust you. They know that you're not looking at the scoreboard all the time, among other things, which is really nice. You're a fortunate man.

Gary Mishuris: I don't want to kind of BS you either. It's also tough to find those clients. You know very well in this industry, how do fund managers sell? They put up two-, three-year results, and they go and find suckers who will extrapolate that into the indefinite future and give them money. Because we all know that's not sustainable, has no statistical significance whatsoever, but humans being human, they're going to give them money because this guy did 27% per year over the last 3.3 years. I'm going to give him some money. And so the craziest statistic in this business is looking at the asset weighted returns of most investors because that takes into account when the money comes in. So usually someone puts up some amazing record over some intermediate period of time on relatively small dollars, and then they market the heck out of it, get a bunch of performance-chasing clients to come in just as the performance is going to turn far to the worse.

And my approach has always been, OK, I'm going to talk very little about performance other than longer periods of time. I'm going to try to focus on process. I'm going to explain why I think the process works, and I think there's two things that are true. One is that there are relatively few people who are going to be interested in that because, you know, you're human, and it's much easier to take advantage of people's psychology by getting them to performance chase. But the ones that do come through those filters, I think, have certain characteristics that make them much more sticky and much more – much better partners. Because the last thing I need – listen, it's been a challenging couple of years. I'm very open about that in my letters, whoever asks. I'm not – I don't make stuff up.

And I'm pretty touch mentally, but if you have clients who are sending you monthly letters saying, hey, why is this thing moving this way, why is that stock moving that way, no matter how mentally tough you are, it distracts you. So I'm lucky that I don't have clients like that, and I think that getting people to come in who are not the right fit, who are then going to pester you about why is this quarter turn this way and not that way, it would do me a disservice, and it would do honestly my other partners – I think of my clients as my partners – it would do them a disservice. So I'm happy staying smaller with a good group of people than trying to go and put up some crazy numbers over some period of time. Almost every manager's going to have a good stretch and a best stretch. I don't like being cynical about it, that's all.

Dan Ferris: Noted. Yeah, you don't want to be cynical about it. So are you actively, like constantly, or at least every year looking for new clients? How do you do that? How do they come to you?

Gary Mishuris: I let people find me. Some is referrals, some of it people listen to material I write. I write a lot. I'm not probably the most prolific writer in the world, but I do write, and I think that people get to know me through my writing, and a small number kind of trickle in usually every year. But I kind of look at that as the output variable. I think that trying – given that the kind of investors I'm looking for are a fairly small percentage of the total pool out there in terms of people who would be a mutual fit, kind of doing a lot of aggressive outbound marketing, even if I wanted to, just wouldn't work. Some RIA dialing for dollars or doing kind of the standard stuff, I just don't think that that works very well. I have a few family offices, I have a foundation, I have a few – a number of high-net-worth families, and I think that I'm happy to expand at a natural pace as long as the quality of those folks in terms of how they approach partner and managers is very high. And I think over time, it'll sort itself out.

Dan Ferris: Well said. You're a very confident man, aren't you, Gary?

Gary Mishuris: I think I don't have any other choice in the sense that what's my alternative? Listen, I spent – before starting Silver Ring, I spent 15 years at large firms. I started at Fidelity, I spent a part of my career at a couple other large firms, so I've been inside the sausage factory, I know how the sausage is made, I know how it works, I get that it's profitable, but at some point, what is the point? I drive a Toyota Highlander, not because I can't afford a fancier car... because I like it and it's useful, I have three kids. I'm not looking to massively increase my consumption in life. What I am looking to do is live my life both personally and professionally in a way that I'm proud of and that, frankly, I could have my kids be proud of it.

And when I was part of kind of the factory, so to speak, I no longer was trying to feel proud. I felt like it was almost a zero-sum relationship with clients where you were trying to make money off of them as opposed to for them. I don't want to get into the minutiae, but there wasn't – as my mutual friend Vitaly puts it, there wasn't internal alignment. And so I traded making a lot of money for doing things exactly the way I believe is right for me. And by the way, I think there are many ways to do it, and I'm not saying that everyone else is doing it wrong. I'm just saying for me I think this is the right approach, and so I would be a darn fool, to quote the late Charlie Munger, if I were – if I sacrificed all of that, easy seven-figure job, fancy title, all of that, to then start compromising while on my own. I could have stayed at the big shops and with very little effort.

Dan Ferris: All right. So what do you – since you're not an aggressive marketer, if we ran into each other and didn't already know each other, and I said I've got millions of dollars I don't know what to do with and I'm kind of a long-term patient person, what would you tell me? What would you say? Well, I manage money, or let's just say I was trying to pull it out of you and you were saying, OK, I'll tell him a little bit about what I do? How would you talk to me? What would you say to me?

Gary Mishuris: Well, honestly the first thing I would ask is where have you invested in the past, just to understand each other because a lot of people say they're patient, and I've found that people do mostly what they've done before. So when you're patient and you're trading bitcoin or doggie coin or whatever, you probably – might be a wonderful human being, but you're probably not going to be someone who can help. If you're in and out of funds and you're doing this and that, or if you're buying the latest IPO, nothing wrong with it. Chances are we're not a fit. If you kind of say I've kind of invested in such-and-such, I'll say, listen, honestly for most people, I think the index dollar-cost averaging is a perfectly fine approach that'll do better for you than the vast majority of things out there.

Other reasons to deviate, there are a few, and they apply to people who can assess the manager's process. And if you wanted to have a conversation and get to know me better, I'll be happy to do it, but you have to be honest with yourself in that if you can't understand how I'm doing a good job without looking at short-term results or how I'm not doing a good job despite good short-term results, then I think you honestly are better off giving your money to Vanguard or whoever is a good low-cost provider because you're just going to end up paying fees for no reason. But if you were interested in that, then I think we would have a longer conversation.

But I think simplistically, and I think my competitive advantage, if you said OK, Gary, I'm going to grab you by the collar, what is it that you do that's so special? Everybody can quote Warren Buffett. I think many people can read security analysis, do a DCF, analyze the business. There's degrees of skill in that, and I teach a seminar of business school students here in Boston, and there obviously are levels to the game, but even that can be taught and essentially can teach an MBA how to do a Porter Five Forces analysis and all of that. And soon, by the way, we'll have ChatGPT telling us that. It can, by the way. We play around with that. It does a pretty decent business school level job with that.

What I have that I think very few people have is two things combined, and those two things are, one, a unique temperament where I'm just willing to stick to my process, even when things are going against me and AI stocks are skyrocketing and all these things around me are screaming at me, "Hey, Gary, you've got to change." Again, that's different from not learning. Of course I learn and improve continuously, but there's this human tendency to change because of external pressure. And then No. 2 is I have a set of behavioral models I've developed over time, frankly, through painful experiences in some cases where I have messed up or I have come up short, and that kind of library of mental models really helps me, I think, make better decisions. So yes, I do all the things that I think other value investors do well, but I think at the end of the day, where I can succeed where I think a lot of other people I see kind of folding to the pressure and saying the market's changed, value investing doesn't work, is I can actually stick to a process when it's really painful to do so. Most people can't.

Dan Ferris: You know, this is analogous to – we talk to a lot of traders, like folks who appear in market wizards books and others who do that kind of trading, and we always arrive at this point when they talk about – they say, well, the money management is far more important than how we select a trade. Where are our stops? How's our risk management? What's our position sizing, all that sort of stuff that traders do that's very important. And that's analogous here because you can be wrong, and we talked about this actually last time you were on the show too. It's an important point. But in your case, rather than the money management and the position sizing and all that, it's your ability to stick to a long-term viewpoint and a tried-and-true process that you admit – like, this is not technically difficult. Would you agree with that? This is not technically difficult. The primary difficulty lies in the allocator, whether it's an individual like our listeners or a professional like you, the primary difficulty is you're just managing yourself and your own behavior.

Gary Mishuris: I think that's right. I mean, this is – might sound like a tangent, but it's not. There's a really good book out there called The Psychology of Poker, I think. So my seminar – in my seminar, it's the last book we read. It's Jared Tendler, I think is the author. And he talks about – so in poker, there's this idea of tilt, and what tilt is, it's deviation from your best play. And I don't want to get into the technicalities of poker, which by the way, the book is not about poker, but the book really introduces this very interesting mental model of you’re a-game and your C-game. And in the A-game, it's like whatever your best technical ability is when you're perfectly calm and rational. And then your C-game is how badly you deviate from that for whatever reason. Maybe you lost a big pot and you're now upset. Maybe you've actually been winning a lot, and now that's kind of undermining. There's tons of ways you can go on tilt, which by the way is interesting because one of my clients is a professional poker player who has won millions playing poker, so we talk about this periodically. And so it's a real thing.

So the thing is this. Many people can achieve a very good A-game because very few people can truly – you can't eliminate your C-game. That's impossible, but truly narrow the gap substantially between the A- and the C-game. And I've seen this. I used to play poker, and you see some guy who's a fearsome player, and he's racking up chips, and everyone's afraid to play a hand with him at the table, and then he goes ono tilt and his stack is gone in 25 minutes. And so you say, well, is he a good player or a bad player? Well, his A-game is amazing, but there's two things about the C-game. It's the frequency, how often do you move from your A to your C-game, and there's the magnitude deviation, like do you deviate a little bit or a lot. So it doesn't – in some ways, it doesn't matter how good your A-game is if most of the time or a substantial portion of the time you're on your C-game and your C-game sucks.

And I think the mistake a lot of investors make is they keep trying to improve their A-game. Not to say that that's wrong, I think what's wrong is making that the only source of self-improvement, while as I think a lot of the easier opportunity is trying to minimize your C-game, trying to narrow the gap a bit, decrease the frequency, decrease the magnitude. Because the returns on that, the returns on effort from focusing on minimizing your C-game I think is much greater – first, I've done this for 20-plus years, so for me, I'm not going to make a much better DCF. Can I be a better business analyst? Sure, but I'm not that terrible at business analysis, and so the incremental improvements are not going to be huge. But taking my C-game percentage from X to 0.8 X could be huge, and I think that's what people don't do. And I think I have a natural temperament that allows me to have a fairly even keel, but then systematically working on that as well, I think adds up to over time a big advantage.

Dan Ferris: OK, so this is someplace where I often wind up with guests who do manage money as well, whether they're traders, long-term investors, and that is the via negative, as Nassim Taleb would call it, the learning of life is about what to avoid, and you're telling me the C-game is a very important thing to learn to avoid. You don't want to deviate too often or too much from your A-game. So it doesn't surprise me at all that we sort of got here. That's life, isn't it, man? It's – everybody wants to do the sexy thing. They want to engage in basically security selection stock picking, know what to buy, and the real game, if you will, is to avoid the mistakes, to avoid the big mistakes, or even the small ones. Just avoiding mistakes seems so much more important than being some kind of virtuoso. You mentioned Munger a minute ago. He says we're not trying to do very smart things... We're just trying not to do stupid things.

Gary Mishuris: That's a big advantage I think was the corollary in that quote. I think it's amazing because when I think about my early days as a value investor and my journey, I joined Fidelity, and I met Buffett at MIT when I was studying there during the bubble. I listened to him talk, and I was like, oh my God, he's everything. And I came in bright eyed, bushy tailed, you know, like the people who are more zealous about their religion are the newcomers. So I was this newcomer to the value investing religion, and I literally thought everybody who didn't do value investing is stupid. You do value investing in this specific way, and so forth and so forth. And then I made some pretty big mistakes, and the introspection and the understanding of why did this not work. Well, it was cheap. I did what I thought I was supposed to do. What happened? And thinking through that and cycling through that knowledge and kind of that cycle of self-improvement, well OK, doubling down, doubling down on a levered, modest-quality-at-best-but-cheap stock, terrible idea, especially when the thesis is working. But to a young value investor, it's like, well, I'm disciplined. I'm supposed to do this, and so I'm going to be disciplined and double – and then by the time you get to the bottom, it's like you lost so much money that you can't think straight, and you're like what happened? What is value investing again?

And so I think that having both guardrails for yourself to keep yourself calm, but also understanding that investing at its heart is two things. It's processing information, and it is self-control to act on that information. And I think that a lot of us investors think of investing in this, OK, we do a bunch of work and we make a buy decision, and then we have some rules, and maybe they'll tell us when to sell. But a lot of the decisions are in the middle because, not to geek out on you, but like base theory, basically you say, OK, you have some hypothesis which is your prior, and you have some new information, and that new information you should update your hypothesis, making it more or less likely. Not talking about an actual math formula here, but just as a framework for thinking. You have a thesis, constantly have new information. Most of it is noise, but some of it is not, and you have to keep updating your thesis.

And I think that is one of the things that we value investors have a pretty poor record overall is we anchor so heavily on our prior – on our initial value range, whatever decision, that it just – that's why people talk about value traps. There's really no such thing as a value trap. There is a thing as a practitioner, failing to update the value as the business is eroding and they're putting more money in because they haven't processed the information correctly that this business is less valuable than they thought, perhaps so much less valuable that they should sell it immediately at a lower price even though there'll be a realized loss, which by the way, as I'm sure you know that. We hate taking realized losses. I'm not a trader, but I've read trading books you wrote, and one of the things that struck me is how good those guys are at cutting their losses very, very quickly. They might be intuitive at this. They might have this sense I just have to cut the losses. It doesn't matter why it's not working... I'm just going to cut it. But I think we can do a little bit better because, as value investors, we should understand the why, but we need to not be ashamed if we change our mind, and I think that's one of the things where behavioral models can help.

Dan Ferris: Yeah, not be ashamed to change your mind. That's an interesting phrase, isn't it? Because what after all is the shame in changing one's mind when you have new updated information, but it is a human foible, isn't it? It's just – changing one's mind is hard. You feel like – it's the same pressure as the pressure to change your mind when everyone else wants to buy the stuff that you're not buying.

Gary Mishuris: Well, there's that, but there's also an extra nuance because it's easy if you have the excuse of you have new information. What if you don't have new information? Are you no longer allowed to change your mind? You should still be able to change your mind because – and this was hard for me. You basically say, well, I can't tell my clients something new happened and therefore I'm changing my mind. You have to tell them, hey, I re-analyzed the same set of facts, and I think I was wrong. Behaviorally, that's very hard for us to do.

Dan Ferris: The insight piece can – the facts can be identical. You can analyze them one time and you say, hey, let's buy this. You analyze them a second time, you say I don't want to buy – I don't want to own this, and it is perfectly valid.

Gary Mishuris: I remember a conversation, Tom Gayner from Markel, they used to have these small little brunches in Omaha the day after Berkshire meetings. That was a giant production. I enjoyed it quite a bit more when it was at the Marriott with the free omelets, which is what hooked me initially. But I remember during the financial crisis, Tom Gayner said we own Citigroup, it was a big position, we're selling Citigroup not because something has changed, but because we just realized that we didn't know what we were doing and we never should have owned it. And I thought that was a very honest, brave thing to say publicly because it's not like, well, we were fooled, and/or these guys – management was doing something obnoxious that we don't like. It's like, no, we just – we fooled ourselves and we're fixing it now by changing our minds. I was like, wow, that's impressive.

Dan Ferris: Yeah, and talk about a value trap of a bet. I mean, of all the big banks, that one. It's interesting too, the guy has a lot of responsibility, he's famous, he's been very successful, and he stood up and said we didn't know what we were doing when we bought it. That's gutsy and honest, and it builds instant credibility, doesn't it?

Gary Mishuris: I think it does. Also, you don't want to keep doing stuff where you have no idea what you're doing because at some point, OK listen, my friend, start doing things you know. But I think the way he handled communicating that, that was kind of pretty, I would say, inspirational, like OK, this is a person's behavior that I would like to emulate. Just be honest, be up front, and just say, hey, we made a decision mistake. What would be worse than making that mistake is perseverating and not changing your mind.

Dan Ferris: Right. And the other part you want to imitate is the consistent long-term success, right? Let's not forget that part. That's a key ingredient.

Gary Mishuris: Yeah, but I think – again, I think Tom – I'm not a huge – I sound like I have a ton of knowledge of Tom outside his public statements, but I don't think he's trying to portray himself as some amazingly clever investor. Just to go back to your Charlie Munger point, I think he's just trying to say, hey, we do the basics well, we stay rational, stay within our circle of competence, and just avoid stupid things.

Dan Ferris: Yeah, absolutely. I was not trying to be flip. I was just saying that the credibility is the contrast of someone who does a great job in whatever you're doing – this is not just money management – and is willing to step forward and say I shouldn't have done that, I didn't know what I was doing. It's like you said, you don't want to say this – if you're a money manager, you don't want to be saying this every quarter or something. Oh, we didn't know what we were doing.

Gary Mishuris: You have a limited budget of I was stupid in the public statements.

Dan Ferris: Right. And I often think about Buffett in that regard, and I think he's obviously – some people will call him the greatest investor of his generation or the greatest living investor or things like that. Certainly one of the greatest if there is any objective way to establish the greatest. And he certainly knows that. He certainly knows the degree of his skill. He knows how good he is, and very consistently has built this reputation of this kind of humble guy. But if there's anybody who might be guilty of humble bragging, I think it's him. I think he almost overdoes it. Just a personal viewpoint, but at this point, it's like he's so obviously fantastic at this, I think, OK Warren, we know you make mistakes, you're not perfect, you're trying to keep our expectations low because Berkshire is a giant entity now, but you can go too far in both directions I guess is what I'm saying.

Gary Mishuris: No, you're right. You don't want to put on airs to be humbler than you are, but I also think investing is a humbling business. Here's a few little tidbits. When I was at Fidelity, Anthony Bolton came, who was the head, main investor at Fidelity International, and he has an incredible long-term record. And he came to talk to all of us, and he put up his record, and he said, well guys, I started in the '80s, and in the early '90s, he had three years of massive underperformance versus the S&P. And he said let's be honest here. If I had started in the early '90s with those three years, I wouldn't be talking to you here right now because Mr. Johnson would have fired me a long time ago.

And so there is a lot of randomness to that, which goes back to the cynicism of marketing three-year numbers to unsuspecting suckers who then chase performance is that he didn't get worse. He arguably got better, but if he hadn't had that decade of credibility under his belt, he would have been – you wouldn't have heard of him. By the way, I think he has a very good book about investing against the tide or something like that, about international investing. But a more – another example is actually Charlie Munger. I don't know if you know this – you probably do – but either way, if you look at Munger's record, the last three years of his – he dropped 50% or something like that, much worse than the market, and if you had only looked at those three years, and if you were an allocator at some endowment and you were given these three years, you would say this is an obvious monkey, doesn't know what they're doing, and they're supposed to be a value investor. They're down 53%, the market is down 28%. This guy is downside market capture. There would be a whole bunch of bullsh-t. And you'll be talking about one of the other great investors of the century.

And that we're all fooled by randomness and we want to create a narrative out of short-term data points. The reality is, if you invest for a long time, you will be guaranteed or nearly guaranteed to be humble for a meaningful period of time at some point, or multiple points. I think Buffett might be overdoing it with his Midwestern "aw shucks" or not, but I think that there is a legitimate amount of humility that every investor needs because they're going to be humble whether they want to or not.

Dan Ferris: Yeah, and he knows that he's a role model. He's fully embraced his status as a role model, so there's that too, and I get that. And he knows new people are discovering him all the time, so there's other dynamics there. But you know, you can go too far in either direction.

Gary, it's actually time to ask our final question, which you've done it before. I hope you don't remember it because it works better that way. So it's the same question for every guest, no matter what the topic, even if it's a nonfinancial topic. And if you've already said the answer, by all means feel free to repeat it. So the question is simply if you could leave our listener with a single thought today, what would it be?

Gary Mishuris: You know, I've kind of – I think that the more I spend time meditating, learning how to be a better father, learning how to be a better investor, as corny as this might sound, it's like knowing yourself and knowing what makes you happy and sad, what is your happy place. And a lot of times, we have these standardized mental models of what we should be doing or where we should be, whether it's in life. And I think there's so little first principles thinking in life, and I think that if you marry the idea that you should think from first principles about what makes sense for you with truly do you – thinking of what makes you happy. It could be money management. It's like, OK, it doesn't matter what the absolute best way to invest is. What are you doing to be able to do well with given your mental profile and all of that?

It also doesn't necessarily matter – a whole bunch of things don't matter unless they matter to you. And I think that – I'm going to be 45 and all this gray hair is probably added through the last few years of the market, but I think having gone through personal challenges, through family challenges, through professional challenges, and also obviously the ups of all of those areas, I feel like I made progress on the journey to understanding myself better, and I think you can't really succeed unless you dig deep inside and say who am I and what do I want? What gives me a sense of validation in life or in this domain of life? And again, sounds corny and whatnot, but I think that if you start with that, a lot of things become easier – where to work, where to invest, how to spend your time, who to spend your time with, where to – all of those thing start to line up faster if you start with that discovery. Again, a little froufrou, but that's what I would –

Dan Ferris: It's actually a very good answer, Gary. Thank you for it. And I want our listener to know I didn't know that Gary was going to say that, and the reason I'm saying that is – there you go, neither did he. And the reason I'm telling you that is because we've had other interviews recently with guests who, whether it was during the final question or not, touched on – used almost the exact same words.

Gary Mishuris: No disrespect to your podcast, but I did not prepare by listening to the prior interviews, so I'm guilty of that, but it's an honest answer that I think a lot about for myself.

Dan Ferris: There you go. So it's just one of the themes. Many themes have come up on the show over the years, and this is certainly one of them. Know yourself. So thanks for that answer and thanks for being here, Gary. It's always a pleasure to talk with you.

Gary Mishuris: Likewise. Thank you very much for having me. Really appreciate it.

Announcer: Opinions expressed on this program are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Stansberry Research, its parent company, or affiliates.