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Five Good Questions Podcast

Welcome to Five Good Questions. I’m your host, Jake Taylor. Fact: the average American watches 5 hours of television per day. What would the world be like if we dedicated one of those hours to reading books instead? I don’t know, but I’d like to find out. So to inspire others to read more, I ask five good questions of interesting authors and share the results with you every Friday. Let’s see if together, we can’t rescue some of those lost hours. In addition to author interviews, we also publish "The Hikecast." The Hikecast is a show where interesting people take me on their favorite hikes or walks and we talk about big ideas in an unconstrained format.  No planned agendas, just deep conversations, recorded out in nature. The idea is for you to put on The Hikecast and get outside to simulate taking a hike with us.  I want you to feel like you're there with us out in nature.
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Now displaying: 2021
May 21, 2021

In this week's episode of Five Good Questions, we're interviewing Adam Mead about his new book, The Complete Financial History of Berkshire Hathaway.

Adam Mead is CEO and Chief Investment Officer of Mead Capital Management, LLC, and founder of WatchlistInvesting.com.
His book, The Complete Financial History of Berkshire Hathaway: A Chronological Analysis of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger’s Conglomerate Masterpiece (Harriman House, 2021) was released in April. Extras and research material can be found at brkbook.com.

Five Good Questions:
1. There’s an unbelievable amount of financial data and analysis pulled together into this book. What was the process of sorting through and organizing so much information?
2. Which decade for Berkshire was the most impressive to you?
3. Much of Berkshire’s success can be tied to insurance. What are some of your observations after deep-diving into their insurance operations for decades?
4. The effects of compounding are so small at the beginning, they’re almost imperceptible. Have you noticed any patterns that might help you detect the next Berkshire early in its formation?
5. How has writing this book made you a better investor?

May 1, 2021

In this week's Five Good Questions, we're interviewing William Green about his new book Richer, Wiser, Happier. This book is based on hundreds of hours of interviews that he’s conducted over the last 25 years with a pantheon of legendary investors—everyone from Sir John Templeton to Charlie Munger, Howard Marks to Joel Greenblatt, Ed Thorp to Nick Sleep. William has written for many publications, including Time, Fortune, Forbes, Barron’s, The New Yorker, and The Economist. He edited the Asian, European, Middle Eastern, and African editions of Time. Born and raised in London, he studied English literature at Oxford and has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia. He lives in New York with his wife, Lauren, and their two children, Henry and Madeleine.

Five Good Questions:

1. How did you get these world-class investors to open up for you in such a striking way?

2. What are some of the common traits running through the people you interviewed? Are these characteristics we can develop, or are they naturally born?

3. Was there anything about a global pandemic that changed how these people thought? Or perhaps confirmed they were using the right approach?

4. It seems that often those who reach the highest levels of wealth and achievement had to sacrifice a lot to get there. Perhaps even their own personal happiness. Who seemed like the happiest of those you interviewed? Why were they happy?

5. We’re perhaps toward the end of a 40-year bull run in bonds which saw interest rates fall from high teens to practically zero. Any phenomenon which spans a career length has a greater chance of creating survivorship bias. Are there perhaps any wrong lessons to learn from their success which might hurt us over the next 20 years if the cycle turns?

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