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Introduction
Sean: [00:00:00] I’m Sean DeLaney. And you’re listening to What Got You There. What Got You There is a must-follow for entrepreneurs, creatives, high achievers, and change-makers. Each week I sit down with some of the world’s most influential people and focus on the journey behind their success. We uncover the strategy, tactics, and routines that help them get there. Now it’s your journey, so it’s time to learn what’s going to get you there.
Speaker 1: [00:00:26] Grant Williams is a legend in finance and media where he’s carved out his niche over the last 35 years. In this episode, grant distills down some of the most insightful wisdom he’s learned along his journey. That journey includes co-founding the financial media company, Real Vision, working in seven major financial centers from London to Sydney, building the kind of network that many others can only dream about, and creating the publication, Things That Make You Go, Hmm. This is a wide-ranging conversation about failure, memorable people who have changed his life, learning by being a fly on the wall and so much.
Sean: Grant, welcome to What Got You There. How are you doing today?
Grant: [00:02:31] Sean I’m doing great. I’m thrilled to be a part of this. Thanks for inviting me.
Sean: [00:02:35] Absolutely. I’m thrilled about this because we’re really going to try to distill down your thinking, how and why you think, and then extract some of that wisdom that you’ve accumulated over the years.
Uncle Harry’s Influence On Grant
I’m always intrigued about how people go through their trajectory, and more importantly, some of the people that shaped their trajectory. So I would love to know how your uncle Harry was an influence from early on.
Grant: [00:02:57] Yeah. Yeah. It’s so funny, I’ve told this story a couple of times, and it’s funny how you have these little stories in your life that are just little moments to you, and they can really change the trajectory of your life. Uncle Harry wasn’t even a real uncle. He was a friend, a colleague of my father’s who used to come around for dinner with my parents. I was a little kid. I was seven, eight years old, I guess. I would always want to greet people when they came and say hello to all these uncles and aunties and stuff, and just kind of show off in front of them and just kind of talk to them. And before getting our shit upstairs to bed, when the drinks started getting poured and dinner started getting served.
Uncle Harry was the guy who would always sit and spend time. He would always have a joke for me. And he would always show me a card trick and he had this he would do this thing where he would, he could line up a whole set of different size Brandy glasses, and he would pour just literally straight down the line, pour, pour, pour, and you would tip all of them over. And the measure was perfect right up to the rim where the line of Brandy lands. It’s just little things like that. I was blown away by just how cool this guy was. I just wanted to be whatever Uncle Harry was. I had no idea what he was. He had this great house. He had like spice, Aveda machines and pinball machines, and this little barn and stuff. He was just like the coolest guy. So, I wanted to be him. I was asking my dad, what does Uncle Harry do? He’s something called a foreign exchange trader. So, I wanted to be a foreign exchange trader. I have absolutely no idea what it was. And that really was, I mean, my dad was working for a small merchant bank at the time.
He was in banking, but, from an administrative perspective, really, and that really was my introduction to finance. I wrote, “I want to be a foreign exchange trader”. I’m going to find out what it is. And, so I kind of found out what it was, I had no idea when I read about what it was, it didn’t make any sense to me whatsoever. And I told my dad, and I remember, kind of on a family holiday to Spain and, they had Pesetas back then. And so I kind of got an introduction to Pounds and pocket money and Pesetas and stuff, but I just kinda knew I wanted to be in finance at that point. I went for a job actually at 16 in the UK back then you could leave school at 16 or 18.
And I actually went for a job at the age of 16 with the Union Bank, Arab And French in London. UBAF and I somehow got to a second interview, which was bizarre to me and I ended up not getting the job. So I went back to school. And then during my holidays, when I was 17, 18 studying for what we have A levels in the UK, my dad, who by that point had left banking and had set up a recruitment consultancy with a friend of his, would get me temporary jobs in my holidays to earn a bit of pocket money. I worked at Continental Illinois before that went bust. I worked in the mailroom there for a kind of a summer, which was great. And, eventually, I ended up getting a job in, what was called the EuroBond settlements department at a merchant bank called Robert Fleming and Co., which was a small, independent merchant bank, which is part of the Fleming family, Alexander Fleming- Penicillin, and Ian Fleming- James Bond.
It was all part of the same family. So it’s, it’s kind of a cool place to be. And, I just love the people I work with. I was literally checking telexes in the morning and making sure that things matched up and what have you, but behind the partition wall was the trading desk. And at the time it was the Japanese equity warrants and convertibles trading desk. And this was the mid-eighties when Japan was a really hot market. And so, you know, spending a month, the other side of that wall, and taking every opportunity I could to go into the dealing room, you know, to pick up trade tickets or do whatever I could to just be around it and soak it in and listen to it all. And on my last day, I was going to go back to take my exams before I went to uni. And the guy that ran the back of it said to me, “look you know, we’d love to have you here. And if you want a job when you’ve done your exams, there’s one here for you.” And so you know, I kind of went away and thought about it and said to my dad, you know, it’s either uni or do I take this job?
And he said, well, if you go to uni, what do you want to do when you come out? And I said, well, the job on the other side of that wall. And he said, well, and then this was a very different time in the UK. You could start looking at 18 with no college degree back then. And, and, it was actually the usual, it was the norm, the exception was university degrees because there were so few universities in the UK. And so, it was absolutely… So I did that. I took the job and, you know, within six months, I think I’ve kind of giggled my way into an assistant’s job in the trading room. And, then on, I kind of lived the dream that I’d wanted to, even though I didn’t realize it was Japanese equity warrants that I wanted to try to set up for an exchange.
“Fork In The Road” Moments
Sean: [00:07:36] So interesting and intriguing about that moment, where you ended up going back to your father and he was saying, well, if that’s what you want to do after uni, why don’t you just do it now? Have there been other moments like that we can call this fork in the road type moments for you throughout this journey?
Grant: [00:07:50] It’s so funny, Sean, because I’m not sure that you recognize them at the time. I think sometimes you do, you have big decisions to make, but oftentimes life comes at you fast and things happen to you. And what I’ve found over the years is it’s great to have a plan and it’s great to have some way you want to be, in a career path you want to follow, but in the same way, it’s very dangerous because I think if you get absolutely set on that, and intent on following that course, you can be blind to things that come along that could take you in a completely different direction. And for me, it’s really been things that have happened to me. I was working, … I’d kind of been in various countries all over the world with my trading jobs. I was living in Tokyo when the.com bubble burst, I mean, sorry, the Japanese equity and real estate bubble burst. Again I was really too young to understand really what was going on. I had this sense that this just doesn’t feel right, but I had no real grounding in history to understand the context of it. And that kind of happened to me rather than me navigating my way through it, but I was surrounded by people far more experienced.
And, that was I think one of the advantages for me of starting so young. I was always the youngest guy on the trading desk, whether it was in London, whether it’s in Japan, whether when I was in New York. I wasn’t expected to know what was going on, that people were very gracious in terms of helping me understand and helping me learn, and taking care of me through. The 87 crash was my first real wake-up moment. And, I remember that so clearly because I was like a deer in headlights. I mean, I just had no idea what was going on, how could this happen? And I’m watching the guys around me, guys who were actually, not that much older than me, but it seems so much more experienced than me and I just watched how they, … because they all must have been feeling the same as me, but they just did what they needed to do. It’s like, “yeah, we can sit here all day and go, how the hell can the Dow be down 22%? How can Japan be down 20%? And how can these things happen?” They just said they are, these things have happened now, what do we do? And that was, I guess that was my first real lesson. That the time you spend thinking about how the hell did this happen is just wasted time. There’s a time to do that, but it’s after the event. It’s after you’ve dealt with the immediate situation that that event presents you with. So you know, that was definitely a big moment for me. And I think having that so early in my career, as they happen to me, rather than me experiencing it, happened to me.
I definitely think that’s colored my mindset throughout my career, and it’s made me understand what can happen. It made me understand what risk really looks like, and it’s definitely tempered my animal spirits over the years. I’m definitely not someone that goes all-in and piles into things and follows trends and chases bubbles, even though I’m much better at recognizing them for what they are. I still have a real problem because I know you hang on one minute too long and you can be wiped out. I’m much more comfortable letting something run up 15, 20% and getting some momentum behind it, then getting in. And then once it’s done something that starts to feel incredulous to me, I’m happy to step away and leave the rest of it. And I’ve missed out on so many blow-off tops in my career. And I haven’t regretted it once because I’ve also pretty much ducked. Every single major event that’s happened because I’ve been sitting on the sidelines or short or something before that. So yeah, again, these things happen, and having the wherewithal to just sit back and analyze “the now” and not “the what’s happened” was crucial.
But I think the biggest turning point for me really was something that happened to me in 2010. And this was, I left the business for a short time, moved to Singapore to help a friend set up a business. And unfortunately, that happened right in the teeth of the fallout financial crisis and that business didn’t work out. So I was kind of at a loose end and wondering what to do. And a dear friend of mine, Steve Conway who I’ve known for many years was in Singapore and he was looking to start a business and God bless him. He kind of gave me a route back into the business, which I’ll forever be grateful to. And because during that period of time, I’d been writing things that might go home just on my own and sending it out and kind of putting it out into the world. Really as a kind of pressure valve for me with all the stuff that was going on, I kind of reached this crossroads.
And at that point in my life, that was, I think, the middle of 2013 during the court case with Jeffrey’s and that was when Raoul Pal and I crossed paths. And Raoul and I met for dinner in Spain where he lives with his assistant Remi. And, you know, there was something about me being freed up from that lawsuit. And, I went traveling just, … I had a speech to give, but I thought I spent a week in Spain, just kind of decompressing off this whole thing. And you, because of that, and the timing of that serendipitous meeting, the three of us had, you know, that was where we had the conversation about launching Real Vision. And that happened to come along. And again, you come back to that point about having this path set in your head, but not being open to these avenues and the combination of being in the middle of writing Things That Make You Go Hmmm…. So having some exposure to the media world, even though it’s kind of in my spare time, this idea that the three of us had about founding a media platform and that kind of sense of, okay, the court case is finished. That chapter of my life is over. It meant I was open to doing this. And so, when we kind of thought, let’s give this a go, I was able to go to Steve and say, look, you know, I’ve got this crazy idea with these friends of mine and I’ve got this itch to go and explore it. It feels like a road I want to take.
But to do that, I can’t continue managing the fund that I was managing for Steve at full pace. I said, you know, there’s no way I can, if I’m managing people’s money, I can’t be doing something else on the side that needs to be my sole focus. Look, you know, I owe you everything. And so if it’s inconvenient for you or whatever, then I will not take this route. I’ll stick with you, and stay here. And Steve blesses me and he’s just a wonderful guy. He said, look, I get it. Go ahead, go do it, and if it doesn’t work out, you know, you can come back here anytime. So again, to have that support, knowing that you had a safety net again, there are ways I’ll never be able to thank Steve for what he’s done for me. And so, that’s where I went. I went off down that Real Vision road and that’s kind of taken me really… that’s why you and I are talking today. Had I been working as a hedge fund manager for Steve, you and I wouldn’t have heard of each other, and had I been working in an investment bank, you wouldn’t have heard of me. And so, that story is the Genesis of why I’m here today. And so, I apologize for taking so long to tell it and it’s the first time I’ve ever told it. So, it’ll be interesting to see where actually it gets, but it’s by far the most impactful turning point of my life.
Serendipity and Luck Versus Skill
Sean: [00:15:13] No, I love it. Thank you for sharing that. I’m so intrigued by the number of serendipitous moments that got factored in there for you. I mean, with hindsight, being able to look back on history there, how do you just think about serendipity and luck versus skill or just controlling in your own life now?
Grant: [00:15:31] I think skill without luck is really not much good to you. Frankly, you can be the most skillful person in the world, but you do need luck. It’s just that simple. And I think my Real Vision journey has taught me that, through finding people who are incredibly skillful at what they do, but no one’s ever heard of them. And I, through sheer luck would stumble across these people, be intrigued by what they do and intrigued by their writing or their thinking and ask them out of the blue to do an interview, and be lucky enough to be able to expose these brilliant people, to an audience that would be able to benefit from them. So, that’s luck for them, they were always brilliant, but they didn’t have an audience. And to be in a position to help people like that with a little bit of luck, … a PDF landing on my desk, you know. I found a note in a seatback pocket once on a plane, and I screwed up. I was about to throw it away and I just saw the word in the corner, where I screwed up. And so I opened it and increased it, read it, and was just blown away by it. And I kept it in my computer bag for about two years. And I would ask everybody, have you ever seen this?
Because it had no branding on the top. Have you ever seen this? Do you know who this is? And it took me two years to find the guy who’d written it. That guy was Luke Grommen who wrote something called Forest For the Trees. And again, you’re talking about serendipity. Someone had told me that, oh, it’s “this trees” guy, he lives in Connecticut somewhere. I found the website, recognized the logo. I thought, wow, this is the guy. I contacted him and said, Hey, look, you know, I’m in New York, any chance you’ll be free this week for dinner. And he said, look, I can do dinner tonight, but I have a train tomorrow morning. We went and had dinner that night and literally we were talking till the end of the evening. I had a great time with Luke and he’s just a tremendous guy. And I said to him, what time is your train to Connecticut? I used to live in Connecticut. So I know the last train roughly goes from Grand Central… “What are you talking about?” Don’t you have to get back to Connecticut? He said, “Connecticut, I live in Cleveland”. And he happened to be in New York that day and was leaving the next day. So you talk about serendipity and you know, we’ve become the best of friends since then. And again, he’s another guy that I was so thrilled to get a chance to help him build a platform.
And, you know, it’s amazing what a tiny bit of assistance he needed from me to turn that into, you know, what he’s turned it into now, and, and the recognition he’s getting, which is beyond deserved. It’s just fantastic. So it’s it easiest, those little moments that you don’t expect and you don’t recognize at the time for what they are, but to your point, Sean, you know, in hindsight you look back and you go, wow, if I had thrown that piece of paper away for me, I would never have met someone who’s become a dear friend. You know, beyond that the business side of things is great. But, it’s funny how the world works like that.
Sean: [00:18:22] That is funny. I mean, granted, if this didn’t work out for you, it sounds like you could have been a real-world detective there on that two-year journey. That’s just remarkable the serendipity within that. Yeah. I’m curious though because you mentioned kind of finding them, that undiscovered talent and it almost seems like you’ve got that, that fingertip feel for people that are capable of unique things. What is it specifically that usually you tease out that you see in others?
The Importance of Listening and Genuine Curiosity
Grant: [00:18:44] You know, Sean, I’ll be honest, I’ve thought about this a lot and I would love to be able to tell you that I’ve got some great secret. All of there is something special about me, but there really isn’t. And I have spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I distill it down to … I was listening to another podcast several years ago, and they had this thing at the end. “What five words would you say to your younger self?” And they were asking the guests, but of course, you think about it yourself. And I realized that those five words for me would be, listen more than you talk. And the more I thought about that, the more profound that became for me personally, and it may not be for everybody else, but for me and for my journey I’ve always listened. I’ve always tried to be a fly on the wall in as many conversations as I can. If it’s one-on-one obviously that’s not possible, but anytime I’m in a group, I will try and listen. And if I’m brought into the conversation, I will happily engage, but I just like to listen and learn from people because I’ve never learned anything by listening to myself. I’ve said that many times, but I haven’t apart from, you know, how dumb I can be. And so, that idea of listening is I think incredibly important, and asking people just simple questions, but being genuinely curious about the answers.
And so what I found when I went into the Real Vision thing, Raoul and I had no media experience. We had no idea about interviewing as an art or a scale. We didn’t even think it was, we just thought of these as conversations, the same as we’d had over dinners and drinks over the years. And that was the genesis of the idea, you know, all those dinners we’ve been to over the years and just sat around talking finance, we are great. We’ve learned plenty from them. So why don’t we just try and recreate that? It really wasn’t that, they weren’t interviews. And I found going in, and this was again, a pure accident on my part. I didn’t think this through, I just kind of found it to be true was that having a list of prepared questions for me just didn’t work because what I found would happen is I’d sit there with my list of questions, I’d ask them the first question and the guy would start answering, but then two things would happen. He would say that I had a list of questions. And so he was looking at me thinking, okay, he’s got other questions to get to. I don’t want to talk too long. So you could see that they would kind of reign themselves in and maybe not be as expressive as they might be. And at the same time, I’m half-listening to his answer and half thinking about how to segue from this to my next question and not be like a crunchy gear change. And so I found there was a disconnect in that conversation and I thought about it. I thought, well, I would never have a list of questions when I’m having dinner with someone, the conversation goes where the conversation goes and I’m going to dig into the stuff that I’m interested in.
And I realized that when you’re filming these things for other people, the things I’m interested in might not be what the audience is interested in. They might have people screaming at the iPod going ask this, ask him this, but I always figured that my role was to just be the guy there, listening and picking up on the stuff that might be interesting and asking the questions that hopefully the audience would want to follow up on. And so that’s kind of, to me, that’s how it works. I’m genuinely curious about the people I’m talking to. I’m really interested in how they think like you, which is why your podcast resonates so strongly, that you and I think about this the same way. You tell me what to think and that’s really useful at the moment, but I can’t use that again. That moment is gone. You tell me what stock to buy today, great. But if I listen to your podcasts a week after you’ve put that together, the information is useless to me, but you tell me how you came to the decision to buy that stock on that day. I don’t care when I hear that I can use that to help reinforce my own framework.
And so, all my conversations became about that. It was, how do you do what you do and why do you do what you do? And what experiences have brought you to those conclusions? What did you get wrong? And, you know, I think talking to people about what they got wrong is such an underrated approach because I think interviewers think, “I don’t want to make him look stupid”. But the beauty of that is I found that people who are successful are delighted to talk about what they got wrong, because look, it’s obvious, it didn’t derail me. I’m here. You know, I’m here. I’ve told you the guy I am, I’ve built the business. I’ve had the success I’ve built. It’s a pressure valve for them to be able to say, oh man, there was this time, I was such an idiot. And I did this, I did it. And I think we, as listeners, learn so much more from mistakes, people made. As a father, I was trying to stop my kids from making mistakes, but I realized as a father, there are things you can try and stop your kids from doing, but they’re going to do them anyway. And I, when I thought about this, I distilled it down into the fact that there are things you can be taught, but there are things you can’t be taught, but you can learn. And that’s what I’m interested in, things that no one can teach you. But if you listen to them, tell their stories, you can pull the threads out of that yourself. And, that’s where the real timeless wisdom is that you can apply to so many situations in your life rather than a moment in time.
Starting a Business
Sean: [00:24:20] Yeah, I think that’s why your interviews and your writing resonates so much. It’s evergreen. It’s not that guidance it’s gonna live on. It’s gonna be that timeless wisdom that unfortunately we’re just scared, starving for these days.And so I’m really intrigued how you mentioned just that at the start of Real Vision, that no true media experience prior to that. And I’m wondering, going into things like that, is that the best approach? I mean, I know it’s the approach that you’ve taken, but you mentioned learning things along the way, in hindsight, would you try to dive deeper into media training prior to that?
Grant: [00:24:51] It’s such a great question. I think the answer is, it’s the best approach and the worst approach. And yeah now, it’s funny. We had this idea. And we spent a weekend in Hong Kong. Raoul, Remy, and I, and the same guy, Brian Poley, who I met that night I got fired. He gave us his office in Hong Kong for a weekend. And the three of us, I was in Singapore and they were in Spain, but they were going to Asia to meet clients. And we spent an entire weekend locked in this tiny room with a whiteboard and we kind of mapped this thing out. And at the end of it, we kind of stood back, and I said, “you know, it’s not the dumbest idea anybody’s ever had. Why don’t we give it a go?” And we did. And so we thought, right, we’re going to do this. Now, the questions we hadn’t asked at that point, had we asked them would have completely derailed us. We would have gone, okay, this is, not doable, but we were just dumb enough to think, this might work. And so we kind of moved forward and we’d already gone far enough when we came to ask the faithful. Yeah. How much does it cost to make like half an hour of video content? We’d gone far enough where we asked that question to someone in the business that when they told us the price and we just kind of went, oh, we are so screwed.
We’d kind of sunk so much time and energy into it, that our response to that was there must be a cheaper way to do this. We must be able to figure out a way to do this. And so again, it’s timing, right. Had we asked that question a month prior to that same guy and got the same answer we probably would have given up and said, well, we just don’t have the funds to do that. But there’s a point where you kind of, that bloody-minded this kicks in, you’re going to, you know, we’ve come this far. And so we just coincidentally asked that question past that point of no return. And so we figured out how to do it cheaper. And we did figure out how to make it work. But now, we had no media experience and I think that’s part of the reason why it resonated with people. And I looked back at some of those early pieces we did, and they were incredibly amateur, they were very amateur. But they were about the conversations. They were about the content. They weren’t frills and special effects and guns. These were just two people in a room with minimal camera angles, but having interesting conversations to an audience that was interested in the substance of those conversations, not the graphics, and the flash and all that sort of stuff. So we found that group of people to your point, who were starved of thoughtful long-form content. And because of my writing Things That Make You Go Hmmm…, and my great friend, John Walden who had distributed that to his audience, there were enough people who were aware of me. That we kind of had people that we could go to at the very beginning to say, hello, here’s what we’re going to do.
And it might be a dumb idea, but if you kind of give it a go, we’re pretty sure at the end of the year you may want your money back. So how about you give us a shot, and enough people did that. It got us off the ground. And every day, I mean, literally every day from that point on was a learning experience of some kind, whether it’s about the technical side, whether it’s about the business side, the audience you know, social media, all of it. It comes at you in waves. I was focusing on the interviews. I was doing a lot of the interviews and, you know, Raoul and Remi were amazing. I mean, the amount of work they did on the business side and the lessons they were learning, and the stuff they were doing to build a platform as a business was truly remarkable. And you know, we came together with a group of very different skill sets and it worked, which was fantastic for all of us.
Behind The Scenes
Sean: [00:28:41] I’m so intrigued when you mentioned just the amount of you’re learning as you go here and for you, what’s going on behind the scenes? You’ve really skilled up and you’ve developed these unique talents over years, and I’m wondering, we see this finished product, these remarkable conversations, this excellent piece of writing, what’s going on behind the scenes for you. Like, how are you really cultivating that learning?
Grant: [00:29:04] I don’t know if you’ve seen the episode of the Simpsons where they cut to the inside of Homer’s head and there’s a monkey on a unicycle banging symbols together. Right. It feels like that to me. I’ve really learned an awful lot over these years, but I’ve been lucky enough to have learned them through trial and error. I’ve been fortunate that I haven’t blown myself off at any point, which is a moment away when you’re an Englishman in the 70s with a sarcastic sense of humor. But I think the thing that I’ve tried to do consistently, … and again, it’s not, I wish it was some kind of Machiavellian plan I had or some great strategy. It really isn’t all of this stuff that I’ve heard, these conclusions I’ve come to from looking back rather than forward and having a plan and thinking about, okay, why is this working? Why has that not worked? I think that the thing that I’ve tried to do consistently, whether it’s my writing or whether it’s in video conversations is I’ve tried to create content that I would want to read, or I would want to watch. By making my audience me, I then have to trust that the audience that has either found my work or has come to Real Vision and wants to watch one of my interviews, they trust me that they know what they’re going to get. It’s a similar thing, but it is an exercise in trust.
And for some people, it doesn’t work. Some people will hate every word I’ve written. Some people will, as soon as they see me on the interview, will skip forward and look for the next one, and that’s totally fine. And that’s part of the reason why I think focusing on yourself and thinking, well, that way I know like-minded people are going to be as curious about this as I am, is for me, certainly a better idea than trying to cater to a bigger audience. And that to me was when it came time for me to leave Real Vision it wasn’t a big fight that some people have speculated. There’s some big fight going on. We really reached, I think, a natural point where Raoul had done a tremendous job in growing an audience and building a platform. And my part in that had stayed on a much narrower path because the stuff I was interested in, didn’t really fit with trying to build a big audience. I was creating a certain kind of content that I know resonated incredibly strongly with a certain group of people. Some of the stories I can tell you about the interactions I’ve had with people about those conversations are truly life-changing.
But, I knew that there was an audience for that, and it wasn’t this gigantic audience that Real Vision was trying to build. So, it reached really a natural point where it just felt like, this is the time, this is the time that you’re going to go off, and you’re going to continue to expand your audience and build a platform, build a media presence, and I’m going to stick to doing what I do, try and find my audience. So, that’s kind of where the fork in the road moment came, and I’m much happier knowing that I’m not trying to build a brand because it’s just not who I am as a person. Honestly, if I could do this stuff anonymously, I would, I really don’t seek out attention. I don’t seek out. And I’ve had so much grief over the years and good friends of mine who berate me every time they see me give a presentation, a conference, for example, and I’ve got really good friends who have been at multiple conferences and they take me aside, offers to go, would it kill you to plug your newsletter? You’ve got an audience here, would it kill them to just tell them what you do instead of the guy up there giving a speech? And it’s just something I’ve always struggled with, a great salesman. Raoul is one of the greatest salesmen I’ve ever met in my life, but it’s just not a skill set that I have.
I’m very uncomfortable doing it. And so, part of the reason that I ultimately took my work behind a paywall was that I wasn’t looking to maximize my audience. I wasn’t looking to generate eyeballs, and build something that people want to advertise on. I want it to find my audience. I want to find the people for whom my work has value. By definition, I figured that if this is valuable to you, you’ll be happy to pay for it, I know I am. When I find content that costs money and it’s valuable to me, I have no problem paying for it. And so that was my decision, that I want my audience, the audience who understand what I’m doing, understand the motivations behind it, and it resonates with them. And that again came from, … by the way, Sean, I’ve never told this much in my entire life. I can’t believe you’ve got me doing this in the same conversation, I’m talking about listening more than you talk. And here I am droning on for … So let me tell you one of these stories that I was alluding to a minute ago, because it’s, … I’m going to try and get through this without tears of my own because it was such an incredibly powerful moment. I did an interview back in January of 2018 with a guy called Tony Deden. And Tony is someone who’d been kind of a pen pal almost for a number of years after we were introduced by mutual friends. We met once, maybe twice and I’d been begging him to do an interview with me because I was just so taken by this man and everything he stands for, the way he thinks, the way he carries himself.
He turned me down for three years, four years maybe. And I eventually again went through another serendipitous moment where I ended up at dinner with him. He turned out to be a mutual friend of my dear friend, Simon, and Wendy McConaughey. It’s in New York and we ended up having dinner. I couldn’t believe that they knew him and I hadn’t realized that I joined those dots three years prior. I eventually persuaded Tony to do this interview. And so I flew to Switzerland. He lives in Zurich and we spent a day in a hotel in the Alps talking, just talking. I had dinner with Tony, that dinner where I met him with Simon and Wendy and I’d spent three hours. So that dinner I would’ve said five words and I was just listening to Tony talk to Simon and Simon talk to Tony, two profound thinkers. And it was just such a remarkable conversation. Tony and I spent this day talking and I knew at the end of that filming that we had something very special. That conversation was special because coming away from it, I knew how I felt about it and how many points in that conversation had really struck me on a very, very deep level.
And so we, my camera, my friends and I left, we filmed all these beautiful shots of the Alps and friends is an absolute genius with a camera, a real talent in producing these beautiful conversations. We came back to the Cayman Islands and we set about editing this thing and we had close to four hours of footage and we cut out the stuff where it wasn’t meant to be on camera, bits here and there. We cut out the hums and all that, and we ended up with two hours and 45 minutes of just great footage. And I got into a big fight with Raoul and the other guys about this. They said this needs to be an hour long. I said, there’s absolutely no way this could be an hour long. No way and I cut it down to two and a half hours. We got to the point where I said, I will die on this hill. I cannot cut another minute from this, trust me, every single second of this is gold and people are going to want more, not less of it. And somehow I won that fight. I was outnumbered, but I won that fight. And so we put this piece up, and I genuinely, when we put it up, I was so nervous about this piece. As good as I knew it was, I was so nervous for a couple of reasons. One, because it was so long, and it’s daunting when you look at the video and it says, two hours and 30 minutes or 2 25, I think it was, there’s a commitment that you’re making.
And many people won’t make that commitment today because everyone wants soundbites and snackable content and this kind of stuff. And so I was very nervous that people would be frightened by it. And then I was nervous about the people who were looking for trade ideas and who would listen to Tony and go, “who’s this old fool? There’s not one trade idea. What am I supposed to do with the S and P because that wasn’t what it was about?” So, I just didn’t want Tony having spent three years, persuading him to do this. Having taken up so much of his time and him at the end of it going, I’m not happy with that. I think it could have been so much better than me saying this was great. I promise you, I just didn’t want him to be faced with people, criticizing all of them. So we had this thing, and I’m kind of looking at the comments through my hands. And slowly, but surely the comments started to come in just about how much people appreciated this and why we never heard of this guy before, and who the hell is he? And, so it was great. I breathed a sigh of relief and I would get emails from people about, and I would forward those on to Tony and say, look just so you know, this is an email I got today about someone thanking you for sharing this and Tony begrudgingly conceded that it felt good to be helping people you’d never met that. That was as far as he would go into acknowledging that, how important this conversation was.
And then a year later, I was in New York, Real Vision held a conference, and I was the last speaker that day. Normally, I do these presentations and I’m very particular about my presentations and there the screen is in constant motion and it’s there for a reason. I am self-conscious, as I am talking in public, there is no one who’s looking at me, there’s it. As long as there’s stuff happening on the screen, I know they’re going to be forced to look at the screen. So I make these very intricate presentations that allow me to just read my presentation out while the stuff’s going on over here. But because I’ve been running around, I didn’t have a chance to build one of these for this Real Vision presentation. I was incredibly nervous about what to do for this presentation. What I did was I took clips from my videos, this in conversation series, Tony was the second one and I’d done 12 throughout that year. I took little clips and I played them. And then I just talked about the lessons I’ve learned from those clips and why I felt that clip was important and meaningful to me. I went through and the very last clip was a clip from Tony’s interview, where he talked about an investment he’d made in a date farm.
And he’d been to this farm to meet the family who ran this business. The CEO was in his late forties, maybe early fifties. It was a family business, showing Tony around this property and they came to this field with freshly planted date trees, and Tony said, “I don’t know anything about dates.” I asked the guy, I said, “how long until those trees bear fruit?” The guy said, “oh, it will be 20 years before they bear fruit but closer to 40 before we can actually sell it as good enough and rich enough for us to sell under the family brand.” I asked this guy, “So why are you planting trees, you’ll be 85 by the time you can sell the fruit on them?” The guy kind of gestured to the next field and said, well, that field was planted by my father and the field behind that by his father and the field behind that by his father. I’m just here to carry on the family legacy. And that was how the story ended. I stopped the video and I said, Okay, I’ve done all the hard work for you so far. This one’s up to you. You can figure out what you take from this. Thanks very much. Good night. That was the end of my presentation. I went to the bar and I’m standing at the bar chatting with a couple of guys, and this is in New York and I’ve got my back to the bar and I’ve got one guy on either side of me. We’re just talking about nothing in particular, the Yankees or weather or whatever it might be. And another guy who was at the conference walks towards me and he’s kind of on the fringe of this conversation, and he’s obviously looking for an avenue to join us. So I just said, come join us, come join us.
So he joins the conversation. We’re just chit-chatting and then there’s a pause. And as soon as there’s a pause, he says to me, “I can’t believe that you picked that story of Tony Deden, about the date farm.” I said, yeah. I said I love that story. It’s one of my favorite stories. He said, well, that story changed mine and my wife’s life. And I said, what do you mean? He starts telling this story and he said, we were working in Silicon Valley, a couple of VCs and we’re earning more money than we can ever spend. And he said about five years ago, I think it was, we’d bought an interest in a furniture factory in North Carolina. We both loved furniture, and it was just a hobby. We just wanted to have a fun pastime and stuff to do. We watched that interview, my wife and I, and we cracked open a bottle of wine and we’re sitting, drinking the wine and talking about what we’d heard. And we both landed on that story. He said, “and so right there over that bottle of wine, after that story, we both decided that we were going to quit our jobs. We were going to buy the rest of this business and we were going to build something that we could leave to our kids that they could then take on as a family business.” And this is happening again, every time I tell this story, and as he’s telling me this story, there were tears running down his cheeks, and there is nothing in this world more frightening for an Englishman than emotion in public. We do not like being confronted with it. We don’t like showing it, and so I’m just frozen. And so I just kind of give him a big hug. And at this point, I’m now crying and the two guys next to me both see the thing they pilot and there are these four grown men in a bar in New York crying.
I mean, in tears, in a crowded bar with all these people, looking at us, going who did the Yankee sign or what the hell is happening. And it was the power of that story. Over the years since I’ve published that conversation, I’ve had people stop me in airports, stop me at conferences, stop me in the street who want to talk about that conversation and not the same moment, different moments in that conversation have different resonances for different people. And that’s what made me realize that there are people out there, who to your point earlier, are starved of this kind of conversation and it’s not a big audience. It’s not a lot. Okay. Most people do want to be told what to buy and when to buy it and when to sell it and how to make money and to do it quickly. But I think for the other people, short-term people are very well served. There’s plenty of people that will tell you what to buy and when to buy and when to sell it. That’s very easy, but to try and do something that a small audience would appreciate. And to your earlier point about something being timeless, that interview, I have a handful of people who email me every month.
They watch it every month as a reminder, and they email me every month. I just watched it again, I’ve forgotten this part or I picked up on that part. So that for me is what I am so energized to do is to try and have these conversations that won’t resonate with everybody. But the people that they do resonate with, they’re incredibly powerful. They’re meaningful and they have a timelessness about them that they can go back to the well over and over again. And hopefully take what to me is wisdom. There’s knowledge, but there’s also wisdom. And that wisdom, those lessons that you can, as I said, you can learn, but not be taught are priceless.
Authenticity
Sean: [00:45:30] I think that interview you had with Tony Deden was just fascinating to me. I remember it was a Saturday morning, the first time I came across it. I did the transcript first. I’ve gone through that a dozen times. And the thing I love most about that when we talk about evergreen-type content, as I develop my own journey, I go back and revisit and it’s, oh, I hadn’t even considered what he was saying there in that light. It’s one of those things you can keep going back to. He has this moment in it when he’s talking about being somewhat lost and he’s like, it’s like when you have a map but you don’t know where you are, so the map does you no good. I feel like a lot of the things you’re talking about, I guess I’m wondering, how do you get your footing where even when you were talking about moving on from Real Vision, how do you get your own footing there where you can be comfortable enough in saying, you know what, this is me, this is my journey?
Grant: [00:46:16] Again, it’s a great question. Things I haven’t really thought about, but I think when you ask that question, the thing that leaps immediately into my mind, and I’ve learned to trust that, is this idea of authenticity, is this idea that whatever you’re doing needs to be authentic. I think if you are pursuing these goals out of genuine curiosity, if you are trying to find these people to talk to because you genuinely want to learn? I think if you know that there are authentic reasons for this, I think you can trust yourself to then follow where those wishes take you. I think if you are, … if things are a means to an end, I don’t know. But I think for me, I wouldn’t dare to trust myself as much if my goal was to build a billion-dollar business, for example, then I don’t know that I would trust myself to make these decisions on the fly because do they match my goal?
Do they match my goal of building a billion-dollar business? And you might think, no, they don’t at the moment, but in hindsight, yes, they would have done. But I don’t know. Whereas for me, I’m really building a business as an afterthought. I’ve been very, very fortunate. And believe me, I understand exactly how fortunate I am that by pursuing this, this passion of mine to communicate with people, to write, and to put stuff out there that I know every time I publish a written piece, I get so much more back in terms of people, either adding to what I’ve written about or challenging my view, it’s invaluable. So this passion that I’ve had to try and learn and become smarter and become better at what I do. That passion has taken me down a path that has accidentally turned into a business. And it really is accidental. I had no designs to do anything I’m doing now at any point, it happened along the way. I’m incredibly fortunate that not just the work I do, but I think the way I do it resonates with that small group of people. Yeah. The fact that it resonates with them is great for me and the fact that I don’t have a desire to build an enormous audience works for them. So we’ve kind of found each other, and it works for everybody involved.
I just think there’s this idea of authenticity and doing something for reasons that aren’t driven by either personal success or financial gain. It’s easy to say, but I’ve found them to be true. I’ve found that if you do that, then recognition, whether you want it or not, will come. And then it becomes a question of, okay, how do I kind of minimize that recognition? How do I avoid that? Becoming something bigger than I’m comfortable with? If the financial gain isn’t your ultimate motive, the creation of worthwhile and valuable content is, if you create something of value to people, no matter how big that audience is, I think people recognize it and they value it. And therefore you can build a business out of it. Now, if you get to a point, you think, okay, I can now take this business and build a media empire. I think you lose the authenticity in that, and you lose the integrity of it. It’s something that is a passion project that you just happen to accidentally turn into a business. I’m not sure how much sense that makes, in my head, it sounds great, but I know as it comes out of my mouth, there’s a disconnect somewhere.
On Delayed Gratification and Thinking
Sean: [00:50:20] I think it sounds a little better than you think. It makes me think of that line, “escape competition through authenticity”. No one can beat you at being you. So, that does speak so deeply. I’m wondering then because as you’re doing things through your authentic voice and you are authentic, I guess I’m just wondering how you’ve been able to delay that gratification and be comfortable with the path you’re on, even when there aren’t those for immediate rewards
Grant: [00:50:48] To me, actually, that’s been the easiest part of it. I’ve never put out a piece written or audio or video that I wasn’t happy with. I would never. If I wasn’t happy with something, I would rather put nothing out than just think I’ve got a deadline to meet and put something out. I’ve never had to do that. I’ve also been fortunate in that, as I said, the feedback I get from people on these pieces and even the negative stuff. I’m so proud of the fact that I think the audience that has kind of found me and does value my work, understands me as a person. And so the criticism I get is constructive. I don’t get the stuff I see on Twitter that just turns my stomach with just this ad hominem stuff. You know, so-and-so is an idiot because he doesn’t think the same as me and that stuff. It physically makes me feel ill. I just can’t stand it. But someone who will email me about, … and I’ve got guys who emailed me after every piece I write and will be equally fulsome in their praise and their criticism. And it’s fantastic because it’s respectful. It’s not, you’re an idiot. You wrote this, you don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s no, I know you wrote this, but you should read this because it actually debunks what you wrote. I think by cultivating that kind of two way atmosphere of respectful communication, I don’t think there is any delayed gratification. I’m always nervous whenever I publish anything. There’s always that moment when you hope, not that everyone says nice things about it, but, I hope people value this.
I hope I’m continuing to provide my part of the bargain. If you’re paying for my lateral painful podcasts I want you to feel like this was worth your time. More importantly than the money, was this worth an hour of your day when there are so many things competing for that hour. If the delayed gratification is in terms of money, I just don’t worry about that. That’s not gratification, that’s a byproduct of doing the best work you can, and constantly holding yourself up to a high standard to put something out, that if I were listening to, I would embrace and find it.
Sean: [00:53:20] I just love the foundation that you’ve built on the values there, that you’ve been able to instill. One of the pieces you bring up there that I just think is so important, and one of the things I most admire is the amount of diversity of thought you bring into the world, and then you’re even willing to expose yourself to that. I’m just wondering if that’s something that you’ve cultivated over time or was that just something you were born with being able to actively think objectively.
Grant: [00:53:43] I think objectivity for me particularly today is, unfortunately, an offshoot of just good manners. I think this idea of a well-mannered disagreement is tragically going the way of the Dodo and it upsets me greatly. And this is really one of the main reasons why my forays into the world of cryptocurrencies are so few and far between because … the lack of civility that I find in that world just makes me not want to engage. I have plenty of friends who are very knowledgeable about the space and I will talk to them privately to help understand it, but I realized that putting something out there publicly. I think I’ve done two pieces. I did one podcast about Bitcoin, when I had Mike Green, who’s become a dear friend. And again, another guy who was introduced to me by a friend whom I’d never heard of, no one else ever heard of. And after my first hour talking about Mike, my jewel was on the floor at just how smart this guy was. He proved me wrong about how smart he was, in a good way, everyday since. And Nick Carter, who’s a fine young man and a great proponent and advocate of Bitcoin, very respectful and polite and a great debater.
And I had a debate with those two guys on my podcast about Bitcoin, and it was fantastic. It was respectful. They kind of pushed back at each other but in what I felt was a respectful way and it was useful. It was a useful back and forth. And once the podcast goes out there, I could tell from the comments on it for the tweets and stuff who were in the audience, who were familiar with me and who were the Bitcoin crowd, right. It’s such a shame because everyone had already picked a side, the big crowd said, “oh, Mike, you got schooled by Nick” and the non Bitcom crowd,”Now, Nick, you got school by Mike”. And so you lose any value from listening to the other side. So for me, that objectivity. It’s never been more important than it is now because you accidentally find yourself in these echo chambers. Your social media feed will feed you more of what you agree with. I just think that the more people you listen to and the more ideas you can embrace, and in the moment when you’re in a conversation, people talk about, well, why didn’t you push back when this guy brings that point up and oftentimes in the moment it’s a new point to you and so it’s not something you should instinctively push back against. I want to digest it. It might be that I’ll move on, but I might email that guy the next day and say, Hey, listen, you know, that thing you’d said, but I don’t want to be in the knee-jerk reaction business. And I don’t want conflict for the sake of stirring up media attention. “Oh, there was a great fight between Peter Schiff and so-and-so on that podcast.” I just have no interest in that.
I’m genuinely curious, and I’ve joked about this many times, but people think it’s a hundred percent joke. It’s not, it’s 50% a joke. I said, every conversation I’ve had through all my interviewing, I’m the dumbest guy in the conversation. I acknowledged that, and so I just want to learn, I want to hear what other people have to say. I want to challenge it, but respectfully, if I have a different view and I’m not going to label the point to score any kind of win. If someone is in the deficient camp and I’m in the deficient camp, I’m going to say, well, what about this? But I’m not then going to hammer them until they say, “all right, all right. Uncle, inflation, it is.” Because what’s the point? I’m much more interested in speaking to guys who have different views to me and who can help me explain why I’m wrong because that’s, I think the trap that we all fall into is believing that we’re infallible and it’s so far from the truth, particularly in my case to be laughable.
Things That Have Stuck Over The Years
Sean: [00:57:43] Grant that is some absolute timeless wisdom there. I know we’re going to wrap up here in a minute. You mentioned just the voracious nature of you learning how much you’ve learned from your conversation with Tony Deden, and a lot of your conversations have been those things that they just absolutely stuck with me. I’m wondering for you, what are some of those things that have just stuck with you over the years?
Grant: [00:58:04] Oh, look, I’ve been so fortunate in the people that I’ve spoken to. And, more importantly, I think how open they’ve been with me and how generous they’ve been, not just with their time, because you know, these interviews take a long time to film. It’s not just, “Hey, come in and sit in the chair and you’re gone in an hour.” We can eat up an entire day of someone’s time. Spending a day with Felix Zula who’s been hero of mine for many, many years, and we’ve been pen pals for a number of years, but to spend a day with Felix, his warmth, his generosity taking me to his home, and sharing so much of his thought process with me was something I’ll never forget. And you know, somewhat Leon Cooperman who gets an incredibly hard time from people, he’s a polarizing figure, and he was described by the mutual friend that introduced us “a gruff billionaire”. He was anything but, he was reflective and thoughtful and open and honest about stuff. We finished the conversation and then we just sat for an hour eating pizza and talking about the world. These people that you come into contact with and who give you their time. But then I spent time interviewing a great friend of mine called David Hay, who’s out in Bellevue Washington.
David’s a money manager for a phone firm called Evergreen Garett. He’s been a friend for many, many years, and David is one of the most thoughtful, humble, principled people you’ll ever meet in your life. And not enough people know who David is, and he helped me out. I was supposed to film into it with a guy who at the last minute backed out. And so I called David and said, look, I want to come and have a conversation with you, that you and I have had in private many, many times. I’m in a bind. I need to film it into you next week. Is there any chance you’d do this for me? And he did, it was five and the conversation was all about the relationship between a money manager and their clients. Again, this was a conversation David and I spoke about a lot over the years because it’s arguably the most important relationship in finance, but understanding it and how it’s changed over the years is so important. It’s become corrupted by this idea that gathering assets is the most important thing. You compromise that relationship because you’ll say anything you need to say to get someone to invest with your firm because you want to get to those assets. David, I went out to Bellevue. I sat with David, poor guy, he’d had the worst cold. He had this sore throat. He could barely understand what he was saying.
And we spent the entire day having this conversation and to be able to put that out into the world, a deeply private conversation with a dear dear friend, and to be able to let thousands of people sit on that boat with us and sit on that deck with us and just listen to a man of enormous principle and integrity, doing a job that the audience had no doubt familiar with, but explaining how he manages that relationship and how he’d rather lose clients, the money. He’s not in the asset gathering business, but it’s those conversations that I think people don’t get a chance to hear because of what we spoke about earlier. Everybody wants a stock tip. Everybody wants to know where the S and P is going to close at the end of December. I recorded a conversation with Lizanne Saunders of Schwab recently, who it’s just a remarkable woman,and a wonderful, wonderful person. She’s so warm, so giving, so open and so smart. And she said the same thing he said, “look, I’m not in the business of giving forecasts because why would I tell you, I don’t even know if December 31st there’s a business day. So what are we going to tell you where the S and P is going on that day.” I just think in trying to have these conversations about things that are interesting and are intriguing and are useful to try and understand better.There’s an authenticity and an integrity because who doesn’t want to understand things, but who doesn’t want to ask people interesting questions about stuff they care about. I’m just fortunate that people are, as I said, gracious with their time and will allow me to come into their homes and ask them those questions.
Sean: [01:02:25] I know you’re a big fan of history. If there was someone back in history that you could spend one of those days on a boat with just having a conversation like this, who would that be?
Grant: [01:02:34] Oh boy, I’m tempted to say England managers when they were choosing their soccer team sheets for some of these world cups. It’s a great question. There’s so many of them. I’d love to sit down with Rudy Vaughn, having seen both, both the real one and his Twitter namesake to get in the mindset of the whole Weimer hyperinflation thing. I’d love to sit and talk to Winston Churchill about perseverance and about how he galvanized an entire nation into something that was extraordinary. I’d like to sit and talk to Keynes and really understand what it was that he really meant because his work has been taken and like everything’s like, there are so many different reads on it, but, go back to Socrates and Plato and Robert Frost. There are so many people from all different walks whose words have resonated with me so strongly over the years that to boil it down to one person in history I’d like to spend time with, I know I’d be sitting at that table spending… the first off African Marcus. It really is. I knew I should’ve thought of that guy. What the hell am I doing here? We’re Plato. I think the beauty of it is of course we can spend time with these people and their words are there. And that’s why for me reading history is just so beneficial to say nothing enjoyable. I don’t understand what happened before, but you learn lessons without even realizing. I always get asked for book recommendations, and I bore people to death with the book recommendations.
I give them because I keep banging on about the same ones that went out the times we’re living in change. I’m sure I won’t recommend the Laws of finance to people, but I have a great friend of mine, Michael Schneider down in Australia, who’s again a brilliantly smart investor. He emailed the other day and I’ve been recommending him to read Laws of Finance for at least a decade, and he’s finally reading it and he sent me this long email saying, “why the hell didn’t I read this book when you first told me?” He broke down all the things that he’d learned from it and all the parallels to today. I think there are things that are worth reading that you can never tell people too many times. I’m a great believer that books tend to find you at the right time when they’re going to mean the most to you. And so kind of putting these titles out there and at some point someone’s going to go, “no, this is what that gray haired English fool said I should read 10 years ago. I’ll pick it up and it’s the right time.” There’s so much, everything you need to know is in history. I just think you should read as much of it.
Sean: [01:05:15] Grant, that curious nature of yours is coming out. It’s so apparent. I just need to thank you. We talked about some of those things that just leave a lasting impact on multiple of your conversations. Your writing truly has done that for me, I’m going to link up some of my favorites in the show notes here. Where else can the listener stay connected with you? I mean, this is a conversation I could have going on for hours, but we want to expose people more to what you’re doing, where should we direct them?
Grant: [01:05:39] You know, it’s very simple. There’s two things. I’m on Twitter at T-T-N-Y-G-H, which is the acronym for Things That Make You Hmmm…. If you can’t remember, and my website, grant-williams.com.Basically got all my work there. Everything’s in one place. Now, I finally did that at the beginning of this year, after many years of wishing I could get my finger out and do it. It’s finally down. So grant-williams.com.
Sean: [01:06:02] Grant Williams, I can’t thank you enough for joining us on What Got You There.
Grant: [01:06:04] Sean, you’ve made me talk more than any human being in history for which I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’ll have to reflect on that and come back to you, but it’s been a thrill for me. Thank you so much for having me and being so patient with me.
Sean: [01:06:16] You guys made it to the end of another episode of what got you there. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I really do appreciate you taking the time to listen all the way through. If you find value in this, the best way you can support the show is giving us a review, rating it, sharing it with your friends and also sharing on social media. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. Looking forward to you guys, listening to another episode.