Stuart Miller
speaker
308 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Stuart Miller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It would basically be the same. Decisiveness, the open-minded with a point of view, like at a high level, that's the same. There are moments where in 2008, 2009, we're like this, where you're on the field and the game itself changes in these structural ways. And people that can handle being comfortable with that level of change of mindset. no, you thought you had cash in a bank.
Actually, you don't. Oh, yes, you do. No, you don't. Those sort of movements of the game. I remember at the time, there were several managers who I would not have guessed felt wronged by... They were short. And when the SEC banned short selling, there was one guy in particular who just felt like that wasn't fair. I felt like the sentence underlying everything he said was, that's not fair.
And that's a version of, I feel like, trying to be right rather than making money. Like, what? Nothing's fair. It's not fair that you have a gazillion dollars and you're managing a hedge fund. Like, what? Yeah.
So I feel like if you told me there was some shift in, I don't know what it would be, but just in the game itself over the next five to 10 years, that it's useful to be so opportunistic and so flexible that you're fine with that and you flow with it rather than getting stuck. And it matters more during periods of punctuated equilibrium.
Scared and excited at the same time. Munger spoke at SOAN Australia a year before he died, and he had this amazingly poignant thing where he said, I was talking with Warren this morning, and we were both saying, like, if we could just watch what happens the next 30 years. And then he said, not even participate, just watch. Think how, like, oh.
Yeah, I oscillate back and forth between fear around how my kids will navigate that reality and we as a society. And then Tyler Cowen's frame of like, number one, it's happening no matter what. Yeah. Number two, it's the return of history. Like there have been other eras that felt like this. And so that's how I try to rationalize it.
One thing is just the path dependence of it. You happen to have launched in a period where your first year, you made either good returns or bad returns. And then we tell all these stories after the fact. But I remember there was Cliff Asness, AQR. There was another manager who launched at the exact same time, very similar pedigree.
And it didn't work. And I remember one story on that is maybe they launched two months apart or something. There was a difference in their initial returns. Yeah. And then that led to just these crazy different that we have all these stories about after the fact.
I think there's a path dependence and an arbitrariness and luck component that we, in retrospect, tell stories about skill and other things. Of course, real life is it's both and it's messy. So that's one.
Yeah. Yeah. And have a feel for where you are in the cycle, obviously. That requires a macro judgment that most people wouldn't have or that may not be available in any given period.
Well, the origin story is I worked for Ted Seides, who had learned it from the Yale Investment Office. Their emphasis on it and their professionalism around it was kind of my window into that where it's like, oh, it's not quite true. When I met Ted, I had started a reference-oriented business. business and was pitching him as a client. And then I ended up joining him.
So I was kind of already onto it, but he was so good at it. I felt like I learned a lot from, in effect, the Yale Endowment lineage of references. And they were maniacal about it. Like they tracked down college roommates and that sort of thing.
And then I wrote that piece, What's Going On Here With This Human, partly to put myself, like I reread it before I do references, because it captures a mood. I'm trying to get myself back into the mood when I'm in the zone of holding somebody back.
at the humility about how much you can see, how much you know at that moment, and then kind of enjoying the process of figuring them out together with other people. There's also just at this point, the felt experience of finding it so accurate. I can often find in the reference something that is highly relevant to what ends up happening later and how I end up experiencing that person.
I've just seen the power of it. I do believe that there's signal in there. It's not 100%, but it's like 75%.
I like Jonathan Haidt's metaphor of the elephant and the rider, which he says he came to in a psychedelic trip. And it resonates because both on references and when you're interviewing a candidate, there's some percentage of the time where you're interviewing the rider and his idea is that they're too separate.
I guess it could be just the ego and the unconscious, but it feels like it's more than that. You have to distinguish between what somebody's saying and How self-aware are they? And are they speaking for just the writer or for the writer and the elephant?
And an example would be like, everybody knows that you need, quote, should be high conscientious and detail-oriented in most professions on most things. But the reality is some people aren't. And understanding in a reference process like... The implications, where are they on that? And the implications for that given role ends up being super important.
You get at the elephant because it's the pattern of behavior over time that you're hearing from multiple people in different contexts. Past performance is indicative of future results. Past behavior is indicative of future behavior. Past behavior as experienced by multiple agents on the field over time in similar contexts.
My wife knows my elephant well. People I've worked with, Waitzkin knows my elephant well. It's like, so it'd come out in adjectives from them. I'm extremely comfortable with ambiguity. And so I like to hold, I think one of the characters in Shogun apparently does this. I haven't just started watching it, but Torunaga, just hold, hold to the point where everybody else is losing their mind.
Showing 221–240 of 308 · page 12 of 16
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