You once described yourself to me as a node in a neural network, which I thought was a really interesting image. And the more I observe you, the more I've seen that this is one of your great competitive advantages, that you're surrounded by people in your ecosystem who wish you well and want to help you. And it's a remarkably powerful thing. It's a different way of playing the game. And I guess it sort of plays to your strengths as well because you're a sociable, gregarious guy. But I'm wondering, was there somebody you saw, whether it was your father or Buffett or someone at Graham Holdings or whatever, that you looked at and you're like, that's a really smart way of operating in the world, or not just smart but decent and right and feels good?
Right. Well, the answer to your question is yes. There are people who I've managed to somehow be around or bump into or be exposed to that taught me those lessons and have done it over and over and over again. So, one of the first ones would have been my father because I was a kid and I was running and I observed him in that way. And the public figures that you speak of, somebody like Don Graham or somebody like Warren Buffett, I've observed that in them personally for multiple decades and have learned that as an adult. But it doesn't grow stale or it doesn't grow old. And as recently as within the last 30 to 60 days, there was a circumstance and a situation in Richmond, Virginia, where there was a gentleman, and I've known this guy reasonably well, we're not real close, but I've known him reasonably well for probably the better part of 35 or 40 years. And he's reasonably well known around Richmond. He's successful both in the terms that the world might immediately jump to as successful, but he's also successful in that I know his children and they're good people. They're fun to be around. They've not been warped by affluence in the way that some are. They are successful as well. And I think when you see that sort of kindness and love-based and trust-based success that is both financially and in human terms successful for multiple generations, you're really looking at something special and you want to pay attention and try to learn something from that. And I was in a conversation with him and somehow it came up that he said, 'Well, he gets up every day and the first thought he has is how can he do something for somebody? How can he help somebody?' Now, if somebody who I did not know for 30 or 40 years and I was meeting on first occasion and I didn't know a single thing about him, there's a natural skepticism that one has when you hear somebody say something like that because you wonder, you know, what's their angle or what's going on here really. But as you get to know somebody and you can have some sense personally that that is indeed genuine and you can see 35 or 40 years of track record of how it's worked out for that person, because yeah, I think he really does mean what he says and he does that over and over and over and over again. Again, I've tried to live this. I've certainly been exposed to it and been taught that from my earliest memory. But yet here it is within the last 60 or 90 days there was an occasion where I had a chance to drink a cup of coffee or talk to somebody who I knew a little bit and that was his core message, just getting up in the morning like, what can I do today that will help somebody? And I've seen him do it for 40 years, so you learn those kinds of things and are exposed to them on a regular basis.
It's curious how this turns out to be incredibly helpful even in the investment business, which we kind of assume is this ultra-competitive zero-sum game where somebody has to suffer for you to benefit. And to some degree maybe that's true, but I see in your life and in the life of someone like my great old friend Guy Spier that you guys embody what I call in my book the Mensch Effect, where you know, you're mensches, you're trying to be decent, kind human beings to lots of people, and I see the world kind of organizing itself around you. So there are lots of people trying to help you. And I was chatting with Josh Tarasoff, a mutual friend of ours the other day, an excellent hedge fund manager who I remember he was talking to you about Amazon years ago and you ended up buying Amazon after discussing it with him. And it seems like that's happened to you a lot, right? Where people are exchanging information in a way that's kind of selfless, but maybe it's also because at the time he was invested in Markel. But you have that to an extraordinary degree and it's instructive for people because I think it suggests that there's another way of going about business and investing that actually requires a degree of courage, right? Because it's not just guarding everything for yourself.
Well, it's both courage and cowardice at the same time because if you really, and all these things tie together, and I think the time frames in which you're talking dictate so much of how you would frame things. So, if you're talking about a short-term situation where you're trading, I don't know, pick whatever it is, Bitcoin or pork bellies or options which tend to be measured on day-to-day if not moment to moment or second to second or nanosecond to nanosecond kind of measures. Those do tend to be win-loss games and are zero-sum, and if you win some, somebody else loses. But when you stretch those time horizons out over 5, 10, 50, lifetime kind of measurements, I think you have the opportunity to play win-win games, and that's just an entirely different way of thinking. And as an illustration of that, of how this can be so successful from a business point of view, I can remember a couple years ago at the Berkshire annual meeting and Charlie Munger, who oftentimes just puts his finger right on it in terms of behavior and just trying to be stand-up people and do the right thing and think longer term, he said in response to some question, 'How do you do it? How do you do it? How do you do it?' The endless questions of young, intelligent types trying to figure out Berkshire, he said, 'Look, we were two guys talking on the phone and now we are bigger than General Electric. That should not have happened.' And he was just trying to illustrate the point that General Electric was a company that in many ways lost its way. It had huge, epic advantages. You go back 50 years ago and you look at whatever collection of businesses at whatever place in society General Electric occupied versus whatever position Berkshire Hathaway occupied 50 years ago. I think it would have been hard to foresee and bet and predict that Berkshire was going to be the one who would be more successful in many of the measurable metrics that you would think about. But that is indeed what happened. And Munger would suggest the word that he likes to use a lot is rational. And he would say Buffett and he do their best to make rational decisions day after day after day. I would extend that and say rationality looks different when you're playing a finite win-lose game than what it looks like when you're playing an infinite win-win game. And I think it was James Carse, if I'm remembering the name correctly, who wrote about the infinite game and he talked about, you know, in a finite game there are rules, there's a period of time, it's finite, and there's a winner and there's a loser, and that's the definition of a finite game. Infinite games tend to not have so many rules and they don't have a time horizon attached to them. And the only prime directive that exists in an infinite game is that all of the players of the game have to feel that they're winning because if they don't, they're going to stop playing and the game is no longer infinite. So I just want to play an infinite game. And I'm fortunate in so many ways, the advantages I had, the upbringing, the education, the base of never worrying about where my next meal was going to come from or getting a good education. And I would say the next most substantive thing that happened to me was getting married to Susan. And I was married to her by age 19. I knew a good thing when I saw it. And she's been a spectacular partner that in so many ways has undergirded so much of what I've done because she was gainfully employed and frugal and just always took care of 75% of my life that I was really able to concentrate on this piece of my life and know that she had me covered for everything else. So that kind of partnership is a crucial component of how these sorts of things unfold and happen over time. Yeah, she's a remarkable woman and she runs a good business, too.
She does indeed. For people who don't know, Tom's wife, Susan, who he met, I think, when he was 15 and went on his first date at the Custard Stand in Salem, New Jersey, now runs a very successful business for Markel as well and is a remarkable person. So Tom, the first stock you bought back at Markel where you took charge of the investment portfolio in 1990 was Berkshire back when I think the stock was at around 5,750 and now it's what, 467,000?
