Friday Wrap-Up: Milken’s Method and a Tech Day in New York

Hi everyone and welcome back to our Friday wrap up. I'm Steele Martisgaard. I'm Nicola Tangen from New York. Great to see you, Nikolay. This week you spoke to Mike Milken. Why did you want to have him on the podcast? Well, that is just so interesting, because when I went to Wharton, he was on the Wall of fame, and they basically had a wall where they had pictures of the aluminis who had achieved great things. And he basically started up the high yield market, which is also called the junk market. They don't particularly like that word, but it's a high yield market where you basically get higher paid for lending to riskier companies. It's just incredible what that whole industry opened up. It enabled the consolidation of totally new industries in telecom, in media, and so on. And these industries wouldn't have been there. And some of these famous names, the the big founders, so things like Murdoch, the big telco guys, the cable guys, they just wouldn't have been there. So, really fascinating. And when I meet people who now work in different types of firms, many of them basically, in a way, went to school with Mike Milken and learned from having worked with him. I think you can kind of draw the connection to some more than 80 firms, which are now in a way indebted to what they learned from him. Yeah, so he for sure has been a great inspiration for many. Then he also runs an annual conference that he has been running for thirty years. What find do most interesting in this episode? I think it's interesting how the whole thing started. I mean, he just questioned really how things were working, you know, from a young age. He just said that, listen, the things which are considered safe are actually not that safe. And the things which are considered risky are if you just pool enough of these types of assets, it's actually not that risky and pays a lot more, even when you adjust for higher level of losses. So, it really intrigues me that people question the status quo try out new things. Yeah, and he for sure does that. I also find it interesting when he talks about how he's trying to change people's minds by kind of not raising your voice, but by asking simple multiple choice questions and then let people find answers themselves. What do you think of this method? Mean, it's a very, very effective method. It's just incredible how difficult it is to get to get people to change their mind generally. We are so set in our opinions. It goes for everything. Things just so quickly turn into religion, be it political views or other kind of really hard held views. And so, to question people in that way is a very good trick. Do you think we're good enough at that, as investors, to question everything? Absolutely not. …