Tom Woods on his stingray experience

When I open my eyes in the morning I'm usually looking at a wall that contains (I just counted) 60 small pictures, each of which depicts a happy memory from the past five years or so.  

Last week was rather exhausting for me, so I'm relaxing in bed before heading for the gym in a little while, and one of those pictures caught my eye.  It shows my wife and me in the ocean at a stingray experience in the Bahamas.  I went primarily for her sake, but the experience was enjoyable enough. 

At one point everyone was given a chance to touch a stingray.  I politely declined.  Then the kind of thing I can never understand happened: The event organizer, along with the other attendees, started insisting I do it, thinking that maybe I was frightened or nervous.  Nope, just don't want to.  I have no idea what difference what I do makes to anyone else there, but man did they want me to.  They insisted again.  Again, I politely declined.  I did not make a spectacle of myself, I wasn't a drama queen about it, nothing.  I simply declined. 

For some reason this episode left my wife very impressed.  She couldn't believe I had simply stood my ground.  From then on, whenever there's been pressure on me from any group at all to do something I prefer not to do, she recalls the episode with the stingray.  Sometimes people hear about an incident like this and wonder if I'm just a contrarian by nature -- particularly given my views on politics and many other subjects.  But I'm not.  

However, doing the opposite of what's expected of me has generally served me well.

~ Tom Woods, March 25, 2024

Charlie Munger on how investing isn't like physics

I think [Warren and I] have had some effect [on investing and thinking], but they’re still teaching the Efficient Market Theory at business schools.  The old ideas die hard. And by the way, it’s roughly right.  It’s just the very hard form, which everybody believed.  They believed it was impossible, they didn’t think it was rare.  They thought efficiency was absolutely inevitable, like physics.  I call it physics envy.  That’s what they had in the finance field, they wanted to make their subject like physics.  Now, what kind of a nut would want to make stock markets like physics?  It ain’t like physics.  It’s more like a mob at a football game.

~ Charlie Munger

January 1, 1924 - November 28, 2023

Søren Kierkegaard on independent thinking

The more people who believe something, the more apt it is to be wrong.  The person who's right often has to stand alone. 

~ Søren Kierkegaard

Ana Bozovic on history

I always talk about how everything moves in cycles.  Why does it do that?  I have this theory harkening back to our concept of human nature, that history is the cyclical aggregate of human herding behavior... being pushed on by innovation.

~ Ana Bozovic, tweet, 5:30 mark, February 16, 2023

Kevin O'Leary on his investment in FTX

So much due diligence had already occurred.   If you look at the cap table of who was investors in this company, it's a Who's Who of financial services.  I'm one of them.  We're all embarrassed.  We feel foolish.  But luckily, when I look at the long-term, thank goodness I make more good investments than bad ones.

~ Kevin O'Leary, "Kevin O’Leary Gets Candid on SBF, FTX Crisis," The Daniela Cambone Show, 4:00 mark, December 1, 2022

Marc Faber on the Reddit crowd

Concerning the Reddit crowd, which buys meme stocks, unicorns, all sorts of cryptocurrencies, NFTs, etc., I am reminded of the words of Seneca the Younger: “It is the proof of a bad cause when it is applauded by the mob.”

~ Marc Faber, The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, January 1, 2022

Mahatma Gandhi on standing against the crowd

It's easy to stand with the crowd; it takes courage to stand alone.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Dr. No on manias

Mania, my dear Mister Bond, is as priceless as genius. Dissipation of energy, fragmentation of vision, loss of momentum, the lack of follow-through — these are the vices of the herd. 

~ Dr. No, from the Ian Fleming novel, Dr. No

Euripides on propaganda

When one with honeyed words but evil mind persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.

~ Euripides

Gustave Le Bon on the transformation of men by crowds

By the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation.  Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian — that is, a creature acting by instinct.

~ Gustave Le Bon

Gustave Le Bon on crowds and civilization

The ascendancy of crowds indicates the death throes of a civilisation.  The upward climb to civilisation is an intellectual process driven by individuals; the descent is a herd in stampede.  Crowds are only useful for destruction.

~ Gustave Le Bon

Gustave Le Bon on crowd behavior and images

A crowd thinks in images, and the image itself calls up a series of other images, having no logical connection with the first...  A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective.  It accepts as real the images invoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed facts...  Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images. 

~ Gustave Le Bon

Gustave Le Bon on how the crowd clamors for illusions

The masses have never thirsted after truth.  Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.

~ Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, p. 137

Sam Stewart on how portfolio managers are pressured to own hot stocks

There's definitely pressure generated from two places.  One is the benchmark you're trying to keep up with, the other comes from investors.  If your failure to own Wirecard or Valeant has caused you to lag behind the index, you'll hear, "What, are you guys idiots?  These are companies that are working."

~ Sam Stewart, co-manager of Seven Canyons World Innovators Fund, "Why Don't More Fund Managers Detect Corporate Fraud?," Barron's, September 5, 2020

Baltasar Gracián on the wisdom of crowds

Take no pleasure in the wonder of the mob, for ignorance never gets beyond wonder.  While vulgar folly wonders, wisdom watches for the deception.

~ Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647)

(This was the quote of the week on the April 8, 2021 episode of the Stansberry Investor Hour, hosted by Dan Ferris.)

George Carlin on the common good

People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a 'common purpose'. 'Cause pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they're going to visit at 3am. So, I dislike and despise groups of people but I love individuals. Every person you look at; you can see the universe in their eyes, if you're really looking.

~ George Carlin

George Carlin on crowd behavior

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

~ George Carlin

Bob Farrell on crowd behavior

When all the experts and forecasts agree, something else is going to happen.

~ Bob Farrell

Edward Gibbon on democracy and the decline of the Roman empire

Under a democratical government, the citizens exercise the powers of sovereignty; and those powers will be first abused, and afterwards lost, if they are committed to an unwieldy multitude. 

~ Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), Volume I, Chapter II, Part I

Tom Woods on the insanity of 2020

I have no idea what is going to happen in the world even in the near future, much less ten years from now. Imagine being at a point where you positively long for Bill Clinton, and that's where we are now. 

We turn on the TV (mistake #1) and a reporter is seriously telling us that protests are "mostly peaceful" while buildings burn directly behind him, on camera. If you and I protested something and one of our signs had a misplaced semicolon, the news would breathlessly report on the rise of fascism in America.

Just the other day the President Tweeted something clearly true: we don't shut the country down for the flu. We learn to live with it, in exactly the same way that we will obviously have to learn to live with COVID. We can't shut down all of society in a monomaniacal battle against one thing. There will be horrific consequences. At the very least, that's an eminently defensible view, and one held by some of the best scientific minds in the world. Twitter attached a statement saying that this is ordinarily the kind of Tweet they'd remove, but that in the public interest they're keeping it up. 

Today a senior writer with the Washington Post tried to debunk the claim that for some groups the flu is more deadly than COVID -- but in order to do so he had to use CFR figures for one and IFR figures for the other. This is a top person at one of our top newspapers. 

NPR just ran an item on how dangerous schools are, even though every bit of data we have, from all over the world, tells us the exact opposite. 

Three months ago, Washington, D.C., reached numbers indicating that it should have been at phase 3 of reopening, but it's still in lockdown limbo, indefinitely. 

They told us 15 days to slow the spread. It's day 205. They said we could have our lives back when we got a vaccine -- as if that were a guarantee. Now they're saying we can't have our lives back even with a vaccine. 

Joe Biden -- the man leading in the polls -- promises more of the same. Lockdown forever. Your countrymen are begging to have their life savings depleted and be confined to their homes -- or at least that's what the poll numbers seem to suggest. 

To call this insanity wouldn't come close to the scope of what's happening here.

Tom Woods, October 7, 2020