Matthew McLennan

“One lesson that I've drawn from all of these discussions is that really the first priority for investors should be simply to survive and stay in the game, even in extreme conditions, instead of fantasizing about getting rich quick in the short term. As Matt once told me, you want to be structured to participate in the march of mankind, but to survive the dips along the way.”

“He introduced me to this notion that life is actually more complex than the sort of simple games or truths that I was trying to unravel and that much of truth is unapproachable. And in fact, it wasn't until I was in college and many years later reading other works that I realized that this was a sort of a whole field scientific methodology.”

“I became pretty interested in Karl Popper who wrote about the notion of falsification... and I remember Fish's work when he talked about the difference between risk and uncertainty. Risk being something that you can narrowly quantify with statistics and uncertainty being where you don't even know what the range of distributional possibilities are.”

“I think despite the fact that I had a really fortunate childhood in terms of being very happy and being exposed to a lot of thinking and life experience, we didn't have a lot of basic necessities. And so I think there was a motivational force of wanting to live a more comfortable life, not for material purposes per se, but for a sense of personal freedom, not feeling encumbered by one circumstance.”

“As a child, I always liked puzzles and trying to crack the code... I think he could see very clearly that I like to get to an absolute truth, like the proof of a mathematical equation. And he introduced me to this notion that life is actually more complex than the sort of simple games or truths that I was trying to unravel and that much of truth is unapproachable.”