Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:31:13 · Michael Moritz
[00:31:13] S2: I grew up, as you know, in Britain. And when I left college, I really wanted to be a journalist. My goal was to work on one of the big, at that point, what we call the Fleet Street newspapers. This is a long time ago, it's fifty years ago, that everybody read. And there were papers for different sections of the population. And I wanted to work on one of the big, really well regarded newspapers. But there were trade union rules because the unions had a big clamp down on the way in which they held the operators of these newspapers in a straight jacket. And one of the consequences was the newspaper editors, they weren't allowed to hire college graduates directly from college because the fear of the unions was that it would impede their ability, interfere with their ability to hire 16 year olds straight out of high school. The result was that if I'd wanted to go and work on The Times or The Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, one of those papers, I would have to go and spend two or three years working on a small provincial newspaper. And I just didn't really want to do it. I was impatient, I was ambitious and all that sort of stuff. And I met this fellow, Bill Deeds, who was the editor of The Daily Telegraph and was a revered figure in British journalism and had actually in an earlier life been the figure on which Evelyn Waugh had modeled one of the characters in his famous satirical novel called Scoop. Bill Deeds very kindly responded to a letter that I'd written to him applying for a job at The Daily Telegraph. He gave me half an hour in his office in Fleet Street, and I remember it. It was in the winter, it was raining. And I asked him for advice. And he told me that what he had wished he had done as a young man was go to America. And he encouraged me to move to America. I think that really helped propel me in this direction.
00:33:12 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:33:12] S0: So when you arrived here, what was the first big break or big move that you made that kicked off this? [00:33:20] S2: Well, got very lucky. Got hired by time straight out of school without any work experience. They were very willing to take a risk on a 22 year old or 23 year old without any real prior experience. And that was my first big break. [00:33:36] S0: The episode with Jobs and Time was so fascinating in your history, and I'm sure frustrating for you. What happened and what did you learn through that episode?
00:33:45 · Michael Moritz, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:33:45] S2: It's a painful part of the past. This is three years after I joined TIME. I'd taken a leave of absence. By then I was working in San Francisco in the bureau there, and had taken a leave of absence to write a book about Apple and for a variety of reasons, because the magazine didn't have room enough to tell the tale of the private days of Apple, which is what I was really interested in doing. And then I was on this leave and I got a call from Time asking me to contribute to a profile of Steve that they wanted to run-in what became a very famous edition of TIME, which was the computer of the year. I think it was the only time in TIME's history where they'd picked an inanimate object to celebrate for their big annual issue. I worked on this profile of Steve. Steve was convinced that he was gonna be named Man of the Year, even though nobody had told him that confirmed it, yes or no. But worst of all, the profile, which he hated, for very good reason, I might say in his defense. And I was appalled by, for different reasons, severed my relationship with Steve. Back then at time, these things went through an editorial combine harvester. So what came out in the bale at the end probably didn't resemble very much of the straw that got fed in. And so the whole tone of the piece was malicious and nasty and underhanded. As I said, Steve disliked it. And it was one of the reasons I left time. I felt very, very disenchanted by the treatment of it all. Sadly, as a result of that really never repaired the relationship with Steve. [00:35:30] S0: Were you in awe of him?
00:35:30 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:35:30] S0: Were you in awe of him? [00:35:31] S2: No. Have you ever been in awe of anyone? That's a difficult question. The people that I've known who have done incredible remarkable things are also flawed individuals. And if you get to know them well, you also see that aspect of it. So seeing that up close makes it difficult to hold anybody in awe because you see the flaws as well as all of their accomplishments and virtues. [00:35:58] S0: Why were you not in awe of Steve? It seems like he's the person that the most people in our world were in awe of in living memory. I wanna be careful [00:36:07] S2: here because I respected him. I admired him tremendously. I was well aware of the fact that he had achieved things later obviously as well, that I couldn't ever possibly have accomplishment. But I think I knew some of the darker shades of him, which made it difficult to hold him up as an object of unalloyed admiration. But he's a heroic figure, obviously. [00:36:38] S0: What's the role of monomania in all of these character studies? And I'm curious to tie it back to this idea of the outsider, the survivor.
00:36:38 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Michael Moritz
[00:36:38] S0: What's the role of monomania in all of these character studies? And I'm curious to tie it back to this idea of the outsider, the survivor. [00:36:47] S2: You see it now. This goes in generations. The monomania, when it comes to creating anything of value, it could be a piece of music, it could be a book, it could be a painting, it could be a company, complete obsession with the topic at hand and locking out the rest of the world, eliminating every unnecessary distraction. There are downsides to this, people get hurt along the way. There isn't enough time for families or others or friends because of the monomania that you referred to. But then great things sometimes come out of it. [00:37:23] S0: Is the primary cost of monomania relationships typically? [00:37:28] S2: I suspect the answer is yes, or maybe for some of these people feeling that they may have lived life differently if they had to live it over again because there were consequences to this monomania. But yes, clearly relationships. Evelyn Ward, people don't really know him today, but a very famous British author who was capable of writing 10,000 words a week with ease, 10,000 good words, not rubbish. He said, The greatest enemy to good art is the sight of the pram. The stroller in today's parlance is the sight of the stroller in the hallway. What about Frank Auerbach, the painter? [00:38:12] S0: Wasio Mano Maniacal? Frank Auerbach
00:38:16 · Michael Moritz
[00:38:16] S2: has never got the recognition in this country that he deserves, although there's a retrospective of him coming here in the next two years to very significant museums around the country here. He was a refugee from Nazi Germany. He died maybe five years or so ago. I didn't know him well, but I got to know him a little bit. And he was a complete obsessive, completely obsessed with this art, painted every day, except he treated himself to a day, one holiday. For many, many years, he treated himself to one day off a year. And every year he'd go to Brighton where there's a famous pear, it's on the South Coast Of England, and take the day off on Christmas Day. Every other day of the year he worked. And I remember once talking to him, his wife had a house out on the English Coast. And I asked him once at a dinner, I said, so do you ever go out and visit Julia, your wife? He said, I've never been to the house. Now this is probably ten years ago, we were chatting and New York came up, And he said, I love New York City. I just love it. It's so bustling with energy and going to Times Square and all the rest of it. And so this conversation was maybe in 2012, 2013. Frank, were you just in New York? Yeah, I went there in 1967. And he had this routine where he had, and I knew some of these people who posed for him or know some of these people, that all of his subjects are still alive. They posed for him once a week. He had this regular coterie of sitters, and he painted these same individuals for his figurative work over the course of thirty, forty years. And there's one of the subjects who lived in Venice of all places, who once a week flew to London for his session with Frank, because I think the sitters found it like therapy sitting for Frank. But he'd go into an utter meltdown if the sitter was late. And then similarly, with his landscape paintings, he painted the same landscape over and over and over again, interpreting it. But he lived for art. Really, was no time for... He had a son, Jake, but there was no time for anything else.