Context: As with the other articles in the ‘Notes from the book’ series, the primary reader I had in mind when writing this is me. I use these notes as an online Journal, with the act of writing a way to learn better, and the act of publishing, a driver to be very clearer in my views and to create an easy to access reference source from wherever I am. You may find some of the quotations longer than a typical book review, and this is by design. The notes are those I highlighted when reading the book using my Amazon Kindle – I outline how I sync these to my publishing workflow in this article.
Introduction
Richer, Wiser, Happier sets out William Green’s learnings from 25 years interviewing many of the world’s greatest investors. I was drawn to the book as it features chapters two of my “favourite” investors – Howard Marks and Charlie Munger. However, some of my favourite takeaways come from investors I’d never heard of such as Nick Sleep.
The book is split into eight chapters, each focussing on an investor and the learnings from them.
What follows are my top highlights from each chapter. Words (mostly) not my own.
Chapter 1: Mohnish Pabrai
About: Value investor deeply influenced by Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.
Learning: How to succeed by shamelessly borrowing other people’s best ideas
In recent years, it’s become almost an article of faith that it’s impossible to beat the market over the long run. But Pabrai, thanks to Buffett and Munger, had found a formula for outperformance. As we’ve seen, the key principles were not that difficult to identify and clone:
- Be patient and selective, saying no to almost everything.
- Exploit the market’s bipolar mood swings.
- Buy stocks at a big discount to their underlying value.
- Stay within your circle of competence.
- Avoid anything too hard.
- Make a small number of mispriced bets with minimal downside and significant upside.
Chapter 2: Sir John Templeton
About: Legendary investor known for his contrarian philosophy and pioneering global investing.
Key learning: The willingness to be lonely to beat the market.
Templeton’s rules:
- Beware of emotion: “Most people get led astray by emotions in investing. They get led astray by being excessively careless and optimistic when they have big profits, and by getting excessively pessimistic and too cautious when they have big losses.”
- Beware of your own ignorance, which is “probably an even bigger problem than emotion. . . . So many people buy something with the tiniest amount of information. They don’t really understand what it is that they’re buying.”
- You should diversify broadly to protect yourself from your own fallibility.
- Successful investing requires patience.
- The best way to find bargains is to study whichever assets have performed most dismally in the past five years, then to assess whether the cause of those woes is temporary or permanent.
- “One of the most important things as an investor is not to chase fads.”
Chapter 3: Howard Marks
About: Co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management, with insights on cycles, risk, and the importance of second-level thinking.
Key learning: Making smart decisions when nothing stays the same and future is unknowable.
It was in a class on Japanese Buddhism that he encountered the Zen concept of mujo, or impermanence.* (Location 1178)
<aside> 💡
In our conversations and in his writings, Marks returns repeatedly to a handful of themes that have obsessed him for decades. As I see it, five critical ideas come up again and again:
- The importance of admitting that we can’t predict or control the future.
- The benefits of studying the patterns of the past and using them as a rough guide to what could happen next.
- The inevitability that cycles will reverse and reckless excess will be punished.
- The possibility of turning cyclicality to our advantage by behaving countercyclically.
- The need for humility, skepticism, and prudence in order to achieve long-term financial success in an uncertain world. </aside>
Marks drew a simple but life-changing lesson from these academic debates: if he wanted to add value as an investor, he should avoid the most efficient markets and focus exclusively on less efficient ones. “The more a market is studied and followed and embraced and popularized, the less there should be bargains around for the asking,”
Marks has a rare gift for identifying cyclical patterns that have occurred again and again in financial markets. Once we understand these patterns, we can avoid being blindsided by them and can even profit from them. “It’s very helpful,” Marks tells me, “to view the world as behaving cyclically and oscillating, rather than going in some straight line.”
He believes that almost everything is cyclical. For example, the economy expands and contracts; consumer spending waxes and wanes; corporate profitability rises and falls; the availability of credit eases and tightens; asset valuations soar and sink. Instead of continuing unabated in one direction, all of these phenomena eventually reverse course. He compares these patterns to the swinging of a pendulum from one extreme to the other.
The problem is, most investors act as if the latest market trend will continue indefinitely. Behavioral economists use the term recency bias to describe the cognitive glitch that leads us to overweight the importance of our recent experiences. Marks notes that the human mind also has a treacherous tendency to suppress painful memories.
Marks spends much of his time analyzing the mood and behavior of other financial players, looking to deduce where the markets stand in their cycle. He’s particularly proud of a memo he wrote in 2007, a year before the financial crisis, that identified a slew of danger signs. These included idiotically loose lending standards for mortgages in the United States and the UK, a carefree willingness to finance undeserving companies, and a readiness to invest in risky bonds without covenant protections. Writing for emphasis in bold letters, he cautioned that “times of laxness have always been followed eventually by corrections in which penalties are imposed.”
One way that Marks gauges the current investment environment is by gathering “vignettes” about “stupid deals” that are getting done.
Such observations give Marks an impressionistic view of the market, not a numerical one. “All my processes are intuitive, instinctual, gut,” he says. “I just try to develop a sense. What’s really going on in the world? And what are the important inferences from what you can observe?” To arrive at a conclusion, he asks himself questions such as Are investors appropriately skeptical and risk averse or are they ignoring risks and happily paying up? Are valuations reasonable relative to historical standards? Are deal structures fair to investors? Is there too much faith in the future?
Howard Marks Quotes
“Change is inevitable. The only constant is impermanence,”
“We have to accommodate to the fact that the environment changes. . . . We cannot expect to control our environment. We have to accommodate to our environment. We have to expect and go with change.”
“When there’s a really powerful bias against an asset class, that’s a way to get a bargain. And that’s what I did.”
“I’m convinced that everything that’s important in investing is counterintuitive, and everything that’s obvious is wrong.”
“Skepticism calls for pessimism when optimism is excessive. But it also calls for optimism when pessimism is excessive.”
“I always look at things in terms of ‘Where’s the mistake? Is the mistake in buying or not buying?’” says Marks. “It didn’t take an enormous leap of faith to conclude that these were good buys.”
Chapter 4: Benjamin Graham, Jean-Marie Eveillard, Irving Kahn, Mathew McLennan
About: n/a
Key learning: Reslience / How to build enduring wealth and survive the wildness that lies in wait
Jean-Marie Eveillard
In a preface to The Intelligent Investor, Buffett wrote, “To invest successfully over a lifetime does not require a stratospheric IQ, unusual business insights, or inside information. What’s needed is a sound intellectual framework for making decisions and the ability to keep emotions from corroding that framework.”
It’s hard enough to make rational decisions in a crazy market that has renounced traditional valuation measures. It’s infinitely harder if you’re also barraged by external pressures from shareholders jumping ship, colleagues with their own commercial agenda, and bosses who lose faith in you at precisely the wrong moment. As you can see from Eveillard’s travails, fragility comes in many forms. So it follows that financial resilience must also be multifaceted.
It’s revealing that Buffett and Munger have structured Berkshire Hathaway to be resilient in every way. For example, they’ve vowed never to keep less than $20 billion in cash, so they’ll never be caught out by a shortage of liquidity.
How, then, can individuals reduce their vulnerability and bolster their resilience? Following Buffett’s lead, we should always keep enough cash in reserve so we’ll never be forced to sell stocks (or any other beleaguered asset) in a downturn. We should never borrow to excess because, as Eveillard warns, debt erodes our “staying power.” Like him, we should avoid the temptation to speculate on hot stocks with supposedly glorious growth prospects but no margin of safety. And we should bypass businesses with weak balance sheets or a looming need for external funding, which is liable to disappear in times of distress.
Irving Kahn
Kahn became Graham’s teaching assistant at Columbia in the 1920s, and they remained friends for decades. I wanted to know what he’d learned from Graham that had helped him to prosper during his eighty-six years in the financial markets. Kahn’s answer: “Investing is about preserving more than anything. That must be your first thought, not looking for large gains. If you achieve only reasonable returns and suffer minimal losses, you will become a wealthy man and will surpass any gambler friends you may have. This is also a good way to cure your sleeping problems.”
As Kahn put it, the secret of investing could be expressed in one word: “safety.” And the key to making intelligent investment decisions was always to begin by asking, “How much can I lose?”
“Considering the downside is the single most important thing an investor must do. This task must be dealt with before any consideration can be made for gains.
Mathew McLennan
McLennan’s voracious reading led him to the same wary conclusion that Graham and Eveillard had reached: The future is so “intrinsically uncertain” that investors should focus heavily on avoiding permanent losses and building “a portfolio that can endure various states of the world.”
A dangerous blunder that investors repeatedly make is to assume that the period ahead will resemble the period they most recently experienced. “But the future can be incredibly different,” says McLennan. “That next generation had a very different life experience from the prior generation.”†
When we first spoke in his sleek Manhattan offices in the summer of 2017, he listed a litany of threats to which investors were exposed. For example
- he pointed out that the United States had even more debt relative to GDP than before the 2008 financial crisis.
- Interest rates were so low that savers were being penalized for prudence.
- The rise of automation was fomenting social and political upheaval.
- The geopolitical backdrop was fraught with the risk of conflict, not least from China’s emergence as a rival to the US.
- And a low cost of capital had driven asset prices to exuberant levels, making it hard to find stocks that offered a wide margin of safety. He described these phenomena as “forms of fragility and frailty that history shows it’s dangerous to ignore.”
How does McLennan construct a portfolio to achieve his goal of resilient wealth creation? He starts by envisioning the global markets as one giant block of marble. He then begins “chipping away” every piece that he doesn’t want to own, removing whatever promotes fragility, in order to “sculpt a better outcome.”
Likewise, McLennan chips away any company that he believes would add fragility to his portfolio. For example, he avoids business models that are particularly vulnerable to technological change.
He’s equally averse to companies with opaque balance sheets, too much leverage, or imprudent management that is “too expeditionary.” That protected him from time bombs such as Enron, Fannie Mae, and all of the banks that imploded during the financial crisis.
In markets, as in life, so much hinges on our ability to survive the dips.
<aside> 💡
Five Rules for Resilience:
- First, we need to respect uncertainty. We can’t predict the timing, triggers, or precise nature of these disruptions. But we need to expect them and prepare for them, so we can soften their sting. How? By identifying and consciously removing (or reducing) our vulnerabilities. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, “It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it.”
- Second, to achieve resilience, it’s imperative to reduce or eliminate debt, avoid leverage, and beware of excessive expenses, all of which can make us dependent on the kindness of strangers. There are two critical questions to ask: “Where am I fragile? And how can I reduce my fragility?” If, say, all of your money is in one bank, one brokerage, one country, one currency, one asset class, or one fund, you may be playing with a loaded gun.
- Third, instead of fixating on short-term gains or beating benchmarks, we should place greater emphasis on becoming shock resistant, avoiding ruin, and staying in the game.
- Fourth, beware of overconfidence and complacency.
- Fifth, as informed realists, we should be keenly aware of our exposure to risk and should always require a margin of safety. </aside>
Chapter 5: Joal Greenblatt
About: The founder and a managing partner of Gotham Capital, a private investment partnership that has achieved 40% annualized returns since its inception in 1985. ****
Key lesson: Simplify
Our life is frittered away by detail. . . . Simplify, simplify. Henry David Thoreau
The great paradox of this remarkable age is that the more complex the world around us becomes, the more simplicity we must seek in order to realize our financial goals. . . . Simplicity, indeed, is the master key to financial success. Jack Bogle
Buffett himself is a grand master of simplification. Writing to his shareholders in 1977, he laid out his four criteria for selecting any stock: “We want the business to be
- one that we can understand,
- with favorable long-term prospects,
- operated by honest and competent people, and
- available at a very attractive price.”
We each need a simple and consistent investment strategy that works well over time—one that we understand and believe in strongly enough that we’ll adhere to it faithfully through good times and bad.
The key, then, is to identify situations in which there’s a particularly large spread between the price and the value of the business. That spread gives you a margin of safety, which Greenblatt (like Graham and Buffett) regards as the single most important concept in investing. Once you realize that your entire mission is to value businesses and pay much less for them than they’re worth, it’s incredibly liberating.
When I mention that all of the best investors seem to think probabilistically, carefully weighing the odds of different outcomes, he replies, “I don’t think you can be a good investor without thinking in that way.”
Cheap + Good = The Holy Grail
Greenblatt needed a shorthand measure of cheapness and quality. So he chose two metrics as a rough gauge of these essential traits. First, the company should have a high earnings yield—an indication that it generates lots of earnings relative to its price. Second, it should have a high return on tangible capital—an indication that it’s a quality business that effectively converts fixed assets and working capital into earnings.*
It helps immeasurably, says Greenblatt, “if you have simple principles that you can just stick to . . . simple principles that make sense, that are unshakable.” Why is this so critical? Because you need this clarity of thought to withstand all of the psychological pressures, setbacks, and temptations that can destabilize or derail you along the way. “It’s a hard business and the market is not always agreeing with you,” says Greenblatt. “It’s the nature of the beast that stock prices are emotional, and you’re going to be hit from every which way, and you’re going to be reading every expert saying you’re wrong.”
It’s particularly hard to keep the faith when you’re losing money or have lagged the market for several years. You start to wonder if your strategy still works or if something has fundamentally changed. But the truth is, no strategy works all of the time. So these periods of financial and psychic suffering are an unavoidable part of the game. Inevitably, weaker players fall by the wayside, creating more opportunity for those with the sturdiest principles and the strongest temperaments. As Greenblatt puts it, “One of the beauties of the pain that people have to take in underperformance is that, if it did not exist, everyone would do what we do.”
These experiences have led him to an important revelation: “For most individuals, the best strategy is not the one that’s going to get you the highest return.” Rather, the ideal is “a good strategy that you can stick with” even “in bad times.”
💡
When I think about everything that I’ve learned from Greenblatt, I’m struck above all by four simple lessons.
First, you don’t need the optimal strategy. You need a sensible strategy that’s good enough to achieve your financial goals. As the Prussian military strategist General Carl von Clausewitz said, “The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.”
Second, your strategy should be so simple and logical that you understand it, believe in it to your core, and can stick with it even in the difficult times when it no longer seems to work. The strategy must also suit your tolerance for pain, volatility, and loss. It helps to write down the strategy, the principles upon which it stands, and why you expect it to work over time.
Third, you need to ask yourself whether you truly have the skills and temperament to beat the market. Greenblatt possesses an unusual combination of characteristics that give him a significant edge. He has the analytical brilliance to deconstruct a complex game, breaking it down into the most fundamental principles: value a business, buy it at a discount, then wait. He knows how to value businesses.
Fourth, it’s important to remember that you can be a rich and successful investor without attempting to beat the market.
Chapter 6: Nick Sleep
About: Former manager of Nomad Investment Partnership, emphasizing long-term compounding and a unique, patient approach to investing. Key lesson: Focus on long-term value creation and ignore short shelf life information
When Sleep was about twenty, he fell under the spell of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.
For Pirsig, motorcycle maintenance provides an ideal metaphor for how to live and work in a transcendent way. “The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself,” he writes. “The machine that appears to be ‘out there’ and the person that appears to be ‘in here’ are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.”
“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” William James:
Shelf life
For a start, they disregarded all of the ephemeral information that distracts investors from what matters. Sleep notes that information, like food, has a “sell-by” date. But some of it is especially perishable, while some has “a long shelf life.” This concept of shelf life became a valuable filter.
So how did they spend their time? “We just read annual reports until we were blue in the face and visited every company we possibly could until we were sick of it.” Sleep traveled so much that he filled every page of a supersize passport and had to order another.
Destination analysis
When they analyzed companies and interviewed CEOs, Sleep and Zakaria probed for insights with a long shelf life. They sought to answer such questions as
- What is the intended destination for this business in ten or twenty years?
- What must management be doing today to raise the probability of arriving at that destination?
- And what could prevent this company from reaching such a favorable destination?
They referred to this way of thinking as “destination analysis.”
Focus on long-term value
Wall Street tends to fixate on short-term outputs, favoring questions such as What will this company’s profits be over the next three months? and What is our twelve-month price target for this stock? Sleep and Zakaria focused instead on the inputs required for a business to fulfill its potential. For example, they wanted to know:
- Is this company strengthening its relationship with customers by providing superior products, low prices, and efficient service?
- Is the CEO allocating capital in a rational way that will enhance the company’s long-term value?
- Is the company underpaying its employees, mistreating its suppliers, violating its customers’ trust, or engaging in any other shortsighted behavior that could jeopardize its eventual greatness?
Culture of value creating companies
The culture of such companies is typically molded by visionary founders, not hired hands. They tend to be passionate about the smallest details, improving the customer experience, cutting costs even in good times, and investing for the distant future despite external pressures to report strong numbers now.
Five Lessons with a Long Shelf Life
As I see it, there are five key lessons to be learned from Sleep and Zakaria.
- First, they provide a compelling example of what it means to pursue quality as a guiding principle in business, investing, and life—a moral and intellectual commitment inspired by Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
- Second, there is the idea of focusing on whatever has the longest shelf life, while always downplaying the ephemeral. This principle applied not only to the information they weighed most heavily, but also to the long-lasting companies they favored.
- Third, there is the realization that one particular business model—scale economies shared—creates a virtuous cycle that can generate sustainable wealth over long periods.
- Fourth, it’s not necessary to behave unethically or unscrupulously to achieve spectacular success, even in a voraciously capitalistic business where self-serving behavior is the norm.
- Fifth, in a world that’s increasingly geared toward short-termism and instant gratification, a tremendous advantage can be gained by those who move consistently in the opposite direction. This applies not only to business and investing, but to our relationships, health, careers, and everything else that matters.
“It’s all about deferred gratification,” says Sleep. “When you look at all the mistakes you make in life, private and professional, it’s almost always because you reached for some short-term fix or some short-term high. . . . And that’s the overwhelming habit of people in the stock market.”
Chapter 7: [High performance habits]
Key lesson: The best investors build an overwhelming competitive advantage by adopting habits whose benefits compound over time.
I think that people underestimate—until they get older—they underestimate just how important habits are, and how difficult they are to change when you’re forty-five or fifty, and how important it is that you form the right ones when you’re young. —Warren Buffett
When I asked Vinik why he’d been so successful, he offered two explanations.
- First, he said, “I’ve really used the same consistent approach to investing throughout my career, which is focusing on individual companies with good earnings outlooks that are selling at very reasonable valuations.”
- Second, said Vinik, “There’s another constant through the twelve years, and that’s very, very hard work. The more companies you can analyze, the more cash-flow statements you can go through—and go through every line of—the more good ideas you’re going to find and the better the performance is going to be. There’s no substitute for hard work.”
When I interviewed Lynch two decades ago, he explained the simple logic that had driven him to study so many stocks each day. “I always thought that if you looked at ten ideas in a day, you might find one good one,” he told me. “If you looked at twenty, you might find two.”
The Art of Subtraction
If there is one habit that all of the investors in this chapter have in common, it’s this: They focus almost exclusively on what they’re best at and what matters most to them. Their success derives from this fierce insistence on concentrating deeply in a relatively narrow area while disregarding countless distractions that could interfere with their pursuit of excellence.
Thousands of years earlier, the Taoist philosopher Lao-tzu wrote that the path to wisdom involves “subtracting” all unnecessary activities: “To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day.”
The art of subtraction is incalculably important, particularly in an age of information overload when our minds can so easily become scattered. If you expose yourself to it, there’s a deafening din of discordant political news, social media notifications, robocalls, and other disruptive noise. In World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, Franklin Foer warns, “We’re being dinged, notified, and click-baited, which interrupts any sort of possibility for contemplation. To me, the destruction of contemplation is the existential threat to our humanity.”
The more distracted others become, the more of an advantage it is to subtract mental clutter, technological intrusions, and overstimulation.
Chapter 8: Charlie Munger
About: One half of the world’s most successful investment partnership
Key lesson: Don’t be stupid / Inversion
It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. —Charlie Munger
“Charlie can analyze and evaluate any kind of deal faster and more accurately than any man alive. He sees any valid weakness in sixty seconds.” – Warren Buffet
Inversion
Munger’s approach of solving problems backward was influenced by Carl Gustav Jacobi, a nineteenth-century algebraist who famously said, “Invert, always invert.”
In 1986, Munger delivered a commencement speech at a Los Angeles prep school attended by several of his eight children and step-children. Instead of trotting out the usual bland platitudes about the secrets of success and happiness, he provided an inspired illustration of how to apply the principle of inversion. He gave the students a series of “prescriptions for guaranteed misery in life,” recommending that they should be unreliable, avoid compromise, harbor resentments, seek revenge, indulge in envy, “ingest chemicals,” become addicted to alcohol, neglect to “learn vicariously from the good and bad experience of others,” cling defiantly to their existing beliefs, and “stay down” when struck by the “first, second, or third severe reverse in the battle of life.”
This, then, is the first mental trick we should learn from Munger as a safeguard against stupidity: imagine a dreadful outcome; work backward by asking yourself what misguided actions might lead you to that sorry fate; and then scrupulously avoid that self-destructive behavior.
The Collector of Inanities
This habit of actively collecting examples of other people’s foolish behavior is an invaluable antidote to idiocy. In fact, it’s the second great anti-stupidity technique we should learn from Munger.
The lesson? “If people can’t tell you how they do it” and “you can’t understand what they do,” says Martin, “that’s probably not the best spot to be in.”
Munger, who’d never taken a psychology course and had read three textbooks on the subject, compiled a list of twenty-five “psychological tendencies” that cause our minds to malfunction, giving them evocative names such as Excessive Self-Regard Tendency, Twaddle Tendency, and Simple, Pain-Avoiding Psychological Denial. He even had the temerity to criticize academic psychologists for failing to understand their own subject.
Munger’s compilation of “standard thinking errors” provides him—and us—with a practical checklist of pitfalls to avoid. “The trick here is to first understand them and then train yourself out of them,” says Sleep. “Articulating this stuff is easy. Internalizing it is not. That’s the hard work.” But it’s essential because “the most enduring advantages are psychological.”
Epilogue
The Ability to Take Pain
Mohnish Pabrai remarks that all of the best investors share one indispensable trait: “the ability to take pain.”
Stocks and Stoics
In challenging times, Pabrai attempts to clone the mindset of Marcus Aurelius, a second-century Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher whose notes to himself are preserved in Meditations, a book that he never intended to publish. As Marcus Aurelius saw it, “the greatest of all contests” is “the struggle not to be overwhelmed by anything that happens.” But how?
The key, he wrote, is to “concentrate on this for your whole life long: for your mind to be in the right state.” That includes “welcoming wholeheartedly whatever comes,” “trusting that all is for the best,” and “not worrying too often, or with any selfish motive, about what other people say. Or do, or think.”
Marcus Aurelius considered it futile to fret or complain about anything beyond his control. He focused instead on mastering his own thoughts and behaving virtuously so he would meet his moral obligations. “Disturbance comes only from within—from our own perceptions,” he argued. “Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been. It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character. Otherwise it cannot harm you.” He sought “to be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it.”
Basically, you can’t control what happens to you,” says Miller. “You can control your attitude towards it. Whether it’s good, bad, indifferent, fair, unfair, you can choose the attitude you take to it.”
Epictetus, who was born into slavery, provided a path to mental freedom under any conditions. He taught that we can never be certain of controlling anything external, including our health, wealth, and social status. However, we can take total responsibility for our intentions, emotions, and attitudes. “It is within you,” he declared, “that both your destruction and deliverance lie.”
For Miller, nothing beats being able to live and invest his own way—unconstrained, independent, beholden to nobody. “Oh, yeah,” he says. “That’s the best.”
Pabrai’s invincible optimism reminded me of a glorious line from Meditations: “So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.”
“The most important thing people need is love—and the less love they have, the more they need these material things,” says Van Den Berg. “They look for money, for some accomplishment, or something external to validate them. But all they need to do is be loved and to give love. You know, my wife never knows how much money we have. She never cares and she never thinks about it other than how she could use it to spend it on somebody.”
