Episode 16 – How Investing Shapes the World with Finny Kuruvilla of Eventide
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On today’s episode, we’re talking to an expert on capital, influence, and how investments can serve the common good. Finny Kuruvilla is the Chief Investment Officer for Eventide Funds, and if you haven’t heard of them, you’re going to be glad you did.
They’re on a mission to pursue investments that make the world rejoice—and today, Finny is going to tell us just how they do that. With a unique background in healthcare, statistics, and investing—not to mention two postgraduate degrees from Harvard and one from MIT—Finny is the type of guest you just can’t get enough of.
As always, thanks for listening.
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Episode Transcript
Henry: [00:02:52] Finny, thank you very much for being on the show today. We’re excited to hear all that you’ve got going on at Eventide to get things started. We want to give the reader some insight into your background. Tell us a little bit about your personal journey and the steps that led to where you are today and then bridge into what is Eventide. [00:03:08][15.9]
Finny: [00:03:09] Sure. Yeah. So my journey started in the 1990s. I moved to Boston, where I am right now in 95 to go to medical school. And while I was in medical school, I had a scholarship. I was doing an MGP PHC program. And this is common among the MGP h.g students. You get a modest stipend. It’s ten thousand dollars a year, not a lot. This was back then and my parents were encouraging me at this phase of life here. You’re in your 20s to start to think about saving and in particular saving to buy a house one day. And so here I was, a single person at the time and very low overhead and very low expenses. And so I said, hey, that sounds great. And so I went to the newfangled Internet was just coming out around that time and tried to figure out what kinds of options were available for investing. And you could see even back then this vehicle of the mutual fund and I could see the top 10 holdings of these mutual funds through the various literature brochures that they have available. And I couldn’t bring myself to invest in any of those funds because I would look at the companies that they were invested in and these are top 10 holdings and saw a lot of things that as a Christian, I felt a personal objection to. And so my roommate at the time, he was doing his PhD in economics and he said, hey, you should just learn to invest on your own. And so he gave me a book by Peter Lynch and I kind of self taught myself the investing world. And Peter Lynch’s Paul thesis, as you probably know, is by what you know, his basic sense is that a specialist who really knows an industry well can far outperform a generalist, because by the time it gets to Wall Street, by the time everyone’s covering it, well, one, you’ve missed a lot of the. And 2, they’re not going to be able to really understand a company or an industry as well as someone who is a practitioner of the field. And so if you’re a construction person, you’re going to know the tools and the instruments that are used. Much better than someone who is a financier who’s going to have no idea who’s just going to be basically looking at the financials. And so I thought, hey, that makes sense. And so I decided to start to invest in the biomedical realm and pursue that just at the time on the side as a hobby, because I was in medical school, obviously. But for the next 10 years, kept that up and found that one, I enjoyed it. And two, I thought I was decent at it. And that was the early days of what became even tied to finishing med school, did my residency at a local hospital here and saw mostly patients who had a variety of blood disorders sickle cell anemia, leukemia, lymphoma, people who required bone marrow transplants, things like that. Did a residency fellowship, a postdoc and eventually started even at the end of that. And the vision that we started was if it was that much work for me to do all that, I had to go off and read all these books and leverage the expertise that I had accumulated in the medical realm, more democratized and accessible for the everyday Christian who wants to invest in ways that are more compatible with their values, both on the negative side of things. So not investing in objectionable areas abortion, tobacco, gambling, things like that. But then more importantly, or as importantly, embracing the positive capacity for change that we as investors leverage and as those who supply capital to investors leverage on behalf of causes that we feel really good about. So we started it in 2008. And here we are 11 years later. We’ve got now several mutual funds, a little bit more than four billion dollars under management. And it’s been a blast. [00:07:08][238.9]
Henry: [00:07:09] So I see that a tagline for Eventide is “investing that makes the world rejoice”. Talk to us about the mission and vision of Eventide Fundss. It look like when the world rejoices at the investments we make. What does that mean? [00:07:23][14.3]
Finny: [00:07:24] Yeah. There’s a great verse in Proverbs Chapter Eleven, verse 10 that says When the righteous prosper, the city rejoices, and that this has become our theme verse and the way that we define righteous and many others we follow in the steps of many others who have done really great work in understanding the Hebrew behind it. But the term righteous basically refers to people who put others interests ahead of their own. They’re willing to disadvantage themselves for the sake of others. [00:07:56][32.3]
[00:07:57] And the opposite is, of course, the wicked. Who are those who put their own economic or social or personal desires ahead of others? There is a great book by Amy Sherman called Kingdom Calling that she also really develops that verse in a beautiful way. The term rejoice there as well as a special word. [00:08:16][18.6]
[00:08:16] It’s not the ordinary term that’s used for rejoice. It’s something that is used as the handful of times in the Hebrew Bible, for example, is used after Hannah gets the good news that she is now pregnant. And I’m thinking there, Samuel. [00:08:33][17.0]
[00:08:35] And so that’s been something that we have used in our own thinking quite a bit, that when the righteous prosper, it’s supposed to be the case that the city rejoices, meaning that they’re blessing redounds to those around them, that there’s such an overflow of prosperity in all dimensions that the city rejoices and isn’t a kind of tragic today, that when people prosper, when the rich get richer, people tend to go around. It’s the opposite because it tends not to lead to that overflow of blessing that makes the city rejoice. And so our aspiration and eventide is to instantiate that for the cities and the communities that we’re at, that they can experience some of the blessing in the rejoicing that should come from biblical and wise investing. [00:09:24][48.8]
Henry: [00:09:24] That’s awesome. That’s a great vision. I want to pivot right into the heart of the episode. Some of the things that we picked up in the past and some of the times you’ve given. Oftentimes we hear that phrase and oftentimes we say the phrase capital equals influence. And most of us in the Western world throw that around. But I’ve heard you share some interesting thoughts on the importance of recognizing that capital does have influence and how we see that in history. Talk us through that. [00:09:49][24.7]
Finny: [00:09:50] Yeah, well, let me start with a book that if you haven’t read it, if your listeners haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. It’s a book that I think is a classic and everyone who’s a faith based investor or entrepreneur should read. It’s called To Change the World by James Davis Hunter. And what he brings out in this book is there’s really a widespread myth out there, which is the myth of the heroic individual, that individuals have the capacity and the ability to change the world. And what Hunter, I think very persuasively argues and demonstrates in his book is that the real. The power is, in fact, within institutions and institutions, far more than individuals shape us and shape the world in very profound ways. And so if you really want to change the world, then you have to be able to either change institutions. But as it turns out, it’s very difficult to do because institutions generally resist change or start institutions. And that turns out to be a much easier act, because as I said, there’s this natural resistance to change that institutions have, whereas starting new institutions is much more likely to be in line with the values of the founders. And he shows, as I mentioned in the book, that virtually all, if not all of the great change movements that we’ve seen in the last several hundred years in the West have been the result of institutions. Although we often put the credit on individuals, it’s really more of the institutions that deserve the credit as having the ability to affect change in broader society. So with that thesis and again, you can read that or anyone can read that in his book, which I do highly recommend. I like a look at this from historic perspective and I like to go all the way back to Christopher Columbus. So all of us know Christopher Columbus, who sailed the ocean blue and fourteen ninety two. It’s one of the most famous voyages of all time. But what people don’t realize is that he was doing this as part of a for profit venture and he was looking for investors to finance his voyage there. [00:12:00][129.7]
[00:12:00] So if you think about it, the whole enterprise of exotic ship building and these faraway voyages was fraught with risk. I mean, it was something that unlike today, you had very little hope or very little confidence the person would come back on any kind of known schedule safely with goods intact. And so this was the basis of what most historians would say is the modern corporation that modern corporations were born out of the necessity to share the cost of financing these expeditions as well as sharing risk. And Christopher Columbus in particular was looking for investors and he traipsed all over Europe trying to find investors and eventually structured a fairly sophisticated deal. So if you go and actually study the specific terms that he received, he was going to receive 10 percent of future revenues that came from later expeditions as well as he played or not, got an option to invest in one ace, a future commercial businesses that were formed as a result of his adventure. So he had a quite sophisticated financial contract that he negotiated, but was as interesting is to think about the fact that he went to France. He went to England. He went to Portugal. And he could not secure investors from those countries. And in fact, although he ultimately gained investors from Spain and the Spanish investment ended up being very, very lucrative for those who were behind it. And importantly, this is why so many people today from the Caribbean on down all of South America, why they speak Spanish. [00:13:45][105.0]
[00:13:46] You know, literally world history was written with the decision of who financed Columbus’s expedition there. If it had been the French, there would be French speaking. If it had been the British, it would be English speaking. But lo and behold, it was the Spanish. So to think about the decision there that investors made. That was literally shaping the religion and languages of millions and millions of people. It was all bound up in the choices and the decisions that investors made at the time. And that goes on. And so that was obviously in the late 40s, hundreds, early. Fifteen hundreds. But this continues. And so Columbus is one of the pioneers were the trailblazers of this industry. But in sixteen hundred and sixteen 02, you have the British and Dutch East India companies form. So these were formed explicitly with the goal of trading with India as the name communicates there. And same thing. [00:14:40][54.3]
[00:14:40] So they have incredible capital requirements. You have capital calls that are required. You have something like dividends that were paid out. And so those companies were financed using a mixture of stocks and bonds. And again, most historians, economic historians will tell you that the modern corporation was born around this time, complete with liquidity. And in fact, the very first exchange was developed in the early 60s, hundreds in Amsterdam so that people could trade shares of these. In this case, the Dutch East India Company. And for those who know I’m ethnically Indian, even though I was born and raised in the US, for those who know anything about the history of India, you will know that the British East India Company defined so much of what we today call India to be. So India, as it turns out, just like America, ended up being a colony of Britain, which is why today the official language is English and India was really defined, the borders were defined, the culture was defined, the railway system was defined by a group of investors who form this British East India company. So you talk about massive implications for culture, for language, for religion. It’s all bound up here in the choices that investors and these these corporations made. So I think it’s very profound. There’s a lot more that could be said on the historic side of things. But if we now then maybe jump forward into modern history and think about what this looks like here. I mean, surely we would agree that our world is shaped very profoundly by Facebook, by Netflix, by Google, by these entities that we’re all venture backed. When you go back and trace how these companies began, they’re fascinating stories in some cases. Movies have been made about these companies that have really changed the whole world. I mean, it’s hard to even imagine how differently the world would be without some of those companies there. So I think from the genesis of what we would today call investing in the sixteen hundreds and fifteen hundreds to today, I think we can confidently say that that James Davis at Hunter thesis is correct and that it’s really something that is an amazing testimony to the power of investing and the power of entrepreneurs and those who are minded to change the world through the power of business, to tell us how that impacts the way that you invest. [00:17:09][149.0]
Henry: [00:17:10] So understanding that business can be used to explore and to be able to solve challenges that exist in the world and to be able to advance trade. What’s it look like for the themes that you look to invest in where the modern day equivalents, the eventide as you get out to put your investors money to work? What are the themes and the adventures that you want to invest in? [00:17:31][21.6]
Finny: [00:17:32] Yeah, there’s a lot that we can talk about there. So what we have done is we have made a list of themes, as you pointed out, that we believe are themes that have great capacity to change the world and to positively advance human flourishing. One of my favorite quotes that I say often in different context is from Henry David Thoreau, who says For every thousand people hacking at the leaves of evil, there’s one striking at the root. And that’s true in many domains of life, but probably none as true as in medicine, where we’re definitely dealing with symptoms. And so just to illustrate with a little bit more specific up an example here, we have a number of investments where what we do is we will finance companies, both private companies as well as public companies. And we’re very active in our investments. We sometimes even take board seats on our investments. But what we’ll do is we’ll find companies that are getting at that root cause level of disease. So companies that are doing DNA sequencing to figure out what is broken in a particular patient and using the sound sci fi. But believe it or not, it’s true, you can actually take a virus. And we think of a virus as being bad. Right. We get a call that’s from a virus influenza. There’s all these diseases from a virus. But what you can do is you can take a virus and you can engineer out the bad parts of the virus that cause disease and you can drop in to that virus. The good part of a gene that’s broken in a person. So let’s say there’s a patient in front of me who’s got muscular dystrophy, a real example for us. And you can sequence that little boy. Those boys typically die around 20 years old and figure out where exactly is that break? Where is that mutation would be the technical term in that little boy’s DNA. And then you can make a virus that has that same gene, but the corrected good copy into that virus and then give that little boy a one time injection. This is what’s amazing. So you just go into the hospital, get a one time injection, and we only have a couple of years of follow up now. But in theory, you’ve now cured that boy for life. They want to come back into the hospital for later treatments. I mean, you’re talking about an absolute game changer. I saw some videos of some of the boys that were treated in a clinical trial that we helped to find along with many others. And it literally brought tears to my eyes where I saw the pre and the post videos of these boys. One video there was a boy who was going up the stairs and he was dragging himself up by the rail because he didn’t have strength in his legs coast. This injection of this virus. The boy was running up the stairs. There’s another one where a boy could barely walk. And then in the second video, he’s playing soccer in a field. I mean, it’s the kind of thing that when I was in medicine, when I was still practicing, nobody believed this was possible to actually reverse the kinds of. Damage that these muscular dystrophy patients have suffered. So you talk about massive changes in the way that health care is done. You know, it’s so exciting. I’m giving you here just one little slice of why we’re excited about these kinds of therapies and how much we think that investors can get really excited about putting their dollars to work to change the lives of thousands, if not eventually millions of patients in route causeways. [00:20:56][204.4]
William: [00:20:58] That’s amazing. That’s amazing to think about. It does kind of sound Sci-Fi at some level when I think about Capital equals influence from your perspective, maybe let us in. Do you focus more on the products and services that you’re investing in or do you also take potentially board seats or do you have influence over the company? You know, there’s lots of different types of influence that capital provides you. Could you drill down on which ones you think you’re focused on and where you get to kind of bring the gospel to life and maybe some others that you maybe look at in the future? [00:21:28][30.2]
Finny: [00:21:28] Yeah, that’s a good question. So we don’t often take board seats. That’s the exception, not the rule for us. And most of what we do is public investing. But because we’re a decent sized firm, as I said, we’ve got a little over four billion dollars when we invest. We’re usually a top 10 shareholder. It’s not a top three shareholder. And so, not surprisingly, you’re going to have the ear of management there. And we’ve used that position quite successfully in a number of ways. So the first is having conversations about the ethics of products and services. So we will have very direct conversations with management about, hey, why do you want to go into this particular area? Not that particular area. And speaking as a Christian here, obviously we have a set of values that we believe should inform those discussions. We’ve had discussions and we’re going to be releasing some of these examples pretty soon. We’re very excited about where we’ve been able to change corporate giving. So giving to causes that we would look at and think like, hey, one, you’re actually giving to causes that are going to alienate those who are traditional faith based employees and customers there because they’re pursuing one particular agenda. And by us having a conversation around inclusiveness. Now, when you hear the word inclusiveness, people tend to not think about the inclusion of the Judeo-Christian moral view in that. But we remind people that a traditional world religions, whether it’s Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, you name it, they stand for, for example, certain views of sexuality, certain views of how to look at the world, that you can alienate your customers and even employees over there. And have you even thought about this significant source of constituents here that are right under your nose? So we’ve had some great conversations and even positive examples of change, as I said, that we’re hoping to release shortly there. In general, we believe that every business has six primary stakeholders that they need to think about. So number one is customers. Number two is employees. Number three, it’s supply chain. Number four is the host community, wherever that business is located. Number five is the environment and then number six is broader society. And as we engage with our companies, at least we use those six stakeholders as our basic framework. We call it Business 360, which is our way to make sure that a business is operating ethically and compatibility with our views of what the common good really is and what human flourishing really is across those six stakeholders. So, yeah, we’ve got a lot of great examples there that we’ve been able to come up with over the last several years and now that were the size that we are. It gets a lot easier because our size in that whole capital equals influence idea, right? People pay more attention to you. The larger you are. And so I’m very excited about what you all are doing, number one, because the Christian community has the potential to be a much bigger force for change. And it currently is. I mean, it was Martin Luther King and the church was a sleeping giant. And I think that’s a good term to describe the latent power that is resonant but unused as we band together around causes that we care about. So, yeah, we’re very excited about that overall potential. [00:24:50][201.6]
William: [00:24:51] That’s awesome. I love that phrase. Sleeping giants. I’m going to give you a little bit of a soapbox here. One of the things I love about some of your presentation does I think you do an incredible job of challenging and pushing people to think about the world in a little different way. So we have investors through the podcast. Some are just getting started. Some may be tuning in, some in the business a long time. If you add a challenge from the capital equals influence and from a perspective of people may not have been thinking about this the right way. What would that be for some of our listeners to maybe take away a challenge to think about what their own portfolio or what their own job in general? [00:25:28][36.8]
Finny: [00:25:29] The world has bought this. I would say lie that investing is largely a passive activity. And even that term passive, you know, people think about ecac think about very low cost products where there’s minimal basis points. The whole world of investing has become commoditized where and it’s becoming something more and more where people think about the market as this abstract entity that is is almost divorced from the productive capacity of the underlying companies. And if you ask most people what they own, they have no idea. Investing in general has just become very divorced from its original purpose, which is supplying capital to companies. And when you think about that original purpose of investing, then it starts to reframe and hopefully rekindle how exciting investing is, right? It’s giving capital to companies. It’s not just being a passive participant in a larger world where somebody else determines the rules of the game. And when we begin to recover that very simple thesis that investing is ownership, it changes everything. I mean, if you’re an owner of a small business down the corner, you care a lot about that business, right. Because your name is attached to it. You would care about the investing practices. You care about the practices that the company had. If that company going to legal trouble, you’d be in trouble. If that company got accolades, well, then you would look good as a result. We get it. If it’s a private business that is owned by a couple of people, even though it is quantitatively different, it’s not qualitatively different. Investing is ownership and we should have a real degree of pride in the companies that we own and I like to use as a test. [00:27:11][102.3]
[00:27:12] Would I be proud to tell people that my son or my daughter worked at that company as a way to kind of just calibrate myself about is this company that I want to invest in here? And if it’s not, then we shouldn’t be investing. And if it is, well, then that’s great. But, you know, using just some really simple tests like that, some really basic reminders of what the purpose of investing is, I think that’s extraordinarily helpful. And we are standing against a tsunami of, like I said, information that goes the other way where it’s all about, like I said, being passive low fees and profiting from this thing called the market, which somebody else is going to determine who the market is and that scheme and why not take more more of a stake? Given the ethical implications to the downside as well as to the upside. [00:27:58][46.3]
Henry: [00:27:59] In some of your time to get it both the negative and then also the positive aspects of being an active investor. And I like this a lot. [00:28:05][5.5]
[00:28:05] And in particular, to go to the illustration you have about apartheid, how people of faith got together in the early 70s and use their influence to be able to help some large companies curtail what they did. But then also on the positive side, which is less of going ahead in time, people stopped doing bad things. There are also three themes that you guys like a lot. Cyber security, clean water and then also some aspects of mental health that you think that Christ followers might be able to be proactive and invest in key touch on both of those. Absolutely. Influence of the negative screen side. Maybe. But then also on the positive side, yeah. [00:28:43][37.9]
Finny: [00:28:44] So I love both sides of this. And the Christian community should realize that there have been all those small. There have been some small efforts through history that have had very dramatic effects on history. [00:28:55][11.9]
[00:28:56] So the one that you mentioned there is apartheid, which I love that example. So in 1971, four years before I was born. But I know that the government of South Africa had ignored U.N. sanctions and multiple embargoes that were already in place specifically over the issue of apartheid. And so the governments stick didn’t work. And as it turns out, the way that that ultimately shook out was it was a group of Episcopal shareholders that filed what’s called a shareholder resolution with General Motors, the automotive company. So the shareholder resolution is a tool that public investors have. All you have to own is a thousand dollars of stock in a particular company. You can file what’s called a shareholder resolution, which will then be put up to vote at the next annual meeting of the company. And this is widely regarded to be one of the very first examples, if not the first example of modern shareholder advocacy. So this group of shareholders basically said, hey, what are you doing in General Motors with respect to working conditions, to employing whites and blacks, separate bathrooms, you know, all those types of issues and longer hold. What they did was they enlisted the wisdom of a Baptist minister whose name was Leon Sullivan, who was an anti-apartheid activist. And he proposed specific resolutions for the board of General Motors that they ended up adopting because of that shareholder resolution. And then, not surprisingly, after GM. Adopted those what are often called the Sullivan principles after Leon Sullivan. Then Ford and Goodyear followed suit. And so most historians will tell you that the key instrument in the fall of apartheid was investor pressure. And that’s great. I mean, that is so exciting that this small group of investors leveraged their influence to change General Motors, which in turn changed Ford, which in turn changed Goodyear, which then changed corporate practice and ultimately led to the dissolution of apartheid, although not quite as moderate. There’s a similar story to be told with abolition. So if you look at the history of, for example, Quakers, people like Charles Finney and others, they certainly used the power of business and investing to assist in the demise of abolition. So those are powerful examples on the negative side. And I think that there’s a lot of examples today that we could think about. One example that I really like is mental health. Mental health is something that we don’t realize how big of a problem it is. So one of the examples that I really like is schizophrenia. Schizophrenia afflicts about three million people today in the United States. And a lot of people don’t even know what schizophrenia is. They think of it as having multiple personalities. You know, this alien schizophrenic because you’re acting differently. That’s actually not what schizophrenia is. That’s a completely different disease called multiple personality disorder. And it’s kind of offensive, actually, to people who have schizophrenia. So we need to make sure that we use more accurate terms there. Schizophrenia represents something very different, which is a set of positive and negative symptoms, but in particular on the positive side. For example, it’s hearing voices coming from a wall. It’s auditory and visual hallucinations. On the negative side, it’s the inability to initiate. People just have a very flat affect. This is ranked by the W.H.O. as the third most disabling condition in the world. If you ever encounter homeless people and you actually talk to them, you’ll find that a huge percentage of homeless people have schizophrenia. And if you could fix the schizophrenia problem, you would be dealing with a root cause of a lot of homelessness. And right now, for example, we actually financed a private company that has since gone public that has had one of the most game changing results in schizophrenia and probably the last 30 years. And so this is really, really exciting, right? So if you care about homelessness, you care about mental health, there’s excellent ways for Christians to be deploying their capital in ways that support very high innovations. [00:33:11][255.0]
[00:33:12] And again, these are companies that aren’t in indices. If you just go out and buy the S&P 500, you’re not going to be participating in these kinds of companies. Why not consider moving our investments into areas like this that are so high yield in terms of net positive impact to society? I used to work in a homeless shelter many years ago, and I’m sure many of your listeners have as well. And while your heart breaks and you interact with these patients and you realize there’s some very profound issues there that you can’t even deal with, you don’t have the tools to deal with with what we have today. When you have somebody who’s coming in, who’s a true schizophrenic and they’re totally disassociated from reality, well, you give all the warm meals you want, but you’re not really going to be changing the trajectory of that person. What we really need there is to change the underlying disease and to begin to heal the pathology that we have in their brains. [00:34:05][53.3]
[00:34:05] I’m really excited about that as yet another example. [00:34:08][2.3]
Henry: [00:34:08] So you talk about that and I’ve heard you talk and present before about clean water and some other issues, including cyber security and maybe on another podcast we’ll get in. It’s clear to me as a listener how your investment in these types of industries, in some of these types of problems can advocate for human flourishing. But I also know that you are a fund manager that is graded on your performance. You hit Morningstar reviews and things like that. You ever find that where you as an investment manager say, oh, my goodness, this company is doing things are super important, but it’s just not representing the stock price. [00:34:43][34.2]
[00:34:43] So therefore, we have to sell the stock, whereas their attention with delivering shareholder returns versus some of these themes that you think are so important, you ever find that they’re at odds with each other? [00:34:53][10.0]
Finny: [00:34:53] You know, there is. But I would say that in general it’s an overblown tension. A lot of people think that if you can kind of dance in and out of a stock at the right time, you’ll be able to do much better than those who are just more patient, long term buy and hold investors. [00:35:08][14.5]
[00:35:09] And it sounds really easy, like, oh, yeah, it’s overvalued sell. And when it gets undervalued by and to some extent people try to do that. We try to do that. But in general, I think there’s lots of data. I know there’s lots of data. And we certainly have found this to be true, that you’re much better off as an investor finding great companies doing your homework. They are investing and then a while the magic of compounding to do its trick. And most of the time I think people would say that when they found great companies, the main problem they’ve had is they’ve sold too early and they haven’t allowed time and the greatness of a management team to really prove itself. And when you look at some of the investments that we’ve had that have been 10 baggers, 20 baggers over the years, it just takes time. And yeah, you could try to game it from month to month and dance in and out quarter quarter. But it’s a fool’s game. And although, like I said, in theory, this pension does exist, and I think there are times where you might want to lighten up a little bit. I would say it’s way more important just to make sure that you’re in great companies and that you feel confident in the companies that you’re investing in and you’re spending your time and your energy not on watching the day to day stock moves, but on understanding the people and understanding the industry. Warren Buffett has said this before and I think he’s spot on that the market would be way better off if it was open for trading one day a year and that was it, so that people could spend more of their time on what actually matters, which is the fundamentals and not the gyrations of the market, which are just very difficult to predict and very difficult to handle. [00:36:41][91.7]
William: [00:36:41] I love your quote about would you want your son or daughter to work at the company? I had a similar experience recently where at a good friend going through a couple a job interviews and he got some offers. I wrote a column in one of these companies as well-known companies and as I don’t work there. Why would you work there for this reason? This reason, this reason? And then literally, I looked like the weight I own stock in that company. It was so obvious to me and to him what I laid it out to him. He’s like, oh, yeah, you’re right. Why would I go work for that company? And so I sold my position the next day. And, you know, I’ve lost money on that. The company has done well, but I know it was the right call. So I love that framework. And so maybe people don’t have children, maybe think three, you know, would you want a good friend of yours going over there or would you go work there? Right. Another good screening thing that was really interesting for me is I think you bringing that up and it reminds me of something recent. And then as we do come to a close, one of the biggest things in particular, the most important we love asking our guests is if you’d be generous with us is where is God? Have you right now in his word, in his scripture, maybe during the season, maybe this morning? You know, what might he be taking you through that you could share with our listeners and let us into your world and your journey? [00:37:49][67.8]
Finny: [00:37:50] Yeah, sure. That’s an excellent question to do. Well, this is by way of encouragement. I am married with I have seven children. And one thing that I would highly recommend that everyone do is as a family and this is what we do. We pick one passage per day and we’ll generally pick a book of the Bible and do one chapter per day. Then we journal everyone journals who can write all my children and write. But those who can’t write, we have a set of questions that we go through every single day together. And we started the morning when we wake up. Open up revivals of George Arnwine. And then in the evening we discuss what we’ve learned. And the questions that we ask are what did you learn about God from this passage? Second question, what do you learn about the nature of humanity from this? Question is this what did you read in this passage that makes you want to worship God? Fourth question is what promises did you find in that passage? The fifth question is what did you see in yourself in this passage that you want to put to death? You want to mortify in some way. This question is what are you going to do differently today? What kinds of applications are going to put into practice? And then the seventh is to write out a prayer. So those are the seven questions that we do as a family every single day. If there’s any parents here who don’t have a practice like that going, I will say that it will be a complete game changer for your family to do that. [00:39:10][80.6]
[00:39:11] And your children will form with scripture. God will bless you in ways that you can’t even know until you go through it and probably even in this life fully understand it. [00:39:19][8.4]
[00:39:20] So that’s my general encouragement. I’ll give you a passage that we were just talking about the other day. It’s a very familiar passage. In fact, yesterday we were talking about how so much of the life of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, you know, those first three individuals is it’s almost representative or emblematic of the whole rest of the Bible. I mean, you can see so much of the gospel, even in the stories of those individuals. So, you know, one famous story of Abraham offering Isaac, for example, that even though the New Testament doesn’t explicitly mentioned that, I think we all justly take that as a foreshadowing of the father offering the son two thousand years later. And I remember when I was reading that passage, it struck me that at the end of it. God says to Abraham, he says, Now I know that you fear me. And I thought, wow, this is Abraham, who already left her of the calley’s. He left his father’s home. You became a sojourner in Tainan. [00:40:21][60.8]
[00:40:22] You talk about someone who was a radically obedient follower of God and what it took. Was this episode of offering his beloved Isaac on the altar for God to say. Now, I know that for me, you know, you did all that before and what it led me to be reminded of and to share in my family was you can be an amazing person. And so many ways and I sometimes like to point out that you can confess 98 percent of the stuff in your life, the junk in your life, but it’s that last 2 percent that will ruin you if you don’t confess it, that there’s often this like the hard thing in your life. There is something deep that God has for all of us that he wants us to put it on the altar, so to speak, and that Abraham like manner, that even though he had done so much, much more than I think most of us would probably have a tolerance for. But that final 2 percent is where the real gold is. And I would encourage everyone to think about what does that look like in your life? What is that, 2 percent? How do you confess that? How do you work through that? How do you lay out on the altar? And I believe that God would give a significant blessing on those who are willing to go that final step into that full hearted obedience where you’re just putting your most valuable person possession, whatever it is on the altar for God to use it as he was. [00:41:43][80.9]
Henry: [00:41:44] So this has been a great podcast, but I’ll go with what you said. And that is the real gold of this podcast is in the last 2 percent. Yeah, that was awesome. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you very much for sharing. We look forward to having you back on the program and God bless you and Eventide. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure being with you. [00:41:44][0.0]
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