Mike Green Is An Intentional Investor

Mike Green might be one of the smartest people I know, but I’m not telling him.

He joined me, from somewhere in the middle of the intelligence spectrum, to record an episode of the Intentional Investor for Epsilon Theory. Whenever people normally interview him, the talk is usually focused on one of his (many) thoughtful insights into how the world works. The guy has been on the right side of enough fantastically fascinating (and fairly profitable) financial shifts that it’s clearly not just luck. Plus, it’s earned him the professional respect of people like David Einhorn and Peter Theil to name a few. Obviously, that’s interesting stuff. People should ask him about all of those things.

But what I always want to hear Green talk more about is the little details he drips out. I want to know more about his love for cooking and where it came from. I want to hear about:

what life was like as a kid (on farms in California?!),

what he really wanted to be when he grew up (a physicist?!?),

how’d he end up on the east coast (and about how he took a plane from Philly to New York because he didn’t realize they were THAT close?!?!).

I wanted to hear about selling his first company, meeting his wife, raising their family, moving all over the country multiple times over, including to an old ice farm outside of Scranton, PA for a while, and how all of that related back to, yes, his fascinating career in finance so far.

And maybe more than anything, I wanted to at least get my own collection of Mike Green quips too. He’s funny. People don’t often dig into that with him, publicly at least. Probably because his humor is so quick. His default answers can be deceptively depreciative and sarcastic in the best of ways. Don’t let those sneak by when you listen, because they’re a key insight into how his brain takes in and plays with information to get the ideas he comes up with.

There’s a reason we only cover his history up to about 2009. Because when you casually throw in stories about how your shoe size was too big as a kid so you ended up with hand me downs from the San Francisco Forty Niners, this is just the way it’s going to go.

Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you enjoy this conversation at least half as much as I did, via Epsilon Theory on YouTube, Mike Green is an Intentional Investor!