On The Power of Digital Relationships!

Dear second-level thinkers,

If you follow me on social media, or if my Notes show up in your Substack feed occasionally, you will have noticed that I have been fairly critical of Meta Platforms’s social media apps over the past few weeks.

My issue has little to do with the business itself, which is superb by nearly every financial measure I care about. My issue is with the products, which I find way too addictive and, on balance, harmful to the people using them.

My position is probably summarized best by a comment I left under a tweet from Joseph Carlson. He asked where the legally accepted line on addictiveness is supposed to sit in a case like this, and who gets to decide where that arbitrary line goes.

My answer:

“It’s so addictive that most people can’t even watch a 3-hour movie anymore without checking their phone 30x throughout. It’s so addictive that some people’s brain is so fried, that they watch movies at 1.5x speed or fast forward during segments where little happens.”

I meant it.

And this weekend I finally acted on it and deleted Instagram from my phone. The trigger was nothing dramatic. I simply caught myself opening the app for what must have been the twenty-eighth time in a single day, with no goal whatsoever, no message to answer, nothing to post, watching influencers stage fake drama in Reels for an audience of millions who will forget it within the hour.

I kept the account, because it might turn into a useful marketing channel at some point, who knows? The app is gone though, and I have no plans to reinstall it anytime soon.

I would love for my wife to do the same. Her Instagram use has had a net negative effect on our relationship as well in my view, in the sense that anybody – and this is a more general comment I want to make here – who spends more than 60 minutes a day inside a social media app – and many people’s screen time exceed five hours – is less present than they would otherwise be.

Source: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/screen-time-for-teens

Heavy users are simply somewhere else.

Now, you may have noticed that I keep saying “net negative” rather than plain negative, which implies that there is something on the other side of the ledger.

There is, and quite a lot of it.

Entertainment that is actually funny. Niche communities for interests that nobody within a ten-mile radius of your home shares. Free access to teachers, practitioners, and specialists who would have been completely unreachable a generation ago. Independent creators and small businesses, myself very much included, reaching an audience without a publisher, a broadcaster, or a marketing budget. Grandparents watching grandchildren grow up from another continent. Job leads, apartment listings, honest product reviews from strangers with no incentive to lie. Live information during a crisis, long before the evening news gets to it (which might pursue its own agenda anyhow).

The biggest item on that side of the ledger, for me at least, is the ability to connect with people anywhere on the planet, which was barely an option two decades ago. It is easy to forget how narrow the default used to be. For almost all of human history, your intellectual peer group was decided by geography. You thought alongside whoever happened to live within walking distance, and if none of them cared about capital allocation or margin structures or the difference between a good business and a good stock, then you simply thought alone. Find me someone who is as passionate about reading a new Michael Mauboussin paper as soon as it drops within a 50-mile radius!

The sociologist Mark Granovetter published a paper in 1973 called “The Strength of Weak Ties,” and his finding was that most of the genuinely useful things in life, job offers and ideas, and opportunities, arrive through loose acquaintances rather than through close friends.

The logic is almost obvious once you see it. Your closest friends already know everything you know, because they move in the same circles you do.

New information comes from the edges.

The internet, whatever else it does to our attention spans, is the most efficient weak tie machine ever built, and a handful of those weak ties have turned into something much stronger in my case.

Putting yourself out there, publishing, being visible online, exposes you to a lot of noise. I received some nasty comments below my YouTube videos at times. And some anonymous accounts on X are just waiting, like hyenas, for them to rub a mistake you’ve made under your nose.

However, finding the courage to put yourself out there also exposes you to people who end up having a net positive impact on your life.

I want to share a few examples of what I mean, roughly in chronological order.

In fact, before I started writing this, I told my wife the title of the piece and asked her which names came to mind. She listed every single one of the people below, unprompted, which I find remarkable given that I have never met a single one of them in person.

Maybe I can inspire some of you to connect with people online. That’s the point of this post.

Five people I have never shaken hands with but who’ve improved my life tremendously!

King Andrew I from the States

Andrew Letendre is the first name that comes to mind, because he is arguably the first person I formed an actual online friendship with.

If I remember correctly, Andrew found my YouTube videos early on, became one of my first regular viewers, and eventually messaged me on Instagram. Now that I have deleted the app I cannot go back and check the date or his opening line, and I would have loved to insert a screenshot here, but I am not reinstalling Instagram for a blog post. Andrew is likely still asleep while I type this, but maybe he can drop the screenshot later, and I’ll insert it later in an edited version of this post.

My best guess is 2021.

What I do remember is that I was a little defensive at first. Who is this stranger on the internet who wants to connect, and what does he want from me? We connected anyway, exchanged WhatsApp details, and have been trading long voice memos and even longer texts ever since.

I have come to appreciate Andrew’s investing prowess enormously, and beyond that he is simply a great guy with great hobbies, two fat cats (his words, not mine), and now a young family.

We eventually started a podcast together and have recorded something like thirty episodes (just a guesstimate), most of them over an hour, rambling about the thing we are both obsessed with.

This must have been the first podcast we recorded

King Andrew II from Down Under

Andrew Letendre is also the reason I know Andrew Brown, the finance creator from Australia (check out his YouTube channel here). Andrew L. approached him in what I assume was a similar fashion, since he clearly has a pickup line that works with financial content creators, and at some point the three of us ended up in a small WhatsApp group with the wonderfully creative name “Stock Talks AAR.” (AAR standing for Andrew, Andrew, and René in case that short form needs any explanation)

We have recorded a long podcast together, which was a scheduling nightmare, because the three of us sit in the US, Germany, and Australia, and there is roughly one hour in the day where all three of us are awake and functional (I think it was 10 pm my time when we recorded it).

Andrew B. is another lovely guy I am looking forward to meeting in person eventually, and I am eager to follow his progress as he builds his own serial acquirer, which we covered in some depth on the show.

Ruki

My friend Ruki is next. He is based in the UK, and our relationship started when I was looking for a small test cohort of people whose investing know-how I could help take to a higher level. I recorded a YouTube video asking anyone interested to simply email me, and Ruki sent one of the kindest emails I have ever received, clearly written with a lot of care and effort.

Hi Rene,

Firstly, I want to thank you for all the content you have been sharing. I have been following you since the pandemic and I am truly grateful for the knowledge you have shared.

My name is Ruki and I work and live in London, with a great interest in long term investing. I am also writing to see if I could become one of your test clients […] I am always eager to learn. […] Thoroughly enjoyed your last video featuring Greenblatt. The little book that beats the market was one of my first introductions to value investing.

If you still have spaces or would like to offer me this opportunity, I would be really grateful. Hope to hear from you soon

All the best

Ruki

We then interacted a lot with each other for about six months, meeting regularly online in Zoom calls, along with three other gentlemen, and stayed in touch afterward.

We recorded a podcast on Moncler, then another one together with Andrew Letendre. We have worked on shared research projects, including a format I used to run called “Stock of the Month,” back when the community was tiny.

And today Ruki is one of the most active pillars of that community. Thank you for that, Ruki.

Niklas

The next close digital relationship I formed is with Niklas from Heavy Moat Investments. This one did not come out of YouTube, at least not directly as far as I recall, but out of Twitter, which was still called Twitter at the time.

I think we had been vaguely aware of each other for a while. I could tell Niklas was German from his accent on podcasts and in Spaces, and I am sure he could tell the same from my videos (we just cannot hide it).

We interacted with each other’s tweets regularly, and it became clear fairly quickly that we are wired in a very similar way. The relationship got closer, I believe, when I invited him onto the podcast, which fits a pattern I have noticed again and again: meeting someone digitally in a live setting, where you actually see each other’s faces and react in the moment, moves a relationship onto a different level entirely.

We have recorded several episodes since, we message constantly on WhatsApp, we are in similar stages of life, and Niklas is another one of those unselfish people who carries the community, always willing to share what he has found, always making time for our digital investing conferences. Both of them are, Ruki and Niklas alike.

Tiho

Then there is Tiho. I had to look up how this one started. I vaguely remembered it beginning on X, but not the details, so I scrolled back through our chat history and found that he slid into my DMs in late 2023 with the following message:

This is probably the right moment for the broader lesson of this whole piece. Do not hesitate to take the first step. You genuinely have no idea how it might change your life. As an aside, I met my wife in front of a Zara store more than ten years ago, purely because I found the courage to walk up and talk to her. The same principle applies online, at a fraction of the social risk. The worst realistic outcome of sending a thoughtful message to a stranger on the internet is that nothing happens. That happened to me a couple of times. Who cares?

But back to Tiho. At some point he suggested jumping on a Zoom call, we did, and from there it developed much like the others. Endless WhatsApp threads. Another podcast episode for you to listen to (it might be one of the best - find part 1 here).

Andrew Letendre might believe he holds the record for the longest voice message in my WhatsApp history, and I have to break it to him that Tiho beats him comfortably. Twenty-minute voice memos on investing, on economic history, on culture, on whatever happens to be on his mind that morning? No problem.

I told him recently how impressive I find his ability to deliver a ten to twenty-minute mini-lecture on more or less any subject, off the cuff, packed with insight and life experience.

We have ended up in an interesting sort-of mentor-and-mentee dynamic where both sides learn something, though I would be kidding myself if I claimed it was symmetrical. Tiho is considerably wiser and a great deal more successful as an investor than I am, and more often than not I listen to one of his private lectures and reply with a thumbs up, because in the spirit of Munger, I have truly “nothing to add.”

What All of Them Have in Common

What all of these people have in common is worth spelling out: They are extraordinarily generous with their time, their knowledge, and their energy. They are supportive without keeping score. And in almost every case, they were the ones who reached out first.

Maybe they hesitated before hitting send, I do not know. Whatever the barrier was, they got over it, and I am the beneficiary.

Our Community

The last example is not a person at all. It is my investing community, a space that pulls together a group of individuals who share the same obsession. Activity in the group has picked up materially over the past year or so. We have run two digital investing conferences already, with the next one scheduled for early October, and it still amazes me that people from every corner of the world share the same passion.

When someone joins, I ask them to add a few details about themselves to a shared spreadsheet, which helps everyone contextualize who they are talking to and makes it much easier to reach out. I also encourage anyone living in the same region to connect and meet up in person, which brings me to the last part of this piece.

Honorable Mentions

A few honorable mentions before I get there, because the list above is not exhaustive. Every single person I have worked with in a coaching setting belongs in it.

• Andy, better known as @evfcfaddict on X, probably has no idea how much he has influenced the way I think about networking and community building, since he has done a lot of the same.

• Conor Mac from Investment Talk.

• Mike Kytka from Money Flow Investing.

• Pieter from Compounding Quality.

• Jakub (@jakubhajost on X), who I recorded a podcast episode on InPost with a day before the acquisition rumors surfaced and the stock popped.

• Trevor from The Pursuit of Compounding

• Siem from The Dutch Investors

• Marc from Learning.Investing.Thriving.

• Mostapha from Compound With AI

• … and more!

I hope I have not forgotten anyone. If I have, and the odds are not in my favor here, consider this an apology and imagine a very large hug.

The Next Step?

Arne Ulland recently published a Note that stuck with me for days. He described running a Discord server a few years back, full of skilled investors and genuinely enjoyable, and admitted that the thing he failed at was building “a link to the ‘real world’.”

All those hours spent discussing ideas, sharing mindsets, working through good days and bad ones, never turned into connections that existed outside the server.

He wants to do it differently this time, because he has seen what happens when an online acquaintance becomes an offline friend. He mentioned getting to know someone from X whose connection grew roughly tenfold after a single video call, and who has been a friend for three years since.

His point was that it would be a shame if all that time and effort produced nothing more valuable than a slightly better answer on whether to buy or sell a stock.

He floated a few options, from a simple form with names, professions, and locations (I already have that set up), all the way to video calls (again, we did this twice already with our community), which he admits is a high barrier even for him.

He is onto something. Meeting “in person” changes a relationship in a way that no amount of messaging replicates.

But what if you met people in the “real world”? That would elevate the relationship on a whole new level, I believe. Right?

I know that Ruki met up with one of the other participants from his cohort in London a while back, and seeing the two of them out having a pint made me genuinely happy, because that pint only happened as a consequence of a few people deciding to interact online. Somewhere in the chain, someone sent a first message.

So here is sort of a wild idea I have had in mind for a few days now: What if I bring the community together for a casual hangout weekend? I know that EVtoFCFaddict has done exactly that, and it was a huge success. Several members have already signaled they would enjoy exactly that too. I have a city in mind, my own, and a rough shape for the weekend that leans much more toward good food and long walks than toward a rented conference room and a projector. It will require some effort and some travel budget from everyone involved, yet I have no doubt at all that it will be worth it. I’ll keep you updated on that.

YOUR Next Step?

Until then, a small request:

If there is someone out there whose work you have followed for a while, whose thinking you admire, whose Notes you keep opening before anyone else’s, send them a message. Skip the small talk, tell them what you actually found valuable and why. Nine times out of ten, nothing may come of it. The tenth time, you might be writing a post like this one in five years.