You're listening to A Book with Legs, a podcast presented by Smead Capital Management.

At Smead Capital Management, we advise investors who play the long game.

You can learn more at Smeadcap.com or by calling your financial advisor.

Welcome to a book with legs podcast. I'm Cole Smead, CEO and portfolio manager here at Smead Capital Management. At our firm, we are readers, and we believe in the power of books to help shape, inform investors. In this podcast, we speak to great authors about their writings. The late great Charlie Munger prescribed using multiple mental models and analysis. We analyze their work through the lens of business,

markets, and people. In this episode, we are going to learn about the history of a company,

the history of a country's banking industry, and how large companies may not be successful.

They've just survived numerous times.

Joining us to discuss his recently published book, Meltdown, Greed, Scandal, and the collapse of

Credit Suisse is Duncan Maven. Duncan is currently an editor for Bloomberg in London. He has worked

for the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Bairns Magazine, and

Toronto's Financial Post. He has also been a chartered accountant in London and Toronto. He has

a degree in history from Durham University in the UK. He has also published another book, The Pyramid of

Lies, which was a UK best-selling book. Duncan, thanks for being here today.

Thanks, I'm me.

I really appreciate it.

So like we were talking about before the podcast,

you obviously have this other book you'd published,

The Pyramid of Lies, which was you'd published in the UK,

which is all about the Green Sill saga.

So that has some of the information that obviously comes into this story about Credit

Swiss. But what caused you to write really this corporate history that, as I mentioned to you,

you don't tend to see people go back to the mid-19th century and start to ask questions about

...