This is Rick Rule for Real Vision and Sprought US media. Today I have the good

fortune to introduce a friend of very longstanding Tom Kaplan. The theme of this is know who, which is to say a lot of investing is knowing how to do it,

but an important part of investing too is knowing the people who have been successful in finding out why.

So while we will discuss many facets of investing and many

facets of life with Tom Kaplan, we will always bring it back to the theme of

what caused you to do this, what caused you to do that, how did you learn from your

successes, how did you learn from your failures, how did building businesses make you a better

investor and what lessons that you have learned can you impart to others. So Tom with that introduction let's get

started and let's begin at the beginning. I was fascinated with you and I visited

personally about the discussion you had around going to university

majoring in history, not many tycoons, as far as I know, start with the academic background in history that you had.

First off, how did you choose history as a young man?

And secondly, how, if at all, did the study of history influence you are investing and possibly

make you a better investor?

Well, I knew that history would be my, certainly my avocation when I was very young.

Most of the passions in my life really began to emerge when I was six, seven, eight years old and history was no exception. By the time I was 10, 11 years old, I was reading lives of the Theesers by Suetonius and I understood that I could see things in history that just came very naturally to me. I decided that I wanted to study history at the best university which exists for history in my opinion and that was really

prompted by watching a professor being interviewed on television.

This is back in the day when there were only four channels

and one of them was PBS.

And he was asked, where could you

get the best education as an undergraduate in history?

And he said, Oxford.

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