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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 informed 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. Today's date is December 29th, 2025. This is our quarterly book list

where we talk about books, books, and yes, more books. Hosting this with me is

what my father, Bill, likes to call our crack analyst team. To my right is my colleague,

Seamus Sullivan, who's our senior analyst, and then to his right is also Will Keenan and Nick

Garcia, and they are both analysts here at our firm.

So gentlemen, this is the second time having you guys all on. So thanks for joining me again.

I think last summer. So you guys are like my six month date every six months.

So let's start out talking about what you guys have just read. I will say you guys had kind of a, you didn't

have the same books, which I was glad to see. So, James, I'll kick it to you first. And you can talk about what you've been reading. No, I appreciate it. So I have two on there. So the first one is 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin. I'm sure a lot of viewers or listeners to this have probably already read it. It was, I think, kind of broadly out

there. It was actually really pretty good. I enjoyed reading kind of a refresher about it.

I think the backstories he gives on the people involved at the time were kind of interesting.

You didn't know kind of a lot of the granular stuff or some color on what was going on back

then and the personal reasons that were in play at the time. The one thing I thought was more interesting about it

is it's not akin maybe to the temperament of today. I mean, you have madness of crowds,

obviously, then, and you've got a little bit today. It's more how things were handled back then versus how they are now. So back then,

you had people had personal loss, you had companies go bankrupt, you had the, obviously the Great

Depression, whereas today everything is, you know, we can't have anybody falter. We can't have

anybody fall. And that dichotomy of back then versus today, I think, was kind of the major theme I took away from it.

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