Humble Giants – Vanguard’s Gerry O’Reilly and Jim Rowley

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:04)
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is a principal and portfolio manager at O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:46)
My guests today are Gerry O'Reilly and Jim Rowley. Gerry oversees roughly $800 billion in assets for Vanguard, including their flagship Total Market Fund.
He does so quietly with great humility.
Jim is a Senior Investments Analyst with Vanguard with deep knowledge of both indexing and ETFs. I've always been impressed with Vanguard as an institution, so it was a blast diving into some of the particulars that make the company and its funds tick. For show notes on this episode, visit investorfieldguide.com forward slash Vanguard. And now, please enjoy my conversation with Gerry O'Reilly and Jim Rowley. All right, well, Jim and Gerry, thank you very much for doing this with me today. This is going to be a really fun conversation. I think some of the interesting minutiae that we'll get into around index investing and Vanguard's actor strategies as well will be great fodder for the listening audience out there. I'd love to start with something fun, which is that I have recently gotten very into running. Let's see where this is going.
I looked up with the last name O'Shaughnessy, all of the Irishmen who had broken the four minute mile. I was reading Phil Knight's new book, Shoe Dog, which I really enjoyed and saw in connection with the interview that you, Gerry, had, I think, the third fastest time, certainly at Villanova, but sub four minute mile. So I'd love to hear just a little, tell me a little bit about the first time you did it.

**Gerry O'Reilly** (2:12)
Okay. So I had been knocking on the door of four minute miles for my sophomore year in college and just for whatever reason, at 4.001, 4.2 tenths of a second, just never quite got there. And so at the end of my sophomore year, a little disappointed and then went into my junior year and kind of figured, okay, this year it's going to happen and trained like I'd never trained before.
And when I got the opportunity, I actually went from, instead of running 359 or 358, I actually went from a four minute miler to a 354 miler. So I took almost six seconds off my personal best in one race. And that was, I think, just, I think the fact that I didn't have success my sophomore year in terms of breaking it, made me even more determined. So that's kind of was the fodder for breaking it.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:04)
At what stage did you figure out, I'm assuming you started running relatively young, like at what stage was it, did it become apparent, like, oh, okay, I've got, I've got something interesting going on here.

**Gerry O'Reilly** (3:13)
I think I was probably, you know, you're right. I did start running at a very, very early age, probably eight or nine. The town that I grew up in Ireland didn't have a whole lot of options available. There was, there was Gaelic football, soccer and running, and that was kind of it. So a neighbor happened to be into running and invited me to, hey, you should come down and try it out, tried it out, liked it.
But I'd say it was probably 15 when I realized, you know, I actually have something going on here where I can, I tend to be able to keep going when other kids start blowing up. And, you know, I just said, this is, this is maybe something I should stick with.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:46)
So there's this thread there that I'm interested in the quote that I pulled up here from Shoe Dog, which was Bill Bowerman, I think they pronounce his name, the famous Oregon track coach said that his philosophy for running the mile was to set a fast pace for the first two laps, run the third as hard as you can, and then triple your speed on the fourth, which sounds insane and like crazy, but a lot of people said that actually is kind of what you do.