Chris Davis: Three Generations of Wealth

Shane Parrish: I want to start with your grandfather, and if I understand correctly, when you were 15 and 16, you were working for him up in Maine as a cook and a chauffeur, and that really cemented your relationship with him. I want to talk about some of the lessons you learned from him.

Chris Davis: He was in many ways a great man and in many ways a very difficult and very flawed person, which I guess just makes him human. And I think within our family system, he was viewed as being very aloof, very unloving, distant, and even pompous and almost a caricature. And so we had to kowtow and be polite. And I just remember my father always making sure we had good manners at the table. But he was not popular among the grandchildren. And I think that my grandmother, his wife, was just this incredibly warm human and just so full of love and light. I used to say, “If you average them together, you’d get normal.” And that was true in a lot of dimensions. I think that that summer that I worked for them, I was able to see much more of him, see him outside of the context of this patriarch.