In this episode of the VALUE: After Hours Podcast, Jake Taylor, Bill Brewster, and Tobias Carlisle chat about:
- Value’s Best 50 Days
- Li Lu’s Amazing Journey
- Misinformation And Why We Should Stop Reading The ‘News’
- Keith McCullough’s Quad 4
- $QRATE vs $ZM Update
- The S&P 5
- ARKK’s Taxi Market Estimate
- Canadian Truckers Protest
- Interest Rate Betting
- Just Index & Talk To Market People
- ETF’s For Everything
- No Easy Bets ATM
- Buffett On Getting Call Options
- Tobias’ Early Life
- Could Spreads Widen Further?
- Podcasting Is A Tough Medium
- The Time To Go After SaaS Businesses Is When They’re Really Cringy
- Buffett’s Network
- Kettlebell Crochet
- If It Bleeds It Leads!
You can find out more about the VALUE: After Hours Podcast here – VALUE: After Hours Podcast. You can also listen to the podcast on your favorite podcast platforms here:
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Full Transcript
Bill: Awful.
Tobias: It’s just old age, mate. It’ll get to you.
Bill: No. I don’t look good.
Tobias: We’re live. It is 10:30 on the West Coast. I had to look at it just to make sure 1:30 on the East Coast. I’m Tobias Carlisle. I’m by Jake Taylor and Bill Brewster. As always, how are you, gentlemen?
Jake: Feeling good.
Bill: I’m okay.
Jake: [laughs] Just okay?
Bill: Yeah, just okay.
Tobias: [crosstalk] it’s January?
Bill: I don’t think it was nearly as bad as my June to November. That was awful.
Jake: I had a pretty great January myself. Sorry, everybody.
[laughter]Tobias: In the market or just generally?
Jake: Oh, that was fine, too. But no, just living a good life. I don’t know.
Tobias: You are too Zen. You listen to too much Buffett and Munger on your walks on that little path behind you that I see.
Jake: Yes, this is my actual walking daily hike that I get out and get some fresh air, listen to the Buffett and Munger and provide perspective.
Tobias: You shifted your time horizon all the way up to the horizon. So, now you’re Zen.
Jake: It helps.
Tobias: It’s the trick really, I think.
Jake: It could be a form of self-hypnosis at this point. I’m willing to accept that.
Tobias: Well, everything is right. You’re either being hypnotized in a good way or hypnotized in a bad way.
Jake: Yeah.
Tobias: You might as well be conscious about it and do the good thing.
Jake: Yeah.
Bill: I think that’s right.
Tobias: We’ve got some people tuning in because market’s in turmoil for people who won’t [unintelligible [00:01:37].
Jake: [laughs] Yeah. We’re back to that.
Tobias: Or people who’ve been short the junk. Jesus, big junk rally.
Bill: Yeah.
Jake: Shorting is the game.
Bill: Yeah.
Tobias: You want to add to that, Bill? I thought you’re going to say something. [laughs]
Jake: Yeah. [laughs]
Bill: I tweeted out. If I could, I’d probably reverse the Qurate-Zoom bet. I said that before they whiffed. Today, I’ll do a postmortem on my ownership there.
Tobias: Are you done?
Bill: Yes, I am for now.
Tobias: What’s the stock done? Has it fallen off or– What’s the–[crosstalk] it was going to get to?
Bill: What?
Tobias: Are you selling because it got to where you thought it was going to get to–?
Jake: Show us on the doll where it touched you?
Tobias: Facts have changed.
Bill: No. We’ll talk about it.
Jake: All right.
Tobias: Okay.
Jake: I’ve got a little veggie segment, probably not that veggie dense, but it’s on misinformation and it’s based on a couple of books I read last week.
Bill: So, you’re doing a Spotify segment?
Jake: I could get into that, sure. It’s where we want to take it. [laughs]
Bill: Just saying.
Jake: Yeah.
Bill: It’s the news event.
Jake: Yeah. Well, I thought this would be good because it might provide a little more historical perspective.
Bill: Misinformation’s as old as time [unintelligible [00:03:05] politics.
Jake: Quit stepping on my segment.
Bill: I’m sorry. Sorry.
Jake: [laughs]
Tobias: Evidently values had the best relative 50 days since a really long time back according to the Wall Street Journal.
Jake: Yes, I love this.
Tobias: That’s how we are measuring it in these days.
Jake: Yeah. We are just measuring it wherever we can get the– [laughs]
Tobias: Slipping off time, mate. It’s slipping off time. You got to measure when you can measure. It didn’t feel a particularly good 50 days to me, but who knows? That’s what the data say, I guess.
Bill: Well, relative outperformance when everything’s crashing is not exactly fun.
Tobias: Yeah. I went and pulled some of the Ken French data and had a look. I don’t know. Maybe it’s in there, but I had to get a magnifying glass out to see it.
Jake: Oh, man.
Bill: I’ve been there.
Jake: [laughs] I’m not even going to go there.
Bill: Anyway.
Jake: All right. Where do we want to start today? Let’s get into it.
Bill: I don’t know.
Tobias: Mine’s too depressing. Leave it until the end. Let’s start– [crosstalk]
Bill: I’ll do Qurate and then whatever.
Tobias: Yeah. Let’s do Qurate.
Jake: Okay.
Tobias: Bill, what’s the original thesis that just folks who are [crosstalk]
$QRATE vs $ZM Update
Bill: Well, at the end of the day, when Mike and I bought it, you had a $4 billion company that I pitched as being able to sustainably do $500 to $750 million in free cash. People were locked inside, it was a pro forma 2.5 billion-dollar valuation roughly, we had six more months of lockdowns, and I thought that the probability of losing much was pretty low, despite the leverage.
Jake: About corporate actions, were those in play at that point yet?
Bill: Yeah, it was after the corporate announcement. Now, they came out last quarter and what did they say? Anyone that’s listened to this thing knows the thesis, but fundamentally you have these super fans and then you fill your funnel with the rest of the sales. Third quarter, they say revenue decreased 7%. They come on the conference call, they said, “Okay, well, yes, revenue decreased but a lot of that has to do with why or when we ship the items.” We should have some catchup in the back or in the beginning Q4. Don’t worry, yet. Okay, fine.
Now, they say, revenue down 8% to 9%, QXH down 6.5 to 7.5. I guess you could argue that that’s within the realm of possibility. I know a couple people have had it modeled that way. They said though, “Revenue performance of QXH deteriorated throughout the fourth quarter deviating from initial trends indicated on our third quarter earnings conference call. We are not pleased with the results and are actively taking steps to improve our long-term performance.”
To me, this one really hurts more than being wrong on something generally, because I truly love this business. I think it serves a really important function in a lot of women’s lives. I think it provides comfort. [crosstalk] It’s really, really like it. I like the people at liberty that are involved. There’s a ton of stuff that I like about it. Anyway, long story short, we talk about playing with leverage.
I don’t fuck around with leverage for real. If the trends are deviating substantially, and you have a new CEO that has limited retail experience, and you just lost the head of QXH, who in my opinion had a great run over the last years and yeah, Mike George is still in the building, but he’s an advisor. He’s not the CEO. I had been moving funds out of Qurate into Charter because I thought that that was a better risk/reward anyway.
I had a little bit left on the table when the punch came the day that I guess you could argue we all capitulated. I think some people are writing me and they’re saying, in my model, it’s still cheap. To you guys, I say, I really hope that you make a lot of money. I really hope that the business is great and I have no problem buying it higher once they prove that there’s a true digital pivot here. But I have some concerns over whether or not this ship could be righted.
In theory, we’re now down to a sales level that’s below 2019 levels. Look at retail sales since 2019. It’s not below 2019 levels. EBITDA down 20% this quarter, inflations got something to do with that, the Fire’s got something to do with it. I get it. Look whether or not, however I feel about the people involved in that business, go read Hempton’s post on when you should double down and when you shouldn’t. In my opinion, if I held and I continued to hold here, that’s one of these hopium, but it’s still too cheap theses, and I’ve seen people get smoked on those over, and over, and over again. I’m not going to hold the zero because I think it’s too cheap.
Jake: How much capital did you get back before having to punch out?
Bill: A lot but where I messed up my trade is I really thought I was right in Q2 and I put more in at 11 bucks. Net of taxes and net of everything I probably had a slight loss. I haven’t fully calculated it but the last I looked I’d imagine the punch that I took the other day wiped out the gains. But I will defend some value investing by saying that’s what you pay a low price for. I’m pissed I didn’t sell it higher, but I thought I was right, and I still may be but the original thesis was not.
Jake: Maybe it’s the friends we make along the way. I’m kidding.
Bill: Well, I think some of it is. I think some of it is and I’ve had people write me and they’re like, “It’s still too cheap.” I just think that with everything that’s going on in media– If I wanted to make that argument, I’d point to minutes watched going up. Why aren’t they converting it into sales? I’ve had questions.
Every question that I’ve asked in investor days has been, “What are we doing to invest in the business?” I’ve constantly asked, “What are we doing to improve shipping times?” I’ve asked, “Why the QR code opens to the homepage and not to the item?” I think they have a problem converting the last 30% of sales. If that’s the case, I don’t want to sit around with the debt there. If they can change it, and they can show me that they can convert social media leads to actual economic value, then I’ll buy it higher than here. But the risk/reward doesn’t make sense to me here.
Tobias: Question from the floor, mate. What do you make of John Malone saying Qurate was the most undervalued Liberty complex company at the Investors conference a few months back?
Bill: I don’t know. You tell me. I don’t think Malone knows this any better than I do. I know that that sounds arrogant but I don’t.
Tobias: How did you do relative to Zoom?
Bill: So far, really well. I’ve been trying to figure out how to lay a little bet on SaaS. I don’t know if it’s picking some, I don’t know if it’s a shotgun approach but some of that stuff’s too beat up to me. I think you could argue Zoom’s one of those.
Jake: Well, that does remind me of the– did you tweet out Toby about Einhorn saying just because it’s down 50%, it doesn’t make it deep value.
Tobias: “Two times a silly price is still a silly price. Half a silly price doesn’t mean it is deep value.”
Jake: There you go.
Bill: Yeah. I think that’s one way to look at the world. I think the other way to look at the world is–
Jake: Buy the fucking dip.
Bill: No, it’s not that dude. You’re paying 10 times revenues for a company that’s growing 20% and generates healthy free cash flow. I think if you anchor to the Sun Microsystems guy saying that thing about sales. I think you’re making a massive mistake. Maybe I’m wrong, that’s fine. But I think a lot of these SaaS businesses are going to grow and I think if you have a really long– Zoom, maybe not. I don’t care. You don’t like Zoom? Fine. You don’t like Peloton? Fine. There’s something out there right now that is way too beat up. I know it. I would argue probably– [crosstalk]
Tobias: That’s a [crosstalk] something.
Bill: Well, I don’t know [crosstalk].
Tobias: I’m with you.
Bill: I don’t know what it is. I’m just saying and it looks optically expensive. Mario Cibelli said a while ago, “That great growth company that you’ve always wanted to buy, you’re going to pass on this time.” I think he’s right. I wish I knew which one because part of the thing that hurts about what’s going on with Qurate is that was a lot of opportunity cost. I could have been studying a lot of other stuff.
Jake: Yeah. With all the corporate actions and different things happening, there was probably a fair amount of brain damage involved for that one, right? Just on sorting out all the moving pieces.
Bill: Yeah. I think there still could be. There is a rebuttable presumption that it’s an ice cube. I think with that much debt, you got to respect that.
Tobias: The nice thing about the Qurate bet when you originally put it on, it was basically too much capital tied up and not paying anything for the business. It got a pathway to releasing the capital and then you don’t know what’s going to happen with the business, but it’s a free hit. So, that’s a good bet to put on. You just update that as you go along. Facts have changed, punch out. Same thing applies to those SaaS businesses. I don’t know necessarily that I want to be taking a swing at them when you’ve got to do all of these.
Calculations about where the planets are going to be in five years’ time, I just think that’s too hard. For a lot of these things, the best time to buy this stuff is when it’s all– drain the water out of the barrel, they’re all flopping around the bottom, you’re not paying much for the business. Then you’ve got all that upside optionality. I don’t know that those have got here yet. Ten times sales, it’s not a great metric because we don’t know how much of it’s falling down at the bottom. So, it’s irrelevant metric.
To Scott McNealy’s point, when he said that, fair enough, he was building hardware. All of this stuff is a long way from hardware, it’s got much fatter margins. But it’s still got to prove it at some stage, right? I get the idea, you can see that they’ve got fat gross margins.
They’re not yet covering some of their fixed costs, and they’re still spending more on customer acquisition costs, and they’ll ultimately have to spend because they’re in a competitive world, and they’ve got to this point in the future where they’re the only one and they’re going to win. I still think that’s a hard bet to make. I think that they’re just easier bets around. If you’re an expert in that stuff and you can figure it out, then it’s been a great five years, I think that these cycles come and go, and the cycle has shifted away a little bit, because they’ve got so expensive.
To Einhorn’s point, I think he’s right. I don’t know where– the revenue, that’s not the great metric for these things. That’s the way we’re looking at them because we don’t have enough of an idea about what falls into the bottom. But you don’t have to be able to do the Fosbury flop over these six-foot posts. As Buffett says, “You just walk around looking for the 1-foot ones you get to stepover.” That’s my approach.
Buffett On Getting Call Options
Jake: Interestingly enough, I found a quote from 1973 Forbes article from Buffett that I’d for some reason never come across, and he’s talking about Polaroid, and how beat up it was at the time, and he said you basically get a call option on anything that Dr. Edwin Land was going to come out with. He recognized getting free optionality 40 years before all of us started thinking it was a great idea.
The Time To Go After SaaS Businesses Is When They’re Really Cringy
Tobias: I think the time to go after SaaS businesses is when it’s really cringy. I remember 2002 to 2007, if you were at tech.com, it was super cringy to be in there and likewise the commodities got really cringy for a while there, you’re just uncool, because– What that creates is that, that terrible sentiment creates those opportunities where you’re basically paying balance sheet cash, and you’re getting a swing at the business. If you buy those kinds of businesses, that’s how you get the gigantic runs out of things. It’s all buying them when the sentiment is trash, but the business can survive or the company can survive.
Jake: Biotech had that at one point. There’s a washout in biotech and you basically got a bunch of pipelines for free.
Tobias: Tech’s being smashed, but people still believe they’re not broken. When people don’t want to be anywhere near, and just don’t want talk about it, refuse to accept that they were ever in it, completely eliminate it from their memory, and anybody who brings up any kind of tech stock just gets laughed out of the room, that’s when you want to go and load up on that stuff.
Bill: Yeah, maybe.
Jake: Every never sell tweets deleted.
Tobias: [laughs]
Bill: Yeah, I don’t agree but that’s fine.
Jake: [laughs]
Bill: I don’t.
Jake: That’s fine.
Tobias: JT, you want to do–?
—
Li Lu’s Amazing Journey
Jake: Yeah. This segment came from a couple of books I read last week that I didn’t really ever imagine fitting together when they ended up in my book docket, but somehow, they did. The first one is called Moving the Mountain by Li Lu. Actually, this book’s really hard to get in the US. So, shoutout to my boy, George in the UK, who bought me a copy and sent it to me because it’s apparently easier to get there.
Tobias: You can’t get it on the Kindle?
Jake: I’m not sure. I don’t think so. I could be wrong on that.
Tobias: I’m listening. I’m just looking something on the Kindle.
Jake: Yeah, go ahead and look. This book is written by Li Lu, who everyone knows at this point as Himalaya Capital founder and investor, Charlie Munger, outside capital, only person who runs any pf Charlie’s money outside. It was written when he was 24 years old, the year after the Tiananmen Square event. A little bit of background on Li Lu, which is absolutely fascinating. His life story is– This is what he’s telling for a lot of it. He’s born in 1966 in Tangshan during the Cultural Revolution that was taking place. He was basically an orphan because his parents were intellectuals, and they were sent away to reeducation camps, and de-radicalized if you will. He grew up bouncing around orphanages, and different families within Tangshan, and he tells this story that’s, I guess, kind of a Chinese proverb, and this is where moving the mountain comes from.
There’s this old farmer who has to go all the way around this big mountain to get to his farm to till and earn his keep, basically. Over time, he’s moving the rocks from the mountain little bit every single day and this rich guy comes up, and sees him, “What are you doing, you old fool?” “I’m moving this mountain because it’s in the way of my farm.” “You’re never going to move that mountain, it’s huge. You’re taking nothing away from it basically.” He says, “Well, yeah, I won’t but you see my son over there who’s also moving a couple rocks every single day? Well, he’s going to move it and he’ll have sons someday who are moving it, and eventually my family will move this mountain.” This is how he frames his interactions with the Communist Party at that point in his life.
When he was 10 years old, the Tangshan earthquake happened and he’s obviously right in the middle of it, and it was one of the most deadly earthquakes that’s ever hit. Several people in his adopted family were killed, and he ends up– When he’s 19, he goes to Nanjing University, and in 1989 at 23, he goes to Beijing to be part of the student protests that were taking place against the Communist Party at that point. It was actually a month-long demonstration and he becomes basically voted in as one of the leaders of the student revolution.
The students all, many of them were doing a hunger strike similar to what Gandhi did where it’s nonviolent protesting. It’s peaceful and respectful. But you know what they were actually demonstrating against was inflation and government corruption. I think about our 8% CPI print, I think about our Congress trading scandals that have been happening, I think about little bit of our distrust. But 1 million people ended up turning up at the peak in Tiananmen Square, which is, It’s a very big place. I was there in 2016. It’s this huge open-air Square but to imagine a million people there is pretty astounding and you can see some of the pictures if you go online.
Tobias: Was it a million or 10 million?
Jake: There are different reports, but a million seems to be maybe the most realistic number. I don’t know.
Tobias: Ten sounds like a lot. I think when we talked about previously, you said 10, but [crosstalk]
Jake: I’ve seen different reports. What’s interesting is that the CCP at the time tried to actually sabotage the student protests, obviously. They’re trying to suppress it. At one point, the crowd chased off these whoever they were plainclothes government officials, and they had this van, and it was full of weapons. Some of the students got them, looked at them, and all the weapons were all dummy, all the firing pins were taking out of the machine guns. They were trying to plant– If all the students grabbed them and ran out of the Square, and now all of a sudden, we’ve got this out-of-control situation that we have to really take care of and do a lot of excessive force to take care of. There were spies running through there, they cut the power, they tried to suppress the media that was reporting on it.
This goes back to thinking about last week, our heavy gravity conversations, and analogies, and boy, like if there’s that much gravity from a government in that area, it almost sucks the information back in almost a black hole like it can’t escape. Eventually, The People’s Daily, which is the version, it’s the mouthpiece of the government, but it’s where all the news comes from. They had declared that the students’ protests were– It was necessary for the government to take a clear-cut stand against these disturbances because they were anti-party and antigovernment. The students really took a lot of offense to that because they felt that they were protesting within the bounds of what was promised to them in the Chinese equivalent of the Constitution. They wanted the party to say like, “Listen, we’re being patriots here. We’re standing up for to tell our government that we don’t like things about it.”
Anyway, eventually, the government declares martial law, and 300,000 troops show up, and tanks show up, and they clear the Square and, in the process, they start shooting, and running people over, and basically, through martial– Perhaps, thousands of people were killed. It’s not clear exactly what the number is. At least hundreds and very obviously thousands of people injured. Li Lu escapes to the US because he was placed on the most wanted list in China at that point. So, he flees. Incredible life story, right? He’s 23 years old and all of this stuff has already happened to him. From there, he’s gone on to become I think, effectively a billionaire at this point and led a pretty amazing life.
—
Misinformation And Why We Should Stop Reading The ‘News’
Jake: Second book I read, which is called The Gray Lady Winked and this is by Ashley Rindsberg. This is basically, all the catalogue of a bunch of The New York Times articles and reports that have been either misreporting distortions or even just fabrications of reality, and how they actually have changed points in history. In the 1920s and 1930s, The New York Times had this German correspondent, who was like a celebrity correspondent. He was basically a pro-Hitler and pro-Nazis. Reporting on the Olympics about how amazing it was, and not talking about how they didn’t let Jewish athletes participate, [laughs] all kinds of stuff. It was basically he was reporting straight from the Gobbles press releases effectively.
Then they ignored 7 million-ish people in Russia, who were starved to death by Stalin. They knew it was happening but they reported about how amazing Russia’s transformation had been. Again, reporting basically facts from the Russian government straight to as New York Times articles had been researched. The New York Times effectively helped create Fidel Castro in Cuba to the point they had all these glowing vignettes of him, biographies about how he’s– He was so popular that they didn’t even need to run a democratic election. There’s no point of doing an election. He’s so popular. Then you have– [crosstalk]
Tobias: Saddam Hussein used to get 99.9% of the vote, too.
Jake: Amazing. How did he do that? He was so popular. Then, things in Vietnam that happened, they effectively ignored the Holocaust as it was happening, even though, they knew about it. It’s just one thing after another, they underreported about what they called the atomic plague, which is basically all the people dying after the bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. Just all these different things were, and they really radically altered the way, like the US average person and around the world too. Because the New York Times was the world’s number one newspaper, and they drove the narrative for a lot of things, and they really altered history in a lot of ways.
Of course, more recent history for us to remember, like, Jason Blair, who was just totally making up stories, and then weapons of mass destruction in the early 2000s, where they were basically saying they found them, but ended up not– How much money we spent on wars since then, it’s just one thing after another. It gets to today now a little bit more and recently, there’s been a lot of talk about misinformation. We have Joe Rogan’s podcast in the news right now, we have truckers in Canada who are being– There’s a lot of maybe questions about how come other media in the US isn’t covering this at all? If you weren’t looking in other places, you might not have even heard about it. So, I don’t know. It’s very interesting to me.
We can get into the investment context of this where I think we’ve all seen it, where I know I personally have. I’ve been at an annual shareholders meeting, and then read reports about it later where it does not match at all the tone or anything that I witnessed with my own eyes relative to– If you’re just reading reports and assuming that they’re true, boy, there’s just a lot of room. This has always been the case. Misinformation has always been a thing as we said at the beginning. I guess maybe they just take everything with a healthy dose of skepticism no matter what.
Tobias: You forgot to mention the Time Magazine had Hitler on the cover as Man of the Year and whatever vintage that was 36 or something like that.
Jake: Ouch.
Tobias: Good call there. Yeah. Then Michael Crichton’s great line about, “You turn to open the newspaper up or something that you know about, and they’ve just got the causation just inside out, and then you turn a page, and you just accept the face value.”
Jake: Yes. Right. The Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia.
Tobias: Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia, yeah.
Jake: Yeah.
Tobias: Great line. Yeah, it’s one of the reasons I just stopped reading news a long time ago. I read that 2006 Taleb book. I always get confused. Not The Black Swan one, Fooled by Randomness one. Yeah, somebody mentioned that just then I think Fooled by Randomness, there we go. Just that same thing where Taleb said, you can open up the paper from a year ago, and you look at it, and it’s screaming at you, and none of it was even that important. Even it’s wrong and it’s not that important. I think that’s probably a pretty good approach. That’s why I tried to be a little bit more data driven and ignore a lot of the narrative about that stuff. It’s not helpful for the most part.
Jake: One of the things I’ve had a hard time squaring is Buffett and Munger read seven newspapers a day or something like that. How do they keep themselves from being misinformed? Is it a triangulation issue? How did they do that?
Tobias: There are people who are just hyperrational and they just don’t get particularly persuaded one way or the other for anything that they read. But if you have any of that, which most of us aren’t that way, most of us are more emotional than that. You just need to control a little bit better, I think.
Bill: Yeah. I suspect that they actually call who matters when they find something that’s interesting.
Jake: So, you think they dig deeper on everything that they would make a meaningful data point?
Bill: Yeah, I think they just look at it and they’re like, “Garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage.” Or, I’ll call this senator and then they call them. I think that’s how it works. If you study Buffett’s relationship with Kay Graham, he got access to a ton of people. Then as you get wealthier and more powerful, I think you get more access, and Munger’s clearly connected in the law realm. I think that’s what they do. That’s what I do. I’d get a crumb and then I’d call– If I’ve learned anything from this podcast stuff, it’s talk to people.
I went through it on OppFi and it sucks to be down on that stock but whatever. The CEO comes out and everybody is like, “Oh, the stocks down, CEO is fired. Oh, this is a fucking dumpster fire.” Okay. Well, I actually got on the phone with the guy. I’m pretty comfortable with the situation. I think there’s a way to invest and then I think there’s a way to get caught up in narratives. I try to find to the extent I can people that know what the hell is going on to actually ask.
If It Bleeds It Leads!
Tobias: What are the problems with the media as it is, is that it’s a full profit business and people stop to look at car crashes? They get the most attention-grabbing headline, if it bleeds, it leads. Then they’ve got to keep that story alive for as many days as possible. They’re just saying the same thing but it’s a slightly different twist on it. Here’s what somebody else says about that, here are consequences of it, and so on and so on. I think that’s one of big problems– [crosstalk]
Bill: Dude, I wouldn’t be shocked that Buffett reads something and gets private investigators to go investigate that stuff on his behalf. I think they’re looking for stuff that is like, “Why is this here right now?” Then, I think they dig into, “Why it’s here right now?” I don’t think they read the news like normal people read the news. I think the news is to half mind control the normal people.
Tobias: At least, half. Yeah.
Jake: What about the other half? [laughs]
Tobias: That’s selling the stuff.
Bill: Yeah, more or less.
Jake: What can us, mere peasants do then?
Bill: Index.
Tobias: [laughs]
Jake: Fair enough. Well, actually, you guys said the same answer. Just slightly different.
Tobias: It’s amazing when– it comes on the Twitter on the sidebar, sometimes, some of that news and I’m as affected by it as anybody else, then I walk outside, “What [unintelligible [00:33:37].” [laughs] It’s not that bad.
Bill: Yeah.
Tobias: [crosstalk].
Bill: I don’t know. I got two more years and then if I’m no good at this, I really am going to index and I’m just done.
Tobias: There’s a lot of steps between pure discretion and pure index you could, for example.
Bill: I’m good, man. People won’t hear from me again and I’ll be outside. I’m in Florida. We got masks off, shirts off, we’re ready to go although it’s a little cold now. It’s 60. But I’m okay. If it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out, I’m not going to chase it.
—
Buffett’s Network
Tobias: But I have an approach that’s basically, I don’t want to index it, I don’t want to market cap weight all the stuff that I own because I think that that’s systematically a mistake. You could just– [crosstalk]
Bill: Oh, Buffett has shunned the idea of using insider info. Get the fuck out of here. That dude does more research on people. It may not be insider info. There’s no way that Buffett doesn’t know more about stuff than the people that he’s buying it from and he’s talking to everybody.
Tobias: MNP– [crosstalk]
Bill: Things people don’t talk about. His dad was a congressman. The notion that Buffett has not curated an insanely good network every chance that he got, he’s asinine, asinine.
Tobias: I still think he’s also that personality type that it doesn’t really matter what someone says. He’s still going to go and do his own thing. Make his own decision.
Bill: What am I on about? What does this guy mean? I’m not on about anything. What’s that mean in Australian?
Jake: [laughs]
Tobias: What you’re talking about? What you’re talking about?
Jake: [laughs]
Bill: I think he talked to people, I think he triangulated why people were selling, I think he knew the other side of the trade, I think he knew GEICO, if he’s not into insider information, he doesn’t drive down to the corporate facility and interview the guy for six hours. Come the fuck on.
Jake: Lorimer Davidson.
Bill: We think this– [crosstalk]
Tobias: Wasn’t he the janitor [crosstalk]
Bill: It’s insane to me to think he didn’t look at stuff like that and tried to talk to people.
Jake: Yeah, he’s got [unintelligible [00:35:52] for sure.
Bill: Oh.
Tobias: All right, dudes.
Jake: All right. Let’s move on.
Tobias: Ah, hang on. I’ve managed to close it down because I was–
Jake: Because you’re going on about something?
Tobias: I was on about something else. I was trying to find Li Lu’s– Li Lu, there’s no Kindle and they’re trading at 99 or 100 bucks.
Hungry Jacks
Bill: I saw you let you smile at that comment. What do you think about it? Hungry Jack’s in Australia, what do you think about it?
Tobias: Hungry Jack’s Burger King. There’s this boy, who owned a whole lot of cattle farms, and he thought McDonald’s is doing well, I’ll get a competitor to McDonald’s where I can sell my beef cattle. I don’t know whether he didn’t like the name Burger King or somebody else that already registered the name, Burger King. He called it Hungry Jack’s. So, Burger King in Australia is Hungry Jack’s. Maybe they’ve changed it since I left, I don’t know. But for all of my childhood, it was Hungry Jack’s. I don’t eat that stuff. I didn’t eat that stuff when I was there.
Bill: That’s because you’re one step away. You know this beautiful Chad picture that’s all over. You’re going to be that guy soon.
—
Tobias’ Early Life
Tobias: What happened was, I grew up in a little country town. But there was just nothing out there. There was a Dirty Chook. We got Kentucky Fried Chicken. That was the only thing. There were no stoplights. The only reason you’re coming to my town is because you’re going through somewhere else. The main street was literally the highway, and so you drove in, and this is in kilometers an hour. I could hear the conversion but you went from 75 miles an hour, and then you had to slow down to 35 miles an hour for about three miles, and then you accelerated back up again. That was how people visited the town. So, there were no stoplights. You just slow it down a little bit there.
Bill: How did parents [crosstalk] get there?
Tobias: Ah. It’s a really long boring story. I’ll say it another time. [laughs]
Bill: Were they walking across Australia and they were like, “Fuck it. That’s the last step. I got no more steps in me”?
Tobias: No, I meant a physician and they have this thing called the Flying Doctors. If something happens to you in a rural and remote region and there’s no doctor there, they fly in some doctors in these tiny little twin-prop planes. They flew a guy out and they stopped there. They had to do a burr hole in his skull as they were flying back to the city. [laughs] So, that was good. I guess, we grew up in this little country town. But [unintelligible [00:38:32] doctor because you get to do everything. He was delivering babies and that’s– [crosstalk]
Jake: Yeah, veterinarian too.
Tobias: Yeah. Basically, using horse dewormer on humans. I don’t know. [laughs] I made that up.
Bill: Horse dewormer, we are definitely getting demonetized today.
Tobias: I didn’t use the-
Jake: Nazis, we had–
Tobias: -name of it. I didn’t see that coming.
Jake: Yeah. [laughs]
—
Value’s Best 50 Days
Tobias: Yeah, this is going to be a total letdown now. But Wall Street Journal says, “Value investing is back.” Couple of great quotes in here from Cliff Asness. I just want to read these and then I got a little point. The guy was making the point that, as we all have seen interest rates run up a little bit, inflation runs up a little bit, value investing starts looking a little bit better, and the growthy stuff gets kicked around until they ask Cliff what he thought about that, and he said, “You can’t find behavioral magic on a spreadsheet.” He’s just making the point that nobody knows what turns around. Then there was– [crosstalk]
Jake: Yeah, if it was a rebirth or a death spasm? [laughs]
Tobias: That’s right. I think he said that on Twitter.
Jake: Yeah.
Tobias: I think he said on Twitter. He was like–
Jake: Let’s go with rebirth. [laughs]
Tobias: Yeah, why not? La petite mort as they sometimes say in France. That’s not a death spasm. The most interesting thing. I just tweeted this out because I thought it was an interesting chat. Everybody’s trying to find the relationship, why is it that values suck so bad, why is that values doing a little bit better now?
The one thing that made a big difference was, the 30-year Treasury has sort of bottomed in the recession in March 2020, and it’s run up pretty consistently since then. It’s amazing how much it looks like the market neutral value spread. It’s been the thing that’s driven the run. It’s a funny fit. I tweeted it out to some like– I’m always shocked by these things. I don’t want to be macro.
I feel bad that the little clip that I tweeted out this morning was a Bill saying. You are talking about, I forget now, but then I went straight into CAPE, because I think in the context of what we were talking about that was appropriate, but it did sound a little bit jarring when I listened to that thing. I don’t know, if it’s value sucks so bad for so long. You’re looking for those external reasons why the thing that you’re doing is not working. So, you start grasping at straws like inflation, and interest rates, and the Fed which is basically saying the same thing.
Jake: Grassy knoll. [laughs]
—
Interest Rate Betting
Tobias: The shooter on the grassy knoll. Cliff didn’t actually ever produce this little thing. But when I had him on the podcast, we’re talking about that his colleagues had just put out this paper where they looked at every single permutation of interest rates that they could find. The absolute level of interest rates, the change in interest rates, the slope in the curve, all these things. Nothing fit the performance. But still, it’s convenient, that story keeps coming back and I think I said to him at the time, it’s a shame because it makes intuitive sense.
Even though, it doesn’t really predict it, it’s an intuitive idea that as rates go up, you get that movement in the different durations of growth versus value. I shouldn’t say this guy. The author of this, James Mackintosh, he comes to the same conclusion. He says that– [crosstalk]
Bill: Has he knocked this guy out, well? Whatever.
Tobias: Say that again.
Bill: Nothing. I’m not saying anything. In theory, the longer dated cash flows are longer duration assets, right?
Jake: It’s an interesting thought experiment how much all of us have been making rates bet one way or the other, maybe unintentionally, sometimes?
Tobias: That’s my concern.
Bill: Yeah. I think it’s a reasonable concern. I also think that over the long term when you overlay earnings growth in stock performance that tends to be pretty correlated. If I was some SaaS investor right now, if I was really confident that these companies are going to grow 30%, they’re doubling every three years, every two years, every two and a half years? You should outrun rates. It means you are right. You got to be right. But you can’t be not right in cheap stuff. You got to be right, no matter what you’re doing, I think.
—
No Easy Bets ATM
Tobias: There are no easy bets at the moment, because the stuff that grows fast has a very, very high multiple attached to it. You can do any kind of analysis where you think about, any fade in the rate of growth, and then you say that or fade in the rate of growth failing a set of return on invested capital most things. As you reduce the rate at which something earns on its capital or it grows, there should be a commensurate reduction in the multiple applied to it. If you do that, it’s frightening how quickly these things start looking very, very expensive. They really have to retain those supernormal rates of growth and returns in order to retain those supernormal multiples. Then on top of that, you’ve got to assume that rates stay where they are. Good luck.
Jake: It’s interesting. They talk about in 1997 and 1998 AGM at Berkshire. Because the people are already expressing, if rates move up, isn’t everything expensive? This was in 1998, when I don’t know, rates were five or six or something. But people had anchored from 15 in 1982 at that point. We forget how relative some of this stuff feels. The other thing that was happening there was profit margins return on equity for American businesses was way higher than normal. Buffett said, “If returns on equity stay high and rates stay low, things are pretty cheap right now…” But I wouldn’t really bet that way. It’s almost the exact same conversation all over again today, I feel like.
Tobias: It sucks because I don’t want to be a macro guy. I don’t want to be talking about this stuff all the time. I don’t want to really talk about what’s in the portfolio too much either.
Jake: There’s nothing left then. [laughs]
Could Spreads Widen Further?
Tobias: Yeah. Well, that’s in this situation. I think that what we have been saying for a little while. I’ve been as shocked as anybody else that has been slowly coming through, but it does seem to me that we’re screaming– When I launched everything in 2019, I could see how wide those spreads were. I got to see that we’re going to go on into historical widths.
Jake: It’s about to blow out from there?
Tobias: Yeah. There’s always a new record coming that’s entirely possible that we’re now like I think September 2020 was as wide as that spread got and then it ran through to April or May, and then it closed really rapidly. I was shocked at how fast it was closing there. Then something happened in about April or May and it just backed off a little bit. Now, the spread is as wide as it was at any point through this whole process, which is shocking, even though it’s– [crosstalk]
Jake: Right now, it is?
Tobias: No, it’s peaked up a little bit off the bottom.
Jake: Okay.
Tobias: But like I said, this is what I was referring to earlier and you got to get the microscope out to see it.
Jake: Oh, yeah.
Tobias: A little tick back up off the bottom, see it closing. I think it’s even moved yet. Nothing’s really even happened. I think that initially what I was saying is a lot of the spread was driven by overvaluation growth. A lot of that has collapsed but when you look at how much it has moved relative to how much it’s probably going to move, it’s really not even started yet, which is shocking given how beaten up everything is.
—
Jake: It was pretty wild was somebody tagged us to go replay and rewatch our early March 2020, Value: After Hours.
Tobias: What are we talking about, then?
Jake: Well, shockingly enough, we didn’t say that many stupid things. In fact, I feel we were early talking about a not so– Well, some supply chain issues, but a shrinking pie being the cause for possible inflation.
Tobias: A shrinking supply?
Jake: Yeah.
Tobias: Yeah.
Jake: Shrinking pie of goods and services and more claim tickets chasing those. That was not the dumbest thing. The only real shocker was how much younger we looked in two years.
Tobias: It’s been a rough two years.
Jake: Two years, we’ve all aged a lot. It was a little sad to see. [laughs]
Tobias: Been inside a lot.
Bill: Yeah.
Tobias: Not getting enough sunshine.
Jake: Stress.
Bill: I’m going to look at me from December and if I don’t look any better, I’m going to drink more.
[laughter]Tobias: Did you do a dry January?
Bill: I didn’t do a dry January per se.
Jake: [laughs]
Bill: I was California sober for most of it. I made three exceptions, all of which were, well, four actually. The three were all dinners that were nice with my wife and another couple. One of which we had paid and it was a prefix with wine pairings, and my wife was like, “You seriously not going to drink here for some stupid fucking dry January thing.” I was like, “Okay, you win.”
Jake: [laughs]
Bill: The other was actually a wine dinner.
Jake: That would make it a double.
Bill: Then, one was a golf thing with a bunch of guys. So, I had some beers at that. But I’m going to keep this lifestyle, man. I think the habitual drinking is gone for me.
Tobias: It just can’t [crosstalk] old age.
Jake: Big win.
Bill: Yeah, I got my prescription, went on vereheal.com. I’ll be officially legal on Wednesday. Getting a puppy tomorrow, too. So, I got a lot of shit going on, man.
Tobias: What kind of dog?
Jake: Yeah, you better you better start indexing. You got to– [crosstalk] [laughs]
Bill: I know, I know. Golden Retriever.
Jake: Oh, man. That’s a win.
Bill: Yeah, man. Some happiness coming into the kids’ lives.
Tobias: That’d be fun. If you can’t tone it, tan it. There you go. That’s the sentiment.
Jake: Ooh, [laughs] that’s pretty good.
The Long Run Is Really Bloody Long
Tobias: In the short-term sentiment over fundamentals and the long-term fundamentals over sentiment, I couldn’t agree more. The problem is that it turns out that the long run is really bloody long.
Jake: Amen.
Just Index & Talk To Market People
Bill: Yeah. What I’m saying about the indexing thing is, I’m pretty comfortable with the bets I have laid. If these bets don’t work, what am I doing all this for? And yes, I do like it. William Green doesn’t have some active portfolio. I love the market. I love talking to market people. I could just index, and talk to market people, and not deal with all this shit.
Jake: I think Jason Zweig is similar?
Bill: Yeah.
Tobias: You can also 95%– [crosstalk]
Jake: He knows as much as anybody but happy to index.
Bill: Yeah.
Tobias: Put 95% of your assets in the– If you’re going to do it, and then have 5% it’s just you are betting.
Jake: Value ETFs, just different names.
Tobias: You can intellectually– [crosstalk]
Bill: Yeah.
—
Podcasting Is A Tough Medium
Tobias: Someone asked about the one-on-one interviews. Those interviews, they’re just so much work, and I reckon they’re four times the work, and they’re quarters of the viewers. I just show up to these and they seem to do much better than the interview. I’m not in any great hurry to return to those interviews. I guess if there was enough demand for it, which I really don’t think there is. So, that’s basically why I’d much rather just be doing this from– [crosstalk]
Bill: What do you think of the podcast business? As a two-to-three-year podcaster now, what have you experience seen? My general take on it is, it’s a better marketing mechanism than it is business.
Tobias: Yeah, I have never really used it as a business.
Jake: I would say our lack of revenue would indicate that that is very true. [laughs]
Bill: Yeah, well, I’ve been thinking about this.
Tobias: The other thing is the numbers are way down from– I forget when numbers peaked but the numbers are half where they were in, I think it might have been, it’s a year, it’s maybe a year or more. The numbers are about half where they were a year or more ago.
Jake: Not for us, right? My ego couldn’t take that. [laughs]
Tobias: Value: After Hours is probably– Yeah, I have to tease that out individually, but definitely the interview style, possibly because that builds a longer form, one is a better version of the one hour one.
Bill: That’s not why.
Tobias: Well, it’s possible. Then, there’s exponentially larger amount of competition out there. I don’t know. I much prefer this format to those individuals.
Bill: I’ve just been thinking about it because on Spotify– I’ve just been thinking about that asset a lot. Streaming ad insertion I think is a large part. I don’t know, man. You get $20 to $30 CPMs or per thousand listens, and then you split it 50-50, and it’s how many podcasts are actually doing big enough numbers. It’s just not much money.
Tobias: There’s a right tail to it.
Jake: Yeah, it’s a powerful one.
Bill: Yeah. No doubt. I just wonder how many people are doing a podcast for hundred listeners and what they’re doing with it.
Jake: Possibly the majority.
Bill: Yeah, that’s crazy to me. What are you doing with your time, folks? Unless you like it, being super small or whatever, but I don’t know. I’d rather be at the beach.
Tobias: There’s other model, so, you could subscription revenue rather than advertising.
Bill: Yeah.
Tobias: The conferences, where people will pay for conferences where there are speakers who are professional investors or you can get access to the CEO of the company. So, if your podcast is replicating that in some way, you probably could charge a subscription fee for those premium features or you let them get into a room where they can ask the questions when they’re there.
Bill: Yeah, that’s real visions model from what I understand. But I don’t know what I’m talking about. Diarrhea of the mouth, it gets me in trouble, sometimes.
Tobias: You need a lot of listeners. Ah, it gets us all in trouble. Sell some merch? Yeah, you can sell merch.
Bill: We had that merch store. I don’t even know what it is now. I didn’t push it much. [crosstalk] We could find that.
Jake: We need t-shirts for Berkshire. That way we have something to identify our every– [crosstalk]
Tobias: I was going to wear my [crosstalk]–
Bill: Are you going to set up a booth?
Tobias: [laughs]
Jake: No, but just for fun.
—
ETF’s For Everything
Tobias: Yeah, I think that in terms of indexing, you don’t have to go all the way to market cap weighted index. I think that there is an index for just about– Evidently there are more indexes and there are stocks at the moment. So, you can definitely find the index that you’re looking for. You can find the ETF that you’re looking for.
Jake: How’s that possible? By the way, I’ve heard that stat before. It [crosstalk] boggles my mind.
Tobias: Because to list the company is an expensive time-consuming process and to create an index–
Jake: [crosstalk] can start index. [laughs]
Tobias: You can create an index for virtually nothing and start tracking stuff and then you try to market that index to someone who will turn that into an ETF. That’s quite common.
—
Tobias: We should sell our blue quarter zips. Yeah. I wish I could find a good one.
Bill: Yeah. I liked the VAH coin.
Tobias: The VAH coin. [laughs] What would you buy with it?
Bill: Yeah, that would be dope.
Tobias: I don’t know. Let that get cracked down on a little bit. Twitter Space is pretty fun. I’ve jumped on a few Twitter Spaces not as a speaker, just as listener. They’ve been pretty good. [laughs]
Kettlebell Crochet
Bill: I was thinking about you. I think I see what you are laughing at. I was thinking about kettlebells.
Tobias: Oh, kettlebells crochet [crosstalk] [laughs].
Bill: Yeah, that’s right.
Tobias: It is easy [crosstalk] shipping.
Bill: Oh, poor Peloton.
Tobias: I can’t ship the kettlebells through post. Yeah, Peloton got savaged.
Tobias: Yeah, I think that there are people who are going to be able to make money in those podcast businesses, but I think that you need to be like a GaryVee type to drive it really hard or like Rogan, when he just started out and it was just four monkeys just hitting the computer and talking about nonsense, and it grew organically over– [crosstalk]
Jake: We were only three of us. [laughs]
Tobias: Over 10 years.
Jake: One monkey short.
Tobias: I love chatting to you, guys. If it wasn’t being broadcast, I’d be doing it probably a little bit more honest– The more time we do it, the more honest we get, I think.
Jake: Yeah.
Tobias: That’s probably why it’s chopped in half, why the numbers are down so much.
Bill: Yeah, but then I get reminded not to be bad on.
Jake: Yeah.
Bill: Yeah. No, I agree. I don’t know. It’s weird. It’s a weird world to me where people are just sitting there talking to no one. But there’s a lot of it. [crosstalk]
Tobias: If you are having fun at– [crosstalk]
Bill: Yeah, no doubt.
Tobias: Even if you’ve only got hundred listeners, it’s hard to get hundred people to come to an event and listen to you talk. If you’re getting hundred listeners when you do it, that’s not too bad.
Bill: It’s the juice versus the squeeze thing. That’s the only thing that I find interesting.
Tobias: If you’ve got nothing else going on, when I started Greenbackd, that little blog, I think the first month, I got 225 clicks and [crosstalk] half of them.
Jake: I might have been half of them.
Tobias: [laughs] Yeah. You are the other half. There you go.
Jake: Yeah.
Tobias: I was just doing it because it was fun. I was just doing it because I just wanted some record of what I was doing. I didn’t really care if it got any clicks. I just wanted it to be a record in years to come. So, I could go and get a job. Buying these things didn’t ever get me a job. Yeah, in the States, it got me a firm. So, it worked out okay.
—
Keith McCullough’s Quad 4
Bill: Somebody asked about credit card data. I have no idea. What I do, Hedgeye, I think people have mixed opinions about Keith McCullough. He’s definitely an aggressive personality with his marketing sometimes. But I understand that. I’m intrigued by his framework. Long story short, they think there’s a massively strong probability that we’re going into what he calls quad four in the second quarter, and I don’t think it’s some big– You don’t have to be a genius to figure out why. [crosstalk] Yeah, you think about all the stimulus rolling off, and it’s not good for tech stocks quad four according to him. So, it’ll be interesting to watch.
Pessimism Sells Better
Tobias: The only problem, I’ve been accused of this before. I authentically believe what I’m saying and I’m sure they did, too. But it definitely is the case that the pessimism sells better, attracts more attention than optimism does.
Optimism always looks really dumb when the market cracks. To Buffett’s great credit, and it’s taken me a long time to learn this too, because it’s not naturally my personality. But to be basically optimistic is usually the best position to be in.
Even if it turns out to be true that everything gets cracked, you just can’t trade in and out of it. It’s too hard. You’re better off deciding now what everything looks like at the bottom of the crack and then positioning yourself now.
Then that’s the way you should be running anyway or have a range of outcomes where you’ve got your right tail hedged which is going buying some leaps on the FAANGs, or the SaaS stocks, or whatever, and then hedge your left tail with– [crosstalk] This is not an investment advice, by the way.
Jake: Don’t you feel a little bit Augusty at this point, though, where it is like, “Give me optimism but not yet.” [laughs]
The S&P 5
Tobias: Yeah. One of things that makes me I’m thoughtful like, Bill saying that there’s a fundamental change in the composition of the indices, where we’ve got five of the biggest companies like 25% of the index are exceptionally high return is on invested capital growing very rapidly. Really not much competition. I do think that that’s a good reason why you should probably fade CAPE a little bit here. But I’m just nervous about those– It doesn’t impact anything that I do. I’m trying to buy the best and cheapest stuff around– The cheap is first and then best stuff in that cheap bucket that no matter what happens, it’ll be okay.
When I look at the expected returns absent any multiple fade, it’s hard to get– The S&P 500 looks like it’s got a reasonably good expected return absent multiple fade. If you assume some multiple fade, then it’s ugly. But if you don’t assume multiple fade, it’s doing pretty well.
Whether we can go 10 years forward and still be at peak CAPE, because the five biggest companies in the index are such high quality still at that point. If you fast forward those companies, those $3 trillion companies over 10 years with these assumptions, they’re bloody big companies and there’s not much else out there. It’ll be the S&P 5 by that point.
Jake: Yeah. Just to produce a normal return from those starting points over 10 years, you start talking some very, very large businesses.
ARKK’s Taxi Market Estimate
Tobias: You get numbers like Ark’s estimate for entire taxi market [crosstalk] in trillion.
Jake: That would have been trillion-dollar opportunity.
Tobias: What’s most amazing is last year that was only $6 trillion and it’s gone to $11 trillion year over year. That’s a big hike. The TAM is growing quickly. Ark system of the TAM is growing quickly.
Jake: That’s the trick. You can never saturate when your TAM is growing 50% [laughs]
Bill: If your view of the world is everything that’s going to be self-driving, then you do have a lot of expansion in the taxi market. I don’t know. Whatever. I don’t need to know, I don’t care.
Jake: [laughs]
Tobias: It sounds great.
—
Bill: Somebody asked real quick about the– I don’t want to talk down about people that have small podcasts. It’s not my point. There’s a lot of work that goes into doing a podcast. That’s my point. He said like, “Do you feel the same way about people tweeting?” Tweeting takes no work. Come, do a podcast, then talk to me about work versus tweeting. This podcast may not take too much work, but there’s a lot that goes on after.
Tobias: Once it is setup, it’s easy. getting it set up takes a little bit of effort. Once it’s set up anything, starting anything is just breaks your head and then the moment that it’s set up, it’s pretty easy just to keep it going.
Bill: Yeah. My editing is pain but yeah. I don’t– [crosstalk]
Tobias: Yeah, editing is pain. But I don’t edit this one. This one just goes out raw and uncut.
Bill: And then people get mad at me because I say things I shouldn’t.
Tobias: That’s why we love you, mate. That’s why you are here.
Bill: Has been my whole life imagine living with me and being married?
[laughter]—
Tobias: We’re over time a little bit I like this idea. I don’t know whether it’s going to actually be the case or not, but oil companies, the price of energy– I saw this tweet earlier. I’ve seen this a few times, this idea that it’s not ultimately the Fed, even though the Fed does tend to raise rates and that does tend to collapse the market. But they have to raise rates because the economy is overheating and that’s tends to be oil and energy. The way that energy is running up at the moment, that’s got to be– Does that factor into quad four? Is that one of the inputs?
Bill: Oh, I don’t know. But it’s hard to argue. It’s good for consumer spending. I have my tinfoil hat theory that a high energy prices politicians love because it helps them drive the EV adoption.
Jake: I don’t know, man. food and energy and housing, you push those up and I think you push up guillotine like risk, which is throwing everybody out.
Canadian Truckers Protest
Bill: Yeah. I don’t know. It’ll be interesting to watch. I was talking to Braden Brock today, and he was telling me about what’s going on in Canada and how pissed off the truckers are there. I don’t know, man. Supply chain could really be messed up for longer than– [crosstalk]
Tobias: Well, there’s some talk of American truck is doing it, too.
Bill: Yeah.
Tobias: Then you got the shipping is jacked up Canadian, importing stuff into the States jacked up, then transported on the State’s jacked up. I don’t know what happens then. That’s really nasty.
Tobias: I want to say– [crosstalk]
Bill: [crosstalk] only to think about what we’re actually doing here.
Tobias: All right, dudes. It’s way over time.
Jake: All right.
Bill: Yeah. All right.
Tobias: This is fun everybody.
Jake: Good work, everyone.
Tobias: We’ll see you next week. More conspiracy–
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