RWH033: Lessons From Buffett & Berkshire w/ Chris Bloomstran

Hi there, this is part two of my conversation with Chris Blumestrand, a terrific investor who's the president and chief investment officer of Semperor, Gustus Investment Group. Chris has an excellent long-term record over the last three decades, but he's probably best known as one of the world's leading experts on Berkshire Hathaway. Chris's annual letter to clients has developed a cult following, not least because it includes an amazingly detailed analysis of Berkshire. In his most recent letter, he devoted 59 pages by my count to analyzing Berkshire's many different businesses and valuing the company in four different ways. That attention to detail gives you a sense of how fiercely driven, obsessive and intense Chris's when it comes to analyzing stocks. In this part of our conversation, we talk in some depth about why investors and CEOs should study Berkshire Hathaway and what they can learn from Warren Buffett about things like how to allocate capital more intelligently and how to think rationally about share buybacks and also how to treat shareholders more nobly and honorably and fairly as partners. We also discuss the merits and risks of Buffett's enormous investment in Apple. And Chris explains why he expects Berkshire to outperform the S&P 500 over the next decade. Along the way, we also chat about why most investors shouldn't pick individual stocks for themselves and why they should be extremely careful of the casino side of Wall Street, which is full of smooth talking promoters who are good at spinning stories and making themselves extremely rich, but are not necessarily looking out for the best interests of unsuspecting retail investors. As you'll hear in this very candid conversation, Chris has some intensely personal reasons for caring so deeply about integrity and truthfulness and protecting regular folks from abusive behavior. I hope you enjoyed part two of our conversation. Thanks so much for joining us. You're listening to The Richer. Why isn't Happier Podcast where your host, William Green, interviews the world's greatest investors and explores how to win in markets and life? Berkshire obviously has been an enormous part of your portfolio going back to 2000 when, as you said before, it had halved, and I think you boarded in February 2000, initially at about 43,700 and here we are. 43,707. There were $7.00 as a commission. Yeah. And so, I mean, and this has grown at times to 20 or 30% of your client's portfolio. So it's clearly a very important anchor position and you're best known really publicly for your enormously detailed analyses of Berkshire, which you do each year in your shareholder letter. So I wanted to talk a little bit about Berkshire because it's so associated with you and you're pretty much unrivaled in your understanding of the minutiae of the business. When you were writing about Berkshire in one of your annual reports, you said it's run by the world's most skilled and shareholder-friendly management team and that it embodies how capital should work and it is probably the best business to study if you want to learn how to invest and how to run a company morally and ethically. And I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about Berkshire as a model for others. What other CEOs and investors can learn from Berkshire about things like rational asset allocation and running a company in an ethical way and looking out for shareholders. These very fundamental things that I think so much of the casino side of the investing world forgets about. Well, I think Berkshire should be studied by management's rarely our companies led by great capital allocators. CEO comes out of operations in many cases. CEO comes out of finance in many cases. Berkshire largely compensated with a nominal day salary, but then in most cases some varying degree of bonus, but then largely stock options restricted share units and the hurdles that are put in place to be rewarded with your options. It's not just time-vesting, but their performance elements that a lot of times they're things like revenue growth and they're things like EBITDA and they have nothing to do with any kind of return on asset, return to equity, return on capital. Well from day one, Warren Buffett ran Berkshire to grow its book value per share and to not put the business in harm's way. And when it was in harm's way to pivot when the first business they owned obviously was the textile business and famously ran it off and eventually closed it in 1985. All of the first businesses they bought Blue Chip Stams diversified retailing were wound up essentially being zeros and they pivoted away from those and it's been this capital allocation at Berkshire that's a lot of to be so successful, but it's beyond that. It's the treatment of the shareholder and what Warren is the largest shareholder, he's run it for, and I'm going to say this wrongly, but he's run it for his benefit. He's not so much to line his pockets at the expense of the other shareholders, but at the benefit of all of the shareholders. And so it's the lack of abuse in accounting. It's making rational acquisitions when you're laying out capital. You don't have a litany in a long history of right off and right tabs. The $10 billion right down of precision cast parts, he's acknowledged was a mistake on price. In particular, the business got worse. Part of it was already in bad shape, the term in business was already in bad shape when they bought it, who would have known with the pandemic that aircraft manufacturing would go through the law that it did. But he paid, and I thought we, I'm a stock, I thought he overpaid for it. I think he probably is back to we from the big elephant hunting with the lesson of having overpaid for business that did get harmed in various ways. But you've got so much alignment, and it's so easy to learn the lessons by simply going back and reading the chairman's letters. Yeah, so it was striking that in one of the letters, you pointed out, for example, that Mark Zuckerberg, for example, had paid, I think, $330 in 2021 for shares that would later be worth less than a hundred. And you were just talking about the fact that, you know, not $331 a year, but not to gang up on Mark Zuckerberg, who's obviously brilliant in his way. But the lack of discipline in a lot of companies about things like share buybacks, where instead of buying their stock back when it's cheap, they'll buy back kind of any time, the sort of short-termism. And it seems like, I mean, there was something very, very striking to me in a lot of your writing about return on capital, and maybe, maybe Berkter is kind of the best way to look at this. You said, in one of your letters, we think at least 90% of publicly traded companies aren't worthy of investment because they don't earn their cost of capital. Companies that slowly lose capital have generally been able to raise new capital and mask what is really going on. In that way, many businesses operate on the order of a legitimate Ponzi scheme. So can you talk about how a company like Berkter, that's very rational about cost of capital, return on capital? How it embodies this kind of, just much more logical and intelligent way of thinking about its investments? Well, the levers of capital allocation are known and understood at least by the value investing world. There are only so many things you can do with money. From a capital allocation standpoint, I had a chart in this year's letter which looked at the last five years of capital allocation at Berkter, and it started with cash flow from operations from the cash flow statement, net it out depreciation expense, which is a real charge. And in Berkter's case, I think in a lot of companies' cases, depreciation expense essentially matches what you'd call maintenance capex as opposed to growth capex. Berkter has a lot of money being spent in the energy world where they're growing the footprint of their energy assets. But you can do things with the share. You can issue shares in transactions. You can issue shares to management as compensation. You can buy back the stock and the price at which you buy it back becomes critically important and so little understood by most CEOs. You can use leverage in the capital structure. You can issue debt. You can retire debt. You can spend money on capex, on growth capex. You can spend money on growth R&D. You can make acquisitions using any of the combinations of capital available to you, internally generated capital, net new capital, either through the equity markets or the debt markets. And then I had to throw off one-way line in my table this year or you can buy jets, a jet or jets or you can have birthday parties and you can have a birthday party with from matriculating ice, cherubs, vodka, that's a nod back to the tyco, Dennis Coslowski days for, you know, the young ones, but don't remember the tyco saga. And that's all you can do and I don't think that's what CEOs sit around thinking about. I think they look at, look, if I'm paid, if I'm incentivized to grow EBITDA, they're going to grow EBITDA, if that's what drives their account package, well, that's above the line. The components below the EBITDA line interest is a very real thing, interest expense, but you become indifferent as to the capital structure of the business. If you're paid to grow the top line and you're paid to grow EBITDA, you become a lot more tolerant of leverage in the capital structure because you're measured before the interest expense. And in so many cases, you'll put the business in harm's way with excessive leverage, but you're not paid to keep the business out of harm's way. You're not in the captain's chair as CEO, as Warren has been since 1965. You're in the captain's chair for four and a half years on average. And when you're given big option packages and big RSU packages and big PRSU packages, this is your chance to make money and your motivation becomes in so many cases, short-term earnings, making Wall Street happy, driving the stock price up. When the Sherry purchase becomes front and center, perhaps your best use of capital. Now I'd also argue that so many companies don't have the opportunity set to go invest in growth capex intelligently. They don't have the opportunity to go invest in growth R&D, so what do you do with the money? Well, if you look at, it's fascinating to me. You've got this $38 trillion market cap for the S&P 500. The share count for the S&P 500 is exactly the same where it was 23, 24 years ago. If you look at the percentage of net income or the percentage of cash flow from operations that have been spent retiring shares and buying stock at last year was a trillion dollars out of the $1.6 trillion in aggregate profits for the S&P 500. Between dividends and Sherry purchases, there's nothing left for the S&P 500 for the last 20 years, and you've been buying shares back at 20 times earnings at a 5% earnings yield. Well, if you can go invest in a project, if you really have a business that earns 15 on equity, do you really earn 15 on equity if you can't go reinvested to 15 ROE, but your best use of capital is buying the stock back at a 5% return? This is not a normal boardroom, conversational strategy. This is not with the CEOs laying away thinking about it tonight, but if you're Tom Linebarber at Commons and his retiree, God love him. He's one of the best CEOs and this best management team, the new CEO, I forget her name, she's come up for operations, but the whole management team, they've all been there forever. I mean, they've been at Commons for 20, 25 years, and they have a culture of their compensation is driven by the performance of their business units, and when they get to the executive level and they start to be compensated with options and RSUs, it's all a very return on capital based driven. It's very return on asset based driven, and you love to see that because in that setting, the decision making of how capital goes in and out the door becomes very aligned with the shareholder, and they're just very, very good, and so getting that alignment right is so critically important, and if you take the time to read through everything that Mr. Buffett that Warren has written about executive compensation and stock options and accounting and the treatment of the shareholder, it's just, I don't think that the incentives aren't there for the managers to go live that way and think that way. They've come up through the system of seeing how their mentors got rich, and they're going to emulate that behavior. They're not going to emulate this old guy in Omaha, who's really aligned himself with the shareholders, and I think he thinks deeply about treating all constituents well, goes back to your note about Peter Kaufman, and our conversation, and we will ultimately led to how Costco runs their business, but it's taken care of your employees. It's taken care of your customers, it's taken care of your community, it's taken care of your regulators, and through all that, the last thing it's taken care of is the shareholder, and there are great businesses that really are aligned in differing degrees, but that's really what you're looking for. Now, you have places where you think you have that alignment, you have bad businesses. Most insurance operations are not good, especially underwriters, or brokers are totally different story, but insurance underwriting is brutal. It's very, very difficult to approach underwriting from a conservative standpoint. Lending banking is very brutal. If you go back and look at the long-term stock price chart, so if almost all of our leading banks over the last 25 years and the stocks are below, or they're not much above where they were 25 years ago, they're cyclical. You lower lending standards at the peak of a cycle, and you wind up with right off some losses, then you want to have to recapitalize your shares at the most inopportune time. Some of the reasons that the divisor on the S&P 500 or the share counts were it was 25 years ago, is because every time you have a recession, you're right off so much of corporate assets and equity, and you've got to recapitalize, and you're wanting to get now capitalizing when the share price is the cheapest. When it's the most attractive from an investment standpoint, you're not buying it in, but you're issuing it because you need the money. So the sharey purchases tend to be a disaster at the wrong time. It's when you should be buying the stock back, well, Olin couldn't buy the stock back in the pandemic because they had $4 plus billion in net debt on the balance sheet. Today, they've got $2.7 billion in net debt. It's a better business, and they can buy a Mac, the stocks trading at five times earnings. It will be a private business in 20 years. That's a great use of capital. This management team at Olin absolutely gets it. Those managements to your point, and to your comment, or their fewer and far between that ought to be the quest of any investors is finding where you've got the alignment of incentive. Let's take a quick break here from today's sponsors. Facts are facts. Like how contributing to employees' financial security makes them want to work harder for their company. In fact, according to a 2023 study by principle, 87% of employers say that better employee financial security means employees are more engaged and productive at work. 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Your taught useful everyday phrases for everyday conversation and you can test your pronunciation too. Beyond the comprehensive lessons on the app, you can listen to podcasts or join live online classes with professional teachers to get the best speaking practice. Babel is designed for you to break down that barrier that makes you feel self conscious and for your knowledge to become hardwired and that way you feel comfortable and confident speaking the new language with over 10 million subscriptions sold and 60 thousand lessons on the app conversations start with Babel. Are you ready? Use our code investor spelled I N V E S T O R and get a 12 month subscription for the price of six months. Visit babel dot com slash audio to redeem your code now. That's babel dot com slash audio with code investor. You can also find all the info on this limited time offer in our show notes. All right. Back to the show. I'm also struck by just how difficult this stuff is for an investor. When I look at the kind of analysis that you do, you're having to really drill down and get a sense from the company's financial statements of the true profitability of a business after all the write downs and the litigation expenses and funding defined benefit pension plans and stuff. And some of it just makes me think really to get a sense of the true earnings power of a company and really to get a sense of its true intrinsic value, even an approximately is just such a difficult game and that it just seems to me that for most investors, they should just not be playing this game. It's too difficult to buy individual stocks. What do you think? Why do I think it takes the proper wiring? Why? I think it takes a little bit of the contrarianism, the skepticism. I'm very jaundiced when I'm talking to management and I'm reading case and filings. I'm always looking for where I'm being lied to and maybe it goes back to my upbringing and being in a household where you didn't have the honesty and need and have the behavior that you'd really want to see. But I also think it's repetition. I think it requires an awful lot of time and purpose. You really do have to have a thorough knowledge of a client. You have to know not just accounting. You can't just simply take some gap earnings number or even think you're making some accounting adjustments and throw some multiple on it or you do it via running a DCF. You can tweak your models to get the output to be anything you want. It's really understanding over time how accounting is either judiciously applied or not. It's what is the history of write-offs and write-downs. If you do have a return and equity component to your compensation and you're in the business of making lot acquisitions, maybe you do want to every cycle, take a bunch of write-offs write-downs, deflate the equity number which in turn in the next cycle when your profitability comes through it's now against a lower equity base because you just take a bunch of accounting write-downs and write-offs. Since the mid-1980s, on average, the S&P 500 has seen 15% of operating earnings written off and written down to charges and it tends to be the most extreme and at the highest during recessions, during times when times are bad. You don't have as many write-offs when times are good, but what is book value? In book value you can get distorted by repurchases of shares at a big premium of book value which may or may or may or may not make economic sense. What is net income? Is it understated? Is it overstated? If you're doing a lot of deals and you're writing off intangibles, what kind of intangibles are being written down? If you have a lot of patents and you're in the drug world, patents really do lose value over time. If you're buying businesses where economic earnings are durable, the intangibles that are customer lists should not lose value over time unless you've overpaid, then of course you're going to make charges to intangibles and goodwill because if you overpaid for a business, it's not as good of a business. It's hard, it takes a lot of work, I'm on, I'm fortunate to be, I love this, I love being on college campuses a lot and just kind of passing along some of the few things that I've learned and I always say, look, you always get asked for what one book should I read that'll teach me how to be a great investor? What podcast do you think are the best? My point is, get away from largely thinking you're going to learn something vicariously through an author or if you're somebody talking, then I love these podcasts. You had Ray Dalio on it, obviously he's brilliant, he's a genius, but given an hour, given two hours, I want to figure out what's going on in comments and I want to figure out what's going on in the world of hydrogen because these are the things I worry and think about. Part of the lesson for me, Chris, has been the more time I spend with really superb investors, the more I realize how ill-qualified I am to play the game on my own and so it becomes, so it's actually, it's really helpful for me to study great investors because then I start to think, all right, well, I'm not wired that way and I'm just not as interested and it struck me, I was thinking about this the other day, I was reading one of your annual reports and there was a moment where you got really excited in the annual report and you were saying, you know, the light went on when I was looking at like this footnote about the tax treatment of the Burlington Northern Railroad that Berkshire owns and then I realized, oh no, there's the equivalent of float in there, you know, that's not really understood and I was just thinking, God, I just don't give a damn in comparison and so for me, like, I mean, look, I own Berkshire, right, and I love Berkshire, I'm totally biased, but literally part of what I do each year, I'm embarrassed to say this, but I read your report and I'm like, okay, well, here's here's how he's valuing it for different ways and I trust Chris to be really assiduous with this and I'm like, I'm done and I'm happy, you know, and I trust the values of Berkshire and Buffett and Munger and I trust that they're not out to screw me, but I'm really, I'm kind of almost like, just outsourcing the really serious analytical work to you because I'm not interested enough or capable enough. Well, I've no doubt in my mind you're capable enough, but you said it, it's, I think it's the level of interest. I mean, Warren talked about tap dancing to work, I have never felt like I've worked in the business of money management. I mean, I'm just so and will actually curious about business and industries, the companies I own, the competition, finding new ideas, that that's all that interests me. You try to read books on behavioral economics. Yeah, I get through a few pages and I can't do it, podcasts, love, I mean, Ray Dalio's a genius, but I, okay, you meditate, I guess my meditation is worried about what's going on in the displacement of the class aid, the diesel engine. But you're, you're walking like 10 miles a day, right? So that's presumably one of the habits that in some ways is your equivalent of meditation where it's, it's enabling you to disconnect from the office, to disconnect from the noise, to quieten down a bit, to get some peace, to get some perspective, right? I mean, that's a, that's, that's really, so I mean, I think you've just found a different, a different kind of habit to keep you a sanity, no? It is. And even here in the last three months of, I'm getting ready to have my hip replaced. And so it's been very hard for me to walk. I've got a, I mean, with all the, the surgeries on the knee and the damage I did to the body playing football and in time in the weight room and all the sports I played, the body's broken down. My left knee, I've been deferring at the replacement for seven years. The hip got really bad two years ago, surgeon said, dude, this is one of the worst hips I've ever seen. So I did a cortisone shot. We going over to, before going over to switch to an early, just allowed me to walk around and I started taking a cocks to a inhibitor. And I really had to make myself walk more than my typical, you know, one mile a day. And so I'm up to trying to walk 20,000 steps. And so, you know, here I am in all of July of, I'm now walking, I have an eight mile course. I'd change up the course a little bit, but, you know, that it takes time. So I'm out there walking for two and a half on average hours per day. And you can either listen to music, which I like to do. And that gives me time to think. I mean, it's, it's the time where I'm not engaged in, in analysis. And I'm not on the phone, and I'm not emailing. It's my time to think I'm not really listening to the lyrics of the song I'm thinking. But I'm walking so much more now and I've lost 30 pounds, which is great that I've, knowing I'm coming out of your podcast and listening to your podcast and they're phenomenal. I mean, they're genuinely wonderful. So I can take two hours listening to your podcast and then I can go through what my form of meditation is and that's thinking about what's going on and my life and the world and the portfolio and the competition that's coming and all the things that matter to me. And it's, and it's a, I guess everybody needs a channel to get out and get away and, and bring themselves to a car. It's just striking to me, Chris, that you have a, I mean, you were saying to me last week, look, if, if you need more time to dig through some of my annual letters and interviews and the like, it would be easy to, to postpone our conversation when you said, I have no travel in a very open calendar. And I was really struck by that. This idea of having a very open calendar. And likewise, I've seen you say that you have a kind of ADD approach to structuring your day and that while your, your business partner who you've worked with forever is very structured and very orderly and very systematic. You kind of leave your day largely unstructured so that you can do your research and like, can you talk about that idea of how you structure your life so that you can think and work independently and peacefully and get some perspective on the investment world, rather than being kind of sucked into the, the mayhem, the, you know, the, the noise and confusion that most investors are subjected to. Well, on blessed to your point, with a great business partner of 25 years, Chad Christensen, in the early days of the firm, you know, we all, we, we had to wear a lot of hats, you know, a lot of blocking and tackling and so you find jails, we just didn't find yourself spending a lot of the day involved in running the business, setting up the business mercifully, you know, he through the team he's built on our operation side. I've taken all the hats in the firm other than the investing hat away from me, which is wonderful thing. And I'm blessed with a wife that I don't deserve. And I'm blessed with two kids that I don't deserve. I think if you, if you observed my household life, you'd find it pathetic because I don't do anything. Okay. I, I love to admit this, but yeah, I don't cook. You know, I occasionally do some dishes. I don't do the laundry outsource the lawn mowing. You know, I kind of grew up a lawn mower in my hand and doing all the, all the job and all the projects. And I did the laundry and I swept the floors and vacuumed the carpet. I, I've, my, my life, it's luxurious, but I have all the time to do what I'm interested in doing. And that's doing what I do for a living, which doesn't feel like I'm doing it for a living. It's just something I enjoy. And all of my friends, my colleagues, again, other lesson that I tell students is, look, if you've gotten bad people in your life that I've been using this message for years, get the cancers out of your life. I said, you're going to look around the room, the classroom. Very few of these people are going to wind up being permanent friends, unless you're in a place like Columbia's MBA program where you're going to have a great social network. But I mean, how many high school friends do you still spend time with? How many of your college friends you don't? And I said, when you have families, to the extent you have families, your friend group is going to change based on your kids' activities and where they go to school. If they're playing sports teams, you're going to spend time with the families of the sports teams and you're going to spend time with the families at schools and whatever their interests and activities are. So, but from the professional standpoint, your friends and your profession, if you like your profession, so first to say, if you don't like what you're doing, you're looking at the clock at 455, because you can't wait to go home. If you can find something else to do with your life, do it. But you see, if you find something you can get paid to do that you like doing, you know, that's a great combination. But I said, build your friend group carefully. And, you know, I've been really, really blessed and lucky over the years to develop some wonderful friendships with like like minded, not, you know, cookie cutter. We don't look at stocks the same way. But I have a group of 25 or 30 really good friends, a handful in particular that I spend a lot, a lot of time talking to one who I talk to three, four times a week, typically, than two like that. I spend a lot of time with one in person here in town and another on the song with. But if you have bad people that enter your world, if you have immoral people, maybe this is less than that I learned when I was a kid, which is interesting because I lived and I set out to live an exact opposite life of what I had seen, a little bit of a boomerang effect there. I had another one brother in the house who, you know, in the same setting, seeing, observing the same sets of behavior, co-opted the behavior that I found so retugnant, and has chosen to live his life that way, which is very interesting at minimum. But the message to students in his luck, if you wind up with immoral unethical people, if you wind up out with people that don't make you feel comfortable because they're abusive to servers, get them out of your life, surround yourself with kind people, good people. So Chris, I keep hesitating to ask you about this, but you've referred to it a few times and there is the journalist in me that can't resist, so forgive me. But you've mentioned a few times the growing up situation I'm wondering is this your father, is it your stepfather? What was going on? Because it's obviously had such a profound impact on you in terms of you defining yourself by not being that way and by gravitating towards people like Bob Smith or towards Manga and Buffett, or also to your football coaches when you were growing up, who've obviously had a really profound impact on you as moral exemplars. And so I just wanted to get a sense of you don't mind me asking of what is it you're referring to because you obviously had a very intense and kind of traumatic formative experience that. Well, I don't want to get it. I won't get into too much. Yeah, but I lost my mother this year. She passed. She'd be the poster child of why you shouldn't smoke. She smoked from the age of 12 on a couple of packs a day and wound up ultimately passing of COPD, but she wound up in a relationship with somebody I really just didn't like for a whole host of reasons from the get-go. I found the behavior unsettling. I just observed a way to live a life that was not great. And throughout her life, there was just a lot of dishonesty out of the way women are treated. It very much within tent chose to live my life 180 degrees opposite. And I set out to be a different father. And so I've gone out of my way to raise my kids differently than the experience that I had when I was a kid. It was important to me to be involved in their lives and their activities to be good to them, be fair with them. What a privilege to coach some of their youth team since you mentioned my football coaches. I'd go through the roster of each of them and they all had a profound impact on my life. And they were all genuinely good men. I've got to be very good friends with my high school football coach, Brian McGregor, in life. And these were all men of integrity. And they were men of honesty. And most of them were hard. I mean, football coaches are hard. They're hard on players. But at bottom, they were fair. And so many lessons of life on how to behave and how to behave with honesty. So my mom just lost my mom four weeks ago. She was in hospice for four or five weeks. And there were just a lot of horrible things at the end that maybe I'll tell you over a beer sometime. But yeah, I'm so sorry. And I appreciate you sharing that. I'm sorry to put you through that. I was very struck in reading your annual report that at the end of the latter. I mean, you said she deserved more joy in a life filled with not enough of it. And she'd obviously had a very hard life. But then I was also really touched by a part where you were saying, I'm not sure dedicating an annual investment letter is a thing. I do want to say in the spirit of my mom, don't let a day go by that you don't work on relationships with those closest to you. Let them know as often as you can how much you love them. And then there was a really beautiful thing towards the end of the letter where you were talking about a friend of yours who you mentioned before. Jeff Goodall from the Marines who, you know, is obviously a big tough six foot four two hundred and ninety five pound guy who said is beating the hell out of cancer at present. And you said he was someone who would always kind of stand by you and someone who could never be messed with. And you said, but sorry, Jeffrey, you're now number two. Nobody protected me like Bob, your mother. And you said her children were her universe piece. And so I thought it was a it was a lovely tribute in the same way that we talked about Mr Smith before I wanted to, you know, honor the memory of your mom who clearly was remarkable in, you know, being the sort of staunch defender of you through thick and thin as a child, but also later in life. Yeah, as a kid, she did. I mean, her life was all about her children. And I think she tolerated her relationships. She really shouldn't have been in. And when when behavior got so bad as an adult, I really worked to try to convince her to not be in the relationship, but there was even a little bit of Stockholm center out to it. And if I have any regret about my relationship with my mother, it's and I haven't thought this fully through, but it'll be that maybe I didn't do enough to get her out of that relationship. But you know, she also made you make your own decisions and family was important to her as misguided as and as unconventional as this relationship was, you know, perhaps like could have and should have done more. But yeah, she say everyone's responsible for their own decisions and it's hard with a mother to be the one who's like, here's how you should live your life. Yeah, yeah. And I tell you, being in hospice in her last days, the people in that world are wonderful. And you know, they saw that they they understood what was going on. They they knew of behavior. Her neighbors, in fact, knew of the behavior and they knew of a lot a lot of what had gone on in their life and even to the end and they were very supportive of her. And so she had a little bit of a network, but there were so many good people in her life, especially the end of her life in our last five or six years, neighbors. And then in the last five months, certain members of her hospice team that managed to bring her a lot of joy, as I said in my life, in a world that was devoid of enough joy. So then there was even strife at the end. And I won't get into the details. It would, it got pretty ugly in the last few months, but I'm so sorry. She, she endured, she endured a relationship that I wish she hadn't gotten into and I wish she had gotten out of earlier. But she, I think she did it in large part for her perception of trying to keep her mind what was a family together. And I think she tolerated a lot of a lot of madness in the spirit of thinking it was the right thing for her two songs. So I think you and I pretty much the same age. I think we were both born in 1968 if I remember rightly. And it's kind of, I mean, I in many ways had an easier path than you because you know, I had two very loving parents floored at times, not my mother, but we'll be listening to this, but occasionally flawed on my father's side. And I'm wondering like how you, how you were able to rise above this very difficult childhood because you had an extraordinarily successful career. It seems like it's, I mean, it seems like your dad was also a tough guy. I mean, I remember you, I think writing a story about how he would get you to work during the summer and working incredibly intensely. What was it that enabled you not to be messed up by this really difficult childhood, but actually to become a very successful and functional human being? I thought there's a lot to I suppose that suppose it was it was it was probably a trusting, you know, I always harbored a little bit of anger toward my mother for being in that relationship in the first place. But I think what evolved of that is is the ability to learn how to trust those that deserved it and not trust those that didn't. And maybe that's what led itself to the approach of the contrary and approach to investing. It had approaching the written word and the spoken word with a skeptical eye. I mean, it's, you know, it makes you a very guarded, guarded person. And it made it want to make me very driven to succeed. I mean, I had to channel my energy somewhere. So I, in football, I was never going to get outwork in the, in the weight room or in preparation. I'd never got outworked and out in a practice approached academics with similar rigor, although school was very easy for me. And I wished I'd to your point and studied Greek and some of the classics. But I just did enough to get bio as an academic minimalist. But then when I approached the academic side, the real academic side, my academic side of investing, I approached it with a vigor because I loved it. But it wasn't what was the top side from, from the booth school. It was, how do you break down a business? And it was the cumulative learning and loving to read financial statements. So I, I suppose some of that background always made me driven and very, very dependent upon myself, very willing to take, very, very, very, I needed to shake care of myself and make sure I was okay. But that then lent itself toward who I think I am and how I treat people and the whole combination of things. I haven't, I haven't, I've never really, but articulated it and gone through it all in conversation. My clarity and my mind about how things all evolved and, but like senior year high school, I lived with friends and their basements off and on. I just, I was, I was ready to be on my own when I was eight years frankly. And so, yeah, I mean, it's, it's clear that your work ethic was a huge part of getting you out of the mess. And I was very struck in your 2020 literature clients that you said the best investors I know seem to come at investing with a chip on their shoulder. They will outwork you. They will outcompete you. And you talked about Mario Gabelli, his quip of wanting to hire PhDs, but that's standing not for people with doctorates, but who are poor, hungry and driven. And that was clearly the case with you that there was, there was always this intensity to you and this kind of fire to you. And it seems to me that's something that when you're, when you're coaching kids, a football or your mentoring kids on campuses, that that comes up again, again, just this idea of having a really good work ethic, which, which obviously got you to be an exceptional football player, got you to be an exceptional investor. Is that fair to say the work ethic has just been absolutely central for you? Oh, it is. And when the football ended, sooner than I thought I was going to end for injury, I had to find something to rechannel my energy. I'd become so curious about investing already, but it absorbed all of my focus, 100% of my focus. And when you really close, like, could you have been an NFL player like were you that good and that serious when you were a college before you got injured and broke your foot? Well, hard. I mean, who knows? That was always the goal in the plan. You know, a good friend wound up my back up at the roommate. In fact, wound up playing through the Steelers for three years. I mean, he, he have to, first you have to survive health wise long enough to get there. I think had I had I had I not been hurt and played and gotten the repetitions, you know, given the work ethic, given some of my just innate athleticism, that was the strongest player in the big eight to spend just lived in the weight room, lived for working out. And I was very quick. And I don't know, but I do know how I played having watched the game now for a lifetime and even even in those early years, I played defensive line. I think I probably would have been a better offensive guard or a center than on the defensive side of the ball and retrospect. But when I saw guys like Warren sat play the game, all the famous, he didn't know way was I ever going to play on that level. I mean, that just size mixed with athleticism mixed with raw meanness. I was very mean. I mean, it was a very, yeah, I think you have to be in the football world. You have to, you have to be, you have to be a little mean. But yeah, like Warren sat was, he played at a different level. So, you know, I would have been one of those. If you know how pro football works, you hit free agency at three years, you don't get paid anything. I think the league minimum, when I was a senior, we won the national championship championship my senior year. I didn't get to play my senior year for the injuries, which took me out the broken foot and my knees. But well, let's take a quick break here from today's sponsors. You want to speak a new language, but haven't quite got the hang of it. Meet your language learning match, Babel. You get a whole kit of effective learning methods that have been developed by real teachers in over 200 language experts. You're taught useful everyday phrases for everyday conversation and you can test your pronunciation too. Beyond the comprehensive lessons on the app, you can listen to podcasts or join live online classes with professional teachers to get the best speaking practice. 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You also, you once said that when you look back at your high school football coach, and your college football coaches, you said everything I learned from those guys carries over to the investment arena. What are you thinking of when you think of the stuff that really applies from your football days that's really helpful? I think it's the dedication to the process. It's the dedication to practice and the work that goes into it. But the other takeaway is I think the interaction with people. I think it's this cultivation of my friend network. I mean, I owe a lot of how I think and how I approach the world to being able to spend time with my good friends. We have a group that gets together once a year. Here in St. Louis, we spend three days and get through 10 or 12 ideas. These are all marvelous investors and analysts. But they're all kind people. I go back to my first high school. High school, I run my first football coach when I was eight and nine years old, gentleman and Ken Acker. He was driven. He was probably my age. I thought he was really old because I was eight and nine years old. But he wound up being so supportive. As I evolved in my first years of playing to be a very driven player in practice. My love for the game exploded. We had a game that we lost against Columbine, which is the Columbine with the high school. But it's Jefferson County School. We lost a game against some of those guys who became friends later in life. But we had a good football team. We had some really good football players turns out on that little league, our van a midget football team. We lost a game and I played my heart out with it in retrospect. I think I blocked an extra point and a pond. I'm thinking why at that age is anybody kicking an extra point upon having coached little kids later in life. I mean, only bad things happen when you kick the ball when you're eight years old, nine years old. But I was pretty down after the game. In a setting, he didn't have to do this, but he saw that I was down in a setting of all of my teammates and all of the pairs. You're having your Pepsi and your Coke, whatever it was after the game, which we got. He can put his armor on me and talked at length about my character and passion for the game and how I played the game and that message, well, boy, at that moment, I mean, that kindness from that man changed who I was. Really? How so? I just thought, you know, well, he makes you feel that it made you feel bad, important and that good. And I thought, you know, what a way to treat other people. And even at that early age, that lesson of how to treat other people, I think became hardwired in my DNA. Yeah, I think there's something really inspiring when I look at your career and I see, you know, this trajectory where you came out of a very difficult beginning and you made a conscious decision about the type of person you want it to be. And I don't know, it's interesting. It's also really nice to see the amount of pleasure you get from mentoring college kids and business school students and people through the CFA society that I know you played an important role in. But also, you know, kids football teams and like, really giving back over the years. Yeah, I think, you know, I think about this image, I suppose, that's developed by my being on Twitter and what I've done a little bit with that platform rightly or wrongly, but, you know, I've chosen to take the abusers of the retail investors, the charlatans, you know, when somebody tells her constituents on TV that you're going to make 40% than 50% a year and, you know, I call that behavior out. I mean, there are a lot of people that think I'm probably quite a bit of a jerk. And I was just at the, John, all of a church conference in Switzerland last month. And one of the guys who only knew me, I think, from Twitter, put out a picture of three of us. And his comment was spend time with Chris. And he's remarkable. He a very nice guy. I think you have a sense of righteous indignation about people being abused, lied to, deceived. And it's, I don't know, I think it makes a lot of sense psychologically given what you came through. And I think you've honest it in a really powerful way because there is, there is a lot of deception. And as you put it, Charlotteson promotion within the investment industry. And this is people's life savings. I mean, it's, it's, it's blood money for a lot of people. And so I, I mean, I, I tend not to call people out because I don't know, I'm sort of a reprast Englishman. And also because I don't want to be too judgmental of other people. So because I think we're going to invite judgment of myself. And so I tend, I tend just not to interview people who I think don't have great integrity. So I sort of, I try to shine a light on the people who I think are impressive and a good role models and a people we can, we can learn from. But I, I applaud you for the fact that you take a stand and that you, you call out these inconsistencies because you also, you have the actual granular knowledge to be able to point out the inconsistencies. And I was very struck when, I mean, again, I, I didn't really want to be disrespectal of individuals. But, you know, I think of someone like Chamath Palai, Hippataya, if I'm pronouncing it even vaguely correctly, who obviously is a brilliant guy. I mean, I remember once seeing him at a, at a conference, maybe I got this guy smart, but at the same time, a brilliant promoter. And, you know, when he was starting to say that his returns were better than Warren's, you'd take down that actually kind of analyze the distortion of the returns and the, you know, it was very powerful. Yeah. And I think it was necessary, you know, not that the Berkshire Record needed defending. But it was the comparison was so maligned and so unethically done that, you know, I kind of reflexively, you know, I never would have even heard of the guy, had he not made the comparison, and I'd seen the comparison. And one that he'd done it a few times, and his most latest, and his most latest iteration on Twitter, somebody brought up the, the, his comparison to Berkshire, which he claim to have never made, which is extraordinary. Yeah. So I don't, I don't think it's so much about, you know, maligning Chamath, who, you know, as I say, I was impressed at how smart he was when I was just listening to talk his smart charismatic guy or Kathy Wood, who I've never met or interviewed, but I'd like to interview her one day. I think it's interesting, interesting, phenomenon. It's more about reminding our listeners that you could be really careful. This is an industry where there's a lot of misalignment of interests and incentives. And, you know, if you can, if you can align yourself with people who actually have good ethics and who aren't overcharging you, and I mean, even you think your first investment all those years ago, college, I think, you know, the commission was 10%. It was kind of a pretty good introduction to the casino aspect of Wall Street. And so I, I don't know, if there's, if there are messages for our listeners to take home, one of them is, you've got to be diligent about things like price and valuation, and you've got to really assess whether the people you're getting in bed with have integrity or, you know, a record of not looking out for that shareholders and just being promoters. You, you can't take this stuff on trust. No, you can't. And, you know, and the last and the latest chairman's letter out of Berkshire, even the last several. I mean, Warren has said, essentially, we have deserved trust over all these years. And, you know, we have owners who have trusted us for this long. And, so, in essence, he would say, you can trust us. But it's such a hard thing trying to figure out, you know, who the charlatans are and who the promoters are from, you know, who's legitimately doing it the right way is so difficult for the ordinary investor to ferret it all out. And with attention spans being sure, I'd like to say most people spend more time analyzing what their next car purchase is going to be. Then they do who's going to shepherd their capital for the next 30 years. But you're not armed with the tools to analyze either whether, you know, how to go about investing for yourself or how to allocate the allocation of that capital to somebody else, which is why I think Warren says that default of the S&P 500 for the typical industrial that doesn't know what they're doing is such a suitable thing to do because you're eliminating the frictional costs of fees. And you've got a diversified portfolio and Charlie would dig to differ and say, well, I think Berkshire's better. He might say they're active managers that are better than there are, but how do you go about finding them? Today, you've got, again, such a concentration at the top of the market, 30% and seven names that group trading at well north of 30 times earnings today, it becomes dangerous. And so, you know, if you're the family that's just starting out on a biweekly saving plan through your 401k and you overpay for your first S&P 500 shares, that's okay. If you have a determined, regimented, consistent saving plan over a life, time you're going to wind up eventually getting some shares that are reasonably priced, some shares that are undervalued. But if you have real money today and these backed entities high price to sales, businesses that are pricing almost too much perfection, pricing in the implausible outcome, especially now with some of these bigger business, even Apple that's now 50% of the Berkshire portfolio. Berkshire's kind of corned himself into the box of woods becoming never sell. Well, it's half and it's 33 times earnings. And you've got a big business doing sufficiently large number of sales revenue that think can't grow much more than maybe a high single digit on earnings per share basis after sharey purchases. And so, you know, he'd acknowledge later in the game that Coca-Cola probably should've been sold when it traded at say 50 times starting. So, you know, I hope there's a price at which an Apple position might be trimmed because the economics of what you can earn out of it even on a net of 21% corporate tax rate basis now, you know, would justify a trimming of the positional lease. He did trim the position a couple years ago and regretted it because the stock did so well and the business did so well. But there's a price at which anything ought to probably be trimmed or sold, including Berkshire, and there are prices at which I would sell down my Berkshire position, especially for an opportunity cost standpoint. But I'm going to do it tax efficiently. I need to have as much after tax proceeds available to buy my best idea at the top of the opportunity cost, stack to justify that shave to the government. And so, there are nuances between taxable money and non-taxable money. But, you know, it's a really hard game and it's not easy, but it requires constant thought, constant worrying, risk management. And I think probably if you took some similarity to most of the great investors, they spend a lot more time thinking about what's going to go wrong than what's going to go right. And the non-professional investor and even I think the majority of professional investors are in arms with either the psychological wiring that's required to do that or the temperament for approaching it that way. Yeah, all the technical knowledge. I mean, you think of, you know, in your annual letter, the four different approaches you take to estimating the value of Berkshire. That's an enormous amount of work to break that down. And at the end of 2022, if I remember rightly, I think you said your calculation was that it was basically at around 74% of fair value. It was trading at a pretty at a pretty generous discount. And your view then was that over the next 10 years, it would outperform the S&P 500. And now that it's had a pretty good run, but also the S&P has a lot of inflated stuff. I know that you update your intrinsic value estimates every quarter, I think, for all of the stocks you own. I'm asking this very selfishly, should I over the next 10 years still feel happy down Berkshire? Oh, Berkshire's stock portfolio is up 20% this year apples grown back to where it's now at a record 50% of the portfolio. But the stocks are a much smaller percentage of the portfolio than Coke was when Berkshire was much more of a peer insurance operation than it is today. You take the moving parts of Berkshire, the profitability from the energy business where the inhibitions has the ability to retain capital. They're earning $5 billion, retaining all of it, augmenting it with a like amount of debt. You've got $5 billion there. You've got what's pushing $8 billion from the railroad, earning low teams returns on. Essentially, the capital of the business, you've got another $13 billion coming from the manufacturing service retail group that are earning adequate returns on unlevered capital. The $3 billion, let's say, on a regular basis from underwriting a few billion from the less than the more than 20 less than 100% held businesses. Then whatever you think, the equity portfolio is at what's now $370 billion, $360 billion in stocks. That's now a third of Berkshire's assets. Their assets are going to be over $1 trillion. All those moving parts of the income streams, Berkshire's less cheap today than it was a year in. The stocks up 11 or 12% for the year. You've basically earned in the first six months and a month. Here we are in mid-July. It's probably earned what it should. It's trading at a reasonable price. I think it's trading at a discount. But if it maintains this 140% of buck, and it's a more expensive book today than it was, because again, Apple is so much more expensive. A year in 21, I had shaved the Apple position in my appraisal by $50 billion. The stock got killed last year. I eliminated the shave. I'd be shaving it by $50 or $60 billion today. All in all, you have the S&P trading at 21 or 22. Margins have not recovered. I just did my S&P work up and the portfolio work up for quarter end. Earnings at 204 for the S&P 500 or $4 below where they were at the year in 21. Sales are up probably 17%. You've had margin compression of what was probably a peak. But you're paying 22 times, what's probably kind of what's still peaky-type profit margins where they're just likely not going to grow here. If you get inflation rolling, it's in decline at the moment. But you may have rolling inflation for the next decade or two. You're more likely than not to get margin compression. I think even best case, the index at the moment is a 5 or 6% return. More likely than the not, you'll have periods where it's substantially underwater in the next 10 or 15 years. And Berkshire's a very conservative 10 to 12 if you hold the current if you're hold the current valuation constant. And it's a very durable, predictable learning stream. And so I think Berkshire's hands down an easy bet from a valuation climate like you have today. When everything gets washed out, you know, it's captured. My advantage, prospectively, in late 08, early 09, when I'm down 20 and the market's down 40, you know, my advantage is less than it is in a period like today when I get a portfolio training at nine and a half times earnings again, 10 and a half percent earnings yield, which is half the multiple of the index. And I think we've got a better roster of businesses managers. Berkshire's just a better manager. And on a on a net, essentially unlevered basis, you're not going to blow yourself up. You'll never wake up with the headline Berkshire Hathaway negotiating with creditors. I mean, they're negotiating with creditors, but it's the one where they're buying businesses because somebody's going bankrupt. It's not Berkshire ever having to worry about the balance sheet. And so I'll look at it as a bond. It's business turns 10 to 12 on equity that trades at a pretty modest premium equity. And you know, it's a place where you can make 10 to 12 in a world of low interest rates. And I think it's got some inflation protections built into some of the big moving parts that make it very attractive in the current setting. And we all know that it's not going to do what it did in its first 35 years, but you know, relative to what I think is, you know, maybe a half return of what Berkshire can earn. It's deserving at least in our world at present prices of a big position. Yeah. And I don't know. Everyone always wants to kind of hit the ball out of the park. I kind of put a pretty high premium on survival. I want to get to the finish line. And I always feel like I'm more likely to get to the finish line with Berkshire than with many other things. Like, Buffett's emphasis on survival resonates pretty deeply with me. I was on the phone with a guy yesterday. We were talking about that notion of return of capital and return on capital and not so much yield, but return to par in the credit world. And you've got so much leverage on corporate balance sheets, you know, the total leverage in our system is still 350% of GDP. Corporate leverage is very high. If we have persistently high, albeit rolling interest rates, I mean, if we have recession, Buffett will be back in zero. There'll be at the next iteration of QE. But we have so much leverage on the corporate balance sheet. And so much of it is short term and intermediate term. A lot of it coming due on 24 and 25 fuel rates at current levels. You have a massive hit to profit margins coming because the interest burden is going to grow from something that was almost not existent to something that's very real. And so again, if you live below the EBITDA line and not above it, you know, leverage in a world of high and rising interest rates when you've got a refinanced low coupon debt with with higher yield, higher coupon debt will become very problematic in a world that's allowed too much leverage to build up on the aggregate balance sheet. And so being on the unleverter, less levered side of things allows for the survival that you talk about. I want to tell us you one final thing for I'll let you go. There's a lovely story that I remember hearing you tell me, maybe I read it in one of your annual reports about a golfer Ellen Port and she had been teaching, I think, your daughter's high school team. And she told a really wonderful story that gets at a lot of what we've been talking about in terms of choosing the path of integrity while also being competitive and successful. And I wonder if I could ask you just to tell the story if you remember it of what happened to Ellen Port because I know it's a story you've often told to college students. I remember well that Ellen was a great mentor to my daughter and she's a great friend of mine. She and her husband are wonderful people very well known in in the golf world, but but not known at all outside the golf world. Ellen took up the game of golf in her early 20s. She was a great athlete. She was a tennis player, but grew up with around the golf course, but never played golf competitively and she took up the game in her adult life and she was a teacher, but took up the game of golf and wound up overall easier. She's now, you know, I don't tell you how old, but she's probably didn't easy. And she's I'll take up the game at such a level with local instruction. She started winning some local tournaments and she would not have worked with Hank Haney. I didn't have the money and Hank was very good to her and just saw the drive and her to point told the Oklahoma Stateman's golf team that lady up on the hill. I mean, how many of you were here on the driving range at six o'clock this morning? Well, she took golf balls into her cottage because she wanted to get out before my lesson and get two hours of work in. He says, now, how many of you ride hitting balls before with Ellen in the morning? Yeah, nobody, of course. So Ellen in the meantime has now won seven U.S. G.A. championships. Isn't amateur golfer and she's like right there in the top four with Jack Nicholas Tiger Woods. She's won, I think, three U.S. G.A. women's mid-Ams and four senior grams. And she's still playing golf at a highly competitive level. And she's played on Curtis Cups. They just introduced a couple three years ago. The women senior open, but she was honored to coach a Curtis Cup. I'm going to say six or seven years ago. The Curtis Cup for those that aren't in the golf world. We have the Walker Cup and the Curtis Cup. And it's the top amateur golfers on the men's side with the Walker Cup and on the women's side with the Curtis Cup. They play against the top players from Great Britain and Ireland. So with the writer type format at the amateur level with the U.S. against G.B. and I, you know, golf is the game of integrity. You call penalties on yourself. It's the rule of luck kind of sections on etiquette. Ellen takes that just to heart it. She is the human being. You know, you talk about Bob Smith being kind and wonderful and all the high level of morality and ethics. I put Helen on a pedestal on the same level. So Lucy and I were invited, St. Louis Country Club, to listen to her talk to the media and a gathering before the Curtis Cup. And she told a story about playing in one of the USGHA championships. And I guess she was in, so when you're playing amateur championships, you have two metal rounds. There's a field of 128, I think. And you wind up with the top 64 that wind up in match play. And then it plays all the way down. So you've got to win six matches to eventually be champion. And it's it's growing. So she was in metal play and I think she was as she normally was. She was leading the field or not. But she said, you know, every night when she when she's going to bed, she replays the rounded off in her head in her mind and try to figure out what I could have done here, what I could have done there. And I don't remember where she was. I think it was, I think it was one of the championships and one of the courses, the spring courses in Michigan, I can be wrong. But wherever it was, she got to a par three. And she said, Oh my God, Ellen, you did not par the Holy, you made a bogey. And her playing partner did, you know, it engulfed in match play and even in metal play, you keep the opposite player score in your group. And so you wrote you that around. Well, you know, they all wrote down three. They thought Ellen and made a three that metal round play wasn't on TV. The the the score keepers that walk with the group, you know, everybody thought she'd made whatever she thought she had made. Maybe she said the score. And the next thing she said was the, she said the drive home the next day was the longest drive in my life. And, you know, had, you know, kids that don't know golf or what happened when she disqualified herself from the tournament. No, you know, you know, it would have been that easy to move on to the match play around. And but, you know, she she recorded an improper scorecard, which is a disqualification from the tournament or it was at that time. And so she took herself out of the chance to win because I mean, she's literally when she's if she wins the eighth UFGA championship, I think she's tied for all time. Maybe they're the professional or the amateur level and, you know, out of that, at that high of a level of a game, you just asked the students all the time to look inward as to whether you can do something like that. I just I think of the world of Ellen and she's so awesome and what a what a proper way to construct your life to be able to do something like that. Yeah, I think that's a great note on which Dan, he reminds me of a lovely thing that Jason's why I said to me on the podcast when I was interviewing him where he said something like what more people should say, would would I sell this to my mother? And I think that idea of looking inward and saying, yeah, I better not do that is is pretty good. And so anyway, I've just really enjoyed chatting with you and I've learned a lot from studying your your writing over the last week. And I'm thrilled that we got a chance to talk in such depth and I hope we'll get a chance to actually meet in person before too long. Maybe in Omaha this coming year. By all means or sooner or sooner. That'd be great. I'll be in I'll be in New York in October, but great. Well, let's get to the counter. But it's what a what a what a treat to be here and thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Well, I am. Thank you so much. It's it's a real delight for me. Thank you, cheers. Thank you. All right, folks. I really hope you enjoyed this conversation with Chris Bloomstrand. If you'd like to learn more from Chris, I'd highly recommend reading his terrific annual letters to clients. You can find more than a dozen of them archived on the website of his investment fund, Semper Augustus. And I'll include links to the website and his letters in the show notes to this episode. As you'll see his letters are enormous that sometimes as long as 140 pages. So they're not a quick and easy read, but he's a very good writer and they're full of really helpful insights about how to invest more intelligently and how to think better. They're also invaluable if you want to understand Buck's health way as he analyzes the company in exhaustive detail and officer an array of different ways of valuing it. It's really an extraordinary feat and amazing that this is publicly available for people who actually care to look. In any case, I'll be back very soon with some more great guests, including a fascinating conversation with Peter Keith, a brilliant investor and thinker who very rarely speaks in public. So that's really a treat and an important conversation, I think. At least for me, I've learned a tremendous amount. In the meantime, please feel free to follow me on Twitter at William Green in 72 and do let me know how you're liking the podcast. I'm always delighted to hear from you. Until next time, thanks so much for listening. Take care. Be righted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.