YouSaid · the spoken record

Anthony Scilipoti

lines on the record: 109
first: 2025-10-28
most recent: 2025-10-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“the market conditions at the time, because the people are running a business, but the business is operating in a certain economic environment. Well, you had brand new bond market activity. QE, no one ever heard of QE before the early two thousand tens. The central banks were buying long dated bonds to keep interest rates low. Well, now all of a sudden, what does that do to a company like Valiant that's making, that's growing through acquisition and needs capital? Well, they could borrow money at very low rates. And if that's the case, then their IR cost of capital, etc., the hurdle rate is very low, so they look really great. All these transactions that may not have made any sense in other time periods when risk free rates were not in the one or two percent range.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the money management industry, when you're underperforming, it is so difficult to stay the course. You saw this, you know, in the financial crisis, that movie about the big short. Like those individuals became clients of ours. Like I know Porter Collins, if he ever listens here and Danny and so forth. Like we befriended each other during this time of madness and afterwards. It was like they were crazy. Like you end up looking at yourself going, I'm crazy. I'm seeing this and nobody cares. It becomes so difficult when you're on the other side. Now you're trying to make money and raise money from clients because investors now are saying, well, wait a minute, you're up five or you're down five markets up twenty. You don't know what you're doing. What are you doing? And, you know, it's hard. Because that's how you earn your living. That, I think, becomes the problem. And with Valiant, it just went on for so long. And you need to look at...”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So all of a sudden you don't believe it day one. But then you see that they made an acquisition it didn't seem like it was going to work, but then it works, and the stock price goes higher. And then they do something else, and it kind of seems a little bit strange, and then they change their accounting, and they change the way they present their non gash gap metrics, which is things we noticed. Like, that's another huge flammable item. The company says, you know, they're reporting their, they use an adjusted EBITDA and they calculate it in a certain way. And then the following year, they calculated a different way. Well, that's a non-audited number. It's whatever management wants, and the market's just believe it. And so that's something the Valiant was notorious about. But didn't matter because the stock price just kept going higher. And as the stock price keeps going higher, it's very difficult.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The CO and the management team soldiers Mike Pearson. and was executing. And, you know, he comes where he came from a great pedigree. He was not taking a salary and everything was tied to the stock price. You know, he was tireless, tirelessly working in the company. And he'd proven, because what ends up happening is price creates narrative.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I sat with them, talked to them before the cave before. It's a situation where someone is such a masterful spinner of a story and is absolutely”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“sell valiant, okay? We're the only cell on Valiant in twenty twelve, twenty thirteen. The company didn't blow up until 2015, okay? But and they would talk about their integrity and their, you know, how they were changing the world with the drug reformulations they were doing and so forth. But if you look deeper, they were just manipulating the accounting and changing the pricing on drugs and creating a fraudulent network of online pharmacies.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All good. But if a new peer comes in play, now all of a sudden that model may not work, and now you have a blow up. In my podcast The Fact Finders I interviewed an individual who we've used before this private investigator, and he's the one that got me on to this way of this mental model. And he says, you know, if the CEO beats his wife and runs stop signs, kicks his dog, doesn't get along with the neighbors, probably could be a problem. But that's not going to show up on the financial statements. That's not going to show up in any interviews. You got to kind of follow things that are going on. What is that organization stand for? How are they operating? What are their values? But not just what they write down. The culture and the values are not what you read on the financial statements and in their press releases. We wrote above valiant.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“looking for a spark because let's use that same negative cash flow. Well, if all of a sudden a new competitor comes into that company's operating space, okay, and is able to take market share. Now all of a sudden that negative cash flow is a problem, if you notice in the financial statements when you look at that negative cash flow, the company's taken on very expensive debt. Again, very expensive debt by itself doesn't mean anything because if the potential return on invested capital”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“call forensic analysis is taught unless you know so if a company is generating negative cash, it may actually be a fantastic thing. They're investing in an AI startup that is going to be a huge opportunity and they've shown over time that the return on invested capital is in excess of twenty percent or fifty percent or whatever it is, and so they're investing in something. Yes, it's negative cash flow today, but I'm not investing for the cash flow today. I'm investing for the cash flow tomorrow. So you see that as the red flag you don't invest in it. And unless you understood the first part, which was the fact that where they are in their life cycle type of business, et cetera, that is now not a red flag. It's just a flammable item. By itself, not a problem? It depends. And then you get to the third bucket, which is the spark. And so you're always.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not red flags we call them flammable items. Okay. So this goes to our process, it's a three stage process that we use and we teach because one of our we have Veritas U. And so we teach investors how to make better investment decisions. And so the first stage is you understand the business and the control environment. Again, understand and understand the accounting that's being used so that when you study the financial statements, everything else, they all make sense. And you understand sort of the structure, how is management compensated? What stage of their life cycle are they at? Because those are all sort of constraints and opportunities within the business. So then you look for a flammable item. For example, companies generating negative cash flow. That could be by itself a red flag in the normal way this type of”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like the way you posed the question because it sets up what we've learned over time. The problem with red flags is it gets to your point that you started at before where you don't want to be crying wolf. And so I've learned to temper because you could be wrong.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you have to read the notes to the financial statements first before you actually read the statements, the notes to the financial statements tell you how the company modified the accounting because it made accounting choices. We decided to account for this, these type of transactions in this way. So then when you look at the financial statements, once you know how they're prepared, you can better interpret them. Accounting is a language. If I said to you tomorrow you're going to speak Spanish. Oh, you know, you could do AI and you figure it out and you're going to learn it. But the nuances of the language. In that language, they're going to understand way more about the language than you are. The same like reading the financial statements. The more you understand of what went into them and how they're prepared, the better you're going to interpret them.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you'll also be scarred because people make investments. This is why it's so difficult to be a long term sound investor because emotions get in the way, which is one of my rules. Emotion has no place in investing. Another rule is don't trust management. I'm sure there's many management teams and I run my, you know, we're an operating business private company, and it's not that you shouldn't trust anything they say, but again, it's a mindset. Everything you do is about how you present your mindset going in. And so if you go in with the mindset of don't trust, then you'll be curious. Then you're going to ask questions. It's not that you think that they're bad people. I didn't say they're bad people. I said, just don't trust. Verify and then trust. And then another rule would be.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want to invest, I think, so my number one rule is avoid embarrassing loss. You want to avoid the loss of a company potentially blowing up. If the company might, you know, if it looks like it's a little bit expensive and it might potentially go down five percent or something or ten percent or twenty, okay, you can deal with that. But if you're investing in a company where if something goes wrong, you could wake up one day and it's down twenty or fifty percent, that's the one you don't want to have in your portfolio because investors will never invest with you again.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The number one rule, and I boil this from Warren, and so if you ever, I was not going to pay attention to listen to me, but I did reach out to him. His number one rule is don't lose money. And my concern with don't lose money is any investment requires the absorption of risk. And so if you're not willing to take some level of risk, which means potentially to lose money, you won't make money either. So you don't want to invest with a position of fear.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“these things matter until they matter, and then when they matter, they matter a lot. You know, with great power comes great responsibility, you're right, this should not be interpreted as impelling that something's going to blow up. I'm just saying that there are some linkages, things we've seen in past euphoric times. Things could continue for any number of period. I don't know, but we're getting to a point, as I said earlier, where there's very little cost to risk today.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being negative typically is looking at facts. It's looking at numbers. It's presenting them to you in a way that says wow, that seems really compelling. If I want to sell you something, that is, you know, so that's the negative side. If I want to sell you the positive side, well, then I got to sell you the dream. AI is going to change the world. People are going to be no longer going to need to work. It's going to replace jobs. Margins are going to go higher. There's going to create, you know, it's going to improve healthcare services and all the phenomenal things that could potentially happen. And so you'd see that and then you're willing to invest. You're buying a dream. But if I tell you. This is based on all these intricate transactions where there's no disclosure about you go that doesn't matter, Anthony. Look, we're changing the world, buddy. I'd like to say”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's one of the things we're celebrating our 25th anniversary this year, and I developed ten rules, investing rules. They relate to life as well. But one of them is being negative sounds intelligent.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, it is fantastic business savvy. You want if I'm trying to create a new paradigm which is AI, then I in order to foster that paradigm, I need to invest in it as the key player in it. And what ends up happening if you see that my name as a key investor and a leader in this industry is making an investment in this company, well then what does everybody else do? Warren Buffett tells you he's buying something. What does everybody do? They go buy it. Well, if NVIDIA is buying something, what do all the private equity firms do looking around? Oh, that's a good one.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not material to NVIDIA and the dollar amount to Nvidia's total balance sheet is also immaterial. So it doesn't matter. But if this is happening over hundreds of transactions, whereas making investments like this in its own customers, then what ends up happening if all of a sudden it runs out of the ability to get cash or the customers end up having problems selling services with the chips that it buys, then kind of things start to fall apart.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company selling things at a long term receiver for over a period of extending beyond one operating cycle, but it's part of its normal operations that should be part of operating cash flow. And in fact, after an after Nortel, Fazby changed the rules, and then long term receivables became part of operating and short and current assets. And that's something we wrote about. We said, this is wrong. The free cash was actually negative because this number needs to be shown. So they're extremely vulnerable to something going wrong if the customer can make payments. And today, now let's look at the accounting today NVIDIA would make that investment in Corweave? It's such a small, meaningless dollar amount. To the balance sheet of NVIDIA, that the amount of disclosure is irrelevant. It's a related party. Now, we only own five percent.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“statements of Nortel didn't show that long term loan as a part of current assets. It showed it as part of long term assets. So when the simple calculation of current ratios, they would only take well current assets. And so this long-term asset, that wouldn't show up as part of the liquidity calculation. It also wouldn't show up as part of operating cash flow. And if it's not part of operating cash flow, then operating cash flow looks better. And no one would look at long term receivables. And what they would, because they're taught in their CFA, how do you calculate free cash flow? Operating cash flow less capex. But this is the problem with when you just create, race, and invest by ratio. The ratio needs to be adapted to the company, the life cycle, the industry, the business model.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“trying to close its equity, its financing on the last moment, NVIDIA buys two hundred fifty million dollars worth of shares of Corweave, so that it could close the deal. These are, you know, JP Morgan gives them a loan so that they could just before they go public and then they go public and repay the loan to JP Morgan. Who's one of the lead underwriters? JP Morgan. No one's doing anything bad. No one's cheating. It's just these are all the same type of symptoms of things that we're going on way back some twenty five years ago. All these things don't mean anything. Nothing means anything until it means something. I say, you know, the things that we're talking about right now, these little things, if you will, you know, in the time of two thousands, just like we talked about Enron that didn't have the disclosure, so the key wrinkle to everything I brought up, and that's why now I want to take it to the accounting, is the financial.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“NVIDIA invests in open AI and NVIDIA is a supplier of chips to OpenAI. So it's all circular what's going on here. There's a new company that just went public earlier this year, Corweave. Who is its largest customer? Corweave provides data transaction like analysis of on chips, right? It's a data farm for the large AI users like Microsoft. It's largest customer is Microsoft. Microsoft hasn't invested in it. But NVIDIA supplies pretty much all its chips. Corweave goes public.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“etc that were the customers of the big three that I just mentioned they went by the wayside. And so what ended up sort of now let's take that and think about what's happening today. So you have the likes of the NVIDIAS of the world and let's say Microsoft and you have OpenAI and such and NVIDIA is investing in OpenAI and Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI. Microsoft offers cloud services to OpenAI. So it's a customer. So OpenAI becomes a customer of Microsoft, but Microsoft gave it the money so they could actually pay it back.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eventually get some debt, but the powers that be at Lucent and Nortel would also offer them, so they would say buy this ten million dollars worth of product, and why don't you pay me over some extended period of time? Oh, and by the way, we'll give you a line of credit so that you need ten million from us of cable, but you need to buy some routers from Cisco, you know what will give you some line of credit so you could do that because Norto could borrow money, could had a great balance sheet, could raise money, whatever. And so that's what was happening. Well, ultimately when the equity market started to wobble and there was no one left to continue to make sales to, right? Well, then now all of a sudden Nort and Nortel didn't get paid on its debts and the wheels came off, and then the three hundred sixty night works in JDS unifays.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I knew what I was looking at but didn't realize that if you dropped said pebble into the water, what happens? And then when John Roth gets quoted in the newspaper that we're hurting his ability to raise capital, and clients are cancelling, and employees are contacting us upset because of the things we're saying, and it's like, I didn't mean to hurt anybody, I'm just saying the truth, hence the name Veritas. So let's link to what I think some of the linkages from the past. So at the time you had Nortel and you had Cisco and you had Lucent and they were building out various components, parts of the internet. And what they would do was they needed customers. Well, the customers needed to raise money because if you're going to build infrastructure, you're not going to generate cash flow for some time. So they would raise money from equity holders.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so what I see is the same. We actually put, you know, I transitioned the forensic accounting knowledge and skill set into what is today Veritas. And so that's an independent equity research firm. And then later into also an asset management arm. And all of that started because we wrote a cell report on Nortel in 2000. And people thought we were crazy. And at the time I was 29 years old. So I didn't realize what I was actually doing. It's amazing when we're young.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“which is the most dangerous words in life and in finance. One day they want to write a book that marries finance with life because it's one and the same.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and markets can continue going up for any number of amount of time because it's a function of how much liquidity is in the market as well. People have if investors have lots of cash they'll continue to invest. The people that you're seeing that are making the most money today are not those that historically in general I'm speaking the ones that you hear about that have made money historically. We talk Radalio, we talk about, you mentioned, of course, Warren Buffett. And there's a quote that I learned over time and it says, during raging bull markets, knowledge is superfluous and experience is a handicap. If you have the benefit of knowing what happened in all the other blow ups, you know how painful it could be. But if you've never experienced it and every time something went wrong it just rallied back like nothing happened.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I like the comment you made, Shane, I'm not here to predict markets. It's a fool's game. I don't know, you know, I wish I knew that I just by futures and make tons of money or short them. But what instead I know is I'm looking at the underlying companies and except for some of the MAG seven that are growing to earnings, the smaller and mid caps are not. When Walmart is telling you that there's a problem with its sales forecast and target is struggling and Lou Lemon can't sell the same number of pants and Starbucks is considering to changing some of its pricing and some of its business model, you know, this is Joe Sixback and Stevie Weinbox that stepped up from Joe Sixpack you have Stevie Weinbox in the middle and I think they're the ones that are struggling and so it tells me that this can continue”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing about the markets and companies is they'll continue longer than you and I will be alive. And so when you're investing, it just depends on your horizon. And I think what's happening today is investors have learned and rightly so that every time the market falls it rallies back.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It could become a situation of where you sell the news, because everybody was moving the market up in anticipation of it happening because the belief is when we cut rates, we provide more lower cost capital to companies, they put that capital to work, and it generates return. Every company is only as good or as stable or as strong as its customer base, and if we're seeing that the customer base of let's call it the average Joe, and I call that Joe six pack, he's a buddy of mine, we all have a buddy Joe sixpack. And so if Joe sixpack is struggling, then ultimately how is everything going to trickle down and create growth?”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They want interest rates down because debts have continued to balloon in a period which has been relatively buoyant by historical standards and interest rates they perceive, interest rates are going to go down, that's going to keep on the buoyancy. Well, the central bank, and if you follow Powell despite all the pressures coming from Trump to cut rates, I mean, Powell is going to cut rates because he's concerned about either the employment situation, right, or the economic situation more broadly”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Benign levels not the lowest it's ever been, but it's at a benign level. So in essence what investors are saying is there's no risk. Everything's fine.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And I think right now the reason why I think we're in a very high risk situation is because the cost of the risk is priced very low. And that's when the risk is highest. And so how do we look at that? We look at the high yield bond spread, the spread between the ten year bond and the high yield bond in the US. Okay, that's the non-investment grade bonds. Well, that's the tightest, near the tightest that's ever been. which means that investors are willing to lend money to non investment grade companies at a spread over what a government bond is at a rate which is the tightest its being practically in history. So there's no risk priced in to the bond market, and then in the equity markets we use VIX, which is a measurable volatility of the SP five hundred, and that is trading.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But those companies don't exist anymore. They built what they built, and that still exists, but they no longer exist. either bankrupt or folded into other companies. Cisco still exists today, but has never traded at its historical valuation, and yet it's a multiples bigger than it was back then, and by earnings and by revenue.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's what I think the fundamentals are. And so when a company today is not generating much in free cash, impact negative, and yet the market wants to trade it at a multiple of its revenues, Well, then the company's valuations is extracted from its current fundamentals and trading based on some future expectations. I've been asked if you could have anything, what would it be? And I'd say tomorrow's newspaper, because then I'd know what was going to happen and I would be able to invest on that. And so we're all trying to do the impossible, figure out what's going to happen tomorrow. And all I know is I've seen that when you read and speak to investors and they say that the numbers don't matter and the financial statements no longer matter because this is changing the world, I say well I've seen this before. You know, I saw that Nortel was changing the world and Lucent and Cisco and three hundred sixty networks. They were building out the infrastructure of the internet but were using today.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're talking now equity markets as that. I think we're in what seems to be on a hate calling things bubbles, but I think we're in a period of extreme euphoria where the numbers, the fundamentals and fundamentals is thrown around in the investment industry, like the word love is thrown around among humans. The fundamentals, well, someone looks at the chart and sees that, you know, it did a double bottom. Well, that's the fundamentals. And someone else says, you know, that they're looking at the RSI or some other things or someone else says they're just looking at cash flow or someone's looking at the multiple related to earnings. And those are the fundamentals. Well, you know, historically, and if we follow what Buffett says, the company is the present value of its future cash flows. And how do you develop those cash flows? Well, you need to do a forecast on what it's going to drive the business.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if I can make the initial stage, it can help me get there quicker, and more accurately, but if I don't already have a model of what I'm looking for, it's not going to get there.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The chef who created that recipe, who's got all the Who did the, you know, who's made it hundreds of times? It and they're like, oh, your oven said 375, but it's actually 350. You stirred this too much. You let this boil. They instantly know what went wrong. if in a world of AI that's the nuance I was telling Steve Shortsman about this in a different way. But he basically said, you know, a lot of the analysts coming up, they know the numbers, but they don't know what the numbers mean, correct. Experience teaches you judgment and you And a lot of the things I see happening today link back to things I've seen when I started my career over the last thirty years. And I think that's something that AI can't quite do unless you tell it where to look because it doesn't know the link toad that I'm thinking about to it.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do every You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between me and the chef. Like the food, maybe it's not plated as well, but. Gray. It's going to taste the same. You'd be like, this is amazing. But if something goes wrong, if you want If I don't”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so In their career fifteen, twenty years. And I use my 14-year-old as an example. You know, in a world where human work, he's a mid le”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And somehow it's okay So it wasn't okay in my class and ultimately I think you build respect because people see that there's a rule and it's followed and then people have respect for the rule Weird”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I taught at university for about fourteen years at York, and truly one of a very fulfilling time in my life and I still loving guest lectures. I remember I would always start to, you know, I would go over the outline and I would tell the students, I said, so assignments are due at the beginning of class. If they're handed in after the 8.30 start time, it's a zero. and invariably at some whether it was the first and usually the first or second assignment, somebody would show up and hand it in late, and I would say it's a zero. And they would whine and say it's how can you do that and you're so draconian. And I said, well, you think in the real world when an RFP is required and you've signed with the contract with a client that they demand the report by nine AM on Monday and you show up at nine oh five? How's that look?”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, in fact, it ties to so many things with my own children I've seen growing up when we went to school and we were in elementary school, we would be, you know, we'd have to do the math tables and recite them two times two is four and so on. I remember I was struggled with my nine times table and then my 12th times table and so I had to memorize them and get them going. But then my children came along and they were using a calculator. And apparently that was okay. I went bananas. I said, you're not going to use the calculator. You need to learn it without the calculator, and then you can use the calculator, which is the same with AI. You need to understand how the financial statements are prepared, understand the linkages, develop mental models, so that when the AI gives you information, you can digest it and make decisions.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A hundred percent This is I love it. If that's where investors go and that's where they're going, everything's going to AI. The bottom level of being an analyst, the junior analyst is going to be replaced by an AI. The one that said find me all the references of where the company capitalized costs, that the AI can do. I get it. But you need someone with experience to know which of those references matter and to what that means to the business. And this brings about a number of challenges because, well, if that junior person doesn't learn, doesn't get on the inn on the ground floor, they'll never learn to be able to make all those connections.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So then you think that that's enough, but you have to then, and I was showing one of my guys this, so then let's go to the income, let's actually pull up the statements where it told us to go, because AI made it faster. I now no longer needed to flip the 300 pages, but it gave me where to go. So now I went there, and now I could say, well, that means if that is what's happened, then we need to look at this other note to see the implications of that. And then we got to look at the cash flow statement to see how it's actually impacting what ends up being reported as cash flow. And so those linkages come, the AI makes me get to the answer perhaps more quickly. But it's my, if I don't already know where I want to go, then AI just gives me information. But if that information doesn't help my decision if I didn't start with where I want to get to.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because now read the financial statements, Auntie, I just put it into A. What about this? Look for that, look for that, and there's all the instances of those things, and then I just read it and it's all there. Well, did the AI miss it? Did the AI understand the linkages between each of those sightings? If I'm looking at, for example, I was looking at a company recently and I was looking at it was capitalizing costs. Okay, this is a reit, and if it capitalizes costs versus putting them through the income statement, if it goes through the income statement, it makes their operating earnings look poor, lower, and their EPS ultimately. But if they put it on the balance sheet, well, you know, that's an investment in the future and everything looks okay, right? And so there's a gray area. Was it an operating expense or was it a capital item? And so first thing I looked for was capitalized interest. And so it gave me all the quotes. And then capitalized costs and gave me all the quotes.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do you mean it's a B plus? Do you think that question, that way I answered that question couldn't have been this way or the other way? You know, and this is it ties into so many things, you know, AI and so forth. Business is judgment. People run companies. They don't run themselves. The decisions associated with a business transaction end up being reflected on those financial statements. But when the group that's making the decision in the business to do something, well, then they come back to the office and show up in the accounting department and say, hey, we just did this. You know, can you guys figure out how to account for it? And all of a sudden the accounts are like, oh, what do I do now? How do I do this? Because then, and by the way, when you do this, I want it presented as bright as possible so that our investors and all our stakeholders are really excited by the results. Like, don't present it badly.”
2025-10-28 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source