YouSaid · the spoken record

Bruce Flatt

lines on the record: 84
first: 2025-04-01
most recent: 2025-04-01
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

“Brookfield Is one of the great investment management groups in the world today. And 20 years from today, success is that it is bigger, broader, more relevant to clients and continues to do exactly what it does today for everybody and earn reasonable returns with downside risk protected. And if we can do that, we'll have felt success of all of this.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know like I would say we have a large amount of capital ourselves, we've always invested ourselves. We want to make mistakes with our own money first. Not with others our reputation with our clients is the only thing we have. And that's really important to us. And we try to incrementally grow two prices. For example, we have a massive platform in the United States, so we started an insurance in the United States. Now we're going to the UK. Do the same thing we did in the United States. We just got licensed to do that, but we now have all the experience we have from the United States. We probably couldn't have started there because we just didn't have the same presence there as we had here.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't randomly go to countries This is not a random business. This is hard work, therefore, we have to be in country, be able to action, an opportunity when it comes. And therefore, if we're not in a country and somebody calls us with an opportunity, we just say, sorry, we're not set up to do that, no can do.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that you can't go to a little country? We can't invest $100 million. It's not relevant to us. So we need large places. We'd like them to have We need to operate with a standard, so we operate globally with. We'd like to have large GDP. We'd like to have it growing. And we'd like to have a currency that's relatively I didn't have to grow better than everyone else. It just has to stay consistent. If it's highly volatile, I'm not good. If it goes down over the long periods of time, Pat So we'd rather pick countries with those. Those factors, and but it all comes down to price, like some have all that and then you invest when you can. But for us, we have to have people on the ground. So we picked those countries very methodically. We put people on the ground. We invest from time to time new investments when we find the opportunities.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good means for us, it has to be large enough to build invest. Like we can't have small countries just not because they're not good place to invest. It's just not meaningful to us. When you have a trillion dollars things, Benefit or the Or the undrawback. Yeah, the drawback is that.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Politics don't really matter to us. You know, they do on the margin, but on balance, as long as you invest in a good country, You're going to be fine.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We invest in backbone infrastructure largely. And even our private equity business is our backbone infrastructure type businesses. Therefore, what's important for us is to go to good countries. With good people that you can operate with the standards we operate with, and that those countries respect rule of law and will over time be good places to invest. We don't really sell over borders. So in the United States, where we are We own data centers and telecom towers and real estate and industrial facilities and all of the things that we own in the US and we make batteries and we et cetera all of those are consumed by individuals or companies in the United States. They're not shipped. We make power. It's used within state.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The only thing I tell you about a model is produced in an investment committee is it will never be exactly. Happens. But I'd say if we're trying to get the trends right is really what it is. Is in investing, it's can you get the trend right? And I would say most of our investing is we're trying to get the price right for value. And therefore, often we're buying at a discount of what we think is the value of something. And therefore, that's an important thing to note.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just sometimes we're pushing out into areas which are adjunct to what we do and we probably shouldn't have. We really didn't know what we're doing. And not often does it happen, but once in a while.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We try to look at the successful ones you can usually identify and know what happened. The unsuccessful ones are harder to identify what happened. But often there are reasons why. And it either comes down to execution. You didn't execute properly. You mistimed the market or you just made a bad, bad, flawed investment decision. And those are the worst. You mistime the market. You know, it's okay. Making flawed investment decisions is really bad.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say in general we don't do training. But Every day, every single person in this organization is learning. And it's a learn biosmosis process. We have open plan in the place, including myself, never had an office. And people talk to one another. And it's very interactive. And therefore, well, I started off by saying we don't train anybody. We train them every single day. And it's just different than sending people to school.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would just say that cycles are never the same, but they sort of rhyme. And they look similar. So the one thing of having wise older guys around, I'll consider myself that today, I used to be a young, unwise individual. I'll try to consider myself. I know I'm old, just not sure I'm wise. But Some of the reason for having the wiser individual around is having the Elongated knowledge of what goes on in cycles and what goes on in periods. And we've seen this before is helpful. Sometimes it's a hindrance. Sometimes it's very helpful for context and therefore that's what makes great organizations, I think, in our view is that you have the combination of the tenacity and passion to make investments and be successful tempered by The”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you may not want that. And if you do, you better knowingly do it. And so in addition to all the deals being approved down below where accountability comes from, we have an oversight committee that approves everything that goes on in the organization, which includes six or eight of us. And that approves everything really just to be a final governor over the entire organization.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, usually, what happens to some transaction came into the company some way, or we had an idea and we won't talk to somebody and a transaction came about. It's then approved by today because we have these vast businesses. It's approved in the business, but then we have one committee that it's almost like an allocation committee up top because we want to know how many across the organization we want to know how many transactions are happening at any one point in time. So we're not compromising like you said, how could you make a mistake if everybody made a massive transaction at the same point in time, what we're probably betting on is a cycle.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, look, we make mistakes. We try to make small mistakes. I'd say that's it. When we're wrong, where are we wrong? We're wrong in small ways Which aren't You don't know about them very much. Because in the last 35 years, we've been right generally on the large things and nothing has been. Irreparably harmful. And that's because the things we do are small incremental. And when we make mistakes, we make them along the way. And we encourage people to keep... Learning and growing because if you don't make some mistakes, you never advance, but do not make big mistakes. And that's, I'd say that's the biggest thing we try to impress across the organization.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our investment process is we only invest in things that we deal with and know. We have people on the ground, and our knowledge of the business, and our investment committees are normally only focused on downside protection. Upside will always take care of itself. And whether you shoot for 16%, 22%, 29, 18, none of those matter. They're all great. What's really important is what are the risks? What can go wrong? How bad could it get? And how do we deal with it if that happens? And so we spend virtually all of our time on townside protection at our investment committees, and that's all that's important to us.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every new trend in the world and what's going on out there. And it also, I'd say, creates a culture where people want to be here and get ahead because they know they can. And so I, look, we brought. To the partners and to our senior people three years ago, we brought Connor Teskey forward as the next person that will be the CEO of the Asset Management Business. That was internally vetted. It was an externally vetted. And today we're in the process of him continuing to meet clients and investors and all those kind of things. And I think he's 37 years old today. He's incredibly passionate, talented, and he'll bring through a whole new group of people within the company and re-energizing businesses is what makes them better and different.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we've always had the view that firstly, we're an extreme meritocracy. This is a partnership, it's partnership of individuals. When we leave the partnership, our shares that if you're an owner or controller of the partnership, they go away. They go on to somebody else. So nobody's family will ever... Ever be part of this partnership, it's a meritocracy. Second, we've always had the view that a cross between Wise older people. And smart, aggressive, young people, both give you the gravitas to deal with situations which you need a little history, but also allow you to be Allow you to know more about what's going on today. I'm positive our 30 year olds today and the business know more about technology than I do because they've grown up with it differently. It allows us to be faster, better, quicker.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think they're all different, they're all totally different. Everything we invest into has enormous opportunity going forward as long as we execute properly. But each one of them is different. I get excited. I could get excited about having all of my net worth in every single one of them. And they're all pretty exciting going forward.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can trust us for that, and that's what it is. So they're just different audiences. And it just allows us to have a security, which is tailored to that audience. And if we want to offer it to somebody in the public markets or to another alternative manager, we want to merge in or something, it gives us the opportunity to do that and not have to deal with all the other issues that we have. What about your insurance business? Or what about your investments? Or what are you going to do next? And it just allows us to do that. So I don't, we could do it. It just would take away a lot of the great benefits we have in the organization.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would just mean dilution to some shareholder. And for example, we spun off our asset management business two years ago. There's a whole group of U.S. investors, largely, that buy asset management businesses that only want to be invested in asset management. They don't want to own assets that we own. They don't want to be invested in insurance. They don't want to do all the other things we do. They don't want to change. Like our parent company, Brookfield Corporation. It has changed in 35 years in many different ways and many different times for the benefit of all of us. But you need to trust us when we're changing. Field asset management is a pure play asset management business that's asset light that will probably never be anything different.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the short term, we could wave a wand and get rid of all those, as you denote complicated parts. We could wave one, get rid of them all. In the long term, it would be bad for shareholders. Less returns would be earned. We would be more at financial risk. We have the maximum amount of flexibility within our structure to be able to go through, deal with opportunities, risks, and everything that's out there. So I just, look, we can always do better on explaining the pieces, and we try all the time. And it's incredibly our reputation is incredibly important to us. So when people criticize us about our structure, our different things that are there. Try to double down and make sure we explain it all to people. But I would just say that each of those pieces is really important and contribute a lot to the business.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I would just say that, yes, there are probably more pieces of Brookfield. First hand, I might disagree first by saying there are Many companies in the world That are large like us, and they have as many pieces as we do. That's first point. So I'm not sure that's actually a true statement, but I'll take your points at face value, and I would just say each one of the pieces we've set up has been highly thought through and contributes a lot to the business. These are not random things we've done. They're very specific and they contribute enormous value in the long term to the company. And because of that, we have to explain them more to maybe sometimes have to explain them more to investors. But for our friends, they understand exactly why those pieces are there and what they do for us and what each accomplishes.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have a $10 billion plan. There's $10 billion assets, $10 billion liabilities. They can commute that plan to us and we can, our insurance company can take it. So they're no longer on the hook for the plan. They're no longer at risk on the assets or the liabilities. We've assumed that risk. We will now pay their pensioners, and they gave us the assets to earn over time, hopefully the amount of money to pay all their pensioners. And if not, we're on the hook for it, not them.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are pension risk transfer means, which happens in the US, Canada, and the UK largely, those three places in the world. What it means is that if there's a corporation that has a defined benefit plan that wants to get it off their balance sheet,”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, look, I would say we wanted to start. This is a 25-year venture. We're five years in. We wanted to start to make sure that we knew what we were doing. We met all our regulators. We earned their respect. And we could operate and figure out what were all the risks. We've been in it five years. We're very comfortable. Over time, we may branch out into other types of products that we can understand that fit our skill set. And that's really what's important to us. So first, we're expanding internationally writing annuities or pension risk transfer annuities, which are both are very similar. So instead of going out of our... The comfort zone on the type of liability. What we're doing today is we're expanding to the UK, which is a big pension risk transfer market. And that's just a different way to expand.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Transparent with all the transactions we do with them. And we happen to have some very unique things that we can do because, for example, if we own an office building and somebody owns the other half and they want to sell and we know that's a really cheap price they're going to sell at, that's a great real estate investment for our insurance company. Very seldom do people have that opportunity with our knowledge and access to opportunities. So it's a pretty unique offering and that's what we bring to the table.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can own real estate to a greater extent. We can own alternatives to a greater extent. We can own infrastructure to a greater extent. We can own high-yield bonds as opposed to just fixed income on the market. All the things that we do for our clients, we can put them in the insurance company, and they may take more capital, but we've overcapitalized the company. So we started with $4 billion. We've increased the capital, I think, to $16, $17 billion of book equity within the business. We continued overcapitalize. But on top of that, we have another $150 billion of capital up top that if we need more money, we'll put it into the insurance companies to ensure they're healthy and better than any that are out there. And we have an excellent relationship with the regulators and explain all these things to them and are very...”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We knew it is. What appeals to you? It's just because they're low risk liabilities. We're not taking on high risk on the liability side. Our goal originally was in getting into this was don't take risk on the liabilities, earn our money on the asset side. And we have this unique ability to earn excess returns on the asset side. And our goal was put very significant amounts of capital and overcapitalize the businesses, which allows us to do things in the asset side of the balance sheet, which is very different than many insurance companies.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our goal is our clients come to us because they want our investment skills. What we have is a very unique offering, is a bunch of investment skills that can create products for long-term investors. Our insurance company now being $120 billion of assets is a perfect long-term investor into all of the things we do from our asset management business. So we have a special... Special expertise to be able to offer because we have access to our investment products or we have greater access or greater comfort with all the investment products to be able to put into the insurance companies than most other groups out there. Maybe there's a few other others like us, but not very many. And therefore, we have a special benefit for that. So we've chosen annuities in the United States largely. So far, we've now just got licensed in the United Kingdom.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, outside of our asset management business, we decided to take a portion of our capital and put it into insurance five years ago. It was a fortuitous time because we bought some excellent insurance companies at a point in time where they weren't doing very well because interest rates were extremely low and they weren't earning very high returns on their capital. Fast forward four years later, the companies are doing extremely well. We're making $2 billion a year of cash flow within the business. And insurance for us is, I'd say the following. Firstly, maybe just to go back, our goal was get in the insurance business, not because we wanted to be an insurance.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can buy it in the public market that fits in a stock portfolio, but to date we haven't offered you a product for your 401k in the private market. That was open to you to say, Do you want to buy infrastructure with us and just own a bunch of data centers and different things like that? We happen to have a couple of listed ones that are very unique, but what people want is private assets within their portfolios, and that's going to increase. I'd say exponentially over the next 20 years.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now happening in retail being individuals. 401ks in the US are going to open up to alternatives. I think plans around the world will open up to alternatives. Alternatives are ideal products for retail as well. In fact, they're almost more ideal because you're saving for your retirement and what better to have in there than a product that earns a reasonable return over very long period of time and can compound. And so the future of our asset management business is really about that the opening up of retail and continued growth of retail wealth with our products, doing the same things that we do for institutions, exact same. Now just opening up in different types of products that are suited or tailored for individuals.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It started, nobody wanted to invest with us because they didn't really understand alternatives. And today that's turned into a trillion dollar business. It's been extremely successful largely because these products are ideal for institutional and retail clients to invest into. And the past 25 years has been about institutional and this comment is not meant to say that they won't be investing, but their increase from going from zero to some of them are at 30, 40, 50 percent alternatives. When you go from zero to 50, you can't go to 100. So a lot of them are out there numbers, but what's happening today, and to your question of the future, is that the same phenomena.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we started as an We just invested for ourselves. We had the businesses that we basically have today, infrastructure, real estate, renewables, and industrial service we call private equity to A businesses and credit lending. Those were our five businesses. We did it for ourselves and we lent money. And 25 years ago, we decided that we could take those skills we had. And turn them into a business to be able to manage. Some of our money and some of our institutional or other clients' money and offer alternatives into those funds”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's the point. The point is we've earned, our parent companies earn 19% return, annualized returns for 30 years. When you compound up, which doesn't sound like very much, 19% returns annualize for 30 years. Like it just, when you say that in that line, doesn't sound like that much. But I think that's a million dollars became almost $200 million over that period of time or $1,000 became $200,000. It's a lot. So the point is Success in investing isn't about making a lot of money in a short period of time What it's really about is earning reasonable returns over very long periods of time. And look, that's Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire Hathaway is successful because They have been able to deploy capital at reasonable amounts of turn over very long periods of time. And that's the success of long-term investing.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's not that much when you do what we do. A couple years ago we bought Deutsche Telekoms, a half a Deutsche Telecoms Telecom Tower business in Germany and Austria. It's $20 billion transaction. We're building for Microsoft $13 billion of power plants. We're building with Intel a $32 billion. Fabrication plant in Arizona. I can go through the list. These are large transactions that consume significant amounts of capital that earn excellent long-term returns. Just use that to say. We've been doing this a long time. What we promise our investors and our clients is that we will take moderate amounts of risk. Not no risk, but modern amounts of risk and earn good returns over long periods of time. We won't shoot the lights out. You're not going to get 45% returns every year. And we're not trying for that.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's even better to enhance the business is at that point in time as the market's starting to recover and once you're comfortable, we've taken care of all the things within our business that you can then invest capital into new businesses at that point in time and add to your entity. And if you can, that's the difference between the great winners and long-term investing and those that are just in the middle”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the first thing one has to do when there are dislocations in the market is make sure that You were prepared for it. So the one thing you should do always when times are really good is ensure that you're preparing for the down markets that's coming. The ones that don't Usually aren't successful in the fullness of time. But if you are prepared, the first order of business is let's double down and make sure that we're fully prepared. But then secondly, and I'd say coming out of recessions or cycles, coming out of the bottom, what's most important is just have everything you have intact. Do not lose anything. Do not lose too much and keep going because there'll be many people who will have lost stuff.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, look, I think that maybe is the most important point to note here is that interest rates aren't that high. They're higher than they were because interest rates went to zero, and for a number of years after the financial crisis, they were close to zero. And now they're actually in a normal, a relatively normal range. I'm sure we're going to see another few, 100 base points off of the short rates. And we're going to settle into just a regular range of rates. But these rates are actually pretty normal and for our business very constructive. And the things that we can do and we're refinancing at, because the coupons aren't that much different than what they were before.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Base rates are high. We're back to five. Guess what? Spreads are the lowest they've ever been in history. We just did a 30-year Brookfield corporation financing. So we're borrowing money for 30 years fixed for that time period and is 125 over. It spreads basically all in coupons are important and that's really important to remember about investing in real assets real estate but also infrastructure, renewables, et cetera.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what most of the lenders said to us is I'm not going to lend you at 200 over and give you three. I'm widening that out to 350. So I'll give you five. Four and a half. And therefore, before we were born at five, and in COVID, we were boring at four and a half. So when people say, oh, geez, you've got all this financing in COVID. Yes, maybe some people did and some people got very low rates because rates were zero and they might have borrowed at two at an extreme point in time, but not very much. And most of it lenders just widened the spread out. Today...”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is with our lenders is that we're one of the best sponsors in the world to lend money to because we support our businesses. But having asset by asset by asset financing allows you to just deal with the situation one by one by one and its duration. I mean, they're spread over long, long periods of time. And with interest rates, I think the most important thing to remember is we don't borrow the treasury rate. Only the government borrows at treasury rates. And what we borrow at is Treasury rate plus spread. And historically, spreads were 200 basis points, and interest rates were 300 basis points, and therefore you borrowed at five. And when COVID hit interest rate, the treasury rate went to zero.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our fundamental thesis of investing is that you should put a prudent amount of debt on assets that can withstand markets if you can, then you should fix it because you know your cost. And from time to time, if you got it wrong, you put sure you have a little more money around to put it in and support your asset. So we've always conservatively financed our businesses and assets all of our financing is asset by asset by asset by asset or business by business by business by business. So any debt that we accumulate onto our consolidated balance sheet is just the accumulation of a whole bunch of single asset financings. And it's not that we ever want to or think that we will give back assets or not live up. In fact, our reputation.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we continue to experience some great numbers. Look, over the last five years because of COVID and because of other things, and because interest rates went up by 400,000 or 500 base points, all of that disrupted the real estate market. But the worst is behind us by far. We're looking in the rearview mirror by what happened in real estate. And in fact, this time the fundamentals are actually pretty good in most things. It's just there are some people that have capital structures that aren't built for these financing markets. And therefore, they have to put capital in to be able to deleverage or whatever they have to do or somebody else will take over the asset. But that's not a huge issue. Across the world.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In stores today, what they do is they do very bespoke shopping in stores and they want experiences in stores. But if you want to buy paper towels, you usually don't go to the mall. You just order it online. But if you want to have a meal and you want to go and try on a shirt or pair of pants or have some fun for the afternoon, you go to the mall. And that's what's changed is that commodity goods, if you own commodity If you own almost today commodity anything, it's bad. If you own commodity office, bad, if you own commodity retail bad, you own commodity industrial bad. In fact, if you own commodity hotels bad, what's great today is all of those things in the top 25%. And our view always has been by the best, own the best, by the best, continue to Reinvest into the best, and so our real estate is among the best in the world.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I would say over the past 25, 30 years, 10 years, five years. These things always just evolve. And industrial capacity used to be just used for manufacturing, storage of goods, and today it's used for transportation of many goods that are delivered to homes. So industrial has changed enormously changed as a business over the past 10 years. Retail has changed because people used to all their shopping”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is no straight line in anything. Everyone always thinks that somebody says something and it's going to happen tomorrow morning. Usually it happens in greater amounts, but it takes longer periods of time and takes slower than you think it would happen. I would say we're in the early stages of all of this. We're going to see productivity advances and nobody just flips a switch. Is nobody ever flips a switch? These are incremental changes over very long periods of time, but what it means is that the application of greater intelligence into businesses is going to make business better, more efficient, more productive, and better for the world, frankly. That just makes us all smarter.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Energy, capital, and technology dominance. There's nobody in the world that has a technology businesses that the US has. There's nothing in the world that has the capital markets the U.S. has. And the US, just by nature, has dominance and some hard work has dominance in oil, in gas, in solar, and in wind, and has dominance in nuclear. those five things together give it energy dominance in the world for a long, long period of time and so i think those three those three things are going to make on top of one of the greatest gdps in the world an entrepreneurial class manufacturing moving back at least to some extent a lot or to some extent on balance is going to be positive For growth. The US has a pretty good runway going forward.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On balance for Western countries, I'll just take the US as an example, you're bringing some jobs back, maybe not as many as left before to make the product, but if that product comes back, you've actually added jobs. And that's very positive, which sort of leads to the long-term story of America, which is the long-term story of America is extremely strong because the US today has energy capital and technology dominance.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source