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

“Look, I think China, it's an economy in itself today. It's 1.5 billion people. They're getting richer every day. They're turning into a consumer service society. There's not that much of manufacturing that's relevant to them. I think they will do extremely well as a country on their own. But there are some countries in the world where they haven't yet transformed themselves to be service economies and they're reliant on jobs that were from outsourced manufacturing. And if you can do that closer to consumer, those countries may have some issues.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It can't get out of China. What am I going to do? So increasingly those type of things, but also with tariffs and with other things, you're going to relocate manufacturing capacity back to other markets and be more local. And what I would say is many things went to Asia and a lot of them will stay there. And the Asian markets will be fine with this because they've now matured to the point where they are service economies in themselves. But many products that have been developed there will move back to America because the labor components with robotics coming in are becoming less and less and less. So the reason for them to be in Asia is less their... Today, than it's ever been, and on top of that, if there happens to be a tariff long, if there is a tariff longer term, then it's even going to quicken that process up.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because of what's going on in the world. And that started with COVID. It started with the Asia West issues, which, as you can imagine, that one has only since we coined that four years ago, five years ago, it's only increased given what's been going on. But increasingly, many companies are moving industrial capacity back to Western markets where on balance they can make sense of putting plants there. Part of it's for supply chain, pharmaceuticals now need to be next, some of it needs to be next to customer because they get caught during COVID that all of a sudden all my manufacturing in China, how do I get it here?”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the third trend that we identified a long time ago, and I'd say it's changed even more but is more relevant today than ever, which is just the de-globalization of industry, or I'd call it the re-industrialization of countries.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generally, yes. We're not, we've in past, we never have, and I don't think we need to take risk on that. And therefore, it's like when we build an office building, you let it to a bunch of tenants, then you build it for them. And you don't have to take the risk on that in particular in these because of the demand for it.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Power the data center and the needs of the technology companies are very significant. And on top of that, energy usage everywhere is going up. And as a result of that, it just takes time to bring sites on. And most sites today that are available to be built are already contracted to somebody for the next 20 years. We're at a point in time where we're now trying to entitle new sites and we're, because of our vast real estate business, our vast power business, our vast data center business, we're as skilled and as integrated as they are to entitle new sites, but it takes time. And we've got some really exciting large sites coming, but the earliest big one that's going to come. On that's brand new that we're entitling will, and even though it has enormous advantages because of it already has power, it'll be years away.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the reason why one of your questions earlier, which I really didn't answer, was our data centers, are we going to get in trouble with the amount of money that's going into data centers? And the answer is no. And it's largely because it takes a long time to permit a data center. You need to find power to...”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, we have baseload capacity in the US, which is nuclear. That will continue to grow. We can talk about nuclear if we have time later. What's happening in grids is that you need something to stabilize the grids and to store when, because remember, solar, the sun only shines during the day, usually dark at night. wind actually usually only blows at night but you normally don't have the the incidence of both together are not always the case and you have to have something to bridge one of those and increasingly in past nuclear has done that and gases done that increasingly battery storage at scale distributed well Help both with transmission bottlenecks but also with the two offsetting amounts.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And where it's going to be needed for baseload because they need that baseload power, or it's replacing coal, which is hugely beneficial to the world. So natural gas is an incredibly important Bridge fuel in America and long term fuel in many other places in the world so the LNG market in the United States is extremely important and very lucrative for a long period of time.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as a result of it, the lowest cost power in most countries of the world is solar and wind. Therefore, you're going to choose solar and wind. So it's inexorable that we're going to build out more solar and wind in the world. In the United States today, there's no doubt we're drilling more oil, which is, remember, oil is not used in power. Oil is used for basically cars, chemicals, and planes. It goes into jet engine fuel, goes into car engine fuel, and it goes into chemicals. And that has nothing to do with power. Oil is not used for power. Natural gas is, and natural gas is one of the great assets the United States has. It's going to export it for a long time. It's going to use a lot of it in America. Eventually batteries and nuclear will be the baseload and it won't be natural gas, but it's being shipped elsewhere in the world.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second one is that there is a transition of the world to low carbon energy. And I say it that way because what's really important here is we just have less carbon out there. What's even more important today is that solar and wind, which is where's filling the gap, are the lowest cost energy sources for power in the world in most countries today. And why that's really important is it doesn't matter whether you choose to have less carbon or don't care about less carbon. What you do choose is to pay less for your power. And that's the simple economics are today. If you go to somebody and say, do you want to pay more for your power, they will say they will say, No, I don't want to pay more for the power.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every single business we have, we have a healthcare business where we have, we approve your healthcare in the United States if you need a back surgery and you need authorization from your insurance company to do it, we take the phone call from you and we approve it online. We approve your $150,000 operation or not and our agents do that. And today the amount of information we can put up when you call in is incredible. Even from two years ago, is incredible. And that just helps us make better decisions quicker and server clients who are the healthcare companies better. But it's everywhere. We're applying. These types of things in all the businesses, but we're in the first inning of this. So anybody that hasn't started should start. And it's not too late. We're in the early innings of the application of this.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as a result, and we have $9 billion of costs within the business, if you can improve those by 30%, that's a lot of money to the bottom line. And it can be very significant for the company.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just under half of the car battery. So we make the little car battery that starts your car when you Get up in the morning, it doesn't start, you have to go get a new one. So that normally that's Half of those Half of those will come from us. That are out there, and it's an amazing business, and we continue to re- you know, we're always trying to optimize businesses. Our job is to invest in businesses and make them better so that they will grow greater amounts of cash flow so we can continue to invest in the businesses and provide dividends to our owners. And so as we try to make these better, we're applying artificial intelligence into all our businesses, including that battery business, which is, and why it's a perfect one for these type of applications is we have 25,000 people in 20 plants. We do very repetitive process.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, we're in the early, early stages of this. And so we're trying to learn from everybody. We're talking to many. We've, of course, given our scale, we have access to very significant resources. And we can talk to most people. So we talked to all the technology greats. We deal with all of them in our business. In addition to that, we're continuing to learn and apply these technologies within our business. And what I can tell you is the early learnings of our business. Some of our industrial businesses are, and why I say the things I just said to you is that the early learnings are that the advancement of productivity is very, very significant.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to be the companies that can apply artificial intelligence into their businesses and make them more efficient and more profitable. And I think those that do it will win, those that don't, some will fall behind. But the productivity advances we see over the next 20 years probably will be unprecedented for a period of time. Certainly, we haven't seen it for a long time in business across America.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are the companies that are going to figure out how to apply artificial intelligence into their businesses and make them better? And there are many businesses today where you cannot get people to operate the businesses. There just aren't enough people. And if you can therefore deploy robotics into businesses and shrink the amount of labor you need, or there are plants that are being operated in Asia that had high dollar value, that's why they went there. But high dollar value products, but they went there because there was high labor component. If you can shrink the labor component, many of those plants can come back to where the demand is, specifically, I'd say the United States. So the unknown winners are”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they have enormous amounts of data. So they're going to win up. That's easy. I'm not sure there's anything that's helpful to anyone listening to this. If I tell you, oh, you should buy Google. These are going to be great companies and they're going to continue to be great. The winners that are unknown today”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's no straight line in investing to success. And usually at points in time, people will lose money because they get overexcited. But we're in a period of time where this is a major, major buildout of what's going on. The clear winners in this AI revolution are going to be the major technology companies. That's sort of easy. They're very sophisticated. They have large balance sheets and capital to deploy. They've already developed models and they're going to be very, very, they're going to win. They're going to win.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is in amounts which have almost never been seen invested before. So that's sort of the first theme we have of investment, and it both affects our operating businesses because we're now applying artificial intelligence in our business to make them better, and they'll be more productive. And we're also investing and supporting many of the technology companies with their funding for the re-digitalization of the world.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone thinks of artificial intelligence as chat GPT. I'm going to get it to write my cooking class memorandum. But really where the money is going to be made is the application of artificial intelligence into business and simply stated that's taking processes in service and industrial businesses. And making them more efficient by using advanced robotics who have learned how to run those processes from models run on artificial intelligence. And we're in the very, very early stages of that, but from an infrastructure standpoint, the amount of money being put behind this.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we generally have three sort of themes that we invest around or we have a few themes we invest around at all points in time today. We have three. The first one is just the digitalization of everything and the amount of capital that's being invested. Behind that digitalization. And really what it is is there are many, many, many, many trillions of dollars going into the Movement of information into the cloud. Onto your phone and just the digitalization of everything behind it. And that has been enhanced, increased, enhanced, by artificial intelligence and the networks being set up now to harness artificial intelligence. And maybe the most simplest way to explain it is”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I know the answer is no. The markets are never efficient. In fact, very seldom do they ever trade at the actual value of securities. Most of the time, they trade above or below. Very seldom do they trade at the value. But yes, I guess there are many theories in life.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And maybe even more importantly, by owning them privately, they don't have to have the distraction of the public market. They don't have to get confused that you and I bought a telecom tower business. It generates a 6% yield. It grows at 4% every year, and we don't have to invest much cash flow into it, so it's free cash flow. And if it's privately owned, we just watch the cash flow and keep growing and try to enhance the business and grow it. And that's what we do privately. If it trades in the public market, and today it's worth $20, and tomorrow because of whatever happens in the markets, it's worth $10, nothing changed in the business. And that distraction is what causes people issues. They sometimes make rash decisions. And I'd say that's maybe the biggest enhancement to long-term investors by having private assets.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the trading price of the security, one is not really relevant. Some businesses need access to capital and have to raise capital, and therefore the price is important. But most Businesses that are listed don't need access to capital. They're only listed because they're large and they happen to be just they need owners and therefore they're in the public markets. They're never issuing equity. And therefore the price of the security in the market really does matter. And in fact, it's a distraction, which is why when people often ask me what happened with the alternatives industry and why did it grow? The extent that it grew over the last 25 years. And it's really grown that way because private assets Are the fundamentals are exactly perfectly matched to the fundamentals of what institutional investors want to have in their portfolios?”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Firstly, you don't have to look at what the price is versus the value. You just know what the value is and you run it for what it is. But secondly, we can operate differently, finance differently, invest for the future, and run a business like somebody should just run it. If you and I owned a business privately. We wouldn't care about the markets. We wouldn't care about whether the stock went up or down tomorrow morning. We just run our business. Cash flow comes out. We decide, should we divide it out to ourselves to use together? Or should we keep it in the business and invest? And that's really the difference is all you look at is the fundamentals of your business if you're private. And if you're public, people tend to get distracted.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's changed is the price of some things trades up and down. If over the last 18, 24 months, if you've been one of the big technology stocks in the world, everyone needed or wanted to buy you in the indexes and therefore their multiples traded very high. But if you were something that Didn't neatly fit the indexes. It traded at a low price. The opportunities are that we can take those companies private. So we took a large container shipping company private. It had one analyst and nobody following it fit in no indexes. It was a $6 billion company and we took it private and it's been an exceptional investment. So we continue to I'd say capitalize on opportunities where we understand the value and the price is not trading at that in the markets.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, in everything, when there's, when I say there's a problem, there's always an opportunity. And I think that's the Chinese symbol, right? Problem and opportunity. For some companies, smaller mid-size don't fit indexes. They will be lost within public markets investing because active investors may not be investing in those sectors anymore. And if you don't fit the index. Increasingly, though, what it's doing is it's creating a large disparity in some securities at points in time between the price of them and the market and the value of the underlying assets. Back to, you asked me, first question, what has changed in the investing world? And I said nothing. That's related to value.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To many individuals in India, and that was originally built by Reliance Industries Geo. We bought it from them and we support their and other telecom companies activities through those telecom towers. And historically that would have been built by government. But that's built by private enterprise.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How that gets delivered to you is data center storing it, fiber delivering it to you, going to a tower and bringing it down to your phone wireless. And all of that needs enormous amounts of infrastructure and all of that is built by private enterprise, in fact, not virtually all of that is delivered to you as an individual, and this is 8 billion people in the world getting that delivered to them in various forms. It's all delivered by private money. And that's what's changed. Before historically, that was built out by governments. Today it's being built out by private enterprise, you know, to use an example. We own all of the telecom towers, not all, but we own a very substantial portion of the telecom towers in India. They deliver all the phone and wireless infrastructure.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we started an infrastructure 25 years ago, we were among the first, we thought that it would be governments privatizing. And to some extent it is, and they're not privatizing because they have a hard time selling assets. What they do is they're just not investing. Therefore, private enterprise takes it up. But the biggest area of investment today is really just the whole backbone of the world is changing. The digitization of the whole world behind your phone or your computer, as you know, laptops didn't exist before the internet didn't exist before. Cell phones didn't exist before. Today, you can have this podcast on your cell phone and go for run in the morning.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say maybe the most simple way to say it is 50% of the things that we invest in today. Did not exist as an investment asset class. For investors like us 20 years ago, 50%. And we invest in the backbone of the global economy. Like these are simple things. We deliver your water in the morning. We sold the road you drive on in the afternoon. We deliver your power to your house, the data center that powers your phone, we own. Those are all really backbone things. So what we do is backbone. This is not innovative venture capital that we're doing. But 50% of the backbone of what we own today did not exist as an asset class for investment 20 years ago.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, on the first level, I'd say it hasn't changed at all. What investing is about is to buying great things or great businesses, holding for long periods of time, earning cash returns, and that hasn't changed at all. So the fundamentals of investing are exactly the way they were before. What's changed is the environment around it. And I mentioned a couple things. First one is many businesses are publicly traded and the indexing of and passive investing has changed the publicly traded market for investments. It's very different than the actual investments. The investments are still the same. And what we do is still the same, how they trade in the market and whether they're included in indexes has changed how they trade in the public markets. So I think that is probably the fundamental, biggest thing. The second thing, and this”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fundamentals of investing hasn't changed at all. Buying great things or great businesses, holding for long periods of time, earning cash returns. What's changed is the environment around it. The whole backbone of the world is changing. Behind your phone or your computer, you can have this podcast on your cell phone and go for run in the morning. How that gets delivered to you is data center storing it, fiber delivering it to you, going to a tower and bringing it down to your phone wireless. And all of that needs enormous amounts of infrastructure. And all of that is built by private enterprise. 50% in the backbone of what we own today did not exist as an asset class for investment 20 years ago.”
2025-04-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bruce Flatt on Value, Discipline, and Durability · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source