Yet Another Value Podcast - Railroader (August 2025 fintwit book club)

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

In this episode of Yet Another Value Podcast Book Club, host Andrew Walker and co-host Byrne Hobart of The Diff discuss Railroader, the biography of Hunter Harrison—one of the most transformative figures in modern railroading. They explore Harrison’s management style, capital discipline, and the precision scheduled railroading model he pioneered. The conversation digs into his alliances with Bill Ackman and Paul Hilal, controversial board dynamics, and the balance between performance and persona. Was Harrison a generational genius or just a man with perfect timing? Tune in for a deep probe into leadership, rail strategy, and long-term industry shifts.___________________________________________________________[00:00:00] Podcast and guest introduction[00:01:54] Book focus: 'Railroader' overview[00:03:20] Hunter’s train schedule philosophy[00:05:21] Anecdotes of hands-on leadership[00:07:43] Hunter's capital allocation approach[00:09:33] Evaluating Hunter's industry impact[00:12:51] Railroad competition and timing[00:14:59] Railroads' long-term infrastructure value[00:17:05] Extreme management and physical risks[00:19:45] Strategic image and brand building[00:21:09] Customer complaints and PR responses[00:25:59] Precision scheduling adoption industrywide[00:27:36] Ackman and Hillel strategies[00:30:04] Norfolk Southern bid complications[00:33:39] Hunter's bold management targets[00:36:26] CEO succession and board relations[00:40:58] Hunter’s final campaign at CSX[00:43:19] Compensation and personal contradictions[00:47:37] Comparison: Ellison vs. Harrison[00:56:22] Wall Street expectations pressureLinks:Yet Another Value Blog: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com See our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimer

You're about to listen to the yet another value podcast with your host, me, Andrew Walker. Today is my monthly book club with my friend, Bern Hobart. He writes the diff. He's one of my favorite people to read. I think his newsletter has a higher open rate than any other thing that hits my inbox. So I really enjoy talking to Byrne. We talk about the railroader. The reason we're talking about it, as we'll discuss, is there's been a lot of railroad activity. So we kind of thought we'd read something topical, really interesting book. I think both of us were surprised by kind of our takeaways and how we thought about it in the takeaways from the book, but really interesting book. I'll include a link in the show notes if you want to go check out the book or anything,

but I'm excited to get to the monthly Finchwit Book Club. But first, over from our sponsors. Today's podcast is sponsored by, oh, kind of Alphosense, but also kind of me. Look, I've been talking about it on the blog for a while, but podcast number 333, I'd encourage you to go listen to it. It's me and Arden Fokin talking about how to kind of improve and perfect the craft of investing. I think it's a fantastic podcast. I had so much fun. We got great reviews on it. And then alongside that podcast, we did a webinar with Alphacin's talking about using two tools that I think of kind of revolutionized investing for, especially small investors over the past 10 years, expert networks and AI. Alphson says a burgeoning set of AI tools. And obviously one of the

reasons I got involved with Alphson's Zatigis is because of the expert calls. So I think you're really going to enjoy that podcast. I think you're going to learn a lot from that. I think you're going to learn a lot from the webinar. I'd encourage you to go, the podcast is always, free. So I encourage you to go listen to Episode 3333. But the webinar is free. All you have to do is follow the link of the show notes. Go sign up and you can listen to us talking about a tool that I think will really improve anyone as a fundamental investor. So that is the sponsor of this podcast. And thank you for listening. And we'll get to the full episode now. All right. Hello. Welcome to the other value podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Walker. With me today, it's my co-host for our monthly book

club, Byrne Hobart from the diff and capital gains. Burn, how's it going? Going great. Awesome. Well, today, I'm excited to to talk to you about we read the railroader that's the name of the book right i can't even remember the name of our own book it's just railroader yeah yeah railroader we run railroaders it's cleaner railroad this is the history of hunter the CEO who ran for like there are only seven class one railroad roads and he runs four of them he gets involved with acman in the book he's basically the railroad goat right i think people widely were harder than them and we decided to read that because railroads have been in the news. When we started doing this, there were lots of rumors that

Buffett's railroad, BNSF, and CSX would merge because Union-specific and Norfolk Southern announced the merger about a year ago, about a month ago. So we're seeing the railroads kind of start consolidating again, and we were like, hey, this will be a really interesting book to talk about with that backdrop. And, you know, just as we were getting ready to record, the, I think it was Bloomberg who reported that Buffett, he's not betting. Say again? He's not bidding, right? He's not bidding on CSX, but they announced a partnership at like three different places or something and there should be synergies there. So everything, all the chess pieces are still kind of rearranging. Anyway, that's an overarching theme of the book and what we thought.

I've got tons of questions. I thought this was very interesting, but I'd love to just start overall. Byrne, what were your takes on the book? The railroad, where does you want to go? So it was one of the things about the book is that I feel like he was either born in the exact ideal generation or the wrong generation. Because when you read about Harrison and his management style, he is extremely blunt, he's very first principles driven, not in the sense of he just imagines there's a way the business could work and he makes it work that way. But he's clearly someone who spent a lot of time looking at the spreadsheets, but also looking at the physical infrastructure and just asking himself, is there a better, faster way to do this? And I feel like he was actually really born to be a very, like a staff software engineer at AWS or Eddie or Google or some hyperscaler because he just has this very linear way of thinking about things. But he's also able to just abstract away the way things are done and ask that there's a better way to re-architect the whole system. So it's kind of a spoiler alert for the book.

But the historical way that the railroads worked as it's portrayed in the book is, Train arrives. It gets filled up with stuff. When it's full, it departs. And it's kind of the customer deciding when it fills up and the railroad is trying to get trains to where there is demand. And, you know, obviously they're scheduling this stuff, but the schedule is kind of a work of art and they are always willing to delay things in order for someone to add one more car load worth of stuff. And that, of course, encourages the customer to take their time. They don't have a really strong incentive to optimize around the train schedule because the train schedule is whatever they needed to be. And Harrison's idea is, no, let's actually just set a schedule, and if the train's not full, we will leave.

And then you know exactly how many trains you have, and you have a much better sense of where they are, how many things you need, how many backups you need, all of that stuff. So suddenly the network actually becomes more tractable. And what's weird about that is there are all these anecdotes in the book where it's clear that he just has insane working memory specifically around managing railroad networks. So there's the anecdote at the beginning where he, I think, does it say explicitly he likes to get hotel rooms when he's traveling from business? He likes to get a hotel room with a view of the railroad yard. And then he'll call off the rail manager and be like, hey, I see like the black engine over there isn't moving. Why is that engine not moving? And then there's another point later in the book where he actually pulls an all-nighter just being the dispatcher remotely for a different location.

He just spends the entire night doing that, even though he has the CEO. He's the CEO. He's 60. I think he's in his late 60s at the point. He's having some health problems and he just casually pulls in all night as a dispatcher. And he says, like, dispatcher, listen off. I'm going to make this work. Yeah.

Yeah. So he's really good at just the granular day-to-day details. And you feel like people like that, they end up doing very well for themselves. And they hit some level where the thing they're managing, it's at their maximum working memory. And if they try to do a little bit more, things would start to break. And he just seems to be able to toggle back and forth between here's what's happening over the next 15 minutes in this physical place versus here's what's happening over the next 50 years in the railroad business. And he does talk about how with railroads, he talks about the capital intensity and how railroad capital just depreciates more slowly than trucking. There's like one of the threads in this book is just how much he hates and resents the truckers because they clearly have what is in many ways of better business.

or certainly a much easier to manage business. And then he realizes that railroads do have this unbeatable competitive advantage of if you want to move a ton of mile of cargo over land and you have train tracks between where it is and where you want it to be, there is no cheaper way to do it. So you have that cost advantage, and then you have all this capital, and he has some line about how you are the capital investments, the capital allocation decisions you make now are the ones you live with

over the next half century. So you have to be really confident that you know what you're doing. But that's also what he's trying to do with his management approach is make that a more tractable problem. And if you have more of a sense of what utilization really looks like and where it trends and where it peaks, then you actually can afford to buy more equipment and buy more trains or repair the ones that you already have and so on. You're not flying blind as much. So in some ways, it's also a book about just the capital asset pricing model and how you get much, like you can really lever up if you actually know more about what your returns are and how bad they, how good or bad they'll be.

Let me, let me go a high level, right? There's lots of things in this. I found this book fascinating. In particular, I was really surprised by this. And I want to talk about this in a second with you. I thought this was the best book I've read in a long time for it just had these casual throwaways about how CEOs and boards work together and everything and how activists. It would just have these casual throwaways. It was like, I read entire activist books and I never hear inside like that. So I want to put a pin in that for a second. But if I just high level backups you, I read this book, and the whole book is about Hunter Harrison is the railroad goat. When Athman wants to buy an Athman in the back half of the book, his presence is huge.

When Athman wants to buy a railroad, he goes and gets Hunter Harrison. He gets his railroad to basically pay, I think this is CNP, $50 million to get him out of his nominee. Right, just let him out. Yeah. And then when he all spins out of Athman and wants to go get a railroad, he guarantees Harrison like, you know, over $100 million. I think he guarantees heirs an $100 million, and they pay CP in this case $100 million to get him out of his contract. So people are thrown around, you know, forget AI researchers. These are huge sums of money to get this one man.

And the whole book is he's got this photograph. I want to ask you, is he that good? Because the whole book is dedicated to him. But throughout the whole book, you'll see stuff like, hey, he takes their operating ratio down from 90 to 65. But, you know, I keep he seeing every other peer out the corner of your eye is at 70. And I keep seeing, oh, the stock went up 4-X in this time period. I went and looked at the stock price of all the other peers in the time period. They're better.

Heerson's better. But it's not like, you know, you're not screaming better. So I just wanted to do you think that this is a case of this one man's brilliance? Or do you think this is a case of, hey, he had a lot of tailwinds. The railroad industry for a lot of reasons was getting better from the early 90s to the 2010s. And he was really riding that. Yeah. When I mentioned earlier, you know, I wasn't sure if he was born in the exact right,

generation or the wrong one there's some line where he gets his first job at the frisco and he's something like the second person to be added to the team and i don't remember how absurdly long it was i want to i'm gonna go back and look i underline this um maybe i did hopefully i did um well you look i'll just throw out a random at the beginning he like he gets married to his wife and he's married to her for about 50 years but they get divorced for a few years in the middle and it's like oh yeah he would go to a bar and get on like three-on-one fights and wake up in a hospital room you're like, what? This man would become the CEO? This is crazy. It is railroad business. And apparently, there are all these anecdotes in that business about just, it seems like

the last gasp of a certain kind of blue collar culture of just, not just like you should act as if you could throw hands if you're mad at someone. But no, you will probably get in the periodic fist fights at the office. And it's all the part of the person. I love to join CSS. And this is completely different than throwing hands. But he joins CIS. Wait, our rule book has policies on napping during the day for our workers. We're not taking naps during the day. And it's just like, that is just true old blood. We are a monopoly.

We have railroad tracks. People will go on them. Yes. So here we go. He joins at the end of 1963. And he says he is the first or second person hired in his department at Friscoe since the end of the Second World War. Yes.

Yes. So there's some industries go through that, especially industries where they were growing fast and then they're in decline, where the last large class of people who got hired into that industry, those are the people who end up running it. And once growth slows down, average age goes up, everyone's really cautious. The people who move up in that business are the ones who were more cautious, the ones who did not want to spend and did not want to change things

and to kind of manage the decline well. And yeah, you eventually reach this point where all the bad trends are exhausted. Like coal was such a big part of the railroad business for a very long time. Railroads are great for transporting coal, but we just don't want to be transporting as much coal as we used to. So that number always ticks down and you have competition from trucking. And then he did seem to get into the industry probably before it reached equilibrium, but he got into the industry at a point where they were very close to equilibrium with trucking.

And maybe things like the oil shock where it does affect trucking more than railroads, maybe that kind of thing helps out early in his career where he can actually, you know, that might have been the first time in many decades. that suddenly the phones are ringing again, but customers they haven't talked to in a very long time saying we can't afford to be paying people with gas that's expensive. We can't afford to be paying people to truck this stuff around.

Let's put some of it back on trains again. So he had some of those advantages. Like, I'm sure there's some level of, you know, PR, and there's some amount, like, he has to present himself as a smart guy. And I'm sure, you know, he surely after the first time that he realizes that people are going to, of pay to cash him out of his non-compete, you realize this is a lot of his net worth comes down

to how much can he convince Ford's that he is just the railroad Messiah versus being a good, you know, maybe the best of the railroad CEOs, but best among a pretty comparable peer set. There's an interesting anecdote when, sorry, which was the one he did with, Akman? Ackman, was CP, right? Or was it C.N? I can't remember which the Canadian railroad was. Yeah, I forget. I think it's CP, yeah. So there's an interesting area, he comes in, Ackman runs this campaign in 2011. They get Harrison installed in 2012. Ackman retires from the CP board in 2016.

And when Ackman's getting ready to retire, before anything even happens, the CP board, while Harrison is still the CEO, sends Harrison a letter that's like, hey, we just want to remind you of your fiduciary duty and obligations to CP, right? And when you read the book, it does not say anything on what has happened then. But I read that and I was like, oh, like, A, I'm sure the board has in back their mind this has happened before. But at this point, Harrison's like in his early 70s, mid-70s, his health is declining. And I was just, you know, when I read that, I was like, oh, this is a board who, there had to be a little smoke here for them to send the CEO a letter being like, hey, you can't go talk to him betters and stuff. So I do think it kind of underplays how much Harrison was like, hey, I am looking for the next payday.

I am looking to level up. I'm always looking for someone. And the biggest through theme of the book, customer complaints, employee complaints, and Harrison looking to get paid. So it very much matches up personality. Yeah, like I think there's sometimes the way that someone makes a lot of money is realizing that an industry's net promoter score is actually higher than it needs to be.

And especially if it's a monopoly, high net promoter score is just the raw material that you turn into high free cash flow by spending less on whatever it is that makes customers so happy because they have nowhere else to go. And, you know, that's quite cynical, but it's also quite true. And it is just the case that the railroads have this really valuable asset the route network. It's very hard to build new railroads in the United States today.

So we pretty much are stuck with whatever rights of way we have. In fact, it's hard enough to build stuff that there are cases where people used railroads, like they acquired railroads just to get the rights of way in order to build fiber and things like that. So that was that said that I learned recently because of cogent. Sprint. I did not realize this. So Sprint stands for Southern Pacific Railroad internal network transmission or something. But it's because all of their rights of ways that form the network were built along the railroad. I did not realize that. So you are, yeah, exactly correct. Yeah. So just the ability to move something in a straight line across the United States is this incredibly valuable

asset. The railroads have ended up owning that asset. And you know, you can you can almost say that depending on your discount rate, maybe they're actually getting what they really deserve for the fact that the U.S. has a really good freight network and that railroad investors did very badly for a couple generations in there. Even going back to the late 19th century, you have these periods where a quarter of U.S. track miles are in bankruptcy or passenger traffic, I think, peaking in 1913 and just declining forever after that and freight traffic also having its ups and downs. So in some ways the railroads were kind of subsidizing the rest of.

to the economy for a very long time and now they're they're taxing it again and we'll see where things they prolibrate after that. You can imagine a lot of different directions for things to go after that. But yeah, so he's very much out for himself. He does realize that you can be a little bit relaxed on safety. There was one bit where they talk about the safety numbers and actually the book presents it in an interesting way because it says that I think it's something like per worker hour accidents went up a little, but per cargo ton mile accidents went way down. So getting more productivity out of each worker and then the workers are facing a very slightly elevated increased risk, but there's more money to go around.

It is a job where you kind of expect there to be physical risks. And he certainly is out there, you know, getting grease on his shirt and, you know, actually moving stuff around out there. So he's, I'm sure the CEO has fewer on-the-job accidents that the average worker just on the line. But he was also that average worker when he started. He did work his way up from the very bottom. Forget about from when he started. I mean, there are multiple stories in here. And again, I'm sure part of this is building road.

And I think the interesting thing when you read this is how he's setting the culture, right? Like CSX, he's not traveling that much anymore, but he's still setting the culture. But there's multiple stories. Hey, one of the tracks is underwater. and everybody says it's not safe to run a train over. So he says, okay, cool, I'm going to hop in that train and I'll go take it over myself and we'll get this network back on track. There's a story of a railroad crew.

This is towards the end, a railroad crew that's trapped somewhere. And he like shimmies over a bridge hanging onto the bridge to go tell them, hey, help is on the way and stuff. So this man is like literally putting himself in harm's way. And it's just an interesting way of thinking about setting the culture and everything there. But let me go back to the, unless you have thought on the culture, I want to go back to the customer point. Yeah, like on the culture stuff and, you know, on how he presents himself versus how good he is.

Like, I think, I think in a lot of cases, what people do if they are a celebrity CEO, and I think within the context of railroads, he definitely counts. Although I had not really, I hadn't read much more than, you know, occasional references to his name before I picked up the book. I mean, I knew railroads had done well. I didn't realize there was a guy who kind of symbolizes this. But one of the things I was thinking about when I was reading it is there's this book by Connie Brooke about what's his name, Steve Ross. of Time Warner. And it's a really good investigative journalism type book.

And she talks about how he had this whole persona of he's always, always happy, always friendly, and always really lucky. And that he talks about how he would take his friends to Vegas, and he would just tell them, hey, I'm going to go gamble for a while, see you later. And then he'd come back with a huge snack of chips. And I forget if she says that someone caught him doing this, or just they had this realization of he's not actually playing blackjack for a couple hours and making $50,000. Like, he's just buying a bunch of chips and he's going to return those chips later.

And it actually seemed like, you know, a really clever way that you could make yourself, you know, you could just be, you could produce good vibes if people always have these stories of he goes to Vegas and he's just a really lucky guy. He gambles a lot and he always comes out ahead. And if he's running a really levered media conglomerate that sometimes does very strategically messy deals, it makes sense to have someone who's just very lucky in charge of that. So I think for Harrison, he might have looked at those situations where he's like, you know, he could use the walkie-talkie, probably,

or he could yell. But if he actually crawls over there, that's the story that people will remember, and that's the story that they will tell, and that means that that's who he's got to be. So he's kind of, you know, maybe this is a story about someone creating a kind of exaggerated brand and then actually living up to it and actually pull it off.

I love your point, though. The difference would be like with the Warner Brother guy you mentioned, mentioned, he has to, or sorry, Time Warner, he, all he has to do is pull 50,000 out of his bank account. And he takes, he runs the risk that he's mugged and he lose $50,000, right? Where with Harrison, when he goes on that train and the tracks underwater, he even says, oh, I did the whole thing standing outside engine because if the train derailed, I was going to jump off it. So he literally is putting his life from like a little bit more risk, but I love that one on culture. Let me just go back to the customer complaints and the complaint complaints

really good. You know, you read this book and I wish it had dove more into them and of more just like reporting, like, here's what they said. Do you think they were real or not? Because here's the fact. If you lay off, he's laying off 20% of the workforce at all the places he goes, you're going to have some complaints, right? And when you're dealing with the unions, you're generally going to have some complaints. And when he's increasing prices on customers, you're generally going to have some complaints. But do you think these were anything more than just like, as you said, every monopoly is going to have some complaints and maybe the service was, he would argue his service was above average, right? There's the thing is,

littered with reports of customers emailing him and him getting customers to improving service levels to customers. Do you think like there was actual statistical significance, hey, this railroad was materially worse for employees, customers, whatever it is? Or do you think this was just kind of, you know, hey, he's the top guy and every top guy people are going to take shots out of it. Yeah, like I did feel like a lot of this is just people doing their jobs. You know, the union, the union collects dues and your job if you're representing the union

is tell the boss, we need more money, we need more job protections, and we need the job to be safer, and whatever else is on the wish list. Like, that is your job. And so, you know, and then for the customer, like the customer's job is periodically call up suppliers and try to beat them down on pricing or get them to throw in some extra service. So everyone's kind of doing what you expect them to do. And it could be, I think some of it was that the railroads were sort of enabling bad habits on the part of their customers. Less so for the employees. I think it's just, like, it is the nature of a capital-intensive network-based logistics business that the individual workers have a lot of responsibility to do their job right,

but it's really tough for them to figure out how their whole job could be rearranged. And so it's just a more hierarchical organization. You do want that kind of thinking happening at particular levels of the org chart. So, yeah, I don't think that they would really be in a position to push back on that, and they can certainly feel salty about it. if accident rates go up on a per-worker hour basis. And, of course, that's how the workers are not thinking, well, I am slightly more likely to have a broken bone or potentially die.

On the other hand, I am responsible for shipping more cargo tons, more miles than I otherwise would have been, so it's all fine. There is room to pay people a little bit better if there's more throughput, especially in a business with lots of fixed costs. And, you know, of course, a lot of those returns are true to the shareholders and a lot of those returns also accrue to Hunter himself, but I'm sure some of that, it at least makes it less likely that someone gets laid off because there just is not enough money to support them if there is, in fact, plenty of money to support them. So that part, you know, it's, you just have

to figure out what the tradeoffs are. And I think that given the people like Hunter Harrison exist and given that they do rise to the top of different organizations, what it probably means is just you want to make sure that laws on workplace safety are written very clearly and set exactly what we as a society think is an acceptable level of physical harm in order to enjoy all of our material abundance. So that part, I wasn't super surprised by the worker complaints, I think for the customer complaint. So a lot of it is just that if you were used to this idea that the railroad is going to be your logistics backstop, and if you messed up something earlier in the week and, you know, one shift was not as productive at the factory as you expected, and therefore the shipment you thought was

ready on Thursday. It's not going to be ready until Friday. If that becomes your problem, because the railroad is now insisting on sticking to a timetable, that just complicates your life. But what it means is that he's basically taking his approach for running a railroad and making it contagious. And this is like, this is kind of the story of globalization. Like a lot of US business norms and then U.S. cultural norms just get accidentally imposed on other countries because we need our counterparties to understand things in the same way that we do. And so we need a lot of standardization in terms of the rules that people follow and the expectations they have. And because the U.S. is that economic center of gravity, the U.S. just ends up de facto writing a lot of those

rules. And it doesn't feel like that because it feels like if you're an American company and you order something from a different American company and then you order something from a Chinese company and you don't get what you were expecting, you know, you had the same parameters and they just interpreted it differently. To you, that just feels like bad customer experience. To them, it probably feels like these customers are really needy, and they also don't know what they're asking for. And it's really whoever has the most financial stake in getting the transaction to happen is going to be the one who adapts. And in the case of the companies that were using the railroads, because that cost gap was so big between the railroads and the trucking companies,

I think the railroads basically got to write the rules. But I also think, like, you can, so you can tell this whole story, which I think is consistent. with the kind of generational story, it's consistent with your observation that, hey, all the other railroads did find two. You could just have made a sector bed. It's not just about this one guy. I think that you probably, it was probably the case that just the industry was at this kind of inefficient equilibrium where railroads were somewhat overcapitalized and therefore they always had some spare capacity. And so it wasn't, they didn't have a sense of urgency around maximizing efficiency at all times and maximizing utilization. But once,

you have someone who actually thinks they can make it happen, it does happen and happens pretty much everywhere. There was that note. There's a footnote that talks about two of the other railroads adopting precision scheduled railroading, and one of them does it in September of 2018, and then the other one does it in October of 2018. So once people realize that's the way things are going to go, that's just the way they have to go. You jumped on my next point. I was wondering if one of the reasons that other roads sucks, again, is the best, but it's not like screaming higher like you would kind of think just based on the reputation of everything. I was wondering if one of the other reasons was, hey, he gets in there and he does it at two railroads

and then everybody starts saying, look, you've got to get on board with what he's doing or else we're going to fire. We're going to fire you and literally replace you with him. And like, it's not lost to me. The only one that kind of doesn't really start improving is CN where everybody starts, everybody has said for years. And I remember this from when I was at a consulting firm before he took over, and he said, oh, the reason it doesn't work there is they're going through the Canadian mountains and it's really steep and everything. So they have a structural disadvantage that explains why they're OR. So everyone else, like, kind of has to get on the program because he, in the same way, Roger Bannister, I've been using this all the time. Roger Bannister proves you

can run a four-minute mile and then the four-minute mile starts falling like crazy. He proves you can take your OR from the 90s to literally the 60s. And then everyone else might not quite get to where he is, but everyone else is kind of getting to the high 60s, low 70s on their own once they follow this path. So that's it. I want to switch gears completely. I have some other stuff I want to talk to you about, but the back half of this book is where most of the meat is. And it's really interesting and Bill Ackman, Pershing Square, and Mantle Ridge are huge players in that. And I just want to ask, you know, when you read this book, Ackman's obviously still in the news all the time. When you read this book, how do you feel Atman, Persian Square, and

mental rage come out of this book looking? I mean, they, they look kind of like the generation of value investors who spent a lot of time reading 10Ks and buying cheap stuff, realized they had to do a little bit more than that to make a high return and got into various flavors of activism. So, and I think there's, you know, there's some level of pretty mercenary behavior and that's what you expect. Like, it would be very, very odd to expect the hedge fund to be the participant in this drama, who's kind of best behaved, most friendly. But I think they also just saw that there was this opportunity. They saw that there's this set of assets that can be used more efficiently.

And there's a way to make that happen really effectively. And I think sometimes, to your point on Zuckerberg and how much he pays for AI researchers, sometimes that's the actual insight you have to have is you can, if you think that there is a billion dollar opportunity, then the difference between paying someone $10 million a year or $50 million a year to make that opportunity happen. happen is actually pretty immaterial. But it is weird to be the first person saying we will just literally pay you five times as much as you were making before when you thought that what you were making before was absurd. So that's just sometimes how things go, especially if you have

there's a fixed asset and every in every uptake and utilization is a lot closer to pure profit than just what the average of profit performance of that business is. It does make sense that that you can transform these companies and that if you want to do that and you want to do it in a de-risk way, you probably want someone who has successfully de-risked it before. I think it was also just impressive that they, I mean, in some ways, the person who comes out of this book looking the most impressive might actually be Buffett because he figured out he's, he'd been, presumably, he's been reading Railroad Annual Reports since, you know, he'd been reading the reports for half a century

before he decided that BNSF is finally cheap enough that we could actually buy some of this thing and eventually bought all of it. So he figured that out early. But I think people still had to, like you could still look at that deal and say he picked a specific network, he bought a specific railroad,

and we can't just assume that the same thing works for every other railroad. And I guess Ackman had the view that, yeah, it probably does work for every third railroad, and that view works. But I'm curious about what you thought of just all, yeah, all the boardroom drama, all the 13Ds, all that stuff. So the one, the one story that really jumped out to me was there's, so after they've taken over CP, they make a bid for Norfolk Southern. And Ackman comes on and he says, look, the bid for Norfolk Southern has to make sense to my eight-year-old daughter.

And then he launches into like this crazy, complicated bid where Harrison, they'll throw C. into a blind trust. Harrison will go become the CEO of Norfolk Southern. There's a CVR that pays out Norfolk Southern if the stock goes down and all this type of stuff. And I was just like, just classic act, man, say something's going to be simple and then launch it to things. And they say the IR firm had never been inundated with as many calls as with the CVR, which I love CVRs. But that was my personal favorite. I'm with you. I hadn't thought about the Buffett thing, but the Buffett thing looks absolutely incredible in hindsight, right? Because, and also, it might be because, it might be because I was literally mapping Harrison's at each of these companies for about five years.

So I was matching railroad returns over five-year periods. I was like, oh, railroad starts really taking off right around Winbuff and starts by. And I'm kidding. There he is. He has none of the drama of, yeah, I think Agman and Hill come out, I think they come out incredible in this, right? Like, they, A, the investment in the railroad is great. They generally, they generally went on the strength of their arguments and the logic.

I think they generally check me the board, despite a lot of, You know, they talk about Canadian pride versus Americans coming in. A lot. Halal comes out great, you know, a lot of his concerns when him and Harrison take out CSX as kind of Harrison's last dance, a lot of the concerns Halal expresses actually come to be real concerns. And I'm particularly thinking about Harrison just says, get me in there and I'll start turning the road around.

And he'll was like, no, man, we need control of this board. So you've got the backing to do what you want to do. Harrison ignores him. And that comes to bite him a few times. He'll all has a very, I mean, you tell me, how many times as a hedge fund said, I'm going to write an insurance policy for the CEO, I'll get, I'll pay $100 million to buy him out. We'll be on the hook for that if we can't get him installed at the CEO. By the way, the new company, you know, the first thing they're going to have to do is pay the $100 million buyout. And they might try not to pay it because it's not going to him.

It's going to us because we make them whole. They have to pay that plus the new CEO. I think he comes out looking incredible in terms of creativity. investment, he really turns it into a trade. You know, he turns into a trade. He says,

okay, there's a piece of this risk that everyone is reluctant to take. Everyone, no one really wants to underwrite it, but we think it's underwritable and we'll just, we'll be on the hook for it

in order to make this next thing happen. So it is, in that sense, it is just the liquidity provision function of the financial system in general, that you look for cases where the reason something isn't getting done is that there's some risk

that nobody, really wants to quantify, and where the bidass spread is too wide for anyone who really transact, you find a way to shrink that bidass spread. That often means taking on the most unloved piece of the transaction and just making that yours at whatever price makes it makes sense. And it is also evidence that it's great to have a large balance sheet. Like, it's great to be able to put just a lot of money into the equity of something if you think that you're going to be pushing, if you think you're going to be driving a lot of the upside. So I guess you could you could definitely imagine the, you know,

Ackman and Halal feeling a little bit salty that they were mostly riding along with regular shareholders. Like someone could have just seen the same 8K that is the result of their many months of effort and bought the stock and gotten most of the returns. There are a lot of people who, there's a lot of stories that people see in the industry, see, oh, Hunter is going to take over that railroad

and they buy the stock and they make, you know, basically the same returns as Atman and them. So pretty interesting. Let's kind of some of the, I'd love to build on that with some of the stories through the book about board dynamics and activism. You know, I thought the most interesting one that jumped out to me was early in the book, I think it's the early 90s. There's a CEO who's about to leave. And he goes and he just says, hey, our long-term targets are, I'm making numbers up because I didn't write the specific. But he's like, hey, our long-term targets, we're going to get down to a 65-O-R and we're going to be growing 5% per year.

And then he leaves and all those lieutenants are looking around like, what? There's no chance on earth we can do that. And there's lots of stories like that with director and board dynamics stuff. I just look, like, did this give you any insight into, and obviously, a railroad is different than a tech company, but did this give you any kind of newer, unique insight into the dynamics between CEOs, their lieutenants, their board, all that type of stuff? Yeah, it felt like it was kind of uniquely weird. It's sort of internally, really hostile industry sometimes. So I wasn't sure how much to read into that.

But I think just general questions on CEO succession and what should a CEO, what should a lane duck CEO do? What should a former CEO say or not say? You know, a lot of these norms, you hear about the norms, and they do seem kind of weird and specific and constraining, like former CEO should not talk about the person who took over afterwards other than to be kind of blandly, generically positive about their protege, et cetera. But then you definitely see in this, like here's, here are all the frictions. that can show up if someone decides that his last act as CEO is to put out some impossible target or, you know, say something weird to the media or whatever. So, yeah, you can definitely see why. And I think what that flows back into is actually some of the comp stuff where people get

outraged about golden parachutes and things. But a CEO who doesn't really want to be running the company or who wants to be running it in a way that the board doesn't like is a huge liability from the perspective of the board. and the board's job is to steward the company. And so just like Ackman and Hillal are like to take these big risks on getting the deal done where they will be liable for a lot of the shortfall if it doesn't happen. Sometimes when boards give someone a very large bonus in order to get them to leave, it's basically paying them just not to blow up a deal or not to blow up a CEO transition

that is actually important for the company. So, yeah, it made me feel slightly better about overpaying. in-competent CEOs because you're often paying them specifically to make them go away and be incompetent in running someone else's company instead. The one that really jumped out to me is Hunter's first dalliance with, I guess this would have been CN Canadian National, where he leaves in 2010 and he's taken them up. He's done a great job. Everyone says he's done a great job.

And he's ready to stay. And the board's like, actually, Hunter, it's time for you to go. We need to get you out of here. which, you know, how many times do you see a star, a rock star CEO, who's taking the company further than anyone thought it could get in terms of operating margins, stock prices, stock's screaming higher? How many times do you see the board say, nah, we're good. Let's move along here. And it reminded me in many ways of sports coaches. You know, there are these coaches who are so grinding. Tom Tippetto with the Knicks who got fired this season after taking the Knicks of the Eastern Conference champion, remind me, they're so grinding, they win and everybody loves them for a year or two. And then after three years, everybody's like, I'm kind of dumb with this guy, man. It'd be more fun to not win and, like, not be around this guy. And I feel like Hunter is kind of like that.

And it was just an insight for me into, I think, of these boards as honestly kind of, like, out for themselves, just trying to cash a paycheck for a lot of them. But these guys, in this case, were just like, this guy's so unpleasant. We need someone in here. And that's not kind of what I would have expected from a board trying to keep their jobs. And the Canadian National Board was a political animal. Yeah. I, so maybe that is part of the Hunter Harrison production function is he irritates a lot of people, ruins a lot of people's days.

And, you know, when he does things like doing the job of someone five levels down the org chart and just insisting to them that he's going to do their job and then doing it better, like, that's got to be humiliating, right? So he probably is a really, it was a really unpleasant person to work with in many ways. I assume he paid his people well enough that some of them are willing to stick around and maybe, you know, People also just vary in how much they tolerate different kinds of unpleasant personalities. But if his schick is you look very carefully at the existing network you have, you look at all the ways that you could drive more efficiency by just telling customers, here's the new way things are. And if you don't like it, just go ahead and pay two and a half times as much per ton mile

to the trucking companies instead. You only need that once. And maybe it's actually more valuable to have. one person show up, lay down the law, lay off a ton of people, and then have someone else who just doesn't have that track record and who is not the guy who did that and not the guy who said that or humiliated people. And maybe that guy produces, you know, 0.5% less operating income growth per year than Hunter Harrison would. But if everyone likes them, then it probably means there's less executive attrition. And the board can spend more time thinking about actual

business problems and not just gossiping about how noxious their CEO is. So it might be that this is actually another case of efficient markets at work, is that, yeah, sometimes he does get gently removed from the company. And then sometimes there's some friction in getting him out, depending on how close he is to finishing whatever transformation it is. I think if you had the same person and he just was at the same railroad for his entire career, I think, one, he would probably go crazy. Two, it would be an interesting piece of trivia if you were able to say, hey, did you know that the best performing U.S. railroad over the last X number of years is this small cap railroad that never consolidated?

But I think the story makes a lot more sense if he is going from one to another to another to another. And by the time a critical mass of North American railroad infrastructure is already on this precision scheduled model, everyone else just has to comply. And then he's kind of, you know, that's, I always feel a little bit depressed reading comprehensive biographies of someone who died because the last chapter or the last couple chapters are about things like, and then he started forgetting the names of his grandkids and, you know, he got moved into a home or, you know, the last bit is just, it's really unpleasant. But then in his case, he kind of, he actually seems to have done exactly what he feels he was put on this earth to do. and then he died. So he kind of got the full thing. And I'm sure if someone had interviewed him on his deathbed, that one, he would have wanted to talk about trains.

And two, he would have said, yeah, I think that the railroad industry is never going back. And it's always going to be profitable, more profitable than otherwise would have been. It's always going to deliver more service at a lower cost than otherwise would have. And that's good job, Hunter. I don't know what.

This one, there is a tinge of sadness. I think it's because the author, genuinely likes Hunter and it develops a relationship with him and uh but i i was sad and you know the ending like he he dies suddenly he goes on medical leave of absence and two days later passes away but i was sad but yeah it was sad hearing him like he's orchestrating this last great turnaround and he's doing it multiple times they mentioned he can't travel as much he's doing it from his bathrobe in in his home one other story i thought was interesting and i just love your take on it and then i want to compare him to one other figure we've read about recently uh so

he every time he switches jobs he is getting paid and when he's talking to people he lets them know i get paid the two stories that i thought were really interesting were uh and he you know he buys CSX shares on the open market when he's about take over and he says that's a huge motivating platform the two stories i thought were really interesting i'd love to show the world view number one he gets paid on operating targets and he has a meeting with his management team and this is at CSX so his last railroad and they're trying to plan everything and he's like look Here are the operating metrics that are in my bonus target. That is what we hit.

And it sounds great coming from a guy who's driving, turnarounds, all this sort of stuff. But you know what else it sounds like? That sounds like frauds me. Like a fraudster says, hey, we hit my EPS metrics. So I just want to hold on that one. The other one that just, I don't think there's much. I don't know if there's anything for greater. But he goes on tangents fighting tooth and nail for every last dollar compensation,

to the point where, you know, Pershing Square and Polval get this man $400 million all in property, right? they get them all. And when he's about takeover CSX, he yells at Paul Lollins as, hey, for four months, I was consulting for Pershing Square and trying to get the CEO role at Canadian National Pacific, whichever it was. And I wasn't getting fully paid on that, on that time. And the reason that struck me was because when he starts posting people for his last job at CSX, there are all these stories where the people are talking and he's like, you're going to get well compensated. And like, hey, man, I've been working here for a month. I don't even have an employment agreement or compensation or anything yet. And it was just so funny because that's also another thing that's kind of reminiscent

in the back of my head of bad actors where it's like they bring everyone over on promises and then nobody's made but them. So I just wanted to ask those two things from this goat, I'm not accusing anyone of anything. Just like, if you gave me these in a black envelope, I'd be like, oh yeah, I'd be very hesitant around that guy. I mean, that's part of what makes fraud so hard to spot is that sometimes, I mean, sometimes they're just really obvious, but Sometimes they're hard to spot because the fraudster is doing what everyone else is trying to do and they're able to hit the numbers that everyone else tries to hit. It's like the observation that people in when people, when long distance bike racers were doing lots of blood doping and things, it wasn't like the 200th fastest person who is turning himself into a guinea pig in order to become the 150th fastest person. It's the top people.

It's the people who they would be number 11. and forgotten, but they could be on the top 10 list if they make this one little decision. And it makes them 1% better, but it's in a domain where 1% is the difference between world famous and nobody outside, like only the sports fans actually know this person's name. So sometimes something you can execute well enough that it does look like fraud. I think the other thing is that when he is doing these weird self-centered negotiations, but he's also paid very much on performance. What has to be in the back of people's minds is he's going to fight about this hard

every time he's talking to the unions, every time he's talking to his flyers, every time he's talking to customers. And so maybe he is actually worth whatever that incremental extra amount of money is because he just does not give up until he's gotten everything he possibly can. So, and you also, and then you can think about that one step further and be like, if he spends the next two weeks, just full-time negotiating comp, That's two weeks he's not going to spend running the railroad. And that's two weeks that we have to wait before things start improving.

So maybe it's actually worth paying him just to shut him up and get him to focus on other things. The other stuff, yeah, he seemed very, very organized when it came to moving large vehicles around on tracks and maybe a little bit less organized in terms of moving paper to the appropriate HR person and getting an actual number on someone's employment contract. And I don't know. Maybe some of that is that he's just doing a little bit of working capital management and trying to wrote people in. And then they're getting paid very well,

but maybe 15% less than they thought they were getting paid. But it's not quite enough that they want to quit because that would also look bad. People would wonder if they just can't handle working under Hunter and maybe they're just not quite as good as they think. It's like all this stuff, it's a pretty effective bundle where if you are really abrasive and you set incredibly high standards, it does actually allow you to get away with a lot of otherwise abusive behavior that people would call you on because they know that if they just quit, people will wonder if you're just not the kind of person who can deliver the right operating ratio. It's all great points. Let me ask my last point.

I can't believe I'm not going to mention Piss and Bill, but we're going to have to pass them for time. But let me do my last one. The last book you and I read, if I remember correctly, there's always a chance time's flying and forgot, was Larry Ellison. And I was interested in the similarities and contrast between the two, right? Like similarities, both of them, Ellison gets into sailing. Hunter gets into a question. So they've got side-bitant projects that they're having their company sponsor,

and especially at CNN, it becomes an issue for Hunter. But expensive side projects, they've got great lifestyles. I mean, Larry is a different magnitude than Hunter. but Hunter's 100 billionaire. Larry's a billionaire at some point, minimal type. You know, the real things I was thinking about, though, was Larry Ellison has no problem taking vacations, right? It actually becomes a point of concern with the board and investors.

He's going six weeks sailing everywhere. Hunter Harrison does not vacation, right? He's cutting vacations left and right. There are all these stories of family being like he works Christmas morning. His chief of staff is like Saturday morning. We called it Hunter Time because the chief of staff. So I was just interesting. and in the difference in different industries and everything.

But do you compare and contrast when you read these two? Do you see anything in the management styles or anything that blends? Or is it just, hey, two different people, except an all different paths to reach, similar results? So I actually kind of read just the hinges between these books we just read. Yeah, I think the kind of lack of self-awareness or total comfort in one's own skin, depending on whether you like them or not. Like, that's definitely a commonality.

And I don't know if people, like that, just have some moment in their life where, you know, I don't know if very Alison just had some moment where he said, okay, I have, you know, I have made everyone around me so much money because Oracle is all me. And therefore, if I feel like taking a vacation, that's the best thing for Oracle because when I'm running Oracle, I always do what's best for Oracle, you know, by definition, this is what's best. Or I think the other way is that it's just a pretty natural thing that Hunter Harrison wakes up on Saturday morning and he's been dreaming about the railroad and he wants to start talking to people about the railroad

and that's what he's going to do. So yeah, it might be just like a slightly different wiring where if it is fun and gratifying and it feels like a lot of this book, it actually feels like this is really the first biography of an e-sports star where you're reading about someone who is just making a ton of complicated decisions based on some very complex thing where you have limited controls, limited inputs. There are a bunch of external things that are happening. But if you are able to make lots of reasonably good decisions really, really quickly,

you just automatically win. And he seems like that kind of guy at multiple levels. But also, if you look at competitive e-sports, to get good, you have to just have lots of actions for a minute and incredible reaction time and you have to put a lot of hours in. But to get really good, you also have to come up with a new meta. You have to figure out some strategy that other people did not figure out. And then you have to be very adaptive.

whenever the circumstances change and figure out what is the new strategy that didn't work before and will be the dominant one now. And he did some of that too. So it is the same kind of the same kind of epicycles, like cycles and epicycles of you've got to get everything to where it's supposed to go today, but you also have to get the business to where it needs to be over the next 10 years. And Ellison, I guess maybe there's also some kind of compatibility where if Harrison's big thing was we're actually, going to stick to a schedule and everything flows from that. If that's the case, it means that everything that everything else has to vary in response to how much effort is needed to keep that

schedule. And that means that's just not a good system. It's not a system that's very compatible with long vacations. It's not a system that's compatible with being asleep during normal business hours, US time. Whereas with Ellison, like part of Ellison's attitude was, there was that really interesting parallel where Ellison talks about how customers will tell him, you need to change your e-business suite around our business. And he would say, no, you just need to change your business around the e-business suite. And in one sense, that is what Harrison was doing. But in another sense, I think Ellison was just, he was more okay with downtime. And if Harrison's big idea was downtime is the problem. And downtime and unpredictability are completely unacceptable,

then that just leads to very divergent attitudes towards how much intensity, how much your work intensity should be coming from you, coming from the fact that you're pretty interested, pretty jazz right now versus how much of it is just there is a problem and you are the person with whom the buck stops. So you're working until the problem's gone. If I could just point you meter, the e-sports one is great because,

and I compared Harrison to a coach. He reminds me of one of those hard-shurging coaches, but esports is great. To me, when I read the Harrison biography, I kind of got it, right? Like, this is a man who was all consumed by railroads. And not that he wasn't smart, but he wasn't like, there's no hint of like Harvard business school or this man was a natural genius or anything, right?

But he literally has a photographic memory when it comes to one thing, railroads. And he's obsessed. And I think the book made tonight point, he's not obsessed to the point where he's got like railroads on it. He's not a homer. He loves the business of railroading. The specific point they made there was that the railroad. industry does attract people who are just really nostalgic for when railroads were a lot more

important than salient and so on. Joe Biden would have been a perfect railroader. Yeah, yeah. But then, yeah, I think the line is something like Hunter Harrison is really interested in the railroad industry today and the railroad industry in the future. And from a financial perspective, you could say he has no interest in what the stock chart looks like, but he has a lot of interest in what the net present value of the business is. And that's something you really want in a CEO.

You want someone who can show up at a company that's doing incredibly well and not feel really nervous, like if they change anything, they ruin everything, and also can show up in a company where the stock price is down 90% for the peak, or in the case of railroads, where they used to be something like 70% of U.S. equity market cap, and now we've had to create new categories like transportation just so that there is a sector that is big enough that isn't just like, here are the three names. So if you can be completely indifferent to what happened before, but you can be very responsive to what's going on right now, then you can do quite well in a space like that. And I guess maybe that's something on the Ellison versus Harrison point. With tech, it is more of an active business. Like you have to decide what the future looks like and either. We talk about Ellison makes multiple bets, right?

And I think both of us are impressed. If he makes seven big bets, five of them turn out correctly, which in tech, I mean, because that's going to be grand slams, that it's an unparalleled track record. Yeah, yeah. Like, it's so funny to read that book. And he's basically, you know, he doesn't have the vocabulary for it,

but he's basically like, he'll be doing a lot of your work on your iPad and on your iPhone, and you know, everything's going to be on a server somewhere and you won't actually have files that are on some physical device in your home, except as just a temporary working cache or something. Like, he knew that stuff was coming and he got it right. With Harrison, you know, he does have that one big bet,

but in a sense that one big bet, is just, it's not some kind of cosmic macro bet, really. It's just a way that you could recut the spreadsheet. You know, he, I think the timing is wrong for this to have literally been the output of a pivot table where he just tries to look at, okay, what what margins look like if we just sometimes move these trains partially filled and what does it look like if we assume

that by the end of this, you know, within a year or two, everyone's just going to adapt to that and how it's going to be lower our costs if they get a little salty about that. he it's the time he doesn't quite work for that but it is the kind of thing where you when you make a bunch of incremental progress you realize that's actually what you're progressing towards and that you could make progress a lot faster by just going straight there so in that that that that model of you're going to constantly make incremental progress like you're you're sending brains that would be recognizable to um to cornelius vanderbilt on routes that cornelius vanderbilt may have personally owned and it's going to haul things where he could look at it you can say oh that one's full of coal. That one's full of gravel. You know, he would be able to understand, he'd be able to read the 10K pretty straightforwardly. So in that sense, you don't want to be super imaginative. You actually just want to be very literal and linear. And so you also don't need to take a lot of time off to dream big dreams about railroads. Like the big dream is we could grow revenue 2% faster

annually and that really compounds over time. And it's very, very accretive. We could buy back a lot of stock as we get rid of some of our excess capital equipment, like it doesn't require insanely bold dreaming, but it does require just this relentless grind of making everyone step up their game a little bit. The only other point, and I think we have to wrap here because I haven't stopped. The only other point was there's so many differences, and I think I lean a little bit more the Harrison model where like the price of greatness, right? Harrison's to me has the price of greatness, whereas Larry Ellison, I'm not saying he's not great because he's clearly great. He's just Like out there, like, two weeks in Australia, two months in Australia, you guys,

and then we'll make the bed of the century when I come back. But the one thing that jumped out to me is both of them are obsessed, obsessed with how Wall Street reacts to their quarterly earnings numbers. Like, they're really obsessed with that a lot of, like I told you in the Oracle book, so much of it is they take out an ad to promote their earnings and tell people why there's no sky. And with Hunter, like so much, especially the latter. years is around, oh, my God, we're about to report earnings. We've got to make sure people understand it, the stock price reaction. And I would have guessed, like, these guys in my minds are business builders. I would have guessed they're thinking beyond that. I don't know if this is just end of two, but I was just really surprised by how much obsession they put on the quarterly

earnings results, the analyst interpretation, all that sort of stuff. I'll let you have the last word there if you have anything to add on to that. No, I think it's nice to have internal motivation and it's very hard to accomplish things without some external referent and Wall Street is very good at being cynical. People love to be the first person to figure out that somebody is lying or that some trend that looks invincible is actually completely unsustainable.

So it's a great way to stress test yourself and figure out to what extent did you actually pull off something amazing and to what extent did you really manage to shift some costs and shift some business uncertainty onto the next person. But, you know, so far, railroads, they haven't had some complete collapse. It's so it's clear that Under Harrison was not single-handedly holding the industry together. And also that he didn't just, you know, he probably did identify a lot of the low-hanging through. Like, maybe there's an alternate version of the railroad story where it takes 10 or 20 years longer to have valuations reset where they are today.

But it does end up happening. So, but it does look like he did, he made necessary changes. They actually worked out really well. He did reset the standard of the industry. I missed on some vacation time, but I think he'd be very, I suspect he was very happy looking back at his career. Oh, I think the book, even says it. At the end of the book, so he passed away and he was talking about CSX, which is his last business, getting them to a mid-50s OR, and they were kind of in the mid-60s when he takes over and they were stuck right there.

And I thought it was interesting. Right now, CSX, I looked it up, they're in the mid-60s as we speak today, almost, let's just call it 10 years later, right? And you do wonder, like, hey, if he was still alive, would all the railroads be pushing into the mid-50s? Or if we lived in an alternative universe with no Hunter Harrison, would all the railroads today kind of be in the high 70s? And there would be, the new Hunter Harrison, he'd be coming along and be like, we can get to the mid-60s in by 2035. But why don't we end it there? This has been great. I'm looking forward.

I'm about to go on the baby moon tomorrow. So you and I are going to have to pick a book for next month so I can read it on the flight there because you've got four kids. I'm about to have two. You know, the best time to read is when the grandparents have the kids. Absolutely. Burn Hobart from the Diff. It's been awesome and looking forward to chatting next month. Likewise.

All right. A quick disclaimer. Nothing on this podcast should be considered investment advice. Guests or the host may have positions in any of the stocks mentioned during this podcast. Please do your own work and consult a financial advisor. Thanks.