Andrew Marks

A charity run for the benefit of the American consumer.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And that came from looking a lot at the income statement and recognizing that they were losing money partially because they were continuing to lower price to achieve scale.

But I think what's interesting is they actually had a very favorable cash conversion cycle.

So the business was much more sound from a free cash flow perspective much earlier than it was from an income state perspective.

Yeah.

And so I think it's just another sign of the fact that you probably shouldn't come to a conclusion about something without really trying to understand it for yourself.

but also very often not.

And so you can't just be in one camp and you can't say, well, I shouldn't care ever about losses, or I should just take for granted that all reinvestments and growth are good, but you also can't take the point of view that none of them are good.

Oh.

Well, the other thing that you say sometimes is, how can life insurance companies make money knowing that every single person's going to die?

To go back to your question, I think if you're an investor, you have to have a couple of different skills.

One is you have to think about the future potential of the company.

And that's sort of what my dad was talking about, about moats and disruption and things like that.

And the second thing is you have to think about, well, what's that worth versus what is that selling for?

And if you come back to the fundamental ideas of the memo, one of them is that all investments in equities are worth the discounted value of their future cash flows from here to eternity.

And for some companies, those cash flows are more in the here and now.

And for some companies, those cash flows are very far away, but they all go into the formula.

And by the way, if you think about the nature of a DCF formula, every company requires judgments about the future.