Cliff Sosin
speaker
323 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Cliff Sosin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So if I were to grill an AI about all things like Medicare, Medicaid, managed care, it knows a lot. If I grill it about Carvana, we pretty quickly run out of stuff. Like this interview will get in there, but, you know, most of what I know about Carvana
I've learned from a lot of thinking, a lot of talking to people who used to work there, a lot of data scraping and other things that just aren't in the internet yet. And so the tools, if you spent a bunch of time trying to learn about Carvana from an AI, I don't think you'd get very far.
That being said, over time, maybe they have agents that are able to gather information, put it into the internet. Maybe the internet, this bulk corpus information in the internet gets bigger because more stuff is put in there in other ways. And of course, these tools are only going to get better.
When AIs get to the point where they can make investing decisions, there's probably not a lot that's pretty far down the spectrum, I think, of things that they would require doing.
um it gets it's kind of like asking about the singularity it's like yeah you know i sometimes i'm grateful that i've had a chance to sort of do well you know before um before all this happened because um you know it might be hard to do well after all this happens if i reflect on um the future sort of big picture i mean i people used to ask me what my macro opinion was and they always meant like interest rates and gdp growth and i always always give them some version of something like look i
I'm fully confident that my great grandchildren will marvel at my poverty. Unless they're all dead, but hopefully they won't be. I think these tools make it all the clearer how we're going to get there, especially if quantum computing happens, right?
The ability to create synthetic data with real world simulations using quantum simulators and then to train the eyes on that seems like a wildly interesting tool.
You know, the US is an amazing system. I think there's a lot of reasons for that. I mean, I tend to think about the idea that there was meaningful selection effects in the people who chose to migrate to the US versus the people who chose to stay behind.
And that probably led to us having, you know, the US having a gene pool that, you know, an aggregate is selected for people, the sorts of people who will create businesses and be sort of independent minded and get on a ship and travel to an unknown land across the other side of the sea for a better life. I don't see that changing in any deep way.
But I don't necessarily think I've invested in the US because it's such a great place, per se. I think I've mostly invested in the US because I always use the following example. You talk to some investor, and they're telling you about their British restaurant investment or something. And you say, that's so cool. It sounds like you really know England really well.
Why don't you tell me three places you could buy a power drill in the UK? And they sort of, like, realize that they don't know, right? And there's just an enormous amount that you learn about a place by being there. And so it's not that I could never invest outside the U.S.
It's just that, like, I'm keenly aware that, like, overcoming a certain degree of naivete is very, very hard, even for some places seemingly close as, like, the U.K. And... And so I just think that the US is an enormous market. There's lots of interesting things to do. And someone will pitch me some Chinese stock. And I say, that's fascinating. I'm sure it's going to be great.
I'm going to put it on the bottom of my list right after all the American stocks. That served me well. I'm sure I missed all kinds of stuff, but we got to pick our lanes.
I have a fairly boring view like everyone else. I think for the average investor, an S&P 500 ETF is a great way to go. Maybe an all-market ETF or whatever. But I've certainly looked at all these big companies. They are great for a reason. I've certainly thought at times that they represented good to even superior returns. It's just they've never kind of...
I mean, one of the hardest parts about my job is, like, I sit around and I study all these things, and I find plenty of things where, you know, I said a joke, in the $100 billion portfolio, there's definitely room for that. But we don't, you know, we're not managing $100 billion. And as it is, you know, the opportunity cost of selling A to buy B doesn't work.
So the hardest part about this, one of the harder parts about my business, about my day to day, is spending a lot of time on something, getting to know it really well, concluding that it's a great investment, but just not quite as great as the other thing. That's frustrating. And there have been times, I remember back in 2010, a friend of mine put it really well.
There's Google sitting there, looking all cheap.
right and you know he was right uh but thank goodness i didn't buy it because i think the things i owned you know did better but um not all of them so you know i wish i could have picked the worst thing i had but like that's not how life works these are great businesses um if i ever you know retire um i imagine i'll like i'll stop thinking about stocks and diversify and i'd own them and if i had a someone who wasn't you know if my mother wasn't invested in my fund i'd you know tell her to
you know, buy that. But, you know, there's a lot of businesses I don't own. The key isn't to understand everything or to pick the even to pick the very best one. The key is to pick a bunch of things, a handful of things that you know well and, you know, are going to do well and watch them closely and don't worry too much about all the other stuff.
So I had the two that I mentioned earlier. One was the guy who, right when I was starting my fund, invested in it. And I didn't quite appreciate at the moment just how rare that was. But it turned out to be a major kind of event that played a big role in me ultimately having some success.
Showing 301–320 of 323 · page 16 of 17
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