Why 'what if...' is the most vital question for investors

Hello and welcome to Shobri Things, on Long Term Thinking. Thanks for joining us. I'm Malcolm Borthwick, Managing Editor at Billy Gifford.

大家好，欢迎来到Shobri Things的长期思考栏目。感谢大家的加入。我是Billy Gifford的主编Malcolm Borthwick。

Change is often uncomfortable. Cost your mind back to being told you can't see friends or family because of COVID. For a time your travel pounds were disrupted because a plane was cancelled. For many of us, stock market volatility is the latest source of anxiety. And it's natural to feel concerned. Our brains are wired to prefer incremental change over sudden bursts of activity beyond our control.

改变通常是令人不舒服的。回忆一下，因为新冠疫情不能见朋友或家人的时候，你的心情。有一段时间，你的旅行计划因为飞机取消而受到影响。对于我们中的许多人来说，股市波动是最新的焦虑源。担心是自然的。我们的大脑更喜欢渐进式的变化，而不是突然出现我们无法控制的活动爆发。

So, as investors, how are we thinking about recent market turbulence? To find out, I'm joined by Kirstie Gibson, joint manager of both the Billy Gifford US Growth Trust and American Fund. But before we start the conversation, some important information. Please remember that as with all investments, your capsules are at risk and your income is not guaranteed.

作为投资者，我们应该如何看待最近的市场动荡呢？接下来，我邀请到了基斯蒂·吉布森，同时管理着比利·吉福德美国增长信托基金和美国基金。但在开始讨论之前，请务必记住，与所有投资一样，您的利润有风险，收益不被保证。

Kirstie, welcome to Shobri Things, on Long Term Thinking.

Kirstie，欢迎来到Shobri Things的长期思考节目。该节目旨在探讨长期思维的重要性，并为您提供相关的见解和建议。希望能为您带来启发与帮助。

Thanks Malcolm, thanks for having me back. It's been a long time since I was here last time.

谢谢马尔科姆，感谢你让我回来。我上一次来这里已经很久了。意思就是感谢主持人让他回到这里，并提到已经有一段时间没有来过了。

There's lots of volatility on the stock market at the moment. Is this a good time or a bad time to be a growth investor?

目前股市波动性很大，这对于成长型投资者来说是好是坏呢？

It's a very exciting time to be a growth investor, but I think it's very uncomfortable time to be a growth investor. That's because we've had a lot of questions over the past year, probably about bubbles and overheating and growth versus value and what remains exciting. Those questions are by no means unfounded, but what makes the most interesting to me is that they're representative of this idea of the human condition, that the human brain is wired to handle incremental change. And we've experienced a lot of change over the past few years. We'd all like to believe we're heading towards a period of stasis where that kind of all of that change is bedded down and we can begin to relax into a sort of new normality.

成长型投资者现在正处在一个非常令人兴奋的时代，但同时也非常不舒服。这是因为过去一年中，我们面临了很多问题，比如泡沫、过热、成长与价值等，让我们感到不安。这些问题并非没有道理，但最有趣的是它们代表了人类条件的这个理念，即人类大脑的运作方式是适应渐进式变化的。在过去几年中，我们经历了很多变化。虽然我们都希望我们正在走向一段稳定期，在那里，所有的变化都已经定下，并可以开始放松进入一种新的正常状态。

But what's really interesting to me and what makes being a growth investor really exciting right now is what if we are just at the tip of the iceberg of what change is yet to come?

但对我而言真正有趣并使成为一名成长投资者变得令人兴奋的是，如果我们只是处于未来变革的冰山一角，那将会是什么样的情景呢？

So how do you stay focused on the long term at times like this?

如何在这种情况下保持对长期目标的关注和专注？

What we're trying to do is to find really great businesses and in order to do that we have to accept the uncertainty that comes with that. It's about recognising asymmetry, it's understanding that plans are not full of straight lines that they tend to zig and zag and it's recognising that straight away and it's therefore opening your mind to the possibility of what a company can become, what a business could achieve in future rather than looking at what it is today and sort of extrapolating from there.

我们所努力做的是找到真正伟大的企业，为此我们必须接受不确定性的挑战。这意味着要认识到不均衡性，要理解计划不是一条直线而是会曲折前行，要立即认识到这一点，从而开放自己的思路去探讨一个公司未来可能达到的高度，而不是只看它今天的状况，从中做出未来的推断。

Because I think that is how we as humans feel most comfortable is that we reason by analogy. We like to say well this becomes the this of this, you know, Uber was the this of taxis etc. I think we like to reason by analogy and actually we need to sort of break out of that habit in order to imagine if you're going to invest on a five to ten year view what a company could be.

因为我认为作为人类，我们最舒适的思考方式是通过类比。我们喜欢说，这个变成了那个，比如说Uber成为了出租车等等。我认为我们喜欢通过类比来推理，但实际上，如果你想要在未来5到10年的时间里进行投资，你需要打破这个习惯来想象公司未来可能成为什么样子。

And imagination is all about thinking differently, let's have a listen to this.

想象力就是不同寻常地思考问题，让我们听一下。

We have all individually developed an internal model of reality which is based on the machine and on mathematics and it's simply antithetical to human life and destructive of the biosphere. And we have heard this person on the podcast before because your colleague Gary talked about him in episode 21 when we talked about Cure Decoganizations, the balance between chaos and order.

我们每个人都发展出了一个基于机器和数学的内部现实模型，它与人类生命是完全对立的，破坏了生物圈。我们之前已经在播客中听过这个人，因为您的同事加里在第21集中曾经谈到过他，那一期我们谈论了“治愈去中心化”，以及混沌与秩序之间的平衡。

Tell me a little bit more about who this is and why what he says is significant.

告诉我关于这个人的一些信息，以及他所说的话为什么重要。

So this is D-Hawk and D-Hawk is actually the founder of Visa. Visa came out of a necessity I guess with a group of banks in the US and they decided that they needed a new way for people to be able to pay on credit and they sort of all club together and I guess you could say D-Hawk was the leader of that.

这是D-Hawk，他其实是Visa的创始人。Visa是由美国的一些银行集团出于需要而设立的，他们决定需要一种新的方法让人们能够信用卡支付，他们集体合作，D-Hawk可以说是这个集团的领袖。

He wouldn't probably class himself as a founder because of this idea of chaotic organizations as blending of chaos and order. He provided the guide rails, he helped them to lay down the guide rails and he led that business. And interestingly when that was over and when he decided to seek a step back from leading Visa, he actually returned to farming. He decided well my job is done and that's where he spent the sort of the rest of his days was doing that.

他可能不认为自己是创始人，因为他认为混沌组织是混沌和秩序的融合。他提供了引导，帮助他们铺设了引导轨道，并领导了这个企业。有趣的是，当这一切结束并且他决定从领导Visa中退后一步时，他实际上回到了农场。他认为我的工作完成了，这就是他度过余生的地方。

And I think this plays into this idea that humans have a preference for structure and ultimately for control and this runs counter to the creativity of human beings as a species and you have to think outside of the box in order to invest on a long term basis. And I think that's why this quote, sort of rings a bell with me is because we really want this kind of control and the more we go through life I guess the more we try to put controls on top of things and actually we need to break out of that and to think about things in a completely different way.

我认为这个观点与人类对结构以及最终对控制的偏好有关，而这与人类作为一个物种的创造力相违背。如果想要长期投资，必须打破常规。这句话振聋发聩的原因可能是因为我们真的想要控制，随着我们经历更多，我们会尝试在事物上加上控制。实际上我们需要打破常规，从一个完全的不同的角度去思考问题。

But thinking in a completely different way and imagining isn't easy is it?

但是以完全不同的方式思考并想象并不容易，是吧？ 这句话表达的是对于一些比较困难或者不同寻常的想法或方式，人们可能会面临不少挑战和难度。

No, I mean I think if we just look in front of you look at your iPhone in front of you and know when when Bardeen invented the transistor no one predicted the iPhone that was 1948 of course no one was going to predict the iPhone and that's not unexpected but we have to accept that we cannot predict the future but that doesn't mean that we can't hypothesize about the future and I think there's a couple of characteristics that we can place emphasis on to understand if we think businesses can achieve different things and solve new problems that may or may not emerge in future and one of those is to do with adaptability is the ability of a management team to be able to alter the path that they're on to navigate different situations whether they be internally internal challenges or whether those be external forces like the macro environment for example.

不，我的意思是，我认为如果我们只是看着你面前的iPhone，并知道巴丁发明了晶体管，那时没有人预测到iPhone，当然没有人会预测到iPhone，这是不出所料的，但我们必须接受我们不能预测未来，但这并不意味着我们不能猜测未来，我认为我们可以强调一些特征来理解如果我们认为企业可以实现不同的事情并解决未来可能出现的新问题，其中之一是适应能力，是管理团队能够改变他们所处的道路，应对不同的情况，无论是内部挑战还是像宏观环境这样的外部力量。

And give an example of a company that you can think of that fits into that. I think most companies that you have where you have a sort of real strong founder leading that business are very much adapting so a great example would be actually the previous time I was on the podcast we spoke about synthetic biology so a company would be like for example Ginkgo Biowork so we first invested in Ginkgo when it was a private company and at the time Ginkgo was looking to is ultimately this business is looking to make biology programmable so put the tools of biology into human hands and it was very much focused on the flavor and fragrance industry that was sort of that was the opportunity they had in front of it use fast forward you know six seven years now and they they're in agriculture and pharmaceuticals they're doing some work with regard to monitoring you know biosecurity monitoring for pathogens for things like covid so and that's because that's a management team that's adapted with the fact that that business has evolved and the opportunity set has grown over time.

你能想到一家符合这一情况的公司吗？我认为大多数有真正强有力的创始人领导的公司都在很大程度上适应了这样的情况，一个很好的例子就是上一次我在播客上谈到合成生物学的时候，例如银杏生物工作室，我们最初投资于普通公司，当时银杏生物工作室希望最终是将生物学进行编程，将生物学工具交到人类手中，重点关注的是风味和香料行业，这是他们面临的机会，现在回顾六七年的时间，他们跨入了农业和制药业，他们正在开展一些关于监测生物安全的工作，例如监测covid的病原体，因为他们的管理团队随着业务的发展而适应了变化，机会的范围也随着时间的推移而扩大了。

It's probably impossible to envisage what these conceptual breakthroughs are I mean maybe also in the early days of Amazon who was to know that it would be the cloud that would make so much revenue for the company in the future so is it more really about sticking with what you're saying about the culture of the organization and the founders of those companies. Yeah I think I think it's about from me anyways the starting point is to try and understand what motivates those individuals it's about looking back at their childhood they're upbringing about how and why they make the decisions that they do and then being able to think about in future what at different junctures because we're all going to hit those different you know there's different folks in the road at those folks in the road how do you think they are going to react based on the kind of foundational beliefs that they have from life experiences that they have gone through and that helps you to build conviction and ultimately what we're talking about as a long-term investor is building hypotheses and those hypotheses are about saying what do I think could happen but hypothesis is great but if you don't have any conviction in that hypothesis it's just an idea and the only reason that you can make those ideas actionable is by starting to build your conviction in that idea and some of that conviction comes from the fact that you learn and understand what motivates the management team.

很可能很难想象这些概念突破是什么。我的意思是，在亚马逊创业的早期阶段，谁又知道云计算会给公司带来如此多的收入呢？所以，更重要的是坚持你所说的组织文化以及公司创始人所传递的理念。对于我来说，开始是尝试理解这些个体的动机，回顾他们的童年和成长背景，了解他们做出决策的原因和过程，从而思考在未来的不同路口，他们将如何反应基于他们从生活经历中获得的基础信仰。这有助于你建立确信，最终我们所说的长期投资者所要做的就是建立假设，这些假设是关于我认为会发生什么的表述，但是假设很好，如果你对此没有确信，那它只是一个想法。而能够将这些想法变为可行的行动，是因为你开始建立对想法的坚定信仰，而这样坚定信仰的一部分，就是了解和理解管理团队的动机。

So another example of a sector that's going through transformational change in terms of imagining the future is the metaverse and in many cases I mean trying to some investors with them barely give a question whether not the metaverse exists at all.

因此，另一个正在经历变革的领域是“元宇宙”，许多情况下，即使是一些投资者也很难相信元宇宙是否真的存在，他们要开始想象未来。

Yeah I think it's quite a difficult one and I think there's a difference because there's like lots of different companies now talking about it in different ways so I think you have on the one end of the scale you have kind of this idea of like the full scale we're going to live in a completely different world and then at the other end you have a company like Snap for example that's more talking about this idea of a mirror world so it's about augmented reality it's about accentuating our world and adding a layer on top rather than us living in a completely different world and actually a private gaming company that we have in the portfolio of well called Neantic which is behind Pokemon Go.

我认为这是一个相当困难的问题，因为现在有许多不同的公司以不同的方式谈论它，因此我认为在一方面你有这种完整的尺度的想法，我们将生活在一个完全不同的世界中，而在另一方面，例如Snap这样的公司更多地谈论这种镜像世界的想法，因此它关注增强现实，即在我们的世界上添加一层，而不是让我们生活在完全不同的世界中。我们在投资组合中拥有一家私人游戏公司Neantic，它是Pokemon Go的背后推手。

There the CEO of that business John Hanky he has quite strong views on this as well this idea that actually what you want is you want people to go outside like we don't want people more in their heads that would be his argument we want people we want people to go outside more so I think I think the sort of jury's out it doesn't necessarily it's not necessarily clearly it's going to play in one way or another and I like the idea of this kind of mirror world that you can that you would get to this to a point where you know I could approach a statue for example and I could learn about the history of that statue or I could I could perhaps play a.

这个商业公司的CEO约翰·汉基对此有着非常强烈的观点，他认为我们想要的是人们出门，而不是更多地把他们的注意力放在自己的内心上。这是他的主要论点。因此，我们希望人们能多出门走走。我认为，目前还没有准确的结论，无论如何会有这样那样的影响。我喜欢这种镜像世界的想法，这样我们就能接近一座雕像，并了解关于那个雕像的历史，或者玩一些有趣的东西。

game with my friends or you know I can have a photo etc but it kind of it augments the world around us it doesn't it doesn't mean that we want to block the current world and create a new one it's more about taking what we have around us and saying well how do I make this better so much that is idea behind Pokemon in the sense you go around collecting figures that you wanted to get people outside and it's one of his yeah it's one of his big things is one of his big things has been he's written actually he's there's a letter on the on the Neantic website where he's made a sort of declaration of what he believes and why and I think so I think that Neantic and snap and more closely aligned in that respect a lot of what snap is trying to do is to say we can make the snap sort of camera and the lenses that snap available to everyone we can we can power your mobile app to Disney's Disney's mobile app when you go to their parks all our augmented reality is powered by snap snaps sort of cameras.

我和朋友们一起玩游戏，或者你知道的，我也可以拍照等等。但这种游戏增强了我们周围的世界，而不是要我们阻塞当前的世界并创造一个新的世界。更多的是关于利用我们周围的东西，说：“我要如何让这更好。”这就是《精灵宝可梦》这个游戏的理念，你收集你想得到的角色，让人们外出活动。这也是他的一大事业，他写了一份关于他的信仰和原因的声明，可以在Neantic网站上看到。我认为Neantic和Snap在这方面更加密切地联系着。Snap在努力做的很多事情是说，我们可以让Snap相机和镜头对每个人都可用，我们可以让你在去迪士尼乐园时用Snap的增强现实技术来升级你的移动应用。

Another company that I'm really interested in that you invest in kersti is zipline and how that's transforming the logistics industry yes so zipline is an autonomous drone delivery company and it's based in San Francisco and I think when you say drones everybody thinks of the military and that's not what zipline is looking to do it's looking to transform what is possible in logistics and it was founded with the mission of creating the first logistics system that serves all humans equally and it's making really great progress against this goal while disrupting existing last mile logistics solutions so we first invested in the business in 2018 and the companies had a sort of really direct impact in helping many nations in Africa with the delivery of well actually blood products but since then covid vaccines as well so they started out in rwanda where the government actually hired zipline to deliver blood and medical supplies to hard to reach rural locations so what they basically have is they set up what they call nests which are like little little launch sites where they launch these drones and these drones will fly to more rural hospitals or health centers and they can deliver things like blood and medical supplies.

我对你投资的zipline公司非常感兴趣，它正在改变物流行业。zipline是一家自主飞行货运公司，总部位于旧金山。当人们听到无人机时，大多数人会想到军事，但zipline的目标是改变物流行业的可能性。该公司的使命是创建第一个平等服务于所有人的物流系统，并且他们正在朝着这个目标取得非常好的进展. 在颠覆现有的“末端物流”解决方案的同时，zipline已经在非洲许多国家的物流业上产生了直接影响，2018年我们首次投资了这家公司，zipline在协助非洲国家向偏远地区的医疗机构发送血液和医疗用品方面取得了巨大的突破。当时，卢旺达政府雇佣了zipline公司进行这项服务。实际上，他们建立了所谓的“巢”，即小型发射场，从这些发射场启动无人机，无人机将飞往更偏远的医院或保健中心，向他们运送血液和医疗用品。由于zipline在非洲的成功经验，它现在向世界其他地方的人们提供COVID-19疫苗的运输服务。

Now what's really interesting is this allows governments to better manage their planning because you can actually therefore send things that are closer to expiry date you can actually send them at that point because you know they're going to arrive in time you know that they're on a flight that's going to take you know less than 24 hours etc and actually zipline's automated delivery system is now the largest in the world and it's flown significantly more miles and made more commercial deliveries than it's than it's closest competitors so it's at the time of their last sort of public disclosure they've had over 300,000 commercial flights covering more than 20 million miles and all done autonomously and all done with zero instances of injury to anybody because I think what people's fears is sort of drone falling out the sky and dropping on their head and so they now actually operate on three continents and they're currently running a commercial trial in the US for Walmart delivering people with their groceries delivered to their garden and actually when we when I was last in the US earlier this year the CEO showed me a video he went on a on a sort of walkabout I guess with the CEO of Walmart and him to this place called P-Ridge in Arkansas which is where they've been doing this experiment and he's basically standing in people's back gardens and watching fully grown adults sort of almost jumping up and down when a drone came in and dropped a bag of Walmart shopping on their on their front lawn so there's an opportunity there for them to expand into the grocery delivery in the US and also potentially delivering sort of pharmaceutical products as well in the US they've got a few relationships there but it's just really interesting that this has been a business that's been highly highly successful in in really solving a logistics problem in emerging markets and they're taking that learning and bringing it back into the US.

现在真正有趣的是，这使得政府能够更好地管理他们的规划，因为你实际上可以在保质期接近到期的时候，就可以把它们送出去，因为你知道它们会按时到达，你知道它们在一个飞行中，所以只需要不到24小时等等，而且Zipline的自动投递系统现在是世界上最大的，它的商业飞行里程数和投递量都超过了它最接近的竞争对手，因为在他们最后一次公开披露的时候，他们已经完成了超过30万次的商业飞行，覆盖了超过2000万英里，全部是自动完成的，在这期间，没有任何人受伤，因为人们的担心往往是无人机会从天上掉下来，砸在我们的头上，现在，他们在三个大陆运营，目前在美国正在进行Walmart的商业试用，将商品送到人们的后院，当我今年早些时候在美国时，CEO向我展示了一个视频，他和Walmart的CEO一起走到了一个叫P-Ridge的地方，那是试验的地方，他站在人们后花园里，看着成年人欢呼雀跃地见证着无人机空降一袋Walmart的购物套装到他们的前院，所以有一个机会供他们在美国扩大到食品杂货递送领域，并可能在美国递送药品，他们在那里有一些关系，但真正有趣的是，这是一个非常成功的企业，在解决新兴市场的物流问题方面非常有成就，他们正在把这种学习带回美国。

Yeah I mean visually it's extraordinarily looking at their website in terms of how they have launched pads just to fire off the drones isn't it? Yeah and I mean they've delivered over a million COVID vaccines in Rwanda and Ghana and I think there was a there was a piece of work done by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that showed you know Zipline's direct ability to has had a direct influence on the ability of the individuals in rural parts of Africa to access vaccinations and that's a great post of note 10 the podcast Kirsty thanks very much for joining us thank you very much and thanks to you the listeners for investing your time and showbethings on long term thinking you can find our podcast at beathergiford.com forward slash podcasts or subscribe bit Apple podcasts Spotify or on tune in and if you enjoyed the conversation you can check out previous discussions we've had on the podcast such as why private companies matter more to exploring the innovative Scandinavian country that is an earth global giants such as Ericsson Spotify and IKEA.

“我是说在视觉上，他们推出的发射架只是为了发射无人机，看起来非常出色，对吧？是啊，他们已经在卢旺达和加纳交付了超过100万剂COVID疫苗，比尔和梅琳达·盖茨基金会进行的一项工作显示，Zipline的直接能力已经对非洲乡村地区个人获得疫苗的能力产生了直接影响，这是一个非常值得注意的帖子。 Kirsty，非常感谢加入我们的讨论，感谢各位听众把时间花在长期思考上。您可以在beattheridge.com/podcasts找到我们的播客，或在Apple Podcasts、Spotify或Tune In上订阅，如果您喜欢这次谈话，您可以查看我们以前在播客上进行的讨论，比如为何私营公司更重要，还有探索创新的斯堪的纳维亚国家，如爱立信、Spotify和宜家的全球巨人。”

What's its secret? Find out by listening to the podcast and there are 26 other episodes so plenty to choose from and if you're listening at home you're listening in the car wherever you're listening stay well and we look forward to bringing you more insights in our next podcast.

它的秘密是什么？通过聆听播客来找出答案，而且还有26个其他节目可供选择。如果您在家中听，或是在汽车里听，无论您在哪里听，请保持健康，并期待我们在下一个播客中为您带来更多见解。