This Is Where the Rubber Meets the Road, with Jurrien Timmer

Michael Batnick (0:00)

There's no limit to what people will do physically. You saw the 61 year old woman that just did a five and a half hour plank.

Josh Brown (0:08)

What?

Michael Batnick (0:09)

61 year old lady, five and a half hour plank.

Jurrien Timmer (0:11)

Well, like I said, my wife just did the World Championship Ironman 70.3 in Nice, France, without training.

Michael Batnick (0:19)

That doesn't make sense.

Jurrien Timmer (0:20)

You get eight and a half hours to do it, she did in eight hours and 50 minutes.

Josh Brown (0:23)

But why without training? She was just already in shape for that?

Michael Batnick (0:27)

I could do 20 pushups without stopping.

Jurrien Timmer (0:29)

Without, because she doesn't, she's too busy to train. And for her, this is like, it's just fun. Like it's not, she's not trying to meddle or anything.

Josh Brown (0:37)

Oh my God.

Jurrien Timmer (0:38)

But a number of years ago, she had this trophy case installed with no trophies.

And she says, I'm going to fill this case up with trophies. And now it's full of trophies. So it's like, you know, that's determination.

Josh Brown (0:53)

That's pretty awesome.

Michael Batnick (0:54)

I have a cousin who is doing or attempting to do a marathon. Seven marathons in seven days in seven continents. Do you know about this?

Seven marathons.

Jurrien Timmer (1:05)

So that's like an extra super duper ultra marathon.

Michael Batnick (1:07)

Seven days on seven different continents.

Josh Brown (1:10)

You run a marathon and wake up the next day and run a marathon?

Michael Batnick (1:13)

Yeah.

Josh Brown (1:13)

How do you get from one to the other? You run there?

Michael Batnick (1:16)

You swim.

Josh Brown (1:18)

You swim.

Jurrien Timmer (1:19)

Wow. That one I haven't heard.

Michael Batnick (1:22)

People are maniacs.

Jurrien Timmer (1:24)

It's good to be back.

Michael Batnick (1:26)

We're so happy to see you.

Jurrien Timmer (1:27)

I was in Europe the last time with the Peter Lynch thing. I unfortunately missed it. I was one of our crazy institutional roadshows that Fidelity International does, our sister organization. This year, I did three weeks throughout all of Asia-Pacific on one carry-on, but last year it was a big Europe trip.

Josh Brown (1:47)

How many cities? Three weeks.

Jurrien Timmer (1:49)

I did Seoul and then the southern city where the National Pension Fund is, then Tokyo, then Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong.

Josh Brown (2:00)

Does Fidelity have clients in all these places?

Jurrien Timmer (2:02)

Oh yeah. I met with all the central banks.

Josh Brown (2:04)

They have mandates with the governments of these places?

Jurrien Timmer (2:07)

So Fidelity International is institutional and wholesale, so it's not like the US where you buy a mutual fund.

And being the Fidelity brand, we have access. I mean, I was at the PBOC, I was at CIC, the Big Sovereign Wealth Fund, all asking about gold. What's going on with gold?

Josh Brown (2:23)

Gold, in this day and age.

Jurrien Timmer (2:24)

Because they don't have a reserve currency. For us, it's a luxury, like who cares, right? It's a size show, it's like Bitcoin, you play or you don't, but for them, it's existential.

Josh Brown (2:36)

That Fidelity event I did with Peter Lynch was definitely like a career highlight. Nice.

Like guys like you and I, we're always talking, he doesn't do a lot of that. And he was razor sharp. And I think, so I think at first, we did a prep call and as you could imagine, it's Fidelity. So there's 10 people on the prep call.

So this is a true story. So we're talking, he has no idea. It's a podcast. And then all of a sudden he starts telling stories.

And I slacked, I forget who I was slacking with, somebody on my side. I was like, holy shit, he thinks this is the podcast. Like I was worried, because he was like, he was great. He was riffing, he was making jokes. And I'm like, I think he thinks we're recording the podcast. It turns out I'm an idiot. What he was doing was warming me up. Like, hey, I can have fun. I know the types of things that you want to ask me. He was showing me that he's into it, which was really cool. So we get on stage.

He was kind of like backstage. He was kind of like, I would only do this for Fidelity clients. He's like, that's pretty much it. So I thought like, all right, he kind of like got dragged into this, but he warmed up. And by the end, the audience was laughing at everything he was saying.