When 20% Won’t Do
The danger of overindulgence
Japanese A5 Wagyu is the finest beef in the world.
Farmers carefully nourish special “Japanese Black” cows for ~600 days to produce the exquisite product.
Government monitors watch over the process from birth to slaughter ensuring only the finest product takes the coveted rating.
The result is a beef so special it sells for ~10x the cost of a comparable size and cut at an American grocery store.
Normal steaks, the pedestrian variety you’ll see at Longhorn or Texas Roadhouse, are solid red (muscle) with a little fat around the edges. Or gristle, in the cheapest variety.
Not the case with Wagyu… it’s almost infused with fat. The muscle looks more like a shaken snow globe. The cow did pretty much nothing its entire life. The muscle is the fat.
Notice the three little slivers of meat in the picture below. That’s the recommended serving size for a reasonable person. It’s about ~2-3 ounces of meat.
Most Japanese people know instinctually this is a sort of maximum serving for indulgent items. It’s a way to finish the meal. It’s a treat… “finest in the land.”
Just one piece on your tongue is enough to fry tastebuds for the rest of the evening.
The Japanese suggested serving seems reasonable. But reasonable is a debated term.
Reasonable for people who don’t want gout. For people in a society that produces lots of centenarians. And one that values a balanced approach to living.
But that’s not how we do it in America.
The American Way
If it’s good, you need a freezer full of it. That’s the American way.
Forget about one bite. The specialness of the meal has little to do with the details. It has nothing to do with biology. That was merely a class in high school.
We’re all about Instagram attention, excess, extremes, and ultimately, distraction. It might be through indulgent food, flashing screens, or the chance to win free money. Either way, as a society, we do bizarre things to distract from the truth of the moment. It’s as if we can’t handle it.
When it comes to premium meat, a cow is merely something we’ve seen a picture of. Meat comes from a kitchen or a plastic container. We pair it with indulgent side items that cause acute gastric stress. That’s how we do it.
Take Spokane, Washington native Katina DeJarnett for instance. She’s a competitive eater behind the YouTube channel Katina Eats Kilos.
Katina knows how popular Wagyu beef is. She decided to film herself eating ~6lbs of the special meat in this video.
Her serving is roughly ~40-times what the Japanese curators behind fine Wagyu recommend.
As she attacks the giant tomahawk ribeye mid-way through the video, she comments on how it’s “a little fatty” for her taste… Understandable as a frontier family of 10 might feel over-indulged trying to finish it… let alone one person in under 48 minutes.
That’s right… in 48 minutes she finished six pounds of Wagyu beef, and two cast iron pans of bacon-topped, cheesy macaroni, and creamed spinach… which no sensible person considers a vegetable anyway.
The Danger of Excess
Let’s get something straight here… TTL is no ascetic publication.
We ate those three slivers of Wagyu unapologetically in Tokyo. It capped off a memorable meal. Long-time readers may remember it.
We also don’t fault excess. Hats off to Katina, she has another video showing off her new hillside crib in Nashville, TN. Competitive eating on YouTube pays big, evidently.
The issue with excess is not about the item consumed. Food, money, time, people’s emotions…eyeballs, clicks & likes, anything…it’s all the same. The problem is, when the focus is all about more, you lose your senses.
Competitive eaters miss the point of fine foods. You enjoy them, savor them, share them with old friends or new friends. You slow down and let your senses take in the experience. It’s what marks a life well lived. When it’s done, you fold the napkin, pay the bill, and thank the owner. That’s it.
When the focus becomes more, a thousand dinners, 6lbs of Wagyu, enough for 40 people, you can’t tell the difference between good and bad, enough, and too much. Everything gets blurry.
And while Americans love competitive eating, they also love competitive earning.
Many people do jobs they don’t enjoy for money they don’t know how to spend. They’ll say they do… everyone swears they’ll do it better, if they just get the chance. But they won’t.
By the time they figure this out, it’s too late. The quest for more ruins the meal, the date, the trip, the moment…
The Money Obsession
Just a little more money should do the trick… but it won’t.
You see, nobody puts a number on the lust of just a little more money. Nobody.
Just ask people. They’ll move the goalposts again and again. Three million might seem like an un-spendable amount to a twenty-five-year-old with a starter job. Come back in ten years and they’ll swear ~$5 million will do it. Another ten years and ~$10 is the minimum. Soon they’ll think who can live without a summer cottage, these kids aren’t going to educate themselves, and how can anyone retire on less than ~$20 million.
But don’t get stuck on the numbers…. They’re irrelevant. You’ll find the upper portions of the wealth scale do the same thing.
For instance, take a look at these two billionaires, Marc Lipschultz and Doug Ostrover. Bloomberg puts them at ~$2 billion each.
Most of you probably think that’s enough money to get around for the next few years without much trouble… You’re wrong. You don’t understand the power of perspective.
Humans operate with the perspective of a sonar on a ship. We see the world from our point of view. Everything else is outside of us. The cow comes from the butcher, the steak comes out of the box, or maybe overnight from Tokyo via FedEx. We don’t think about it from the cow’s perspective, or the farmer’s.
And the Ostrover/Lipschultz duo has about the same behavioral tendency of Katina the competitive eater.
These two cobbled together a collection of General Partner (GP) interests in various leveraged private funds you’ve heard of from Vista Equity to Silver Lake…the list is long.
Blue Owl Capital (OWL) is the listed entity they took public in the SPAC frenzy of 2020. However, they didn’t sell out and retire as the average thousandaire desperate for life-changing gains might assume.
Instead, they borrowed heavily against their hoard of OWL stock. For what, we don’t completely know.
We do know they bought a majority stake in the NHL Tampa Bay Lightning in late 2024. They surely have ample personal housing in various climates. And there’s no way they’ve seen the inside of a commercial aircraft in a decade…
But they didn’t sell stock to fund this lifestyle… they borrowed against it… and it went down.
They did what everyone else does…what the Morgan Stanley rep begs your editor to do, what every high-end executive does, what everyone except like 12 people in the whole upper crust does… they borrowed against their stock.
And we’re in a period where deal activity pulled the parking brake. Where credit stopped rolling over on endless buyouts. Where the private equity funds that bought 300 car washes across 8 states figured out you actually do have to wash the cars…
That’s part of why the OWL stock looks a little flat. That’s why the borrowing, while we can’t know exactly what the use of funds was, the borrowing is a problem for the duo.
It’s Never Enough
The OWL duo will likely be fine. Odds are an incoming Fed orchestrator like Kevin Warsh lowers short-term rates, shifts the Fed balance sheet to T-bills from longer-term holdings, and engineers an upward-sloping yield curve… the duo surely finds relief as its GP interests come back to life.
There’s a deep history of this odd behavior in the private equity and leveraged finance scene. The stake in Vista Equity created big value for OWL. Vista executive Robert Smith settled a huge tax evasion case with the IRS in 2020 paying an estimated ~$140 million to avoid prosecution.
We’re no fan of taxing authorities here at TTL… but we do value clear thinking. Tax evasion often leads to ideological obsession with the quest, blinding the evader’s ability to make rational investment decisions.
Smith agreed to cooperate against his early backer billionaire software mogul Robert Brockman. Brockman was a spendthrift who stayed in cheap motels eating TV dinners. When the IRS came with full force, he claimed dementia, passing away at the not so old age of 81 before his estate settled with the agency paying the largest ever penalty of $750 million to end the case.
He might have lived longer if he paid the tax bill, and used the remaining ~$3 billion to stay in nicer hotels, with better food. The evasion effort seems like it has a hidden cost.
It’s a lot like the OWL guys, who borrowed against falling stock to buy whatever hockey team or roller derby arena they wanted. It caused avoidable stress… if selling stock and spending freely, they might make different decisions.
Foggy Glasses
We say it all in the spirit of cushy spending. A life of comfortable freedom gets a high ranking at TTL HQ. Let’s call it, swiping the Amex with impunity.
Doing what you choose, when you choose, with whom you choose, is the ultimate freedom.
The issue for people like the OWL duo is, when you borrow against an asset, you lose some clarity on that asset. You can’t as easily see if you still want to own it. You lose the power of choice.
What you want is a relationship with your stock where either of you can leave at any time. It keeps things competitive… keeps everyone paying attention.
While that might sound scary, it’s the truth. There is no certainty. There is no permanence. Not with countries. Not with companies. And certainly not with money.
Plus, you don’t need permanence. If you bought a newspaper stock in 1910 aiming to hold it “forever” and stopped paying attention, you missed the internet.
The more you go with change, the more you live a full, rich, interesting life, the more you realize change is more valuable than permanence. The opportunity is in the change.
When it comes to borrowing against stock, sure, you might miss a rally. It’s true. And in the case of personal decisions, it’s easy to look backwards and say this or that could’ve been optimized differently. But that’s dangerous thinking.
True power is in letting go, using money to live, deciding what you want, when you want it, what you’ll chase, and what you’ll do when you catch it… that’s the game. And it’s the best game.
Contorting an otherwise incredible life journey with complex arrangements feels smart in the beginning, but sometimes ends in painful regret.
Clear-Headed Decisions
While most people want the next secret stock pick, what they really need is a reminder about the three-slice Wagyu rule.
The S&P 500 Index (SPX) rose about ~10% per year over the entire 20th century. It rose 16.4% last year or about ~18% with dividends.
Between 2003-2025 the index only had 3 down years… take out 2008 and the two other down years look like blips.
Point is, we’re in a sustained bull market. It feels like we don’t have bear markets anymore…. Just occasional panic attacks.
The old definition of recession was two consecutive quarters of contracting GDP. Now we see two days of market declines and we go full hysteria.
That’s a two-day panic… before a reversal strong enough to give you whiplash.
Last year, 2025, we had a huge market rally into inauguration day. Then we had an equally huge market panic over DeepSeek, which released a powerful, low-cost AI tool.
You’re forgiven if you completely forgot about DeepSeek. The news cycle runs about ~72 hours taking most people with it. As a reminder, NVIDIA Corp (NVDA) lost about ~40% of its market cap in that panic…
Then there was the tariff panic. Around April 2025. It’s when we just knew the world wouldn’t do what it should and everything went full liquidation. The SPX fell from ~6,100 to under ~5,000… a large decline of ~19% top to bottom in ~5 weeks.
Five weeks… five. Not five years, quarters, or even months. Five weeks. If you sold stock then, you got cooked.
Then last week, software stocks faced overnight obsolescence, taking the entire market down for “two days.”
This is not capitalism, as it relates to free markets. This is a centrally-controlled capitalism, with managed markets. We should trade what we see, not what we were taught last century.
Let’s get specific about this in the portfolio… because we’re doing great.
For starters, not one comment in the comment section mentions quiet gainers in the portfolio… it’s almost like people want 6lbs of tomahawk Wagyu, or nothing.