Vance Crowe Podcast 001: Tim Hosler, Investment Banker

About this episode

The debut episode of the podcast: Vance interviews Tim Hosler, a semi-retired investment banker and fractional CFO he met after Tim reached out over a newspaper article Vance wrote. They open with the origin story of Vance's viral Warren-Buffett-and-Bitcoin article, which Tim inadvertently inspired by pointing out that Buffett is "a marketing genius" with self-interested blind spots (tank cars vs. pipelines). From there the conversation ranges widely: the St. Louis startup ecosystem and why coastal cities aren't actually more intellectually diverse than the Midwest; Tim's unconventional minimum-wage proposal, in which the federal government would top up low earners' pay based on family circumstances rather than mandating a flat wage floor; how the 1977 dual mandate shifted responsibility for the economy from Congress to the Federal Reserve, and Tim's own back-of-envelope finding that the Fed sets rates roughly 40-50% higher on average under Republican presidents; regulatory capture, using both banking (too-big-to-fail) and agricultural biotech deregulation costs as parallel examples of how compliance costs entrench incumbents; a detailed proposal for restructuring health insurance around high-deductible catastrophic policies with means-tested federal backstops instead of comprehensive-but-thin coverage; and a discussion of municipal pension collapse mechanics (Chicago, Detroit, Puerto Rico) as a cautionary tale about promising more than a system can fund. They close on lighter personal notes: Tim's pick for most impactful book (Atlas Shrugged) and his answer to Vance's signature "who do you want at your funeral" question — his family, especially his new grandson.

“The problem that we're having right now is actually the very same problem when we first got newspapers, right? Because the first people that could afford newspapers were the political press, right? Which is why you had, you know, a two party newspaper system in any given town, right? And the, and the only thing the local news was about was what's coming up in your election and what's going on and why those guys are the enemy.”

“Once you decentralize that and you're now back to the attention phase, you go straight back to hyperbole and back to that polarization.”

“I get there and I find like you are, I, I find many times, and I'm talking with people at the highest echelons of science and technology, they're repeating the same things. Whereas I have many, many people in St. Louis that, that having a heterodox idea does not create doesn't make you an outcast here.”

Key moments

• Origin story — Tim's Berkshire Hathaway "democratization" unit trust provoked Warren Buffett into creating B shares. (money)
• Tim's framing that "Warren Buffett is very, very smart, but he's not a God and he is really a marketing genius," which became the seed of Vance's viral Bitcoin article. (money)
• Vance argues coastal elites aren't actually more open-minded than the Midwest — "having a heterodox idea does not create... doesn't make you an outcast here." (bubbles)
• Tim's proposal for a tiered, means-tested minimum wage topped up by the federal government based on family circumstances rather than a flat mandated floor.
• Tim's claim that the Federal Reserve sets the overnight rate roughly 40-50% higher on average under Republican presidents than Democratic ones, based on his own averaging of historical Fed data.