We're gonna start with our investment in Alphabet, the holding company for Google and other assets. Why don't we start there? Bharath, why don't you lead off with our new investment in Alphabet? Sure. Google is a company we've studied and admired for a really long time. We think it's one of the world's great businesses with deep barriers to entry and incredibly strong network effects underpinning its core search franchise. We had an opportunity to initiate a position in the company earlier this year at a very attractive valuation as concerns around Google's competitive positioning in AI overshadowed the high-quality nature of its business and its strong growth prospects. Why do we like Google? Just for the technical factors here, we have a position that investors have seen the Form 13F. Position's actually another 20%, 25% larger. We own some of our Google positions were forward contract. That does not appear in the Form 13F. Our average cost was around ninety-four- 94. Yeah. $94, $94 and a half dollars a share. Yeah. Okay, go ahead. just to summarize our investment thesis, one of the main reasons we like Google is they're a dominant leader in a rapidly growing digital ad market. Google has 85%+ share in search advertising, along with YouTube, has approximately 50% share in the total digital ad market. Given higher improving ROIs, in digital ads, we expect digital ads to continue taking share from traditional formats like TV and print, and increasingly drive the total ad market to grow above its historical levels. For example, in the retail vertical, rising e-commerce penetration is catalyzing the migration of offline customer acquisition costs, like shelving fees and promotional spend, into online ads. With Search and YouTube as two of the highest return and most resilient ad formats, Google is very well positioned to benefit from the structural growth in digital ad intensity across different verticals. Likewise, in its Cloud business, Google is a top three player in a highly oligopolistic market that's still very much in the early stages of IT workloads migrating from on-premise to cloud and hybrid cloud solutions. These powerful secular tailwinds have enabled the company to grow revenue at a 20% annual growth rate over the last five years, and should continue to support close to double-digit top-line growth over the coming few years. Secondly, we think there's a significant margin opportunity at Google. Despite revenues nearly doubling since 2018, core Google margins are only 100 basis points higher. The company has recently committed to improving their cost discipline, and as part of that, they announced a 6% reduction to their workforce. Given the fundamentally fixed cost nature and high incremental margins associated with their core search business, we believe Google should be able to deliver operating leverage while continuing to invest in AI. Moreover, Google Cloud segment reached break-even profitability for the first time this quarter, and margin in that segment should continue inflecting higher given peers like AWS enjoying nearly 30% EBIT margins. Thirdly, we really like that the company has a defensive balance sheet with a very attractive capital return program. Google's cash position makes up about 8% of its market cap, and the company's buying back about 4% of its shares on an annualized basis. Despite these highly compelling attributes, we were able to initiate a position in the company at a very attractive valuation of only 16 times forward earnings. That represents a meaningful discount to its historical mid-20s average trading multiple, as concerns around AI's perceived negative impact on Google Search business have weighed on its share price. We think those concerns vastly underestimate Google's position as a long-term structural AI winner for several key reasons. 1, the company's incredible scale and the deeply ingrained consumer habit of Googling gives them the largest distribution channel to roll out AI into Search and their suite of consumer apps. Secondly, they have access to the highest quality training data for their AI models, given their vast historical index of consumer queries and consumer behavior. Lastly, Google has invested in AI for nearly a decade, from their acquisition of the pioneering AI startup DeepMind in 2014 to developing proprietary TPU semiconductor chips, which are designed specifically for AI functions. Google has consistently prioritized and invested in AI and machine learning far earlier than any of their peers or the current wave of emerging startups. That AI leadership was clearly on display at their recently held developer conference, Google I/O Day. During that event, the company unveiled its newest state-of-the-art large language model, PaLM 2, and showcased a variety of very groundbreaking AI capabilities that will be made available to both consumers and Google Cloud customers. For context, Google has 15 different products with over 500 million users each, and 6 of those products have over 2 billion users each. Throughout its Google I/O day keynote, the company demonstrated how AI is already deeply embedded in and will continue to enhance each one of those products in its ecosystem from, you know, features like Smart Compose that'll automatically help you write emails in Gmail to image editing and image generation in Google Photos. Then most importantly, the company also introduced the integration of generative AI into their core Google Search product. The vast majority of Google Search queries that you do today already incorporate substantial elements of machine learning. Going forward, the company plans on serving results powered by generative AI for queries where a chat-like response can improve the consumer experience. As part of their demo, they also displayed how Very context-rich ads can be seamlessly weaved into those generative AI search results. More broadly, we think greater AI integration will only serve to improve the relevancy and conversion on ads and increase advertiser ROI and monetization. Stepping back, we still believe we're in the very early days of AI development. Google's current valuation represents, you know, fantastic opportunity to own one of the most advantaged scale players in AI with an unmatched business model and a very long runway for growth. The share price has appreciated by approximately 30% from our cost basis, but we still think there's tremendous upside from here, just given the high level of future earnings growth and the continued potential for the multiple to keep expanding. I think what's interesting here with looking at the company, when you talk about earnings multiple, you're incorporating into the earnings, you know, loss making, if you will, businesses, therefore, you know, assigning kind of negative values to these other bets that have obviously some potential. The cloud business being only marginally profitable, but at this scale, you know, Amazon's cloud business had, you know, meaningful profits suggesting that when they want, they're going to position to kind of generate real cash, you know, from that business. In fact, they've had a large cash position, which we don't deduct from the enterprise value when we think about the price that we're paying for the company. We think we're looking at it in a very conservative way, and we think it's a secular winner in advertising and likely AI as well. With that, let's go to Universal, which remains our largest position, although it's shrunk in the last period, but maybe you can address that. I guess the question for Ryan is, how's the underlying business doing? Apparently that business is doing well. Why is the stock down? Sure. The underlying business momentum really remains even ahead of what we initially thought when we entered into the transaction to buy the Universal shares just under 2 years ago. The company reported earnings last month and showed that their revenue growth continues to be very close to a double-digit rate, which is actually a little bit ahead of our expectations. Even really ahead of the company's own algorithm that they unveiled just under 2 years ago at their Capital Markets Day, where they talked about the long-term revenue growth would be a high single-digit rate, and then they would expand profit margins at about 100 basis points annually, yielding double-digit EBITDA growth. The company has actually outperformed that in the last really almost 2 years. If you just step back, I think one of the reasons we remain so excited about the business and why the business has such momentum is really the fact that we view Universal as being an unbelievable business model that's really a royalty on the growth of music streaming. We've had this transition from a physical listening experience to effectively a digital experience where you have the ability to have on your smartphone almost the vast majority of the 100 million songs that have ever been created. You pay only about $10 a month in order to listen to most of those songs. We think that's really the cheapest form of high-value entertainment you can find. While there's about 500 million people who subscribe and pay to these services today, there's no reason why that over a long period of time shouldn't be up into the billions. At the same time, given that the price point is so low relative to forms of other entertainment, whether it's live entertainment or video streaming, we think there are opportunities to improve the monetization, which Universal is really starting to scratch the surface on. I think the current business results and momentum reflect that, and we think they're going to continue. The business itself is doing very well. As you mentioned, the share price is not. The shares are down roughly 15% year to date. I think there's really two reasons for that. The first is sort of concerns about AI, which we actually think are misplaced. We think AI is actually a very large opportunity. I think the theory as to why people are concerned about AI in the marketplace is it really calls into the question, can you create music digitally through artificial intelligence? Therefore, you don't need the key artists in Universal's position as a record label with those key artists may be somewhat disintermediated as music can just be created by technology. I think this fear grew because there were a few songs that were released in the style of some Universal Music artists that were uploaded on a couple platforms and very quickly got a lot of streams. Our perspective is actually that Universal has a very strong position defensively and legally to make sure that these types of illegal streams don't occur. They have the opportunity to use their copyrights and their intellectual property to really be on the leading edge of artificial intelligence. First, the way we think about it is if AI creates new music and it's not in the style of a Universal artist, that really just contributes to the proliferation of music on streaming platforms. One of the problems we've seen even before AI, where that was coming from independent artists was you can't break through the noise. Record labels are even more valuable now than they were in the past, because in a world in which there are hundreds of thousands of uploads every single day, you need somebody of Universal stature to help you break through all of the noise and become recognized. We think a lot of the AI that's not trained on Universal's intellectual property and copyright content is really going to contribute to the noise. Ultimately, many people won't ever see it. They won't ever hear it. That won't really be a threat. For some of the songs that have already broken through, those songs were taken down very quickly because effectively the models have been illegally trained on Universal's copyright. Universal is really the only one that has the right with their artists to be able to create any sort of AI on that property. There's even a recent Supreme Court case that came down within the last week that really highlighted how when property is changed and effectively we think would hold for AI, that models are trained on somebody else's copyright for commercial intent. That's an illegal activity. I think one of the things that's very different now in a positive way than in the past is platforms immediately took these things down. If you go back seven, 10 years ago, when there was a lot of, you know, illegal uploading of videos on whether it was YouTube or other services, it was a little bit more difficult to get them taken down quickly. I think the company as well as the digital service providers have a much stronger partnership now. I think it's gonna be even easier to enforce those copyright protections. That's really kind of in the defensive nature as to how it won't be a threat. I think on the more positive side, the reason it's an opportunity is Universal owns a bunch of valuable IP. You can imagine a lot of situations in the future where there can be artists, from their back catalog who are no longer living, where AI might be able to create, you know, limited time hits. That would be very interesting for users to further kind of capture the fan imagination or even collaborations with existing artists and, artists who are no longer performing. There's a lot of things that Universal can do with AI to create really unique, interesting fan experiences. Just more broadly, I think one of the things we've understood from our work on Alphabet and other AI winners is the improvement for artificial intelligence to help targeting, to provide more effective results for people at the moment they want based on their intentions is really powerful. Imagine that, you know, you are a very large Taylor Swift fan. The ability of AI to help you find other artists that relate to Taylor Swift that you may have never thought about. We think that AI in a variety of ways can be used both for Universal's own IP, but also just to help create a better fan experience over time. All that should endure to the company's benefit. That, that's the first concern that's weighed on the share price that we think is misplaced and is actually an opportunity. The second really relates to this recently announced management compensation plan. If you step back a few years ago, the company, when it was a subsidiary of Vivendi, nearly all the compensation was in cash. There was an intention to replace some of that cash with equity to kind of better align the incentives of the senior management team, which we agree with. I think the market expectation, though, was that the cash compensation would roughly be offset dollar for dollar with the equity compensation. What was announced recently was that there's actually gonna be about $100 million more incremental equity awarded than the reduction in the cash. That would result in sort of a mid-single digit headwind to earnings growth from that larger than expected by the market compensation plan, which has been a reduction in some of the earnings estimates that analysts had for this year. Compounding that, there was also an increase in the tax rate from prior years that I don't think the market had expected, which was gonna shave off a few more points of earnings growth. I would say there's been sort of a concern about AI, which we disagree with. There has been, if you will, an incremental kind of headwind to the earnings per share, which has reduced estimates a little bit and is a reason why the share price is down. I thought, you know, perhaps you wanna add a few more thoughts on the compensation more broadly, Bill. No, I think you, I think you covered it very well. I will say they're not particularly well-noticed, I would say by the shareholder base, but a fairly significant announcement in that the director who chaired the compensation committee was not reappointed, is not gonna be reappointed to the board at the end of her term. That was a result of a vote of not just the unaffiliated shareholders, but two of the three large shareholders of the board, including Pershing did vote against that member of the board. I think that will have a longer term beneficial effect in how the board and the management think about compensation and the, you know, making sure that management is compensated fairly and competitively and their interests are aligned with shareholders. Where, you know, it's done in a measured, thoughtful way, that, you know, the market can anticipate and, you know, build into, you know, where the shareholders win and the management wins alongside a success for the shareholders of the company. Why don't we go to Chipotle? Chipotle, on the other hand, unlike Universal's, had a fairly spectacular start to the year. Update us, Anthony. Thank you. Thanks, Bill. Chipotle stock is up about 50% year-to-date. It's really driven by 2 factors. The first is a market factor. There's been a recovery of growth companies generally. You know, the Nasdaq is up about 20% year-to-date. The larger driver here is the company's idiosyncratic performance. You know, 30 points of the 50-point year-to-date increase really driven by strong results reported in Q1 at the end of April. Those results were exceptionally strong. They included same-store sales growth of about 11%, which was comprised of 10 points of pricing, 4 points of traffic growth, which was really notable following a couple quarters of traffic declines, and a 3-point headwind from mix. Four-year cumulative same-store sales, which is kind of cumulative growth since the pandemic began, was over 46%. That's an industry-leading result. This quarter really broke the bear case on Chipotle in two respects. The first is that traffic started growing again following two quarters of declines. The second is that margins expanded meaningfully despite what's obviously been a significantly cost-inflationary environment. I'll touch on each of those. First traffic. Why did that come back? Well, there's really three drivers of that. The first is better operations. The Q1 was one of the best quarters in five years for both hourly and salaried turnover, and that drove faster throughput. The line in the store is moving faster. Digital orders are more accurate. They're more often on time, customers like that, they come back more often. Both sides of Chipotle's business grew in the Q1. The in-store business grew 23%, excuse me, and accounted for 60% of sales. The digital business grew 10% and accounted for the remaining 40% of sales. There's much more to come on the operations front going forward, including a new clamshell grill that's currently in test in 10 restaurants. This grill reduces the Chicken cooking time from 12 to 13 minutes to 3 minutes, it actually results in a better end product that's juicier. You can imagine what an unlock that'll be for, you know, both the employees and customers. Second driver of traffic growth is menu innovation. There were 2 of them that were both popular with customers and operationally easy to execute that were launched in the Q1. The first is the Fajita Quesadilla. This was really an order that was invented by a customer. It was something that was going viral on TikTok, gaining a lot of popularity, and customers were kind of jerry-rigging the digital menu to kind of order it. Chipotle just went ahead and added that as a permanent digital menu item. It's entirely composed of existing ingredients, so it adds no complexity whatsoever to the restaurant. This is really a great example of Chipotle's ability to basically crowdsource new products and launch them and drive incremental traffic and not introduce any additional complexity at all. The second was a limited time offering that launched in mid-March, so only had a small impact on the quarter. We'll have a larger impact on the Q2. That was Chicken al Pastor. This is a chicken with a spicier, more flavorful flavor profile. Its pricing is only at a modest premium to the regular chicken. Based on results to date, it's on track to be the company's most successful limited time offering that's ever been launched. The third factor that drove the traffic growth was strength across income cohorts. Higher income cohorts, consumers continued to increase their purchase frequency, same as they did last quarter. What really changed this quarter is that demand from lower income consumers actually improved versus the prior six months, which really highlights the great value that Chipotle offers for what you're paying. The second segment of the bear case that was really kind of disproven with the Q1 was that margins expanded meaningfully. The company's powerful restaurant economic model is fully intact despite the inflation that they've experienced. Restaurant margins increased nearly 5 percentage points in the Q1 to 25.6%, while operating profit margins increased over 6 percentage points to just under 16%. This margin expansion reflects the benefit from price increases, as I mentioned earlier, boosted same-store sales by 10 points in addition to operating leverage from traffic growth. The company has no plans for further pricing in 2023. They haven't taken any pricing this year at all, and they don't plan to unless inflation re-accelerates. The benefit they're getting from pricing is all from price increases that were taken last year. We think that this should compare very favorably to peers who have taken or will take price increases this calendar year. What's interesting on the margin front is the company's outperforming management's framework of 40% incremental margins. The incremental margin was 54% in the Q1 and has been 45% on average over the last four quarters. If you look at their old framework of kind of a $3 million AUV gets you a 27% margin, they're not far off from that. The trailing 12 month margin in Q1 was about 25% on an AUV of $2.9 million. I'd also point out that recall, this business used to achieve 27%-28% margins on average restaurant sales of $2.5 million, you know, before the food safety issues in 2015. Its peer Taco Bell, which is the current CEO's alma mater, in 2022, achieved a restaurant margin of 28% on a much smaller AUV of $2.2 million. I would say their food quality does not compare. Their food quality does not compare, that's for sure. My point being that this company, Chipotle, and this CEO, Brian Niccol, are no strangers to attractive economic models. We expect more good news to come on that front going forward. Despite a significant re-rating year to date, we believe Chipotle remains an extremely compelling long-term investment. What's the bear case now? It's basically the multiple is high. You know, we've heard that since we bought the stock at $400 in mid-2016, and we've heard it at every point along the way. The stock is 5x since then. Why is that? Well, that's because this is a business that grows earnings rapidly. There's a long runway of mid-teens revenue growth, at least mid-teens ahead of us, driven by 8%-10% unit growth and at least mid-single digit same-store sales. That last assumption I think is gonna prove conservative. Current management has grown same-store sales at a 10% compound annual rate since 2018. This management team has a 5-year+ track record of really outperforming expectations in many areas. I would finally note that our valuation does not take into account any upside levers from things like automation or AI, international growth beyond Canada, which can come in the form of franchising or company-operated expansion, or additional day parts like breakfast. We think all of these things are eventualities. Very excited to see what is in store for the future at Chipotle. Turn it back to you, Bill. Thank you, Tony Asnes. Charles, why don't you update us on Lowe's. Interesting that they've reported a quarter, took down guidance, the stock went up. What happened? Sure. Well, turning to a business that does not trade at a high multiple, which is kind of the essence of perhaps why the stock reacted favorably, we have Lowe's. I'm also first gonna maybe just touch on macro because I think that's like the kind of the core of the debate on the stock today. Short of it is the near-term outlook is fairly uncertain. That's part of the reason why the stock trading where it is, although we continue to believe that the long-term backdrop for this industry remains extremely favorable. In the near term, what's happening kind of at present, and you'll see this in the numbers, I'll talk through it, is comparable transactions for this industry have basically now round trip to 2019 levels. Yet, industry-wide same store sales are still elevated, you know, in the order of kind of 30-ish percentage points relative to the 2019 pre-COVID-19 base. This is entirely due to an expansion in the average ticket. Now, that itself is a combination of both mix and also price. For the first time, we're now starting to see in 2023 some modest pressure to ticket, which was evident in Lowe's results this quarter. This is overwhelmingly being driven by the flow-through of commodity deflation. Lowe's basically passes through the cost of lumber and other building materials directly to its consumers. When you have lumber prices which go from $1,200 per 1,000 sq ft or 1,000 feet of board to $340, it massively pressures sales. Notably, this dynamic is basically gonna moderate over the coming quarters as they kind of lap into and roll over these price adjustments. Now, absent widespread deflation of retails, i.e., you know, the MSRP of a lawnmower, a prospect we find highly unlikely. We believe that home improvement same store sales should consolidate during the balance of the year near current levels. Yet we remain very optimistic around the medium and long-term outlook for home improvement in the United States. Some of the variables that drive that optimism include a historically old and aging housing stock. The average home in the U.S. is now older than 40 years old. Increasingly, baby boomers are choosing to age in place, and so they reconfigure and remodel their homes to kind of support that decision. Millennial cohorts are entering homeownership for the first time, in large numbers. There is a widespread and well-debated national housing shortage and a general lack of new builder inventory. Then you have this kind of dynamic of some continued post COVID-19 hybrid work from home, which gives you incremental use cases and a higher asset utilization for your home, which should pressure the repair and remodel activity which is required to support your home. Yet you still have very high levels of home equity when compared to 2019. We believe the combination of these variables creates a very attractive kind of medium-term outlook and long-term outlook for this industry. Turning to Lowe's quarterly results specifically. The company reported negative same store sales of 4.3%, which the pass-through of lumber deflation pressured sales by approximately 350 basis points. A late arrival of spring, which is a critical selling season for Lowe's, negatively impacted revenue by 175 basis points. Adjusting for those variables, same store sales would have been up, obviously, you know, they matter in the impact of sales. Operating profit margins expanded owing to strong expense control and the benefits of Lowe's enterprise-wide perpetual productivity initiative. Taken together and reflecting the sale of Lowe's Canadian operations, which closed at year-end 2022, adjusted operating profits declined 2%, but earnings grew 5% year-over-year as there was a 10% reduction in their share count. Lowe's bought back another $2 billion of stock this quarter and is on track to buy back roughly 7% of their market cap this year. As you alluded to, Bill, Lowe's moderated their full year guidance, reflecting these near term market dynamics. Same store sales are now projected to decline between 2%-4% this year, which will be partially offset by operating margin expansion. Earnings per share are likely to be roughly flattish this year, or down low single digits, depending on specifically where they end up in their guidance range. There's 2 interesting callouts from this quarter, which I'd highlight, which I think is part of the reason why the stock actually reacted favorably. 1 is, despite the headline same store sales decline, Lowe's reported that comparable sales increased with their pro-customer base. This is roughly 25% of their revenue, and that was despite 800 basis points of lumber-specific deflation that that customer base experienced. Looking through the lumber deflation, they're still growing same store sales with a pro customer base in the high single digit range. That was over a 22%, comparable growth last year, which is quite impressive. This is great indication that many of the operational initiatives that Marvin and his team have undertaken in recent years are bearing fruit and is clear evidence of share gain. Unlocking the pro productivity is critical to their long-term revenue productivity and margin aspirations. This was a really positive data point in the quarter. You know, the other thing I'd note is they announced that following a highly successful pilot program, they intend to expand their merchandise assortment at 300 rural store locations to include certain kind of farm and other kind of rural specific SKUs, which they believe will be well-received by consumers. These rural locations had historically been viewed by the investor communication as a structural impediment of Lowe's achieving Home Depot. You mean the investor community? Yes. Sorry if I said something else. A structural impediment of Lowe's achieving Home Depot-like revenue productivity and margins. These are viewed as kind of a weakness in their store base. What's interesting is Lowe's, for the first time, kind of came out and said, "No, in fact, we view these stores as a competitive advantage for us, and we believe that we have a unique opportunity here to drive incremental sales and profit growth in these locations, and they should help us achieve our long-term aspirations." Longer term, we continue to see line of sight for Lowe's to grow earnings off the current base at an accelerated rate as they close the revenue productivity gap and the margin percentage gap with their closest competitor, targeting that kind of 15% margin over time, which will allow them to generate roughly $20 of earnings per share over time, which is roughly 50% higher than their current base of earnings. Yet they continue to trade at approximately 14.5 times forward earnings, which we view as a low valuation for a business of this quality. It is still a very substantial discount to its direct competitor, Home Depot, which trades in excess of 19 times earnings. One thing I think is always ignored, interestingly, when people look at retailers, the vast majority of retailers lease their stores, which create actually a lot more risk. Of obviously upward increasing rents, loss of control of good locations, Lowe's basically owns all of its own stores, which, and that real estate is quite valuable. When you think of a 14 multiple in the context of owning the real estate, it makes it an even cheaper story. Thanks for the summary. For us, Restaurant Brands. Sure. Restaurant Brands is making great progress in growing each of its brands while also turning around Burger King in the U.S. Patrick Doyle has now been executive chairman for just about six months, and under him, results are already starting to improve. In particular, one of the things that he's focused on is putting a renewed focus on franchisee profitability with specific medium-term targets by brand and compensation for many senior leaders also being tied to it. At Burger King in the U.S., the company reported its second consecutive quarter of improving same-store sales relative to pre-COVID levels, which are now up about 8%. This is despite being in the very early innings of its Reclaim the Flame program. The company's only spent about $45 of its $400 million program so far, meaning there is plenty of opportunity for it to recapture share as the program's benefits start to kick in. That spend has been largely focused on advertising and some light-touch remodels, but the larger intensive remodels will begin later this year. As part of that effort, the company will optimize its store footprint. We'll close about 300-400 stores and transition more of its stores towards its, you know, better-performing franchisees. Given the improvements that have already been made and the building blocks for future improvement, we believe the company's target of improving franchisee-level EBITDA to about $175,000 per store by next year is well within reach, at which point the franchisees will take on some of the additional advertising burden. Look, the company doesn't need to look too far for a blueprint for success. Its international business at Burger King, which actually represents more than half the EBITDA, is growing as well or better than all of its competitors, with same-store sales that are up almost 30% relative to pre-COVID levels. The obvious question being, what is the difference between the international business and the U.S. business? Well, abroad, the stores are much newer, they're more efficient, and Burger King has a much larger digital business. All efforts that the Reclaim the Flame plan will tackle in bringing to the U.S. as well. Turning to Tims in Canada, that business has also continued to make improvements with its eleventh consecutive quarter of improving same-store sales trends prior to pre-COVID levels, really every single quarter since COVID began. Over the last few years, that brand has undertaken a fairly dramatic effort to grow sales by improving their offering in the lunch and snacking day parts and extending their lead in the beverage category with innovations in cold beverage. Those efforts are finally paying off as afternoon foods and cold beverage sales are growing more than 20% currently. Abroad, Tims is also continuing to grow its brand. In particular, if you look at China, that now has more than 600 units, really from a standing start a couple years ago. If you look at other brands elsewhere, Popeyes and Firehouse are continuing to grow well, with management starting to accelerate unit growth at both brands. Notably, Popeyes is now growing units at more than 10% a year as the higher AUVs have dramatically improved the unit economics of that business. We believe that's a great case study, an example of what QSR can actually achieve with Firehouse in the coming years as well. Given the excitement around Patrick Doyle's new leadership, the improving business fundamentals, the share is actually now up 12% for the year. Given the opportunity for QSR's brands to still catch up to their peers, in particular in their home markets, and a very long runway for unit growth, internationally, we're still very excited about our investment at these prices. Great. Look, I think, it's great to have Patrick on board, but I think we've also talked as a team about how impressed we've been with Josh Kobza, who is the operating CEO of the business, and we thought did a great job on his first earnings call as CEO. We think the team here is strong and deep in the company. Brian, why don't you update us on Hilton? Sure. Hilton really continues its just dramatic recovery from kind of the depths of COVID. When the company reported results last month, they actually highlighted that their same-store sales metric, which they call RevPAR, is actually 8% across the system ahead of where it was before COVID, which is really remarkable given that COVID just happened over three years ago. At the same time, their EBITDA is actually about a little over 30% above where it was pre-COVID, which really just reflects the fact that Hilton's grown its unit count significantly over the last three years, but also really re-engineered its cost structure to become more efficient, which it did really during the depths of the COVID days and has been able to maintain that efficiency over time. One of the things I think is really impressive in the near term is despite having improved beyond where it was pre-COVID, Hilton is still not back to the level of occupancy that it was prior to COVID. That's really because its core business customer is still returning to the road. We actually think on the coming next several quarters, you're gonna see an accelerated rate of growth as that occupancy trend tends to normalize to where it was before. There's still more of an accelerated growth in that COVID recovery phase from Hilton to come over the coming quarters, which we're excited about. I think longer term, again, one of the reasons why we like the business model so much is these royalty-based, you know, franchisor models are capital light. If you have the ability to grow, that can be one of the most valuable business models out there. Hilton really is growing its unit count. Their target's about 67%, you know, at a rate that really grows in excess of a lot of the franchise concepts that we're familiar with. One of the reasons that they can achieve that I talk a little bit about now, is their ability just to create new brands from scratch, which isn't really something that even the other franchise concepts that we admire Certainly not as competitors are able to do. There's 2 concepts that Hilton's recently introduced, I thought were worth discussing a little bit just to highlight this opportunity and why we think Hilton can continue growing its unit count at such an elevated capital light way for a long period of time. The first concept they announced a little while ago, called Spark. Spark is a really interesting development because it's basically at a premium economy segment, which is below the price point of any of Hilton's other brands. It's not competitive with anything they do today, but it's actually one of the largest travel segments. Interestingly, because of the low price point, it often tends to be one of the more fragmented segments where there's a lot of independent owners and operators. There's a lot of people who go to these, when they first start traveling, and they have very bad experiences because the experiences can be incredibly inconsistent. What Hilton is doing that we think is very smart here is in Spark, they're creating a conversion opportunity. In an environment where it may be a little bit more difficult to get financing to build new projects, Hilton is coming up with a project where it costs very little because you just need to spend a little bit of money to convert your existing hotel into something that meets Hilton's brand standards. They can provide a very consistent customer experience to what is today a very inconsistent customer experience. They're getting the largest funnel of travelers who are first starting to travel to the lowest price points that they can then over time upsell into some of their higher end products. We think this could be a very large opportunity over time, and it's something that doesn't cost the company any capital in order to create. Unlike some of their competitors, they don't need to go out and buy it. They can just build it. We think that's very smart. Another concept that they just talked about on their earnings call for the first time and really just released some more details over the last couple of days, is what's being called now, Project H3, which is a very unique extended stay solution. This is really in response to kind of how flexible work arrangements are changing the travel and residential landscape. So this product is a low-cost product that is really aimed at somebody who's gonna stay in what they want to be an apartment-like experience with the consistency of a Hilton brand for more than 20 days. There's really nothing else like it on the marketplace. This is coming in again at a lower price point. It's not competitive with any of the other existing Hilton extended stays, which are really designed to be extended stays of a week or 10 days, nothing this long term. This is something that the company talked about, that they already have over 300 development deals, even though they've just started talking about this in the last month. We think it just really highlights these two concepts. The ability for the company to create new brands to power that unit growth, but also to do it in a very intelligent way, which really maximizes the network effects longer term for their entire customer base. I just thought those were two things to highlight as to why we're so excited that the company can continue growing its units at a high rate, which we think will really help the company achieve kind of our internal estimates longer term of growing at a kind of mid to high teens earnings per share growth once they normalize from this rapid recovery from COVID-19. We remain very excited about the company. While the shares are up about roughly 7% year to date, you know, we actually believe the company is trading at one of the lower multiples it has over time. Actually, it's probably one of the most attractive kind of investment returns we think we've seen from the company since really the last several years. We're very excited about it. One of the, you know, it's an interesting analog to compare, you know, restaurant brands and Hilton, and we like obviously both businesses. Unique to Hilton is the ability to create brands. All of the restaurant brands were acquired. That, of course, limits the universe of things that you can do. Here, we're limited by creativity, basically. And their ability to launch them with, you know, their credibility enables them to launch them with a lot of demand. One question I would have, I think our investors would wanna know the answer to. The regional banking system, which has provided a lot of the financing, particularly for smaller real estate loans. Think of some of the extended stay or the Hilton kind of concepts in the U.S. What do the companies say about any impact, potential impact on the unit development program? Sure. I think it's a concern that may be out there that is weighing on the hotel industry in general, because it certainly is the case that bank lending standards are getting tighter. It is becoming more difficult to finance a large variety of real estate projects right now. What I think makes Hilton unique and why they feel like they're more insulated than most, is really two different things. First, their brands are the most financeable across the industry because they have such a high return, high margin profile, and they have such a just deep network of relationships with lenders and with developers. I think that if any project is not getting financed, Hilton will sort of be the last one that they're still willing to finance before they cut off this spigot. I think that Hilton is very well insulated relative to the pressure of the industry in general. The other thing, though, I think it's worth pointing out is that, where Hilton's projects are, a lot of them tend to be at the more kind of mid or what they call upper scale. Lower price point, not the luxury properties, not the high-end ones. Those are the ones that would be the most difficult to finance in this market with the most risk. Hilton is really doing more consistent high return, and really lower cost, hotels for their partners who are actually financing these things, and those are easier, lower ticket items. Secondly, for example, if you think about Spark, which I just discussed, a lot of what Hilton does is actually conversion opportunities. They have a very good balance between things that their partners need to build from the ground up, which in some respects will certainly be more impacted than they would have been when, you know, money was free a few years ago. Although we think they're still pretty well insulated. A lot of their growth can come from conversions where people don't really need to go to a bank to have a loan because they're just making some more cosmetic-like changes that are very low cost. They may even be able to finance, you know, just out of their operations. We think that balance of new builds and conversions is something that will really help Hilton through to the extent that credit, you know, remains tight or, or continues to tighten over time. Great. Thank you. Ben, Howard Hughes. Thanks, Bill. Howard Hughes has really now established itself as the country's premier owner and developer of large scale master planned communities or MPCs. As we've talked about, these MPCs are located in sought-after, low cost, low tax, and pro-business regions like Texas and Nevada, which continue to benefit from strong in-migration trends. Due to the macroeconomic uncertainty that has come with elevated interest rates, Howard Hughes has underperformed the market this year alongside and in line with the overall REIT sector. However, we believe that Howard Hughes' uniquely advantaged business model is once again proving its resiliency throughout various market cycles. As mortgage rates have stabilized this year, we've seen a positive shift in homebuyer sentiment. With supply of home resale inventory limited due to owners' reluctance to sell and take on more expensive mortgages, there's been a resurgence in demand for newly built homes. Home builder stocks have significantly outperformed this year as investors have come to appreciate this dynamic. In fact, Toll Brothers just reported this morning, and they had very strong commentary on new home demand trend. Howard Hughes saw this trend in its own MPCs with a 120% sequential increase in new home sales compared to Q4 and only 9% decrease compared to the elevated levels of Q1 last year. As a result, Howard Hughes expects to see strong residential land sales throughout this year, and it's guided for approximately $200 million of MPC earnings before taxes, which is in line with levels seen in 2017 and 2018 prior to this period of outsized land and home sales post-pandemic. Howard Hughes has 30,000 acres of remaining land in its MPCs, which will provide ongoing cash flow generations for decades to come. In its income-producing operating asset segment, Howard Hughes' Q1 same-store net operating income grew by over 8% year-over-year. They experienced continued favorable leasing momentum across the portfolio, with sequential improvements in overall leasing percentages across its core property types. This strong performance in a difficult leasing environment again shows the strength and desirability of Howard Hughes' communities. In its Ward Village Hawaii development, Howard Hughes has three condo towers under construction and a fourth in presales, all of which are nearly fully sold out at a record pace for the company. These four towers are expected to generate combined future revenues of nearly $2.5 billion between 2024 and 2026 at a nearly 30% cash margin. Given this continued strength and demand for its premium condo product, Howard Hughes announced the launch of its eleventh condo tower, which is expected to commence presales in late 2023 and be delivered in 2027. A steady pace of new condo home sales over the next few years. At the Seaport in downtown New York, revenues increased 27% in Q1 compared to the prior year due to the addition of the Jean-Georges-operated Tin Building. It also came with continued losses as they attempt to ramp up the customer base and build customer loyalty. Tin Building achieved seven-day per week operations throughout Q1, which required some overstaffing to ensure the customer experience is stellar in the start-up phase. Over the coming months, HHC intends to dial back that labor, which will hopefully result in better cash flows throughout the remainder of the year. From a balance sheet perspective, HHC ended up with $420 million of cash on hand. 100% of the company's debt is now fixed, capped or hedged, with approximately 87% due in 2026 or later. We would note, as we talked about, the construction financing remains challenging. For Howard Hughes, that may just mean that they perhaps slightly delay a project or two. Given that they own their own land, they have the luxury of being able to build whenever the demand and financing is available. Lastly, given our view of value at the company, Pershing Square has continued to purchase additional shares over the past year, increasing our ownership position to over 32% of the company. Thank you, Ben. I think Howard Hughes is a, I would say, very long-term story, with macro sensitivity, particularly in the short term, in a market environment, where people are looking to avoid risk. The unfortunate nature of this business is the market tends to focus on whatever they think of the most concerning part of the portfolio and use that as a reason to knock the company. You know, home builder stocks are up a ton. You know, our land sales are directly related to home builder outcomes, yet our stock is, you know, Howard Hughes stock is underperforming. We own a significant number of office assets. They're generally very well leased because they're inside our MPCs, but I think we're getting dinged there. It's okay. Again, we take the long view, and we're very happy to own more of the company at an attractive price. Manning, Canadian Pacific, you know, over the weekend, read a news story about, President of Mexico expropriating a small railroad line. I think that's contributing to some weakness in the stock. Maybe you can start there, and then why don't you talk about how the company's doing with Kansas City Southern? Yeah, definitely. Thanks, Bill. I'll definitely touch on Mexico, but maybe just first stepping back. You know, a very exciting milestone happened in the 1st quarter at CP when it finally received regulatory approval from the Surface Transportation Board for its acquisition of Kansas City Southern. This transaction, as you know, everyone may recall, has been in the works for nearly 2 years, and we'd really like to congratulate Keith and the entire team for getting it over the finish line. The Surface Transportation Board's decision, it was extremely favorable for CP. The decision highlighted the many benefits of the transaction, which are also some of the reasons why we're so excited about the stock, including increasing competition in the rail industry Creating new transportation options for shippers and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by shifting freight from trucks to rail. CP, you know, after receiving the green light from the government, officially closed the acquisition on April 14th and renamed the combined company CPKC or Canadian Pacific Kansas City. You know, although it has only been several weeks since officially merging, the team has really hit the ground running and already announced two major intermodal contract wins while focusing on integrating the two networks. Now that the merger has closed, investor attention has shifted to both the integration of KCS as well as the new financial targets for the combined company. In terms of the financial targets, management has a synergy target out there of $1 billion of EBITDA over three years post-integration. This target was last updated in August 2021, which was obviously prior to CP gaining control of KCS. Since then, the pricing environment in the transportation industry has significantly improved. Not to mention that CP has identified many more synergy opportunities after getting to spend more than a year and a half talking with customers and analyzing KCS's network in great detail. Management is planning on updating these financial targets at their upcoming Investor Day in June, and we expect the new synergy target to be well in excess of the $1 billion prior number. You know, Bill, you mentioned Mexico. I'll highlight a little bit. You know, there's been several, I guess, recent events over the weekend that have contributed to, you know, weakness in the share price performance, weighed on investor sentiment, but in our opinion, actually do not impact CPKC. There's a little bit of background. There were headlines over the weekend that the Mexican government has expropriated a small section of railroad in southern Mexico that is currently operated by Grupo México, which is a large, you know, industrial company there. In Mexico, the railroads are owned by the government, but they are operated by private players, exclusively via long-term concessions of the government grants. This railroad in particular that was taken over by the government is really integral to the president's key infrastructure project connecting the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. The Mexican government and Grupo México have been in long-term negotiations over how to kind of, you know, make this project into fruition. Talks, I think, fell through over the weekend and the government went forward and, you know, took over the railroad. I would note that the railroad is actually still operated by Grupo México. It's still in operation today. Grupo México and the Mexican government are in active negotiations over the compensation and kind of the go-forward operations here. You know, the KCS situation is, in our opinion, completely different. You know, KCS's network is in northern Mexico. It has nothing to do with connecting the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, this, you know, pet infrastructure project that the President of Mexico is very focused on. The KCS network obviously is cross-border with the U.S. and connects a lot of the Mexican industrial heartland to the very important U.S. market. We think it would be extremely detrimental to impact that. I'd also note that KCS's concession was recently extended to last until 2037, which we believe signals kind of the Mexican government's confidence in KCS and the CPKC combination. I guess lastly, I'll note that the Mexican president, he's known as AMLO, he has 15 months left in his term. Mexico is a fully functioning democracy, so the president cannot kind of unilaterally take actions like this without consequences. The Mexican Supreme Court has already actively pushed back on many of his infrastructure projects where the government would, you know, perhaps be seen as overreaching into private industry. Again, you know, negative headlines, but again, we think this has nothing to do with CPKC, and we remain really excited about the opportunities combining CP and KCS together. We look forward to learning more at the June Investor Day. Great. Thank you, Manning. Anthony, any comments on Fannie/Freddie you'd like to make? I guess that's a nice segue with expropriation, but no, no real updates. Aren't we an active democracy? We are. With just compensation for taking a private property. Well, we'll see. You know, it's a long runway here. You know, in the meantime, while we wait for kind of the eventual resolution, you know, the entities are continuing to build capital. They earned just under $6 billion combined in Q1. They have total capital of $103 billion on a GAAP basis or $85 billion excluding deferred tax assets, which they're not allowed to count towards regulatory capital. They need another $222 billion of capital. It'll take about eight years to reach that through retained earnings alone. I don't think they actually need that. I think that. According to the latest, The higher capital standards. That's right. Yeah. That's right. You know, what's interesting about Fannie and Freddie is I don't really know how to think about why the stock price is here versus any other stock price. It's, you know, it was a period of time where they weren't building any capital at all, and the share price was 3x the current share price. I think it's actually probably the most interesting play on who the next administration is. You know, if President Trump is reelected, I think it's probably very good for Fannie and Freddie or any more conservative, leaning administration. Don't let that affect your vote. Consider other factors. Just thought I'd actually, there's a question from a shareholder investor about Fannie and Freddie. There was a Supreme Court decision in something called the Axon case, but we do not believe it is relevant to Fannie and Freddie and the anti-injunction provision that the Supreme Court basically is allowing the government to act, you know, without, you know, to take the actions that they deem necessary and that we are not in a position to challenge them. Our bet at this point is really based on the economic logic of Fannie and Freddie becoming independent companies once they are sufficiently capitalized, whether that's 8 years or whether it's some shorter period of time because the capital rules are changed or the businesses raise capital in an IPO. We do think that's the inevitable outcome. Interesting options representing a little under 1% of the portfolio. Just want to comment on Pershing Square SPARC Holdings. This is our called SPAC 3.0 vehicle. It's been, you know, almost a year and a half, I guess, probably more than a year and a half that we've been working with the SEC, and we are getting close, but we're not quite there yet. We expect to make a revised filing, answering a few more questions with the government. This, you know, hopefully by the end of this week. We also are endeavoring to finish the various state approvals that are necessary. My best estimate of when we're in a position to actually start working on a transaction is really a July timeframe. Probably second week in July is probably the most, I would say conservative, but, you know, again, this has taken a lot longer than we would expect. We do think Spark is going to be a very interesting vehicle at a time when it's very challenging for a business to go public. We think the phone will ring once people realize this entity is live. We believe this will be the most efficient way for someone to go public and have certainty on a transaction occurring, on price, and a minimum capital raise of significance. We think we do one, and we'll set a kind of roadmap for what we can do going forward. We're actually quite excited about it, although we're patiently excited because that's taking some time. Briefly on hedges. Well, first of all, you know, we the elephant in the proverbial room are the debt ceiling talks that remain unresolved. I would say our house view is that this is probably more likely than not to not lead to a default, although, you can't discount that kind of outcome. We don't think any of our individual businesses is materially affected by a government default. They're all well-financed companies that generate their own cash and have are conservatively financed. It's just not a good for America moment, and it could lead to a permanent increase in the cost of our debt. We do have a couple of interest rate-related hedges on the kind of longer-term part of the curve. We do think 30-year borrowing rates for the United States government would certainly go up in the event of a default on a persistent basis. We didn't put that hedge in place initially for that reason, but it will serve a somewhat similar fact. We have no other sort of directly related hedges. We've looked at some alternatives, but the reward is not sufficiently asymmetric to justify the investment. Again, there we'd be only hedging opportunistically, i.e., with the goal of making a large profit, having liquidity at a time when markets could be in disarray. We think it's the lower likelihood outcome, but we can't be certain. With that, we've got about one minute left. Let's see if there's anything that we didn't yet cover that we're permitted to discuss in some of the questions. You know, if there's anything new here of consequence. Actually, I think we've done a pretty good job in covering the questions. If you have further questions, please feel free to contact Tony Asnes or our ir@persq.com email address, and we'll get back to you promptly. Thank you for joining us for our Q1 conference call. Let's hope the government doesn't default, and we'll know more certainly by the next call. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. This concludes your conference call for today. You may now disconnect.