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- [00:00]
A
Do you honestly look for the cheapest dentist in town? Like you have some, some issues, some, some pain and some discomfort, do you? We don't have yellow pages anymore, but you go online and you look up the cheapest dentist, we don't do that. Right. So we know that this intuitive value and price dynamic, right, like this price is what you pay, value is what you get. It reminds us the stock doesn't know we own it. So if you found a stock that makes sense, you don't have to check on it every five minutes. If it's supposed to do well, it will do well. If it does terribly, sell it, buy something else, but you don't have to check on it. This was one huge lesson for me, to pay up for exceptional opportunities. Because you're not buying for the static way of value investing 50% off. You're buying for the dynamic approach where a dollar could be a hundred. And our mutual friend Chris Mayer talks about how sometimes it's worth to pay a full dollar if you're actually buying a hundred dollar bill.
- [01:00]
B
You're watching Excess Returns right here on YouTube. I'm Matt Zigler in background. So I find myself reading the Wall Street Journal as one is want to do in this day and age. And I'm looking at this and I'm looking not for stock tips. I'm looking for a dentist, oddly enough. And I want a cheap one, not a discount dentist. I want a good deal on some high quality dentistry and not some Steve Martin in Little Shop of Horror stuff. I'm going to front run the person getting rowdy in the comments with that one. I'm not doing that. So my return on flossing as I reflect as I'm looking at the paper it's made my oral portfolio, let's say I'm compounding towards two cavities ever and both only after the age of 40. So I'm feeling good. But that's despite my clear error in avoiding orthodontics like a young Buffett avoided tech because I thought it was overpriced. So I'm reading the Journal and I see the expensive truth about cheap investments by the one and only Bogomil Baranowski. And yes, this is what I needed in my life at this moment. I learned so much that I pick up the phone, I call up Bogumil and I say we have to get you on excess returns. So here we are, investment advisor at Blue Infinitas, talking billion show host on YouTube, Spotify and all the places the best name in the Business BB Cruel Bogomil Baranowski welcome to Access Returns.
- [02:15]
A
Well, I'm so excited to be here and we started chatting a minute ago and I'm grateful you're here. You're asking questions and I'm really moved by how much this article hit a nerve of some sort. And I'm sure we're going to dig in deeper into this today.
- [02:31]
B
It hit a nerve. Not in another oral hygiene pun. There's no root canal here. But it did hit a nerve because I think you took something I've take this the right way, seen packaged a million different ways, and you package this kind of flawlessly. So I want to start there. Yes, it's a pun, but the comparison at the top. We never choose the cheapest dentist, the rock bottom restaurant, or the sketchiest used car. But investors routinely hunt for the cheapest stocks. Why do you think this contradiction exists in investor psychology? Why do we do this?
- [03:04]
A
So I have some whys that I found both in my own pursuit, but also in the pursuit of so many friends in this business that I get to talk to regularly. And I wasn't going in with a judgment. I think too often we go and we try to label things. I was just trying to observe and understand both myself and people that I admire in the business that have been very successful, doing very well and helping a lot of clients and serving others. But they went through a transformation and I wanted to understand how that happened and why and. And why it might be possibly a secret that can unlock something for all of us. You know, we might be already in the right place investing in stocks, investing in the right stocks, but I think there's something to be unlocked. And I write a lot about patience, but I think once you have the patience figured out, what you actually buy and how you buy it, I think matters. At the end of this episode, I'll share with you exactly how this essay came about. And it came out in a different way than many others. But I'll save that until the end. Remind me to share it with you.
- [04:10]
B
Save it for the end. I want that story of where this.
- [04:12]
A
Came from, but I want to give you some background. So when I started investing 20 years ago, I was very fortunate that I got to spend time with people that were close to retirement or basically should have been retired by then, which is the beauty of the investment profession, that there is no retirement age. And I run into 80 year olds 20 years ago that are no longer with us. But the coolest thing was that they worked with people that remembered the Great Depression. So they themselves invested through the 70s. Mind you that Buffett shut down his partnership right before the 70s because he thought that some tough times are ahead and he was right about it. And those folks remembered people that lived through the Great Depression. So I got to hear those stories that we know from Ben Graham. Ben Graham was buying companies that were so cheap you could basically liquidate them and walk away with more cash than it cost you to buy them. Just think of it, right? Unheard of, a business listed on the stock exchange that you could go buy so much of it that you could liquidate the whole thing and walk away with more money. But that didn't exist in the 70s and definitely harder to find these days. Anyways. A lot of us joined the investing profession because we have a little bit of capital to invest and it's kind of a chicken and egg, right? We have the capital because we are frugal. We know that what a bargain is. We go about our life saving more, spending less than we earn. So we have all those habits. I watch my grandma who grew up in the Great Depression and remembered it as a kid. So I'm as guilty as anybody else listening to this. So don't, don't, don't feel guilty about it. That's just the human experience.
- [05:54]
B
And a baseline of guilt is normal. I'm gonna feel that a little bit.
- [05:58]
A
Yeah. Well, okay. But we'll take it in a productive direction anyways. You end up here, you're investing and you have a little bit of money because you've been frugal. And guess what? You look for stocks that are also cheap. Why? Well, Ben Graham did it. It's your second nature to do it because that's how you have any savings to begin with, right? So I think a lot of people get hooked on this idea that I'm going to look for cheap stocks. And guess what? This actually can work for a period of time and can deliver decent returns and has in the past. I think the dynamics might be shifting and changing. The point that I'm making in your everyday life. And I make this joke about a dentist. Do you honestly look for the cheapest dentist in town? You have some issues, some pain and some discomfort, do you? We don't have Yellow Pages anymore, but you go online and you look up the cheapest dentist or you call friends, hey, Matt, who's the cheapest dentist that you know?
- [06:56]
B
Hey, Perplexing, find me whatever the modern equivalent is.
- [07:00]
A
We don't do that, right? So we know that this intuitive value and price Dynamic, right? Like this. Price is what you pay, value is what you get. So if you find the cheapest dentist, that dentist might actually cost you more because you're gonna go back and visit the same, or maybe three more dentists after that to have that issue. I don't even have to explain it. It's like, it's so obvious. Now, when you buy a difficult stock, you may work out, you may. The whole thing may work out just as it did for Ben Graham, but it can get you in real, real trouble. That's one thing. But the second thing is that you're not capturing the upside of slightly more expensive businesses. I see this theme, I call it a three phase kind of evolution of the investor, right? So we're looking for the bargain, and then we start to recognize good value, which is like, oh, this is a decent dentist. He doesn't charge yet as much as he should, right? So we have this like, oh, it still fulfills this frugal element of my personality, but it's okay, I'm going to pay up. But I think the real secret starts when you learn to pay up for exceptional opportunities. And I think this is something that Buffett discovered in many more people.
- [08:13]
B
I want to zoom in on each of these just for one more second. It was cheap, good, and then the payoff as the three phases, which I think is, give me examples. Give me an example from Buffet. Give me an example from your career, your life. Give me a cheap example. Give me a good example. Give me a, oh, paying up example. Well, you're a billet.
- [08:38]
A
Yeah, I can do it. I can do it. So I don't know if people know, but Ben Graham was not actually holding his stocks in the 30s, 40s, 50s. He would buy what people call these days, and I think he called it at the time, the 50 cent dollar bills, right? So you see a dollar bill, it's half off. And he would wait. And he actually had a formula for it. He was very scientific about it. And it frustrated maybe some of his colleagues that he wasn't really interested anymore in the businesses. He got burned by the Great Depression. So he didn't really care, like, oh, it' making these widgets or something else. He just wanted the numbers to work. And I think the prime example is Berkshire Hathaway itself, because this was a liquidation kind of story. Textile industry really struggling. The more capital they put in, the results were more and more disappointing. And had Buffett not showed up, this business would have been gone in the next five, maybe 10 years. The most the textile industry, foreign competition, labor cost. It just became impossible to operate this kind of business in the U.S. but Buffett bought it because it was cheap and it looked cheap and he thought, worst case, he's going to get his last puff and walk away. It's a miracle in the history of business that Berkshire became what it became. It has nothing to do with what it was when Buffett bought it. A whole story about it, but we'll leave it for another time now. Good value. For me, it's, it's a very tempting territory because these are decent businesses that for one reason or the other are, are, you know, a bit off. And it could be a disappointing quarter. It could be something that's bringing the stock down, a management change, a product launch delay or something like that. So it's a business that's not going to really impress you, but it's not a shrinking, falling apart kind of business. And I'm sure we can find those. Coca Cola has been written about so many times, I can use it as a case study here. You guys do your own research, but it's a slow growing business. But if you watch it over a decade or two, you'll see that there are periods where it's a decent value and you'll buy it and it belongs in some portfolios. I found purpose for it at different points in time myself. No recommendation of any kind, but it's good value. It's not going to blow you away, but it's also not going to surprise you. Being half off and it's like, how did that happen? What did they do? Hopefully not going to work. That's why you don't buy a single stock. I think that's why you buy a handful anyways. Exceptional opportunities, that's a tough territory. And it's a tough territory for especially people that believe that they're value investors. I had the experience of working with a lot of folks that consider themselves value investors. Like really hardcore old school value investors that told me those Great Depression stories and the legends of the bygone era. And to the last day of their career, they waited for the single digit pe and I'm not kidding, they would tell me bogomil, you'll see. And wonderful humans, I learned a lot from them and incredible storytellers. But we never got to see those single digit P's for the main index of any kind. We haven't seen it again, knock on wood. We don't see it because that would be really painful if we saw that. But that's a Whole different thing. Now and then you come across something that's really exceptional. And I'll use a case study, no endorsement. You guys might be listening to this five years from now. So do your own research. Anyway. But I was exposed to Facebook, which is called something else today, early on, and I remember when it was a busted ipo. So busted ipo, meaning it got listed, it ran up. Guess What? Like many IPOs, they disappoint, but the expectations are so high that the stock gets completely destroyed. So the stock ran up to $42, I remember, and it went down to 20, $19. And I do remember one Wall street analyst writing it up and saying that it should be a single digit dollar stock. And Matt, I wish I saved a copy of that report because I haven't seen it since. It's been just taken, gone, vanished.
- [13:03]
B
It's been erased from.
- [13:03]
A
Erased from history. Somebody dropped it on my desk. So I read it and it existed. And it was a reputable firm. But that I am. I don't remember even which one, or I choose not to remember. Either way, to me, Facebook, when I was first exposed to it, I thought that the business model is exceptional. I thought that it's a media company that has content creators, all of us, producing content for free. And we have this huge motivation to go out and report on our lives, on the lives of our kids and relatives and. And basically it's like free journalism on one side. And then they found a way to sell the ad space. So it's not. Not that different than a newspaper model, but a newspaper has to do a couple of things. They have to hire reporters. The reporters have to do some really diligent work to write something interesting. And I've met and you know a lot of investigative journalists that do incredible work. It's not easy. Long story short, they had all the content for free. And they were charging for this access to that content, to our attention, because of the content. And I thought, I don't know how the metrics will work out, but it's an exceptional opportunity. And it was a tough stock to hold. It was a very tough stock to bring up to the attention of my value investing fellow friends at the firm where I was at the time. And it was a battlefield to even talk about this. And that's really stuck in my head very deep how you had this exceptional opportunity. But it violated all the value investing principles. The multiples were high. It was a hard stock to hold because the first years and even the following years were tough in terms of excitement. And disappointment, excitement and disappointment and huge swings when you really think about it. But I do know, and I'm aware of folks and portfolios where the shares of this company remained through this ride. And to me this was one huge lesson for me to pay up for exceptional opportunities. Because you're not buying for the static way of value investing 50% off. You're buying for the dynamic approach where a dollar could be a hundred. And our mutual friend Chris Mayer talks about how sometimes it's worth to pay a full dollar if you're actually buying a hundred dollar bill.
- [15:39]
B
Chris's point inside of that. And first off, let's just say Whoever wrote the $1 article, speak out. Probably an underwriter. Probably an underwriter on the green shoe. Somebody was a little bit burned by however that went down. Can we drill into the Chris Mayer point a little bit? Because I think this deserves the nuance and I know you have the nuance because you spent a lot of time with Chris. Talk about that. Sometimes it's worth paying that dollar. Flesh that out a little more.
- [16:08]
A
It requires a lot of imagination and it also requires an incredible patience which are really hard things to do. But it also remains conviction to have conviction. It requires us to have conviction and conviction of a different level and category. So there's conviction that allows you to buy something which is, you know, you're going to ponder, you're going to do your research. Now there are tools to do really deep research and go through things and. But that's only the initial conviction. And Chris and I spoke about it and you and I and Chris discussed it more. There are periods when you have drawdowns in the stocks and then you have periods of dead money at drawdowns. And Chris points it out. And I agree that drawdowns are usually short lived. You know, you bought, I mean, let's take on Facebook for a second. You bought Facebook and then it's 50% off. And if you've held it the last 15 years, there are a few moments when it was 50% or 45%, I don't know, 40% off a lot. So the drawdown, Chris argues that it's easier than that money period. And I think he's right because it's short lived. So you feel like, you know what, I'm going to hold my breath for six months and this will start to come around. If I'm right, there are stocks that never come back. But if I'm right, it's going to start to come back now, the dead money period. And if you're honest. And if you go back and look at charts, even of some of the magnificent seven that we have these days, you will see long periods when some of them had their stock go nowhere for two years or three years. Don't take my word for it. Look up a chart, zoom in and look three years and the stock goes nowhere. Now, if you're managing your own money, it's already hard because you feel like I should put my money somewhere else. Even if I put it these days in a certificate of deposit, it's going to earn something that here I'm holding this tech company that's underneath it all. It's growing, but the stock hasn't moved. It's growing into its valuation until it's going to take the next leap. That's the aspiration. At least now the dead money periods are even harder if you're managing other people's money, because people go through the portfolio and go stock after stock. What is this? Why is it there? But I think what is really hard is when you get a question from a client, why is this still in the portfolio? And the stock that's down, they're going to ask you, are you going to buy more of it? Are you selling it? But the stock that hasn't moved in a year or two, and you say, you know what? I still believe in it. Maybe one of the hardest things to do in this profession.
- [18:41]
B
How do you. So how do you answer that? When something hasn't moved in a year or two years or three years, you're still excited about it because of something you're seeing that's not the price.
- [18:54]
A
Yeah.
- [18:55]
B
How do you parse out. This isn't in the price, but I still like this story. And how does that validate this? It was okay that I paid for this fully priced dollar because I still have an imagination of a future versus when you separate. Oh, no, this is. Something is going horribly wrong inside of this thing too. And the price hasn't caught onto that either.
- [19:15]
A
So maybe I flip it on its head a little bit. But if for a second, let's imagine that you're holding 30 stocks and you don't know the prices of these, let's say your, your terminal, whatever. You're using a cruel game.
- [19:27]
B
This is a cruel game. Okay, go ahead.
- [19:31]
A
You don't know the price, but I'll show you every single quarter how the earnings are doing, how the revenues are doing, how the margins are doing. And this will be the only way for you to judge what you actually hold. And when you really think about it when you operate as a business owner and you own a corner store or a gas station or anything else, that's so much more relatable. And I show you the receipts and this gas station had a million of revenue, 1.1 900,851 million. You feel like more or less. I still own a gas station that, you know, books a million of revenue every year. Show me the costs and we can go through the costs. And I tell you, I don't even know what the margins are for this kind of business, but you have the number and then you have the margins and you have the costs and what we're doing to make it better. And end of story, we move on. Throughout this entire conversation, most business owners in this world and most business owners listening to this have no idea how much their business is actually worth to an outside buyer. That's the reality. And I've seen it with my clients and people I talk to. They just don't know. We just don't know. Now, the stock portfolio is different because you see the price every day. So when the question comes up, I say, look, we bought it three years ago. This business was earning whatever 500 million, and three years later it's earning a billion or huge numbers, whatever, hundreds of millions. So it's a multiple in terms of earnings, it's a multiple in terms of revenue. So they've done something right. But we bought it at a higher valuation. It's basically growing into its valuation. And now it's a question of can they maintain the growth rates and the margins they've had. And if the growth rates collapse dramatically, then we are sitting on a loss or we're not going to have the full potential, that can happen. But if I can convince myself that this business has more potential to grow and has already done so well, despite of the stock price not going anywhere, it allows me to wait. Matt, I think the hardest thing for a lot of investors is to go back to an idea they found before. We're trying to make this whole experience the least emotional and the most intellectual as possible. But we're humans at the end. I've met very gifted investors that have not been able to eliminate the emotional aspect of the experience. If you bought a stock and it did something awful to you, however you define it, even if it puts you for a three year torture with clients asking you why you hauled it, guess what? It's half off after that. An opportunity of a lifetime to buy it. I would guess a lot of professional investors would choose not to have it in the portfolio. Not to answer yet one more question and I personally show up and still buy it. But it's been a learning experience. It wasn't always intuitive to do that.
- [22:34]
B
Bogoville Baranowski, nice to his exes. That's the lesson here. There's something, and I've wanted to ask you this question because when you explain it that way, you also make me think of Berkshire Hathaway and the idea of discussing the look through earnings.
- [22:51]
A
Yeah.
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B
And the idea of looking inside of the portfolio and say, what are these companies actually doing as companies forget all the other details.
- [23:00]
A
Yeah.
- [23:01]
B
That's a whole extra layer of work for a person to do. But you're telling me this is a very, very useful exercise to check the composite health of a portfolio. Is that the takeaway here? Like what are. What's the look through for everything I own?
- [23:14]
A
You know, you don't have to do it for every single stock all the time. I think if you have once. Yeah. If you have ones that really, for lack of a better way to explain it, bother you on some level. I see those massive reactions in the market and maybe my memory is failing me here, but I don't remember such volatility around earnings. Twenty years ago we had some sell offs around earnings. But nowadays I want to say, and it's just my impression that it takes a lot less to disappoint and it takes a lot less not to impress when it comes to earnings. When I think of owning a business, the quarterly earnings are just kind of like a little hint, a reminder, like that's what we're doing. I don't see each and every quarter as a test and as very important. It's just one quarter. I'm just trying to see if they're more or less going where they're going and doing what they're supposed to do. But I see so many quarters where the business still booked. I mean, let's say a billion revenue and more or less the same profit as last year. But they lowered their guidance. What an awful thing to do. Right. And by the way, guidance is most CEOs honestly don't know what the next 12 months will look like. I mean, look at the last 12 months. How many of the things that we've experienced in the last 12 months, you would have predicted, like, honestly go back a full 12 months cycle. Right. Most of it we would have. Right.
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B
We have companies, you know, reversing their tariff write offs, basically contributing to positive earnings surprises.
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A
There you go.
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B
That Tells you about, all you need to know about the ability to predict these things, right?
- [24:57]
A
So you look at the business. Let's say revenue didn't grow 1% up, whatever. Earnings are down 1% and the stock is off 20%. And because the guidance is up 5 instead of 7, whatever it is, for the year, for the quarter, whatever they say. And you feel like if this was a private business, my gas station, would I really panic and call Matt and ask him, hey, do you want to own a gas station? I really don't want to own mine. No, no. I mean, who cares? You know, it's the same business. It's a question of, should I buy some more? I think that's the nature of it. I'm working on an article. I want to call it an Anatomy of a Successful Investment. And it's just going to be one not named, unnamed example of how I really see the most successful investments I've ever held. And in that article, I want to describe this initial period, which is a bit of a purgatory for a lot of investors, where I think that's the biggest edge that remains in this profession beyond long term holding a lot of the stocks. And I was just trimming some stocks, some, some clients needed some cash lately, and I've been going through some portfolios and, and I look at the cost basis, which is a fascinating thing. So I, I usually buy gradually and sell gradually. And I have cost basis that sometimes are very, you know, different for even one account because I bought more and I bought more and I bought more. And I'm very thoughtful about how I trim it for the tax consequences for the client. But I see this very clear period when I bought something and for six months, a lot of those stocks were down another 20 or 30%. I don't want to say always, but often enough to get my attention. And it's, it's a, it's a tough moment for a lot of investors because you have to go and realize, listen, I've done all my research. I bought it at 20 bucks, but now it's at 17. What do I do? Now it's at 16. What do I do? And to have the conviction and the confidence and the courage to buy a little bit more, that's where the secret lies.
- [27:07]
B
I want to contrast this not to, not to pick on her in any way. I want to broaden out this idea too. I want to go to grandma.
- [27:13]
A
Oh, Grandma, yes.
- [27:15]
B
So tell the grandma's story. But then also, could grandma ever have gotten here or was it the prior life experience that would have kept her from thinking this way. I know we're talking about farmer's market stands. We're not talking about, we're talking about perishable goods, not long term businesses. But I want to explore the metaphor of grandma, so maybe you could explain her and then let's talk about the constraints of her logic.
- [27:43]
A
So I asked my guests on talking Billions about childhood and upbringing and even this week I spoke with two people and one of us, well, I teared up a little bit. We're sharing a story and it gets emotional sometimes, I have to tell you. And they love that question as much as they have their reservations about that question. Because you're digging into something deeper. I have this belief that nobody does something for 40, 50 years of their lifetime just because it pays well or because they want to impress somebody. You must love what you do. I mean there are thousands of thousands of things that you could be doing. I know people that absolutely love this profession, whichever aspect that they fell in love with, but they love it. And the story begins with grandma or grandpa always, it always does, or dad or mom or uncle or you know, somebody in the family. Anyways, my grandma, my grandma would take me to farmers markets and I'm sure many kids listening, I'm a 45 year old kid, would go to the farmer's market and, and I paid attention, I think took me years, what I was learning at the time. But she would ask and look at different produce and people would bring things and some of the things were out in the sun for a bit too long and the prices would be different, you know, the eggs at the beginning or at the end of farmer's market or tomatoes or cucumber or whatever. But she would pay attention not just to the price but also to what kind of value she's getting. And I don't think she had any idea that she's shaping the future value investor with a growth holder mindset. But she had this instinct about purchasing things. She had her budget and she wasn't trying to buy as much as possible for the least money, but she was trying to get something that's still useful that she can use that night to make dinner for us and all the grandkids that are coming. And I watched it and I absorbed something. And I have this idea that we absorb a lot of lessons on a deeper level. It may take us a few decades to realize what we've learned at the time. But a bigger point that you're making, what got you here will not get you where you're going. I think a lot of us value investors got into investing because we were frugal and we had a little bit of capital. Every single person I can think of had to have that frugal bone to some extent, some of us more extreme than the others. And we have that little capital and we have to do something with it. So we start investing it and the capital starts compounding and growing and we get to a very comfortable place. And I'm thinking of Walter Schloss, who knew Ben Graham and worked with him, lived 100 some years, by the way. A lot of value investors live 100 years. Why is that anyways? Is it the diet?
- [30:20]
B
It's that Graham and Doddsville diet. It's all the cherry Coke.
- [30:25]
A
I think if you're having fun, you're in no rush to go anywhere. I think that's.
- [30:30]
B
And with an intellectual pursuit. I think it's that mix good friends, good times and.
- [30:35]
A
Exactly. The community. So Walter Schloss invested in Ben Graham kind of stocks all the way for 100 years or 80 years of his practice. And it just worked for him. And I think I come across folks that see that whatever they were doing buying those cheap stocks we talked about at the beginning, it works. It's not in sync with the market, but it works. It does what it's supposed to be doing, which is compounding your money at a respectable rate without taking you on a horrendous journey, unless you're super concentrated, which a lot of those folks actually are not. And then if you have a certain capital the same way Buffett in 1969 had, you have a choice. Continue to do that for the rest of your life. And then you realize the capital is so big that you can't find those 50 cent dollars anymore. I think that's what Buffett realized. That was one.
- [31:23]
B
Or not to move the needle.
- [31:24]
A
Right. Oh.
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B
Or not. You might find one. But it's. It's like this doesn't matter.
- [31:28]
A
Yeah. And it works and it works. And it's in line with your nature. And then he meets Charlie Munger. He reads Phil Fisher's book about more qualitative look at businesses. He also gets exposed to some businesses like See's Candy, where he realizes, wow, if you buy a great business, it kind of takes care of itself. It's a lot less work and even intellectual effort to follow a business like that because they reinvest the capital they need, they return the one they don't need, and they continue on this beautiful journey. It's a good business. And then he found some great businesses that he held onto for decades. That's really the biggest secret of Berkshire Hathaway. Most institutional investors would not be in a position to let their stock positions run up to 40% of the portfolio. Name one. I mean, it's. Unless you are a highly concentrated hedge fund, it's not something you can practice. So the point is, what got you here to this successful place? Buffett 1969 to Buffett 2025. He had to go. He chose, he accepted that he had to go through this transformation and pay up for some businesses and go to a whole different level of becoming one of the richest people in the world. For him, from the beginning, if you actually pay attention, none of it was really about the money or has not been about the money for a long. But it was just the intellectual puzzle that he found so fascinating that even you and I spoke about the last words. When he decided to pretty much retire this year, he said, if the markets get interesting, call me. And I felt like, oh, my God, he still loves it. He still doesn't want to let go.
- [33:14]
B
When you look at that, and I want to just close the lip on your grandmother when you look at that, I think she was keenly aware of the purpose of what she was shopping for. So there wasn't like a natural timeline extension that was going on because it was, what am I getting to make the meal tonight or this afternoon? But is there. Is this what you're hinting at, like, it's that balancing act of like, start with a frugal mindset, but then gradually understand how to take what you're interested in and extend the time horizon for what those payoffs and opportunities and possibilities could be. Is that a good way to frame it?
- [33:49]
A
It's a good way to frame it. And I think without a tiny bit of frugality, it's very hard to interact with money as such in life. That's one thing. The second thing is if you take time or choose not to accept that there's a difference between value and price, I think some things might be very confusing for you in life in general. No judgment, just a perception. The minute you realize that, yes, you have to spend less than you make, even if you're collecting a massive distribution from a family trust, you have to realize this is all and I have to live within it. You and I are working with high net worth families, multigenerational family fortunes. If you receive a distribution, you have to learn to live within the limits. Somebody told me that was it Fraser Rice that told me that that one of the hardest things to tell a wealthy person is that they have to live within the limit of the wealth that they have. No matter how much you have, there's a limit to how much you can spend in a sustainable way. So that frugal, for lack of a better way element to it exists. No matter if we're talking about $100 or $100 million, it doesn't really matter. The math is the same. The value and price. I noticed that some people just get it, some people notice, other people do it or practice it, and they get it. And for some people, it will always escape them. And I take all kinds of calls throughout the week. I'm just curious about people and they reach out to me and I say, well, it's just chat. So I realized that there are really successful, accomplished people to this point. The distinction between value and price escapes them. And I can see why. I mean, Buffett has this interesting saying that just because something has a price quota doesn't mean it's worth anything. And there's so many things out there. And I think there will be more with the digital creation of assets and all those things, allegedly assets that have a price. But I claim, I would argue they have no value. And then I have this pushback. What do you mean it has no value? Well, I explain that to me. If I own a stock, you know, it has some sort of earnings, maybe some sort of a dividend. Even if there is no price quote, it has value to me. It pays me some sort of a check every quarter and I'm entitled legally to a portion of the earnings that it accumulates one way or the other. My net worth is growing with this. The ability of this business to produce cash flows and accumulate earnings over time. A piece of land has value. It can be repurposed, used, rented, leased, and can have a commercial property on it. It has value, it can produce income. But a digital item, and I don't want to hate on anything here, but it has a price quote but provides actually no real income producing ability, then the value is only in the eye of the beholder and the last person buying it. If you rely on you getting out of the investment on somebody else bailing you out by buying it from you, I think it's one of many different telltales here that this might not have an underlying value if you own. If I own a gas station and there's never a buyer for that gas station, never. And Matt never tells me the Price quote for my gas station. I remain a shareholder of this gas station for a lifetime. It has value to me. It either clicks or it doesn't. I just can't explain. It either does or it doesn't.
- [37:32]
B
It's clicking. And to all the gas station owners watching this.
- [37:36]
A
Not trolling.
- [37:37]
B
We're not trolling.
- [37:38]
A
This is.
- [37:39]
B
This is. All right, red flags versus green flags. Tell me, help me with what to call these. But yeah, give me some of the. When you're looking at holdings, when you're reviewing the portfolio, the things that turn into the red flags that you're watching for.
- [37:54]
A
Yeah.
- [37:54]
B
Where cheap. It's cheap, but it's cheap plus a problem. And therefore you go, oh, I don't like that. Give me some real examples of this.
- [38:03]
A
There was a stock, and I won't mention the name because it's still public and people pay attention to it. But there was a company that. It must have been more than a decade ago that I was looking at the firm where I was at the time, and it was just a cheap stock. And my value, fellow value investors that I work with, they just loved how low the multiple was. Now, the multiple itself doesn't tell you the whole story. So it had a bunch of leverage, a lot of debt, and it had management change. They were doing things that we didn't really understand why they're doing, and they had to restate some financials over time. And it felt like I, you know, I don't know how bad it's going to get, but it was so cheap. So we got really, really tempted and we, we bought it. And this stock took up so much of my attention and a few colleagues that got involved, and we looked at it. We had the new management come in. We were the only shareholders still asking questions. So that management showed up in New York, came to our office, and I thought maybe that's not a good sign that they want to even see us because they're trying to convince us to keep on holding. But I'll tell you a little secret. There was another manager at that firm who's long gone. He passed away, a lovely guy. And he walked up to me and he says, I'm not going to go to your meetings, but you know they have a competitor. And I said, I know they have a competitor. He says, and the competitor it treats at a higher multiple, but it somehow has everything figured out. It gets the pricing right, the product right. The management has been around for a while, and they're winning new business in places when the other one is just not getting it right again and again. They have a new product launch, they're upgrading a whole. It was just a great opportunity. But you know, the multiple, it's just higher. But he said, I, I don't care, I'm going to pay up for it. And it wasn't the only stock that he paid up for. And I watched him diligently over the years. But he did a very smart thing at that time. He didn't go after the cheapest stock that we were just trying to research the, you know, the last bit off. He went after the other competitor that he was even less familiar with. But he said, it's just worth paying up for. It's just worth it. And he did very well with that one. We sold that troubled stock very soon and moved on. It was a huge relief. You and I talked about it when you look at the portfolio, I think with Joseph Sapochnik, we talked about it how when you look at the portfolio, it's not just the weight of the stock that it has in the portfolio, but also the percent of the attention it takes up. You could have a 2% position in the portfolio that takes up 40% of your attention. I have an easy fix here. Sell it.
- [40:56]
B
Great. Red flags. I totally agree. I'm loving this theme too. Of all the non price indicators where things like attention is even one of those indicators. If you're fretting over this all the time, that tells you something too. What about green flags? What about the other direction of. And maybe you just sort of, you hit some of them in that last story about the other guy.
- [41:18]
A
It's amazing. So investing is such a fascinating pursuit. The closer you look, the more you study, the more you observe, the more you're immersed in it, the more you realize it's so different than many other pursuits. When you write about something, it pays not only once, but it can pay tenfold or a hundredfold. So let's say that you found a stock, you did the research. I actually would argue and even, let's make it a even big argument. I came across folks through the podcast and through my career and I've had 180 guests on the podcast, a lot of conversations on the record, off the record, and I'll share one big revelation that I have is that I know so many people that bought the right stocks at the right time and even at the right price, but I know very few that helped them long enough. So when people think about, you know, research and all these new tools coming out and I'm going to be the first one that runs through the transcript and concludes what if the earnings were good or bad and we're going to be faster at research. It's all great. And I think that's not really where we win the battle. I think there are enough people already that know exactly which stocks are worth buying. But we go back to the conviction, confidence and courage to hold these things for a long period of time. I think it's the hardest thing. So you might come across something that makes sense and just holding it. And I'll add the sweetener here. If you buy a stock that makes sense, I mean let's, let's pick on a stock that everybody knows. Amazon, right? Amazon, by the way, was a stock that all my professors at the university absolutely hated on. I think they lost money in the dot com bubble. Just as a refresher for this audience, Amazon went From I think $108 to $8, 108 to 8, which is a 90 some percent decline. And Bezos wrote a letter with the first word being ouch. And he argued how the business is doing fine. The market is not appreciating what it can do anyways. Amazon was an online bookstore, an incredible online bookstore. So if you bought it because you saw that they're doing the right thing for the right reasons, you had no way of knowing that they will go to so many other services. They will become an everything store. Basically you can buy anything. Then they will have the web services business, that they will stream video and I even lost count of things that they make their own devices too. I don't know if that's a good part of the business, but they do it. And then they will have prime, they'll lock you in and they will become basically a collection of businesses by replicating something that works again and again and again. So I think the point I'm making here is that if you get something right and you hold it over a long period of time, the green part that you talk about, these are never ending positive surprises. And I don't mean quarterly earning surprises, I mean real new business opportunities that the initial analyst or you yourself were in no position to imagine. I think that's the beauty. So when you're wrong about the stock, and I don't wish on anybody to have a zero, I actually have a no zero policy in my portfolios that I don't want to have anything that could go to zero. But imagine you put in a hundred dollars, worst case you lose most of it, right? But that Hundred could become, like Chris Mayer tells us, 100x. Think about it. Even if you take this idea to a whole extreme, like you're totally wrong about some of them and they end up being close to zero, if a handful of them become 10, 20, 50 or 100x, they'll carry you forward.
- [45:04]
B
I want to connect that idea to the multi generational perspective. Because if somebody is in a fund, an etf, some active entity manager, typically when they're talking about that, they're saying, I have a long term time horizon.
- [45:22]
A
Yeah.
- [45:22]
B
And they're talking about their horizon and their product. You and your professional life don't talk about it as you and your product. No, you talk about it in terms of the families and what this means for both the money that comes in and the money that's going to be there long after you're gone. This article, what's the multi generational perspective that you're sewing into this? Because I, I feel it there in every sentence.
- [45:46]
A
I mean it's, it's a huge connection. And I think maybe it's even the privilege and the luxury to pursue even that kind of thinking. Because of the, the mandate that I have. I look at a certain challenge that my clients have, which is a beautiful challenge in many ways, that they have substantial capital for one way, one way or the other, whether inherited or, you know, sold a business or successfully accumulated wealth over their lifetime, and they have to do something with that capital. And they're in a whole different game than I think the majority of participants out there. They can take a long term view. They already have capital that I call that. That's the money they don't immediately need. I think that's the biggest realization when you really want to think long term is the money you don't immediately need. So it can't be the money you're thinking about using to buy your second home or a car or redo your kitchen. No, it's the money that you really have no purpose for right this minute, rather than investing it in a thoughtful way. And that money can be committed for the long run. And the other realization I see is that at some point, you know that a portion of your money is not just for your lifetime. It will outlast this lifetime. And it's not something I can point out or teach. I just, people come to me when they, they realize that. They say, you know, this is the amount. I really don't need it. I'd be happy to enjoy it later on in my life. It may happen, but the assumption now is that it's really for my kids, nephews or the charities I have in mind. And that moment, it's just priceless and it's intangible. But when you see it, it's a whole different mindset. You're not looking at the quarterly results, you're not looking at the benchmark. You're looking at an amount that you definitely don't want to lose, but it's the amount that you can commit over a long period of time. All we talked about and all that Buffett and handful of people accomplished can only exist in a certain context. If you're trying to impress the potential fund shareholder with some monthly numbers, you can't even be a part of what we're trying to talk about here. You just can't. You're trying to follow the benchmark. You're trying not to fall behind the benchmark. Maybe you're making massive bets with very few stocks to impress your fund holders. And there's nothing wrong about that. It's just realization of where you are and what you're trying to do. When you're thinking about long term family money, especially the one that has been already around for a while, they're operating as, you know, well, with a whole different time horizon. They really think about 100 years. I actually asked Charlie and Warren in omaha about their 100 year vision for the firm. And it's public, it's online, people can look it up. But I love that idea because it opens up a whole different world of opportunities. When you think about those businesses we talked about that are worth holding over a long period of time, you have to own them in a certain context, that makes sense and that serves this investment well and that investment will serve back the purpose you're trying to accomplish. So if you can have this infinite investment horizon because that's what family wealth really is, it doesn't have an expiration date. It really does. You're a steward of capital over a long period of time. Matt, I want to highlight something, something that came up in a conversation I recorded the other day and somebody had a bit of an issue with the term billionaire and I thought like, oh, let's explore it.
- [49:19]
B
Not enough commas. Too many commas. What's the.
- [49:22]
A
No, I thought it's fascinating because we use the words and we don't know how they resonate with people. So I said, tell me more about it. And I hope he doesn't mind, I'm not going to mention who. And he says accumulating that much wealth, it's just like, what's the point? Why it's needed? And I said, the families I work with, they don't think in terms of accumulating wealth. They think in terms of being a steward of something that serves a greater purpose. Not just for their family. It could be for their community. It could be for the world at large. They could be owning huge swaths of land that they are protecting and not allowing the trees to be cut down because of the capital they have. Not all of it has to be invested in a very productive, high rate, rate of return way, but they have the excess outside that they can commit to protect some pieces of land and from development all kinds of ways. They're stewards. They're not looking at that billion that they made it. And they have to show everybody that they made it. I actually wrote a piece I called Invisible wealth because I see this very clear phenomenon among quite a few people that I have in my life where you wouldn't know that they are the richest person at a dinner table. Right. And I think it invites a lot here. Like, it invites this ability for you to have a very normal social life without people thinking of you as the billionaire or, you know, deca millionaire, whatever. But you can also live a very normal life, and it doesn't impact your everyday existence as much. There's a catch, though, Matt. I think the catch is that your kids might be absolutely unaware of the kind of actual financial riches that you accumulated. And I see it, and I say it with, you know, it's hugely important and meaningful that the integration part that Jay Hughes talks about, our mutual friend, that the next generation is ready to embrace it. So just because your neighbors don't know that you have, I think at some point your kids have to be brought into the conversation. So they're not surprised with the great responsibility that may be coming, the blessings and the challenges that it brings. But I'll stop here.
- [51:32]
B
The blessings and the challenges of my 2017 Subaru. I'm just hiding all of them. I'm just hiding them. Must be the valuation on this podcast by not thinking about it. Yeah, this is the spoils of riches. Let's talk about the value investor dilemma, at least for a second. Yeah, because I think somebody's going to read that article in the paper, they're going to see it online, they're going to read one of your posts, and they're going to go, oh, but not me. Like, I clearly get this, but I'm still going to run my quant screens and look for My low PE stocks, because I'm still going to get this right. Has that ship sailed? Is that all dead? Is it only. Does it only work in a certain size? Are you just not interested in anymore?
- [52:16]
A
You know, it's. It's interesting that you put it that way because people say, oh, this is working. This is not working. What they actually mean, is it beating the market or not? Like when you actually ask them, what do you mean by that? Because. And you and I will have more conversations about it in the coming weeks about outperforming the market, which I'm looking forward to, but I'm not going to say more just for the benefit of the audience. You guys stay tuned. Matt has something up his sleeve, but always. Anyways, I was thinking how if the index was never invented. Dan Paris, who is a guest on my show Dividend Investor, wrote a piece about how the s and P500 came about. He called it the Frankenstein index. He wrote an incredible article. People can look it up. He shared it online. And if the index of any kind was never invented, the Dow has been around for a lot longer, but S and P, much less never invented. We don't have a way to aggregate what we consider the markets. You know, like, we just don't have a way. And you and I are here sitting and making a decision and we have some sort of an amount, a million dollar endowment of, you know, of a high school. And what are we going to do with it? Let's invest it in a productive way. We build a portfolio. And the portfolio is up 7% next year. And here we're like, is it working or it's not working? I mean, it's more than it was last year, right? And it's more than the high school needs for that. So it's like, let's celebrate. Let's try to do it again next year. And we change the portfolio and move it around. It's up at 11% and then it's down 2% or it's whatever, and we move on. We move on. We move on. So when you say, is it working? Is it serving the purpose that you said for this money? Is it fulfilling the goal? The goal is to grow it. The goal is to cover the expenses of that institution. And it's. It's working, right? I would say it's working. It's meeting some sort. We can even put in numbers. We want to have a return of 5 to 15%. If we fall below that, we're not going to pop a champagne. If we go above it or pop a champagne, whatever. We self impose some sort of a goal. You would say that it's working now. You put in an index on top of it. And what's an index? Index is a man made, as Dan Paris reminded us in this article. It's a man made invention. And it's a very different index that I know from 20 years ago. Even the S&P 500, a lot of the top stocks are not even there and definitely don't have the weights. So it's a man made thing and it ruins our day because we are up seven but the S&P is up nine and a half. I mean first question is why the difference? Well, the difference is because we might have 30 stocks, the S&P has 500. The difference might be because we chose to equal weight them. The S&P 500 is market cap weighted. And the differences continue and continue and continue. We might not have any of the top three, we might have some of the other ones, but we don't have the top three, let's say. Right. So what are we actually comparing? Are we comparing it to what we're trying to accomplish with this money? Are we comparing it against a benchmark that continues to change and evolve? And actually it's more and more momentum driven as it grows because the more money goes in, the higher it goes and it becomes more and more momentum driven. So anyways, the bottom line is what kind of game are you playing? What's your goal? And when people say that something is not working, you're asking about those super cheap stocks, are they working? I don't really know the answer because the question would be have they made money for people? Forget the benchmark. I don't know. I haven't seen a study that shows that. Had I invested the way Walter Schloss has invested the last decade, what would be the outcome of investing in the bank formula for the last 10 years? I haven't seen people say it underperformed a high rising market. I'm sure a lot of things have underperformed the high rising market. But has it delivered whatever goal somebody would put on an approach that buys super cheap stocks the way Ben Graham did? Maybe it has worked or not, depending on what people expected from it. So I think we have to reformulate our expectations. What is it that we're trying to do? I'll add one more thing. People are celebrating even this year. You know, the tech NASDAQ is up this much. People forget that by April Nasdaq was down 20%.
- [56:27]
B
It's been a wild year.
- [56:28]
A
Yeah.
- [56:28]
B
I keep reminding people. I'm like, do you remember?
- [56:31]
A
No.
- [56:31]
B
Remember this world, this life we lived in February through April of this year when this was not the conversation we were having. Do you remember? Yeah. They know. Everyone's forgotten already. It never happened.
- [56:41]
A
If you want the 20% up and the 20% down, if you want those swings, then, then you can be on the more momentum driven side of it. If you can't stomach it, then you have to find a formula that works for you. I think the beauty of investing after talking, you know, to almost 200 people is, and I have huge respect for what everybody's doing, find a way that works for you and that works for the clients you're serving. If you have outside clients, if you find that you're in a, in a beautiful spot to serve them over a lifetime, the benchmarks will come and go. The benchmarks will change. And I have no idea what the s and P500 will look like 20 years from now. Will it have half of its value in one stock? I don't know. It might. Which one you pick? I don't know, but it may be different. I'll add one more thing. I'm talking too much. But if you use the equal weighted S&P 500, has anybody listening here has done it? Because there's actually an ETF that even follows.
- [57:37]
B
There's an ETF that tracks it. Yeah.
- [57:40]
A
Any idea? It's. It's mind blowing. So the.
- [57:43]
B
Wait. Say the question again. What, what's.
- [57:45]
A
What's the difference between the S and P market cap weighted and equal weighted? So most. Yeah, the return difference. So most of us, most of the time, a lot of the time they're actually not that far off, which when you think about it, these are very. Two different portfolios. One can have a real concentration of a handful of stocks. I, I lost the count. If it's 7 or 8 or 10 that are like 30, 40% of the portfolio, basically for the market weighted, the equal weighted is obviously 500 stocks with a small portion. So the last, and we're talking about 20, 25, there's some funky stuff going on, but there's a huge disconnect yet again, we had it before where the equal weighted hugely underperformed the S&P 500. Now if you look at the equal weighted into the decline in April, and it's just more of an observation than anything more, it has not done as badly or poorly as the market cap weighted. What does it tell you? It tells you that the Momentum swings in both directions. I think we're loving what people call the positive tracking error and we kind of forget about the negative tracking error. Right. Like when you actually fall behind and do poorly. And at the end of the day, you have to find a sweet spot that works for you.
- [59:04]
B
All right, standard closing questions time. You know, I have to turn this around on you once in a while here based on all this experience. Let's go here first. If you could teach one lesson to the average investor, what would you teach them?
- [59:17]
A
Ah, that's a great question. So I, I'll tell you something that I haven't told many people. And I'm on this two week information diet and probably I shouldn't be talking about it in public because people start sending me stuff. But anyways. But speaking of lessons, this is just between us.
- [59:32]
B
If you're one of Bogu Hill's clients, the episode just ended. Go away.
- [59:37]
A
They know, they know. They picked it up.
- [59:38]
B
They know, they know.
- [59:40]
A
And I think they love me for it. But anyways, I enjoy it. But if I have one lesson, like an immediate quick lesson, it would be to pay attention to fewer things. But if you do pay attention, pay attention in a very deep way. I think the next decades will look very different than the previous two decades in so many ways. But one of them that I immediately see, there will be no shortage of input and data and information and stimulation. And we're just the same humans that used to hang out by the river and catch fish with a stick. We're the same hardware with a slightly improved software sense. So we are not. I'm personally not in a position to have an opinion about the thousand things that end up in my inbox every day. And there's no way that I can make a difference in so many different, so many things. I have to choose and pick what I care about. There's this anecdote from a hundred years ago. It's in Paris in a park. And I'm paraphrasing, some people might remember the story better, but there's this famous philosopher walking around just very upset and just not having a good day. And it's a beautiful day in Paris. And his friend walks up and he says, what's going on? He says, I just read about this huge accident that happened in China, in Hong Kong, something happened and some people died. And it's just horrible. And I'm having this terrible day. And I'm thinking, 100 years ago this kind of news would come to Paris with a five day delay. And today within moments, we can hear about the worst disasters that are happening around the globe. We just don't have the stomach, the heart, the soul to process all of it. And we have to choose and pick. Investing is a tough game and you really have to filter out so much noise to cherry pick a handful of things that matter at the end of the day. And I wrote it in a recent article how it doesn't matter how much time you spend analyzing and following and how closely you follow a stock, like the stock doesn't really care. Buffett reminds us that the stock doesn't know we own it. So if you found a stock that makes sense, you don't have to check on it every five minutes. If it's supposed to do well, it will do well. If it does terribly, sell it, buy something else, but you don't have to check on it. And just because you have a phone and a smartwatch and everything pinging and vibrating all the time, it's not really helping the patient long term process we talked about throughout this conversation. So try an information diet. It's been really wonderful the last two weeks. Highly recommend it.
- [62:13]
B
You might have just answered this, but I'm going to give you and you can say I just answered it in this comment, but I want to ask you the other question now. Extra. And I know this is the hard one, but what's one thing you believe about investing that most of your peers would disagree with?
- [62:29]
A
That's a good one. I, I still believe that a lot of my peers would disagree with me with the idea of how little work you would actually have to do to be a successful investor in terms of research. There's this famous investor whose name escapes me, had this idea of a fine folder when we used to actually collect cutouts, newspapers, notes in a folder. And when you really think about it, and there was somebody who reposted a Forbes article about Buffett, how he's looking for things that are simple, easy to explain. I think we get drawn into investing because we think it's such a fascinating intellectual puzzle that we go about it with full force that I'm going to turn every single stone and I'm going to do all this research. And now there's no shortage of tools that will allow you to do incredible research and really produce 100 page reports about every single company within minutes, if not seconds. The point is that you don't need to do such an incredible amount of work. If the business makes sense, you can explain it in a simple sentence. If you cannot, I choose not to own it. I don't have anything in my portfolio that would take me, you know, more than a minute or two to explain why I hold it. And it's not that they're dumb businesses, they're doing incredible things, but the actual underlying thesis behind it is very, very simple. And as long as it applies no matter what the quarterly earnings look like, I'm going to hold on to them. And I felt for, held onto things for a decade or more. I mean it's, it's nothing unusual for me, but the amount of work that goes in, I would question that. You need a hundred page write up. And I think a lot of my colleagues would tell me that I'm crazy, but I'm gonna say it. I think if you can explain it with a paragraph, I think you'll do just fine.
- [64:18]
B
I, I think you just wrapped this all the way back down to the beginning better than I ever could have. Because just like with this post, you wrote this as a standard newsletter blog substack post.
- [64:30]
A
Yeah.
- [64:31]
B
And then it ends up in the journal like you did something that was a simple to explain story worth spreading and that's why it spread. There's magic in these ideas.
- [64:41]
A
There is. And I promise you I'll tell you how this essay came about. And I almost.
- [64:45]
B
This is what I need to hear now. That's where we're coming back to tell me the story about how this came about. Because it's been so cool to watch this run and now have this conversation with you.
- [64:54]
A
It exceeded my expectations, first of all. But I was walking around Manhattan seeing some clients and I had this idea that's been on my mind. But there are moments when I told you about it in some of our conversations where I want to capture the idea. When it comes to me, when I say an idea, it's sometimes it's almost like a physical expression that I see and I have no pen, no pencil, so I panic in those moments. And I had my phone, so I thought I'm going to do the second best. I'm going to put in my headphones and I'm going to keep on walking through Manhattan and I'm going to record exactly what's coming to my mind right this minute. And in New York, as you might know, people walk around and talk to themselves. Even before headphones they were doing it. So you kind of blend in. And here I am walking and it was, you know, five, ten minute walk back to the next appointment. I just recorded the whole thing and then I rewrote it and I counted 27 times before it became the article that you saw. I just wanted it to come out in a certain way. All this to say if an idea comes to you, no matter what it is, and I told you that before. I have this image of a guy chasing butterflies. An idea is a butterfly. If you don't catch it, somebody else will. And it doesn't have to be a life changing idea. Sometimes it's just a thoughtful article. Record it, then rewrite it 27 times. And maybe then Wall Street Journal and Matt Zigler will notice it. So that's my recipe here.
- [66:24]
B
From your mouth to God's voice notes Bo Camil. If people want to find you, read more of your stuff on the Internet. Or should they look you up these days?
- [66:33]
A
Start with my substack. You can look up my name and I post everything. The podcast, there are the essays. I even write up notes from the podcast so that people can stay longer with the ideas that my guests bring to the podcast. And I even review some books now and then. But that's a great place to start. I'll also say that I have this incredible habit that very few people probably have. I write to my substack readers, as many as I can physically write, but they're surprised and flattered and moved that I wrote to them. A personal email. But I go down the list and I say, hey, you're the lucky one, I'll write to you. So guys, if you're listening, if you got a personal email, it's really a personal email that I sent down and wrote to you. And so many respond and share stories. It's a very fulfilling, gratifying thing to do. When it becomes a two way street that I told you about, how I know that everybody's listening and enjoying this podcast and the content, but for me to actually hear what you guys think, that matters to me and their stories matter to me. And I appreciate you being here.
- [67:39]
B
Love that. This is why you gotta get on the mailing list. This is why talking billions on YouTube. Look it up. Get Bogomil on your radar. Get on Bogamil's radar. Thank you so much for doing this with me today. Bogomil.
- [67:50]
A
Thank you so much. This was incredible. Thank you for all the great questions, Matt. Thank you.
- [67:55]
B
Excess Returns right here. Like subscribe, leave a comment. Bring me back to Steve Martin as the dentist in Little Shop. This is how we did it. Excess Returns. See you guys real soon. Thank you for tuning in to this episode. If you found this discussion interesting and valuable, please subscribe on your favorite audio platform or on YouTube. You can also follow all the podcasts in the Excess returns Network @XS returns. If you have any feedback or questions, you can contact us@excess returnspodmail.com no information on this podcast should be construed as investment advice. Securities discussed in the podcast may be holdings of the firms of the hosts or their clients.