Talking Billions with Bogumil Baranowski

Joseph Foresi, equity analyst, portfolio manager, finance lecturer, and author of Anatomy of a Stock, joins Talking Billions to explain what it really takes to own a business through the stock market.

Episode Sponsor: Fiscal AI is a modern data terminal—link in show notes for a two-week free trial plus 15% off https://fiscal.ai/talkingbillions/He opens with the story of mailing his book to Warren Buffett and receiving "the nicest sort of Dear John letter." He also explains how Bernard Baruch's challenge, to examine the market the way a physician studies anatomy, gave the book its name.

Joe credits Jack Bogle with doing enormous good for everyday investors. He also warns that passive investing has drifted from Bogle's low-cost, own-the-market idea toward pricey, opaque ETFs and an index driven by a handful of stocks. Calling himself "an active fundamentalist," he argues that the real edge is experience, and that it can't be rushed.

He walks through his five-factor framework: competitive advantage, catalyst, valuation, quality of management, and market psychology. Along the way he reminds us that you can be right on the numbers and still lose on the stock. Models are a healthy checkpoint but never the leader, as Long-Term Capital Management learned. A MasterCard case study shows the factors at work in a "toll booth" business. A conversation on trust explains why management should have to earn it.

Joe closes with market cycles and why bottoms are easier to spot than tops. He explains why twelve months is too short to judge a manager and names his one golden rule: "Cash is King." Finally, he says why he defines success as process and the journey itself.

Podcast Program – Disclosure Statement

Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC is a registered investment adviser and the opinions expressed by the Firm’s employees and podcast guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.

Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed.

Eric So, an MIT Sloan professor and former Nasdaq researcher, bridges investing, behavioral science, and AI in his book The Collision.

MIT Sloan professor Eric So, a former Nasdaq researcher who studies investing, behavioral science, and artificial intelligence, joins Talking Billions to discuss his new book, The Collision: What AI Does To Us. The book began with a moment of unease. Eric finished a colleague's email with ChatGPT, felt the rush of efficiency, and then realized he had removed his own brain from the process. That "splinter" set him on a quest to understand what our growing reliance on AI is doing to us.

He revisits Steve Jobs' bicycle for the mind and argues that AI has become a motorcycle: more power, more risk, and increasingly the one setting the direction. Eric explains why so much work comes in "bundles of inseparable tasks." If you skip building the model or the slides, you lose the ability to defend them. He warns of cognitive short-termism in companies that reward AI usage over capability. He also draws on Walter Camp, Socrates, chess grandmasters, and the USS Vincennes to show how tools reshape the people who use them.

We explore why AI is built to flatter, how that can harden disagreements, and his simple trick of asking AI to explain why a colleague's idea is wrong. Eric contrasts a Turkish study, where unrestricted AI access hurt learning, with a Nigerian program designed as a tutor that delivered strong gains. He closes on agency, calibration, and the one thing he'd urge everyone to stop outsourcing: judgment.

Podcast Program – Disclosure Statement

Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC is a registered investment adviser and the opinions expressed by the Firm’s employees and podcast guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.

Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed.

My guest today is Octavian Graf Pilati — a member of an Austrian aristocratic family whose lineage traces back nearly a thousand years, and the founder of The Antifragile Family. At 25, he was handed responsibility for saving his family's centuries-old estate through a devastating financial crisis, a story so instructive that Harvard Business School turned it into a case study — Burning the Sails to Save the Ship. Since then, Octavian has built a body of work around what actually makes multigenerational families endure: governance, conflict, succession, and the human systems that either hold a legacy together or quietly tear it apart.

At 25, Octavian Graf Pilati was handed responsibility for saving his family’s centuries-old Austrian estate, a crisis triggered by a bankrupt Costa Rican teak company his father had guaranteed. The story became a Harvard Business School case study: Burning the Sails to Save the Ship.

Octavian recalls walking into creditor meetings with an engineer’s mindset, expecting to solve a problem together, only to learn the other side mostly wanted to get paid fast. He reflects on selling a forest and a palace held for 300 years, and why every asset, legacy assets above all, must serve a clear purpose rather than become a burden for the next generation.

He traces deeper roots of fragility: the fall of the Habsburg Empire, when the family “became just a wealthy family” and lost its sense of purpose, and 1945, when Soviet occupation scattered the family and the estate came back a decade later stripped of half its forest. He explains why he chose to research his family’s wartime past himself, and recounts a COVID-era scheme in Costa Rica involving a forged passport and a stand-in for his father.

Octavian lays out the crisis ladder, from incident to catastrophe, and why family catastrophes almost always combine slow-building internal tension with an external shock. He walks through the five capitals of family wealth, argues that spouses strengthen a family, and offers a line worth keeping: “the currency of love is time.”

He closes with what he’d tell his children at 25: understand how your brain works, look after your body, and remember that practice without rest doesn’t make a master.

Podcast Program – Disclosure Statement

Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC is a registered investment adviser and the opinions expressed by the Firm’s employees and podcast guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.

Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed.

Chris Davis and Robert Hagstrom explore the tension between holding great businesses and keeping a winning stock from becoming too much of a portfolio risk. Why do two investors who believe in letting winners compound also use 10% position limits?
On this episode of 100 Year Thinkers, Chris Davis of Davis Funds and Robert Hagstrom of EquityCompass join Matt Zeigler and Bogumil Baranowski to discuss position sizing, selling mistakes, index concentration and the cost of growth. From Chris Davis’s experience selling Costco to the debate over who will capture AI’s economic benefits, they examine what it takes to hold a business through uncertainty without ignoring risk. Stay for Matt and Bogumil’s closing discussion of the lessons for investors.

Available now on Excess Returns Podcast and Talking Billions. 🎧 I’m excited to share this episode with you—it’s reposted here with permission and blessing from the Excess Returns team. Don’t miss it! And follow their work, links below.
Topics covered:

• Why selling a genuinely great business can be an investor’s most expensive mistake

• How client behavior and fund constraints influence 10% position limits

• Chris Davis’s concerns about index concentration, momentum and future IPO incentives

• Robert Hagstrom on trimming positions as the margin of safety shrinks

• The bull-case pre-mortem: asking what could make selling today a mistake

• What Chris Davis missed about Costco’s growth and ability to adapt

• Why identical earnings growth can produce different shareholder returns

• Whether AI spending builds durable pricing power or delivers more value to users

• How customer trust and restraint on margins can strengthen competitive advantages

• Balance sheets, circular financing and the humility required to size a position
  

Chris Davis / Davis Funds https://davisfunds.com/

Robert Hagstrom / EquityCompass / https://www.equitycompass.com/

Chapters:
00:00 Holding great businesses and the case for position limits
06:47 Robert Hagstrom on concentration and client risk
12:40 Index concentration, momentum and IPO incentives
19:03 Trimming winners, margin of safety and the Costco lesson
30:09 Valuation, return on capital and the cost of growth
36:01 Is AI’s capital spending cycle temporary?
40:10 AI pricing power: builders versus users
45:35 Competitive advantage, margins and customer trust
51:45 Balance sheets and circular AI financing
55:53 Evaluating the AI investment cycle
01:00:23 Matt and Bogumil’s takeaways: position sizing and AI
01:10:25 Being an AI user versus an AI investor
Learn more about the Excess Returns podcast network
https://excessreturns.co

No information discussed in this podcast should be construed as investment advice. Securities discussed may be held by the hosts and guests, their firms or their clients.

Podcast Program – Disclosure Statement

Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC is a registered investment adviser and the opinions expressed by the Firm’s employees and podcast guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.

Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed.

Information expressed does not take into account your specific situation or objectives, and is not intended as recommendations appropriate for any individual. Listeners are encouraged to seek advice from a qualified tax, legal, or investment adviser to determine whether any information presented may be suitable for their specific situation. Past performance is not indicative of future performance.

Find me on Substack!

Today on Talking Billions, I'm joined by Michel Ingenbleek — an investor and writer whose career took an unusual road here: from leading teams in the Dutch Korps Commandotroepen and Royal Netherlands Marine Corps, to two decades running offshore energy projects and corporate strategy at companies like Subsea 7 and Technip. These days he writes Capital and Character, a weekly Substack on the psychology of long-term investing, and his debut book, Staying Intact, turns two decades of his own investment mistakes into a framework he calls the behavioral margin of safety.

Episode Sponsor: Fiscal AI is a modern data terminal that gives investors instant access to twenty years of financials, earnings transcripts, and extensive segment and KPI data—use my link for a two-week free trial plus 15% off: https://fiscal.ai/talkingbillions/

Michel's path to investing began a hundred meters down, inside a pumped-dry habitat on the seabed, finishing a days-long weld on a 48-inch pipeline and asking himself, "is this it?" The former Dutch commando and Royal Netherlands Marine went on to project and strategy roles at Subsea 7 and Technip, and chose to invest his offshore bonuses himself rather than hand them to a wealth manager. The mistakes that followed became his book, Staying Intact.

At its heart is the behavioral margin of safety. Graham's margin tells you the price at which an asset is worth buying; Michel's tells you the size you can hold without your judgment breaking if the position falls further before you're proven right. He shares the story of selling ASML and Nvidia in 2022, then realizing his follow-up research was really a search for reassurance: "I get fooled so easily basically by feelings."

We trace the recurring ingredient of every bubble, from tulip mania to GameStop: not a lie but a truth, until rising prices get mistaken for evidence. Michel applies that lens to AI without pretending to forecast it. He separates loud, fast narrative risk from quiet, slow economic risk, explains why a deliberate pause can save a position better than more information, and revisits Long-Term Capital Management as a lesson in what models can't see. We also talk about red-teaming your own ideas, the strength in saying "I don't know," why "enough" is a horizon rather than a destination, the neglected years of simply owning, and his current work on what happens to investors when intelligence becomes commoditized.

Podcast Program – Disclosure Statement

Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC is a registered investment adviser and the opinions expressed by the Firm’s employees and podcast guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.

Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed.

Find me on Substack!

My guest today is Neeraj Khemlani, the former president and co-head of CBS News and Stations, a veteran 60 Minutes producer and media executive, and the author of The Coffee Can Investor, A Stock Picker’s Journey to Build Generational Wealth, who uses the story of a Midwestern portfolio manager’s decades-long search for 100-bagger stocks to make the case that patient, concentrated ownership of exceptional businesses can build truly generational wealth.Episode Sponsor: Fiscal AI is a modern data terminal that gives investors instant access to twenty years of financials, earnings transcripts, and extensive segment and KPI data—use my link for a two-week free trial plus 15% off: https://fiscal.ai/talkingbillions/Neeraj Khemlani, former co-head of CBS News and Stations and longtime 60 Minutes producer, grew up in a lower-middle-class immigrant family in New York, where education was his path forward. He wrote The Coffee Can Investor "largely out of mission," wishing someone had taught him the basics of investing much earlier.

The book began on an annual call with Matt, a portfolio manager he met in Denver in 1999 and his longtime "Marvin the Explainer." Matt had studied every hundred bagger since 1980. He planned to put $5 million of his own money into potential future ones, untouched for thirty years, as a gift to his three daughters. Neeraj's reaction: "Holy shit, that's a book."

The idea traces back to Robert Kirby. One of Kirby's clients had a husband who quietly bought every stock Kirby recommended and never sold. After the husband died, he left behind a coffee can of stock certificates that beat the managed account, including a Xerox position that went to $800,000.

Neeraj explains why holding is the hard part through Matt's early sale of Fastenal, which went on to grow roughly nineteenfold: "you don't learn to have patience until you learn what happens when you don't have patience." He shares the chessboard parable of doubling grains of rice. He also walks through Matt's findings: most hundred baggers were founder- or family-run, many grew through acquisitions, and 68% sold to other businesses. Neeraj saw the same pattern firsthand at Hearst, where Fitch became the biggest profit contributor. As he puts it, "the sexiest things are usually the least lucrative."

The conversation closes at Thanksgiving, when Matt and his wife told their daughters about the coffee can. "The girls never once asked for anything," Neeraj recalls. The lesson for both fathers: "we already won. They already won."

Podcast Program – Disclosure Statement

Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC is a registered investment adviser and the opinions expressed by the Firm’s employees and podcast guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.

Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed.

In this Unfiltered Coffee episode, I share some thoughts that have stayed with me through recent conversations, listener emails, books, podcasts, and my own work with investors and families.

I reflect on a different kind of urgency—not the manufactured urgency of expiring offers or opportunities that supposedly require an answer by Friday, but the urgency that comes from within. It’s the realization that something in your financial life may need attention today because being off by an inch now can mean being off by a mile five or ten years from now.

I explore the difference between benign neglect and costly neglect, the extraordinary effects of compounding over time, and why what got us here may not always be the path forward.

I also talk about consistency and what it means to be a constant in someone else’s life. Consistency isn’t perfection. It’s returning to a calm and thoughtful place after life tests us, showing up again, and remaining dependable through changing circumstances.

Another recurring theme is family fortune and multigenerational wealth. I share why I increasingly think about family wealth through the lens of stewardship rather than ownership—and why what we inherit, care for, and pass along extends far beyond financial assets.

Finally, I return to a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to invest sensibly? Capital can eventually begin doing some of the heavy lifting that once depended entirely on our own efforts. How we put that capital to work is deeply personal, but perhaps we make investing more complicated than it needs to be.

Along the way, I revisit recent conversations with Paul Johnson, Lee Freeman-Shor, Alexander von der Vellen, Jan Petke, Jared Dillian, Peter Lazaroff, Ian Cassel, Owen Zidar, and Eric Zwick, and share a few things I’ve been reading and listening to lately.

Some of the ideas in this episode:

• The difference between internal and manufactured urgency
• Benign neglect versus neglect that quietly costs us money
• Why small financial decisions can compound into enormous differences
• Luck, risk, and revisiting assumptions that have worked in the past
• Consistency as a practice in investing and in life
• What it means to be a constant for other people
• Family fortunes, stewardship, and multigenerational thinking
• The transition from earning money to letting capital do more of the work
• Why investing doesn’t have to be unnecessarily complicated

I always enjoy hearing from you, so if you have a question, thought, or story to share, write to me at [email protected] not com. Save it somewhere—I’ll only keep it here for a little while.

Podcast Program – Disclosure Statement

Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC is a registered investment adviser and the opinions expressed by the Firm’s employees and podcast guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.

Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed.

Find me on Substack!My guest today is Peter Lazaroff, CFA, CFP®—the Chief Investment Officer of the $10-billion-plus RIA Plancorp, chair of its investment committee, host of The Long-Term Investor, and author of Making Money Simple, and a new book The Perfect Portfolio, whose central message is that the best portfolio is not the historical winner but the one tailored to an investor’s goals, capacity for risk, and ability to stay disciplined.

Peter Lazaroff's first stock arrived on his twelfth birthday: a single share of Nike from his grandmother. He was disappointed until a one-dollar dividend check showed up in the mail. "I didn't even have to work for this," he recalls, and he was hooked. Today, as CIO overseeing more than $10 billion and author of The Perfect Portfolio, he argues that the best portfolio isn't the historical winner but the one built for your life.

He opens his book with a steak dinner, burned on a cheap grill in the backyard of his first home, because the perfect portfolio, like the perfect meal, is personal. He tells the story of a client whose blue chip stocks and mutual funds were chosen to impress others rather than to fund his goals. A portfolio, Peter says, is "a piece of their identity," and it changes over a lifetime as your human capital, balance sheet, and heirs come into view.

On market timing, he reminds us that "You do have to be right twice," and that taxes can turn a bad call into a "permanent bear market." Rather than predicting declines, plan on them. He explains exposure therapy for investors, why narratives scare us more than percentages, and why our instinct to run from the rustle in the bushes makes beating the market so hard.

Peter reveals his own guardrail, "It's to not do it yourself," shares why bond indexes lend the most to the most indebted, and makes the case for goals-based benchmarks: "am I still on track?" He closes with a controversial plea to read twenty minutes a day, and with the idea at the heart of his book: the perfect portfolio is the one you can stick with.

Podcast Program – Disclosure Statement

Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC is a registered investment adviser and the opinions expressed by the Firm’s employees and podcast guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.

Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed.

Find me on Substack!

Ian Cassel is the founder of MicroCapClub and CIO of Intelligent Fanatics Capital Management, specializing in underfollowed public companies led by exceptional owner-operators — pairing rigorous, boots-on-the-ground research with the patience to hold rare compounding businesses through volatility. He became a full-time private investor at 28 and has spent his career hunting for undiscovered small public companies, and the founders who run them, before Wall Street ever notices. Today, we discuss his new book, The Stock Picker: How to Develop the Mindset, Temperament, and Strategy to Outperform Wall Street.

Episode Sponsor: Fiscal AI is a modern data terminal that gives investors instant access to twenty years of financials, earnings transcripts, and extensive segment and KPI data—use my link for a two-week free trial plus 15% off: https://fiscal.ai/talkingbillions/

Ian Cassel didn’t take the conventional path into investing — he skipped it entirely. Raised in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania’s blue-collar, Amish-adjacent farm country, Cassel became a full-time private investor at 28, guided for years by a single line he wrote on a napkin at 22: “10K and two ten baggers equal millionaire.” It took six years to make it true.

That patience defines everything Cassel does now as founder of MicroCapClub and CIO of Intelligent Fanatics Capital Management. He makes the case for microcaps as one of the market’s last true structural edges — citing research showing 87% of stocks that returned 10x or more over the past decade started as microcaps, and 91% of those were already profitable businesses, not speculative stories. Institutions, he argues, are locked out not by risk but by illiquidity itself.

Cassel also opens up about the mentors who shaped him, including a message-board trader named Skip who taught him that a stock is “a buy or a sell,” never a hold — and that if you’re not willing to put your money where your mouth is, you should keep quiet. He’s candid, too, about his own losing streaks, the temptation to double down on losing positions, and a Porsche-and-Rolex purchase he now looks back on with some embarrassment.

The conversation closes on something bigger than markets: Cassel’s belief that “the secret to compounding” isn’t just financial — it’s showing up, present, for the people you love, today, rather than waiting for some future payoff.

The book: The Stock Picker: How to Develop the Mindset, Temperament, and Strategy to Outperform Wall Street.

Podcast Program – Disclosure Statement

Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC is a registered investment adviser and the opinions expressed by the Firm’s employees and podcast guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.

Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed.