Talking Billions with Bogumil Baranowski

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 StatementBlue 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 StatementBlue 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 mistakeHow client behavior and fund constraints influence 10% position limitsChris Davis’s concerns about index concentration, momentum and future IPO incentivesRobert Hagstrom on trimming positions as the margin of safety shrinksThe bull-case pre-mortem: asking what could make selling today a mistakeWhat Chris Davis missed about Costco’s growth and ability to adaptWhy identical earnings growth can produce different shareholder returnsWhether AI spending builds durable pricing power or delivers more value to usersHow customer trust and restraint on margins can strengthen competitive advantagesBalance sheets, circular financing and the humility required to size a positionChris 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 networkhttps://excessreturns.coNo 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 StatementBlue 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 StatementBlue 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 StatementBlue 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.