YouSaid · the spoken record

Carl Kawaja

lines on the record: 101
first: 2021-07-27
most recent: 2021-07-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Thank you so much, Patrick. Thank you so much for the show. I learned so much from it and so grateful for it. Thanks for your friendship.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“go well. He had this confidence in me that gave me so much confidence in myself. And it was so exceptionally kind. And I still have that car on my desk when stocks are down and much I reach out and push it back and forth and think, oh God, boy, that other stuff worked out. Maybe the stock will go up again someday too. Sometimes I think the kindest thing someone can do for you is to believe in you”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the door, and I went to the door, and this guy had come, Dr. Bill Stannis, and he opened the door and he said, hey, I know you were really bummed today. And I know you enjoyed playing with that little model car. And he said, I wanted to give you that car, a patient of mine gave it to me, so I didn't feel like I could give it to you. But he said, I went by this toy store and I had another little model car like that, a little car with, I think they had gullwing doors or something like that. And he said, I bought it for you. And I want you to have it. But he said, more importantly, I want you to know you're going to be okay. You're going to have a normal life. You're going to end up being a normal kid. And this is something that you're going to surmount and you're a good person like your life.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He had a small little model car in his office, a little Ferrari. And I was listening to him and pushing the car back and forth on the desk in front of me, playing with the car. And I said, I understand. And I went home. I took the bus home or something. And I didn't even tell my parents because I figured he'd tell them the next day or they'd get the news or something. But I was really bummed about it. Then I remember later that night there was a”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good enough to like look at the printouts myself and say, oh, still need some more medication that's not working out. But then eventually I thought that I had graduated from the medicine and I remember that I was in Dr. Senes' office. He was meeting just with me and he said, look, I'm sorry, but I have some bad news for you. He said, your EEG came back and he took it out and he showed it to me. And I realized that, you know, it was bad news. And I was going to have to stay on this medicine. And I think I was 11 or 12 years old. But really bummed about it and kind of feeling like my whole life I'm going to have to deal with this thing. And it's so...”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Effect of making me feel a bit ostracized as a kid. Like no one wants to be like a weird kid who's taking pills every day and on some weird medicine and drop his books or not able to play soccer because he's doing something. My parents had a doctor who took care of me, a guy named Bill Stennis when I was growing up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And he was my doctor who I saw. And I used to go in for electroencephalograms where they put electrodes on your head and then they measure your brainwave activity. And basically, if you've ever seen an EEG, it's kind of like an EKG. Like you look at the pattern on the EKG. And with the EEG, you should sort of see like a uniform series of spikes. But then if that's interrupted or unusual, then there's something that is interfering with the brain activity. And when I was a kid, I got these so often that I”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But because I love your podcast so much, I know that you ask this question, gave a lot of thought to it. There have been so many that I'm grateful for. But I guess one that I remember was when I was a boy, I had a neurological condition. I had fallen as a little baby and I cracked my skull and had a brain injury. And it caused me to be on anti-seizure medication. I used to be on this medication. Now I think people take something called KEPRA and there are lots of the whole field of seizure treatment has improved amazingly over the course of the last 50 years, which is totally great for the patients. But I was on an earlier generation of the medicine that kind of like dulled your reaction times and had a very sedating effect. And I didn't like it as a kid and I battled having these seizures. And it also had the”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“kind and he did not i really recommend it as reading and i recommend it as advice too i'd like to practice it more i should practice it more than i do i'm committed to doing it more but i was telling you my experience with cancer before seeming like a dragon but being a princess but i have had the opportunity to help some folks with cancer some of whom have done well and recovered and pursued the right treatment and been healthy and others unfortunately who have succumbed to it and i had a dear capital colleague a friend named galen hoskin who battled prostate cancer a very aggressive form of it and then unfortunately succumbed to it but the opportunity to spend time with him and work with him and try to be helpful to him is one of the great gifts of my life i'm so grateful i was able to do i feel like i learned that from george saunders that was a good lesson for me”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you and I think have both read George Saunders' commencement address about kindness. I mean, that should be required reading as well along with Rilke. I feel like I've learned so much from it. I guess the thing that I learned, for those who have not read the essay, George Saunders, in a delightful, entertaining way and the brilliant writer that he is, says that he's made a lot of mistakes in his life. Like he's swam in some river in Bali and these monkeys were pooping from the bridge. He swam under it anyway and he got dysentery and nearly died and was just like incredibly dumb and did a bunch of other like really stupid things. But he says he doesn't regret those. What he regrets are like opportunities in his life that he had to be kind when he didn't exercise it. And as he looks back on his life as like an older person, which all commencement speakers tend to be, his regrets are the times that he had an opportunity to be.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But Edward Tuftie took those 13 pages of data and he put them in one graph. And the graph had the size of the rocket, the year, the launch of the rocket, like where it happened. He basically condensed all of the information into one graph and included in that graph was the temperature. And when you looked at it, you realized that on the cold days over the course of 30 years something didn't work. And they didn't know then tragically what it was. They only learned after the fact. All you need to do was look at that and you were like, oh my God, it's going to be cold tomorrow. It's going to be under 62 degrees on lunch day. We should not do this. And sometimes investings like that. If it's under 62 degrees on launch day, don't buy the stock.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Do you know the space shuttle challenger Tufty story? Edward Tifty looked at the data when the challengers are tragically exploded, as you may remember, everyone did these inquiries in Richard Feynman pointed out that it was the O-rings that were the problem. But I guess the night before the launch, this is roughly true, the scientists at Morton Thiokol, who built a rocket sent 13 pages of data to NASA and said, hey, we really don't think you should launch tomorrow. And I guess in NASA's defense, apparently everyone writes them in the last week and says, don't launch tomorrow because everyone gets nervous that they made a mistake and they kind of need to go ahead with it. But I guess they looked at the 13 pages of data and they're like, eh, we're not convinced we're going ahead with it. And as you know, it was a cold morning, the O-ring, which separated the two chambers, shrunk in the cold, and it allowed gas from one chamber to leak into the other, which ignited in the air and caused it to tragic.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Convey something. A typical sell site earnings model probably has 26 by 20 rows or something like that, 520 numbers in it. You're a bright numerate person, but even you can't quickly parse 520 numbers and see what's relevant. I certainly can't. It would be helpful if the font sizes or the script were different that pointed your attention to things and that's the kind of thing that you learned from Edward Tufty. And frankly, if you really studied his book and he has several of them, but giving him a free plug here, but order the quantitative display, the visual display of quantitative information. It's a delightful book for one thing. And it's so useful for thinking. So that would be some of my advice for people coming into the business.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ideas well. Our job requires so much numeracy, and I'm always struck in analyst earnings models that every number is the same font. If the gross margin is going to go from 42 to 67%, make the 67 bigger than the 42.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a practical piece of advice, Patrick. I mean, I have lots of whatever broad philosophical kind of advice, but some people probably listen to your podcast. They're like, I don't want to hear another guy telling me to read Reltco. That's not so helpful. I need a job. One thing that I think is very helpful that I always say to people, and I swear no one ever follows my advice, and maybe it's bad advice, but I still keep repeating it stubbornly, is I really believe in reading Edward Tufte, the visual display of quantitative information has a dry title, is the single probably most practically useful book you can read to distinguish yourself in this job, because it is an education into thought. It is a pathway to understanding how to think about things critically and understand which variables matter. And then importantly, it's also a user's manual for how to convey”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, Faragamo, Hermes, these are all things with heritage. Like one of the reasons someone spends $2,500 on a Louis Vuitton bag is that Catherine Hepburn had one or something like that. And the reason that Emma Stone has one is that Catherine Hepburn had one. And that's why someone else wants one. But no one had Brunello Cuccilli bags 50 years ago. But he has out of whole cloth created this incredible luxury brand through his vision. And I think that's remarkable. And I think I had mentioned to you Diana Vieland, who was the editor of Vogue, but she had a similar real commitment to beauty and to elegance that I think made Vogue the formidable presence and brand and magazine that it's been in America for the last 50 years.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And rather than expand it or renovate it or turn into another factory, he knocked it down and he planted a field of grass and flowers. And the reason he did that is he said, we make beautiful clothes. He said, how can I ask people to make beautiful clothes when they don't look at something beautiful that inspires them? I mean, on the one hand, you and I as financially oriented. People might say, that's insane. You spent $60 million to plant a field of flowers. Like, you're the craziest guy I've ever heard. On the other hand, it's beautiful and incredibly brilliant really because how many luxury brands can you cite that have not been around 50 years, the great brand, Chanel, Celine, LV, Prada, Montclair,”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Medieval village and made it totally beautiful and sponsors art festivals and tries to encourage other people to do that. And he also has a real commitment to beauty and to beauty and design that I think is very authentic and a lovely story, I think you wouldn't mind if I shared, is that they have a factory where they sell the products where they manufacture the products and it's in the valley kind of underneath the town of Solomeo. And there was some distribution facility next to it, like not a DHL, but something like that, like a trucking logistics things where trucks came in and trucks went out and so on. With his own money, Brunello bought the factory next door. I think for about $60 million. I mean, fortunately, he's a billionaire because Brunello Cucinelli has been very successful, but he bought the facility next door for $60 million.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Runello Cicinelli is an entrepreneur and a business person who I really respect probably many people on this call have heard of his clothes, they're high-end clothes for men and women sold through their own chain of stores, but also in Bergdorf or Demon Marcus or something like that. They have a certain cachet with people. Brunello is a remarkable individual himself though. He's from Salomeo in Umbria in Italy. He still lives in Solomayo and all of the products that Brunella Cuccilli sells are manufactured in Solomeo. And he has a very distinctive philosophy about a humane approach to business. So he thinks that businesses should be integrated into society and make society better. And he's a very charitable person. And he has rebuilt Solomeo.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Folks at the company, like a good annual report, they read it and they're like, oh, wait, that's who I want to be. Jeff at Amazon has done so many brilliant things, but in some ways he is also led by his own phenomenal example, his own incredible attention to detail, his own rigor for things. And I think other folks at Amazon have a brother who worked at Amazon. They kind of say, huh, I kind of want to be like that too. I mean, of course, everyone would like to be worth $200 billion, but people also want to be hardworking and bold and creative and creditor ferocitum and all that.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And look at nice houses all the time. And my dad used to like to do that on the weekend. And these were houses that we, it seemed like we could not have afforded in our wildest dreams. And they're like vastly beyond our reach. And my dad said, I like driving around and looking at these houses because it motivates me to figure out how I can afford to live in one of them someday. And he sort of believed, teach people to want certain things and then let them figure out how to get there. So teach your children to want to be ethical, want to be hardworking, want to be good dads and partners and brothers and stuff like that. And then let them figure out their path to it. And I think some great CEOs do that too, which is why I sometimes think I'm sad sometimes when people don't take the time to write annual reports. And I'm so grateful to see CEOs who write annual reports in their own words because I really think that a lot of the”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Own a bunch of Amazon, something bad happens, and stocks down a bunch. It's not your DCF model that's going to keep you in it. It's going to be something that Walt Whitman said, struck you as like a fundamental piece of wisdom that you hung onto. And another quote that I think you know that I like is from Antoine de Santa Zuper Reed, but he says, if you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. I think sometimes like, and great leaders do that, like they teach people to want certain things. And I mean, we all think of our parents when we think of people who we learn from, but like I remember when I was a kid, my father luckily has had financial success in his life, but initially we didn't, or in the beginning. And we used to drive around these nice neighbors.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a few companies related to oncology, and that worked out well from a work perspective, it ended up being something great. And Patrick, I know you are such a prolific reader, and I enjoy going to investors field guide and just reading your summary of work that you've read. But I think some of those like fundamental truths that you learn from reading outside of work. Like, of course, read Warren Buffett. Of course, Michael Mobison. I'm going to give a shout out to Henry Ellen Bogan, who I guess in a way a competitor of mine, but really a friend now has his own firm Durable. But I thought he wrote wonderfully in his annual reports when he was at New Horizons. Like, of course, read all that, but read the other things too that reflect on you. Because honestly, when things are really uncertain and I don't know, let's say.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course, some problems or problems, but like in my own case, I had cancer 10 years ago now, 10 years ago this summer, and totally fine now, luckily. But that was a problem. That was a dragon. I was scared. And initially we didn't know what source of the cancer was and didn't know the trajectory of it. And it turned out I was very lucky and that worked out well. But it's been a princess for me or a prince, depending on your gender, but it has been something wonderful. I got involved in cancer research. I got to know several scientists. You know, some of those scientists became some of my best friends. I joined the board of a hospital, the hospital in San Francisco. Other people started to view me as a cancer resource or someone who they would call if they had a question or knew something. I ended up investing.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I do love RealKit. I know that you sometimes ask people what their favorite things are to read, and I feel like people have all these very scholarly things. I love Michael Mopeson, who's on his show, for example, and as an aside, like I think everyone should read every single thing that Michael writes. But then having been said, as much as I love Michael, I doubt that some of his wisdom will have the staying power of letters to a young poet. And I have learned a lot from reading Rilke. And one of my favorite Rilke quotes gave me a softball because I know you like this one too. But he says, perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us just once act with beauty and courage. I love the idea that like dragons or princesses. And I think we often look at things that are problems in our life, think that they're so daunting when really they're opportunities. And I don't mean to be Pollyanna.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Room to run. And when she leaves and goes to some other place or retires to Bermuda, sell the stock because they know something that you don't, or at the very least quadruple the amount of work you do on it to see if you're certain about it.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go work at that place. And I didn't sell the stock because I was like, well, I still like the business a lot. And he did get this other offer. Like I generally think when a CEO has a good job and is doing a good job at a firm that he likes and he leaves, he has written you a letter saying to sell the stock. And you should read the letter. And there's always some fancy reason. This happened or that happened, but there's nothing more fun than running a company that's doing great and doing a great job of it.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I am narrow minded. My father has a saying that I like, as I mentioned before, he was a professor, but my dad likes to say there are no decisions that are difficult to make. And I think it's sort of true about investing as well. He said there are only decisions where you have imperfect information. So anytime that you can't decide what to do, force yourself to go get more information. On the errors of commission, I guess One theme that's probably true that I haven't done enough work on those also. Occasionally I have deluded myself and I've kind of allowed myself, particularly when the story changes, I've sloughed it off. There was a CEO who I really liked and then he got a job at another company that seemed really good. So he left and he went that went to”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's like, how can you not own this stock? Like, everyone wants to own them. And I remember I was at a Columbia Business School class, and one of the students wrote a short report on Tesla that was convincing as all the reports were back then at the time about how much cash they were burning and they were going to be insolvent and everything else. And I was one of the judges, it was one of those class judging things. And I said to the students, I said, who in the room wants a Tesla? All of them raised their hand. And I said, I would not short the stock if I were you. Like, I don't know whether I would buy it, but I wouldn't short it. But honestly, I was too lazy and too close-minded to do more work myself. I knew that what they had was something really powerful because everyone wanted them, but then I didn't push myself to do more. So I have made multiple errors of omission and I make them all the time.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can hit a home run and score a thousand runners and beat the other team like a thousand to three. It's worth swinging for it. I think that is generally more true. So, I worry more about errors of omission than errors of commission. When I have made errors of omission, I would say that it is often because I have not, and it's embarrassing to say this, but it's because I have not done enough work and I have not been open-minded enough about the opportunity. I have dismissed it. And I'm sorry, I'm citing so many of my colleagues, but I always associate ideas with names, but I have another colleague whose name is Andras Razen, who's owned Tesla probably since it was $18 a share or something like that prior to like a million splits, so maybe it's like, you know, two dollars a share or something like that. And we're good friends, and we were driving around San Francisco actually in the beginning of 2000, when I still could have bought the stock. And he said to me, he's like, look how many Teslas there are here.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funny, you're asking me one of my favorite questions, ironically. Like one of my favorite questions with CEOs is to ask them, what is their greatest error of omission and co-mission? In our business, it is my view, and for me certainly personally it is the case, that is the errors of omission that bother me the most. And so I really don't spend much time worrying about errors of commission. And I admit, and maybe that's because I've made so many of them that if I worried, if I'd never sleep at night. But I also think it's kind of healthy not to get too hung up on them because I learned so much from Jeff Bezos' annual reports. I love them. He has that analogy where he's like, in baseball, you can hit a home run and score four runs if the bases are loaded, but that's as well as you can do. But in our business,”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, as we saw in this playoffs, guys get injured. Something happens, and maybe the government does the injury or something else happens that injures them.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would you take the field or would you take the Lakers? Those five companies are the Lakers with LeBron and Healthy Anthony Davis and maybe like James Harden and Kevin Durant on the team too.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's probably no one who comes to this call, myself included, who doesn't have fairly rosy outlooks for those companies. Like I think the consensus is they're all going to grow 15% a year. You know, Microsoft's a 20% grower. Amazon's a 20% grower. Facebook has so much monetization left. Yada, yada, yada. But if you assume that they all grow that quickly, If you assume that the S&P 500, I think we would all agree is not going to compound at 15 to 20% a year over the next decade. But if these companies do, not only are they 22% of S&P 500 earnings now, but they're going to be 75% of S&P 500 earnings. And that seems unlikely to me. And so to me, that is kind of an interesting market question right now. Like if you were a betting man, would you take the other four?”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here, I'll show you how it works. Their kid will be like, oh God, that sounds neat. You can turn it yourself. That's amazing. Most stuff won't make it. If I can segue Patrick, like another thing that you and I talked about that I think is interesting right now and maybe like partly speaks to the Empire Strikes Back thing is I wish I knew the answer to it. I'm just raising the question, but I think it is an interesting question. One of my colleagues, Brady Enright, did some math that really resonated with me the other day. It's that simple math, but he looked at the percent of S&P 500 earnings of the top five companies account for. This is roughly true, but I think Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are 22% of the S&P 500s earnings. There are 500 companies in the S&P. Five of them are 22% of the earnings and similar percent of the market cap. And also, I think”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very fair summary of it. And look, they're not all going to make it, Baron Buffett also has this beautiful analogy about horses. I forget the exact math, but there were, I don't know, 20 million horses in America in 1900. That math's not right. And there are like 6 million now. There are fewer horses. That, as an aside, may be the math on non-autonomous cars. If autonomy works, I do like driving. It's fun, but I don't know if I like it that much, especially over the July fourth weekend. I don't know if I like it enough to have a car that doesn't have full autonomous capability and maybe roll this forward 50 years from now driving the car yourself is going to be something that like old guys do to like indulge their nostalgia our children will be like oh yeah dad used to drive a car”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dropped last night or whatever. And she's like, You have to drop everything and watch it immediately. She's like, please. And my son, Marcus, who you know, Patrick, he feels the same way. He thinks her content's dynamite. So congrats to them.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, hats off to the team there. I haven't owned the stock. Some other folks have, but my family sure likes Disney Plus. My daughter wrote me, my daughter Noel, is my media advisor, but she wrote me about the Loki show that I guess.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Partly just because I didn't like going to the gas station, I just didn't resonate with me. Like, I didn't get a lot of value out of going to the gas station. Like, it's not that much time, but just drove me crazy to spend my time waiting there and filling up. And I'm such a person who's always trying to time optimize. I always was like, does it make sense to fill the tank 100%? Or like, what is the math of filling it 90%? You know, that extra minute I saved myself today. Like, what'll that add up to over the next 20 years? And then I think Disney probably is the poster child for it.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. So I think nothing is going to make Bill happier than to have like an electric hummer because it is a really fun car. And then they also are inventing themselves in terms of autonomous vehicles, reinventing themselves. And I actually think what they're doing Cruise is really interesting and it's a longer and separate discussion. To me, autonomous vehicles remind me a little bit of the iPhone and we're not at the stage where we know for sure they work and so on. But if autonomous navigation works in vehicles, both trucking and passenger cars, it's going to be such a powerful thing. And I think electric vehicles already are that. We've seen it in Tesla, but the Chinese EV companies, for example, are also terribly interesting that way. And I drive an electric car now, and I'm never going back to a combustion engine car again.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a friend, a colleague, a guy named Bill Gray, also at Capitol, who drove a hummer but lived in Marin, and he felt like he had to stop driving the hummer because like so many people kind of yelled at him and said like you're destroying the planet.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Her father also worked at General Motors. In my view, a very, very talented executive who I suspect could have a bevy of the most coveted jobs across America and has chosen to stay at GM to kind of reinvent GM. What has she and the team at GM done? Invest incredibly heavily push all the poker chips on the table behind being successful on electric vehicles. And I really think that they have some great products coming. Time will see. But if this new Cadillac lyric is a success, if the electric version of the Silverado truck is a success, and if this hummer, which looks awesome, by the way, electric hummer, is a success, I mean, how interesting, what is more Empire Striked Backer reinventing yourself than taking the hummer the most kind of lows. Planet killer vehicle, like imaginable And making an electric version of it.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spanish retailer, but a brilliant retailer, in my view, a brilliant founder and a brilliant currency chairman, CEO, Pablo Isla, with apparel, it's changing, but with apparel, a lot of people like to go into the store and they like to try on the product. And importantly, they like to return the product. A lot of people, they sort of have a philosophy. I'm going to buy six different things. I'm going to keep actually two of them, but I'm going to try them on for fit. I'm going to see how they look in the mirror, and then I'm going to return them. And it turns out that having a physical presence is very helpful to that. Another example of a company like that, in my view and a company that I really admire and think is really interesting to spend time on right now is General Motors. And I really have a ton of respect for Mary Barra, the CEO there. She is a GM lifer.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And adjust to it. And some of these established retailers are reaching a tipping point where they have a certain percent of their sales online and they're using their store network, do some fulfillment, and some people do still like going into stores. Another example of a company like that would be Inditex, which owns Zara. I don't know how well you know that company this time.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is What is the extent to which existing incumbent companies, the empire, can reinvent themselves to respond to the companies that are disrupting them and doing well? So I feel like Amazon famously for a long time killed Target. Target, in fact, was briefly Amazon's partner with all due respect to the management of Target. I was always blown away that they partnered with Amazon to sell their products to represent their store online through Amazon. And Jeff Bezos has said to me that he feels like Amazon would have done a pretty good job for Target. And he may be right. I'm sure he is right. But I think Target should have been making those investments themselves early on, obviously, to be competitive. But now what are we seeing? We actually are seeing target reinvent, et cetera.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, sometimes I think it's helpful to have an idea in your mind of things to go out and find more of. I can't imagine there's anyone who comes to your call who doesn't say that they haven't learned a lot from reading Warren Buffett. I remember that I read this thing about Nebraska Furniture Mart years ago in one of the Buffett Annuals where he said Mrs. Blumpkin, he said that he was so stupid because when he met her, he forgot to ask her if there were any more like her at home and turned out that her cousins or something like that were the Borscheims. And then he bought Borsheim's, that worked out well. Sometimes I like find a family that I like, the Blumpkins, the Blumpkins per se, but then see like, do you have like a daughter at home that my son could marry, you know? And for me right now, one idea I've been thinking about is this idea of the Empire Strikes Back.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, he did it to be self effacing, but I think he was also saying, hey, if you want to do well like I have, you need to be able to tolerate doing terribly.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You look so stupid. It's so embarrassing. And some people can't cognitively process that well. And they should go do another job. Like, I don't know whether manager and consulting has lots of failure, but those people seem really smart to me and seem to do well. Like maybe go do that job. Go do some other thing where if you work hard and are smart, you're going to either win a lot or win a little, but basically you're going to win every day. But you shouldn't do this job unless you're willing to experience a lot of failure and have it be really galling. And my experience, the best investors here, I had a former colleague, he used to say that he'd had more one-way bungee jumps than anyone else at Capitol. And he was arguably the best investor I ever saw here. Like, I think he made that point on purpose.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Manage money for people who we encourage to have long term time horizons. And then we try to take long time horizons with people too. So there are folks here who've started as analysts and frankly had terrible results. And we've waited five years, six years, seven years to sort of see whether they were in fact bad. If you covered U.S. financials in the beginning of 2008, it was hard to look smart at the end of 2008. You certainly own one of them. It was terrible. So we give that time. And also sometimes the best thing we like to say that happens internally is when you lose money right off the bat. It's a great mind focuser to be unsuccessful. And especially in this current hiring environment, I see so many resumes from leading business schools. These candidates, they haven't made a mistake their whole life.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the market, and he took his money out. I think he took half of his money out in 1929. And then by the end of 1929, the other half wasn't really there. But the half that you took out was very valuable to have taken out. He moved to Los Angeles, which is obviously far-sighted. He started capital. I believe that we acquired investment company of America, which was like an early mutual fund, basically, in either 1931 or 1933. And then he ran the firm for 26 years without making money. So he was a SaaS pioneer before SaaS existed. But he ran the business with a very long-term time horizon that is still true to the way that the firm is managed today. So we try to invest with a long-term time horizon so that TSMCs or Amazons or Valleys, we try to own with a long time horizon. We try to...”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which you and I remember was scary. And you're a new analyst who just graduated from Harvard or Stanford, Columbia, or wherever it is. And oh my God, you're in the rapids and you're going over this waterfall and people are falling out of the boat, especially you. And it's really important to be at a firm that has a long time horizon so that you kind of have time to figure it out. I think a lot of people aren't smart enough or perspicacious enough to figure it out on day one and we have very long time horizons here. So this firm really was started in the 1930s by the Lovelace family. And this is roughly true, but the legend goes that the original Mr. Lovelace John Lovelace, he was working in Detroit at a stock brokerage firm as a partner, and he got nervous about the fraud.”
2021-07-27 · Invest Like the Best · Carl Kawaja - Wisdom from Decades of Investing - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 236] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source