YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert Hagstrom

lines on the record: 116
first: 2025-08-17
most recent: 2025-08-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You don't have to worry about them searching your luggage. You can get out of town, get to the next country, and access your blockchain and bring your Bitcoin with you. That to me makes perfect sense of why Bitcoin has tremendous value. It's just it has value for different people in different locations. Woman came up to me afterwards. She goes, that was the best explanation. Our family lives in Argentina. We've been wiped out twice by the government, bank account to zero twice. Yes, we're in Argentina. We have a lot of Bitcoin. And so then I went, okay, so then Bitcoin is something that would be a currency that would be valuable to people in very unstable countries, economies, whatever the case may be. I've lost sight and help me, William, understand what's going on today.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Handbags with jewelry or whatever. If things go bad, they hop on a plane and when they get to Honolulu, they open up the luggage and they monetize all their Louis Vuitton back. And I said, okay, that's Bitcoin. I said, what I see happening with Bitcoin is that if you were in, and today actually there's an article on Bloomberg talking about Bolivia, and Bolivia has roadside stand transacting in Bitcoin because they're inflation 50% and no currency. But it could be El Salvador, it could be Lebanon, Brazil, Argentina. Go down the list. And I gave that talk to a client event and I said, first of all, I said, look, you're going to do it, do it with 1%. That's the right way to do it. But two, if it works, Charlie may not be right in that it could be horse maneuver here in the United States where we don't have a fragile banking system. And even though we've got some inflation, nothing like you would see it. And very poor countries. But imagine if you were in a very dire place, maybe you would have some money in a blockchain Bitcoin that if you had to leave the country, you would.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there's obviously a ply demand issue here. And demand is more than supply. The price goes up. And there's plenty of things to look at that value has gone up that didn't generate cash. So I put that aside. That didn't make any sense. When we bought Louis Vuitton, I was saying that we bought Louis Vuitton 11 years ago. And you go through Magwild's hierarchy of Meads, you know, when disposable income goes up, better tasting liquor, better tasting food, household products and makeup. And then, you know, fourth on the list is fashion goods. You just start dressing better. And so when we drill down into Louis Vuitton and kind of had that, I figured out one of the executives said to us, in addition to Mazbar hierarchy and needs, as you've identified, we've also discovered it's a great sense of stored value that people in difficult countries with fragile banking systems or dictatorships or things like that, we're seeing, we can see that there's purchases there and whether”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To have bought it with 1% of my net worth. But he did. So the hardest. Not to write a check on 1% of my net worth that's going to go to zero in my mind. I think everyone is kind of flabbergasted, that's Charlie's word, flabbergasted, at how this thing has evolved. Now, I came about it slightly different, and I don't own Bitcoin, but at the same time, I thought the argument that it can't be valued because it didn't generate any cash was a poor argument. I mean, a Van Gogh painting doesn't generate any cash.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So for Bill, those are great odds, right? Which is, all right, I'm going to make a 1% bet. And if I'm wrong, it's not going to change my lifestyle. But if I'm right, and there could be things that we could think about that could make it right, you know, deficits, inflation, whatever the case may be, the value of the dollar over the last hundred years, whatever you want to go to, if this actually thing worked, then it could be a really big deal. And I think that's the way he set it up. You know, writing a check for 1% of your net worth, says I could go to zero and I lose, you don't lose any sleep over. But when it becomes hundreds of millions of dollars and then a billion dollar investment and you still own it and it's given a lot of way. I mean, a lot that he's given away through his charity has been Bitcoin and others. I don't think he's given any Amazon away. I could be mistaken. But it was harder, it would have been harder in my mind to hold it at $100 million.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, a couple of things is I'm not sure I'll have to think about this more about whether Amazon equals Bitcoin because the way that he described Bitcoin to me, and I think he heard it the same way, is that after he read the paper, that, you know, basically, you know, the argument was, I have no idea if this is going to work or not. But if it does work, it could be really big. And if it doesn't work, you should put no more than 1% of your net worth in it”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Never quit wanting to make money. He never quit wanting to be successful. And there's some people that just get tired and quit, go home. And gosh, knows he earned enough stripes and he had enough things that he wanted to call it a day. He could have. But, you know, he's wide back. You know, he goes to Bitcoin and he goes to this. And now he's an AI. Santa Fe Institute has huge influence on his life and all that. But that's a special person that has this continuous appetite to learn and discover and curiosity. And Bill's what 75 this year and just as much curiosity today as he had almost 40 years ago when he started doing the value trust track record.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I never saw Bill emotional, not to say that he wasn't, as you pointed out. You know, he confessed that and maybe in private he was emotional. I never saw him yell. I never saw him dressed down an analyst. I never saw him angry. He just always seemed to be so out. He might have gotten in the car and, you know, punched the windshield. Who knows? But decorum demeanor temperament and his, you know, job as CIO and senior portfolio manager and all of its under it, we couldn't have had a better role model to go through the wicked times. And he just had it all figured out. But I think to your point, I don't know if we can point to one thing. It's just a lot of things came together in light and bubbled up. But to, you know, if we could say if there's anything that you could say, what was the one thing? It was just that he never quit. He never quit being curious.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, this whole thing about the intelligence, I've got way 20th of my books on intelligence analysis, you know, kind of going, all right, what there, what there. And there's something there, right? You know, and it was his willingness to, like you say, assess, you go through all these layers, you know, one, two, three. But then Sherman Kent was very much broaden out to what everybody else is thinking, seeing what they're thinking.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you hit on something very important, Will, which I think we're coming together. It's the culmination of it all, right? His father was his baseball coach, and so he had that competition spirit early on. I spent a lot of time with Bill talking about intelligence. And he was very, you know, he kept the cards close. And it's not like any information that's now 50 years old that, you know, he can't share anything like that. I read the, you know, a book that read Sherman Kent, who wrote a book about the intelligence services in the U.S. And it's almost Bill to the T, which is, you know, how to handle things like that. But Sherman Kent was also the guy that said, be multi-go find the experts, the scientists. Go find these other people. You're an analyst and you've got all this data, but go find out what the scientists over here are saying and find out, you know, so he was, Sherman Kent, his hero, kind of a guy that he looked up to being an analytical, you know, figure at the time in the 40s and 50s. That was probably somebody he wanted to emulate, right?”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they got to get back up on the mound and pitch again, right? The whole, you know, you've got to wave it off and you got to keep pitching. And you're talking about a guy playing baseball from Little Leaguers all the way to college. So how many of those episodes in his life? And I'm just theorizing now, where, you know, sometimes you got your good stuff and you've got the strike zone and you're fine and everything's good. And another day, you might have lost the most important game and your team is down and it just, you know, the chance to go off into the playoffs. It's a picture you've got a lot of failure that comes your way just naturally by the numbers. But if you spend a whole life of pitching winning games and enduring losing games, as he had as a pitcher, you have to think that that helped to craft some sense of not only competition, but perseverance, willing to give back up on the mound again, not quit. You know, some kids that might have lost the game might have never thrown the glove in the dark.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Well, you know, we haven't covered a lot of this. I've thought about doing something, but I don't know if you'll ever come in. But, you know, like Buffett's a competitor, right? And for him, competition was bridge and, you know, probabilities of that. With a baseball pitcher, and I read a lot about baseball pitchers. And baseball pitchers had to have, you know, a strong back, a backbone. They had to have the ability when they just got knocked out of the ballpark and maybe lost the game or lost the World Series or whatever the case may be. They take a lot of pain. They take a lot of abuse.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was in your book. And I did, I got it. You helped me understand that because when he was going through that, it was personally traumatic, personally devastating. You know, so many ways. And I did not, I knew he was hurting and I knew it was a hard, hard, hard time. I did not know until you had written about it and you talked to him about it, how important the Stoics were. And now you can see why, right? I mean, it was a perfect philosophy to embrace. Your darkest hour that allowed him to come out on the other side and then still be able to contribute. Because, you know, something like that, there are not a lot of managers that come back from that and can't come back.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just really too difficult to make. Now, you might argue government's involved in AI and government's involved in tariffs and things like that. Yet it makes it a little bit more trickier. But when something is either going to survive or not survive based upon a government decision, we're out. We go somewhere else. We're not going to play that game.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Process your ability to predict what's going to happen goes right down because there's so much personality and emotion. The politics of the day was we're not lending money to these fat cats on Wall Street just so they can keep their job in their company. And they wiped them out. And we missed it. I mean, and so that was one of those things where I will never forget. And anytime I see government playing a heavy hand and God knows how we can get through the day today without worrying about heavy hand, When the government gets involved in decision making that can affect the underlying value of stocks, it's almost like the two hard pile of Charlie Munger. Remember Charlie Munger said, I'll do the easy one. This is flat out no, I'm not going to do it. And the third one is this is just too complex. I'll come back to it later. I can't figure that out. But it's almost anytime government's involved in investing in a very big way. That's in the too hard to figure out file for me now. I don't get involved.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Said, okay, it's fine, let's just do it this way and let them work it out themselves. In 2008, we thought that 2008, having the track record of what happened in 1992, the smart thing would have been this let them work it out, we'll get through it, and through support, they'll come out on the other side and we'll be able to keep the system intact. And of course, the exact opposite happened. They wiped out all the equity and it caused, you know, large, large ripple effects. And so the answer then was what? We had the wrong description, right, of 2008. 2008 was not 1992. It was something totally different. And the lesson we took away from, which is, I'd love to talk, have dinner with Billy Soon again and talk about this, is when government is involved in the decision-making process, you know, no matter what happened 20 years ago, what happened 50 years ago, if government and large committees are involved in decision-making,”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About how that mistake was. And Bill's come to the term, you know, we've all come to terms with it. It was cathartic, obviously. But here was a situation where we failed when we did the post-mortem on it, stuff like that. As you well know, and you wrote extensively about it, we thought that 2008 was 1992. You go back to 1992, that was the great savings and loan, you know, the Keating story and all that. Banks in Colorado were failing. And in Texas and Boston and stuff like that. And it was really a mess. But the government decided that for the health of the banking system, financial system, he would allow the equity to survive to come again. So Fanny and Freddie went to two and three state private companies, right, even though they were the government support. And so he bought Fannie and Freddie at two and three and four, and that was the beginning of the 15-year track record. So the government...”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where value is, and I'm not going to be locked into only buying low stocks, and I'm not going to be blocked into buying Tom Marcico growth stocks. I'll do both. Just tell me, you know, where the mispricing is. So that's pragmatism, right? That's just, you know, let's just figure out what's working. Let's go after it. You know, I don't know if you want to talk about, you know, one of his biggest mistakes was the financial crisis, but actually it was a great insight.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and Heard, if you look at build value trust, it was never a growth portfolio, never a value portfolio. It was a core portfolio that had both growth and value stocks. In his mind, the growth stocks were mispriced and the value stocks were mispriced as classically defined. But when we were managing money for sovereign wealth funds and the big pension plans and traveling around the world and stuff like that, they were all like, well, if he value or is it growth? There's value, but there's value over here in low PE and there's also value over here in high PE. And so they always stuck him in core. They always made him a core manager. But that ability to be able to navigate back and forth between value and growth was a pragmatic way in which to attack the investing world. I mean, you said, I'm only going to buy growth stock. Well, growth stocks worth sometime, but not all the time, or I'm only going to buy classic value stocks. Well, you know, you're going to be in the doghouse two out of five years. Is that a life that you want? And he goes, well, why don't we? He just kind of figured out, let's just figure it out.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Marketplace that did migrate. It goes to different places. So if you're pragmatic in how you think about things, you're not afraid to buy value if it's in technology. You're not afraid to buy value if it's in a financial. You're not afraid to buy. You just go wherever the opportunity set is. But correspondence theory of truth does put you in a sense of absolute and you're not flexible in your thinking. There's so many classic value investors that have lost decade plus performance numbers because of stubbornness.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The correspondent theory of truth and unwilling to see what's changing and working and the pragmatic theory of truth. And you could see it everywhere, right? And I don't know how many times you and I probably have listened to a classic value investor who's had a great career, lots of money under management, stuff like that, but it's in a dry hole performance-wise and says, you know, as soon as value investing returns to the market, we're going to make a lot of money. And Bill used to laugh. He goes, I just made 20 times on Dell. That was a huge value investing. How come they didn't own Dell? And he could go through all of these other stocks that people with a correspondent's theory of truth of how to think about value ignored because it doesn't work the way the world says it's supposed to work. And Bill went to a pragmatic view about what's working and how long can this work and how to think about that. And he says, value is always in the market.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Bill, with you, and I thank you for that quote. That has to be one of my most favorite lines. I'm not sure how I ever came up with that, but let's not get stranded on a desert island of absolutes. It was one of those moments where I went, gosh, maybe you can write. I don't know. But Phil, remember Bill talked about, you know, there's kind of two theories of truth. One is a correspondent theory of truth, which is you basically have figured out how the world works. You know, the scientists have basically said, this is how it works. And so you're connected intellectually, emotionally, psychologically to just, this is how it works. This is the correspondence theory of how the world works. And then there's the pragmatic theory of truth, which is in a biological system, things are changing, evolving, evolving, adapting, things of that nature. And he said, Bill said, most of the problems and failures of investors is they're too wedded.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get to the gap number at the end of the quarter and the quarter showed a loss, so the quarter showed a break even. There's tons of cash. I mean, a second year student at college could have figured that out if they just would have had a nose for curiosity. So there's Bill. He's got a company that's working. He can see the revenues. He can see, you know, how it's getting bigger and getting larger. He knows that it's working. So go, let's figure out how it's working. So William James is always the cash value of ideas. Go figure out what's working and get to it, right? And just figure out, is it sustainable or it's a one-time trick pony? And William James just kept saying, I don't want to say follow the cash, but it was like, what's the cash value of these ideas and Bill seemed to be able to sniff those out beautifully? And no matter what the street was saying, you know, he had the self-confidence and the ability just to say the street says this, I see this and furthermore, I'm betting it.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was the guy that did maybe that was the Baron story, the guy that did doing the convertible bonds for Amazon. They did a convertible bond issuance because Jeff wanted for a one-time only built six or seven, eight big distribution centers in the marketplace that he needed. And the guy continued to linear extrapolate that he'd do that every year. He'll go broke without ever talking to management and saying, well, how many more times do you have to do that? And Jeff goes, I'm done. And Bill said, but he's not doing this again. This is all he needs for the time being. What that struck to me is this two ways. One is you just didn't do the work. I mean, here you're talking about Amazon and you basically making a call on it. You might have thought about calling management and saying, how many more distribution centers do you need and how many are you going to build over the next five years? And that would have said your thesis is wrong. Or two, could you have gone through the income statement and followed the cash all the way down and said, yeah, there's a lot of cash here just because it didn't.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe this was 2002 or something like that and said, how much profit had Amazon either gained or lost over the last three or four years? And the numbers were like they've lost $3 billion and they've never made any money. And Bill came up with, you know, they made something, but they made like $500 million, $600 million. And the crowd was aghast. And Bill walked them through and said, look, here's the income statement. And here's the number. But right before he drops it to gap to record it, he just throws it back in the company. But on that moment before he reinvested it, it had earned $100 million. It earned $200 million. It had a thriving, growing business. It was growing leaps and bounds year over year. But Jeff was smart enough to do what he should have been doing, which is continue to reinvest in the business to make it as big as you. It can't be in Amazon 2. Get there as fast as you can. Get the land grab. Build out the thing that was so lappable.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With pragmatism, of course, you know, that's probably, you know, Hopkins was rich and pragmatism there. And Sanders Pierce with Charles Sanders Pierce, you know, taught there and stuff like that. But the whole thing about William James and how Bill related investing was, just observe what's working. Now, what does that mean? Well, it could be, I mean, the stock price is going up, or it could mean that sales are going up or, you know, market share. Just kind of being an observer of what is the reality going on in the market. And he would look at things that were being successful. Then he would say, okay, why is it being successful? Let's figure out, right? Why this thing is doing what this thing is doing. Instead of stopping which other people did and said, oh, the multiple is too high. Or, you know, and you wrote about this, too, and I think it's that Bill had made the bet, you know, he asked a room full of people.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But Bill Miller taught me more about investing outside the world of accounting, finance, and economics that I could ever imagine that you could learn. So, you know, making those decisions required you to have a multidisciplined thought process that allowed you to pull on models from different disciplines that gave you the insight to make the bet. And when I saw that reality and I saw the payoff from that, I went, holy mackerel, this is just good stuff. I mean, Charlie was right. A lot of Luza, you know, effect, right? When it all comes together and all these multi-models are starting to come and working in, I think, you know, confidence goes up, not stubbornness. If your confidence goes up and you're able to pull the trigger and more importantly, you're able to defend it when the stock price doesn't always behave correctly.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they're doing other things and they're doing kitchen stuff and stuff like that. And he goes, nope, you've got these words. This is what's forming your description. Your description's wrong, so your explanation's wrong. And when he got it into our heads, it was Dell, then it was home-free. You know, it was just we're off to the races. But everybody on Wall Street had the wrong description, therefore their explanation was wrong. And so when you go into the philosophy of language, you begin to understand very quickly that how you form descriptions ultimately determines your explanation. You better damn well have your description right. Well, then Bill would come back to us and say, how many different ways can you describe something? Take a company, you know, whatever the case.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, here's the part. So then, you know, Bill was a PhD in philosophy, absent the dissertation, pragmatism. One of his favorite philosophers is Wittgenstein, the very famous Austrian philosopher who, you know, I think it was Bertrand Russell said the greatest example of genius that you've ever seen and considered Bertram Russell was a genius. The guy was pretty good. But he did on the philosophy of language that everything that you do is based upon the words that you choose that gives the meaning and the meaning then forms a description, the description is your ultimate explanation. And Bill's walking us through this, right? And we're all scribbling. He goes, what is the description of Amazon today? And everybody said, well, they think we should buy Barnes& Noble and sell Amazon because Barnes& Noble is 15 times earnings and Amazon is through the roof and stuff like that because no, that's not the right. That's not the right description. You have the wrong explanation. And they said, well, now it's Walmart.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out there speaking, and Bill met with Chuck was right when the IPO's coming up. And Jeff is just this loud, laughable, depot, you know, like that. And Bill said, okay, what are you doing? And at the time, it was books, right? And he said, what's your business model? And everybody was kind of waiting around and he's trying to figure, you know, was it Barnes& Noble bus? Was it, you know, how do you think about that? And Jeff says, it's Dell. And Bill went, okay. Explain. He goes, well, with books, you know, I can keep them for six months and don't even have to pay for them. And sometimes they'll take them back for free. He goes, I got no capital in this thing. And we're going to run it out of the garage. We got things like that. But basically, he convinced Bill that Amazon's business model was Dell. And by Bill seeing what a Dell business model could eventually become went, I'm interested.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It at I don't know 50 times earnings, 55 wherever it was maxing out. And it was the 100% return on capital. I mean, nobody, because they had negative working capital. You remember you'd order a computer, you'd call up Dell, and you'd order a computer and you play, I want this monitor, this keyboard, this much speed, this much storage, whatever the case may be. And they said, okay, that's great. X amount of dollars, and it'll be to you in two weeks. You say, great, thanks. And they get your American Express number. And then the American Express number went into that money, went into the Dell Coppers that night. But they didn't have to pay the suppliers for $36.90. So he grew the entire business on the accounts receivables, right, of his customers, right? It was a negative working capital story that allowed him to get to 100% return on capital. So through the roof. We go to visit, and you know, we're in Amazon. I think we're out in Las Vegas at the time doing the brokers with a boondogle out there.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Well, it is a fascinating story, and I want to share the complete because it shows the brilliance of Bill, which was, first of all, he bought bills. Let's just back up. He bought Dell Computer. Bill will slapped me on the head, you know, 93, 94. And it was a single multiple stock. And he had an idea, you know, the internet's coming, blah, blah, blah, you know, and he had that all figured out, and Dell looked pretty cheap. But what happened with Dell is that it became the very first company that became 100% return on investor capital company. Never had to happen in history before. And of course, for multiple went through the roof, I think it ended up being 18% of the value trust portfolio. And he didn't sell it. Dell Computer went up 8,000% in the decade of the 1990s. I think Bill got 5,000% of that in value trust. So it wasn't that it was hard to buy Dell at six times earnings. The hard part was how did you hold?”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have earned it. They actually have made the money that justifies the price. It's not a hundred times Cisco in 1999. Far from it.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just phenomenal. But we've never had, you know, if you go back to Brian Arthur and increase in returns economics at Santa Fe, when you get into digital economies, it's totally different than brick and mortar economy. And you have to think about them differently and you end up valuing them based upon return on capital much more so than just gap earning. And when you start to do that, what is more stupefying to me that NVIDIA and Microsoft are 4 billion and MEDA's heading that way, Google's heading that way, Amazon's heading that way is I can't see right now how that slows down at all. So then you've got to check yourself with that. So, you know, these are questions that AI doesn't answer. You've got to run through all these Rubik Cube type things. But what I would tell you is, you know, looking at these companies, I don't care if they're 4 billion or 400 billion, 4 trillion or 400 billion, whatever the case may be, they actually.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The same was with Google's, the same was with Meta, the same was with ASML. So all of these gargantuan businesses that are at the top and causing everybody so much angst because they believe it's the beginning of the end have actually earned their way to the top. And so then the question is, what's the value proposition? Is it still a value proposition? And I would make an argument that, you know, $25, $30, 35 times earnings for some of these businesses. And remember, NVIDIA's earning $125% return on capital, right? And it has no close competitor. And if you believe AI is not a bottlocket, but it's going to last much longer than, you know, a few more quarters or a few more years, it looks to me that NVIDIA is really quite compelling. And you can make that argument about meta. You can make that argument about Google. What's just freaking everybody out is that we've never had a trillion dollar business become a four trillion dollar business. It just escapes people's ability to comprehend.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And all this, that, and another. And we looked at the price gain of Navidia 23 to 24, and looked at the earnings per share of Navidia 23 to 24. And the earnings per share over, it was actually over a two-year period were growing faster than the share price. But multiple NVIDIA actually was coming down.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the fall of 2022, we knew AI was coming on. We knew from the Santa Fe Institute that the GPU was the way to get there over the CPU. We knew that that was all lining up. We just didn't know that ChatGPT would show up in November of that year. And of course, when it did, it was off to the rates. And at that time, I think NVIDIA was 2%, 3% of the portfolio. Well, it ended up being 10 to 12% of the portfolio. We had to actually, because of, we manage a lot of tension plans and individual IRAs, you know, the attorneys either right or wrong say, you know, you got to be careful about your overbet. So it gets to 10 to 12, we feel a little bit back. But basically, NVIDIA should have been at the top because it earned its way at the top. We did a study in 2023 to 2024 when everybody was telling me the magnificent seven was 1999 at the tech bubble when Bill and I were managing money back then. And Cisco was 101 times earnings and Microsoft was 60 times earnings.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, yeah, this would be Charlie and Pascal and we're building probability statements. What is the probability? That a 50%, what does a probability can do this? What is the probability to do that? What does the probability can do this? X, Y, and Z, and then you do a weighted average. That's how Warren does the decision tree. But you actually having to think about that. It's not so much, you know, people look at my portfolio and said, oh, you're just an AI geek. The economic returns actually drove What are the positions in the portfolio? The only reason why NVIDIA went to the top and Amazon is at the top and that goes back to the Bill Miller days and some of this is because they earned it. I didn't buy it in anticipation of some rabbit coming out of the hat and oh my God, they finally figured it out. They basically earned their way to the top. I didn't start NVIDIA in 2022.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a financial ecology of other competitors and how it works with AI and what is that, you know, it can't get there yet. Now, maybe AGI gets there, but right now for a buy and hold low turnover portfolio manager, I'd spend 80 to 90 percent of my time on how long can this last? And there's nothing in AI that can tell me that. It's almost old school. You got to be thinking about who your competitors are. You got to be thinking about the landscape. You've got to pull this multi-hack trick together of all these things. And AI is not there. That may be where we still have runway as human beings, as individual investors is one of the great books that Andy Grove wrote, I think, in the 1990s, it's only the paranoid survive. And AI can't, you know, AI just can't put that together just yet.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The one mistake he has made most often and most critical and has cost him the most money is a question that AI can't answer yet. And the mistake that he made when we wrote the Warren Buffett Way was he looks for companies that have favorable long-term prospects, which is, you know, that's competitive advantage period. Michael Mobison, how long does this last? And how long can I get a high rate of return on my capital? And how long can I sustain it? Those are the mistakes Warren has made, the biggest mistakes. That which he thought was going to last long didn't, or that which he thought was going to do well with high economic returns longer didn't. He says, I got those wrong, whether it's Dexter's shoe or whatever the case. If you go to AI and add AI to ask you what is the competitive advantage period in NVIDIA, it can't do it. It could tell you what happened today. It can tell you what happened last week. And we're going to monitor the sales and we're going to monitor the margins. They kind of drill it down into sales margins, return on, but it had no idea how to think about Navideo with.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Getting better, but it's still, though, William, I get your thought on this, this still to me is still these chatbots are still just Google on steroids. I mean, it just does a better job, right? And it gets you more material and it goes deeper and wider. But we're still not by example. I saw where Cliff Atna said, AI now can do about 80% of the work of all its analysts. Well, that doesn't surprise me. Cliff's a very successful investor and deserves all his accolades, but he's a factor-based guy. And he runs factors out. And he wants to know factors 10 years ago and what were the factors when interest rates did this and inflation did that. So AI can get you that like that, right? It can get you anything you want in the historical database. And it can build dividend discount models. And I want a three-year model that does this in years four and five, I wanted to do that and it can get it for you. The one mistake that Warren says that he has made”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They've spent a lot of time backing it up. But opinions are worth what, a cup of coffee sometimes. But a well thought out debate or defense of something that's powerful. And I'm bullish on AI. I'm optimistic on AI. But you're right. There's so much yet that hasn't happened. And we haven't figured out, I think, how to use it to our best ability. There's a professor at Wharton here at University of Pennsylvania who's actually teaching, of course. He wants his kids to the students to actually use AI. I want you to use AI, but he's really kind of helping them use it thoughtfully, not just as they get a quick answer and put it in the paper. It's just how to connect things and stuff. So I think he's going about it in the right way. But AI, I was just saying ChatGPT number five is coming out and was reading the reviews on that. It's kind of like, well.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me make the extra poll. Nothing is more fearful. And it's funny because I would send Bill stuff that would ride and stuff like that. And I knew it was really polished. He'd always send it back with, you need to check that. You need to check. That's misspelled. The University of Connetsburg doesn't have two G's. I'm like, oh, yeah. In constant fear and paranoia that you don't have your facts right or you've misspelled something or whatever the case may be.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Year from now, a week from now, a month from now, and says, oh, that's wrong. There's nothing more horrid in your life as a writer than to be called out on a myths fact or an untruth that you said was true. And it wasn't. So being a writer, you really got to get that stuff right.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when I think about that, Sherlock Holmes did, one, you got to have facts. If you're going to make a statement and it is maybe it's a conversational statement that you're trying to convince someone or persuade and something like that, you say, well, I believe this and it's based upon these facts. Well, the fact thought it'd be pretty good and you should have facts that support your statements or whatever you're doing, but it's amazing how many people you'll run into and you'll start talking about something and they will then instantaneously almost act as if they are a professor on this subject. It's canoric. What's your data set? What are your facts? What are your resources? What's the bibliography? They got nothing. So that stood with me. If I'm going to say something, I'm going to write something. You can damn well sure I'm going to footnote it. I'm going to have some backup because I'm not going to, you know, from being a writer, you're exposed as soon as you write it and put it in print. You better be able to defend it because if somebody comes at you.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Well, what I find my experience is I find a lot of people have opinions for no facts. It's always kind of like, okay, you got the opinion. What are your facts? And then they had sloppy facts, right? And their facts are, you know, I heard it from a friend or, you know, it was on the TV or, you know,”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's going to demonstrate your thinking skills, your logic skills, and the ability to come to a conclusion. And more importantly, it's going to demonstrate your ability to write and communicate, which is what we're all afraid of with, you know, AI and texting and sloppy emails and stuff like that. It's just, can you communicate? Can you write and communicate? And when you do that and you demonstrate that, it does take you up another level from other people that are operating at the surface level.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And edit it and send it to your English teacher and get her. And then when you drop your resume on the guy's table and you're doing the interview, and then right before you leave, I want you to drop that term paper on his desk and say, hey, this is something that I wrote that meant a lot to me that I had been researching. It's a strong idea. And I said, one, if you do that, the other 19 people will not have done it. So you're going to separate yourself.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“verbalize it out in an hour-long podcast. That's huge too. It all then becomes a part of you and it stays with you and, you know, stuff that I wrote in the Warren Buck of portfolio 25 years ago. Just think of the other day about risk tolerance and how to think about that and stuff like that. I wrote about that 25 years ago. But I could cite everything about that right now because it really became a pretty good part of my learning. And that learning was reinforced by writing it, writing it down. And I spent a lot of time with young college kids who are trying to get a job. And I said, look, you've gone to a great university. You got a great GPA. You've done all the internships. And you're really terrific. You got the right contacts. But guess what? There's 20 of them just like you all looking for this job. I said, what I want you to do is I want you to take one of your research papers, a term paper, whatever the case may be. You really, really like. And I want you to clean it up.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, 100%. I would say, my mother used to say write it down, you won't forget it. And when you write a book, you own it, right? You own the material, so to speak. Writing things down, even if I write a commentary for our shareholders, our partners, I should say, or for the firm or anything like that. Writing for me, whether it's informal, formal, whether it's three pages, whether it's a chapter, whatever, really does pound it into me. It becomes a part of me. Once you've written it, you own it. It becomes a part of, you know, it's deep inside you. It's not a flighty idea that you forgot about and it showed up again. It really does become a part of your life. And you don't forget it. I mean, and to your second point, William, and you're brilliant about this, you are a teacher. Once you then begin to share the ideas with other people and you share them with audiences or your listeners on your podcast or whatever, and you begin to”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT