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

“get your PhD and Loustein's philosophical investigations. I don't go that far, right? But I got a pretty good idea about the philosophy of language and descriptions and how we thought about that, which helped me investing. So once you kind of get a foot deep, you can then move on and continue to explore on the ripples with what else is going on.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't really understand that phrase, but I would say I'm more like a foot deep and a mile wide because I do try to get, as Charlie says, the whole idea, you don't have to become an authority on the great mental model. You don't have to be an authority on any one philosopher or, you know, any one aspects of the mental models that you're working on. But you have to have a working knowledge of it, right? And so that allows you to kind of get the big ideas, the stuff that the moving and shaking part of it and the ha-ha moment of it without me necessarily having to do a PhD dissertation on the subject, right? So that's the other key, which is Charlie says you don't have to be an expert in all of it. You just have to grasp the really big ideas. And so that you can pick up speed doing that, which is once you've glammed on to the big idea, the central component here, you can move on. You don't have to continue to write your dissertation on this for, you know,”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Resonate It does, and I'm so glad to hear that you treat your books the same as either because I thought I was just a terrible person. But if you're doing it, it's okay. I'm in good company here. You know, the phrase, you know, an inch deep and a mile wide.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it really stays with you. Bill said, you know, all reading is exponential. And what moves people in books becomes an experience, an internal experience for them that I never get from TV. I never get from the Wall Street. Wall Street Journal is a great paper, Financial Times, great paper, but I never get a shiver moment of like, aha, I finally got it. I finally figured out. I get those from books.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“through To figure out whether the book deserves my time. Now, if we get to that point, and I make the book my own and I spend eight hours on it, what gets fun from there is do what's called synoptical reading, which is to find other books like this that are similar, that are written by somebody else. You're trying to bring in multiple viewpoints of a single topic. And that's been terrific as well. So the whole idea here is that I am not going to learn anything. I'll get new information on financial news networks and mostly newspapers, but insight, you know, things that kind of change you in a fundamental way have always occurred through books, have always, for me, it's like you're reading it and it is the epiphany. It's an epiphenic moment. The light bulb goes on. You get a feeling in your body.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know yet. And so more. That really deserve an up close spend a lot of time with. But what you try to do is you're catching the net wide for all these ideas and different disciplines and different periodicals. It's just getting down to what's worth it. So after you do what's called this kind of, is it worth my time? Then you go into intelligent skimming, which is you read it as fast as you possibly can, and you're going through the pages to see if anything's popping up new. And the other thing that I did, I don't know how you treat your book, William, but for so many years, I refuse to put a mark in them. They were like, you know, I was in a museum with my books. I didn't want anything to happen to them. They were glorious and stuff. Mortimer Marat said, make the book your own. I mean, it's your book, right? Take a pen, take a highlighter, underline things, you know, and try to figure out, you know, is this actually really worth your time? And if you get to there, then the third part is, okay, you've got my eight hours. So the first thing I do is kind of systematically go.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's a couple ways to go about that, I think, kind of attack it. I think I read this stat the other not too long ago. The average book takes about eight hours to read plus or mine. And so when you kind of think about, you know, do I have eight hours this week? I won't read a book a day, but let's say, do I have eight hours this week to get through a book? I'll find eight hours. I'll get it. But let's back that up and say, because this, you know, it's important, which is, does the book deserve my eight hours? And that was big opening when I wrote investing the last liberal art. There was a guy Mortimer Adler that wrote a book called How to Read a Book. And I thought, well, that's very presumptuous. You know, I know how to read a book. But in fact, I did not know how to read the book. And this is for nonfiction. We could talk about fiction later. And Bill is huge in fiction and the insight there. But the idea is that every book that you come across, you don't know whether it is worth your time for eight hours.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Businesses and how to think about that. The problem is it probably would get no subscribers, no viewers, no advertisers. It's kind of like Aleister Cook, Masterpiece Theater. Nobody would watch it. So, you know, by design, I have a good strategy that allows me open time to shut off all the noise. And three, it's just this natural curiosity, and we were talking about this earlier, that once you find a nugget and you have an epiphany, you want another one. You know, it's like, well, okay, this was really good. I didn't expect this. I didn't expect to learn this. And boy, I can connect this to that. And you go, well, I wonder what else is out there. So one of the things that Bill did, I mean, we all go through, you know, the Wall Street Journal in New York, you know, that's just daily information. But, you know, he would have me reading the New York Review of Book and the London Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. And just always scouring for books and ideas that might have relevance. And it's been a treasure hunt.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“any news coming in, but he spent no time watching TV. And I think that those two things, one, I have a portfolio strategy that allows me to have a lot of time to explore for ideas. But the other point is just turning out the noise. And it is noise. I mean, for my particular style, right? For my particular style, I wanted to share this with you. You remember in the cable first came out, there was this idea that they would put a V chip in the television so it would protect the kids from violence, right? So you could actually put a chip in. And if there was a violent program come on, it would black out. I think we need that on with financial news networks. Like if you're going to speculate about market or try to forecast markets, I need a speculation chip that'll turn it off, right? It's totally black because that has no interest to me. And then I just want the chip that does how to understand.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of time. I don't have to be glued. The first thing I did was I just turned off all the financial news networks. I don't have a TV in my office brokerage firm or stuff like every broker seems to have a CNB city or Bloomberg or Fox Business on whatever the case may be. And they just seem to stare at it all day long. Well, the first thing I did was, you know, years and years and years ago was just get the financial networks out of the room, get them out of the office, get them out. I watch Bloomberg, you know, for maybe 30 minutes, first thing in the morning, I'm up usually, you know, five o'clock. And if we have trades going off in Europe, I'll start, you know, just what's going on in Europe with Bloomberg. And then I turned it off. And it's amazing. I remember Debbie Bazanik, Warren's secretary. I said, does Warren watch the NBC? She goes, well, Robert, I'm not sure how we would call it watching it. He sometimes has it on, but he never has the sound on. Kind of uses it as a ticker tape and see if there's.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I would tell you it is by design. One thing that is important to remember, William, is being a concentrated low turnover portfolio manager. We own 20 stocks plus or minus and average holding periods five, six, seven years. And I think out of the 20 stocks that I own, I think seven of them I've had for 11 years. So we're not doing a lot of trading. I don't have to spend a lot of my waking hours worrying about markets and prices and trading and stuff like that. We're kind of market aware, we're economically aware, but we're really kind of agnostic. So we don't really invest a lot of time, energy thinking about where the market's going, where the economy's going. It's all kind of business centric. We kind of feel like we own a collection of businesses and we just kind of hang out with our owners and see what they're doing and how they're prospering and stuff like that. So just by design, being this kind of portfolio manager opens up a lot.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't emphasize how important it was to do the practicals with Bill because I can see how Bill used philosophy and biology and literature and all down the line as we were actually making investment. So I could see the payoff, the tangible payoff that was accruing, and it just led me to do it more and more. It's kind of like when you kind of get that first spark, that aha moment, you go, gosh, I want some more. Give me more. Give me more. And it just led me to do more readings in different disciplines and continue to drill down into different areas. So, you know, Charlie and Bill were pretty good. As you well know, Warren's not deep in this area. I mean, he's really good at investing in balance sheets and income statements and businesses, but he's not too vocal about multidiscipline, but certainly Charlie and Bill are.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Phenomenal and multidiscipline. And so two things were happening. One, I was theoretically trying to wrap my hands around what Charlie was saying. But the blessing that I had. What the actual practitioner have said, you know, Robert, you wrote your dissertation on Bucket, but you did your practicals with Bill Miller.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was riding the Warren Buckle portfolio after the Warren Bucket Way. That's where we really got involved with Charlie a lot more. Charlie was a lot more in the Warren Bucket portfolio book than the Warren Bucket Way. And we got into the art of achieving worldly wisdom and the psychology of misjudgment. and all these things. But that was also happening simultaneously when I began to work with Bill Miller after I wrote the Warren Buffaloway. I met Bill. As a stockbroker, when I joined Leg Maith in 1984, Bill was directive research. He's a true polymath. And Bill and I struck a friendship Has lasted to this day. And apprenticeship was largely built around this whole curiosity of multidisciplines. And Bill, as you well know, William is.”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, William, I would like to tell you the finger came down through the clouds and God said, you know, this is what you're going to do, Robert. But I literally flailed about. Years and years trying to figure out what was going to be my uh. Score in life. My mom was a doctor. She was one of the first medical doctors out of Vanderbilt University. My dad was a chemical engineer and they seem to have wanted to do that day one and I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do. But we'll talk about kind of the whole. Journey of becoming an investor Riding the warm by the way, I would say the intersection of becoming, and I don't consider myself a polymath. I'm still a student of the art. There were two people, Bill Miller and Charlie Munger, and they both happen almost coincidentally”
2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
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2025-08-17 · We Study Billionaires · RWH060: What Buffett, Munger & Bill Miller Taught Me w/ Robert Hagstrom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT