YouSaid · the spoken record

Tobias Carlisle

lines on the record: 82
first: 2025-10-31
most recent: 2025-10-31
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

“Identify this as an opportunity. And then when they announced it, the investment world was sort of perplexed completely by this thing because it was such a departure from what he had done previously and was kind of criticized that maybe this is him trying to go back to his roots because the original security analysis, the 34 edition of security analysis is all written about railways and it had been kind of Graham spread and buttered at trade railway bonds and various other bits and pieces in the capital structure. And I said, is this just a guy trying to buy himself a railway set? Is this a billionaire buying himself a big railway set? But no, there were very good financial reasons and strategic reasons for doing it. And I hope that I sort of explain them a little bit in that book so you can understand why he did it and how that fits into strategy more broadly.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pronunciation You'll see it in the book. It looks like coup dual D O E I L, I think, but it means literally it's a French term, it means stroke of the eye, but the idea is that it's a glance and that they say that the great commanders had this ability to glance at a battlefield or something and make a decision because they understood the process and both parties and the generals and the weather they understood all of these things so intimately that all they needed was the glance to sort of make their decision and so they talk about Napoleon having this and Frederick the Great having this and all of these sort of great commanders had this coup d'Oi and Buffett certainly has the coup doi as well and he used after he'd conducted this analysis and he used it to roll up that geographic spread of BNSF, the tax code, the movements of goods, the relative cost advantage of a railway identity.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He talks about this as like being businesslike in your investment, going through and conducting the analysis, doing all of these things and sort of ignoring what everybody else says, just doing your own analysis and then working out whether it makes sense or not. And so I transition there and I use Graham's analysis for valuing a company rather than Sun Tzu's. But then Sun Tzu also says you do these analyses where you go through and you look at, he calls it heaven and earth and the commander, but heaven is the conditions. What are the conditions? Earth is the territory and doing these analyses and then looking at the commander and that's the leader and making sure that they're honest and good and doing all these things. And that's very, very gray unlike in the way that he thinks about these things. And then you make a decision. And there's this idea in the military literature. They call it the coup doi, which is a really, it's a French term. The spelling is absolutely bizarre compared to the”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Conducting this analysis on it and then making a decision. And then he gives you some rules for making these decisions. And he says, you're looking for this overwhelming advantage. And he says a pound compared to a grain, which is this older measure. But basically it's 6,000 to 1, which is being extreme to sort of illustrate the idea, but he's saying you want this overwhelming advantage. And when you don't have an overwhelming advantage, then you shouldn't do it. But you conduct this method of analysis to determine whether you do have it or not. And you shouldn't do anything until you've conducted this analysis, which when I read that, I was like, this is, this sounds exactly like Graham. And I think Benjamin Graham, who was Buffett's teacher and mentor and probably more than that. And at one point, his employer.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He thought that he could get a 10% regulated return, but then there were some additional things that he worked out that he could take some of the money out from Burlington Northern. So he got a lot of his capital back very quickly. And it's now paying out dividends that are in the order of like 12 or 13% on his investment. So he's got all of his capital back from that deal. And the rail line as it exists. I've seen some independent analyses that value it between $100 billion and $200 billion. And this is something that he valued in its totality, I think, at $44 billion and ultimately I think he spent about 19 taking it over because he owns some of it and he used shares again. And so I use it to illustrate two ideas. One idea is that Sun Tzu calls this method military method. And then he describes, he goes through this, it's spread throughout the book. So I've sort of collated it all together so it makes some sense. But he talks about going and measuring.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Century or millennium. And so that was going to be over the Pacific. And so they were going to need connections throughout the Midwest to the West to access the Pacific. And there were some changes to the tax code as well, which meant they could accelerate depreciation of their investments. And it's a regulated business. So the regulator sets what they can earn. And they're trying to make sure they get a good return out of these investments. Altogether, Buffett had to understand the sort of geographic implications and the shift of geopolitical business, the tax code. It looked externally like Burlington Northern was earning about 6% on its assets, which is pretty low. But in the context of that period of time, that was a zero interest rate. That was during the zero interest rate period, the ZERP that started in 2008 and it ran through until maybe 2018, something like that.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Northern, though, is that it would be impossible to recreate that network today. They're trying to build a railway, a rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco. And they're years and years and years behind schedule, and they've already overspent by billions and billions of dollars. And there's really nothing there. They haven't built this rail line at all. So it's an incredibly hard thing to do, maybe even impossible in the modern times to replicate that. So there's a definite moat there and there's no way it can be overbuilt. And it's also a much cheaper method of moving goods than trucks. Trucks are more expensive. Rail is still the cheapest way of doing it. And Burlington Northern in particular has this unusual geographic footprint where it stretches out to the Pacific and Buffett had it figured out that where previously the US had done most of its business with Europe from the east coast, it was transitioning to an age.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that he's got some very valuable ideas that definitely add on to the Giles translation. Do you want to discuss the second deal in the book? So the second deal that I discussed, because this was again, I was fairly early in my journey understanding Buffett, I think this was 2000, 2010, I forget the exact year, but it was around about that period of time when Berkshire announced that it was buying BNSF Burlington Northern, which was the railway. And again, completely defied everything that we had understood about Buffett's investment strategy up to that point because he'd been very clear that he wanted these wonderful companies at fair prices, which was high return on invested capital, and didn't require a lot of capital to grow. And Burlington Northern was the absolute antithesis of that because railways are famously capital intensive and require very serious maintenance capex just to stay where they are, let alone to grow. The advantage of something like Burlington”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was my process. I used two translations in this book. I used the original translation because the guy who Giles, who the guy who wrote it was like a military man. And so he puts this into the context of, and he writes in the start, this is a book written by someone who was a practical soldier. And he writes and he says that all of these ideas are still applicable in contemporary military matters. So that book is valuable from that perspective. But then there are later editions that have been written from different perspectives, some just trying to reword what Giles had said. But the one that came out in 1998, and I'm just blanking on the author a little bit, which is a shame because I discuss him repeatedly in the book, he takes a slightly different perspective, which he takes it from an Eastern philosophical perspective. And I think his edition is also very, very interesting. And I discussed a little bit in the book in the last third. I don't want to jump ahead just yet.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Enduring ideas. And that's one of the ideas that I put in the book that your objective is to be as durable as possible because even though this cycle may not be yours, the very next one might be, and it would be a terrible shame to be stopped at now when a very good cycle for you is coming, which that's just the nature of markets. They call it the law of ever-changing cycles when something works, everybody starts doing it and it stops working and it creates the conditions for the thing that hasn't worked to start working again. I do think that the art of war is a good example of that sort of understanding cycles. They talk about that a little bit. Understanding cycles and durability. And I think those are good things to remember in your investment life.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Goes the other way, it cuts both ways, and you look like an idiot because you get stopped out. And that's the idea of ruin and avoiding ruin. So I think that there are many ideas in the book that really resonate today. And you can find their contemporary analogous examples. And so I think that that means that they are, they have withstood the test of time. And there's no reason for this book to continue to be. There are lots of books that have been written in history that we no longer refer to anymore because they're useless, they're a waste of time. So I think that I do believe that the Lindy effect is a real thing and that things that survive to this point have some merit and are worth checking out. I think Lindy is an idea of Talebs and Taleb says he doesn't even read a book if it's not 100 years old because he doesn't know if it's going to last if the idea isn't it going to last beyond that. I'm not quite as strict as that, but I do like ancient literature and I do like reading through these things. And there are some really durable and”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That idea of approaching success from the negative is known as via negativa or via negativa. It's a very similar idea to Charlie Mongers, invert, always invert. You know, he quotes the mathematician Carl Jacob Eyen. He says, invert, always invert. And he says, all I want to know is where I'm going to die, and then I'm not going to go there. So that's the idea. And I like that kind of that principle, and it's true in strategy and it's true in investment. If you think about all of the ways that people have blown up and then you don't do those things, you put yourself in a pretty good position, I think. So one of the ways that people have blown up historically is debt and leverage. And leverage is embedded in many, many different things. So, you know, options are a way of getting leverage. Derivatives contracts are a way of getting leverage just borrowing as a way of getting leverage. Margin loans are a form of leverage. All of these ways of using leverage and Buffett makes the point that when the market's going up, you look like a genius. But when the market...”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Translation, which is the original English translation, which came out in 1910. But Giles says in there that this story can't be true because the dates are wrong, the timing is wrong. So this story is sort of a later fabrication, and it's not related at all to Sun Tzu. But that's something that a lot of people will mention to me that they've read that book and they know that the Sun Tzu story, but Giles himself in there says that it can't be, they're not related at all. So I think that one of the reasons that the book, the Art of War continues to apply is it's there are ideas in there that don't. They're very related to the bronze age stuff. Like if you're traversing a salt marsh and your salted get you back up against some trees, like clearly I don't use that as I'm walking the kids to school. I'm not thinking about that kind of stuff. But there are other much more broader things. One of the ideas is all of the art of war is written in the negative. It says do not. It's always saying don't do this. It very rarely tells you to do something in positive terms.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About 100 years, there were these seven super states that went to war, and then that warring states era, there's a document that sort of documents this warring states as they fought and they were ultimately there was a single winner who the Terracotta army guards his mausoleum. He put together the Great Wall of China. He's a very significant figure in Chinese history. But at the beginning of about 100 years into that warring state era, this document emerged. And so we don't know a lot about Sun Tzu because Sun is a very common. Zoom is Mr. Sun is a very common name at that time. In the warring states documents, there is some discussion of Sun Tzu and his principles of warfare, and there's a story about one of the kings getting Sun Tzu to instruct his concubines and them sort of laughing at him chopping the head off one. And it's documented at the beginning of the Giles.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the art of war, one of the things that I did, and I don't do a great deal of discussion on it, but I do sort of contextualize the art of war a little bit. And it was written in, it's now known as the Age of the Warring States era. And basically there had been an empire, the Zhao Empire. Apologies for mispronouncing all of these words. This is me reading the English translation. But that empire fell apart. And then there was this 300-year period of warfare where really it started with these little walled city-states. So this was in the Bronze Age. This was very common around the entire world. Every little city was sort of its own state. And they all had walls around them, though a little walled city-states. And this was true in the Middle East and Europe and in Asia and in China. And after these little city-states sort of went to war with each other, after a period of time,”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He talks about it as having an internal scorecard rather than external scorecard. And he's got this great line where he says, you know, every day when I tie my tie in the mirror, then everybody has had their say about what goes on in my life. Because he only cares about what the guy in the mirror thinks. And then he goes and works, does his day in the office. He's got an internal scorecard. He doesn't really, he's not worried about what the external is. Provided he's doing the right thing, but we'll come to that in a little bit”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be aware of hiding what you're doing, being very careful. And Berkshire does exactly the same thing. And I thought that the Jenri deal was really a great illustration of that principle of defense being so important and then defense turning into offense when the bonds rolled off and turned into cash that he could reinvest long. And then also sort of disguising what he was doing because everybody remembers it now. He's criticized for Coke. He's criticized for the weapons of mass destruction. When really it was kind of... And he's never really sought to set the record straight. It's just he's happy for people to think of it all as a mistake. And so I just think it's just a great illustration of lots of different principles.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it was one of the ones that I just wanted to set the record straight and to put that into the context of Sun Tzu, one of the first lines in Sun Tzu is you have to pay attention to, he calls it the art of war, but you might think of it as the art of strategy because it's a path to ruin or safety. And so that idea of ruin is important in a, I call it a game in the sense of game theory, in a game with a risk of ruin. Ruin is like the end of the game. It means that you can't participate any further. You go to zero. And Buffer talks about this quite a lot, being ruined and how all of these great returns that you've put up to the point of becoming ruined are irrelevant when you're ruined because you go to zero and you can't compound from zero. And so avoiding ruin is a big part of Sun Tzu and it's a big part of what Buffett does. And then Sun Tzu says the way that you avoid ruin is you defend first. And then he goes through all of these ways of defending.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Code, which he did, but they still took hundreds of millions of dollars of losses trying to reverse their way out of it. And that prompted him to then write those letters about weapons of mass destruction, derivatives being financial weapons of mass destruction. And he said that they were in Jenri and he didn't know that they were there, didn't know the extent of them, didn't know. And they would often have both parties on the contracts to tell you how complex these contracts are. Both parties are claiming that they are making a profit on these contracts where they're zero sum. Only one party can be making a profit. So after he had unwound it, he wrote about weapons of mass destruction. So everybody remembers the deal as being the one where he got exposure to financial weapons of mass destruction and so it was a mistake, which is the way he described it. So he's criticized for Coke. He's criticized for the weapons of mass destruction. And everybody forgets the deal was actually an incredibly profitable deal for Berkshire and it saved them through that crap.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that bond portfolio gradually rolled off and then Buffett reinvested that long in equities. And so it was this master stroke of investment. What sort of confuses folks a little bit? One, he didn't sell the coke. So everybody remembers that as being a mistake. But the other thing is that Jen Ree had this derivatives business where they would write these bespoke contracts. So every single derivatives deal is just two parties standing together and writing a contract between them that describes some index or whatever they calculate the profit. And those contracts are complex and they're hard to value and nobody really knows what they're all. It's hard to, because there are so many of these contracts, nobody really knew what the exposures of Jenri were. So Buffett sort of instructed these guys in what was a pretty benign market after the collapse, it was a pretty good market for getting out of these things. And Buffett was desperately trying to get out of all this stuff as fast as he possibly could.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the dot coms were kind of the blueberries and the blueberry muffins. They were there, but most of the muffin was this overvalued growth stuff. And so then there was a collapse, as we all know, the dot-com bust. And Berkshire, so Coke halved through that period. And that was a big chunk of Berkshire's portfolio. But because he had the bonds in there, bonds sometimes, when markets fall over, there's a flight they call the flight to safety. People rush into bonds and the yield on bonds goes down as people rush into bonds. And if you understand bonds, if the yield goes down, the face value of the bond goes up. And so Berkshire's generous bonds, which know are now part of Berkshire's portfolio, rallied through that period, creating this ballast really for Berkshire. And so Berkshire didn't participate in that crash nearly as much as everybody else did. They were protected because they had this bond portfolio.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into a better mix of bonds and equity. And if he does it by issuing shares, then he dilutes down the equity risk on Berkshire's side to get access to those bonds. So he does that. It's a huge transaction, transformative for Berkshire, changes the investment mix of their portfolio, gives them these synergies where Jen Re could get access to other markets that Berkshire wasn't presently in and allowed Jen Reed to expand internationally. So it works for everybody in this deal. That's the synergies that he's talking about. The true genius of the deal sort of reveals itself as we all know what happened after 1999 after the dot-com bubble. We all remember it as a dot-com bubble, and that's how it sold now. But really, it was a large growth market, very similar to the one that we're in now where there were companies that were, they're not.coms, it was Walmart and GE, Microsoft also was participating in that. But all these companies were just very big growthy businesses that were trading at very high multiples.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wheel where it had to report. So it was hard for Jen Ree to invest in international business, which where it saw its expansion. And it had an investment portfolio that was typical of insurers, which was heavily invested into bonds. Berkshire doesn't do that. Berkshire tends to be more heavily invested into equities, but that's because Buffett runs their equity book and he's an investment genius. Everybody else is sort of in bonds and trying to follow the statute. Berkshire's a little bit different. They write a little bit less insurance, but then they put relatives what they could write. But then they put what they do write into equity. So they get a little bit more performance out of it that way. And so Buffett saw that if you merge the two together, he could dilute down the risk that he had in the equity portfolio, which was largely coke and overvalued and everything else trading at a very high price earnings multiple with the bonds and thereby turn what was a heavily equity portfolio.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But folks who criticise him have missed the fact that he used that overvaluation in Coke and then the overvaluation in Berkshire on top of that to do this deal with Jen Ree. So General Re is a reinsurer. That's a funny part of the business, but that's the insurance of insurers. They insure their own clients up to a certain amount. And then they may find that they've got too much concentration in Florida hurricanes or in Los Angeles earthquakes and fires or whatever the case may be and you want to lay off some of that risk. And the way that you do that is you turn to retrocession or reinsurance, same funny words for the same thing. Basically what that means is you find another insurer who'll take some of the risk for some of the fee. And usually Berkshire stands in that role as being a reinsurer. So they take the risk from other insurers. Jenri had these sort of problem specific to itself. It was publicly listed, so it was on a quarterly earnings.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then Berkshire Hathaway had got recognition for this phenomenal performance. And Berkshire Hathaway was trading at three times its tangible book, which included particularly Coke, which was now super expensive. Buffets are very conservative, cautious investor. And he needed a way to protect himself from this sort of overvaluation in Coke and overvaluation in Berkshire with the problem being that you can't sell this stock or you incur tax at a 35% rate. And there's no guarantee that you can never get back into Coke at a reasonable price because Coke may just keep on, it might stay expensive, even if it doesn't stay expensive forever. It might stay expensive for 25 years, which is in fact what has happened. It's stayed very expensive. It hasn't got more expensive, like, and it's been an underperformer for Berkshire. And he's been criticized. for not selling coke many, many times.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When he did it, like this is one of the famously 12 or 14 times earnings when he did it. What he was buying, of course, was all the international expansion. And then that delivered in spades. And he got that exactly right, had this massive return out of Coke. Like a few years after he did that deal, it had tripled. And so what had been one third of the book became almost the, you know, it was three billion on a $5 billion enterprise. The other stuff had done well as well. By 1998 or 1999, he was up 14 times in that deal in about 10 years. And it was expensive by that point. Where it had been trading at 14 times earnings, now it was at like 60 times earnings. Earnings had grown very substantially over that period too. So it was a massive winner for him.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Valuable entity. And anytime you trade it for something which you did do on a few occasions, which not in material numbers, although they're close to material numbers, but then Jen Ree came along. And it was completely baffling to me why he had done that deal. And it's taken me a long time, really, to understand why he did that deal. And part of it was I talked to Chris Bloomstrand, who's a friend of mine. He's a buffet watcher. He's perhaps one of the most detail-oriented investors out there. And he goes through footnotes and all of that sort of thing. And he explained it to me. And I really understood it for the first time. And I thought, well, I might not be the only person who doesn't understand this deal. So let me articulate what happens and then put it in the context of strategy and explain why he did what he did. So in one of his iconic deals that everybody will know about is the investment in Coke. And he put a third of Berkshire's assets into Coke. Berkshire was like a $3 billion enterprise at this time. He put a billion dollars into Coke and Coke looked expensive.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The 1934 edition of security analysis, which is brutal, which is the one that's all railway bonds. There were newer editions then, but because I'm like, I like literature, I went and bought the original one, which is a mistake to buy the most recent copy, don't buy the original when you get started. It was like a reprint of the original, so I was super excited to get it. It wasn't an original document, but it was like a recreation of the original. When Jen Ri happened, I remember it very distinctly because I had just read all of this stuff on Buffett and his process. And I understood in very broad terms, you know, wonderful company at a fair price. That means high return on invested capital, something that can grow while it throws off capital rather than consuming capital all the time, like needing to reinvest in large amounts. And also that he didn't like issuing shares because it diluted down the shareholders. And Berkshire Hathaway was a very...”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I've tried to come back to it every five years or so after high school and never really got it until the pandemic. And I read it and I thought for the first time, I was like, gee, these ideas are very similar to the ideas that I understand from Buffett. And I sort of articulate why as we go through this process, but I wanted to find iconic deals of buffets that I hadn't previously covered or that I could cover from a slightly different angle. And then to use the principles of strategy, which really haven't changed much since Sun Tzu wrote them down, to illustrate why these deals were so clever, for me Jen Ri was one that really stands out because I had just started studying Buffett in the late 1990s. I think that it was 97 or 98. I'd really like read every single, all the letters were online. Then I read all the letters I'd bought Making of American Capitalist. I'd read.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's why you talk about synergies. But what happened and so often happened whenever Buffett would go into new territory is that it just was a master stroke. Toby set the scene for us. What happened? Put that into context in the book so the book is look at Buffett's investment strategy and you need to contextualize this. I make this clear in the book that he's an industrialist rather than an investor and that's an important for folks to understand what that distinction means. So he doesn't run a pool of money for other people. He owns a company who owns the lion's share 40% or I know that he's been diluted down. I don't know if it's exactly 40% anymore, but he hasn't ever sold a share, so he's never made any money out of Berkshire Hathaway other than the salary that he's got, which has been about $100,000 a year, plus some security and other things like that. And I wanted to contrast his industrial strategy, his business strategy with the original work on strategy, which was Sun Tzu's Art of War. It's a book that I have read. I read it first when I was in high school and frankly didn't get it.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fantastic. Thank you for saying so. And as the audience can probably hear from this episode, it's very much a conversation between kindred spirits. And I want to kick this off about talking about a very iconic deal. This is the 22 billion dollar deal between general reinsurance corporation or genri, as it's known, and then Brexit Halloway. So you already know this is between Kindred Spirits. And we're talking about a deal that happened back in 1998. And still, we talk about it today because it was very, very special. And at first glance for us who follow Buffett, it seemed like a very unbuffet-like move. For one thing, you know, Brooks Your Stock was used as currency, which was something that Buffet Long resisted and he even described the deal as having synergies. And he had previously NSENS joked that it's usually code for acquisition that doesn't really make any sense.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bet and we are here to talk about your new book Soldier of Fortune, Warren Buffett Sung Tzu, and the Ancient Art of Risk Taking. Toby, I kind of feel like to some extent we're going full circle because back in 2015, this was back on episode 25. This is more than a decade ago. When we talked about the book deep value, I don't know if you recall, but I kind of feel it's full circle now we're talking about your most recent book. And I don't know if it means anything to you, Toby. To me, it does because you are the guest we had on the most times here on the podcast. You hold the record. So I don't know if I said congratulations, but just thank you for being so generous with your time. Well, I'm very grateful that you keep on having me on because I love chatting to you guys. Love chatting to you.”
2025-10-31 · We Study Billionaires · TIP764: The Art of Buffett w/ Tobias Carlisle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT