The Warren Buffett Way: Lessons on Investing, Reading, and Life with Robert Hagstrom

And it was, you know, it was the proverbial light bulb went on. All of a sudden, everything about investment made sense because he wasn't throwing numbers at me. He was throwing people and companies and products and services. And I went, ah, this is what this is about. You know, there are companies here and they have products and there's managers. So it was Rose Blumkin at Nebraska Furniture Mart, you know, and Chuck Huggins at See's Candies and all these great people, Jack Byrne at GEICO. And he was just talking about businesses. And I went, ah. I get it. This is what we're doing. We're buying businesses. And that's what launched my investing career and made me a devotee of Warren Buffett.

Robert, welcome to The Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books Podcast. I would love to start with you in, I believe, 1984, walking past Legg Mason Woodwalker, member of the New York Stock Exchange, How did you end up there and how did it change your life?

Oh, God, Luke, what a great, great first question. That kind of takes me back, you know, unbelievable, 40 years ago. Can you imagine? I had no intention to be an investment broker. My dream was to be a reporter. I was a political science major in college and I'd written for the Villanova, which is our school newspaper. I started the Libertarian Society at Villanova. which was my radical years way back when. I interviewed senators and congressmen, local, you know, for— so I had it in my mind that I really wanted to be kind of the Woodward Bernstein of my generation and go to Washington and do investigative journalism and write and spent a few months down there and was totally disillusioned. I just felt the place was dysfunctional, to say it the best I can. And I came back and asked for a job at my local newspaper, and it was a small community newspaper. They couldn't afford to pay me, but they did cut me a deal that said if I pay, you know, went out and, and, and sold quarter-page ads in the newspaper and raised so much money, they let me do a column every once in a while. And so I walked up and down, uh, the main line, which is Route 30, and it goes west of Philadelphia out to Lancaster, the old Conestoga Wagon Trail. and knocked on doors. And one day I was walking down the street and something said Legg Mason Woodwalker, members of the New York Stock Exchange. I had no idea what that was. I thought maybe it was a law firm or an accounting firm or something like that. And I walked in and introduced myself and said, you know, could I speak to the manager? They took me back and I said, hi, I'm Robert Haxton. Would you like to buy a quarter-page ad in the newspaper? He said, no, would you like to be a stockbroker? Well, that wasn't the objective of me coming into the office today. Um, I was dating a young woman at the time who I'd hoped would be my wife. And, you know, I thought maybe she'd be a little more impressed with a stockbroker than a quarter-page ad salesman. So I took a shot, went into training. We trained for 3 weeks down in Baltimore on Redwood Street. I thought I made a terrible mistake, Luke. I didn't have any accounting, economics. I didn't know anything. And all they did was do Value Line Investment surveys and, you know, earnings this and price-to-book that. And I was going to resign and apologize for wasting their time. That Thursday night of the 3rd week, and we would leave the next day, that afternoon, I was given a copy of the Berkshire Hathaway annual report photocopy, which I'd never heard of, written by a guy named Warren Buffett, which I'd never heard of. And our task was to go back to the hotel and read it that night and come back the next day and discuss. And so here comes the punchline. I'm sitting in the hotel room instantly depressed because I opened it up. There's no photos in there. There's no tables, no graphs. It's like A 25, 30-page written letter from Warren. And it was, you know, it was the proverbial light bulb went on. All of a sudden, everything about investment made sense because he wasn't throwing numbers at me. He was throwing people and companies and products and services. And I went, ah, this is what this is about. You know, there are companies here and they have products and there's managers. So it was Rose Blumkin at Nebraska Furniture Mart. You know, and Chuck Huggins at See's Candies and all these great people, Jack Byrne at GEICO. And he was just talking about businesses and I went, ah, I get it. This is what we're doing. We're buying businesses. And that's what launched my investing career and made me a devotee of Warren Buffett.

I absolutely love that story and thank you so much for telling it. It just speaks to the fact that anybody can change their life with a few choices that they make. And also, I love how you said, hey, this wasn't necessarily the thing that I wanted to be in. Yet once you got it, you got it, and then you continued in it. So I'd love to ask, like, how did you go from there to then writing a book about Warren Buffett?

Well, when I went into production in 1984 as a stockbroker, you know, the bull market had just begun. So they were looking for bodies, you know, they were looking for salesmen. And I had taken it upon myself that I was going to just learn everything I could about Warren Buffett. So I sent away, for $25, you send a check to the SEC. This is before email, and they would send you back the annual report that you want. So I had all the Berkshire annual reports going back. I had all the annual reports of the companies that he had purchased. I collected newspapers, magazines. I was like a kid following a ballplayer, and my job was basically to imitate him. So whatever he was doing, I was doing. And one day my manager came up to me and said, Robert, these days— this wasn't fee-based management back then. You were a commission broker. So you got to eat what you kill, or I should say you eat what you bought and sold. And he came up and said, Robert, you're going to starve to death if you don't ever sell something. I said, well, that's not how this works. I mean, we're supposed to buy and hold these great businesses because they compound economic value over time. And that's the trick. And he goes, yeah, but you're living on half rations. And so I left and went to a bank trust department and got a salary, went to a small investment counseling firm soon after. And in 1992, I'd gotten my Chartered Financial Analyst, my CFA designation. They came out with the performance presentation standard and said, if your performance is not 100% discretionary, you can't publish it. And I understood the rationale, but our problem was that we acted more like a trust company. We would talk to our clients, You know, what is of interest to you? You know, the, you know, the kids say, Dad, can you buy this stock for me? There were tax issues. So clearly these weren't 100% discretionary. And I said to my partners, we're in a whole lot of trouble. We don't have a track record and we've got to come up with a track record. And they said, well, what do you want to do? And I said, you know, I'd love to do this Warren Buffett thing. And they go, you know what, I'm up to here with you and Warren Buffett. That's all you talk about 24/7 is Warren Buffett. And so the deal was, okay, you know, if you— if I wrote a marketing paper or some kind of white paper, on the strategies and the investment approach of Buffett and could get enough people to sign on, that would be our discretionary track record. And that's what happened. And the white paper ended up getting picked up to a guy that was a writer for the local newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer. And he had an agent and people thought this would be a really neat book. And so we shopped it around and pretty much everybody said, I'm not interested in a book about Warren Buffett. I want a book written by Warren Buffett. Well, 40 years later, they're still waiting on a book written by Warren Buffett. Although I would say you could actually take— there's 1,100, and I think I added up 1,192 pages of chairman's reports to shareholders that he's written since 1965. That's kind of like War and Peace. He's written a very great book himself over the last 55 years, 60 years now. And And one day I ran into a firm called John Wiley and Sons, who was the publisher then, and he's still my publisher today. And he said, Robert, I think this could be a pretty good, interesting book. He goes, it's $3,000. I said, I don't have $3,000. And he goes, no, we're going to pay you $3,000 for this book. I said, well, it's working out really well. I get a book and you're going to pay me, and this is really kind of great stuff, you know. And so the trick then was I wanted to use Warren's voice in the book. I wanted to have him explain. I had gone through the annual reports and I had a pretty good idea of how he thought about stocks from businesses, management, the financials. We knew about valuation using John Burr Williams' discounted present value of future cash flows. So we had that all laid out, but I wanted Warren to speak to the reader. The problem was, guys, that The copyright, I mean, the shareholders' reports are copyrighted. It's the only shareholder report I think in the world that's actually copyrighted every year. So you have to get permission to quote extensively from it. And so I wrote him a letter and I said, dear Mr. Buffett, my name is Robert Hagstrom. You don't know me, but my intention is to— I'm kind of paraphrasing. My intention is to write a book about your investment strategies. May I have your permission for copyright? And weeks went by. Once again, no FedEx, and, you know, we're waiting for the mail. And one day a crisp white envelope comes back, all typed out, Robert Hagstrom, and on the back, Kiawah Plaza, Omaha. There it is, right? And I opened it up, and the deal was this. He said, Robert, I can't give you copyright permission just yet. Well, in sales, just yet is not a no. It's just, what do we got to do to get this done? And the deal was with Warren that he needed to see every chapter. He really was trying to protect his brand, uh, from, you know, someone that would do the get-quick-rich schemes of Warren Buffett or how to make a billion like Warren Buffett. And so I said, okay, you know, that's fine with me. And he goes, I want to know how you're going to title it, how you think about the marketing, blah, blah, blah. I said, fine. So I, I would write a chapter and I'd send it to him. And he had a secretary then whose name was Debbie Buzanek, who is his secretary today. Debbie Bozzani, because she must have been like 12 years old. I don't know, maybe she's, you know, 60 now. Maybe she was, you know, right out of college, right? And Debbie would call me and say, Robert, that's okay. Chapter 1 is good. Keep going. So every chapter I would send to him, and the publisher was going, Robert, where's the copyright permission? You know, you don't have a book without this. I said, it's going to be fine. We're going to get it, you know. And finally, at the very end, he gave me copyright permission. He didn't change one word in the book. And, and it's kind of like, well, that's good because I actually used all your words for it. So if you wanted to change anything, you'd have to go back and change, you know, the earlier annual reports and stuff like that. And, uh, you know, he blessed it and, uh, you know, just said, uh— and I said to him, you know, he didn't help me, he didn't change anything, he just gave me permission for the copyright. Uh, this was like in October '94, the book, uh, had come out and, uh, I was down at my parents' farm in Nashville. with my family and, uh, uh, that, that woman that I wanted to impress, you know. But yeah, that was my wife and our 3 kids were down there. Yeah, I know, success, right? And, uh, uh, I got a call on Saturday after Thanksgiving from Miles, my publisher. He said, Robert, the book's a big success. You got to get back here to New York. Um, you're about to hit the New York Times bestseller. I was like, who is this? It's like a practical joke. What are you What are you talking about? So, you know, I got the, got the family in the car and got them back by Sunday afternoon. I was on a train up to New York and Sunday night walking down Fifth Avenue. And I'll give you the story of why it became a New York Times bestseller, which had nothing to do with me. Walking down Fifth Avenue, Barnes& Noble, cold rain drizzle, and walked past Barnes& Noble, huge, you know, glass, you know, windows. There's a big picture of the book. There's Warren right there, you know, big as life. Across the top, The Warren Buffett Way. And we had gotten the foreword done by Peter Lynch. Now, Peter Lynch at the time was probably the most famous mutual fund manager in the country at Magellan Fund at Fidelity. And the gig there was that John Rothschild was a personal friend of Miles Thompson, the editor of the book. And John Rothschild was the ghostwriter for Peter's books. And Miles called John and said, do you think Peter will do the foreword? John calls Peter. Peter Lynch calls Buffett. And Buffett says, well, I don't know, you know, do what you want. The kid's okay, you know, whatever you want to do, you do it. So Peter Lynch wrote the foreword to the book. Off to the side was a quote from Forbes magazine. Said, the best book of the 1990s, buy it and read it.

Forbes.

Well, the story there was that was Ken Fisher who was writing a column at the time of Forbes. In the book, The Warren Buffett Way, I had expressed in lengthy terms that I thought Phil Fisher was every bit as much an influence on Warren Buffett as Ben Graham was. Everybody had always said Ben Graham was the mentor. That was true. Ben Graham was the second most important person in his life after his dad. But Phil Fisher had a huge impact on his thinking, coupled with what Charlie Munger began to say about buying good businesses. So Ken Fisher was so taken by the fact that I had illuminated his dad's teachings. And Warren had met Phil Fisher and thought his books, Common Stock and Common Problems, great book. And so it was all— so just think about this, Warren Buffett Way, poured by Peter Lynch. Off to the side, Forbes, best book of the '90s by— and at the very bottom, I had to get on my knees and maybe a couple of inches by Robert Hagstrom. I had nothing to do with the New York Times bestseller other than the fact that That was the first book that ever was written by Warren Buffett with a foreword by Peter Lynch and Forbes magazine, that along with Fortune, the leading financial magazine, said buy it. And we were off to the races. We were in the New York Times for 17 weeks. And, you know, here we are today.

Robert, thank you for detailing that story. There are so many things that we could unpack there, and I'd like to unpack a few of them. Number one, what did it feel like as a young professional studying this mentor of yours. And then all of a sudden, now you didn't write the book with him, but you're on with his assistant every week going through chapters. It kind of felt like you almost did write the book with him in a way. And he was so involved in giving Peter sort of the green light to do the foreword. I mean, he was involved in the project, just not in writing the project directly.

Well, you know, behind the scenes, you know, the dials were getting turned. But, you know, Nick, you being a writer and a reader, I think it's the combination of both. When you're reading, you're absorbing. And there's a lot to be said about the emotional impact of reading something that has a big, big impact on your psyche. And when that happens, for me, it was the proverbial light bulb of Warren speaking to me in the '80s about what investing— and then you begin to write down how you are thinking about this and integrating Warren into the thoughts. It was the it was a symbiotic relationship between both reading and writing that created the crystallization of my thinking and emboldened me. Because I think it's one thing to read a fact sheet and go, oh, that's great performance, and oh, that's a good strategy. But the first time it underperforms, you might cut and run and not even think about it anymore. But when you really read deeply about something and then add to it writing, whether you write a book, you write a commentary, you write a shareholder report, You write a letter to your best friend. But the combination of reading and writing, I think, is the juxtaposition of getting something deeply, deeply ingrained into your psyche. And then, and then you're off to the races.

Yeah, I think so too. As I wrote about in Rise of the Reader, which you so kindly complimented before we jumped on.

Yeah.

One of my early influences was a book called The Art of Learning by Joshua Waitzkin.

Yeah.

Joshua Waitzkin talks about Oh, you're looking for the copy. Do you, do you have one too?

I actually, I think I've got it up here. I was just thinking, boy, I'm listening to you, but you now have got me all my teaching.

Yeah, well, he talks about the importance of studying a subject so intensely in such depth that your subconscious recognizes opportunities to implement what you've learned. And that doesn't happen with a book summary. It doesn't happen by asking ChatGPT to answer a question. It happens by reading as much as you did in preparation for this book. And so, yeah, maybe we can open the can of worms a little bit and talk a little bit about the state of reading in the United States and maybe some more reasons why you think it's so important for a young person listening today to pick up physical books and to consume them, you know, the entire thing.

Well, it's, you know, you just sparked something in my mind, which is, you know, actually a book that's very popular is a book called Smart Brevity, which is written by the founders of Axios. And I'm I like them. They're great. And, you know, I get their emails and I read the book and it really is, and everything starts with, it'll take you 5 minutes to read this section or it'll take you 3 minutes. And so you say, oh, you know, I can afford 3 minutes, so I'll read it. But they're giving you information, right? Basically information. I don't think they're giving you knowledge in such a way that it's reframing how you think about the world or gives you insights that you never had before. It really is just an information vessel, and they're trying to do it as quickly, as productively, as succinctly as they possibly can, knowing there's only 24 hours each day and there's a lot of competition for that. There was a book written by Mortimer Adler in 1949 called How to Read a Book, and it actually became a New York Times bestseller because this is before television, where people actually— part of the entertainment was you had radio, you had plays and you had, you know, the movie theaters, but most of the time people read and that was part of the entertainment. But he said really there's, there's kind of 4 levels of reading and the first level he called intellectual skimming. He said basically you don't know whether this book, and this is more geared to nonfiction than to fiction, but he says basically you don't know if this book is worthwhile your time or not. And, and, and for so many years, maybe Nick, you and Luke, but when I started with a book, it was almost like, you know, this treasure. I would open it up and I would You know, I wouldn't mark in it. I would, you know, turn each page very gently. I was treating it like, you know, some rarefied gem, and which I'd always thought they were. And oftentimes I get through the book and I go, well, that wasn't much to it, you know, and stuff like that. He says, you don't know whether this book is worth your time or not. So I want you to do this. I want you to open it up. I want you to look at the table of contents, maybe read the foreword, go to the back, look at the acknowledgments, look at the footnotes, look at the bibliography. I want you to go through the first chapter as fast as you can and go to the last chapter and go fast as you can. And then if you think— and that whole thing maybe takes you 15 minutes, 20 minutes, depending upon the size of the chapters, you know, fingers going fast down the page. He says, then if you think it is worth your time, then you should buy the book and you should sit down and you should read it. But at the same time, you should, you know, purposely move through it. Don't labor through it, purposely move through it. So the first 2 stages are, you know, we're not taxing you hard. We're not, you know, telling you that, you know, this is the Holy Bible that you've got to, you know, ingest slowly and, you know, on your knees and things like that. It's just get through it. He says though, by the end of that book, as you've underlined things and written things and stuff like that, it's made an impact on you. Then you do what is called synthesis reading, is that you go find other books that are similar to that, and then you engross the whole idea. I tell that long-winded story because in many ways what Mortimer Adler was telling you in 1949 is not too different than what Smart Brevity is telling you today. When you start with something, move fast, you know, move through it fast to see, to actually try to determine if this thing is worth, you know, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10 hours of your life, because you don't have enough time to read every single book like that. Some will be deserved. And most will not. And you've got to be very discriminating on the front end. So I would tell your listeners who are readers, you can get through a heck of a lot more books if you kind of follow that program and let the book earn the right for you to give it hours of your time. And if it doesn't earn the right, just respectfully set it off to the side and go to the next book. That's kind of how I think.

I think it's great advice. I'm curious, how often do you give up on a book? How often do you go through the quick part of that process, phase 1 and 2, and then you say, eh, you know what, I'm not feeling it?

Yeah, in my earlier years, probably 2 to 3 out of 5. You know, today though, a lot more discriminating. I mean, I guess you've read so much that you already know pretty much firsthand this isn't going to move the needle. But there's still books today. I, I'm actually— downsized my writing office here, and, and I actually gave me a chance to— I donate books to the local library out in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. And I guess it's kind of like, you know, when you take the puppy to the farm, you think the farmer's going to take care of your puppy forever. And so when I donate books to the library, I think they're going to take care of all my books. I probably have given away about 300, 400 books over the last couple of months. just trying to downsize. And I went through a lot of books and I went, did you really read that? Was that really, was that really so important to you? So long-winded answer, Nick, it's probably 1 out of 3 now, you know, that, that stay on the shelf. And I, I look at the shelf and it's almost like having photographs because when I'm thinking about things, I can see the book and the bind of the book and I go, oh yeah, I got that. Or I'll just go left to right down the library shelf thinking about things and something will pop out at me. So, the jewels are still on the library shelf, but not every book you select is going to change your life. Maybe 1 out of 3 is going to be on your shelf 10 years from now.

Yeah. And I'm really interested in your take on fiction books because you read a lot of fiction too and not just nonfiction. How do you— why do you read fiction, number one? And then number two, how do you divvy up between nonfiction and fiction books?

Yeah, it's interesting. I've had this conversation with Bill Miller. I worked with Bill for about 14 years. He was actually director of research when I was a broker at Legg Mason in 1984. And we became friends before he went off to run the Legg Mason Value Trust, which is— he's the only fund manager actually beat the market 15 years in a row. And Bill was a liberal arts major like myself in history and economics. He did his PhD at the dissertation in philosophy at Johns Hopkins. So, you know, a well-read guy. And he basically had convinced me that reading nonfiction could be just as powerful. You can go back and read Henry James or the Brothers Karamazov or things like that. And he gets pretty deep with this stuff. But I'll give you one quick story. I wrote a book called The Detective and the Investor. And basically, my dad had turned me on when I was doing the graveyard shift in the summer of my freshman year, I worked 11 PM to 7 AM as a bellman at a hotel. And of course, you know, 11 to 1 you were working, and then about 1:30 to about 5 there was nothing to do. And he gave me these old Rex Stout Nero Wolfe mysteries, and I would read one of them a night. They're only 180 pages long, and I just found it fascinating. So I met a guy, Otto Penzler, who ran the Mysterious Bookstore up in New York, and he had come to the conclusion that there were 3 what he called great detectives that actually solved mysteries by their mental acumen. You didn't pistol whip a confession out of them, you know, or, you know, string them up or something like that, but you basically solved it by your mental acumen. And that was Auguste Dupin, you know, which was Edgar Allan Poe's very first detective, and then obviously Sherlock Holmes, and the third one was a different one by Gilbert Keith Chesterton, the great British literary critic called called Father Brown. And so I went through all of the short stories and it was amazing that you could really polish your investment skills. And we wrote it in the book, and this was probably 20 years ago, about how they solved mysteries, had great analog to how to become a great investor. So I'm always interested in mysteries. I try to read the great works of fiction. There's sometimes a little bit of a struggle. I'm still trying to get through Moby Dick for about the 5th time. They tell me it's a great book, and I'm really giving it all my chances. Every summer I go, this is the summer I'm going to read Moby Dick. But I do, and it's good to kind of break it up, and it rests the muscles in one part of your brain and lets the other part relax for a little while. So I'm a big believer in reading fiction as well as nonfiction.

Yeah, I had a college professor challenge me on that subject because I had just discovered nonfiction books going into my senior year of college, really for the first time. And I remember in a public speaking class, a professor telling me, Nick, fiction oftentimes is a better represent— a more accurate representation of reality and somebody's inner thinking than a nonfiction book would be. Because in nonfiction, especially biographies or autobiographies, you're—

Yeah.

You want to put your best foot forward. You're not fully transparent. But when you're writing in fiction, you can sort of project these alter egos and these other versions of yourself onto the page and be maybe a little bit more transparent and in like the taboo a little bit. So I think that's interesting.

Yeah. And it makes an impact on your psyche. It's like a great movie. You know, if you watch a great movie and it moves you emotionally, you'll remember that movie for the rest of your life. And great works of fiction are the same way. When you've read a really great work of fiction. Whether you read it 20 years ago, it's still part of you today. You can remember everything about it. So that's the special gift that fiction has that nonfiction often does not.

I'd love to ask you, you just put out your 30th year edition of The Warren Buffett Way. I'd love to just maybe you can unpack a little bit about your expectations for the book. I know you mentioned that you were like, oh man, this thing was a New York Times bestseller. You weren't Like, what was your hope for the book originally? And now looking back, what are you feeling about it?

Well, it's not going to be a New York Times bestseller. So, let's put that to bed. And actually, when Wiley came up, Wiley wanted— we've gone through 3 editions. We've written 3 editions of The Warren Buffett Way over the last 40 years. And they said, let's do another one. And I said, no, I'm passed. I'm done. You know, it's time to move on. And they said, well, look, we have this category at Wiley called Investment Classics. And these are books that Wiley has anointed, if you will, classic status, which means they are dedicated, obligated to keep those books in print for the next 20 to 30 years. And they're like, so it doesn't go out of print. And they said, well, what if you make it an Investment Classics? And they gave me the list of the Investment Classics and all the great books. You know, Phil Fisher's book is there. You know, there's some Ben Graham books, you know, Where Are the Customers' Yachts, you know, Extraordinary Delusions, and, you know, all of them are there, right? John Brooks' books are there. And so you went, wow, that's kind of cool. You know, my book could be amongst these classic writers. And then I thought, you know, Warren telling the story about him reading The Intelligent Investor in 1950, the year after it came out in '49, in the library in Omaha. this college student trying to find his way. He was still doing technicals, had no idea about value investing, and picked up the book on the shelf and it had a big impact on him. And so maybe romanticizing that idea, I thought, well, it might be pretty cool 10 or 20 years from now. I'll be dead. Warren will already be up in heaven on the right-hand side of God and directing investment traffic. But it'd be pretty cool if maybe that book is still somewhere on a shelf And the book is now translated into 18 foreign languages. Warren is more popular outside the United States than he is inside the United States. We sell more books outside the US than we do inside. And it's pretty clear because as Warren said, Robert, I think congratulations on the book. I think it'll do fine. I'm very honored, but we kind of saturated this thing. I don't know if there's anything else we can write about Warren Buffett. So what we did was we took the original Warren Buffett Way and we took the Warren Buffett Portfolio, which I wrote years after that, which was a book on portfolio management. And then we took the book called Ultimate Money Mind, which is all philosophical, you know, on Warren, and collapsed them into one book. And so that's it. That's the one. And the desire was, okay, you know, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, there may still be a book in a library somewhere called The Warren Buffett Way that will introduce a young college student or a young individual man or woman, you know, and say, hey, this is a different way to think about investing. What do you think? And that was the biggest motivation for me to write.

Yeah, I think it's fun to think about somebody reading your book 20 or 30 years from now in a library and then having that book ultimately change the direction of maybe that young person's life. We're getting towards the end of the conversation. Time flies when you're having fun, Robert. So maybe we could highlight just a few of the high-level lessons that somebody might be able to get if they choose to read this book, like why they should be a company or business picker instead of a stock picker? Could you just highlight a couple of things that sets Warren Buffett apart from everybody else?

Yeah, it's a great send-off, Nick. I think what we have to recognize is that there's many different ways to get to Mecca or heaven or wherever you're going to go. And there's quantitative, there's hedge funds, there's private equity, there's public securities, and even within public securities, There's different strategies, momentum, low PE, whatever the case may be. Well, this is but one strategy about how to make money in an investment, an equity investment. And it is about thinking about stocks as businesses, which if you actually go back to first principles, Nick and Luke, first principles is like, how did this whole thing start? How did this whole idea of investing kind of start in common stocks? You go back to the late 15th century and You know, in Amsterdam, and you know it was the very first share of common stock. You know that was used at that time, and and so on first principles, the first thing that happened by having a common stock is that you owned a share of a business. Right? There's first principles. That's what a common stock is. Now after that, a whole heck of a lot of stuff started happening with common stocks. But first principles was you owned a share of business, and and so if you think. that's a pretty neat way in which to think about compounding your wealth over time is to be a business owner that uses stocks to do that. Then this is a, this is a pretty great strategy. And I, I would say to you, you know, Warren often says it's easier than you think, harder than it looks. The easier than you think part is you don't have to make bets about the stock market. You don't have to make bets about whether the economy's in a recession or interest rates are doing this, or I need to buy oil now. No, we've got inflation. Should I do— oh no, we're in a recession. So I should buy growth stock. All that stuff is unnecessary. All you're doing is trying to find great businesses. The harder than it looks part is this: the ability to turn off the noise and the TV set and the financial news and the neighbor who says buy this or the cab driver who says I just bought that. You got to turn off the noise. It's kind of like, you know, it's addition by subtraction. You know, you're getting better the more you subtract out of your mental space That's noise. And so if that appeals to you, the Warren Buffett way, the Warren Buffett approach to investing is just a perfect way in my mind to compound wealth in a low-risk way, long-term, that doesn't require you to lose sleep every single day trying to worry about what to do this minute, this second, next day. You just basically own great businesses and it's a pretty neat way to compound wealth.

One quick subject that I find really interesting. So I just love a quick thought from you on it is, are there certain strategies or habits or methods that you use to quiet your mind and be a little bit more logical and rational, a little bit less emotional? Because with the dollar values that you're playing with, Robert, I can imagine it does get a little stressful once in a while.

Yeah, the first thing is I don't have a TV in my office. You know, and, and I go into brokers' offices, and it doesn't matter which broker, and every single one of them has either CNBC, Fox Business, or Bloomberg on. And I'm going, oh, okay, right? And so I once asked Debbie, I said, does, does Warren watch CNBC? She goes, well, he used to keep CNBC on, but he didn't have the sound on. It was always muted. He was just using it as a tape to see if there was some immediate— because he doesn't have a Bloomberg machine. So You know, it was kind of like, you know, news of the moment, or did something just happen that he needed to think? But he basically just turns the noise off. So the first thing that I do is I don't watch TV. I don't watch financial news. I mean, I don't. I just, you know, most of the things that are going on in the TV world are short-term forecasting, which we already know doesn't work. It's amazing. You want to know, Luke and Nick write this book, Why Do People are so seduced by forecasters when they know, and we know, that forecasters can't forecast a complex adaptive system, which is a stock market. We know scientifically it is impossible to predict the behavior of complex adaptive systems 6 months from now, 12 months from now. But as soon as someone shows up on the TV and says, I'm going to tell you what's going to happen in the next 6 months, they are glued to it like he is, you know, Moses. He's going to tell us exactly what's going to happen. You just got to turn it off and read. Just go read an annual report or read something, you know, just get your mind out of the day-to-day noise. Listen to a podcast. I mean, what a great, you know, if you want, if you need to, you know, be connected to media, go listen to smart people on podcasts. Listen to an audiobook, you know, read a book, you know, do something. But I think you just got to turn the TV off, you know. I enjoy British Mysteries at night, but I'm not watching 24/7 what's going on in financial news. I can tell you that.

I think it's great advice. And we'll kick it over to Luke for the final couple of questions here. But in summary, it's almost like you're preventing the distraction by not having the TV present, right? It's not like you're sitting there practicing meditation for 2 hours every day to get control of your mind. Not allowing the distractions into your life. And I think that's a great method.

I think what you tell people, you're protecting yourself. You're protecting yourself from anxiety, from stress, from worry. Just go do something else. The world will be fine. Believe me, the market will open tomorrow. Stocks will go up and down next week like they have been going up and down for the last several hundred years. And life will be fine. We'll be okay. But just, you know, give yourself a break.

And I tell you what, that's just solid advice just for everything in life. I mean, I know that my life has greatly improved just by getting the news out of my system and out of my life. I just do not consume any of it. And anything that's crazy that happens, somebody's going to tell me, like, I'm going to know about it.

Yeah. Well, as a matter of fact, tomorrow morning, Axios will give me smart brevity in 5 minutes. They can tell me what happened yesterday and I can read it in 5 minutes and it'll be over with and I can move on.

Exactly. Beautiful. All right, Robert, this has been so much fun. I have 2 more questions that I'm going to ask you. The first is, where can people go to find out a little bit more about you? And of course, we'll link all that stuff in the show notes.

Well, I mean, Amazon has a webpage on my writings and anytime you want to see what we're up to on writings, go to amazon.com. I'm a Chief Investment Officer for a firm called Equity Compass. We're a wholly owned and registered investment advisory that's owned by Stifel Financial, but our website is www.equitycompass.com. And on there, I manage a portfolio. We do some writings, literature, quarterly commentaries, and things like that. So between Amazon and what we have at Equity Compass, people can keep up with what's going on. I do have a LinkedIn page. I don't do a lot of posting. I do have an X page. I don't ever think I tweet anything, but I do use it because I follow other people. And so I'll repost what I think is kind of interesting. So if someone's following me, They can see what I'm reposting or saying that I like or something like that. So those are the ways we can do it.

Beautiful. And we'll make sure we link all that stuff in the show notes.

All right.

This is my final question that I love to ask all of our guests. And it's this: all the books, the material, everything that you've put out disappears after you pass away, but you can leave the world with a single piece of advice. What would it be?

Well, I'm reminded of a quote by Emerson. It is those who give who receive the most. I think, you know, I've tried to build my life around giving back. I received something from Warren and Charlie Munger and countless other people. And I think it's a duty. It's almost a moral duty that you turn around and give it back, whether you do it with guys like you and Nick, Luke, or you do it with your neighbors, or you do it with your family. do it with advisors, you write, whatever you do. I think the world is made better by giving back. And if you— if every day you found a way to, to give back something of worth to the world, whether it's just opening a door or anything like that, your life is made much better.

I 100% agree. And I love that quote. So thank you so much, Robert. This has been awesome. You're such an intelligent guy. It was great learning from you.

Hey, thanks for the invitation. Good luck. We'll see you again soon, I'm sure.