Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
42 published records
01 / commitment
“To which he writes, all I can say is that I'm going to do so, hold the stock, and I plan to buy more.”
02 / belief
“We think about whaling now and it seems barbaric, and it totally was, but it was the biggest industry in America.”
03 / disagreement
“Points one and two, great, I totally agree with. Point three, I also agree with but I disagree with the interpretation.”
04 / uncertainty
“There might have been some tie-in with the government agencies that, maybe there was marketing that went out to agency employees. I don't know exactly.”
05 / uncertainty
“I think when you have that, that is when you have these 10 sigma events, or I don’t know how many standard deviations from the mean this is, but this performance is remarkable and enduring.”
06 / belief
“I think you're totally right about the puzzle piece fitting together aspect. He learns that in his third great investment, which will be the last one we'll cover on this episode.”
07 / belief
“Don’t time the market unless you’re the oracle of Omaha, I think is the second part of that phrase.”
08 / belief
“Not until Apple and I think—I haven’t done the research yet—Apple bubbles up within Berkshire from Todd Combs, not from Warren.”
09 / belief
“When Noyce leaves to start Intel and Arthur Rock is putting the deal together to finance Intel, Noyce brings it to the investment committee at Grinnell College and says, there's $100,000 piece. I think Grinnell should invest in this company.”
10 / belief
“I think that the classic Warren Buffett aphorism, “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful,” springs to mind, where it’s easy to say this guy shut down his investment partnership when everyone else was being greedy.”
11 / belief
“Of course, we are all a product of our environment, and I think one of the phrases that is a Buffett-ism that applies to this is we've talked about the market weighing machine.”
12 / commitment
“I will not abandon a previous approach, the cigar butt investing strategy, whose logic I understand, although I find it difficult to apply in the current environment, even though it may mean foregoing large and apparently easy profits to embrace an approach which I don't fully understand, have not practiced successfully, and which possibly could lead to substantial permanent loss of capital.”
13 / belief
“I think the Dow dropped in the low teens maybe percentages on Black Tuesday but it was still shocking to people.”
14 / belief
“I think of the Buffett Partnership, he moves stuff around much more than he later would in Berkshire Hathaway.”
15 / commitment
“We will cover this again much later in the episode, but he claims that purchasing Berkshire Hathaway cost him $200 billion in opportunity cost.”
16 / belief
“Exactly, and this is 1952. World War II ended four years ago, and Graham was, I believe, British-European.”
17 / uncertainty
“Yup. He's like, I don't know. I don't want to run your firm. If I'm going to run a firm, I'm going to run my firm.”
18 / belief
“People talk about Snowball all the time as the sort of more popular Buffett biography. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, so I think you can’t go wrong.”
19 / commitment
“If my performance is poor, I expect the partners to withdraw. 1963: It is a certainty that we will have years when we deserve the tomatoes.”
20 / belief
“Brand doesn't show up on a balance sheet, but it's a huge asset. It's one of these things where I think Buffett's starting to flex a little bit and say, hey, I actually can analyze these businesses a little bit beyond the black and white numbers they are showing up on the financial statements by doing a little bit of a different form of diligence and assigning value to things that are a little bit less tangible than previous value investors have in the past.”
21 / belief
“I think that would be an understatement, and that everyone in the audience is probably chuckling if they’ve made it with us that far.”
22 / commitment
“I will say, this is the first time I’ve started research months in advance, giddied to do this episode.”
23 / belief
“His son, Ernest Buffett, (I think) actually technically set up a different story, but it’s like the family business, so Ernest is running the legacy of the grocery store in Omaha.”
24 / belief
“I think that little cliffhanger is probably a great place to leave it on history and facts for this first half of Berkshire Hathaway.”
25 / uncertainty
“Warren, I don’t know, was probably neutral to Berkshire Hathaway, his involvement.”
26 / uncertainty
“I don't have the Dow numbers in 1961, so I don't know relatively how good this performance was.”
27 / belief
“I think he actually only learned one, but the first that he says he learns is don’t fixate on the price you paid for something; it’s irrelevant.”
28 / belief
“I mean in 2008, I think the market lost close to 50%, maybe, but 90% people were just wiped out.”
29 / belief
“The way that I have been thinking about this, I think the closest analogue is basically to gross margin in an operating business, where if you're running a tech business with super high gross margin and high fixed costs, you got to spend on the fixed costs, but then you get that gross margin forever without having to change what business you're in.”
30 / commitment
“What I can and do promise is that: (a) our investments will be chosen on the basis of value not popularity, (b) we will attempt to bring risk of permanent capital loss, not short-term quotational loss to an absolute minimum by maintaining a wide margin of safety, and (c) my wife, children, and I have virtually our entire net worth invested in a partnership.”
31 / belief
“Berkshire Hathaway eventually would become (I think) the largest or one of the largest producers of men's suit linings.”
32 / belief
“Now, I think you could also argue about the cigar butt investing and Ben Graham, that before him and them, there was just rampant speculation that was happening, and that’s ultimately value destructive for everybody too.”
33 / evaluation
“He is right because his facts and analysis are right.” This is something that I think as a venture investor is so difficult because so much of the success of a company when you’re investing in it depends on its ability to, in the near-term, raise future capital from someone who is not you.”
34 / evaluation
“I think the way to think about New Bedford was like they were an industry town and their industry was whaling and whaling oil.”
35 / evaluation
“Speaking of doing whatever they want with the money, I think what was happening back then is that, as you would imagine in the early days of insurance, you would want your premiums to basically equal the amount of money that you would need to pay out in the future.”
36 / recommendation
“The Intelligent Investor, I think is the one he probably read and was like, this is incredible.”
37 / commitment
“All right, I think I can retire and if I set a budget that we can live on in Omaha, I'm going to enjoy the good life.”
38 / evaluation
“I think that’s the difference between Warren and most normal people, too, is that money in the future probably has about the same utility to him because it’s not about what he can buy with the money.”
39 / evaluation
“Before we dive into the story, I think the framework that I would use if you're listening to this and hearing a lot of this for the first time, you heard about GEICO, you're hearing these puzzle pieces, where there's a lesson learned from each of these companies, that Buffett was the first to figure out that these businesses are each interesting in a puzzle piece way that fits in with other businesses, that in the sum of its whole could create this unbelievable capital-efficient flywheel.”
40 / evaluation
“He was not totally crazy because the world is melting down, but for anyone who does still have some wealth left, they need something to do with it.”
41 / evaluation
“I think she gave him the chairman role because she had so much respect for his counsel.”
42 / prediction
“Seventy years from now, my money has a lot less utility to me than it does today because I will have not had it my whole life, which is the curse, but if you’re Warren and all you’re seeing all the time is that money in the future, my gosh.”