Talking Billions with Bogumil Baranowski

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My guest today is Neeraj Khemlani, the former president and co-head of CBS News and Stations, a veteran 60 Minutes producer and media executive, and the author of The Coffee Can Investor, A Stock Picker’s Journey to Build Generational Wealth, who uses the story of a Midwestern portfolio manager’s decades-long search for 100-bagger stocks to make the case that patient, concentrated ownership of exceptional businesses can build truly generational wealth.Episode Sponsor: Fiscal AI is a modern data terminal that gives investors instant access to twenty years of financials, earnings transcripts, and extensive segment and KPI data—use my link for a two-week free trial plus 15% off: https://fiscal.ai/talkingbillions/Neeraj Khemlani, former co-head of CBS News and Stations and longtime 60 Minutes producer, grew up in a lower-middle-class immigrant family in New York, where education was his path forward. He wrote The Coffee Can Investor "largely out of mission," wishing someone had taught him the basics of investing much earlier.
The book began on an annual call with Matt, a portfolio manager he met in Denver in 1999 and his longtime "Marvin the Explainer." Matt had studied every hundred bagger since 1980. He planned to put $5 million of his own money into potential future ones, untouched for thirty years, as a gift to his three daughters. Neeraj's reaction: "Holy shit, that's a book."
The idea traces back to Robert Kirby. One of Kirby's clients had a husband who quietly bought every stock Kirby recommended and never sold. After the husband died, he left behind a coffee can of stock certificates that beat the managed account, including a Xerox position that went to $800,000.
Neeraj explains why holding is the hard part through Matt's early sale of Fastenal, which went on to grow roughly nineteenfold: "you don't learn to have patience until you learn what happens when you don't have patience." He shares the chessboard parable of doubling grains of rice. He also walks through Matt's findings: most hundred baggers were founder- or family-run, many grew through acquisitions, and 68% sold to other businesses. Neeraj saw the same pattern firsthand at Hearst, where Fitch became the biggest profit contributor. As he puts it, "the sexiest things are usually the least lucrative."
The conversation closes at Thanksgiving, when Matt and his wife told their daughters about the coffee can. "The girls never once asked for anything," Neeraj recalls. The lesson for both fathers: "we already won. They already won."
Podcast Program – Disclosure Statement
Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC is a registered investment adviser and the opinions expressed by the Firm’s employees and podcast guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.
Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed.

In this Unfiltered Coffee episode, I share some thoughts that have stayed with me through recent conversations, listener emails, books, podcasts, and my own work with investors and families.
I reflect on a different kind of urgency—not the manufactured urgency of expiring offers or opportunities that supposedly require an answer by Friday, but the urgency that comes from within. It’s the realization that something in your financial life may need attention today because being off by an inch now can mean being off by a mile five or ten years from now.
I explore the difference between benign neglect and costly neglect, the extraordinary effects of compounding over time, and why what got us here may not always be the path forward.
I also talk about consistency and what it means to be a constant in someone else’s life. Consistency isn’t perfection. It’s returning to a calm and thoughtful place after life tests us, showing up again, and remaining dependable through changing circumstances.
Another recurring theme is family fortune and multigenerational wealth. I share why I increasingly think about family wealth through the lens of stewardship rather than ownership—and why what we inherit, care for, and pass along extends far beyond financial assets.
Finally, I return to a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to invest sensibly? Capital can eventually begin doing some of the heavy lifting that once depended entirely on our own efforts. How we put that capital to work is deeply personal, but perhaps we make investing more complicated than it needs to be.
Along the way, I revisit recent conversations with Paul Johnson, Lee Freeman-Shor, Alexander von der Vellen, Jan Petke, Jared Dillian, Peter Lazaroff, Ian Cassel, Owen Zidar, and Eric Zwick, and share a few things I’ve been reading and listening to lately.
Some of the ideas in this episode:
The difference between internal and manufactured urgency
Benign neglect versus neglect that quietly costs us money
Why small financial decisions can compound into enormous differences
Luck, risk, and revisiting assumptions that have worked in the past
Consistency as a practice in investing and in life
What it means to be a constant for other people
Family fortunes, stewardship, and multigenerational thinking
The transition from earning money to letting capital do more of the work
Why investing doesn’t have to be unnecessarily complicated

I always enjoy hearing from you, so if you have a question, thought, or story to share, write to me at bogumil@talkingbillions.co not com. Save it somewhere—I’ll only keep it here for a little while.
Podcast Program – Disclosure Statement
Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC is a registered investment adviser and the opinions expressed by the Firm’s employees and podcast guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.
Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed.

Find me on Substack!My guest today is Peter Lazaroff, CFA, CFP®—the Chief Investment Officer of the $10-billion-plus RIA Plancorp, chair of its investment committee, host of The Long-Term Investor, and author of Making Money Simple, and a new book The Perfect Portfolio, whose central message is that the best portfolio is not the historical winner but the one tailored to an investor’s goals, capacity for risk, and ability to stay disciplined.
Peter Lazaroff's first stock arrived on his twelfth birthday: a single share of Nike from his grandmother. He was disappointed until a one-dollar dividend check showed up in the mail. "I didn't even have to work for this," he recalls, and he was hooked. Today, as CIO overseeing more than $10 billion and author of The Perfect Portfolio, he argues that the best portfolio isn't the historical winner but the one built for your life.
He opens his book with a steak dinner, burned on a cheap grill in the backyard of his first home, because the perfect portfolio, like the perfect meal, is personal. He tells the story of a client whose blue chip stocks and mutual funds were chosen to impress others rather than to fund his goals. A portfolio, Peter says, is "a piece of their identity," and it changes over a lifetime as your human capital, balance sheet, and heirs come into view.
On market timing, he reminds us that "You do have to be right twice," and that taxes can turn a bad call into a "permanent bear market." Rather than predicting declines, plan on them. He explains exposure therapy for investors, why narratives scare us more than percentages, and why our instinct to run from the rustle in the bushes makes beating the market so hard.
Peter reveals his own guardrail, "It's to not do it yourself," shares why bond indexes lend the most to the most indebted, and makes the case for goals-based benchmarks: "am I still on track?" He closes with a controversial plea to read twenty minutes a day, and with the idea at the heart of his book: the perfect portfolio is the one you can stick with.
Podcast Program – Disclosure Statement
Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC is a registered investment adviser and the opinions expressed by the Firm’s employees and podcast guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.
Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed.

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Ian Cassel is the founder of MicroCapClub and CIO of Intelligent Fanatics Capital Management, specializing in underfollowed public companies led by exceptional owner-operators — pairing rigorous, boots-on-the-ground research with the patience to hold rare compounding businesses through volatility. He became a full-time private investor at 28 and has spent his career hunting for undiscovered small public companies, and the founders who run them, before Wall Street ever notices. Today, we discuss his new book, The Stock Picker: How to Develop the Mindset, Temperament, and Strategy to Outperform Wall Street.
Episode Sponsor: Fiscal AI is a modern data terminal that gives investors instant access to twenty years of financials, earnings transcripts, and extensive segment and KPI data—use my link for a two-week free trial plus 15% off: https://fiscal.ai/talkingbillions/
Ian Cassel didn’t take the conventional path into investing — he skipped it entirely. Raised in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania’s blue-collar, Amish-adjacent farm country, Cassel became a full-time private investor at 28, guided for years by a single line he wrote on a napkin at 22: “10K and two ten baggers equal millionaire.” It took six years to make it true.
That patience defines everything Cassel does now as founder of MicroCapClub and CIO of Intelligent Fanatics Capital Management. He makes the case for microcaps as one of the market’s last true structural edges — citing research showing 87% of stocks that returned 10x or more over the past decade started as microcaps, and 91% of those were already profitable businesses, not speculative stories. Institutions, he argues, are locked out not by risk but by illiquidity itself.
Cassel also opens up about the mentors who shaped him, including a message-board trader named Skip who taught him that a stock is “a buy or a sell,” never a hold — and that if you’re not willing to put your money where your mouth is, you should keep quiet. He’s candid, too, about his own losing streaks, the temptation to double down on losing positions, and a Porsche-and-Rolex purchase he now looks back on with some embarrassment.
The conversation closes on something bigger than markets: Cassel’s belief that “the secret to compounding” isn’t just financial — it’s showing up, present, for the people you love, today, rather than waiting for some future payoff.
The book: The Stock Picker: How to Develop the Mindset, Temperament, and Strategy to Outperform Wall Street.

Podcast Program – Disclosure Statement
Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC is a registered investment adviser and the opinions expressed by the Firm’s employees and podcast guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.
Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed.

Join me on Substack! Look up my name.
Today I'm joined by two economists who spent a decade inside a room most of us will never see — the basement of the U.S. Treasury Department — building the first database that ever linked confidential tax records to the individual owners of America's private businesses.
Episode Sponsor: Fiscal AI is a modern data terminal that gives investors instant access to twenty years of financials, earnings transcripts, and extensive segment and KPI data—use my link for a two-week free trial plus 15% off: https://fiscal.ai/talkingbillions/Owen Zidar teaches at Princeton, Eric Zwick teaches at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and together they've written a book that completely reframed how I think about wealth in this country: The Everywhere Millionaire.
Their argument, backed by data nobody had ever assembled before, is that America's real fortune isn't sitting with the Forbes 400 on the coasts — it's sitting with three million "ordinary" business owners: car dealers, dental practices, gutter manufacturers, hiding in plain sight in nearly every town in the country. They define an "everywhere millionaire" as a private business owner worth $5 million or more, and collectively, these three million households hold thirteen times the wealth of the Forbes 400.
We trace the hidden engine behind that wealth, and they share story after story of the individuals who built it. We go beyond the economic power of this group into the political influence it quietly carries too.
Their book is eye-opening and genuinely inspiring. It makes the case that the American Dream is very much alive, and that there are far more paths to it than most of us realize. Some readers may even find themselves seeing, for the first time, that they're not alone — that they're part of a much larger, wealthier, more established group than the billionaires who steal all the spotlight. And maybe that's exactly where they want to be: financially successful, politically influential, yet comfortably out of sight, living among the rest of us.

Podcast Program – Disclosure Statement
Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC is a registered investment adviser and the opinions expressed by the Firm’s employees and podcast guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.
Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed.