My guest this week is Carl Kawaja. It’s the second time I’ve had Carl on the show and my first conversation with him is one I go back to often. Carl is a portfolio manager at Capital Group, where he’s quietly overseen a huge portfolio for decades. He is one of the top investors operating today as well as one of my favorite people. The investing world has changed quite a bit since Carl and I first spoke in mid-2021 so this was a great chance to use Carl’s curious mind and wide range of experiences to discuss the regime change taking place across capital markets. In true Kawaja fashion, we go all over the map and discuss Apple, the Amazonian rainforest, baseball, the oil & gas industry, Muhammad Ali, and more. Please enjoy my great discussion with Carl Kawaja.
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
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Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.
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Show Notes
[00:02:44] - [First question] - What the market feels like to him today
[00:06:00] - The pros and cons of the cost of capital and experimentation
[00:09:09] - Things we can learn from Oil & Gas stocks and resource commodities in general
[00:14:38] - Pulling apart the key lessons from Berkshire’s purchases of IBM and Apple
[00:20:37] - The practical implications of wanting to land more soft-wins in investing that aren’t apparent out of the gate
[00:25:52] - How he approaches and considers products and product cycles writ large
[00:31:10] - The Systems Bible
[00:33:15] - Thoughts about making money from value based strategies
[00:38:31] - His methodology to go about finding the next diamond in the rough
[00:42:48] - A New Innings
[00:45:13] - The Arc of Boxing; Lessons from Muhammad Ali fighting Cleveland Williams
[00:48:54] - Someone he thinks is an exemplar in both business and the world
[00:54:37] - Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes
[00:59:41] - The role fossil fuels play in the energy transition and the current regime change
[01:07:35] - What we can learn from uncontroversial transitions in the past
