Playing the long game with Bogumil Baranowski

What does it mean to truly play the long game with your money—and your life?

In this episode, Morgan sits down with investor, author, and “Talking Billions” host Bogumil Baranowski for a \conversation on investing, identity, and the deeper purpose behind wealth.

They explore the idea of an “infinite time horizon” and why the best investors—and families—think far beyond their own lifetimes. From lessons learned during the pandemic while writing Crisis Investing to the role advisors play in moments of uncertainty, Bogumil shares how to stay grounded when the world feels anything but.

Along the way, they unpack the mental models that shape how we think about money—like why building wealth might be less like climbing a mountain and more like rolling a snowball.

If you’re thinking about your financial future, your family, or how to take a more intentional, long-term approach to wealth, this episode is for you.

Learn more about Bogumil - https://www.bogumilbaranowski.com/

Thank you for listening!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Welcome back to the Morgan on Purpose podcast. I'm thrilled to welcome my next guest because it feels like the perfect time to have this conversation. Bogomil Brnowski is an investment advisor, an author, and a podcast host. That might sound familiar to you. And I'm so excited to host this brilliant thinker, the host of Talking Billions, which is one of my favorite uh investments and just kind of thought uh podcasts, and the founder of Infinitas Capital and one of my favorite investment writers. So, Bogamil, thank you for joining us today.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Oh, it's my pleasure. It's so nice to see you for the benefit of this audience. Morgan was on Talking Billions a year and a half ago, talked about his writing, his books, his ideas. So if you're listening to it and want to hear Morgan, go to Talking Billions, look up that episode too.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Well, go to Talking Billions anyways, because there's so many wonderful guests, so many wonderful interviews. Um, before we started, Bogumi I was saying you're you're prolific. You're you're you're everywhere. How how do we even begin to create this much?

SPEAKER_00 1:14

I have more ideas than time, I have to tell you that. And I've gotten better about capturing my ideas and sharing them. So I have a pretty good system. When I have an idea for an article, I just write it down and I find a moment to turn it into a piece and it's a half a page that turns into two pages. And if you've been reading my content, it's hard to stop. So it requires some discipline. Now I think having a good system of catching those ideas and putting them out to the world has been really helpful for me to become a better investor, to continue to learn, but also to be exposed to other people's perspective. I think you can't stop in this profession. You have to always assume that you're wrong about something. So I'm always open to hearing other people's perspectives, including yours.

SPEAKER_01 2:03

It's a process of always checking assumptions, I think. And um, luckily, I have a wife and a daughter and other people in my life who always question every one of my assumptions. So um I've become adept at that. Um, and hopefully it makes me a better investor in the long run. Um, I I wanted to, one of the themes of this podcast is identity, and and it kind of flows into this book I'm writing right now, the hopeful it'll be published uh sometime in 2026. Um, and a lot of that is like the identity as a business owner, for example. Um, do they identify as entrepreneurs? Do they identify with their business at all? Um, or do they feel kind of passive about it at some point? Uh you're you're a renaissance man. Um, in many ways, you've offered authored three books. Um, you clearly have a love of history if you if you read your writing and listen to your podcast. You're multilingual. I happen to know this. Uh, you're a business owner, and you have a deep passion for the puzzle of investing. How the heck do you introduce yourself, Bogamail? What's what's the elevator pitch for who is Bogamail?

SPEAKER_00 3:11

Well, I'm not so good with elevator pitches, but I can tell you what I what I tell people, depending on the context. But I tell people that I was born in Poland, I went to schools around Europe and I made New York my home. And I also tell people that I always liked numbers, math. Then I discovered economics, political science, business. And it wasn't until I found a book that you know very well, one up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch, that opened my eyes to the idea of owning small pieces of businesses, which is what I consider investing. And I came to New York and I was very fortunate to have a wonderful experience with a few generations of advisors to families that have managed family fortunes in stock portfolios for decades. And it opened my eyes to even wider than before, to the idea that the stock portfolio can serve a family to grow and preserve the capital. When the original business, the original real estate holdings, whatever it is, is sold, liquidated, eventually the money has to end up somewhere. And the stock portfolio has proven to be a good way to grow that wealth over a long period of time. But it it opened my eyes to a certain time horizon. I call it the infinite time horizon, and many people refer it to this way, where you're not thinking just about your lifetime, you're thinking about many lifetimes to come. And then you look at that capital, financial capital, in a whole different way. The way you think about risks, the way you think about rewards, how long you can wait for the outcomes. And it puts you in a very privileged position that very few people can find themselves. We're too short-term focused, we're too obsessed about the daily movements of stock prices. If you can have that kind of a mindset looking way beyond the horizon, you put yourself in a very unique position.

SPEAKER_01 5:03

Yeah, I love that. I I think of um I can't think of the author right now, but the recent book, The Infinite Game. Um, and and you're playing, I think it's so easy to get trapped in the you know, myopic thinking, or worse, myopic action, uh, instead of thinking long term, thinking long-term games. And by the way, long-term isn't three years uh from what you're describing. Long term could be hundreds of years, perhaps, uh, if not, if not longer. Um, your recent book, Crisis Investing, uh, was conceived during the pandemic, which uh feels so long ago, but was only what, I guess six years ago at this point, um, that we're recording. Uh the principles, though, I know because I read it and I loved it, though those are everlasting principles. Um it seems like we're in a new crisis every other week now. And I think like like looking back over my investment career, it kind of always feels like that, frankly. Um, even though we get consumed about what's happening at the moment. And as we're having this conversation, there's a lot happening, Gold and Mail. Um, what did you learn writing that book? How does it apply today?

SPEAKER_00 6:19

So the book was a collection of articles, essays with a lot of editing that I wrote during the pandemic, the first year and a half, two years of the pandemic. And I wanted to turn it into a book because I felt like it was a time that really made a difference in how I think. It reinforced some principles that I embraced earlier. It taught me even to be more patient, more disciplined about what I do, and keeping a steady course through some really tough times. And but it also taught me that we play as advisors a certain role in people's lives. And I mentioned it to you on some occasions how sometimes the most an advisor can do is make yourself available and let your clients hear your voice. And people called me in March of 2020 when the world was coming to an end, and they just said, I just wanted to hear our voice. And it made me realize that it's almost secondary what I say in this moment. They just want to know that everything will be okay. And when you think about the value added of an advisor, there are numbers, you can quantify it, you can compare it to different things, you can uh review it every month or every quarter, every year, whatever you want to do. But at the end of the day, you add this intangible value of a certain presence in moments of crisis that somebody doesn't have to be on their own. Now, I mentioned in one of the recent episodes how I'm really impressed with my listeners who reach out and share how successful they have been growing their financial capital on their own. And I'm really, really impressed. But I also said how I'm so amazed, and so many of them have not asked for any outside help. I personally ask for outside help wherever I can. From a dentist to my accountant, to my bookkeeper, to my compliance, and you name it. And I'm amazed that they didn't even sit down for an hour once every year or every few years with somebody. The questions they ask is uh they are really interesting. They ask, you know, am I doing the right thing? How am I doing so far? And I feel like having somebody in your life, even if you want to do a lot of those things on your own, through moments of crisis, having somebody you can call and sit down and talk to. The crisis, I think you point out something interesting, and I'm trying to capture it. And I've been thinking about it how it may seem these days that we have a crisis every day, but it it doesn't sound accurate. I think there are certain moments where we just don't know what the future holds. And March 2020, I had so many questions we all had. Now I was working from home. I didn't know when I'm gonna go back to the office, I even didn't know when I'm gonna see my family. So there are a lot of questions that were way beyond just money, but almost existential. Am I gonna get sick? If I'm gonna get sick, what would it look like? Am I gonna get sufficient help? You know, there were lines in the hospitals and there was a lot of headlines. So there was a lot of uncertainty. And I think we're experiencing it now on and off on an ongoing basis to a smaller or larger extent. But going through that period, I think you have to realize, you know, what you have control over, what you can change and do. What I did during COVID, I resumed some routines that allowed me to keep a steady course. I started riding a bicycle and going for walks, you know, that you try to reintroduce things that actually bring some stability to your life. And I continued to write. I actually wrote every single week for most of the pandemic because it helped me organize my thoughts, but I also wanted to fill in the gaps between the phone calls with clients so they can hear from me in between and they know what's going on. But you're asking a bigger question, and I hope I can capture it. I feel like there's a certain phenomenon happening with our interaction with information. You know, when you own a portfolio of stocks or anything, you're getting all that information coming your way. And I think because the access is so easy these days, you can get headlines on your phone, you can get them on your smartwatch, you can't really run away from them. Just because something is news, it doesn't mean it's it's relevant to you. And I thought about it a lot last year, and it will become an essay at some point, but I practice what I would call, I called it first information diet, but it was more of an information fasting. I I refused to accept any information for uh a few weeks. And I thought, let's see what happens. Am I gonna miss something? I was still reading earnings calls and earnings releases about my businesses that I own, but I wasn't reading the headlines and and I was wondering if I'm gonna miss something. And I changed that approach to an actual diet, which is I I choose what kind of information I consume. And one of the things that I do, and we can talk more about it, I don't consume daily headlines. I'm looking at weekly publications. Um, I follow a handful of newsletters and substack writers that write something that has a longer shelf life. And I think, you know, I'm as human as anybody here listening, I'm very patient. That's my nature, but I do get, if I get poked enough, I will react, right? Like if somebody tells me this is a bad idea, I will react eventually. So I I try to organize my life and experience with information in a way that allows me to move swiftly through this, you know, what feels like a never-ending crisis.

SPEAKER_01 11:45

It's almost like you have to curate your own information in a world of over information. Instead of seeking more or digesting all of it, you have to curate it and slow it down. Uh, it's the classic signal from the noise. Um so yeah, I really resonate with what you're saying and how you describe that. Um, and thank you for sharing that. Um, I'm gonna kind of pivot a little bit to another topic uh that we have a shared passion for, I think, and that is family wealth. And the idea of not only creating family wealth, but also stewarding it, right? So stewarding wealth across generations. Um, in a recent Substack, you noted that stewards of family wealth aren't trying to get rich, they're trying to build something worth passing on. And that floored me because it so perfectly describes a sense I've received from many of the people I've worked with and talked to over the years. Uh, and I've and I've worked with hundreds of families. I write books on this stuff, I talk about money all the time. I've never heard one person say, Bogamil, I'm trying to get rich. I've never heard it. Because it's never about that. And this whole podcast is it's let's do things on purpose, right? It all comes back purpose. Um, and so the purpose is well, I want something better for me and my family. I want education for my kids. I want to support my grandkids or great-grandkids who I don't even know yet, right? Or some cause or charity. Um I'm wondering if you could elaborate on that point. I'm trying to build something worth passing on. What does that mean to you?

SPEAKER_00 13:30

Well, I like the point that you made that the clients you interact with, they don't come to you to get rich. In many cases, however you want to define the term, they are probably rich or very rich, or maybe even extremely rich, however statistically you want to qualify it. What they want, and it's something that's very hard to capture, and the more I write about it, the more elusive it seems to me. But it's a certain feeling that whatever they've built, it's no longer just for them. And, you know, there are the words that we use: ownership and stewardship of assets or legacy and and you know, control or lack of it. I think it's a it's a fascinating when you ask people and they use different words, it means different things to them. But there's a certain moment, and I saw it with many of my clients, some of them have passed away since, and I'm working with the next generations, where they realize that the assets they build up, the capital they build up, is in a way no longer theirs. And that they either openly admit it, or you can read between the lines and see it. And it's not something you and I can convince them of. It's not something you and I can show them. Maybe we can talk about it, but they have to come to that realization on their own. And once they do, they start to think about that capital in a whole different way. And something interesting happens because the decisions they make, they no longer think about their retirement, their lifetime. They're thinking about multiple generations. So the time horizon expands. There are certain risks that I say now and then that even the richest people cannot afford. And that's that's that realization that what they have at this point, they don't want to lose. They want to leave it for the next generation.

SPEAKER_01 15:16

I would, it's almost like there's a perception that that could be seen as a strong form of attachment. And I think the experience of it, what I hear you sharing, what I see in your writing, Bogamiral, is that it's actually a wonderful form of detachment. This isn't for me anymore. And I think what is worth passing on? It's like another framing of that question is like, what is worth passing on when you think of it this way?

SPEAKER_00 15:46

I I ask my my mentor, Jay Hughes, who you know, whose books you you know very well, and I asked him just as a thought experiment, and he has worked with many more families than I have, or maybe than both of us have over the decades. I asked him, if you remove the financial capital, because Jay reminds us that this, there's the human capital and social capital and other capitals. But if you take away the financial capital, I asked Jay, are all all the problems gone? Right? Because sometimes it feels like, oh, it's it's all about the money, and the money is the problem. Like my brother has too much, or I have less, or my uncle got more than I thought, whatever it is. You feel like if we could just take that out of the equation, would the problems be gone? And I think you you and I know very well that that's not the case. So it's fascinating to observe what happens when the capital shows up. And the financial capital is just one of many legacies or aspects of a legacy that the family passes on. And Che would chime in that also the advisors that are around this phenomenon are as valuable as the capital itself, to have somebody to talk you through it, to be that bridge between generations, to be in the room when the grandfather is no longer around, and you have an advisor that knows what your grandfather would say. It's a very powerful, profound moment to be in a room and you realize you are the bridge. You are the only one that can share and participate. But I want to broaden the topic because I feel like we focus on the financial capital, but there's so much more than the family passes on. And I've worked with and I got to know a lot of families that lost it all and actually made it back in a generation or two. It's such a frequent topic that I think it deserves an essay at some point. See, you're inspiring a lot of articles already as you're asking questions, but I can I can think of a handful of families that I talked to in the last few weeks that had this experience of making the financial capital bags, which makes you know, begs the question. Something else was passed on that outlasted, outlived the capital that was lost for whatever you know, political circumstances, life circumstances, that the financial capital was gone. And whatever that was allowed them to recreate what they lost. Obviously, you and I would not want any of this, our families to go through that, but it does happen.

SPEAKER_01 18:07

There's educational capital. There's uh uh you know, team, as you as you kind of said, there's uh like our community or our network. These are all sources of capital, um, ingenuity, family communication, the family charter, mission values, right? These all kind of come in and can be assets that allow the family to move forward with or without financial capital. They're the tools that create financial capital, is what I hear you say.

SPEAKER_00 18:36

So we we observe the financial capital because we can almost touch it. It's on a statement, it's it's visible, it's in a report. And the other capitals are legacies, our values, principles that you mentioned, we can feel them. You're in the room around the family, and you can feel the way they treat each other, the way they talk to each other, the way they see certain things. And that is very hard to capture. And I I mentioned, I talk about in Money Life Family the part that think of the people that will be there to enjoy and take care of this capital. The preparation of that next generation is as important as the fact that you grew that capital to a substantial amount. And then there's a second stage to it, which is the integration of that phenomenon into your life. It might sound like not that significant, but it's hugely important because the next generation might not be aware or might not be prepared to embrace this gift in a way that's productive and positive and enriching in their life. And that's something that I think even more families today will have to think about and will experience than ever before. So some of the families I worked with over the years, the initial capital they created might have been started 200 years ago, like the initial initial capital. So those families have had a lot of experience. And at the time when they were creating that capital, maybe a sliver of the society would ever experience the kind of wealth. But now there are actually millions of million-dollar households in the US. And a lot of them have five, ten, twenty million dollars. They have a lot of considerations here to take that only a handful of families, the Vanderbilts or the Rockefellers would ever think about. Different scale, but still the same idea. So there are a lot more households, and I get emails from listeners that quietly accumulated five, 10, 15, 20 million dollars. And there's a second phenomenon that I wrote about in one of the essays, which I call the invisible wealth. You might be at a dinner party, and nobody will know that you are the richest person at that dinner. Back in the day, your family had the largest brewery in town, the largest bank in town. Everybody knew that you're from that family. Now you could have a stock portfolio that grew, I don't know how many times over, over many decades. And here you show up, and nobody in your life, including your kids, knows about that wealth. And it has some benefits because you can interact on a social level with your friends and you know, split a dinner bill, and nobody knows that you could buy this dinner easily and many other dinners. But also realize that your kids don't know. And they probably should.

SPEAKER_01 21:26

That's the I think what we see time and time again is that the next generation has no idea how much money the first generation actually has because no one's talked about us. There's no family meeting. Uh no one has the language to to talk about this. Um and it's yeah, it's interesting to think through. Well, part of that is because it's all in stock wealth or market wealth, as opposed to a more traditional, it was. In the business or the brewery or the uh the merchant business, whatever that is, right? Um that's such an interesting point. You you you you had a in a recent note you you talked about um the difference between seeing building wealth as a mountain which I love and it's so common versus building wealth as a snowball. And I'm wondering if you just elaborate on that for a second, and then like why is this distinction important?

SPEAKER_00 22:38

Well, I I realized that I was catching myself using the wrong metaphor for the wrong reasons, and and I think you know, you get you hear other people talk about reaching a certain summit, financial independence, and it's described as this goal. And I was thinking about the actual mountain climbing. We're using so many references in building wealth, family meant family wealth, as reaching a summit. And I thought, well, the actual climbing of the Mount Everest, the first few steps are very easy. The last hundred steps are very hard. Once you reach the mountaintop, you can't stay there too long. There's no not enough oxygen. So you hopefully take a photo and you start climbing back down. And I thought about let's take financial independence or you know, some financial comfort. Once you reach that level, you do want to stay at the top. You realize that the first few steps are the hardest, not the last few steps. Compounding kicks in. And then the additional money making money on top of money, which is compounding, gets easier and easier. So what you're trying to do, you're actually rolling a snowball. I'm not the first one using the metaphor, but I think sometimes we we trade the two metaphors back and forth and we get lost and confused because the experience is so different. Rolling the snowball at the beginning, it's very hard, it's very small, little progress, you might get disappointed with the immediate results. Once it's a big, big snowball, like Buffett's snowball, he made the 99% of his wealth after the age of 65, whatever it is. So you're rolling a much bigger snowball. And for him to add a few billion dollars to his net worth comes at almost no effort. It's a momentum. And when you think about a family wealth, think of the mountain that you're rolling this snowball from, right? A lot of language and communication around what we do is about retirement. Do you have enough to retire? Which I think is a fair question. But beyond retirement, you have a much longer runway, a much longer slope to roll this snowball on. It's your lifetime, but it's also the years in your retirement, which people forget about. You retire at 65, let's say, you might live to 85, 95, or 105. The following decades, the compounding kicks in. So by the time you actually pass it on to the next generation, it could be a multiple of what you accumulated by retirement. And then your kids have a whole new slope and your grandkids have a whole new slope to roll it down. So that's how I picture it. We're not really climbing a mountain running out of oxygen. If anything, it gets easier and easier and easier as you go. It's more and more capital. The questions become bigger, the risks, all of those things come to play. If you lose the first 10,000 that you you saved and you're making 50,000, to make it back, it's not an issue. But if you're going to lose a million dollars and you're making 50,000, to make it back, it's very hard. And some people get it. They have the intuition to actually embrace it. And for some people, it's very hard to realize that you might not want to lose what you build up over a lifetime. I remind my listeners whenever they reach out, this is the only capital. Think of it like this is the only capital, right? Every decision you make, think about the risk of losing it as much as you're excited about doubling it.

SPEAKER_01 25:57

Well, I'm struck by this. I think when we talk about wealth or money, we often live within this like more money, mo problems mindset of like the the more you accumulate, the more problems, the more issues that come along with it, uh, the more stress, the more you know, you have to work. And I think like more family dissension, perhaps. Right. And we have all these shows to to prove this, or you know, let's say cultural archetypes or whatever. And then you look at Warren Buffett, who we both love, and it got easier. Like the the wealth building got easier because it was a it was a snowball. And for him, it seemed like he just glided through life. Now, personal life aside, and I think he's got a complicated person, but the the wealth building was pretty pretty easy uh on that front. And so I I I I read this comparison of the metaphors, and I instantly, you know, it's like I want to write it on my hand. So this I always sit with this. Um I got one last question for you, Bognell. What advice would you give someone who is just starting to think about the idea of family or generational wealth?

SPEAKER_00 27:11

That's a great question. And if it's someone that already has the capital, it grew to a certain extent, and they realize this will outlast me, I think it's a fascinating moment to find yourself. And it's absolutely fine to ask for help. But it's something that the client, the prospect, comes to realize that they need outside help to guide them. I think there's a certain relief that the time horizon is not just until retirement, it's beyond your lifetime. And there's a new, newly discovered responsibility that this capital will not only create comfort and peace in your lifetime, but also many other lifetimes of possibly people that you will never meet. It's a very powerful, powerful realization. You know, bring bringing up Jay, Jay has this beautiful idea of at a party, Thanksgiving, or any holiday when you see your family, to look around who is there at the table. And he says, look at the youngest and the oldest. And very often at that family table, you might have a whole century. You might be touching a century because your great-grandmother was around at a certain point in time, and maybe she was sitting in the lap of her grandmother at some point, right? So we're touching maybe late 1800s. And then on the other side, think of the two-year-old, your cousin that was just born a few years ago. That little boy will be around a hundred years from now. Maybe in his lap, there will be a great, great grandchild that you can't even think of. So stretching your arms, you're touching so many more lives than you think with a family fortune. So thinking of the time horizon. And one last thing I'm going to add, and a lot of people ask me about it. It's okay to go slow. In a moment when you realize you're about to inherit a substantial amount, or you're realizing that this will be an inheritance, an inheritance for the future generations, you feel like you have to make all the decisions very quickly. You have to allocate it very quickly. And there are a lot of people that will make you believe it. You have to act by the end of the month. This is the last opportunity. It took a long time to build it. Take a bit of time to decide what you're going to do with it. Sleep on it, as my grandma used to say.

SPEAKER_01 29:28

If we extend the time horizon, if we're thinking of the infinite time horizon, uh, we we don't have to be so myopic, right? To think through that perspective again. Um, thank you, Bogomil, for joining us. Um, and for everybody obviously listening. Um, to learn more about Bogomil uh via his Substack, uh his podcast, Talking Billions. We'll include all of that information in the show notes. Um, so please go check him out. And we'll see you back here in a couple weeks. Thanks so much.