A Conversation with Charlie Munger & John Collison - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY]

25:40If you're looking at a business today and you know that the industry will consist of two or three players, how can you predict will those players make money? I don't think it's possible to be 100 % accurate in making these predictions. But certainly over looking backward, the people who had branded profits like coffee and oatmeal and so forth made very high profits. And airlines basically made no profits at all for their shareholders. But airlines were branded goods. But everybody had big capital equipment. If they didn't use it, they obviously were losing a lot of money. So it was almost forced into a very destructive competition by the logic of the individual situations.

26:20There are a lot of businesses that are very hard to make money in permanently. If you want to go into the business like restaurants, most people fail. A small percentage of restaurants even last long enough to make a living for the people who own them. Too competitive, that's why they fail. Just like if there are too many deer on an island and no predators, pretty soon there are too many deer. So all the deer suffer because there are too many of them. But again, to go back to this question, if I want to understand, will a business be like an airline or like a serial? company. Is it then the ongoing capital expenditure that's required where airlines fundamentally, they have lots of capex on an ongoing basis.

26:57It's like the original Berkshire textile mills. The airlines are like a guy who builds a big hotel and it's just sitting there and he makes some incremental profit from filling it. And if it's up in staff, that's better than just leaving it sit there vacant. It almost forces irrational, intense competition. The same thing does not happen in cereals. The NSF was one of the biggest acquisitions you guys did. And my sense from the outside is that it's maybe even been more successful than you would have expected. Is that accurate? Or did you expect to be this successful? The railroads were a lousy investment.

27:31There were a few people when they were first created that basically stole a lot of money by bilking the government and bribing legislators and doing all kinds of terrible stuff. But by and large, most railroads were a lot of lousy investors, like the airlines for a long time. And finally, it got down after years of fighting unions and consolidations. So you get down to a few big systems. Now they're just two big transcontinental systems and we've got one of them. Of course, that's a less competitive market than was, than existed earlier when there were a hundred different railroads. But early the railroads, when they were terribly competitive, they were terrible places to invest money.

28:09But again, airlines, bad business, not a good investment. Early railroads, It's bad business. Early railroads, yes. Railroads today still require a lot of ongoing capex. Yes, but they're so dominant. Once you have a railroad that can put shipping containers on it, stack too high on tracks, it's one of the most efficient ways of transferring a lot of stuff over the country. It's way more efficient than trucking. So that they have a system that just accidentally happened. Nobody anticipated you'd be able to double the capacity of the railroad, just by two shipping containers, one on top of the other.

28:45So they got very efficient finally. And now they're so efficient, they're more efficient than anything else. And of course, they do well. Okay, so nothing can compete with railroads in terms of efficiency, cost to actually move stuff, energy required to move stuff. And so with an airline, you might have three airlines competing on a route, whereas the railroad may have a route to itself. Were you ever tempted to invest in other forms of transit infrastructure, ports, shipping? We've looked at things like that. I can't remember a single. and what we once bought a big position on a bridge. A literal toll bridge business.

29:18A literal toll bridge. And then we decided that we didn't want to look like goddamn monopolists. And besides, we just sort of moved on to something less monopolistic. Or at least it looked less monopolistic. Has investing gotten harder? Of course it's gotten harder, way harder. It's gotten so hard that most of the people who are in wealth management have an almost zero chance of outperforming an unmanaged index like the S &P. How has it gotten harder? It's gotten A, there's so much more of this wealth and investment securities. And so you'll get a whole lot of big sums to manage. And of course, it's a long time to buy in, a long time to sell out, costs are higher.

30:01And so it's way harder to manage a large sum of money to make a lot of money, a high return than it is to manage a small sum of money. And then way more brains came into the business. So it's gotten brutally competitive. And then we have these manias that get, when things are hot and start running, the behavior gets almost crazy. It's almost like a delusion. Of course, it's harder. And in my lifetime, a guy who just bought the best common stocks and sat on his ass would have made about 10 % per annum before inflation, maybe 8 % after inflation. That is not the standard return that man can expect from investment.

30:40That was a very unusual period in a very unusual place. And I do not anticipate that the average result is going to be nearly that good over the next 100 years. Why was the result so good? Why was it 10 % per annum? Let's call it 8 % after inflation. The Great Depression so demoralized everybody, they were utterly despised. And then the economic system improved a lot. and the combination of the investment climate and the economic situation together evolving, it just made it unusually good. If you go back to what the rich people of England did back, say, in 1900, they bought consoles, 2.5%, no inflation.

31:232.5 % return was considered. If you wanted to stay safe, to be satisfied with that. No rich people thought there was any safe way of getting 8%. If you go back to 1880, among the rich people of England. And so this is an unusual period. And now everybody who's in investment management teaches everybody, you'll get 8 % after inflation by dealing with us, because that's the way it worked for the last 100 years. This is going to work for the last 100 years does not mean it's going to work for the next 100 years. So it's been a period of significant economic growth. I think there's also maybe the US stock market has outperformed.

31:57Yes, everything. United States, country, prosper. A lot of good stuff happened at once that caused that very good result. It's not always going to work that way. Okay, so say we have a 25-year-old investor who's thinking about investing over the next 50 years. If you take the lessons from Poor Charlie's Almanac about avoiding the relatively simple mistakes that can be avoided, thinking about investment as the underlying business and the quality and sustainability of the business, taking the punch card investing approach of making a small number of investments rather than trying to play or time the market.

32:29Do you think that approach is still a recipe for success over the next 50 years? Yes, but it requires considerable self-discipline and considerable skill. And most people will lack the discipline and skill. What discipline will they lack? What will they screw up? Well, they'll get carried along too much by what other people believe at the time. and they'll respond too much to improper incentives. In other words, they'll start buying stuff that's silly to buy to get the fees. The thing scrape off the top, and they'll do a lot of things that are wrong. Not written in the stars that everybody has an automatic way of making 8 % after taxes.

33:07That's quite an achievement, yeah. It's a huge achievement, a real return of 8%. And by the way, the ordinary customer, the ordinary stock browser, probably earns 2 % or something instead of 8%. So the ordinary stockbroker is just an absolute menace to humanity. Not that there aren't some honorable good stockbrokers on earth, because there are some. But there are a lot of people who are responding to the incentives they're under in a way that their investors who trust them are not going to get a good return at all. You've been famous for criticizing gold earlier on and now cryptocurrency. I like gold a lot better than I like cryptocurrency.

33:46You've criticized both. Before there was cryptocurrency, I never bought gold. So I didn't like gold. But I don't hate gold as an investment as much as I hate cryptocurrency. I think cryptocurrency ought to have been driven out as illegal. At the risk of maybe getting ejected from the premises, if I can try to defend cryptocurrency, isn't the perspective you have where I think you would say invest in a productive business, isn't that a reasonably US-centric perspective where absolutely we have a great currency, here, we have a great respect for property rights here. If you're in Turkey and their property rights aren't as strong, the currency is inflating 80 % a year as it has this year, then the ability to move your wealth...

34:30Oh, if I lived in Turkey, I might do something odd. Buy gold if I were in Turkey, but I would never buy cryptocurrency. Even in Turkey? No. I don't think that buying a percentage of nothing is a good investment, even though it's hard to create more nothing. But isn't gold functionally an investment in a percentage of nothing? It is similar, except it's been established so long as a... An agreed-upon store of wealth. With the history we have and with the need for a currency, and a currency that is backed by something, and gold is hard enough to mine and so forth, gold is a perfectly reasonable thing to use as a currency.

35:07And the evolution of use of gold as a currency was a very good thing for civilization. I don't have the feeling that gold is evil. Gold helps civilization develop. But I think cryptocurrency is a scumball activity. And I think by and large, the people who promote it are scumballs or delusionary. And I don't know which is worse, being a scumball or a delusionary. But I think they're both pretty bad. Some people can manage to be both. There's plenty of scams in crypto. That's absolutely not up for debate. But are we talking about questions of degree here between gold and cryptocurrency, where they are societally agreed upon stores of value which trade above.

35:43Well, let's put it this way. If we didn't have gold, we might have invented something like cryptocurrency as a substitute. But once we have gold and currencies that are now long established, we don't need the goddamn cryptocurrency. But isn't cryptocurrency handier? You can work with it in just software. You don't need to actually go get some physical gold, trade it, melt it down. It's much harder to seize cryptocurrency than it is to seize gold in an autocratic regime. If you don't have to bother with any physical inventories or anything that has any intrinsic value, you can create a system for efficiently dealing in it.

36:15I don't want to officially deal in nothing and craziness. I want to make it illegal. All nations have had anti-counterfeiting laws. And I think the anti-counterfeiting laws ought to have been used to totally bar cryptocurrency. But nothing's been counterfeit here. But if I'm a nation and I have a currency, I don't want a new currency established. But it's not really a new currency. It's a new store of wealth. You can call it a store of wealth. I call it a store of delusion. I don't think it's good to participate in delusion, even when it gets quite common. A second medium of exchange, widely used.

36:49It's ideal for drug dealers, dope dealers, scam artists of various kinds, every kind of criminal you can imagine. Very good in extortion, kidnapping. Why would we want a wonderful crime facilitating new medium of exchange? Why wouldn't we just say this is like counterfeiting? You're coming into the government's business and you're trying to create a fiat currency and you can't do that. It's a field I don't. You don't like. All righty. Well, I will agree to disagree on crypto, but - You don't have to agree. I can handle it if you like, Chris. Go. I don't like it, but I can handle it. We're staring into a recession, potential stagflation.

37:27What advice do you have for people thinking about how to work the way through the - I have one standard set of advice for all difficulties. Suck it in and cope. And that's all any human being can do is suck it in and cope. Partly, you have to be shrewd. That's one way of coping is to be as shrewd as you can possibly be. But that's my recipe. I must say it's worked pretty well for me. It'll work pretty well for any other person who uses my methods. Berkshire made a lot of money in 08 with opportunities that might not have existed. some of the bank deals, say the preferred stock deals. Are there different ways investors should act at these discontinuous lows?

38:08We got some opportunities, which other people wouldn't have gotten because we were admired by a small minority of people who could be helped if we helped them. But that isn't our main way of getting ahead of Berkshire Hathaway. The net amount of money we've made in those deals is pretty minor compared to the amount of money we've made elsewhere. We get occasional opportunities other people don't get. I don't think it's at all easy to get the kind of opportunities that we got, and we don't get that many ourselves. But there may be a lesson there in being a preferred counterparty. Berkshire was known to have lots of cash, be extremely trustworthy, and be quick to deal with.

38:44Those are good refutations. Who wouldn't like an opportunity of being very trustworthy and easy to deal with and always having a lot of money available? Is there anybody who would be hurt by it? Of course, people would like that. How do you feel about American society? over the coming decades? Old men have always tended to think the new generation is going to hell. The old Romans, oh temporis, oh mores. That goes back to the earliest civilizations we had. The old guys were saying, my God, the world is going to hell. And it really wasn't going to hell net by and large. But I do not like the way politics has morphed in my lifetime in the United States.

39:24I don't like democracy. The way it actually morphed into existence with these primaries and the dominance of two parties where only the most extreme members of each party have a lot of pulling power and therefore they control the nominees and so forth. I think our way of getting nominees is deeply flawed now. It may have worked pretty well up till now. It worked better when we had those old crooked bosses in the cities and it's working now with the primaries. I wish those old crooked bosses would come back and replace the present primaries. Wanted to control the patronage, so they actually nominated some pretty good people like Teddy Roosevelt.

39:59And these modern primary systems, the worst people often win. Just because they move further left and further right. Yes. How do you feel about declining birth rates? It creates a different kind of a world. But I don't see that mankind would be at all smart if everybody had six children. I think that just jams up the population way too much, starting with 7 billion for the whole world. So I think it's good that the population is growing more slowly. But do I think it is good for people to be quite self-centered until they're 35 and then get married compared to marrying at 21 or 22 and having a lot of children?

40:33No, I think the people who married at 21 or 22 and grew up fast because they had to because they got those young children, in a sense, I think they were a luckier generation than the people who came along with all these different options and who delay marriage until a late age and have one or two children and all that. I'm not at all sure it's good for the people who are having these new options, but it is good for the population. Why do you think the people who had kids at 21 were happier? It's very constructive to help other people. And everybody feels pretty good about his own children. To have a lot of responsibility and bear it well, I think, helps people.

41:13If you take the philoprogenitive people, say the Mormon church, where they still have the big families. If you measured human felicity in some objective way by measuring time spent smiling versus time spent frowning, the Mormons would average out way happier than the general population. So early marriage and big families and believing a religion that is somewhat hard to believe in its technical theology is very good for the occupants in terms of their personal happiness. I'm not interested and believing something I don't believe in. Just to be happier, I'm a peculiar person that way. I have no doubt in my mind at all that the Mormons are every child happier than the rest of us.

41:52Does that make you worried? No, it doesn't make me worry. I just live with it. But people are being less religious and having fewer kids. I'm used to things not working perfectly. And so why should I expect my society is always going to be marching upwards because it has for a long time? I believe you just adjust to whatever society turns out to be. and you do the best you can. And that's all any human being can do. And that's all I'm going to do. How concerned should we be about institutional sclerosis and the rise of it, where you were just talking about this waterfront property that you've been working on developing for the University of Santa Barbara, but it's property on the water that you just can't develop now in a way that you could 40 years ago.

42:34And as you look across all sorts of different domains in the United States, it feels like the institutions are becoming more sclerotic and it's harder to do things. Of course. In our political system, the people with political power in these states and cities don't want a lot of new development. And they have the legal power to prohibit it, and they do. And that's causing way less opportunity to have good housing for young people coming up than was common when I was young. And in a sense, that's sad, but it probably does make the existing communities a little better off. They already have enough traffic.

43:09They don't want any more. They just weren't making it very hard to get new building permits. You can understand why the city thinks it's better off not accepting the growth. It's a very serious problem. It's not at all clear that the cities are wrong in doing it. It's in their self-interest, many of them, not to grow. And so they use their legal powers to prevent it. That makes it hard for young people coming up. I think the young people coming up now are going to find it a lot harder to get what more or less automatically came to my generation. At modest cost, we got a house in a good school district and a growing, pleasant civilization.

43:44And it was pretty widely available. And now in the big cities, I think it's going to be very hard to get a new house. It's sad, but it's sad to get old and die, too. Maybe civilizations have some sadness they have to adapt to, just as human beings do. It's not automatic. Everything in your life is going to be better than it was for your parents or your grandparents. Perfectly possible for a world to develop where it's a little worse in some ways. Where do you think the world is getting worse? I think we have a political gang problem that's probably as bad as we've ever had. We have some crazy dictators on the verge of creating a nuclear war.

44:23We've got lots to worry about. The world has never been a perfectly safe place, and it isn't now. Kind of a societal version of your avoiding mistakes framework from Poor Charlie's Almanac, where societies need to avoid the major mistakes, just like individuals do, avoiding nuclear war. We're lucky to have done it so far, but if enough crazy people have enough hydrogen bombs, there will eventually be enough hatred. We'll have an atomic war of some kind someday. You can almost count on it. So you can say that our generation, it was quite unlikely, but I think it's getting more likely, not less.

44:57I'd love to ask about your architecture interest. So again, you designed this house 61 years ago, and of late you've been designing many more projects like some of the buildings for the UC Santa Barbara, where you donated the funds but also designed the buildings. Why do you think architects get it so wrong? They don't get it so wrong. I think architecture is the queen of the arts. In other words, I like it better than painting or sculpture or so on. I don't know, maybe music also deserves to be queen of the arts too. But anyway, I regard it as very important. And so I think hardly anything in the arts is more important than architecture.

45:36But just as I think money management makes a lot of common mistakes, I think architects make a lot of common mistakes. Too many of them want to create something different just because they're bored with the conventional forms. And so they compete in making it artsy, craftsy, and crazy. And you get things like dorms at MIT where people actually would go into the dorm and they get seasick because all the walls are slanted and massively stupid. MIT has a school of architecture. Imagine having a school of architecture in a place that's so stupid they build a dormitory where all the walls are slanted so much everybody gets seasick.

46:12That really happened at MIT. So I think schools of architecture, they have a lot of folly to regret. It's not necessary for architecture to be as stupid as some of its dead denizens are. Okay, so architecture mistake number one is architects wanting to get creative or make their mark by being peculiar. Peculiarity by itself is not art, in my opinion. What are the other architecture mistakes? You've got to understand the customer's business and the customer's real needs in a way that is automatic with people like me. And I want to identify what the real needs of my customer is and really satisfy it intelligently.

46:52And I don't have some crazy artistic preference of my own that I want to just see in three dimensions. Well, somebody else pays me to create it. And of course, you can serve your people better if you understand their business better. The architects aren't multidisciplinary enough. That's what I'm telling you. Practically, no profession is multidisciplinary enough. And what's an example of where you are more multidisciplinary than the architects in some of the buildings you've designed? If you take the building, the graduate residents at the University of Michigan, they had a magnificent site, the parking lot.

47:25They had no other site. They'd used up all the land in Ann Arbor. It was like a campus, but on their main campus, they'd used up all the sites. And there's one little parking lot left. And I realized that if they used their power of permanent domain and doubled the size of that parking lot, They could put a big square building on the site that would hold a lot of graduated students. But there was no way to do that without creating a window shortage in some of the bedrooms. And I also knew that it didn't matter that there was a window shortage in the bedrooms because I went around Ann Arbor and saw the private builders in Ann Arbor who created apartments with no bedrooms, apartment rooms with no windows, and relying on artificial light.

48:09and I walked side by side the exactly identical bedroom, one with a real window and one just a blank wall. And the one with just a blank wall rented for 10 % less. So I ran it wasn't much of a problem. I looked for the evidence and then once I realized that, I could do all kinds of wonderful things in that building once I got over this prejudice that was absolutely required under any and all circumstances that every bedroom have a window. So it was just an example of just the most elementary common sense. I looked at the evidence in Ann Arbor. I understood geometry well enough to know. And then, too, I was well aware that every ship has exactly the same problem.

48:48Every ship has a window shortage automatically, every cruise ship. Yeah, they pay$20 ,000 a week to be on the ship and so forth. And if they don't want a little light, they walk out of the ship and go into one of the common rooms. And of course, that's what I arranged they do in the dorm. So I was following correct precedents from marine architecture. But show me an architect that's learned anything from a marine architect. I think you could go into any school of architecture in the country, and you won't find anybody studying marine architecture. They think it has nothing to do with it. It has a lot to do with what they're doing.

49:21If you don't look, you won't find. I feel like another example of understanding the customer is giving the students in the dorms single rooms where most people design the rooms. Oh, well, talk about insanity. Now, I have sent a lot of children through a lot of graduate education. And I've never had a child that liked being in a room with one or two other unrelated people sleeping in the same room. At the age of 20 or 25. Or 18 or 16. Of course, they'd rather have a room of their own. And I just figured out how much the incremental cost would be of giving them an extra room compared to the value.

49:54And I finally realized that what everybody was doing was dead wrong. UCLA built brand new housing in the last two or three years. They put three people in a little room to sleep, three unrelated strangers. Nobody likes it. It's crazy. And this stuff I've designed now is grinding slowly through the Coastal Commission. Every single student gets his own sleeping area private to himself. Why did this shared delusion persist for so long? What happened was that the fire codes, they worried that the firemen would need a ladder to go up and look through the window and crawl in through the window and haul out somebody who had passed out from smoke.

50:34So they required that every sleeping space have a window so the fireman could crawl up on a ladder. There were two things wrong with that. One never happened. Nobody could find a case where a fireman had ever crawled up a high ladder and looked through a window and found somebody lying in bed, passed out with smoke. And two, of course, a modern building with automatic sprinklers, death was going to be zero. And that's why the fire codes change. And when the fire codes change, because the people are used to doing it a certain way, of course they keep doing it the same way they've always done it.

51:08Listen, at the Mayo Clinic, it's one of the best places on earth in terms of an admirable culture. They kept doing hip replacements by a procedure that their doctors knew how to do, because the new one that was better for the patient was very hard for the doctor to learn. And so they just kept doing it the old way. Architects are no different. They do what they're used to. Again, for say someone who's 25 or 30, is the lesson that there are a lot of$20 bills lying on the sidewalk? There's a lot of inefficiency in the world to be rectified, that people should not assume the world works efficiently?

51:41Well, of course, there's always a lot of things that can be improved. Always a lot of people who are getting ahead by doing something new. And that's one of the pleasures of modern civilization. And imagine a postal clerk in the United States can go to Hawaii on a two-week vacation on a superjet and have a nice time. No postal worker could do that in the world I grew up in. You can learn a whole new profession just punching buttons on the internet and so forth. So the possibilities of self-education are just perfectly enormous. So all kinds of things have been greatly improved. And of course, that causes new opportunities for some people.

52:25And it causes absolute economic destruction from certain people who get obsoleted. Imagine the Kodak company, which hired all the PhD chemists, totally dominated the chemistry of film and so forth, and had one of the most reliable trademarks in the whole world, go through Africa when I was young. There are two things you always saw a Coca-Cola and Kodak. That was the brands all over Africa from the poorest villages. And of course, Kodak went totally broke because somebody invented a new way of taking photographs and developing photographs. And it just obsoleted their whole damn business. And Kodak wiped out its common shareholders.

53:04That happens all the time, that kind of thing. And you can't blame the management for it and say, why didn't Kodak invent its own destruction? That's hard to do for human nature. You've got a business as big as Kodak. Everybody's lived on it for years. They're like the surgeons who didn't want to learn a new technique that was a lot harder to learn when they were old. People don't welcome having to learn something new that's really hard to learn. Everybody would rather get ahead using what he already knows. One of the bits of advice you emphasize in the book is to avoid getting addicted to chemicals, which again maybe sounds flippant.

53:40You give the example of some of the people you knew growing up. Oh my God, of course. In the circles in which I was raised, nobody smoked even marijuana, but everybody drank, of course. And I would say that something like 5%, all the people that I was raised amid got hooked on alcohol and became alcoholic. And I think half of them just drank themselves to death and died. And the other half licked it, got over it, became abstemious alcoholics. But that's a lot of people, 5%. They were not horrible people or weak people or something. You spend a lot of time in the book talking about businesses that are win-win for both sides and the importance of this for their long term.

54:21How can anything be much more important? It isn't just that it works better in terms of creating plenty for all. It's better morality. Of course, if both sides want both sides to win, that's more moral than trying to take advantage of other people. when it's so obviously the right way to live and it's the right way to do business. Who's fallen afoul of that? All kinds of people. If you're a carny operator, you're trying to cheat people on little gambling games. And they do it all day. If you're selling drugs, that's another way of cheating. And your whole life you want to be on a win-win basis.

54:58Because it builds and it's like capitalism. It has these effects that multiply. And there's so much of it we have. That's why civilization works as well as it does, is so much of it is win-win. But there are all kinds of people that are looking for ways to cheat people. We had a guy with us when I was in the military. Everybody called him Honest John. And of course, they called him that because he was totally crooked. And if it wasn't dishonorable and crooked, he didn't think it was sound. He wouldn't consider any proposition that wasn't sleazy and never living crooked. He was trying to screw people out of money.

55:33But how much better if you have a voluntary transaction where both sides are happy on a win-win basis? That's perfect. And capitalism in such a system causes this flourishing civilization. Of course, it's the way to go. Which Berkshire businesses do you think are most emblematic? Everything is win-win. Take Dairy Queen. We have all these little shacks, particularly up north where they're just open in the summertime because you can't sell much ice cream in the winter. All the parents come and get their cheap hot dogs and ice cream cones and so forth. And the people around the little shack make pretty good money in the summertime.

56:11And it's win-win. Customers are getting something they want. The people who are manning the store get something they want. Of course, the Berkshire shareholders get some capital returns that they like. It's all win-win. Of course, I'd rather do business that way. Who wouldn't prefer to do that than trying to sell? Think of all these people that sold drugs, the OxyContin thing. It was just disgusting, fairly disgusting way to make money. And so the businesses you'd exclude are tobacco, drugs, what else? I don't think you want mass mania either. Very uneasy by the Grateful Dead's popularity with everybody in the audience using drugs and so forth.

56:49There the music was contributing to the decay of civilization. So you wouldn't invest in drugs, tobacco, or the Grateful Dead? No, that's correct, I would not. When I sell you a tennis racket for$100, One side gets a tennis record they'd rather have than$100 they're partying with, and the other guy, he likes what he's getting too. It's win-win. That's the beauty of capitalism. It makes win-win transactions very easy and almost automatic. It's such a hugely important idea. And people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, both of whom I regard as quite talented in some ways, but they just don't get it.

57:24I think you mean that as a backhanded compliment. It's both a compliment and a criticism. Is the fundamental thing they don't get that a lot of the win-win businesses are net positive and win-win for both sides? And they cherry pick examples. It's automatic in a capitalist transaction. Net one side is making a big mistake. And most people are pretty good at not making mistakes over and over again with their own money. It's not fully automatic, right? No, no, it's not. But a lot of good happens automatically. Do you worry about the rise of this faction of the political spectrum who don't really believe in capitalism?

57:58Of course. Look at the misery that has happened to the Russian people. They didn't like their old system with a bunch of serfs serving a bunch of landlords and so forth, corruption and so forth, so they went to something worse. They were rebelling against something that was awful, so they substituted something that turned out to be actually worse. It's hard to create a new form of government that works worse than Russians served them, but Russia has managed to do it. And not only that, they're proud of having done it. You should never be proud of your defects. What are Berkshire's defects? We haven't eliminated all mistakes of judgment or even all mistakes of morality.

58:34So nobody gets anywhere near perfect ever in human affairs. It's not exactly a defect. A lot of what worked for us in the early days, we can't do anymore because the world is more competitive. The low-hanging fruit has all been picked. And we can't get fruit out of barren branches where the fruit has gone away. And so we have to go to something else. And, of course, that's harder. A lot of people have that problem. They go to new systems and new ways. I've always liked the quote, capitalism is how we take care of people we don't know. It's utterly remarkable how it works. I like a social safety net, but I'm different from other people.

59:08If I were running a government, a modern civilization, I would be quite liberal at rewarding everything that can't be faked, like being blind or not blind or something. I just give a very blind person a lifetime pension, which went up with inflation, and I say, life is tough enough for you. We can afford to do it, and you and your handlers can figure out how to use the money. So I would be very liberal. I would give anybody any education right through college, courtesy of the government, but it would be meritocratic. You have to be able to do the work or you don't qualify for the benefit. So I wouldn't let people pretend to be learning things in some half-assed institution and send the bills to the government.

59:47But places like Caltech or MIT, anybody could get in and do the work. If I were the government, I'd pay for it all the way through college and graduate school. which they do in places like New Zealand and Australia and so on. Again, everything in medicine that is almost automatic, I would pay for that too. But would I pay for Freudian analysis? No. Stuff that can be gamed and it was crazy, I would not pay for. And I wouldn't allow people to get rewards for low back pain, even though they have real low back pain. Anything that's easily faked, I wouldn't pay. It just causes too much cheating and the cheating gets a via vet jewel and so forth.

1:00:23I would just say we can't do that. It's not that we don't, sympathetic about your low back pain, your poor life adjustment. But we can't give lifetime pay just because you say, my low back hurts or my life adjustment is imperfect. That's the way I would organize the government. Nobody thinks the way I do. I feel lonely. I would be quite generous, but I would be quite tough on people with low back pain or psychological problems. How did poor Charlie Zomini come to be? I went around and made a few talks because, oh, I did it because I kind of admired Ben And Graham, the way he also invested money, but he also tried to be an educator.

1:00:56And so I made a few talks as a matter of civic duty. I enjoyed doing it, too. That's how it happened. But I never would have circulated it. Peter Coffin came by and asked for permission to raffle through my files. And I said, as long as I don't ever do anything, you can just go into my office. I don't have any dirty secrets in my office. I'm not worried. And so Peter just rippled through my office and created Port Charlie's Almanac. It's his creation, not mine in a very real sense. What's the legacy of it been? What's happened is that it's spread all over the world and that I'm way more popular in India and China than I am in my own country.

1:01:33And I don't mind that either. I think it's peculiar that these high IQ nerds in China and India love me in my own country. People think I'm a pompous old bastard. Why India and China in particular? I didn't set out to do it. It just happened. But why do you think it's really resonated in those countries? It is a little Confucian. Elderly male of wealth. Lots of experience sharing. That doesn't sound a lot like Confucius. The new Confucius. And the Indians. I don't know. But all I know is that in India and China, people really like it. There are people in the United States, too. But I've gone with Peter to technical places, and I just see a sea of Chinese and Indian faces.

1:02:14When we go to Google or somewhere, that's what I see. Those two groups have been very successful. in the high-tech world. Is there also something about the cultural import of striving and getting ahead? They like that too. You hardly find any two groups on earth that are more interested in getting ahead than the people in India and China. And inasmuch as the book is a manual for that. Yes, it's a manual for going there. And it's a manual that's worked for the guy who's talking. That gets people attention too. It's kind of a get-rich-slow manual. Yes, it's mildly ridiculous. There is no other big conglomerate that succeeded as much as Berkshire did.

1:02:53Not in the whole world, as far as I know. And that is a very unusual thing to have happened. If you could snap your fingers and transform Berkshire's corporate forum, would you? No, I like it the way it is. It wouldn't be better as a partnership or as a private company or... Well, it could have evolved. There are private places that make a lot of money and stay private. But I think both Warren and I have actually enjoyed as much of the public life as we have in terms of the annual meetings and the poor Charlie's Almanac stuff. And Buffett gives all these seminar talks and so forth. I think we've all enjoyed as much of this, what do you call it, educational sideshow that we do.

1:03:39We've actually enjoyed it, and we actually think it's constructive. As far as I'm concerned, what we're doing in the educational side, that's win-win too. If people will listen to what we have to say, they'll be better for it, at least more successful. Is Koch Industries maybe the closest business analog to Berkshire, where it's a very large, diversified, conglomerate, probably in the whole world? Well, I don't know anything about Koch Industries other than they've gotten ahead mightily. But I would not want to be as active politically as they are. I just don't enjoy it that much. But Koch Industries has been quite successful, yes.

1:04:15You're absolutely right about that. On the book, you got a note from a reader just this week. Hi, Charlie, I wouldn't expect you to remember, but I visited with you in a group of Stanford Graduate School of Business students in 2018 at your office before having dinner at your house. I read through, per Charlie's Almanac, at least once each year and just finished my 2022 read. I want to thank you for all your enthusiasm and worldly wisdom. How often do you get notes like this? A lot. Really a huge amount. It's so much so that I can't really handle it. I don't want to spend my time answering notes from strangers.

1:04:43A lot of people are genuinely grateful for the book. And that's amazing. The accidental book made a lot of people grateful. And what do you charge that book now, Peter? $60. It's selling faster now than it did when it came out. There is no book. I don't think the Bible is selling more than it did. It keeps selling and selling. This is like when John Lennon said he was bigger than Jesus. You have to be careful. You and Warren have been working together for decades. Patrick and I have been working together for decade, singular. We plan to work together for many decades to come. What advice do you have for us in constructing a constructive partnership?

1:05:18You're very lucky to have a good life partner. Yeah, I'm sure you're also very skillful and talented. But it's a blessing to do it with a good partner than be all alone doing it. And of course it's better. Of course it's a blessing. Warren and I have not just succeeded in making money or something. We have had a lot of fun, actual fun. We enjoy doing what we've done mostly. We're associated with a perfectly marvelous group of human beings. It's almost unfair. The people that Warren and I associate with all day long are such high-grade people. Of course, it's a pleasure to associate with high-grade people all day long.

1:05:58Talented people, too. When you're saying it's fun for you and Warren together, just the relationship is fun outside of the results, what does that look like? Is it staying up late, watching funny YouTube videos? No, no, no, no, no. We get fun doing. Doing and understanding. We both like learning something new, particularly something useful that's new. And we both like accomplishing a certain amount. And the fact that it's difficult and you're still able to do it, of course, it's a pleasure. What do you and Warren debate? What's an ongoing topic of debate between you? We don't debate. There's some things that I'm willing to do that Warren isn't.

1:06:30And of course, I just adapt. Like what? If he doesn't want to do them, we don't do them. That's very simple. Just as a matter of time budgeting. Now, he'll do some things, because he likes doing them, that aren't necessarily the best use of his time. And so will I. But we do a lot of stuff where we like doing it, and where we associate with good people and are accomplishing things. And we both believe that if you're unusually successful, you ought to share to some extent. Some of your success you should share by giving it away to others, in effect. And if you give away money and time and advice and so forth, almost all the world's religions, The Christian religion requires it.

1:07:08The Jewish religion requires it. So we enjoy the mix we have of education on philanthropy and operating business. Now, we wouldn't want to make any one of it much bigger than it is. I'm not looking for a lot of new opportunity. My life is pretty full the way it is now. But what do you and Warren disagree on? Or what have you disagreed on? We don't disagree. Oh, you must. I called him and I said something. and he said, Charlie, I don't want to think about new faces, anything that's small. So he's budgeting his time. Warren doesn't want to do anything that's small. He wants to do big bites. He's disciplined that way.

1:07:47Now, something small he enjoys doing, he damn well does it. But he doesn't want to look for new small business opportunities. He doesn't want to devote the thinking time to them. Yeah, that's one example of a disagreement. What else? Well, it's not exactly a disagreement. And it's just, of course, he's entitled to spend his time the way he wants to in his 92nd year of life. In 1930, he's now in 92. But we've had a lot of fun. And, of course, it's been a very effective way to do pretty well in a worldly sense. We've enjoyed that. To crawl up from absolutely nothing as far as Berkshire crawled, of course, that's a pleasure.

1:08:21Why did you guys essentially merge? You were doing your own things with Wesco and Blue Chip and Berkshire. And then at a certain point, you merged the efforts. We didn't really mind it being all mixed up like that. But since so many financial operators are kind of manipulated and dishonorable, if we had a lot of different entities always buying stock in one another, it looked a little like mischief or something. And so we just put them all together so we wouldn't look like we were manipulating. So no one could have any claims of conflict of interest type things. And so many people who do have a lot of different hands, they do manipulate, behave improperly.

1:08:58What do you think of the SEC? We're a lot better with an SEC. The tendency to prosper through financial chicanery in all forms of wealth management is perfectly enormous. So of course you need something to throttle it back and control it. So I'm glad we have an SEC. It would be crazy not to have one. By the way, that came in as part of the Roosevelt. And I would argue that its main trouble is it isn't tough enough. Tough enough on what? Miscreancy. If I were running the SEC and had the power to do it, I wouldn't allow people to publish a record saying, here's what I did over the last 20 years when I started with$2 and went up to$200 million because it misleads people.

1:09:42And of course, people who create mutual funds create little ones to get a phony big record. I would forbid that kind of stuff. I would force everybody who is a big-time money manager to report his investment record per dollar a year instead of historical. And that would take the miscreancy out of it. And it would be so simple. And it would radically change the whole industry. And how many people have you ever heard? It ought to be mandatory that all wealth management ought to report its results per dollar a year, which would be easy to do mathematically. And it would totally change the way everybody is promoting their service in a way that fosters truth and excellence in a lot of things.

1:10:19It reminds me of the requirement to register clinical trials. Are you aware of this movement where people can, if they don't publish the ones that don't do anything and they do publish the ones that generate results, you can get bias towards non-replicable results being published. And so the idea that you need to pre-register the clinical trials you're going to run in advance, it sort of reminds me of that. I am not an expert on pharmacology and how it's done, but I am in favor. What I just suggested is so goddamn simple and so obviously required in terms of honorable disclosure. That ought to be automatic.

1:10:53And yet, who has ever suggested it? Why does little Charlie Munger, 98 years old, think the SEC or the government ought to require that all investment professionals report results per dollar a year instead of per historical? Nobody suggests it. But to me, it's obvious it ought to be required. And when you say per dollar a year, you mean dollar-weighted results, basically? How much return for every dollar a year? What was your return? And of course, that's a very different figure. I know of a case of a hedge fund where the proprietor made a lot of money, but per dollar a year, the net return was zero.

1:11:29Because when he got a lot of money, he really made a lot of dumb mistakes. And he made a lot of money when he was young, didn't matter much. And yet it looked like a wonderful record. But in fact, it was terrible. And why wouldn't that be a fair thing to require? Why aren't Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren? That's low-hanging fruit. They don't like the miscreancies of capitalism. There's one that could be easily fixed. Instead, they want to change the whole system to what looks more like Russia's. It's crazy. And people zero in on very odd things, like the current war on share buybacks is very odd.

1:11:59It's just terrible. Of course, I'm against that. Because I don't like left-wing woke, and I don't like right-wing nutcase either. I'm an equal opportunity hater of political orthodoxy. The war on share buybacks seems very misguided and dangerous. Share buybacks are the way that we return money from less productive companies to more productive enterprises. And so we're kind of encouraging institutional sclerosis and ossification through large companies have to just get large and stay large and reinvest internally. That seems really bad. Look at it differently. Look at it in terms of opportunity cost.

1:12:34If your stock is selling for half of what it's worth, and in the external world, you have to pay into companies managed by others you don't like as well, and it's selling what it's worth or higher than it's worth, of course, you want the ability to buy. But when your shareholders are better off buying their own stock than they are doing something else, of course, you ought to do it. And a corporate manager should be a good fiduciary for the shareholders. I mean, you got excess cash, and your own stock is selling for cheaper than it's worth. Of course, you should buy your own stock. It's the right way to behave.

1:13:06And so I'm against all these crazies who think it'll be made illegal. Other people do it just to pump it up so they can use it as currency or something. And that, of course, is disreputable. We never do that. We buy it when it's too cheap. If Patrick and I came and pitched you on Stripe, what would you want to understand about the business? What would your concerns be? That's an interesting question. And considering how much Berkshire Hathaway is made out of payment systems, including American Express, we recognize the power of having a dominant position in payments in a way that's very efficient.

1:13:42And of course, anything in modern payments that enables all this internet stuff is very useful. So you come into a field and made a contribution and made yourself very useful. I'm for all these payment systems that get better and better. So I think you've made your money honorably and you've made a lot of it and good for you. I admire what you people have done. Why wouldn't I? I regard everything that you're doing as a little bit threatening to American Express, but American Express actually has a position where it's like Hermes or something. And so it won't necessarily be ruined by Stripe. In evaluating a business like Stripe, what questions would you want to answer for yourself?

1:14:23Is it likely to remain forever as a money generator? and that's a more complicated subject. It's hard to know how the world is going to evolve. If Kodak could suddenly be obsoleted away, maybe it's not utterly unthinkable that Stripe could. The company that dominates software for architects, terribly prosperous company. But some other companies come up in that field a lot and it no longer dominates as much as it did. So not everything in software always wins. So I do not have the feeling. The venture capitalists tend to think everything in software is always going to win. I don't believe that for a minute.

1:14:57That does seem to be a remarkable aspect of Berkshire is just the duration of the investments, where it's very hard to pick out companies in the Berkshire portfolio that you don't feel good about 50 years from now. It's even worse than that, because the ones that were obvious mistakes, there were way too many jewelry stores. And we had low returns on capital, so it looked as bad as airlines. And of course, recently, the COVID jewelry stores have been coining money. and we've closed about 75 of the stores and more coming. It no longer looks so bad. We have trouble losing even when we try to. It's like Warren, he bought some baseball team to help his town because somebody asked him to do it.

1:15:36And that goddamn thing started making money immediately. Well, that's the way I feel about some of our investments. We don't deserve a lot of credit. We just stumbled into it. Why has NetJets done so well? It's better in its niche than anybody else. In net jets, the whole culture, safety is first. Customer service is second. And after that, we'll start worrying about the capitalists who own net jets. And of course, with enough fanaticism of that kind of a culture, we create a hell of a product for the person who can afford anything. And ours is better than anybody else in the country. And it's now big.

1:16:12It's a big business. And we have yet to kill our first passenger. All these many years, we've never killed our passenger. I didn't know that, Seth. Well, now you do. And we're proud of that. Proud of us not killing our customers as well. We don't say it because we're afraid of my changes. We get too bold in telling God we're so pleased with ourselves. I can picture the magazine ads. NetJets, no one has died yet. You're very bullish on China. Why? Well, the first reason is that their economy was growing faster than ours. That's necessarily true, as we've heard this exact minute. But for a long time, that economy grew a lot faster than ours.

1:16:51Number two, we could get way better and stronger companies at a much lower price in China than we could get in the United States. Now, on the other side, we had to take the political risk of buying into a peculiar system of government that's not different from ours. As long as we were getting enough bargains, I was willing to run them. And it's with part of our assets is we would never invest all of our money in China, for God's sake. But we were certainly willing to invest part of it. That's perfectly logical. And of course, we were investing through Leeloo, who is a very exceptional money manager.

1:17:23And you put all those four things together at once, of course, it made sense. Did you meet Leeloo through the book or separately? That was an interesting story. Leeloo was coming to visit, because he was a hero of Tenement Square, a friend's wife who was very leftist and loved him being a Tenement Square thing. Of course, I'm not the least interested in Leeloo's revolutionary career. And so I'm interested only in his adapting to modern capitalism. And so he came up to me. My house was 100 yards away from the house he was visiting. And we talked for three hours. At the end of three hours, I did something I'd never done before.

1:18:00I said, I'll give you some monger money to manage if you will stop doing what you're doing now and invest only in Asia. And he did, just on the spot. So it took us exactly three hours to find one another, from meeting to financial commitment and took three hours. How does the current geopolitical hawkishness change your view on investing in China, if at all? Obviously, I'm more uncomfortable now than I was. The guy who changed the whole system and said that I don't care if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice, he wanted the goddamn economy of China to work like Singapore's. Of course, we loved that guy.

1:18:38And the new guy isn't quite as much like that guy as we would consider ideal. We think the political risks in China should be run. And I think we should go out of our way to have a lot of friendly relations with big atomic powers. Both China and the United States ought to get along with one another as a matter of holy duty, because they're two big atomic powers. And the way to get along best is we should carefully work out a bunch of win-win transactions between us and China and actually work to make them work even better. That is the right policy of the United States. We should not be trying to discipline China by telling them, like a nattering nanny, how China ought to behave and say, we know better.

1:19:19We're a democracy and you're not. We have a lot to be ashamed of in our own form of government. We shouldn't be going around lecturing everybody else. And we should organize transactions with China. Anything else is madness. And for a long time, we had that. You can argue that China came to modernity, primarily in win-win transactions with the United States. because we were so open to their imports. That's what enabled them to get ahead so fast. And I'm proud of that, and I'm glad we helped them. And I want to do more of it. I don't want this hostility on both sides. Tom Wolfe wrote a short story about bad noise.

1:19:54I'm a huge Tom Wolfe fan of his books, but there's this great short story about bad noise. And you can read the short story as it's really about Grinnell, Iowa, and the effect of Midwestern culture. in Silicon Valley. It was a huge success, of course. And the success is interesting. But I would argue that the failure of Intel was just as interesting a story. Intel was on the ground floor of modern chipmaking, absolutely ground zero. They were at the absolute best place. And they just grew and grew and so forth. And they eventually lost all their leadership completely. And they're just a little pissant company compared to the big guys now.

1:20:37Why did that happen? First place, some of that's inevitable in competition. Some people are going to lose. Partly it demonstrates the inevitable, even if you're successful, some little guy that really scrambles, beats you, there's some accident on it. But partly, they were so interested in always reporting more earnings. They didn't go to the whip enough to stay on top. If you're surfing along the edge of a new development like that, You have to just absolutely go flat out all the time, and you have to be leading all the time. You see, at Berkshire, we don't have to invent new things particularly compared to most places.

1:21:10They're in the business of inventing new things, and you have to be totally fanatic. And the truth of the matter is that the people in China were way more fanatic than Intel. In China, you had one old guy that controlled the place, and he was a fanatic. And Intel had an army of bureaucrats, and they were interested in their executive rewards and the way the price-earnings ratios and the approval of Wall Street, a whole lot of other things. And they were powerful enough that they could look good for a while just by using their power to make the earnings go up. But they should have been using the power to make sure their goddamn chips stayed way ahead of everybody else.

1:21:43And they had to be a totally reliable supplier, which they weren't. They disappointed a lot of customers. And you can't disappoint customers if you want to have a male system of trust. That's the interesting part of the story, not the noise story. The story of the failure of Intel is the great story there. So you're talking about an obsession with reported earnings rather than the fundamental quality of the business. The book was published in 2005. Have you revised your view of Jack Welch given the last 17 years of GE performance? Of course I've revised it. Of course I knew him personally. And he was a cocky conductor's son with a PhD in engineering thermodynamics.

1:22:22mixed. And he was terribly competitive. He wanted to win. He'd been an athlete. He was almost a scratch golfer. But he got obsessed with getting ahead and abusing the incentive system to force everybody else to get ahead. He ran like an athletic team saying everybody would be more fanatic. And he wanted to be fanatic on abusing the spires and pushing people and manipulating it. In the end, he thought it was his duty to make the earnings go up. And he just kept compromising more and more and more in the way they showed the earnings. It wasn't win-win. It was for a while. It worked short-term, but it ruined the country long-term.

1:22:56Of course, if he lived long enough, he would have ruined his own reputation. After he was dead, everybody knew he was a failure. I mean, it wasn't win, say, with the suppliers, over-squeezing them. No. I call that me-win. Win is one system, and me-win is another. Jack Welch had a me-win system. It's very interesting reading the book with the lens post the financial crisis. It's also interesting to see you railing against derivatives in a few years before the financial crisis. That derivative trading was so manipulative. And they marked the books. And two guys would make a big trade. They'd both record a big profit to their accountants.

1:23:32And the accountants would bless the profit on both sides. The same trade. One was reporting a profit. And the other was reporting a profit. Now, they couldn't both be. If it gets too easy and too manipulative and into that culture, stock brokerage, big banking, The guys who did the ordering, they'd take them to Las Vegas. They'd buy them a stack of chips, negotiable chips. You'd give it to them. There was cocaine. There were prostitutes. It was not a pretty culture. And kind of tolerated, what do you expect from a bunch of security traders? Everybody knew that his traders were behaving that way.

1:24:08But it was a mistake to allow that stuff to creep in. And it got pretty extreme. And then the bankers dealt. That deal that Goldman Sachs did with Malaysia, sovereign will fund. Or the 1MDB scandal, yeah. Absolutely inexcused. That guy, the danger flags, he was absolutely, obviously should have been avoided on moral grounds. And prudential grounds, too. But they just get so intoxicated by the easy money. It feels like a lot of the objections you have to, say, professional money managers or Wall Street or whatever can be summed up by people should be more cognizant of principal agent problems. Is that fair?

1:24:42You can hardly imagine a field more full of principal agents than money than wealth management. Of course, the wealth managers take care of themselves. That includes the foundation manager. A foundation manager is basically, he wants to get$400 ,000 a year when a professor gets$110 ,000. He's got one way of doing it, picking money managers who get 3 % off the top and in various forms of private equity. That's the only way he justifies his big pay. So it's a principal agent problem. Of course, you're going to want to invest a lot of money with private equity. And of course, private equity is going to do all kinds of horrible things to try and get three points off the top.

1:25:23Imagine you can get three percentage points off the top of somebody else's money. It's a good business model. You can only do that if you have some miraculous way of making money. By the way, the guys in your field who did Jim Simmons, Jim Simmons is a world-class mathematician. Here's what he did. He just used his damn computers to identify trading patterns that had deep human psychological background. One of them was very simple. He looked at his computer data, and he found that patterns in the market as a whole, there are four different patterns. Win-win, lose-lose, win-lose, and lose-win. If it's just random, they're all going before we're going to be equal.

1:26:07And lo and lo and lo, they shifted the data, and win-win was more common than win-lose or lose-win. And lose-lose was more common. So all they had to do was just program the computers to make these modest, moderate-sized trades that were big standards, but moderate compared to the market. On that basis, computers' word and word and word and the money just poured out of the clearance system. But they also had the tax shenanigans. Billions poured out of the clearance system. And it was so simple and so elementary. And the social utility of making money that way is about zero. So if I'd done that, I suppose I would have been pleased that I was so clever.

1:26:45But I would have been a bit ashamed of not delivering anything to society in exchange for my big winnings. But luckily, I wasn't enough of a computer science to even think about such things. And I don't like short-term trading. And I don't want to be hanging over some trading desk punching keys. Why do you think Sequoia has done so well? Sequoia got early into the game. And it's a fanatic meritocracy. So they worked very hard, all of them. And they got big and successful way ahead of everybody else. And they kept writing it like some chip manufacturer, each generation of chips they get. And in the end, they have a file.

1:27:27We had an example. In our apartment houses, we used some little computer program in adjusting the rents or something or other than somebody. And there's one little guy. I had him check. Sequoia already had a file on this guy. So every little asshole with a little tiny computer program. They got an army of young guys out there finding every little guy in the big files and so forth. So they see more. They see better opportunities sooner and more than other people. and they've got the reputation for people who are unusually successful. They want to go to Sequoia, not some lesser firm. And the combination is just unbeatable.

1:28:04But lately, were they right to go into big Robinhood? No, they had a huge mistake for Sequoia. And they shouldn't have gone into... Morally or... Morally and potentially, it's a big mistake. Really stupid. But it got so much. We've got to be in every new thing that's hot. They got to thinking like investment bankers. But it was a huge mistake for somebody to get involved with Robinhood. Is your objection to Robinhood that it encourages short-term trading and trading options? Yeah, and they lie and so forth. Do they? Oh, my God. What do they lie about? Anything that works. They try and sell it.

1:28:38This is a new fraternity of freedom. It's the whole thing. It's a lie. You don't like the movement aspect of it? Oh, no, no. They're trying to create mass hysteria. I don't like luring people in and screwing them, basically. And Bitcoin, why would you're successful at Sequoia and you're identified with financing people like Apple and so on? Why in the hell would you take Robinhood or some goddamn crypto? It's totally crazy. You don't want to do all the business that's legal for you to do. You want to exclude all kinds of things because it's beneath you. This shows that you work at these things intelligently.

1:29:14It gets hard, but it doesn't get impossible. But the other side of it is, if you take the moment, I've been very well located. in life. But with minor exceptions, what do I have for the relevant investments in life? I've got Costco stock, Berkshire stock, Leloo's China fund, and Obby's apartments. So I've got four investments, basically, after 60 years or something of, by the way, I feel perfectly adequately diversified. Nobody teaches that's adequate diversification. And they're dead wrong. The simple fact is that it's easier to find four things that are above average than it is to find 40. It's not that damned easy to find.

1:29:54You find something that's almost sure to work because you figure you're asking to find a gold mine in your backyard. When it works, it's that easy. How many gold mines are you going to find in your backyard? You shouldn't expect to have all that many opportunities that are clearly identifiable. It's going to be very hard. And you're lucky if you get only a few in a lifetime. And then you have to be a combination of very patient and very aggressive. You have to sit patiently, waiting, watching, surveying, hunting, and pounce very occasionally. You get four pounces in a lifetime that really work big time.

1:30:28And that's a very successful lifetime. And other people think you're like a guy on TV. He's an expert in every company, every time. That's crazy. He's an expert in saying something that's mildly plausible. That's not being an expert investor. Doesn't it feel like the narrative on that is changing, where I think people are coming to understand the merits of concentration in positions that really work? I had dinner with a whole crowd of Fidelity this very week, and they've got trillions under management, and they scrape only a modest amount off the top. and they've got a wonderful business, but they have the moral problem that they have no possibility at all of exceeding what an index fund can do with their common stock investments.

1:31:16Now, maybe they have an occasional analyst that's a little better than average that works into the system. Basically, what they do is they force everybody to be a closet indexer because nobody wants to be a stream outlier on a losing side because that can destroy your investment management business. But I would argue that the whole damn system is corrupt in investment management. It's corrupt illustrations. They take care of the agents way better than they take care of the principals. And they lie to themselves and they lie to others. And that's our system. And everybody wants a fair amount of easy money pretty fast.

1:31:53And that requires a plausible narrative and a big fee. That's what's admired now. I regard modern venture capital as investment banking in disguise. Just a little different form of investment banking. Same morality, same obsession with a lot of quick wealth. There's nothing wrong with investment banking properly done. Things are investing. Is the secret of Berkshire's culture just the anti-bureaucracy bent? Could you sum it up? Berkshire's pretty extreme in culture. We are deeply aware of how bureaucracies tend to create their own internal dynamics so that everybody protects everybody else and nobody changes anything, ruffles any feathers.

1:32:33And the net result is that a lot of bureaucracies make some very stupid decisions. And we try and avoid that. But the way we've done it mostly is by not having anybody around you. They can't be bureaucratic if they're not there. There is nobody in the head office. So we've avoided the bureaucracy. We just don't have the people to do it. Nobody else is as extreme as we are in that. A huge advantage to us. And another thing is we like very trustworthy people. I'd rather have a brief telephone of somebody I trust than I would a 40-page contract prepared by the finest law firm in the world with somebody I don't trust.

1:33:09And so we like to deal with trustworthy people and to be able to count on their oral promises. If you look, you're going to a Mayo operating room. It's what I call a seamless web of deserved trust. The surgeon's trusting the anesthesiologist, the anesthesiologist trusting the surgeon, the nurses are trusting. Everybody trusts everybody else. There's no bureaucracy at all. They don't have time for bureaucracy. It's in the patient's interest to get it over as soon as possible. And so that seamless web of deserved trust can do these very complicated procedures. We like a business system that operates as much as possible like a male operating room.

1:33:46And that requires having very good people who are experienced enough with one another to trust one another. And that trust is internally between the Berkshire folks or between the Berkshire folks and the managers? Well, we want the internal, all the Berkshire people to trust one another internally. And we also want the customers to trust us. We're all for trust. Trust is one of the greatest economic forces on earth. How frequently do you disagree with managers on how much cash to send up to the mothership versus how much to reinvest in the business? Of course, some of our subsidiaries hoard the cash if we'd let them and so forth.

1:34:21Not brutal. In the early conglomerates like Teledon, they just forced all the cash to headquarters. And if you want a new cash, you had to ask for it back. We never went to that. Everybody in the society knows that we'd rather have the cash sent back. If it can be sent back, we'd rather have it sent back. And is that one of Warren's skills, is keeping those managers happy? He does not. He's not brutal. But he tickles it out of them. When they don't need it, it has a way of ending up back at headquarters without any big internal friction. That sounds like some tickling is happening, You can call it what you will.

1:34:50You're right, a lot flows to headquarters. It's interesting how much cash Berkshire does accumulate. It's a lot of cash. 5 % of Apple-sized amounts. Remember, I was there when it was nothing. And we have not issued many shares net since we started. So mostly what we have is created out of almost nothing. One famous example of share issuance was the general reacquisition in 2000. Was that because you guys felt it was a market top? It was true that our stock was then more highly valued than it is now. And, of course, we valued general revenue. We gave it more value than it really had, too. But it all worked out.

1:35:32Everyone was overvalued. But no, we made it work out well enough. One of the things that was awful is we gave Berkshire shares for Dempster Shoe Company, and the Chinese competition destroyed our business. As the ink dried on the purchase act, two years later, we could see we'd made a terrible mistake. Now, it was only two percentage points of performance in one year. So in the history of Berkshire, it's not that big. You guys did okay in the end. No, but it was a big negative, but not very big as it was affected on Berkshire history. Having two percentage points go away from one year, it's not that bad.

1:36:07Is that an example of the do as I say, not as I do, where you and Warren would say don't try to time the market, but that was a very effective bit of market timing? Of course, we're more willing to buy heavily with a cash accumulation when things go down, down, down. And of course, we're less and less able to find things when things go crazy. But I like the way Berkshire has behaved. I like the way its businesses have turned out. I like the people we deal with. It's been a very satisfactory part of my life. I feel privileged to have been part of it. You stop to think about it. Per Charlie's almanac is a lot like the guy who created modern Singapore.

1:36:44And what he always said was, figure out what works and then do it. Figure out what works and then do it. And he just did that more relentlessly than anybody else and more intelligently. And he was probably the greatest nation builder that ever existed in terms of quality of leadership. He's probably the greatest nation builder that ever existed. including Pericles and everybody in all history. And it's very much like poor Charlie's Almanac. Figure out what works and do it. Figure out what doesn't work and avoid it. And he just was relentless. That's all he did. And he started as a left-wing labor lawyer.

1:37:22And to start as a left-wing labor lawyer, end up creating modern Singapore just by figuring out what works and do it and figure out what doesn't work and avoid it. Just keep doing that over and over again. So as far as I'm concerned, the politician who looks the most like poor Charlie Salmanack is Lee Kuan Yew. And I'm not surprised that he got ahead better than any other nation builder that ever lived. That was all he did. It was pretty goddamn simple. Maybe a good example of that that I love from Lee Kuan Yew's life of find out what works and then do it is about the deliberate choice of English as the national language.

1:37:59Of course. Or Chinese. He made zillions of decisions like that that were totally correct. And not everybody is a political leader. Tell the people to change their goddamn language. But when the logic required it, he just figured out it would work better for a second board, and he did it. Of course, that's admirable. And of course, it works. And everybody ought to study Lee Kuan Yew. In this house, I've got two busts of other people. One's a Benjamin Franklin. One of them is Lee Kuan Yew. That's all I have. I could have guessed Benjamin Franklin. I wouldn't have guessed Lee Kuan Yew. You can see why I like him.

1:38:31Just time after time, he was so smart. I think he's smart to have the death penalty for drug dealers. They do not have a big drug problem in Singapore because he's very tough. They kill drug dealers. By the way, that's the way the Chinese got. When one man in six in China was addicted to opium, the way they fixed that was death penalty for users, no exception. They did not have to kill all that many people before the drug addiction problem went away. and I think more things ought to be dealt with in those Lee Kuan Yew-ish ways. That's a very good set of lessons maybe to end on. Find out what works and then do it.

1:39:07Avoid the big mistakes. Take a multidisciplinary approach. Thank you so much for this and we're very excited to be working with you on the project. It was a very meaningful book for me and I'm excited to have lots more people read it. I'm glad to do it. If you enjoyed this episode, check out joincolossus.com. There you'll find every episode of this podcast complete with transcripts, show notes, and resources to keep learning. You can also sign up for our newsletter, Colossus Weekly, where we condense episodes to the big ideas, quotations, and more, as well as share the best content we find on the internet every week.

1:39:58Thank you. Thank you.