Interview · 2016

The Power of Partnership with Warren Buffett (2016)

2016 30m video

Source: YouTube · embedded from the original; we don’t host it.

The Buffett-Munger partnership is one of the most successful in the history of business, and one of the least dramatic — no blowups, no power struggles, no parting of ways across sixty-plus years. In this conversation Munger reflects on how that actually worked, and why it lasted.

Why watch. Munger is clear that the partnership rested on alignment, not contracts: shared values, a ruthless filter for the people they’d deal with, and a clean division of labor in which each man trusted the other’s judgment in his domain. He returns to a favorite principle — that the surest way to a good partnership is to deserve one, and to associate only with people you admire. The anecdotes about how he and Buffett actually made decisions are the payoff.

It’s a useful complement to the investing-focused recordings in this archive: the temperament that made the partnership work is the same temperament he insisted made the investing work. Watch via the official YouTube upload linked above.

Buffett partnership

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charles munger interview take one when i went back in 1959 to wind up my father's law practice mutual friends introduced us my father was a sole practitioner and somebody had to go sit in his chair and wind up his practice and it was during that period that i met warren when i first met warren i recognized immediately that he was a very intelligent person and of course he was interested in the subject that i was also interested in which was the process of being a successful investor and so and we have a similar sense of humor and we had a high old time probably making ourselves obnoxious to the other people in the room we both came from omaha we both worked in his fa his grandfather's grocery store so we had a lot of common experience well there's a big correlation between success and life and an early start and warren had a passion for doing well competitively getting money as a little tiny child and he just kept it and now you add a very high iq and a lot of energy and he got a flying start well he was an old grandma newman follower and he made a lot of money buying thinly traded securities that were incredibly cheap statistically and with small amounts of money which is what he's working with he could find enough of those to earn pretty high returns on capital year after year after year now occasionally the market would give him a big security to buy instead of an observer the first one i remember of that kind was american express when the salad oil swindle pretty well clobbered that stock for a while warren went around a lot of research and decided that it was a minor blip the market was wrong and he was right so he bought a big a-rated security and made a lot of money but mostly he was buying more obscure securities that were incredibly cheap well he always said it was less distracting to be there among all the rumors and action on in manhattan and i would say was making most of his money in a very solitary fashion just by sifting a lot of data and thinking a lot and he could do that as well in omaha as he could in wall street in fact better i've never known anybody in a long life who liked criticism zero so i'm sure warren didn't like criticism he taught a course on investments at the university of omaha and in that course he criticized certain common practice in the over-the-counter securities market where a securities firm often met no lady in church and then sold her stuck in a utility with a five percent markup that was sort of hidden and warren thought well that was dirty and cheating and inelegant and of course when he talked that way in his university course some of the people who were doing it hated him and so he got private criticism people tried to keep him out of clubs and stuff like that if he bought it in his partnership which he owed more of he would have made a lot more money and as it worked out he made billions and billions of dollars for a bunch of people he didn't even know and but i don't think he can call it a mistake in that sense but i don't think he regrets it's given him a public platform it's enabled him to in effect teach what he wants to teach no i think if you ordered him to live his life over and say you can go back and buy national indemnity in your partnership instead of in berkshire i don't think he'd do it one of the reasons warren's successful is he's brutal in appraising his own past he wants to identify miss thinkings and avoid them in the future and in a narrow financial sense that was misthinking but i would say in a big sense it was fortunate miss thinking because his life worked out better where social animals are supposed to help one another and we can do it in various ways and there's nothing that helps people more than helping them get rid of the wrong idea and replacing it with the right one you know it's like god's gift and so and since we're trying to avoid sin and error uh helping other people avoid it is it's a useful thing to do i think the sort of solid middle western unpretentious background helped i don't think it would have helped if the mungers and buffets had been at the exact pinnacle of omaha society and been going to the fancy balls and owning the local newspaper or the local bank i think then we might have worked out differently but what i call a solid upper class upper middle class background you know i think helped us both one was very close to his father and of course he didn't like it but warren soldiers on i think it just sobered him and heard him but both warren and i could look at our fathers and see what they did right and what they did wrong warren father was a strong ideologue real old-fashioned right-wing ideologue as was just grandfather and his father was so intense about it that warren just decided that it was a mistake that cabbage up your head to be that much of an ideal so he loved his father but he didn't want to become that much of a true believer in anything and so yeah what happened by accident he had that contour tall where the ceo of berkshire hathaway tried to cheat him out of an eighth and he got angry and said well hell will they all just buy more and that was a pretty silly way to behave as warren has recounted in retrospect but it's what he did and the rest is history it happened to make his life work better not worse but it was an accident that he chose berkshire hathaway if the chairman hadn't tried to cheat him out of an eighth on the 11 price uh there wouldn't have been any buffett dash berkshire hathaway history well he'd made so much money for so long doing what he'd been taught by ben graham which said by these very cheap stocks if they were cheap enough he didn't care it was a lousy company and lousy management he knew he was going to make money anyway just because of the cheapness and i always knew that would be self-limiting that would only be available for a while and then it would go away and it would be easier to make money by getting into the great businesses that either had a great manager or were businesses where a fool could run and still prosper and so i don't think i did anything but maybe cause warren to go where he was going to go anyway a little faster i don't think i changed him i think he would have been there anyway there was more potential for the long pole and getting in the good companies nice we both wanted them cheap but cheap good companies was the field that we shifted to and of course that was really important when we started to buy whole companies we never had an argument we just we just kind of roll with it easily we never had a fight but suppose warren doesn't want to do something that i would have done and suppose that happens four times over 40 years or something what the hell difference does it make to me why should i fuss over that and also suppose one of us makes a mistake that the other wouldn't have made and that happens four or five times why should anybody care net the record is working out fine yeah we believe you should go at life with a certain amount of equanimity and rationality he made millions and millions of dollars value investing in lousy companies that he bought very cheaply besides it's unpleasant to watch lousy companies you don't like it's much more fun to watch somebody you like and admire succeeding than watching some jerk kind of half mismanaged some company that's very cheap it's a it's a better life it's the reason we don't short stocks even if we could make a lot of money doing it neither one of us would bother we'd find it unpleasant you're crazy if you're rich that deliberately go out and do a lot of unpleasant things you don't have to well that was the most useful idea that ben graham ever had have the mindset of somebody that was buying into a business planning to hold for the long pole and use that mindset when thinking of stocks and we neither one of us have ever departed from that one well remember warren had a long history of buying stocks below working capital per share hugely cheap securities and by definition they were all pretty lousy companies and in seas we bought a really good company in this field it was the best in its part of california which is pretty much all of california and it had a wonderful product a wonderful reputation and so on and had a powerful trademark and a good culture and we bought that and made so much money it just was eye-opening how important these brands were i don't think that warren would have made all the money that berkshire made in coca-cola if he hadn't bought c's it just he learned the record of berkshire hathaway and the record of warren buffett is a record based on continuous learning if he hadn't kept learning from every experience the record would not be as good he learned from seas that he should buy coca-cola you really can understand the power of a brand more when you buy something very cheaply in your student getting 300 per annum on your investment in cash that draws your attention a brand can be very important well what really makes it work is the business school term is durable competitive advantage which is a pretty good term you really want an advantage that nourished without overwhelming skill will keep working for you for a long time you want to avoid a business which is just so brutally competitive that nobody does well over the long pole we've bought some businesses that looked pretty good to us that turned out to be pretty bad we have a few of them still around but luckily they're small we sell them if they present problems we just can't solve but if they just turn out to be a little mediocre we hold them we're not going to play gen rummy with the people that are part of our lives he was just like me he didn't improve much at all for quite a f for decades we were pretty good but not really good and then he really started working at it and working with somebody who was a world champion and he is really quite good now whereas i have stayed the same well we found out what had happened because we were on the board and that's another example of a mistake that finally worked out pretty well we never should have bought into solomon it was too much trouble it was too much danger it was too much involvement and one would have probably made more even though the investment finally worked out well it caused a lot of agony and one would have made more money some other way better so it was it was another mistake that worked out well but the crisis once we were on the board uh the company could have gone under it was a very serious exciting crisis with crucial meetings and if nick brady the secretary of the treasury hadn't relented on a key point solomon might have gone under and he went with warren because he trusted him and it saved solomon it shows how having a good reputation is really helpful in life the interesting thing about that is nick brady's family had own stock in berkshire when it was a textile company and he when he was at the harvard business school determined it was a lousy business and he had his branch of the family sell out the other branch of the family stayed and the guy got to like warren when he came on the board and he was kind of a stubborn new englander and he held all his shares in this lousy failing business and of course he became enormously rich whereas nick brady who made the correct decision to get out of a lousy business watched his relative who knew less and hadn't gone to business school and so on made this great fortune life is full of little ironies like that one i don't think it bothers nick brady he's a pretty mature fellow but it was one of those crazy quirks of life well if you if you start with a bunch of lousy businesses which is what we started with but we're going to ring a fair amount of cash out of those businesses so basically we started out with cash and ended up buying a bunch of businesses including insurance companies and drove berkshire without really issuing much stock to anybody from virtually nothing into hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap nobody else has a record like that there's some great conglomerates general electric united technologies honeywell but nobody has a record like if you're in a big bureaucracy it can't change it's just too hard so you may say well i'd like to operate that way with no overhead and just a few people at headquarters and quick decisions that are good and but they're locked into a procedure like the army or navy with lots of meetings and people and they just can't get to where we are from where they are and they know that and so they just shrug their shoulders some people can do way better than i do by that method do i god bless them i don't envy them because i can't follow them well i think the modern berkshire is pretty much all a reflection obaron the businesses that he started with are gone most of them died under him and so he's created berkshire with nothing but a small bit of starting money well we used to have just 30 people in the cafeteria and now we have this huge public spectacle but i think it's helped the company it's i mean the big spectacle meetings it's helped the teaching part of warren's personality i think it's been very good for us remember warren used to volunteer as a teacher at the university of omaha he likes a certain amount of this he would hate doing it all the time no i think warren has his life just the way he wants it including the annual meeting celebration is part of making a group of people work well together it's a celebration well he came out of a private partnership where people he knew were trusting him a lot when he was obscure and he and he had his relatives in the partnership and they were not rich so he was always had a good stewardship idea and he just as it got bigger started treating everybody else the way he treated his relatives that is a very good idea i have a name for it i call it extended confusionism it's a very good idea to extend your confucianism certainly to suppliers and customers and so on it's so powerful i constantly talk about berkshire a seamless web of deserved trust it's such a simple idea then bureaucracy has so much dysfunction and evil buried in it even when the people in the bureaucracy are not awful people that running a system that has practically no bureaucracy at headquarters is hugely advantageous to berkshire i'll tell you how you do it have you ever seen a juggler juggle 25 milk bottles how did he ever get to do that the answer he started with one bottle and two then three and just kept doing it and pretty soon he was at 25 and that's the way we did it now there's a limit maybe the guy has to stop at 25. and i don't think that is happening to us yet our return is slowing down but berkshire is still a collection of businesses that are above the average quality of the indexes so it's a very respectable investment even though it can't work the kind of miracles it did when we were young that's a source of enormous satisfaction to both of us well i think our philosophy is basically pretty universal i don't mean it's the only way to get ahead because there are a lot of different ways to get ahead in a competitive scrambling world there are even some rogues that get ahead i have always loved the statement of one of the popes about cardinal reishlu what the pope said was if there is a god cardinal worship has much to answer for but if not he's done very well there are a lot of people who succeed like cardinal rischlow i don't want that kind of success but a lot of people get it we both love the investment game enables you to think about a whole lot of intertwined things and you get to watch a lot of people who are fabulously good at doing something who are your partners that is very pleasant it's a lot like being on a winning football team or something and of course looking for new things is a lot like hunting and fishing so we have a way of living that has both more pleasure and more achievement in it so why wouldn't we like it nobody wins the game we're all dead in the end you just win for you just surf along for a little while and then you lose he likes to win at bridge he likes to win a business he doesn't like to win at all costs he wants to win by playing by the rules and all that but yes warren likes to win warren is so competitive that if you watch his life you will find he doesn't play what he's not good at when he got old enough so he couldn't play good golf he quit and he would do the same thing if he his bridge skills went way down warren does not like to play games he's not good at oh warren has a streak of sympathy for people who are unfairly treated and get bad outcomes it's not like he spends a lot of time with such people on a one-to-one basis but he has he feels a sort of obligation to vote and help in a way that will be good for a lot of people that are way less fortunate than he is he's more so than i am i'm more philosophical about the inequalities of the world and i wouldn't waste a lot of time trying to fix something that the world has had for so long but one likes to vote to try and fix it he has more of it than other members of his family i worked for his grandfather it was not what drove his grandfather and you know i would say that orange is i give susie some credit for that susie was a wonderful mate for warren in all those early years and did him a world of good unconditional love and good company and loyal just all the nice things and susie had all these sympathy sympathies i give her credit for some of that in warren well you got to remember one key fact we both of us know that we've done better by having ethics well do you deserve credit for doing something you know is going to work better for you i don't want to take too much credit since i know clearly that it helps me instead of hurts me so i think the people who are ethical when they know it's going to hurt them deserve credit than people like me and warren who know all along the alex is going to help us in the end i think partly we both like it intrinsically so i don't think it's we're doing it just because it works better but we know it works better and so what's our real motivation i don't think people know their own motivations i don't think i know mine all i know is i end up there i know i don't deserve as much credit for it as somebody who does it when it hurts him because i'm doing it and i know it's going to help me nat over the long pole well you thought it was a good business run by good people it's exactly what we like and i think there was a little tinge of nostalgia it's a sort of a middle western company the burlington railroad was very important in omaha always the union pacific is headquartered in omaha and warren had always been a electric pain fanatic when he was young and i had electric trains no i think there was a little bit of nostalgia in it too he's always looking for foreign investments but what he's found mostly is united states investments and yeah he it has to be a pleasure for somebody raised in omaha to buy the burlington northern railroad it built the whole country it changed the whole world the railroads it we all remember them there was a time we used them instead of airplanes i can remember that time and i can remember the trips on the old pullman cars no i we both liked it but we wouldn't have bought it if the numbers hadn't been good by and large it's all been pretty pleasant and we've had ups and downs i have never heard warren complain about a down draft i've never heard him indicate that he regards the world has been being unfair to him even when susie died which really shook him up uh for quite a while even but he never complained never thought the world was being unfair when they took her away some people just naturally complain and other people are just naturally put their head down sail through it soldier through it warren and i believe in soldiering through without too much fuss i have the theory that the dumbest thing you can do in life is it ever feel like a victim and any politician that makes people feel like victims i automatically dislike i never saw any good to come on feeling like a victim even if you are a victim i think it's a mistake the chinese were living in poverty subsistence agriculture in caves and so on real poverty hundreds of millions of them and they worked their way out of poverty and look at them now how would it have worked and they said no we'll vote ourselves rich we'll just raise the minimum wage it just it's so much better to use the chinese way they just soldiered through and worked their way out well i've always had the idea that if you pretty much knew all the obvious things you should know in pretty much all the disciplines and use that knowledge routinely and didn't go crazy or irrational or go into anger or resentment or that it would work very well and so naturally i've operated that way all my life it was my way of getting ahead i didn't get ahead by specializing i got ahead by knowing the big ideas and all the disciplines and that works if you're a wide-ranging investor like me or warren it's not the way for most people to get ahead and so we were very lucky to have the outcomes we did i don't think either of us deserves huge credit for what happened we're in the right place with the right family values the right temperaments and i'm sure we had some favorable breaks but yes i was lucky and that my grandfather monger really believed down to the souls of his feet that rationality was a moral duty it's just the way he was put together and so it was very easy for me to pick up that idea but even for people with prepared minds so we got more we had better results than are at all common so there was some luck in it amazing how you can go through a modern textbook in psychology whole damn thousand pages and in a subject that's been worked over by generations of academicians you will not people you will not find people talking about the way that when you combine four or five psychological tendencies at once you get a lollapalooza effect but it's a hugely important idea and i don't know why a whole academic subject uh i think the reason they ignore it is it's hard to do their little experiments that prove it listen berkshire is a lollapalooza effect there are several factors that intertwine all moving in the same direction both of us prefer to make our money in association with people who merit but if a marketable security was available in gobs on a horrible mispriced basis in some lousy business i think we might still buy it things are cheap enough it sets the juices running i'm not sure we're right to do that but i think we might do it hasn't happened in a while so we've pretended to drift out of it but would we ever go back in well warren did those derivatives we sold puts on the indexes i think we'll make lots of billions of dollars out of that very easily i think both of us believe the world would be better off without those derivative markets but if they're there and it's mispriced we act they're for sale it's a public market there's no dishonor if you ask me as a voter if i would vote the derivative of markets like that one out of existence i'd do it tomorrow and warren wrote the best and only letter when the options exchanges were allowed he wrote a letter of objection it was like the only letter you really ought to dig that out and print it because it's it's it's he was so right and it was so early and nobody else was saying it so anything about buffett ought to go back and get his letter about the derivatives in the option mark he said we don't need these and even when 2007 came nobody dug it up and played it up big but you can do it you probably should

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