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Matthew Monaghan from Palo Alto, California. Mr. Buffett, Mr. Munger, first of all, I want to thank you both for sharing your wisdom and knowledge so generously over the years. Although we have never met in person, I consider you both to be close mentors and I owe any success I have achieved in business to date to your teachings and philosophies.
So, thank you. Here is my question. For a 23- year-old guy with big ambitions, some starting capital, and, as you say, a genetic predisposition to disciplines like investments, mathematics, and technology. What significant areas of opportunity do you see for the next 50, or even 100 years? And if you were in my shoes, what would be your approach and methodology for truly learning, mastering, and conquering these areas to create tremendous value?
Well, I... I remain very... And frankly, when you get a chance to talk to someone like Laura Davidson, as I did when I was 20, I probably learned more from Laura Davidson in those four or five hours than I did in all of college, except, of course, accounting and a couple of other subjects. So you just have to absorb it all.
If you have the qualities discussed, you will see these areas for yourself over time. I mean, Charlie and I probably made money in a lot of different ways. Some of them we didn't even foresee 30 or 40 years ago. But we had the ability to recognize opportunities. We couldn't always recognize each of them, but we knew clearly when we understood what we were doing and when we didn't.
And we just kept looking. We remained curious about everything. You would know, for example, during the Long-Term Capital Management crisis, that there would be ways to make money. They were just going to show up, and all you had to do was read and think for eight to ten hours a day, and you would catch a lot of opportunities, probably a very high percentage of which would be good, and some of which would be just sensational.
So you can't plan everything in advance. You may not have a clear roadmap, but you can have a reservoir of knowledge by studying different types of businesses, different types of securities, markets in different places, and then you will notice a fair number of opportunities that will come along the way.
You won't notice every one of them. We missed all sorts of things. But the most important thing is to have an approach where you never do anything where you have a lot to lose. I mean, our best ideas weren't better than other people's best ideas. But we never had much that would set us back that far .
So we never took two steps forward and one step back. We probably took two steps forward and part of a step back. But avoiding disasters is very important, and it will be important in the future. I mean, you'll have your chance to participate in disasters. Charlie. Yes. And of course, the place to look when you're young is inefficient markets.
You shouldn't try to guess whether one pharmaceutical company has a better portfolio of drugs than another. When you're young, you should go where things are very inefficient. And you shouldn't try to guess whether the stock market will go up or whether long-term bond yields will change. I mean, you won't win anything in a game like that, but you can achieve a lot in games that very few people play, and where they might even be thinking wrongly about the subject matter.
RTC was a great example of a chance to make a lot of money. I mean, here's a seller of hundreds of billions of dollars of real estate, where the people selling it had no economic interest in it, were trying to get it done quickly, you know, and were selling at a terrible time when those who were prone to risky lending were no longer lending.
Those who were prone to risky equity investments in real estate were completely eliminated from the game . So you had a great background, and then you had an imbalance of intensity in analyzing the situations between the seller—the government, where a bunch of people had no economic interest and were probably looking to close the deal quickly—and the buyers, who were mostly cautious because the riskier players had gotten out of the game.
So, there was a huge amount of real estate. So you will get these opportunities, and you will get even more. I mean, there will be no shortage of opportunities in your life. Although there will be days when you will feel the opposite.
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