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we have the mindset of the person that's buying the whole business at the price you would realize by multiplying the price we're paying by share by the number of outstanding shares and and we want the price for the whole business so calculated to look very attractive so we like buying individual shares at a price that's lower than we think a rational person would pay if he could buy the whole business yeah at a deeper level of generality if you have a passionate interest in in knowing why things are happening you always are trying to figure out the world in terms of why is this happening or why is this not happening that cast of mind kept over long periods and gradually improves your ability to to cope with reality uh and if you don't have that cast of mind i think you're you're destined probably for failure even if you've got a pretty high iq we have another question peter furlin from toronto mr munger you famously run investments through your mental checklist is there anything that you wish you had added to your checklist sooner well i'm constantly making mistakes where i can in retrospect realize that i should have decided differently and i think that that is inevitable because it's difficult to be a good investor and i'm pretty easy on myself these days i'm satisfied with the way things have worked out and i'm not gnashing my teeth that other people are doing better and i think that the methods that i've used including the checklists or the correct methods and i'm grateful that i found them as early as i did and the methods have worked as well as they have and i recommend that other people follow my example it reminds me of the key phrase in bunyan's pilgrim's progress he says my sword i leave to him who can wear it i'm afraid that's the way we all have to leave our swords we have to deal with things that we're capable of understanding and then once we're over that filter we have to have a business with some intrinsic characteristics that give it a durable competitive advantage and then of course we would vastly prefer a management place with a lot of integrity and talent and finally no matter how wonderful it is it's not worth an infinite price so we have to have a price that makes sense and gives a margin of safety considering the natural business statutes of life that's a very simple set of ideas and the reason that our ideas have not spread faster is they're too simple the professional classes can't justify their existence if that's all i have to say i mean it's also obvious and so simple what would they have to do with the rest of the semester well of course if a person with a chronic drunk we avoid him everybody has shortcuts to screen out certain hazards and we probably have more of those shortcuts than others and and uh and they've served us well over the years i we one of the great advantages of the way berkshire operates is that we associate with a lot of marvelous people and if you stop to think about it that is also true at the daily journal what little newspaper company has come through the crisis of it's destroying all the newspapers better than the little daily journal and we've had marvelous people here who helped us do it through very difficult times and one of them is jerry salsman and and jerry and i have been together how many years jerry well i think i had the right temperament and when people gave me a good idea and i could see it was a good idea i quickly mastered it and started using it and just used it for the rest of my life and you say that everybody does that in their education but i don't think everybody does it's such a simple idea and of course without the method of learning you're like a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest it's just not going to work very well take jerry you think the daily journal would have hundreds of millions of marketable securities now if jerry didn't know how to learn something new he didn't know one damn thing about the daily journal we made him ahead of it but he knew how to learn what he didn't know of course that's a useful thing ended and we put jerry in and he's made every decision wonderfully ever since that's our system somebody's tom irving used to say his system of management was delegate delegation just short of total abdication and that's the way we handle jerry well of course they bring in a brand new technology you don't understand at all you're something of a disadvantage and my advice would be if you're if you have a fixable disadvantage remove it and if it's unfixable learn to live without it what else can you do you fix what can be fixed and what can't be fixed you endure the other another idea that was hugely useful to me was that i listened in law school when some wag said a legal mind is a mind that when two things are all twisted up together and interacting it's feasible to think responsibly about one thing and not the other well i could see from that one sentence that that was perfectly ridiculous and it pushed me further into my natural drift which was into learning all the big ideas and all the big disciplines so i wouldn't be a perfect damn fool who was trying to think about one aspect of something that couldn't be removed from the totality of the situation in a constructive fashion and what i noted since the really big ideas carry 95 of the freight that wasn't at all hard for me to pick up all the big ideas in all the disciplines and make them a standard part of my mental routines once you have the ideas of course they're no good if you don't practice if you don't practice you lose it so i went through life constantly practicing this multi-disciplinary approach well i can't tell you what that's done for me it's it's it's made life more fun it's made me more constructive it's maybe more helpful to others it's made me enormously rich you name it that attitude really helps now there are dangers in it because it works so well that if you do it you will frequently find you're sitting in the presence of some other expert maybe even an expert that's superior to you supervising you and you will know more than he does about his own specialty a lot more you'll see the correct answer when he's missed that is a very dangerous position to be in you can cause enormous offense by helpfully being right in a way that causes somebody else to lose face and i never found a perfect way to to solve that problem i was a great poker player when i was young but i wasn't a good enough poker player so the people failed to sense that i thought i knew more than they did about their subjects and it gave a lot of offense now i'm just regarded as eccentric but there was a difficult period to go through in business and obviously opportunity costs which is a doctrine of economics really a doctrine of lifespanship are also very important and we've always had that kind of basic thinking of course capital isn't free and of course you configure cost of capital when you're borrowing money or at least you can figure cost of loans but the theorists had to develop some theory for what equity cost and there they just went bonkers they they said if you earned 100 on capital because you had some marvelous business your cost of capital was 100 and therefore you shouldn't look at any opportunity that delivered a lousy 80 that is the kind of thinking which came out of the capital assets pricing models and so forth that i've always considered inanity what is berkshire's cost of capital we have this damn capital it just keeps multiplying and multiplying what does its cost you have perfectly good old-fashioned doctrines like opportunity cost you know at any given time when we consider an investment we have to compare it to the best alternative investment we have at that time we had perfectly good old-fashioned ideas that are very basic to use but they weren't good enough for these modern theaters so they invented all this ridiculous mathematics which concluded that the companies that made the most money had the highest cost of capital well all i can say is it's not for us now the other half of that question you have perfectly good old-fashioned doctrines like opportunity cost you know at any given time when we consider an investment we have to compare it to the best alternative investment we have at that time we had perfectly good old-fashioned ideas that are very basic to use but they weren't good enough for these modern theaters so they invented all this ridiculous mathematics which concluded that the companies that made the most money had the highest cost of capital well all i can say is just not for us
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