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we have to deal on things that were 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 in 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 vicissitudes 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 it's all so obvious and so simple what would they have to do with the rest of the semester oh yeah you've always been opportunistic what does that mean well it's Carlyle he said the task of man is not to see what lies dimly in the distance but do the duty that lies clearly at hand and we are like Carlyle do you see any great duties at hand right now no but I think we've been pretty good grasping things our duty impelled us to grasp and it's worked way better than master planning I have a deep distrust of master planning people get to believing the plan because they created it so that it is the kind of propensity to disbelieve that by changing your previous conclusions and we're very good at that thank God I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep saying when i naturally drift toward preferring one etiology over another and that as i say i'm not entitled to have an opinion on this unless I can save the arguments against my position better than the people do who are supporting I think only when I reach that state am I qualified to speak now you can say that's a too much of an iron discipline it's not too much of an iron isn't even that hard to do 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 they 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 so for 50 years you've continually read about these industries even though you have disdain for them yes I talked about patience I have red barons for 50 years in 50 years I found one investment opportunity embarrass other which I made about 80 million dollars almost no risk I took the 80 many nerves and gave it to lilo who turned it into so I have made four or five hundred million dollars so to reading back Barron's for 50 years and following me my idea now that doesn't help you very much does it I'm sorry but that's the way it really happened I didn't have a lot of ideas I didn't find them easily but I did pounce on one which one was right which idea was that it was a little Auto Maru Supply Company anyway it was it was a cigar but is that kmw no no no this was I forgotten the name I was but it was a little it was the mom rose shock absorber and all that stuff the stock was a dollar and the jungle bouncers paid eleven three eighths percent were 35 when I bought the junk bombs they paid me the thirty five percent they went right 207 let me call you nose and then they and the stock went from one to forty but of course I sold my stock at fifteen my advice to you is to learn sometimes to keep your life under a bushel one of my colleagues also uh number one is glass and law school the great success in life clerk for the Supreme Court etc but he knew a lot and he tended to show it as a very young lawyer and one day the senior partner he was working under called him in and said listen Chuck says I won't explain something to you so your duty under any circumstances is to behave in such a way that the client thinks he's the smartest person in the world you've got well any little energy or insight available after that use it to make your senior partner look like the smartest person in the world and only after you've satisfied those two obligation do you want your light to shine at all well that may have a very good advice for rising in a large firm it wasn't what I did I always obeyed the drift of my nature and other people didn't like it well I didn't need to be adored by everybody it was succeeding mightily on multiple fronts and it was cheap in relation to what was plainly going to happen that was a valuable insight there are times when even a company as big as coca-cola is too cheaply priced by the market considering what it's going to do for the shareholder and there are times when we can figure that out and there are times when we can't and the times when we can figure it out we tend to go in heavily for many many months we were buying as much coca-cola as we could buy roughly a third of the volume trading every day for months so we were very aggressive in buying into coca-cola another idea and by the way when I talk about this multidisciplinary attitude I'm really following a very key idea of the greatest lawyer of antiquity Marcus tell us Cicero and Cicero is famous for saying a man who doesn't know what happened before he's born goes through life like a child that is a very correct idea of Cicero's and he's right to ridicule somebody so foolish as not to know what happened before he was born but if you generalize Cicero as I think one should there are all these other things that you should know in addition to history are the big ideas it doesn't help you just to know them enough so you could prattle them back on an exam and get an A you have to learn these things in such a way there's a mental lattice work in your head and you automatically use them for the rest of your life if you do that I solemnly promise you that one day you'll be walking down the street and you look to your right and left you think my heavenly days I'm now one of the few most competent people of my whole age cohort I think our business experience helps our investment judgment and vice versa and so I have no problem with that what's happened of course is the investment portfolio we used to have these meetings decades ago there would be more in common stock value in the portfolio submerge sure than there was in the market capitalization of the whole country the whole company and that went on year after year after year that has radically changed now most of the value is in controlled businesses and the investment portfolio is something that looks more like the normal portfolio of an insurance company it's a good thing sure sure we always said that what we liked best was owning a wonderful business outright and second best we liked good ideas and securities that has never changed the skill that got purger through one decade would not have sufficed to get it through the next decade with the achievements made without Warren Buffett being a learning machine continuous learning machine the record would have been absolutely impossible the same is true at lower walks of life I constantly see people rise in life we're not the smartest sometimes not even the most diligent but they are learning machines they go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that habit help particularly when you have a long run ahead of you your life in the next three weeks would be more pleasant if you went on heroin but it would totally destroy you over the long pole and that's what an economy does when it allows itself to be seduced by the potential for an idiot boom into allowing all this gross immorality him this and this craziness to take over when I met Warren he immediately started telling me how much better his way of making a living was than mine and that I was too smart to stay in such a silly business's law practice when I could go into his business of running an investment partnership and it took me about two or three years to realize he was right it makes ask Warren how he wants to be remembered he wants to remember it as a teacher when the hell is saying that from the top of a company from a record like Warren's why wouldn't I like being associated with that ethos how do you want to be remembered well I have a little different twist I have less ambition than Warren at being a great teacher I am trying to emulate my great grandfather when he died died they said about him nobody can read the success so fairly one unwisely used it's a simple philosophy but what in Wall Street have worked better if more people had tried to imitate my great grandfather am
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