A Conversation with Charlie Munger and Michigan Ross - 2017

Charlie was born in Omaha Nebraska January 1st 1924 he graduated from Omaha Central High School and 41 attended the University of Michigan for one year and Caltech for a year I believe as well under the Air Force auspices he served as a second lieutenant as a meteorologist in the Air Force in World War two he received a JD degree magna laude from Harvard Law School without having an undergrad degree he practiced law in Los Angeles from 1948 to 65 and during that time he helped found a incredibly successful a law firm called Munger Tolson Olsen since 65 he's been engaged in a very variety of businesses and after 1975 primarily as officer and director of Berkshire Hathaway Charlie's the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway under Warren Buffett and he's the chairman of the daily journal Corporation the public companies of which he's a director or Berkshire Hathaway The Daily Journal and Costco Wholesale company mr. Munger became a trustee of the Good Samaritan Hospital in 79 and served as the chairman since November 1987 he was a trustee and chief financial officer of Planned Parenthood Los Angeles from 1967 to 1993 and he's the founder and president of the Alfred C Munger foundation he is the author of poor Charlie's Almanac which I think is a must read for anybody who wants to be in business so please welcome Charlie and Scott [Applause] thank you John for those very kind words and wonderful introduction first of all I just want to welcome all of you one of the luxuries of this job as Dean of Michigan Ross is the opportunity to travel the world and engage with our alumni our students our prospective students our community broadly the people make the place and this place is really special because our people are really special and so I want to thank all of you for coming out this evening tonight I've got the the privilege and the honor of sharing the stage with with Charlie who needs no introduction for all of you he's been a true champion and advocate for the University of Michigan for many years if you were to study at the law school you would live and study in the Munger residences which is one of the most innovative in the country because what it does is it takes students from different disciplines and puts them together in a living learning environment and that really amplifies the strength of the University of Michigan where you have 130 programs 103 of which are in the top ten that breath of excellence is not matched in the country except one school here on the west coast so it's an honor to have you here this evening and for on behalf of the entire University thank you very very much for all that you've done yes please so Charlie as I was as I was on the flight over this morning I was thinking about and preparing for our conversation this evening and as I went through my notes I realised that we share an admiration for a historical figure in Ben Franklin absolutely and and and Ben wants once quoted that there are two things that you can do in life you can write something that's worth reading or you can do something that's worth writing about and you've done both of those oh but not like Franklin and so a couple hours ago I went on Amazon books and I just typed in Charlie Munger in the search field and over a hundred books have been written about Charlie and my favorite title was the towel of Charlie Munger which was which was pretty interesting and and so what I thought we would do this evening for our conversation is really just explore your life and many of the moments in your life that have shaped how you think and and and what you've been able to accomplish and I'll ask a number of questions and at some point hopefully we'll have time to open it up and and ask some of the questions that you all are interested in as well so far were two for two in Bitcoin so that's that gives you a sense of what's on people's minds but but I'd like to go back to to your early childhood in Omaha Nebraska so you were raised in Omaha and what are some of the moments in your experience in Omaha that you really find memorable that shaped you and who you are today and how and how you think can you talk a little bit about growing up in Omaha well yes I was I really liked Omaha it was a size where I knew a lot of the people no matter you know what they did I wasn't lost and I great metropolis and I was very fortunate in my nature of my parents my parents friends and I was fortunate in the public schools I attended were pretty remarkable by the standards of the time and of course most of my schooling was in the Great Depression but that means I'm one of the very few people it's still alive who deeply remembers the Great Depression and that's been very helpful to me it was so extreme that people like you have just no idea what the hell was like it was really there was just nobody had any money the rich people didn't have any money people would come and beg for a meal at the door and we had a hobo jungle not very far from my grandfather's house and I was forbidden to walk through a good amount that walked through it all the time and I was safer in that hobo jungle the depths of the 30s when people are starving practically and I am walking around my own neighborhood now in Los Angeles at night the world has changed on that you'd think the crime would be less but it was the crime was pretty low in those days so anyway I saw I had a very unusual bunch of experience to be to go through civilization and various phases including the greatest recession well I say it's one of the greatest recessions and 600 years in the english-speaking world it was really something and it was very interesting to watch and and also to watch it fixed it was fixed by the accidental Keynesianism of world war ii very interesting and Hitler had fixed the Great Depression in in Germany by the deliberate Keynesianism but he wasn't doing to stimulate the economy he wanted to get even with all the people he hated but he borrowed all this money and created all these armaments in Hitler's Germany by 1939 was the strongest economic power in Europe but nobody else was close so and you wouldn't understand that as well as I do they hadn't lived through it he just could see the place gaining traction more and more and more more and pretty soon it was fixed and and and of course that was in those days there were all kinds of people most of my family for they believed in hard money based on gold of not much welfare and so on and so on so they I was raised among fairly backward people by modern standards but they were backward in kind of a self-reliant way that I think was helpful I've never regretted that I wasn't raised in a more liberal establishment I had a liberal aunt my mother's cousin but you I was and she was the first second lady Dean at the University of Chicago and she done her thesis on emissions in the coal mines and of course she was a screaming leftist I would be extreme leftist who I observed the way the coal miners of yesteryear were treated you couldn't be a human being with any decency on you without feeling that it was deeply improper to have the misery that great and haven't manipulated for the benefit of the minoan race and so forth but she sent me all these left-wing bangs books one every Christmas and I always thought she was a little nuts which shows that if sometimes a very vivid extreme acts you know evidence misleads you I'm a deeper reality you you've got to be a guard on that against that all your life in fact the whole trick in life is to get so that your own brain doesn't mislead you and and I have found that just a lifelong fun game and I can't remember a time I wasn't doing it I was not a prodigy or anything like that but I was I was a prodigy and having adult interests I was under and what worked and what didn't and why and I could see that very eminent people that I loved and revered we're nuts in some ways and I would to say well I certainly like dr. Davis but he's a little naughty in one way and I'm not gonna be that way like that yeah so I was very judgmental and I think that helped me also help me that I kept changing my judgments as I learned more and more facts came in and that created lifelong habits that were very very useful another thing that really helped me is protect me on my father's side of the family my paternal grandfather was the only federal judge in Lincoln Nebraska capital city of Nebraska and he'd been there forever and he stayed there forever after that I think when he left he was the longest-serving federal judge in the country and he was a brilliant man and he'd risen from nothing he was a child of two impoverished schoolteachers and when he was raised in a little town in Nebraska they gave him a nickel to go buy the meat and he'd go to the butcher shop and he would buy the parts of the animal nobody else would eat and that's what to Scalia schoolteachers lived on in those days and the very indignity of it bothered him so much that he just determined to get out of poverty and and never go back and he did he got a head like Abe Lincoln educated himself and lawyers offices and so on he had to leave college because he couldn't pay the tuition anymore and but he had you gated himself and since he was utterly brilliant it wasn't all that hard and he had an attitude that was pretty damned extreme I would say his had it was you have a moral duty to make yourself as a unag neurontin the son stupid as you possibly can and that it was you're pretty much your highest moral duty maybe taking care of your friend we came first but but in the ranks of moral obligations quasi related well yeah he was conventionally religious so it may have been a religious duty to him but he he really believed that the rationality was a moral duty and he worked at it and he scorned people who'd on the other hand as a judge he started with the idea why would anybody rob a train or whatever a federal crime on those days and he was pretty hard on people who did it and I noticed as he got older and older and older he was willing to call a man a good man on easier terms then he started out with him and I think that was a correct a correct development in my by the way when he relaxed a little he was still pretty tough but he did relax a little which I thought was appropriate and but it was but influenced by such people and when the thirties came one son-in-law was a musician of course he couldn't make a living so my grandfather didn't have that much money sent him to pharmacy school carefully pecking a profession that couldn't fail and found him a bankrupt pharmacy to buy and loaned him the money and my uncle was suing prosperous and remained prosperous the rest of his life my other uncle at a bank in Strasburg Nebraska but there were nine hundred and sixty-eight people in Strasburg and there were two national banks and the capitalization of my uncle's bank was $25,000 and of course he was a lovely man but he was an optimist and a banker should not be an optimist and when they closed the banks in 1933 the bank examiners came in and they said you can't reopen and it was the only business he had well judge bunker had always saved his money and he had a lot of good first mortgages on homes occupied by teetotaling German butchers and people he'd carefully pitch of course he never had a default I was in the right neighborhood the people were sober during hard working and and so what my grandfather did is taking a third of his good mortgages which is all he had and put him into the bank and took all the lousy assets out of the bank so he saved two out of three of his of his children and I thought it was a pretty good thing to do and very sure the way he does and he actually got most of his money back ten or fifteen years later out of the assets of the bank when World War that was a good lesson on the other side my grandfather on the other side his main business had gone broke in 1922 with all the other wholesale dry goods houses and what he did his son broke and he cut his house in half and moved that family in and the other family the guy was an honors graduate of the Harvard School of Architecture and he was very prosperous in the 20s in Omaha and had a wonderful life and the 30s came the total building permits and I Mahal with some 90 $25,000 a month and that was for furnace repairs or something there was just no work none zero he moved to California and he lived for several years and he got finally he got the County of Los Angeles to hire this great Harvard architect and his he got 108 Oh 8 a month after deductions and they had him do drafting work but they classified him as a laundry room him to save money and he could actually rent a house for $25 and feed himself under an old car he could live on $109 a month amazing how poor everybody was and what happened to that grandfathers along came the FHA and they had a competitive civil service examination he was a very brilliant man of course he was first in the exam and that made him a chief architect for the FHA in Los Angeles where he spent the rest of his life but I watched all this family coping with all as difficulty and I'll say this it sounds awful but they weren't all that unhappy you can cope pretty well because you get used to it that's a nice thing about the human condition I mean you get to be my age you got a lot of horrible things to get used to it's just one new indignity all the time a friend of mine says a good day when you're old is when you wake up in the morning and nothing new hurts [Laughter] that's my experience in Omaha but that background of these all these people were educated and civilized and generous and decent and a lot of them had good senses of humor and it was a pretty damn good place to grow up in and my memory is of being surrounded by a lot of very fine people and I think the whole thing was privileged I look at my background is absolutely privileged I'm proud of being an Omaha boy I sometimes use the old saying they got the boy out of Omaha but they never got them all out of the boy and and so all those old-fashioned values family comes first be in a position so you can help others when troubles come prudent sense of a moral duty to be reasonable more important than anything else more important than being rich more important than being important an absolute moral duty because none of my intelligent relatives suffered terribly because they didn't advance higher right yeah one of the things I'm fascinated by is I mean this was in the 20s and 30s in the level of detail that you recall about their experiences and how that shaping your experience is I'm trying to give people a flavor of something that nobody else can remember I mean you're you're you're you're a student of the people that you're that you're experiencing so so you grow up in Omaha Nebraska you find yourself in Ann Arbor Michigan how does that happen very simple I wanted to go to Stanford and my father said to me Charlie I was the only son to two sisters he says I've got two daughters they educated right after you I don't have unlimited money he says I will send you to Stanford if it really means a great deal to you but I'd rather you pick a university in the Midwest much better than mine which was the University of Nebraska and that was obviously gonna be Michigan what was I gonna say well screw you sent me to stammers well I didn't say that I went to Michigan so you come to me I have never regretted that at all at Stanford people came to Stanford in the 30s with their string of polo ponies and it was a very upscale fraternity sorority culture I used to call it the co-educational Princeton of the West and and people loved it and so forth but literally you call it a Stanford with a string of polo ponies just say I'm bringing back to you young people time you can't remember was it you ever know in college that came with a string of polo ponies not very many people know they go they'd be in the ROTC but they had their own string of polo boys you could win better if you have your own string so you come to Michigan and you study math for a year yes but I don't get credit for that when I was young I could get an A in any mathematics course without doing any work at all and so I always took math because it meant that I could literally I never didn't any problems that's I just did the math and and so I should not get credit as some budding mathematician I was choosing what for me was the easiest way to think about what I want to do instead of what somebody else want me to do come to find out it ended up being a subject that has I think paid some dividends hugely yeah but but but this will interest you in this world where a people have all these algorithms and computer science and fancy math and so forth neither Warner eyes ever have ever used any fancy math and business and neither did Ben Graham who talked Lauren everything I've ever done in business could be done with the simplest algebra and geometry in addition moba visions of what I never used calculus for any practical work in my whole damn life I was a perfect whiz at it when they taught it to me and by the way since I never touched calculus not one after I was 19 years old I've lost it it's the the symbols would mystify me and but I think you'll find that if you really know the basic stuff its enormous ly useful and only a very few people are gonna need any calculus so you study math at Michigan then the war comes calling yeah you moved to California and you study meteorology well that was because I was too dumb to do what I should have done with with my background I should have gone to the naval ROTC because I hated infantry or DC which had done for years open high school rising to be second lieutenant which is a very low rank and of course that was about five feet - I got my growth late so I was I didn't was not your ideal of a manly soldier in high school yeah so when you went to Harvard Law why-why-why law well my grandfather and father had been lawyers and I knew I didn't want to do everything else it's very simple I didn't want to be a doctor I didn't want all the blood and misery and so forth and the repetitive work I knew I didn't want to go to the bottom of a big organization and crawl my way up I'm a natural contrary and that was not going to work for me and I found that people could tell me when I thought they were idiots and that is not a way to rise in a big organization and so I couldn't do that and so now I'm left with with law I admired my father and grandfather and a good life for them so I naturally drifted into it I think people are still going to law school for that reason it's the least bad of options considering their interests and ability I guess now people go to business school some of them many of the people in this room I think are gonna go to business school the least bad of their options and all I can say that that's the way it worked for me and it'll probably work for you it worked out okay you were okay so I had to leave the profession well it was a dumb perversion for me so so that's actually what I want to ask so you moved to California you actually start a law firm and then practice law for some period of time I had no alternative and then you had an army of children almost immediately I painted myself in quite a corner yeah so zero choice is pretty powerful yeah for sure House of course so so you practice law and then you leave law in the firm that you helped found and move over to investments well but that's actually an that sounds miraculous in fact it was rather interesting I probably got paid about $350,000 in my first 13 years of law this total and I had an army of children and no capital to start with and when I chose this alternative career I had over $300,000 in liquid instruments so I had and that was 10 years of living expenses so I was not a courageous bench or some admirable man I was a cautious little squirrel saving up more nuts than I really needed it and not going very deep into my pile of nuts and so that was it wasn't that courageous and I kept one foot in the law firm while I tried my capitalist career but as soon as the capitalist career succeeded I intended to lift that second foot because I recognized that the potential of law practice as I saw it then I didn't anticipate the boom that came to the big firms I just saw this being more difficult I wanted more independence though it was going to have her as a lawyer I hated sending other people invoices and needing money from richer people I thought it was undignified I wanted my own money not because I loved either social prestige I wanted the independence well and when you so you founded wheeler mongering company so that was the investment firm yes and for a noble and I went and I v real estate projects I did both side by side for a few years and very few years I had three or four million dollars and for a number of years you outperform the market 2x 3x and so why did you then leave Willer monger and company and then move to now what you're doing well I had three or four million dollars which was a lot of money to them and I also knew how to handle that three or four million dollars very well by that time and so I I knew I didn't need to get fees and right some other investors and I found that when you got into things like this 70-64 7475 crunch which was the worst since the 30s I didn't suffer I knew everything was going to work out but the quoted prices of these things really went down to ridiculous levels and some of my investors I knew were suffering you know I needed the money and of course I have enough of fiduciary gene that that pained me greatly and so I said it's just it's like them my grandfather once they asked you how he felt wouldn't my aunt divorced my uncle he said I feel just the way I did when they left my carbuncle and that's the way I had a carbuncle my producer gene was giving me pain and I last the carbuncle I just lived on my own money no fees no overrides no celery just seemed more manly to do when I knew it would work and so at what point did you meet Warren and 1959 and and so where did Berkshire Hathaway come from in terms of this partnership that you all have now had for two decades well Warren had been taught by Ben Graham to buy things for less than they were worth no matter how lousy the business was you can't imagine a more lousy business than New England textile mills because textile is a congealed electricity and the electricity rates in New England were about 60 percent higher than TVA rates so it was absolute inevitable certain liquidation no warrant should have known better than to buy into a totally doomed enterprise it was so damn cheap we get bad at a big discount from liquidating value so he bought a big giant fire all the business but the business was gonna die so the only way to go forward from there was to wring enough money out of this declining take those tax little business to have more money than the paid to get in and use it to buy something else that's a very indirect way to proceed and I would not recommend it to any of you just because we did some dumb thing that worked you don't have to repeat our path and and of course we eventually learned not to buy these cigar butts when they were cheap and do these painful liquidations and and and stead buy better businesses that's the main secret of Bircher the reason that Berkshire has been successful was the big conglomerate more successful than any other big conglomerate so far as I know any other big conglomerate in the world the reason it's been successful as we try and buy things that aren't gonna require much managerial talent at headquarters everybody else thinks they've got a lot of managerial talent at headquarters and that's a lot of hubris if the business is lousy enough it gets a wonderful manager the business allows the reputation of the manager has a good reputation it's the business of the river it's the reputation of the business that's going to remain intact you can't fix these really lousy businesses you can wring the money out whatever comes in liquidation and do something else with it but most lousy businesses can't be fixed but at the time Warren was that's what he was doing and so yes how did you convince him I helped him he bought a windmill company in a little town in Nebraska and Warren didn't know anything about running a windmill company why because it was cheap he said what do you do why can't you fix my windmill company who can you get to help me I said I've got just the man for you and so one of my old colleagues from transformer business who was an accountant I said he will fix your windmill company and Warren was desperate he he didn't he just hired him on the spot and Harry walked in the first day this little town this big collection of windmills and so forth and a whistle blew and the whole plant stopped for 15 minutes what the hell is this well it's a respect for the time it has a funeral we blow this whistle and stop for 15 minutes there he said that'll be the last time and he just approached everything that way and of course nothing he did is he he cut away all of fat that he didn't need and then he found there were certain parts where we're the sole supply and he raised all the price of those parts you can see what a business genius we are so how did you convince Warren to stop buying the bad apples and start buying the good apples you think Warren Warren he gave me credit he was gonna learn it anyway he just made so much money in this other stuff and he'd been taught it by Ben grander it was hard for him to quit when he was just cleaning money but he saw the point and well you couldn't scale that business and and and I was kind of scroungy and unpleasant when you're firing people it's when they all wants to do that so so we just run no money out and bought better businesses and we've been doing it ever since coming to business not as business school graduates but as people who had owned portfolios or securities we thought like capitalists because we were always in the shoulder mindset a lot of people running the businesses think like careerists and believe me you got to think like a grace to some extent if you're in a career but it also helps to look at the business strategy problems as though you're an owner and so my advice to you is you don't be never get to be a career so much you don't see it from the owners point of view that's what General Motors did they had a bunch of careers and an owner would have seen immediately that situation was hopeless and they just romped through it with a lot of denial and Sue Petty and pompous and of course they went bankrupt the mightiest company in the world went bankrupt and and none of those hotshot executives thought like an owner they would have seen that it was hopeless so Charlie one of the things I've always been fascinated it was hopeless the way they were handling it well with with Berkshire in the way that you all manage both headquarters and the businesses that you own you are putting talent in place who think like shareholders not careerist so how do you when you're buying a business how do you or bringing talent into an existing business how do you evaluate talent to see are they going to think more like a shareholder as a private equity frequently buy a business where the founder is going to leave then they go out on our talent to run it that is a tough way to make a buck and I don't like it we generally buy with the talent in place not maybe some guy in the number two place and we put him in the number one place but we very seldom like an ardent I can't think of any place where we bought something and put somebody in after Harry bottle and no we don't do that and and it's amazing how long we have some of those people stay Byrne always says we can't we can't teach the new dogs the old tricks what and what's what's what's the implication of not being able to teach the old dogs new tricks or new tricks to old dogs when if we look at what's happening in business today what we see is exactly a teach the old tricks to the young dogs that's that's what we found and and when we keep the old dog in plays [Laughter] but that's not that's not the norm right I mean if we look around like the norm in life it may not be our practices may not be the norm but normally it's very hard to get the you got a wise old dog get a young dog they could match him that's hard by definition he's survived a big culling process I mean he's he's unique and he's got a record to prove it and by the way everybody thinks you can judge people by an interview and of course you know who you like you know you don't like but everybody over estimates how much you can tell in prediction by meeting somebody we all like to think that we have that capacity but it's a vastly stupid type of overconfidence the paper record has about three times the predictive value of your impression interview and of course we're buying great paper records it's so simple but it's it's fascinating to me if we look around business generally the movement of people across firms and there's always new dogs and you've taken a contrarian position to that and managed Berkshire differently oh it doesn't like work of course we're still hiring young dogs and the end of these businesses but it's amazing how much of the record of Berkshire has come from the old dogs who are in the business when we buy them you can't believe how good those people have been there's one huge exception in the new dog department I almost despise the business of executive search because I find that they really want to sell you the best that's available even if there's no damn good and I don't like that but the best single expense that Mercer ever had as we paid an executive recruiting firm to find us a chain to come in a little tiny insurance operation you have any experience of insurance at all he was an honors graduate of the main technical in India it was a very smart man but he came in and created our whole region it's the only big business we created from scratch and how he did the whole damn thing of course he talked with Warren every night and so it was like father and son married this is a very Confucian company and and but that was unbelievable so we heard an executive recruiter here brings us in India dad no experience at all insurance he talks about it old man every night and it's now by far the biggest reinsurance business in the world that's been a gold mine there's at least 60 billion dollars in Berkshire of net worth that Ajith has created that we would not have created without him Wow and the value is way more than 60 billion I mean there's I mean there's that much an extra just liquid net worth but the value of the business is way more than 60 billion Wow so Charlie I'm gonna I'm going to turn to a few questions from the audience as we as we start to to wrap up probably half my questions here are about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency I could answer those very quickly I think it's perfectly assam i and even pause to think about them you know it's one thing to think that gold has some marvelous store value because man has no way of inventing a more gold or getting it very easily so it has the advantage of rarity believe me man is capable of somehow creating more Bitcoin they tell you they're not going to do it but they mean they're not gonna do it and that's they want to that's what they mean when they say they're not going to do it they hear their rules and they can't do it don't believe them when there's enough incentive bad things will happen it's bad people crazy bubble bad idea luring people into the concept of easy wealth without much insider work that's the last thing on earth you should think about if it worked it would be bad for you could try to do it again it's totally insane and by the way I've just laid out a wonderful life lesson for you give a whole lot of things a wide berth they don't exist you know crooks crazies egomaniacs people full of resentment people full of self-pity people who feel like victims there's a whole lot of things that aren't gonna work for you figure out what they are and avoid them like the plague and one of them is Bitcoin and the worst thing would happened if you won because then you do it again it's total insanity and it's so easy to simplify life from just all these things there beneath you yeah I don't even know people are crowding Bitcoin I don't wanna know my address so Charlie I kind of people Charlie what I hear you saying is you're not going to be investing in Bitcoin is that that's fair I think you're severe so so let me move to a similarly maybe controversial topic I you know if you read the news recently but there's a lot of tax policy conversation going on both here in California and and nationally as well what do what's your thoughts on where this ends up in terms of the policy I think we will get a tax bill I think they will squeak it through and they'll make whatever adjustments they have to to get the last few votes I don't think it's a bit crazy to give this extra two thousand a year to all those people who make $70,000 a year and have a lot of children that strikes me as a it's good politics and probably good policy I also do not think it is crazy to reduce the corporate income tax on the C corporation and if you look at the world a lot of the places that it worked best including Singapore and so forth have that policy and may even have good macroeconomic consequences a lot of the people who are screaming about it and are so sure it won't work they may not be right it may actually work pretty well it causes the capital values of the companies to come up and there's a wealth effect from the increased market value of all the companies everybody recognizes there's an effect but people some people say it's small and some people say it's going to be large and I'll tell you what they all have in common none of them know it is not totally inconceivable little war pretty well and with so much of the world doing well with similar tax policy and of course the Democrats go berserk on this subject and but I think I think they're wrong it may actually help them yeah so I'm I don't I don't I'm not sure it'll work it may not but it's not totally crazy well it reminds me of a piece of advice that they you've you've offered and given to me which is you know people often have a point of view and the danger in and having that point of view is you start to assume with certainty that you're right absolutely totally crazy and and and I think what your point of view is is you need to have a point I've just Deven here's a very important subject I'm thinking about all my life yes for my opinion I don't really know how well is gonna work I don't think anybody else does either I think it'll work to some extent but how much I don't know now is it unfair well the corporations are by and large owned by a bunch of charitable endowments and by a bunch of pension plans and the whole world is going into a world where they're trying to have the business interests of the company support their huge pension obligations can bigger all the time China is trying to do exactly what the Republicans are China wants to have the main businesses in China owned more by the pension plans and the stocks to do well I don't think China's crazy to have that I don't think you're Republicans are crazy either it could work pretty well and and and it's not just some evil thing that people are cooking up it's a disagreement between people and both sides who have violent hatreds and contempt for the other side they're wrong it's a disagreement on policy that ought to be civilized when I see Congress on my television set and the degree of hatred they have utter contempt I mean really serious way more than as usual it's it's evil to hate that much it's a mistake to hate that much that much hatred will turn it's always been true as anger comes in reason leaves it's a truism so do you want to adopt a political point of view or you're angry all the time if you do welcome to the house of misery and pretty LOI worldly achievement to boot so if that's what you want I you just if I found out how to do it behave like those people you see on television well the other thing that is both parties by the way the other thing that's true going back to any earlier comments is the difference difference between a careerist mindset and a service or shareholder mindset we're in politics we have the emergence of a careerist mindset that is shaping how people behave because they're trying to survive only that they have a groupthink just as the Moonies go crazy because they hang around together sort of our politicians yeah yeah do you want to go crazy is that what your ambition in life you start with some advantage just make yourself a violently believing politician on either side you'll turn your brain into cabbage you know I got one brain why would you want to turn in a cabbage so Charlie I've got a question here what's the new amazing technology that you're most excited about well I couldn't get not not to get very excited about I think that technology changes the world that reminds me the other thing if I ask you what was the biggest the worst single mistake in the work of Adam Smith you know I know I'd get oh I don't see everybody big eyes lighting up the biggest mistake in the work of Adam Smith he was totally right about markets and so on and the advantages of trade division of labor and so forth what he missed was how much the steady advance of technology would advance wealth and standards of living he in the 1700s was living not to much differently than the way they lived in the Roman Empire and he just missed it but and there in fact had been huge improvements in technology but he just missed that he wasn't very technically minded and it was really stupid and now I ask you a harder question what was the worst mistake David Ricardo made I'll bet the Dean can't answer this question I'm not going to ask you to try I'll tell you the answer I'll tell you the answer David Ricardo missed he got the first-order consequences of trade perfectly right and it was not an obvious insight and it was a great achievement which is yeah but he didn't think about the second-order consequences he wasn't mathematical enough to see and he wasn't mathematical to think what would happen in one country had way higher living standards in another like Adam Smith he missed in the main issue in a place like the United States is if you have an advanced nation and some other nation which is numerous but the people of any are better on average than yours in terms of their innate quality which i think is roughly true of China and and and they're in poverty living in caves and they're caught in a Malthusian trap and you got an advanced economy and you suddenly go into free trade what is going to happen is Ricardo program both sides are going to live better right but the people here that are assimilating all great economies of the world and say they're going to go away faster so you go up two percent a year and they go up twelve and pretty soon the other dominant nation in the world and you aren't well are you really better off well the answer is no and we're car don't ever figure out any of that stuff I'm so I'm telling you that so that you can fix your inadequate knowledge of Ricardo and and but one of the interesting problems of that is you can't understand Ricardo properly and thinking about the United States visa fee free trade with China without thinking about the tragedy of the Commons because if we had the only nation in the world except for China we could say won't trade with them we'll just leave them in their damned agricultural poverty and we'll just you know and we could probably have done that well the whole rest of the world will trade or they're gonna rise anyway so we have any power to to hold back the the rise of China by not trading with him so we had to do what we did and once you do that now there going to be a greater power than we are and the two of us are gonna be big enough so we can accomplish pretty gently anything we both want to do so we have to be friendly with China so you can imagine how I like Donald Trump complaining about these Chinese it's really still but it's a compulsory friendship it's a compulsory friendship you you believe out of your mind to do anything else why wouldn't you want to have an intimate friendly relationship but the biggest other power in the whole damn world particularly when they got what's atom bombs it's it's it's just naughty we have no alternative but to do this and when that happens you're gonna get a certain amount of misery at the people who are competing with the Chinese as a race of poverty with trade and so forth that was inevitable it's not the follow once youíve evil Republicans who don't love the poor that is just total balderdash it just happened and we didn't have all these choices so Charlie in Retton wrapping up we've got I don't know roughly 250 300 people in the room tonight and many of them looking at their futures their careers with many decades ahead of them I wish I had many decades I'd trade I'd trade some large numbers if I could just buy some more I think spectrums what as you look back on your life experience what's the what's the most important piece of advice that you would offer everyone in the room tonight as they look forward and into their futures well or a few obvious ones they're all ancient Ben Franklin has married just like the most important decision you have your business career it'll do more for you good or bad than anything else Ben Franklin had the best advice ever given on marriage you said keep your eyes wide open before marriage and half shut thereafter it's amazing how if you just get up every morning and keep plugging and have some discipline and keep learning and it's amazing how it works out okay and I don't think I don't think it's wise to have an ambition to be present in the United States or a billionaire or something like that because the odds are too much against you much better to aim low I did not intend to get rich I wanted to get independent just overshot [Laughter] and by the way while you're clapping some of the over shooting was accidental there's something there's a big you can be very deserving and very intelligent very disciplined but there's also a factor of luck that comes into this thing and the people will get the good the outcomes that seem extraordinary though the people who have discipline and intelligence and good virtue plus a hell of a lot of luck why wouldn't the world work like that so you shouldn't give credit for the unusual a lot of the people my friend of mine said about a colleague of his in his fraternity he says old George was a duck sitting on a pond and they raised the level of a pond there are a lot of people would just walk into the right place and rise and then and there are a lot of very eminent people who have many advantages and they've got one little flaw or one bit of bad luck and they they're mired in misery all their lives but that makes it interesting to have all this variation well Charlie on behalf of everyone here thank you your your wisdom I often say as an educational institution we not only can provide people with knowledge but the most important thing we can do is is give them wisdom and judgment and your comments I know for me and I expect for everyone in this room tonight have added to our wisdom and our judgment and also inspiring at the same time thank you very much you

Channel: Ross School of Business

Views: 497,588

Rating: 4.8466172 out of 5

Keywords: Ross, MBA, business school, university of michigan, go blue, wolverines, RSB, ross school of business, michigan ross, michiganross, Ross business, Business, School

Id: S9HgIGzOENA

Length: 55min 39sec (3339 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 20 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/finfun123]

Charlie and Warren are a competitive advantage to the USA. Goldmines of Wisdom.

[u/TheRocknD69]

Is there a transcript of this? Thanks in advance.

[u/FelineFranktheTank]

“Law is a fine hobby”

[u/macklemores_hair]

really enjoyed this! wish i could have been there.

[u/augustabound]

Uncle Charlie needs to up his sock game.