Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Of course. (1) they're hanging out because they respect each other's intelligence, but (2) Alice points out in The Snowball, there's actually a second reason why Warren likes Charlie so much. And that’s as Warren starts to get more and more known in Omaha and on the national scene for his investing track record, nobody's willing to tell him he's wrong anymore, everybody's super differential to him. As Alice puts it, "Charlie's deference to Warren was limited by his high opinion of himself." That's awesome. That is something that we start to see play out here in the late ‘60s where Buffett was famously very shy about ever sharing investment ideas. I think like, occasionally, at that annual group that he would convene of all the Ben Graham disciples, his fellow classmates, which he then started bringing Charlie into, they would occasionally sort of alluding to some investing ideas they were thinking about. Maybe this business is interesting, but they would kind of talk around it. Warren really found in Charlie someone that he could literally present, here's the name that I'm thinking about, and start talking through the business and look for holes in his thinking in a way that he never opened up to anyone else to ever say the name of a company he was thinking about buying. Yup, totally. At the same time, Charlie is starting to go down this different path in philosophy. Munger starts saying and he says to Buffett, he’s like, hey, you're obsessed with this Graham guy. I'll give it to you that that's a great strategy, it works. Graham at several points, this time Graham also lives in Southern California by now. He's like, hey, he's not God. There's a flaw in cigar butt thinking, which is that it was driven by the environment that Graham came of age in and the depression. The quote from Charlie is that the flaw is that Graham believes that the future is more fraught with hazard than ripe with opportunity. Here in the post-war era in the U.S. especially in California, it's super hard to look at the future and not see opportunity. Charlie starts ringing Warren about this. Here's a great quote, "Because Warren is so good at explaining Ben Graham, he's behaving like the old Civil War veteran. Who after a few minutes of ordinary conversation, always interjects, 'That reminds me of the Battle of Gettysburg.'" In other words, Warren is falling victim to one of the oldest human misjudgment tendencies in the book, the man with a hammer syndrome.…

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