Charlie Munger DESTROYS Fake Gurus

if you take the modern world where people are trying to teach you how to come in and trade actively in stocks well i regard that as roughly equivalent to trying to induce a bunch of young people to start off on heroin it is really stupid and when you're already rich to make your money by encouraging people to get rich by trading and then there are people on the tv another wonderful place and they say i have this book that will teach you how to make 300 a year and all you have to do is pay

for shipping and i will mail it to you how likely is it the person who had suddenly found a way to make 300 a year we trying to sell books on the internet to you [Music] [Laughter] and it's ridiculous and yet i've described modern commerce and the people who do this all day think they're useful citizens the advertising agents invent the lingo and so insurance they say well they say the two people who shifted from geico to mcglott's insurance company save 400 each but they don't tell you is there only two such people in the

whole united states and they were both nuts but they mislead you on purpose and and i get tired of it and i don't think it's right that we deliberately mislead people as much as we do let me tell you another story that i think is an interesting one about the modern life but this goes back to a different time and this man has this wonderful horse it's just a marvelous horse got an easy gate and good looking and everything it just works wonderfully but also occasionally just gets so he's dangerous and vicious and causes enormous

damage and trouble and breaks arms and legs brothers rider and so on and he goes to the vet and say what can i do about this horse the vet says that's a very easy problem and i'm glad to help you because what should i do and the man says the next time your horse is behaving well sell it well think of how immoral that is and haven't i just described what private equity has to do when private equity has to sell something that's really troublesome they hire an investment banker and what does the investment banker

do he makes a projection you can't i have never seen such expertise in my whole life i just created in making projections in investment banking there is no business so lousy you can't get a wonderful projection and but is that a great way to make a living to have phony projections and use it to make money out of people you look right into the eyes of i would say no and by and large warren and i we never tried to make money out of the dumb say out of stupidity of our dumb buyers we tried

to make money by buying and if we were selling horse we didn't want to pretend it was a cure for arthritis and and and i think it's better to go through life our way instead of theirs i think it's always been this way i think there's always been chicanery think of the carnivals of the carney operator think how much trickier there is in a carny operation and people just seek out the weaknesses of their fellow man and take advantage and you have to get wise enough so you you avoid them all and you can't avoid

them if they're in your family i have no solution to that one but but where you have a fair choice there's just so many people that should be avoided my father had this best friend and client and he also had this other client who is a big blowhard and and he was always working for the big blowhard and he wasn't ever working for his wonderful clown whom i admired and i said why do you do this and he said charlie you idiot he says the big blowheart is an endless source of legal troubles he's always

in trouble overreaching and misbehaving and so forth where he says grant mcfaden treats everybody right the employees the customers everything he gets involved with some psychotic he walks over there and makes a grace election immediately a man like that doesn't need a lawyer and my father was trying to teach me something and it really worked i spent my whole life trying to be like grant mcfaden and i want to tell you it works it really works peter goffin is always telling me if the crooks only knew how much money you could make by being honest

they all behave differently warren has a wonderful thing i like he says you take the high road it's never crowded