The Best of The Warren & Charlie Show: "Buffett & Munger Unscripted"
"Buffett and Munger have covered a lot of ground over the decades — and unless you have a photographic memory, there are likely dozens of great discussions and quotes that you no longer remember."
I sometimes forget that CNBC’s archive of Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meetings is a relatively new thing. That, for decades, we didn’t have ready access to these videos and transcripts at a moment’s notice.
If you didn’t make the annual pilgrimage to Omaha, you were out of luck.
Sure, there were occasionally written reports from attendees and other secondhand sources — but those could never quite capture the full breadth of wit and wisdom on display by Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.
That all changed, though, in 2018.
Like manna from the heavens, Berkshire handed over decades’ worth of recordings from its AGMs dating back to 1994. At the risk of grave hyperbole, it was a bit like discovering the Berkshire version of the Library of Alexandria — and everyone, all over the world, could access it for free.
(Yes, in the space of one paragraph, I compared video recordings of an investors meeting to the divine gift of food and the lost Library of Alexandria. I do understand how crazy that makes me sound.) 🤪
Now, hundreds of hours of video — containing thousands of thought-provoking questions and answers from Buffett and Munger — sit at our fingertips.
How best to sift through and digest all of this content?
That’s where Buffett & Munger Unscripted steps in…
Figuring out how to handle the firehose of information that the typical Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting provides is a daunting task. When I’m in the middle of putting together an AGM At-A-Glance, I sometimes question my sanity. The questions are so diverse — and the answers so deep and thorough — that any cutting or summarizing can feel akin to sacrilege. And I only do one year at a time!
In Alex Morris’s new book, Buffett & Munger Unscripted, he actually tackles 31 of them — each and every Berkshire AGM from 1994 to the present.
Across 473 pages, he gathers Buffett and Munger’s remarks from these meetings and organizes them by topic for easy reference. These run the gamut from value investing to capital allocation to Berkshire itself — as well as the insurance business, consumer brands like See’s Candies and Coca-Cola, among many others.
In short, what Lawrence Cunningham’s The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America did for Buffett’s annual letters, Unscripted does for the many episodes of the Warren & Charlie Show that played out at Berkshire AGMs. And, happily, Alex even time-stamps all of the commentary so we can go right to the source whenever something interesting catches our eye. A very thoughtful touch.
After spending many happy hours with Unscripted over the past few weeks, I’m once again struck by the consistency of Buffett and Munger’s teachings. These two men are no weathervanes — blowing to and fro as the winds of investor sentiment change. No, they dutifully intoned much the same message year after year, whether popular or unpopular, whether the financial world wanted to hear it or not.
Consistency, though, does not mean stagnation. Importantly, Unscripted also shows how Buffett and Munger never stopped learning and examining their prior beliefs — even evolving on a few notable subjects over the years. (More on this down below.)
In Unscripted, Alex manages to not only compile and organize this incredible amount of information into a very readable and enjoyable book, but also to contextualize it in such a way so that everyone — from longtime shareholders to market neophytes — can learn something new at the feet of these two legends.
That is much easier said than done.
Much like a box of See’s peanut brittle, Unscripted is best savored slowly in bite-sized pieces. (Yes, I’m out of my Christmas supply of brittle and well into withdrawal at the moment.)
Despite flirting with the subject in earlier years, Warren Buffett will probably never write a book of his own. But Buffett & Munger Unscripted — alongside Cunningham’s Essays — forms a Buffett anthology of sorts that will keep the Oracle’s words alive for generations to come.
In the run-up to release day, I caught up with Alex Morris to find out more about Buffett & Munger Unscripted — and what he learned while compiling the book.
(1) What moments from past Berkshire Hathaway AGMs stand out as particularly impactful to you?
One was the tone of the meetings during the late 1990s, as Buffett and Munger faced growing criticism for their unwillingness to invest in tech stocks. Those meetings were memorable because they illuminated how Buffett and Munger held firm to their approach despite appearing (to some) as having been left behind in the new world.
As we think about investments Berkshire would go on to make over the next two decades, most notably IBM and Apple, I also think it’s impactful to consider how they have kept learning — even when they were both well into their eighties. This ability to balance rigidity and flexibility is something that comes up often in Unscripted.
(2) You had to dive really deeply into the Berkshire Q&A sessions while writing this book. Did Buffett and Munger ever surprise you by changing their minds?
There’s a notable comment on Apple from the 2013 meeting, where Munger said the following: “We think BNSF will have a competitive advantage fifteen years from now, with a high degree of confidence. We would never have that degree of confidence about Apple, no matter what their financial statement showed. It’s too hard.” Clearly, they changed their minds over time.
The other example that comes to mind is auto insurance — GEICO and telematics — where I have been surprised by how they largely missed the importance of that input to the underwriting decision and which they are still trying to rectify to this day.
They began receiving questions about this topic in the early 2010s, with Buffett saying the following at the 2013 meeting: “I invite you to compare the Progressive results with the GEICO results in the next two or three years. If we’re wrong, I will be here to freely admit that we were wrong — but I don’t think I will be.” It took a bit longer than 2-3 years, but it eventually became clear that telematics was leading to materially improved underwriting at Progressive, which became a competitive disadvantage for GEICO. Long story short, they missed a key change and it has since taken a long time to try and catch up.
(3) Many Kingswell readers attended these annual meetings in person or watched the video recordings once they became available. What makes Unscripted a must-read regardless of a person’s familiarity (or lack thereof) with Berkshire AGMs?
I think Unscripted will be a valuable resource for a wide range of investors — from beginners to the most diehard Berkshire fans (i.e. Kingswell readers like myself). I wrote it with the goal of highlighting the most valuable insights that Buffett and Munger have shared with investors over the past three decades.
Even though I set a high bar for what would be included, it is still nearly 500 pages. Buffett and Munger have covered a lot of ground over the decades — and unless you have a photographic memory, there are likely dozens of great discussions and quotes that you no longer remember. In addition, I think readers will find that their ability to derive insights on a particular topic — for example, Berkshire’s evolving views on the role of telematics in the auto insurance business — is greatly enhanced when you can read them in one place and in chronological order.
One final thing to note is that the book will help to support a good cause: I’m donating 50% of my net proceeds to GLIDE, an organization Buffett supported for decades through the lunch auction.
If you’re a diehard Berkshire fan, I think you will love Unscripted.
Wow, what a great review - thank you Kingswell!