2023-05-12 A Conversation with Charlie Munger & John Collison

Refer To：《A Conversation with Charlie Munger & John Collison》。

Introduction

引言

Patrick

帕特里克

We've had this interview with Charlie Munger scheduled to air for a while, coinciding with Stripe Press's launch of the amazing reprint of Poor Charlie's Almanack, which is launching today. Tamara Winter and the team at Stripe Press created a beautiful book worth its weight in gold. You should get one immediately. We were all stunned last week when we heard the news of Charlie's passing, but having consulted with those close to him, everyone agreed that he'd want us to release the interview as planned.

我们早已安排好播出这段与查理·芒格的访谈，恰逢 Stripe Press 今日推出《穷查理宝典》精彩重印版。Tamara Winter 和 Stripe Press 团队打造了一本价值连城的精美书籍，你应该立即入手。上周得知查理离世的消息时，我们震惊不已，但在与他亲近的人商议后，大家一致认为他会希望我们按计划发布这次访谈。

In reviewing his remarkable uncompromising life, a few things stood out to me. The word curious doesn't do Charlie justice. He was a voracious truth seeker. He was funny. He was wise. But from my perspective, maybe the most impressive of all was that he was a great teacher. The sheer number of people who shared a meal with him and learned from him was staggering. He gave what he learned freely to those that were interested, and in the process, changed people's minds and their lives. That everyone listening can probably recite a few pearls of Munger's wisdom without looking it up is a testament to his reach and impact.

回顾他非凡而坚定的一生，有几点尤为突出。“好奇”已不足以形容查理；他是孜孜不倦的求真者，风趣又睿智。但在我看来，也许最令人钦佩的是他是一位杰出的老师。与他共进餐并向他学习的人数之多令人震惊。他毫无保留地向有兴趣的人分享所学，并在此过程中改变了人们的思想与人生。如今大家脱口就能说出几句芒格的金句，足见其影响之深远。

He says in this interview, if you don't look, you won't find. For me, and I hope for you, part of his legacy will be go seek, go learn, go look, never stop. Before I turn it over to John Collison, who conducted this interview with Charlie, I'll leave you with one final quote from Charlie. He said, the best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more. Amen to that. We need more people like him. I'm thankful to be able to learn from him just one more time in this interview. Please enjoy and may Charlie rest in peace.

他在这次访谈中说：“如果你不去寻找，就不会有所发现。”对我而言，也希望对你们如此，他的遗产之一就是：去探索、去学习、去观察，永不停息。在把话筒交给此次访谈的主持人 John Collison 之前，我想引用查理的最后一句话：“人类能做的最好的事，就是帮助另一个人学到更多。”对此我深表认同。我们需要更多像他这样的人。能通过这次访谈再向他学习一次，我心怀感激。请欣赏节目，愿查理安息。

A Multidisciplinary Approach

多学科方法

John

约翰

We are here in Charlie's house in L.A. where you have lived for 61 years.

我们现在身处查理位于洛杉矶的住所——你已经在这里居住了 61 年。

Charlie

查理

Yes.

是的。

John

约翰

And I just learned that you designed this house.

我刚得知，这栋房子是你亲自设计的。

Charlie

查理

Right.

没错。

John

约翰

So we're here in your creation to discuss your creations, which I'm extremely excited about. I read Poor Charlie's Almanack pretty early in starting Stripe. I can't remember exactly where it was, but it was pretty early, the first few years. I feel like the book is an ode to thinking for yourself where, at least for me early on at that stage, there's all this received wisdom and how things work and it requires a certain bit of confidence to work up to actually question some of that received wisdom or come at things in your own way.

因此，我们置身于你的作品之中来探讨你的其他创作，我对此异常激动。创办 Stripe 初期，我就读过《穷查理宝典》，虽记不清具体时间，但肯定是在最初几年。我觉得那本书是一曲倡导独立思考的颂歌——至少对当时的我而言，世界充满既定观念与运行逻辑，要鼓起勇气去质疑这些观念、以自己的方式切入问题，需具备一定自信。

And I feel I took away, obviously, there's the multidisciplinary thinking and multiple mental models, which have been very useful for me. But I feel like part of it as well and thinking about, say, for me, the Stripe business, but the quality of businesses generally is, I feel like a lot of what you get at is a sort of a map territory confusion where the professional financial world who very much discusses the map and the numbers of a business whereas you're a much more obsessed with, is this a good business, is it long-term sustainable?

我从中当然学到了多学科思维和多元心智模型，这对我帮助很大。但我还体会到另一层含义：无论是对 Stripe 还是对企业质量的整体思考，你指出了“地图与领地”错位的问题——专业金融界热衷于讨论企业的“地图”和数字，而你却更执着于追问：这是一门好生意吗？它能长期持续吗？

Charlie

查理

Well, it goes further than that. The conventional financial world is pretty reliable if you want to use electrical engineering or automobile transportation or a lot of things. But in a messy world of running businesses and institutions and so forth, the conventional religion is asinine. And my theory from very beginning was I want to eliminate all the most conventional asininity. And I saw that if I could just do that, I'd have an advantage over most people. And so I collected asininities as things I should avoid.

不仅如此。如果是从事电气工程、汽车运输等领域，传统金融理论尚算可靠；但在经营企业与机构这类复杂世界里，主流教条荒唐可笑。我的理论自始至终就是要消除所有最常见的荒诞观念。我意识到，只要做到这一点，我就能比多数人更具优势，于是我把那些荒诞之事列入应当规避的清单。

And when you get to the way the wealth advisory business is created, you can hardly find a place in the world where so many high IQ people are doing so many dumb things. And so it was a hog heaven field for somebody who can develop anti-asininity because there was so much of it to be avoided. And I was lucky that my temperament and my location forced me into the business of investing my own money shrewdly. And I was shrewd even when I didn't have much money. And that's the way I got ahead.

说到财富顾问行业的运作方式，你几乎找不到另一个地方，汇聚了这么多高智商却在做着如此愚蠢事的人。对擅长培养“反荒诞”能力的人来说，这里简直是天堂，因为有太多东西可以规避。幸运的是，我的性格和环境迫使我必须精明地投资自己的钱；即便囊中羞涩时，我也足够精明，这就是我取得进步的方式。

And when it worked, I just kept doing more and more of it and so forth. And I never paid any attention to the boundaries between disciplines. I early got the idea I would learn the big ideas in pretty much all the disciplines.

当这一策略奏效后，我便不断加码，越做越多。我从不在学科之间设限；很早我就立志要学习几乎所有学科中的“大思想”。

John

约翰

And because you're...

而且因为你……

Charlie

查理

Ideas to fluency by constantly using them. And that would give me an advantage in what might we call -- but other people call it common sense. Somebody says that old Joe has common sense. They don't mean that. They mean he's got uncommon sense. And the people who are sensible on right away everything they deal with, they're uncommon, not common, most people are a mass of crazy prejudices.

通过不断运用理念来熟练掌握它们。这会给我带来一种优势，也许我们称之为——别人所谓的常识。有人说那位老乔有常识，他们并不是那个意思，他们的意思是他拥有非常识。那些在处理任何事情时立即表现得明智的人并不常见，而是罕见；大多数人都充满荒唐的偏见。

John

约翰

Did you learn the big ideas in the various disciplines because you were just intellectually curious about them? Or because you thought they'd be instrumentally useful in the work?

你学习各学科中的那些重大思想，是纯粹出于智力上的好奇，还是因为你认为它们在工作中具有工具性的价值？

Charlie

查理

Both. I saw instantly, for instance, when I was introduced to the math of Pascal and the elementary probability, I saw immediately how important this math was. My math teacher had no idea that he'd come to a part of the math that was very important in the regular world to everybody, but I saw it immediately and I just utterly mastered it. And I used it. I'm still using it. I used it routinely all my life quite intensely.

两者兼而有之。举例来说，当我第一次接触到帕斯卡的数学和基础概率论时，我立即看出这门数学的重要性。我的数学老师根本不知道他讲到的数学分支在现实世界中对所有人都如此重要，但我立刻领悟并彻底掌握了它。我运用了它，我现在仍在运用它，我一生都在非常频繁地运用它。

And when I got to study in the Harvard Business School, in the early days at the Harvard Business School, they were proudest of something called decision tree theory. And they taught it at the Harvard Business School, a lot of pomp and ceremony and many examples, all these graduate students.

当我去哈佛商学院学习时，在早期的哈佛商学院，他们最引以为傲的是所谓的决策树理论。他们在哈佛商学院以隆重的仪式和大量例子向这些研究生教授它。

Decision tree theory, it's a Harvard Business School -- in those early days, what they were teaching you was that Pascalian probability math works in real life. Here's the Harvard Business School needing to do remedial high school math to a bunch of graduate students, and they weren't wrong. They were right in those days to teach decision tree theory because other people hadn't mastered probability math the way it should be mastered.

决策树理论——在那些早期，哈佛商学院教给你的其实是帕斯卡概率数学在现实生活中行之有效。哈佛商学院需要对一群研究生进行高中数学补课，他们并没有错。在那个时代教授决策树理论是正确的，因为其他人并没有按应有的方式掌握概率数学。

My teacher in high school, if you don't pay attention to anything else, this stuff you ought to master. And he should explain how carny operators and casinos take advantage of ordinary people. It should have been taught, and it wasn't taught right in high school, and it wasn't taught right in college and it wasn't taught right. Finally, the Harvard Business School got so they taught high school math to graduate students. And you can say how could that be correct? But it's because the earlier education was so ineffective.

我在高中时的老师应该说：如果你什么都不注意，这些内容至少必须掌握。他还应该解释游乐场摊主和赌场如何利用普通人。它本该被教授，却在高中没有教好，在大学也没有教好。最终，哈佛商学院只好教研究生高中数学。你可能会问这怎么可能正确？原因就在于早先的教育实在太无效。

John

约翰

In Poor Charlie's Almanack, you advocate the multidisciplinary approach and knowing the big ideas from all the different disciplines. And one of the ones that I particularly liked and stuck with me was the one from biology of stable ecosystems and understanding how entities prosper within ecosystems. And in particular...

在《穷查理宝典》中，你提倡多学科方法，了解各学科中的重大思想。其中我尤其喜欢并一直记得的是来自生物学的稳定生态系统理论，以及理解实体如何在生态系统内繁荣发展。尤其是……

Charlie

查理

And how they perish too.

以及它们如何灭亡。

John

约翰

How you don't want necessarily to be in this robber baron, monopolistic, rent extraction position. But instead, businesses that sustain and endure over the long term are ones where they are not rent extracting the...

你未必想处于那种强盗资本家、垄断、收租剥削的地位。相反，能够持久经营的企业是那些并非靠收取租金……

Charlie

查理

Well, some of the robber barons last a long time. And there are a lot of real estate operators that are basically sleazy. And they don't even think their business is sound unless they're doing something sleazy. They're doing something sleazy, they have a safe advantage. And of course, that's exactly the opposite to my idea.

嗯，有些强盗资本家确实存在很长时间。而且有很多房地产经营者基本上都很下作。如果不做些肮脏的勾当，他们甚至认为自己的业务就不稳健。只要干点肮脏的事，他们就拥有安全优势。当然，这与我的理念完全相反。

My idea is so simple, is that if you make your living selling things to other people that are good for them, that is safer and more profitable averaged out than selling them stuff that's bad for them like gambling, drugs, crazy religions, all kinds of things that are terrible for people. And so of course, you want to sell things that are good for them. And it's amazing the people who don't pay any attention to that rule.

我的理念非常简单：如果你靠向他人出售对他们有益的东西谋生，这平均而言比卖给他们那些对他们有害的东西——比如赌博、毒品、疯狂的宗教以及各种对人们有害的事物——更加安全且更赚钱。因此，你当然应该卖对他们有益的东西。令人惊讶的是，有那么多人根本不遵守这一准则。

And I think it was sleazy products and investment banking has sort of you willing to sell and the sleazy stuff that compensation consultants are perfectly willing to sell. And I just decided I wasn't going to do any of that. I was going to sell what kind of stuff that I would buy if I were on the other side. And I also wanted to work with the kind of people that I admired. And that's a very important thing to learn to just search out the reliable people that you can trust and be the kind of person in dealing with everybody else that they can trust.

我认为在投资银行业里也充斥着肮脏产品，你若愿意便可出售；薪酬顾问也乐于出售这些肮脏玩意儿。我决定我绝不做这些。我要卖那种如果我站在对面也会买的东西。我还想与我钦佩的人共事。这是个非常重要的教训：努力寻找可靠、值得信任的人，并在与他人交往中成为他们可以信赖的那种人。

巴菲特写的商业原则的第一条。

It's just a huge advantage if you start doing that young and keep doing it consistently through life. It isn't very hard, stay awake in high school math and deal with the good people instead of the bad people and sell what you would buy if you were the buyer, not what you can sell by misleading people. These are very simple ideas. But it's just absolutely amazing how well they work for people who relentlessly follow these simple ideas.

如果你在人生早期就开始这么做并始终如一地坚持下去，这将是巨大的优势。这并不难：在高中数学课上保持清醒，与好人而非坏人打交道，卖你若是买方也愿意买的东西，而不是靠误导他人出售产品。这些都是非常简单的观念。但令人难以置信的是，对于那些不懈遵循这些简单观念的人来说，它们的效果竟如此之好。

John

约翰

Just because it's easy advice or simple advice does not mean it's commonly followed...

仅仅因为建议简单易行，并不意味着人们普遍会遵循……

Charlie

查理

It's better if it's simple.

越简单越好。

John

约翰

You presumably also add be reliable to that. That's the point that you make…

你大概还会补充“要可靠”这一条。这正是你强调的要点……

Charlie

查理

Who wants to be dealing with an unreliable person?

谁愿意和不可靠的人打交道？

John

约翰

You mentioned the lesson your dad taught you about -- was your switch from the law to investing partly informed by this question of the counterparties you were dealing with prior in the law, so the adverse selection and the people who buy a lot of legal representation.

你提到过你父亲教给你的那一课——你从法律界转向投资，是否部分是因为思考到之前在法律行业里所接触的交易对手问题，也就是逆向选择以及那些经常雇佣律师的人？

Charlie

查理

People get into a lot of trouble or are skirting along the edge of dangerous regulation because they deserve to be dangerously regulated. It's extremely dangerous. If you weigh the list, you can hardly figure a more unethical way of making money in capitalism than the Sackler family did when they started selling illicit drugs under the cover of being a legitimate pain removal.

有些人陷入麻烦，或者在危险监管的边缘游走，是因为他们理应被严厉监管。这非常危险。要是列个清单，你几乎找不到比萨克勒家族更不道德的赚钱方式了——他们以合法止痛的名义贩卖非法药物。

If you looked at the law firms and advisory firms and accounting firms that help the seculars along the way. There'll be a lot of very respectable names. I think it's stupid to take clients like the Sacklers. You don't want these people to even know your address, you don't want to have anything to do with them.

如果你看看在这一过程中帮助他们的律师事务所、咨询公司和会计师事务所，会发现其中有不少看似体面的名字。我认为接萨克勒家族这样的客户是愚蠢的。你甚至不希望这些人知道你的地址，更不想与他们有任何瓜葛。

And yet a lot of law business is caused by the people who are right on the edge of something very immoral. And a lot of the big law firms will take those clients if they're successful enough. I don't agree with that particular model of law practice. I think you ought to be quite selective in the clients you take on.

然而，律师业务中有很大一部分恰恰来自那些行事极不道德、徘徊在边缘的人。只要这些客户足够成功，很多大型律所都会接手。我不认同这种执业模式。我觉得你应该对所接的客户非常挑剔。

John

约翰

What do you think is the societal fix for problems like the pharma company's role in the opioid epidemic?

你认为社会应如何解决诸如制药公司在阿片类药物危机中所扮演角色之类的问题？

Charlie

查理

Well, that's a big issue. A lot of people rationalize selling drugs to other people to make money. If you go back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his money mostly came from his grandfather selling opium to the Chinese and he was selling it to Chinese bandits, too. And he was very respectable when he got back to the United States and lived in a big house, and I'm sure behaved well in dealing with those tradesmen and so forth.

嗯，那是个大问题。许多人为向他人出售毒品赚钱进行种种辩解。如果追溯到富兰克林·德拉诺·罗斯福，他的钱主要来自其祖父向中国人贩卖鸦片，而且还卖给中国土匪。回到美国后，他住在大房子里，很受人尊敬，我敢肯定他在与那些商人打交道时表现得彬彬有礼。

But I don't want to make that money by selling opium to the Chinese. It's a terribly disgusting way to make money, but a lot of the early money that came to Harvard, Yale and Princeton and so forth, they also made money, those early tradesmen in that area, by selling opium to the Chinese.

但我不想靠向中国人卖鸦片赚钱。那是一种极其恶心的赚钱方式。然而，哈佛、耶鲁、普林斯顿等许多早期资金，也同样是那些当地早期商人通过向中国人贩卖鸦片赚来的。

So a lot of people have rationalized all the terrible conduct in the history of the world. And I think it's safer and surer and better just to eliminate that whole system from your repertoire. Just get the bad people out of your life and the bad activities out of your life, just exclude them.

因此，世界历史上很多可怕的行为都被人们合理化了。我认为，更安全、更稳妥、更好的是把那整套东西从你的选项里彻底剔除。把坏人和坏事统统排除在你的生活之外。

The Map Is Not The Territory

地图并非疆域

John

约翰

And this gets back for me to the -- one of the big takeaways I had when I read Poor Charlie's Almanack is again, the map is not the territory. A business is not its income statement and balance sheet. You can have a business that looks very robust by the numbers but there's a question of, is the management honest? Is the product actually good for the people who are buying it? And you could have two businesses with very similar income statements, but one is a much more sustainable business and one is not.

这让我再次想到——我读《穷查理宝典》时的一个重要收获：地图并非疆域。企业并不是它的损益表和资产负债表。你可能看到一家企业的数字非常强劲，但问题是管理层诚实吗？产品真的对购买者有益吗？你可能有两家损益表非常相似的企业，但其中一家可持续性要高得多，而另一家则不然。

Charlie

查理

The trouble with investment is most business is going to perish. It's like evolution. Over a scale of 300 years, practically, everything perishes. All great retailers, 90% of them have perished in the last 100 years. And lots of other fields, Kodak perished, all kinds of big things that looked permanent.

投资的难处在于，大多数企业终将消亡。这就像进化一样。以 300 年为尺度，几乎所有事物都会消失。所有伟大的零售商中，过去 100 年已有 90% 消亡。其他许多领域也是如此，柯达也倒下了，许多看似永久的大企业都消失了。

And of course, successful investment, you want to anticipate things that are going to destroy businesses. For instance, as we sit here. Over the last 100 years, the people who control the big brands reliably made more money more easily with less risk and downside than frankly anybody else.

因此，要想投资成功，你需要预见那些将会摧毁企业的因素。举例来说，在过去 100 年里，掌控大品牌的人比任何人都更轻松、更可靠地赚到更多钱，承担的风险和下行也更小。

John

约翰

Brands like what? What's an example?

有什么样的品牌？能举个例子吗？

Charlie

查理

Just any toothpaste, Procter & Gamble, you name it. But I remember when Ipana was a popular, fast growing toothpaste and it went out and it's gone totally. And I think that there are forces -- in fact, now they're going to make it harder for the people that control the big brands because these house brands like Costco has and the other house brands and the success of places like Aldi and so forth, I just think that there's more trouble coming to big brands than they've had in the last 100 years.

任何牙膏都行，比如宝洁旗下的，随便说一个牌子。但我记得当年有款叫 Ipana 的牙膏曾经风靡一时、增长迅速，如今却彻底消失。我认为存在一些力量——事实上，如今这些力量会让掌控大品牌的人更加难做，因为像 Costco 这样的大卖场自有品牌，以及其他自有品牌，再加上 Aldi 之类连锁店的成功——我只是觉得未来大品牌要面对的麻烦，将比过去一百年更多。

And if you're an investor, you should realize that even though you haven't seen it yet. And you wouldn't realize that modern big brands have a perish risk unless you were familiar enough with economic history to remember all the other things that perished that once looked investable and looked permanent and, of course, they weren't.

如果你是投资者，即便你现在还没看到，也应该意识到这一点。除非你对经济史足够熟悉，能记起那些曾经看似值得投资、似乎可以永久存在却最终消亡的事物，否则你不会意识到现代大品牌也有灭亡风险——它们当然不是永恒的。

John

约翰

Because it feels like they're getting squeezed on two sides, right? On the one side, you have very large retailers like Walmart or Costco or Amazon, but then on the other side, you have companies selling direct-to-consumer over the Internet where they don't need a retail distribution channel. And so it feels like the brands...

因为感觉它们正被两面夹击，对吧？一方面有像沃尔玛、Costco 或亚马逊这样的大型零售商；另一方面是通过互联网直接面向消费者销售产品的公司，它们不需要零售分销渠道。所以感觉这些品牌……

Charlie

查理

That too. I figure all investment is intrinsically damn difficult. Because obviously good ideas get bid to such high prices that They get dangerous just because there's no investment that is so good you can't ruin it by raising the price higher and higher, because none of them are worth an infinite amount of money.

那也是。我认为所有投资本质上都非常艰难。因为显然好点子会被一路抬价到极高水平，这就变得危险——世上没有哪项投资好到你不断把价格抬得更高也不会把它毁掉，因为没有任何投资值无限高的价格。

John

约翰

This gets to one question I was wondering about, which is you and Warren famously say that you divide investments into yes, no and too difficult to reason about, and say, much high tech might be in that too difficult to reason about...

这引出了我一直在想的一个问题——你和沃伦有句名言，说你们把投资分成“可以投”“不能投”和“难以判断”三类，并且说很多高科技可能就属于那“难以判断”……

Charlie

查理

For us anyway, yes.

至少对我们来说，是的。

John

约翰

For sure, yes.

当然，是的。

Charlie

查理

Well, we're the biggest shareholder in Apple. So we haven't totally failed.

嗯，我们是苹果公司的最大股东。所以我们并非完全失败。

John

约翰

No, understood. And I think that 5% position in Apple, my understanding is it's done pretty well for you. But you don't get to not reason about tech because you think about the Buffalo Evening News. Newspapers are fabulous toll road businesses until the Internet comes along, and then suddenly the economics of that business look very different.

没错，我明白。而且我知道伯克希尔持有苹果 5% 的股份，据我所知这笔投资表现相当不错。但你不能因为想到《水牛城晚报》就完全不去思考科技——报纸曾是一项极佳的“收费公路”式业务，直到互联网出现，这家业务的经济学瞬间大为不同。

Charlie

查理

Basically, the wealth of the newspaper industry, with minor exceptions, it just all went away. They were invincible monopolies, gold mines and made their owners safely rich for 200 years even, and almost all went away.

基本上，报业的财富几乎全部消失了，少数例外而已。它们曾是不可战胜的垄断者，是金矿，让拥有者安全富足了两百年，但几乎全都消失了。

John

约翰

So my question is, how do you think about the quality of the business when overarching tech changes are really going to shake it up?

所以我的问题是，当宏观技术变革真的即将撼动一个行业时，你如何看待这家企业的业务质量？

Charlie

查理

You've got to recognize the tech changes do cause some new businesses to flourish and other businesses that looked impregnable to fail. And that's one of the realities you have to understand.

你必须认识到，技术变革确实会让一些新企业蓬勃发展，也会让一些看似牢不可破的企业失败。这是你必须理解的现实之一。

John

约翰

So you secretly are a tech investor because your reasoning about the effects of tech on Costco or on...

所以你其实是个科技投资者，只不过你是在思考科技对 Costco 或……的影响。

Charlie

查理

Yes, it's just that -- take, for instance, pharmaceuticals. The American pharmaceutical industry is better than any other pharmaceutical industry in the whole world. And number two is not remotely even close. So we have one of the great achievements in the whole history of the world in science and technology and so forth. At the same time, there's a fair amount of sleaze in the way pharmaceuticals are distributed. Everybody rooks the government...

是的，只不过——以制药业为例。美国制药业比世界上任何其他国家的制药业都要强，第二名都远远无法望其项背。因此，在科学与技术等方面，我们拥有世界历史上最伟大的成就之一。但与此同时，药品分销方式中也存在相当多的肮脏行为。每个人都在占政府的便宜……

John

约翰

The PBMs, yes.

药品福利管理机构（PBMs），是的。

Charlie

查理

Yes. And that's just the system. By and large, we haven't invested in pharmaceuticals because we've got no edge. I don't know enough about biology, medicine and chemistry to have any edge in guessing which new pharmaceutical attempt is likely to succeed, and other people who know those things—not that they have perfect knowledge, but it’s way better than mine. Why in the hell would I play against other people in a game where they're much better at it than I am, when I'm playing for something desperately important to me like a way of feeding my family? So of course, we didn't go near it.

是的，这就是整个体系。总体而言，我们没有投资医药行业，因为我们没有优势。我对生物学、医学和化学了解不够，无法在判断哪种新药有望成功方面占到优势；而那些真正懂行的人，虽然也不是全知全能，但比我强得多。我怎么可能在攸关养家糊口的重大事务上，与比我高明得多的人对弈？所以我们根本没碰那块。

能力圈。

I would argue that they're— in practical life, you want to succeed, you’ve got to do two things. You’ve got to have a certain amount of confidence. And you have to know what you know and what you don't know. You have to know the edge of your competency. And if you know the edge of your competency, you're a much safer thinker and a much safer investor than you are if you don't know it. And I constantly meet people; better to have an IQ of 160 and think it's 150 than an IQ of 160 and think it's 200. That guy is going to kill you because he doesn't know the edge of his own competence and he thinks he knows everything.

我要说的是——在现实生活中，想要成功必须做到两件事：第一，要有足够的自信；第二，要了解自己知道什么、不知道什么，认清能力圈的边界。如果你清楚自己的能力边界，你在思考和投资上都会安全得多。我不断遇到这样的人：与其智商 160 却自认 200，不如智商 160 却自认 150。前者会害死人，因为他不懂自己的能力边界，自以为无所不知。

Partly, Warren and I, we pretty much know what we know and what we don't know—what we're good at, what we're not good at. And one of the things we're not good at is guessing which new pharmaceuticals. So we don't even look at it. After all, it's a big universe out there, and if we have to leave a certain kind of investment behind because we lack the capacity to deal with it as well as some other people, that's all right. We don't need an infinite number of opportunities.

在这方面，沃伦和我很清楚自己知道什么、不知道什么，擅长什么、不擅长什么。而我们不擅长的事情之一就是猜哪种新药能成，所以我们连看都不看。反正投资世界那么大，如果因为不如别人而放弃某类投资，也没什么大不了；我们并不需要无限多的机会。

John

约翰

Why did you never invest in Amazon? It feels very similar to Costco in the thesis of how it operates—economies of scale delivered back to the consumer in the form of lower prices, compounding over a long time.

你们为什么从未投资亚马逊？它的运营理念与 Costco 很相似——通过规模经济将更低的价格回馈消费者，并长期不断复利增长。

Charlie

查理

We've actually started a business or two, and we bought some little ones that we made big. So we have done some things that look like venture capital, and some of them have been quite successful. But on average, we've bought existing businesses that had a lot of momentum as well as all the talent and just rode those things.

我们确实创办过一两家公司，也收购过一些小企业并把它们做大。所以我们也干过一些看似风险投资的事，其中有些相当成功。但总体而言，我们更倾向于买入那些已经势头良好、人才齐备的现成企业，然后一路随行。

So we made way more money by finding something that's already working in a business and just buying in than we have starting new ones from scratch. NetJets was an interesting business. We lost money or broke even for 10 to 12 years, and now it's just a gold mine of a business. We look like venture capitalists—I guess we were in that case.

相比从零开始创办，我们通过发现已经运转良好的业务并直接买入，赚的钱要多得多。NetJets 就是一桩有趣的生意，我们在头十到十二年要么亏钱，要么勉强持平，而现在它成了一座金矿。我们看起来像风投——在那件事上确实算是。

John

约翰

NetJets is now a very good business?

现在 NetJets 是一家非常优秀的企业？

Charlie

查理

Good is an understatement. That's not an adequate word.

“优秀”还不够，那个词不足以形容。

John

约翰

So one thing I observed about a lot of the very successful businesses that you're obsessed with is they seem particularly well-designed to be capital-efficient. And so NetJets and Coke might not look like similar businesses on the surface. When you think about Coca-Cola, they are the brand, they do the advertising, they manufacture the syrup, but the capital-intensive bottling work happens with partners who take on that CapEx. Similarly, with NetJets, they pioneered the model of not owning the aircraft, but they put the ownership and depreciation on to other people.

我注意到，你们钟爱的许多成功企业似乎都特别注重资本效率。表面上 NetJets 和可口可乐看起来不像同类生意，但若想想可口可乐：他们拥有品牌、做广告、生产糖浆，而资本密集的灌装环节由合作伙伴承担；同样，NetJets 开创了不自持飞机的模式，把所有权和折旧转嫁给他人。

Charlie

查理

What you've said is exactly correct. Of course, it's better to have a business that earns large profits without requiring any capital than it is to have one where you have to put in a lot of capital to make the money. Naturally, everybody is drawn to a business that will produce huge profits with no capital, or a huge return on the capital put up.

你说得完全正确。当然，能够在几乎不占用资本的情况下赚取巨额利润，当然好过必须投入大量资本才能赚钱的生意。自然，每个人都会被那种无需资本就能赚大钱，或者资本回报率极高的生意所吸引。

John

约翰

Do you specifically look for businesses that are good at pulling in other partners who invest the capital? So Domino's Pizza...

你们是否会特意寻找那些擅长吸引外部伙伴出资的企业？比如达美乐披萨……

Charlie

查理

We don't have any one model of being good. The harsh reality of business is that enterprises can be good in various ways, and all we care about is whether the way is working. And by and large, they're working pretty damn well. But sure, of course, everybody loves the business that prints a lot of money without requiring any capital. Costco requires no working capital.

我们并没有固定的“优质”模式。商业的残酷现实在于，优秀有各种形态，我们只关心它是否奏效，而大体上这些模式确实奏效得很不错。当然，人们都喜欢那种不用占用资本就能大赚其钱的生意。Costco 几乎不需要营运资金。

John

约翰

Why not?

为什么不呢？

Charlie

查理

Because the turnover is so high that they don't have to pay the supplier until they've been paid by the...

因为周转率太高了，他们在收到客户付款之前就不必支付供应商的款项……

John

约翰

They've shifted the inventory by the time they need to pay the supplier.

在他们需要向供应商付款的时候，库存早已周转出去了。

Charlie

查理

Somebody else is financing their inventories. And we could, if we wanted to, lease all the properties. We don't. We own all the ones we can. But basically, you could run Costco with primarily zero capital if you wanted to. Of course, we like a business like that a lot better than ordinary businesses, there aren't many, unfortunately.

别人在为他们的库存提供资金。如果我们愿意，我们可以把所有物业都租出去，但我们没有这样做，我们尽量自己拥有物业。不过，基本上，如果你愿意，你可以用几乎零资本来运营 Costco。当然，我们比普通企业更喜欢这种模式，只可惜这种企业并不多。

John

约翰

Would you agree that this is something that's much misunderstood in business is people are obsessed with percentage margins, but the capital efficiency of the business is a function of its percentage margins and the inventory turns and either of those can contribute to the capital efficiency?

你是否同意，商业领域常被误解的一点是，人们过于执着于利润率百分比，而企业的资本效率其实是利润率百分比与库存周转率的函数，两者都能提升资本效率？

Charlie

查理

Well, I think everybody understands that who go to a modern business school. But they learn the wrong culture. They learn for instance, that if you just pay the suppliers in 90 days and sell in 30 days, then you get all this -- somebody else is furnishing your working gaps. So they abuse the supplier, who's a little supplier, because they can get by with it. I don't think those models are safe or good. I think that's a dumb way to treat little suppliers. So I don't believe in that kind of brutality to little suppliers.

我想所有念过现代商学院的人都懂这一点，但他们学到的是错误的文化。比如，他们学到如果在 90 天后才付款给供应商，却在 30 天内销售完货物，那么资金缺口就由别人来填补。于是他们就虐待那些小供应商，因为他们觉得自己可以这么做。我认为这种模式既不安全也不好，把小供应商那样对待是愚蠢的。我不认可这种对小供应商的残酷做法。

People who are in the wrong religion, they say we want to reduce the capital. We'll just pay a bunch of little people who we want to trust us and love us and serve us well. We start treating them in a very improper way. That's vastly stupid. That's not smart.

那些信错了“宗教”的人说要减少占用资本，于是就拖欠一群我们希望信任并爱戴我们、好好为我们服务的小企业的款项，我们开始以非常不当的方式对待他们。这极其愚蠢，一点也不聪明。

John

约翰

So what examples do you prefer of businesses driving capital efficiency without squeezing small suppliers?

那么，在不压榨小供应商的前提下，你更欣赏哪些提高资本效率的企业案例？

Charlie

查理

Well, Costco is one.

Costco 就是其中之一。

John

约翰

By turning the inventory quickly?

通过快速周转库存？

Charlie

查理

Yes and doing that because they have fewer stocking units and they're way more efficient.

对，而且是因为他们的库存单位更少、效率更高。

John

约翰

You're on the board, right?

你是董事会成员，对吗？

Charlie

查理

Yes. I am somewhat the older member. But Costco, it's an amazing culture. The whole damn culture of the place is so subtle and it just marches from triumph to triumph. It was smart to have a small number of stocking units flowing through with enormous speed. It was right to have a membership system.

是的。我算是年纪较大的董事。不过，Costco 的企业文化非常惊人，整个文化非常微妙，却不断从胜利走向胜利。他们让少量库存单位高速流转，这是明智的；他们采用会员制也是正确的。

There are three things that Costco didn't want. Didn't want people who stole merchandise. They didn't want the people who used bad checks, and it didn't want people cluttering up his goddamn parking lot without spending a hell of a lot of money in stores. So a membership system, where they accept only a certain kind of a member, all of a sudden now they've got nothing but people who buy a lot per trip.

Costco 不想要三种人：不想要偷东西的人，不想要开空头支票的人，也不想要占着他们的停车场却不在店里大额消费的人。所以通过会员制度，只接纳特定类型的会员，他们的顾客一下子全都是一次买很多东西的人。

Costco has always had the lowest shrink rate in the world. Tricks the inside too. So the net theft rate at Costco was always below 2/10 of 1%. That's unheard of.

Costco 一直拥有全球最低的损耗率，包括内部偷窃在内，其净盗损率始终低于 0.2%，这在业内闻所未闻。

John

约翰

I hadn't thought of the parking lot efficiency with the membership system.

我以前没想到会员制度还能提高停车场效率。

Charlie

查理

You can't go to Costco just to buy bottle of iodine, just drop in. You got to be a member and then you got to pay enough, so to an ordinary person, they’re not going to pay an extra \$100 to buy a bottle of iodine or something. We keep the peach pickers, the little buyers out.

你不能随便去 Costco 只买一瓶碘酒就走，你必须是会员，还要付出足够的会员费用。普通人不会为了买一瓶碘酒而额外花 100 美元。这样我们就把那些“摘桃子”的小额买家挡在了门外。

Sol Price used to say “A business should be careful in the business it deliberately does without”. Of course, that's straight out of a Munger book. You figure out what you want to avoid. And they want to avoid theft losses, embezzlements, bad checks and cluttering up the parking lot without buying much. And their system caused all those effects at once.

Sol Price 曾说过：“企业要谨慎对待自己刻意不做的业务。” 这句话当然直接出自芒格的书。你要弄清自己想要避免什么。他们想避免盗损、侵占、空头支票，以及占用停车位却不消费的行为，而他们的系统一次性解决了这些问题。

John

约翰

It's like your first speech in the book, start with the business you don't want, work backwards.

这就像你在书中的第一篇演讲那样，从不想要做的业务开始，然后倒推。

Charlie

查理

I know, but it's so simple.

我知道，但这实在太简单了。

John

约翰

Any others? Of businesses driving capital efficiency without squeezing suppliers.

还有其他例子吗？哪些企业能在不压榨供应商的前提下提升资本效率？

Charlie

查理

There are lots of others. Practically all of the aerospace businesses have learned to make very high returns on capital.

还有很多。几乎所有航空航天企业都学会了实现极高的资本回报。

John

约翰

How do they do it?

他们是怎么做到的？

Charlie

查理

They specialize in being good at something and handling the government well as a paying customer.

他们专注于自身擅长的领域，并且善于与政府这一付费客户打交道。

John

约翰

Did you ever look at TransDigm?

你研究过 TransDigm 吗？

Charlie

查理

Sure. I don't like that way of making money.

看过。我不喜欢那种赚钱方式。

John

约翰

Because the price increases.

因为涨价嘛。

Charlie

查理

It's too brutal. They figure out something that has a little monopoly due to the defense department regulations, and they raise the price 10 times. And they're famous for it. I regard that as immoral.

那太残酷了。他们发现由于国防部法规而形成的小垄断，然后把价格提高十倍。这一点他们很出名。我认为这种做法不道德。

John

约翰

Did you ever look at Domino's Pizza?

你研究过达美乐披萨吗？

Charlie

查理

No.

没有。

John

约翰

You're familiar with the returns, though, right?

不过你知道他们的回报率，对吧？

Charlie

查理

I'm familiar that they have good returns. A lot of people get good returns on the investment when they get hot and get big volume through small. Listen, McDonald's earns a big return on capital. A lot of places do.

我知道他们的回报率不错。很多企业在生意火爆、以小博大、实现大规模销量时都能获得不错的回报。听着，麦当劳的资本回报就很高，很多地方都是如此。

Finding Monopolies & Profitable Industries

寻找垄断与高利润行业

John

约翰

One of the things you raised in the book is this question of when you have a small number of players in the industry, say, two or three players in the industry, it is not always easy to predict who will earn good profits and who will not. And so the airlines lost money since the Wright brothers versus the cereal manufacturers, very durably profitable. If you're looking at the business today and you know that the industry will consist of two or three players, how can you predict will those players make money?

你在书中提出的一个问题是，当一个行业只有少数几家参与者，比如说两三家时，想预测谁能赚到好钱、谁赚不到并不容易。例如，自莱特兄弟以来航空公司一直亏损，而谷物制造商却长期盈利。如果今天你看到一个行业将由两三家公司构成，你如何预测这些公司是否能赚钱？

Charlie

查理

I don't think it's possible to be 100% accurate in making these predictions. But certainly, we're looking backward, the people who had branded profits like coffee and oatmeal and so forth, made very high profits and airlines basically made no profits at all for their shareholders.

我认为要百分之百准确地做出这些预测是不可能的。但回顾过去，那些拥有品牌溢价的企业，比如咖啡、燕麦等，都获得了很高的利润，而航空公司基本没为股东赚到钱。

John

约翰

But the airlines were branded goods.

可航空公司也是有品牌的呀。

Charlie

查理

But everybody had big capital equipment; if they didn't use it, they obviously were losing a lot of money. So everybody was almost forced into a very destructive competition by the logic of the individual situations. There are a lot of businesses that are very hard to make money in permanently.

可每家公司都拥有大量资本设备，如果设备闲置，他们显然会亏大钱。因此，在各自处境的逻辑驱使下，他们几乎被迫陷入一种极具破坏性的竞争。很多行业要想长期赚钱都非常困难。

If you want to go into the business like restaurants, most people fail, small percentage of restaurants even last long enough to make a living to the people who own them. Too competitive. That's why they fail. Just like there are too many deer on an island and no predators, pretty soon there are too many deer. So all the deer suffer because there are too many of them.

如果你想进入像餐饮这样的行业，大多数人都会失败，只有少数餐馆能撑得够久，让老板糊口。竞争过于激烈，这就是他们失败的原因。就像一个岛上鹿太多又没有捕食者，很快鹿群就会过剩，结果所有鹿都因数量过多而受苦。

John

约翰

But again, to go back to this question, if I want to understand, will the business be like an airline or like a cereal company. Is this then the ongoing capital expenditure that's required where airlines fundamentally, they have lots of CapEx on an ongoing basis, it's like the original Berkshire textile mills?

不过，再回到这个问题，如果我想弄清这家公司会像航空公司还是像谷物公司那样运营。这是否取决于持续性的资本支出？航空公司从根本上需要大量的持续资本开支，就像最初的伯克希尔纺织厂一样？

Charlie

查理

The airlines are like a guy who builds a big hotel and it's just sitting there and he makes some incremental profit from filling it. And if it's got up and staff, that's better than just letting it sit there vacant. It almost forces irrational intense competition. The same thing does not happen within cereals.

航空公司就像有人建了一座大酒店，酒店空在那里，他只是通过填满房间赚取一点额外利润。如果酒店已经建好并配备了员工，至少比闲置要好。这几乎迫使大家陷入非理性的激烈竞争。而谷物行业则不会出现这种情况。

John

约翰

The NSF was one of the biggest acquisitions you guys did. And my sense from the outside is that it's maybe even been more successful than you would have expected. Is that accurate? Or did you expect it to be this successful?

NSF 是你们做过的最大收购之一。从外部来看，我的感觉是，它的成功或许甚至超过了你们的预期，这是真的吗？还是说你们原本就预料到它会如此成功？

Charlie

查理

The railroads were a lousy investment. There were a few people when they were first created that basically stole all the money by milking the government, bribing legislators and doing all kinds of terrible stuff. But by and large, most railroads are lousy investors, like the airlines for a long time. And finally, it got down after years of fighting unions and consolidations, so you get down to a few big systems.

铁路曾是糟糕的投资。铁路最初建立时，有少数人靠榨取政府、贿赂立法者等可怕手段把钱都拿走了。但大体而言，多数铁路长期以来都是糟糕的投资，就像航空公司一样。经过多年与工会的斗争和并购整合，最终只剩下少数几个大型系统。

Now there are just two big transcontinental systems, and we've got one of them. Of course, that's a less competitive market than it was -- than it existed earlier when there were 100 different railroads. But early railroads when they were terribly competitive, they were terrible places to invest money.

现在只剩两大跨大陆铁路系统，而我们拥有其中之一。当然，这比早先 100 多家铁路公司时的竞争要小得多。但在早期高度竞争时，铁路是极其糟糕的投资场所。

John

约翰

But again, airlines, bad business, not a good investment.

不过再说一遍，航空业是糟糕的生意，不是好的投资。

Charlie

查理

Early railroads, bad business.

早期铁路，也是糟糕的生意。

John

约翰

Early railroads, yes. Railroads today still require a lot of ongoing CapEx.

早期铁路，是。如今的铁路仍需要大量持续资本开支。

Charlie

查理

Yes, but they're so dominant. Once you have a railroad that can put shipping containers on that stack too high on tracks. It's one of the most efficient ways of transferring assets all over the country. It's way more efficient than trucking. So that they have a system that just accidentally happened. Nobody anticipated you'd be able to double the capacity of the railroad just by shoving containers one on top of the other. So they got very efficient finally. And now they're so efficient. They're more efficient than anything else. And of course, they do well.

是的，但铁路如今极具主导力。当铁路可以在轨道上把运输集装箱堆成两层时，它就成了全国最高效的货物转运方式之一，远比卡车运输高效得多。这一系统几乎是偶然形成的。没人预料到仅靠把集装箱一层层往上堆就能把铁路运力翻倍。结果他们变得十分高效，现在效率比任何其他方式都高，表现自然也很好。

John

约翰

Okay. So nothing can compete with railroads in terms of efficiency, cost to actually move stuff, energy required to move stuff. And so with an airline, you might have three airlines competing on a route, whereas the railroad may have a route to itself. Were you ever tempted to invest in other forms of transit, infrastructure, ports, shipping?

好的。所以在效率、实际运输成本和能耗方面，没有任何东西能与铁路竞争。而在航空路线中，你可能会有三家航空公司竞争，而铁路可能独占一条线路。你们是否曾想投资其他形式的运输方式，比如基础设施、港口或航运？

Charlie

查理

We've looked at things like that, But I can't remember -- and what we once bought a big position in a bridge.

我们确实研究过类似项目，但我记不清了——我们曾买下过一座桥的大量权益。

John

约翰

A literal toll bridge business?

真的是收费桥业务？

Charlie

查理

A literal toll bridge, and then we decided that we didn't want to look like a goddamn monopolist. And besides, we just sold and moved on to something less monopolist.

确实是一座收费桥，然后我们觉得自己不想看起来像该死的垄断者。于是我们卖掉了它，转而投向看起来没那么垄断的项目。

John

约翰

Or at least it looked less monopolistic. Has investing gotten harder?

或者说至少看起来没那么垄断。投资变得更难了吗？

Charlie

查理

Of course, it's gotten harder, way harder. It's gotten so hard that most of the people who are in wealth management have an almost zero chance of outperforming an unmanaged index like the S\&P.

当然，难度大大提升了。如今大多数从事财富管理的人几乎没有机会跑赢像标普这样的无人为管理的指数。

John

约翰

How has it gotten harder?

事情怎么变得更难了？

Charlie

查理

It's gotten, a, there's so much more of this wealth invested in securities. And so we'll get a whole lot of big sums to manage. And of course, it’s a long time to buy in, a long time to sell out, costs are higher. And so it's way harder to manage a large sum of money to make a lot of money at high returns than it is to manage a small sum of money. And then way more brains came into the business. So it's gotten brutally competitive.

事情变得更难，首先是因为如今有更多财富涌入证券市场，我们需要管理的资金规模巨大。买入耗时长，卖出也耗时长，成本更高。因此，想在管理大额资金时获得高回报要比管理小额资金困难得多。再加上行业涌入了更多聪明人才，竞争已变得异常激烈。

And then we have these manias that get -- when things are hot and they'll start running like the behavior gets almost crazy. It's almost like a delusion. Of course, it's harder. And in my lifetime, a guy just bought the best common stocks and sat on his ass, would have made about 10% per annum before inflation. Maybe 8% after inflation. That is not the standard return that a man can expect from investment. That was a very unusual period in a very unusual place. And I do not anticipate that the average result is going to be nearly that good over the next 100 years.

此外，还有各种“狂热”——市场一火热，价格就会一路狂奔，几乎疯狂到幻觉的程度。自然，这让投资更难。在我这一生里，一个人若只是买进最优秀的普通股然后什么也不做，每年名义收益大约可达 10%，扣除通胀后约 8%。这绝非投资者通常能期待的回报，那是处于极度特殊时空的非常时期。我不认为未来 100 年的平均结果还能如此之好。

John

约翰

Why was the results so good? Why was it 10% per annum?

为什么结果那么好？为什么年回报能达到 10%？

Charlie

查理

Let's call it 8% after inflation. The Great Depression so demoralized everybody, they were utterly despised and then the economic system improved a lot. And the combination of the investment climate, the economic situation together evolving, just made it unusually good. If you go back to what the rich people of England did back, say, in 1900, they bought consoles, 2.5%, no inflation. Two and a half percent return was considered, that was, you wanted to stay safe, you'd be satisfied with that. No rich people thought there was any safe way of getting 8% if you go back to 1880 among the rich people of England.

算上通胀后就是 8%。大萧条极度打击了人们的士气，股票被彻底嫌弃；随后经济体制又大幅改善。投资环境与经济形势共同演变，造就了异常优越的回报。回到 1900 年左右的英国富人，他们买的是 2.5%收益、无通胀的永久公债（consols），年化 2.5%就被视为安全且令人满意。若再回到 1880 年，英国富人根本不认为有任何安全方式能获得 8%收益。

And so this is an unusual period. And now everybody who's in investment management teaches everybody, you'll get 8% after inflation by dealing with us because that's the way it worked for the last 100 years. Just because it worked for the last 100 years does not mean it's going to work for the next 100 years.

因此，那段时期极不寻常。而如今所有投资管理人都对客户说：“跟我们合作，扣除通胀后能拿 8%”，因为过去 100 年确实如此。但过去 100 年行得通，并不代表未来 100 年也行得通。

John

约翰

So it's been a period of significant economic growth. I think there's also maybe the U.S. stock market that has outperformed...

所以那段时间经济增长显著。我想也可能是美国股市表现尤为出色……

Charlie

查理

Yes, everything, United States, country prospered, a lot of good stuff happened at once that caused that very good result. It's not always going to work that way.

是的，一切——美国、这个国家——都在繁荣，许多有利因素同时发生，才带来了那样的好结果。但情况不会永远如此。

Charlie on Crypto

查理谈加密货币

John

约翰

Okay. So I say we have a 25-year-old investor who's thinking about investing over the next 50 years. If you take the lessons from Poor Charlie's Almanack about avoiding the relatively simple mistakes that can be avoided, thinking about investment as the underlying business and the quality and sustainability of the business, taking the punch card investing approach of making a small number of investments rather than trying to play your time in the market. Do you think that approach is still a recipe for success over the next 50 years?

好的。假设有位 25 岁的投资者，打算在未来 50 年进行投资。如果他采纳《穷查理宝典》的教诲——避免那些可以避免的简单错误，把投资视为评估底层业务及其质量与可持续性，并采用“打孔卡”策略，只做少量投资而不频繁择时——你认为这种方法在未来 50 年仍是成功秘诀吗？

Charlie

查理

Yes, but it requires considerable self-discipline and considerable skill. And most people will lack the discipline and skill.

可以，但这需要相当的自律和相当的技能，而大多数人缺乏这种自律和技能。

John

约翰

What discipline will they lack? What will they screw up?

他们会缺什么样的自律？会在哪些方面搞砸？

Charlie

查理

Well, they get carried along too much by what other people believed at the time. They'll respond too much to improper incentives. In other words, they'll start buying stuff that's silly. They buy in to get the fees, they scrape off the top and they'll do a lot of things that are wrong. Not written in the stars that everybody has an automatic way of making 8% after taxes.

他们会过于随大流，被当时他人的想法所左右，对不恰当的激励反应过度。换言之，他们会开始买些愚蠢的东西，为了赚取手续费、抽头，做许多错误的事。并没有命中注定让每个人在扣税后都能自动赚到 8%回报。

John

约翰

That's quite an achievement, yes.

那的确是了不起的成就，是的。

Charlie

查理

It's a huge achievement, a real return of 8%. And by the way, the ordinary customer or the ordinary stockbroker probably earns 2% or something instead of 8%. So the ordinary stockbroker is just an absolute menace to humanity, not that there aren't some honorable, good stockbrokers on earth because there are some. But there are a lot of people who are responding to the incentives that are under in a way that their investors who trust them are not going to get a good return at all.

实现 8% 的实际回报确实巨大。顺便说一句，普通客户或普通股票经纪人可能只能赚 2% 左右，而不是 8%。因此，普通股票经纪人简直是全人类的威胁——并非没有正直优秀的经纪人，确实有；但大量从业者受激励驱使的做法，会让信任他们的投资者得不到好回报。

John

约翰

You have been famous for criticizing gold earlier on and now cryptocurrency.

你此前因批评黄金而出名，如今又批评加密货币。

Charlie

查理

I like gold a lot better than I like cryptocurrency.

与加密货币相比，我还是更喜欢黄金。

John

约翰

You've criticized both.

你两者都批评过。

Charlie

查理

Before there was cryptocurrency, I never bought gold. So I didn't like gold. But I don't hate gold as an investment as much as I hate cryptocurrency. I think cryptocurrency ought to have been driven out as illegal.

在出现加密货币之前，我从未买过黄金，所以我并不喜欢黄金。但相比于我对加密货币的厌恶，我并不那么讨厌黄金作为投资。我认为加密货币本应该被取缔为非法。

John

约翰

At the risk of maybe getting ejected from the premises, if I can try to defend cryptocurrency, isn't the perspective you have where -- I think you would say, invest in a productive business. Isn't that a reasonably U.S.-centric perspective, where absolutely, we have a great currency here. We have a great respect for property rights here. If you're in Turkey and their property rights aren't as strong, the currency is inflating 80% a year as it has this year, then the ability to move your wealth...

为了不被现场赶出去的风险，我想为加密货币辩护一下：你所持的观点——我想你会说要投资于具有生产性的企业——难道不是一种相当以美国为中心的视角吗？在美国，我们的货币信用良好，产权保护有力。但如果你身在土耳其，他们的产权保护没有那么强，货币像今年一样每年通胀 80%，那么转移财富的能力……

Charlie

查理

Well, if I lived in Turkey, I might do something odd. I might buy gold if I were in Turkey, but I would never buy cryptocurrency.

如果我住在土耳其，我可能会做一些奇怪的事情。我可能会买黄金，但我绝不会买加密货币。

John

约翰

Even in Turkey?

即便在土耳其？

Charlie

查理

No. I don't think that buying a percentage of nothing is a good investment, even though it's hard to create more nothing.

不。我认为买“虚无的一部分”不是好投资，即便“创造更多的虚无”很难。

John

约翰

But isn't gold functionally an investment in the percentage of nothing?

但从功能上看，黄金不也是在投资“虚无的一部分”吗？

Charlie

查理

It is similar, except it's been established so long as a...

差不多，但黄金作为……

John

约翰

An agreed upon store of wealth...

一种公认的财富储藏手段……

Charlie

查理

With the history we have and with the need for a currency and a currency that is backed by something and gold is hard enough to mine and so forth. Gold is a perfectly reasonable thing to use as a currency. And the evolution of use of gold as a currency was a very good thing for civilization. I don't have the feeling that gold is evil. Gold helps civilization develop. But I think cryptocurrency is scumball activity. And I think by and large, the people who promoted it are scumballs or delusionary. And I don't know which is worse, being a scumball or a delusionary. But I think they're both pretty bad.

考虑到我们已有的历史，以及对于货币——一种有实物支撑且开采难度足够高的货币——的需求，黄金作为货币完全合理。黄金被用作货币的演进对文明大有裨益。我并不觉得黄金邪恶；黄金促进了文明发展。但我认为加密货币是一种卑劣行径。我认为大体上推广它的人要么是卑鄙小人，要么是妄想狂。我不知道哪种更糟——是当卑鄙小人还是当妄想狂，但我觉得两者都很糟。

John

约翰

Some people can manage to be both. There's plenty of scams in crypto. That's absolutely not up for debate. But are we talking about questions of degree here between gold and cryptocurrency, where they are societally agreed upon stores of value, which trade above...

有些人两者兼具。加密货币里骗局众多，这毫无争议。但我们是否在讨论黄金和加密货币之间的程度差异？它们都是社会共识的价值储存手段，交易价格高于……

Charlie

查理

Let's put it this way. If we didn't have gold, we might have invented something like cryptocurrency as a substitute. But once we have gold and fiat currencies that are now long established, we don't need to add in cryptocurrency.

换句话说，如果没有黄金，我们也许会发明类似加密货币的东西作为替代。但既然黄金和法定货币已经沿用已久，我们就没必要再添一个加密货币。

John

约翰

But isn’t cryptocurrency handier? If you can work with it in just software, you don't need to actually go get some physical gold, trade it, melt it down. It's much harder to seize cryptocurrency than it is to seize gold in an autocratic regime.

但加密货币不是更方便吗？只需在软件里操作，就不必真去拿实物黄金、交易或熔炼。在专制政权下，没收加密货币也比没收黄金困难得多。

Charlie

查理

You don't have to bother with any physical inventories or anything has any intrinsic value. You can create system very efficiently dealing in it. I don't want to officially deal in nothing and craziness. I want to make it illegal. All nations have had anti-counterfeiting laws. And I think the anti-counterfeiting laws ought to have been used to totally bar cryptocurrency.

你无需担心任何具有内在价值的实物库存，就能高效地建立系统进行交易。我不想正式与这“虚无和疯狂”打交道。我希望将其定为非法。所有国家都有反伪造法，我认为本应利用这些法律彻底禁止加密货币。

John

约翰

But nothing's being counterfeit here.

但这里并不存在伪造（货币）的情况。

Charlie

查理

Well, if I am a nation and I have a currency, I don't want a new currency established.

嗯，如果我是一个国家，而且有自己的货币，我就不希望再出现一种新的货币。

John

约翰

But it's not really a new currency. It's a new store of wealth.

但它其实不算一种新的货币，而是一种新的财富储存方式。

Charlie

查理

You can call it a store of wealth, I call it a store of delusion. I don't think it's good to participate in delusion even when it gets quite common. A second medium of exchange widely used. It's ideal for drug dealers, dope dealers, scam artists of various kinds. Every kind of criminal you can imagine. Very good in extortion, kidnapping.

你可以把它称为财富储藏，我称其为妄想储藏。我认为即便妄想变得相当普遍，参与其中也并不好。它是一种被广泛使用的第二交换媒介，非常适合毒贩、毒品经销商以及各种骗子。你能想到的所有罪犯都觉得它很好用，在勒索、绑架中尤其便利。

Why would we want a wonderful crime facilitating new medium of exchange? Why wouldn't we just say this is like counterfeiting? You're coming into the government's business and you're trying to create a fiat currency and you can't do that. It's a feel they don't...

为什么我们要一种能极大便利犯罪的新交换媒介？为什么我们不直接说这就像伪造货币？你闯入政府的职能领域，企图创造一种法定货币，这是不允许的。这让人感觉他们不……

John

约翰

All right. Well, I will agree to disagree on crypto. But...

好吧，那么在加密货币问题上我们就各持己见吧，但是……

Charlie

查理

You don't have to agree. I can handle it if you like crypto. I don't like it, but I can handle it.

你不必同意。如果你喜欢加密货币，我可以接受。我不喜欢，但我可以接受。

Today's Societal and Investing Landscape

当今的社会与投资格局

John

约翰

We're staring into a recession, potential stagflation. What advice do you have for people thinking about how to work their way through the...

我们正面临经济衰退，甚至可能出现滞胀。你对那些在思考如何度过这一时期的人有什么建议……

Charlie

查理

I have one standard set of advice for all difficulties, suck it in and cope. That's all any human being can do, suck it in and cope. Partly, you have to be shrewd. That's one way of coping is to be as shrewd as you can possibly be. But that's my recipe. And I must say it's worked pretty well for me. It will work very well for any other person who uses my methods.

对于所有困境，我只有一条标准建议：咬牙忍着，努力应对。这是人类唯一能做的事情——咬牙忍住，然后应对。部分方法是要足够精明，这是应对的一种方式——尽可能地精明。但这就是我的诀窍。我必须说，它对我效果很好，对任何使用我的方法的人也会效果很好。

John

约翰

Berkshire made a lot of money in '08 with opportunities that might not have existed. Some of the bank deals, say, the preferred stock deals. Are there different ways investors should act at these discontinuous lows?

伯克希尔在 2008 年利用一些原本不存在的机会赚了很多钱，比如某些银行交易，如优先股交易。在这种断崖式低谷时，投资者是否应采取不同做法？

Charlie

查理

We got some opportunities, which other people wouldn't have gotten because we were admired by a small minority of people who could be helped if we helped them. But that isn't our main way of getting ahead of Berkshire Hathaway. That amount of money we've made in those deals is pretty minor compared to the amount of money we've made elsewhere. We get occasional opportunities that other people don't get. I don't think it's at all easy to get the kind of opportunities that we got, and we don't get that many ourselves.

我们确实得到了一些别人得不到的机会，因为有少部分人敬佩我们，如果我们帮助他们，他们也能得到帮助。但这并不是伯克希尔取得成功的主要方式。与我们在其他领域赚到的钱相比，那些交易赚到的钱其实很小。我们偶尔会获得别人得不到的机会。我认为得到我们那样的机会一点也不容易，我们自己也没得到那么多。

John

约翰

But there's maybe a lesson there in being a preferred counterparty. Berkshire was known to have lots of cash, be extremely trustworthy and be quick to deal with.

但或许这里有一个成为首选交易对手的启示。伯克希尔以充裕的现金、极高的可信度以及处事迅速而闻名。

Charlie

查理

Those are good reputations. Who wouldn't like an opportunity of being great, trustworthy and easy to deal with and always having a lot of money available? Is there anybody who would be hurt by -- of course, people would like that.

这些都是好名声。谁不想成为出色、值得信赖、易于合作且随时有大量资金的人？这会伤害到谁吗——当然，人们都会喜欢。

John

约翰

How do you feel about American society over the coming decades?

你对未来几十年的美国社会有何看法？

Charlie

查理

Old men have always tended to think that new generation is going to hell. The old Romans, o tempora, o mores. That goes back to the earliest civilizations we had. The old guys were saying when I get out of the world, it's going to hell. And it really wasn't going to hell net by and large. But I do not like the way politics has morphed in my lifetime in the United States. I don't like democracy. The way it actually morphed into existence with these primaries and the dominance of two parties where only the most extreme members of each party have a lot of pulling power and therefore, they control the nominees and so forth.

老人总是倾向于认为年轻一代在走向堕落。古罗马人就这样叹息，“时乎！世乎！” 这可追溯到我们最早的文明。老人们总说自己离世后世界就要完蛋了。但总体而言，世界并没有真的完蛋。不过我不喜欢我所经历的美国政治演变方式。我不喜欢如今的民主形式——通过初选出现，两党格局占据主导，且只有各党最极端的成员拥有巨大影响力，从而控制候选人等。

I think our way of getting nominees is deeply flawed now. It may have worked pretty well up until now. It worked better when we had those old, crooked bosses in the cities then it's working now with the primaries. I wish those old, crooked bosses would come back and replace the present primaries. Wanted to control the patronage so they actually nominated some pretty good people like Teddy Roosevelt. And these modern primary systems, the worst people often win.

我认为我们现在选出候选人的方式存在深刻缺陷。也许此前还能凑合，但过去那些城市里的老派腐败政客时期效果反而比如今的初选制好。我真希望那些老派的腐败政客回来，取代现行初选制。他们为了掌控政治恩庇会提名一些相当不错的人物，比如西奥多·罗斯福。而在这些现代初选制度下，往往是最差的人获胜。

John

约翰

Just because they move further left and further right.

只是因为他们向更左或更右移动。

Charlie

查理

Yes.

是的。

John

约翰

How do you feel about declining birth rates?

你如何看待出生率下降？

Charlie

查理

It creates a different kind of a world. Well, I don't see that mankind would be at all smarter if everybody had six children. I think that just jams up population way too much starting with 7 billion for the whole world. So I think it's good that the population is growing more slowly. But do I think it is good for people to be quite self-centered below 35 and then get married compared to marrying at 21 or 22 and having a lot of children?

这会形成一种不同的世界。我不认为如果每个人都有六个孩子，人类会更聪明。从全球 70 亿人口开始，这只会让人口过度拥挤。所以我认为人口增长放缓是好事。但我是否认为人们在 35 岁之前相当自我中心、之后才结婚，相比 21 或 22 岁结婚并生很多孩子要好？

No, I think the people who married at 21 or 22 and grew up fast because they had to because they have those young children. In a sense, I think they were a luckier generation than the people who came along with all these different options and who delay marriage into late age and have one or two children, I'm not at all sure it's good for the people who are having these new options, but it is good for the population.

不，我认为 21 或 22 岁结婚并因为有年幼孩子而被迫迅速成熟的人，在某种意义上比那些拥有多种选择、推迟到较晚才结婚并只生一两个孩子的人要更幸运。我一点也不确定这些新选择对当事人是否有利，但对总体人口来说是好的。

John

约翰

Why do you think the people who have kids at 21 were happier?

你为什么认为 21 岁生孩子的人更幸福？

Charlie

查理

It's very constructive to help other people and everybody feels pretty good about his own children. To have a lot of responsibility and bear it well, I think helps people. If you take the philoprogenitive people, say, the Mormon church, really still have the big families. If you measured human felicity in some objective way by measuring time spent smiling versus time spent frowning, the Mormons would average out way happier than the general population.

帮助他人非常有建设性，每个人对自己的孩子都感觉良好。承担许多责任并良好履行，我认为对人有帮助。如果你看那些爱子嗣众多的人，比如摩门教徒，至今仍然是大家庭。如果你用客观方式衡量幸福度，比如测量微笑时间与皱眉时间的比例，摩门教徒的平均幸福度会远高于普通人群。

So early marriage in big families and believing in religion is somewhat hard to believe in its technical theology. It's very good for the occupants in terms of their personal happiness. I'm not interested in believing something I don't believe in just to be happier. I'm kind of a peculiar person that way. I have no doubt in my mind all that the Mormons are average out happier than the rest of us.

因此，早婚、大家庭，以及信仰一种在技术神学上难以置信的宗教，对当事人的个人幸福非常有益。我不想仅仅为了更快乐而去相信自己并不相信的东西。在这方面我算是个怪人。但我毫不怀疑摩门教徒平均而言比我们其他人更幸福。

John

约翰

Does that make you worried because…

那会让你担心吗，因为……

Charlie

查理

No, it doesn't make me worry. I just live with it.

不会，这不会让我担心。我只是顺其自然。

John

约翰

But people are being less religious and having fewer kids.

但人们正变得不那么宗教化，也生更少的孩子。

Charlie

查理

I'm used to things not working perfectly. And so why should I expect my society is always going to be marching upwards because it has for a long time. I believe you just adjust to whatever society turns out to be and you do the best you can. And that's all any human being can do and that's all I'm going to do.

我已经习惯了事情并不完美。所以我为何要指望我的社会会一直向上发展，只因为它过去长期如此。我认为人就该适应社会的最终样貌，尽己所能。这是人所能做的一切，也是我将要做的一切。

John

约翰

How concerned should we be about institutional sclerosis and the rise of it where you were just talking about this waterfront property that you've been working on developing for the University of Santa Barbara, but it's property on the water that you just can't develop now in the way that you could 40 years ago. And as you look across all sorts of different domains in the United States, it feels like the institutions are becoming more sclerotic and it's harder to do things.

对于体制硬化及其上升趋势，我们该有多担忧？你刚谈到为圣塔芭芭拉大学开发的一块滨水地产，但如今无法像 40 年前那样开发。放眼美国的各个领域，似乎体制正变得更僵化，做事更难。

Charlie

查理

Of course. In our political system, the people with political power in these states and cities don't want a lot of new development. And they have the legal power to prohibit it and they do, and that's causing way less opportunity to have good housing for young people coming up than was common when I was young. And in a sense that's sad, but it probably does make the existing communities a little better off. They already have enough traffic. They don't want anymore.

当然。在我们的政治体系中，这些州和城市掌权者并不想要大量新开发项目。他们拥有法律权力去禁止，他们也确实这么做了，这导致现在年轻人获得优质住房的机会远少于我年轻时。从某种意义上说这很可悲，但这可能确实让现有社区稍好一些。交通已够拥挤，他们不想再增加。

They just want to make it very hard to get new building permits. You can understand where the city thinks it's better off not accepting the growth. It's a very serious problem, not at all clear that the cities are wrong in doing, it's in their self-interest, many of them not to grow. And so they use their legal powers to prevent it. That makes it hard for young people coming up.

他们只是想让获取新建许可变得非常困难。你能理解城市为何认为拒绝增长更有利。这是个非常严重的问题，也并不一定说明城市做错了；许多城市出于自身利益选择不扩张，于是他们利用法律权力加以阻止。这让年轻人处境艰难。

I think the young people coming up now are going to find it a lot harder to get what more or less automatically came to my generation. At modest cost, we got a house in a good school district and a growing plus in civilization. And it was pretty widely available. And now in the big cities, I think it's going to be very hard to get a…

我认为当下年轻人将更加难以获得我那一代几乎自动就能得到的东西。我们以适度成本就能买到好学区的房子，分享文明进步，这在当时相当普遍。而如今在大城市，我认为要获得这种……

John

约翰

But isn't that very bad…

但那不是非常糟糕吗……

Charlie

查理

A new house. It's sad, but it's sad they get old and die, too. Maybe civilizations have some sadness. They have to adapt to it just as human beings do. It's not automatic. Everything your life is going to be better than it was for your parents or your grandparents. Perfectly possible for a world to develop where it's a little worse in some ways.

一栋新房子。这令人难过，但人老去并逝去也令人难过。也许文明本身就带着一些悲哀，它们必须像人类一样去适应。这并非自动实现的，并不是你的一切生活都一定比父母或祖父母更好。世界完全可能在某些方面变得更糟一些。

John

约翰

Where do you think the world is getting worse?

你认为世界在哪些方面正在变糟？

Charlie

查理

I think we have a political game problem that's probably as bad as we've ever had. We have some crazy dictators on the verge of creating a nuclear war. We've got lots to worry about. The world has never been a perfectly safe place and it isn't now.

我认为我们现在的政治博弈问题可能是有史以来最糟的。我们有一些疯狂的独裁者濒临发动核战争的边缘。有许多让人担忧的事。世界从未绝对安全，现在也一样。

John

约翰

Kind of a societal version of your avoiding mistakes framework from Poor Charlie's Almanack, where societies need to avoid the major mistakes just like individuals do, avoiding nuclear war.

这似乎是《穷查理宝典》中“避免错误”框架的社会版本——社会也需要像个人一样避免重大错误，例如避免核战争。

Charlie

查理

We're lucky to have done it so far. But if enough crazy people have enough hydrogen bombs, there will eventually be enough hatred, we'll have an atomic war of some kind someday. You can almost count on it. So you can say that our generation, it was quite unlikely, but I think it's getting more likely and not less.

到目前为止我们算幸运。但如果足够多的疯子掌握足够多的氢弹，终有一天仇恨会积累到某种原子战争爆发。你几乎可以笃定这一点。也就是说在我们这一代，这种事发生的可能性较小，但我认为未来只会更可能而不会更少。

What We Can Learn From Architectural Mistakes

从建筑失误中我们能学到什么

John

约翰

I'd love to ask about your architecture interest. So again, you designed this house 61 years ago. And of late, you've been designing many more projects like the -- some of the buildings for the UC Santa Barbara where you donated the funds, but also designed the buildings. Why do you think architects get it so wrong?

我想请教一下你对建筑的兴趣。你 61 年前设计了这所房子。近年来，你还设计了更多项目，比如加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校的一些楼——你不仅捐了钱，还亲自设计。你为什么认为建筑师会犯下如此多的错误？

Charlie

查理

They don't get it so wrong. So I think architecture is the queen of the arts. In other words, I like it better than painting or sculpture or so on. I don't know, maybe music also deserves to be queen of the arts, too. But anyway, I regard it as very important, and so I think hardly anything in the arts is more important than architecture. But just as I think money management makes a lot of common mistakes. I think architects make a lot of common mistakes.

他们也并非全都做错。我认为建筑是“艺术之王后”。换言之，我比起绘画或雕塑更喜欢建筑。或许音乐也配得上“艺术之后”之称。但无论如何，我认为建筑极其重要，在艺术领域几乎没有比建筑更重要的事物。然而正如我认为资产管理常犯普遍错误一样，我也认为建筑师经常犯普遍错误。

Too many of them want to create something different just because they are bored with the conventional forms. And so they compete in making it artsy-craftsy and crazy. And you get things like dorms at MIT, where people actually go into the dorm and they get seasick because all the walls are slanted, and massively stupid.

太多建筑师仅因为厌倦传统形式就想做出与众不同的东西，于是互相攀比，搞得花里胡哨、古怪离奇。比如麻省理工学院的宿舍，墙壁全是倾斜的，人走进去都会晕船，这极其愚蠢。

MIT has a school of architecture. Imagine having a school of architecture in a place that is so stupid they build a dormitory where all the walls are slanted so much everybody gets seasick. That really happened at MIT. So I think schools of architecture, they have a lot of folly to regret. It's not necessary for architecture to be stupid as some of it dead denizens are.

麻省理工还有建筑学院。想想看，在一个如此愚蠢的地方竟然建造了墙壁倾斜得让所有人晕眩的宿舍楼，这是真实发生在 MIT 的。所以我认为建筑学院有很多愚行值得反思。建筑没必要像某些参与者那样愚蠢。

John

约翰

Okay, so architecture mistake number one is architects wanting to get creative or make their mark.

好，那么建筑错误第一条就是建筑师想要标新立异、留下印记。

Charlie

查理

By being peculiar. Peculiarity by itself is not art, in my opinion.

通过追求怪异。但在我看来，怪异本身并不是艺术。

John

约翰

What are the other architecture mistakes?

还有哪些建筑错误？

Charlie

查理

So you got to understand the customer's business and the customer's real needs in a way that is automatic with people like me. And I want to identify what the real needs of my customer is and really satisfy it intelligently. And I don't have some crazy, artistic preference of my own that I want to just see in three dimensions. Well, somebody else pays me to create it. And of course, you can serve your people better if you understand their business better. The architects aren't multidisciplinary enough. That's what I'm telling you. Practically, no profession is multidisciplinary enough.

你必须了解客户的业务和真正需求，这对我而言是自然而然的。我得弄清客户真正需要什么，并以聪明方式满足这些需求。我没有什么疯狂的个人艺术偏好，想把它变成三维实体并让别人付费。要想更好服务客户，就需更好理解他们的业务。建筑师在跨学科方面做得还不够。我想说的是，几乎没有哪个行业的跨学科程度足够。

John

约翰

And what's an example of where you are more multidisciplinary than the architects in some of the buildings you've designed?

在你设计过的一些建筑里，你在哪些方面比建筑师更具跨学科能力？请举个例子。

Charlie

查理

If you take the building, the graduate residence at the University of Michigan. They had a magnificent site with a parking lot. They had no other site. They'd used up all the land in the dormitory. They have a second campus, but on their main campus, they'd used up all the sites. And there is one little parking lot left. And I realized that if they used their power of eminent domain and doubled the size of that parking lot, they'd get it with a big square building on the site tha would hold a lot of graduate students.

以密歇根大学的研究生宿舍楼为例。他们有一块绝佳的场地，是一片停车场，除此之外再没有地可用。主校区的宿舍用地已经全部耗尽，只剩这么一小块停车场。我想到，如果他们运用征收权，把这片停车场面积扩大一倍，就能在上面盖一幢大的方形建筑，容纳大量研究生。

But there was no way to do that without creating a window shortage in some of the bedrooms. And I also knew that it didn't matter that there was a window shortage in the bedrooms because I went around Ann Arbour and saw the private builders in Anna Arbour now have already created apartment rooms with no windows and relying on artificial light. And I walked side-by-side exactly identical bedroom, one with a real window and one with just a blank wall. And the one with just a bank wall renting for 10% less.

但这样一来，一些卧室就会缺少窗户。我知道这并不重要，因为我在安娜堡走访时看到，私人开发商已经建了许多无窗、依赖人工照明的公寓房。我并排看了两间完全相同的卧室，一间有窗，一间只有空白墙；没窗那间租金只低 10%。

So it wasn't much of a problem. I looked for the evidence and then once I realized that, I could do all kinds of wonderful things in that building once I got over this prejudice that it was absolutely required under any and all circumstances that every bedroom have a window. So it's just an example of just the most elementary common sense. I looked at the evidence at Ann Arbor. I understood geometry well enough to know. And then too, I was well aware that every ship has exactly the same problem. Every ship has a window shortage automatically. Every cruise ship. Yeah, and they pay \$20,000 a week to be on the ship and so forth.

所以这并不是真正的问题。我找到了证据，一旦摒弃“所有卧室必须有窗”的偏见，就能在这栋楼里做很多美妙设计。这只是最基本的常识例子：我查了安娜堡的证据，懂得足够的几何学；而且我很清楚，每艘船都有同样的问题——船上的舱室天然缺窗。每艘游轮都是如此，乘客一周要花两万美元。

And if they don't want a little light, they walk out of the ship and go into one of the common rooms. And of course, that's what I arranged they do in the dorm. So I was following correct precedents from marine architecture. But show me an architect that's learned anything from marine architect. I think you could go into any school of architect in the country and you won't find anybody studying marine architecture. They think it has nothing to do with it. It has a lot to do with what they're doing. If you don't look, you won't find.

如果乘客想要采光，就离开舱室到公共空间去。当然，我也让宿舍楼里的学生这样做。我是借鉴了船舶建筑的正确先例。但你给我找个从船舶建筑学到东西的建筑师看看？在全国任何一所建筑学院，你都找不到有人研究船舶建筑。他们以为毫不相干，其实与他们的工作大有关联。不去看，就发现不了。

John

约翰

I feel like another example of understanding the customer is giving the students in the dorms single rooms where most people design...

我觉得理解客户的另一个例子是：给宿舍里的学生设单人房，而大多数设计……

Charlie

查理

Oh, well, that -- talking about insanity. Now, I have sent a lot of children through a lot of graduate education. And I've never had a child that liked being in a room with one or two other unrelated people sleeping in the same room.

哦，那简直是疯狂。我送过很多孩子念研究生，从来没有孩子喜欢和一两个毫不相干的人同屋睡觉。

John

约翰

At the age of 20 or 25.

在 20 或 25 岁的时候。

Charlie

查理

Or 18 or 16. Of course, they'd rather have a room of their own. And I just figured out how much the incremental cost would be of giving them an extra room compared to the value -- and I apparently realized that what everybody was doing was dead wrong. UCLA -- brand new housing in the last two or three years. They put three people in a little room to sleep, three unrelated strangers. Nobody likes it. It's crazy. And this stuff I've designed now is grinding slowly through the cost of the commission. Every single student gets his own sleeping area private to himself.

或者 18 岁、16 岁。显然他们更想要独立房间。我算过多出一间房的增量成本与价值相比——很明显，大家的做法完全错误。加州大学洛杉矶分校最近两三年建的新宿舍，把三个互不相干的人塞进一间小屋睡觉。没人喜欢，这太疯狂。我现在设计的宿舍正慢慢通过成本评审，每位学生都能拥有私密的睡眠空间。

John

约翰

Why did this shared delusion persist for so long?

为什么这种集体妄想能持续这么久？

Charlie

查理

What happened was that the fire codes, they worry that the fireman would need a ladder to go and look through the window and crawl in through the window and haul somebody who had passed out from smoke. So they required that every sleeping space have a window. So the fireman could crawl up on a ladder. There were two things wrong with that.

原因出在消防规范。他们担心消防员需要架梯子透过窗户查看并爬进房间，把被烟熏昏的人拖出来，于是规定每个睡眠空间必须有窗，好让消防员能爬梯子进去。但这有两个问题。

One, it never happened. Nobody could find a case were a fireman -- they would crawl up by ladder and look through and they had found somebody lying in bed passed out of smoke. And two, of course, a modern building with automatic sprinklers, that’s why there was going to be zero.

第一，这件事从未发生过，没有案例表明消防员真的爬梯子透窗发现有人因烟雾昏迷。第二，现代建筑装有自动洒水系统，本就几乎不可能出现这种情况。

And that's why the fire codes changed. And when the fire codes changed because -- but the people are used to doing it in a certain way. Of course, they keep doing it the same way they've always done. Isn't it the Mayo Clinic is one of the best places on earth in terms of an admirable culture. They kept doing hip replacements by a procedure that the doctors knew how to do because the new one that was better for the patient was very hard for the doctor to learn. And so they just kept doing it the old way. Architects are no different. They do what they're used to.

所以消防规范后来修改了。但人们习惯了某种做法，当然还会照旧做。梅奥诊所是全球文化最令人钦佩的机构之一，他们曾长期用医生熟悉的髋关节置换术式，因为对病人更好的新术式医生难以学习，于是继续用旧术式。建筑师也一样，只做自己习惯的事。

John

约翰

Again, for say, someone who's 25 or 30, is the lesson that there are a lot of \$20 bills lying on the sidewalks? There's a lot of inefficiency in the world to be rectified that people should not assume the world works efficiently?

再举例说，对一个 25 岁或 30 岁的人来说，这是否说明街上还躺着许多 20 美元的钞票？世界存在大量无效率之处有待修正，人们不应假设一切都运转得很高效？

Charlie

查理

Well, of course, there's always a lot of things that can be improved, always a lot of people who are getting ahead by doing something new. And that's one of the pleasures of modern civilization. And imagine a postal clerk in the United States can go to Hawaii on a 2-week vacation on a superjet and have a nice time. A postal worker could do that in the world that you're up in.

当然，总有许多事情可以改进，也总有人凭借创新而脱颖而出，这正是现代文明的乐趣之一。想象一下，美国的一名邮局职员可以乘坐喷气式客机去夏威夷度两周假并玩得很开心。在你成长的那个世界里，一名邮差也能做到这件事。

You can learn a whole new profession just punching buttons on the Internet and so forth, so the possibilities of self-education is fairly enormous. So all kinds of things have been greatly improved. Of course, that causes new opportunities for some people, and it causes absolute economic destruction from certain people who get obsoleted.

如今只要在互联网上点点按钮，你就能学会一个全新的职业，自我教育的可能性巨大无比。各种事物都得到了极大改进，这自然为一些人带来新机遇，也让另一些被淘汰的人遭受彻底的经济毁灭。

Imagine the Kodak company, which hired all the PhD chemists, totally dominated the chemistry of film and so forth and had the most reliable trademarks in the whole world. Go through Africa when I was young, there are 2 things you always saw: a Coca-Cola and Kodak. That was the brands all over Africa, the poorest villages. And of course, Kodak went totally broke because somebody invented a new way of taking photographs and developing photographs. And it just obsoleted their whole damn business, and Kodak wiped out its common shareholders. That happens all the time, that kind of thing. And you can't blame the management for it and say, “Well, didn't Kodak invent its own destruction?” That's hard to do.

想想柯达公司，他们雇佣了大量拥有博士学位的化学家，完全主宰胶片化学领域，拥有全球最可靠的商标。我年轻时走遍非洲，无论多贫穷的村庄，你总能看到两样东西：可口可乐和柯达的标志。然而柯达还是彻底破产了，因为有人发明了新的拍照和冲洗方式，一举淘汰了他们的整个业务，普通股东被清零。这样的事天天在发生。你不能责怪管理层说“难道不是柯达自己发明了毁灭自己的技术吗？”——那很难做到。

I mean for human nature, you've got a business as big as Kodak, everybody's lived over for years. They're like the surgeons who didn't want to learn a new trick that was lot harder to learn when they were old. People don't welcome having to learn something new. It's really hard to learn. Everybody would rather get ahead using what he already knows.

人性如此，面对柯达这么庞大的企业，人人都在里面安稳度日。他们就像年老的外科医生，不愿再学更难的新手术。人们并不愿意被迫学习新东西，学习真的很难。每个人都更愿意凭已有的知识继续前进。

John

约翰

One of the bits of advice you emphasize in the book is to avoid getting addicted to chemicals, which again maybe sounds flippant. You give the example of some of the people you knew growing up...

你在书中反复强调的一条建议是避免沉迷化学物质，这听起来也许轻描淡写。你举了小时候认识的一些人的例子……

Charlie

查理

Oh my god. Of course. In the circles in which I was raised, nobody smoked even marijuana, but everybody drank, of course. And I would say it's something like 5%. All the people that I was raised amid got hooked on alcohol and became alcoholic. I think half of them just drank themselves to death and died and the other half licked it, got over it, became abstemious alcoholics. But that's a lot of people, 5%. They were not horrible people or weak people or something.

哦，天哪，当然了。我成长的圈子里，没人抽大麻，但人人都喝酒。我估计大概有 5% 的人因此成为酒精成瘾者。那些我一起长大的人里，一半人最终把自己喝死了，另一半戒掉了酒瘾，成了滴酒不沾的酒精戒断者。可那也是很多人啊，5%。他们并不是坏人或懦弱的人。

In Search of Win-Wins

寻找双赢之道

John

约翰

You spend a lot of time in the book talking about businesses that are win-win for both sides and the importance of this for their long term.

你在书中花了很多篇幅探讨对双方都双赢的商业模式，以及这种模式对企业长远发展的重要性。

Charlie

查理

How can anything be more important? It isn't just that it works better in terms of creating plenty for all. It's better morality. Of course, both sides want both sides to win, that's more moral than trying to take advantage of other people when it's so obviously the right way to live and it's the right way to do business.

还有什么比这更重要？它不仅能为所有人创造更多财富，而且道德层面也更高。双方都希望对方获益，这比占别人便宜更合乎道义，这是显而易见的为人处世和经商之道。

John

约翰

Who's falling to follow that?

谁会没做到这一点？

Charlie

查理

All kinds of people. If you're a carny operator, you're trying to cheat people on gambling games. And they do it all day long. If you're selling drugs, that's another way of cheating. And your whole life, you want to be on a win-win basis because that builds them. It's like capitalism. It's got these effects that multiply, and there's so much of it we have. That's why civilization works as well as it does so much if it is win-win.

各种各样的人。如果你是游乐场的小摊经营者，你就想靠赌博游戏坑骗别人，他们整天都在干这个。卖毒品也是另一种欺骗。你的一生都应该寻求双赢，因为那会创造价值。这就像资本主义，其乘数效应会不断放大，我们因此受益匪浅。这也是为什么当系统是双赢时，文明能如此良好运转。

But there are all kinds of people that are looking for ways to cheat people. We had a guy with us when I was in the military. Everybody called him honest John. And of course, they called him that because he was totally crooked. And if it wasn't dishonorable and crooked, he didn't think it was sound. He wouldn't consider any proposition that wasn't sleazy and that weren’t crooked. He was trying to screw people out of money. But how much better if you have a voluntary transaction where both sides are happy on a win-win basis? That's perfect. And capitalism in such a system causes this flourishing civilization. Of course it's the way to go.

然而总有人想方设法坑蒙拐骗。我服兵役时遇到一个人，大家都叫他“诚实的约翰”，当然这么叫是因为他极其不诚实。若提议不够龌龊，他就觉得不可靠；若不涉肮脏勾当，他连考虑都不会考虑，一心只想骗钱。可如果能有双方自愿、皆大欢喜的双赢交易，那该多好！那就是完美状态。在这样的体制下，资本主义助推文明繁荣昌盛，这显然是正确道路。

John

约翰

Which Berkshire businesses do you think are most emblematic or...

你认为伯克希尔旗下哪些业务最具代表性或……

Charlie

查理

Everything is win-win. Take Dairy Queen. We have all these little shacks, particularly over north where they're just open in the summertime, because you don't have so much ice cream in the winter. All the parents come and get their cheap hot dogs and ice cream cones and so forth, and people will run a little shack, make pretty good money in the summertime and it's win-win.

一切都是双赢。以 Dairy Queen 为例。我们有许多小亭子，尤其是在北方，因为冬天冰淇淋卖不动，所以只在夏季营业。家长们会来买便宜的热狗和冰淇淋甜筒等；经营小亭子的人在夏天也能赚到不错的钱，这就是双赢。

Customers are getting something they want. The people who are manning the store get something they want. Of course, the Berkshire shareholders get some capital returns that they like. It's all win-win. Of course I'd rather do business that way. Who wouldn't prefer to do that than trying to sell -- think of all these people that sold drugs, the OxyContin thing. It was just disgusting, perfectly disgusting way to make money.

顾客得到了想要的东西；店员也得到了他们想要的收益。当然，伯克希尔的股东也获得了他们喜欢的资本回报。这全都是双赢。我当然更愿意这样做生意。谁不想这么干，而去卖——想想那些卖药的人，像奥施康定那样的勾当，那简直是一种令人作呕、极其恶心的赚钱方式。

John

约翰

And so the businesses you exclude are tobacco, drugs, what else?

那么你排除的业务包括烟草、药品，还有什么？

Charlie

查理

I don't think you want mass mania either. Very uneasy by the Grateful Dead's popularity, with everybody in the audience using drugs as a way. There, the music was contributing to the decay of civilization.

我想你也不希望出现集体狂热。我对“感恩而死”乐队（Grateful Dead）的流行很不安，观众席里人人都在嗑药。在那种场合，音乐正在助长文明的衰败。

John

约翰

So you wouldn't invest in drugs, tobacco or the Grateful Dead?

所以你不会投资药品、烟草或“感恩而死”乐队？

Charlie

查理

No, that's correct. I would not. When I sell you a tennis racket for \$100, one side gets the tennis racket they'd rather have than a hundred dollars they're partying. The other guy, he likes what he's getting, too. It's win-win.

没错，我不会。当我用 100 美元卖给你一支网球拍时，一方得到比手中那 100 美元更想要的网球拍；另一方也喜欢自己得到的东西，这就是双赢。

That's the beauty of capitalism. It makes win-win transactions very easy and almost automatic. That's such a hugely important idea. And people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, both of whom I regard as quite talented in some ways, but they just don't get it.

这正是资本主义的妙处。它让双赢交易变得非常容易，几乎是自动实现的。这是一个极其重要的理念。而伯尼·桑德斯（Bernie Sanders）和伊丽莎白·沃伦（Elizabeth Warren）之类的人——我在某些方面认为他们很有才华——却就是没搞明白这一点。

John

约翰

But I think you mean that as a backhanded compliment.

不过我想你这话多少带着反讽的赞美。

Charlie

查理

It's both a compliment and a criticism.

这既是赞美，也是批评。

John

约翰

Is the fundamental thing they don't grasp that a lot of the win-win businesses are net positive and win-win for both sides and they...

他们没有领会的根本问题，是不是很多双赢型企业都能产生净正效益、双方都受益，而他们却……

Charlie

查理

It's automatic in a capitalist transaction, unless one side is making a big mistake. And most people are pretty good at not making mistakes over and over again with their own money.

在资本主义交易中，这种结果几乎是自动的，除非某一方犯了大错。而大多数人在花自己的钱时，很少会一错再错。

John

约翰

It's not fully automatic, right? We can…

但这并非完全自动，对吧？我们可以……

Charlie

查理

No, it's not. But a lot of good happens automatically.

不，并不是。但仍有许多好事会自然而然地发生。

John

约翰

Do you worry about the rise of this faction of the political spectrum who don't really believe in capitalism?

你会担心政治光谱中出现越来越多不信奉资本主义的派系吗？

Charlie

查理

Of course, look at the misery that's happened to the Russian people. They didn't like their old system with a bunch of serfs serving a bunch of landlords and so forth, corruption and so forth, so they went to something worse.

当然。看看俄罗斯人民的悲惨境况吧。他们厌恶旧制度——一群农奴侍奉一群地主，伴随着腐败等等——于是转向了更糟糕的东西。

They were rebelling against something that was awful, so they substituted something that turned out to be actually worse. It's hard to create a new form of government worse than Russian serfdom, but Russia has managed to do it. And not only that. They're proud of having done it. You should never be proud of your defects.

他们反抗的是可怕的旧体制，却换来了一个更糟糕的新体制。要建立一种比俄国农奴制更糟糕的政府形态本已极难，但俄罗斯做到了。不仅如此，他们还为此感到自豪。你永远不该为自己的缺陷感到骄傲。

John

约翰

What are Berkshire’s defects?

伯克希尔存在哪些缺陷？

Charlie

查理

We haven't eliminated all mistakes of judgment or even all mistakes of morality. So nobody gets anywhere near perfect ever in human affairs. It's not exactly a defect. A lot of what worked for us in the early days, we can't do anymore because the world is more competitive.

我们并没有消除所有判断错误，甚至没有消除所有道德错误。在人类事务中，没有人能够真正做到完美。这并不完全算是缺陷。我们早期奏效的许多做法，如今已经行不通了，因为世界竞争更加激烈。

The low-hanging fruit has all been picked, and we can't get fruit out of barren branches where the fruit has gone away. And so we have to go to something else. And of course, that's harder. A lot of people have that problem, and they go to the new systems in new ways.

易摘的果子都被摘光了，我们无法再从已经不结果的枯枝上摘到果实。所以我们必须寻找其他方式。当然，这更难。很多人都面临同样的问题，他们只能以新的方式转向新的体系。

John

约翰

I've always liked the quote capitalism is how we take care of people we don't know.

我一直很喜欢这样一句话：资本主义是一种使我们得以照顾陌生人的方式。

Charlie

查理

It's certainly remarkable how it works. I like a social safety net, but I'm different from other people. If I were running the government, the modern civilization, I would be quite liberal at rewarding everything that can't be faked, like being blind or not blind or something. I'd just give a very blind person a lifetime pension, which goes up with inflation.

这种机制的运行方式确实非同寻常。我赞成社会安全网，但我的想法与别人不同。如果由我来管理政府、管理现代文明，我会对那些无法造假的情况给出相当慷慨的补偿，比如是否失明之类。我会直接给重度失明者终身养老金，并随着通胀同步提高。

If life is tough enough for you, we can afford to do it, and you and your handlers can figure out how you use the money. So I would be very liberal. I would give anybody any education right through college, courtesy of the government, but it would be meritocratic. You have to be able to do the work or you don't qualify for the benefit.

如果你的生活确实够艰难，我们完全负担得起，你和照料你的人可以自行决定如何使用这笔钱。所以我会非常慷慨。我会让任何人接受直到大学阶段的教育，由政府买单，但前提是任人唯贤。你必须有能力完成学业，否则就没有资格获得资助。

So I wouldn't let people pretend to be learning things in some half-assed institution and send the bills to the government. But places like Caltech or MIT, anybody could get in and do the work, if I was the government I’d pay for it all the way through college and graduate school, which they do in places like New Zealand and Australia and so on.

因此，我不会允许人们在那些半吊子的机构里假装学习，然后把账单丢给政府。但像加州理工或麻省理工这样的学校，只要有人能考进去并完成学业，如果我是政府，我会负担他们从大学到研究生阶段的全部费用，一些国家如新西兰、澳大利亚等就是这么做的。

Again, everything in medicine, that is almost automatic, I would pay for that, too. But would I pay for Freudian analysis? No. Stuff that can be gamed and it was crazy, I would not pay for. And I wouldn't allow the people to get rewards for low back pain, even though they have real low back pain. And it's easily faked. I wouldn't pay. It just causes too much cheating and the cheating gets to the eventual and so forth.

同样，医疗方面几乎是自动的，我也会买单。但我会为弗洛伊德式精神分析付费吗？不会。那些容易被钻空子、且带有疯狂成分的项目，我不会掏钱。我也不会让人因下背痛而获得补贴，即使他们真的疼，因为这一点太容易造假。我不会支付，这只会带来过多欺诈，最终损害系统。

I would just say we can't do that. It’s not that we don’t sympathize with your low back pain and your poor life adjustment? But we can't give lifetime pay just because you say, “My lower back hurts.” or, “my life adjustment is imperfect.” That's the way I would organize the government. Nobody thinks the way I do. I feel lonely. I would be quite generous, but I will be quite tough on people with low back pain or psychological problems.

我会直接说，这事我们办不了。并不是我们不体谅你的下背痛或生活不顺，但不能仅凭你说“我背疼”或“我适应不好”就给予终身补贴。这就是我管理政府的方式。没人像我这样想，我感到孤独。我会相当慷慨，但对下背痛或心理问题等情况会相当严苛。

The Origins and Legacy of the Book

本书的缘起与传承

John

约翰

How did Poor Charlie's Almanack come to be?

《穷查理宝典》是如何诞生的？

Charlie

查理

I went around and made a few talks because -- I did it because I kind of admired Ben Graham, the way he also invested money, but he also tried to be an educator, and so I made a few talks. It's a matter of civic duty. Enjoyed doing it, too. That's how it happened.

我到处做了一些演讲——这样做是因为我很欣赏本·格雷厄姆，他不仅投资，还尝试做教育者，所以我也去做了几场演讲。这是一种公民责任，我也很享受，就这样发生了。

But I never would have circulated. Peter Kaufman came by and asked for permission to rifle through my files, and I said long as I don't ever have to do anything, you can go into my office. I don't have any dirty secrets in my office. I'm not worried. And so Peter just rifled through my office and created Poor Charlie's Almanack. It's his creation, not mine, in a very real sense.

但我本来不会去传播这些内容。后来彼得·考夫曼来找我，想翻阅我的资料，我说只要我不用做任何事，你就去我的办公室吧。我办公室里没什么见不得人，我不担心。于是彼得就翻遍了我的办公室，编成了《穷查理宝典》。从某种意义上说，那是他的作品，不是我的。

John

约翰

What's the legacy of it been?

这本书的影响如何？

Charlie

查理

What's happened is it's spread over the world, and that I'm way more popular in India and China than I am in my own country. And I don't mind that either. I think it's peculiar that these high-IQ nerds in China and India love me, and my own country, people think I'm a pompous old bastard.

结果这本书传播到了全世界，我在印度和中国的人气远高于在本国，这我也不介意。我觉得很奇特，中国和印度的高智商书呆子们都喜欢我，而在我自己的国家，人们却觉得我是个自以为是的老家伙。

John

约翰

Why India and China, in particular?

为什么尤其是印度和中国？

Charlie

查理

I didn't set out to do it. It just happened.

我并不是刻意为之，一切都自然而然发生。

John

约翰

But why do you think it's really resonated in those countries?

但你认为为什么这本书在这些国家引起如此共鸣？

Charlie

查理

It is a little Confuciun. Elderly male of wealth, lots of experience sharing, that sounded a lot like Confucius. And the Indians, I don't know. But all I know is in India and China, people really like it. There are people in the United States, too, but I've gone with Peter to Vedika places, and I just see a sea of Chinese and Indian faces. We go to Google or somewhere, that's what I see, those 2 groups who've been very successful in the high-tech world.

这多少带点儒家味道：一位富有的年长男性分享丰富经验，听起来很像孔子。至于印度人，我也说不清原因。但我知道在印度和中国，人们真的很喜欢这本书。在美国也有读者，可我跟彼得去一些 Vedika 场合时，映入眼帘的总是一片中国和印度面孔。我们去 Google 或其他地方演讲，也看到这两群人在高科技界大获成功。

John

约翰

Is there also something about the cultural importance of striving and getting ahead?

这会不会也与那些文化对奋斗、上进的重视有关？

Charlie

查理

They like that, too. You can't find any 2 groups on Earth that are more interested in getting ahead than the people in India and China.

他们也喜欢这一点。全世界找不到比印度人和中国人更渴望上进的两个人群了。

John

约翰

And inasmuch as the book is manual for that?

既然这本书堪称那方面的行动指南？

Charlie

查理

Yes. That's a manual for going there. And it's a manual that's worked for the guy who's talking. That gets people's attention, too.

是的。这本书就是通往成功的指南，而且对正在讲话的作者本人确实奏效，这也能吸引人们的注意。

John

约翰

Yes. It's kind of a get-rich-slow mindset?

可以说是一种“慢慢致富”的思维方式？

Charlie

查理

Yes, it's mildly ridiculous. There is no other big conglomerate that succeeded as much as Berkshire did. Not in the whole world, as far as I know, and that is a very unusual thing to have happened.

是的，这听起来有点滑稽。就我所知，全球再没有哪家大型综合企业能像伯克希尔那样成功，这实属罕见。

John

约翰

If you could snap your fingers and transform Berkshire's corporate form, would you?

如果你能打个响指就把伯克希尔的公司形式换掉，你会这么做吗？

Charlie

查理

No, I like it the way it is.

不会，我喜欢现在的样子。

John

约翰

It wouldn't be better as a partnership or as a private company or...

把它改成合伙制或私有公司会不会更好，或者……

Charlie

查理

Well, it could have evolved. There are private places that make a lot of money and then stay private, but I think both Warren and I have actually enjoyed as much of the public life as we have in terms of the annual meetings and the Poor Charlie's Almanack stuff. And Buffett gives all these seminar talks and so forth.

嗯，它本可以走那条路。确实有些私企赚了很多钱后仍保持私有。但我想沃伦和我都很享受公开公司的生活，比如年度大会和《穷查理宝典》等活动。而巴菲特也会做各种研讨会演讲。

I think we all enjoyed as much of this what you call educational slideshow that we do. We've actually enjoyed it, and we actually think it's constructive. As far as I'm concerned, what we're doing in the educational side, that's win-win, too. If people will listen to what we have to say, they'll be better for it, at least more successful.

我觉得我们都很享受这种你称之为教育式“幻灯秀”的事情，我们确实乐在其中，也认为这很有建设性。在我看来，我们在教育层面的工作同样是双赢。如果人们肯听我们的话，他们会因此受益，至少会更成功。

John

约翰

Is Koch Industries maybe the closest business analog to Berkshire, where it's a very large diversified conglomerate?

科氏工业也许是最接近伯克希尔的商业类比吗？它也是一家庞大的多元化企业集团？

Charlie

查理

I don't know anything about Koch Industries other than they've gotten ahead mightily, but I would not want to be as active politically as they are. I just don't enjoy it that much. But Koch industries has been quite successful, yes, you're absolutely right about that.

除了他们取得了巨大成功，我对科氏工业几乎一无所知，但我不想像他们那样在政治上如此活跃。我并不那么享受那样的事情。不过科氏工业的确相当成功，这一点你说得完全正确。

John

约翰

On the book, you got a note from a reader just this week. "Hi, Charlie. I wouldn't expect you to remember, but I visited with you in a group of Stanford Graduate School of Business students in 2018 at your office before having dinner at your house. I read through Poor Charlie's Almanack at least once each year and just finished my 2022 read. I want to thank you for all your enthusiasm and worldly wisdom." How often do you get notes like this? And...

谈到这本书，你本周刚收到读者的一封信：“嗨，查理，我不指望你记得，但 2018 年我随斯坦福商学院的一组学生到你办公室拜访，并在你家共进晚餐。我每年至少通读一次《穷查理宝典》，刚刚完成 2022 年的重读。我想感谢你所有的热情和世故智慧。” 你多久会收到这样的来信？然后……

Charlie

查理

A lot. Really a huge amount. And so much so that I can't really handle it. I don't want to spend my time answering notes of strangers. A lot of people are genuinely grateful for the book, and that's amazing. The accidental book has made a lot of people grateful, and what do you charge that book now, Peter? \$60? It's selling faster now than it did when it came out. There is no book -- I don't think the Bible is selling more than it did. It keeps selling and selling.

很多，真的非常多，多到我根本忙不过来。我不想把时间花在回复陌生人的信件上。许多人对这本书真心感激，这很令人惊讶。这本偶然诞生的书让许多人心怀感恩。彼得，这书现在卖多少钱？60 美元？它现在的销量比刚出版时还快。我想圣经的销量都未必比它高。它一直在不断销售。

John

约翰

This is like when John Lennon said he was bigger than Jesus? Be careful. You and Warren have been working together for decades. Patrick and I have been working together for a decade, singular. We plan to work together for many decades to come. What advice do you have for us in constructing a constructive partnership?

这是不是有点像约翰·列侬说自己比耶稣还大牌？小心点。你和沃伦已经合作了数十年。帕特里克和我只合作了十年，才一个“十年”。我们打算在未来继续合作几十年。请问你对建立一段富有建设性的合作关系有什么建议？

Charlie

查理

You're very lucky to have a good life partner. Yes, I'm sure you're also very skillful and talented, but it's a blessing to do it with a good partner than to be all alone doing it. And of course it's better. Of course it's a blessing. Warren and I have not just succeeded in making money or something.

你拥有一位优秀的生活/事业伙伴，是非常幸运的事情。是的，我相信你们俩都非常能干、很有天赋，但能与好伙伴一起做事，比孤军奋战要幸福得多。当然这是一种福气。沃伦和我不仅仅是在赚钱方面取得了成功。

We have had a lot of fun, actual fun. We enjoy doing what we've done, mostly. We're associated with a perfectly marvelous group of human beings. It's almost unfair. The people with Warren and I associate with all day long are such high-grade people. Of course it is a pleasure to associate with high-grade people all day long. Talented people, too.

我们获得了很多乐趣，真正的乐趣。我们大体上很享受自己所做的事情。我们与一群绝妙的人在一起，这几乎有些“不公平”。沃伦和我整天打交道的人，都是高素质的人才。整天与这样优秀的人相处当然令人愉快，他们也都很有才华。

On Warren, the SEC, Buybacks, and More

关于沃伦、美国证监会、回购及其他

John

约翰

When you're saying it's fun for you and Warren together, just the relationship is fun outside of the results. What does that look like? Is it staying up late watching funny YouTube videos? Is it...

当你说与沃伦在一起很有趣时，指的不仅是结果上的有趣，而是你们之间的关系本身就充满乐趣。这具体是什么样子？是熬夜看搞笑 YouTube 视频之类的吗？还是……

Charlie

查理

No, no, no. We get fun doing, doing and understanding. We both like learning something new, preferably something useful that's new. And we both like accomplishing a certain amount and the fact it's difficult and you're still able to do it, of course it's a pleasure.

不，不，不。我们的乐趣在于“做事、实践与理解”。我们都喜欢学习新东西，最好是有用的新东西。我们也都喜欢完成既定目标，而当事情本身很难、你却依然能做到时，当然更是一种享受。

John

约翰

What do you and Warren debate? What's an ongoing topic of debate between...

你和沃伦会争论什么？你们之间持续争论的话题是……

Charlie

查理

We don't debate. There are some things that I'm willing to do that Warren isn't. And of course, I just adapt.

我们不争论。有些事情我愿意做，但沃伦不愿意做。当然，我就顺势而为。

John

约翰

Like what?

比如什么？

Charlie

查理

Well, if he doesn't want to do it, we don't do it. That's very simple. Just is a matter of time budgeting. Now he will do some things because he likes doing them that aren't necessarily the best use of his time, and so will I, but we do a lot of stuff where we like doing it then, where we associate with good people and are accomplishing things. And we both believe that if you're unusually successful, you ought to share, to some extent. Some of your success, you should share by giving away to others, in fact.

如果他不想做，那就不做，很简单。这只是时间分配的问题。他会做一些自己喜欢、但未必是最佳时间利用的事情，我也一样。但我们很多时候从事自己喜欢的事，跟优秀的人合作并取得成果。我们都相信，如果你格外成功，就应该在某种程度上分享成功——事实上，你应当通过向他人捐赠来分享部分成功。

You give away money and time and advice and so forth. Almost all the world's religions -- the Christian religion requires it. The Jewish religion requires it. So we enjoy the mix we have of education and philanthropy and operating the business. Now, we wouldn't want to make any one of it much bigger than it is. I'm not looking for a lot of the new opportunity. My life is pretty full the way it is now.

你捐出金钱、时间与建议，等等。世界上几乎所有宗教都要求这样——基督教如此，犹太教也是如此。因此，我们享受教育、慈善与经营业务三者之间的平衡。我们并不想把其中任何一项做得比现在大得多。我也不打算去寻找大量新的机会，我当下的生活已经很充实了。

John

约翰

But what do you and Warren disagree on? Or what have you disagreed on?

可你和沃伦在什么问题上存在分歧？或者说，你们曾经在哪些方面有过分歧？

Charlie

查理

We don't disagree.

我们没有分歧。

John

约翰

Well, you must.

这不可能吧，你们肯定会有。

Charlie

查理

I called him and I said something, and he said, “Charlie, I don't want to think about new faces, anything that's small.” So he's budgeting his time. So Warren doesn't want to do anything that's small. He wants to do big bucks. He's disciplined that way. Now something small he enjoys doing, he damn well does it. But he doesn't want to look for new small business opportunities. He doesn't want us both waste thinking time to them.

我打电话跟他说了一件事，他说：“查理，我不想去琢磨任何新面孔，也不想做那些小事情。”这就是他的时间预算方式。所以沃伦不愿意做小项目，他只想做“大票子”的事，他在这方面很自律。如果某件小事他喜欢，他当然会去做。但他不想去寻找新的小型商业机会，他也不希望我们俩把思考时间浪费在那些小机会身上。

John

约翰

Again, that's one example of a disagreement. What else?

再说，那只是一次分歧的例子。还有什么其他的？

Charlie

查理

Well, that's not exactly a disagreement. It's just -- of course he's entitled to spend his time the way he wants to in his 92nd year of life. 93rd, he's now 92. But we've had a lot of fun. And of course, it's been very effective way to do pretty well in a worldly sense. We've enjoyed that. To crawl up from absolutely nothing as far as Berkshire crawled, of course that's a pleasure.

嗯，那并不完全算是争论——在他 92 岁的年纪里，他当然有权按自己的方式支配时间。准确说是 93 岁——他现在 92 岁。但我们一直玩得很开心。当然，这也是在世俗层面取得不俗成就的有效方式。我们确实乐在其中。从一无所有一路爬升到伯克希尔今天的高度，这当然令人愉悦。

John

约翰

Why did you guys essentially merged? You were doing your own things with Wesco and Blue Chip and Berkshire, and then at a certain point, you merged the efforts.

你们为什么最终合并了？当时你们各自经营 Wesco、Blue Chip 和 Berkshire，但在某一阶段却把努力合到了一起。

Charlie

查理

We didn't really mind it being all mixed up like that. But since so many financial operators are kind of manipulative and dishonorable, if we had all the different entities always buying stock in one another, it looked a little like mischief or something. And so we just put them all together so we would look like we were manipulating.

我们并不介意事情混杂在一起。但是，由于很多金融从业者或多或少都搞操纵、缺乏操守，如果让这些不同实体不断互相买卖股票，看起来就像是在耍花招。所以我们干脆把它们全部并在一起，好让人看不出任何操纵的影子。

John

约翰

So no one could have any claims of conflict of interest-type things.

这样别人就不能指控存在利益冲突之类的问题。

Charlie

查理

And so many people who do a lot of different hands, they do manipulate, behave improperly.

而且许多同时插手多家公司的人士确实会搞操纵、行为不端。

John

约翰

What do you think of the SEC?

你怎么看待美国证监会（SEC）？

Charlie

查理

We're a lot better with an SEC. The tendency to prosper through financial chicanery in all forms of wealth management is perfectly enormous. So of course, you need something to throttle that back and control it. So I'm glad we have an SEC. It would have been crazy not to have one. By the way, that came in as part of the Roosevelt, and I would argue that its main trouble is that it isn't tough enough.

有 SEC 对我们而言好得多。在各种财富管理形式中，通过金融欺诈发财的诱因巨大无比，因此当然需要一个机构来遏制并监管这种现象。所以我很高兴有 SEC；如果没有，那简直不可思议。顺便说一句，SEC 是罗斯福时代设立的，我认为它的主要问题是不够强硬。

John

约翰

Tough enough on what?

在哪些方面不够强硬？

Charlie

查理

Miscreancy. If I were running the SEC and had the power to do it, I wouldn't allow people to publish a record saying, “Here's what I did over the last 20 years, when I started with \$2 and went up to \$200 million." because it misleads people. And of course, we will create mutual funds, create little ones to get a phony big record. I would forbid that kind of stuff.

针对不端行为。如果我掌管 SEC 并拥有相应权力，我不会允许任何人公布那种“看看我这 20 年的战绩，我从 2 美元做到 2 亿”的记录，因为这会误导大众。当然，有人会先搞几个小基金，做出虚假的亮眼业绩。我会禁止这种事情。

I would force everybody who is a big-time money manager to report his investment record per dollar year instead of historical, and that would take the miscreancy out of it. And it would be so simple, and it would radically change the whole industry.

我会强制所有大型资产管理人按“每美元·年”报告他们的投资记录，而不是用历史累计值。这样就能根除这些不端行为。这么做非常简单，却能从根本上改变整个行业。

And how many people have you ever heard say it will be mandatory that all wealth management will report its results per dollar year, which would be easier to do mathematically? And it would totally change the way everybody is promoting their service in a way that fosters truth and excellence and a lot of the things.

你什么时候听说有人主张强制所有财富管理机构按“每美元·年”披露业绩？这种统计在数学上更容易，也会彻底改变所有人推销服务的方式，促进真实、卓越及诸多正向发展。

John

约翰

Sort of reminds me of the requirement to register clinical trials. Have you read of this movement where people can -- if they don't publish the ones that don't do anything and they do publish the ones that generate results, you can get a bias towards nonreplicable results being published? And so the idea that you need to preregister the clinical trials you're going to run in advance. It sort of reminds me of that.

这让我联想到必须登记临床试验的规定。你有没有了解过这一运动——如果研究人员只发表有结果的试验，而不发表没有结果的试验，就会形成偏向于无法复现结果的发表。于是需要事先预注册即将进行的临床试验。我想到了这种做法。

Charlie

查理

I am not an expert on pharmacology and how it's done, but I am in favor. What I just suggested is so goddamn simple and so obviously required in terms of honorable disclosure, that it ought to be automatic. And yet who has ever suggested -- why is little Charlie Munger, 98 years old, think the SEC or the government ought to require that all investment professionals report results per dollar year instead of per historical? Nobody suggest it. But to me, it's obvious it ought to be required.

我不是药理学或其运作方式方面的专家，但我赞成这种做法。我刚才的建议如此简单，而且显而易见地符合诚信披露的要求，本该自动执行。可是谁提出过呢——为什么 98 岁的小查理·芒格认为 SEC 或政府应当要求所有投资专业人士按“每美元·年”报告业绩，而不是按历史累计？没人这么建议。但在我看来，这显然应该成为强制要求。

John

约翰

And when you say per dollar year, you mean dollar weighted results, basically?

当你说“每美元·年”时，你的意思基本上是按资金加权的收益结果吗？

Charlie

查理

Yes. How much return -- for every dollar year, what was your return? And of course, that's a very different figure. I know of a case of a hedge fund where the proprietor made a lot of money, but per dollar year, the net return was zero. Because when he got a lot of money, he really made a lot of dumb mistakes.

是的。也就是说，每一美元·年能带来多少收益？这显然是完全不同的一组数字。我知道有家对冲基金，老板赚了不少钱，但按每美元·年计算，净收益为零。因为当他掌管大额资金时，犯了许多愚蠢的错误。

He made a lot of money when this one didn't matter much. And yet it looks like a wonderful record. But in fact, it was terrible. And why wouldn't that be a fair thing to require? Why aren't Bernie Sanders with Elizabeth Warren -- that's low-hanging fruit. They don't like the miscreants use of capitalism. This one could be easily fixed. Instead, they want to change the whole system so it looks more like Russia's. It's crazy.

他在资金规模不大时赚到很多钱，于是账面业绩看起来光彩照人，实际上却糟透了。为什么不要求强制披露这种真实数据？伯尼·桑德斯和伊丽莎白·沃伦不是痛恨资本主义的滥用者吗？这可是唾手可得的“低垂果实”。这一问题轻易就能解决，可他们却想把整个体系改得更像俄罗斯，那简直疯了。

John

约翰

Some people zero in on very odd things. Like the current war on share buybacks is very odd.

有些人盯着非常奇怪的事情不放，比如当前针对股票回购的“战争”就很离谱。

Charlie

查理

That's just terrible. I'm against that because I don't like left-wing woke and I don't like right-wing nutcase either. I'm an equal opportunity hater of political orthodoxy.

那简直糟透了。我反对这种做法，因为我既讨厌左翼的“觉醒派”，也反感右翼的极端分子。我对任何政治正统都一视同“恨”。

John

约翰

War on share buyback seems very misguided and dangerous. Share buybacks are the way that we return money from less productive companies to more productive enterprises, and so we're kind of encouraging institutional sclerosis and ossification through large companies have to just get large and stay large and reinvest internally. That seems really bad.

围剿股票回购看起来既误导又危险。回购是把资金从低效率企业转回更高效率企业的渠道。如果禁止回购，就等于鼓励“大公司只会变得更庞大、守着内部再投资”，从而导致体制硬化和僵化，这真的很糟。

Charlie

查理

They'll get it. They'll get it differently in terms of opportunity cost. If your stock is selling for half of what it's worth, and in the external world, you have to pay and the company is managed by others you don't like as well, and selling it what it's worth or higher than, of course, you want the ability of buyback. When your shareholders are better off buying their own stock than they are doing something else, of course you ought to do it.

他们终会明白机会成本的概念。如果公司股价只有内在价值的一半，而外部投资标的价格高昂、管理层又不如意，当然应当有回购的权力。当股东买回本公司股票比做其他投资更划算时，理所当然应当回购。

And the corporate manager should be a good fiduciary for the shareholders. You've got excess cash and your own stock is selling for cheaper than it's worth, of course you should buy your own stock. It's the right way to behave. And so I'm against all these crazies who think it ought to be made illegal. Other people do it just to pump it up so they can use it as currency or something. And that, of course, is disreputable. We never do that. We buy when it's too cheap.

公司管理者应当成为股东的忠实受托人。手里有多余现金，而自家股票被低估，当然应该回购，这才是正确行为。因此，我反对那些想把回购定为非法的疯子。有些人回购只是为了拉高股价、再把股票当货币用，那种做法当然不光彩。我们从不那样干，我们只在股价过于便宜时回购。

Evaluating Stripe, NetJets, China, and GE

评估 Stripe、NetJets、中国及通用电气

John

约翰

If Patrick and I came and put you on Stripe, what would you want to understand about the business? What would your concerns be?

如果帕特里克和我把你带到 Stripe，你最想了解这家公司哪些方面？有哪些顾虑？

Charlie

查理

That's an interesting question, considering how much Berkshire Hathaway has made out of other payment systems, including American Express. We recognize the power of having a dominant position in payments in a way that's very efficient. And of course, anything in modern payments that enables all this Internet stuff is very useful. So you've come into a field and made a contribution and made yourself very useful.

这是个有趣的问题——毕竟伯克希尔在其他支付体系上赚了不少钱，包括美国运通。我们深知在支付环节占据高效主导地位的力量。当然，任何让互联网生态得以顺畅运作的现代支付手段都大有裨益。你们闯入这一领域并作出了贡献，让自己变得非常有用。

I'm for all these payment systems that get better and better. So I think you've made your money honorably and you've made a lot of it, and good for you. I admire what you people have done. Why wouldn't I? I regard everything that you're doing as a little bit threatening to American Express, but American Express actually has a position where it's like Hermes or something, and so it won't necessarily be ruined by Stripe.

我支持所有不断完善的支付系统。因此，我认为你们赚的钱来得光明正大，而且赚得不少，这很好。我钦佩你们的成就，为什么不呢？我确实觉得你们的业务对美国运通有点威胁，但美国运通的定位像爱马仕那样高端，因此不必然会被 Stripe 颠覆。

John

约翰

In evaluating a business like Stripe, what questions would you want to answer for yourself?

在评估像 Stripe 这样的企业时，你自己会先回答哪些问题？

Charlie

查理

Is it likely to remain forever as a money generator? And that's a more complicated subject. It's hard to know how the world is going to evolve. If Kodak could suddenly be obsoleted away, maybe it's not utterly unthinkable if Stripe could.

它是否能永远持续产出利润？这是个更复杂的话题。很难预测世界将如何演变。如果柯达都能突然被淘汰，那 Stripe 被颠覆也并非完全不可想象。

The company that dominates software for architects, terribly prosperous company, but some other companies come up in that field a lot and it no longer dominates as much as it did. So not everything in software always wins. So I do not have the feeling -- the venture capitals tend to think everything in software is always going to win. I don't believe that for a minute.

曾经主宰建筑师软件市场的公司一度风光无两，但不断有新公司涌现，它的主导地位早已不再。所以软件领域并非永远赢家通吃。我可丝毫没有这种感觉——风险投资家常以为“软件必胜”，我一分钟都不相信这种论调。

John

约翰

That does seems to be a remarkable aspect of Berkshire is just the duration of the investments, where it's very hard to pick out companies in the Berkshire portfolio that you don't feel good about 50 years from now.

伯克希尔最引人注目的特点之一就是投资的持久性——很难在其投资组合里挑出一家让人担心 50 年后不靠谱的公司。

Charlie

查理

It's even worse than that because the ones that were obvious mistakes were way too many jewelry stores. And we had low returns on capital and so on. It looked as bad as airlines. And of course, recently, the jewelry stores have been coining money, and we've closed about 75 of the stores and more coming. It's no longer look so bad.

其实更糟的是，当初明显犯错的就是买了太多珠宝店，资本回报率很低，看起来和航空公司一样糟糕。但最近这些珠宝店开始大赚特赚，我们已关掉约 75 家，未来还会更多，现在看上去就没那么差了。

We have trouble losing even when we try to. It's like Warren bought some baseball team to help his town because somebody asked him to do it and the goddamn thing started making money immediately. That's the way I feel about some of our investments. We don't deserve a lot of credit. We just stumbled into them.

我们就算想亏钱都很难。就像有人请沃伦为家乡买下一支棒球队，他答应后那该死的球队立刻开始赚钱。我对我们某些投资也是这种感觉。我们没什么可夸的，只是撞了大运。

John

约翰

Why has NetJets done so well?

为什么 NetJets 表现这么好？

Charlie

查理

It's better in its niche than anybody else. In NetJets, the whole culture, safety is first, customer service is second. And after that, we'll start worrying about the capitalists who own NetJets. And of course, there's enough fanaticism of that kind of a culture. We create a hell of a product for the person who can afford anything. And ours is better than anybody else in the country, and it's now big. It's a big business. And we have yet to kill our first passenger. All these many years, we've never killed a passenger.

它在细分领域里无人能及。NetJets 的文化是安全第一、客户服务第二，之后才考虑股东回报。这种文化里充满狂热，我们为能负担得起一切的人提供一流产品，比全国任何对手都好，如今规模庞大，生意兴隆。多年下来，我们还从未让一个乘客丧命。

John

约翰

I didn't know that such.

我之前不知道这一点。

Charlie

查理

Well, now you do, and we're proud of that. We don't say it because we're afraid it might change. We get too bold in telling God we're so...

现在你知道了，我们很自豪。我们不大声宣扬，是怕说得太满会翻车，别跟上帝吹得太狠……

John

约翰

I can feature the magazine ads. NetJets- “No one has died yet”.

我都能想象杂志广告了：NetJets——“至今无人死亡”。

You're very bullish on China. Why?

你对中国很看好，为什么？

Charlie

查理

Well, first reason is that their economy was growing faster than ours. That isn't necessarily true as we consider this exact minute, but for a long time, that economy grew a lot faster than ours. Number two, we could get way better and stronger companies at a much lower price in China than we could get in the United States. Now on the other side, we had to take the political risk of buying into a peculiar system of government that's not different from ours.

首先，他们的经济长期增速比我们快——虽说此刻未必如此；其次，在中国我们能以远低的价格买到更好更强的公司，而在美国做不到。反过来，投资中国要承担一个与我们体制不同的政治风险。

As long as we were getting enough bargains, I was willing to run the -- as with part of our assets is we would never invest all of our money in China, for Gods' sake. But we were certainly willing to invest part of it. That's perfectly logical. And of course, we were investing through Li Lu, he was a very exceptional money manager. And we put all those 4 things together, the ones, of course, that made sense.

只要有足够便宜的机会，我就愿意冒这个险——天晓得我们绝不会把所有钱都投在中国，但拿出一部分投资很合逻辑。更何况我们是通过李录操作，他是极出色的资金管理人。把这四点加在一起，事情就说得通了。

John

约翰

Did you meet Li Lu through the book or separately?

你是通过那本书认识李录的吗，还是另有渠道？

Charlie

查理

That was an interesting story. Li Lu was coming to visit because he was a hero of Tiananmen Square. A friend's wife, who was very leftist and loved him, being a -- Tiananmen Square thing. Of course, I'm not the least interested in Lu's revolutionary career, and so -- I'm interested only in his adapting to modern capitalism.

这事挺有意思。李录要来拜访，因为他是天安门广场的英雄。一个朋友的妻子很左派，崇拜他的天安门经历。当然，我对他的革命经历毫无兴趣，只关心他如何适应现代资本主义。

So he came up to meet me. My house was 100 yards away from the house he was visiting. And we talked for 3 hours. At the end of 3 hours, I did something I'd never done before. I said I'll give you some Munger money to manage if you will stop doing what you're doing now and invest only in Asia. And he did, just on the swap. So it took us exactly 3 hours to find one another, from meeting to financial commitment took 3 hours.

于是他来见我。我的房子离他拜访的那栋房子只有 100 码远。我们聊了 3 个小时。最后我破天荒地说：如果你停止现在的工作，只专注投资亚洲，我就给你一笔芒格的钱来管理。他当场答应了。从初次见面到达成投资承诺，我们只用了 3 个小时。

John

约翰

How does the current geopolitical hawkishness change your view on investing in China, if at all?

当前的地缘政治强硬态势是否——如果有的话——改变了您对在中国投资的看法？

Charlie

查理

Obviously, I'm more uncomfortable now than I was. The guy who changed the whole system and said, "I don't care if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.”, he wanted the goddamn economy of China to work like Singapore's. Of course we love that guy. And the new guy isn't quite as much like that guy as we would consider ideal. We think the political risk in China should be run, and I think we should go out of our way to have a lot of friendly relations with big atomic powers.

显然，我现在比从前更不安。那个曾彻底改造体制、说出“黑猫白猫，能捉老鼠就是好猫”的人，希望让中国经济像新加坡那样运作，我们当然喜欢他。而新任领导人与那位理想的人选并不完全相同。我们认为在中国投资就该承担政治风险，而且我认为我们应当尽力与其他核大国保持友好关系。

Both China and the United States ought to get along with one another as a matter of wholly duty because they're 2 big atomic powers. And the way you get along best is we should carefully work out a bunch of win-win transactions between us and China and actually work to make them work even better. That is the right policy in the United States.

中美同为核大国，有义务彼此友好。最佳相处方式是精心设计一系列双赢交易，并推动这些交易运转得更顺畅——这才是美国应奉行的正确政策。

We should not be trying to discipline China by telling them like a nattering nanny how China ought to behave and say, “We know better. We're a democracy and you're not.” We have a lot to be ashamed of in our own form of government. We shouldn't be going around lecturing everybody else. And we should organize win-win transactions with China. Anything else is madness.

我们不该像唠叨的保姆那样训斥中国，指责他们“我们更懂事，我们是民主，你们不是”。我们自己的政府形式也有许多值得羞愧的地方，没资格四处说教。应当与中国组织双赢交易，其余做法都是疯狂。

And for a long time, we had that. You can argue that China came to modernity primarily in win-win transactions with the United States because we're so open to their imports. That's what enabled them to get ahead so fast. And I'm proud of that, and I'm glad we helped them. And I want to do more of it. I don't want this hostility on both sides.

长期以来我们确实如此。可以说，中国主要通过与美国的双赢交易迈向现代化，因为我们对其进口极为开放，这让他们得以迅速崛起。我为此感到自豪，也很高兴我们曾经帮到他们，我希望继续这样下去，而不是双方敌意丛生。

John

约翰

Tom Wolfe wrote a short story about Bob Noyce. I'm a huge Tom Wolfe fan of his books, but he has a great short story about Bob Noyce. And you can read the short story as it's really about Grinnell, Iowa and the effect of Midwestern culture in Silicon Valley.

汤姆·沃尔夫写过一篇关于鲍勃·诺伊斯的短篇。我是沃尔夫的忠实书迷，那篇作品非常精彩；实际上，它讲述了爱荷华州格林内尔以及中西部文化对硅谷的影响。

Charlie

查理

It's a huge success, of course. And the success is interesting, but I would argue that the failure of Intel was just as interesting a story. Intel was on the ground floor of modern chip making. Absolutely ground zero. They were at the absolute best place. And they just grew and grew and so forth. And they eventually lost all their leadership completely, and they're just a little pissant company compared to the big guys now.

那当然是一段巨大成功的故事，可同样引人入胜的还有英特尔的失败。英特尔曾站在现代芯片制造的起点，真正的“零号地点”，占据绝佳位置，一路扩张壮大，却最终完全失去领导地位，如今在巨头面前不过是个无足轻重的小公司。

John

约翰

Why did that happen?

为什么会这样？

Charlie

查理

Firstly, some of that's inevitable. In competitions, somebody are going to lose. It's -- partly it demonstrates the inevitable even if you're successful, so a little guy that really scrambles, be sure that there's some accidents, but partly, they were so interested in always reporting more earnings. They didn't go to the leap enough, just stay on top.

首先，这在竞争中不可避免，总要有人失败；即便成功者也难免跌落，小公司拼命追赶时总有意外。另一方面，他们过于专注于不断提高报表利润，却没有做出足够大的技术飞跃来保持领先。

If you're serving along the edge of a new development like that, you have to just absolutely be going flat out all the time, and you have to be leading all the time. Berkshire, we don't have to invent new things, particularly, compared to most places. They're in the business of inventing new things, and you have to be totally fanatic.

若身处新技术浪潮最前沿，就必须时刻全速奔跑、持续领先。伯克希尔与多数企业不同，不必不断发明新东西；而这些企业做的正是发明，你就得无比狂热才行。

And the truth of the matter is that the people in China were way more fanatic than Intel. In China, you had one old guy that controlled the place and he was a fanatic, and Intel had an army of bureaucrats, and they were interested in their executive rewards and the way the price earnings ratios and the approval of Wall Street. A whole lot of other things. And they were powerful. Now they look good for a while just by using their power to make the earnings go up.

事实是，中国那边的人比英特尔更狂热。那边由一个老家伙掌控，他极度狂热；而英特尔则是官僚大军，只关心高管奖励、市盈率以及华尔街的认同等一堆事情。他们凭权势短期内把利润做高，看上去风光。

But they should have been using their power to make sure their goddamn chips stayed way ahead of everybody else. And they had to be a totally reliable supplier, which they weren't. They disappointed a lot of customers, and you can't disappoint customers if you wanted to have a Mayo system of trust. That's the interesting part of that, not the Noyce story. The story of the failure of Intel was the great story there.

可他们本该利用权势确保自家芯片始终遥遥领先，并成为完全可靠的供应商——然而并非如此。他们让许多客户失望；若想建立梅约式信任体系，就绝不能让客户失望。这里真正有趣的不是诺伊斯的成功，而是英特尔失败的故事。

John

约翰

So you're talking about an obsession with reported earnings rather than the fundamental quality of the business. The book was published in 2005. Have you revised your view of Jack Welch, given the last 17 years of GE performance?

也就是说，他们沉迷于报表盈利而忽视了业务的根本质量。那本书出版于 2005 年；鉴于过去 17 年 GE 的表现，您对杰克·韦尔奇的评价是否已改变？

Charlie

查理

Of course I've revised it, da da da. Of course I knew him personally, and he was a cocky conductor's son with a PhD in Engineering Thermodynamics. And he was terribly competitive. He wanted to win. He’s been an athlete, he was almost a scratch golfer.

当然调整了，等等。我私下认识他——一个趾高气扬、拥有工程热力学博士学位的列车长之子，好胜心极强，总想取胜；他曾是运动员，高尔夫差点几乎为零。

But he got obsessed with getting ahead and using the incentive system and force everybody else to get -- ran like an athletic team saying, “Everybody had to be more fanatic.” And he wanted to be fanatic in abusing his buyers and pushing people and manipulating, and he thought it was his duty to make the earnings go up, and he kept comprising more and more in the way they…

但他后来迷恋于出人头地，借助激励制度逼迫所有人前进，把公司运作得像竞技队伍，高呼“人人必须更狂热”。他在压榨客户、施压员工、操纵手段方面也极度狂热，自认为让盈利上涨是他的责任，于是在……方面不断妥协。

John

约翰

It wasn’t win-win.

这并不是双赢。

Charlie

查理

It was, for a while.

在一段时间里确实如此。

John

约翰

Who knows…

谁知道呢……

Charlie

查理

It worked short term, but it ruined the country long term. Of course, if he lived long enough, he would have ruined his own reputation. After he was dead, everybody knew it was a failure and…

这在短期奏效，却在长期毁了国家。当然，要是他活得够久，也会毁了自己的名声。他去世后，大家都知道那是一次失败，然后……

John

约翰

I mean it wasn't win-win, say with the suppliers, over squeezing them?

我是说，比如对供应商来说，被过度压榨就不是双赢吧？

Charlie

查理

No. I call that me-win. Win-win is one system, and me-win is another. Jack Welch had a me-win system.

不。我称之为“我赢”（me-win）。双赢是一种体系，而“我赢”是另一种。杰克·韦尔奇奉行的正是“我赢”体系。

The Principal-Agent Problem

委托—代理问题

John

约翰

It's very interesting reading the book with the lens post the financial crisis. It's also interesting to see you railing against derivatives in this a few years before the financial crisis.

在金融危机后的视角下再读这本书非常有意思。同样有趣的是，危机前几年你就已经在书里痛斥衍生品。

Charlie

查理

That derivative railing was so manipulative and they marked the books like, “Two guys that make a big trade, they both recorded a big profit to their accounts, the accounts would less the profit on both sides.” It's the same trade. One was reporting a profit, and the other's reporting a profit. It couldn't both be -- if it gets too easy and too manipulative, and into that culture, the stock brokers, big banking, the guys who did the ordering, they take them to Las Vegas, they buy them a stack of chips, negotiable chips, and give it to them.

那种衍生品操作充满操纵性，他们在账面上这样记：“两个人做了一笔大交易，各自在账户里都记上一大笔利润，账面再减去交易双方的利润。”这是同一笔交易，一个记了利润，另一个也记了利润，怎么可能两边都赚？当事情变得过于容易、过于可操控，这种文化就蔓延开来；证券经纪、大型银行，那些下单的人把客户带去拉斯维加斯，给他们买一叠可兑现的筹码送上。

There was cocaine, they were prostitutes. It was not a pretty culture and kind of tolerated. What do you expect from a bunch of security traders? Everybody knew that his traders were behaving that way, but it was a mistake to let all that stuff to creep in. And it got pretty extreme. And then the bankers deal -- that deal that Goldman Sachs did with Malaysia, that sovereign wealth fund...

还有可卡因，还有妓女。那并不是光彩的文化，却被默许存在。你还能指望一群证券交易员怎样？大家都知道他的交易员在这么干，却仍纵容这些东西渗透进来，结果越演越烈。后来又有银行家们的交易——高盛和马来西亚那个主权财富基金做的那个交易……

John

约翰

The 1MDB scandal, yes.

“1MDB”丑闻，对。

Charlie

查理

Absolutely. And it's cute, that guy, the danger flags, he was absolutely, obviously, should have been avoided on moral grounds, and prudential grounds, too, but these get so intoxicated by the easy money.

完全正确。那个家伙，危险信号那么明显，无论从道德还是审慎角度，都该敬而远之，可他们却被轻易到手的钱迷住了眼。

John

约翰

It feels like a lot of the objections you have, sort of, say, professional money managers or Wall Street or whatever, can be summed up by people should be more cognizant of principal agent problems. Is that fair?

听起来你对职业投资经理或华尔街的不满，大体都可以归结为：人们应该更意识到委托—代理问题，对吗？

Charlie

查理

You can hardly imagine a field more full principal agents with their money than wealth management. Of course the wealth managers take care of themselves. That includes the foundation manager. A foundation manager is basically -- he wants to get \$400,000 a year while a professor gets \$110,000.

没有哪个领域像财富管理这样充斥着代理人拿别人钱办事。理财经理们当然会优先照顾自己，这包括基金会经理。一个基金会经理的基本思路就是——要拿到 40 万美元年薪，而教授只有 11 万。

He's got one way of doing it: picking money managers who get 3% off the top and in various forms of private equity. That's the only way he justifies his big peso. It's a principal agent problem. Of course you're going to want to invest a lot of money with private equity. And of course, private equity is going to do all kinds of horrible things to try and get 3 points off the top. Imagine you get 3 percentage points off the top of somebody else's money.

他只有一条路：挑选那些能在各种私募股权里抽头 3% 的资金管理人。只有这样，他才能为自己的高薪找理由。这就是典型的委托—代理问题。当然，他会把大量资金投向私募股权；而私募股权自然会想尽办法，从别人的钱里先拿走 3 个百分点。想想吧，直接从别人口袋里拿走 3%！

John

约翰

It's a good business model.

这是个很好的商业模式。

Charlie

查理

You can only do that if you have some miraculous way of making money. By the way, the guys in your field, Jim Simons, Jim Simons is a world-class mathematician. Here's what he did. He just used his damn computers to identify trading patterns that had deep human psychological background.

只有当你拥有某种神奇的赚钱秘诀时才能办到这一点。顺带一提，你们这个圈子里的吉姆·西蒙斯——他是世界级数学家——干的就是这样：他用那些该死的电脑去识别深藏人类心理背景的交易模式。

One of them was very simple. He took his computer data and he found that patterns in the market as a whole, there are 4 different patterns: win-win, lose-lose, win-lose, and lose-win. If it's just random, then all 4 are going to be equal. And lo and behold, he sifted the data and win-win was more common than win-lose or lose-win. And lose-lose was more common.

其中一种模式非常简单。他拿电脑数据发现，整体市场里存在四种模式：双赢、双输、赢-输、输-赢。如果全凭随机，这四种应当一样多。结果他筛选数据发现，双赢比赢-输或输-赢更常见，而双输也更常见。

So all they had to do is use program at computers to make these modest moderate-sized trades, or big -by his standards were moderate compared to the market. On that basis, the business whirled and whirled, the money just poured out of it.

于是他们只需用电脑程序下那些适中规模的单子；按他的标准算大，但相对市场仍属中等。就凭这一招，生意飞速运转，钞票如泉涌。

John

约翰

The tax shenanigans.

避税鬼把戏。

Charlie

查理

Billions poured out of the clearance system. And it was so simple and so elementary. And as a social utility of making money that way is about zero, so if I'd done that, I suppose I would be pleased that I was so clever, but I would have been a bit ashamed of not delivering anything to society in exchange for my big winnings. But luckily, I wasn't enough of a computer science to even think about such things, and I don't like short-term trading. And I don't want to be hanging over some trading desk punching keys.

数十亿美元从结算系统里流了出来，这一切既简单又原始。从社会效用角度看，这种赚钱方式几乎为零。要是我干了这事，也许会得意自己够聪明，但也会因未向社会回馈任何价值而感到羞愧。幸好我不懂那么多计算机科学，也不喜欢短线交易，更不想守在交易台上敲键盘。

John

约翰

Why do you think Sequoia has done so well?

你认为红杉资本为什么表现如此出色？

Charlie

查理

Sequoia got early into the game, and it's a fanatic meritocracy. So they work very hard, all of them. And they've gotten big and successful way ahead of everybody else, and they kept writing it like some chip manufacturers, each generation of chips they get. And in the end, they have a file. We have an example.

红杉入局得早，又是狂热的精英制度。每个人都拼命工作，他们早早做大做强，像芯片厂商一样一代代往上叠加成功。最终，他们为每个人都建档。我举个例子。

In our apartment houses, we use some little computer program in adjusting the rents or something or other that somebody -- and this one little guy, I had him check, Sequoia already had a file on this guy. So every little asshole with a little tiny computer program, they got an army of young guys out there finding every little guy and on big files and so forth.

我们公寓里用的一个小程序来调租金之类的，我让人去查，发现红杉早就给那个小家伙建了档。也就是说，任何一个写着小程序的小家伙，红杉都有一群年轻人去挖掘并建厚厚的档案。

So they see more -- they see better opportunities sooner and more than other people. And they've got the reputation. So people who are usually successful, they want to go with Sequoia, not some lesser firm. And the combination is just unbeatable. But lately, were they right to go into big Robinhood, but no, they made a huge mistake for Sequoia there, and they shouldn't have gone...

因此他们比别人看得多、看得早，机会更好；再加上名声在外，通常成功的人都想投奔红杉而非小公司。这样的组合无往不利。但最近，他们重仓罗宾汉对不对？不，他们犯了大错，红杉不该插手……

John

约翰

Morally or...

道德上，还是……

Charlie

查理

Morally and professionally, it's a big mistake. Really stupid. But it got so much, we've got to be in every new thing that's hot. They got to thinking like investment bankers, but it was a huge mistake for Sequoia to get involved with Robinhood and...

无论道德还是专业层面，这都是大错，真的愚蠢。他们太急于插手所有热门项目，思维开始像投行一样；红杉卷入罗宾汉是个天大错误，而且……

John

约翰

Is your objection to Robinhood that it encourages short-term trading and trading options?

你反对罗宾汉，是因为它鼓励短期交易和期权交易吗？

Charlie

查理

Yes, they lie and so forth.

是的，他们撒谎等等。

John

约翰

Do they?

真的？

Charlie

查理

Oh my God.

我的天哪。

John

约翰

What do they lie about?

他们撒什么谎？

Charlie

查理

Anything that works. They try and sell it, hey, this is a new fraternity of freedom or it's -- the whole thing is a lie.

凡是有用的都拿来忽悠。他们鼓吹这是一场新的自由兄弟会——整个宣传都是谎言。

John

约翰

You don't like the movement aspect of it.

你不喜欢它那种“运动式”炒作，对吧。

Charlie

查理

Oh no, no. They're trying to create mass hysteria. I don't like luring people in and screwing them, basically. And Bitcoin. Why was -- you're successful with Sequoia and you're identified with financing people like Apple and so on, why in the hell would you take Robinhood, you know it's some goddamn crypto? It's totally crazy. You don't want to do all the business that's legal for you to do. You want to exclude all kinds of things because it's beneath you. This shows that you work at these things intelligently. It gets hard, but it doesn't get impossible.

哦，不，不。他们在制造群体性歇斯底里。我可不喜欢把人骗进来再宰他们。还有比特币。你在红杉那么成功，又以资助苹果等公司闻名，为什么偏要投 Robinhood？那就是某种该死的加密货币！这太疯狂了。不是所有合法生意都该做，你得主动剔除那些配不上你的东西。这样才说明你在这些事上动了脑子。事情会变难，但绝非不可能。

But the other side of it is, if you take the -- I have been very well located in life. But with minor exceptions, what do I have relative to investments in life? I've got Costco stock, Berkshire stock, Li Lu's China fund and Avi's apartments. So I have four investments, basically, after 60 years or something -- by the way, I feel perfectly adequately diversified. Nobody teaches that's adequate diversification.

另一方面，如果你看我的投资——我的位置一直很好。可除了少数例外，我的投资就这些：Costco 的股票、伯克希尔的股票、李录的中国基金，以及 Avi 的公寓。六十多年了，我基本只有四项投资——顺带一提，我觉得这已经相当分散了。没人会教你这样的分散就足够。

And they're dead wrong. Simple fact is that it's easier to find four things that are above average than it is to find 40. It's not that damned easy to find. You find something that's almost sure to work because you figure -- you're asking to finding a gold mine in your backyard. When it works, is that easy? How many gold mines are you going to find in your backyard? You shouldn't expect to have all that many opportunities that are clearly identifiable.

他们大错特错。简单事实是，找出四个优于平均的标的比找四十个容易得多。这事本就不那么好办。你要找几乎肯定能奏效的机会，就像盼着在自家后院挖到金矿。真挖到时容易吗？你能在后院找到多少座金矿？别指望一生会有那么多明显机会。

It's going to be very hard and you're lucky if you get only a few in a lifetime. And then you have to be a combination of very patient and very aggressive. You have to sit patiently waiting, watching, surveying, hunting and pounce very occasionally. You get four pounces in a lifetime that really work big time, and that's a very successful lifetime. And other people think -- like that guy on TV, he's an expert in every company every time. That's crazy. He's an expert in saying something that's mildly plausible. That's not being an expert investor.

这会非常难，一生能遇到寥寥几次就算幸运。然后你得兼具极大的耐心和极强的进攻性。耐心守候、观察、侦察、狩猎，只在极少数时刻猛扑。一生真能成功扑到四次，就已极其成功。可别人——比如电视上那家伙——自称对每家公司都专家，那太疯狂了。他不过是擅长说些似是而非的话，并非真正的投资专家。

John

约翰

Doesn't it feel like the narrative on that is changing, where I think people are coming to understand the merits of concentration in positions that really work?

难道你不觉得这种说法正在改变吗？我认为人们开始理解在真正有效的仓位上保持集中投资的好处。

Charlie

查理

I had dinner with a whole crowd of Fidelity this very week, and they've got trillions under management, and they scrape only a modest amount off the top. And they've got a wonderful business, but they have the moral problem that they have no possibility at all of exceeding what an index man could do with their common stock investments.

这周我刚和一大群富达的人吃晚饭，他们管理着数万亿美元，只抽很少的费用。生意做得好极了，可道德上有个问题：他们普通股投资的业绩根本不可能超过指数基金。

Maybe they have an occasional analyst that's a little better than average that works into the system. Basically, what they do is they force everybody to be a closet indexer because nobody wants to be a stream outlier on the losing side because that can destroy your investment management business. But I would argue that the whole damn system is corrupt in investment management.

或许偶尔会有分析师水平稍高，但总体而言，他们迫使每个人都做隐性指数化投资，因为没人想在亏损那头当异类——那会毁掉你的投管业务。但我说整个投资管理体系都烂透了。

但斌的做法是普遍的做法。

They take care of the agents way better than they take care of the principals, and they lie to themselves and they lie to others. And that's our system. And everybody that wants a fair amount of easy money pretty fast. And that requires a plausible narrative and a big V. That's what's admired now. I regard modern venture capital as investment banking in disguise. Just a little different form of investment banking, same morality, same obsession with a lot of quick wealth. There's nothing wrong with investment banking, properly done, venture investing.

他们对代理人照顾远胜于委托人，还自欺欺人，欺骗他人。这就是我们的体系。人人都想很快赚到一大笔轻松钱，这就需要一个看似合理的故事和一个宏大的愿景。现在这最受追捧。我认为现代风投就是披着外衣的投行，只是形式略有不同，道德观一样，对快速致富的痴迷一样。投行也好，风投也好，只要做得合规并没错。

The Secret of Berkshire's Culture

伯克希尔文化的秘密

John

约翰

Is the secret of Berkshire's culture just the anti-bureaucracy bend? Could you sum it up...

伯克希尔文化的秘密仅仅是反官僚倾向吗？能总结一下吗……

Charlie

查理

Berkshire is pretty extreme in culture. We are deeply aware of how bureaucracies tend to create their own internal dynamics so that everybody protects everybody else and nobody changes anything, ruffles any feathers. And the net result is that a lot of bureaucracies make some very stupid decisions and we try and avoid that.

伯克希尔的文化相当极端。我们深知官僚机构容易形成内部保护机制，人人相互庇护，无人愿意变革、得罪人。结果很多官僚机构会做出极其愚蠢的决策，我们努力避免这种情况。

But the way we've done it, mostly, is by not having anybody around. They can't be bureaucratic if they're not there. There is nobody in the head office. So we avoided the bureaucracy. We just don't want other people to do it. Nobody else is as extreme as we are in that. It's a huge advantage to us.

我们的主要做法就是不设人员。没人就搞不起官僚。总部里一个人都没有，所以没有官僚可言。我们也不想别人来搞。没人像我们这么极端，这对我们是巨大优势。

吃自己的饭，不用杠杆，只做高端的AMEX，不用代理的Geico，都能想明白但做不明白的想法。

And another thing is, we like very trustworthy people. I'd rather have a brief telephone with somebody I trust than I would a 40-page contract prepared by the finest law firm in the world with somebody I don't trust. And so we like to deal with trustworthy people and to be able to count on their oral promises.

还有一点，我们喜欢非常值得信赖的人。我宁可与信得过的人通个简短电话，也不愿跟不信任的人签世界顶级律所起草的 40 页合同。我们乐于与靠谱的人打交道，并相信他们的口头承诺。

If you look to go into a Mayo operating room is what I call a seamless web of deserved trust. The surgeons trusting the anesthesiologist, the anesthesiologists trusting the surgeon, the nurses are trusting -- everybody trusts everybody else. There's no bureaucracy at all. They don't have time for bureaucracy.

走进梅奥诊所的手术室，你会看到我所谓的“应得信任的无缝网络”：外科医生信任麻醉师，麻醉师信任外科医生，护士也信任——所有人彼此信任。这里完全没有官僚主义，他们没空搞那些。

It’s in patients’ interest to get it over as soon as possible. And so that seamless web of deserved trust can do these very complicated procedures. We like a business system that operates as much as possible like a Mayo operating room, and that requires having very good people who are experienced enough with one another to trust one another.

越快完成手术对病人越有利。正因为有这张应得信任的无缝网络，才能完成极其复杂的手术。我们希望企业体系尽量像梅奥手术室那样运作，而这需要优秀的人才彼此熟悉、彼此信任。

John

约翰

And that trust is internally between the Berkshire folks or between the Berkshire folks and the managers?

这种信任指的是伯克希尔内部员工之间，还是伯克希尔员工与各子公司经理之间的信任？

Charlie

查理

Both. We want the internal and all the Berkshire people to trust one another internally, and we also want the customers to trust us. We're all for trust. Trust is one of the greatest economic forces on earth.

两者都有。我们希望伯克希尔内部所有人彼此信任，也希望客户信任我们。我们完全拥护信任——信任是世上最强大的经济力量之一。

John

约翰

How frequently do you disagree with managers on how much cash to send up to the mothership versus how much to reinvest in the business?

在把多少现金上缴总部、多少再投入业务的问题上，您和各位经理意见相左的情况有多常见？

Charlie

查理

Of course, some of our subsidiaries hoard the cash, if we’d let them and so forth.We're not brutal.

当然，如果任由子公司自行其是，有些公司会囤积现金，等等。我们并不残酷。

In the early conglomerates like Teledyne, they just forced all the cash to headquarters. And if you wanted new cash, you had to ask for it back. We never went to that. Everybody in the business knows that we'd rather have the cash sent back. If it can be sent back, we'd really have it sent back.

早期的多元化并购公司，比如泰利达恩，都会把所有现金强行调至总部；你要用钱得再申请要回去。我们从未那么做。业内人人都知道，我们更愿意他们把现金汇回总部——能汇回，我们就真希望他们汇回。

John

约翰

And is that one of Warren's skills, is keeping those managers...

这算是沃伦的一项本事吗？就是说让那些经理人……

Charlie

查理

He does not -- he's not brutal.

他可不是——他并不粗暴。

John

约翰

But he tickles it out of them.

但他还是能轻巧地把钱“挠”回来。

Charlie

查理

When they don't need it, it has a way of ending up back at headquarters without any big internal friction.

当他们用不着那些钱时，资金自然就会回到总部，而且内部几乎没有摩擦。

John

约翰

That sounds like some tickling is happening, yes.

听起来确实像是在“挠痒痒”啊，哈哈。

Charlie

查理

You can call it what you will. You're right, a lot flows to headquarters. It's interesting how much cash Berkshire does accumulate. It's a lot of cash.

你爱怎么称呼都行。没错，大量现金流向总部。伯克希尔累积的现金之多，确实令人惊讶。

John

约翰

5% of Apple sized amounts?

差不多相当于苹果公司市值的 5%？

Charlie

查理

Remember, I was there when there was nothing, and we have not issued many shares net since we started. So mostly what we have was created out of almost nothing.

要知道，我在公司一无所有的时候就已经在那儿了，而自成立以来我们几乎没净增发过股份。所以，我们拥有的基本都是从接近零起步创造出来的。

John

约翰

One famous example of share issuance was the General Re acquisition in 2000. Was that because you guys felt it was a market top?

一个著名的增发例子是 2000 年收购General Re。那是因为你们觉得市场见顶了吗？

Charlie

查理

It was true that our stock was then more highly valued than it is now. And of course, we valued General Re, we gave it more value than it really had, too. So...

那时候我们的股票确实比现在估值更高。当然，我们给General Re的估值也高于其真正价值。所以……

John

约翰

But it all worked out.

不过最后一切都还算顺利。

Charlie

查理

We made it work out well enough. The one that was awful was we gave Berkshire shares were Dexter Shoe Company, and the Chinese competition destroyed our business as the ink dried on the purchase every day. 2 years later, we could see we'd made a terrible mistake. Now it was only 2 percentage points of performance in 1 year. So in the history of Berkshire, it's not that big of a deal

我们让它最终运转得还行。最糟糕的一次是用伯克希尔股份收购 Dexter 鞋业，结果中国竞争对手在并购完成后迅速摧毁了我们的业务。两年后我们就看出犯了大错。不过那只让当年业绩少了 2 个百分点。放在伯克希尔历史里，这事算不上太大。

John

约翰

You guys did okay in the end.

你们最终还是干得不错。

Charlie

查理

No, but it was a big negative, but not very big. And as expected on Berkshire history, having 2 percentage points go away from 1 year, it's not that bad.

倒也谈不上不错，那确实是个负面因素，但并不算特别大。放在伯克希尔的历史长河中，一年少 2 个百分点并不算太糟。

John

约翰

Is that an example of the do as I say, not as I do, where you and Warren would say don't try to time the market, but that was a very effective bit of market timing?

这算不算是“听我说、别学我做”的例子？你和沃伦总说不要试图择时，但那却是一段非常有效的市场时机把握，对吧？

Charlie

查理

Of course, we're more willing to buy heavily with the cash accumulation when things got -- go down, down, down. Of course we're less and less able to find things when things go crazy. But I like the way Berkshire has behaved. I like the way its businesses have turned out. I like the people we deal with. It's been a very satisfactory part of my life. I feel privileged to have been part of it.

当然，当市场一路下跌、下跌、再下跌时，我们更愿意用手中的现金大量买入；而当市场疯狂时，我们越来越难找到合适标的。但我喜欢伯克希尔的行事方式，喜欢其业务的发展结果，喜欢我们合作的人。这段经历令我的人生十分满意，我能参与其中感到荣幸。

When you stop to think about it, Poor Charlie's Almanack is a lot like the guy who created modern Singapore. And what he always said was figure out what works and then do it. Figure out what works and then do it. He just did that more relentlessly than anybody else and more intelligently. And he was probably the greatest nation builder that's ever exists in terms of quality of leadership. He's probably the greatest nation builder that ever existed, including Pericles and everybody in all history.

仔细想想，《穷查理宝典》很像那个缔造现代新加坡的人。他始终说：找出有效之道，然后照做；找出有效之道，然后照做。他比任何人都更执着、更聪明地践行这一点。以领导品质论，他或许是史上最伟大的建国者，比伯里克利等历史人物都更出色。

And it's very much like Poor Charlie's Almanack. Figure out what works and do it. Figure out what doesn't work and avoid it. And he just was relentless. That's all he did. And he started as left-wing labor lawyer. At the start, he was a left-wing labor lawyer, end up creating modern Singapore just by figure out what works and do it, and figure out what doesn't work and avoid it.

这正是《穷查理宝典》的精髓：找出有效之道并照做，找出无效之道并避免。他毫不松懈，只做这件事。他起初是左翼劳工律师，最后却靠着“找出有效之道并照做，找出无效之道并避免”创造了现代新加坡。

Just keep doing that over and over again. So as far as I'm concerned, the politician who looks the most like Poor Charlie's Almanack is Lee Kuan Yew. And I'm not surprised that he got ahead better than any other nation builder that ever lived. That was all he did. It was pretty goddamn simple.

就这么不断重复。所以在我看来，与《穷查理宝典》最相似的政治家是李光耀。我并不惊讶他比任何建国者都更成功——他所做的一切就是如此，简单得要命。

John

约翰

Maybe a good example of that, that I love from Lee Kuan Yew's life of “find out what works and then do that” is about the deliberate choice of English as the national language, where Chinese would have been...

我很喜欢李光耀生平中“找出有效之道然后照做”的一个例子：他刻意选择英语作为国家语言，而本可以是中文……

Charlie

查理

Of course. He made zillions on decisions like that, that were totally correct. And not everybody has a political leader that tells the people to change their goddamn language. But when the logic required that he just figured out it would work better for Singapore, then he did it. Of course that's admirable. And of course it works. Everybody ought to study Lee Kuan Yew. In this house, I've got 2 busts of other people. One's a Benjamin Franklin, one of them is Lee Kuan Yew. That's all I have.

当然。他在那类决定上大获成功，全都正确。并不是每位政治领袖都敢要求人民改变自己的语言，但当逻辑表明那对新加坡更有利时，他就这么做了。这值得赞赏，也确实奏效。每个人都该研究李光耀。在这屋子里，我只摆了两尊半身像，一尊本杰明·富兰克林，一尊李光耀，仅此而已。

John

约翰

I could have guessed Benjamin Franklin. I wouldn't have guessed Lee Kuan Yew.

我能猜到本杰明·富兰克林，但没想到会有李光耀。

Charlie

查理

You can see why I like him. He just, time after time, he was so smart. I think he's smart to have a death penalty for drug dealers. They do not have a big drug problem in Singapore because he's very tough. They kill drug dealers.

你可以理解我为什么欣赏他。他一次又一次展现出聪明才智。我认为他对毒贩执行死刑很明智；新加坡毒品问题不严重，因为他执行得很严格——他们处死毒贩。

By the way, that's the way the Chinese got -- when 1 man in 6 in China was addicted to opium, the way they fixed that was death penalty for users. No exception. They did not have to kill all that many people. The problem went away. And I think more things ought to be dealt with in those Lee Kuan Yew-ish ways.

顺便说一句，中国当年六分之一的人染上鸦片时，也是靠对吸食者判死刑来解决，没有例外。他们并没处死很多人，问题就消失了。我认为更多事情应当以类似李光耀的方式处理。

John

约翰

That's a very good set of lessons maybe to end on. Find out what works and then do it. Avoid the big mistakes. Take a multidisciplinary approach. Thank you so much for this, and we're very excited to be working with you on the project. It was a very meaningful book for me, and I'm excited to have lots more people read it.

这是一组很好的结束箴言：找出有效之道然后照做，避免大错，采用多学科方法。非常感谢您的分享，我们很高兴能与您合作这本书。它对我意义重大，我也期待更多人阅读它。

Charlie

查理

I'm glad to do it.

乐意效劳。

2023-05-12 A Conversation with Charlie Munger & John Collison

2023-05-12 A Conversation with Charlie Munger & John Collison

Introduction

A Multidisciplinary Approach

The Map Is Not The Territory

Finding Monopolies & Profitable Industries

Charlie on Crypto

Today's Societal and Investing Landscape

What We Can Learn From Architectural Mistakes

In Search of Win-Wins

The Origins and Legacy of the Book

On Warren, the SEC, Buybacks, and More

Evaluating Stripe, NetJets, China, and GE

Why did that happen?

The Principal-Agent Problem

The Secret of Berkshire's Culture

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