让事情变得复杂很容易，变得简单却很难。​

Robert: Thank you so much for joining us today at "Exploring the Legacy of Charlie Munger, a Conversation With Mohnish Pabrai." Hello. My name is Robert Pittenger with the YPO Mosaic Chapter. Mohnish Pabrai has been a YPO member since 1997, lives in Austin, Texas, and graduated from Clemson University. He is the CEO of Dhandho Funds, which he grew from a million dollars with eight investors to  million as of December 31st. A massive growth in that time. Mohnish authored two books on value investing, The Dhandho Investor and Mosaic: Perspectives on Investing. So it is only fitting that he is speaking to the YPO Mosaic Chapter today. Mohnish is a highly successful value investor who did it, according to him, by "shamelessly cloning" the management decisions of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. He always says thank you to them for his success. Mohnish Pabrai along with fellow YPO Guy Spier teamed up to purchase the 2007 charity lunch with Warren and Charlie for $650,000. The lunch was life-changing for both gentlemen and Mohnish is here to tell us more about his close friend, Charlie Munger, which he developed out of that lunch. Besides his friendship with Charlie, one of the things Mohnish is proudest of is his lifetime ban from a casino in Las Vegas for his Blackjack crowds. Mohnish thank you for being with us today. We are so grateful, and we look forward to hearing some of your wisdom about Charlie and about playing Blackjack. The first thing that we would like to start with is there is a quote that you have talked about that Charlie Munger has said, which is, "Take a simple idea and take it seriously." Can you talk to us about what that means? What did Charlie mean by that line and how did you apply it in your life and your investing?

Mohnish: First of all, it is a pleasure to be with you. It is always a pleasure to talk to YPOs. Like many of you, YPO has completely changed my life for the better. I cannot even imagine what my life would have been if there was no YPO. There were just so many changes and improvements YPO brought along. I also wanted to share my grief and condolences with all of you on October 7th. Many of you, directly or indirectly, maybe knew some of the victims or the people who got injured or who got taken hostage. My thoughts and prayers are with you on that, and hopefully, we will get to a finish line on that at some reasonable point. My friendship with Charlie was quite unexpected and accidental. I never expected to even meet him. That was a great bonus of my life.

莫尼什：首先，很高兴与您在一起。与YPO交流总是一件令人愉快的事。和你们中的许多人一样，YPO彻底改变了我的生活。我甚至无法想象，如果没有YPO，我的生活会是什么样子。YPO给我带来了太多的改变和进步。10月7日，我还想与大家分享我的悲痛和哀悼。你们中的许多人可能直接或间接地认识一些受害者、受伤者或被劫持的人质。对此，我与你们同在，并为你们祈祷，希望我们能在某个合理的时间点找到答案。我和查理的友谊是意外和偶然的。我从没想过能遇到他。这是我人生中的一大收获。

The first time I met Charlie was even before the Buffett lunch. It was at a YPO event. One of the YPOers, Peter Kaufman, arranged for him to speak to YPO. I had just moved to California. That was around 2004. That was the first time I met Charlie and hung out with him a bit. The quote you brought up "Take a simple idea and take it seriously," is a famous Munger quote and it is something that I have always tried to practice in my life even before I

我第一次见到查理是在巴菲特午餐之前。那是在 YPO 的一次活动上。YPO的一位成员彼得-考夫曼（Peter Kaufman）安排他到YPO演讲。当时我刚搬到加利福尼亚。那是 2004 年左右。那是我第一次见到查理，并和他一起玩了一会儿。你提到的那句 "接受一个简单的想法并认真对待它 "是芒格的名言，也是我在生活中一直努力践行的，甚至在我还没有

heard of Charlie, or even before I heard about that quote because it is so powerful. As we go through life, we get some aha moments, where we uncover some nugget of wisdom or knowledge that maybe many other humans have either not figured out or not given the amount of weight they should to that particular piece of wisdom and knowledge. It can become a source of a tremendous competitive advantage. One of the things I learned about very early was the power of cloning and the power of copying.

我听说过查理，甚至在我听说这句话之前，因为它太有力量了。在我们的生活中，我们会有一些 "啊哈 "时刻，我们会发现一些智慧或知识，而这些智慧或知识可能是其他许多人都没有弄明白的，或者是他们没有给予这些智慧和知识应有的重视。它可以成为巨大竞争优势的源泉。我很早就了解到克隆的力量和复制的力量。

I remember when I was in my early twenties, I read a book by Tom Peters. He was a big management guru in the eighties. In that book, he was giving the example of two gas stations in California that were diagonal on a busy intersection from each other. Both the gas stations were self-service stations. You come in, you pump your gas, and you leave. The owner would come out maybe once an hour, pick a random car, wash the windshield, or check the oil; just some extra service at no charge. The guy who was diagonal across the street was seeing this take place. He said to himself, "Well, that is kind of stupid. You cannot do it for everyone. If you did it for everyone, you would lose your shirt because you are not charging for it. He never copied or cloned that.

我记得在我二十出头的时候，我读过汤姆-彼得斯（Tom Peters）写的一本书。他是八十年代的管理大师。在那本书里，他举了一个例子：加利福尼亚州有两个加油站，分别位于一个繁忙十字路口的对角线上。这两个加油站都是自助加油站。你进来，加油，然后离开。店主可能一小时出来一次，随便挑一辆车，洗一下挡风玻璃，或者检查一下机油；只是一些额外的服务，不收取任何费用。斜对面的那个人看到了这一幕。他对自己说："嗯，这有点愚蠢。你不能为每个人都这样做。如果你为每个人都这样做，否则你会赔得血本无归，因为你没有收费。他从来没有复制或克隆过。

Over time, what happened is that the gas station that was providing this random extra service saw an increase in business, and the one diagonal from him saw a decrease. Even after seeing the decrease, the guy across the street did not change his behavior. Tom Peter said, and this is what I found very unbelievable, that you can go to your most direct competitors and you can sit down with them, and you can give them all your trade scenes, everything that you learned that has given you an advantage, and they will listen to you, but there will be no behavior change. When I read that, I said, "This is ridiculous. This cannot be the way the world works." I am in my early twenties, I haven't kind of experienced life, and I don't know kind of how things work, but I made a promise to myself that I was going to prove Tom Peters wrong, and I was going to prove him wrong two ways. One, I was going to look for instances where humans see something smart happening and copy or clone it, because that would prove him wrong, and the second is, whenever I see someone doing something smart, I am going to copy it because that also proves him wrong. From my early twenties till now, this year, I am going to be 60, what I found, because I became a student of this, is that Tom Peters was mostly right. I still do not know why this is the case, but humans have an aversion to cloning. They somehow consider it beneath themselves that they did not come up with the idea. What I also found is that when I forced myself to copy things that I found to be smart, it gave me a big edge. This was an example of a simple idea. What I found is that there was a very small sliver of humans who were master cloners, and these humans owned the world. They did very well.

随着时间的推移，提供这种随机额外服务的加油站的生意越来越好，而他斜对面的加油站的生意却越来越差。即使看到生意减少，街对面的那个人也没有改变他的行为。汤姆-彼得说，这是我觉得非常不可思议的地方，你可以去找你最直接的竞争对手，你可以和他们坐下来，把你所有的商业秘密说给他们，你所学到的一切能给你带来优势的东西，他们会听你的，但行为不会改变。当我读到这句话时，我说："这太荒谬了。世界不可能是这样运转的"。我才二十出头，还没有经历过生活，也不知道事情是怎么运作的，但我向自己承诺，我要证明汤姆-彼得斯是错的，我要从两个方面证明他是错的。第一，我要寻找人类看到聪明的事情发生的实例，并复制或克隆它，因为这将证明他是错的；第二，每当我看到有人做聪明的事情时，我就要复制它，因为这也证明他是错的。从我二十出头到现在，今年我就要六十岁了，我发现，因为我成为了这方面的学生，汤姆-彼得斯大部分时候都是对的。我仍然不知道为什么会这样，但人类对克隆有一种反感。他们莫名其妙地认为，不是自己想出了这个主意，就有失身份。我还发现，当我强迫自己复制那些我认为聪明的东西时，会给我带来很大的优势。这是一个简单想法的例子。我发现，有极少数人类是克隆高手，这些人类拥有整个世界。他们做得非常好

For example, almost everything at Microsoft is cloned. Microsoft spends billions of dollars on its research labs. Nothing has ever come out of that. What has worked for them is looking at Lotus and creating Excel, looking at WordPerfect and creating Word, looking at the Mac and creating Windows, and so on. Even now, OpenAl is a partnership with AI. Google did the work. Microsoft did none of the work, and they are ahead. Sam Walton was another great cloner. In fact, James Sinegal, former CEO of Costco, had cloned the entire model from Sol Price, who he used to work for. Someone asked him, "What did you learn from Sol Price?" His response was, "It is the

例如，微软几乎所有的东西都是克隆的。微软在研究实验室上花费了数十亿美元。但却没有任何成果。他们的成功经验是：研究 Lotus 并创造出 Excel，研究 WordPerfect 并创造出 Word，研究 Mac 并创造出 Windows，等等。即使是现在，OpenAl 也是与AI合作。谷歌（在AI方面）做了大量工作，微软没做什么工作，但他们却领先了。山姆-沃尔顿是另一位伟大的克隆者。事实上，好市多的前首席执行官詹姆斯-西内格尔（James Sinegal）就是从他曾经的同事索-普莱斯（Sol Price）那里克隆了整个模式。有人问他："你从索尔-普赖斯那里学到了什么？"他的回答是："这是

wrong question. Everything I know is from Sol Price. There is nothing I know that did not come from Sol Price." These were people who took a simple idea very, very seriously. It is not just enough to read about some idea and be impressed with it. When you see that something grabs you, you have to go all in and you have to fight the normal tendency of the status quo.

问错了。我所知道的一切都是从 Sol Price 那里学来的。我所知道的一切都来自于Sol Price"。这些人非常、非常认真地对待一个简单的想法。仅仅读到一些想法并对其印象深刻是不够的。当你看到某个东西抓住了你的心，你就必须全力以赴，你必须与想要维持现状的倾向做斗争。

Both Charlie and Warren, their success has come from the dogged pursuit of a few very simple ideas. For example, when they bought See's Candies in the 70s in California, it was a huge jump for them. They paid three times the book value for the company. They thought they were paying too much, and they didn't understand how good a business it was. The only thing Warren did every year was he left the management alone to run the business. However, on January 1st of each year, he changed all the prices significantly above the rate of inflation. For instance, if inflation was  , he would raise the price  , and the next year it was 3 or  , he would raise another  . What surprised him was he kept pounding in these very heavy price increases and unit volumes kept going up. It stunned him that you could have a business with this much pricing power. Both Warren and Charlie did not understand brands and did not understand the power of brands, but they became very ardent students of "What was this phenomenon? What did this mean? How can we apply this in other businesses?" Today, we see that it was fundamental to Berkshire, because it was, again, looking at a relatively simple idea, but trying to get your arms around it. Many of us start businesses because we see an offering gap. We see some product or service that should exist in the world but doesn't, or maybe there is not enough of it, so we go into it. Once we take that plunge, having this notion of the dogged pursuit of simple ideas will lead to a lot of good things.

无论是查理还是沃伦，他们的成功都源于对一些简单想法的执着追求。例如，70 年代他们在加利福尼亚收购 See's 糖果公司时，对他们来说是一次巨大的跳跃。他们为这家公司支付了三倍于账面价值的价格。他们认为自己花的钱太多了，而且他们并不了解这家公司的业务有多好。沃伦每年做的唯一一件事，就是让管理层独自经营公司。不过，在每年1月1日，他会上调所有价格，提价幅度远高于通胀增速。例如，如果通货膨胀率是3%，他就会把价格提高10%，第二年是3%或4% ，他就会再提高10%。让他惊讶的是，他不断地大幅提价，单位销量却不断上升。这让他惊呆了，原来企业可以有这么大的定价权。沃伦和查理都不了解品牌，也不了解品牌的力量，但他们都非常热衷于研究 "这是什么现象？这意味着什么？我们如何将其应用到其他业务中？今天，我们看到，这对伯克希尔公司来说是至关重要的，因为这同样是在研究一个相对简单的想法，但却要努力去掌握它。我们中的许多人创办企业，是因为看到了市场空白。我们看到一些产品或服务应该存在于这个世界上，但却没有，或者可能还不够多，于是我们就投入其中。一旦我们下定决心，坚持不懈地追求简单的想法，就会有很多好的结果。