A Conversation with Charlie Munger查理·芒格访谈录 (John Collison)

原文信息：

• 标题：A Conversation with Charlie Munger
• 作者：John Collison
• 发表时间：2023-12-05
• 链接：HTML
• 翻译：Vito
• 修订：Vito、Ponge

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Introduction 引言

Patrick: [00:00:57] 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.

帕特里克：按照我们早已拟定的计划，查理·芒格的这篇访谈，与Stripe Press推出的《穷查理年鉴》的精彩再版同时进行，都在今天发布。Tamara Winter和Stripe Press团队制作了一本价值非凡的美妙书籍，你值得拥有。上周当我们听到查理离世的消息时，都无比震惊，但在与他亲近的人商议之后，大家都一致同意按计划发布这次采访。

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.

回顾他卓尔不群的一生，有几点给我留下了深刻的印象。用好奇这个词来形容查理还远远不够，他是一位贪婪地探求真理的人。他幽默、他智慧。但对我来说，最令人印象深刻的是，他是一位伟大的导师。与他一起共进晚餐并深受启发的人数之多令人震撼。他将自己所学无私地传授给那些感兴趣的人，改变了他们的思想和生活。每个听众都能够脱口背出查理·芒格的一些智慧箴言，这证明了他的影响力和影响范围。

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.

他在这次采访中说道，如果你不去探寻，就不会有收获。对我来说——对你们来说我也希望如此——他的遗产之一就是要去求索、去学习、去寻找，永不停歇。在我将采访交给约翰·科利森之前，他是本次访谈查理·芒格的主持人，我想和大家分享查理的最后箴言。他说，人类所能做的最好的事情就是帮助另一个人多知多智。对此我深表赞同。我们需要更多像他这样的人。能够再一次从他的采访中接受启示，我感到非常感激。请大家享受这次采访，愿查理安息。

A Multidisciplinary Approach 多学科思维方式

John: [00:02:27] We are here in Charlie’s house in L.A. where you have lived for 61 years.

约翰：我们在查理位于洛杉矶的家里（做这次访谈），你在这里已经住了61年。

Charlie: [00:02:32] Yes.

查理：是的。

John: [00:02:33] And I just learned that you designed this house.

约翰：我刚刚才得知原来这座房子是你自己设计的。

Charlie: [00:02:35] Right.

查理：是的。

John: [00:02:34] 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.

约翰：所以我们是在你的作品里面讨论你的创意思想，我对此非常兴奋。我在创办Stripe的早期阶段就读过《穷查理宝典》，记不清确切的阅读地点了，但应该是在最初的那几年里。我觉得这本书是对独立思考的赞美诗，至少在我的早期阶段，有很多既定观念告诉人们世界如何运行，要起身质疑其中的一些成见或用自己的方式来看待事物，需要一定的自信。

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?

很明显，我觉得我从中得到的收获是，多学科思维和多心智模型，这对我极有帮助。但我觉得其中的一部分关键是，比如对于我来说，关于Stripe这一生意，更应该思考业务的质量好不好，我很强烈地感觉到，你所关注的是某种程度上的经营思路和经营数据迷思，金融业界的关注点常常局限于企业的经营思路和经营数据，而你则更加注重这家企业的生意模式是否优秀，是否具备长期可持续性。

Charlie: [00:03:35] 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.

查理：嗯，事情还不止于此。如果仅仅是在电气工程、汽车与交通工程或诸如此类的领域，传统金融思维还算靠谱。但在经营企业或机构等复杂系统中，传统的教条观念就是愚笨的见解（译者理解是说，对于复杂度没那么高的工程领域，机械的工程性金融思维还算靠谱。但对于复杂度更高、影响因素更多的真实世界的金融市场、企业经营领域，传统金融思维就会只见树木不见森林或盲人摸象或刻舟求剑。类似牛顿物理vs混沌理论）。从一开始，我的理论就是要消除所有最通常的愚见。我意识到，如果能做到这一点，我将比大多数人更有优势。因此，我收集愚见以图避其而行。

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.

谈及财富管理行业的运行之道，在这个世上很难再找到这么一个地方有这么多聪明人在干着愚笨事。因为有太多愚笨行为需要避免，对于那些能够习得反愚能力的人来说，简直就像聪明人进了猪圈那样掉进天堂碾压同行。我很幸运，我的性格和遭遇迫使我从事投资这个业务并精明地投出了自己的钱。即使在我还没多少钱时候，我就很精明地投资。这就是我取得成功的方式。

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.

当这种方法奏效以后，我就一直不断重复这一成功之道。我从不在意学科之间的界限。我很早就意识到我需要融会贯通几乎所有学科的重要理念。

John: [00:05:01] And because you’re…

约翰：是因为你…

Charlie: [00:05:02] 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.

查理：思想伟力源于常用常习。这就是我们的竞争优势所在——但其他人称之为常识。有人说老乔有常识。他们其实言非意指，反而是指他有非凡洞察。那些敏于一眼看穿所有事的人，他们有着非凡洞察，而不是基于常识，大多数人就是这样固执偏见。

John: [00:05:25] 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?

约翰：你如此探求各个学科的重要理念，是因为纯粹的好奇心，还是因为你认为它们在工作中有实际用途？

Charlie: [00:05:33] 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.

查理：两者都是。比如，当我接触到帕斯卡的数学和基础概率论时，我立刻意识到这门数学有多么重要。我的数学老师完全没有意识到他所教授的这门数学（指概率论）对于普通人的日常生活有多么重要，但我立即看到了这个本质，并完全掌握了它。我将概率论用于实际，并一直在用。我一生都在反复运用这种方法。

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.

在哈佛商学院的早期，当我去读哈佛商学院时，他们最引以为豪的是决策树理论。他们在哈佛商学院教授研究生这门理论，庄重肃穆，引经据典。

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.

在那些早年时代，哈佛商学院教授的决策树理论，是帕斯卡概率论在生活中的实际应用。这是哈佛商学院在为一群研究生补习高中数学，他们并没错。他们在那个年代教授决策树理论是对的，因为很多人没有像应该掌握的那样掌握概率论。

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.

如果没三心二意的话，我们在高中的时候就应该掌握这些东西。我们的高中老师就应该解释清楚马戏团和赌场忽悠普通人的把戏。这门课早就应该教过了，但在高中就没教好，大学也没教好，教的方法也不对。最后，到了哈佛商学院（这样的顶尖学府），才开始给研究生补习这门高中数学。你会说这究竟是哪门子事啊？原因就是，我们之前的教育体系实在太渣了。

John: [00:07:09] 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…

约翰：在《穷查理宝典》中，你倡导多学科方法，建议掌握各个不同学科的重要理念。其中一个我特别喜欢并征服了我的，是生物学中的稳态系统理论，理解种群如何在生态系统中繁荣。特别是…

Charlie: [00:07:30] And how they perish too.

查理：如何走向灭亡。

John: [00:07:33] 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…

约翰：你为什么不想置身于那些掠夺性的寡头、垄断企业、能够轻松榨取租金的企业。相反，而是那些具备可持续性、能够穿越周期，却没法榨取租金的企业…

Charlie: [00:07:46] 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.

查理：嗯，有些掠夺性寡头也能活得很久。还有，有很多房地产商都是卑鄙下流的。不做下贱事，他们甚至认为自己在这行都混不下去。他们认为自己只有干了卑鄙勾当才能有安全优势。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，就是如果你赖以为生的是叫卖对别人有益的东西，而不是诸如赌博、毒品、疯狂的宗教、以及如此种种的对他们有害的东西的话，平均来说，就会更安全、更有利可图。当然，你会希望叫卖对他们有益的东西。真不理解那些根本不在乎这个规则的人是怎么想的。

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，投资银行和薪酬顾问推销的多是些卑鄙的玩意儿。我可不会沾那些东西。我只会推销那些我自己愿意买的东西，只愿意和我钦佩的人一起工作。这是个非常重要的原则，要学会挑出那些值得信赖的可靠之人，和别人打交道时也要成为他们可以托付的人。

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.

如果在很年轻时就开始这样做，并坚持一生，就会占据巨大优势。这并不是很难。在学习高中数学时就保持清醒；结交好人，而不是坏人；只推销你自己会买的东西，而不是只要能忽悠到就啥都卖。这都是些非常简单的理念。但让人极其吃惊的是，对于那些不为诱惑坚持这些简单理念的人来说，效果是如此出色。

John: [00:09:32] Just because it’s easy advice or simple advice does not mean it’s commonly followed…

约翰：只是因为这些建议简单或容易，并不意味着它们会被普遍遵循…

Charlie: [00:09:36] It’s better if it’s simple.

查理：如果（真的那么）简单，就更好了。（译者理解芒格的意思是，表面上看上去很简单，但要做到，其实并不容易。）

John: [00:09:37] You presumably also add be reliable to that. That’s the point that you make…

约翰：你或许还要把靠谱这一点加上去。你曾强调过这一点……

Charlie: [00:09:42] Who wants to be dealing with an unreliable person?

查理：谁会愿意与不靠谱的人打交道呢？

John: [00:09:45] 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.

约翰：你提到过你父亲教给你的一课——正是促使你从律师转行到投资的部分原因之一，律师的客户们，那些需要大量购买律师服务的人都是些不靠谱的人，所以你选择了反其道而行之。

Charlie: [00:10:01] 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.

查理：人们之所以会遇到很多麻烦，或者岌岌可危，那都是咎由自取。这些都非常危险。如果你回顾资本主义历史，再也找不到比Sackler家族打着止痛药的合法旗号兜售非法药物赚钱更不道德的方式了。

If you looked at the law firms and advisory firms and accounting firms that help the Sacklers 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.

如果你看看那些帮Sackler家族助纣为虐的律师事务所、咨询公司和会计师事务所，其中有很多非常体面的名字。我认为服务Sackler家族这样的客户是脑子不好使。你甚至都不希望这些人知道你的地址，你不该希望与他们有任何瓜葛。

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，很多法律业务都出自那些行走于非常不道德边缘的人。如果他们足够“成功”，很多大型律师事务所都会欣然接受这些客户。我非常看不惯法律服务这行的这种情况。我认为你应该慎重选择自己的客户（而不是什么官司都接）。

John: [00:11:02] What do you think is the societal fix for problems like the pharma company’s role in the opioid epidemic?

你认为社会应该如何解决制药公司在阿片类药物流行中扮演的角色等问题？

Charlie: [00:11:10] 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.

这是个大命题。很多人会想把贩卖毒品牟利的历史洗白。如果你回溯富兰克林·德拉诺·罗斯福（美国第三十二任总统）的家族史，会发现他的钱主要来自他祖父卖到中国的鸦片，他也把鸦片卖给中国土匪。他回到美国后非常受人尊敬，住在大别墅里，我确信他在与那些商人打交道时表现得很好。

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.

但我不想赚卖鸦片给中国人这样的钱。这是一种非常恶心的赚钱方式，但很多早期捐给哈佛、耶鲁和普林斯顿等名校的钱，很多这类的钱，也是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，很多人把世界历史上所有可怕的行为都合理化了。我认为，把这整个系统从你的剧目中删除会更安全、更可靠、更好。把坏人从你的生活中剔除，把不良行为从你的生活中剔除，就这么简单。

The Map Is Not The Territory 地图并非疆域

John: [00:12:06] And this gets back for me to the — one of the big takeaways I had when I read Poor Charlie’s Almanack 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.

约翰：对我来说，这让我想到了《穷查理宝典》中的一个重要观点，即地图并非疆域。一家企业并不只是它的利润表和资产负债表。一家企业的财务数据可能看起来非常强大，但问题是，管理层是否诚实？产品是否真正有益于其客户？你可能会遇到两家利润表非常相似的企业，但其中一家的生意更可持续，另一家则不是。

Charlie: [00:12:31] 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.

查理：投资（这门生意）的困难在于，大多数企业都会消亡。这就像进化一样。在300年的时间尺度上，几乎所有事物都会消亡。所有伟大的零售商中，90%在过去的100年里都消亡了。还有很多其他领域，柯达消亡了，所有看起来会永久存在的大公司都消亡了。

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.

当然，成功的投资要预见到可能摧毁企业的因素。例如，就在我们坐在这里的时候。在过去的100年里，控制大品牌的人相对于其他任何人都能更轻松、更安全地赚更多的钱。

John: [00:13:12] Brands like what? What’s an example?

约翰：比如什么品牌？举个例子？

Charlie: [00:13:13] 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.

查理：任何一种牙膏，比如宝洁，你可以随便举例。但我记得当年伊潘那是一种很受欢迎的快速增长的牙膏，但现在已经彻底消失了。我认为还有一些力量——事实上，如今对于控制大品牌的人来说，情况将变得更加困难，因为像Costco这样的自有品牌以及其他自有品牌的成功，以及像Aldi这样的零售商的成功，我只是认为对于大品牌来说，未来的困难将比过去100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.

如果你是一名投资者，你应该意识到（这种风险），即使你还没有看到这一点。除非你对商业史足够熟悉，记得所有那些看起来可投资、看起来会永久存在的东西——当然，这不可能——最终都消亡了，否则你不会意识到现代大品牌存在消亡的风险。

John: [00:14:03] 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…

约翰：因为感觉它们在两个方面受到挤压，对吧？一方面，有像沃尔玛、Costco或亚马逊这样的大型零售商，而另一方面，一些公司可以通过互联网直接卖给消费者，他们不需要零售分销渠道。所以感觉品牌…

Charlie: [00:14:17] 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.

查理：是的。我认为所有的投资本质上都是非常困难的。因为显然，好主意被推高到如此高的价格，以至于它们越来越危险，因为没有一种投资会好到那样，把价格越抬越高就意味着会毁掉它，树不会长到天上去。

John: [00:14:36] 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…

约翰：这引出了一个我一直在想的问题，你和沃伦有一句名言，说你们将投资分为“是”、“否”和“太难理解”，并表示许多高科技公司可能属于“太难理解”这个类别…

Charlie: [00:14:48] For us anyway, yes.

查理：对我们来说，是的。

John: [00:14:49] For sure, yes.

约翰：当然，没错。

Charlie: [00:14:50] Well, we’re the biggest shareholder in Apple. So we haven’t totally failed.

查理：嗯，我们是苹果公司最大的股东。所以我们并未完全失败。

John: [00:14:52] 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.

约翰：当然不是，我明白。我认为你们在苹果持有的5%股份，在我看来，对你们而言表现得相当不错。但你们不能因为只是去思考布法罗晚报而不去思考科技公司。报业曾经是很棒的类通行费业务，直到互联网出现，然后这个行业的经济模型就完全变了样。

Charlie: [00:15:08] 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.

查理：基本上，报业的财富，除了少数例外，全都消失了。他们曾经是坚不可摧的垄断者、是金矿，让他们的所有者安全地致富了200年，但几乎全部消失了。

John: [00:15:25] 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?

约翰：所以我的问题是，当全面的技术变革真的动摇某个行业时，你如何思考生意的质量？

Charlie: [00:15:32] 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.

查理：必须承认，技术变革确实会让一些新兴企业兴旺发达，而让其他看似不可动摇的企业走向失败。这是你必须理解的现实之一。

John: [00:15:44] So you secretly are a tech investor because your reasoning about the effects of tech on Costco or on…

约翰：所以你私底下其实是个科技投资者，因为你思考了技术变革对好市多的影响或者对…

Charlie: [00:15:51] 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…

查理：是的，只是…拿制药业来说吧。美国的制药业比世界上任何其他国家的制药业都更好。第二名甚至无法与之相提并论。所以我们在科学与技术等方面取得了人类历史上最伟大的成就之一。但与此同时，制药业在分销方面存在着相当多的欺诈行为。每个人都欺骗政府…

John: [00:16:16] The PBMs, yes.

约翰：对，是那个药品福利管理系统（Pharmacy Benefit Managers）。

Charlie: [00:16:17] 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 and 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.

查理：是的，就是那个系统。大体上，我们没有投资制药业，因为我们没有优势。我对生物学、医学和化学了解不够，要我预测哪种新药研发更可能成功，我没任何优势，其他懂得这些知识的人，虽然他们掌握的知识也并非完美，但他们要比我懂得多的多。当我在为像养家糊口这样对我来说至关重要的事情而努力时，为什么要与那些在这个领域比我擅长得多的人竞争呢？所以当然，我们不会去碰它。

I would argue that they’re — in practical life, you want to succeed, you got to do two things. You 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.

我认为在现实生活中，要想成功，你必须做到两件事。一是要有一定的自信。二是要知道自己知道什么，不知道什么。你必须知道自己能力的边界。如果你知道自己能力的边界，相比于不知道自己的边界，你就是一个更安全的思考者和投资者。我经常遇到聪明人，那些IQ160但认为自己只有150的人，要比那些IQ是160但认为自己有200人更安全。那样（没有自知之明）的家伙会害了你，因为他不知道自己能力的边界，他认为自己无所不知。

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.

一定程度上，沃伦和我，我们基本知道自己知道什么，不知道什么；擅长什么，不擅长什么。我们不擅长的事之一，就是预测哪种新药会成功。所以我们甚至都不去关注它。毕竟，世界上有很多机会，如果我们因为缺乏处理某种投资的能力而不得不放弃，就让其他人去处理。那样也挺好。我们不需要抓住所有机会。

John: [00:17:49] 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.

约翰：为什么你们从未投资亚马逊？它在运营方式上与好市多非常相似，通过规模经济将价格降低然后回馈给消费者，并有长期复利效应。

Charlie: [00:18:02] 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 average that, we bought existing businesses that have a lot of momentum as well as all the talent and just wrote those things.

查理：实际上，我们创办了一两家企业，收购了一些小企业并将其发展壮大。所以我们做过一些看起来像风险投资的事情，其中一些还非常成功。但平均而言，我们只是开出支票买下那些势头强劲的现有企业以及所有人才。

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.

我们通过发现已经运作良好的企业并投资其中赚了更多钱，而不是从零开始创办新企业。NetJets就是一个有趣的例子。我们（在这笔投资中）承受亏损或仅仅盈亏平衡坚持了10到12年。现在它是一家金矿般的企业。我们看起来像风险投资家。我想在这个案例中我们确实是的。

John: [00:18:42] NetJets is now a very good business?

约翰：NetJets现在是家非常好的企业？

Charlie: [00:18:45] Good is an understatement. That’s not an adequate word.

查理：用”好”来形容NetJets太过轻描淡写，还远远不够。

John: [00:18:49] 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.

约翰：所以我观察到，你们所痴迷的很多非常成功的企业似乎都特别注重资本效率。NetJets和可口可乐在表面上看起来可能并非一类企业。当你看待可口可乐时，他们是大品牌，他们做广告，他们只生产糖浆，但把资本密集型的装瓶工作交给合作伙伴，由他们来承担资本开支。类似的，NetJets开创了不持有飞机的模式，而是将所有权和折旧费用转移到其他人身上。

Charlie: [00:19:23] 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 that you have to put a lot of capital to make the money. Of course, that’s true. Naturally, everybody is drawn to a business that will produce huge profits with no capital or a huge return on the capital put up.

查理：你说得完全正确。当然，拥有一家能够赚取大量利润却不需要任何资本投资的企业，要比另一家你必须投入大量资本才能赚钱的企业更好。当然，这千真万确。自然而然，每个人都会倾向于能够产生大量利润却不需要任何资本投资或者能从已投入的资本赚取大量回报的企业。

John: [00:19:43] Do you specifically look for businesses that are good at pulling in other partners who invest the capital? So Domino’s Pizza…

约翰：你是否会特别搜寻那些善于拉拢其他合作伙伴投入资本的企业？比如达美乐比萨…

Charlie: [00:19:50] We don’t have any one model of being good. The harsh reality of business are good in various ways, and all we care about, is the way 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.

查理：我们没有一个固定的成功模式。面对残酷的商业现实，企业的经营方式多种多样，我们关心的只是哪种方式可行。总体而言，它们都干得很棒。当然，每个人都喜欢那种不需要任何资本就能印出很多钱的企业。好市多不需要营运资本。

John: [00:20:09] Why not?

约翰：为什么会不需要？

Charlie: [00:20:10] Because the turnover is so high that they don’t have to pay the supplier until they’ve been paid by the…

查理：因为周转率非常高，他们在需要向供应商付款之前已经把库存卖出去了……

John: [00:20:17] They’ve shifted the inventory by the time they need to pay the supplier.

约翰：他们在需要向供应商付款之前就已经卖掉了存货。

Charlie: [00:20:20] 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.

查理：另一些人在为他们的存货融资。如果我们愿意，我们可以租用所有的物业。但我们不这么做，我们尽可能自持物业。但基本上，如果你愿意，你可以几乎不需要任何资本来经营好市多。当然，相比其他平庸生意，我们更喜欢这样的企业，可惜这样的企业并不多。

John: [00:20:38] 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?

约翰：你是否同意，这一点在商界被误解得很深，因为人们都痴迷于百分比利润率，但却忽视了企业的资本效率是百分比利润率和存货周转率的函数，其中任何一个因素都能促进资本效率的提高？

Charlie: [00:20:54] 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.

查理：嗯，我相信现代商学院中的每个人都能理解这一点。但他们学的是错误的文化。他们学的是，例如，如果你只需在90天内支付供应商，但30天内就卖掉了存货，那么你就可以将中间所得都据为己有——有人为你提供经营资金。他们这是在欺负供应商，这些供应商都是些小供应商，所以他们才能得逞。我不认为这种模式既安全又好。我认为这种欺负小供应商的做法很愚蠢。我不主张这么无情对待小供应商。

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.

那些观念错误的人会说，我们只是想要降低资本投入。我们只想及时支付一小部分我们希望他们信任我们、喜爱我们并服务好我们的小供应商。我们开始用非常不恰当的方式对待他们。这样的做法极其愚蠢，很不明智。

John: [00:21:36] So what examples do you prefer of businesses driving capital efficiency without squeezing small suppliers?

约翰：那么，在不压榨小型供应商的情况下提高资本效率这一点上，你更喜欢哪些企业的例子？

Charlie: [00:21:43] Well, Costco is one.

查理：嗯，Costco就是一个例子。

John: [00:21:44] By turning the inventory quickly?

约翰：通过快速周转库存吗？

Charlie: [00:21:46] Yes and doing that because they have fewer stocking units and they’re way more efficient.

查理：是的，他们通过减少单位库存数量以及更高的效率实现了这一点。

John: [00:21:51] You’re on the board, right?

约翰：你是董事会成员，对吧？

Charlie: [00:21:53] 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.

查理：是的。我算是其中比较年长的成员。但Costco，它的企业文化真是令人惊叹。整个公司的文化是如此精明细致，它只是一次次从胜利走向胜利。降低单位库存，提高商品流速，真是太明智了。实行会员制也是个高招。

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不想要三类顾客。他们不要偷东西的人。他们不要用假支票的人，也不要那些在他们的门店不花很多钱却占着他们该死的停车场的人。所以他们采用了会员制，只接受某些类型的会员，结果现在，他们筛选出了那些每次光顾都大量购物的顾客。

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一直是世界上失窃率最低的零售商。这也有内部的小技巧。因此，Costco的净失窃率始终低于千分之二。这是闻所未闻的。

John: [00:22:46] I hadn’t thought of the parking lot efficiency with the membership system.

约翰：我没想到会员制还可以提高停车场的效率。

Charlie: [00:22:49] 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.

查理：你不能只是为了买一瓶碘酒就去Costco，随便就去。你必须是会员，而且你必须支付足够的费用，所以对于普通人来说，他们不会为了买一瓶碘酒之类的东西额外支付100美元（会员费）。我们挑出了好顾客，把那些只买几件小东西的人挡在了外面。

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曾经说过：“企业应该谨慎选择它有意不做的业务。”当然，这句话直接出自芒格的书。你要弄清楚你想避免什么。他们想避免失窃损失、挪用资金、假支票以及占据停车场却不大量消费。而他们的系统一下子就实现了所有这些目标。

John: [00:23:27] It’s like your first speech in the book, start with the business you don’t want, work backwards.

约翰：就像你在书中的第一次演讲一样，从不想要的业务开始，逆向思考。

Charlie: [00:23:30] I know, but it’s so simple.

查理：我知道，但这太简单了。

John: [00:23:32] Any others? Of businesses driving capital efficiency without squeezing suppliers.

约翰：还有其他的例子吗？在不压榨供应商的情况下提高资本效率的企业。

Charlie: [00:23:35] There are lots of others. Practically all of the aerospace businesses have learned to make very high returns on capital.

查理：还有很多其他的例子。几乎所有的航空航天企业都学会了在投入资本上取得非常高的回报。

John: [00:23:42] How do they do it?

约翰：他们是如何做到的？

Charlie: [00:23:43] They specialize in being good at something and handling the government well as a paying customer.

查理：他们专注于擅长某个细分领域，并善于与政府打交道，发展其为付费客户。

John: [00:23:49] Did you ever look at TransDigm?

约翰：你有没有研究过TransDigm？

Charlie: [00:23:51] Sure. I don’t like that way of making money.

查理：当然有。我不喜欢他们赚钱的方式。

John: [00:23:54] Because the price increases.

约翰：因为他们提高了价格。

Charlie: [00:23:56] 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.

查理：这公司太黑了。他们找到了一些在国防管制规则下具有小垄断地位的东西，然后将价格提高10倍。他们因此而出名。我认为这是不道德的。

John: [00:24:08] Did you ever look at Domino’s Pizza?

约翰：你有没有研究过达美乐比萨？

Charlie: [00:24:10] No.

查理：没有。

John: [00:24:11] You’re familiar with the returns, though, right?

约翰：但你知道他们的回报率很高，对吧？

Charlie: [00:24:12] 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.

查理：我知道他们有不错的回报率。很多企业在火爆并实现大规模销量增长时资本回报率都不错。听着，麦当劳的资本回报率也很高。很多公司都能做到这样。

Identifying Monopolistic Businesses and Profitable Industries 识别垄断性生意和盈利的行业

John: [00:24:25] 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?

约翰：你在书中提出过的一个问题是，当某一行业只剩下很少的几家公司，比如说两三家，很不容易预测哪家公司能赚钱，哪家不能。航空公司自莱特兄弟时代以来一直亏损，而谷类食品制造商则非常持久地盈利。如果你现在审视某一行业，知道该行业将有两到三个主要玩家，你将如何预测这些公司是否会赚钱？

Charlie: [00:24:50] 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.

查理：我认为不能百分之百准确地预测出来。但回顾过去，可以确定的是，那些拥有品牌利润的企业，比如咖啡和燕麦片等，赚取了非常高的利润，而航空公司基本上没有为股东创造任何利润。

John: [00:25:09] But the airlines were branded goods.

约翰：但航空公司也是品牌商品。

Charlie: [00:25:11] But everybody had big capital equipment if they didn’t use it, they obviously were losing a lot of money. So that 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.

查理：但每家企业都有大量的资本设备，一旦利用率降低，就会立刻大笔亏钱。因此，每家企业在个体理性的驱使下被迫陷入破坏性竞争。有很多行业是非常难以永久盈利的。

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.

如果你想进入餐饮这样的行业，大多数人都会失败，只有少数餐馆能够持续经营下去，让业主们维持生计。竞争太激烈了。这就是为什么它们会失败。就像一个岛上有太多鹿而没有捕食者，很快鹿群就会过于庞大。所以所有的鹿都会因数量太多而受苦。

John: [00:25:49] 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?

约翰：但是，再次回到这个问题，如果我想要搞清楚，一家企业到底是像航空公司还是像谷物食品公司。这是否与持续的资本支出需求有关，航空公司基本上需要大量的持续性资本支出，就像伯克希尔最初的纺织厂那样？

Charlie: [00:26:02] 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.

查理：航空公司就像某人建了座大酒店，它就那样呆在那里，只能从入住中获得一些增量收入。如果有人入住和员工工作，总比让它空着要好。这几乎是在强迫非理性的激烈竞争。而在谷物食品行业，就不会有这样的情况。

John: [00:26:19] The BNSF¹ 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?

约翰：BNSF 是你们进行的最大的收购之一。我从外部的感觉是，它甚至比你们预期的还要成功。这准确吗？还是你预料到它会这么成功？

Charlie: [00:26:31] 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.

查理：铁路公司是项糟糕的投资。在它们刚刚成立的时候，有一些人通过榨取政府、贿赂立法者和做各种龌龊事偷走了所有的钱。但总体而言，大多数铁路公司都是糟糕的投资者，就像航空公司长时间以来一样。最终，在与工会的多年斗争和合并之后，终于剩下了几条大型铁路系统。

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.

现在只剩下两条横贯大陆的大型铁路系统了，而我们拥有其中之一。当然，相比之前存在着100家不同的铁路公司时，这是一个竞争更少的市场。但早期的铁路公司在竞争激烈时，是投资的糟糕选择。

John: [00:27:12] But again, airlines, bad business, not a good investment.

约翰：但再次说起来，航空公司是个糟糕的行业，不是好投资。

Charlie: [00:27:16] Early railroads, bad business.

查理：早期的铁路公司也是糟糕的行业。

John: [00:27:19] Early railroads, yes. Railroads today still require a lot of ongoing CapEx.

约翰：是的，早期的铁路公司是如此。而今天的铁路业仍然需要大量的持续性资本支出。

Charlie: [00:27:23] 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.

查理：是的，但它们的主导地位已经如此之强。一旦你可以在轨道上加堆集装箱，这是全国范围内最高效的运输方式之一。比起卡车运输，它要高效得多。因此，这么一个高效的运输系统就意外诞生了。没人预料到你可以仅仅通过将集装箱加叠一层就使铁路的运输量翻倍。所以最终它们变得非常高效。现在它们如此高效，比其他任何东西都更高效。当然，它们做得很好。

John: [00:27:53] 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?

约翰：好的。所以在效率、单位运输成本和单位能耗方面，没有任何方式能与铁路竞争。对于航空公司来说，可能会有三家航空公司在某条航线上竞争，而铁路公司却是独占一条线路。你是否曾经有过投资其他形式的交通、基础设施、港口和航运的诱惑？

Charlie: [00:28:11] We’ve looked at things like that, But I can’t remember — and what we once bought a big position in a bridge.

查理：我们曾经看过类似的投资标的，但我记不起来了——我们曾经投资过一座大桥很大部分的股份。

John: [00:28:19] A literal toll bridge business?

约翰：就是如字面所说的现实中的收费桥梁生意？

Charlie: [00:28:21] 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.

查理：就是字面意思的收费桥梁，然后我们决定我们不想看起来像个该死的垄断者。因此，我们卖掉了那笔投资，转而投向一些看起来不那么垄断的项目。

John: [00:28:31] Or at least it looked less monopolistic. Has investing gotten harder?

约翰：或者至少看起来不那么垄断。投资变得更难了吗？

Charlie: [00:28:35] 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.

查理：当然，变得更难，难得多了。现在变得如此之难，以至于大多数主动管理的投资经理几乎不大可能跑得赢像标准普尔500这样的被动指数。

John: [00:28:47] How has it gotten harder?

约翰：为什么会变得如此之难？

Charlie: [00:28:49] 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.

查理：变得更难了，嗯，如今投资于证券的财富规模过于庞大。因此，我们需要管理的资金规模比过去大得多。因此当然，买入就需要更长时间，卖出也需要很长时间，成本也更高。所以，管理一大笔资金还要获得高回报比管理一小笔资金要难得多。而且，更多的聪明脑袋进入了这个行业。因此，竞争变得非常激烈了。

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.

然后，我们见识到像躁狂症一样的现象，当市场变得火热，一些投机者的行为会像疯了一样。就像是得了什么妄想症。当然，投资变得更难了。在我这一生，一个人只需买入最好的公司股票，然后坐等，就可以获得大约10%的年回报率，不计通胀约8%。这并不是一个人可以从投资中期望的标准回报。那是因为非常不寻常的天时、不寻常的地利因素。未来100年，我觉得平均结果不会有那么好。

John: [00:29:53] Why was the results so good? Why was it 10% per annum?

约翰：为什么结果如此出色？为什么是每年10%？

Charlie: [00:29:57] 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.

查理：让我们称之为通胀后的8%。大萧条让每个人都感到绝望，他们受到了彻底的蔑视，然后经济体系有了很大的改善。投资环境和经济状况都有了很大改善，情况才变得如此好。如果你回到1900年左右，看看英国的富人是怎么做的，他们购买的是2.5%的国债，未计通胀。如果想要安全，2.5%的回报被认为是可以满意的。在1880年左右，英国的富人中没有人认为有任何安全的方式可以获得8%的回报。

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.

所以这是一个不寻常的时期。如今，每个从事投资管理的人都诱惑投资者说，只要把钱交给他们打理，就能获得通胀后的8%回报率，因为在过去的100年里回报率就是这样的。但仅仅因为过去100年是那样，并不意味着在未来100年也会如此。

John: [00:30:54] So it’s been a period of significant economic growth. I think there’s also maybe the U.S. stock market that has outperformed…

约翰：所以这是一个经济增长显著的时期。我认为可能还有美国股市的表现优于其他…

Charlie: [00:31:00] 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.

查理：是的，这一切，美国（建国），国家的繁荣，这么多好事同时发生了，才有了这么好的结果。但未来并不总是会有那么多好运。

Assessing Today’s Societal and Investing Landscape 评估当今社会和投资环境

John: [00:31:08] 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?

约翰：好的。假设现在有一位25岁的投资者，他正考虑在未来50年内从事投资。如果像你在《穷查理宝典》中所写的那样，吸取那些教训，避免那些可以避免的简单错误，把投资作为主业，重视所投公司业务的质量和可持续性，采取如你之前提倡的打卡式投资，只投少而精的几家公司，而不是进进出出和市场玩命。你认为这种方法在未来50年内还会是成功的秘诀吗？

Charlie: [00:31:35] Yes, but it requires considerable self-discipline and considerable skill. And most people will lack the discipline and skill.

查理：是的，但这需要相当的自律和相当的技能。而大多数人会缺乏那样的自律和技能。

John: [00:31:45] What discipline will they lack? What will they screw up?

约翰：他们缺乏的是哪方面的自律？他们会搞砸什么？

Charlie: [00:31:48] 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.

查理：嗯，他们会人云亦云。他们在不当激励面前会把持不住。换句话说，他们会买错。他们会为了赚点小费而买入，他们会刀口舔血，会做很多错事。并不是每个人都注定能自动享受税后8%的回报。

John: [00:32:11] That’s quite an achievement, yes.

约翰：对，8%已经很了不起。

Charlie: [00:32:13] 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.

查理：这很了不起，8%的实际回报。顺便说一下，普通投资者或普通股票经纪人可能只能赚取2%之类的回报，而不是8%。因此，普通股票经纪人对投资者来说绝对是危险分子，这并不意味着世界上没有诚实的、优秀的股票经纪人，因为确实是有的。但太多的股票经纪人只是跟着市场激励的感觉走，这不会给信任他们的投资者带来什么好回报。

John: [00:32:38] You have been famous for criticizing gold earlier on and now cryptocurrency.

约翰：你以前批评过黄金，现在又批评加密货币。

Charlie: [00:32:46] I like to gold a lot better than I like cryptocurrency.

查理：比起加密货币，我还是更喜欢黄金。

John: [00:32:49] You’ve criticized both.

约翰：但你两者都批评了。

Charlie: [00:32:51] 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.

查理：在有加密货币之前，我也从未买入过黄金。所以我不喜欢黄金。但作为一项投资，我不像憎恨加密货币那样憎恨黄金。我认为加密货币本应该被逐出市场，应该被非法禁止。

John: [00:33:03] 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…

约翰：虽然冒着可能被赶出去的风险，但我想试着为加密货币辩护。您的观点是——我认为您会说，投资于一家有生产力的企业。这不是一个相当以美国为中心的观点吗？我们在这里有伟大的货币系统，我们对财产权利非常尊重。但如果您在土耳其，那里的财产权利就没有那么有保障，货币今年贬值了80％，那么转移财富的能力…

Charlie: [00:33:34] Well, if I lived in Turkey, I might do something odd. Buy my gold if I were in Turkey, but I would never buy cryptocurrency.

查理：嗯，如果我生活在土耳其，我可能会做一些奇怪的事情。如果我在土耳其，我会买入黄金的，但我绝对不会买加密货币。

John: [00:33:39] Even in Turkey?

约翰：即使在土耳其？

Charlie: [00:33:40] No. I don’t think that buying a percentage of nothing is a good investment, even though it’s hard to create more nothing.

查理：不会。我不认为买入“一无所有”的一部分会是笔好投资，尽管很难创造更多的“一无所有”（芒格的意思是，加密货币毫无实际价值）。

John: [00:33:47] But isn’t gold functionally an investment in the percentage of nothing?

约翰：但黄金在投资功能上难道不也是“一无所有”的一部分吗？

Charlie: [00:33:50] It is similar, except it’s been established so long as a…

查理：是的，类似，只是黄金作为货币的一种已经存在很久了…

John: [00:33:57] An agreed upon store of wealth…

约翰：作为被广泛认可的财富储存方式之一…

Charlie: [00:33:58] 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.

查理：考虑到人类的历史之长，需要一种货币，一种有某种东西支撑的货币，而黄金又很难开采，等等。黄金是一种完全合理的货币。黄金作为一种货币的使用演变对人类文明来说非常有益。我并不觉得黄金是邪恶的。黄金有助于文明的发展。但我认为加密货币是卑鄙的。而且我认为总体上，推广加密货币的人都是卑鄙的或者是妄想狂。我不知道哪个更糟，是卑鄙还是妄想。但我认为它们都相当糟糕。

John: [00:34:31] 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…

约翰：有的人可能两者兼具吧。加密货币中确实存在大量骗局，这绝对不容置疑。但我们不是在讨论黄金和加密货币之间的差异问题吗？它们都是被社会认可的价值储存方式，社会交易都基于它们之上…

Charlie: [00:34:46] 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.

查理：这么说吧。如果人类历史没有确立黄金为通用货币媒介，我们可能会发明类似加密货币那样的替代品。但是一旦我们长期确立了黄金和如今法币的地位，我们就不需要再引入加密货币了。

John: [00:34:59] 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.

约翰：但是加密货币不是更方便吗？如果可以仅通过软件进行交易，就不需要实际取得实物黄金，进行交易、熔炼等等。在威权国家，没收加密货币比黄金要困难得多。

Charlie: [00:35:10] 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 ban cryptocurrency.

查理：不必费力去处理任何实物库存或任何具有实际内在价值的东西。可以非常高效地建立一个处理系统。我不想参与这样的虚拟和疯狂交易。我希望将其定为非法。所有国家都有禁止造假的法律。我认为这些反造假法律应该被用来完全禁止加密货币。

John: [00:35:33] But nothing’s being counterfeit here.

约翰：但这里没有任何造假行为。

Charlie: [00:35:34] Well, if I am a nation and I have a currency, I don’t want a new currency established.

查理：嗯，如果我就是一个国家并且已经有了现有的货币，我不希望出现一种新的货币。

John: [00:35:38] But it’s not really a new currency. It’s a new store of wealth.

约翰：但它实际上不是一种新的货币，它是一种新的财富储存方式。

Charlie: [00:35:42] 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.

查理：你可以称之为财富储存方式，但我称之为幻觉储存方式。哪怕已经相当普遍，我认为参与幻觉交易也不是件好事。作为另一种被广泛使用的交易媒介。它被毒贩、骗子和各种类型的犯罪分子广泛使用。任何一种想得到的犯罪方式都在用（加密货币）。尤其是勒索和绑架。

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…

我们为什么想要一种对犯罪分子来说很好用很有帮助的新交易媒介呢？为什么这就不是伪造货币呢？你们进入了政府业务，你们试图创造一种法定货币，你们不能这样做。我觉得他们并不…

John: [00:36:18] All right. Well, I will agree to disagree on crypto. But…

约翰：好吧，关于加密货币，我们还是搁置分歧吧。但是…

Charlie: [00:36:20] You don’t have to agree. I can handle it if you like crypto. I don’t like it, but I can handle it.

查理：你不必勉强同意。如果你喜欢加密货币，我可以接受。但我不喜欢它，但我可以接受。

John: [00:36:25] We’re staring into a recession, potential stagflation. What advice do you have for people thinking about how to work their way through the…

约翰：我们正面临经济衰退、潜在的滞胀。您对那些考虑如何穿越这段艰难周期的人有什么建议…

Charlie: [00:36:35] 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.

查理：对于所有困难，我有一套通用的建议，就是既来之则安之，然后想办法与之周旋。这是任何人能做的事情，既来之则安之，然后想办法与困难周旋。但某种程度上，你得学得聪明些。与困难周旋的生存方式之一就是尽量变得聪明些。这只是我的小诀窍。我必须说，这对我来说效果不错。对于使用我这方法的其他人来说，我想效果也会很好的。

John: [00:36:59] 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?

约翰：伯克希尔在’08年赚了很多钱，这些机会对其他人来说可能并不存在（意思是这是伯克希尔独有的机会，因为伯克希尔持有巨额现金，声誉卓著，快速决策）。其中一些银行交易，比如优先股交易。在那些不连续的历史低点，投资者是否应该采取不同的行动？

Charlie: [00:37:11] 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.

查理：我们获得了一些其他人无法获得的机会，因为我们在一部分人眼里倍受尊敬，如果我们帮助他们，他们也能受益。但那并不是人们超越伯克希尔哈撒韦的主要方式。与我们在这些交易中赚到的钱相比，我们在其他地方赚到的钱要多得多。我们偶尔会捡到其他人没有的机会。我不认为那种机会唾手可得（其实是长期累积的声誉和现金才可能获得，那可不是一般人一般公司能轻易得到的），而且我们自己也没得到那么多。

John: [00:37:40] 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.

约翰：但在成为优先交易对手方面，或许可以总结出一条经验。伯克希尔以持有巨额现金、倍受信赖和快速决策而闻名。

Charlie: [00:37:47] 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.

查理：这些都是好名声。谁不希望有机会成为一个棒棒哒、受信赖、好相处并且总是有大把钞票（可随时投出去）的人呢？有人会因此受损吗——当然，人们会喜欢这样的机会。

John: [00:37:59] How do you feel about American society over the coming decades?

约翰：对于未来几十年的美国社会，您有何看法？

Charlie: [00:38:03] 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.

查理：老年人总是倾向于认为新一代正在走向毁灭。古罗马人曾感叹：“哦，时光啊，哦，世风啊。”（感叹世风日下，出自西塞罗《反卡提利纳》）这可以追溯到我们最早的文明。老人们说当我离开这个世界时，它要完蛋了。实际上，总体而言，并没有完蛋。但是我不喜欢我这一生中美国政治的变化。我不喜欢民主。演变到今天这样的方式，通过初选，两党的主导地位，两党中只有最极端的家伙才有选票号召力，因此，他们控制着提名权等等。

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.

我认为我们现在的提名方式实在太糟了。或许在之前，这种方式运行得还相当不错。过去当城里有那些老派的、奸诈的党魁们时，它运作得更好，现在的初选系统就没有那么好了。我希望那些老派的、奸诈的党魁们能够回来，取代现在的初选。他们想控制赞助权，所以他们会提名一些相当出色的人，比如泰迪·罗斯福。而在这些现代初选系统中，最糟糕的人往往赢得初选。

John: [00:39:06] Just because they move further left and further right.

约翰：只是因为他们要么更左和要么更右。

Charlie: [00:39:09] Yes.

查理：是的。

John: [00:39:10] How do you feel about declining birth rates?

约翰：您如何看待人口出生率的下降？

Charlie: [00:39:11] 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?

查理：这造就了一个不同的世界。嗯，我不认为如果每个人都生六个孩子，人类会更聪明。我认为那只会让全球的人口过于拥挤，尤其是从70亿人口开始。所以我认为人口增长缓慢一些是好事。但是，相较于那些21或22岁就结婚并生很多孩子的人，那些相对以自我中心，等到35岁再结婚的人，到底哪类更好？

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，我认为那些在21或22岁结婚然后迅速发展的人，他们不得不这么做，因为有孩子要抚养，比那些有各种不同选择的人更幸运，后者推迟婚姻到较晚的年龄，只生一个或两个孩子。对于那些拥有这些新选择的人来说，我并不确定这对他们是否是好事，但对于人口来说是好事。

John: [00:40:01] Why do you think the people who have kids at 21 were happier?

约翰：您为什么认为那些在21岁生孩子的人更幸福？

Charlie: [00:40:04] 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.

查理：帮助他人是有建设性的，帮助自己的孩子对父母就更有利，每个人都爱自己的孩子。我认为，肩负责任并积极承担责任，会让人们变得更好。如果你看看那些热爱生育的人，比如摩门教徒，他们仍然保持着大家庭风俗。如果你通过衡量人类的幸福程度，通过比较微笑时间与皱眉时间的比例，摩门教徒的幸福感要远远高于一般人口。

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.

所以在大家庭中早婚，以及信教，在神学技术上来说带来的幸福感真是难以置信。但这对居民的个人幸福很有好处。我对于为了更幸福而相信我不相信的东西不感兴趣。在这方面我有些古怪。我毫不怀疑，摩门教徒的平均幸福感要超过我们其他人。

John: [00:40:55] Does that make you worried because…

约翰：那是否让您担心，因为…

Charlie: [00:40:57] No, it doesn’t make me worry. I just live with it.

查理：不，这并不让我担心。我只是欣然接受。

John: [00:40:59] But people are being less religious and having fewer kids.

约翰：但人们变得不太信仰宗教，生育孩子的数量也在减少。

Charlie: [00:41:02] 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.

查理：我已经习惯了不完美。所以为什么我要期望我的社会总是向上发展呢？尽管它长期以来一直是这样。我相信你只要适应社会的发展，然后尽力做到最好。这是每个人能做的，也是我要做的。

John: [00:41:20] 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.

约翰：我们应该对制度僵化及其进一步的恶化有多担忧？您刚刚谈到您一直在开发圣巴巴拉大学的一块滨水地产，但因为滨水问题，现在无法像40年前那样开发。纵观美国各个领域，制度变得越来越僵化，做事变得越来越困难。

Charlie: [00:41:43] 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.

查理：当然。在我们的政治体系中，这些州和城市中拥有政治权力的人不希望有太多新的发展。他们有立法权来禁止它，并且他们确实这样做了，这导致年轻人寻找更好住房的机会比我年轻时常见的要少得多。从某种意义上说，这是令人伤感的，但这可能确实使现有社区的状况稍微好一些。他们已经有足够多的交通了，不再希望有更多。

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.

他们只是希望加大获取新建筑许可证的难度。你可以理解，那些城市认为不发展更好。这是一个非常严重的问题，说不清楚那些这么做的城市是不是错了，这符合他们自身的利益，许多城市不希望发展。因此，他们利用立法权来阻止开发。这让年轻人很难成长起来。

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…

我认为现在的年轻人将发现，要得到我那一代人几乎自动可得的东西要困难得多。以很便宜的价格，我们就可以在一个优秀的学区买到房子，然后与文明一起发展。并且这些都触手可及。而在如今的大城市里，我看（年轻人）要能买到一座新房子都非常困难…

John: [00:42:52] But isn’t that very bad…

约翰：但这不是很糟糕吗…

Charlie: [00:42:53] 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.

查理：也就是一座新房子而已（年轻人都买不到）。这是令人伤感的，但老去和死亡也是令人伤感的。或许文明中总会有那么一些悲哀。他们必须适应它，就像人类一样。一切并非理所当然。你生活中的一切都会比你的父辈或祖父辈更好。世界完全有可能在某些方面变得更糟。

John: [00:43:15] Where do you think the world is getting worse?

约翰：您认为世界的什么地方变得更糟了？

Charlie: [00:43:17] 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.

查理：我认为我们面临着一个可能是有史以来最严重的政治问题。我们有一些疯狂的独裁者行走在发动核战争的边缘。我们有很多需要担心的事情。世界从来都不是一个完全安全的地方，现在也不是。

John: [00:43:32] 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.

约翰：这有点像《穷查理宝典》中您避免错误的框架的社会版本，社会需要像个人一样避免重大错误，避免核战争。

Charlie: [00:43:42] 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.

查理：我们幸运的是迄今为止做到了这一点。但是如果足够多的疯子得到了足够多的氢弹，最终会有足够的仇恨，总有一天会发生某种形式的核战争。你几乎可以肯定。所以你可以说对于我们这一代人来说，这是相当不太可能的，但我认为它正变得越来越可能而不是越来越不可能。

What We Can Learn From Architectural Mistakes 我们能从建筑错误中学到什么

John: [00:44:00] 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?

约翰：我很想问问您的建筑兴趣。所以再次提到，您61年前设计了这座房子。最近，您还设计了许多其他项目，比如加利福尼亚大学圣塔芭芭拉分校的一些建筑，您不仅捐赠了资金，还设计了这些建筑。您认为为什么建筑师总是搞砸呢？

Charlie: [00:44:17] 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.

查理：他们并没有完全搞砸。所以我认为建筑是艺术女王。换句话说，我更喜欢建筑而不是绘画、雕塑等等。我不知道，也许音乐也称得上是艺术女王。但无论如何，我认为建筑非常重要，所以我认为在艺术中几乎没有什么比建筑更重要的了。但就像我认为财富管理业界经常犯很多常识性错误一样，我认为建筑师也会犯很多常识性错误。

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.

其中太多的人想要别出心裁，只是因为他们对传统形式感到厌倦。所以他们竞相将其变得艺术化和疯狂。比如麻省理工学院的宿舍，人们走进后就会感觉要晕船，因为所有的墙壁都是倾斜的，这太愚蠢了。

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.

麻省理工学院里有自己的建筑学院。想象一下，在一个有自己专业的建筑学院的名校，他们竟然设计了一座让每个人都晕船的宿舍。这是在麻省理工学院真的发生过的事。所以我认为建筑学院有很多愚蠢的事会后悔。建筑不必像其中一些愚蠢的人一样愚蠢。

John: [00:45:27] Okay, so architecture mistake number one is architects wanting to get creative or make their mark.

约翰：好的，那么建筑错误的第一条就是建筑师想要与众不同或刻意显示自己的独创性。

Charlie: [00:45:32] By being peculiar. Peculiarity by itself is not art, in my opinion.

查理：通过古怪来展示独特性。古怪本身并非艺术，我个人认为。

John: [00:45:36] What are the other architecture mistakes?

约翰：还有其他的建筑错误吗？

Charlie: [00:45:39] 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.

查理：所以你必须理解客户的业务和客户的真实需求，这对像我这样的人来说是自然而然的。我想要确定客户的真实需求，并以聪明的方式满足它。我没有自己疯狂的、艺术上的偏好，只是想在三维空间中看到它。要知道，别人付钱是让我来设计（实用的建筑，而非通过奇形怪状显示自己的特立独行）。如果你能更好地理解客户的业务，你就能更好地为他们服务。建筑师们缺乏多学科思维。这就是我告诉你的。实际上，几乎没有什么专业人士有足够的多学科思维。

John: [00:46:15] And what’s an example of where you are more multidisciplinary than the architects in some of the buildings you’ve designed?

约翰：您能给出一个在您设计的建筑中比建筑师更加多学科思维的例子吗？

Charlie: [00:46:19] 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 that would hold a lot of graduate students.

查理：如果你是说建筑的话，可以看看密歇根大学的研究生宿舍楼。他们有一块令人印象深刻的停车场地。他们没有其他地方可用了。他们的宿舍区已经无地可用了。他们有个新校区，但在主校区，他们已经用尽了所有地方，只剩下一个小停车场。我意识到，如果他们动用征地权，将该停车场的面积扩大一倍，他们就可以在那个地方建造一个大的方形建筑，容纳许多研究生。

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.

但是，如果不把一些宿舍设计成无窗的，就没办法做到这一点。我也知道，宿舍有没有窗户并不那么重要，因为我在安娜堡附近曾看到过，安娜堡的私人建筑商已经建造了没有窗户且依赖人工照明的公寓房间。我并排走过两间一模一样的卧室，一间有真正的窗户，一间只有一面空墙。无窗的房间租金低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.

所以这并不是什么大问题。我找寻（设计）依据，一下子意识到，只要我克服了认为每个卧室都必须有窗户的偏见，就可以在这座建筑中做很多奇妙的事情。这只是一个用最基本的常识设计的例子。我研究了安娜堡的案例，我对几何学有足够的理解。然后，我很清楚每艘客轮都面临同样的问题。每艘客轮都会必然面临窗户不足的问题。每艘邮轮都是如此。是的，他们每周支付2万美元乘坐的豪华邮轮（也有大量无窗的客房）等等。

And if they do 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.

如果他们需要些光线，他们可以走出船舱，进入其中一些公共区域。当然，我在宿舍设计里也是这么安排的。所以我是仿照海洋建筑的正确先例设计的。但请告诉我有没有一个建筑师从海洋建筑学中学到过什么。我认为你可以去全国任何一所建筑学院，都找不到任何人在研究海洋建筑学。他们认为这与他们所做的没有任何关系。实际上，却与他们所做的事情有很多关系。如果你不去寻找，就不会有所发现。

John: [00:48:27] I feel like another example of understanding the customer is giving the students in the dorms single rooms where most people design…

约翰：我觉得另一个理解客户需求的例子是为宿舍的学生提供单人间，而大多数人设计的是…

Charlie: [00:48:32] 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.

查理：哦，那个…说到疯狂。我送过很多孩子读研究生院，并没有一个孩子喜欢和其他无关的人睡在同一间房间里。

John: [00:48:46] At the age of 20 or 25.

约翰：大约20或25岁的年龄。

Charlie: [00:48:48] 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.

查理：或者18岁或16岁。当然，他们更喜欢有自己的单间。我只是算出了，如果要多设计出一个房间，相比于新增价值，会增加多少成本——我明显意识到，其他人一直在做的，错的有多离谱。加州大学洛杉矶分校（UCLA）在过去两三年里建设的全新宿舍，他们把三个毫无关系的陌生人塞进一个小房间里睡觉。没有人喜欢这样。这是疯狂的。而我设计的这些东西正在逐渐通过委员会的成本审核。每个学生都有自己的单间宿舍。

John: [00:49:19] Why did this shared delusion persist for so long?

约翰：为什么这种共性错觉持续了这么长时间？

Charlie: [00:49:22] 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.

查理：原因是防火规定，他们担心消防队员需要通过窗户爬上梯子，然后爬进窗户救出因烟雾昏迷的人。因此，他们要求每个睡眠区域都有窗户，这样消防队员才能爬上梯子查看情况。这个规定有两个问题。

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，这种情况从未发生过。没有人能找到一起消防队员通过梯子查看情况并发现有人躺在床上昏迷的案例。第二，现代建筑都配备了自动喷淋系统，所以这种情况根本不会发生。

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.

这就是防火规定发生变化的原因。但习惯成自然。当然，他们会继续按照他们一直以来的方式做事。就令人钦佩的文化而言，梅奥诊所不正是世界最佳之一吗？但是，他们一直墨守医生们熟悉的程序进行髋关节置换手术，因为对患者更好的新程序对医生来说太难学了。他们只是沿用老办法。建筑师也是如此。他们只是墨守成规。

John: [00:50:32] 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?

约翰：对于一个25或30岁的人来说，这个教训是说，值得改进的地方就如同有很多放在人行道上的20美元可以随便捡吗？这世上有很多低效率的地方需要改进，人们不应该希望世界运转得更高效吗？

Charlie: [00:50:45] 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.

查理：当然，总是有很多可以改进的事情，总是有很多人通过一些新做法取得领先。这就是现代文明的乐趣之一。想象一下，美国的一名普通邮局职员都可以乘坐超音速喷气式飞机去夏威夷度两周的假，逍遥惬意。在一个不断发展的世界里，一名邮局职员也可以做到这一点。

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.

你可以通过在互联网上点点鼠标等方式学习一个全新的职业，所以自我教育的空间是相当巨大的。所以各种各样的事情得到了很大的改善。当然，这给一些人创造了新机会，但对另一些遭到淘汰的人来说却是绝对的经济灾难。

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.

看看柯达公司，研发人员都是有博士头衔的化学家，完全占领了胶片化学等领域，拥有全世界最可信赖的商标。当我年轻的时候，在非洲旅行，总是能看到两样东西：可口可乐和柯达。这是一个遍布非洲各地的强大品牌，甚至覆盖到了最贫穷的村庄。当然，柯达（最终却）破产了，因为有人发明了一种新的拍照和成像方式。一下子淘汰了柯达整个曾经熠熠生辉的业务，股东们损失惨重。这种事情经常发生。你不能责怪管理层，说：“为什么柯达没有发明摧毁自身的东西呢？”这很难做到的。

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.

我的意思是，对于人类来说，当你拥有一家像柯达这样大的企业时，每个人都习以为常。他们就像那些上了年纪的外科医生，不愿意学习一种更难学会的新技术。人们不愿意学习新东西。学习起来真的很难。每个人都宁愿利用自己已知的东西前进。

John: [00:52:36] 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…

约翰：你在书中强调的一个建议是避免对化学物质上瘾，这听起来可能有些轻率。你举了一些你从小就认识的人的例子…

Charlie: [00:52:45] 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.

查理：哦天哪。当然。在我成长的圈子里，大麻都没什么人吸的，但每个人都喝酒，当然。我可以说大约5%的我成长中接触到的人酒精成瘾，成为酒鬼。我认为其中一半人一直喝到死，另一半戒掉了酒精，摆脱了酒精瘾。但这已经是很多人了，5%之多。他们并不是什么可怕的人或者软弱的人之类的。

In Search of Win-Wins 寻求共赢

John: [00:53:18] 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.

约翰：你在书中花了很多篇幅讨论实现双边共赢的生意，以及这一点对于它们（能否实现）长期发展的重要性。（芒格的意思是，只有实现双边共赢，对买卖双方都有利，对利益相关者都有利，对社会有利，道德生意，才是长期可持续的生意。）

Charlie: [00:53:24] 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.

查理：还有什么比这更重要的呢？它不仅在为所有人创造丰盈方面更有效，而且也更道德。当然，双方都希望己方能赢，这比占别人便宜更道德，很明显这是正确的生活方式，也是正确的经商方式。

John: [00:53:45] Who’s falling to follow that?

约翰：哪些人没遵循这个原则呢？

Charlie: [00:53:46] 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.

查理：各种各样的人。如果你是赌场老板，你就会在赌博游戏中骗人。他们日复一日都在这么做。如果你贩毒，那是另一种欺骗方式。你的一生，都应该要建立在共赢的基础上，因为那样才更利于建设美好生活。就像资本主义。它有复利效应，而我们有这么多的资本主义。这就是为什么文明能够如此良好运转的原因，因为它是基于共赢的。

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.

但总是有各种各样的人在想方设法骗人。当我在军队服役时，有个家伙，大家都叫他诚实约翰。当然，人们这么称呼他是因为他是个彻彻底底的骗子。只要一件事不是不光彩和不正当的，他就不认为那是合理的。他不会考虑任何不卑鄙、不歪曲的主意。他总是试图行骗牟利。但如果交易是双方基于共赢自愿发生的，那该好多少。这多完美。在这样系统下的资本主义造就了文明的繁荣。当然，这才应该是世界正确的运行方式。

John: [00:54:50] Which Berkshire businesses do you think are most emblematic or…

约翰：你认为伯克希尔的哪些业务最具共赢代表性或…

Charlie: [00:54:54] 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.

查理：一切都是共赢的。以Dairy Queen为例。（DQ生意里的）这些小门店，特别是在北方，夏季才开业，因为冬季冰淇淋销量不高。父母们都会来（给孩子）买便宜的热狗和冰淇淋等（为父母们省了钱），有些人也会经营一些小门店，在夏季能赚到不少钱，这是共赢的。

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.

顾客买到了他们想要的东西。经营店铺的人赚到了钱。当然，伯克希尔的股东们也赚到了一些他们喜欢的资本回报。这都是共赢的。当然，我宁愿以这种方式经商。谁不愿意这样做，而是试图贩卖那些——想想那些贩毒的人，奥斯康定之类的东西（阿片类药物）。这简直令人恶心，那彻彻底底是一种令人作呕的赚钱方式。

John: [00:55:38] And so the businesses you exclude are tobacco, drugs, what else?

约翰：那你排除的业务有烟草、毒品，还有什么？

Charlie: [00:55:43] 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.

查理：我认为你也不希望出现大规模的狂热。我对Grateful Dead乐队（1964年组建的美国乐队，迷幻摇滚的开创者）的受欢迎程度感到非常不安，因为他们的乐迷都以吸毒为风尚。那种情况下，音乐成了文明衰败的助推器。

John: [00:55:56] So you wouldn’t invest in drugs, tobacco or the Grateful Dead?

约翰：所以你不会投资于毒品、烟草或Grateful Dead乐队？

Charlie: [00:55:59] 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.

查理：是的，没错。我不会这么做的。当我以100美元的价格卖给你一个网球拍时，一方得到了他们宁愿拥有的网球拍（去享受运动的愉悦），而不是拿那100美元去纵乐（比如去听Grateful Dead乐队的演唱会）。另一方也得其所欲。这是共赢的。

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.

这就是资本主义的美妙之处。它使得共赢交易变得非常容易，几乎自动自发。这是一个如此重要的观念。而像伯尼·桑德斯和伊丽莎白·沃伦这样的人，我在某些方面虽然认为他们相当有才华，但他们就是不明白（这个道理）。

John: [00:56:27] But I think you mean that as a backhanded compliment.

约翰：但我认为这有点反讽的意思。

Charlie: [00:56:29] It’s both a compliment and a criticism.

查理：这既是称赞也是批评。

John: [00:56:32] 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…

约翰：是不是，他们没理解的根本问题是，很多共赢的交易是净盈的（总社会福利增加），对双方都是共赢的，他们…

Charlie: [00:56:40] 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.

查理：除非一方犯了大错，这在资本主义交易中，是自动自发的。大多数人在事关个人利益时都相当擅长不反复犯错。

John: [00:56:49] It’s not fully automatic, right? We can…

约翰：它不是完全自动的，对吧？我们可以…

Charlie: [00:56:51] No, it’s not. But a lot of good happens automatically.

查理：不，不是完全自动的，但很多好事情就这么自动发生了。

John: [00:56:54] Do you worry about the rise of this faction of the political spectrum who don’t really believe in capitalism?

约翰：你是否担心有个并不真正相信资本主义的政治派别会崛起吗?

Charlie: [00:57:00] 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.

查理：当然，看看俄罗斯人民所经历的苦难。他们不喜欢他们旧的制度，一群农奴（被迫）供养一群地主等等，还有腐败等等，所以他们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.

他们革了一种糟糕的制度的命，结果却换来了一种实际上更糟糕的制度。很难创造出比俄罗斯农奴制度更糟糕的新的政府形式，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自豪的。

John: [00:57:30] What are Berkshire’s defects?

约翰：伯克希尔有什么瑕疵吗？

Charlie: [00:57:31] 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.

查理：我们没能保证自己不出现判断错误，甚至没能保证自己不犯道德错误。所以在人类世界，没什么人能绝对完美。这不完全是个瑕疵。在早年时代管用的很多做法，现在我们做不了了，因为世界变得竞争更加激烈了。

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.

所有容易摘到的果子都被摘完了，我们没法再从摘完的果园榨出什么果子了。所以我们必须另觅桃花源。当然，那就更难了。很多人都会面临类似问题，他们（必须）用新方法找到新世界。

John: [00:58:01] I’ve always liked the quote capitalism is how we take care of people we don’t know.

约翰：我一直很喜欢这句话，资本主义（制度或系统），是一种我们如何照顾那些我们不认识的人的（制度或系统）。

Charlie: [00:58:05] 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.

查理：（资本主义的）运行机制确实相当非凡。我喜欢社会保障系统，但我（的观点）和其他人有所不同。如果我负责管理政府、管理现代文明，我会相当慷慨地鼓励那些无法伪造的事物，比如盲人或非盲人之类的。我会给一个重度盲人终身养老金，而且会随通货膨胀而增加。

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.

如果某人的生活已经足够艰难，而我们（的社会）负担得起，他和照顾他的人可以决定如何使用这笔钱。所以我会非常慷慨。我会为所有人提供从小学到大学的免费教育，由政府付费，但这必须在贤能制下（指掌握权力的人必须是贤人）。你必须有能力做到这样才能这样去做，否则社会就没法享受到这样的福利。

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.

所以我不会让人们假装在某个半吊子的机构上学，然后由着他们把账单寄给政府。但是像加州理工学院或麻省理工学院这样的地方，任何人都可以学习并完成学业，如果我是政府，我会支付他们从大学到研究生阶段的全部费用，就像新西兰、澳大利亚等地做的那样。

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（也应该像上述教育一样）自动运行，我也会支付。但我会支付弗洛伊德式的心理分析费用吗？我不会。那些容易造假的东西是疯狂的，我不会支付。我也不会让人们仅仅声称自己腰背痛就能报销医疗费，即使他们真的有腰背痛。这太容易造假。我不会报销（容易造假的医疗费）。这只会导致更多欺诈行为，欺诈会影响最终的效果等等。

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.

我会说我们不能就这么做。这并不是说我们不同情你的腰背痛或你的心理不适。但我们不能仅仅因为你说“我腰背痛”或“我心理不适”就给你终身报销医疗费。这就是我管理政府的方式。没有人像我这样思考。我感到孤独。我会非常慷慨，但对于患有腰背痛或心理问题的人，我会非常严格。

The Origins and Legacy of the Book 本书的缘起及其遗产

John: [00:59:47] How did Poor Charlie’s Almanack come to be?

约翰：《穷查理宝典》这本书是如何诞生的？

Charlie: [00:59:50] 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.

查理：我四处走走谈谈，因为——我这么做是因为我有点崇拜本（杰明）·格雷厄姆，他是这么做投资的，但他同时也努力成为一名传道者，所以我也公开做这些对话。这是一种公民责任。我很享受这个过程。就是这样发生的。

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.

但我从来没考虑过出书。彼得·考夫曼来找我，要求允许他翻阅我的文件，我说只要我什么都不用做，你可以进我的办公室（自己随便翻）。我办公室里没有什么不可告人的秘密。我不担心。所以彼得翻阅了我的办公室，并创作了《穷查理宝典》。从非常实质的意义上说，这是他的创作，而不是我的。

John: [01:00:26] What’s the legacy of it been?

约翰：它的遗产是什么？

Charlie: [01:00:28] 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.

查理：情况是，它传播到了全世界，我在印度和中国比在自己的国家更受欢迎。我也没啥感觉。古怪的是，中国和印度的那些高智商书呆子们喜欢我，而在我的国家，人们认为我是个夸夸其谈的老家伙。

John: [01:00:45] Why India and China, in particular?

约翰：为什么特别是印度和中国？

Charlie: [01:00:47] I didn’t set out to do it. It just happened.

查理：我没有刻意去做什么。就这么发生了。

John: [01:00:49] But why do you think it’s really resonated in those countries?

约翰：但你为什么认为它在那些国家确实引发了共鸣？

Charlie: [01:00:52] It is a little Confucian. 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.

查理：这有那么点儒家文化的意思。一个有钱的老男人，爱分享自己丰富的人生经历，这听起来很像孔子。至于印度人，我不知道（是为什么）。但我知道的是，在印度和中国，人们真的喜欢（这本书）。美国也有人喜欢，但我和彼得一起去Vedika的时候，见到的是人山人海的中国和印度面孔。我们去谷歌或其他类似的地方的时候，也是如此，这两个族群在高科技领域都非常成功。

John: [01:01:24] Is there also something about the cultural importance of striving and getting ahead?

约翰：这些是否还与崇尚奋斗和进步的文化息息相关？

Charlie: [01:01:29] 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.

查理：有可能。在这个世界，你很难再找到两个比印度和中国更渴望发展的民族了。

John: [01:01:36] And inasmuch as the book is manual for that?

约翰： 那么，这本书是一本《发展红宝书》吗？

Charlie: [01:01:39] 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.

查理：是的。这本书告诉人们如何取得发展。而且，说这些话的人靠这个成功致富了。这可能也是（这本书）受到人们关注的原因吧。

John: [01:01:46] Yes. It’s kind of a get-rich-slow mindset?

约翰：是的。这有点像“慢慢变富”的理念吗？

Charlie: [01:01:48] 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.

查理：是的，这有点不可思议。在我所知道的世界范围内，没有其他哪家大型企业集团像伯克希尔那样取得了如此成功。这是一件非常不寻常的事情。

John: [01:02:02] If you could snap your fingers and transform Berkshire’s corporate form, would you?

约翰：如果你能打个响指就改变伯克希尔的组织形式，你会那么做吗？

Charlie: [01:02:07] No, I like it the way it is.

查理：不，我喜欢它现在的状态。

John: [01:02:08] It wouldn’t be better as a partnership or as a private company or…

约翰：如果是合伙企业或私人公司（区别于伯克希尔现在的公开上市公司）的组织形式，会不会更好，或者…

Charlie: [01:02:14] 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.

查理：嗯，它本来也可能变成私人企业（相对于公开上市公司而言）的，有些私人企业赚了很多钱但一直保持私有，但我认为沃伦和我都真的很享受如今这样的公众生活，比如年度股东大会和《穷查理宝典》之类的公众活动。巴菲特也做了很多公开演讲，等等。

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.

我想我们真的都很享受我们所做的这种传道秀。我们都很享受这一切，并且我们确实认为这是有益的。就我而言，我们的这些说教也是共赢的。如果人们听进去了我们所说的那些话，他们会因此受益，至少会更加成功一点点。

John: [01:02:55] Is Koch Industries maybe the closest business analog to Berkshire, where it’s a very large diversified conglomerate?

约翰：科氏工业集团是不是最接近伯克希尔的大型企业集团？因为科氏也是一家非常大的多元化企业集团。

Charlie: [01:03:03] 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.

查理：我对科氏除了他们取得了巨大成功这一点外，一无所知。但我不想像他们那样过多参与政治。我就是不那么喜欢那样做。但科氏确实非常成功，这一点你完全正确。

John: [01:03:19] 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…

约翰：关于这本书，你最近收到了一位读者的留言：“嗨，查理。我不指望你记得，但2018年我和一群斯坦福大学商学院的研究生在你办公室参访过，然后在你家吃过晚餐。我每年至少读一遍《穷查理宝典》，刚刚完成了2022年的阅读。我希望感谢你的热忱和普世智慧。”你经常收到这样的留言吗？而且…

Charlie: [01:03:39] 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.

查理：非常多。真的非常多。以至于我实际上没法回应。我可不想把时间花在回答陌生人的留言上。很多人对这本书真的非常感激，这真是令人惊讶。这本意外出版的书让那么多人感激不尽，彼得，如今这本书卖价多少？60美金吗？这本书现在卖得比它刚出版时还要快。没有一本书——我不认为圣经的销量超过了它。它就在那里一直卖啊卖。

John: [01:04:05] 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?

约翰：这就像约翰·列侬说他比耶稣更有名一样？可要当心点哦。你和沃伦已经合作了几十年。我和帕特里克合作了第一个十年，我们计划未来的好几个十年都保持合作。你对我们发展一种有建设性的合作伙伴关系方面有什么建议？

Charlie: [01:04:21] 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.

查理：能得一位优秀人生伙伴是件很幸运的事。是的，我相信你们都很有才华，但能与一位好伙伴一起往前走比一个人独行要幸运得多。当然有人同行更好。当然这是一种福分。沃伦和我并不只是成功地发家致富或其他什么（更赢得了彼此以及公众的尊重，并且很享受共同的人生旅程）。

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.

我们真是无比开心，真的很开心。我们很享受我们所经历的一切。我们与一群非常了不起的人联系在一起。这几乎有点不公平。我与沃伦厮守的这帮家伙都是高尚的人。整天和高尚的人在一起当然是种享受，何况他们还都那么有才。

Thoughts On Warren, the SEC, Buybacks and More 关于沃伦、证券交易委员会、股票回购等

John: [01:05:02] 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…

约翰：当你说你和沃伦在一起享受乐趣时，除了成果之外，这到底是怎样一种场景呢？是一起熬夜看好玩的YouTube视频吗？还是…

Charlie: [01:05:09] 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.

查理：不，不，不。我们享受的快乐的是实践和理解（这个世界）。我们都喜欢学习新东西，最好是一些有用的新东西。我们都追求一些目标，最好还是有一定难度的目标，但你仍然能够实现的目标，这当然是一种快乐。

John: [01:05:25] What do you and Warren debate? What’s an ongoing topic of debate between…

约翰：你和沃伦会争论些什么吗？有哪些一直在争论的话题…

Charlie: [01:05:28] We don’t debate. There are some things that I’m willing to do that Warren isn’t. And of course, I just adapt.

查理：我们不争论。有一些事情我希望做，但沃伦不愿意。当然，我会顺其自然。

John: [01:05:35] Like what?

约翰：比如什么？

Charlie: [01:05:36] 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.

查理：嗯，如果他不想做，我们就不做。就这么简单。这只是把时间花在哪里的问题。如今他会做一些他喜欢的事情，尽管这些事情不一定有最佳效用，我也会这么做，但我们会一起做很多我们喜欢的事情，与优秀的人一起合作，取得成就。而且我们都相信，如果你取得了非凡的成功，你应该分享出去。事实上，你应该通过捐赠分享你的一些成功。

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.

你捐钱、捐时间、给出建议等等。几乎所有的世界宗教——基督教如此要求，犹太教也如此要求。所以我们很享受我们目前所做的事——传道、慈善和经营企业结合在一起。如今，我们不希望其中的任何一点比其他更重要。我不再寻求更多的新机会。我的生活已经如此充实。

John: [01:06:28] But what do you and Warren disagree on? Or what have you disagreed on?

约翰：但你和沃伦肯定会有意见不合的地方，或者说你们曾经有过意见不合的地方。

Charlie: [01:06:31] We don’t disagree.

查理：我们没有意见不合。

John: [01:06:33] Well, you must.

约翰：嗯，你们一定有。

Charlie: [01:06:35] 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. No 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.

查理：我给他打电话说要投资个啥啥啥，他说：“查理，我不想再见新面孔了，任何小生意。”所以他只是很珍惜他的时间。沃伦不想投任何小公司了，要投就投大家伙。他在这方面很有纪律性。他不再对小公司感兴趣，他在（纪律性）这方面很擅长。他不再想找什么小商机。他不希望我们俩浪费时间再去琢磨这些小事。

John: [01:06:59] Again, that’s one example of a disagreement. What else?

约翰：允许我再啰嗦一遍，这算是个意见不合的例子。还有其他的吗？

Charlie: [01:07:02] 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.

查理：嗯，那不算是什么意见不合。这只是——他已经92岁，快93了，他今年92，他有权利自己决定把时间花在哪里。但我们在一起合作很愉快。当然，世俗意义上讲，这是一种非常有效的方式。我们都很享受这一切。从伯克希尔差不多一无所有开始，逐渐壮大，这当然是一种快乐。

John: [01:07:24] 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.

约翰：为什么你们最终合并到了一起？你们之前各自经营着Wesco、Blue Chip和伯克希尔，然后在某个时刻，你们把各自的努力合并到了一家公司。

Charlie: [01:07:31] 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 not look like we were manipulating.

查理：我们之前并不介意事情搞得这么混乱（指多家公司交叉持股）。但由于很多金融市场玩家动不动操纵市场不顾廉耻，如果我们控制的这几家不同实体动不动就买相同的公司，看起来会有点像要掩人耳目啥的。所以我们就决定把它们都合并到一起，这样就不会看起来像是在操纵市场。

John: [01:07:52] So no one could have any claims of conflict of interest-type things.

约翰：这样就没人再指控你们有利益冲突了。

Charlie: [01:07:56] And so many people who do a lot of different hands, they do manipulate, behave improperly.

查理：是啊，有太多人通过不同的壳公司操纵市场，这样很不好。

John: [01:08:01] What do you think of the SEC?

约翰：你对证券交易委员会（SEC）有什么看法？

Charlie: [01:08:02] 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.

查理：有了SEC，情况会好很多。在花样繁多的财富管理这一行，通过金融欺诈赚昧心钱的情况比比皆是。所以当然需要一些机构来遏制和管控这种行为。因此，我很高兴我们有SEC（这样的监管机构）。如果没有SEC，市场将更疯狂。顺便提一嘴，SEC是罗斯福新政的一部分，我认为它的主要问题在于还不够强硬。

John: [01:08:26] Tough enough on what?

约翰：对哪些行为应该更强硬？

Charlie: [01:08:28] 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 $2andwentupto$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.

查理：对不当行为的规制。如果我是SEC的负责人并且有权力这样做的话，我不会允许人们发一份这样的公告，说：“这是我在过去20年里的表现，我从2美元开始，涨到2亿美元。”因为这会误导投资者。当然，有人会创办共同基金，创办一些小型基金来制造虚假的辉煌记录。我会禁止那种行为。

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.

我会强制要求每个大型基金经理按照每一美元收益每年报告他的投资记录，而不是按照历史记录来报告，这样就可以消除不当行为。这样做非常简单，而且会彻底改变整个行业。

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.

你有听多少人说过，所有财富管理机构都必须按照每一美元每年的结果报告他们的业绩吗？这其实在数学上很容易实现。这将完全改变每个人推销（理财）服务的方式，培育真实、卓越和许多其他方面的良好风尚。

John: [01:09:22] 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.

约翰：这一点让我想起了注册临床试验的披露要求。你听说过这事儿吗？如果他们不发布那些无效的试验结果，只发布有效的试验结果，那么就会导致发表的试验结果失真。所以需要提前注册你打算进行的临床试验。这让我想起了这个情况。

Charlie: [01:09:42] 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.

查理：我不是药理学和临床试验方面的专业人士，但我赞成这种做法。对于诚信披露来说，我刚才提出的建议是如此简单，如此显而易见，以至于它应该就自动发生。然而，谁曾经提出过这个问题呢？为什么只有小查理·芒格，今年都98岁了，才认为SEC或政府应该要求所有投资专业人士按每一美元每年的结果报告业绩，而不是按历史记录？没有人提出过。但对我来说，这是显而易见的要求。

John: [01:10:15] And when you say per dollar year, you mean dollar weighted results, basically?

约翰：当你说每一美元每年时，你指的是按美元加权的结果，对吗？

Charlie: [01:10:17] 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.

查理：是的。每一美元每年的回报是多少？当然，这会是一个非常不同的数字。我知道有一个对冲基金的案例，基金经理赚了很多钱，但按每一美元每年来算，净回报是零。因为当他管理的资金规模更大时，他犯了很多愚蠢的错误。

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.

他在这种情况下赚了很多钱，并不重要。更糟糕的是，他的业绩看起来很好。但事实上，这有多可怕。为什么不要求这样做呢？为什么伯尼·桑德斯和伊丽莎白·沃伦不支持这个公平的要求呢？这本是个低成本的事情。他们不喜欢资本主义中的不当行为，但却完全无视这个可以很容易就解决的问题。相反，他们想要改变整个系统，让它更像俄罗斯的那套系统。这太疯狂了。

John: [01:10:58] Some people zero in on very odd things. Like the current war on share buybacks is very odd.

约翰：有些人关注的事情就很奇怪。比如当前对回购股份的抵制就很奇葩。

Charlie: [01:11:02] 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.

查理：那真是太糟糕了。我反对这个，因为我既不喜欢左翼的唤醒，也不喜欢右翼的疯狂。我对正统政治的憎恶程度不相上下。

John: [01:11:14] 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.

约翰：对回购股份的抵制似乎非常误导人也相当危险。回购股份是我们将资金从不那么有生产力的公司返回给更有生产力的企业的方式，所以我们实际上是在鼓励机构的僵化和停滞，大公司只能变得更大并在内部再投资。这似乎非常糟糕。

Charlie: [01:11:34] 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.

查理：他们会理解的。他们会以不同的机会成本来理解这个问题。如果你的股票价格只有它的价值的一半，而对自家公司之外（的其他公司），你同样也是要付钱买股票，而那些公司还由你不那么喜欢的人管理，而且以高于价值的价格出售，当然你会希望有回购的能力（而不是买其他不喜欢还价格高的公司）。当增持自家股票比做其他事情对你的股东更有利时，当然你应该这样做。

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.

公司的经理人应该是股东的良好受托人。如果公司有富余现金，且自家股票价格低于其价值，当然你应该回购自家股票。这是正确的行事方式。所以我反对那些认为回购应该被认定为非法的疯子们。有些人回购只是为了推高股价，以便牟利或有其他什么（不当）目的。当然，这是可耻的。我们从不这样做。我们只在股价过低时才进行回购。

Evaluating Stripe, NetJets, China’s Prospects, and GE 评价Stripe、NetJets、中国前景和GE

John: [01:12:23] If Patrick and I came and put you on Stripe, what would you want to understand about the business? What would your concerns be?

约翰：如果帕特里克和我来向你推介Stripe，你想了解这个业务的什么情况？你关心的会是什么？

Charlie: [01:12:30] 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.

查理：这是一个有趣的问题，考虑到伯克希尔·哈撒韦（Berkshire Hathaway）通过（投资）其他支付系统，比如美国运通，赚了很多钱。我们认可，通过提高效率的方式在支付领域占据主导地位这一力量。当然，现代支付领域中支持互联网相关业务的一切都非常有用。所以你们进入这个领域并做出了贡献，让你们变得很有价值。

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.

我支持所有变得越来越好的支付系统。所以我认为你们是通过光明正大的方式赚钱的，而且赚了很多钱，这很好。我钦佩你们所做的事情。为什么不呢？我认为你们所做的一切对美国运通来说都有一定的威胁，但美国运通实际上有一种类似爱马仕（Hermes）那样的市场地位，所以Stripe未必一定能让它垮掉。

John: [01:13:22] In evaluating a business like Stripe, what questions would you want to answer for yourself?

约翰：在评估Stripe这样的生意时，你觉得需要想清楚哪些问题？

Charlie: [01:13:26] 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.

查理：它能否持续产出现金？这是一个更复杂的问题。很难知道世界会如何演变。如果（曾经那么强大的）柯达（Kodak）都能在一夜之间被淘汰，那么 Stripe 也有可能，这并非完全不可想象。

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.

在建筑师软件领域占据主导地位的公司曾经非常繁荣，但当新的公司在这个领域崛起时，它的地位不再像过去那样占还能持续占据主导地位。所以并不是软件领域的公司都能一直赢下去。所以我对此没啥感觉——风险资本家们往往认为软件公司能一直赢下去。我对此不敢苟同。

John: [01:14:00] 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.

约翰：伯克希尔的一个显著特点似乎就是投资的持续时间（足够长），在伯克希尔的投资组合中，很难挑出你认为50年后不好的公司。

Charlie: [01:14:12] 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.

查理：比这更糟的是，因为那些明显的错误投资，比如我们在历史上收购的太多的珠宝店。（这些生意的）资本回报率很低等等。几乎和航空公司一样糟糕。当然，最近珠宝店开始产出现金，我们已经关闭了大约75家店铺，还有更多要关闭。情况不再那么糟糕。

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.

我们想输都不那么容易了。就像，因为有人希望沃伦买一支棒球队来帮助他的城市，然后他就买了，没想到这该死的东西立马就赚钱了。我对我们的一些投资也是这样的感觉。我们不值得那么多赞誉，有时候只是运气而已。（译者注：芒格是谦虚吗？还是伯克希尔、巴老、芒格真的有那么多幸运？或者，是否，他们如果真的有那么多幸运，也是因为他们足够道德？）

John: [01:14:48] Why has NetJets done so well?

约翰：为什么NetJets取得了如此好的成绩？

Charlie: [01:14:50] 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.

查理：它在自己的细分领域比任何其他公司都更出色。在NetJets，整个文化是安全第一，客户服务第二。之后，我们就会开始担心那些拥有NetJets的资本家了。当然，这种文化也足够狂热。我们为那些能够买得起任何东西的人提供了非常优秀的产品。我们的产品比全国任何其他公司都更好，而且现在规模很大。这是一门大生意。我们尚未发生过一起导致乘客死亡的事故。这么多年来，我们从未造成过乘客的死亡。

John: [01:15:21] I didn’t know that such.

约翰：我还不知道原来NetJets这么牛逼。

Charlie: [01:15:22] 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…

查理：现在你知道了，我们为此感到骄傲。我们不这么说是因为我们害怕它可能会改变。我们太大胆地告诉上帝，我们是如此的…

John: [01:15:33] I can feature the magazine ads. NetJets- “No one has died yet”.

约翰：我的脑海中都浮现出广告词了。NetJets-“从未有人亡”。

You’re very bullish on China. Why?

你对中国非常看好。为什么？

Charlie: [01:15:41] 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.

查理：首先，他们的经济增长速度比我们的快。如果仅指此时此刻这一点可能并不一定成立，但在很长一段时间里，中国的经济增速远远超过我们。第二，我们可以以比在美国低的多的价格买到更好、更强大的中国公司。硬币的另一面是，我们不得不承担进入一个与我们不同的特殊政府体制买入公司的政治风险。

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.

只要我们有足够的安全边际，我愿意承担这些风险，当然，我们永远不会把所有的钱都投到中国，天晓得。但我们当然愿意投资部分资金。这是完全合理的。当然，我们是通过李录进行投资，他是一个非常出色的基金经理。把这4个因素结合起来考虑，当然，这么选择就是有意义的。

John: [01:16:30] Did you meet Li Lu through the book or separately?

约翰：你是通过这本书还是通过其他途径认识李录的？

Charlie: [01:16:32] 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.

查理：这是一个有趣的故事。李录来拜访，因为他是a hero of Tiananmen Square。我的一个朋友的妻子非常左派，很喜欢他，因为他参与了Tiananmen Square。当然，我对李录的革命生涯不感兴趣，我只对他适应现代资本主义这件事感兴趣。

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.

所以他来见我。我家离他当时拜访的那位朋友家只有100码。我们谈了3个小时。在3个小时的结束时，我做了一件以前从未做过的事情。我说，如果你停止目前的工作，只在亚洲投资，我愿意给你一些芒格家族的资金来管理。他答应了，就这样。我们用了3个小时找到彼此，从见面到承诺投资只用了3个小时。

John: [01:17:19] How does the current geopolitical hawkishness change your view on investing in China, if at all?

约翰：当前地缘政治中的鹰派立场有没有改变您对投资中国的看法？如果有的话？

Charlie: [01:17:24] 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.

查理：显然，我现在比以前对这一点更不安心了。那个改变了整个制度的人说：“不管黑猫还是白猫，只要抓到老鼠就是好猫。“他希望中国的经济能像新加坡那样发展。我们当然喜欢他。新任领导人并不像我们理想中的那样。我们认为中国的政治风险应该被考虑，我认为，我们应该不遗余力地与核大国建立友好关系。

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.

中美两国都是核大国，理应和睦相处。而最好的相处方式是，我们应该在我们和中国之间仔细规划一系列共赢交易，并切实努力使它们运作得更好。这才应该是美国的正确政策。

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.

我们不应该试图约束中国，像喋喋不休的保姆那样告诉他们该怎么做，教训他们说，”我们知道得更多。我们是民主国家，而你们不是。”我们自己政府的组织还有很多让人羞愧的地方。我们不应该到处给别人上课。我们应该与中国发展共赢交易。不这么做是疯狂的。

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.

在很长一段时间里，我们都是这么做的。你可能会说，中国主要是在与美国的共赢交易中走向现代化的，因为我们对他们的进口如此开放。这就是他们能够如此迅速地取得进步的原因。我为此感到自豪，也很高兴我们帮助了他们。我希望能（为帮助中国现代化）做更多。我不希望双方都充满敌意。

John: [01:18:53] 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.

约翰：汤姆·沃尔夫写了一篇关于鲍勃·诺伊斯的短篇小说。我是他写的书的忠实粉丝，他关于鲍勃·诺伊斯的短篇小说非常精彩。你可以读一读这篇短篇小说，它实际上是关于爱荷华州格林内尔，以及中西部文化对硅谷的影响。

Charlie: [01:19:11] 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.

查理：当然，这是一个巨大的成功。成功很有意思，但我认为英特尔的失败同样有趣。英特尔是现代芯片制造的奠基者。绝对是从零开始。他们曾（在竞争中）处于绝佳位置。他们一直在增长，增长，增长，等等。最终他们却完全失去了领导地位，如今只是与那些大公司相比微不足道的小公司。

John: [01:19:40] Why did that happen?

约翰：为什么会发生这种情况？

Charlie: [01:19:41] 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.

查理：首先，其中一部分是不可避免的。在竞争中，总会有人失败。这意味着，即使你曾很成功，也不可避免地会有一些意外发生，但部分原因是，他们过于关注财报收益。他们没有跳跃得足够高，只是停留在顶部。

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.

如果你处在一个那样的新技术前沿，你必须始终全力以赴，并且始终处于领先地位。伯克希尔（Berkshire）公司，我们不必像大多数其他公司那样发明新东西。他们却是在需要不断发明新东西的领域，你必须天天打鸡血（才能保持领先地位）。

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.

事情的真相是，中国人比英特尔人更加狂热。在中国，有个老家伙控制着那地方，他是一个狂热者，英特尔有的却是一群官僚，他们只关心自己的高管奖金、市盈率和华尔街的认可。还有很多其他（糟糕）的事情。他们把持着权力。如今，他们看起来好像有一段时间表现还不错，是因为利用他们的市场地位提高了收益。

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.

但他们本应该利用自己的权力确保他们的芯片始终领先于其他公司。他们必须成为一个完全可靠的供应商，但他们并未做到。他们让很多客户失望了，如果你想建立一个类似梅奥诊所那样的信任系统，就不能让客户失望。这才是其中有趣的部分，而不是诺伊斯的故事。英特尔的失败才是那个故事中的伟大部分。

John: [01:21:03] 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?

约翰：所以你说的是对财务报告中公布的账面盈利的执着，而不是对企业基本质量的关注。这本书出版于2005年。考虑到GE在过去的17年中的表现，对杰克·韦尔奇的看法是不是有什么改变？

Charlie: [01:21:15] Of course I’ve revised it. 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.

查理：当然，有所改变。当然我和他认识，他是一个自信的指挥家的儿子，拥有工程热力学博士学位。他非常好胜，他想赢。他是一名运动健将，几乎从零开始成为一名高尔夫球手。

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…

但他过度着迷于取得领先地位，用激励制度迫使每个人卷起来——他像教练那样对他的队员大吼：“每个人都必须更加全力以赴。”他对业绩的狂热让他欺骗客户、施压员工、操纵财务数据，他认为他的职责就是提高盈利，为此他越来越多妥协（而不是坚持正确的原则）……

John: [01:21:53] It wasn’t win-win.

约翰：这不是共赢的局面。

Charlie: [01:21:54] It was, for a while.

查理：有一段时间是共赢的局面。

John: [01:21:55] Who knows…

约翰：谁知道呢…

Charlie: [01:21:56] 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…

查理：短期内是管用的，但长期来看却毁了这个帝国。当然，如果他活得足够久，他的声誉也会被毁掉。在他去世后，每个人都知道这是一个失败，而且…

John: [01:22:06] I mean it wasn’t win-win, say with the suppliers, over squeezing them?

约翰：我的意思是，这不是共赢，比如对供应商的压榨就不是共赢吧？

Charlie: [01:22:09] No. I call that me-win. Win-win is one system, and me-win is another. Jack Welch had a me-win system.

查理：不是。我称之为“我赢”。共赢是一种关系，而我赢是另一种。杰克·韦尔奇奉行的是“我赢”。

The Principal-Agent Problem 委托-代理问题

John: [01:22:18] 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.

约翰：站在后金融危机（指2008年次贷危机）视角阅读这本书会非常有意思。同样有意思的是，在金融危机发生前的几年里，你就已经猛烈抨击了衍生品。

Charlie: [01:22:28] 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.

查理：批评衍生品是因为这玩意儿太容易操纵，比如说会出现这么个奇闻怪谈“两个家伙进行了一笔大交易，他们在利润表上都计入了大额利润，减计的时候也能同时减去。”这是同一笔交易，竟然可以一方报告利润，另一方也报告利润（同一笔交易，一方赢，另一方必然是亏。对同一笔交易双方同时记录盈利，肯定是造假无疑了。）。它们不可能同时都是对的——如果这么容易，如果操纵（报表）变得这么简单，如果这些做法腐蚀了文化，股票经纪人、大型银行家、交易员，他们就会带他们去拉斯维加斯，买一堆筹码给他们，可兑换的筹码，交给他们。

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…

可卡因，烟花柳巷……这可不是什么好的文化，不应被容忍。你对一群证券交易员会有什么期望呢？（如果）每个人都知道他的交易员是这么搞的，但是让那些乌七八糟的东西溜进来绝对是个错误。然后会变得越来越极端。然后银行家们就会进行这样的交易——高盛与马来西亚的那笔交易，主权财富基金……

John: [01:23:21] The 1MDB scandal, yes.

约翰：就是1MDB（一个马来西亚发展有限公司）丑闻，是的。

Charlie: [01:23:23] 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.

查理：就是那家伙，绝对是，鬼精鬼精的，他脸上写着“危险”两个字，显然，出于道德和审慎，应该离他远远的，但他们被轻松赚钱蒙蔽了心智。

John: [01:23:35] 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?

约翰：你的批评似乎可以总结为，专业的财富管理者、华尔街或诸如此类的领域，人们应该更加重视委托-代理问题。这么说公平吗？

Charlie: [01:23:46] 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 $400,000ayearwhileaprofessorgets$110,000.

查理：你几乎无法想象，会有一个比财富管理这一行更充斥委托-代理问题的领域了。当然，财富管理者会优先考虑自己（的利益）。当然包括基金经理。基金经理基本上是——他想要每年拿到40万美元（薪酬），而教授只能拿到11万美元。

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.

他想了这么个办法：选择那些能够给他3%优先管理费的资金管理者，然后把钱投到了各种各样（能答应他这个条件）的私募股权基金。只有这样，他（认为自己）才能稳稳当当赚大笔管理费。这是个非常典型的委托-代理问题。当然，这样你就会热情高涨地投大量钱到私募股权。当然，私募股权就会无所不用其极想把那3个百分点先赚回来。想象一下吧，在你替别人管的钱里优先抽走3个百分点（会造成什么后果吧）。

John: [01:24:29] It’s a good business model.

约翰：这个赚钱方法很精明。

Charlie: [01:24:31] 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.

查理：除非发现了什么点石成金的奇门妙法，否则绝对做不到的。突然想起来，你们（科技、数学）领域有个家伙，吉姆·西蒙斯（James Simons，1938年出生美国马萨诸塞州，1961年获加州大学伯克利分校数学博士学位。后同时在麻省理工学院和哈佛大学教授数学。1968年创立纽约州立大学石溪分校数学系，年仅30岁。1976年，获Oswald Veblen几何学奖。1978年创立文艺复兴科技，旗下大奖章基金从1989到2007年间的平均年收益率高达35%。和陈省身一起提出了Chern-Simons theory），是位世界级的数学家。他是这么赚钱的。他只是用他那该死的计算机来捕捉因为人类追涨杀跌的心理因素导致的极微小的交易机会。

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.

其中一个模式非常简单。他拿到计算机数据后发现，市场整体上存在着4种不同的模式：双赢、双输、赢输和输赢。如果这些只是随机的，那么这四种模式将平均出现。令人惊讶的是，他清洗数据后，发现双赢比赢输或输赢更普遍。而双输则更为常见。

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.

所以他们只需要利用计算机程序进行这些规模适度的交易，或者根据他的标准来说，相对于市场来说规模适中的交易。基于这个基础，这个业务风起云涌，金钱源源不断地涌出。

John: [01:25:31] The tax shenanigans.

约翰：那些避税把戏。

Charlie: [01:25:34] 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.

查理：数十亿美元就这么涌出了清算系统。这是如此简单和基础的方法。但这种赚钱方法的社会效用几乎为零，所以如果我这么做了的话，我想我会为自己如此精明而自鸣得意，但我也会对自己赚了这么多钱却没有为社会做出什么贡献而感到有些羞愧。但幸运的是，我不是一个足够懂计算机科学的人，所以甚至都不会考虑这样的事情，我也不喜欢短线交易。我可不想沉迷于那种在键盘上敲敲打打的交易方式。

John: [01:26:06] Why do you think Sequoia has done so well?

约翰：你认为为什么Sequoia做得这么好？

Charlie: [01:26:08] 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.

查理：Sequoia 在这个领域早早地入局了，而且这是一个狂热的精英主义组织。所以他们都非常努力地工作。他们比其他人更早、更成功地发展壮大，并像一些芯片制造商一样，每一代芯片都有所突破。最终，他们建立起了一个数据库。我们有一个例子。

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.

在我们的公寓楼里，我们会用一些小的计算机程序来调整租金或其他一些事情，然后有个小家伙（写的这个程序），我让人去查（这家伙的底细），（结果发现）Sequoia的系统里早就有这个家伙的档案了。所以每个有那么点程序天赋的混蛋，他们都有一支年轻的团队，四处搜索每一个这样的小人物，然后建立起一个大系统等等。

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…

所以他们看得更多——所以能比其他人更早发现更好的机会。而且他们名声在外。所以通常成功人士，他们都愿意选择Sequoia，而不是其他什么不知名的公司。这种系统性是不可战胜的。但最近，他们是否正确选择了大型Robinhood，不，他们在那方面犯了一个巨大的错误，不应该去的…

John: [01:27:15] Morally or…

约翰：道德上还是…

Charlie: [01:27:16] 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…

查理：在道德和专业上都是一个巨大的错误。真的很愚蠢。但事情发展得如此之快，我们必须参与到每一个热门的新事物中。他们开始像投资银行家那样思考，但对于Sequoia来说，搅进Robinhood这样的公司是个巨大的错误，而且…

John: [01:27:29] Is your objection to Robinhood that it encourages short-term trading and trading options?

约翰：你反对Robinhood是因为它鼓励短线交易和期权交易吗？

Charlie: [01:27:33] Yes, they lie and so forth.

查理：是的，他们还撒谎等等。

John: [01:27:35] Do they?

约翰：他们撒谎了吗？

Charlie: [01:27:36] Oh my God.

查理：天哪。

John: [01:27:37] What do they lie about?

约翰：他们撒了什么样的谎？

Charlie: [01:27:38] 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.

查理：任何对他们有利的（谎他们都撒）。为了推销，他们说，嘿，这是一个新自由者联盟，或者这是——整个事情都是谎言。

John: [01:27:45] You don’t like the movement aspect of it.

约翰：你不喜欢它的运动性质。

Charlie: [01:27:47] 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.

查理：哦不，不，不喜欢。他们试图制造大规模的恐慌。我不喜欢勾引人们然后欺骗他们，基本上就是这样。还有比特币。Sequoia已经取得了成功，你在很早期投资了苹果这样（伟大）的公司，那你为什么还要选择Robinhood（那么糟糕的主）呢，你知道它是一种该死的加密货币吗？这完全疯了。你不能做尽所有对你来说合法的生意。你得排除那些过于低级的东西。这才能表现你的智慧。虽然（投资）越来越难了，但也并不是不可能（做好）。

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.

但另一面是，如果你看看我——我觉得我的人生定位就很好。但除了一些小例外，我都投资了些什么呢？我投了Costco的股票，伯克希尔的股票，李录的中国基金和阿维的公寓。所以基本上在经历了60来年后，我只有四项投资——顺便说一下，我觉得自己已经足够分散了。没有人会教你说这是足够分散的。

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.

而他们完全错了。简单的事实是，找到四个优秀的事物比找到四十个要容易得多。这并不是那么容易的事情。你要找到几乎肯定能成功的东西，因为你是在寻找你后院的金矿。要成功找到，有那么容易吗？你在你后院能找到多少金矿？你不应该期望有太多明显看得出来的机会。

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.

这将是非常困难的，如果你一生中只抓住了几次这样的机会，就已经算很幸运了。而且你必须既非常耐心又敏于出击。你必须耐心地坐着等待、观察、调查、寻找机会，偶尔扑击一次。你一生中可能只会遇到四次大机会，那已经是非常成功的一生了。而其他人则认为——就像在电视上（夸夸其谈）的那个家伙，他每一次对每家公司都是专家。那太疯狂了。他只是擅长说一些正确的废话。那成不了投资专家。

John: [01:29:45] 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?

约翰：难道你不觉得这种说法正在改变吗？我觉得人们开始理解集中投资于那些真正有效的头寸的好处了。

Charlie: [01:29:55] 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.

查理：这个星期我和富达基金的一大群人吃了顿晚饭，他们管理着数万亿的资金，只收取很少的管理费。他们这生意很棒，但他们面临着一个道德问题，他们这种主动投资根本没法跑赢指数基金。（这就是巴老说的，如果哪一天他发现自己没法跑赢指数的时候，就会把资本返还给投资者。如果主动投资跑不赢指数，投资者为什么还要把钱交给你而不是简单地去买指数基金呢）

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.

也许，他们的系统里偶尔会冒出一个超越平均水平的分析师。基本上，他们所做的，就是强迫每个人都成为一个不为人知的指数投资者，因为没有人希望成为那个失败的异常值，因为那可能会毁掉你的投资管理业务。但我会认为，这整个该死的投资管理系统都是腐败的。

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.

他们对待经纪人比对待委托人更好，他们自欺，也欺人。这就是我们的（基金管理）体制。谁都想赚轻松的快钱。这就需要可信的大型（投资）机构。如今这才是人们看重的。我把现代风险投资视为伪装成投资银行的东西。只是一种稍微不同形式的投资银行，道德观念相同，同样一门心思想着赚快钱。投资银行这么想没错，只要做事得当，风险投资也是如此。

The Secret of Berkshire’s Culture 伯克希尔企业文化的秘密

John: [01:31:17] Is the secret of Berkshire’s culture just the anti-bureaucracy bend? Could you sum it up…

约翰：伯克希尔文化的秘密就是简单的反官僚主义吗？你能总结一下吗……

Charlie: [01:31:22] 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.

查理：伯克希尔的文化挺极端的。我们深知官僚主义往往会在组织内部形成一种自我运行机制，相互牵制，却没有人改变任何事情，谁都不想惹麻烦。结果很多官僚机构做出了一些非常愚蠢的决策，我们会努力避免这种情况。

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.

但我们主要是通过不让（总部）有那么多人待在一起来实现的。如果没那么多人搞在一起，就不会有什么官僚主义。我们的总部没几个人。所以我们能避免官僚主义。我们只是不希望人们陷入官僚主义。在这方面没有其他人和我们一样极端。这对我们来说是一个巨大的优势。

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.

还有一件事是，我们喜欢非常值得信赖的人。我宁愿和一个我信任的人口头达成交易，也不愿和我不信任的人雇的最好的律师事务所准备的40页合同打交道。所以我们喜欢与值得信赖的人做生意，只需要他们的口头承诺就行。

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.

如果你去看梅奥诊所，你会发现那里就是我所说的，理所当然的无缝信任网。外科医生信任麻醉师，麻醉师信任外科医生，护士们互相信任。根本没有官僚主义。他们没时间搞官僚主义。

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.

尽快完成手术对患者有利。因此，在这种理所当然的信任网络的加持下才可以进行非常复杂的手术。我们喜欢一个尽可能像梅奥诊所那样运作的商业系统，这就需要非常优秀的人员，他们彼此之间有足够的阅历来建立起这样的信任系统。

John: [01:32:55] And that trust is internally between the Berkshire folks or between the Berkshire folks and the managers?

约翰：这种信任是伯克希尔内部人员之间的信任，还是伯克希尔内部人员和管理层之间的信任？

Charlie: [01:33:00] 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.

查理：兼具。我们希望伯克希尔内部的所有人相互信任，我们也希望客户信任我们。我们全力支持信任。信任是地球上最伟大的经济力量之一。

John: [01:33:10] 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?

约翰：在需要将多少现金上交给总部，留多少现金再投资于本公司业务的问题上，你们和下属公司管理层多少时间会发生一次分歧？

Charlie: [01:33:18] Of course, some of our subsidiaries hoard the cash, if we’d let them and so forth.We’re not brutal.

查理：当然，我们会同意，我们的一些子公司留存现金。在这方面我们并不那么苛刻。

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.

在类似特利丹公司这样早期的企业集团中，他们会强制下属公司将所有现金汇回总部。如果下属公司需要用到现金，必须向总部申请。我们从来没有这样做过。（伯克希尔）业务系统中的每个人都知道，我们宁愿把现金再投资回去。如果有可投资机会，我们真的希望再投资回来。

John: [01:33:39] And is that one of Warren’s skills, is keeping those managers…

约翰：那是沃伦的一种天赋吗，保持那些管理者……

Charlie: [01:33:42] He does not — he’s not brutal.

查理：他不会——他一点都不苛刻。

John: [01:33:43] But he tickles it out of them.

约翰：但他会从下属公司挤出（现金）来。

Charlie: [01:33:45] When they don’t need it, it has a way of ending up back at headquarters without any big internal friction.

查理：当下属公司不需要那么多现金时，现金就会以某种方式回流总部，（在这件事情上）没什么大的内部摩擦。

John: [01:33:50] That sounds like some tickling is happening, yes.

约翰：听起来好像确实有些“榨取”的意思。

Charlie: [01:33:52] 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.

查理：你想怎么说就可以怎么说。你说得对，很多现金流向了总部。有意思的是，伯克希尔积累了那么多现金。这是一大笔现金啊。

John: [01:34:01] 5% of Apple sized amounts?

约翰：相当于苹果公司规模的5%？

Charlie: [01:34:03] 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.

查理：要知道，当我们起步的时候，几乎一无所有，我们自开始以来（指控股伯克希尔以来）没有净增发太多股份。所以我们如今拥有的大部分东西几乎都是无中生有而来。

John: [01:34:15] One famous example of share issuance was the General Re acquisition in 2000. Was that because you guys felt it was a market top?

约翰：2000年，有个著名的发行股份的例子是收购通用再保险公司（的那笔交易）。那是因为你们认为当时是市场顶部吗？

Charlie: [01:34:22] 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…

查理：的确，当时我们股票的估值比如今高得多。当然，我们那时在对通用再保险公司估值时，也给出了高于它真实价值的价格。所以……

John: [01:34:34] But it all worked out.

约翰：但结果还好。

Charlie: [01:34:35] 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.

查理：我们做得足够好了。最糟糕的一次是我们用伯克希尔的股份换取了德克斯特鞋业，而中国的竞争对手在我们的收购墨迹未干时，就摧毁了我们的业务。两年后，我们意识到我们犯了一个可怕的错误。那只影响了我们一年中表现的2个百分点而已。所以从伯克希尔的历史来看，这并不是什么大不了的买卖。

John: [01:34:57] You guys did okay in the end.

约翰：最终你们做的还是挺不错。

Charlie: [01:34:59] 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.

查理：不，但那是一个挺大的减分项，但也没大到那种程度。正如我们在伯克希尔的历史上预期的那样，1年中2个百分点的损失并不算太糟糕。

John: [01:35:10] 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?

约翰：这是不是一个“我说什么你们听着，我做什么你们别学”的例子，你和沃伦总是说不要择时，但那笔交易是不是一次很好的择时交易？

Charlie: [01:35:18] 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.

查理：当然，当市场恐慌时，我们更愿意用累积的大量现金买买买。当市场高不可攀时，我们就越来越难找到合适的投资对象。但是我喜欢伯克希尔的行事方式。我喜欢这些业务进展。我喜欢我们与之打交道的人。这是我生活中非常令人满意的一部分。能成为其中的一份子，我感到很荣幸。

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.

当你停下来想想，《穷查理宝典》非常像那个创造了现代新加坡的人。他总挂在嘴边的是，找出有效的方法，然后去做就是了。找出有效的方法，然后去做就是了。他比任何人都更加坚定不移地、更加聪明地做到了这一点。他可能是有史以来最伟大的建国者，包括伯里克利斯（古代雅典政治家）和历史上的其他人。

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.

这非常像《穷查理宝典》。找出有效的方法并去实施。找出无效的方法并绕道而行。他只是这么坚持不懈。这就是他所做的一切。他的职业生涯始于左翼劳工律师。起初，他只是一名左翼劳工律师，最终却创造了现代新加坡，他的秘诀只是找出有效的方法并去实施，找出无效的方法并绕道而行。

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.

就这么日复一日地重复做对的事。所以在我看来，最像《穷查理宝典》的政治家就是李光耀。我并不奇怪他比任何其他建国者都做得更好。他所做的就是这些。就TM这么简单。

John: [01:36:53] Maybe a good example of that, that I learn 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…

约翰：我从李光耀这一生中学到的一点是，“找出有效的方法并去做”这个理念的一个范例是，小心翼翼地选择了英语作为新加坡的国家语言，而不是中文……

Charlie: [01:37:01] 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.

查理：当然。他在像这样的决策上做出了无数正确的选择。并不是每个政治领导人都会让人民改学其他语言。但当理性地认识到，这对新加坡来说更好时，他就这么做了。当然这是令人钦佩的。而且当然它奏效了。每个人都应该学习李光耀的做法。在我家里，我有两个人的半身像。一个是本杰明·富兰克林，另一个是李光耀。就只有这两个。

John: [01:37:30] I could have guessed Benjamin Franklin. I wouldn’t have guessed Lee Kuan Yew.

约翰：我可以猜到本杰明·富兰克林，但想不到李光耀。

Charlie: [01:37:33] 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.

你知道我为什么喜欢他。他一次又一次地表现得非常聪明。我认为他很聪明，他对毒贩处以死刑。新加坡并没什么严重的毒品问题，因为他们在这方面非常严厉。他们对毒贩处以死刑。

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，这就是中国人的方式 — 当中国每六个人中就有一个吸食鸦片时，他们的解决方式就是对吸食者处以死刑。没有例外。他们不需要杀死那么多人。问题就解决了。我认为很多问题应该用李光耀式的方法来解决。

John: [01:38:05] 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.

约翰：总结出了这么一系列的经验，我们该以这种方式结束这次对话了：找出有效的方法并去做；避免犯大错；多学科思维模型。非常感谢您的分享，我们非常高兴能在这一期访谈中请到您。这对我来说是一本非常有意义的书，我很高兴能让更多人读到它。

Charlie: [01:38:20] I’m glad to do it.

查理：我很荣幸。

胡维：我去看了一下，根据文中的意思，确实应该是 BNSF（伯克希尔旗下铁路业务），而不是 Norfolk Southern ，后者就算缩写也是 NFS ，而不 NSF。 Norfolk Southern 是单独上市的诺福克南方铁路公司，股票代码 NSC。

Footnotes

1. 20231226 更正：这里英文原文是 NSF，经胡维考证，应该是英文标注错误。之前被翻译为 NSF （Norfolk Southern），已按照 BNSF 进行了调整。 ↩