Letter #180: Todd Combs, Michael Mauboussin, and Tano Santos (2024)
Letter #180: Todd Combs, Michael Mauboussin, and Tano Santos (2024)
Berkshire Hathaway Investor, Counterpoint Global Head of Consilient Research, and Columbia Business School Professor of Asset Management and Pricing | Charlie Munger's Legacy
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Happy Berkshire Hathaway Weekend to those who celebrate! While I was planning to send out a different letter this Saturday per my usual posting schedule, I’m in Omaha this weekend and enjoyed this conversation so much that I wanted to share it immediately! (Note: we will return to regular scheduling with Letter #181 coming out next Tuesday.)
I’ll be in Omaha until Sunday, and still have the capacity to meet a few folks—DM me on X or respond to this email if you’d be interested in trying to get together.
Today’s letter is a special one—it’s a conversation between Todd Combs, Michael Mauboussin, and Tano Santos—and it’s all about Charlie Munger. In this episode, the three celebrate Charlie Munger’s contributions and legacy before Todd jumps into his initial meeting and subsequent encounters with Charlie, provides color on the intellectual journey and partnership between Charlie and Warren Buffett, describes Charlie’s approach to life, investing, and the importance of mental models, discusses behavioral economics insights from Charlie (and Danny Kahneman), and shares practical applications of Charlie’s wisdom in business and investing. They ends with parting thoughts on Charlie’s lasting impact.
Todd Combs is one of Berkshire Hathaway's top two investment managers and the President and CEO of GEICO, where he is responsible for all insurance operations. He started his career as a pricing analyst at Progressive Insurance, then joined Keefe, Bruyette & Woods as an insurance analyst. After that, he headed up financial services at Copper Arch Capital, before starting Castle Point Capital in 2005. He joined Berkshire in 2010.
Michael Mauboussin is the Head of Consilient Research at Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley Investment Management), a Trustee of the Santa Fe Institute, and an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School. Michael started his career as a broker at Drexel Burnham Lambert during the Milken years, before becoming the senior packaged food analyst at First Boston, which later merged with Credit Suisse and became Credit Suisse First Boston. While at CSFB, he met Bill Miller, who recruited him to Legg Mason Capital Management, where he was Chief Investment Strategist. He then rejoined Credit Suisse, where he served as a Managing Director and Head of Global Financial Strategies, before becoming Director of Research at Blue Mountain Capital. He joined Counterpoint Global in 2020.
Tano Santos is the Robert Heilbrunn Professor of Asset Management and Finance and the Academic Director of the Heilbrunn Center for Graham & Dodd Investing at Columbia Business School. Before Columbia, Tano was an Associate Professor at Uchicago’s Booth School of Business.
This was an intimate look into the wisdom of one of the greatest investors of our time, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did!
[Transcript and any errors are mine.]
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Transcript
Michael Mauboussin: Welcome to a new edition of the Value Investing with Legends podcast. My name is Michael Mauboussin, and I'm an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, and a faculty member at the Heilbrunn Center for Graham and Dodd Investing. I'm here with my cohost, Tano Santos, the Robert Heilbrunn Professor of Asset Management and Finance at Columbia Business School, and the faculty director at the Heilbrunn Center. Hi, Tano, how are you today?
Tano Santos: I'm doing great.
Michael Mauboussin: I understand that you have a group of students and alumni in Omaha for the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. That's going to be a little bit different this year, isn't it?
Tano Santos: It's going to be a bit different. It's gonna be a bit sadder. On the side of Columbia, as you know, every year we hold the Omaha Dinner, formerly known as the from Graham, Buffett, and Beyond dinner. We do it every year at the Berkshire shareholder meeting. It's a wonderful opportunity to see old friends, students, alums. And yes, many of the students come attend the shareholder meeting. Organized a little get together for them and alums. And Warren actually was kind enough to show up and meet them one year not that long ago. It's always a lot of fun.
Michael Mauboussin: Well, in this episode, we're going to do something different. We're going to take some time to celebrate the life and contributions of Charlie Munger. Munger, who was the Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, died in late November 2023. Just a month shy of his 100th birthday. He was an extraordinary man who made an indelible mark on Berkshire Hathaway, and indeed the whole investment world. In a very touching tribute to Munger in the 2023 annual report, Warren Buffett called Charlie the architect of the present Berkshire Hathaway, and he, Warren Buffett, acted as the general contractor to carry out the day to day construction of Charlie's vision. To help us honor Charlie Munger's memory, we are delighted to welcome Todd Combs, an investment officer of Berkshire Hathaway, and Chairman, President and CEO of Geico. Prior to joining Berkshire Hathaway in 2010, Mr. Combs was the CEO and Managing Member of Castle Point Capital Management, an Investment Partnership he founded in 2005. Mr. Combs also serves on multiple boards of directors, including that of JP Morgan. Importantly, from our point of view, Todd is a graduate of the Columbia Business School. Welcome, Todd. Thank you very much for being here. We really appreciate you taking the time to share your reflections on the incredible life of Charlie Munger.
Todd Combs: Thanks so much. It's great to be here.
Michael Mauboussin: Perhaps we can just start at the top. Can you tell the story of how you first met Charlie Munger, and perhaps your first impressions of meeting him in person?
Todd Combs: Yeah. Thanks so much, Michael and Tano. I met him in the summer of 2010. I had been running a partnership for about five years through the global financial crisis, and we'd done quite well. And I was going to purchase an insurance company. And I wouldn't even begin to say, try and emulate Berkshire Hathaway, but certainly, with respect to long term capital, and not having monthly results, and so forth. And obviously, Warren's talked extensively about the concept of float. So I met Charlie in the summer of 2010 at California Club at a 7am breakfast, which I was obviously very nervous about. And he was completely charming and disarming, and so much so that we sat there for six or so hours. They ran all the way through lunch, they'd gone and cleared all the breakfast tables, and were serving lunch. And so we had one and a half meals, or what have you, and talked about everything from investing, a lot--he was obviously quite a Renaissance Man, talked a lot about the sciences, and just life in general. And so that's how we met.
Michael Mauboussin: As a follow up to that, Todd. Were you surprised that he was interested and happy to talk about life, as well as investing? Or were you just anticipating that he would talk about investing?
Todd Combs: Yeah, that's a good follow up, because I was a little surprised. I had the same exposure everyone else had to him at that point, the Daily Journal and Berkshire meetings. And so I was not surprised in his breadth and depth, and bandwidth--obviously, everyone's very familiar and could see that. It's part of what endears us to him. But I was surprised when we talked a lot about family. My kids were young men. And I asked him about a lot of advice and what his lessons were from raising his children. And so we talked extensively about that. And I guess he not only had a deep reservoir of knowledge on all of these topics, but he also genuinely cared. And so he would ask me questions. It wasn't him just pontificating or lecturing, or what have you. It was very much a two way conversation, which--that probably took me as much as anything.
Michael Mauboussin: And then after you had that conversation, did he call up Warren and say, I've got a guy you got to talk to for us to consider hiring?
Todd Combs: Interestingly, I don't know exactly when he first called Warren. I've oddly never talked to him about this, but I do know that it was about a week later, I went home, he said, Let's stay in touch. That's how we kind of ended the six or so hour session. And I kind of assumed that I might never hear from him again, it was just a nice natural way to kind of end the conversation. And about a week later, I was sitting in my office in Connecticut, where I was still running my fund, and he called. And I think Costco had just--I know--Costco just reported results. And even though I was running a financial services fund, I actually had looked at them because I looked at a lot of things. And we sat and we talked on the phone for, I don't know, it was a couple of hours, at least. At the end of that, he said, It'd be great to meet you again, in person--do you have plans to be out? And I usually get out to California once a year or something like that--I was sitting in Greenwich, Connecticut. And so obviously, I made plans to go see him again. So it was a week or two later, I got back out there, and same thing--we did a five or six hour deal at the California club. And long story short, we then ended up talking and so forth, over the phone, and meeting in person. And one of those times, probably late that summer, he said, You should give Warren a call. And you really got to meet Warren. And so I kind of assumed at that point that somewhere in the interim, from beginning to that point, he had spoken to Warren.
Tano Santos: So can I add one thing about this conversation? I never met the man personally--of course, watch every single interview I could get my hand on. And you said something that struck me, Todd, on listening. One of the things that is striking about his interviews--he really thinks about the question he's been asked. He's answering the question that he's been asked. Many of these great men, so to speak, they have this one line they're repeating, independently of what they've been asked. It's okay, I understand that if you get to that level, you have the right to say whatever you want to say. One of the striking things about Charlie--in the shareholder meetings, in a TV interview--he would answer the question he was being asked. You may not like the answer, but he will answer it. And he thought about it, and he evaluated the question on its merits. And it was a wonderful intellectual attitude that he had. So it was impressive.
Todd Combs: It's an incredibly astute observation, Tano, that I've actually had CEOs tell me before--especially the ones who don't like doing public appearances, conference calls, etc--that they might have five kind of go to answers. And those are the things that--and particularly if you're talking to your employees, every CEO knows you have to say the same thing many, many times over again. So it's a muscle memory, but Charlie had his own muscle memory, which is part of what made him so special. But you're absolutely right. It's part and parcel of being such a deep thinker. He did have such a deep and broad reservoir of knowledge to be able to go to to genuinely try to answer exactly and precisely the question that you were asking.
Tano Santos: Absolutely. I always thought that this was really something wonderful about the man. So Todd, can I ask you a little bit about the intellectual connection of Charlie with value investing? All of us are associated with Columbia Business School--it's where Ben Graham, David Dodd, Roger Murray, Bruce Greenwald taught. So I want to draw a little bit on that. And I want to make some connections to set up this question, if you allow me to put it. So Ben Graham, of course, is the most famous teacher we ever had at Columbia, and Warren is, of course, our most famous graduate. Buffett, of course, work for Graham and has nothing but wonderful things to say about him. Charlie, on the other hand, admired much about Graham, but said, I don't love Ben Graham and his ideas the way Warren does. And that Warren gives Charlie credit for being the architect for Berkshire Hathaway suggests that Warren came around to Charlie's views, as we all know he did. So can you tell us a little bit about that intellectual trip, from Graham to Charlie that Warren undertook. How do you see that intellectual contribution to our discipline?
Todd Combs: I'll try and keep the answer short, because I could certainly go on at length about this. And I'm assuming many, if not all of your listeners would have read the Berkshire annual report, and Warren's ode to Charlie at the very beginning. He obviously says it perfectly, which is that Charlie really flipped that switch, as you said, to getting him to buy wonderful businesses purchased at fair prices and give up buying fair businesses at wonderful prices. And so the part that Warren, and Charlie, obviously, stay true to, that Ben Graham espoused, is that valuation does matter. You can't just say, Go buy wonderful businesses at any price. That is not gonna have a good ending. And so valuation matters, but it's not just in the static state, but that over time, you end up kind of getting what you measure. And so there's these qualitative aspects, I think, that Warren would say Charlie got him to appreciate in terms of the valuation and the compounding of wonderful businesses is far more on the qualitative end of the spectrum, in terms of quality of management, moats, pricing power, brands, all these things that they've talked about over the years. And that a lot of that may not, and probably isn't captured in static state valuation metrics. And Charlie used to espouse the virtues of what he called one decision stocks--you could just buy and hold: Costco, Berkshire, etc.--that had these wonderful aspects--Coca Cola, etc. Famous speech he gave on Coca Cola in Poor Charlie's Almanac. And that strategy is, as he would say, simple but not easy. And simple is the most important factor in scalability. So Charlie would always talk about being long term greedy versus short term greedy, and you're far better off finding that one compounder versus the 20 cigar butts where you have this, he would say--three decisions. You have to buy it, you have to sell it, then you have to buy another one. And he would joke, of course, and say he was lazy, which he wasn't. I think that's really what Warren's talking about, that he came around to.
Tano Santos: I've always been impressed by something wonderful about both of them. First of all, I mean, or, how early Charlie understood these ideas that now we take for granted. And Warren's ability to pivot, which is quite something too--that he was able to--he got it. And it involves changing the way you approach investing. And he was able to understood, of course, conceptually and theoretically, and be able to implement it right away. I want to, if I may, guys, to write this end of a quote of a long speech on Graham, something that Charlie said that also speaks to his character, and that we are celebrating him I think it's appropriate. So talking about Graham: I pick up the ideas, but he started a practice that didn't suit me. I don't want to own bad businesses run by people I don't like, and say no matter how horrible this is to watch, it will be bouncing by 25%. I'm not temperamentally attracted to it. So the idea of also having a bit of fun investing, which I think sometimes we forget.
Todd Combs: Yeah. That's a great, great quote, actually. And you're right. We would sit around and talk when I'd go to California and visit him, mostly pre COVID, and we'd sit in den, and we'd talk into the late hours, or what have you. We would talking a lot about, I would say Life is too short. Why would anyone want to surround themselves with people they didn't want to be around? Certainly, both Charlie and Warren have that very, very much in common. And if you solve, again, by keeping it simple, in that, that doesn't mean necessarily you have a great business, you've got to check a lot of other boxes. But yeah, Charlie just wouldn't want to be bothered by it. And neither would Warren.
Michael Mauboussin: So Todd, we also just lost another legend, Danny Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in behavioral economics. Charlie was an early--and vocal in pointing out the importance of understanding behavior and investing. Can you share some of the big behavioral lessons you learned from Charlie and why they're relevant in your work--both as an investor and also as an executive?
Todd Combs: Yeah, it's another great question that if you had--I could talk for hours about this, because there's so many things that Warren also commented very aptly so that you could never have a conversation with Charlie without learning something new. And usually many things. I would say, first of all, try to reread Thinking Fast and Slow at least once a year--I have it on my bookshelf here behind me. It's a true classic. My first response or reaction to that question is that Charlie made it look so easy. It was almost as if he was born with the understanding of these concepts at birth. That's literally the first thing that came to my mind, it's just so remarkable. And so some of the lessons, in no particular order, just that come to my mind would be that he would always talk about living life rationally and being devoid of pitfalls such as envy and resentment, self pity. He would always, always espouse to anyone and everyone that it's a moral duty to learn and to get better every single day. Find super talented people, and then get out of their way, and let them do their magic. And he would talk about the seamless web of trust that's so important. Because if you don't have that, you're gonna have all these high IQ people, but you're not gonna get anything done. Take a simple idea and take it seriously. It was one of his favorite quotes. And I mentioned earlier that simple scales. And you know, Einstein, I think, gets attributed with the quote, The orders of intelligence is smart, intelligent, brilliant, genius-and what's better than genius? Simple. So Charlie really--he espoused it in everything that he did. And then this is another popular one that comes to mind--we should actively try to destroy what we think are our best ideas. and our most closely held beliefs. We see that every day, especially as we're coming up on the political election. To find win-win situations, and only enter into transactions and situations where if the situation were reversed, you'd be comfortable being on the other side. I think that's core to his, to Warren. to Berkshire's ethos and culture. So I could go on and on, but those are some of the big ones. And he certainly lived it. He just didn't talk about these things. He actually had it in his DNA.
Michael Mauboussin: I'll just add that Danny Kahneman, especially toward the end of his career, was quite well known for this idea of adversarial collaboration. So literally picking someone who had an opposite view, and trying to figure out sort of crux questions, and then really trying to be as thoughtfully as possible, to pursue those. So I thought that was wonderful. As a follow up, though, do you find these behavioral issues--how is it different as an investor, so wearing your investor hat, and running a portfolio, so you're kind of dealing "with the market," versus as an executive, where you are dealing with competitors, but essentially, it's you're dealing with employees and suppliers and so forth. Is it a different set of issues that you have to deal with?
Todd Combs: Oh, absolutely. No--there's no question. I talked to a lot of people, Charlie very much included, before taking the Geico job. And everyone has their opinions and so forth, and a lot of people would say, Well, they try and simplify investing. And there's not a lot of people who've done both, either. But investing is really more--they'd use their own words--either academic, or it's very--you're really figuring out problems, and you're trying to figure out a puzzle at the end of the day, whereas obviously, when you think of running a company, you think of, naturally, of managing people, and all the pluses and minuses that come with that. But I would say that there's plenty of intellectual problems. One way--I'll just say, what Charlie related to--he always had these--he loved architecture. And so he would oftentimes bring analogies back to some architecture. And he'd say, Well, it's like being on a submarine. If you're an investor, you're out, got the hatch open, you've got a 360 Periscope, and you're kind of looking around. And as an operator, you're down in the boiler room, and you're trying to figure out why the pipe is clanking or that the heat light is a little--it's run a little hot, or something like that. He had just fascinating analogies where his mind would immediately go. And I just got a call with a management team the other day, and I find that both professions are quite humbling, if you take it with an open mindset, I think. And so there's a lot of similarities. I'd argue, actually, in some ways, more similarities than differences. I think people generally come at it from the differences because on the surface, they look very different. But there's plenty, plenty of intellectual challenges in an operating environment. Obviously, I've got 12 direct reports, we have 30,000 people at Geico. And there's a lot of differences there. But the interactions that I have with management teams are now much different, based on the operating experience. And in here, I would go to one of Warren's famous quotes, obviously, that being a businessman made him a better investor and being an investor made him a better businessman. And so I think it's like anything--the left hand's got to talk to the right hand, and vice versa. And if you get both working together, in theory, you're building a concentric circle, and so forth. But Charlie also had no interest, really, in operating. He was quite open, so I'm not revealing any secrets there. But he had no interest in operating anything. He liked the purely intellectual aspects of it.
Tano Santos: So if I can have a quick follow up to something you said that I think is super important, and I would like to emphasize, in particular for students who are listening to this, this beautiful, beautiful quote of Take a simple idea and take it seriously. We take it for granted, but once you have a simple insight, you really have to have the courage to follow the implications of that insight all the way to the end. And I think what makes a difference between these very successful people and people who are perhaps a little bit less successful, is that courage to follow the implications of your insight, the confidence that it takes. Okay, I have this insight. Let's say this wonderful insight about valuation that Charlie had. Let's follow it all the way to the end. And we're going to test it, we're going to basically challenge it. But you have to have the courage of following that insight all the way to the end.
Todd Combs: Yeah. Well, in my experience, what I would say to that--my first reaction is that I've never met anyone with greater clarity of thought on the breadth of issues. And again, Charlie would be the first one to say, it doesn't mean that he was always right--but certainly he had these mental models that he would talk about, a latticework from which to think of things that I think provided him with a lot--an unbelievable clarity of thought. And if you don't have that clarity of thought, it's very hard then to have the confidence that you're alluding to, to be able to then act on it. Because then it's just intuition. And so the difference between intuition and the acting on the intuition, passive versus active, and for everybody it's different, obviously, some confidence interval along that spectrum, that tips. And the more--it's that book, the noise in the signal. Charlie didn't have any noise. He just didn't have any noise--it was all signal. And that's not to say--he'd be the first one to say--he wasn't always right. None of us are perfect. But he had clarity, and there was no noise in the system. I've never met anyone with less friction between the thought and the action.
Tano Santos: This is a key point, I think, and a key contribution of Charlie--his advocacy of the mental models approach. And something that is striking about the man is that he thought as a scientist when it came to these mental models. They encode information, they encode experiences you had in the past, and they yield testable implications. The model can be reacted. Something new comes along that falsifies the model--does it have the same value to you in your career as an investor, Todd, the value of the mental models approach and their ability to incorporate knowledge from disparate sources?
Todd Combs: Absolutely. What it did for me, was reinforced my intuition. And so I felt like I had--and that's why I went immediately to that answer a second ago--I had a lot of experience in running a financial services fund and so forth through the global financial crisis, but you still have intuition that you're relying on because you haven't seen even close to everything, and things are constantly changing, and so forth. And so removing that noise, that's what those mental models, in my opinion, do. Is remove that noise, provide that clarity. And then you--people use this term flywheel a lot for businesses, but there's a mental flywheel that people can have too, where you're always going to make mistakes, but generally speaking--I had a wonderful conversation with Charlie around this. One day, I said, really, once you get to a certain point, you want to be pulling as many things forward as possible if your batting average is decent. Because--and certainly this is true operationally, too, where, if it's a success, certainly, you want to pull that forward. But where I think a lot of people go wrong is if it's a failure, or a mistake, you also want to pull that forward, because it's there regardless. You want to make the mistake yesterday, not a year, or 10 years, or 20 years from now. And Charlie, obviously, absolute best in class at that. And I think to do that, you need this--I think it's been referred to as an epistemic humility, where there's this profound--some people just summarize it as like an open mindset. But I think it's deeper than that. I think it's a profound sense of how little anyone can know. And how important it is to be open, and change your mind, which of course, comes back to destroying your own best ideas. When I met him, I thought, what book am I possibly going to bring Charlie, who's probably read every book there is? And it was this book exactly on this concept, even though I didn't know necessarily, maybe I was just relying on intuition--about half of everything that we know, at any point in time, is actually completely wrong, and ends up getting disproven generation after generation after generation. It goes back to Copernicus, and Galileo, and so forth and so on. And so Charlie, just again, made it looks so easy. It was like, Yeah, of course. It was like he was born with that knowledge and that understanding. So that's what I come back to. Once you have that kind of understanding, that provides some level of clarity. And it also is a relief, by pulling it forward, that mistakes will be made, but you might as well pull it forward as much as you can so that you can then fix the mistake and adjust from there.
Michael Mauboussin: Is that book The Half Life of Facts by Sam Arbesman?
Todd Combs: I think it is. I think it is.
Michael Mauboussin: Yeah. Half Life of Facts. Yeah. Sam Arbesman, for those that want to track that down. Todd, let me ask you very quickly about reading. I know that you're a wonderful reader. Obviously, Charlie Munger was extraordinary at that. And I'm sure that's one of the reasons you clicked--is also why you clicked with Warren Buffett. He also read across an incredibly broad range. So what did you learn about how to learn, and in particular, how you step outside of disciplines? In other words, you obviously have to read 10-Ks and annuals and so forth, but you also probably are reserving some time to go a little bit outside the discipline. How do you think about that and what did you learn from him about how to do that well?
Todd Combs: Again, that's a great question. I come back to this latticework. And so if you read a couple dozen books a year or something like that, a couple books a month, that adds up. And what I find is you really learn, at least for me, and I think this was certainly very true for Charlie, he never read business books, because it was just so blatantly obvious to him. So he would much rather read a book on Darwin--I'm using an obvious example--and he would say, Well, of course that relates to this thing in architecture and this behavior from a CEO, and this over here with some scientific foundation, etc., etc. So human behavior--he'd always say Follow the incentives. So he would--and of course, he would refer to these Lollapalooza effects as well, where he'd say, Well, of course, this thing, multidisciplinary thinking was--you can call that second or third order or whatever you want, but he would always be looking somewhere else to then draw corollaries, or some people think of them as Venn diagrams--he'd be far more interested that this Venn diagram overlaps 1% with this other Venn diagram instead of reading the book that's blatantly obvious on things that he already knew. And so I think the more that you can build that, you just expand your thinking, and it almost becomes, hopefully, three dimensional or something like that, because you see patterns elsewhere that more or less repeat themselves in different ways. If that makes sense.
Michael Mauboussin: It does. Well with that, Todd, thank you very much for joining the Value Investing with Legends podcast, and for sharing all your thoughts. It was really a wonderful tour. And to all of you listeners, thank you for tuning in. And we look forward to seeing you at our next episode.
Todd Combs: Thanks so much for having me.
Tano Santos: Thank you so much, Todd, for coming.
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One of your best pieces. Thank you for posting.