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He said something about being a harsh grader of people. Yes. What does that mean?
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Well, I I told I told Warren.
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I said, "Warren, you know, you are both you and Charlie are such good judges of humans and human nature.
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Were you always that good at figuring people out?"
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So, he says to me, "Mohnish, you're mistaken.
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I am useless at figuring people out."
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He said, "If you put me in a cocktail party with 100 people and you gave me 5 or 10 minutes to meet each person, uh I could tell you three or four people are exceptional.
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And I could tell you three or four people you want nothing to do with.
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And the remaining 92, I would have no opinion on because not enough time to figure them out.
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So, but he's but he also said that look, what you do in life is those three or four people who are exceptional, you bring them into your inner inner circle.
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And obviously, the three or four people who are you know, not not the great humans, you're not going to have any anything to do with them.
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But the third thing you do is you treat the 92 just like the useless humans.
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And you exclude So, he says, "Be a harsh grader."
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So, he says that when you have friendships and when you have people you work with, your peers and all that, he says there's a gravitational pull.
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If you hang out with people better than you, you're going to get better.
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If you hang out with people worse than you, you're going to get worse.
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So, he said that one of the things that most humans are not willing to do is loyalties get in the way for them, right?
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So, they may have a friend who's kind of weird or quirky or has ethical issues, but they've had a long friendship.
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So they'll keep that person going with them.
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Uh that has detrimental impacts.
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So basically um I really took that to heart.
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And I said that uh I really going to try to see if I can uh focus on the great relationships, you know, the great people.
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And that's actually been um a journey I've been on now for like you know, 16, 17 years. It's been tremendous. It's It's great. Now, it's it's unfair. Right?
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Because you're treating the unknown the same as the useless people.
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But but that's the way life is.
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I think that sometimes you have to make these difficult choices uh because if you don't do that, then uh the impact of that is significantly negative.
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And one other thing that I realized when I started to uh get to know Charlie, I got to meet Charlie's friends.
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So I would play bridge with his friends. I'd meet his friends.
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And what I realized is his friends were so off the charts.
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They were so exceptional.
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I said, "Wow, this is like a different world, right?"
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And I said, "I'm going to take a shortcut.
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I'm going to make Charlie's friends my friends because he's already done all the work. Okay. He did the filtering.
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He's You can't get a better filter than Charlie Munger, right?
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And and so I I worked on building relationships with Charlie's friends and some of his family.
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And that's been beautiful.
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I mean, some just great friendships.
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Uh and you know, I realized that there's such a huge delta in off the chart top point one percent top one percent of humans and the rest.
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And you know, we we talked about this.
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Adam Grant uh wrote this wonderful book Give and Take, right?
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And he categorizes people uh in three buckets, right?
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The givers, the takers, and the matchers, right?
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Now, the takers, you don't want anything to do with.
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You know, they're just going to like want to extract whatever they can from you.
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So, they're just not people you want to uh have in your life.
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The givers are people who are selflessly trying to help the planet.
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Not really concerned about what comes back to them, right?
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Those are the ones you want to be with.
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And then the matchers, they're kind of doing math in their heads.
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Oh, you know, Sean did this for me, so I'm going to do something similar for him.
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They're kind of And so, even the matchers aren't that great.
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So, what you really want to do is you want to seek out the givers.
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And more important than that is you want to be a giver. Right.
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And uh and so, the the interesting thing that he pointed out in that book is that when you're a giver, the universe conspires to help you.
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And I found it magical how And Warren and Charlie are great examples of givers.
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Everyone's trying to help them in any way they can.
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And so, that's the the funny thing is that the matchers who are trying to do this, you know, equalization, they end up losing.
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The best way to get the most is not ask for anything. It'll all come to you. Right.
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You know, and so, so these are wonderful models to incorporate.
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Yeah, there's even some game theory with that, which is the cost of excluding somebody who might be good or might be great is quite is actually quite low to you, but the cost of accidentally including somebody who might be have some toxicity or it's quite costly to you.
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And so, uh you know, I I think even in investments, he has the the good pile and then the the two hard pile.
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Warren has a lot of baseball analogies.
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He says that in investing, there are no called strikes, right?
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So, in baseball, uh you're at the pitch, three strikes, you're out, right?
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He says, I can let a thousand balls go by, thousand stocks go by, and not swing. Right.
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I I only need to swing when eight moons line up, right?
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And uh so, The fat pitch, right? The fat pitch, right?
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And so, the thing is that we live in a world with infinite humans.
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If there are infinite humans, it also implies that there are infinite number of good humans.
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So, basically, making of excluding a good human from your circle because you can't figure them out, there's no penalty for that because there's a infinite supply. Right.
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Just to put it bluntly, wait for the fat pitch.
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In a mathematical way, mathematically, but but when you bring in a substandard person, it just the the so many drains, it's just never All right, if you like that clip, there's a full conversation with a lot more just like that. Just follow my finger. It is right here.