What to learn from Buffett & Munger Unscripted, Alex Morris?

Alex Morris of TSOH Investing joined us to discuss his new book “Buffett & Munger Unscripted”. You can get it here: https://amzn.to/4iPCtOE *

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Easily discover all the topics of this interview transcript on “Buffett & Munger Unscripted” by clicking on the table of contents:

Introducing to Alex Morris’ “Buffett & Munger Unscripted”

[00:00:00] Tilman Versch: Dear viewers of Good Investing Talks, it’s great to have you back on the podcast and very happy to welcome Alex Morris of TSOH Investing for the first time. Hi Alex, great to have you here.

[00:00:14] Alex Morris: Thank you for having me. I know it’s been busy for me lately. With Berkshire’s letter, annual report coming out, the meeting is getting closer. I know it’s the same for you, but I’m glad we’re able to take a little time to do this. I think it’ll be a great discussion.

[00:00:26] Tilman Versch: You already set the right frame because we are talking about your book, Buffett & Munger Unscripted, which I didn’t get in a physical copy rather an eBook. And you have to physically copy, that’s great.

[00:00:39] Alex Morris: And one of the benefits of being the author you can get a physical copy.

Why write another book about Berkshire Hathaway?

[00:00:44] Tilman Versch: People can buy it both ways, so the options are out there, and today I want to talk with you about the book in the second part of the interview about writing and publishing. So let me start with a bit of a challenging question because there are so many Berkshire books out there. Why was this book “Buffett & Munger Unscripted“ missing in the Berkshire Book universe?

[00:01:07] Alex Morris: First of all, your access to the Berkshire material changed in a hugely significant way in 2018 when they released the meeting videos back to 1994. And for anybody who’s been to the meetings before, I think you surely agree that the content in the meeting is very different from what’s written in the letter. And I think at times it is also very different from what you’ve seen in CNBC interviews elsewhere, that partly speaks to the nature of the questions, and I should say when they released the meetings, they released them back to 1994.

So, you’re also getting a glimpse into a part of Berkshire’s existence where you know the composition of the meeting, the composition of the shareholder base was different from what it really is today, call it 30 years later. So, there was this huge trove of meeting material, and the challenge is then actually going through it and finding a way to, I mean, just to get through it as a challenge. It’s something north of 150 hours of video and more than 1700 questions. So, just watching it for anybody would be a pretty big exercise.

But then there’s also retaining it and putting the content in a way that is digestible and most valuable. So, I leaned heavily on the structure that Larry Cunningham used in the essays of Warren Buffett, where he took Warren’s essays over the course of decades and framed them in a way, by the content or by the material. That allowed you to more easily take everything in.

So, I used a very similar structure here. And you know my opinion after having finished the book and after having heard a lot of feedback from readers too, is that this gives you an ability to kind of go through certain topics and to understand their views on a specific topic may have changed overtime or even things where the views have not changed at all.

There are insights there as well, but it allows for a certain level of insight from the material that again, I think it’s different material, but an insight from the material, if you’ve even if you’ve reviewed it in a way that is it’s very, very valuable. So, I think it’s a resource that, especially if you’re only paying $40 for the book or something. I mean, it’s worth significantly more than that if you’re someone who really cares about investing or business operations generally.

How interested investors should read “Buffet & Munger – Unscripted”

[00:03:27] Tilman Versch: So how as an author, how have you designed to read the book? Or how can you or should you read the book Buffett & Munger Unscripted?

[00:03:37] Alex Morris: Yeah, I was listening to David Senra, who does the Founders Podcast, I was listening to the episode he did about the book the other day, and I think he did a really good job basically saying it’s more of like a resource. It’s something that, for me at least, sitting on my desk again very similar to the essays of Warren Buffett, as I’m reading about something happening in the markets or in the world. And it may pertain to a particular topic.

It’s kind of something that you can just pull up and go to. OK, here’s the section on market efficiency or here’s a section on retailers and how that business has evolved over time. I think you just go to certain topics and really start to derive insights again that have been shared over the course of decades, but it’s captured here in 10 pages or something like that. So, you can kind of pull out the insights from that in 20 minutes, something that’s been put together over the course of decades. So, I think it’s really, really valuable in that manner.

Who the book “Buffett & Munger Unscripted” is for

[00:04:32] Tilman Versch: With what kind of avatar or person did you write the book in mind? So, who did you design it for?

[00:04:40] Alex Morris: It’s funny, I really thought of it as a very wide range of readers. I mean, I imagine myself as, again, when I was reading a Warren Buffett for the first time, I had basically just started in this world of investing in business. It was almost 20 years ago now, but it’s still a book that I pick up today and can derive some insights from, maybe different things than what I did 20 years ago, but there’s still a ton of value that comes through when I read that book.

So, I think it’s applicable for a very broad range of investors. And I think it’s also very applicable for business operators, and you know, as Warren and Charlie have said many, many times, those two things are somewhat indistinguishable from each other and understanding the framing of both sides of that coin is really helpful for being good at either side of that point.

So, I think it’s applicable for a very broad range of investors. And I think it’s also very applicable for business operators, and you know, as Warren and Charlie have said many, many times, those two things are somewhat indistinguishable from each other and understanding the framing of both sides of that coin is really helpful for being good at either side of that point.

So, I think it’s really applicable to a wide audience. You know, people have said going to the Berkshire meetings is like going to church. You hear a lot of things that you’ve already heard before many times, but it’s kind of in some ways refreshing, or you pull something from something that you’ve heard before you hear it in a different light, and it means something different to you than it maybe did a couple of years ago. I think it plays a similar kind of role.

[00:05:56] Tilman Versch: When was the book released?

[00:05:59] Alex Morris: It was released in January 2025, and I can’t remember the exact date now. It’s been a whirlwind the last couple of weeks and months, but yeah, it was released, I think it was January 20 or something like that.

The most surprising responses to the book release

[00:06:11] Tilman Versch: One month out, and who have you seen resonating with Buffett & Munger Unscripted? You haven’t really thought of maybe, or what surprised you?

[00:06:21] Alex Morris: It’s funny, I haven’t been overly, and this is probably informed by running TSOH Investment Research by an investment research service. I haven’t been overly consumed by how it’s doing sales-wise or anything like that. So, I don’t totally know. I’ve heard feedback from a wide variety of people, a lot of people I know personally, that I’ve met over time through Twitter and elsewhere. You know, Bill Ackman tweeted about it, someone I don’t know, obviously. So, there have been a couple of random people commenting on it. And again, David Senra doing it for Founders was really cool. Someone I don’t know personally, but I absolutely love his podcast and the kind of books he’s covered, or it just means a lot for this to kind of be added to that library of materials. So, generally speaking, the feedback’s been really good, and you know we’re only a month in. So, hopefully, the audience for it can continue to grow and be valuable to a wider group of people.

Warren Buffett’s and Charlie Munger’s work

[00:07:19] Tilman Versch: You have structured the book into different topics and added a lot of quotes and wisdom from Buffett and Munger below it. So, how did you decide to come up with these topics?

[00:07:31] Alex Morris: Well, it was certainly a work in progress and with some revisions along the way. When I first started going through the materials, I needed to find it kind of find a way to structure it all and to have any sense for where is this given conversation going to land in the book, and you know, how to make a structure in any way that is somewhat digestible for the reader.

So, I think at one point there may have been something like seven or eight chapters, and then you get to certain discussions around things like Coca-Cola and See’s Candy, and it’s like, OK, well, this probably deserves to be its own separate section. I could put it somewhere else, but what’s said here is somewhat distinct and so important that it probably deserves its own discussion. A similar thing happened with GEICO and US Auto Insurance. Like, there’s so much in here that is relevant just to this specific business, but they’re insights that are so much broader as well, and it deserves to be pulled out and to become its own thing.

So, I started basically with a high level or high-level idea of these different chapters. You know things like value investing, capital allocation, etcetera. Then, a Berkshire chapter, which allowed me to go to some of the subsidiaries that are talked about somewhat frequently, but not a ton. Things like Net Jets or Borsheim’s, or Nebraska Furniture Mart. Things that I wanted in the book, but are not really deserving of their own chapter, necessarily.

So, I started splitting it up that way and eventually landed on leaving total, there are 13 different parts to the book, and number 13 is a catch all of other topics with a bunch of things that, again, just there isn’t enough material there for them to be kind of their own chapters.

Topics that didn’t make it in the “Buffett & Munger Unscripted” book

[00:09:15] Tilman Versch: What topics have you left out of “Buffett & Munger Unscripted“?

[00:09:19] Alex Morris: I mean, I left out. Again, as you get to the later years of the meeting, call it 2015 and onward, you start to get a lot more of the life advice type of stuff. What would you go back and change if you could do it all over again? Those types of things. Warren, his political voice, obviously, as he became even more popular with time, his political voice became more relevant in US politics and things like that. So, that became a bigger part of the meeting. And it just wasn’t really what I thought the scope of the book should be, or at least what I wanted it to be, and even with pulling stuff like that out, the book is still almost 500 pages.

So, there was also the consideration of, like, how do I make this somewhat digestible for the reader to get to the stuff that’s really important? It’s somewhat challenging when you’re working with Warren and Charlie, almost everything they say is really insightful. So, you kind of wanted to include it all, but at the end of it, I think that the transcript, I was kind of working with, and I compiled all the meeting, all the meeting transcripts, was something like, I think it was more than 1500 pages. So, I had to kind of find a way to make this a little bit more controlled.

So those things are kind of natural to pull out, but even there’s even stuff in there that in some ways bleeds over, like, for example, Berkshire Hathaway Energy and talking about US energy policy is basically right, like some of those things still find their ways in to the extent that they’re really relevant to Berkshires businesses specifically. But the stuff that was more general, I decided to keep out of this book. Maybe that’s an idea for book number two right there, I guess. I ought to give you a commission because you just thought of it, basically.

Alex’s favorite parts of Berkshire Hathaway’s story

[00:11:02] Tilman Versch: Let’s see when it comes out, we can chat about it. Which three segments are your personal favorites in “Buffett & Munger Unscripted“?

[00:11:13] Alex Morris: That’s a really good question. The discussion about national indemnity, which I’ve written about previously, but there was more in the meeting that also shed light on this topic and basically, I mean the really short version of this is over a 25 year period, the premiums volume and national indemnity and insurance business at Berkshire was like a roller coaster. It went up very significantly. It was like a 15-year period where it contracted by something like 80% and 15 years.

So, a very sustained period of contraction and premium volume, which, generally speaking, people would perceive as bad, right? Followed by a significant ramp as they came out of a certain period in those markets, and it’s a really fascinating discussion on you know basically the right way to run an insurance business, and they also make a really good point in terms of the right way to run an insurance business. The right way to run national indemnity is not necessarily applicable to every other type of business out there. It depends on the variables in that specific business. So, that’s a discussion where there’s just a ton of insights that come out of that discussion.

Another really prominent one is as they talk about See’s Candies and Coca-Cola, and it’s nice that the meetings start at, I believe, if I’m not mistaken, ‘94 is the last year that Warren bought or sold the share of Berkshire, I believe it was that year. And interestingly, I’ve written about this, so it’s somewhat top of mind. Eighty-nine was the first year that they bought the stock, and the shares that they bought in ‘94 were bought at roughly three times. The price was three times higher than it had been five years earlier.

So, obviously, if most investors, myself included, the idea of buying something at a three times higher price five years later is like, man, that’s really annoying to do, but the fact that Warren was making that decision and that’s kind of the first year of the meeting when they start talking about that business, there’s a lot of really interesting insights that come out, out of those discussions.

The other one is really prominent to me that I think about a lot more than I used to is this idea of, well, one capital allocation, but also manager incentives and you see it really clearly in the way that Warren talks about how they structure incentives at the wholly owned businesses. I mean, I think it was very prominent, actually, in this year’s letter, the 24-shareholder letter, when he’s talking about the Forest River acquisition, the RV manufacturer, and he talked about the discussion that he had with the founder and CEO of that company.

Again, it’s just like one line, but to the extent that you have this history, which is laid out in the book of how he thinks about these things. It’s a really interesting framing of what Warren is trying to get across to the managers of the businesses, and the way he gets that across is how they incentivise comp. So, that’s something that, again, like you go in knowing this is really important and then you walk away from it with kind of the Charlie Munger view on incentives. Like I thought this was important my whole life, and I’ve understated how important it was. It’s that type of takeaway for me.

The telematics case & Berkshire’s reaction

[00:14:16] Tilman Versch: Did you discover any pivots or 180° changes in the opinions of Buffett and Munger in the three decades you covered in the book?

[00:14:28] Alex Morris: I think about a lot of stuff. It was, you know, pretty well cemented by this time. I mean, they’ve been, they’ve been investing for, I guess, probably even by ‘94. They’ve been investing for more than four decades. So, they had a very good understanding of what they were doing, even running Berkshire, obviously, for decades at that point, too. So, they had a good understanding of the constraints that they were dealing with there.

The most prominent one in any business is what happened with GEICO and Telematics, and coming out of, call it the 2010s, when progressives started to make a bigger push there, and their response on the front end was basically we don’t think this meaningfully changes the underwriting decision and US auto insurance would be interesting to go back and look. I need to do this. How expensive it was.

Because at that time, Telematics, for anybody who doesn’t know, is basically progressive, sending people these devices that they would kind of attach to their car as a way to track their driving, and they would then use that information to change the underwriting decisions over time. Obviously, that’s been basically replaced by cell phones. But they came into that period unconvinced that this was worthwhile to do. They thought they basically had enough variables at their disposal to make intelligent enough underwriting decisions. And you see through this period from I believe 2011 or 2012 is the first time it’s really prominently discussed from this period of 2012 to 2022 or so, you see basically a complete reversal by the end of that period and they’re now behind as a result of having kind of missed the first part of that development.

Pretty interestingly. I don’t remember when this was maybe a year or two ago, and I can’t remember if it was Todd or Ted, but one of them, when they first met Charlie, and they flew out to California to meet with them, they said to him, I guess it’s by Todd. They said to him, You guys are making a big mistake here in terms of not recognize the value of the data that’s coming out of this business and how important it will be to managing the business, and in hindsight, clearly that was directionally correct, and they kind of missed it.

So, that’s the most prominent one that I saw, where you know they’re thinking about a particular business issue, really changed. On the flip side of that is, certainly, throughout the period of the late 90s and early 2000s, they very clearly saw what the Internet was going to do to the newspaper business generally, I think they also appreciated in some ways how that was going to float through to other forms of kind of digital information like media. So, that’s part of the discussion. Just kind of funny in hindsight to look 25 years later and they go like, oh, these guys, to some extent, kind of saw where some of this stuff was going, which is pretty interesting, especially when you overlay the fact that they were at that point already in there, what 60s? They weren’t exactly young guns at that point in time. So, they were still kind of staying up with how the world was kind of evolving and what technology could potentially do so. That part of it all to me is pretty interesting.

The process of writing “Buffett & Munger Unscripted”: The finish line is not the finish line

[00:18:15] Tilman Versch: I want to switch now to the offer level and a bit of a meta level, and people who are just interested in the book “Buffett & Munger Unscripted“. I would recommend just getting it and reading it. Let me carry on with the topic of writing and publishing with Alex here. And what did you learn about yourself when writing the book?

[00:18:38] Alex Morris: Well, for one, I learned that I was already fairly busy, quit doing TSOH with investment research. I now have an 11-month-old son, but thankfully, throughout most of the work process, he wasn’t born yet. So, I had a little bit more time at my disposal throw an extra couple of hours a week on top of the current workload. I think people have different views on this stuff, right? And it gets to a kind of work-life balance to some extent, and I love obviously investing in the source material, but it was there were times where I was quite busy for a while.

So, learning to adjust to that and to work through those constraints was interesting at times. I also learned a lot more about what it actually means to write a book. I worked through the process of listening to all the meetings, kind of organising the transcript, picking the answers, making the edits that were necessary to kind of work it into the book. Laying that all out, sending it to the publisher, and when I sent it, I was like, OK, like, we did it. We’re at the finish line.

I’ve since learned that is not the finish line of writing a book. There’s a lot of extra work that goes into it after having sat like what you think is a final manuscript or whatever the term would be to the publisher. So, that was a learning experience. Another thing that I’ve learned is that I’ve kind of seen this as well, from running TSOH Investment Research. It’s just an interesting balance of I’m not overly promotional, I don’t think, and at the same time, to the extent that you want to get the word out about something, especially in today’s world, you have to figure out a way to do it, right?

And even learning kind of how bookstores, physical bookstores, think about what books are going to hold their inventory is a kind of interesting part of the business that I obviously knew nothing about previously. So, I’ve been learning this skill or how to do this a little bit more, to some extent, with TSOH Investment Research, but just getting the word out there about something and trying to find the right audience for it is that has its own lessons as well.

What keeps Alex going while writing Buffett & Munger Unscripted

[00:20:49] Tilman Versch: So maybe let’s dive a bit deeper. What do you learn about publishing a book, and what would you maybe do differently in hindsight? Or what would you expect differently in hindsight?

[00:21:01] Alex Morris: I mean, the main thing I learned is that’s a pain in the ass. It’s a lot of work. It takes a lot of time. You’d better really love the source material and what you’re working on, and be ready to put in a lot of hours. And I think back, it’s funny, my conversations with the publisher effectively started with a cold e-mail from them of, hey, you have a decent following, you write articles, you should write a book, and my response was, and I don’t really think I have a great idea.

I had one thing that I was actually working on, which was kind of inspired by my former life as an equities analyst in the RA Business, Investment Advisory Business, which was this question of for people who are not really big into finance or investing, I was thinking of people like my parents or my grandma. People were asking me, like, what should I do with my money? It was basically a book about how to navigate an RA relationship, and like, what do you need to know without becoming a fanatic about this stuff, to be reasonably secure and how you go through that relationship.

And it’s something I started to write. The problem was fairly early on, I was like, I kind of know this source material, I don’t know it. I don’t know every part of this topic as well as I probably should, but more importantly, there are parts of this that I’m like not really in love with, and I don’t want to spend a ton of time writing about this. Thankfully, I recognise that at an earlier stage.

So, when I went to the publisher and basically said I have this one idea, but I don’t really know if I want to commit the time to do this, and I don’t really know if there’s an audience for it either. After that got shelved, there’s a couple of weeks later I was like, hey, there’s also this other thing I potentially want to do, which has since become Buffet and Munger unscripted. But yeah, I think maybe the takeaway from that is, again, if you’re going to, if you’re going to begin this process, be sure that you want to do it. It’s going to be a significant commitment of your time, and you know the financials of writing a book. I don’t know if there are standard terms across the industry, but it’s entirely how all this works. But my sense is that it’s not a way to make life-changing amounts of money necessarily, unless you’re Morgan Household and you can sell a few million books, which probably helps. But there’s only one Morgan Household as far as I know.

[00:23:22] Tilman Versch: Selling investing books, like Buffett & Munger Unscripted, might be hard because it’s a small niche. What is your strategy to do it? If you have something like a strategy.

[00:23:33] Alex Morris: Yeah. Well, on your last point, really quick. It’s funny when I periodically peruse the Amazon rankings for the book. It’s funny how it’s surrounded by a sea of like day trading and technical books. So, I guess if you’re going to write a book about investing, maybe that’s the area to go into because it seems to be a bit hotter than, potentially, the world of value investing.

My strategy is largely similar to how I think about the TSOH Investment Research grant. It’s slightly different, but it’s to kind of consistently repeat the message of what it is and to do that in a way that hopefully isn’t overbearing, but to try to get the word out to the people who would be the right audience for the book, right? It’s doing things like this podcast. It’s periodically talking to people out of that, at TSOH Investment Research and then hopefully letting word of mouth do its thing and having it fall into the hands of the right people. Beyond that, I still really haven’t found a way to kind of speak about it or push it, that feels as effective as that. So, it’s kind of just letting it do its thing and hopefully getting a bit of a snowball rolling down the hill.

[00:24:43] Tilman Versch: Great. Fingers crossed for this. I have finished all my questions for the end there’s always a chance for you to add something. Is there anything to add at the end of this interview?

[00:24:56] Alex Morris: No, I’m very thankful to be on the podcast. I mean, to the extent that people want to know more about me and what I do, they can always check out TSOH Investment Research. I’m on Twitter at @TSOH_investing. And I’m always open to talking to people about the book or my research service. if you have any questions about whether or not you’re a good fit for one or both of those, I’m more than happy to talk to you about what they are. And so, you can make an informed decision.

Closing thoughts & thank you

[00:25:25] Tilman Versch: Awesome. Then we will link both below and the book link as well. So, if you want to get the book, go to the show notes and get it. Thank you and bye to the audience. Bye-bye. I really hope you enjoyed this conversation. If you did, please leave a like and a comment, and for sure, subscribe to my channel.

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