Learning from Buffett and Munger: Masters in Business with Alex Morris

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Barry Ritholtz** (0:07)
This week on the podcast, another extra special guest, Alex Morris is the author of Buffett and Munger Unscripted, fascinating story of how he put this book together by reading and watching 31 years of annual shareholder meetings, thousands and thousands of questions, hundreds and hundreds of hours of video distilled into a fairly digestible compendium. I thought the book was fascinating and the conversation was fascinating. And I think you will too with no further ado, my interview of Alex Morris.
I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Alex Morris. He is the founder of TSOH Investment Research Service, launched in 2021 after 10 years as a buy-side equities analyst. He is the author of Buffett and Munger Unscripted, Three Decades of Investment and Business Insights from the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder Meetings.
Amazon named it one of the best books of 2025 It's pretty beefy. I've been reading it over the past, I don't know, eight months. It's about 500 pages, and I have really, really been enjoying it. In fact, I've been enjoying it so much that I reached out to Alex and said, let's talk about your research and the book. He has been a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder since 2011, attended multiple annual meetings, including the 2026 meeting, the first of the Greg Abel era. Alex Morris, welcome to Bloomberg.

**Alex Morris** (2:03)
Thank you for having me. As I was saying to you before, Bloomberg headquarters is a nice place to be. I'm going to drop my resume on the way out.

**Barry Ritholtz** (2:10)
So before we get to your resume, let's roll back to what led you to where you are today. Both a bachelor's and an MBA from University of Florida, was finance always the career plan?

**Alex Morris** (2:24)
It was not. When I went to school, I really didn't have any idea what I was going to do. My dad's a plumber, so at first he did building construction and took a couple of physics classes and some other things that kind of threw me for a loop. And then I got my first internship working down in Miami outside all day and fairly quickly realized, let me find something a little easier. So I went to finance.

**Barry Ritholtz** (2:43)
What were you doing working outside all day in Miami over the summers?

**Alex Morris** (2:46)
What were we doing? We were working on a high rise that was being built. And I spent most of the time running from the rain that came every single day at noon or one o'clock.

**Barry Ritholtz** (2:53)
I spent a summer in college working with a crew, building decks, swinging a sledge, breaking up concrete of an old pool to put in a new pool. And nothing makes you want to buckle down and study more than physical labor. It's like, oh my God, this is really hard work. I have tremendous respect for people who do that. It really forces you to see the world in a different way, doesn't it?

**Alex Morris** (3:17)
Yes, it's very different work than sitting and writing a book, as you and I both know.

**Barry Ritholtz** (3:21)
So after you get your bachelor's and MBA in finance, you take the CFA exam, it's a two-part exam, you spend a decade as a buy-side equities analyst. What did you learn from those 10 years on the buy side?

**Alex Morris** (3:37)
Yeah, a lot. I kept my head down and learned as much as I could every single day. The first job I started at, I was brought in and basically told, hey, you're running all the research for equities but also you're a secretary and you're doing the trading, you're doing everything else. So I got a lot of good experience there, but it was a role where my boss really was like, just go do what you think makes sense to do, which works really well with my kind of disposition.
As time went on, I learned a lot from making a lot of mistakes. That's a really good way to learn. Ton of reading, ton of writing online and sharing stuff with people, getting good feedback. So yeah, just time and effort.

**Barry Ritholtz** (4:10)
That's one of the big problems with everybody. Here's what Billionaire's morning routine is like. You seem to learn more, all of us learn more from our errors and mistakes than we do from our victories.
Do these guys have anything to say about that?

**Alex Morris** (4:26)
Oh yeah. They say learn all you can, particularly from other people's mistakes if you can, but that seems to be hard to avoid, at least for me and most of us.