Mohnish Pabrai: The One Person Warren Buffett Would Like To Have Lunch With

In this Q&A session with students at JNV Bengaluru, Mohnish Pabrai discusses the time he asked Warren Buffett who he would like to have lunch with. Here is his response:

I want to have lunch with Ben Franklin, so I said…no actually not Ben Franklin he said, I want to have lunch with Isaac Newton.

So I said why do you want to have lunch with Isaac Newton?

He said Franklin was the wisest, but Newton was the smartest. So Newton not only came up with the laws of physics and so on, he came up with calculus. Some of you may not like calculus so much but you can blame Newton for that.

Newton was a very smart man, and what happened to Newton is that there was a speculative bubble known as the South Sea Bubble where a lot of people put a lot of money… because these companies were going up in price a lot, and Newton understood that this is all stupid. But in the end he put his money in there too and then lost all his money.

So Buffett said I want to meet Newton because he’s the smartest person and he also made this stupid mistake when someone like him should be beyond all that. And part of that has to do with human psychology.

You can watch the entire discussion here: