This transcript is from the video on YouTube called Warren Buffett's First Television Interview, which can be seen here. Buffett shares a lot of timeless investment principles in this clip, which he still holds on to today.

The interviewer is labeled Q in the following transcript, while Buffett's answers are labeled A.

Enjoy the read!

A: First rule of investment is don’t lose. And the second rule is don’t forget the first rule, and that’s all the rules there are. If you buy things for far below what they are worth and you buy a group of them you basically don’t lose money.

Q: What’s the most important quality of an investment manager?

A: It’s a temperamental quality not an intellectual quality. You don’t need tons of IQ in this business. I mean you need to have enough IQ to get from here to downtown Omaha, but you do not have to be able to play 3-dimensional chess, or in the top league of bridge playing or something of the sort. You need a stable personality. You need a  temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd, because this is not a business where you take polls, it’s a business where you think. And Ben Graham would say you’re not right or wrong because a thousand people agree with you, and you’re not right or wrong because a thousand people disagree with you. You’re right because your facts and reasoning are right.

Q: What do you do that is different from 90% of the other professional investment managers? 

A: Certainly most of the professional investors focus on what the stock is likely to do in the next year. There are all kinds of arcane methods of approaching that. But they do not really think of themselves as owning a piece of a business. The real test of whether you’re investing from a value standpoint or not is whether you care if the stock market is open tomorrow. If I'm making a good investment in a security it shouldn’t bother me if they closed down the stock market for five years. All the ticker tells me is the price, and I can look at the price occasionally to see whether the price is outlandishly cheap or outlandishly high. But prices don’t tell me something about a business. Business figures tell me something about a business. I would rather value a business or a stock first, and not even know the price, so that I am not influenced by the price in establishing my valuation, and then look at the price later to see whether it’s way out of line with what my value is.

Q: How can you stay away from Wall Street?

A: Well if I were at Wall Street I'd be less rich. Wall Street may shorten your focus, and a short focus is not conducive to long profits. I don’t need to be in New York to know what a company is worth. The intellectual process is defining your area of competence in valuing businesses, and then within that area of competence finding whatever sells at the cheapest price in relations to value. And there are all sorts of things that I’m not competent at valuing.

Q: Here’s the technological revolution going on and it’s going right passed you. Is that alright with you?

A: I don’t have to make money in every game.  I mean, I don’t know what cocoa beans are gonna do in the future. There are all kinds of things I don’t know about. And that may be too bad, but why should I know all about them; I haven’t worked that hard on them. In securities business you literally have 1000’s of the major American corporations offered to you at a price every day, and at a price that changes daily. And you don’t have to make any decisions. Nothing is forced upon you. There are no called strikes in the business. The pitcher just stands there and throws balls at you. And if you’re playing real baseball and it’s between your knees and your shoulders you either swing or you get a strike call on you, and if you’re getting too many call on you, you’re out. In the securities business you sit there and they throw US Steel at $25 and General Motors at $60, and you don’t have to swing at any of them. They may be wonderful pitches to swing at, but if you don’t know enough you don’t have to swing. And you can sit there and see 1000’s of pitches, and finally you get one right there where you want it, something that you understand, and then you swing.

Q: And you might not swing in 6 months?

A: I might not swing in two years.

Q: Isn’t that boring?

A: It would bore most people. And certainly boredom is a problem for most money managers. Not only do they get somewhat antsy, and the clients start yelling swing you bum from the stands! And that is very tough for people to do.

Q: Warren, your approach seems so simple. Why doesn’t everybody do it?

A: I think it’s because it is so simple. The data is there, so they focus on if you buy stocks on Tuesdays and sell them on Fridays you’re better off if you buy them in election years. There are all these variables, because the data is there, and they learn how to manipulate data. And as a friend of mine says, “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” And once you have these skills, you are just dying to utilize them in some way, but they aren’t important. If I were being asked to participate in a business opportunity, would it make any difference to me whether I bought it on a Tuesday or a Saturday, or in an election year or something? It’s not what a businessman thinks about in buying a business. So why think about it when buying stocks, because stocks are just pieces of businesses!