Charlie Munger

Morning Session - 2025 Meeting

“No, I think you've touched it, but as you said, it's right up our alley. And I absolutely agree, Warren. believe we'll see some very large opportunities long term. And that's just been a great plus of that, that relationship.”

Morning Session - 2025 Meeting

“He didn't dream of the fact, I mean, men that would really be converted, or converted in energy, and the way that would change the world. When I was born in 1930, they had known about the law of physics that Einstein had come up with 25 years earlier. Nobody, to my knowledge, had thought, what can this do to change warfare in the future? And literally, it just wasn't thought. Einstein didn't think about it at that point. And then in 1939, Roosevelt got a letter. They got around August 1st. It's the most famous letter in history from Leo's the Lord. Leo's Lord couldn't get his letter in front of Roosevelt because whoever heard of Leo's the Lord, but he got Einstein to sign it. And Roosevelt probably understood about as much about physics as I do, so he didn't understand it, but he understood that Einstein signed it. So he calls in a general role, or may not have been general, then, and said, we should do something about this, and all we did was learn how to destroy the world. And we needed to do it, and Germany at Heisenberg, and he looked like he was, he was ahead of us. And he can't put that genie back in the waddle. And its role does change. And we've got all these ones, we've got wonderful things. We've got wonderful things, but we also have, we have a guy in North Korea, if we criticize his haircut, you know, who knows what he might decide to do with. What does North Korea need, need nuclear weapons for? I mean, can that be a good thing in the world? But they're not going to go away, so it's a world of change, and we are enjoying incredible change. We've treated everybody in this room living so much better than people were living a couple hundred years ago. But we haven't been able to, we haven't changed human beings very much so far. We've certainly changed weapons of mass destruction, but we haven't made much progress with the human race. And we'll see what happens with that, but in the meantime, we'll see changes in auto insurance, too, and cars. And the easier for us to deal with it than it was when we had to deal with the problems of turning out textiles in New England. And you deal with the world as it develops. And like I say, everybody here is living in the luckiest period. And you still try to figure out the answers to what's going to happen. Yeah. Yeah. In all insurance, as we go along, and we've done. pretty well actually adapting to the answers. There's a few big problems in insurance.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Well, no, of course everybody would rather have a business for a high return on capital. This is just like are you doing it.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Well, it's been a very, I took that because it was basically a losing hand. And I placed so many winning hands. winning hands, I thought I should force myself to play a losing hand.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“And I must say it's been very difficult.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“I think a single-payer health system would work a lot better, yes. I think it will eventually come. I think the existing system is A ridiculous room goal. It's a ridiculous system.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“To recognize that he has some flaws. Okay. So you bet against the jockey, not against the horse necessarily?”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“He was just, you're sort of building a chain letter. It's intrinsically a sort of dishonorable thing to do. Because your nature, then you're doing something that can't continue on its own motion, you're making it look like a will. So it's intrinsically sort of dishonorable. So I don't like chain letter operators. I don't like drunks. I don't like drunks. I don't like people that help them to buy. I don't like people who raise prices on drugs that people have to have by 500% overnight. Just as over. Just a lot of flags were flying.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Yes, I know him slightly. Very slightly.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Well, he was a genius. On the other hand, he was a screwball. He absolutely was nuts about screwing a lot of different women. I'm going after the wives of his own graduate students. That's disgusting. So he had this blind spot. In physics and teaching, he was one of the noblest people we've ever had. But in his personal life, he was a little nuts.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Yeah, real estate. The trouble of real estate is everybody else understands it. And the people who you're dealing with and competing with it, they've specialized on a little 12 blocks or a little. 12 blocks are a little industry. They know more about the industry than you do. And you've got a lot of bullshitters and liars and brokers. So it's not a bit easy. It's not a bit easy. The trouble is it's easy. All these people, a whole bunch of things that love real estate. You know, Asians, the city, Jews, India's of India, they all love real estate. They're smart people. And they know everybody and they know the tricks and getting this. You don't even see the good offerings in real estate. They show that the big investors are dealing. It's not an easy game to play from, from again and some point of view, real estate. Whereas stocks, you're equal with everybody, if you're smart. In real estate, you don't even see the opportunities when you're a young person starting out. They go to others. The stock market's always open. It's adventure capital. Sequoia sees the good stuff. You could open office, Joe Schmo, venture capitalists. Startups come to me. It's starved at it in. You got to figure out what your competitive position is and what you're choosing. Real estate has a lot of difficulties. And he said, those Patels from India that buy all the motels. They know more about motels than you do. They live in the goddamn motels with their family. They pay no income taxes. They don't pay much in workman's compensation. And every day, time they get, they fix up the thing and buy another motel.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Well, first there's some very good people with his family. One of whom I worked under was Fred Buffett. So we had people we knew well that were really noble people. So we had bases to compare people against. And we had bases to compare really against in terms of capacity and talent. So we had a lot of data in our heads that helped us. I think we had some genetic advantages. Not IQ points, just absolute quirks of nature that made us better. Like, what was it, Harry Bottle? What was his name?”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Well, I'd worked with them in an electronics business that had gotten terrible difficulties. He'd help us work out of that business trouble by downsizing. He knew how to do it. And Warren had a business that needed it. business that needed downsizing and Ward did not know how to do it. So I put those two together. Of course, it worked well.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“What I learned is easy money and easy leverage and so forth in investment banking. It creates a culture that's all envy, jealousy, craziness, overreaching, over leveraging. It's a very hard business. very hard business to manage. It was out of control. The envy was these people won versus CERC. If one jerk got four million dollars some year, the other guy was curiously only got three million. And they just seethed and caused trouble. It was a very difficult business to manage. I think a lot of easy money that comes into finance just ruins practically everybody. No thing so.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Well, it's a very odd thing. It's a very odd thing for us to do, and obviously we've got no special insights as to how sticky Apple's business is. Apple, whole supply chain is like one man with two million employees. That's very peculiar. And the man is not perfect. On the other hand, Apple has a very sticky bunch of customers.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“You've got a time shift of the power if it comes from either the sun or the wind. Of course there are going to be a lot of storage. This might sound like Max Planck, chauffeur kind of knowledge, but when it comes to find the sellout price, the intrinsic value of the company, you want to compare that to the market. Of what? Just BYD, let's say. How would you... Oh, that's hard. And again, we've learned things there. When we bought in, we could see that a venture capitalist were paid three times as much for that kind of a deal. So it was cheap as a venture, and we could see it was a good venture capital thing because the guy had worked minor miracles already. So we, that was a cheap stock, but it was one that took some special insight. And I wouldn't have had it, Lee What? It's, it's Lee Liu who found that. And once we were in it, I got to know on John Fu. I know Juan Chon Fu, even though he can't speak a word of English. And Juan Chon Fu is a genius. And he's shrewd. And he's honest and he's fanatic and he loves his company and so on and so on and so on. And what he can do is just incredible. He learns whole new technologies. So it's mostly qualitative? It's partly what they have. And it's partly what it's quality. Partly I'm betting on the horsemen. betting on the horseman out there. I mean, because he's on the, and he's got a bunch of Chinese, young Chinese. You can't believe what those employees do. He's got 230,000 Chinese working for him. Berkshire only has 460,000 employees. Why? It's a lot of employees. And they can do things you can't believe you look at those young Chinese girls. Would you? Would you buy the whole company if you, if they'd allow that? If they'd allow that? I don't think so because one of the reasons he succeeds is the Chinese are proud of a eighth son of a peasant that creates a little company all himself and is doing so far. And a lot of the other stuff they're doing joint ventures and automobiles. They're joint ventures with the West that was already had. So in a sense they love and are proud of their own man, the son of the peasants that did it all himself and it's still Chinese. So I wouldn't want to destroy it. I wouldn't want to destroy that Chinese image by buying BYD. It works better the way it's going. But you're right, I'm betting to some extent on a person. I was in their battery separator plant. There are about five companies on Earth's owning battery separators.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“That goo comes bilaterally and hangs together through its own chemical something cohesion. It's the most complicated damn process you ever saw. It's very hard to do. If you don't do it exactly, right, the battery fails. He just learned that. Boom, what he needs to know, he just figures out. There aren't many people who can do that.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“No, I think that Aunt John Fu knows what he can do and what would be really difficult. I think Elon Musk thinks he can do anything. I'd rather bet on the man. Some limit to his self-appraisal.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Way better than you think. Bezos is utterly brilliant and utterly remorselessly ambitious. I would never bet against Jeff Bezos.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“And a few nuts like you make us get something out of it. But in terms of the greater world, I bored the people. Some of my fellows sleep. It was the most failed talk I ever gave. And so I published it when they did Poor Charlie's Almanac. Because I still think the basic lessons are right. It's just it's hard to understand. hard to understand. Most people don't understand basic psychology very well.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Well, all I did was create a building. They already had the institute. But it looks fantastic, the whole idea and everything.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“No, I'm working on another student building in UCSC. UCSB.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“I really am deeply aware of this agricultural revolution, and everything takes it for granted. It wasn't, you know, it isn't like agricultural productivity ever increased by 300% in a few decades. I mean, it was just amazing what happened. And of course, the world needed it terribly. terribly. And so I'm quite impressed. And more of that's coming. So all this stuff about gene splicing to make plants grow better, and gene splicing to make domestic animals produce better. All that's coming. Some are starting to work already. And they'll push this crossbreeding of seeds in the ordinary way. A few more. It's a hugely important thing that's happening, and the world needs it terribly. And it changed the whole world for everybody. We couldn't have this civilization without the food. And there's not that much arable land. We have to get more product out of our existing land. And our existing land, the way we're farming it intentionally, is degrading. And the reason we produce all this stuff is we pour chemicals and so forth into the land. Fungicides, herbicides, insecticides too. But it's just amazing what's happened. And we've made the miracle rice, the miracle grains. It's just, and so I'm quite impressed by the fact they keep doing that stuff. And to have 1% of the people produce all the food for America on their farms, when we used to have 80% of the people, it's a huge, huge change in the human condition.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“And we'd all be doing stoop labor instead of running around on airplanes to hear people talk. If it weren't for all these revolutions that our predecessors created for us. So I have, I always, I'm, I just find that quite interesting. And we need it. I'm, Costco, you know, buys a lot of produce now. For vegetables growing in hot houses. Let me grab, let me grab me. And by and large, those are, those are Chinese. The Chinese who are good, they, you know, funny, six-acre hot house they really know where every damn blade is growing and it's not that different from rice growing. I mean, they're just very good at it. And that has a lot of potential that isn't, that is coming. So I like the agricultural stuff. Most people will just ignore it. We take it for granted. But I'm quite impressed by it.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“What? I don't know TransDime. What is TransDimes?”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Oh, I don't know anything about Transdine. But of course, it's generally a little easier to cheat the government that is to cheat anybody else. And so a lot of people try and cheat the government on defense contracts. And of course, there's suppliers also if the whole culture has some cheating. So I regard it as a little bit dangerous territory. But I don't know nothing about Transign.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Well, I'm sure it's way better. You'd stop stealing it. They'd already cut off your left hand. You wouldn't want to lose the other.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“it could have handled its succession plans differently for his businesses? Well, I never knew of Summner Redstone, but I followed him because he was a little ahead of me in law school. But Sumner Redstone. was a very peculiar man. Almost nobody's ever liked him. He's a very hard-driven, tough tomato. And basically, almost nobody's ever liked him, including his wives and his children. And he's just gone through life. There's an old saying, screw them all except six and save those for pallbearers. And that is the way Sumner-Richton went through life. And I think he was into the point. And I think he was into the pallbearers because he lived so long. So one thing I've used someone or rest of all my life as an example of what not to do to do. He started with some money. And it was very shrewd and hard driven. You know, he saved his life by hanging while the fire was up in his hands. He's a very determined high IQ maniac. But nobody likes him. And nobody ever did. And when he paid for sex in his old age, cheated him. You know, he's had one this of one with another. Yeah. It's not a life you want to admire. I've used Sumner Redstone all my life as an example of what I don't want to be. But for share talent driving shrewdness, you would hardly find anybody stronger than Sumner. And he didn't care if people like him.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Well, that's. They all, they all, they, they, our ancestors were pretty good at creating fragile moats, too. I think it's natural with what's up in one era. Think of what I've lived through in terms of the people. DuPont looked impregnable. General Motors was the strongest corporation in the world. Kodak was one of the, boom, boom, boom, but they're gone, Xerox. I mean, it is hard to keep winning, and the world keeps changing. Look, the daily journal, it's hard. Imagine going into computer programming, dealing with a lot of agencies all over the world, including South Australia, bubble company like this. It's not a bit easy. And if we hadn't done it, we'd just be one more dying newspaper.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“I do not. I've always been troubled by the cable industry. For one thing, it was thinly disguised bribery when they got the franchises. I don't like to even think about a lot of scummy places that are getting their franchises by robbery. So I've just sort of ignored it. I didn't want to think about it. Malone is obviously something of a genius and he's a fanatic and doesn't like to pay taxes. And he's been very successful. very successful and I've just ignored it. I just don't want to think about it, so I haven't. I can afford the luxury and I don't have to think about everything. But the starting bribery that got the franchises, I just didn't like it. So I just haven't thought about it, and I'm still not thinking about it. And the movie business I don't like either because it's been a bad business. Career and labor unions, crazy agents, crazy screaming lawyers. screaming lawyers, idiosyncratic stars taking cocaine. It's just not my field. I just don't want to be in it. And these other stuff, I find out of the other stuff that I like. We've got so many places in Berkshire that just do their work pretty well. I like that. You'll be amazed. The Seas candy, they make the good candy they work out. We've got lots of places like that. Our utility business. We probably have the best run utilities in the United States.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“We care more about satisfying the regulators. We care more about safety records. We care more about everything we should care about. We bought Northern Natural Gas, which Enron owned. Of course, to show more earnings and more cash, they just don't know maintenance. The goddamn pipeline can blow up and kill people. And the minute the ink dried on that, we could, everybody took six months off and we spent all these pigs through the a big special name. We went through the pipelines, and we just caught up on all the deferred maintenance. We were not just killing people. That's the right way to behave. Enron is the wrong way to behave. Imagine deferring maintenance on a pipeline so you can show more cash. It's disgusting. It's like killing people on purpose so you can make more money. I mean, it's deeply immoral. And so, but they fix it fast. Of course, I'm glad to be associated with people who behave like that. Greg Abel is a terrific operator and a terrific guy. And he's actually in Iowa, Nebraska or side by Nebraska. Nebraska has public power. So they did not, they borrowed tax exempt, build a new plant, General Electric, they're paying 3% on the debt or something. And they could run a big public power agency. Our Iowa utility, the Greg A. well runs right across the river. His rates are miles below Nebraska public power entirely finances, you know, and the other utility in Iowa, our rates are half theirs. Of course I'd like being associated with a company that can deliver the power quite a lot. And more than 50% of all the power in Iowa comes from the wind. So we're, and the farmers are glad to have a few wind machines out among the corn. And so we've just quietly created a revolution there. The regulators, the customers, everybody likes it. Of course I like people who do that. And Berkscher's full of that stuff.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“That is very interesting. I don't want to be in the... the bottom 80% of the auto dealers. Sure. I think these people are well up in the top 20. And so if we've got 80 dealerships making 3 million a year after taxes, it's $240 million.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Well, it could. You could change things so much that Geico would be a bad business. Everything can change. That's the nature of the game is that your great business is that you're a great business. are being eroded by something at all times. I think it's a long time in the future. I think it's a very complicated subject. After all, if you're in a self-driving car, it works better if all the things are being self-driven by the same people. We have that already. The monorails don't have operators. Nobody's driving the monorail.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“The goddamn computer won't. He's not programmed to care about machine guns.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“On what? On investing, on just basically thinking, not just investing, but just... Well, I think we've had some effect. But they're still teaching the efficient market theory in the business. And the old ideas died hard. And by the way, it's roughly right. It's just the very hard form, which everybody believed. They believed it was impossible. It was rare. They thought efficiency was absolutely inevitable.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“It was like physics. I call it physics envy. That's what they had in the finance field. They wanted to make their subject like physics. Now, what kind of a nut would want to make stock markets like physics? It ain't like physics. It's more like a mob at a football game.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“interested? Well, I think I am interested, and I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised. It's worked. It's just what I recommended. And he picks on the same stocks. Right.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Well, I think what a simple way that was to get rich.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Of course. Of course I was surprised on election day.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Well, no, because I expect to be disappointed with politics.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Well, I didn't change him that much. You know, Warren would have gotten there anyway. Maybe I accelerated it in six months. But Warren would have figured out that what he was doing wouldn't scale.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“So I was very fond of my dad. My grandmother, Munger, was more disciplined than my father. My father made a good income as a lawyer, which he carefully spent, except for his life insurance in his house, and so on. My grandfather always saved his money. And the Great Depression came, he could save the whole rest of the family.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“And so, actually, I remember more when I talk about the investors. And the Alfred Munger Foundation? I mean that for my father. That's not my grandfather. Right.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Well, I'm going to give away all that money with where I'm dead if I'd last a little longer. It's not that much money.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Whatever appeals to me at the time. I don't ask anybody.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“What?”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Doing what? So we're giving away money. money?”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“I do it. If I give anything off again, please. I regard this is a tax exempt, a bunch of munger money. I've got no staff. I just do it.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“I do it when I want to do it and I give where I want to give it.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Well, naturally, we hope the grandchildren do well. In any grandchild, I've got one who's running a little tiny partnership. But my grandchildren are all doing different things. I've got one at Google. He's a computer software engineer.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“I've never bought, I've read Fortune for 60. or 60. Fortune for 60.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“I bought them for my wives. But I always bought a Cadillac that was about 3,000 miles on a way cheaper. Pull around and coach airplanes. He has to go to the Berkser-Hathaway meetings and coach. They were all the coach, too. They'd stand up and clap.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Yeah, well. That's the way he felt.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Well, I don't have his idea that he was good at puzzles, because this was a big puzzle to him. So he actually loved that great puzzle on the puzzle maker in the sky.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Well, I have a lot of children. I educated them all. And I take the results as they fall. Well, it's going to do with a family. I have a lot of very admirable children, some of whom are out there today. And that's a huge blessing. One of things I like about them is that they're decent, generous people. One of my daughters who was there. He had a friend who was married to a total church. go to the church, straightened circumstances, bitter divorce. My daughter just bought her a house. I think she owns the house, but his other family lives in it. What's your opinion? That's a nice, generous thing to do if you're rich. Wow. I'm glad my children like that and not like some arrest them. What's your opinion of the giving flag? I told Gates that I wouldn't do it. Because I've already found. Because I've already flouted it. When Nancy died, community property stay, I, she left it up to me to decide where it went. But I knew she would want to go to the children. Every wife, always afraid the old man will have his money taken away by some nurse or something. He's dotage. I knew Nancy would want to go right to the children. So I shunted more than half the monger portion, quite a bit more than a half to the children. I said, I've already totally violated. I've already totally violated the spirit of his plague. And I said, Bill, I'm not going to publicly be a spokesman for something. I've already totally flouted. And I flouted it because I knew my wife who had helped me all these years would have wanted it that way. I'm not a good example for his pledge. So I won't do it. I don't pretend to be doing something I really didn't do.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“A long life has many disappointments and agonies in it. I watched the sister die of horrible death of Parkinson's disease, dying young, 64. I lost my first son to leukemia, miserable, slow death. And at the end, he kind of knew it was coming. I've been lying to him all along. It was just so awkward. And it was just pure agony. You have some of those agonies that are going to happen. There's not so much agony when somebody's really old dies. You know, they deteriorate so much, you almost don't miss them. Which I'm doing a good job of. But, no, I think you just take the hardships as they come. You take the blessings as they come. You have fun out of figuring out the puzzles as best you can. It's really, we're very blessed to have the... We're in the United States. We're not in India. We're not in India. under some crazy dictator like Russia, live where everybody's like bribe India. We got a lot to be thankful for here. And we have a lot of options. We can change jobs. We can move around. We can do this to that. We get a huge admixture here with all the cultures of the world without having to travel. So we're not restricted to one narrow group of Bulgarian farmers making olive oil or something. We got this great mixture of people. great mixture of people who are quite interesting and quite different, and they're all cross-marrying, which makes it even more interesting. It's amazing to me there was a lot of anti-Jewish prejudice when I was young. And now every family I know, they got a thorough cross-married. I don't have a friend, hardly, but the big family doesn't have a Jewish in-law. It's all, and the old ideas have sort of died. How did you meet your wife? wife and how did she accept you? My wife, 52 years and died seven years ago. That was mutual friends who introduced us. We were both divorced, both the same age, both had two children. And I only say that I owe a gratitude to the people that introduced us.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Yeah. the stress that you had to go through because it looks like it was going to go under right at one point for a while, right? Well, take us the story about the buffoons. We were never the weakest in the town. So we were betting that we'd be the survivor. And we were. So it was unpleasant because we showed no return for a long time. But when the other guy finally turned up his toes, we suddenly started making a lot of money. So it just was delayed gratification. seven years of like no profits. Wow. And it disappears and the sky rings gold. On the note of... The earnings went from nothing to 70 million years pre-tax. Boom, boom.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“I don't know anything about radio assets, yeah, but it's a very mature market. And Godham radio is basically an auto market. I'm choosing the radio.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“saying if it all goes to hell, we'll give you your money back. That was the change you wanted. Now, you can imagine. how likely we were to see the next venture capital investment. And nobody has to tell Leloo to do that stuff. Some of these people, it's in the gene power. It's just such a smart thing to do. It looks generous. And it is generous. But it's also a huge self-enders down. Is there a little reciprocity opportunity there? Well, it's the right way to behave anyway. And the second way, it helps you. And Berkshire has helped you. And Berkshire has helped by its past behavior to see things that other people don't see. But how many people, would Sumner Redstone have ever done that? Would General Electric have ever done that? That whole culture of behaving otherwise. Ben Franklin talked about morality being the best policy. But then you see the Sumner Redstones and the icons and the Trump's doing really well by acting kind of the opposite. Yes. How do you reconcile that and still? and still come out with the, what no doubt is the correct answer, that it's wiser to be moral? Well, of course, Sautner Redstone, I graduated from Harvard Law School a lot a year or so apart. And he ended up with more money than I did. So you can say he's the success. But that's not the way I look at it. And so I don't think it's just a financial game. And I think it's better to do it the other way. other way and you sometimes you think you're getting by with this General Motors is a letter they file out when they take something over a letter says dear Joe Schmo major supplier to this business they've just bought we're going to accomplish wonderful things together we have to but we have to harmonize the systems of General Electric with the and you're going to evaded 90 days instead of 30 days, which is just horrible imposition on the supplier. But they got a whole department that's just organized and brutalize the suppliers and the furnishing all the money. They did that with one supplier that I know. And of course, the sales manager said, but I don't tell them to go fuck himself. And the guy said, no, I won't do that. He says, just bring me all the stuff where General Electric is my customer, where they've got no alternative. And he just raised the prices by about four times. I think it's a mistake to be quite that brutal. Now they do. They compete in GE based on who can get the suppliers to burnage more and more of the capital.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“that was Conwood. It's an addictive product. People are totally hooked. They're a number two person in the market. They all believe in their product. Every damn one of mature tobacco. And the figures were just unbelievable. That was virtually no financialist. You're going to know nothing but money. And the cancer caused by that mouth tobacco is maybe 5% of the cancer. percent of the cancer you get from cigarettes. But it's not still. You definitely are going to kill people with that product. They have no reason to die. It's the best deal we ever saw. We couldn't lose money to it. We passed. They didn't pay it out. Jay Pritzker, who was then head of the trustees or something at the University of Medical School. Fiskers were big in Chicago. He just snapped it up so fast. The visitors made two or three billion dollars out of that. Do we miss the two or three billion we would easily have had? Not an Iota. We had a moment's regret? Not an Iota. We are way better off not making a killing out of a product. We knew going in was a killing product. Why should we do that? On the other hand, it was just a marketable security. We wouldn't feel that the morality owe it was ours. But it's going to be our subsidiary.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Well, she was very very very very very. and bossy. She was illiterate in English, although she was fluent in Yiddish. And she could make arithmetic complications in her head that you can't make. She knew exactly how many yards there were in 26 and a half by 104 and a quarter in her head. And she was there, but she was a very bossy, domineering, hardworking woman. And it was a very bossy, was she worked herself a hundred hours a week. She had sons-in-law who were the nicest people, and they weren't maybe 50 hours a week after they were filthy rich. She called them those bums. It said, you know, a lot of characters. The other one is, is we bought a business from, it was half owned by a daughter of Moses, Salmon. She was a very rich woman, and she don't have this business, which was her husband's business. And she was driving cattle. Her husband died, but she had a company car and had a company car. And she wanted the catalog. So she told her lawyer to ask Mr. Bobbitt, give me the catalog. And she told the lawyer what to say. Tell warrant, she said, that a lot of people give money to poor people. money to poor people. But that's easy. They get the reward and fulfillment of knowing the poor and observing the tenets of religion. It's the real charity that's unusual, is giving money to the rich. And so she made that pitch to war and the lawyer was very embarrassed to do it. Tell her also to her a wholesale bluebook, which she finally did. But she said, but she first made the pitch that we should give her. the car because it was so much more generous to give to the rich. It was so more unusual. That woman had an adopted child who was a genius. And so she would rent Carnegie home and let the child conduct an orchestra. Rich can get quite except for you.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“The market. cap of the Washington Post was 75 million we bought in.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“and the clams. Now they've lagged by a point a year or whatever you know, it is. They handle that the way, by denial. They just don't face it. I was there the other day, and this very nice portfolio manager was very smart, a polished, generous, nice man. It's just a very nice, polished, intelligent woman. He said, well, you know, we outperform in my fund, which has $100 million by two percentage points a year. I'm going to raise my eyebrows. I was looking at it for a while. He said, well, I mean that we outperforming our competitors. outperform our competitors by 2% plus. And I said, yes, and in that overperformance, a lot of it was a long time ago, and he had way less money. And that was another horrified pause, and finally the woman says, he's on to us. We're not on to discuss something else. We're not on to discuss something else. Anyway. It's awkward. You know, you want to keep getting paid. You like your money to work. You're flying around interviewing management and so forth. And what all said and done. And they did it for a long time before. It just got harder. And then I see people leave. They say, I can't manage $30 billion. I'll manage $3 billion. And now I'll outperform. And they've had that happen two or three times. And the new guys don't outperform either. either because the new client still wants 10 stocks or something. Oh, and there's another experiment. They've done about five, not five, three times at Capital Guardian. Follow what the great investors are doing. That's one way. They said, we get the best idea from our best people and we'll make a portfolio just of our best ideas from our best people. Nothing can be more plausible. I've done it three times and failed every time. Now, how would you predict that? Well, I can predict it. because I know psychology. When you pound out an idea as a good idea, you're pounding it in. So by asking people for their best ideas, they were getting the stuff that people had most pounded in, so they believed. So of course it didn't work. And they stopped doing it because it didn't work. They didn't know why it didn't work, because they haven't read the psychology books, but they knew it didn't work, so they stopped. And it's so plausible. I don't think that's true at Berkshire. I think that's true at Berkshire. at Berkshire, if you asked me and Warren for our best ideas, that would have worked. But it didn't work in a place like that, the more conventional manager.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“By the way, I don't think it would have worked that perfectly at Berkshire. I think it would work better than did at Capitol Guardian. Isn't that interesting that that would not work? Does it still occur you talk to Warren once a week now? No, no. It'd be like talking to yourself. We don't have any new ideas. 87 and 93 ago. I mean, what the hell? Anyway, the, but the young man makes some contributions. They caused us to think about things we wouldn't have thought about before. We would not have bought the airlines or the, or the Apple, if the young man hadn't come up with the idea. But once they did, Warren ran with it. And Warren's pretty great. It was hard to buy that much airline stock. Doesn't sound like much airline stock. You know. by Berkshire standards, but we had to be a hell of a percentage of the market in those years for a pretty long time. It's very hard to manage a lot of money. It must be an awkward conversation with Bill Gates after he bought the apples. What? I said it must be an awkward conversation with Bill Gates after that Apple has gone by. I don't, Bill Gates does not have any illusions on that subject. Bill Gates bought that $150 million with Apple, I think they sold it. Right. That was a good buy. Yeah, but it was not a good sale. Oh, I got another story where you would like. I guess another story. I have a firm investment. That thing around all of you. Al Gore. Al Gore has come into you fellow's business. And Al Gore is in your fellow's business. And Al Gore is in your business. He has made three or four hundred million dollars in your business. And he's not very smart. He drank a lot. He smoked a lot of pot as he coaxed through Harvard with a gentleman's seat. But he had one obsessive idea that global warming was a terrible thing, and he understood that he'd protect the world for. So his idea when he went into investment counseling is he was not going to put any CO2 in the air. So he found some partner. partner to go into investment counseling with. And he says, we're not going to have any CO2. And, but this partner is a value investor and a good one. So what they did is, is Gore hired staff to find people who didn't use, put CO2 in the air. And of course, that put him into services. Microsoft. And all these service companies were just ideally located. And this value investor picked the best service companies. So all of a sudden the clients are making,”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Well, it's all emitable. If your marriage reasonably works, and if your family life reasonably works, that doesn't mean perfectly, because nobody's family lives perfectly, particularly with the children. And if your partnerships work well, we have had marvelous partners. Warren's been a marvelous partner for me. I've been a good partner for him. All of our other. subsidiary partnerships, which don't overlap totally a bit marvelous. I did not have a big failed partnership with any kind. But that's because I am a good partner, and Warren is a good partner. And so it's like, you want a good spouse, deserve one. If you want to be a good partner, be a good partner. It's a very simple system, and it's worked very well. Of course, it wouldn't work without it. And also get rid of the bureaucracy. You deal with good people you trust. people you trust expense trouble lawyers checking we're always closing something with no audit we basically are very old-fashioned we bought the”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Well, I don't think Kendra Morgan is anything like Enron in the sense of it. Enron is total fraud and bullshit and craziness and regulation. They went for CERC and Kendra Morgan made puff a little and pretend that cash flow is really cash and there isn't. really an obligation to replace a debris. He may, but it's not Enron. Enron was just pure, disgusting, awful. And I think most of those limited partnerships have a slight touch of the old mining companies on the San Francisco Exchange. They've all paid monthly dividends as they got into the ore. And of course, once they'd done that, they had two divisions. They had a shuck the suckers division. on the mining exchange in San Francisco. And a bunch of miners that went in the mine. It was like a two-handled pump. They'd flood the mine. Stock would go down and they'd buy it. They'd pump the water out of the mine, pay a big monthly dividend. A shocking suckers over here by kind of fraudulent, illegal, by modern standards. And the mine, they were, it was disgusting. But to some extent, the master limited partnerships, they pretend that the cash is really free. When a lot it really isn't, it's sort of, it's, it's, they're taking out money, they really, the business is going to need to replace what it's doing. In that sense, it's sort of a mildly, a moral way of doing things and they're doing it, because they can get by with them.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Yeah, well, it was kind of dishonorable. You know, I, yeah. Well, I, the old con dominole. I had the old condomerate business with he issued the stock and then the stock sell 30 times our needs to keep buying a bunch of ordinary business. That was like a chain letter, yeah. It was dishonorable. There's a lot that goes on in finance. It's dishonorable.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“Well, it's hard for all that. Benjamin Franklin has already taught me what I want to know because he left such a record, and his biographers have been so good, and he was so famous in his own lifetime, and for so long. So I already have had my conversations with the Franklin. He actually gave us the autobiography. And then the various biographies I've read, and the rest of the story. It was interesting, in the end, he failed in his relationship with his only surviving son, who was loyal to the crown. That rupture never healed. And it was just too much. Ben thought his son had a duty, not to publicly have a big fight with his father who had raised him and gotten his fancy position with the crown for him and everything else. And the son felt that, you know, protected position. in the protected position he had. You could understand that I'd feel that way. Most people wouldn't do that. They would reconcile somehow or pretend to reconcile. But that really erupts. He didn't even talk to that son at the end. Which is interesting. Franklin was capable of having more resentment than I have. I have conquered resentment better than Franklin did. I'm not that mad about the people that disapproval. That's why I kissed off that Trump stuff by making up. off stuff by making a compliment today. I don't want to... I don't think much of Trump, as you can imagine. Imagine me voting for Hillary Clinton. It was very hard to push the pen. But I did.”

RARE Charlie Munger 2017 Daily Journal AFTER Interview

“No, I'm fine. I'm getting riddle. I'm going to leave with a minute. Is Oscar out there?”

Afternoon Session - 2024 Meeting

“I'm going to have to use that nothing, sorry, nothing to add.”

Afternoon Session - 2024 Meeting

“But it was just so popular that if we didn't have it, people left the store and went to Best Buyer someplace. And if you know, the Blumkins, they can't stand or anybody leaving the store. So, yeah, they behave according to you. But then you learned, you know, that had the interest in the brand. And then you have a million different inputs. But I think the psychologist called this apperceptive mass, but there is something that comes along that takes a whole bunch of observations that you've made and knowledge you have, and then crystallizes your thinking into action, big action in the case of Apple. And there actually is something which, which you have. I don't mean to be mysterious, but I really can't talk about. But it was perfectly legal, I'm sure you're that. But it just happened to be something that entered the picture that took all the other observations. And I guess my mind reached what they call that perceptive mass, which I really don't know anything about. But I've, I know the phenomenon when I, when I experience it. You know, that is, we saw something that I felt was, well, enormously underpriced. Maybe I've used this example before. But if you talk to most people, if they have an iPhone and they have a second car, the second car costs them 30 or $35,000. And they were told that they never could have the iPhone again or they could never have the second car again. They would give up the second car, but the second car cost them 20 times. So now people don't think about their purchases that way, but, but I think about their behavior. And so we just decide without knowing, I don't know, have the fainted, there may be some little guy inside the iPhone or something. I have no idea how it works, but I also know what it means. I know what it means to people, and I know how they use it. And I think I know enough about consumer behavior to know that's one of the great products, maybe the greatest product of all time, and the value it offers is incredible. And I think it has, in Tim Cook, I think it has somebody that, in his own way, is the equivalent of a partner with Steve Jobs that could do one thing extraordinarily well and more than one application. But one thing, and Tim was the perfect partner to serve sequentially with him. So it's, you sort of know it when you see it. I actually saw it with Geico when I went there in 1950. I didn't know exactly what I was seeing.”

Morning Session - 2024 Meeting

“Charlie, I'm so used to. I had actually checked myself a couple times already, but I'll slip again. That's a great honor word.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Well, I hope it'll be interesting. It's certainly a peculiar example of one life.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Yeah, sure. To take things from different studies and different models in life.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Of course. I could see the power of it.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Well, it came naturally to me, and that was what I would call naturally arrogant. And it wasn't that good of mind. You know, I was in the top 1%, but not. No prodigy. So I never would have succeeded in a field that required a mind to be that of a prodigy. But it was a much better mind than ordinary people had. And I recognized that quite early, and I just played the hand I was dealt in order to get as much advantage as I could.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Very young. When I was taking courses in grade school, I was often revising the textbook and the course in my head to make it more correct because I realized the professor was doing it wrong.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“They had some crazy idea. For instance, my Latin teacher was a maladjusted woman who was a devote follower,”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Sigmund Freud. And I recognized that Sigmund Fred was a horse assassin. I still first read him when I was in high school. And, of course, it was an odd little boy whose Latin teacher is teaching him Freud. But that was, she was peculiar, and so was I. And of course, When I read, I bought the complete writings of Segment Freud from the American Library. It was one big book. And I went through it very laboriously. And I realized he was a goddamn lunatic. And so I decided I wasn't going to learn that from my Latin teacher. And that's the way it is. That's what I went through all my life, trying to turn every teacher into my Latin teacher. Just a poor fellow. poor fellow. I hadn't quite learned to understand it right yet. Now, I didn't always succeed. I had some very unusual teachers. The best teacher I had in my life was Lon Fuller, but he was the best contracts teacher in any law school. And contracts is the best subject in every law school, at least I think it is, because it integrates so beautifully with the new doctrine of an economics that came along with Adam Smith and all those people. And of course, I could see the integration, and so could this landfowler was a damn contract teacher. I had been the leading contact teacher in some other law school, I was what got him to Harvard by transfer, which was rare in those days. And also I could see in the Harvard Law School something very interesting. When I went to the Harvard Law School in the immediate aftermath of a long, long range, in which 15 professors handled 1,500 graduate students. This is unheard of. Nobody had ever done anything like that. It just morphed into that system, and it did it early. And of course, when you have a system like that, it really helps to have a few big ideas. is that are strewn through the system that are useful, and as some borrassar that sees it. And that's what Lund Walter did. He really saw the old dam. He integrated the law and economics is what he did to some extent. And the reason he did is he wanted to know why do we have these contracts. So obviously make modern civilization work. And he never, he didn't explain exactly why. But I can sort of explain why to myself after hearing Lon Fuller, well, that's an ideal teacher. You had this idea of mental models before you got to him, though. Yes, and I just naturally came to it. But it was very much a Lonfoller-esque thing.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“I was just awestruck by Lon Fuller. I have never been awestruck by any other teacher in my whole life. including some gifted mathematicians and physicists who did some remarkable things. But Fuller really, really had him, he really changed my life. He almost made me a law professor. I considered being a law professor. And I knew I'd be pretty good at it. Did you keep in touch with him for a long time after law school? I never kept in touch with him. He was so remote a figure. to me. And he was like Moses or something going down to the mountain top. And I was pleased he was there for ordinary. And he'd put it all in a book I didn't need Hunt Fuller. That's the way I handled almost all my teachers. I didn't need him. And... Let's talk about Benjamin Franklin. Yeah. He's one of the framers of our nation. He very famously gave out very... And he was a prodigy. And he was a prodigy. And he was a prodigy. in lots of different disciplines. Well, and he self-trained himself with like two years of grade school education. This is a very remarkable thing. And when he found late in life, he needed something like algebra. He went back and pulled down the textbook and taught himself algebra. How old were you? He was a very much a self-educated man. And that was a very much an interesting story for that reason. How could a man who taught himself everything? everything, you know, like Latin. And it was just, how could a man like that going to so many different fields and be the top guy in the whole country? And weren't we lucky to have him? Yes. Yeah. No, all those five or six people whom we now consider the founding fathers have worn pretty well. But you found Ben Franklin when? How young were you when when when you first came across what Ben Franklin had done? what Ben Franklin had done. Well, I think high school. And that's when you started modeling yourself after some of things? I don't know when I started modeling myself after Franklin Franklin, but I certainly tried to model myself a little. I like the mixture of financial life and regular life. And I couldn't copy. I didn't have any musical ability. And so Franklin was, he played four different. musical instruments, one of which he invented. Well, this is a lot of musical ability. God simply left out of me. And so I don't, I can't do it. So I never made any effort to annotated Franklin's musical ability. But any other ability he had, of course, I tried to imitate.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Because I could get an A& without doing any work. That's why I took mathematics.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“And that obviously I had to start with physics. So I took physics.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Not only that, I lived in the aftermath of a previous century of history. In fact, you could argue that about 90% of the progress of man has happened, in civilization, has occurred in the last two centuries. And I lived in the immediate aftermath of one. And it was a very important cemetery. That cemetery that ended when I was born, because in that, in that century, we figured out so very, very much that was quite important as a start. You stopped to think about the technical. revolution. It happened in that century. That's when they, you know, opened all these coal mines and created all these steam engines and, and so on. And so it was just, and of course, that was what brought the economic system up. So, man, had enough leisure, had enough time to think”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“who hired as much many brilliant people as Old Eastman did, could take the company into bankruptcy. I figured that lesser people could easily take big companies in the bankruptcy, eventually, in spite of their best efforts. It wasn't like Kodak didn't try. They hired the most brilliant graduate students. They gave them all kinds of time to think. They learned everything, any important man on earth, learned as quickly as they could. They could and so on and so on. And even so, they wiped out the common shareholders. And that taught you what, as an investor, as a businessman? Sure, and I was going to be a common shareholder someday in some company, and it would help me to know that it was very easy to wipe out the common shareholders, even a great company run by a genius. I mean, that's an argument for being diversified, but... No, not, no, I, that, it's a, yes, it is an argument. for being diversified. But that's not really what the lesson you took away. There's some argument for being diversified. But there's also some argument for being non-diversified. And the argument for being non-diversified, better for a few people than the argument for being diversified. So the lesson I would take out of that is to be diversified. That's not the lesson you took out. What's the lesson you took out? Well, it was going to be very difficult to be excellent enough at anything to make any money. That's the lesson I took out of it. And then, and I could look around me. And I was lucky there too, because one of my father's two best friends, was a guy named Eddie Davis Senior. And Eddie Davis Sr., was the leading urologist probably in the United States at the time. And just working as a private physician who taught medical students, students, urology, without charging for teaching time. Because that's what doctors did in their days. They were volunteers at the medical school. And they also furnished free medicine to their colleagues whom they knew. So it was like a cartel against the rest of those and courtesy to the noble profession. And if you read the Hippocratic Oath Carefully, which I'm the kind of a fellow who did, It doesn't sound like nobility. What he was telling the doctors to do was to keep their secrets away from the people who might compete with them practicing medicine. Do not reveal the secrets of our craft, Outsiders. That's the great rule of hypocritees. Not do no harm?”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Well, he gets credit for that one. But what he really emphasized don't tell anybody else how to do this. the people who have the modern system of this are the magicians. Okay. They have kind of a code of not telling fully how they're doing the tricks. Right. And for a long time I could not understand how they turned those women back and forth into apes or panthers and so forth in Las Vegas. Right. And I could smell a panther. And I knew panther smell. And I thought that is a hell of magic trick. They're fooling my sense of smell. And I couldn't figure out how they were doing it. I could figure out how they were filling my sense of smell. They were bringing in panther smell. But they weren't, but they also brought in, they turned the women into panthers and back into women. And I couldn't understand how they were doing that. And when I was finally explained to me by some guy who broke their code, like the code of Apocrates, don't tell the outsiders our tricks. What they had is they had little slats of mirror that slid out of little slats of bamboo. And by using those little slats of mirror, the very French of a button would slat, move out. It would show you a different image. And it was just a very, it was a clever goddamn contrivance to fool the eye and mind of man. But you saw a different, and smell a woman turning into a panther. I never saw that drink. It was a tiger more often than a panther. Yeah. But that's the way they did.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Yeah, but I was an unusual child. And I was curious. And I saw what was happening. And it was just clobbering my family everywhere it looked. And it wasn't a little clobber. little clobber. It was a major clobber. What happened? Clobber, clobber. Well, my mother had two sisters, and my father had two sisters. And all four of those sons-in-law, who were my uncles, got utterly clobbered by the Great Depression. One was an architect and to be able to stop building practically everything. And he finally got a job doing drafting work for the kind of of Los Angeles, and they paid him 10808 for a month for doing that drafting work, which was above what they would have paid an architect, but not much above. And that's what he was earning. And then they passed the FHA rules, and that was competitive civil service examination. And he was a brilliant man, and so he took the examination and came in first.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“And they made him chief architect for the FHA in Los Angeles, which is a huge program during the 30s to revive at least some building. And he set the standards for that. He wouldn't let the subdivider get by with much. You know, there was a rule as how many later a lot of outlets there had to be in every bedroom. And he'd make them put in the right number instead of the lesser number. And that was an important job builders under depression incentives being what they would naturally be. and a good architect being what he would naturally be. Right. And so the FHA, which was then fostering a great percentage of the total building that was going on in terms of houses. Just the guy, if you're going to build a house, you've got to have so many hours. Let's fill out, lots for a bedroom. Well, it was useful work my uncle was doing. Yeah. And he was enough of an architect that he could force in a little bit of grace too as well as the right number of electrical outlets. But... One of the things he was very interested in was the plaster screen. And most people don't even know what the plaster creed is even though they live in a building. But if you've got plaster that goes down into the ground, you get capillary attraction that sucks a lot of water up into the plaster. It's not desirable. It doesn't always do that, but it sometimes does it. But it's a tiny little incremental cost to stick as a little... a little thing on the bottom of the flaster as it comes to the end near the ground. And you put in that flaster screen, it can't suck that water out of the ground into your flaster. He made out, my uncle made everybody put in the plaster screen. And saved all these houses as a result. Yes, yes, yes. And of course, it was a good example for somebody like me to watch that being done. To put in the hard work early on and the extra step. No, it would. the extra thing that could be added at a tiny incremental cost and would last for a hundred years. Wow. You saw your family getting clobbered on all sides on the Depression. Yes. One was an architect. But how did that? One was a builder who was broke. He had loans he wasn't even paying off from the 20s, boom. Well, bubble when he was a builder. And he became, he made himself an appraiser. And finally he was almost as best appraiser. best appraiser. And he made a good living too. But he had terrible years in the early 30s. And he had a terrible medical problem with one of his children died very slowly of”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“meningitis. And it cost a lot of money. He just couldn't pay it. He had not paid off that fully until the war came. So what did that? He finally paid it off and got quite full. got it quite prosperous in the Boz War Boobo. But he had a long period of his being utterly without money. And all these impressions aren't you? He moved into an extra house that my grandmother, grandfather Russell owned. And then he didn't have to pay ransom. What did all these impressions mean for you? I mean, these are formative years for you as you're watching this. Well, it's quite serious. It's a little boy of his cousin who's the same age, is dying next door and takes forever and causes a wards. And there's no money to pay the doctors, the hospitals, anything. That's a serious growing up experience. And I turned the other side of me, who lived Madeline Duffy, my great female flame. And Madeline and I were just inseparable living side by side. And Madeline Duffy and I were playing and I were playing with this little dog that was a stranger to us. We were very young. But I can remember her and the dog, so it must have been nearly four years old. Or four years old, more or less. And that dog was inches away from my cheek, but it bit her cheek instead of mine. And they didn't quite get the fast-door treatment in time. They got to it, but it was too late. And she died after terrible. after terrible trauma. And she was a very outstanding little girl who might have grown up to be a Becky Quake if the world had been different. And she never grew up. So I'm sitting there two dead children. Feel don't realize how high the death weight was among children until about the middle of the century that preceded the one in which I was born. which I was born. And in those days, if you wanted six, three children, you had six, and you shoveled three out of the graveyard before they even grew up. That was the system. That was mankind's system. That's an awful system. It was an awful system. The agony of doing that was just, you see the agony with somebody like Lincoln who loved his children so much and did not have a really functioning wife. and a man who has no functioning wife to have his children die one by one. So he lost three out of his four sons. They never grew up. And the one who grew up never had any children. As a little boy, I carried more money and all the other little boys. When I used to shoot agates in the schoolyard to make money playing competitive”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“If you go into the intelligent people, if you go into the... decisions that the teaching profession makes with its IRA money and its pension money where it gets any choice. A lot of it is indexed and a lot of it is invested in shrewd. Shrewd investments held for a long time. So a lot of what I do is being done now, and that wasn't true when I was young. I couldn't just look at somebody else and see some. I saw some people who've gotten rich by by holding a few good things. So you think it's harder to make money now?”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“And of course it's harder. It's so much harder you can't believe it. The people that have found it harder are the people that made Warren so rich. Ben Graham and his colleague Dodd in a damned adjunct course at Columbia. And by the way, Graham was invited into three different... in the three different economic departments at Columbia on the full ten-year track and turned him down. He was that good at literature and math and so forth, both, which is rare. And Ben Graham was interesting. Ben Graham was polymathic, like the Davis is a different way. And the same thing, also somewhat musical. And so I saw something like a dancer. He liked a dancer, well, he left out of me. And anyway, what Brandon Graham did that was so interesting is that he taught that you should find a few good things and stay with him for a very long time. But a long time to him was a few years. It wasn't a few decades. And he did that for like 40 or 50 years and a little investment partnership with incentives and so on. And his... investors who were, by and large, not very rich, did very well with him. After he got his share, they got a good cut that was higher than what other people got after fees. And so he did a valuable product. And he taught you got into things, he could be a lousy business, but they were cheap enough, they're still all right if they had enough assets for share. So you're getting at least twice as money assets as you were paying for. And he just floated around for the best. available stuff among companies good and bad. That was his system. And he had worked for 50 years. His clients had good returns. Well, after he became so famous, partly with the help of Warren Buffett and Warren Buffett's success, everybody tried to do the same thing. And of course, everybody crowded in, trying to be a little bit grand.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Whoever, but I did not really think that we'd ever have one that would, in the so many hundreds of billions in Berkshire. I did not anticipate when Warren and I were starting with our little piddly start than we'd ever get to a hundred billion, much less several hundred $100 billion. It was an amazing occurrence.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Well, we got a little less crazy than most people, and a little less stupid than most people. And that really helped us. Then in addition, we were given this much longer time to run than most people because something kept us alive in our 90s. And it gave us a long track. It was a long track from our little fiddling start, all the way to the 90s. Those are the two things that really happened. And, of course, we wise up over time. We got into better and better companies. We understood more and more of the bad things that could happen, you know, and how easy they could creep in. And we avoid them even more assiduously when we were old than we did and we were young. And it all worked. I think that.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“The main trick that Berkshire shows is the power of what I call the Wooden effect. And Wooden was the most famous basketball coach of the whole era. You figure out what the hell he really did, which of course, somebody like Warren and me, we just automatically do it. He concentrated at about 90% of the playing time in seven players. And everybody else was just a sparring partner for the people. And that turned out a great system for winning a basketball because you identified your best player and concentrated so much of the playing time and your best player. And more playing creates better, better, better. You learn by playing. In a way, you can never learn just by shooting practice baskets. And they concentrated all this playing time in his best players. Simple idea. That's what, that's what Berger did. Of course it worked better. And everybody's not. learned it. You've talked about... Everybody would know it automatically if it were just a little more obvious. If all of us had to make a living, backing people in chess tournaments, but there's very little revenue to pay anybody, anything, we'd all recognize we have to get into the top seven players or something like that or have no chance of winning, you know, chess tournaments. And everybody would be trying to play the wooden style to get the bet, but...”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“But an investment picking it, people think anybody can learn it who just goes to Harvard or Columbia or something. And of course, anybody can't learn it. It's like chess or mechanical ability or a lot of other abilities. It's somebody who does it a lot and has a natural attitude for. Who's the outlier? Who gets the big results? And that's what happens in the investment world. Just a few outliers make money. money. Now, we've also created a whole lot of people who get the reputation of being geniuses, run venture capital funds and so forth, and do pretty well for themselves because they get paid so outlandish. But they don't really get the bottom 80% of the people invest in venture capital. When we had a row, they didn't even look at it. So they're just making... The other people who stumbled into Sequoia in the right year were different. They got a long long run when Sequoia didn't try and grow and they got the advantage of milking Sequoia. But that was rare. Nowadays, everything is quite different. I do not think venture capital will win in the future the way Sequoia once did. And I don't think Sequoia will win in the future the way Sequoia once did. It's too hard. It's too damned hard. Meaning that it's... There's too much failure, difficulty. accident in the world. It's really hard to have a stretch like Sequoia has had as an investment firm. Now everybody thinks if they sort of copy the method, they'll get the result. And of course, it's like a meeting with John Wooden's example. You can compete in John Wooden's example while you in fact do something else, which is what they're doing. And of course, but they're not going to get something else. They're going to get lousy results, not wooden results.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Well, of course, who doesn't like to happily enjoy extreme success accumulated with people who are extremely admirable. That's what Warren and I have gotten to do. Well, of course that's a lot of fun. And a lot of the people at Sequoia have had a lot of fun because they've been a lot of similar things.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Well, I've often favorites, but again, BYD is a good lesson. I didn't find BYD. LeLoo found BYD. And he encouraged me, I didn't, I encourage him to get this partner's And he found, as his, occasionally would do a B-Y-D-A-A, a venture-held of investment in his early life, something I would never do, or notherst tell them to do anyway. And so he did one or two similar transactions that were a lot like Sequoia. He went into B-W-D-A-M- and was so small that it would have been appropriate in an early stage, support investment. And it was a public company, but it was just so small. It was barely a public company. And he went into it. And this little nothing company headed by this, we could see that two things about Munchon Fu. One, he worked 70 hours a week, and the other was he was a genius. And of course, the idea of having somebody was a genius and had all this mechanical aptitude that Warren and I lacked was interesting, at least to me. And so I was willing to take what was piddling money by hunger standards and have some of it invested by Louis Lidou and Lim. But then he came to me and said, Juan Chon Fu wants to buy a bankrupt auto plant in China and starting there, go into the auto business. And I said, let us mind. God, this is a horrible news. I said, it's a really dumb idea. Who in hell has ever seen? succeeded in creating a new auto competition with older companies that are as admirable as Toyota and so forth than Mercedes and people really know a lot about autos and have a big lead and I said let's talk him out of it so we tried to talk bunch on food out of going into it he paid no attention to us he charged into it well this year he'll probably sell two billion automobiles at huge profits for automobile, mouthwatering to lead to delicious profits for auto. It's a huge stunt. And we, Warren and I share the, not Warren and I, but Oh, and Genu, Bon John, I mean, Lee Lou and I share the distinction of urging him not to do it. Thank God he didn't take you up on it. Well, he did. That's what geniuses do. They don't listen. It's just amazing when he's done. Of course, he's been lucky, but all the great records are partly work, partly talent, and partly luck. That's what you expect to win. With this many people in the game of investment, of course the big winners are going to be people who get luck and who get work and talent and luck. That's what we've had.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Well, my worst trade was buying a block for the Bunger family in Alibaba, which is a pretty good company. But I think it got overhyped. And Jack Ma was made mistakes in dealing with Chinese goods. dealing with the Chinese government. I had some bad, everybody has some bad ones.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“I think people learn more from their mistakes sometimes than the successes.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Making sure. sure you don't use leverage?”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“That comes in my too hard pile. hard pile.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“That was a funny way to raise grandchildren. And I was the first grandchild on that side. And so I went down. I don't live there for weeks on end sometimes. And so I got doses of all these lessons from Sunday school and also from Robinson Crusoe. And of course, I really absorbed the Daniel Crusoe lesson. Then I was lucky with my ancestors on the other side of the family. I am very good at learning things from dead people. That's what everybody should learn. And so I had one grandfather on the other side. grandfather on the other side whose life never overlapped mine. He was dead before I was born. But he was the richest man in his town, had an immense old house. And he invited all the grandchildren to come in and stay every summer, as many of us want them. And of course, it's fun to go stay with a rich old grandmother. You know, who kind of owns the town. And he was the majority owner of the main bank. And Army's a grandchild. And the old man had been a pioneer. He'd come there as a pioneer and lost all his money in some bank failure in the East. So from absolute nothing as a pioneer in Iowa, he had eventually made himself the richest man in his town and so forth. And he lived to be an old man, as you can imagine. And what he loved to do was talk about the hard old days of living in a sod house, which is a cave. You moved into a. a cave in the winter. How many people want to raise two little children? In a cave, you can imagine yourself doing it? No. In Iowa winter, living in a cave with two little children. Well, that's what he gave his wife in marriage. And they, from that poor start, ended up with this huge success. And by the standards of his time and place. And he did that, he said, he loved to talk about the early days, because he was so proud of having survived them. the Indian wars and everything. And so he was pleased to talk about, reminded him of all he'd surrounded. My grandmother, Ingham, wouldn't talk with the grandchildren about the early days. They tried to talk about it and they said they were mean hard days. I don't like to remember them. Get them out of them, don't know, don't talk about it in front of me. And that was her reference. So she wouldn't allow people to talk about the early days. But Grandfather Ingham just talked endlessly about the inner days. Now he'd surmounted all these hardships. And when he taught the grandchildren of a fiscal nature, he says, you know, he says, people think I was the best farmland in the world and I own a lot of it.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Yes, that kind of thing has been done in some places that got enough trouble. And it has worked. It can't physically be done. He's certainly right about it. It can be done. Whether it will be done, neither one voter, I can tell you. But is that the proper situation that's just setting up the right incentives? Well, we may come to a place where we simply have to, where we mismanaged to the place where it's obviously we have to go back to something that's more like, that's more like Adam Smith, and just take the inequality. It's dead of the poverty. I like inequality a lot better than I like poverty. I mean, is this modern monetary theory that's gotten out of control at this point, do you worry? Of course, modern monetary theory. Modern monetary theory was a level of indebtedness, which in the past would have happened only during a war, can now be routinely created to avoid any kind of unpleasantness from some families getting squeezed by hardship at the very bottom of the very bottom of the at the very bottom of the economic order. I'm not sure the whole damn system works when some families aren't being squeezed at the bottom of the economic order. That may be our path to civilization, and maybe the only one we got. In that case, we just have to be financially responsible whether it feels good or not, even whether it works well or not on a temporary basis. Maybe we just have to do it. And that may come, by the way. I mean, the most recent news is that 87 for, there was an 87% increase in the U.S. cost for borrowing money over the last year.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Interest rates are high, but they come down to ridiculously low levels. I was going to say they're high, but not high historically. Well, talking economically. Yeah. When the English console didn't lose purchasing power way back in the 1800s, early, 2.5%. Where did we get the idea that every endowment? that every endowment should get 5%, 5% real, 2% or 3% of inflation. That was written in the stars. I do not think it's written in the stars. We may have to do something so unpleasant, but it looks like we're bringing you back.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“And the Chinese said to the Russian peasants, earn your own grain by farming your own farm. And if it fails, it's your problem, not mine, which is what they say. said, that was a hardship lesson at the time. It happened to work. It was, it was, it was, it looked like a hardship lesson. But it really was an invitation to plenty. It was say, eat this spinach and it'll really be good for you. It's capitalism. And you've said all along that capitalism is the best system. Well, it works. If I like your little medallion, and you like my $7 restaurant. And we trade. them I may think your little medallion is worth X and you may think my little wrist budget is worth $7. And we may work out some kind of trade, but if yours is worth $1,000, if yours is worth $1,000 and mine is worth $1,000, we both made $1,000 because that's the way we value them, and the voluntary exchange hasn't goes to government in anything. The GDP just goes up by $1,000. dollars in the United States. I'll exchange my watch for your medallion. And there's nothing else that will do that except capitalism. And do it automatically. You need capitalism plus somebody that creates a sound currency, that uses a medium exchange. When you got those two things, now you and I can have a simple system of exchanging watches for medallions. And we both want to do it.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“something we can do and it's just that was the stuff that somebody like Ron Fuller he was interested in that stuff and in seeking out to make his own work more meaningful he tried to understand it and you guys see him struggling with it and it was early in the history of economics of the discipline when this was going on now the main ideas had been discovered but but the main ideas had not been discovered in law schools. I mean, Lon Fuller was one of the very few people who had some vague understanding of how economics interwoved with law.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“And of course, it's the combination that helped me do as well as they didn't want. You've said that proper incentive structure should be set up for public policy too, that you have to think about it very carefully. If you want to go into public policy, you should go in and think about what the end results are going to be from some of your actions they take. Well, it's not that. in the business of saying to make it fairer so that the hardships of life are more widely distributed. If you call it fairer, you can call it more generous. But either way they mean the same thing. They want the hardships of life to be mitigated for some people. That means other people can sell things to the government that they use in helping unfortunate people. And people have a different idea of about the government. They think it's mildly cheating. The government's all right. It's a big, dumb bureaucracy. Everybody's, they're engaged in manipulating us so they can live well. Of course, we can finagle a little so we can live well. And therefore, it's okay to cheat the government. And the cheating of the government is so extreme. If I could just wave a wand and take all the cheating out of the workers' comp system, who can not be in favor of the workman's comp system? system. It says if you're injured in course of doing your job, that makes you a living and feed your children, and now you can't function for a while, the government will lift down and give you a lifting hand. That's why they created compulsory workers' comp insurance, because it just seemed unfair that some people got so utterly clobbered by things that weren't their fault. And yet that wonderful system, it is ripe with fraud. They puffed their injuries up so they can get time off, they puff their injuries up so they can have extra much cash. They puff their injuries up so they can get permanent disability pay. And they have doctors and lawyers that help them do it. I mean, mislead the government in an unfair fairness. So in an effort to cure an unfairness, we may find that there are whole areas where the way human nature works, we have to endure more hardship. And the endure. and the unfairness that comes with it. There was... The ordinary rich person who talks that way is talking, because he wants to hold all his wealth and keep a great, and make the disparity between his wealth and the ordinary people get greater and greater.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“That's his ambition. But it doesn't work that he gets what he wants. The ordinary outcome of the well-to-do families is they go back to the mean. If you look to somebody as rich as the Rockefellers. And that was really, And that was really rich by the standards of a near human being. Even the Rockefellers will eventually go back to the main. Pretty close anyway. It just happens. There's a lot of misfortune out there, both fiscal and other kinds. And it takes it down one after another.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“I don't regard Elon. Musk is truly that rich because I don't think it's sure that everything he's working on can work. I think he could get his ass handle to him in autos. I would not invest in Elon Musk's autos myself.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Yes. Who cannot? Again, that's another lesson. What is the lesson of Elon Musk? The Musk is, it's always an outlet, somebody who has a, a very ridiculous amount of money. It almost always has an element of luck in him. He's been quite lucky in what he's picked to double down, double down, double down, double down. And then he's used leverage so much that he's doubled down right to the edge of extinction, maybe two or three times. How many people can go to the edge of extinction without stepping into it? He's done three times, maybe he's got six more in any, I don't know. I put Elon Musk in a file. in a file. I never read against him and I never read with him. As far as I'm concerned, he doesn't exist. My life works better if I treat the world as though he didn't exist.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Well, yes, even the fiction, which includes a good deal of the Bible. The Bible and the Shakespeare and the... and great novels and all that stuff. The people were good at painting pictures and painting and telling stories. And people learn best when they learn a story. It looks more like a piece of a life story. So it works.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Well, and now is it, my life is, people know I'm on books. And they kind of like for Charlie's Almanac or something.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Well, I mean, every one in America is too old to be president. It may be just too hard a job. The way things have worked out, maybe this is like my cousins, my cousins. meningitis, maybe it's just a hand too tough to play. Maybe you're not going to be allowed to play it out. We don't know.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“No, I'm talking about the atomic war factor. Just the idea of being president at all.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“I don't know much time on it because I can't fix it. because I can't fix it. It goes into my too hard file. Even if I had all the power, I couldn't fix it. If you gave me the power to write all the laws of the world, I would sit down, even if it happened a day, and try and help you write those laws. I would think it was the most important thing that mankind could possibly do because there's a lot of laws that are stupid and cause bad results. And if you know what they are, where you would just eliminate the ones you didn't like and put in ones that. would help and I think somebody like Warren who naturally thinks the way I do on this issue, he'd be quite happy making laws for the whole United States.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Well, there are all kinds of things. I would, where the fraud just gets too much. I think you just have to take it out. But there are whole professions that go out. And there's a whole half progression that goes out. Half the chiropedic progression should go out. It should not exist. Chiropractors.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Yeah, it's horseshit. Because?”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Yeah. To try and do things they couldn't help. You've seen that with other. Modern medicine. doesn't really allow it. A licensed does not allow you to practice medicine. I can't give Becky quick penicillin because I'm a chiropractor.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Well, taking the fraud out is also important. How can a whole lot of fraud be a good thing? And almost everybody has known that. And the early legislators, legislators made, they made creating an artificial currency. You tried to pass it off as real. They made that as a very serious crime. Of course, they killed you for it. And that was probably a good rule of that step in mankind civilization, was to kill the counter herders. One thing I'll guarantee you is the counterfeiter who's dead is not going to counterfeit it any more currency. They can't do it after they're dead.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“But I consider some people so damn mischievous that it's a very good place to have them as dead as soon as possible. So you bring back more capital punishment? Yes. I might have less in some places and more than others. I'm sure I would.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Yeah. Yeah, of course that's true. Yeah, of course that's true. And that's the kind of problem you weren't into. The great rulers are people like Leek on You and Lonfowler and Leek on View. He said, figure out what works and do it. That was his sole message. Figure out what works and do it. And of course, mathematically that translates, figure out what doesn't work and avoid it. Right. And both rules are correct. And you have to get it right or as close to right as you can get it right.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Yeah, sure. I have a hard time thinking of a time when you set your expectations low though.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Invert, invert, and try and figure out where you don't want to be.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Yes, of course. That's what everybody's life is with any sense. All the people I know. and my friends now, they never would become alcoholics. It was too dangerous. They would, they just don't, they don't, they don't get near it if it takes that many fine people into deep trouble.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“that all the people that had had very, very early heart trouble, the males that had very early heart trouble. Had one thing in common. They all smoked a lot of cigarettes. Oh. So I could see that coming fairly early. I tried to learn to smoke so I could be a cool kid, like the other kids in high school. I tried to ruin my life, but it nauseated me. And so I said, I said, how well this? People have lured me into a goddamn thing. You've got to get nauseated, boy, learning to do it. And I said, I'm not. interested enough in going through a lot of nausea that I want to smoke, so I just didn't smoke.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Yeah, sure, but I didn't. Again, I was, and I even drank to ex a few times. But I was always, there were enough alcoholics and near alcoholics and my own family to make me worry about liquor.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“cautious about drinking liquor. Now, I did occasionally get drunk and throw up. That gave me the nausea, which enabled me to give a liquor.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Well, I don't know the secret. I avoided the standard ways of failing because my game in life was always to avoid all standard ways of failing. You teach me the wrong way to play poker and I will avoid it. it. You teach me the wrong way to do something else I will avoid it. And of course, I have avoided a lot because I'm so cautious. But you do things you like, like, like you'll eat peanut brittle or...”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Okay. I drink that coke. Yeah. I'm sure that I go shortens my life a little. But I don't give a damn if the last week of lying there and consciousness goes away. It's only the good part of life I want anyway. You know, there are all of these billionaires now, Silicon Valley types, who are trying to do anything they can to extend life, like crazy things. They find they've got a family full of Parkinson's. And because I watched my mother and my sister die of Parkinson's disease. And so I'm familiar with that one.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“I do not like the last month of Parkinson's disease. I've seen it up close.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“It's no fun of the people in it. the people around them. It's no fun at all. And Dad Coatman will be helping me skip it.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Who knows? He's helping me skip the last month, not the first month. There are some new ways that people think that they can extend life, though. And one of the crazier things I've heard is this idea of doing a blood transfusion with younger people, so you get younger blood. I mean, there's like some silicon ballet types that are doing those things. Well, but that was crazy. You got to remember the practice of medicine and my father's boyhood was Charlottons for depression. People learn to make a living at it, and they gradually learned a few things they can do with the help with patients. But they, but basically they did a lot of nonsensual things. If other people want to know what the best way to live is, you would just tell them, avoid the crazy things. Avoid the things that take you down.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Of course, of course, of course, of course. Of course. I think another thing you've said is whatever you are, wealth and age will make you more so.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Yeah, but not like Warren. More than half of the munger money is already even best of the descendants. So I've made exactly the opposite. It was a smaller wrong money. But I made exactly the opposite decision for the majority of our money.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Well, that's an interesting question. I am so old and weak compared to what I was when I was when I was 96 that I no longer want to catch. a 200 pound tuna. It's just too got that much work to get it in and takes too much physical strength. So I don't know why I would have paid any amount to get you a 200 pound tuna. When I was younger, I never caught one. And now I give me the opportunity. I would just decline going. I won't even go out after them. There are things you give up with time. You're pretty active. You've got a business. social schedule? You're on Zoom. You have breakfasts and lunch?”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“And when it happened, I welcomed it. I am very good at recognizing unfair advantages. And I got unfair advantages in old age. The way I got unfair advantages in old age, the way I got unfair advantages in non-old age. And when they came, I just grabbed them. Boom, boom, boom. The one grab I never made was for her third wife. Too late. Why? It's too late. There are people for whom it's a necessity. Necessity. They're so much more comfortable in marriage than they are outside it, that they really need it to be human. That's just the way they're put together. And for sure. such people, I represent the 100-year-old dating app. But you'll find that if you put it in, that not many 100-year-olds want it, they're just lying there.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Of course, everybody struggles. The iron rule of life is everybody struggles. I try and think back of what the toughest moments might have been and how you got through some of those. And I mean... Well, we all know how to get through them. Through, the great philosophers of realism are also the great philosophers of what I call soldiering through. If you soldier through, you can get through almost anything. It's your only option. You can't break the dead, you can't cure the dying child, you can't do all kinds of things. You have to soldier through and you just... somehow you soldier through. If you have to walk through the streets crying for a few hours a day, as part of the soldier, if you go ahead and cry away, but you have to, you can't squit. You can't cry all right, but you can't quit. You've had time in your life when you've done that? Sure. I cried all the time when my first child died, but I knew I couldn't change the fate. In those days, the fatality with the childhood leukemia. but leukemia was 100%. That's gone away. Now the cure rate is way up in the 90s. And it's an amazing development. Think of how much pleasure it's given me to watch the cure rate for leukemia.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Yeah, sure. I assume you've done the same thing for yourself.”

Charlie Munger's final CNBC interview | November 14, 2023

“Yeah. When a rich family, you think your duty is to use the wealth that live grandly. That's whatever he's doing with the money. You will learn from the people that are doing it. Is the plan for your life, the obituary you would write in your 30s the same you would write today?”

Warren Buffett I HBO Documentary

“That was a pretty silly way to behave, as Warren has recounted in retrospect. One of the reasons Warren's successful is he's brutal in appraising his own past. He wants to identify mis-thinkings and avoid them in the future. But it was an accident that he chose Berkshire Hathaway. If the chairman hadn't tried to cheat him out of an eighth, there wouldn't have been any Buffett-Dash-Ber-Hathaway history. If you're emotional about investment, you're not going to do well. You may have all these feelings about the stock.”

Warren Buffett I HBO Documentary

“I think it just sobered him and hurt him. But Warren's soldier's on. Both Warren and I could look at our fathers and see. what they did right and what they did wrong. Warren's father was a real old-fashioned right-wing ideologue. And his father was so intense about it that Warren just decided that it was a mistake. It cabbaged up your head to be that much of ideologue. So he loved his father, but he didn't want to become that much of a true believer in anything. My politics became more overt after my dad died. Civil rights changed my view. Civil rights changed my view. You know, in 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote, all men are created equal. And then when they wrote the Constitution, they all of a sudden decided that, no, it was just three-fifths of a person if you were black. I mean, that struck me as kind of crazy. I was talking to him one day about some racial issue. And he said to me, wait till women discover they're the slaves of the world. Now, how many men were cognizant of that, and even women then? The initial examples, really, my model, She came from a generation where the main function of the wife was to help her husband in the job. And my sisters are fully as smart as I am. They got better personalities than I have. But they got the message a million different ways that their future was limited, and I got the message that the sky is the limit. And it wasn't due to a lack of love or anything of the story. It's just, it was the culture. On the other hand, you can look at the flip side and say it's quite encouraging. I'd say it's quite encouraging because if you look at what this country accomplished only using half of its talent, you know, just think of the potential for the future. I'm enormously bullish on America over the future. And part of the reason is that we, by some rather stupid decisions, essentially put half our talent on the sidelines. Warren is probably the most rational person I've ever met. Charlie Munger would be a close rival. And Charlie became a man that Warren depended on heavily. And I think that Warren depended on heavily.”

Warren Buffett I HBO Documentary

“Well, I want to know. I thought he was a prodigy, and I got a lot of criticism. My wife said, why are you paying such enormous respect to that young man with a crew cut who won't eat vegetables? He's ungodly smart. He's got a much broader intellect than I do. And he's magnificent at being able to condense important ideas into just a very few words. If you're not interested in the economic scene right now, you're mentally dead.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Charles Munger Well, the answer is Steve chose his own titles coming in and we'll change whenever he wants to change it. How's that?”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“The sound has gone off.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“I can't hear you.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, it's all very simple. We made a lot of extra money out of the publishing business in its heyday, and that was about $30 million. And that was all made in the foreclosure boom. And of course, in the old days, we had information monopoly on publishing the appellate court's decisions daily in newsprint. And the Internet came along and destroyed our position. Our circulation went way down and so forth.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“So we've had a drastic change in good fortune in our publishing business. And Steve actually ran a small software company in Canada for years and years and years, which is quite similar to what Journal Technologies does. And so that's how we got together.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“The future of this business is not in the publishing side, it's on the Journal Technologies side. And the good news is that we're a huge market because all the courts of the world are in the Stone Age still in terms of automating with modern technology. And so it's a big market.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“The bad news is it's a long, slow slog where you deal with all of the bureaucracies in response to RFPs or request for proposals. And it's just a very slow, difficult business. So we got a slow, difficult business of chewing our way into a huge market that's not going away with one big competitor in it.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“And that's the future. And like many publishing company, which used newsprint, it's a miracle when any survive. If you look in the small and mid-cap addition of the value line books, you'll find there are 2 entries left. One is Gannett, which used to own the monopoly newspaper, I don't know, 50, 60, or 100 different cities. And the executive used to ride their own jet airplanes and be treated like lords of England when they went to publishers' convention.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“And every newspaper publisher was a hugely powerful in this own community. And so they're like the lords of England, all these publishers. And now mighty Gannett is just a pale shadow of itself. Newspapers shrunk down to a tiny little few and very limited assets and so forth.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“So there's been an unbelievable change in the technology and competitive outcomes in publishing ordinary newspapers on newsprint. And by and large, the safe rule is they're all dying just in different states of near death. And so if this place has a future, it's in the Journal Technologies side. And that's a long, slow grind. And the only reason we have a lot of marketable securities is we have the extra money, and we preferred the marketable securities to cash in an inflationary world. And so -- and of course, there's been a minor miracle that we've got as much as we have in marketable securities because our investments have done better than average.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“So the good news is we survived so far, and we've got some surplus wealth. And the bad news, it's a long, slow slog ahead, and the main future is in Journal Technologies.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Steve, you take that one.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, you accurately stated our circumstances. We do have a lot of surplus wealth, but we needed to attack this big market. These courts, why would they gamble on a little company with no net worth, the courts that are letting the RFP contracts. So we're using our net worth to help the business.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, I don't buy it, and I don't sell it. So that's what the Mungers have been doing. You know what?”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“It's not a crazy evaluation considering what everything else is selling for these days. So I have no feeling that it's -- almost foolishly I have some crazy mystique, somebody, well, it's a small Berkshire, and it will double like rabbits. And of course, it's not a small Berkshire. I'm 99 years old [indiscernible].”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, I might have different ideas. If you own securities -- marketable securities within a corporation, located in California, you pay huge state and federal taxes and you sell things at a big gain. And that affects our willingness to sell somewhat. Those bank stocks I bought on the bottom tick in the foreclosure crisis. Literally, it was the bottom tick, and they're practically all gain. So I immediately give the government 40-some-percent, everything we sell out of it -- out of those bank stocks. So -- and of course, they're producing a tax -- the dividends are almost tax free. So based on what we would get if we sold them and the return we're getting out of the dividends, it's not so bad for us. The answer is it's -- we're not in a normal position. All factors considered, we're willing to hold them for a while. And there is a big disadvantage in adding a huge layer of federal corporate taxes and state taxes between us and any money we make in a state like California, which is a very business unfriendly state as my people are rushing to come out and incorporate in California. And there are all kinds of states that have no income taxes and deliberately use that lure to bring in corporations. California is trying to force its wealthy people and its wealthy corporations out of the state. And I must say it's working fine. They're leaving just one after another. And that's just where it is. But if we succeed in the software business, it will all come good in the end. And if we fail, we have a crutch under us in our real estate and our securities, which means we won't lose so much from the present market price. So it's not a crazy thing to own now at the market valuation, but it's not cheap either.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, what happened is we used to have [ Garon and ] Munger, who were the 2 biggest shareholders. And of course, we've been partners for years and years. And we took no fees, no directors fees, no expenses, no nothing. And so it was a very user-friendly Berkshire-type place. Well, [ Garon ] died finally at age 90-some. And so now we're down to one last survivor of the old guard. And of course, we need a certain number of new directors. And our new directors are pretty damn smart, and they're all rich, by the way. So it's still a very Berkshire-like Board, smart and rich and thinking like a capitalist to -- we still -- we have that.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“We'll work it out.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“It's really quite interesting to have a pile of securities and one interesting activity in a very high-tech field and with a lot of politics and travel and difficulty in it. But it's a huge, huge market. And it isn't like there are a lot of other people in it. Most of the big corporations that would be our natural competitors are places where they -- they hate RFPs. In other words, one of the reasons the business is good for us is a lot of the big companies just hate what we're doing. They want easier money, they are able to sell standard piece of software just repeat it over and over and get. They're spoiled. We're willing to slug it out of the mud of all these little consulting contracts. And that makes us to have literally a few competitors in the field.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“No, go ahead.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, he was just terrific as a person, as an investor, and I miss him terribly, of course. We were together for years and years and years, and we were poor together, and that creates a bonding. When we met in 1961, we were both poor and struggling and young. So we had a long ride together. And -- but all things in, that's the nature of the human condition.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, I think artificial intelligence is very important, but it's also a lot of crazy hype on the subject. Artificial intelligence is not going to cure cancer. It's not going to do everything that we want done. And there's a lot of nonsense in it, too. So I regard as a mixed blessing, all this artificial intelligence. Some people have used it in some things like insurance underwriting pretty well. But a lot of people tried to use it, ordinary things like buying office buildings or something, I think that's way more -- I don't think it's going to help when you're going to buy an office building. Not very much anyway.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“We had our big disruption when technology kind of severely -- it adversely affected our publishing business. And we have our opportunity in this new business, but it's just a long, tough slog. There's no short -- there's no royal road to success in what we're doing.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, what -- if I had to name one factor that dominates human bad decisions, it would be what I call denial. If the truth is unpleasant enough, people kind of -- their mind plays tricks on them, and they think it isn't really happening. And of course, that causes enormous destruction of business where people will go on throwing money into -- the way they used to do things, isn't going to work at all well in the way the world is now having changed. And if you want an example of how denial is affecting things, take the world of investment management. How many managers are going to beat the indexes? All cost considered, I would say maybe 5% could consistently meet the averages.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Everybody else is living in the state of extreme denial. They're used to charging big fees and so forth for stuff that isn't doing their clients any good. It's a deep moral depravity. If some widow comes to you with $500,000 and you charge her 1 point a year for her, you could put her in the indexes, but you need the 1 point. And so people just charge somewhat a considerable fee for a worthless advice. And the whole profession is full, that kind of denial. It's everywhere. So I had to say I was -- I always quote Demosthenes. It's a long time ago, Demosthenes, that's 2,000 -- more than 2,000 years ago. And he said, what people wish is what they believe. Think of how much of that goes on. And so, it's of course, is hugely important. And you can just see it. I would say the agency costs and money management, there are just so many billions, it's uncountable. And nobody can face it. Who wants to -- keep your kids in school, you need the fees, you need the brokerage, you need this or that. So you do what's good for you and bad for them. Now I don't think Berkshire does that. And I don't think we -- [ Garon ] and I did at the Daily Journal. [ Garon ] and I never took entire month salary or directors' fees or anything. And if I have a business, I talk out of my phone or use my car, I don't charge it to the Daily Journal. That's unheard of. It shouldn't be unheard of, and it goes on in Berkshire. It goes on in the Daily Journal, but we have an incentive plan now in this Journal Technologies. And it has $1 million worth of Daily Journal stock. That didn't come from the company issuing those shares. I gave those shares to the company to use in compensating the employees. And I learned that trick, so to speak, from a guy at BYD, which is one of the securities we hold in our securities portfolio. And BYD at one time in its history, the founder, Chairman, he didn't use the company's stock to reward the executives. He used his own stock. It was a big reward, too. Well, last year, what happened? BYD last year made more than $2 billion after taxes in the auto business in China. Who in the hell makes $2 billion, who's a brand-new entrant in the auto business for all practical purposes. It's incredible what's happened. And so there is some of this old-fashioned capitalist virtual lift in the Daily Journal, and there's something left in Berkshire Hathaway, and there's something left in BYD. But most places, everybody is trying to take what they need and just rationalizing whether it's deserved or not.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, that's easy. Tesla last year reduced its prices in China twice. BYD increased its prices. We're direct competitors. We're so much ahead of BYD -- I mean, BYD is so much ahead of Tesla in China. It's like -- it's just -- it's almost ridiculous. And if you look at BYD, which most of you never heard of, if you count all the manufacturing space they have in China to make cars, it would amount to a big percentage of what we have in Manhattan Island. And nobody ever heard of them a few years ago.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, BYD is talking about 50x earnings. That is a very high price. On the other hand, they're likely to have increased their auto sales by another 50% this year. So it's -- we saw a part of ours, by the way, years ago -- not years, about a year ago at a much higher price than they're selling for now. And no, we're not a mini Berkshire. We're not going to have a big correlation between us and what Berkshire does. And you could understand why somebody will sell Berkshire's -- BYD stock at 50x earnings at the current price of BYD stock, a little BYD is worth more than the entire Mercedes Corporation, market capitalization. So it's not a cheap stock. On the other hand, it's a very remarkable company. And by the way, I want to tell people the great contribution I made to the success of BYD. We got into it through Li Lu, and it was a little company that knocked off the Japanese cellphones. And the Chairman of this company was a -- genius say, I'll buy a bankrupt, a little crappy auto plant and go to the auto business from dead scratch when he's making cell phones little [indiscernible] company. And both Li Lu and I tried talking about it. Please don't do this dumb thing. You get your head handed to you in the auto business, little BYD and so forth. Well, last year, they made more than $2 billion in the auto business from that standing start at 0. It's unheard of. But Li Lu and I get all the credit because we tried to get him -- we tried to talk about doing what works so well, which shows that there's some accident in life.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Yes, it's true. I operated with no leverage for long stretches of my old age and Warren is the same way. And recently, I did use a little bit of leverage here in another place because the opportunities were so ridiculously good. I thought it was desirable to do that. So you're right, it's unusual for us, but we did find a few things. And by the way, if you go back early in my career, I used some leverage. I sometimes ask myself a mettle question, I say, "What is the appropriate percentage of your net worth you should put it in the stock if you think it's an absolute cinch?" Well, if you're kind of fellow who's right when you think something is the cinch the answer is 100% or maybe 150%. But nobody teaches people to think that way in finance. But if the opportunity is great enough, the logical answer is 100% or maybe 200%.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, I used a little on my way up, and so did Warren, by the way. The Buffett partnership used leverage regularly every year of its life. What Warren would do is, he would buy a bunch of stocks and any borrower -- and so stocks need by end of these -- they used to call the bad arbitrage, liquidations, mergers and so forth. And that was not -- didn't go up and down with the”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“market. That was an independent banking business. And Ben Graham's name for that type of investment, he called them Jewish Treasury Bills. And it always amused me that's what he would call them. But Warren used leverage to buy Jewish Treasury Bills on the way up, and it worked fine for him. I don't think neither of us, everybody is -- well, no, Berkshire has stock in Activision Blizzard. And you can argue that's -- whether that will go through or not, I don't know, but that's the Jewish Treasury Bill.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, yes, [indiscernible] arbitrage -- we sort of stopped doing it because it sets a crowd in place. But here's little Berkshire doing it again and Activision Blizzard and Munger using a little leverage at the Daily Journal Corporation.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“You can argue that I used that leverage to buy BYD, you can argue it's the best thing I've ever done for the Daily Journal.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“I think most people should avoid it, but maybe not everybody need to play by those rules. I have a friend who says, the young man knows the rules, and the old man knows the exceptions.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“He's lived right. He knows it.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, of course, it was a very interesting thing. Jack Ma was a dominant capitalist in Alibaba. And one day, he got up and made a public speech, where he said the communist party is full of monarchy. They don't know [indiscernible] they're no damn good, and I'm smart. And of course, the communist partly didn't like his speech. And pretty soon, he just sort of disappeared from view for months on end, and now he's out of BYD. It was pretty stupid. It's like poking a bear in the nose with a sharp stick. It's not smart. And Jack Ma got way out of line by popping off the way he did to the Chinese government. And of course, it hurt Alibaba and -- but I regard Alibaba as one of the worst mistakes I ever made. In thinking about Alibaba, I got charmed with the idea of their position on the Chinese Internet. I didn't stop to realize they're still a”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, that's a very good question, of course. But I would argue the chances in a big confrontation from China have gone down, not up because of what happened in the Ukraine. I think that the Chinese leader is a very smart, practical person. And he doesn't -- Russia went into the Ukraine is like a cakewalk. I don't think Taiwan looks like such a cakewalk anymore. I think it's off the table in China for a long, long time. And I think that helps the prospects of investors who invest in China. And the other thing that helps in terms of the China prospects are that you can buy the best -- you can buy better, stronger companies at a cheaper valuation in China than you can in the United States. So you're getting -- the extra risk can be worth running, given the extra value you get. That's why we're in China. It isn't like we prefer being in some foreign country. Of course, I'd rather be in Los Angeles right next to my house. It will be more convenient. But I can't find that many investments right next to my house.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, I have more optimism about the leader of the Chinese party than most people do. He's done a lot right, too. And he had led a big anticorruption drive. He's done a lot of things right. So -- and I don't know where this man lives. Where is there a place where the government is perfect in the world of sin and sorrow? Democracies aren't that rigidly run either. So it's natural to have some decisions made by government that don't work well. It's natural to have decisions in each individual life that don't work very well. We live in a world of sin, sorrow and misdecision. That's what human beings get to cope with in their days of life. So I don't expect the world will be free of folly and mistakes and so forth. And I just hope I've invested with people who have more good judgment than bad judgment. I don't know anybody who's right all the time.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, the semiconductor industry is a very peculiar industry. In semiconductor industry, you have to take all the money you've made, and with each new generation of chips, you throw in all the money you've previously made. So it's compulsory investment of everything you want to stay in the game. Naturally, I hate a business like that. In Berkshire, we like a whole lot of surplus money to come in that we can do something else with. And of course, now if you're now ahead of it, like Taiwan Semiconductor is, that may be a good buy at these prices. It's not at all clear to me that they're not going to succeed mightily. But it's a difficult -- its bit of an enormous promise for the big winner, but it's a difficult business and requiring everybody to keep increasing the bets on and on with all the money. And so -- it's not perfect, that semiconductor business. But remember when Intel owned the world? Intel was once the Taiwan Semiconductor business of the world. They invented the damn business, and they've dominated it for decades. And it's not clear to me that Intel is going to have a very decent semiconductor business, getting as far behind as they are now. My answer is it's not so damn foolproof as it looked.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, of course, that will really help. But they're borrowing money. There's no indication that government is going to forgive the loans or something. It's not like the recent loans to the business where they said, "we'll you owe the money and then oh, keep the money." The government is not planning to do that at least new semiconductor loans. And so -- okay, it's not a field where I feel I have a lot of expertise. What the hell do I know about semiconductors?”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, of course, all of that, it's deeply intertwined with government policies in both China and the United States. So I would rather have something that's more foolproof myself. But I do think Taiwan Semiconductor is the strongest semiconductor company on earth. So I am a big admirer of what they've achieved. It's just incredible of what they've achieved.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“By the way, maybe a wonderful investment, the fact that I don't like it because I am an old man, and I don't like learning new tricks. That doesn't mean it isn't right for some younger person that understands it better than I do.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, I don't think there are good arguments against my position. I think the people who oppose my position are idiots. And so I don't think there is a rational argument against my position. This is an incredible thing. Naturally, people like who're in gambling and seals wherever people lose. And the people who had been in this crypto crappo which is my name for it, sometimes I call it crypto crappo and sometimes I call it well, crypto s***. And it's ridiculous that anybody would buy this stuff. It isn't -- you can think of hardly nothing on earth has done more good to the human race than currency, national currencies. They were absolutely required to turn man from a damn successful ape into modern successful humans and human civilization. This has enabled all these convenient exchanges. So if somebody says I'm going to create something that sort of replaces the national currency, it's like saying I'm going to replace a [ natural ] air. It's [indiscernible]. It isn't slightly stupid, it's massively stupid. And of course, it is very dangerous. And of course, the governments were totally wrong to permit it. And of course, I'm not proud of my country for allowing this c***, what I call a crypto s***. It's worthless. It's no good. It's crazy. It will do nothing but harm and its antisocial to allow it. And the guy who made the correct decision on this is the Chinese leader. The Chinese leader took one look at crypto s***, and he says "not in my China," and boom is over, there isn't any crypto s*** in China. He's right, and we're wrong. And there is no good argument on the other side. I can't supply it.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“I do think you ought to be able to state a lot of issues. You ought to be -- how big should the social safety net be? That's a place where reasonable minds can disagree. And you should be able to state the case on the other side about as well so the case you believe in. But when you're dealing with something as awful as crypto s***, it's just unspeakable. It's an absolute horror. And I'm ashamed of my country that so many people believe in this kind of crap and the government allows it to exist is totally, absolutely crazy, stupid gambling with enormous house odds for the people on the other side. And they cheat -- in addition to cheating and like betting, it's just crazy. So that is something. There's only one correct answer for intelligent people there, just totally avoid it and avoid all the people that are promoting it.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, it's not as bad as crypto s***. I don't think there's much harm in betting a modest amount you can afford on a Supermarket Bowl game. That strikes”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“I'm all in favor betting with the odds.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Yes, sure.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“No, I don't short. I have made 3 short sales in my entire life, and they're all more than 30 years ago. And one was a currency, and there were 2 stock trades. In the 2 stock trades, I made a big profit on one of them, made a big loss on the other, and they canceled out. And my currency bet, I made $1 million, but it was a very irritating way to make $1 million. I mean, I've stopped.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, you can laugh, but that's true. It was irritating.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, like I'm asking you for more margin. I kept sending over treasury notes. It was very unpleasant. I made a profit in the end, but I never want to do it again.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, as long as Costco keeps the faith with a strong culture and their extreme low markup policy, I don't see any stopping at that. The trouble with Costco is it's 40x earnings. But except for that, it's a perfect damn company. And it has a marvelous future. And it has a wonderful culture, and it's been run by wonderful people. And I love everything about Costco. I'm a total addict. Never going to sell their share.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, I'm strongly opposed because I think if you're -- a good culture has a lot of people who are good fiduciaries. And it is like stealing to do something dumb with the corporate money once you can get more advantage to your shareholders from buying back your own stock. And I like encouraging morality and decency and honor, and so you're dealing with the people you're the fiduciary for. And so I agree with our President on some things, but this is not one of them.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“What?”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Say that again.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, I'm not vehement because it's not as bad as cryptocurrency. Yes, it's a forgivable error. But yes, I disagree strongly. I think it's a big mistake to adopt that policy. But I'm a Republican. I sometimes vote for Democrats, but I am a Republican.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“I never pay any attention on how they do it. They're cautious and careful people. And -- but if you take the amount that's been brought back in the last 3 years, it's a lot. And so I thoroughly approve what we're doing, and I don't consider at all fair that we're being taxed. We're doing something good for our own shareholders.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, there's no question about the fact that he sympathizes with the employees more, and that's understandable. And a lot of people would have the President's orientation on that issue. And I don't have a big opinion about how well thought it'd be distributed in the country. I think -- I don't know the answer. I do think we need a capitalistic system if we want to have a productive economy to make some of these in advance.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, I don't think it's at all likely that we're broken up for a long, long time. A lot of companies are worth more dead than alive, meaning at the current price for whole businesses, you could sell things at higher prices. You can only do it once. The shareholders will pay a big tax then you have the problem of what to do with the money and forth. I think all factors considered and with Berkshire buying in its own shares when they are”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“reasonably priced, I think Berkshire's a pretty damn good bet for shareholders as a whole of long term in the future. And I don't think it's any hardship. It isn't being broken up. It works pretty damn well. Everybody that bought Berkshire and held it for 20 years has done well. I think that will be true for those who buy at the current price.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“I don't think it will be as good in the future as it was in the past, but it will be okay considering how poorly everything else is going to do.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Because the valuations start higher now and because government is so hostile to business.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“I would say it will fluctuate naturally between administrations and so on. But I think basically, the culture of the world will become more and more anti-business in the big democracies. And I think taxes will go up, not down. So I think the investment world is going to get harder for everybody. And -- but it's been almost too easy in the past for the investment class. It's natural that it would have a period of getting harder. I don't worry about it much because I'm going to be dead. It won't bother me very much...”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Yes, 99, right?”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“No, I'm eating this good peanut brittle. That's what you want to do if you want to live to be 99.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“I hate to advertise my own product, but this is the key to longevity.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, that's a very -- I have almost no exercise, except when the Army Air Corps made me do exercise. I've done almost no exercise on purpose in my life. If I enjoyed the activity like tunnels, I would exercise. But for the first 99 years, I've gotten by without doing any exercise at all.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“No, no, I'm not changing it.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, I step out of my bed these days and sit down in my wheelchair. So I am paying some price for old age. But I prefer it to being dead. And whenever I feel sad of -- in a wheelchair, I think Roosevelt ran the whole damn country for 12 years in a wheelchair. So I'm just trying to make this wheelchair thing last as long as Roosevelt did.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, there's no question about the fact that you lose some mental acuity as you get older. But some people get shrewder at adapting to their limitations, and they do pretty well. And so far, I've had plenty of decline, but I'm pretty shrewd about the way I handle it. And so far, the results have not been that bad in my old age.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“My s**life would be a different subject.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Yes, that's all right.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, there's no question about the fact that the interest rates have gone up. It's hostile to stock prices. And -- but they should go up. We couldn't have kept them forever at 0. And I just think this is one more damn thing to adapt to in investment life as that there are headwinds and there are tailwinds. And one of the headwinds is inflation. And I think more inflation over the next 100 years is inevitable with -- given the nature of democratic politics -- politics in a democracy. So I think we'll have more inflation. That's one of the reasons the Daily Journal owns securities instead of government bonds -- owns common stock instead of government bonds.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“No, no. I'm talking about -- Trump ran a deficit that was bigger than the Democrats did. All democratic -- all politicians in a democracy tend to be in favor of printing the money and spending it. And that will cause some inflation over time. It may avoid a few recessions, too. It may not be all bad.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, if you take the history of democracy in the world and go back far enough, it fails a lot and gets succeeded by dictatorships and all kinds of awful things. And as a matter of fact, the worst thing that happened to the human race in my lifetime was an advanced civilization like Germany was taken over by a dictator as awful as Adolf Hitler. That happened as a consequence of a big worldwide depression. It would never have happened if we hadn't had the Big Depression. And once Hitler got in, that meant World War II was inevitable. And that could have worked out a lot worse than it did for the people like the United States. So these things are quite important. And they're not going to be done perfectly in the future, no more than they were done perfectly in the past. So of course, you've got to expect a certain amount of future trouble in the world, and your government is going to do some things that aren't exactly right. On the other hand, I would argue that the U.S. government did some things magnificently right. I said on many occasions that the thing that makes me proudest of my own government is the way we handled the sequel to World War II. Instead of punishing the Germans and the Japanese, we made them into some of our best friends on earth. Now that was a stunt. And it was to the credit of our country that, that was done. And it was done on a bipartisan basis. And I think we can all be proud of that. That was a smart thing to do. It took some generosity. We had to give up some of our money to help them rebuild. And it was a credit to our species that we behaved that well on that occasion. And I don't think our future behavior will lack similar episodes of some kind.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“We'll do some things very right and some things very wrong. That's the way it happens.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“No, I will keep doing both wrong and right as far ahead as you can see.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“I don't regard myself -- I think I'm pretty good at long run expectations, but I don't think I'm good at short-term wobbles. I don't have the faintest idea what's going to happen short term.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, the way I feel about Jay Powell is that I feel he's about as good as we have any right to expect. I think he's honorable and intelligent doing the best he can. And I have no feeling that I know a lot of people who'd do it a lot better. So I'm glad we have him.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, of course, it's a very serious issue because it's an enormous amount of power. And for a while, these index funds got the feeling they were suddenly made God-like to clean up the world. And -- but Vanguard has retreated from that policy and I think wisely so. And I have some hope that Larry Fink will follow. I don't think it's smart for these index funds to try and influence the policy and politics of the country just because they're an index fund. I think they should be satisfied to eliminate some of the folly from investment management and do a better job for their clients, which I think they do very well. And I think they should be pleased with that and not try and run the whole damn country as a matter of corporate governance. I have no feeling that anybody at Vanguard or Larry Fink's operation has any special genius at how American corporations ought to be run. And to the extent they ask Berkshire who is that, I wish they'd stop.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“I mean, I'm just not interested in their view as to how Berkshire should behave.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, I think you will find in American corporations very good incentive systems and others that are too liberal and others that are too niggardly. And what else would you expect in human nature with a certain amount of variety. And I agree that some of this -- in many a corporation, everybody would vote to being allowed to have stock-based compensation. You didn't count it in computing the earnings. They just want any damn way of making the earnings appear higher. It's just human nature.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Of course, they want their -- it's like little kid goes off to school. They want to bring him good grades, not bad grades. And so sure, there's a big problem of excess corporation paying in some places. Other places like Costco, I would say the compensation system is damn near perfect. It's -- and there's a fair amount of stock.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“But we always buy in enough stock in Costco to pay for the stock we're issuing. A lot of people in high tech, they issue the stock and they don't buy it in, so it's a net dilution. I think there's a lot that's wrong in American compensation systems and -- but why wouldn't there be?”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“By the way, when I was young, it wasn't so bad.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“This is something that's happened in the last 50 years. I don't know. It's just the history of the way things came up and greater hardship in the pioneering ethos or whatever it was, when I was young, nobody complained about executive compensation.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Now frankly, everybody in the investment world thinks in many cases, executive compensation has gotten too high. Take General Electric in its heyday. Think of all the big compensation packages. They pay -- then think of how they were phoning up the earnings and so forth to pay for it. It was disgusting.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“And of course, if that kind of c*** creeps in everywhere in our civilization, the civilization will perish. We need more honor, not less. And -- but I have no suggestion as to how to fix the places where it's excessive. It's a difficult issue, really difficult.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, I don't use Twitter. So I'm not a good judge on that subject. And my policy and Elon Musk is -- he's a very talented man but also peculiar and so I. I don't buy them, and I don't sell them short. I just say, "well, he's a very usual person."”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Oh, it's unbelievable. Who else has done it except BYD? It just shows how tough capitalism is. Even if you're a genius like Musk is in some ways, there's always some little BYD that comes out and does better. Capitalism is not easy.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, I wouldn't doubt it myself. But it's in the nature of things that not every court is going to be right in every verdict for every judgment. And I do think that allowing -- again, you raised a very tough subject. You will get occasional verdicts that are just totally outrageous, and that's inevitable. And of course, that's what appellate courts are for, but sometimes the appellate courts are very sympathetic with crazy verdicts. Again, I can't fix everything that's wrong with you in life, including a few crazy verdicts.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Yes, sure.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, like every other human being on earth, some deals work out better than others for 3G. Yes. They would love to have a way of going back and turning all their bad deals into good deals. Berkshire would like to have the same option. We don't get it either. Average out, 3G did pretty well. But recently, they've had some -- their approach hasn't worked as well in recent years as would be ideal. Again, well coming to human life, it isn't so damn easy.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“We've never owned Disney shares.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Your own, no. But Disney is an interesting case. Practically every business that Disney has, has gotten tougher than it used to be. Again, welcome to human life. Think about Disney once owned the world. Lion King was running a long run on the Theater District of New York. They went from triumph to triumph, marching, marching, marching. All of a sudden, practically every front, it's more difficult. This is what happened. Imagine Kodak, which totally dominated photography in the world, and they invented this new technology, Kodak wiped out its common shareholders.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“No, no. I think Disney has a lot of assets in it. But it's unpleasant to have something -- how would you like running the sports, ESPN now at Disney compared to its heyday? It's going to be way harder for them.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Movies look to me like it's going to be a blood bath, too. So it's not a bed easy. It was easy in the heyday of ESPN, Disney made nothing but money out of ESPN. It was a total gold mine.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“I live within a few blocks of Paramount Studios. And I don't even know anybody at Paramount. I have avoided the movies like the plague as an investor all my life. I've never made an investment in the movie business in any way, shape, manner or form. It always gives you [indiscernible]. I don't like the unions. I don't like the crazy agents. I don't like the crazy lawyers. I don't like the crazy movie stars. I don't like the people who sell dope to the musicians. Everything about it is not my culture. I like those old English actors who became old. I grew up with them. And -- but basically, movies is not my scene. So I avoided it. It's always been very hard for the people to put up the money. It may be a very good place to make a living as an actor or a writer or something or a musician. But it's a hard place to make money if you're an investor.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“As I said, he's a smart man sometimes. Sometimes, like all the rest of us.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, everybody makes mistakes. And one of the -- actually one of the most interesting things that happened in my lifetime. It was the rise of IBM and the fall of IBM. IBM was the most admired company in America for most of my young life. They just marched from triumph to triumph to triumph. And in the last 10 or 15 years, they've slipped. They're falling back in relation to other people in their field. It's the Apples and the Googles and so forth came ahead, IBM just -- they kind of missed the boat. I think that's almost inevitable. Kodak missed the boat of change to digital photography, too. And I've heard Bill Gates say that it's almost a rule of a really disruptive technology comes along, the incumbent screw up their reaction to it. It's hard to change your ways when they've been successful for a long time and go into a totally different way of behaving and thinking.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Where we're sitting with Daily Journal Corporation, we're adapting to the new world -- think how different it is publishing in newspaper and being a -- inventing software records to automate. These are 2 radically different businesses.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“We have what?”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, I suppose we've got some, sure. Of course, you're going to have a certain amount of animosity one group towards another. In the whole history of the human race, we've had a certain amount of that. I think it's gotten way better in my lifetime, however. I would argue that racism has gone down a lot.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, I'm not sure I am any good answering that kind of a question.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“I don't think I know particularly how well. I think there's a good chance that climate change will be less important than all the people think. That doesn't mean it will be unimportant, but I think it won't be an absolute full-blown horror capacity with no possibility to adjust.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“No, that's all right.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, that's a good question because it's a big question. And if you have good judgment, your life will work a lot better than if you have bad judgment. And you get good judgment gradually over time, partly by making bad judgments and having them work out poorly. So my counsel has always been to start trying to be better and keep doing -- keep trying to improve all your life, and you got about half a chance. If you don't do that, you got like no chance. And so it's -- I used to say I could only teach what the other person almost knows. Then I can just throw him over of the brink when he's hanging on the edge. But if the guy is not within miles of even starting, I never make any public. I never succeed. So in removing idiocy, I have a 100% [indiscernible]. I've never succeeded.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“There's an old saying, dumb is forever.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, yes, you climb as hard as you can by just advancing 1 inch at a time. That's the secret of life. And now there's always somebody who's a little nuts and succeeds. But that's -- but for every guy who succeeds, there's 1,000 failures.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, of course. Who in the hell in his right mind would like going around making a lot of commitments and failing time after time after time of doing what you promised to do? Everybody would hate you, right? There's no more guaranteed way to maybe we'll hate you than the fail in their reasonable expectations. So of course, you want to live a life where, by and large, you're meeting reasonable expectations of other people. That's what civilization requires of all of us.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, that is a very good question. And I think having a big position in the Permian Basin through those 2 companies, it's likely to be a pretty good long-term hold. So I like that aspect of that position. And Ben Graham used to say, "If it's a good investment, it may be a good speculation." And I think that's generally true. But I don't do those short- term speculations, at least not very often. And -- but I like the big position that Berkshire has in the Permian through those 2. I kind of admire both places a lot. Both Occidental and Chevron are very admirable places. And by the way, Oxy didn't start like that. If you go back 30, 40 years, Oxy was owned by a crook. And now it's evolved in a wonderful place, but it started as a sleazebag.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“A man named Armand Hammer. Before your time, Becky. You're too young.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Yes. Yes. Anyway.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Remember, a lot of Ben Graham's rise in life was during a period when there was plenty of low-hanging fruit among mediocre businesses that are way too cheap. And he was relatively rare in doing his hunting in that garden. And so he made a pretty good living for himself buying these. What happened is that low-hanging fruit eventually went away as the aftermath of The Great Depression got away. And then Graham actually made more than half of all the money he made in his life out of one stock, and that stock was GEICO, which was a great business. So if you actually look at the great man's own life, you see that what he taught wasn't the way he got rich himself. And by the way, he told that story on himself late in life. He carefully computed how much he made in GEICO compared to everything he had ever done in his previous life. And so you can argue Ben Graham himself woke up once.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, because it's so obvious, and I'm going to -- doing things that are obvious. Of course, it was obvious if you wanted to have good result, you got to do a great company. I recognize that greatness was good. Big deal. Charlie Munger, genius, recognizes greatness is good. Of course, greatness is good.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“No, I don't think we're the same. I think we like the business great first. And then second, we want great manager. But we have not made a huge success by investing in great managers to take over lousy businesses. That is not the way we rose.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“If you're a lousy manager, you really, really need a great business.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Sometimes. Coca-Cola was run for years by a man with a very severe mental impairment. And the director says that somebody was drunk [indiscernible] year after year. Now that's my idea of a wonderful business that you can be mentally defective and run it pretty well. That was Coca-Cola in its heyday.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, 25 years.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, it helps to have somebody that says, "Look into a good position." So a great business that would be what you'd like and of course, you'd like a great management, too. And occasionally, we've had both the ride together for a long, long period. And -- but of course, everybody is looking for the same thing.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“And the trouble with it is you will find when you get into those good businesses, places picked over and analyzed as American stocks are. And you can imagine the amount of time spent thinking about American stocks. And you will find by and large in America, but it's really a great business. It's at least 25x earnings, and maybe 30 or 35 or something. So that makes it much harder, of course, because if something goes wrong, you can lose a lot of your investment.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“And of course, that's what makes investment so difficult is the fact that the good businesses don't stay cheap. You have got to somehow recognize a good business before it's recognizable as a good business. That's very hard to do.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Some people get good at it, but not many. I don't think I would want 95% of the people who are America's professional asset managers, I wouldn't want working for me.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“I think it's that hard. I think you need to be in the top 5% to have a reasonable chance. It's very difficult. Now it's not difficult as by an index and selling your asset. That's the great default position.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“And by the way, that's -- if you said -- look at the Daily Journal Corporation. We just put in a 401(k) plan. What are the investment options for the people at work? 0. It's all index funds.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“What percentage of American 401(k)s have our plan, index funds required? About 0. Am I right or am I wrong? Of course, I'm right. It's a logical thing to do.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Sometimes, sometimes. Being worth [ 2 and 20 ], I would say that is way less than 5%. Demand is worth [ 2 and 20 ]. That is really -- that's getting very rare indeed, particularly under modern conditions where every niche is occupied. It's -- you really -- if you take early-stage venture capital like Sequoia does, how many people have a Sequoia-like record? I don't think there's 1 in 100 that has a Sequoia-type record.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“And by the way, even Sequoia makes an occasional mistake. Everybody does.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Go ahead.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, the idea that I destroyed that it wasn't a good idea. It was a bad idea. When the Internet came in, I got overcharmed by the people who are leading in the online retailing. And I didn't realize it's still retailing. It may be online retailing, but -- it's also still retailing. And I just -- I got a little out of focus and that let me overestimate the future returns from Alibaba. And so I have never gotten [indiscernible] mistakes.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“[Indiscernible] my own knows and my own mistakes, I say I'm doing now because I think it's good for myself.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Yes. When somebody asked for and what happened their experiment with JPMorgan Chase and Amazon and so forth. And they were going to change. They improve the -- what was wrong with the American medicine and its cost. And when they gave that up as a total failure, Warren just said the tapeworm won, and that's what happens. I think the American system is cost way too much. Can you hear me?”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, I vary a little in my time, but I'm pretty regular. And I'm a pretty good sleeper in my old age. So I'm very lucky in that respect. And...”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“You got sound again.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Modern technology.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, I think I'll duck that one. I don't want to get into the presidential politics.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“He was the best writer -- and he was the best writer in his nation and also the best scientist and also the best inventor. [indiscernible] that ever happen again. Yes, always other things, yes.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“And he played 4 different musical instruments. If there is anything else.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“One of which he invented. One of which he invented. The glass thing that [indiscernible] -- they still play it occasionally.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“But he actually played on 4 different instruments.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“No, he was a very amazing person. Of course, the country was glad. We were lucky to have him.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, they're creating an online edition.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“By the way, the Chinese edition sold way more than the one in the United States.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“That's not the sole reason.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, a rich old man looks like Confucius. In their system, there's nothing better than a rich old man.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“I'm still doing the -- now that I'm old, I buy these apartment houses, it gives me something to do. And [Indiscernible] everybody else runs them. Everybody else is trying to show high income, so they can have high distributions. We're trying to find ways to intelligently spend money to make them better. And of course, our apartments do better than other people do because the man who runs them does it so well for me. The man, there are 2 young men that do it with me. And -- but it's all deferred gratification. We're looking for opportunities to defer other people are looking for ways to enjoy. It's a different way of going at life.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“You get more enjoyment in life doing it my way than theirs?”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“No, I learned this trick early. And we've done that experiment with 2 marshmallows with little kids. [indiscernible] And they've done watch them how they work out in life by now. And the delayed -- the little kids were good at deferring the marshmallow, also the people that succeed in life. It's kind of sad that so much is inborn, so to speak. But you can learn to some extent, too.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“I was very lucky, I just naturally took the deferred gratification very early in life. And of course, it's helped me ever since.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, Warren is not only a very good thinker and a good learner, which is important, but Warren has a big strong fiduciary gene. He cares about what happens to the shareholders. Warren and I were lucky in that the early shareholders that really trusted us, we were young and didn't have a reputations and so on. And naturally, we feel an exceptional loyalty to those people. And of course, naturally, they're all dead now. We're still loyal to them. Warren and I still care what happens to the Berkshire shareholders, a lot. And I think that helps us. I think that it helps if you're good at loyalty. Go ahead Becky.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“In my own life, I'm a big self-insured and so is Warren. It's ridiculous for me to carry fire insurance on my house because I could easily rebuild a house if burned down. So why would I want to bother fooling around with the claims process and all kinds of things. So if insurance -- you should insure against things you can't afford to pay for yourself. But if you can afford to take the bumps, so unusual expense coming along doesn't really hurt you that much. Why would you want to fool around with some insurance company. If your house burned down, I would just write a check and rebuild it. And all intelligent people do that way. I don't say all, but -- maybe I should say, all intelligent people should do it my way. There should be way more self-insurance in life. There's a lot of waste. You're paying when you buy insurance for the other fellows frauds, and there's a lot of fraud in life. And you can afford to take the risk yourself and not fool around with claims and this and that and commissions and time. Of course, you self insure, it's simpler and so forth. Think of what I've saved in my life. I narrowed it. I don't care. I never carried - - never. I think once -- but with one exception, I never carried collision insurance on a car. And once I got rich, I stopped carrying fire insurance on houses. I just self insure.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“That is the right way to do it. What?”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Well, but I'm not -- I'd rather tell the way it is. And tell it in a way that helps Berkshire. I'm not going to tell it differently than I think it really is just because it's better for Berkshire. Even though it's bad for Berkshire, I want to tell you if you can afford to self-insure, self-insure.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“That is different -- your insurer pays the doctor in the hospital is a small fraction of what you pay. So that's a different kind of calculus. Everything in medicine is -- the cost of American medical care and the medical insurance, it's a disgrace. If you go to Singapore, you will find that they do the whole thing better than we do, and it cost 20% of what we pay.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“And by the way, I have no idea of how they get from where we are to where [indiscernible] is because all the people are getting all that extra money, fight like fierce tigers to hold on to it. And they control boards and cities and states and every other -- so I don't know how to fix the cost in American health care. They're totally out of control and I weren't trying to fix it with Amazon, all that stuff. He failed too. Everybody's failed. Everybody in America has a marvelous record failing in handling our cost of medicines.”

Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 — Munger Q&A

“Yes. Greg is just sensational at being a business leader, both as a thinker and as a doer. And he's also sensationally good at smoothly getting things done through other people. So he's a very remarkable human being, and Berkshire is very lucky to have him. And he's also a tremendous learning machine. You can argue that he's just as good as Warren in learning all kinds of things. And one of the interesting things about Greg is there are some things he's better at than Warren is, and Warren knows that and he just keeps dumping on the Greg. Everything that Greg can do better, and it's a lot. And so the system at Berkshire is working pretty down well. We're very lucky to have a 92-year-old this good shape is [indiscernible]. And we're very lucky to have us a chief executive like Greg. Greg is very remarkable. Greg is trusted by insurance -- by utility regulators and rightly so. He is trying to run all those utilities as if he were the regulator. How many people think that way? But it's a smart way to think.”