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Charlie Munger may be best known as Berkshire Hathaway's vice chairman, Warren Buffett's best friend, confidant and business partner for six and a half decades. But Munger was also a giant in his own right. He was a scold of corporate excess and greed. He preached to a large flock of devout followers about how to get along in investing and in life.
A Renaissance man, Munger modeled himself after none other than Benjamin Franklin. He studied mathematics, physics, meteorology, and engineering, and that was all before he attended Harvard Law School. He trained himself in subjects like psychology and architecture. Charlie passed away at the age of 99. That was just one month shy of his 100th birthday, and it was two weeks after our last interview with him.
I'm Becky Quick of CNBC, co-host of Squawk Box. This is Charlie Munger, a life of wit and wisdom. 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. What was interesting about Berkshire's history is what turned the first $300 million of Berkshire net worth into the first $3 billion of Berkshire net worth. Now, some people have now gone back and checked all their figures, but some people figured it out. But the results we got in turning $300 million into $3 billion,
really quickly, helped us a lot. What was it? It was blue chips, stamps, and See's candy, and the Buffalo News newspaper, and the early insurance operations under R.G.J. when he came to us. Everything worked at once. We made these unholy profits.
out of these fiddling businesses that weren't that good. Warren has said that his worst trade ever was buying Berkshire Hathaway itself, the mills. Yeah, sure. What was your worst trade? Well, I think 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 the Chinese government. I had some bad, everybody has some bad ones. You have an off day, the greatest tennis player goes out there someday to the center court and has a bad day. It happens. I think people learn more from their mistakes sometimes than their successes. Yeah, and their bad days even. Yes.
But it's knowing you're going to have a very bad day. Do not live your life in such a fashion that a bad day can kill you. Which means what when it comes to investing? Making sure you don't use leverage? Well, they aim for the fences. It's like a hitter at baseball who tries to hit a home run on every pitch. The great home hitters do not remotely swing at every pitch. It's happily good. They wait for one that they can really handle.
Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger were friends and business partners going all the way back to the 1950s. When I first met Warren Buffett, he kept talking about this guy, his partner, Charlie Munger. And it wasn't until later that I realized it was his business partner. You know, this is something that he spoke so endearingly about Charlie Munger. He talked about their friendship.
Back in May of 2021, I sat down with the two of them in Los Angeles and talked about how the two of them first met. There was a doctor couple, very prominent in Omaha, and his name was Eddie Davis. Her name was Dorothy Davis. And it was Mrs. Davis that called me naturally. She did everything. She said, we've heard that you manage money and
And we'd be kind of interested in listening to your story about how you do it and what we might do with you. So I went over and I talked to him and I was all full of myself. I couldn't talk fast enough about stocks in those days. And Dorothy Davis...
Very smart. And she would listen to every word. And the doctor was kind of over in the corner, smiting a yo-yo or something. I'd pay much attention. And the wife looked over at the doctor and he said, I'm going to give him $100,000. And I was managing about $500 at the time. So it was a big deal. And in a very nice way, I said, Dr. Davis, I said,
you know you really haven't been paying attention to what i've been saying everything i i kind of like to know why you're giving me this hundred now so i'm much more modest than that way edged into it and uh dr davis looked at me and he said well he says you remind me of charlie munger
And I said, "Well, I don't know who Charlie Mugger is, but I like him." So Charlie, in 1959, his dad died and he came back to Omaha. His mother lived there. And the Davises really got us together. And so they arranged a dinner. About five minutes into it, Charlie was sort of rolling on the floor laughing at his own jokes, which is exactly the same thing I did. So I thought, "I'm not going to find another guy like this." And we just hit it off.
Charlie, what did they first tell you about Warren? How did they describe him to you? Well, the Davises were like a second set of parents to me. There were two sets of three children. My father's best friend was Eddie Davis. My mother's best friend was Mrs. Davis. I lived in that house back and forth as though it were an alderman house of the mongers. And Mrs. Davis gave me the honor of switching my legs when I misbehaved, just as if I were one of her own. laughter
He probably gave her plenty of clothes. Anything the Davises asked me to do, I was going to do. What did you think of Warren when you first met him? We got along fine. Oh, well. Both of our wives thought, my God, another one. What I like about Warren is the irreverence. We don't have automatic reverence for the pompous heads of all civilizations.
Is that something that came with age, or you guys were born with that? We were kind of always the way. We were a little more extreme. I've learned to behave a little bit better. Charlie and me haven't learned to behave much better.
Charlie was a teacher. He thought the best way to learn things was through the use of storytelling. And boy, did he know how to tell a story. Part of the advice that you give people in life is pretty basic stuff. But if you follow it, it's really excellent advice. I think your first one is, is have low expectations. The second one is have a good sense of humor. And the third one is surround yourself with love of friends and family, obviously.
Yeah, sure. It's simple. I have a hard time thinking of a time when you set your expectations low, though. Yeah, well, I did. How so? Well, let me give you an example. It's perfect. Here I am, a little boy growing up in Omaha, and my father...
One of my mother's best friends is living two blocks away, and he has two sons, and I'm right in the middle of the age of his two sons. And I'm a little older than one and a little younger than the other. And Eddie Dreyfuss Jr. is sort of a mechanical genius. He can take anything apart quickly and put it right together and perfectly. And he also reads books all the time, and that's probably all he ever does is sit around reading books.
He was a very bookish little genius with vast mechanical ability. And Eddie Davis Sr., his father, was the son of the leading mathematics professor at the University of Nebraska. And he didn't have any money. In those days, he had a huge family. It was very difficult supporting them on a professor's income. And he went to all kinds of stratagems.
He'd make his own raincoat out of a piece of oilcloth to save the money of buying a raincoat and so on. And nobody else did that, even by the standards of the '30s. But that's the way he did it. But he was a very talented man who wrote math textbooks and so on. And Dr. Davis had enormous mechanical ability as well as enormous mental ability and being physically dexterous.
He could do anything. He saw things in three dimensions. It was quite obvious that anything required mechanical ability.
I would not be as good as the two Davises. And so I decided to stay the hell out of businesses where I would compete with people like Eddie Davis Jr. and Eddie Davis Sr. in their strong suit. Knowing your competencies. Knowing your circle of competency, right. And that kept me away from those businesses, totally.
But part of your advice in life, I think, is to understand that change comes with life and adapt to it. And it's something I think about a lot in my own struggles with life. Not everybody knows that. Yeah, but I think about that a lot in struggles with life. Just don't take it into account. Think about how your life would have worked out if you hadn't been a good-looking woman with a good head. There turned out to be a hell of a market for that when we had modern TV broadcasting. And...
If you had just gone up a little earlier, nobody would have given a damn that you were good looking or having a good head. We'll take fortune when we can get it, right? We'll take fortune and luck when we can get it. You dealt the hand you were dealt, and you lived in the era in which you were born, and nobody gave you any option to do anything else. It worked well for you, and it worked well for me, and we ought to be pretty damn pleased with ourselves. But I'm not all that pleased.
I could have done a lot better if I had been a little smarter, a little clearer. What are you talking about? You've had success in everything you've done in life. What would you like to do differently? I might have had multiple trillions instead of multiple billions.
Do you sit around thinking about this? Yes, I do think about it. Yes, I think a lot about what I nearly missed by being just not quite smart enough or hard-working enough. What would you have changed? If you could go back and look at the last 100 years? Of course, it would be a cinch to go back and do it, knowing what was going to happen now. I would be the richest man on earth. Well, what did you miss? Something where you zig-zagged? Well, I would have started earlier, for one thing.
And I would have compounded longer, and I would have compounded better. So saved even more. And of course, I would have ended up richer. I was going to live to be 100 years old. And I constantly am aware of the facts that...
I basically screwed up. Given the hand I dealt, I could have done a lot better, quite easily done a lot better. But you are not somebody who spends a lot of money on yourself. We're sitting here in a beautiful house, but this is a house that you lived in for 70 years. I know. You could have moved and spent more. Warren's lived in his house for about 60 years. We're similar. But you see, we're both smart enough to have watched our friends who got rich build these really fancy houses. And I would say in practically every case,
They make the person's life happening not happier. How so? Having a basic house really helps you. Having a really fancy house that's good for entertaining a hundred people at once is a very expensive thing to do. And it doesn't do you that much good. I think one of the things you've said along the years, at least this is what I've been told, is that it's not staying rich that's difficult. It's staying sane. Yeah, of course. What happens? Well, most people go a little crazy in some way or another.
Charlie, one of my favorite lines from you is you want to hire the guy with the IQ of 130 that thinks it's 120 and the guy with an IQ of 150 who thinks it's 170 will just kill you. You must be thinking about Elon Musk. Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller were the richest people in the world when you were born in 1924. Today it's Elon Musk. I don't regard Elon Musk as truly that rich because I don't think it's sure that everything he's working on can work.
I think he can get his ass handled to him in all those. I would not invest in all of this myself. But you've been impressed by what he's built. Yes. Well, who cannot? Again, that's another lesson. What is the lesson?
of Elon Musk. Somebody who has a perfectly ridiculous amount of money 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. 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 it three times. Maybe he's got six more in him. I don't know. I put Elon Musk in a pile. I never bet against him and I never bet with him. I mean, that's a lot of your life. A lot of your life and advice is- Avoiding traps. Invert, invert, and try and figure out where you don't want to be. Yes, and then avoid it. 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 have become alcoholics. It was too dangerous. They just don't get near it if it takes that many fine people into deep trouble. I bumped into a lot of different people. And I noticed as I got older and older that all the people that had 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, how will this? People have lured me into a goddamn thing. You've got to get nauseated by learning to do it. And I said, I'm not interested enough in going through a lot of nausea.
that I wanted to smoke, so I just didn't smoke. And you did drink from time to time, right? Yeah, sure. But I didn't, again, I was, and I even drank to excess a few times. But I was always, there were enough alcoholics and near alcoholics in my own family to make me worry about liquor. Yeah. I was always very cautious about drinking liquor. Now, I did occasionally get drunk and throw up. That gave me the nausea which enabled me to give up liquor.
Do you still, I mean, living to 100, everybody wants to know what's the secret. What is the secret for you? 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. You teach me the wrong way to do something else, I will avoid it.
And of course I avoid it a lot because I'm so cautious. But you do things you like, like you'll eat peanut brittle or... Yes, it doesn't matter that much. I drink that coke. I'm sure that shortens my life a little. But I don't give a damn if the last week of lying there unconscious 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. Yeah, they've got a family full of Parkinson's. And of course, I watched my mother and my sister die of Parkinson's disease. And so I'm familiar with that one. That's a very unpleasant thing. I do not like the last month of Parkinson's disease. I've seen it up close.
It's no fun for the people in it. It's no fun for the people around them. It's no fun at all. And that code may be helping me skip. Who knows? It'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 Valley types. Well, but that was crazy. You got to remember the practice of medicine in my father's boyhood.
was a charlatan's profession. People learned to make a living at it and they gradually learned a few things they could do to help the patients. But basically they did a lot of nonsensical things. When I was a lot younger, there were ads in the newspaper for the high colonic. What the hell is a high colonic? It's an enema.
And the people, my ads were full of people who were better than us. We give the best damn high colonic in our city. I didn't want to go down high colonic, but a lot of people did. It would make them live longer. So you made it to 100 without one? Yes. No high colonic. I had a few animals in my life, but I never had it.
I never raised one's dignity by causing it a high colonic instead of an animal. But 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. Yes. Avoid crazy at all costs. Crazy is way more common than you think. It's easy to slip into crazy. Just avoid it, avoid it, avoid it. Of course, of course, of course.
Stay tuned for more of my final interview with Charlie Munger. He spent decades as the right-hand man and confidant of Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett. We were given as much longer time to run than most people because something kept us alive into our 90s. And some of his favorite stocks. This year he'll probably sell two billion automobiles at huge profits for automobile. Mouthwatering, delicious profits for auto. It's a huge stunt.
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Welcome back. I'm Becky Quick, and this is Charlie Munger, A Life of Wit and Wisdom. As a little boy, I carried more money than all the other little boys. When I used to shoot agates in the schoolyard to make money playing competitive agates. Marbles? I made sure, you marbles. But agates were the most valuable marble. And I never wanted to lose my good, valuable collection. You know, some guy was more coordinated than I was at shooting marbles.
So I would never play for stakes unless I could play better than the other boy. That's kind of been a habit you've made throughout life. You don't play poker with someone you're going to lose with. Exactly. I didn't always arrange the circumstances. I just fell into them very quickly. But I got to play with competitors who were dumb calls. People who weren't assessing the odds quite the same way? No. A lot of what you do, though, also is picking your shots. I mean, I think you call it sit-on-your-ass investing.
Where you wait for the big fat pitches to come in, you don't do a lot over time because you don't want taxes to whittle down or anything else along the way. No. It's fairly obvious that every intelligent person ought to do that. A lot of the intelligent people have figured it out, 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 investments held for a long time.
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 something. I saw some people who had gotten rich by holding a few good things. So you think it's harder to make money now? Well, that's a very interesting question, and it's a very important question. 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. By the way, Graham was invited into three different economic departments at Columbia on the full tenure track and turned around. He was that good at literature and math and so forth, both which is rare. What Ben Graham did that was so interesting is that he taught that you should find a few good things and stay with them for a very long time.
But a long time to him was a few years. It wasn't a few decades. He did that for like 40 or 50 years in 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. 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.
Of course, as everybody crowded in trying to be a little bit Graham, it got more and more competitive. Well, your upgrade on that was to just look for good businesses. I saw immediately that Graham was wrong. Right. You looked for- The real money was in the really great companies, which carried you up and up and up and up and up. Whoever, but I did not-
really think that we'd ever have one, so many hundreds of billions in Berkshire. I did not anticipate when Warren and I were starting with our little piddly start that we'd ever get to 100 billion. What led to that success? 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 as much longer time to run than most people because something kept us alive into our 90s.
It gave us a long track from our little fiddling start all the way to the '90s. Those are the two things that really happened. Of course, we wised up over time. We got into better and better companies. We understood more and more of the bad things that could happen, how easy they could creep in. We avoided them even more assiduously when we were older than we did when we were young. It all worked.
I think back in 2015 for the 50th anniversary of Berkshire, you wrote in the shareholders letter that among many other things, you had a $60 billion pile of cash at that point. You thought that
that pile of cash would decline over time because you'd be able to buy more and more things. Now you've got almost $160 billion in cash. Is there an opportunity for a really big purchase with that? And do you think you'll see one? Well, of course, there's an opportunity for a purchase a lot bigger that people can make who don't have $160. We have $160 billion in cash, plus a great credit rating we deserve.
And who in the hell has that? Not very many. Yes, but what it's going to be, I can't tell you. It can't be anything too small because it doesn't matter how good it is, we're of a size now where too small just doesn't move the needle very much. So we need something big to come along and use up all our cash and some borrowing. But who's more likely to find something than a guy who has $160 billion in cash
plus a long history of buying bargains. I don't think it's hopeless. It may have to be done by some different people. You know that next time we may not be able just to squeeze a little more lemon juice out of the old lemons. But who can make them better than somebody that has watched the early process all through all those years?
and seeing how well it works, and who starts with a little legacy of $160 million of cash. So you're talking about Greg Abel, Ajit Jain, Ted and Todd. Yes, or somebody not yet identified. 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. And you figure out what the hell he really did.
which of course, somebody like Warren and me, we just automatically do it. He concentrated 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 at basketball because
You identified your best player and concentrated so much of the playing time on your best player, and more playing creates better, better, better. You learn by playing. They concentrated all this playing time on his best players. 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 where 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. It's somebody who does it a lot and has a natural attitude for it who's the outlier, who gets the big results. That's what happens in the investment world. Just a few outliers make money. Now, we've also created a whole lot of people who get the reputation of being geniuses, who run venture capital funds and so forth.
and who do pretty well for themselves because they get paid so outlandishly. The people who stumbled into Sequoia in the right year were different. They got a long, long run. When Sequoia didn't try and grow, 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 damn hard. Now everybody thinks if they sort of copy the method, they'll get the result. They're going to get lousy results, not wooden results. You talked about some of the joy you found with some of the investments Berkshire's made along the way. I think Washington Post was a great one. 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. Besides the Washington Post, though, which is one you mentioned in a 1995 speech as being one of the best investments ever, what other investments have been some of your favorites? I'm thinking of maybe a BYD or a Costco. Well, I've offered favorites, but again, BYD is a good lesson. I didn't find BYD. Leeloo found BYD. 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, we could see two things about Wenchuan Fu. One, he worked 70 hours a week, and the other was he was a genius. And of course the idea of having somebody who was a genius and had all this mechanical aptitude that Warren and I lacked was interesting, at least to me. So I was willing to take what was piddling money by Munger standards
and have some of it invested by Lui Li Liu. But then he came to me and said, "Wan Shunfu wants to buy a bankrupt auto plant in China." God, this is horrible news. It's a really dumb idea. Who the hell has ever succeeded in creating a new auto company in competition with older companies that are as admirable as Toyota and so forth and 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 Ban Jun-Fu 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. Li Lu and I share the distinction.
I'm urging him not to do it. Thank God he didn't listen to you. Well, he didn't. That's what geniuses do. They don't listen. We'll take a quick break from Charlie Munger, A Life of Wit and Wisdom. Stay tuned.
This episode is brought to you by Schwab Market Update, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Join host Keith Lansford for this information-packed daily market preview delivered in 10 minutes or less, including projected stock updates, monetary policy decisions, and key results and statistics that may impact your trading. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com slash market update podcast or find Schwab Market Update wherever you get your podcasts.
To realize the future America needs, we understand what's needed from us to face each threat head on. We've earned our place in the fight for our nation's future. We are Marines. We were made for this. This is Charlie Munger, A Life of Wit and Wisdom, a special audio presentation of the Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman's final interview. ♪
I mean, Charlie, people probably look at you and think you're incredibly wealthy. You've had all these great opportunities and things that have happened in your life, but you've struggled too. 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. Well, we all know how to get through them. The great philosophers of realism are also the great philosophers
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 bring back 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 soldiering, go ahead and cry away. But you have to
You can't quit. You can 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 childhood leukemia was 100%. That's gone away now. 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. What mankind did, what mankind's civilization did was soldier through those tough years that took away my cousin Tommy from meningitis and then and took away my son, my son Teddy from leukemia. Imagine pretty well fixing that disease for families who came into life later.
It's a huge achievement. You can see why I like civilization. To me, civilization is what man has done over the last two centuries. And it's been a good thing to watch. Let me just ask you, I've had people say recently that because of the multiple wars that are going on around the globe right now, if you look at Israel, if you look at Ukraine, what's happening with Russia,
People say that we are potentially in the worst of times if you look at China for the potential to take over Taiwan. It could end up blowing up human civilization, which I love so much. And naturally, I hate getting anywhere near. Imagine coming at life with a basic attitude of Grandfather Munger and Grandfather Ching. How little I want to see human civilization blown up when it's been so hard to get it where it is from where it was.
Of course, I don't want it blown up. You worry about that right now? Yes, of course I worry about it. I don't spend too much time worrying about it because if it's something I can't fix myself, I frequently put it on something I call my too hard file. Charlie, Warren Buffett has said that he could fix the budget deficit problem in Washington by simply saying that any member of Congress couldn't be eligible for reelection if the
national deficit was more than 3% of the GDP. Yes, that kind of thing has been done in some places that have gotten in trouble. It has worked. It isn't that it can't physically be done. He's certainly right about that. It can be done, or it will be done. Neither Warren voter, I can tell you. Is that the proper situation? It's just setting up the right incentives? Well, we may come to a place where we simply have to, where we mismanage the place.
where it's obviously we have to go back to something that's more like Adam Smith and just take the inequality instead 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? 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 economic order. 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." It looked like a hardship lesson, but it really was an invitation to plenty. It was a
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 wristwatch and we trade them, I may think your little medallion is worth X and you may think my little wristwatch is worth $7. And we may work out some kind of a trade. If yours is worth $1,000 and mine is worth $1,000,
We both made $1,000 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. When you got those two things, now you and I can have a simple system of exchanging
watches for medallions. A lot of companies are getting rid of mandatory retirement ages. Boards are getting rid of a lot of those age mandatory retirements. But there are questions right now about whether Joe Biden or Donald Trump are too old to be president at 81 and 77 years old. Well, I mean, everyone in America is too old to be president. It may be just too hard a job the way things have worked out. We may be
Maybe this is like my cousin's 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. You mean the age factor? No, I'm talking about the atomic warm factor. Just the idea of being president at all. Yeah, yeah. If you've got a big, ruinous smoking country, it's not much fun being president. It goes into my too hard pile. 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 today, 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, why don't you 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. And you would, too? Yeah. I'd feel it was my duty to try, too. What would be the first to go or the first to get written in? Well, there are all kinds of things. I would, well, 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 whole half professions that goes out.
Half the chiropractic profession should go out. It should not exist. Chiropractors. Chiropractors, yeah. It's horseshit. You are...
I think not just the elder statesman at Berkshire, but also the moral authority for the company. And there have been a couple of stories recently that have raised some questions, people on the outside asking if Berkshire is doing things differently. One is a ProPublica story that came out about Warren Buffett suggesting that he is trading in his own account in the past against what Berkshire has been doing or what he said publicly at Berkshire.
and that that would be hypocritical and a violation of his own internal rules at Berkshire. Well, I haven't seen the story so much as written and said nowadays. I don't make any effort to read and say it all. I don't think there's a slightest chance that Warren Boat is doing something that's deeply evil to make money for himself. He cares more about what happens at Berkshire than he cares about what happens to his own money. He's getting all his own money away. He doesn't even have it anymore.
and showing how little he thinks of it. And part of the reason he's done that is he wants to show people that the game is not a community of a lot of money. You only get a temporary possession anyway. Nobody gets to gather up all the money and put it in stacks of currency in his funeral shroud and go off to spend it in the next world. It doesn't work. There isn't any spending in the next world. Not for Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger or anybody else. So his whole life has been
of pushing away personal money. And what has come instead of personal money is a whole lot of Berkshire money, which is not that significant now that it's gone away. And to Warren Buffett, I'd say the man's a little nuts. He gave away the last hundred million he has on Earth
And having done that, they say, "Well, the dirty son of a bitch is taking advantage of Berkshire to make money." It's not a plausible argument. It's one more ridiculous thing that's said about Berkshire. That's your plan too. You've given away a lot of your money. Yeah, but not like Warren. More than half the monger money is already been passed to the descendants. So I've made exactly the opposite. It was a smaller amount of money, but I made exactly the opposite.
decision for the majority of our money. The majority of his money he gave away. Now he didn't exactly give it away. If it goes to public foundations to go on for another 100 years, that's not exactly giving it. It's not exactly like wasting it. It's having some significance. Is there anything left on your bucket list? Anything you'd like to do? Well, that's an interesting question. I am so old and weak compared to what I was when I was 96 that I
no longer want to catch a 200-pound tuna. It's just too goddamn much work to get it in. It takes too much physical strength. So I don't know why I would have paid any amount to catch a 200-pound tuna. When I was younger, I never caught one. And now I...
If you give me the opportunity, I would just decline going. I would only go out after them. There are things you give up with time. You're pretty active. You've got a busy social schedule. You're on Zoom. You have breakfasts and lunches. Well, I like it that way. That's my idea of a proper old age for me. And I didn't plan it. It just happened. And when it happened, I welcomed it. I am very good at
at recognizing unfair advantages. 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 a third wife. Too late. Why? It's too late. There are people for whom it's a necessity. They're so much more comfortable in marriage than they are outside it that they really need it to be human. It's just the way they're put together. And for such people, I recommend the...
100-year-old dating app. But you'll find that not many 100-year-olds want it. Your partnership with Nancy, your second wife. Yeah, so it was a 52-year-old marriage. It's a long marriage. And she got to live with it all the way to 86, which is a long life. And now there are some tough stretches.
But most lives have some tough stretches. And hers came very near the end. Physically? Just in terms of what she had to... Yeah, she had an unpleasant last year. Now, she didn't make it unpleasant. She soldiered through very well. But it wasn't easy. Old people affluent older people. The next generation below is still alive. And they see that...
Old people lose their balance and fall on the way to the bathroom in the night. And then they either die horribly or they break and it can't be fixed. Or they barely soldier through and maybe get 80% as well off as they were before they fell. But it's a serious thing, a big fall in the bathroom, and you're merely going to the bathroom. So everybody gets these night attendants to help with the night. Who has the money? That's the system. It's peculiar.
I never thought about it when I was young, even though I observed all this in my older friends. Charlie, I want to thank you very much for your time here today and for how generous you've been with us. Well, I'm glad to do it. I'm an accidental guru and it's partly happened because of you. And if you get some little opportunity to get some little advantage in your life because of me, why, I save more power to you. Thank you, Charlie. Thank you for everything.
The honor has been all mine. It's certainly been a privilege. Charlie Munger was an amazing man, and getting to know him is one of the highlights of my life. I want to thank you all for listening to our special expanded audio presentation of Charlie Munger, A Life of Wit and Wisdom. This was one of his last interviews. Check out our episode notes for links to further reading about Charlie Munger and his century of life. What a phenomenal life it's been. We'll include links to previous interviews as well.
Please take some time, check it out. Also, thank you, Charlie, for being an accidental guru and for being my friend. Well, Charlie, thank you again for being so gracious with your time. Well, I'm delighted, Becky. Our lives overlap peculiarly, which is all right. I'm lucky for it. Well, we've both been quite lucky. But that was inevitable. People are successful when they're lucky. Yeah.
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