Date: 2024-05-26 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00026048
FINANCE
BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY
Charlie Munger ... Last Interview:
BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY
Charlie Munger ... Last Interview:
Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOJ8pCCN6rs
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
The heading references the valuation of Berkshire Hathaway at $785 billion ... but I am confused. What does that 'number' really mean?
Frankly ... the number has no tangible meaning other than. perhaps, bigger is better.
Charlie Munger died at age 99 ... part of the Buffett world.
Peter Burgess
Buffett Online
Dec 1, 2023
16.9K subscribers ... 81,301 views ... 1.5K likes
#Geico #CharlieMunger #AmericanExpress
(November 29, 2023) Berkshire Hathaway, valued at over $785 billion, has surpassed expectations, exceeding the late Charlie Munger's projections. Munger, in his final interview, expressed awe at the company's growth, citing their conservative approach and prolonged lifespan as key factors. Notably, Berkshire's major investments include Apple, American Express, BNSF, Geico, and See's Candies.
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Transcript Intro 0:00 old of corporate excess and greed who preached to a large flock of devout followers about how to get along in 0:06 investing and in life a renaissance man Munger modeled himself after none other 0:11 than Benjamin Franklin he studied mathematics physics meteorology and Engineering all before attending Harvard 0:18 Law School he trained himself in subjects as diverse as psychology and architecture Munger passed away at the 0:25 age of 99 just one month shy of his H 100th birthday and two weeks after our 0:30 last interview with him tonight we bring you a look back at the wit and wisdom of 0:36 Charlie Munger certainly A peculiar example of one life it's interesting 0:42 that a man who started out to be a lawyer ended up with an identity that's 0:47 more like a gurus than a lawyers I I called you a lawyer once and I think 0:52 that was the most irritated you've ever been with me um because that was how you started things but you really have 0:59 studied every field out there and tried to yeah sure to take things from different studies and different models 1:05 in life did you did you go about doing that intentionally of 1:11 course I could see the power of it when did you figure it 1:17 out well it came naturally to me 1:22 and I was what I would call naturally arrogant 1:28 and it was wasn't that good a mind you know I was in the top 1% but not no 1:35 Prodigy so I never would have succeeded in a field that required a mind to be 1:41 that of a prodigy but it was a much better mind than ordinary people had and 1:46 I recognized that quite early and I just played the hand I was still in order to 1:52 get as much Advantage as I could when did you recognize that were you a child very young 1:58 yeah I usually when I was taking courses in grade school I was often revising the 2:04 textbook and the course in my head to make it more correct cuz I realized the professor was doing it 2:10 wrong what kind of things would you recognize that they that they were doing wrong they had some crazy idea for Sigman Freud 2:19 instance my Latin teacher was a maladjusted woman who was a devote 2:25 follower of Sigman Freud and I recognized that Sigman Freud was was a horse SI when I still first 2:31 read him when I was in high school and of course it was an odd little boy whose 2:37 Latin teacher is teaching him fright but that was she was peculiar and 2:43 so was I and of course when I read I bought the complete writings of Sigman 2:49 frud from the American Library it was one big book and and and 2:55 I went through it very laboriously and I realized he was a goddamn 3:01 lunatic and so I decided I wasn't going to learn that from my Latin teacher I 3:06 had some very unusual teachers the best teacher I had in my life was Lon Fuller 3:13 but he was the best contracts teacher in any law school and contracts is the best 3:19 subject in every law school at least I think it is because it 3:26 integrates so beautifully with the new doctrine of an economics that came along 3:32 with Adam Smith and all those people you had this idea of mental models before you got to him though yes and I just Mental Models 3:39 naturally came to it and and but it was very much a un 3:44 fulles thing I was just a struck by law 3:49 Fuller Bon Fuller I have never been a struck by any other teacher in my whole 3:54 life including some gifted mathematicians and physicists who did 4:00 some remarkable things uh but Fuller really really had he really 4:07 changed my life he almost made me a law professor I considered being a law 4:13 professor but then I and I knew I'd be pretty good at 4:18 it let's talk about Benjamin Franklin yeah he's one of the framers of our Benjamin Franklin 4:24 nation he very famously gave out very and he was a prodigy and he was a prodigy and he trained himself in lots 4:29 of different um disciplin well and he self trained himself with like two years of grade school 4:35 education this is a very remarkable thing and when he found late in life 4:41 that he needed something like Al he went back and pulled down the textbook and taught himself algebra how old were you 4:48 he just he was a very much a self-educated man and that was a very 4:53 much an interesting story for that reason How could a man who taught 4:58 himself everything How could a man like that go into so many different fields and be the top guy 5:05 in the whole country and what we lucky to have him yes yeah and that's when you 5:10 started modeling yourself after some I don't know when I started modeling myself after PR but certainly tried to 5:18 model myself a little I like the mixture of financial life and regular life MH University of Michigan 5:25 you started out in college at the University of Michigan you were Young when you went there because you had ski 5:31 some time in grade school and you went for mathematics why did you choose mathematics because I get an A without 5:37 doing any work that's why I took mathematics you 5:44 did that for a couple of years yes and then World War II interrupted things you 5:51 were 17 still when decided that geology was not the proper science to handle any 5:58 war and that obviously I had to start with physics so I took physics and then 6:04 you focused on well I didn't take it very much because as soon as I mastered the first part of 6:11 physics I actually entered the airport cor as a private right and marched 6:17 around in some field in the middle of the winter and slept in a tent so Charlie you were born on the first day A Century of History 6:24 of 1924 you have seen A Century of of history and I I want do you ever stop 6:30 not only that I lived in the aftermath of a previous previous Century of 6:36 history in fact you can argue that about 90% of the 6:42 progress of man has happened in Civilization has has occurred in the 6:47 last two centuries and that I lived in the immediate aftermath of one in that 6:53 Century we figured out so very very much that was quite important as a start 7:00 if you stop to think about the technical Revolution it happened in that Century 7:07 that's when they you opened all these coal mines and created all these steam engines and and of course that what 7:13 brought the economic system up so man had enough Leisure had enough time to think when he wasn't just getting enough 7:19 food to eat so it was an amazing time to be born and he born in the place in that 7:26 Century where all the growth was going to occur and then you come along and 1924 The Last 100 Years 7:33 immediately after that my father grew up in a world where if you want to go around like in Nebraska he had to use a 7:40 horse and buggy there was no car there was no broadcasting it was it 7:45 was a very different world and what's happened over the last 100 years has 7:51 been pretty remarkable too uh yes then the 100 years I've lived has been even more remarkable that's pretty much all of 7:58 Modern Biology modern medicine 8:04 and modern industrial civilization Modern 8:10 Chemistry just imagine what the world would be like you we had photographs for 100 8:16 years before we had modern chemistry and but now it was done by a 8:22 guy was a natural very good chemist and he created a mighty company a great growth stock and so forth and it finally 8:30 wiped out the sholders in bankruptcy Eastman Kodak yes Eastman Kodak which is 8:36 an amazing story that that could happen and of 8:43 course it helped me because if somebody something is somebody as brilliant 8:50 as old Eastman and somebody who hired as much many brilliant people as old Ean 8:57 did could take the company into bankruptcy I figured that lesser people 9:03 could easily take big companies into bankruptcy eventually in spite of their best efforts what's the lesson you took 9:10 out well it was going to be very difficult to be excellent enough at anything to make any money that's the 9:17 lesson I took out of it part of the advice that you give people in life is Low Expectations 9:22 pretty basic stuff but if you follow it it's really excellent advice I think 9:27 your first one is is have low expectations the second one is have a good sense of humor and the third one is 9:34 surround yourself with the love of friends and family obviously yeah sure I have a hard time thinking of a time when 9:40 you set your expectations low though yeah well I did how so well let 9:46 me give you an example here I am little boy growing up inall and my father one of my 's best 9:55 friend is living two blocks away and he has two sons and I'm right in the middle of of the age of his two sons and Eddie 10:01 duris Jr is sort of a mechanical genius he can take anything apart quickly and 10:07 put it right together and perfectly and he also reads books all the time and that's probably all he ever does is sit 10:13 around reading books he's a very bookish little genius with vast mechanical 10:18 ability and Eddie Davis Senior his father was the son of the leading 10:25 mathematics professor at the University of Nebraska and he didn't have any money 10:31 in those days he had a huge family he could do anything he saw things in in 10:37 three dimensions and and it was quite obvious anything required mechanical ability I would not be as good as the 10:44 two davises you know I just no amount of effort or work was ever going to do it 10:49 make me into a a fly Caster like Dr Davis was or anything else didn't have 10:55 that kind of ability and so I decided to stay the hell out of businesses where I 11:02 would compete with people like Eddie Davis Jor and Eddie Davis Senior in their strong 11:09 suit knowing your competencies you knowing knowing your circle of Competency right and that kept me away 11:16 from those businesses totally but I'm not all that pleased I could have done a 11:22 lot better if I been a little smarter a little quicker what are you talking 11:27 about like you've had ESS in everything you've done in life what would you what would you like to 11:33 do I might have had multiple trillions instead of multiple billions do you sit around thinking 11:39 about this what would you have done I do think about I think about yes I think a lot about what I nearly missed by being 11:46 just not quite smart enough or hardworking enough coming up What Would You Have Changed 11:53 avoid what would you have changed if you could go back I know I would be the richest man on earth well what did you 11:59 miss what was there something where you Zig I would have started earlier for one thing and I would have compounded longer 12:06 and I would have come out it better so saved course i' be would have ended up richer I was going to live to be 100 12:12 years old and I I constantly aware of the facts that I I basically screwed up 12:20 given the hand I doubt I could have done a lot better quite easily done a lot better but you are not somebody who 12:26 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 12:32 years I know lived in his house for about 60 years we're similar and but you 12:39 see we're both smart enough to have watched our friends who got rich build 12:44 these really fancy houses and I would say in practically every case they make 12:50 the person less happy not happier how so having a basic house 12:55 really helps you having a really fancy house it's good for entertainment P 100 people at once is a very expensive thing 13:02 to do and it doesn't do you that much good I I think one of the things you've said along the years at least this is Staying sane 13:08 what I've been told is that it's not staying Rich that's difficult it's staying sane yeah of course I mean 13:14 that's a lot of your life a lot of your life and advice is avoiding DRS invert invert and try and figure out where you 13:20 don't want to be yes and then avoid it yes of course that's what everybody's 13:26 life is with any sense all the people I know and my friends now they never would 13:34 have become alcoholics it was too dangerous they would they just don't they don't they don't get near it if 13:40 it's takes that many fine people into deep trouble and I noticed as I got 13:45 older and older that all the people that had very early heart trouble the males that had 13:51 very early heart trouble had one thing in common they all smoked a lot of cigarettes so I could see 13:57 that coming fairly early and it's rather I tried to learn 14:04 to smoke so I could be a cool kid like the other kids in high school I tried to ruin my life but it no 14:11 hit me and so I said the hell was this people lered me into a goddamn thing you 14:17 got to get nauseated by learning to do it and I said I'm not interested enough in me going through a lot of nausea I 14:25 want to smoke so I just didn't smoke now you you did drink from time to time right yeah sure but I didn't again I 14:34 was and and I even drank ex a few times but I was always there were enough 14:41 alcoholics and near alcoholics in my own family to make me worry about lior and 14:48 and so I was always very cautious about drinking liquor now I did occasionally 14:53 get drunk and throw up that gave me the nausea which enabled me to give up liquor 15:00 everybody wants to know what's the secret what is the secret for you what did you cons I don't know the secret I 15:07 avoided the standard ways of failing because my game in life was always to 15:13 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 15:20 way to do something else I will avoid it and of course I have avoided a lot because I'm so 15:26 cautious but you you you do things you like like you'll eat peanut brittle or yes con doesn't matter that much okay I 15:34 drink that coke yeah I'm sure that go shortens my life a little but I don't 15:39 give a damn if the the last week of lying there unconscious goes away it's 15:44 only the good part of life I want anyway and Dad Coke may be helping me skip who 15:51 knows it's helping me skip the last month not the first month if other people want to know what the the best way to live is you would just tell them Avoid crazy 15:58 avoid void the crazy things avoid the things that take you down yes avoid crazy at all costs crazy is 16:06 way more coming than you think it's easy to slip into crazy just avoid it avoid 16:11 it avoid it I think another thing you've said is whatever you are um wealth and Wealth age make you more 16:17 age will make you more so yeah sure up next I did not anticipate one I I 16:24 carried more money than all the other little boys when I used to shoot egots in the schoolyard to make money playing 16:31 competitive agots marbles I made sure yeah marbles but agots were the most valuable marble and I never wanted to 16:39 lose my good valuable collection to you know some guy was more coordinated than 16:45 I was at shooting marbles so I would never play for Stakes unless I could play better than the other boy that's 16:52 kind of been a habit you've made throughout life you don't play poker with someone you're going to lose with exactly right I didn't know always 16:58 arrange the circumstances I just fell under them frequently but but I got to play with 17:04 competitors who are dumb CS people who weren't assessing the odds 17:10 quite the same way no no they weren't assessing the odds the way it was easy 17:15 to to assess the odds if you learn you just paid attention when the teacher was 17:21 teaching you experimentation combinations a lot of what you do though Picking your shot 17:26 also is picking your shot I mean I think you call it sit on your ass investing 17:32 yeah where you wait for the big fat pitches to come in you don't do a lot over time because that's correct so you 17:37 think it's harder to make money now well that's a very interesting question and it's a very important question and of 17:44 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 17:52 made waren so rich Ben Graham and and his colleague DOD in a damn adjunct 17:59 course at Columbia what Ben Graham did that was was so interesting is that he taught 18:09 that you should find a few good things and stay with him for a very long time 18:14 but a long time to him was a few years it wasn't a few decades and he did that 18:21 for like 40 or 50 years in a little investment partnership with incentives and so on and his 18:29 investors who are by and large not very rich did very well with him after he got 18:35 his share they got a good cut that was higher than what other people got after fees so he delivered a 18:42 valuable product 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 18:49 getting at least twice as many assets as you were paying for and he just floated 18:55 around for the best available stuff among companies good and bad yeah that was his system and he 19:03 worked for 50 years his clients had good returns well after he became so famous 19:09 partly with the help of Warren buett and Warren bu's success everybody tried to do the same thing and of course as 19:17 everybody crowded in trying to be a little B gram it got more and more 19:22 competitive and that's what's happened now and the low hanging fruit that gra 19:28 had a lot of because of the Great Depression has gone away and the if you 19:34 just try and Float from one under valued Bad Business into another and pay all 19:39 the costs forth it just doesn't work well enough for the people to actually put the money to be worth bothering with 19:47 that's the way it works now but in Graham's time it was the best way there was well your upgrade on that was to 19:54 just look for good business I saw immediately the grandma the grandma was wrong right and you look for and you had the 20:00 real money was in the really great companies right which carried you up and up and up and 20:07 up just so many hundreds of billions in birkshire I did not anticipate when 20:12 Warren and I were starting with our little plyy start that we'd ever get to 100 billion much less several hundred 20:20 billion it was an amazing occurrence what happened that you didn't anticipate What led to success 20:25 what what led to that success well we got a little less crazy than most people 20:30 a little less stupid than most people and that really helped us then in addition we were given this much longer 20:37 time to run than most people because something kept us alive in our '90s and 20:43 I gave us a long track from our little piddling start all the way to the '90s 20:50 those are the two things that really happened and of course we wised up over 20:57 time we got into better and better companies and we understood more and more of the 21:03 bad things that could happen you and how easy they could creep in and we avoid them avoided them even more ously when 21:10 we were old than we did when we were young and it all it all 21:15 worked I think back in 2015 for the 50th anniversary of birkshire you wrote um in Opportunity for a big purchase 21:22 the shareholders letter you had a $60 billion pile of cash at that point you thought that that pile of cash would 21:29 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 21:36 an opportunity for a really big purchase with that and do you think you'll see one well of course there's an 21:42 opportunity for a purchase a lot bigger that people can make who don't have as 160 we have $160 billion in Cash Plus a 21:51 great credit rating we deserve and who in the hell has that not very many 21:58 but what it's going to be I can't tell you because it doesn't matter how good it is we're of a size not we too small 22:06 just doesn't move the needle very much so we have we need something big to come 22:11 along and use up all our cash and some borrowing but who's more likely to find 22:18 something than a guy who has 160 billion in cash for a long history of buying 22:24 bargain I don't think it's hopeless it it may have to be done by some different 22:30 people you know that next time we may not be able just to squeeze a little 22:35 more lemon juice out of the old lemons we we may be able to you may have to 22:41 squeeze some new lemons meaning new people may have to make the decisions but who can make them better than 22:47 somebody that watched the early process all through all those years and 22:54 seen how well it works and who starts with a little Legacy 160 billion of cash so you're talking 23:01 about Greg Abel a Jane yes and Ted and Todd or somebody not yet 23:08 identified the main trick that bur Berkshire shows is 23:15 the power what I call the wooden effect and wooden was the most famous basketball coach of a whole era and you 23:24 figure out what the hell he really did which of course somebody like Warren and me we just automatically do it he 23:32 concentrated about 90% of the playing time in seven players and everybody else 23:38 was just a sparring partner for the people and that turned out a great 23:43 system for winning at basketball because you identified your 23:48 best player and concentrated so much of the playing time on your best player and more playing crates better better better 23:55 so he concentrated all his playing time and his best players simple idea that's what that's what burshire did you talked The joy of investing 24:01 about some of the joy you found with some of the Investments Burger's made along the way I think Washington Post 24:07 course doesn't like to happily enjoy extreme success accumulated with people 24:13 who extremely admire all that's what or and I have gotten to do well of course 24:19 that's a lot of fun what was interesting about berkshire's history is what turned 24:26 the first 300 million dollars of 24:33 Berkshire net worth into the first $3 billion of bir net worth what was it I 24:40 well it was Blue Chip Stamps and se's candy and the Buffalo News 24:47 newspaper and the early Insurance operations under a Jane when he came to 24:53 us and so it just everything worked at once 24:58 and we made these Unholy profits on out of these fiddling businesses that weren't that good and it was a very 25:06 remarkable thing and there was some luck involved Warren has said that his worst trade ever was buying Berkshire hathway 25:14 itself the Mills yeah sure what was your worst trade well I my worst trade was 25:21 buying a block for the Bunger family in Alibaba which is a pretty good company 25:27 but I think it got overhyped and Jack ma was made mistakes 25:33 in dealing with the Chinese government I had some bad everybody has some bad ones 25:38 you have an off day the greatest tennis player goes out there someday to the Center Court and has a bad day it 25:45 happens I think people learn more from their mistakes sometimes than their bad days even yes yeah but they were what 25:53 really is knowing you can have a very bad day do not live your life life in such a fashion a bad day can kill you 26:00 mhm which means what when it comes to investing making sure you don't use leverage well they aim for the fences 26:07 it's like a hitter at baseball which has to hit a home run on every pitch the 26:12 great home riters do not remotely swing at every pitch they wait for one that they can 26:18 really handle and that's what great stockers do too still ahead only Charlie let's talk How to fix bloated bureaucracies 26:27 a a little bit about bureaucracies because you have duly noted the problems with 26:35 bureaucracies where whether it be a big company whether it be the government have I ever right so how would you fix 26:41 some of the bloated bureaucracies out there let's start with the federal government that comes in my two hard 26:47 pile I can't tell you how to do that that would be really hard cuz you 26:53 got the problem a figuring it out and B getting it done and to solve both both those pop problems are really it's like 27:00 picking the high pick on Everest and saying I Walt up there in 27:07 a day you know you well you aren't going to waltz up there it takes several days 27:12 to do there was a presidential candidate who recently said that his solution for Social Security 27:18 that would just be to fire everybody in the federal government social security number ends with an odd number does that 27:25 sound like a good way to fix it no it does not it's too arbitrary it it 27:33 may be that you need it some bigger fix than that and it may be you're never going to get it too it may be that it's 27:41 just something like old age that we're never going to get rid of but you still Robinson Crusoe 27:46 a believer in the need for a government of course I'm a I'm a if you get right down 27:54 to it what I am is a lover of the progress of 28:02 civilization that turns me out oddly enough the man whose name I bear my father's 28:08 father and my father's mother both thought exactly the same way and the 28:14 great moral book they took me to church but when they really wanted to teach me 28:20 something because which turned them on it was the legend of Robinson cruso 28:26 created by devot and of course it was good for me and of course never got over it I still 28:33 I'm still following Robinson cr's method of going 28:39 out life that's what I did I I imitated Robinson croo then I was lucky with my 28:45 ancestors on the other side of the family I am very good at learning things from dead people that's what everybody 28:51 should learn and so I I had one grandfather on the other side whose life 28:57 never never overlap n but but grandfather inam just talked endlessly about the inner days how he surrounded 29:03 all these hardships and he says it looks pretty easy looking back at retrospect 29:09 but it was damn hard I want you to know and he said and interviewing my life 29:16 what you grandchilden have to realize it was his version of Robinson he taught every Grand it's when they give you a 29:23 real opportunity the world's not going to do it very often and you're only going to get three or four of these in 29:30 invitations to the F counter and when you get your invitation for God's sakes don't take us small 29:38 helping he he basically said lever up when you when you're sure you're right 29:43 and of course that's good advice but be sure you're right is what makes it 29:49 hard how can you be sure you're right yeah well but you can't that's the point 29:54 you can't do it very often just a few times in a lifetime even if you're a grandpa ham or waren buet you only get a 30:01 few trips to the Pik if you take out of Warren Buffet's 30:07 life the 10 most important trips to the pie counter the his the whole record 30:12 would look like dung we knew enough to take a good 30:18 helping we were over to trip to the pie counter now we did take way smaller 30:23 helping than we could have easily handled Berkshire could EAS leave you were twice what it is now and the extra 30:30 risk we would have taken would have been practically nothing all we had to do is a little more leverage that was easily Avoiding Potential Risk 30:37 available in hindsight you're glad you didn't just well from the potential risk 30:43 it's interesting example the reason we didn't is the idea of disappointing a 30:48 lot of people who had trusted us when we were young under a thing that left us if we 30:55 lost 3/4 of our money we were still very rich right that wasn't true of every 31:01 shareholder losing 3/4 of the money would have been a big let down so we 31:07 were very cautious in dealing with our shareholders money it weren't I had own Berkshire without any sharers that we 31:13 knew we would have made more we would used more leverage Charlie Warren Budget Deficit 31:20 Buffett has said that he could fix the budget deficit problem in Washington by 31:25 simply saying that any member of Congress couldn't be eligible for reelection if the national deficit was 31:33 more than 3% of the GDP yes that kind of thing has been done in some places that gotten enough 31:40 trouble and it has worked if it isn't it can't physically be done he certainly 31:46 read about that it can be done whether it will be done neither weren vter I can 31:51 tell you but is that the proper situation it's just setting up the right incentives to we may come to a place 31:58 where we simply have to where we mismanage to the place where it's obviously we have to go back to 32:03 something that's more like like Adam Smith and just take the 32:10 inequality instead of the poverty I like inequality a lot better than I like 32:15 poverty I mean is this modern monetary Theory that's gotten out of control at this point do you worry of course modern 32:22 monetary theory was that a level of indebtedness 32:27 which in the past would have happened only during a war mhm can now be routinely created to 32:35 avoid any kind of unpleasantness from some families getting squeezed by hardship at the very 32:41 bottom of the economic order I'm not sure the whole damn system works when some families aren't being 32:47 squeezed at the bottom of the economic order that may be our path to civilization and maybe the only one 32:54 we've got in that case we just have to be financially responsible whether it feels 33:01 good or not even whether it works well or not on a temporary basis maybe we just have to do it and 33:10 thinking about age um a lot of companies are getting rid of mandatory retirement ages boards are 33:16 getting rid of a lot of those mandatory retirements um but there are questions right now about whether Joe Biden or 33:23 Donald Trump are too old to be president at 81 and 7 7 years old well maybe true 33:29 that everyone in America is too old to be pres that maybe it may be just too 33:35 hard a job the way things the way things have worked out maybe it's just a hand too tough to play maybe you're not going 33:41 to be allowed to play it out we don't know you mean the age factor or no I'm 33:46 talking about the Atomic Warfare the Atomic Warfare just the idea of being president at all yeah yeah if you got a 33:52 big ruin of smoking country it's it's not much fun 33:58 being president so that is something that really you can say you set it aside and 34:04 it's not worth worrying about but I don't have much time on it because I can't fix it right it goes into my two 34:11 hard pile even if I had all the power I couldn't fix it up next if you Soldier Bucket List 34:18 through you can get through almost anything yeah yeah but not not like Warren more 34:26 than half the Munger money is already been pass to The Descendants so I i' I made exactly the 34:33 opposite it was a smaller amount of money but I made exactly the opposite decision for the majority of 34:39 our money the majority of his money he give away and now he didn't exactly give it away if it goes to BU foundations to 34:48 go on for another 100 years is there anything left on your bucket list anything you'd like to 34:54 do well that's an interesting question question I am so old and weak compared 35:00 to what I was when I was 96 that I no longer want to catch a 200 lb tuna 35:10 it's just too godamn much work to get it in takes too much physical strength so I don't know I would have 35:18 paid any amount to catch a 200 lb tuna when I was younger and never caught 35:25 one and now I if you give me the opportunity I would just decline going I I won't even go out 35:31 after them there are things you give up with time you're pretty active you've got a 35:37 busy social schedule you're on Zoom you have breakfasts and lunch well I like it that way yeah that's my idea of a proper 35:45 old age for me and I didn't plan it it just 35:51 happened and and when it happened I welcomed it I I am very good at 35:59 recognizing unfair advantages and I got unfair advantages 36:05 in old age the way I got unfair advantages in non- old age and when they 36:12 came I just grab them boom boom boom the one grab I never made was for a third 36:18 wife too late why it's it's a too late 36:24 there are people for whom it's a necessity they're more they're so much more 36:29 comfortable in marriage than they are outside that that they really need it to 36:35 be human it's just the way the way they're put together your partnership with Nancy uh your second wife yeah so 36:41 56 52 year old marriage yeah it's a long marriage and she got to live it the all 36:48 the way to 86 which is a long life now there are some tough 36:54 stretches but most lives have some tough stretches and hers came very near the 37:00 end I mean Charlie people probably look at you and think you're incredibly wealthy you've had all these great 37:06 opportunities and things that have happened in your life but you've struggled too um of course everybody 37:12 struggles the iron rule of life as everybody struggles I try and think back 37:17 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 37:24 through them through you the great 37:30 philosophers of realism are also the great philosophers of of what I call 37:38 soldiering through if you Soldier through you can get through almost 37:44 anything and it's your only option you can't bring back the dead you 37:50 can't cure the dying child you can't do all kinds of things you have to Soldier 37:55 through and you just somehow you Soldier through if you have to walk through the 38:00 streets crying for a few hours a day as part of the soldier go ahead and cry 38:06 away but you have to you can't squit you when you can't you can cry all right but 38:11 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 38:20 child died and but I knew I couldn't change the 38:25 Fate in those days the fatality with childood leukemia was 38:32 100% that was your son that's gone away now it's now the Cure rate is way up in the 90s and it's an amazing development 38:42 think of how much pleasure it's given me to watch The Cure rate for 38:50 leukemia what mankind did what mankind civilization did was Soldier ru those 38:56 tough years that took away my cousin Tommy from menitis and 39:03 then and took away my son Teddy from 39:09 leukemia imagine C imagine pretty well fixing that disease for for families who 39:15 came to came into life later it's a huge achievement you can see why I like 39:22 Civilization to me civilization is what man has done with the last two centuries 39:29 and it's been a good thing to watch Charlie 39:34 Warren Buffett told me that a long long time ago you told him he should live his life he should write his obituary the 39:41 way he wants it written and then live his life accordingly yeah sure I I 39:46 assume you've done the same thing for yourself well no I've written my 39:51 obituary the way I've lived my life and if you want to pay attention to what is all right with me and if they want to 39:57 ignore it that's okay with me too I'll be dead but what difference will will make it's not a bad 40:03 idea listen Warren and I both live in the same house for decade after decade 40:09 after decade all our friends get rich and build better bigger and better houses and naturally we can we both 40:16 considered bigger and better houses and I had a huge number of children so it was justifiable even and I still decided 40:24 not to live a life where I look like the Duke of wichester or something I did it on 40:33 purpose why I didn't think it would be good for the 40:38 children that it would spoil them yeah it's a rich family you think your duty 40:45 is to use the wealth and live grandly that's what everybody's doing with the money you will learn from the people 40:50 that are doing it is the the plan for your life the obituary you would write 40:57 in your 30s the same you would write today sure I I basically believe in the in the 41:05 soldier on system lots of hardship will come and 41:11 and you're you got to handle it well by soldiering through 41:17 and lots of a few where opportunities will come you got to learn how to 41:22 recognize them when they come and not they make two minor a trip for the I counter when the opportunity is 41:29 available and those are simple 41:34 lessons