Charlie Munger
speaker
204 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Nov 2022
last heard 6 Feb
Charlie Munger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Who knows? Saul kind of liked it. He was kind of a financier. He liked deals. He liked this miscellaneous real estate. Yeah, but it doesn't make sense. You got an enterprise as big as Costco. You don't want to screw around with your parking lot and get other people to clog up your parking lot permanently and stuff that's not going to pay you very much. You don't want them is the answer.
Well, there are lots of them. That little grocery store chain here in Los Angeles, Gelson Brothers.
Well, you may find it five years after you bought it. These things may work into it or your own understanding may get better. But when you know you have an edge, you should bet heavily. You know you're right. And most people, they don't teach that in business school. It's insane. Of course, you've got to bet heavily on your best bets.
You work at it. You do a lot of reading and thinking and visiting.
There was a lot of low-hanging fruit in the early days of our operation. You don't have any low-hanging fruit that is easy to recognize.
keep our families safe and take a good job for our investors and so on. We had similar attitudes. Yeah. Did it change over the decades? No. Warren still cares more about the safety of his personal shelters than he cares about anything else. If we used a little bit more leverage throughout, we'd have three times as much now. And it wouldn't have been that much more risk either.
And we just never wanted to give them at least a chance of screwing up our basic shelter position.
No, I think it would have worked fine. Does Warren think that? Very easy. The situation lends itself to, if you were intelligent, just milking it out.
It's automatically leveraged. You open a new store with no capital, of course it's leveraged. Who wouldn't want a business with no inventories?
A lot of people now do it who manufacture something that is terribly strong, and they're just forcing the suppliers to carry all the inventory.
It helps if you like one another and enjoy working together. We do. Yeah. But I don't use any one formula. A lot of partnerships that work well for a long time happen because one's good at one thing and one's good at another. They just naturally divide it. And each one likes what he's doing.
Now, in Costco's case, they had Jeff Brotman, who's very smart, but not a retailer, and Jim Senegal, and they divided it up. And they had originally agreed that Brotman would be the chairman and CEO, because he was his ID, he founded the whole thing. But Senegal decided, no, I have to be the CEO. So it was a big, unfortunate board meeting, a big internal struggle. And Brotman moved aside.
Was that after you joined the board?
But Warren has very close relations with all those people that have lunch every Saturday at Berkshire headquarters. It isn't like he doesn't have a little quarter of people there who are kind of pals from the ground up.
Well, of course, we used to spend a lot of time together when we were young because we didn't have that much to do. Now we've got more to do, but then it's just the other minutiae of life. So it's different.
It's very difficult to invest money well. And I think it's almost impossible to do time after time after time in venture capital. Yeah, we really wanted to ask your thoughts on venture capital. Sometimes all the deals get so hot and you have to decide so quickly. You're all just sort of gambling.
Well, of course it's good for the world as a whole to have a way of having some currency. The way that was solved is... For a long time, the British pound was the national currency of the investment world. Then it shifted to the dollar, and it's still the dollar. And people like China have these enormous reserves of dollars.
The money we make, think of the money people give us where we always just print up these pieces of paper.
Well, they do if they ever get any money. The dollar is very fungible. You can always buy one anywhere.
Well, I think it's a very legitimate business if you do it right. If you want to give the right people the power and nurture them, help them. You know a lot about the tricks of the game, so you can help them run their business, yet not interfere with them so much they hate you.
Showing 61–80 of 204 · page 4 of 11
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