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
Number two, the leading companies of China are stronger and better than practically any other leading companies anywhere. And they're available at a much cheaper price. So naturally, I'm willing to have some China risk in the Munger portfolio. How much China risk? Well, that's not a scientific subject. But I don't mind whatever it is, 18% or something, whatever's worked out in the Munger family.
It's okay with me.
Well, I don't like that as well as I like something with a real consumer brand of its own like Apple.
Well, I only study two kinds of companies. One, I'm enough of a Ben Graham follower. If something is really cheap, even though it's a crappy company, I'm willing to consider buying it for a while anyway. And? I do that occasionally. And I've done it with great success a time or two, but my hard marks, I've done it once or twice in my lifetime for big gains, and that's it.
It's not like I have a second. I've done it a hundred times. So it isn't a bit easy. A hundred times easy money is almost nonexistent.
Well, the grand companies, of course, are good. Get them at the right price. The whole trick is to get them on the few rare occasions when they're really cheap. But buying Costco at its present price, it may work out all right, but that's, again, it's getting hard.
Well, I don't give advice to just any young people. I give it to some. I paint my spots. I don't want to be more of a guru to the young people than I already am. It's getting hard out there. And there's all this bullshit and craziness. Of course, it's going to be hard.
Damn near. Of course it could be possible. It's only possible, it's likely, and it's actually happened.
It's the nature of things. Look, biology produces a very advanced creature like us. We can sit around and talk intelligently on all these subjects. But it does it by killing everybody off in brutal competition one with the other for hundreds of thousands of years. In other words, the system that nature uses to get smart is kind of unpleasant to the people who are losing.
Well, it wasn't that it was all that easy back a long time. It just was a lot easier.
And God knows what happens after an unpleasant blow-up with our modern democracies. You get to see a lot like Europe, which is quite dysfunctional.
It was never easy. I thoroughly understood it was never easy, and it's harder now. Those are the two . And you pay attention to how you're handling the people you deal with. You want a good reputation when you're all done, not a bad one.
The beauty of it is you only have to get rich once. You don't have to climb this mountain four times. You just have to do it once.
It takes a lot of good execution to do it. You really have to set out to do it and then do it with analysis every day, every week, every year for 40 years. It's not so damned easy.
Yes. Yes. Culture plus model. Yes, absolutely. And very reliable, hardworking, determined execution for 40 years.
I would say that the central norm was don't raise the market. Get it low and keep it there forever.
I don't know. I had no conversations with him on that subject.
Well, I'm sure Jim would have forbade it. Absolutely. There was no board-level discussion of the hot dog? No, no, no. Those two would not have thought it was a board matter to discuss the price of hot dogs.
I'll tell you what it is. It is hard to open too many stores a year. New store, new manager, new this, new politics. It's hard. Plus, a lot of stuff has to be learned and taught and put in place. And so they didn't want to do more than they could comfortably handle.
Well, I'll tell you what happened there. The first store they tried to open in China, the first store somebody wanted a $30,000 bribe. Chinese culture. And they just wouldn't pay it. And that made such a bad impression on Jim Senegal. He wouldn't even talk to him going into China for about 30 years thereafter. So what changed? Why finally go in?
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