RIP Charlie

[UK]

Rest in peace. Gone but not forgotten.

[competitive-advantage]

Thanks Charlie. I'm out of words, but will celebrate rational behaviour and joy today in your memory.

That's how you have inspired me 

 

 

[Paarslaars]

12 hours ago, valueseek said:

RIP! I listened to the Acquired episode just yesterday. First time famous personality death feel sad. 

Second time here (Robin Williams was the first :))

[dymanojbabu]

RIP Charlie. 

[Libs]

12 hours ago, rohitc99 said:

Will dearly miss him. This quote from him got me through some of the toughest times in life

 

" You should never, when facing some unbelievable tragedy, let one tragedy increase into two or three through your failure of will.

 

 

He said that after losing his 9 year-old son. I've never forgotten it, and it has helped me enormously also. You simply have no choice other than to carry on.

Thank you for everything, Charlie.

 

 

[SharperDingaan]

One of a kind.

May the rest of us bow before the master!

 

SD  

[ratiman]

On the day his father died his son Phil liked this tweet:

It’s amazing how fast you can go from “a robot is vacuuming my house” to “a robot is doing a bad job vacuuming my house, man fuck this boi”

 

[John Hjorth]

Latest and last Charlie Munger interview by Becky Quick :

 

One guy is on an eternal quest for the [next] big elephant, while the other guy had a wet dream of ... catching a 200 lbs tuna! 

 

 

[vinod1]

Really sad.

 

One of the rarest people who if you disagree with him, it is safe to assume you are very likely wrong.

 

 

[villainx]

Rest in peace.  Great teacher and role model.

 

I've been enjoying some of the youthful pics of him that has been circulating in articles.  Very dashing.

[Parsad]

11 hours ago, Paarslaars said:

Second time here (Robin Williams was the first :))

 

I still feel sad to this day about Robin Williams...went well before his time...one of the greatest comics of all time, as well as a superb actor!  Whereas Munger lived a full life, so it doesn't sting as badly.  Either way, the loss of both is a loss for society!  Cheers! 

[Paarslaars]

8 hours ago, Parsad said:

 

I still feel sad to this day about Robin Williams...went well before his time...one of the greatest comics of all time, as well as a superb actor!  Whereas Munger lived a full life, so it doesn't sting as badly.  Either way, the loss of both is a loss for society!  Cheers! 

It bothered me most how he died.  He made so many people laugh yet ended up depressed.

Reminds me I need to see Flubber again, was one of my favorite childhood movies.

 

I'm sure Munger was able to pass with satisfaction from his life. He did not seem like the type of man to hold regrets.

[Spooky]

We will miss you Charlie. One of the wisest and most generous people on the planet, I learned so much from him. It's like losing a grandpa.

[Chris]

Of all the people I dont personally know, no one influenced my life in such a dramatic and positive way.
The jury is still out, but in 20 or 30 years I can begin to fully appreciate HOW MUCH impact he had.
It is such a tragedy that I was not able to learn even more from him. Would be so fascinating to have his takes on all that will come in the next years and decades.
 

[MCR]

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/29/charlie-munger-these-basic-career-rules-made-me-successful-in-life-with-warren-buffett-i-had-all-3.html

[MCR]

https://www.dailyjournal.com/articles/375936-charles-t-munger-1924-2023

[Cigarbutt]

2 hours ago, MCR said:

https://www.dailyjournal.com/articles/375936-charles-t-munger-1924-2023

 

-About newspapers/journalism, the ability to get balanced views and the transition 'we' are going through:

• "Now about 95% of [newspapers are] going to disappear and go away forever. And what do we get in substitute? We get a bunch of people who attract an audience because they’re crazy …. I have my favorite crazies, and you have your favorite crazies, and we get together and all become crazier as we hire people to tell us what we want to hear. This is no substitute for Walter Cronkite and all those great newspapers of yesteryear. We have suffered a huge loss here. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s the creative destruction of capitalism, but it’s a terrible thing that’s happened to our country.” — 2022 Daily Journal Annual Meeting

[Monsieur_dee]

https://assets-global.website-files.com/5ef3c7300432b40ed865991a/656a8ceee9e7fe82b04f1156_Remember my teacher Charlie Munger Nov 30 2023.pdf

 

 

 

Some words from Mr. Lu

[Crip1]

21 hours ago, Cigarbutt said:

 

-About newspapers/journalism, the ability to get balanced views and the transition 'we' are going through:

• "Now about 95% of [newspapers are] going to disappear and go away forever. And what do we get in substitute? We get a bunch of people who attract an audience because they’re crazy …. I have my favorite crazies, and you have your favorite crazies, and we get together and all become crazier as we hire people to tell us what we want to hear. This is no substitute for Walter Cronkite and all those great newspapers of yesteryear. We have suffered a huge loss here. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s the creative destruction of capitalism, but it’s a terrible thing that’s happened to our country.” — 2022 Daily Journal Annual Meeting

This is fascinating. Not only was Charlie brilliant, he was able to communicate his brilliance extraordinarily well. The ability to observe multiple, multiple things, see how those multiple things inter-relate, and then draw conclusions is brilliance. We have all observed this over the past several years but I doubt any of us could have said it in a way that Charlie did.

 

Yes, very sad news about his passing, but it's vitally important to focus less on sadness and loss, and more on how the legacy he left is available for all of us to observe and learn, and relearn, and relearn.

 

Thanks Charlie

 

-Crip

[Munger_Disciple]

Article about Charie's philanthropy: 

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/charlie-munger-donations-blueprints-a539e390?mod=hp_lead_pos6

[gfp]

Apologies if this was already posted, but here is what Li Lu wrote to honor Charlie:

 

https://www.facebook.com/li.lu.376043/posts/pfbid0C6WjUbMLt5GD5dadMrkeftL24tRxuQsPjs5Xk3rBdD2Y47ZNYFBFwk95ix4N1Q4ol

 

Quote

Remembering my teacher Charlie Munger

Thursday, November 30, 2023

I was on a business trip in Asia on Tuesday when I got the call from the Munger family informing me that Charlie was in his final hours. I hopped onto the next flight I could find to California, and before departure, was able to talk to Charlie through the help of his daughter. Charlie had largely lost consciousness, but still I could clearly hear him trying to make a sound to acknowledge he had heard me. Upon landing, I learned that Charlie had left us a few hours earlier.

I arrived at his Santa Barbara home and had the opportunity to spend cherished time with family members, reminiscing about all things Charlie. Charlie was engaging, humorous and full of wit even at Thanksgiving dinner just a few days ago, family members told me. I visited his home library again. In that very room, exactly 20 years ago, also on a post-Thanksgiving weekend afternoon, following the introduction by our mutual friend Ron Olson, Charlie and I first struck up a deep conversation which ran for several hours. It began an investment partnership that has now endured two decades. Charlie became my mentor, partner, dear friend and above all, life-long role model.

I was so deeply grateful that the Munger family made a special arrangement the next day for me to say a proper and private goodbye to Charlie.

There, lying quietly with eyes closed, Charlie looked the same as ever, peaceful and sincere with a subtle smile on his face. There was a serenity about him. For a moment, I was reminded of the Living Buddhas I once saw in the Buddhist temples of Thailand. In the Buddhist tradition, the bodies of truly enlightened monks, through life-long self-cultivation, can remain incorrupt, without any traces of mummification after death. In that moment, it is what I saw in Charlie, an enlightened sage with an incorruptible body, surrounded by a glimmer of eternal light.

Charlie was not a Buddhist. That vision can never be tested. But it is incontrovertible that his legacy and impact will live on for generations to come.

In our capitalist society, where do virtue, moral responsibility, truth-seeking and public service fit in? Charlie Munger answered these questions through his long exemplary life. He insisted on making money in the most morally sound way, entering transactions only when, if positions were reversed, he would comfortably take the other side. He sought worldly wisdom through life-long learning. He guided life with rationality devoid of mental deficiencies such as envy, resentment and self-pity. He faced and persevered through countless adversities with stoicism and equanimity. As he gained in wealth and stature, he showed little appetite for the trappings of that success, and instead spent his wealth on worthy causes and tirelessly spread his worldly wisdom to those who would listen, often with humor. He remained deeply engaged with family, friends, partners and the broader world with loving assiduousness through his last days.

In his later decades, Charlie Munger’s ideas began to spread across the world, particularly in the most populous countries of China and India. In China, the Mandarin language version of “Poor Charlie’s Almanack,” an anthology by and about Charlie Munger, sold over 1.2 million copies over the last 10 years. There, the educated class increasingly came to view Charlie as the embodiment of the modern-day Confucianism, maintaining a virtuous and enlightened life while embracing the market forces of capitalism. In time, that vision of modern Confucianism will be crucial for Chinese modernization and how China interacts with the rest of the world.

Charlie’s teachings will continue to spread, inspire and impact the world even more profoundly. That will be his eternal legacy.

 

[james22]

Dear Partners and Friends,

Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway fame passed away on Tuesday November 28th at the age of 99, just shy of his 100th birthday on January 1st. Charlie was our role model and the main inspiration behind creating Brotchie Capital. He was a generous teacher, exemplar, a brilliant renaissance man, and phenomenal human being who will be sorely missed.

I was fortunate to have met Charlie early in my investing career. I first ran in to him many years ago in the basement of the Ak-Sar-Ben Coliseum in Omaha at the Berkshire Annual Meeting. At that time, there was a much smaller crowd at the meetings than the 45,000+ that attend now. Regardless, I was stunned to see Charlie was just sitting alone at a table signing a book about Berkshire.

A few years later, a group of us started traveling to Pasadena CA directly after the Berkshire meeting in Omaha to listen to Charlie take questions as Chairman of Wesco Financial. He affectionately called us “the really hard-core nut cases” for making this second leg of the trip and joked that he was like the assistant headmaster of a cult. It was totally worth the trip. Charlie intentionally played the part of Warren’s side kick at the Berkshire Meeting, in part because I believe he was happy to let Warren have the spotlight. At Wesco, it was all Charlie, and he was completely unfiltered, candid and often hilarious. He and Warren could also be very funny together, but Warren is very sensitive to insulting anyone. Praise by name and criticize by category is his mantra. Charlie on the other hand, is widely known for his candor. We’ve included some of our favorite “Mungerisms” further down the page.

It was at one of these Wesco meetings that his friend Peter Kaufman introduced me to Charlie once again and we had a nice chat. Charlie was extremely well read, super intelligent and he did not suffer fools with kid gloves. This made having a personal conversation with him or asking him a question publicly from a microphone at a meeting an exercise in one’s own self-confidence.

A few years later, a close friend of my wife who worked for the corporate offices of Marriott got us bumped up to the Concierge level on the 6th floor at the Omaha Marriot. A close friend and I were sitting in the 6th floor lounge having breakfast one Friday when in walked Charlie, who preceded to sit right next to us. We were invited over to join the conversation by Charlie’s son-in law and a new annual tradition had begun which would continue for several years.

The last time we were able to get together there was 2019, just before the pandemic would change so many things. I knew he was an avid fisherman so during that conversation I asked him if he had ever caught a giant tuna fish. He kind of downplayed the idea of giant tuna fishing and said that sort of thing was for big, strongman types.

Blue Fin Tuna fishing had become a hobby of mine and I thought of writing him with pictures of all the gear we use to explain how you really didn't have to be Arnold Schwarzenegger to do it...but I didn't want to bother him with that sort of thing if he wasn't really interested. Charlie got lots of fan mail and more books sent to him from admirers than he could read. When I saw this clip from CNBC of his last interview just a few weeks ago, I was shocked to hear him say that catching a 200 lb tuna was the main unmet item on his bucket list.

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2023/11/28/charlie-mung...

In a final lesson from Charlie for me, this just goes to show that you shouldn't ever hold back reaching out to someone you really admire, even if you’re trying to be considerate. Of course, I would have offered to take him out with us and would have loved to have shown him our fishing banks. Ironically, the first letter I ever wrote for our partnership focused on Charlie’s idea that the economy and market was very much like an Eco-system, and I used the tuna fishery to highlight that idea.

One of Charlie’s more famous lectures focuses on The Psychology of Human Misjudgment with a list of 25 items he identified as commonly recurring errors we make in our life’s decisions. It would have been fascinating to have a discussion with him about the psychology of tuna fishing, as it can be a swamp of obsession and mimetic rivalry, to borrow a term from Rene Girad.

Much has been and will continue to be written about the contributions Charlie made to humankind, as it should be. For us, his most outstanding achievement will always be his discussions and writings on what it took to become “passionately rational”.

The first book I read about Warren Buffett was Lowenstein’s ‘The Making on an American Capitalist’, where he described both Buffett and Charlie as embodying ‘Emersonian Independence’. Charlie was quoted as saying he desperately wanted to get rich fast when he was young, but not so he could buy Ferrari’s. He craved independence so much that he even found sending out invoices to his law clients somehow demeaning. Having a stubbornly irrepressible independent streak myself, I was drawn like a moth to the flame to Buffett and Munger. I would listen to Charlie reference this craving for independence repeatedly through the years; from the poetry of Scottish poet Robert Burns to his own self-deprecating jokes about needing to get rich because he was so opinionated and outspoken. Charlie was famous for making friends with and quoting the “eminent dead” as he called them. From Ben Franklin to Cicero, the Stoics and beyond, he was always teaching with stories and humor. I was surprised that I never really heard him mention Emerson in that light, so I asked him why that was. He explained that he was raised on Emerson through the New England Style Unitarian Church in Omaha growing up and it just became so deeply rooted in who he was that it wouldn’t have occurred to him to reference it. Warren has told the crowds that his father was always quoting Emerson to him: “The power that resides within you is new in nature…” he would remember.

Charlie was famous for thinking through the second and third order effects of any action or policy. “And then what?” he would say. In keeping with that idea, it’s only natural to ask that question of this Emersonian Independence. What happens once you’re free from the shackles of corporate over lords or from clients who can cancel you? How will you live out your life getting the most horsepower out of your own unique personal engine and avoiding the pitfalls that snare so many of your fellow humans?

Charlie considered it a moral duty to continue to improve one’s own rationality and ability to spot cognitive biases throughout your lifetime. I think the events of the pandemic years we’ve just lived through have made this all so obvious that Charlie often took to shortening his discussion of this topic. More recently, when a questioner would bring up a topic Charlie felt belonged in his “Too Hard Pile”, he would close with “Its hard enough to just stay sane”. A full discussion or examination of what Charlie meant by becoming ‘passionately rational’ is beyond the scope of this note, but here’s just one quote from him that may shed some further light:

“Man’s imperfect, limited-capacity brain easily drifts into working with what’s easily available to it. And the brain can’t use what it can’t remember or when it’s blocked from recognizing because it’s heavily influenced by one or more psychological tendencies bearing strongly on it … the deep structure of the human mind requires that the way to full scope competency of virtually any kind is to learn it all to fluency—like it or not.”

We would urge everyone who doesn’t already own a copy of ‘Poor Charlies Almanac: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T Munger’ to buy a copy of a new edition available December 5th. You may even consider buying one for every member of your family, as we have.

What’s the most passionately rational thing we can do as individuals with our limited time on this earth? Learning to keep from wasting time by getting sucked into our phones, apps and other technology designed to monetize our attention has to be high on the list. We were about to send Charlie a book we had just read on this very subject and the gamification of technology. Charlie was not a fan of legalizing gambling and more and more of today’s apps have a lot in common with the behavioral psychology of slot machines! We would highly recommend Scarcity Brain, by Michael Easter.

***

No discussion of Charlie Munger would be complete without an examination of his investment track record. Prior to joining Berkshire Hathaway, Munger and Buffett each ran independent investment partnerships, even though they worked together on ideas as intellectual partners.

The understated record of Charlie’s partnership is below: ( Unfortunately I can't get the table to format)

The reason we use the term understated to describe the record above is that when the partnership was liquidated, individual limited partners were distributed stock in Blue Chip Stamps and Diversified Retailing, which were positions the partnership held. Both entities were eventually folded into Berkshire Hathaway in exchange for its stock. If we use Berkshire’s closing price of $38 in 1975 as a proxy for the continuing compounding effect, each share is now worth $542,900. Otis Booth was one of Charlie’s partners that ended up owning 1.4% of Berkshire because of this stock swap. Charlie had another limited partner whom he could not persuade to stick with the partnership during a steep market drawdown in the 1973-74 period. The partner’s $350,000 investment would now be worth $7.3 BILLION if it had remained invested throughout the years. For those of you keeping score, that’s a compounded annual return of approximately 22.5% per annum for 47 years.

A few of our favorite Mungerisms:

“I think the reason why we got into such idiocy in investment management is best illustrated by a story that I tell about the guy who sold fishing tackle. I asked him, “My God, they’re purple and green. Do fish really take these lures?” And he said, “Mister, I don’t sell to fish.”

“If you want to understand science, you have to understand math. In business, if you’re enumerate, you’re going to be a klutz. The good thing about business is that you don’t have to know any higher math…. Without basic numerical fluency though, you are like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.”

“Invert, always invert.”

“Just think of it as heavy odds against a game full of bullshit and craziness with an occasional mispriced something or other. And you are not going to be smart enough to find thousands in a lifetime. And when you get a few, you really load up. It is just that simple.”

“Capitalism without failure is like religion without hell.”

"What we do in investing is simple, but not easy."

“The idea of caring that someone is making money faster [than you are] is one of the deadly sins. Envy is a really stupid sin because it’s the only one you could never possibly have any fun at. There’s a lot of pain and no fun. Why would you want to get on that trolley? At least with gluttony or coveting thy neighbor’s ass, there’s something in it for the sinner”

"If I can be optimistic when I'm nearly dead, surely the rest of you can handle a little inflation."

“You’re smart and I’m right…and because you’re clever you’ll soon see that.”

Around 2016, an acquaintance asked which person, in a long life, he felt most grateful to, “My second wife’s first husband,” Munger said instantly. “I had the ungrudging love of this magnificent woman for 60 years simply by being a somewhat less awful husband than he was.”

"The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more."

“Warren once said to me, “I’m probably misjudging academia generally [in thinking so poorly of it] because the people that interact with me have bonkers theories.” … We’re trying to buy businesses with sustainable competitive advantages at a low – or even a fair price. The reason the professors teach such nonsense is that if they didn’t], what would they teach the rest of the semester? [Laughter] Teaching people formulas that don’t really work in real life is a disaster for the world.”

“There’s a lot wrong [with American universities]. I’d remove 3/4 of the faculty — everything but the hard sciences. But nobody’s going to do that, so we’ll have to live with the defects. It’s amazing how wrongheaded [the teaching is]. There is fatal disconnectedness. You have these squirrelly people in each department who don’t see the big picture.”

“…a different set of incentives from rising in an economic establishment where the rewards system, again, the reinforcement, comes from being a truffle hound. That’s what Jacob Viner, the great economist called it: the truffle hound — an animal so bred and trained for one narrow purpose that he wasn’t much good at anything else, and that is the reward system in a lot of academic departments.”

“I think liberal art faculties at major universities have views that are not very sound, at least on public policy issues — they may know a lot of French [however].”

“Proper accounting is like engineering. You need a margin of safety. Thank God we don’t design bridges and airplanes the way we do accounting.”

“ ‘F.A.S.B’ … ‘Financial Accounts Still Bogus.’ ”

“Creative accounting is an absolute curse to a civilization. One could argue that double-entry bookkeeping was one of history’s great advances. Using accounting for fraud and folly is a disgrace. In a democracy, it often takes a scandal to trigger reform. Enron was the most obvious example of a business culture gone wrong in a long, long time.”

“I also want to raise the possibility that there are, in the very long term, “virtue effects” in economics— for instance that widespread corrupt accounting will eventually create bad long term consequences as a sort of obverse effect from the virtue-based boost double-entry book-keeping gave to the heyday of Venice. I suggest that when the financial scene starts reminding you of Sodom and Gomorrah, you should fear practical consequences even if you like to participate in what is going on.”

Two thirds of acquisitions don’t work. Ours work because we don’t try to do acquisitions — we wait for no-brainers.”

“We tend to buy things — a lot of things — where we don’t know exactly what will happen, but the outcome will be decent.”
 

https://shrewdm.com/MB?pid=213411239

[Ulti]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/other/charlie-munger-close-up/ar-AA1mboxN

[gfp]

h/t to kingswell newsletter for highlighting Charlie's memorial service at Harvard Westlake School - Mohnish appears to be the only attendee to post selfies from the event -

 

[nwoodman]

Kingswell also linked to this, you end up running out of superlatives :
 

"Charlie Munger, who died in November within sight of his 100th birthday on Jan. 1, fell ill at his home in Santa Barbara. When he got to the hospital, a nurse asked him how he was. 'I’m dying,' he said. 'How are you?'" 
 

https://diocesela.org/the-bishops-blog/charlie-munger-memorial/