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was Bloomberg's John Tucker. Well, Munger passed away Tuesday at a California hospital. According to a statement from Berkshire Hathaway, he was 99 years old. For
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a closer look at Munger's life and legacy, we had a long conversation with Bloomberg News reporter Noah Booheier, who spent years covering Berkshire Hathaway and someone who spent decades following and being influenced by both Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, smeed capital management founder and chief investment officer Bill Smeed, also a longtime Berkshire investor. First of all,
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I'm sorry because I know you know these individuals. Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett just together built something so iconic in the investment
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world. I wrote a letter to Buffett probably five years ago just thanking him for how incredibly generous that him and Munger have been with all of us. I mean, it literally changed our lives. What do you mean by that? Yeah. Oh, by communicating the discipline that they practiced, they shared why they were doing what they're doing all these years in the writing, in the annual meeting sitting there taking questions for six hours, all the way up into their 90s. It's like a goldmine of wisdom. I used to get irritated because I kind of wish they would restrict the questions to better questions because as the years went by, there were a lot of goofy questions that came up. But
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sometimes they got some goofy answers, which were fun. Yeah. But
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here was this incredible resource. Charlie Munger was the Solomon of our era. He was the wisest man in the investment business. He was a Caltech grad, Harvard Law Educated, started a law firm in Los Angeles, had a successful career in real estate, successful career in making common stock choices. And the right hand guy to the most successful investment selector and asset allocator of all time. I mean, he is, he is, you know, we just admired him so much. And then of course, we
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admired him immensely because he'd say exactly what he was thinking and didn't really care very much who he might offend in the process. You mentioned that you've been doing this for over 40 years. What are some lessons that you've incorporated from Charlie Munger over these decades into the way that you manage portfolios and you
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allocate assets? Yeah, we when we're talking to people, I'm here in New York talking to some possible new customers. And we tell them when it comes to value people, we hold our winners to a fault because compounding is the eighth wonder of the world. So if you can find a business, let's just right off the top of our head pick, Occidental Petroleum, who Munger and Buffett started buying in the last year and a half or two years, they're generating massive free cash flow. They're paying down debt with it, but then they're also buying back stocks. So like Buffett says, over the years, if it's a company generating high returns on equity, high free cash flow buying back their stock, he ends up owning a larger and larger and larger part of the business as the years go by. That's what he did with Coke. That's what he did in the Iraq Express. That's what he did with a lot of different companies and holding your winners the fault is a key component of alpha. As I explained to people, you buy a stock at 30 and pay cash. The worst thing that happened is it goes to zero. You lose 30 points of alpha. If you buy a stock at 30 and it goes to 90 and you sell it and goes to 210, you lose 120 points. And Buffett Munger taught that to people. As a powerful thing, it's much better to get a less spectacular company that you can hold all the way through a 10 or 15 times your money than it is a spectacular company that
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you might make five times in five years, but you got to be smart enough to sell it and go to another project. Well, and you're, you know, something I want to ask you a little bit more too about what what Charlie Munger was to Warren Buffett, what he brought out and Warren Buffett, having said that, I want to bring Noah Boo higher into this because, you know, Noah, it's one of those things where you think as we're hearing from Bill, you know, these are both brilliant men, successful men and would have been on their own, but something about them together brought out even so much more.
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Yeah, I think that's a critical point here. The combination of talents that they they brought to bear really was deeply important in the evolution of Berkshire. The other thing, just speaking as a journalist, the thing that I always found so incredibly amazing about Charlie Munger was his directness and his willingness to be his mind, even if his opinion wasn't necessarily a popular one, you know, as a business reporter and someone writing about investing, you always knew that Charlie was not just going to give you the pithy quote, but something that actually had some real substance behind it. And I think that's, you know, in large part what has resonated with a lot of investors over time. I mean, people would go, what one of the things that's underappreciated about Charlie Munger is that deep into his 90s, people would go to Los Angeles to hear him speak at the annual meeting of a small publishing company called the Daily Journal. This was, Buffett had nothing to do with this thing. They would just go to hear Munger alone. And I remember the first time I went to this thing, there were maybe 100 or 200 people. And you know, three or four years later, word had gotten out and a couple thousand were going. I mean, you have to understand that Charlie Munger was respected in his own right. It wasn't, you know, he's often known for his affiliation with Buffett, but he really did have his own loyal following.
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To back up Noah on that, one of our favorite things is when it comes to climate change, he just said, why don't we just build a seawall? Right, that was his opinion. It's like, okay, if it's real, let's do what they did in Amsterdam and just build a seawall in California and New York. And that's so simple and logical and less expensive, but that's Charlie Munger. It was always common sense, always one. The difference between the two men is Warren wants to die without any enemies. He has a more of an urge to be liked. It's a wonderful man. And he wants to be liked, whereas Charlie could care less if he's liked, right? He just, he wants to share wisdom, share truth.
