Thread by @trengriffin

1/ The video starts a little slow with some questions about building apartments, but kicks into "straight up" Charlie Munger. Buckle up.

"Famed investor Charlie Munger shares insights into the ‘basic math of life’ at Redlands Forum" FEBRUARY 7, 2020 redlands.edu/bulldog-blog/2…

Charlie Munger:

"We like businesses that can withstand poor management, but then don't get it."

"I have done any calculous since I left Cal Tech. It is completely gone." He said he uses uses arithmetic and common sense.

Someone creating a transcript would be appreciated.

I sent a link to the video in a retweet, but finally found a direct link:

Charlie Munger: "My grandfather believed it was a sin to be stupider than you have to be. ... We are all born stupid and have a hard time being sensible.... I pick easy problems."

1/ Charlie Munger: "We want to buy something that's intrinsically a very good business, meaning that an idiot could run it and it would do all right. Then we want that business which an idiot could run successfully to have a wonderful person in it running it."

2/ "My friend says, 'If it won't stand a little mismanagement, it's not much of a business.' We like businesses that can stand a lot of mismanagement, but don't get it. That's our formula. We can't make it work perfectly, but it has certainly worked better than most efforts."

3/ “We reject some wonderful businesses with some wonderful people where it's just too tough. I was chair of a nonprofit hospital. Too many competitors, too weak a position. It had a lot of terrible defects. [It exposed me] to the disappointments of the real world." C. Munger

4/ “What really works in life is win/win. That requires some sensitivity to the other person’s way of thinking, and their needs, too. But win/win is the only formula that really will work on, and on, and on. When it really starts working is when people trust each other.”

5/ “Take the operating theater at the Mayo Clinic. The group trusts one another. There are no lawyers. They just know what to do and when to do it, and who to call for what help. Everybody does what they're supposed to and so on. We're trying to get these win/win relationships."

6/ “I'm a director of Costco which has this reputation of being a fairly tough buyer. I don't regard them as that tough. There are a lot of people who are rich, and small suppliers of Costco. But Costco is into win/win. That's what really works.”

7/ “There's a million different reasons for philanthropy. One thing that is interesting I've observed in my life. I've known a lot of roguish people who made a fair amount of money. They started giving a little money to show off and 20 years later, they're real philanthropists.”

8/ “I don't think you can take every bookish little boy and turn him into a billionaire by patting him on the head and saying, ‘Read all you want, Johnny.’ If it were that easy, there'd be more billionaires.” It enormously helped me.” Charlie Munger

9/ “Specialization is the safest way up for most people. For that reason, surgeons know more and more about less and less. That's what gets rewarded. If you have a nasty fistula in your colon, you do not want a surgeon who's good at Proust or political science.” Charlie Munger

10/ "The world rewards specialization. I love ideas - being a great passionate reader. I decided to make whatever living I could doing what I liked to do, which is romping over a whole field. I don't often recommend it. The safe way up is to know a hell of a lot about something."

11/ “My mother told a nursery rhyme- ‘I'll do it myself,’ said the little red hen. Figuring things out myself has helped me enormously in life. It's also hurt me because you get terrible offense when you go into somebody else's profession and act like you know more than they do.”

12/ "What's going on in politics is people hate each other more than they used to. It wasn't that we didn't have political hatreds in the old days, but now you can cut the hatred with a knife on both sides. It's very ugly. It is stupid to allow yourself to hate that much."

13/ "Averages are up something like 40 times in my adult life. Maybe 2 or 3% of that is inflation. But what are the chances that a person born today is going to have seven or eight percent growth, and no big wars or troubles for 70 years? I'd say they're almost zero." C. Munger

14/ “I don't think that's any reason to despair. After all, why should you despair in a world in which we can't win anyway -- we're all going to die. If you can stand that, you can stand the little depression or something.”

15/ “I am continuously invested in American equities. But I've had my Berkshire stock decline by 50% three times. It doesn't bother me much. That's just a natural consequence of adult life, properly lived. If you have my attitude, it doesn't really matter. Just roll with it.” CM

16/ “Warren and I are very much the way we were born. We were both a bit nerdish and not huge successes as boys. We we both loved humor and we both loved understanding how things worked. If you don't have humor, I don't think you can get it. I think you're born with it.”

17/ "We all live with the natures we were given, and we just have to make do. Warren and I have fun in business. We like the problem solving. That's a huge advantage in life. If you really love problem solving, that is worth about 20 IQ points." Charlie Munger

More later

18/ 'I have a good mind, but I'm way short of prodigy. I've had results in life that are prodigious. That came from tricks. I just learned a few basic tricks from people like my grandfather." There are all kinds of tricks got into by accident. One is I invert all the time."

19/ “Someone asked my grandfather once: "Why won't you drink?" He said: 'Why would I take money out of my pocket to put something in my mouth that would make my head work less well?' Well, you can see why I like my grandfather."

20/ “I see these people doing due diligence and the weaker they are as thinkers, the more due diligence they do. It's just a way of allaying an inner insecurity. Of course, it doesn't work. You've got to be able to quickly understand. You don't need perfect, if you're 96% sure."

21/ “One of the great tricks in life is to destroy your own best loved ideas. That I worked at. I actually go through my best loved ideas occasionally, see if I can weed one out.”

22/ ‘My grandfather would say, he basically thought it was sinful to be dumber than you had to be. I share some of that. What you can't remove I think is forgivable, but to have easily removable ignorance in your own head is really stupid.”

23/ “Can you think of anything dumber than building student housing that's going to last 200 years when you force a whole bunch of unrelated people to live together, and throw up on one another, and God knows what? So I gave every student his own room.” Charlie Munger

24/ “We all start out stupid, and we all have a hard time staying sensible. You have to keep working at it. Berkshire would be a wreck today if it were run by the Warren I knew when we started. We kept learning.“

End of Tweetstorm.

Thanks to Claude Leveille for a transcript.