Watch Legendary Investor Charlie Munger's Final Interview With CNBC – Transcript

00:05Charlie Munger may be best known as Burkshire Hathaway's Vice chairman Warren Buffett's best friend Confidant and business partner for six and a half decades but Munger was also a giant in his own right a scold of corporate excess and greed who preached to a large flock of devout followers about how to get along in investing and in life a renaissance man Munger modeled himself after none other than Benjamin Franklin

00:30he studied mathematics physics meteorology and Engineering all before attending Harvard Law School he trained himself in subjects as diverse as psychology and architecture Munger passed away at the age of 99 just one month shy of his 100th birthday and two weeks after our last interview with him tonight we bring you a look back at the wit and wisdom of Charlie Munger hey Charlie first of all I just

00:58want to thank you for inviting us to your home today and for hosting us here we appreciate it well I hope it'll be interesting certainly A peculiar example of one life it's interesting that a man who started out to be a lawyer ended up with an identity that's more like a gurus than a lawyers I I called you a lawyer once and I think that was the most irritated you've ever been with me

01:23um because that was how you started things but you really have studied every field out there and tried to yeah sure to take things from different studies and different models in life did you did you go about doing that intentionally of course I could see the power of it when did you figure it out well it came naturally to

01:48me and I was what I would call naturally arrogant and it wasn't that good of mind you know I was in the top 1% but not no Prodigy so I never would have succeeded in a field that required a mind to be that of a prodigy but it was a much better mind than ordinary people had and

02:15I recognized that quite early and I just played the hand I was de in order to get as much Advantage as I could when did you recognize that were you a child very young I used when I was taking courses in grade school I was often revising the textbook and the course in my head to make it more correct because I realized the professor was doing it wrong what kind of things would you

02:41recognize that they that they were doing wrong they had some crazy idea for instance my Latin teacher was a maladjusted woman who was a devote follower of Sigman Freud and I recognized that Sigman Freud was a horse as when I still first read him when I was in high school and of course it was an odd little boy whose

03:06Latin teacher is teaching him frud but that was she was peculiar and so was I and of course when I read I bought the complete writings of Sigman frud from the American Library it was one big book and and I went through it very laboriously and I realized he was a goddamn lunatic and so I decided I wasn't going to learn

03:32that from my Latin teacher what and and that's the way it is but that's what I went through all my life trying to turn every teacher into my Latin teacher just a poor fellow he hadn't quite learned to understand it right yet now I didn't always succeed I had some very unusual teachers the best teacher I had in my life was Lon Fuller but he was the best

03:59contract cont teacher in any law school and contracts is the best subject in every law school at least I think it is because it integrates so beautifully with the new doctrine of an economics that came along with Adam Smith and all those people and of course I could see the integration and so could this Lon fer

04:26was a damn contract teacher at now he'd been the lady contact teacher in some other law school as what got him to Harvard by transfer which was rare in those days and also I could see in the Harvard Law School something very interesting when I went to the Harvard Law School it was in

04:49the immediate aftermath of a long long range in which 15 professors handled 1,500 graduate this is unheard of nobody had ever done anything like that it it just morphed into that system and it did it early and of

05:13course when you have a system like that it really helps to have a few big ideas that are strewn through the system that are useful and a some Professor that sees it and that's what Lon vter did he really saw the old damn he integrated law and economics is what he did to some extent and the reason he did is you want to know why do we have these

05:39kind contracts that so obviously make modern civilization work and he never he didn't explain exactly why but I could sort of explain why do myself after hearing L Fuller well that's an ideal teacher you you had this idea of mental

06:06models before got to him though yes and I just naturally came to it and and but it was very much a un fulles thing I was just a struck by law Fuller Bon Fuller I have never been a struck by any other teacher in my whole life including some gifted mathematicians and physicists who did some remarkable things

06:33uh but Fuller really really hadn't he really changed my life he almost made me a law professor I considered being a law professor but then I and I knew I'd be pretty good at it did you keep in touch with him for a long time after I never kept in touch with him he was so remote a figure to me he was like

07:01Moses or something going down from the mountain top and I was pleased he was there for ordinary and he he put it all in a book I didn't need on full that's the way I handled almost all my teachers I didn't need them and let's talk about Benjamin Franklin

07:27yeah he's one of the framers of our nation he very famously gave out very and he was a prodigy and he was a prodigy and he trained himself in lots of different um discipline he self trained himself with like two years of grade school education this is a very remarkable thing and when he found late in life he needed something like alge he went back and pulled down the textbook and taught himself

07:52algebra how old were you he just he was a very much a self-educated man and that was a very much an interesting story for that reason How could a man who taught himself everything you know like Latin and it was just how could a man like that go into so many different fields and be the top guy in the whole

08:19country and weren't we lucky to have him yes yeah no all those five or six people whom we we now consider the founding fathers have worn pretty well but you found Ben Franklin when how young were you when you first came across what Ben Franklin had done well I think High School yeah and that's when you started

08:44modeling yourself after some I don't when I started modeling myself after Frankin but I certainly tried to model myself a little the I like the mixture of of financial life and regular life mhm and I and well I couldn't copy I didn't have any musical ability and so Franklin was he he played

09:11four different musical instruments one of which he invented oh this is a lot of musical ability that God simply left out of me and so I I don't I can't do it so I never made any effort to Franklin's musical ability but any other ability he had of course I tried to damate you started out in college at the University of Michigan you were young

09:39when you went there because you had skipped some time in grade school and you went for mathematics why' you choose mathematics because I could get an A without doing any work that's why I took mathematics and then you shifted with time you did that for a couple of years years yes and then World War II interrupted things you were 17 still

10:06when then decided that biology was not the proper science to handle a war or geology was not the proper science to handle any war and that obviously I had to start with physics so I took physics and then you focused on no I didn't taken very much because as soon as I'd mastered the first part of

10:33physics I actually entered the airport cor as a private right and marched around in some field in the middle of the winter and slept in a tent and I must just say it was pretty damn unpleasant to be outside in the winter sleeping in a tent look this is the middle of November we're in Southern California look at it yeah this is pretty nice yes and and of course I

11:00noticed that it was like that and it wasn't like that in Noah at the time I was at calag and it was in the middle of the water and and it was like this and so I naturally thought this is better yes I understand why you moved permanently yeah well well you understand why the whole nation moved

11:25right it moved South and West is what it moved and to do so yes yes so Charlie you were born on the first day of 1924 you have seen A Century of of history and I I wonder do you ever stop not only that I lived in the aftermath of a previous previous Century of history in

11:48fact you can argue that about 90% of the progress of man has happened in Civilization has has occurred in the last two centuries and that I lived in the immediate aftermath of one and it was a very important SE Cemetery that Cemetery that ended when I was born

12:12because in that in that Century we figured out so very very much that was quite important as a start you stop to think about the technical Revolution it happened in that Century that's when they you opened all these coal mines and created all these steam

12:34engines and and and so on and so it was just and of course that what brought the economic system up so man had enough Leisure had enough time to think when he wasn't just getting enough food to eat and so it was an amazing time to be born and to be born in the place in that Century where all the growth was going