How Charlie Munger Survive Life’s Hardest Moments... | Final Interview with CNBC 2023

[Transcript]

BECKY QUICK: Your partnership with Nancy, your second wife —

CHARLIE MUNGER: Yes, it was a 52-year-old marriage. It’s a long marriage. And she got to live all the way to 86, which is a long life. Now, there were some tough stretches — but most lives have some tough stretches. And hers came very near the end.

BECKY QUICK: I mean Charlie — People probably look at you and think you’re incredibly wealthy, you’ve had all these great opportunities and things that have happened in your life — but you’ve struggled, too.

CHARLIE MUNGER: Of course. Everybody struggles. The iron rule of life is that everybody struggles.

BECKY QUICK: I try and think back of what the toughest moments might have been and how you got through some of those. And I mean —

CHARLIE MUNGER: Well, we all know how to get through them. The great philosophers of realism are also the great philosophers of what I call soldiering through. If you soldier through, you can get through almost anything. And it’s your only option. You can’t bring back the dead. You can’t cure the dying child. You can’t do all kinds of things. You have to soldier through it. And you just somehow, you soldier through. If you have to walk through the streets, crying for a few hours a day as part of the soldiering through — go ahead and cry away. But you have to — you can't quit. You can cry alright, but you can’t quit.

BECKY QUICK: You’ve had time in your life when you’ve done that?

CHARLIE MUNGER: Sure. I cried all the time when my first child died, but I knew I couldn’t change the fate. In those days, the fatality with childhood leukemia was 100%.

BECKY QUICK: That was your son, Teddy.

CHARLIE MUNGER: That’s gone away. Now, the cure rate is way up in the 90s. And it’s an amazing development. Think of how much pleasure it’s given me to watch the cure rate for leukemia. What mankind and civilization did was soldier through those tough years that took away my cousin Tommy from meningitis and then took away my son Teddy from leukemia.

Imagine a cure. Imagine pretty well fixing that disease for families who came into life later. It’s a huge achievement. You can see why I like civilization. To me, civilization is what man has done with the last two centuries — and it’s been a good thing to watch.

Source: https://youtu.be/H5Oom5Rjp_Y?si=ZEkkZkAN6WyOWcl9

 

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