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One of the things uh Charlie Munger told me many years ago. He said in the investing business it's really important to have somebody to talk to. uh just you know you're on an echo chamber and so on so i said oh you mean like you have Warren? He said it wasn't wasn't always Warren, but i had somebody and he said it's really important that you have somebody to talk to.
And the person shouldn't be shouldn't be someone who reports to you. It should be kind of like a peer-type relationship and uh he told he told Li Lu and me, that he wanted us to get together for lunch once a month. He basically pretty much instructed us. That the two of you uh i want the two of you to meet once a month for lunch and uh and i told i told Charlie and Li Lu.
If Li Lu wants to waste you know an afternoon or you know hour a month with me, I'm more than happy to do that. You know life is great what's wrong what's not to like about that. And so uh before Li Lu moved to Seattle and of course I'm in Austin now. We used to get together uh once a month and i remember one time uh Li Lu told me during the one of these lunches.
He said um you should you should look at and maybe you should buy "Amore Pacific". Okay? And I said Amore what? He said "Amore Pacific" okay? He said it's a Korean company. Okay and uh i said okay and you know i went back and i looked at this and everything's in Korean excuse my French. Everything okay and um and i i figure out it's a cosmetics company and then i also figure out that there's some of their products you can actually find in southern California but i could never really figure the business out.
Okay? And i really couldn't really get my arms around it in terms of like what was what was the secret sauce here. And what happened so i eventually just you know left it alone and that went up like something like 80 x, after he told me that. Okay i just watched it like go crazy, okay? And they they had this uh product which you know these extract from snails, which women would apply on their on their faces and it would make them younger, make them look like younger, you know the wrinkles kind of go away or whatever.
And what what what "Amore Pacific" had been able to do what they had been able to convince Chinese women that uh and i think now Korea is very well known for being kind of the state of the art for Asian women skin products and so on and they had they had had a massive tailwind from Chinese women clamoring for their products and they done really well.
And so I said you know well such is life then you know after uh i think a year or something he tells me um you should buy Mautai, okay? and I said you know uh Li Lu and I used some colorful language with him I said you know you give me these names then i go and i can't figure out head or tail. So I'm not going to do it that way.
Please spend the next 20 minutes explaining Mautai to me. He said why didn't you ask me that for Amore Pacific? I've done that I said okay you know we we're gradually learning... So then he proceeds to explain Mautai to me and Mautai is now the most valued uh liquor company in the world it's the most valuable company so basically just has one product.
But it's more valuable than any of the other uh global liquor players. And I was depressed at the time, right? Because there was a corruption scandal and people could no longer give? Yeah as a gift... Yeah it it's it's very very heavily consumed by government officials who are being wined and dined by people in the private sector and all that, and of course the Mautai is flowing freely.
And then it became, that if you were out at lunch and you were a government official and there was Mautai on the table... Uh you wouldn't be seen after that... You pretty much should suddenly disappear off the face of the earth, never to be heard from again. And uh yeah so there uh when they were cracking down it became synonymous because the government's perspective was nothing good is happening if there's Mautai on the table, you know.
one bottle uh i don't know what the prices are now but when i was when i held the stock it was over a thousand dollars or twelve hundred dollars for for a bottle and it might be a lot higher by now and um and uh and this time i was actually able to understand the business they actually had English uh financials and it was pretty straightforward to figure out and uh made the investment and like everything else in my life i sold too soon....
And um but anyway those lunches were really good and uh Li Lu and i became great friends and uh and actually there's uh there's one uh there's one business that we actually then collaborated on, uh which was Micron and uh and uh so that actually went from me to him, you know? I mean the other ones were coming from him and uh and so we had a we had a good uh good interaction and exchange on that and then he uh he took a position and i think he hold that for a while...
And and what do you what to go back to that original question. What do you think Charlie saw in him? Because i remember Charlie once saying i can't remember whether it was to you or Guy Spear that um it was lucky Li Lu was a force for good, because he's so unbelievably talented that if he wanted to rule the world he he could be and if if i remember rightly i I've met Li Lu a few a few times but I've never been able to interview him on the record only kind of privately or background i when i was studying him i think he was the first person at Columbia University to get a triple major which he got while sleeping in a in an apartment in the living room that he shared with about eight people and this wasn't even in his first language, I mean he had just It's not it's not just uh it's not actually a triple major it's three degrees it's a MBA, it's a law degree and it's an undergraduate all at the same time.
You know I mean these are completed it's not like a bachelor's degree with three majors you know? This is well beyond that. In a language that's a foreign language to him. Right? And he did really well in all of them but uh when i asked Charlie the question he said well it was a complete no-brainer and he said i just had to look at the track record so he said here was a here's a guy who was on student loan, so he had no money and on the float of the student loans, which is you know?
He would get the money in you know January maybe he has to pay it in April or something he said he would invest the float of the student loans and when he graduated he had a million dollars. Okay? So when Li Lu finished at Columbia with Colombia's loan money with the stuff he was doing and then after that he he went into venture capital and he had an incredible record uh you know one of his early investments is a company now that we know as Capital IQ uh and actually a lot of what is Capital IQ uh a lot of influence from uh from Li Lu and uh Capital iq basically is the closest thing you can get to to Bloomberg uh it's it's it's a really incredible uh product i mean like we have a subscription.
We pay them an arm and a leg. And uh we can't get around it um and you know so so he's he's been an incredible investor and i think what Charlie said was it was one of the easiest decisions to figure out that Li Lu was amazing he said that his track record was incredible and then i think the other piece is that uh what Munger and Buffett are both extremely good at is their uh incredible judge of judges of humans and uh so it was uh um you know Ron Olson's wife she worked for one of these uh human rights groups which was you know protesting things happening in china and uh they had helped Li Lu when he came to the us uh in term because you know he he was active in Tinmen Square and all of that.
And there was an event uh i think in Santa Barbara or something that she had hosted and Li Lu had come for that event and Charlie had gone there as well and that's where they met for the first time. and and then so it was an accidental meeting and then i think uh once Charlie started to talk to Li Lu and understand how he invested.
But i would also say the following uh i would say that you know like George Soros has this theory of reflexology and i think that uh Charlie made Li Lu an even better investor so they would meet once a week for breakfast and and of course you know Li Lu will discuss different investments and whatever with Charlie
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