215: Poor Charlie’s Almanack

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1. 00:00:00 So we've got some follow-up items here.
2. 00:00:03 I'll go first.
3. 00:00:04 I've got two, one of them I did great, one of them I did awful.
4. 00:00:11 Care to guess which one is which?
5. 00:00:13 I'm going to say that you were able to build out
6. 00:00:16 the latter of importance.
7. 00:00:17 But when you went with Get Social, maybe I'm wrong.
8. 00:00:22 You are wrong.
9. 00:00:25 I guess you haven't been on social media much.
10. 00:00:28 I have no judgment here.
11. 00:00:31 But yeah, I have been successfully scheduling posts
12. 00:00:37 for social media ahead of time.
13. 00:00:39 I still want to do more with this,
14. 00:00:41 but I am publishing regularly.
15. 00:00:44 And this was sort of necessitated
16. 00:00:46 by the Practical PKM cohort starting.
17. 00:00:50 So I kind of had to do it.
18. 00:00:53 But I feel like this is sustainable, famous last words,
19. 00:00:59 I guess, because over the last week,
20. 00:01:01 my cue has gotten down there quite a bit.
21. 00:01:04 And I need to create some new stuff.
22. 00:01:06 But yeah, so that has been successful.
23. 00:01:09 Well, building out the latter of importance from my topic
24. 00:01:12 has not been something I've been able to set aside
25. 00:01:15 any time or mental resources towards.
26. 00:01:18 And I don't think that is probably
27. 00:01:20 going to happen until the cohort is over at this point.
28. 00:01:25 But I am going to be working with the same designer developer
29. 00:01:30 that updated the cohort page for updating the rest of the site.
30. 00:01:34 So it is going to be necessary for me
31. 00:01:36 to figure that stuff out in terms of giving them
32. 00:01:41 what they need to build out the sales pages.
33. 00:01:45 But yeah, that's not happening in the immediate future.
34. 00:01:49 How did you do?
35. 00:01:51 I did terrible, absolutely horrible, terrible.
36. 00:01:54 So Mike, I don't even know if it's worth talking about them.
37. 00:01:56 I had to apply the belief ladder to the CCU engineering
38. 00:02:00 program and choosing engineering and then develop a ladder.
39. 00:02:03 Well, I guess it's just one, really, kind of the develop
40. 00:02:06 to the ladder for the CCU program.
41. 00:02:09 But one of the things that I struggle with
42. 00:02:10 is when we get back into the semester,
43. 00:02:13 the week before the semester starts
44. 00:02:15 and then the first week or two of the semester,
45. 00:02:18 it's kind of like all hands on deck, go, go, go, go, go.
46. 00:02:22 And then when you're not in that mode,
47. 00:02:24 like brain just shuts down, right?
48. 00:02:26 So the fact that I'm reading the books
49. 00:02:29 and like engaging in the books is like win.
50. 00:02:32 So here's the intervention question, Mike,
51. 00:02:35 which we've had multiple of these.
52. 00:02:38 I need a way to prioritize these action items.
53. 00:02:41 And I don't know how to do it.
54. 00:02:42 Like we've talked a little bit about this in the past.
55. 00:02:45 I don't know whether or not I should just not care about it.
56. 00:02:49 And it's like, if it becomes important enough, it'll happen.
57. 00:02:51 Or if it's like, I need to set aside a time every week
58. 00:02:55 and be like, this is my bookworm action item period of time.
59. 00:03:01 Which I'm against that inherently.
60. 00:03:03 Like I more go on the philosophy of like,
61. 00:03:06 if this is important enough, it'll bubble to the top.
62. 00:03:09 Like it's going to rise to the top.
63. 00:03:13 But I also don't know if that's right.
64. 00:03:15 Like if I should schedule some time in there.
65. 00:03:16 So I need to think about that.
66. 00:03:18 I need to figure it out.
67. 00:03:19 One of the things I wanted to tell you about your action item,
68. 00:03:22 maybe this will help me too.
69. 00:03:23 You know, maybe we need to schedule
70. 00:03:25 like a half hour working session, right?
71. 00:03:27 That is, you know, our bookworm action items
72. 00:03:30 or whatever it might be.
73. 00:03:31 It's like the Corey, Mike, working session.
74. 00:03:34 - We need to figure out the details of this yet.
75. 00:03:36 But the library, my private community,
76. 00:03:39 we do these co-working calls.
77. 00:03:42 And a bunch of people show up, Christopher was someone
78. 00:03:47 who's been involved in my different cohorts
79. 00:03:49 and is now the community manager actually hosts the calls
80. 00:03:52 and he gets a bunch of people that show up every week.
81. 00:03:55 And maybe we could do something like that
82. 00:03:58 for bookworm pro listeners.
83. 00:04:01 I do think like having time set aside
84. 00:04:04 to work on things together is a cool idea.
85. 00:04:07 And virtual tools make that easy.
86. 00:04:10 But we're still working out the details for that.
87. 00:04:14 Hopefully we'll have something that we can announce
88. 00:04:17 by the next episode.
89. 00:04:20 We were working on something and then it took a detour
90. 00:04:24 and now we're back to the beginning kind of.
91. 00:04:27 So yeah, it's not that we've neglected this completely.
92. 00:04:31 They've been progress made and then kind of had to pivot.
93. 00:04:35 So, but that is something that we could certainly look into.
94. 00:04:39 The other thing is I mentioned this to you,
95. 00:04:44 the group coaching stuff that I'm gonna be doing,
96. 00:04:48 which this is related to your creative action item.
97. 00:04:53 But if you want some direct accountability,
98. 00:04:56 I mean, yeah, happy to provide that.
99. 00:04:58 Maybe we just need some public shaming
100. 00:05:02 from the bookworm club listeners.
101. 00:05:04 I don't know.
102. 00:05:05 Or we could just, you know, continue as is
103. 00:05:07 if you're fine with that too, whatever.
104. 00:05:10 Part of me is like, well, we read these things
105. 00:05:12 and like, I actually think, okay, this is a good one.
106. 00:05:14 I should work on this, I should do that.
107. 00:05:15 'Cause that's, I don't make action items just for fluff,
108. 00:05:18 like just to make action items.
109. 00:05:20 So I think like, okay, I should really work on this one.
110. 00:05:22 And then we finish recording, life comes at me
111. 00:05:27 and overwhelms and then I don't ever make it back to it,
112. 00:05:29 which we'll probably get into some of this in the show today.
113. 00:05:34 But one of the things I did just write down
114. 00:05:35 is I just wrote down an action item
115. 00:05:37 that says lead the effort on the library
116. 00:05:40 co-working sessions.
117. 00:05:41 So one of my action items, not even from the book,
118. 00:05:44 is to lead the effort on the library co-working sessions.
119. 00:05:46 Now Mike, before you get your hopes up,
120. 00:05:49 before you get your hopes up,
121. 00:05:51 I'm really bad at following through on these action items.
122. 00:05:54 So maybe I'm trying to get you
123. 00:05:57 to help me be more accountable, but I will work on the action.
124. 00:06:00 - Okay, well, let's just have a conversation about that.
125. 00:06:03 That'll be the action item.
126. 00:06:04 How about that? - Yes.
127. 00:06:05 (laughs)
128. 00:06:06 - 'Cause I think that one will be pretty easy to implement,
129. 00:06:09 especially based on some of the stuff
130. 00:06:11 that we had kind of talked about already, so.
131. 00:06:14 - Yep.
132. 00:06:15 - All right, cool.
133. 00:06:16 Well, we don't need to belabor your failed action items
134. 00:06:19 any longer, you want to just talk about today's book?
135. 00:06:22 - Thanks, Mike, thanks, Mike.
136. 00:06:24 - Yeah, let's talk about it.
137. 00:06:25 - Yeah, let's do it.
138. 00:06:26 - All right, so today's book is poor Charlie's Almanac.
139. 00:06:29 Who do you say this book is by, by the way?
140. 00:06:33 - Okay, this is a really good question
141. 00:06:36 because it's really kind of like an editorial book, right?
142. 00:06:42 Like, I mean, somebody brought some stuff together,
143. 00:06:45 added some commentary in and out of it,
144. 00:06:48 but the main gist of this talk is,
145. 00:06:51 or sorry, this book, you heard me kind of allude to it there.
146. 00:06:53 The main gist of this book is these 11 talks
147. 00:06:56 that Munger gave at these different places
148. 00:06:59 throughout the years, primarily through like the early 2000s.
149. 00:07:03 And then they brought in,
150. 00:07:05 and I'm forgetting the guy's name,
151. 00:07:06 I'm blanking on the guy's name right now,
152. 00:07:07 but the editor came in and he put them all together
153. 00:07:10 and wrapped them in a package and put it out
154. 00:07:12 as poor Charlie's Almanac,
155. 00:07:14 which we're gonna talk about the pros and cons of that,
156. 00:07:16 I'm sure, as we get into the book and into style and rating.
157. 00:07:21 But I think it's like a authored by Charlie and Friends
158. 00:07:28 and then edited by this other guy, right?
159. 00:07:31 - Yeah, and again, I'm blanking on his name right now.
160. 00:07:33 - So if you look it up on Amazon, the author,
161. 00:07:36 even though it says in parentheses, editor,
162. 00:07:38 that's Peter Kaufman.
163. 00:07:40 I don't know if there's different versions
164. 00:07:42 of poor Charlie's Almanac,
165. 00:07:43 and that's the specific one that we read,
166. 00:07:47 but the stripe.press version,
167. 00:07:50 which you made me aware of last episode,
168. 00:07:53 which is really well done, if--
169. 00:07:56 - Incredibly well.
170. 00:07:57 - Even if you read physical books all the time like I do,
171. 00:07:59 you need to check out this website.
172. 00:08:02 There's like little floating Charlie Munger balloons.
173. 00:08:05 You can poke with your mouse and stuff like that.
174. 00:08:08 It's really cool.
175. 00:08:10 This website is amazing,
176. 00:08:11 and it's basically the entire book for free online.
177. 00:08:14 So great place to read it.
178. 00:08:15 There's also a lot of additional photos and things.
179. 00:08:18 A lot of the things that they talk about are linked
180. 00:08:21 and you click on them and it'll open up photos
181. 00:08:23 of those particular things.
182. 00:08:24 So that's a better resource, I think,
183. 00:08:27 for really grocking what is a summary of the website says,
184. 00:08:37 by the way, let me look up the whole title.
185. 00:08:39 The Essential Whitney Wisdom of Charles T. Munger.
186. 00:08:41 So it's really a book about Charles Munger,
187. 00:08:45 which is Warren Buffett's Right Hand Man,
188. 00:08:47 Berkshire Hathaway.
189. 00:08:49 The structure of the book is kind of different.
190. 00:08:52 There's a couple chapters at the beginning
191. 00:08:56 where a portrait of Charles Munger
192. 00:08:58 remembering the children on Charlie,
193. 00:09:01 the Munger approach to life learning and decision making,
194. 00:09:04 and then there's 11 talks,
195. 00:09:05 which is what you were alluding to,
196. 00:09:07 things that he's said different places.
197. 00:09:09 Some of them are, this is the talk that he gave at this place,
198. 00:09:12 but because this is really the life of Charlie Munger,
199. 00:09:20 and it's little snippets of these different things
200. 00:09:23 that he said at different moments in time.
201. 00:09:24 There's a lot of overlap, so it's been edited in a way
202. 00:09:27 where it's like, okay, Charlie talks about this stuff again
203. 00:09:29 here, it's a long book, it's like 350 pages,
204. 00:09:35 but it could have been a lot longer.
205. 00:09:37 - And let me say a couple of different things here.
206. 00:09:39 One, I really think that you gotta say Charlie Munger
207. 00:09:43 is the author of it.
208. 00:09:45 And the reason why, especially in the version I read,
209. 00:09:48 which I believe is the same version that you read,
210. 00:09:51 he does the revised portion after each talk
211. 00:09:54 where he goes back in and says,
212. 00:09:56 and here's the update,
213. 00:09:57 and I think that really doubles down on the fact that
214. 00:10:01 he wrote this and then he had a very strong hand
215. 00:10:05 in coming back and just kind of giving you an overview of it.
216. 00:10:08 Now, those aren't long, it's not like he takes that talk
217. 00:10:12 and like changes a bunch of stuff,
218. 00:10:14 it's mainly a page, half a page or something,
219. 00:10:16 of like, oh, and I've had this thought since,
220. 00:10:18 or I really wanna drive this point home or whatever it is.
221. 00:10:21 But I wanna go back to something
222. 00:10:23 that we were talking about, the stripe,
223. 00:10:25 the press.stripe book.
224. 00:10:27 I believe this is what iBooks was supposed to be.
225. 00:10:32 Do you remember iBooks and what they touted iBooks
226. 00:10:34 to be like these interactive books
227. 00:10:36 where you could zoom in and zoom out
228. 00:10:38 and there's multimedia built into them
229. 00:10:40 and presentations and stuff like within the book
230. 00:10:43 and how amazing it was gonna be?
231. 00:10:44 Like, I think this is the realization
232. 00:10:50 of what iBooks promised and never delivered.
233. 00:10:53 And I think it's like incredible.
234. 00:10:55 Like, I loved reading the press.stripe version
235. 00:11:00 of this book as compared to just the normal bound
236. 00:11:04 or even digital form of the book.
237. 00:11:06 Like, I loved, loved, loved reading that version of this book.
238. 00:11:10 - Yeah, this is a really cool website.
239. 00:11:14 I read the physical version
240. 00:11:16 and I still think that is a worthwhile addition
241. 00:11:22 to the collection.
242. 00:11:23 That in and of itself is actually a pretty beautiful book.
243. 00:11:27 But yeah, having it all available for free on this,
244. 00:11:32 this website is pretty cool.
245. 00:11:35 There's also the alternate formats on this website
246. 00:11:39 so you can buy the actual book itself.
247. 00:11:41 There's the audio book so you can listen to it.
248. 00:11:43 And then there's what they call Berkshire Mode.
249. 00:11:47 Did you click on that at all?
250. 00:11:48 - Oh, I didn't see Berkshire Mode.
251. 00:11:50 Hold on, I gotta go ahead and check this out.
252. 00:11:52 - Yeah, it's basically a really ugly website
253. 00:11:55 where all the text is on one page.
254. 00:11:58 I don't get the inside joke there
255. 00:12:01 about this being Berkshire Mode.
256. 00:12:04 - Okay, hold on, how do I get there?
257. 00:12:06 Where's the setting that says put it into Berkshire Mode?
258. 00:12:09 - You don't see that in your web browser, huh?
259. 00:12:11 So if you go to the website,
260. 00:12:13 you've got the chapters on the left.
261. 00:12:14 - Okay, down at the box.
262. 00:12:15 - On the right, yeah, you've got alternate formats
263. 00:12:18 and there's Berkshire Mode.
264. 00:12:19 And that one just opens up a really ugly website.
265. 00:12:22 It's like web 1.0 with all of the text.
266. 00:12:25 - My suspicion that is that ties into the fact
267. 00:12:27 that Buffett eats a McMuffin every morning
268. 00:12:32 and what does he want to drink a Coke?
269. 00:12:35 Right, that's all the most drink is a Coke, right?
270. 00:12:37 So it's a McMuffin and a Coke every day.
271. 00:12:38 It's like he's reading the newspaper.
272. 00:12:41 That's Berkshire Mode.
273. 00:12:43 - Yeah.
274. 00:12:45 So this is again, maybe a terrible pick for Bookworm
275. 00:12:50 because we're gonna try and talk about a 350 page book
276. 00:12:55 and provide a summary which is in and of itself
277. 00:12:58 a bunch of random thoughts from a bunch of different places
278. 00:13:00 at a bunch of different times in his life.
279. 00:13:03 So I have no idea like the structure for this episode.
280. 00:13:07 I've got the mind map and it's broken down
281. 00:13:11 into the main chapters and then the 11 talks.
282. 00:13:13 I have in the outline all 11 talks
283. 00:13:17 but because there's a lot of overlap
284. 00:13:18 maybe we'll jump between them.
285. 00:13:20 I'm okay with that.
286. 00:13:22 I really think if you were to condense all of the talks
287. 00:13:25 there's probably five or six recurring themes
288. 00:13:28 that he ends up hitting a lot.
289. 00:13:32 But yeah, you're ready to dive into the specifics?
290. 00:13:37 - Yeah, I am. I think my disclaimer to anybody
291. 00:13:41 who's thinking about reading this, right?
292. 00:13:43 And whether you decide to after our conversation or not,
293. 00:13:46 you know, he's a pretty eccentric guy
294. 00:13:50 and he's also an insanely famous eccentric guy.
295. 00:13:53 So it's like whether or not you know him
296. 00:13:56 or you've ever even heard of him or not.
297. 00:13:59 If you're interested in some of the quips, the wit,
298. 00:14:02 you know, if what we talk about here kind of goes,
299. 00:14:05 oh, that'd be interesting to talk about.
300. 00:14:07 The other one would be really, really big
301. 00:14:10 into economics, psychology.
302. 00:14:13 And then just I would say like general rational thinking.
303. 00:14:16 So it's like while some of the stuff got really specific
304. 00:14:19 and personally wasn't really that relevant or interesting,
305. 00:14:23 you know, like I wasn't going into it going, man,
306. 00:14:25 I really want to read that, you know, that talk.
307. 00:14:29 There were some general principles
308. 00:14:30 that you can get out of this.
309. 00:14:31 So it's like if you're looking at this
310. 00:14:33 and you're like a Charlie Munger, I don't care.
311. 00:14:35 I don't even know who that is, you know,
312. 00:14:37 kind of go into it with a little bit more of an open mind,
313. 00:14:38 especially after you listen,
314. 00:14:40 if you decide that like, okay,
315. 00:14:41 those are some pretty interesting thoughts.
316. 00:14:43 That would be my disclaimer before we get going.
317. 00:14:46 - Yeah, that's fair.
318. 00:14:48 All right.
319. 00:14:49 Well, let's start by talking about the introductions.
320. 00:14:53 There's multiples here.
321. 00:14:56 There is a forward by John Collison who I did not look up.
322. 00:15:01 There's a forward by Warren E. Buffet.
323. 00:15:04 So Charlie's business partner, basically,
324. 00:15:08 where Warren says some nice things about Charlie
325. 00:15:11 and then there is a rebuttal by Charles T. Munger
326. 00:15:14 where he responds to the nice things
327. 00:15:15 that Warren said, basically.
328. 00:15:17 And then there's an introduction by Peter D. Kaufman,
329. 00:15:19 who is the editor.
330. 00:15:22 The, I guess the forward by John Collison,
331. 00:15:26 it sounds like this was a younger guy
332. 00:15:28 who got to know Charlie directly in his 20s
333. 00:15:33 and had the opportunity to meet him directly.
334. 00:15:36 This is the one where it says the quote,
335. 00:15:42 there's no better teacher than history
336. 00:15:43 and determining future.
337. 00:15:44 There are answers with billions of dollars
338. 00:15:45 and a $30 history book.
339. 00:15:46 And that's kind of the thought that
340. 00:15:49 I've heard other people talk about this book,
341. 00:15:51 how it's a very valuable business education in a book.
342. 00:15:56 Yes and no, in my opinion,
343. 00:15:58 Charlie had a bunch of success.
344. 00:16:01 And so those are the types of people
345. 00:16:02 you wanna learn from.
346. 00:16:04 It's not as simple as just copying what they did
347. 00:16:07 and he's not gonna provide you a simple system on anything.
348. 00:16:11 So if you're tired of those books, kind of like I am,
349. 00:16:14 this is sort of a breath of fresh air.
350. 00:16:17 But also this isn't one that you pick up
351. 00:16:19 because you're trying to solve a specific problem.
352. 00:16:23 This is one just because you're interested in the person
353. 00:16:26 and you wanna find out more about them.
354. 00:16:28 And if you go into that with an open mind,
355. 00:16:30 I think you can learn a ton
356. 00:16:32 and that's kind of what Peter Kaufman talks about
357. 00:16:34 in his introduction.
358. 00:16:35 These are all fairly short.
359. 00:16:37 I actually don't have any notes on these in my mind map.
360. 00:16:41 It's really just setting the stage for the rest of the book
361. 00:16:44 and I don't have anything more to say about these.
362. 00:16:46 Do you have anything from the introductions
363. 00:16:48 that you wanted to go up?
364. 00:16:49 No, no, I didn't have any notes on this either.
365. 00:16:50 But my question to you, Mike, is where did this book come from?
366. 00:16:55 Like why did you pick this book up?
367. 00:16:57 Like what was the motivation when you picked it?
368. 00:17:01 Yeah, well, I have this general rule
369. 00:17:05 where when someone that I respect recommends a book,
370. 00:17:09 I buy it immediately.
371. 00:17:11 And so this was one that when this version
372. 00:17:14 was actually published, I saw multiple people recommend it.
373. 00:17:18 Oh, you gotta pick this one up.
374. 00:17:19 So it had been sitting on my bookshelf for a long time.
375. 00:17:23 A long time, yeah.
376. 00:17:24 I saw that it was, well, long time.
377. 00:17:26 I think it came out like a year ago.
378. 00:17:27 So I'm not super long.
379. 00:17:29 Sorry, I thought it came out way before that.
380. 00:17:30 My fault, it came out in '23, yeah.
381. 00:17:32 Yeah, this version, probably shortly after Charlie died,
382. 00:17:36 would be my guess.
383. 00:17:38 And so it had been sitting on my bookshelf
384. 00:17:40 and I'd look at it every once in a while.
385. 00:17:42 I'm like, oh, I should really read that.
386. 00:17:44 But it's really big.
387. 00:17:45 I've got other books that I've got to read
388. 00:17:47 or I'm more interested in reading.
389. 00:17:50 And then when we did simple marketing for smart people last,
390. 00:17:53 I ran it by you ahead of times.
391. 00:17:55 I didn't want to give you a whole bunch of extra homework.
392. 00:17:59 But this is one that I've heard good things about.
393. 00:18:02 And maybe with the shorter one before this,
394. 00:18:05 this is a good timing to do this particular book.
395. 00:18:08 You said, sure.
396. 00:18:10 So we went for it.
397. 00:18:11 I didn't really know what to expect.
398. 00:18:13 And I didn't really know exactly what it was.
399. 00:18:16 It's sort of like modern meditations,
400. 00:18:19 though I think I prefer meditations by Charles Munger
401. 00:18:22 more than meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
402. 00:18:24 I can tell you I 100% prefer meditations by Munger
403. 00:18:28 than I did meditations by Marcus.
404. 00:18:32 But do you think that's a fair kind of description of it?
405. 00:18:35 That's sort of how it's written.
406. 00:18:39 Yeah, I would say if you combined meditations
407. 00:18:43 with the 101 essays, right?
408. 00:18:46 And if you smoosh those two books together,
409. 00:18:48 that's this book only.
410. 00:18:50 It's written by what's out of you, not even written.
411. 00:18:53 It's edited and put together based on his talks,
412. 00:18:57 which is it's just strange.
413. 00:18:58 Like it's a strange concept for a book,
414. 00:19:00 but it works really well.
415. 00:19:01 And I think it came together well.
416. 00:19:04 So we should get into the chapters.
417. 00:19:05 So thanks for letting me know how we got to it.
418. 00:19:08 Yeah.
419. 00:19:09 So the first chapter is a portrait of Charles T. Munger.
420. 00:19:13 And this is basically kind of just like a life history.
421. 00:19:19 And I guess I'll just share some of the things
422. 00:19:22 that I have in my notes here, just some details.
423. 00:19:27 This is this part of the book.
424. 00:19:28 It's really not, you know, the way that I took notes was
425. 00:19:32 I wanted to have a couple of historical facts.
426. 00:19:35 Like in my mind, I'm thinking of what does this look like
427. 00:19:38 when I transfer it to Obsidian.
428. 00:19:41 This is gonna be like the important details
429. 00:19:43 if I wanted to go back and look up,
430. 00:19:45 you know, who was Charles Munger.
431. 00:19:46 So born in Omaha, Nebraska, January 1st, 1924.
432. 00:19:50 Cool birthday, New Year's Day.
433. 00:19:53 He worked at Buffett and Sun,
434. 00:19:55 an upscale grocery store owned by Warren's grandfather, Ernest.
435. 00:19:58 That was kind of interesting
436. 00:19:59 that they had a family connection.
437. 00:20:00 And then they kind of grew apart.
438. 00:20:03 His parents gave the kids several books at Christmas,
439. 00:20:06 which I thought was a really cool idea.
440. 00:20:09 They got reacquainted at a dinner party with Warren
441. 00:20:12 when he was 25 and Charlie was 31.
442. 00:20:16 That's where Warren convinced Charlie
443. 00:20:18 to quit practicing law.
444. 00:20:19 A lot of the talks come from his connection
445. 00:20:21 to Harvard Law School.
446. 00:20:23 So that's kind of a fascinating subplot there.
447. 00:20:28 And then they make a point to call out
448. 00:20:31 that despite his wealth,
449. 00:20:32 Charlie would prefer to remain anonymous.
450. 00:20:34 You kind of get that vibe as you go through
451. 00:20:36 the rest of the book.
452. 00:20:37 And he's a huge fan of Benjamin Franklin.
453. 00:20:40 There's a lot of additional details there
454. 00:20:44 which are probably not interesting for bookworm,
455. 00:20:47 but that kind of gives you a synopsis,
456. 00:20:49 I think, of who he was and how he got to be,
457. 00:20:52 where he was at Berkshire Hathaway.
458. 00:20:54 - Something that I didn't realize as I was reading this
459. 00:20:57 and I'm almost positive in this first chapter
460. 00:20:59 was he did a lot of different things, right?
461. 00:21:02 So he had his hand in a lot of different stuff
462. 00:21:04 throughout his life.
463. 00:21:05 I mean, I always knew of him as he and Buffett
464. 00:21:09 were two peas in a pod and they were taking Berkshire Hathaway
465. 00:21:14 and they ran it to crazy success.
466. 00:21:17 But I didn't know, he was in real estate development,
467. 00:21:20 he was in law, you know, he had then done the economics
468. 00:21:25 and the financial different side of things.
469. 00:21:27 Like he had his hand in a ton of different things
470. 00:21:30 which I think when you look at his background
471. 00:21:34 and then you look at like the way,
472. 00:21:36 I guess when they get to into the details
473. 00:21:38 of his investment strategies later on,
474. 00:21:41 it kind of makes sense why he's well-rounded,
475. 00:21:44 you know, kind of disciplined in a bunch of different fields
476. 00:21:46 in a bunch of different ways
477. 00:21:47 is because he had a lot of life experience.
478. 00:21:49 I mean, he had a whole lot of life experience
479. 00:21:51 living in the Midwest and moving to California
480. 00:21:53 and all of that stuff.
481. 00:21:55 So that was really interesting.
482. 00:21:56 I like the fact that, you know, from chapter one,
483. 00:21:59 he talks about basically making friends
484. 00:22:03 with what they call the eminent dead who had good ideas
485. 00:22:07 and like having this, you know, this education
486. 00:22:11 through smart people that came before you
487. 00:22:12 and trying to have, I guess, this dialogue with them
488. 00:22:15 even though they can't dialogue back because they're dead
489. 00:22:17 which that ties into his connection to Franklin
490. 00:22:21 and like, you know, Franklin and then Samuel Johnson
491. 00:22:24 and a bunch of these people that he'll cite
492. 00:22:27 or he'll reference over and over and over again,
493. 00:22:30 Keynes, like it was like he was friends with these people
494. 00:22:33 even though there's no way he possibly could
495. 00:22:35 which I think that's a cool aspect of his personality
496. 00:22:38 or an aspect of the way he tried to engage
497. 00:22:41 with historical content.
498. 00:22:44 - Yeah, and so the reason that this is even titled
499. 00:22:49 Poor Charlie's Almanac is kind of a nod
500. 00:22:53 to his affinity for Benjamin Franklin
501. 00:22:56 with what's his version, Poor Richard's Almanac?
502. 00:22:58 - Poor Richard's Almanac, yep.
503. 00:23:00 - Yeah, so I think if he had a historical figure
504. 00:23:03 that he wanted to be like, it's probably Benjamin Franklin
505. 00:23:08 and that's kind of how the editor, I think,
506. 00:23:10 positions him as like a modern Benjamin Franklin.
507. 00:23:13 You think that's fair?
508. 00:23:13 That would agree, for sure.
509. 00:23:15 - Cool.
510. 00:23:16 All right, the next chapter is remembering
511. 00:23:19 the children on Charlie and this is basically
512. 00:23:23 just some snippets and some memories from Charlie's kids.
513. 00:23:27 I don't think there's a whole lot here
514. 00:23:29 that is worth discussing, to be honest.
515. 00:23:34 I will say a couple things I jotted down for my notes.
516. 00:23:38 One of the things that one of the kids had mentioned,
517. 00:23:41 they really impressed by, is do the job right the first time.
518. 00:23:45 They mentioned that they always saw him reading books,
519. 00:23:48 which you can also pick up from some of the things
520. 00:23:50 that he says later on, but it's cool to hear
521. 00:23:52 that he actually walked the walk,
522. 00:23:55 basically didn't just talk about
523. 00:23:57 how you need to read books all the time.
524. 00:23:59 And then they spent a lot of time at the lake
525. 00:24:00 in Minnesota growing up, so again, Midwest roots.
526. 00:24:04 But it's interesting that I think all of the talks,
527. 00:24:07 or most of the talks, happened at places
528. 00:24:10 that were in California, that's obviously that's where
529. 00:24:14 he was most of the time.
530. 00:24:16 - I think that one of the major things
531. 00:24:18 that came out of this chapter for me,
532. 00:24:19 and in my prior research-type work,
533. 00:24:24 and a lot of the stuff that I did
534. 00:24:26 in academia before coming to this position,
535. 00:24:28 it was like entrepreneurship education,
536. 00:24:30 and we always take these entrepreneurs,
537. 00:24:32 or these business people, and we put them on pedestals
538. 00:24:34 and talk about how amazing they are,
539. 00:24:36 and all these wonderful things that they've done.
540. 00:24:38 Man, and the one thing that came out of this one,
541. 00:24:40 that made me sad, there are a lot of the gems from Minnesota.
542. 00:24:43 This is one of the kids talking.
543. 00:24:45 In those days, when Charlie worked so long and so hard,
544. 00:24:48 that was the only meaningful time we spent with him.
545. 00:24:50 During the work weeks, he was off before dawn,
546. 00:24:53 home about dinnertime, and then studied Standard and Poor's,
547. 00:24:56 and later, we spent a couple hours on the phone with Warren,
548. 00:24:59 and it was like, this guy sacrificed,
549. 00:25:01 there was no easy, he didn't have this easy,
550. 00:25:05 like, oh, I just fell into this really good investment
551. 00:25:08 strategy, and became a partner with this other guy.
552. 00:25:11 It's like, he really dedicated and committed the time to it,
553. 00:25:15 and, I mean, they don't pitch it like this,
554. 00:25:18 but I have to think, on some level,
555. 00:25:19 his family suffered because of it.
556. 00:25:21 Like, the relationships among the family
557. 00:25:23 were just not there from a time standpoint, right?
558. 00:25:28 'Cause he had his nose in a book,
559. 00:25:30 or he was working, or whatever he was doing,
560. 00:25:32 which I think is just a really interesting tidbit,
561. 00:25:37 but it's very, very common across really successful people
562. 00:25:41 that people will put on a pedestal,
563. 00:25:42 is there was this gigantic sacrifice
564. 00:25:44 in some aspect of their life,
565. 00:25:46 in some way, shape, or form of their life.
566. 00:25:48 - I kind of wonder if, I mean, just up front,
567. 00:25:53 I think you're probably right,
568. 00:25:56 like, that's not how I would want to be remembered,
569. 00:25:59 but I do wonder if that is maybe a little bit
570. 00:26:04 of like a different era sort of a--
571. 00:26:08 - Generational thing, yeah.
572. 00:26:09 - Yeah, I don't think he probably saw that as a sacrifice,
573. 00:26:13 and they probably just, because of his age,
574. 00:26:19 and when this happened,
575. 00:26:21 I don't have a whole lot of memory
576. 00:26:24 from my grandpa on my dad's side,
577. 00:26:29 but I do remember a little bit,
578. 00:26:31 and I think he passed away when I was maybe like 10,
579. 00:26:36 and what I remember is that grandma was always
580. 00:26:41 the social one, and grandpa had his routines,
581. 00:26:44 and you did not mess with grandpa's routines.
582. 00:26:48 He was the primary breadwinner,
583. 00:26:50 and he did his thing,
584. 00:26:51 and everyone else just kind of supported him,
585. 00:26:54 but stayed out of his way.
586. 00:26:56 And no one thought less of him for that,
587. 00:27:00 it was just like, well, that's what he does,
588. 00:27:01 and that's kind of the picture that I got
589. 00:27:03 with that description was not like,
590. 00:27:06 well, he needed to spend a couple of hours
591. 00:27:08 talking to his boss every night on the phone,
592. 00:27:11 but that was his way of unwinding after our day of work,
593. 00:27:17 which sort of doesn't make sense, but sort of I get it.
594. 00:27:21 I don't know, I'm projecting at this point,
595. 00:27:23 but I feel like if you're as successful as he was,
596. 00:27:28 you probably get to,
597. 00:27:29 I mean, they're spending the summer
598. 00:27:30 at a lake in Minnesota when they,
599. 00:27:32 sounds like he's living in California,
600. 00:27:35 so I don't know, maybe like they're well off enough,
601. 00:27:40 obviously, that they can go spend the summer at the lake,
602. 00:27:43 so I don't think he's wondering
603. 00:27:45 where he's gonna make the next buck,
604. 00:27:47 that's just how he's wired maybe,
605. 00:27:49 and that's what he does for fun.
606. 00:27:52 - Yeah, I would agree.
607. 00:27:53 I think that's how he was wired, right?
608. 00:27:55 Like I get the impression that his brain was always churning
609. 00:28:01 on some sort of multidisciplinary thing
610. 00:28:04 and how do I connect the dots
611. 00:28:05 and how do I do this other thing?
612. 00:28:08 I just think that was an interesting,
613. 00:28:09 'cause isn't there a part two
614. 00:28:11 where they talk about walking into his office or something
615. 00:28:13 and you basically just saw the top of his head,
616. 00:28:15 like you saw a portion of his head behind the newspaper
617. 00:28:19 'cause he was always had his nose in something,
618. 00:28:21 either a book or the newspaper.
619. 00:28:23 - Yeah, so. - All right, I'm ready to go to chapter three.
620. 00:28:26 - All right, so chapter three,
621. 00:28:28 the Munger approach to life learning and decision making.
622. 00:28:34 So a couple things that stood out to me from this,
623. 00:28:36 number one, he's a big fan of mental models.
624. 00:28:39 - Yes. - And the message
625. 00:28:40 that he had about a hundred of 'em that he used
626. 00:28:42 to evaluate companies to invest in.
627. 00:28:44 He didn't make a ton of investments
628. 00:28:46 and he tended to hold them for a long time
629. 00:28:49 and he attempts to assess and understand
630. 00:28:52 competitive advantage in every aspect
631. 00:28:55 and the durability of that advantage.
632. 00:28:57 And there's these different,
633. 00:28:59 he's got a investing principles checklist,
634. 00:29:02 which I think don't think there's a whole lot
635. 00:29:04 to be gleaned by this,
636. 00:29:05 but I'll just share risk, independence,
637. 00:29:07 preparation, intellectual humility, analytic rigor,
638. 00:29:10 allocation, patience, decisiveness, change and focus.
639. 00:29:13 And I say it's not a lot to be gleaned here
640. 00:29:14 because I'm not in a place where I'm asking myself
641. 00:29:18 for a checklist of investing principles.
642. 00:29:21 Maybe some of our listeners are.
643. 00:29:23 Go check out that section of the book.
644. 00:29:25 - Exactly. (laughs)
645. 00:29:27 But not for me.
646. 00:29:29 - I really liked here how,
647. 00:29:33 I mean, you saw like kind of his whole structure, right?
648. 00:29:36 And you talked about the mental model.
649. 00:29:37 So Mike, this is why I thought you were,
650. 00:29:40 this is why I thought you picked this book.
651. 00:29:41 I was like, oh, Michael loves mental models.
652. 00:29:43 So he wanted to know monger's mental models, right?
653. 00:29:46 And I was like, so he picked this book, right?
654. 00:29:49 But I don't know, was it just coincidence?
655. 00:29:51 - I see it was just coincidence.
656. 00:29:52 - Yeah, I mean, to be honest,
657. 00:29:54 I don't think his discussion of mental models
658. 00:29:57 is really all that effective.
659. 00:30:00 If you're looking for a better book on mental models,
660. 00:30:03 Shane Parrish just redid the whole mental model series.
661. 00:30:07 You can get the box set with the different colors.
662. 00:30:10 Those are the ones that I think are the best.
663. 00:30:12 And then after that, it's super thinking.
664. 00:30:15 I think we covered that one.
665. 00:30:17 - Yeah, we covered that one, yeah.
666. 00:30:18 - And that's just a big list
667. 00:30:19 of all the different mental models.
668. 00:30:20 And so if you're trying to discover mental models,
669. 00:30:23 that's more effective.
670. 00:30:24 But it is interesting to see
671. 00:30:25 which ones he thought were important.
672. 00:30:28 He's not gonna go crank through the whole list
673. 00:30:31 of all the mental models, by the way.
674. 00:30:33 And I actually think that's a good thing.
675. 00:30:35 - And I think he would say the multidisciplinary approach
676. 00:30:38 is the important part, right?
677. 00:30:39 Like it isn't even necessarily the specific mental models.
678. 00:30:42 It's this multidisciplinary approach
679. 00:30:44 and then figuring out what is the fundamental model
680. 00:30:46 in that field or in the thing you,
681. 00:30:48 you know, you are paying attention to.
682. 00:30:51 You get a little bit of inside his personality here.
683. 00:30:53 So it's kind of fun to sit there
684. 00:30:55 and outthink people who are way smarter than you, right?
685. 00:30:58 Like it's like, it was almost like life was a game, right?
686. 00:31:00 Like he was like trying to, you know,
687. 00:31:03 go into the game and play the best game he could all the time.
688. 00:31:05 He talks about investing and it basically is like,
689. 00:31:09 okay, well, we do the basic math on that.
690. 00:31:11 He goes, but then, you know, it becomes philosophical as well
691. 00:31:15 and there's psychology involved into it,
692. 00:31:16 but then it's also mathematical and, you know,
693. 00:31:19 like the feel comes,
694. 00:31:20 which I really like that aspect of it is
695. 00:31:23 when you become such an expert
696. 00:31:24 or you've refined your process so much,
697. 00:31:27 like you can just feel what's gonna work.
698. 00:31:29 You're like, oh, yeah, like that's gonna work, you know?
699. 00:31:31 Or, nope, I got this weird feeling about it.
700. 00:31:34 It's just not gonna go well.
701. 00:31:35 Like that's not gonna work.
702. 00:31:36 And I like that he, that he hits on that.
703. 00:31:39 I am a big fan of, and I wanna do this more.
704. 00:31:43 I think if I was gonna create a vague action item, right?
705. 00:31:46 Like one that's really, really hard to measure
706. 00:31:48 and really hard to keep track of is,
707. 00:31:50 I wanna practice this invert principle more
708. 00:31:53 or this think about one to avoid more, you know?
709. 00:31:55 'Cause I think that's a really valuable concept.
710. 00:31:58 And it says, Charlie, generally focused on
711. 00:32:01 what to avoid first, what not to do
712. 00:32:03 before he considered what to actually do.
713. 00:32:05 And I think that's a really interesting way
714. 00:32:07 to approach the world that I don't,
715. 00:32:09 like I don't approach the world that way
716. 00:32:10 only when it's gonna like kill me or hurt somebody, right?
717. 00:32:14 That's really when I go,
718. 00:32:15 how do I not get hurt in this situation?
719. 00:32:17 - Yeah, I do like that.
720. 00:32:19 The inversion, invert always invert,
721. 00:32:21 I forget the specific person who said that,
722. 00:32:23 but that is-- - Jacoby.
723. 00:32:25 - Yeah, Jacoby. - Yep, that's right.
724. 00:32:27 That one comes up over and over and over again.
725. 00:32:31 So the next chapter is really short.
726. 00:32:34 Chapter four is 11 talks.
727. 00:32:36 And this is really kind of the philosophy behind the talks.
728. 00:32:40 And then the rest of the book is the talks.
729. 00:32:42 So real briefly, a couple of things
730. 00:32:46 from this, just a couple pages.
731. 00:32:47 Chapter mentioned that Charlie is not shy
732. 00:32:50 when offering both frank criticism and constructive advice,
733. 00:32:52 whatever the topic, you can tell it like it is.
734. 00:32:55 And then these 11 talks are a special compilation
735. 00:32:59 for this particular book.
736. 00:33:01 And yeah, that's the meat of the book.
737. 00:33:03 So we should probably jump into those next,
738. 00:33:06 anything else you wanna mention before we do?
739. 00:33:08 - Yeah, so if you're gonna read this book,
740. 00:33:09 if you haven't read it yet, every talk will have a preamble
741. 00:33:13 and that's by Kaufman.
742. 00:33:14 Kaufman will explain to you what is gonna happen.
743. 00:33:17 Then there's Charlie's talk and I believe it's verbatim.
744. 00:33:21 It's just a transcript of his talk that he gave,
745. 00:33:24 wherever he gave it.
746. 00:33:25 And then at the end, Charlie will revisit the talk
747. 00:33:28 and say, oh, here's what I'd change
748. 00:33:30 or here's what I won't change or this stays true
749. 00:33:32 or I'd tweak this story a little bit
750. 00:33:34 or whatever it might be.
751. 00:33:35 So that's the nature of the next what 11 sections,
752. 00:33:39 if you will, of the book.
753. 00:33:40 And some of them are real short.
754. 00:33:41 Like some of them are, you know, you can read it
755. 00:33:43 in 15 minutes and then other ones,
756. 00:33:45 like the last one is like three hours long.
757. 00:33:47 I mean, it's a really long chapter.
758. 00:33:50 - Which, we'll get to that one.
759. 00:33:51 That's actually a combination of talks.
760. 00:33:54 So kind of weird.
761. 00:33:56 Yeah, let's start with the first one though.
762. 00:33:59 So talk number one is titled
763. 00:34:03 Harvard School Commencement Speech.
764. 00:34:06 And this was given June 13th, 1986
765. 00:34:09 at Harvard School in Los Angeles.
766. 00:34:13 The format of this speech is interesting
767. 00:34:16 because he's kind of building off
768. 00:34:19 of him putting his own twist on Johnny Carson's
769. 00:34:22 commencement speech that he gave,
770. 00:34:24 where he shared three ways to guarantee misery.
771. 00:34:28 And that was just, yeah.
772. 00:34:30 And just chemicals in an effort
773. 00:34:31 to alter mood or perception, envy and resentment.
774. 00:34:35 So he starts by sharing those three
775. 00:34:37 and then he adds four more prescriptions for misery.
776. 00:34:41 Be unreliable, learn everything you possibly can
777. 00:34:43 from your own experience, minimizing what you learned
778. 00:34:45 vicariously from the good and bad experiences of others,
779. 00:34:48 living and dead.
780. 00:34:49 That's all the second one.
781. 00:34:52 Go down and stay down when you get your first,
782. 00:34:54 second or third, severe reverse in the battle of life.
783. 00:34:57 That's the third one.
784. 00:34:58 And the fourth one is ignore a story of a rustic
785. 00:35:00 who said, I wish I knew where I was going to die.
786. 00:35:02 Then I'd never go there.
787. 00:35:04 And then he kind of extrapolates
788. 00:35:06 and shares a whole bunch associated with those points.
789. 00:35:09 So Johnny Carson's points are a lot more succinct
790. 00:35:13 and probably better as a list.
791. 00:35:15 But it's an entertaining speech, I think.
792. 00:35:17 And yeah, you could probably dig in further
793. 00:35:22 and expound more on each one of those different prescriptions.
794. 00:35:26 But I don't know, there's not a whole lot
795. 00:35:29 I want to go into with these talks.
796. 00:35:32 I'd rather just kind of crank through them fairly quickly
797. 00:35:34 and then stop and park on some of the main ideas
798. 00:35:37 and the themes that emerge from them.
799. 00:35:40 But anything else that stands out to you
800. 00:35:42 from this first talk?
801. 00:35:43 - Nope, you highlighted exactly what I highlighted.
802. 00:35:45 So we can move on.
803. 00:35:47 You want me to answer your number two
804. 00:35:49 or do you want to?
805. 00:35:49 - Sure, go for it.
806. 00:35:51 - All right, so number two.
807. 00:35:52 Number two was a lesson on elementary worldly wisdom
808. 00:35:57 as it relates to investment management and business.
809. 00:36:00 And the title is going to attach to where he gave it,
810. 00:36:04 he gave it at the USC Marshall School of Business.
811. 00:36:06 So this one, and this is where this book
812. 00:36:09 is really interesting to me because this one digs
813. 00:36:11 a lot more into investment management,
814. 00:36:13 digs a lot more into business,
815. 00:36:15 and some of them will be like that.
816. 00:36:17 This one was given on April 14th, 1994,
817. 00:36:21 to like I said, the USC Marshall School of Business.
818. 00:36:24 And so coming out of this one,
819. 00:36:28 you get into everything like stock picking,
820. 00:36:30 but also you get into his like models of many disciplines
821. 00:36:35 and how you have to lattice work these models.
822. 00:36:37 But you get into stock picking, let me see what else.
823. 00:36:42 - Well, I've got a specific question for you.
824. 00:36:45 So he actually shares,
825. 00:36:46 what should a young person look for in a career?
826. 00:36:49 I jotted down these three things.
827. 00:36:51 Don't sell anything, you wouldn't buy yourself.
828. 00:36:52 Don't work for anyone, you don't respect and admire it.
829. 00:36:55 Work only with people you enjoy.
830. 00:36:57 Do you think that's good advice,
831. 00:36:58 and would you give that to the students that you work with?
832. 00:37:00 - Okay, I think that is great advice.
833. 00:37:04 I also think as a new graduate coming out of school,
834. 00:37:08 you have so little agency in so many of those things,
835. 00:37:12 and then you have so little knowledge about like,
836. 00:37:14 that is stated from a position of someone
837. 00:37:17 who can walk into any room
838. 00:37:19 and immediately start talking to whoever they wanna talk with,
839. 00:37:22 because that's his background.
840. 00:37:24 Most people don't ever get that, right?
841. 00:37:26 So if you could figure that out,
842. 00:37:28 don't sell anything to you and buy yourself shirt.
843. 00:37:29 Like that makes complete sense, right?
844. 00:37:32 Don't work for anyone you don't respect and admire.
845. 00:37:34 Well, and that takes a while to figure out.
846. 00:37:36 Now you can see it on the front end, right?
847. 00:37:39 Like you can be like, okay,
848. 00:37:40 I've seen enough of that person to know like,
849. 00:37:42 nope, I don't want anywhere near them professionally,
850. 00:37:44 and then work with only people you enjoy.
851. 00:37:46 Again, you need to work with people
852. 00:37:47 before you know whether or not you enjoy them.
853. 00:37:50 This is a much easier thing to do at 80, right?
854. 00:37:55 Or much easier thing to say at 70 or 80
855. 00:37:58 than it is at 20 something
856. 00:37:59 when you're coming out of school going, okay, here we go.
857. 00:38:02 But you get to the ideas,
858. 00:38:03 like there's a whole question and answer section of this one,
859. 00:38:05 which is really, really, I think it was really interesting.
860. 00:38:09 Listen and do his answers.
861. 00:38:10 - One of the things that I jotted down from this section,
862. 00:38:13 just because it was personal interest to me,
863. 00:38:16 was on page 99, he mentions owning a newspaper in Oshkosh.
864. 00:38:21 Do you know where Oshkosh is?
865. 00:38:24 I know of Oshkosh.
866. 00:38:25 I don't know where Oshkosh is,
867. 00:38:27 but I know of it because my neighbor
868. 00:38:29 has referenced Oshkosh before.
869. 00:38:31 - Okay.
870. 00:38:32 - Cause the only reason I know it.
871. 00:38:33 - So Oshkosh is actually where I grew up.
872. 00:38:36 It's a small town in Wisconsin, probably 60,000 people.
873. 00:38:40 But the reason that he's probably familiar with it,
874. 00:38:43 'cause he reads a lot of history,
875. 00:38:44 is it was World Famous City back in the day
876. 00:38:49 because it's located right on the Fox River
877. 00:38:51 in the whole Fox Valley where we are was a big paper industry.
878. 00:38:55 So a lot of, when the Chicago fire happened,
879. 00:38:58 the lumber that they used to rebuild came from Oshkosh.
880. 00:39:02 - Okay.
881. 00:39:02 - And a lot of these big old mansions in Oshkosh
882. 00:39:06 that were tied to Thomas Payne,
883. 00:39:08 who was the big lumber bearing in the area.
884. 00:39:11 So it's kinda interesting to hear him mention Oshkosh.
885. 00:39:15 - I'm gonna turn it back on you though.
886. 00:39:18 So one of the other questions that he was asked
887. 00:39:20 and at the end of this talk,
888. 00:39:22 what overall life advice do you have for young people?
889. 00:39:25 And he puts out three things.
890. 00:39:26 Have low expectations, have a sense of humor,
891. 00:39:29 and surround yourself with love of friends and family.
892. 00:39:32 What do you think about those?
893. 00:39:34 - Probably generally good.
894. 00:39:38 The have low expectations.
895. 00:39:40 I don't think he's saying don't try to be successful.
896. 00:39:44 I think he's saying don't get bent out of shape
897. 00:39:47 when stuff doesn't go the way you think it will,
898. 00:39:49 which younger me could probably afford to hear that.
899. 00:39:54 So yeah.
900. 00:39:56 And then the other thing from this section,
901. 00:39:58 which is probably worth calling out,
902. 00:40:00 is he talks about the multiple models
903. 00:40:02 that come from multiple disciplines,
904. 00:40:04 the multidisciplinary approach.
905. 00:40:05 That's something that he hits on the rest of the talks.
906. 00:40:08 And you can't really know anything
907. 00:40:10 if you just remember random facts.
908. 00:40:11 You have to have these models in your head.
909. 00:40:13 There's one funny quote which was on page 87.
910. 00:40:17 It's like if you don't, he says,
911. 00:40:18 if you don't get this elementary but mildly unnatural,
912. 00:40:20 mathematics of elementary probability into your repertoire,
913. 00:40:23 then you go through a long life,
914. 00:40:25 like a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest.
915. 00:40:30 Which people have probably heard that quote associated
916. 00:40:32 with Charlie Munger before would be my guess.
917. 00:40:35 - He's a really like interesting guy
918. 00:40:39 in terms of like kind of a spitfire, if you will.
919. 00:40:42 It has some good one liners, has some good quotes.
920. 00:40:45 But then like when he goes, you know, deep into a topic,
921. 00:40:50 like he goes deep really, really quick.
922. 00:40:52 I feel like it's like, oh, you know,
923. 00:40:54 and he's telling these stories and next to you know,
924. 00:40:55 like he drops into it and he goes real quick.
925. 00:40:58 The, he is, and we're gonna see this throughout the talks,
926. 00:41:03 he's very hard on education and the educational system.
927. 00:41:08 - I wanna talk to you about that but probably not yet
928. 00:41:11 'cause I think he hits it a little bit further
929. 00:41:13 in some of the later talks.
930. 00:41:15 But what I wanna get out here is his many models,
931. 00:41:18 or his models and many disciplines,
932. 00:41:20 we still get the question all the time when we say,
933. 00:41:22 well, hold on, with everything being on the internet right now,
934. 00:41:24 why would anybody go to university?
935. 00:41:25 Why would anybody care, right?
936. 00:41:26 Like why would anybody still actually, you know,
937. 00:41:29 pay that much money and blah, blah, blah.
938. 00:41:31 And this is, I think, he makes a really, really strong
939. 00:41:33 argument for why you would go to university.
940. 00:41:36 You get four years immersed.
941. 00:41:38 If it's a good university and they're doing the right thing,
942. 00:41:40 you get four years immersed in different mental models.
943. 00:41:44 And you get the space and you get the time and the challenge,
944. 00:41:48 if the faculty are doing a good job,
945. 00:41:49 to really think through those models
946. 00:41:51 and try to figure out what you believe
947. 00:41:53 and how you think around these different areas.
948. 00:41:56 So it's like his many models or multiple models kind of idea,
949. 00:42:02 I think is a big proponent for the higher education system
950. 00:42:05 or education in general to push us along forward.
951. 00:42:10 Or else you become a really, really good technician
952. 00:42:12 most of the time, I think.
953. 00:42:13 And this lets you be a little bit more well-rounded.
954. 00:42:15 So sorry, I had to, I had to because this is the first time
955. 00:42:19 we got into the models in any depth.
956. 00:42:22 - No, I agree with you.
957. 00:42:25 All right, so ready to go into the next one?
958. 00:42:26 - Yeah, let's go to three.
959. 00:42:28 - Okay, so three is a lesson on elementary,
960. 00:42:31 worldly wisdom as it relates to investment management
961. 00:42:34 and business revisited.
962. 00:42:36 This one was given April 19th, 1996.
963. 00:42:39 It's Stanford Law School, basically talking about
964. 00:42:42 if you want to be a good thinker,
965. 00:42:44 you have to develop a mind that can jump
966. 00:42:46 the jurisdictional boundaries.
967. 00:42:48 You have to know how mental models interact
968. 00:42:50 or you can't play the right hand.
969. 00:42:52 He warns you to be wary of heavy ideology,
970. 00:42:56 says each of us has to figure out his or her own lifestyle,
971. 00:42:59 which I think is probably pretty good advice.
972. 00:43:01 And then there's a quote here where I thought it was funny
973. 00:43:03 'cause it was part of the talk.
974. 00:43:05 He says, "I don't have much interest
975. 00:43:06 in writing a book myself as we're reading a book,
976. 00:43:10 which kind of he wrote, kind of not, I guess,
977. 00:43:13 but yeah, basically it's his book."
978. 00:43:16 - I don't think he wrote it though.
979. 00:43:17 Like I don't think this was his idea.
980. 00:43:18 I think the only part of this book that was his idea
981. 00:43:21 was the last talk.
982. 00:43:22 He was like, "I really want people to know
983. 00:43:25 the big long one on human psychology.
984. 00:43:27 The other one's absolutely great."
985. 00:43:28 - Yeah, it's like, well, I guess if we're doing this.
986. 00:43:30 (laughing)
987. 00:43:33 - Okay, from this talk for me,
988. 00:43:35 and if I say chapter, I apologize,
989. 00:43:36 but from this talk for me,
990. 00:43:38 he introduces this idea of what he calls
991. 00:43:40 the lala-palooza effect.
992. 00:43:42 And he uses the idea just like he used multidisciplinary
993. 00:43:46 and many models and all that stuff
994. 00:43:48 throughout this whole thing.
995. 00:43:50 He talks about this lala-palooza effect.
996. 00:43:52 And essentially the lala-palooza effect
997. 00:43:53 is when you have multiple different forces,
998. 00:43:57 ideas, models, all pointing in the same direction.
999. 00:44:00 And because of that, it makes a larger effect on something.
1000. 00:44:04 And I had never heard of it, called this,
1001. 00:44:07 or I'd never heard it called this before.
1002. 00:44:09 Do you know of the concert lala-palooza,
1003. 00:44:12 like the weekend long concert in Chicago?
1004. 00:44:15 - I've heard of it, yeah, like I've never been,
1005. 00:44:18 and I've never heard of the lala-palooza effect before,
1006. 00:44:20 but interesting.
1007. 00:44:22 - I've gone the lala-palooza, right?
1008. 00:44:24 Like when we lived in Chicago,
1009. 00:44:25 but I had no, I don't know if these two things
1010. 00:44:27 are meant to connect with each other,
1011. 00:44:29 or if it's just a coincidence or what it is.
1012. 00:44:31 But I thought, you know, like, so he hits that key idea here.
1013. 00:44:37 And then he also talks about the fact of when you're,
1014. 00:44:40 when you're, I guess you're trying to teach somebody,
1015. 00:44:42 or you're trying to convince somebody,
1016. 00:44:43 or make an argument to use examples, right?
1017. 00:44:44 And that examples go a long way.
1018. 00:44:47 So I thought there's were a couple of different things
1019. 00:44:49 that sit out of this talk for me.
1020. 00:44:51 - Yeah, and hopefully you're kind of getting the idea
1021. 00:44:53 at this point that these are very well-done talks.
1022. 00:44:57 And there's a lot that you can glean from these.
1023. 00:45:00 It's just, what are you actually picking up
1024. 00:45:03 when you grab this 350 page?
1025. 00:45:05 Tell them at the beginning.
1026. 00:45:07 - I've listened to a lot of people give a lot of talks.
1027. 00:45:12 And all I can tell you is like,
1028. 00:45:14 almost all of these are better than most of the talks
1029. 00:45:17 that people give, you know,
1030. 00:45:18 at different commencements and different things.
1031. 00:45:21 It's just a really, it's a really creative way.
1032. 00:45:23 And he's quirky.
1033. 00:45:24 Like I said, he's really quirky.
1034. 00:45:26 So even if you don't love what he's saying,
1035. 00:45:28 the way he says it makes you laugh.
1036. 00:45:30 - Yeah, exactly.
1037. 00:45:32 So talk four is practical thought about practical thought.
1038. 00:45:37 Question mark.
1039. 00:45:38 - Yep, this is one of my favorite talks.
1040. 00:45:42 - Interesting, okay.
1041. 00:45:43 So this was an informal talk given July 20th in 1996.
1042. 00:45:47 And it's basically an exercise
1043. 00:45:50 of how would you take $2 million in capital
1044. 00:45:52 and build a business worth $2 trillion?
1045. 00:45:55 And then he goes on to use Coca-Cola as an example
1046. 00:45:59 and shares five different helpful notions
1047. 00:46:02 at the beginning, but then lays out basically
1048. 00:46:04 the 15 minute pitch that he would have given
1049. 00:46:06 to this guy back in, I forget the year, 18 something, right?
1050. 00:46:11 - Yeah, 18 something.
1051. 00:46:12 I forget what it was too, but yeah.
1052. 00:46:14 - On how he would plan to do this.
1053. 00:46:17 And this was interesting.
1054. 00:46:21 I don't know, like I didn't write down any notes
1055. 00:46:25 from his big pitch.
1056. 00:46:27 The things that stand out to me from that big pitch
1057. 00:46:29 are number one, holy cow,
1058. 00:46:31 he's really smart, at least when it comes to business.
1059. 00:46:35 If he's just sitting down giving this talk,
1060. 00:46:37 which I believe he could have done,
1061. 00:46:40 then that is a whole nother level of business understanding
1062. 00:46:44 which I can kind of grok how you could get to that
1063. 00:46:47 if he's constantly reading this stuff all the time.
1064. 00:46:50 If he's just like living in this world
1065. 00:46:52 and learning as much as he can about it,
1066. 00:46:54 that's how you become such a proficient business thinker.
1067. 00:46:59 But it is impressive nonetheless when he lays it all out there.
1068. 00:47:02 But the other thing is,
1069. 00:47:03 I got enough of that when I was in business school.
1070. 00:47:06 (laughing)
1071. 00:47:07 - Yeah, I didn't go to business school.
1072. 00:47:08 - So for me, there's a little bit of this balance
1073. 00:47:11 where the way that he does it is very,
1074. 00:47:14 I'll say academic, very traditional.
1075. 00:47:17 And that's different than the simple marketing
1076. 00:47:20 for smart people style stuff.
1077. 00:47:22 So it's not that I don't like the business thinking,
1078. 00:47:26 but it did have that flavor to it,
1079. 00:47:29 which I was a little bit like not my jam.
1080. 00:47:34 And I guess the reason that I have that sort of reaction
1081. 00:47:38 to it is when I think about business school,
1082. 00:47:44 I think about the things that I learned there,
1083. 00:47:47 the things that were valuable,
1084. 00:47:49 I don't know that a whole lot of it was textbook based.
1085. 00:47:54 I think it was really just from the conversations
1086. 00:48:00 with the people, which again, to your point,
1087. 00:48:02 if you're immersed in that environment, that has value.
1088. 00:48:05 I don't think you have to go to a business school
1089. 00:48:07 in order to learn that.
1090. 00:48:08 And Exhibit A is Charlie Munger, who went to law school
1091. 00:48:11 and didn't take a business class,
1092. 00:48:13 didn't take an economics class.
1093. 00:48:15 And here he is waxing poetic about those particular topics.
1094. 00:48:18 You can totally learn that stuff other ways.
1095. 00:48:23 And I don't know how valuable it is
1096. 00:48:27 to think about things in that lens.
1097. 00:48:31 Like it's sort of a fun exercise once in a while
1098. 00:48:35 when you can nerd out about stuff, certain ways.
1099. 00:48:39 I guess my version of this is sort of like
1100. 00:48:41 the practical PKM cohort where I can nerd out
1101. 00:48:43 about PKM workflows in obsidian, but to the average person,
1102. 00:48:46 it's kind of like, well, that has limited value.
1103. 00:48:48 And that's really like the only place
1104. 00:48:50 that I would really geek out about that kind of stuff.
1105. 00:48:52 The rest of the time is just like, well, you know this stuff.
1106. 00:48:54 Now, how do you actually apply it?
1107. 00:48:56 So I don't know.
1108. 00:48:57 This is a little bit too meta for me, I guess.
1109. 00:49:00 - See, and I'm a sucker for a good case study, right?
1110. 00:49:03 And essentially that's this whole chapter, right?
1111. 00:49:05 Is the case study turning $2 million into $2 trillion.
1112. 00:49:12 And I just thought that was,
1113. 00:49:15 I thought that was a lot of fun.
1114. 00:49:17 Hold on, I'm blanking, I didn't, yeah, okay.
1115. 00:49:19 This is the case study, it's 1884 Atlanta, right?
1116. 00:49:22 Okay, yeah, go lots in the cook, okay.
1117. 00:49:24 I was making sure I wasn't on the wrong chapter.
1118. 00:49:27 But then I like in this one too, the five helpful notions.
1119. 00:49:31 So he throws out there the five helpful notions.
1120. 00:49:33 I will go through them all now,
1121. 00:49:34 but I thought those were a good kind of summary
1122. 00:49:37 of some of the things we get in a much more long-winded way
1123. 00:49:42 other places.
1124. 00:49:44 And then he's got a quote in here at the end
1125. 00:49:46 from an advertisement.
1126. 00:49:49 I jatted this down too, I love this.
1127. 00:49:50 He mentioned just multiple places.
1128. 00:49:52 - Yeah, I love this, it says,
1129. 00:49:54 the old time Warner and Swayze ad that was a favorite of mine.
1130. 00:49:58 The company that needs a new machine tool
1131. 00:50:00 and hasn't bought it is already paying for it.
1132. 00:50:02 And I was like, man, that is a great, great quote.
1133. 00:50:05 So, no, I just thought this one was a good,
1134. 00:50:10 fairly short kind of succinct version of his
1135. 00:50:14 with a wrapped in a really good case study.
1136. 00:50:16 - Yep, agreed.
1137. 00:50:18 All right, so talk five is the need
1138. 00:50:23 for more multidisciplinary skills
1139. 00:50:25 from professionals, educational implications.
1140. 00:50:29 I think I got that title, right?
1141. 00:50:30 - You did, yes.
1142. 00:50:31 - Okay, so this was given, it's a little bit clumsy,
1143. 00:50:33 but given April 24th, 1998 at the 50th reunion
1144. 00:50:37 of Harvard Law School, so to the class of 1948.
1145. 00:50:42 So this is where he introduces the idea
1146. 00:50:44 of Socratic solitaire, which is kind of interesting.
1147. 00:50:47 He broad-scale professionals do more multidisciplinary skill.
1148. 00:50:50 Was our education sufficiently multidisciplinary
1149. 00:50:52 in elite broad-scale soft science?
1150. 00:50:54 What is the essential nature of practical,
1151. 00:50:56 best-form multidisciplinary education?
1152. 00:50:59 In the last 50 years, how far has elite academia
1153. 00:51:02 progressed to our attainable, best-form multidisciplinary?
1154. 00:51:05 What educational practices would make progress faster?
1155. 00:51:08 And just in that, you can kind of get a tone for the grammar.
1156. 00:51:11 And if that's off-putting to you,
1157. 00:51:13 you're not gonna like this book.
1158. 00:51:14 - Yep, I agree.
1159. 00:51:15 - He uses a lot of big words
1160. 00:51:17 'cause he reads a lot of books.
1161. 00:51:19 There's a couple things that stood out to me
1162. 00:51:21 from this section.
1163. 00:51:22 One is, this is where you find out
1164. 00:51:24 that he never took a business or an economics class,
1165. 00:51:26 which is sort of astounding
1166. 00:51:27 'cause he's so smart when it comes to this stuff.
1167. 00:51:30 Another thing is that there's this two-part rule
1168. 00:51:32 that he talks about,
1169. 00:51:33 and this is actually on the back cover of the printed version.
1170. 00:51:36 This is pretty simple, but pretty brilliant
1171. 00:51:39 if used in the right context.
1172. 00:51:41 Take a simple basic idea, that's part one.
1173. 00:51:43 Part two is take it very seriously.
1174. 00:51:45 You can see how that could translate into success.
1175. 00:51:49 But the thing that I really wanted to just ask you,
1176. 00:51:52 'cause this whole thing is really
1177. 00:51:53 where he's starting to rail on
1178. 00:51:55 the way that things are taught in academia.
1179. 00:51:58 What do you think about his statement
1180. 00:52:00 that many more courses should be mandatory, not optional?
1181. 00:52:03 - Okay, so you have to understand
1182. 00:52:04 my background coming from this is,
1183. 00:52:06 I live in a world where we don't get many optional courses,
1184. 00:52:10 right?
1185. 00:52:10 So engineering, I mean, my students have zero electives.
1186. 00:52:14 You know, there's maybe like one class
1187. 00:52:16 where they can pick the version of the class that they want,
1188. 00:52:18 but like they don't have any electives.
1189. 00:52:20 And when I was in undergrad,
1190. 00:52:22 I barely got any electives at all,
1191. 00:52:25 and even then they were very, very tightly confined.
1192. 00:52:28 Like what I was allowed to take is an elective.
1193. 00:52:29 So I don't have any kind of rub on, you know,
1194. 00:52:33 what they should do.
1195. 00:52:34 I think one of the drivers of this,
1196. 00:52:36 and why he says is that they should be, you know,
1197. 00:52:38 more required courses is because
1198. 00:52:40 the courses he's talking about, people don't wanna take.
1199. 00:52:44 Like they won't wanna take.
1200. 00:52:45 So he's talking about this, you know,
1201. 00:52:46 multi-disciplinarity that's going to round people out
1202. 00:52:50 in a way that's going to make them uncomfortable
1203. 00:52:52 and it's gonna introduce them to models
1204. 00:52:54 that don't make sense for them.
1205. 00:52:55 So for instance, a communications major,
1206. 00:52:58 getting a basics physics class,
1207. 00:53:00 I can tell you right now,
1208. 00:53:01 communication majors want nothing to do with physics, right?
1209. 00:53:04 They want, like they don't wanna do the math,
1210. 00:53:06 they don't wanna do the science,
1211. 00:53:06 like they want nothing to do with that.
1212. 00:53:08 And there's nothing,
1213. 00:53:09 I'm not gonna tell you that there's anything wrong with that.
1214. 00:53:12 That's just the reality of the way it is.
1215. 00:53:14 Just like my engineering students,
1216. 00:53:17 when you give them an English literature class,
1217. 00:53:20 you know, or a rhetoric class,
1218. 00:53:22 they're like, this is the dumbest class I've ever taken.
1219. 00:53:24 And it's like they, some of them will see the bigger picture
1220. 00:53:28 either during that class or later on down the road,
1221. 00:53:30 they'll be like, oh yeah,
1222. 00:53:32 like that was a really powerful class for me.
1223. 00:53:34 So like one of the ones I took was logic, right?
1224. 00:53:37 I took like a basic logic class, you know,
1225. 00:53:39 philosophy, you know, kind of logic class.
1226. 00:53:41 And man, what a crazy powerful course
1227. 00:53:44 because it taught you the way people think
1228. 00:53:46 and the way people put things together
1229. 00:53:47 and then how people can mess that up.
1230. 00:53:49 And so I am a fan of this, right?
1231. 00:53:51 Like I think that our job as academia
1232. 00:53:55 is to make decisions to help educate people
1233. 00:54:00 in a certain way.
1234. 00:54:02 I think it's the students job to figure out,
1235. 00:54:05 do I like that form of education?
1236. 00:54:07 And is that something I'm going to buy into?
1237. 00:54:10 Now, where the engineering ed world and me, right?
1238. 00:54:13 Where my colleagues in the engineering ed
1239. 00:54:15 where would like get cranky, you know,
1240. 00:54:17 and start to debate me on it is like,
1241. 00:54:19 well, what about agency?
1242. 00:54:20 You know, like what about the students agency
1243. 00:54:22 in the whole learning process?
1244. 00:54:23 And I would say like, okay, they have agency.
1245. 00:54:26 They have agency in the degree that they pick.
1246. 00:54:27 So therefore they're going to focus
1247. 00:54:29 and specialize in certain ways.
1248. 00:54:30 And then we're going to be encouraging them
1249. 00:54:34 to push them out of their comfort zone
1250. 00:54:36 or push them away from it.
1251. 00:54:37 Where this all falls down though, is it done effectively?
1252. 00:54:41 Because if it's not done effectively,
1253. 00:54:43 you just throw it all out the window, right?
1254. 00:54:45 'Cause you're making them take courses
1255. 00:54:46 that actually don't matter.
1256. 00:54:48 And that's when everybody gets real cranky.
1257. 00:54:51 - Yeah, so that's kind of the frame of reference I had.
1258. 00:54:53 I went to a small liberal arts college
1259. 00:54:55 in Green Bay called St. Walt D. Pierre called St. Norbert.
1260. 00:54:59 And they make you take a whole bunch
1261. 00:55:02 of different classes, a bunch of different areas.
1262. 00:55:06 And there were some of those classes
1263. 00:55:08 that I was just like, I really resent the fact
1264. 00:55:11 that I am paying $30,000 a year.
1265. 00:55:13 And I'm sure it's much more now
1266. 00:55:15 to take this stupid class.
1267. 00:55:18 - I hear that all the time.
1268. 00:55:19 I hear that all the time.
1269. 00:55:20 It's like, I can't stay at this class.
1270. 00:55:22 Why do I have to take it?
1271. 00:55:23 So I teach up at this classes.
1272. 00:55:27 - I feel like there should be,
1273. 00:55:30 I think I can get on board with him
1274. 00:55:32 about more classes being mandatory instead of optional.
1275. 00:55:36 But I'm kind of curious what he means by that.
1276. 00:55:38 'Cause I don't think he's talking
1277. 00:55:39 about liberal arts education at this point.
1278. 00:55:41 I think he's talking about a bunch
1279. 00:55:43 of tangentially related classes,
1280. 00:55:45 which are sort of like, well, you could take this one
1281. 00:55:48 or this one.
1282. 00:55:49 I think he would probably be arguing
1283. 00:55:51 that night you should take both of them.
1284. 00:55:53 (laughs)
1285. 00:55:53 Not if you are a business economics major,
1286. 00:55:57 you should be taking religion classes,
1287. 00:55:59 which is what I did.
1288. 00:56:01 - Well, I think he's coming at it from a person
1289. 00:56:04 who has had to learn a lot of this stuff on his own.
1290. 00:56:08 And he's saying, what if we took these core ideas
1291. 00:56:13 and we made them do that in,
1292. 00:56:16 and I say made them, right?
1293. 00:56:17 Like we required them to do that
1294. 00:56:18 in basic undergraduate education.
1295. 00:56:21 - Yeah.
1296. 00:56:22 So I don't know, and there's probably like a big debate
1297. 00:56:27 to be had about the right way to do this.
1298. 00:56:29 I think there's probably an element of truth
1299. 00:56:31 in what he's arguing for.
1300. 00:56:32 But also, I wasn't a big fan of the liberal arts approach.
1301. 00:56:36 I kind of wish I had not gone to a school
1302. 00:56:40 that took that approach,
1303. 00:56:42 just because I went there, my wife went there.
1304. 00:56:45 We met a bunch of great people there.
1305. 00:56:47 We had a lot of great experiences there.
1306. 00:56:49 Also put us in a whole bunch of debt
1307. 00:56:51 that took us a really long time to pay off.
1308. 00:56:53 And I used almost none of it.
1309. 00:56:55 (laughs)
1310. 00:56:56 Same with her.
1311. 00:56:57 - I mean, my thing is the intangibles of that,
1312. 00:57:01 like how do you measure some of the intangibles of that?
1313. 00:57:04 Like, is there more of that thinking that you actually apply?
1314. 00:57:06 But what I'll tell you is I had the opposite experience
1315. 00:57:09 because I went to Penn State,
1316. 00:57:11 and I mean, it was engineering through and through.
1317. 00:57:14 Like we are teaching you to be an engineer through and through,
1318. 00:57:16 so it was 100% not a liberal arts education, right?
1319. 00:57:20 Like there were times when I was like,
1320. 00:57:22 "Man, I just wish I could take like a basic XYZ class," right?
1321. 00:57:26 Like to learn personal accounting or whatever,
1322. 00:57:29 you know, like whatever it was.
1323. 00:57:30 And it was like, nope, you got it, you know,
1324. 00:57:32 these types of classes.
1325. 00:57:33 And they tried, but they're just not a lot of room.
1326. 00:57:36 Okay, we should move on.
1327. 00:57:37 We should move on there.
1328. 00:57:38 'Cause I can nerd out on this all day.
1329. 00:57:39 - Well, I mean, the next talk,
1330. 00:57:42 I don't have a whole lot to say about this is
1331. 00:57:45 "Talk 6, Investment Practices of Leading Charitable Foundations."
1332. 00:57:49 Given October 14th, 1998,
1333. 00:57:51 as a speech to the Foundation Financial Officers Group
1334. 00:57:54 at the Miramar Sheraton Hotel in Santa Monica, California.
1335. 00:57:58 - I basically just shouted down that extra care
1336. 00:58:00 and thinking also introduces extra errors.
1337. 00:58:03 So you got to be aware of that.
1338. 00:58:05 And then two quotes.
1339. 00:58:06 "Would a man wishes he will believe by Demosthenes
1340. 00:58:09 and you must not fool yourself
1341. 00:58:11 and you're the easiest person to fool by Richard Feynman."
1342. 00:58:13 (laughs)
1343. 00:58:14 - The Feynman quote was all I had.
1344. 00:58:17 And Mike, I'll even go further.
1345. 00:58:19 And I would say, "Talk 6, talk 7, and talk 8.
1346. 00:58:21 I'm good," right?
1347. 00:58:22 Like we can tell what the titles are
1348. 00:58:24 and just keep on flying.
1349. 00:58:27 Because those talks just, they were interesting to read,
1350. 00:58:30 but I didn't just didn't get anything out of them.
1351. 00:58:32 - Okay, well, let's go to the next one then,
1352. 00:58:35 which is "Talk 7, Breakfast Meeting
1353. 00:58:37 of the Philanthropy Roundtable."
1354. 00:58:39 There is an idea here in an original term
1355. 00:58:43 that he comes up with, (laughs)
1356. 00:58:45 which we should probably talk a little bit about.
1357. 00:58:47 So this was given November 10th, 2000
1358. 00:58:49 in Pasadena, California.
1359. 00:58:51 And he takes the idea of bezel,
1360. 00:58:55 which is a contraction of the word embezzle,
1361. 00:58:58 coined by John Kenneth Galbraith,
1362. 00:58:59 described the amount of undisclosed embezzlement.
1363. 00:59:03 And he sort of creates this argument
1364. 00:59:06 that embezzlement that you're not aware of
1365. 00:59:10 isn't really stealing from a specific person.
1366. 00:59:14 So maybe it's not that big a deal.
1367. 00:59:16 That's a totally gross representation
1368. 00:59:18 of the well-articulated argument that he's making.
1369. 00:59:21 But basically, he's kind of talking about
1370. 00:59:23 how when you print new money
1371. 00:59:27 and you introduce it into the economy,
1372. 00:59:28 you're not taking it from somebody else.
1373. 00:59:30 So maybe that's not as bad as you think it is.
1374. 00:59:33 So he creates this term febezzle,
1375. 00:59:36 which is the functional equivalent for bezel.
1376. 00:59:41 Febezzle Mint is the process of creating febezzle.
1377. 00:59:44 And febezzlers are the persons engaged in febezzlement.
1378. 00:59:48 There is a whole big economic discussion
1379. 00:59:53 to be had on the relevance of this,
1380. 00:59:55 which is kind of interesting to me
1381. 00:59:58 because I was a business major and an economics minor.
1382. 01:00:01 So a lot of the things that he's talking about,
1383. 01:00:04 I remember from some of those economics classes,
1384. 01:00:07 I can tell you I used zero of it
1385. 01:00:09 in what I actually do, running my own business
1386. 01:00:13 and even working with other small businesses.
1387. 01:00:15 You know, there's, I don't know, micro versus macroeconomics.
1388. 01:00:19 Not a whole bunch of relevant application day to day
1389. 01:00:24 for that sort of stuff.
1390. 01:00:25 But it is important if you're trying to understand
1391. 01:00:27 how markets work and stuff like that.
1392. 01:00:28 So he's at a whole new level
1393. 01:00:29 where maybe that stuff is super important.
1394. 01:00:32 But I can still draw the curves and the charts
1395. 01:00:37 that he's talking about.
1396. 01:00:38 Like I recognize what those look like,
1397. 01:00:41 but I just, I have not had a single time
1398. 01:00:45 in my working existence since I graduated
1399. 01:00:49 where I have actually had cause to draw those
1400. 01:00:53 and talk about those.
1401. 01:00:54 Up until this point.
1402. 01:00:55 (laughs)
1403. 01:00:56 - Yeah.
1404. 01:00:57 I misspoke 'cause I guess I did get one interesting thing
1405. 01:01:00 out of these three chapters.
1406. 01:01:02 Samuel Johnson, I think I would like to read
1407. 01:01:05 more Samuel Johnson.
1408. 01:01:06 So in the, in talk seven,
1409. 01:01:08 there's an ethical rule from Samuel Johnson.
1410. 01:01:11 Basically, he believed that the maintenance
1411. 01:01:13 of an easily removable ignorance
1412. 01:01:16 by a responsible office holder was treacherous malfeasance
1413. 01:01:20 in meeting moral obligation.
1414. 01:01:21 And I was like, that's actually a really interesting idea.
1415. 01:01:24 Like if you essentially, if you like intentionally
1416. 01:01:27 don't get rid of the bad thing, you are to blame.
1417. 01:01:30 Like you are the cause of the blame.
1418. 01:01:32 And I'm like, I think I would like the Samuel Johnson guy.
1419. 01:01:35 I think he and I would be a resident.
1420. 01:01:37 If I could understand his structure,
1421. 01:01:40 his sentence structure and word choice,
1422. 01:01:42 I think I'd like him.
1423. 01:01:44 (laughs)
1424. 01:01:45 - That's cool.
1425. 01:01:46 Ready to go to the next one?
1426. 01:01:48 - Yes.
1427. 01:01:49 - We're gonna talk eight, I think.
1428. 01:01:50 - Yeah, yeah.
1429. 01:01:51 Talk eight is the great financial scandal of 2003.
1430. 01:01:56 What's interesting about this is that this was a handwritten
1431. 01:02:01 talk that Charlie wrote when he was vacationing
1432. 01:02:05 in the summer of 2000.
1433. 01:02:08 And it's sort of a prediction of what was going to happen
1434. 01:02:12 in terms of financial markets crashing.
1435. 01:02:16 And it's sort of a parable about a historical company
1436. 01:02:23 but under a fictional name.
1437. 01:02:25 And the specifics of everything again,
1438. 01:02:32 reminded me of my economic textbooks,
1439. 01:02:35 not necessarily a great thing.
1440. 01:02:37 But for some people, maybe that is really of interest to you.
1441. 01:02:41 There are a couple of things that I got from this.
1442. 01:02:44 One, there's a quote from this fictional account.
1443. 01:02:48 It's sort of like a parable kind of Patrick Lencioni style.
1444. 01:02:51 It's the best way to put it, I think.
1445. 01:02:54 Where he says it's hard for an empty sack
1446. 01:02:56 to stand upright.
1447. 01:02:58 - To stand upright.
1448. 01:02:59 - Sort of interesting.
1449. 01:03:00 And then he's talking about how this fictional
1450. 01:03:05 slash not fictional company after the founder died
1451. 01:03:08 and people came to take it over.
1452. 01:03:10 They wanted to maintain this level of growth
1453. 01:03:13 so they were kind of exploiting this economic loophole
1454. 01:03:17 in US law.
1455. 01:03:20 And eventually that just led to a whole big collapse.
1456. 01:03:23 But there's this quote, it says,
1457. 01:03:24 "If we mix only a moderate minority share of turds
1458. 01:03:27 "with the raisins each year,
1459. 01:03:28 "probably no one will recognize or will ultimately become
1460. 01:03:31 "a very large collection of turds."
1461. 01:03:33 - Yes.
1462. 01:03:34 - That's pretty funny.
1463. 01:03:36 - I'm telling you, he's just so quirky in the way he writes
1464. 01:03:40 and the examples that he uses.
1465. 01:03:42 But then the whole point of this whole thing
1466. 01:03:45 is employee stock options.
1467. 01:03:47 And he's going into actual,
1468. 01:03:50 I mean, you probably, I would assume you understood
1469. 01:03:53 this way better than I did because I was like,
1470. 01:03:56 "Okay, I get like somewhat gist of what's happening here."
1471. 01:03:59 I was like, but I don't really know anything
1472. 01:04:00 about employee stock options and all this stuff.
1473. 01:04:03 And like what they're actually doing
1474. 01:04:04 and how they're, I guess how they're hurting themselves
1475. 01:04:08 to where in a couple years they're gonna be,
1476. 01:04:10 they're gonna be hurting long-term financially.
1477. 01:04:13 So I kind of glazed over, right?
1478. 01:04:15 Like, so I'm reading this chapter going,
1479. 01:04:17 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
1480. 01:04:18 'cause I kind of glazed over 'cause I was like,
1481. 01:04:20 I don't really understand the economic side
1482. 01:04:22 of what we're talking about here.
1483. 01:04:23 And he's going hard into the economic side.
1484. 01:04:25 - Yeah.
1485. 01:04:26 - Of what we're doing.
1486. 01:04:27 - Well, see, that's the thing, in my opinion,
1487. 01:04:31 there is a very limited application of this stuff.
1488. 01:04:38 So I went to, and I got a business degree,
1489. 01:04:43 the traditional path that you can follow from that
1490. 01:04:46 is to climb the business ladder.
1491. 01:04:50 So I had a bunch of friends that I graduated with
1492. 01:04:55 who went into commercial real estate
1493. 01:04:58 down in the Milwaukee area.
1494. 01:04:59 And they played the game and they climbed the ladder.
1495. 01:05:02 And I have one friend now who is president
1496. 01:05:05 of one of the companies down there
1497. 01:05:07 that leases out all of the big skyscrapers.
1498. 01:05:10 Those are his accounts.
1499. 01:05:12 I had zero interest in that ever.
1500. 01:05:16 So if you are trying to get to that level,
1501. 01:05:20 there is a ladder that you climb.
1502. 01:05:23 I think there has never been a better opportunity
1503. 01:05:28 for people who wanted to own their own small business
1504. 01:05:31 and are completely not interested in that particular world.
1505. 01:05:35 You don't need the MBA.
1506. 01:05:37 You don't need to jump through the hoops.
1507. 01:05:39 So if you were to take the average business student
1508. 01:05:42 at this point, which path are they taking?
1509. 01:05:45 It's probably a lot more 50/50 than it was even back then.
1510. 01:05:48 But I've always kind of taken the untraditional path.
1511. 01:05:52 I guess you can blame my dad for that.
1512. 01:05:54 He did the same sort of thing.
1513. 01:05:57 Plays on his terms.
1514. 01:06:00 So yeah, that's not...
1515. 01:06:05 I remember that sort of discussion
1516. 01:06:09 from my economics classes.
1517. 01:06:11 And I could study enough to talk about
1518. 01:06:14 that stuff intelligently,
1519. 01:06:16 but have had zero real world application of that since then.
1520. 01:06:21 And there probably is a place where you can do that.
1521. 01:06:23 And for the person who is looking for resources
1522. 01:06:27 in that particular area,
1523. 01:06:28 they're probably already familiar
1524. 01:06:29 with Port Charlie's Almanac.
1525. 01:06:30 And for the people who aren't,
1526. 01:06:31 there are sections of this book,
1527. 01:06:32 just know that you're not gonna need
1528. 01:06:35 to really engage with this.
1529. 01:06:38 It's fine that it's over your head.
1530. 01:06:40 - Exactly, exactly.
1531. 01:06:41 Can I introduce chapter nine?
1532. 01:06:43 'Cause I have a point that I wanna make with chapter nine.
1533. 01:06:45 - Yes, but one other thing from chapter eight,
1534. 01:06:48 the other note I have here,
1535. 01:06:50 it's very clear he is not a fan of accounts.
1536. 01:06:53 - Oh, not at all.
1537. 01:06:55 Oh yeah, yeah, not at all.
1538. 01:06:57 - There's somebody else he's really not a fan of.
1539. 01:06:59 He rips him, oh, chiropractors.
1540. 01:07:02 Why does he rip chiropractors so bad?
1541. 01:07:04 Because he rips him like a bunch of times.
1542. 01:07:07 - Well, I think I have extended family members
1543. 01:07:13 that I think just from family conversations
1544. 01:07:17 at Christmas growing up, stuff like that,
1545. 01:07:19 where we would get together with a whole extended family.
1546. 01:07:21 I maybe have a little bit of insight into this
1547. 01:07:24 where chiropractors, that I could be completely wrong,
1548. 01:07:28 and I actually wanted to be a chiropractor at one point.
1549. 01:07:30 I was trying to get into a Palmer chiropractic college
1550. 01:07:33 in Iowa, I think, but biology, chemistry, not for me.
1551. 01:07:39 So I switched to business.
1552. 01:07:42 But that was what I went into originally.
1553. 01:07:45 And yeah, just was not my thing.
1554. 01:07:48 But I remember people saying things
1555. 01:07:50 about quack doctors and things like that.
1556. 01:07:52 So my only guess is that maybe that's a newer medicine
1557. 01:07:56 and people who are just really traditional
1558. 01:07:58 view it as not valid.
1559. 01:08:00 But I would think at this point,
1560. 01:08:03 most people know chiropractic care is a real thing.
1561. 01:08:07 - Yeah, exactly, right?
1562. 01:08:08 And the other thing I would think is
1563. 01:08:10 he talks about this later on
1564. 01:08:11 when he talks about the different tendencies in psychology,
1565. 01:08:15 but about the fact that I think a lot of times
1566. 01:08:19 a chiropractor is like, okay, I'm gonna fix you
1567. 01:08:21 and then we're gonna come back later
1568. 01:08:22 and I'm gonna fix you again.
1569. 01:08:23 And this is a continual thing.
1570. 01:08:24 And that just seems something like Munger's like,
1571. 01:08:26 no, no, no, no, we don't buy into that thing
1572. 01:08:29 where your fix leads to more of you fixing me.
1573. 01:08:33 That's just not his style.
1574. 01:08:35 - That's probably part of it too, yeah.
1575. 01:08:38 - Okay, can I do chapter, sorry, talk nine.
1576. 01:08:40 I wanna call it chapter nine, but can I do talk nine?
1577. 01:08:42 - Yep, go for it.
1578. 01:08:43 - Okay, so talk nine, academic economics,
1579. 01:08:46 strengths and faults after considering
1580. 01:08:49 interdisciplinary needs.
1581. 01:08:51 So this talk was 2003.
1582. 01:08:55 It's one of the longer talks that he gives.
1583. 01:08:59 He gives it to the Herb K Undergraduate,
1584. 01:09:02 it's the Herb K Undergraduate Lecture
1585. 01:09:04 at the University of California Santa Barbara
1586. 01:09:06 in the Economics Department.
1587. 01:09:07 And the reason why I wanted to introduce this
1588. 01:09:09 is because it's almost like people want him
1589. 01:09:14 to talk about economics.
1590. 01:09:16 And all he wants to do is talk about
1591. 01:09:18 interdisciplinarity and education and psychology.
1592. 01:09:22 And people keep saying, please talk about economics.
1593. 01:09:24 And he's like, no, I wanna talk about these other things.
1594. 01:09:27 And they're like, but I really want you to tell me
1595. 01:09:29 how to make a million dollars and a billion dollars.
1596. 01:09:31 I mean, he's like, no, I wanna talk about psychology
1597. 01:09:35 and education and it's like, I felt that tension,
1598. 01:09:39 the entire book, right?
1599. 01:09:40 Because it's like, you'll get these chapters
1600. 01:09:42 and he'll like go on this tirade about some, you know,
1601. 01:09:45 employee stock options or some economic principle.
1602. 01:09:48 And then there's these other ones where it's like,
1603. 01:09:50 okay, I got to write this one.
1604. 01:09:51 Like this one was mine.
1605. 01:09:52 Like nobody told me what to do.
1606. 01:09:53 And it's all about, it's all about like education
1607. 01:09:56 and thinking and mental models.
1608. 01:09:59 And then, oh, by the way, he'll say economics enough.
1609. 01:10:01 That way people were like, this is why you invited us.
1610. 01:10:03 - He basically was like, this is the problem
1611. 01:10:06 with your economics department.
1612. 01:10:07 It's kind of interesting that he was invited
1613. 01:10:10 to give the talk there.
1614. 01:10:11 - Yes, like it's crazy.
1615. 01:10:14 So he's really a guy who's speaking with nothing to lose.
1616. 01:10:18 Right, absolutely nothing to lose, you know what I mean?
1617. 01:10:21 But they, somebody at some point,
1618. 01:10:24 I think it's in the intro by Kaufman.
1619. 01:10:26 He says, this is the grand unified theory
1620. 01:10:29 of the Munger approach, right?
1621. 01:10:30 Like, so if you're looking for his ideas
1622. 01:10:34 around this interdisciplinarity concept,
1623. 01:10:38 it's really here.
1624. 01:10:39 Here he talks about the fact that, you know,
1625. 01:10:41 appeal to interest and he gets into the fact
1626. 01:10:43 that opportunity cost is a superpower,
1627. 01:10:45 incentives are a superpower.
1628. 01:10:47 He's talked multiple times up to this point
1629. 01:10:49 about the tragedy of the commons,
1630. 01:10:51 which Mike, are you familiar with the tragedy of the commons?
1631. 01:10:54 - Yes, I don't remember the specific details of it,
1632. 01:10:57 but it's basically a model, yeah.
1633. 01:10:59 - Yeah, so we, there's a good example of fish in a pond
1634. 01:11:04 that will run to teach students how to use Excel
1635. 01:11:06 and how to think about tragedy of commons,
1636. 01:11:09 which basically you can fish out of this pond.
1637. 01:11:11 And then, but everybody gets to fish out of the same pond,
1638. 01:11:14 so as a group we have to control the resources in that pond,
1639. 01:11:18 'cause if we use up all the fish, everybody dies.
1640. 01:11:21 But at the same time, there's personal stake in it
1641. 01:11:24 because I wanna get more fish than you do.
1642. 01:11:26 And it's this really fun game that we play
1643. 01:11:28 because students will start competing with each other.
1644. 01:11:31 And then you'll get student teams that'll group up
1645. 01:11:33 and they'll form little sub-clans,
1646. 01:11:36 and then they'll hoard the fish for themselves,
1647. 01:11:38 and then they'll try to offer the fish to the other teams
1648. 01:11:41 to buy and stuff.
1649. 01:11:42 So it's like the tragedy of commons is really interesting
1650. 01:11:44 if you've never explored that or not,
1651. 01:11:45 but he's talked to it about it a bunch of times
1652. 01:11:47 up until this point.
1653. 01:11:49 He goes through a lot of different things, right?
1654. 01:11:53 There's a, I'm looking at how many are there are, nine.
1655. 01:11:56 So there's nine different points he has
1656. 01:11:58 on what's wrong with academic economics, right?
1657. 01:12:01 And he basically just goes on this tirade
1658. 01:12:03 of all the things that are wrong with economic economics.
1659. 01:12:07 Some of them are more interesting than others.
1660. 01:12:09 And then, so let's hit a couple of the ones
1661. 01:12:12 that we think are interesting.
1662. 01:12:13 So the first one I think was interesting is
1663. 01:12:17 too little is paid attention to the second
1664. 01:12:20 and higher order effects that essentially we only look
1665. 01:12:22 at what the immediate impact is gonna be of something.
1666. 01:12:25 We don't look at the second and third order effects.
1667. 01:12:27 I thought that was an interesting one
1668. 01:12:29 to take away from here.
1669. 01:12:31 Another one is that fairness and unfairness,
1670. 01:12:34 and I really like what he says here is,
1671. 01:12:37 and I'm gonna read it
1672. 01:12:37 because he says it's so much better than I can.
1673. 01:12:40 Morality should sometimes appear unfair
1674. 01:12:42 like most worldly outcomes.
1675. 01:12:44 The craving for perfect fairness
1676. 01:12:45 causes a lot of terrible problems in system function.
1677. 01:12:48 Some systems should be made deliberately unfair
1678. 01:12:51 to the individuals because they'll be fair
1679. 01:12:54 on average to all of us and it goes on further.
1680. 01:12:57 But like what a different concept
1681. 01:12:58 than we have right now.
1682. 01:12:59 It's like, oh no, it should be fair across everything
1683. 01:13:01 and it should be completely egalitarian and blah, blah, blah.
1684. 01:13:04 And it's like, well, hold on, maybe not, right?
1685. 01:13:06 Maybe when we do that, we actually break the larger system
1686. 01:13:09 and he's got a few of these
1687. 01:13:12 and everybody who reads it'll get different stuff out of it,
1688. 01:13:14 but those are a couple of the ones I took out.
1689. 01:13:16 Mike, what did you take?
1690. 01:13:17 - Is that related to the last one,
1691. 01:13:18 the not enough attention to virtue and vice effects?
1692. 01:13:20 - Yeah, yep, that's the last one.
1693. 01:13:21 - So there's a quote associated with that,
1694. 01:13:24 which I think is interesting.
1695. 01:13:25 The cash register did more for human morality
1696. 01:13:27 than the Congregational church.
1697. 01:13:30 Basically just eliminating the ability to steal money
1698. 01:13:36 is what caused people to act right,
1699. 01:13:38 not educating them on the right way to act.
1700. 01:13:43 One of the nine objections he has,
1701. 01:13:45 which I thought was kind of funny,
1702. 01:13:47 not enough attention to the concept of the bezel mitt,
1703. 01:13:49 which he made up.
1704. 01:13:53 Let me see, oh, the first one too,
1705. 01:13:55 fatal unconnected is leading
1706. 01:13:56 to man with a hammer syndrome.
1707. 01:13:58 He talks about man with a hammer syndrome throughout
1708. 01:14:02 and that is basically when you,
1709. 01:14:04 all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail
1710. 01:14:07 and makes sense that that would be something
1711. 01:14:10 that he would key in on since he is advocating
1712. 01:14:14 for having all these mental models
1713. 01:14:15 and being able to use them.
1714. 01:14:17 So I can totally see having been in economics classes
1715. 01:14:22 how like the micro and macro economics specifically,
1716. 01:14:27 you kind of get funneled into this way of thinking
1717. 01:14:29 about things and this is the way that markets behave.
1718. 01:14:31 And so obviously this is the cause
1719. 01:14:33 and maybe it's not that simple.
1720. 01:14:35 So I think that's probably a pretty fair one.
1721. 01:14:40 Yeah, I mean, every single one of these objections,
1722. 01:14:43 he's probably accurate in sharing it.
1723. 01:14:47 Kind of weird that he's doing this
1724. 01:14:49 to an economics undergraduate class though.
1725. 01:14:53 Yeah. So, I don't know.
1726. 01:14:56 Also, he like basically calls out the way
1727. 01:14:59 that they teach economics at the beginning
1728. 01:15:01 when he shares a story about how he asks someone
1729. 01:15:04 at the Julius Stein I Institute in UCLA.
1730. 01:15:06 Why are you treating cataracts only
1731. 01:15:08 with this totally obsolete cataract operation?
1732. 01:15:10 And the response was, but Charlie,
1733. 01:15:12 it's such a wonderful operation to teach.
1734. 01:15:15 He's like, so what, it's useless.
1735. 01:15:18 Yup, yup, yup, yup, yup, yup, yup.
1736. 01:15:20 Unfortunately, that's all too real.
1737. 01:15:23 Yup. All right, ready for the next one?
1738. 01:15:25 I am ready for the next one.
1739. 01:15:26 Okay, so the next one,
1740. 01:15:29 talk 10 USC Gould School of Law Commencement Dress.
1741. 01:15:33 This was given May 13th, 1997 is the date
1742. 01:15:37 that I wrote down, is that correct?
1743. 01:15:39 No, it's 2007.
1744. 01:15:40 2007, okay.
1745. 01:15:42 Actually, it was 20, 90,
1746. 01:15:44 29, 97, I'm like, that can't be right.
1747. 01:15:46 29, 97.
1748. 01:15:47 Yup, okay, so May 13th, 2007,
1749. 01:15:50 the safest way to try and get what you want
1750. 01:15:53 is to try and deserve what you want.
1751. 01:15:54 I like that quote.
1752. 01:15:55 Mm-hmm.
1753. 01:15:56 Mm-hmm.
1754. 01:15:57 It mentions how the acquisition of wisdom
1755. 01:15:58 is a moral duty, I like that.
1756. 01:16:00 He hits on this thought about,
1757. 01:16:02 you need to be a lifelong learner.
1758. 01:16:04 Without that, you're not gonna get very far.
1759. 01:16:06 There's a quote associated with that.
1760. 01:16:08 It says you're not gonna get very far in life
1761. 01:16:10 based on what you already know.
1762. 01:16:12 That's a really interesting thing to say
1763. 01:16:14 at a commencement address for a law school.
1764. 01:16:18 I kind of wonder how that went over,
1765. 01:16:20 but I completely agree with it.
1766. 01:16:23 Yeah, there's a bunch of just like random tidbits
1767. 01:16:25 from this that I jotted down.
1768. 01:16:28 One thing was, he mentions that about half a warm buffet's
1769. 01:16:31 waking time is spent reading.
1770. 01:16:33 That's a lot of time to be reading.
1771. 01:16:35 I don't think I could do that.
1772. 01:16:37 I thought I read a lot, but I guess I got further to go.
1773. 01:16:42 Okay, I wanna hear your comment on this,
1774. 01:16:45 so I wanna prep you, or I wanna beat you to it.
1775. 01:16:49 Do you remember the wooden, the wooden comment?
1776. 01:16:53 The non-egality, John Wooden.
1777. 01:16:55 No, what was that?
1778. 01:16:56 Okay, so there's a section in here
1779. 01:16:58 where he talks about maximizing non-egality,
1780. 01:17:01 and basically he refers to John Wooden,
1781. 01:17:03 and John Wooden would say, like, listen,
1782. 01:17:05 the best players are gonna play.
1783. 01:17:08 And if you want playing time,
1784. 01:17:09 you have to be one of the best players, right?
1785. 01:17:11 Because that's the way it works.
1786. 01:17:14 And you get into this idea of meritocracy
1787. 01:17:17 and stuff like that, but I really like,
1788. 01:17:20 just that he's not afraid to just throw that out there
1789. 01:17:23 and say, listen, we can lower the quality,
1790. 01:17:26 we can lower the quality of the overall product,
1791. 01:17:29 or we can say, come up, rise up to the level
1792. 01:17:34 of the people who are really out there and really performing,
1793. 01:17:37 and I thought that was a really interesting one
1794. 01:17:39 from this commencement speech.
1795. 01:17:41 Yeah, so I do like that a lot,
1796. 01:17:43 and I like that concept, and I have lots of thoughts on that.
1797. 01:17:46 I guess I just kinda glossed over that,
1798. 01:17:49 but didn't really jump out to me
1799. 01:17:50 when I was reading this particular book.
1800. 01:17:52 But I agree with that.
1801. 01:17:54 I mean, John Wooden is one of the most successful coaches ever.
1802. 01:18:00 You really can't knock what he was able to achieve
1803. 01:18:07 in terms of his success as a coach,
1804. 01:18:08 and I would argue in his leadership and development
1805. 01:18:11 of people as well.
1806. 01:18:13 So I think that that is a completely accurate and fair
1807. 01:18:18 and right way to approach things.
1808. 01:18:21 I think there's a caveat with that though,
1809. 01:18:24 where if you are going to say
1810. 01:18:27 only the best people are going to play, that's fine.
1811. 01:18:31 If you are a good coach, you will then make clear
1812. 01:18:34 what are the criteria for becoming the best.
1813. 01:18:39 And unfortunately, that doesn't happen very much.
1814. 01:18:44 Like I've got kids who are going through that stuff currently
1815. 01:18:48 with coaches on the teams that they're on,
1816. 01:18:50 they're frustrated with their lack of playing time,
1817. 01:18:52 and I would agree if they're better than some of the kids
1818. 01:18:55 that are playing, and you can say,
1819. 01:18:56 well, life's not fair, you just gotta learn to deal with it.
1820. 01:18:59 Part of it is you gotta speak up
1821. 01:19:02 and have conversations with your coach.
1822. 01:19:04 One particular instance that has happened in the coach,
1823. 01:19:07 just as a terrible communicator,
1824. 01:19:09 so they don't even know what to tell them.
1825. 01:19:11 And at that point, you gotta figure it out for yourself,
1826. 01:19:14 but the ideal scenario would be the coach who is responsible
1827. 01:19:19 for putting the best team on the field
1828. 01:19:21 or on the court, whatever, has made it clear
1829. 01:19:24 to everybody on the team, this is what I am looking for.
1830. 01:19:27 This is the definition of success.
1831. 01:19:30 Do these things better than anybody else, and you will play.
1832. 01:19:35 - Did you wrestle, did you ever wrestle in your life
1833. 01:19:37 for like a, so this is a, there's two ideas here,
1834. 01:19:41 so I'll get to the wrestling one in a second.
1835. 01:19:42 But this also works really well with competitive leagues
1836. 01:19:45 as opposed to developmental leagues.
1837. 01:19:47 Like I think if you're in a developmental league,
1838. 01:19:49 this kind of goes out the window
1839. 01:19:50 'cause it's like, no, you're trying to develop your players
1840. 01:19:52 as you go, so maybe you don't just play the best or whatever.
1841. 01:19:57 But wrestling was really, really interesting for that
1842. 01:19:59 because you would have essentially wrestle-offs,
1843. 01:20:03 and you could do those as many times as you needed
1844. 01:20:07 to do 'em, so it's like if you were in a weight class
1845. 01:20:09 and there were three other people in your weight class
1846. 01:20:11 on the team, at any given time, somebody could be like,
1847. 01:20:14 "Hey, I wanna do a wrestle-off for whatever it is."
1848. 01:20:17 Or the coach would say, like every so many weeks,
1849. 01:20:19 "We're gonna give you the chance to do wrestle-offs."
1850. 01:20:22 And you had to do it.
1851. 01:20:23 Like you had to prove that you were still the best wrestler
1852. 01:20:27 to start at that weight class.
1853. 01:20:29 And what an interesting good way to establish
1854. 01:20:33 your starting lineup is based on the wrestle-offs.
1855. 01:20:35 - Yeah, so I didn't have that,
1856. 01:20:37 but I did play tennis, and I played college tennis.
1857. 01:20:39 So I was pretty good, but not great.
1858. 01:20:42 And with tennis, you'd have challenge matches.
1859. 01:20:44 - Yep. - So, yeah.
1860. 01:20:45 If you lose, then someone takes your spot.
1861. 01:20:49 Yeah, and it was the latter, you know,
1862. 01:20:51 so you could challenge the person above you
1863. 01:20:53 and you work your way up and it just kind of
1864. 01:20:54 starts itself out by the end.
1865. 01:20:56 If you wanna be number one, you gotta beat number one.
1866. 01:20:58 - Exactly, yeah, exactly.
1867. 01:21:01 - Yeah, a little bit differently team sports, unfortunately.
1868. 01:21:04 - And personalities, right?
1869. 01:21:05 And humans are called too.
1870. 01:21:06 - Yeah, yeah, I mean, you never wanna default to excuses
1871. 01:21:10 and politics, but the truth is that it's real.
1872. 01:21:14 And you gotta figure out how to navigate that stuff.
1873. 01:21:16 That's something that my kids are working through right now.
1874. 01:21:21 I do think that, you know, my approach to that
1875. 01:21:25 would be be a squeaky wheel, right?
1876. 01:21:30 Keep asking the coach, become annoying to the coach.
1877. 01:21:32 Like, hey, I wanna know what I can do to get better.
1878. 01:21:35 And then when you do that, over and over and over again,
1879. 01:21:37 and you build up a body of work,
1880. 01:21:38 become so good they can't ignore you,
1881. 01:21:39 and be like, hey, I deserve to be out there.
1882. 01:21:41 - Exactly.
1883. 01:21:42 - No one wants to have to do that.
1884. 01:21:44 - And it's the presentation of it, right?
1885. 01:21:46 Like, what can I do to get better?
1886. 01:21:47 What can I do to get better?
1887. 01:21:48 Not, I should be starting, I should be starting,
1888. 01:21:50 I should be starting, right?
1889. 01:21:51 'Cause those are two very different messages
1890. 01:21:52 you send to the coach, right?
1891. 01:21:53 It's like, yeah, so.
1892. 01:21:56 - Yeah, but if they can't tell you, you know,
1893. 01:21:58 and you are one of the better players,
1894. 01:22:00 I think you can get to the point
1895. 01:22:02 where you do have to tell the coach,
1896. 01:22:03 okay, so I think I should be starting.
1897. 01:22:05 - Yeah, exactly, yeah.
1898. 01:22:06 - Why am I not starting?
1899. 01:22:08 Just tell me, that's completely fair.
1900. 01:22:11 You don't have to do it in front of the rest of the team.
1901. 01:22:13 You know, you can do it one on one,
1902. 01:22:14 but people, am I right?
1903. 01:22:17 - People, yep.
1904. 01:22:18 - Well, we're gonna get into people in talk 11.
1905. 01:22:21 - Yeah, so actually, I do need to call out in talk number 10,
1906. 01:22:25 this is where my one action item comes from.
1907. 01:22:30 So it's not really related to the topic
1908. 01:22:34 of the talk necessarily,
1909. 01:22:36 but he is a big fan of checklists.
1910. 01:22:39 And at this point, I'm reading this,
1911. 01:22:40 and he's talking about how we need to have more checklists,
1912. 01:22:43 good doctors have checklists,
1913. 01:22:44 we should have these checklists.
1914. 01:22:46 And I was like, I should build more checklists.
1915. 01:22:48 So that is my action item, more checklists.
1916. 01:22:52 - My issue with his checklist is
1917. 01:22:54 I'm not exactly sure what's on his checklist
1918. 01:22:57 and like how that works out,
1919. 01:22:59 because it's like, it wasn't very clear.
1920. 01:23:01 I know he's got a lot of checklists,
1921. 01:23:02 I know he works down through the checklists,
1922. 01:23:04 but I'm not really sure how they're constructed, so.
1923. 01:23:06 - Well, so I'm just building more checklists.
1924. 01:23:08 I'm not building more monger style checklists.
1925. 01:23:10 - Ah, okay.
1926. 01:23:11 - Okay, that's good, yeah, that's good.
1927. 01:23:13 - All right, so the last one is talk 11,
1928. 01:23:17 and this is the big Kahuna, I don't know.
1929. 01:23:21 This is a whole bunch of psychology based tendencies
1930. 01:23:24 that often mislead, he's got a list,
1931. 01:23:27 I think there's like 26 of them.
1932. 01:23:29 I don't even know how many pages,
1933. 01:23:30 this is the one that you sent me a message about,
1934. 01:23:32 that was like, hey, just so you know,
1935. 01:23:35 this is a big one, it's a combination
1936. 01:23:40 of three different talks that were,
1937. 01:23:43 so it's selections from three of his talks
1938. 01:23:45 that were combined into one that he never made,
1939. 01:23:47 and those three talks were the Bray Lecture
1940. 01:23:49 at the Caltech Faculty Club in February 2nd, 1992,
1941. 01:23:52 a talk under the sponsorship of the Cambridge Center
1942. 01:23:54 for Behavioral Studies at the Harvard Faculty Club
1943. 01:23:56 on October 6th, 1994, and the talk under the sponsorship
1944. 01:23:59 of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies
1945. 01:24:01 at the Boston Harbor Hotel, April 24th, 1995.
1946. 01:24:05 So he combined these into one big long talk,
1947. 01:24:07 revised in 2005, and I don't even know
1948. 01:24:11 how to talk about this one.
1949. 01:24:12 - I don't either, I honestly don't either,
1950. 01:24:14 this one's a really hard one, I mean it's 25 tendencies,
1951. 01:24:19 and it's just his thoughts on these 25 psychological
1952. 01:24:22 tendencies.
1953. 01:24:23 - Yeah, it's ginormous, there's a couple of things
1954. 01:24:29 that I guess just random tidbits I'll pull out here,
1955. 01:24:32 but really have nothing to do with the messages
1956. 01:24:36 trying to get across with this big long talk.
1957. 01:24:40 I do think the tendencies are interesting
1958. 01:24:42 if you wanted to jump into them,
1959. 01:24:45 but it's not even worth going through the list.
1960. 01:24:48 They're basically psychology-based tendencies
1961. 01:24:50 that can often mislead, and he does say at one point
1962. 01:24:53 in this talk that they can mislead,
1963. 01:24:56 but they're not necessarily bad,
1964. 01:24:58 they're tendencies for a reason.
1965. 01:25:01 So tendencies are generally positive,
1966. 01:25:05 but he does mention that it's easier to prevent a habit
1967. 01:25:09 than to change it, and he mentions
1968. 01:25:11 that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
1969. 01:25:15 I had heard that before, and I liked that phrase.
1970. 01:25:19 He talks about the Tolstoy effect,
1971. 01:25:22 which is when man makes excuses for fixable poor performance
1972. 01:25:26 instead of providing the fix,
1973. 01:25:28 which is kind of interesting.
1974. 01:25:30 He mentions that we should learn
1975. 01:25:31 how to ignore the examples of others when they're wrong.
1976. 01:25:34 Sounds great.
1977. 01:25:35 How do you necessarily know when they're wrong?
1978. 01:25:38 Introduces Granny's rule, which is eat the vegetables first,
1979. 01:25:42 generally good advice,
1980. 01:25:45 and he mentions influenced by Robert Chaldini
1981. 01:25:50 as a great book to read.
1982. 01:25:51 That one has come up as a recommendation for Bookworm a lot,
1983. 01:25:55 and there's a new and revised version,
1984. 01:25:58 which I think is like 400 pages.
1985. 01:25:59 I don't want to read it for the podcast because it's so long.
1986. 01:26:02 - We looked at it.
1987. 01:26:03 - Yeah.
1988. 01:26:04 - We looked at it before, and it was way too long.
1989. 01:26:06 We were just like, nah, it's too long.
1990. 01:26:08 - It would be an interesting conversation,
1991. 01:26:10 and it's also kind of interesting
1992. 01:26:12 that he's sort of railing against psychology,
1993. 01:26:18 but then also exalting influence by Robert Chaldini.
1994. 01:26:23 And I think really he's talking about really the way
1995. 01:26:26 that psychology is taught.
1996. 01:26:30 He does mention, by the way,
1997. 01:26:31 that psychology can be used for good or evil
1998. 01:26:36 and how you can use it to manipulate people
1999. 01:26:39 and how cult leaders will do this sort of thing.
2000. 01:26:43 So I think that's an important caveat
2001. 01:26:45 for not just relevant to this discussion,
2002. 01:26:48 but with a lot of the books that we read for Bookworm,
2003. 01:26:52 that came up a lot with like the 48 Laws of Power.
2004. 01:26:56 And it really made me uncomfortable reading that
2005. 01:26:58 because it's a very direct connection.
2006. 01:27:01 He's not necessarily, Robert Greene isn't necessarily saying,
2007. 01:27:04 like use it this way, but this is how people can use it,
2008. 01:27:06 sort of a thing, I don't know.
2009. 01:27:09 So that's important to recognize with all of this stuff,
2010. 01:27:12 but yeah, this is a big talk and it's exhausting to read.
2011. 01:27:18 - I agree, I mean, as Mike's put it,
2012. 01:27:21 we could go through the different 25 things
2013. 01:27:23 and what we got out of it,
2014. 01:27:25 but I think you're gonna go through it when you read it
2015. 01:27:28 and you're gonna pull different pieces out of it.
2016. 01:27:30 What I think is interesting is,
2017. 01:27:31 if you've never thought about these tendencies before
2018. 01:27:34 or if there are a handful of them
2019. 01:27:36 that you've never thought about before,
2020. 01:27:38 they're compelling to read
2021. 01:27:40 and they're compelling to think about, right?
2022. 01:27:42 So not having taken a bunch of psychology classes,
2023. 01:27:46 these were enjoyable, it's probably the wrong word,
2024. 01:27:49 but they were informative, right?
2025. 01:27:50 Like they were informative to read
2026. 01:27:51 and informative to work through.
2027. 01:27:54 What I'll say is, you know, it's just a,
2028. 01:27:59 it's a long, like it's a,
2029. 01:28:00 I almost wanted to take this one and separate it out
2030. 01:28:05 and like do it on its own because, you know,
2031. 01:28:07 I felt like at one point I was just trying to get through it,
2032. 01:28:10 you know, and I wasn't like taking it in anymore, so.
2033. 01:28:13 - Well, see, this is where he's not in his element
2034. 01:28:17 talking about this type of stuff
2035. 01:28:19 'cause basically the psychology-based tendencies
2036. 01:28:21 that often mislead, it's a different framing,
2037. 01:28:23 but it's sort of like the 48 Laws of Power.
2038. 01:28:26 And he's not the guy to talk about that,
2039. 01:28:30 that's Robert Greene.
2040. 01:28:31 - But I think this is, I truly think,
2041. 01:28:33 this is why he wanted this book to be published
2042. 01:28:36 is for this last section.
2043. 01:28:37 - Could be, I mean, he definitely,
2044. 01:28:39 this one is definitely one that he wanted
2045. 01:28:41 to get off of his chest.
2046. 01:28:42 This is also the one that he has the biggest,
2047. 01:28:44 like revisited thing at the end.
2048. 01:28:47 And the most interesting thing
2049. 01:28:50 out of this particular talk for me is the way
2050. 01:28:52 that he ends that and ends the book.
2051. 01:28:54 It's like, and with that, I have nothing more to say.
2052. 01:28:56 - Exactly, what a great way,
2053. 01:28:58 what a great way to end the book.
2054. 01:28:59 - It's like, mic drop, I'm out.
2055. 01:29:01 - Yup, yup, yup, yup, yup.
2056. 01:29:05 - All right, anything else from the book
2057. 01:29:07 before we get into action items?
2058. 01:29:09 - Nope, I'm good.
2059. 01:29:09 I'm good to get into the zero action items
2060. 01:29:12 that I have on this book.
2061. 01:29:13 - Okay, so I have the one action item
2062. 01:29:17 which I mentioned from the last talk,
2063. 01:29:20 and that is simply to create more checklists.
2064. 01:29:24 And I guess I'll report back on this being successful
2065. 01:29:29 if I have created at least one more checklist,
2066. 01:29:32 which I think is gonna happen
2067. 01:29:34 because I have a call this week
2068. 01:29:35 with someone that I'm working with
2069. 01:29:37 as a kind of executive assistant role.
2070. 01:29:40 So I'm gonna have to make checklists for them.
2071. 01:29:44 That's gonna be the forcing function,
2072. 01:29:45 but yeah, that's all I got.
2073. 01:29:49 I have an action item that isn't related to the book.
2074. 01:29:51 It's related to-- - Oh yeah, from the beginning.
2075. 01:29:53 - From the pre-show and all that stuff.
2076. 01:29:55 So I have an action item,
2077. 01:29:57 but it has nothing to do with the book.
2078. 01:29:58 It's more about, you know, a co-working sessions
2079. 01:30:00 for, you know, different things.
2080. 01:30:02 So yeah, I just don't have any real action item
2081. 01:30:05 takeaways from this.
2082. 01:30:06 I will tell you that it's not,
2083. 01:30:09 that's not an indication of like lack of interesting content.
2084. 01:30:13 It's just more of a,
2085. 01:30:14 there wasn't really anything tangible to act on
2086. 01:30:16 coming out of this one.
2087. 01:30:18 - Yep, it's fair.
2088. 01:30:20 All right, styling rating.
2089. 01:30:23 - Give it to us, Mike, come on.
2090. 01:30:24 - You hear the dread in my voice, not just kidding.
2091. 01:30:28 This is a difficult one to rate.
2092. 01:30:30 Like I said, I think I've not done a great job
2093. 01:30:33 picking books for bookworm lately.
2094. 01:30:37 I do really like this book
2095. 01:30:39 and I am really glad that I read it.
2096. 01:30:42 Am I gonna pick this up and go through it again?
2097. 01:30:44 I'm not sure.
2098. 01:30:46 I think I probably would like to go through it again
2099. 01:30:50 at a slower pace.
2100. 01:30:52 The audio book is also included with the online version.
2101. 01:30:56 So I could definitely see going back
2102. 01:30:57 and listening to this again as an audio book.
2103. 01:31:01 But cranking through this in two weeks
2104. 01:31:03 is not the right way to approach this book.
2105. 01:31:06 - I agree.
2106. 01:31:08 - It's one of those that you kind of dip in
2107. 01:31:10 and out of periodically and you do so
2108. 01:31:15 with an open fascination about what made this guy tick.
2109. 01:31:20 And if you are interested at all
2110. 01:31:22 in the life of Charlie Munger, which I am,
2111. 01:31:26 then this is a good one.
2112. 01:31:29 I kind of made a joke earlier about this
2113. 01:31:32 is sort of like a modern meditations by Charlie Munger.
2114. 01:31:38 I think that is kind of accurate.
2115. 01:31:42 Like if Marcus was just writing all this stuff down
2116. 01:31:44 and it was written and combined into these different books.
2117. 01:31:48 So substitute books with talks
2118. 01:31:51 and adds some historical stuff at the beginning.
2119. 01:31:53 And if you do the online version,
2120. 01:31:55 a bunch of cool old photographs to really give you a picture
2121. 01:31:59 for the life of one of the most successful business people
2122. 01:32:02 who has ever lived.
2123. 01:32:04 I get that the whole topic of business
2124. 01:32:06 is not gonna be interesting
2125. 01:32:08 to the entire book or audience.
2126. 01:32:10 If that's you and you've listened this far,
2127. 01:32:13 thank you and I'm sorry, I don't know.
2128. 01:32:17 Some people who just have no interest whatsoever
2129. 01:32:20 in the topic of economics and all that kind of stuff.
2130. 01:32:24 You kind of can self-identify whether that's you.
2131. 01:32:28 I would say probably you don't need to pick this one up.
2132. 01:32:31 But on the other hand, there's the free one online.
2133. 01:32:33 You can poke around in that a little bit
2134. 01:32:34 and at least see if it piques your curiosity
2135. 01:32:37 and decide if you wanna read it that way.
2136. 01:32:40 So it's sorta hard to recommend this one
2137. 01:32:45 because number one, it's like, who is this for?
2138. 01:32:47 Number two, which version do you recommend?
2139. 01:32:49 I generally recommend people go by the physical book
2140. 01:32:53 and read that and I'm glad I own that version of it.
2141. 01:32:56 But I think this is the one book in the history of bookworm.
2142. 01:33:00 I would say, don't buy that first.
2143. 01:33:03 - I'm vigorously shaking my head, everyone.
2144. 01:33:06 I agree with you completely, yes.
2145. 01:33:08 - Yeah, so there's absolutely no risk
2146. 01:33:11 in loading up the website and poking around on that
2147. 01:33:15 and seeing if this is of interest to you.
2148. 01:33:19 I have trouble reading through
2149. 01:33:23 like the totality of the material in that format.
2150. 01:33:27 There's just something about reading on a digital screen.
2151. 01:33:29 It's not the same.
2152. 01:33:31 So I'm still not a fan of that format.
2153. 01:33:34 And honestly, if I had to read the book that way,
2154. 01:33:37 I wouldn't have finished it.
2155. 01:33:39 Wouldn't have happened.
2156. 01:33:40 But I'm also probably not the ideal customer for this
2157. 01:33:48 which is kind of weird.
2158. 01:33:51 I feel like a lot of the things that made him tick
2159. 01:33:56 are not the things that make me tick.
2160. 01:33:59 It was a little bit surprising to discover that.
2161. 01:34:03 But the people who are absolutely gonna love this
2162. 01:34:07 are the business bros.
2163. 01:34:09 That's the best way to describe it.
2164. 01:34:13 Does that mean that people who have an affinity
2165. 01:34:17 for like how business processes and systems are put together
2166. 01:34:22 won't get anything out of it?
2167. 01:34:23 No.
2168. 01:34:24 But also, if that's you and you've got enough time
2169. 01:34:28 to invest reading a 350 page book,
2170. 01:34:30 I could probably give you a bunch of other ones
2171. 01:34:33 that you're gonna get a higher return
2172. 01:34:35 on your time, attention and energy investment.
2173. 01:34:38 So I'm not sure that this is one that I'd necessarily
2174. 01:34:42 recommend it.
2175. 01:34:43 Like I said, at the beginning to solve a problem
2176. 01:34:45 that you are currently facing.
2177. 01:34:48 It's one of those ones that you just kinda gotta dip your toes
2178. 01:34:51 in every once in a while because it's fun.
2179. 01:34:55 And that's gonna sound weird to some people.
2180. 01:34:58 Like reading a business book by Charlie Munger.
2181. 01:35:00 That's fun for some people, yeah.
2182. 01:35:04 So I do think it's really well written.
2183. 01:35:07 I think Charlie Munger is brilliant.
2184. 01:35:10 And I know these talks are edited.
2185. 01:35:12 I did not go back and find like a video or an audio
2186. 01:35:16 of him giving these talks.
2187. 01:35:18 But I have no doubt that he's not stumbling over his words
2188. 01:35:23 and kinda to the point that you made earlier,
2189. 01:35:25 he's a much better speaker than most speakers
2190. 01:35:29 that you would hear.
2191. 01:35:31 I feel like just the quality of the thinking
2192. 01:35:34 that is evidenced in the talks that he shares
2193. 01:35:38 is very aspirational for me.
2194. 01:35:42 I feel like I've learned a lot
2195. 01:35:44 through the years doing bookworm.
2196. 01:35:46 I've learned to think on my feet.
2197. 01:35:47 I feel like I do a pretty good job
2198. 01:35:49 of fairly concisely communicating.
2199. 01:35:54 Some people will laugh at that
2200. 01:35:55 because we're approaching two hours
2201. 01:35:57 as we're talking about this.
2202. 01:35:58 But I think that that has been a big takeaway
2203. 01:36:01 from bookworm for me is I've gotten a lot better.
2204. 01:36:07 I still have a long ways to go.
2205. 01:36:09 But I don't throw out nearly as many
2206. 01:36:12 just jumbled word salads as I used to.
2207. 01:36:16 But if you want an example of what perfection looks like,
2208. 01:36:19 I mean, this is it.
2209. 01:36:23 I'm gonna rate it four stars.
2210. 01:36:25 And I guess that there's a caveat there
2211. 01:36:28 just for some people, they're absolutely gonna love this.
2212. 01:36:31 And this is a five star and even more if it was possible.
2213. 01:36:36 There are some people who, you know,
2214. 01:36:37 this is just totally not the right thing for them.
2215. 01:36:41 I feel like I'm kinda in between.
2216. 01:36:43 And so for me personally, it's a four star book.
2217. 01:36:46 - Okay.
2218. 01:36:47 Well, I could not disagree with you more
2219. 01:36:49 about the online version of this book.
2220. 01:36:52 I loved every second of that.
2221. 01:36:54 And if I could have every book written in this format,
2222. 01:36:58 I would read every book in this format.
2223. 01:37:01 I 100% loved the stripe.press version of this book.
2224. 01:37:06 It gave some visuals that I thought may add a value to it.
2225. 01:37:11 It had the audio right in there, like in line.
2226. 01:37:15 So you could listen to it if, you know,
2227. 01:37:16 you got tired or bored or whatever it was
2228. 01:37:18 and you wanna just change it up a little bit,
2229. 01:37:20 which I'm a big fan of.
2230. 01:37:21 So I, Mike, I love you, but I could not disagree
2231. 01:37:25 with you more on that.
2232. 01:37:27 - That's fair, that's fair.
2233. 01:37:29 - Okay.
2234. 01:37:30 In terms of the nature of this book,
2235. 01:37:33 the big caveat to this book is do you care
2236. 01:37:37 about Charlie Munger's opinion?
2237. 01:37:39 Because if you care about Charlie Munger's opinion,
2238. 01:37:42 read the book.
2239. 01:37:43 If you don't care about Charlie Munger's opinion,
2240. 01:37:45 or if you are definitely negative
2241. 01:37:48 towards Charlie Munger's opinion,
2242. 01:37:50 you may not wanna read this book.
2243. 01:37:51 I mean, like you're getting one individual's opinion
2244. 01:37:54 on a bunch of different things.
2245. 01:37:57 I think the thing that I maybe would disagree with you
2246. 01:38:01 a little bit on, but I don't remember
2247. 01:38:02 how exactly you phrased it, but it's like,
2248. 01:38:04 I actually don't think this is that much of a business book
2249. 01:38:07 or that much of an economics book.
2250. 01:38:08 I actually think it's much more of a human psychology
2251. 01:38:12 applied in economics, human psychology applied investing,
2252. 01:38:16 or a mental model is applied.
2253. 01:38:18 I think this is a different education style book, right?
2254. 01:38:24 I don't know exactly what word to put on it right now,
2255. 01:38:27 but because of that, I actually liked it better.
2256. 01:38:31 Like the parts of this book that I didn't get as much out of
2257. 01:38:34 and wasn't as interested in were capital investing,
2258. 01:38:38 and you know, sorry, not capital investing,
2259. 01:38:41 but the investing stuff and the economics talks
2260. 01:38:45 and stuff like that.
2261. 01:38:46 I just wasn't as interested in that.
2262. 01:38:48 But when he talked about the multidisciplinarity,
2263. 01:38:50 the lattice work, the different psychology topics
2264. 01:38:53 and how they applied in context
2265. 01:38:55 and that we should be lifelong learners,
2266. 01:38:56 like I was in for that, like that was interesting to me.
2267. 01:39:00 The other part is I didn't know a ton about Charlie Munger,
2268. 01:39:03 so it was interesting to me from a biography-type standpoint.
2269. 01:39:08 So if that sounds interesting to you
2270. 01:39:11 and you're willing to dip your toe in,
2271. 01:39:13 I completely agree with Mike, go online,
2272. 01:39:17 look at the titles of the talks and pick one of the ones
2273. 01:39:21 you think would be the most interesting to you.
2274. 01:39:23 Or based on our discussion,
2275. 01:39:25 pick one of the ones that would be the most interesting to you
2276. 01:39:27 and read that one first.
2277. 01:39:28 I do not think if you're on the fence,
2278. 01:39:31 I would invest the 350 pages
2279. 01:39:33 and the amount of time into this.
2280. 01:39:35 I don't think you're gonna get your bang
2281. 01:39:36 for your buck out of it.
2282. 01:39:38 But that said, I don't think it was a terrible book.
2283. 01:39:44 Like I don't walk away from this going like oh man,
2284. 01:39:46 I wasted a whole bunch of time, you know,
2285. 01:39:47 regardless of the show and whatever.
2286. 01:39:49 But I don't think I wasted a whole bunch of time.
2287. 01:39:51 I think there were some still really good nuggets out of there.
2288. 01:39:54 And one of those nuggets would be like other people to read.
2289. 01:39:56 So, you know, like I think there's more in Ben Franklin
2290. 01:40:01 that I could get out of.
2291. 01:40:02 Samuel Johnson that I could get out of.
2292. 01:40:04 Keynes, I didn't know what's talking about Keynes,
2293. 01:40:06 but he quotes Keynes a bunch of different times
2294. 01:40:08 that like would be interesting to go and read some of that work.
2295. 01:40:12 So I got a lot of those like places I could dip my toe in as well.
2296. 01:40:17 So, by the way, that name, I pronounced,
2297. 01:40:22 I mispronounced Feynman earlier, I think.
2298. 01:40:25 You pronounce it the right way.
2299. 01:40:27 I pronounced it the wrong way.
2300. 01:40:28 That person you're talking about is Keynes.
2301. 01:40:32 Keynesian economics.
2302. 01:40:33 Yeah, Keynes, yeah, thank you, thank you, yep.
2303. 01:40:36 Okay, so all of that being said,
2304. 01:40:38 what is my ranking for this book?
2305. 01:40:41 I'm gonna rank it a four as well with the idea though
2306. 01:40:46 that like I was interested in Munger.
2307. 01:40:49 So it's like we could have read any book on Munger
2308. 01:40:52 and I'm going to move that rating up a little bit.
2309. 01:40:56 If somebody read this book and they were like,
2310. 01:40:59 nope, that book's a two or a three,
2311. 01:41:01 I couldn't really fight you on that
2312. 01:41:03 because you're either interested in what he talks about
2313. 01:41:07 or you're not and I don't think there's gonna be a lot
2314. 01:41:09 of in between there.
2315. 01:41:10 So because I was interested in what he talked about
2316. 01:41:13 and I wanted to read a book,
2317. 01:41:14 like I like the idea of reading a book about Munger,
2318. 01:41:16 it bounces it up to a four.
2319. 01:41:18 The thing that knocks it down from like a five to me,
2320. 01:41:21 like the big draw that knocks it down from a five
2321. 01:41:23 is the investing in economic side of it
2322. 01:41:27 because that's just less interesting to me.
2323. 01:41:29 So four stars for me on this one.
2324. 01:41:33 All right, well let's put poor Charlie's Almanac
2325. 01:41:37 on the shelf, what's next, Corey?
2326. 01:41:39 The next book we're gonna read is called
2327. 01:41:41 The Courage to Be Dislighted by Ichiro Kishimi
2328. 01:41:45 and Fumitake Koga.
2329. 01:41:48 And this book is kind of an interesting book
2330. 01:41:53 in terms of it takes the work of a psychologist
2331. 01:41:57 named Alfred Adler and basically kind of puts it
2332. 01:42:01 into this different package.
2333. 01:42:04 So it's dialogue between a philosopher and a young man
2334. 01:42:07 and like how they're gonna have these conversations
2335. 01:42:09 and we're gonna learn some things about
2336. 01:42:11 life direction and past burdens and those type of things.
2337. 01:42:15 Really the thing that drove me to this one
2338. 01:42:17 was it was talked about in another book that we've read,
2339. 01:42:19 a previous book that we read.
2340. 01:42:21 And then just the concept in itself,
2341. 01:42:23 the courage to be disliked because there's a little bit
2342. 01:42:26 about me, like there's a little bit of me personally
2343. 01:42:28 that's like, well hold on, I don't like to be disliked.
2344. 01:42:31 Like I want to be liked by other people.
2345. 01:42:33 So I think this book is gonna challenge me
2346. 01:42:36 in terms of that.
2347. 01:42:37 So hopefully you'll come along for the ride with us.
2348. 01:42:40 If you are gonna come along for the ride,
2349. 01:42:43 the courage to be disliked by Ichiro Kishimi
2350. 01:42:46 and Fumitake Koga.
2351. 01:42:48 - Yes.
2352. 01:42:49 - How about you, Mike?
2353. 01:42:50 What's the one after that?
2354. 01:42:52 - I'm having trouble picking one yet again.
2355. 01:42:55 I have one here as the default option,
2356. 01:43:02 but I've heard from people in my community
2357. 01:43:08 that make it stick by Peter Brown, Henry Rotiger,
2358. 01:43:12 and Mark McDaniel is a great book on learning.
2359. 01:43:16 They actually tagged you and I and said,
2360. 01:43:18 you should totally cover this one.
2361. 01:43:20 So I'm willing to do that if you want to,
2362. 01:43:22 otherwise I've got the backup listed in the notes.
2363. 01:43:26 What do you think?
2364. 01:43:28 - So I, because of that comment in the community,
2365. 01:43:32 was like, okay, make it six, gotta go on there.
2366. 01:43:34 We just gotta figure out when to do it.
2367. 01:43:36 So I'm up for make it stick
2368. 01:43:38 or I don't know anything about the long game.
2369. 01:43:40 So you tell me if that's the one
2370. 01:43:43 that you're really jazzed about.
2371. 01:43:44 - All right, well, people can help us pick this book
2372. 01:43:48 together then.
2373. 01:43:49 So make it stick is another fairly long book.
2374. 01:43:52 It's 336 pages.
2375. 01:43:54 So I don't wanna pick another book
2376. 01:43:57 that is just impossible to get through.
2377. 01:44:00 You're picking the easy ones lately.
2378. 01:44:04 The long game is by Dory Clark and this one,
2379. 01:44:08 the subtitle, how to be a long-term thinker
2380. 01:44:11 in a short-term world.
2381. 01:44:13 I've had this one for a while.
2382. 01:44:14 I feel like this would be very applicable
2383. 01:44:16 for the bookworm audience.
2384. 01:44:17 This one's 256 pages.
2385. 01:44:20 Yeah, I don't know.
2386. 01:44:21 So I'm gonna give you the choice.
2387. 01:44:23 - Me?
2388. 01:44:24 You're gonna give me the choice.
2389. 01:44:26 - Yes.
2390. 01:44:26 Do you wanna read another?
2391. 01:44:29 Another long book which Ward had recommended
2392. 01:44:32 that we both read and it's probably great fodder
2393. 01:44:34 for bookworm but would be another heavy lift, I think.
2394. 01:44:39 Or something a little bit easier.
2395. 01:44:41 - Mike, have you ever turned it to the audience
2396. 01:44:44 and had them provide feedback and pick the book?
2397. 01:44:50 - I think we've done that once or twice before
2398. 01:44:53 but we don't really have a mechanism for people to do that.
2399. 01:44:58 And also I'm afraid of,
2400. 01:45:01 we're definitely gonna get influence
2401. 01:45:03 recommended to us a bunch if we do something like that.
2402. 01:45:07 So I'm trying to do a smaller version of that
2403. 01:45:10 and give two options and let my co-host pick.
2404. 01:45:13 - No, so that's what I'm saying is,
2405. 01:45:14 what if my choice is you have the long game
2406. 01:45:18 or you have make it stick and they have to go to blue sky
2407. 01:45:21 and they have to tell me what they want
2408. 01:45:23 and then I can pick it that way.
2409. 01:45:25 - All right, yeah.
2410. 01:45:25 So you create a poll and we'll link to it in the show notes
2411. 01:45:31 and people can pick one.
2412. 01:45:34 - So it's either gonna be the long game
2413. 01:45:35 or it's gonna be make it stick.
2414. 01:45:37 We'll get it out there, we'll put in the show notes
2415. 01:45:39 and you all can help tell us which book to do.
2416. 01:45:44 That's gonna be fun.
2417. 01:45:45 Yeah, this is good, I like this.
2418. 01:45:47 - All right, got any gap books?
2419. 01:45:50 - No, I do not have any gap books.
2420. 01:45:52 My gap books are the academic subjects
2421. 01:45:56 that I'm teaching right now, so no gap books.
2422. 01:45:59 - Yeah, I don't have any gap books either.
2423. 01:46:01 And maybe I'll have a gap book,
2424. 01:46:03 depending on what the audience picks, we'll see.
2425. 01:46:06 - Awesome.
2426. 01:46:07 - All right, well, thank you for listening.
2427. 01:46:09 If you are a Bookworm Pro supporter,
2428. 01:46:13 thank you specifically for helping us keep the lights on.
2429. 01:46:17 We really appreciate that.
2430. 01:46:18 You can become a Bookworm Pro supporter
2431. 01:46:21 by going to patreon.com/bookwormfm.
2432. 01:46:25 Seven bucks a month, you get access
2433. 01:46:27 to a couple additional feeds,
2434. 01:46:29 one of which is the bootleg episode
2435. 01:46:31 where you get the complete unedited version
2436. 01:46:33 as soon as we're done recording it,
2437. 01:46:35 is also a profeed which has an ad-free version of the show
2438. 01:46:41 with an extended segment where today we talked about
2439. 01:46:44 my shiny new object and Bookworm wallpaper,
2440. 01:46:49 a couple of other things that'll be coming to that shortly,
2441. 01:46:52 but we'll have details hopefully to share
2442. 01:46:54 in the next episode or two.
2443. 01:46:56 But again, if you wanna support the show,
2444. 01:46:58 financially, we would love to have your support.
2445. 01:47:01 You can do so at patreon.com/bookwormfm.
2446. 01:47:05 - And if you were reading along with us,
2447. 01:47:07 pick up the courage to be disliked,
2448. 01:47:09 and we'll talk to you next time.