#90 Charlie Munger (Poor Charlie's Almanack)

**David Senra** (0:00)
Warren Buffett is the public face of Berkshire Hathaway, and is rightly credited with a tremendous long-term success. But there's another major contributor to the firm's legendary performance record, Charles T. Munger. Although less well-known to the general public than Buffett, he's an equally astute and effective teacher, as Poor Charlie's Almanack, a collection of his best talks, quotes, and ideas, will demonstrate.
With Charlie himself as your guide via his speeches and writings, you're about to embark upon an extraordinary journey toward better investing, decision-making, and thinking about the world and life in general. Charlie's unique worldview, what he calls a multidisciplinary approach, is a self-developed model for clear and simple thinking, while being far from simplistic itself.
Throughout the book, Charlie displaces intellect, wit, integrity, and rhetorical flair, while simultaneously reinforcing the virtues of lifelong learning and intellectual curiosity. All right, so that is from the cover, the inside flap of the book that I'm holding in my hand. Poor Charlie's Almanack, the expanded third edition, is the subtitle is The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger.
So this book is rather unique compared to some of the other biographies and books that I've covered so far in the podcast because it's more like a textbook. Again, very similar to the 54 shareholder letters. I went over the Warren Buffett shareholder letters. The book is huge. So in addition to containing all the Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Munger, you could also work out with it or maybe even yield it as a weapon. So it is large and I have a ton of notes. So let's not waste any time. Let's go ahead and jump into it. I want to start with this quote. That's a great quote to start with. It's at the very beginning of the book, and it's Charlie in his own words telling us, he says, acquire worldly wisdom and adjust your behavior accordingly. If your new behavior gives you a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group, then to hell with them. So I picked up that quote because one, it gives you an insight into the personality of Charlie Munger.
He definitely has the habit of making these pithy statements meant to provoke. But second, I think he's hitting on there's no point in encouraging people to be lifelong learners if what you're learning does not affect your behavior. So I appreciate the fact that he just assumes that, hey, you're doing this learning and obviously you're going to take the ideas and it's going to change the way you act. So the book is arranged in a rather bizarre way.
As you could imagine, more, less of a narrative, more like a textbook. So I'm just going to pull out some of the, I mean, we're here to study the ideas of Charlie Munger. So it's not going to be like a cohesive experience whatsoever. So I just pulled out a bunch of ideas. I am going to cover his early life, which is more, will sound more like a narrative, but this one was in this next highlight of mine, was just in the very beginning of the book. And it's something I talk about constantly, that reputation is persuasive. And you're going to realize that when you study Charlie Munger, he has a bunch of ideas that he repeats in different ways because he understands the importance of repetition and redundancy. So it says, Charlie's redundancy in expressions and examples is purposeful. For the kind of deep fluency he advocates, he knows that repetition is the heart of instruction.
So he's going to give you the same idea. The bulk of the book, I'd say half of the book, is transcripts, edited transcripts of 11 of his most famous talks. And what you'll notice is he repeats a lot of the same things, but in different contexts. I actually think that's extremely helpful because you, one, that you're more familiar with it because you hear it over and over again, but he's also applying it to different domains and different examples, which he has this idea of the lattice work of mental models, meaning you can't just hang an idea in your mind and not anchor it to something. If you don't anchor it to something, you're just going to forget it. So that's what I think he was doing in all these talks. All right, so let me go. I'm going to start in Charlie's early life. He actually met Warren Buffett after. He worked for Warren Buffett's uncle, and he didn't know Warren because he's a few years older at the time. So let me just go right to this. He says, Charlie initially crossed paths with the Buffett family during the formative years of his life when he worked at Buffett & Son, an upscale grocery store in Omaha. The boss and part owner was Warren's grandfather. Okay, so now his uncle is his grandfather. His grandfather, Ernest, a strict disciplinarian, he scheduled his young workers for 12 hour shifts with no meals or breaks.