Charlie Munger: 100 Years of Wisdom Summed up in 20 Minutes

And I’ve catalogued the inanities on structures in my head, and it’s been a wonderful thing to do. If you stop to think about it, how many unhappy collectors do you know? Whether they collect silver, or mistresses, or you know... I thought I would speak tonight a little bit on my favorite subject, just as a talk, and after that just take questions from Tom of any kind he wants to answer.

What I’d like to talk about briefly is [laughter]... table! You think I’m kidding. The topic I’d like to talk about briefly is common sense, which isn’t common. Yes, see, and what people mean when they say a man has common sense is uncommon sense. Usually, they don’t mean that the man has a narrow little activity he’s good at, like knitting sweaters, and he sticks to that. What they mean is a man that can operate over a pretty broad range of human territory without making any big boners, and that is a very important thing to be good at.

And the question is, how do you get it? I was very lucky in my own life because everywhere I looked at the pinnacle, there was a guy that was better than I was. One of my father’s best friends was a great surgeon with vast mechanical ability, and I knew what this man did with his mechanical abilities in inventing all these spreaders and things he used to do his operations. But I would never be as good as he was, and everywhere I looked, there was somebody like that. And there was all this folly out there, and I suddenly realized I could just avoid all the folly. You know, maybe I can get an advantage without having to be really good at anything, and I kept doing that all my life.

It worked so well that I enjoy sharing it with people like you. It really works to tackle much of life by inversion, where you just twist the thing around backwards and answer it that way. I have to give problems to my children, and once, when I had all of them together, I said, well, there’s an activity in America—there’s a one-on-one tournament, and the national champion became the national champion on two separate occasions 65 years apart! Name the activity, and seven of my children could not remotely do it. The eighth, a PhD physicist, did it very quickly.

What he did was he just turned it around. He said, “Can it be athletic?” and he realized that no 85-year-old was ever going to win an athletic thing with the neurological or other deteriorations that are so evident tonight on the stage. And so I said, well, it couldn’t be chess. He’s a chess player, and he realized that no 85-year-old was ever going to be the U.S. chess champion. He knows what a chess tournament is like. But that led him to checkers, a game that you could almost master with enough experience. Of course, that was the correct answer. It took him about 15 seconds.

All kinds of problems like that that look so difficult when you turn them around, they are quickly solved. And so this process that I’ve gone through life doing of identifying folly and trying to avoid it has worked wonderfully for me. Another trick that I got very early was that I loved big ideas that had a lot of instructive power. I liked them so well that I didn’t mind when they were in somebody else’s territory. I just went in and took the ideas. So I paid no attention to the territorial boundaries of academic disciplines, and I just grabbed all the big, big activity ideas that I could. Then I used them in daily activity to solve problems, amuse myself, and do self-education and so forth.

Well, that makes me a collector. I’m a collector of inanity, and I’ve catalogued the inanities on structures in my head, and it’s been a wonderful thing to do. If you stop to think about it, how many unhappy collectors do you know? Whether they collect silver or mistresses, or you know... by and large, collectors are happy, and collecting inanities is just wonderful. If you collect stamps the way I once did, I soon had a U.S. stamp collection I couldn’t afford to add a stamp to. Well, what fun is collecting when you can’t afford the next stamp? When you’re collecting inanities, there’s never a shortage, and there’s all this low-hanging fruit.

We had one this morning from the governor of New York that was pretty expensive! Well, but... when you—this is just a wonderful activity! It’s amused me and instructed me all my life.

Another thing that I got into when I did that was to be very interested in seeing how these ideas interplayed together. There’s not big academic reward or worldly reward for integrating one discipline with a strange discipline that’s not your own. So if you do it in your head, you’re in a territory without much competition. Warren always says you should take the high road in life because it’s less crowded, and this is a less crowded mental road in life, and it really works.

Of course, when you do that, you get into issues where ideas are in conflict, and of course, it demands synthesis. Well, a lot of people, when they see a demand for synthesis, just immediately retreat into whatever orthodoxy they came from. That’s not the monger. If there are two big powerful ideas and there’s a terrible tension between them and synthesis is demanded, I look it up if I can, and if I can’t look it up, I try and figure it out. If I have a poor approximation, I use that for a few years until it gets better.

I got another idea that was very useful: I always liked Occam’s razor. Now, that is a wonderful way to think. You can argue that Einstein’s whole career was just a marvelous demonstration of Occam’s razor, and E=mc² is a pretty damn simple idea. But think of the power out! And then Einstein developed—some people say—a corollary, a counter corollary to Occam’s razor. This may be apocryphal because I’ve never seen it in any original source I trusted, but I’ve seen Einstein quoted with this observation over and over again: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no more simple.” Well, if Einstein didn’t say it, he should have said it because this is a very sound idea.

I later developed a supplement to that corollary, and my supplement to Einstein’s corollary about Occam’s razor was in messy social science. If the result you’re observing is a lollapalooza, look for a confluence of multiple causes, multiple forces operating in the same direction. I got to that idea when I was trying to explain to myself how the Moonies were able to get some student to come out for a weekend in the country. At the end of the weekend, the guy was a brainwashed zombie who was the slave of some megalomaniac nutcase for the rest of his paltry life.

This is obviously a lollapalooza result, and so I looked in academia for an easy, correct answer to this, and of course, I didn’t find it. I finally stumbled across a popular book done by some psychiatrists founded by the Rockefellers who had studied the last work of Pavlov. Pavlov had these dogs in these cages, and when the Leningrad flood came in 1920, it went right up to the dogs’ noses, and they damn near drowned and died but didn’t. The stress was perfectly horrible, and they’d all been conditioned to have these dog personalities, and when the waters receded, the personalities had reversed.

Well, Pavlov, being a great scientist, spent the rest of his life giving nervous breakdowns to dogs and trying to reverse those breakdowns. This is not pretty reading, but it was very instructive. I realized that the Mooney methods and the involvement of stress was clearly part of it. I also realized that the psychiatrists did not have an adequate explanation. Well, finally, I stumbled into psychology, in which I’d never taken a course. I just bought the three main textbooks in Psych 101 in the country and riffled through them quickly. You know, I could pick up the 20 main ideas in social psychology very easily.

And when I used them as a routine system, I could see that the Moonies were using about six of these things in combination with the Pavlovian stress. And, just as the dogs’ brains snapped in the Leningrad flood, the Moonies have a term in their conversion method called “causing the target to snap”—same damn idea. I found that very interesting, and because I reached a conclusion, a very unpopular, unpolitically correct conclusion that I’ve just given you, you know, because it gets into religion. Conversion is a tough subject.

Anyway, that satisfied me. So I expanded it into this corollary of looking for a confluence of causes when you see a lollapalooza result in social science, and that has been enormously helpful to me. Because I find that a lot of social scientists have a weird mania where they twist everything into whatever little concept they started with. Again, it’s that old saying: to a man with a hammer, every problem looks pretty much like a nail. I have worked hard to avoid that problem.

Of course, if you grab the big ideas in all the disciplines, by definition, you’re a man with multiple tools, so you’re less likely to commit the inanities of the people who twist every problem into being a nail. Well, anyway, there were a series of tricks like that that I used as I went through life, and it was amazing how many times I found something I could easily solve with my little bag of mental tricks that had missed other people who were eminent in their field. I could go right into their territory sometimes and see more clearly than the professional denizen how his conclusions fit into the bigger picture.

Again, this is a very dangerous attitude to have in ordinary social discourse, but it’s a very good way to invest money. Anyway, that’s the kind of a peculiar man you have here tonight. Of course, I idolized Ben Franklin because I identify with him. Of course, he was so much more talented than I am; it’s just a joke to make the comparison. But at least he was a totally self-educated man that wandered over a vast amount of territory and was pretty competent over the full range. And a lot of Franklin’s knowledge was psychological too. He was a great observer of human nature, and so, there are implications, of course, in this attitude of mine in academia.

The implication is very simple: social science in America is very poorly taught, and the people who are the denizens and the people that they teach are way more incompetent than they need to be. The solution is to get all these social scientists, or the ones that have the capacity to do it at least, so that they are comfortable across the boundaries of disciplines and see where the ideas conflict. Let me give you a simple example. If you went around Caltech and asked people where do the laws of chemistry not apply, practically everybody would say, well, they don’t work in a hot plasma—no big deal.

But if you ask a bunch of people who have taken the main course in economics and have gone on to business school in America, you say, well, you’re selling something which is measured in units, and you want to sell more units. Do you raise the price or lower the price? Well, we’ve seen supply and demand because you lower the price, then you say, tell me the occasions on which, if you want to sell more units, you raise the price. Now, this is an intelligent group; you’ve been through social science. I’m giving you some time—will anybody who has the right answer raise his hand?

Yeah, luxury goods! What do about 1 in 50 come up with? The idea of luxury goods that the price is sort of a signal that it’s high quality, and if it’s not a signal of high quality, it’s a way of bragging to your friends that you have both discrimination and money. But the interesting—one other interesting example is the one that happened to my Caltech-educated friend, Bill Ballhouse, who was CEO of Beckman Instruments Company founded by another eminent Caltech professor.

Ballhouse had in his business collection a company that made some complex gizmo that they sold for a lower price than the other two gizmos in the market, and yet it was much better and it had lousy figures. Ballhouse took one look at it and he realized that it was a gizmo where if it failed, it imposed enormous costs on the owner of the gizmo. He recognized that the price being low was sending the signal wrong in reverse. This can’t be very good! So, he raised the price enormously and sold way more units, and of course, the profits went up in a truly dramatic way.

So these idiots that can’t answer the question are leaving a lot of money on the table that a man like Ballhouse knows how to get. The world is just full of opportunities like that for people who get the main points and go across it. But of course, that’s not the main answer to the question; that’s just Ballhouse, by the way. The main answer to the question is very simple! Suppose you raise the price and use the money to bribe the other guy’s purchasing agent.

Well, you can laugh because it’s so obvious once somebody points it out. But who was raising his hand over that one after all the fancy education you’ve had? And so... the kissing cousin of that direct bribery of the other guy’s purchasing agent—that’s the way title insurance is sold in America! That’s the way load mutual funds are sold in America! That’s the way a certain amount of defense contracting has been done or attempted to be done. It’s just... it’s a huge important part of capitalistic life, that business of raising the price and using the money to enhance sales.

Of course, there are legitimate ways to do it too, like legitimate information through advertising or otherwise, but there’s a lot of illegitimate use of increased price to increase sales, and that’s a big part of the capitalist condition. If you don’t have a brain that automatically has these things pop into it, you haven’t really assimilated social science correctly. What good does it do to be able to pass a test, parroting back to the professor what he told you? Well, I’ll get you an academic label, but it won’t get you the many millions of dollars Ballhouse made by raising the price, and it won’t get you really fabulous investment results in life if it takes some imagination and you don’t see how all these things work and how they interplay.

Of course, the way to get that competency, like any other competency, is to adopt the necessary elements and practice using it over a considerable period of time in a considerable area of complexity. Now you get to a really interesting question: Can we fix the social sciences so they aren’t such total horse’s asses? The answer is yes. Is it likely to happen? The answer is no. It will happen eventually because... well, here I’m going to lose my humility, right?

I had a guy in the Harvard Law Review ahead of me who said to me once in the course of an argument, “Charlie, think about it for a while, and you’ll agree with me because you’re smart, and I’m right.” Radar! Well, the liberal arts are going to come to the monger system in due course because they’re smart and I’m right. It can be done better, but it can’t be done better with a crazy reward system that allows people to be as silly as they are in many departments.

I always liked the story of P.J. O’Rourke, who said, “You know he says the last communist dictator of Albania was a pure communist, and he finally threw out the Russian embassy because they’d lost the pure faith. Then he kicked out the Chinese communists because they’d lost the pure faith.” I said finally he was only comfortable with two places in the world. One was the communist dictator of North Korea, and the other was the English department at Yale.

Well, you think I’m kidding, but there is a lot of extreme craziness in some of the liberal arts, and they select people who share their craziness. It is not necessary that academia tolerate forever this lack of multi-displinary competence. It’s not that hard! If some aging untrained fat old man can do it, you know, surely the young brilliant liberal arts people can do it. It will take a different incentive, even a different system. It might even be that a place like Caltech could do it, but they’d have to get a rather unusual person to do it for them.

All right, now I’ll turn it over to you. Well, actually, I’d like to...