Charlie Munger Interview

I highly recommend reading everything you can about Warren Buffett's partner Charlie Munger. If you are unfamiliar with him you are in for a treat. He is incredibly intelligent and he knows it -which adds a certain (well deserved) brashness and arrogance to his message. For me this makes him that much more engaging.

Here are some notes from a recent interview. I recommend visiting him at the Berkshire and Westco meetings so that you can experience him in person. I GUARANTEE you'll learn something.

Tonight I got to see A Conversation with Charlie Munger at Caltech in Pasadena. I took some notes on the discussion below. C refers to Charlie Munger speaking, while T stands for Tom Tombrello, the interviewer. These are not their exact words.


C: I love Occum's Razor (Wikipedia). Einstein once said make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. In the field of messy social sciences, use a variety of disciplines and look for a confluence of factors when dealing with "lollapaloozas". (significant and strange events, black swans)

For example, I was fascinated about what made people join Moonies, a cult-like group. It didn't make sense until I ran into Pavlov, who experimented on dogs by pushing them to nervous breakdowns (He did this by locking them in cages and then raising the water level up to mouth height, making them think they were about to drown) . Afterwards, they would act in the complete opposite fashion. This was very similar to one of the Moonies conversion methods: "causing the target to snap".

Continue the Interview