The archive

The Recordings

Every Charlie Munger recording worth your time — verified, dated, and described in plain English. The Daily Journal meetings, the major speeches, the interviews, and his one real podcast. Where a famous “talk” survives only as text, or a circulating video is mislabeled, we say so rather than pretend.

31 recordings

2023 Interview Charlie Munger's Final CNBC Interview (2023) The last interview Munger ever gave — taped with Becky Quick on November 14, 2023, just two weeks before he died at 99. A valedictory conversation on Berkshire's secret, what he got wrong, why he revered Costco, his contempt for the modern money game, and his abiding faith in the progress of civilization. 2023 Podcast Charlie Munger on the Acquired Podcast (2023) Munger's only dedicated long-form podcast appearance — recorded over dinner at his Los Angeles home, weeks before his death, with Acquired's Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal. An hour-plus on Costco, the Daily Journal, what makes a business worth owning, and a life spent thinking clearly. 2023 Daily Journal Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2023 Munger's last Daily Journal meeting as host — almost two and a half hours, at 99, on BYD and Tesla, calling Alibaba 'one of the worst mistakes I ever made,' the retailer he most admires (Costco), banking, China, and another broadside at bitcoin. 2023 Podcast Charlie Munger & John Collison (Invest Like the Best, 2023) Stripe co-founder John Collison interviews Munger at home in Los Angeles — a conversation tied to Stripe Press's reissue of Poor Charlie's Almanack, released the very day it aired, the week after Munger died. Wide-ranging: evaluating business quality, why he passed on Amazon, the Costco model, crypto, the opioid crisis, architecture, and the origins of the Almanack itself. 2022 Interview On Leadership & Capital Allocation, with Todd Combs (2022) Munger in conversation with Berkshire investment manager Todd Combs, anchored on Henry Singleton — the Teledyne founder Munger called the best capital allocator who ever lived. A working seminar on what great capital allocation actually looks like, why most managers are bad at it, and what makes a leader worth following. 2022 Daily Journal Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2022 Munger's last meeting as Daily Journal chairman, virtual again via Yahoo Finance, hosted by Becky Quick. At 98 he talks succession (he and Gerry Salzman both needed replacing, and he says so plainly), warns that the Fed's easy money was storing up inflation trouble, and — asked why so many people are unhappy in a rich society — gives a characteristically dry answer about envy and unrealistic expectations. 2021 Daily Journal Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2021 The first virtual Daily Journal meeting, streamed by Yahoo Finance during the meme-stock mania. Munger at 97 is unsparing: Robinhood is running a gambling parlor dressed up as investing, SPACs are a sign of an overheated market, and bitcoin is 'disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization.' A blunt diagnosis of a bubble, delivered while it was inflating. 2020 Interview A Conversation with Charlie Munger — Caltech Distinguished Alumni (2020) A roughly hour-long virtual conversation tied to Munger's Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award, recorded when he was 96. Looking back across his life, he talks about rationality as a moral duty, what made the Berkshire partnership work, the careers and mistakes that shaped him, and how to keep thinking clearly in old age. One of the richest late-life Munger interviews on video. 2020 Daily Journal Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2020 Munger at 96, weeks before COVID upended the markets. Roughly two hours of Q&A in which he tosses crypto onto his 'too hard pile,' makes the case that admitting you're wrong is a competitive advantage, and explains why being right less often costs less than being stubborn — the Munger fortune, he says, partly came from liquidating things he'd bought for bad reasons. 2019 Daily Journal Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2019 Munger at 95, the year CNBC streamed the full two-hour Q&A. A wide-ranging session: why he was comfortable owning Chinese equities when most American investors weren't, how he reads banks and what makes one safe to own, and the recurring sermon that the big money is made in the waiting, not the trading. 2019 Interview Charlie Munger on Investing (CNBC, 2019) Berkshire's vice-chairman, then 95, on what actually drives long-run investing returns — patience, temperament, and a short list of businesses worth owning. Vintage Munger: blunt about index funds, the cult of activity, and the difference between investing and gambling dressed up as finance. 2019 Interview Charlie Munger on China's Rise and Elon Musk (Yahoo Finance, 2019) Munger on two things that genuinely impressed him late in life: the speed of China's economic ascent, and Elon Musk's raw intellect. Characteristically two-handed — he admires the brilliance while warning about the overconfidence, and explains why he was willing to own Chinese equities despite the political risk. 2019 Interview Charlie Munger on Investing and the Life Choices That Build Wealth (2019) Munger's plainest advice on getting wealthy, and it has almost nothing to do with stock-picking: spend less than you earn, invest the difference, avoid ruin, and let time and compounding do the heavy lifting. A short clinic on temperament, patience, and deferred gratification from a man who lived it. 2019 Interview · text only Charlie Munger, Unplugged (WSJ / Jason Zweig, 2019) The edited transcript of a six-hour dinner interview Munger gave Wall Street Journal reporters Jason Zweig and Nicole Friedman at his Los Angeles home in 2019, at 95. Sprawling and unguarded — on his global fan base of self-improving 'nerds,' what he refuses to call investing, regret, mortality, and how to live a rational life. 2018 Daily Journal Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2018 Munger at 94, about two hours of solo Q&A. He opens with the Daily Journal's two businesses — shrinking legal publishing and growing (but slow-selling) court software — then ranges across his mental-models approach, the just-announced Berkshire–JPMorgan–Amazon health venture, and why he stays patient when there's nothing to do. 2018 Interview Charlie Munger & Li Lu on China (2018) A rare joint conversation between Munger and Li Lu — the only outside manager Munger ever trusted with his own money — ranging across China's economy, value investing across cultures, and the rare temperament that makes a great investor. Three parts; part one is embedded here, parts two and three linked in the notes below. 2017 Daily Journal Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2017 The first Daily Journal meeting CNBC filmed — Munger at 93, running roughly two hours of solo Q&A. He walks through the company's pivot from declining legal publishing into court software, uses Valeant as a case study in how bad incentives wreck a business, and lays out his theory of executive compensation: if you already own a big stake, don't try to grab all the money too. 2017 Daily Journal Fireside Chat After the 2017 Daily Journal Meeting After the formal 2017 meeting ended, Munger stayed and took questions for nearly two more hours in a loose, informal setting. With no corporate agenda left to cover, the talk drifts toward how he reads, how he decides, and how to stay out of trouble — a rare unhurried look at Munger off-script. 2017 Interview A Conversation with Charlie Munger (Michigan Ross, 2017) A second long-form conversation hosted by the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business in 2017 — an alumni event recorded in Los Angeles, where Munger lived. At 93, he talks business quality, capital allocation, the kinds of mistakes that ruin people, and how to think about a career — covering much of the same ground as the 2011 session but with another six years of perspective. 2016 Daily Journal Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2016 The last Daily Journal meeting before CNBC began filming — so it survives as audio and transcript, not video. Munger at 92 runs nearly two hours, covering the Daily Journal's bet on court software (he singles out the Los Angeles courts contract as a milestone), why IBM's predicament mirrors the company's own, and a favorite story about an oil-royalty bid that paid out for fifty years. 2016 Interview The Power of Partnership with Warren Buffett (2016) Munger on the relationship that defined both their careers — six decades alongside Warren Buffett, with almost no friction and never a serious quarrel. How two strong-minded men built one of history's great partnerships on shared values, division of labor, and a refusal to do business with people they didn't trust. 2011 Interview A Conversation with Charlie Munger (University of Michigan, 2011) An extended on-stage conversation at Munger's undergraduate alma mater, the University of Michigan, where he studied before the war. Over more than an hour he ranges across his life story, the discipline of investing, the mental habits that compound, and the advice he'd give students — relaxed and discursive in a way the shareholder Q&As rarely allow. 2008 Lecture Caltech DuBridge Distinguished Lecture (2008) Munger's DuBridge Distinguished Visitor lecture in Caltech's Beckman Auditorium. Speaking to an audience of scientists and engineers, he argues that the engineering mindset — backup systems, margins of safety, breakpoint analysis, inversion — is exactly what's missing from finance and the soft sciences, and works through how he actually solves problems. 2007 Speech USC Law School Commencement Address (2007) Munger's most-loved speech, delivered to USC's graduating law class at 83. In about half an hour he lays out the whole playbook: get 'deserved trust' by being reliable, invert problems to find the answer, master the big ideas from every discipline, avoid envy and resentment, and keep learning your entire life. Warm, funny, and unsentimental — the closest thing to a personal commencement from Munger himself. 2003 Lecture · transcript only Academic Economics: Strengths and Faults (UCSB, 2003) Munger's Herb Kay Memorial Lecture at UC Santa Barbara, and his most pointed attack on a single academic field. He grants that economics is the best of the soft sciences, then enumerates roughly nine things wrong with it — 'physics envy,' disciplinary insularity, willful ignorance of psychology, no attribution ethos, and a blindness to second-order effects — all leading to his standing critique of the efficient-market hypothesis. 1998 Speech · text only The Need for More Multidisciplinary Skills (Harvard Law 50th Reunion, 1998) Delivered to his own Harvard Law class at their 50th reunion in 1998, this is Munger's most academic talk — a serious argument that the soft sciences and the professions train people too narrowly. He builds the case that anyone with the big ideas from other disciplines (A plus B) beats the narrow specialist (A alone), and proposes how elite education could actually fix it. 1996 Speech · text only Worldly Wisdom, Revisited (Stanford Law, 1996) Munger's 1996 Stanford Law School lecture, explicitly framed as a sequel to his 1994 USC 'worldly wisdom' talk. He amplifies the latticework idea, hammers the point that Buffett's edge came from never stopping learning, and — for a room of future lawyers — dwells on incentives, social proof, and the necessity of building human systems that are hard to cheat. 1995 Speech The Psychology of Human Misjudgment Munger's single most important talk — a self-taught tour of roughly 25 psychological tendencies that make people predictably irrational, and how they stack into a 'lollapalooza.' This is the 1995 spoken original; he rewrote and expanded it in 2005 for Poor Charlie's Almanack. 1994 Berkshire Meeting Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meetings (1994–present) The single largest body of Munger on the record — three decades of Berkshire Hathaway annual meetings, with Munger seated beside Warren Buffett for every hour of Q&A. CNBC's Warren Buffett Archive is the authorized home of this footage: 33 full meetings going back to 1994, around 145 hours of searchable video synced to roughly 3,000 pages of transcripts. We link to it rather than embed, because CNBC owns the official stream. 1994 Speech · text only A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom (USC, 1994) The talk where Munger first laid out the 'latticework of mental models' — the idea that you must hang the big ideas from every major discipline on a mental framework, or you'll have a bunch of disconnected facts you can't use. Delivered to a USC Marshall business class in 1994, it's the philosophical bedrock of everything else he taught about thinking, and it ends with a candid section on how he actually picks stocks. 1986 Speech · text only How to Guarantee a Life of Misery (Harvard School, 1986) Munger's commencement address to the Harvard School in 1986, and the purest demonstration of his favorite trick: inversion. Instead of telling graduates how to be happy and successful, he gives them a step-by-step recipe for guaranteed misery — be unreliable, learn only from your own experience, give up after setbacks, never invert — so they can do the opposite. Short, savage, and unforgettable.

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