Interview · 2020

A Conversation with Charlie Munger — Caltech Distinguished Alumni (2020)

Dec 14, 2020 53m video

Source: Caltech / YouTube · embedded from the original; we don’t host it.

Recorded in late 2020 for his Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award, this is Munger at 96 in reflective mode — not fielding shareholder questions but taking stock of a long life. He returns to his core conviction that rationality is something close to a moral obligation, talks about the temperament behind the Buffett partnership, and is characteristically frank about the things he got wrong along the way.

Why watch it. Late-life Munger is some of the best Munger: he has nothing left to prove and says exactly what he thinks. This conversation is more personal and wider-ranging than the Daily Journal meetings, with extended stretches on how to build a career, how to stay rational, and what he believed actually compounds over a lifetime.

The video linked is Caltech’s own recording of the conversation. For a similarly reflective late-life session, see the 2017 Michigan Ross conversation; for his unfiltered engineering-minded thinking, the 2008 Caltech lecture.

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Auto-generated from YouTube captions and lightly cleaned — punctuation and proper names may be off. We don’t own this; all rights belong to Caltech / YouTube. Source ↗

hello i'm jealous rosenthal and i would like to welcome you to a conversation with caltech's distinguished alumnus charlie munger uh we are going to proceed in uh three parts uh tom rosenbaum our president will give some remarks uh then charlie and i will have a conversation of uh about 20 minutes and then there will be a q a period after that it is my particular pleasure to welcome tom rosenbaum the president of caltech to make some remarks about the student alumni awards and introduce charlie munger tom thanks so much laurent and welcome to everyone we have almost 2 000 participants which is quite a testament to our distinguished alumnus that we're honoring today caltech alumni have changed society for the better in characteristically inventive intrepid irreverent and inspiring fashion they pursue careers in academia in industry in public service whatever and wherever their chosen paths our alums demonstrate to the world the special nature of a caltech education caltech's distinguished alumni award is the highest honor the institute bestows upon a graduate initiated in 1966 this award recognizes those who consistently undertake high risk high payoff endeavors in the pursuit of knowledge and impact caltech's influence in the world depends materially and extensively on the cumulative contributions of our graduates today we celebrate the achievements of charles t munger charlie only spent a short time at caltech earning a certificate in sealing and visibility unlimited in 1944 before being deployed to alaska as a meteorologist in the u.s army air corps yet charlie and caltech forged a lasting connection 75 years and going strong charlie appreciates excellence one of the keys to caltech success and like richard feynman demonstrates the advantages of quote using different tools than everyone else we see this in the way he tackles problems whether it be a business or philanthropic proposition or the architectural design of the building in both a grounded and iconoclastic approach to investing and to life he sums up his success as follows it is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid instead of trying to be very intelligent charlie is considered one of the world's savviest investors having helped guide warren buffett's investment since 1959 and he is also well known for his life advice an admirer of benjamin franklin he has compiled his lectures public commentary and insights into a tome edited by caltech trustee peter kaufman poor charlie's almanac the wit and wisdom of charles t monker today we are privileged to honor charlie and to sample his wisdom in conversation with jean-laurent rosenthal and without further ado here again is the distinguished economic historian and hss division chair jean-laurent rosenthal thank you tom it is a true honor to have a conversation with charlie munger and also a rare one i thought i might anchor my questions around time past and present and future but in fact a good conversation runs through and around time it's also true of investing since most of the evidence comes from the past one has to make a decision today but only earn the reward or punishment in the future as an investor charlie you have been phenomenally successful to start by looking back at the time when you left the army which brought you to caltech and to start what was caltech like in 1944 well the main campus looked very much the way it does now and the athenian was exactly the way it is now how connected with the meteorology program to the rest of what was going on campus yes i was in the part of the campus where thomas aunt morgan was and of course he was the world's greatest geneticist and he used fruit flies and they stank and so my whole part of the campus had the odor of dying fruit flies the whole time i was there by the way i liked the camp and i got used to the fruit fly odor well presumably you didn't spend all your time with fruit flies or were they part of the way they predicted the weather in 1944 i was so ignorant in those days i could have walked over and introduced myself and he would have been quite courteous with me and he was a very great man and i was too dumb to do it i did it didn't occur to me so at the end of the war you decided not to return to mathematics in michigan or to stay uh and go to college somewhere else instead you went to law school so what can you guess what your my father had gone to the harvard law school and my grandfather was a distinguished judge in nebraska so that was a natural course of activity for me so what kind of sort of in thinking about these career changes which a lot of people go through over the course of their lifetime what could our fellow alumni and in particular our soon to be new alumni can borrow from your experiences in those early days of your life when you were choosing a career uh that still has resonance today well it's very important when you choose a career if you go into a career that's very tough you're not going to do very well and if you go in one where you have special advantages you're going to and you like the work you're going to do pretty well and it's i went into law because i didn't want to be a surgeon i didn't want to be a doctor i didn't want to be a college professor i finally got through there was only one i just went down the family path and uh it wasn't the wisest decision i ever ran and you didn't once you started to get into investment your legal training your mathematical background your experiences so what came to be to be resident for you well what happened was there were things i didn't like about law practice and but i had an army of children to support and no family money or anything to start with so i had to make my way in life for this army of children and i had to it was going to be a little difficult and there are things about law practice i saw were quite limiting and what happened was my pitifully small earnings as a young man i kept underspending them and i kept investing fairly boldly and fairly smartly and at the end of my first 13 years of law practice i had more liquid investments that i made in all those years of law practice pre-tax i'd done that in my spare time with these little tiny sums so it was natural for me partly prompted by warren buffett's success to think i should just start working for myself instead of for other people so another connection in my spare time i thought well what will happen if i do it full time so one of the things that connects my career connects caltech to uh to investing is of course the process of discovery which creates new technologies and for an economic historian one thing that we're very aware of is that technological change has driven a lot of the growth of the american economy over the last several centuries but from your perspective as an investor what have been the most dramatic transformation you've seen over those 75 years that tom rosenbaum reminded us that you've been connected to us but also been living in los there have been huge booms in huge busts and that has been very interesting and of course the government has tried to do things that will dampen down the fluctuations and make recoveries from the bus happen faster and of course that's caused a fair amount of inflation and a life that's lived as long as been as long as mine and what's happened in the investment field is of course that so many people have gone into it and people have made so much money and it's it's driven an almost frenzy of activity in the investment field when i was young there was practically nobody and they weren't very smart and now almost everybody's smart even a caltech graduate a good proportion of them are sucked into finance by the money and so that's been a hugely important development i don't welcome it myself at all i don't think we want the whole world trying to get rich by outing smarty outsmarting the rest of the world in marketable securities but that's what's happened and uh and there's been frenzies of speculation and so on so it's been very interesting but it's not been all good but at some at some level once you make an investment you're putting your money into the hands of an entrepreneur who is going to actually produce something i at least it seems that the value investment that you practice has that characteristic relative to a pure arbitrage approach to trying to make money in finance well i did not make my fortune by and large on the cutting edge of technology my first investment with my pivotal savings of adventure some sort i invested in a community right in pasadena and it was called william miller instruments and i damn near lost all my money it was hell on earth we just barely squeaked out with a substantial outcome but and what did this end is that the oscillograph that we'd invented and we were so proud of and we thought it was gonna knock the world flat somebody invented magnetic tape without telling me and by the time we got that telegraph ready to go to market we sold three total in the whole world whole country well it's this technology is a killer as well as an opportunity and my first experience that damn near killed me and so but that's sort of the other part right over the 75 years that you've been you've been involved in investing for a long time was keep me out of venture capital on the edge of technology but even i tried to avoid it but even so in the companies that you deal with some of them are market leaders at one point in time and as you just suggested some technological change or change in preferences will lead those companies to be without with less of a market than they used to have for their products and so how does one think about this over the long term because the companies of america behave more like biology than they do anything else in biology all the individuals die and so do all the species it's just a question of time and that's pretty well what happens in the economy too all the things that were really great when i were young have receded enormously and new things have come up and some of them started to die and that is what the long-term investment climate is and it does make it very interesting look at what's died all the department stores all the newspapers u.s steel john d rockefeller's standard oils a pale shadow of his former self you know it's just like biology so they have their little power they have their little time and then they get clobbered and so how does one as sort of a witness or sort of in a certain way one lives longer than the life of some of these companies sort of deal with change right so you could think about uh an investment portfolio that you created at a point in time will only have validity for a certain amount of time and so how does one learn to deal with change it's a question that i always ask my students and i would just how does one how does somebody who has to take the resources of very large numbers of people deal with change any thoughts on that matter well some people try to get on the cutting edge of change so they're destroying other people instead of being destroyed themselves and those are the googles and the apples and so forth other people like me do some of that joining things like apple and in some ways we just try and avoid big change that we think is likely to hurt us and so berkshire for instance owns the burlington northern railroad you can hardly think of a more old-fashioned business than a railroad business but who in hell's ever going to create another trunk railroad so it's a very good asset for us so and we've made that success not by conquering change but by avoiding it now burlington northern itself has been quite clever at adapting technology to their railroad imagine the good luck of being able to take an existing railroad and double deck all the trains and raise the heights of the tunnels a little and so forth and all of a sudden you've got twice the capacity at very little incremental cost which is what that railroad has done so that is affordability everybody uses new technology but it really helps to have a position that almost can't be taken away by technology how else are you going to carry goods from the port of los angeles to chicago except on our railroad so it's it so it's innovation within uh an economy that continues to follow certain sets of rules rather than looking for the new economy is that another way one could think about it there are different ways all successful investment involves trying to get into something where it's worth more than you're paying that's what successful investment is there are a lot of different ways to find something that's worth more than you're paying you can look for it right in the cutting edge of technology the way sequoia does the most remarkable investment firm in america is probably sequoia that venture capital firm which absolutely fanatically stays right on the cutting edge of modern technology they've made more money than anybody and they have the best recorded investment record of anybody it's perfectly amazing what sequoia has done so you've also talked uh repeatedly about people's mental biases as you said you don't want to be the smartest person but you want to avoid doing stupid things so how do how does one guard against mental biases in one's decision-making uh i spent a lifetime trying to avoid my own mental biases a i rub myself i rub my own nose and my own mistakes b i try and keep it simple and fundamental as much as i can and i like the engineering concept of a margin of safety i'm i'm a very blocking and tackling kind of a thinker i just try and avoid being stupid so i have a way of handling a lot of problems i put them on what i call my too hard pile and i just leave them there i'm not trying to succeed in my too hard pile and do they sometimes come back and require for you to oh i sometimes get things that are too hard and when that happens i fail so one has to accept limitations that is that one of the really important pieces of avoiding these biases what i would say is the single most important thing if you want to avoid all the stupid errors is knowing where you're competent and where you aren't knowing the edge of your own competency and that's very hard to do because the human mind naturally tries to make you think you're way smarter than you are so as a question that's that's almost personal given my research uh i can't resist asking about innovation in finance over the last half century it's a sector that's gone through several upheavals radical change um to go back to uh the time when you were born there were 30 000 banks in the u.s none of them were very large a few new york banks were big and now the top 20 banks account for almost everything but the range of innovation and finance has been huge and there's a debate in academic fine academic finance for sure about how much of this innovation is helpful to the markets versus how much actually creates instability uh i have a very clear opinion on that i think the early innovation that the bank of america did under giannini where he helped all these immigrants with these loans and he and of all kind and he kind of knew which ones were good for it and which ones weren't i think that was all the good that brought breaking banking to a and banking help to a lot of people that deserved it helped the economy it helped everybody but once banking got so they want to be in soft white hands and make zillions as uh speculators i don't think that i don't think those developments have been a plus in other words i like banking when they're trying to avoid losses prudently so uh i have one more question which i think a lot of people have in mind um covet has been extremely disruptive to american society and to america the american economy um how do you think the economy is going to emerge over the next 12 months from this period of great difficulty and how much of the change that we've seen start to happen is going to be persistent well my opinion on that is no better than anybody else's and but if you i think it's quite likely that a year from now the worst of that will be very thoroughly behind us it's amazing i watched the polio get totally killed by the vaccinations and i think they'll spread these vaccines over the world so fast it'll make your head swim so i think this horrible covered thing is very likely to shrink to insignificance in the course of the next year and what about the transformation to retail she said department stores are gone but there seems to be at work a quite massive transformation of retail are we going to go back to old town pasadena for example or is the shift to online retail well i don't think retailing is going to go away after all it's been around for thousands of years but certainly it's been a very difficult place to make money because of what the internet has done i recently had a friend send me a blue blazer made in china bought on the chinese internet and it cost 42 delivered and it was it may not have been a perfect blazer but it was an amazing blazer for 42 dollars the person who created that blazer gave to some little factory in order for a hundred thousand at once and those have been pre-sold using the internet and so it's the most extreme kind of kill all the competitors type of rate of selling i've ever seen of course retailing hasn't coped with something like that how good is it for brooks brothers when somebody can deliver a thing to the internet from china for 42 dollars it didn't look like that bad a blazer to me either retailing has gotten very tough and i think this online stuff is here to stay and we'll get more and more efficient so that so that could be actually good for the consumer but more difficult for certain sets of investors in particular sort of commercial real estate of course these changes are always bad for some investors and good for others but when they're bad they're very bad in the full brunt of the changes that are coming in terms of this online shopping well but there's also i'm a director of costco and in the last reporting period their online sales were up 86 over the same quarter last year now that is a significant development and is it good for other retailers no it's good for costco but it isn't good for them but how much of their sort of brick and mortar stores have how much of this is people who would have shopped at costco in the department in the store martyr stores are already doing well but their brick and mortar stores have been enormously destructive because of their low prices and efficiency to other retailers and now they're doing all this internet thing the last thing i would want to do in retail is compete with costco so we've talked a bit about retail and the reorganization of the american labor force is also going to you think that is going to be a more transitory phenom that once we get vaccinated the jobs are going to return or are we likely to see a slow return of employment in the same way that we did after 2001 2002 remember i did not make my fortune such as it is by predicting macroeconomic changes better than other people what buffett and i did was we bought things that were promising and then we just sometimes we had a tailwind from the economy and sometimes we had a headwind and either way we just kept swimming that's our system and after all that's the system calte has too caltech just gets up in the morning and keeps swimming and pretty soon they're imminent caltech's not trying to play the game of getting big advantage out of the booms and bus we're just like caltech well we do hope that we are committed to our path of discovery and not the victims of the current fashion for uh and that we have our own decisions about what we think is really important research so in that sense you're absolutely right oh you're trying to get the right answers but you're not really trying to predict what the economy is going to be like 18 months from now so perhaps we now have a large number of really interesting and imaginative questions from the audience so perhaps i could actually uh have you answer some of these and i will just read them to you i mean uh let me just uh close that second so the one from uh dr john victor who was a bachelor of science in chemical engineering 1971 and he's he has two questions the first one is he has a theory that really smart people foresee the better the future better than others and so we can ask what did you think about that and then his second question is did you ever make a bad business decision well the answer is the second one is of course i've made bad business decisions you can't live a successful life without taking some doing some difficult things that go wrong that's just the nature of the game and you wouldn't be sufficiently courageous if you tried to avoid every single reverse and what was the first question do smart people predict the future better than others well that is a very interesting question you could argue that both ways a lot of smart people think they're way smarter than they are and therefore they do worse than dumb people and if you ask me and it's very common to be utterly brilliant and think your way the hell smarter than you are i think warren and i have been pretty good at avoiding that one we're pretty modest about how i know how uh what my mental capacity is and it's pretty low compared to the best that could possibly be when i was at caltech i took this course in thermodynamics from homer joe stewart and one thing i learned from a by the way a lovely human being and gifted beyond compare and one thing i learned was that no matter how hard i would try i could never be as good at thermodynamics as or joe stewart and i think that is a very useful lesson i knew what i could do and i couldn't and i never even considered trying to compete with the homer joe stewarts of the world in thermodynamics so the next question actually goes back to that time at caltech from james you know uh bachelors of 1984 how did the study of meteorology influence your thinking well not much but you learn something from anything you do it was a very empirical science in those days we just made weather maps which laid out the weather on the map and then we stacked up those maps and by looking as one followed another you could see whether weather systems were moving and that's the way we were predicting the weather and of course that's a lot better than nothing and we did have some little tricks like predicting icing and so forth but basically we just were doing two things we were trying to prevent a pilot from going somewhere and not being able to land and therefore having to crash and die or we were trying to prevent a pilot from going into icing that was so tough that he couldn't handle it and if i did that in my army air corps i knew i wouldn't kill a pilot that's not very complicated by caltech's standards but well there's a lot of uncertainty right in this area the location you're trying to predict the weather for yeah but sometimes you can it's pretty easy and when it's and when it's likely to be bad you can tell them not to go i was in the ferry command so i didn't have any i didn't have any bombing runs or anything like that and so it really was dangerous so we just told around to go that it was such an empirical science i never wanted to be in it they threw the biology the meteorology department out of caltech early after world war ii and i think it was a correct decision it was too empirical a activity for caltech so we're back in climate science so i think things have changed since climate science is different from meteorology hey that's a very interesting subject about which there's a lot of disagreement well we're actually trying to uh make some progress in having better predictive model over the long run evolution of the climate of the globe everybody is it's but it's proven very difficult it's better than nothing don't misunderstand me but it's it's proven very difficult my attitude on that is that the worst that can happen in terms of global climate can be coped with by the advanced civilizations if you had to erect sea walls to protect the entire present united states that wouldn't take that much of gdp per capita for that many years and it could be done quite safely if we had to so other i don't see that as the worst tragedy the man could get so our next question comes from miss pavardi menon who was a bachelor's degree in 2008 what is one critique of caltech of its alumni that we ought to pay attention or how should caltech or its alumni evolve in the future i think caltech is doing very well just the way it is and i think one of its great advantages is that it doesn't change too much i think it was very smart to keep the undergraduate department pretty small and make the graduate department so outstanding in other words i think the whole idea was i think quite sound and it hasn't changed all that much remember i was there when milk milken was there and i knew him i'm not well and it hasn't changed that much and i think that's been a strength so one of the reasons if i to extend i understand that history is that we really wanted to focus on the ability of people with different backgrounds and different disciplines to talk to each other because we thought that new ways of thinking about the world about science or about engineering would emerge from that and that was one of the things that we tried to privilege but there are also uh have in situations where scale matters so in thinking about uh those um investment opportunities or other kinds of activities in trying to be smart about things how much of this is accepting information from a variety of different sources to cross-check the decision you want to make well i'm a big fan of knowing the big ideas and pretty much all the disciplines the ones that are pretty easy to assimilate and then using those routinely in your judgments that's just my system and i don't trust the executive i don't believe in just constantly consulting with experts and doing things that way i might do that if i were building a chemical plant or something but in the investment decisions uh i think it's very helpful to be able to yourself be pretty comfortable with the big ideas and all the disciplines and i think that it also life's more fun if you do that what i find is though that academia is not very good at the interdisciplinary stuff academia rewards a researcher who knows more and more about less and less and there are real difficulties with that approach well we what we try to i mean that is an inevitable part of the way we go about doing i know it's work outside your own little field it's dangerous so my next set of questions are more on the finance side so paul goodson who was a vassar's degree in science in 1975 asked do you expect the next 10 years to have lower returns in the equity markets than the last 10. it doesn't give us an idea why the answer is yes and could you give us a hint as to why that might happen yes because so many people are in it and the frenzy is so great and the systems of management the reward systems are so foolish that i don't think it's going to work at all i don't think i think the returns will go down yes in real terms the returns will be lower so uh schuler coolant bachelor's degree uh is going to ask about political economy so two different questions what do you think of the dominations of quantitative easing and large fiscal deficit and where are they going to lead us well there i've got a very simple answer and that is it's one of the most interesting questions anybody could ask and we're in very uncharted waters we have nobody has gotten by with the kind of money printing we're doing now for a very extended period without some trouble and i think we're we're very near the edge of playing with fire um so uh it is remarkable how much we've expanded the money supply how low interest rates are and how little initial response there's been on remarkable not too strong a word astounding would be more like it i will i will let you choose the adjective charlie it's unbelievably extreme some european government borrowed money recently for some tiny little fraction of one percent for a hundred years now that is weird well they could loan money to a european government for a hundred years less than one percent so can i can i ask you a question that sort of falls out of this but from a different perspective which is that for a lot of time a lot of the policy making in the world was because capital is scarce for a long time the world economies were poor and since world war ii we've been creating wealth at a very high rate have the rules change to some extent because in some sense the developed economies are just very wealthy well of course it's changed to some extent because the developing county economies are very wealthy it's changed enormously in my lifetime advanced civilization has gotten ahead faster than any century that exists before and nothing else is even close it's utterly without president in real terms it just it's unbelievable i watched the whole damn thing practically because i've lived so long and it's been absolutely astounding i can remember having a five course filet mignon dinner in omaha for 60 cents when i was a little boy the world has really changed so our next question which is the converse wealth can be high because we've accumulated a lot of wealth or because the value of that wealth is high so doctor uh so david whitner who is an associate degree in asked is it nasdaq in a bubble and will it blow up and do we know when is the nasdaq in a bubble well i nobody knows when bubbles are going to blow up but just because it's nasdaq doesn't mean it'll have another run like this one very quickly again this has been unbelievable again there's never been anything quite like it if you stop to think about it think what apple is worth compared to john d rockefeller's old oil empire it's been the most dramatic thing that's almost ever happened in the entire world history of finance the other thing that's really remarkable the last 30 years of china they have had real economic growth at a rate for 30 years that no big country has ever had before in the history of the world and who did that a bunch of communist chinese now that is really remarkable so if you're studying finance you've got a lot of strange things to account for so bob regenthal who has a phd in 1979 from aeronautical engineering asked so how would you rate investing in china with the current political tensions or you invested in china through the ownership of american companies that do business in china well i'm of course i'm invested partly in american companies that do business in china including coca-cola but i'm also invested very significantly in china through the uh the uh management of lilu whom the monker family backed heavily when he formed a little private equity firm to invest in china and he has had a very successful record and that's made me follow very closely the leading companies in china and of course i've had very successful experience there and i think it's likely to continue china the chinese story is the damnedest thing that it's a damn decision that ever happened to a big country in terms of economics no other big country ever got to head this fast for that long and does that say that sort of the politics don't matter so much or yeah that's a very interesting observation what that shows is exactly right who would have guessed that a bunch of communist chinese run by one party would have the best economic record the world has ever seen of course it's extreme and i think it proves that you know it doesn't we americans would like to think that our free expression and allowing all kinds of opinion and all kinds of criticism of the government is totally essential part of the economy and what the chinese have proved is you can have a screamingly successful economy with a fairly controlling government all the government has to do is a is created a lot of smithy and smithy and capitalism if you do that having a sort of a controlling one-party government doesn't matter that's not a fashionable thing to say but i think it's true so for those of us who can't only rely on that form of growth uh zach rifkin who's a bachelor of science uh 2014 um in math ask how do you encourage young mentees to take big bets on big edges and how should this be taught at caltech well if you asked how could caltech teach people how to win chess tournaments or poker tournaments you would find that some people at caltech are very good at that and others aren't and if you want to win at those things you better bet on the people that are really very good at it and not everybody is i don't think caltech can make great investors out of most people i think great investors to some extent are like great chess players they're almost born to be investors and that's because of the tolerance for risk is it the patience what are the traits obviously you have to know a lot but partly it's temperament partly it's deferred gratification you got to be willing to wait and it's a weird good investing requires a weird combination of patience and aggression and not many people have it also has to it requires a big amount of self-awareness and how much you know and how much you don't know you have to know the edge of your own competency and a lot of brilliant people are no good at knowing the edge of their own competency they think they're way smarter than they are and of course that's dangerous and causes trouble so i think caltech would have a hard time teaching everybody to be a great investor could it help people discover that they have that temperament or is this something that you mostly should try on your own i think you find out whether you got the qualities to win at poker by playing poker that's a very empirical approach charlie yes but i think it's right so uh obviously it helps to know the basic math of fair math and pascal but everybody with any sense knows that stuff but having the temperament where fairmount and pascal is the most part of you is your ear and nose that's a different kind of a person and i think it's hard to teach that i have found warren and i have talked about this in the early days when we talked about our way of doing things which is working so well we found some people got it and they instantly converted our way and did very well and some people no matter how carefully we explained it and no matter how successful they were they could never learn what they could never adapt it either got it faster they didn't get it at all so that's my experience so really sort of related to this uh charles miller uh asks have you talked about you've talked about the search for psycho psychological research and education grounding how humans truly operate have you found it yet well no i haven't found anything yet except how to get by fairly well and that's harder than it's harder than a lot of people think just think of how hard it is to get far ahead in life suppose you guys you want to get ahead of caltech you like the academic life if you want to caltec is very good at getting people tenure if you're very brilliant and work 80 or 90 hours a week for 9 or 10 years you get tenure that is not what i call an easy life and competing with the homer joe stewarts well some of us love it that's all i can say charlie some of us love that life yes of course i know and that's fine i chose to avoid it because i knew i wouldn't win big added so laura j list a perfectly successful professor of my ordinary standards but i would not have been a star so finding your own path is seems very something you really recommend to everyone what helps everyone is to get in something that's going up and it just carries you along without much talent or work and so if you pick a really strong place like say costco and you go to work at it and you really are reliable and nice you're going to do fine in life you've got a big tailwind and but in elite education nobody wants to go to work for costco from harvard or mit or stanford and of course it's the one place where it would where it would be easiest to get ahead uh so i have a few more questions that are more on the on the finance side but there is one i cannot resist asking you ask i'm 16 i want to take up investing as a full-time career what is mr munger's best advice for me well if you pursue any career with enough fanaticism that's that's very likely to work better than not having the fanaticism and so if you look at warren buffett he had this fanatic interest in investments from an early age and he kept making small investments even with his paper out savings and so forth and he finally learned how to be pretty good at it and so if you want to succeed in investments start early and try hard and keep doing it's very that's all success comes that way but by and large so laura jalif uh bachelor of science uh 2020 was so very recent grad asks what are you proud of proudest of well i'm proudest of avoiding some things i don't like i don't like irrationality and i've worked to try and avoid it in my life and i haven't succeeded of course nobody does i haven't but i've i've done better than i thought i would starting out at a fairly low state and it's been a pleasant way of going so i and caltech biology stands for that caltech really tries to figure things out that's that's the value and having that just right into your gene plasm it really helps i work a lot these days with a caltech postdoc who's now a professor of physics at ucsb and he's a pleasure to work from he never says anything stupid he's just so talented lars bilstein is his name and he heads that visiting program for the physicists of the world at ucsb and but lars he's trying to figure it out right and his graduate students are trying to figure out everything a little faster and better than other graduate students that's caltech he was at caltech for i mean two or three years as a postdoc and lars bilson is a wonderful man caltech is full of people like that i don't think caltech has a lot of improvement that they can do in their physics department i think it's pretty good the way it is well we're we are very glad that of that and very proud you should be uh it's harder to be that smart in the liberal arts partly many liberal arts professors are so leftist it's it's hard to be pretty smart if you're crazy leftist you're going to have the world along wrong a lot wrong so uh john denis uh phd1961 asked what did you get out of caltech that was the most memorable to you uh and you said a little bit about this just now which is why i want to come back and this issue of figuring things out and also rationality um but what was the most memorable thing for you when you were at caltech well the caltech i would it comes back to homer joe stewart homer still story joy was just exactly the kind of a person you want you're representing caltech to the students and i came back to my 50th anniversary from my time at caltech and there was homer jose stewart he must have been 88 or something he was just sharp as attack and he started talking to me a little about thermodynamics and he says you know he says what's interesting about thermodynamics is how little of it was derived mathematically from newtonian physics and that is such a good thing to say and if you understand both subjects it's so correct it's weird you would think that the effect you could just derive all thermodynamics of from what newton but you can't in other words as long as you have people like homer joe stewart you don't have to worry about caltech so uh one of my students when she knew i was going to be talking to you asked me to ask you about the role of philanthropy but then a question came from grace leichmann bachelor of science 2016 about which of your acts of philanthropy are you proudest of well i'm not that proud of my philanthropy i regard it as a absolute minimal duty somebody to be reasonably successful uh successful you ought to be reasonably generous so i don't think you get big merit points for uh philanthropy because you do that you get a lot of discredit if you didn't and i don't think i've been any record philanthropist i've given way more money to my family than i've given to philanthropy i am sort of a bad example now i think my philanthropy has been pretty intelligent i think i've done a lot of good with the money i've given away but i don't think i deserve any credit for giving away money that caused me pain i don't want to be under false pretenses on them so uh the last question comes from somebody who's not affiliated with caltech but it's it's a great question to ask you after your 75-year association with caltech christenberg asked what are you most curious of about in the next 30 to 40 years having been an investor for so long i'm of course interested in these weird present conditions and these weird economic conditions where they're printing money like crazy and so forth and of course that's very interesting and i'm interested in the fact that the world has come so far in having these undeveloped countries get ahead so fast like china then i compare india which has a way worse economic record even though they got more of our political ins you know they got more free speech in india and way worse economic achievement i think the economic development of the modern world is very interesting it's a very interesting subject and i see why so many people in economics like it because it is just so perplexing and so interesting and of course the achievements have been so great and so i think a lot of enemies technology is the same way who would guess that the whole world could have colloquia on zoom we weren't doing it a year and a half ago i mean it's it's just amazing what's happened who would have guessed that well a lot that's happened should surprise everybody and it's very interesting charlie thank you very much for this conversation uh i particularly appreciate your enthusiasm and ongoing curiosity which is something that we very much value at caltech is that there's always something new to think about a question to ask again um and uh please accept my congratulations on the alumni distinguished alumni award and my very great thanks for participating in this event well i'm very i like caltech when i was there you know it wasn't on the career path i was going to choose for myself but i loved the detour that i got by accident of having to participate in a war it was good for me to be in the caltech for my nine months and it's been good for me to live in the same community all these decades since and no i like the whole thing fantastic and i want to thank the 2400 people who have joined us for this conversation um stay safe and goodbye you

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