Daily Journal Annual Meeting 2018

The 2018 meeting runs about two hours, with Munger at 94 showing no real falloff in stamina or sharpness. As usual he begins with a sober accounting of the company he chairs — the legal-publishing side still bleeding revenue as the industry moves online, the software side growing but constrained by how long and how much trust it takes to migrate a government agency onto new systems.

Why watch it. It’s a clean example of how Munger talks about a business he runs: no spin, explicit about what’s hard, candid that the software transition could take years and might not fully work. The Q&A is where the value compounds — he gets asked to describe his latticework of mental models and obliges, and he reacts in near-real-time to the Berkshire–JPMorgan–Amazon healthcare announcement that had just landed.

Notable threads: the multidisciplinary mental-models system applied out loud; the difficulty of selling enterprise software to courts; his standing argument for sitting still when the opportunity set is poor rather than manufacturing activity.