USC Law School Commencement Address (2007)

If you read only one Munger speech for how to live rather than how to invest, read this one — and here it is on video, which the older text talks are not. Speaking to USC’s law graduates in 2007, an 83-year-old Munger distills decades of accumulated rules into a half-hour: be reliable so that people extend you “deserved trust”; avoid extreme ideology; learn to invert (“all I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there”); and acquire the big models from every major discipline so you stop being the man with only a hammer.

Why watch it. Most of Munger’s wisdom is scattered across shareholder Q&As and dense written talks. This speech is the rare moment where he sits down and states the principles plainly, in order, to an audience of young people who asked him how to build a good life. The advice on avoiding envy, jealousy, resentment, and self-pity is some of the most quoted he ever gave.

The recording linked here is the cleaned-up “Complete” upload of the address. For the same material in print, Munger expanded these themes across the talks collected in Poor Charlie’s Almanack, but the spoken version carries the timing and the dry humor that the page can’t.