The set pieces

Speeches & Lectures

The talks Munger prepared and polished — the ones that became chapters of Poor Charlie’s Almanack. Several of the most famous survive only as text; where that’s true, or where a circulating video is mislabeled, we mark it plainly.

8 recordings

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 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.