The Library · first edition
The Munger Library
Charlie Munger (1924–2023) left no textbook — he left talks, letters and marginalia, delivered with the patience of a teacher and the bluntness of a Nebraskan. This shelf gathers his own words where they survive, and the best commentary around them. Start with the Almanack.
I The books
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Poor Charlie's Almanack
The book. Eleven talks spanning thirty years, modelled on Ben Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack — the source this application is built from.
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Damn Right!
The only full biography written with Munger's cooperation — Omaha, the law years, the Wheeler-Munger partnership, and how the Berkshire partnership actually formed.
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Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger
The most serious attempt to systematise Munger's latticework — psychology, physics and mathematics as instruments of judgment.
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The Tao of Charlie Munger
A compact commonplace book of Munger quotations with commentary — a good travelling companion to the Almanack.
II The talks
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The Psychology of Human Misjudgment
The famous catalogue of the standard causes of human misjudgment. The psychology shelf of this app's model library is drawn directly from it.
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A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom
Where the latticework idea is laid out in full: “you've got to have models in your head… and array your experience on this latticework of models.”
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USC Gould School of Law commencement address
The distilled life advice: acquire wisdom as a moral duty, avoid envy and resentment, and go to bed a little wiser than you woke.
III The pilot's checklist
Munger's favourite picture of how to use mental models came from aviation. Addressing the fiftieth reunion of his Harvard Law class in 1998, he held up FAA pilot training as a strict six-element system that every serious profession ought to copy: (1) formal education wide enough to cover practically everything useful in piloting; (2) knowledge raised to practice-based fluency, even in handling two or three intertwined hazards at once; (3) training to think sometimes forward and sometimes in reverse, so the pilot learns what to avoid as well as what to attain; (4) training time weighted toward the most important and the rare-but-dangerous, not the merely frequent; (5) mandatory checklist routines; and (6) forced maintenance of rarely used knowledge — back to the simulator, so skills don't quietly atrophy.
“How can smart people so often be wrong? They don't do what I'm telling you to do: use a checklist to be sure you get all the main models and use them together in a multimodular way.” — Stanford Law School, 1996
“Checklist routines avoid a lot of errors. You should have all this elementary wisdom and then you should go through and have a checklist in order to use it.” — USC Law commencement, 2007
An honest note on provenance: Munger prescribed the routine, never a canonical list — his checklist was the latticework itself, run right down, model by model. The pilot's checklist at the foot of every evaluation here is our synthesis of the checks he returned to most: inversion, circle of competence, incentives, disconfirming evidence, margin of safety, haste, and combining forces. And true to the aviation original, it is never screened for relevance — every question is answered, for every situation, every time.
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Stop Crashing Planes: Charlie Munger's Six-Element System
Shane Parrish's reading of the 1998 speech — the six elements as an answer to “transmission loss”, the gap between knowing and doing.
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The Checklist Manifesto
The aviation checklist generalised to surgery and beyond — including a chapter on investors (Mohnish Pabrai, Guy Spier) who built theirs straight from Munger's pilot analogy.
IV Letters & meetings
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Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters
Buffett's pen, but half a century of the partnership's thinking — with Munger's fingerprints on every capital-allocation decision.
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Wesco Financial annual letters
Munger writing alone: drier, sharper, and franker than almost any other chairman's letters ever filed.
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Daily Journal annual meetings
Hours of unscripted Munger in his nineties, taking any question in the room.
V Watch & listen
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The Warren Buffett Archive
Decades of Munger beside Buffett on the Omaha stage — including every “I have nothing to add.”
VI Around the web
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Farnam Street — Mental Models
The best-known modern continuation of the latticework project.
A shelf curated by hand, and still being filled — if something of Munger's belongs here, tell the librarian.