I think reading once you've learned it reading in arithmetic you can take in so much and you can take it in on your own time schedule if somebody's talking to you he may be telling you something you don't want to know you already know it's too hard or he's going too fast or too slow yeah but when you're reading you can just take it as your take it as you want so it's just it's just it's just God's gift if you if you're into education there's nothing like reading and of course people do a lot
of it have an enormous advantage of course if you learn your own language that's a very useful gift and of course learning the basic math of life is another tremendous gift and if you're really good at picking up language and doing just basic arithmetic you can take enormous territory you don't need much else specialization is the safest way up for most people and for that reason say surgeons know more and more about less and less and that's that that's what gets rewarded and if you have a nasty fistul in your colon you do not want
a surgeon who's good at PR or political science it's it's it's understandable how how the world rewards this specialization I never liked it and I loved picking up new ideas being a great passionate reader and so I decided I'd make whatever living I could make doing what I like to do which is sort of ruming over a whole field I do not recommend it to other people because the safe way up is to know a hell of a lot about something and and under our system they find you out I have never looked at the
calculus problem since I left Caltech never left it never looked once never used it and I was a whiz mhm by the way it went away [Music] totally 70 some years that was enough yeah I don't know about your calculus but mine is mine was is gone and and so but this other stuff never goes away and if you keep honing it and if you get good at it then you learn something that's more important than what they teach you in college is you learn the method of learning when I want to know something I
just learn it and take for instance I got to the Harvard Law School I couldn't figure out how Rend moon was inviting people out to one weekend and then they came back brainwashed zombies for the rest of their lives and I just nobody in the Harvard Law School could explain it to me so I said I'll figure it out for myself took me a long time but I finally figured out to my satisfaction exactly what what was being done they were just and they just stumbled into this through practice Evolution it wasn't calculated for they
just assembled a bunch of psychological tricks and pounded them on these people all at once under conditions involving stress and at a certain point the brain would just snap and they had these people transformed into slaves boom well that was a very interesting thing but of course nobody wants to talk about it because it has implications people here but but I think that the that habit of of if they won't explain it to you figure it out for your self has helped me enormously in life it's also hurt me because you give terrible offense when
you go into somebody else's profession and act like you know more than he does right and I've I'm much smoother now than I was when I was young I'm still pretty insufferable I would try and relate the changes in the graph and in the data to what happened in the business and so there are all these wonderful lessons in those in those graphs I don't know why people don't do it the graphs don't even exist that I would use to teach I can't imagine anybody being dumb enough not to have the kind of graphs I
year yearn for but so far as I know there's no business in school in the country that's yearning for these graphs partly the reason they don't want it is if you taught a history of business this way you'd be trampling on the territories of all the little professors and subdisciplines you'd be stealing some of their best cases and in bureaucracies even academic bureaucracies people protect their own turf I really think the world that's the way it should be taught Harvard Business School once taught it much that way and they stopped and I'd like to make
a case study as to why they stopped I think I can success I think I can successfully guess it's that of course in history of business trampled on the territory of Barons of other disciplines like the baron of marketing the baron of Finance the baron of whatever and uh this IBM is an interesting case I mean they're just one after another that are utterly fascinating and I don't think they're properly taught at all because nobody wants to do the full sweep my grandfather Munger was a had been born in extreme poverty his two parents were
School teachers in a little town in Nebraska and two School teachers income enabled him to buy the meat for dinner every night at the butcher shop and he went to The Butcher Shop with a nickel and he bought the parts of the animal nobody else would eat now if you start life that poor and make your own way which my grandfather did uh you're quite a fellow and he was self-educated and not self-educated in a rary way I mean he spoke Greek and Latin self-educated and and so I had very interesting people as my examples
and my grandfather Munger believed down to the souls of his feet and being rational and he worked at it and I watched it and of course it had worked well for him it had made him district attorney and president of the bar association and finally a very young federal judge and he served as the only federal judge in his capital city for almost 40 years I mean he had a splendid life and he always lived way below his income and and was able to help other people when they needed help he we say very good
example and he was kind of firm about it he he never took a drop of liquor in his whole life somebody asked you once why don't you drink and he says why would I take money out of my pocket and put something in my mouth that would make my head work less well [Music] [Music] n [Music]
