A Learning a Day

Charlie Munger had a guiding philosophy on checklists: “No wise pilot, no matter how great his talent and experience, fails to use his checklist.”

His investing checklist reflects that same discipline:

• Risk – begin every evaluation by measuring risk, especially reputational
• Independence – only in fairy tales are emperors told they are naked. You need independence of thought to ensure you aren’t just following the crowd blindly.
• Preparation – the only way to win is to work, work, work, and hope for a few insights.
• Intellectual humility – acknowledging what you don’t know is the dawning of wisdom
• Analytical rigor – the scientific method and effective checklists minimize errors
• Allocation – proper allocation of capital is the investor’s number one job
• Patience – resist the human bias to act
• Decisiveness – when the right circumstances present themselves, act with conviction
• Change – accept unremovable complexity
• Focus – keep things simple and remember what you set out to do

Easy to say. Really hard to do.

But underneath it all, Munger’s approach distills to four things: extreme preparation (work, work, work, work), consistent discipline, patience, and decisiveness.

Applies just as much to investing as it does to life.

“We are all permeable to the influence of the group. What makes us more permeable is our insecurities. The less we are certain about our self-worth as individuals, the more we are unconsciously drawn toward fitting in and blending ourselves into the group spirit. Gaining the superficial approval of group members by displaying our conformity, we cover up our insecurities to ourselves and to others.

But this approval is fleeting; our insecurities gnaw at us, and we must continually get people’s attention to feel validated. Your goal must be to lower your permeability by raising your self-esteem.

If you feel strong and confident about what makes you unique – your tastes, your values, your own experience – you can more easily resist the group effect. Furthermore, by relying upon your work and accomplishments to anchor your self-opinion, you won’t be so tied to constantly seeking approval and attention.” | Robert Greene in “The Laws of Human Nature”

A simple, well stated truth. Applies well beyond truth to authority figures and even family.

Our insecurities never fail to show up – in what we do, in who we choose to do it with, and in the way we talk about ourselves and what we do.

Someone told us recently they were considering an electric car. Knowing we had an electric car for almost 8 years now, they asked us for our recommendation. It got me thinking about how to lay out the case.

Three things stand out.

The first is software. Electric vehicles are built technology-first, and the small stuff adds up fast. The car knows who’s driving. Mirrors, seat position, and climate are all automatic. The navigation is genuinely good. But the bigger point is that the car keeps getting better. Tesla, for example, pushes dozens of software updates. Features that didn’t exist at purchase continue to appear. When you build around software, improvement becomes continuous rather than generational.

The second is maintenance – or the near absence of it. A gas engine has nearly thousand moving parts – pistons, valves, transmission, exhaust, cooling system, fuel system. Each one is a potential failure point. An electric drivetrain has a fraction of that complexity with twenty or so parts. No oil changes, no timing belt, no catalytic converter. We’ve had ours a few years now. Maintenance has been close to nothing. That’s not anecdote – it’s physics.

The third is all about the math and this is where it gets interesting. If you take a comparable 28 MPG gas car as the benchmark (3.5 miles per kWh for the EV), here’s how the numbers look across a few places:

• Northern California (off-peak EV rate): ~7¢/mile electric vs ~17¢/mile gas. With solar covering a meaningful portion of charging, that drops closer to 4–5¢/mile.
• Texas: ~5¢/mile electric vs ~10¢/mile gas.
• Florida: ~5¢/mile electric vs ~13¢/mile gas.
• London: ~10¢/mile electric vs ~26¢/mile gas.
• Paris: ~7¢/mile electric vs ~24¢/mile gas.
• Mumbai: ~3¢/mile electric vs ~17¢/mile gas.

These figures are approximate and shift with energy markets (notwithstanding the war-driven oil shocks right now) and local taxes. The direction, though, is consistent. The gap is narrowest in Texas and widest in Europe – but across every location above, electric comes out 2–3x cheaper per mile.

In sum, you now have technology that enables a car to be personalized and to keep improving through software. It means virtually no maintenance. And, most importantly, it has a per-mile cost that’s 2–3x lower at minimum than gas, pretty much anywhere in the world.

There’s nothing like simple math to help make better decisions.

Robert Greene, in The Laws of Human Nature, tells a story about Anton Chekhov that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

Chekhov had a miserable childhood. His father was physically and verbally abusive. Anton and his siblings grew up in a household defined by fear and resentment. When the family fell into financial ruin, everyone except Anton left for Moscow. He stayed behind to finish his diploma, taking up tutoring on the side to earn money.

Something shifted during that time alone. Free from his father’s voice, he slowly realized he wasn’t useless. He had worth. Confidence, tentative at first, began to build.

As he examined his own thinking, he came to a realization – he had the freedom to choose his attitude. He thought about his father differently. Not just as the man who had hurt him, but as someone shaped by generations before him, by his own suffering, his own inheritance of pain. That shift in perspective allowed Chekhov to see his father as a victim rather than a tyrant. And from there, remarkably, came forgiveness. And eventually, unconditional love.

That freedom – to choose how to respond to what life dealt him – is what drove Chekhov to Moscow. His family all lived together in a single room in a red-light district. The conditions were as adverse as they come. And yet every time despair crept in, Chekhov reached for perspective. He understood something that’s easy to know intellectually but hard to actually live – that you can’t always choose your circumstances, but you can choose your response to them.

Over time, he turned his family’s fortunes around, not just financially but emotionally. He became the person holding everyone else up.

And it didn’t stop there. Even as he grew in stature as a writer and playwright. Even as tuberculosis slowly took hold of him. People who met Chekhov in his final years remarked on the calm he carried. He had, in some way, found freedom even from death itself.

Agency (or the ability to be proactive) is one of the most powerful freedoms available to us.

Maybe the most powerful one of all.

“People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.” | John Kenneth Galbraith (quoted in Poor Charlie’s Almanack)

It got me thinking about how often I’ve done this.

I chuckled at this other related accompaniment – “People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.”

Loss aversion is real.

A few nights ago, I chose to sleep less to get something done. It was fascinating to see the difference in some of the choices I made as I ran out of steam toward the end of the day. I made dinner choices I wouldn’t normally make (lot more carbs). I then crashed immediately after eating.

One of the lessons from a few weeks with a continuous glucose monitor showed a metabolic response on low-sleep nights that looked like the Nasdaq – it was all over the place. Poor sleep wrecks your metabolism. The glucose response to the same food looks meaningfully worse when you’re sleep-deprived.

But that’s only half of it. The other half is that poor sleep also degrades your decision-making. So you’re not just less equipped to handle the metabolic hit – you’re also more likely to make the choices that cause it in the first place. Worse decisions, worse outcomes from those decisions. It’s a double whammy.

Now, not every night will be a perfect night of sleep. But it is worth keeping in mind for the next time. Awareness is the first step.

When researchers from Heinz followed consumers home, they found something odd – people were storing their tall, thin ketchup bottles upside down in the refrigerator door. This was a precarious hack to get the last of the ketchup out.

That duct tape moment – the workaround customers invent when a product almost works – turned into one of the great packaging innovations of its time. A Michigan engineer named Paul Brown designed an inverted bottle with a silicone valve that seals automatically and releases the moment you squeeze. Clean, simple, elegant.

It came entirely from watching what customers were already doing.

The duct tape is always powerful signal. When customers hack your product, they’re telling you exactly what they need – more precisely than any survey could.

The acute problem, observed closely, often contains the innovative solution hiding inside it.

There’s a fictional story about Nobel Prize winner Max Planck touring Germany giving the same lecture on quantum mechanics. Over time, his chauffeur memorized it and proposed a switch – he’d give the lecture in Munich while Planck sat in the front row wearing the chauffeur’s hat.

Planck agreed. The chauffeur delivered the lecture flawlessly.

Then a physics professor stood up and asked a difficult question. Without missing a beat, the chauffeur replied: “I’m surprised that in an advanced city like Munich, I get such an elementary question. I’m going to ask my chauffeur to reply.”

This was one of Charlie Munger’s favorite stories – not because of the quick-wittedness of the chauffeur – but because it illustrated two kinds of knowledge.

There are people with Planck knowledge – they’ve done the work, wrestled with the hard questions, and earned the understanding.

And then there are people with Chauffeur knowledge who have learned to talk the talk. They can make a great impression but there’s nothing underneath the surface.

The challenge is to surround ourselves with people who have Planck knowledge – and stay away from those who have chauffeur knowledge.

But as Munger warns – there are huge forces working against you.

Brian Grazer’s book – A Curious Mind – makes a point that I hadn’t considered before.

Curiosity has a negative connotation in our culture. And it isn’t accidental.

People in power have always found curiosity threatening. The Adam and Eve parable is the oldest example – the moral being that curiosity leads to suffering.

Curiosity also killed the cat.

Even in everyday language, when we describe something as “curious,” we mean it’s an oddity. A little weird. Other than normal.

It makes sense when you think about it. Curiosity asks why things are the way they are. It doesn’t take things for granted. That’s challenging to any established order.

I’d never noticed this bias.

Now I can’t unsee it.

Dr. Eric Topol published a thoughtful breakdown of why VO2 max has become an overrated marker for cardiorespiratory fitness.

Three simple problems.

• Cardiorespiratory fitness is measured in METs – a practical, real-world measure of how your heart and lungs perform during actual activity. VO2 max, by contrast, requires a lab, a specialized mask, trained technicians, and exercising to absolute exhaustion. Most people use smartwatch estimates that carry a 10-15% error rate.
• Nearly all the data linking fitness to longevity outcomes comes from MET-based studies – not VO2 max studies. Peter Attia conflated the two, calling VO2 max the single most powerful marker for longevity while citing research that never measured it.
• The practical consequence is that people are now stressing over an unreliable number while ignoring what matters – living an active life that improves cardiorespiratory fitness.

I’d add a couple things.

First, metrics should never get in the way of common sense. If you want better cardiorespiratory fitness, sprint up a hill regularly. Or play basketball every week. Go for a brisk walk and occasionally sprint. These are all tests of the very thing you’re trying to improve. It’s important to focus on the actions, not the number.

Next, if you do track VO2 max on a wearable, the absolute number is less useful than the trend. In my experience, even if the reading is imprecise, the direction it moves maps well to periods when I’m consistently active. Trends are often the signal even when the number is noise.

And finally – be careful about treating any one voice as gospel. I read Outlive and it genuinely changed how I think about exercise. Breaking it down into cardiorespiratory fitness, strength, stability, and mobility gave me a framework that pushed me toward a health journey I’m grateful for.

While Dr. Peter Attia’s work has been valuable to me, I’ve also been upfront about my gripe with his push for expensive scans and statins (and his fall from grace recently has been sad to see).

All in all, a reminder to read widely, think critically, and don’t let metrics get in the way of common sense.