MBAs vs Charlie Munger: Recommended Reading Lists | RP 92

Hey friends!

Welcome to Rox’s Picks — a weekly newsletter that analyzes business, technology, and media from the lens of history.

Last week’s newsletter had a 43.4% open rate. The top link you clicked on was my review of Write of Passage. Welcome to the 1 person who joined since then!

I’m sipping my second latte of the day. It’s the last serving from a bag of Indonesian beans I got from Stumptown Coffee in New York. I’m excited to get into my next bag tomorrow: it’s from an award-winning roaster.

In my quarterly review, I wrote that for the next few months, the goal of this newsletter is to deliver “a 10-minute MBA every week.” As you’ll learn in today’s newsletter, an MBA isn’t just about financial modelling and business cases. The wider your education, the better off you’ll be! I’m excited to share that with you. I also categorized each of the three lessons in today’s newsletter so it’s easier to scroll through.

As always, let me know what you think in the poll at the end. And with that…

Here’s your 10-minute MBA this week:

Business, Media & Technology

1 – MBA Curriculums vs Charlie Munger’s Recommended Reading List

Most people know about Warren Buffet, but very few know about his quiet business partner, Charlie Munger.

Munger is vice chairman and one of the largest stockholders in Berkshire Hathaway. According to Buffet, Munger is a kindred soul, a perfect business partner, and the smartest person he’s ever met. Thanks to their partnership, Berkshire stock has increased from $38 a share in 1975 to over $500,000 a share as of this writing.

In a book about Munger’s speeches and quotes called Poor Charlie’s Almanack, there lives a secret gold mine that hints at how he built his wealth. It’s his recommended reading list and here it is:

1. Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity by John Gribbin

2. F.F.I.A.S.C.O.: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader by Frank Partnoy

3. Ice Age by John & Mary Gribbin

4. How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It by Arthur Herman

5. Models of My Life by Herbert A. Simon

6. A Matter of Degrees: What Temperature Reveals About the Past and Future of Our Species, Planet, and Universe by Gino Segre

7. Andrew Carnegie by Joseph Frazier Wall

8. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared M. Diamond

9. The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal by Jared Diamond

10. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini

11. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin

12. Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos by Garrett Hardin

13. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

14. Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr. by Ron Chernow

15. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor by David S. Landes

16. The Warren Buffett Portfolio: Mastering the Power of the Focus Investment Strategist by Robert G. Hagstrom

17. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley

18. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher, William, and Bruce Patton

19. Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information by Robert Wright

20. Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove

Of the 20 books here, only ten are about economics, management, or business figures. The rest are about science, history, and ecology.

In contrast, take a look at the curriculums for top MBA programs like Yale, MIT, or Wharton. There are courses on financial modelling, operations management, and accounting, but next to none on history, decision-making, or human behaviour.

I’m not sure why this is. But it does hint that business professionals and organizations might not see the value in a broad, liberal arts education.

If so, this is a huge issue.

As book lists from Munger and other successful businesspeople like Naval Ravikant show us, success in entrepreneurship and business demands a wide education. This includes the liberal arts.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with business books, spreadsheets and databases, SWOT analyses, and case studies. These impart important skills that teach us a starting point to analyze businesses.

But whether its growing a large enterprise or building a small media business, the more I learn, the more I understand that success in business is an art and a science.

And there is so much gold in applying the patterns and outlines of history to current business problems. Legendary fund manager Bill Gross once said:

If we rely on MBAs and business schools to teach us how to run our businesses or navigate our careers, we'll always be playing catch up.

If instead we take our education into our own hands and study the “soft” arts like history, economics, and psychology, we will see industry trends and market movements based on past patterns. This hones our own intuition and allows us to spot new opportunities and de-escalate possible threats before they manifest. As the editor and compiler of Poor Charlie’s Almanack Paul Kaufmann writes:

History & the Arts

2 – A Cautionary Tale of Ten Brothers and Twenty Shekels of Silver

When people read the biblical account of how Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery, most see a lesson on parenting and family relations.

What most people miss is that it is also a cautionary tale of the ways money can help or harms us.

Enter Joseph. He was an 18-year-old boy who lived in Canaan, between 1800–1700 BCE. He had ten older brothers, but it was no secret that he was his dad's favourite son.

When dad gifted little Joe a really nice technicolour coat that probably took months to weave, his brothers got jealous.

Then Joseph had a couple of dreams. In one of them, his parents bowed down to him. In another, it was his older brothers who did the kowtowing. Of course, as any brash, spoiled teenage boy would do, he told the whole family about it. His brothers got even more jealous. But this time, they hatched a plot to kill him.

One day, ol' dad sends Joseph to check up on his brothers working in the fields in Dothan, about 100 kilometers north of where they lived in Hebron. Plenty far enough from their influential father’s protection.

There, the brothers seize Joseph, rip the pretty coat from his shoulders, and chuck him into a dry well to await his fate. The brothers planned to take Joseph's life themselves, but then a caravan of traders pass by. They decide to sell Joseph to them as a slave for twenty pieces of silver instead.

There's a lot more to Joseph's story, of course — you can read all about in the book of Genesis, beginning in chapter 37 — but I want to zoom in on this moment in history.

On one hand, money and trade in the Bronze Age had developed far enough to allow Joseph's brothers to participate in what we now condemn as human trafficking. On the other hand, the existence of the shekel lowered their offense from fratricide down to human trafficking, in effect saving Joseph’s life.

So did money help or harm Joseph?

To answer this question, we've got to understand two properties of money:

1. Universal convertibility

2. Universal trust

Money has universal convertibility

Like magic, money bridges the world of the tangible and the intangible. In Sapiens, historian Yuval Noah Harari likens money to an alchemist:

In selling Joseph for money, his brothers were like alchemists. But instead of converting metal into gold, they bought food for their families from the silver they received from the traders, successfully converted a flesh-and-blood boy into sacks of grain.

Money is built on universal trust

Money is the most efficient way for strangers to coordinate and trust each other, without actually getting to know each other. According to Harari, "Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted."

Here's the scenario: Joseph's brothers wanted to get rid of him. The Ishmaelite traders wanted a slave to sell at the markets in Egypt. Neither parties knew each other beforehand, but at the crucial moment, the shekel allowed them to strike a deal where both parties got what they wanted.

Of course, the story also illustrates the problems we encounter with money.

Universal convertibility means that everything could potentially have a monetary value

Money allows us to attach a number to everything we see. In doing so, we forget that there are many things best left unquantified. This also means we tend to forget that money is just one way with which we can gauge value. It is not meant to be an objective measure of worth.

Back to Joseph's story: the brothers received 20 shekels or 166 grams of silver for their brother. This is in accordance to the price of a slave woman or a youth (which Joseph was) in the Code of Hammurabi. Three ethical questions stand out:

1. Is 166 grams of silver the price of a human life?

2. Was Hammurabi someone who should determine that?

3. Should a human life even be quantified in monetary terms?

Of course, the answer to all three questions is no — if you say yes at all, then pls pls unsubscribe from my newsletter — but because of the circumstances and historical context of the story, both parties answered, hell yes.

Universal trust does not meant that we trust in other people; it merely means we trust in the value of money

Money gives us the ability to cooperate with anyone else in the world, but that doesn't mean we trust the other person. The truth is, we don’t care about the other person's willingness or goodness; we trust in money's ability to allow us to cooperate.

Realizing this was a mental jiu-jitsu moment for me.

Joseph's brothers didn't sell him to the traders because they thought the traders would be great babysitters. In fact, they were Ishmaelites — ancestors of modern Arabs (we know how that relationship has played out).

But the brothers' belief in money allowed them to sell Joseph to their sworn enemies. They trusted in money and believed that selling their brother would make them feel less guilty than taking his life.

What does this mean for us?

We know that money can bring out the worst in all of us, but we also know that money can make many of our problems go away.

Oftentimes, it's easier to use money to escape our problems, than to use it to solve them.

Like paying for Netflix to binge watch Love is Blind and avoid dealing with our relationship issues.

Or paying for bottle service at the club to surround ourselves with people, so we don't have to deal with our intrusive thoughts.

Or in the case of Joseph's brothers, selling their sibling into slavery, instead of seeing a therapist to deal with their daddy issues.

From the beginning, the brothers' intent was to take Joseph's life and tell their father that he was attacked by wolves. They did not set out to make money from selling their brother.

Money gave Joseph's brothers an outlet to lower their offense from homicide to human trafficking. In exchange, they received 20 shekels of silver and an emotional sword over their head for the next twelve years... But was it worth it?

Wildcard

3 – Roald Amundsen’s Relentless 20-Mile March to the South Pole

In the early 20th century, Roald Amundsen set out to race Robert Falcon Scott to reach the South Pole. Both faced a round trip of over 2200 kilometers, -6℃ plus windchill… In 1911. This meant no GPS, no weather forecasts, no radio. The possibility of being rescued in the event of a screw up was improbable, at best.

In the end, Amundsen reached the South Pole first on December 15, 1911.

By the time Amundsen arrived back home on January 25 — precisely as planned — Scott’s team was a week into man-hauling their sleds home after reaching the South Pole on January 17, almost a month after Amundsen.

By mid-March, Scott’s party was still battling the winds of the Antarctic with supplies running low.

Months later, a British search party found Scott’s frozen remains in a little tent, just 16 kilometers away from his next supply stash.

What set them apart?

One of the reasons for Amundsen’s success was his commitment to consistent effort, but also his discipline to hold himself back from overexertion.

All throughout his journey to the South Pole, Amundsen stuck to travelling between 25 to 30 kilometers a day. His team could keep this pace in good weather or bad. When his team suggested they go 40 kilometers a day, Amundsen said no; he wanted them to go at a pace they could maintain while staying rested.

In contrast, Scott would go fast on good days, then stay in his tent on bad days, complaining about the weather.

Since reading about Amundsen and Scott in Jim Collins’ book Great by Choice, I’ve been obsessed with building this kind of discipline in my life. I want to know how to end up like Amundsen, not Scott.

Collins calls this discipline the 20-mile march. Here’s how he defines it:

Steady, consistent effort leads to spectacular results — and this doesn’t just apply to outdoors exploration.

Between May 2022 and April 2023, The Cultural Tutor published daily Twitter threads on art, classical music, architecture, and rhetoric. In doing so, they built their Twitter account from zero to 1.3 million followers and 75,000 email subscribers, within the span of 11 months.

From May 2015 until October 2016, Casey Neistat filmed, edited, and published a vlog a day. By publishing 567 short films, he amassed over 2 million YouTube subscribers and over 130 million views in 18 months.

Without a doubt, these are stellar numbers.

Knowing what we know, though, maybe the question isn’t “How fast can I get 1 million YouTube subscribers?” but “How many published videos do I need to get to 1 million?”

Maybe it’s not “How do I get big on Twitter?” but “How many threads do I need to publish to get to 100k?”

How about you: What’s your goal’s version of the 20-Mile March?

😉 You're welcome

A selection of interesting links & fun recommendations.

📚 A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon. Never has finishing a prequel made me want to reread a novel… Until now. Day was published after the first novel in the series, The Priory of the Orange Tree, but if I could go back, I would read this one first.

If you like epic fantasy with worlds that toy with and question our own conventions — what if the world’s predominant religion didn’t dictate gender roles? What if we had dragons and magic instead of technology? What if some nations welcomed magic but others didn’t? — then you’ll enjoy this.

▶️ Hardcore Literature. I’m planning a quest to read through the great books of literature soon, so I’ve been binge watching Benjamin McEvoy’s videos on how to do that. Check out this playlist that collects most of those videos. Start with this one on how to read and this one on how to annotate books and take marginalia.

Have a great weekend!

Stay strong, stay kind, stay human.

Till next week,

— roxine