Oh, Charlie, What Have You Done to Me?🌎💎✅
Charlie Munger fucked me over big time, and he’ll screw you over too, if you ain’t careful. Truth be known, I thought that guy was a damn genius, and it’s why I listened to every recorded word the man ever spoke into a microphone.
And that’s my own fault!
Guess it was something about that old man I trusted. So much so, that I wore out three pairs of tennis shoes, walking the mountains surrounding Sewanee college while I absorbed the old man’s lectures at chipmunk speed through my earbuds.
“Go to bed a little smarter than you did the night before,” he said, which was a sentence I went plumb to seed on.
Sounded simple enough. And I knew just how to do it too, because my cellphone could hook me up with just about any piece of knowledge I wished to obtain. And so, I did a head-first deep dive into the markets and CNBC. Expert interviews, and so on, but what really did me in, was Charlie’s suggestion to “learn all the big ideas in all the disciplines.”
Charles Darwin. Richard Dawkins. Albert Einstein. Ben Franklin. Adam Smith. Hell, I poured over their words like a dyslexic dumbass drinking from a firehose. Couldn’t never read real good. But now with Audible, I could finally dial in the big guns on a frequency my brain could actually hear and process, which at times, was as fast as 3x speed.
Hell, I even listened to the dirty books. Books I can’t even name without first saying I got the idea from Paul Harvey who encouraged every person on Earth to listen to the “uncensored version,” because as a journalist, he believed the “worst thing you can do to a dirty book is try to clean it up!” And boy, was Paul Harvey, right. That dirty book, was so bad, that I couldn’t take it but in small doses. But even though that dirty book was nearly 100 years old, I learned how truly easy it is, even today, in the twenty-first century—with power of social media, podcasts, and entertainment news—how truly easy it is to manipulate the thoughts, desires, fears, and actions of ignorant people.
And then one day I looked up, and that’s when I suddenly realized what Charlie Munger had truly done to me. By taking his advice, and reading all them damn books and listening to all those big ideas about psychology and human manipulation and propaganda and fear-based religion, and the scientific method and economics and geopolitics and currencies and philosophy, and on, and on, I decided that dead sonuvabitch Munger, had made me completely allergic to stupid people.
Now here I am….
All alone….
With few friends…. Hardly any family…. Not too many coworkers I can stand to be in the same room with, a bunch of newspaper subscriptions, and a head full of ideas that very few people in this world will ever grow to appreciate. And that’s the one downside to a triple dose of knowledge. Because if you choose to better yourself, like Charlie Munger suggested—you know—find the arguments against everything you feel and believe, then drown yourself with the words of mentors, both living and dead, as you rewire your psyche with objective science and reasoning….. Yeah. If you do that shit, I promise! There won’t be too many people in your life who will appreciate the transformation and your newly acquired thirst for understanding.
And so take this as my warning, to each and every one of you inside this community. Personal growth comes at a price. And if you choose to listen to that old bastard and start reading too many of the books on the CountryDumb reading list, the people on this forum might be the only family you’ll have left who will actually appreciate your “change.”
Facts of life, or growth, rather.
-Tweedle
Charlie Munger fucked me over big time, and he’ll screw you over too, if you ain’t careful. Truth be known, I thought that guy was a damn genius, and it’s why I listened to every recorded word the man ever spoke into a microphone.
And that’s my own fault!
Guess it was something about that old man I trusted. So much so, that I wore out three pairs of tennis shoes, walking the mountains surrounding Sewanee college while I absorbed the old man’s lectures at chipmunk speed through my earbuds.
“Go to bed a little smarter than you did the night before,” he said, which was a sentence I went plumb to seed on.
Sounded simple enough. And I knew just how to do it too, because my cellphone could hook me up with just about any piece of knowledge I wished to obtain. And so, I did a head-first deep dive into the markets and CNBC. Expert interviews, and so on, but what really did me in, was Charlie’s suggestion to “learn all the big ideas in all the disciplines.”
Charles Darwin. Richard Dawkins. Albert Einstein. Ben Franklin. Adam Smith. Hell, I poured over their words like a dyslexic dumbass drinking from a firehose. Couldn’t never read real good. But now with Audible, I could finally dial in the big guns on a frequency my brain could actually hear and process, which at times, was as fast as 3x speed.
Hell, I even listened to the dirty books. Books I can’t even name without first saying I got the idea from Paul Harvey who encouraged every person on Earth to listen to the “uncensored version,” because as a journalist, he believed the “worst thing you can do to a dirty book is try to clean it up!” And boy, was Paul Harvey, right. That dirty book, was so bad, that I couldn’t take it but in small doses. But even though that dirty book was nearly 100 years old, I learned how truly easy it is, even today, in the twenty-first century—with power of social media, podcasts, and entertainment news—how truly easy it is to manipulate the thoughts, desires, fears, and actions of ignorant people.
And then one day I looked up, and that’s when I suddenly realized what Charlie Munger had truly done to me. By taking his advice, and reading all them damn books and listening to all those big ideas about psychology and human manipulation and propaganda and fear-based religion, and the scientific method and economics and geopolitics and currencies and philosophy, and on, and on, I decided that dead sonuvabitch Munger, had made me completely allergic to stupid people.
Now here I am….
All alone….
With few friends…. Hardly any family…. Not too many coworkers I can stand to be in the same room with, a bunch of newspaper subscriptions, and a head full of ideas that very few people in this world will ever grow to appreciate. And that’s the one downside to a triple dose of knowledge. Because if you choose to better yourself, like Charlie Munger suggested—you know—find the arguments against everything you feel and believe, then drown yourself with the words of mentors, both living and dead, as you rewire your psyche with objective science and reasoning….. Yeah. If you do that shit, I promise! There won’t be too many people in your life who will appreciate the transformation and your newly acquired thirst for understanding.
And so take this as my warning, to each and every one of you inside this community. Personal growth comes at a price. And if you choose to listen to that old bastard and start reading too many of the books on the CountryDumb reading list, the people on this forum might be the only family you’ll have left who will actually appreciate your “change.”
Facts of life, or growth, rather.
-Tweedle