IFB113: Charlie Munger’s “Invert, always Invert”

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Dave:                                    00:36                     All

right folks, we’ll welcome to Investing for Beginners podcast. This is episode

130 tonight, Andrew, and I are going to talk a little bit about they called an inversion.

I came across this great blog post from a gentleman named James Clear who talks

a lot about habits and developing different patterns and ways that we can think

better and work better with our minds and how we can set ourselves up to have

better processes in our lives. And he talked about inversion. So if those of

you who are not familiar with inversion, inversion means that you take

something and you turn it upside down, and you look at it from a different

angle or a different way. And I’ve talked a little bit about this in the past.

And Charlie Mugger is a big fan of a; I’m a big fan of Charlie monger. I was going

to say; he’s a big fan of mine. That’s so not true. , I’m a big fan of Charlie

Munger and the way he thinks. He’s a very, very deep guy.

Dave:                                    01:33                     And

he talks a lot about inversion in his blog posts, in his books, in his speeches

that he gives. And he’s always quoting this term, invert, always invert. And

you got that from a mathematician named, Carl Jacobi and this is a German

mathematician, and he was famous for figuring out very, very hard problems by

inverting them. And by, what he meant by this was that he would take a math

problem and look at the answer and try to work backward to try to figure out

how to solve the problem as opposed to looking at the problem and then moving

forward trying to figure out what the answer would be. And he felt like that

that was a powerful way for him to look at the roadblocks and figure out

backward how to look at things. And this is something that I do myself when I’m

trying to figure out how to work with different formulas and things that are a

little bit above my pay grade so to speak is I will look at the answers and