Charlie Munger shared a humorous story at the USC Law School Commencement in 2007, which goes as follows:
I frequently tell the apocryphal story about how Max Planck, after he won the Nobel Prize, went around Germany giving the same standard lecture on the new quantum mechanics.
Over time, his chauffeur memorized the lecture and said, “Would you mind, Professor Planck, because it’s so boring to stay in our routine. [What if] I gave the lecture in Munich and you just sat in front wearing my chauffeur’s hat?” Planck said, “Why not?” And the chauffeur got up and gave this long lecture on quantum mechanics. After which a physics professor stood up and asked a perfectly ghastly question. The speaker said, “Well 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.”
The story is funny, but also shares a solid point — the chauffeur doesn’t really understand what he’s talking about. Certainly spending that much time around Planck would be very beneficial, but he’s still never really studied what’s behind the main speech.
Charlie explains the difference between the two types of knowledge in his book “Poor Charlie’s Almanack“:
In this world, I think we have two kinds of knowledge. One is Max Planck knowledge, that of the people who really know. They’ve paid the dues, they have the aptitude. Then we’ve got chauffeur knowledge. They have learned to prattle the talk. They may have a big head of hair. They often have a fine timbre in their voices. They make a big impression. But in the end, what they’ve got is chauffeur knowledge masquerading as real knowledge. I think I’ve just described practically every politician in the United States. You’re going to have the problem in your life of getting as much responsibility as you can to the people with the Planck knowledge and away from the people who have the chauffeur knowledge. And there are huge forces working against you.
That’s partially the reason for this blog. It’s one thing to hear something and repeat it back, but true understanding requires much more work. Writing a blog post about any given topic certainly doesn’t make me an expert at all, but it does get me one step closer each time I do it.
Further, I think having “chauffer knowledge” can sometimes be a good place to start, but then you need to dig deeper and build a better foundation to really understand what you’re talking about.
