Links

Changing the Culture at a Large Company (LINK)

Re-Reading Seth Klarman: Excerpts from 2 OID issues [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Isaac Newton Learned About Financial Gravity the Hard Way - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

Michael Lewis on Charlie Rose (video) (LINK)

Related article: "Inside Trump's Cruel Campaign Against the U.S.D.A.'s Scientists"

The 1990s Telecom Bubble. What Can We Learn? - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: Episode 131 — Head-on is Hard (LINK)

Y Combinator Podcast: Tencent’s Chief eXploration Officer, David Wallerstein on WeChat, QQ, and Gaming (LINK)

Automotive News -- Bob Lutz: Kiss the good times goodbye (LINK)

Brian Grazer on The Tim Ferriss Show (podcast) (LINK)

Related book: A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life

Oliver Sacks on the Three Essential Elements of Creativity (LINK)

Related book: The River of Consciousness 

The Hipster Ninja Bats That Sneak Up on Their Prey - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

"Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each one of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see." -Marcus Aurelius

Graham & Doddsville: Fall 2017 (LINK)

Opinions on Everything (LINK)

Goodbye Gatekeepers - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Your Next Home Could Run on Batteries [H/T @morganhousel] (LINK)

Loss Leader or Value Creator? Deconstructing Amazon Prime - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Can We have an ETF Meltdown? - by Rick Bookstaber (LINK)

Nassim Taleb on Black Monday, Fed, Market Lessons (video) (LINK)

Jim Chanos Shares 'Bizarre' Black Monday Experience (video) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

"60 Minutes" on the opioid crisis (video) (LINK)

Whistleblower Joe Rannazzisi says drug distributors pumped opioids into U.S. communities -- knowing that people were dying -- and says industry lobbyists and Congress derailed the DEA's efforts to stop it

The Family Making Billions From The Opioids Crisis [H/T The Browser] (LINK)

"60 Minutes" talks with Danny Meyer [from last week] (video) (LINK)

Related books: 1) Setting the Table; 2) Shake Shack: Recipes & Stories

Tim Urban talks with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (podcast) (LINK)

What Facebook Did to American Democracy [H/T The Browser] (LINK)

Containers: An 8-part audio documentary (and podcast) about how global trade has transformed the economy and ourselves (LINK)

TED Talk -- Kristin Poinar: What's hidden under the Greenland ice sheet? (LINK)

How Domestication Ruined Dogs' Pack Instincts - by Ed Yong (LINK)

The Microbes That Supercharge Termite Guts - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Walter Isaacson talks to Charlie Rose about his latest biography, Leonardo da Vinci, which was released today (video) (LINK)

Ebook of the day (You can also read the posts that make up the ebook for free online, HERE.): The Elon Musk Blog Series: Wait But Why

Links

“The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes 

Baupost Group owns nearly $1 billion worth of Puerto Rico's bonds (LINK)

Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft, on Charlie Rose discussing his new book, Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone (video) (LINK)

Solar Grew Faster Than All Other Forms of Power for the First Time [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Shopify Tumbles After Citron Calls the Company a ‘Get-Rich-Quick Scheme’ (LINK)

Atul Gawande on the Tell Me What To Say podcast (audio) (LINK)

May 2016 presentation by Niall Ferguson: "Five Ingredients for a Populist Backlash" (video) (LINK)

Sample chapter of Tim Ferriss' upcoming book, Tribe of Mentors (LINK)

Books of the day:

The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Tyrant Who Created North Korea and the Young Lieutenant Who Stole His Way to Freedom [H/T Evan Osnos]

King of Spies: The Dark Reign of America's Spymaster in Korea

“Lead the ideas of your time and they will accompany and support you; fall behind them and they drag you along with them; oppose them and they will overwhelm you.” - Napoleon [H/T Lewis]

Links

"A person understands himself not thru thoughts, but with actions. It is only thru making an effort that a person will understand his worth." — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Source)

Shane Parrish talks with Adam Grant on The Knowledge Project Podcast (LINK)

Paul Sonkin and Paul Johnson discuss their book, Pitch the Perfect Investment, at NYU (videos) (LINK)

Sam Harris speaks with Siddhartha Mukherjee about his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (podcast) (LINK)

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick discuss their 10-part, 18-hour documentary series, “The Vietnam War,” with Charlie Rose (video) (LINK)

Infants Can Learn the Value of Perseverance by Watching Adults - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Even Jellyfish Sleep - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

Ray Dalio on Charlie Rose discussing his book, Principles: Life and Work (video) (LINK)

Ray Dalio on CNBC (Video 1 [Bridgewater], Video 2 [economy], Video 3 [Bitcoin])

Risk Management in the Long Term - by Rick Bookstaber (LINK)

Andrew W. Lo: "Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution At The Speed Of Thought" | Talks at Google (LINK)

The Investors Podcast: Small Cap Investing w/ Eric Cinnamond (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Tech Investing Outside of Silicon Valley, w/ David Tisch (LINK)

Scientists Can Now Repaint Butterfly Wings - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Annual JPMorgan Energy Issue, Wednesday, June 14th, 2017 [Vaclav Smil helped in the preparation of the report.] (LINK)

Book of the day: Energy and Civilization: A History - by Vaclav Smil

Links

Home Capital plans to keep rebuilding the lender after Buffett's second tranche rejected (LINK)

The Lessons and Questions of the iPhone X and the iPhone 8 - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Delivering Alpha Conference Notes 2017: Robertson, Dalio, Chanos, Cooperman & More (LINK)

Jim Chanos is skeptical on shale, betting against Continental Resources (video plays) (LINK)

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon says bitcoin is a 'fraud' that will eventually blow up (video plays) (LINK)

Beyond blockchain: what are the technology requirements for a Central Bank Digital Currency? (LINK)

Evan Osnos talks to Charlie Rose about his article "The Risk of Nuclear War with North Korea" (video) (LINK)

General and Surprising - by Paul Graham (LINK)

There’s a Speeding Mass of Space Junk Orbiting Earth, Smashing Into Thing [H/T Matt] (LINK)

The Kakapo Is The First Species to Have Every Individual’s Genome Sequenced - by Ed Yong (LINK)

***

The books and/or audiobooks on my short list related to China that I'm about to start going through are listed below. If you have any other great recommendations, please let me know via email or Twitter. Thanks.

Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the China Production Game

The Fall and Rise of China

Links

"If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial." -Michel de Montaigne

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report as a Harbinger - by Frank K. Martin (LINK)

Exponent podcast: Episode 121 — The Uber Mutation (LINK)

FT Alphachat podcast: Buchheit and Gulati on restructuring Venezuela's debt (LINK)

Lee Buchheit and Mitu Gulati, two of the world's foremost experts on sovereign debt restructuring, join the FT's Robin Wigglesworth to explain Venezuela's looming debt crisis and options for solving it, while the country's economic collapse and humanitarian problems continue to worsen.

Henry Kissinger talks to Charlie Rose (video) (LINK)

Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state, shares his thoughts on resolving the North Korea crisis, the U.S. relationship with China, and Donald Trump.

Here are the paths of the next 15 total solar eclipses (LINK)

Links

"To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day." -Lao Tzu

Jeremy Grantham talks to Charlie Rose (video) (LINK)

Leithner Letter No. 213-214 (26 July - 26 August 2017) (LINK)

The Unreformed Stock Picker: Without A Boss Bill Miller Is Betting On Amazon, Bitcoin And Bob Dylan (LINK)

Why the Hatchet Men of 3G Spent $10 Million on a Better Oscar Mayer Weiner (LINK)

The Conglomerate That Troubles China [H/T Matt] (LINK)

Apple and the Oak Tree - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

The Crypto Currency Debate: Future of Money or Speculative Hype? - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Mutual Fund Observer, August 2017 (LINK)

Freakonomics Radio: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Money (But Were Afraid to Ask) (LINK)

a16z Podcast: From Mind at Play to Making the Information Age (LINK)

Related book: A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

Revisionist History podcast:  “Mr. Hollowell Didn’t Like That” (part two of a two-part story) (LINK)

A Kerfuffle About Diversity in the Roman Empire (LINK)

The Designer Baby Era Is Not Upon Us - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

Tom Russo talks with Ted Seides on the Capital Allocators podcast (LINK)

Walt Mossberg talks with Charlie Rose (video) (LINK)

Related article (Mossberg's last weekly column): The Disappearing Computer

It’s the Little Things That Can Color an Investor’s Outlook - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

The Widening of Amazon’s Moat - by John Huber [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

Tesla Sales Fall to Zero in Hong Kong After Tax Break Is Slashed ($) (LINK)

Tesla Inc.’s sales in Hong Kong came to a standstill after authorities slashed a tax break for electric vehicles on April 1, demonstrating how sensitive the company’s performance can be to government incentive programs. 

Not a single newly purchased Tesla model was registered in Hong Kong in April, according to official data from the city’s Transportation Department analyzed by The Wall Street Journal. 

In March, shortly after the tax change was announced and ahead of the April 1 deadline, 2,939 Tesla vehicles were registered there—almost twice as many as in the last six months of 2016. 

...As a result of the new policy, the cost of a basic Tesla Model S four-door car in Hong Kong​has effectively risen to around $130,000 from less than $75,000.

Tesla’s Skid Is Coming at the Worst Time ($) (LINK)

When the story of Tesla is finally written, this week will be seen as a crucial juncture. On Friday, the electric car company started production on its highly anticipated Model 3, one day after its stock briefly fell into a bear market. 

The week’s 13% share-price decline as of Friday morning brings the company’s financial position into fresh focus given its historic reliance on the equity market. At first glance, the company has plenty of cash on hand—more than $4 billion as of March 31. But that is likely to go quickly. 

Tesla’s free cash outflow was $622 million in the first quarter. Since Tesla delivered fewer cars in the second quarter than in the first, there is a decent chance that number will worsen. Tesla said Friday that about 3,500 cars were in transit to customers at the end of June, the lowest tally in five quarters.

How to Live Without Limits – Kyle Maynard (The Tim Ferriss Show) (LINK)

***

On sale for $0.99 today (Kindle): Startup Opportunities: Know When to Quit Your Day Job

Books of the day [H/T Rick Bookstaber]:

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report (free PDF HERE)

Wall Street and the Financial Crisis (free in Kindle format, and free PDF HERE)

Links

"Throughout his life, a wise man engages in practice of all his useful, rarely used skills, many of them outside his discipline, as a sort of duty to his better self. If he reduces the number of skills he practices and, therefore, the number of skills he retains, he will naturally drift into error from man with a hammer tendency....Skills of a very high order can be maintained only with daily practice." -Charlie Munger

A (Long) Chat with Peter L. Bernstein - - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

Looking through my files recently, I came across a buried treasure: a transcript of the highlights of my hours-long interview with the great Peter L. Bernstein at his vacation home in Brattleboro, Vt., on July 28, 2004.

Stockpicking Is Dying Because There Are No More Stocks to Pick - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

A Dozen Lessons I Learned from Bill Gates Sr. - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

Nudgestock 2017 videos [H/T Tamas] (LINK)

Short-Seller Nailed Home Capital, Then Got Stung by Buffett (LINK)

Lessons From the Collapse of Banco Popular [H/T @Sanjay__Bakshi] (LINK)

How a Broke 30-Year-Old Failure Became America's Billionaire Tire King [H/T Matt] (LINK)

Related book: Six Tires, No Plan

Jack Ma talks with Charlie Rose (video) (LINK)

Amazon’s Nike deal took a billion dollar bite out of competing retailers (LINK)

The industrial robotics market will nearly triple in less than 10 years (LINK)

How I Built This podcast -- TRX: Randy Hetrick (LINK)

Adventures in Finance podcast: Episode 21 - Ponzi Hunters: Harry Markopolos and His Dogs of Fraud (LINK)

Grant’s Podcast: Hear, hear Jim Bianco (LINK)

The renowned fixed-income analyst discusses the flattening yield curve, the reluctant Fed and the sinking finances of his home city, Chicago.

Freakonomics Radio (podcast): Why Hate the Koch Brothers? (Part 2) (LINK)

Exponent podcast: Episode 119 — Amazon and Avocados (LINK)

The 10 Commandments of Startup Success with Reid Hoffman (The Tim Ferriss Show) (LINK)

FT Alphachat podcast: On the verge of a productivity boom? (LINK)

Edge #494: Compassionate Systems - A Conversation With Daniel Goleman (LINK)

Daniel Dennett on Tools To Transform Our Thinking (audio/podcast) (LINK)

Related book: Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking

Stoicism and Buddhism, a dialogue between Robert Wright & Massimo Pigliucci (video) (LINK)

The Risk of Rushing Through Legislation (LINK)

Why Are Bird Eggs Egg-Shaped? An Eggsplainer - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Book of the day (mentioned by Mohnish Pabrai in his latest Google Talk): The Art of Being Unreasonable

Links

"Traditionally the investor has been the man with patience and the courage of his convictions who would buy when the harried or disheartened speculator was selling." -Benjamin Graham & David Dodd, Security Analysis

Don’t Compare Yourself To Others - by Ian Cassel (LINK) [“To be a disciplined investor you have to be willing to stand by and watch other people make money on things that you passed on” – Howard Marks]

Perpetual Beta - by Chris Pavese (LINK)

How to Be Your Own Quant - by Jason Zweig [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Hussman Weekly Market Comment: Being Wrong in an Interesting Way (LINK)

Exponent podcast: Episode 116 — Blockchain Beauty Contest (LINK)

Why Flamingos Are More Stable on One Leg Than Two - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Why Did the Biggest Whales Get So Big? … and perhaps more importantly: when? - by Ed Yong (LINK)

How Zika Conquered the Americas - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Neil deGrasse Tyson talks with Charlie Rose about his latest book, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (LINK)

***

On a separate note.... I've been doing a lot of walking (slowly) over the last few days, and these are probably my favorite pair of shoes I've owned, for those that may be interested (and who like the thin, barefoot-style sole): Merrell Men's Vapor Glove 2 Trail Running Shoe

Links

Howard Marks at a CFA Society India event in Mumbai (video) [H/T @Sanjay__Bakshi] (LINK)

Jamie Dimon's 2016 Shareholder Letter (LINK)

GMO's Grantham: Stocks 'Decently Different This Time' (video) [H/T Barry Ritholtz] (LINK)

Jeremy Grantham, co-founder of Boston investment firm GMO, doesn't expect valuations to drop back to normal levels for two decades. But he is keeping cash on hand to take advantage of any dip, which he says would need to be 15-20% to act.

Horizon Kinetics: The Indexation That Is, Versus The Indexation That Should Be (LINK)

Jim O'Shaughnessy: "What Works on Wall Street" | Talks at Google (video) (LINK)

Schiff's Insurance Observer's February blog post (first post since 2009) --  The Big Fall: Greenberg Admits He Oversaw Sleazy Transactions [H/T @GnDsville] (LINK)

Meb Faber chats with Raoul Pal (podcast) (LINK)

How do winning consumer-goods companies capture growth? [H/T @Find_Me_Value] (LINK)

Toronto Home Prices Just Jumped Another 33% (video plays) [H/T Matt] (LINK)

New details on Amazon's move to shutter the company it bought for $545 million (video plays) [H/T Matt] (LINK)

Mutual Fund Observer, April 2017 (LINK)

Speech by Andrew Haldane: A little more conversation - A little less action (LINK)

The Absolute Return Letter - April 2017: The truth about Brexit (LINK)

a16z Podcast: Cryptocurrencies, App Coins, and Investing in Protocols (LINK)

Siddhartha Mukherjee talks with Charlie Rose about his latest article, "A.I. Versus M.D." (video) (LINK) ["Genetic technology is A.I. I mean these two things are changing what human beings will be like in the future. There's no doubt about that, so it's something to know about; and particularly in medicine."]

Related book: The Gene

Get More Done By Working Less (LINK)

Related book: Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less 

Related video: Five Good Questions for Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Why Are Maker Schedules So Rare? (LINK)

Edge #490: Urban Evolution - A Conversation With Jonathan Losos (LINK)

Trees Have Their Own Songs - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Related book (just released): The Songs of Trees

Coastal Carolina football team goes to prison to learn a lesson (LINK)

Today's Audible Daily Deal ($3.95) is a book I've mentioned before: Spaceman: An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe - by Mike Massimino

Links

"A wise man seeks wisdom; a madman thinks that he has found it." 

-Persian proverb (via A Calendar of Wisdom)

The video of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates on Charlie Rose (LINK)

'Becoming Warren Buffett' Goes Beyond a $74 Billion Fortune [H/T Linc] (LINK)

‘Becoming Warren Buffett’ is a timely reassurance that some billionaires have a heart [H/T Linc] (LINK)

The $99 Billion Idea: How Uber and Airbnb Won (LINK)

Related book (released tomorrow): The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World - by Brad Stone

James Grant on WealthTrack (video) (LINK)

The Hidden Fees Inside Managed-Future Funds - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

Everyone Poops and has Customer Churn (and a Dozen Notes) - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

Billionaire Steve Wynn: Building Las Vegas (2014 video) [H/T @iancassel] (LINK) ["We never risked the firm. Never risked the firm. My responsibility to my employees, my stockholders and such; that I can't promise to be right all the time. No one can. You make calls. Sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong. But capital structure allows you to survive the inevitable cycles of business, which go up and down as surely as sunrise and sunset, except we don't know the timing. They allow you to survive your own miscalculations. Capital structure, I learned at a young age, thanks to Mike Milken who taught me this story; capital structure is everything. And I've always had a capital structure that was bulletproof."] [Wynn's answer about building a good company culture from the 33:50-40:58 mark is also worth a close listen.]

Hussman Weekly Market Comment: On Governance (LINK)

Those who aspire to “right speech” often measure their words with four questions: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? Is it the right time? Right speech should not escalate conflict, but it doesn’t retreat from necessary truth, and criticisms don’t always seem kind. The question of right speech is the question of how one might best serve others. Criticism with the intent to offend is not constructive, but silence is equally detrimental when it quietly endorses a pattern of offense, or encourages the silence of others. 

Those of you who have followed my work over the decades know that I look at the world holistically in terms of the interconnection and responsibility we have toward others, and I’ve never been much for separating “business” from those larger values. After all, most of my income regularly goes to charity, and nearly everything that remains follows our own investment discipline. Whether my comments on matters like peace, civility, economic policy or governance are well-received or not (and I'm grateful that they have been over the years), there are moments when one has the responsibility to speak if one has a voice.

How Mark Sisson grew a loyal tribe before launching a niche health food line (podcast) (LINK)

Related book: The New Primal Blueprint

Amor Fati: The Immense Power of Learning To Love Your Fate (LINK)

Related previous post: Friedrich Nietzsche quotes on amor fati ("love of fate")

Book of the day (mentioned by Warren Buffett at Columbia): Essays In Persuasion – by John Maynard Keynes

Having time to think...

“It has struck me that all men’s misfortunes spring from the single cause that they are unable to stay quietly in one room.” -Blaise Pascal

On Charlie Rose last night, there was an exchange between Rose, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates that once again reminded me of the importance of keeping some free time (or "white space") in one's schedule; and making sure to leave plenty of time for reading and thinking. After a discussion about Buffett's relatively open schedule being something Gates learned from him earlier in their relationship, here was the exchange (my transcription, and slightly edited for clarity):

Gates: I also remember Warren showing me his calendar. [For me], I had every minute packed [and thought] that was the only way you could do things....The fact that he is so careful about his time. He has days that there's nothing on it.  

Rose: That taught you what? Not to crowd yourself? Give yourself time to read and think? 

Gates: Right. You control your time. And sitting and thinking may be of much higher priority than a normal CEO who, you know, there's all this demand, and you feel like you need to go and see all these people. It's not a proxy of your seriousness that you filled every minute in your schedule. 

Buffett: People are going to want your time. That's the only thing you can't buy. I can buy anything I want, basically, but I can't buy time. 

Rose: So to have time is the most precious thing you can have. 

Buffett: It is. I better be careful with it. There's no way I will be able to buy more time. 

Rose: And living in Omaha makes that easier?  

Buffett: That makes it a lot easier. For 54 years, I've spent 5 minutes going each way [his commute to the office]. Just imagine if that was a half an hour each way. I'd know the words to a lot more songs, and that's about it.  

Rose: It adds up, doesn't it? 

Buffett: It really adds up. 

This last point was also similar to advice Mr. Buffett recently gave to a group of students. As described in an article by a student that was attending from Dartmouth:

Live where you want to live, then build your business around that. Buffett lived in New York for many years, where he had a thirty-minute commute to the office. In Omaha, his commute is five minutes. “I’m more productive when I’m happy. I have a better life in Omaha than I did in New York.” 

And the importance of keeping an open schedule was also discussed by Charlie Munger at the 2016 Daily Journal Meeting:

There’re two things that Warren and I have done and Rick Guerin has done, too, to a considerable extent. One is that we spend a lot of time thinking. Our schedules are not that crowded. We look like academics more than we look like businessmen. 

Our system has been to sift life for a few opportunities and seize a few of them. We don’t mind long periods in which nothing happens. Warren is exactly the same way. Warren’s sitting on top of an empire now. You look at his schedule sometime and there’s a haircut. 

Tuesday, haircut day. 

That’s what created [one of the] world’s most successful business records in history. He has a lot of time to think.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett at Columbia University - 27th Jan 2017

They were also on the Charlie Rose show last night, but that video isn't yet available.


Link to video

Links

Some nice footage of Katharine Graham in 1977 at the 55:38 mark in THIS VIDEO, and at about the 25-minute mark in THIS VIDEO.

An Expert Called Lindy - by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (LINK)

Related book: Antifragile (or the whole collection: INCERTO)

Nassim Taleb also just gave a 5-star Amazon review to the book Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos.

Chuck Klosterman: "But What If We're Wrong" | Talks At Google (LINK)

Related book: But What If We're Wrong?

My Friends are Way Smarter than Me - by Shane Parrish (LINK)

Davis Funds’ Unconventional Wisdom [H/T Will] (LINK)

5 Reasons I’m Optimistic About Africa - By Bill Gates (LINK)

Bill Gross' January 2017 Investment Outlook: "Echoes from Africa" (LINK)

Candy and gum are no longer Mars’ biggest business [H/T Matt] (LINK)

Jazz Pharmaceuticals (JAZZ): Bruce Cozadd’s $7 Billion Decision - by Ian Cassel (LINK)

Product Study: iPhone - by Max Olson (LINK)

Barry Ritholtz talks with Dana Telsey on the Masters in Business podcast (LINK)

U.S.-Canada Paper Dispute Shows Unintended Results of Import Tariffs (LINK)

Sir James Goldsmith on Charlie Rose in 1994 (video) [H/T Venkatesh Rao (video)] (LINK)

Related books: 1) Billionaire: The Life and Times of Sir James Goldsmith; 2) The Trap - by James Goldsmith

Francis Fukuyama on Charlie Rose in 2011 (video) [H/T Venkatesh Rao (video)] (LINK)

Related books: 1) The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution; 2) Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

Helen Czerski on the Inquiring Minds podcast (audio) [H/T @mikedariano] (LINK)

Related book: Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life

What is DNA and How Does it Work? (video) [H/T Fred Wilson] (LINK)

A male Japanese macaque monkey has been caught in the act of trying to mate with two Sika deer (LINK)

My God. It’s Full of Black Holes. - By Phil Plait (LINK)

Scientists Predict Star Collision Visible To The Naked Eye In 2022 [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Links

Farnam Street: The Self Education of Louis L’Amour (LINK)

Some great links and thoughts from Guy Spier (LINK)

The 2016 Stratechery Year in Review (LINK)

Woe to Those Disrupted by Amazon (LINK)

‘Anonymous Billionaire’ in the Spotlight After 1,000% Rally [H/T Matt] (LINK)

EROEI Calculations for Solar PV Are Misleading (LINK)

Andrew Moore, dean of Carnegie Mellon's school of computer science, on Charlie Rose discussing artificial intelligence and robotics (video) (LINK)

This book, which was released yesterday, looks interesting: The Activist Director: Lessons from the Boardroom and the Future of the Corporation 

Josh Waitzkin also mentioned a couple of books on the Tim Ferriss podcast worth mentioning. The first was the Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English translation of the Tao Te Ching. And the other was Sebastian Junger's Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging.

Links

Kindle edition on sale for $1.99 today: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder - by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest article: Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, and the Modern Whistle-Blower (LINK)

Brian Moynihan on Charlie Rose (video) (LINK)

Sohn London Conference Notes 2016 (LINK)

Hussman Weekly Market Comment: Economic Fancies and Basic Arithmetic (LINK)

The past several weeks have brought an enormous amount of loose economic analysis encouraging investors to expect a meaningful surge in economic growth and corporate profits. Most of this hope rests on projections of higher deficit spending and increased domestic investment. It might benefit investors to consider these arguments more closely, and with greater focus on a century of economic evidence than on the verbal arguments of enthusiastic talking heads. 

While there is a strong correlation between growth in gross domestic investment and growth in real GDP, the slope of that relationship is only about 0.2, meaning that even if the growth rate of real gross domestic investment was driven from the recent growth trend of zero all the way back to the previous post-war growth rate of 3.5%, the overall impact on real GDP growth would only be about 0.7% annually, placing the level of U.S. real GDP about 2.8% higher 4 years from today than it would otherwise be. That’s not an annual growth rate, but a cumulative gain. 

Granted, if even a 0.7% boost to annual GDP growth was sustained, it would have a major impact on long-term living standards over a 20-30 year period. But investors have a screw loose if they believe that the overall prospects for GDP growth over the coming 4 years have changed significantly. 

Let’s do some arithmetic here. The primary determinants of GDP growth over time are 1) growth in total employment plus 2) growth in real output per hours worked. There’s a little bit of cyclical variation due to changes in average hours worked, but that difference only shows up meaningfully during recessions. In practice, nearly all of the variation in GDP growth over time is explained by the sum of employment growth plus productivity growth. 

Let’s look at each.

a16z Podcast: The Internet Is Your Movement (LINK)

The Endgame at Saturn Begins (LINK)

The Cassini spacecraft has been orbiting Saturn since 2004, and is one of the most successful missions NASA has ever done. We’ve learned vast amounts of knowledge about the gigantic planet, its moons, and its rings. 

But all good things … after more than a decade of Cassini sending back data and devastatingly beautiful images, NASA has decided to end the mission. With its final days approaching, NASA has decided to take more chances with it. The spacecraft has been sent into a series of risky trajectories, passing over Saturn’s north pole, then diving through the ring plane just outside the rings. These will be the closest approaches to the rings since Cassini first arrived at Saturn.

PBS Documentary on nuclear weapons (2015): The Bomb (video) (LINK)

It began innocently enough. In 1938, two German chemists accidentally discovered how to split the nucleus of the uranium atom: nuclear fission. Einstein’s E=mc2 equation predicted that the amount of energy released from just one atom would be enormous. 

Physicists all over the world immediately realized that fission might make a bomb of extraordinary power — and that Nazi Germany might be capable of creating one. The fear of Adolph Hitler getting a nuclear weapon led to a race to deter him by developing such a bomb first. Thus began a chain of events that would lead inexorably to Hiroshima, the nuclear arms race, the hydrogen bomb, the Cuban Missile Crisis and some of the greatest fear and tension ever in world history.

Links

Michael Lewis on Charlie Rose discussing his new book, The Undoing Project (video) (LINK)

Latticework Of Mental Models: Hyperbolic Discounting (LINK)

Robert Shiller on CNBC (video) (LINK)

Tim Ferriss on CNBC discussing his new book, Tools of Titans (video) (LINK)

What Comes After Mobile? - by Benedict Evans (LINK)

Speaking Truth to Power: An Interview With Peter Buffett (LINK)

Related book: Life is What You Make It: Find Your Own Path to Fulfillment

Jeff Bezos talks with Charlie Rose

Link to video