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"In terms of generally advancing within organizations, I think you’d be surprised at how little competition you really  have if you start thinking like you would if you were an owner of the place, and working like you would if you were an owner of the place, and pretty soon you may be running something." --Warren Buffett (2010)

Armed With Swabs, Covid Hunters Stalk Their Prey - by Michael Lewis (LINK)

Michael Lewis in Conversation with Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg (podcast) (LINK)

Bronte Capital's Q1 Letter [H/T Linc] (LINK)

[There's another great collection of Q1 letters HERE.]

What Have We Learned Here? - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

The Psychology of Masks (LINK)

The Glut Drowning the Oil Market ($) (LINK)

Here’s What to Know If You Must Sign Up for Cobra Health Insurance ($) (LINK)

Cloud Gaming: Why It Matters And The Games It Will Create - by Matthew Ball & Jacob Navok (LINK)

Tom Colicchio’s Plan to Save Restaurants (LINK)

The Joe Rogan Experience (podcast): #1470 - Elon Musk (LINK)

Recode Media Podcast: Michael Jordan’s Last Dance, with director Jason Hehir (LINK)

A Much-Hyped COVID-19 Treatment Has a Weird Connection to Black-Market Cat Drugs - by Sarah Zhang (LINK)

The Problem With Stories About Dangerous Coronavirus Mutations - by Ed Yong (LINK)

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Howard Marks warns of 'dark' impact of trade war [H/T Linc] (LINK)

An Economic Warning Sign: RV Sales Are Slipping ($) (LINK)

The Network Effects Manual: 13 Different Network Effects (and counting) [H/T @ChrisPavese] (LINK)

Thinking aloud about bank margins - Part 1 - by John Hempton (LINK)

Odd Lots Podcast: John Hempton on What’s Ailing Bank Stocks (LINK)

Masters in Business Podcast: Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments (LINK)

a16z Podcast: Software has eaten the world…and healthcare is next (LINK)

EconTalk Podcast: Tyler Cowen on Big Business (LINK)

The Investor’s Podcast: TIP256: Raoul Pal - Global Financial Concerns (LINK)

Hidden Forces Podcast: Hong Kong Revolution: Geopolitical & Financial Implications for China and the World | David Webb (LINK)

A summary of The Courage to be Disliked (LINK)

Ebola outbreak spreads to third province in eastern Congo [H/T @Atul_Gawande] (LINK)

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“Busts are the product of booms, and I’m convinced it’s usually more correct to attribute a bust to the excesses of the preceding boom than to the specific event that sets off the correction. But most of the time there is a spark that starts the swing from bullish to bearish.” --Howard Marks (“Now What?,” January 2008)

Pershing Square's reason for buying shares in Berkshire Hathaway [pages 10-12 of report] (LINK)

John Hempton on the Markopolis GE paper (Post 1, Post 2)

Why Viacom Fell (And Why It Can Come Back) (LINK)

Pushing on a String - by Frank K. Martin (LINK)

WeWork IPO Shows It’s the Most Magical Unicorn (LINK)

Everything about the company is over-the-top: its growth, losses, potential conflicts of interest and financial gymnastics.

What is We!? Understanding the WeWork IPO - by Byrne Hobart [H/T @BrentBeshore] (LINK)

The Disruptive Voice Podcast: A Jobs-To-Be-Done Masterclass with Andrew Glaser and Bob Moesta (LINK)

Revisionist History Podcast: Chutzpah vs. Chutzpah (LINK)

A Tissue Sample From 1966 Held Traces of Early HIV - by Ed Yong (LINK)

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Advantage Flywheels - by Max Olson (LINK)

Where Did This ‘Bull Market’ Come From, Anyway? - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

Buffett Steers Clear of Buying Stocks; Berkshire’s Cash Pile Hits a Record (LINK)

Bill Murray and Warren Buffett spotted at Ted and Wally's in downtown Omaha (LINK)

Good for Google, Bad for America - by Peter Thiel (LINK)

The latest Ken Henry blow-up - by John Hempton (LINK)

The Tides Trump the Waves - by Frank K. Martin (LINK)

Focused Compounding Podcast: 103. Ian Cassel and The Power of Capacity Constrained Investing Strategies (LINK)

Techmeme Ride Home Podcast: The State of Amazon With Jason Del Rey (LINK)

The Rank Hypocrisy of Trump’s Ebola Tweets - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Incredible, must-see video: 'The Comet,' a film noir view of 67P (LINK)

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"It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer." --Albert Einstein

Ruane, Cunniff & Goldfarb Investor Day Transcript (May 2019) [H/T @BluegrassCap] (LINK)

John Hempton on The Jolly Swagman Podcast (LINK)

The Fireworks Over Share Buybacks Are Duds - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

Share buybacks are as American as mom, apple pie and hot dogs on the Fourth of July. 

You’d never guess that given the many politicians on both the left and the right who say share repurchases are a newfangled, evil spawn of deregulation. 

Complexity Investing [H/T @BluegrassCap] (LINK)

My Questions About Negative-Yielding Debt - by Ben Carlson (LINK)

Marketing 3.0: How L’Oréal is embracing new marketing codes [H/T @ivan_brussels] (LINK)

Raoul Pal with a Twitter thread about some of the macro risks he sees in Europe (LINK)

Short Seller Targets Anta in Another Attack on China’s Biggest Sportswear Company ($) (LINK)

Carson Block’s firm takes aim at Anta in report titled ‘Turds in the Punchbowl’

Huawei staff share deep links with Chinese military, new study claims (LINK) [The paper is available HERE.]

Cyberweapons: A Real Worry - by Kevin Kelly (LINK)

Ben Thompson on The Talk Show With John Gruber Podcast (LINK)

Techmeme Ride Home Podcast: The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates? (Part 1, Part 2)

Robert Greene: "The Laws of Human Nature" | Talks at Google (LINK)

TED Talk: Grief and love in the animal kingdom | Barbara J. King (LINK)

Ancient life awakens amid thawing ice caps and permafrost [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Not a Human, but a Dancer - by Ed Yong (LINK)

What Snowball the parrot’s spontaneous moves teach us about ourselves

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A write-up on the book The Path of Least Resistance - Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life by Robert Fritz (LINK)

Patsy in the Game - by Sanjay Bakshi (LINK)

Mr. Market Just Got Inside Your Head. Don’t Let Him Mess With You. - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

Negative Rates, Designed as a Short-Term Jolt, Have Become an Addiction ($) (LINK)

Europe’s central banks haven’t been able to wean the eurozone off cheap money, which distorts economies and leaves little ammunition to cushion a downturn

The New Social Status - by Steven Wood (LINK)

Researchers have no idea when electric cars are going to take over (LINK)

All Eyes On The U.S. Truck Market - by Daniel Ruiz (LINK)

WorkLife with Adam Grant (podcast): Fadbusting (LINK)

Freakonomics host Stephen Dubner joins Adam for a live conversation to reveal why some popular workplace fads might be bogus—and what to do instead.

John Hempton on The Jolly Swagman Podcast discussing housing in Australia (LINK)

Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us? - by Cal Newport (LINK)

Bill Gates recommends 5 books for the summer (LINK)

The books: 1)  Upheaval - by Jared Diamond; 2) Nine Pints - by Rose George; 3) A Gentleman in Moscow - by Amor Towles; 4) Presidents of War - by Michael Beschloss; 5) The Future of Capitalism - by Paul Collier

An update from the fight to eradicate polio - by Bill Gates (LINK)

Bonobo Mothers Are Very Concerned About Their Sons’ Sex Lives - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Book of the day: Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom

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"There are things in life that you don’t have to make a decision on and that are too hard.... One of the interesting things about investment is that there’s no degree of difficulty factor.... We get paid, not for jumping over 7-foot bars, but for stepping over 1-foot bars. And the biggest thing we have to do is decide which ones are the 1-foot bars and which ones are the 7-foot bars so when we go to step we don’t bump into the bar. And that is something that I think we’re reasonably good at. Now maybe we cast out too many things as being too hard and thereby narrow our universe. But I’d rather have the universe be interpreted as being a little smaller than it really is, than being interpreted as larger than it is." --Warren Buffett (2005) 

Connor Leonard's presentation to the Value Investing Club at Google (LINK)

Spring 2019 issue of Graham & Doddsville (LINK)

2019 Value Investing Conference | Keynote Speaker: Kiril Sokoloff (video) (LINK)

2019 Value Investing Conference | Keynote Speaker: Lawrence A. Cunningham (video) (LINK)

Gates’s Law: How Progress Compounds and Why It Matters (LINK)

A critical step to reduce climate change - by Bill Gates (LINK)

Against the Rules with Michael Lewis (podcast): The Magic Shoebox (LINK)

Related book: Flash Boys

O Behave Podcast: Rory discusses Alchemy & The Surprising Power Of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense (LINK)

Related book: Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life - by Rory Sutherland 

The Knowledge Project Podcast: Popping the Filter Bubble (with DuckDuckGo CEO, Gabriel Weinberg) (LINK)

A Truly Remarkable Spider - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Today's Audible Daily Deal ($3.95) is one I've seen recommended by at least one science writer: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

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Jake Taylor's book, The Rebel Allocator, has just been released, and I'm really looking forward to reading it. Jake is the man behind the Five Good Questions interviews, and Jake's book is his mission to distill some key lessons on capital allocation that he's learned from Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, and the other greats that many of us follow into a fictional, story format that will be interesting to a wider audience, as well as to those of us in the investing world. As Jake described it in an interview: 

I was working hard on a non-fiction guide to proper capital allocation. It felt like different books, podcasts, and conversations at that time were telling me I needed to write a fictional story if there was any chance of my book still mattering in ten years. The emotion of a story is all that persists. Around that same time I lost a close friend my age to a tragic hiking accident. It was a wake up call. If I were to disappear tomorrow, what kind of book would I want to leave as a literary legacy for my two young boys? It certainly wasn’t a dry, non-fiction, vanity project that no one would care about in six months. I had to try something radically different and tell a story. This lead to researching hero’s journeys and even screenplay writing to learn about character arcs and dynamic pacing to engage the reader. I hope the book reads a little like watching a movie.

***

John Hempton reviews the book The Myth of Capitalism (LINK)

What Amazon’s Rise to No. 1 Says About the Stock Market - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

How Aging Japan Defied Demographics and Revived Its Economy - by Greg Ip (LINK)

Back to Class: A Teaching Manifesto! - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History Podcast: 63 - Supernova in the East II (LINK)

Brent Beshore on The Learning Leader Show (podcast) (LINK)

Related book: The Messy Marketplace

60 Minutes video: Facial and emotional recognition; how one man is advancing artificial intelligence (LINK)

a16z Podcast: All About Synthetic Biology (LINK)

a16z Podcast: The Science and Business of Innovative Medicines (LINK)

Cal Newport on The Ezra Klein Show (podcast) (LINK)

Related book: Digital Minimalism

A review of “The Big One,” a new podcast from the Southern California NPR station KPCC about the potential devastation an earthquake could cause in Los Angeles (LINK)

What Happens When the President Doesn’t Have a Science Adviser - by Ed Yong (LINK)

A cool video of New York City in 1911 [H/T @Jesse_Livermore] (LINK)

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"The game in our kind of life is being able to recognize a good idea when...it rarely is presented to you. And I think that’s something you have to prepare for over a long period. What is the old saying? That opportunity comes to the prepared mind? And I don’t think you can teach people in two minutes how to have a prepared mind. But that’s the game." --Charlie Munger

When Markets Tank, Do This - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

Tariffs Hit Those Trump Wants to Help: U.S. Factories ($) (LINK)

Book Review: Mastering the Market Cycle (LINK)

Howard Marks on The Investors Podcast (LINK)

Related book: Mastering the Market Cycle

Did Uber Steal Google’s Intellectual Property? - by Charles Duhigg (LINK)

How Manhattan Became a Rich Ghost Town - by Derek Thompson (LINK)

Lessons from Annie Duke - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

Related book: Thinking in Bets

John Hempton's 2011 post on Sears Holdings (LINK)

My view: owning Sears as a property play is a demonstration of the arrogance and breathtaking naivete of much that passes on Wall Street. Sears Holdings has over 300 thousand employees. I don't know how you successfully liquidate a business integrated with that many lives. I don't know of anyone who has ever successfully liquidated a business with that many employees.** I am not sure it can be done and it certainly can't be done by someone with my skill-set (highly analytical, ability to spy value or value traps but no people management skill and not much tact). 

The idea that Sears was going to be managed/liquidated by a bunch of hedge fund guys (people like me) well - that was comical. 

Just to stress the point for my fund manager friends who read accounts and have my skills (but like me are often disconnected from the businesses they invest in) I will state the obvious. The employees are living breathing people and as you pull the business apart the way you treat those people and how they think about you (and behave towards you) are critical to any value you extract in liquidation. Someone has to look these people in the eye and tell them they don't have a job. And someone has to pick-and-choose which people to fire and which to retain. And they have to do this without destroying much of the value extracted along the way. They have to liquidate the firm in such a way that the value accrues to the liquidators and not to the people who are being screwed. 

I don't care what you think of the morality of that. The reality of that is that it was always going to be hard - possibly very hard.

Stephen Hawking feared race of ‘superhumans’ able to manipulate their own DNA [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Related book: Brief Answers to the Big Questions

Male Gorillas Love Hanging Around With Infants - by Ed Yong (LINK)