Links

"It’s pretty hard in a declining business to buy things cheap enough to compensate for the decline." --Warren Buffett (2006) 

What’s Warren Buffett Up to in Europe? [H/T Linc] (LINK)

The Meb Faber Show (podcast): John Huber - Stock Prices Fluctuate Much More Than The Underlying Businesses (LINK)

Paul Tudor Jones on JUST Capital, U.S. Recession, and Gold (video) (LINK)

Kyle Bass Sees Hong Kong Politics 'Speeding Up' Pressure on Dollar Peg (video) (LINK)

Related letters from Bass: 1) "The Quiet Panic in Hong Kong"; 2) "Trouble in Hong Kong- Part Deux"

Leonardo da Vinci’s Huge Notebook Collections, the Codex Forster, Now Digitized in High-Resolution: Explore Them Online (LINK)

For Kindle readers, there are a couple titles of note currently on sale:

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

Links

"Study the past, if you would divine the future." --Confucius 

Berkshire Hathaway Reduces Home Capital Investment (LINK)

Investing Ideas That Changed My Life - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

The 2018 Stratechery Year in Review - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

A new way to look at Leonardo - by Bill Gates (LINK)

Chris Cole talks with Meb Faber (podcast) (LINK)

Daniel Kahneman talks with Tyler Cowen (podcast) (LINK)

Why Do These Dinosaurs Have Long, Twisted Tubes in Their Heads? - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

As most readers of this blog will know, Howard Marks' new book, Mastering the Market Cycle, was released today.

Winning It Back - by Ian Cassel (LINK)

Data Factories - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Buyer beware? - by Seth Godin (LINK)

Atul Gawande talks with Shane Parrish on The Knowledge Project Podcast (LINK)

The world-renowned surgeon, writer, and researcher Atul Gawande shares powerful lessons about creating a culture of safe learning, the critical difference between a coach and a mentor, and how to ensure constant improvement in key areas of your personal and professional life.

Fritjof Capra on the MetaLearn Podcast (LINK)

Related book: The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision

Yuval Noah Harari In Conversation with Christine Lagarde (video) (LINK)

Related book: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Ryan Holiday on Merging Creativity and Business (podcast) (LINK)

A newly discovered extremely distant icy world points to Planet 9 - by Phil Plait (LINK)

What a Beetle’s Genital Worms Reveals About the Concept of Individuality - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

"First, define your own circle of competence with intellectual honesty. You have to know what you don’t know to determine what you know. Second, have the highest degree of fiduciary duty and imagine that every dollar you take from a client is coming from your own middle-class parents who are entrusting their life savings to you." --Li Lu

Chairman of Multibillion-Dollar Investment Firm Elected as New Caltech Trustee (LINK)

Li Lu, the founder and chairman of Himalaya Capital, a multibillion-dollar firm focused on long-term investments in Asia and the United States, has been elected to the Institute’s Board of Trustees.

Real World vs. Book Knowledge - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

Ideas and Institutions: A Growth Story - by Andrew Haldane (LINK)

A collection of Q2 investor letters (LINK)

Short-seller Jim Chanos breaks down his best investment ideas (video...Chanos starts around 11:18) [H/T Linc] (LINK)

The Oral History of Travel's Greatest Acquisition Booking.com (LINK)

One American’s quest to teach Italy — the motherland of espresso — how to do it better (LINK)

Lessons from Elad Gil and High Growth Handbook - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

Related book: High Growth Handbook

The Office-Messaging Wars Are Over. Slack Has Won. (LINK)

Rob Arnott on the Masters in Business Podcast (LINK)

The Jolly Swagmen Podcast: The Man Who Defied Europe - Yanis Varoufakis (LINK)

The Art of Manliness Podcast: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 (LINK)

Related book: Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon - by Robert Kurson 

Leonardo Da Vinci’s To Do List (Circa 1490) (LINK)

Have we finally found liquid water on (well, under) Mars? Maaaaaaaybe. - by Phil Plait (LINK)

***

For Audible members, Audible's latest sale is Sci-Fi & Fantasy audiobooks for $4.95 [And if you're not a member, and haven't yet done a free trial, you can get a free trial and 2 free audiobook credits by signing up HERE.]. Some of the titles that stood out to me are below:

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Snow Crash

The Hobbit

The Fellowship of the Ring

Brave New World

2001: A Space Odyssey

Links

"We tend to go into businesses that inherently are low-risk, and are capitalized in a way that that low risk of the business is transformed into a low risk to the enterprise. The risk beyond that is that even though you...identify such businesses, that you pay too much for them. That risk is usually a risk of time rather than loss of principal, unless you get into a really extravagant situation. But then the risk becomes the risk of you yourself. I mean, whether you can retain your belief in the real fundamentals of the business and not get too concerned about the stock market. The stock market is there to serve you, and not to instruct you. And that’s a key to owning a good business, and getting rid of the risk that would otherwise exist in the market." --Warren Buffett

‘Crush Them’: An Oral History of the Lawsuit That Upended Silicon Valley [H/T @jtepper2] (LINK)

Twenty years ago, Microsoft tried to eliminate its competition in the race for the future of the internet. The government had other ideas.

Tokens (Don’t) Rule Everything Around Me — Thoughts On Security Tokens - by Parker Thompson (LINK)

How To Recover When The World Breaks You - by Ryan Holiday (LINK)

In an Age of Gene Editing and Surrogacy, What Does Heredity Mean? (LINK)

Related book: She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

Kindle book of the day (on sale this month): Leonardo's Notebooks: Writing and Art of the Great Master

What made Leonardo da Vinci a genius?

From Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson:

What made Leonardo a genius, what set him apart from people who are merely extraordinarily smart, was creativity, the ability to apply imagination to intellect. His facility for combining observation with fantasy allowed him, like other creative geniuses, to make unexpected leaps that related things seen to things unseen. “Talent hits a target that no one else can hit,” wrote the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. “Genius hits a target no one else can see.” Because they “think different,” creative masterminds are sometimes considered misfits, but in the words that Steve Jobs helped craft for an Apple advertisement, “While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. 

What also distinguished Leonardo’s genius was its universal nature. The world has produced other thinkers who were more profound or logical, and many who were more practical, but none who was as creative in so many different fields. Some people are geniuses in a particular arena, such as Mozart in music and Euler in math. But Leonardo’s brilliance spanned multiple disciplines, which gave him a profound feel for nature’s patterns and crosscurrents. His curiosity impelled him to become among the handful of people in history who tried to know all there was to know about everything that could be known. 

There have been, of course, many other insatiable polymaths, and even the Renaissance produced other Renaissance Men. But none painted the Mona Lisa, much less did so at the same time as producing unsurpassed anatomy drawings based on multiple dissections, coming up with schemes to divert rivers, explaining the reflection of light from the earth to the moon, opening the still-beating heart of a butchered pig to show how ventricles work, designing musical instruments, choreographing pageants, using fossils to dispute the biblical account of the deluge, and then drawing the deluge. Leonardo was a genius, but more: he was the epitome of the universal mind, one who sought to understand all of creation, including how we fit into it.

Intuition needs nurturing...

From Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson:

When Leonardo was painting The Last Supper, spectators would visit and sit quietly just so they could watch him work. The creation of art, like the discussion of science, had become at times a public event. According to the account of a priest, Leonardo would “come here in the early hours of the morning and mount the scaffolding,” and then “remain there brush in hand from sunrise to sunset, forgetting to eat or drink, painting continually.” On other days, however, nothing would be painted. “He would remain in front of it for one or two hours and contemplate it in solitude, examining and criticizing to himself the figures he had created.” Then there were dramatic days that combined his obsessiveness and his penchant for procrastination. As if caught by whim or passion, he would arrive suddenly in the middle of the day, “climb the scaffolding, seize a brush, apply a brush stroke or two to one of the figures, and suddenly depart.” 

Leonardo’s quirky work habits may have fascinated the public, but they eventually began to worry Ludovico Sforza. Upon the death of his nephew, he had become the official Duke of Milan in early 1494, and he set about enhancing his stature in a time-honored way, through art patronage and public commissions. He also wanted to create a holy mausoleum for himself and his family, choosing a small but elegant church and monastery in the heart of Milan, Santa Maria delle Grazie, which he had Leonardo’s friend Donato Bramante reconstruct. For the north wall of the new dining hall, or refectory, he had commissioned Leonardo to paint a Last Supper, one of the most popular scenes in religious art. 

At first Leonardo’s procrastination led to amusing tales, such as the time the church prior became frustrated and complained to Ludovico. “He wanted him never to lay down his brush, as if he were a laborer hoeing the Prior’s garden,” Vasari wrote. When Leonardo was summoned by the duke, they ended up having a discussion of how creativity occurs. Sometimes it requires going slowly, pausing, even procrastinating. That allows ideas to marinate, Leonardo explained. Intuition needs nurturing. “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least,” he told the duke, “for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.”

.....................

Related previous post: Curiosity and Observation

Links

​Value Investor Klarman Watching for Stumbles Among ‘Unicorns’ (LINK) [And if anyone happens to have a copy of Klarman's letter that they'd be willing to share (valueinvestingworld@gmail.com), I'd be much appreciative. Thanks.]

Morgan Housel's presentation at last year's MicroCap Leadership Summit: What Other Industries Teach Us About Investing (video) (LINK)

Horizon Kinetics: 4th Quarter Commentary [H/T @chriswmayer] (LINK)

Future U.S. Equity Returns: A Best-Case Upper Limit [H/T The Big Picture] (LINK)

The Biggest Electric Vehicle Company You’ve Never Heard Of [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Shenzhen’s BYD, which started as a battery company, is a giant in China—and its ambitions are increasingly global.

Super Bass-O-Matic Subscriptions: Lessons from Rovco on Customer Retention - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

The techlash against Amazon, Facebook and Google—and what they can do (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: Episode 137 — Addicted to Facebook (LINK)

Why you should check email less often, and how to do it (LINK)

The World Has Never Seen an Oil Spill Like This (LINK)

‘Least Racist Person’ Is Scared of Great Whites - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Adam Grant interviews Walter Issacson about his biography of Leonardo da Vinci [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Related book: Leonardo da Vinci

Links

"It seems [Fred] Wilson was correct that software alone is a commodity. In the language of legendary investor Warren Buffett, pure software companies don't have an effective "moat" to defend their business; it's easy for competitors to storm the barricades and overwhelm them. Since most software industries have relatively low barriers to entry—especially today, when startup costs are lower than ever—it's practically guaranteed that a competitor will come along and offer customers similar software that's either better or cheaper. That's where network effects come in.... Networks are much harder to duplicate than features are.... Successful platforms have strong moats in the form of their networks and operate at a scale that positions them to dominate their industries." (via Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy)

Bruce Wayne vs. Leonardo da Vinci - by Christopher Pavese (LINK)

Related book: Leonardo da Vinci

The Most Powerful Research Tool is a Great Network - By Lewis Johnson (LINK)

Disruptive Regulations are coming: This Could Give Shipping Investors Multiple Ways to Win 

The two changes he noted are global environmental standards sponsored by the International Maritime Organization.  The first is the “Ballast Water Management Convention” that went into force late last year.  It requires that newly built ships have waste-water treatment equipment that purifies ballast water to certain minimum levels.  After September 2019, ships that were built before these standards came into force will need a costly upgrade to their equipment to meet this standard for the vessels to pass their periodic inspections.  

The second standard will be implemented in 2020.  I was amazed to learn that the world’s biggest 25 ships emit more sulfur than the entire world’s fleet of cars!  Accordingly, the regulation’s goal is to limit this pollution.  Ship-owners must achieve this goal and have several ways to do so, such as retooling to switch to a less polluting fuel like gas or methanol or by installing scrubbers to lower concentrations of pollutants.

Lessons from the 1980s for disruption. (LINK)

Hype Meets Reality as Electric Car Dreams Run Into Metal Crunch [H/T Matt] (LINK)

When Biology Becomes Engineering (video) (LINK)

Sebastian Junger: "Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS" | Talks at Google (LINK)

On the doorstep of victory - By Bill Gates (LINK)

The world is closer than ever before to wiping out polio. 

Last year, the world saw the fewest number of polio cases—just 21, according to the latest figures. 

That’s incredible, especially when you consider that just 30 years ago, there were 350,000 cases of polio per year worldwide.

Curiosity and Observation

From Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson:

CURIOSITY AND OBSERVATION  

In addition to his instinct for discerning patterns across disciplines, Leonardo honed two other traits that aided his scientific pursuits: an omnivorous curiosity, which bordered on the fanatical, and an acute power of observation, which was eerily intense. Like much with Leonardo, these were interconnected. Any person who puts “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker” on his to-do list is overendowed with the combination of curiosity and acuity.  

His curiosity, like that of Einstein, often was about phenomena that most people over the age of ten no longer puzzle about: Why is the sky blue? How are clouds formed? Why can our eyes see only in a straight line? What is yawning? Einstein said he marveled about questions others found mundane because he was slow in learning to talk as a child. For Leonardo, this talent may have been connected to growing up with a love of nature while not being overly schooled in received wisdom. 

...His curiosity was aided by the sharpness of his eye, which focused on things that the rest of us glance over.... The acuteness of his observational skill was not some superpower he possessed. Instead, it was a product of his own effort. That’s important, because it means that we can, if we wish, not just marvel at him but try to learn from him by pushing ourselves to look at things more curiously and intensely. 

In his notebook, he described his method—almost like a trick—for closely observing a scene or object: look carefully and separately at each detail. He compared it to looking at the page of a book, which is meaningless when taken in as a whole and instead needs to be looked at word by word. Deep observation must be done in steps: “If you wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects, begin with the details of them, and do not go on to the second step until you have the first well fixed in memory.”

Practice and theory...

“Those who are in love with practice without theoretical knowledge are like the sailor who goes onto a ship without rudder or compass and who never can be certain whither he is going.... Practice must always be founded on sound theory.” - Leonardo da Vinci

(Source)

....................

Related previous post: Clayton Christensen and Charlie Munger on theory

Links

"Obviously the stock market is quite irrational in thus varying its valuation of a company proportionately with the temporary changes in reported profits. A private business might easily earn twice as much in a boom year as in poor times, but its owner would never think of correspondingly marking up or down the value of his capital investment." - Ben Graham

Leonardo's Principles - by Ray Dalio (LINK)

Related book: Leonardo da Vinci

Connor Leonard on the Invest Like the Best Podcast (LINK)

Spin Gold From Spinoffs: A Portfolio Of 5 Castoffs Trounces The S&P 500 - by Mohnish Pabrai (LINK)

Not all risk mitigation is created equal - by Mark Spitznagel [H/T Jim] (LINK)

Amazon tells Australian retailers to prepare for orders from Thursday (LINK)

Katrina Lake, Stitch Fix founder & CEO, on CNBC (video) (LINK)

Latticework of Mental Models: Manufactured Memories (LINK)

Tyler Cowen on the Longform Podcast (LINK)

TED Talk -- Mariano Sigman and Dan Ariely: How can groups make good decisions? (video) (LINK)

TED Talk -- Scott Galloway: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google manipulate our emotions (video) (LINK)

Related book: The Four

Edge #504: "A Difference That Makes a Difference" - A Conversation With Daniel C. Dennett (LINK)

How Coral Researchers Are Coping With the Death of Reefs - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Stewart Brand on The Tim Ferriss Show (podcast) (LINK)

Tim Ferriss' new book was also released this week: Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World

Links

CNBC's full interview with Liberty Media's John Malone (video) [H/T Will] (LINK)

One of tech's most successful investors says Silicon Valley's unicorns need to 'grow up' (article and video) (LINK)

Blackstone May Do Its Cleverest CDS Trade Again [H/T Matt] (LINK)

Structures of power: author Michael Lewis on Donald Trump, Wall Street women and Harvey Weinstein [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Business Lessons from Ben Thompson of Stratechery - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: Episode 132 — Successful Disappointments (LINK)

How Entrepreneurial Management Transforms Culture and Drives Growth (LSE podcast) (LINK)

Related book: The Startup Way - by Eric Ries

Kim Jong Un’s North Korea: Life inside the totalitarian state (LINK)

A Chess Novice Challenged Magnus Carlsen. He Had One Month to Train. ($) (LINK)

The da Vinci Pause (LINK)

What DNA Says About the Extinction of America’s Most Common Bird -  by Ed Yong (LINK)

New Zealand’s War on Rats Could Change the World - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Book of the day: The Way We Live Now - by Anthony Trollope [Tim O'Reilly mentioned this book near the end of his chat with Tim Ferriss, when discussing how reading bestselling novels during a given time period can be a great way to learn history, as it gives one a sense for the way people thought about things during that time. And he mentioned the The Way We Live Now as a book about the great railroad bubbles of the 1860s.]

Links

Asking the Right Questions (LINK)

The smaller the company and the more illiquid its currency, the more the investment process becomes an art and less of a science. Just like with any art form, whether it’s music, acting, painting, etc it just takes a lot of time and experience to do it well. The art of investing in small companies is evaluating management teams. If you don’t believe that management is important when investing in small companies like microcaps, just wait a little longer. You will.

The Generalized Specialist: How Shakespeare, Da Vinci, and Kepler Excelled (LINK)

The Rot That Lies Beneath Some Index Funds - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

Investors Playing ETF Rout Pushed Junk Bonds to Brink of Chaos [H/T Rick Bookstaber] (LINK)

Camouflage and dope in a Bull Market - by Sanjay Bakshi (LINK)

Kyle Bass predicts investors are getting ready to pour billions back into Greek economy (LINK)

Stitch Fix and the Senate - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Robert Sapolsky Explains How Religious Beliefs Reduce Stress (article and video) (LINK)

Neil deGrasse Tyson With Walter Isaacson: What Makes a Genius.

Link to video

..........

Related book: Leonardo da Vinci

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 struggle ends when gratitude begins." -Neale Donald Walsch [H/T Ferriss]

"For me, Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo da Vinci have the same life lesson, which is: be interested in everything.... If you can be interested in everything, if you can be cross-disciplinary, then you can see the patterns of our cosmos, and how we connect to them. And that's the magic of Ben Franklin, but even of Steve Jobs...and of course the ultimate of that is Leonardo da Vinci, who was the greatest creative genius in history because he spanned disciplines." -Walter Isaacson [In his answer to the first question in podcast below.]

Walter Isaacson talks with Tim Ferriss (podcast) (LINK)

Related book: Leonardo da Vinci

The Case Against Bridgewater Isn't Proven - by Matt Levine (LINK)

Mohnish Pabrai with a brief interview on ET NOW last week (video) (LINK)

How China’s first ‘silk road’ slowly came to life – on the water [H/T Claire Barnes] (LINK)

What Killed Post-Break Up AT&T? What Lessons can be Learned from this Titanic Modern Failure? - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

Waymo Safety Report  (an overview of how their cars work) [H/T Recode] (LINK)

Scott Galloway's Ask Me Anything on Reddit (LINK)

Related book: The Four

The scale of tech winners - by Benedict Evans (LINK)

a16z Podcast: Platforming the Future (LINK)

Related book: WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

Exponent Podcast: Episode 127 — The Worst-Case Scenario (LINK)

FT Alphachat Podcast: Richard Florida on geographic inequality (LINK)

Related book: The New Urban Crisis

Adventures in Finance Podcast: 37 - Hours from Oblivion: Inside the White House During The Cuban Missile Crisis (LINK)

Atul Gawande: "Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End" | Talks at Google (LINK)

Jimmy Soni & Rob Goodman: "A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age" | Talks at Google (LINK)

Darwin's Backyard: "How Small Experiments Led to a Big Theory" | Talks at Google (LINK)

Octopus-Inspired Material Can Change Its Texture - by Ed Yong (LINK)

How a Quarter of Cow DNA Came From Reptiles - by Ed Yong (LINK)

The Ancient Origins of Both Light and Dark Skin - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

The Lessons of Leonardo: How to Be a Creative Genius - by Walter Isaacson (LINK)

Related book: Leonardo da Vinci

Warren Buffett’s “2 List” Strategy: How to Maximize Your Focus and Master Your Priorities [H/T Kevin Rose] (LINK)

Howard Marks: Nobody knows what will happen (interview) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

Bias from Incentives and Reinforcement (LINK)

Stop Wasting Time - by Ian Cassel (LINK)

Will You Be Ready When the Stock Market Crashes Again? - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

A Half Dozen Lessons about the Right Burn Rate (Post Product/Market Fit in a Connected World) - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

How I Built This podcast -- Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg (LINK)

How the Feuding Kellogg Brothers Fought their Cereal Wars (podcast) [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Related book: The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek

Grant's Podcast: Resources roundtable (LINK)

Jim Chanos on Bloomberg last week (video -- Chanos enters at the 24:30 mark) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

Mutual Fund Observer, October 2017 (LINK)

Seth Godin: "You're doing it wrong" (LINK)

Author and NYU professor Scott Galloway on the Recode Decode podcast (from a couple of weeks ago) (LINK)

Related book (released tomorrow): The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

Freakonomics Radio (podcast): “Tell Me Something I Don't Know” on the topic of Behavior Change (LINK)

Desert Island Discs: Siddhartha Mukherjee (audio) (LINK)

Edge #500: Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination - A Conversation With Tim O'Reilly (LINK)

Related book: WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

Why T. Rex's Puny Arms Are a Sign of Strength (LINK)

Links

Joel Tillinghast Finds Big Returns in Small Stocks ($) (LINK)

Related book: Big Money Thinks Small: Biases, Blind Spots, and Smarter Investing

10,000 Hours With Claude Shannon: How A Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives [H/T @chriswmayer] (LINK)

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

A Dozen Lessons about Product and Services Pricing (Including being “Too Hungry to Eat”) - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

A Tesla 2017 Update: A Disruptive Force and a Debt Puzzle! - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Benchmark Capital sues Travis Kalanick for fraud (LINK)

Walter Isaacson video: What Leonardo can teach us (LINK)

Related book (to be released in October): Leonardo da Vinci

Scott Galloway on the FT Alphachat podcast (LINK)

Related book (to be released in October): The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

a16z Podcast: Centers of Power, War, and History (LINK)

Related book: Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

A Conversation With Richard Dawkins [H/T The Browser] (LINK)

Related book: Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist

How Humans Turned a Sea Snake to the Dark Side - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

"It is a deeply held conviction within economics that our world can be reduced to models that are founded on the solid ground of axioms, plumbed by deductive logic into rigorous, universal mathematical structures. Economists think they have things figured out, but our economic behavior is so complex, our interactions are so profound that there is no mathematical shortcut for determining how they will evolve. The only way to know what the result of these interactions will be is to trace out their path over time: we essentially must live our lives to see where they will go. There is no formula that allows us to fast-forward to find out what the result will be. The world cannot be solved; it has to be lived." -Richard Bookstaber (The End of Theory)

Walter Isaacson talks with David Rubenstein about Leonardo da Vinci (video) (LINK) ["Smart people are a dime dozen. The people who matter are the creative people."]

Related book (to be released in October): Leonardo da Vinci – by Walter Isaacson

The Knowledge Project podcast: Marc Garneau on The Future of Transportation (LINK)

Masters in Business podcast: Chris Anderson and the Long Tail (LINK)

Related books: 1) The Long Tail; 2) Free; 3) Makers

Brent Beshore talks with Vishal Khandelwal (LINK)

Jim Chanos: U.S. Economy is Worse Than You Think [H/T @vitaliyk] (LINK)

Mutual Fund Observer, July 2017 (LINK)

The Absolute Return Letter, July 2017 (LINK)

A Dozen Things I’ve Learned About Startups from Hunter Walk - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

The Lost Art of Thinking - by Frank Martin (LINK)

Related book (back in print): The Art of Thinking – by Ernest Dimnet

The Alternative to Thinking All the Time (LINK)