Links

"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)

Links

"Our approach is really to try and learn vicariously. But there’s a lot of mistakes that I’ve repeated, I can tell you that. The biggest one, probably — or the biggest category over time — is being reluctant to pay up a little for a business I knew was really outstanding, or to continue to buy it at higher prices when I knew it was outstanding. The cost of that has been many, many billions. And I’ll probably keep making that mistake. The mistakes are made when there are businesses you can understand and they’re attractive and you don’t do something about it. I don’t worry at all about the mistakes that come about because when I met Bill Gates, I didn’t buy Microsoft or something. That’s not my game. Most of our mistakes have been mistakes of omission rather than commission." --Warren Buffett (1997)

The Hollywood Drama That Cost a BlackRock Fund $75 Million - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

U.S. Airlines Face Test as Epidemic Spreads ($) (LINK)

We all need to change how we live our lives to fight this generation of pandemics - by Matt Ridley (LINK)

Corona Panic - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

How the Horrific 1918 Flu Spread Across America (2017 article) [H/T @rationalwalk] (LINK)

Related book: The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History

1997 article from Malcolm Gladwell: "The Dead Zone" (LINK)

Seven bodies buried in the Arctic tundra might solve the riddle of the worst flu pandemic in history—and might help us prevent it from happening again.

Absolute Return Letter, March 2020: Five Lessons from History (2/5) (LINK)

Innovations in payments (BIS Quarterly Review) (LINK)

Stripe Teardown: How The $35B Payments Company Plans To Supercharge Online Retail [H/T @david_perell] (LINK)

The Acquirers Podcast: Passive Agro: Michael Green on the looming threat from passive indexing, shorting XIV and what value guys can do (LINK)

Hidden Forces Podcast: Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World | Peter Zeihan (LINK)

Related book: Disunited Nations

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum Podcast: EP10 Strangelove Whisperings (LINK)

Origin Stories Podcast: 41: Tribes Old and New (LINK)

The Five Revolutions in Cancer Treatment (LINK)

Jack Welch, Legendary CEO of General Electric, Dies at Age 84 (LINK)

Links

"Another thing to avoid is extremely intense ideology because it cabbages up one's mind. You see a lot of it in the worst of the TV preachers. They have different, intense, inconsistent ideas about technical theology, and a lot of them have minds reduced to cabbage. And that can happen with political ideology. And if you're young, it's particularly easy to drift into intense and foolish political ideology and never get out. When you announce that you're a loyal member of some cult-like group and you start shouting out the orthodox ideology, what you're doing is pounding it in, pounding it in, pounding it in. You're ruining your mind, sometimes with startling speed. So you want to be very careful with intense ideology. It presents a big danger for the only mind you're ever going to have." --Charlie Munger (Poor Charlie's Almanack, Talk Ten: USC Gould School of Law Commencement Address)

First, Do No Harm - by Ben Thompson (LINK) [Thompson was also on a panel for a Public Workshop on Venture Capital and Antitrust: VIDEO.]

Hidden Forces Podcast: The Decline of Active Management, the Rise of Market Nihilism, & the Fall of the Roman Republic | Mike Green (LINK)

Conversations with Tyler (podcast): Tim Harford on Persuasion and Popular Economics (LINK)

Ryan Holiday interviews Tim Ferriss (podcast) (LINK)

Ezra Klein with Malcolm Gladwell: Why We’re Polarized (video) (LINK)

China’s “Iron House”: Struggling Over Silence in the Coronavirus Epidemic - by Evan Osnos (LINK)

Links

"I would say that I like a certain amount of social intervention that takes some of the inequality out of results in capitalism. But I hate, with a passion, rewarding anything that can be easily faked. Because I think then people lie, and lying works, and the lying spreads. And I think your whole civilization deteriorates." --Charlie Munger (1996)

Sam Zell on Bloomberg TV discussing buying distressed oil assets, discussing WeWork, and discussing why he's not investing in Hong Kong.

Past as Prologue - by Frank K. Martin (LINK)

The Case Against Boeing (LINK)

Stephen Schwarzman on The David Rubenstein Show (video) (LINK)

Related book: What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence

Planet MicroCap Podcast: 100 - Investing: It’s All About the Journey with Ian Cassel (LINK)

The Joe Rogan Experience (podcast): #1383 - Malcolm Gladwell (LINK)

Related book: Talking to Strangers

The Tim Ferriss Show (podcast): #395: Jocko Willink Takeover — On Quitting, Relationships, Financial Discipline, Contrast Baths, and More (LINK)

Links

"Wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it." --Benjamin Franklin

Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan (LINK)

Fall 2019 issue of Graham & Doddsville (LINK)

The Heilbrunn Center's Schloss Archive is also worth going back and checking out periodically (LINK)

The Knowledge Project Podcast: #68 Daniel Kahneman: Putting Your Intuition on Ice (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: 175 — The Abyss Stares Back (LINK)

The Next Big Idea Podcast: Malcolm Gladwell and David Epstein on the Keys to Success (LINK)

Related book: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Links

"The inflow of money and outflow of money should not be, in our view, attempted to be matched too carefully in this world, because you get investment and business opportunities at times that differ from the times that funds come in. And one of the most important disciplines in running a business or managing investments is to not try to coordinate your actions simply with the availability of cash." --Warren Buffett (1996)

Channels: The Business of Communications periodical, dated November 1986 (Warren Buffett cover) [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Three Big Things: The Most Important Forces Shaping the World - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

How a Public Narrative Can Move Markets - by Frank K. Martin (LINK)

Why Ken Fisher Advertises So Much (LINK)

The Map and the Terrain - by Ben Horowitz (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: 174 — Distracted at Facebook (LINK)

The Ezra Klein Show (podcast): Malcolm Gladwell’s Stranger Things (LINK)

Related book: Talking to Strangers

The Tim Ferriss Show (podcast): #389: Neil deGrasse Tyson — How to Dream Big, Think Scientifically, and Get More Done (LINK)

HBR IdeaCast: 703: Melinda Gates on Fighting for Gender Equality (LINK)

Value Investing with Legends Podcast: Jenny Wallace - Identifying Value at the Summit (LINK)

Mars sounds weird - by Phil Plait (LINK)

Links

"The whole secret of investment is to find places where it’s safe and wise to non-diversify. It’s just that simple. Diversification is for the know-nothing investor; it’s not for the professional."  --Charlie Munger (2008) 

"And there’s nothing wrong with the know-nothing investor practicing it. It’s exactly what they should practice. It’s exactly what a good professional investor should not practice. There’s no contradiction in that. A know-nothing investor will get decent results as long as they know they’re a know-nothing investor, diversify as to time they purchase their equities, and as to the equities they purchase. That’s crazy for somebody that really knows what they’re doing. And you will find opportunities that, if you put 20 percent of your net worth in it, you’ll have wasted the opportunity of a lifetime, in terms of not really loading up. And we’ve had the chance to do that, way, way in our past, when we were working with small sums of money. We’ll never get a chance to do that working with the kinds of money that Berkshire does. We try to load up on things. And there will be markets when we get a chance to from time to time, but very seldom do we get to buy as much of any good idea as we would like to." --Warren Buffett (2008)

What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max? - by William Langewiesche (LINK)

Bob Iger Remembers Steve Jobs, the Pixar Drama, and the Apple Merger That Wasn't. (LINK)

Related book: The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company

Insights on VC Pricing: Lessons from Uber, WeWorks and Peloton! - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Am I a market fundamentalist? - by Russ Roberts (LINK)

Steve Schwarzman talks with James Altucher about his new book, What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence (podcast) (LINK)

Malcolm Gladwell talks with Oprah about his new book, Talking to Strangers (podcast) (LINK)

One Protein Makes Ebola Deadly. Scientists Can Turn it Off (LINK)

A final message from T. Boone Pickens shared before his passing on September 11, 2019 (LINK)

Links

"You’ve got to remember that it’s the nature of things that most small businesses will never be big businesses. It’s also in the nature of things that most big businesses eventually fall into mediocrity or worse." --Charlie Munger (2008) 

The iPhone and Apple’s Services Strategy - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Battle of the Bubbles [H/T @ShaneAParrish] (LINK)

The early darling of fizzy water is losing ground to big soda, and shareholders are questioning its management.

T. Boone Pickens, the ‘Oracle of Oil,’ corporate raider and billionaire philanthropist, dies at 91 (LINK)

Decrypted Podcast: Is Your Amazon Habit Wrecking the Planet? (LINK)

With ‘Talking to Strangers,’ Malcolm Gladwell Goes Dark (LINK)

Related book: Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know

Malcolm Gladwell on Talking to Strangers (video) (LINK)

Would you eat an animal if you knew it was as old as the U.S. Constitution? (LINK)

Book of the day (released next month): The Body: A Guide for Occupants - by Bill Bryson

Links

"No person has the power to have everything they want, but it is in their power not to want what they don’t have, and to cheerfully put to good use what they do have." --Seneca

The Big Short’s Michael Burry Sees a Bubble in Passive Investing (LINK)

‘They Get Fired All the Time. And They Have No Idea Why.’ [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Pop culture lionizes the dazzling brilliance of money managers on the autism spectrum. Reality rarely measures up.

How you can make better predictions [H/T Linc] (LINK)

You Better Love This - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

Bethany McLean on the Axios Pro Rata podcast discussing her latest article (LINK)

Venture Stories Podcast: A Primer on Information Marketplaces (LINK)

An excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell's upcoming audiobook, Talking to Strangers (LINK)

A Game of Giants - by Tim Urban (LINK)

Vulnerability: The Key to Better Relationships - by Mark Manson (LINK)

The Amazon Is Not Earth's Lungs - by Peter Brannen (LINK)

Book of the day: Faster, Higher, Farther: How One of the World's Largest Automakers Committed a Massive and Stunning Fraud

Links

"The job of the board of directors is to have the right CEO. I mean, if you’ve got the right CEO, 90 percent of it takes care of itself. If you were the director of Cap Cities and you had Tom Murphy as the CEO, case closed. It was all you needed. And if you have that CEO, I think you have an obligation on the board to make sure that there’s not overreaching by the CEO, because the CEO can have different interests. And I think the third thing that the board should do is they really should bring some independent judgment in on major acquisitions. Because there is a natural tendency for people with, usually, big egos, big motors, who get to be CEOs that like to do big things and to become bigger spending other people’s money.... So I think in those three respects, a good director will first make an affirmative decision [that] you’ve got a very good CEO — not the best in the whole world, not everybody can do that — but a very good CEO. That that CEO is not overreaching. And when significant deals come along, that they get a chance to weigh in, and that you really get a balanced discussion about the real economics of what you’re doing." --Warren Buffett (2007)

The Long View Podcast -- Rob Arnott: Don’t Sleep on Value Investing (LINK)

RA Conversations: The Inverted Yield Curve and Stock Returns (video) (LINK)

Cam Harvey explains the link between the yield curve inversion and future stock returns as well as why value offers investors a potential hedge against downside risk after a yield curve inversion.  

The risks grow that the passive and algorithmic transformation of equity markets could lead to a crisis. (LINK)

The Meb Faber Show: #171 - Raoul Pal - Buy Bonds. Buy Dollars. Wear Diamonds. (LINK)

The Art of Manliness Podcast: How to Achieve a “Rich Life” With Your Finances [with Ramit Sethi] (LINK)

Related book: I Will Teach You to Be Rich

The Stephen Wolfram Podcast: A Very Brief History of Mathematics [H/T @nntaleb] (LINK)

Revisionist History Podcast: The Obscure Virus Club (LINK)

Venture Stories Podcast: The Most Well-Read Person in the World on The Future of Reading with Robert Cottrell (LINK)

Audiobooks or Reading? To Our Brains, It Doesn’t Matter (LINK)

What If I Said No? (And Other Questions to Consider Daily) - by Ryan Holiday (LINK)

A Simple Invention Could Change How Fast Disease Is Detected - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Book of the day: The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West - by David McCullough

Links

I may have posted this before, but since I saw it making the rounds again, and in case anyone hasn't seen it..... large Berkshire/Buffett compilation.

Howard Marks on Loans, Distressed Investing, Fed Policy (video) (LINK)

How Economists’ Faith in Markets Broke America - by Sebastian Mallaby [book reviews] (LINK)

Revisionist History Podcast: In a Metal Mood (LINK)

Two seasons after its investigation of the decline of McDonalds french fries, Revisionist History returns to fast-food’s high-tech test kitchens. This time the subject is cultural appropriation. The case study is Taco Bell. Oh, and Pat Boone is involved.

Links

"At Oaktree we say, 'Well bought is half sold.' By this we mean we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what price we’re going to be able to sell a holding for, or when, or to whom, or through what mechanism. If you’ve bought it cheap, eventually those questions will answer themselves. If your estimate of intrinsic value is correct, over time an asset’s price should converge with its value." --Howard Marks ("The Most Important Thing")

Board Upgrades Its Scrutiny of Financial Planners - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

Boyar Research's Q2 Letter (LINK)

The Absurdities of 'Franchise Fatigue' & 'Sequelitis' (Or, What Is Happening to the Box Office?!) - by Matthew Ball (LINK)

Notes on the book Let My People Go Surfing (LINK)

Video: Software Eats Care Delivery (LINK)

Revisionist History Podcast: Descend into the Particular (LINK)

Astronomers are watching a star die in real time - by Phil Plait (LINK)

The Tumor That Broke All the Rules - by Ed Yong (LINK)

A Scientist Witnessed Poachers Killing a Chimp - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

"Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power." --Seneca

A Few Gentle Thoughts on Journalism - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

What You Gain—and Lose—When You Lock Money Up for the Long Run - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

America’s Public Pensions Are Stuck In The Clouds ($) (LINK)

Beyond Ridiculous (LINK)

Oaktree Insights: Structured Credit Primer & Commentary (LINK)

Paradigm Shifts - by Ray Dalio (LINK)

Kyle Bass on CNBC last week (video) (LINK)

Value Investing with Legends Podcast: Connecting Theory and Practice Through The 5x5x5 Student Investment Fund (LINK)

Today’s conversation is with Tom Russo, the master of consumer brand investing, and two of our best students, Jeffrey Johnson '19 and Michael Allison '19. We’re talking about the 5x5x5 Student Investment Fund and having a deep discussion about some of the specific stocks in the portfolio. The concept for the 5x5x5 fund came out of Tom’s concern that conventional investment funds for students offered limited learning potential due to their short-term nature and was made possible by a generous gift given by him and his wife, Georgina.

a16z Podcast: The Search for the Secret Metal that Powers All Our Devices (LINK)

Revisionist History Podcast: Dr. Rock’s Taxonomy (LINK)

Radiolab Podcast: G: Unnatural Selection (LINK)

This past fall, a scientist named Steve Hsu made headlines with a provocative announcement. He would start selling a genetic intelligence test to couples doing IVF: a sophisticated prediction tool, built on big data and machine learning, designed to help couples select the best embryo in their batch. We wondered, how does that work? What can the test really say? And do we want to live in a world where certain people can decide how smart their babies will be?

Should the Rich Be Allowed to Buy the Best Genes? - by Walter Isaacson (LINK)

What Tick Saliva Does to the Human Body - by Sarah Zhang (LINK)

The Stump That Didn’t Die - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Through underground connections with its neighbors, it somehow stays alive. What does that say about the concept of a tree, or the future of forests?

Book of the day: The Bubble that Broke the World - by Garet Garrett

Audible also has some notable titles currently on sale for $5....

The Fifth Risk - by Michael Lewis

Skunk Works - by Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos

The Crusades - by Thomas Asbridge

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World - by Andrea Wulf

The Sixth Extinction - by Elizabeth Kolbert

Cosmos - by Carl Sagan

Links

"Volatility is not a measure of risk.... Risk comes from the nature of certain kinds of businesses. It can be risky to be in some businesses just by the simple economics of the type of business you’re in, and it comes from not knowing what you’re doing. And if you understand the economics of the business in which you are engaged, and you know the people with whom you’re doing business, and you know the price you pay is sensible, you don’t run any real risk." --Warren Buffett (2007)

"One of the reasons we’ve been able to do pretty well is that we early recognized that very smart people do very dumb things. And we tried to figure out why. And we also wanted to know who, so we could avoid them." --Charlie Munger (2007)

Financial Twitter Loses a Source of Humility and Wisdom, but Good Voices Remain - by Jason Zweig (LINK) [And a big thank you to @jasonzweigwsj, an ultimate must-follow, for including me in his list.]

Twitter isn’t just a megaphone for bragging about yourself and insulting your enemies, real or imagined. All investors should appreciate that some financial thinkers have turned the social-media site into a force for enlightenment and fun—if you follow the right people. 

That’s never been clearer than it was a few days ago, when the person behind the @Nonrelatedsense account died, prompting an outpouring of love and grief in the financial quadrant of Twitter known as FinTwit. (Although I know who he was and where he worked, I’m honoring the wishes of his family and friends to preserve his anonymity.) 

Those who followed him, even without meeting him in real life, felt as if we had lost one of our smartest friends.

The Meb Faber Show (podcast): #165 - Chris Mayer - I Do Think The Biggest Challenge…Is Keeping It, Holding On To It (LINK)

Related books: 1) 100 Baggers: Stocks That Return 100-to-1 and How To Find Them; 2) 100 to 1 in the Stock Market: A Distinguished Security Analyst Tells How to Make More of Your Investment Opportunities - by Thomas W. Phelps

Revisionist History Podcast: The Standard Case (LINK)

If You’re Angry, You’re Part of the Problem, Not the Solution - by Ryan Holiday (LINK)

Blurring Offline and Online: More on the Potential of Long Tail Social Media - by Cal Newport (LINK)

The Future of the City Is Childless - by Derek Thompson (LINK)

America’s urban rebirth is missing something key—actual births.

Apollo 11 at 50 (LINK)

The Disturbing Sound of a Human Voice - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Hearing people talk can terrify even top predators such as mountain lions, with consequences that ripple through entire ecosystems.

The WHO Finally Sounds Its Loudest Alarm Over Ebola in the Congo - by Ed Yong (LINK)

The ongoing outbreak is the second worst in history and has proved to be unusually difficult to contain.

Links

"When you’re trying to determine something like intrinsic value and margin of safety and so on, there’s no one easy method that could be simply mechanically applied by, say, a computer and make anybody who could punch the buttons rich. By definition, this is going to be a game which you play with multiple techniques and multiple models, and a lot of experience is very helpful. I don’t think you can become a great investor very rapidly any more than you could become a great bone tumor pathologist very rapidly. It takes some experience and that’s why it’s helpful to get a very early start.... We’ve never had any system for being able to make correct judgments on the values of all businesses. We throw almost all decisions into the too hard pile, and we just sift for a few decisions that we can make that are easy. And that’s a comparative process. And if you’re looking for an ability to correctly value all investments at all times, we can’t help you." --Charlie Munger (2007)

"We know how to step over one-foot bars. We don’t know how to jump over seven-foot bars. But we do know how to recognize, occasionally, what is a one-foot bar. And we know enough to stay away from the seven-foot bars, too." --Warren Buffett (2007)

On Writing - by Chris Pavese (LINK) [A big thanks to Jason Zweig for the writing series last year (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), and to Chris for this summary of some key points. I've also added Chris' highlights of Jason's series to the end of my file on writing tips.]

Lucy Kellaway on turning 60 — and starting out afresh [H/T @jasonzweigwsj] (LINK)

Shopify and the Power of Platforms - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

The Amazon Arbitrage - by David Perell (LINK)

History of Public SaaS Returns and Valuations (LINK)

Six Reasons Why the Rebate Rule Failed—And What’s Next (LINK)

Value Investing with Legends: Taking a Top-Down Approach to Value Investing [with Jean-Marie Eveillard] (LINK)

Venture Stories Podcast: The Intersection of Financial Services and Marketplaces (LINK)

The James Altucher Show: 470 - Ramit Sethi: (Part 2) (LINK)

Related book: I Will Teach You to Be Rich

Revisionist History Podcast: Good Old Boys (LINK)

Stuff You Should Know Podcast: How Sloths Work (LINK)

No, You Can’t Make a Person Change - by Mark Manson (LINK)

Have You Seen Britain’s Tiny Potential Tree-Killer, the Adorable Spittlebug? (LINK)

A Groundbreaking Study Is Good News for Cats—And People - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

"You don’t get paid for what’s already happened. You only get paid for what’s going to happen in the future. The past is only useful to you in the extent to which it gives you insights into the future, and sometimes the past doesn’t give you any insights into the future." --Warren Buffett (2007)

Being Ethical Is Long-term Greedy (LINK)

Markel Omaha brunch 2019 (video) (LINK)

Use Your Edge (LINK)

Why Things Break: Easy Causes of Business and Investing Failure (LINK)

Tim Wu Explains Why He Thinks Facebook Should Be Broken Up (LINK)

Related book: The Curse of Bigness

The Absolute Return Letter - July 2019: Energy Misconceptions (LINK)

A Return to Tiananmen - by Peter Zeihan (Part I: The Evolution of China, Part II: The Ending of Hong Kong)

Grant’s Current Yield Podcast: Middle Kingdom microscope (LINK)

Eric Cinnamond talks small cap, absolute return value investing with Tobias Carlisle on The Acquirers Podcast (LINK)

The James Altucher Show (podcast): 468 - David Epstein: Proof That It’s Never Too Late to Master Something New (LINK)

Related book: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Revisionist History Podcast: Tempest in a Teacup (LINK)

American Innovations Podcast: Biologist Timothy Mousseau Can’t Stop Going Back To Chernobyl (LINK)

AI: Hype vs. Reality: Doctor AI (LINK)

Eric Topol on the Making Sense podcast (LINK)

Related book: Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again

(Re)Building the Good Society (video) (LINK)

Humanization, Dehumanization and Other Things Psychologists Do (video) (LINK)

Alex Honnold: A Soul Freed (video) (LINK)

Edge #545: Collaboration and the Evolution of Disciplines - A Talk By Robert Axelrod (LINK)

Related book: The Evolution of Cooperation

Why Waves of Seaweed Have Been Smothering Caribbean Beaches - by Ed Yong (LINK)

For Smart Animals, Octopuses Are Very Weird - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Book of the day: The Last Pirate of New York: A Ghost Ship, a Killer, and the Birth of a Gangster Nation - by Rich Cohen

"We learn who we are in practice, not in theory." --Herminia Ibarra

Links

"The nature of the private equity activity is such that it really isn’t a bubble that bursts. Because if you’re running a large private equity fund and you lock up $20 billion for five or longer years and you buy businesses which are not priced daily, as a practical matter — even if you do a poor job, it’s going to take many years before the score is put up on the score board, and it takes many years, in most cases, for people to get out of the private equity fund even if they wished to earlier.... The investors can’t leave and the scorecard is lacking for a long time. What will slow down the activity — or what could slow down the activity — is if yields on junk bonds became much higher than yields on high-grade bonds. Right now the spread between yields on junk bonds and high-grade bonds is down to a very low level, and history has shown that periodically that spread widens quite dramatically. That will slow down the deals, but it won’t cause the investors to get their money back." --Warren Buffett (2007)

Jony Ive Leaves Apple, Ive’s Legacy, The Post-Ive Apple - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Nudgestock 2019: Gerd Gigerenzer - Less is more: Decision making under uncertainty (video) [H/T @mikedariano] (LINK)

Related book: Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions

Oaktree Insights: Are There Still Winners in a Maturing Real Estate Cycle? (LINK)

Have Power, Respect Power, and Use Power Wisely - by Ray Dalio (LINK)

The Massive ‘Pig Ebola’ Epidemic Will Give Trump Big Leverage In His Trade Standoff With China - by J. Kyle Bass and Daniel Babich (LINK)

The Attention Diet - by Mark Manson (LINK)

The side of Paul Allen I wish more people knew about - by Bill Gates (LINK)

The Tim Ferriss Show (podcast): #375: Josh Waitzkin — How to Cram 2 Months of Learning into 1 Day (LINK)

Revisionist History Podcast: The Tortoise and the Hare (LINK)

Value Investing with Legends Podcast: Investing with Curiosity [with Christopher Davis] (LINK)

Five Good Questions Podcast: Gautam Baid - The Joys of Compounding (LINK)

EdgeCast (podcast): Barbara Tversky - The Geometry of Thought (LINK)

Related book: Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought

Nature Podcast: Nature PastCast, June 1876 (LINK)

According to the fables of early explorers, the gorilla was a terrible, man-eating monster. It was also thought to be man’s closest relative in the animal kingdom. Naturally, scientists and the public alike wanted to see these fierce beasts for themselves. But in the mid-nineteenth century, as the evolution debate heated up, getting a live gorilla to Europe from Africa was extremely difficult. In 1876, the pages of Nature report the arrival in England of a young specimen.

North Atlantic Right Whales Are Dying in Horrific Ways - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Notes on the book Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing (LINK) [This book is also fantastic as an audiobook.]

 "Man has known for a long time that getting too enchanted with the trappings of power is counterproductive. The Roman emperor that’s most remembered as presiding over a period of great felicity was Marcus Aurelius, who was totally against the trappings of power even though he had them all — he had all the power. So I think all these things can be abused, and I think the best way to tackle a subject is to provide examples of contrary behavior." --Charlie Munger (2007)

Links

David Sackler Pleads His Case on the Opioid Epidemic - by Bethany McLean (LINK)

The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be ($) [H/T @BrentBeshore] (LINK)

Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think [H/T @morganhousel] (LINK)

The Appeal of 21st Century Stoicism (LINK)

Related book: How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius

On Crypto and Its Implications for American Technology Innovation (LINK)

Editor’s Note: This testimony was delivered by a16z managing partner (and former chairman of the board of the National Venture Capital Association) Scott Kupor to the House Agriculture Committee as part of their public hearings on “Cryptocurrencies: Oversight of New Assets in the Digital Age” in July 2018. 

Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky Demystifies Depression, Which, Like Diabetes, Is Rooted in Biology (2009 video) (LINK)

Revisionist History Podcast: Puzzle Rush (LINK)

Stuff You Should Know Podcast: What happened to the Neanderthals? (LINK)

Narlugas Are Real - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

"We don’t play big trends. We don’t think about demographic trends or anything of the sort.... Big trends, they just don’t mean that much. There’s too much money to be made from year to year to think about things that take decades to manifest themselves." --Warren Buffett (2006) 

Brilliant stock picker John Neff, who ran Vanguard's Windsor Fund and built Penn’s endowment, dies at 87 (LINK)

Terry Smith presents the full Fundsmith FEET 2019 Annual Shareholders' Meeting (video) (LINK)

A 2017 paper from Ernst & Young: "Getting ROIC right" [H/T @_inpractise] (LINK)

Related paper: "Calculating Return on Invested Capital" (Mauboussin, Callahan); Related book (2006): Cash Return on Capital Invested: Ten Years of Investment Analysis with the CROCI Economic Profit Model

The Joe Rogan Experience (podcast): #1309 - Naval Ravikant (LINK)

Related podcast: Naval: How to Get Rich: Every Episode

The Ezra Klein Show (podcast): Michael Lewis reads my mind (LINK)

Conversations with Tyler (podcast): Russ Roberts on Life as an Economics Educator (LINK)

Standard Deviations Podcast: Brent Beshore - Building a “Baby Berkshire” (LINK)

Crazy/Genius Podcast: Influencers: Frauds or the Future of Online Commerce? (LINK)

Venture Stories Podcast: A Deep Dive On InsureTech with Karn Saroya and Sheel Mohnot (LINK)

Solvable Podcast: Homelessness is Solvable (LINK)

Malcolm Gladwell talks to Rosanne Haggerty about ending homelessness for everyone. Forever.

Kevin Kelly on Still Untitled: The Adam Savage Project Podcast (LINK)

AI: Hype vs. Reality Podcast: AI On The Job (LINK)

Humane: A New Agenda for Tech (video) [H/T @harari_yuval] (LINK)

The Deep Sea Is Full of Plastic, Too (LINK)

Links

"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for." --Epicurus

Mark Leonard. An Anthology of Lessons [H/T @Gautam__Baid] (LINK)

China, Leverage, and Values - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Jeffrey Gundlach and Danielle DiMartino Booth at the Rockefeller Center's Rainbow Room discussing macro and the economy (video) (LINK)

On the topic of macro, A Brief History of Doom: Two Hundred Years of Financial Crises looks like it could be interesting.

Against the Rules with Michael Lewis (podcast): Bonus Live Episode: Michael Lewis and Malcolm Gladwell (LINK)

The Tim Ferriss Show: #371: Ramit Sethi (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Priya Parker – The Art of Gathering (LINK)

Related book: The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

TED Talk: Sloths! The strange life of the world's slowest mammal | Lucy Cooke (LINK)

Why So Many Sharks Have Bird Feathers in Their Bellies - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Apollo Astronauts, in Their Own Words (LINK)

Marcus Aurelius on Embracing Mortality and the Key to Living with Presence (LINK)

"The longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose." --Marcus Aurelius