Links

"It's one thing to have an opinion, and something very different to act as if it's right." --Howard Marks

The CFA Institute's Virtual Conference [Howard Marks, Peter Zeihan, and others] (LINK)

Platforms in an Aggregator World - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

All six parts of Matthew Ball's & Jacob Navok's primer on Epic Games (LINK)

The Rise of TikTok and Understanding Its Parent Company, ByteDance (LINK)

What Is Clubhouse, and Why Does Silicon Valley Care? (LINK)

The 'Don't Worry, Make Money' Strategy Trouncing The Stock Market By 30 Percentage Points (LINK)

Mortgage Credit Tightens, Creating Drag on Any Economic Recovery ($) (LINK)

Could the Pandemic of 2020 Redefine “Enough”? - by Frank K. Martin (LINK)

Can Remote Work Be Fixed? - by Cal Newport (LINK)

Chapter 1 of Matt Ridley's new book, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom (LINK)

Ian Cassel Talks MicroCaps and 100-Baggers on the Chain Reaction Podcast (LINK)

Rob Arnott on WealthTrack (video) (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Shishir Mehrotra – The Art and Science of the Bundle (LINK)

The Talk Show With John Gruber (podcast): 285: ‘Fahrenheit Truthers’, With Ben Thompson (LINK)

Recode Decode Podcast: Brian Chesky: These 9 weeks were the most stressful in Airbnb’s history (LINK)

Acquired Podcast: SpaceX (LINK)

Masters in Business Podcast: Michael Lewis on the Power of Intelligent Leadership (LINK)

Against the Rules with Michael Lewis (podcast): The Coach Effect (LINK)

Tail risk of contagious diseases: a conversation between Nassim Taleb and Pasquale Cirillo (video) (LINK)

Freakonomics Radio (podcast): 419. 68 Ways to Be Better at Life [with Kevin Kelly] (LINK)

Links

Amid the Coronavirus Crisis, a Regimen for Reëntry - by Atul Gawande (LINK)

Scanning for answers to a pandemic - by Bill Gates (LINK)

David Tepper says this is the second-most overvalued stock market he’s ever seen, behind only ’99 (LINK)

Druckenmiller Says Risk-Reward in Stocks Is Worst He’s Seen (LINK)

Daniel Yergin at The Economic Club of New York (video) (LINK)

Related book (September release): The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

BIS paper: US dollar funding markets during the Covid-19 crisis - the money market fund turmoil (LINK)

BIS paper: US dollar funding markets during the Covid-19 crisis - the international dimension (LINK)

Dithering and Open Versus Free - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Steven Kiel interviews Harris Kupperman as well as Calvin Froedge about the opportunity in tankers.

Steve Vafier with the investment case for Stitch Fix (video) (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Tobi Lutke – Building a Modern Business (LINK)

Acquired Podcast: Adapting Episode 3: Intel (LINK)

TC's Chartcast Podcast: #25: Josh Wolfe (LINK)

Against the Rules with Michael Lewis (podcast): Don’t Be Good – Be Great (LINK)

Hope, Through History Podcast: 4 | The Cuban Missile Crisis (LINK)

Eat Rat, Make New Body: Easy Stuff for Pythons - by Carl Zimmer (LINK)

Book of the day (released yesterday): No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention - by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer

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

"Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. The measure of success attained by Wall Street, regarded as an institution of which the proper social purpose is to direct new investment into the most profitable channels in terms of future yield, cannot be claimed as one of the outstanding triumphs of laissez-faire capitalism which is not surprising, if I am right in thinking that the best brains of Wall Street have been in fact directed towards a different object." --John Maynard Keynes

Warren Buffett’s Optimistic? Pessimistic? No, Realistic - by Andrew Ross Sorkin (LINK)

Sam Zell on Market Valuations, Real Estate, Post-Virus Economy (video) [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Spring 2020 issue of Graham & Doddsville (LINK)

Content, Cars, and Comparisons in the "Streaming Wars" - by Matthew Ball (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Ali Hamed – An Update on Private Credit (LINK)

Against the Rules with Michael Lewis (podcast): The Invisible Coach (LINK)

The Case for Deeply Negative Interest Rates - by Kenneth Rogoff (LINK)

MacroVoices Podcast #217 Dr. Lacy Hunt: The Road Through Deflation Toward Eventual Hyperinflation (LINK)

Hope, Through History Podcast: Episode 3 | The Polio Epidemic (LINK)

The Daily Stoic Podcast: Ask Daily Stoic: Ryan and Robert Greene Talk Plagues, Politics, and Polarization (LINK)

All You Need Are a Few Small Wins Every Day - by Ryan Holiday (LINK)

Our message to the class of 2020 - by Bill and Melinda Gates (LINK)

It is time to take seriously the link between Vitamin D deficiency and more serious Covid-19 symptoms - by Matt Ridley (LINK)

Links

"As I've gotten older...I could not help but notice the effect on people of the stories they told about themselves. If you listen to people—if you just sit and listen—you'll find that there are patterns in the way they talk about themselves. There's the kind of person who's always the victim in any story that they tell—always on the receiving end of some injustice. There's the person who's always kind of the hero in every story they tell. The smart person—they deliver the clever put-down. There are lots of versions of this. And you gotta be very careful about how you tell these stories because it starts to become you. You are, in the way you craft your narrative, kind of crafting your character. And so, I did at some point decide: I am going to adopt self-consciously as my narrative that I'm the happiest person anybody knows. And it is amazing how happy-inducing it is." --Michael Lewis [Source]

The Tim Ferriss Show (podcast): #427: Michael Lewis on the Crafts of Writing, Friendship, Coaching, Happiness, and More (LINK)

Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting Transcript 2020 (LINK)

The Investor’s Podcast: TIP295: Mohnish Pabrai on Value Investing & Philanthropy (LINK)

Masters in Business Podcast: Jim Chanos on Financial Fraud (LINK)

Finding Your Balance in a Topsy-Turvy Market - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

Beyond coronavirus: The road ahead for the automotive aftermarke [H/T @chrispavese] (LINK)

How Greenwich Republicans Learned to Love Trump - by Evan Osnos (LINK)

The iconic brands that could disappear because of coronavirus (LINK)

Price Gouging Could Actually Fix Our Face Mask Shortage - by Russ Roberts (LINK)

Old Drugs May Find a New Purpose: Fighting the Coronavirus (LINK)

Why Weren’t We Ready for the Coronavirus? - by David Quammen (LINK)

Making Sense with Sam Harris (podcast): #201 [with Yuval Noah Harari] (LINK)

Hope, Through History Podcast: Episode 1 | FDR and The Great Depression (LINK)

Hope, Through History Podcast: Episode 2 | Winston Churchill and World War II (LINK)

The Man Who Thought Too Fast (LINK)

Book of the day (recommended by Michael Lewis): The Long Ships

Links

"If the business changes in a material way, you’d better change your business model. Or somebody else will. And then you’ll even have more changes facing you.... Capitalism is creative destruction. And sometimes, you’re on the short end of that." --Warren Buffett (2009)

"Some of our businesses have a shared-hardship model, where they don’t layoff, at least not yet. And the businesses with that model tend to be very strongly placed economically. So I guess it shows that Benjamin Franklin was right, when he said, 'It's hard for an empty sack to stand upright.' So we’re all over the map on that, and so is all of industry. But I do think an ideal model would be a business so strong that it could operate in the shared-hardship mode instead of the layoffs." --Charlie Munger (2009)

"Yeah, some are doing that, where you give up hours. But a lot of operations don’t lend themselves to that very well, either. So...in other cases, you basically have to close down whole plants. That’s just the nature of it. You really can’t operate every plant at 50 percent and have it work as effectively as shutting down the least-productive plants." --Warren Buffett (2009)

"In a world where you sometimes have to amputate a limb to stay alive, you can’t expect that every business can stay exactly as it is." --Charlie Munger (2009)

***

Klarman Made $1 Billion Hedging Markets. He Still Lost Money (LINK) [If anyone happens to have a copy of a Baupost quarterly update letter during this time, and is willing to share, it would be greatly appreciated (valueinvestingworld@gmail.com).]

The first 4 video replays of Grant Williams' 2020 Hmmminar Series are available online (LINK) [Marc Cohodes is the latest one from last night, and the next one is scheduled for tonight, with John Hussman.]

FUNDSMITH Annual Shareholders' Meeting - 25th February 2020 (video) (LINK)

Apple, Amazon, and Common Enemies -  by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Sarah Tavel - Consumer & Marketplace Investing (LINK)

The Daily Podcast: A Kids’ Guide to Coronavirus (LINK)

The Peter Attia Drive (podcast): #104 - COVID-19 for kids with Olivia Attia (LINK)

Recode Decode Podcast: Niall Ferguson: How viruses (and fake news stories) spread, and how America screwed up its coronavirus response (LINK)

TED Connects: Why sleep matters now more than ever | Matt Walker (video) (LINK)

The Gene | Part 1: Dawn of the Modern Age of Genetics | PBS (video) (LINK) [A Ken Burns documentary, inspired by Siddhartha Mukherjee's book The Gene.]

WHO must answer serious questions before it is trusted with leading a Covid-19 inquiry - by Matt Ridley (LINK)

The Shelves Are Empty, the Test Swabs Are Gone - by Michael Lewis (LINK)

Some of Warren Buffett’s comments on inflation over the years (LINK)

Book of the day (PDF): Dying of Money: Lessons of the Great German and American Inflations - by Jens O. Parsson

Links

My Learning Process - by Blas Moros (LINK)

Why Time Has Slowed - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

Bill Miller On Why Coronavirus Sell Off Is Buying Opportunity Of Generation (video) (LINK)

A Viral Market Meltdown V: Back to Basics! - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Given the news on the company today, this may be worth revisiting (from a couple of months ago): An anonymous, detailed short thesis on Luckin Coffee

Jim Chanos on CNBC (video) (LINK)

Steve Bregman on Energy (audio) (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Gavin Baker – Investing Through a Bear Market (LINK)

Grant’s Current Yield Podcast: The Grice Man cometh (LINK)

Freakonomics Radio: 411. Is $2 Trillion the Right Medicine for a Sick Economy? (LINK)

How I Built This with Guy Raz (podcast): Live with Guy Online: Jeni Britton Bauer (LINK)

The Peter Attia Drive (podcast): #102 - Michael Osterholm, Ph.D.: COVID-19—Lessons learned, challenges ahead, and reasons for optimism and concern (LINK)

The Four Rules of Pandemic Economics - by Derek Thompson (LINK)

Private Labs Are Fueling a New Coronavirus Testing Crisis (LINK)

A Coronavirus Fix That Passes the Smell Test - by Michael Lewis (LINK)

Is the Coronavirus Airborne? Should We All Wear Masks? - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Longform Podcast: 386: Ed Yong (LINK)

Related articles: 1) "How a Pandemic Might Play Out Under Trump" (December 2016); 2) "The Next Plague Is Coming. Is America Ready?" (July 2018); 3) "How the Pandemic Will End" (March 2020)

Links

Here's what's in the $2T stimulus package — and what's next (LINK)

GMO White Paper | Memo to the (Virtual) Investment Committee II: Fear and the Psychology of Bear Markets - by James Montier (LINK)

Q&A with Murray Stahl (audio recorded March 24, 2020) (LINK)

MOI Global: Isaac Schwartz on Intelligent Investing in Crisis Mode (video) (LINK)

Corporate Socialism: The Government is Bailing Out Investors & Managers Not You - by Nassim Taleb (with Mark Spitznagel) (LINK)

The curious age discrimination of coronavirus - by Matt Ridley (LINK)

The Pandemic in My Neighborhood - by Michael Lewis (LINK)

How Does the Coronavirus Behave Inside a Patient? - by Siddhartha Mukherjee (LINK)

Links

Bill Gates speaks with TED's Chris Anderson about COVID-19 (video) (LINK)

How Will the Coronavirus End? - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Atul Gawande on PBS NewsHour (video) (LINK)

Related article: "Keeping the Coronavirus from Infecting Health-Care Workers"

Against the Rules with Michael Lewis (podcast): Bonus Against the Rules: Help in a Crisis (LINK)

Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman (podcast): Special: Danny Meyer on the wrenching decision to do layoffs (LINK)

David Remnick speaks to the historian John M. Barry, the author of “The Great Influenza,” about parallels between the Spanish-flu outbreak of 1918 and the current coronavirus crisis. (video) (LINK)

Marc Andreessen’s Blog Archives (LINK)

Links

"I think that the most important investment you can make is in yourself. Very, very, very few people get anything like their potential horsepower translated into the actual horsepower of their output in life. Potential exceeds realization to just an enormous factor with so many people.... Your best asset is your own self. And you can become, to an enormous degree, the person you want to be." --Warren Buffett (2008)

Portability and Interoperability - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

How Spices Have Made, and Unmade, Empires [H/T @wolfejosh] (LINK)

Prime Mover: How Amazon Wove Itself Into the Life of an American City (LINK)

The One-Traffic-Light Town with Some of the Fastest Internet in the U.S. (LINK)

The Absolute Return Letter - December 2019: A Future Embedded in the Present (LINK)

Michael Lewis on CNBC (LINK)

My Decade - by Michael Batnick (LINK)

The ergodicity problem in economics - by Ole Peters (LINK) [Mostly technical. For some non-technical thoughts on ergodicity, see Nassim Taleb's Skin in the Game, Blas Moros' summary of the book, or the recent Sanjay Bakshi presentation.]

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation (LINK)

Programming Biology: Read (r), Write (w), Execute (x) (LINK)

Links

On Howard Marks’ Memos (LINK)

Portrait of an Inessential Government Worker - by Michael Lewis (LINK)

Related book: The Fifth Risk (upcoming paperback edition)

Google and Ambient Computing – by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Why New Technology Is A Hard Sell - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

Acquired Podcast: Season 5, Episode 5: Atari (LINK)

How Salesforce Closed the Pay Gap Between Men and Women (LINK)

In an excerpt from his new book, Marc Benioff says he initially didn't believe any pay gap was pervasive in the first place.

Tuning up photosynthesis to feed the world - by Bill Gates (LINK)

Links

"You might have good reason to pray for a tornado, whether it comes in the shape of swirling winds, or a politician. You imagine the thing doing the damage you would like to see done, and no more. It’s what you fail to imagine that kills you." --Michael Lewis ("The Fifth Risk")

What Is a Tech Company? - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

GMO Quarterly Letter | Bigger’s Been Better (LINK)

The Absolute Return Letter, September 2019: Is Ageing Inflationary? Really? (LINK)

The Exclusive Inside Story Of The Fall Of Overstock’s Mad King, Patrick Byrne [H/T @pcordway] (LINK)

Fairfax to invest $5 billion more in India in next 5 years (LINK)

Odd Lots Podcast: Why Value Investing Has Been Doing Terribly (LINK)

The Product Science Podcast: Tim O’Reilly Hypothesis: Build a Market by Building an Ecosystem (LINK)

The Tim Ferriss Show: #384: David Allen — The Art of Getting Things Done (GTD) (LINK)

a16z Podcast: Making Culture, Making Influence — Dapper Dan! (LINK)

Tweet of the day, via @MebFaber, which is also probably why my watch list is filled with UK and other European names:

Over the past 10 years the UK stock market has underperformed the US by about 200 percentage points. 0% return last 12 years...ouch! The good news? UK stocks trade at half the valuation of US stocks across every long term valuation metric.

Book of the day (released next week): The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care--and How to Fix It

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

Links

"Now the search expenses that brought us Ajit Jain, now there was an investment that really paid a dividend. I can think of no higher return investment that we’ve ever made that was better than that one. And I think that’s a good life lesson. In other words, getting the right people into your system can frequently be more important than anything else." --Charlie Munger (2005)

GMO Quarterly Letter: Stop Worrying About Your Portfolio (LINK)

Notes From Sohn New York Investment Conference 2019 (LINK)

Google Fights Back - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Matthew Ball's latest articles (parts 6 and 7) on Netflix misunderstandings came out last week.... Here are links to all 7 parts to date (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7)

Against the Rules with Michael Lewis (podcast): Baby Judge School (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Stephanie Cohen – The Evolution of M&A and Corporate Strategy (LINK)

Mr. Rogers’ Nine Rules for Speaking to Children (LINK)

Will You Choose Alive Time or Dead Time? - by Ryan Holiday (LINK)

The Birth-Tissue Profiteers - by Caroline Chen (LINK)

Links

"Charlie and I spend no time thinking or talking about what the stock market is going to do, because we don’t know. We do know, sometimes, that we’re getting very good value for our money when we buy some stocks or some bonds. But we are not operating on the basis of any kind of macro forecast about stocks. And there’s always a list of reasons...why the country will have problems tomorrow. But there’s always a list of opportunities which don’t get mentioned quite as often." --Warren Buffett (2005)

Warren Buffett Backs Occidental’s Bid for Anadarko with $10 Billion Pledge (LINK)

Microsoft, Slack, Zoom, and the SaaS Opportunity - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Videos from the 2018 Prime Quadrant Conference with Joel Greenblatt, Nassim Taleb, Sam Zell, and Steve Eisman  [H/T ValueWalk]

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

Sam Harris speaks with Shane Parrish about some of the mental models that should guide our thinking and behavior (podcast) (LINK)

Related audiobook: The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts

Rationally Speaking Podcast: Tyler Cowen on “Defending big business against its critics” (LINK)

Related book: Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero

A brief review of the book Fiber (LINK)

Meet the virus hunters - by Bill Gates (LINK)

Links

"Inflation destroys value, but it destroys it very unequally. The best business to have during inflation is one that retains its earning power in real dollars without commensurate investment to, in effect, fund the inflation-produced nominal growth. The worst kind of business is where you have to keep putting more and more money into a lousy business. In effect, the airlines have been hurt by inflation over the last 40 years, because now they have to put a whole lot of money in a lousy investment, which is a plane, compared to 30 or 40 years ago. And they have to stay in the game. They have to keep buying new planes. And the new planes cost far more now, and the returns continue to be inadequate. So the best protection is a very good business that does not require big capital investment...  Inflation is always a factor in calculating the kind of investment, the kind of business, that we want to buy. But it isn’t like it crowds out all other factors. I mean, it’s always been with us. We’ll think about it always." --Warren Buffett (2005)  [Related link: Warren Buffett’s Comments on Inflation]

Geographic Diversification Can Be a Lifesaver, Yet Most Portfolios Are Highly Geographically Concentrated [H/T @MebFaber, whose Twitter thread is worth reading as well] (LINK)

Ray Dalio at Stanford (video) (LINK)

Value Investing with Legends (a new podcast): Mario Gabelli (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Josh Wolfe – The Tech Imperative (LINK)

Against the Rules with Michael Lewis (podcast): The Hand of Leonardo (LINK)

Decrypted Podcast: As Amazon Gets Bigger, Sellers Feel the Squeeze (LINK)

WorkLife with Adam Grant (podcast): When Strength Becomes Weakness (LINK)

Lifesaving Forecasts Start Here: Inside the Storm Prediction Center [H/T @pcordway] (LINK)

Links

"The best investment you can have, for most people, is in your own abilities." --Warren Buffett

Some presentation slides are available from the Ben Graham Centre's 2019 Value Investing Conference [H/T @chriswmayer] (LINK)

Prediction is Difficult, Especially About the Future (LINK)

When You’ll Believe Anything - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

Hard Truths for the Inflation Truthers - by Cullen Roche (LINK)

Secrecy, Self-Dealing, and Greed at the N.R.A. (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: Family-Friendly Disney (LINK)

Longform Podcast: Michael Lewis (LINK)

Freakonomics Radio: The Most Interesting Fruit in the World (LINK)

Radiolab Podcast: Americanish (LINK)

Scientists Partly Restore Activity in Dead-Pig Brains - by Ed Yong (LINK)

The Predator That Makes Great White Sharks Flee in Fear - by Ed Yong (LINK)

TED Talk: Inside the black hole image that made history | Sheperd Doeleman (LINK)

Links

"The history of much of which we don’t like in modern corporate capitalism comes from an unreasonable expectation, communicated from headquarters, that [corporate] earnings have to go up with no volatility and great regularity. That kind of an expectation from headquarters is not just the kissing cousin of evil. It’s the blood brother of evil. And we just don’t need that blood brother in our headquarters." --Charlie Munger (2005)

 "Businesses do not meet expectations quarter after quarter and year after year. It just isn’t in the nature of running businesses. And, in our view, people that predict precisely what the future will be are either kidding investors, or they’re kidding themselves, or they’re kidding both. Charlie and I have been around the culture, sometimes on the board, where the ego of the CEO became very involved in meeting predictions which were impossible, really, over time. And everybody in the organization knew, because they were very public about it, what these predictions were and they knew that their CEO was going to look bad if they weren’t met. And that can lead to a lot of bad things." --Warren Buffett (2005)

Michael Mauboussin: Looking for Easy Games in Bonds (LINK)

A compilation of Q1 investor letters [H/T @MineSafety] (LINK)

CNBC’s interview with ValueAct’s Jeff Ubben (video) (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Katherine Collins – Impact and ESG Investing (LINK)

Against the Rules with Michael Lewis (podcast): The Alex Kogan Experience (LINK)

WorkLife with Adam Grant (podcast): Bouncing Back from Rejection (LINK)

The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish (podcast): Catalyzing Success (LINK)

Business Wars Podcast: Ferrari vs. Lamborghini (Part 1, Part 2)

Edge #535: Machines Like Me - A Talk By Ian McEwan (LINK)

The world’s deadliest shapeshifter - by Bill Gates (LINK)

Exploding Aphids Plaster Holes in Their Home With Bodily Fluids - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

Released today: The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts

A Regulatory Framework for the Internet - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Frackers, Chasing Fast Oil Output, Are on a Treadmill ($) (LINK)

Why is a good management so important? A talk with Robert Vinall on his approach (video) (LINK)

Against the Rules with Michael Lewis (podcast): The Seven Minute Rule (LINK)

The Tim Ferriss Show: Eric Schmidt — Lessons from a Trillion-Dollar Coach (LINK)

WorkLife with Adam Grant (podcast): How to Remember Anything (LINK)

Venture Stories Podcast: Tyler Cowen On His New Book: “Big Business: A Love Letter To An American Anti-Hero” (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Geoffrey Batt – The Nature of Transformational Returns (LINK)

The Investing City Podcast: Portfolio Manager, Gautam Baid: Joyful Compounding (LINK)

Related book: The Joys of Compounding