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"Ben Graham said long ago that you’re neither right nor wrong because people agree with you or disagree with you. In other words, being contrarian has no special virtue over being a trend follower. You’re right because your facts and reasoning are right. So all you do is you try to make sure that the facts you have are correct.... And then once you have the facts, you’ve got to think through what they mean. And you don’t take a public opinion survey. You don’t pay attention to things that are unimportant. What you’re looking for [are] things that are important and knowable. If something’s important but unknowable, forget it. I mean, it may be important to know whether somebody’s going to drop a nuclear weapon tomorrow but it’s unknowable. And there are all kinds of things are that knowable but are unimportant. In focusing on business and investment decisions, you try to narrow it down to the things that are knowable and important, and then you decide whether you have information of sufficient value that—compared to price and all that—will cause you to act. What others are doing means nothing." --Warren Buffett (2006)

Unbreakable - by Ian Cassel (LINK)

Fraud in the Bull Market videos [H/T @colemanrhawkins] (LINK)

Bethany McLean Has Something To Say, and You Should Listen (video) (LINK) [The first episode of McLean's new podcast is free, HERE.]

Hayman’s Kyle Bass on trouble in Hong Kong (video) (LINK)

Your Employee Health Plan Could Soon Look Like Your 401(k) ($) (LINK)

Trump to Issue Executive Order on Health-Care Price Transparency ($) (LINK)

A candid conversation with EA's Andrew Wilson at E3 2019 (LINK)

Jeff Bezos took another veiled shot at Elon Musk, arguing that reaching Mars is an 'illusion' without going via the moon (LINK)

Are millennials really growing horns from using their phones? - by John Hawks (LINK)

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“People get smarter but they don’t get wiser. They don’t get more emotionally stable. All the conditions for extreme overvaluation or undervaluation absolutely exist, the way they did 50 years ago. You can teach all you want to the people, you can tell them to read Ben Graham’s book, you can send them to graduate school, but when they’re scared, they’re scared.” --Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett: ‘I’m having more fun than any 88-year-old in the world’ ($) (LINK)

How We Spend Our Money, Part II - by Phil Ordway (LINK)

You Played Yourself - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

Kyle Bass Is Ready to Rumble on Hong Kong 'Time Bomb' ($) (LINK)

Having a Printing Press Doesn't Mean Money is Infinite - by Cullen Roche (LINK)

The World According To Boyar Podcast Episode 9: Mario Gabelli (LINK)

Living With Money Podcast: Brent Beshore (LINK)

Business Wars Podcast: Ferrari vs. Lamborghini (Part 3, Part 4)

Edge #536: How to Create an Institution That Lasts 10,000 Years - A Conversation with Alexander Rose (LINK) [Also available as a podcast.]

On finding something to say - by Seth Godin (LINK)

This Is the Way the Animals Arose: Not With a Bang, but With a Bunch of Bangs - by Ed Yong (LINK)

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Jamie Dimon's 2018 Letter to Shareholders (LINK)

The Berkshire Empire Is Quietly Collaborating More Than Ever ($) (LINK)

What seven years at Airbnb taught me about building a company - by Lenny Rachitsky (LINK)

The avocado principles - by Seth Godin (LINK)

Future of Higher Education: Apprenticeships vs. Business School (LINK)

Robert A. Caro on L.B.J., Understanding Power and Nearing Completion (LINK)

Jane Goodall’s original tale of chimpanzees still astonishes today (LINK)

To celebrate her 85th birthday, National Geographic revisits Jane Goodall’s 1963 article about the chimpanzees of Gombe Stream Game Reserve.

Book of the day (released next week): The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning - by Gautam Baid 

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"There is less risk in owning three easy-to-identify, wonderful businesses than there is in owning 50 well-known, big businesses.... If you find three wonderful businesses in your life, you’ll get very rich." --Warren Buffett (1996)

"If you’re right about the companies, you can hold them at pretty high values." --Charlie Munger (1996)

"We really have a great reluctance to sell businesses where we like both the business and the people. So I don’t think I’d count on seeing many sales. But if you ever attend a meeting here, and there are [holdings at] 60 or 70 times earnings, keep an eye on me.... You can really hold them at extraordinary levels if you’ve got [wonderful businesses]." --Warren Buffett (1996)

"Generally speaking, I think if you’re sure enough about a business being wonderful, it’s more important to be certain about the business being a wonderful business than it is to be certain that the price is not 10 percent too high or 5 percent too high or something of the sort." --Warren Buffett (1997)

"All intelligent investing is value investing. You have to acquire more than you really pay for, and that’s a value judgment. But you can look for more than you’re paying for in a lot of different ways. You can use filters to sift the investment universe. And if you stick with stocks that can’t possibly be wonderful to just put away in your safe deposit box for 40 years, but are underpriced, then you have to keep moving around all the time. As they get closer to what you think the real value is, you have to sell them, and then find others. And so, it’s an active kind of investing. The investing where you find a few great companies and just sit on your ass because you’ve correctly predicted the future, that is what it’s very nice to be good at." --Charlie Munger (2000)

Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger on diversification (video excerpt from the 1996 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting) (LINK)

Related previous post: Charlie Munger on diversification

***

The BuzzFeed Lesson - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Greenhaven Road Capital's Q4 Letter (LINK)

Horizon Kinetics Q4 Commentary [H/T @chriswmayer] (LINK) [There are also a bunch more Q4 investor letters posted HERE.]

For Bill Simmons’s The Ringer, Podcasting Is the Main Event ($) (LINK)

Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, on EconTalk (podcast) (LINK)

Opportunity costs just went up - by Seth Godin (LINK)

Getting Ahead By Being Inefficient (LINK)

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"The only way to be loved is to be lovable.... But the nice thing about it, of course, is that...you always get back more than you give. I don’t know whether it was Oscar Hammerstein or who said,... 'A bell’s not a bell till you ring it, a song’s not a song till you sing it. Love in the heart isn’t put there to stay. Love isn’t love till you give it away.' And basically you’ll always get back more than you give away. And if you don’t give any, you don’t get any. It’s very simple." --Warren Buffett (2003)

Things I’m Pretty Sure About - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

Managing reputation in the age of infinity - by Seth Godin (LINK)

Why Regulators Went Soft on Monopolies - by Jonathan Tepper (LINK)

Strong and Weak Technologies - by Chris Dixon (LINK)

a16z Podcast: What’s Next for Marketplace Startups (Hint: Services) (LINK)

Vinod Khosla on How to Build the Future (video) (LINK)

10% Happier Podcast: Oliver Burkeman, The Power of Negative Thinking (LINK)

The French Burglar Who Pulled Off His Generation’s Biggest Art Heist [H/T @oraunak] (LINK)

The World Shifts When a Black Widow Squats - by Ed Yong (LINK)

I finally got around to listening to Joe Rogan's podcast with Matthew Walker discussing his book Why We Sleep, and there is a bunch of interesting information and tips in the episode. It also looks like there are some good notes on the key ideas from the podcast HERE.

"It's not just that you...go to sleep and you replay and you hit the save button on these new memories;  you actually sculpt out those memories and you improve them. And we've done some of these with motor skill learning, critical for athletic performance, and practice does not make perfect—practice with a night of sleep is what makes perfect, because you come back the next day and you're 20 to 30% better in terms of your skilled performance than where you were at the end of your practice session the day before. Sleep is the greatest, legal performance-enhancing drug that most people are probably neglecting in sport.... Skill learning, memory and then also...in the body all over—the recuperative benefits. And you can flip a coin, by the way, if you're getting 6 hours of sleep or less, your time to physical exhaustion drops by up to 30%.... [You should get] somewhere between 7 to 9 hours [of sleep]. Once you get below 7 hours of sleep we can measure objective impairments in your brain and your body " --Matthew Walker

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"The key to [Benjamin] Graham’s approach to investing is not thinking of stocks as stocks or part of a stock market. Stocks are part of a business. People in this room own a piece of a business. If the business does well, they’re going to do all right as long as they don’t pay way too much to join into that business....  It doesn’t make any difference to us whether the volatility of the stock market...averages a half a percent a day or a quarter percent a day or 5 percent a day. In fact, we’d make a lot more money if volatility was higher, because it would create more mistakes in the market. So volatility is a huge plus to the real investor.... As an investor, you love volatility. Not if you’re on margin, but if you’re an investor you aren’t on margin. And if you’re an investor, you love the idea of wild swings because it means more things are going to get mispriced." --Warren Buffett (1997 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting)

On Writing Better: Becoming a Writer - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

Aggregators and Jobs-to-be-Done - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Business Insider IGNITION conference video (Day 1) (LINK) [Paul Graham and Drew Houston at 27:55; Dalio at 1:42:45; Scott Galloway at 3:30:25]

Decrypted Podcast: The Secrets Hidden in Our Google Location Data (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Maureen Chiquet – Leadership Through Hard Conversations (LINK)

Do I Deserve What I Have? Part I - by Russ Roberts (LINK)

Situational spending - by Seth Godin (LINK)

The CRISPR Baby Scandal Gets Worse by the Day - by Ed Yong (LINK)

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CNBC's full interview with John Malone (~55 minutes) (LINK)

Real Vision has made the full interview with Stanley F. Druckenmiller, which was filmed in early September, freely available for all (LINK)

How This All Happened - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

The story of how America evolved from 1945 to 2018.

How Warren Buffett Is Expanding His Overseas Real Estate Empire [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Why I love fertilizer - by Bill Gates (LINK)

How to Weigh Your Options and Decide Wisely: Benjamin Franklin’s Pioneering Pros and Cons Framework (LINK)

How Amazon Picked HQ2 and Jilted 236 Cities ($) (LINK)

A Reckoning With the Dark Side of the Restaurant Industry ($) [H/T @trengriffin] (LINK)

On the other hand, young cooks’ heightened expectations don’t always take into account low wages or difficult labor, restaurateurs say. Dreams of fame and fortune have driven growth in culinary schools and programs and encouraged thousands of students to finance this education with debt. 

Last year, 672 culinary programs were accredited by the ACF, compared with roughly 100 in 1998, Ms. Brust says. More than 39,000 students matriculated from two-year or four-year culinary degree programs accredited by the ACF last year. Yet the Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts the creation of only 14,100 new chef and head-cook jobs by 2026. There will be 10 times as many “cook” jobs, but these pay half as much. 

Restaurant cooks make a median wage of $12.10 an hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Culinary-school graduates are no exception, even at top-tier restaurants in expensive cities, a number of restaurateurs say. While some top chefs can earn six figures, the median annual wage for chefs and head cooks is $45,950, according to the BLS.

Focused Compounding Podcast: Talking MicroCap Investing with MicroCapClub's Ian Cassel (LINK)

Capital Allocators Podcast: Michael Lombardi – Leadership Through Football (LINK)

Related book: Gridiron Genius

Seth Godin talks about his new book on his podcast (LINK)

Jocko Podcast 151: How to Really Implement Change. Different Leadership Styles. Balancing Discipline. Different Jiu Jitsu Styles. (LINK)

The Myth Of the Traumatized Neanderthal - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

A reminder to readers, especially those in and around New York City, the super-early-bird pricing for the Project Punch Card Conference ends on November 7th. 

***

"Once you crank into your mental apparatus that you’re not looking at things that wiggle up and down on charts, or that people send you little missives on, you know, saying buy this because it’s going up next week, or it’s going to split, or the dividend’s going to get increased, or whatever, but instead you’re buying a business. You’ve now set a foundation for going on and thinking rationally about investing. And there’s no reason why you need a high IQ to do that. There’s no reason why you have to be born in some way. I do think there’s certain matters of temperament that may be innate, they may be learned, they may be intensified by experience as you go on, partially innate, but then reinforced in various ways by your experience as you go through life, but that’s enormously important. I mean, you have to be realistic. You have to just define your circle of competence accurately. You have to know what you don’t know and not get enticed by it.... You’ve got to have an interest in money, I think, or you won’t be good in investing. But I think if you’re very greedy, it’ll be a disaster, because that will overcome rationality." --Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Repurchases More Than $900 Million of Stock ($) (LINK)

Berkshire’s Repurchase Policy: Too Little, Too Late? (LINK)

Howard Marks chats with James Altucher (podcast) (LINK)

Related book: Mastering the Market Cycle

The Tim Ferriss Show: Seth Godin on How to Say “No,” Market Like a Professional, and Win at Life (LINK)

Related book: This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See  

Related 2010 article (mentioned in the podcast): The world’s worst boss

Elon Musk: The Recode interview (podcast and transcript) (LINK)

Robert Cialdini on the Masters in Business podcast (LINK)

Leithner Letter No. 229-232 (LINK)

Unpacking Industry 4.0 (LINK)

Could Military Veterans Change More Than Control of Congress? - by Evan Osnos (LINK)

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"I do find that most creative people end up applying different rules to their lives—in terms of how their lives are managed—because creativity doesn't necessarily conform to more traditional boundaries; whether their hours of work, places of work, circumstances. What you have to accept with creators and creativity is that one rule doesn't apply. It's whatever works for them." --Bob Iger

Bob Iger’s Bets Are Paying Off Big Time for Disney (LINK)

Howard Marks talks with Barry Ritholtz (podcast) (LINK)

Related book: Mastering the Market Cycle

Robert Vinall with an excellent letter on the 10-year anniversary of his fund [registration required] (LINK)

A great list of Investment Resources [H/T Linc] (LINK) [It may be especially worthwhile to read THIS, 10 years after the event.]

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon doesn't think he has too much power in this economy (Corner Office podcast) (LINK)

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Investor Sentiment and the Housing Market -  by John Huber (LINK)

Risk Management - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

How Humans Get Hacked: Yuval Noah Harari & Tristan Harris Talk with WIRED (video) (LINK)

Yuval Noah Harari, historian and best-selling author of Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and Tristan Harris, co-founder and executive director of the Center for Humane Technology, speak with WIRED Editor in Chief Nicholas Thompson.

Lawrence Burns: "AUTONOMY: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car" | Talks at Google (LINK)

Yale Is Said to Invest in Crypto Fund That Raised $400 Million (LINK)

The Fed on Unemployment and the Future - by Frank K. Martin (LINK)

Jim Grant on CNBC yesterday (video) (LINK)

Michael Lewis calls Trump's approach to staffing the government 'insane' (video) [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Related book: The Fifth Risk

For Real Vision subscribers, Kyle Bass sits down with Graham Allison, author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, to chat about China, geopolitics, history, and more (LINK) [If you're not a subscriber and would to join or take a free trial, you can sign up HERE.]

Human Action: A Chapter-by-Chapter Summary (LINK)

Four roads we call customer service - by Seth Godin (LINK)

On the Law of Diminishing Specialization - by Cal Newport (LINK)

Your Work Is the Only Thing That Matters - by Ryan Holiday (LINK)

A Controversial Virus Study Reveals a Critical Flaw in How Science Is Done - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Slightly More Than 100 Fantastic Articles [H/T Phil] (LINK)

A list of nonfiction journalism from 2017 that will stand the test of time.

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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)

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"We generally believe you can just see anything in markets. I mean, it's just extraordinary what happens in markets over time. It gets sorted out eventually, but we have seen companies sell for tens of billion dollars that are worthless. And at times, we have seen things sell for...literally 20 percent or 25 percent of what they were worth. So we have seen and will continue to see everything. It’s just the nature of markets. They produce wild, wild things over time. And the trick is, occasionally, to take advantage of one of those wild things and not to get carried away when other wild things happen because the wild things create their own truth for a while." --Warren Buffett (2000)

Links to some old Ben Graham articles (via Twitter) [H/T @jasonzweigwsj] (LINK)

Mohnish Pabrai interview in The Economic Times (LINK)

The checklist that I created came out of looking at mistakes made by great investors. The single biggest reason why investments don’t work out for investors is leverage. The second biggest reason has to do with a misunderstanding of the comparative advantage of the moat. Then you get to management and ownership and other issues. You might get to environmental or unions and labour and that sort of things. The three really big things are — leverage, moats and management, probably in that order. 

More than money, Berkshire’s Todd Combs coming on Paytm board is the best outcome (LINK)

The Race of Our Lives Revisited (in a nutshell) - Jeremy Grantham (LINK)

In this abridged version of “The Race of Our Lives Revisited” Jeremy Grantham provides a detailed discussion of the long-term, slow-burning problems that threaten us today: climate change, population growth, increasing environmental toxicity.

Citron Research's short thesis on Wayfair (LINK)

Akimbo Podcast: Ignore sunk costs (LINK)

Radiolab Podcast: Baby Blue Blood Drive (LINK)

Does Our Cultural Obsession With Safety Spell the Downfall of Democracy? (LINK)

Fred Rogers: a quiet psychological revolution in children’s television (LINK)

Related book: The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers  

Related documentary: Won't You Be My Neighbor?

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GMO Quarterly Letter: Emerging Markets—No Reward Without Risk (LINK)

The Incredible Story of Gert Boyle and Columbia Sportswear (LINK)

For Real Vision subscribers, Jean-Marie Eveillard makes an appearance in a chat with Jim Grant (LINK) [If you're not a subscriber and would to join or take a free trial, you can sign up HERE.]

Lessons from Michael Batnick (Big Mistakes) - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

Related book: Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments

Worth paying for - by Seth Godin (LINK)

When you bring a product or service to the free market, the market decides what it’s worth. If you don’t want to be treated like a commodity (a race to the bottom), there are two paths: 

Through scarcity: This is worth extra because there’s not a lot of it or we’re the only one who’s got it. 

Through connection: This is worth extra because everyone else is already using it. 

A little or a lot.

a16z Podcast: Earned Secrets (LINK)

What does it really take to start a startup (or work at one)? In this episode of the a16z Podcast — based on a Q&A with Ben Horowitz as part of an event hosted by a16z’s Technical Talent and People Practices team for a16z portfolio company summer interns 2018 — Ben shares quick thoughts and advice geared towards those early in their tech careers.

EconTalk Podcast: Frank Dikotter on Mao's Great Famine (LINK)

Related book: Mao's Great Famine

The Art of Manliness Podcast: The Life of a Dragon — The Untold Story of Bruce Lee (LINK)

Related book: Bruce Lee: A Life

Scientists Have Uncovered a Disturbing Climate Change Precedent - by Peter Brannen (LINK)

Book of the day (will be released next month): 21 Lessons for the 21st Century - by Yuval Noah Harari

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The world’s greatest investors: John Maynard Keynes [H/T CIO] (LINK)

Related previous post: John Maynard Keynes' change in investment philosophy

A Conversation With Robert J. Shiller (video) [H/T CIO] (LINK)

Related books: Irrational Exuberance 3rd edition; Phishing for Phools

Andre Kostolany, bon vivant and speculator (LINK)

Seth Godin: On saying "no" (LINK)

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Seth Godin had a short blog post on intuition that is worth thinking about. For a while I've been thinking about how to apply the 'Intuition = Pattern Recognition' equation to the process of continuing to develop one's skill in investing. And I think a lot of how to do that is to put in the work to really understand one's investments at a fundamental level, and to spend time studying the great business and investment successes and failures throughout history to recognize when a pattern may be repeating itself. It is also good to study all mistakes (one's own and those of others) to recognize when a potential negative pattern of any size may be repeating. And I think a thorough understanding of psychology, and a continuous process trying to improve upon one's own psychology, also goes a long way.

Berkshire Hathaway: The Next Ten Years (LINK)

The Last Days of Target Canada [H/T Phil] (LINK)

Ranking Global Stock Markets On Valuation - by Meb Faber (LINK)

FT Alphachat (podcast): Boardroom battles and the rise of Xiaomi (LINK)

Related book: Dear Chairman: Boardroom Battles and the Rise of Shareholder Activism

Links

Seth Alexander and Joel Cohen of MIT Investment Management Company talk to Sanjay Bakshi's class (LINK)

Warren Buffett and the Great Salad Oil Swindle [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Related book: Dear Chairman: Boardroom Battles and the Rise of Shareholder Activism

The guy who blew the whistle on Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme says there's one 'bigger than Madoff' [H/T @chriswmayer] (LINK)

Related book: No One Would Listen

Seth Godin on the Tim Ferriss podcast (LINK)

Brain Pickings - The Life of the Mind: Oliver Sacks’s 121 Formative and Favorite Books from a Lifetime of Reading (LINK)

Egg Russian Roulette with Peyton Manning and Magic Johnson (video) (LINK)

Book of the day: Against the Odds: An Autobiography - by James Dyson [I also linked to James Dyson on the Charlie Rose show a couple of years ago, which was a great interview, and which you can find HERE.)