Links

"I'm curious. I want to know how things work. And even more importantly, I want to know what's going to happen. And what's going to happen is often related to what has happened." -Seth Klarman

BPIAA 2017 Distinguished Alumni Honoree Video: Seth & Michael Klarman [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

3 Tips from Warren Buffett on Becoming a Better Person (LINK)

Half Life: The Decay of Knowledge and What to Do About It (LINK)

Latticework of Mental Models: Benford’s Law (LINK)

Making it Look Easy is Hard Work - by Ben Carlson (LINK)

The Best and Worst Performing Stocks Since the March 2009 Start of this Historic Bull Market [H/T Abnormal Returns] (LINK)

Audience vs. Traffic - by Scott Galloway (video) (LINK)

The Quest to Bring 3-D Printed Homes to the Developing World [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Britain's housing crisis is caused by the wrong kind of regulation - by Matt Ridley (LINK)

Freakonomics Radio Extra: Satya Nadella Full Interview (LINK)

Three Key Questions About Donald Trump’s Summit with Kim Jong Un - by Evan Osnos (LINK)

Supervolcano Goes Boom. Humans Go Meh? - by Ed Yong (LINK)

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.

Links

The Greatest Mentor-Mentee Relationship Ever - by Ian Cassel (LINK)

Related book: Edison As I Know Him - by Henry Ford

Buybacks & the Instant Gratification of Financial Engineering - by Frank Martin (LINK)

Amazon's Checking Account Push Shows Next Target: Swipe Fees [H/T Matt] (LINK)

Adventures in Finance Podcast: Blue Steel: Tariffs, Trade and Trump (LINK)

Related books: 1) The Accidental Superpower; 2)  The Absent Superpower

Jim Grant on the Macro Voices Podcast [The Grant segment starts around the 14-minute mark] (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: Episode 144 — 90s Alt Forever (LINK)

Wei’s Wisdom: How to read broadly (LINK)

Book of the day (to be released next month): The Warren Buffett Shareholder: Stories from inside the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting

***

"Most of economics is perceived to be incentives and disincentives. So, skin in the game would be to incentivize people if they do well, and also disincentivize them. But that's not it. No. Skin in the game for me is about filtering. It's evolution. You cannot have evolution if you don't have skin in the game. In other words, you are filtering people out of the system. And I give the example of bad drivers. Now, why is it that on a highway, when I drive on a highway, you don't, I don't really encounter people who are, you know, go tapioca and drive crazily, kill 30 people? Why doesn't it happen? Well, it doesn't happen because bad drivers kill themselves. Partly because they kill themselves, and also partly because, okay, we catch them....we filter them out of the system by taking away their driver's license. And we're good at doing that, for those who have survived. So...this is filtering. Filtering is necessary for the functioning of nature. Necessary for the functioning of anything. And that's called evolution." -Nassim Taleb (Source)

Links

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

Bill Miller on Philosophy: An Interview (LINK)

The Tim Ferriss Show (podcast): Joe Gebbia -- Co-Founder of Airbnb (LINK)

Freakonomics Radio (podcast): Here’s Why All Your Projects Are Always Late — and What to Do About It (LINK)

A star is about to plunge head first toward a monster black hole. Astronomers are ready to watch. - by Phil Plait (LINK)

Leopards that live in cities are protecting people from rabies (LINK)

Hawaii: Where Evolution Can Be Surprisingly Predictable - by Ed Yong (LINK)

***

"He who fears death will never do anything worthy of a man who is alive, but he who knows that these were the terms drawn up for him at the moment of his conception will live according to the bond, and at the same time will also with like strength of mind guarantee that none of the things that happen shall be unexpected. For by looking forward to whatever can happen as though it would happen, he will soften the attacks of all ills, which bring nothing strange to those who have been prepared beforehand and are expecting them; it is the unconcerned and those that expect nothing but good fortune upon whom they fall heavily. Sickness comes, captivity, disaster, conflagration, but none of them is unexpected — I always knew in what disorderly company Nature had confined me." -Seneca, "On Tranquility of Mind" 

Links

"You don't necessarily get it right the first time.... Henry Ford, as you may know, failed twice before he started the Ford Motor Company in 1903. The test isn't whether you get the greatest business idea in the world the first time out. The test is whether you keep learning as you go along what your strengths are, what you can do for your customers, what you can bring especially to the party. And to do that, you need...a genuine desire—day in, day out—to delight the customer." -Warren Buffett

The Micro PE Reality Check - by Brent Beshore (LINK)

Latticework of Mental Models: Thinking From First Principles (LINK)

Pretenders and Ghosts: Stealth promotion network exploits financial sites to tout stocks (LINK)

KPMG Acts Globally But Keeps Scandals Local ($) (LINK)

Masters of Scale Podcast: How To Do Good And Do Good Business with Starbucks' Howard Schultz (LINK) [The Schultz part really starts around the 11:40 mark.]

People Don't Actually Know Themselves Very Well - by Adam Grant (LINK)

Everyone Is Going Through Something - by Kevin Love (LINK)

What tennis and philanthropy have in common - By Roger Federer  (LINK)

The Fish That Makes Other Fish Smarter - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Do Adult Brains Make New Neurons? A Contentious New Study Says No - by Ed Yong (LINK)

It’s the latest chapter in a century-long debate about whether neurogenesis continues throughout humans’ lives.

Warren Buffett - Advice for Entrepreneurs

February 13th, 2018: Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway CEO, talked about his personal experience in business and gave advice to small business owners.

Link to video


[H/T Vishal]

[And for members of the Intelligent Fanatics website, there is also a transcript of this talk HERE.]

Links

Incentivizing For Innovation - by Ian Cassel (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: The Berkshire of Software, with Savneet Singh (LINK)

Related article: Building the Berkshire Hathaway of Software

Grant’s Podcast: The rates puzzle (LINK)

The Ordinary Greatness of Roger Bannister - by Malcolm Gladwell (LINK)

Billionaire Paul Allen Discovers World War II Era Aircraft Carrier in Australia's Coral Sea (LINK)

Nature’s Partnerships Might Break in a Warming World - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Captive Orangutans Are Curious (But Wild Ones Are Not) - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

Nassim Taleb on EconTalk, discussing his book Skin in the Game (podcast) (LINK)

What do I mean by Skin in the Game? My Own Version - by Nassim Taleb (LINK)

Joel Greenblatt on Fox Business [H/T Will and Linc] (Video 1, Video 2, Video 3)

Mutual Fund Observer, March 2018 (LINK) [With a brief profile of one of the funds managed by the great team at Fenimore Asset Management.]

Interest Rates and Stock Prices: It's Complicated! - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Lessons from Spotify - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Business Lessons from Jim Clark (Silicon Graphics, Netscape, etc.) - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

a16z Video: Distribution and Sales Channels - by Ben Horowitz (LINK)

How a society gala was used to sell young-blood transfusions to baby boomers desperate to cheat death - by Rebecca Robbins [H/T @edyong209] (LINK)

We need new ways of treating depression [H/T @Atul_Gawande] (LINK)

One-handed prospect Shaquem Griffin stars at NFL combine [H/T Linc] (LINK)

The Bannister Method - by Seth Godin (LINK)

The Tyranny of Convenience - by Tim Wu [H/T Cal Newport] (LINK)

When Twenty-Six Thousand Stinkbugs Invade Your Home - by Kathryn Schulz (LINK)

Links

"Neither Jerry nor I believed the efficient market theory. I had overwhelming evidence of inefficiency from blackjack, from the history of Warren Buffett and friends, and from our daily success in Princeton Newport Partners. We didn’t ask, Is the market efficient? but rather, In what ways and to what extent is the market inefficient? and How can we exploit this?" - Ed Thorp, A Man for All Markets [currently $1.99 on Kindle]

Is Warren Buffett Too Big to Beat the Market? - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

An interview with Peter Buffett (LINK)

Related book: Life Is What You Make It: Find Your Own Path to Fulfillment

The Broyhill Annual Letter - Hilariously Rich (LINK)

New leader of $6 billion money-management firm looks to podcasts and cryptocurrencies to keep active investing relevant (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: Episode 143 — Dilly-Dallying Dropbox (LINK)

Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer on the When to Jump podcast [H/T Abnormal Returns] (LINK)

Sal Khan: "Education Reimagined" | Talks at Google (LINK)

Carl Icahn dumped millions in steel-related stock last week [H/T @eosnos] (LINK)

Related article from last year: Carl Icahn's Failed Raid on Washington (The New Yorker, August 2017) 

Possibly worth reviewing given yesterday's news on trade...
Tyler Cowen's podcast chat with Douglas Irwin whose book, Clashing over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy, Cowen thinks is the best history of American trade policy ever written.

Tyler Cowen’s 12 rules for life (LINK)

Jordan Peterson: 'I Don't Want People Falling Down in an Ideological Abyss' (LINK)

The Role of Luck in Life Success Is Far Greater Than We Realized [H/T @sfiscience] (LINK)

The Temin Effect (LINK)

Book of the day [H/T @awealthofcs]: A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World - by William J. Bernstein

Links

Nassim Taleb chats with Gad Saad about his new book, Skin in the Game (video) (LINK)

The Absolute Return Letter - March 2018 (LINK)

Related book: The End of Indexing

Bethany McLean & Roddy Boyd on Forensic Talk with Jim Campbell (audio) (LINK)

WorkLife with Adam Grant [a new podcast]: Dear Billionaire, I Give You a D-Minus (LINK)

In most workplaces, criticizing your boss is a great way to lose your job. At Bridgewater Associates, you can be fired for NOT criticizing your boss. We grill founder Ray Dalio and a series of employees to figure out how this kind of radical transparency works in real life -- and how we can all get better at dishing it out (and taking it).

Discovering Gilgamesh, the World’s First Action Hero (LINK)

How to Break Free from Limiting Beliefs [H/T @AnnieDuke] (LINK)