Links

"Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present." -John Kenneth Galbraith (A Short History of Financial Euphoria)

The David Rubenstein Show: Phil Knight (video) (LINK)

Related book: Shoe Dog

Small Companies Are Gone, but Should They be Forgotten? - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

Bruce Berkowitz Seeks Return to Glory by Betting on Sears ($) (LINK)

Kyle Bass spots 'tectonic shift' in US relationship with China (video) (LINK)

Adventures in Finance podcast: Murderer, Gambler, Aristocrat & Pauper. John Law, The Godfather of Central Banking (LINK)

Meet an 18th-century murderer, banker, convict, laughing stock, and the godfather of central banking, John Law. Accompanied by Dr. Ben Hunt, the Chief Investment Strategist at Salient Partners and author of the Epsilon Theory website, we explore how Law wrote the modern central banking playbook which resulted in a bubble which has reverberated through the actions of future central bankers since.

FT Alphachat podcast: Sizing up US retail (LINK)

In light of Amazon's $13.7bn Whole Foods takeover, Cardiff Garcia talks with the FT's Shannon Bond and Anna Nicolaou about the state of the US retail industry.

Exponent podcast: Episode 120 — Google, Antitrust, and Aggregation Theory (LINK)

What's Different about "Unicorns" - by Jessica Livingston (LINK) [You can also watch the video of her talk starting at the 24-minute mark HERE.]

Everyday Terror In Venezuela [H/T The Browser] (LINK)

Book of the day: Fiat Money Inflation in France

Links

Warren Buffett on PBS NewsHour (videos) (Part 1, Part 2)

Here is Warren Buffett’s first tax return, filed at age 14 [H/T Matt] (LINK)

How Nike Capitulated to Amazon After Years of Resistance (LINK)

Illinois Is in Deep Trouble: What Investors Need to Know (LINK)

a16z Podcast: Companies, Networks, Crowds (LINK)

Related book: Machine, Platform, Crowd

Revisionist History podcast: “Miss Buchanan’s Period of Adjustment.” (LINK)

In this week's episode, I meet with the Browns, the family behind the landmark Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education — a civil rights revolution! 

But what about the city where the case began? The ruling left behind a bittersweet legacy. There was one big mistake that everyone seems to have forgotten. 

Let me introduce you to the origin story of this civil rights milestone as we rediscover what actually happened next.

Links

"We, and our judgment, and all mortal things go on flowing and rolling unceasingly. Thus nothing certain can be established about one thing by another, both the judging and the judged being in continual change and motion." -Michel de Montaigne (via How to Live)

Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses Yearning to Send Cash [H/T @ivan_brussels] (LINK)

Western Union built its business on refugees and immigrants. Can it survive the political backlash against them?

Ends, Means, and Antitrust - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

User/Subscriber Economics: An Alternative View of Uber's Value - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Masters of Scale podcast: Netflix's Reed Hastings in Culture Shock (LINK)

Blake Mycoskie, Founder and Chief Shoe Giver of TOMS, on The Tim Ferriss Show (podcast) (LINK)

NPR's Hidden Brain podcast: Guessing Games (LINK)

Pundits and prognosticators make predictions all the time: about everything from elections, to sports, to global affairs. This week on Hidden Brain, we explore why they're often wrong, and how we can all do it better.

Links

"The line separating investment and speculation, which is never bright and clear, becomes blurred still further when most market participants have recently enjoyed triumphs. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money." -Warren Buffett (2000 Letter to Shareholders)

Buffett’s Bet on Store Capital Shows Not All Retail Real Estate Is Equal [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Yoplait Learns to Manufacture Authenticity to Go With Its Yogurt [H/T @Connor_Leonard] (LINK)

Taking the pulse of ESPN [H/T @BluegrassCap] (LINK)

The sports media giant is on the defensive about a declining subscriber base, layoffs and executive changes. What happened? And what’s the plan for the future?

Google Fined Record $2.7 Billion in E.U. Antitrust Ruling (LINK)

Scott Norton talks with Patrick O’Shaughnessy on the Invest Like the Best Podcast (LINK)

Brent Beshore talks with David Perell on the North Star Podcast (LINK)

Long Now: Conversations at The Interval -- Proof: The Science of Booze: Adam Rogers (LINK)

Related book: Proof: The Science of Booze

Long Now: Seminars About Long-term Thinking -- James Gleick: Time Travel (LINK)

Related book: Time Travel: A History

How CRISPR Yanked Jennifer Doudna Out of the Ivory Tower - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

"Throughout his life, a wise man engages in practice of all his useful, rarely used skills, many of them outside his discipline, as a sort of duty to his better self. If he reduces the number of skills he practices and, therefore, the number of skills he retains, he will naturally drift into error from man with a hammer tendency....Skills of a very high order can be maintained only with daily practice." -Charlie Munger

A (Long) Chat with Peter L. Bernstein - - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

Looking through my files recently, I came across a buried treasure: a transcript of the highlights of my hours-long interview with the great Peter L. Bernstein at his vacation home in Brattleboro, Vt., on July 28, 2004.

Stockpicking Is Dying Because There Are No More Stocks to Pick - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

A Dozen Lessons I Learned from Bill Gates Sr. - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

Nudgestock 2017 videos [H/T Tamas] (LINK)

Short-Seller Nailed Home Capital, Then Got Stung by Buffett (LINK)

Lessons From the Collapse of Banco Popular [H/T @Sanjay__Bakshi] (LINK)

How a Broke 30-Year-Old Failure Became America's Billionaire Tire King [H/T Matt] (LINK)

Related book: Six Tires, No Plan

Jack Ma talks with Charlie Rose (video) (LINK)

Amazon’s Nike deal took a billion dollar bite out of competing retailers (LINK)

The industrial robotics market will nearly triple in less than 10 years (LINK)

How I Built This podcast -- TRX: Randy Hetrick (LINK)

Adventures in Finance podcast: Episode 21 - Ponzi Hunters: Harry Markopolos and His Dogs of Fraud (LINK)

Grant’s Podcast: Hear, hear Jim Bianco (LINK)

The renowned fixed-income analyst discusses the flattening yield curve, the reluctant Fed and the sinking finances of his home city, Chicago.

Freakonomics Radio (podcast): Why Hate the Koch Brothers? (Part 2) (LINK)

Exponent podcast: Episode 119 — Amazon and Avocados (LINK)

The 10 Commandments of Startup Success with Reid Hoffman (The Tim Ferriss Show) (LINK)

FT Alphachat podcast: On the verge of a productivity boom? (LINK)

Edge #494: Compassionate Systems - A Conversation With Daniel Goleman (LINK)

Daniel Dennett on Tools To Transform Our Thinking (audio/podcast) (LINK)

Related book: Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking

Stoicism and Buddhism, a dialogue between Robert Wright & Massimo Pigliucci (video) (LINK)

The Risk of Rushing Through Legislation (LINK)

Why Are Bird Eggs Egg-Shaped? An Eggsplainer - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Book of the day (mentioned by Mohnish Pabrai in his latest Google Talk): The Art of Being Unreasonable

Mohnish Pabrai: "Intensive Stock Research Can Be Injurious to Financial Health" | Talks at Google

Link to video

Charlie Munger's "The Psychology of Human Misjudgment"

The abridged and animated video of Munger's "The Psychology of Human Misjudgment" speech that has been making the rounds led me to go back and re-read the version Munger rewrote in 2005 for inclusion in Poor Charlie's Almanack. The copy I continuously go back to is from a Word file that I created in order to put the speech on my Kindle, which is a lot easier to carry around than the book. I also added a few additional things that I took from Tren Griffin's book on Charlie Munger. In case this is of interest to any of you, here is a link to that file: 

"The Psychology of Human Misjudgment" - by Charlie Munger

The italicized parts at the end of many sections are the additional quotes and comments from Tren Griffin's book. I noticed a few grammatical errors that I corrected when reading it through this time, and there are probably some others that I missed. If you happen to see them, please let me know so that I can correct them. And similar to Griffin's book additions, if you happen to come across other comments or examples by Buffett or Munger that might be worthwhile to add to the file, let me know that as well.

Links

Berkshire Hathaway Invests in Embattled Lender Home Capital (LINK)

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is providing a lifeline to Home Capital Group Inc., the embattled Canadian alternative lender whose near collapse sparked intense scrutiny of the country’s fraught housing market. 

Berkshire agreed to indirectly acquire C$400 million ($300 million) of the firm’s shares for a 38.4 percent stake and provide a C$2 billion credit line to subsidiary Home Trust Co., Home Capital said late Wednesday in Toronto. 

“Home Capital’s strong assets, its ability to originate and underwrite well-performing mortgages, and its leading position in a growing market sector make this a very attractive investment,” Buffett said in the statement.

Related previous link to the above (from the end of April): Home Capital Group - it is time for the Canadian regulator to act -- by John Hempton

Related video to the above: Marc Cohodes at the Grant's Fall 2016 Conference [short pitch on Home Capital Group starts around the 27:26 mark]

Canada's Housing Bubble Will Burst - by Ben Carlson (LINK)

Related to the above, from the Almost Daily Grant's commentary yesterday:

"Preliminary home price data in the formerly hot Toronto housing market is little short of shocking.  According to the Toronto Real Estate Board, the average transaction for the first half of June dropped below CAD $809,000, from CAD $863,910 in May and CAD $919,614 in April.   The reversal coincides with the introduction of a 15% foreign buyer’s tax at the end of April."

Jeff Bezos has advice for the news business: 'Ask people to pay. They will pay' (video plays) (LINK)

Bezos delivered some of this advice at the Future of Newspapers conference in Turin, Italy, on Wednesday. Here are the highlights:

• Focus on readers first, not advertisers.
• You can't shrink your way to relevance. 
• Don't look for a patron or expect charity.
• Use technology, but don't be a slave to it.
• Advertising alone will not support investigative journalism.
• "When you're writing, be riveting, be right and ask people to pay. They will pay."

RIGGED: Forced into debt. Worked past exhaustion. Left with nothing. [H/T @AlexRubalcava] (LINK)

A yearlong investigation by the USA TODAY Network found that port trucking companies in southern California have spent the past decade forcing drivers to finance their own trucks by taking on debt they could not afford. Companies then used that debt as leverage to extract forced labor and trap drivers in jobs that left them destitute.

John Mackey: "The Whole Foods Diet" | Talks at Google (LINK)

Uber's Bad, Awful, Horrible Week: Doomsday Scenario or Business Reset? - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast: "The Road to Damascus" (LINK)

In this week's episode, I track down a former CIA employee to hear the whole story, the true story, about a masterful spy and a terrorist who had a change of heart. What happened to them? And was it fair?

Freakonomics Radio (podcast): Why Hate the Koch Brothers? (Part 1) (LINK)

Charles Koch, the mega-billionaire CEO of Koch Industries and half of the infamous political machine, sees himself as a classical liberal. So why do most Democrats hate him so much? In a rare series of interviews, he explains his political awakening, his management philosophy and why he supports legislation that goes against his self-interest.

From Boardroom To Locker Room, How Joe Moglia Shocked Wall Street And College Football (podcast) (LINK)

Related book: 4th and Goal: One Man's Quest to Recapture His Dream 

Tony Robbins: The 6 Human Needs (LINK)

Links

"Unfortunately in this kind of work, where you are trying to determine relationships based upon past behavior, the almost invariable experience is that by the time you have had a long enough period to give you sufficient confidence in your form of measurement, just then new conditions supersede and the measurement is no longer dependable for the future." -Benjamin Graham

Jason Zweig‏ has annotated, added links, and highlighted some of his favorite passages from Benjamin Graham's 1963 lecture, “Securities in an Insecure World” (LINK)

Farnam Street: All Models Are Wrong (LINK)

Sohn Conference Hong Kong Notes 2017 (LINK)

Energy Checklist - by Eric Cinnamond (LINK)

Brexit In Reverse? - by George Soros [H/T Santangel's] (LINK)

MSCI to Add China Shares to Indexes, Opening Market to More Foreign Investors (LINK)

It’s Lonely at the Top—or It Should Be [H/T @pcordway] (LINK)

An Early 20th Century Lesson on the Difference Between Convenience and Value (LINK)

NPR's Planet Money‏ podcast: What the Falcon's Up With Qatar? [H/T @jasonzweigwsj] (LINK)

Geoffrey West: "Scale" | Talks at Google (LINK)

Simon Sinek: "The Finite and Infinite Games of Leadership" | Talks at Google (LINK)

a16z: When We Enter the Century of Biology (LINK)

Y Combinator podcast: How Should Business Schools Prepare Students for Startups?  (LINK)

Cool Tools for Travel – Tim Ferriss and Kevin Kelly (podcast) (LINK)

This Common Butterfly Has an Extraordinary Sex Life - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Book of the day [H/T @Greg_Speicher]: One Buck at a Time: An Insider's Account of How Dollar Tree Remade American Retail

Links

Warren Buffett’s Scout Inside Europe’s Biggest Economy ($) [H/T Matt] (LINK)

Zypora Kupferberg, the ‘eyes and ears’ of Berkshire Hathaway in Germany, could become more important as the company looks for new targets

Bruce Berkowitz on Bloomberg (full video) [H/T Will] (LINK)

Escaping the Magnetic Pull of a Bubble - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

Ten Valuable Insights on Structuring Your Fund (LINK)

Insurance as a platform [H/T @sanguit] (LINK)

The future of supply chains as networked ecosystems – by Sangeet Paul (LINK)

Patrick O’Shaughnessy talks with Andy Rachleff on the Invest Like the Best podcast (LINK)

My guest this week is Andy Rachleff, who is the CEO of the automated investing platform Wealthfront. Andy was also a co-founder and long-time partner at Benchmark Capital–one of the most interesting and successful venture capital firms in the world.

James Grant on the Hidden Forces podcast (LINK)

Evan Lorenz speaks with Demetri Kofinas of the Hidden Forces podcast (LINK)

The Mussels That Eat Oil - by Ed Yong (LINK)