Links

"It’s not any goal of ours to double the revenues or increase them 20 percent, even, or anything. We just try to do whatever comes along that makes sense. And if there’s a lot that comes along in one year that makes sense, we’ll do a lot. And if there’s nothing that comes along that makes sense, we’ll do nothing. So there’s a lot of accident in it." --Warren Buffett (1996)

Warren Buffett's latest attempt to put his cash to work is thwarted (LINK)

Chris Bloomstran of Semper Augustus Investments Group doesn't like the price being offered by Kyocera for the rest of AVX. He posted some thoughts and his letter to the CEO and Special Committee on Twitter, which you can also find HERE.

Mohnish Pabrai's Annual Talk at Boston College (video) (LINK)

Josh Wolfe's Lux 2019 Annual Meeting Talk (video) (LINK)

Paul Tudor Jones and Ray Dalio at the Greenwich Economic Forum earlier this month (video) [H/T Linc] (LINK)

The Greatest Value Investor You’ve Never Heard (LINK)

Risky Business - by Frank K. Martin (LINK)

The Complete Guide To Drilling (LINK)

Value Investing with Legends Podcast: Matthew McLennan - The Power of Selectivity and Patience (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Gavin Baker – Tech and Consumer Growth Investing (LINK)

Value: After Hours Podcast: Taylor, Brewster and Carlisle discuss Rentec, Chanos, and value (LINK)

Conversations with Tyler (podcast): Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen on the Nature and Causes of Progress (LINK)

The Tim Ferriss Show (podcast): #398: Peter Attia, M.D. — Fasting, Metformin, Athletic Performance, and More (LINK)

The Beirut Banyan Podcast: 81: Nassim Nicholas Taleb & Local Solutions for Lebanon (LINK)

Origin Stories Podcast: 40: The Denisovans (LINK)

Links

"To discover new things, you have to work on ideas that are good but non-obvious; if an idea is obviously good, other people are probably already working on it. One common way for a good idea to be non-obvious is for it to be hidden in the shadow of some mistaken assumption that people are very attached to." --Paul Graham

Novelty and Heresy - by Paul Graham (LINK)

Bill Gates on AI, Climate, Carbon Tax, Nuclear Power, China (video) (LINK)

Oaktree’s Marks on Global Economic Outlook, Recession (video) (LINK)

No More Gurus - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

EBITDA Definition Danger (LINK)

Infinite Loops Podcast with Jim O'Shaughnessy -- Behind the Curtains: Ramp Capital and Super Mugatu (LINK) [New podcast, available via Spotify]

Acquired Podcast: Disney, Plus (LINK)

Full Interview: Tom Hanks On ‘A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood’ (video) (LINK)

The World’s Biggest Heart Can Beat Just Twice a Minute - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

"You can, of course, pay too much for even the best of businesses.... Investors making purchases in an overheated market need to recognize that it may often take an extended period for the value of even an outstanding company to catch up with the price they paid. A far more serious problem occurs when the management of a great company gets sidetracked and neglects its wonderful base business while purchasing other businesses that are so-so or worse. When that happens, the suffering of investors is often prolonged.... Loss of focus is what most worries Charlie and me when we contemplate investing in businesses that in general look outstanding. All too often, we've seen value stagnate in the presence of hubris or of boredom that caused the attention of managers to wander." --Warren Buffett (1996 Letter to Shareholders)

“You Don't Bring Bad News to the Cult Leader”: Inside the Fall of WeWork (LINK)

How Performance Reviews Can Kill Your Culture (LINK)

Venture Stories Podcast: Keith Rabois on How He Invests, Forming a Founding Team, and Funding “Ridiculous” Ideas (LINK)

How to Win in the Startup World — Mike Maples and Andy Rachleff (The Tim Ferriss Show podcast) (LINK)

The Plate Climatology Theory (video) (LINK)

A video that summarizes the building block principles of the Plate Climatology Theory and provides specific research proven examples supporting these principles.  The viewer will learn how geological forces affect or control climate and climate related events of Antarctica, the Arctic, El Nino's / La Nina's, so-called Ice Ages, or land volcanic eruptions.  

CBS This Morning Podcast: Becoming Friends with Mister Rogers [H/T @BrentBeshore] (LINK)

Related articles: 1) Can You Say...Hero? (1998); 2) My Friend Mister Rogers (2019) 

**********

For Audible Members, the current Black Friday Week sale has many titles of note:

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

Being Mortal

The Gene

The Undoing Project

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

The Innovator's Dilemma

Prediction Machines

Algorithms to Live By

Smarter Faster Better

I Will Teach You to Be Rich

Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

The Disappearing Spoon

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

The Obstacle Is the Way

*****

It's not included in the sale, but I also noticed that Damn Right: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger is now on Audible.

Links

The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius - by Paul Graham (LINK)

It’s Slow Going, but Stuff Like Wheat and Oil Can Spice Up Your Returns - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

The best time to get interested in an investing strategy is when its performance is at its worst. By that standard, commodities are starting to look intriguing.

Everyone Gets Paid in CBS-Viacom Except Shareholders [H/T @JohnHuber72] (LINK)

Health Care Without (much) Government - by Russ Roberts (LINK)

How to Reverse Engineer Biology (LINK)

Full Disclosure Podcast: The Overachieving Underwriter [H/T @rationalwalk] (LINK)

Markel Corp vice chairman Steve Markel on the insurer and investment shop as it approaches its 90th year in business. Worth $15 million when its shares debuted on Wall Street in 1986, Markel Corp is now a Fortune 500 member in 18 countries that is valued at more than $16 billion.

Grant’s Current Yield Podcast: It’s a gusher (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: 178 — More Ergonomic (LINK)

The Knowledge Project Podcast -- Scott Adams: Avoiding Loserthink (LINK)

One Man's Wild Quest to Reach the Bottom of Every Ocean [H/T @MebFaber] (LINK)

Links

CNBC’s full interview with Liberty Media Chairman John Malone (LINK)

Disney’s Kevin Mayer | Full interview | Code Media 2019 (video) (LINK)

WarnerMedia CEO John Stankey | Full interview | Code Media 2019 (video) (LINK)

This Man Is a Junkyard Billionaire (LINK)

Lessons From 24 Years of Operating: Bowl America, Inc. (LINK)

Banking on the Future: Why our most hated institutions will become our most beloved (LINK)

The Long View Podcast: Charles de Vaulx: Why Value Investing Has Slumped but Will Rebound (LINK)

Planet Money Podcast: #953: Three Sides Of A Car Loan (LINK)

Kyle Bass: "China: The Most Reckless Financial Experiment In History" (Hedgeye Investing Summit Video) (LINK)

Health Care Lessons from Dr. Keith Smith - by Russ Roberts (LINK)

Here’s to the Crazy Ones (LINK)

The Fascination With the Skin of a Dead French Revolutionary - by Sarah Zhang (LINK)

Whack 'em or nuke 'em: How to deflect a killer asteroid - by Phil Plait (LINK)

Links

"Throughout the careers Charlie and I have had in investing, there have always been hundreds of cases, or thousands of cases, of things that are ridiculously priced, and phony stock promotions, and the gullible being led to believe in things that just can’t come true. So that’s always gone on. It always will go on. And it doesn’t make any difference to us. We are not trying to predict markets. We never will try and predict markets. We’re trying to find wonderful businesses. And the fact that a part of the market is kind of screwy, that’s unimportant to us." --Warren Buffett (1996)

Integration and Monopoly - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Oaktree Insights: A Place for Real Estate Debt in Global Credit Investing (LINK)

The Greatest Money-Making Machine of All Time: On Renaissance Technologies and the Medallion Fund (LINK)

Aswath Damodaran on Aramco's IPO (Part 1, Part 2)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger – How to Build a Great Product (LINK)

EconTalk Podcast: Keith Smith on Free Market Health Care (LINK)

Hidden Forces Podcast: The Present Danger: America, China, and the Second Cold War | Kyle Bass (LINK)

‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims (LINK)

Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Constantly Changing World (LINK)

Algorithmic Blindspots - by David Perell (LINK)

The Greatest Shortcut for Leaders Is Reading Books - by Ryan Holiday (LINK)

Why polio is still around—and why we can eradicate it - by Bill Gates (LINK)

What America Lost When It Lost the Bison - by Ed Yong (LINK)

David Goggins quote

From the audiobook version of Can't Hurt Me:

You have to turn that around yourself. No one is coming to save you. We have this mentality of "I'm going to wait to be saved. I'm going to wait for someone to come and help me." And I'm telling you right now, I believe in God—a lot of us believe in praying on it and stuff like that. Yeah, you can pray on it. But if you sit in a room and pray on it and do nothing about it, nothing's gonna happen. You have to put work behind everything in life. You have to put effort. You have to put friction behind something for something to change.

Links

"We could make a lot of decisions about a lot of things very fast and very easily. And we’re unusual in that respect. And the reason we’re able to do that is there’s such an enormous other lot of things that we won’t allow ourselves to think about at all. It’s just that simple. I have a little phrase when people make pitches to me, and about halfway through the first sentence, I say, 'We don’t do startups.' They don’t exist. Well, if you blot out startups, there’s a whole layer of complexity that goes out of your life. And we’ve got other little blotter-out systems. And using those, we finally find out that what remains is still a pretty large territory that we can handle." --Charlie Munger (2008)

Value Investing with Legends Podcast: Joel Greenblatt - Investing Off the Beaten Path (LINK)

Scaling Fallacy in Investing (LINK)

The Softbank-WeWork End Game: Savior Economics or Sunk Cost Problem? - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

The Brooklyn Investor blog: What It Takes, Dimon, Twitter etc. (LINK)

The Acquirers Podcast: Growth Underwriter: Marcelo Lima on valuing SaaS businesses Amazon, Facebook, and Netflix (LINK)

Five Good Questions Podcast: Alan Klement - When Coffee and Kale Compete (LINK)

The Disruptive Voice Podcast: Disruption and electrification in the auto industry featuring Cliff Maxwell and Ned Calder (LINK)

Apes Might Know That You Don’t Know What They Know - by Ed Yong (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)

Sorfis is now on Schwab

I'm pleased to announce that we've added Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. as a second custodian for offering our services. Given the extent of the Schwab platform, as well as the desire of some potential clients we've spoken with for a more diversified product than the Absolute Return Strategy, we are also now willing and able to offer more customized accounts.

For more details, please see the Services section of the website.