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Hey Liberty, Great posting.

He seems to have a good record. What do you guys know about him other than what was in VII?

Here is a video of Lemann and Buffett at Harvard Business School. it's an hour long conversation. Lemann was getting an award, I think he just gave Harvard a chunk of money, and Buffett walks in (to rapturous applause, of course), he sits down and the discussion starts. (I skipped the first 5 minutes, some in Portuguese, how great Lemann has been, etc. and the surprise entrance.)

Here are Greg Speicher's notes Formula 1: great international sports franchise; 400 million+ TV audience; many parts of the business are under-exploited such as sponsorships. Chase Carey is a great manager who has brought on some top-tier talent to round out the management team. Race calendar is locked in for 2017 and probably 2018. Sponsorship has the most potential for near-term improvements. The races need to be more interesting. This will take some time. They think the opportunity is bigger than they first thought. Teams have an interest in a more balanced league will make the product more compelling. Best TV deal is in the U.K. There is a lot of potential to improve the TV deal in the U.S. Liberty Sirius XM. Pandora is way under monetized. The subscription streaming business does not have very good economics. The free radio market is still a $16 billion market. Perhaps Pandora could help Sirius to go after some of that money. The rest of the notes is at http://gregspeicher.com/?p=4748 To listen to it yourself here: https://cc.talkpoint.com/morg007/022717a_as/?entity=29_8S8DC40

Here it is The-Best-of-Charlie-Munger-1994-20111.pdf

This is my month for reading Munger, so I'm rereading Kaufman' Poor Charlie's Bevelin's books, Seeking Wisdom and All I want to Know Damn Right the 300 page compilation that is floating around the old Blue Chip stamp annual reports. I think I got it from Mr.B Racemize (t/h) Tren Griffin's blog posts on Munger: 25iq Any more suggestions?

It is most certainly not you. It is interesting. It's CPG so undoubtedly it was a design choice. That said, other cultures and ethnic group will put their stamp on a figure or image from another culture or ethnicity. Images of Alexander the Great for example. In a more modern context, see for example, the statue of Martin Luther King by a Chinese sculptor, on the mall in DC. The statue makes him look like he is about to lead the cultural revolution by posture and with, shall I say, eyes not as 'round' as they obviously were!

I do find Ritzholtz a pretentious prig, but his guests can be great. Liberty's list above are my favorites plus ; For Silicon Valley themes: A16z (this is the VC firm, Andressen Horowitz, podcast, they also have interesting audio that is on their website, but is annoyingly not on their podcast.) John Mihaljevic, Manual of Ideas, has a monthly podcast that is very good. NPR politics Shane Parish, Farnam Street has one Harvard Business Review The Big Think

Some company's respond to customer complaints if you tweet at them.

Anyone want to share a subscription? DM me

Well Munger says to study failures, and this case is a Lollapalooza indeed. My takeaways are, unless you are business with a really sound partner, i.e. you are invested in BRK, thirty years ago, with a Buffett at the helm, don't concentrate so much. I will have to go back and look, but I don't think Buffett ever had that much in any 'cinch' like say American Express during the salad oil scandal. The estimate on the board and Forbes looks as if he had from 60 to +80 in WAC. The business was not good enough for that. (Munger seems to have gone to those kinds of %'s, but those were cinches.) With WAC, you have execution risk, and there where there is one cockroach there often are many. And you had to know what the asset values, in this case earning power, in an industry that is changing. We have a case of poor portfolio management and poor stock selection both. So this is a why not and how not to be a concentrated investor!

First of all restaurants tend to be terrible businesses. The people I know who have made decent money long term in restaurant businesses have either franchised the concept or made money on the real estate. For an excellent 50,000 foot look at the business check out what Tren Griffen has to say--the issues boil down to no moat and what he calls the wholesale transfer problem, which is somebody else has a power over your business (viz. Michael Porter) in this case it is the owner of the real estate and/or the franchisor. As far as your specific example, let's invert it, a la Munger: What would kill the business? Well after the two mentioned above, supposed some enterprising young woman sees what you see and opens a ice cream parlor (franchise or not) in the area. Unless there is something quite odd about that area, there is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from doing this. Clearly, you are willing to put up with the mind numbing hours and tedium of running a restaurant, so with that drive and persistence, you might think of running a better business!

It seems to me that investing in India would be quite a useful portfolio diversification. Reading Sanjay Bakshi's discussion of investing in Indian subsidiaries like Unilever has certainly whetted my appetite. As a non-resident non-Indian (although with a long ago documented Indian ancestor) what would a reasonable way of investing. (Fairfax India never cut it for me frankly.)

Why would anyone read any article that starts out (with apologies to LC) I use the clickbait rule, the claim is preposterous on the face of it like the clickbait "Obama says refinance your mortgage" or "Trump uses xyz you should too" You don't need to read any further. Next Now, I know enough about the sciences to know there are bad studies, that nutrition is particularly complex, that some of the incentives to publish research are wrong and that "facts" have a half life, but still what is the proposal here? Witchcraft?

From one cultist, me, to all you out there, here is an interesting tidbit from the WSJ and CNBC:

Has anyone seen any "after" party notes on the internet? (Other than Shane's?)

Given that the Daily Journal Annual is coming up (Feb 15) and the Berkshire Annual is two months away, I have a question for the board..What would you ask Charlie or Warren if you could ask them anything. What would you ask if you were in private? This year I am thinking about asking Charlie, Why he thinks that he and Warren are so much better at investing than Dr. Singleton an acknowledged genius? Does he subscribe to the notion that Warren has said that he could do 50% on small sums? For another investing 'case' like the one he shared last year. Given that simple algorithms enormously improve decision making, what simple algorithm would improve stock picking and life in general--actually I know the answer to that one on reflection, use mental models and checklists! If I were in private, I would ask him: Why he doesn't seem to like Singleton. Why he doesn't seem to like Peter Drucker.

Anyone want to share a copy? via PM, if necessary.

We are in the midst of a it, waist deep and the waters are rising. I just wonder why the VIX is so low.

First of all a little civility would be nice. Humor works too. Notice I did not attack you or call your argument specious. Second, Are you arguing that a president has authority to issue EO's, which is no argument at all, because of course they do. I think you are arguing that Trump has the authority to issue this specific EO. Here, there are eminent legal scholars who disagree with you. So you can say it's gibberish, but let us know when you get your appointment to Harvard Law Review, much less a professorship somewhere. Obviously you don't know the law, constitutional or otherwise. Intent has great meaning in law in general and in specific constitutional law, both in theory and application, Note this is one bulwark of certain conservatives' argument about how to interpret the constitution in modern day, i.e what did the framers intend. Thus, intent is not limited to criminal cases. Courts have justly looked to statements of lawmakers when judging constitutionality of a law. I have not per se seen any specific cases with regard to EO's but the principle holds. There also may be statutory issues, given the 1965 Immigration Act as amended. Furthermore, that more than one district court stayed parts of the EO, clearly show that the arguments are not "gibberish". Now it may turn out that eventually this EO survives, I don't care to handicap that, but it is not nearly as simple as you would make it out to be.

Actually there is a question about the EO both on constitutional and statutory grounds. On the constitutional side there is ample evidence, which could be taken either way with Trump's original call for a Muslim ban and Guilani's description of crafting such. What 'bigly' worries me is this sort of carelessness, (no consultation with Republicans in Congress, cabinet secretaries--State, Defence and Homeland not consulted or informed prior) will be replicated in dealing with China, Russia and N. Korea. I hope we have no wars shooting or trade, but I think the odds of some kind of trade war are over 50/50. Trump's supporters just proves Munger's adage about ideology turning the brain into cabbage. (As does my antipathy to the buffoon, shall we share some coleslaw? That said, most of the rightist I read agree with me on the Trumpster--See George Will and Brett Stephens)

Since you say they were "evil" mind explaining why you selected these 3? Hopefully you have a valid reason to call someone "evil" beyond the usual libertarian nonsense. +1 Unless one were draft age at the time, LBJ is not even close to being "evil". Got the Civil Rights bill passed knowing that it would destroy the Democratic base in the South for a generation, not to mention the poverty programs and science funding. FDR helped save the world from Hitler, and to all you libertarians probably saved America from socialism, even as he was called a traitor to his class. Wilson was pretty bad, a f#cking racist, who tried to destroy what little progress the US had managed since Reconstruction.

Yes, and I think that is quite an improvement. People think Trump is going to be the end of the world or something. I think that he's going to be no worse than any of the other presidents in my lifetime*, only far more entertaining. A solid win as far as I'm concerned. *I was born during the Nixon administration. You will have been alive for three of the worst presidents in the history of the nation-- Bush 2, the shrub-trillions spent on an unnecessary war, with the country in shambles, Iraq. Nixon, resigned in disgrace. and now Trump, with 85% probability he will be one of the worst, already one of the worst transitions.

So I would go to the newspaper or magazine archives and read the front page of say the Wall Street Journal or the Business section of the sunday New York Times or Fortune over the whole year (by the way Buffett did this for the 30's) To go to the next level. Now from a distance it is hard to get a real feel for this, but to get it emotionally, imagine the most terrifying event in your life, (if it's too painful skip this). Now go back and re read some of the headlines. Feel the fear and the emotions in the pit of your stomach. Third level: Feel the emotional turmoil of the above and try to figure out how to deal with that if you were in it. Could you have bought BRK or Amazon and then watched it decline by another 25% without losing faith, selling, etc. (Remember that even Buffett likes to evaluate companies without knowing the price history. He just want to know the current price. )

A good thing for what. Not believing science or the scientific method, definitely Pruitt, as in putting the fox in the hen house!! Don't hold your breath. So you get the choice of an ideologue with strongly held crazy views, versus a person who has never expressed a view on the subject, whom you hope is not an abject failure, i.e he has never run anything larger than a doctor's office, (of course Trump has not managed anything (well) either a RE dev. shop, what 30 people, or himself. The lunatics have taken over the asylum. I will (unhappily) take my (probable) tax reductions, even as I fear for the country.