Liberty

Looks like you've read more than I have in the business field, unless my memory's failing me right now. Have you read The Halo Effect, which is kind of a meta-level look at some of this? Let me know what you think of Billion Dollar Lessons. Most of the "mistakes" or "things gone horribly wrong" books I've read have probably been about other things (history, military, memoirs, etc).

Morgan Housel on some lessons form Theranos: http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/theranos-lessons/

20 minute interview with Jeff Ubben from the end of April 2018 (I just finally got around to watching it): https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/04/27/full-interview-with-valueact-ceo-jeffrey-ubben.html

Theranos is the fault of the media?! Get the outta here man! The investors who kept giving it money had nothing to do with it? Give me a break. And old-power apparatchiks? Mad dog is the current secretary of defense. I don't know who you're talking to, but not to me or to the person I quoted. Theranos was a media darling, with Holmes on lots of magazine covers, being compared to Steve Jobs, with breathless features about her brilliance and personal life and such. The media certainly helped a lot to legitimize the company to the wider world, no doubt about it. Most startups never get that kind of coverage. Holmes was just a good story, and the media latched to it and ran with it. And "old power" doesn't mean "not in power anymore". I think it can mean a few things: Old as opposed to new, just look at their board, it's a bunch of old military and diplomats/politicians, old media moguls, etc. It wasn't backed by the SV tech guys, or Google and Sequoia and Elon Musk or whatever. Also, old power can just mean they've been in power for a long time, again, just look at the board.

https://overcast.fm/+JCDbMlqZ8 Haven't listened yet, but saw that Jim Grant had a new podcast on Canadian housing. Update: Had a chance to listen. Good overview, some updated stats, nothing too new.

That's not the only problem with this approach... Book? Who cares about the book value of these companies? It's not like they're financials (I know they have lots of cash on the balance sheet, but still)... Would you value Microsoft or Adobe on book value too? And not looking at growth and growth runway and ROIC ex-excess cash and things like that... BRK's great, but it has a pretty different profile from, say, Facebook. I think focusing on easily quantifiable metrics without analyzing the actual businesses is exactly the kind of myopia that Buffett warns against.

Bryson is fantastic. He's probably my favorite author. I'd like to add One Summer, which is a collection of important historical stories that all happened in the U.S. in 1927. 'A Walk in the Woods' was also quite fun.

Finally: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/15/theranos-chief-elizabeth-holmes-arrested-on-federal-criminal-charges-.html

I've watched the 1995 afternoon session and it's quite good. Nothing new if you've been following Buffett for years, but it's a lot of his greatest hits in one place. It's also nice to see video of a younger Buffett, since most of his stuff from that era that I've seen has been written.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3195066

https://tim.blog/2018/05/31/steve-jurvetson/amp/ I really enjoyed this interview with Steve jurvetson. I recommend it, it contains lots of interesting ideas from many fascinating fields, and he's incredibly sharp.

30 minute interview with Jeff Bezos about space exploration and blue origin: https://overcast.fm/+HGVU3-Hjc

If you hit "modify" on the original post in the thread, you can edit the title.

My loyalty is only up to the point where everything works fine + friction. If there was zero friction, I'd change every time I had a problem and/or they created some new fee that was higher than the competition. In other words, they're pretty much a commodity to me.

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/jim-chanos-cryptocurrency-is-a-security-speculation-game-masquerading-as-a-technological-breakthrough

If you read Thompson daily this will be a bit redundant, but this is a good overview of his theories on modern aggregators (Google, Facebook) and what makes them different from platforms (like Microsoft): (The video is 20 minutes long.)

'The Billionaire Who Wasn't' was a good bio of Chuck Feeney. Inspiring guy.

Thanks Joel!

29-minute interview with Buffett and Jamie Dimon: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/06/07/warren-buffett-jamie-dimon.html

That sounds great. I ordered Storm of Steel. I already had it on a list somewhere, but there's a better chance I'll get to it within the next decade if I own it..

I agree with that. I think a related phenomenon that I might write about is when you know someone so well that the simulation of them that you run in your brain gets good enough (even if still crude) that you can predict them pretty decently. I think that's kind of why Munger and Buffett used to talk for hours each day, and now they haven't been doing that in a while. Not because they aren't interested in what the other thinks, but because they know so well how they think. We end up being like that with some people like Buffett too, so that certainly reduces the novelty factor over time... But yeah, the piece I wrote is flawed in many ways. I could've made it clearer that I didn't mean that I thought this phenomenon happened to everyone, and as you point out, I could've made it clearer that to many people, they don't become less impressed even if they learn a lot less. I had a hard time finding the right word to describe things and ended up going with "impressed" in the title and that colors the interpretation of the whole thing, but I'm not sure what other word I could have used that would've been more precise... Writing's hard! Especially when it's about meta-cognition and fuzzy things like that...

I didn't mean to imply that it happens to everybody, and I probably should have made that clear. It's just something that I often see in a noticeable fraction of the "old students" for many mentors. I think the best way to avoid this phenomenon is to be aware of it and calibrate yourself to the fact that the novelty has worn off and the low-hanging fruits have been picked. I think some people don't do that, and see to expect their mentors to constantly blow their minds the way they did initially. And I intentionally didn't name anyone else than some superstars because I didn't feel good comfortable doing so. Or I could be wrong about all this! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I wrote something. It's a pretty obvious concept, but for some reason I felt like writing it down. Sharing it in case someone else finds some interest in it, but frankly, it's nothing that will blow your mind, just a little phenomenon I kept noticing: https://medium.com/@Liberty/why-your-mentors-seem-less-impressive-over-time-e6d8938b2d51

That's a good question, but I think it's the same question you have to ask yourself even if there's no history between the parties. M&A is often done for the wrong reasons and destroys value (empire building, "strategic" reasons, following competitors, etc). At least buying tiny startups isn't quite as dangerous for these behemoths as doing large acquisitions where there's a chance that the culture will clash or that projections/synergies will never materialize.