Acquired

Ben Rollert a composer recommended that I read Diamond Age by Neil Stevenson and he's famous for snow crash and coining the term metaverse and all those things.

Diamond Age is really fascinating because it's a non-digital future It's a future where a lot of the innovation has come on the physical side of things and The world map is split up in all of these interesting ways and it takes place in what is today China

And the best part is it reminds me in terms of writing style a lot of Kurt Vonnegut And so it's just this really fascinating Book to read I would highly recommend Diamond Age by Neil Stevenson

I haven't finished the book yet, I'm still in the middle of it but I'm riveted. The only reason I haven't finished is because we had to finish this episode.

Phil basically saw the future of what tech company like Dynamics were going to be way back in the day.

He writes about like the value of corporate R&D and this sort of paradox that like you can't measure the value on a balance sheet of like corporate R&D and the cost of it may be high and you don't know but the cost of not doing corporate R&D is even higher.

Really great book, highly highly recommend it.

So there literally was a book called Angel Investors of China. I think it had like 12 men in it.

And then I read a book called Wired to Eat which talks about continuous glucose monitoring.

Invent and Wander, which was like a collection of writing from Bezos and it was sort of organized by Walter Isaacson.

And it's Bezos over, I don't know, like two decades.

And the consistency and like the long-term thinking that you can just see it through the writings.

It's like this guy was writing about this in like the late nineties, you know?

I think looking at the writings of Bezos over a long period of time just gives me a new respect for like the vision and the determination that that guy has exercised over just such a long period of time.

It's actually someone who listened to our Bitcoin episode and had some feedback and we were catching up and they reminded me you should watch this video.

And it's called How the Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio.

It's unbelievably succinct. It's unbelievably digestible at any level.

It's basically a 30 minute primer on the economy.

He's like, we got three big things that happen over time.

Yeah, Buffett the making of an American capitalist a great book by Roger Lowenstein

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. So I think you can't go wrong

The way that it's described in in Lowenstein's book is that what was unique and remarkable about the Great Depression was that Even the smart money got wiped out because the people who sort of realized ooh things are cheap now that the crash is over Would buy in and then even they lost all their money.

He had gone to the library and taken out a book called 1000 ways to make $1,000 One of those like books that could only exist in like the 40s and 50s.

How long the times would survive would depend largely on how well ox's heirs got along in the decades ahead? He knows this nothing would crumble his foundation faster than family squabbles, selfish ambition or shortsighted goals, his successors would have to make money but not be enticed by it, would have to keep up with the trends but not be carried away by them, would have to hire talented people but not people so talented or egocentric that they could become too special as writers or indispensable as editors, or else they'll go start a substack.

The times would go on indefinitely he hoped towering over all individuals and groups in its employ and his family would work together repressing any personal animosity for the greater good and if possible choose mates in marriage who would also be wed to the times

There's this great book called Transitions by William Bridges and it's wonderful and it's About psychologically dealing with Transitions in your life Even if it's like a good transition like getting married or or having a kid or you know And bad Transitions too like big changes in your life and The whole theme of it is that when you have a transition like the old you needs to die Before the new you can arise And to my I kept thinking about this through this story here in this part one of like Warren was so successful He was the most successful bengram disciple That there was more successful than ben himself but that wasn't gonna work anymore and he needed to get to start to understand these things that you're talking about and He needed to Symbolically You know die the old Warren to have the new Warren arrive And I think that's what happened here with the closing down of the partnership Whether he knew it or not almost assuredly he did not he needed to close the chapter on Like that part of his life to start to embrace some of these very different philosophies

Saba to hears ember in the ashes series

It's really cool, it starts out the first book ember in the ashes I thought was a little slow and felt a little hung hunger games knockoffy, but my wife jenny had read the series and she was like no no no no like stick with it and by the end of the first book and then into the second and beyond it gets gets really good I thought really good world building, very cool sort of like It was um, kind of like game of thrones meets lord of the rings meets like the middle east like it was uh, it was good highly recommend

The great ones eliminate all distractions and focus only on what matters Shut out the things that don't matter and don't let their time get stolen away People forget how few hours there are in a year. You must focus on what's important and not do What's not?

He's got that one essay. I think it might be in Startups equals growth about the hill climbing algorithm and you basically always try and find the next highest hill.

And you would think that you could accidentally find a local maximum and not the global maximum that way.

But in practice, whenever you're on a higher hill that's a better way to get to the next hill.

And you can sort of always use that way to find your way to the absolute maximum.

And he was a visiting author at Stanford and he was staying, I don't know if it was on Stanford Housing or something over on Alpine Road, which is kind of behind the dish if you know the Stanford campus.

And he works for Leafley, the marijuana company. He had written a book called Weed the People about legalizing marijuana.

And that was largely from a book called "What Works on Wall Street" which was sort of the book that created the asset management firm which is kind of an interesting directional story.

And that was about it. I think the plans may have been to expand types of strategies and make it more and more customizable which I think would have been a powerful concept, one that we're playing with today. But never quite made it there.

The reason I named it this was so my dad's first book he's written for, his first book was called "Invest Like the Best" and the whole premise,

And so I just thought, oh, that's kind of cool. You know, I'm basically going to do a version of that where I'm talking to people because I'm interested in getting them to share portable lessons with me and everybody else. So it would be kind of a neat tip of the hat to my dad's original research.

I think it was called "Dear Chairman" which was a a story of eight different activist investment campaigns in public markets including the letters that were written by the investor to the chairman. I mean it's an awesome book and Jeff was kind of marketing the book and I can't remember who asked who but we decided that we would record like an audio version of of the major topics covered in the book that was the first episode I told my producer Matthew that I would commit to doing seven of them again because if I don't have a habit I don't do well so I figured seven was like seven weeks felt like long enough.

Our next book club will be reading Brotopia by Emily Chang of Bloomberg TV fame.

And Emily has graciously agreed to join us and all of our LPs for a discussion on the book next month.

The more skill and activity requires, the more luck will play a role in the outcome.