The Global View With Mohnish Pabrai And Guy Spier (video) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)
How Dangerous Is a Stock Market of Mindless Robots? - by Jason Zweig (LINK)
Charlie Munger’s Most Important Concept (Takeaways from the DJCO Meeting) - by John Huber (LINK)
How to Quickly Scan a 10-K Report for Key Updates (LINK)
Jim Grant on CNBC: Rising auto loan delinquencies spell trouble (video) (LINK)
John Rogers of Ariel investments talks with Patrick O’Shaughnessy on the Invest Like the Best podcast (LINK)
Anu Hariharan on Network Effects (video) (LINK)
Related previous link: All about Network Effects (and podcast follow-up)Tony Robbins on The School of Greatness podcast (LINK)
Related book (released today): Unshakeable: Your Financial Freedom PlaybookCormac McCarthy Explains Why He Worked Hard at Not Working: How 9-to-5 Jobs Limit Your Creative Potential [H/T @mjmauboussin] (LINK)
The Factious, High-Drama World of Bird Taxonomy [H/T @edyong209] (LINK)
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There were some good quotes from Reed Hastings in his chat with Marc Andreessen that I thought were worth breaking out here. First, on competition:
"We spend a very small amount of time thinking about competition. We spend almost all the time trying to improve the service. And that's because there's nothing we can do about the competition."
And then this quote, after talking about the Andy Grove idea of 'only the paranoid survive,' and how it oversimplifies, because the paranoid can see too many things that aren't there. So it's important to focus on eliminating the risks you can and not think that everything can crush you, or you'll get distracted on the wrong threats:
"To be great at business is like being great at chess. You have to anticipate which series of things 7, 8 moves down are likely to happen, and by the time in chess you go 7 or 8 moves, the tree of possibilities is at the limits of human understanding. And so you have to prune the branches.'That's probably not going to happen, so I'm not going to explore that.' And if you prune wrong, then you get check-mated. And that's the same thing in business."
And then on Amazon and Jeff Bezos, which is especially interesting given that Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have mentioned on several occasions that he might be the best business person of all-time:
"In Amazon's case, I would say they've exceeded the amount of investment that I would have thought they'd put in, and they've spent a tremendous amount of money in the area and some of the shows, as you said, are working out. But I would imagine that from a focus standpoint, it's just not at the core of what they do. The core of Amazon retail and AWS are operational excellence and margin efficiency. And entertainment is a very different thing. But I say that and then I look at Jeff Bezos and I think, not only is he running one of the most amazing companies in the world, but then he's also doing Blue Origin, and also doing The Washington Post. And so I feel like we're competing with an unusual person. And so the normal limits of.... Normally you could not combine all the competencies they're trying to do in Amazon and have that work with entertainment. But because Jeff is there, it's kind of scary."