Warren Buffett visits Texas Capitol and "Buffett Bill" is born [H/T Linc] (LINK)
Richard Branson's 70 must-read books (LINK)
On Neo-Cons and their Mental Defects – by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (LINK)
He Rides a Decrepit Bike and Owns a French Vineyard: The Unconventional World of Bank CEO Bob Wilmers (LINK)
Stress and Comfort: Careful What You Wish For - by Morgan Housel (LINK)
Sure, Stocks Are Overvalued. Now What? - by Ben Carlson (LINK)
Paul Tudor Jones Says U.S. Stocks Should ‘Terrify’ Janet Yellen (video plays) (LINK)
Billionaire investor Paul Tudor Jones has a message for Janet Yellen and investors: Be very afraid.
The legendary macro trader says that years of low interest rates have bloated stock valuations to a level not seen since 2000, right before the Nasdaq tumbled 75 percent over two-plus years. That measure -- the value of the stock market relative to the size of the economy -- should be “terrifying” to a central banker, Jones said earlier this month at a closed-door Goldman Sachs Asset Management conference, according to people who heard him.
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Chat With Traders podcast Episode 121: Tactics for better decision making, and skill versus luck w/ Michael Mauboussin (LINK)Managers expecting the worst each have a pet harbinger of doom. Seth Klarman, who runs the $30 billion Baupost Group, told investors in a letter last week that corporate insiders have been heavy sellers of their company shares. To him, that’s “a sign that those who know their companies the best believe valuations have become full or excessive.”
Adventures in Finance Podcast: Episode 12 - Bass and Burbank, A Masterclass (LINK) [The Bass/Burbank part is from a Real Vision TV chat in March of 2015, and the audio of that can also be found HERE.]
Quora raises $85 million to expand internationally and develop its ads business (LINK) [Sam Altman also discussed Y Combinator's reasons for investing HERE.]
Exponent podcast: Episode 111 — Lamentation Not Condemnation (LINK)
The World’s Strangest Mammal Can Survive 18 Minutes Without Oxygen - by Ed Yong (LINK)
Oxygen makes up around 20 percent of the air around you. If it fell to 5 percent, you’d pass out after 3 minutes or so. Then, your brain would start to die. To fuel itself, this gas-guzzling organ requires a constant supply of sugar and oxygen—even when you’re not doing anything. Without the vital gas, ions flood across the barriers of neurons, causing internal havoc, and forcing them to self-destruct. “There’s probably more than a hundred things that will kill brain cells if you turn off the oxygen,” says Thomas Park, from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Bill Nye Saves the World premiers on Netflix today (LINK)Within minutes, you’d be dead. And hours after that, a naked mole-rat in the exact same conditions would be happily walking around—the picture of health. Imagine a disembodied index finger that’s been soaking in the bath for too long, and has teeth at the end. That’s a naked mole-rat. These weird rodents live in large underground colonies with nesting chambers the size of footballs. In these cramped subterranean quarters, oxygen levels often fall as low as 6 percent. And yet, these animals cope with this hypoxia.
Books of the day:
Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World
The Undersea Network
The Network: The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age