America is all we have.
“The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true. ” ― J. Robert Oppenheimer
CURATED COLLECTION
A collection of 705 issues
You Stay.
Capital Thinking • Issue #1204 • View online I have a metal filing cabinet in my office. The bottom drawer is locked. No one touches it. It’s not full of files. It’s full of old, cracked leather collars. Thank-you cards written in crayon. Blurry photos from the 90s. A single,
We never know when the bus is coming
Capital Thinking • Issue #1202 • View online "I love being horribly straightforward. I love sending reckless text messages (because how reckless can a form of digitized communication be?) and telling people I love them and telling people they are absolutely magical humans and I cannot believe they really exist. I
Money is a Window
"If you find something that is true in more than one field, you’ve probably uncovered something particularly important. The more fields it shows up in, the more likely it is to be a fundamental and recurring driver of how the world works."
I remember you well
People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve. - Tom Robbins
Bye, bye UnAmerican Lie
there seems to be a strong new sense that the politics of vilification have gone too far. this is just not the sort of thing america tolerates and those cheering for it (there were folks who did this for reagan’s would be assassin too) are going to be rapidly ejected from the debate.
Go Play Outside
if you cannot govern yourself, someone else is going to come along and do it for you, good and hard, for he who adjudicates grievance may easily rule the plaintiffs and demand ever more baroque and debased prostrations to whatever is passing for “authority.”
We cannot save ourselves
The Three-Body Problem is electrifying in any format thanks to the grim power of Liu’s central question: if another world came bringing death to ours instead of fellowship, how many of us would welcome our own doom?
Filling his shoes
Here's to parents everywhere. May it be the best job you ever have.
Survival is the Exception
The intoxicating power to nullify people instead of hypotheses is irresistible, and Sagan’s dark predictions will prove true.
When My Someday Began
I hated living in a trailer. I hated sneaking out the back door and walking around the block to show up at the bus stop from a different street, hoping no one would guess where I really lived.
No one is going to remember you in 100 years
Capital Thinking • Issue #1192 • View online Here are some thoughts from Morgan Housel on money and the things it cannot buy. Scottish proverb: Be happy while you are living, for you are a long time dead. - Morgan Housel A Few Laws of Getting Rich by Morgan Housel | The Collaborative
People hire me to fix things
I call myself a part-time autodidact handyman, a playful term to distract folks from the fact that, on paper at least, I have no business whatsoever working on their house.
It's an Island, babe
"Sporadic time spent in places you like is not enough to erase the harm of living in a place you don’t. It hurts you when the place you live doesn’t align with your values. How much of what you become is because of where you are?"
What Never Changes
Everyone tells us to keep our eyes on the never ending changes all around us, but what would happen if we actually turned that around and focused what doesn't change? Ever?
What you put in
No one finds exponential growth natural; every child is surprised, the first time they hear it, by the story of the man who asks the king for a single grain of rice the first day and double the amount each successive day.
The Devil you know
There is perhaps no literary trope more misunderstood—and therefore, misused—than Robert Louis Stevenson’s immortal Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde. Often, the two are used as a a kind of balance, a rough form of moral balance, which is not the point of the story at all.
Walking Away
So I turned down the all-cash offer for Groove, believing the company could be so much more, and believing that I had so much more to prove.
Risk is a Four Letter Word
We trade freedom not for safety, but for the illusion of safety. Illusion, because: you can’t eliminate risk. - Packy McCormick
Stuck on Repeat
Roger Williams would tell us that censoring speech does not further the search for truth or advance the goals of unity and peace; neither does enforcing belief (or as he would say, forcing consciences – forcing souls) promote these aims.
The Road Not Taken
It reminds me of a recent tweet I saw from Morgan Housel: "Bad luck is easy to identify when you fail and good luck is easy to ignore when you succeed." This is why you should never look down the road not taken. Because that road never leads to where you think it should.
COOL WON'T PAY THE RENT
The sudden and collective realization that while, yes, we all concede that a 14-inch scimitar and a flask of Fernet Branca on your hip are cool, they’re not nearly as cool as health insurance and a 401k from a job where the sous chef doesn’t hump your leg every shift.
ONE MAN'S TRASH
The problem with offering unsolicited advice is that people don’t like to be told what to do.
EACH PERSON IS A DIFFERENT MIRROR
There’s a war of ideas. If wise people’s thoughts don't spread, other’s thoughts will. And the people who want their ideas to spread the most are rarely the ones who should be spreading ideas.
HUMANITY'S END
Ultimately, movements such as these will fail because they stubbornly refuse to understand core human drivers and incentives: the desire for life, for prosperity and for growth.
BE THANKFUL
If you are reading this, you won ovarian lottery. Be thankful.
WHAT IF THE STORY IS WRONG?
American is wealthy, influential, powerful, and increasingly equal. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
HOW LUCK AND RISK WORK
Knowing the high odds of something happening loses its meaning when that thing happening hurts. Probability goes out the window. Odds that are in your favor but still hurt are hard to distinguish from odds that aren’t in your favor.
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR
It’s not until you focus on internal benchmarks and see how far you’ve come, relative to where you began – the gap between today and your own cost basis – that you have a good view of where you stand and what you’ve accomplished.
WE ARE NOT RUSSIA NOR CHINA - ARE WE?
Americans are allowed and entitled to say almost anything we can dream up to say under something called The First Amendment to the US Constitution. We do not need permission from the left, Twitter, or the FBI to have a “theory” about anything.
NO ONE IS MOVING FOR THE WEATHER
As we say in Nevada, California Governor Gavin Newsome is a tremendous realtor. With every edict he passes and every sentence he utters, home values in bordering states go up.
FLASHBACK
The most important thing to remember about the markets is they are constantly surprising — both to the upside and the downside.
LANGUAGE IS AN IMPERFECT INSTRUMENT
The caveat to keeping your identity small is when you want to identify as a positive trait – “I’m a kind person” – so that you’re forced to live up to it, especially when this is an unchanging desire.
The Power of a Gift
There’s no mention of a product here. No crass commercialism. No “pushing” anyone’s agenda. Just a simple story about the incredible power of a gift.
THE ONLY WINNING MOVE
At times it can look like the entire financial industry is filled with charlatans and frauds. However, we forget that the honest people don’t make the headlines. These are the people that understand that managing peoples’ money is a serious affair. They aren’t messing around.
MR. GRINCH GOES TO WASHINGTON
May the peace of the Lord in these troubled times comfort you and may you enjoy the holidays in the bosom of your family. May all of Putin’s missiles miss and may Santa make it through the artillery in Ukraine.
WHERE IT ALL BEGAN
I was asked to speak at an event on Anti-Bullying Day to tell that story again. Over 1,000 people in the audience listened as I shared those two words that had paralyzed me for years earlier. And when I got done, there was a line of people that started outside of the room and ran up to the stage.
THE QUICKEST WAY TO A BILLION
Over the long run, unsubstantiated valuations revert and perpetual motion machines stop. When this happens, the illusion of wealth bursts and the inside game is revealed. Some people end up with dollars, others end up with tokens. Choose wisely.
Whenever Possible
Instead of wasting breath on the macro headline of the day, investors would be better off focusing on understanding their current situation the best they can with the information at hand and investing accordingly.
CHEAP ENOUGH TO SAVE THE WORLD
Mahalanabis never received the Nobel Prize for medicine. I doubt that worried him, but it should give the rest of us pause. If there is no room in our stories of success for the tin can, the menstrual pad and oral rehydration therapy, then we are missing something which matters.
AI: CREATING A CONFIDENT BULLSHITTER
Lots of people have posted similar examples of ‘false facts’ asserted by ChatGPT. It often looks like an undergraduate confidently answering a question for which it didn’t attend any lectures. It looks like a confident bullshitter, that can write very convincing nonsense.
THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA
It is difficult to explain moral hazard to tenured professors or the pampered princes of bureaucracy, who beat the drum with their silver spoons in support of shifting the risk of loss to the public every time that Wall Street falls into one of its own schemes and blows itself up.
Bloat
Indeed, I gather the point of the Stanford effort is precisely to regulate AI research. Which will mostly just mean China does it instead.
GOING, GOING, GONE
For big banks, operating safe deposit boxes no longer makes financial sense. But as the likes of Chase and Capital One exit the safe-deposit business, they have accidentally created an intractable problem for consumers. People still want safe deposit boxes and now it’s nearly impossible to get one.
THE CULT OF STEAK
As you might expect, vegetarians will have a somewhat rough time here. For most people in Argentina, a vegetarian is something you eat. Vegans will not survive in Argentina
ONE HELL OF A RIDE
We don’t look back. We don’t complain. We drive fast. We take on the Machine. People we love come and go. Times change. People die. We fly into an unknown future. Remember what you said in your recent memoir? “There’s one thing they can never take away: Nobody had more fun than I did.”
JUDGING THE FUTURE BY THE PAST
There are occasional periods when society learns that debt can be dangerous, greed backfires, and more money won’t solve all your problems. But it quickly forgets and moves on. Again and again. Generation after generation.
THE WORLD'S TALLEST BUILDING
The rapid construction schedule ended up shaping almost every aspect of the building. Primarily, this meant the design of the building needed to be as simple and repetitive as possible.
THE POWER OF REPEATING YOURSELF
Regardless of the number of times you air, the bottom line is this: If you don’t put a message in listeners’ ears often enough for them to retain or recall it, there is no point in airing it at all.
Wheel Estate
By 1974 mobile homes were produced by over 300 firms in 800 plants across the country, and across the country 9 million people were living in nearly 4 million mobile homes. According to Forbes, the top 3 most profitable companies between 1968 and 1973 were mobile home manufacturers
The 1934 Securities Exchange Act and all that
Bronte Capital (John Hempton) post originally from 2008 - but repeated in 2022 because history rhymes
Nothing Good Happens After Midnight
You know exactly what that expression means. The markets version of this is: Don’t obsess about investing beyond the point of diminishing returns.
History on Repeat
Fraud, money laundering, and corruption on a global scale, yet regulators seem asleep at the wheel. This has happened before...
Bet on Black? or Red?
Roulette, as an investment, is not in the range-of-good-choices. But as an analogy it fits nice. Prepare and pick from prime possibilities but remember the ball might not bounce any of those ways.
What Doesn't Change
Most decisions aren’t made on a spreadsheet, where you just add up the numbers and a rational answer pops out. There’s a human element that’s hard to quantify, hard to explain, and can seem totally detached from the original goal, yet carries more influence than anything else.
The Next Warren Buffet? Nah, I don't think so
The overall picture is clearーwe have enough potential sources of losses that even if some of the numbers are off here and there, it is now at least conceivable how they might have arrived at such staggering losses.
Tea Party Barbie
Democracy dies in darkness my ass. They are so full of crap that their eyes are brown.
Are the good times really over for good?
Like Wile E. Coyote, tech companies ran off the cliff long ago; only now is economic gravity starting to assert itself.
One of you will die this summer
Trust the statistics. Trust the rules. Remember, the ranger said one of you. Never mind the summers when there were two.
History is Rewritten All the Time
If each individual has a hard time with their own memories of what happened, how accurate can other people’s assessments of their life truly be?
Wanted: People Who Color Outside the Lines
These periods aren’t fun. They never are, but the good news is that in their wake something positive happens. The adversity will separate the wheat from the chaff, the three-stars with upside from five-stars without it, and those who can “handle hard well” from those who cannot
Finding your place in the sun
*Maybe Travis McGee had it right all along - and he was years ahead of the rest of us. - Ed.
Everything Has a Price
The price of building wealth isn’t just the trouble of earning money; it’s avoiding the post-earnings urge to spend what you’ve accumulated.
The Weakest Link
The O-ring model is merely a simple way of thinking about how an economy might work — albeit one that seems packed with insight
Red or Blue?
Winston Churchill said to keep champagne cold in your fridge at all times. In victory you deserve it, in defeat, you need it. Both parties will be drinking it tomorrow for different reasons.
Buying Time
It doesn’t make sense to try to do everything yourself. You have to find people who are good at things and empower them to help you. You have to be strong enough to hand over the keys, to relinquish control, to develop a system—an organization—that is bigger than just us.
Housing Market Impacts
Today the median house price in relation to median income is at the highest level in modern US history, even higher than it was at the height of the housing bubble in 2007. It is almost double the level of the early 1980s.
From the World of Smoke and Mirrors
There are times when tiny mistakes occur that get blown out of proportion when outsiders believe hidden agendas exist despite all evidence to the contrary. This is the story of such a case.
Making Our Brains Dance
This brings me back to the people who each paid $700 to hear me speak. If they had paid less, or if they hadn’t paid at all, would they have valued it the same?
The Republic of Suffering
Deep down we know that cultural appropriation—when done right, when done well—is actually called art. And when we are not too busy looking for outrage points on the internet to look at the art itself, we know that it is actually something quite powerful and important
Killing Facebook
Zuckerberg is currently participating in the single-most expensive attempt to manifest reality and painfully failing. He is a nakedly awful ruler that can never actually be fired, meaning that he can burn this company to the ground if he sees fit.
Two Types of Risk
You’re not known for your losses, you’re known for your wins.
To Be or To Do
As the world moves faster and faster, we don’t need more formulas or how-tos. We need to improve our ability to change our minds based on a changing reality and in so doing turn uncertainty into opportunity and ambiguity into advantage.
Changing How You Think
Books that, when you’ve finished them, have caused you to “pivot” your mindset. Ones that make you think in a new and more informed way.
Will There Be Donuts?
A good meeting is a good meeting less because of what happens at the time, but because of what came before — and most importantly, what comes after.
Everything is sales
Most problems are more complicated than they look but most solutions should be simpler than they are.
Mortgage Rates: How High Can They Go
The good news for the homebuilders is activity usually picks up quickly following an interest rate induced slowdown (as opposed to following the housing bust when the recovery took many years)
The Candor Room
I promise, we learn more from our failures than we do our victories. Our failures challenge us at our core and test us to see if we are up to overcoming what others may perceive as our demise.
Map or Compass? Chapter 1
We don’t have to relive our mistakes to learn from them.
Why We Do The Shit We Do
Finding out how to get your needs met is not just some self-help mumbo jumbo: it’s one of the most important business decisions you can make.
The Art of the Con
Some lessons in sales and trust from the man who tried to sell the Eiffel Tower twice.
Purchase Denied
How much of your wealth is reliant on trusting external, opaque systems and complying with their increasingly one-sided, ephemeral and arbitrary policies, expectations or whims?
Unsexy Money
“You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems you solve.” - Elon Musk
You will never see it coming
When you look back at what people said in the late 1920s – their confidence, their clarity, their logic – you can’t help but wonder what we are confident in today that will look foolish in the future.
The Harder You Work, The Luckier You Get
I am a hardcore capitalist because I have seen how it can change people’s lives. I am anti-socialist because socialism destroys people. It destroys society. In its most virulent forms, it kills people. That’s the debate we should be having today and no one is calling anyone out on it.
Tales from the Road
It’s what we all want to do. Which is why we were addicted to this music to begin with. We boomers remember when you didn’t take endorsements, when your credibility was everything, when you were channeling truth.
Going, Going, Gone
In the nineties, well-heeled investors began rolling up mom-and-pop businesses across the country, from plumbing to pest control, hoping to boost profitability by providing economies of scale. The result has been baleful for small towns.
The Heart of Socialism's Failure
Labor or capital without a mind behind it is useless.
The Most Lethal Shipwreck in History
Seventy-five years on, some details of the disaster still remain a mystery, however. Was sabotage to blame when a suspicious radio message warning of sea mines reached the command bridge, just before the first torpedo hit?
Write Your Own Playbook
My favorite career advice
Memento Mori
From scary phone call through world exploration to her last hospital check-in, she wrote just 20 tweets. 289 words. 1640 characters.
Eye of the Beholder
Art represents a $1.7 trillion asset class. That makes it bigger than private debt and about half the size of private equity.
Failing in Style
I was basically alone. I didn’t have a team, nor an office. Some of my friends became billionaires. Meanwhile, I was running a “measly” lifestyle business. It wasn’t what I wanted to do, but I had to keep the ship from sinking.
We Can't All Be Winners
The “harbingers of failure” study reminds us that we could equally seek customers with the opposite quality: an unerring nose for products that the mass market will despise. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that such people exist.
The first rule of the game is knowing what game you are playing
The game of growing a company is a game of learning and mastering new games as fast as you can, then leaving the old games behind.
The Match King
He charmed everyone, from President Hoover to Greta Garbo to the journalists who put his boyish face on the covers of Time and The Saturday Evening Post. Kreuger favored perception over reality. He believed financial statements were an art, not a science.
Tail risks
Most people don’t (and can’t) know exactly what caused their own successes and failures. So even if you ask them for a roadmap, they might lead you down a different path than the one they took themselves.
The sum of our yesterdays
Memories are important not only for learning and remembering but also because they form the basis of what we can imagine and create. In so many ways, we are what we remember.
Pick a Card. Any Card.
Misinformation doesn’t thrive because we can’t spot the tricks. It thrives because, all too often, we don’t try. We don’t try, because we are confident that we already did.
Something Different
I think it’s super important to know what we’re striving for and why. Some of us want to ensure a comfortable retirement, others want to get rich. But ask yourself what does rich mean.