SnoJohn

10048

Good. If I can get there this weekend I can get my last free battery from the battery club.

Here are his last two interviews. I hope I can be as insightful at that age.

2022: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lewis-lapham-money-and...

2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glcTLgnEEGE

His last interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWpm2NOF2Zw

Books in Charlie Munger's Library: Influence by Robert Cialdini, Einstein by Walter Isaacson, Go East Young Man (memoir of William O. Douglas), Eugene Meyer bio (Father of Kay Graham, Chair of Fed in 30s), Max Planck bio, John Kenneth Galbraith’s Ambassadors Journal, Set of the Harvard Classics, Copey of Harvard by James Donald Adams, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Federalist Papers, Capital (history of Capital Group) by Charley Ellis, Current Value Line Binder, Set of Shakespeare at the top, Possibly a set of Balzac.

From a photo of his last interview in the WSJ.

LQ was always a labor of love supported by a handful of Lapham's friends and supporters. He was recently still coming into the office everyday at 87 and was actively editing the journal.

Lapham dropped out of Cambridge (where his advisor was CS Lewis) and went to work as a beat reporter at the SF Chronicle in the 1950s. LQ was always his dream of the the perfect magazine, and it is great that he achieved it.

The issues are evergreen. Some of my favorites are Technology, Celebrity and Swindles & Frauds.

If there is one takeaway from all the issues it is that there is nothing new under the sun.

Robert Ringer wrote the classic on this type of behavior: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ringer

It's called Winning Through Intimidation, and it is a very funny story of how he learned to not get burned in real estate transactions by being prepared for the inevitable tricks people would try to play on him. Short and lots of sage advice.

He has been saying so for years. Here he is detailing it with Sam Harris in 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9aAYJhQz3A

One of the more harrowing accounts of 1918 is the famous short story by John O'Hara called The Doctor's Son, about a teenage boy driving a country doctor around during the 1918 flu. We got off easy: https://archive.org/details/collectedstories0000ohar

Update: It's Al Capone's vault: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_Al_Capone%27s_V...

Better link: https://archive.is/vfTjc

Religious organization of crowds:

"The faithful are gathered together at appointed places and times, and through performances which are always the same, they are transported into a mild state of crowd feeling sufficient to impress itself on them without becoming dangerous, and to which they grow accustomed. Their feeling of unity is dispensed to them in doses and the continuance of the church depends on the rightness of the dosage." p. 25

Surprised the author did not mention Louis Auchincloss, who is the obvious template for the excellent Diaz book. Auchincloss was fascinated by what money did to the wealthy class of his time. The Great World and Timothy Colt, The House of Five Talents (fiction but about the Vanderbilts) and many others focus on what happens to the person who makes the money and what they ultimately leave behind.

It was common for Auchincloss to use diaries, news stories, and personal narration from people around the subject to provide perspective. The Rector of Justin has six narrators. This seems to be most useful at piercing the many layers that form around wealth, and how the individuals often lose themselves. Citizen Kane would be the film example of this.

Auchincloss was also a great short story writer. Tales of Manhattan is a great way to get into his subtle, but deeply perceptive writing about New York's old world of finance, law and art worlds.

Logan Allin - We only invest with repeat founders. This has saved us more money than anything else. It means you passed on FTX, Celsius Network, BlockFi, Bolt, and Fast.com.

This is fun to listen to for all its counterintuitive observations like not wanting to meet the founders.

But like a lot of angels, it just ends up being a fish story without any real hard numbers or company names.

I don't doubt what he is saying, it's just hard to learn anything from angels when you have no real data.

Tom Nicholas, an HBS professor, wrote a book about the history of VC (1) which spends the first chapter of the book talking about the whaling industry and how it created the venture structure we know today. Many whaling voyages failed to find whales, and some outright sank or disappeared, but some came home full of whale oil. He found the parallels in the data striking. It is a great book and a good companion to Mallaby's Power Law.

Fun fact: his source for whaling data was a book by Alexander Starbuck.

1. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/42449471

This is very cool.

Would love to try it on The Rest is History podcast.

Sorry to quibble, but these aren't investment memos. They are PR statements announcing an investment. An investment memo is an internal document that lays out a business model, a competitive analysis, a risk assessment, the reasoning behind investing or not, and how it should be valued.

Really nice site though. Well designed and works smoothly.

I recently learned about the concept of the "Lead Dad" which is when the father is the chief caregiver. There are a handful of groups that try to connect these fathers (1).

A big part of their emerging agenda is to get corporations and schools to recognize that the father is actually the point of contact and to destigmatize the dad who pauses or leaves his career to raise the kids.

1. https://thecompanyofdads.com