Long Reads

OnlyCFO walks through the accounting shenanigans that let startups deceive investors — from capitalized sales commissions and internal-use software to burn multiple games — and explains why VCs are particularly easy to fool.

Jack Raines applies James Carse's finite vs. infinite games framework to the way we live — arguing that optimizing for achievements (finite play) is a trap, and that the better life is spent in pursuit of things you actually enjoy pursuing.

Bryce Roberts argues that the venture model's obsession with $50B+ outcomes — where 15 companies drive 95% of the industry's value — has crowded out a huge population of profitable, founder-controlled businesses that represent a better path for most entrepreneurs.

Lionel Barber reviews two books that strip away the aura of respectability from management consulting — exposing conflicts of interest, fee-driven avarice, and work for despotic regimes that contrast sharply with the industry's 'thought leader' self-image.

Packy McCormick argues that ZIRP-era phenomena (creator economy, NFTs, elaborate lifestyle content) were just appetizers — previews of a much stranger world where automation shrinks the workforce and UBI-style abundance changes what humans do with their time.

Noah Smith argues that America's failure to build housing, transit, and green energy isn't a money problem — it's a broken permitting, land use, and development system exploited by entrenched local interests.

Joe Lonsdale argues that America's national greatness was always tied to Frontier conditions — falsifiable, accountable environments that harden ideas and people — and that restoring the Frontier mindset is the antidote to bureaucratic dysfunction, not fighting cultural sideshows.

McKinsey Global Institute argues that regaining historical rates of productivity growth (2.2% annually) would add $10 trillion to US GDP — and outlines why the past 15 years of digital technology have paradoxically produced a productivity slowdown.

Stephen Wolfram walks through the mechanics of how ChatGPT generates text — from next-word probability to neural nets to the remarkable fact that meaningful human language may have more structure and simplicity than we ever knew.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy interviews Okta co-founder/CEO Todd McKinnon: leaving Salesforce to bet on the cloud, the painful early years, how you create and become the default name in a new market category, and the frameworks for innovating as a public company.

Yale case (2020) on why holding a business for decades beats flipping it: compounding, the friction of trade (taxes, fees, idle cash, redeployment risk), and why MOIC beats IRR.

Books and lectures fail to convey knowledge for the same reason — both silently assume transmissionism (you absorb knowledge by reading/hearing sentences), which is false. The fix isn't better books but new mediums designed out of how people actually learn.

TIME's special edition on how the brain learns — debunking the 10,000-hour myth, naming the ingredients of learning (motivation, opportunity, sustained attention) and habits of mind (curiosity, diligence), and tracing the lineage of education reform from Hall and Dewey to Montessori, Piaget, and Dweck.

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland's MTC address to departing missionaries: the central change Preach My Gospel made was to convert the missionary first, so the missionary can meet investigators where they are. Built around the Wallace Toronto / Moroni 8 doorstep story, the three things missionaries do poorly (study, prepare, teach for commitment), and a close reading of Christ's threefold 'Feed my sheep' to Peter.

Talk 3 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — Munger revisits the latticework of mental models: ignore jurisdictional boundaries, beware heavy ideology, 'Work. Finish. Publish.', knowing what you know vs. don't, and why you'll have a lousy career if you try to succeed at what you're worst at.

Talk 2 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — Munger's USC Business School lecture on building a latticework of mental models: telling people 'why,' two-track analysis, incentives (Federal Express), circle of competence, and why betting on the business beats betting on the manager.

Talk 9 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — Munger on what's wrong with academic economics: physics envy and false precision, the fatal unconnectedness of disciplines, overweighting what can be counted, gameable systems, and the Medicare cost forecast that was off by 1,000%.

Talk 5 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — Munger's prescription for fixing soft-science education: mandatory multidisciplinary courses, cross-discipline problem-solving practice, business periodicals, avoiding passionate ideologues, and imitating the organizing ethos of hard science.

Talk 1 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack. Munger on addiction's subtle pull ('the bonds of degradation are too light to be felt until they are too strong to be broken'), Darwin's habit of prioritizing disconfirming evidence, and Kipling's 'If' as a guide to avoiding life's pitfalls.

Talk 6 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — Munger to foundation investors on the croupiers' take, ubiquitous overconfidence (90% of Swedish drivers, Long-Term Capital Management), Feynman's 'you are the easiest person to fool,' and the antisocial pull of money management on ethical young brainpower.

Talk 7 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — Munger on the 'wealth effect,' stocks valued 'partly like Rembrandt paintings,' the febezzlement of wasted investment fees, crowd folly versus the efficient-market gospel, and Samuel Johnson on easily-removable ignorance as treachery.

Talk 4 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — Munger's five helpful notions for problem-solving (no-brainers first, numerical fluency, invert, multidisciplinary thinking, lollapalooza effects), and his candid reflection that the talk itself failed as teaching because he 'attempted too much.'

Talk 8 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — Munger's satirical parable of 'Quant Tech,' a board optimizing for market capitalization, and the incentive-driven accounting fictions it breeds, punctuated by Upton Sinclair and John Kenneth Galbraith.

Talk 11 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — Munger's capstone: his self-built system of psychological tendencies behind human misjudgment (incentive-caused bias, liking/disliking, doubt-avoidance, social proof, deprival-superreaction, authority, and more) with their standard antidotes.

Talk 10 of the eleven in Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — Munger's commencement counsel: the acquisition of wisdom is a moral duty, be a learning machine, avoid intense ideology and self-pity, the 'iron prescription,' Planck vs. chauffeur knowledge, and Epictetus on humility.

Kyle's long-form notes on Chapter Four of Poor Charlie's Almanack — the eleven talks Charlie Munger gave between 1986 and 2000, collected and annotated by Peter Kaufman. One sub-page per talk.

Truman G. Madsen's second lecture in his Joseph Smith series: a close-up portrait of the man rather than the prophet — physical constitution, athletic streak, the four cast of his mind, temperament and humor, humility, emotional depth, home life with Emma, and the testimony of contemporaries who knew him.