Each Sunday I compose a list of the most thought-provoking and interesting content I’ve consumed during the past week. Primarily as a way to keep inventory of material that influenced me and my way of thinking. This week’s edition mainly acts as a tribute to Norm Macdonald. I wrote about his uniqueness in The last of the iconoclasts – Norm Macdonald 1959-2021.
Papers
Turn and Face the Strange: Overcoming Barriers to Change In Sports and Investing (2021) by Michael Mauboussin & Dan Callahan.
”One of the main lessons from this discussion is that organizations can be slow to adopt certain approaches even when analysis reveals that they add value. Reasons for this include the fact that losses often feel worse than comparable gains and the inclination to maintain the status quo. But perhaps the biggest factor is that in any field where a good decision leads to a good outcome only some percentage of the time, those who make the right decisions may suffer poor outcomes in the short run and hence look wrong. This limited link between decisions and outcomes plants doubt in two ways. The first is the decision maker must question whether his or her process does add value. The second is that naysayers can point at short-term failure as evidence of the futility of the strategy.”
Writings/Essays
My Greatest Gig by Norm Macdonald. An excerpt from Norm’s enigmatic novel ”Based on a True Story.”
This Is What It’s Like to Text Norm Macdonald by Geoff Edgers. In which Norm retells the story of The Overcoat.
Jeff Ross Remembers Norm Macdonald by Jeff Ross.
”His bits were long and weird and sometimes he would bomb. When he did, he would stand by the exit door and awkwardly say goodbye to every single person as they left. This was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. He purposely made people so uncomfortable.”
Confronting the New Eugenics by Rachel Coleman.
”And here I come to my thesis: eugenics – especially the contemporary form it takes – is indeed the Christian virtue of compassion gone mad, isolated from its proper home, the Church, and run wild doing untold damage. . . . If we cannot eliminate suffering then we eliminate the one who suffers. There is no elimination of suffering, there is only elimination of people. So eugenicist logic is after all a murderous impulse, but murderous because compassionate, if perversely so.”
Podcasts/Conversations
Norm Macdonald from 2011, WTF with Marc Maron.
Conan Talks About Norm Macdonald, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.
Dangers Lurk In Market Structure’s Changing Dynamics with Michael Green, The Contrarian Investor Podcast.
Researching the Risks of Return Stacking with Corey Hoffstein & Rodrigo Gordillo, The Derivative.
George Will: Why He’s Against Biden, Trump, and the 1619 Project – And Bullish on the Future, The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie.
Long vol, short prediction models 