“Beyond God & Elvis” by From Monument to Masses (Mixhell Remix)

Posted: June 12th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Music | Comments Off

From Monument to Masses (SF/NY) remixed by Brazilians Mixhell.

J’s photos from the FMtM tour are here.

“Home” by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Posted: June 7th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Movie | No Comments »

“Il est trop tard pour être pessimiste.”
Article Le Monde

“Way You Make Me Feel” by Guido

Posted: May 26th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Music | No Comments »

Via many brain, yo

Stephen Schwarzman vs. Carl Icahn

Posted: April 26th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Economics | No Comments »

Both making a guest appearance at Yale School of Management over a year ago at the ECON 252: Financial Markets class.

Stephen Schwarzman

Some quotes from the transcript:

[...]“it’s fun. I mean, in my last two weeks, where have I been? Let’s see, certainly in New Haven now; I was in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Cambodia, Korea, Ireland and Germany.”[...]

[...]“My first project that I did–just to give you an idea of the real need for excellence and perfection in what we do–is I was assigned a project. I worked on it really hard; I wrote something up that was like a term paper, which normally you only get to do one a year. In the real world, you get to do them every two to three weeks. I submitted this thing to a gentleman named Herman Kahn, who was a partner at Lehman Brothers–an older partner at the time when I was doing it. I sent it down to him and he was waiting for this project and I got a phone call about three hours later. It sort of went like this: “This is Herman Kahn calling, is this Steve Schwarzman?” I said, “Yes it is, Mr. Kahn.” He said, “I got your paper; there’s a typo on page forty-three.” Bang. That is the only thing I ever heard from Herman Kahn. A slammed phone because a comma was in the wrong place on this piece of work and I had really struggled.” [...]

[...]“How do we deal with failure? I really hate failure. I mean it’s deep, it’s visceral; I really can’t stand it. Because I feel so passionately about that, the people who work at our firm, all of whom I’ve been involved hiring, understand how I feel about failure and so we don’t have a lot of people around who like failing either. One, because they don’t want to disappoint me, but two, because I don’t hire people who don’t feel the same; this is like a passion not to fail. When we fail it’s a major, major, major event. This is not a normal thing.

What we do when we fail is we spend enormous time thinking through, what did we do wrong; what should we have seen; are our processes good; did we misidentify a variable that got us or did we identify it and didn’t evaluate how bad that can be–we got that wrong. Or did we just simply have bad luck where there are three or four bad things that could happen and they all happened, like in a very rapid period of time? Failure is a–how you manage failure is very important and some people manage failure by making pretend it didn’t happen. They just go about their jobs and people don’t pay attention–well we lost money on that one. I don’t believe in that. I like to learn.
Sometimes, you learn more from your failures than you do from your
successes. “[...]

[...]“So, failure is a really important element in learning. It’s like bad dating. You date somebody, it doesn’t work out; that’s the way, by the way, most dating is–it doesn’t work out. Works out for a while, then it doesn’t work out. So, all of you would probably think about, what did I learn from this? Why did I get involved with this person? Was this a good thing on balance or not a good thing? Am I going to repeat this mistake in the future? What did I learn? That’s what we all do in our own lives and we do it in our commercial life as well.”[...]

In this lecture Mr. Schwarzman also delivered a brief and simple but very well done look at the origins of the financial crisis, worthwhile checking out.

I also enjoyed e.g. his remarks about starting up a business in this one (not related)

Carl Icahn

Transcript

Mr. Icahn referred to the poem “IF” by Rudyard Kipling
(Copied from this site)

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!