Good Morning. Warren Buffett sat on $397 billion for two years. His successor spent a chunk in ninety days. Plus, vegetable biodiversity, Arnold's best workout advice, and the true origin of S'mores (forwarded this email? Join 523k readers).
Missed Friday? Our most clicked link: Daily Diet Coke leads to cognitive decline
TOP STORY TODAY
Spending Buffett’s Money
Berkshire Hathaway's cash pile fell to $365.5 billion at the end of June, down from a record $397.4 billion three months earlier. It was Greg Abel's second quarter as CEO, and his first big spend.
The headline move was a $10 billion stake in Alphabet, which knocked Apple out of the top spot in Berkshire's portfolio for the first time in nearly a decade. Buybacks hit roughly $4.5 billion.
Operating earnings rose 16% to $12.98 billion, with energy up 27% and Geico underwriting profit down 45%. Berkshire closed a $6.8 billion cash deal for homebuilder Taylor Morrison on July 24.
Vegetables Vanishing
An international team of nutrition and botany researchers published a report last week arguing that the world's vegetable supply has narrowed dramatically, and that our diets are worse for it. They counted more than 1,480 edible vegetable species.
Most people eat about 40% fewer vegetables than recommended, and low vegetable intake ranks among the top five dietary risk factors for global disease. Roughly 24% of assessed wild vegetable relatives are now at risk of extinction.
The potato makes the point. There are over 4,000 varieties worldwide, but only five to eight are widely grown in the US. The fix at home: heirloom seeds, saved seeds, and farmers' markets.
Barbarians Reconsidered
Researchers from the US and Sweden published a review in the Journal of Archaeological Research arguing that history's so-called barbarians were far more organized than the record suggests. The word itself started as the Greek term for foreigner.
The team examined four groups: the Vikings, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Sea Peoples, and the Comanche. Each coordinated at large scale without a capital city, a single leader, or centralized command. Raiding was strategic, not chaotic.
The twist is that decentralization was the point. No head meant nothing to cut off, which made these groups hard to defeat. Their reputation for savagery came from the literate empires losing to them.
TOGETHER WITH IMPACT
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22 Books F. Scott Fitzgerald Called Required Reading
In the summer of 1936, F. Scott Fitzgerald was broke, injured, and living in a North Carolina hotel. His nurse, Dorothy Richardson, asked what she should read. He wrote her a list of 22 books and called them required.
He closed the list with Keats. Fitzgerald kept a volume of his poetry on the desk while writing Gatsby, and pulled the title Tender Is the Night straight out of one of his poems.
Arnold's Fix For Wasted Reps
Arnold Schwarzenegger says most people sabotage their own progress the same way: too much weight, range cut short, set rushed. His fix is one rule, and it works on everything.
Go all the way down. Go all the way up.
Drop the weight until you can hit a full stretch at the bottom
Pause there instead of bouncing out of it
Squeeze at the top before you reverse
Slow the descent, since that's where the growth happens
Apply it to squats, pull-ups, curls, all of it
He argues the half-rep isn't cheating the weights. It's cheating yourself out of the only part of the set that mattered.
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▲ Myspace's Owners revealed in a new documentary they lost $150 million on the 2013 relaunch attempt
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TOGETHER WITH HAIRMAX
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Fun Links
Why data centers need so much power? [Video]
Is your office wardrobe acceptable? [Quiz]
3 books for entrepreneurs to read [List]
Chocolate protein cookie dough [Recipe]
Luck doesn’t come looking for you [Post]
The true history of the S’mores recipe [Blog]
A digital Blockbuster for streaming [Resource]
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