Most people don’t know the exact Cinnabon cinnamon roll recipe but for a decade, both Aaron and my mom have been intermittently attempting to crack the code, making various tweaks to their pastry-baking-marathons. They’ve been close but never hit upon a recipe that was indistinguishable, in our opinion, from the Cinnabon franchise version.
An English professor walked up to the chalkboard and carefully wrote out the following sentence, informing the students it was their responsibility to punctuate it correctly. “A woman without her man is nothing” All of the males in the class wrote: “A woman, without her man, is nothing” All of the females in the…
Aaron and I were sitting in a sandwich shop trying to flavors in the new Coca-Cola Freestyle machine, when I began to wonder what it would take to build a $250,000 stake in a company like Coke by the time a person reached 35 years old. It was a fun academic thought experiment.
Before you invest a single penny of your money into a potential stock, bond, project, or other asset, there are two questions you should ask yourself. These two questions could have saved a lot of investors from asset bubbles and bankruptcy court. #1 – Does the Investment Offer an Adequate Rate of Return All Things…
I’ve made no secret of the fact I’ve been a net purchaser of Berkshire Hathaway shares for the past year. The valuation seemed (and still seems) absurdly low relative to intrinsic value. Apparently, the Berkshire Hathaway Board of Directors and management agrees.1 The company is now looking at itself as the best use of the firm’s cash.
Today’s mail bag question deals with the ethics of the mental model called assortative mating. This refers to the phenomenon whereby individuals choose to engage in relationships with others who are like themselves (positive assortative mating) or dissimilar (negative assortative mating). There are strong economic arguments that the perceived rise in income inequality is due to assortative…
There is a quick test that can help you determine if you rely on intuition or reflective reasoning (intellect) when making decision. Answer the following question as quickly as possible: “A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?” Do you…
This clip has gone viral over the Internet, generating nearly 700,000 views since it was posted. It shows what it would feel like to fly over Earth if you had a spaceship. Watch of for the lightning and thunderstorms. We live on a beautiful planet. The original poster of the video had this to say:…
Wendy’s recent commercial introducing the remade cheeseburger named after founder Dave Thomas is one of the best examples of marketing and psychology I’ve ever seen. It’s brilliant; mental models applied in a constructive way. I’m not going to take the fun out of it, but be on the lookout for some of the clues…
What does it take to be in the top 1% of wealth in the United States? Many of you write me and ask that question, hoping someday to make it into the top 1% of net worth but not sure where that line gets drawn. I thought it might be useful to provide a reference to which I could point people in the future whenever they write, as well as make for some interesting afternoon reading for those of you who are curious about the nature of the economic world in which we live.
