This week’s episode is part of an experiment and so requires a longer than normal introduction. I’ve come to view this podcast as a learning tool, a means to understand a new topic in a short window of time. One of those areas is venture capital and startups—an area that one year ago was completely foreign to me. I think the best way to learn is aggressive immersion in a topic along with some consequences, what we often call some skin in the game. Accordingly, this is a conversation with the fou...
Oct 24, 2017•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 60
This week’s conversation is about artificial intelligence and interplanetary travel. Its about content creation, thinking from first principles, and death progress units. Its about brain machine interfaces and why it is crucial that you be a chef and not a cook. My guest is Tim Urban, along with his business partner Andrew Finn. Tim is the most entertaining writer I’ve come across in years, who explains complicated and interesting topics to his millions of dedicated readers on the website “Wait,...
Oct 17, 2017•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 59
In episodes one and two of Hash Power, we explored blockchain technology and cryptocurrency investing. In this episode, we discuss the current and potential future states of the crypto world. We cover new forms of cooperation, regulation, security and storage, and why blockchains allow systems to evolve at such a rapid pace. Be sure to listen until the end, where we close with some advice about conducting ourselves in a new world where creativity reigns and repetitive jobs disappear—a trend that...
Oct 10, 2017•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 58
In episode 1 of Hash Power, we explored blockchains as a technology—how they work, why tokens (also known as cryptocurrencies) are an integral part of any blockchain, and how these new networks might change the world. In episode two, we spend time with the leading investors in the field. Like any frenzied asset class, there are countless cryptocurrency hedge funds popping up everywhere. But founders from three of the original firms—Polychain, Metastable, and Blocktower Capital—are our primary gu...
Oct 03, 2017•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 57
Welcome to the first episode of Hash Power, an audio documentary that explores the world of blockchain and cryptocurrencies with leaders in the field like Naval Ravikant, Olaf Carlson-Wee, Fred Ehrsam, & Ari Paul. Hash Power is meant to be an introduction, but really, it is an invitation to explore this emerging world on your own. In the coming weeks, we will cover the technology, the power of decentralization, bitcoin, Ethereum, ICOs, cryptography and hashing. We will spend time with the leadin...
Sep 26, 2017•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 56
My guest this week is David Tisch, who was instrumental in building and fostering venture capital investing in New York City. If you liked my conversation with Jerry Neumann--who, incidentally, introduced me to David--you are going to love this one. David was a co-founder at tech stars, New York's answer to Silicon Valley’s famous tech incubator Y Combinator. He now runs the Box Group, a prominent seed stage venture capital firm, which has looked at thousands of startups and invested in more tha...
Sep 19, 2017•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 55
The investment strategy discussed in this week's episode is diametrically opposed to my own value tendencies, but it still one that has done exceptionally well. My guest is David Gardner, co-founder of the Motley Fool. He is unique in that he is both a pure investor--a true stock junkie--and an entrepreneur. His energy is remarkable. His positive vibes are something to behold. You'll hear it over audio, but it's ever more palpable in person. Our conversation is about finding companies which are ...
Sep 12, 2017•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 54
My guest this week is Meb Faber, who started a podcast similar to this one right before mine and was a big reason I was open to the idea in the first place. Meb is a quantitative researcher whose firm Cambria has been behind many interesting investment strategies that break the Wall Street mold. We talk investing factors, dividends, angel investing, podcasts and more. This was a fun catch up with a close friend in the industry who has been in a leader in using data to explore the best active str...
Sep 07, 2017•53 min•Ep. 53
My guests this week don't need to be introduced. In celebration of the one year anniversary of invest like the best, I asked Josh Brown, Mike Batnick, and Barry Ritholtz to join me for a hour, during which I spent more time laughing than asking questions. I chose this team because they are the pioneers of mold breaking honesty and personality in our industry. They all figured out that just being themselves yields incredible results. This is a strategy that everyone should try, but very few do. H...
Aug 29, 2017•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 52
My guest this week is Pat Dorsey, who was the longtime director of equity research at Morningstar, where he specialized in economic moats: sources of sustained competitive advantage that allow a few companies to deliver huge returns over time. Several years ago he left Morningstar to form his own asset management firm, Dorsey asset management, and build a portfolio of companies with wide moats like those he studied at Morningstar. And while moats are critical, equally important is how companies ...
Aug 22, 2017•52 min•Ep. 51
My guests this week are both veterans of the podcast, Jason Zweig and Morgan Housel. They are two of the best in the world at making the complicated simple, and in that spirit, I’ll keep this introduction short. Morgan shifted from public markets to the private markets a year ago when he joined the Collaborative Fund, so we begin with what he has learned about venture capital in his first year on the job. For comprehensive show notes on this episode go to http://investorfieldguide.com/writers Fo...
Aug 15, 2017•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 50
This week's conversation is about performance. More specifically, it is about the ins and outs of steady progress and growth. My guest is Brad Stulberg who coauthored the book Peak Performance, which combines research from many fields into a description of how athletes, creatives and others continue to push boundaries in their respective crafts. As someone who is intermittently lazy, the growth equation framework that Brad and I explore has impacted me often since I first read the book several m...
Aug 08, 2017•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 49
Several weeks ago my conversation with Leigh Drogen on quant investing proved timely and popular--because everyone in asset management is facing the rise of big data, and the use of data science in investing strategies. Because of the rise of quants, many are asking themselves how to survive and thrive in a changing industry. In short, how can traditional managers compete with quants? This second conversation with Leigh was set up to answer many of the questions posed in the first one. If quants...
Aug 01, 2017•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 48
My guest this week is a version of me—a funnier, cooler version who has a PhD and served as an active duty marine. Lots of you will already be familiar with Wes Gray, and those of you who are not are in for a treat. Wes is the founder of Alpha Architect, a firm which manages quantitative equity strategies for clients using factors like value and momentum. He also advocates for a more concentrated, pure approach to factor investing, which listeners know is music to my ears. While we share a lot o...
Jul 25, 2017•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 47
My guest this week is Rishi Ganti, who invests in what he calls esoteric assets. I'm not sure what to do other than laugh in amazement at his professional credentials -- PhD in economics, CFA, CPA, lawyer, speaks six languages, and so on. The best part is he isn't lording those over anyone and in fact casts some shade on the whole idea of credentials in our conversation. He just did it all because he's a learning fiend. Rishi's core idea about markets is this: avoid markets at all costs. As he e...
Jul 18, 2017•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 46
I am drawn to a group of investors that I call practitioner philosophers. These are people who have gotten their hands dirty in their respective fields, but despite being doers, they still often sit back and ponder the big questions in business and life. My guest this week is one such practitioner philosopher, NYC based venture capitalist Jerry Neumann. I came across Jerry's essays a year ago, and he is on a very short list of writers whose work I read without fail and almost always more than on...
Jul 11, 2017•2 hr 30 min•Ep. 45
A future guest just told me, every band has a song about being in a band, so today I give you my version. I won’t do this often, and only do it this week in case listenership drops due to the holiday—I didn’t want any guest to have a smaller than normal audience. I have now been doing this for almost one year, and have learned a tremendous amount. Since the whole idea behind the show is to learn in public, I am going to share a few of the lessons I’ve learned with you today. I’ll shape it as a t...
Jul 05, 2017•21 min•Ep. 44
If you told me a year ago that I’d be learning critical life and business lessons from the founder of a ketchup company, and that thirty to fifty thousand people would listen to our conversation, well, I’d have told you that’s impossible. But the fact that it is true proves many of the points laid out by this week’s guest Scott Norton, co-founder of Sir Kensington’s which was recently acquired by Uni-Lever. Sir Kensington’s, which makes “condiments with character” is no ordinary Ketchup company,...
Jun 27, 2017•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 43
My guest this week is Andy Rachleff, who is the CEO of the automated investing platform Wealthfront. Andy was also a co-founder and long-time partner at Benchmark capital--one of the most interesting and successful venture capital firms in the world. We spend most of our conversation discussing venture capital investing and entrepreneurship. Andy coined the now ubiquitous term “product/market fit,” and has great insight into how investors and entrepreneurs should think about business. In that ve...
Jun 20, 2017•48 min•Ep. 42
I’ve often joked that this show should be called “this is who you are up against,” because I am so often having conversations with brilliant people across the investment landscape who are effectively my competition and yours. This week’s conversation fits that description because it gives you an inside view into how things work among some of Wall Street’s most competitive investment firms. My guest is Leigh Drogen, who has worked as a statistical arbitrage portfolio manager and who founded and n...
Jun 13, 2017•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 41
This week’s episode is very unique. It is the first episode devoted to bonds, just not the kind of bonds you are used to. My guest is Ira Judelson, who is the leading bail bondsman in New York City. I met Ira through my friend and former podcast guest Danny Moses, who is also a part of this conversation. I have always had a passion for understanding how different businesses work. In this case, this week we are exploring a different business, but also a different world. Ira’s story is larger than...
Jun 06, 2017•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 40
This week's conversation was especially fun. I have a long history with my guest, Dave Chilton, but this was the first time we'd met in person. I'd heard stories about him from people I work with for twenty years, so getting to finally spend time with him was a real treat. I'll let him reveal the connection. This episode will also be fun for listeners in the US, as Dave is one of the best-known people in Canada because of his famous book the wealthy barber and his more recent stint as a dragon o...
May 30, 2017•2 hr 38 min•Ep. 39
My guest this week is David Salem. David was the founding president and CIO for The Investment Fund for Foundations, which served 800 endowed charities under David’s 18-year tenure. He's now the CIO of the Windhorse Group, which focuses on long-term, value oriented investing. This conversation wanders into and explores many different areas of investing and life. The theme is how to think about asset allocation and investing holistically--from first principles--but we talk a lot about motivation,...
May 23, 2017•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 38
My guest today is Michael Mauboussin, who is the head of global financial strategies at Credit Suisse and is on my short list of must read writers on all things investing. If you read his entire catalogue, Howard Marks's memos, and Buffett's shareholder letters, you be sitting pretty. Michael was also a big reason for the early success of this show appearing as my second guest and now my 37th. He and his team have been prolific in the last six months, publishing several long research reports on ...
May 16, 2017•2 hr 31 min•Ep. 37
This week’s guest is Will Thorndike, an author and investor whose book The Outsiders is an all-time favorite of mine. Our conversation is in two parts. First, we dive deep into the lessons of his 8-year research project studying CEOs who were master capital allocators. These CEOs include Henry Singleton, John Malone, Tom Murphy, Katherine Graham, and Warren Buffett. We discuss how these CEOs tended to be contrarians on topics like dividends, buybacks, acquisitions, and the use of debt. As we go ...
May 09, 2017•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 36
This coming weekend is the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting in Omaha. That means this week is the perfect opportunity to discuss a topic which will likely figure prominently at Berkshire this weekend: Ted Seides’s famous bet with Buffett. Ted and I discuss the origins of the bet, the nuances beneath the headlines, and whether he’d make the bet again for the next ten years. Along the way, we cover many hot topics like hedge funds, alternatives, fees, and indexing. Please enjoy! For c...
May 02, 2017•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 35
My guest this week is Danny Moses, who was directly in the middle of the biggest trades in market history, chronicled by Michael Lewis in his book the Big Short. Danny was the head trader on the Frontpoint team led by Steve Eisman, which was one of a small group of firms that figured out, in real time, the dire situation with mortgage-backed securities during the financial crisis, and how to build a portfolio to bet against the U.S. housing market. We cover his part in the Big Short story, but a...
Apr 25, 2017•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 34
In this episode, I continue to pull on one of the most interesting threads that I have uncovered while producing this podcast: the world of permanent equity. My guests today are Royce Yudkoff and Rick Ruback, two Harvard Business School professors who have partnered to create a popular class that teaches students how to search for, acquire, and run a small business directly after graduation. I approach this conversation from an investors standpoint. LP investors usually partner with these search...
Apr 18, 2017•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 33
SPECIAL EPISODE: Introducing Capital Allocators Podcast with Host Ted Seides This is a special episode to premiere a new podcast from my friend, Ted Seides. In this show, Capital Allocators, Ted will feature a broad range of people that control the flow of money through the capital markets. Ted is in a unique position to this; he knows this world as well as anyone having spent with both allocators and the money managers who invest on their behalf. Below is the information about this first episod...
Apr 13, 2017•1 hr 14 min
This week’s episode is the most unique to date. My guest is Boyd Varty, who grew up in the South African Bush, living among and tracking wild leopards. The main theme of our conversation is tracking, and how the same strategy for pursuing animals in the wild can be applied to all aspects of our lives. Boyd’s family has been tracking animals for four generations, and he is bringing what they have learned to a larger audience around the world. The episode includes the best answer I’ve ever heard (...
Apr 11, 2017•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 32
