Pods & Recs: No. 159

Today we have a must listen with Dan Rasmussen on his private equity thesis and how to profit in emerging market crises, a deep dive into NFT’s, and a wide-ranging conversation on hot sectors from the perspective of a VC.

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Investing

***Must Listen*** The Meb Faber Show: #294 — Dan Rasmussen, Verdad Advisers — A Lot Of These Regime Changes Happen Around Recessions And Crises. Dan Rasmussen is the founder of Verdad Advisers, a global investment firm that provides a public market alternative to private equity. Dan starts with an update on his private equity replication thesis and explains how private credit has ballooned the past few years. Then he dives into his recent paper on emerging markets crisis investing. While buy and hold investors in emerging markets have experienced higher volatility for disappointing returns, Dan believes learning to navigate these EM crises can provide the ability to reap excess returns. He walks through the differences between global and idiosyncratic crises and what performs best between both debt and equity in each case. [March 17, 2021–1 hour, 11 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker | Website Link

Modern Finance (MoFi): NFTs: Blockchain-Powered Art, Trading Cards, Music, and More with Aftab Hossain. This is a fantastic primer on one of the most popular topics in 2021: non-fungible tokens (NFT’s). Aftab Hossain is a is a strategic advisor and private investor to projects in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space, with special focus on decentralized finance (“DeFi”) and ethereum. He covers some of the reasons behind the explosion of interest in NFT’s recently, which include humans love of collectibles that are both scarce and able to be used as a store of value. He discusses some of the more popular ones recently, the benefit of having a digital collectible instead of a physical collectible, and why they’re a store of value similar to how the wealthy think of high-end art now. [March 10, 2021–1 hour, 2 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker

Village Global’s Venture Stories: Crypto, Gaming, and Space with Alice Lloyd George. This is a fun wide-ranging conversation with Alice Lloyd George, a VC at Rogue and host of the podcast, Flux. She covers a ton of different topics: the current crypto wave and NFT’s, climate tech, the space sector, the metaverse, gaming, mobile, and VR. She also touches on companies that are taking ideas from other countries that have gained traction and bringing them to the U.S. and argues we need more founders doing what Elon Musk has done, meaning tackle enormous problems that have the potential to change the world. [March 18, 2021–39 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker | Website Link

Money Life with Chuck Jaffe: Fidelity’s Timmer: Rising inflation, interest rates are triggering market changes. At 35:00, Jaffe interviews Jurrien Timmer (start listening here), the director of global macro at Fidelity Investments. Timmer shares his thoughts on inflation and why he’s focused on monitoring real rates going forward. He also talks about the possibility we’re entering a change in which companies are leading the market, with small-cap value and ex-U.S. stocks now leading the way. And since these stocks are more inflation-sensitive and cyclically-oriented, it may suggest inflation could be bottoming in a structural way. [Marcy 17, 2021–59 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker | Website Link

The Rational Reminder Podcast: Hal Hershfield: The Psychology of Long-term Decision Making. Hal Hershfield is a psychologist and professor at UCLA and discusses long-term decision making, mostly from the perspective of making financial decisions. He shares what his research has shown about how we can get ourselves to show more empathy with our ‘future self’ and view that as a different person. He also shares how we should think about the relationship between time and well-being, and the trade-off we all face between time and money. If you enjoy The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel, you’ll like this episode. [March 18, 2021–54 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker | Website Link

The Rest

The Jordan Harbinger Show: 482: Adam Grant | The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. Grant joins Harbinger to discuss his new book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. Grant explains why it’s more important than ever to be flexible about your beliefs since we’re constantly taking in new data and information. He offers suggestions on how to become less tied to your beliefs, including having a group of people to hold you accountable and write down what makes you believe certain things and triggers to change your mind ahead of time. And possibly most importantly, he says we need to all do a better job of respecting those who change their mind as they take on new information and not criticize them. [March 16, 2021–1 hour, 32 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker | Website Link

“I don’t want my idea to be my identity.”

WorkLife with Adam Grant: Taken for Granted: Daniel Kahneman Doesn’t Trust Your Intuition. Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman covers when to all things decision-making. He advises on when you should and shouldn’t trust your gut, when our intuition leads us astray, best practices for interviewing people, and why he thinks you can’t fight behavioral biases without having structures in place beforehand. [March 16, 2021–37 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker

Book Recommendations

Bill Gurley (Partner, Benchmark):

1. One Up On Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In The Market by Peter Lynch
2. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos by M. Mitchell Waldrop
3. The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power; Means of Ascent; Master of the Senate; The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro
4. Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies by Tom Koller, Marc Goedhart, David Wessels
5. EVA: The Real Key to Creating Wealth by Al Ehrbar