#514: Ted Seides on The LP Perspective

Ted Seides, CFA has spent 25 years as an institutional investor, allocating money to managers. He started in 1992 at the Yale University Investments Office, seven years after David Swensen arrived at Yale. Ted spent five years learning under David’s tutelage and departed to attend Harvard Business School shortly before David wrote the bible in the industry, Pioneering Portfolio Management. In 2017, Ted launched the Capital Allocators podcast, a series of interviews with leading Chief Investment Officers. His most recent book — CAPITAL ALLOCATORS: How the World’s Elite Money Managers Lead and Invest — will be published on March 23, 2021. In this conversation, we discuss the Yale Investment Office, Dave Swenson, asset allocation, rebalancing, asymmetry, ESG, Diversity and Inclusion, comfort being different, and crypto. ======================= Exodus is an absolute game changer in the crypto wallet space, and we’ve teamed up to offer an exclusive discount for you, as listeners of the podcast. Sign up for Exodus today using my promo code Exodus.com/pomp. This is a no brainer for both newcomers and crypto heavyweights - go sign up today. ======================= LMAX Digital is the leading institutional crypto currency exchange with current average daily columes of $2bn. Built on proven, trusted LMAX Group trading technology, LMAX Digital delivers a market-leading solution for trading and custodial services for the most liquid crypto currencies. Trading with all the largest institutions globally, LMAX Digital is a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading indices and analytics platforms, enhancing the quality of market information available to investors and enabling a credible overview of the spot crypto currency market. Learn more at lmaxdigital.com/pomp ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 140,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Ted Seides has spent 25 years as an institutional investor allocating money to managers. He started in 1992 at the Yale University Investments Office, seven years after David Swensen arrived at Yale. Ted spent five years learning under David's tutelage and departed to attend Harvard Business School shortly before David wrote "In the Bible, in the Industry", pioneering portfolio management. In 2017, Ted launched the Capital Allocators Podcast, a series of interviews with leading chief investment officers. His most recent book, Capital Allocators: How the World's Elite Money Managers Lead and Invest, will be published

• 0:44Anthony Pompliano?

  on March 23, 2021. In this conversation, we discuss the Yale Investment Office, Dave Swensen, asset allocation, rebalancing, asymmetry, ESG, diversity and inclusion, comfort being different, and crypto. I really, really enjoyed this conversation with Ted, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Exodus. Exodus is leading the world out of the traditional financial system by building beautiful and user-friendly blockchain products. With its focus on design and user experience, Exodus has become one of the most popular and loved cryptocurrency apps. It's supported on both desktop and mobile, allowing you to sync your wallet

• 1:26Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:51Anthony Pompliano?

  data to the industry-leading indices and analytics platforms, enhancing the quality of market information available to investors. Trade like an institution with LMAX Digital. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com. If you're an institution, you should be trading at LMAXdigital.com/pomp. Go to slash pomp so they know I sent you. LMAXdigital.com/pomp. If you're an institution, go to LMAXdigital.com/pomp. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 140,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry.

• 3:34Anthony Pompliano?

  You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Ted. I hope you enjoy this one.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 4:08Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang, I've got Ted here. Thank you so much for doing this, sir.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Thank you. Great to be here with you, Paul.

• 4:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Let's just jump into your background before we get into the fun stuff that you're doing with capital allocators. Where'd you grow up? What'd you do? And how'd you get into investing?

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Yep. Grew up in the suburbs of New York, the mean streets of Westchester County.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  And my father was a psychiatrist. My mother was a preschool teacher, so not a lot of business background. I did have not only a proverbial, but a literal rich uncle. A guy named Jim Rothenberg, who passed away a couple of years ago. He was the chairman of Capital Group. So I had interest in stocks, but I grew up in the East Coast. He was West Coast and I never really had a lot of exposure to him. And I went to college, had no idea what I was going to do. Probably would have been a doctor if my father hadn't told me, just don't do that because there's just better ways of making a living. And while I was in school, I took a class, a big seminar, actually a big lecture that Dave Swenson taught on portfolio theory. Class was then known as Stocks for Jocks.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  And he mentioned that they hired one person a year. So I interviewed with the Yale Investments Office alongside of all the Wall Street interviews. This is 92, so you're coming out of a recession. I used to tell people the Goldman Sachs Global Investment Banking Class was 18 people that year. They were not in hiring mode. And I got the offer from Yale and decided to go. Really, David had been there for seven years, so the portfolio was taking shape in his image. But nobody in the outside world, outside of a very boutique community of money managers, had any idea who he was and what was happening. And it was fantastic. So that was really my formative education, investing in that particular style. So you're really investing in managers, learning how to find them, how to do the homework, cross asset classes.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  And stayed for five years and ultimately just didn't think at that point in time, I wanted to spend my whole life in New Haven. And I was lucky to get into Harvard Business School and off I went, thinking I'd become the next great manager that Yale employs. Did that for a couple of years of direct investing, both in private equity and hedge funds back in 99, 2000. And did not find a great home in that for myself. And by then, David had written his book, came out in 2000, and everybody was calling me. And so all of a sudden, this background that nobody wanted to talk to me about for five years became popular and ended up having an opportunity to join, at the time, Dan Stern, who ran Reservoir Capital, and he wanted to build an asset management firm.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  He put me together with my partner, Jeff Tarrant, who was my late partner. And we started Protege Partners back in 2002, which was a hedge fund of funds investing in and seeding smaller hedge funds. Did that for a long time, left in 2015, and a bunch of things since then, including this podcast.

• 6:55Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. So we got to talk about Swenson and Yale, because I think that there's an entire group of people who really, really understand just what an epic run and what an education you probably got there. And then there's a whole bunch of people who listen to this podcast, who are a little bit younger, a little bit more kind of crypto-centric, probably have no clue who Dave Swenson is, right? And have no clue what the importance of that is. So maybe just walk through very quickly, kind of, who Dave is, the Yale Investment Office, and then kind of what your main learnings and takeaways were from that style of investing.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would love to. So David was hired at Yale to manage Yale's endowment at age 31, which was unheard of back then. Before, he had a PhD at Yale, he went to Wall Street, he was on the desk at, he worked at Lehman Brothers and Solomon Brothers, and he was on the desk that created the first interest rate swap. So he's just an innovative guy, a brilliant independent thinker. And he got to Yale, and he looked at what other people were doing with these pools of capital, which was mostly back then, a traditional 60-40, really US stocks and bonds, and wild diversification was not crypto, it was international stocks.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  And he said, look, Yale has a really long time horizon. And therefore, they should be equity oriented and not debt or credit oriented. But just owning US stocks, there's not a lot of diversification in that. So let's try to find different ways of investing that you can get equity-like exposure and benefit from diversification, the ultimate free lunch. And so he did that. He pursued that. People look at what he did and say, oh, he likes illiquid investments. But the truth is, if you own US stocks and bonds, anything else you do is less liquid. So he invested in, and some of this had been in Yale's portfolio. It just wasn't emphasized when he got there. Invested in venture capital. He invested in leveraged buyout funds, invested in real estate funds.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  All different kinds of things with this equity orientation. And Yale's returns were fantastic in spite of that asset allocation while I was there, because the equity markets were running. It was a bull market. And in 2000, he published a book called Pioneering Portfolio Management, which described not just what he was doing, but this really elegant academic underpinning of it. All the reasons why, the data behind it, how it worked. And it became a manual for other institutional investors. Think endowments, foundations, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, all over the world, large family offices, to not only say, hey, this is interesting, but he gave them the playbook so that they could go to their committees

• 9:37Speaker 02

  and adopt what's really a better approach than just the traditional approach. So he became very, very well-known for that. He's really, for those who don't know, he's the Warren Buffett of this business. And justifiably so. So what I would say is, it wasn't just that he created this structure. He is one of the most, if not the most brilliant investors I've ever seen. And his ability to select managers, to really understand what they're doing across asset classes everywhere in the world is just extraordinary. And so he did a phenomenal job for Yale and continues to. He joined Yale in 1985. So he's been there 36 years.

• 10:23Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you think about what makes him great, you say that he can go around the world and he can find these managers, vet them, select them, and he's been able to compound money very aggressively for an institutional investor, not for a year, not for five, not for 10, but for literally 30-plus years. What makes him so good at doing that? Is it an intuition thing and just like, hey, there's a once-in-a-lifetime or once-in-a-generation type guy who can do that? Or is it something that is a repeatable process where other people can study it and actually take it away and use it themselves?

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's pieces of both. So if you start with the latter, which is what people really care about, like, hey, how can I do this? One of the things, if you look back, so I worked with a bunch of people who are terrific, who later left and became the chief investment officers of others and other endowments and foundations. So think of Andy Golden at Princeton and Paula Valenta at Boden, and Donna Dean, who recently retired from Rockefeller Foundation, and Ellen Schuman had run the Carnegie Corp. for a long time, and Seth Alexander at MIT. All of these people were colleagues of mine. And what's interesting is that, taking the model at that time of this multi-asset class approach with a certain group of managers, every single one of them succeeded and delivered for their institutions.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  And that is unusual to have a group of people coming out of the same place, all of whom do well. You know, by definition, some are probably "better than others," some probably are luckier than others. But there is a structure to it. And some of the structure is the asset allocation. A big part of the structure, which I'll turn to David now, is discipline. Extreme discipline in asset allocation, in rebalancing strategies, in having a target for what you're looking for and sticking to it with almost no exceptions. And that was something that people can learn, but David has a true north, and he sticks to it like nobody else. So that's the first, and probably the most transferable. The stuff

• 12:21Speaker 02

  that's less transferable is he understands and embraces the risk of being different.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  So the asset allocation he put together back when he did was so different from everybody else. And I'll tell you a story. It was before my time there, but David joined in 1985. And part of what they imposed very early on was this concept of rebalancing. In 1987, the stock market crashed. He's 33 years old, going in front of investment committee and telling them they need to aggressively buy equities right after the crash to rebalance. Most people don't do that. And he had no wavering in his approach to do it. Once he did that, it worked, which again, there's always luck involved. And imagine the credibility you got by saying, we have a set of rules. We stuck to our rules and it worked. And then

• 13:12Speaker 02

  you could look back without, you know, with hindsight, but without hindsight bias and say, yes, this, this process really works. So the, the, the individual temperament to be able to be different, think differently, put together arguments for different, and then stick to your guns when it's not working is pretty extraordinary. So that's the second. You know, if you start with discipline, the second would be this, this real ability to be different. And the third is, is him. He is just innately talented at assessing people and investment strategies. He was one of these people that when you're around him, every year he starts to focus on two or three things. And it might be small things. It

• 13:55Speaker 02

  might be something that has to do with terms, you know, last year it might've had to do with diversity. He puts a letter out. And when he says it, he's just one of those people that you go, yep, he's absolutely right. You know, we're going to follow that. But he just comes up with it himself over and over and over again.

• 14:09Anthony Pompliano?

  It really sounds like the original thinking and that independent thinking is, is a critical part of this because it's not just, hey, I figured one thing out, right? It's the constant almost reinvention or looking a step ahead. When you worked there, I think you worked there for about five years. What do you think were the biggest things that you either one took away or to change the way that you invested, right? So kind of after spending five years in that environment, how do you think it had an impact on you?

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Most of it was the former. I mean, I really, it's so hard to be in a seat like that and think that you could do something different that's better. Because they're just so, so good at it. So, most of what I learned and how I tried to apply investing was trying to remember, what was it that I learned? Everything from, you know, where are you sourcing your managers from? What kinds of questions are you asking? How are you doing your due diligence? How do you trust your instinct? That's most of it. What I would say is that, you know, I left a long time ago, so 20 something years ago, and I had 14, 15 years of investing in hedge funds away from them. And at times, you know, your own intuition takes you in a different direction from what

• 15:19Speaker 02

  you imagine, you know, David might want or Yale might do. And what I found from doing that time and time again was that they were right. It just takes a long time to internalize lessons. I do have a few things that are different. And, and again, there's been so much time since I was there. I'm sure they have evolved in their thinking and sophistication in many, many ways. It's far beyond my time there. But the one that's a big difference for me that I never quite embraced. So David was always a die-in-the-wool value guy. And if you read what he says about, you know, where they invest in the stock market, they want small cap and value. And we had those biases in our portfolios before they were factors, as it goes back

• 16:04Speaker 02

  to the early 90s. What I saw from investing since is there are very few people, like the ill-endowment, that have a capital structure that really can invest for, you know, decades, if not longer. Most people, the long term is probably three to five years. Even private equity firms, you see, they turn around their companies in three to five years. And in three to five years, a lot can happen that is different from what might play out over the long term. So in different areas, you know, the easiest one to describe is, say, US equity market. Yale's portfolios tended to be very value biased, and my portfolios were much more balanced because I just didn't think that if you're value and wrong for 10 years, that's actually

• 16:48Speaker 02

  not okay when you have clients. One of the things Andy Golden at Princeton said in the podcast is, "To finish first, you first have to finish."

• 17:00Speaker 02

  And so that type of thing, I tend to prefer to have a little more balance in my portfolio stylistically, but for the most part, those are all on the margin. Now, my investing is primarily, my comfort zone is investing in managers. And then on the side, I'll do things that I think I can do, which is usually a more efficient way of investing in a manager. But that's really what I learned and what I've continued to apply ever since.

• 17:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And what's so fascinating about this, I think that also these lessons apply differently to different people, right? One of the things that is always debated is kind of diversification can protect wealth. Concentration usually builds it, but at the same time, concentration can also mean that there's insolvency. And so there's always kind of the balance of risk and reward. How do you think about, for many of the people who are coming to this from a more crypto centric viewpoint, should we take some of the timeless investing lessons and try to apply it to what's, you know, forming as a new asset class? Are there kind of completely new rules as the things maybe some people believe? Like, how do you just look at using the experience and education and frankly,

• 18:08Anthony Pompliano?

  the well-worn path of success in investing for decades, if not centuries, and apply it to a new asset class? So like, just what's the framework that you use for that?

• 18:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a lot easier to describe on the outside how I would view it than advice I would be able to give for someone on the inside. So let me start with that. I'm a big fan of crypto, have been for a few years, without really being in the weeds and understanding it, for one part of a portfolio that's incredibly important, which is asymmetric options. So in this case, that asymmetric option is the possibility, I don't know if it's true or not, but the possibility then a world of fiat money debasement, that Bitcoin, let's say, let's start with Bitcoin, becomes a store of value, that's a better store of value than capital market, stocks, bonds,

• 19:00Speaker 02

  companies, gold, anything else. I say I don't know because it's totally unclear if that is sort of, we don't have a long enough history. For you to know if that actually happens in that in that world. So, you know, for me and other institutions, you start with Bitcoin. You then go to Bitcoin and Ethereum. Frankly, that's where I am today. And then you start to pay more attention to the ecosystem and you could look at the five protocols and and NFTs and stuff like that. And I think you're starting to see it from the institutional perspective. It all looks like a venture investment. So the first legs when when Yale was in the news for, you know, investing in crypto a couple of years ago. Well, not really. They were just investing with Chris Dixon at Andreessen.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  And and that was another venture investment and it fits right in. You have a venture portfolio. That's what it looks like. More recently, there's been news that that some of these institutions are buying Bitcoin, maybe Bitcoin Ethereum directly. But again, it's far more of a diversifying option to them. So then you turn it to your original question is, what does that mean if you're inside it? You are certainly, according to that lens, in a seat where you are taking risk in an attempt to build wealth. And there's downside to it. But one of the things you find, you know, a lot of the smart people in this ecosystem are younger, makes a ton of sense. To have that kind of experience in your career where you're really trying to build something and there's so much to do and you put so much effort into it.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  Is incredibly valuable, no matter what the outcome is. So a lot of what we talk about, a big section of the book, I talk about decision making and investing is process over outcome. And the corollary I would give, I left business school in 1999. And that was the peak of the internet bubble. There was one of all of my classmates, probably half or more ran to do some internet startup. There was only one that monetized it. But I would argue that probably like 90% of the people that did it. Got experience that was so valuable for them that it propelled them in different ways through their career. So I wouldn't think about it so much from that lens of is it binary? Like, am I going to get rich or not?

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Usually the people that are in it to get rich may or may not have success, but they don't ultimately achieve kind of their own satisfaction or call it fulfillment at the end of that road. Maybe they do if they get really rich and then they can go do the things they that they really want to do. But it really is about being involved in something exciting and building something. And then learning along the way to figure out, you know, each person's path of where they want to end up.

• 21:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Before we go any further on the investing side, I would be doing the audience a disservice if I didn't talk to you about the media empire that you're building in terms of Capital Allocators Podcast, which is fantastic. And then you've got a new book that's coming out. Maybe let's just start with, why spend so much time creating content and interviewing people? Like, what is the interest or the intrigue in doing that stuff on a daily basis?

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, it came out, it didn't come out by design. So when I left Protege a couple of years ago, I was doing a couple of projects. I had time on my hands. I had written a book, my first book, which was really about case studies for startup hedge funds. And I had done a few podcasts and it kind of demystified it. So I just thought it would be fun to go run around and talk to some of my friends and share those conversations. I did not plan on having it be like a media business. I always view myself as an investor. It was just something to do on the side. And it stayed that way for a couple of years. Now, one of the benefits of that is after 20 something years in the business, I do have a lot of relationships with really, really talented people that generally aren't

• 22:46Speaker 02

  available in the public. And as the podcast grew, there was real benefit to those people to tell their story. So that was, that was fun. It's kind of, I called it the business of building goodwill on my personal balance sheet. And then only about a year and a half ago, the, the main project I was working on ended and around the same time advertisers started calling on the podcast. I said, hi, like, maybe this could be a business out of it. And the content part of it, I've just enjoyed. So what I describe what I'm doing today is a little bit different from what I had in the past, because a lot of my time is spent the same way. I created a little vision statement, which is to learn, share,

• 23:30Speaker 02

  and implement the, the process of elite investors through compounding knowledge and relationships. And the biggest difference in what I do today from what I did back then was the word share. So I naturally like sharing what I learned with other people. And when you're managing a pool of capital, that's not, you know, maybe it helps you on the margin. Maybe you share and you get more investors, but the goal is to compound capital and to grow your business. So to have the goal being contributing to help other people is just innately satisfying for me. And so it started that way. It just started as I'm doing these conversations. Hey, the people I have on the show are getting a lot out of it. That's great. Wasn't asking anything in return, still don't.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  And then things come out of it, which is, you know, it's almost like this, I don't know if you'd call it the gig economy portfolio, but there's a whole bunch of different things. So, you know, there's the podcast and the business around it. I get asked to do a lot of speaking. Sometimes that's interviewing people so they can tell their story. Sometimes it's me telling my story. And then, you know, call it advisory, like I work with a small number of managers, mostly hedge funds still, but some allocators as well with the goal of, I just want to help them make more money. Like it's fun making money. They want to make more money. And just from my experience, there's just lots of different ways I can help. What I don't do is sell for them or market, but there's a lot of strategy. There's a lot of understanding what they're trying to do in their portfolio.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  And a lot of times these firms, even if they're successful, they don't have lots of adults in the room.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  I mean, they may have adults in the room, but they don't have adults that have independent thought and experience. And so it's just really fun to be able to help that way. And kind of all these things come together. And, and what's happened over time is the more I built it up and I've hired a few people to help, it gives me more time to think about investing and to share those thoughts. And so, you know, we have a little premium content membership and more and more I'm just sharing more investment ideas with that. And I just like it. It's, you know, that's all there is to it. I'm a middle child, so I don't mind the spotlight and it's fun.

• 25:39Anthony Pompliano?

  I love the viewpoint of it. What is the most memorable interview you've ever done? And not necessarily because it's the most, you know, well-known person, the most successful, but just is there one interview that you look back and you're like, wow, that one was really special and sticks out?

• 25:53Speaker 02

  I can answer that in a lot of different ways. So let me give you two or three stories. The first is when I interviewed Scott Malpass, who's the retired CIO at Notre Dame. It was such a fantastic interview that covered so much about what he had done that I came away saying, that is exactly what I'd hoped to do on this podcast. And that's resonated with lots of people. People really point to that interview. And it was really, I knew Scott from when I worked at Yale. I hadn't seen him in many, many years. And I was like, hey, what have you been doing the last 15 or 20 years? And he just did a brilliant job of walking through it, including the subtleties of how they ran that office and how they evolved. So that was one that was like right in the

• 26:34Speaker 02

  sweet spot. The other ones that stand out to me are when I learned something way beyond what I could have imagined. And usually that comes from these kind of interdisciplinary thought leaders from outside of investing. So when I've had non-CIOs and non-managers on, the lens I use is do I think I can talk to someone who's going to share something that will help me be a better investor, help other CIOs be a better investor? And the first of those was Annie Duke. So Annie's done a lot of stuff, but the whole science of decision-making is I knew everything about behavioral finance, but none of that was prescriptive. And Annie's work is like, how do you get better at this? And so that was really fun. I learned a tremendous amount from her. And the other

• 27:17Speaker 02

  two of that ilk, and really the first, I should say, the first section of the book, I call a toolkit. And it's five tools that these people that are CIOs, they're really disciplines that they need to know, but it's not taught in investing. Decision-making is one of them. Another one is negotiations. So I went to business school. I got taught negotiations. I've read all the books you're supposed to work on. I was terrible. Like every negotiation I ever had in my career, I got crushed. It didn't matter what it was. And then I met, I got introduced to a guy named Delian Kane, who's a professor at Yale, teaches negotiations. And he has a way that he's developed of, of teaching that's really much more practical about how you go about a negotiation. And it was the last face-to-face

• 28:01Speaker 02

  interview I did, not, I just did one face-to-face, but pre-COVID. And I was just blown away by how much I didn't know about how you can actually effectuate a negotiation in a way that felt good for me and, and learned a tremendous amount from that. And the last one, I would say, is within the investment process. So I interviewed a cognitive psychologist, his name's Gary Klein. And Gary invented the pre-mortem analysis, originally for fighter pilots. And it's a, it's a risk management tool that anytime you're making a decision, any kind of decision, pretty much when you think you're at the answer, you conduct this little 20-minute exercise that he describes on the podcast. And it allows you to do a

• 28:44Speaker 02

  whole bunch of things. It allows you to unearth other possibilities you might not have thought of. It's particularly good in a, in the team setting. It reduces your confidence. And we know that everybody has overconfidence when you're going into making decisions. And it was just prescriptive. Like, I listened to this and I went, wow, I can't believe I didn't know this. And I can't imagine all the decision process, all the investment committee meetings I ran with our team, and how much we could have benefited from having this little 15 or 20-minute exercise at the end of that process. So those are three examples. There are so many. I've done, you know, 200 episodes at this point in time.

• 29:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's crazy how the actionable little things can have the biggest impact, right? Like, I think that that's probably one of the things people don't understand if they've never done kind of a high volume of interviews, is they expect the big ideas to be the most impactful. But you kind of get desensitized a little bit to the big ideas because you just heard them. And what you find is, most people actually think pretty similarly, whether that's good or bad. It's more so just the like, here's a specific thing that I do in my life that has had a positive impact. And if you can take that away, those are usually the cool things. The podcast isn't the only thing you do. You've got another book out. Maybe talk a little bit, just kind of around what was the impetus for, for writing the book? And then kind of what was the process like?

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I started writing the book because after a while of doing the podcast, just to what you just said about all these little lessons, I just couldn't remember them anymore. And I thought at some point in time, it'd be great to just write them down, get those like four or five nuggets from every episode and just have them somewhere. But I didn't have time to do it. And then COVID hit and any travel I had was shut down. And a bunch of the things I was working on, I knew I was going to have some more time. So I decided to just start writing it. And it really is an attempt to get at exactly what you just said. So there is this section I mentioned that are these, these tools. The first section is a toolkit. So there's a chapter about interviewing, a chapter about

• 30:38Speaker 02

  decision making, a chapter about negotiations, leadership and management, all super important things for anyone leading an investment organization, but none of which are taught, you know, from the CFA or anything else anyone in investing does. And then there's an investment section, which is sort of what did I learn after Dave Swensen?

• 30:57Speaker 02

  Not did I, what did I learn from people? How have these CIOs evolved taking that EL model and what are they doing with it? And then the last section, which is probably the most fun is the, by virtue of what I said, starting to write the book came with curating the best quotes from what was 3,500 pages of transcripts. It ended up being, I think, 859 quotes. I might have that number a little bit wrong. You can't just put a book together that's 859 quotes, but it did allow me to figure out what to write in those first two sections. And there were 160 phenomenal quotes left over. And I categorized them. And that last section, that last section is called Nuggets of Wisdom. There's a investment lesson section and a life lesson section, and they are those great one-off nuggets

• 31:42Speaker 02

  from all those shows.

• 31:44Anthony Pompliano?

  I have to ask, what's your favorite investing book? Is it Swensen's book? Is there another one? What would you categorize as the best one or your favorite?

• 31:53Speaker 02

  I mean, it's hard for me to get past Swensen's book because when I was reading it, and I remember it vividly, I knew what was going to come on the next page. Like I had lived that book. There are so many great ones. I think my most recent favorite book is Morgan Housel's Psychology of Money, because it's, the lessons in it are very straightforward, but the storytelling and the writing is sort of consummate Morgan. It's just brilliant. It's so easy to read and so much fun.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  Those are, there are a lot. I don't know that my favorites would be all that much different from other people's, but, but those are two of them.

• 32:33Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. You're a very well read and very educated in the business of investing, but you take a little bit different approach to investing than most of the people I have on the podcast. Most people are the managers, they're the direct allocators. You take much more of a kind of limited partner seat. So you're taking capital, you're giving that to these managers. And I want to talk about the last 12 months from the LP viewpoint. It seems like, as before we jumped on here, I told you, we've lived 20 years and 18 months, right? So maybe just walk through from a macro view, like what has changed and how do you sit in the LPC, view the world today that might be different than the world, you know, 12 months ago, when the pandemic hit the United States?

• 33:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, most of the perspective of sitting in the LP seat is, is much longer term than changes over even a year. But there are different points in time where you see points of emphasis shifting. And certainly in the last 12 months, the two, I guess you'd call them mega trends, maybe there's three, one that's continued, were ESG, and then through that, diversity, equity and inclusion. And then going into this year, the one that I would say continues, and for good reason, is private equity. And we talk about each of those. The fourth, though, that is brand new and is in the early innings of serious

• 33:56Speaker 02

  institutional consideration is crypto. And so if you, if you look at the lens of each of those, ESG is sort of fascinating in that it's not new. People have talked about it for a long time, but starting when, really starting with Davos just before COVID, and Greta Thunberg in, in Europe the year before, Davos last year, every single conversation was about climate change. And so who knows why, it's a Malcolm Gladwell tipping point, but for the first time, particularly on the environmental side, because governance was always something considered important, people really started paying

• 34:35Speaker 02

  Paying attention and that is, that is a, pardon the expression in light of what we're talking about, but that is a tsunami that will not abate anytime soon. So there's a lot of implications for that. There's a lot of definitions that people are working through. There's a whole question of like, what will, what is good? Like what will indexing being, what's the right strategy? There's lots of things, but everyone in that community is paying attention to what they own already as it relates to environmental risk and then how they want to tweak their portfolios. Again, not revolutionize their portfolios, but tweak their portfolios. The S came out of it, right? So we had George Floyd during the pandemic and all of a sudden, for the first time,

• 35:19Speaker 02

  people really thought seriously about diversity. I don't have to go on a big tangent about that. I did a mini series and I came away thinking that this industry is the wrong place to pay a lot of it. I don't say this industry is the wrong place to make meaningful change in a short period of time. Because we are the tail that wags the dog and it really has to do with talent and where that talent comes from and how you groom it. And if it doesn't exist in the industry today, you can't just flip a switch and have it exist tomorrow. So, you know, I've been telling people, I think the way to make that kind of change happen in the industry is to start with the winners, start with the large incumbents, the large asset managers, and force them to have more diverse hiring practices. Because typically when a new fund spins out, there's already a brand attached to them.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  And if you want a new, great organization that is diversely run in the future, they have to come out of a place that they have that brand because it's just too hard to do a startup anyway.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  And so that's, you know, the governance stuff, let's, let's, let's watch. So one of the Australian super funds recently completely divested from China for governance reasons. It hasn't really hit the news that much, but that'll be interesting to see. So that's the ESG and diversity, private equity we know about. There's a lot of structural reasons why that bid will remain strong. And then we've got SPACs on top of that and that'll just keep going. And crypto is fascinating, right? The, the, the case for crypto from an institutional lens.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  Today is no different than it was than what it was in 2017. So it really starts with this store of value, monetary debasement and Bitcoin and what that might mean. And then you get into an ecosystem from there. Most of the institutions don't yet understand more deeply everything that's happening underneath. They do understand that there's been a lot of talent and a lot of resources attracted to it that are building things on the blockchain. And there are some applications that might make sense in the future. So it looks like a venture investment to them. But to give you an example, a couple of months ago, I got asked if I could help put together a discussion with Michael Saylor from Michael's Strategy, just to hear his case on Bitcoin. And this was last fall. And I said, no, you know, the people I know really aren't that

• 37:30Speaker 02

  interested. Same person asked me again in about a month ago, and I said, yep, we can. And I asked 30, you know, we together, we asked about 30 CIOs. Every single one either participated or said, oh, my gosh, I can't make it. Let me send my number two. So they are learning and taking it seriously. And there will be a lot of capital that follows that down the road.

• 37:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What's so fascinating to me, I think about, let's take Saylor as an example. I've gotten to know him pretty well. And what he's doing is not really that complicated, right? He has a belief now, whether he's right or wrong, the market will determine. But he's basically got a belief that he is able to get access to the capital markets where there is a devaluing currency. He's going to take that currency and then he's going to convert it to something that he thinks will continue to appreciate and purchasing power over time. And so it's as classic of a of an arbitrage as there ever is, right? Is you're going to give me basically free money. I'm going to go buy something that I think goes up 200% a year. That sounds like a pretty, you know, easy investing strategy. And if you believe that that's true, then you should go participate. But I think that the crazier part about the whole thing is, one, he's doing it with large dollars, obviously, right?

• 38:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And so that kind of catches people's attention. But two is the people who are giving him the money. But I think to me, that's the part when he, you know, he puts out these like convertible bonds and stuff, when you start to look at and try to peel away and see like, who's actually giving him a billion dollars at 0% interest? It's not, you know, me, right? It's not a bunch of crypto, you know, or Bitcoin kind of ludites who who basically say, hey, this thing is going to be, you know, the global reserve currency. We're talking about the largest financial institutions on Wall Street. We're talking about CIOs. Like, we're talking about, you know, more your world than my world. And that, to me, is the fascinating part of this is, uh, don't listen to what people say, just watch what they do with their dollar or something, right?

• 39:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I can't say specifically I know who's doing that, but but I do think that there are rational reasons on the other side that might seem crazy when you just say it that way.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  So a lot of that goes to thinking about what some of these pools of capital are trying to achieve. So let's just take a pension fund. You know, I've had Ash Williams, who runs State of Florida Pension Board, and Chris Hailman from CalSTRS on the show. They're trying to fund future retirees' income. That does not require 200% returns. They have a liability stream. They had to figure out how to meet a liability stream. Now, if they're lending at zero, they're not going to do that. But there are a lot of insurance companies. There's a lot of pension funds that that an investment like that might meet their objectives, you know, within the portfolio of what they're doing. And so they're not, not everyone out there is trying to make

• 40:11Speaker 02

  the most money they can all the time. They're really trying to say, what's this money for? Now, what's the purpose of this money? And how are we going to structure our assets so that we maximize the probability of fulfilling that purpose? And, you know, I don't know the specifics of like the micro strategy convert, and it rates, you know, who's lending to the US government at zero. It doesn't make any sense to me. But there are people who I think think very, very carefully about it, and it may well fit into the structure of their assets.

• 40:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's go a little further on this in terms of you talked to CIOs at pensions, endowments, foundations, kind of really all across the the investment spectrum. What are they saying about crypto right now? So there's obviously an interest, right? You kind of alluded to that, but just are they thinking of this as, let me go put, you know, 25 basis points in my portfolio and cross my fingers because I think I bought a lottery ticket? Is it something that's more pervasive than that? Just what are you hearing?

• 41:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the case right now, and I think we just talked about this, I was curious to hear what they're hearing too. And so I did almost like a, I don't even want to say a crypto 101, it's probably like a crypto 001 mini series that's coming out, maybe out by the time we do this. There's really only two cases that I see in that world for now. One is the monetary fiat money debasement and saying that crypto is a better way to diversify against a portfolio of risk assets than other things. And the other is, is from a venture capital lens, which is this is an ecosystem that is still in the very early innings that will have or may have tremendous value accruing from every piece of the activity.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  So then you can set aside the store of value coins and instead you're now you're getting into protocols and, and assets and all the things that will happen off the blockchain.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  The way that they tend to participate in that, again, going all the way back to what we were talking about with Dave Swenson, which is, you know, how do you own a piece of that ecosystem? It's not quite equity yet. It might be tokens. They're not going to do that directly, but they might do it through a venture capitalist. They might do it through a public markets manager. And that's how they're participating in a very small way. Because what they're starting to wake up and pay attention to is that this isn't going away, that there's real technology here that may well change a lot of business, you know, somewhere down the road. Now, what I would tell you is that concept is not new to any of these people. When I was talking to venture capitalists in the early 90s,

• 42:45Speaker 02

  every year there was something that was new and exciting, and it wasn't as pervasive as a blockchain technology, but it was, you know, palm computing and there was these pen based things way before we had iPhones. And some of those were way too early and it didn't work. And there was, there's always some innovative technology that they're on the forefront of. And clearly this ecosystem is it today in the same way the internet probably was 20 years ago. And I think it takes time for institutions to embrace any new area. It usually starts with a thought leader like a Yale or somebody like that first saying, hey, they're interested and that we've seen those, and then having a run. So if you think about 2017,

• 43:28Speaker 02

  In some institutions, we're in the news for really investing in some venture funds that were in the ecosystem. But then, then the price of Bitcoin collapsed. And now you have another rise in Bitcoin. And so people start to pay attention to it. They say, hey, what happened over the last couple of years? What's been developed? It feels like the floor is higher than it was. We now have proof that even though there was this 80% sell off, we've made all the money back and then some. Maybe now is another time to participate. So you need both the thought leader to move, and then proof of concept in the markets, that this is a place you can make money, and that there's real innovation happening underneath. So all of that is happening. You know better than that ecosystem, that it's happening. But they're learning about it. And I think that's where the real capital will come into the space.

• 44:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What's fascinating to me is, of course, you get kind of the innovative forward-thinking folks to jump in first. In 2018, the first two US public pension funds invested very similar type of fund, right? Venture capital for 80%, 20%, basically, give or take, went into Bitcoin. Good market timing, it's up a lot, right? All of that. But what has been surprising is that everyone always talks about kind of breaking the seal, right? The first one or the second one that goes, and then hey, you get all the fast followers. I'm not aware of another public pension fund that decided to do that yet. And so it's it's one of these things where I always go back to the Bill Gates quote of like, we overestimate what's possible in one year, but underestimate in 10. And you know, now

• 44:57Anthony Pompliano?

  we're sitting kind of two, three years in. And if you look at various aspects of the institutional world, public pension funds probably way behind where I thought they would have been given that development in 2018. Corporate treasuries way ahead of where you would have thought they would be, right? In terms of now you got Fortune 500 companies, and you know, maybe there's more, maybe there's not. But you're starting to see that conversation change. I think the key piece to this whole thing, though, is the world that you live in terms of these large, kind of multi-billion dollar, you know, CIOs, sitting and saying, look, this isn't the lottery ticket, right? This is a core part of our of our strategy. And maybe that's only, you know, 200 basis points, right? But we're going to go and we're going to invest in this ecosystem. And it's not just Just through one single manager, we're actually going to build a portfolio of managers.

• 45:40Anthony Pompliano?

  We're going to have liquid and we're going to have private and really kind of all of those timeless examples of what Swenson and Yale have done for so many years, kind of on a macro basis across traditional assets, it feels like that's going to get all rebuilt, whether it's coexistence or replacement in the crypto world. And so somebody's going to figure out, you know, what is the portfolio construction looking for this new world? And my guess is that it actually looks a lot like the old world, just, you know, new technology, right?

• 46:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I think that's just right. And the way it happens, you can almost follow it through the adoption of other called asset classes over time, right? So public pensions, you know, pension funds, they will not be the first movers. And the reason has nothing to do with who the CIO is and what they think. It's the governance structure on top of them. So if you have a board that's, you know, firemen and policemen and good luck trying to, you know, they're not going to know. It's very hard for them to adopt something new without proof of concept. And that usually starts for them with a consultant. And the consultant isn't in a risk-taking business. So they're not

• 46:47Speaker 02

  going to, they're not going to promote a new ecosystem like that until they see it in the hands of other people. So what typically happens is you see it with individuals, which, which is where the ecosystem is today. And then as they have success, you see it in family offices, the family offices or the leaders of those families might sit on the boards of endowments and foundations, and then they bring into the boardroom an acceptance that allows those first movers to move forward. And there's just much less governance constraints on them. And, and from there, you tend to get to, you know, more public pension or sovereign wealth. Corporates are interesting because this is a different dynamic where you're seeing it on corporate balance sheets themselves, not in the corporate pension fund necessarily. So the, usually the corporate pension fund is

• 47:30Speaker 02

  slow moving as well. But they, what we've seen already at these leading mover, really technology minded CEOs, putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet in particular, is a new thing. And I think that there's a lot of capital that's going to be coming behind it.

• 47:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, when you kind of just zoom out, so crypto is one part of the world, but obviously you look at kind of all asset classes. Over the last 12 months, what's been the biggest surprise? And it's somewhat of a loaded question, just because there were so many surprises. Everything from the public health crisis to kind of the Fed and central banks around the world's response and the way that different asset classes responded to that. But is there one event or one specific asset that you're like, this was the really big shocking moment to you?

• 48:16Speaker 02

  You know, I still scratch my head. It's easy to see in retrospect. I still scratch my head on what happened with the equity markets. You know, that we sit today with an economy that probably will, on a percentage basis, will do a lot better than it did last year, but stock markets are higher and on a nominal basis is a lot lower. It does make sense. I understand why it happens with Fed pumping money in. But there have been a lot of those dynamics. So you have you have that in the US. You have, you know, people were thinking there was going to be a wave of defaults. So all these distressed debt investors and high yield people were just licking their chops, saying, you know, this is going to be great. And that money just saves all these companies. And then, of course, you can anticipate

• 48:59Speaker 02

  that crypto is going to be worth a lot more at some point in the future. But there's not that many like I rebought my I bought and sold kind of my core holding in Bitcoin and Ethereum a couple of times and I rebought it last August. Thank goodness. But I've never owned anything that went up, you know, 5X in three or four months. And those trees don't grow to the sky linearly. And so, you know, we'll see what happens from here. But I think those are all huge, huge surprises.

• 49:30Anthony Pompliano?

  I tend to think that that is not going to be the top of this cycle. Where it goes, nobody knows. But you're going to be saying some crazy thing like, you know, I can't believe I own an asset that did X in 12 months, or whatever ends up being. But it just feels like it. And part of this too, also is like, I think a lot about the way that folks evaluate traditional assets and asset classes is pretty well understood, right? I mean, literally, you know, Swenson wrote the book in 2000 and It's served as a fantastic manual, as you described it, for large asset allocators, literally for two decades. And so when you start to look at today's world, there's kind of two schools of thought, right? One is, hey, everything's overvalued and I can

• 50:11Anthony Pompliano?

  describe why, but it's unlikely to stay like this forever. And then there's this new school of thought, and I put new because we have yet to figure out whether they're correct or not, is no, we're talking about using old valuation models for more capital intensive businesses, trying to apply it to, you know, kind of capital light, software type businesses, or these assets like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies or digital assets, they just don't fit into those old models. Less about like, which valuation methodology is correct, and more of just like, how do you try to understand both of them, right? Like, you come from a classically trained valuation kind of methodology and world, but you're also very open minded and forward thinking, I think, when it comes to cryptocurrencies

• 50:52Anthony Pompliano?

  and blockchains. Like, how do you try to reduce as much cognitive dissonance there as possible?

• 50:58Speaker 02

  It's really hard.

• 51:00Anthony Pompliano?

  That's actually the best answer. That might be the best answer.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  It's really hard, right? You're absolutely right. I was brought up in the business, understanding cash flow, business valuation. And, you know, in 2017, when I first started learning about crypto, I should say, my old chief technology officer, Protege Partners, gave us a luncheon chat, and it had to be in 2011 or 12 about Bitcoin. He's Russian, and he would say Bitcoin, you know, we'd go through this whole thing. And I, you know, I was just like, what are you talking about? This is ridiculous, you know? So, I didn't get it. I think that one of the things I've learned through my career, and it really came from a line that the late Peter Bernstein said over and over about risk, and he would

• 51:47Speaker 02

  say, "Risk means you don't know what will happen."

• 51:53Speaker 02

  And the corollary, the add-on to that was even if you think you do. So I always, and maybe it's just me, like I worked with Dave Swenson. Dave is right, like a lot, and he sees the world in black and white, and he's deeply convicted in what he does, and I never felt I had the kind of conviction that he did. So I do understand cash flow investing much more. In 2017, I was like, well, what are these things going to turn into? Because you have to keep in mind, I lived through 99 and 2000, right? I had friends, brilliant people, building businesses on the internet that made no sense to me, made no sense at all. And in most of those, it turned out, didn't survive.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  And so I do have this baggage, if you want to call it that, or this belief that I've seen through my career, that ultimately, things have to turn into profitable ventures for them to sustain themselves. But then, you get lucky if you're me. You have a podcast with someone like Chris Dixon, and Chris described for me, he just does a wonderful job of these analogies to help you bridge that information gap. So one of them was, I was asking him about just this whole token ecosystem of like, you know, I don't get it. And he said, well, the best performing asset in anywhere in the world over the last 20-something years were domain names. You could have bought pizza.com for like $30, and 20 years later, someone sold it for $20 million.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  And the reason was, obviously, it was a scarce asset, that particular domain, in an ecosystem, the internet, that got used far more than anyone anticipated. And so that was an analogy I completely understood. And I still will look with skepticism and say, will any one of these protocols be that in the future, where people use it so much that the tokens become... Well, I'm looking at what's going on with NBA Top Shot, and I reached out to a friend and said, you need to explain to me, I went on the website, and I saw the Zion Williamson clip of him swatting away the shot, and someone's trying to sell that clip that I just saw for $250,000.

• 54:02Speaker 02

  And we went through this with Ari Paul, and we went through this whole conversation of like, what is art? You know, what's the difference between a Picasso and a forgery of a Picasso and a Chanel bag or a Birkin bag and something that looks exactly like it might have even been made in the same manufacturing facility. And so you do get these analogs that hold in the virtual, you know, in the, in the, in the actual world. But I do, at my core, still understand the nature of cash flows and how that turns into business value more than other things. So that is kind of crypto versus the traditional world. The, the change in profit margins of these technology companies, the dominance

• 54:43Speaker 02

  of the large ones is so much different that I do think there's some valuation premium. That said, I have an analog with Japan. So early in my career, the Japanese equity market traded at 100 times earnings and people thought that was just what it did. Right? It was different. It just, that's how expensive it traded. And at some point in time, you know, late 90s and on, it collapsed. So it's not so much that it's binary. And I just wrote a piece last week for my premium subscriptions. It's called, I told you so. It was a little brief blog type piece that would point you to there, there, there are voices now calling for doomsday. Jeremy Grantham and, you know, value equities and Jeffrey

• 55:27Speaker 02

  Gunlach with high yield defaults and even Mark Cuban saying Bitcoin is in a big bubble. What I learned over my career is that you don't, they will be right. Someone will be right and they will say, I told you so. But you'll never understand, how long did it take them to get there? What was the opportunity cost? And how many other people were wrong along the way? And I started paying attention to this back in 2007, 2008, because we were investors with John Paulson and his subprime short. And it was the perfect investment, the greatest trade ever, according to Greg Zuckerman, who wrote the book about him. And I started paying attention to all these people calling out these things over the years. And what you find is that there are many, many more people calling for a crisis than

• 56:10Speaker 02

  actually predict the crisis. So, you know, I, I think you just look at all of it with this deep humility that you can't really know. And my whole career has been betting on and following people. So the most compelling thing to me about the crypto world is the knowledge that the people in the valley, the Chris Dicksens of the world, tell me that, you know, look, this is where the top programmers are going. And when they go there, they're going to build stuff that has value in the future. And that I buy into wholeheartedly.

• 56:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's basically the argument of the intellectual capital flowing more so than the financial capital, right? Financial capital goes all over the place. It does crazy things, but hopefully markets are somewhat efficient and kind of get them back in line. But the intellectual capital definitely is kind of the leading indicator. And I, you know, I've even been surprised. One of the craziest yet, you know, most sensical ways to invest in the space is I've seen people who literally go and they say, look, all of the information's on chain. And so why don't we go and we look at actual the developer activity in some of these ecosystems. And so we can literally see where is the most code being contributed, like, let's go look there. And it reminds me a lot of like, what did hedge funds do? I mean, you've got a front row seat to this. They're taking pictures of cars at Walmart,

• 57:24Anthony Pompliano?

  right? They're, you know, the oil tanks, how high are they? Like, all that kind of stuff. And so it's just people are constantly going to look for an edge and look for data and information. And I think that in this kind of digital world where there's a lot more transparency, you know, one of the issues could be there's more noise than signal. But if you can find those signals, then it can lead to quite profitable investing strategies.

• 57:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, couldn't agree more.

• 57:46Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Before we wrap up, I want to ask you three questions. I ask everybody, and then you'll get to ask me one to finish. The first is, what is the most important book that you've read? I know I asked you earlier, what's your favorite investing book? But what is the most important book, a book that you read, and it just had a massive impact on your life?

• 58:02Speaker 02

  So this one may not be great for your audience, but it will at some point in time. So a friend of mine introduced me a number of years ago to the, a book called Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  And it, I just turned 50, so I guess I'm almost at the second half of my life. But it had less to do with that and more to do with sort of always the answer to some questions of like, what do you know today that you wish you knew 10 years ago? And it was the first time I read something that I said, oh, wow, I like actually might be able to learn this before I have to learn it and wish I knew it from experience. But it's a beautiful book. There are a lot of them, but that that is one in the last couple of years that stands out.

• 58:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's a great book. I feel like everyone, even if you're younger, could go read that and probably take away a ton of stuff from it. So that's a fantastic suggestion. Second question is a little bit more personal. It comes from our friends over at Eight Sleep. I used to sleep like five or six hours, was horrendous, almost wore it as a badge of pride. And then my wife was like, hey, knock it off. You know, you probably should sleep a little bit more. And so Mateo, who's a CEO there, helped me out with this Eight Sleep. And I started sleeping on this thing and you could basically make it freezing cold. And all of a sudden now I'm like a convert of the sleep religion, right? I'm like, if I don't get my eight hours, I'm very aware that I didn't get the eight hours. So what is your sleep schedule and kind of how has that changed over the years?

• 59:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I'm a big proponent of sleep. I am, I've been, I've had a Fitbit for a number of years. At this point, I only use it to track my sleep. It's not even that good at that. So I like to try to get, for me, it's about seven hours if I can get it. And most of the time I do. But, you know, for example, recently I haven't been and it just, you know, it just happens I'm more aware of it. And for sure, like I get cranky if I don't sleep a lot and things like that. So I've always been a big proponent of sleep and I view myself as an eight hour a night guy. I just haven't quite gotten there. The biggest change for me with COVID and, you know, a little bit before. So I used to commute from Connecticut into the city and that's an hour commute each

• 1:00:12Speaker 02

  way. And when you try to fit in that plus a work day, plus working out, sleep easily can get compromised. And combination of COVID and what I've been doing, which doesn't really require me to certainly not to go in every day, but not even that much, has been monumentally better in making it more reasonable for me to get called a full night's sleep.

• 1:00:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it feels like COVID was a very big inflection point for people. And everyone started to ask themselves, not only, hey, why do I live in this city? If I don't have to go into an office, but also, you know, what do I, what do I do all day? And there's positive and negatives. One of the ones that I think people in New York and in the city that was a negative impact was, you don't realize how much you walk in a day, right? Even, even just walking from the train to an office, then you walk to lunch, like whatever. Like you end up doing a lot more walking than, than I think people realize. If you sit at home, then, you know, all those steps go away. So it's, it's pretty crazy. Last question for you is a fun one. Aliens, are you a believer or a non believer?

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  Boy, oh, boy. So I'm a believer that there's a lot out there that I don't understand, but I'm not sure aliens is one of them.

• 1:01:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. When you say a lot of stuff out there, like other planets, stars, and any ideas as to what it could be other than intelligent life?

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  So I don't really specifically have any information, insight or opinions about intelligent life elsewhere. But what I will say is I've had a number of experiences in my life and call them spiritual experiences, not, not religious, but spiritual, where the power of intention, whether it's that or experiencing things that just didn't make sense any other way came. So let me give you one example, just specifically. A number of years ago, I got taken to, it was at a little church. It was one of these guys who's, who like, you know, goes around and predicts things. And people bring pictures of people who had passed away and he's like talking to the dead. And I was just like, come on, I didn't believe in any of it.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  And I'm sitting there and he's going around and every single conversation was, you know, oh, you know, they're thinking of you. It was about the last day. And I'm just like, none of this applies to me. And so it was early on in my protege years, things were going really, really well. And I remember thinking to myself, if this guy, I'd love to know that there's like something else out there. And if this guy comes to me, wouldn't it be fun if there was some sign that somehow like this guy would say something completely different to me than everybody else? Like, well, you just thought it to myself. Sure enough, the guy comes around and he said, there's a bunch of family around you, not fam- close to family.

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  They're all telling you, you're on the right path. Keep doing what you're doing. And I went, what? You know, it turned out as he said that, I had this like little flash of an aunt and uncle of mine who had passed away probably two years before that, that hadn't, hadn't even been thinking about. And it was the first time I went, okay, like that guy couldn't have made that up. And there probably is something else out there and that, you know, gave me a lot of comfort with like thinking about death and all those kinds of things. But, you know, whether he was an alien or not, I can't really answer.

• 1:03:28Anthony Pompliano?

  But here's the thing that I think is, is really crazy, right? Is in those situations, I always ask, and I don't have an answer more so than anybody else, but it's just like, how much of it is psychology and biology at work, right? Versus like this, like spiritual thing. And what it really tells me is like, our minds are things that we don't understand. Forget intelligent life elsewhere. Like, we don't understand our own oceans, but we don't understand our own brain and the power of it and kind of just the, the idea that it's something simple. Hey, if you sit down at a chair and you have to think versus if you get up and you walk around scientifically, it's better for your brain to walk than to sit, right? And you start to like, understand some of the stuff and you just realize like, we are really, really complex creatures. So it's, it's cool to see those experiences, this kind of reminders of like, you know, we're not geniuses, right?

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, if you find the pill that Bradley Cooper ingested in the movie Limitless, let me know. I'm up for trying that one.

• 1:04:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Ted, I think that that is called Adderall.

• 1:04:25Anthony Pompliano?

  You could ask me one question to, to finish up. What, one question you have for me?

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  What, what is the most surprising thing you've learned from doing a podcast?

• 1:04:40Speaker 02

  About yourself?

• 1:04:41Anthony Pompliano?

  About myself? Um, there's a lot of things. I would say, one, the more structure I try to put around the conversation, the less enjoyable and less learning I get. So I now almost do no prep. I talk to the guests, you know, four or five minutes beforehand, uh, and that's kind of a much more enjoyable experience, which ends up making the content better. Uh, the second is asking really good questions, uh, is hard. And usually it comes down to, you gotta be a good listener to ask good questions. Right? And so kind of just the classic, like, uh, are you listening or are you waiting to talk? Type framework. Um, and then the third thing I think is, uh, it's the ultimate life lesson.

• 1:05:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? It, it really is, uh, if you can make this valuable for the audience, if you can make it valuable for the guests, it ends up being way more valuable for yourself and not in kind of a selfish way, but it's just, you, you begin to learn that, um, what you extract is, is very kind of zero sum. But when you give, it's very positive sum. Right? And I, I think that that, uh, lesson, although it's in kind of a non-financial, uh, situation, you mentioned earlier, kind of a personal balance sheet. Right? Or, or kind of this idea of there's non-economic, um, you know, pluses and minuses on a, uh, on kind of a, uh, or debits and credits, if you will. And like, to me, that ends up changing the way you think of interactions. It ends up changing the way you think of conversations. And when you can make it

• 1:06:09Anthony Pompliano?

  win, win, win for the audience, the guest and yourself, I think that's ultimately where like the real magic is. Uh, and early on, like, yeah, uh, Jim O'Shaughnessy was one of the first three people I ever interviewed and he came in and you know what we did the whole time? He kept saying, I don't know. And we laughed the whole time and it was a blast. And then I remember saying to him afterwards, like, hey man, that sound like we gotta do like more structured stuff. And going back and thinking about it, it's like, no, that, that was the, you know, one of the best interviews because it was fun. We enjoyed it and he was being honest. And so it's just like, how do you kind of recreate that type of magic over and over again? Uh, I can't do it every time, but I think, uh, you know, this conversation was a great one. And, uh, and that's what I try to do.

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, pump. I think you're crushing that. So. Keep on keeping on with it.

• 1:06:51Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm just trying to keep up with you. You, every time I hear you're releasing, you're releasing, you've got books, you've got all this stuff. So one day I will be like you and I grow up. Ted, listen, where can we send people to find you on the internet and then find the book or the podcast?

• 1:07:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks. So I have everything on a website, capitalallocatorspodcast.com or capitalallocators.com. I'm on LinkedIn and a little bit on Twitter, not as prolific as you are. But that's kind of where I put all the content up. And then, you know, from the website, people can sign up for a mailing list. I send out once a month and then we also have some premium content on top of that. So that's kind of where everything's housed and welcome everyone to jump in.

• 1:07:32Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm a big fan, so people should definitely go check it out and we'll have to do this again in the future.

• 1:07:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, looking forward to reversing the mic on this one.