Top Podcasts of the Week

November 16, 2020

Below is our “Top Podcast” episode with our curator, Colby Donovan!

Today we have episodes with Jeff Gundlach & Jim Rogers with market updates, Steven Levitt nerding out on economics, and Mark Suster on the VC landscape.

Investing

  • Real Vision: Finance, Business & The Global Economy: Jeffrey Gundlach — Waiting for the Next Big Trade. Jeffrey Gundlach is the CEO of DoubleLine Capital and is often referred to as the “Bond King.” He starts with his background and getting media publicity after he navigated the 2008 crisis well. At 19:45, he talks about how he trades himself and uses his view on the dollar as an example — he’s a long term bear but thinks positioning is currently overweighted to the downside so he’s currently long. At the 47 minute mark he gets into the current environment: he think’s we’re in the very late stage of a momentum market and the U.S. will underperform in the next stage. He’s a proponent of the permanent portfolio (equal weight cash, gold, stocks and bonds) and thinks we’re in a short-term deflationary environment but will eventually have inflation. He finishes with giving his thoughts on the Fed backstopping the bond market in 1H20, talking about why he believes in the fourth turning, and explaining why he believes the next huge trade will be when equities are at single digit P/E’s. [November 14, 2020–1 hour, 14 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker | Website Link

Valuation makes absolutely zero difference when you’re in a true, brutal bear market.

  • The Grant Williams Podcast: The End Game Ep. 11 — Jim Rogers. Another must-listen from The End Game series — this episode is with Jim Rogers, who is the Chairman of Beeland Interests and was the co-founder of the Quantum Fund and Soros Fund Management. He was also the creator of the Rogers International Commodities Index (RICI). He starts with discussing the situation Japan is facing with awful demographics and a high debt load, the U.S. & China relations going forward, and why MMT in the U.S. (and around the world) will end bad. He also states the only asset he sees as cheap is commodities, explains why there is a bond bubble, and shares the three places he’s mostly invested in are Russia, Japan, & China. [November 14, 2020–1 hour, 10 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker | Website Link

If you’re ten years old, you better immigrate (from Japan) or learn how to use an AK-47. Because when you’re 40 or 50, your country, if it’s still here, is going to have serious, serious, serious problems.

  • EconTalk: Steven Levitt on Freakonomics and the State of Economics. This episode is the ultimate economics nerd-fest, and I say that in a flattering way. Levitt is the author of the best-selling book, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.). He talks about the success of the big and what pushback he’s received and the issues in academia with economists being unable to look in the mirror and act as the rational beings they portray in research. They talk about a wide variety of subjects but it is a blast to listen to. [November 9, 2020–1 hour, 33 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker | Website Link

Economics is about going into the world and finding puzzles and thinking about how understanding incentives or markets might help us get a better grasp of what’s really going on.

  • Top Traders Unplugged: 113 The Systematic Investor Series ft Jack Schwager. Schwager is the author of Unknown Market Wizards, a book profiling some of the top investors in the world. He covers a lot, including investors he profiled who embraced trend following in a variety of ways, the ways the investors he profiled evolved throughout their career, and how they also embraced risk-management to ensure they survived in the long run. He also talks about the ways the traders he profiled stood out — they often had terrible starts to their careers and seemed to have uncorrelated returns to the overall stock market. [November 8, 2020–1 hour, 11 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker | Website Link

The trend is your friend until the end when it bends.

  • LA Venture | Venture Capital | VC: Mark Suster — Upfront Ventures. Suster is a Managing Partner at Upfront Ventures, the largest venture capital firm in L.A. It’s a phenomenal episode with one of the most successful venture capitalists. He covers what the point of being a VC is, why his firm chose to have partners specialize in different verticals, how he tries to differentiate himself from other VC’s, and what the future of the industry looks like. [November 11, 2020–33 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker | Website Link

  • The Long View: Ramit Sethi: What Is Your Rich Life? Sethi is a personal finance expert, author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich, and founder of Earnable, an online course created to help entrepreneurs start and accelerate their businesses. In this great episode all about personal finance, he explains what it means to define your “rich life” and work towards that, how to start having financial conversations with a spouse, why tracking expenses doesn’t work and he doesn’t advise people to do so, and the fact the pandemic made him say people should have 12 months of emergency savings instead of six. He also talks about when and why someone should look for a financial advisor and why the myth that’s been perpetuated about how buying a home is financially sound is not true. [November 11, 2020–53 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker | Website Link

  • Invest Like A Boss: 161: Cult Wines — Tom Gearing. Gearing is CEO and co-founder of Cult Wines Ltd, the world’s leading fine wine investment company with assets under management of £130 million, which provides physical fine wine portfolio management services to private individuals and clients of family offices, wealth managers, and private banks globally. The interview goes from 6:00–52:00. He begins by covering the wine market in general, from the perspective of buying land and selling wine or just buying bottles of wine to resell later on. Then he explains his firms service, which offers SMA’s to mostly high net worth individuals, but notes investors don’t need to be accredited. He also touches on the low volatility of the asset class, which was barely down in March and April when most other asset classes tanked. [November 13, 2020–1 hour, 23 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker | Website Link

The Meb Faber Show

  • The Meb Faber Show: Sammy Courtright, Ten Spot — How Do We Get People To Feel Like They Work For A Company When They’reNo Longer In The Same Place. Courtright is the co-founder of Ten Spot, a startup uniting teams around common interests or collaborative projects, combining virtual experiences with sophisticated engagement tools to create perfect space for building a strong culture. In this episode, she discusses the origin for the company, what it was like to participate in the TechStars accelerator, and navigating 2020 with COVID while raising venture money at the same time. [November 9, 2020–39 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker | Website Link

  • The Meb Faber Show: #265 — Rusty Vanneman, Orion — To Manage Portfolio Risk, I Think You Have To Be More Creative Moving Forward. Vanneman serves as Chief Investment Officer for Orion Advisor Solutions. In this episode, he explains Orion’s TAMP (Turnkey Asset Management Platform) offering to help advisors break out on their own. He also covers direct indexing, why it makes a lot of sense when implementing ESG, and why in a year like 2020, it can provide huge alpha for investors. He also covers his thoughts on the markets going forward and behavioral ways to convince investors to remain invested during downturns like March 2020. [November 11, 2020–53 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker | Website Link

The Rest

  • Brave New Planet: Episode 6: Reshaping Nature Through Gene Drives. This is a fascinating episode about gene drives, which can spread any genetic instructions you wish across an entire animal or plant species in the wild. And the development of CRISPR has provided the underlying technology for gene drives. While this is something that offers a lot of promise to improve species or help eliminate things like malaria, it also may have massive unintended consequences and is incredibly hard to conduct trials with.[November 9, 2020–1 hour, 10 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker | Website Link

Instead of spraying nasty poisons on our crops in order to get rid of pests…why don’t we program the pests to dislike the taste?

RECOMMENDATIONS
Books

Mark Suster (Managing Partner, Upfront Ventures):

Adam Posen (President of the Peterson Institute for International Economics):

Derek Zanutto (General Partner, CapitalG — Alphabet’s Independent Growth Fund):

Documentary

Tom Gearing (CEO and co-founder, Cult Wines Ltd):

Good investing,

Meb Fabertheideafarm.com