Welcome Back to RV Classics — Festival of Learning 2021
- Real Vision
- March 24, 2023
This is RV Classics, a monthly newsletter where we pull the best from the Real Vision vault. We’ve spent the last 8 years learning from some of the greatest investors of our time, and we’ve got thousands of hours of analysis to show for it. Well, now it’s time to dig into the most thought-provoking, relevant insights.
Consider these our tales from the crypt — the greatest hits handpicked by Raoul Pal to help you learn how past cycles are shaping the world today.
Real Vision Classics Newsletter
A decade of the best financial interviews, compressed into a 5-minute read.
This Week…
We’re throwing it back to Real Vision’s second Festival of Learning in 2021. Economist Dr. Pippa Malmgren and renowned investor Jim O’Shaughnessy sat down to discuss the 2 common traits that have informed every stage of their decorated careers: curiosity and a lifelong commitment to learning.
Given today’s wildly uncertain economic environment, we hope this discussion on how investing in our own curiosity can benefit portfolio decisions and help you rethink how to approach markets and sustainable investing.
(Plus, Jim and Pippa drop some🔥 book recommendations too. See below.)
Bonus Points
🚨 Speaking of the Festival of Learning, the third virtual celebration of financial knowledge returns March 30-31, 2023.
- Join thousands of other attendees (for free…!) to learn from the world’s best investors and thinkers, chat in exclusive Discord channels, and connect with like-minded Visionaries.
The Festival of Learning is like Burning Man for capitalists… with less nudity. Let’s go with SXSW for investors.
With headliners like David Rosenberg, Mish Schneider, and Brent Donnelly, no stone across macro and crypto will be left untouched.
- You can find this year’s full lineup and details on how to sign up right here.
The Highlight Reel
- What Is Lifelong Learning? It all comes down to curiosity. “If you’ve got that gene, it’s almost impossible not to be a lifelong learner,” Jim says. But learning “requires the ability to be comfortable with uncertainty… If you can remove your beliefs from your sense of self, you’ll be much more open-minded.”
- Take the Punches: “In order to be a lifelong learner, you have to be a lifelong risk-taker,” says Pippa. “There’s no substitute for getting into the ring of life and taking the punches.” No wonder she willingly worked at the White House…
- Diversity of Thought: Pippa says the ability to empathize helps her as an investor. Her father, a former White House chief trade negotiator Harold Malmgren is to thank: “He taught me to always take the other person’s position into consideration and see things through a different lens.”
- Never Stop Reading: Jim and Pippa both share a love of literature. “When we read, what we’re really doing is creating a philosophy of our own,” says Pippa. “We’re stitching together an understanding of the world and our place in it.” Jim adds: “The best way to learn about anything is to write a book about it.”
- Incentive Structures: It’s important to recognize the incentive structure of your surroundings. Those incentives ultimately drive decision-making and inform our perception of the world. For Pippa, government incentives were far different than what’s rewarded on the trading floor. Wherever you are, “job number 1 is sussing out the incentive structure,” says Jim. “And if you want to remain employable, you want to continuously upgrade your thinking.”
The Reading List
Not only did Pippa and Jim drop an encyclopedia’s worth of knowledge in this interview, they cited their sources too. Here’s a list of all the books they recommended:
- The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch
- Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu
- The End of Economic Man, Peter Drucker
- Adventures of a Bystander, Peter Drucker
- Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson
- Quantum Psychology, Robert Anton Wilson
- Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, Adam Grant
- What Works on Wall Street, James O’Shaughnessy
- The (Mis)behavior of Markets, Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard D. Hudson
- Wholeness and the Implicate Order, David Bohm
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter. (This one nearly defeated Jim.)
Watch Now
Thanks for reading.
In our next issue, we’ll flash back to a conversation with legendary investor Howard Marks to hear how he invests successfully in a world dominated by moral hazard and political polarization.
When you have a moment, let us know what you think of RV Classics. Just email us at essential@realvision.com.
Real Vision Classics Newsletter
A decade of the best financial interviews, compressed into a 5-minute read.