Greetings friends! I hope the past week has been good to you. The Fall season drawing to a close as we get closer to year’s end is reminding me to slow down, focus on what’s critical, savor the moment for myself and with others and make sure I stay on top of my healthy habits. Rather than trying to do more with less time of day, which I’ve tended to do my entire life, and subsequently resenting myself and the Daylight Savings cabal for it, I’ve decided to pare back this year and just re-adjust my own expectations of myself and make sure I set expectations with those around me as well. To ebb and flow feels better than trying to fight the tides of life sometimes. 

A theme I wanted to focus on this week is empathy. A lot of what’s been in the news is polarized one way or another and tends to demean broad swaths of people into good versus bad. As an extension, there’s even more anti-social behavior and attitude in the financial, macro economic and tech sector. I get why people just shut off the news and leave social media to reclaim their mental health from a constant barrage of content that’s literally designed to turn us depressed or angry.

But it is not like this everywhere. I’ve noticed several times in the past year listening to specific voices in the macro world who talk about how awful things are in the economy right now and maybe have investment ideas to capitalize on this, or just say there’s nothing to be done. It all seemed very self-centered to me until I started following a few names that I will share here. While they’re extremely smart, use words I often don’t understand at first and do think about how money is made, invested and destroyed, they often come back full circle to ways they want to see the world become a better place, even when it seems like it would not be as beneficial to their bottom line. 

I understand nihilism - I fell into that trap when I was younger. Feeling like you have nothing to lose financially or otherwise makes it hard to be empathetic to others - it just consumes you. Hearing points of empathy from the folks at the center of the financial world really is an interesting experience and I don’t think folks like this get enough attention for it. 

What do most if not all of the people (to my knowledge) have in common that I’m mentioning? They’re parents. They seem to think of the world outside of their own lifetimes and what will befall future generations based on our collective decision making now. That really resonates with me as a father. 

I want to give a particular hat tip to Julia LaRoche as she’s become one of my favorite interviewers in macro and finance - she isn’t afraid to ask common everyday questions that might seem beneath high flying and famous guests as she genuinely seems to seek to make her show for everyone of any background, not just people who do this for a living or who are highly sophisticated. 

I follow a lot of people in this space and I tend to avoid assholes, but what’s more - this is not an exhaustive list. I’ve kept a running note of the content that I’ve consumed lately that really hit home for me and that list will likely keep growing. If you have any questions or want to know more about where I source my content I’m always happy to share!

Danielle DiMartino Booth

Darius Dale

Mike Green

Luke Gromen

Vitaliy Katsenelson