• Maciej Wojtal (Should you invest in Iranian equities?)
    Aug 27 2021
    00:00:20 How Maciej got started with Amtelon Capital and why he chose Iran as a primary investment target?00:05:33 Why is Iran like Russia (and Eastern Europe ) in the 1990s? Is there a catalyst for Iran making it back to be connected with the rest of the world?00:14:25 A short story of sanctions against Iran.00:26:06 How Iranians and the regime in Iran differ? Why is the regime so successful in controlling power?00:32:32 What are great businesses to invest in Iran?00:48:11 How Iran avoided the 'Dutch disease' of big commodity exporters.00:56:08 Is Iran starting to be a new part of an 'Axis power'? Will this hamper the participation of outside investors in the Iranian market? Maciej Wojtal is the founder and CIO of Amtelon Capital which is focused on investing in Iranian equities. Maciej has worked with Citigroup and JP Morgan before running his own fund. Big Thanks to our Sponsors! ExpressVPN – Claim back your Internet privacy for less than $10 a month! Mighty Travels Premium – incredible airfare and hotel deals – so everyone can afford to fly Business Class and book 5 Star Hotels! Sign up for free! Divvy – get business credit without a personal guarantee and 21st century spend management plus earn 7x rewards on restaurants & more. Get started for free! Brex – get a business account, a credit card, spend management & convertible rewards for every dollar you spend. Plus now earn $250 just for signing up (Terms & Conditions apply). Torsten Jacobi: Maciej, welcome to the Podcast. Thanks for coming on, really appreciate that. Maciej Wojtal: Yes, thank you for having me here. Torsten Jacobi: Hey, absolutely. You run something really interesting and you are the cofounder and the CIO of Amtalan Capital, which really focuses on investing primarily in equities in Iran, from what I understand. That sounds really cool, really unique. I have never heard about an investment fund out there that actually invests in Iran. How did that happen? How did you get started on why Iran? Why not something that's a little more politically correct, so to speak? Maciej Wojtal: Yes, well, it is super exciting. And when I speak to the local regulator in Iran, they tell us that we are their favorite foreign investor, foreign institutional investor, because we are the only one. There is really no other foreign institutional investor in Iran, so we are the only ones. So I decided to launch Amtalan Capital back in 2016, when JCPOA, the nuclear agreement, was implemented. And the reason why Iran and not something else was actually pretty simple. There was no other market. There's still there is still no other market at this moment in the world with lower evaluations, a higher growth potential, both like a long term structural growth potential, as well as near term growth that will be coming from the reopening of the country or reintegration of the country with the rest of the world. And to be honest, this is potentially the last opportunity of this size. So the type of opportunity, I mean, is a transformational opportunity. So country going from one situation, because it's not from one system to another, I don't expect any political, you know, revolution or transformation there. But the economic situation will change, will change from a, you know, decades of sanctions, where the economy was basically cut off from the rest of the world to the economy that is slowly opening up, catching up with the rest of emerging markets, with everything good that happened in the rest of the emerging markets over the last two decades. And on top of that, no one is there. So Americans cannot touch it. So all the big funds out there have to wait until the primary US sanctions are lifted. So suddenly you get, you get to go to a new market like this of this size and invest before the big US funds go there. It doesn't happen too often. And what I mean of this size, what I mean by this size is, you know, that's another unique thing is that you may have some frontier markets that you can get excited about because of demographics, you know, growth potential, whatever. But usually they have no capital markets. You can go and launch startups, build a factory, a bank, whatever. And here you already have pretty well developed capital markets, stock market with 600 companies. Right now it's around $250 billion market cap. Back in 2016, it was already $100 billion market cap. And right now several hundred million dollars turnover per day. And so, you know, big enough market to be attractive even for big investors. I mean, too big to ignore basically. And for us with a new fund, startup fund that wants to basically focus on this niche and do the initial fundraising and so on. Well, there was looked as an amazing setup with everything that we needed in place. So hence the decision. And, you know, the important thing is that I had no connections to Iran. So I actually had never met an Iranian in my life before my first visit to Tehran. So I had no ...
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    1 hr and 7 mins
  • Jared Dillian (From Lehman Brothers to 2021 – how did the financial industry change?)
    Aug 27 2021
    00:00:23 How did Jared's path from Lehman Brothers to Internet personality develop?00:05:06 How did the finance industry develop during the last 20 years?00:08:18 Jared's experience on writing a novel (and how it compares to his other book)?00:11:29 What is Jared's view of the deflation/ inflation debate?00:17:03 Is productivity growth really as low as we assume? What role do stock buybacks play?00:22:01 Is individual risk taking the key to increase productivity growth?00:25:01 What are great areas of investment according to Jared?00:30:01 Will DeFi eradicate banks and most of the financial industry?00:34:01 Is the banking industry a good indicator for the health and competitiveness of an economy?00:38:36 How consistent should financial commentators be? Jared Dillian is the author of Street Freak: Money and Madness at Lehman Brothers, named one of the top business books of 2011 by Businessweek magazine. Jared runs The Daily Dirtnap, LLC, which provides daily market commentary and insight to a range of institutional clients. Big Thanks to our Sponsors! ExpressVPN – Claim back your Internet privacy for less than $10 a month! Mighty Travels Premium – incredible airfare and hotel deals – so everyone can afford to fly Business Class and book 5 Star Hotels! Sign up for free! Divvy – get business credit without a personal guarantee and 21st century spend management plus earn 7x rewards on restaurants & more. Get started for free! Brex – get a business account, a credit card, spend management & convertible rewards for every dollar you spend. Plus now earn $250 just for signing up (Terms & Conditions apply).   Torsten Jacobi : Jared, thanks a lot for coming unto the Judgment Call Podcast, I really appreciate that. Jared Dillian: Yeah. Torsten Jacobi : Hey, thanks for taking the time. And you know, you have a really interesting history, and it's something that's becoming a bit of a theme though, is you started in an investment bank, and you worked for Lehman Brothers, then you wrote a book, you became an author, and now you're an internet personality, you run your own internet business, your own content business. Maybe you can tell us a little bit more about this transition, how this came upon, and how do you feel, was it the right choice looking back, or do you feel like, well, no, I want to go back to an investment bank? Jared Dillian : No, it was absolutely the right choice. It was funny because I was talking to my old boss at Lehman, this is the guy that I worked for 2001, 2002, and he told me a story of, you know, when I worked for him, we used to get the Garmin letter. I don't know if you know Dennis Garmin, but we used to get the Garmin letter at Lehman Brothers, and he had probably the biggest financial newsletter. It was a daily letter, and I used to get this stuff, and you know, I liked it. I didn't, you know, I didn't think his writing was the best, but I said, this is an amazing business. I was like, you can just get paid to write about finance, you know, I'd never heard of this before. So around 2003, you know, I had this idea in my head that I wanted to write a financial newsletter, so I had some ideas, and my initial idea was it would be sort of a retail newsletter. I would charge a very small amount of money, about $150 a year, and I would do personal finance stuff, and then I would do seminars and stuff like that. And I figured if I had 1,000 subscribers, I would make $150,000 a year, and that would be enough. And then what happened was, while I was at Lehman, I was put in charge of the ETF desk, and I was told to just grow the business, because the business was very small. They said grow the business, so my idea was to do that through writing. So I started writing market commentary and sending it out to people, and it was very popular, and it grew, and it grew, and it grew. So by the time the bankruptcy came around, I had several thousand people on my list, and I said, you know, I can easily monetize this, so the day the bankruptcy, I sent out a message. I said, I'm going to start a newsletter, and you know, hundreds of people said I'll sign up. So I quit Lehman Brothers, and I started the business, you know, I formed an LLC, and I got some office space, and about six weeks later, I started sending out content again, and I got a few hundred people to sign up, and that was the beginning of the newsletter. So that was in 2008, and about that time, I was also approached to write a book about my time at Lehman Brothers. There was a literary agent that found me and asked me to write a book about it, and initially I said no, but six months later, I came around and I said yes. So while the early days of writing the newsletter, I was writing this book, and that came out in 2011. So there's just been a bunch of stuff since then, I started writing from Alden Economics in 2014, I wrote another book in 2016, I'm an op ed columnist at Bloomberg, I've taught finance at the undergraduate...
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    45 mins
  • Stephen Clapham (How to spot a good investment – and a fraud!)
    Aug 27 2021
    00:00:33 How Stephen got started in the world of finance and what motivated him to write his latest book.00:10:05 What is the basic premise of Stephen's analysis of financial statements (forensic accounting)?00:21:01 What is the fine line between fraud and creative accounting?00:27:22 What is Stephen's analysis of the Wirecard fraud?00:32:27 How well do the current accounting standards actually work for provide transparency into profits/ losses of banks?00:39:51 Where does all the printed money (from Central Banks) actually go? What is the best option to 'weather the current low growth environment'?00:51:10 How 'money printing' at this huge scale seems to be deflationary instead of inflationary? Stephen Clapham is a retired hedge fund partner who now trains stock analysts at some of the world's largest and most successful institutional investors. Stephen is also the author of The Smart Money Method: How to pick stocks like a hedge fund pro and hosts his own podcast. Big Thanks to our Sponsors! ExpressVPN – Claim back your Internet privacy for less than $10 a month! Mighty Travels Premium – incredible airfare and hotel deals – so everyone can afford to fly Business Class and book 5 Star Hotels! Sign up for free! Divvy – get business credit without a personal guarantee and 21st century spend management plus earn 7x rewards on restaurants & more. Get started for free! Brex – get a business account, a credit card, spend management & convertible rewards for every dollar you spend. Plus now earn $250 just for signing up (Terms & Conditions apply).     Stephen, thanks a lot for coming on the Judgment Call Podcast. I really appreciate it. Wow, thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to it. Hey, absolutely. I'm sorry about my improvised setup here today, but I hope you can still manage that. So you run a company called Behind the Balance Sheet and you also recently published a book that's called The Smart Money Method. And both I thought are really interesting and we want to dive a little deeper into both of the topics that you illuminate there. Maybe you can give us a very quick intro into how you got into the financial world in the first place and what inspired you to write the book and what's kind of the 30,000 feet view of what's in the book. Okay, so nothing inspired me to get into finance. It was purely accidental and serendipitous. I had accepted a job at a very senior level, one of the largest companies in the UK, where I was reporting to somebody that was reporting to the CFO, Finance Directorate. I was interviewed by the CFO for the job at a relatively young age and they gave me the job and they were delighted to have me and I accepted the role and they then called me up and they said, oh, we made a bit of a mistake because you're too young. You can't be this grade until next year and I said, well, what do you mean? And they said, well, you know, don't worry, only a little bit less money and there'll be a slightly fewer benefits and we'll make you up next year. And I said, well, I'm very sorry, but you know, as far as I'm concerned, we had a deal and I'm not allowing you to renege in that deal. If you have such a stupid philosophy that somebody has to be a certain age before they're qualified to do the job, then I suggest you go and look elsewhere because I'm not really interested in working for an organisation where merit doesn't overcome age. And I was recounting this tale and a friend of mine said, oh, well, that sounds a bit upsetting, but why don't you go into the city? And I said, well, don't be stupid. I don't know any of the cities for people with privileged backgrounds that won't suit me. And he said, well, no, I think you'll find that things are opening up and I said, well, how would I do that? Well, I don't know. How would I get? I don't even know where to start. And he said, well, I don't know either, but my secretary's husband, he works at a stockbroker and I bet you he'll see you and explain, you know, what sort of things you might be able to do. And I said, well, that'd be fantastic, so he called up his secretary at home and she said, oh, yeah, of course, he would be delighted to see Steve of Egan come in next Wednesday at 8.30. So next Wednesday at 8.30, I rock up to this stockbroking firm and this very nice chat Bob Carl spends half an hour telling me what it's like to be a research analyst. And I'm thinking, oh, man, that sounds like fun. And he says, well, why don't you come and work for us? And it was, you know, I hadn't gone there to get an interview, I'd gone there simply to learn and understand what the city was about. And I, you know, I went to work for him and it was a brilliant job. I really loved doing it, found it incredibly interesting, incredibly exciting. And I never really looked back. And so my career spanned the sell side where I was an analyst covering various sectors for many years, and I then was asked by one of my clients, a big hedge...
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    1 hr and 7 mins
  • Mike Green (The gravitational force of passive investing on capital allocation and geopolitics)
    Jul 21 2021
      00:00:31 How Mike researched and developed his theory of a market bubble in passive investing/ index investing? Are markets about information or transactions?00:08:01 Is the bubble of investing just a (bigger) change of the NIFTY fifty or the NASDAQ bubble in the 2000's?00:13:53 Does Mike's theory of passive investing predict higher volatility due to the changes in market structure?00:19:22 Is our low productivity growth linked to inefficient capital allocation due to passive investing skewing investments? Is the Fed to blame for the asset bubbles?00:26:57 Is the Fed's own forecast model broken now that markets follow a flow model much more than a valuation model?00:31:01 Is our retirement model the problem or the solution? Is a future crash inevitable? Is the small enterprise dead forever?00:39:13 How should contrarian investors position themselves? How committed can one be to an 'impending bubble'?00:47:45 What is America's contribution to the world? Does China now have the better approach to capitalism? Can we ever come up with companies that do things cheap and better (instead of just better)?00:55:05 Are societal changes solely to blame for changes in productivity growth?01:01:01 Can longevity research (and the ability to live forever) change how the world will grow?01:09:01 Should we always be 'smart investors' or is 'going with the crowd' often better? What are the dilemmas of the contrarian or cataclysmic investor? How do high profile investors deal with this?01:21:10 What other bubbles does Mike see in today's market and how can retail investors trade against such a bubble formation (if they choose to do so)?01:26:48 Will China start a hot war in Asia in the next 15 years? Will trade (and China's trading partners) matter? How is the chess board stacked towards such a war. What are China's incentives?   Mike Green has been a student of markets and market structure for nearly 30 years. Mike works with Simplify to create ETF products that give retail investors an edge. Before that Mike has worked with Logica Capital Advisers and Thiel Macro. You may watch this episode on Youtube - #100 Mike Green (The gravitational force of passive investing on capital allocation and geopolitics). Big Thanks to our Sponsors! ExpressVPN – Claim back your Internet privacy for less than $10 a month! Mighty Travels Premium – incredible airfare and hotel deals – so everyone can afford to fly Business Class and book 5 Star Hotels! Sign up for free! Divvy – get business credit without a personal guarantee and 21st century spend management plus earn 7x rewards on restaurants & more. Get started for free! Brex – get a business account, a credit card, spend management & convertible rewards for every dollar you spend. Plus now earn $250 just for signing up (Terms & Conditions apply).   Torsten Jacobi: Mike, welcome to the Judgment Call podcast. Thanks for coming. We appreciate that. Mike Green: Thank you, Torsten. It's a pleasure to be here. Torsten Jacobi:  Hey, so your claim to fame is really the passive investment bubble, and you also recently joined Simplify, one of the most interesting ETF creators out there. My first question is for listeners out there who haven't heard of this particular bubble that you've been describing for a couple of years now, what are the core tenants of your thesis there, and what do you think is wrong with passive investment? Because a lot of us think of this as a very safe and potentially very lucrative investing stone. Mike Green: Well, I think this is one of the challenges that in terms of my theory and what I've observed about the market and how it's playing out is that for most investors, there's a natural attraction to being in a passive vehicle. Your objective is very much to just try to match the return of the market, and so it feels like it is the right choice, and you're seeking out lower fees, you're seeking out broad exposure, you're diversifying as you would expect, etc. And so it is a winning combination from the investor standpoint on an individual basis. The problem is, like many phenomenon, when you expand it and it becomes the dominant feature, it becomes a tragedy of the commons. And so the first place you have to start with passive investing is to understand that the basic theory behind it is predicated almost referred to as the efficient market hypothesis. And so the efficient market hypothesis was a theoretical construct that was created in the 1950s and 1960s, most closely associated with Eugene Fama. The idea is very straightforward. The prices in the market represent all of the information or the best estimate, the best intersection of information that exists across the market. And this is the idea that prices are set on a fundamental basis. So I as a single investor look at Microsoft, I make a forecast of the cash flows, I estimate what the future performance is going to be. I make some estimate in terms of what I expect it to be worth in ...
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    1 hr and 44 mins
  • Thaddeus ‘the Catholic’ (Pluralism, Liberalism, Postmodernism, Idolatry, World Government)
    Jul 19 2021
    00:01:00 How Thaddeus got into philosophy and theology in the first place?00:05:45 How political pluralism should work? Is the US actually pluralistic?00:12:23 Has liberalism built a super structure of metaethics on top of religions. Are religions (too) boxed in by the liberal structure? How has our consciousness already been changed by this structure?00:19:13 Is the treatment of religions and reality comparable? How should philosophy deal with quantum physics?00:30:03 What did postmodernism contribute to the current state of philosophy?00:35:03 What did Friedrich Nietzsche really try to tell us in 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'? How much of his depression should be attributed Christianity?00:39:03 Why are so many people falling out with active Christianity? Is it connected to the different role of idolatry (the replacement of the divine) between the older Abrahamic religions and the New Testament?00:45:02 What kind of love is the most fulfilling - self-centered or selfless?00:51:02 How does Ayn Rand's philosophy (Objectivism) fit into the high regard that is given to selfless love by philosophers? Is altruism self love or selflessness?00:53:01 Why do we have this endless potential of addiction? Is addiction a coping mechanism for reality? Does it help us reconcile long-term and short-term goals? Is it better than being stuck in place?00:57:34 Is religion a system of societal error correction? Do religions give you better life goals (and free you of addictions). Have religions become too lazy and are not challenged enough? Has postmodernism shown us how uncontested religious ideas are a problem?01:07:13 Is the catholic church a good model for a 'world government'? Thaddeus Kozinski is a professor of theology and philosophy at the Divine Mercy University. He is the author of Modernity as Apocalypse: Sacred Nihilism and the Counterfeits of Logos and The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophers Can't Solve It. You may watch this episode on Youtube - Thaddeus 'the Catholic' (Pluralism, Liberalism, Postmodernism, Idolatry, World Government). Big Thanks to our Sponsors! ExpressVPN – Claim back your Internet privacy for less than $10 a month! Mighty Travels Premium – incredible airfare and hotel deals – so everyone can afford to fly Business Class and book 5 Star Hotels! Sign up for free! Divvy – get business credit without a personal guarantee and 21st century spend management plus earn 7x rewards on restaurants & more. Get started for free! Brex – get a business account, a credit card, spend management & convertible rewards for every dollar you spend. Plus now earn $250 just for signing up (Terms & Conditions apply).     Today's welcome to the judgment call podcast really appreciate thanks for coming You're welcome. Thanks for having me on torsten. Hey, absolutely I looked into you a little bit and there's two books that you wrote and it stood out and got quite a bit of recognition One is where you talk about what role does religious pluralism have in society? How nation states should actually be a construct and is that even possible which we all think it is right? So that's kept I guess the consensus and the other book that I took a quick look at is How Catholicism really fits into modern society and what what happened to Catholicism? Because it went through so many changes at least the public perception during the last 100 years So i'm excited to talk about this and you're also just in that before when we spoke earlier you mentioned A couple of other topics that I think are really relevant to today's discussion about what's going on in the world So maybe like my first question is how did you start with philosophy and how do you select those topics? So why are certain things closer to your heart like those topics? We just talked about and others that you come across from what you feel others are not as relevant to you You just leave them by the wayside a little bit well, I I started out in college as a pre med major math and science Towards my junior year I was reading And I wasn't practicing religion at this point. I was kind of a Nietzschean In my in my behavior and thought even though I didn't know who Nietzsche was, you know what I mean? I was sort of uh, I was a de facto Nietzschean living for extreme extreme experiences trying to defy uh the status quo you know Trying not to be a conformist all that and I was searching though at that point And I I actually read one particular book which sort of opened up a whole new world to me And was called the screw tape letters by c.s. Lewis Have you heard of the book? I have not no I have not so the screw tape letters are fictional letters written from uh a devil in hell called screw tape To his nephew wormwood and the whole book is about how to How to get this one particular individual into hell and so what lewis does is he incorporates a lot of uh social commentary and spiritual truth in this But what happened to me when ...
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    1 hr and 21 mins
  • Max Wiethe (The state of financial industry and financial media)
    Jul 19 2021
    00:03:30 What regulation should we employ in the financial industry? Does it make us more safe?00:10:57 How Max got into his current career and what he has learned from his interviewees.00:17:01 Is the world going crazy? Is the 'attentionalism' already changing people and is the financial industry a good showcase for this? Is 'career risk' actually the most important part of financial decision making? How should 'risk taking' work in the financial industry?00:27:00 What is the state of financial media? Why is holding up better than other parts of journalism?00:36:01 Which opportunities are available in the finance sector? Are entrepreneurial opportunities in other sectors of the economy really harder to come by than a few decades ago?00:41:16 Will machines take over everything but marketing and sales? Are humans competitive vs. machines in terms of making complex decisions?00:56:16 Will we see the 'rise of independent curators' in the financial industry?01:10:30 Have preferences for earning money changed? Is quality of life more important than high earnings?01:20:11 Will exploring new planets (and the possibilities of discovering assets) change the society on earth forever?   You may watch this episode on Youtube - Max Wiethe (The state of financial industry and financial journalism). Max Wiethe is an editor and journalist at Real Vision where Max hosts a weekly series of interviews with financial industry heavyweights. Big Thanks to our Sponsors! ExpressVPN – Claim back your Internet privacy for less than $10 a month! Mighty Travels Premium – incredible airfare and hotel deals – so everyone can afford to fly Business Class and book 5 Star Hotels! Sign up for free! Divvy – get business credit without a personal guarantee and 21st century spend management plus earn 7x rewards on restaurants & more. Get started for free! Brex – get a business account, a credit card, spend management & convertible rewards for every dollar you spend. Plus now earn $250 just for signing up (Terms & Conditions apply).   I actually saw something yesterday, a guy who was talking about like, go on zero hedge and there are articles that are promoting stocks. And he actually, he said back in the 80s, he got a call or his dad got a call from basically a boiler room broker telling him that it was the height of Billy Crystal, if you know the comedian Billy Crystal, his career, he said, this company is making the next Billy Crystal movie and got him to invest $2,000 and he ended up losing all of his money. Not a ton of money, but in the 80s, $2,000 was a good chunk of money and he was basically saying these websites where you can promote a stock and then they'll just have a little disclaimer down at the bottom, it's like so and so may have received compensation to write this article. Like that's the same guy as the people in the Wolf of Wall Street who were calling you and saying like, I've got Aerotine international investment and like when you see it on a website, it doesn't feel like it's a broker because it's not a broker, but that person is being compensated to write that article about that stock and if you can't tell, if you can't see those little things, you might not understand the biases of that information. So there's lots of things like that that I think are important. I mean, happy to just talk about content in general and how I think about it. I think you'll find... I want to get into this. Yeah, I said I think you'll find once you get me going, we will have no problem filling time. Yeah. Well, we don't want to just fill time, but I'm really curious about your insight and you've seen the industry from a different point of view than most of us. And maybe you can just go there right now. One thing that a lot of people in the financial industries or industry are very much involved with it, but they're also passionate to an extent with it is regulation, right? So there is a ton of amount of regulation with financial industry. It seems so easy to innovate new cars and just come out with something completely new. And over the century, the last, what is it, since the late, probably since the beginning of time, but we really see what's still left since I'd say that the 18th century, there's been a lot of regulation that prohibits certain behavior, like you just gave us an example about zero hedge. I don't want to put zero hedge. I just like use them as an example of a website where it could be anywhere, right? What I'm trying to say is from where I come from, and we should get into this topic a little deeper, I always feel there is a lot of regulation that's so complicated to enforce that creates so much red tape that it's probably not worth it. If you have trust in the investment, if you have trust in the active participant in that marketplace in the financial industry, maybe people just have to wise up. That's where I come from, where I feel like, well, if you fall for this thing, that's your problem, ...
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    1 hr and 27 mins
  • Julio Maria Muhorro (Tales of Entrepreneurship in Africa)
    Jun 16 2021
    00:00:36 How Julio's entrepreneurial journey started?00:06:29 How do opportunities for entrepreneurs in Africa stack up currently?00:13:45 How knowledge based and digital content businesses are faring in coastal African countries. How staggered access to digital innovations delays opportunities outside of the US.00:20:48 How to find early adopters for your startup? Can you find them in a 'non early adopter market'?00:24:35 What is the 'correct idea' of a risk-taking entrepreneur?00:29:01 How will we get to nine billion brains and innovating entrepreneurs in the future?00:36:34 How will we deal with the enormous amount of 'cultural download'? How difficult is it to identify opportunities?00:40:14 How do we identify and allocate future revenue streams (that look more like TV/film royalties)? How do we stabilize resource allocation for micro entrepreneurship?00:45:01 Why the 'platform economy' is a short term 'trap' for most entrepreneurs. But is it a good intermediate stage?00:54:01 How do we set the right framework and incentive to encourage and foster entrepreneurship (as an example in Mozambique).01:01:01 Is valuation the only USP of an investor? Are secondary variables more important?01:04:01 Is negative or positive motivation the 'better motivation' for creating the desire to 'improve the world'?01:09:10 What are the best countries to invest in in Africa? Do the 'nation states' even matter much?01:16:15 Is Crowdfunding a solution to the funding problem of African startups? You may watch this episode on Youtube - Julio Maria Muhorro (Tales of Entrepreneurship in Africa). Julio Maria Muhorro is an entrepreneur and business coach based in Mozambique and South Africa. Big Thanks to our Sponsors! ExpressVPN – Claim back your Internet privacy for less than $10 a month! Mighty Travels Premium – incredible airfare and hotel deals – so everyone can afford to fly Business Class and book 5 Star Hotels! Sign up for free! Divvy – get business credit without a personal guarantee and 21st century spend management plus earn 7x rewards on restaurants & more. Get started for free! Brex – get a business account, a credit card, spend management & convertible rewards for every dollar you spend. Plus now earn $250 just for signing up (Terms & Conditions apply).     Julio, thanks for coming to the Judgment Call podcast. We really appreciate that. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to have this conversation with you, man. Hi, same here, same here. We spoke a couple of months ago, and we were just chatting about that. There were a couple of things we really wanted to talk about, and you are a very successful entrepreneur. You're quite young. You do all this for Mozambique, and now you're in South Africa. Maybe you tell us a little bit about yourself, and what really motivated you to become an entrepreneur so early in your life? Sure. It all started for me when I was just about to graduate for university, and I realized I didn't have a job afterwards, like many people. One of my friends, he was already an entrepreneur doing some transportation business, and he wanted to go into developing short term courses. He had all the entrepreneurial experience, but he knew nothing about academia, per se, or knowledge based businesses, but there was my jam. I was a lecturer at a university to help pay for my scholarship and my fees, and the university I was studying in, and my parents were teachers. Education and knowledge based stuff was really my jam. We joined forces and we started this company out of scratch, two young people, and I remember we really went over what we thought it was right, because I had no experience developing courses. My experience at the time was just delivering courses. I remember I had to Google how to build a session plan for a workshop and stuff like that, but then in three months, we trained almost 600 people in total. For you to think this is like a startup that no one heard of, and the key of our success early in the stage is that we were quite doing a lot of interactions with the market. We did all the research piece, we asked students what they wanted to learn, we kept their contact details, so when we launched the courses, we sent them SMS and all that stuff, and the energy was just cool and vibe. I mean, I was giving teachings and classes like eight hours a day, and I didn't want them to be boring, so I really made sure that it was interactive and fun, and people really appreciated. From that place, back in the days in Mozambique, business mentors, advisors, there was not even words we were used to it. It was at a time in the business where I felt I was making good decisions, but I wasn't making great decisions, and I just didn't know how I could make that leap. It made sense to me to get a job while my co founder was still running the business, and that's what I did. I joined them as a mechanical company called Idea Lab. They are major in supporting entrepreneurs ...
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    1 hr and 26 mins
  • Alexander Bard (The philosophy of everything)
    Jun 15 2021
    00:00:30 How Alexander and his co-author Jan have managed to produce such an enormous (and prophetic) body of written work over the last 20 years00:04:43 What Alexander thinks about postmodernism?00:09:01 What are 'Netocrats'? How is the world changing due to the Internet? Who is ready for the digital future and who is not?00:14:01 What is the future of (representative) democracy and politics in general? What is a 'sensocracy'?00:19:30 How should a 'world government' work? How much subsidiarity will it allow? What role will 'charter cities' play?00:24:15 Will we be able to switch between city state benevolent dictatorships (i.e. will countries/ cities be run like companies) as part of our life?00:27:01 Why was Jesus Christ actually killed & the surprising utility of 'empires'.00:30:42 How our future laws are already emerging throughout Internet.00:34:31 Is competition increasing for companies? Should we react with more collaboration to improve our competitiveness?00:42:31 What role do Internet platforms play? Do they actually have a monopoly?00:45:21 Is marketing as a whole evil? How has it changed over the years and how it is connected to 'attentionalism'? We will abolish advertising soon to protect our 'sacred space'?00:51:01 Why is productivity growth so low? Are we not daring enough? Is the focus on marketing ('useless products') to blame?00:58:43 Why wars (as terrible as they are) are good measures of productivity and ideology.00:59:55 After the 'Death of God' and the 'Death of the Individual' how are we now orient ourselves?01:07:32 Why 'native tribes' don't see a crisis of meaning or depression currently? Why some religions are more static than others.01:11:23 What is our best bet for a future religion? Is it likely to emerge or will we have to live with many parallel truths? Will we see 'weird activism' instead?01:18:11 Why the world will look more like India and Singapore soon?01:24:12 What surprised Alexander the most (compared to his predictions) the within the last 20 years?01:26:58 What will happen in 2038? Will AGI actually emerge by itself?01:31:01 Are we (co-)created by an alien intelligence? Is the multiverse theory useful? Should we investigate spacetime more thoroughly? You may watch this episode on Youtube - #96 Alexander Bard (The philosophy of everything). Alexander Bard is a musician, author, lecturer, artist, songwriter, music producer, political activist and philosopher. Alexander is co-author of a number of books incl. Syntheism - Creating God in the Internet Age, The Futurica Trilogy and Digital Libido.   Big Thanks to our Sponsors! ExpressVPN – Claim back your Internet privacy for less than $10 a month! Mighty Travels Premium – incredible airfare and hotel deals – so everyone can afford to fly Business Class and book 5 Star Hotels! Sign up for free! Divvy – get business credit without a personal guarantee and 21st century spend management plus earn 7x rewards on restaurants & more. Get started for free! Brex – get a business account, a credit card, spend management & convertible rewards for every dollar you spend. Plus now earn $250 just for signing up (Terms & Conditions apply).   Torsten Jacobi: Alexander, welcome to The Judgment Call broadcast. Thanks for coming. Really appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time. I know you're busy. Alexander Bard: Well, thank you for having me. Torsten Jacobi: Absolutely. Hey, so you are a 21st century philosopher, and I feel after reading two of your books, you wrote a couple of those over the last decades. I actually read Fruturica Trilogy and The Digital Lividone. I started with Sintiism. I feel they're very, very accessible. It's a philosophy that's relatively easy to read, which is, you know, not easy to find. And I feel like you've seen the future, and now you just write about it. So how did that happen? How did you make yourself so aware of the future? Alexander Bard: Well, I should first of all honor my co writer, Jan Söderkvist. He's very experienced and extremely learned. And we're the same age. We met about a year before we started writing together, but I would say the accessibility in our work, and I'm glad if they're accessible. We do our utmost to make velocities as accessible as it possibly can be without losing any of the quality. We don't compromise on the quality. And I think Jan is the guy who really does a lot of the work in making the text in Swedish and German language as accessible as possible. But we don't compromise on the quality. And these are, of course, this is philosophy. I mean, the philosopher is the guy who tries to observe the world at the furthest possible distance. But if somebody's even further behind the philosopher trying to see the bigger picture, that's the philosopher. So the philosopher is always the guy who tries to look at the world with the biggest possible picture. And of course, then also the biggest time scale. And that's what we try to do as philosopher. And of ...
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    1 hr and 43 mins