Your Sophist Filter: On CEOs, Cynics, and the Voice in Your Head - Ep 304
The Intellectual Investor
Around 155 BC, Athens sent the philosopher Carneades to Rome to plead for a fine to be lifted. He delivered a brilliant speech and swayed the audience. The next day he returned to the same square and delivered an equally impassioned speech making the opposite point, and swayed them all over again. Cato the Elder was in the crowd this time, and Athens paid the price. This essay is an excerpt from my book Soul in the Game. It's about building what I call a Sophist filter: the discipline of stripping the emotional coloring off other people's words, and off your own. In ancient Greece, Sophists...
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My New Daughter - Ep 303
The Intellectual Investor
On August 30, 2026 we gained a daughter. My son Jonah married Molly after eight years and one week of dating, and the Wedding Politburo gave me exactly three minutes for a speech. (I kept it to 40.) This episode is the speech I gave at Jonah and Molly's wedding, along with the story of the rabbi who married them and my 12-year-old Mia Sarah's contribution to the evening. In the speech, I tell Jonah about the chess tournament he won at ten years old and then handed to his friend Kevin. I tell the story of how he talked his way into the St. Julien in Boulder for the price of a Motel 6, and how...
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Depressing Reasons Why I Am Bullish On Gold (Part 2) - Ep 302
The Intellectual Investor
The US is running a 6% budget deficit in peacetime. Peacetime is now over. Interest on our debt now costs more than defense. It crossed in 2024 and has stayed there. This is the second half of my letter to IMA clients, and it argues for an asset I spent most of my career politely ignoring: gold. The fact that I am writing this is a bit shocking to me. Gold falls outside my value framework. It has no cash flows. I have no idea what it is worth. What changed my mind is not something about gold, but many things about the dollar. The dollar's place as the world's reserve currency rested on three...
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Narrative Change (Part 1) - Ep 301
The Intellectual Investor
In mid-August 2026, the 30-year Treasury yield hit its highest level in 19 years, above 5.3%, and the 10-year touched 4.75%. What happened next did not shock me, but it worries me: the US Treasury bought back its own long bonds to push yields down, financing the purchase by issuing short-term Treasuries. Yields fell for a day and then went right back up. This is the first half of my latest client letter. I sat down to write about individual stocks and kept ending up somewhere else. I get a feeling we are having a Caliber 89 moment. Caliber 89 was the two-pound Patek Philippe pocket watch with...
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You Are Responsible for What You Have Tamed - Ep 300
The Intellectual Investor
A client of mine left $100 million to his wife and two grown kids after cancer took him at 66. He was Yale-educated, second-generation American, ran the family business his Russian immigrant father started, and worked 16-hour days, seven days a week, in the basement. His son, days away from becoming a father himself, told me: "I don't want to be like my father." That conversation hit me hard. As a father who runs a business, I asked myself whether I'm doing the same thing to my own kids. A few days later I drove my 18-year-old son Jonah to the airport for a gap year in Israel, and he handed me...
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Chess Nights at Red Robin - Ep 299
The Intellectual Investor
After my daughter Hannah watched Queen's Gambit in January 2021, she said "Dad, let's play chess." With those fateful words, our lives shifted. Just over a year later, I could no longer beat my 16-year-old daughter. Neither could her 6'3 older brother Jonah. I wrote this essay a few years ago. Hannah is off at college now, Jonah is all grown up, and Mia Sarah is no longer eight. I did not want to change a word, because everything I felt on those Thursday nights is still exactly true. Once lockdowns lifted, Hannah wanted to play against live humans, and we discovered chess meetups happening all...
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Today’s Market = 1999 Capex + 2008 Credit - Ep 298
The Intellectual Investor
Anthropic's revenue has grown nearly 10x a year, three years running. Its losses are accelerating with it. And here is Dario Amodei in February: "If my revenue is not 1 trillion dollars, if it's even $800 billion, there's no force on earth, there's no hedge on earth that could stop me from going bankrupt if I buy that much compute." The AI rollout has felt like déjà vu of the 1999 telecom bubble. It is starting to feel like that bubble is being supersized into something closer to what led to the 2008 financial crisis. Trillions in data centers, financed through the same opaque vehicles that...
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You Don't Need to Be an Expert to Hire One. You Need a Tunaman. - Ep 297
The Intellectual Investor
My wife and I are taking a perfectly good 25-year-old house and spending 20% of the purchase price on a sizable remodel. Parts of it are going back to the studs. I had never done a big remodel, I knew nothing about construction, and I was shocked by how many landmines, wrong decisions, and outright deceptions we had to avoid just to start. Strangely, the experience gave me incredible empathy for the smart, highly educated people who walk into a financial firm like mine: lawyers, doctors, engineers, businesspeople trying to decide who will manage their life savings. They feel what I felt. A mix...
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Most People Don't Want to Write. They Want to Have Written. - Ep 296
The Intellectual Investor
I was at a conference in Switzerland. A reader came up to me and asked, "Vitaliy, I've been reading your articles for years. I'd like to write. How should I start?" This question spilled into a long conversation over dinner. When I told him what almost two decades of writing have taught me, his face fell. He'd tried it. He'd spent weeks staring at the computer and written complete garbage. Welcome to my world. In this piece, I work through what I told him over that dinner. Frustration and empty pages are par for the course. Quantity and quality are joined at the hip. "Writing is rewriting" is...
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You are not as smart as you think you are - Ep 295
The Intellectual Investor
Lately, I've been getting this powerful feeling that everything I touch turns to gold. Every time I buy a stock, it goes up. Did I finally figure out the stock market game? Did I find a secret way to follow Will Rogers' advice: Buy stocks that go up, and if they don't go up, don't buy them? No. I didn't get much smarter. I was simply a willing participant in the latest cyclical bull market. A bull market makes you feel smarter than you are, the same way a bear market makes you feel dumber than you are. This piece is a small excerpt from my first book, Active Value Investing (2007), which I...
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