A Timeless Collection of Infinite Wisdom with Jim O'Shaughnessy
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This week on the podcast, what a delight. Extra special guest, Jim O'Shaughnessy. His book that I came to know him with first was What Works on Wall Street, which has been just a perennial seller. I think it's in its fourth or its sixth edition and really influenced sales.

several generations of quants on finance. O'Shaughnessy Asset Management became a leader in direct indexing, eventually was bought by Franklin Templeton, leading him to launch O'Shaughnessy Ventures, O'Shaughnessy Fellowships, Infinite Loops Podcast, just so many different things. His

His new book is delightfully titled Two Thoughts, a timeless collection of infinite wisdom and reflects many of the insights and just thoughtfulness that Jim shows in everything he does. I always find it delightful.

delightful to have him on the show and you can tell how much I appreciate him just by the conversation meanders wherever it goes and I occasionally look at my list of questions but really

I just want to see where Jim's mind is going to take it and come along for the ride. I thought this was delightful. And I think you will also, with no further ado, my conversation with Jim O'Shaughnessy. Barry, I am always looking forward to these conversations. It's great to be back. It's a pleasure for me also. You and I go way back. Way, way back. And it's kind of funny, like 25 years later, I was like, oh, how do you know Jim? Oh, we met in the green room.

of TV, you know, right after the dot-com crash. It was kind of funny. But let's talk a little bit about all the different businesses and ventures that you're involved with. So I knew you right around the time you were getting ready to depart from

You were at Bear Stearns for like a decade or so? No, about five and a half years. Okay. So in the mid-2000s, and you had the great insight and business acumen to tap out of Bear Stearns in 2007 with all of those options that you had, and-

exercise the options, sell them, and launch your short-term asset management. So you went on the way out. You went on the way into starting the new firm. Tell us a little bit about the early days.

leaving Bear Stearns and setting up OSAM. So first let me correct the... Everyone assumes that I saw the great financial crisis coming and therefore wanted to spin out of Bear Stearns. Take the win. Yeah. What do they say? If the story conflicts with the legend, print the legend. The legend really isn't correct, though. We had begun conversations...

with Bear Stearns folks months and months before the financial crisis came on the scene. And it was essentially a very amicable parting. As you note, when we spun out, we kept all of our Bear Stearns accounts, continued to work with all their partners,

private client service people over there. So it was very, very amicable. But of course, because the great financial crisis came along and Bayer had those CDO funds that had a little bit of a problem, it was just...

Irresistible for news people to say. I had one reporter sit with me for an hour and a half, and all she kept doing was, come on, tell me the truth. Tell me the truth. Tell me the truth. You know, it's funny because when we look at certain books that get the timing of things right or completely wrong, people forget about...

A book just doesn't appear wholesale out of thin cloth. It's the idea has to come along and then you got to get a publisher that wants it unless you're going to self-publish. Then you got to write it. So it's like a one or two year lag. I would imagine pulling out a substantial division from a major brokerage firm.

doesn't happen overnight. It's going to be like a six or 12 month process. Absolutely. Because you have to have everyone with the oars going in the same direction. You want to make sure that it is agreeable and everyone is, whether they're unhappy that you're going, they're happy with the deal that allowed you to go. And so I took extra time to

to make sure that that happened because I loved the folks over at Bayer and it was really just my own desire to be an entrepreneur again and they really got that. And so very amicable but as you know, those things take a long time to get negotiated out. - Yeah, to me the thing I was always kind of sad about

with the fall of Bear Stearns eventually picked up for pennies by Jamie Dimon and J.P. Morgan Chase, and then even Lehman Brothers. I knew a lot of great people in a lot of different divisions. You know, we all have mentors all over the street that even if they're a counterpart or if they're a salesperson, there were things to learn from folks there.

And Baer and Lehman were two, like, giant storied names. And, I mean, obviously there was a massive disruption throughout society. But the tragedy that a lot of lay people don't know are really good people doing really good work get— they're the collateral damage from someone else's screw-up. Totally agree. And the—you know, obviously just my personal opinion—

But I think at that particular point in time, all of the investment banks were bankrupt or insolvent. Well, some were a little more insolvent than others. Yeah, I agree. I agree.

And so it was almost a bit like luck of the draw that Lehman and Bayer were the ones to go down. Right. Bayer went down early enough that it was salvageable. And then a little known story that a lot of people are unaware of, when I was writing Bailout Nation and doing my homework, it turned out that JPMorgan Chase had a little derivatives flare up like years earlier than

And I don't remember if it was Jamie Dimon or one of his lieutenants, but someone said, hey, this is a mess and this is really potentially damaging. And it might have been Dimon who said, sell it all. I don't care the price. If you have to take a 10 or 20 percent haircut, I want all this off the books. And that's what they did. And so when the world went to hell, the.

They were they picked up Washington Mutual. They picked up Bear Stearns. They got to cherry pick the best of the best at pennies on the dollar. And that's why J.P. Morgan is the monster success it is today. Well, Jamie is a super smart guy. And that does not surprise me at all. You know, the joke around Bear Stearns at the time was that Jamie really the real reason he wanted to buy Bear was he wanted the building. Right, right.

Which is now overshadowed by their brand new headquarters in the park. But that was a great octagonal building, which we could see out from our firm's windows on Bryant Park with the glass towers.

It was a beautiful building. And you walk in and it's like, you know, there used to be Wall Street. And then there was, you know, the Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers sort of off of Midtown. Yeah, not my favorite part. Lehman was in Times Square. And then this was just, all right, so very prescient before Vanderbilt was even a thing. That's right.

And there they are. Now, one Vanderbilt is a monster. So so let's bring it back to what you're doing. So you leave there, you launch. Oh, Sam, you've already had great success with what works on Wall Street. What made you think, I think we're going to develop a series of quantitative approaches to managing money?

Wow. So that was a dinner when I was a teenager. My grandfather had been very successful. He was an oil speculator. And he kind of beat the pledge guys by about 70 years. He proceeded to give away the vast...

portion of his fortune during his own lifetime. Was it really a fortune? It really was. No kidding. And what he couldn't give away, he put into a foundation, the IA O'Shaughnessy Foundation,

which I think today is still about a hundred million dollar foundation. No kidding. And, but he made his five kids, the trustees. And so once a quarter there would be a dinner and it would rotate. I was brought up in St. Paul and,

And so during the St. Paul rotation, I got lucky enough at I think I was 16 to get invited to the adult table. And of course, like I'd want it to be an adult. I loved going to my parents cocktail parties and talking to adults. And so I was really excited. And literally, I was put down next to my Uncle John and my dad. And I'm listening and they're talking about IBM.

But they're just talking about the CEO. They're not talking about how much do they make? How much do you have to pay for every dollar of earnings or sales or EBITDA? And I kind of raised my hand and said, Dad, Uncle John...

Don't you think it might be a better idea to look at it by the numbers? And they dismissed me. This is 1976, right? What's the plot? Yeah, well, exactly. And so I decided, you know what? I'm going to go look into this. So I took myself down to the James J. Hill Research Library in downtown St. Paul.

And I thought I was going to be really ambitious, but I am potentially the world's laziest man. So when I saw the 500 of the S&P, the S&P tear sheet book, I'm like, oh, I'm not I'm not going to be able to do that. So I lighted on the Dow 30 stocks. Right. Right. Did the research found very compelling evidence that what its P.E. is really matters to your returns going forward?

Very, very high valuations tended to crash and burn. Very, very cheap valuations tended to do well. But of course, you know, Barry, I was 16, 17, much more interested in girls. Right. And so after college, got married young, I was like, I've got to revisit all this.

and got the data set from Compustat, and essentially that became what works on Wall Street. So wait, so what did you study in college? So the reason I am in economics, I have a degree in economics. The reason for that was I had maybe six more credits, four to six more credits in economics than I had in history. Okay.

Otherwise, you might have been a historian. Yeah, absolutely. Well, listen, I think a good knowledge of history is absolutely vital if you want to be a good investor, right? A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, like one of the Roman wits said, he who does not understand what happened before they were born remains forever a child. Huh.

And essentially, I didn't want to remain a child. If you look back at the market's history, guess what? History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. For sure. I mean, you go back to Isaac Newton losing a fortune in the South Sea bubble. And literally, I always do this joke because people get it. It's like people were so in love with that stock publicly.

poets wrote poetry about it. One went, fill the South Sea goblet full, the gods shall of our stocks take care. Europa pleased accepts the bull, but Jove with joy puts off the bear. And I used to, when I was still at OSAM, I used to say, I'm totally a quant, but if somebody writes a poem about a stock you own, sell it. That's a high. That's amazing. And it's funny, you and I both have a love of quotations and

And I tried repeatedly to track down the source of history. It doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. It's always attributed to Mark Twain or someone else, and I've never been able to really verify that. Yeah, Quote Investigator. I love that site. Yeah, it's pretty good. They can normally get you to the original site.

citing of the text. What's funny about that, though, is almost inevitably it's somebody you've absolutely never heard of. That's right. And I think that's why people like when that sounds like something Mark Twain would say. Right. And but then there's also the Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde. I mean, there's a bunch of them.

Like any quote that you really love and you don't know who did it, people tend to say Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde. The one from Twain that stands out is, and I'm going to mangle this, it's not the things we know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know for sure that just ain't show. Yeah, that was actually a character of Mark Twain's. Oh, really? And he spoke like a southerner of the late 1900s.

And I think his last name was Ward. The character's last name was Ward. Twain, I mean, he has some of the great actual quotes that are really his. One I love is like, if you pick up a dog in the street that is starving and feed it, it will love you.

If you do the same for a human, it will bite you. This is the principle difference between a dog and a man. Which A is true and B leads to the newer line. If you want a friend on Wall Street, get a dog. And it's really true. We're going to talk more about quotes and books in a moment. Before we do that, I just want to bring up the first book, What Works on Wall Street, which

That book not only has been through multiple editions, it's had legs. It's influenced an entire generation or two of quants. What was the most surprising thing about what you found in the book and then its subsequent reception in finance?

So I think the most surprising thing was a number of people at various firms that I was investigating working for before starting my own. I mean, I had my own company, but I was getting a lot of offers primarily because they knew the book was coming. Right. Many of them, when they saw the galleys of the book, the manuscript, right.

The first thing they said to me, Barry, was we would love to hire you, but you cannot publish this book. You're giving it away. Exactly. I knew you were going to go there. Exactly. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. You can have the greatest truth in the world. You can scream it from all the rooftops. You can take full page ads in the Wall Street Journal. Most people are just going to go, meh.

They're not going to do it. It's so true. You know, my takeaway from my first book, which is now 15 years ago, was...

there would be these debates about what led to the crisis, what were the factors, what were... And I'm like, no, no, we've solved that. I've addressed that. Let's move beyond that. And the arguments didn't stop. People just kept on debating it. And my takeaway was, oh, you could just drop a truth bomb on people's laps, and if they don't want to believe it, they're not going to believe it. And that was like, maybe I was naive, but you're 100% right that...

The fact that they thought you were giving the secret away, you could, here's a secret to investing. Maybe you'll do okay with it, but nobody's going to really adapt. Well, you know, what's funny is I would say to these people, it was one of the, like when I started out, and actually What Works wasn't my first book, Invest Like the Best Was, which showed you how to clone your favorite money managers, right, by looking at the biggest...

difference between their portfolio factor distribution and then using those as screens to get a portfolio much like your manager. Note, we used to update the clones versus the manager. Last time we did it was years and years ago. But the thing that I found really interesting was all of the clones were beating the managers that they cloned. Was that because of the fee or was that because they're not great sellers? It was because...

are very human emotional decision makings, almost always under extreme stress. Models don't get stressed. You know, they don't get hung over. They never fight with their spouse. They just keep applying those criteria. You're in, you're out. And I think that the, you know, we went through some tough times after that book came out and people have different ways of dealing with stress. And one of them is not being good at selling.

So there's been a number of studies, and I don't want to talk about my book. We're going to talk about your book. But some really fascinating things you learn are when you look at the academic research, fund managers are actually surprisingly good buyers. Yes. But they're terrible sellers. Yeah. And part of the reason is the emotionality of the sale. They tend to panic out when they shouldn't or do the opposite, hold on.

right to the bitter end when they really shouldn't. Well, and also it's just because it's just part of our human OS, part of our human operating system. I remember when Enron was going through difficulties and I was set to speak with a classic manager, a fundamental guy, and we were going to share the stage. And the first question went to me and it was like, do you own Enron?

And my answer was, no, the numbers are pretty bad. And so we don't. And he looked at me kind of, you know, with the chuckle. Oh, you quants, you know. And then he launched into this description of not only did he hold, he bought more. And then he gave this as the explanation. I went to a barbecue at the CFO's house once.

The CEO was there, the CFO, and I looked them in the eye and I said, is there trouble? And they assured me there wasn't.

And I'm just kind of like sitting over there with, oh, okay, just don't touch this one. Maybe we could get a short pun on this. I'll tell you something that's really funny, and this just goes to how naive and stupid I am or especially was. Early in my career, I would listen in.

on quarterly calls. And I would believe every word I heard. Like, these guys aren't going to lie to their investors. Everything's going to be great. And I very quickly learned, oh, you're a terrible judge of people. You'll buy anything that a slick salesman is selling you. You just have to stop

And I just stopped listening to calls because I'm an idiot. I believe what they say. I would rather look at the numbers. And yeah, I know the numbers can lie, but not as easily as the CEO or CFO. That's also a really big part of human OS, default to trust.

Well, we're social primates, right? We grew up in...

For the vast majority of people, it probably works better to trust who you're listening to, right? And so one of the things that we're looking at in one of our divisions at Oceania Ventures right now is...

Voice software AI that does stress analysis on any type of media. So obviously earning calls present themselves as kind of number one. Yeah, really. And I got to tell you, Barry. Wow. Exciting stuff. Oh, my God. Now, how much of that is nervousness about speaking to a large audience?

And nervousness goes, they know something and they don't want to disclose it. So as you might guess, you do baselines. You take a recording where clearly either you get some tape that was before the call or a speech that had nothing to do with earnings. And that creates your baseline. Uh-huh.

And then you get to see very, very quickly, like, Spike, we don't have any worries, Spike. Wow, that sounds like fun. Yeah, it is fun. And we're not sure how we're going to do it because we don't offer asset management services to people outside of O'Shaughnessy Ventures.

That was a deal that we made with Franklin Templeton that we would not launch. But you could still do a little, come on, don't you get the itch sometimes to say, hey, XYZ, stock is wildly overvalued and the CFO is full of it. Let's put on some, let's buy some deep out of the money puts and see where this goes. You know, if you can keep a secret, we might try that with some of our internal capital.

Let me know. I'm right there with you. I love the idea of that.

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So it came from a group of my teammates at OSV. Essentially, I have been a quote junkie all of my life. Same. So I have kept, I barely have notebooks filled with quotes. Oh, really? From way back when I was, I think the first time I started it, I was 21. And so I just love them. And I think that, you know, they can pack a lot of a punch.

If you put them together right, if you curate them right, et cetera. If you read What Works on Wall Street, I open every chapter with a quote. I do that a lot also. I find that's fun. Let me ask you one other question about the title. So one of the things that's fascinating, if you like music or poetry or even—

I'm going to go into the weed, Shakespearean iambic pentameter. I love all those. Okay, so there is a rhythm to—and I'm going to write this down so you know, even if you get this, I want you to know—

There is a rhythm to the phrase, a timeless collection of infinite wisdom that reminds me of another book title. And I'm curious if it was in your mind when you came out with this. Oh, you got me on that one. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. A Timeless Collection of Infinite Wisdom.

It just leaps off in that same rhythm. I love that connection. I don't know if that was a... No, at least it wasn't in the back of mind. It wasn't purposeful. No, it wasn't purposeful. Because I've always loved that title. Oh, it's a great title. A heartbreaking work of... And it's like you could go with a different one. It's a staggering work of heartbreaking. It's like you could flip it around. Yeah. But this...

This phraseology just leapt right out of me. I am incredibly lucky to have just extraordinarily talented teammates. We have a lot of writers on the team. We have a lot of editors.

And, you know, they would just go at it like, what about this title? What about because we had to call it two thoughts because this started, Barry, on a whim. Well, I know I know you have been tweeting for, I don't know, 10 years, not just a quote. And I was doing that for a long time, just throwing a quote up that I thought was relevant. Sometimes I would stagger them out like you can plan it.

tweet six months in advance. Hey, I don't know what's going to happen in August, but I think this is relevant. You have been doing two tweets for forever. Yeah. And so it was kind of like, you know, Ken Stanley's book, Greatness Can't Be Planned. Mm-hmm.

This is a perfect example of that. So I just thought, you know, what the heck? I'm going to put up two thoughts and I'll see if I like it. If I keep doing it, I'll just keep doing it. Right. And then all of a sudden, like the people that got attracted to it were there was a lot of people. And then I started getting DMs on Twitter basically saying, hey, if you would do this in a newsletter, I would subscribe. Right.

And then one of my colleagues was like, well, let's do the newsletter. And in the newsletter, why don't we say, hey, would you like a book? And that's what happened. Literally, we iterated, iterated, iterated and ended up publishing the book. So that's really interesting that that's the genesis of the two thoughts there.

When you're picking a pair of thoughts from the same author, are you looking for things that complement each other? Are you looking for their two most profound statements? How are you selecting A and B for this author? Yeah, it's a little bit messy, to be really honest, because I'll usually start with the notebooks that have all my handwritten quotes out when I copied the quote over.

And sometimes I'll think, ooh, I found like the perfect one quote from this author. And then I'll spend some time going through the rest of their work, et cetera, finding one that would complement it. But then sometimes some of the best two quotes that work the best are,

They don't compliment each other. In other words, it's kind of like, hey, you know, history rhymes. But then the second quote is, but always keep your eyes on the horizon. Right. Like, hmm. Two very different. Two very different things. And so I I.

I wasn't precious about it at all, literally, because it just grew out of me throwing two quotes from the same author up on Twitter. And so, you know, after the fact, people start asking, like, well, did you plan it that way? And the honest-to-God truth is, no, I did not. It was organically grew out of it. Organically. Hey, if you do something... My experience has been...

tacking into what works. Yeah. And, you know, it's not quite direct mail. No. Where, hey, we're getting a response from this, but not that. It's not exactly an A-B test. But, hey, people seem to like this. Let's give them more. Yeah. And that's what happened here. You know, like one of the best growth factors in investing is momentum. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

And if you see something gaining momentum, this is a really important idea for me. I always listen to the market because if I have one opinion and the market has a different opinion, I'm wrong. Probably most of the time.

And so momentum in this regard, you see all the DMs increasing. Hey, when are you going to do the book for this? Hey, where's the newsletter, et cetera? And I'm like, OK, this is this is truly emerging from beneath, not from me saying, you know what, I'm going to do a two quotes book and it's going to be great. No, this was all others in the marketplace saying to me, hey, Jim, do a two thoughts book.

grassroots groundswell. So let's talk about knowing that you've had all these quotes over the decades, how did you begin to think about organizing this? Just quotes. There's Bartlett's book of quotations and that's alphabetical. And you know, that's a research piece, but you're putting this out as less of an encyclopedia and more of a nonfiction

nonfiction, how'd you think about how you wanted to structure it and organize it? We went back and forth on that forever. And then we decided, okay, let's, let's separate it by broad groupings like thinkers, writers, authors, you know, dynamos, people who founded companies and were incredibly successful. And we, in the hardcover of the book,

We made sure that each one was color coded because really the book is not meant for you to sit down and read all the quotes in it. It's really meant to have on your coffee table, have on your desk and just open it up randomly. It's what I do. And just read the two quotes because you'll see two quotes on each page and kind of think about them and just

And by the way, that's the way everyone I've ever talked to has a copy of the book. That's the way they're using it. And so it was the kind of the, you know, a lot of people do morning pages, do that kind of thing in the morning. They write. And the number of people who've either emailed me, texted me or DM me on Twitter saying, oh,

I absolutely love this for my morning writing, right? Because they'll open it randomly. Right. They'll contemplate the quote. They'll write it at the top.

Of their morning writing. And then that's what they talk about. It inspires them. So based on that, let me suggest we need a two-quote-a-day desktop calendar. Do you remember those old ones? Of course I do. It was almost like a giant pad of Post-it notes. Mine was a far side calendar. I was about to say that. I still have the score.

In my head, the school for the gifted where he's pushing on the, and the door says pull like I, from that exact same calendar. Exactly. I had one of those and I had a Calvin and Hobbes and it's like a different one every day. Another one of my favorites. Absolutely. That's so funny. So let's talk about what are real quotes and what are not. And I have a very vivid recollection of putting a quote on,

That supposedly was Thomas Jefferson in Bailout Nation. And like a year after the book was published, I got an email from someone saying they liked the book, P.S.,

This is an urban legend. Thomas Jefferson never said this. And that's how I ended up eventually tracking down quote investigator because I was so horrified. And one person said something. Nobody ever mentioned it again. Yeah. And it was like, all right. So the good news is the bad news is what a screw up. The good news is.

Nobody noticed. How did you go about the process of validating and verifying that the quotes were real and genuine? It's not just Mark Twain. It's Albert Einstein and George Carlin. Yeah. Apparently said all these things they never said. Right. Compounding is the eighth wonder of the world. Einstein never said. Yeah, no, I know. So there I was very lucky to have a very diligent team.

And they identified a host of sources. We use quote investigator, but we used others as well to try to get the veracity of the author and the quote right. Now, having said that, I'm sure that there are still some examples in there where we got it wrong. Right. And so we even put a little thing in there saying, you know, all errors are our own. Right.

But philosophically, I have a little bit of a different view of this. I think that we all too often because we we anthropomorphize things to the extent where if Albert Einstein said this, then it's important.

I invert that and I say, it doesn't matter who said this. Let's stay with the compounding is the eighth wonder of the world. You know what? You and I know that's true. It actually is true. We know that's true. And so what's more important, that idea getting into somebody's head or that Barry Ritholtz or Jim O'Shaughnessy actually said that to me, it

It doesn't really matter. Now, I'm not trying to diss the people who want to be exact. They should be. You want to be accurate. You want to be accurate. Absolutely correct. But with me, it's always more like...

I'm fascinated by the thought or the message that's being communicated. That's what I want people to focus on. Now, obviously we want it to be attributed to the right person. You know, Banksy had a really funny quote. I don't think we put it in the book, but I put it up on Twitter a lot and it's, um,

Any kind of philosophical statement sounds better if you put the name of a dead famous philosopher after it. And he put Plato and then and then waved beneath it. He wrote, no Banksy. And so I thought that was really funny. But, you know, that's probably what's actually happening. Right. It's like.

I want people to really take this seriously. So I'm going to make sure that Einstein said this. It doesn't add to what the thought is inspiring in you. You know, that kind of reminds me of the Abe Lincoln line, don't believe everything you read on the Internet. Right. But let me let me invert the question here.

In your research process, did you find a quote that you knew and loved and thought, oh, this is great and it fits this person so well? And then subsequently you discover, oh, it wasn't by that person. Yes. Any come to mind? Well, we had quite a few...

Actually, Eleanor Roosevelt quotes that were not Eleanor Roosevelt. And we had a lot of, well, not going back over the obvious ones, Einstein, you know, Twain, George Carlin, Oscar Wilde, etc.,

and if we love the quote, we would put it in under the actual author's name. And I can't, I can't think of one that's great right now, uh, where we did that, but it's really funny too, because the reaction, we did this, we did a test on our company Slack. I put the same quote when we found one of these and it was originally attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt and it actually ended up being,

a woman who was a friend of hers and often in the White House, but who no one had ever heard of, at least no contemporary person had ever heard of. So I put them both up on our company Slack and I said, what do you guys think of the first one? Lots of emojis and everything. And then I put it up with the other woman's name. The less famous actual author. The less famous actual author, Crickets.

And so to me, there's obviously something being activated in our brain that says, ooh, must be important because Eleanor Roosevelt or Albert Einstein said it. And I always try myself to be neutral on that. I always try to focus on what is being said, not who is saying it. And to give you the behavioral finance spin on that,

That's the halo effect. You're giving credit to a person for success in one area, and you're allowing that to spill over to the quote, whether or not they said it or not. It's not quite social proof, but hey, if it's Oscar Wilde or Mark Twain, we know they were wordsmiths and brilliant. And hey, if they said it, it must be valuable. Must be good. Right. And I wonder if that's why people attribute things to George Carlin and

to say nothing of Einstein. So you co-wrote this book. Tell us a little bit about your co-author, Vatsal Kaushik. How did you guys handle the workload? Was he more organizational and you more philosophical? I know you're deep down inside a philosopher. Tell us, how did you go about putting the work together? So Vatsal was the first employee of Infinite Loops, my podcast. Mm-hmm.

And he is an amazing guy. He is multi-talented. He's a great builder of tech, but he also reads extensively. And it was actually Vassil who came to me and said, OK, Jim, you've got all these guys and women texting you saying we want a book. He goes, let's do the book.

And so what he handled was almost exclusively the vetting, the process of making sure who I had attributed the quote to was correct. But then he also did a bit of curating. You know, he decided with...

ultimately my approval, you know, we don't think this group really goes in there. We'd much prefer this group. So he was very instrumental on the actual curation of the quotes where I was, as you say, much more philosophical. If there was one that I absolutely loved and he just wasn't finding a place to fit it in, then I would say, well, try harder.

All right. So I know there are certain authors you really appreciate, but I'm curious what thinkers, what philosophers, what books found their way into the gestalt of this book? What really influenced your approach to this?

So it was not necessarily because, hint, there'll probably be another version of this book coming out. Could be 10 more versions of this book, right? So some I held in abeyance because I really wanted them to go into the second book. But, you know, I admire greatly all of the Age of Enlightenment authors and thinkers. You know, your Adam Smiths, your...

you know, all the people who were like, wait a tick, we could actually do things that we might call the scientific method and really test all of our beliefs, much to the chagrin of the ruling churches of the time period. And so Voltaire, always big, big fan of his work. And, you know, but I didn't go at it from that vantage point.

What I really wanted to do because of the nature of the book, in other words, I never expected anyone to sit and go from the front page to the last page. If I had, I would have done it differently. Then I would have tried to tell a story, an overall story with the quotes, something we might actually try with one of the next versions of the book. Right.

But with this one, since I knew I wanted it to be kind of a jumping off point for people to get an idea, to think about it, I just was very much not, you know, I'm not going to make it obvious and I'm not going to follow them in sequential order or, you know, this group all are together and absent from other places in the book.

So, yeah, I mean, like you'll get a very good idea for some of my favorite thinkers by just looking at who I'm doing quotes by. Why a book? Why not some other media? You're so, you know, digital forward and have been for a long time. I always find I like physical books.

But, you know, you and I are from an earlier generation. Everything seems to be moving in a different direction. It is. But number one, like if you look at O'Shaughnessy Ventures, it's everything that I love, like Infinite Books, the publisher, Infinite Film. I love movies.

the fellowships, which you know all about. But I think that it's not just people of our generation who like beautiful books. In fact, the people who were the most excited about it were younger people. Oh, really? Because we took a great deal of care to make it beautiful. And we had the printer from Italy do the printing and

And it's got color and the spine isn't glued. So the number of younger people, and when I say younger, anyone probably under 35, the notes that I would get saying this is the most beautiful artifact ever.

And I heard that term more than once, artifact, artifact. So one was a friend, and so I called him, and I'm like, why are you calling this an artifact? And he goes, because I'm beginning to look at these hardcover books as works of art, right? And so...

That was surprising to me, but I love books. You know, I have big libraries at my house. I mostly, by the way, Barry, read on Kindle for iPad. Really? But if I love a book, I always buy the hard copy.

And if I really love a book, I buy the hard copy from my library and three paperbacks to give to friends. And so one of the things, it's kind of like vinyl, right? We grew up on vinyl. That's how we made our mixtapes, everything else. But guess what? A lot of young people are going back and sampling vinyl. So everyone seems to like it. There's a certain tactile feel. I used to love the,

Me too. All the album art, which not only do you not get with the same way with small CDs, but when you move to streaming...

You don't even know the names of half the songs on an album because it just all kind of comes through at once. It's a different experience. Yeah, very much so. Deep domain expertise, strong relationships, broad capabilities. It's what makes Stiefel one of the industry's leading providers of M&A and capital-raising services in the middle market.

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you let your son Patrick take over as CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. He was a key driver of Canvas.

which was built on top of a database that you've been refining since the 1990s. Do I have that right? Yeah, yeah. And actually, you might remember I started the first online investment advisor called Netfolio. That's right. In 1999, 2000. I was just 23 years too early. And I also made the mistake of making it B2C online.

Whereas that was a huge mistake. Should have gone B2B because I later learned, you know, I was a level playing field guy and like people can just buy their no loads and everything. But the more the data presented itself to me, the more I came over to the side where advisors are earning every dollar you pay them because the results, the outcomes were just so much better.

So we started building the tools that became Canvas during the great financial crisis. I'm like, okay, we're probably not going to sell another long only U.S. stock portfolio for the next three years. So let's really attack the data. Let's clean it. By the way, really hate it by my research team for that entire period. Right. Because it's really mind-numbingly bad. Tedious, yeah.

But by the way, now that's a great use case for AI. It can do it much faster. It can do it, you know, you can free your staff to not have to do that laborious, mind-numbingly dull type of work so that they can work on better research, more interesting topics. But yeah, and as we were doing it and Patrick walked into my office and he's like,

You know, Dad, we he actually did say this to me. I know it became lore, but he goes, we built the Death Star to kill a mouse here. And I'm like, what do you mean? He goes, well, our our clients, the the Ritholtz wealth managements of the world are.

could use this and it would be amazing for their business. Now, obviously, because I had already tried with Netfolio, I was like, let's do it. So yeah, building out the actual technology though, that was a multi-year effort. It took us a long time. Our mutual friend Dave Nottig has been a supporter of direct indexing

and ETFs obviously for a long time. And my complaints were always, yeah, but it's kludgy. Yeah, but I get these 200 page quarterly appointments and it's not very fine tunable. And I'll never forget when BATNA came back to the office having seen a demo of

If he had hair, it would have been on fire. Like, that's what it was like. He was jumping up and down. And just the demo is like, oh, wow, this is slick and...

wow, this really looks good. I can't believe it's that definable. It's that user. And like the deeper you went into it, it was just every step along the way, there was a ton of stuff. What was the vision when you originally were building this? Was it, hey, let's pump this up and sell it? Because I know you guys never were really shopping this around. Yeah, no. Kind of fell out of the blue. Yeah, no, we, it was not to pump it up and sell it at all.

It was we wanted to have the absolute best software for the way we managed money. And there was really nothing off the shelf that suited our needs. And so we put on a pretty significant developer team that had background in portfolio management. This is key.

The problem with just a technologist trying to come into our industry and build a platform like this, they don't know all of the junk that goes on underneath. We do because that's what we do, right? They don't think about, well, who's the clearance agent, who's the custodian, all of those types of things.

So by actually having people with very deep domain knowledge in asset management, the way it really works, that was a huge help in us building out the software. But the original thing, Barry, was we wanted to serve you, our clients, better and faster.

And then when we saw that the customization, that the tax management, that all of that would be really appealing to not only our advisors, but to our advisors' clients, that's when it clicked. Wow. Like kind of our AWS moment was, huh.

We think other people might really like this too. No, absolutely. The tax side of it was a game changer. And when I was doing some recent research for another project, I

I just started going through the list of trillion-dollar asset managers that either bought or built a direct indexer. And when you see 10 or 20 of the largest firms in the world all moving in the same direction, hey, pay attention. Something's going on in that space. Customization is the future. Yeah, absolutely. We are leaving one size fits all.

And the ability to customize your client's portfolio down to their specific needs, it really is a game changer, especially on the tax alpha that you can generate. So you mentioned your AI earlier. I know you've been appointed chairman of the board at Stability AI. I was. So let me rephrase that question.

So you mentioned AI earlier. How do you see AI transforming either the investment management industry or venture capital? What is the role of AI going to be going forward? I truly believe that AI is the most powerful technology that has ever come on the scene during my career. Wow. And it is going to be used primarily for...

replacing arduous, boring, mind-numbing type activities that humans are currently doing, the AI can do. Let me give you an example. In our publisher, if you work with a legacy publisher,

You're done with your manuscript. You sent it in. You probably had this experience. Typos, typos, typos. Right. Typos, typos, typos. But it didn't get back to you probably for a couple of months. Right. With infinite books, it'll probably get back to you the next day. Really? Because we have an AI that takes all of those typos, fixes them.

It prints it in galley format because non-authors might not believe this, but an author, when they see their work in the way it's going to look as a book, it kind of freaks you out. You start reading it differently. Very much so. And so we'll have that. That will go back to the author. All the typos will be gone and any incongruity in the manuscript will be noted.

We won't touch it because we want to leave it to the author to make whatever changes they want. But if it says, hey, Barry, in chapter one, you said this, but in chapter four, you said the exact opposite thing.

Which one do you want? And then finally, we have plagiarism routines where, you know, a million little pieces where you have to go on and get scolded by Oprah should never happen again. Because sometimes people aren't plagiarizing intentionally.

They are maybe doing it from memory, something they read, etc. And wouldn't it be far better for everyone concerned if you just bring that to the author's attention and they can fix it? So you have a lot of interest. So it's not just venture investing. It's AI. It's publishing. It's fellowships where you find somebody who...

You sponsor for a year and, you know, sort of a MacArthur genius grant. Where can you go? What can you do with this? You know, where do you really focus your time and effort? What most interests you?

So I'm going to cop out and give you the answer. All of it interests me, Barry, or I wouldn't have it. True. But I'm very lucky in that we have a senior person at the head of each one of these verticals. And so I let them... I'm very big on hiring people with super high agency and who are really, really bright, mostly brighter than me. And I let them...

run with what they want to do. They always keep me informed as to, "Hey, we might be trying this big change," and then I sign off there.

But I mean, basically, the verticals were all areas that I loved. I love movies. I love books. I love media. I love podcasts, etc. And they were also areas where I felt that there was a lot of arbitrage opportunity available. For instance, like most legacy publishers are operating under best principles, right?

But they're operating under the best principles from 1925, not 2025. And so there is so much that can be improved here.

in the process to make the author a good deal happier, to make the reading public have access to their author's work sooner than they might otherwise. But also, because of the technology, we are able to offer a much better deal to our authors. Our authors typically will take 70% of the royalties after the costs have been cleared. Wow.

So we can still make a great deal of money at the 30% that we maintain. But there's also cross-pollinization, right? There's a great podcaster who is going to be a great author. There is a great author who might be a great podcaster. Or we'll do the whole thing for them. We'll set them up on a sub stack. We'll give them a podcast. We'll publish their book.

What we really want to focus on is ideas that ended up in slush piles in days of yore. A lot of great writing is there. And so we want to be able to not only see that, but publish the best of it. So you're publishing books. You're hosting your own podcast, Infinite Loops. I'm kind of intrigued by the idea of investing in movies, right?

which tend to be a black hole of losses. You know, it's like restaurants, plays, and films. Tell us what you're doing cinematically. So cinematically, we started, our little mantra is crawl, walk, run.

And so, you know, it was odd for me because, you know, I had a very established reputation in asset management. And here I'm the total underdog. I mean, like we are the rebel alliance, if you will, going up against some very, very tough competitors. Right.

So on the film side, we started with documentaries. One of our first, Flipside, actually premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, got amazing reviews, got bought out by a distributor. And so that went very, very well. We are now commissioning documentaries with some younger talent that isn't really bound up by the way Hollywood currently does things.

Meaning a little more nimble, light, fast, responsive. Much more nimble, much faster, much more responsive. Someone had shot a film on an iPhone sort of as a little bit of a publicity stunt, I want to say eight or ten years ago. Yeah.

But that's really very feasible today, isn't it? Oh, absolutely. And when you add in all of the things that AI, I mentioned all of the laborious stuff that you get rid of with publishing, same is true in film. So this is going to sound weird, but you know what eats up like huge amounts of time and is ridiculously boring? Color matching.

When things are filmed over a variety of days or locations or what have you, one day is cloudy, one day is sunny...

You've got to have that match up so that your film appears of a piece. So it's more than just continuity. Absolutely. It's the next step beyond that. And there's just so much that can be done with the visual part, with the editing AIs that we have.

Always going to have a human editor, but we are giving them tools that just makes them able to do their job in a much more creative way because they don't have to take that hour or two hour and do the niggedly, oh, I've got to move this to here and that to there. They literally can press a button and it happens. Yeah.

So what we're finding is a great amount of the workflows in these industries are time consuming, boring, and just like they take forever.

And we can fix that to the point where they no longer take forever. And the people we're working with absolutely love it because they can spend their time making that edit like supreme, right? We're giving them back time that they can use artistically. So, so many people...

have been pessimistic about AI. It's going to kill jobs. It's going to damage society. You won't know what to do, to believe, to trust. We'll all be out of work. I don't get the sense that you're looking at AI that way. You seem to think that this sounds like

You're finding this is just an incredibly useful tool, and it's going to make all of us more productive and more creative. Precisely. You know, we always get frightened when some new technology comes on the scene. And by the way, this goes back forever. The Luddites, right? The Luddites, right? It goes back to Ned Ludd.

and who broke up all the machines because they were going to take their jobs. Well, he ended up working on one of those looms, and he vastly preferred his new job because he didn't have to do it the old, horrible way. Same thing's going to happen here, but it happens all the time, right? So when records first came out, do you know that symphony orchestras took full-page ads in newspapers saying, that isn't real music?

Real music is live and you have to hear it live or you're listening to a counterfeit. Right. So when this type of advance comes along, you always axiomatically people get freaked out. I think, you know, AI is not going to take your job. A human being using the AI tools will.

because they are going to be so much more proficient at what they're doing. They're going to have so much more time to focus on the really high value stuff

And not have to worry with all the stuff that they had to do in the past, but now we can automate it through AI workflows. So I subscribe to what they call the Senator model. You remember the mythical beast? Half horse, half man. That's what is...

going to happen with AI. It's going to be AI plus human being. That's where all the great stuff is going to come. Right now, we're going to see a tsunami of slop that's going to be just AI generated and people will think, oh, that's good enough, right? And so going forward, you can create a huge edge of

By having good taste and curating it well. But I can guarantee you almost all of that is going to be humans using AI as a tool to make their jobs better, easier, more creative. The way I look at it is, you know, Steve Jobs famously said computers were bicycles for your mind. AI is a rocket ship for your mind. I like the way you phrase that. You know, someone once asked me,

What's the secret to putting out the daily reads? And my answer was curate viciously. Exactly. And AI, I don't think in our lifetime and probably not our kids' lifetime, is going to reach the point where it can be a tastemaker. We believe, passionately believe, that if you have good taste and you are a great curator, your future looks incredible. Really?

Really? Because you'll be able to use these tools. You won't have to spend all the time that you used to. And that's going to even make it's going to be the rocket ship to give you get you to the next level of your good taste and curation. So a couple more questions before we get to our final question. And that is, first, I have to ask you about the O'Shaughnessy Fellowship, what I've been calling your MacArthur Award.

Tell us a little bit about the support you offer for young entrepreneurs, what inspired you to start this program. I know we've had at least one O'Shaughnessy Fellowship person, Kyle Scanlon, as a guest on the show. Maybe one other. I'll have to go through the list and see. What motivated you to create this program and how has it been running? So it's running really, really well.

We have the applications. We're now in our third year. The applications are much more numerous, and the quality of the applicant, I mean, Barry-

Literally, if I could, I would give most of them fellowships. But the real reason that I did it was because I had become convinced that geography, time and space have all collapsed. And in the old days, you know, you and I would know each other still because we both live here in New York and we both are in the same business. But.

Other than that, like prior to the Internet, prior to what I call the human colossus, we couldn't find those geniuses elsewhere. We can now. And I believe that it is absolutely imperative to show the world that there are a ton of brilliant people in this world, many of them young.

who don't have an opportunity to demonstrate what they have to offer to the world. Now we can find and more importantly, fund them. And the way we do it is it's totally no strings funding. So if you're a fellow, you get $100,000 over a one year period to work on your project. If you're a grantee, you get 10,000. We have obviously many more grantees than we have fellows. But

Just the blossoming of the way the groups work together.

Like I thought that it would take us at least five years to build like a really cool network of super smart switched on people. It's already happened. We have we have we have in-person meetings once a year. And the last one we had, I'll just give you a quick example. We have a scientist who is developing an in-home way to work.

test your baby's poop to make sure that it's okay. She had no idea how to market this. Another fellow was sitting right next to her. He's a writer, he's a thinker, and he knows all about this. And literally, over the course of an hour and a half, he gave her a completely different marketing plan that she adored. She came over to me and she said,

I can't believe that in an hour and a half, he totally changed the way I'm going to bring this to market. Huh?

So the cross-pollinization and the synthesis of these great minds is really a thing to behold. I'm just very, very excited about what's coming out. And before we get to our favorite questions, I want to throw you a curveball. Curveball. So since we first met back in a CNBC green room in the early 2000s, so a few decades ago,

You've had a fairly unique perch on the world of finance and investing and asset management. How has financial media and asset management changed over the course of your career? Well, at the beginning of my career...

kind of a squawk box on CNBC was the gold standard. And the format they used at that time, I used to co-host with Mark Haynes all the time. Sure, I've done that a few times. Back then, it was a three-hour program.

in which the portfolio manager or the strategist that we were talking to was given like 20 minutes. I recall. To actually articulate their thesis about why they were bullish or bearish, why they liked this particular group or that particular group. So one of the things that I saw happening when that changed was we were not giving the audience like that kind of

treatment, which is really, really incredible treatment. It was a three hour period that gave you enough time to actually talk things out. Now, what's happened? Podcasts like yours clearly have come along and you've replaced that aspect.

And so, you know, I would bemoan when I saw that happening with Squawk especially. Oh, I would really wish that they could return to the old format. But then you and many, many other, my son, with Invest Like the Best, came in and filled the void. So I think what investors are able to get access to now is,

is just, it dwarfs are the early days when you and I met in that green room. They have so many podcasts. They, they can choose from, they can, they can still watch financial media. Then there's the YouTube people, right? Yeah.

But like everything, you've got to aggressively curate. Somebody like you, you know, you're way up here and you're kind of the gold standard. But how many shows have you done? You have proof of work. I'll tell you a funny story. So July will be 11 years. It's 550 shows.

The origin story, I don't know if I ever told this on my own podcast. I'm pretty sure I've told it elsewhere. I was coming back from a conference in Vancouver, Canada, and I had to either change planes in Chicago or Montreal. I don't remember. Coming back to New York. And I'm in the lounge, and I want to say it was CNBC, and they were interviewing –

Bill Ackman. I could be wrong. Maybe it was Einhorn. I don't remember. But it was a fund manager like that who back then was not – there's no Twitter. They weren't doing a lot of TV. They're like, you really don't go on TV unless you were marketing or had a really good quarter. And I just remember hearing the worst –

Like it was a five minute hit, not a 20 minute hit. That's right. And when you have five minutes, it's what's your favorite stocks? When the Fed's going to cut? Where's the Dow going to be next year? Thanks for coming by. And the moment that guy walks out of the building, those answers are stale. And so so I was flying back after you change planes. I bumped into a friend and I was kind of like grinding my teeth. And he's like you.

What's on your mind? You look like you're annoyed. And I relate the story. And he said, what questions would you ask? And the questions we're about to ask are,

I'm about to ask you, those were some of the questions. Who are you? How'd you get that way? What are you reading? Who are your mentors? How did you develop your philosophy? If you were giving me advice as a college grad, what would you tell me if I wanted to go? Like just off the top of my head. Sure. Just because...

I wanted the person to have, to use the word you used earlier, agency and control over the story, but also express what they've learned over the decades. Exactly. And 30 seconds doesn't give you that. So on that note, let's jump to our speed rounds.

and do our favorite questions that we ask all of our guests. I think this is probably the third or fourth time I've had you do these. I hope I don't give the same answers. Hey, listen, we'll have AI go through it and find out how your thinking has evolved. Let's describe that. There we go. I love that. Right? So starting with...

What's keeping you entertained these days? What are you watching or listening to? So mostly listening to the normal group of podcasts that you would yours, my son's, my own. Do you find listening to your own is a challenge in that it sucks up time that you can't listen to others?

Or you don't want to listen to somebody you're going to interview and you don't want someone else's questions in your head. So my dirty little secret is that I very seldomly listen to my own.

I do read the transcripts just to make sure, ooh, I really screwed that up. I got to fix that. Transcripts don't come across the same way as the spoken word. Yeah, I know. I know. But I prefer to give my active listening time to your podcast and Patrick's. In terms of reading, I continue to read very, very broadly. My favorite...

sort of literary fiction author is David Mitchell who wrote Cloud Atlas. Oh really? And I've started reading. Made into a movie. Yeah, yeah. The book's much better than the movie. Someone else said that, yeah. And I

I love Howard Bloom's work. Closing of American Minds? No, no, different guy. Sounds like, right? Howard is a very fun, eccentric genius who sort of started life as a scientist and now takes all of what he learned there and applies it to the social world or the business world. Closing of the American Minds?

No, no. Entertaining ourselves to death?

And like he's got a great book, Taming, Reimagining the Beast, where he talks about capitalism, saying, hey, capitalism is hands down the winner, but we can still improve it and we should improve it. And here's how I think we should. So love his work.

Read pretty much any paper I can get my hands on having to do with advances in AI and that sort of thing. For fun, I just saw the new Bob Dylan movie. Loved it. Mm-hmm.

A complete unknown. A complete unknown. And I also love the way Timothee Chalamet, the lead in that, I loved his speech when he got up and said, you know what? I could say, oh, shucks, and I'm nothing. But I want to tell you something. I am aspiring to greatness. I want to be great. And I love actually seeing the younger generation start saying things like that because for so often, you know, we...

you know, oh, wasn't really anything. Come on.

Come on. False humility. False humility. It stands out. Doesn't it? It jars when you hear it. It jars when you hear it. And it's like, when I heard him give that speech, I'm like, right on. That's what I love hearing from a young actor or writer or whatever. Hey, I aspire to this. Don't we all aspire to greatness? I think so. Or at least shouldn't we? We should. Like, you get one bite of the apple. You really do. You get one run. Make it worth something. Make it worthwhile. Yeah. Make it worthwhile.

And so I was very happy to see that again. Just for total fun, I love Billy Bob Thornton, so we really enjoyed Landman.

You know, you're like the third or fourth person who told me how much they love that series. It is so much. It's just fun. And so you're probably not going to learn a lot by watching it other than that Billy Bob Thornton chews up every scene that he appears in. He's such a good actor. Always is. Every time I see him in something. Me too. He's a delight. You know, you have such an interesting background.

I'm curious if you had any mentors help shape your career. I did. I had a gentleman who was, when I was very, very young, I'm not going to mention his name because some of his kids might be listening, but we'll go with Jim. He was also a Jim. And he probably did more for me when I was younger.

and filled with vinegar and very definitive beliefs. And I will tell you all, I'm going to proselytize. This is the way to do it. And he was really, really good at saying, Jim, you might want to take that a step back because what do you really want?

I want people to know about this. Okay, but what's the broader implication here? Process over outcome. Okay, well, why don't you talk a little bit more about that? Why don't you talk about the way that people can actually take what you're saying to them and make them useful in their own life? So he was an amazing mentor to me because he was very patient, wicked sense of humor, and always good at reminding me that

You might want to take it back a notch or two. That's great. You mentioned a few books. Any other favorites you want to mention before we get to our favorite questions? Let me reference our infinite books. We have a list that you can get anywhere. You can go to Twitter. You can go to our Substack page.

And it's kind of our seminal books, you know, books like The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. I think it's a masterpiece. Beginning of Infinity. By David Deutsch, who's a quantum physicist in the UK. I love all of his work, but I also think people should be reading things like my perennially read Tao Te Ching.

Right.

I was going to say, it's a different book each time you read it. It really is. It's like Heraclitus, you know, no man steps in the same river twice because it's not the same man and it's not the same river. Absolutely. All right. Our final two questions that we ask all of our guests, what sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in either investing, quantitative analytics, or venture capital?

Understand the leverage that you get from all of the new AI tools. It gives you several advantages. The older people on those desks might not be rapidly adopting use of those tools.

And if you walk into a job interview with some mastery of them, what they're doing in terms of what they can uncover for like VC, for traditional long only or long short management is staggering. Get a deep domain knowledge there as it fits into your particular passion, be it investing or...

analysis, et cetera. But that would be my number one piece of advice. Wow. And our final question, what do you know about the world of investing today that would have been helpful back in the 1990s when you were first starting out? People don't change. Markets change. And when I really, really came to understand that was after actually the great financial crisis.

I went through the crash in 1987. I went through the other bear markets. But I didn't really lock in on the fact that markets change millisecond by millisecond. Human behavior barely budges millennia by millennia. Arbitraging human nature is the final moat.

arbitraging human nature is the final note. That's fantastic place to end it. Jim, thank you so much for being so generous with your time and for being just such a great colleague, mentor, source of wisdom. Like it's been my privilege to know you my whole career. I remember, I want to say it was like the late 2000s,

2000s sitting at an outdoor on a Starbucks. Yeah. In I remember it. Well, I'm like, remember it. Well, don't we know each other? And it was it was just like one of those small world moments. And you've always been just so thoughtful, so inspiring.

And your insights just I know so many people you've had such a positive impact on. It's just a delight and a pleasure to know you. Well, right back at you, Barry. It's been my great pleasure knowing you all of these years. So this mutual admiration society has to come to an end. It's a bromance.

We have been speaking with Jim O'Shaughnessy, founder and CEO of O'Shaughnessy Ventures. If you enjoy this conversation, well, check out any of the 500 previous ones we've had over the past 10 years.

Thank you.

Coming wherever you get your favorite books on March 18th, 2025. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together. Anna Luke is my producer. Meredith Frank is my audio engineer. Sage Bauman is the head of podcasts at Bloomberg. Sean Russo is my researcher. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business.

on Bloomberg Radio.

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