Investing in Emerging Markets with Ali Akay
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Welcome to Money for the Rest of Us. This is a personal finance show on money, how it works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. I'm your host, David Stein. Today is episode 522. It's titled Investing in Emerging Markets with Ali Akai. Last week, we shared how emerging market equities massively outperformed U.S. stocks from 2002 through 2012.

Emerging markets stocks outperformed U.S. equities by almost 12% annualized over that decade. Then over the next 12 years, trends reversed. U.S. stocks outperformed emerging markets equities by over 11% annualized. In 2025, emerging markets are again outperforming U.S. stocks. Given that, we thought it was an opportune time to hear from an expert on emerging markets.

Ali Akai is founder and CIO of Carhey Capital, a London-based emerging markets investment boutique founded in 2011. In this episode, Akai is interviewed by Greg Dowling, FEG Advisors' Chief Investment Officer and Head of Research. Greg and I worked closely together when I was at FEG. Akai answers the question we all have, why invest in emerging markets? He also shares insights on China,

Mexico, South Korea, Argentina, Greece, Turkey, South Korea, and South Africa. This is a fascinating discussion on the developing world.

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essential investment principles that I follow. And if you follow, they can help make you a better investor. The Insiders Guide email newsletter is the next best step to get the most out of your investment journey. It's absolutely free. So if you're not on the list, go to moneyfortherestofus.com and subscribe right there on the homepage. Here is Ali Akai and Greg Dowling.

Ali, welcome to the Insight Bridge. It's great to be here. Would you please introduce yourself and Cary Capital? Absolutely. I'm the founder and CIO of Cary Capital. We're an emerging markets asset manager focusing on equities. I've personally been doing emerging markets for about 24 years on the buy side and set up Cary Capital with my partners about 14 years ago. We run about $2.5 billion of capital in long, short, and long-only strategy. We have 24 people sitting across emerging markets.

emerging markets. We have people from India, China to Brazil, our main officer in Dubai and London. Now, I know you're a history buff and Qari is a reference to that, right? How did that name come about? Well, all the rocks and harbors and all the good names were taken. So we had to come up with something else. I love Roman history.

And Bath of Carré is quite a poignant example of arrogance and failure to take local advice. And when marching east, we're marching into uncharted territory. And I thought, you know, when we go to emerging markets, we need to go with local advice with degree of humility. So I thought it would be opposite.

So I actually read up on this beforehand and pretty interesting. So a huge Roman legion is lured into the desert and basically slaughtered, right? Yes. And the man commanding the legion and who actually financed and equipped the legion is Marcus Crassus, who was part of the triumvirate running Rome. And he didn't have military glory. The others had. So he just had to measure up to them and he did something pretty stupid.

You have a pretty interesting background, so maybe that helps you not get slaughtered. We'll start with some of your central bank background and maybe some of the professional background after that. But you've been involved with a couple of different central banks. Maybe explain that and then how is that helpful? Well, I guess macro is kind of at the heart of emerging markets. My involvement with central banks, I guess the most extensive engagement was as a consultant to the Turkish central bank during the

Last bank crisis in late 90s, early 2000s, we were brought in to advise on what to do with all the failed banks and come up with a blueprint for the new bank system that would be more resilient. And I had the chance to work with some great people, including the ex-head of the BOE at the time, Bank of England, as a young McKinsey consultant. I had exposure to a lot of politics, macroeconomists, central bank technologists.

technocrats, which was great. And I'm glad to say 24, 25 years on, despite all the macro policies that the president has been dictating recently, they haven't had a bank crisis. So I guess it's not too bad. It indicates our approach. Turkish lira goes up and down a lot, but they haven't had a banking crisis. Yeah, exactly. The bank system is still solid. My other tangential central bank experience or involvement is I was a teaching assistant for the current head of the central bank in Israel. That's fascinating. We're going to talk about

investing in emerging markets. And one of the questions I wanted to ask, it's really hard because not only do you have normal fundamental analysis that you have to do, there's politics and there's currencies and it's very, very different. So how does that frame your thinking? Is there like, okay, yeah, that might be a great stock, but we need to be cognizant of currency devaluations or something. Absolutely. In emerging markets, only the paranoid survive. I tell my team at the end of

whatever is next, it's going to be us and the cockroaches who live through. But in terms of the framework that we use, we have the saying, we need to align the whole stack. So if you look at the longer term history of emerging markets stocks, a third of stock dispersion happens on the country level. Another third happens on the industry level and the remaining third happens on the bottom up level. So you really need to make sure you scrutinize all three levels. You

You could have a great bottom-up idea and it could be slaughtered on the currency, interest rates or regulation and vice versa. It could be very positive on a certain country and you might not have scrutinized the alignment of shareholders and you get into some corruption scandal. It's important to be thorough. Don't get lured into the desert. Yes, indeed.

So you have the central bank background, but then you also have some pretty amazing practitioner experience too. So you worked at Goldman Sachs, SAC Capital, HBK. Anything you kind of learned or took from any of those different organizations? I think they all had something to contribute. When I was at Goldman's, I was on the principal strategies group that used to be their risk arbitrage group. So they had that background of... A lot of famous people went through there. Yeah, they did. Yeah.

Lots of decision trees, nodes, assessing outcomes, scenario analysis, quite useful. That thinking and probabilities. Yeah, probabilities, assigning probabilities to nodes. HBK, I work with the macro team there. They were great relative value investors in EM fixed income. They had access to all the central bankers, the IMF people and economists, and they had a very sturdy way of investing in emerging markets without taking a whole lot of country risk.

and understanding the instruments, understanding the signals that you get from fixed income and transcribing that to useful heuristics or insights for equities was something that I picked up there. At SAC, it's the sizing discipline, it's the risk management, it's managing your liquidity, and also optimizing the sizing of your positions based on risk reward and trying to be very cognizant about how we can optimize your return by sizing optimally. So...

SAC or any of these pod shops, you could run a lot of money and be happy. They take care of everything for you. Why did you want to launch your own firm? I guess I was asking trouble. I'd say I've worked at pretty great institutions, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, HBK, SAC. I think I picked up something from each of them and I wanted to combine what I learned, my learnings, and add something from my own and put it all together and build something even better. I

At least try. I remember meeting you. It was like a Goldman Sachs prime brokerage event in Rome. We shared a taxi and you probably don't even remember this. I was like, so who are you? And what are you doing? And you're like, I'm going to launch this firm. And we weren't day one investors with you, but we followed you ever since. It's been a long time. Well, great to have you on board. It took a while, I guess. Why EM now? I mean, can't we just invest in the US? I mean, boy, it's easy. Go straight up. Why invest? I think it's...

mainly diversification. And I think people are very aware of the relative returns and how exceptionally well the US have done. And I think people are here aware of, you know, US valuations are or the predominance of US equities in their own portfolios. But I think if you travel across EM, one of the things that I noticed is how long the rest of the world is in US stocks. Korean retail is

owns like $250 billion of US stocks. That was 50 a couple of years ago. The owner of a hotel in Brazil will tell you about their positions in NVIDIA. Oligarchy meet in Dubai will say, you know, how much they made in meta, et cetera, et cetera. So everybody's long and the weighting of the S&P is essentially very concentrated. And it's the ultimate MoMo trade, right? Because US has momentum, S&P has momentum, and then the top names get weighted higher.

I'm not saying people should divest from the US, but it's still the place where capitalists treat it the best. And the companies are envy of the world and they're amazing companies, amazing management, et cetera. But everything you own, and especially as a US resident, your long US stock, your long US housing consumption, housing prices, everything is correlated to the future, the fate of seven stocks.

And owning an asset, I mean, we own gold not because of its yield, right? Owning an asset like EM that is also pretty low quality, sometimes inversely correlated to US asset prices, it's probably not a bad thing. And secondly, it is the asset class where active management adds the most alpha, which is very difficult to do anywhere else.

So diversification, there's more alpha potential there. Relative valuations are better as well. But you mentioned the oligarch who's investing in metal. All those examples you named were tech stocks. Is some of the difference in valuation just the lack of tech sector other than China and a lot of the EM countries? Actually, it goes beyond that. I can give you very specific examples. We cover a lot of industries globally, so we're well aware of the US peers.

I can give you a half a dozen EM companies who, if they move their listing to the US and they have US operations, they would get a huge value bump. And one of the biggest M&A or listing activities in Europe these days is take European companies that have either a big US division or US presence, either moving the listing or listing their US arms. And then you get an immediate 40, 50% bump because it's the US. So-

Let's say in Brazil, there's Gerdau Steel, half the operations in the US, trades at, I don't know, three and a half times EV EBITDA, valued the US arm at something close to Nucor. You will get a negative value for the rest of it. And the list goes on and on and on. So it's not only tech, it's just US stocks that are just priced more dearly than elsewhere.

All right, let's talk about the elephant in the room. That all sounds great. I mean, you're starting to sell me a little bit on this, the M thing, but what about tariffs? We can talk about the picture as of yesterday or the pictures of last week or the picture as of next week, if anybody's guess. And tariffs usually lead to currency adjustments. You just need to be aware of that and where the potential big currency moves are. But I don't think tariffs in themselves would sink.

emerging markets. The trade adjusts, currencies adjust, and great companies continue to compound.

As of who's going to get tariffs, what tariff, I think I'm probably the wrong audience. There's only one man who knows. And I was in Miami, not far from Mar-a-Lago, but I'll visit him next time when I'm there on a weekend. Yeah, there you go. Just walk right up. I'm sure they'll let you do that. I guess related to that, you're right. The shock absorber for a lot of things is currencies. And so how do you kind of deal with currency fluctuations and the other big headwind for US investors who

who want to invest abroad is the strong dollar. I mean, it seems like it'll continue to be fairly strong over at least the short term. Well, that's difficult to know, but the way we see it is we have a good mix of exporters, importers, et cetera, stocks that could benefit from a strong dollar. We own stocks in countries that have managed currency. So if you're investing in the Middle East, you don't care about the strong dollar. So

So we've been happy holders of Embraer, the Brazilian company that is actually very geared to weaker BRL. We try to put a good mix together, not get too hurt or not be too bothered if the dollar keeps getting stronger. The other related to tariffs is just general geopolitics. And it does seem like the world is splitting along an east-west divide.

Is China investable? Definitely. It goes up, it's investable. If it's not going anywhere, it's not. But I think we need to think about the investor basis for the American investor investment in China. That's been going down across what privates to publics. But China is one of the highest savings to GDP societies in the world.

And the average equity allocation is very, very, very low. Interest rates are very, very, very low. And they can't invest in real estate because it's not attractive anymore. So currently they're piling up cash balances and invest in gold. But if they got animal spirits, and my experience in China, they flip on a dime about everything and they go to excess.

from pessimism to optimism to back. So they don't need us to rally their markets. They can. And for the US investor, I would be personally quite apprehensive about putting money into venture capital or private equity fund or growth fund in China with a five-year lock, seven-year lock, et cetera, or buying real estate in China. But they are not going to disappear. There is a case where Chinese equities can do a lot. I'm not saying they will, but there's a chance.

So you need to be agile, tactical, and be able to benefit if and when that happens. Being a global emerging market manager who can be in China, but don't have to be in China, I think we're pretty well positioned for this kind of world. Yeah, it's hard too, because I mean, you mentioned that only one person knows.

President Trump is hard to pin down and he's pretty volatile himself and likes to negotiate. I mean, it wouldn't shock me either if there was some grand bargain that he hit with China and then all of a sudden China was our friend and not our enemy, but who knows, right? The events of the last month should tell everyone that what they read from, you know, political consultants, of which we have many, it's very unlikely to be accurate in the sense that, you know, we have a new administration come in, the most hawkish,

or China Sinophobe cabinet ever. And we were expecting 60% tariffs on China and nothing on the friends. And now it's the perfidious Canadians that are getting the bulk of the tariffs and Chinese are slot free. I mean, that could change, but we don't know. And there are pretty fat tails on either side. Yeah, maybe we'll be divesting from Canada. I think that's... Get rid of those... Yeah, those ducks. Yeah, exactly. That's right. You gotta watch them.

China and India get most of the headlines as sort of EM land, but it's such a huge market. And I wanted to spend some time talking about some other markets. So maybe we can kind of go on a journey around the world and hit a few different countries. Let's get going. Yeah. So how about let's do Greece? It's been a fantastic market. It's small. It has no correlation with the rest of this hodgepodge of countries called emerging markets. And they've had been atrociously run for decades.

number of years that have financial crises and post-financial crises. There's been a great recovery in their financials and asset pricing and real estate. And the banks have been a very good play on that. And it's been a gift that keeps on giving. And obviously the fundamental of their economy is essentially tourism. They're in the Eurozone. They don't trade with the US. No tariff wars there, no China risk there, no major currency risk there.

It's got its own thing and it's a good diversifier and it's been a great source of return. I'm a fan of Greece and on vacation there, but maybe even more underrated, but also an emerging market is Turkey. Indeed. Actually, of Turkish origin, according to my DNA, I'm 60% Greek. And the borders change so many times. Who knows? Yeah, my family came from Greece to Turkey. Yeah. And so what about Turkey? It is a wild market. It's been a great source of alpha. What makes it so great is...

Because of the crazy macro policies this government has pursued over time, the foreign investment into equities is very, very low. But the local investment is very high because they run negative real interest rates for a long time. So the locals try to protect their wealth, real financial assets, equities, and real estate. And equities, they trade actively. And wherever you have big retail participation, you can get alpha. So we like Turkey. One problem for us has been

single stock short sale ban. So we have to use the index for a while. So for the last couple of years, we've created alpha, but always in smaller size because not short single stocks, but they've just lifted the ban and we look forward to doing much more there. Oh, that's great. All right. So let's hop to another part of the world.

Peru. There's one or two stocks there. There's a bank that I love. I've been a shareholder on and off for almost 15, 20 years, Credit Corp. That economy is very interesting in the sense that what I like about it is the government's always about to fall. And the prime minister's always, the popularity rating is, and the president, 15%. You talk to economists and locals and say, well, there's that risk. But the

the country, after having been on the precipice for so long, has learned to live with it. The bureaucrats are on the place. The politics are a mess, but who cares? And they have very low leverage in the corporate and households and governments. They have the GP, I think, probably 30s. It's this quasi-managed currency. You don't worry about the currency. You don't worry about the politics because it's always a mess. They loan copper and gold, which we both like. Copper and gold. You know, it's funny. We

When you visit some of these countries as a foreigner and you read up on all the headlines and you must be thinking, gosh, everything must be crazy in this country because of the politics and this and that. And oftentimes you go there, it's just normal business. They're used to it and they just kind of go about their daily routines. Yeah, human beings were an incredibly resilient, adapted species. So we just adapt and move on. So one country that

Gosh, you just think, well, you know, they should be developed. Then every once in a while, they remind you why they're an emerging market country. How about South Korea?

Well, the last political events, the shenanigans, that was a curveball, I might say. I didn't expect that. I mean, quarrels about budgets is one thing, but getting upset at the opposition for being intransigent about the budget negotiations and trying to arrest the MPs is something else. And the president who did that was a erstwhile prosecutor. So I think he knows the law. You would think, yeah. But I think the good thing about the whole thing, it was just so shambolic. And he was basically came out

as an oddball madman and the whole society coalesced around the core values of parliamentary democracy and didn't go anywhere. So I think for anybody else who harbors such thoughts about politics or such methods about politics, the message was that the country will not bear it. So I think it was crazy, but it had very little chance of succeeding and somebody else trying to act in such ways is probably this point.

pretty inconceivable in South Korea. With South Korea talking to a lot of either Asian managers or EM managers, there is this general theme that the South Koreans were behind the Japanese in some of their governance reforms. There's a little competition between them and they were going to improve their governance. And this political shenanigans, is that going to at all prevent or slowing that down? I think it was already...

bit slow given that there is no clear majority, very difficult to push through significant reform, structural reform when you don't have a clear majority, when power is so divided. But I think the impetus is there. And in Korea's case, they have awful demographics, worse than the world. Is it worse than Japan? Worse than Japan. Wow. They're in a bad way. And the concentration of wealth and GDP among seven different groups

stifles competition and they've caught the stock market investing bug there. I think a third of people over a certain age own stocks now and there was zero, you know, 10 years ago. I think as a country and people, they have an incentive to break up these groups, improve capital location so that they create wealth for a very precariously aging society. I know what should happen, but I don't know whether it will happen or when, but we have some positions. What we try to do is we look at the operating businesses that we want to own. We're

We own Hynex, SK Hynex, the memory foundry that has a dominant market share in high bandwidth memory. And then we look at parent companies. They have multiple parents. And if we see something, a huge discount that might eventually shrink and create additional off on top of the operating company, we buy that as well as an adjunct add-on trade. And let's get a little closer to home. How about Mexico? Well, Mexico, we're going to know in a few days whether they get the tariffs or not.

We've been looking at this situation with the U.S. relationship for a while. We've had extensive contact with the local politicians and decision makers there. And from the beginning, the presidential administration took over in Mexico, the message to us was clear. We're going to engage the U.S. constructively. We understand their concerns and we'll do whatever it takes to have a good relationship with our largest trading partner and neighbor.

And if you look at what they've been doing on immigration, cracking down on incremental efforts they put in against the drug cartel and this new economic plan that prioritizes North American trade and reducing imports from Asia and buying more from North America, which is a pretty extensive, well-thought-out plan. They're doing everything they can. Whether it's good enough is going to be assessed by somebody sitting in the U.S. And

And they haven't engaged in any of the grandstanding. Let's say the recent example with the Colombian president, they've been quiet. They've had their emissaries and people traveling around D.C. and meeting people and explaining what they can and can't do. And just to remind people, the current trade agreement between U.S., Canada, and Mexico was updated and signed and designed by the first Trump administration. And he hailed it as the best trade.

trade agreement ever signed by the US. So it's slightly disingenuous to turn around a couple of years later and say, you know, this was a terrible agreement and being taken advantage of. I think there are things that the US is legitimately concerned about, you know, Chinese companies taking advantage of Mexico to come in as a Trojan horse into the US market. And Mexico has

back-channeled solutions and they want to work with the U.S. on that. So the current agreement, it's just that the current agreement needs to be updated. And finally, almost half the value add of Mexican export to the U.S. accrues to American companies. It makes absolutely no sense to punish Mexico and Canada and punish U.S. corporate America. Auto manufacturer. The same auto part goes back and forth 15 times and you're going to tariff it each time. Great.

Crazy thing is we've been canvassing a lot of manufacturings on tariffs from Samsung to Nissan to other emerging companies. And when we heard some Korean company telling us, well, this happens, the Canada, Mexico tariffs, we might downscale North American manufacturing and move manufacturing to China and Malaysia.

Like that is just crazy. That's the opposite of what that's. Yeah. Right. I want to send that excerpt to people in DC to carefully consider what they're doing. You mentioned gold earlier. I know you have some positions in gold miners. I'm a gold bug. Maybe you just always own gold, but why gold now? I think there are multiple reasons as a multilayer thesis. One on the golds, but there's gold, gold miners and the gold miners we own, right? There's three layers to that. The first layer, gold,

You can see the fiscal situation in the G20 and the needs for government spending just keep increasing. I mean, the Europeans need to spend on defense. The U.S. wants to increase more spending on defense, engaging societies, et cetera, et cetera. And I don't really believe on a magic deus ex machina solution to dodge and dodge solution to solve the U.S.'s fiscal issues. So you need to run these economies hard. You need to take

take it from the savers in one way or the other. You're not going to increase taxation and then increase taxation rarely solves. You solve it by a little growth and then a little inflation. Yes. And gold is a good asset for that. Furthermore, you have the geopolitical tensions, what was done to Russian reserves is a clear sign to anybody, whether you're Saudi Arabia or

You're not inside the tent if you're not US, UK and part of the club. So our assets might be at risk. So they need to diversify and they are. And just going back to the original point, gold demand was traditionally been so strong in Middle East and India and Turkey, but China retail joined the camp. They have every reason to diversify and have something solid. They don't

they don't trust their future in the country. So good to have a mobile asset that's real, et cetera. And now seeing it in Japan, Japan retail is buying gold. And I think in the US, a portion of society is very excited about new administration and the pro-business stance, but there are people who are apprehensive about the country's future and how the debt mess is going to be cleared. So there's demand there. So globally, we're having structurally higher demand for gold. And I've been in gold mining for a very long time. It's,

It's a tough business. You can never get the supply in the timeframe, the cost that you want. So there's that. And gold miners are very cheap versus gold. Talk to any gold mining analyst. They have the back end of the curve. The assumption they come up with to justify their stock prices are, you know, 1800 gold, 1700 gold, 1600 gold, where a spot is much, much higher. So I think the gold miners versus gold is interesting.

they're very cheap. And then we have individual miners that have, we think, underappreciated assets. So hopefully we're right. Is there any other area you wanted to hit on, a country or maybe a company that nobody has heard of that they should have heard of in emerging markets? I think the sort of companies we invest in are mid to large caps. I think we're talking to a pretty sophisticated base. I think they would have heard of most of the companies that we invest in. If you want to be positive, I

I would say South Africa is interesting in the sense that that place was probably that they won the medal for the worst run country for a very, very long time. Now they're just poorly run. You can make a lot of money in emerging markets when you go from really bad to slightly bad. Exactly. Exactly.

And then, you know, you've seen the transformation in Argentina, right? Yeah. I mean, almost seems nuts, but free markets on steroids, but it seems to be, at least for now, working. Yeah. I'm not sure about the equities. They seem a bit over-egged, but the sovereign bond has been amazing. And I still think it's interesting. And Ukraine, obviously, I think that place when the

reconstruction starts. There's going to be beneficiaries. I think the Ukrainian bonds are interesting. The GDP warrants are interesting. And there are plays outside Ukraine that can get a nice kick if and when that conflict is wrapped up. All sides are very tired. So I think they will try very hard to come up. There's a window to at least stop the bleeding. Well, that's interesting. You heard it here. Ukrainian GDP warrants could be... I like it. I like it a lot.

So we've talked about all these far-flung countries and how emerging markets are, it's not really a block. People always talk about BRICS and like it's an acronym, but emerging markets is much, much bigger and just different types of economies, different growth patterns, but can be pretty volatile. I'd be curious to know how you manage risk of your portfolio. Well, we have developed our customized risk management system. We have three quants.

And I've been running an EM portfolio for 20 odd years. My team's quite experienced. And I have a severe case of asset reflux that's episodal.

So my stomach usually, apart from our risk-based systems flashing, my stomach gives me the best signal. When your stomach hurts, you know there's a problem coming. That's pretty good. Yeah. He's a better investor than I am. But in the hedge fund, we've been able to compound pretty nicely, even in a market that's done nothing in dollar terms for 14 odd years. We're very cognizant about our currency risk. We are...

very tight on liquidity. Two-day ADTV, I think we're managing it like we're still running in a pot shop. We don't do smaller micro caps. We don't do frontier so that we have an ability to move our positions around. And we do a fair amount of tail hedging on other money puts, calls, CDS when it's necessary. And then along the fund, we are aware of the benchmarks

We're not going to be following the benchmark, but if something is a very big weight in the index and we don't have a very significant view and it could go either way, we're not going to take the risk. We're not going to have errors of mission either if we can avoid it. So we're paranoid. We have very good risk systems and we try to invest in very uncorrelated clusters of stocks. A Brazilian aerospace company,

and the Greek bank and a Chinese internet name, they shouldn't correlate. In the case they do, there's a global contagion event, we have the tail risk. And most times they don't, but they sometimes do, right? Because they might be all part of it, especially if it's an index and people are just selling the EM index, they can all kind of correlate to one. Then we try to also have positions in places where EM index or foreign investors are

are not the major price determinants. So if you invest in the Middle East, they determine the stock price. Saudi retail determines the stock price. It's not EM investor because everybody's underway. So I think it's important not only to look at the fundamental correlation, but also investor basis, et cetera. So it's a lot of work. I've heard people say that no one is going to rain because they can feel it in their hip or their bones, but I've never heard of the stomach. That's the early warning system for emerging markets.

I like it. I wanted to ask you, been all over. How many languages do you speak? I speak seven. Most of them rather badly, but I speak seven. So what are those seven? Well, English, Turkish, German, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish. And then how many languages are spoken at your firm? Too many to count. From Korean to Hindi to Arabic to Brazilian Portuguese to Russian, we got it covered. You've traveled quite a bit. So I wanted to ask you, favorite ESL

EM country to visit? Depends on the season. Okay, well maybe give me some seasonal Olympics. In the European winter, South Africa is pretty great. Or Brazil, late summer or early autumn, I'd say Turkey and Greece are pretty amazing. One of my favorite activities is going to a country, chatting with the cabbies,

I particularly love going to a barbershop, getting a haircut. Usually should save a bunch of money, but also those people are actually quite location. They're great conversationalists because they have to. And they speak to a million people a day, so they give you the lay of the land pretty well. If you've never done it, Turkish barbershops are pretty amazing. Yeah, they also burn your... The air. Yeah, they put fire into your ears, yeah. It's an experience. It's an experience. It's an experience. You also said earlier that you love history.

and you're a big reader of history. You mentioned Roman, but maybe other history that you're fond of, and maybe we'll take a couple of your favorite books about history that you would recommend to our listeners. I have a very broad range. I could go from the history of Byzantium, anything by Ronson is a great read, Byzantine art. I think it's a lot of what we construct in our head as kind of

the great Western narrative and its origins. I think Byzantium is essentially written off our histories because they were on the losing side. I think it's important to look at these narratives critically and find the parts of the world and civilizations that didn't quite make it because they're not going to be in the history books and they're in the common narrative, but they've had interesting contributions to who we are today. So I like doing that. You mentioned one author, any other authors you'd recommend?

Well, I would avoid Niall Ferguson. I like Niall Ferguson. Just as a person. You write some good, you know, a set of money. Yeah, yeah. Look, I've read most of his books, but he's now become too much of an ideologue. Yeah. And then once you have a jaundiced lens, everything becomes an opinion rather than history. But I like his other books.

Favorite food in an emerging market? You're in a country you got to go to. What are you eating? Give me two if you can't choose one. I think I just like a good mezzer platter, whether it's Greek, Turkish, Lebanese, I don't care. Just give me a good mezzer platter. I won't have a space left for the main, but give me a good mezzer platter. I did a Turkish breakfast one time and I've never seen so many plates on a table. I know. How do you go to work afterwards? Maybe you don't. Maybe if they got rid of that giant breakfast, the economy would be good. Yeah, crap.

Thank you so much for spending time with us today and our listeners. We learned a lot and you won't get slaughtered in a desert. You're going to take the right approach to... I'll hydrate well, don't worry. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you.

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Thank you.