#70 Mark Spitznagel: The Dao of Capital

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories, and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso, or four energy drinks before or during the show, so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today, and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th.
You've got to love to lose money, hate to make money, love to lose money, hate to make money. But we are human beings. We love to make money, hate to lose money. So we must overcome that humanness about us. This is Clip's Paradox, repeated countless times by sage old Chicago trader named Everett Clip, and through which I first happened upon an investment approach, one that I would quickly make my own. This is the roundabout approach, indeed central to the very message of this book. Rather than pursue the direct route of immediate gain, we will seek the difficult and roundabout route of immediate loss, an intermediate step which begets an advantage for even greater potential gain.
This is the age old strategy of the military general and of the entrepreneur.
Because of its difficulty, it will remain the secuitous road least traveled, so contrary to our wiring and to our perception of time. And this is why it is ultimately so effective. To Clip, time is not exogenous, but it is an endogenous primary factor of things, and patience the most precious treasure. Indeed, Clip, with a simple message that encapsulated how he survived and thrived for more than five decades in the perilous future markets of the Chicago Board of Trade. Okay, so that's an excerpt from the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is The Dao of Capital, Austrian Investing in a Distorted World by Mark Spitznagel. Okay, so today's gonna be a little different. Normally, I try to focus just on a biography, like the life story of somebody that founded a company. And this isn't really that, but it is, I think, worth time, because the time to talk to you about it. Because it's one of the most strange and unique books that I've ever come across.
So much so that I've probably listened to the audiobook by now probably five times. I was listening to it 30 to 45 minutes before I went to bed every day for quite a while. I think I've been working on this book for about six weeks, which is much longer than I normally do.
And I'm still not, I was a little unsure, one, if I want to do a podcast on it, because I don't know if I fully understand everything the author is saying. And so it's a little, for lack of a better word, scary to talk about something where I don't even know if I'm grasping it. But I think that's like an emotional response I'm having that's important because it means like the messages I've come across are so distinct that I should spend the time. So just a fair warning, I hope this podcast is going to be good, but this is the thoughts and the ideas that Mark has are so far, they're so like an outlier from normal people, like the way other people think that I don't even know if I'm smart enough to grasp what he's saying completely yet, even after devouring it, reading it twice, and listening to it at least five times. But I am going to try, and hopefully you get value from that. And before I jump into the rest of the book, I want to tell you a little bit about Mark Spitznagel and why I think it's worth that we listen to him. First of all, he's the founder of the Universal Hedge Fund, and he's widely known. If you're familiar with the work of Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, Antifaradio, Full By Reminis, somebody I tell you, I recommend all those books to people constantly, because I think they're just really important to understand, to survive in a very complex world like the one we live in.