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Ethan A. Everett, "The Investment Philosophers: Financial Lessons from the Great Thinkers" (Columbia Business School, 2025)
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- [00:01]
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- [01:33]
Ethan A. Everett
Network.
- [01:36]
Alfred Marcus
So welcome to the New Business Network. I'm Alfred Marcus, and today we're exploring a fascinating intersection where philosophy meets finance. My guest is Ethan A. Everett, author of the Investment Financial Lessons from the Great Thinkers, Columbia University Press, 2025. In a world where most investors rely on the same models and metrics, Everett takes us on a very different journey, showing how modern philosophy, from Spinoza to Nietzsche, can illuminate investing. From Benjamin Graham opening his lectures with Spinoza's view from Eternity to Warren Buffett's ethical kinship with Nietzsche's eternal Recurrence, Everett argues that some of the richest insights into markets come from unlikely places. This conversation sits right at the cusp of strategy and ethics, exploring how philosophical depth can make us not just better investors, but better decision makers in a turbulent economy. So let's start with your background and motivation for doing this, Ethan. What's your story? You grew up passionate about markets, but chose to study philosophy alongside finance. What drew you to connect these two seemingly different worlds? As we were saying before in our discussion, I too have connected these worlds in my in my lifetime.
- [03:19]
Ethan A. Everett
Well, thank you for having me, Alfred. Thank you for the generous introduction. It's great to be on with someone who's a fellow interdisciplinary Thinker and listen. It's always great to be making new connections. That's what I aim to do here. Frankly, my story has been a case of me trying to make these connections since I was very, very young. Anything strategic that I could get my hands on when I was younger, whether it was playing chess, whether it was analyzing stats of sports teams in the newspapers, these were all things that I was really interested in. And then when I found the stock market when I was 12 years old in middle school math class, it felt to me like chess on steroids. And to me again going with that theme of loving kind of the puzzle and the complexity to other fields that became really, really interesting to me were philosophy and law. Again, two puzzles in and of themselves. Now that's not to say that there aren't other puzzles out there. For instance, I joke around. Chemistry was not my strong suit. So figuring out the medical puzzle was not the thing for me. But again, one thing that I found when I was younger was that taking analogies or taking mental frameworks from something like chess and applying them to investing was very fruitful. So I was inspired to not only go to a school that had a good finance program, but that also had good liberal arts opportunities. And that's how I ended up landing on Bucknell University. So while at Bucknell, I studied finance mainly and philosophy as well. And that was a really great time for me. I got to explore a lot of thinkers and listen. It even encouraged me to after college was over. Continue reading more and more philosophical thinkers and as time went on, I found myself looking for more and more connections between philosophy and investing. Why is that? I think there's less connections between philosophy and investing because of the fact that so much of what is modern philosophy is an enigma wrapped within a riddle wrapped within some crazy maze. At the end of the day, there's oftentimes this great wisdom buried deep down in some of these philosophers thoughts. But they obscure that with layers and layers and layers of pages of complexity. And I felt that if we could, or if I could get down to the bottom of it and then relay that same wisdom in an accessible way, that not only would it help me better understand and better make connections between philosophy and investing, but it would also help other people do that and encourage them to make their own connections. So this is really just a starting point for me. I started writing this book, this goes back I started, let's say 2017 before I started grad school. So I ended up to just finish off my background. I worked in mainly in Fixed income investment management after college, then ended up doing a J.D. mBA degree at Cornell University. Became a CFA charter holder. During my time at Cornell, I also got to kind of continue making these multidisciplinary connections there. I would say the connections were more law and related but then you know, kind of afterwards I, I took a. I worked at several funds. I'm now working at a registered investment advisor doing in house proprietary equity research. It's called Galvin Gon Stein LLC out in Scottsdale, Arizona. Loving it. I also in addition have another side venture there where I am a co founder and co CEO of something called Collecty. And Collect is a new service that's kind of a little bit still in stealth mode, but basically it uses different LLMs, different AI models to basically create fundamental equity research. Not quantitative research, but qualitative research that we think rivals, if not even beats a lot of institutional equity research. So anyway, that's where we are. That's my background. I have a lot going on. There's two other books that I have in kind of like the, the. They've started, they are, you know, kind of waiting. One of them is a book connecting law and investing, why certain lawyers are extremely successful investors and what, you know, what legal paradigms can we use. And the other one is a little more out there. It's about mixed martial arts and boxing and how they relate to investigate what can be learned from that. That might be a little more out there. So we, I don't know about that, but that would be the, that might be one, you know, maybe, maybe dozens of years from now. But anyway, we're here now and I'm super excited for the investment philosophers to come out and to really get people thinking about these connections. So hopefully that's enough of my background. I'm really ready. I can talk about whatever you want. I'm an open book. But I'd love to talk about, you know, whoever you want to talk about, whatever. Thinker. Let's jump in. I'm excited for our conversation before we jump in.
- [08:59]
Alfred Marcus
And we will jump in in just a moment. I don't want to miss any comments that you have about using LLM for investment. I wasn't aware of that. That sounds really fascinating because I've been starting to play with that myself and I just wanted to also say that I'm going to do a, a podcast very soon with Professor Byrd who wrote a piece, a book on law and competition. So that might be of interest to you. I'll send you an email on the side about that.
- [09:31]
Ethan A. Everett
Great. We have a lot to discuss offline.
- [09:33]
Alfred Marcus
And I guess the final thing before we plunge in is that I also believe that analogies are a key to the way we think. And I was once very, and I continue to be obsessed by sports statistics, more so than actually watching sports.
- [09:49]
Ethan A. Everett
A. Money. You're a Moneyball fan?
- [09:51]
Alfred Marcus
Yeah. Yes, definitely. And I teach, when I teach strategy, I use the analogy of chess. So let's just, we'll plunge into philosophy now right now. So you think it has immense untapped potential for investors, but the complexity, as you said, keeps most people away. So why is this the right moment for philosophy to re enter the conversation about markets?
- [10:15]
Ethan A. Everett
I think that philosophy is really, I see it as a toolkit of lenses that can help you understand really complex things. And I think why now is because, listen, there's always been so many moving parts to markets and the economy and needing to do bottom up research and needing to do top down research. But now more than ever that complexity is as great as ever. And it's not going, it's certainly going in one direction. It's becoming more and more complex. There's more and more things to think about. And again, I think that having that philosophical foundation and having some of these ideas kind of as these core lenses, like almost like, you know, you have bifocals, trifocals, whatever, to be able to see these different types of market paradigms, I think it's really important. And, and again, I think one of the real biggest things is why it's important now is because in a, in a world where it's, you know, people trying to active investors trying to outperform the benchmark, people have so much trouble finding actually differentiated investment perspectives, you know, variant perceptions that can beat the market, ideally beat the market. And the thing is this is a way, because it's a novel way of producing insights that hasn't necessarily been tapped. And it's not something necessarily that consensus does that. If it leads to a positive insight or some advantage and you see something other people don't, it will lead hopefully to outperformance. By the way, that is not guaranteed. It's not as simple as making the philosophical connection and then you got all this alpha, but it does give the potential for differentiated insights and potential outperformance. And again, in a world where it's harder and harder to outperform the benchmark and be different. Right. By the way, to be successful, you got to be two things, right? And I talk about this in the book, in the book, you got to be different and you got to be right. And actually, there's a third thing, and we talk about this in my chapter on David Hume. You also have to consider a lot of other pragmatic considerations, which Hume referred to as common sense. But anyway, we'll jump into whoever first Hume is.
- [12:36]
Alfred Marcus
Yeah, I also, you know, I think that given the complexity, there's a huge amount of risk in investing and there's a lot of unknowns and there's a lot of danger. So philosophical approaches also provide you with the confidence and the conviction that if you're wrong, that you've appropriately dealt with the danger and the risk it may give you, even in the sense of, like, that you're investing in companies that you believe in at a certain level and there's a theory you have about them.
- [13:14]
Ethan A. Everett
Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point. I think that is true. And then kind of the other side of the coin is I think that you have to balance that with not being dogmatic, not getting too caught up in one philosophical framework. And one of my chapters is actually about Bruce Lee, who actually taught philosophy. Most people don't know this and was a philosophy student. He believed in kind of the style of no styles. His idea was that people limit themselves by taking on some sort of ideology and then just going with that strategy and not actually reacting to what's in front of them. The dynamic changes that are in front of them, which I think a lot of investors do. So, for instance, a philosophical paradigm either might apply. It might, for a certain amount of time, it might become invalid. So there's this balance. Right. Of being able. Definitely. I totally agree with you. This can help give you conviction in your ideas and have the, the, you know, the stick to itiveness, to see things through. But also within these philosophical paradigm paradigms, one of those paradigms is this great one from Bruce Lee, which is this style of no styles, this kind of being able to move adeptly in between philosophical paradigms and being able to admit when it doesn't. When it doesn't work, or being. Being able to potentially cut your losses and, you know, seeing that. That it's not the right time for that paradigm. So, yeah, I think it's a great point in terms of it building conviction. And I. But I think also, you know, there's always this kind of idea that there's this middle line to walk in terms of being able to maintain that flexibility. I think one of the things that I really, really push forward in this book is the importance of being dynamic. So, yeah, I think it's a great point and I think it's very interesting to kind of consider all of these different philosophical paradigms on top of all the other mental models that people use from all sorts of other fields. Again, a lot of them which are much more often discussed in investment circles when you're talking about like behavioral finance using cognitive psychology or people using, you know, evolutionary biology or statistics or, you know, those types of paradigms. But again, you gotta be flexible. You gotta be able to stick and move.
- [15:52]
Alfred Marcus
Yeah, I think every theory has its place and has its moment. And knowing when to abandon and when to adopt is very, very hard. It requires judgment and the likelihood is that you're not always going to be right. So the ability to take feedback too, and to readjust is critical. Although I think that's true in business strategy as well. Because business strategy, I think, is very much like investment. You're investing in the company's future and you're deciding what's likely to where are you putting your money? Basically, all these are questions about where you're putting your money in the future.
- [16:33]
Ethan A. Everett
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- [17:32]
Ethan A. Everett
The the really difficult thing about investing is the feedback is not necessarily straightforward. I think in the I think the academics refer to this as basically, I'm simplifying it. But a wicked learning environment I believe is yes, terminology, beautiful phrase. And the idea yeah, right. Wicked, you know, by the way, the sequel of Wicked is coming out soon, so that should be a good. Should be a good one anyway. But the Wicked learning environment, you don't get this clear feedback signal, right? You may do well, but you got lucky and got made money for the wrong reasons and don't know that. That. So it creates again this entirely new level of things. But yeah, I think you. What you said feedback is so important, but now the feedback is even. Is even cryptic, right? Like it's pretty obvious in a. In a, you know, a UFC fight, if a fighter is getting punched in the face, it's pretty obvious that either something's not working or that he's getting hurt. Maybe there could be a time where it looks like he's losing, but he's actually tiring the other guy out or, you know, whatever. But the feedback is pretty clear to the fighter. I'm getting hurt. This. I'm. I'm doing well hitting him. I know what to do, how to adapt based on how I'm doing. The market, unfortunately, isn't that that simple. Not even close. The potential to lose for the. To lose for the wrong reasons and when. For the wrong reasons is always. Is possible. And you could be discouraged from doing something that was. Process, that was. Had a perfect process, and, you know, you might be encouraged to do something that had an awful process. So again, I think. I think. I think the point was, was really, really important to talk about that being able to deal with feedback.
- [19:39]
Alfred Marcus
When is theory work and when does it stop working? And I think what you're saying also is very insightful. The idea that you may have succeeded despite the theory, your rationale for making the investment may have been the wrong rationale, but because luck still plays a role in all of this, and I guess the philosophical approaches to luck are important in and of itself.
- [20:02]
Ethan A. Everett
You know, it's funny, now that you bring up luck, I'd love to. This is one I didn't get to talk about on my first podcast appearance, and that is Blaise Pascal, who, you know, one of the geniuses of modern history, and he writes about luck, and I really, really related it to finance, in addition to all the things that he did, you know, like math related to statistics. I mean, he did so many things. I mean, created the first mechanical calculator. He's just. A lot of people know Blaise Pascal for Pascal's Wager, which is a whole other thing where he argues that from a probabilistic standpoint, it actually pays to believe in God. Because you have nothing to lose if he doesn't exist. Anyway, that's not what I wrote about. I wanted to write about for. For me again, I tried to choose philosophers who. Either their work had not really been discussed in the context of investing, or for those who people might have heard of, because I think some people have heard of Blaze Pascal, I wanted to use parts of their work that were unfamiliar to people, that people didn't. Hadn't necessarily heard of, that people hadn't ever necessarily even thought about connecting to investing. And for Pascal, it's really interesting. There's this essay he writes, and it's fascinating because in the essay, he starts it off by describing this man who arrives on an island, and all the islanders look at him and think he's their long lost king. And they start just lavishing, throwing gifts at him, giving him a throne, you know, heeding every single thing he says, you know, at his beck and call. And then the guy kind of realizes he knows he's not that king and he feels like an imposter. And he's in this kind of position of, what do I do? Do I keep. Do I keep, you know, taking all of this? And the funny thing, Pascal then kind of does this, like, kind of reality check, and he says to you, guess what? If you're a rich person or any rich people in the world today, you're basically that you have no more right to your wealth or social position that you were born into than that guy had as the mistaken king. Because just one more roll of the dice, one more turn of the, of the slot, and you could have been born in a country that didn't have laws where you couldn't even have private property, right? And, you know, kind of Buffett refers to the ovarian lottery. So there's, there's that aspect. But in. So Pascal is seeing that. But he goes further. Pascal, he's. Because, because again, what I. The reason I, I really like to talk about this Pascal Pascalian luck perspective is because luck in finance is generally seen in terms of, you know, being there at the right place or making the investment. Oh, you made the investment.
- [23:15]
Alfred Marcus
You were.
- [23:15]
Ethan A. Everett
You're lucky. You're unlucky with the outcome, right? But to be in the position to make that investment in the first place, even for me, to have been able to be able to invest in the stock market with my bar mitzvah money and having had grandparents who were, you know, on. On Wall street and who encouraged me when I was interested in Wall street, like, you know, Having all those things is a whole other layer of luck. And again, if I didn't have the US Legal framework or system to protect my private assets, there was so many ways that I could have potentially not been able to invest in the first place or not had the money to invest in the first place. And what Pascal is saying is, not only is there luck in what family we're born into, but there's luck in the time we're born into the, the, the, the country we're born into, the legal system we're born into. And he even goes on to say that our passions is, is, is lucky. He says, basically, you know, change one or two interactions in your life and the thing that you ended up following through on as your passion. Like for me, let's say investing law and philosophy, one other decision or one time where my mom didn't take me to this event, that inspired me, all of a sudden, I'm not passionate about it. So the reason I really thought Pascal was interesting here is he kind of. He calls people. And again, he's not talking specifically about investors, he's talking about wealthy people and powerful people in general. But he's making the point, no matter how successful you are, you have so much that is determined by chance, which you had zero control over. And it's funny, I even brought up the other one being born in this time period, in the time of modern securities markets. Not that there wasn't investing before that, but I start my book with Spinoza and the Dutch East India Company, which slightly predates him, but the Dutch East India Company starts the first modern securities exchange in order to facilitate trading in their own shares. So again, that, and that starts like 1600. Around 1600. So again, for me to even be able to have these interactions in all of us, to be able to, you know, even pursue investing in public insecurities. Right. We, we'd have to live in this couple hundred year period especially, but, but also we have to think, you know, pre 19, you know, 1950, it was even, it was very hard to even participate in for most people. Right. So we could even say it's even the past few decades where it's become, you know, accessible to, to, to many people in, in, you know, retail investors. So again, there's so much, there's so much to take.
- [26:21]
Alfred Marcus
Brokers.
- [26:22]
Ethan A. Everett
Yes. Yeah. Yep. And there's so much to take into account. And so for Pascal, he's one philosopher that I think is a really, really important one to think about when we think about luck in the market. Because I think that from a philosophical standpoint, we can really stop ourselves from getting too full of ourselves in our investment success. Because even if we function perfectly, 100% perfectly as investors, which isn't realistic, but let's say we do even that our ability to have the chance to function 100% perfectly was contingent on so many other things.
- [27:01]
Alfred Marcus
Right, Right. There's a real random walk. I want to delve in more into the book because he's talking about Benjamin Graham, who is fundamental to the way Buffett invests, as I understand it. And you describe he, him beginning his courses with Spinoza's called a view things under the aspect of eternity.
- [27:22]
Ethan A. Everett
Subspecchiae aeternitatus. Yes, as the Latin why did he do this?
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Alfred Marcus
And what can investors take from it today?
- [27:32]
Ethan A. Everett
So I think what Graham is getting at is about transcending the vicissitudes and the craziness that is modern security markets. So it's. Well, so when you're. What he's trying to push people to do is he's trying to get them out from being embedded inside of securities markets. The tough thing with securities markets is we can try to view them from a bird's eye view, eye in the sky view. Right. But at the end of the day, we're still a part of the market and we're a participant. So this kind of dual aspect to us. And I think what Graham is saying.
- [28:20]
Alfred Marcus
Quantum mechanics, Heisenberg, oh, God, I don't.
- [28:23]
Ethan A. Everett
That, that. So that's beyond, beyond me. That's where my, my expertise ends. But he's, but he's saying basically, you want, you need to be able to, to not let your participation in the market be what takes over you. You need to be able to zoom out of that timeline of that here and now and view things from this objective, impartial aspect of eternity, this perspective of eternity, to really see things like in a steady state, intrinsic value kind of view. And that is for him what's most important. Not being taken over by the on and off crazy swings of the here and now, but being able to transcend that. And even though you're going to be part of markets, you can never like and you don't want, and you don't even necessarily want to fully detach because sometimes you want to have a pulse on the market. But at this, what Graham, I think is saying is having that removed impartial view that really is able to take objective stances and see things as they are in their eternal perspective. So that's what he's saying, and whether someone say, oh, he's talking about intrinsic value, long term value. Yes, all those things. Unfortunately, I can't ask Graham myself. It's very interesting. So when I was in high school, I found out that my grandfather, my late grandfather, Henry Everett, was actually in Benjamin Graham's class at Columbia Business School. And my grandfather was a successful hedge fund manager himself. Not until his much, much later years, he started his own fund. But I must say, it's so interesting to think about, this man was teaching and starting classes with Spinoza. And again, this has been, you know, attested to by Columbia, by Columbia Business School students who were in his class. So I, I think it's, it's awesome. I think people forget that Graham came from a classics background.
- [30:34]
Alfred Marcus
That's interesting. I didn't re.
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Ethan A. Everett
Gladden. Oh yeah. When he studied at Columbia originally, it wasn't just, you know, finance or economics. So again, I'm sure, I'm sure Graham and I, he knew a lot of other philosophers and talked about other philosophers too, but for some. But Spinoza really, really stuck with him as the core prototypical perspective into being a successful investor, which he says is again, this zoned out, zoomed out, impartial from the perspective of eternity.
- [31:11]
Alfred Marcus
Yeah, as I told you, I did a master's thesis on Spinoza. So this is bringing me back to my youth as well.
- [31:19]
Ethan A. Everett
And to be. There's so many aspects, by the way, to Spinoza's thought. We're talking about just this. He does some. Writes some really, really incredible stuff when it comes to modern democracy, thought in politics, and also in addition to ethics and religion, everything. So I just want to say, for those who, you know, there's so much Spinoza out there on this, I'm just scratching the surface.
- [31:43]
Alfred Marcus
So you show how his warnings about distorted emotions parallel Kahneman's behavioral finance insight. So practically, how do investors apply this? What does it mean to go short on irrational notions? I guess, which is a quote from the book.
- [32:02]
Ethan A. Everett
So the hardest thing, as always, is to actually apply it. It's easier said than done. What is Spinoza trying to help us do? He's basically saying that we often have these emotions that are rooted in irrational ideas and those will often cause us to take actions that even though if we were to have thought about it, we would consider it harmful to us, we would say, huh, wait, that's not, that's not a reason I would want to do. That's not a good reason to do that. It's something that we instinctively do because some sort of emotion, some feeling pushes us to do it that's based on some irrational idea. And for Spinoza, he's pushing a really, really deep sort of introspection and talk, and we can talk about practically how investors can do this, but he's pushing a deep introspection where we force ourselves to think about what thoughts are underlying our actions and whether certain ones might be based on emotions that don't have valid underlying ideas. Just to very quickly relate this to Kahneman, for those people who are more familiar, you know, with behavioral finance and, you know, by the way, rest in peace Daniel Kahneman, the Israeli Nobel prize winner, who really, you know, changed everything by connecting cognitive psychology and finance. Now it's commonplace, but it wasn't Spinoza, I think, kind of is really connected to it because Tandem is talking about, you know, system one, system two, system X, system system Y, that intuitive thinking that's kind of at. At the lower levels of our brain structure that just kind of happens, and then the effortful kind of reflective thinking that happens. But oftentimes the two are at odds. And Spinoza knows this. Well, you know, intuitively, I don't think he knew about. I'm not sure he knew exactly how the Neocortex worked and everything like that. But the thing is, Spinoza would tell us that we have these irrational emotions, and even though we can't necessarily, we can't stop ourselves from getting them. We can. We can adjust for them. We can. We can do things that make it possible to not let them, you know, ruin our lives. And what we can do is when you know, and when you understand why you might have done something wrong, and understanding the natural state of things and why you might be doing something irrational is also, for him, he thinks it's a really satisfying state to be in, as opposed to just doing things and not understanding. How do we do this in investing? Right. That's the million dollar question. I think that forcing yourself to justify your investment portfolio on some repeating basis for me, again, you need to look at things from a perspective of, okay, what's my portfolio? Now? If it was today and I had no prior history with this portfolio and holding this stock, would I have the exact same opinion? Because what that does is it forces you to do in some ways what Spinoza wants us to do, and that is to question our intuitive feelings. Once we kind of have a stock and have held it for a while, we begin to have all sorts of emotions that get tied up in it. As Buffett says. Yeah, yeah, as Buffett says. You know, you have all these feelings towards the stock, but the stock has no idea you own it. It's the Buffett says it's the ultimate cold shoulder. But you know, the thing is we need to force ourselves to do this sort of introspection in the markets. And again, listen, I'm thinking of another, another example. Sometimes you might have invested in a company in the past and you may see them again coming up again in your screens. You need to push yourself to introspect on what types of emotions and feelings you might have towards that stock because you may be pushed towards buying that stock again because it worked out really well last time, right? And you have good feelings associated with it. Right? But you know that to Spinoza, you know, is, is what he would call, you know, he calls being a slave to your emotions, you know, emotional bondage. He's saying that we need that we can reflect on that, even though we can't necessarily stop that feeling from happening in the first place if we can structure things in a way that we can reflect on that. And again, whether it be checklists, whether it be having portfolio meetings with the investment team every so often to make sure that you can still re justify your investment thesis on a monthly basis or whatever it may be, these are the types of things that we can do to practically try to put Spinoza's insights on irrational emotions into effect and not be quote unquote slaves to our emotions. Now we're all, listen, it's easier said than done, right? But that's what Spinoza is saying.
- [38:02]
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- [38:30]
Alfred Marcus
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- [39:58]
Ethan A. Everett
No. Oh no. I want to be clear about that. It's funny, I have a another chapter where the co founder, a legendary investor and co founder of Home Depot and also great philanthropist Ken Langone. I talk about how his ethical action was inspired by the type of thought paradigm that's reflected in the work of Martin Buber. But I doubt he has any clue who Martin Buber is. Or it's not that sometimes people emulate these ideas even without knowing that exact person, but. But there's still intellectual kinship. And that's what I like to often to point out. It's like listen, sometimes it's as direct as somebody like George Soros who if there ever has been a successful investor to make connections between philosophy and investing, it's him. And he literally talks about how Karl Popper, his philosophical mentor and professor, how his teachings kind of help shape source's views on reflexivity and his fundamental views of markets. I'm not saying that oh, Buffett's ethical stances are shaped by his reading of Nietzsche. He may never have. Listen, I know he reads a lot, but he may never have read Nietzsche in depth whatsoever. But what I do is, and what I saw is first off, as I've said earlier, I wanted to take connections or make connections that had not really been made before in the mainstream. And you know, for me I talked about doing that in terms of okay, there's philosophers that people generally don't know. And then like in the example of Pascal, there are philosophers people do know, but they only know them in one respect and not with regard in run some other respect. I felt the same way with taking and talking about really, really well known investors. So for me there's just, there's so much rich, great content out there on Buffett. For me to talk about Buffett and really have, you know, a big part of a chapter talking about him, it had to be Something new. And it had to be something making, you know, creative, insightful connections. And for me, that was Nietzsche and his idea of eternal recurrence. So for those that don't know, for those that don't know. Sorry, I got cut off. For those that don't know, Nietzsche's. It's the idea of returnal recurrence. It's basically a thought experiment that he lays out in his writing. And it's this idea that some, you know, spirit comes to you in the middle of the night and tells you every single thing you do, every second of your life, once your life is over, will be repeated over and over and over and over again for eternity forever. We go back to this concept of eternity. Nietzsche is using that thought experiment in response to what he sees as an. What he would call a lacking, insufficient moral system in Europe in terms of, you know, in terms of religion specifically, talking about, like, mainstream Christian religion. He feels that this idea of do this because you get rewarded with heaven, don't do this because you get punished with hell. He's basically saying that those for him are inadequate because they force people to do something because of self interest. It's not being good for the sake of being good. So Nietzsche. So Nietzsche's. So the. So the fundamental. And this. There's so much scholarship on this. And again, I'm simplifying, but the fundamental idea that should be taken from by listeners and readers on eternal recurrence is this idea that, okay, you're thinking about every single action you take gets repeated over and over and over and over again forever into eternity. And when you take significant actions, think to yourself, especially when you're in, you know, the business or investing world, when you have momentous decisions to make, think to yourself, am I comfortable with this repeating again and again and again and again to echo an eternity? All right, where does Buffett come into all of this? So Buffett. You know, listen, I. Again, I'm still a huge Buffett fan, but, like, I was, you know, I was one of the. I was as. Let's just say as intense above it fan as they come back in my younger. In college days. But I remember in college I had on my dorm room a poster that had one of Buffett's quotes that said, you know, it takes 20 years to build the reputation and, you know, 10 seconds to ruin it. Right? And he talks about that. And I was interested in seeing for Buffett. He really has this incredible moral sense and compass that he uses to seemingly effortlessly and listen, it's not effortless and there's always gray area and nobody's perfect. But to really do a great job of navigating the moral, the moral puzzles that life presents you with in a life of someone in his position, where he is in the business world. And I think what really caught me when looking through his work and writing and trying to figure out, okay, what are some things that shape his ethical approach? One of them is something that he talks about in one of his memos to directors of Berkshire Hathaway. And he's talking about when something is morally justified. And he says, you need to really think before doing something. It's not enough to say, well, everyone else is doing it, or. And it's not enough to say, well, it's technically legal according to the letter of the law. For Buffett, he has this what I call front page newspaper test, which is basically, would you be comfortable with it appearing on the front page of the New York Times? Now, the way he specifically says it in this writing, to make it more specific, this kind of mental thought experiment, think about a reporter who's smart, skeptical, but fair, and would you be comfortable telling him about what you did for that article? And if not, you should take a step back and really think, rethink what you're doing. And the thing that's so intellectually related between Buffett and Nietzsche is those types of sorts of things. It makes it about the ethics for ethics sake, as opposed to just, oh, you do this, you get rewarded. You do this, you get punished. It's tapping in to something deeper. And even though Buffett may not have read any Nietzsche whatsoever, this connection is really fascinating and I think I love it because listen, I think it helps. I understand Nietzsche better from thinking about Buffett's modern perspective. And I understand Sam Buffett's modern perspective better by thinking about Nietzsche's perspective. So again, there are just so many of these connections that can be made. This is a novel one that I made. But there's so many. Again, listen, again, sometimes these investors, famous investors, have actually read a certain philosopher, Right. Like again, we talk about Bram actually read Spinoza. Right. But there are also times where we can it. But there are also times, yeah. Sora and Soros and Popper and Soros read plenty of other, other other flaws, sources very widely. He was a philosophy student at the in. In London. So where. Where I think he was actually. So he had to wait tables to put himself through. But that's, you know, that, that again and I'm happy to talk about any more connections that you thought really stuck out for me. The book is, I believe there's 13 thinkers that I discuss and there's countless investors throughout with whom I make connections. And oftentimes I connect multiple thinkers to a single philosopher in a chapter because oftentimes people embody things or have an intellectual kinship at different times or in different ways. And again, I think that's what's exciting about this book.
- [48:47]
Alfred Marcus
To me, Buffett always represented a kind of equanimity or calmness, and maybe that came out of this moral certainty that he had that he was doing what he considered to be right, and that if it was entirely transparent, there would be no shame or embarrassment.
- [49:07]
Ethan A. Everett
I really like that. And it's funny, when I was doing my research, that's what I was kind of trying to dig into. It's almost this equanimity, this calmness, but it almost seems innate. It almost seems. And that's part of his character. Part of his character, yes.
- [49:27]
Alfred Marcus
Right. Sort of these mainstream values that he represents. But you talk also in the book about the Dutch East India Company and the Amsterdam Jewish community invested heavily in the Dutch East India Company, and this shaped Spinoza's thoughts. How does history, that history really help us understand markets and investors today?
- [49:51]
Ethan A. Everett
Well, so to begin with, I start the book because Spinoza plays this role in shaping Graham. It's interesting to see in what context is Spinoza coming up, because one of the things that I tried to do, I tried to do two things. One, show how philosophers, ideas can be used to help understand better and shape potentially, you know, investment ideas in securities markets. But I wanted to also kind of take a sort of reflexive approach also, and look at how have modern markets and investing and stock gains and bond losses, how did they actually impact and shape the thoughts of the very philosophers whose ideas we're using? And Spinoza is a. Is a great starting point because again, he's born in Amsterdam, where the first modern securities markets are. Again, as I discussed earlier, the Dutch East India company starts in roughly 1600, maybe 1601. They start the first modern securities exchange in Amsterdam, literally to facilitate the shares of stock in their own company. Right. So this happens, and this is kind of this place where this begins to evolve. And just to say, to think about, people might think, wait, having a stock exchange for the shares of just one company. Well, to be clear, this company is giant. Again, people think Nvidia is big. Now, on an inflation adjusted basis, I've seen estimates, I think I put like 7 1/2 to 8 trillion in the book. But this was a little while back when I was running. Some people say it would be inflation adjusted. The market cap of Industrious India Company would be about $10 trillion today from near. Near its peak levels. They literally, I mean, they had effectively had their own army. I mean, it was. This company affected so many parts of so many people's lives. And what's interesting is that for Spinoza, he's born into a community. And while I don't think it's not that he even necessarily talks so much about it, but you can, from my deep historical investigations, you can literally see how it was unavoidable. One of the most interesting things that I found was when I was looking at. When I was looking at books written by leaders of the Jewish community at that time, I found one where the dedication to this religious book, which is about clarifying contradictions between the Torah and, you know, common knowledge in the introduction or in the acknowledgments, says, thank you to the Dutch East India Company, who does not see how wonderful and glowing their prophets are. And it's like a rabbi saying this. And again, this particular rabbi was actually Spinoza, Spinoza's early. One of Spinoza's early Hebrew teachers. So Rabbi Manash of Ben Israel, who was very. Actually important and very interesting. I believe he was actually also involved in going to England and asking for Jews to be allowed.
- [53:24]
Alfred Marcus
Right. He interacted with Cromwell.
- [53:27]
Ethan A. Everett
Cromwell was Cromwell, yes. So there's so he very important figure. But. But interestingly so it is, you know, historically he did, you know, teach Spinoza. So it's fascinating. You have this backdrop where clearly the Dutch East India Company is something that, that, that Jews, again, they were, I think they became, you know, to own a quarter of the company shares. So this was something that Spinoza kind of came up in again. And there's all sorts of stuff that happened that shaped people's experiences. Like, you know, you know, Spinoza, he was too. Really too young to appreciate this, but, you know, you have the tulip bubble that, that went on during. He was. But, you know, these things shape people. And it's funny, I talk about. In Nietzsche, he talks about how there was a boom, there was a stock market bubble in the 1860s in Germany when German equity markets were first started, kind of gaining prominent acceptance. So. And then there was all sorts of unethical things that occurred in the follow up to the bubble that happened. But again, I talked about the Dutch East India Company to begin with because it thought it was a great starting point. To show how modern companies, these conglomerates, and today more than ever, where you have these companies that really are embedded into our lives. Apple, Google, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon. I think about how many times I, you know, how many things I do through Amazon or how many things I do through Apple or Microsoft in a given day, you know, and our lives are just so shaped that way. And for a lot of people, you know that there was examples of that in the past and it's interesting to see how we're shaped by markets and companies now versus other people in other times. And I specifically focused on that for specific philosophers. So I thought that was a great way to kind of understand the context of Spinoza. But as I said, I also did it with Nietzsche. I also did it with Voltaire, which I think is an incredible historical story about his interaction with markets now. Or in fact that his worldview and his philosophy. But yeah, that's why I chose to talk about the Dutch East India company. I think that it was a really, really great perspective for understanding philosophy in its historical context.
- [56:15]
Alfred Marcus
The executives, when they're making investment decisions for their companies. I think that's a great analogy between when you're investing in an individual investor or any investor is the decision. The strategic decisions are very much like investment decisions because they involve risk and unknowns and they can involve long term commitments or short term commitments that can be reversed at a certain point in time. Any thoughts on that?
- [56:47]
Ethan A. Everett
Well, well, so I think one thinker who would be an interesting one to bring up in response to this question would be Michel DeMontagne. And because you talked about investments and strategic investments and where you invest. Right. And now more than ever we are seeing the importance of investing in intangibles as opposed to the classic paradigm where it was just about investing in physical plant and equipment. And you know, listen, it's caused, you know, a lot of headaches and mispricings in terms of, you know, because accounting is really, you know, created and designed around capturing those physical things as opposed to the, you know, kind of the intangibles now. I mean, obviously there's there, there are other methods to, to do it. But why do I bring this up? I want to talk about Montaigne because he really encouraged this investment in certain intangibles. How so? So very quick background. Michel DeMontagne is an incredible French figure. He was a jurist, he was a judge for a while in France. But the reason a lot of people know him nowadays is he's actually considered the, some would say the originator of the modern essay format. He was so very, very, very early writer, but he was a very frank and open type of writer who was willing to discuss his own kind of personal reflections in a really, really honest way. And one of the things that he talks about is how his relationship with money has affected his life. So, you know, he's born into a wealthy family, but he's, he's a judge for a while. And just to, you know, clarify, in those times in France, you actually could buy judgeships from, from, from, you know, basically from the, the monarchy. They sold judgeships and basically then as a judge, you were able to collect fees for running court and settling cases and disputes for various people. So Montaigne did that for a while. He sells his judgeship and it comes into even more money, right? And it's the money to the point where he, he just goes to his castle and in his, in his tower, shuts himself, is able to shut himself away and write.
- [59:30]
Alfred Marcus
He doesn't have to do anything.
- [59:33]
Ethan A. Everett
Certainly not. But he talks about how the more this experience where the more money he had, it didn't necessarily equate with him having less anxiety or with it, with it, with it, you know, kind of having a positive ROI in his life. And so one of the things he talks about, talks about how the more money I had, you know, every time I tried, I traveled, I was worried about the guy carrying my bags or my chest or who was watching whatever at home. And why do I bring this up? Because he basically is advocating the importance of investing in certain intangible things that aren't so subject to the vicissitudes of chance, things that really can't be taken away from us, things that like, like learning certain things that really intellectually entertain us or things that we can build that have some kind of eternal aspect to them that, you know, can't just be taken away from us easily, that aren't just subject to the randomness and chaos of the universe. He's saying to do that, to invest in certain intangibles and you know, there's lots of ways of doing that. I think that that relates to public companies today. I think that it can be easy to try to amass giant, you know, hoards of physical assets, but sometimes it's a lot better to invest in this long term, less clear thing that's going to last the company over time. There's many ways we can kind of make this connection. I'm happy to talk about it more, but I think at the end of the day there's connections to be made in what we invest, in how we invest, for what time period we invest. And Montaigne is talking about investing in ourselves. We're talking here about investing in companies and ventures and things of that nature. But I think that there's an intellectual kinship between the two.
- [61:51]
Alfred Marcus
I mean, you have to know why you're investing. It's not necessarily to maximize immediate returns and what is your purpose. And even companies like I've referred in many of these podcasts to intel and I think intel lost its way because unfortunately it was headed by MBAs who were overly sensitive to Wall street and they couldn't make the long term investments because they could have really accomplished my opinion, what Nvidia accomplished. But they were afraid of the reaction on the Street.
- [62:26]
Ethan A. Everett
Well, the amazing thing is that I believe it's Andy. Andy Grove.
- [62:32]
Alfred Marcus
Andy Grove, yes.
- [62:33]
Ethan A. Everett
He writes this fascinating book, Only the Paranoid Survive, which literally is almost, you could say like several decades before this, talking about how it's so important to not let something like this happen. Like what's happened with Nvidia completely overtaking them and their business model falling apart.
- [62:55]
Alfred Marcus
They did exactly what he said they should not be doing.
- [62:59]
Ethan A. Everett
It's amazing how even when you think someone sees it coming, it can still be overlooked. I think one thing that you said, one thing that you said that I would like to make a quick connection with is you talk about what's your purpose. And that's very important, embedding meaning in something that's so important for. Listen, ultimately companies are made up by people and those people having a purpose really, really can have an impact on the company's performance and people's willingness to put in effort and being willing to be on board for the long term and things of that nature. I wanted to talk about another purpose that is related, but a little bit different. It's purpose in terms of people who are investors, people on Wall street, whether you're investing your personal money, whether you're a hedge fund manager, whether you're a mutual fund manager. At the end of the day there's a question of what drives your investing activity. Is it just ones and zeros and that's it? And you have no intellectual interest in.
- [64:12]
Alfred Marcus
What it is in the absence of the companies themselves, what they're doing.
- [64:18]
Ethan A. Everett
Listen, you know, HHL Hunt, it was the famous oil magnet and investor. His son is quoted as saying after, after his father died, he said, you know, my father wasn't, wasn't after, after the money. It was just kind of how he Kept score, right? He loved playing the game. He loved playing the game and money was just how he kept. Kept score. So what, what is that, that, that type of passion, right? Listen, compare myself to HL Hunt, but my passion, my entry in the market preceded any money. My first experience with it was playing the fantasy stock market game with my middle school math teacher when I was 12, when there wasn't even any real money involved. And it was still fascinating for me. So why am I bringing this up? I bring this up because there are a lot of people on Wall street who, in the investment landscape that don't have a worthy purpose or they need to. Not that they can't have, or they need to create it. I can't tell you how many people would look at me crazily and when I was younger and I would talk about how passionate I was about stocks and how much I enjoyed it. And they would say, what, you know, what's wrong with you? If you want to work on Wall street, be prepared to be miserable. And I was. And you know, for me, I was always thinking, well, can I find something within Wall Street? There's so much interesting stuff going on. And listen, you can't always enjoy what you're doing 100% of the time is. Aren't there ways to be doing something where you love what you're doing and you really feel like you have a purpose every day when you're going into it? And where are we going? Philosophy wise? We're going to Kierkegaard, Soren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher, writing in the 1800s, just to give a little perspective. This is a man who was laughed at. There were even newspapers wrote articles just literally mocking everything about him. Couldn't get people to read his books. He even says he can get a couple of people to maybe read half. He can't even get anyone to read the whole thing. And why do I bring this up? One of the things he talks about is why is he writing? He talks about what's driving him and he talks about the fact that he has this noble purpose in his writing. He even goes so far as to say is, you know, even though he's not making money on his writing now because no one will read it. And he's writing, he's writing in a Danish. And there's only so many, you know, that's a limited market. Even despite that, there's still an inherent value, nobility in what he's doing. He even uses the example of how in ancient times the people would, would pay for the right to be, which kind of, kind of going back to something people would pay for the right to be a judge. He says, what if it was similar with being an author? What if you paid for the right to be an author because it was so not such a noble pursuit, not, not people the way people usually see it, as, oh, be an author so you can make money. And he says that's how he feels about his writing. He has such a strong sense of purpose in his, in his writing endeavors that it really, really drives him. And for me, I think that is really, really important to think about in the context of us and people on Wall street today and what drives them in their careers. Because if it's just the dollar signs and the zeros and that's all it is, you are, according to Kierkegaard, going to be up for a lot of despair at the end, because you're not going to. You look back at it and it doesn't have the same meaning. And what you said, which I much earlier in our conversation, which I think was fascinating, is that oftentimes people will kind of do something. And I think you talked about this in terms of Buffett, where even if he wasn't successful because of how he operated on a moral standpoint, he would be okay with what he did. So in that, that the kind of we talked about, you talked about his equanimity that comes as a result of that, that even if the investment parts didn't work out from the money standpoint, result, what he was doing was noble in its purpose and meaningful in and of itself. The problem is for modern people that only care about the ones and zeros, if they're not taking pride in the process and embedding meaning in the process, you don't have that at the end, even if you have the money, it's not going to feel as fulfilling to the person who doesn't embed meeting in their investing endeavors as the person who does embed meeting in their investing endeavors. So I think that I bring up Kierkegaard as a way to say, think about your purpose. Think about how you embed meaning into what you do in markets and things of that nature and how it all fits into things, right? How how your relationship with markets falls into place and whether you like that and how you want to potentially change that. And yeah, that's we, we've been talking.
- [70:14]
Alfred Marcus
This is a great discussion. We could go on for a long time. We have to have some sensitivity to the listeners too, in terms of how much they can absorb. But I would like to get back to one thing you mentioned briefly, the use of AI. You said there's a company now that you've started. Just speak a little bit about that because I found that quite interesting.
- [70:41]
Ethan A. Everett
Yes. So I have started a company called Collectity, which I actually use myself in my everyday investment research. I should say it's an institutionally focused product. It's not, it's not targeted retail investors. It's really try. What I tried to build was the tool that I wanted that I wasn't getting through all of the incredibly expensive subscriptions to data services that I was already subscribing to. So that Bloomberg wasn't the means, that Bloomberg wasn't meeting, that FactSet wasn't meeting, that AlphaSense wasn't meeting, despite, you know, a Bloomberg terminal costing $32,000 a year for a single, single C. Right. And I felt that the uses of AI in LLMs so far in these technologies were very, very surface level. You know, AI in finance has been used to really dissect quantitative phenomena in finance for a very long time. But I think in terms of doing it well, from a qualitative, fundamental research standpoint, it's not good. And even again, looking at the AI that's embedded in Bloomberg's fundamental analysis, or the AI that's embedded in the expert calls of AlphaSense, it was not doing it for me. So I wanted to create a research tool that first off took an agnostic view towards LLMs. I didn't want to be trapped in terms of using one specific model. So ours, ours we use, and again, literally we have access to thousands of models based on how we've written this kind of flexible infrastructure. But we use what's best for the specific purpose at hand. So literally my product is using Gemini 2.5 Pro, Groq, the GPT5, you name it. Claude, actually, I got to give Claude a shout out. We use Claude in a lot of contexts. There are so many different models that first of all, they're all constantly improving in different ways and they're all good for different things. It's kind of funny because there's actually a parallel there with my talking about philosophical perspectives and different things being appropriate for different times at the right time.
- [73:18]
Alfred Marcus
Each of these, each of the LLMs probably has a different philosophy to some degree implicit.
- [73:25]
Ethan A. Everett
And listen, they have their listen. There's obvious, of course, there's similarities, but what I've done is I have taken those LLMs and tried and really used very, very specific prompts in this cocktail, this proprietary cocktail of data that's not, I should say tainted by the sell side and you know, kind of people's over like existing opinions. It's not taking on just the consensus view. It's being forced to think backwards. And there's all sorts of different ways that we use to prompt these things to really, really think about these fundamental problems deeply. And right now not only can it generate research ideas but it also, I mean if I, I could say I. It's literally to the point where it can create investment theses with incre. What I would say is you know, consulting firm level slideshows where I can basically go through it and then, and see if I like it. But at the end of the day it's for me having all of this philosophy background has been helpful because if there's anything that's, that's really, really helping so far it's been my openness to adapting new models and new elements and not just fitting into one specific thing. So that's been, that's been really, really interesting. I'm very excited. We're going to have some initial users, strategic customers, partners that are going to be kind of the first to use it. We're really, really excited about launching it. We have research, we already have in depth research on a thousand companies, the entire Russell 1000 and we're expanding. So yeah, anybody who wants to sign up for the waitlist or reach out to me. CXITY AI C O L L E X I T Y A I for the waitlist. Again I want to be very clear it is targeted towards the institutional investment crowd as opposed it would be a little over the top too much for what I would think the retail industry not as, as a, as an insult anyway but just, just, just given how, how much it is how in, in terms of how much much data or analysis it's doing. It's, it's not telling you go invest in the, the Vanguard S&P 500 index. It's, it's going to a whole nother layer level of depth. So yeah that's, that's what's, what's going on with complexity and you know, look out for it. I think, I think we have something really, really special. I know a lot of people are doing a lot of things with LLMs right now frankly. I like to see what they're doing and how mine is different. I constantly am looking at that and yeah, we'll see what happens.
- [76:31]
Alfred Marcus
Good luck with it. And I think we have to draw this to a close if we could continue. For a long time, this has been fascinating. That was Ethan A. Everett, author of the Investment Financial Lessons from the Great Thinkers, published by Columbia University Press. This book reminds us that investing isn't just about numbers. It's about judgment, ethics, risk, and the ability to think beyond the herd. Whether you're a professional investor or just curious about how philosophy can shape markets, Everett offers the challenging and rewarding lens. I'm Alfred Marcus for the New Books Network. Thanks for listening and I look forward to having you join us again for our next conversation on the ideas shaping business strategy and ethics today.
- [77:18]
Ethan A. Everett
Thanks so much for having me.