Treussard Talks.

Conscious Leadership, Curiosity, and Culture by Design — with Kaley Klemp | Treussard Talks (E26)

Conscious Leadership, Curiosity, and Culture by Design — with Kaley Klemp | Treussard Talks (E26)
Most cultures aren't built. They emerge. A founder has an idea, recruits two friends, and the three of them live and breathe the mission until it works. Nobody stops to ask what values they're building on. Nobody writes down who gets to make the call when there's a jump ball. And then the firm grows, the osmosis stops working, and the culture they didn't design starts running the show.
Kaley Klemp has spent her career helping leaders see that clearly — and do something about it. She is the co-author of The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership and has worked with organizations from YPO member companies to Research Affiliates, where she and I first met over a decade ago. The conversation that follows is about what it actually takes to lead with intention: in firms, in partnerships, in families, and in the relationship you have with your own wealth.
What We Cover in This Conversation:
Above the line vs. below the line: curiosity and responsibility vs. defensiveness, blame, and rescuing
Why "the need to be right" is a corrosive force in knowledge-based organizations
Decision rights: who gets to make the call, why bottlenecks form around founders, and what gets left on the table when they do
What co-founder breakups have in common with divorce — and how candor, practiced early and often, is the only real prevention
The Enneagram as a vocabulary for difference: why people who want to be "strong," "safe," and "good" end up in entrenched conflict
"If you don't define the money, the money will define you" — and what it means to help clients have that conversation with themselves
Disclaimer: The content of "Treussard Talks" is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed are those of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Treussard Capital Management or its affiliates. Listeners should consult with their own financial advisor before making any investment decisions. For full disclosures, visit treussard.com.
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This podcast is for entertainment and education only. Nothing here is financial advice. Treussard Capital Management is a registered investment advisor. Please visit our website www.treussard.com for additional information and disclaimers.

Systematic Investing, Mission, and the Discipline of Expectations — with Eduardo Repetto | Treussard Talks (E25)

Eduardo Repetto is the Chief Investment Officer of Avantis Investors, the systematic investment firm he founded in 2019 that now manages more than $125 billion. Before Avantis, Eduardo was Co-CEO and Co-CIO at Dimensional Fund Advisors, where he worked alongside Eugene Fama and Ken French. He holds a Ph.D. in Aeronautics from Caltech.
The history of investing has been a slow march from artisanal to systematic. Markowitz gave us the framework. Fama and French gave us the factors. The toolkit Eduardo has spent his career building is what happens when those ideas get implemented at scale — broadly diversified, daily-managed, transparent, and priced to respect the investor. In the industry, we sometimes call it "core and bore." The "bore" is the point.
We also talk about ownership. Avantis sits inside American Century, whose controlling shareholder is the Stowers Institute for Medical Research — an endowment built from the donated shares of a cancer-survivor founder, funding fundamental research that grant cycles rarely sustain. Eduardo describes it as "taking one for society."
And we get into discipline. Liquid wrappers around illiquid assets. Thematic ETFs that turn out to hold the Magnificent Seven in disguise. The behavioral pull to bail in a drawdown. Eduardo's framing — build the expectation of volatility into the journey the way a traveler builds in traffic on the way to the airport — is the kind of anchor a client can actually hold on to in a hard moment.
Eduardo is unhurried, undramatic, and uninterested in selling you on a person. He believes in the process, not in himself.
You'll hear us cover:
Why STEM training is really about building mental models — for markets, for marketing, for any problem worth solving
The arc from Markowitz to CAPM to the Fama-French factor model, and why "anomalies" are only anomalies if you treat the original framework as gospel
Why factor investing belongs in the middle ground between passive and active — and why "core and bore" is the ambition, not a consolation prize
The Stowers Institute and American Century: how mission-aligned ownership funds long-horizon medical research in a way the grant system structurally cannot
Why thematic ETFs with "the future of" in the title are often back-test engineering dressed as investing
What happens when shareholders ask for their money back from a fund holding mostly illiquid assets — and why this is mechanics, not bad luck
The plane versus the bicycle: knowing yourself, knowing what you're trying to accomplish, and matching the vehicle to the destination
If this conversation is useful to you, the next step is the Wealth, Empowered newsletter — free, published every two weeks, written for people who want to think seriously about markets and wealth without the noise. Subscribe at wealth-empowered.beehiiv.com.
Disclaimer: The content of Treussard Talks is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed are those of the host and guest and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Treussard Capital Management or its affiliates. Listeners should consult with their own financial advisor before making any investment decisions. For full disclosures, visit treussard.com.
Newsletter — Wealth, Empowered: https://wealth-empowered.beehiiv.com/
Website: https://www.treussard.com/

Capital, AI, and the Limits of Liquidity — with Andrea Eisfeldt | Treussard Talks (E24)

Andrea Eisfeldt holds the Laurence D. and Lori W. Fink Endowed Chair in Finance at UCLA Anderson and is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She received her PhD in economics from the University of Chicago, trained under John Cochrane, Lars Hansen, and Doug Diamond — three names that account for multiple Nobel Prizes between them. Her research covers intangible capital, liquidity, human capital compensation, and what AI is doing to firm values and labor markets.
The accounting data that underlies most factor investing was built for an economy that no longer exists. The companies that dominate markets today run on software, customer relationships, and engineering talent. None of it shows up on the balance sheet the way it should. Andrea has spent the better part of two decades building the tools to correct for that — and the implications are significant.
We also get into liquidity. Why it dries up in bad times. Why that is structural, not accidental. And how the current stress in private credit fits a pattern that goes all the way back to her dissertation.
Andrea is an eternal optimist. Her optimism is grounded in mechanisms, not sentiment.
You'll hear us cover:
Why accounting statements were designed to record transactions, not to serve as portfolio management inputs — and what that means for factor investing today
The three categories of intangible capital: knowledge, customer, and organization — and how partial non-rivalry creates natural economies of scale
Why market concentration and pricing power are not the same thing, and why conflating them leads to bad investment thinking
The task-level research on AI and firm value: how workforce composition predicted abnormal stock returns in the weeks following ChatGPT's release in November 2022
The bottleneck model: why the human oversight still required by AI becomes both a constraint on growth and the most highly compensated skill in the economy
Equity compensation beyond the C-suite: why ignoring it distorts what we think we know about labor's share of income and firm ownership
Endogenous liquidity: why the greed-fear cycle has a structural explanation — and why liquidity disappears in bad times in ways that are entirely predictable in advance
The frontier problem: why engineering liquidity from illiquid assets always runs into limits, and why private credit stress is a feature of that pattern, not an accident
If this conversation is useful to you, the next step is the Wealth, Empowered newsletter — free, published every two weeks, written for people who want to think seriously about markets and wealth without the noise. Subscribe at wealth-empowered.beehiiv.com.
Disclaimer: The content of Treussard Talks is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed are those of the host and guest and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Treussard Capital Management or its affiliates. Listeners should consult with their own financial advisor before making any investment decisions. For full disclosures, visit treussard.com.
Newsletter — Wealth, Empowered: https://wealth-empowered.beehiiv.com/
Website: https://www.treussard.com/

Debt, Inflation, and the Risky Macro Regime of Fiscal Dominance — with Jim Masturzo | Treussard Talks (E23)

The conventional tools of monetary policy assume the central bank is in charge. What happens when the debt burden gets large enough that it isn't? At some point — and no one knows exactly when — raising rates stops cooling the economy and starts feeding it, because the interest expense on the debt itself becomes a source of stimulus. That's fiscal dominance. It's not a theoretical curiosity. It's the logical destination of a decade of spending without restraint.
Jim Masturzo has been thinking about this carefully. As CIO of Research Affiliates — the firm behind one of the most widely used asset allocation frameworks in the world — he spends his days asking what today's market and economic circumstances imply for the decade ahead. We recorded this conversation on February 25, 2026, days before the US–Iran war began. We weren't talking about the news. We were talking about the structure underneath it. That structure hasn't changed. If anything, it's more visible now.
You'll hear us cover:
Why starting conditions (yields, valuations) matter more than long-run historical averages
How to think about expected returns without confusing "expectations" for "predictions"
The CAPE ratio near 40: what it implies for US equities relative to the rest of the world
Debt, deficits, and the logic of financial repression
Fiscal dominance: when higher rates can become inflationary via interest expense dynamics
Why non-US assets can benefit in a weaker-dollar regime
Real assets and commodities as diversification in inflation-volatile periods
Private credit, insurance balance sheets, and where the next fragilities might hide
AI, software pricing power, and second-order risks to credit and cash flows
If this conversation resonates, there's more where it came from. Wealth, Empowered is my newsletter — published twice a month. Just rigorous but accessible thinking about markets and wealth, and what it actually means to manage money with purpose. Written for people who want to understand what's happening, not just be told what to do about it.
Subscribe: https://wealth-empowered.beehiiv.com/
More about Treussard Capital Management LLC and how I work with clients at: https://www.treussard.com/
Disclaimer: This content is for informational and educational purposes only and is not financial advice. Views are those of the host and guest. Consult your own advisor before making investment decisions. Full disclosures: https://www.treussard.com/

Tax-Advantaged Investing, Long-Short Strategies, and the Future of Wealth Management with Erkko Etula | Treussard Talks (E22)

Wall Street is building a trillion-dollar business around slashing the tax bills of wealthy investors. The innovations are real. So are the risks. This conversation is about how to think clearly about both.
Erkko Etula built his career at the intersection of academic finance and institutional practice — MIT, Harvard, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a decade at Goldman Sachs rebuilding the wealth management investment process from the ground up, and ultimately founding Brooklyn Investment Group.
We start where his research started: what broker-dealer balance sheets reveal about risk appetite in the system, and why the overnight repo market remains one of the most important and least-watched corners of finance. We then move to what Erkko spent his Goldman years solving — how to manage a taxable portfolio holistically, treating tax efficiency not as an afterthought but as a structural input from the start.
That work led him to what he considers one of the most consequential innovations in wealth management since the invention of the ETF: tax-advantaged long-short strategies. We get into the mechanics carefully, because the mechanics matter — especially when markets are volatile and the institution renting you balance sheet capacity changes its mind.
What We Cover:
Risk appetite and balance sheets: Why broker-dealer leverage is a better real-time signal of systemic stress than many other economic indicators — and what that research revealed when Lehman collapsed.
The ETF timeline: Mutual funds, ETFs, direct indexing — each step brings taxable investors closer to keeping more of what they make. Where long-short fits in that arc.
Direct indexing 2.0: What happens when you combine tax-loss harvesting with long-short portfolio construction — and why the potential power of that combination is measured in months, not years.
Risk management first: The three-layer framework — benchmark beta, tracking error, concentration risk — and why communicating tail risk matters in this context.
Balance sheet as rented space: Why leverage works until it doesn't, and what that means for investors in these strategies right now.
Building Brooklyn: What Erkko learned leaving Goldman — about humility, team, and the relationship between certainty and disappointment.
Erkko Etula is CEO of Brooklyn Investment Group and winner of the Smith Breeden Prize for Outstanding Capital Markets Research.
Want to go deeper? Jonathan's newsletter Wealth, Empowered. covers markets, wealth, and what it all means for sophisticated families. Free to subscribe at wealth-empowered.beehiiv.com
Treussard Talks is for entertainment and education only. Nothing here is financial advice. Treussard Capital Management is a registered investment advisor. Visit treussard.com for additional information and disclaimers.

The Strait of Hormuz, Oil Markets, and the Futures Curve with Nic Johnson | Treussard Talks (E21)

The Strait of Hormuz was always the thought experiment. The scenario commodities traders ran when they needed a stand-in for the unimaginable. Fifteen to twenty miles of waterway. One fifth of the world's oil. Now it isn't a thought experiment anymore.
Nic Johnson spent years at PIMCO as head of commodities, managing large commodities portfolios. Before that, he was a research fellow at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is one of the more technically grounded people I know on this topic — and a friend. We recorded this conversation two and a half weeks into the disruption. Not to predict what comes next. Neither of us knows. But to understand what is actually happening, and where to look if you want a clearer picture than the headlines are giving you.
What we cover:
The physical reality — how oil moves through the Strait, what limited storage capacity means for exporters, and why strategic petroleum reserves buy weeks, not months
Why $100 oil is high but not crazy high — and what the shale revolution did to the long-run marginal cost of production
How the US, Europe, and more financially fragile economies experience this shock very differently — and what a populist export restriction would and wouldn't actually accomplish
The futures market versus the physical market — why systemic contagion is unlikely, and where localized blowups could still happen
The one indicator worth watching: not the headline spot price, but the oil futures curve — and why the front month and the five-year forward are telling very different stories right now
Why anyone thinking about reinventing themselves as a commodity trader should understand what variant perception means before placing a single bet
Understanding your wealth requires understanding the world your wealth lives in. This is that conversation.
The content of Treussard Talks is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed are those of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Treussard Capital Management or its affiliates. Listeners should consult with their own financial advisor before making any investment decisions. For full disclosures, visit treussard.com.
Stay Connected
Newsletter — Wealth, Empowered: wealth-empowered.beehiiv.com
Learn more: treussard.com
This podcast is for entertainment and education only. Nothing here is financial advice. Treussard Capital Management is a registered investment advisor. Please visit our website treussard.com for additional information and disclaimers.

The State of Trump Economics in 2026 with Larry Kotlikoff | Treussard Talks (E20)

In this conversation, Larry Kotlikoff (https://kotlikoff.net/)—Professor of Economics at Boston University, Research Associate at the NBER, and former Senior Economist on Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors—and I go through the current administration's economic agenda one proposal at a time. Not from a partisan lens. From first principles.
What follows is rigorous and at times surprising.
You'll hear us cover:
Why Kotlikoff sees genuine merit in capping credit card interest rates—and what it reveals about the tension between capital and consumer in American finance
The 401(k) proposal to fund home purchases: what it misunderstands about saving, housing supply, and the purpose of retirement accounts
Tariffs and the capital account: why the trade deficit is a symptom, not the disease—and why tariffs almost certainly can't fix what's actually broken
The fiscal reckoning hiding in plain sight: why raising every federal and state tax by 25% today still might not be enough—and why the US is in worse long-term fiscal shape than Italy
Immigration and demography: US population growth fell by half in 2025. What that means for labor, capital, and the long-term American economic project
The Fed, Volcker, and the power of expectations
Geopolitical realignment as economic policy: why the current international moment may be the most consequential—and least understood—economic story of our time
Why this matters now: Every proposal in this conversation connects back to the same underlying tension—a fiscal system that has been quietly redistributing from young to old for 70 years, suppressing saving, distorting incentives, and mortgaging the future. The individual headlines are symptoms. Kotlikoff keeps bringing us back to the diagnosis.
And understanding your wealth requires understanding the world your wealth lives in. This is that conversation.
Disclaimer: The content of "Treussard Talks" is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed are those of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Treussard Capital Management or its affiliates. Listeners should consult with their own financial advisor before making any investment decisions. For full disclosures, visit treussard.com.
Stay Connected
Newsletter — Wealth, Empowered: Subscribe https://wealth-empowered.beehiiv.com/
Learn more: treussard.com
 
This podcast is for entertainment and education only. Nothing here is financial advice. Treussard Capital Management is a registered investment advisor. Please visit our website www.treussard.com for additional information and disclaimers.

Tail Risk, Market Structure, and Building Resilience with Vineer Bhansali | Treussard Talks (E19)

In this conversation, Vineer Bhansali—Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Harvard, former PIMCO portfolio manager, and founder of LongTail Alpha—and I explore why the tails of the distribution are where both some of the most misunderstood risks and opportunities reside. We connect the mechanics of options pricing, market structure changes, and risk management to the decisions that actually restore clarity and control for sophisticated investors.
You'll hear us cover:
Why diversification alone may not protect you when correlations converge (2022, Liberation Day 2025)
The hidden dynamics driving call option mispricings in today's markets (passive flows, buybacks, gamma imbalances)
How zero-DTE retail option trading can be rational—and what it reveals about wealth inequality
Currency markets as early indicators of multi-decade macro realignment
Volatility as a tradable asset class and why options are "on sale" for building portfolio resilience
The ultra-marathon mindset: never get forced out of the game
Why "the only thing worse than not having insurance is to think you do when you don't" (Bob Merton)
Why this matters now: We're potentially exiting a 30-year regime of falling rates, low volatility, and credible central banking. In that new world, the strategies that worked—passive diversification, stocks-and-bonds—may not be enough. Bhansali offers a physicist's lens on probability distributions, market microstructure, and the practical tools for building portfolios that survive and compound through regime change.
Disclaimer: The content of "Treussard Talks" is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed are those of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Treussard Capital Management or its affiliates. Listeners should consult with their own financial advisor before making any investment decisions. For full disclosures, visit treussard.com.
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This podcast is for entertainment and education only. Nothing here is financial advice. Treussard Capital Management is a registered investment advisor. Please visit our website www.treussard.com for additional information and disclaimers.

Passive Investing's Endgame and America's Hidden Precarity Crisis with Mike Green | Treussard Talks (E18)

In this episode, I sit down with Mike Green—Chief Strategist at Simplify Asset Management and one of the most rigorous thinkers on market structure today.
We start with Mike's journey from Wharton to small-cap value, through Canyon Partners during 2008, to correctly predicting the XIV collapse in 2018, and eventually co-founding Simplify where the firm now manages $12 billion across 30 strategies.
From there, we dig into two slow-burning crises that most people are getting wrong: how passive investing is reshaping market mechanics in ways that can't be sustained, and how we've systematically mismeasured economic precarity over the last 60 years.
These aren't separate stories—they're symptoms of the same problem: asking systems to do things they weren't designed to do.
You'll hear us cover:
ON PASSIVE INVESTING AND MARKET STRUCTURE:
The critical flaw in Sharpe's 1991 "Arithmetic of Active Management": passive funds trade continuously as cash flows in and out, making them perpetually active systematic strategies
How the Pension Protection Act of 2006 accidentally created a market where over 100% of marginal capital became "passive"—and why regulators couldn't act due to regulatory capture
Over 50% passive by market cap in US equities, and the physics predict accelerating volatility
Why contributions (tied to income) and withdrawals (tied to asset values) create an unstable dynamic
The fundamental mistake: we changed markets from pricing capital to providing retirement security—incompatible objectives
The seeds of its own destruction
ON AMERICA'S HIDDEN PRECARITY CRISIS:
How Mike stumbled onto the poverty line calculation and "felt sick" when he understood what it meant
The 1963 origin: families spent 1/3 of budgets on food, so HHS tripled the USDA minimum food budget to define poverty—then locked that number in place
That same food budget now represents 5-7% of household expenditures, not 33%—making the poverty line meaningless
The real number: for a family of four in Caldwell, NJ, the inflation-adjusted equivalent isn't $32K—it's $140K
The "valley of death": benefit cliffs where earning more makes you functionally poorer
Why childcare became the single largest budget item for young families—and what disappeared when informal support networks collapsed
What we've forgotten: capitalism requires redistribution for system sustainability and provisioning the next generation
The connection to markets: when we can't afford crashes because retirement security depends on asset values, we've painted ourselves into a corner
ON INTELLECTUAL HONESTY:
Why taking time off with no risk on the table is essential for seeing systems clearly
What Earl Thompson taught me at UCLA: don't trust the "intellectual cartel"
Why Mike's analysis isn't left or right—it's about hard-coding numbers in 1963 and watching the world change around them
THE BOTTOM LINE:
Markets weren't designed to provide retirement security—they were designed to price capital. We've grafted a social insurance system onto a capital allocation mechanism, and both are breaking under the strain.
Mike's work matters because he's doing what few others will: following the math wherever it leads, even when it's uncomfortable. This conversation is about understanding the actual rules of the game—not the ones we wish existed, but the ones that actually govern outcomes.
If you want to understand why markets feel unstable and why economic anxiety persists despite "strong" headline numbers, this episode explains the mechanics.
Disclaimer: The content of "Treussard Talks" is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed are those of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Treussard Capital Management or its affiliates. Listeners should consult with their own financial advisor before making any investment decisions. For full disclosures, visit treussard.com.
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Incentives, Investor Behavior, and AI with Devin Shanthikumar | Treussard Talks (E17)

In this episode, I sit down with Devin Shanthikumar—faculty at the UC Irvine Merage School of Business and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies—to talk about how real-world market outcomes are shaped.
We start with Devin’s path from UC Berkeley (engineering and computer science) to a PhD in finance at Stanford, and how the early-2000s dot-com boom and bust shaped the questions that became the foundation of their research.
From there, we dig into what happens when smart people make painful investing mistakes—not because they lack intelligence, but because they don’t understand the incentives embedded in the financial system.
We also zoom out to what AI means for the future of work and learning, and what that might imply for the next generation.
You’ll hear us cover:
Why Devin’s research became “behavioral finance” through a simple question: what mistakes are people making, and why?
What individual investors often miss about sell-side analyst incentives.
How analysts balance multiple audiences at once: institutional clients, individual investors, and the companies they cover (and the role that access plays).
The “two tongues” idea: why analysts’ recommendations and earnings forecasts can reflect different constraints and objectives.
What changes when investing commentary moves into more disintermediated, online spaces, including the risk of echo chambers.
Devin’s working paper on financial blogs, and why engagement in comment threads can sometimes push people toward more moderate views.
What Devin is studying now about AI’s impact on analyst research, including why analyst work is a powerful setting to study AI (clear, measurable outputs and outcomes).
Early evidence on how AI can improve analyst performance: accuracy, speed of updating, and handling complex filings.
A surprising finding: rather than forcing consensus, AI may enable analysts to be bolder, especially where human judgment matters most.
How Devin approaches teaching and curriculum in the AI era, including the importance of foundational knowledge, critical thinking, and building real human community.
A candid concern about the AI age: fewer entry-level roles, and what that means for the development ladder over time.
Disclaimer: The content of “Treussard Talks” is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed are those of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Treussard Capital Management or its affiliates. Listeners should consult with their own financial advisor before making any investment decisions. For full disclosures, visit treussard.com.
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