John H. Cochrane

Well, I'll give you a few different answers.

I think the first answer is, I think it's John Cochrane from Stanford who has said that our standard of living is the best it's been in human history.

Like, we are extremely well off.

Look at-

Looking forward to a spirited conversation featuring three of my colleagues we jokingly refer to as the Goodfellows.

And who are the Goodfellows? They are the historian Sir Niall Ferguson, the economist John Cochrane, and former presidential national security advisor Lieutenant General H.R.

McMaster.

Niall, John, and H.R. are Hoover senior fellows, by the way.

And I saw the, the Twin Towers fall on a rather pixelated, uh, screen on my, on my laptop.

And incidentally, it was not long after that, and because of that, that I decided to leave Oxford and come to the United States, so it certainly changed my life, even though I was thousands of miles away from Ground Zero.

John Cochrane, where were you on 9/11?

I was...

It's fiscal theory of the price level.

Read John Cochrane's book or-

Yeah

... maybe you have.

Right.

And then on top of that, there's a risk premium.

And how to decompose that, you know, economists like John Cochrane, whom we mentioned earlier-

Yeah

But even just the facts, um, of, "Oh, you need crypto to diversify your portfolio." Look, crypto is two trillion out of three hundred trillion, right? So, so we don't even have to start talking about correlations to know that this is probably not fantastically important, um, if I just know basic facts about how big the market portfolio, um, even is.

Yeah, in terms of research, John Cochrane wrote this great paper on portfolios for long-term investors, which makes a few great points, but of course, it's not personalized, right? It's a freaking academic paper.

And even if it's just about individual taxes, that only tells me so much about how I should invest my money, um, um, and that just remains a limitation of the research.

But now knowing that Markus would ask me the question of what AI can do, [clears throat] it turns out that one of my students coded up a, a skill in Claude that dumped the learnings from my family office, um, course, um, and analyzes individual portfolios, and the output is pretty good.

He was a man incapable alike of leading and of following, conceited, captious, and wrong-headed, an endless talker, a sluggard in action against the enemy and active only against his own allies.

With Hume was closely connected another Scottish exile of great note, who had many of the same faults, Sir John Cochrane, second son of the Earl of Dundonald.

A far higher character belonged to Andrew Fletcher of Saltoon, a man distinguished by learning and eloquence, distinguished also by courage, disinterestedness, and public spirit, but of an irritable and impracticable temper.

Like many of his most illustrious contemporaries, Milton, for example, Harrington, Marvell, and Sidney, Fletcher had, from the misgovernment of several successive princes, conceived a strong aversion to hereditary monarchy.

If he died, his lands at once devolved on the next heir.

If he were pardoned, he would be able to pay a large ransom.

He was therefore suffered to redeem himself by giving a bond for forty thousand pounds to the Lord Treasurer, and smaller sums to other courtiers.' Sir John Cochrane had held among the Scotch rebels the same rank which had been held by Grey in the west of England.

That Cochrane should be forgiven by a prince vindictive beyond all example seemed incredible.

No, I, I agree with all of that a hundred percent.

Reminds me of John Cochrane in one of his papers has a made-up dialogue where someone has been told to invest in an inflation-indexed perpetuity, which is the risk-free asset for a long-term investor.

You're gonna get guaranteed inflation-indexed income for the rest of your life, forever.

The person who has decided to invest in this asset, because it makes sense for them, is trying to explain to their wife why their portfolio is down fifty percent.