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How Philosophy Can Make You a Better Investor
The Stoic Investor | The Timeless Investor
In 161 AD, a man inherited the largest economy on earth — and spent his first night as emperor writing philosophy in a private journal. That man was Marcus Aurelius, and what he wrote was never meant to be read by anyone else. Yet buried in those pages are three investing frameworks so precise, so battle-tested, that no DCF model or Bloomberg terminal comes close.
In this episode, Arie van Gemeren draws on a decade of operating hundreds of apartment units — including surviving a brutal 2023 deal collapse that cost him $250,000 in earnest money — to show you how the ancient Stoics built the one thing markets cannot give you: a disciplined mind.
You'll learn:
🏛️ The Dichotomy of Control — Epictetus was a slave who owned nothing and controlled nothing, yet became one of the most influential philosophers in Western history. His framework for separating what you can govern from what is just noise will permanently change how you allocate your mental energy as an investor.
🔥 Amor Fati — The love of fate. Why the sponsors who couldn't survive the 2021–2024 cycle weren't unlucky — they were under-tested. And how Arie's personal 48-hour rule, drawn directly from Stoic philosophy, has stopped him from selling good assets at bad times more than once.
⚰️ Memento Mori — Roman generals returning from triumph had a man ride beside them whispering: remember that you will die. Applied to investing, this is the ultimate hedge against ego — and the one question Arie asks on every acquisition that has saved him more money than any financial model he has ever built.
This is not a morning-routine episode. This is not a cold-shower episode. Stoicism, as Arie experienced firsthand while his father was dying from cancer and a major deal threatened to push him into bankruptcy simultaneously, is a complete operating system for people who make consequential decisions under conditions of adversity and uncertainty.
Which is to say — it is the most practical investing framework ever written.
Think well. Act wisely. Build something timeless.
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By Arie van GemerenThe Stoic Investor | The Timeless Investor
In 161 AD, a man inherited the largest economy on earth — and spent his first night as emperor writing philosophy in a private journal. That man was Marcus Aurelius, and what he wrote was never meant to be read by anyone else. Yet buried in those pages are three investing frameworks so precise, so battle-tested, that no DCF model or Bloomberg terminal comes close.
In this episode, Arie van Gemeren draws on a decade of operating hundreds of apartment units — including surviving a brutal 2023 deal collapse that cost him $250,000 in earnest money — to show you how the ancient Stoics built the one thing markets cannot give you: a disciplined mind.
You'll learn:
🏛️ The Dichotomy of Control — Epictetus was a slave who owned nothing and controlled nothing, yet became one of the most influential philosophers in Western history. His framework for separating what you can govern from what is just noise will permanently change how you allocate your mental energy as an investor.
🔥 Amor Fati — The love of fate. Why the sponsors who couldn't survive the 2021–2024 cycle weren't unlucky — they were under-tested. And how Arie's personal 48-hour rule, drawn directly from Stoic philosophy, has stopped him from selling good assets at bad times more than once.
⚰️ Memento Mori — Roman generals returning from triumph had a man ride beside them whispering: remember that you will die. Applied to investing, this is the ultimate hedge against ego — and the one question Arie asks on every acquisition that has saved him more money than any financial model he has ever built.
This is not a morning-routine episode. This is not a cold-shower episode. Stoicism, as Arie experienced firsthand while his father was dying from cancer and a major deal threatened to push him into bankruptcy simultaneously, is a complete operating system for people who make consequential decisions under conditions of adversity and uncertainty.
Which is to say — it is the most practical investing framework ever written.
Think well. Act wisely. Build something timeless.