Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing.

Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching.

Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson work for Ritholds 12 Management.

All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast guests are solely their own opinions

and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholds 12 Management.

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions.

The clients of Ritholds 12 Management may maintain positions and the securities discussed in this podcast.

We're joined today by Perth Toll.

She is the founder of Life Plus Liberty Indexes.

And full disclosure, I am on the advisory board, a proud member.

There's no financial incentive for me, but there certainly is a personal incentive for me to see Perth succeed.

So I just wanted to get that out of the way.

All right, Perth, tell everybody, where did this idea come from?

And wait, hang on, I should say, before I ask you where the idea is, what is the idea? What did you do here?

Yeah, so what we do is freedom waiting in the emerging markets.

And so as you guys know, in emerging markets, because of the nature of the types of countries that are in this universe,

there's a lot of autocracies and countries just coming out of autocracies.

So the biggest emerging market is China and then you have Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey.

Some of these are countries that have very poor human rights records.

And so investors sometimes shy away from emerging markets because they don't want 60% of their emerging markets allocation going to autocracies and funding these types of regimes.

So what we do is freedom weight the emerging market so that the freer countries get a higher weight, the less free countries get a lower weight,

and the worst human rights offenders are excluded altogether.

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