some great recent podcast episodes
from Patrick OShaughnessy's tweet replies
Just a casual Sunday infodump!
I’m trying to be helpful and listing some great podcast episodes recommended by others, sort them by category, provide some highlights or context, and link to them.
Recommendations are from Patrick OShaughnessy's tweet: What’s a great recent podcast episode?
The format for each episode linked is: Episode and podcast linked to transcript / YouTube [Apple Link] [Spotify Link]
Enjoy!
Business, Investing & Markets
Nassim Nicholas Taleb & Scott Patterson on Tim Ferriss [Apple] [Spotify]
“I came into Wall Street and started reading about how there’s this belief that people are irrational and the markets are rational and they are predictable because of this. And I thought that is just crazy. To me, I look at financial markets and I see black swans, I see fear and greed. That to me is what drives markets, not rational behavior, rational expectations.” - Scott Patterson
Nvidia: The Dawn of the AI Era on Acquired [Apple] [Spotify]
Costco on Acquired [Apple] [Spotify]
Ben: I want to say a Jim Sinegal [co-founder and former CEO of the Costco] quote, "This isn't a tricky business. We just tried to sell high quality merchandise at a lower cost than everybody else." I think it's hilariously farcical. He's both right and so cheeky. This is an extremely tricky business.
David: Yeah. I have heard him say that many times, too, in my research, and I occasionally hear him say the second part of the quote that he selectively leaves off. The second part is, "Anybody can sell goods for cheap. The trick is to make money while doing so."
Ben: We've talked about a bunch of it in this episode. It's the 50 little things that they do that all synchronize with each other that makes it work. You don't do one of those and it falls apart.
Oh, I want 10,000 SKUs. Oh, I want to be a leader in ecommerce. Oh, I don't want a membership fee. Oh, I want to blow out a bunch of merchandise and do a sale. Any of these trade-offs you break them, the whole thing breaks.
Simon Torring on eCommerce in Southeast Asia [Apple] [Spotify]
“when we talk about TikTok, we must bear in mind that they have a Chinese sister-app called Douyin, which is a fair few years ahead of TikTok in development and monetization and TikTok shop fits very well in the mold of what Douyin did in e-commerce in China. So I think what is happening a little bit is that in a sense, they have the future already. There was a question mark on whether Southeast Asia would react similar to the Chinese market and whether the same features and the same businesses would work, but it seems that they generally do. So I can imagine that a lot of this is them being eager to pull the future into the present. We have seen that and whatever is working in China, let's just very quickly apply it here as well.”
Teledyne Early Annual Reports [1967 and 1968 on Spotify]
Where Does Your Return Come From: Yield, Growth, and Multiple Expansion [Apple] [Spotify]
Will England - A Primer on Multi-Strategy Hedge Funds on Invest Like the Best [Apple] [Spotify]
the job of being a PM, whether you're quantitative or fundamental is psychologically extremely toxic because you're going to be wrong basically just as much as you're going to be right. You're going to get kicked in the face a lot and you're going to be someone who's the smartest person that they've known their entire life and then they're just going to get beat up all the time.
And that's what the job is. And that takes a certain psychological profile and that requires training, and I just don't think many humans are wired that way. So I don't know the exact number, but it would be inaccurate to say that you can just take anyone with a resume and assume that they're going to do well in the model. And if anything, probably the multi-manager space, in my opinion, is a bit too crowded at the moment, which is natural in finance because something works when we know more people get drawn into it. And in some ways, we're seeing that right now.
Health, Science & Tech
Dr. Paul Conti: How to Understand & Assess Your Mental Health [Apple] [Spotify]
I thought the whole breakdown of the structure of self was fascinating and a good reminder that we're 95% just a chemical concoction (biological supercomputer) and 5% conscious. - @awilkinson
Also loved the bit about projective identification (radiating stress to others for no reason other than to get attention/make them feel your feelings).
AI-Powered Biological Software with Jakob Uszkoreit, CEO of Inceptive [Apple] [Spotify]
Behavioural & Self Improvement
Derek Thompson: From Acting to the Eminem of Macroeconomic Analysis [Apple] [Spotify]
His maxims for writing:
1. Formula for interestingness: Novel + important = interesting.
2. All interestingness arises from the presence of conflict. To make academic ideas interesting, find the conflict… the point of tension.
3. Ignore the A-holes. Find critics who are rooting for you and listen to them instead.
4. The taste of individuals is surprisingly weird. The taste of the masses is surprisingly basic.
5. Many successful people are like good oil scouts: They spend a lot of time searching for their space, and then they drill deep when they find the right niche.
6. Write to be remembered — so, write musically.
7. Repetition is the God particle of music. Rhythm repeats within songs. Verses repeat, and the chorus repeats too. There's no music without repetition. If you want to make your writing musical, add repetition.
8. When something doesn’t make sense to you, it probably doesn’t make sense to a million readers. When something seems kind of interesting to you, it’s probably kind of interesting to a million readers.
9. Writing a first draft is like crawling through 1,000 mud pits of uncertainty, doubt, mental blockage, and uninspiration so you can sprint for a few minutes in the clean fields of flow between them.
10. Some questions to ask if you're researching a subject: Can you explain this to me like I barely know anything about this subject? What, if anything, is actually interesting or new about this story? Is there some angle here that I'm not even seeing?
11. Every great scene in theater is a fight. Think of your favorite scene from your favorite movie. Did the characters agree on everything? Nope. Writing comes alive when there's conflict hanging in the air.
Richard Koch on The Tim Ferriss Show [Apple] [Spotify]
“Happiness is probably the least selfish thing that you can pursue, because if you’re happy, you’re going to make a lot of other people happy as well. If you’re miserable, you’re going to make other people miserable.”
&
“The 80/20 principle runs … through the whole of my thinking. So, in terms of my own success or money but also things like happiness, I’m trying to think, ‘What are the few things that I need to do in order to attain what I want?'”
Misc
Christopher Nolan: The Nolan Variations on Founders Podcast [Apple] [Spotify]
The efficiency of filmmaking is for me a way of keeping control. The pressure of time, the pressure of money. Even though they feel like restrictions at the time, and you chafe against them, they're helping you make decisions. They really are. If I know that deadline is there, then my creative process ramps up exponentially. - Christopher Nolan
Every Second Counts with Actor Jon Bernthal (‘The Bear’) [Apple] [Spotify]
“The scary thing is—when you change, you’re ripping out a whole part of yourself, and you don’t know what goes in there. You’ve got to start filling it with other things. You’ve got to fall in love, in this business, with the not knowing. It’s a wonderful blessing of a ride if you look at it that way.” - Jon Bernthal
Ari Emanuel on Freakonomics [Apple] [Spotify]
So if you were going to give life advice —
EMANUEL: Some of them would be don’t be indifferent. The other one is be curious. The other one is be comfortable in the uncomfortable. Another one would be show up — meaning half of my success, like that phone call I took beforehand is — do I want to take that meeting? F*** no. But I want to get to this. I’m going to take that meeting. […] And then, try and be as consistent as you possibly can.
Being a leader is not about how many punches you can throw. It’s about how many punches you can take. Trying to buy a company is about how you can last through the brutality of it. Because it’s brutal, right? They want certain things. You want certain things. You’re going at it and just hanging tough. Yeah. You just have to be comfortable in the uncomfortable.
Rory Sutherland on Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin [Apple] [Spotify]
basically, to me, anecdotes are data, because they're outliers. The fact that we find them interesting suggests that in evolutionary terms they're important, and therefore you shouldn't discount anything as being anecdotal.
&
of all the things that probably needs to be more widely known, and which would aid the creative community greatly, is this understanding that many great ideas are not overnight successes. (h/t @tomowenmorgan)
Winston Churchill: Hero of the Empire [Apple] [Spotify]
Although he would become famous for his sharp wit, Churchill was also uncomfortable addressing an audience unless he had carefully written and exhaustively rehearsed every line of his speech. Winston spent hours preparing for every formal lecture and even his brief remarks and would do so throughout his life. A friend would later joke that Winston has spent the best years of his life composing his impromptu speeches.
The Lincoln Highway with Amor Towles [Apple] [Spotify]
The Architect of Modern China [Apple] [Spotify]
“Let us advance courageously, to change the backward condition of our country, and turn it into a modern and powerful socialist state!”
Deng Xiaoping, a man purged by Mao and his followers twice before becoming leader of China, paved the way for a modern Chinese state and economy, opening the country up to foreign investment and technology, whilst maintaining firm control of the Chinese Communist Party. […]
they look at how China transitioned into the global economic and political powerhouse it is today, [and] Deng Xiaoping’s role in transforming the country
Zadie Smith on NPR [Apple] [Spotify]
What we're here to do is to interrogate history together. That is not a complicated idea, in my mind. What's going on in America is a long-term consequence of a kind of binary argument that happens online, and that is the opposite of thought, in my view. The opposite of history, the opposite of understanding. It's like a childish football game. You win, I lose. You did this, you did that. History is something we participate in together. We are all involved in history, and all have something to gain from understanding what happened
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