Top Podcasts of the Week

Business

• Off the Chain: Kyle Bass, Founder & CIO of Hayman Capital: From The Housing Bubble to Bitcoin. Pompliano is joined by Kyle Bass, the CIO of Hayman Capital. Bass covers shorting the housing market during the 2008 Financial Crisis right after he started his global macro fund, why he chose to buy millions of nickels as an investment, what is transpiring in Hong Kong and how that fits within China’s history, why he expects a shallower recession in the developed world and a deeper recession in Southeast Asia (meaning Central Banks will print more money), and what his thoughts on Bitcoin are. [July 29, 2019–48 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Overcast | Breaker | Website Link

• North Star Podcast: Tren Griffin: The Love of Learning. Perell is joined by someone who is as excited about learning as anyone I’ve listened to on a podcast: Tren Griffin. Griffin is a Senior Director at Microsoft and author of the blog 25IQ. He starts the episode with discussing his writing process (he’s written an article every week for six years), and then dives into business strategy, the tradeoff between experience and novelty, complex adaptive systems, and why he decided to bet his career on the SaaS business model. He also mentions a Harvard professor, Richard Zeckhauser, who he thinks is a fascinating thinker (his favorite post can be read here: Investing in the Unknown and Unknowable). He finishes with touching on lessons he’s learned from a variety of people: Ed Thorp, Lil’ Wayne, Nassim Taleb, Bill Gurley, and more. [July 25, 2019–1 hour, 36 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Overcast | Breaker | Website Link

• Freakonomics Radio: 386. How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War. This was a really fun episode on how the concept of the supermarket helped America display the benefits of capitalism and win the Cold War. It also discusses the economics behind the government’s intervention in the not-so “free-market” of farming, and how that has continued to today with the trade-war with China. [August 1, 2019–43 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Overcast | Breaker | Website Link

The Rest

• ***Must Listen***Revisionist History: Descend into the Particular. Gladwell’s most recent episode is an all-timer. He discusses a couple of police shootings that occurred in the past few years, and why instead of jumping to conclusions, we would be better off taking a step back and assessing the entire situation on a case by case basis. The idea can be applied to any aspect of life — every situation requires independent analysis and that we fight our biases. Note — this is the third part of a 3-episode series, but you don’t need to listen to the first two. [August 1, 2019–45 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Overcast | Breaker | Website Link

• Invest Like The Best: Brian Christian — How to Live with Computers. Christian has a really unique background, majoring in computer science in undergrad and philosophy in graduate school, and recently writing The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive and Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions. He covers how close we are to artificial general intelligence (the topic of his first book) and where it can take us in the future, the explore/exploit trade-off and how it applies to your personal life and business in general, and how humans can both work with computers and outperform them going forward. [July 30, 2019–1 hour] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Overcast | Breaker | Website Link

• How To! With Charles Duhigg: How To Withstand Pain. Best-Selling author Charles Duhigg’s new podcast dives into how we can mentally and physically push ourselves to the extreme. He takes some tips from Wim Hof, a man who has earned the nickname “The Ice Man” due to his insane ability to withstand cold, be it an ice bath or climbing (most of) Mount Everest without a shirt. He offers advice, including, 1) controlling your breathing, 2) exposing ourselves to cold, and hence, stress, and 3) program your mind to find peace. [July 30, 2019–29 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Overcast | Website Link