LP Vol 12 - Favorite Podcasts of 2020
The Power of Podcasts
A great book is an author's highly compressed version of a complicated idea. A book is an incredible piece of technology for conveying years, if not decades, of human experience and laborious research into a taut and compelling experience a reader can devour in a matter of days. Books are how humanity has encoded lessons of success and failure for future generations to learn from asynchronously so that they don't have to learn from first-hand experience.
But not all of today's successful business people and world experts have the time, tenacity or desire to write a book about what they know. Podcasts have become a refuge for a level of intellectual discourse that has long since left the platforms of radio and television. Through the power of the Internet, Twitter and modern computing, it has never been easier for curious and motivated truth-seekers to sit down with emerging and renowned experts to chop it up at length about what is happening in the world and what might be coming next.
There's a bunch of interesting stuff happening in the podcasting industry writ large - Spotify has spent nearly a billion dollars over the past two years
on Joe Rogan, Bill Simmons, and other podcast-related acquisitions as they attempt to create a dominant position in an emerging ad-tech category and lower their content costs. The drama surrounding the Call Your Daddy podcast last year was a wild look at how profitable and culturally meaningful a new podcast can become in record time.
On the purely tech side, the openness of podcast as a media format (distribution is based on the open-source RSS format and files are encoded as open-source MP3s) has enabled a healthy variety of consumer app experiences. As an Apple nerd, I am partial to Overcast as it has a robust sync engine that allows easy handoff for listening across my phone, iPad and now even my laptop. The solo developer, a podcaster himself, has built useful end-user features like Smart Speed that dynamically edits dead space during playback (independent of playback speed) and Voice Boost which provides EQ adjustments to improve audio quality during playback. The app even tells you how much time Smart Speed has saved you - in my case 826 hours over my 5 years of using the app!
I'm also a 2x playback truther and several independent podcast apps (Overcast and Castro on iOS both for sure) have done innovative audio engineering work to eliminate annoying interference or other audio artifacts when using >1x speed. While this doesn't work for everyone, I for one appreciate the ability to compress real-time as it allows me to keep up with and be exposed to a wider variety of conversations.
Finally, as creators have figured out how to turn podcasting from a side gig into a full-time gig (usually monetizing through subscriptions), you're seeing the best conversationalists offer their paying members premium features like extended or extra episodes and, close to my heart, professionally-transcribed transcripts. People are going deeper, getting weirder, and also making the content available in different mediums that facilitate note-taking and broader sharing/distribution and idea compounding.
Here are my personal favorite conversations from 2020. They are deep, nerdy and sometimes hard to follow discussions. But they are most definitely not boring. If you give any of them a try, you're sure to learn something.
💡 Sam Hinkie - Find Your People
Sam Hinkie is the former General Manager of the Philadelphia 76ers who instilled the mantra of "Trust the Process". Forced out when new ownership stopped trusting the process, he's emerged as a new solo-GP VC and sat down for a wide-ranging conversation on how to evaluate talent, the power of culture, and the returns to writing well.
Anyone that manages people or spends time interviewing should listen to this
💸 Mike Green - The End Game
Mike Green is a hedge fund manager at Logica, but spent the last few years as the private wealth manager of Peter Thiel's family office. In both the hedge fund world and the subculture that is FinTwit, he is best known for his views on how passive investing is a ticking time bomb that is going to cause the next great financial market implosion.
I will have more to say on this in a future transmission, but I think it's important to consider what kind of systemic downside may exist when more and more investors follow the advice of buying passive vehicles like Vanguard index funds. There's also some good stuff in here about the first principles thinking, the value to hiring youthful and inexperienced people, and Mike's love of The Princess Bride.
🔑 Nick Kokonas - Know What You Are Selling
Nick Kokonas is the co-owner of The Alinea Group which owns several Chicago restaurants including Alinea, a former world #1. He is also the CEO of Tock, which provides software tools to restaurants and small businesses and pioneered the selling of tickets to dining experiences. He's also a former derivatives trader and overall smart, thoughtful and insightful business mind.
This deep dive hits on decision-making in times of crisis, the fusion of creativity and business first principles that built my favorite restaurant in the world, and a close-up look on how a multi-million dollar hospitality business innovated their way through COVID (and how Nick then applied those lessons at Tock which enabled thousands of restaurants worldwide to do the same).
🤣 Jerry Seinfeld - The Tim Ferriss Show
You may only know Tim Ferriss as the 4-hour workweek guy, and that would be a real shame. He's emerged as one of the best interviewers and podcasters out there, period. Full stop. It's worth looking through the backlog and dropping the needle on a guest of your liking, you'll be impressed.
And if you want a suggestion, this conversation with the great Jerry Seinfeld is a great place to start. It's a rumination on stand-up, creativity, writing, and the power of simple systems.
🇺🇸 Tom Ricks on What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and the Romans - Hidden Forces
My single best discovery of 2020 was the Hidden Forces podcast. It's well-worth your time for a wide spectrum of guests exploring topics of "culture, philosophy, economics, technology, social science, and the hard sciences".
Tom Ricks is the former Pentagon reporter for the Washington Post, and the author behind a number of books including Fiasco, generally thought of as the single best volume describing the 2003 Iraq War.
This conversation goes into his latest book, First Principles, looking at the sources of inspiration the Founding Fathers drew upon when crafting the American Experiment over 200 years ago. It's a great palate cleanser for this upcoming week of transition (and the shortest of all of these suggestions at roughly an hour!).
In some personal news, after a six month sabbatical, I head back to the working world this week. I have really enjoyed putting this newsletter together. If it hasn't been obvious, there hasn't been a ton of structure, rhyme, or reason to these weekly glimpses into my brain - I've been throwing a ton of stuff against the wall to see what worked and what resonated.
I plan to keep this going at a weekly-ish pace, and to the extent you have the time and inclination, I’d appreciate any feedback you have on what you've enjoyed the most so far.
I'm always trying to improve, and always looking to give the people more of what they want.
Thank you for indulging me.
W