[The Weekend Bulletin] #147: A Podcast Special

A collection of some long and dense conversations

A digest of some interesting reading material from around the world-wide-web. Your weekly dose of multi-disciplinary reading.

Welcome to the first issue of 2023. Apologies for the longer than planned hiatus, but some extended travel and some personal developments held back the regular updates. Took a lot of flights over the last one plus month, and heard a lot of podcasts mid-air. This one is a compendium of some of them. Hope you enjoy them all.

• First-up is a follow up to a conversation between Alix Pasquet and Frederik Gieschen that we heard in #139. While the first one covered the journey of an institutional investor - from being an analyst to becoming a portfolio manager - this one covers the importance of networking in investment management. A lot of interesting tid-bits in this conversation from networking triads to mentoring to matching personality types and investing.

• Next up is a podcast that deals with many softer aspects of personal development. Whether you are a business owner, a team manager, or a solo-preneur, there is something that you can take away from this podcast. It deals with a range of topics from overcoming fear, to laying off people, to why companies should be lean, to how to manage your time and energy better. The speaker is a life coach having worked with many interesting founders, including Naval Ravikant. Better still, the podcast comes with a detailed document of a step by step process of everything that is being spoken about and more.

• This next podcast came highly recommended to me, and rightly so. This is a fantastic conversation covering so many first principles about life, business, trust, decision making, biases and more. You should definitely make time to listen to this one: Kunal Shah on The Knowledge Project.

  By design, gross margins exist when you allow human beings to jump their social status. And gross margins disappear when you do not help them increase their social status.

  One of the interesting things i always wonder about is that it's very easy to find super apps in Asia, but rarely you find super apps in a western societies. But it's also true for super stars and super companies and conglomerates. ...Every low trust society will have concentration of trust.

  Using emotions to detect symptoms is great, using emotions to solve or make decisions is terrible.

  One of the reasons I find this so helpful is that the sources of all our biases are blind spots. You know, we can only see through our frame of reference, but the world exists outside of our frame of reference. When you ask yourself like, what would Warren do? Or what would Steve do? Or, you know, what would Kunal do? What you're really doing is your getting out of your own head, and your seeing the world through a different lens. And that in and of itself starts to reveal blind spots. And the source of all bad decisions is blind spots.

• Wiring Your Brain for Performance Under Pressure - is the topic of this fantastic podcast. Host Sean Delaney interviews Dr. Dan Dworkis, who is an attending emergency physician and professor at USC’s Keck School of Medicine / Los Angeles County+USC Medical Center, and the founder of The Emergency Mind Project. Dan is the author of The Emergency Mind: Wiring Your Brain for Performance Under Pressure. His work focuses on human performance under pressure, especially in times of emergency and crisis. Anyone that deals with decision making in high pressure situations will find this conversation very useful.

• Next up is a very interesting conversation on consumer businesses. Host Patrick O'Shaughnessy interview John Fio on Invest Like the Best podcast. John has an interesting background as a product innovator and entrepreneur. The podcast covers his thoughts on product positioning, how to create an enduring brand that is separate from its founder, and what he learned from working for Justin Bieber, among other things. I loved his take on product positioning (the Coca-Cola story), his view that consumer businesses don't need funding, and his take on ideas vs execution.

• Lastly, not a podcast but an interesting presentation aptly titled 'Brave new world' that looks at investing from the macro view-point. It presents a lot of interesting perspectives on current and recent market developments, looking through the lens of liquidity and history.

Before we end this, a quick word: Since we are talking podcasts, I wanted to talk about this app that I have been using for a while now to listen to podcasts: snpid. Why I like the app is that is has an inbuilt AI-backed transcription capability which allows me to read the podcast transcript while listening to the podcast (the AI syncs the text and audio). Not only that, at any point I can highlight any portion of the podcast and export it (both audio as well as transcript - some of the notes shared above are straight from the app) to my note-taking app. This makes the whole experience a very rich one. Best of all, the app is free to download and use. I hope you find some good use of the app too.

Please note: I have no affiliation or any kind of commercial arrangement with the app or the company behind it.

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That's it for this weekend folks.

Have a wonderful week ahead!!

- Tejas Gutka

[Feb 04, 2022]