Podcasts

Dwarkesh Patel

Ada Palmer explains that Machiavelli wrote *The Prince* during a crisis of institutional legitimacy in Italy, where constant papal interference and broken city-state continuity created chaos. His infamous advice was shaped by firsthand experience with Cesare Borgia, against whom Florence's only survival strategy was calculated submission—buying time through abject loyalty until fortune (in the form of a pope's death) intervened.

Stripe

Charles Gorintin, CTO of Alan, recounts the company's decade-long journey from Silicon Valley roots to becoming a European healthtech leader with 4 million members, detailing their strategy of aggressive early internationalization, AI transformation through the medical agent MO, and the strategic imperative of building European technological sovereignty via Mistral.

Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson explains how human sensory limitations and evolutionary hunting adaptations shape perception and social behavior, arguing that our intrinsic need for engaged struggle makes utopian visions of passive bliss both psychologically impossible and politically catastrophic.

Adam Taggart | Thoughtful Money

Michael Every argues the US-Iran "peace deal" is largely performative—a vague memorandum with contradictory interpretations that masks deep skepticism about Iran's nuclear concessions, while Gulf states quietly prepare for future conflict by building infrastructure bypassing the Strait of Hormuz.

Impact Theory

Economic collapse triggers emotional reasoning and tribal conformity that historically enables populist authoritarianism and mass atrocities committed by ordinary people, but understanding these psychological vulnerabilities offers a path to prevent democratic collapse.

New York Times Podcasts

Consumer tech prices are skyrocketing as AI companies compete aggressively for limited RAM and storage components, reversing decades of affordability trends and making budget laptops and devices increasingly scarce for average buyers.

The Prof G Pod (Scott Galloway)

The historic $86 billion SpaceX IPO marked a turning point in financial markets as Chinese investors were explicitly banned from participating, reflecting a broader bilateral decoupling where both Washington and Beijing are restricting cross-border capital flows to protect strategic tech interests and redirect investment toward domestic priorities.

Stanford Online

Former U.S. Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil warns that healthcare systems are dangerously unprepared for AI-enabled cyberattacks from nation states, while simultaneously seeing rapid democratization of medical knowledge through tools like Open Evidence that are fundamentally reshaping the doctor-patient relationship.

The David Lin Report

Trader Todd Horwitz warns that despite markets rallying on the Iran deal resolution, underlying economic deterioration and Federal Reserve rate hike expectations create a dangerous setup where investors should take profits and prepare for significant downside in stocks and oil.

Stanford Online

Sam Altman explains how AI has fundamentally altered startup economics, enabling small teams to achieve unprecedented scale, while sharing OpenAI's journey from research lab to product company and arguing that pushing systems beyond conventional scaling limits often reveals emergent properties that consensus thinking misses.

The David Lin Report

Fund manager Adrian Day argues that robust headline jobs data masks underlying labor market weakness, while oil price shocks from geopolitical tensions threaten to trigger global recession and force central banks to maintain restrictive monetary policies despite economic fragility.

Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson argues that genuine character development requires confronting our capacity for evil, abandoning intellectual arrogance, and committing to radical truth-telling by eliminating speech that creates internal weakness.