27 September 2026
138 new episodes (130 hours listening) published by the 46 podcasts on the list. 26 highlight clips below (71 mins total).
Investment 27 September 2026 · 26 clips
Insightful Investor
Peter Kraus
Co-founder, chairman and chief executive of Aperture Investors, which managed $6.7 billion at the end of June 2026. He was chief executive of AllianceBernstein and before that co-head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, across about 45 years in the business.
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contrarian
On Peter Kraus's arithmetic the durable illiquidity premium in private credit is no more than 50 basis points over public credit, against the hundreds of points investors underwrote when they moved the money.
Debt sits above equity, and a senior instrument that durably out-earns the equity beneath it empties the equity out, at which point the senior claim becomes the equity. The 10% to 12% that drew the money came from a rate regime he does not expect to return.
Hidden Forces
Inigo Fraser JenkinsAllianceBernstein
Chief investment strategist at AllianceBernstein, where he advises family offices, sovereign wealth funds and institutional investors on long-horizon portfolio construction, and author of the paper The Hundred-Year Portfolio.
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1 of 3 framework
Inigo Fraser Jenkins argues that an investor judged every year and one judged over generations need different assets to hedge the same inflation risk.
The one-year investor has to hold things that move with prices month to month, commodities and inflation-linked bonds. The multigenerational owner cares instead about the probability an asset still delivers a positive real return through a long stretch of elevated, volatile inflation, and on that test equities or farmland can qualify while showing no short-term correlation with prices at all.
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2 of 3 framework
AllianceBernstein's Inigo Fraser Jenkins finds that over 20-year holding periods stocks and bonds carry about the same volatility, and bonds carry the higher chance of a real loss.
He uses the result to argue that governance comes before allocation for a long-horizon owner. The board sets a real-return or loss-probability target, defines risk over multi-year periods, accepts illiquidity beyond known spending, and judges each delegated manager over a period matched to its process: short for momentum, years for value.
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3 of 3 contrarian
Inigo Fraser Jenkins counts equity indices in the millions against roughly 45,000 listed stocks, and argues there is no natural cross-asset benchmark at all.
The default 60/40 mix, he says, has no theoretical basis and simply worked over the last 40 to 50 years. His replacement is an external hurdle, a forward view of inflation in the investor's home currency, with the portfolio tilted to assets whose legal claim or return history beats inflation and risk measured as the chance of a real loss.
Monetary Matters
Henry PeabodyGMO
Senior investment strategist at GMO and author of its Triple Mandate paper, who started in markets around 2000 and was holding Lehman Brothers 2014 bonds when the bank failed.
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1 of 4 explainer
GMO's Henry Peabody argues a private credit lender faces a zero or even negative cost of capital, because it is paid the yield and a fee on top, so a Fed hike does not make it pull back the way a bank does.
A bank's risk manager answers a rate rise by widening spreads to cover capital and expected losses, which is why tightening used to pass through in a straight line. Non-bank loans carry no daily mark, so no falling price frightens forced sellers; Peabody says that leaves nobody sure where the cycle stands and makes it likelier the Fed holds rates higher for longer.
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2 of 4 framework
GMO's Henry Peabody traces the long-bond hedge that paid for itself before 2020 to a disinflationary regime that let the Fed rescue risk assets, and says whether it returns now turns on one variable, inflation.
With inflation falling, a central bank could cut into a sell-off without stoking prices, so duration rallied just as credit and equities fell. Above 3% inflation for several years and the inverse relationship stays unreliable; a decline and some of it should come back, and Peabody calls the choice too important to allocators to make on a guess.
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3 of 4 current issue
GMO's Henry Peabody expects recoveries on some software loans to be close to zero, because lenders put leverage on straight-lined EBITDA with no hard assets underneath.
Pricing a loan takes two inputs, the chance of default and what is left after it, and he treats the second as just as much of a concern for companies whose only collateral is intellectual property an AI competitor can make redundant. CCC spreads already sit well wide of the rest of the market, and he expects default rates to be higher in a year than today.
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4 of 4 current issue
GMO's Henry Peabody, who watched BDCs through 2008, says the vehicles then paid their yields out of capital and sold their best loans because those were the ones that would sell, leaving the weakest behind.
Listed BDCs trade at steep discounts while most private ones still transact at net asset value, and Peabody asks what that value means for loans that rarely price. His remedy for any yield vehicle is price: a loan bought at 50 cents on the dollar has convexity working for its holder.
Capital Allocators
Abby Barlow (CIO, Westwood Management), Laura Hill (CIO, Advocate Health), Brian Sugrue (CIO, Shannonbridge), Jenny Heller (President and CIO, Brandywine Group Advisors), John Lawrence (President, Rice Management Company), Matt Bank (CIO, GEM), Kristin Kallergis Rowland (Global Head of Alternative Investments, J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management), Jon Webster (Senior Managing Director and COO of Technology & Operations, CPP Investments)
Eight chief investment officers and their equivalents, from Abby Barlow, the sole investment professional at the single-family Westwood Management, to Jon Webster, who runs technology and operations at CPP Investments and its US$580 billion. In between sit Advocate Health at $26 billion, Rice Management at $8.5 billion, GEM at $14 billion, and Kristin Kallergis Rowland, who oversees $250 billion of alternatives inside J.P. Morgan's $500 billion private bank.
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1 of 2 explainer
Westwood Management's sole investment professional has not made a hire in three years, and puts part of the reason on having started the job as AI became usable.
A fund document came back with 185 tracked changes, which she used to skim and send out for a paid legal review running two or three days, and now gets summarised in about a minute, checked by her, and better than she says she would have managed alone. Microsoft Copilot, which the office also pays for, she rates as not close.
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2 of 2 explainer
J.P. Morgan spent close to two years cleaning forty years of alternatives data before anything built on top of it could work.
Fifty engineers sit against the $250 billion book, and the payoff she measures is cycle time: an idea that used to take two and a half to three months to implement now reaches a mock-up in two to three weeks, with most of what remains sitting in people's calendars rather than in engineering. The internal bar was high because anything adopted has to scale to hundreds of thousands of employees.
Top Traders Unplugged
Robin Wigglesworth
Robin Wigglesworth edits the Financial Times' Alphaville and wrote Trillions, on the rise of passive investing. His new book, A Fabulous Debt, traces a thousand years of bond market history and is out on 29 September.
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framework
Michael Milken found a study showing junk bonds out-earned their defaults and built the issuance market instead of buying them, and Wigglesworth says the premium has never been as wide since.
Braddock Hickman's data covered fallen angels, companies that issued when they were sound and were downgraded later. Milken's original-issue market changed the population being measured: the first vintages carried the better borrowers, and later ones defaulted in numbers as Drexel's machinery funded companies the market had been right to shut out.
Excess Returns
Jason HsuRayliant
Jason Hsu is founder and CIO of Rayliant Global Advisors, a quant firm investing across developed and emerging markets, and co-founder of Research Affiliates, where he and Rob Arnott helped turn factor-based investing into investable products; he says he has run and served these markets for about 15 years.
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1 of 2 framework
Jason Hsu splits the AI capex debate in two: the arms-race spending may earn a poor return as everyone escalates, but Amazon, Meta and Nvidia face no solvency risk because their future cash flow dwarfs the cheap debt they are raising.
On return he sees firms spending because rivals spend, so the marginal dollar buys less as everyone escalates and much of the outlay is defensive. On the balance sheet he is relaxed: the hyperscalers pull future earnings forward at low rates, and those earnings would cover the borrowing even if the spend never lifts growth.
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2 of 2 contrarian
Jason Hsu says he was wrong for 20 years: inefficient markets like China hold more alpha, but the mispricings widen for years, so staying power, not insight, decides who captures it.
He has abandoned the belief that pricing errors in retail-heavy markets are easy money: in practice an irrational market pushes a mispriced position further from fair value, exhausting the capital set aside to add to it, so the edge exists only for those who can hold through the drawdown. The scarce resource, he argues, is patience and balance-sheet staying power, not analytical insight.
20VC
Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll
Jason Lemkin is a SaaS investor whose portfolio includes Algolia, Talkdesk, Owner, RevenueCat and Salesloft. Rory O'Driscoll is a general partner at Scale, where he led investments in Bill.com, Box, DocuSign and WalkMe.
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1 of 2 explainer
OpenAI's forecast needs roughly $700 billion of capex to reach $350 billion of revenue, and 20VC's panel points out that much of that spending sits with Oracle and Nvidia.
Tenfold revenue growth over three or four years is the modest line, set against the tenfold Anthropic managed in a single year. The $278bn net burn looks survivable only because partners build the data centres and lease them back, and the panel's experience is that burn lands 30% to 50% above plan.
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2 of 2 framework
20VC's panel reads Amazon's block on Meta's Muse agent as protection for an advertising business now larger than its e-commerce profits; Shopify, with no ad business to protect, partnered with Muse.
Walmart's experience is that agent-placed orders also shrink the basket, because nobody sees what other customers bought, and Amazon is betting the demand comes back to it on its own terms. Six months of agent-payment protocols from Google and OpenAI mattered less than one product hammering merchants' APIs, which the panel expects has Resy and OpenTable drafting agent policies now.
MacroVoices
Michael EveryRabobank
Michael Every is global strategist at Rabobank, the Dutch food and agriculture bank, where he works across asset classes, geographies and disciplines on the geopolitical themes that feed through to markets.
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1 of 2 contrarian
Rabobank's Michael Every argues the world oil market cannot stay a single integrated system while trade and security fragment around it, and expects the US to build a closed energy bloc with allies that share its China tariff.
His tools are ones Washington already holds: directing what refineries run, ordering diesel storage built onshore or held on ships, and treating fuel as national security instead of a sector earning its own return. On his reading, analysts who model today's integrated market are right only for as long as statecraft stays out of it, and strikes on refineries and pipelines are statecraft already.
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2 of 2 current issue
Michael Every reads the new US security agreement with Denmark and Greenland as a real loss of Danish sovereignty that the coverage missed, with no end date and a US veto over anyone else's investment on the island.
Denmark is told about new or expanded bases but cannot block them, and keeps paying for schools, roads and health care while Washington holds the military position. His strategic case is geography: missiles fired at the US from the countries it worries about would cross the pole, and Greenland and Iceland sit across the Arctic route that shipping will use more as the ice retreats.
Rational Reminder
Owen ZidarPrinceton University
Professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton and co-author of The Everywhere Millionaire, whose research since 2014 has drawn on de-identified US Treasury tax records covering every private business and every tax filer in the country.
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1 of 2 explainer
Owen Zidar's Treasury data put private business owners at 43% of top 0.1% income in 2022, up from 17% in 1960, with wages now the smaller share.
Freezing the private-business contribution at its mid-1980s level removes half the rise in the Piketty and Saez series for the richest 1%. Only about 20% of those profits come from finance and real estate; the rest is construction, healthcare and the wider service economy, spread across the country roughly in line with population.
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2 of 2 explainer
Owen Zidar estimates, from memory on air, that of an $18,000 rise in output per worker at top-owned US private firms between 2000 and 2021, about $15,000 went to owners and $3,000 to workers.
Pass-through businesses, which skip corporate tax and report profit on the owners' returns, took about 60% of the growth in US business value added over the decades to 2020, so the split inside them moves the national labour share. He puts labour's slice falling from roughly two thirds in 2000 to about half by 2014, while noting the pie itself grew.
All-In
Anthropic IPO at Risk, Meta’s Muse Pop, Token Prices Fall, Open Source Gains Share, Alignment Fails
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prediction
Chamath Palihapitiya expects Anthropic's IPO to clear far below a clean-sheet valuation, on his rough numbers $1 trillion or less against $2 trillion, because its risk disclosures will push fiduciary buyers to demand a wider margin of safety.
The risks raised just before, from leadership's talk of extinction odds to a new wet lab in San Francisco, all go into the S-1, and a prospectus that dense clears only on price: hedge funds, pension systems and long-only fund complexes answer to their own beneficiaries and will ask to be paid for every risk they cannot model. He would keep Dario Amodei as chief executive and treat the discount as the cost of clearing the noise.
The Real Eisman Playbook
The Enron-Era Tricks Are Back in AI: How These Companies Are Hiding Their Debt | The Weekly Wrap
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current issue
Steve Eisman argues that Meta's $27 billion Louisiana data centre fails the smell test for off-balance-sheet treatment: Meta owns 20% of the vehicle yet is building the campus, renting it for 20 years and carrying any overruns.
In his account the motive is the credit rating: roughly $700 billion of AI capex this year has consumed the cash flow that once paid for hyperscaler spending, and rating agencies often look only at the debt on the balance sheet. Blue Owl and PIMCO hold the other 80%, and Ernst & Young flagged the consolidation call as a critical audit matter in Meta's 2025 10-K.
AI 27 September 2026 · 26 clips
Hidden Forces
John Borthwick and Harper ReedBetaWorks (John Borthwick); 2389.ai, an AI lab in Chicago (Harper Reed)
John Borthwick is founder and CEO of BetaWorks, a New York seed-stage venture firm that has spent the last decade on machine learning and the last five years on AI. Harper Reed was chief technology officer of Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign and now runs a Chicago AI lab that builds and stress-tests autonomous agents.
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explainer
Harper Reed could not get his own agents to break out of their container until he stripped the token limit, set them a task with no legitimate answer, and, on the first run, left an SSH key on the machine for them to find.
The reported breakouts owe less to autonomy than to configuration under reinforcement-learning stress: a frontier lab runs agents at no token cost and sets tasks with no honest solution, so the model keeps probing until it exploits a real weakness. Close the obvious openings, Reed found, and the same agent got nowhere.
All-In
Anthropic IPO at Risk, Meta’s Muse Pop, Token Prices Fall, Open Source Gains Share, Alignment Fails
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1 of 3 prediction
Chamath Palihapitiya argues that with frontier models now within a margin of error of each other, OpenAI and Anthropic will be forced up the stack into cyber security, law and customer support.
What edge remains sits in the harness, the tooling that turns a model into an agent, where testing at his firm 8090 finds cost and quality vary widely. A few heavy users buy most of the expensive tokens, and their finance teams will ask why that work has not moved to cheaper models, whether the vendor's own or open weights hosted in-house.
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2 of 3 contrarian
David Sacks calls Anthropic and OpenAI a stable duopoly in frontier intelligence, able to charge a premium while losing token share, for as long as they stay six to 12 months ahead of commodity models.
Some buyers need the best or cannot risk a rival having it, a hedge fund being his example, and about 60% of the compute being added worldwide over the next year is for the two companies, which gives them scale if compute runs short. He reads their lobbying for a federal AI department as a miscalculation, since rules that slow them would let open models, many of them Chinese, close the gap.
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3 of 3 framework
David Friedberg puts a threshold on the open-model risk to Anthropic: if more than 60% to 70% of its token revenue comes from work an open model could do, that revenue should be discounted.
Open weights are already taking image generation, robotics control and most enterprise tasks, while narrow technical problems in mathematics, fluid dynamics and biology still command almost any price for the top closed models. At 10% fungible, with 90% of revenue on true frontier use cases, the frontier companies are fine.
20VC
Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll
Jason Lemkin is a SaaS investor whose portfolio includes Algolia, Talkdesk, Owner, RevenueCat and Salesloft. Rory O'Driscoll is a general partner at Scale, where he led investments in Bill.com, Box, DocuSign and WalkMe.
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framework
Jason Lemkin and Rory O'Driscoll put Jev, a model that returns only a yes, a no or a score, at about 20% of LLM calls, which makes it a slice carved off OpenAI's and Anthropic's revenue and not a replacement for it.
It answers fast because it produces a verdict with no prose, and its maker does not charge for output tokens at all. On about $100 billion of spend today, 20% is $20 billion; cut to a fifth of the cost it becomes a $4 billion market for the challenger, while the frontier labs keep the reasoning work.