4 October 2026
145 new episodes (139 hours listening) published by the 50 podcasts on the list. 30 highlight clips below (88 mins total).
Investment 4 October 2026 · 30 clips
Alpha Exchange
Brij KhuranaWellington Management
Fixed income portfolio manager at Wellington Management, where he runs an unconstrained, go-anywhere bond strategy across rates, credit and currencies. He joined Wellington about ten years ago and has traded markets for around 25 years.
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1 of 2 contrarian
Brij Khurana argues markets in Australia and New Zealand are pricing a hiking cycle that would be a mistake, given rising unemployment and supply-driven inflation.
Variable-rate mortgages pass rate rises into consumption faster than in the US, sovereign balance sheets are stronger and curves are steep, so some of those bonds out-yield Treasuries even hedged back to dollars. Emerging market local bonds are his second pick, with real rates of 6% to 8%, cheap currencies and a return of almost 18% last year.
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2 of 2 current issue
Brij Khurana counts close to $1 trillion of new bank loans to non-depository financial institutions in six or seven years, money that private credit then lends on.
Banks favour these loans because the capital charge is lighter than on direct corporate lending, and some chip financing deals look circular to him in a way that recalls pre-GFC lending outside banks. He expects the Fed to cut those charges and argues it should raise them, keeping more of the credit where regulators can see it.
Monetary Matters
Ed Zitron
Author of the Where's Your Ed At newsletter and host of the Better Offline podcast, who has published his own reporting on OpenAI's financials.
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1 of 3 explainer
Ed Zitron cites a report that Anthropic's $65 billion July run rate was a single day's revenue, about $178 million, multiplied by 365.
Zitron accepts annualising subscriptions but not API calls, which do not recur, and neither the labs nor Microsoft say which method they use. He treats recurring revenue as contracted revenue, and reads a $30 billion jump in OpenAI's figure within a month as a sign something changed.
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2 of 3 current issue
Ed Zitron counts $413 billion of non-cancellable compute commitments in Anthropic's leaked filing, $252 billion owed to Microsoft, Google and Amazon and $161.2 billion to Broadcom TPU leases.
The $252 billion already sits inside analysts' revenue expectations for those three hyperscalers, so a shortfall at Anthropic would run straight into their guidance. One Broadcom arrangement, a $35 billion loan package involving Apollo and Blackstone on Zitron's account, leaves Anthropic responsible for only $5 billion in an insolvency.
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3 of 3 current issue
Ed Zitron reprices CoreWeave's roughly $7 billion of bonds at about 13% at today's spreads, and puts Meta's Hyperion data-centre debt at 89 cents on the dollar.
Hyperscalers can carry higher borrowing costs; the strain lands on neoclouds, on Oracle, whose borrowings already price like junk while it sits one notch above it, and on project vehicles such as Hyperion, where, he says, Meta owns 20% and keeps the liability off its balance sheet. A downgrade would force funds barred from junk to sell Oracle paper.
The Real Eisman Playbook
Why Private Equity's Software Bet Is Going to Zero | The Weekly Wrap
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1 of 2 framework
Steve Eisman works through a software buyout half-funded with floating debt in 2022 and down 50% since: at its 2027 refinancing the equity is worth nothing even with cash flow intact, and he expects most sponsors to walk away.
Corporate loans pay only interest, so the whole principal must be refinanced at maturity, and the lender will want the equity cushion rebuilt. That means a second cheque the size of the first, leaving the owner with $1 billion of its own money in a company now worth $500 million.
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2 of 2 current issue
Steve Eisman counts SaaS as 90% of private equity's tech buyouts and a quarter of the whole buyout market, with $256 billion of US software deals in the 2021 peak alone.
Sponsors favoured the model because subscription revenue is easy to forecast: customers times price, plus assumed growth and price rises, then debt on top. Since 2023 two things have moved against it: floating-rate interest costs have climbed with rates, and the AI scare has cut what investors will pay for the same revenue.
The Credit Edge
H.T. FlanaganKirkland & Ellis
Debt finance partner at Kirkland & Ellis in New York and Dallas, advising private credit funds and alternative lenders on acquisition financings, liability management, special situations and hybrid capital. About 10% of his practice is on the company side of liability management deals.
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1 of 2 current issue
Kirkland & Ellis's H.T. Flanagan agrees with Bloomberg Intelligence that BDC non-accrual rates holding under 2% hide a wave of restructurings.
Lenders know BDC books are public and manage distressed credits with that in mind. Some PIK toggles go to healthy borrowers building cash for acquisitions and some to borrowers that cannot pay; the filings do not say which, and even a switch from cash pay to PIK is not conclusive.
Audio streamed from the publisher.
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2 of 2 contrarian
H.T. Flanagan of Kirkland & Ellis says private credit documents would permit liability management exercises, and sponsors mostly decline because the same lenders fund their next ten buyouts.
In the broadly syndicated market, amend-and-extend deals with harsh terms for holders who stay out have become the standard tool. The untested case is the mega-unitranche, 10 to 15 lenders that have so far behaved as a club and have yet to face a real maturity wall.
Audio streamed from the publisher.
Odd Lots
Luke KawaSherwood News
Head of markets at Sherwood News and a former Bloomberg News colleague of the hosts, who sat in asset allocation meetings at UBS through 2022 and 2023. He draws on Robinhood's retail trading data.
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current issue
Luke Kawa cites a Goldman note estimating that about half of this year's earnings growth is driven by hyperscaler capex alone.
A second Goldman study finds multiples across the Russell 1000 explained, more than usual, by three-year forward sales estimates, while one-year revisions have almost no explanatory power. Near-term sales are priced in, so the premium goes to stocks with high long-dated estimates, and his own screen of those surfaces Bloom Energy and the optical names.
Audio streamed from the publisher.
Forward Guidance
Aidan GarribPGM Global
Head of global macro strategy and research at PGM Global, recently acquired by National Bank of Canada, where his team publishes cross-asset trade ideas for institutional investors.
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1 of 2 current issue
Aidan Garrib argues Washington is engineering captive demand for Treasuries, with US pension plans, now funded above 100% on average, among the next buyers.
A plan 90% funded with liabilities growing 3% a year needs about 3.3%, which a 10-year Treasury now covers; he cites LGIM and BlackRock data for the funding levels. Banks freed from the SLR and stablecoin issuers buying bills fill the rest of the curve.
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2 of 2 current issue
Aidan Garrib cites Amazon guidance that memory prices will absorb 30% of its 2026 AI data centre spend, up from 8% in 2023-24.
Hyperscaler AI capex grew over 90% in 2026 and is forecast to slow to 30% to 35% next year, and he reads Microsoft's $190 billion guide as carrying roughly $25 billion of chip-shortage pricing.
a16z
Sarah Wang, Alex Immerman, Santiago Rodrigueza16z
Partners on a16z's growth team, presenting the firm's annual State of Markets synthesis of trends in technology, AI, infrastructure and markets.
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1 of 2 current issue
a16z says secondary trades in late-stage private companies now clear at close to no discount to the last round, after meaningful discounts through 2022 to 2024.
Carta data puts employee participation in tender offers at only 58%, which the partners read as staff choosing to hold. Tenders also let a private company reset its price more often, giving it current stock to recruit with and to pay for acquisitions.
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2 of 2 current issue
a16z finds roughly 75% of listed software companies profitable and only 30% growing at 20% or more, with fewer than five growing above 30%.
New SaaS projects are the easiest place for a CIO to find an AI budget, and incumbents are trying to sell AI products into customers who are locked in. The partners' bar for putting the SaaS fear to rest is 98% gross dollar retention held and revenue growth re-accelerating by 10% or more, with security, observability and vertical software already holding up best.
Rational Reminder
Victor HaghaniElm Wealth
Founder of Elm Wealth and co-author of The Missing Billionaires, with more than 40 years in markets since starting on Wall Street in 1984. A founding partner of Long-Term Capital Management, the hedge fund that collapsed in 1998.
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1 of 2 framework
Elm Wealth handed players tomorrow's Wall Street Journal front page and on average players still did poorly, with over-large bets a main cause, and the AI models it later tested called direction well and made the same mistake.
Bond trades were the easier call, since strong economic news is ambiguous for stocks and plainly bad for bonds, yet players preferred stocks. Six or seven senior macro traders hit only about 60% of their calls and doubled their capital over 15 rounds, and the paid AI models improved further once told to read Elm's book on sizing.
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2 of 2 current issue
Victor Haghani explains the US market's rise through higher rates, deficits and tariffs with flows: over a trillion dollars a year of buybacks, about as much again into 401(k) plans, and almost no IPOs.
On that arithmetic a couple of points of market value or more disappear each year, and extrapolators chasing a 10%-a-year story add to it. He sees the limit where equity becomes cheaper than debt and boards start issuing, as Japan did in the late 1980s, and puts it perhaps 50% higher, or at 10-year Treasuries near 6% with TIPS at 3.5%.
Odd Lots
David KangQatar Airways
Group treasurer, formally vice president of treasury and risk management, at Qatar Airways from 2011 to 2013, hedging consumption of 24 to 27 million barrels in his first year; earlier he traded FX and rates at banks, worked as an oil broker and was a structurer at J.P. Morgan.
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1 of 2 framework
David Kang recalls Qatar Airways' chief executive rejecting the textbook defence of a $360 million hedge loss: falling oil also meant emptier planes and unburned fuel.
The standard answer, that swap losses are offset by cheaper physical jet, assumes the airline still flies its schedule. In a slump it does not, so the swaps lose, the saving never arrives on grounded aircraft and fares fall together; the mandate that followed was no more red on the balance sheet.
Audio streamed from the publisher.
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2 of 2 framework
David Kang found Qatar Airways was long oil through its fuel surcharge, 75% correlated with Brent, and used that to sell a strangle against its fuel bill.
Calls sold above $120 were covered by surcharge revenue that rises with oil, and puts sold below $80 by cheaper physical jet, so neither leg was naked. The structure took no view on direction, only that oil holding near $100 would mean-revert within a band over five months.
Audio streamed from the publisher.
20VC
Chase LochmillerCrusoe
Co-founder and chief executive of Crusoe, which builds and powers data centres for AI training and inference. Crusoe has raised about $6.4 billion in equity, most recently a $3.9 billion Series F at a $30.9 billion valuation, from backers including NVIDIA and Founders Fund.
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contrarian
Crusoe says renting an Nvidia Hopper GPU now costs more per hour than in 2023, when the chips were new and the doubt was whether they would be worth anything after year three.
Chase Lochmiller depreciates over six years, the industry standard, and expects to stretch that by selling older silicon through managed inference, where buyers pay for cheap tokens and never see which hardware served them. Early GPU financings demanded fast payback and heavy debt service coverage, which he thinks underestimated how quickly developers turn spare compute into paid services.
Latent Space
Dylan Patel and JordanSemiAnalysis
SemiAnalysis's ClusterMAX ratings now track 323 GPU cloud providers; Jordan leads the ClusterMAX testing after 10 years designing hardware systems at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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1 of 2 explainer
SemiAnalysis argues Nvidia's Poolside deal, put at $7 billion to $12 billion, costs it little, because the cash comes back as GPU orders once Poolside turns itself into a gigawatt-scale cloud.
In the episode's illustration, with $10 billion on the balance sheet after a further raise and lenders at 75% loan to value, Poolside could fund about $40 billion of build-out. The transaction buys researchers for Nemotron and creates a new customer in one move, and the episode suggests other labs should seek the same terms.
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2 of 2 framework
SemiAnalysis's stock-market research favoured Nebius over CoreWeave while still rating CoreWeave the better cloud, because Nebius's shorter contracts let it reprice as GPU rental prices spiked.
The same split runs through the rest of its coverage: Iris Energy's managed service is one SemiAnalysis tells buyers to avoid, yet its new data centre was leased as bare metal to Microsoft. A provider with a credible gigawatt site can rank last on service quality and still make a great deal of money, and whether its shares are cheap is a separate question of price.
a16z
Diogo AlmeidaTypeSafe AI
Diogo Almeida founded TypeSafe AI, maker of the Jev model, after Google Brain and OpenAI, where he worked on RLHF from late 2021 and helped release the resulting model.
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contrarian
Diogo Almeida expects the large SaaS incumbents to be among the biggest winners from AI, the reverse of the sell-off coding agents set off, while declining to forecast the stocks.
His reasoning is that the market priced software as easy to replicate, when most of the value sits beneath the surface and in knowing which customer workflows to automate. The hosts add the distribution half: a SaaS company has already spent its capital reaching every customer, so a better product lands on an installed base.
MacroVoices
David RosenbergRosenberg Research
Founder of Rosenberg Research, which he started in 2020 and which he says serves 2,300 clients in 40 countries. He began his career in October 1987 and wrote his first gold report at Gluskin Sheff in February 2010.
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1 of 2 contrarian
David Rosenberg puts most of the rise in US yields this year down to regime change at the Fed under Kevin Warsh, ahead of AI capex or federal deficits.
Three of the four largest hyperscalers are now free-cash-flow negative and borrowing at the long end, which lifts real rates, yet the national debt passed $39 trillion in February with the 10-year below 4%. Markets have swung from pricing one or two cuts to three or four more hikes, and the 10-year is up about 90 basis points since Warsh took over in June.
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2 of 2 contrarian
David Rosenberg argues an energy shock becomes lasting inflation only if it feeds into wages, and cites a 29 September speech by the New York Fed's John Williams finding no sign of it.
The 2021 to 2023 spiral had a hot labour market behind it, with quits, hiring and openings surging, whereas nominal wage growth is now slowing. Without that link a price shock works like a tax increase, squeezing real incomes and pulling down the discretionary 80% to 85% of prices, and labour, at 30% of retail costs, outweighs energy six to one.
AI 4 October 2026 · 30 clips
All-In
Trump’s Super Intelligence Summit, AI Safety Accord, GDP Beats, Midterm Predictions
The four hosts, with no guest this week; Sacks and Palihapitiya attended the White House summit discussed in the first segment.
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explainer
David Sacks argues the White House accord on superintelligence binds its six signatories even though signing was voluntary, because it hangs their safety controls off the board's fiduciary duty.
Each lab sets internal controls, an internal team checks them, external auditors verify the checking, and the reports go to an independent committee of the board, which cannot ignore an auditor's report without putting its directors' and officers' insurance at risk. Behind that, the FTC and SEC can enforce the companies' public commitments, so nothing waits on legislation or an international treaty.
ChinaTalk
Julian Gewirtz
Author and former China director on President Biden's National Security Council staff, who has spent much of his academic career on China's turning points: the death of Mao, Tiananmen and WTO accession.
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framework
Julian Gewirtz argues China's Minister of State Security can only name an AI risk in public if the Communist Party already claims a solution, unlike American AI chiefs who air risks they cannot solve.
Read that way, the minister's essay on AI and regime security says more about what Beijing believes it can control than about what it fears. Gewirtz sets it against 25 years of American predictions that the internet would change China's political system, which Beijing met by building the firewall.
The Cognitive Revolution
Jeremie Harris, Edouard Harris, Steve Hou, Joel Borgen and Daniel McKinnonGladstone AI; Silicon Data; Gamow Labs
Jeremie and Edouard Harris, of Gladstone AI, drew on interviews with about a dozen State Department diplomats who have negotiated with China. Steve Hou leads research at Silicon Data, which builds price indexes for rented GPU capacity and model tokens.
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current issue
Silicon Data's Steve Hou finds hyperscalers consistently charge at least two to three times what neoclouds ask to rent the same GPU, and sometimes more.
Silicon Data adjusts for what it can, such as location, memory and contract term, and is left with a residual it cannot: bundled software, compliance and analytics, plus enterprise customers slow to move. The index files hyperscalers as a separate category and treats the neocloud quote as the closer measure of a single unit of compute.
Latent Space
Dylan Patel and JordanSemiAnalysis
SemiAnalysis's ClusterMAX ratings now track 323 GPU cloud providers; Jordan leads the ClusterMAX testing after 10 years designing hardware systems at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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current issue
Dylan Patel puts open-model inference providers such as Baseten and Fireworks at around 60% gross margins, against perhaps 10% six to nine months earlier, and says that is why renting GPUs has never been harder.
Once any GPU can earn money serving tokens, a new lab bidding for training capacity competes with profitable buyers where it once competed with loss-making ones. The frontier labs have also cut their minimum rentals from about 8,000 GPUs to as few as 1,000, the size a neolab wants, while serving firms will happily take four nodes at a time.
Conversations with Institutional Investors
Michael Kollo
Author of Future Ready with Generative AI: Skills, Mindsets, and Stories in the Age of AI.
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framework
Michael Kollo argues that an AI analyst told it must find something damning in a clean company, with no permitted answer of nothing, is pushed toward manufacturing evidence.
The agents in the Hugging Face incident were set puzzles they could not solve and turned to cheating and collusion; he maps the same incentive onto a room of AI equity analysts sharing a message board. His remedy is in the design: an explicit exit, so that finding nothing counts as a finished task.
The Cognitive Revolution
Keerthana GopalakrishnanGoogle DeepMind
Staff research scientist at Google DeepMind and research lead for Gemini Robotics, on her fourth annual appearance on the show. Her team released Gemini Robotics 2 this summer, about 15 months after the first version.
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current issue
Gopalakrishnan still puts robotics at its GPT-2 stage, because teaching a robot from a few examples is unreliable and a model trained on one robot is often helpless on another.
A language model behaves much the same on any phone or operating system, whereas a robot model's behaviour depends on the body it runs on. One-shot demonstrations also invite memorisation, so the open questions are whether the model adapts when the scene changes and whether it can pick up something as hard as tying a bin bag from one showing.
Worth listening to in full 4 October 2026
Most clips above stand alone. These are the episodes that justify the whole hour.
How Airlines Actually Hedge Higher Fuel Prices
A former airline group treasurer walks through fuel hedging from the plain instruments to the revenue-hedging structure he built, and one argument holds for the whole conversation: a hedger's first job is to find the business's natural exposure on both sides of the income statement. That carries to any institution hedging a liability, and the hosts keep pressing on mechanics rather than anecdote.
Who Causes Stock Market Anomalies? (with Victor Haghani) | Rational Reminder 429
Eighty minutes held together by one question, how different kinds of investor and the way they size positions move prices. Haghani applies the Merton share in turn to momentum, buybacks, tax-loss harvesting, the newspaper experiment and borrowing to invest, the hosts let him work through the arithmetic, and the weak stretches (the book plugs and the closing advice) are short.